Paul Krugman
The New York Times
July 21, 2006
SourceToday we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush
was president, those who believed that America could remake the world
to its liking with a series of splendid little wars — people like Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — were known within the administration as
“the crazies.” Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a
dangerous fantasy.
But in 2000 the Supreme Court delivered the White House to a man who,
although he may be 60, doesn’t act like a grown-up. The second
President Bush obviously confuses swagger with strength, and prefers
tough talkers like the crazies to people who actually think things
through. He got the chance to implement the crazies’ vision after
9/11, which created a climate in which few people in Congress or the
news media dared to ask hard questions. And the result is the bloody
mess we’re now in.
This isn’t a case of 20-20 hindsight. It was clear from the beginning
that the United States didn’t have remotely enough troops to carry out
the crazies’ agenda — and Mr. Bush never asked for a bigger army.
As I wrote back in January 2003, this meant that the “Bush doctrine”
of preventive war was, in practice, a plan to “talk trash and carry a
small stick.” It was obvious even then that the administration was
preparing to invade Iraq not because it posed a real threat, but
because it looked like a soft target.
The message to North Korea, which really did have an active nuclear
program, was clear: “The Bush administration,” I wrote, putting myself
in Kim Jong Il’s shoes, “says you’re evil. It won’t offer you aid,
even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be
rewarding evil. It won’t even promise not to attack you, because it
believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they
actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the
Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are
militarily weak.” So “the best self-preservation strategy ... is to be
dangerous.”
With a few modifications, the same logic applies to Iran. And it’s
easier than ever for Iran to be dangerous, now that U.S. forces are
bogged down in Iraq.
Would the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened
even if the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting
terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies’
agenda? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that the United States would have
more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush
hadn’t squandered both the nation’s credibility and its military might
on his war of choice.
So what happens next?
Few if any of the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they
were wrong. Vice President Cheney continues to insist that his two
most famous pronouncements about Iraq — his declaration before the
invasion that we would be “greeted as liberators” and his assertion a
year ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes” — were
“basically accurate.”
But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things
going so badly?
The crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of
omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.
Thus William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has called
for a military strike — an airstrike, since we don’t have any spare
ground troops — against Iran.
“Yes, there would be repercussions,” he wrote in his magazine, “and
they would be healthy ones.” What would these healthy repercussions
be? On Fox News he argued that “the right use of targeted military
force” could cause the Iranian people “to reconsider whether they
really want to have this regime in power.” Oh, boy.
Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a policymaker. But
there’s every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol says in public
is what Mr. Cheney says in private.
And what about The Decider himself?
For years the self-proclaimed “war president” basked in the adulation
of the crazies. Now they’re accusing him of being a wimp. “We have
been too weak,” writes Mr. Kristol, “and have allowed ourselves to be
perceived as weak.”
Does Mr. Bush have the maturity to stand up to this kind of pressure?
I report, you decide.