March 24, 2008 Issue Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
The Right Choice?
The conservative case for Barack Obama by Andrew J. Bacevich
Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination come November, principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives— and the state of the conservative movement— they could do worse. Granted, when it comes to defining exactly what authentic conservatism entails, considerable disagreement exists even (or especially) among conservatives themselves. My own definition emphasizes the following:
• a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;
• a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;
• veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation;
• a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;
• respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;
• a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.
Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion. During the period since 1980, certain faux conservatives— especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire— have prospered. But conservatism as such has not. The presidency of George W. Bush illustrates the point. In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush’s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans “safe,” he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution.
Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles. As with every Republican leader since Reagan, President Bush has routinely expressed his support for traditional values. He portrays himself as pro-life and pro-family. He offers testimonials to old-fashioned civic virtues. Yet apart from sporting an American flag lapel-pin, he has done little to promote these values. If anything, the reverse is true. In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.
Should conservatives hold President Bush accountable for the nation’s cultural crisis? Of course not. The pursuit of instant gratification, the compulsion to accumulate, and the exaltation of celebrity that have become central to the American way of life predate this administration and derive from forces that lie far beyond the control of any president. Yet conservatives should fault the president and his party for pretending that they are seriously committed to curbing or reversing such tendencies. They might also blame themselves for failing to see the GOP’s cultural agenda as contrived and cynical.
Finally, there is President Bush’s misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.
For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it is. Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.
Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation. The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home. The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.
So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival. To appreciate that possibility requires seeing the Iraq War in perspective. As an episode in modern military history, Iraq qualifies at best as a very small war. Yet the ripples from this small war will extend far into the future, with remembrance of the event likely to have greater significance than the event itself. How Americans choose to incorporate Iraq into the nation’s historical narrative will either affirm our post-Cold War trajectory toward empire or create opportunities to set a saner course.
The neoconservatives understand this. If history renders a negative verdict on Iraq, that judgment will discredit the doctrine of preventive war. The “freedom agenda” will command as much authority as the domino theory. Advocates of “World War IV” will be treated with the derision they deserve. The claim that open-ended “global war” offers the proper antidote to Islamic radicalism will become subject to long overdue reconsideration. Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes. This explains the intensity with which they proclaim that, even with the fighting in Iraq entering its sixth year, we are now “winning” —as if war were an athletic contest in which nothing matters except the final score.
The neoconservatives brazenly ignore or minimize all that we have flung away in lives, dollars, political influence, moral standing, and lost opportunities. They have to: once acknowledged, those costs make the folly of the entire neoconservative project apparent. All those confident manifestos calling for the United States to liberate the world’s oppressed, exercise benign global hegemony, and extend forever the “unipolar moment” end up getting filed under dumb ideas. Yet history’s judgment of the Iraq War will affect matters well beyond the realm of foreign policy. As was true over 40 years ago when the issue was Vietnam, how we remember Iraq will have large political and even cultural implications.
As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can “keep us safe.” Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government. Above all, there is this: the Iraq War represents the ultimate manifestation of the American expectation that the exercise of power abroad offers a corrective to whatever ailments afflict us at home. Rather than setting our own house in order, we insist on the world accommodating itself to our requirements. The problem is not that we are profligate or self-absorbed; it is that others are obstinate and bigoted. Therefore, they must change so that our own habits will remain beyond scrutiny. Of all the obstacles to a revival of genuine conservatism, this absence of self-awareness constitutes the greatest. As long as we refuse to see ourselves as we really are, the status quo will persist, and conservative values will continue to be marginalized.
Here, too, recognition that the Iraq War has been a fool’s errand— that cheap oil, the essential lubricant of the American way of life, is gone for good— may have a salutary effect. Acknowledging failure just might open the door to self-reflection. None of these concerns number among those that inspired Barack Obama’s run for the White House. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office. Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama’s age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.
Whether conservatives will be able to seize the opportunities created by his ascent remains to be seen. Theirs will not be the only ideas on offer. A repudiation of the Iraq War and all that it signifies will rejuvenate the far Left as well. In the ensuing clash of visions, there is no guaranteeing that the conservative critique will prevail. But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation’s heedless march toward empire will continue. So, too, inevitably, will its embrace of Leviathan. Whether snoozing in front of their TVs or cheering on the troops, the American people will remain oblivious to the fate that awaits them. For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.
_________________________________
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His next book, The Limits of Power, will be published in August.
Reflections from news and commentary of the day
Subscribe To
Posts
All Comments
Monday, March 31, 2008
Mangled rationale for bigger defense budget by Winslow Wheeler
The New York Post has re-run an argument in the Washington Times from the Heritage Foundation's James Carafano that argues we should increase the defense budget because modern defense technology - like civilian technology - brings vast performance improvements. He argues we should expect to pay more for military hardware, just as we do for civilian technology, such as entertainment electronics. It is a superficially facile argument based on misinformation that so easily passes in Washington DC as informed insight. In this case, it's a double barrel of ignorance: both on economics and technology. A commentary I wrote after this pained logic appeared in the Washington Times was today released by Defense News, just in time to address the re-run in the New York Post.
This commentary "Getting What We Pay For? Mangled Technology at Gigantic Cost" can be found at http://defensenews.va.newsmemory.com/default.php?type=&token=e88c12e66111e7ec1d5c5631645fed36&, or just below.
The Pentagon's budget is now bigger than at any point since World War II as measured in constant 2008 dollars.
Nonetheless, some want more stuffing. They want the money not for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but for the so-called baseline, non-war budget.
Some adopt arguments that destroy their own case. Examining them explains how the Pentagon fails to give us a war-winning, combat-ready military. James Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argued Feb. 21 in the Washington Times , "In Defense of Defense Spending," that "Comparing the cost of today's military to what America spent to equip and deploy GIs against the Nazis is like comparing today's home entertainment center — plasma-screen, surround-sound HDTV with PlayStation 3 and Wii — to Harry Truman's Philco Radio. Sure, to day's system costs a lot more. But look what you're getting." A typical example is the F-22 fighter. It may cost more, but it is also a superb fighter, the argument goes.
According to Wikipedia, Harry Truman's Philco radio console "ran into the $500-$800 range." Today, at Circuit City, a top-of-the-line HDTV runs about $3,800; a good surround-sound, about $1,800. The PlayStation 3 and Wii are $400 and $250 respectively.
Add a DVD player and a year of broadband TV service for $200 and $600, respectively.
That makes $7,050 for the "lot more" cost of the superb, modern home theater compared with Harry Truman's dowdy Philco console.
According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to compensate for the change in the value of the dollar from 1945 to today, the 1945 price should be multiplied by 11.9. That "$500-$800 range" for Harry Truman's Philco calculates to $6,000-$9,500 today.
In other words, if we adjust for inflation, weapons today should cost — very roughly — what they cost in 1945, at most 30 percent more. Of course, the advance in technology should bring a vast improvement in performance.
Now, let's run the price comparison for fighter aircraft. The newest thing in 1945 was the Lockheed P-80 jet, the most expensive fighter Harry Truman could buy. In 1945, the P-80 cost $110,000. Using the OMB index to convert the dollars, we get $1,309,000.
Today's F-22 is a little pricier.
The 184 F-22s the Air Force is now buying will cost $65.3 billion in contemporary dollars. That's $355 million per copy. That's not exactly in the price neighborhood of the inflation-adjusted P-80. In fact, it's in a whole different universe. It's a multiple of 273.
We should not pretend that free market inflation and technology improvement is an excuse for today's huge defense budgets. While commercial prices have barely grown in inflation-adjusted terms and brought gigantic performance improvements, military prices have grown astronomically.
A defense process so grossly inefficient that it can run up weapon costs 273 times faster than inflation reeks not of the commercial market but of socialism and bureaucracies that breed incestuously ad infinitum.
And what about performance improvements? Does the cost of the F-22, even if astronomical, really help the Air Force win? A 273fold improvement in capability is unreasonable to expect, but is it worth buying?
On the purely technical level, the F-22 can fly more than three times the speed of the P-80 and almost twice as high. It has other special characteristics (a reduced signature against some radars at some angles and long-range sensors and missiles, and more) that the P-80's creators were incapable of designing.
However, there are consequences to the gigantic price.
The F-22 force is too small. Even if the Air Force gets the additional 200 it wants, the United States will have the smallest tactical fighter inventory since World War II.
The F-22 makes our fighter force too old. When the last F-22 is bought, our shriveled fighter inventory will be — on average — older than at any previous point in history.
F-22 costs are strangling pilot training. Combat data repeatedly demonstrate that pilot skill is much more important than technical differences in fighters to determine who lives and who dies in an aerial fight. To help pay for the F-22's gigantic cost, the Air Force has shrunk its own training budget. F-22 pilots now get a totally inadequate 10 to 12 hours of air combat training per month.
Twice that amount would be barely sufficient.
But even worse, the technology in the F-22 may be more analogous to 8-track audiotapes. It depends on the efficacy of a technological road that has not proved itself in real war.
The beyond-visual-range, radar-based air war the F-22 is built to fight has not been proved effective in actual combat involving more than a very few aircraft. Moreover, some serious experts, including the designers of the highly successful F-15, F-16 and A-10, argue that the F-22 is a huge performance disappointment.
The thinking behind the F-22 gives us massive problems and a bloated budget. Spending more will only make things worse. We need to demand a less bloated budget, and more importantly, radically new thinking about how it all goes together. ■
By Winslow Wheeler , director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, Washington, and the co-author of "Military Reform."
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
winslowwheeler@msn.com
This commentary "Getting What We Pay For? Mangled Technology at Gigantic Cost" can be found at http://defensenews.va.newsmemory.com/default.php?type=&token=e88c12e66111e7ec1d5c5631645fed36&, or just below.
The Pentagon's budget is now bigger than at any point since World War II as measured in constant 2008 dollars.
Nonetheless, some want more stuffing. They want the money not for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but for the so-called baseline, non-war budget.
Some adopt arguments that destroy their own case. Examining them explains how the Pentagon fails to give us a war-winning, combat-ready military. James Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argued Feb. 21 in the Washington Times , "In Defense of Defense Spending," that "Comparing the cost of today's military to what America spent to equip and deploy GIs against the Nazis is like comparing today's home entertainment center — plasma-screen, surround-sound HDTV with PlayStation 3 and Wii — to Harry Truman's Philco Radio. Sure, to day's system costs a lot more. But look what you're getting." A typical example is the F-22 fighter. It may cost more, but it is also a superb fighter, the argument goes.
According to Wikipedia, Harry Truman's Philco radio console "ran into the $500-$800 range." Today, at Circuit City, a top-of-the-line HDTV runs about $3,800; a good surround-sound, about $1,800. The PlayStation 3 and Wii are $400 and $250 respectively.
Add a DVD player and a year of broadband TV service for $200 and $600, respectively.
That makes $7,050 for the "lot more" cost of the superb, modern home theater compared with Harry Truman's dowdy Philco console.
According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to compensate for the change in the value of the dollar from 1945 to today, the 1945 price should be multiplied by 11.9. That "$500-$800 range" for Harry Truman's Philco calculates to $6,000-$9,500 today.
In other words, if we adjust for inflation, weapons today should cost — very roughly — what they cost in 1945, at most 30 percent more. Of course, the advance in technology should bring a vast improvement in performance.
Now, let's run the price comparison for fighter aircraft. The newest thing in 1945 was the Lockheed P-80 jet, the most expensive fighter Harry Truman could buy. In 1945, the P-80 cost $110,000. Using the OMB index to convert the dollars, we get $1,309,000.
Today's F-22 is a little pricier.
The 184 F-22s the Air Force is now buying will cost $65.3 billion in contemporary dollars. That's $355 million per copy. That's not exactly in the price neighborhood of the inflation-adjusted P-80. In fact, it's in a whole different universe. It's a multiple of 273.
We should not pretend that free market inflation and technology improvement is an excuse for today's huge defense budgets. While commercial prices have barely grown in inflation-adjusted terms and brought gigantic performance improvements, military prices have grown astronomically.
A defense process so grossly inefficient that it can run up weapon costs 273 times faster than inflation reeks not of the commercial market but of socialism and bureaucracies that breed incestuously ad infinitum.
And what about performance improvements? Does the cost of the F-22, even if astronomical, really help the Air Force win? A 273fold improvement in capability is unreasonable to expect, but is it worth buying?
On the purely technical level, the F-22 can fly more than three times the speed of the P-80 and almost twice as high. It has other special characteristics (a reduced signature against some radars at some angles and long-range sensors and missiles, and more) that the P-80's creators were incapable of designing.
However, there are consequences to the gigantic price.
The F-22 force is too small. Even if the Air Force gets the additional 200 it wants, the United States will have the smallest tactical fighter inventory since World War II.
The F-22 makes our fighter force too old. When the last F-22 is bought, our shriveled fighter inventory will be — on average — older than at any previous point in history.
F-22 costs are strangling pilot training. Combat data repeatedly demonstrate that pilot skill is much more important than technical differences in fighters to determine who lives and who dies in an aerial fight. To help pay for the F-22's gigantic cost, the Air Force has shrunk its own training budget. F-22 pilots now get a totally inadequate 10 to 12 hours of air combat training per month.
Twice that amount would be barely sufficient.
But even worse, the technology in the F-22 may be more analogous to 8-track audiotapes. It depends on the efficacy of a technological road that has not proved itself in real war.
The beyond-visual-range, radar-based air war the F-22 is built to fight has not been proved effective in actual combat involving more than a very few aircraft. Moreover, some serious experts, including the designers of the highly successful F-15, F-16 and A-10, argue that the F-22 is a huge performance disappointment.
