[From the diaries by susanhu.]
Charles Krauthammer, for the second week in a row, has turned his dripping venom against another Republican. This time, he has turned his fangs against former Bush I National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.
Krauthammer knows very well that the GOP is in tatters from the recent run of bad news. So, he is now on a self-righteous crusade to restore order by whipping reluctant Republicans back in line with the same kind of venom that right-wingers so often use on Democrats. However, Krauthammer is not without his venom towards the left. First, he takes a cheap shot towards Cindy Sheehan:
Now that Cindy Sheehan turns out to be a disaster for the antiwar movement — most Americans are not about to follow a left-wing radical who insists that we are in Iraq for reasons of theft, oppression and empire — a new spokesman is needed. If I were in the opposition camp, I would want a deeply patriotic, highly intelligent, distinguished establishment figure. I would want Brent Scowcroft. … Continued below:
Scowcroft has been obliging. In the Oct. 31 New Yorker he came out strongly against the war and the neocon sorcerers who magically foisted it upon what must have been a hypnotized president and vice president.
First of all, that slur is a factual error that is not based on the data. The latest poll on Sheehan was done in September, by Rasmussen. And the Rasmussen poll says that the data does not show favorability or unfavorability towards her so much as it reflects people’s attitudes towards the war itself:
In general, people continue to see in Sheehan what they want to see. People who think we should withdraw troops from Iraq now have a positive opinion of Sheehan (58% favorable, 12% unfavorable). Those who do not think we should withdraw troops at this time have a negative view (10% favorable, 68% unfavorable).
And Sheehan’s protest has galvanized opposition to the war. Only 33% in the most recent polls show support for the war, as opposed to 50-50 numbers pre-Sheehan. Bush’s popularity is in the high 30’s, compared to 50-50 before Sheehan. So, in fact, Sheehan has had a negative impact on Bush’s popularity and support for the war. It has also given political leaders cover to propose their own plans to leave Iraq.
Of course, Scowcroft’s opposition to toppling Saddam Hussein is neither surprising nor new. Indeed, we are now seeing its third iteration. He had two cracks at Hussein in 1991 and urged his President Bush to pass them both up — first, after Hussein’s defeat in the Persian Gulf War, when the road to Baghdad was open, and then, days later, during a massive U.S.-encouraged uprising of Kurds and Shiites, when America stood by and allowed Hussein to massacre his opponents by the tens of thousands. One of the reasons for Iraqi wariness during the U.S. liberation 12 years later was the memory of our past betrayal and suspicions about our current intentions in light of that betrayal.
That massacre was the result of a blunder by the Bush I administration. The implication for the Iraqis was that the US would come in and help them overthrow Saddam, which they had no plans to do. Bush I never should have encouraged the Iraqis to revolt against Saddam.
This coldbloodedness is a trademark of this nation’s most doctrinaire foreign policy “realist.” Realism is the billiard ball theory of foreign policy: The only thing that counts is how countries interact, not what’s happening inside. You care not a whit about who is running a country. Whether it is Mother Teresa or the Assad family gangsters in Syria, you care only about their external actions, not how they treat their own people.
Realists prize stability above all, and there is nothing more stable than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship. Which is why Scowcroft is the man who six months after Tiananmen Square toasted those who ordered the massacre; who, as the world celebrates the Beirut Spring that evicted the Syrian occupation from Lebanon, sees not liberation but possible instability; who can barely conceal a preference for Syria’s stabilizing iron rule.
Realpolitik has its advantages as well. It understands the heavy long-term price to be paid for fighting an unwinnable war. In fact, realism was fueled by the desire of people never to have another unwinnable war, like Vietnam was. It also understands the impossibility of sending US troops all over the world to topple foreign governments, contrary to the naive idealism of movies like “Tears of the Sun,” which teaches blind faith in the ability of the US military to make things right.
Realism can best be understood by looking at the example of Superman. In one movie, he attempted to bring about world peace by singlehandedly trying to destroy the world’s nukes. But even he was not able to stop the threat of world destruction. In the end, he realized that the world had to solve its own problems rather than depend on him.
The advantage of realism is that with that kind of outlook, it is easy to come to grips with the limits of your powers. This kind of realism is sorely lacking in the Bush administration and in the misplaced idealism in Krauthammer’s writings.
