Iraq War critics: Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter's national security adviser and was considered a hardliner on relations with the Soviet Union, then and later.

But he is also one of the so-called "realist" school, which puts him at odds with much of the present foreign policy. He recently gave an excellent speech on US foreign policy. Here's a sample (my emphasis).

Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level [i.e., the President] what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, "he who is not with us is against us." ...

The second condition, troubling condition, which contributes in my view to the crisis of credibility and to the state of isolation in which the United States finds itself today is due in part because that skewed view of the world is intensified by a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind. ...

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States [the WMD fiasco]. That failure was contributed to and was compensated for by extremist demagogy which emphasizes the worst case scenarios which stimulates fear, which induces a very simple dichotomic view of world reality.

... I do not believe that [the need for] serious debate is satisfied simply by a very abstract, vague and quasi-theological definition of the war on terrorism as the central preoccupation of the United States in today's world. That definition ... theologizes the challenge. It doesn't point directly at the problem. It talks about a broad phenomenon, terrorism, as the enemy overlooking the fact that terrorism is a technique for killing people. That doesn't tell us who the enemy is. It's as if we said that World War II was not against the Nazis but against blitzkrieg.

But I'm not sure that the return to "bipartisanship" on foreign policy like that of the Cold War era that Brzezinski recommends is likely to happen any time soon.

Tags: iraq war, zbigniew brzezinski