Former Bush War Supporter Admits He Was Wrong:
New York Times columnist and war hawk David Brooks sounded some similar themes on Tuesday. In a remarkably honest and self-critical column, Brooks wrote, "This has been a crushingly depressing period, especially for people who support the war in Iraq. The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have ... We went into Iraq with what, in retrospect, seems like a childish fantasy."
Perhaps the most striking passage in Brooks' column is this one, which implicitly repudiates the entire Bush Doctrine: "We didn't understand the tragic irony that our power is also our weakness. As long as we seemed so mighty, others, even those we were aiming to assist, were bound to revolt. They would do so for their own self-respect. In taking out Saddam, we robbed the Iraqis of the honor of liberating themselves. The fact that they had no means to do so is beside the point."
Brooks blasted the Bush administration's foolishness -- and its failure to take responsibility -- in his Times column two days prior:
"Whose bright idea was it to keep Saddam's gulag open as a U.S. prison, anyway?
"It's hard not to be appalled by the Pentagon's blindness to the psychological catastrophe these photos were bound to create. Even [Friday], months after the atrocities were first known, Rumsfeld and company were incapable of answering the most elemental questions from John McCain, Lindsey Graham and others about who was in charge of the prison, and why the photos weren't immediately seen as weapons of mass morale destruction."
He demurred as to whether Rumsfeld should go. But as he called for an overhaul of U.S. foreign policy, Brooks seemed to say that time is fast running out for President Bush and his inept policy team.
"Believe me, we've got even bigger problems than whether Rumsfeld keeps his job. We've got the problem of defining America's role in the world from here on out, because we are certainly not going to put ourselves through another year like this anytime soon. No matter how Iraq turns out, no president in the near future is going to want to send American troops into any global hot spot. This experience has been too searing ...
"We've got to acknowledge first that the old debates are obsolete. I wish the U.S could still go off, after Iraq, at the head of 'coalitions of the willing' to spread democracy around the world. But the brutal fact is that the events of the past year have discredited that approach."
Brooks dismissed the U.N. as a failed institution -- but nonetheless started to sound remarkably like a multilateralist Democrat:
"We've got to come up with a global alliance of democracies to embody democratic ideals, harness U.S. military power and house a permanent nation-building apparatus, filled with people who actually possess expertise on how to do this job." |
