Liberals Never Learn
Press Action
Saturday, November 06, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/stephens11062004/
By Eli Stephens
Thursday night I went to Stanford, ostensibly to hear Amy Goodman speak on the subject of “where to after the election?” What it turned out to be was Goodman interviewing three Stanford professors. Interesting, although not what I expected. Anyway, the first of those was Larry Diamond, evidently the (a?) token liberal at the Hoover Institute, who had spent four months in Iraq as a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, and who has just written an article for Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “What went wrong in Iraq?” (or something like that).
Like John Kerry, who no doubt associates with people like Diamond, Diamond’s main point was the failure to plan for the “post-war” phase of the war. But as I wrote just a few weeks ago, this misses the key point—on the big questions, at least, the Bush administration knew precisely what they were doing (this isn’t to say that they aren’t also quite incompetent in dozens of ways).
If they had spoken the truth in public—that the war was likely to require several hundred thousand troops and many hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of many years—public opposition would have been even stronger than it was, and the Democrats just might have gotten a bit of a spine and stood up against the war. If they had told the truth about WMD—that they had no decent evidence that they existed, and didn’t give a rat’s ass if they did, and that they couldn’t let the inspections continue not because there was some kind of “imminent” threat (or any threat, for that matter), but because their motivation for invading Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with WMD—the world would have risen even more strongly against the invasion.
And, with history still teaching these kind of lessons in Iraq, Diamond (and, no doubt, Kerry and the Congressional Democrats too) press on with the same misguided approach in Iran. After talking about what a bad idea it would be for the U.S. to bomb Iran’s nuclear facility, and the negative consequences such an action would have, Diamond then totally undercut himself by claiming that nuclear proliferation was the “greatest danger” we face, and that the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facility could not be ruled out as part of “statecraft.” Sounds so pleasant, doesn’t it? Bomb your alleged enemies, and call it “statecraft.”
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that it is precisely the existence (or alleged existence, anyway) of nuclear weapons in North Korea that is giving the United States pause about attacking that country, and only (well, not “only,” but definitely it’s a big factor) the future existence of nuclear weapons in Iran that will keep Iranians safe from attack by the United States. In both cases, nuclear weapons would be a stabilizing factor against the most dangerous, unstable regime in the world today, the one in Washington.
Eli Stephens is editor of Left I on the News.