Closing Thoughts
I know that most of my contemporaneous comments on Bush's State of the Union (see below) aren't particularly astute or inspired. They were really just musings of the moment. But here are my closing thoughts.
My first thought is that I always wonder how many of those long term "call upon" the administration actually believes are achievable. Mainly though, I thought the speech was a great reflection of where our neighbor to the south finds itself. Tired. Exhausted even. They feel like they need a break. There's a quote in a little movie called New Waterford Girl that is a propos. "If they are guilty, they fall down." People find it hard to win when they think they are wrong. The US is so introspective - that they kinda want to win. But they kinda want to lose a little too, I think. They are the good guys. They aren't supposed to go to war on false pretenses. They aren't supposed to suspend habeas corpus. This war is killing more than troops. It is killing the myths that make them Americans.
I don't think it had to be this way either. I think it is cost of electing a man who wasnt articulate enough or insightful enough to be a wartime President - a President elected in another era - an era that was like summer camp. The post-cold war era. I've said before - the problem wasn't going to Iraq. There were very good reasons to go to Iraq. The problem was the administrations belief that those reasons weren't good enough. Their impatience. Their duplicity. Their hubris.
History will say that invading Iraq was the mistake. I disagree. It was invading Iraq with the wrong man in charge.
(This is not to be confused with the original Iraq mistake, which was made by George H.W. Bush - not stopping the invasion of Kuwait in the first place. THAT was the real diplomatic blunder.)
2 comments:
I really enjoyed your running commentary on the “State of Disunion” Cory, and I partially agree with these final thoughts.
I often wonder what the hell happened to the glorious post-WWII dream of a United Nations. I’m actually in favour of much more international intervention. Someone should have stepped into the breach in Indonesia to help the East Timorese, into the Congo and Rwanda, and into Iraq to save the Kurds at the outset of Saddam’s barbarity. (Unfortunately, the East Timorese weren’t sitting on a horde of crude.)
The trouble is that someone can’t be the United States alone. Military analysts believe that this so-called surge of 20,000 troops is about one-fourth of what the situation actually requires in terms of ground troops; in order to stabilize the situation. What is Bush’s latest “strategy” going to accomplish then exactly? All I can imagine is more death all around and a minor slowing of the inevitable crawl to open civil war. As an international community, we don’t seem to want the U.S. running around the world, achieving their foreign policy objectives at the barrel of a gun, but we also don’t seem to want to rally around the concept of UN with an independent standing army--a police force.
Until we really start thinking like a global community and not a global shopping mall, we are doomed to continually wallow around in the wake of the only actual super power. And, although I’m not much of a U.S. booster, thank f*ck that super power isn’t China.
New Waterford Girl is an awesome movie.
I agree with your observations re: moral exhaustion and lack of conviction.
RE: Andrew's comment about insufficient numbers, I'm reading Robert Kagan's new book on the history of American foreign policy, Dangerous Nation. He points out that setting out lofty goals and then providing insufficient means to reach those goals is a recurrent problem in American foreign policy.
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