a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Monday, November 10, 2003 Land Wars in AsiaToday I went to a neoconservative-toned talk in San Francisco put on by the World Without War Council, where my wife used to work. I got to sit in as a member of the liberal media. One point everyone seemed to agree on was that NPR, The New Yorker, and The New York Times were major opinion-factories where journalists took for granted that projection of American power was just a bad idea. Anti-American liberals, in other words. I pointed out that The New Yorker itself was a projection of American power; most of its writers were probably not anti-American or plain dumb enough to think otherwise. (Susan Sontag may be an exception.) Anyway, around Radio Free Mike we like the word "liberal" and know how to use it: We think the U.S. is fundamentally a great liberal democracy that can do old-fashioned liberal good when its power is wisely used.I mean, point taken -- you do hear a lot of smug assumptions on NPR, etc. One is that U.S. military power amounts to an immoral capitalist juggernaut, and the big lesson from Vietnam under this idea is that we should butt out, in all cases, period. To me that's a cliché. The real lesson of Vietnam is that we shouldn't fight a land war in Asia to prop up a corrupt and failing regime. We were right to resist Communism, wrong to think Vietnam was winnable (from the 1940s on! Daniel Ellsberg makes this point forcefully in Secrets. Impossible to read that book and think of this dumb Instapundit post as anything but naîve.) Not just Asia: My novel touches on the mess in Nicaragua, which went bad for the same reason. The Sandinistas were no good, but they'd won an election, and their Contra enemies had no base of support beyond the CIA. The difference between those disasters and Iraq is that this time we opposed the corrupt and failing regime. Good! Only now there's no regime. So we need to make sure that whatever rises in Saddam's place will not be weak or corrupt. A good place to start might be honesty. But Bush and his apologists have not been honest, much less wise, and until that pattern changes the forecast for a credible new government will be dismal. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:27 AM | |
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