FrontPage Magazine (for which I've written) has continued its tradition of publishing erstwhile antiwar conservatives who have seen the light and decided to attack their brethren. This time the author in question is William Hawkins, apparently a sore loser from his John Randolph Club debate on how quickly we should get out of Iraq. Hawkins was on the go-slow side, a position that's defensible even though his conduct is not.
Justin Raimondo has responded adequately here. Chronicles executive editor Scott Richert has here. Daniel Larison made short work of Hawkins here. It's probably to the antiwar right's credit. Many conservatives I respect continue support the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Far fewer who I respect substitute "unpatriotic conservative" smears or their like for genuine debate on the most pressing foreign policy issue of our time.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Partition: Biden’s Bad Idea (if we divide it up, they won’t all just get along)
Much of the criticism of the Democratic-controlled Congress can be encapsulated in a single question – “why don’t they just do something!?!” – why don’t they de-fund the war? or at least pass bills that directly contradict the White House?
Well, the Dems have now“done something”, they’ve passed bill that challenges the White House’s official policy, and they actually got 20 Republicans to join them.
The vote was non-binding, but on Wed., Sept. 21, by a count of 75-23, Congress expressed its opinion that Iraq should be divided into separate Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions, with a weak federal government established for oil-revenue sharing. The bill runs strongly against Bush’s plans for Iraqi national unity.
The bill was officially sponsored by fledgling presidential candidate – and secretary-of-state in-waiting – Joe Biden. Among Democrats, all but Russ Feingold voted for it. At the MSNBC debate at Dartmouth just after the vote, the bill was generally warmly received. The Republicans were generally split, and, as far as I can tell, no pattern emerges among the bill supporters and detractors – the nays included administration cheerleaders like Lindsey Graham but also the dovish Chuck Hagel and the second-thoughter Lamar Alexander. Joe Liberman—whom Bush can usually be rely on—voted with his former party for partition.
Congressional independence from Bush is a good thing; however, the bill passed on Wed. was exceptionally unwise. A non-binding resolution like this one serves, in many ways, as a kind of congressional policy paper – a way to get an idea out there. In this case, partition is an exceptionally bad idea, and given that it has clearly gained currency in Congress, it is necessary to explain exactly why.
At first glance, partition is attractive for some obvious reasons.
1) A segregated Iraq is quickly becoming a reality whether Congress approves of it or not. The Iraqi civil war, unleashed after the fall of Saddam, has entailed an ethnic cleansing of various regions. The Kurds have been most successful in carving out for themselves a semi-autonomous province, and have built up a stable government – if not a particularly democratic one – where the Iraqi flag rarely flies.
2) As many in America are simply confused and fed up with sectarian violence, it’s all to easy to blissfully hope that if we’d only just divide up the warring parties and send them to their respective camps, they’d stop fighting and Iraq would be at peace.
3) A national Iraq might seem to have little rationale in the first place. The nation-state of Iraq was more or less invented in the wake of the First World War by British imperial magistrates – among them the feminist of the desert, Gertrude Bell – in way that ignored ethnic and religious divides. With no real historical raison d’être, would anyone really miss the old Iraq after we split it up?
4) Partition dictated from Washington is hardly a new idea – indeed, this has been a common strategy for stabilizing regions for the past century. Woodrow Wilson’s notion of “national determination” is not too different from Richard Holbrooke’s plans for dividing up the Balkans.
Partition is certainly attractive, but examined closely from an historical and strategic perspective, the perils of such a policy come to the fore.
1) Partition won’t stop a civil war – to the contrary.
Much of the progress that was made in the ballyhooed al-Anbar province is the result of its being an ethnically homogenous Sunni region. It’s thus useful to look at this region in imagining what rigid separatism might forebode for Iraq. The Anbar Sunnis might have rejected al-Qaeda and moved towards stability, but this does not mean that they’re anywhere closer to being able to work with the Shia-dominated parliament in Baghdad. In many ways, our arming of our new-found friends may ultimately amount to taking sides in an even broader and more violent Sunni-Shia conflict on the horizon.
The Sunnis are the Prussian of the Middle East – a small minority who think of themselves as the ruling class. Simply giving them a region might very well amount to giving them time to prepare for a violent bid for a “re-nationalization” of all of Iraq under their leadership.
