Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kagan And Other Of America's Enemies Are Emboldened And On The March

I don't know anyone who was a Saddam Hussein fan… but I've never been to Iraq. In fact, I always avoided the place. Even in the '60s and '70s when I traveled a lot in that part of the world, I did all I could to avoid Iraq, spending my time lolling around Trabzon, Ezurum and Van in Turkey (much of it, without any real paved roads, having just been opened to foreigners for the first time since 1925) and Tabriz and Zanjan in Iran, to avoid the dubious allure of Baghdad (where the Ba'athists had just taken over). When I was traveling in the area, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was in charge of Iraq and the Shah was still firmly on the Peacock Throne in Iran. Saddam didn't really take power until 1979, the same year Iran finally booted out the Shah and the parasites around him (who moved, en masse, to Beverly Hills).

Still, in 2006, when Rauf Rashid Abd al-Rahman, the chief judge for the kangaroo court the U.S. set up to execute Saddam, sentenced the Iraqi president to death, I felt a little queasy. There was just something about the U.S. invading a sovereign state under false pretexts and murdering the president (on the eve of the main Muslim religious festival Eid) and his sons that seemed a little on the barbaric and primitive side to me.

Last week, in northern Iraq, ISIS rebels and Ba'athists captured al-Rahman, who had recently served as Minister of Justice for Kurdistan. They executed him two days later. When I get a barbaric and primitive urge myself, I wonder what they would do to Dick Cheney-- and I wonder if I would be as reticent about it as I was about the murder of Saddam.

In the must-see video up top, Bill Moyers interviews respected military historian Andrew Bacevich about the war hysteria being drummed up again by sleazy neocon, Robert Kagan, a former advisor to 3 hawkish politicians who were all wrong about Iraq and have all earned the distrust of the American people: John McCain, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. Moyers wanted to discuss a recent article he wrote for Commonweal, The Duplicity of the Ideologues which was, in effect, a response to the deceitful warmongering Kagan was spouting last week at the neocon publication the New Republic, Superpowers Don't Get To Retire. Bacevich reminded his readers what Kagan does for a living: propaganda. He also told Moyers that "the most important thing the President has learned from his predecessor is that invading and occupying countries in the Islamic world is a pretty dumb idea. It leads to complications and enormous costs." Nice that Obama and Chuck Hagel have learned that lesson. Cheney and Kagan certainly haven't. Have Hillary and Kerry?

[B]ack in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the intellectual forebears of Robert Kagan decried this decision to cut American losses. Leaving implied the acceptance of failure. Such a failure, they insisted, would hand the Communists a great victory. U.S. credibility would suffer permanent damage. The Soviets would seize the initiative. Dominoes would topple. The United States would find itself isolated and alone.

None of those gloomy predictions-- similar in tone to Kagan’s own forecast of “increasing conflict, increasing wars over territory, greater ethnic and sectarian violence, and a shrinking world of democracies” as the inevitable price for any lapse in American globalism-- turned out to be accurate, of course.

Instead, the nation that Kagan describes as committed to doing “what no nation had ever been able to do” actually did what every great power does when it loses a war.  It licked its wounds and left it to others to lick their own. That the United States made next to no effort to aid the Vietnamese and others adversely affected by the war speaks volumes about the definition of “global responsibility” that actually prevailed in Washington. But however cynical, leaving-- more accurately abandoning-- South Vietnam turned out to be a smart move. Doing so facilitated this nation’s military, economic, and political recovery.

With the end of the Cold War, according to Kagan, Washington’s commitment to promoting a liberal world order reached new heights. The signature of U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s was renewed activism. A series of armed interventions ensued. “All aimed at defending and extending the liberal world order,” Kagan writes, “by toppling dictators, reversing coups, and attempting to restore democracies.”

As Hemingway’s Jake Barnes might put it, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” In fact, during the post-Cold War decade, with the Persian Gulf now the epicenter of U.S. military activity, “extending the liberal world order” lagged well behind other, more pressing considerations. Priority number one was to ensure the safety and well-being of the distinctly illiberal Saudi monarchy. Priority number two was to contain Shiite-majority Iran. Fear of delivering Sunni-controlled Iraq into the hands of its own Shiite majority muted U.S. enthusiasm for democratizing that country. If the choice was between stability and democracy, Washington preferred the former.

Still, if as Kagan regretfully notes (and recent polls affirm), Americans today show signs of being “world weary,” it’s not the events of the 1990s that have induced this weariness. No, if Americans appear disinclined to have a go at overthrowing Syria’s Assad or at restoring the Crimea to Ukrainian control, it’s due to their common-sense assessment of what U.S. policy in very recent years has produced.

…Back in 1996, in a famous Foreign Affairs article co-authored with William Kristol, Kagan identified “benign global hegemony” as the proper basis for U. S. policy. It was incumbent upon the United States to exploit its Cold War victory. Armed with a combination of “military supremacy and moral confidence,” Washington needed to put existing and potential adversaries in their place. The idea was “to make clear that it is futile to compete with American power.” Permanent dominion was the goal. To settle for anything less, Kagan and Kristol wrote, was to embrace “a policy of cowardice and dishonor.”

Even before September 11, 2001, Kagan was among those fixing their sights on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the place to validate this approach. The events of 9/11 reinforced his determination along with his sense of self-assurance. Writing with Kristol in April 2002, he declared flatly that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.”

George W. Bush took that road. Yet much to his considerable chagrin, Bush discovered that it led to rather considerable unpleasantness. As it dragged on, the Iraq War exposed as hollow any American aspirations to global hegemony. Left behind when U.S. troops finally withdrew was their reputation for military supremacy. Meanwhile as reports of prisoner abuse, torture, and the killing of noncombatants mounted, American moral confidence lost its luster. As for the Iraqis themselves, although few Americans are inclined to take notice, today they enjoy neither security nor peace.

On all of these matters, Kagan chooses to stay mum. That is his privilege, of course. Yet in exercising that privilege he forfeits any claim to be taken seriously. As with members of the Catholic hierarchy who hoped that the clergy sex abuse scandal would just blow over or investment bankers who shrug off the economic collapse of 2008 as just one of those things, without accountability there can be no credibility.

William Buckley once remarked that the country would be better off governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. Here’s a corollary: When it comes to foreign policy, the president of the United States would be better served to consult a few reasonably informed citizens from Muncie, Indiana, than to take seriously advice offered by seers such as Robert Kagan.

If experience has brought President Obama to share in this view-- as his recent ruminations on foreign policy appear to suggest-- then more power to him.

I have serious doubts that Hillary Clinton has learned anything at all, and I hope Democrats will demand she prove she has before handing her their party's presidential nomination. Her natural inclinations have always been more in line with Kagan's than Bacevich's. "My reading [of history] is of course there is evil in the world that needs to be taken into account and some time must be confronted," Bacevich told Moyers. "But let’s not kid ourselves: In somehow imagining that the United States represents all that is good and virtuous, we, ourselves, have committed many sins. And we ought to be cognizant of those sins before we go pronouncing about how the world ought to be run."