Historian/pundit Victor Davis Hanson has come up with a theory about how the United States approaches Middle East policy: All of the theories (and thinkers about them) are wrong.
Or rather, they end up in all the same places: chaos, confusion and blood.
Did you like realists? President George H.W. Bush kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and did not go on to kick Saddam Hussein out of Baghdad, because a) it would have exceeded his mandate to reverse the invasion; b) because it would have broken up the coalition with which he had done so; but mainly because c) he shuddered at the thought of plunging into the maelstrom of Shiite versus Sunni contention that Saddam’s removal would have brought on.
And what happened then? Saddam massacred the Kurds, oppressed and murdered the Shiites, continued to nurture uncounted terrorists, and was a center of turbulence until removed later on.
Do you fancy the neoconservatives? President George W. Bush stepped into the maelstrom his father avoided, and unleashed three years of spiraling horrors until the surge checked it.
Ready now for a fling with the liberals? Barack Obama extended his hand, and Iran clenched its fists even harder. Ready to “lead from behind,” with “soft power?”
In the “‘Arab Spring,” liberals crowed they had found a better way to oust tyrants, but Egypt and Libya are still in deep trouble, with riots and protests and ongoing massacres, and the chance of takeovers by radical elements.
Ready to chuck the whole thing, and crawl back to your borders? Ah, but that’s what started it all in the first place, letting the Taliban take over Afghanistan, and plot the bolt from the blue that blew a huge hole out of lower Manhattan, and left nearly 3,000 people dead.
Each step brings on a call for its opposite number, which is hailed as the answer, until it, too, reveals flaws. As Hanson recalls, nation-building “was not our first choice but rather a last resort after numerous failures.”
After September 11, Bush 43 was assailed for not “connecting the dots” that led to the Taliban, and taking action to stop it, and assailed later for connecting the dots that led to Iraq as the next source of possible terrorist funding.
After he failed to take out Saddam, the commentariat assailed Bush 41 without mercy for his failure of vision in not leading Iraq out of its misery, and into the uplands of sunny self-government.
Liberal hawks lamented that he hadn’t the guts to finish the job, thereby making problems for their man, Bill Clinton, who in l998 took time off from impeachment to say regime change was the policy of his administration, and that Saddam, who was known to have used chemical weapons, was no doubt planning to use them again.
But when Bush 43 effected regime change and ran into problems, the liberal hawks bailed in short order, declaring Bush 41 to be their role model, and using the father to batter the son.
When the first phase of the war went well, these liberals called themselves hawkish. When the second phase failed they disowned it, and called themselves realists.
When the surge worked, they became incoherent, some still calling Iraq catastrophic, while Joe Biden called it a triumph — of the Obama administration! — and Obama himself called it a “victory,” when he, perhaps prematurely, pulled the troops out.
So here we are now, after three wars, two Bushes, and one Obama, facing a problem that started with President Carter, no wiser than when we began.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
