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Iraq IS our Afghanistan. Hopefully, we won't be quite as stupid and try to stay for a decade and bleed ourselves of hundreds of billions of dollars, like the USSR did.
I thought this was a thoughtful critique of the "Neoconservative" idea that the US could spread democracy and liberty by its military power. It's about 5 times longer than what I've posted here, but what it basically calls for is a return to a more guiding, evolutionary approach to a better world rather than by relying heavily on military power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html
February 19, 2006
After Neoconservatism
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy do ent.
But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.
The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives --- red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East --- supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.
More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.
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Iraq IS our Afghanistan. Hopefully, we won't be quite as stupid and try to stay for a decade and bleed ourselves of hundreds of billions of dollars, like the USSR did.
That article is ing stupid.
If it was not for Amerikan power we would either be saluting the Nazi or Commie flag.
Only a leftist ing pussy with a twisted world view and no balls would write some piece of article like this.
On Behalf of all our fine soldiers winning the war in Iraq ... I on this ing thread...
Blah, it was American Isolationism and European appeasement that led to the rise of Hitler. Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his help with drafting the Treaty of Versailles effectively ending WW1. However Wilson failed to win Senate support for ratification and the United States never joined the League of Nations. Republicans under Henry Cabot Lodge controlled the Senate after the 1918 elections, but Wilson refused to give them a voice at Paris, and refused to agree to Lodge's proposed changes. The key point of disagreement was whether the League would diminish the power of Congress to declare war. Historians in 2006 ranked Wilson's failure as the #4 worst presidential mistake ever madeGood point, only that 50 percent of it has yet to materialize, and realistic Wilsonianism, led to the rise of hitler. There was no preemptive strategies in the Wilsonian doctrines, and the writers pointing of neocons means to it's ends just loses real credibility to real historians, when the means back then was to throw japanese americans into internment camps and wiretapp abuse.
Thanks for proving my point.
Wtf,
You really didnt go to Notre Dame did you?
Dont you know that it was the treaty of Versailles that put all the burden on Germany economically which led to the desperate situation of leading to hitlers rise?
nah, you have to much bush hatred that it's distorted your view of history so much that you have acquired a 4th grade sense of the subject matter.
Oh yeah, there was a turkey, yams, and green bean casserole along with the token Cowboys game at the original thanksgiving in the New World.
I'll be sure not to buy the one you hold in your hand, good advice. Wouldn't want to get your info.
"Dont you know that it was the treaty of Versailles that put all the burden on Germany economically which led to the desperate situation of leading to hitlers rise?"
find a history book that would refute this theory, otherwise put up or shut up.
you'd still have heavy sanctions on germany that would of led to hitler's rise.
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