The Bush administration rightly saw this as a large and looming danger, and their desire to forestall it was behind much of what they wound up doing over the last eight years: pressuring North Korea, Iran and (more successfully) Libya to abandon their nuclear weapons programs; trying to induce Pakistan (and Russia) to better secure their nuclear facilities; rolling up the A. Q. Khan network; creating at least the beginnings of a domestic capability for detecting WMD and defending against their use; taking an extremely aggressive approach to gathering intelligence against and attacking terrorist organizations; overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to deny al Qaeda a safe haven from which it could continue its efforts to acquire WMD; and, of course, invading Iraq in hopes of removing what was thought to be the most likely nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.What am I missing here? Peter Scoblic just published a book detailing (in part) Bush administration's failure to make counter-proliferation a priority. Graham Allison, perhaps the nation's foremost student of proliferation, gave Bush a D for its proliferation policy in 2005. More recently, the 9-11 Commission gave Bush a C in this department (and it was, I believe, a lot lower a few years ago). Is there any unbiased expert who thinks Bush's team did a good job here?
And I am in awe of the audaciousness of the self-congratulatory line about "pressuring North Korea, Iran and (more successfully) Libya." Did you know that I took my three Labradors to some dog fights in Mexico City last week? They did great, fighting a Doberman, a pit bull, and (more successfully) a terrier. Two of my dogs are dead now.
2 comments:
Wow. You could devote a seminar to the leaps of logic, misleading declarations, and asinine insinuations in that passage. To his credit, it's a rather beautiful encapsulation of the hideous, intellectually bankrupt distortions we'll be subjected to in the coming weeks as valedictories are issued from deep within the Neocon Command Bunker. I'm actually related to Friedberg through a relative's marriage and once sought career advice. Short story shorter, we quickly came to the implicit agreement that there was so little ideological common ground that we should just forget about the whole thing.
Yeah I was stunned. I can't think of a less credible argument. It's like arguing for Alabama as the national championship right now.
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