Joe Klein hasn’t responded to my letter. But he did continue the conversation about his challenge in an exchange with Wonkette.
Oh, Ana, I disagree–and my disagreement is about substance rather than positioning.
Klein is responding to Wonkette’s criticism, “It does somehow hearten me that the American public is less concerned with how a position “looks” than pundits are.” So, Klein says he is more concerned about substance than positioning. But, then look at what he does next.
First of all, polls about complicated, emotional issues like the war in Iraq are unreliable. Most people have confused feelings–frustration, patriotism, anger–that simply can’t be quantified. I’d hate to see the results of a poll that asked: “Should we withdraw our troops immediately and bomb those damn Arabs back to the stone age?” At their best, polling questions tell only a sliver of a story: I’d guess that Democrats now have as much credibility about national security as Republicans because Republicans have lost all credibility, given Bush’s performance these past four years. Democrats certainly haven’t done very much to earn the public trust.
I want to take a second here to talk about substance. Klein will eventually get to substance in this piece, but so far he is talking about the the unreliability of polls and he is asserting that, even if the public says they trust the Dems as much or more on national security, the Dems have done nothing to earn that trust.
Mr. Klein, I want to ask you a question. Would you agree that you trust people that have given you good advice in the past? If someone told you, for example, that 1994 was absolutely the best year for Blanc de Lynch-Bages, and then you tried it and it was just exquisite…might you not feel just a tad bit safer asking them their opinion of 1996 Corton-Charlemagne Dom. Du Martray before you plopped down $225.00 for the bottle? I know I would. I hope you are following the analogy here, Mr. Klein. Because there is no shortage of Democrats that voted and/or advised against invading Iraq. Many of them even predicted that it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and make terrorism worse. They are the people that have earned America’s trust on matters of national security. That is how you earn trust. You makes predictions and recommendations based on facts and experience, and if you are proven right then people trust you.
Based on your next sentence, I don’t think you understand my point. It’s also straining the whole ‘substance over positioning’ thing.
Attitudes about war and patriotism are notoriously volatile. Liberals were “right” about Vietnam, but they have paid a price ever since because they were so obnoxious about their correctness.
I have a lot of liberal friends and they tend to seize on sentences like this as indicative of your lack of substance. And I tend to agree. But I see that you are going to get more substantive below, so I’ll leave that debate until later.
The leftier liberals proceeded to see Vietnam in every American military initiative–the placement of Pershing missiles in Europe, Star Wars, the removal of Noriega, the first Gulf War–and they suffered as a result.
Mr. Klein, this seems to be a core idea within your worldview. Some people call it the ‘dirty fucking hippie aversion of Mr. Joe Klein’. I think it is a very bad core idea to have because it turns you into an idiot. It makes you say and believe what is little more than crap. So, in the interests of your mental health and posterity, I want to try to disabuse you of this opinion, which I can only assume is more an opinion of substance than positioning.
We are only going to discuss our foreign policy decisions that occurred after the whole country realized the dirty fucking hippies were right about Vietnam. First we helped topple Salvadore Allende in Chile and replaced him with Augusto Pinochet. Go ask the Chileans how grateful they are. Pinochet turned out to be one of the worst dictators of the second half of the 20th Century. At the time of his death in 2006, around 300 criminal charges in Chile were still pending against Pinochet for human rights abuses and embezzlement during his rule. If you want to know more about this history you can ask Henry Kissinger the next time you are invited to Sally Quinn’s house.
At the same time we were ruining Chilean society for the next two decades we were turning the Shah’s Iran into the biggest client of U.S. weaponry in our nation’s history.
Between Fiscal Year (FY) 1950 and FY 1977, the United States supplied Iran with over $20 billion worth of arms, ammunition, training, and technical assistance under the Military Assistance Program (MAP) and the Foreign Military Sales Program (FMS). This figure includes $67.4 million provided through the International Military Education and Training Program, to subsidise the training of 11,025 military personnel. Iran also received $767 million in direct MAP grants, $496 million in FMS credits and $1.7 million under the Agency for International Development’s Public Safety Program for the training of Iranian police. Iran ceased receiving MAP grant aid in 1970, and has since spent a full $18 billion on US arms under the FMS cash sales program. Since Iranian orders for new hardware were placed faster than the weapons could be produced and delivered, at the end of 1978 there was an outstanding balance of $12 billion worth of yet undelivered arms destined for Iran.[2]
The problem was that the Shah was not very popular with his own people. In fact, he was so unpopular that the Iranians turned to Ayatollah Khomeini instead. How did that work out for us? How did it work out for the Iranians?
