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Bad News for People Who Read Real News

The post-Askariya analysis on Iraq continues to be pretty poor.  Here's Pat Lang in an interview at CFR:

What should the U.S. response be to this latest round of violence in Iraq?

There's really nothing we can do about it. We lit a fuse on this by the kind of political process we've been sponsoring, which is clearly reversing the social order in Iraq to the unhappiness of the Sunnis. The Shiites have been pretty quiet because the electoral process has clearly been going in the direction of handing power over to them. Leaders have urged [Shiites] to be quiet, and not carry out reprisals. But this [latest attack against the shrine] is such an outrage from their point of view. This is like blowing up St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

[...]

Does this latest violence affect the timeline to draw down U.S. forces there?

The U.S. government will still try to reduce its troops, but I think it'll be very difficult because the situation is not going to get better anytime soon. The more people you pull out, the more vulnerable you are on the ground and the less influence you have.

Throwing up his hands entirely is William F. Buckley, whose typically rambly piece closes with this little nugget:

Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.

He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.

Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.

Yeesh.  Dark days at the White House, one imagines.  Can't be too pleasant to be working at the NSC these days, hm?

Quite a Metaphor

No?

George Friedman Is Making Sense

Remember Frank Gaffney's dark warnings about Chavismo?  George Friedman has some good pushback on the whole Latin American bogeyman:

Taken in isolation, Venezuela can't really hurt the United States. If all of South America were swept by a Bolivarian revolution, it wouldn't hurt the United States. Absent a significant global power to challenge the United States, Latin America and its ideology are of interest to Latin Americans but not to Washington. The only real threat that Venezuela poses to the United States would be if its oil production becomes so degraded that the United States has to seek out new suppliers and world prices rise. That would matter to Washington, and indeed it may eventually occur -- Venezuelan output has dropped about 1 million bpd below pre-Chavez highs -- but it would matter a thousand times more to Venezuela.

As George Kennan wrote in 1977, when it comes to Latin America,

Let us be generous in small things, courteous in all circumstances, and helpful whenever we can be, but beyond that not greatly concerned for their opinion of us, and happy enough not to be an active factor in their affairs.  The rest, surely, will look after itself.

Just so.

Whither the Imperial Service?

Max Boot is back on the pages of the LA Times, trumpeting the lilting attempts to turn the State Department into a colonial office.  Here's Boot:

why not set up a new nation-building department built, perhaps, on the foundation of the Agency for International Development? The new Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization is doing good work, but it is unlikely to get sufficient support from Congress or its own department as long as it's subsumed in a larger bureaucracy.

In any case, the skills needed for nation-building are more akin to those of the old British Colonial Office than to those inculcated by the State Department. We should open up our own version of the Colonial Office at USAID.

Alas, unless Boot intends on having a LOT of children, and sending all of them, it appears these posts will go unfilled.  A trial program in Iraq along these lines yielded this result, from the snarky Al Kamen:

In November, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unveiled an ambitious plan to establish 16 provisional reconstruction teams, or PRTs, each to be staffed by at least four Foreign Service officers, throughout Iraq, including in some seriously dangerous places.

The Pentagon, not wanting to stretch forces even further to protect the equivalent of 16 mini-Green Zones and provide escort when the teams travel, was said to be a bit lukewarm to the plan.

But Rice summoned the Foreign Service, which has sent hundreds of officers to Iraq in the past three years, to sign up for this new venture.

Alas, to paraphrase the Bard, she can summon them, but the returns indicate they aren't showing up. Word is that a tally a couple of months later indicated hardly anyone qualified for the jobs had bid for them -- even though garden spots such as Baquba, Al Anbar and Tikrit were available.

The department remains hopeful that enough volunteers, including extended tour people, FSOs, and civil servants, will fill the bill.

Jeez, it must be a rough time to be Max Boot, no?  Poor guy.  Of course, if he'd read our paper, he would have thought twice before rolling out his "colonial office" trope again...

They Read the Fukuyama Thing So We Don't Have To

Ugh, of course I'll have to, but here's a good start for a roundup of differing views on the Fukuyama non-apology apology in the NYT:

Pat Lang:

I once had one of the leading theoreticians of the "movement" tell me that the "con" in "neocon" is the "con" part.  Translation:  They are not Conservative.  Conservatives in America believe in the limited utility of government, the importance of stopping government when it tries to run one's life and that Freedom has little to do with the Patriot Act. The religious right in America are no more conservative than the neocons. They are merely right wing in a narrow minded and sectarian way.

[...]

Fukuyama's solution for the mess that he and his pseudo-conservative Jacobin friends have gotten us all in is that the US should have much the same policy with regard to "friendly autocrats" but should be careful not to do anything that might further break up the China (dishes).  In other words, he has no solution for the mess that he and his pals made but is frightened by the result of their sophomoric meddling with the deepest forces in human nature and Middle Eastern history. Ah, I forgot.  History has no meaning for them because like all good little Utopians, the past is dead and only the future matters.

