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Sebastian Mallaby is confused

Sebastian Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist, specializing in foreign affairs, so I suppose him to have some knowledge of the parties positions on these issues. This paragraph bespeaks some confusion, a confusion that continues all the way down the page.

Begin with foreign policy. Bush is right about the big lessons of Sept. 11: that terrorism is a mortal threat; that its root causes lie in poverty and state failure; that you can't sit about waiting for the enemy to declare war, so you need the option of preemption.

Bush said that terrorism's root causes lie in poverty? With the power of Google, maybe you could find him saying that once or twice in the last three years. When you're calling the terrorists "evil," you are not saying that terrorism is a choice people reach for when the alternatives are also pretty bad; you are saying that even in the depths of your poverty and disenfranchisement; terrorism is absolutely wrong.

Bush said that terrorism's root causes lie in state failure? Really? If anything, Bush's signature claim about the relationship between terrorism and states, was that the danger was that "rogue" states would co-operate with terrorists.

Failed states would lack the capacity to administer their own territory, much less strike up a co-ordinated alliance with terrorists.

The idea that terrorism is at least partly rooted in poverty and failed states is more an idea associated with Gordon Brown, Tony "tough on terror, tough on the causes of terror" Blair, and Bill Clinton than Bush.

The confusion only deepens when Mallaby writes that you need the option of pre-emption to deal with these threats. How, exactly, does this apply in Iraq? Iraq was not a failed state -- Bush's claim was that the Iraqi state was a little too effective in carrying out its classical state-like functions of exercising a monopoly on legal violence! It was the capacity of Iraq to succeed as an actor on the regional and world stage that had to be dealt with, not it's inability to administer its own territory.

No wonder Mallaby is confused about who to vote for.

Posted by robe0419 at August 9, 2004 12:48 PM | TrackBack