GOOD MEN DOING NOTHING:

Bush Ex Machina (Maureen Dowd, 3/02/03, The New York Times)

George W. Bush has often talked wickedly about his days as the black sheep of a blue-blooded, mahogany-paneled family. But the younger rebellion pales before the adult revolt, now sparking epochal changes.

The president is about to upend the internationalist order nurtured by his father and grandfather, replacing the Bush code of noblesse oblige with one of force majeure.

Bush 41, a doting dad, would never disagree with his son in public, but in a speech at Tufts last week, he defended his decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after Desert Storm.

"If we had tried to go in there and created more instability in Iraq, I think it would have been very bad for the neighborhood," he told the crowd of 4,800. (Was he referring to Baghdad or Kennebunkport?)

He conceded that getting a coalition together is harder now, because the evidence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is "a little fuzzier" than was his evident invasion of Kuwait. But 41 still thinks coalitions work: "The more pressure there is, the more chance this matter will be resolved in a peaceful manner." (Maybe he should enter the Democratic primary.)

At the very same moment the father was pushing peace, the son was treating the war as a fait accompli. At the American Enterprise Institute, he finally coughed up the real reason for war: trickle-down democracy.

Communism, by itself--and it was just one of the "isms" that the elder Bushs formed an "international order" to "contain"--killed scores of millions people last century. Time and time again we bought peace at home by standing by as the Soviets, the Nazis, the Chinese Communists, the North Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, etc., etc. etc., ad nauseum, slaughtered either their own people or their neighbors or both. It may well be that our current course will engulf the world in bloody warfare--pan-Arabism or Islamicism or whatever is driving the radical anti-Westernism of the Middle East seems to have a similar thirst for blood to its predecessor isms and Kim Jong-il may choose this moment to slake his--but there can be no doubt about who'll emerge triumphant at the end of that conflagration, and if this century is to be as much a charnel house as the last, let us at least fight its evils on our own terms rather than lying back until we have no other choice but to restore order after the killing's gone on too long for even us to ignore it--say in a general war between Israel and the Arab world or an India/Pakistan War The butcher's bill for "peace" is too high a price to pay...again. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2003 10:41 PM