Ron Brownstein columns are often thoughtful, his latest for National Journal unfortunately tilts at a straw man. He contrasts the Obama "velvet glove" and the Bush "iron fist" as though those were the two extremes of an entirely linear, bipolar range of policies.
Brownstein finds both to be failures, and with that COTTonLINE agrees. The bone I have to pick with him concerns his assumption that the way Bush utilized force is the only muscular foreign policy.
Born-again Bush wanted to "save the world," to turn everyplace into a god-fearing, market-oriented democracy. His use of force was incidental to that end. Bush's nation-building was a failure everywhere it was tried, but we spent many borrowed billions in those fiascos.
Another way to use force is to punish malefactors, raining death and destruction. Putting their lives back together should be the malefactors' problem, not ours. Perhaps the effort to survive will keep them too busy to bother us for some years to come.
Foreign intervention is much cheaper when you omit the nation-building. And it has greater deterrent value as well, meaning it will be needed less often.
