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about their foreign policy, French actresses are just the best. Man, I've prattled on about Anna Karina here before, a poster of BB adorns my wall, and now I'm trying to watch La Fleur du Mal (not to be confused with Les Fleurs du Mal), but Mélanie Doutey is pretty damn distracting:
Dear Fellow Washingtonians:
It was 45 degrees this morning. We do not live in Yakutsk. You don't have to dress like we do.
Love,
Justin
Good God, the Ahmadinejad statement was just astonishingly stupid and irresponsible. But those words don't even begin to sum it up. So let's go to the Diplomatic Thesaurus for a roundup:
Israel: "Outrageous."
Britain: "Deeply disturbing and sickening."
France: "Unacceptable."
Germany: "Completely unacceptable."
I was hoping the State Department would find something more creative and forceful than diplo-fave "unhelpful," and although not too elegant, they did:
United States: The declaration "underscores our concern and the international community's concerns about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons."
Overall, I'd say a solid B. None of the above is exactly Kennanesque, but they'll have to do.
Unsurprisingly, The New Republic has a solution to the myriad problems within Syria. I'll give you one guess what it is. Ready?
It's fashionable to dismiss the Syrian opposition, but the reality is that it has made tremendous progress in recent months toward creating a genuine, homegrown civil society. In the October 16 Damascus Declaration, for example, a wide array of normally bickering civil-society groups demanded a national conference on democratization. Declarations are nothing new in Syria, but this was the first time these groups had together laid out a concrete plan for political change. Ask most Syrian dissidents, and they'll tell you what they need: time and pressure. If the international community keeps up the pressure on Assad--not just over Lebanon, but within Syria as well--it can eventually create a viable alternative to Assad's regime. Ideally, Assad's regime would not fall right away, but would slowly weaken under international pressure as Syrian liberals gradually gain strength.
Ideally, of course, Iraq's Sunni community would come to grips with the fact that it is 20% of the population and start planning (and acting) accordingly. Ideally, President Ahmadinejad would come to understand that this idiotic and childish line on his wish list needs to be erased for a thousand reasons. Ideally, the Chinese and Taiwanese would come to some understanding over the long-term status of Taiwan. Ideally, Osama bin Laden would step on a landmine.
I submit to you that none of these "ideal" premises is a solid foundation for building an approach to any of the above issues. Then again, I suppose I'm just one of those cynical, calculating "realists" who we're hearing so much about these days.
Not much bloggage lately; been busy producing actual work. So go read Ted's and my piece on China's defense budget that ran in the HK-based South China Morning Post, and read Julie Mason's Houston Chronicle article on Syria in which I'm quoted.
It's amazing the clunky phrases that you sometimes utter during an interview. "At this particular time"? Who talks like that? Me, I guess.
Because I always wanted to be a headline writer. Story here.
Snark aside, the story does break some news:
Stephen Hadley, national security adviser, commissioned 10 briefing papers exploring various options [about what to do with Iran]. A National Security Council meeting was cancelled this month after one of the papers, which proposed expanding diplomatic contacts with Iran, was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Some officials suspect that someone senior wanted to sabotage the idea.
Diplomats and two US officials said the latest review was prompted by the conclusion reached by Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, and others that an effective sanctions option did not exist, and that they had been misled by the predictions of neoconservatives who saw the Iranian regime ripe for overthrow by a restless populace.
Innnteresting.
John J. Miller is carping on NRO today about a New Yorker piece on Peter Viereck. Miller grouses:
The New Yorker's interest in Viereck does not arise from a sincere desire to explore the roots of the Right. Instead, the article by Tom Reiss is a transparent attempt to attack "the radicalism of the George W. Bush Presidency" by suggesting that the conservative movement, in its infancy, betrayed its founding father.
Those wily left-wingers! Always trying to make Republicans look bad! Oddly, though, Miller leaves out the fact that erstwhile NR capo WFB had a rather choice quote in the New Yorker piece precisely along these lines:
I asked Buckley how he felt about conservatism's current course. "I'm not happy about it," he said. "It's probably true that there"--in the support for the war in Iraq--"you have a rediscovery of idealism. But if one acknowledged the second inaugural address of the President as marching orders, well, that would keep us busy with something to do for all eternity. It's not, in my judgment, conservatism. Because conservatism is, to a considerable extent, the acknowledgment of realities. And this is surreal."
I think we'll all agree that Buckley is guilty of mounting a transparent attack on "the radicalism of the George W. Bush Presidency" here. Shameful, really. One wonders, though, why Buckley's remarks didn't find their way into the NRO article.
Hat tip for the New Yorker article to Jude Blanchette.
"When we recall how we discussed methods for demonstrating 'our superior resolve' without ever questioning whether we would indeed have or deserve to have superiority in that commodity, we realize how puerile was our whole approach to our art. Well, one learns from hard experience, though in this case we have learned also the importance of depressing the quantity of comparable experience in the future."
