DO WE WANT TO GO BACK?
The Department of Defense
especially the creation of a policy to ensure that Soviet Communism did not
enter Western Europe. Critics on the right once argued over "Who lost China
and Eastern Europe?" and the stalemate in Korea ("No substitute for
victory"). Left-wingers harped on American knee-jerk support for
anti-Communist dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the
Middle East.
Be that as it may, Americans owe Harry Truman a great deal for overseeing
the rebuilding of Europe, his prescient understanding of the danger of
Soviet expansionism, and preservation of the Democratic party from the
forces of appeasement - and worse - from its extremist Left.
Something similar to that landmark policy - a Bush Doctrine - is now
emerging to face the threat of Islamic radicalism. Despite the current
shrill claims that the United States is hated, hopelessly naļve, bogged down
worldwide, and back in another Vietnam, since September 11 we have witnessed
a historic emergence of a comprehensive foreign policy to confront Islamic
fundamentalism and its parasitic relationship with Middle East autocracy -
without which it cannot survive.
The end of the Taliban and Baathist Iraq are impressive accomplishments. So
are the scattering of al Qaeda and the arrest of hundreds of Saddamites and
terrorists. But there are a number of other developments that have often
gone unheralded and are, in the long run, just as important, even if they
will not make nifty sound bites in the November election.
Hello, Europe. Far from polarizing our allies, we are entering into a more
mature relationship that has dispelled much of the dishonesty of the last 20
years. Expect more, not less, cooperation from Germany and France around the
globe. The United States' willingness to use force for the preservation of
Western ideals has given the Europeans new confidence at home and more
credibility worldwide. Indeed, they now boast of their soft power in
pressuring rogue regimes in a way impossible without the specter of allied
American muscle. Our new relationship with Eastern Europe has reminded the
Europeans that liberty rather than government-enforced equality still
resonates with millions. NATO is at a crossroads, and will either deploy
credible forces in Afghanistan and Iraq or die on the vine - and this is now
as it should be.
Goodbye, Bases. Thanks to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the entire question
of where, why, and how American soldiers are based and deployed overseas is
now, for the first time in 60 years, under sober review. To the Bush
administration's credit, the issue is not merely one of cost and pique - nor
even of tactics and strategy in a post-Cold War world - although such
considerations remain critical.
More importantly, the present leadership has grasped that many of our own
problems with allies arose from an unhealthy dependency, in which we
provided unquestioned security while they ankle bit amid their own growing
sense of inferiority. Our post-Cold War relationships with Europe, South
Korea, Japan, Turkey, and Middle East countries will become far better for
all involved once they begin to learn American military support is a
partnership to be shared rather than an entitlement to be granted.
Maturity in the Middle East. Despite hysteria that the Bush administration
is in the clutches of some vast neoconservative (read Jewish/Likud)
conspiracy, it has advanced the most ambitious, humane, and needed
initiatives for the Middle East in the last half century. Precisely because
we no longer give autocracies a pass for pumping oil and keeping out
Communists - and are no longer complacent as usual, but unpredictably angry
about terrorism - our policy now is neither cynical realism nor starry-eyed
multilateral fantasy.
Instead, without naiveté we strive for constitutional government and
modernization. We are trying to help to integrate the Middle East into the
rest of the world's democratic economy - and to end our own appeasement of
fundamentalism, dictatorship, gender-apartheid, anti-Semitism, press
censorship, and pathetic victimhood that all played their parts in leading
to September 11.
Liberals ridicule the Bush doctrine because they claim to be idealistic, and
resent that force, rather than reason alone, is sometimes needed.
Islamicists hate it, because if Afghanistan and Iraq work, they are largely
through. Moderate dictatorships in the region slur it because they can no
longer triangulate with us to garner aid and a pass on their own repression.
Arab faux-intellectuals and their fellow travelers in the West caricature
it, because reform will make untenable their hothouse cynical
anti-Americanism - as they soon become as irrelevant as Panamanian or
Serbian leftists damning the United States for removing Noriega and
Milosevic to give democracy a chance.
A Pass for Saudi Arabia? No autocracy has been more involved in the spread
of anti-American Islamic fascism than the Saudis. And unlike the Taliban and
Saddam Hussein, the royal family was so intertwined with grandees in
Washington - oil projects, arms sales, decades-old shared anti-Communism -
that it seemed impossible for the United States to distance itself from that
hereditary plutocracy and all that it stands for.
To the credit of the Bush administration, all American troops will soon be
out of Saudi Arabia. Its "charities" are being systematically shut down to
end their subsidies to terrorists. For the first time in a half-century, the
royal family is more worried about American support for democratic change in
the Middle East than we are of an oil embargo. Given that the Saudis sit on
25 percent of the world's known oil reserves, and that the American appetite
for imported oil is insatiable, it is quite amazing that we have come this
far this fast.
