Idealists vs. Realists?

While MoDo laments the portentous choice between the current Neo-cons and the newly re-annointed Bush I "realists," each offering up their "how-to-save-face" solutions to the Iraq war, let's remember exactly what the two have in common: key players in both factions are long-standing members of the Carlyle group.

In other words, Democrats back in Congressional power or not, don't expect the Baker-Bunch to stumble over each other in their rush to suggest ways to bring our troops home. And don't expect any big, long lasting world peace initiatives in our lifetimes. Seems no matter who is in power, the game remains the same: war equals big money for the Carlyle Group and organizations like it. War is good for their businesses; peace is bad. And that's the end of the story.

Speaking of Congressional investigations ..... Carlyle Group, anyone?

Pouring Chardonnay Diplomacy
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

The foreign affairs fur is flying.

I’m not talking about the catfight between two strong-willed, expensively dressed Democratic pols married to California gazillionaires, with Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi trying to yank Jane Harman from heading the House Intelligence Committee.

I’m talking about the catfight between the Idealists and the Realists.

After an election that spurned ideology, and the triumphant return of the Bush 41 pragmatists James Baker and Robert Gates, the self-proclaimed Idealists are reduced to hissing from the sidelines.

The Vulcans and neocons had grandiose plans to restore trumpets, morality and spine to foreign policy, to establish America as a hyperpower with a duty to export democracy — by force and on its own, if necessary. But now the grandiose experiment of Iraq is in a sulfurous shambles, and the Realpolitik crowd is back cleaning up.

In The Wall Street Journal, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute railed against the evils of “chardonnay diplomacy,” recalling that in 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan’s Middle East envoy, met with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, hoping to restore relations out of a concern over growing Iranian influence. He didn’t bother to mention Saddam’s use of chemical weapons.

“Mr. Gates was the C.I.A.’s deputy director for intelligence at the time of Mr. Rumsfeld’s infamous handshake, deputy director of central intelligence when Saddam gassed the Kurds, and deputy national security adviser when Saddam crushed the Shiite uprising,” Mr. Rubin wrote. “Mr. Baker was as central.”

Rummy, he said, “worked to right past wrongs.” By contrast, the neocons fear, Mr. Gates and Mr. Baker are back winking at dictators. Already they’re talking about cozying up to the evil leaders of Iran and Syria and perhaps dreaming of more concessions to the Palestinians. (Israel and its supporters among Christian evangelicals are having conniptions.)

The Idealists who loved Ronald Reagan’s evocation of Thomas Paine — “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” — are right that Americans yearn for a moral foreign policy. It was sickening in 1989 to see Brent Scowcroft — another realist back in fashion — offering a cozy supper toast to Chinese leaders only six months after Tiananmen Square, and getting Poppy to lecture Ukrainians not to break the iron grip of Moscow.

It was sickening, after Bush père sold the Persian Gulf war as a moral mission, to see the 41 team decide at the end not to intervene to stop Saddam from slaughtering thousands of innocent Shiites and Kurds who rose up as the president had asked.

It was sickening when the first Bush administration decided to do nothing about the genocidal Serbian war on Bosnia in 1992. As Secretary of State Baker frostily explained, “We do not have a dog in that fight.” Justifying the administration’s tough stance toward Israel, the Velvet Hammer made another notorious comment. “(Expletive deleted) the Jews,” he told a colleague privately. “They didn’t vote for us anyway.”

But while the Idealists have a point, they also have a problem. Their moral war in Iraq was sold four years ago with two big lies: that Saddam had W.M.D. and that the Iraqis were yearning for democracy. And it has continued in a fog of deception about imaginary progress. It is immoral to put troops’ lives at risk because one is doctrinaire, to make people die for a failure of flexibility.

America’s bungled occupation and naïve assumptions unleashed sectarian bloodletting that could ultimately, as The Times’s John Burns wrote, “match the mass killing that characterized Mr. Hussein’s psychopathic years in power” and embolden authoritarian Arab leaders.

Bush junior cast himself as the Reagan heir. But as President Reagan showed in Lebanon, when he pulled out troops after 241 servicemen were blown up, and in Reykjavik negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear arms, he was incredibly flexible — an effective contrast with his inflexible rhetoric. He pursued openings and even radical diplomacy. If the Gipper was wood, the Decider is stone.

Voters rejected W.’s black-and-white, good-and-evil, incompetent foreign policy last week. The president got the message that some shades of gray were desirable and brought in the family fixer with the bright green ties, who is perfectly positioned to come up with a solution that will fly in Washington and flop in Baghdad.

As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, morality without realism is naïvité or worse, and realism without morality is cynicism or worse. Morality should open your eyes, not close them.

Photo credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Also See:

• The Carlyle White House


• Ray McGovern | Iraq Study Group "Bipartisan?"


• Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say


• Reid Pledges To Press Bush On Iraq Policy


• The Meaning of Gates: From Imperial Offense to Imperial Defense


• Gates a Bad Retread from Reagan Days


• Family Feud: Little Bush Hits Back at Daddy

  Little Bush's suddenly conceived internal Iraq policy review is just another salvo in this ongoing struggle. The Cheney militarists will certainly not give up without a fight, even after the "Gray Hawk Down" disaster of Rumsfeld's resignation. Bush Junior will certainly not keep swallowing Daddy's cod liver oil without throwing a fit now and then.
  

• The Highjacking of a Nation by Sibel Edmonds

  Foreign influence, that most baneful foe of our republican government, has its tentacles entrenched in almost all major decision making and policy producing bodies of the U.S. government machine. It does so not secretly, since its self-serving activities are advocated and legitimized by highly positioned parties that reap the benefits that come in the form of financial gain and positions of power.

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