March 23, 2016: THE COWBOYS
We gave a brunch last month for some old and new friends and I was sitting next to someone on our couch that I've known for 35 years, let's call him David, and he leaned over to me and said something about Iraq, to the effect of, what if we had left Saddam Hussein in power?
Amen to that, brother.
And then this week I read the very long piece in the current Atlantic about Obama's foreign policy, and my admiration for that policy was confirmed. Obama is cautious. Prudent. He believes in diplomacy, not war. He understand the complexity of the world and its interconnections. He gets it about tribalism in the Middle East. He knows something of the history of the region. He is trying to point America in the direction of the Pacific, as the coming region, a region where we might do more good than in the snake pit of the Near East..
Most of all, he understands that America is not the savior of the world. It cannot impose democratic systems on societies that do not want them, have no experience with them, and are not ready, and may never be ready, for them.
So naturally Thomas Friedman, writing today in the New York Times, devoted his column to critiziaing Obama's views as expressed in the Atlantic. To be brief about it, I have long despised Friedman's views on foreign policy. He was one of the principal hawks promoting American intervention in Iraq in 2001, one of the idiots who drank the Kool-Aid, believing in the carefully calculated lies of whichever Chalabi (sp?) it was, who convinced the Neo-Cons that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction even though the international experts--I'm thinking primarily of Hans Blix--knew there weren't, having actually been in Iraq looking for them and found none.
Has anyone noticed we are still there? Still involved? Is the situation better than it was? As Obama points out, Iraq presented no serious threat to the security of the United States at the time. Is the situation in Afghanistan better than it was? I wrote a piece about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and read a book about the British experience in Afghanistan and it all still applies. The Soviet intervention, ten years worth, was an utter disaster. Afterwards a Soviet ambassador to the U. S. warned someone at the State Dept. not to make the mistake they had made. Wasted words. The English in the nineteenth century tried to impose, by force, a tribal leader on the Afghans who would rule the country, and wound up losing an entire army, every single man killed. Nothing has changed. There's an excellent movie out now, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, with Tina Fey, that graphically depicts how things currently fare in Afghanistan, and only the technology has changed. More helicopters. More IEDs.
I blame Woodrow Wilson for much of this. Make the World Safe for Democracy. Right, Woody, you naive fool. American intervention stems from this doctrine, although, to be sure, there was plenty of infantile talk in the nineteenth century about America being the Redeemer Nation, showing the world how to live free, and this talk went on even while we were exterminating the Indians, another tribal culture, and buying and selling black human beings, breaking up families, treating human beings like cattle. WE did this. Holier than thou Americans, smug, lucky in their isolation between two oceans, and consequently stupid.
It's a cowboy dumbness. It believes in myths, Shane, really fast with a gun, quick on the trigger, defending the innocent family, killing Jack Palance, then riding into the sunset. And all those who followed, Clint Eastwoods riding into town, killing the bad guys, almost always all by themselves, then riding on. That's who we are, we Americans, heroes bringing law and order to chaotic places. The appalling thing is to see this mentality at the very top, among people who actually run things and have serious power, and seeing how they persist at these levels no matter how many terrible mistakes they make. Caution? Prudence? Not for them.
Serving in the military, actually firing weapons at other people, and being fired at? Not for them.
Not until this country faces the truth about itself and so much of its past will it ever crawl out from under its own arrogance. But I don't have a whole lot of hope. Myths are extremely difficult to kill. In a country that seldom pays attention to its own history, its own moral failures, myths can only flourish.
