Tom got this email:
You highlight successes of the big bang on occasion. The Washington Post's Dionne really nails it as a failure in today's edition: Big Bang Theory In Ruins. Is he looking only at short term issues, where you look farther down the road, or is there more to the differences you both seem to see? Hope the visit to Westfields went well yesterday. Meant to make that, but duty called at the Pentagon. Thanks!
Good and fair assessment by Dionne, one that speaks to the major tactical errors in this strategy: not doing well enough in postwar Iraq (enough said) and not being more imaginative on Iran, which would have gotten us better control remotely in Syria and Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Palestine (Hamas) WRT Israel.Blaming the current Israel situation on Bush and the BB is a bit much though. There is the dream that the Arab-Israeli thing can get fixed directly, when Arab regimes plus Tehran have always used the Palestinians for their own trouble-making reasons at home (averting popular attention from much-needed reforms), in the region (stirring the pot) or complicating things for the Americans. So it's just naive to think you will ever "fix" this conflict short of fixing the regional security issue, and that's where the current Bush track on Iran lacks all strategic imagination.
When you pursue the BB, you lock in wins along the way, and Bush failed to do that in postwar Iraq and with an Iran we just made strategically ecstatic by removing threats both east (Taliban) and west (Saddam). Instead, Bush ignored and still ignores the soft-kill option on Iran (its nuke run should trigger our leadership with other Core powers on a comprehensive regional, CSCE-like agenda) and instead he's rerun the WMD drama (as if the screw-up on that subject never happened in Iraq!).
Shortest reply to all those post-Saddam-toppling mistakes?
Kerry should have won in 2004. We needed a dealmaker with strategic imagination. Carp all you like on Kerry's behavior since (he ain't prez but an opposition senator, so DUH!), but he would have been a huge and likely successful opportunity for smarter choices on pushing the BB to better fruition.
He and his certainly would have done no worse than what we've had with Bush and Rice and Hadley running our foreign policy.
These people are just tapped. As I've said many times before, they know how and when to say "no," they just don't know how or when to say "yes."
If I could give a short critique of their mindset (still very neocon, in my mind, just neocon tamed by the Iraq tie-down), that would be it. After that one bold stroke with Saddam, no strategic imagination.
In that sense, the Big Bang is a big over-reach for this crowd.
But yes, I still support the decision to go. The alternative of stasis still sucked.
Better the tumult over there, not here. Better the killing and terror over there, not here. And better professionals wage (and fight and die) in this war than U.S. citizens on our shores.
This fight was preordained in the Middle East by globalization's rapid expansion. Somehow, some way, the Middle East will be forced by history to rejoin the larger world. You can't have 3 billion new capitalists and all their needs and desires and pretend the Islamic Middle East will somehow continue in its queer disconnectedness or immoral civilizational apartheid and gender repression.
Osama picked the timing of this fight (9/11) and Bush picked the venues (Afghanistan and Iraq), but never entertain the delusion that we can "just make it all go away" with isolationism or pull-outs or hydrogen cars. Problems postponed are not problems solved, they're just problems passed on.
And on that note, Dionne is equally correct.