Matt Bai has a writeup in this Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine of McCain’s vision on foreign policy. Buckle up:

McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet….

[…]

as we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

The United States faced a similar obstacle in Myanmar, McCain went on, shaking his head sadly. “First of all, you’d have to gauge the opinion of the people over time, whether you’d be greeted as liberators or as occupiers,” McCain said. “I would be concerned about the possibility that if it were mishandled, we might see an insurgent movement.” He talked a bit about Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he called “one of the great figures of the 20th century,” but then wondered aloud if the American public would support a military intervention.

“It goes back to the Vietnam thing,” McCain told me. “I’m just not sure the American people would support a military engagement in Burma, no matter how justified the cause. And I can’t tell you exactly when it would be over. And I can’t tell you exactly what the reaction of the people there would be.”

Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn’t make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

Thankfully, though, the Washington Post is reporting that McCain apparently has a secret plan to win the war in Iraq by 2013.

Should we force our way into Burma to aid cyclone victims? Since the May 3 storm, Burma’s military regime has barred most outsiders from delivering supplies and medical relief. The regime is accepting aid shipments, it appears, but lacks the capacity and maybe the will to efficiently deliver them. With people still dying — estimates so far range roughly from 40,000 to 130,000 — and another storm possibly on the way, several Western nations may push the UN Security Council to evoke the “responsibility to protect,” and authorize the use of military force to deliver the aid. National positions are still solidifying, but it appears that France, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, maybe Canada, and even Pakistan endorse this tact. EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana, for one, is willing to do “whatever is necessary to help the people who are suffering” in Burma.

Less importantly, Robert Kaplan takes up the call in today’s New York Times, pointing out that US Naval forces now exercising off Thailand could escort in an invasion force. Kaplan doesn’t quite come out and call for the use of force but seems to be leaning that way, as is his wont.

Kaplan does concede that things could get messy. Even if the war were quick, the government could fall, and then the invaders might wind up trying to reorganize the country, which is fraught by ethnic tensions. Kaplan is cautiously optimistic about this endeavor — he thinks the fact that Burma has suffered insurgencies for 60 years is conducive to their settlement rather than indicative of their tenacity. Personally, I think the last thing the United States needs is another occupation to manage. We should wish the Europeans luck if they’re game, but we shouldn’t encourage them.

You could argue that the best way to get the junta to open Burma’s doors is to get legal authority to knock them down. But bluffing may be a bad tactic here. The Burmese military is reputed to be paranoid about invasion. According to the Times, “One of the generals’ most enduring fears is a seaborne invasion by Western powers it refers to as ‘foreign saboteurs.’” Along with the truth of the adage, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” this fear indicates that threatening to break in may only cause the Burmese to double their locks. Painful as it is, diplomacy is a better route.

For a look through the keyhole into the bizarre world of the Rumsfeld-era DOD establishment, take a look at these documents describing the DOD military analysts/”force multipliers” program. Or better yet, listen in to some of Rumsfeld’s Roundtables, with audio available here and here. Over the slurpings and mastications of people like Jed Babbin, now editor of Human Events who was then thought to be a reliable pitcher of “softballs” designed to defend the DOD line of the day, you can hear what your half-a-trillion per year pays for. (Sounds like expensive china their forks and knives are clinking against, at least.)

The topics of conversation range from Rumsfeld likening himself to Churchill, Rumsfeld grousing about obstruction to his ideas on the Hill, Rumsfeld grousing about Moqtada al-Sadr (”he’s not a real cleric!”), and various people (including Babbin) fawning over Rumsfeld. The discussion is peppered with Pentagon-speak, good-old-boys-club outbursts of laughter, and Rumsfeldian aphorisms (”you don’t want to eat your seed corn…”) It’s a little nauseating and a little enlightening. Bill Lumbergh meets Robert McNamara.

Steve Clemons posts a heartening little video of Bush père’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft responding to Steve’s question “What do you think about Cuba?” It’s a rare occasion for foreign policy folks to take heart and ponder whether the forces of reality may not be making progress on some issues, at least:

More common sense on Cuba here.

