Yesterday’s radicalism is today’s conventional wisdom – and nothing underscores this truism more than the current foreign policy debate. Remember way back when neoconservatives were calling for “draining the swamp” of the Middle East, George W. Bush was hailing the advent of a “global democratic revolution” to be led by the US, and anyone who dissented was marginalized as part of what Andrew Sullivan called a pro-terrorist “fifth column”? Those were heady days for the War Party, which was still enjoying the momentum of the post-9/11 rage that sucked us into two major wars simultaneously. It was also before the Great Meltdown of 2008, when the biggest pillars of the American economy creaked, cracked, and nearly collapsed of their own weight.
As a great songwriter put it a couple of decades ago: the times, they are a’changing.
A Pew poll taken a couple of years ago in which respondents were asked whether the US should “mind its own business” showed a huge disparity between elite and hoi polloi opinion on the matter, with the elites saying “No, no, a thousand times no!” and the plebeians answering “Heck yeah!” I suspect elite opinion hasn’t changed much: among the general public, however, recent polls show an even more overwhelming popular consensus in favor of non-intervention, including one taken by The Hill newspaper which records a whopping 72 percent saying “the United States is fighting in too many places,” and a mere 16 percent saying “the current level of engagement represented an appropriate level.” (Twelve percent weren’t sure.)
Against this level of popular disapproval, no administration can stand. That’s why the President is getting ready to announce the withdrawal of some 10,000 troops from Afghanistan, with more in the pipeline. There’s also the supposedly ongoing withdrawal from Iraq – yes, we’re still there!
Of course, there are the usual caveats about “conditions on the ground,” i.e. the possibility that the generals will veto more substantial future troop cuts. In short, these announcements of troop withdrawals are just smoke and mirrors: even if the administration actually follows through on the maximum cut of 30,000 soldiers out of Afghanistan, in stages, that will still leave 70,000. And will someone tell me what we are doing still bogged down in Iraq, which is being held up as a “model” of successful US intervention? According to the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the US and Iraq, all American troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011 – but the American public doesn’t believe it, and neither do I. The Hill reports:
