If Pres. Obama had found his inner George Bush, he'd be getting 5,000 of our guys killed invading a country he damn well knew shouldn't be invaded.

Walt

Actions will speak. More immediately, more cheap talk on the 22nd at AIPAC will determine if this great speech that Obama seems so capable of delivering, words that is, means anything. Until then, at the earliest, I reserve judgement.

Actually, this part of the right is calling President Obama George W. Bush. The tell is the title of the main post here.

There is the former President's theory about the absence of democracy in the Arab world, in all its burbling, intellectually adolescent glory. No suggestion of Arab agency. No recognition that most of the worst, most oppressive Arab governments were Soviet clients for years during the Cold War, not American ones, or that unfree Arab countries tended to have governments built to monopolize power over politics and the economy, and sometimes (as in pre-2003 Iraq) much else as well. Not even a hint that during most of the 60 years Bush spoke of the alternative to "stability" was not freedom, but war.

Bush's theory represented the kind of shallow, self-congratulatory thinking one might have expected from a shallow, self-congratulating man. All those earlier Presidents had gotten the Arabs so wrong, and Bush the Liberator was going to prove it with his "forward strategy of freedom." I'm sure he believed it; he kept saying freedom was on the march in Iraq as that country slid from insurgency and disorder to civil war. Of all Bush's legacies, though, this was one from which Obama might profitably have distanced himself.

Instead, he swallowed it whole. He charged into Libya with no plan for getting out (or for consulting Congress), because Libya seemed to offer a chance to prove Bush's theory. He sought to inspire today by telling, campaign-style, human stories from about half a dozen Arab countries about individuals seeking freedom. Obama tried today to make sure all the Arabs hearing his voice knew he was on their side, no matter where they lived, just as Bush did.

He might better have sought to establish some distance between the United States and political developments in other countries that the United States cannot decisively influence. The legacy of the Bush administration included overseas commitments this country cannot sustain. Obama would save him, and us, a lot of trouble by acknowledging that right up front. He should worry less about what side of history we are on and more about whether we are running ahead of history or just being overrun by it.

The primary component of the Bush Doctrine, of course, did not concern democratic transitions; it held (as stated in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) that "To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense."

By the time of the November 2003 speech cited by Mr. Inboden, the US has invaded Iraq, failed to find the promised WMD, or the links to al-Qaeda, and had it's preferred top-down indefinite-timeline transition challenged to the point that US had to accede to Sistani's demands on the election and constitutional process.

It is utterly unsurprising that, under these circumstances, President Bush would proclaim his realization that it would have been reckless to do other than introducing democracy to Iraq at the point of a gun. How else does one suppose the invasion could be justified at that point?

And just what sort of democracy did Mr. Bush hope to promote in Iraq? Not one that would be free to operate independently of the US, it would seem. How else are we to explain the new US embassy in Baghdad, described as the largest and most expensive in the world. Clearly also the Bush administration intended that Iraq would host a long-term US military presence.

I do wish Mr. Inboden, and Dr. Schake as well, would remember these critical details when they revisit the lofty pronouncements of the last decade. Bush is criticized (according to Dr. Schake) for being long on vision but short on implementation? That's not my criticism; rather, his vision was cynical, contrived and unrealistic.