Here’s Michael Goldfarb:

As to whether Bush is a recruiting tool for terrorists–who cares? Al Qaeda was recruiting before Bush was in office and they will continue to do so after he’s gone. The important thing is that we keep killing those recruits. Eventually, one side will give up.

Do they edit this stuff before putting it up? By this logic, why don’t we airdrop a bunch of copies of Penthouse Letters into the Kabaa? After all, al Qaeda will continue recruiting whether we do it or not. Or maybe we could declare war on all of Islam. After all, al Qaeda was recruiting before we declared it. Or maybe we could send Senator McCain’s “moral compass and spiritual guide” onto al Hurra to tell Muslims that “America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.” After all, it’s not like al Qaeda’s not recruiting today.

Over at The American Conservative blog, Jim Antle points out that Rep. Walter Jones, an antiwar Republican incumbent, as well as another antiwar Republican, B.J. Lawson, won big in last night’s North Carolina primary.

Although the Republican establishment in Washington seems to have sacrificed every other governing principle at the altar of reckless militarism, it appears that a contingent of Republican voters haven’t. Maybe Bill Kauffman is onto something…

The back page of the Week in Review section of yesterday’s NYT features a symposium on “How to See This Mission Accomplished,” in which the Times asked nine experts to address problems going forward in Iraq.  Since at least five of the nine were enthusiastic backers of the war — and three work for the American Enterprise Institute — this is something like asking the captain of the Exxon Valdez* for his considered judgment on how best to conduct the cleanup.  Hey NYT: next time, why not consult someone who got it right? 

* Ironically enough, the Valdez’s Wikipedia entry places one “Able Seaman Robert Kagan” at the helm during the crash.  They’re everywhere. 

This Sunday, the department of Santa Cruz, the richest region of Bolivia, will hold a referendum on regional autonomy. Other departments in the eastern half of the country will likely follow suit in the upcoming months. The central government in La Paz opposes the project and calls it “separatist.” Despite that, polls show that an overwhelming majority of “cruceños” will vote in favor of autonomy.

As a consequence, the ruling party has threatened to use violence against the citizens of Santa Cruz who show up to vote on Sunday. It wouldn’t be the first time. Last December, the government forced the approval of a new constitution in a Constituent Assembly while a pro-government mob outside the building prevented opposition assemblymen from attending the session. This year, something similar happened when the national Congress declared these referenda on regional autonomy illegal in a rigged session while mobs outside Parliament prevented opposition Congressmen from entering the building.

This time around, the party of president, Evo Morales, has warned about the possibility of taking thousands of its supporters to Santa Cruz to prevent the vote from taking place. The only way to accomplish this is by force.

So it’s kind of surprising that the European Union is taking sides with those who, over and over again, have used violence to suppress democratic institutions. The French ambassador in Bolivia and representative of the EU in that country has stated that the leaders of Santa Cruz who are pushing for autonomy will have to “assume the consequences” if violence erupts on Sunday. That is, the EU will blame the victims if they get beaten up by government thugs for exercising their democratic rights.

Shame on the EU.

In its infinite wisdom, C-SPAN chose to commit this Hudson Institute panel to celluloid. Of course, I can’t get the dang video to work right, but I had the fortune to catch most of the panel last night on the teevee. Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Senor, and Peter Rodman got the old gang back together in an effort to pretend-examine What Went Wrong in Iraq.

The line that Feith advances is that we shouldn’t have done a, y’know, occupation. Wolfowitz supports this position, expressing amazement that “the term ‘occupation’ sticks with us today, even though the occupation ended in June 2004.” These are cute semantic games, but they’re an affront to reality. So Wolfowitz turns to this move, as reported by Eli Lake:

And I do think a real failure — I assign responsibility all over the place — was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the population.

This sends Abu Muqawama, the pseudonymous U.S. military veteran and proprietor of a popular counterinsurgency blog, into apoplexy. What’s a real shame is that Lake’s own question, which was excellent, didn’t elicit a serious response. Lake observed that even under close tutelage from the Americans, galling depredations had been committed by the ISF, such as torture conducted by the Ministry of Interior, etc. Why, then, if we had handed more control over sooner, wouldn’t we have expected much more of this kind of thing to have happened?

