A quote from Tony Blair at Davos:
"Being prime minister of Britain means having to go around the world apologizing to everybody."
Would that that were true! But now that we've decided that it would be great to take up many of the English imperial cockups and make them our own, maybe it will be a U.S. president traveling around the globe saying this sort of thing someday. Ugh.
George Kennan had some views with which I disagree, on topics from universal suffrage to energy independence to the implications of technological innovation. But I think our foreign policy commentariat today could learn a lot by re-reading their George Kennan, both in terms of how to write English prose, and in terms of looking at foreign policy not as high-schoolers look at playing Stratego late at night, but as statesmen look at the burdens of their awful responsibility. Kennan's writing was, in almost every case, characterized foremost by a fundamental decency and candor that was uniquely American. That decent character and candor are lost almost completely in today's discussion. One doesn't see writing (or thinking) like this much in contemporary American foreign policy commentary. With respect to Israel-Palestine, Kennan wrote, it was essential to
bring about an early clarification--not just vis-a-vis the Israelis themselves but also vis-a-vis the Arabs--of the limits of our responsibility for Israeli policy. We have allowed the impression to become established throughout the entire region that we have it in our power to make the Israelis do almost anything we want, and that this being the case, we are really responsible for Israeli policy. This assumption is reflected in a host of Arab statements. It is, of course, wholly incorrect. Not only can we not dictate to the Israelis, who are very well aware of the strength of their bargaining power vis-a-vis us, but it is a real question whether we ought to do it even if we could. (More about that in a moment.)
[,,,]
[W]e have allowed ourselves to be maneuvered into a position where each of the two parties believes it can use us for its own ends, where each has the impression that it is primarily through us that its desiderata can be achieved, with the result that we are always first to be blamed, no matter whose ox is gored; and all this in a situtation where we actually have very little influence with either party. Seldom, surely, can a great power have got itself into a more unsound and unnecessary position.
[...]
I stand firmly with [George] Ball on the need for an attempt to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union with relation to the larger problems of the region, but not on the details of a possible Arab-Israeli settlement. That, it seems to me, should be left for direct negotiation between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Our own role should be confined to assuring that the Israelis are strong enough militarily so that the idea of crushing them by force of arms does not offer promising prospects to anybody, and so that they have an adequate measure of bargaining power in any negotiations on these subjects they may enter into. But we should not try to tell them, or the Arabs, what the terms of a settlement should be. It is they, after all, not we, who would have to live with any settlement that might be achieved. Many of us can think, I am sure, of concessions which, in our personal opinion, it would be wise for the Israelis to make; but for the United States government to take the responsibility of urging them to make such concessions is quite another matter. There are many who would think, for example, that it would be wise for them to give up the Golan Heights. They may of course be right. But how can we be sure? What would our responsibility be if we urged this upon them and it turned out to be disastrous?
From The Cloud of Danger, 1977.
For those happening back by these parts and with interest, I reviewed Richard Betts' recent book on intelligence in the Fall 2007 issue of the Cato Journal. I didn't have the space to get into the main area of disagreement with the book--what I think is Professor Betts' undue faith that intelligence gathered by the federal government on Americans can be effectively cordoned off and would not be abused--but I hope the review is of use regardless. Here's my concluding paragraph:
The question becomes whether the public will blame policymakers for their mishandling of the national security portfolio rather than blaming the intelligence community for their inability to effectively support the policy. Given that the policy community has demonstrated its willingness to shift blame for policy failures onto the intelligence community, and given that the intelligence community has no political voice to rebut these accusations, it is easy to believe that a disproportionate share of the blame will continue to fall at the feet of the intelligence community. With such a political backdrop, and with the community struggling to adapt to recent reforms and simultaneously fighting enemies outside, innocent, and inherent, it should not be surprising if the intelligence process continues to produce results that fall well short of expectations.
I sometimes worry that since I've spent almost a decade in DC and vigorously oppose gratuitous American military intervention, my relatives and friends back in the Midwest worry that I've transformed into an East Coast, shrugging agnostic liberal. In part as a way to reassure them (and myself), I have to admit chuckling at my friend Matt Yglesias' recent exploration of how, in the context of Romney's "I'm not a cult member" speech the other day, "Mormon emphasis on Gethsemane rather than the crucification is not a trivial theological difference." (emphasis mine)
On an unrelated note, how did I never catch this article before? Leave it to The Onion to speak volumes in 99 words. 10 years in advance.
Fareed Zakaria makes the case that we could deter a nuclear Iran, while highlighting the neoconservatives' poor track record of magnifying threats, from when they pooh-poohed detente and Reagan's engagement with Gorbachev to the present day. Ol' Poddy really comes off as a one-note-Johnny with the whole Fallacy of '39 riff.
Point, Zakaria.
This book, astonishingly, holds the following sales rankings on Amazon in these categories:
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #42 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories:
This one holds these rankings:
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #238 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories:
Yglesias points to this Daniel Byman/Kenneth Pollack idea as evidence that the DC Foreign Policy Community hadn't done much thinking about postwar Iraq. Byman and Pollack
envisioned "as many as 200,000 troops" that "should be replaced by a multinational force of 50,000 to 100,000 troops, including American and foreign forces" within one or two years.
