two lost wars later (part 4)

This letter to the NY Times gets it precisely wrong:

To the Editor:

President Bush's "scolding" of the United Nations General Assembly may have gone over like a "lead balloon" (editorial, Sept. 22), but he demonstrated something that the world needs: conviction married to strong, principled leadership.

President Bush's words echo those of Winston Churchill in the late 1930's. Churchill rejected appeasement of Nazi Germany; the president rejects watered-down measures against terrorists and support for tyrants.

Internationally, Mr. Bush stands as isolated today as Churchill was back then.

There are times when a leader must deliver the truth to unsympathetic ears. The United Nations may not have appreciated President Bush's candor, but the world body needed to hear it.

Jeff Thieret
Harmony, Pa., Sept. 22, 2004

In fact, the Bush Administration EMBRACES "watered-down measures against terrorists and support for tyrants." For the former, see many of my previous posts and this op-ed in today's Times (countered somewhat by this one); for the latter, see Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, to name a few. Now, it is debatable whether the Bush Administration is making the right decision in cozying up to these tyrants -- we can look at the evidence and weigh the merits in each case -- but it is simply not true that Bush opposes tyrants. He simply opposed one tyrant in particular.

Sy Hersh, in this interview with Salon, longs for the good old days of Kissinger when we had a manipulative, machiavellian foreign policy leader, someone "who lied like most people breathed," but who at least knew what he was doing and knew that he was lying.

Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?

Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.

[snip]

With Kissinger, there were lies, and he knew exactly what he was doing ...

Yes, one of his aides was assigned -- literally assigned on one of the secret flights they made to China -- to keep track of the lies, who knew what. I think they used to describe it as keeping track of what statements were made, but essentially it was who was being told what, because so many different people were being told different things. But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it's not! It's not about oil. It's about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it's idealism that's dead wrong. It's like one of the far-right Christian credos. It's a faith-based policy. Only it wasn't a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish.

...So you don't think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative ...

I used to pray it was! We'd be in better shape. Is there anything worse than idealism that doesn't conform to reality? You have an unrealistic policy.

It seems that they are very selective not only about what kind of information they present to the public but even in what they decide to believe in themselves.

I think these guys in their naiveté and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by -- not the Israelis -- but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there's a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi's disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD]. I think there were people in the CIA who suspected this all along, but of course they couldn't get their view in. I think the Senate Intelligence Committee's report's a joke, the idea this CIA was misleading the president. They get some analysts in and say, "Were you pressured?" And they all say, "No, excuse me?" Is that how you do an investigation? The truth of the matter is, there was tremendous pressure put on the analysts [to produce reports that bolstered the case for war]. It's not as if anybody issued a diktat. But everybody understood what to do.