H. Brandt Ayers: New president — Second chance
04-29-2007

The former secretaries of defense were meeting in Atlanta, a cast that included Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Bill Cohen. I had a question for some of them: “Now that we've become an empire, what kind do we want to be.”

Is having irresistible power but undefined intentions a good thing? I put the question to former Secretary Jim Schlesinger, who replied with mock grumpiness, “If you're big and powerful, you're always going to get criticism.”

True, but brilliant though he is, Schlesinger didn't answer the question. Bill Cohen came closer, and his answer was 180 degrees opposite to the chilling articulation from a high Bush aide in 2004 who sneered at critics he called “the reality based community.”

The Bush adviser said, “That's not the way the world really works anymore … We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities…. We're history's actors.”

If you like the reality the Bush team has created, you're not going to like the new book by one of America's premiere foreign-policy thinkers, a dreaded realist most often compared to Henry Kissinger.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's Second Chance examines the three presidencies since the collapse of the Soviet Union left us alone at the top of the global pinnacle: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Brzezinski lauds Bush the First as an experienced professional who managed a soft landing for what could have been a chaotic and destabilizing collapse of the Soviet Union. But he failed to give form and substance to his “new world order” rhetoric and, thus, did not fill the void of a world listening for a voice it wanted to follow.

Bill Clinton's formless foreign policy seminars took clearer shape in his second term imposing discipline on Serbia, the most aggressive of the squabbling Balkan remnants of the former Yugoslavia.

His worldwide popularity, Brzezinski compares with Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, but … “He never made a concerted effort to develop, articulate, and pursue a comprehensive strategy for a responsible American role in the volatile world that confronted him.”

Enter the nice guy from Texas, the compassionate conservative, George II, who wanted the American colossus to go forth in the world with “humility,” and who brought with him a couple of pros who knew what they were doing, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Humility wasn't exactly what Dick and Don had on their mind. They had been a kind of rear guard in the first Bush administration that wrote neocon memos that wiser heads suppressed.

The 9/11 attacks broke the lock and released on an unsuspecting world the suppressed neocon's Manichean philosophy. Manichean is one of Brzezinski's and my favorite words. It embodies a war of opposites: good vs. evil, love vs. hate, idealism vs. brutality, order vs. chaos, all struggling against each other for supremacy.

“The blend of neocon Manicheanism and President Bush's newfound propensity for catastrophic decisiveness caused the post-9/11 global solidarity with America to plunge from its historical zenith to its nadir,” Brzezinski concludes in his summation.

In a three-part indictment, he writes, “the war has caused calamitous damage to America's global standing; has been a geopolitical disaster and has increased the terrorist threat to the United States.”

He did find solace in this thought, “Perhaps the war's saving grace is that it made Iraq the cemetery of neocon dreams.”

All is not lost, though it will take years to rebuild the powerful AND admired America, which after World War II first stretched out a generous hand, respectful of European cultures, in the Marshall Plan. Only then did it send the good cops of NATO to secure the rebuilding effort.

The former Carter security adviser sees a newly stirring world where “yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.”

A sense of humiliation and yearning for respect seems to me most acute in the Middle East where there are no Nobel laureates in economics, health and science, no optimistic, charismatic Arabic Mandela to inspire the region.

American leadership of an Asian and European partnership, with participation from oil-rich Arab nations, to launch a Middle Eastern Marshall Plan would be a better remedy for humiliation-inspired hatred than soldiers kicking down doors of Muslim families.

“Only by identifying itself with the idea of universal human dignity — with its basic requirement of respect for culturally diverse political, social, and religious emanations — can America overcome the risk that the global political awakening will turn against it,” as Brzezinski sees it.

The next president will get a second chance at global leadership, but with technologies such as the Internet creating a shared community of resentment and envy, there may not be a third chance.

http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/200 ... 8t2326.htm