Posted by Damozel | Did the jackbooted power fantasies of American neoconservatives---dreams which the Bush Administration attempted to implement---bring about the permanent collapse of the US's influence over foreign nations?
In "Bush's Old World Disorder," Sidney Blumenthal argues that it may have done exactly that.
Every aspect of Bush's foreign policy has now collapsed. Every dream of neoconservatism has become a nightmare. Every doctrine has turned to dust. The influence of the United States has reached a nadir, its lowest point since before World War II, when the country was encased in isolationism....Gone are the days when the stern words of a senior U.S. official prevented rash action by an errant foreign leader and when the power of the U.S. served as a restraining force and promoted peaceful resolution of conflict. In the vacuum of the Bush catastrophe, nation-states pursue what they perceive to be their own interests as global conflicts proliferate....The neoconservative project is crashing....
The "unipolar moment," the post-Cold War unilateralist utopia imagined by neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer; "hegemony," the ultimate goal projected by the September 2000 manifesto of the Project for the New American Century; an "empire" over lands that "today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," fantasized by neocon Max Boot in the Weekly Standard a month after Sept. 11, have instead produced unintended consequences of chaos and decline. Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's presumption that successful war would instill fear leading to absolute obedience and the suppression of potential rivalries and serious threats -- the "dangerous nation" thesis of neocon theorist Robert Kagan -- has proved to be the greatest foreign policy miscalculation in U.S. history.(Salon)
Sadly, those of us who knew they were wrong when they started can take no satisfaction from witnessing the utter failure of their strutting, hubristic fantasies. I knew they were wrong about everything before events proved they were wrong about everything, but the ability to jeer "Toldjah!" isn't exactly compensation for what they've managed, in seven short years, to do to my country.
And in fact, many of them continue to be loud and defiant, confident that history will vindicate them. But whose history and whose historians? If there is a way out of the mess we're in, it won't be the neocons who lead us out of the desert. They were---and are--- the false priests, the credulous fools, the liars, the greedy opportunists bent on exploitation. Like false priests throughout history, they continue to yell to their remaining bemused and endangered followers---who continue to lurch along behind them--- that their path is the only path; and that if the path leads us into the pit, it's because the Bush Administration didn't do the religion of neoconservatism the way its gods and guardians intended.
So now what?
The quest for absolute power has not forged an "empire" but provoked ever-widening chaos. The neocons have been present at the creation, all right. But this "creation" is not another American century, in emulation of the post-World War II order fashioned by the so-called wise men, such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson.... Squandering the immense influence of the U.S. in such a short period has required monumental effort. Now the fog of war clears. On the ruin of the neocons' new world order emerges the old world disorder on steroids. (Salon)
In the meantime, they insist that the war in Iraq is going well, as if that's even the real issue anymore.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose soul President Bush famously claimed to peer through, is scuttling arms control agreements and cutting his own deals with the Iranians. The Turkish army is poised to invade northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish militants that the Iraqi government and the U.S. allowed to roam freely. The resurgent Taliban, given a second life when Bush drained resources from Afghanistan for the invasion of Iraq, is besieging the countryside, straining the future of the Western alliance in the form of NATO. Pakistan, whose intelligence service and military contain elements that sponsor the Taliban and al-Qaida, remains an epicenter of terrorism. Gen. Pervez Musharraf's imposition of martial law in Pakistan on Nov. 3 was his second coup, reinforcing his 1999 military takeover. Facing elections in January 2008 that seemed likely to repudiate him and an independent judiciary that refused to grant him extraordinary powers, he suspended constitutional rule. Toothless U.S. admonitions were easily ignored.
Gone are the days when the stern words of a senior U.S. official prevented rash action by an errant foreign leader and when the power of the U.S. served as a restraining force and promoted peaceful resolution of conflict. In the vacuum of the Bush catastrophe, nation-states pursue what they perceive to be their own interests as global conflicts proliferate. The backlash of preemptive war in Iraq gathers momentum in undermining U.S. power and prestige
What now, you may be wondering? Nobody knows.
The Bush administration finds itself devoid of options. Neoconservatives are left, happily at least for some of them, to defend torture. They have no explanations for the implosion of Bush's policies or suggestions for remedy. Self-examination is too painful and in any case unfamiliar.....On the rubble of neoconservatism, the Bush administration has adopted "realism" by default, though not even as a gloss on its emptiness. Bush still clings to his high-flown rhetoric as if he's warming up for his second inaugural address. But this is not rock-bottom; there is further to fall. (Salon)
And still a whole year to go.
LINKED
Bush's old world disorder (Salon)
Neo Culpa: Politics and Power (Vanity Fair) ["As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's
neoconservative boosters
have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand
designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of
exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and
others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president
himself."]
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/11/08/musharraf_bush/
Comments