So Long, Yasser Arafat. If one believes that Mr. Arafat is not merely an
ex-terrorist but a contemporary criminal as well - given the proximity of
killers in his midst - then past American support for his Tunisian mafia was
crazy. In an era when Mr. Arafat had recently felt like the White House was
his second home, and the fatally flawed Oslo agreements were still spoken of
in near religious language, President Bush had the courage to sever the
pathological relationship. The Americans have made it clear that Arafat's
brutality makes peace with Israel impossible while his innate corruption
precludes any chance that there will ever be prosperity and consensual
government for the Palestinian people. So it is now the Palestinians' call -
fair and periodic elections, free speech, and civic audit - not ours. And
that too is as it should be.
Nuke-Mart. For two decades the Western world lamented the spread of nuclear
materials, but chose to avoid the messy work of coercing crazy regimes to
reveal their arsenals. The old American policy was based on two flawed
premises: trust in the power of international agencies, and bribery. That
led to the nuclearization of both Pakistan and North Korea - and a number of
other lunocracies like Libya and Iran reaching the penultimate state of
getting the bomb.
Amid the wreckage of the past, credit goes to the Bush administration for a
new tripartite policy: 1) engaged vigilance, but not blackmail, of rogue
nuclear states like Pakistan and North Korea; 2) pressure, including the
threat of force, against would-be nuclear powers like Libya; 3) empowerment
of international agencies to monitor emerging nuclear programs through
promises the United States will (cf. the fate of Saddam Hussein), if need
be, enforce their edicts.
The United States is waking up from a serious malady. Once upon a time
state-supported terrorism was seen as a criminal problem, not war, requiring
yellow police tape, not GPS bombs. Afghanistan was turned into an
anti-American terrorist base. Saddam Hussein required never-ending patrols
to "box" him in. Osama bin Laden was too "hot" to be apprehended when
offered up by potential captors. Pakistan and North Korea went nuclear - the
greatest failure of many of the Clinton administration. Iran and Libya
bought arsenals with impunity. Yasser Arafat systematically destroyed twenty
years of economic progress on the West Bank and violated every accord he
signed. Anti-Americanism grew in Europe without rejoinder or consequences.
Saudi Arabia expected protection while our own female soldiers on patrol
there hid their faces and arms - and promised not to drive. Terrorist funds
flowed freely throughout the globe, as anti-Semitism and Islamicist-inspired
hatred of Israel became the new pillar of trendy left-wing thought. All that
has at least been recognized, checked, and is well on the way to being
stopped.
Just as a presidency of earlier ossified liberals like Michael Dukakis or
Walter Mondale probably would have led to support of a utopian nuclear
freeze and subsequent Russian intimidation of Europe, unilateral cuts in
military preparedness, and acquiescence to the Soviet Union, so too the
election of John Kerry may well undo much of what has been achieved these
last three years as we return to the old, normal way of doing business.
With Howard Dean gone, Kerry realizes that suddenly he must move rightward
to sound tougher than George Bush. Finally, he seems to understand that
every northern liberal Democrat in the last 30 years who ran to the left on
national security lost badly - like McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. And so
Mr. Kerry abruptly will have to talk grandly of what he would have done to
make us more secure. Yet a better guide is his own record in opposing
defense programs, in harboring a chronic suspicion of using American force,
and his own contradictory past votes about deployments to the Middle East.
More likely, if President Bush loses, the war against terror will return, as
promised, to the status of a police matter - subpoenas and court trials the
more appropriate response to the mass murder of 3,000 at the "crime scene"
of the crater in New York. Europe will be assured that our troops will stay
while we apologize for the usual litany of purported unilateral sins. North
Korea will get more blackmail cash, while pampered South Korean leftists
resume their "sunshine" mirage. Iraq will be turned over to the U.N. as we
abruptly leave, and could dissolve into something like the Balkans between
1991 and 1998. Iran and Syria will let out a big sigh of relief - as
American diplomats once more sit out on the tarmac in vain hopes of an
"audience" with despots. The Saudis will smile that smile. Arafat will be
assured that he is now once again a legitimate interlocutor. And strangest
of all, the American Left will feel that the United States has just barely
begun to return to its "moral" bearings - even as its laxity and relativism
encourage some pretty immoral things to come.
If White House politicos figured that many who were angered about
out-of-control federal spending and immigration proposals would grumble, but
not abandon Mr. Bush - given the global stakes involved after September 11,
and the specter of a new alternative foreign policy far to the left of that
of a Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright - then they were absolutely
right.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/2446