2) Throughout history partition has intensified ethnic cleansing. With the defeat of Austria-Hungary and Germany in the Great War, Wilson, Llyod George, Clemenceau & Co. decided to divide up the former continental empires into nationalized statelettes – a few had some historical basis, Poland for instance, others were basically invented out of thin air, such as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
With “national determination,” it’s often difficult to determine who’s really “national.” Before the partition, many in Central Europe identified with the empires, with their religion, or else with a nation other than the newly minted one in which they are residing. – “Am I Polish, a Catholic, a German, an imperial subject?”
In all of these cases, it proved impossible to gerrymand the borders around homogeneity. Setting borders and then waiting for the right people to re-locate to the right regions is simply a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and forced-migration. With these European examples, the nations were still determining themselves for close to 30 years, ending only with the brutal expulsion of ethnic Germans, qua “Nazis,” from the former regions of Prussia in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The more recent Balkan examples yield more of the same. After the 1995 Dayton Accords, Kosovo was left under Serbian rule; however, quickly thereafter, the prospect of Washington doing some more nation-building inspired the Kosovo Liberation Army to attempt secession. The “liberation” of Kosovo – with Washington’s and NATO’s full support of course – entailed the destruction of Serbian Churches and bullying, forced-exile, and even mass-murder of ethnic Serbs whose families had lived in the region region for centuries.
If we decide to divide up Iraq into ethno-regions or statelettes, should we expect a different outcome?
3) Three new countries means three new dependents for Washington to protect.
If Washington decided to will into to being three new autonomous regions or sovereign states, it will have given itself the responsibility of guaranteeing their independence. If history is a guide, we would need to intervene again and again.
The prospect, mentioned above, of a resurgent Sunni class deciding to take back the country they feel they should rule would put Washington in a truly bizarre predicament for which no clear solution exists. Scenarios such as Iran attempting to increase its influence in a Shia region – or even attempting to subsume it outright – only become more likely after a partition.
With the European examples, the new statelettes became tid-bits to be gobbled up by the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. The Second World War itself was triggered by, on the one hand, Hitler’s grasping for the Central European nations and, on the other, Britain’s and France’s guarantees of the sovereignty of the newly-minted Poland.
* * *
There is simply no reason to believe that multiplying the political dynamics at play in Iraq will serve America’s national interest.
Well, the Dems have now“done something”, they’ve passed bill that challenges the White House’s official policy, and they actually got 20 Republicans to join them.
The vote was non-binding, but on Wed., Sept. 21, by a count of 75-23, Congress expressed its opinion that Iraq should be divided into separate Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions, with a weak federal government established for oil-revenue sharing. The bill runs strongly against Bush’s plans for Iraqi national unity.
The bill was officially sponsored by fledgling presidential candidate – and secretary-of-state in-waiting – Joe Biden. Among Democrats, all but Russ Feingold voted for it. At the MSNBC debate at Dartmouth just after the vote, the bill was generally warmly received. The Republicans were generally split, and, as far as I can tell, no pattern emerges among the bill supporters and detractors – the nays included administration cheerleaders like Lindsey Graham but also the dovish Chuck Hagel and the second-thoughter Lamar Alexander. Joe Liberman—whom Bush can usually be rely on—voted with his former party for partition.
Congressional independence from Bush is a good thing; however, the bill passed on Wed. was exceptionally unwise. A non-binding resolution like this one serves, in many ways, as a kind of congressional policy paper – a way to get an idea out there. In this case, partition is an exceptionally bad idea, and given that it has clearly gained currency in Congress, it is necessary to explain exactly why.
At first glance, partition is attractive for some obvious reasons.
1) A segregated Iraq is quickly becoming a reality whether Congress approves of it or not. The Iraqi civil war, unleashed after the fall of Saddam, has entailed an ethnic cleansing of various regions. The Kurds have been most successful in carving out for themselves a semi-autonomous province, and have built up a stable government – if not a particularly democratic one – where the Iraqi flag rarely flies.
2) As many in America are simply confused and fed up with sectarian violence, it’s all to easy to blissfully hope that if we’d only just divide up the warring parties and send them to their respective camps, they’d stop fighting and Iraq would be at peace.
3) A national Iraq might seem to have little rationale in the first place. The nation-state of Iraq was more or less invented in the wake of the First World War by British imperial magistrates – among them the feminist of the desert, Gertrude Bell – in way that ignored ethnic and religious divides. With no real historical raison d’être, would anyone really miss the old Iraq after we split it up?
