...more recent posts
Thursday, Sep 07, 2006
Bad Policy for Bad People
Apologies to the Cramps for cribbing the title of a great album.
Wonder of wonders, the WSJ carried a major opinion piece that -- gasp -- criticizes Dear Leader.
In all that analysis of the region, he somehow forgot to discuss one of the most pivotal events: the CIA's overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953. Heckova oversight, what?
In the end, Kaplan's critique is of the execution, which all rational people (which doesn't include the opinion staff of the WSJ) can agree is a clusterfuck of historic proportions. But he doesn't have a problem with the basic policy goal, which he describes as "moving history forward after 9/11 [by] shaking up the suffocating complacency of the Sunni Arab police states from where the terrorists originated." Ah, that makes sense. Help Saudi Arabia move toward constitutional monarchy by blowing the crap out of Baghdad. Yes, it all makes sense now.
But this brilliant plan was foiled by poor execution by Mr. Bush. Due to his failures, we will have to draw closer to the remaining Sunni dictatorships.
The president may need to pull closer to the Saudi royals, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah. Weakened by our response to 9/11, terrified by Israeli incompetence in defending their interests in Lebanon, these regimes still demonstrate more enlightenment than their populations. They fear Iran more than do the Europeans. Whatever our ultimate decisions in regards to a nuclearizing Iran, we require all the help we can get. That is what comes of bold ideas, poorly executed.
Sure, things were made worse than they could have been by the incompetence of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. But why the difficulty in grasping that the policy itself was doomed? I've not seen a single cogent analysis of what a "good" outcome would look like. All the descriptions of desirable outcomes I've seen are unadulterated fantasy about a "unified democratic Iraq". That's not even an oxymoron; it's a logical impossibility.
The invasion and occupation have been a horrendous implementation of a immoral and strategically idiotic idea. Failure by Americans to grasp this allows policy makers to dismiss the problems in Iraq as "Bush's screwups", and leaves us vulnerable to the next wave of ill-advised adventurism: Iran.
older posts...