Lindy, I loved your "kiss the hand that slaps us" characterization of the State Department's conduct over the last several decades.
Here's hoping Hanson is correct. Apologies in advance if this has already been posted (besides, some here need to read it a thousand times)
nationalreview.com
June 6, 2003, 7:00 a.m.
The Old Game
Once upon a time, everything was so nice and predictable . . .
Seasoned diplomats lectured that superpowers must act carefully and
predictably, allowing friends and enemies to know in advance the parameters
of their behavior. A certain caution arose in the United States during the
last 20 years that held that we had a special burden not to overreact to
provocations and must always work within the framework of multilateral
consensus. The conventional wisdom admonished that we were too powerful or
perhaps too civilized — or even polite — to respond to every annoyance.
Because our diplomatic experts so often graduated from our elite
universities, they believed that before shooting back it was always wise to
examine the social and economic conditions — read Western exploitation —
that might have encouraged such anti-American behavior in the first place.
Moreover, we usually were willing to implore our clients to let us spend
billons of dollars on them and risk in their defense thousands of American
lives.
We routinely would worry about riling the world in order to put troops in
harm's way to protect nations that were privately relieved and publicly
hostile. Those voices that urged that it was wiser for America — given the
nature of man — to be a little unpredictable, perhaps even volatile at
times, and, like the Greeks of old, to punish enemies and help friends, were
caricatured as Rambos and simpletons who did not understand the complexities
of diplomacy, a supposedly higher art than the rules of the factory, farm,
or neighborhood corner.
Unfortunately, the world soon caught on to us predictable and unimaginative
Americans and mastered this strange game far better than we ever did.
If I had been a terrorist in the 1980s and 1990s, I would have sized up the
rules of the contest something like this. Kill or take hostages at no more
than ten or so Americans at a clip, about every other year. Big operations —
like killing hundreds of Marines in Beirut or taking embassy hostages in
Teheran or blowing a crater in the USS Cole — would be possible, but only if
they were cloaked in general Muslim radicalism and purportedly independent
of state sanction. Or, such mayhem could be carried out on the home soil of
an Islamic state without much law and order, ensuring that American
reprisals would not be deemed logical by strict cost-benefit analysis. The
aim, of course, would be something like a perpetual series of smaller
Vietnams — Mogadishus and Haitis where Americans threw up their hands,
withdrew, and allowed killers and thugs to drop the pretense of political
reform and simply take over. At worst, retaliation might involve a
battleship salvo or a few dozen cruise missiles — usually a minor irritant
and sometimes valuable for publicity purposes if there were enough
collateral civilian damage.
The terrorists' modus operandi sort of worked if you look at the record of
American restraint, confusion, and paralysis from Teheran 1979 to September
10, 2001 — or until bin Laden got greedy, broke the rules, and killed too
many at once and at home.
If I had been a friendly Middle Eastern head of state who wanted my family,
tribe, or clique to continue its despotic rule, I would have trolled for
U.S. support by being anti-Communist, pumping oil aplenty, or keeping
terrorists from moving in downtown. All that would win me American money,
debt relief, trade concessions, military credits, a pass on human-rights
abuses, or explicit promises of protection.
Then I would move in the other direction to assuage domestic anger and
frustration that was inevitable under a corrupt and authoritarian regime. I
would offer bases, but impose such stringent conditions on their usage that
they could not really be employed for major operations in the region, and,
in fact, would become sources of money and recycled arms — not to mention
the state pride that comes when such powerful renters are ordered to stay
put and not venture off the premises. Meanwhile, I would send my youth over
to the United States to get educated and acquire expertise in the Western
material things I wanted, but ensure that they resented their benefactor and
decried its decadence and license.
So the Middle East calculus ran something like this: unleash the
state-controlled press to attack America and its Zionist puppet and either
buy off or subsidize Islamic fanatics to curb their political venom or at
least direct it against the United States. The party line delivered to
visiting American diplomats: Only with increased financial or military
support (as stealthily as possible) and a more "balanced" policy in the
Middle East crisis will the "Arab Street" — that raging herd that
materializes out of nowhere with its effigies, bloodcurdling yells, and
perpetual fist-shaking — be neutralized. All this would win platitudes like
"America's traditional friend in the Middle East" or "decades of commitment
to security and stability in the region."
