The cracks showing in Vulcans' visionPage 2 of 2 -- The reluctant Vulcans, Powell and Armitage, tried to warn the president that the complexities of war and the Middle East might combine to defeat such grandiose schemes. But in the end, as Woodward writes, they became "the enablers, providing cover and an appearance of reasonableness so Cheney and Rumsfeld worked their will." It is disillusioning to me, who had written that Powell's UN speech on the dangers of Iraq was utterly convincing, to hear Powell say now that much of it was nonsense.
It took personal courage for Rumsfeld, on the day that most of our leaders had fled Washington, to stay in the burning Pentagon and say he was too old to go to an undisclosed location. But he doomed the Iraq operation when he told Colin Powell that postwar planning could only be done by those who were truly committed to invading Iraq and supporters of change, not the 75 Middle East experts whom the State Department had assembled. As always, ideology trumped expertise. And so it went. When the looting started because of bad planning, Rumsfeld's comment was that "stuff happens" and "freedom is untidy," never mind that historians will one day write that this was the moment that lost the war. When torture by Americans was revealed, Rumsfeld preferred to call it abuse -- not quite Rush Limbaugh's claim that it was little more than a fraternity hazing, but close enough. Bush libeled his critics by saying that those who doubted that the Middle East was ready for democracy were racists. It was never that Arabs couldn't be democrats. It was rather that democracy couldn't be imposed by American military might in a region unready. Today, however, the Vulcans have so diminished America's prestige and power by their imperial overreach and their bungling of the war that the United States is less able to influence other countries than before Iraq, less of an engine for democratic change. George Bush as the "strong leader," of "bold action, big ideas" distracted the nation from the war on terror and made us more vulnerable. As for the "strong team," the Vulcans and their Iraq obsession have made us weaker, not stronger. And by the way, Mann tells us the Vulcan statue has been taken down to repair its structural faults.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
|
