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There is no shortage of suggestions about how to run the country for the new president, Barack Obama. The debate is heated over whether the economy, universal health care or the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should take precedence with the new administration. We can take solace in the knowledge George W. Bush is officially retired, but the days of blaming Bush ended Tuesday when Obama took his oath. The new man in the White House officially owns all the problems and is responsible for finding solutions.
While the mounting issues of a bad economy are front and center, there is an old adage presidential candidates run on the economy, but wind up spending most of their time on foreign policy. There is no reason to believe this won’t be the case for Obama. If so, may I with all due humility suggest we collectively as a nation take a good look in the mirror.
Our reaction to an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at Bush is indicative of what I mean. Most of America reacted at the incident as an example of Iraqi ingratitude. In fact, we believe the world for the most part doesn’t appreciate us. In Iraq, we are willing to expend the precious treasure of our men and women and spend countless billions on the defense of Iraqi freedom, and instead of a simple "thank you," they throw shoes at our leader.
The new president promised during his campaign we would try and see ourselves as others see us. To do that, maybe we should revisit the shoe drama. Was it an act of ingratitude or a statement against the very nature of our being the neighborhood bully? Despite protestations to the contrary, we now know our invasion of Iraq was far from altruistic. The focus was on our self-interests not theirs. We believed after America was hit on 9/11 we had carte blanche to take whatever action we deemed necessary for whatever reason, and the rest of the world be damned. Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator, but essentially, we turned Iraq upside down just because we could. We were enjoying the privilege of being mighty and powerful.
The idea Saddam was a threat to us and we had the right to preemptively invade Iraq was based on circumstantial evidence and we cooked the books to build our case before the world. Although we paid lip service to liberating Iraq, our arrogance could be seen in Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the pillaging and looting of Baghdad that followed our invasion. Rumsfeld said, "Stuff happens."
When it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction, we were hardly contrite. Being the strongest of nations means never having to say you’re sorry. We just changed our rationale for the war. We did it for their own good. But to emphasize our real disinterest in improving the lot of Iraqi citizens, we proved to be incompetent managers. Life never really has returned to anything approaching normal for Iraqis. Sure the violence has been reduced, but we needed to do that to politically justify our continued occupation. But we seemed apathetic about getting the electricity turned on outside the Green Zone or rebuilding Iraq. Our response to the rampant corruption in managing the funds that were supposed to help the Iraqi people was studied indifference. It was more important to reward our friends than have an accounting system in place to stop millions of dollars from disappearing. We replaced the opulent palaces of Saddam with the opulence of the American Embassy. Our hubris is we can leave anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000 Americans in place in the country and not be considered occupiers.
Is there much hope the Obama administration will re-think our military posture around the world? Will we continue to have American troops in Europe long after World War II? Will we still keep 30,000 troops in South Korea as hostages to any future invasion by the North without anyone asking why it is a thriving South Korean nation is not fully capable of defending itself? Will we still put a missile system in Poland, whose existence provokes Russia, while we make the silly claim it is to protect Eastern Europe from Iran? Will we continue to believe we can broker a peace in the Middle East when one side still believes in the absolute destruction of Israel?
We should not have to become isolationists to see there are limits to American power. Will we ever see ourselves the way other nations see us? The sentimental view is we are beacons of freedom, but our friends and enemies alike see us as cocky, as the bull in the china shop that never reflects on the china it breaks.
The real question for Obama is, even now after Bush is gone, will any of this change?
