CYA (Cover Your Ass) is the opposite of leadership. Leaders take bold moves to deal with a problems. Managers do the expected minimum. We've all seen this in the workplace.
The reaction to North Korea in 1994 was pure CYA. No one can say that Clinton didn't try to peacefully solve the problem. He has a treaty in hand to prove it. No one is asking Clinton why he thought that North Korea's past track record indicated they could be trusted. He did the minimum and faces no scrutiny.
Bush, instead took the war straight to the enemy, regardless of how many in the world and in this country would have been satisfied had Bush done the CYA alternative. The fallout is that he gets all kinds of scrutiny that the CYA Guy never gets. The dictator is now defeated, but somehow this is a worse alternative than the situation in North Korea. To George Soros, and internationalist liberals, the world is less safe now.
Bush used false pretenses -- by saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and implying a connection with al-Qaida -- to get the country to go to war, he said. "The invasion in Iraq has been a dismal failure,'' he said.
Contrary to the assertion that other rogue rulers might now fear the United States, he said he believes America is in a weaker position than before the invasion.
The world knows "we are not going to spend another $160 billion and sacrifice 500 lives to remove another heinous dictator,'' he said.
America needs to act as the leader of the free world to promote democracy, not simply as the world's only superpower. "You can't be the godfather of the world,'' he said.
I'm really baffled by the number of Americans that see the United States as a danger because it's the lone superpower. I'd certainly grant that many agencies within the government are corrupt, but those are the agencies that the same people usually see as the solution to the problems of mankind.
They'd like to see the kind of world where everyone gets along. They think the American super power is getting in the way. But would we really be better off with the butchers of Tiennaman Square competing with us?
What George Soros and other critics don't offer is the specifics of how to do it better than Bush. They want a peaceful world like the rest of us, but they don't know how to get there other than by begging rouge nations to be nice.
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