Philosoraptor: Bush’s Military Policy the Worst of Both Worlds
Philosoraptor makes what appears to me to be a slam-dunk case: Iraq and the evaporating myth of American invincibility.
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.
I think there’s a level on which George Bush believes it’s a good thing for him to act irrationally and unpredictably with the US military. And evaluated in the Karl Rove calculus, which is all about winning and holding elective office in the US, he was obviously smart to believe that. But in the larger scheme of things, in which there’s a collective good to be striven for, both in terms of US citizens’ interests and the interests of humanity generally, that attitude of Bush’s is horribly stupid and wrong.
