May 13, 2003
BETTER WELL-DISCUSSED FAILURE THAN SUCCESS WITH A POKER FACE
Europe Won't Be Fooled Again (Olivier Roy, New York Times, 5/13/2002)The official war objectives given to the allies were these: destruction of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; fighting terrorism; getting rid of a tyrant....
For Old Europe, the poverty of the official American arguments gave rise to suspicion that there was a hidden agenda....
And, in fact, there had always been a not-so-hidden agenda ... [T]he rationale for the military campaign in Iraq was not that Iraq was the biggest threat but, on the contrary, that it was the weakest and hence the easiest to take care of. The invasion was largely aimed at ... [r]eshaping the Middle East ... through military pressure and ... democratization....
This American agenda is very risky and full of pitfalls, but it is logical, perhaps laudable, and should have been put on the table. At least then the real issues could have been debated....
Would Europe have accepted the real agenda? Certainly not. But at least the debate would have been based on the relevant issue: does it make sense to reshape the Middle East through military pressure?
Mr. Roy is a talker, not a doer. He acknowledges that a grand plan to reshape the whole of the Middle East would have been resisted by Europe, while 18 European nations embraced the more limited plan of regime change in Iraq. He might have added that setting forth a grand plan to begin with would have united America's Middle Eastern enemies against us at once, and foreclosed certain post-war options. He might further have added that the grand plan could not have won the necessary Congressional support in the U.S., while war on Iraq did. In other words, Mr. Roy's plan would have failed every which way.
As every successful businessperson knows, success in any persuasive venture is built out of patience and tenacity. To get a deal done, one must argue from the premises that one's counterparty believes, and proceed only to mutually acceptable conclusions. One successful businessman told me that relationship-building is like fishing: you must patiently understand the fish's preferences, offer the fish something attractive, patiently court the fish, and, once hooked, reel it in neither too aggressively nor too daintily.
George Bush made himself into a successful business executive. He's doing an excellent job applying his skills to governing. Meanwhile, the intelligentsia are busy wondering why he doesn't prefer talk without accomplishment. They haven't realized: that's their job.