Jumping the Shark

This much we can say with certainty:
Bush is as much in the dark as you are
--Andrew Bacevich
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Andrew Bacevich sounded the death knell this week for the Phony War on Terror (PWOT©) ((Picking Up After the Failed War on Terror). He's not the first, but his reasoning is as follows:

"War requires adherence to principles. Once a conflict becomes an exercise in improvisation, it ceases to be meaningful. It becomes the antithesis of war -- killing without political purpose or moral justification.

"The Bush administration is no longer engaged in a principled effort to address the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism. In lieu of principles, the administration now engages in crisis management, reacting to problems as they pop up. Last week, it was Turkey's threat to invade Iraqi Kurdistan. This week, it's Pervez Musharraf, key ally and beneficiary of $10 billion in U.S. aid since 2001, imposing naked military rule on Pakistan. Next week, who knows what surprises await?"

But reactionary crisis management is not the sole mode of conducting the PWOT. It also requires the skills of consummate spinmeisters contorting logic and reality to fit the paradigm PWOT. The war is as phony as every justification given for it. Justifying a war is not the same as winning it.

"During the heady run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the president was boldly promising that the United States, drawing on its 'unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence,' would not only 'defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants' but also 'extend the benefits of freedom across the globe.'"

Fighting terrorists and tyrants has expended our military strength, destroyed U.S. economic viability and discredited our political influence. Other than those miserable failures, all is well in Crawford, Texas.

On Condoleezza Rice: "Because the United States 'has always been, and will always be, not a status quo power but a revolutionary power,' the Bush administration was going to engineer a democratic revolution, thereby creating what Rice called a "new Middle East." "This revolution has demonstrably failed. In such places as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it never got off the ground. "

To borrow Alice Randall's title, the wind done gone out of those once revolutionary sails. In any event, a revolution is effected by an impulse upwelling from within a society. A nation can inspire via example and assist from the boundary, but to enter unbidden and smash a country's leadership and then impose one's own ideology is fascist. Obvious, right?

"Policymakers such as Rice, who once disdained mere stability, are now frantically trying to prevent the greater Middle East from sliding into chaos. As the clock runs down on the Bush era, the administration preoccupies itself with damage control."

Professor Bacevich, not even a military scholar, ends with some sound suggestions on how the U.S. might comport itself via a vis Islamic radicalism. The last one is priceless.

"The essence of these principles can be expressed in a single word: realism, which implies seeing ourselves as we really are and the world as it actually is." What this administration needs is not spinmeisters, but opthamologists.

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Erratum: Prof. Bacevich is most certainly a military scholar. Mea culpa.