If there’s one truly pathetic anti-war line being peddled right now, it is that the Bush administration tragically “blew” the world-wide sympathy for Americans in the wake of 9/11. How did they DO this? By allegedly refusing allied support in Afghanistan and Iraq, sidelining the U.N., acting all “unilateral,” and … well, you’ve probably listened to enough NPR to finish the sentence. Fred Kaplan in Slate lays it on with a trowel this week. After European sympathy two years ago, he claims,
the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures – and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.
Excuse me, but who exactly was excluded from helping us in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Does Kaplan believe that Chirac and Schroder were just desperate to help America win the war on terror in Iraq and that if we’d been so much nicer they would have come around? Puh-lease. They cared more about their own petty prestige than about supporting the U.S. after the atrocities of two years ago. But then it’s always America’s fault, isn’t it? Even when America has had war brought to its own cities and has the temerity to respond in kind. He goes on:
An American leader could have taken advantage of that moment and reached out to the world, forged new alliances, strengthened old ones, and laid the foundations of a new, broad-based system of international security for the post-Cold War era-much as Harry Truman and George Marshall had done in the months and years following World War II.
Blah blah blah. Does Kaplan mean that the administration didn’t bend over backwards to win the support of, say, Pakistan? That it rejected peace-keepers and troops from many nations to help police Afghanistan? That it spurned British, Australian, Polish, Spanish, Italian support – militarily and diplomatically – in order to go it alone?
COME OFF IT: To put it bluntly, Kaplan’s piece amounts to a series of wild stretches and utter fabrications. The U.S. did everything to win the support of as many countries as we could for a war which many, frankly, do not have the stomach to fight. And militarily speaking, there wasn’t much the Big Europeans could have done anyway. Kaplan claims the Prague NATO summit wasn’t deferent enough to the allies; and the U.S. should not have been so determined to go to war against Iraq. But he surely knows that deference to Germany and France would have meant one thing: no war. He surely knows that it was the French who scuttled any chance for a compromise on Iraq in the last days at the U.N. He knows that the Bush administration did everything it possibly could to bring the U.N. around. So how can he say the following:
Over the past couple of weeks, as the fighting persists in Baghdad, as the Taliban attempts a comeback in Afghanistan, as Saddam and Osama Bin Laden remain on the prowl-in short, as the light glows dimmer, the tunnel stretches longer, the budget piles higher, and the desert-swamp gets deeper-President Bush seems to have realized he took a wrong turn back at the 9/11 junction. He has been persuaded to go back to the much-loathed United Nations, for assistance and legitimacy… He has extended his hand a bit late in the game.
Almost a year ago this week, the president extended his hand to the U.N. Or doesn’t that count? It makes you wish that the Bush of Kaplan’s fevered imagination had simply ignored the U.N., gone into Iraq a few months after Afghanistan, given Saddam much less chance to prepare, and our rivals in Europe less of a chance to keep the terror-masters informed. At least then Bush would have deserved some of this now fashionable obloquy. But no good strategy goes un-attacked, does it? A useful lesson, this, about some foreign policy liberals. Ignore them: they’ll attack you. Do what they want: they’ll attack you anyway. If it means a grotesque distortion of history, so be it.
The Dish 