Fukuyama: Bush administration has bred anti-Americanism
On "Comment is free", the Guardian's new "group blog", Francis Fukuyama has posted A self-defeating hegemony, on the topic of anti-Americanism around the world. Fukuyama once was a beacon among neoconservatives, and urged both Clinton and Bush to invade Iraq and take care of Saddam Hussein once and for all. He's singing a different tune now, and has been for sometime. In this post, he asserts that "[f]our key mistakes made by the Bush administration have made anti-Americanism one of the chief fault lines of global politics". They were:
- Engaging in preemptive war, which "cannot be the core of a general non-proliferation policy, whereby the United States intervenes militarily everywhere to prevent the development of nuclear weapons."
- Miscalculating how the global community would react to their "'in-your-face' disregard for a variety of international institutions" (or they just didn't care).
- Overestimating the power of conventional armed forces in engaging with trasnational terrorists and "weak states." "It is worth pondering why a country with more military power than any other in human history, and that spends as much on its military as virtually the rest of the world combined, cannot bring security to a small country of 24 million people after more than three years of occupation".
- A lack of "simple competence" in the execution of everything related to the Iraq invasion and occupation.
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Comments
Nice post, Mike, but don't you mean the Bush Admin. has "in-bred" anti-Americanism? HA!!!
Mark my words - Bush will launch air strikes against nukular targets in Iran next summer. The attacks will follow a "skirmish" along the Iraq/Iran border between the Quds forces and our boyz in da hood. The official line out of Washington will be that the Iranians attacked our troops while they were innocently eating sloppy Joes in the mess hall. Nobody will ever know what really happened. (Think Gulf of Tonkin...)
Anyway, this will conveniently happen a few months before the 2008 elections (if they are allowed to happen at all). The whole point of the attacks on Iran will be to show that only the Republicans can save America. Enough dipshit American citizens will buy this tripe to install another Republican in the White House. - That's if the election isn't cancelled due to a "national crisis."
I keep imagining that if such a nightmare scenario were to actually play out, a handful of key Generals and other military personnel would rise to the occasion and neutralize Bush and his cohorts.
Shit is gonna get crazy...
(For the record, I predicted in 2000 that Bush would invade a Middle Eastern Country in the third year of his presidency. Don't get me started on my conspiracy thories (the "Truthers" don't have shit on me...))
Posted by: Jude | October 25, 2007 11:49 PM
Good criticisms.
My hope with Iran is that we do whup the shit out of them in border skirmishes (in fact I hope we are doing so now) and that it all stays under the radar and we don't find out about it. I hope we don't bomb them.
In fact I wish our entire counter terrorism model involved us whupping the shit out of various "martyrs" in mini-invasion little skirmishes with bad guys. That's good for everybody. Military enlistment would go through the roof. I thought that sort of army was part of Rumsfeld's vision.
Posted by: barabajagal | October 26, 2007 4:29 PM
Unfortunately, you can never whip the shit out of guys who attack you from Saudi Arabia and Yemen by fighting skirmishes in Iran and Iraq. There's never been a way to fight a Tim McVeigh 'Over There'
Posted by: niarb | October 29, 2007 8:13 AM