Bush comes of age with Iraq, (John Hughes, Christian Science Monitor)
In the next few days, George W. Bush will make critical decisions likely to determine the fate of his presidency. Whether or not he goes to war with Iraq, and whether he is successful in breaking the tyrannical grip of Saddam Hussein, will decide whether the American people praise him or reject him, and what his place in history will be.It became painfully clear to me watching the State of the Union address this year that I've drunk the Koolaid: I'm W's man. He is my leader and I am his follower (unless there's been no regime change in Iraq by the next election, in which case I'm moving to France). So I like a good 'hasn't W grown in office?' column as much as the next guy.
But by assuming that Bush's focus is on his popularity and the history books, Hughes, like so many observers both pro and anti-Bush, betrays his Clinton-era thinking. These observers are thinking too small. What George Bush intends is nothing less than ending the post-war security system and setting up a new system for the new century. This is a huge gamble with a commensurate potential payoff, but is as risky as anything the United States has attempted since World War II. Despite my own trust in the President, I find it odd that this is going on without much discussion, mostly because so many observers refuse to take W seriously when he says, in the State of the Union, to the UN or at press conferences dismissed as soporific, that he intends to remake the world.
The bouts of faux nostalgia for the cold war that pop up every now and then are impossible to take seriously. When this nostalgia takes the form, as it has recently, of wishing that the US could be defeated in war it is, at best, puerile. But it is another thing entirely to abandon the structure that, at least in Europe, kept the peace for 50 years and reconciled nations whose wars, over the past three centuries, had threatened more and more of the world. Anything that lasts so long becomes part of the landscape. It is almost impossible to imagine life without it.
And so people forget that the UN was formed to perpetuate the alliance that won World War II. NATO was formed to deter and contain the Soviet Union. With Germany and Japan tamed, with eastern Europe freed, with the Soviet Union gone to the dust-bin of history, the UN and NATO and the rest of the post-war order kept going more out of habit than purpose. Having lost their purpose, they needed a second. What were these powerful institutions to do now?
The first President Bush had an answer: he would use these post-war instruments to shape a new world order. Russia and the US, east and west, rich and poor, white and non-white, north and south, he would gather them all together to provide the stability previously imposed by the cold war. Even better, because we would no longer have to fear that some random hotspot could unleash global thermonuclear Armageddon, we would no longer have to suffer tyrants to live. This worked well once in Iraq. It half worked, without the UN and with a stiff-arm to Russia, in the Balkans. It will never work again and President Bush, contrary to the pop-psych theories that he lives to finish his father's work, has decided to undo that work.
To return to Hughes,
The defining moment in this coming of age was Sept. 11, 2001. Bush's life changed when Osama bin Laden sent his misguided minions on a surprise suicide attack with hijacked airliners against New York and Washington. As Bush said in his press conference last week, he will not take the chance of that happening again.Will the UN or NATO or any collective security arrangement help us prevent another 9/11? Or, given that we can't guarantee our safety, is the old system the best we can do, or can we establish a better system? George Bush believes that the best interests of the United States require a new system, and it is that system that he is now working to establish.
The administration has decided to make the world safer in order to reduce our presence in the world substantially. Remake the middle east, so that it is not a powder keg. Leave Europe to the Europeans. Tame North Korea and reduce our presence in Asia. Through a free trade agreement for the Americas, plus military assistance when needed, build up the economies and the governments of Latin America.
This is, in some ways, a return to an older idea of America's place in the world -- Teddy Roosevelt's vision rather than Franklin's. But it will also depend on 21st century weaponry, technological superiority and the ability to put fires out while they are still smoldering. We will work with others. We will help when needed. We will accept help when offered. But at the end of the day, it will be America relying on itself. As the President said shortly after 9/11, we can do it alone if we have to, we're the United States.
The mavens of collective security deride the President as a cowboy but they have not watched enough westerns. The best follow a simple story: the stranger rides into town, sees a wrong that needs righting, he does what must be done, but he must do so alone. He discovers that the townsfolk, as afraid of him as of those he has fought, will never accept him. At the end, he rides out of town the same way he rode in, alone but tall in the saddle. George Bush hears the theme music playing; its time for the final shoot-out and then we'll saddle up and ride out of town.
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