George W. and the Dominoes: Iraq was supposed to trigger a democratic ...

[ProSense]

George W. and the Dominoes

Iraq was supposed to trigger a democratic chain reaction in the Middle East. Instead—see the missiles over Haifa—the tumbling is going backward.

Snip...

Bush and his adjutants have, of course, heard these arguments ad nauseam—and ignored them ad infinitum. From the start, his attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian question seemed to be one, at least in his eyes, of constructive disengagement. Perhaps this was (like so many things with Bush) a rejection of his father, who enjoyed nothing more than playing the peacemaker in the Middle East. Or perhaps it was (like so many other things) a rejection of the Clinton model, which entailed untold time and immeasurable energy in the pursuit of a land-for-peace deal that still ended in failure—although, as one former Clinton foreign-policy hand noted to me, “Engagement à la Clinton doesn’t necessarily get you to yes, but while you’re trying and talking, there tends to be less shooting and dying.”

More likely, however, the hands-off attitude of the Bush crowd ­toward Israel and a potential Palestine owes mainly to the administration’s fixation on the war on terror generally and on Iraq in particular. For the neoconservative theoreticians who conceived the war, Iraq was to be the centerpiece of what Condoleezza Rice has lately taken to calling, with bizarre optimism, “a new Middle East”—precisely the role that more-traditional foreign-policy strategists had long hoped that a coexistent Israel and Palestine would play.

Snip...

And so has its democratic variant turned out—so far—to be bogus with respect to Iraq. In fact, what democratization has brought to the Middle East to date has been, most prominently, dangerous instability: the election of thuggish Hamas to control of the Palestinian Parliament; the endowing of murderous Hezbollah with a substantial voice in the Lebanese government; the election of a vengeful Shiite majority in Iraq (where, we learned last week, American generals fear that we are on the edge of civil war). Moreover, as Odom adds, “it is precisely our actions in Iraq that have opened the door for Iran and Syria to support Hezbollah and Hamas actions without much to fear from the U.S.”

So what to do? Get out now, Odom says. “We need to eat some crow,” he told an interviewer. “It will bring the Europeans back and have them cooperate. If we’re lock-armed with the Europeans, that is the greatest chance for success in Iraq.” As for the administration’s argument, put forward by Dick Cheney, among others, that precipitous withdrawal would cause yet another set of dominoes to fall—the governments in Pakistan, Egypt, and ­Saudi Arabia—Odom waxes incredulous.

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http://www.nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/18858

[Democrats_win]

1. Good article. "constructive disengagement" = slacker. That's Bush.

Americans know that the job doesn't get done with "constructive disengagement."

[endarkenment]

2. That 'democratic chain reaction' was window dressing.

The PNAC crowd used intellectual idiots to dress up their retro imperialism with the democratic chain reaction crap. They just wanted to blow away the regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria and establish an occupation force on top of the mesopotamian oil fields in their Big Game with China over peak oil. They still think that basically their plans are on track.

[Skidmore]

3. I think Iraq triggered what it was intended to trigger, and that wasn't

democracy, but a regional destabilization followed by an excuse to overwhelm oil countries and take over those oil fields. Trouble is the nimrods in this administration overlooked the sheer amount of weaponry that has been sold into that region over the past 50 years and are learning that playing both ends against the middle sometimes means you get slapped back hard.

[Sinti]

4. Hey man, sometimes "deMOCKracy" is messy n/t

[MurrayDelph]

5. This is what you get when you try to play dominoes

when you use checkers.