I think there are a lot of criticisms of the Bush administration that can be made on two tracks:
1) Their conduct from the Spring of '02 to the Spring of '03 actually made it MORE for some nations to go along with us. Bush went to the UN in September of '02. But for six-nine months prior to that, he had already been using the term "regime change" in Iraq, even before we had really wrapped up Afghanistan. It played into their fears. Let me explain that...when Americans saw how effective our military was in Afghanistan (when all the commentaters were warning that we would get in a quagmire there--"Graveyard for British, Russians, etc, blah") we thought...."damn, we rule. Don't F*** with Uncle Sam"...and rightfully so. But when the rest of the world saw that they said..."Whoa, America is twice as powerful military as ten years ago, and there's nobody that can check them militarily...what happens when they realize this, will they just start doing this as a first option instead of a last resort? And is that the kind of world we want to live in?"
I'm not saying that the international view is right or wrong, just that its natural for them to worry about that. And by us immediately nameing a hit-list (axis of evil) and talking about our plans to whack #1 on that list within a year, it played right into that fear. By September we had already made up our mind, it was obvious to everyone. Then Bush goes to the UN and calls for them to act to disarm or Iraq "or else"...At that point it looked to the rest of the world like we were just looking for a rubber stamp.
There's a process for these things, and we didn't really follow it. We just sort of mimed it, and not very convincingly. Preponderance of power is an alienating thing. Its as much of an obstacle for us as a benefit, so we need to be able to tip-toe around it, we have to walk everyone through the process until they get to the point where they see it our way. It takes a lot more time than just brow-beating them and making fun of them. But looking at Iraq right now, you see why it is necessary.
2) The second track of criticism is the post-war planning...How could it be that we got to Baghdad and literally did not KNOW what we were going to do with the Iraqi army...why were we making these decisions on the fly...you know, its not like we didn't have a year to plan for this thing, and its not like we couldn't anticipate that the post-war period would be 100 times harder than the war itself. The naivete shown was staggering...the civilians in the Pentagon and in the VP's office completely failed to account for how 2-3% of the population could ruin the whole program just by engaging in persistant and creative violence....I mean it is such a low-threshold, its much easier to destroy a country than build it. We knew our enemies would have that on our side. And yet the planning was just atrocious. Almost every single assumption has turned out not only to be obscenely wrong, but based more on wishful thinking than on cold, hard, analysis.
But Kerry shouldn't make the mistake of hilighting the differences between him and Bush by rehashing the Iraq debate and talking about what his plan would have been. We aren't electing Kerry to be President in 2002, we're electing him to be President in 2005. He should hilight the differences in strategy and approach by talking about the NEXT challenge. We desperately need a debate on our Iran policy in this country. Getting Iran right is more important than getting Iraq right. If we get Iraq right, but Iran develops a nuclear weapon, Iraq won't have mattered at all. A nuclear Iran completely re-orders and destabilizes the entire region and represents a much bigger threat than what is going on in Iraq right now. And yet nobody is talking about it. Kerry can and should step in to fill that void, and he should talk tough on it and use powerful language about how unacceptable it is and how much of a threat it is. That will convince Americans he understands the world after 9/11.
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