And Don't Forget Our Love Affair With Bhutto

I think the importance of this posting is lost a bit in its brevity, but in my opinion this is primarily the reason why both US foreign policy and public school American History curriculum are so screwed up:


"According to George W. Bush, Egypt is making progress toward "greater political openness." That's, um, not true.



"I'm not sure there's very much the US government can or should do, in practice, to push Egypt into becoming a democracy. And, certainly, I grasp the pragmatic need to get along with governments willing to get along with us. But I don't really understand why this need is pragmatically construed as the need to lie and pretend to believe that Hosni Mubarak is moving his country toward democracy when everyone knows that he's cracking down on the opposition and trying to install his son as the next pharaoh. The schizophrenia of American policy -- invading Iraq to spread the flame of democracy, and then spinning on Mubarak's behalf in Cairo; between demonizing Hugo Chavez as a totalitarian menace and then hanging out with Saudi officials at the president's vacation home -- is really absurd.



"The idea that these tin pot dictators would somehow turn on us if we didn't kiss their assess doesn't hold much water. We need Saudi oil, and the Saudis need our money. We have interests that can be advanced through collaboration with the government of Egypt and the government of Egypt has interests that can be advanced through cooperation with our government. The pretense that every country we have a dispute with is run by the New Hitler while every country we opportunistically ally with is run by a Bold Reformer is incredibly dumb and something a grownup country ought to be able to move past."


I wish I could say that this complete inability to recognize mistakes and moral nuances was limited to Bush's reign but it's been endemic to the United States for some time. Now I can't say for sure whether or not other Democratic states have the same issues, but the idea of reworking history to fit a mold of "we good (always)" and "They bad (always)" seems Orwellian. Yet this is something we regularly do, whether it be inflating JFK's legacy because he was assassinated, or deflating the historical importance of our relationship with the French because they occasionally disagree with us on certain issues. And that's not even beginning to talk about the segued racial history of our country. It seems to me that one of the reasons we get consistently bogged down in mires like Iraq is because we reshape history to never prove us wrong, and thus never learn from our mistakes.

PS: Don't take the above to mean that I everyone suffers from this malady. Of course we don't, but much of our policy and policy shapers embrace this reductionist tendency, which screws things up further because by simplifying the issue it forces those that disagree to take the opposite view, thus polarizing the issue. For example, as Joseph J. Ellis writes in American Creation, a polarizing view makes us view the founding fathers as, "demigods who were permitted to glimpse the eternal truths...or a cast of villains who collectively comprise the deadest, whitest males in American history." These reductive narratives completely miss the pragmatic truth while at the same time cloud ones judgement.