The thinking behind the F-22 gives us massive problems and a bloated budget. Spending more will only make things worse. We need to demand a less bloated budget, and more importantly, radically new thinking about how it all goes together. ■
By Winslow Wheeler , director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, Washington, and the co-author of "Military Reform."
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
winslowwheeler@msn.com
Russia challenges US in the Islamic world by M K Bhadrakumar
Russia chalenges US in the Islamic world
For the second year in a row, Russia this month attended the annual summit of the Organization of Islamic Conference as an observer. This signals Moscow's active extension of its involvement in the Middle East by directly challenging the US's traditional dominance of the region. The "peace dividend" of this growing friendship with the Islamic world also translates into hard dollars - from mega projects in Egypt and Saudi Arabia - under the US's nose - to renewed oil interests in Iraq. - M K Bhadrakumar (Mar 28, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JC29Ag01.html
For the second year in a row, Russia this month attended the annual summit of the Organization of Islamic Conference as an observer. This signals Moscow's active extension of its involvement in the Middle East by directly challenging the US's traditional dominance of the region. The "peace dividend" of this growing friendship with the Islamic world also translates into hard dollars - from mega projects in Egypt and Saudi Arabia - under the US's nose - to renewed oil interests in Iraq. - M K Bhadrakumar (Mar 28, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JC29Ag01.html
Sunday, March 30, 2008
U.N. Taps American Jewish Critic of Israel as Rights Expert
http://www.forward.com/articles/13037
U.N. Taps American Jewish Critic of Israel as Rights Expert
By Marc Perelman
Thu. Mar 27, 2008
As if relations between Israel and the United Nations had not deteriorated enough, a new cause for strain arose this week when a prominent American Jewish law professor, who accuses Israel of genocidal policies in the Palestinian territories, was named by the world body's top human rights entity to monitor the situation in the Palestinian territories.
Richard Falk, an emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University, was appointed on March 26 by the U.N.'s Human Rights Council to become the next special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. He will replace South Africa's John Dugard, a staunch critic of Israel whose six-year term is about to end. On the same day, the council elected another departing special rapporteur — and nemesis of the Israeli government — Switzerland's Jean Ziegler, to an advisory position.
Pro-Israel advocates have for years criticized the human rights apparatus of the U.N. for its perceived anti-Israel bias, and the latest nominations are likely to fuel their disenchantment with the U.N.'s recent vows to become more even-handed. That effort appeared to take a step forward with the creation in 2006 of the Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, but the new appointments are seen as a step in the other direction.
"Unfortunately it seems that right now, the council is not missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity," said Sybil Kessler, director of U.N. affairs for B'nai B'rith International. "Change on the margins feels ever more challenging when member states select and promote experts with obviously biased views toward Israel…. The struggle for change has just gotten that much harder, I am sad to say."
Falk's appointment was reached by a consensus of the Human Rights Council's 47 members, despite efforts by Jewish groups to have Canada and the European Union publicly oppose his nomination. The E.U. remained silent, and Canada did not block the consensus, choosing instead to issue a statement dissociating itself from the choice. The United States, which is not a member of the council, also took the floor to criticize Falk's published writings.
The terms of Falk's position, which was created in 1993, are to investigate "Israel's violations of the principles and bases of international law" while excluding Palestinian actions. No such mandate exists to examine Palestinian violations.
Falk, who is also a visiting professor at the University of California, has an extensive written record on the Israel-Palestinian issue, most of it critical of Jerusalem's policies over the past 40 years. A recent article that has particularly irked his pro-Israeli critics is titled "Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust."
In it, Falk writes that "it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as 'holocaust.'"
After describing the Nazi horrors, he asked: "Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty."
The Human Rights Council overwhelmingly elected Ziegler, a Swiss socialist and university professor, to its 18-member advisory committee. He garnered 40 out of 47 votes. As the U.N. expert on the right to food for the past seven years, Ziegler was a fierce critic of Israel and the United States, prompting several Jewish groups to call for his resignation.
U.N. Taps American Jewish Critic of Israel as Rights Expert
By Marc Perelman
Thu. Mar 27, 2008
As if relations between Israel and the United Nations had not deteriorated enough, a new cause for strain arose this week when a prominent American Jewish law professor, who accuses Israel of genocidal policies in the Palestinian territories, was named by the world body's top human rights entity to monitor the situation in the Palestinian territories.
Richard Falk, an emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University, was appointed on March 26 by the U.N.'s Human Rights Council to become the next special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. He will replace South Africa's John Dugard, a staunch critic of Israel whose six-year term is about to end. On the same day, the council elected another departing special rapporteur — and nemesis of the Israeli government — Switzerland's Jean Ziegler, to an advisory position.
Pro-Israel advocates have for years criticized the human rights apparatus of the U.N. for its perceived anti-Israel bias, and the latest nominations are likely to fuel their disenchantment with the U.N.'s recent vows to become more even-handed. That effort appeared to take a step forward with the creation in 2006 of the Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, but the new appointments are seen as a step in the other direction.
"Unfortunately it seems that right now, the council is not missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity," said Sybil Kessler, director of U.N. affairs for B'nai B'rith International. "Change on the margins feels ever more challenging when member states select and promote experts with obviously biased views toward Israel…. The struggle for change has just gotten that much harder, I am sad to say."
Falk's appointment was reached by a consensus of the Human Rights Council's 47 members, despite efforts by Jewish groups to have Canada and the European Union publicly oppose his nomination. The E.U. remained silent, and Canada did not block the consensus, choosing instead to issue a statement dissociating itself from the choice. The United States, which is not a member of the council, also took the floor to criticize Falk's published writings.
The terms of Falk's position, which was created in 1993, are to investigate "Israel's violations of the principles and bases of international law" while excluding Palestinian actions. No such mandate exists to examine Palestinian violations.
Falk, who is also a visiting professor at the University of California, has an extensive written record on the Israel-Palestinian issue, most of it critical of Jerusalem's policies over the past 40 years. A recent article that has particularly irked his pro-Israeli critics is titled "Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust."
In it, Falk writes that "it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as 'holocaust.'"
After describing the Nazi horrors, he asked: "Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty."
The Human Rights Council overwhelmingly elected Ziegler, a Swiss socialist and university professor, to its 18-member advisory committee. He garnered 40 out of 47 votes. As the U.N. expert on the right to food for the past seven years, Ziegler was a fierce critic of Israel and the United States, prompting several Jewish groups to call for his resignation.
The Right Choice? The Conservative case for Barack Obama by Andrew Bacevich
The American Conservative
The Right Choice?
The conservative case for Barack Obama
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives—and the state of the conservative movement—they could do worse.
Granted, when it comes to defining exactly what authentic conservatism entails, considerable disagreement exists even (or especially) among conservatives themselves. My own definition emphasizes the following:
* a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;
* a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;
* veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation;
* a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;
* respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;
* a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.
Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion. During the period since 1980, certain faux conservatives—especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire—have prospered. But conservatism as such has not.
The presidency of George W. Bush illustrates the point. In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush’s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans “safe,” he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution. Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles.
As with every Republican leader since Reagan, President Bush has routinely expressed his support for traditional values. He portrays himself as pro-life and pro-family. He offers testimonials to old-fashioned civic virtues. Yet apart from sporting an American flag lapel-pin, he has done little to promote these values. If anything, the reverse is true. In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.
Should conservatives hold President Bush accountable for the nation’s cultural crisis? Of course not. The pursuit of instant gratification, the compulsion to accumulate, and the exaltation of celebrity that have become central to the American way of life predate this administration and derive from forces that lie far beyond the control of any president. Yet conservatives should fault the president and his party for pretending that they are seriously committed to curbing or reversing such tendencies. They might also blame themselves for failing to see the GOP’s cultural agenda as contrived and cynical.
Finally, there is President Bush’s misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.
For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it is.
Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.
Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.
The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home. The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.
So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.
To appreciate that possibility requires seeing the Iraq War in perspective. As an episode in modern military history, Iraq qualifies at best as a very small war. Yet the ripples from this small war will extend far into the future, with remembrance of the event likely to have greater significance than the event itself. How Americans choose to incorporate Iraq into the nation’s historical narrative will either affirm our post-Cold War trajectory toward empire or create opportunities to set a saner course.
The neoconservatives understand this. If history renders a negative verdict on Iraq, that judgment will discredit the doctrine of preventive war. The “freedom agenda” will command as much authority as the domino theory. Advocates of “World War IV” will be treated with the derision they deserve. The claim that open-ended “global war” offers the proper antidote to Islamic radicalism will become subject to long overdue reconsideration.
Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes. This explains the intensity with which they proclaim that, even with the fighting in Iraq entering its sixth year, we are now “winning”—as if war were an athletic contest in which nothing matters except the final score. The neoconservatives brazenly ignore or minimize all that we have flung away in lives, dollars, political influence, moral standing, and lost opportunities. They have to: once acknowledged, those costs make the folly of the entire neoconservative project apparent. All those confident manifestos calling for the United States to liberate the world’s oppressed, exercise benign global hegemony, and extend forever the “unipolar moment” end up getting filed under dumb ideas.
Yet history’s judgment of the Iraq War will affect matters well beyond the realm of foreign policy. As was true over 40 years ago when the issue was Vietnam, how we remember Iraq will have large political and even cultural implications.
As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can “keep us safe.” Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government.
Above all, there is this: the Iraq War represents the ultimate manifestation of the American expectation that the exercise of power abroad offers a corrective to whatever ailments afflict us at home. Rather than setting our own house in order, we insist on the world accommodating itself to our requirements. The problem is not that we are profligate or self-absorbed; it is that others are obstinate and bigoted. Therefore, they must change so that our own habits will remain beyond scrutiny.
Of all the obstacles to a revival of genuine conservatism, this absence of self-awareness constitutes the greatest. As long as we refuse to see ourselves as we really are, the status quo will persist, and conservative values will continue to be marginalized. Here, too, recognition that the Iraq War has been a fool’s errand—that cheap oil, the essential lubricant of the American way of life, is gone for good—may have a salutary effect. Acknowledging failure just might open the door to self-reflection.
None of these concerns number among those that inspired Barack Obama’s run for the White House. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.
Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama’s age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.
Whether conservatives will be able to seize the opportunities created by his ascent remains to be seen. Theirs will not be the only ideas on offer. A repudiation of the Iraq War and all that it signifies will rejuvenate the far Left as well. In the ensuing clash of visions, there is no guaranteeing that the conservative critique will prevail.
But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation’s heedless march toward empire will continue. So, too, inevitably, will its embrace of Leviathan. Whether snoozing in front of their TVs or cheering on the troops, the American people will remain oblivious to the fate that awaits them.
For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.
_________________________________
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His next book, The Limits of Power, will be published in August.
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_03_24/article.html
The Right Choice?
The conservative case for Barack Obama
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives—and the state of the conservative movement—they could do worse.
Granted, when it comes to defining exactly what authentic conservatism entails, considerable disagreement exists even (or especially) among conservatives themselves. My own definition emphasizes the following:
* a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;
* a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;
* veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation;
* a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;
* respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;
* a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.
Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion. During the period since 1980, certain faux conservatives—especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire—have prospered. But conservatism as such has not.
The presidency of George W. Bush illustrates the point. In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush’s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans “safe,” he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution. Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles.
As with every Republican leader since Reagan, President Bush has routinely expressed his support for traditional values. He portrays himself as pro-life and pro-family. He offers testimonials to old-fashioned civic virtues. Yet apart from sporting an American flag lapel-pin, he has done little to promote these values. If anything, the reverse is true. In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.
Should conservatives hold President Bush accountable for the nation’s cultural crisis? Of course not. The pursuit of instant gratification, the compulsion to accumulate, and the exaltation of celebrity that have become central to the American way of life predate this administration and derive from forces that lie far beyond the control of any president. Yet conservatives should fault the president and his party for pretending that they are seriously committed to curbing or reversing such tendencies. They might also blame themselves for failing to see the GOP’s cultural agenda as contrived and cynical.
Finally, there is President Bush’s misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.
For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it is.
Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.
Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.
The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home. The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.
So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.
To appreciate that possibility requires seeing the Iraq War in perspective. As an episode in modern military history, Iraq qualifies at best as a very small war. Yet the ripples from this small war will extend far into the future, with remembrance of the event likely to have greater significance than the event itself. How Americans choose to incorporate Iraq into the nation’s historical narrative will either affirm our post-Cold War trajectory toward empire or create opportunities to set a saner course.
The neoconservatives understand this. If history renders a negative verdict on Iraq, that judgment will discredit the doctrine of preventive war. The “freedom agenda” will command as much authority as the domino theory. Advocates of “World War IV” will be treated with the derision they deserve. The claim that open-ended “global war” offers the proper antidote to Islamic radicalism will become subject to long overdue reconsideration.
Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes. This explains the intensity with which they proclaim that, even with the fighting in Iraq entering its sixth year, we are now “winning”—as if war were an athletic contest in which nothing matters except the final score. The neoconservatives brazenly ignore or minimize all that we have flung away in lives, dollars, political influence, moral standing, and lost opportunities. They have to: once acknowledged, those costs make the folly of the entire neoconservative project apparent. All those confident manifestos calling for the United States to liberate the world’s oppressed, exercise benign global hegemony, and extend forever the “unipolar moment” end up getting filed under dumb ideas.
Yet history’s judgment of the Iraq War will affect matters well beyond the realm of foreign policy. As was true over 40 years ago when the issue was Vietnam, how we remember Iraq will have large political and even cultural implications.
As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can “keep us safe.” Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government.
Above all, there is this: the Iraq War represents the ultimate manifestation of the American expectation that the exercise of power abroad offers a corrective to whatever ailments afflict us at home. Rather than setting our own house in order, we insist on the world accommodating itself to our requirements. The problem is not that we are profligate or self-absorbed; it is that others are obstinate and bigoted. Therefore, they must change so that our own habits will remain beyond scrutiny.
