Friday, October 08, 2004
Terrorists' Candidates?
By Charles Krauthammer
Do the bad guys -- the terrorists in their Afghan caves and Iraqi redoubts -- want George Bush defeated in this election? Bush critics, among them the editors of the New York Times, have worked themselves into a lather over the mere suggestion that this might be so. A front-page "analysis" in The Post quoted several Republican variations of this theme -- such as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage saying that the terrorists in Iraq "are trying to influence the election against President Bush" -- then noted that "[s]uch accusations . . . surfaced in the modern era during the McCarthy communist hunt."
Intimations of McCarthyism constitute a serious charge. But the charge is not remotely serious. Of course the terrorists want Bush defeated. How can anyone pretend otherwise?
Why are we collectively nervous about terrorism as the election approaches? Because, as everyone knows, there are terrorists out there who would dearly love to hit us before the election. Why? To affect it. What does that mean? Do they want to affect it randomly?
Of course not. We know the terrorists' intent and strategy. We saw it on display in Spain, where a spectacular terrorist attack three days before the national election set off the chain of events that brought down a government that had allied itself with the United States. The attack worked perfectly. Within weeks Spain had withdrawn its troops from Iraq.
Last month, terrorists set off a car bomb outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the middle of a neck-and-neck Australian election campaign and just three days before the only televised debate between the two candidates. The prime minister, John Howard, is a staunch U.S. ally in both Afghanistan and Iraq. His opponent, Mark Latham, has pledged to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq by Christmas.
The terrorists may be medieval primitives, but they know about cell phones and the Internet and fuel-laden commercial airliners. They also know about elections. Their obvious objective is to drive from power those governments most deeply involved in the war against them -- in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else. The point is not only to radically alter an enemy nation's foreign policy -- as in Spain -- but to deter any other government contemplating similar support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
But Spain and Australia -- Britain, with Tony Blair up for reelection next year, will surely be next -- are merely supporting actors. The real prize is America. An electoral repudiation of President Bush would be seen by the world as a repudiation of Bush's foreign policy, specifically his aggressive, preemptive and often unilateral prosecution of the war on terrorism, most especially Iraq. It would be a correct interpretation because John Kerry has made clear that he is fighting this election on precisely those grounds.
Does this mean that the bad guys want Kerry to win? Michael Kinsley with his usual drollery ridicules the idea by conjuring up the image of Osama bin Laden, "as he sits in his cave studying materials from the League of Women Voters," deciding to cast his absentee ballot for the Democrats.
The point, of course, is that the terrorists have no particular interest in Kerry. What they care about is Bush. He could be running against a moose, and bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi would be for the moose.
How to elect the moose? A second direct attack on the United States would backfire. As Sept. 11 showed, attacking the U.S. homeland would prompt a rallying around the president, whoever he is. America is not Spain. Such an attack would probably result in a Bush landslide.
It is still prudent to be on high alert at home, because it is not wise to bank on the political sophistication of the enemy. The enemy is nonetheless far more likely to understand that the way to bring down Bush is not by attack at home but by debilitating guerrilla war abroad, namely in Iraq. Hence the escalation of bloodshed by Zarqawi and Co. It is not just aimed at intimidating Iraqis and preventing the Iraqi election. It is aimed at demoralizing Americans and affecting the American election.
The Islamists and Baathists in Iraq are conducting their own Tet Offensive with the same objective as the one in 1968: to demoralize the American citizenry, convince it that the war cannot be won, and ultimately encourage it to reject the administration that brought the war upon them and that is the more unequivocal about seeing it through.
It is perfectly true, as Bush critics constantly point out, that many millions around the world -- from Jacques Chirac to the Arab street -- dislike Bush and want to see him defeated. It is ridiculous to pretend that bin Laden, Zarqawi and the other barbarians are not among them.
