by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n B<\/strong><\/span>rent Scowcroft predicted on the eve of the Iraqi elections that voting there would increase the risk of civil war. Indeed, he foresaw \u201ca great potential for deepening the conflict.\u201d He also once assured us that Iraq \u201ccould become a Vietnam in a way that the Vietnam war never did.\u201d Did he mean perhaps worse than ten years of war and over 50,000 American dead, with the Cambodian holocaust next door?<\/p>\n Zbigniew Brzezinski feared that we could not do what we are in fact presently doing in Iraq: \u201cI do not think we can stay in Iraq in the fashion we\u2019re in now\u2026If it cannot be changed drastically, it should be terminated.\u201d He added ominously that it would take 500,000 troops, $500 billion, and resumption of the military draft to achieve security in Iraq. Did he mean Iraq needed more American troops than did the defense of Europe in the Cold War?<\/p>\n Madeleine Albright, while abroad, summed up the present American foreign policy: \u201cIt’s difficult to be in France and criticize my government. But I’m doing so because Bush and the people working for him have a foreign policy that is not good for America, not good for the world.\u201d Elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, troops out of Saudi Arabia, democratic demonstrations in Lebanon, West Bank voting, promises of change in Egypt \u2014 all that and more is \u201cnot good for the world\u201d?<\/p>\n For the last year, such well-meaning former “wise people” have pretty much assured us that the Bush doctrine will not work and that the Arab world is not ready for Western-style democracy, especially when fostered through Western blood and iron.<\/p>\n But too often we discuss the present risky policy without thought of what preceded it or what might have substituted for it. Have we forgotten that the messy business of democracy was the successor, not the precursor, to a litany of other failed prescriptions? Or that there were never perfect solutions for a place like the Middle East \u2014 awash as it is in oil, autocracy, fundamentalism, poverty, and tribalism \u2014 only choices between awful and even more awful? Or that September 11 was not a sudden impulse on the part of Mohammed Atta, but the logical culmination of a long simmering pathology? Or that the present loudest critics had plenty of chances to leave something better than the mess that confronted the United States on September 12? Or that at a time of war, it is not very ethical to be sorta for, sorta against, kinda supportive, kinda critical of the mission \u2014 all depending on the latest sound bite from Iraq?<\/p>\n R<\/strong><\/span>emember realism? Do we recall James Baker\u2019s quip that the first Gulf War was about \u201cjobs, jobs, jobs,\u201d in line with his later realist fillip about the Balkan genocide: \u201cWe don\u2019t have a dog in that fight\u201d? Perhaps that was a sober assessment of the natural limitations on American strength; but had Bill Clinton followed the natural logic of such cynicism, Milosevic would still be in power. Imagine the reaction had the non-teflon Bush said that removing Saddam was about \u201cjobs\u201d or staying out of Dafur was about not having a dog in that fight.<\/p>\n In the Middle East, the tenets of the old realism went something like this: These people are either crazy or backward, and usually both. We are interested in them only to the extent they pump oil and deter Communists. So authoritarians get a pass if they don\u2019t rock the boat and don\u2019t kill too many of their own on television like Saddam or Assad did. Under no circumstances spend American blood or treasure in any pie-in-the-sky project to ameliorate the misery of the Arab people. That will both fail and only earn us disdain as being na\u00efve as well as inept.<\/p>\n Where did this cynical policy lead us? The Saudi royal family \u2014 autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular \u2014 kept Russians out. Despite embargos and cartels, they mostly pumped overpriced oil. We nodded and stationed troops \u2014 and won for our efforts global Wahhabism, whose petrol-fueled mosques and madrassas were the laboratories of thousands of anti-Western terrorists.<\/p>\n The shah, unloved and dictatorial, likewise bought things American. So we kept our nose out of his politics: Khomeini and a quarter century of a nightmarish theocracy ensued. Pakistani dictators, we knew, might hate the Soviets as much as we did, and remind a socialist India to play it straight. Yet American de facto sanction of such strongmen inevitably led to the nuclear conspiracies of Dr. Khan, to the most anti-American and strident Islamists of the Middle East, and to unnecessary tension with the world\u2019s largest democracy India.\u00a0The formula for an Islamic \u201crepublic\u201d is prior Western support for an anti-democratic strongman; the antidote for Islamic fascism is consistent promotion of democratic dissidents.<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/strong><\/span>hen there was the cousin of realism, the much ballyhooed \u201cpunitive strike\u201d strategy of \u201cknocking heads when they popped up.\u201d Remember the logic of all those forgotten hits: We bomb, send a message, and then leave \u2014 swatting the hornet\u2019s nest and then staying clear when the stingers buzz out from the hive.