Do you notice a similarity to these almost mea culpas, a string of words and/or ideas used by all of the second thoughters? They’re puzzled the Bush admin failed so miserably. They’re impressed by the credentials of Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the gang and wonder – as the ancients must have wondered about the distant stars which were said to guide events – how these sterling professionals could have gotten everything so wrong.
I must confess that I’m puzzled by their puzzlement.
I never assumed these men were titans of careful reasoning, ever on guard against bad faith arguments, hubris and other everyday expressions of human sluggishness. I certainly never assumed they were acting in service to noble goals. So I wasn’t shocked by their failures, no, not shocked at all. I mean, all you had to do was listen to their silly speeches about ‘bringing democracy’ to know the project was askew (what country invades another to deliver sweet momma democracy?).
Surely I’m not a cleverer monkey than these learned observers. How did I see what they couldn’t (or wouldn’t)?
I think professional wrestling, which borrows its lingo from the carny world that preceded it, gives us a precisely targeted phrase: the Let’s Go To War crowd was, as wrestlers say, ‘marks for themselves. Or, in other words, they believed their own crap. And not just the crap about the war itself and all its supposed benefits but a wider circle of crap – about the US’ ‘special mission”, about the superior competency of Americans, about the US’ as the “indispensable nation” (as I think M. Albright said years ago).
This is the foundation upon which a faith in the impending success of the Iraq venture is (was) built – we’re rich, we’re good, we’re smart, we’re the ‘most technological nation’ we cannot fail.
But as physicist Richard Feynman said at the conclusion of the inquiry into shuttle Challenger’s (totally preventable) destruction “nature cannot be fooled”. He meant that NASA administrators, ignoring warnings about the condition of their craft and pressuring for launch to meet PR goals, were heedless of the facts of temperature and stress and shearing forces and, by this blindness, doomed the crew of the Challenger to a fiery death.
Surely the rules of cause and effect that determine violence and counter violence are as much a part of the natural order as the insensate forces that ripped Challenger to flaming shreds. Nature could not be fooled as it destroyed the spacecraft and it cannot be fooled now as Americans wonder why their uranium tipped bullets fail to win friends.
.d.
Mourning After: How They Screwed It Up
The New Republic, June 28, 2004
Kenneth M. Pollack, Senior Fellow and Director of Reseach, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Kenneth M. Pollack
Reprinted by permission of The New Republic, (Issue date: 6/28/04, Issue: 4,667).
Bill Galston is one helluva debater. In the fall of 2002, well before the invasion of Iraq, I faced Bill—a University of Maryland professor and a former colleague of mine in the Clinton administration—in a public debate, and he kicked my rhetorical ass. He did it by holding up a copy of my book, The Threatening Storm, and saying to the audience, "If we were going to get Ken Pollack's war, I could be persuaded to support it. But we are not going to get Ken Pollack's war; we are going to get George Bush's war, and that is a war I will not support." Bill's words haunted me throughout the run-up to the invasion. Several months ago, I sent him a note conceding that he had been right.
The primary cause of our current problems in Iraq is the reckless, and often foolish, manner in which this administration has waged the war and the reconstruction. For that reason, when I think back to the prewar debate, the thought that nags at me most is that I, too, should have foreseen what Bill Galston did—that the Bush administration would not fight the war properly. It looms in my thinking as something that probably could have been known before the war and that, had I recognized it, might have led me down a different intellectual path.
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full at -
<http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/pollack/20040628.htm >