the corrosive effects of war

A great piece in the Post today from Andrew Bacevich on the increasing mistrust and alienation our professional army feels toward the rest of the populace. The opening two sentences are much broader, however, and I'm glad to see someone saying it:

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government.

I hope that we get at least one great benefit from the war in Afghanistan, since it looks like we'll get little else: the lesson that even "good" wars are bad. Aside from the trite costs "in blood and treasure," war creates new enemies even when it vanquishes the old ones, damages our reputation abroad, desensitizes our people to violence (which carries its own attendant degradations of character), and breeds resentment of our democratic values and civil rights among both the military and civilian populations. It makes us coarser and more authoritarian as a people.

perspective

Tom Friedman, always so "serious" about foreign policy, writes a column implying that it's okay to inflict massive civilian casualties because Israel's enemies are "implacably hostile." Apparently, the "Arabs only understand force" line of argument is still all the rage in sensible centrist circles.

Luckily, the New York Times made sure to balance Friedman's column with an editorial by former Israeli soldier Jeffrey Goldberg arguing, instead, that Israel's enemies are implacably hostile and only understand force. Fair and balanced, bitchez!

Manichean

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, on Sarah Palin's foreign policy as gleaned from her talking points:

"It is absolutist and Manichean. There is good ("us") and evil ("them"). "We" stand for democracy and the "spirit of freedom that is found in every human heart". Since the clash between good and evil is both desirable and inevitable, "our" role is to bring "our values" to a waiting world and defeat evil. And in this conflict, "our" victory is preordained. Compromise with evil is unthinkable and so traditional forms of diplomacy are to be rejected as a sign of weakness and surrender. (In this worldview, diplomacy means working with those who agree with us, not finding ways to bridge differences with those with whom we disagree.)

Is there anyone on the planet more dangerous than the person who believes their military victory is preordained? Is there any force more destructive than the worldview described above?

the Obamafication of Republican foreign policy: the Sully edition

Andrew Sullivan sees it, too:

On one of the most critical decisions of the war, Obama staked out a position a while back that the Bush camp and neocons assailed as naive, disastrous, and revealing of his unfitness to be president. But like almost everything else Obama has said about the war, he was right and Bush was wrong. Obama was ahead of Bush in proposing to shift troops to Afghanistan, ahead of Bush in suggesting a timetable for Iraq withdrawal (subsequently embraced by Maliki), ahead of Bush in arguing we should talk directly to Iran, and, of course, right about not fighting the war in the first place.

The Bush administration - when guided by the saner forces within it such as Gates and Rice - eventually follows Obama's advice. In that sense, Obama has been president for quite a while already. And proving he could be a shrewd, pragmatic and prescient one.

In case you don't know Sully very well, he's a very famous pundit. A famously conservative pundit.

And here's Radley Balko from Reason, a libertarian rag:

Last year, Barack Obama had the right smirking with glee when he made the sensible suggestion that if the U.S. gets intelligence that there are Al Qaeda cells operating in Pakistan, we should go in and get them, with or without permission of the Pakistani government. If Pakistan won't root out Al Qaeda, Obama said, his administration would. I never quite understood the controversy in that statement, which by the way, is the position of many in the U.S. military.

Nevertheless, Obama was roundly ridiculed. John McCain said the statement showed Obama's naivete. Mitt Romney called him "Dr. Strangelove." Conservative blogs mischaracterized his position as wanting to "invade" or "bomb" Pakistan. Obama's critics at the time apparently believed that it's fine to invade an occupy a country whose government had virtually no ties to Al Qaeda, but suggesting we cross the border into a country whose government may be actively or passively harboring large numbers of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces is foolish.

It looks like the Bush administration didn't find Obama's position all that naive, because they've adopted it to the letter...

He later argues that Obama should be pressing this point hard, and he's obviously right. Then again, this did only come out yesterday, so I'm sure he will (or even better, Joe Biden will!).

John McCain losing his base

By his base, of course, I mean the media. This from the AP, until now shameless water carriers for the Crazy Train:

The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain's skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama's campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

Ouch.

What we're seeing is the beginnings of a new, campaign-ending narrative: McCain, the former straight-talking maverick, losing his moral compass as he is corrupted by the lust for power. It probably won't start affecting his numbers for another week or two, and not unless this narrative appears in other places as well, but if other media figures start talking about McCain like this, he'll be in real trouble.

But don't worry, John: you'll always have Tom Brokaw.

Meanwhile, the AP also reported on Palin's first interview with Charles Gibson. If you saw the interview, you don't need me to tell you it did not go well:

John McCain running mate Sarah Palin sought Thursday to defend her qualifications but struggled with foreign policy, unable to describe President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against threatening nations and acknowledging she's never met a foreign head of state.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told Charles Gibson of ABC News in her first televised interview since being named to the GOP ticket that "I'm ready" to be president if called upon. However, she sidestepped on whether she had the national security credentials needed to be commander in chief.

In case you're not wigged out by her already, when asked specifically whether she would start a hot war with Russia over Georgia, she said:

Perhaps so.

If elected, she will be a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the nuclear button. Then again, if you remember, John McCain was essentially agitating for the same thing with his "We're all Georgians now" crap.

The Washington Post is growing a little disenchanted with McCain's assurances that she knows what she's talking about as well. Apparently, Palin opening her mouth tends to do that:

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 -- Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Good Lord, is there a more thoroughly and publicly discredited misconception that we've seen in the last decade?

the Obamafication of Republican foreign policy, part 3

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Barack Obama, August 1, 2007 (via Reuters):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said on Wednesday the United States must be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan, adopting a tough tone after a chief rival accused him of naivete in foreign policy.

Obama's stance comes amid debate in Washington over what to do about a resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban in areas of northwest Pakistan that President Pervez Musharraf has been unable to control, and concerns that new recruits are being trained there for a September 11-style attack against the United States.

Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government, a move that would likely cause anxiety in the already troubled region.

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said.

John McCain thought Obama's idea was "naive" at the time. Wonder what he thinks now?

For those of you keeping score, the Bush Administration is already quietly adopting Obama's foreign policy positions on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and McCain has himself adopted Obama's position on Afghanistan after chiding him for it. This, then, makes the fifth time the Republicans have mocked Obama's foreign policy only to appropriate it as their own later. Or, as it was expressed 4 years ago, being against it before they were for it.

It's not a flip flop, however, because John McCain was a POW.

how to argue foreign policy like a conservative pundit

Every world event/political issue is exactly like that one time in World War II/the run up to World War II, and the people doing what I don't like are just like Hitler.

Clearly, history teaches us that we should always choose war, because the failure to choose war every single time anyone does something we don't like means they'll be strong enough to take over the world.

If you disagree, that's of course because you're Neville Chamberlain.

John McCain: foreign policy GENIUS!!!

Jon Stewart on the case. This, of course, comes on the heels of McCain referring to the defunct Soviet bloc nation of Czechoslovakia (twice!) and on multiple occasions misidentifying Al Qaeda as Shiite. In fact, he's done it so many times, both verbally and in written statements, that Mother Jones makes the most obvious, and scary, conclusion: he may, in fact, not recognize the difference between Sunni and Shia (to be more precise, what he may not grasp is the landscape of sectarian and ethnic divisions in the Middle East, the Mexican standoff between Arabs Sunni and Shiite, Kurds, Turks, and the various Afghan ethnic groups and regional warlords).

The Obamafication of the Republican Party, part 2

Josh Marshall notes the trend of the Bush Administration and the McCain campaign both quietly adopting Barack Obama's positions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran:

Let's run the list.

McCain and now the White House (via the DOD) are moving toward more US troops in Afghanistan -- a position they've each long opposed and which Obama has been on record in support of for at least a year.

Bush and McCain have each also in different ways tried to nudge closer to Obama's position on withdrawing troops from Iraq. The key shoe falling today is President Bush's embrace of a "time horizon" for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Meanwhile, McCain's declaration of military victory in Iraq seems very much like an effort to get people thinking the troops are coming home soon within the conceptual architecture of his professed goals in Iraq.

And finally Iran. I'm not certain what McCain himself has said about Iran in recent days. But over recent months a key line of attack from the president and John McCain has been that Obama is a latter-day Neville Chamberlain for saying we should negotiate with Iran. And now over recent days we've learned that the White House is sending one of its top diplomats to negotiate directly with Iran's nuclear negotiator. And there are growing signs the White House is poised to open a diplomatic interests section (an unofficial diplomatic outpost) in Tehran.