- Bernard Brodie on the Vietnam War, 1971
"I must mention the serious inadequacy of the American press and electronic media from the standpoint of informing and instructing the American public in matters of foreign policy. A whole series of their attributes: not only the predominance of advertising, as mentioned above, among the concerns of their proprietors, but also the hasty, disjointed, and staccato nature of most of their offerings; the low educational level of the great majority of the reporters and announcers; the persistent tendency to overdramatization; the fascination with the trivial at the expense of the essential; the over-coverage of the peregrinations and utterances of senior figures and undercoverage of the deeper trends of international life -- all these reduce the ability of these media to serve as an effective force for educating public opinion in the field at hand. There is not a daily newspaper in the country that compares, from the standpoint of foreign news coverage, with the great papers of Western Europe, such as Le Monde and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and there are only three or four that even approach them. This general failure must explain such phenomena as, for example, the positively weird misconceptions about Russia and 'communism' that prevail in large parts of the western sections of this country."
- George F. Kennan on the U.S. media, 1977
Cliff May seems to think that an attack by insurgents on a hotel in Baghdad is occasion for a little mirth:
RE: BAGHDAD BOMBING [Cliff May]
The Palestine Hotel is a peculiar target. It’s one of the places where many foreign journalists stay.
What might be the strategy behind this? Does it arise from frustration at not being able to successfully attack American military installations?
Or do the terrorists – or “armed men” or “Resistance” – figure that the journalists will be less angry at them than they will at the Americans for not better protecting them?
Posted at 11:34 AM
Pure class, that fella.
Yglesias passes along Sam Rosenfeld's and his piece on "the incompetence dodge" that has plagued so much talk about foreign policy in liberal circles in the post-Iraq invasion era. It's really very good:
Reckoning with fact [before the war] might have led to some acknowledgement of the tragic worldview that is, however much our better angels may not prefer it, a necessary component of foreign policy making in a world characterized by far more “less bad” options than genuinely good ones. It is perhaps a seduction peculiar to liberalism, which wants to believe the best about human nature, to ignore the tragic character of much of the world -- and to reflexively interpret the failures of an ambitious social-engineering endeavor as evidence of bad technocratic management rather than mistaken premises. Recognizing the flaws of the incompetence argument when it comes to Iraq would necessarily lead liberal hawks to acknowledge that not all interventions are created equal.
This passage, though, I found particularly compelling:
Liberal hawks joined neoconservatives in taking advantage of the public’s post–September 11 engagement with the world to unveil a comically promiscuous military agenda. The New Republic first argued that the Bush administration should have deployed more troops to Afghanistan, then proceeded to argue in favor of the war in Iraq, then criticized the administration for failing to send more of America’s already overstretched forces to interventions in Liberia and Haiti, then urged action to halt genocide in Sudan, and now takes the view that the problem with Iraq is that hundreds of thousands of additional troops should have been sent there from the beginning. Though arguably imbued with loftier motives than its neoconservative variant (The Weekly Standard has variously argued for attacking Iran, Syria, and North Korea), TNR’s stance is still knee-jerk hawkishness that is oblivious to the realities of the situation. It deserves to be tuned out in debates every bit as much as blanket pacifism does. Just as serious opponents of war must be prepared to countenance some wars under some circumstances, serious advocates of using force for humanitarian purposes must be willing to acknowledge some limits to what can and should be done.
We are not realists. Rather, we agree with Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, that coercive humanitarian intervention, while useful and important, “can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life.” Avenging past slaughter, which certainly took place in Iraq years before the U.S. invasion, is not a good enough reason. Using force to build a pluralistic liberal democracy where none existed before could count as a moral justification for war if we had any sense of how to feasibly engage in such an endeavor, but the evidence from Iraq and elsewhere indicates that we do not. Liberal hawks convinced themselves that the war in their heads was a classic humanitarian intervention, but wishing doesn’t make it so. Not merely in its execution, but on the plane of ideas as well, the humanitarian rationale for the war was, at best, neoconservatism with a human face. The confusion currently permeating the discourse only complicates efforts to construct a viable liberal foreign policy, and will continue to do so until it is checked.
Before Iraq, this had always been the liberal understanding. The view that the United States should invade entrenched dictatorships in order to occupy foreign countries and transform them into democracies is utterly novel. No president has ever undertaken a war on this theory. “In the wake of Iraq,” TNR’s Peter Beinart bemoaned in December, “there has been a lot of loose liberal talk about the impossibility of imposing democracy by force.” That loose talk is probably right. The main examples of successful coercive democratization -- Germany and Japan during and after World War II -- involved military methods, notably the wholesale aerial destruction of civilian population centers, that would be condemned as barbaric today. Where invasion is undertaken for other reasons, as in Afghanistan and Kosovo, it is sensible to try to stand up the most decent successor regime we can manage. But to initiate a war in order to begin the occupation is daft.
Is it sad or hopeful that two twentysomething journalists are more grown-up in their thinking about foreign policy than any of the Big Thinkers at America Abroad? The authors and I would certainly disagree about issues like Bosnia (how's that coming these days, anyway?), but the recognition of human imperfection and the fallibility of ambitious schemes that fly in the face of human nature is a welcome development. Now if they could just translate that sensibility onto domestic policy, you'd really have something...