Even today Scowcroft says, “I didn’t think that calling the Soviet Union the ‘evil empire’ got anybody anywhere.” Tell that to Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents for whom that declaration of moral — beyond geopolitical — purpose was electrifying and helped galvanize the movements that ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.
It was not brought down by diplomacy and arms control, the preferred realist means for dealing with the Soviet Union. It was brought down by indigenous revolutionaries, encouraged and supported by Ronald Reagan, a president unabashedly dedicated not to detente with evil but to its destruction — i.e., regime change.
There is a place for idealism. But first, I would note that many other people were responsible as well — Pope John-Paul II, Lech Walesa, and Havel. And I would point out that it was a realist, Mikhail Gorbachev, who reformed the Soviet Union because of his realistic view that the current system could not be sustained. And I would also point out that the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was accomplished without a single shot being fired on our part.
Our goal should not just be to effect regime change; our goal should be to do so without a shot being fired.
For realists such as Scowcroft, regime change is the ultimate taboo. Too risky, too dangerous, too unpredictable. “I’m a realist in the sense that I’m a cynic about human nature,” he admits. Hence, writes Jeffrey Goldberg, his New Yorker chronicler, Scowcroft remains “unmoved by the stirrings of democracy movements in the Middle East.”
Particularly in Iraq. The difficulties there are indeed great. But those difficulties came about not because, as Scowcroft tells us, “some people don’t really want to be free” and don’t value freedom as we do. The insurgency in Iraq is not proof of an escape-from-freedom human nature that has little use for liberty and prefers other things. The insurgency is, on the contrary, evidence of a determined Sunni minority desperate to maintain not only its own freedom but its previous dominion over the other 80 percent of the population now struggling for theirs.
The problem with Krauthammer’s reasoning is that he is ignoring important data which debunks his conclusions. Around 82% of Iraqis oppose our presence there, while 45% support attacks against our troops there. Therefore, the opposition to our presence is broad-based, not just confined to the Sunnis.
In addition, Sistani, a Shiite, is weighing plans to demand an exit plan or call for massive protests of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis opposed to US rule.
Krauthammer is right that the Iraqis want freedom. That is supported by the high turnout numbers in the elections. But the problem is that they see us as the imperialists. Therefore, the only realistic plan for us is to start withdrawing our troops from Iraq by the end of December 2006.
Then, Krauthammer has his “why do you hate Democracy” moment by appealing to one of the biggest promoters of Bush’s War:
These others — the overwhelming majority of Iraq’s people — have repeatedly given every indication of valuing their newfound freedom: voting in two elections at the risk of their lives, preparing for a third, writing and ratifying a constitution granting more freedoms than exist in any country in the entire Arab Middle East. “The secret is out,” says Fouad Ajami. “There is something decent unfolding in Iraq. It’s unfolding in the shadow of a terrible insurgency, but a society is finding its way to constitutional politics.”
Ajami is no fool, no naif, no reckless idealist, as Scowcroft likes to caricature the neoconservatives he reviles. A renowned scholar on the Middle East, Ajami is a Shiite, fluent in Arabic, who has unsentimentally educated the world about the Arab predicament and Arab dream palaces. Yet. having returned from two visits to Iraq this year, he sports none of Scowcroft’s easy, ostentatious cynicism about human nature, and Iraqi human nature in particular. Instead, Ajami celebrates the coming of decency in a place where decency was outlawed 30 years ago.
It is not surprising that Scowcroft, who helped give indecency a 12-year extension in Iraq, should disdain decency’s return. But we should not.
But I would hardly call the killings of hundreds of people through bombings a month a return to decency. And I would hardly call the killings of hundreds of thousands of people a return to decency.
But Fouad Ajami is one of the biggest defenders of the neocon movement and has become a rabid American nationalist. For example:
America ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal of this anti-Americanism as the “road rage” of a thwarted Arab world — the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds. There is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region. Indeed, this is one of those settings where a reforming foreign power’s simpler guidelines offer a better way than the region’s age-old prohibitions and defects.
A reforming zeal must thus be loaded up with the baggage and the gear. No great apologies ought to be made for America’s “unilateralism.” The region can live with and use that unilateralism. The considerable power now at America’s disposal can be used by one and all as a justification for going along with American goals.