Feith’s response? I’m paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of “I just don’t think it would have.” So presumably under the Feith-Wolfowitz plan, we invade, grab Saddam, and then just turn the reins over to “external” Iraqi leader/charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his band of 700 supporters? Or perhaps Wolfowitz meant his remark as an “assume a can-opener” joke? Wolfowitz’s claim that “a real failure…was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough” begs the question How on Earth could we have just had enough committed Iraqi troops “early enough and fast enough”???

Wolfowitz then ups the ante with his claim that “nobody could have foreseen the insurgency,” an insurgency which he attributes almost entirely to Saddam Hussein. Reading from Feith’s new book, Wolfowitz agrees with Feith that neither of them saw “a CIA assessment stating that after their ouster, the Ba’athists would be able to organize, recruit for, finance, supply, and command and control an insurgency, let alone an alliance with foreign jihadists.” This is an absurd over-attribution of responsibility for the insurgency to that Most Unitary of Evils, Saddam Hussein. As for who could have predicted that the intractable confessional disputes may have caused problems, Feith and Wolfowitz may want to look up Paul Pillar.

These points represent just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, if Hudson had had somebody on the panel who did not fundamentally agree on the basic justice, prudence, and strategic genius behind the war, all of this could have been exposed as nonsense in front of the cameras. But that’s not how the game is played, I guess.

Dana Milbank, who reports on Washington as a visitor might report on the monkey house at a zoo, attended Doug Feith’s talk about his new book at CSIS last night and reports on the results. His title? “Iraq War Is Everyone Else’s Fault, Feith Explains.”

I’m no Milbank partisan, but when he’s on, he’s on.

Below are a couple of interesting slides from Shibley Telhami’s latest polling in the Islamic world (click for larger versions):

Thursday the Government Accountability Office published a report that points out that the United States lacks a “comprehensive plan” that integrates “all elements of national power” to deal with problem of terrorism emanating from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The report exemplifies the cult of planning that enthralls U.S. foreign policy analysts — and not just because it uses the phrase “comprehensive plan” 47 times in 25 pages.

Democratic leaders can use the report to bash President Bush, which is presumably why they requested it. But most people will merely find it useless. It is, after all, the GAO’s shtick to issue bland reports like this one, which does little other than note a lack of coordinated planning and then recommend more coordinated planning. (The report does say, to be fair, that the United States has done too little to address the cause of terrorism in northwest Pakistan, which it identifies, with bizarre confidence, as a lack of economic development.) And no one, even at Cato, can really be against better planning and coordination of government agencies to combat terrorists. Seems harmless. So what’s the problem?

The report never considers the possibility that the great minds of Washington, D.C., however well coordinated, may not contain the solution to the problems in Pakistan’s northwest hinterlands. Planning, after all, isn’t power.

I have never been, I confess, to an inter-agency planning meeting, so I can’t rule out the possibility that they’re magic. Maybe the agency representatives perform coordinated rites that reveal the wisdom to solve any problem and the power to implement their insight.

Barring that, it might have been worth devoting a sentence or two in the report to the difficulty of planning the affairs of other people’s countries. The area in question, after all, is not only beyond the control of our government but beyond the control of Pakistan’s, which we also do not control. This is not an engineering problem, like a faulty bridge. This is a problem of Pakistani politics and geography. There is not a U.S. plan that can fix that, including an invasion plan.

(more…)

Earlier this week, Matt Yglesias remarked at “the arrogance of the hawks” and expressed his frustration that

In response to 9/11, the hawks launched a war that’s killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden ever could, at the cost of over 1 trillion dollars; they’ve done nothing to impede nuclear proliferation, nothing to build democracies in the Middle East, failed to kill or capture al-Qaeda’s top leadership, made Hamas and Iran more powerful than ever before, and brought American prestige and influence to a new low ebb.

Now obviously a lot of the folks who adhere to the ideas that have brought all this about somehow think they’re right anyway. And fair enough; there’s just no accounting for some people. But the attitude of thoughtless, unreflective scorn that you see from the [Noah] Pollacks and [James] Kirchicks and [Michael] Goldfarbs of the world is like it comes from some weird alternative reality where their ideas have generally been deemed vindicated, rather than one where 178% of the public says we’re on the wrong track.

