Amateur Hour

In a scene from one of my favorite films, The Remains of the Day, a U.S. senator played by Christopher Reeve graciously but sternly chastises a gathering of European noblemen rushing headlong towards the appeasement of Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II for being a bunch of “amateurs.” What he meant was that they were idealistic ivory tower types, disconnected to the real world and how it operates.

The mess in Iraq is a perfect example of the danger of letting the ideologues, with no sense of consequences or the real world, run the show.

While the U.S. always has cloaked and “sold” its policies and actions in moral terms, self-interest and pragmatism often have played important roles as well. Thus, conflict with the Soviet Union was fought indirectly by a Cold War (not a “hot” one), based on containment and checks and balances.

The reasons for going into Afghanistan—as a safe haven for terrorist camps and the people responsible for 9/11—seemed rather straightforward. However, the justification for invading Iraq, using tenuous connections to 9/11, were markedly less so. In fact, the primary reasons for going after Saddam simply seemed personal. To the neocons, Saddam remaining in power just stuck in their craw, esp. since they felt the success in Kuwait had washed away the ghosts of Vietnam and made America pre-eminent once again. And Bush the Younger seemed anxious to play out some Greek tragedy psychodrama, and to to atone for the sins of his father, as if the decision to not “finish the job” in the aftermath of Persian Gulf War I was a sign of failure, at least among the neocons, and was the reason he only served one term. (Bush the Elder was seen by the neocons as an internationalist who was not a true believe and someone they never considered their own.)

Now let’s review, instead, what has been achieved:

Within a year, the administration completely squandered all of the good will, sympathy, and moral capital in the international community, and made the U.S. look like a rogue state to many.

By destabilizing Iraq without a clear plan in mind, it now has destabilized the whole region and, in fact, empowered Iran which has become an emerging dominant power in the region, esp. as the U.S. has shown itself to be less than invulnerable and overextended and exposed (Iraq actually was the one power in the region that effectively served as a counter to Iran—the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach to realpolitik.)

The level of incompetency by this Administration, esp. when viewed in the context of past administrations, truly is astounding.

Amateur hour indeed.