Squandered Goodwill?

There is a persistant belief that Bush has single-handedly squandered the world's collective post 9-11 goodwill.

Yesterday Iowa Senator Tom Harkin said just that.

"Harkin says, "We tend to forget that a few days after 9-1-1 thousands, thousands of Iranians marched in a candlelight procession in Teheran in support of the United States. Every Muslim country was basically on our side. Just think, in five years, President Bush has squandered all that." Harkin says the U.S. has put billions of dollars into the Iraq war, when it could be helping poor countries with things like clean water, medical aid and education."

This attitude is wrong for two reasons:

1) The immediate reaction to 9-11 is not the baseline on which to understand post 9-11 feelings. Any president (even his highness Clinton) who began bombing to retaliate for the terrorist attack would have earned the ire of the world's lefties and the visceral hatred of many of the world's muslims. This ire, over time, would be increased by repeated media attention on the anti-war minority (majority in most European countries), the repeated condemnation by muslim religious leaders who view the war as an assault on their religion, by the governments of muslim countries who fear that their regime might be next, and by the typical boredom Americans have towards a war that grinds away without spectacular video footage of success.

2) Helping countries with things like clean water is fine, but does nothing to immediately reduce the threat of another al-Qaeda type attack. If anything, this strategy is philosophically closely aligned with the Bush doctrine of bringing democracy to the Middle East. In each case the effects are structural and will bring benefits at some indeterminate point in the future -- not now.

Even without the Iraq war to keep lefties and muslims agitated, the Afghanistan war would have been enough to cause similar feelings, albeit at a slower pace. If Americans are to face reality, then the cold, harsh light of truth would show that the anti-war crowd will hate war no matter the cause, and many muslims will perceive any war against a nation of muslims as a war against their religion.

For these groups the unspoken resolution to each of these grievances is that we should never have attacked the Taliban, much less Saddam.

Rational people should recognize that any attempt to defend ourselves would result in more or less the same state of affairs that exists now: goodwill squandered.

This pernicious myth about sqandered goodwill should be put to bed.