Current Newsweek Article: I Call Shenanigans....

So the Bush Administration is trying to take credit for Lebanon.

This weeks Newsweek’s article “What Bush Got Right” is the biggest load of crap I have read in a long, long time. It’s the same “They hate us because we’re prosperous and free” bullshit. Please note that while “Bush Democracy-Please-Go-Vote-While-Our-Civilian-Contactors-Steal-Money-and-Oil-From-you Tour” is aiming at the Theocratic Republic of Iran, it’s completely ignoring the hereditary monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which Zakaria ranks as one of the most repressive regimes. If this were Bush’s plan, if this was the theory from which he is working, why is he then not pressuring the Saudi’s to holds free elections? And where does the sanctioned Torture fit into this ideal Bush theory of Freedom that Zakaria is professing? It’s funny, but all I have been hearing from the Bush administration is “Afghanistan” then “Iraq” and now “Iran”. I didn’t hear them say anything about Lebanon, did you?

This is the kind of B.S. reasoning he uses:

People have often wished that the president had traveled more over the years. But Bush's capacity to imagine a different Middle East may actually be related to his relative ignorance of the region. Had he traveled to the Middle East and seen its many dysfunctions, he might have been disheartened. Freed from looking at the day-to-day realities, Bush maintained a vision of what the region could look like.

Translated: "Since Bush didn’t actually know what was happening in the Middle East he could fix it."

That kind of reasoning will get you laughed out of your undergrad critical thinking class in a heartbeat. I can also tell you about a thousand managers that can refute that as a business theory.

How much did the Bush administration pay this guy? Really?

I refer you to the recent New York Time article “Unexpected Whiff of Freedom Proves Bracing for the Mideast” by Neil MacFarquar.

“Iraq, however, serves more as a threat than a model. Although many Arabs were impressed by the zeal with which Iraqis turned out to vote on Jan. 30, Iraq remains a synonym for frightening, violent chaos.
"When you are a Syrian, or an Egyptian or a Saudi and you see what happened to Iraqi society over the past two years, you wonder if democracy deserves such instability and such a sacrifice of people," said Ghassan Salame, a former Lebanese cabinet minister.”

For the Bush administration to take credit for the Lebanese people’s cohesion, effort and risk in rising up against the Syrians is so smarmy and false is defies description. The credit for the cohesion, effort and risk taken by the Lebanese people belongs to the Lebanese people alone, not the Bush Administration.