What Is to be Done
In the Washington Post, Richard Clarke details what has gone ignored by the White House as everyone scurries around trying to figure out what to do about Iraq. (What a valuable man Clarke, an unknown just a few years ago, has become! He is different from our president; he is serious.)
Referring to the obsession with Iraq, Clarke writes:
National Security Council veteran Rand Beers has called this the "7-year-old's soccer syndrome" -- just like little kids playing soccer, everyone forgets their particular positions and responsibilities and runs like a herd after the ball.
Here are the issues that Clarke wishes the White House would pay more attention to:
1) Al Qaeda and the struggle against radical Islam
2) global warming
3) Russian revanchism
4) Latin America's turn to the left
5) Africa at war
6) An arms-control freeze
7) Transnational crime
8) The Pakistan-Afghan border
Clarke's conclusion:
As the president contemplates sending even more U.S. forces into the Iraqi sinkhole, he should consider not only the thousands of fatalities, the tens of thousands of casualties and the hundreds of billions of dollars already lost. He must also weigh the opportunity cost of taking his national security barons off all the other critical problems they should be addressing -- problems whose windows of opportunity are slamming shut, unheard over the wail of Baghdad sirens.
Clarke is discussingly only national security issues. I would add to that list...
1) the growing inequality of wealth both within the United States and around the world
2) the tension between America as a traditionally isolationist nation and the changes effected upon it by globalization
3) an educational system that does not seem to be preparing our children for a globalized world
4) the loss of a meaningful spiritual counter to the onrushing materialism and cultural degradation of American life
It's a long list. The fiasco in Iraq has set us back immeasurably far, and history may well record the Bush years as the time in which this nation lost its confidence and its singular place in the roster of nations.