<\/p>\n So we thwarted the Soviets in Afghanistan and departed happily \u2014 allowing in the Taliban and an al Qaeda sanctuary that gave us September 11. Get hit and run from Lebanon and Somalia. Don\u2019t go to Baghdad after success in Kuwait, upsetting our Saudi friends and a corrupt U.N. when Saddam at least keeps a lid on even scarier things. And? After 1991, we got tens of thousands of butchered Kurds and Shiites and years of their subsequent distrust, hundreds of thousands of no-fly-zone sorties, General Zinni\u2019s Operation Desert Fox \u2014 and Gulf War II.<\/p>\n Few ever considered that punitivism embodied the worst of all strategies \u2014 just enough muscle to enrage our enemies but not enough to scare them, just about right to earn their lasting scorn without ever solving the problem.\u00a0Nothing is as dangerous in war as striking but not defeating an enemy, showing contempt without the real ability to humble and humiliate him.<\/em><\/p>\n The punitive strike was the embodiment of sober and judicious consensus, but all the same suggested to radical Islamists that the more power the United States brandished, the less likely it was to use it fully. That led to bin Laden\u2019s disastrous calculation that George W. Bush was, like many former presidential advisers, someone who worried more about the opinions of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and the Council on Foreign Relations than about defeating the enemy.<\/p>\n Policy #3: Bribery<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n B<\/strong><\/span>ribery was a third option. We have given somewhere around $57 billion in aggregate aid to Egypt, apparently so that it would be nice or perhaps would keep away from Israel. Forget that the money helped to paper over structural pathologies in the Egyptian economy and empowered corrupt elites. It had even worse results, suggesting to the Cairo Street that a weak country was prevented from fulfilling its destiny of destroying Israel only by American and Zionist machinations \u2014 as if an underpowered bantamweight was kept from snatching the heavyweight title crown by devious boxing promoters.<\/p>\n Thus radical Egyptians never quite got it that their government settled for peace of sorts not because of American interference\u00a0but because had they tried a fourth full-scale war, what was left of the Egyptian military, especially had it not been re-supplied by American arms, would have been ruined<\/em>. That Mohamed Atta and Dr. Zawahiri came out of Cairo is logical rather than exceptional, as is the frequent murdering by offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and rumors of illicit weapons programs.<\/p>\n Nor did we dare insist at Oslo that Palestinians should embrace the type of humane institutions found in Israel. So Yasser Arafat met Dennis Ross 500 times. Arafat was said to be the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton White House. American money and appeasement followed and we saw kleptocracy, one-vote-one-time, intifadas, and suicide bombings \u2014 and the hopes that Mrs. Arafat and her Paris crowd would leave some crumbs for those on the West Bank, who in turn blamed their poverty on the Jews.<\/p>\n \nPolicy #4: “Let Them Be”<\/strong><\/p>\n A<\/strong>nd don\u2019t forget the policy of indifference and inaction that was predicated on American paternalism and condescension. It is 2005 and few of us know the names of more than a half-dozen dissidents in Egypt, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, who were seen more as potential disruptors of the status quo than as the hopes of a new American foreign policy based on reciprocal notions of justice. Only in Egypt could an autocratic government that received billions in U.S. aid damn America for trying to give a measly million or two to its democratic reformers.<\/p>\n So for all the mess of trying to insist on democracy in the Middle East and fostering consensual government in the place of strongmen, at least muscular idealism is an improvement on what preceded it. September 11 was the wage of decades of American appeasement and neglect \u2014 a pathological Middle East left alone to blame others for its own self-induced mess, kept “in its box” by American money, a few missiles, and soft talk \u2014 like a spoiled child allowed to act up because it was incapable of serious mature behavior and because the ensuing tantrums were not worth the messy efforts at remediation.<\/p>\n Policy #5: The New Americanism<\/strong><\/p>\n W<\/strong><\/span>e\u2019ve seen some very strange things since this war started on September 11. But nothing is quite as odd as the past architects of failure weighing in on the dangers of \u201cneoWilsonianism,\u201d \u201cneoconservative ideologues,\u201d and veiled references to Israeli machinations, as the Bush administration finally sets right three decades these people\u2019s flawed policies and tries to promote a new Americanism based on our own universal values and aspirations.<\/p>\n If the American public has to hear another sermon from a Brent Scowcroft \u2014 \u201cSharon just has him [President Bush] wrapped around his little finger. I think the president is mesmerized\u201d \u2014 or Madeline Albright \u2014 \u201cDo you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?\u201d \u2014 about what we are now doing wrong in the Middle East, I think it will collectively heave.<\/p>\n The past ostracism of Arafat and the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, followed by democratic engagement, will bring eventual stability to the Middle East and enhance the security of the United States. After the failures of all our present critics, this new policy of promoting American values is our last, best hope. And the president will be rewarded long after he leaves office by the verdict of history for nobly sticking to it when few others, friend or foe, would.