That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [131]
It was neither foolish nor irresponsible for President George W. Bush to want to use Iraq as a lever to pry open the closed and autocratic world of Arab politics. It was, however, both foolish and irresponsible to try to do so without a well-thought-out plan, without enough troops, and without an adequate understanding of the scale and complexity of what was required. Execution matters.
America’s initial policy in Iraq offers, alas, a metaphor for much of American public policy in the Terrible Twos: Our reach exceeded our grasp and ability to execute. We simply, casually, and wrongly assumed that things would work out. We willed the ends but not the means.
We cannot say what would have happened had we done things well in Iraq. We can say, though, that if a decent, democratizing Iraq does finally emerge one day it will be something well worth having, and the lives and treasure expended there will not have been in vain. To the contrary, in that case we will have supported something transformational, of great value to both Iraqis and the world. But even in that case, we will have overpaid for the benefits we get, although by how much will depend on how Iraq evolves. Especially given America’s other needs, the American intervention there has cost far too much in lives, money, and the government’s attention. The same is true for the wars in Afghanistan and Libya, enterprises with far less potential strategic benefit. In sum, America—and we very much include ourselves in this mistake—acted as if the world that was created on 9/11 was a whole new world. The events of 9/11 did reveal a serious security threat. They posed a real problem. But it was not, in retrospect, the equivalent of a life-threatening disease that required dropping everything and changing everything; it was a chronic disease that we had to keep under control but in a way that allowed us to get on with the rest of our lives. September 11 was diabetes; it wasn’t cancer. And the rest of our lives that we had to get on with involves addressing the four major challenges of the post–Cold War era by updating and upgrading our formula for greatness.
We overpaid not only for Iraq but for homeland security as well, because no politician wanted to be accused of negligence by some future investigatory commission. Moreover, we paid for all of this—Iraq, homeland security, Afghanistan, Libya—with borrowed money. We gave ourselves a tax cut rather than a tax hike, added a new entitlement—Medicare prescription drugs—and did it all on the eve of the biggest entitlement payout in American history, which will come with the retirement of the baby boomers.
The contrast with a previous era and a previous Republican presidency is striking. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower era, we used a major conflict—the Cold War—as a lever to upgrade our formula for success to ensure a prosperous future for the nation as a whole. In the Terrible Twos, the George W. Bush era, we used another conflict—the war with al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and radical Islam—to avoid doing the things we had to do to assure a prosperous future. In the first period we sacrificed for and invested in the future. In the second we indulged and splurged in the present at the expense of the future.
Crazy Heart
Looking back on the last decade, we could not help but be struck by some of the lyrics to one of the songs in the 2009 movie Crazy Heart. Jeff Bridges won the Oscar for best actor for his portrayal of an alcoholic country singer trying to make a comeback. The song, entitled “Fallin’ & Flyin’,” makes an all too fitting anthem for the