a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Thursday, April 17, 2003 Syria watchWe're retiring this short-lived feature on Radio Free Mike, because "Syria watch" is now front-page news. Everyone can see what we're doing over there, not that Syria's response has been all that noble. The Damascus Ba'athists do truck with terrorists, and of course Bush wants to find those Iraqi weapons, which Syria is probably hiding.But a good guide for our motivations in Syria is the web site of the Project for a New American Century, a think-tank which most of the Iraq war's architects (Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld) either agree with or belong to. The basic PNAC notion goes like this: American influence is a good thing in the world, and forcing it on the worst governments in the Middle East — through diplomacy, or at gunpoint — will make the world freer and safer. Around Radio Free Mike we like democracy, we're not kneejerk Washington critics, and we don't go in for moral equivalence. ("Who's the unelected bully with the bombs?" etc.) We're glad Saddam's gone. But the thinking on the Project for a New American Century site reminds us of the thinking that led to American catastrophes in Nicaragua and places like that in the 1980s. It's ideology. It's the bloat that comes with having too much power, a kind of armchair quarterbacking that doesn't know or think seriously about facts and people on the ground. Iraqis keep promising to car-bomb our Marines if they stay in Iraq a day longer than it takes to set up an unfettered democracy, because they suspect we're not quite as selfless as the President claims; and yet PNAC insists we don't need an exit strategy. Which makes us think at Radio Free Mike that an American imperium in the Middle East — a presence, an influence, a watching-over of American "interests" — is part of the unspoken long-term plan. Here's Robert Kagan's vision of post-war Iraq, from last summer in the Washington Post, reprinted as a PNAC document: The idea [after World War II] was not simply to get rid of a dangerously aggressive Imperial Japanese government, nor merely to deny the Japanese the capacity to launch another Pearl Harbor. It was to rebuild Japanese politics and society, roughly in the American image. American policy in Japan, as in Germany, was "nation-building" on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy. Almost six decades later there are still American troops on Japanese soil. Iraq may not be that different. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:33 PM | |
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