Of all the obstacles to a revival of genuine conservatism, this absence of self-awareness constitutes the greatest. As long as we refuse to see ourselves as we really are, the status quo will persist, and conservative values will continue to be marginalized. Here, too, recognition that the Iraq War has been a fool’s errand—that cheap oil, the essential lubricant of the American way of life, is gone for good—may have a salutary effect. Acknowledging failure just might open the door to self-reflection.
None of these concerns number among those that inspired Barack Obama’s run for the White House. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.
Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama’s age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.
Whether conservatives will be able to seize the opportunities created by his ascent remains to be seen. Theirs will not be the only ideas on offer. A repudiation of the Iraq War and all that it signifies will rejuvenate the far Left as well. In the ensuing clash of visions, there is no guaranteeing that the conservative critique will prevail.
But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation’s heedless march toward empire will continue. So, too, inevitably, will its embrace of Leviathan. Whether snoozing in front of their TVs or cheering on the troops, the American people will remain oblivious to the fate that awaits them.
For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.
_________________________________
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His next book, The Limits of Power, will be published in August.
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_03_24/article.html
Saturday, March 29, 2008
How to End the War by Zbigniew Brzezinski
A preview of a sage article by Dr Brzezinski on Iraq to appear in this Sunday's WP
washingtonpost.com
How to End the War
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sunday, March 30, 2008; B03
Both Democratic presidential candidates agree that the United States should end its combat mission in Iraq within 12 to 16 months of their inauguration. The Republican candidate has spoken of continuing the war, even for a hundred years, until "victory." The core issue of this campaign is thus a basic disagreement over the merits of the war and the benefits and costs of continuing it.
The case for U.S. disengagement from combat is compelling in its own right. But it must be matched by a comprehensive political and diplomatic effort to mitigate the destabilizing regional consequences of a war that the outgoing Bush administration started deliberately, justified demagogically and waged badly. (I write, of course, as a Democrat; while I prefer Sen. Barack Obama, I speak here for myself.)
The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for "staying the course" draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of "falling dominoes" that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.
Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush's obsessions with the removal of Saddam Hussein were worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars -- not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States' world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing -- the answer would have been an unequivocal "no."
Nor do the costs of this fiasco end there. The war has inflamed anti-American passions in the Middle East and South Asia while fragmenting Iraqi society and increasing the influence of Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Baghdad offers ample testimony that even the U.S.-installed government in Iraq is becoming susceptible to Iranian blandishments.
In brief, the war has become a national tragedy, an economic catastrophe, a regional disaster and a global boomerang for the United States. Ending the war is thus in the highest national interest.
Terminating U.S. combat operations will take more than a military decision. It will require arrangements with Iraqi leaders for a continued, residual U.S. capacity to provide emergency assistance in the event of an external threat (e.g., from Iran); it will also mean finding ways to provide continued U.S. support for the Iraqi armed forces as they cope with the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The decision to militarily disengage will also have to be accompanied by political and regional initiatives designed to guard against potential risks. We should fully discuss our decisions with Iraqi leaders, including those not residing in Baghdad's Green Zone, and we should hold talks on regional stability with all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran.
Contrary to Republican claims that our departure will mean calamity, a sensibly conducted disengagement will actually make Iraq more stable over the long term. The impasse in Shiite-Sunni relations is in large part the sour byproduct of the destructive U.S. occupation, which breeds Iraqi dependency even as it shatters Iraqi society. In this context, so highly reminiscent of the British colonial era, the longer we stay in Iraq, the less incentive various contending groups will have to compromise and the more reason simply to sit back. A serious dialogue with the Iraqi leaders about the forthcoming U.S. disengagement would shake them out of their stupor.
Terminating the U.S. war effort entails some risks, of course, but they are inescapable at this late date. Parts of Iraq are already self-governing, including Kurdistan, part of the Shiite south and some tribal areas in the Sunni center. U.S. military disengagement will accelerate Iraqi competition to more effectively control their territory, which may produce a phase of intensified inter-Iraqi conflicts. But that hazard is the unavoidable consequence of the prolonged U.S. occupation. The longer it lasts, the more difficult will it be for a viable Iraqi state ever to reemerge.
It is also important to recognize that most of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq has not been inspired by al-Qaeda. Locally based jihadist groups have gained strength only insofar as they have been able to identify themselves with the fight against a hated foreign occupier. As the occupation winds down and Iraqis take responsibility for internal security, al-Qaeda in Iraq will be left more isolated and less able to sustain itself. The end of the occupation will thus be a boon for the war on al-Qaeda, bringing to an end a misguided adventure that not only precipitated the appearance of al-Qaeda in Iraq but also diverted the United States from Afghanistan, where the original al-Qaeda threat grew and still persists.
Ending the U.S. military effort would also smooth the way for a broad U.S. initiative addressed to all of Iraq's neighbors. Some will remain reluctant to engage in any discussion as long as Washington appears determined to maintain indefinitely its occupation of Iraq. Therefore, at some stage in 2009, after the decision to disengage has been announced, a regional conference should be convened to promote regional stability, border control and other security arrangements, as well as regional economic development -- all of which would help mitigate the unavoidable risks connected with U.S. disengagement.
Since Iraq's neighbors are vulnerable to intensified ethnic and religious conflicts spilling over from Iraq, all of them -- albeit for different reasons -- are likely to be interested. More distant Arab states such as Egypt, Morocco or Algeria might also take part, and some of them might be willing to provide peacekeeping forces to Iraq once it is free of foreign occupation. In addition, we should consider a regional rehabilitation program designed to help Iraq recover and to relieve the burdens that Jordan and Syria, in particular, have shouldered by hosting more than 2 million Iraqi refugees.
The overall goal of a comprehensive U.S. strategy to undo the errors of recent years should be cooling down the Middle East, instead of heating it up. The "unipolar moment" that the Bush administration's zealots touted after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been squandered to generate a policy based on the unilateral use of force, military threats and occupation masquerading as democratization -- all of which pointlessly heated up tensions, fueled anti-colonial resentments and bred religious fanaticism. The long-range stability of the Middle East has been placed in increasing jeopardy.
Terminating the war in Iraq is the necessary first step to calming the Middle East, but other measures will be needed. It is in the U.S. interest to engage Iran in serious negotiations -- on both regional security and the nuclear challenge it poses. But such negotiations are unlikely as long as Washington's price of participation is unreciprocated concessions from Tehran. Threats to use force on Iran are also counterproductive since they tend to fuse Iranian nationalism with religious fanaticism.
Real progress in the badly stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process would also help soothe the region's religious and nationalist passions. But for such progress to take place, the United States must vigorously help the two sides start making the mutual concessions without which an historic compromise cannot be achieved. Peace between Israel and Palestine would be a giant step toward greater regional stability, and it would finally let both Israelis and Palestinians benefit from the Middle East's growing wealth.
We started this war rashly, but we must end our involvement responsibly. And end it we must. The alternative is a fear-driven policy paralysis that perpetuates the war -- to America's historic detriment.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. His most recent book is "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032702405_pf.html
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com
How to End the War
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sunday, March 30, 2008; B03
Both Democratic presidential candidates agree that the United States should end its combat mission in Iraq within 12 to 16 months of their inauguration. The Republican candidate has spoken of continuing the war, even for a hundred years, until "victory." The core issue of this campaign is thus a basic disagreement over the merits of the war and the benefits and costs of continuing it.
The case for U.S. disengagement from combat is compelling in its own right. But it must be matched by a comprehensive political and diplomatic effort to mitigate the destabilizing regional consequences of a war that the outgoing Bush administration started deliberately, justified demagogically and waged badly. (I write, of course, as a Democrat; while I prefer Sen. Barack Obama, I speak here for myself.)
The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for "staying the course" draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of "falling dominoes" that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.
Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush's obsessions with the removal of Saddam Hussein were worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars -- not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States' world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing -- the answer would have been an unequivocal "no."
Nor do the costs of this fiasco end there. The war has inflamed anti-American passions in the Middle East and South Asia while fragmenting Iraqi society and increasing the influence of Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Baghdad offers ample testimony that even the U.S.-installed government in Iraq is becoming susceptible to Iranian blandishments.
In brief, the war has become a national tragedy, an economic catastrophe, a regional disaster and a global boomerang for the United States. Ending the war is thus in the highest national interest.
Terminating U.S. combat operations will take more than a military decision. It will require arrangements with Iraqi leaders for a continued, residual U.S. capacity to provide emergency assistance in the event of an external threat (e.g., from Iran); it will also mean finding ways to provide continued U.S. support for the Iraqi armed forces as they cope with the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The decision to militarily disengage will also have to be accompanied by political and regional initiatives designed to guard against potential risks. We should fully discuss our decisions with Iraqi leaders, including those not residing in Baghdad's Green Zone, and we should hold talks on regional stability with all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran.
Contrary to Republican claims that our departure will mean calamity, a sensibly conducted disengagement will actually make Iraq more stable over the long term. The impasse in Shiite-Sunni relations is in large part the sour byproduct of the destructive U.S. occupation, which breeds Iraqi dependency even as it shatters Iraqi society. In this context, so highly reminiscent of the British colonial era, the longer we stay in Iraq, the less incentive various contending groups will have to compromise and the more reason simply to sit back. A serious dialogue with the Iraqi leaders about the forthcoming U.S. disengagement would shake them out of their stupor.
Terminating the U.S. war effort entails some risks, of course, but they are inescapable at this late date. Parts of Iraq are already self-governing, including Kurdistan, part of the Shiite south and some tribal areas in the Sunni center. U.S. military disengagement will accelerate Iraqi competition to more effectively control their territory, which may produce a phase of intensified inter-Iraqi conflicts. But that hazard is the unavoidable consequence of the prolonged U.S. occupation. The longer it lasts, the more difficult will it be for a viable Iraqi state ever to reemerge.
It is also important to recognize that most of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq has not been inspired by al-Qaeda. Locally based jihadist groups have gained strength only insofar as they have been able to identify themselves with the fight against a hated foreign occupier. As the occupation winds down and Iraqis take responsibility for internal security, al-Qaeda in Iraq will be left more isolated and less able to sustain itself. The end of the occupation will thus be a boon for the war on al-Qaeda, bringing to an end a misguided adventure that not only precipitated the appearance of al-Qaeda in Iraq but also diverted the United States from Afghanistan, where the original al-Qaeda threat grew and still persists.
Ending the U.S. military effort would also smooth the way for a broad U.S. initiative addressed to all of Iraq's neighbors. Some will remain reluctant to engage in any discussion as long as Washington appears determined to maintain indefinitely its occupation of Iraq. Therefore, at some stage in 2009, after the decision to disengage has been announced, a regional conference should be convened to promote regional stability, border control and other security arrangements, as well as regional economic development -- all of which would help mitigate the unavoidable risks connected with U.S. disengagement.
Since Iraq's neighbors are vulnerable to intensified ethnic and religious conflicts spilling over from Iraq, all of them -- albeit for different reasons -- are likely to be interested. More distant Arab states such as Egypt, Morocco or Algeria might also take part, and some of them might be willing to provide peacekeeping forces to Iraq once it is free of foreign occupation. In addition, we should consider a regional rehabilitation program designed to help Iraq recover and to relieve the burdens that Jordan and Syria, in particular, have shouldered by hosting more than 2 million Iraqi refugees.
The overall goal of a comprehensive U.S. strategy to undo the errors of recent years should be cooling down the Middle East, instead of heating it up. The "unipolar moment" that the Bush administration's zealots touted after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been squandered to generate a policy based on the unilateral use of force, military threats and occupation masquerading as democratization -- all of which pointlessly heated up tensions, fueled anti-colonial resentments and bred religious fanaticism. The long-range stability of the Middle East has been placed in increasing jeopardy.
Terminating the war in Iraq is the necessary first step to calming the Middle East, but other measures will be needed. It is in the U.S. interest to engage Iran in serious negotiations -- on both regional security and the nuclear challenge it poses. But such negotiations are unlikely as long as Washington's price of participation is unreciprocated concessions from Tehran. Threats to use force on Iran are also counterproductive since they tend to fuse Iranian nationalism with religious fanaticism.
Real progress in the badly stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process would also help soothe the region's religious and nationalist passions. But for such progress to take place, the United States must vigorously help the two sides start making the mutual concessions without which an historic compromise cannot be achieved. Peace between Israel and Palestine would be a giant step toward greater regional stability, and it would finally let both Israelis and Palestinians benefit from the Middle East's growing wealth.
We started this war rashly, but we must end our involvement responsibly. And end it we must. The alternative is a fear-driven policy paralysis that perpetuates the war -- to America's historic detriment.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. His most recent book is "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032702405_pf.html
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
Friday, March 28, 2008
Hothead McCain by Robert Dreyfuss
Hothead McCain
Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/dreyfuss
If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He's erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me," wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.
You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.
And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."
But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.
"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."
If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.
First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.
This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse." Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran's nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA's coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to "meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war." And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse "an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors," Scheunemann told The Nation.
But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn't understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. "You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency," he says. "I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA.... All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA." Told about McLaughlin's comments, Scheunemann says, "Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does."
The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. "They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat."
McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy toward Putin's Russia. "I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist.
"We need a new Western approach to...revanchist Russia," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, "The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia [sic] and Poland, and I don't care what [Putin's] objections are to it." And he's all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia--and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo's declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain's goal of expanding NATO provocative, to say the least. "McCain says [NATO] ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government," says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. "Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia."
Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.
"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."
Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.
