Iraq and the Evaporating Myth of American Invincibility

If you read this blog, you know that, unlike some opponents of the Iraq war, I'm not exactly what you would call a peacenik. Peace is more important than most people realize, and I value it highly; but I tend to think that our military should be used for humanitarian missions--where this can include combat--more often than it actually is. I tend to have a great deal of respect for the military and for appropriate applications of military force. I also tend to think that it was within our power to promote conditions that would have led to a long and influential pax Americana.

As others have noted, after the first Gulf War, we enjoyed a reputation for virtual invincibility. The preposterous rapidity and thoroughness with which we crushed Saddam's army surprised everyone, including us. Furthermore, there were those who thought that we had such military superiority that no country (China, I'm looking at you...) would even find it worthwhile to engage in a serious arms race with us. Like many of my fellow liberals, I think that it is crucially important to avoid arms races. Unlike most of my fellow liberals, however, I'm willing to consider the possibility that sometimes the best way to avoid an arms race is by pouring massive amounts of money into the military.

One more peripherally relevant piece of this puzzle: this strategy would only work, I believe, if we bent over backwards to manifest our benevolence. If we made the cost of matching us militarily prohibitively high, and made the likelihood that fighting us would be necessary extremely low, we would make it irrational for other countries to try to match us.

Sadly, we're no longer on a trajectory to achieve these goals. By irresponsibly (and possibly unjustly) invading Iraq, the Bush administration has made it irrational for other countries to trust their safety to our good will. Countries now eye us suspiciously, not sure what might set us off next. By invading a more-or-less randomly-selected country--a country no more allied with al Qaeda than, say, Syria or Iran or Pakistan--we have acted irrationally and unpredictably. Since we can't be trusted to act morally or rationally, it becomes necessary for other countries to prepare to defend themselves against us.

And, by botching the job because we committed too few troops and other resources to the war, the very, very useful myth of American invincibility has all but evaporated. We're now, apparently, seen as a bully--and a bully that can be beaten. The world would have been a far, far better place if we still looked like a fair, peaceful, and trustworthy country that could crush those foolish enough to attack it. If--stop me if you've heard this one before--we had, for example, devoted enough resources to crush al Qaeda in Afghanistan and thoroughly rebuild the country.

I've tried thinking about it from many different angles, but I always come up with the same conclusion: the Bush administration's response to 9/11 has, perhaps, been the most disastrous response imaginable. The only available alternative that I can imagine that might have been worse would be to have not responded with force against al Qaeda in Afghanistan at all. As irrational and disastrous as that (non-)response would have been, I have come to doubt that it would have been more disastrous than our actual incomprehensibly irrational response. Which means--and believe me, this is not a sentence I ever thought I'd find myself typing--we might have been better off if even Dennis Kucinich had been president. Think about that one for a moment.

Although I have in the past argued that it was absurd to say, as many liberals do, that Mr. Bush is the worst president ever (who can compete, for example, with the genocidal Andrew Jackson?), I'm beginning to believe that he may very well ultimately be considered one of the two or three worst, and by far the worst in recent memory. A time period, mind you, that includes that during which Richard Nixon was president.