While Timothy Egan’s righteous rant about the damage done by George W. Bush’s presidency is certainly warranted, and his condemnation of anyone who would oppose the current president’s foreign policies based solely on partisan considerations is fully justified, I wonder if Mr. Egan understands that people have learned more and better lessons from the Bush years than not to trust their government. For every lunatic who thinks that Muslims are about to arrive on our shores in ships and planes and take over, there are people who have learned the difficulty and costs of getting involved militarily in large Arab countries that have demographic and sectarian tensions.
Mr. Egan spits out the word “isolationists” with naked contempt:
The isolationists in the Republican Party are a direct result of the Bush foreign policy. A war-weary public that can turn an eye from children being gassed — or express doubt that it happened — is another poisoned fruit of the Bush years.
When I read something like that, I think about the citizens of other countries besides our own. Are the people of Norway or Brazil or Angola turning a blind-eye to dead children because they are “war-weary” or because Bush lied about Saddam Hussein? There’s this idea that simply by virtue of being born here that citizens of the United States are more morally responsible for war crimes than anyone else. If nothing is done about a chemical attack in Damascus, then we are all somehow complicit, indifferent, callous, amoral, and unworthy. But no one says that about the people who live in Australia or Canada or the Cayman Islands.
Lost in this kind of analysis, too, is the possibility that the American people are reflecting a common wisdom that the Syrian civil war is irresolvable by foreign military intervention and that once we go in for a penny, we’ll be in for a trillion pounds. It’s as if Mr. Egan thinks that the public can’t judge anything on the merits. We’re either for humanitarian aerial bombardment or we’re against it, and if we reject one intervention we must reject all interventions. One premise of Mr. Egan’s argument is that we learned the wrong lessons from President Bush and this is preventing us from following President Obama’s leadership.
I don’t think that is quite correct. I think we learned that skepticism is warranted when the government leans on classified information to justify military action. I think we learned that we can’t trust the cost estimates of war-planners and that we can’t rely on their assurances that they know what they’re doing. We learned that countries like Syria and Iraq are going through a sectarian resorting that makes them particularly volatile, violent, and hard to govern. We learned that we’re not any good as occupying forces and that spending all our expendable income on war is costing us dearly here at home where needs are not being met. We learned that we can’t take it upon ourselves to punish every tyrant who attacks his own people. In short, we learned some humility.
So, those of us who think the plan put forth by Obama is hubristic and dangerous are not saying that because Bush was a disaster. We’re saying that because it’s our judgment.
The world will be a more dangerous place if America is unwilling to ever take unilateral action to protect international norms, but that’s not what this is about. This is about a specific action taken against a specific nation in response to a specific crime in a specific context. Is it possible that the American people have simply looked at the specifics and said ‘no’?
