ON KARL ROVE AND THE DANGERS OF POWER
IN THE ABSENCE OF KNOWLEDGE AND PRINCIPLES
SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.
We shall call it the Darwin Principle. NYT ARTICLE
Today's NYT article continues,
The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.
Sorry, Sunnis. NYT ARTICLE
I often wonder about the role of Karl Rove in the Iraq War. If Karl Rove is known for being an excellent if diabolical domestic political strategist, and so influential in Bush’s policy-making, then how did Rove allow the Administration to get the political mess that the Iraq War has become? Isn’t Rove known for the type of long-term strategic thinking that would normally preclude starting a politically unpopular and ultimately politically ruinous war that has no foreseeable end?
My theory is that, as much as Rove knows about how to manipulate American politics, he simply knows nothing about the Middle East. It is well said that, "A little bit of knowledge is dangerous." Rove knew politically how to get our nation’s authorization for a war, and even how to maintain that support for a while in the face of tremendous setbacks, but he didn’t understand the substance – Iraq’s history, parties and animosities – enough to realize the political damage that the war he was starting would ultimately do to the Republican Party.
Of course, Rove had an ideology about foreign peoples and America’s role in the international sphere – as all Republicans do - but an ideology is not knowledge and does not function as such in lieu of knowledge. An ideology in the absence of knowledge often causes its adherents to disregard facts that do not comport with the preconceived ideology, and all with an ignorant obliviousness to the dangers involved.
Karl Rove entered but did not finish college. "Rove was consumed with College Republicans for so many years that he didn’t spend much time actually going to college; he never graduated." THE NEW YORKER Had he stayed in college longer and made an effort to pass his courses, he might have learned more about the forces of nature and the dangers of war. As it was, he became a political powerhouse but a technical empty house, something that would only become apparent when he was challenged to demonstrate both polital acumen and substantive understanding.
As with Katrina, the Republicans were powerful when their work involved only understanding and manipulating the American public, but the science of hurricanes simply doesn’t respond to or respect Republican bullshitting. Hurricanes are separate from, independent and infinitely more powerful than Republicans and so, as we have learned, are the forces unleashed in Iraq. Karl Rove was part of a team that thought it was winning when it was steamrolling America into a war of nobody else’s choice, but he lacked the understanding of international affairs - of Iraq - to realize that, politically, he was digging the Republicans grave.
To be successful, an American administration must be powerful politically but also have and respect a minute command of the complexity of a host of issues, of natural science and international political science. Just as, in order to be successful, a lawyer may rapidly have to master and argue the science of climate change one day and then the patentability of DNA chains the next, so Government of a complex country in a complex world is very intellectually demanding. It requires not only the ability to build a political majority, but the comprehension of natural science an the world community to understand the limits of American control over nature and people. Power without knowledge is infinitely more dangerous than power alone.
It is very dangerous to put people who lack knowledge and training in the White House. Although formal training does not guarantee understanding, yet the lack of such training in people who would lead a nuclear country of 300 Million in a nuclear world ought to raise a red flag. A medical degree does not prove that a doctor is competent, but the failure to obtain such a degree after trying does prevent one from practicing medicine.
When the world was less complex, when science was less advanced, and international communication and war less rapid, there were inherent limits on the damage that an American president could do. We could more afford to make the Presidency simply a popularity prize for white men of means. Today, a President who lacks understanding of the potency of the forces of nature and people is like a child with a vial of nitroglycerine, who believes it is water and behaves accordingly.
The instinct to ignore and then steamroll domestic opponents served the Republicans well in terms of taking over the Government of the United States. However, the international sphere and the natural sciences respond to forces that Republicans cannot control or manipulate. And that has ultimately been the downfall of the Republicans, a descent that unfortunately has only begun. It is unfortunate because, for at least two more years and unless we take action, we will all remain in the same falling helicopter with Karl Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush.