Random Ramblings
David Isenberg stole my thunder with respect to the Pollack-O’Hanlon op ed in the NYT that generated so much attention last week. Many others weighed in, but I think that Glenn Greenwald at Salon nailed the essential points.
Commenting on the broader problem of the bipartisan disaster that is our foreign policy, Matt Yglesias was incisive, as always. My colleague Justin Logan made the case for accountability, an idea that is long overdue in this town.
There is no shortage of opinion on what do to in Iraq, how we got into the mess, and how we avoid similar messes in the future. The following articles caught my attention in the past week.
- Phillip Carter put the whole O’Hanlon-Pollack dust-up into perspective, noting that our battlefield victories – such as they are — are meaningless if the political process doesn’t move forward. This was true in Vietnam, and it is true in Iraq.
- Gian P. Gentile notes the obvious — it is a civil war. His insights are particularly relevant given that he saw this all first-hand as a Lt. Col. with the 4th Infantry Division in Amiriyah, a Sunni district in Baghdad.
- Finally, Chris Hedges’ pessimism is palpable — and justified.
I was expecting more comment on the blogosphere in response to Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder’s piece in Monday’s Washington Post, in which the two men celebrate the broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington policy elites and the major party candidates in favor of military intervention. They note that this shouldn’t surprise us, and I agree with them on that point, if nothing else. Daalder and other Democrats were happy to accept the support of Kagan and the editors of the Weekly Standard when Bill Clinton launched the bombing campaign over Yugoslavia in 1999.
I will have more to say on this subject over at the Cato blog, so I don’t want to steal my own thunder here. In the meantime, I appreciated Matt Yglesias’ imagined view from Beijing.
UPDATE: My full response to the Kagan-Daalder op ed, co-authored with David Rieff, was published online by The National Interest, and the title speaks for itself “A Troubling Interventionist Consensus.”
Troubling, indeed. Bipartisanship cannot rescue us from future Iraq-style debacles so long as there is bipartisan support – among policy elites, at least — for military interventions that have little or nothing to do with preserving U.S. vital national interests.
Related posts:
[...] Chris Preble highlighted yesterday an op-ed by Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan that appeared in Monday’s Washington Post. I actually had somewhat of a different reaction to the piece. Chris wrote that Kagan and Daalder, “celebrate the broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington policy elites and the major party candidates in favor of military intervention.” When I read the piece I felt that the focus of the article was more on the importance of “international legitimacy” whenever the U.S. considers military action. For many years polls have shown that Americans are much more comfortable with the use of force if it has broad international support, often in the form of UN Security Council resolutions. The Bush administration recognized this and, even after UN rejection, hailed its “Coalition of the Willing” that had been, in many cases (with the exceptions Australia and Britain), basically strong armed and bribed into token participation. [...]
Pingback on August 9, 2007 @ 9:58 am