By Charles Krauthammer
Do the bad guys -- the terrorists in their Afghan caves and Iraqi redoubts -- want George Bush defeated in this election? Bush critics, among them the editors of the New York Times, have worked themselves into a lather over the mere suggestion that this might be so. A front-page "analysis" in The Post quoted several Republican variations of this theme -- such as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage saying that the terrorists in Iraq "are trying to influence the election against President Bush" -- then noted that "[s]uch accusations . . . surfaced in the modern era during the McCarthy communist hunt."
Intimations of McCarthyism constitute a serious charge. But the charge is not remotely serious. Of course the terrorists want Bush defeated. How can anyone pretend otherwise?
Why are we collectively nervous about terrorism as the election approaches? Because, as everyone knows, there are terrorists out there who would dearly love to hit us before the election. Why? To affect it. What does that mean? Do they want to affect it randomly?
Of course not. We know the terrorists' intent and strategy. We saw it on display in Spain, where a spectacular terrorist attack three days before the national election set off the chain of events that brought down a government that had allied itself with the United States. The attack worked perfectly. Within weeks Spain had withdrawn its troops from Iraq.
Last month, terrorists set off a car bomb outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the middle of a neck-and-neck Australian election campaign and just three days before the only televised debate between the two candidates. The prime minister, John Howard, is a staunch U.S. ally in both Afghanistan and Iraq. His opponent, Mark Latham, has pledged to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq by Christmas.
The terrorists may be medieval primitives, but they know about cell phones and the Internet and fuel-laden commercial airliners. They also know about elections. Their obvious objective is to drive from power those governments most deeply involved in the war against them -- in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else. The point is not only to radically alter an enemy nation's foreign policy -- as in Spain -- but to deter any other government contemplating similar support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
But Spain and Australia -- Britain, with Tony Blair up for reelection next year, will surely be next -- are merely supporting actors. The real prize is America. An electoral repudiation of President Bush would be seen by the world as a repudiation of Bush's foreign policy, specifically his aggressive, preemptive and often unilateral prosecution of the war on terrorism, most especially Iraq. It would be a correct interpretation because John Kerry has made clear that he is fighting this election on precisely those grounds.
Does this mean that the bad guys want Kerry to win? Michael Kinsley with his usual drollery ridicules the idea by conjuring up the image of Osama bin Laden, "as he sits in his cave studying materials from the League of Women Voters," deciding to cast his absentee ballot for the Democrats.
The point, of course, is that the terrorists have no particular interest in Kerry. What they care about is Bush. He could be running against a moose, and bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi would be for the moose.
How to elect the moose? A second direct attack on the United States would backfire. As Sept. 11 showed, attacking the U.S. homeland would prompt a rallying around the president, whoever he is. America is not Spain. Such an attack would probably result in a Bush landslide.
It is still prudent to be on high alert at home, because it is not wise to bank on the political sophistication of the enemy. The enemy is nonetheless far more likely to understand that the way to bring down Bush is not by attack at home but by debilitating guerrilla war abroad, namely in Iraq. Hence the escalation of bloodshed by Zarqawi and Co. It is not just aimed at intimidating Iraqis and preventing the Iraqi election. It is aimed at demoralizing Americans and affecting the American election.
The Islamists and Baathists in Iraq are conducting their own Tet Offensive with the same objective as the one in 1968: to demoralize the American citizenry, convince it that the war cannot be won, and ultimately encourage it to reject the administration that brought the war upon them and that is the more unequivocal about seeing it through.
It is perfectly true, as Bush critics constantly point out, that many millions around the world -- from Jacques Chirac to the Arab street -- dislike Bush and want to see him defeated. It is ridiculous to pretend that bin Laden, Zarqawi and the other barbarians are not among them.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Iran, When?
The war on terror cannot be won without addressing Iran.
Months before the liberation of Iraq I wrote that we were about to have our great national debate on the war against the terror masters, and it was going to be the wrong debate. Wrong because it was going to focus obsessively on Iraq, thereby making it impossible to raise the fundamental strategic issues. Alas, that forecast was correct, and we're still stuck in the strategic quagmire we created. Up to our throats. So let's try again to get it right.
Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is only one theater in a regional war. We were attacked by a network of terrorist organizations supported by several countries, of whom the most important were Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. President Bush's original analysis was correct, as was his strategy: We must not distinguish between the terrorists and their national supporters. Hence we need different strategies for different enemies, but we need to defeat all of them.
Afghanistan was the classic example, because the Taliban regime was at once home to, and sponsor of, al Qaeda. Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, and we responded against the terrorist organization and against the regime that supported it. Once the Taliban had been destroyed, and al Qaeda had been shattered, President Bush launched a political strategy: support the creation of a free Afghanistan, implant the basic institutions of democratic civil society, work toward free elections so that Afghans could freely govern themselves.
Call it democratic revolution.
That was supposed to be the model for the rest of the war, and it was the right strategy. Use military force where necessary, against both the terrorists and the sponsoring regimes, and support democratic revolution. The whole region understood that strategy, and you could see the consequences. There were pro-democracy demonstrations, even in the most unexpected places, such as Damascus and Riyadh, where none had been seen in human memory. In Iran, where the democratic opposition had shown its passion for several years, the tempo increased. And all the terror masters, in Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh, trembled, fearing that their moment of power and glory was about to pass.
The president clearly understood both the stakes and the opportunity. The "Axis of Evil" was — and is — very real, as the tyrants of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea knew full well. There is now abundant evidence of the close cooperation among them, and with their Libyan, Syrian and Pakistani friends, ranging from nuclear projects to other weapons of mass destruction, and to vital support (sometimes in tandem, sometimes separately) to the terror network.
The terror masters also knew that their greatest threat came from their own people, who were disgusted at the oppressive and corrupt dictatorships, and who saw the United States as the source of their imminent liberation.
Again, the president described the situation well: Time was not on our side, for delay would enable our enemies to regroup and plan for the next challenge. I kept imploring "faster, please," because it was luminously clear that the terror masters were planning for the battle of Iraq. They publicly announced that they would attempt to do in post-liberation Iraq what they had previously accomplished in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s: Use a combination of terror, kidnapping, and political/religious agitation to break our will, drive us out, and expand their own power.
The terror masters could not possibly stand by and permit an easy triumph in Iraq, for that would seal their own doom. For them, the battle of Iraq was an existential conflict, the ultimate zero-sum game. If we won, they died. But, blinded by our obsession with Iraq, we did not see it. For once, the president's intuition failed him. This failure to recognize the enormity of the stakes, and hence the intensity of the coming assault, was heartbreaking, for us and the other members of the Coalition, and for the Iraqi people. It was the ultimate intelligence failure, a pure failure of vision.
Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the ally of al Qaeda, the sponsor of Zarqawi, the longtime sponsor of Fatah, and the backbone of Hamas. So clear was Iran's major role in the terror universe that the Department of State, along with the CIA one of the most conflict-averse agencies of the American government, branded the Islamic Republic the world's number one terror sponsor. As it still does.
Moreover, the Islamic Republic was uniquely vulnerable to democratic revolution, for, by the mullahs' own accounting, no less than seventy percent of the Iranian people hated the clerical fascist regime in Tehran, and hundreds of thousands of young Iranians had shown a disposition to challenge their oppressors in the streets of the major cities. Had we supported them then and there, in the immediate aftermath of Afghanistan, when the entire region was swept by political tremors of great magnitude, the evil regime might well have fallen, thereby delivering an enormous blow to the jihadis all over the world. I do not think we would have needed a single bomb or a single bullet.
So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident. There are many battles ahead, and we may yet engage on the full battlefield. One thing is certain: There will be no peace in Iraq so long as the terror masters rule in Damascus, Riyadh, and Tehran. Those who attended closed discussions with the Iraqi defense minister a week ago heard a long list of evidence and cries of outrage against the murderous mullahcracy next door, and even though the leaders of the West — sadly including some of our own — continue to pretend that diplomacy may yet settle things in the Middle East, they cannot possibly believe it. This is a fight to the finish, still a zero-sum game.
