Letters to the Editor
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Failure of imagination
I think that future historians will look back at this period and diagnose that a lack of imagination was one of the fatal flaws of American society. I think 9/11 gave us a kind of collective brain damage, where our ability to imagine the possible consequences of our actions and examine how likely they are was removed.
In the case of the Iraq war, it was theoretically possible that the scenario decribed by the Bush administration would play out; that we'd see a sweeping democratization of the Middle East following the toppling of Saddam. But it was possible in the same way that a quarter would stand on its edge after being flipped is theoretically possible.
So now we find ourselves increasingly impotent in a highly destabilized world, a position that many critics of the war had identified as the most likely result. Yet now the same flawed arguments are being ramped up for an attack on Iran. Will we as a people be able to exercise a little imagination this time around? Have we learned anything?
I sincerely hope that we have, but I'm not optimistic.
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Here's a little back story as to why this problem keeps getting worse
Regarding this fact:
Those areas are ethnically and politically linked to southern Afghanistan, which has seen a resurgence of guerrilla violence.
There are two reasons why this is true. First reason -- the treaty that established the border between Afghanistan and India, (before Pakistan existed) was drawn with little any regard for tribal territory. That was typical colonialist boo-boo that we see all over Africa as well.
Then along came the royal Pushtun prince Mohammed Daoud, who dreamed of reclaiming the north of Pakistan for Afghanistan and renaming the whole thing Pushtunistan.
Daoud took over in a bloodless coup in April 1973. Declassified documents show that the Nixon State Dept. was warned in advance about the coup and helped get the King out of the country so the coup could happen.
(That's an interesting story by the way. According to the State Dept. documents, the King was hit in the face with a volleyball and suffered a hematoma. Some American doctor working at the Noor Eye Clinic told him his hematoma needed special treatment in an Italian hospital, and off he flew.)
So Daoud takes over. He's officially a modernizer with state socialist leanings with deep concern for women's rights and close ties with the Soviet Union.
Except his real obsession was Pushtuntistan. That obsession is what came between Daoud and the Soviet government and helped lead to Daoud's demise in a very non-bloodless coup in 1978.
Daoud's modernization program for Afghanistan also fell victim to his obsession with Pushtunistan. Instead of making gradual changes and bringing the population on board through education and incentives, he threw everyone in prison who disagreed with him.
His government was so hostile and repressive towards mullahs and religious Pushtuns that many of them MOVED ACROSS THE BORDER INTO NORTHERN PAKISTAN, conveniently strengthening Daoud's claim that northern Pakistan was part of a Pushtun homeland and needed to be returned to Afghanistan.
Even more religious Pushtuns were driven across the border into Pakistan after the Red Army showed up in 1979.
And then when we started bombing, well, unfortunately, I think we added to the problem as well.
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Thank you Professor Cole...
As usual a reader can gain more knowledge reading one column of yours than they could gain by watching a weeks worth of television.
And once again the bullies method of achieving all his goals, that being force, or the threat of force, is proved fatally flawed. Dick n' W have learned what so many bullies before them have learned; Sometimes people actually fight back.
In fact I would say that the only group of people scare tactics have proved to work against every single time would be the Democratic Party.
I sure as hell don't know the way out of this disaster. The only thing I can be fairly certain of is that it will get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
If it gets better that is.
Sigh...
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Hillary wants to continue it
President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.
In an interview for the new book “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said Bush has “been urging candidates: ‘Don’t get yourself too locked in where you stand right now. If you end up sitting where I sit, things could change dramatically.’ ”
Bolten said Bush wants enough continuity in his Iraq policy that “even a Democratic president would be in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there.”
“Especially if it’s a Democrat,” the chief of staff told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”
Fact: Hillary is a NEOCON!
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Coming undone -- or never existed
The Bush administration's entire Middle East policy is coming undone — if it even has a policy left ...
... or if it ever did! Juan Cole's close analysis is excellent as usual, but let's take a step back and acknowledge a basic truth: the Bush Administration never had a policy, not just about Iraq but about anything pertaining to foreign affairs. Like art under a dictatorship or science under a theocracy, statecraft is so fundamentally contradictory to the values that these thieves and mercenaries hold dear that it ceases to be possible to even practice it, let alone well.
The idea that these were a bunch of guys who let their worst instincts get the better of them after the World Trade Center attacks, or that the rest of us all somehow succumbed to shock and awe and let them run roughshod over the country, is comforting but false. Liberals in America have failed to involve themselves in foreign policy in any serious way for a generation, with the result that long before September of 2001 the Bush regime was systemically failing to do any sort of policymaking, and nobody in the Democratic opposition really noticed.
They literally didn't notice, and the reason was because their constituents didn't notice either. Ballistic missile treaties? Euro-Turkish regional politics? Sino-American relations? North Korea's economic collapse? Who in this country cares about those things? Ho hum, right?
Except it turns out that even if you ignore the world, the world isn't going to ignore you. The failure of not only our collective imagination but also our good sense and cognizance of urgency has gotten us into profound trouble, and it's not clear that we've learned any lesson from the experience except "maybe we shouldn't invade Iran. Maybe."