Nonsensical

The Secretary of Defense, from the "quotable" section of today's Chicago Tribune:

"The implication that if you stop killing or capturing people who are trying to kill you, then therefore the world would be a better place, is obviously nonsensical."--Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting.

Of course it might help to be sure that the people you kill or capture are trying to kill you. But The Regime certainly seems not to worry too much about the latter, given the lack of tribunals and hearings, and the evidence of those few released, but never charged, detainees. And if the information gained from torture is as lousy as they say, then we (yeah, it's our tax dollars at work, folks) are probably not too clear on whom we have killed, nor whom we are trying to kill.

Simultaneously, when we kill a lot of innocent people in trying to kill the people we think are trying to kill us, and thereby create still more grief, suspicion, animosity, and best of all evidence for the radicals who say it is the Americans want to kill all _[fill in the blank]_, then yes, Mr. Rumsfeld, you have indeed made the world a "worse place"-- much worse.

Thus, Rumsfeld's logic justifies all sorts of state-sponsored terrorism, as well as the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. Now that's "obviously nonsensical."

For a bit of sensible contrast, there is Stephen M. Walt's column in yesterday's Boston Globe (h/t Mahablog), "Misreading the tea leaves: US missteps on foreign policy" (a pretty major excerpt of the column):

[The Regime's] disastrous record is not just a run of bad luck. These setbacks occurred because the Bush administration's foreign policy rests on a deep misreading of contemporary world politics. Conducting foreign policy on the basis of flawed premises is like designing an airplane while ignoring gravity: it won't get off the ground, and if it does, it is bound to crash.

What did the administration get so wrong?

First, officials misunderstood how other states see US primacy. Convinced that American power was a force for good, Bush thought other states would welcome US leadership as long as he acted decisively. In fact, US primacy made even longstanding allies nervous because they didn't know whether America would use its vast power in ways that would help or harm them.

This underlying fear of US primacy made it harder to win international support than the Bush team expected. Instead of nurturing these delicate relationships with effective diplomacy, however, Bush emphasized a US willingness to ``go it alone." This blunder merely reinforced other states' concerns and made them even more reluctant to cooperate.

A second mistake was blaming anti-Americanism on ``what we are" rather than ``what we do." Bush says our enemies ``hate our freedom" and believes that anti-Americanism arises from ``hostility to core US values." Wrong again.

Independent surveys of global opinion and separate studies by the Defense Science Board and the State Department showed that anti-Americanism is primarily a reaction to specific US policies. Yet Bush and his advisers never considered whether a different set of policies might reduce global opposition and enhance US security.

Third, Bush has consistently underestimated America's opponents, believing that they were too weak to stand up to the world's only superpower. Unfortunately, the past five years have demonstrated that even much weaker actors have many ways to counter US power.

Insurgents and terrorists have used suicide bombings and other brutal tactics to thwart us in Iraq and Afghanistan. States we have threatened -- such as Iran and Syria -- respond by helping one another and by backing such organizations as Hezbollah. North Korea and Iran pursue a nuclear deterrent, and threatening them makes them want one even more.

Because they exaggerate US power and do not understand that even weak actors have options, the Bush team tends to dictate rather than negotiate. Instead of trying to fix such flawed agreements as the Kyoto Protocol, Bush walked away. He refused to talk seriously to North Korea until it was recycling nuclear material, and he
repeated this error in 2003 when he spurned an Iranian overture that might have halted Iran's nuclear program and prevented the election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nonsensical is as nonsensical does, Mr. Rumsfeld.