Let’s turn to the 1980’s. Our foreign policy leaders chose to fight back against Iran by bolstering Saddam Hussein’s regime and encouraging and assisting him in making war on Iran. But we also supplied Iran with weapons (remember, we sold them their army and they needed lots of replacement parts). Rather than rehash the wisdom of those decisions, let’s just ask how they worked out. Did we get rid of the Ayatollahs? Did we get rid of Saddam Hussein? Did it solve our difficulties in the region? No.
How did our peacekeeping mission in Lebanon work out?
We had more success in Afghanistan, where our training of the mujahideen in the manufacture of improvised expoding devices and other tactics of terrorism were vital in driving the Soviets out of the Hindu Kush. How has that worked out?
In Central America we waged a long, and sometimes illegal, war against the Sandanistas. Their leader, Daniel Ortega, was just elected President. So, how did that work out?
We also invaded Panama in 1989. No one really knows why. President Bush mentioned something about Manuel Noreiga being a drug-runner. But I don’t think anyone thinks that explains our decision to invade. Noreiga was a long-time CIA asset. I think he was even on Poppy Bush’s Chistmas card list. If you know why we invaded Panama, Mr. Klein, let me know and maybe I’ll consider it a success.
In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Most Democrats thought we should let him keep it. Our ambassador essentially gave Saddam a green light for the invasion, so it seemed like a double-cross to Saddam when we complained. There were a lot of good reasons to intervene. The most compelling reason was that Kuwait was a member of the United Nations and they asked for help. However, our decision to liberate Kuwait started a sixteen year long war that currently has no end in sight. It spurred Arab resentment, led directly to the emergence of Usama bin-Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, and resulted in
a string of increasingly deadly terror attacks. In fact, our decision to liberate Kuwait was the leading cause of the War on Terror. So, I ask you, how did that turn out?
When I survey the last thirty years of American foreign policy I do not see a string of successes. I do acknowledge that the Soviet Union collapsed without a shot being fired. I do see that as a success. But, I do not think that winning the Cold War justifies Vietnam or any of the other major military or covert actions we have been discussing. Even the Soviet-Afghan effort has left us with a bad case of blowback. It’s hard to know how the world would be different if we had not toppled Allende, armed the Shah, Saddam, and the mujahideen, fought the Sandanistas with Iran’s money, toppled our good friend Noriega, or warned Saddam not to invade Kuwait. But I know that anyone that warned us not to do those things should be heralded as a wise person and trusted in the future. They certainly should not be blamed for our current situation.
Just because they’re right about Iraq, and about this escalation, it doesn’t mean they won’t be blamed by the public if the result of an American withdrawal is lethal chaos in the region and $200 per barrel oil. All I’m saying is that those who oppose the war now have a responsibility to (a) oppose it judiciously, without hateful or extreme rhetoric and (b) start thinking very hard–and in a very detailed way–about how we begin to recover from this mess.–Joe Klein
I have opposed the basic thrust of U.S. foreign policy for a long time. I have rarely been proven wrong. I don’t really know how to oppose our foreign policy judiciously because nothing seems to work. I’m not even sure what it means to be ‘extreme’ when our government is paying $500 billion to ‘create lethal chaos in the region’. I agree that it is possible that I will be blamed, along with other anti-warriors, when the real bill for Iraq (and our other misadventures) comes home, but I can only assume that those doing that blaming will be idiots like you that spent their careers cheerleading one invasion after another.
Mr. Klein, listen to us for once. We’ve been right all along. When Mr. Bush said we needed a ‘more humble foreign policy’ he was right. He was being disingenuous, but he was right. You want us to ‘start thinking very hard–and in a very detailed way–about how we begin to recover from this mess’? Read this blog. That’s what I’ve we’ve been trying to do for two years. Now we’ve reached the point where we must remove our government.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Do you understand, Mr. Klein?
