Pay attention to FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

[gecko]

In a previous thread I had posted an article written by prominent conservative and National Review founder William F. Buckley:

http://www.madjacksports.com/forum/showthread.php?t=229700

In it he states that the U.S. mission in Iraq has "failed". While I do not agree with him on the finality of his statement, he argues quite convincingly that our objective has not been met, and quite frankly, may not see the light of day for quite some time.



So it has taken three years, the loss of tens of thousands of lives (both Iraqi and American), and $200 billion spent, all to achieve the present day chaos some experts call a low-level civil war.


No wonder traditional conservatives like Mr. Buckley and George Will have grown impatient and become dissatisfied with the Bush administration's handing of the Iraqi invasion and occupation.



And then there is FRANCIS FUKUYAMA. A friend of mine--who happens to be conservative--recently told me about him and his books. Who is he you may ask?


Wikipedia has the following:

"Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952 in Chicago) is an influential American philosopher, political economist and author. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science, and is currently Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argues that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989."


That 1993 book, which I plan on reading (after March Madness, of course), is practically a neoconservative bible. It argues that there is a positive direction to recent history, demonstrated by the collapse of authoritarian (i.e. Cold War) regimes. Economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it have emerged, and American's global dominance is here to stay.



It is no wonder that Mr. Fukuyama is acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of the neo-conservative movement that influences much of the policies of this Bush administration . And that includes the policy when it came to Iraq.


In fact, in 1998, while a member of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, he along with other prominent neocons implored then-President Clinton to take action to remove Saddam Hussein from power:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm


Then in 2001, shortly after 9/11, he signed a famous letter calling for swift action against Saddam Hussein "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack":

http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm



Well, in 2006 Francis Fukuyama has realized the failures of that policy and of the neoconservative movement.


In his new book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, Fukuyama the neo-icon decries the lack of troops on the ground, the absurd idea that all Iraqis would welcome the U.S. as liberators, inaction towards looting and lawlessness after the fall of Saddam, and the administration's lack of interest in the specifics of Iraqi culture and history and failure to listen to experts with alternative points of view.


Amazon.com has the following:

"Francis Fukuyama?s criticism of the Iraq war put him at odds with neoconservative friends both within and outside the Bush administration. Here he explains how, in its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, the administration wrongly made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction to its exercise of ?benevolent hegemony.? And finally, it failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq.
Fukuyama explores the contention by the Bush administration?s critics that it had a neoconservative agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the president?s first term. Providing a fascinating history of the varied strands of neoconservative thought since the 1930s, Fukuyama argues that the movement?s legacy is a complex one that can be interpreted quite differently than it was after the end of the Cold War. Analyzing the Bush administration?s miscalculations in responding to the post?September 11 challenge, Fukuyama proposes a new approach to American foreign policy through which such mistakes might be turned around?one in which the positive aspects of the neoconservative legacy are joined with a more realistic view of the way American power can be used around the world."

 

[gecko]

I also found this piece entitled After Neoconservatism--which Mr. Fukuyama wrote earlier this year and appeared in the N.Y. Times--to be a good read, as well as a "must read" if you are into political philosophy relative to today's world and the Bush administration:


http://www.champress.net/english/index.php?page=show_det&id=2405


"As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's na?ve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives ? red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East ? supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.

More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering ? which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare ? suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering."

 

[gecko]

(Fukuyama's NYT article continued)


"In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq?

Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.
Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.

And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion."

 

[gecko]

(Fukuyama's NYT article continued)


"By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.

I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's prot?g? Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern ? that is, technologically advanced and prosperous ? society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.


The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony

The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power."

It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.

There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.

Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.

Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping."

 

[gecko]

(conclusion of Fukuyama's article )



"Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.

The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.
The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.

We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and ? yes, unfortunately ? terrorism.

But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.

If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

The Bush administration has been walking ? indeed, sprinting ? away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.

Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world ? ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about."

 

[smurphy]

Is that a fake name? Don't say that about my momma!

 

[gecko]

Is that a fake name? Don't say that about my momma!

LOL.

