1 Boring Old Man

Beware a new Bush doctrine
By Seyom Brown

IN A DEFT move to divert the political debate away from the embarrassing National Intelligence Estimate on the impact of the war in Iraq on terrorism, President George W. Bush has been prematurely touting the "successes" of NATO’s beefed-up counterinsurgency campaign against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. But reports from the field reveal another potential quagmire in the making. Moreover, Bush has couched this re emphasis on Afghanistan in a reformulation of his grand strategy for conducting the war on terrorism.

The "ideological conflict" of the 21st century, he now avers, is between "moderation" and "extremism." Belatedly, the debate in his administration appears to have been won by those who recognize that equating successful counter-terrorism with implanting democracy is naive (witness the exploitation of democracy by Hamas, Hezbollah, and militant Shi’ites in Iraq), and also embarrassing to intransigently undemocratic governments (like Pakistan) that the United States is courting, not only for help in combating terrorism but also for reasons of arms control, access to energy, military bases, and hospitality to US investments (including Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, and of course China).

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The new Bush doctrine of supporting "moderate" regimes and movements against the extremists sounds like a realistic accommodation to the reality that not all those upon whom the United States depends for its security and well-being can pass a litmus test for democracy and human rights. But it risks a pendulum swing too far back in the direction of completely amoral realpolitik, in which this country indifferently turns a blind eye to gross violations of human rights. It was not a good sign of how the new doctrine will be implemented by this administration to hear Bush say, after meeting with President Nuristan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan last Friday, "We discussed our desire to defeat extremism and our mutual desire to support the forces of moderation throughout the world."

The record of this administration does not inspire confidence that it can avoid a simplistic implementation of the moderation vs. extremism formula in which those who go along with its demands and preferences are, by definition, moderates, and those who oppose it are either extremists or appeasers of the extremists.

It’s fine for Bush to try to change gears. Lord knows, the one he’s in ain’t working. But as Brown points out [in the body of the above article], the problem with Bush and his people [particularly Rumsfeld], is that it’s not just their ideas that are bad, they aren’t very good at implementaion either. There’s an inappropriate saying, "they could f… .. . … dream." that I’ll spare us all.