* I read with peevish interest that Parade magazine interview with former President George W. Bush. One inevitable question dealt with Americans’ safety in a post-9/11 world. The knee-jerk response was right out of GOP talking points. “W” still has his Oval Office neocon script and hymnal.
“The ultimate way for there to be peace … is for freedom to take root, democracy to take root, where governments are decided by the will of the people,” said Bush. “And that’s beginning to happen as a result of the Arab Spring.”
This gives revisionism, over-simplification and naive hope bad names. “Democracy?” We’ve got a leg up, but it’s still a work in progress right here if voter suppression in the last election matters and if the 90 percent who want something meaningfully done about out-of-control access to over-the-top weaponry can’t get 60 senators on their side.
Iraq? Mess-O-Potamia–not liberation or democracy–ultimately beckons if the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds have their way. They will. And it won’t be as tidy as the devolution of Yugoslavia.
Afghanistan? Nobody thinks tribal chiefs, outspoken clerics, resurgent Taliban and poppy-growers will turn into a mosaic of Karzai-supporting, Muslim aldermen. America’s Afghan legacy: More than 2,000 lives lost and more than a trillion dollars wasted over an occupation that will be recalled by locals about as fondly as that of the Brits’ in the 1840s. Afghans have a history of loving blasphemy laws and hating foreign rule. America is not the exception. Endemically poor Afghanistan, where illiteracy is the norm and women are not co-equals, is not about to adopt an erstwhile occupier’s form of government.
No, here’s the angle that Bush–and, frankly, the current occupant of the Oval Office–need to focus on: Where does the U.S. fit in the world? What’s our role? Are we the only one that gets it? Is no one else “exceptional”?
Granted, those whose religion includes cherry-picking contexts for “jihad” and “infidels” will remain threateningly problematic. But what can we do–in our own enlightened self-interest–to pro-actively help defuse hatred-motivated terrorism that might be defusable? It’s not just about anti-terrorism alerts and preventive measures.
Did we, for example, need to keep troops quartered in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest places, after the Gulf War? That didn’t justify what Osama bin Laden wrought, but it does help explain the jihadist fury. Do we need to show the flag on Persian Gulf carriers 12 miles from Iran? What’s our role in the Pacific? Do we still need 50,000 troops in Japan? Do we need a human trip-wire, 28,500 strong, in South Korea?
And, candidly, is the military-industrial complex more than a Cold War cliché? By the way, Saudi Arabia wants advanced missiles to equip that $30-billion fleet of F-16 aircraft that it bought from the U.S. back in 2010. That’s a lot of American jobs, so who really cares if the Middle East ante is raised and Saudi women aren’t allowed to drive? They’re our favorite Wahhabi customer.
And more. But the point is Americans’ safety in a post-9/11 world depends on factors beyond drone targets, intelligence gathering, surveillance cameras, homeland security proactivity and citizen resilience. Most of all, it depends on where we fit in the only world we have.
Bush never addressed it. Likely never thought of it, although it’s the existential issue of global geopolitics. Barack Obama, while formally winding down war, hasn’t realistically addressed it either. But you know he knows better. Sobering.
* Just asking, but in the effort to rein in Iran and North Korea from fully realizing their nuclear-weapons potential, wouldn’t it help–at least rhetorically–if America wasn’t the only country in the world to ever actually use one? You can bet that’s a red-meat line in Tehran and Pyongyang.