Cut and Paste Foreign Policy?

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if George Bush had come to his senses in 2004 not 2006 and removed Rumsfeld after he won the election not after the Republicans got their clocks cleaned in 2006. Of course, such hypotheticals are dubious. After all, Petreaus had yet to write the counter insurgency manual and so who knows who would have been the general on the ground.

Still, Bush's foreign policy has been far from perfect but in this dangerous world no foreign policy would be perfect. The one and only real eye sore was the four years of total incompetence spent in Iraq until Petraeus took over. Yet, liberal partisans have used that incompetence and attempted to paint the entire policy as a failure constantly using Iraq to blunt the whole policy. Furthermore, they attempt to paint McCain's policy as nothing more than an extension even though he opposed vigorously the four years of failure.

That's essentially what we have with this hatchet job from Joe Conason. He starts by trying to turn a pseudo controversy into a real one.

The discovery that John McCain's remarks on Georgia were derived from Wikipedia,
to put it politely, is disturbing and even depressing — but not surprising. Under the tutelage of the neoconservatives, who revealed their superficial understanding of Iraq both before and after the invasion, he favors bellicose grandstanding over strategic thinking. So why delve deeper than a quick Google search?

Worse still, neither he nor his advisers yet grasp how our misadventure in Mesopotamia has diminished American power and prestige. In fact, the Wikipedia episode — an awful embarrassment that would have devastated the presidential campaign of Barack Obama or any other Democrat — revealed an underlying weakness in Sen. McCain's vaunted grasp of foreign policy.

Still enthralled by an exhausted ideology, he seems unable to analyze how we can avoid manipulation by allies or adversaries while advancing our own real interests. Those interests include the cultivation of democracy but also the promotion of regional stability and international security. Pretending to confront Russia from a position of weakness doesn't help.

Now, the wikipedia reference is to a speech about Georgia in which McCain used language similar to Wikipedia. The passages that were near exact replicas were passages of facts though. In other words, what likely happened was that the McCain campaign used Wikipedia for fact checking and didn't bother to change the language when presenting their facts. Now, this is a controversy in the minds of bitter partisans only. I doubt the public at large cares very much if facts are lifted word for word from the source they were checked in.

This pseudo controversy moves immediately into an attack on the Iraq War entirely. Conason, like most liberals, believes that the entire Iraq affair was a waste of time. In reality, the waste was the four years of atrocious military policy that lead us to the brink of loss. What liberals fail to see is that we are now on the brink of victory and that victory will change the nature of the Middle East forever. Conason continues.

Frankly, the Arizona Republican's latest foray onto the world stage suggested that he is not quite ready for the responsibilities of the presidency. When he emphasized that Georgia was "one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion," he sounded like a politician who will gladly damage our global influence merely for the sake of pandering to his partisan base.

Certainly the propagandists of Al Qaeda must have been pleased to hear an ally of President Bush confirm that the United States is engaged in a worldwide crusade, for that is how such words are interpreted by Muslims. (And since when does American policy prefer nations for adopting any "official religion," Christian or otherwise?) This was rhetorical blundering worthy of the Bush White House.

Now, Sen. McCain is not alone among politicians and pundits in exploiting the Georgian crisis to promote an exhausted ideology. Nor is he alone in ignoring the impact of Iraq on our ability to defend our allies by means of diplomacy or force. From the editorial page of The Washington Post to the office of the vice president, much sound and fury has emanated, signifying very little except a shared determination to ignore reality. When Dick Cheney threatens the Russians with "serious consequences," what is he talking about? What would the Bush administration or its cheerleaders actually have done if the Russians had pushed on toward the Georgian capital?

Now, it takes a seriously warped mind to see our opponents who take great joy in turning the entire world Muslim, and then proclaim that any mention of a "Christian nation" plays into their hands.

That said, the criticism goes from peculiar to slanderous and all of it under the false premise that our entire foreign policy has failed. John McCain is exploiting nothing. This is boiler plate blame America first ideology. Vladimir Putin invades another country and of course it is John McCain that is the aggressor. The only one exploiting this situation is Putin himself, however you would need to pull Conason's teeth for him to offer any criticism there.

Without any prejudice to the cause of Georgia's sovereignty or its democratic aspirations, the true answer is not much, despite the illusions that our policy evidently encouraged among the Georgian leadership and people. Blustering aside, there was never the slightest chance that Europe or the United States would come to their assistance with military force against Russian troops. There are many reasons to avoid such a disaster, notably the enormous Russian nuclear arsenal, the European dependence on Russian energy supplies and the cataclysmic effect on the world economy.

Even if we contemplated the use of force, we scarcely have the capacity after squandering our power in Iraq. We can hardly bring effective diplomatic force to bear, either, beyond the tinny echo of White House blustering. The Russians must have laughed as they watched Georgian troops depart in haste from Iraq — and cackled when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations accused them of seeking "regime change" in Tbilisi. Are we telling them they cannot just invade a country they dislike, without international sanction, because they feel threatened?

There can be no doubt that Vladimir Putin's Russia poses a challenge to the West, and to the next administration. It can be argued that Russian ambitions must be checked now to discourage its bullying imperialism. It can also be argued that bringing the former Soviet republics into NATO only provokes the Russians into resisting encirclement by their Cold War enemies, and that we must engage Russia to cope with existential threats like nuclear proliferation and Islamist extremism. What can no longer be sanely argued is that reflexive ideology and confrontational bluster will secure our future.

What conspicuously missing is any hint of a plan to confront Putin effectively. What Conason lays out is all sorts of things we can't do: go to war, bring the Baltics into NATO, or even speak in a confrontational manner. What exactly is Conason suggesting then?

Imagine if Conason were running our foreign policy. Vladimir Putin would know we would never go to war with him, never admit any neighbor into NATO, and we wouldn't even dare to speak harshly of him. In other words, Vladimir Putin would do whatever he wants and we wouldn't even speak ill of it. Then, he has the chutzpah to criticize someone else's foreign policy.