Hey, that's FUK-U-YAMA, not FUK-U-MAMA !!! :mj07:

 

[gecko]

I forgot to highlight these VERY salient passages from Fukuyama's article:



"The End of History and the Last Man" is in the end an argument about modernization...the desire to live in a modern society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

The neoconservative position articulated by people like (William) Kristol and (Robert) Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will....Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.



So that is his take on what neoconservatism has become today, including an erroneous reliance on the assertion of "power and will".


If you consider yourself a neocon, any thoughts regarding what Mr. Fukuyama wrote here, or in the entire article, are appreciated. Plz feel free to share.

 

[gecko]

It's obvious if you read the 1998 letter from neocon think tank Project for the New American Century to Pres. Clinton that the seeds for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein were in place.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm


Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Richard Perle--all of whom were major players in the 2003 Iraq invasion--signed that letter.

Along with Dick Cheney, they came into the Bush administration planning for regime change in Iraq. Yes, it was pre-planned and thought out (not very well as it turns out).


And it's just not right that the legitimate concerns of an experience military man like Sec. of State Colin Powell--who was essentially driven out of the administration and forced to present bogus information in front of the United Nations--were usurped by the zealousness of a group of policy hawks like Cheney, Rumsfeld and gang. Is Bush still listening to these guys? I shudder at the thought!

 

[StevieD]

Great post Gecko.

 

[djv]

Lot of reading for my old eyes but very interesting. Polls show those who want Iraq over and fast. Or believe we may I say may have been misled just a wee-bit. Show big numbers some as high as 70%. At the cost now over 400 billion. And if we hang around just another 3 years final bill at 1 trillion very possible. I do believe the Pres needs some new folks around him with fresh ideas. Funny thing is I'm with many Reb's that think same way. Advise given to him seems to be say same thing. And it does not work any more.

 

[gardenweasel]

""The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem.

"""""But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before."""" It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.""


lets wait and see what all these documents that need to be translated will yield...

funny..the nyt`s, the left and their ilk will take a jihadist`s word that he was tortured and abused...as they are trained to do...

yet,when iraqi generals step forward and tell in detail how saddam moved weapons to syria......

not a peep....lol



the jury`s not out yet...saddam had weapons...and didn`t destroy them as the u.n. mandated....don`t know where they went....maybe we`ll find out...

all that wind...and it`s worthless now that iran is arming itself with nuclear weapons...

again...""But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before""....

should we take ahmadinijihad at his word?....the intelligence is...he tells us what he`s going to do....

does preemption apply here?...

you tell me...

"""Iranian madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has figured out the secret reason why the West is so opposed to Iran’s nuclear ambitions: because they don’t want him to nuke Israel.""

Iran’s Ahmadinejad: "West opposes our nukes to let Israel live on."

“Our enemies on the one hand oppose our nation’s acquisition of nuclear energy and on the other hand want to divert the attention of other nations from the key issue of Palestine to give an opportunity to the Zionist regime to prolong its existence”, he said.

“One of the main reasons why the big powers oppose Iran on the nuclear issue is for the sake of the Zionist regime, so as to let this regime live on. But they are unaware that not only will the Iranian nation continue in the path of obtaining nuclear energy till the end, it will not even for one instant divert its attention from the issue of Palestine”.

“The regime occupying Qods [Israel] is the key to [Western] countries’ domination in Muslim lands, and with every blow at this occupying regime, it’s the pillars of the Global Arrogance (the West) that are targeted”.

this is what the head of state is saying in public.....can you imagine how he talks when he kicks back with his buds over a chivas regal and the tape of this week's stoning at the soccer stadium?

am I missing something here? .....just how does it help the palestinians to nuke israel? .....they are like, right next door, close enough for some serious fall out issues......or do they think that they have a bomb that will miraculously only affect jews? ....

what we`re not getting....what mr fukallama isn`t getting....is that this isn't about the palestinians...or bush.... it's about the 12th imam....

and saddam had absolutely the same intentions....i can post the quotes.....

unless you are totally clueless...you know that you can`t roll the dice with these religious fanatics....

we know how much these people value human life....they won`t mind breaking a few eggs...they`ve proven that...

actually, it is fulfilling yassir arafat's promise of a million martyrs for jerusalem...... if iran nukes israel, there is a good chance they will murder a million plo-arabs and thus make ole yassir's wetdream a reality.....

besides, if the arabs ever did succeed in destroying israel, they'd have to kill all the palestinians anyway since there would be no living with them.......so, to the islamists point of view, two birds with one stone.....

i love these pontificating blowhards...that play fast and loose with madmen and and wmd`s....