Today, Andrew Sullivan links to this video chronicling Douglas Feith’s contorted non-apologies and notes “one wonders whether anyone in the Bush establishment actually believes they ever made an error.”

In this vein, it’s worth wondering what things would look like if things had turned out basically the mirror image of what’s happened today…

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Responding to Charles Krauthammer’s call to make Israel a formal U.S. protectorate, David Frum dissents:

An Iranian nuclear force would be small and inaccurate: a terror weapon, not a weapon of war to be used against an opponent able to respond in overwhelming force. Israel is not the target. So who is?

The short answer: The world oil market.

In 1986, the US waged an undeclared proxy naval war to deter Iran from attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The US won of course and Iran lacked any effective riposte. This US operation played a decisive role in compelling Iran to accept peace in the Iran-Iraq war.

And it may have prompted Iranian leaders to decide: We need an effective counter-deterrent against the US. The US would have been much more reluctant to protect Kuwaiti tankers against a nuclear Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would act as a “Keep Out” sign to frighten the US away from a now truly Persian Gulf.

In other words, an atomic bomb would serve Iran’s hegemonic ambitions rather tha its apocalyptic fantasies. It is a useful weapon sought by rational people. That is precisely why it is dangerous and must be stopped.

Frum packs a lot of problems into a short piece. So Iran is going to use nuclear weapons to try to hold Arab oil from making its way onto world markets? Interesting. A few questions:

1) What do we think the Chinese may think about the resulting skyrocket in world oil prices? Japan? Frum paints the familiar image of a lonely US hanging by a thread to its oil lifeline in the Middle East. Things have changed a lot since 1986. What do we think the rest of the world may have to say about this business?

2) What target are the Iranians holding at risk in this scenario? Ras Tanura? Israel? Iraq? Who’s going to be threatened?

3) Who is going to believe that Iran will pull the trigger? If we believe, as Frum and I do, that Iran is run by “rational people” who are seeking nuclear weapons because they are “useful,” why would we believe that the Iranian regime would bring about its own end by using nuclear weapons against any of the above targets?

I can think of one paper on the topic that Frum might want to read.

There’s a spirited debate going on at National Review. Mark Krikorian, NRO’s resident immigrant-basher, supposed yesterday morning that maybe one more reason we should keep immigrants out is because the grandchildren of Hispanic-American Catholics might turn out to less supportive of Israel than their Anglo coreligionists (a condition he calls “anti-Semitism”).

Charging to challenge this thesis is John J. Miller, coauthor of a book calling, umm, France, “America’s oldest enemy.” (Strangely enough, the book was published around the beginning of the Iraq war.) Bernard-Henri Levy “characterized the book this way:

the whole book is a mad charge (whose only equivalent I know is the fascist French literature of the 30’s) against a diabolical nation, the incarnation of evil, bearing in the body and soul of its citizens the stigmata of an ill will the only aim of which throughout the centuries has been the humiliation of America the great.

Good Lord, what’s happened to American conservatism? The debate between these two reminds me a bit of Henry Kissinger’s remark on the Iran-Iraq War.

I see that the senator from Arizona feels confident enough in his own views on foreign policy to blurb ur-neocon Robert Kagan’s latest call to arms as ”a guide to the dangerous waters of 21st century geopolitics.”

But hey, who really knows what he thinks about foreign policy?

Max Boot writes this today, discussing the competing currents of American foreign policy, militarized Wilsonianism and those who oppose it:

The opposing viewpoint—which denounces American “imperialism” and abjures the defense of liberty abroad—has an equally long history. It lists among its proponents not only modern-day neocon-bashers such as Michael Moore and Pat Buchanan, but also such illustrious predecessors as the “progressive” historians Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams and realpolitik thinkers like Hans Morgenthau and Walter Lippmann.

