Consequences

I’d like to belabor this, at least a little, because the difference in our conceptions of how to protect our people is the difference between a foreign policy that works and a foreign policy in which we continue creating more problems than we can solve.

In the past few years, the idea that we can take a hard line on every issue at once has given us an ongoing disaster in Afghanistan (where even our staunchest NATO allies are finding reasons to abandon us and the alliance, not least because our response to the Russo-Georgian war has made them doubt our leadership, and we now expect them to chase dope dealers as well as terrorists), a mess in Iraq (where having fewer of our people dying is a tactical victory, but not a strategic one), the Palestinian territories (where the elections we pushed for brought Hamas to power), Iran (which will almost certainly go nuclear, not least because of what we did to Iraq), North Korea (which, after 14 – 16 years, chose this moment to test nuclear weapons)…do I really have to go on? You can’t blame everything on Bush, but to blame none of it on him? To still trust in his ability to assess risks and show good judgment? That’s just credulous.

In the face of that record, it’s not very persuasive to imply that you’re for protecting Americans and anyone who expresses doubt about the wisdom of crossing another border to do it is not. “What are you, Donadio, some kind of moral coward?” That sort of sophistry is basically how Obama is selling his healthcare policy right now. “What, you want every American to have health insurance, don’t you? What are you, some kind of caveman?”

The trouble is what happens when we translate the chest-thumping rhetoric into reality. Somehow, good intentions don’t necessarily beget good policy. There are all these irritating little confounding variables, like history, and the fact that this isn’t the first or last time we’re going to be dealing with a country. And unintended consequences: the problem that swatting flies with a sledgehammer breaks everything in the house, without killing the flies.

I mean, we may not be able to bring the murder rate under control in our nation’s capital, a 68-square mile city with only 750,000 people in it, but we’ll have no problem building a secular liberal democracy in Iraq, a 27-million populous country where we can’t even speak the language. Only a moral coward could doubt it!

Then of course there’s the domestic fallout of all this for the Republicans: the fact that a guy who only four years ago was a far-left state senator can ride the words “hope” and “change” all the way to the White House.