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December 07, 2009
The Folly Of Fareed (Power, Poppies and Petroleum At Home and Abroad)
I was and remain a big fan of Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom. Oh, Fareed, why hast thou forsaken facts? He seemed to be implying that the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan were not the crucial path to America's long-term security. He explained that challenges at home -- economic growth, technological innovation, education reform -- were at the heart of maintaining America's status as a superpower. In fact, throughout history great nations have lost their way by getting bogged down in imperial missions far from home that crippled their will, strength and focus. (Sometimes even when they won they lost: Britain prevailed in the Boer War, but it broke the back of the empire.) Fareed is smarter than this. The cost of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan together are considerably smaller in terms of GDP and population than past commitments in Korea and Vietnam. We are not bankrupting the "empire" (VDH: "no tribute; we pay for bases; no land taken since 1898; allies that tell us where to go when we ask them for help; voluntary exits from places like Panama and the Philippines; no flattening of a Grozny when we feel like it; and a strong anti-imperial lobby on both the right and left that make it hard to spend over 5-6% GNP on defense") or breaking its war machine; if anything, we are giving it a finely battle-honed edge. The advancements in robotics and counter-insurgency alone make America considerably deadlier than we were in 2003, to say nothing of our veterans (who some in 2003 believed were too soft to fight a tough, long war). The back of our "empire" is stiffer by the second and sprouting spikes. In any case, Obama is too deep in the pocket of teacher's unions to champion any real eductation reform, and seems bent on crippling innovation and crushing prosperity beneath trillions in new taxes and trillions more diverted in the name of agenda-driven pseudo-scientific environmental scares. For his policy to succeed, Obama will need to maintain his focus come July 2011. Afghanistan will not be transformed by that date. It will not look like France, with a strong and effective central government. The gains that will have been made will be fragile. The situation will still be somewhat unstable. But that should still be the moment to begin the transition to Afghan rule. We can find ways to secure American interests in that region more manageably. This strange combination of wishful thinking (we can "find" other "ways?" really?) and meaningless banalities (everything he says about Afghanistan in 2011 could have been said in 2003; we have been "transitioning" since the Taliban fell) ignores the obvious: leaving Afghanistan means ceding the country to Islamic radicals who think 9/11 was a good start but needs a lot of follow-up work. America needs to realize it is entirely possible Obama will lose Afghanistan to Islamic radicals, with every horrible consequence imagined, and it is not entirely his fault. Social conservatives need to decide between a war on terror we must win and a war on drugs that was lost before it started. We cannot stand up a government in Afghanistan when we are ceding 90% of the country's income to the enemy, and no number of troops will change this; it would be like trying to stand up an Iraqi government while telling them they could not sell oil to pay their troops, but Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army could drill wells wherever they established control. It would be a terrible tragedy if it took a mushroom cloud to end prohibition. posted by Dave on 12.07.09 at 11:25 PM |
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I must disagree with you here.
Based on what Mr. Obama has said, the troops should come home - today. It is irrelevant that there are, in fact, important (if not vital) American interests there. President Obama is not willing to fight them with the level of overwhelming force that would be necessary.