Brian Chatwin
Staff Writer
Last week I attended a dinner party in Hollywood at which my date and I were the only natural-born citizens of the United States. Looking around the table there were three couples from India, one man from China, and us — the two white kids from Calabasas. At this “United Colors of Benetton” event I came to the conclusion that the United States, with its superior acumen of sales and marketing — has become woefully deficient in selling our ideas of international interventionism.
The political philosophies of the dinner guests supported this idea. The Indians, all successful software engineers, arrived at their interpretation of the Iraq war using cost-benefit analysis. They were much less concerned about the Bush political doctrine of exporting democracy as they were with the actual cost. The man from China, a financial auditor for a large accounting firm, had a much more positive opinion of Bush, our goals in Iraq, and U.S. interventionism overall.
During dinner, after all other topics had been exhausted, one of the Indians at the table said “why are we spending $3 billion in Iraq — its ridiculous.”
When I attempted to explain that Bush believes we can bring democracy to the Middle East, he did not agree.
“Trying to bring democracy to Iraq is like teaching a mouse to do calculus — it’s a great idea — but completely unattainable,” he said.
When I asked him if we could apply any lessons from India to the Iraq problem, one of the Indian women said “no, that will take decades. In India, things did not change until the youth promoted democracy from within.”
And she was exactly right and exactly wrong. She was right to say that India found change from within, but wrong to thing the same lesson could not be applied to Iraq.
Young people are the harbingers of change. However, Bush and his administration have not done a good enough job conveying this message to the American people, the World or my dinner guests. If Bush would explain that the United States will stay in Iraq until the youth of Iraq can rise up and fundamentally change the polity from within — then perhaps his detractors would have fewer arrows in their quiver.
However, such as it is, Bush’s timeline for Iraq hinges on a new, stable Iraqi government. This is unrealistic.
From our own history, we know that stability did not come for more than 100 years — after our own Civil War.
Why then, are we to think that Iraq can push the fast forward button and find stability in less than a tenth of the time it took Americans to find it?
No, Bush has done a poor job communicating the goals for Iraq.
Bush’s failure to accurately communicate (i.e., sell and market) the goals and objectives, rightly understood, in Iraq has created a vacuum of ideas.
Hence, Bush has left the vacuum of ideas to be filled by rational cost-benefit analysis of my fellow diners. This is not a good position for the president.
The price of democracy cannot be calculated by cost-benefit analysis — at least not by the average software engineer. No, the president needs to dramatically alter his message.
Bush has two short years to take pages from “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” He must find a way to win more allies both foreign and domestic, and do all he can to influence the already skeptical public.
For Bush, selling is everything.
11-09-2006