The main problem remains the failure of vision, never more evident than in the first presidential debate. The president dismissed the question about Iran by talking only about the nuclear "issue," while Senator Kerry, incredibly, restated his belief that the same policy that failed to deter North Korea would somehow work with the Iranians. The president knows who the Iranians are, while the senator is an active appeaser. But neither was inclined to deal with the central issue, which is that the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Saudis are killing our men and women in Iraq, and we are playing defense, which is a sucker's game.
In the past week, the Iranian people have again taken to the streets in every major city in the country. The chatterers pay no heed, because there is only one zero-sum game that interests them, which is the election, and the election is about Iraq, or so they say.
Except that it isn't, really. It's about the war. The real war, the regional war, the war they are waging against us even if we refuse to acknowledge it.
Faster, damnit.
The war on terror cannot be won without addressing Iran.
Months before the liberation of Iraq I wrote that we were about to have our great national debate on the war against the terror masters, and it was going to be the wrong debate. Wrong because it was going to focus obsessively on Iraq, thereby making it impossible to raise the fundamental strategic issues. Alas, that forecast was correct, and we're still stuck in the strategic quagmire we created. Up to our throats. So let's try again to get it right.
Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is only one theater in a regional war. We were attacked by a network of terrorist organizations supported by several countries, of whom the most important were Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. President Bush's original analysis was correct, as was his strategy: We must not distinguish between the terrorists and their national supporters. Hence we need different strategies for different enemies, but we need to defeat all of them.
Afghanistan was the classic example, because the Taliban regime was at once home to, and sponsor of, al Qaeda. Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, and we responded against the terrorist organization and against the regime that supported it. Once the Taliban had been destroyed, and al Qaeda had been shattered, President Bush launched a political strategy: support the creation of a free Afghanistan, implant the basic institutions of democratic civil society, work toward free elections so that Afghans could freely govern themselves.
Call it democratic revolution.
That was supposed to be the model for the rest of the war, and it was the right strategy. Use military force where necessary, against both the terrorists and the sponsoring regimes, and support democratic revolution. The whole region understood that strategy, and you could see the consequences. There were pro-democracy demonstrations, even in the most unexpected places, such as Damascus and Riyadh, where none had been seen in human memory. In Iran, where the democratic opposition had shown its passion for several years, the tempo increased. And all the terror masters, in Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh, trembled, fearing that their moment of power and glory was about to pass.
The president clearly understood both the stakes and the opportunity. The "Axis of Evil" was — and is — very real, as the tyrants of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea knew full well. There is now abundant evidence of the close cooperation among them, and with their Libyan, Syrian and Pakistani friends, ranging from nuclear projects to other weapons of mass destruction, and to vital support (sometimes in tandem, sometimes separately) to the terror network.
The terror masters also knew that their greatest threat came from their own people, who were disgusted at the oppressive and corrupt dictatorships, and who saw the United States as the source of their imminent liberation.
Again, the president described the situation well: Time was not on our side, for delay would enable our enemies to regroup and plan for the next challenge. I kept imploring "faster, please," because it was luminously clear that the terror masters were planning for the battle of Iraq. They publicly announced that they would attempt to do in post-liberation Iraq what they had previously accomplished in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s: Use a combination of terror, kidnapping, and political/religious agitation to break our will, drive us out, and expand their own power.
The terror masters could not possibly stand by and permit an easy triumph in Iraq, for that would seal their own doom. For them, the battle of Iraq was an existential conflict, the ultimate zero-sum game. If we won, they died. But, blinded by our obsession with Iraq, we did not see it. For once, the president's intuition failed him. This failure to recognize the enormity of the stakes, and hence the intensity of the coming assault, was heartbreaking, for us and the other members of the Coalition, and for the Iraqi people. It was the ultimate intelligence failure, a pure failure of vision.
Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the ally of al Qaeda, the sponsor of Zarqawi, the longtime sponsor of Fatah, and the backbone of Hamas. So clear was Iran's major role in the terror universe that the Department of State, along with the CIA one of the most conflict-averse agencies of the American government, branded the Islamic Republic the world's number one terror sponsor. As it still does.
