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Mrs. Gerecht to Head Public Diplomacy Efforts?

Here's one of the points from Joshua Muravchik's "memo to neocons" in Foreign Policy, about how to save neoconservatism from...well, neocons, I guess:

Fix the Public Diplomacy Mess. The Bush administration deserves criticism for its failure to repair America’s public diplomacy apparatus. No group other than neocons is likely to figure out how to do that. We are, after all, a movement whose raison d’être was combating anti-Americanism in the United States. Who better, then, to combat it abroad?

The silver lining in the cloud of anti-Americanism is that every stuffy orthodoxy inspires some bright, independent-minded people to rebel. Like many of you, I receive a steady stream of messages from behind enemy lines, so to speak—from France, Germany, Arab countries, and even the BBC—saying, “The people all around me hate America, but I love America.” These people, strengthened and inspired, are our best defense against anti-Americanism. We need representatives on the ground in every country whose mission is to find and develop such friends, to let them know we appreciate them, to put them in contact with others of like mind, and to arm them with information and talking points.

Today, no one in the U.S. Foreign Service is trained for this mission. The best model for such a program are the “Lovestonites” of the 1940s and 1950s, who, often employed as attachés in U.S. embassies, waged ideological warfare against communism in Europe and Russia. They learned their political skills back in the United States fighting commies in the labor unions. There is no way to reproduce the ideological mother’s milk on which Jay Lovestone nourished his acolytes, but we need to invent a synthetic formula. Some Foreign Service officers should be offered specialized training in the war of ideas, and a bunch of us neocons ought to volunteer to help teach it. There should be at least one graduate assigned to every major U.S. overseas post.

and now here's the lead story in Al Kamen's column today:

State Department career diplomats are in an uproar over the recent appointment of a mid-level civil servant who worked for Undersecretary Karen Hughes to a top job running the new Public Diplomacy Rapid Response office in Brussels.

In an unusually strong letter last week to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, J. Anthony Holmes, head of the American Foreign Service Association, called the selection of Diane Zeleny a "pre-cooked deal," apparently done by manipulating the process and violating personnel rules and standard practices. AFSA, he said, was filing a grievance "to undo this assignment."

The job opening was never properly advertised. It was quietly announced at virtually the last minute in the personnel selection cycle, sources said, so there was no way top officers could apply for it.

Not so, say department officials. There was nothing untoward. The Brussels job wasn't created until the yearly State Department selection process was largely completed, and most people had already received their next posting. In addition, Hughes and Rice believe Zeleny is "the right person for the job," a spokesman said, "and they have full confidence in her."

Holmes's protest comes at a time when career officers were already upset over a wave of lower-level officers with political connections leapfrogging to top jobs. Also new rules require service in hardship posts, especially Iraq, before anyone can get the cushier European jobs. And many of those jobs are being shifted to send diplomats to Sudan and other garden spots.

The Brussels job, Holmes said, "might well have been a perfect fit . . . for a veteran coming out of . . . Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia." But Zeleny was the only one who applied. Holmes called the selection "unfathomable."

Well, not really. Zeleny, who moved to Brussels for this new job at the end of August, has worked for several years in Europe, including in Brussels and at other posts. Besides, Zeleny is married to Reuel Marc Gerecht, an author and a former CIA Middle East specialist who was an early participant in the Project for the New American Century, the neocon hub and center for Iraq war enthusiasts. Gerecht, an expert on terrorism, was a prominent promoter of the war and has met with President Bush to offer advice on Iraq.

Victoria Nuland, a career officer now in Brussels as our ambassador to NATO, is a pal, and Nuland's husband is Robert Kagan, an author and Washington Post columnist and a PNAC founding member. So now there's four for bridge.

Hardly "unfathomable."

Man, sometimes these coincidences are just eerie, no?

Upcoming Events

Lots afoot over the next several weeks:

• Come to our kickass panel on counterinsurgency on Thursday, featuring Con Crane, Jeff Record, Tom Ricks, and my boss.  I'll be emceeing.
• Come to AFF's panel on Iran on November 15.  Myself, Nick Gvosdev, Ken Timmerman, and a panelist to be named later.  Added bonus: you (and I!) can actually throw a few back during the debate.  Helps keep things lively.
• We've got an event on Iran tentatively scheduled for December 11th.  I'll have a new paper on Iran out by that time, and it looks like we should have two great panels set up.  Details to come.

Logan vs. the WSJ

Normally I feel pretty shaky after doing TV, but I felt pretty okay about this appearance.

Pollock's position seems to be that the current level of violence in Iraq is due to a coalition of Ba'athists and Sadrists who are trying to make sure the Republicans lose the congressional elections.  That's despite, for example, this:

Chart courtesy of Brookings' Iraq Index.

Sadly, No.

Wow, does Andrew Sullivan really think this works?

Question Two: When in recorded history has a change of government in one nation led to a peaceful and spontaneous change of governments in neighboring nations? Answer: the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by an astonishing transformation in many neighboring countries.

This takes about two seconds to unpack.  The Soviet Union was the power center of an otherwise pathetic conglomeration of Commie regimes that relied almost totally on hard Soviet power for their existence.  Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the source of political, ideological, and military power that allowed the other Warsaw Pact governments to exist collapsed as well.  (This puts aside the small fact that many of the Communist countries were collapsing years before their patron.)

Does Andrew think Iraq can play the role of the Soviet Union in this case?  And that other Arab autocracies were in the sway of and had the hard power linkage to Iraq that Eastern Europe did to the USSR?

This is pretty shoddy stuff.  See Fukuyama for more on this:

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq...

New Propaganda, Same as the Old Propaganda

In light of all this talk about how if we leave Iraq, al Qaeda is going to take over, let me refer everyone to Chris Preble's and my piece from December 2005, rebutting the administration's last attempt to foist this baloney on the American people.

On a side note, our piece appeared in the Lebanon Daily Star under the title "If U.S. Leaves, Al-Qaeda Will Not Inherit Iraq."  I remember thinking it was weird when Frederick Kagan had a piece just two months later, also in the Lebanon Daily Star, titled "The Americans must stay, so Al-Qaeda cannot inherit Iraq."