With 68 percent of the American public disapproving of the president’s management of the war in Iraq and global opinion of the United States plummeting, it makes perfect sense for politicos to advocate for a different approach to American foreign policy. Yet for many conservatives, particularly those circling around the eagle’s nest that is Dick Cheney’s office, the appropriate policy pick seems to be more war, but in different countries. Taking a hawkish approach to Syria, North Korea, and Iran, these die-hard conservatives are firm believers in the "practice makes perfect" plan for war.
Take, for example, the response of John Bolton, a rather infamous hawk and the former ambassador to the United Nations, to Syria. Using a suspicious Israeli air raid on Syria this August as a jumping-off point for a Wall Street Journal editorial, Bolton declared "Syria joins the axis of evil," and advocated major shifts in the administration’s policy toward the country.
The air raid had previously been the subject of a loosely constructed conjecture piece in the New York Times, which claimed that the Israelis had attacked an emerging nuclear project. The Times article relied mainly on anonymous sources and was not corroborated by the governments of the United States or Israel. While the unverified information spread rapidly through the mainstream media (as can be expected in this age of corporate competition and perpetual news feeds), it was sheer irresponsibility for a former U.S. Ambassador to represent such speculation as fact. Despite his resignation from the U.N. post last year, Bolton’s hard-line war mongering lent credibility to potentially false, and definitely exaggerated, information. Whether it was intentional or not is another story.
But Syria isn’t the only country on conservatives’ list for target practice. Attacking Iran remains a pet project, along with the belief that the United States should stop negotiating with the country. Interestingly, Bolton has stated that regime change has been successful in Iraq. The only possible explanation for that opinion is all his hard work at U.N. Headquarters prevented Bolton from seeing any sort of international news broadcast in the last six years. The Veep himself has also threatened "serious consequences" if Iran stays on its present course of nuclear development. Obviously, honing our Iraqi strategy on a country double the size and more technologically advanced is a fabulous idea. It’s a wonder no one thought of it sooner.
But, with all the hawks eying future pre-emptive invasion prey, it might come as a surprise that the U.S. military is already stretched to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan. And with Bush requesting an additional $46 billion to fund the wars, bringing the yearly total to an all-time high of $196 billion, a policy of increased escalation and aggravation seems dangerous both militarily and economically. Still, as any good first-grader will tell you, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.