Troy Senik
Staff Writer
Last week witnessed two of the most substantial events of the decade in U.S. foreign policy. On Sunday, the streets of the United States were mostly quiet, the typical Civus Americanus bathed in the listless glow of televised sports. By Wednesday, however, cell phones rang in a round, giddy exclamations punctuated the mid-morning and every eye sparkled like convention confetti. On that Sunday, an Iraqi court handed down the death penalty for Saddam Hussein, on grounds of crimes against humanity. On the latter, President Bush announced the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The United States is rudderless.
Bush, for all of his administrative failings, has always possessed a healthy reserve of character and resolve. But in the aftermath of the misunderstood midterm drubbing (an election where Republicans lost majorities in both houses, yet the electorate as a whole moved to the right), the Commander in Chief developed Stockholm Syndrome overnight, instinctively sending Rumsfeld up the River Styx without a paddle.
Like any wartime leader, Rumsfeld has, of course, been guilty of errors. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal, for instance, will probably go down as the single most ignominious American moment of this war. But while resolving the situation was most certainly Rumsfeld’s responsibility, creating moral equivalence between the Secretary and Specialist Lynddie England (the reprehensible taskmistress of the affair), is like holding the president personally responsible for the actions of every employee of the Commerce Department’s Houston office.
Perhaps the appropriate hour for Rumsfeld’s departure had come, if only to remove a perennial Democratic piñata from the political tree, but the administration’s need for “fresh eyes” seems to have confused a new set of glasses with two patches to shut out the harsh light of reality. Rather than appoint a new secretary whose criticisms of the Iraq War were rooted in an allegiance to the overall mission, such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., or former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Bush chose Robert Gates, a veteran of the middling foreign policy establishment that steered his father’s administration.
Gates is a disciple of the foreign policy school known as “Realism,” an orthodoxy that believes all nation-states are motivated by rational self-interest and raw power, with a severe discount placed on ideology. All this to say that Gates is a man fundamentally unfit for the task placed before him at this point in history. Understanding the significance of the extremist ideology that animates radical Islamic fascism is the most fundamental task of any soul valiant enough to attempt to slay the hydra of the modern Middle East.
The coincidence of Gates’ appointment with the release of the new report authored by a committee chaired by another Bush 41 realist, former Secretary of State James Baker, will almost certainly lead to a plan that extricates the United States from Iraq before the nation is stabilized to the point of self-sufficiency. What remains to be seen is whether the American populace will react as they should to such a hasty retreat; like the child who skips school only to spend the whole day plagued by the irresponsibility of his actions.
Regardless of what one thinks of the Iraqi front of the World War in which the nation is currently engaged, solemn observers of modern geopolitics must recognize the grave implications of a foreign policy apparatus that willingly sacrifices the offensive advantage thus far enjoyed by the United States.
Al-Qaeda has already pronounced that its impending victory in Iraq will open up the path to establishing an Islamic caliphate across the Middle East, finally giving nation-state status to what has thus far been an amorphous barbarism. With Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, the new Shi’a incarnation of Iraq and a re-radicalized Afghanistan all anxious to aid this process and Pakistan only one gunshot away from being the first fully nuclear Islamic state, the stakes could not be higher. Best of luck to Mr. Gates, but here’s to hoping that he considers our enemy’s realism and not just his own.
11-16-2006