Nick Gvosdev:

If a new school of foreign policy thought is emerging, then its progenitors need to move beyond changing labels or finding fault with tactical decisions. And this new school should be able to make the case it would have emerged even if the Iraq war had gone according to plan.

Yglesias:

What he's describing is just regular old liberal internationalism, a set of ideas that's fallen into political eclipse during the Bush years, but that are as robust and important as ever, if not more so. That's where Fukuyama's argument points, and since he's surely heard of it, I don't know why he can't bring himself to say the words.

Could Have Fooled Me

Today's quote of the day comes from the quotemaster himself, Rummy:

"We’re not there to do nation-building."

Just How Bad Are US-Russian Relations Getting?

Nick Gvosdev is in Moscow, at a meeting on US-Russia relations:

One of the things that is very apparent is the high degree of mistrust between both sides as to the other's motives, goals and intentions. From the American side, concern about Russia's intentions in the "former Soviet space" or "Russia's neighborhood" and its stewardship of its energy resources (a point much discussed at the G-8 Finance Ministers' meeting which overlapped with our sessions). From the Russian side, deep suspicion about whether America is really committed to democracy or simply expanding its influence, not only in Eurasia but around the world (and holding the forthcoming Ukrainian elections as a test case, if, as expected, former Prime Minister Yanukovych and his allies win a majority of seats in the Rada and take over the government). Another is about whether the U.S. is prepared to see its policies through in the Greater Middle East--one Russian participant said the U.S. is in the process of creating a belt of failed states from Turkey to India which will directly and negatively impact on Russian national security.

Under Condi Rice's stewardship, look for US-Russia relations to get pricklier and pricklier.

Whaddya Mean, "Isolationist"?

I've got a piece up on the Cato website about the president's invocation of "isolationism" during the SOTU.  It was out the same day the great Bacevich piece ran in the LAT, but didn't end up getting picked up anywhere until last week.  A shame, because it would have been a lot sexier back right after the speech.

Speaking of sexy, Happy Valentine's Day.

How Many Times Are We Going to Do This?

You'd think that the several instances of premature celebration in Iraq (purple finger, anybody?) would have chastened pro-war, pro-intervention types like Andrew Sullivan.  Here he is on Haiti, yesterday:

Here's a case study in which the complete pessimists seem to be wrong. We've just seen a self-run democratic election in Haiti - with most parties accepting the results peacefully. Cultural change takes time. The debate between the neoconservatives and realists might not be so zero-sum. The neocons are right about the long term; the realists have much to contribute in assessing the short term. Why not a fusion?

Here's the news from Haiti today:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Angry supporters of ex-President Rene Preval paralyzed the Haitian capital with burning tires and roadblocks Monday as Preval fell further below the 50 percent needed to win the presidency and allegations of election manipulations mounted.

Radio reports said a young man was killed and several people were wounded in gunfire at a demonstration in Tabarre, north of the capital, where protesters were confronted by members of the 9,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti.

[...]

Traffic ground to a halt, schools shut down and the United Nations told its employees to stay home as demonstrators piled wrecked cars and tree branches in the streets of Port-au-Prince after the latest results. With 90 percent of the vote counted, the Provisional Electoral Council reported Preval had 48.7 percent.

At midday, thousands of protesters, dancing and chanting "Preval is President!" smashed through the gates of the Montana Hotel and swarmed through the complex where election officials have been briefing journalists on the disputed vote count...

How many times will it take for us to learn a lesson just in Haiti?  Functional democracy isn't an airdrop, and you can't just will it from afar.  Even if you blog really hard about it.

Fans of "The Incompetence Dodge"

by Yglesias and Rosenfeld will appreciate this from David Hendrickson and Robert Tucker at the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College:

REVISIONS IN NEED OF REVISING: WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE IRAQ WAR (.pdf)

Though the critics have made a number of telling points against the conduct of the war and the occupation, the basic problems faced by the United States flowed from the enterprise itself, and not primarily from mistakes in execution along the way.  The most serious problems facing Iraq and its American occupiers—“endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society”—were virtually inevitable consequences that flowed from the breakage of the Iraqi state.

[...]

A war plan keyed to the problem of postwar disorder would have inevitably confronted a substantial gap in time between the disintegration of the state and the arrival of forces of sufficient size to establish order. A different plan in all probability could have prevented the worst consequences of the looting, such as the destruction of irreplaceable cultural sites and important government ministries, but the larger consequence of widespread anarchy probably was unavoidable.

[...]

Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was in basic respects a test of the theory that civilians must intervene in the military planning process and force their perspectives down the chain of command. Though the record of Iraq war planning does nothing to advance the case for civilian activism, critics also have neglected the larger lesson that there are certain limits to what military power can accomplish. For certain purposes, like the creation of a liberal democratic society that will be a model for others, military power is a blunt instrument, destined by its very nature to give rise to unintended and unwelcome consequences. Rather than “do it better next time,” a better lesson is “don’t do it at all.”