$710.96... The price of freedom.
Posted on 06/25/2004 4:16:44 PM PDT by Indy Pendance
WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- The Iraq war has demonstrated the limits of American power, not the capabilities, according Stefan Halper, a policy aide under Ronald Reagan's presidency.
This is "what people around the world see," said Halper, and "that's a very frightening development."
Halper, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Reagan in the White House and State Department, made the comments at the New America Foundation, a bipartisan think tank that hosted the presentation of his book, "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order" in Washington Wednesday.
He described the policies of the neo-conservatives as not reflecting "the best course for the country or for the Republican Party."
Along with co-author Jonathan Clarke, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and former career diplomat in the British Diplomatic Service, Halper advanced the view that the United States should return to working multilaterally with allies and to a more realistic approach to international diplomacy.
No one would disagree, he said, with the "forward strategy" of advancing democracy and opposing tyranny. However, Clarke added, "bringing about democracy is something which has got to be handled with a great deal more subtlety than the neo-conservatives seem to be capable of."
Clarke attacked the neo-cons for casting themselves as "neo-Reaganites," when in fact, he said, Reagan's approach was "a much more nuance and balanced way of conducting international affairs, drawing on the military only when absolutely necessary." In contrast, the neo-cons "see the main instrument of carrying out policy as being top-down military force."
As a result, Halper added, they have adopted a strategy that "ended up being a recruiting poster for radical Islam," initiated a "vast decrease in American credibility," and "rupture(ed) ... relationships with multi-national institutions."
"We've got the opprobrium of the world for it and nothing else," he continued.
Clarke spoke of the neo-cons' "binary division of the world into good and evil" as a dangerous categorization that casts the war on terror as a "clash between two civilizations" and has much to do with the role the administration ascribes to religious values in their analysis of foreign policy.
He described a neo-conservative group obsessed with the Middle East who had been lobbying for the removal of Saddam for years.
In 1998, a group called Project for a New American Century sent an open letter to then President Clinton, calling for unilateral military action to "remove Saddam Hussein's regime from power." Among the signatories were Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage and Richard Perle.
A PNAC report published in 2000, before President Bush entered the White House, predicted that the regime change would come about slowly, unless there were "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Halper, provided the opportunity for the plan to be laid on the table.
The president, he continued, had arrived at the White House "with a limited exposure to foreign affairs, and certainly a limited understanding of the kind of texture and nuance which often characterizes international questions."
He described "the people sitting round the table" as without sufficient expertise or historical understanding of the region.
"They're not Arabic speakers, they're not people with expertise in the Near East, they're not social anthropologists who understand the social and community mechanics on the ground of these cultures."
This lack of understanding, he said, "has proved to be a very serious problem in Iraq."
The administration has frequently been criticized for underestimating the difficulties posed by Iraq's deeply divided and factional nature.
He referred to a 77-man State Department team consisting of "Arabists and others with some familiarity with Iraq," which was prevented from going to post-Saddam Iraq by the Defense Department.
Such internal disputes and institutional failure is endemic in the Bush administration, he alleged.
Norman Bailey, senior fellow at the Potomac Foundation and former special assistant to Reagan on the National Security Council, added, "Non-functionality of the National Security Council is ... central to this problem." We have, he said, "the weakest National Security Council staff and National Security Council adviser, probably in history."
The neo-cons, he said, "Are much better at conceiving grand goals than they are at carrying out the detailed execution."
They are, Halper added, people "imbued by a utopian ideology of what might be possible and what is best for these cultures in terms of market democracy.
"In the end that might be best, but that fact of how to actually get it there is missing from this equation."
The Republican National Committee had no comment and the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign committee did not return calls.
What's with all these yahoos named Clarke?
$710.96... The price of freedom.
WHO! LOL!!
To call him a Reagan official is like calling Richard Clarke a Reagan official because their time as a burreaucrat coincided with the Reagan administration.
Bullshit! We haven't come close to unleashing our power in Iraq, if we did it would be over in one afternoon.
This is "what people around the world see," said Halper, and "that's a very frightening development."
The Iraq war demonstrates that most of the world's media lacks the capabilty to tell the truth, and that they'll be on whatever side is against the United States.
Amen.
Another State Dept bootheel slurper.
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