So you don't think that any of the intelligence reports in Bob Woodward's new book are feeding the growing sense that the war is a disaster.
Oh, Woodward, what a big yawn! Who the hell cares about Woodward? I mean, at this point, he's just an inside-the-Beltway figure. I certainly don't need him to clarify my view of the Iraq debacle.
A big problem is that in the minds of too many Americans, Iraqi culpability for the disaster of 9/11 is still pretty deeply rooted. It's because of the vagueness with which most Americans perceive the map and peoples of the Middle East. It shows how bad education has been in geography and international history at both the high school and college levels. It's highly alarming. The reflex mind-set after 9/11 was, "We've got to do something!" So there was this lashing out at whatever seemed Arab or Muslim.
I supported the retaliatory attack on Afghanistan but strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq. Such incursions can only create more terrorism insofar as they inspire disaffected young men around the world to be drawn to a cause. Now we have a splintering of jihadism into these hard-to-track small cells of copycats. Every nudnik out there aspires to be a junior bin Laden. What was needed -- but which may now be impossible -- was to gain the trust of people worldwide at the local level. So that on small islands in Indonesia, let's say, neighbors will turn in the stranger who's gathering followers around him. Without that cooperation, we're never going to defeat world terrorism.
The notion that terrorism could be confronted through conventional military means -- by sending in troops as if it were D-Day -- was such a colossal stupidity. That Donald Rumsfeld is still employed as the secretary of defense is a living testament to the managerial incompetence of the current president. If Rumsfeld had been booted out early on, Bush would have gotten more of a pass. It could have been argued that he had merely been misled by bad advisors.
I'm not a Bush hater. I've always viewed him as a decent fellow who was pushed into the presidency because he was his father's son. But he's been out of his depth in foreign affairs from the start. He certainly lacks the basic verbal skills for the presidency -- reading speeches authored by others is no substitute. But I've become concerned about Bush's mental state in the past few months. Sometimes in his press conferences or prepared statements (which I listened to on the radio), I heard a sort of Nixonian tension and hysteria. His vocal patterns were over-intense and his inflections impatient, lurching and sarcastic. There was this seething quality to his speech that worried me and that seemed to signal that something major is being planned -- perhaps another military incursion.
Iran?
What else? Yet another folly -- creating more generations of hatred against America. The feckless behavior of the Bush administration has been a lurid illustration of Noam Chomsky's books -- which I've always considered half lunatic. Chomsky's hatred of the United States is pathological -- stemming from some bilious problem with father figures that is too fetid to explore. But Chomsky's toxic view of American imperialism and interventionism is like the playbook of the rigid foreign policy of the Bush administration. So, thanks very much, George Bush, you've managed to rocket Noam Chomsky to the top of the bestseller list!
I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking. How are we ever going to get wise leadership or sophisticated diplomacy from people who have such a distorted, clichid view about everything that's wrong with the United States? Neither the intellectuals nor the Democrats have any answers to the problems we face. It's not as if the Democrats are offering a coherent and persuasive foreign policy -- they have no foreign policy! They just come across as small-minded politicos jockeying for power.
And we do face an international crisis of mammoth proportions. What should we do in the face of this ruthless and barbaric Islamic fundamentalism? Is there an answer to the problem of Israel? There was a time when the left's call for a transnational Israel made sense to me, but at this point does anyone really think that, if Israel stops calling itself a Jewish state and opens its borders to all Palestinians who wish to return, there would be instant peace? Because of the shocking upsurge in anti-Semitism in the last few years -- exacerbated by the American incursion into Iraq -- surely such a development would mean suicide for Jews who reside in Israel. Passions have become too inflamed among young Muslims all over the world. I think it will be a century before any of this is resolved.
That leads to the next topic -- the Democrats. They look like they're facing a breakthrough midterm election, but what about 2008?
I was so distressed when I heard that Mark Warner had dropped out of the presidential race. I thought he was going to bring fresh blood into the primaries. Are we really left with the same old tired nags and with robo-Hillary leading the pack? It's extremely discouraging because we would have won the last election if we'd had a better candidate than John Kerry, with his droning hauteur and his Boston-run campaign that made one gaffe after another. It was very close because the country was already getting tired of the Iraq war.
But what candidate do we have to offer when national security is the No. 1 item on the front burner? Democrats became so distracted by their focus on domestic issues over the past 25 years that they're weak on national defense. I started talking about this when I was trying to reform feminism in the early '90s: If we want a woman president, we need to start training ambitious young women not in women's studies, with its myths of universal male oppression and female victimage, but rather in military history and national security issues. That's why Hillary, after she arrived in the Senate, began doing her homework by getting on the Armed Services Committee. But my generation of baby-boom Democrats hasn't done much deep thinking about international issues except in terms of postmodernist fragmentation or fuzzy, smiley-face multiculturalism. We desperately need better candidates.
As for Warner's departure helping John Edwards' candidacy -- good Lord, that guy is such a lightweight! Are we really going to put America's national security in Edwards' hands? He has no relevant experience whatsoever. At least John Kennedy, the first person I ever campaigned for when I was an adolescent, had seen military action in World War II. Except for Charles Rangel, who served in Korea, few Democratic leaders have military experience, so their rhetoric isn't likely to convince this skeptical and apprehensive electorate. The country is being asked to take a gamble with the disordered Democrats or to choose nascent fascism on the Republican side -- the intrusion into personal files and phone records, the shadowy sweeps that may have imprisoned innocent people along with genuine terrorists. The electorate could be ready to accept abrogation of basic constitutional rights in a time of war. In this anxious atmosphere, the Democrats look addled and self-absorbed, with their handmaiden major media and showbiz sermonizers and celebutantes. All that vulgar posturing -- Barbra Streisand trotting out a Bush impersonator at her concert, then being surprised when she gets heckled and cursing the heckler? Streisand is a great artist, but the superficiality of the Hollywood elite's understanding of politics is embarrassing to me as a pro-Hollywood Democrat!
Next page: "Clinton got out of control and went embarrassingly too far"
