Friday, 21 May 2004
The Reagan Myth. Retired general and ex-presidential candidate Wesley Clark makes the case (link via Talking Points Memo) that Bush's Iraq policy failed because the neocons drew the wrong lesson from the Cold War's endgame: They believed that Ronald Reagan alone was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the keys to his success were the "Evil Empire" speech and aggressive use of the military.
And so Bush delivered his "Axis of Evil" speech, invaded Iraq, and waited for the wave of democratic reform to make its way across the Mideast… just as it did in Eastern Europe in the Nineties. No further action was thought necessary to topple the dominoes — just denounce the countries, wave the sword, and voila! You've got democracy.
Clark describes it as "an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder," and cites American diplomat George Kennan, author of the legendary 1946 "Long Telegram" that predicted the next half-century of U.S.-Soviet relations. Kennan, who turned 100 last February, said this of the Iraq war in 2002:
Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.
In the Long Telegram, Kennan argued that Soviet power "bears within it the seeds of its own decay," and that "no mystical, Messianic movement […] can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs." In his view, Communism was destined to fail because it promised utopia and couldn't deliver one; the key to defeating them was to disprove their ideologies, to foster the belief that America and democracy were the way forward, while preventing the Soviets from expanding their sphere of influence.
In other words, Reagan's "morning in America" and his "shining city on a hill" speeches were at least as important as his "evil empire" sound bites… and his military buildup wouldn't have ended Communism without the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Apollo missions and the Helsinki Accords to back it up. It was our conduct and our character that made us the leaders of the free world: Other nations didn't follow us because they feared our guns, but because they admired the example we set.
Apparently the neocons learned a different lesson.
- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:39 am. comments.