Moreover, the Islamic Republic was uniquely vulnerable to democratic revolution, for, by the mullahs' own accounting, no less than seventy percent of the Iranian people hated the clerical fascist regime in Tehran, and hundreds of thousands of young Iranians had shown a disposition to challenge their oppressors in the streets of the major cities. Had we supported them then and there, in the immediate aftermath of Afghanistan, when the entire region was swept by political tremors of great magnitude, the evil regime might well have fallen, thereby delivering an enormous blow to the jihadis all over the world. I do not think we would have needed a single bomb or a single bullet.
So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident. There are many battles ahead, and we may yet engage on the full battlefield. One thing is certain: There will be no peace in Iraq so long as the terror masters rule in Damascus, Riyadh, and Tehran. Those who attended closed discussions with the Iraqi defense minister a week ago heard a long list of evidence and cries of outrage against the murderous mullahcracy next door, and even though the leaders of the West — sadly including some of our own — continue to pretend that diplomacy may yet settle things in the Middle East, they cannot possibly believe it. This is a fight to the finish, still a zero-sum game.
The main problem remains the failure of vision, never more evident than in the first presidential debate. The president dismissed the question about Iran by talking only about the nuclear "issue," while Senator Kerry, incredibly, restated his belief that the same policy that failed to deter North Korea would somehow work with the Iranians. The president knows who the Iranians are, while the senator is an active appeaser. But neither was inclined to deal with the central issue, which is that the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Saudis are killing our men and women in Iraq, and we are playing defense, which is a sucker's game.
In the past week, the Iranian people have again taken to the streets in every major city in the country. The chatterers pay no heed, because there is only one zero-sum game that interests them, which is the election, and the election is about Iraq, or so they say.
Except that it isn't, really. It's about the war. The real war, the regional war, the war they are waging against us even if we refuse to acknowledge it.
Faster, damnit.
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Iraq and Averages
By Robert Kagan
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A23
We all make a common logical error that cognitive psychologists call the "availability heuristic." It means making judgments about the future based not on a broad body of historical evidence but on recent, vivid events that skew our perceptions. My favorite recent example, for reasons that will be apparent, concerns this baseball season and the era's finest sportswriter, The Post's own Thomas Boswell.
In May Boswell wrote a column about the misfortunes of the New York Yankees, particularly Derek Jeter, then in a horrendous slump. Sure, Jeter might come out of it, Boswell admitted, but maybe after eight great seasons the league had found a fatal flaw, namely, Jeter's tendency to swing at too many bad pitches. "Can a hitter completely reverse a characteristic so basic? And once pitchers have recognized it, will they forget?" Boswell also ruminated on other Yankee problems. Gary Sheffield had "a tiny three homers in 43 games," a paucity Boswell attributed not to a bad streak but to Yankee Stadium's capacious left field. Sheffield had averaged 35 homers a year for the five seasons before he joined the Yanks and had boasted, "No park can hold me." But Boswell was dubious: "Big home parks change power hitters' swings." These and other observations led Boswell to contemplate a year when the Yankees, with the biggest payroll in history, might yet miss the playoffs -- and that, he added, would be "delicious."
Four months and 75 wins later, the Yankees have taken their division for the seventh straight year. Derek Jeter finished the season batting .292, below his lifetime average, to be sure, but with a career-high 44 doubles, 23 home runs (one shy of his career high), and 111 runs scored in what will go down in the record books as a fine season indeed. No one will remember that Jeter was hitting below .200 at the end of May. Sheffield, meanwhile, had 36 home runs and 121 RBI and is far and away the Yanks' most valuable player.