4) Partition dictated from Washington is hardly a new idea – indeed, this has been a common strategy for stabilizing regions for the past century. Woodrow Wilson’s notion of “national determination” is not too different from Richard Holbrooke’s plans for dividing up the Balkans.
Partition is certainly attractive, but examined closely from an historical and strategic perspective, the perils of such a policy come to the fore.
1) Partition won’t stop a civil war – to the contrary.
Much of the progress that was made in the ballyhooed al-Anbar province is the result of its being an ethnically homogenous Sunni region. It’s thus useful to look at this region in imagining what rigid separatism might forebode for Iraq. The Anbar Sunnis might have rejected al-Qaeda and moved towards stability, but this does not mean that they’re anywhere closer to being able to work with the Shia-dominated parliament in Baghdad. In many ways, our arming of our new-found friends may ultimately amount to taking sides in an even broader and more violent Sunni-Shia conflict on the horizon.
The Sunnis are the Prussian of the Middle East – a small minority who think of themselves as the ruling class. Simply giving them a region might very well amount to giving them time to prepare for a violent bid for a “re-nationalization” of all of Iraq under their leadership.
2) Throughout history partition has intensified ethnic cleansing. With the defeat of Austria-Hungary and Germany in the Great War, Wilson, Llyod George, Clemenceau & Co. decided to divide up the former continental empires into nationalized statelettes – a few had some historical basis, Poland for instance, others were basically invented out of thin air, such as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
With “national determination,” it’s often difficult to determine who’s really “national.” Before the partition, many in Central Europe identified with the empires, with their religion, or else with a nation other than the newly minted one in which they are residing. – “Am I Polish, a Catholic, a German, an imperial subject?”
In all of these cases, it proved impossible to gerrymand the borders around homogeneity. Setting borders and then waiting for the right people to re-locate to the right regions is simply a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and forced-migration. With these European examples, the nations were still determining themselves for close to 30 years, ending only with the brutal expulsion of ethnic Germans, qua “Nazis,” from the former regions of Prussia in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The more recent Balkan examples yield more of the same. After the 1995 Dayton Accords, Kosovo was left under Serbian rule; however, quickly thereafter, the prospect of Washington doing some more nation-building inspired the Kosovo Liberation Army to attempt secession. The “liberation” of Kosovo – with Washington’s and NATO’s full support of course – entailed the destruction of Serbian Churches and bullying, forced-exile, and even mass-murder of ethnic Serbs whose families had lived in the region region for centuries.
If we decide to divide up Iraq into ethno-regions or statelettes, should we expect a different outcome?
3) Three new countries means three new dependents for Washington to protect.
If Washington decided to will into to being three new autonomous regions or sovereign states, it will have given itself the responsibility of guaranteeing their independence. If history is a guide, we would need to intervene again and again.
The prospect, mentioned above, of a resurgent Sunni class deciding to take back the country they feel they should rule would put Washington in a truly bizarre predicament for which no clear solution exists. Scenarios such as Iran attempting to increase its influence in a Shia region – or even attempting to subsume it outright – only become more likely after a partition.
With the European examples, the new statelettes became tid-bits to be gobbled up by the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. The Second World War itself was triggered by, on the one hand, Hitler’s grasping for the Central European nations and, on the other, Britain’s and France’s guarantees of the sovereignty of the newly-minted Poland.
* * *
There is simply no reason to believe that multiplying the political dynamics at play in Iraq will serve America’s national interest.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Leslie Gelb on Mearsheimer and Walt
I wonder what Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations thought he was doing. His review of Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy begins by comparing the lobby's influence over U.S. policy in the Middle East to Cuban groups' influence over our Cuban policy. Actually, Gelb is not comparing the Israeli lobby to the Cuban lobby--he's comparing the claims made by Mearsheimer and Walt to Fidel Castro's contention that the U.S. can't really be a democracy because a small number of Cuban expatriates shapes our policy toward Havana. Trouble is, Castro has a valid point, and Leslie Gelb, of all people, knows it.
