Bush supporters on North Korea

IN THE NEWS
I was curious what people who have had anything positive to say about the Bush Administration's foreign policy decisions are now saying about the North Korean nuclear test. My admittedly limited, unscientific poll included Little Green Footballs, American Thinker, Neo Con Eagles Wings, Thunder Run, The New Republic, Jim Hoagland's column at The Washington Post, Blogs for Bush, Michelle Malkin, The Jawa Report, and California Conservative. The responses seem to break down into the following categories:

• No response. Sure, Little Green Footballs is more focused on the Middle East than other regions, but it's hardly the only place where North Korea is getting practically no attention.
• Blame Clinton. Senator John McCain's accusation that the Clinton Administration is to blame for this week's DPRK nuclear test is a lightning rod among conservative opinion writers. In some cases, McCain's statement is the only thing that's missing.
• North Korea is bad. Some authors, such as Hoagland, focused exclusively on how dangerous and erratic Kim Jong Il is. That's a lot like, in the 1930s, focusing on how bad Hitler was, without really talking about whether the British or French governments could have done something to halt the annexation of Czechoslovakia.

In short, there's not any willingness to admit that the current Administration failed to deter the DPRK from testing a nuclear weapon. There's another important question that these writers are failing to address: What now?

In that sense, it's worth looking at how the defenders of Bush might mirror bad tendencies among the critics of Bush. It's not enough to scream Nyah-nyah! when people you don't like appear to have fallen on their faces. (For example, the ethics allegations directed at Senator Harry Reid are headline news on practically all the sites I polled.) You have to have some constructive alternatives to propose.

In these pages, I've had a lot of critical things to say about the Bush Administration's Iraq policies, and the way the US military has been fighting the counterinsurgency war there. However, I've also tried to delineate strategies that would work better than the ones being pursued today. My goal is not to say, "I don't like so-and-so, and here's why he's an idiot." Instead, it's to say, "Here are the mistakes our government has made, and how we should rectify them."

When Clinton was in office, I often disagreed with his positions. For example, I thought the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was doomed to failure. I also had my doubts about the long-term effects of NAFTA. During the Nineties, the US also seemed to have lost an opportunity to make more aggressive steps to cut dependence on oil imports, a topic that usually only gets addressed during a crisis in the Middle East (or, recently, confrontations with the Venezuelan government.) I would have been glad to discuss these problems while he was in office. If the person for whom I had voted in 2004 were in office (hint: it wasn't Bush), I'd be glad to dissect what went wrong with his Korean policies, if in 2006 the North Koreans had tested a nuclear weapon.

In other words, I'm a bit disgusted with a collection of Bush supporters who, at a key moment in US history after the Cold War, are not willing to even discuss what went wrong. (Except, of course, to try to deflect blame on someone who hasn't been President for more than five years.) It's also a chastening moment, a reminder of what sort of pitfalls bloggers like Atrios and the many opinion writers at Smirking Chimp can find themselves just as easily as the Little Green Footballs.

Comments

[J.]

A 2003 quote from Colin Powell in today's WaPo:

"The previous administration I give great credit to for freezing that plutonium site. Lots of nuclear weapons were not made because of the Agreed Framework and the work of President Clinton and his team."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/12/AR2006101201615.html

[No Nym]

Great commentary. The righties had a coherent (if not necessarily optimal) policy and approach, in 2001/2002 and even a little up to "mission accomplished." After that, the lack of self-criticism really started to show.