By Paul Krugman
Today
we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush was
president, those who believed that America could remake the world to
its liking with a series of splendid little wars — people like Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — were known within the administration as
“the crazies.” Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a
dangerous fantasy.
But in 2000 the Supreme Court delivered the
White House to a man who, although he may be 60, doesn’t act like a
grown-up. The second President Bush obviously confuses swagger with
strength, and prefers tough talkers like the crazies to people who
actually think things through. He got the chance to implement the
crazies’ vision after 9/11, which created a climate in which few people
in Congress or the news media dared to ask hard questions. And the
result is the bloody mess we’re now in.
This isn’t a case of
20-20 hindsight. It was clear from the beginning that the United States
didn’t have remotely enough troops to carry out the crazies’ agenda —
and Mr. Bush never asked for a bigger army.
As I wrote back in
January 2003, this meant that the “Bush doctrine” of preventive war
was, in practice, a plan to “talk trash and carry a small stick.” It
was obvious even then that the administration was preparing to invade
Iraq not because it posed a real threat, but because it looked like a
soft target.
The message to North Korea, which really did have
an active nuclear program, was clear: “The Bush administration,” I
wrote, putting myself in Kim Jong Il’s shoes, “says you’re evil. It
won’t offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because
that would be rewarding evil. It won’t even promise not to attack you,
because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether
or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its
belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only
regimes that are militarily weak.” So “the best self-preservation
strategy ... is to be dangerous.”
With a few modifications, the
same logic applies to Iran. And it’s easier than ever for Iran to be
dangerous, now that U.S. forces are bogged down in Iraq.
Would
the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened even if
the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting
terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies’
agenda? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that the United States would have
more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush
hadn’t squandered both the nation’s credibility and its military might
on his war of choice.
So what happens next?
Few if any of
the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they were wrong. Vice
President Cheney continues to insist that his two most famous
pronouncements about Iraq — his declaration before the invasion that we
would be “greeted as liberators” and his assertion a year ago that the
insurgency was in its “last throes” — were “basically accurate.”
But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things going so badly?
The
crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of
omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.
Thus
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has called for a
military strike — an airstrike, since we don’t have any spare ground
troops — against Iran.
“Yes, there would be repercussions,” he
wrote in his magazine, “and they would be healthy ones.” What would
these healthy repercussions be? On Fox News he argued that “the right
use of targeted military force” could cause the Iranian people “to
reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power.” Oh,
boy.
Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a
policymaker. But there’s every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol
says in public is what Mr. Cheney says in private.
And what about The Decider himself?
For
years the self-proclaimed “war president” basked in the adulation of
the crazies. Now they’re accusing him of being a wimp. “We have been
too weak,” writes Mr. Kristol, “and have allowed ourselves to be
perceived as weak.”
Does Mr. Bush have the maturity to stand up to this kind of pressure? I report, you decide.
Source: The New York Times, 21 July 2006.
