Spring Break
NY Times's David Sanger addresses Hopkins
Issue date: 3/5/09
David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, painted a chilling picture of our country's future at a Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS)-hosted speech on Tuesday.
Sanger discussed issues dealt with in his recently published book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, which enumerates the various obstacles Obama will face in the world left behind by the Bush Administration and the War in Iraq.
"[The Inheritance]s' central argument is that . . . the real cost of Iraq was an opportunity cost," Sanger said. "It was a cost to being able to pay attention to larger threats while we were occupying. We lost out on a chance to pursue greater opportunities, opportunities that couldn't be addressed by the top leadership in the United States, who were heavily wrapped up in trying to figure out how to manage the war. Most governments cannot pursue multiple endeavors at one time."
Sanger posited that the Bush Administration's involvement in Iraq may have made the United States less nationally secure, rather than more so.
"If in fact the objective in Iraq was to make us safer by finding weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, and if it was to spread democracy and America's influence all over the world, then it significantly failed," Sanger said. "But more importantly, we lost the opportunity to take on bigger challenges, and so now President Obama is left with a numbered list."
Sanger expressed concern that the financial crisis seems more prevalent on the minds of the American people than issues of national security.
He blamed Obama for the universal focus on the economy. In the struggle to fix and refigure the international community's dying financial system, the Obama administration could accidentally ignore rising tensions in Iran, Pakistan and North Korea.
"Afghanistan is perhaps the most vivid failure of [the Bush administration]," Sanger said. "Needless to say, the amount spent on reconstructing Afghanistan was a tiny fraction of capital that we spent on the Marshall Plan. In fact, it was a tiny fraction of the capital that we spent on the war in Iraq."
Sanger discussed issues dealt with in his recently published book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, which enumerates the various obstacles Obama will face in the world left behind by the Bush Administration and the War in Iraq.
"[The Inheritance]s' central argument is that . . . the real cost of Iraq was an opportunity cost," Sanger said. "It was a cost to being able to pay attention to larger threats while we were occupying. We lost out on a chance to pursue greater opportunities, opportunities that couldn't be addressed by the top leadership in the United States, who were heavily wrapped up in trying to figure out how to manage the war. Most governments cannot pursue multiple endeavors at one time."
Sanger posited that the Bush Administration's involvement in Iraq may have made the United States less nationally secure, rather than more so.
"If in fact the objective in Iraq was to make us safer by finding weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, and if it was to spread democracy and America's influence all over the world, then it significantly failed," Sanger said. "But more importantly, we lost the opportunity to take on bigger challenges, and so now President Obama is left with a numbered list."
Sanger expressed concern that the financial crisis seems more prevalent on the minds of the American people than issues of national security.
He blamed Obama for the universal focus on the economy. In the struggle to fix and refigure the international community's dying financial system, the Obama administration could accidentally ignore rising tensions in Iran, Pakistan and North Korea.
"Afghanistan is perhaps the most vivid failure of [the Bush administration]," Sanger said. "Needless to say, the amount spent on reconstructing Afghanistan was a tiny fraction of capital that we spent on the Marshall Plan. In fact, it was a tiny fraction of the capital that we spent on the war in Iraq."
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