Boswell, being human, fell prey to the availability heuristic, partly because of something I'll call its "rooting interest" corollary. Boswell hates the Yankees. Or rather, he hates George Steinbrenner's fat wallet (and who doesn't, other than me and a few million other Yankee fans?) He was rooting for the Yankees to fall flat on their big, overpaid faces. This affected his normally perfect judgment and led him to imagine that the bad news of April and May could well be extrapolated through the end of the season. But the key Yankees hit close to their lifetime averages, which is sort of the point about lifetime averages, and the team took its $180 million payroll to the playoffs for the 10th straight year. And, by the way, hasn't Boswell seen the typical Gary Sheffield home run? No park can hold him.
Now if Thomas Boswell can make this kind of mistake, imagine the mistakes the mortals who write about foreign policy can make. Few possess the historical knowledge of their subject that Boswell has of baseball. And during an election season, especially this election season, they can't help succumbing to the rooting-interest corollary to the availability heuristic.
And so for the past few months it has become common wisdom that the war in Iraq is lost, based on what any historian will tell you is far too little evidence to make such a final judgment. Not only that, but the entire approach to foreign policy that has been called the "Bush doctrine" is, therefore, finished. Another fine Post reporter, Robin Wright, wrote at the end of June that the Iraq war had undermined or discredited the four central planks of President Bush's foreign policy: preemptive action to "prevent strikes on U.S. targets"; a willingness "to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk"; a policy to promote democratic reform in the Middle East, sparked by democratic progress in Iraq; and Iraq as "the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism." I'm not sure what the last one means exactly, so I'll give it to her. As for the other three, is it really likely that they are dead as principles of U.S. foreign policy?
Democracy promotion? This may come as a shock to many people, but George W. Bush didn't exactly invent the idea that the United States should promote democracy abroad. It wasn't even original with Woodrow Wilson. Anyone looking at the broad sweep of American history would have to say that urging democracy upon other nations, often after invasions undertaken for other purposes, is more the norm than the exception.
As for unilateralism, acting alone or with a "select coalition," that really has been the historical norm. The Cold War system of alliances was an aberration, a welcome one, no doubt, but heavily influenced by geopolitical circumstances that no longer pertain.
And preemption? Not only has this been a prominent feature of U.S. foreign policy for two centuries, as historian John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, but everyone from Michael Walzer to Henry Kissinger to Kofi Annan to John Kerry agrees that preventive action is an unavoidable part of doing business in a world of proliferating weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The question is not whether preventive military actions will be taken but how they will be sanctioned by international bodies.
Now, the United States could conceivably lose in Iraq, just as Jeter could some day hit under .200 for a whole season. But the odds are against it, and it is certainly far too early to make that judgment. And as for the effect of such a loss, the strategic and moral disaster would be enormous, and America would pay a huge price. But the fundamental course of American foreign policy would not change. Over the past two decades, the United States has launched nine significant military interventions abroad, about once every two years. That's a more significant predictor of the future than the events of the past four months. And the United States will remain involved in the Middle East for decades to come, trying to protect its security by promoting democracy. The history of U.S. foreign policy, our "lifetime average," suggests it is a mistake to write off key elements of the "Bush doctrine," especially those that Bush only inherited from his predecessors.
The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.
By Robert Kagan
Monday, October 4, 2004; Page A23
We all make a common logical error that cognitive psychologists call the "availability heuristic." It means making judgments about the future based not on a broad body of historical evidence but on recent, vivid events that skew our perceptions. My favorite recent example, for reasons that will be apparent, concerns this baseball season and the era's finest sportswriter, The Post's own Thomas Boswell.
In May Boswell wrote a column about the misfortunes of the New York Yankees, particularly Derek Jeter, then in a horrendous slump. Sure, Jeter might come out of it, Boswell admitted, but maybe after eight great seasons the league had found a fatal flaw, namely, Jeter's tendency to swing at too many bad pitches. "Can a hitter completely reverse a characteristic so basic? And once pitchers have recognized it, will they forget?" Boswell also ruminated on other Yankee problems. Gary Sheffield had "a tiny three homers in 43 games," a paucity Boswell attributed not to a bad streak but to Yankee Stadium's capacious left field. Sheffield had averaged 35 homers a year for the five seasons before he joined the Yanks and had boasted, "No park can hold me." But Boswell was dubious: "Big home parks change power hitters' swings." These and other observations led Boswell to contemplate a year when the Yankees, with the biggest payroll in history, might yet miss the playoffs -- and that, he added, would be "delicious."