Does Boot want us to believe that–to take a particularly salient example–playing one Shi’a militia off the other amounts to “the defense of liberty abroad”? Maybe I don’t want to know the answer, since Boot has called the deranged Gen. Curtis LeMay “one of the ‘greatest peacemakers in modern history,’ a proper candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize” and gushed over how maybe the Philippines (200,000 civilians killed! torture!) could be a model for how to win in Iraq. So I for one will pass on taking my moral cues from Boot, thanks.

One of the funnier press tics of this campaign is when reporters rend themselves in two, agonizing over completely contrived complexity that they imagine exists inside John McCain. Today’s NYT has the latest example, a 1,600 word thumbsucker about how McCain is buffeted between two discrete factions of his foreign policy advisers. It’s complete, unadulterated nonsense.

The narrative Elisabeth Bumiller and Larry Rohter are advancing is that Senator McCain has two different factions within his foreign policy advisory: dyed-in-the-wool war-loving neocons like Max Boot and Robert Kagan on the one hand, and on the other hand, “pragmatists” who are later described in the article as “realists,” best characterized by people like Henry Kissinger, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Richard Armitage. According to Bumiller and Rohter, there are big differences between the two camps.

There are degrees of difference among these advisers, to be sure, but to imply that they represent fundamentally different camps is completely inaccurate. First off, there’s a big difference between academic realists, who overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq before it started, and most people who gallivant around the Beltway proclaiming themselves realists. (Beware, in particular, anyone who uses realist with a modifier, as in “idealistic realist.” Only accept the genuine article.) A huge majority of the Beltway foreign policy establishment–including every member except one of the “pragmatist” faction in the Times story–promoted the war and still have failed to grasp the reasons for its failure.

Bumiller and Rohter then roll out the one prominent figure within the DC foreign policy establishment who did oppose the war, Brent Scowcroft, Bush père’s national security adviser. They describe his opposition to the war and list him as a member of the realist camp within McCain’s advisory. But here’s the thing: If Bumiller and Rohter had dug around a bit, they could have discovered that McCain consigliere Randy Scheunemann, famous for his stalwart promotion of Iraqi charlatan Ahmed Chalabi (a topic that goes totally unexplored in the piece) told the New York Sun in 2006 that “I don’t think, given where John has been for the last four or five years on the Iraq war and foreign policy issues, anyone would mistake Scowcroft for a close adviser.”

Reading the Times piece, you’d believe that there are the war-crazed neocons on the one hand, and the prudent anti-war realists on the other hand. In reality, you have the war-crazed neocons on the one hand, and pro-war realists like Henry Kissinger (who is pro-war first and a realist second) on the other. They present Scowcroft, the one opponent of the war, in order to create the impression that there’s a difference of views on the question, but then fail to mention that he’s been dismissed as a peripheral figure by McCain’s closest foreign policy adviser.

I don’t know whether the Times is trying to make up for the Vicki Iseman story with this, but it makes John McCain look a lot less wedded to perpetual war than anybody who’s been paying attention could easily tell you.

Via Glenn Greenwald, a Rasmussen poll released yesterday indicates that support for withdrawing from Iraq has reached an all time high. 26% of Americans support leaving “immediately,” 39% want U.S. troops home within one year, not contingent on conditions, and 31% want to stay until “the mission is complete.” So 65% of Americans want US troops out of Iraq within–at the outer bound–one year. 31% support the McCain strategy of staying indefinitely.

Two main purposes of the Surge were, in the words of Thomas Donnelly, to “redefine the Washington narrative,” and as White House adviser Peter Feaver put things, to “develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush’s successor.” This can’t look too good for these folks. It speaks volumes, on the other hand, about the wisdom of the American people.

My recent op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor argues that the US objective in Afghanistan – preventing the creation of terrorist havens – does not require that Afghanistan become a peaceful, centralized state. I say that’s good news because it’s beyond us to build one. Absent this goal, the push for a surge of US or NATO forces in Afghanistan makes less sense.

I want to add couple points here that I couldn’t fit into the op-ed.

