Cillizza on Cain and Know-Nothing Foreign Policy
Asked on Meet the Press this weekend whether the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador was an act of war, Herman Cain gave the following response:
After I looked at all of the information provided by the intelligence community, the military, then I could make that decision. I can’t make that decision because I’m not privy to all of that information… I’m not going to say it was an act of war based upon news reports, with all due respect. I would hope that the president and all of his advisers are considering all of the factors in determining just how much, how much the Iranians participated in this.
That struck me as a refreshingly reasonable position. Yet the Washington Post‘s election handicapper, Chris Cillizza, decided to make that quote the centerpiece of an article on Cain’s “know-nothing foreign policy.” He then presents a poll showing that Republicans don’t care much about foreign policy this year, only to conclude that foreign-policy ignorance could be a fatal handicap for Cain. His evidence for that conclusion is a quote from Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, who specializes in arguing for wars and imperialism. Boot, as it happens, just wrote a blog post for Commentary titled, “Iran Plot Goes Straight to the Top,” where he attacks those willing to question the evidence against Iran’s leaders and vaguely supports attacking them.
Cillizza’s article makes clear that foreign-policy ignorance is far preferable to the Washington Post‘s idea of expertise. The worst part is that Cain, who claims not to know what neoconservatives are, seems likely to become one, call Boot for advice, and win the Post‘s respect.
Max Boot Is Worried about Libya
Now he tells us.
Max Boot, among the loudest proponents of military action against Muammar Qaddafi, reports in today’s NY Times that he “can’t stop worrying about everything that could go wrong.”
Recognizing that Libya is so bitterly divided that it might not be appropriate to call it a country, Boot is suddenly concerned that “a long, seething history of rivalries among 140 tribes and clans,” could erupt into full scale civil war. Even if Boot gets his wish, and Qaddafi is ousted, he frets that “the tribes could fight one another for the spoils of Libya’s oil industry; as in Iraq, some could form alliances with Al Qaeda.”
Boot concedes that Libya “has had an active Islamist movement that has sent many fighters to Iraq,” and warns that “the collapse of Colonel Qaddafi’s police state would mean greater freedom for all Libyans, including jihadists who could try to instigate an insurgency as they did in Iraq.”
So, lots of things could go wrong. But Max Boot isn’t rethinking his earlier support for military operations against Qaddafi. Instead, he wants us to widen the war.
The Tetchy Imperialist
Max Boot is thinking about US military personnel training the Afghan security forces and feeling irritated:
What irritates me about the whole situation is that it is the U.S. that has to pick up the tab. Our troops are already doing the bulk of the fighting. Why don’t our rich allies — e.g., Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, France, Italy, Germany, Britain — pay for more of the cost of training? Some of those countries have made sizable troop contributions; others haven’t. But the U.S. has done more than any of them in terms of fighting the Taliban directly. Why do we have to do so much more than the rest of them in financing the Afghan Security Forces too?
I should note that their failure to ante up should not be an excuse for us to walk away. This is not an act of altruism; it is very much in America’s national-security interest to have a functional and effective security force in Afghanistan to prevent a Taliban/al-Qaeda takeover. Our security perimeter runs right through the Hindu Kush.
A few points. First, is this the same guy who asserted in 2001 that “the most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role” and that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets?” I mean, say what you will about the English or the Romans, at least they didn’t whine about others not doing their dirty work for them.
More importantly, it’s uninformed. As I have been incessantly howling at the moon pointing out in other contexts, when we state that we have a vital interest in something, as the US Government has and as Boot reiterates above, smaller, weaker allies have every reason to free ride on Uncle Sucker even if they believe they share that interest.
Finally, Boot asserted the other day that we are “locked in an existential struggle against Islamist extremists,” and here he expands on the theme by asserting that America’s “security perimeter runs right through the Hindu Kush.” This is extreme hyperbole. Existential? As in, our existence is at stake? I thought we were over this sort of thing, but I guess not at Commentary.
Moreover, depending on what Boot is trying to convey with the phrase “security perimeter,” it’s far from clear why it stops at the Hindu Kush. There are all sorts of things going on on the other side of the Hindu Kush that could bear much more heavily on our security than what’s going on just to the West.
I give up.
Gates’s ‘Cuts’ and the Neocons’ Lament
As I discussed last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s latest attempt to “cut” the Pentagon’s budget are phony. The Secretary would ideally like to see the $78 billion over five years in savings filtered elsewhere into the budget; meanwhile, the 2012 budget will actually grow.
This hasn’t stopped uber-hawk Max Boot and a cadre of neocons from attempting to spin the Secretary’s announcement as the latest example of military downsizing that will make our services less prepared to deal with any conflict or international issue around the globe. I rebut Boot’s claims over at The Skeptics:
In his latest offering at The Weekly Standard, Boot wails that the personnel cuts “will bring the Army’s active duty strength down to 517,000—still larger than it was in 2001 but far smaller than it was in 1991, and not big enough to meet all of the contingencies for which it must prepare.”
