It's getting rather irritating for Americans to be lectured by despots and dictators. Earlier this week Bashar al-Assad appeared on American television telling us why invading Syria was bad. Now Vladimir Putin published an editorial in The New York Times saying the same thing.
These two tyrants have a point that can be summarized in two and a half words: George W. Bush.
George W. Bush blew all our credibility when he invaded Iraq based on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Since then no one -- not even the American people -- will trust any American president when he claims that we must attack a murderous thug who has been gassing his own people.
Republicans have been claiming that Obama weakened the presidency by going to Congress to ask permission to retaliate militarily against Syria for using Sarin gas. Why is it weakness to obey the Constitution, which specifies that only Congress has the power to go to war? The truth is, Bush destroyed America's moral high ground when he fabricated evidence about Saddam's WMDs and lied about Iraq's involvement in 9/11.
Since then Obama has been saddled with Bush's wars, Bush's domestic spying programs, Bush's torture, Bush's Guantanamo, Bush's indefinite detentions, and so on. As Republicans keep telling us, once a federal program is entrenched, it's all but impossible to get rid of it. To wit: President Obama tried to close Guantanamo, but Congress stopped him cold.
No matter what his personal convictions, the president becomes a prisoner of precedent and his predecessors' pecadilloes.
Bush's blunders have now made it all but impossible for us to get an international consensus for action against Syria. Our closest allies were burned (Britain in particular) over and over by Bush and Cheney's machinations, and no one else trusts a word we say.
We actually did this right once upon a time. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, George H. W. Bush got overwhelming international cooperation to oust him. By February 1991 Saddam's military was destroyed and he was ejected from Kuwait. It's ironic that that president's son and his secretary of defense learned absolutely nothing from this great success.
Conservatives like to say they'd rather be feared than liked. Now that the Bush's misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have burned out the American military, we're neither feared nor liked.
1 comment:
Nikto you magnificent bastard, you are just giving me every opening I could possibly ask for. Thanks.
I previously linked to New Republic on how badly Obama has performed with regard to Syria, here is another. Do read it, even if it makes you choke the Obamessiah cock right out of your mouth.
I am going to highlight this part though:
The fact that Putin is not the most credible messenger when it comes to the rule of law or pacificism is one thing, but this has always been his strength: taking words and concepts with generally agreed upon meanings—laws, elections, constitutions—and redefining them for his own strategic benefit, and then cloaking himself in their legitimizing powers.
Honestly, is there a better deconstruction of progressive talk you've read of late? Just pop Obama, or heck even W in for Putin, and that paragraph works without any other modification. Oh, I know Bush=bad, Obama=good in that simple-minded partisan binary process that you call thought (or even more amusingly critical thought).
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