Thursday, September 23, 2004
THE END OF SUPERPOWER
Tue Sep 21,12:01 PM ET
Add Op/Ed - Richard Reeves to My Yahoo!
By Richard Reeves
WASHINGTON -- Coming back to the war capital after a long summer has something of a Rip Van Winkle feel. They should put a sign up near the White House or Capitol Hill saying: "Welcome to the only former world's only superpower!"
Latest headlines:
·
Iraqi leader takes center stage in US election battle AFP - 15 minutes ago
·
Bush Shrugs Off Bad Polls on Iraq Outlook AP - 21 minutes ago
·
Kerry: Allawi Abets Bush in Putting on 'Best Face' Reuters - 26 minutes ago
Special Coverage
Richard Reeves
Congress came back to town last week to begin hearings on President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s plan to use $3.5 billion originally allocated for rebuilding invasion-damaged Iraq (news - web sites) to pay for training Iraqi policemen and soldiers. One of the facts that came out during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was that, so far, not a single Iraqi has completed a full training program. Yes, 32,000 Iraqis have begun police training, but they were put out in the line of fire before they finished the program.
"Exasperating," said Sen. Richard Lugar (news, bio, voting record), the mild-mannered Republican chairman of the committee, because only $1 billion of $18.5 billion earmarked for reconstruction has been spent -- the money is there but we can't get it into the local economy because of ongoing insurgency. Another Republican, Chuck Hagel, was more direct: "It's not a pretty picture. ... It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing; it is now in the zone of dangerous. .... We are in deep trouble."
Actually, it is worse than that. Our staggering ignorance and incompetence in trying to rebuild a conquered Iraq has blown away the myth of American superpower.
What do we have to show for the almost $200 billion that we are spending on this war of choice? We found Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), but seem to have lost the man we should have been looking for, Osama bin Laden (news - web sites). The war on Iraq -- as opposed to the war on terrorism -- has drained our treasure, killed our young, smashed our old alliances, and shown us and the world the limits of superpower.
We have shown the world that we do not have enough soldiers to secure what we have conquered, much less fight anyplace else at the same time. We have, more or less, given up on Afghanistan (news - web sites), the haven of the people who did us so much damage on Sept. 11, 2001. We can huff and puff about Iran and North Korea (news - web sites), but our military options in those places are pretty much limited to air strikes and assassinations. (I am assuming that we have no intention of using our shiny nuclear weapons to prevent them from developing or using their own weapons of mass destruction.)
"What a mess," as Hagel said last Wednesday. The younger President Bush (news - web sites) may be a war president, but he's not a good one.
"The much touted 'Bush' doctrine is a dead letter," wrote Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, last week, "with each of its three pillars -- pre-emption, regime change, and clear division between those 'with us' and 'with the terrorists' -- now discredited and abandoned."
Exasperating indeed. We pre-empted Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction, then found out he did not have any. We eliminated his regime without having a replacement. And who is with us? Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Russia? Maybe. Maybe not.
I don't think our president knows. If he did, he would hide it from us, alongside the 50-page National Intelligence Estimate he got in late July, which Douglas Jehl of The New York Times wrote about Thursday. That's the one that raised the real possibility that in the end our legacy in post-Saddam Iraq will be civil war.
We should have known. It was just two years ago, months before we invaded Iraq, that Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who was the first President Bush's national security adviser, surprised more than a few people by writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece arguing against going to war in Iraq. He predicted that an invasion would shatter the worldwide anti-terror alliance that existed then, emphasizing that winning the war on terror required foreign allies and, most important, foreign intelligence:
"If we are to achieve our strategic objectives in Iraq, a military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation. ... An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorism campaign we have undertaken."
When General Scowcroft wrote that, we were still the world's only superpower.
(EDITORS: If you have editorial questions, please contact Alan McDermott at amcdermott@amuniversal.com.)-->
Tue Sep 21,12:01 PM ET
Add Op/Ed - Richard Reeves to My Yahoo!
By Richard Reeves
WASHINGTON -- Coming back to the war capital after a long summer has something of a Rip Van Winkle feel. They should put a sign up near the White House or Capitol Hill saying: "Welcome to the only former world's only superpower!"
Latest headlines:
·
Iraqi leader takes center stage in US election battle AFP - 15 minutes ago
·
Bush Shrugs Off Bad Polls on Iraq Outlook AP - 21 minutes ago
·
Kerry: Allawi Abets Bush in Putting on 'Best Face' Reuters - 26 minutes ago
Special Coverage
Richard Reeves
Congress came back to town last week to begin hearings on President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s plan to use $3.5 billion originally allocated for rebuilding invasion-damaged Iraq (news - web sites) to pay for training Iraqi policemen and soldiers. One of the facts that came out during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was that, so far, not a single Iraqi has completed a full training program. Yes, 32,000 Iraqis have begun police training, but they were put out in the line of fire before they finished the program.
"Exasperating," said Sen. Richard Lugar (news, bio, voting record), the mild-mannered Republican chairman of the committee, because only $1 billion of $18.5 billion earmarked for reconstruction has been spent -- the money is there but we can't get it into the local economy because of ongoing insurgency. Another Republican, Chuck Hagel, was more direct: "It's not a pretty picture. ... It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing; it is now in the zone of dangerous. .... We are in deep trouble."
Actually, it is worse than that. Our staggering ignorance and incompetence in trying to rebuild a conquered Iraq has blown away the myth of American superpower.
What do we have to show for the almost $200 billion that we are spending on this war of choice? We found Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), but seem to have lost the man we should have been looking for, Osama bin Laden (news - web sites). The war on Iraq -- as opposed to the war on terrorism -- has drained our treasure, killed our young, smashed our old alliances, and shown us and the world the limits of superpower.
We have shown the world that we do not have enough soldiers to secure what we have conquered, much less fight anyplace else at the same time. We have, more or less, given up on Afghanistan (news - web sites), the haven of the people who did us so much damage on Sept. 11, 2001. We can huff and puff about Iran and North Korea (news - web sites), but our military options in those places are pretty much limited to air strikes and assassinations. (I am assuming that we have no intention of using our shiny nuclear weapons to prevent them from developing or using their own weapons of mass destruction.)
"What a mess," as Hagel said last Wednesday. The younger President Bush (news - web sites) may be a war president, but he's not a good one.
"The much touted 'Bush' doctrine is a dead letter," wrote Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, last week, "with each of its three pillars -- pre-emption, regime change, and clear division between those 'with us' and 'with the terrorists' -- now discredited and abandoned."
Exasperating indeed. We pre-empted Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction, then found out he did not have any. We eliminated his regime without having a replacement. And who is with us? Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Russia? Maybe. Maybe not.
I don't think our president knows. If he did, he would hide it from us, alongside the 50-page National Intelligence Estimate he got in late July, which Douglas Jehl of The New York Times wrote about Thursday. That's the one that raised the real possibility that in the end our legacy in post-Saddam Iraq will be civil war.
We should have known. It was just two years ago, months before we invaded Iraq, that Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who was the first President Bush's national security adviser, surprised more than a few people by writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece arguing against going to war in Iraq. He predicted that an invasion would shatter the worldwide anti-terror alliance that existed then, emphasizing that winning the war on terror required foreign allies and, most important, foreign intelligence:
"If we are to achieve our strategic objectives in Iraq, a military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation. ... An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorism campaign we have undertaken."
When General Scowcroft wrote that, we were still the world's only superpower.
(EDITORS: If you have editorial questions, please contact Alan McDermott at amcdermott@amuniversal.com.)-->
