The Washington Post’s neocon editors advocate one regime change after another, oblivious to the death and destruction that their strategies have unleashed across the Mideast and now into Europe — and reflecting a lack of realism about what U.S. foreign policy can achieve, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
By Paul R. Pillar
Fred Hiatt, whose Washington Post editorial page has been beating its drum incessantly for more U.S. intervention in Syria, comes at that same theme from another angle with a signed column that criticizes President Obama’s State of the Union address. Hiatt’s critique illustrates some recurring and fallacious patterns of thought that arise in debate about U.S. intervention and especially military intervention.
Hiatt didn’t like that the President, in Hiatt’s words, reserved any optimism in the speech for America and that “for the rest of the world, Obama was pessimistic, even fatalistic.”
Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.
Specific passages in the speech Hiatt cites are one that referred to the Middle East “going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia” and another that noted how “instability will continue for decades in many parts of the world–in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, in parts of Central America, in Africa, and Asia.”
Then Hiatt asks, “Why would a president ask Americans to assume that the problems of Central America, say, are intractable and inevitable?” But the President didn’t say anything about intractability or inevitability. He was merely making an observation about a reality – the sort of reality that, if ignored, can work to the detriment of sound U.S. foreign policy.
Even with insertion of the time frame “for decades”, the President’s observation about what we can expect regarding instability “in” some regions and in “parts of” other places is so safe as to be undebatable. To expect otherwise would be to predict a sweeping, benign transformation of a conflict-prone world the likes of which have never been seen.
Hiatt comments that Costa Rica has been stable for a good…