Four months and 75 wins later, the Yankees have taken their division for the seventh straight year. Derek Jeter finished the season batting .292, below his lifetime average, to be sure, but with a career-high 44 doubles, 23 home runs (one shy of his career high), and 111 runs scored in what will go down in the record books as a fine season indeed. No one will remember that Jeter was hitting below .200 at the end of May. Sheffield, meanwhile, had 36 home runs and 121 RBI and is far and away the Yanks' most valuable player.
Boswell, being human, fell prey to the availability heuristic, partly because of something I'll call its "rooting interest" corollary. Boswell hates the Yankees. Or rather, he hates George Steinbrenner's fat wallet (and who doesn't, other than me and a few million other Yankee fans?) He was rooting for the Yankees to fall flat on their big, overpaid faces. This affected his normally perfect judgment and led him to imagine that the bad news of April and May could well be extrapolated through the end of the season. But the key Yankees hit close to their lifetime averages, which is sort of the point about lifetime averages, and the team took its $180 million payroll to the playoffs for the 10th straight year. And, by the way, hasn't Boswell seen the typical Gary Sheffield home run? No park can hold him.
Now if Thomas Boswell can make this kind of mistake, imagine the mistakes the mortals who write about foreign policy can make. Few possess the historical knowledge of their subject that Boswell has of baseball. And during an election season, especially this election season, they can't help succumbing to the rooting-interest corollary to the availability heuristic.
And so for the past few months it has become common wisdom that the war in Iraq is lost, based on what any historian will tell you is far too little evidence to make such a final judgment. Not only that, but the entire approach to foreign policy that has been called the "Bush doctrine" is, therefore, finished. Another fine Post reporter, Robin Wright, wrote at the end of June that the Iraq war had undermined or discredited the four central planks of President Bush's foreign policy: preemptive action to "prevent strikes on U.S. targets"; a willingness "to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk"; a policy to promote democratic reform in the Middle East, sparked by democratic progress in Iraq; and Iraq as "the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism." I'm not sure what the last one means exactly, so I'll give it to her. As for the other three, is it really likely that they are dead as principles of U.S. foreign policy?
Democracy promotion? This may come as a shock to many people, but George W. Bush didn't exactly invent the idea that the United States should promote democracy abroad. It wasn't even original with Woodrow Wilson. Anyone looking at the broad sweep of American history would have to say that urging democracy upon other nations, often after invasions undertaken for other purposes, is more the norm than the exception.
As for unilateralism, acting alone or with a "select coalition," that really has been the historical norm. The Cold War system of alliances was an aberration, a welcome one, no doubt, but heavily influenced by geopolitical circumstances that no longer pertain.
And preemption? Not only has this been a prominent feature of U.S. foreign policy for two centuries, as historian John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, but everyone from Michael Walzer to Henry Kissinger to Kofi Annan to John Kerry agrees that preventive action is an unavoidable part of doing business in a world of proliferating weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The question is not whether preventive military actions will be taken but how they will be sanctioned by international bodies.
Now, the United States could conceivably lose in Iraq, just as Jeter could some day hit under .200 for a whole season. But the odds are against it, and it is certainly far too early to make that judgment. And as for the effect of such a loss, the strategic and moral disaster would be enormous, and America would pay a huge price. But the fundamental course of American foreign policy would not change. Over the past two decades, the United States has launched nine significant military interventions abroad, about once every two years. That's a more significant predictor of the future than the events of the past four months. And the United States will remain involved in the Middle East for decades to come, trying to protect its security by promoting democracy. The history of U.S. foreign policy, our "lifetime average," suggests it is a mistake to write off key elements of the "Bush doctrine," especially those that Bush only inherited from his predecessors.
The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.
