A worldview based in fallacy

This past Sunday, those of us who believed that the Bush administration had learned from the mistakes of its invasion of Iraq were given an unhappy awakening. Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the story of the My Lai massacre and exposed the abuses of Abu Ghraib, reported that American covert operatives were in Iran searching for military targets and that the Bush administration has given up on diplomatic options before they had a chance to start.

Once again we are given evidence that the administration closes its eyes to the inconvenient facts. Faced with mounting American casualties, staggering loss of Iraqi life and an increasing lack of stability verging on outright civil war, the administration holds firm to its belief that the invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated success.

The election "has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon's civilian leadership who advocated the invasion," Hersh reported in this week's New Yorker. "According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message."

The planners for an invasion of Iran -- who apparently believe that even a small U.S. incursion would be the spark to a popular uprising -- are the same men who proclaimed that troops in Iraq would be greeted with flowers and statues would be built of President Bush. Those men were fools then, and they are fools now. But politics has been all too often the guiding force behind the Bush administration's foreign policy, and the reality of the world enters it infrequently. Events in Iraq have proven Bush's foreign policy experts wrong, but, in their minds, American politics has proven them right.

The planning in Iran is, according to Hersh's sources, but the first example in what will be a string of military actions. The election has, in the administration's view, ratified neoconservative ideas about America's position in the world. It is a view that sees a place for American power but not American cooperation, a view that believes that world opinion is meaningless in the face of this country's military might. It is a view that has led to the remarkable failures in Iraq.

Neoconservatives have unfortunately shown us again and again that they do not believe that any sort of goodwill on the part of this country is necessary for it to hold its standing in the world. They believe that we can stomp our feet and bully our allies when they refuse to do our bidding, that we can ignore Muslim sensibilities and thereby aid al Qaeda and its ilk in gaining converts, that we can propose pathetic sums of aid for tsunami victims -- sums that we spend in mere days in our Iraqi quagmire -- simply because American power has no strategic interest in those affected areas.

We need to do more than just watch this unfold. It's time for the American people to seriously question the priorities of U.S. foreign policy as it extends a stick but never a carrot. We need to ask ourselves whether creation or destruction is more important, why we can find trillions to kill and only millions to heal, why we use our power and economic strength only in ways calculated to increase our hegemony, why the world's people are more likely to experience the violence created by this country than the positive things it has done.

The simple, sad fact is that the legacy of American foreign policy as a whole, not just under the Bush administration, is not one of democracy, but of death. Since the rebuilding period following World War II, in which it successfully created democracies in Japan and West Germany, the U.S. has supported the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Violent and repressive dictatorships have been supported in countless other places. The infamous School of the Americas, located in Georgia's Fort Benning, taught, and continues to teach under a new name, methods of torture, rape and killing to some of Latin America's worst death squads.

As it is inaugurated for the second time, the Bush administration is preparing new offensives and new strategies, indeed, a new idea of this country's position in the world. Clearly, the administration believes that it is time to reevaluate American foreign policy. Perhaps they are right.

Alex Koppelman is a senior individualized major in the College from Baltimore and former editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine. Rock the Casbah appears on Thursdays.

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