 

[gardenweasel]

i will say this... in terms of ending the threat posed to america by the the islamofascists....we actually didn`t hit the 2 biggest offenders first...that being iran and saudi arabia...

wwe screwed up...no doubt...

in afghanistan, we gave the taliban advance notice of military action, refused to bomb many top leaders out of their hideouts for fear of civilian casualties, and allowed many key leaders to escape in the battle of tora borah.

in iraq, while we have taken saddam out of power, we haven`t eradicated the remnants of his baathist regime(thanks to tommy franks),or defeated the insurgency.......or,taken any measures against the rise of a shiite theocracy....that could turn out to be worse than saddam....

and another failure is in how our leadership evaluates these incursions....not in terms of whether they end threats and dissuade other hostile regimes from continuing aggression, but in terms of whether they bestow the “good life” on the middle eastern peoples by ridding them of unpopular dictators and allowing them to vote-in whatever government they choose (no matter how anti-american).....this is the objective that currently consumes endless resources and thousands of american lives in iraq.....

and that grates....

i`m not blind to this administrations blunders...i`ve always said i understand why we went into iraq.....not that it was smart...or that it was done efficiently...

there were crucial blunders...

 

[gecko]

lets wait and see what all these documents that need to be translated will yield...

funny..the nyt`s, the left and their ilk will take a jihadist`s word that he was tortured and abused...as they are trained to do...

yet,when iraqi generals step forward and tell in detail how saddam moved weapons to syria......

the jury`s not out yet...saddam had weapons...and didn`t destroy them as the u.n. mandated....don`t know where they went....maybe we`ll find out...

I believe that most people's patience, including of those in government and the military past and present, are being tested right now. The thought that "change" would somehow happen overnight is the ultimate example of looking thru rose-colored glasses. My point, as well as that of Mr. Fukuyama, is that certain neocons had undue influence on this administration's foreign policy, specifically towards Iraq. The aftermath of the Cold War brought forth overly optimistic ideas about preventive war and the notion of instant regime change and democratization.

The natural tendency of our nation now (as shown with Bush's recent low approval #'s) towards this war is that of skepticism and pessimism. I think this goes beyond criticism of a "liberal" media. I do think that, if anything, the media all over the world is hot on the trail of the perceived arrogance of the United States, and specifically, this administration. You have to keep in mind that the corroboration of a number of "tortured prisoners" (with actual photos as proof) is more easily substantiated than second-hand information passed to a former General who hadn't been involved in Saddam's government for over a decade.

The notion that the "jury's not out" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Every American should be dissatisfied with the progress being made in Iraq. I say this because the outcome could have been different.

Don't blame the media or the protestors. Yes, I understand that Saddam is a dictator, the Islamo-fascists are bad people. But the Bush administration has handled this badly.

It took me a while to realize that Bush is a weak leader. He was elected both as a backlash against Clinton and because of the unwavering (almost fanatical) support of Christian conservatives who sought to further their own agendas.

The neocons have used Bush, the conservatives have used Bush, and quite frankly, it's George W. Bush that is stuck in the middle. He spoke about the accumulation of "political capital" shortly after being re-elected, but I'm afraid that is quickly evaporating.

all that wind...and it`s worthless now that iran is arming itself with nuclear weapons...

again.."But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before"...

should we take ahmadinijihad at his word?....the intelligence is...he tells us what he`s going to do....

does preemption apply here?...

"Iranian madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has figured out the secret reason why the West is so opposed to Iran?s nuclear ambitions: because they don?t want him to nuke Israel."

Iran?s Ahmadinejad: "West opposes our nukes to let Israel live on."

?Our enemies on the one hand oppose our nation?s acquisition of nuclear energy and on the other hand want to divert the attention of other nations from the key issue of Palestine to give an opportunity to the Zionist regime to prolong its existence?, he said.

?One of the main reasons why the big powers oppose Iran on the nuclear issue is for the sake of the Zionist regime, so as to let this regime live on. But they are unaware that not only will the Iranian nation continue in the path of obtaining nuclear energy till the end, it will not even for one instant divert its attention from the issue of Palestine?.

?The regime occupying Qods [Israel] is the key to [Western] countries? domination in Muslim lands, and with every blow at this occupying regime, it?s the pillars of the Global Arrogance (the West) that are targeted?.

am I missing something here? .....just how does it help the palestinians to nuke israel? .....they are like, right next door, close enough for some serious fall out issues......or do they think that they have a bomb that will miraculously only affect jews?

what we`re not getting....what mr fukallama isn`t getting....is that this isn't about the palestinians...or bush.... it's about the 12th imam....

and saddam had absolutely the same intentions....i can post the quotes.....

unless you are totally clueless...you know that you can`t roll the dice with these religious fanatics....

we know how much these people value human life....they won`t mind breaking a few eggs...they`ve proven that...

actually, it is fulfilling yassir arafat's promise of a million martyrs for jerusalem...... if iran nukes israel, there is a good chance they will murder a million plo-arabs and thus make ole yassir's wetdream a reality.....

besides, if the arabs ever did succeed in destroying israel, they'd have to kill all the palestinians anyway since there would be no living with them.......so, to the islamists point of view, two birds with one stone.....

i love these pontificating blowhards...that play fast and loose with madmen and and wmd`s....

First of all, unless it was a typo I expect you to extend Mr. Fukuyama some common courtesy and not call him a name. Can you come up with some doozies and zingers for Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Kristol? I'm eagerly waiting.....
:shrug:



I noticed how a discussion involving War on Terror and the battle in Iraq has evolved into the nuclear capabilities of Iran and the protection of Israel.

I won't argue about the Arab world's general hostility towards Israel, specifically that of Iran's new leader. His own words can only be seen as hostile towards Israel.

Having said that, I hardly expected Saddam and Iranian Pres. Ahmadinejad to form an alliance in the near future. Just like a Saddam/bin laden friendship, it was not likely due to the secularism of Saddam.


I have a thought....It's not implausible that the invasion of Iraq was a preemptive strike serving as a warning to Arab regimes with anti-Israeli sentiments. That would explain in part why those in this administration and people influencing it had it in for Saddam early on. He was an easy target, relatively speaking.


But let me understand something. What you are saying then, gardenweasel, is that Iran could have been the ultimate target could have been all along? The Iran which Reagan made a deal with to release American hostages? The present day Iranian regime which this administration regards as a member of the "axis of evil" with a wacko for a leader?

Some political analysts point to the fact that Iran feels strong because of high oil prices, while America has been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq. What about the talk of getting away from the American dollar standard when it comes to the oil trade?

Certainly this Iranian president has a religious messianism that some see as bordering on divine mission. WOW....ain't that similar to what some in our own country saw in George W. Bush, supposedly a born again Christian?

Yes, Pres. Ahmadinejad's seems devoted to the Hidden Imam, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, and by his own words his government must prepare the country for the Imam's return.

My fear is that the leadership of the United States and Iran are headed towards a collision course. Supposedly, the Imam's return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war and bloodshed. After a cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the world will be lead to an age of universal peace.

This is similar to the Christian vision of the Apocalypse. Indeed, the Imam is expected to return in the company of Jesus.

With the U.S. and Iran at odds, do you, gardenweasel, believe that these apocalyptic events are close at hand and that ordinary mortals can influence the divine timetable?

Interested in your thoughts.

 

[gecko]

WOW....I just saw this new article on the Wash. Post website. I think his administration has been backed into a corner and Pres. Bush is coming out swinging. Not sure if it's the wisest thing to do, but given the hawks in this administration and the United States' unequivocal support of Israel, it's not surprising.....in the name of self-defense?


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502297_pf.html




Bush to Restate Terror Strategy
2002 Doctrine of Preemptive War To Be Reaffirmed


By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 16, 2006


President Bush plans to issue a new national security strategy today reaffirming his doctrine of preemptive war against terrorists and hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, despite the troubled experience in Iraq.