I remember attending a lecture a few years ago at Washington University in which Gelb said that the only people who get what they want out of the Cuban embargo are the exiles and Castro, who benefits tremendously from playing off the United States and keeping his country relatively isolated from the world's financial and cultural superpower. Gelb made it quite clear that he does not support the embargo and does not consider it in the U.S. national interest. (I've Googled around and checked Nexis for other examples of Gelb saying this. The Emerging Markets Debt Report of January 16, 1996 summarizes some of Gelb's reactions after returning from a trip to Cuba:"Pressured by anti Castro Cubans in the United States, President Clinton is highly unlikely to soften the U.S. stance toward Cuba in the runup to the Nov. 1996 U.S. presidential elections, Gelb points out. But, for reasons of its own, the Castro administration isn't particularly eager to see sanctions lifted now, either. ... Gelb advocates gradually lifting the embargo, to avoid shocking the Cuban economy, and calls for increased diplomacy via U.S. Cuban military contacts and a strengthening of the trend to encourage U.S. NGOs to operate in Cuba.")
Does anyone think we would have still have an embargo on Cuba in the year 2007 were it not for the politically powerful Cuban lobby? We trade with nominally Communist China and with our old foes in Vietnam, after all. And the Europeans certainly seem to reap benefits from their trade with Cuba, benefits that we could be reaping as well. (To be sure, the Cuban exile community is not the only factor: the sugar and citrus industries also have reasons for wanting to restrict trade with Cuba. But sugar and citrus would also like to restrict trade with other Latin American countries, and we don't have outright embargoes against any of them.)
Other points in Gelb's review similarly prove the opposite of what he's trying to argue. He writes, for example,"The main source of anti-Americanism and anti-American terrorism is America’s deep ties with highly unpopular regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not to mention the war in Iraq," which I happen to believe is true. But why do we have those "deep ties"? In large part, as Gelb himself writes, we have them because of influential foreign lobbies: he criticizes Mearsheimer and Walt for "minimiz[ing] the lobbying influence of the Saudis and the oil companies, the other major forces on Middle East policy" and writes, "if Mearsheimer and Walt had asked policy participants over the years, they would have been told that the Saudis are the single most potent regional voice in American policy toward the gulf." All true. But it doesn't follow that if the Saudis have tremendous, and probably detrimental, influence on American foreign policy in the Middle East, the Israelis must not have similar influence. The Saudi and Israeli lobbies disagree on much--though certainly not everything--but the one does not negate the other. As Gelb concedes, "Most unbiased students of the matter would probably agree that the lobby is the single most influential force on American policy toward Israel."
Gelb also brings up the Cold War-era China Lobby, which again is an example--particularly, one would think, to someone coming from Gelb's point of view--of a foreign lobby that influenced U.S. policy for the worse. I am sure Gelb would not say that Nixon made a mistake by going to China. The Israeli lobby is not unexampled in terms of its policy influence and political clout; but the examples Gelb cites of other, similarly influential lobbies all tend to support the case Mearsheimer and Walt have been making. Yes, the Israel lobby is only doing what foreign-interest lobbies always do. But is what they do congruent with America's national interests? Gelb hardly tries to answer that question. For him, the cause is primarily moral: "As it happens, America’s commitment to Israel rests far more on moral and historical grounds than on strict strategic ones."
Gelb cites Clifford Clark's argument that "The United States and the world had a moral obligation to support a Jewish state because everyone had stood by and done nothing during the Holocaust." Allowing for the historical uniqueness of the Shoa, one would still be compelled by the logic of that argument to say that by the same token we should support the cause of Armenia, perhaps even in the future the cause of Darfur, since there too a great moral evil is taking place and America and the world are doing very little. Yet we have no national interest in Darfur and precious little in Armenia. A moral case can be made for intervention anywhere and everywhere; indeed, the neocons have predicated so much of their case for war against Iraq and intervention in the greater Middle East on such moral grounds: the plight of the Kurds, for example, and now the prospect of ethno-religious cleansing of the Sunnis once we leave Iraq. And as the Iraq episode illustrates, moralistic interventions that are not in the national interest turn out to be counterproductive for the very people they're meant to save, and they do nothing to enhance America's security--quite the opposite.
In saying all of this, I don't want to give the impression that I have no empathy for the Cubans who were expropriated and persecuted by Castro; for the nationalist Chinese who, whatever their faults, at least were anti-Communists; or for the Israelis, who have every right to defend their country and their lives. All of these groups have sound reasons for attempting to influence American policies. And of these three, Israel is the most capable of succeeding in its objectives with or without American subvention and military support: Israel has won every war she has fought and possesses a nuclear arsenal. It would be a false statement to claim that Israel would be destroyed, that there would be a second Holocaust, without American support. Israel's survival is not dependent on the success of the Israel lobby. If it were, the moral issue might trump questions of narrow national interest.
