#6 I like Bolton, but he's been a disaster for American foreign policy. Neo-conservatism is not only a contradiction in terms, it's a bust. We have gone out into the world looking for monsters to slay, and have discovered that these monsters include not just the leadership but the vast majority of the population we have gone over to liberate. And in so doing, we have lost 7,000 men to date, not counting the lives of allied troops, and spent $1T which, while a relative pittance compared to Vietnam War expenditures, was much more than the American public was prepared to spend.
The problem with neo-conservatism is that it tries to apply the lessons of post-WWII Allied governance of Germany, Italy and Japan to nations that were
- much less developed,
- non-homogeneous,
- religious fanatics (even in Iraq, where a thin veneer of secular Baathism convinced neo-cons that inside every Iraqi was a modern cosmopolite waiting to jump out),
- not completely defeated (unlike Japan and Germany, which lost 5% and 10% of their populations, respectively),
- in the "modern" era, not susceptible to decades of dictatorial oversight the way the defeated Axis Powers were, which is why Iraq and Afghanistan are now sharia states
If Romney is elected and jumps into these pointless foreign policy quagmires the way Bolton recommends, he will be a one-term president who paves the way for yet another Democratic landslide and god-knows-what new laundry list of welfare state programs and environmental nuttiness. The issue has never been whether we can win these wars - it's whether we can win them at what the electorate considers a reasonable cost and whether the outcome is better than what existed before, from a national interest standpoint. So far, the Arab Spring has converted three neutral or allied regimes to semi-hostile or hostile regimes.
The real lesson of WWII is that nation smashing must precede nation building. During WWII, Bomber Harris said "We shall destroy Germany's will to fight. Now that we have the planes and crews, in 1943 and 1944 we shall drop one and a quarter million tons of bombs, render 25 million Germans homeless, kill 900,000 and seriously injure one million." The German public screamed defiance but was so shell-shocked at the war's conclusion that they submitted tamely to Allied rule on both sides of the Iron Curtain. |