Austin Bay Blog

Triple hat-tip to Realclearpolitics.

At rcp Anne Applebaum files a column from Kiev. This is an excellent column looking at “the breakup of the “Orange Coalition.”" After the revolution the struggle begins. Her conclusion: “For Ukraine, the Orange Revolution was the easy part, compared with what lies ahead.”

Alas, her fellow Washington Post columnist David Ignatius takes us on a spin-cycle. His column doesn’t begin with spin. Ignatius compares Iran’s nuclear weapons quest with the Cuban missile crisis It’s a rather brittle comparison bot nottotally unreasonable– both involve missiles, nukes, and ideological clash. (One big difference is quantity. The USSR had lots of nukes and could threaten the US with annihilation. Iran’s threat is nascent. There are others.) Ignatius also compares the situation to 1914.

Excerpt:

The march toward war in 1914 resulted from the tight interlocking of alliances, obligations, perceived threats and strategic miscalculations. The British historian Niall Ferguson argued in his book “The Pity of War” that Britain’s decision to enter World War I was a gross error of judgment that cost that nation its empire.

The 1914 analogy is also rather brittle– Iran has already said it intends to eradicate Israel. However, the 1914 comparison allows Ignatius to work in the term “empire” –and as I re-read it there’s an implicit suggestion the US in 2006 is Great Britain circa 1914. And defeat, loss, collapse (fill in the appropriate pessimistic word) is inevitable…

Ignatius praises JFK for creativity in the Cuban crisis and urges the Bush Administration fo seek creative solutions. That’s certainly solid if pedestrian advice– everyone should start the day with a good, hearty breakfast.

I guarantee that the Bush Administration, the French government, the British government, the German government, and the foreign policy appartchiks in a dozen other civilized nations having been exploring creative solutions to the Iranian problem on a 24/7 basis.

Does Ignatius’ column offer a creative recommendation?

No. But the column is riddled with sentitious pessimism and defeatism– the Beltway cognoscentis’ au courant Weltanshauung.

Excerpt:

The Bush administration needs to be engaged in a similar exercise in creative thinking. The military planners will keep looking for targets (as they must, in a confrontation this serious). But Bush’s advisers — and most of all, the president himself — must keep searching for ways to escape the inexorable logic that is propelling America and Iran toward war. I take heart from the fact that the counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow, is an expert on the Cuban missile crisis who co-authored the second edition of Allison’s “Essence of Decision.”

What worries me is that the relevant historical analogy may not be the 1962 war that didn’t happen, but World War I, which did. The march toward war in 1914 resulted from the tight interlocking of alliances, obligations, perceived threats and strategic miscalculations. The British historian Niall Ferguson argued in his book “The Pity of War” that Britain’s decision to enter World War I was a gross error of judgment that cost that nation its empire.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, makes a similar argument about Iran. “I think of war with Iran as the ending of America’s present role in the world,” he told me this week. “Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it’s still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we’ll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world.”

Ignatius then quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski as saying “time is on our side” vis a vis Iran and that the mullahs are “the past.” (See this column from January 2006 for background on diplomatic and political alternative vis a vis Iran.)

Ignatius concludes with this revealing slash:

The Bush administration has demonstrated, in too many ways, that it’s better at starting fights than finishing them. It shouldn’t make that same mistake again. Threats of war will be more convincing if they come slowly and reluctantly, when it has become clear that truly there is no other choice.

Pshaw. Ignatius is implying the Bush Administration started the fight with Iran. That simply isn’t true. Tehran’s Khomeinist mullahs are at war with the West, at war with Iran’s neighbors, at war with their own people. Ignatius also ignores a dozen years of rather significant history. Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 — and then fought a slow war with the US (Saddam’s slow war) from March 1991 to March 2003. (Perhaps Ignatius has forgotten Saddam’s February 1990 speech in Amman where Saddam openly discussed challenging the US.) Bottom line: Bush didn’t start Iraq, either.

Of course, in the Washington Post world the Bush Administration is a collection of trigger-happy dolts that don’t know enough to start the day with a good breakfast. Bush is so weak Ignatius must tout the foreign policy geniuses who ran the Carter Administration– and failed to adequately respond to Khomeini. I suspect Ignatius is oblivious to the irony of quoting Zbig. The Carter Administration totally flubbed Iran–and it has taken 27 years for “time” to join our side. The Carter Administration was also hampered by a defeatist and “retreatist” world view– the “Vietnam syndrome.” In 1980 Reagan countered Carterite pessimism with “morning in America” optimism.

Ignatius should have made space for four credibility-enhancing sentences: “The theo-cratic tyranny now seeking nuclear weapons took power in Iran on the Carter Administration’s watch. The USSR also invaded Afghanistan and the Carter Administration was caught by surprise. “Our intelligence assessment was flawed and we weren’t very creative in our policy responses,” Zbig admitted. “I hope the Bush Administration learns from our mistakes.”

Of course that assumes Ignatius in his DC tete a tete with Zbig had the spine to ask the former National Security adviser about his own performance in office.

This essay is well-written, properly spiced with quotes from the intelligentsia, laced with historical comparisons– but ultimately it says more about.

But read the whole essay and decide for yourself.

John Hughes in the Christian Science Monitor dismisses re-cycled charges that President Bush lied about Iraqi WMDs.

Key excerpt:

In retrospect it is clear that the weapons did not exist, although they had in the past, and Hussein had used them against his enemies. But what is also clear from captured documents now coming to light is that Mr. Bush had every reason to believe they still existed at the time he launched the military campaign in Iraq. Not only did US and allied intelligence agencies assert that the weapons were there, but Hussein himself played a dangerous game of convincing enemies such as Iran, and even his own generals, that he had such weapons, while protesting to United Nations inspectors that he did not.

While Bush may have been badly misled by his own intelligence and other sources, he did not lie. He believed, and had good reason to believe, that the weapons existed.

UPDATE: Add thisrcp essay to your reading: The French Illusion.

Excerpt:

For decades, the French have lived under the pretense that their parasitical social model could last forever. It’s basically a model in which a small segment of society produces wealth and a much larger segment lives off that wealth through a vast system of government transfers that millions have come to take for granted. In the recent demonstrations, one of the words most frequently used was “security.” For most demonstrators, “security” means the continuation of a social model in which you either work for the government or you work in a private job that is heavily protected by the state, while you receive a wealth of social services and cradle-to-grave entitlements that come pretty easily to you.

This model was born out of the political and social platform of the “Résistance,” the underground resistance movement against the Nazi occupation, which was very heavily influenced by the Communist party. In the 1950s and 1960s, the period of heavy industrialization, this welfare model was affordable because of the great expansion of France’s economy in a dynamic European context. But the “glorious three decades,” as they are called, came to an end in the 1980s. Ever since, France has been living a fantastic illusion. There are now close to four million people without a job, and unemployment among young people is as high as 25 percent. In the poorest neighborhoods around the big cities unemployment reaches 45 percent. The public debt has gone from 20 percent of the nation’s GDP to 66 percent in just fifteen years. Although the big corporations continue to be successful worldwide, millions of small and mid-sized companies, the ones that create jobs in any economy, are suffocating under a labyrinthine regulatory system and a mountain of taxes.