Colossal Failure
by digby
I wonder how long it will take America to recover from George Bush’s uniquely blinkered and self-righteous brand of ineptitude? In the past five years he’s demonstrated to the world that we don’t know how to win a modern guerrilla war. He’s demonstrated that we don’t understand even the basics of waging a propaganda war. He’s demonstrated that other countries don’t need to pay any attention to our threats. He’s demonstrated that we’re good at talking tough and sending troops into battle, but otherwise clueless about using the levers of statecraft in the service of our own interests. If he had set out to willfully and deliberately expose our weaknesses to the world and undermine our strengths, he couldn’t have done more to cripple America’s power and influence in the world. Beneath the bluster, he’s done more to weaken our national security than any president since World War II.
This is the argument. Bush’s foreign and national security policy has given the world the impression that the United States is a paper tiger. It has made us dramatically less safe in the process. It’s not the Democrats or the terrorists who have done this. Bush and the Republican congressional majority did this with their insistence on puerile bully tactics instead of sophisticated use of the “levers of statecraft” — which they then followed up with almost comically incompetent bumbling of their own misguided tactics. Their failure is total and comprehensive. This world is just too complicated for schoolyard thinking and tinkerbell planning.
The other day someone (a former liberal who now believes the Republicans are better at national security) lectured me about how wonderful the lovely Condi Rice has been in representing this country around the world and how this shows that the modern Republican party, of which I am so critical, has changed. I answered, “The whole world hates us now. Do you really think that’s good for this country?” She didn’t have much of a response because having the whole world hate you represents a terrible failure of leadership and she knew it.
This is a big problem and it makes me kind of sad. There’s always been anti-Americanism, of course, but our greatest responsiblity was to try to manage it, not make it worse. We are much to powerful a natiohn to let that sort of thing get out of hand. It makes countries start thinking of creating alliances and building nasty weapons to protect themselves from such a big powerful threat. Anti-Americanism is far worse than it’s ever been now and it’s going to affect many aspects of our lives in this age of globalization, from security to economics. It will not be easy to rebuild what respect and trust we once had.
And then there was the failure of Bush to seize the opportunity we had after 9/11 and the Afghanistan operation to launch a new period of international cooperation, when we had the support of the vast majority of the world. With his casual abrogation of treaties he didn’t like to the invasion of Iraq, he turned an outpouring of support into international disdain.
Here at home, for his own political purposes, he has done bin Laden’s work for him through relentless fearmongering and curtailment of the constitutional freedoms we are supposedly fighting the terrorists to maintain.
The last five years have been a colossal national security failure and the only thing that will change it is if the American people make it clear to the world that they don’t support it — by electing new leadership. We must do it this November and we must do it in November two years from now.
The Republicans are right about one thing:
“These are the stakes. Vote November 7.”
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