The long-overdue document, an articulation of U.S. strategic priorities that is required by law, lays out a robust view of America's power and an assertive view of its responsibility to bring change around the world. On topics including genocide, human trafficking and AIDS, the strategy describes itself as "idealistic about goals and realistic about means."

The strategy expands on the original security framework developed by the Bush administration in September 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. That strategy shifted U.S. foreign policy away from decades of deterrence and containment toward a more aggressive stance of attacking enemies before they attack the United States.

The preemption doctrine generated fierce debate at the time, and many critics believe the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq fatally undermined an essential assumption of the strategy -- that intelligence about an enemy's capabilities and intentions can be sufficient to justify preventive war.

In his revised version, Bush offers no second thoughts about the preemption policy, saying it "remains the same" and defending it as necessary for a country in the "early years of a long struggle" akin to the Cold War. In a nod to critics in Europe, the document places a greater emphasis on working with allies and declares diplomacy to be "our strong preference" in tackling the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

"If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack," the document continues. "When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize."

Such language could be seen as provocative at a time when the United States and its European allies have brought Iran before the U.N. Security Council to answer allegations that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons. At a news conference in January, Bush described an Iran with nuclear arms as a "grave threat to the security of the world."

Some security specialists criticized the continued commitment to preemption. "Preemption is and always will be a potentially useful tool, but it's not something you want to trot out and throw in everybody's face," said Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "To have a strategy on preemption and make it central is a huge error."

A military attack against Iran, for instance, could be "foolish," Ullman said, and it would be better to seek other ways to influence its behavior. "I think most states are deterrable."

Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has written on the 2002 strategy, said the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the strict sense is not an example of preemptive war, because it was preceded by 12 years of low-grade conflict and was essentially the completion of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Still, he said, recent problems there contain lessons for those who would advocate preemptive war elsewhere. A military strike is not enough, he said; building a sustainable, responsible state in place of a rogue nation is the real challenge.

"We have to understand preemption -- it's not going to be simply a preemptive strike," he said. "That's not the end of the exercise but the beginning of the exercise."

The White House plans to release the 49-page National Security Strategy today, starting with a speech by national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to the U.S. Institute of Peace. The White House gave advance copies to The Washington Post and three other newspapers.

The strategy has no legal force of its own but serves as a guidepost for agencies and officials drawing up policies in a range of military, diplomatic and other arenas. Although a 1986 law requires that the strategy be revised annually, this is the first new version since 2002. "I don't think it's a change in strategy," Hadley said in an interview. "It's an updating of where we are with the strategy, given the time that's passed and the events that have occurred."

But the new version of the strategy underscores in a more thematic way Bush's desire to make the spread of democracy the fundamental underpinning of U.S. foreign policy, as he expressed in his second inaugural address last year. The opening words of the strategy, in fact, are lifted from that speech: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

The strategy commits the administration to speaking out against human rights abuses, holding high-level meetings at the White House with reformers from repressive nations, using foreign aid to support elections and civil society, and applying sanctions against oppressive governments. It makes special mention of religious intolerance, subjugation of women and human trafficking.

At the same time, it acknowledges that "elections alone are not enough" and sometimes lead to undesirable results. "These principles are tested by the victory of Hamas candidates in the recent elections in the Palestinian territories," the strategy says, referring to the radical group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.

Without saying what action would be taken against them, the strategy singles out seven nations as prime examples of "despotic systems" -- North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe. Iran and North Korea receive particular attention because of their nuclear programs, and the strategy vows in both cases "to take all necessary measures" to protect the United States against them.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," the document says, echoing a statement made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week. It recommits to efforts with European allies to pressure Tehran to give up any aspirations of nuclear weapons, then adds ominously: "This diplomatic effort must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided."

The language about confrontation is not repeated with North Korea, which says it already has nuclear bombs, an assertion believed by U.S. intelligence. But Pyongyang is accused of a "bleak record of duplicity and bad-faith negotiations," as well as of counterfeiting U.S. currency, trafficking in drugs and starving its own people.

The strategy offers a much more skeptical view of Russia than in 2002, when the glow of Bush's friendship with President Vladimir Putin was still bright.

"Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions," it says. "We will work to try to persuade the Russian Government to move forward, not backward, along freedom's path."

