REDSKINS FOREIGN POLICY?
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James Joyner | Monday, November 10, 2003 |
William Raspberry draws a clever analogy:
Think of an NFL owner who knows less about pro football than, say, Dan Snyder. Then imagine him turning the decision-making over to a coach who is long on theory and lacking in actual professional experience — like Steve Spurrier, for instance. Now, toss in a series of embarrassing setbacks and what have you got?What you’ve got is either the Washington Redskins or Iraq — the key difference being that only one of them involves destabilizing a good chunk of the world, wrecking the U.S. Treasury and an escalating number of body bags, discreetly hidden from TV cameras.
It’ll probably sound like Bush-bashing, but it is becoming clearer every day — it became crystal, with David Rieff’s exhaustive piece in The New York Times Magazine of Nov. 2 — that we went into Iraq with no postwar plan save unfounded optimism. And now, we don’t know what to do next.
George Bush is not a dumb man. But before he decided to seek the presidency, he was willfully ignorant of international affairs — or at least strangely incurious. His mind became a blank slate for neocon ideologues, whose audacious goal was to reshape the geography of the Middle East, and the 9/11 attacks gave them their opening.
While I agree that Team Bush made some serious mistakes–most notably disbanding the Iraqi army–I disagree that they failed to plan. (And, indeed, it’s not entirely clear that the Spurrier experiment has been a failure in Washington, although I’m guessing Snyder wishes he’d hired Bill Parcells instead.)
Raspberry then digs up the quote de jour, the passage from Bush 41’s book with Brent Scowcroft saying what a disaster it would have been to have pressed the 1991 Gulf War on to Baghdad. The trouble with that is that, in hindsight, it quickly became apparent what a huge blunder that decision was. Indeed, most of the Democrats now saying the “quagmire” we’re currently in was predictable have spent the past decade saying that we “left the job undone” in that war.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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And considering Saddam had a much stronger military then, how much harder would it have been? He also enjoyed much more public support back before the mass graves. Our problems would have been 10 fold.
The "Bush Iraq bashers" are going to have the same problem as the "Bush economy bashers" and that is that it is not near as bad as they make it out to be.
By excessively pounding on him while being oblivious to the true story will only backfire. Now the Dems just look silly on the economy.
But they are going down the same path in Iraq.
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