Wednesday November 30, 2005

When We Were Doves

As President Bush readies a speech in which he is expected to announce the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq (see update below)—a position that the administration tarred as traitorous just weeks ago—it’s worth noting that all of this could have been avoided if only the White House had taken an attitude more like this:

Getting even was much easier said than done. These terrorist incidents were not a case of one nation starting a war against another, where you could retaliate against the country that had attacked us. The terrorists in Lebanon lived in small roving bands among the civilian population. There was no way to punish them without slaughtering innocent bystanders, which would have made us as bad as those who wronged us. Simliarly, although Iran was probably behind the Marine Corps bombing, there was no target in Iran that we could strike and know for sure that we had hit the radicals who directed the terrorists. We could obtain no direct proof linking any person or group within reach to any specific attack.

Jimmy Carter? Ted Kennedy? Nope. Former Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes—from his 1988 memoir Speaking Out—detailing the attitude of the Reagan White House following terrorist attacks on the Achille Lauro, TWA flight 847, and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Sometimes it seems like even those on the right don’t understand how far out they’ve swung.

[Thanks to Alexandra, who’s been reading Speaking Out for reasons that weren’t at all clear until she read me this quote.]

UPDATE: Read about Bush’s “strategy for victory” here. It emphasizes empowering Iraqi security forces, but does not set a timetable for troop reductions. Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who pegged the speech as an announcement that U.S. troops would begin stepping down—as cited above—explains while this still might be the case, based on today’s NSC report. None of this undermines the point, however, that even a hawk like Reagan wouldn’t have gotten us into this mess in the first place.

Posted by jim at 12:26 AM ||