Back to Iraq.
Here is something from the Economist- an analysis of George Bush's revolution in Foreign Policy. Apparently, the argument goes, he's not an idiot, but very smart.
It's is "God given mission" that worries me.
Note, Sander's argument elsewhere that America is searching for enemies, might be unique to this president and his own sense of "global mission."
http://medlem.spray.se/james_bond/bondbrudar/18/bilder/thomsen_5.jpg
American foreign policy
In search of monsters
Dec 18th 2003
From The Economist print edition
America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy
By Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay
Brookings Institution Press; 246 pages; $22.95
DON'T misunderestimate George Bush. That is the central message of “America Unbound”, an account of how, after a largely misspent youth, a callow man became at the age of 48 governor of Texas and then, just six years later, president of the United States—whereupon he turned America's foreign policy upside down.
Mr Bush is widely seen, abroad if not at home, as a bonehead with more brawn than brain who has little control over his administration, especially of the neoconservatives who seem to exert such influence within it. This view is rubbish, argue Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, both scholars at American think-tanks. Mr Bush is his own man; he sees himself as the chief executive officer of a huge enterprise and acts accordingly; he has a world view and a clear idea of how America should fit into it; and he is no fool. Moreover, all of this could be detected from his conduct on the campaign trail. It is not the product of finding himself in the White House, still less of the events of September 11th 2001.
Trouble with grammar and a propensity to utter malapropisms have made people think Mr Bush is stupid. The evidence from his exam results suggests otherwise (he attended both Yale and Harvard, and his scores in the national scholastic aptitude tests were more than respectable).
His all-too-evident ignorance, and his candid admissions of it, have made people think he has no convictions either. He might not know where Kosovo was, but, he said more revealingly, “I know what I believe in.” As the authors point out, most people do not form their views in the light of facts; indeed, the more facts they know, the less likely they are to hold simple convictions.
The president was not a complete ignoramus: he knew where to look for help. Thus he plundered the address book of his Republican predecessors for the top members of his administration—not so much people from his father's day as from Gerald Ford's and Ronald Reagan's. Philosophically, George Bush junior is not his father's son but Mr Reagan's, and like the Gipper he too came to the presidency with priorities, even though he had to change them after September 11th. When he did so, however, it was not to abandon his former foreign-policy ideas but to direct them towards the single goal of fighting terror.
What were these beliefs? In short, they held that the world was a bad, dangerous place; that the nation-state was its most important constituent part; that power, especially military power, was the coin of the realm in such a world; that international organisations and treaties only constrained the use of American power; and that, uniquely among nations, America's interests and its ideals were at one. This was the altogether new element that Mr Bush brought to foreign policy—the conviction that America's motives were always pure and would be seen as such by others because it wanted only to spread freedom, prosperity and peace. It led easily on to what he was to term the “new doctrine called pre-emption” that he produced before invading Iraq.
Such beliefs had little room for diplomacy, engagement abroad and treaties—hence the reaction to the Kyoto protocol and all those bits of paper about biological weapons, a comprehensive nuclear test ban and, horror of horrors, a world criminal court. They were also out of sympathy with “nation-building”—helping ravaged countries to get back, and stay, on their feet. And if this antagonised the rest of the world, well, too bad. T
he campaign remark about arrogance—“If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us”—was one of the few that was forgotten, or at least reinterpreted.
The big surprise was that this view of the world survived September 11th, an event that would have caused even an experienced president to undertake a pretty radical rethink, and perhaps to reconsider attitudes to co-operation both with allies and with international organisations. B
ut not the remarkably self-confident Mr Bush. “At some point we may be the only ones left,” he was to say. “That's OK with me. We are America.” September 11th had been the consequence of a lack of American resolve in the Clinton administration (perhaps even in his father's?), he believed; nation-states held the key to dealing with it, and all other countries were either with him or against him in the war against terror. Terrorism was, after all, an undifferentiated evil, and he was an instrument of providence, if not of God, destined to rid the world of it.
If anyone thinks Mr Bush is not responsible for foreign policy, whether the general approach to China or North Korea, the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq or the new American attitude toward Europe, they are wrong, argue Messrs Daalder and Lindsay. Mr Bush is in charge of the cabinet, and he has been ready to put down its supposedly dominating figures, sometimes in public, when he disagreed with them—Donald Rumsfeld on defence spending, Colin Powell on North Korea, Dick Cheney when he tried to displace Condoleezza Rice as head of an inter-agency committee. He is determined, and he means what he says (so pay attention when he emphasises freedom rather than democracy: the Iraqis may have to be satisfied with liberation).
But this determined, clear-eyed man is also pragmatic, and no slouch at politics, as his victory in Texas (never mind the presidential contest) made clear. So what does that mean for Iraq policy as the American election draws near? Among Mr Bush's advisers, the neoconservatives, whom the authors prefer to call democratic imperialists, will be arguing for more troops and money to democratise Iraq. The others, whom they call the assertive nationalists, will be arguing for a swift exit.
Mr Bush will have to make a choice. H
is born-again belief in his own mission to rid the world of terror and to spread the freedom that is, in his view, synonymous with America, suggests he will back the democratic imperialists. These are the people who want to remake the world, starting with the Middle East, in America's image. But Mr Bush's pragmatism, his desire to win re-election and his distaste for state-building all point to an attempt at early extrication from the Iraqi mess, so long as he cannot be accused of cutting and running—by either voters or historians. And, say the authors, Mr Bush is much more of a nationalist than a neocon.
How much of the Bush revolution will endure is not clear. The disdain for diplomacy and other foreign entanglements is already proving expensive, and at some stage the United States will surely want to engage with allies on more emollient terms. Meanwhile, the world had better get used to living with an audacious risk-taker, who, unlike his predecessor John Quincy Adams, is not afraid to sally forth in search of monsters to destroy.
America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy.
By Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay.
Brookings Institution Press; 246 pages; $22.95