American leaders have lately been telling Europeans to make a bigger commitment to Afghanistan, even though the war is becoming unpopular in much of Europe. For instance, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a speech at a conference in Munich in February where he explained the terrorist threat to the Europeans to get them to send more troops to Afghanistan. He did not say how counter-insurgency in Afghanistan serves counter-terrorism in Pakistan, which is where the terrorists in the region who should concern Europeans mostly live. At least in the short term, 55,000 thousand western soldiers across the border seem more likely to inflame Pakistani extremism than to suppress it.

This hectoring demonstrates the trouble with NATO. Back when NATO had a clear purpose, to defend Western Europe from the Soviets, it made sense to ask the Europeans to do more. The Europeans had an incentive to avoid military spending; to free ride. That was OK with Americans at the start of the Cold War, when we were eager to spark European economic growth as a bulwark against Communism. Once Western Europe got rich, we told them to ante up, in part via publications like the Allied Contribution of the Common Defense.

Most American policy-makers believe that we remain in that Cold War relationship; that our allies are free-riding to a shared goal. But, as Stanley Kober has observed, threat perceptions have diverged, and many Europeans, rather than appreciating our wars, dispute their efficacy. Europeans seem more inclined than Americans to wonder whether the war in Afghanistan is making them safer. By asserting a common cause without providing one, NATO clouds this reality. It deludes us into thinking that our efforts are a favor that the Europeans ought to return.

It has become popular to worry that Afghanistan will destroy NATO. That would be no great loss. Today, the principle effect of NATO and its eastward expansion is to antagonize Russia. The benefit that justifies this antipathy is unclear. How do the military responsibilities that the US has so casually accepted in recent years — to defend Estonia, for example, against Russia — serve US interests? This guarantee, if it’s believed, seems likely to encourage the war it defends against by provoking moral hazard; as the defense we provide our new allies frees them to offend Russia.

The thesis that the prospect of NATO membership spreads liberal values or institutions is plausible, but I’m not convinced. Nor is it clear that NATO matters much in signing up allies for wars. It’s possible we got a few more contributions in Afghanistan by virtue of the alliance, but I doubt it mattered much. The countries that went probably did so because they believed in the mission, not because they are in NATO.

Despite its strategic obsolescence, NATO has proven politically useful on both sides of the Atlantic. However hollow, NATO will survive. What we might lose in Afghanistan are misconceptions about its usefulness.

The foreign-policy blog buzz of the day is probably the story, linked by Blake Hounshell at FP, and by Noah Shachtman at Wired, about al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri’s online Q and A recently. Apparently, according to Blake’s excerpts, it’s tough out there for a jihadi:

The general tenor of the questions is sharply critical, so let me boil down the questioners’ main beefs here:

Al Qaeda talks a big game, but never attacks Israel (but we have killed plenty of Jews, Zawahiri responds)
Al Qaeda isn’t doing anything to overthrow the Egyptian regime (it ain’t easy, Zawahiri pleads, but it is inevitable)
Al Qaeda slaughters innocent Muslims (only if they get in the way)
Al Qaeda is too harsh on Hamas (just the leaders who have sold out sharia law, not the “mujahedin”)
Al Qaeda is rumored to be dealing with Iran (a charge Zawahiri has responded to before with a non-denial denial)
Influential clerics and ideologues have denounced al Qaeda (Zawahiri takes great pains to paint two in particular, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the subject of “Egypt’s Contrite Commander” from FP’s current issue, as Zionist-Crusader stooges)

It’s good to know that these bastards are having at least as tough a time with public diplomacy as we are. Apparently sowing mayhem and blowing up wedding parties is a bad PR move. Meanwhile, Noah Shachtman highlights Mr. al Zawahiri’s thoughts on Iran, whom, if you were listening to John McCain or the Weekly Standard on this stuff, you may have thought was an old pal of aQ:

The dispute between America and Iran is a real dispute based on the struggle over areas of influence, and the possibility of America striking Iran is a real possibility. As for what might happen in the region, I can only say that major changes will occur in the region, and the situation will be in the interest of the Mujahideen if the war saps both of them. If, however, one of them emerges victorious, its influence will intensify and fierce battles will begin between it and the Mujahideen, except that the Jihadi awakening currently under way and the degeneration state of affairs of the invaders in Afghanistan and Iraq will make it impossible for Iran or America to become the sole decision-maker in the region. (emphasis mine)

This sounds an awful lot like the old “why don’t you and him go fight?” strategy to me. Doesn’t seem like you’d be too inclined to push Iran to the brink of war with the United States if you were really working hand-in-glove with Tehran like some have been insinuating.

