The essay on the half dozen recent books denouncing Bush’s foreign policy (
NYT Sunday Book Review) is brutally honest. We live in a time and place where the new world order has been revolutionized by a cowboy with a mission and with little experience in world affairs and where a growing number of people look at the Bush America with revulsion and dread.
Consider this excerpt from the essay:
Bush's views, Daalder and Lindsay say, came to rest on two fundamental pillars. ''The first was that in a dangerous world the best -- if not the only -- way to ensure America's security was to shed the constraints imposed by friends, allies and international institutions.'' The second was that America ''should aggressively go abroad searching for monsters to destroy.'' Never mind whether Saddam Hussein -- or Yasir Arafat, Iran, Syria or North Korea -- had anything to do with the fall of the twin towers: they were the global evil America was ordained to destroy.
Schmemann (an editor at the IHT), the author of the essay, correctly, I think, perceives that liberals absolutely cannot stomach this zealot. He writes:
It is inevitable that a foreign policy couched in biblical symbols, eschewing subtleties and advanced by Texans, oil-men, neocons and industrialists would be insufferable to liberals, doves, internationalists and New Englanders (conversely, remember what Bill Clinton did to conservatives). One suspects that even the senior George Bush occasionally looks out from his crag at Kennebunkport on the policies of his firstborn with some misgiving. Still, it is difficult to explain the level of loathing that the junior Bush and his government have achieved among otherwise rational liberals. The assaults in these books range widely in theme and quality, and Bush's defenders are likely, with some justification, to dismiss the more strident writers as congenitally allergic to any manifestation of American power. But the urgency with which they sound the alarm requires attention. History is too clear on what unconstrained power can lead to.
In the last paragraph, Schmemann uses the words of one of the authors to deliver the final, devastating condemnation:
Though I have lived abroad for many years and regard myself as hardened to anti-Americanism, I confess I was taken aback to have my country depicted, page after page, book after book, as a dangerous empire in its last throes, as a failure of democracy, as militaristic, violent, hegemonic, evil, callous, arrogant, imperial and cruel. Daalder and Lindsay may be constrained by an American sense of respect for the White House, but they too proclaim Bush's foreign policy fundamentally wrong. It is not only Bush's ''imperious style,'' they write; ''The deeper problem was that the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution -- that America's security rested on an America unbound -- was mistaken.'' The more moving judgment comes from Soros, a Jew from Hungary who lived through both German and Soviet occupation: ''This is not the America I chose as my home.''
