George W. Queeg
By PAUL KRUGMAN
March 14, 2003
The New York Times
NEW YORK In ''The Caine Mutiny,'' it was the
business with the strawberries that finally
convinced the doubters that something was amiss
with the captain. Is foreign policy George W.
Bush's quart of strawberries?
Over the past few weeks there has been an
epidemic of epiphanies. A long list of pundits who
previously supported the Bush administration's
policy on Iraq have publicly changed their minds.
None of them quarrels with the goal. Who
wouldn't want to see Saddam Hussein
overthrown? But they are finally realizing that
Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more
people than you would think - including a fair
number of people in the Treasury Department,
the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon -
don't just question the competence of Bush and
his inner circle; they believe that America's
leadership has lost touch with reality.
If that sounds harsh, consider the debacle of
recent diplomacy - a debacle brought on by
awesome arrogance and a vastly inflated sense of
self-importance. Bush's inner circle seems amazed
that the tactics that work so well on journalists
and Democrats don't work on the rest of the
world.
They've made promises, oblivious to the fact that
most countries don't trust their word. They've
made threats. They've done the
aura-of-inevitability thing - how many times now
have administration officials claimed to have lined
up the necessary votes in the Security Council?
They've warned other countries that if they oppose
America's will they are objectively pro-terrorist.
Yet still the world balks.
And to what end has Bush alienated all of
America's most valuable allies? (And I mean all:
Tony Blair may be with us, but British public
opinion is now virulently anti-Bush.) The original
reasons given for making Iraq an immediate
priority have collapsed. No evidence has ever
surfaced of the supposed link with Al Qaeda or of
an active nuclear program. At this point it is clear
that deposing Saddam has become an obsession,
detached from any real rationale.
What really has the insiders panicked, however, is
the irresponsibility of Bush and his team, their
almost childish unwillingness to face up to
problems that they don't feel like dealing with
right now.
I've talked in this column about the
administration's eerie passivity in the face of a
stalling economy and an exploding budget deficit:
Reality isn't allowed to intrude on the obsession
with long-run tax cuts.
That same ''don't bother me, I'm busy'' attitude is
driving foreign policy experts, inside and outside
the government, to despair.
Need I point out that North Korea, not Iraq, is the
clear and present danger? Kim Jong Il's nuclear
program isn't a rumor or a forgery; it's an
incipient bomb assembly line. Yet the
administration insists that it's a mere ''regional''
crisis, and refuses even to talk to Kim.
We all hope that the war with Iraq is a swift
victory, with a minimum of civilian casualties. But
more and more people now realize that even if all
goes well at first, it will have been the wrong war,
fought for the wrong reasons - and there will be a
heavy price to pay.
nytimes.com |