More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of "regime change." Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. Like his fellow neocons, McCain touted what proved to be faked intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq. Echoing Vice President Cheney, McCain said on the eve of the war, "There's no doubt in my mind, once [Saddam] is gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." He pooh-poohed critics who argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war plan was too reliant on technology and too light on troops, saying, "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw...back in 1991." When Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, a month before the war started, that occupying Iraq would require far more troops, McCain was mute.
Today McCain portrays himself as a critic of how the war was fought, but his criticism did not emerge until long after it was clear that the United States faced a grueling insurgency. From the fall of 2003 onward, against a growing chorus of critics who called for US forces to withdraw, McCain repeatedly called for more troops to secure "victory." By late 2006, when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for pulling out all combat brigades within fifteen months, McCain, Lieberman and a hardy band of neocons, led by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and joined by Cheney, persuaded Bush to escalate the war instead. Asked if McCain directly lobbied Bush to reject the ISG's recommendations, a McCain aide says, "There were many encounters with the President's senior advisers and with the President on this issue." Fred Kagan, the surge's author and Robert Kagan's brother, told McClatchy Newspapers, "It was a very lonely time. He went out there for us."
In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.
When The Nation asked Scheunemann why US forces would have to stay in Iraq so long, he explicitly linked their presence to the entire Middle East. "Iraq might be stable, but what about the region?" he responded. "Other countries could be in turmoil; other countries could be threatening Iraq. It could be an external threat that we need to have troops there for, à la South Korea, à la Japan." He added, "I understand your readers may think it's some sort of malevolent imperialist conspiracy." Conspiracy or not, it's clear that McCain sees our presence in Iraq as a permanent extension of US power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
CONTINUED BELOW
McCain has made no secret of his belief that using force against Iran is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. "There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran," McCain said. "The regime must understand that they cannot win a showdown with the world." He supports tougher sanctions against Tehran, but critics note that implementing them would require Russia's consent. McCain's provocative anti-Russia stand, though, makes such a deal less than likely. And he rejects direct US-Iran talks.
In the end, McCain seems almost reflexively to favor the use of America's armed might. "He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options," says Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. Scion of admirals (his father and grandfather), a combat pilot in Vietnam who continued to believe long after that war that it might have been won if the US military had been allowed free rein, McCain presents the image of a warrior itching for battle. He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who'd like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.
"I'm an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson--I guess you'd now say Joe Lieberman--Democrat, and he's a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they're pretty close in their views, so substantively there's a lot of overlap between us," says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who's endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. "I think John's style is very TR-like. It's very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick."
We're still waiting for the "speaking softly" part. "There's going to be other wars," McCain warns. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars."
Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/dreyfuss
If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He's erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me," wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.
You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.
And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."
But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.
"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."
If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.
First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.
This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse." Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran's nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA's coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to "meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war." And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse "an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors," Scheunemann told The Nation.
But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn't understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. "You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency," he says. "I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA.... All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA." Told about McLaughlin's comments, Scheunemann says, "Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does."
The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. "They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat."
McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy toward Putin's Russia. "I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist.
"We need a new Western approach to...revanchist Russia," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, "The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia [sic] and Poland, and I don't care what [Putin's] objections are to it." And he's all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia--and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo's declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain's goal of expanding NATO provocative, to say the least. "McCain says [NATO] ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government," says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. "Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia."
Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.
"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."
Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.
More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of "regime change." Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. Like his fellow neocons, McCain touted what proved to be faked intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq. Echoing Vice President Cheney, McCain said on the eve of the war, "There's no doubt in my mind, once [Saddam] is gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." He pooh-poohed critics who argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war plan was too reliant on technology and too light on troops, saying, "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw...back in 1991." When Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, a month before the war started, that occupying Iraq would require far more troops, McCain was mute.
Today McCain portrays himself as a critic of how the war was fought, but his criticism did not emerge until long after it was clear that the United States faced a grueling insurgency. From the fall of 2003 onward, against a growing chorus of critics who called for US forces to withdraw, McCain repeatedly called for more troops to secure "victory." By late 2006, when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for pulling out all combat brigades within fifteen months, McCain, Lieberman and a hardy band of neocons, led by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and joined by Cheney, persuaded Bush to escalate the war instead. Asked if McCain directly lobbied Bush to reject the ISG's recommendations, a McCain aide says, "There were many encounters with the President's senior advisers and with the President on this issue." Fred Kagan, the surge's author and Robert Kagan's brother, told McClatchy Newspapers, "It was a very lonely time. He went out there for us."
In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.
When The Nation asked Scheunemann why US forces would have to stay in Iraq so long, he explicitly linked their presence to the entire Middle East. "Iraq might be stable, but what about the region?" he responded. "Other countries could be in turmoil; other countries could be threatening Iraq. It could be an external threat that we need to have troops there for, à la South Korea, à la Japan." He added, "I understand your readers may think it's some sort of malevolent imperialist conspiracy." Conspiracy or not, it's clear that McCain sees our presence in Iraq as a permanent extension of US power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
CONTINUED BELOW
McCain has made no secret of his belief that using force against Iran is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. "There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran," McCain said. "The regime must understand that they cannot win a showdown with the world." He supports tougher sanctions against Tehran, but critics note that implementing them would require Russia's consent. McCain's provocative anti-Russia stand, though, makes such a deal less than likely. And he rejects direct US-Iran talks.
In the end, McCain seems almost reflexively to favor the use of America's armed might. "He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options," says Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. Scion of admirals (his father and grandfather), a combat pilot in Vietnam who continued to believe long after that war that it might have been won if the US military had been allowed free rein, McCain presents the image of a warrior itching for battle. He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who'd like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.
"I'm an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson--I guess you'd now say Joe Lieberman--Democrat, and he's a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they're pretty close in their views, so substantively there's a lot of overlap between us," says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who's endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. "I think John's style is very TR-like. It's very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick."
We're still waiting for the "speaking softly" part. "There's going to be other wars," McCain warns. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars."
The Education of a 9/11 Reporter. The inside drama behind the Times' warrantless wiretapping story
The Education of a 9/11 ReporterThe inside drama behind the Times' warrantless wiretapping story.
http://www.slate.com/id/2187498/pagenum/all/#page_start
By Eric Lichtblau
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2008, at 7:08 PM ET
This article is adapted from Eric Lichtblau's upcoming book, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice, to be published next Tuesday, April 1, by Pantheon. He and fellow New York Times reporter James Risen won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story of the National Security Agency's wiretapping program.
For 13 long months, we'd held off on publicizing one of the Bush administration's biggest secrets. Finally, one afternoon in December 2005, as my editors and I waited anxiously in an elegantly appointed sitting room at the White House, we were again about to let President Bush's top aides plead their case: why our newspaper shouldn't let the public know that the president had authorized the National Security Agency, in apparent contravention of federal wiretapping law, to eavesdrop on Americans without court warrants. As New York Times Editor Bill Keller, Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman, and I awaited our meeting, we still weren't sure who would make the pitch for the president. Dick Cheney had thought about coming to the meeting but figured his own tense relations with the newspaper might actually hinder the White House's efforts to stop publication. (He was probably right.) As the door to the conference room opened, however, a slew of other White House VIPs strolled out to greet us, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice near the head of the receiving line and White House Counsel Harriet Miers at the back.
For more than an hour, we told Bush's aides what we knew about the wiretapping program, and they in turn told us why it would do grave harm to national security to let anyone else in on the secret. Consider the financial damage to the phone carriers that took part in the program, one official implored. If the terrorists knew about the wiretapping program, it would be rendered useless and would have to be shut down immediately, another official urged: "It's all the marbles." The risk to national security was incalculable, the White House VIPs said, their voices stern, their faces drawn. "The enemy," one official warned, "is inside the gates." The clichés did their work; the message was unmistakable: If the New York Times went ahead and published this story, we would share the blame for the next terrorist attack.
More than two years later, the Times' decision to publish the story—a decision that was once so controversial—has been largely overshadowed by all the other political and legal clamor surrounding President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program: the dozens of civil lawsuits; the ongoing government investigations; the raging congressional debate; and the still-unresolved question, which Congress will take up again next week, of whether phone companies should be given legal immunity for their cooperation in the program. Amid the din, it's easy to forget the hits that the newspaper took in the first place: criticism from the political left over the decision to hold the story for more than a year and from the right over the decision to publish it at all. But the episode was critical in reflecting the media's shifting attitudes toward matters of national security—from believing the government to believing it less.
After all, the fear and trauma that gripped the country in the months and years after 9/11 gripped the media, too; the country's outrage was our outrage. Coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath consumed all else for reporters in Washington. As federal officials scrambled to avert the much-feared "second wave" of attacks, reporters likewise scrambled to follow any hint of the next possible attack and to put it on the front page—from scuba divers off the coast of Southern California to hazmat trucks in the Midwest and tourist helicopters in New York City. One example of the shift: On Sept. 12, 2001, another major newspaper was set to run a story on the extraordinary diplomatic maneuverings the U.S. Secret Service had arranged with their Mexican counterparts to allow Jenna Bush, then 19, to make a barhopping trip south of the border. (She had just been charged with underage drinking in Texas.) A few days earlier, a scoop about a presidential daughter's barhopping trip getting special dispensation from the Secret Service and a foreign government might have gotten heavy treatment. But the story never ran, and the Secret Service's maneuverings remained a secret until now. In the weeks and months after 9/11, there was no longer an appetite for such stories.
At the same time, in the first few years after 9/11, stories that have now become frequent front-page fodder—about water-boarding of terrorism detainees and other aggressive interrogations tactics, about CIA "black site" prisons overseas, or about covert eavesdropping or other surveillance programs that stretched the limits of the law—simply didn't get written by most of the mainstream media. If we had known about them, which in most cases we didn't, there would have been a reluctance to publicize them in those early days of the war on terror.
I wasn't immune to the shifting in attitudes after 9/11. In early 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared at a congressional hearing I was covering and announced, with dramatic aplomb, the unsealing of indictments against two Yemeni men, including a radical cleric accused of personally delivering $20 million to Osama Bin Laden. There was more: The cleric, Ashcroft revealed, said he had received money for jihad from collection at the notorious al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. I didn't wait for a break to rush out the door of the hearing room and call our assignment editor, who would soon be preparing the story list for the next day's front page. "This is big," I told the editor. "Ashcroft says Bin Laden was getting money from a mosque in Brooklyn."
Sure enough, the story ran at the top of the front page of the next day's paper. But among my colleagues in the paper's New York metro section, there was much less enthusiasm: The story, our Brooklyn reporter thought, was overblown, the evidence of an actual link between the Brooklyn mosque and al-Qaida thin. His skepticism was borne out: While the Yemeni cleric was ultimately sentenced to 75 years in prison on terrorism charges related to his support of Hamas, the sensational charge that the Brooklyn mosque was used to raise money for al-Qaida and Bin Laden had melted away to all but nothing by the time the case concluded.
For me, the story about the Brooklyn mosque, along with others, like the justice department's wobbly case against "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, were eye-openers. By 2004, I had gained a reputation, deservedly or not, as one of the administration's toughest critics in the Justice Department press corps; the department even confiscated my press pass briefly after I wrote an unpopular story about the FBI's interest in collecting intelligence on anti-Iraq war demonstrations in the United States. To John Ashcroft and his aides, my coverage reflected a bias. To me, it reflected a healthy, essential skepticism—the kind that was missing from much of the media's early reporting after 9/11, both at home in the administration's war on terror and abroad in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
That shared skepticism would prove essential in the Times' decision to run the story about Bush's NSA wiretapping program. On that December afternoon in the White House, the gathered officials attacked on several fronts. There was never any serious legal debate within the administration about the legality of the program, Bush's advisers insisted. The Justice Department had always signed off on its legality, as required by the president. The few lawmakers who were briefed on the program never voiced any concerns. From the beginning, there were tight controls in place to guard against abuse. The program would be rendered so ineffective if disclosed that it would have to be shut down immediately.
All these assertions, as my partner Jim Risen and I would learn in our reporting, turned out to be largely untrue. Jim and I had already learned about much of the internal angst within the administration over the legality of the NSA program at the outset of our reporting, more than a year earlier in the fall of 2004. Still, the editors were not persuaded we had enough for a story—not enough, at least, to outweigh the White House's strenuous arguments that running the piece would cripple a vital and perfectly legal national-security program. It was a difficult decision for everyone. I went back to writing about more mundane terrorism and law-enforcement matters, poking around discreetly to find out what had happened to the NSA's eavesdropping program. Risen went on sabbatical to write a book about intelligence matters. Then, one night in the spring of 2005, he called me out to his home in suburban Maryland and sat me down at his computer. There on the computer screen was a draft of a chapter called simply "The Program." It was about the NSA's wiretapping operation. "I'm thinking of putting this in the book," he said. I sat and stared at the screen in silence. "You sure you know what you're doing?" I asked finally. He shrugged.
Risen spoke with our editors about what he was contemplating, and so began weeks of discussions between him and the editors that ultimately helped to set the story back on track. Risen's book was a trigger, but we realized we weren't in the paper yet. We still had to persuade the editors that the reasons to run the story clearly outweighed the reasons to keep it secret. We went back to old sources and tried new ones. Our reporting brought into sharper focus what had already started to become clear a year earlier: The concerns about the program—in both its legal underpinnings and its operations—reached the highest levels of the Bush administration. There were deep concerns within the administration that the president had authorized what amounted to an illegal usurpation of power. The image of a united front we'd been presented a year earlier in meetings with the administration—with unflinching support for the program and its legality—was largely a façade. The administration, it seemed clear to me, had lied to us. And we were coming closer to understanding the cracks. By the time we met with White House officials in December 2005, Keller had all but made up his mind: The legal concerns about the program were too great to justify keeping it out of public view. The only real question now was not whether the story would run, but when.
