Tommy Denton

Recent columns

• Gifts for sharpening rhetorical swords
• Bush is feeding China's worst instincts
• Heroism in the face of stupidity, and worse
• Treating oil addiction with a dose of harm

• Column archive

In an interview last week with National Public Radio, the former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan drew a telling lesson about the campaign against the Taliban. He noted the correlation between expeditious, targeted investment in civil infrastructure and the reduced level of military force required to accomplish the mission.

Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry indicated that failure to make such investments merely exacerbated and extended the military facet of an operation. In other words, smart, constructive decisions made early can prevent the painful, destructive work made necessary by an economy of foresight.

Eikenberry's point is well made, but his superiors are missing it. The entire venture in the "war against terror," launched in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, and insanely diverted to Iraq in 2003, has a dangerously large contingent of the United States' force structure bogged down. Most evidence points to disaster, not Vice President Cheney's bizarre vision of "success."

Yet Eikenberry's observation makes fundamental good sense, affirming a strategy that gives at least equal weight to winning hearts and minds as eradicating bad guys.

As the consequence of actions pursued by the Bush administration, the aggressive strategy of eradicating bad guys has clearly been the policy of choice, to the detriment of America's best long-term interests. Superficial, tough-guy thinking rooted in hubris ignores the need to give at least glancing consideration to the iron law of unintended consequences.

The disposition of the Bush administration from its earliest days has been one of single-minded triumphalism, regardless of the issue. From the beginning, officials revealed how they would be conducting public business: in league with their corporate benefactors and with the maximum secrecy a docile body politic would allow.

No policy was more characteristic of that approach than the early, heavily veiled deliberations with industry insiders in fashioning energy policy. At least most observers in early 2001 were willing to concede that no previous administration possessed greater competence regarding oil in its many complex aspects.

The former oilman in the White House was son and grandson of oilmen. His vice president was a CEO of oil behemoth Halliburton. His top foreign policy adviser was a board member of Chevron.

For all the administration's purported expertise in energy, its inclination to force all policy into the mold of its rigid ideological construct set in motion a series of disasters in judgment that have placed the world in greater peril than it has faced in decades.

As former Chevron executive Edward Chow told John Judis of The New Republic in the Feb. 12 edition, "Some of us thought that, after the Clinton years, we had an administration ... that understood the energy sector better. We thought there would be a more thoughtful, nuanced policy, and that it would open more windows of opportunity in Mexico or even Iran, and a more productive relationship with Russia that would lead to real investment and real benefits economically. Whether it was 9/11 or something else, it certainly didn't work out."

The entire fiasco arising from the ill-advised invasion of Iraq began a cascading series of inflammatory foreign policy misjudgments by the Bush administration. Those "with us or against us" misjudgments were rooted in a vigorous unilateralism that in time alienated a host of oil-producing nations -- and resentful major consuming countries like China -- that have begun to form alliances to isolate and restrain what they see as a U.S. quest for global domination.

Within six short years, the administration has squandered multilateral relations that could have produced widespread benefits and neutralized certain authoritarian trends in some of the less-savory countries, in Africa but especially in former Soviet republics in central Asia, and even in Iran, if handled properly.

The unilateralist imperative -- call it command diplomacy -- has soured U.S. relations with Russia, Venezuela and Mexico. China is securing exclusive rights to oil from Africa. Saudi Arabia, its Middle East oil dominance potentially threatened by Iran, makes noises that it will oppose Teheran to protect Saudi interests, even further destabilizing that region.

These are not indications of a successful foreign policy. They are, as the continuing carnage and destruction reveal, the tragic consequences of the destructive work made necessary by hubris and an economy of foresight.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.