Over the last few days, a number of you have written to me asking why I haven't blogged about the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Middle East. Two reasons, really. First, things are changing so quickly I hardly know where to start. And second, its so damn depressing its hard to write about. But if I take this at a high level, well... let me give this a shot....
Six years ago, President Bill Clinton had an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians within sight. But for Arafat's intransigence, the world today might be a very different place.
Fast forward two years. In response to 9/11, President Bush announces to the world a new doctrine for US foreign policy based on preemptive action. As Ron Suskind has so carefully laid out, behind the doctrine was a shift of even greater import: no longer would we wait to gather the evidence necessary to justify our actions. Instead, under Cheney's leadership, a 1% probability of threat would both justify and require preemptive action by the United States. Evidence? Who needs evidence! We want WAR!
For those of you who haven't yet read Suskind's book, here's the short version:
And so for the first time in over a century, the world's leading power declared that it could declare war on a hunch and a suspicion, no evidence necessary. No need to rely on facts. No need to present its case to your allies. It's a faith based foreign policy, one where unquestioning belief is held above all else.
But as all true conservatives know, humans are fallible creatures, and human nature is an unpredictable, illogical force. Combine that with the fact that all actions create reactions, and its easy to see why suspicion of government is central to the conservative belief system. But a "conservative" president cast all that aside, demanding that preemptive action be the new law of the land.
And then, war. A war that three years down the line has gone every which way but right. "Shock and awe" has become "hope and pray," as day by day both Afghanistan and Iraq descend further and further into madness. And now, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, India, and perhaps even Iran.
The connection? With the US establishing a foreign policy doctrine based on the overwhelming preemptive use of force, even in the absence of evidence and reason, we have unwittingly unleashed what is perhaps a new era of growing hostility and violence. Events have, as they always must, moved beyond our control. We are not the only actor on the international stage, and the chaos we have created may now be exploited by those we oppose to their great benefit.
Once again we have forgotten our own history. In the first half of the twentieth century, two great wars engulfed the planet, each supposedly a "war to end all wars." Although neither lived up to that billing, from each came increasingly successful efforts to develop safeguards against further conflict. In the second half of the twentieth century we developed a number of flawed but nevertheless serviceable international treaties, frameworks, and governing bodies aimed at bringing some semblance of order to our complex world. And without firing a single shot, we used them to defeat our ideological enemy and win the Cold War.
But following 9/11 all of that was cast aside, and as predicted the impact of that was anything but predictable. The international system in place on 9/12 was anything but perfect, but after centuries of effort it was in fact that best we could come up with. But rather than work inside the system to bring order to chaos, we cast it aside, replacing it with a doctrine of anything goes. On that point, EJ Dionne's column in today's WaPo is just spot on:
| The most intellectually honest case for the war in Iraq was never about Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. It was the Big Bang Theory.
Not to be confused with theories about the origins of the universe, the Middle East Big Bang idea was simple and seductive. Unlike other arguments for the war, it was based on some facts, though also on some wishful thinking. The point was that the Middle East was a mess. A nest of authoritarian regimes bred opposition movements rebelling against the conditions under which too many people lived and energized by a radical Islamist ideology. Some of them turned to terror. In this bog of failure, moderate Muslims were powerless. They were frequently jailed or killed. The situation's hopelessness argued for a hard shove from the United States to create a new dynamic. Installing a democratic government in Iraq would force a new dawn. Newly empowered Muslim democrats would reform their societies, negotiate peace with Israel and get on with the business of building prosperous, middle-class societies[...] But when the Big Bang happened, the wreckage left behind took the form of reduced American influence, American armed forces stretched to their limit and a Middle East more dangerously unstable than it was at the beginning of 2003. Whether one ascribes these troubles to the flawed implementation of the Big Bang Theory or to the theory itself, what matters now is how to limit and, if possible, undo some of the damage. |
And now, this is one of the results. Rather than bring oder to the Middle East we brought chaos. Should anyone be surprised that things have further unraveled?
What's deeply ironic about all of this, of course, is that it is those of us on the left who predicted this. The left, long vilified by conservatives as too soft to lead the nation in a hostile world, looked out and saw reality for what it was. Conservatives, by contrast, saw it for what they wished it would be and then acted, led by faith and belief but nothing more. We were right. They were wrong. And now we must all live with the tragic results.
I hope and I pray that we walk back from the edge. But I fear that we will not. Both here at home and abroad there are some who argue that the rapidly escalating situation is being driven at least in part by Iran. To be honest, if that were true I would not be surprised in the least. We have nothing to gain from chaos. They do. (More here, here, and here.)
With leadership, we could all walk back from the edge. But for six years our leaders have been leading us astray. And there simply is no reason to believe that they have suddenly learned their lessons and understood the nature of their own mistakes.
They had hoped to create a tipping point in the Middle East. Why it never occurred to them that things might tip the wrong direction is totally beyond me.
UPDATE: And now Baghdad appears to be unravelling as well.
UPDATE II: Watch the WSJ twist itself into knots to analyze the situation without criticizing the Bush administration. ThinkProgress gets it spot on:
| Despite trying to cast their stance as one that “critics of the Bush Administration” would dispute, the position that the WSJ editors take today is one that “critics” have been arguing for some time[...]
But the idea that the U.S. was “bogged down” in Iraq – which the WSJ now appears to embrace – has been repeatedly blasted by their editorial page. For example:
Being “bogged down” in Iraq has had damaging consequences in the Middle East due to the disastrous choices the administration made. The WSJ finally seems to understand that. Better late than never. |
And lest we all forget, its not just the crazies "over there" that are rooting for chaos. We've got our own nuts right here at home, too.
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