That decision was helped along by a chance conversation I had soon after our White House meeting. The administration, I was told, had considered seeking a Pentagon Papers-type injunction to block publication of the story. The tidbit was a bombshell. Few episodes in the history of the Times—or, for that matter, in all of journalism—had left as indelible a mark as the courtroom battle over the Pentagon Papers, and now we were learning that the Bush White House had dusted off a Nixon-era relic to consider coming after us again. The editors in New York had already decided they would probably print the story in the newspaper for that Friday, Dec. 16, 2005, but when word of the Pentagon Papers tip reached them, they decided they would also post it on the Internet the night before. That wasn't routinely done at that time on "exclusive" stories because we would risk losing the scoop to our competitors, but the editors felt it was worth the risk. The administration might be able to stop the presses with an injunction, but they couldn't stop the Internet.
Phil Taubman called us into his office to hear the official word: We were publishing the story, Keller told us. Smiles washed over the room. Rebecca Corbett, who edited the story and had been a strong champion of it, inquired about the play it would get. There'd been talk of a modest one-column headline on the front page. She wanted to know whether we might be able to get two columns, maybe even three. This seemed like a story that would have legs. Keller demurred. He wanted the story to speak for itself; we would be discreet without looking as if we were poking the White House in the eye with a big, screaming headline about NSA spying. This wasn't the moment to quibble over the size of the headline. After all this time, after all the White House's efforts to derail it, we were happy to see the story in the paper at all; in the back of the A section, among the bra ads, would have been fine.
http://www.slate.com/id/2187498/pagenum/all/#page_start
By Eric Lichtblau
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2008, at 7:08 PM ET
This article is adapted from Eric Lichtblau's upcoming book, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice, to be published next Tuesday, April 1, by Pantheon. He and fellow New York Times reporter James Risen won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story of the National Security Agency's wiretapping program.
For 13 long months, we'd held off on publicizing one of the Bush administration's biggest secrets. Finally, one afternoon in December 2005, as my editors and I waited anxiously in an elegantly appointed sitting room at the White House, we were again about to let President Bush's top aides plead their case: why our newspaper shouldn't let the public know that the president had authorized the National Security Agency, in apparent contravention of federal wiretapping law, to eavesdrop on Americans without court warrants. As New York Times Editor Bill Keller, Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman, and I awaited our meeting, we still weren't sure who would make the pitch for the president. Dick Cheney had thought about coming to the meeting but figured his own tense relations with the newspaper might actually hinder the White House's efforts to stop publication. (He was probably right.) As the door to the conference room opened, however, a slew of other White House VIPs strolled out to greet us, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice near the head of the receiving line and White House Counsel Harriet Miers at the back.
For more than an hour, we told Bush's aides what we knew about the wiretapping program, and they in turn told us why it would do grave harm to national security to let anyone else in on the secret. Consider the financial damage to the phone carriers that took part in the program, one official implored. If the terrorists knew about the wiretapping program, it would be rendered useless and would have to be shut down immediately, another official urged: "It's all the marbles." The risk to national security was incalculable, the White House VIPs said, their voices stern, their faces drawn. "The enemy," one official warned, "is inside the gates." The clichés did their work; the message was unmistakable: If the New York Times went ahead and published this story, we would share the blame for the next terrorist attack.
More than two years later, the Times' decision to publish the story—a decision that was once so controversial—has been largely overshadowed by all the other political and legal clamor surrounding President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program: the dozens of civil lawsuits; the ongoing government investigations; the raging congressional debate; and the still-unresolved question, which Congress will take up again next week, of whether phone companies should be given legal immunity for their cooperation in the program. Amid the din, it's easy to forget the hits that the newspaper took in the first place: criticism from the political left over the decision to hold the story for more than a year and from the right over the decision to publish it at all. But the episode was critical in reflecting the media's shifting attitudes toward matters of national security—from believing the government to believing it less.
After all, the fear and trauma that gripped the country in the months and years after 9/11 gripped the media, too; the country's outrage was our outrage. Coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath consumed all else for reporters in Washington. As federal officials scrambled to avert the much-feared "second wave" of attacks, reporters likewise scrambled to follow any hint of the next possible attack and to put it on the front page—from scuba divers off the coast of Southern California to hazmat trucks in the Midwest and tourist helicopters in New York City. One example of the shift: On Sept. 12, 2001, another major newspaper was set to run a story on the extraordinary diplomatic maneuverings the U.S. Secret Service had arranged with their Mexican counterparts to allow Jenna Bush, then 19, to make a barhopping trip south of the border. (She had just been charged with underage drinking in Texas.) A few days earlier, a scoop about a presidential daughter's barhopping trip getting special dispensation from the Secret Service and a foreign government might have gotten heavy treatment. But the story never ran, and the Secret Service's maneuverings remained a secret until now. In the weeks and months after 9/11, there was no longer an appetite for such stories.
At the same time, in the first few years after 9/11, stories that have now become frequent front-page fodder—about water-boarding of terrorism detainees and other aggressive interrogations tactics, about CIA "black site" prisons overseas, or about covert eavesdropping or other surveillance programs that stretched the limits of the law—simply didn't get written by most of the mainstream media. If we had known about them, which in most cases we didn't, there would have been a reluctance to publicize them in those early days of the war on terror.
I wasn't immune to the shifting in attitudes after 9/11. In early 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared at a congressional hearing I was covering and announced, with dramatic aplomb, the unsealing of indictments against two Yemeni men, including a radical cleric accused of personally delivering $20 million to Osama Bin Laden. There was more: The cleric, Ashcroft revealed, said he had received money for jihad from collection at the notorious al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. I didn't wait for a break to rush out the door of the hearing room and call our assignment editor, who would soon be preparing the story list for the next day's front page. "This is big," I told the editor. "Ashcroft says Bin Laden was getting money from a mosque in Brooklyn."
Sure enough, the story ran at the top of the front page of the next day's paper. But among my colleagues in the paper's New York metro section, there was much less enthusiasm: The story, our Brooklyn reporter thought, was overblown, the evidence of an actual link between the Brooklyn mosque and al-Qaida thin. His skepticism was borne out: While the Yemeni cleric was ultimately sentenced to 75 years in prison on terrorism charges related to his support of Hamas, the sensational charge that the Brooklyn mosque was used to raise money for al-Qaida and Bin Laden had melted away to all but nothing by the time the case concluded.
For me, the story about the Brooklyn mosque, along with others, like the justice department's wobbly case against "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, were eye-openers. By 2004, I had gained a reputation, deservedly or not, as one of the administration's toughest critics in the Justice Department press corps; the department even confiscated my press pass briefly after I wrote an unpopular story about the FBI's interest in collecting intelligence on anti-Iraq war demonstrations in the United States. To John Ashcroft and his aides, my coverage reflected a bias. To me, it reflected a healthy, essential skepticism—the kind that was missing from much of the media's early reporting after 9/11, both at home in the administration's war on terror and abroad in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
That shared skepticism would prove essential in the Times' decision to run the story about Bush's NSA wiretapping program. On that December afternoon in the White House, the gathered officials attacked on several fronts. There was never any serious legal debate within the administration about the legality of the program, Bush's advisers insisted. The Justice Department had always signed off on its legality, as required by the president. The few lawmakers who were briefed on the program never voiced any concerns. From the beginning, there were tight controls in place to guard against abuse. The program would be rendered so ineffective if disclosed that it would have to be shut down immediately.
All these assertions, as my partner Jim Risen and I would learn in our reporting, turned out to be largely untrue. Jim and I had already learned about much of the internal angst within the administration over the legality of the NSA program at the outset of our reporting, more than a year earlier in the fall of 2004. Still, the editors were not persuaded we had enough for a story—not enough, at least, to outweigh the White House's strenuous arguments that running the piece would cripple a vital and perfectly legal national-security program. It was a difficult decision for everyone. I went back to writing about more mundane terrorism and law-enforcement matters, poking around discreetly to find out what had happened to the NSA's eavesdropping program. Risen went on sabbatical to write a book about intelligence matters. Then, one night in the spring of 2005, he called me out to his home in suburban Maryland and sat me down at his computer. There on the computer screen was a draft of a chapter called simply "The Program." It was about the NSA's wiretapping operation. "I'm thinking of putting this in the book," he said. I sat and stared at the screen in silence. "You sure you know what you're doing?" I asked finally. He shrugged.
Risen spoke with our editors about what he was contemplating, and so began weeks of discussions between him and the editors that ultimately helped to set the story back on track. Risen's book was a trigger, but we realized we weren't in the paper yet. We still had to persuade the editors that the reasons to run the story clearly outweighed the reasons to keep it secret. We went back to old sources and tried new ones. Our reporting brought into sharper focus what had already started to become clear a year earlier: The concerns about the program—in both its legal underpinnings and its operations—reached the highest levels of the Bush administration. There were deep concerns within the administration that the president had authorized what amounted to an illegal usurpation of power. The image of a united front we'd been presented a year earlier in meetings with the administration—with unflinching support for the program and its legality—was largely a façade. The administration, it seemed clear to me, had lied to us. And we were coming closer to understanding the cracks. By the time we met with White House officials in December 2005, Keller had all but made up his mind: The legal concerns about the program were too great to justify keeping it out of public view. The only real question now was not whether the story would run, but when.
That decision was helped along by a chance conversation I had soon after our White House meeting. The administration, I was told, had considered seeking a Pentagon Papers-type injunction to block publication of the story. The tidbit was a bombshell. Few episodes in the history of the Times—or, for that matter, in all of journalism—had left as indelible a mark as the courtroom battle over the Pentagon Papers, and now we were learning that the Bush White House had dusted off a Nixon-era relic to consider coming after us again. The editors in New York had already decided they would probably print the story in the newspaper for that Friday, Dec. 16, 2005, but when word of the Pentagon Papers tip reached them, they decided they would also post it on the Internet the night before. That wasn't routinely done at that time on "exclusive" stories because we would risk losing the scoop to our competitors, but the editors felt it was worth the risk. The administration might be able to stop the presses with an injunction, but they couldn't stop the Internet.
Phil Taubman called us into his office to hear the official word: We were publishing the story, Keller told us. Smiles washed over the room. Rebecca Corbett, who edited the story and had been a strong champion of it, inquired about the play it would get. There'd been talk of a modest one-column headline on the front page. She wanted to know whether we might be able to get two columns, maybe even three. This seemed like a story that would have legs. Keller demurred. He wanted the story to speak for itself; we would be discreet without looking as if we were poking the White House in the eye with a big, screaming headline about NSA spying. This wasn't the moment to quibble over the size of the headline. After all this time, after all the White House's efforts to derail it, we were happy to see the story in the paper at all; in the back of the A section, among the bra ads, would have been fine.
The Mystery of American Foreign Policy
March 28, 2008
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12596
The Mystery of American Foreign Policy
Why are we propping up the pro-Iranian Maliki faction in Iraq?
by Justin Raimondo
The recent increase in fighting around Basra, which is rapidly spreading to Baghdad, has the punditariat in a lather. Their sacred Surge has turned into a mere splurge – of resources, lives, and misplaced hope. Well, I could have told you that, and, indeed, I did. But never mind the chattering classes, their delusions of American omnipotence, and my own unfortunate penchant for self-congratulation. What's really fascinating about this story is how it underscores the central mystery of our Iraq war policy: why in the name of all that's holy are we supporting the pro-Iranian parties and factions in the Iraqi government, whilst Our Glorious Leader is coupling Tehran and al-Qaeda as "twin" evils to be fought and defeated in Iraq?
We have placed our chips on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose party, Da'wa (Islamic Call), in alliance with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), now known as ISCI, was one of the few Iraqi resistance groups to refuse all U.S. aid in the run-up to the invasion, and wasn't all that cooperative as the occupation regime was established. Together with their partners in government, the Da'wa Party, SCIRI/ISCI took refuge in Iran during the Ba'athist era and received military aid and training from Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The extension of Iranian influence into Iraq was a direct consequence of the Iraq war, and the recent visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Baghdad has underscored this and provided plenty of grist for those who are pointing at the so-called Shia Crescent with alarm.
It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. The original plan of the neocons was to install Ahmed Chalabi, their own personal Iraqi puppet, but that soon fell through – and Chalabi, it turned out, had strong links to Iranian intelligence agencies. Accused of divulging American secrets to Tehran, Chalabi had his Iraq headquarters raided by Iraqi and U.S. personnel. Unfortunately, the horse was already out of the barn.
In any case, what the neocons – who knew (and know) nothing about Iraq or the Middle East – didn't anticipate was the awakening of the Shi'ite giant, whose rising took the form of Iranian-born Shi'ite religious leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shi'ite version of the pope. It was he who scuttled the neocon-devised "caucus" system, which would have convoked assemblies of handpicked U.S. stooges in the provinces, who would, in turn have elected a national constituent assembly, with the result easily manipulated by Washington's expert ventriloquists. Sistani called his followers out into the streets, and that's when things really started to veer out of Washington's control.
When Chalabi's shenanigans were exposed to the light of day, and his extensive interactions with the Iranians were revealed, a theory was floated by several in the intelligence community that we were basically suckered into the Iraq war by its chief beneficiaries, the Iranians. Using their chief asset, the double agent Chalabi, they and their neocon allies fed us ersatz "intelligence" via the various Iraqi "defectors" rounded up by the Iraqi National Congress and paraded across the front page of the New York Times by Judith Miller and her editors.
"One of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history" is how one intelligence officer described the run-up to the invasion of Iraq to a Newsday reporter. Looked at this way, U.S. policy in Iraq begins to make a kind of twisted, Bizarro World sense.
