Hoping to be clowns in the long run
by digby
Those birth pangs are still coming:
“Revolutions are not pretty,” Rice says of the changes sweeping the region now and the often brutal forms they take, such as Gaddafi’s gory end. “If political reform comes late, when there is a lot of anger, then it is not going to be either smooth, or, frankly, look like we would like it to look.”
Despite this, Rice predicts a better ending to the Middle East revolutions and credits Bush’s Freedom Agenda with facilitating it. “We pursued the Freedom Agenda not only because it was right but also because it was necessary,” she writes. “There is both a moral case and a practical one for the proposition that no man, woman or child should live in tyranny. Those who excoriate the approach as idealistic or unrealistic missed the point. In the long run, it is authoritarianism that is unstable and unrealistic.”
And in the short run a lot of men, women and children have to die. But I guess Condi feels good about it because she thinks she “facilitated” somebody’s else’s freedom in the long run.
Gag. This grandiose view is so typically Bushian it makes me want to vomit.Forgive the bad manners in quoting myself, but this is something that’s been sticking in my craw for a long time:
Condi Rice and Laura Bush are insisting that the administration will be vindicated by history for all the wonderful work it has done around the world. Rice, especially, is intent upon making the case that if the world gets better some time in the future, Bush will be given the credit for it. (This isn’t the first time she and Bush have made this stupid comment.)
This definition of success would mean that you have to reevaluate Tojo since Japan has since become a prosperous, first world country. After all, if it weren’t for him, the world wouldn’t be where it is today. Hell, where would Western Europe be if it weren’t for that bad man in the mustache — or Eastern Europe and Russia if it hadn’t been for Stalin? Hey, even Caligula can be seen to be a hero if you believe that the world is better off today than it was during Roman times.
It’s not that Bush is as bad as those examples, but the logic behind Rice’s view inexorably leads you to evaluate everyone in history through the lens of human progress — which means that none of the great villains can be held responsible for their deeds and nothing can ever be learned from bad decisions of the past. As long as the world goes on you can always make the case that things will probably turn out ok in the long run. And that’s hardly any comfort —as the old saying goes, in the long run, we’ll all be dead.
In fact, in the short run a whole lot of Iraqi people are dead because of the United States’ inexplicable decision to invade their country. It is what it is and it’s offensive to compare temporary political resistance to a pragmatic humanitarian policy like The Marshall Plan to the worldwide revulsion at an invasion for reasons that made no sense, as Rice does. If Iraq becomes a sane and prosperous nation some time from now, it will never render that policy, based on lies and propaganda, to be a good one — and Bush, Cheney and Rice will never get credit for any future progress because of it. They need accept that the best they can hope for is to end up among history’s inept clowns instead of history’s villains. It’s not much, but it’s all they’ve got.
It is deeply offensive for this woman to be touting the “success” of her foreign policy when it has resulted in so much death and carnage. Nobody misses Saddam and Gadaffi, but the costs paid by innocent people in having them killed are so huge that anyone who struts around as if they’ve achieved something great (“Freedom Agenda”) should be shunned — at a minimum.