Saturday, December 10, 2005
American defeatists
In a recently published piece entitled “American Debacle,” Brzezinski began by accusing George W. Bush of “suicidal statecraft,” went on to pronounce the intervention in Iraq (along with everything else this President has done) a total disaster, and ended by urging that we withdraw from that country “perhaps even as early as next year”—i.e., 2006. Unlike the late Senator Aiken of Vermont, who once proposed that we declare victory in Vietnam and then get out, Brzezinski wants to declare defeat in Iraq and then get out. This, he mysteriously assures us, will help restore “the legitimacy of America’s global role.”
Now I have to admit that I find it a little rich that George W. Bush should be accused of “suicidal statecraft” by, of all people, the man who in the late 1970’s helped shape a foreign policy that emboldened the Iranians to seize and hold American hostages while his boss in the Oval Office stood impotently by for over a year before finally authorizing a rescue operation so inept that it only compounded our national humiliation. And where was Brzezinski—famed at the time for his anti-Communism—when the President he served congratulated us on having overcome our “inordinate fear of Communism”? Where was Brzezinski—known far and wide for his hard-line determination to resist Soviet expansionism—when Cyrus Vance, the then Secretary of State, declared that the Soviet Union and the United States had “similar dreams and aspirations,” and when Carter himself complacently informed us that containment was no longer necessary? And how was it that, despite daily meetings with Brzezinski, Carter remained so blind to the nature of the Soviet regime that the invasion of Afghanistan, as he himself would admit, taught him more in a week about the nature of that regime than he had managed to learn in an entire lifetime? Had the cat gotten Brzezinski’s tongue in the three years leading up to that invasion—the same tongue he now wags with such confidence at George W. Bush?5
But even if Brzezinski’s record over the past 30 years did not disqualify him from dispensing advice on how to conduct American foreign policy, this diatribe against Bush would by itself be enough. For here he looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the United States being “stamped as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs.” This may not be fair, he covers himself by adding; but not a single word does he say to indicate that the British created the very despotisms the United States is now trying to replace with democratic regimes, or that George W. Bush is the first American President to have come out openly for a Palestinian state.
Again Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and by extension Guantanamo, causing the loss of America’s “moral standing” as a “country that has stood tall” against “political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights.” And that is all he sees—quite as though we never liberated Afghanistan from the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban, or Iraq from the fascist despotism of Saddam Hussein. But how, after all, when it comes to standing tall against “political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights,” can such achievements compare with a sanctimonious lecture by Jimmy Carter followed by the embrace of one third-world dictator after another?
Then for a third time Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees more and more sympathy for terrorism, and more and more hatred of America, being generated throughout the region by our actions in Iraq; and in this context, too, that is all he sees. About the momentous encouragement that our actions have given to the forces of reform that never dared act or even speak up before, he is completely silent—though it is a phenomenon that even so inveterate a hater of America as the Lebanese dissident Walid Jumblatt has found himself compelled to recognize. Thus, only a few months after declaring that “the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory,” Jumblatt suddenly woke up to what those U.S. soldiers had actually been doing for the world in which he lived:It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting [in January 2005], 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.
The columnist Michael Barone has listed some of the developments that bear out Jumblatt’s judgment:[The] progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results—the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya’s giving up WMD’s, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi’s recent suicide attacks, and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia.
Even in Syria, reports the Washington Post’s David Ignatius,people talk politics . . . with a passion I haven’t heard since the 1980’s in Eastern Europe. They’re writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950’s.
And not only in Syria. As the democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim who, like Jumblatt, originally opposed the invasion of Iraq, told Ignatius’s colleague Jim Hoagland:
Those [in the Middle East] who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors . . . [because the invasion of Iraq] has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon’s 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be midwives.
Nor are such changes confined to the political sphere alone. According to a report in the Economist, a revulsion against terrorism has begun to spread among Muslim clerics, including some who, like the secular Jumblatt, were only recently applauding its use against Americans:
Moderate Muslim clerics have grown increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel . . . as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.
Zbigniew Brzezinski may be wrongheaded, but he is neither blind nor stupid. Why, then, his willful silence in the face of all these signs of progress? I can only interpret it as the product of a rising panic. No less than the denizens of the mainstream media, he is desperately struggling to salvage a worldview that, like theirs, should have been but was not killed off by 9/11 and that, like theirs, may well suffer a truly mortal blow if the Bush Doctrine passes through the great test of fire it is undergoing in Iraq.
Don't be a fool: Read the whole thing.
5 Comments:
By 
Cassandra, at
Sat Dec 10, 09:22:00 AM:
Oh I can't wait to read this - I wrote a big long analysis of one of Zbignew's papers a while back on VC because It so infuriated me. I couldn't believe B's piece didn't get more attention.
I'm dying to see what Podhoretz has to say.
By 
, at
Sat Dec 10, 10:29:00 AM:
Thanks for the link to this outstanding piece by Podhoretz. I am printing a copy to send to my Marine.
But Podhoretz is too quick to dismiss blindness and stupidity as plausible explanations for Brzezinski's opinions (or for those of Scowcroft, Carter, Murtha, or the leading lights of the MSM).
By , at
Sat Dec 10, 11:04:00 AM:
Exactly so, Sirius. In a footnote, Podhoretz points out that Brzezinski was similarly critical (jealous) of the Reagan administration's foreign policy. Zbiggy and Jimmy have long put their envy and pettiness on display when embarassment should have led them both into hiding. But their rantings do provide a comical benchmark, and a contra-indicator of actual foreign policy achievement. May they long continue.
By , at
Sun Dec 11, 08:25:00 PM:
Jimmy carter americas worse all time president until clinton came around who asked his young duaghter for advice and was afarid of rabbits and the hostage crissis and could,nt do anything right now he says this? What dont he keep his mealy little piehole closed and quit trying to prove what a jerk he is
By Cassandra, at
Mon Dec 12, 05:16:00 PM:
You know, I had forgotten what old Zbig had said that made my head explode a while back.
I went back and re-read it: here's the Ginormous Global Threat old Zbig was worried about:
*Restless, Disaffected Youth*
Good God. The man is past it. He wrote this big long paper referencing the French Revolution and pulling in all sorts of other BS and concludes that we should ignore Saddam to concentrate on a bunch of punks who are jealous of our iPods.