Pre-Order this Book
From the very beginning, U.S. policymakers were determined to go after militant Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, the son of a prominent cleric, whose Mahdi Army is the only significant indigenous opposition to the pro-Iranian militias and the Tehran-influenced central government. Sadr is critical of both the U.S. and the Iranians, and, as such, represents a direct threat to the occupation and the Iraqi status quo. U.S. efforts to paint the Sadrists as tools of Tehran backfired for lack of evidence, and are, in any case, counterintuitive – as Sadr is an ardent Iraqi nationalist who decries the country's breakup and opposes all foreign influence.
The consolidation of a strong Iraqi state is the last thing the Americans want, for that would threaten their occupation and lead to their swift exit from the country. It is also in the Iranian interest to keep Iraq divided and stop the nationalist Sadr and his brutal militia from taking power in Baghdad. And, as Robert Parry points out, another factor played a key role in tricking us into war:
"Israeli governments have long made a high priority out of forging alliances with countries like Iran on the periphery of the Arab world to divert Arab antipathy that otherwise could be concentrated on Israel. Plus, Israel and Iran had an important enemy in common: Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Both Israel and Iran had a lot to gain by convincing the United States to remove their hated adversary."
As Parry notes – and professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt showed in their trailblazing book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy – the neoconservatives, strategically positioned inside the national security bureaucracy, and the Lobby pushed this agenda, touted Chalabi, and relentlessly campaigned for war with Iraq. Parry's review of the long-standing ties between the Israelis and the Iranians is quite educational, and it explains a lot about what is happening in Iraq today – and, perhaps, what will happen tomorrow.
I think I pretty much summed up here the scenario that is now unfolding:
"I have to laugh when I hear criticisms from the Democrats and the growing number of antiwar Republicans in Congress who complain that we don't belong in Iraq any longer because, you know, it's a civil war. This is largely seen as an unintended consequence of the American invasion – but what if it was intended?
"It would, after all, make perfect Bizarro 'sense.' If, instead of trying to build a stable, democratic Iraq, you're trying to wreak as much destruction as possible and turn Arab against Arab, Muslim against Muslim, and the Kurds against everyone else, then the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the right thing to do."
That was last May, when the Surge was being hailed as the solution to all our problems in Iraq, and it's little wonder that this strategy is now being pronounced a failure. What you have to understand, dear reader, is that, in the Bizarro World alternate universe we seemed to have slipped into, failure is success.
At the end of John McCain's Hundred-Year War, when whoever is president declares "victory" and hightails it out of Iraq, some subversive soul will remind us of King Pyrrhus' lament:
"Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12596
The Mystery of American Foreign Policy
Why are we propping up the pro-Iranian Maliki faction in Iraq?
by Justin Raimondo
The recent increase in fighting around Basra, which is rapidly spreading to Baghdad, has the punditariat in a lather. Their sacred Surge has turned into a mere splurge – of resources, lives, and misplaced hope. Well, I could have told you that, and, indeed, I did. But never mind the chattering classes, their delusions of American omnipotence, and my own unfortunate penchant for self-congratulation. What's really fascinating about this story is how it underscores the central mystery of our Iraq war policy: why in the name of all that's holy are we supporting the pro-Iranian parties and factions in the Iraqi government, whilst Our Glorious Leader is coupling Tehran and al-Qaeda as "twin" evils to be fought and defeated in Iraq?
We have placed our chips on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose party, Da'wa (Islamic Call), in alliance with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), now known as ISCI, was one of the few Iraqi resistance groups to refuse all U.S. aid in the run-up to the invasion, and wasn't all that cooperative as the occupation regime was established. Together with their partners in government, the Da'wa Party, SCIRI/ISCI took refuge in Iran during the Ba'athist era and received military aid and training from Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The extension of Iranian influence into Iraq was a direct consequence of the Iraq war, and the recent visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Baghdad has underscored this and provided plenty of grist for those who are pointing at the so-called Shia Crescent with alarm.
It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. The original plan of the neocons was to install Ahmed Chalabi, their own personal Iraqi puppet, but that soon fell through – and Chalabi, it turned out, had strong links to Iranian intelligence agencies. Accused of divulging American secrets to Tehran, Chalabi had his Iraq headquarters raided by Iraqi and U.S. personnel. Unfortunately, the horse was already out of the barn.
In any case, what the neocons – who knew (and know) nothing about Iraq or the Middle East – didn't anticipate was the awakening of the Shi'ite giant, whose rising took the form of Iranian-born Shi'ite religious leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shi'ite version of the pope. It was he who scuttled the neocon-devised "caucus" system, which would have convoked assemblies of handpicked U.S. stooges in the provinces, who would, in turn have elected a national constituent assembly, with the result easily manipulated by Washington's expert ventriloquists. Sistani called his followers out into the streets, and that's when things really started to veer out of Washington's control.
When Chalabi's shenanigans were exposed to the light of day, and his extensive interactions with the Iranians were revealed, a theory was floated by several in the intelligence community that we were basically suckered into the Iraq war by its chief beneficiaries, the Iranians. Using their chief asset, the double agent Chalabi, they and their neocon allies fed us ersatz "intelligence" via the various Iraqi "defectors" rounded up by the Iraqi National Congress and paraded across the front page of the New York Times by Judith Miller and her editors.
"One of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history" is how one intelligence officer described the run-up to the invasion of Iraq to a Newsday reporter. Looked at this way, U.S. policy in Iraq begins to make a kind of twisted, Bizarro World sense.
Pre-Order this Book
From the very beginning, U.S. policymakers were determined to go after militant Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, the son of a prominent cleric, whose Mahdi Army is the only significant indigenous opposition to the pro-Iranian militias and the Tehran-influenced central government. Sadr is critical of both the U.S. and the Iranians, and, as such, represents a direct threat to the occupation and the Iraqi status quo. U.S. efforts to paint the Sadrists as tools of Tehran backfired for lack of evidence, and are, in any case, counterintuitive – as Sadr is an ardent Iraqi nationalist who decries the country's breakup and opposes all foreign influence.
The consolidation of a strong Iraqi state is the last thing the Americans want, for that would threaten their occupation and lead to their swift exit from the country. It is also in the Iranian interest to keep Iraq divided and stop the nationalist Sadr and his brutal militia from taking power in Baghdad. And, as Robert Parry points out, another factor played a key role in tricking us into war:
"Israeli governments have long made a high priority out of forging alliances with countries like Iran on the periphery of the Arab world to divert Arab antipathy that otherwise could be concentrated on Israel. Plus, Israel and Iran had an important enemy in common: Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Both Israel and Iran had a lot to gain by convincing the United States to remove their hated adversary."
As Parry notes – and professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt showed in their trailblazing book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy – the neoconservatives, strategically positioned inside the national security bureaucracy, and the Lobby pushed this agenda, touted Chalabi, and relentlessly campaigned for war with Iraq. Parry's review of the long-standing ties between the Israelis and the Iranians is quite educational, and it explains a lot about what is happening in Iraq today – and, perhaps, what will happen tomorrow.
I think I pretty much summed up here the scenario that is now unfolding:
"I have to laugh when I hear criticisms from the Democrats and the growing number of antiwar Republicans in Congress who complain that we don't belong in Iraq any longer because, you know, it's a civil war. This is largely seen as an unintended consequence of the American invasion – but what if it was intended?
"It would, after all, make perfect Bizarro 'sense.' If, instead of trying to build a stable, democratic Iraq, you're trying to wreak as much destruction as possible and turn Arab against Arab, Muslim against Muslim, and the Kurds against everyone else, then the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the right thing to do."
That was last May, when the Surge was being hailed as the solution to all our problems in Iraq, and it's little wonder that this strategy is now being pronounced a failure. What you have to understand, dear reader, is that, in the Bizarro World alternate universe we seemed to have slipped into, failure is success.
At the end of John McCain's Hundred-Year War, when whoever is president declares "victory" and hightails it out of Iraq, some subversive soul will remind us of King Pyrrhus' lament:
"Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone."
Why Not Try Diplomacy? by Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Why Not Try Diplomacy?
Remarks to the University Continuing Education Association
March 28, 2008, New Orleans, Louisiana
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
I want to speak to you this afternoon about diplomacy as an element of statecraft. By now most Americans recognize that we are in a bit of trouble both at home and abroad. What is to be done? Is diplomacy a better answer than the use of force?
The late Arthur Goldberg, who was both a Justice of our Supreme Court and Ambassador to the United Nations, observed that "diplomats approach every issue with an open ... mouth." A colleague and friend of mine, who served as Ambassador to China, once told me that "a diplomat is someone who thinks twice – before saying nothing." They set a high bar for a public speaker on diplomacy as an alternative to militarism, but I am willing to attempt it.
Americans believe in military power, and the United States has never spent so much on it. Internationally, given our diminished political standing and the collapse of the dollar, military prowess may be our only remaining comparative advantage. We certainly behave as though we think it is.
In current dollars, we are spending about 28 percent more on our military each year than we did during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and over one-third more than at the height of the Reagan defense build-up against the late, unlamented Soviet Union. We are spending considerably more on military power than the rest of the world put together – three and a half times as much as the highest estimate for China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea combined; and at least 12,000 times as much as Al Qaeda and all other terrorist groups with global reach. It is not clear what enemies justify all this money. Whoever they are, if military expenditures are the key to national security, we've got them where we want them.
In the first ten years of this century, US defense outlays will total about five and one-quarter trillion dollars. Military-related outlays in other parts of the federal budget – like homeland security, veterans affairs, and interest payments on war debt – will add another $2 trillion or so to this, for a cumulative total of something well over $7 trillion in military and military-related spending. Our defense budget, including supplementals to pay for offensive operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, is now about 5 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP). Counting military-related outlays in other budgets, the percentage of our economy devoted to defense is around 7 percent. We have a huge economy and, in absolute terms, that is a lot of military spending.
We need a strong military even though we're not really worried about an invasion from Jamaica or Canada or Mexico or even Cuba or Iran. Unlike other nations' armed forces, what ours do is mostly not defense against foreign invasion or attacks on the homeland. Our military is configured for offensive deployment in support of foreign policy. It does deterrence, punishment, and conquest of real and potential foreign enemies. That is why our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are in Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Bosnia and dozens of other places around the world that have neither the intent nor the capability to attack us. It took 9/11 and its demonstration that we had no military means of preventing foreign attack on US civilians to get us to worry about the possibility that such attacks might occur. We now have a separate department of government focused on that.
Somehow, however, despite all the money we've spent, the debt we've accumulated, and the sacrifices patriotic Americans have made in distant foreign lands, our leaders tell us that we have never been so threatened. Given all the enemies we have been making recently, they may be right. There is, of course, a time-tested political axiom in Washington that if something isn't working the answer is to add money and do more of it. So our president and the three major candidates vying to succeed him join in promising further increases in defense spending – without providing any indication of how these increases would buy us greater security. It's enough to make one wonder whether President Eisenhower wasn't onto something when he warned Americans against the danger of nurturing a "military-industrial complex" that would give us a vested interest in military spending, regardless of the nature and level of the threat to our nation.
Massive military spending has, in fact, become an indispensable part of our political-economy. In addition to buying remarkably capable and costly weapons systems, it feeds hordes of consultants and contractors and houses legions of academic specialists. These are very bright people who labor to develop theories of how military coercion might control foreign behavior. They produce threat analyses to justify continuing US military build-up. They consider how best to apply our military might abroad, and they work out the force packages and weapons system specifications to do it. The intellectual energy that massive spending has focused on these topics – as opposed to means of influence that do not rely on the threat or use of force – has revolutionized the American approach to foreign policy. One should never underestimate the impact of either federal spending or the resulting focus of the academy!
And one should never underestimate the ability of politicians to ignore millennia of human experience and to aspire to expediency if the academy gives them an opening to do so. Most of our leaders, in both major political parties, now espouse a reversal of the longstanding American view that coercion, especially through military means, is a last resort to be brought into play only when diplomacy – in the form of persuasion, diplomatic bargaining, alliance-building, and other measures short of war – has failed. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the sequence approved on both sides of the aisle was to shoot first, then send in the diplomats to mop up. Since this hasn't worked out too well, there is now a lot of talk about how to recruit more diplomats and buy more mops. That's probably a good idea, but it might be more effective and cheaper to involve the diplomats at the outset and avoid creating such a mess in the first place.
It used to be thought that the purpose of war is to secure a more perfect peace. That is an objective that invokes diplomacy to translate military triumph into new arrangements acceptable to both victor and vanquished. It implies war planning focused on the question: "and then what?" and the conduct of war in accordance with a strategy that unites political, economic, informational, and intelligence measures with military actions and a well-crafted plan for war termination. In Iraq, a brilliant general has belatedly come up with a credible campaign plan but his plan is still unconnected to a strategy. Our plan to end the fighting is apparently to hang around until the Iraqis decide to make peace with each other. That might take a while. In the strategy-free zone that is contemporary Washington, no one wants to second-guess a celebrity general, but any reading of David Petraeus' manual on counter-insurgency must lead to the conclusion that, in Iraq, "victory" remains undefined and missing in action.
Sadly, theories of coercion and plans to use military means to impose our will on other nations have for some time squeezed out serious consideration of diplomacy as an alternative to the use of force. Diplomacy is more than saying "nice doggie," till you can find a rock. Weapons are tools to change men's minds but they are far from the only means of doing so. As we are learning from our misadventures in the Middle East, they are also seldom the most reliable or least expensive. The weapons of diplomats are words and their power is their persuasiveness. Talk is cheaper than firepower and does less collateral damage, so it makes sense to try it before blazing away at the adversary.
There is another reason to regard force as a last resort. It creates ruins that cannot easily be rebuilt and resentments that cannot be easily be overcome. War is a form of demolition; its results are messy and its effects on those it touches are uncertain. In the age of globalization, moreover, military invasion is as likely to incubate terrorists with global reach as it is to overthrow governments and seize terrain. It makes sense to exhaust diplomatic remedies first, not to follow a script of "Ready! Fire! Diplomacy!"
