“Broken Engagement” by Gen. Wesley Clark:
So, when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire,” or stood before crowds in Berlin and proclaimed “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” he was reaching a receptive audience on the other side of the wall. The neoconservatives persist in seeing a vast difference between Reagan’s policy of confronting the Soviets and previous American administrations’ tack of containing it. In fact, it was precisely those decades of containment and cultural engagement that made Reagan’s challenge effective.
This makes for some good reading. Clark tells a story that anyone who has even a cursory understanding of the post-War period will recognize as true. What is striking is how the current administration’s thinkers see *everything* in ideological terms, with no regard for the historical facts.
He quotes George Kennan’s phrase “the seeds of its own decay” in reference to how the diplomatic corps forecast the demise of the old USSR (historical note: when I was in high school in the 1970s, we were compelled to take a 30 hour unit called “Americanism vs Communism” (quaint name, eh?) and at the conclusion of it, it was obvious to me that the Soviet system wouldn’t get to the end of the century. Any system that somehow defuses or hampers human ambition, ingenuity, and drive, is doomed. Little did I realize it would be gone in 10 years). Kennan’s phrase shows an understanding of the enemy that I don’t see in the current situation (relying on a book that purports to document “The Arab Mind” as if it were different from the American one doesn’t help their case). [1]
By ignoring the persistent efforts of previous administrations in making it possible for Reagan to claim victory, the neocons have rushed into the laudable but equally difficult task of democratizing the middle east, possibly setting back any real progress for years.
fn1. Tim Bray’s comments were the first I saw on this. The Seymour Hersh articles on the genesis of Abu Ghraib and the general [mis]conduct of the war are eye-opening.