Boot doesn’t define the “contingencies” that he wants the military to prepare for, but it seems pretty clear that he disagrees with Robert Gates’s assessment that “The United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon — that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire.”
…
One can only imagine how hysterical [the neocons] would be if Gates had actually proposed to reduce the amount of money going to the military every year. As it is, the DoD budget is slated to grow. Gates explained at last week’s press conference that his goal was “a steady, sustainable and predictable rate of growth” without explaining why the Pentagon should simply expect to see more money every year while the rest of the country is supposed to be cutting back.
My word of advice to anyone who wants to know what Gates has actually proposed: look at the facts, not the neocons’ interpretation of them.
British Military Cuts, Conservatives, and Neocons
Yesterday, Prime Minister David Cameron announced Britain’s biggest defense cuts since World War II. The cuts affect the British military across the board.
The Army will shed 7,000 troops; the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force will each lose 5,000 personnel; the total workforce in the Ministry of Defence, including civilians, will contract by 42,000. The Navy’s destroyer fleet will shrink from 23 to 19. Two aircraft carriers — already under construction — will be completed, but one of the two will be either mothballed or sold within a few years. Whether the one remaining flattop in the British fleet will actually deploy with an operational fixed-wing aircraft is an open question. They’ve decided to jettison their Harriers; a technological marvel when it was first introduced, it has a limited range and a poor safety record. In its place, the Brits still intend to purchase Joint Strike Fighters, but not the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) version.
And right on cue, Max Boot argues in today’s Wall Street Journal, following the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano’s example, that fiscal conservatives should not use these cuts as an example of how to reign in deficits. According to Boot and Carafano, military spending is off-limits. Period.
But as I note at The Skeptics, most Americans do not buy into this argument:
In Boot’s telling, Cameron’s decision inevitably places a heavier burden on the shoulders of American taxpayers and American troops.
But why should Americans perform a function for other governments that they are obligated by tradition, law and reason to perform for themselves? Defense is, as Boot notes, “one of the core responsibilities of government.” I would go one better: defense is one of the only legitimate responsibilities for government. So why does Max Boot think that Americans should simply resign themselves to take on this burden, doing for others what they should do for themselves?
I suspect that he fears that most Americans are not comfortable with the role that he and his neoconservative allies have preached for nearly two decades, hence his preemptive shot across the bow of the incoming congressional class that will have been elected on a platform of reducing the burden of government. True, the public is easily swayed, and not inclined to vote on foreign policy matters, in general, but as I noted here on Monday, it seems unlikely that the same Tea Partiers who want the U.S. government to do less in the United States are anxious to do more everywhere else. And, indeed, such sentiments are not confined to conservatives and constitutionalists who are keenly aware of government’s inherent limitations. Recent surveys by the Chicago Council of on Global Affairs (.pdf) and the Pew Research Center (here) definitively demonstrate that the public writ large is anxious to shed the role of global policeman.
Click here to read the entire post.
Globocop vs. Nanny State
Max Boot opines in today’s WSJ that ObamaCare is a threat to U.S. global military power, and, by extension, a threat to global security. I disagree. Because we should be seeking to offload some of the costs of policing the world, I hope that our current fiscal difficulties will force an ultimately worthwhile trade-off.
To be clear, I share Boot’s disdain for this massive expansion of federal power. Similarly, I don’t dispute Boot’s characterization of the health care legislation as likely to impose a huge net cost. Rather, the central flaw in the piece is his unwillingness to think clearly about our government’s obligations to our citizens, and of other governments to theirs.
The rationale whereby the U.S. government defends other countries, and U.S. taxpayers pay for it, is flawed. Under our Constitution, the American people grant to the federal government explicit powers to protect and defend the security of the United States. Treaties negotiated during the course of the Cold War effectively equated the defense of other countries with that of our own so that today the U.S. government provides “public goods” for people who are not now, and have never been, parties to our unique social contract.
As such, today’s U.S. military chiefly fights other people’s wars, and builds other people’s nations. The primary role of the U.S. Department of Defense is the defense of others.
These commitments have been sustained since the end of the Cold War under the premise that the costs are both low and sustainable over the long term. But it is becoming harder and harder to maintain these pretenses. By seeking to provide global public goods for all of humanity, we are saddling our children and grandchildren with huge costs.
Fiscal pressures have the potential to cause the American people to scrutinize military spending, and this scrutiny could ultimately force Washington to revise some of the core assumptions that have driven force planning for a generation. If that happens, we might finally shift the burdens of defense spending back onto those who benefit from such spending.
Robert Wright on Being–and Not Being–”Pro-Israel”
The U.S.-Israel relationship has been in the news a lot lately. First, Israel humiliates the American Vice President by announcing an expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem during his trip to that country. Then, Gen. Petraeus states in congressional testimony [.pdf] that the Israel/Palestine imbroglio “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” which in turn creates a dynamic where “Al Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”
For those with interest in the subject, Robert Wright’s piece on the New York Times’ website may be of interest. Wright looks at how chauvinistically Gary Bauer, Max Boot, and Abraham Foxman define “pro-Israel” and writes
If Israel’s increasingly powerful right wing has its way, without constraint from American criticism and pressure, then Israel will keep building settlements. And the more settlements get built — especially in East Jerusalem — the harder it will be to find a two-state deal that leaves Palestinians with much of their dignity intact. And the less dignity intact, the less stable any two-state deal will be.
As more and more people are realizing, the only long-run alternatives to a two-state solution are: a) a one-state solution in which an Arab majority spells the end of Israel’s Jewish identity; b) Israel’s remaining a Jewish state by denying the vote to Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, a condition that would be increasingly reminiscent of apartheid; c) the apocalypse. Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference on Monday: “A two-state solution is the only viable path for Israel to remain both a democracy and a Jewish state.”
So, by my lights, being “pro-Israel” in the sense embraced by Bauer, Boot and Foxman — backing Israel’s current policies, including its settlement policies — is actually anti-Israel. It’s also anti-America (in the sense of ‘bad for American security’), because Biden and Petraeus are right: America’s perceived support of — or at least acquiescence in — Israel’s more inflammatory policies endangers American troops abroad. In the long run, it will also endanger American civilians at home, funneling more terrorism in their direction.
I have been and remain skeptical that Washington could successfully force a deal on the Israelis and Palestinians. To my mind, neither side seems willing to make the sorts of very painful concessions that would be necessary for peace. I think that the big problem the I/P dispute presents for the United States is less inherent in the conflict than it is in the fact that the United States has placed itself in a position, as George Kennan wrote, where “each [side] has the impression that it is primarily through us that its desiderata can be achieved, with the result that we are always first to be blamed, no matter whose ox is gored; and all this in a situation where we actually have very little influence with either party.”
But as long as we’re implicated in this sorry affair, we ought to be throwing our weight around to try to push both parties in the directions we think they ought to go. As Wright writes, smiling and nodding no matter what Israel does isn’t friendship.
More Fear-Mongering Claptrap from Max Boot
Max Boot, fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and perhaps one of America’s most radical neo-imperialists, eight years ago this month likened the Afghan mission to British colonial rule:
Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets…This was supposed to be ‘for the good of the natives,’ a phrase that once made progressives snort in derision, but may be taken more seriously after the left’s conversion (or, rather, reversion) in the 1990s to the cause of ‘humanitarian’ interventions. [emphasis mine]
Just yesterday, this “stay-the-course” proponent said President Obama should fight on in Afghanistan and properly resource the counterinsurgency mission. Sadly, Boot’s arguments are so faulty and disjointed that it is difficult to decide where to begin first. Here I go…
Boot believes that the coalition should properly resource the war effort. What does that even mean? What Boot neglects to tell his readers is that our current policy requires more troops than we could ever send. The metric for successful counterinsurgency missions suggested by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps would require 200,000 counterinsurgents in southern Afghanistan alone, and upwards of 650,000 in the country as a whole, for upwards of 12 to 14 years—not including the last eight. The time and resources required for assisting Afghanistan would not be accomplished within costs acceptable to American and NATO publics.
Another critical point that Boot fails to disclose is how recklessly ambitious the current mission is. The cost in blood and treasure that we would have to incur—coming on top of what we have already paid—far outweighs any possible benefits, even accepting the most optimistic estimates for the likelihood of success. The United States does not have the patience, cultural knowledge, or legitimacy to transform what is a deeply divided, poverty stricken, tribal-based society into a self-sufficient, non-corrupt, and stable electoral democracy. And even if Americans did commit several hundred thousand troops and decades of armed nation-building, success would hardly be guaranteed, especially in a country notoriously suspicious of outsiders and largely devoid of central authority. Western powers could invest hundreds of thousands of troops and twice or three times the materiel and money and still not create a functioning state. Even in the unlikely event that we forged a stable Afghanistan, al Qaeda might simply reposition its presence into other regions of the world.
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Max Boot Grades Own Work, Gives Self ‘A’
Posted by Justin Logan
Max Boot photo via UPI
Sunday’s Washington Post ran a piece about 9/11 called the “pundit scorecard,” and gave Max Boot the “wishful thinking award” for his “Case for American Empire” piece. As the Post article described:
Suffice it to say that Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, isn’t happy. In fact, he looks back at the piece and feels pretty good about it. He points out that he had called on Washington to “feed the hungry, tend the sick, and impose the rule of law” in those benighted foreign locales, to at least “allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over.”
But let’s also recall that in May of 2003 Boot was still pooh-poohing Gen. Eric Shinseki’s admonition that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed for such an endeavor. Instead, Boot thought that our to-do list in Iraq should include “purging the Baathists, providing humanitarian relief, starting to rebuild, and then setting up a process to produce a representative local government,” and that
Just think about that for a second. In 2003, Max Boot was arguing that 60-75,000 U.S. troops could provide security all across Iraq, while simultaneously “purging the Baathists, providing humanitarian relief, starting to rebuild, and then setting up a process to produce a representative local government.”
Grade inflation seems to have gotten out of hand at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security
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