Greg Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch has been guest blogging while Andrew Sullivan has been getting married, and he ends his stint with a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on the desire for a change in American foreign policy. At the core, of course is a simple question: what are we trying to accomplish?
If we think of the GWOT… as mostly geared towards de-radicalizing Muslims to better ensure [that they] pursue a moderate, non-violent politics, how exactly does occupying Islamic nations or regions help in this goal? We’ve seen the hate engendered among Chechens of the Russians, or Pakistanis at India over the Kashmir dispute. We’ve seen how Israel has been bogged down in multiple wars since its founding in 1948. We see how Hezbollah significantly gained in popularity in Lebanon because of fall-out from Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion. We are all familiar with the French experience in Algeria. Is it not the images of ‘collateral damage’ in Gaza, or a razed Grozny, or increasingly now Shi’a civilians being killed by U.S. air-strikes in places like Sadr City, is this not what poses a greater threat? These are the images that future Mohamed Atta’s might pass around the Internet cafes of the Parisian banlieu, or neglected corners of East London, helping precipitate further 9/11s.
Exactly. And yet there are still people who point with pride to the defeat of Saddam’s army and seem perplexed that the Iraqi’s didn’t welcome us with flowers and a firm commitment to laissez-faire economics. And those of us that could see the historical naivety of Bush et al still get lambasted as…
“wise heads” [whose counsel] has led to mass murders, the subjugation of millions, and, at best a suggestion that we could achieve some kind of “stability” that gives us some illusory peace, but at the cost of the Holocaust, the Ukrainian Famine, the “killing fields”, the Gulag and the mass graves and gassed Kurds. ((From an email I received today.))
To these “true believers”, those who oppose GWB and his bungled GWOT are Chamberlain-like appeasers, collaborators with Saddam ((Oh, wait: that was Rumsfeld.)), and Communist fellow-travellers. Or we’re “politicizing” things ((How do you “de-politicize” a war, for heaven’s sales?)) – we’re betraying the troops because we hate Bush (over Florida or something like that). How sad. And of course Bush’s incompetence means that we’ll never know whether there could have been a better way to deal with the situation.
What are we trying to accomplish? For Bush, the first duty was to protect the United States. For Blair, it was to protect Great Britain. For the two of them to respond to 9/11 by rushing into an irrelevant, stupid, unplanned, and incompetently executed war and occupation was bad enough. To do so in a way which has played into Bin Laden’s hands and turned this into a “Clash of Civilizations” and so made Great Britain (demonstrably) and the USA (probably) less safe is nothing short of treason.
So yes, I can understand why the American voters are looking for a fresh approach to foreign policy. Let’s start with competence….