McCain, Musharraf, and The Ways of The World

John McCain is Mr. Foreign Policy, Mr. Experience, the one candidate who's been in government longer than marble. He's seen leaders come and leaders go, he's seen entire nations fall to history, he's seen wars won and wars lost. And all this experience seems to have gone completely over his head. In all those years in government, John McCain doesn't seem to have learned a damned thing.

The lessons of Vietnam are clearly lost on the Vietnam vet. A war based on lies cannot be won, because the objectives aren't based on truth. Beat the living hell out of it all you want, but your aren't going to get that square peg into that round hole. The hammer of the military has its limitations.

But, like free market moonies who believe that the "genius of the market" can do anything -- including predicting terrorist attacks -- McCain is a military moonie who seems to believe that force is the only way to do anything.

As a result, McCain's choices of international allies reflects Bush's -- and a history of failure that goes back throughout the 20th century. Diplomacy is for wussypants appeasers. Stalin's quote -- "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" -- could easily be applied to anyone who shares McCain's thinking. Real allies have guns, because only guns have influence. The world is an awful and dangerous place and only the strong are worth knowing. The Dalai Lama is for photo ops and dictators are for actual work. Nowhere is more apparent than in McCain's support for disgraced Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf.



Prior to 9/11, Musharraf was a nobody -- just another strongman who'd taken over a developing nation in a coup. How much of an nobody is demonstrated in Reuters' Factbox; "Musharraf's evolving relationship with Washington":

November 3, 1999 - In a test of foreign policy acumen, a television news reporter in Boston asks then-Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to name the leaders of four global "hot spots," including Pakistan. Bush cannot name Musharraf, who had taken power in a coup a month earlier, referring to him as "the general."

No word on whether Bush giggled when he was told Musharraf's first name was Pervez, but I think it's probably a given. Bush didn't know who Musharraf was because he probably thought he'd have no use for him. That changed.

September 11, 2001 - After Al Qaeda attacks the United States, Musharraf reverses Pakistan's support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had sheltered Osama bin Laden's network, and throws its weight behind Bush's war on terrorism. Pakistan's Islamist opposition calls him a U.S. stooge.

June 2003 - Washington promises billions of dollars in aid for Pakistan -- it hands over more than $10 billion between 2001 and 2008 -- while White House officials say Bush presses Musharraf to move toward democracy and stop extremists from launching attacks on Afghanistan from Pakistan. Many al Qaeda leaders had fled across the border to Pakistan when U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan.

March 25, 2004 - Bush waives sanctions on Pakistan imposed after Musharraf seized power in a coup, saying this will facilitate a transition to democracy and help the fight against international terrorism.

Musharraf, the classic military usurper, suddenly fit the mold of other unsavory US allies -- Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein come to mind. He had men, he had guns, and he had the sort of power that only an autocrat has. "[D]ictatorships have the characteristic of being efficient," Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said. "They don't have to worry about the press. They don't have to worry about parliaments. They don't have to worry about a court system. They just do things, efficiently, immediately -- poorly, but quickly."

But the problem with dictatorships is that they're always illegitimate. The dictator holds on to power through any means necessary or he doesn't hold on to power at all. The brutality and corruption of dictatorships are born of desperation -- they're always in danger of being legitimately deposed. Musharraf was lucky; many are removed from existence altogether when they lose power, not just removed from office.

Dictatorships are generally seen as the most stable governments, because their oppressive nature makes immediate change unlikely. And, as Rumsfeld pointed out, they don't waste a lot of time screwing around with debate. A dictatorship would seem to make an ideal ally for a nation concerned more with effectiveness than with human rights, democracy, and the rule of international law.

But the dictatorship is a government in one man. As a result, it must be short-lived. An alliance with a dictatorship is by no definition a long range strategy. It's a momentary convenience. John McCain was a big fan of that convenience.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, McCain couldn't find enough nice things to say about Pervez Musharraf. Where many were calling on Musharraf to step down, McCain was running to his defense. McCain called him a "personally scrupulously honest" man who deserved "the benefit of the doubt" on uniting Pakistan and that I continue to believe Musharraf has done a pretty good job, done a lot of the things that we wanted him to do.

He even cast Musharraf as the savior of Pakistan:

Speaking to about 50 people packed into a cafe in Iowa, McCain said U.S. politicians should keep in mind that Musharraf has been a largely reliable ally who agreed to hold elections.

"Prior to Musharraf, Pakistan was a failed state," McCain said. "They had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption, and Musharraf basically restored order. So you're going to hear a lot of criticism about Musharraf that he hasn't done everything we wanted him to do, but he did agree to step down as head of the military and he did get the elections."

And, now that Musharraf has stepped down rather than be impeached, McCain can't get far enough away from his former good buddy. And that's what McCain hasn't learned, that dictatorships are only stable for the blink of an eye, historically speaking. That promoting democracy will serve us for centuries, while supporting a dictator serves us for one man's lifetime -- or an even shorter term. That the guys with the guns have no lasting power.

