Letters to the Editor
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McSame loves Chainsaw Diplomacy, let’s cut him down
Chainsaw Diplomacy, By PETER BEINART , Time, Thursday, Mar. 20, 2008
When America invaded Iraq five years ago, most of the people who set American foreign policy believed two things. First, they believed that the U.S. military could not lose. From Panama to Kosovo, the Gulf War to Afghanistan, America had been on a wartime winning streak since the late 1980s. Our defeat in Vietnam seemed about as relevant as the War of 1812. Second, the policymakers believed that people in Iraq wanted us to win. Hadn't the Poles and Czechs celebrated when we defeated the Soviets? Hadn't Afghans cheered the overthrow of the Taliban? Swirling in the air in the spring of 2003 was an intoxicating blend of militarism and moralism. Our troops would destroy Saddam, and Iraqi gratitude would take care of the rest.
Five years later, that combination has blown apart. John McCain is open to bombing Iran, but he doesn't claim the Iranians will thank us for it. Barack Obama wants to restore America's good name, but not with the 82nd Airborne. For the most part, militarists and moralists now occupy separate camps. In the coming years, America will try to export its values and may well use military force. But it won't try to do both at the same time.
In many ways, this is what happened after Vietnam. Underlying that war were the beliefs that the communists in North Vietnam couldn't withstand our military might and that the noncommunists in South Vietnam wanted to be saved. The war shattered both assumptions. On the left, Jimmy Carter responded by making human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy: America would stand up for liberty--but not militarily. Conservatives insisted that had we used more military force in Vietnam, we would have won. But as the world turned increasingly anti-American, they abandoned the conceit that when we took up arms, other nations would cheer.
Today, however, it's the '70s all over again. Republicans still assume that force--or at least the credible threat of it--is all that regimes like Iran's understand. But you don't hear many conservatives echoing the grand Wilsonianism of Bush's Second Inaugural, in which he claimed that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." The fastest-growing species on the foreign-policy right is what National Review editor Rich Lowry calls "to hell with them" hawks: conservatives who don't care how non-Americans run their societies as long as they don't threaten us in the process.
Among Democrats, hawkishness is out of fashion, but humanitarianism remains strong. In a Foreign Affairs article last summer, Obama argued that many around the world associate Bush's freedom talk with "war, torture and forcibly imposed regime change." His answer: help freedom's march with money, not arms.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1724402,00.html
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-- ondelette
Literally, the stoop to conquer strategy. Brilliant!
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Another incidence...
I'm afraid I don't recall the particulars, but I heard another pundit yesterday morning say almost the exact same thing as Chuck Todd - that if this was Clinton or Obama, the press would have jumped on it. I believe it was from the Chris Matthews show.
I really wonder how it's possible to defend the presumption that the old white male is infallible while the non-old-white-male candidates are inherently less knowledgeable about such things.
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A Possible Future
We can be sure that if we have a President McCain the future will be "da bomb"!
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A Senior Moment
As Bill Maher put it this weekend, we really don't want the guy answering that red phone at 3AM to be having senior moments. To use a crass metaphor, just because the media is acknowledging its own fart by noting their soft treatment with McCain, that doesn't means it stinks any less.
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@DemoChristian
But the damage he's done to the ranks of general officers could be even more devastating in years to come.
I would like to see the Democratic nominee state that any officers who retired during the Bush administration are welcome to be reinstated with full restoration of rank and seniority. Call it de-Bu'ushification.
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Maybe 'o' can invite us to your home?
Oy! Same-same. Good seed and bad tare seeds.
There can be "o' form a mysterious commission?
Help should be recruited to compose a requiem?
A holy mass, a Pigeon Mass, or whatever it takes?
The composition would not surely be mere vanity.
We'll experiment is with "natural spontaneous" passion.
The "weeds" choke" ... Uproot? Down goes a hut foundation.
William T. can be a usher who sits, and grabs a few coins for wine.
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Kurtz again!
Minneapolis: If McCain is gaffe-prone or playing loose with the facts on Iran and al-Qaeda, who's calling him on it? Where's the saturation coverage of this that we would see if Clinton or Obama made such a statement? Where's Howard Kurtz leading his columns with it for multiple days?
Howard Kurtz: I have read numerous articles about McCain's mistake (The Post dealt with it again yesterday in a review of his trip abroad) and seen it debated on television as well. One reason it's not getting "saturation" coverage is that so much media attention is focused on the Clinton-Obama race that McCain, with the nomination in his pocket, has receded. This helps him a bit when he screws up, as he did in this case, but probably hurts him more in that he's not much in the news while the Democrats dominate the coverage.
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Portland, Ore.: If John McCain "believes Iran is actually training al-Qaeda operatives or is not being very careful about sticking to established facts," then why does he have a reputation as someone who knows what he's talking about, or as a "straight talker"? What, exactly, is his "bank" of foreign policy experience based on? And is simply having opinions on foreign policy -- even if they're blatantly incorrect -- a reasonable bar for the media to claim that someone has "foreign policy experience"?
Howard Kurtz: You're welcome to criticize McCain's foreign policy views, but I think to say he doesn't have experience in this area is simply not true. He has more than Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined when they were presidential candidates. He led a Navy squadron during the Vietnam War. He's been in the forefront of national security debates for two decades. He just completed his eighth visit to Iraq. He was a major proponent of the surge. Now experience isn't everything, as Obama frequently points out, citing the very experienced Cheney and Rumsfeld and how they botched the war. But McCain is not a newcomer to these matters.
Yes, he's been wrong for a long time, he's no newbie (scoff!)
I'm speechless.