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Írak, Bush og allir hinir

Nicholas Kristof og Paul Krugman skrifa í New York Times í dag. Athyglisverðir pistlar.

Kristof skrifar um hvernig allt er í kaos í Írak og hvernig "having won the war, we may now be blowing the peace". Sjá: Cheers to Jeers.

Krugman aftur á móti skrifar enn einn pistilinn, Dereliction of Duty, þar sem hann, líkt og fleiri og fleiri leiðarahöfundar vestanhafs, gagnrýnir Bush og félaga harðlega.

Furthermore, even on the military front the administration has been weirdly reluctant to come to grips with terrorism. It refused to provide Afghanistan's new government with an adequate security umbrella, with the predictable result that warlords are running rampant and the Taliban are making a comeback. The squandered victory in Afghanistan was one reason people like myself had a bad feeling about the invasion of Iraq — and sure enough, the administration was bizarrely lackadaisical about providing postwar security. Even nuclear waste dumps were left unguarded for weeks.

So what's the explanation? The answer, one suspects, is that key figures — above all, Donald Rumsfeld — just didn't feel like dealing with the real problem. Real counterterrorism mainly involves police work and precautionary measures; it doesn't look impressive on TV, and it doesn't provide many occasions for victory celebrations.

A conventional war, on the other hand, is a lot more fun: you get stirring pictures of tanks rolling across the desert, and you get to do a victory landing on an aircraft carrier. And more and more it seems that that was what the war was all about. After all, the supposed reasons for fighting that war have turned out to be false — there were no links to Al Qaeda, there wasn't a big arsenal of W.M.D.'s.

But never mind — we won, didn't we? Maybe not. About half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now tied down in Iraq, facing what looks increasingly like a guerrilla war — and like a perfect recruiting device for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, the real war on terror has been neglected, and we've antagonized the allies we need to fight that war. One of these days we'll end up paying the price.

© 2003 The New York Times Company.
Agust skrifaði 17.06.03 20:06 | TrackBack

Flokkun: Meðmæli , Mið-Austurlönd , Stjórnmál