Foreign policy has been poorly focused for more than a century. McCain would continue that myopic focus. As I said, he hasn't learned a damned thing.

-Wisco

Onward to Iran!

The definition of a neocon used to be a 'neo-conservative' who believes in the transformative power of democracy, envisions a democratic world, and has an unquestioning faith in the power of the US military to bring about this transformation. Naive visionaries who believe that everyone wants to live in a democracy and only governments oppose it. Throwing a gigantic monkeywrench into this equation is the fact that antidemocratic governments are people and those people have no interest in democracy. Everyone wants to be free follow their beliefs, but there's no shortage of people who value their own freedom and don't care much about anyone else's.

As I said, that used to be the definition. Today, we can define those few who still embrace the neo-conservative ideal as morons who either can't or won't learn from recent history. It's one thing to have faith in a political hypothesis before you put it to the test, it's another to watch that hypothesis fail the acid test and come to the conclusion that you're correct.

These are today's neocons. They are fewer, no wiser, and just a little bit crazier. Having watched Iraq devolve into chaos, civil war, and anarchy, they believe they're still right. Iraq isn't the problem, others interfering in Iraq is the problem. The problem isn't -- as Gen. Omar Bradley said of the Korean war -- "The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." The problem is that the war is too narrow.

Norman Podhoretz:

The Iranians, of course, never cease denying that they intend to build a nuclear arsenal, and yet in the same breath they openly tell us what they intend to do with it. Their first priority, as repeatedly and unequivocally announced by their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is to "wipe Israel off the map" -- a feat that could not be accomplished by conventional weapons alone.

Pretty much proving that reality is secondary to his theory, Podhoretz writes, "It now remains to be seen whether this President, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will."

I've said it before, but it bears repeating -- Ahmadinejad's the head of Iran in the same way that Mickey Mouse runs Disneyland. What he says is propaganda for regional consumption; he's the marketing department. Podhoretz knows this -- he just doesn't care. He's only interested in going to war with Iran. Like Iraq's WMD, Iran's nuclear ambitions are only a pretext. Where the invasion of Iraq was the beginning of the neocon world-building experiment, going to war with Iran was always a part of it.

The face of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration has always been Dick Cheney and, thankfully, there's some evidence that Cheney's influence is on the decline. Maybe it's the fact that he's the brains behind the Scooter Libby scandal or maybe it's the fact that he's proven himself to be a really bad fortune teller, but there's an internal struggle in the administration over the question of Iran. One side wants war, the other believes diplomacy is the answer.

One guess as to where Dick is. As the old saying goes, "If at first you don't succeed, try again -- fail better."

New York Times:

A year after President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a new strategy toward Iran, a behind-the-scenes debate has broken out within the administration over whether the approach has any hope of reining in Iran's nuclear program, according to senior administration officials.

The debate has pitted Ms. Rice and her deputies, who appear to be winning so far, against the few remaining hawks inside the administration, especially those in Vice President Dick Cheney's office who, according to some people familiar with the discussions, are pressing for greater consideration of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Cheney, Like Pohoretz, seems completely incapable of grasping the fact that the neocon hypothesis has been proven untrue. In their minds, rebuilding the middle east from Iraq is a brilliant idea. And, if you take a look at the map, it becomes pretty obvious that war with Iran was the plan all along. Afghanistan on one border and Iraq on the other puts Iran between two staging areas (with nominal ally in the 'war on terror,' Pakistan, also on the border). They're merely arguing for attacking Iran ahead of schedule.

Regardless of whether or not attacking Iran is a good idea in the best case scenario, we live in the worst case scenario. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is stable. In fact, according to former US General Jay Garner, who'd been appointed two months before the invasion to head reconstruction in Iraq, that country is on the verge of total chaos and civil war on a balkan scale. He predicts a three-way, genocidal war. And he lays a great deal of blame for that in the lack of planning and coordination prior to the war. The neocons were so certain that their vision was inevitable that they didn't put a lot of sweat into figuring out how to go about it.

If Garner's right -- and there's no reason to believe he's not -- then moving the neocon world-dom concept forward right now is even more insane than the original plan. It's hard to imagine working around a war of ethnic cleansing to stage an attack on Iran. It's even harder to imagine taking a retaliatory attack from that position.

Cheney and Podhoretz, not learning a damned thing from Iraq, counsel catastrophe. We can be glad that Cheney's star seems to be past its zenith with the administration. That's the good news. The bad news is that the cooler heads that seem to be prevailing are on the shoulders of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

That's not extremely comforting...

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Iran; Iraq; Afghanistan; war on terror; George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice are our only hope against Dick Cheney's neocon dreams -- in other words, we're screwed...