Mandarin of the Washington Establishment, Joe Klein of Time magazine appears to have had just about enough of Fred Kagan’s writing on Iraq:

On the day that John Yoo’s remarkable torture memo is released, this foolishness is a reminder that none of these people–none of the vicious, mendacious, naive, simplistic, unapologetic, neo-colonialist ideologues who promulgated this disaster–should have even the vaguest claim on the time or tolerance of fair-minded people.

Back story on the abominable green-lighting of torture is here. Kagan article on which Klein was commenting here.

A while back, I characterized the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq as “buy time and pray for a miracle.” Now White House politics-of-Iraq guru Peter Feaver has a piece in Commentary lifting the veil from the White House machinations of surge planning. In the piece, Feaver reveals that the planners’ objective was basically to toss the Iraqi hot potato into the lap of the next administration, dust off their hands, and declare victory:

The challenge…was to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush’s successor. Although important progress could be made on that strategy during Bush’s watch, ultimately it would be carried through by the next President….

This new and different strategy, now called the “surge” but at one point called by insiders the “bridge,” emerged out of a growing recognition over 2006 that our critics were right about one thing: our Iraq policy was not working…

As a political matter, this has a pretty airtight logic to it. Rather than admitting that theirs was the first U.S. administration to start and lose a war of aggression on their watch (bad for the legacy!), this way it comes out heads-we-win-tails-you-lose. If, by the grace of God, some subsequent U.S. president can manage to extricate us from the Iraqi quagmire without a total meltdown, the Bushies will clap each other on the back, declaring themselves visionaries. If, on the other hand, Iraq flames out entirely on the watch of a subsequent administration, the Bushies can play the Dolchstoss card and explain how The Surge Was Working and would have continued working were it not for the fecklessness of the Obama/Clinton/McCain administration.

Sunday’s New York Times contains a review of Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, the book version of his documentary film of the same name. The book is basically a 500 page compilation of the interviews Ferguson did for the film.

Like most of those who reviewed the film, the reviewer, Barry Gewen, has only good things to say about Ferguson’s project. For the most part, he’s right to praise. Ferguson made a fortune in software (after getting a PhD in Political Science from MIT!) and used a chunk of his wealth to travel to Iraq at great risk and make a first-rate documentary, even though he’d never before made a film. You have to give the guy credit.

On the other hand, both the film and book at least implicitly subscribe to the incompetence dodge: the idea that the problem in Iraq was the Bush Administration’s execution of the occupation, not the thing itself; means not ends. Ferguson, a liberal hawk who supported the war and, from what I can tell, still does, says in his preface that the purpose of the film was to answer the “big question of how and why all this had occurred.” “All this” means the disaster in Iraq. He answers by dissecting the management of the early occupation, particularly the decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and fire most Ba’athists from Iraq’s government. He demonstrates that these decisions were ill-considered, ill-advised and aided the insurgency. By stopping there, Ferguson implies that he has answered his question by looking at the tactics of occupation; that this incompetence is what went wrong in Iraq.

The Bush Administration was incompetent and then some in Iraq, but the occupation failed because it involved Americans trying to reorder the government of a far-off country with plenty of grievances and arms but no liberal ideology. It’s too much to say that success was impossible, but failure was likely, no matter who was President.

Gewen flags a quote Ambassador Barbara Bodine gives in the book: “There were 500 ways to do it wrong, and two or three ways to do it right,” Bodine tells Ferguson. “What we didn’t understand is that we were gonna go through all 500.”

What Gewen doesn’t say is that if she’s right and the odds of success are 1/250, the lesson is don’t chance it.

For an explanation of why civil war was likely in Iraq after an American invasion, no matter how well the President planned and whether they dissolved the Iraqi Army, read the essay, “Learning the Right Lessons from Iraq,” that I wrote for Cato with Harvey Sapolsky and Chris Preble.

