Soccer Dad

9/10 chances

In a typically perceptive column today, A manifesto for the next president, David Ignatius suggests that Zbigniew Brzezinski's most recent book, "Second Chance" would serve as a good blueprint for President Obama. (If the book's wisdom is so profound why not recommend for any other candidate?)

Why use Brzezinski's book as a blueprint?

First, an encomium to Brzezinski: If there's any foreign policy analyst who has earned the right to be taken seriously today, it's this 78-year-old veteran of the Carter administration. Brzezinski was right about Iraq, warning early and emphatically of the dangers of an American invasion at a time when most foreign policy pundits (including this one) were, with whatever quibbles, supporting President Bush's decision to go to war.

So because he was correct on Iraq, he's correct about every other topic in foreign policy. I don't mean to be impertinent, but wasn't he the National Security Advisor in Carter's administration? The administration that saw Afghanistan invaded by the Soviets and the Shah fall to the Islamic revolution?

Maybe he had good ideas in those cases and no one listened to him. But serving in the worst administration in memory is an important part of his resume and suggests that getting one thing correct is not, by itself, a convincing credential.

Nor, is Ignatius right that Brzezinski was somehow going against the tide. There were plenty of naysayers before the war.

"Second Chance" is structured as an analysis of how the past three presidents missed the chance to create a true American superpower after the Cold War ended. He has some interesting, tart things to say about George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Bush Senior was "a superb crisis manager but not a strategic visionary," a president who succeeded brilliantly in coaxing the dissolution of the Soviet empire but who failed to take advantage of the opportunities his policies created. Clinton was "the perfect symbol of a benign but all-powerful America," but he was mesmerized by his vision of a deterministic "globalization."

Brzezinski's criticism of Clinton seems apt. But to what end is that a problem for him? Because he failed to grasp the threat of Islamism until it was too late. That's what I believe. But since Brzezinski obviously doesn't see the same threat that I did and still do, why is Clinton's "globalization" a problem? (Obviously there's more to Brzezinski's views than what Ignatius is telling us. Maybe that disconnect is explained. I just can't tell from the column.)

Of course, for Ignatius, the important part of the book is the criticism of the current administration.

But these are just warm-ups. Brzezinski's real focus is the "catastrophic leadership" of the current president. Regular talk-show watchers know Brzezinski's views, but he lays them out here in blistering language: The war in Iraq "has caused calamitous damage to America's global standing," "has been a geopolitical disaster" and "has increased the terrorist threat to the United States." By Brzezinski's account, what drove Bush's presidency so far off course was a combination of sunny "End of History" optimism about America's ability to impose its values with a "Clash of Civilizations" gloom about the threat posed by Muslim enemies.

That "gloom" as Ignatius puts it (and dismisses) is the major threat against the United States today. A failure to acknowledge that by any candidate for president would be a disqualifying flaw. The terrorist threat against America was always there, even when there was a "... benign all powerful America." The failure of President Clinton to address it is one of the factors that led to 9/11.

The problem with the Ignatius column is that it seems to mistake platitude for profundity.

"The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening," he argues. His worry is that America -- enfeebled by "material self-indulgence, persistent social shortcomings, and public ignorance about the world" -- may not get it.

Human dignity? The Islamists hate us because of dignity? They torture and behead their victims and claim that we're somehow impugning their dignity? Come on. That sentence betrays a "public ignorance" of the world.

Usually when a book deemed important by the chattering classes comes out, some newspaper publishes an excerpt to give people a chance to get the gist of the book's arguments. So far I haven't found such an essay, however the NY Times reviewed "Second Chance."

It's impossible not to notice a bugaboo of Brzezinski's that Ignatius ignored.

In Mr. Brzezinski's opinion, Bill Clinton deserves credit for setting forth parameters for a Middle East peace settlement at Camp David II, for expanding and consolidating the Atlantic alliance and for helping to stabilize the Balkans. But in the end, he contends that Mr. Clinton's ''casual and politically opportunistic style of decision-making was not conducive to strategic clarity, and his faith in the historical determinism of globalization made such a strategy seem unnecessary.''

In the dozen years that followed, the author goes on, perception of the United States' role in the Middle East steadily deteriorated, as America ''came to be perceived in the region, rightly or wrongly, not only as wearing the British imperialist mantle but as acting increasingly on behalf of Israel, professing peace but engaging in delaying tactics that facilitated the expansion of the settlements.''

If human dignity is really the issue why don't the Palestinians have a state. A year and a half ago the Israelis withdrew from Gaza. The Palestinians had a place of their own. Instead of building their own society they attacked another society. Now they complain that they lack the dignity of self determinationl. It beggars belief that someone who reduces the central struggle in today's world to "dignity" is considered an authority.

By now anyone who blames the lack of a Palestinian state on Israeli delaying tactics ought to be disregarded outright. Arafat never was looking to make peace. He said what he needed to say and let others interpret him just as the folks in Washington did for Chauncy Gardner. They heard what they wanted to hear and pretended that peace was at hand. But Arafat never changed.

Finally I just can't get past the claim that American prestige is at such a low point. And perhaps that's why Brzezinski never analyzes the administration of Ronald Reagan. Anyone who lived in the 80's remembers how Reagan was reviled by many of the same folks who now criticize President Bush at every opportunity. Reagan confronted the Soviet Union and that made him very unpopular in the intellectual strongholds of Europe. Ex KGB man Yuri Andropov was considered a more sophisticated mind by those precincts than was the President of the United States.

The problem is that with the fall of the Soviety Union, Reagan's lack of sophistication was vindicated. I believe similarly that President Bush's vision will be vindicated by history, despite the sophisticated naysayers, even if the execution of that vision is flawed.

Those like Ignatius and Brzezinski are still living in the 9/10 world.

Blogdigger tags: David Ignatius, Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Second Chance", Global Politics.