Grand Plans
For the past several years, we've seen the Iraq War compared to the one in Viet Nam. More recently, the White House has taken to comparing the Iraq War and its ultimate outcome to the Korean War. Mickey Kaus has adapted one of his posts at kausfiles (Slate) for an op-ed piece published in today's Los Angeles Times which takes the analogy a step further. He thinks it's useful to compare Bush's Iraq War to Bush's immigration plan.
MAINSTREAM editorialists like to praise President Bush's immigration initiative as an expression of his pragmatic, bipartisan, "compassionate conservative" side, in presumed contrast to the inflexible, ideological approach that produced the invasion of Iraq. But far from being a sensible centrist departure from the sort of grandiose, rigid thinking that led Bush into Iraq, "comprehensive immigration reform" is of a piece with that thinking. And it's likely to lead to a parallel outcome.
Mr. Kaus then provides a list of ten bullet points which is intended to show that both the Iraq War and Bush's plans for immigration reform both spring from the same philosophy. Here are just two of the bullet points.
4. Both envision a complicated, triple-bank-shot chain of events happening on cue. Iraqis were going to be grateful to their American liberators, come together in peace and give us a stable "ally in the war on terror," setting off a democratic domino effect in the region — a scenario that seems like highly wishful thinking in retrospect. Latinos, in the Bush immigration scenario, will be grateful to Republicans for bringing them out of the shadows, etc., ensuring a large, growing GOP Latino vote for decades to come. Meanwhile, a program of legal guest workers will somehow stop new illegal workers from crossing the border to join them.
5. Both depend crucially on pulling off difficult administrative feats. In Iraq, we had to build a nation in the chaotic vacuum of sectarian post-Hussein Iraq — which meant training a national army and police force from scratch with recruits who were often sectarian loyalists. "Comprehensive" immigration reform requires the government to set up an enforcement mechanism that can prevent millions of impoverished foreigners from sneaking across thousands of miles of unprotected borders — and prevent America's millions of self-interested employers from hiring them. Meanwhile, the overworked, incompetent federal immigration bureaucracy is going to efficiently sort out the 12 million illegals already here — "Non-Immigrants Previously in Unlawful Status," to use the official Prince-like euphemism — running background checks by the next business day and issuing each of them a new, "probationary Z-visa."
To the extent that both the Iraq War and Bush's plan for immigration reform reflect an ideological stance based on a kind of idealism which operates solely from a view of how things ought to be rather than how they actually are, Mr. Kaus's analogy works. Beyond that, however, I don't think the analysis is particularly useful. Apples and oranges are, after all, both fruit. So?
A more useful examination of the two manifestations of policy (one foreign, the other domestic) might be one which approaches them from the "who benefits" analysis. Such an approach would certainly explain more about this administration and the intentions it brings to the table.
Still, Mr. Kaus's list of ten points does show one source of the basic incompetence of the Bush administration, and for that we should be grateful.
MAINSTREAM editorialists like to praise President Bush's immigration initiative as an expression of his pragmatic, bipartisan, "compassionate conservative" side, in presumed contrast to the inflexible, ideological approach that produced the invasion of Iraq. But far from being a sensible centrist departure from the sort of grandiose, rigid thinking that led Bush into Iraq, "comprehensive immigration reform" is of a piece with that thinking. And it's likely to lead to a parallel outcome.
Mr. Kaus then provides a list of ten bullet points which is intended to show that both the Iraq War and Bush's plans for immigration reform both spring from the same philosophy. Here are just two of the bullet points.
4. Both envision a complicated, triple-bank-shot chain of events happening on cue. Iraqis were going to be grateful to their American liberators, come together in peace and give us a stable "ally in the war on terror," setting off a democratic domino effect in the region — a scenario that seems like highly wishful thinking in retrospect. Latinos, in the Bush immigration scenario, will be grateful to Republicans for bringing them out of the shadows, etc., ensuring a large, growing GOP Latino vote for decades to come. Meanwhile, a program of legal guest workers will somehow stop new illegal workers from crossing the border to join them.
5. Both depend crucially on pulling off difficult administrative feats. In Iraq, we had to build a nation in the chaotic vacuum of sectarian post-Hussein Iraq — which meant training a national army and police force from scratch with recruits who were often sectarian loyalists. "Comprehensive" immigration reform requires the government to set up an enforcement mechanism that can prevent millions of impoverished foreigners from sneaking across thousands of miles of unprotected borders — and prevent America's millions of self-interested employers from hiring them. Meanwhile, the overworked, incompetent federal immigration bureaucracy is going to efficiently sort out the 12 million illegals already here — "Non-Immigrants Previously in Unlawful Status," to use the official Prince-like euphemism — running background checks by the next business day and issuing each of them a new, "probationary Z-visa."
To the extent that both the Iraq War and Bush's plan for immigration reform reflect an ideological stance based on a kind of idealism which operates solely from a view of how things ought to be rather than how they actually are, Mr. Kaus's analogy works. Beyond that, however, I don't think the analysis is particularly useful. Apples and oranges are, after all, both fruit. So?
A more useful examination of the two manifestations of policy (one foreign, the other domestic) might be one which approaches them from the "who benefits" analysis. Such an approach would certainly explain more about this administration and the intentions it brings to the table.
Still, Mr. Kaus's list of ten points does show one source of the basic incompetence of the Bush administration, and for that we should be grateful.
Labels: Immigration, Iraq War
posted by Diane at 4:10 AM
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