The Informationist

A Move Against Appeasement

Donald Rumsfeld has decided that those who favor a withdrawal from Iraq are comparable to those who appeased Hitler prior to WW II. In a speech to the American Legion, he posed some poignant questions:

• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?
• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?
• Can we truly afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply “law enforcement” problems, rather than fundamentally different threats, requiring fundamentally different approaches?
• And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America—not the enemy—is the real source of the world’s trouble?

Rumsfeld presumably believes that the answer to all of these questions is “no.” If that presumption is correct, I agree with him. In fact, I answered all of these questions in the negative back when he was backing Governor Bush’s neo-isolationist/realist campaign in 2000. I also agree with Rumsfeld that at least large parts of the “withdraw now” crowd are chronic appeasers, willing to give in to any demand in order to buy a moment’s quiet. These are the folks responsible for letting large parts of life fall under a “least reasonable party wins” system. In such a system, our loss is guaranteed. Even the least reasonable western rational liberal, encouraged to act in the least reasonable manner imaginable, pales in comparison to a run-of-the-mill divinely inspired anarcho-fascist. We’re just not good at certain games.

Where Rumsfeld has it wrong though, is in attributing all calls for withdrawal to appeasers. Many today call for withdrawal for a much simpler reason: they believe that our leadership lacks integrity and competence. The higher the stakes, the greater the need for a leadership that the people can trust. Rumsfeld in particular deserves stunningly low marks on both counts.

Had the Administration been honest from the outset, it would have told the American people that Papa Bush had committed an historic error in 1990 when he and Jim Baker crafted an international coalition under terms antithetical to American interests. Those terms bound American hands in 1991, and set in play an immoral sub-rosa strangulation of Iraq. It remains unclear whether Bill Clinton ever had any inclination to change that policy, but it is crystal clear that he had no political backing for such a change. Post-9/11, any responsible American President would have reviewed troop commitments around the globe and concluded that it was time to end the BushBaker debacle in Iraq. To this day, no administration spokesperson has admitted how badly Poppy and his Merry Realists bungled the Middle East.

An honest administration also would have told the American public, from day one, that our investment in Iraq was likely to be comparable to our multi-generational investments in Germany and in Korea. Instead, we heard drivel about our ability to transform a culture and import Enlightenment ideas in the space of six months to two years. No one with even a modicum of knowledge about the region—or about history or philosophy or war or governance—could possibly have believed such nonsense. Yet even today, all we get is platitudes about a “long war.”

Finally, a President interested in reaching out across the political spectrum—not just to Democrats in the U.S. but to various political parties abroad—might have acknowledged that his post-9/11 foreign policy ran 180 degrees counter to the one on which he had campaigned. He might, in fact, have even graciously named the primary author of U.S. post-9/11 foreign policy: Tony Blair.

Then of course, there is the constant bungling. The refusal to allocate troops sufficient to win the peace has been so widely documented that it barely warrants repeating. So too with the American refusal to use enough force in Fallujah in April 2004 to prove that we were, in fact, the toughest gang in town. How many American troops and Iraqi civilians have since died to pay for that error? But there are other, less frequently discussed, errors. Pushing Iraq back into the arms of OPEC and the Arab League—two organizations whose interests are antithetical to our own—was mind-numbingly stupid. Allowing the UN to foist Arab League apparatchik Lakhdar Brahimi into a position of influence was almost as bad. And the boneheaded decision to implement slate voting rather than district voting essentially guaranteed a confessional political system split along sectarian lines. The list continues. This leadership team never plans for contingencies, never allocates adequate resources, and never admits when things are unfolding in a manner contrary to plan.

Nevertheless, I am not among the “withdraw now” crowd, and I cannot envision circumstances that would push me there. I recognize, however, that America today is faced with a Hobson’s Choice:

• Withdraw now and appease the terrorists, or trust a deceitful incompetent American leadership to achieve a critical goal?

I can certainly understand the position of those who break this dilemma by leaning in a direction other than my own.

All of which leads, of course, to a third option, an option that Rumsfeld can help to create: New Leadership.

So how about this formulation: Because Rumsfeld’s leadership to date has pushed so many erstwhile supporters of the critical mission that the U.S. has undertaken to drift towards appeasement, his refusal to step aside fuels the fires of appeasement. Bush’s refusal to replace him is detrimental to our goals in both the short- and long-terms.

Secretary Rumsfeld, if you believe that the answer to each of your excellent questions is “no,” please get out of the way. Every day that you stay in office convinces more and more Americans to join the ranks of the appeasers.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 08/30 at 02:47 PM in American Government, Politics, and Domestic Policies, Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders