Politics: Bang and a Whimper
I don’t think the year should slide out like this. I feel like things should be moving at a fever pitch by right now, focusing on the juicy meat of the year ahead. Instead, 2002 is slow-running its way into the end zone, showing off that we survived at all. It’s breathless to be here, but looking back, nobody can say what it did in particular, and most of the time, it achieved by not having something very, very bad happen. For instance, we experienced no super-terrorism in this country this year. We had no sweeping, dastardly voting rights violations this year (we had minor, sneaky voting rights violations, though). We managed to not start any new wars (we’re close, though, and Gulf War II may qualify as a 2002 war on a technicality).
But there are things that should be slowing our final descent into 2003, things we should be pausing to think on before we toss back a few swigs of champagne and call it a night.
First and foremost, we’re in the most dangerous time we’ve ever lived in. As a nation, nothing is more threatening than the twin menaces of our own policy failures and the crises they are attempting to deal with. As Josh Marshall points out in last night’s post on North Korea, we’re playing politics with our foreign policy, and it could have disastrous results. We’re setting standards we claim are unmovable, and then we’re moving them without blinking an eye. Nothing makes the Bush administration's assertion that there is an Iraqi threat more transparent than our behavior towards North Korea in the past few months. North Korea has publicly announced a nuclear weapons program (Iraq has done no such thing). And the North has booted out UN weapons inspectors (Iraq has been more than hospitable to weapons inspectors there). But Colin Powell and the gang in the State Department are making no speeches about the threat from NK. The North has tested a missile which is capable of reaching Europe, Hawaii and possibly further. Does anyone even care about this?
No, because this administration has done more to advance the cause of political slight of hand than any in recent memory. Perhaps because they themselves knew they ruled with no mandate, they daringly pursued a course where they never seemed to question their own actions even for a second. Whenever they were forced to change directions, they acted as if they were running in that direction all along. (Bush didn’t support a Department of Homeland Security until Colleen Rowley blew the whistle on the FBI, and he stonewalled the Democrats on expanding unemployment benefits for six months, finally calling for it like it was his idea earlier this week; in both cases, the media has reported dutifully that these were the president’s ideas.)
So, when we called North Korea a member of the Axis of Evil, we didn’t apparently mean they were evil enough to threaten with war if they, say, announced they were going ahead with a nuclear weapon plan. Just because you’re in the Axis of Evil and you've brewing up some weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean you'll get the war treatment. We didn't erase decades of military policy and adopt a preventive war stance for North Korea. That policy change has 'Iraq' written all over it.
And now, we stare a potentially armed nuclear enemy in the face, and blink. But we stare down a sanctions-weakened, once-beaten former ally who we know has some chemical weapons because they came from us. And we say, “This is the one I want to pick on.”
This is our greatest threat. In 2003, we may go to war against Iraq (though the smart money is on launching the war in time to help the president in 2004), and we’ll have an actual war with bloody death of American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and U.S. aid workers and Iraqi civilians as a result of a power play over an oil-rich former chum of Don Rumsfeld’s and Karl Rove’s unbeatable Senators in 2002 plan. And all this fiddling will take place while North Korea burns spent fuel rods into weapons-grade uranium.
Yeah. Happy New Year.
I don’t think the year should slide out like this. I feel like things should be moving at a fever pitch by right now, focusing on the juicy meat of the year ahead. Instead, 2002 is slow-running its way into the end zone, showing off that we survived at all. It’s breathless to be here, but looking back, nobody can say what it did in particular, and most of the time, it achieved by not having something very, very bad happen. For instance, we experienced no super-terrorism in this country this year. We had no sweeping, dastardly voting rights violations this year (we had minor, sneaky voting rights violations, though). We managed to not start any new wars (we’re close, though, and Gulf War II may qualify as a 2002 war on a technicality).
But there are things that should be slowing our final descent into 2003, things we should be pausing to think on before we toss back a few swigs of champagne and call it a night.
First and foremost, we’re in the most dangerous time we’ve ever lived in. As a nation, nothing is more threatening than the twin menaces of our own policy failures and the crises they are attempting to deal with. As Josh Marshall points out in last night’s post on North Korea, we’re playing politics with our foreign policy, and it could have disastrous results. We’re setting standards we claim are unmovable, and then we’re moving them without blinking an eye. Nothing makes the Bush administration's assertion that there is an Iraqi threat more transparent than our behavior towards North Korea in the past few months. North Korea has publicly announced a nuclear weapons program (Iraq has done no such thing). And the North has booted out UN weapons inspectors (Iraq has been more than hospitable to weapons inspectors there). But Colin Powell and the gang in the State Department are making no speeches about the threat from NK. The North has tested a missile which is capable of reaching Europe, Hawaii and possibly further. Does anyone even care about this?
No, because this administration has done more to advance the cause of political slight of hand than any in recent memory. Perhaps because they themselves knew they ruled with no mandate, they daringly pursued a course where they never seemed to question their own actions even for a second. Whenever they were forced to change directions, they acted as if they were running in that direction all along. (Bush didn’t support a Department of Homeland Security until Colleen Rowley blew the whistle on the FBI, and he stonewalled the Democrats on expanding unemployment benefits for six months, finally calling for it like it was his idea earlier this week; in both cases, the media has reported dutifully that these were the president’s ideas.)
So, when we called North Korea a member of the Axis of Evil, we didn’t apparently mean they were evil enough to threaten with war if they, say, announced they were going ahead with a nuclear weapon plan. Just because you’re in the Axis of Evil and you've brewing up some weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean you'll get the war treatment. We didn't erase decades of military policy and adopt a preventive war stance for North Korea. That policy change has 'Iraq' written all over it.
And now, we stare a potentially armed nuclear enemy in the face, and blink. But we stare down a sanctions-weakened, once-beaten former ally who we know has some chemical weapons because they came from us. And we say, “This is the one I want to pick on.”
This is our greatest threat. In 2003, we may go to war against Iraq (though the smart money is on launching the war in time to help the president in 2004), and we’ll have an actual war with bloody death of American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and U.S. aid workers and Iraqi civilians as a result of a power play over an oil-rich former chum of Don Rumsfeld’s and Karl Rove’s unbeatable Senators in 2002 plan. And all this fiddling will take place while North Korea burns spent fuel rods into weapons-grade uranium.
Yeah. Happy New Year.
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