This game too would have still gone on, had the Saudis not outsmarted
themselves by giving too much money to too many killers or had the censored
Egyptian press and mob cut their vitriol to monthly rather than daily doses.
If I were a Western European government in the post-Cold War era, I would
slash my arms budget and spend less than one percent of GNP on defense. I
would use the savings to increase social entitlements and adopt a utopian
worldview befitting both my country's wealth and absence of military power:
Only in conjunction with the U.N., the EU, or NATO should America act
militarily; in contrast, Europe should never resort to force, even if it
means 250,000 departed souls hours from Berlin or Rome. Talk is cheap, arms
are not.
To handle the rhetoric of a self-centered population demanding ever more
benefits, fewer children, and utopia now, I would seek to blame the United
States for everything from racism to pollution, insisting that
globalization, militarization, and suburbanization were all more or less
imported American pathologies — even as European companies aped American
business, advertising, and financial practices to ensure its people
commensurate profits. I would damn the United States for backing democratic
Israel, and then make huge profits selling everything and anything to Iraq,
Iran, or any other cutthroats who could pay.
All this would hinge, of course, on keeping American arms and troops in
Spain, Italy, Germany, and Greece to keep some rogue from a province of the
former Soviet Union, a madman in the Middle East, or a murderer in the
Balkans from going too far and killing Europeans in Europe — or even blowing
up European tourists, ships, and planes abroad.
NATO would always be praised in the abstract, but never used in the
concrete. Diplomats would know the script: As millions marched in Paris,
Berlin, or Rome against American capitalists, soldiers, or politicians,
functionaries would shake their heads and publicly lecture the poor dense
Americans — but of course keep the financially lucrative and militarily
essential bases and alliances that underpin the whole charade.
So Messrs. Schroeder and Chirac spoiled a good thing by going a wee bit too
far, finally convincing even our most diehard NATO apparatchiks and
trans-Atlantic attachés that Europe was really a different place after all.
How hard it was for them to slither back into the fold, with an American
"anti-Europeanism" that ran deeper, and with a longer memory, than the
parlor game's smug "anti-Americanism."
If I were a roguish China or Russia, I would count on the premise that the
United States wanted a stable world more than I. I would sell arms to
lunatics, forget where my own plutonium was, and claim such enormous
political and economic problems at home that I could ill afford to be
entirely responsible abroad. In a sea of industrial pollution and
state-planned environmental desecration I would hector the United States at
international conferences about assuming a greater burden to save the planet
from people like myself. I would always use force to ensure fealty nearby —
a Tibet or Chechnya — but condemn its employment in the abstract and
especially when the United States was involved. I would triangulate with the
Europeans, arguing that we all must do our part to force the United States
to act more like a world citizen, knowing that if I got out of line, only
America, not they, would stand in my way.
The Old Game had so many sly players. Mexico's Vicente Fox was as adept as
any. He sent millions of his exploited and impoverished population northward
and harangued the United States to treat illegal aliens more humanely than
did his own government — all the while hoping to avoid fundamental political
and economic reform at home, encouraging Mexican nationals to talk of the
"Reconquista" and counting on billions of dollars from expatriates who would
romanticize their homeland the further and longer they were away from it.
South Korea, too, played the game. Its youth hit the streets damning
America, as a new generation of Sunshine diplomats talked grandly of a third
way — while 38,000 American sacrificial lambs served as a trip wire on the
DMZ. The U.N. — its elite housed in New York, its membership often
undemocratic, its budget inflated — was a real gamer as well, damning this
as Zionist, that as imperialist, all the while asking the United States to
pay for being a fat target. The world's intellectuals, writers, and
journalists were expert players.
Unfortunately, two strange events transpired that should not have, undoing
all the old rules. On September 11, 2001, 3,000 Americans were murdered en
masse at a time of peace — in our planes, in our most iconic buildings, and
at the center of American military power. And worse still for terrorists,
faux-allies, and triangulators, our president was a Texan inexperienced with
the game's nuances — not a liberal Democrat who wanted to be liked abroad or
a seasoned Republican congressional alumnus who wanted to preserve the old
rules. Stranger still, President Bush surrounded himself with a different
kind of person — the kind who, in a crisis, offers one reason why we should
act, rather than 1,000 excuses why we should not.
And so, all bets are off. Bases, alliances, institutions, friendships,
immigration policy, easily duped Americans — nothing can be taken for
granted anymore.
The board has been abruptly wiped clean. The game's up. |