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a92005 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A litany of past failure by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Brent Scowcroft predicted on the eve of the Iraqi elections that voting there would increase the risk of civil war. Indeed, he foresaw \u201ca great potential for deepening the conflict.\u201d He also once assured us that Iraq \u201ccould become a Vietnam in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[790],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-19q","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4282,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-we-must-stay-in-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":4428,"position":0},"title":"Why We Must Stay in Iraq","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 4, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Washington Post Vietnam is once again in the air. Last month's antiwar demonstrations in Crawford, Tex., have been heralded as the beginning of an antiwar movement that will take to the streets like the one of 30 years ago. Influential pundits \u2014 in the manner of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2005"","block_context":{"text":"September 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/september-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3709,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/if-we-fail\/","url_meta":{"origin":4428,"position":1},"title":"If We Fail…","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 19, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Been there, done that. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Most Americans accept that if the United States cannot stabilize Iraq, and, in frustration and acrimony, withdraws in defeat, crises follow. The only disagreement is over how bad they will be. Some point to the aftermath of Vietnam and,\u00a0mirabile\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Janurary 2007"","block_context":{"text":"Janurary 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/janurary-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1320,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-christmas-gift-to-iran\/","url_meta":{"origin":4428,"position":2},"title":"Obama’s Christmas Gift to Iran","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 19, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine As the last American troops roll south to Kuwait, the end of the war in Iraq invites unsettling comparisons to another war America declared over before losing its nerve and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Then as now, Democrats have taken the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3973,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/vietnam-after-all\/","url_meta":{"origin":4428,"position":3},"title":"Vietnam, After All?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 9, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Formulaic warfare. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online As with the formulaic type scenes of Homeric epic, there now arises a sense of familiarity with the current outcries over Haditha. We do not really know yet what happened in that terrorist-infected hellhole, but it seems not to matter. Those\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2006"","block_context":{"text":"June 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/june-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3751,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/more-bark-than-bite\/","url_meta":{"origin":4428,"position":4},"title":"More Bark Than Bite?","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 20, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Will the Democrats' new control of the House and Senate shake things up that much abroad? They certainly will have plenty of opportunities to alter the present American course of fighting terrorists, the war in Iraq and our overall foreign policy. For over\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2006"","block_context":{"text":"November 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/november-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10115,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-tar-pits-abroad\/","url_meta":{"origin":4428,"position":5},"title":"The Tar Pits Abroad","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 24, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 As missiles fall on Syria in retaliation for Bashar Assad\u2019s medieval use of chemical weapons\u2014and as voices call for the use of some American ground troops to expedite his removal\u2014we might reflect upon American military interventions in the post-Vietnam era. America\u2019s major interventions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bill Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Bill Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/bill-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4429,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428\/revisions\/4429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPolicy #1: Realism<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
\nPolicy #2: Punitivism<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n