COMMENTARY Bush has no one to blame
but himself By Ehsan Ahrari
Is it possible to envisage American primacy - at
least in the present context - as a boundless phenomenon
that is also invulnerable? Or is it possible for other
great and not-so-great powers to gang up on an
all-powerful United States at a moment of vulnerability?
The latter appears to be the case when the creation of a
United Nations-endorsed interim government in Iraq was
expected to stabilize that troubled country.
Instead, two officials of the interim government
have been assassinated, and violent suicide attacks are
killing more Iraqis. As if these events of last week
were not bad enough to create doubts about the stable
future of Iraq, a group of 26 former American diplomats
and military officials in Washington are set to issue a
joint statement that President George W Bush has
"damaged America's national security and should be
defeated in November".
The basic premise of Bush
to global affairs was questionable, at best, even before
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US. This
was the same candidate Bush, who during the heat of the
presidential campaign of 2000 was advocating humility in
America's approach to world affairs. But once in office,
it seemed that candidate Bush disappeared permanently,
along with all his ostensible thoughtfulness about
humility in international diplomacy. Instead, a
unilateral approach to world affairs was to become a
"normal" pattern for his administration, whose other
significant purpose was to establish America's primacy
to a level that no nation should ever be able to
surpass.
One has to try very hard to fathom why
the notion of unilateralism was adopted so resolutely
and persistently by the Bush administration. Perhaps the
neo-conservatives, who filled most of the
administration's top jobs, thought that such a modus
operandi was warranted to attain America's primacy,
especially after the end of the Cold War. That thinking
further hardened after the terrorist attacks on the US.
But why no attention was paid to the world's reaction to
America's militant arrogance that such phrases as "if
you are not with us, you are with the terrorists"
created worldwide, or the reception given to such
thinking, may not be answered satisfactorily, at least
for now.
Even after reading one of the finest
studies on the evolution of neo-conservative thinking in
James Mann's The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of
Bush's War Cabinet - the latter concept may pass as
another euphemism for neo-conservative - one is left
with the nagging question of why the neo-cons so
consistently failed to realize that in international
affairs, almost invariably, there is a reaction for
every action of global significance. In other words, why
it did not occur to the Republican power-holders and
power brokers of today's Washington that if the US were
to adopt a policy of unilateralism in all heady issues
and signal the world to go jump in the lake if it did
not like Washington's decisions, the world, sooner than
later, would adopt a similar policy toward the US.
The possession of military power does not
simultaneously make the US a sheriff and a judge on all
matters of global magnitude, able to import and impose
its will on the international community. Weak nations
may not amount to much individually; however, they can
and will get together and become a very potent "negative
power" in the sense that they can frustrate America's
actions - or at times nullify them - by refusing to
cooperate, especially using the UN, the sole and
consistent symbol of world class legitimacy. This very
trait was sorely lacking in all US actions that were
taken in Iraq without the endorsement of the world body.
However, it seems that the decision in
Washington to invade Iraq was made in a vacuum, and in
an environment where the neo-cons were scornful and
contemptuous of the necessity of acquiring legitimacy
for the US actions from the world body. They envisioned
America's military power as being able to conquer even
the hearts and minds of the global community, as if the
latter had no mind or analytical capability of its own
to judge between right and wrong. In the strange
thinking of the neo-cons, the dilemmas and mental
reservations about such blatant US action as the
decision to invade Iraq without UN sanction were not
even considered worth pondering or second thought. But
when the international community showed its contempt for
such an action through the strength of its
non-involvement, and through stern denunciation of
America, that very action - ie, the US invasion of Iraq
- became snarled in a quagmire of its own making.
Eventually a decision was forced on the Bush
administration by the indubitable moral force of Shi'ite
leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to return to the
UN to acquire legitimacy. But the time wasted in the
absence of that legitimacy, and the resentment created
as a result of it, both inside and outside Iraq, might
have permanently condemned the US to failure. At least
that is the message that is coming out of the
condemnation of those 26 former senior diplomats and
military officials. As one of those signatories has
noted, "A lot of people felt the work they had done over
their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which
the United States was respected and could lead the rest
of the world was now undermined by this administration -
by the arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others,
the scorn for multilateral organizations." Another
former diplomat added, "Ever since Franklin Roosevelt,
the US has built up alliances in order to amplify its
own power. But now we have alienated many of our closest
allies, we have alienated their populations. We've all
been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that
we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered
by the current administration in the method it has gone
about things."
It is tempting to assign undue
import to this type of criticism of Bush. It is fair to
state, however, that its timing is least propitious for
a president who is frantically seeking some semblance of
grandeur and comparison with late Ronald Reagan, and who
is desperately attempting to create similarities in the
minds of the American public between a global "war on
terrorism" and the great war against Nazism and Fascism,
at a time when bad news from Iraq is hitting the public
airways almost on an hourly basis.
Only future
historians will fairly judge whether there was any basis
of comparison between Reagan and Bush, or whether it is
fair to compare the global "war on terrorism" with the
world's struggle against Nazism and Fascism. What is
certain is that if Bush were to be ousted in November -
as the 26 signatories of that impending joint statement
desire - a large part of that blame should be rested
with Bush himself, and his wrong-headed neo-conservative
cohorts.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an
Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic
analyst.
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