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Wednesday, December 9, 2024
By Steven L. Taylor

As elucidated by former Vice President Dick Cheney (from an interview with Sean Hannity as reported on The Swamp):

"Everybody is watching. The Taliban are watching, the al-Qaida are watching, the Afghans who are on our side are watching, and when they see hesitation, uncertainty, lack of clarity from an American president, they begin to think the Americans aren’t going to be here very long…. Then you see governments in that part of the world start to shift their alliances and their friendships. For example, just in the last two weeks the prime minister of Kuwait has gone to Iran on an official visit, the first time in 30 years. Why did he do that? Well, he wants to make sure he’s got a foot in all camps."

This is hardly a new formulation, but every time I see if, especially from Cheney or other persons closely associated with the Bush administration or its policies, I have to ask:  if being unhesitant, certain and clear equals policy success, surely the Bush administration should have been the most successful administration in US history, yes?

Forget Kuwaiti PM’s visiting Iran (an event that I do no see confirming Cheney’s thesis), but let’s think about things like North Korea’s nuclear program and missile tests or the Iranian nuclear program—all of which flourished under the Bush administration.  Note, by the way, that I am not blaming the Bush administration, as I am of the view that it may well be impossible to stop such activities short of all-out war with the states in question.  However, there is little doubt that President Bush was quite resolute on his positions on those matters.  And yet:  nuclear programs.

Or, for that matter, Bush was quite resolute about Osama bin Laden, and yet he persists (we think).  Indeed, he was pretty darn clear about both Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet we find ourselves still rather involved in those places, and with no clear end (let alone success) in sight in either locations.  Indeed, his clarity on WMD programs and the sponsoring of terrorist is what led to the Iraq war in the first place…

There is the standard pro-Bush response:  that the US suffered no further terrorism attacks on its soil post-9/11,1 but by that somewhat simplistic metric, Obama has had the same level of success.  Of course, during the resolute, certain and clarity-ridden Bush administration we did see the Bali attacks, the Madrid attacks, and the London attacks (to name three) by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists.  As such, the power of resoluteness may not be all that the former Vice President would like it to be.

It strikes me as psychically satisfying to assume that strong-willed leaders with clarity of purpose are what complex problems need, but reality doesn’t tend to work that way.

Sphere: Related Content

  1. Except, of course, the still unsolved anthrax attacks. []
Filed under: US Politics, War on Terror | |
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One Response to “The Certainty Hypothesis in Foreign Affairs”

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    1. PoliBlog: A Rough Draft of my Thoughts » Speaking of the Perils of Resoluteness and Clarity… Says:

      [...] come from an Iraqi taxi driver’), the following fits in well with part of my point in the previous post: An Iraqi taxi driver may have been the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could [...]

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