| Author | Message | | sharkman | | Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2002 7:10 am Post subject: send rumsfeld home... |
| Monday, June 10, 2002
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Woodrow W. Bush
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Posted: June 10, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Patrick J. Buchanan
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President Bush is engaged in feverish diplomacy to stop an
India-Pakistan war. He is mulling over an "American Plan" to end the
Israeli-Palestinian war. And he has just sent his secretary of defense
to NATO to line up allies to launch an American-Iraqi war.
Am I the only one that sees a small contradiction here?
The president's men say only a war on Iraq and Saddam's end can remove
the threat of terror against us. Sharon says only the destruction of
Arafat can end the threat of terror against Israel. Vajpayee says only
the destruction of terrorist camps on Pakistan's side of the Line of
Control can end the threat of terror against India.
Yet as we implore Sharon and Vajpayee not to let slip the dogs of war,
the president wants to unleash the dogs of war.
If our allies seem reluctant to follow us, who can blame them? Our
foreign policy seems increasingly erratic, and the president is
beginning to sound like that bellicose virago, Madeleine Albright.
Candidate Bush disparaged the "indispensable nation" braggadocio of
Albright. In 1999, he said in Simi Valley, Calif.: "Let us not
dominate others with our power. ... Let us have an American foreign
policy that reflects American character. The modesty of true strength.
The humility of real greatness. This is the strong heart of America.
And this will be the spirit of my administration."
Here was Candidate Bush at his best, and in the debates, he expanded
on the theme: "[T]he United States must be humble. ... We must be
proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations
that are figuring out how to chart their own course." But where was
that humility, that statesmanlike reserve, in the president's address
at West Point?
Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment are no longer
adequate, the president said. "[N]ew threats ... require new thinking.
... If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited
too long."
Is this the new Bush Doctrine: America asserting a right to launch
preventive wars on any "rogue nations" that we catch building the kind
of weapons we have had in our own arsenal for half a century?
This is a formula for endless wars, almost certain to produce the very
horror the president seeks to avert the detonation of an atomic or
biological weapon on American soil.
Where is Bush getting these ideas? Is deterrence really passe? What
else but U.S. deterrence keeps China off Taiwan or North Korea out of
the South? What other than America's deterrent power keeps Saddam out
of Kuwait or prevents his using on us or Israel the poison gas weapons
the War Party says he used on the Kurds?
"Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of
mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly
provide them to terrorist allies," said the president.
But is Saddam or Kim Jong-Il or the latest Ayatollah more "unbalanced"
than the mass murderers Stalin, Mao and the megalomaniacal Kim
Il-Sung? If containment and deterrence worked with these monsters, why
will they not work with the smaller fry of today?
"All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price,"
the president declared. "We will not leave the ... peace of the planet
at the mercy of a few terrorists and tyrants. We will lift this dark
threat from our country and from the world."
The peace of the planet? Where does the president get the right to
identify and punish every aggressor on earth? Can anyone other than a
wild Wilsonian Utopian think that any U.S. president can lift the
"dark threat" of aggression and terror from mankind? Israel cannot
even do it in its own cities.
"The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human
progress," the president told the cadets. How humble is that?
"The requirements of freedom apply fully ... to the entire Islamic
world," he added. But does not Islam mean "submission" to Allah? And
if 1 billion Muslims and their rulers reject feminism and refuse to
emulate President Bush by dialoguing with their local Log Cabin Club,
who is to say they are wrong and we are right?
"We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call
evil by its name," thundered the president. But which is the evil side
in Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Kashmir? In the Afghan war, we were aided
by Iran, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan and Northern Alliance generals accused
of massacres. In Desert Storm, we were assisted by Assad, in World War
II by Stalin, in the Cold War by the Shah, Pinochet, Marcos and the
South Africa of the Botha boys.
"Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time and in every
place," said the president. As a Christian, he rightly believes it.
But, Mr. President, ask the Germans if what we did to Dresden was
moral. Ask the Japanese if what we did to Nagasaki was moral. Ask your
own family if abortion is moral. By dividing the world into good and
evil, and threatening pre-emptive wars on all "evil ones," we may
persuade the targets of our pre-emption to acquire the only kind of
weapons able to deter a crusading U.S. president.
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