Diplomacy is the art of pursuing the internationally possible. Its main drawback is that it involves the unpleasant task of interacting persuasively with usually disagreeable adversaries and sometimes tedious friends. Despite the example of useful, wide-ranging dialog with our Soviet enemies (conducted on the sound theory that one should never lose contact with the enemy diplomatically or militarily), a generation of American leaders seems to have concluded that we shouldn't talk to people who disagree with us till they come out with their hands up. But not talking to those with whom one disagrees is the diplomatic equivalent of unilateral disarmament.
Figuring out why others are doing things and explaining to them why Americans disagree with this and why they should, in their own interest, do things our way is the opposite of appeasement. And it is more likely to achieve results than ducking such encounters while loudly proclaiming that those we disdain to speak with already know what they need to do to appease us, so we don't need to reason with them. Substituting reliance on the intuition of our adversaries for diplomatic communication with them leaves few options. We can live with a surging mess or we can slap on some sanctions. When these fail, as they inevitably do, we can send in the B-2s and Abrams tanks. These are not good choices. The approach they impose creates more problems than it solves.
Our next president will inherit a daunting list of challenges: apparently interminable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; withering alliances; diminished international prestige and deference to our leadership; deepening estrangement between the United States and the Islamic world, a mounting threat to our homeland from the growing ranks of anti-American jihadis; a war-fatigued, equipment-depleted, disenchanted, and still untransformed US military; an increasingly lawless world order; and the emergence of a widening range of regional challenges to US influence and interests from the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez Frías, and Vladimir Putin.
.
He or she will have to deal with all these issues while wrestling with a budget and economy in chronic deficit; mounting national debt amidst a credit crisis; recession; inflation; insolvent pension systems; decaying infrastructure – complete with collapsing bridges, pot-holes, and gridlock; a medical system that extracts rapidly inflating payments from middle class Americans without caring for the poor, sick, and destitute among us; and other developments that, collectively, undermine America as a model that other nations wish to emulate. It is tempting to conclude that anyone who wants to be president under these circumstances is prima facie mentally defective and unfit for the office. Still, some poor soul will be inaugurated next January 20 and will have to deal with all these issues and then some.
The new president might start by shaking off the constipated notion that diplomacy is, like military posturing, just a way of conveying menace or containing or deterring threats. These things are, of course, part of diplomacy. And it's true, as Al Capone once sagely remarked, that "you will get farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." Diplomacy is largely about adding the strength of others to one's own, but its greater mission is to take the political offensive by transcending the conventional wisdom and identifying or creating opportunities, and seizing them to the national advantage. That is what Truman did with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. It is what Nixon did with his opening to China. It is what Carter did at Camp David. It is what Reagan did with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. The next president should look into how to restore our atrophied diplomatic capabilities so as to lift us from the mire into which we have sunk.
Resorting to diplomacy will not be as easy as it may sound. Secretary of Defense Gates has recently begun to speak to the lopsided priorities apparent in our budget, which underfunds diplomacy and forces the US military to do all sorts of things that would be more appropriately and better done by civilian foreign affairs personnel. Gates points out that there are fewer professional diplomats in our Foreign Service than there are personnel in military bands or a single carrier battle group. What our country spends on a year's diplomatic and consular operations worldwide is less than what we spend in six days of military operations in Iraq..
You get what you pay for. In this case, that's a superbly professional and supremely lethal military and an anemically staffed and undertrained diplomatic service led by inexperienced political appointees on sabbatical from high incomes. As one of the last century's greatest diplomats, Israel's Abba Eban, said of this peculiarly American practice,
"The bizarre notion that any citizen, especially if he is rich, is fit for the representation of his country abroad has taken some hard blows through empirical evidence. But it has not been discarded."
It has been 196 years since an amateur general – Andrew Jackson – last commanded US troops in battle --not far from here. But to lead our diplomatic work abroad, especially in countries where the standard of living is high and the danger of anti-American violence is low, we still depend on amateurs who must learn on the job, hoping that their experienced subordinates will help them overcome their ignorance of the local language, paper over embarrassing gaffes, and avoid catastrophic mistakes. And in Washington, where Iraq has just reminded us how dangerous it can be to allow civilian armchair generals to substitute their military judgments for those of military professionals, we now staff our foreign policy apparatus almost entirely with people with no diplomatic experience. No other country in the world so values ideological reliability and party loyalty over professional knowledge and expertise. Only in America....
I am reminded of the story of a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mac Toon, a crusty career diplomat who went aboard an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean for a meeting with the admiral who commanded its battle group. At the end of their discussion, the admiral leaned over to ask, "what's it like being an ambassador? I've always thought that after I retire I might want to try it." Ambassador Toon replied, "that's funny. I've always thought that, when I retire, I might try my hand at running a carrier battle group." The admiral said, "That's ridiculous. A naval command requires years of training and experience." But so do the management of foreign policy and diplomacy, if the ship of state is not to be sailed onto the rocks or beached in the desert.
It is a truism that skilled work requires skilled workmen. Americans are now without peer in the military arts. To prevail against our current enemies, we must attain equal excellence in diplomacy. We do not have the margin for error we once did. But even if we devote the equivalent of a whole week's worth of the Pentagon budget to the arts of peace – rather than the three days or so we now do – fixing our Foreign Service will take time. As our military know better than anyone, it takes decades to train, exercise, and professionalize personnel. After years of overemphasis on military means of conducting our foreign relations, getting up to diplomatic snuff will also require a serious investment in intellectual infrastructure comparable to that we have devoted to the military arts.
If we build a diplomatic capability to match our military prowess, we will gain a key building block of national strategy. But a bigger, better Foreign Service will not in itself create such a strategy. Nor will it solve the underlying problem of national strategic illiteracy. We suffer from what one of our most sophisticated foreign policy practitioners, Chester Crocker, has called a "statecraft deficit." It is inspiring to observe the professionalism of our military, which is the most competent in history. It is painful to observe the extent to which military requests for direction from the civilians whose control they are taught to revere go unanswered. The fact is that we – and those we elect and appoint to lead us – are remarkably poorly prepared for the preeminent role in world affairs we now play.
Our educational system bears major responsibility for this. Most Americans can't find Louisiana, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan, on the map. Many are unversed in history, still less diplomatic history. Few have been exposed to any instruction in how to reason about foreign affairs or statecraft and its diplomatic, intelligence, and military tools. Almost none have been tutored in strategy. This is understandable. It is largely a reflection of two factors, both of which have changed.
First, until recently, the American homeland was apparently invulnerable, and the United States was the leader in most fields of human endeavor. Foreign policy was therefore something we inflicted on others without fear of reprisal, not something they did unto us. And we didn't think we had much to learn from foreigners. Foreign affairs and national security didn't seem like anything the average American citizen had to worry about. But 9/11 changed that forever.
And, second, the formative influences of the Cold War, during which the United States led half the world against Soviet communism, are still with us. Then, the capacity of the Soviet Union to annihilate us imperiled our very existence. Its predatory ideology menaced our values; its imperial ambitions threatened our interests and those of many other nations.. The threats to both values and interests became so thoroughly merged that we forgot how to distinguish the two, though they are very different in their functions and import.
Attempts at historical revisionism by the proponents of militarism notwithstanding, the fact is that we won the Cold War by patient adherence to a strategy of containment, not by butting heads on a battlefield. Containment relied on diplomacy – on measures short of war – to build and sustain alliances backed by the deterrent power of great military strength. Some may profess to regret that we did not join in battle with the Soviet Union to roll back its empire. I am glad we substituted patience for belligerence. Our strategy did not vary over forty years. It formed the foreign policy outlook of three generations We did not have to think about strategy. In many ways, we appear to have forgotten how to do so.
We now face a world in which our personal security and that of our communities is threatened, but our national existence is not. As a people and as a nation, we are challenged from many directions and in many ways, not by a single "evil empire" that we can count upon to rot away from within. To secure our domestic tranquility against foreign assault and to lead the 21st Century as we did the last one will demand of us a higher level of strategic conceptual ability and civic literacy than we have had to demonstrate for decades. And it will require instruments of statecraft adequate to the task – diplomatic, informational, and intelligence capabilities of the first order, backed by military power without peer and a prosperous, attractive, and open society.
Two millennia ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca advised the Emperor Nero of the vital importance of setting objectives. "If a man does not know to what port he steers, no wind is favorable," he pointed out. It was good advice, even if Nero didn't take it. It is worth pondering in our current circumstances. Our debate about the challenges before us is almost entirely tactical not strategic; cast in terms of our politics rather than external realities; and focused on preventing change rather than turning it to our advantage.
Yet, for example, we risk reaping the whirlwind if we simply leave Iraq. We cannot do so safely and responsibly without defining realistic objectives and using our withdrawal to advance toward them. If we continue to aid and abet counterproductive behavior by all sides in the Middle East, we should not be surprised when they turn on us. If we do not define a feasible end-game in Afghanistan, we will just incubate more anti-American terrorists while expanding the world's heroin supply.
If we cannot decide what sort of international monetary reserve system should replace the currently collapsing one and persuade other stakeholders to act with us to fix it, we will drift into increasing economic misery. We must develop a plan to reunite the Atlantic region behind the rule of law and other Western values or see these eclipsed by ideas from other regions of the world that are rising to new prominence. Without a vision of mutually beneficial coexistence in our hemisphere, events and the anti-American dreams of others will bring needless trouble right up to our borders. If we are not positioned to help as Cuba, North Korea, Burma, and other troubled nations enter periods of transition, we must expect that they will change in ways that create new problems for us and their neighbors. If we have no positive agenda for enlisting Chinese and Indian power in common causes, they may well apply their power in ways that undercut ours, annoy us, or even injure us.
It has been a long time since Americans had a positive vision or clear objectives for these and many other pressing issues. I could go on, but the afternoon advances, and New Orleans beckons. Let me close with the obvious point that we cannot hope to appeal to the conscience of humankind if we do not continue to embody its aspirations. If we do not restore our country's good name, others will not follow when we lead or share the burdens we take up. To regain the cooperation of allies and friends, we must rediscover how to listen, how to persuade, how to be a team player, and how to follow the rules we demand others follow.
We must do this because we Americans cannot successfully address the problems we confront on our own. Our need for foreign partners has never been greater. Fortunately, the world's desire for partnership with America has not really gone away. Beneath the layers of resentment and animosity laid down by our recent behavior, there is still much goodwill toward the United States. This "fossil friendship" will not last forever. For now, however, it is a resource that American diplomacy can mine to rebuild the respect of allies and friends for our leadership and to unite them behind an American vision of a better world. A return to diplomacy, not threats and the use of force, is the surest path to the reassertion of American leadership. It is time to rediscover and explore that path.
Remarks to the University Continuing Education Association
March 28, 2008, New Orleans, Louisiana
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
I want to speak to you this afternoon about diplomacy as an element of statecraft. By now most Americans recognize that we are in a bit of trouble both at home and abroad. What is to be done? Is diplomacy a better answer than the use of force?
The late Arthur Goldberg, who was both a Justice of our Supreme Court and Ambassador to the United Nations, observed that "diplomats approach every issue with an open ... mouth." A colleague and friend of mine, who served as Ambassador to China, once told me that "a diplomat is someone who thinks twice – before saying nothing." They set a high bar for a public speaker on diplomacy as an alternative to militarism, but I am willing to attempt it.
Americans believe in military power, and the United States has never spent so much on it. Internationally, given our diminished political standing and the collapse of the dollar, military prowess may be our only remaining comparative advantage. We certainly behave as though we think it is.
In current dollars, we are spending about 28 percent more on our military each year than we did during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and over one-third more than at the height of the Reagan defense build-up against the late, unlamented Soviet Union. We are spending considerably more on military power than the rest of the world put together – three and a half times as much as the highest estimate for China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea combined; and at least 12,000 times as much as Al Qaeda and all other terrorist groups with global reach. It is not clear what enemies justify all this money. Whoever they are, if military expenditures are the key to national security, we've got them where we want them.
In the first ten years of this century, US defense outlays will total about five and one-quarter trillion dollars. Military-related outlays in other parts of the federal budget – like homeland security, veterans affairs, and interest payments on war debt – will add another $2 trillion or so to this, for a cumulative total of something well over $7 trillion in military and military-related spending. Our defense budget, including supplementals to pay for offensive operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, is now about 5 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP). Counting military-related outlays in other budgets, the percentage of our economy devoted to defense is around 7 percent. We have a huge economy and, in absolute terms, that is a lot of military spending.
We need a strong military even though we're not really worried about an invasion from Jamaica or Canada or Mexico or even Cuba or Iran. Unlike other nations' armed forces, what ours do is mostly not defense against foreign invasion or attacks on the homeland. Our military is configured for offensive deployment in support of foreign policy. It does deterrence, punishment, and conquest of real and potential foreign enemies. That is why our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are in Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Bosnia and dozens of other places around the world that have neither the intent nor the capability to attack us. It took 9/11 and its demonstration that we had no military means of preventing foreign attack on US civilians to get us to worry about the possibility that such attacks might occur. We now have a separate department of government focused on that.
Somehow, however, despite all the money we've spent, the debt we've accumulated, and the sacrifices patriotic Americans have made in distant foreign lands, our leaders tell us that we have never been so threatened. Given all the enemies we have been making recently, they may be right. There is, of course, a time-tested political axiom in Washington that if something isn't working the answer is to add money and do more of it. So our president and the three major candidates vying to succeed him join in promising further increases in defense spending – without providing any indication of how these increases would buy us greater security. It's enough to make one wonder whether President Eisenhower wasn't onto something when he warned Americans against the danger of nurturing a "military-industrial complex" that would give us a vested interest in military spending, regardless of the nature and level of the threat to our nation.
