The Afghan and Iraqi wars Bush launched never looked more certain to end in U.S. defeats.
What is the cause of the impending collapse of the U.S. position across the Middle East? We put democratist ideology ahead of national interests. We projected our ideas of what is right, true and inevitable onto people who do not share them. We tried to impose our will with our military power, which is more effective at killing Arab enemies than winning Arab hearts.
America is failing in the Middle East because our leaders of both parties will not look at the region through Arab eyes. What Bush saw as a glorious liberation of Iraq, Arabs saw as an invasion. Where Bush sees in Israel a model of democracy, Arabs see a pampered agent of U.S. imperialism, persecuting and dispossessing the Palestinian people.
This inability to see through another's eyes is one of the great downfalls of humanity, typified most gloriously by our current President. While clearly not brilliant, I have to admit that Bush has never struck me as a complete imbecile. Instead, I find that one of his biggest shortcomings has been his complete inability to comprehend that what he ardently believes in may be foreign to someone else. Especially foreigners.
I've been reading A Mencken Chrestomathy of late. In an essay regarding Teddy Roosevelt, H.L. Mencken notes: "Let the populace begin suddenly to swallow a new panacea or take to a new fright at a new bugaboo, and almost instantly nine-tenths of the masterminds of politics begin to believe that the panacea is a sure-cure for all the malaises of the Republic, and the bugaboo an immediate an unbearable menace to all law, order and domestic tranquility."
Obvious we can see that in our time democracy was treated as panacea and terrorism as the new fright. I don't fault Bush for failing to understand the lone tenth who thinks democracy nothing more than a joke, and terrorism to be just another threat that comes with dangerous existence. Were he to understand from whence we come, he may become one of us, and that would leave him in the unenviable position of trying to convert the rest of the wrong-headed mob.
But I do fault him for ignoring the segment of the population in its entirety, and failing to realize that, if anti-democratic Americans are a bizarre lot, they may be, and in fact are, the norm over in the Middle East. In short, Iraq and Afghanistan are not America. Having failed to realize this very simple fact, we have failed spectacularily.
Since I haven't the slightest faith that we've learned a thing, better luck to us next time.
4 comments:
If only Buchanan could see through the eyes of an immigrant with no hope for the future but a desperate flight to an unhospitable land.If only he could link imperialist adventurism to the conditions that economic refugee is fleeing and see the root cause of this malaise.
As for democracy, the use of the term by those promoting advanced capitalism is disingenuous,you are, I believe, soured on what the term has come to mean, hopefully not on what the word could mean. My post for today explores this a bit more.The alternative to deepening democracy is to return to benevolent rulers and the divine right of kings.
Bush in no instance governed like a leftist if we understand left to mean "embracing equality in power sharing".
Though an opponent of unrestricted immigration, Buchanan points out that immigrants are not to be blamed for seeking out a better life in this country.
I think he does a pretty decent job at seeing through other people's eyes, though, of course, being human, he does fail from time to time.
The alternative to deepening democracy is to return to benevolent rulers and the divine right of kings.
I think it would be interesting to live under a King, though I'm not ready to advocate for such as yet.
Bush in no instance governed like a leftist if we understand left to mean "embracing equality in power sharing".
You are more of a revolutionary than a leftist. Most leftist's simply want government to do some of the work which only citizens can do. No Child Left Behind was sponsored by Ted Kennedy, a fairly traditional leftist.
You point out the difficulty of morphing terminology, in this time period when liberals are called the left and progressives are something different and anti-capitalists are called extremists.If Bush spent like a liberal he failed to tax like one.
If Bush spent like a liberal he failed to tax like one.
He simply placed a future tax on the next generation or two by engaging in deficit spending. I hate to say it, but he's a clever liberal.
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