It may all just be an attempt to build some last-minute bragging rights while taking Iraq off the table in the election, but at the end of the day this is still John McCain and George W. Bush tacitly conceding that Barack is right about getting out of Iraq and negotiating with Ahmadinejad, and they were wrong.

One hell of a story, if you can find someone to report it.

the Obamafication of Republican foreign policy

We learned yesterday, despite a nearly complete media blackout on the story, that John McCain has abandoned his policy on Afghanistan and has adopted Barack Obama's. From the Huffington Post:

John McCain likes to paint Barack Obama as a naive follower on key national security issues. But by moving up his planned Afghanistan speech by two days to follow Obama's, and by agreeing that more U.S. troops are needed there, McCain appears to be following the Illinois Democrat on a major proposed shift for U.S. foreign policy.

Last month, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said he needed at least three brigades shifted to Afghanistan, but that "troop constraints were preventing such a move."

Democrats trumpeted the statement as vindication, but McCain's campaign held its line and "resisted calls for more [U.S.] troops" in Afghanistan.
...
Flash-forward to today. As the AP reported, McCain was set to discuss the economy, with an address on Afghanistan scheduled for Thursday. But the campaign ditched its planned focus on jobs (although not its banner) to follow Obama's lead -- not only by talking about national security but by joining him in calling for more American troops in Afghanistan.

Nearly an hour after Obama finished his D.C. speech, in which he repeated his call for "at least two additional combat brigades" to be sent to Afghanistan, McCain stepped to his podium across the country in New Mexico and tried to one-up his Democratic rival. As McCain's website now says, the Arizona Republican wants "at least three additional brigades" for the fight in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama: a leader John McCain can believe in.

Following that, we hear this morning of a striking reversal in a notorious Bush Administration. From AP:

In a break with past Bush administration policy, a top U.S. diplomat will for the first time join colleagues from other world powers at a meeting with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, The Associated Press has learned.

William Burns, America's third highest-ranking diplomat, will attend talks with the Iranian envoy, Saeed Jalili, in Switzerland on Saturday aimed at persuading Iran to halt activities that could lead to the development of atomic weapons, a senior U.S. official told the AP on Tuesday.

Now who was it again who not only advocated talking to our enemies as a central feature of his foreign policy plan, but took an enormous amount of grief from both George W. Bush and John McCain, as well as his fellow primary candidates for it?

dignity promotion

Spencer Ackerman writes a great article on Obama's foreign policy team and the essence of his agenda.

America's overreach in Iraq and the end of hegemony

A great if wordy article in the NYT on the future makeup of world politics/economics and how the U.S. must reorient its foreign policy strategy to regain its footing and succeed in that world.

Surprisingly, engaging in numerous unilateral wars, telling everyone they're "with us or agin' us," and giving the UN the finger are not included among the ideas for success.

Also, did you see the 60 Minutes interview with George Piro, Saddam's FBI interrogator? Wow, fascinating. Lots of stuff about Saddam's personality, how actual, non-torture interrogations work, and the subtle ways to influence a guy like Saddam.

...oh yeah, and then some filler about how Saddam really did dismantle his weapons programs in the '90's and considered bin Laden an enemy and a dangerous fanatic. Of course we've known that since the last presidential election season.

Clusterf#%k 101

Sy Hersh has written a great article, available in the New Yorker (yes, that does mean it's long-- unlike The Economist, however, that also means it's worth it) on the web of relationships and power politics in the Middle East, focusing especially on Iran, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the US. It's a complex situation for sure, but a narrative that emerges almost immediately is that the US lunged headlong into an impossible strategic situation in Iraq, propelling its longtime enemies (and those of its allies) to increased power. The same action virtually forced us to take opposite sides in Iraq (i.e., the Shiite allies of Iran and Syria) from those we take everywhere else (the Sunnis-- specifically the Saudi royal family), thus making the situation even worse for everyone in the region... except Iran, the one player we want to screw over all others.

Now our #2 ally in the Middle East and #1 financier, Saudi Arabia, openly threatens to side with those currently killing the most US troops if we dare to leave.

Heckuva job, Dubya!