Jim Hoagland of the WaPo, who was one of the main, most influential, and most insistent voices in the commentatoriat who goaded a (never-reluctant) Bush administration into the truly disastrous war adventure in Iraq, nowadays seems to be having some second thoughts… Or is he?
He has this truly extraordinary piece in today’s WaPo, which shows, well, if not a distinct change of heart on the virtues of the invasion of Iraq, then at least some lofty (and very muddled-looking) self-distancing from it.
Look, I know the move. As an op-ed writer, you have to meet deadlines; and sometimes an issue is so much in the news that you feel you have to write about that issue. But either you can’t figure out exactly what to say; or else, what you want to say runs so much at odds with what you’ve said before that you have to do an awkward-looking bit of segueing to get into it.
That’s definitely how this extraordinary piece reads. It starts thus:
- President Bush and Vice President Cheney fight an inexorable tide that pushes their goal of restoring presidential and national power farther away even as they accelerate their efforts to reach it.
They swim against a tide of the global fragmentation of power in all its forms — economic, political and military. More nations today possess the ability to make and sell inexpensive, good-quality shirt buttons than ever before. The same is true for costly but workable nuclear weapons.
Located at the opposite ends of any spectrum of importance, the spread of consumer goods and of history’s deadliest weapons underlines the need to update our notions of power, whether we are ordinary shoppers or strategists working in the White House
Thirty years ago Americans fantasized (in horror or delight) about U.S. troops occupying oil fields in the Middle East to guarantee low-cost energy. Today U.S. troops fight in Iraq — but China and India determine the record levels of world oil prices more than the White House does. The galloping consumption and fierce competition for supplies and future contracts by the two Asian giants make supply and demand dance on a knife’s edge….
Looks like he’s heading for a big critique of the administration’s militaristic power-grabbing?
But he ends up with this extremely clunky (and unoriginal) ending:
- What our leaders have to fear is fear itself. Fear will inhibit the vision and judgment needed to adjust and rebalance power on a global and equitable basis.
What the heck that is meant to mean, I have no idea.
I think the WaPo should just retire this tired old guy, pronto. And perhaps along the way some of us can go back over some of Hoagy’s past war-mongering columns and start laying some symbolic coffins of those thousands of Iraqis and Americans who have died because of the war he so successfully mongered right at his front doorstep.
That’s what Abraham Lincoln did to the secessionist General Robert E. Lee whose actions were responsible for scores of thousands of deaths back in the mid-19th centruy…. Nowadays, what used to be Lee’s front meadows– right up to the front door his house– is called Arlington National Cemetery.
So how about it, Jim? Cleveland Park US-Iraqi Cemetery…
I think the correct term for the Jim Hoaglands of the world is “asshats”.
It is very interesting to see the advocates of superpower dominance slowly begin to perceive their status as dinosaurs. Such a short time ago, it seemed (to them) they were the vanguard of a new world order. And now, they are experiencing a “senior moment” in which the world suddenly seems much larger, more ambiguous and threatening. Give Hoagland some credit. At least he acknowledges that things look different now. Unlike our Dear Leader.
“Thirty years ago Americans fantasized (in horror or delight) about U.S. troops occupying oil fields in the Middle East to guarantee low-cost energy.”
This is the ideology that US policy maker thinks, most the Americans think inside in same way about the oil in Middle East.
The problem these oil fields are belong to other nations, it
Nice oped on the oped…. One might have fun building a data base of very influential columnists who were among the loudest cheerleaders for the Iraq war and see which ones are now having the courage to rethink, if not admit, their previous assumptions. Come to think of it, somebody oughta write a dissertation on Tom Friedman…. Ah, but he’s still on the kick of thinking that if only academics would shut up, all would be fine in what he once proclaimed should be, “America’s new 51st State.”
Hoagland:
What our leaders have to fear is fear itself. Fear will inhibit the vision and judgment needed to adjust and rebalance power on a global and equitable basis.
Hoagland to Bush. Go nuclear, bomb Bejing, bomb Bangladore – don
Fear will inhibit the vision and judgment needed to adjust and rebalance power on a global and equitable basis.
Hoagland is getting to be just as bad as Broder.
Both of them seem caught in some 40 year old time warp when Washington was still run by relatively moderate and pragmatic politicians and East Coast Foreign Policy Establishment types. Neither seem to get it that there is no judgment or vision left inside the Beltway. Contemporary Washington is like one of those civics education stunts where you let a class of sixth-graders run City Hall for a day, only in the present case the sixth-graders are staying on permanently.