It also warns China that "it must act as a responsible stakeholder that fulfills its obligations" and guarantee political freedom as well as economic freedom. "Our strategy," the document says, "seeks to encourage China to make the right strategic choices for its people, while we hedge against other possibilities."

To assuage allies antagonized by Bush's go-it-alone style in his first term, the White House stresses alliance and the use of what it calls "transformational diplomacy" to achieve change. At the same time, it asserts that formal structures such as the United Nations or NATO may at times be less effective than "coalitions of the willing," or groups responding to particular situations, such as the Asian tsunami of 2004.

Beyond the military response to terrorism, the document emphasizes the need to fight the war of ideas against Islamic radicals whose anti-American rhetoric has won wide sympathy in parts of the world.

The strategy also addresses topics largely left out of the 2002 version, including a section on genocide and a new chapter on global threats such as avian influenza, AIDS, environmental destruction and natural disasters. Critics have accused the administration of not doing enough to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, responding too slowly to the Asian tsunami and disregarding global environmental threats such as climate change.

 

[gecko]

OK, so the President is continuing our strategy of preventive war.

Can it be that an expanded air war in Iraq is laying the groundwork for expansion of the war into Iran? My answer is YES!...very plausible. The seeds might have well been sewn.


(This is similar to Vietnam when Nixon attempted to expand the war into Laos and Cambodia.)



------------------------



U.S. military airstrikes significantly increased in Iraq


Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder Newspapers
March 14, 2006


BAGHDAD, Iraq - American forces have dramatically increased airstrikes in Iraq during the past five months, a change of tactics that may foreshadow how the United States plans to battle a still-strong insurgency while reducing the number of U.S. ground troops serving here.

A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year. Knight Ridder's statistical findings were reviewed and confirmed by American Air Force officials in the region.

The numbers also show that U.S. forces dropped bombs on more cities during the last five months than they did during the same period a year ago. Airstrikes hit at least nine cities between Oct. 1, 2004, and Feb. 28, 2005, but were mostly concentrated in and around the western city of Fallujah. A year later, U.S. warplanes struck at least 18 cities during the same months.

The spike in bombings comes at a crucial time for American diplomatic efforts in Iraq. Officials in Washington have said that the situation in Iraq is improving, creating expectations that at least some American troops might be able to withdraw over the next year.

On Monday, President Bush stopped short of promising a withdrawal. But he said he expects that Iraqi government forces will control more of Iraq, allowing U.S. forces to carry out more targeted missions.

 

[gecko]

gardenweasel brought up an interesting point about Iran. It is possibly the end game. Never mind North Korea, or Belarus or Burma. Quite possibly the U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East for the remainder of this administration will focus upon Iran. Everything will revolve around it.



I found this to be interesting...

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/14/deja_vu_all_over_iran.php




Here are the main points in this article:


Deja Vu All Over Iran


By Robert Dreyfuss
TomPaine.com


Tuesday 14 March 2006


The pieces are falling into place for Operation Regime Change II, this time in Iran. You'd think, given how badly it went the first time, and how utterly unpredictable a showdown with Iran would be, that the Bush administration would have at least changed its m.o. - but no.

In the past few weeks, we've seen the Bush administration create a brand-new Office of Iranian Affairs at the State Department.

The United States is pressing the U.N. to sanction Iran, to be more aggressive in shutting down a nuclear program that, so far at least, the International Atomic Energy Agency has not been able to find, exactly. In 2002, the Bush administration took Iraq to the UNSC, got the IAEA inspectors invited back in, began pressing for further U.N. action-and then gave up the whole thing and invaded Iraq unilaterally.

The Bush administration iis planning to spend $75 million to support Iranian "democrats" and to back Iranian exile television stations. And, according to a recent State Department planning document, the United States is busily setting up anti-Iranian intelligence and mobilization centers in Dubai, Istanbul, Ankara, Adana, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, London and Baku to work with "Iranian expatriate communities."

Finally, various U.S. officials are talking openly about bypassing the U.N., ignoring international legitimacy, and forging yet another ad hoc coalition of allies - a "coalition of the willing" - to confront Iran.