However, if you look to the longer Washington Quarterly article (.pdf) from which the DLC piece was extracted, it gets worse. A lot worse:
By leading a multinational force of initially at least 100,000 troops with a strong mandate to act throughout Iraq, the United States and its coalition partners will have an excellent prospect of ensuring the degree of security necessary for a successful transition to democracy. In essence, the goal for the U.S.-led peacekeeping force would be to ensure that no group or individual uses violence for political advantage. International security forces will reassure Iraq’s Shi‘a and Kurdish communities that repression at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis is at an end. Equally important, the presence of these foreign troops would reassure Iraqi Sunnis that the end of their monopoly on power does not mean their persecution and repression, minimizing their incentives to oppose the process. The presence of multinational troops could prevent small incidents from snowballing and thus could help create the expectation of peace within Iraq—an instrumental factor in making peace a reality.
Such a U.S.-led security force would likely affect all aspects of political transition profoundly and discourage, if not eliminate, most efforts to subvert the process by, most obviously, preventing the cancellation or disruption of elections and other elements of democratic institution-building. Preventing hate speech, warmongering, and chauvinism will be more challenging, but tremendous room for influence still exists. By ensuring domestic security and deterring foreign aggression, leaders will find playing on people’s fears to gain power far more difficult.
Still, try challenging this sort of thinking and getting an op-ed placed in the New York Times or Washington Post. I say my predictions database idea looks better and better all the time. And not as a "gotcha" vehicle, but rather to seriously put our reputations on the line, which hopefully could get us to more actually serious thinking about the implications of our policy choices.
Interestingly, Michael O'Hanlon, in his interview with Glenn Greenwald, appears to agree:
what I would say is over a several year time horizon is that I think I've had a good track record, but certainly not a perfect one, and I think that to the extent that people would be asked to believe me just based on my own credibility, I don't think I've been so infallible that that should be expected of people. In fact, as an academic who always likes to go back to the evidence myself, I don't tend to think that anybody in any walk of life should get a free pass just based on their personal reputation. So, that's one more way of saying that I think it's only fair that there be scrutiny of people's record.
As I wrote in TNI:
Predicting the future is hard, and if nothing else, pundits are experts at explaining why their failed predictions are somebody else’s fault. It may be the case that even the best experts rarely make accurate predictions of important events. But the only way to better our predictions in the future is to learn not just who gets things right, but why. Putting our reputations where our mouths are would teach us a great deal.
So: How can we operationalize this?
"Why we're not at war with them is a little bit of a mystery."
-Max Boot on Iran and Syria
"If we let a caliphate take over the world, we are not going to live in freedom."
-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, on the floor of the Senate, debating Iraq
Somehow I had missed this report:
WASHINGTON, DC—Departing from his usual hopeful rhetoric during a question-and-answer session with reporters in the White House Rose Garden, President Bush suggested Tuesday that the war in Iraq has not been successful because the nation's armed forces are "just not very good."
"When the decision was made to liberate Iraq, I was going on what my advisers were telling me and what everyone has said for nearly a century—that the U.S. military is the best in the world," Bush said. "But if that were the case, and we did have the most powerful army, navy, marines, and air force on the globe, we would be winning, right?"
The president admitted that he'd been toying with the idea that a thorough lack of quality in personnel, from the top U.S. commander to the lowest-ranked private, is the only way to account for the colossal failure in Iraq, given that everything on the administrative side of the war has been carried out with the utmost care and precision.
"I know the folks on our end didn't drop the ball," Bush said. "The civilian oversight of this war and the plan of attack has been brilliant. There's no doubt about that in my mind. Hate to say it, but maybe our men and women in uniform just aren't what they're cracked up to be."
[...]
Bush said that in the past year he has had much occasion to think about the U.S. military's role in history, which, he recently was forced to conclude, is "overrated." He traced the roots of the misperception back to the nation's victory in World War II.
"We haven't really flat-out won a war since then, and you have to admit even that one was pretty close," the president said.
Continued Bush: "We pretty much have a 3-4 record in terms of important wars, and that's being generous, because I'm counting the Civil War as a victory. We got absolutely killed in Vietnam, which was another war where the leadership at home did a fine job, only to be let down by the troops. Not quite sure what happened in Korea. And I thought we won the first Gulf War, but apparently we didn't, because we're still there."
Shortly after the press conference, the White House announced that an advisory panel comprised of former officials from both Bush administrations and of private military contractors would be formed to devise effective solutions to problem areas in the nation's defense, namely the quality of the soldiers. Some of the likely recommendations include toughening recruitment standards so that not just anyone can enlist, and offering swift advancement opportunities for troops who show less dependence on the support current forces seem to constantly require from the American people. The panel is also expected to recommend that the nation enter into additional costly overseas conflicts as a way for the military to hone its combat skills.
Also, this.
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