Massive military spending has, in fact, become an indispensable part of our political-economy. In addition to buying remarkably capable and costly weapons systems, it feeds hordes of consultants and contractors and houses legions of academic specialists. These are very bright people who labor to develop theories of how military coercion might control foreign behavior. They produce threat analyses to justify continuing US military build-up. They consider how best to apply our military might abroad, and they work out the force packages and weapons system specifications to do it. The intellectual energy that massive spending has focused on these topics – as opposed to means of influence that do not rely on the threat or use of force – has revolutionized the American approach to foreign policy. One should never underestimate the impact of either federal spending or the resulting focus of the academy!
And one should never underestimate the ability of politicians to ignore millennia of human experience and to aspire to expediency if the academy gives them an opening to do so. Most of our leaders, in both major political parties, now espouse a reversal of the longstanding American view that coercion, especially through military means, is a last resort to be brought into play only when diplomacy – in the form of persuasion, diplomatic bargaining, alliance-building, and other measures short of war – has failed. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the sequence approved on both sides of the aisle was to shoot first, then send in the diplomats to mop up. Since this hasn't worked out too well, there is now a lot of talk about how to recruit more diplomats and buy more mops. That's probably a good idea, but it might be more effective and cheaper to involve the diplomats at the outset and avoid creating such a mess in the first place.
It used to be thought that the purpose of war is to secure a more perfect peace. That is an objective that invokes diplomacy to translate military triumph into new arrangements acceptable to both victor and vanquished. It implies war planning focused on the question: "and then what?" and the conduct of war in accordance with a strategy that unites political, economic, informational, and intelligence measures with military actions and a well-crafted plan for war termination. In Iraq, a brilliant general has belatedly come up with a credible campaign plan but his plan is still unconnected to a strategy. Our plan to end the fighting is apparently to hang around until the Iraqis decide to make peace with each other. That might take a while. In the strategy-free zone that is contemporary Washington, no one wants to second-guess a celebrity general, but any reading of David Petraeus' manual on counter-insurgency must lead to the conclusion that, in Iraq, "victory" remains undefined and missing in action.
Sadly, theories of coercion and plans to use military means to impose our will on other nations have for some time squeezed out serious consideration of diplomacy as an alternative to the use of force. Diplomacy is more than saying "nice doggie," till you can find a rock. Weapons are tools to change men's minds but they are far from the only means of doing so. As we are learning from our misadventures in the Middle East, they are also seldom the most reliable or least expensive. The weapons of diplomats are words and their power is their persuasiveness. Talk is cheaper than firepower and does less collateral damage, so it makes sense to try it before blazing away at the adversary.
There is another reason to regard force as a last resort. It creates ruins that cannot easily be rebuilt and resentments that cannot be easily be overcome. War is a form of demolition; its results are messy and its effects on those it touches are uncertain. In the age of globalization, moreover, military invasion is as likely to incubate terrorists with global reach as it is to overthrow governments and seize terrain. It makes sense to exhaust diplomatic remedies first, not to follow a script of "Ready! Fire! Diplomacy!"
Diplomacy is the art of pursuing the internationally possible. Its main drawback is that it involves the unpleasant task of interacting persuasively with usually disagreeable adversaries and sometimes tedious friends. Despite the example of useful, wide-ranging dialog with our Soviet enemies (conducted on the sound theory that one should never lose contact with the enemy diplomatically or militarily), a generation of American leaders seems to have concluded that we shouldn't talk to people who disagree with us till they come out with their hands up. But not talking to those with whom one disagrees is the diplomatic equivalent of unilateral disarmament.
Figuring out why others are doing things and explaining to them why Americans disagree with this and why they should, in their own interest, do things our way is the opposite of appeasement. And it is more likely to achieve results than ducking such encounters while loudly proclaiming that those we disdain to speak with already know what they need to do to appease us, so we don't need to reason with them. Substituting reliance on the intuition of our adversaries for diplomatic communication with them leaves few options. We can live with a surging mess or we can slap on some sanctions. When these fail, as they inevitably do, we can send in the B-2s and Abrams tanks. These are not good choices. The approach they impose creates more problems than it solves.
Our next president will inherit a daunting list of challenges: apparently interminable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; withering alliances; diminished international prestige and deference to our leadership; deepening estrangement between the United States and the Islamic world, a mounting threat to our homeland from the growing ranks of anti-American jihadis; a war-fatigued, equipment-depleted, disenchanted, and still untransformed US military; an increasingly lawless world order; and the emergence of a widening range of regional challenges to US influence and interests from the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez Frías, and Vladimir Putin.
.
He or she will have to deal with all these issues while wrestling with a budget and economy in chronic deficit; mounting national debt amidst a credit crisis; recession; inflation; insolvent pension systems; decaying infrastructure – complete with collapsing bridges, pot-holes, and gridlock; a medical system that extracts rapidly inflating payments from middle class Americans without caring for the poor, sick, and destitute among us; and other developments that, collectively, undermine America as a model that other nations wish to emulate. It is tempting to conclude that anyone who wants to be president under these circumstances is prima facie mentally defective and unfit for the office. Still, some poor soul will be inaugurated next January 20 and will have to deal with all these issues and then some.
The new president might start by shaking off the constipated notion that diplomacy is, like military posturing, just a way of conveying menace or containing or deterring threats. These things are, of course, part of diplomacy. And it's true, as Al Capone once sagely remarked, that "you will get farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." Diplomacy is largely about adding the strength of others to one's own, but its greater mission is to take the political offensive by transcending the conventional wisdom and identifying or creating opportunities, and seizing them to the national advantage. That is what Truman did with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. It is what Nixon did with his opening to China. It is what Carter did at Camp David. It is what Reagan did with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. The next president should look into how to restore our atrophied diplomatic capabilities so as to lift us from the mire into which we have sunk.
Resorting to diplomacy will not be as easy as it may sound. Secretary of Defense Gates has recently begun to speak to the lopsided priorities apparent in our budget, which underfunds diplomacy and forces the US military to do all sorts of things that would be more appropriately and better done by civilian foreign affairs personnel. Gates points out that there are fewer professional diplomats in our Foreign Service than there are personnel in military bands or a single carrier battle group. What our country spends on a year's diplomatic and consular operations worldwide is less than what we spend in six days of military operations in Iraq..
You get what you pay for. In this case, that's a superbly professional and supremely lethal military and an anemically staffed and undertrained diplomatic service led by inexperienced political appointees on sabbatical from high incomes. As one of the last century's greatest diplomats, Israel's Abba Eban, said of this peculiarly American practice,
"The bizarre notion that any citizen, especially if he is rich, is fit for the representation of his country abroad has taken some hard blows through empirical evidence. But it has not been discarded."
It has been 196 years since an amateur general – Andrew Jackson – last commanded US troops in battle --not far from here. But to lead our diplomatic work abroad, especially in countries where the standard of living is high and the danger of anti-American violence is low, we still depend on amateurs who must learn on the job, hoping that their experienced subordinates will help them overcome their ignorance of the local language, paper over embarrassing gaffes, and avoid catastrophic mistakes. And in Washington, where Iraq has just reminded us how dangerous it can be to allow civilian armchair generals to substitute their military judgments for those of military professionals, we now staff our foreign policy apparatus almost entirely with people with no diplomatic experience. No other country in the world so values ideological reliability and party loyalty over professional knowledge and expertise. Only in America....
I am reminded of the story of a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mac Toon, a crusty career diplomat who went aboard an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean for a meeting with the admiral who commanded its battle group. At the end of their discussion, the admiral leaned over to ask, "what's it like being an ambassador? I've always thought that after I retire I might want to try it." Ambassador Toon replied, "that's funny. I've always thought that, when I retire, I might try my hand at running a carrier battle group." The admiral said, "That's ridiculous. A naval command requires years of training and experience." But so do the management of foreign policy and diplomacy, if the ship of state is not to be sailed onto the rocks or beached in the desert.
It is a truism that skilled work requires skilled workmen. Americans are now without peer in the military arts. To prevail against our current enemies, we must attain equal excellence in diplomacy. We do not have the margin for error we once did. But even if we devote the equivalent of a whole week's worth of the Pentagon budget to the arts of peace – rather than the three days or so we now do – fixing our Foreign Service will take time. As our military know better than anyone, it takes decades to train, exercise, and professionalize personnel. After years of overemphasis on military means of conducting our foreign relations, getting up to diplomatic snuff will also require a serious investment in intellectual infrastructure comparable to that we have devoted to the military arts.
If we build a diplomatic capability to match our military prowess, we will gain a key building block of national strategy. But a bigger, better Foreign Service will not in itself create such a strategy. Nor will it solve the underlying problem of national strategic illiteracy. We suffer from what one of our most sophisticated foreign policy practitioners, Chester Crocker, has called a "statecraft deficit." It is inspiring to observe the professionalism of our military, which is the most competent in history. It is painful to observe the extent to which military requests for direction from the civilians whose control they are taught to revere go unanswered. The fact is that we – and those we elect and appoint to lead us – are remarkably poorly prepared for the preeminent role in world affairs we now play.
Our educational system bears major responsibility for this. Most Americans can't find Louisiana, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan, on the map. Many are unversed in history, still less diplomatic history. Few have been exposed to any instruction in how to reason about foreign affairs or statecraft and its diplomatic, intelligence, and military tools. Almost none have been tutored in strategy. This is understandable. It is largely a reflection of two factors, both of which have changed.
First, until recently, the American homeland was apparently invulnerable, and the United States was the leader in most fields of human endeavor. Foreign policy was therefore something we inflicted on others without fear of reprisal, not something they did unto us. And we didn't think we had much to learn from foreigners. Foreign affairs and national security didn't seem like anything the average American citizen had to worry about. But 9/11 changed that forever.
And, second, the formative influences of the Cold War, during which the United States led half the world against Soviet communism, are still with us. Then, the capacity of the Soviet Union to annihilate us imperiled our very existence. Its predatory ideology menaced our values; its imperial ambitions threatened our interests and those of many other nations.. The threats to both values and interests became so thoroughly merged that we forgot how to distinguish the two, though they are very different in their functions and import.
Attempts at historical revisionism by the proponents of militarism notwithstanding, the fact is that we won the Cold War by patient adherence to a strategy of containment, not by butting heads on a battlefield. Containment relied on diplomacy – on measures short of war – to build and sustain alliances backed by the deterrent power of great military strength. Some may profess to regret that we did not join in battle with the Soviet Union to roll back its empire. I am glad we substituted patience for belligerence. Our strategy did not vary over forty years. It formed the foreign policy outlook of three generations We did not have to think about strategy. In many ways, we appear to have forgotten how to do so.
We now face a world in which our personal security and that of our communities is threatened, but our national existence is not. As a people and as a nation, we are challenged from many directions and in many ways, not by a single "evil empire" that we can count upon to rot away from within. To secure our domestic tranquility against foreign assault and to lead the 21st Century as we did the last one will demand of us a higher level of strategic conceptual ability and civic literacy than we have had to demonstrate for decades. And it will require instruments of statecraft adequate to the task – diplomatic, informational, and intelligence capabilities of the first order, backed by military power without peer and a prosperous, attractive, and open society.
Two millennia ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca advised the Emperor Nero of the vital importance of setting objectives. "If a man does not know to what port he steers, no wind is favorable," he pointed out. It was good advice, even if Nero didn't take it. It is worth pondering in our current circumstances. Our debate about the challenges before us is almost entirely tactical not strategic; cast in terms of our politics rather than external realities; and focused on preventing change rather than turning it to our advantage.
Yet, for example, we risk reaping the whirlwind if we simply leave Iraq. We cannot do so safely and responsibly without defining realistic objectives and using our withdrawal to advance toward them. If we continue to aid and abet counterproductive behavior by all sides in the Middle East, we should not be surprised when they turn on us. If we do not define a feasible end-game in Afghanistan, we will just incubate more anti-American terrorists while expanding the world's heroin supply.
If we cannot decide what sort of international monetary reserve system should replace the currently collapsing one and persuade other stakeholders to act with us to fix it, we will drift into increasing economic misery. We must develop a plan to reunite the Atlantic region behind the rule of law and other Western values or see these eclipsed by ideas from other regions of the world that are rising to new prominence. Without a vision of mutually beneficial coexistence in our hemisphere, events and the anti-American dreams of others will bring needless trouble right up to our borders. If we are not positioned to help as Cuba, North Korea, Burma, and other troubled nations enter periods of transition, we must expect that they will change in ways that create new problems for us and their neighbors. If we have no positive agenda for enlisting Chinese and Indian power in common causes, they may well apply their power in ways that undercut ours, annoy us, or even injure us.
It has been a long time since Americans had a positive vision or clear objectives for these and many other pressing issues. I could go on, but the afternoon advances, and New Orleans beckons. Let me close with the obvious point that we cannot hope to appeal to the conscience of humankind if we do not continue to embody its aspirations. If we do not restore our country's good name, others will not follow when we lead or share the burdens we take up. To regain the cooperation of allies and friends, we must rediscover how to listen, how to persuade, how to be a team player, and how to follow the rules we demand others follow.
We must do this because we Americans cannot successfully address the problems we confront on our own. Our need for foreign partners has never been greater. Fortunately, the world's desire for partnership with America has not really gone away. Beneath the layers of resentment and animosity laid down by our recent behavior, there is still much goodwill toward the United States. This "fossil friendship" will not last forever. For now, however, it is a resource that American diplomacy can mine to rebuild the respect of allies and friends for our leadership and to unite them behind an American vision of a better world. A return to diplomacy, not threats and the use of force, is the surest path to the reassertion of American leadership. It is time to rediscover and explore that path.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)