In other words, Ajami operates under the faulty premise that we are somehow morally superior to Middle Eastern countries instead of the belief that all nations should be equal. This repulsive attitude borders on racism and is the symptom of a man drunk with power.
Ajami is openly an imperialist; for example:
War in Iraq, and a new role in that country in the aftermath of that war, would only confirm and deepen this American imperium. There is already talk of Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the Central Command, overseeing in Baghdad the twin goals of demilitarizing and democratizing that country-a high commissioner on the Tigris, Tommy Pasha delivering the land from its historical furies. It is an odd and ironic outcome: Eight decades after Britain’s “imperial moment” in the modern Middle East, after the states of that region were put together by administrative fiat, we are now at another historical watershed. A decade earlier, after Desert Storm, America had walked away from any imperial burden in Iraq. The campaign, it was said then, was about freedom of nations (the liberation of Kuwait), not freedom in nations-the liberation of Iraq’s brutalized people.
This sort of imperialistic attitude is more similar to the 19th-century colonialist nations who thought they knew better than the “savages” how to run their affairs.
The Nation documents Ajami and exposes him for what he is:
Despite his training in political science, Ajami often sounds like a pop psychologist in his writing about the Arab world or, as he variously calls it, “the world of Araby,” “that Arab world” and “those Arab lands.” According to Ajami, that world is “gripped in a poisonous rage” and “wedded to a worldview of victimology,” bad habits reinforced by its leaders, “megalomaniacs who never tell their people what can and cannot be had in the world of nations.” There is, to be sure, a grain of truth in Ajami’s grim assessment. Progressive Arab thinkers from Sadeq al-Azm to Adonis have issued equally bleak indictments of Arab political culture, lambasting the dearth of self-criticism and the constant search for external scapegoats. Unlike these writers, however, Ajami has little sympathy for the people of the region, unless they happen to live within the borders of “rogue states” like Iraq, in which case they must be “liberated” by American force. The corrupt regimes that rule the Arab world, he has suggested, are more or less faithful reflections of the “Arab psyche”: “Despots always work with a culture’s yearnings…. After all, a hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, maintains ‘You will get the rulers you deserve.'” His own taste in regimes runs to monarchies like Kuwait. The Jews of Israel, it seems, are not just the only people in the region who enjoy the fruits of democracy; they are the only ones who deserve them.
In other words, Ajami, whom Krauthammer and other neocons swoon at the feet of, is no real champion of freedom, but an odious racist who closets his views as much as possible. You cannot possibly believe in freedom unless you also believe in the equality of the people you are trying to give freedom to. Racist attitudes like Ajami’s poison our thinking towards other people.
In addition, I noticed an important omission in Krauthammer and Ajami’s writings — they do not once worry about the sanctity of human life. This is the key difference between Liberal thinking and Neocon thinking — Neocon thinking sees people as pawns to be moved across a chessboard and not living beings. Liberalism sees people as living beings deserving a high quality of life.
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What other blogs say:
It’s hard to take Krauthammer seriously, though. He always goes over-the-top and takes selective, biased bits of information to use against his target-of-the-moment. Instead of addressing the substance of Snowcroft’s criticism of Bush’s foreign policy and handling of the Iraq war (and situation on the ground), he takes a quote Snowcroft made about the cold war and slickly uses it as a straw man to distract us from the substance of Snowcroft’s criticisms. In fact, Krauthammer makes a point of making sure we really don’t know what Scowcroft’s criticisms are, lest we agree with them.
Interestingly, my attitude towards Scowcroft has become much more favorable since reading Krauthammer’s hatchet job. He was one of the few Republicans to oppose the war in the beginning, and anybody who is realistic about things is pretty good in my book, regardless of whose side of the aisle they are on.
Notice the meme here, an attack on reality. Once again the idea that they, the neocons, are not limited by reality but through use of military might can create a new reality. Scowcroft was able to convince Bush 41 that reality would prevail and that invading Baghdad would mire the US in a quagmire with no end in sight. If Mr Krauthammer would pull his head out of his ass for a minute or two he would see that Brent Scowcrofts reality was real.
And Scowcroft was right. We need many more people like him who are champions of realism rather than party ideology.