And then, of course, there is the saber-rattling. No one is better at that than the Israelis, and last week the neoconservative Hudson Institute gave a platform to a rabid former Israeli army chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, who had these charming words to say:

Israel has the ability to disrupt the Iranian air defense system; Israel can strike Iran through a number of ways, not only through aerial attack. ? The Israeli strike can be precise, like targeted assassination. Just as we succeed in striking a lone terrorist, we can also strike a nuclear site without causing major damage to the environment and harming civilians.

But U.S. officials, too, from Vice President Cheney to Bolton to the president himself continue to insist that all options are on the table, that a military attack against Iran cannot be ruled out, and so forth.

As cooler heads have pointed out, none of this amounts to an actual strategy. The Iranians know that a military attack on their nuclear facilities isn't a feasible option. Not only would it kill hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians (if all of the more than 50 sites, many in populated areas, were attacked), but the Iranians know that they could strike back at the United States with a deadly combination of counterstrikes. Martin Indyk, the hard-headed hawk at the Brookings Institution, ridicules the idea of a military strike against Iran:

The Iranians have 500,000 battle-hardened Pasdaran (members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp), plus the people they have control or influence over in Iraq. I would just put this proposition on the table-the United States cannot strike Iran while we still have our troops in Iraq.

The Iranians also know that the idea of U.N. sanctions is hollow, since neither China nor Russia will go along with economic sanctions against the country.


The fact is that the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq knocked off two of Iran's deadliest regional enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Iran has amassed great power inside Iraq, not by supporting the insurgents, as President Bush claims, but simply by using its Shiite allies to gain power in Baghdad. Iran is building its influence in Lebanon, too, and among the Shiite population in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Bush administration seems incapable of understanding the need to engage with Iran, to seek their help in Iraq, and to search for an accommodation with the ayatollahs.

 

[gecko]

It would be nice to know that the U.S. and Israel hinting at military strikes against Iran is part of some grand diplomatic strategy.

I'm sure Francis Fukuyama would be proud.



On another note, I had heard the other day about a book by Stephen Kinzer called All the Shah's Men, published back in 2003. In it he writes of the U.S.' role in regime change in Iran in 1953. How ironic is it given the recent developments in Iraq and Iran.


This is what I'd learned.....

Eisenhower was President in 1953 when the U.S., CIA and British government orchestrated a coup overthrowing the popular democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran.

The reasoning? In 1951 Mossadegh roused Britain's ire when he nationalized the oil industry. Mossadegh argued that Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves which had been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The company later became known as British Petroleum (BP).

OMG, all over control of oil? Haven't we heard parallels drawn regarding Iraq this time around? Well anyway, after considering military action, Britain opted for a coup. President Harry Truman rejected the idea, but when Ike took over the White House, he ordered the CIA to embark on one of its first covert operations against a foreign government.

In the end, the CIA and the British helped to undermine Mossadegh's government through bribery, libel, and orchestrated riots.

Mossadegh was overthrown, sentenced to three years in prison followed by house arrest for life.

The crushing of Iran's first democratic government ushered in more than 25 years of tyranny and repression under the Shah, who relied heavily on U.S. aid and arms. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution. The anti-American backlash that toppled the Shah in 1979 shook the whole region and helped spread Islamic militancy.

The 1953 coup in Iran was a pivotal event. Most certainly all Iranians know about it. Yet the majority of Americans haven't even heard of it.

The 50th anniversary of the coup was front-page news in Iranian newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor reports one paper in Iran publishing excerpts from CIA documents on the coup, which were released 2000.

And it was in 2000 that the U.S. acknowledged its involvement in the fall of the democratically-elected government of Mossadegh. In a New York Times article in March 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that "the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."



In fact, even the CIA has a review of this book on their website. Here it is....

http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no2/article10.html

 

[djv]

Yes the 2002 story is way to go said Rowe. I believe it's a old story and new thinking is needed. As a new member of parliament in Iraq said. It's not about U S troops staying here or even our elections. It's about clean water to drink and safe streets to walk. Better education and more good hospitals. He said during this interview on C Span. That just having a American soldier standing there does make anything better. Or taking a building and calling it a hospital dose not make it one. These are the folks we should at least listen to to understand our old policy may not work.