On why getting this right matters, see Andrew Bacevich:

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.

Banal maybe, but worth repeating.

Buried in a story in Thursday’s Washington Post about the mess in Somalia is the following nugget:

In recent weeks, the State Department dispatched a team of contractors to Somaliland to explore the idea of establishing a military presence at an old airstrip there, according to members of the team interviewed in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Somaliland’s government, eager for recognition, welcomed the possibility.

“If the U.S. wishes to have a military presence in Somaliland territory, we will welcome them and accept them,” said Somaliland President Dahir Rayale Kahin. “There are discussions, and we agreed to work together toward mutual ends. But things have not materialized so far.”

This demands more reporting. What kind of military presence? Most likely we’re talking about a staging ground for special operations forces or UAV flights. But that would presumably be secret, begging the question of what contractors are doing talking about it.

The State Department just designated al-Shabaab, a wing of the Islamic Courts Group, as a terrorist organization. The Courts Group is the loose-knit Islamist alliance that briefly gained power in much of Somalia before being routed by the Ethiopians and reforming as an insurgency.

Beyond claiming that “al-Shabaab is a violent and brutal extremist group with a number of individuals affiliated with al Qaeda,” State’s designation does not explain itself. Reuters cites officials who claim that al-Shabaab’s leader trained with al Qaeda in Afghanistan and that it shelters al Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 and 2002 bomb attacks in Kenya. The UN is less certain about an al Qaeda presence in Somalia.

That is thin gruel. Prior links and several al Qaeda guys in the mix, while worrying, do not mean that organization is going to attack Americans, and is therefore one we should target.

Mixing a “war on terrorism” with the promiscuous designation of Islamic insurgent organizations as terrorists is a recipe for spending the next century tied up in other people’s civil wars. There’s a self-fulfilling aspect to this policy. Declaring war on insurgents may cause them to attack Americans or ally with those who do. There’s evidence that this dynamic is already occurring in Somalia. And if you agree with Robert Pape that military occupations cause suicide terrorism, American boots on the ground could create terrorists, rather than denying them sanctuary.

If we can locate terrorists bent on attacking Americans in Somalia, we should target them if the local government cannot. Aside from that, we should keep our powder dry and wait and see what emerges. Sending even a small force (and it’s possible we already have covert operatives on the ground to target airstrikes) into Somalia — even Somaliland, a relatively calm area in the south — is a terrible idea under present circumstances.

Wouldn’t it be terrific if we had a system of divided war powers so that Congress could monitor what the Pentagon is doing in Somalia, inform the public, and prevent a slide into a small war?

Fred Kaplan’s new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, is written in a pleasantly breezy, journalistic style that makes it easy to blow through in an afternoon. While a lot of the material in the book will be familiar to those who’ve been closely watching the trainwreck-in-slow-motion that is the Bush administration’s foreign policy, it contains a few shocking tidbits that are new. Here’s one that was particularly striking, discussing the so-called “freedom agenda,” a plan to spur undemocratic Arab regimes to democracy that was led by Iran-Contra figure Elliot Abrams. When a document Abrams had overseen describing Washington’s agenda for overhauling the Arab world leaked to al Hayat, the Arab world unsurprisingly reacted with outright hostility. Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched to smooth ruffled feathers. He met with his staff before the trip.

Speaking privately with his aides, Powell said the White House was, in effect, telling the Arabs, “Get down out of those trees and be democrats.” The United States had just toppled the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq with military force. Now, Powell said, we seemed to be ordering the Arab nations, “Line up, you’re all next.”

There’s also this, where Natan Sharansky was apparently trying to warn Bush that Ariel Sharon’s policy of disengagement from Gaza could wreak havoc there.

Sharansky wrote a private letter to President Bush, making [the case that disengagement would be dangerous] and hoping that he too would oppose Sharon’s move. Bush wrote him back a private letter, saying that he supported Sharon’s policy. Disengagement, the president argued, would create a vacuum, which the natural forces of freedom would fill: Gaza would become a democracy almost of its own accord.

If you need to get caught up on what’s gone wrong, Kaplan’s book is a decent primer. More info here.