Instead, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, the Israel lobby and the more-Likudnik-than-Netanyahu neocons here in the United States have been pushing policies that are ultimately detrimental to Israel and that run counter to America's interests. Leslie Gelb seems to be aware of this--he certainly presents evidence to that effect--but he can't bring himself to say it.
I remember attending a lecture a few years ago at Washington University in which Gelb said that the only people who get what they want out of the Cuban embargo are the exiles and Castro, who benefits tremendously from playing off the United States and keeping his country relatively isolated from the world's financial and cultural superpower. Gelb made it quite clear that he does not support the embargo and does not consider it in the U.S. national interest. (I've Googled around and checked Nexis for other examples of Gelb saying this. The Emerging Markets Debt Report of January 16, 1996 summarizes some of Gelb's reactions after returning from a trip to Cuba:"Pressured by anti Castro Cubans in the United States, President Clinton is highly unlikely to soften the U.S. stance toward Cuba in the runup to the Nov. 1996 U.S. presidential elections, Gelb points out. But, for reasons of its own, the Castro administration isn't particularly eager to see sanctions lifted now, either. ... Gelb advocates gradually lifting the embargo, to avoid shocking the Cuban economy, and calls for increased diplomacy via U.S. Cuban military contacts and a strengthening of the trend to encourage U.S. NGOs to operate in Cuba.")
Does anyone think we would have still have an embargo on Cuba in the year 2007 were it not for the politically powerful Cuban lobby? We trade with nominally Communist China and with our old foes in Vietnam, after all. And the Europeans certainly seem to reap benefits from their trade with Cuba, benefits that we could be reaping as well. (To be sure, the Cuban exile community is not the only factor: the sugar and citrus industries also have reasons for wanting to restrict trade with Cuba. But sugar and citrus would also like to restrict trade with other Latin American countries, and we don't have outright embargoes against any of them.)
Other points in Gelb's review similarly prove the opposite of what he's trying to argue. He writes, for example,"The main source of anti-Americanism and anti-American terrorism is America’s deep ties with highly unpopular regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not to mention the war in Iraq," which I happen to believe is true. But why do we have those "deep ties"? In large part, as Gelb himself writes, we have them because of influential foreign lobbies: he criticizes Mearsheimer and Walt for "minimiz[ing] the lobbying influence of the Saudis and the oil companies, the other major forces on Middle East policy" and writes, "if Mearsheimer and Walt had asked policy participants over the years, they would have been told that the Saudis are the single most potent regional voice in American policy toward the gulf." All true. But it doesn't follow that if the Saudis have tremendous, and probably detrimental, influence on American foreign policy in the Middle East, the Israelis must not have similar influence. The Saudi and Israeli lobbies disagree on much--though certainly not everything--but the one does not negate the other. As Gelb concedes, "Most unbiased students of the matter would probably agree that the lobby is the single most influential force on American policy toward Israel."
Gelb also brings up the Cold War-era China Lobby, which again is an example--particularly, one would think, to someone coming from Gelb's point of view--of a foreign lobby that influenced U.S. policy for the worse. I am sure Gelb would not say that Nixon made a mistake by going to China. The Israeli lobby is not unexampled in terms of its policy influence and political clout; but the examples Gelb cites of other, similarly influential lobbies all tend to support the case Mearsheimer and Walt have been making. Yes, the Israel lobby is only doing what foreign-interest lobbies always do. But is what they do congruent with America's national interests? Gelb hardly tries to answer that question. For him, the cause is primarily moral: "As it happens, America’s commitment to Israel rests far more on moral and historical grounds than on strict strategic ones."
Gelb cites Clifford Clark's argument that "The United States and the world had a moral obligation to support a Jewish state because everyone had stood by and done nothing during the Holocaust." Allowing for the historical uniqueness of the Shoa, one would still be compelled by the logic of that argument to say that by the same token we should support the cause of Armenia, perhaps even in the future the cause of Darfur, since there too a great moral evil is taking place and America and the world are doing very little. Yet we have no national interest in Darfur and precious little in Armenia. A moral case can be made for intervention anywhere and everywhere; indeed, the neocons have predicated so much of their case for war against Iraq and intervention in the greater Middle East on such moral grounds: the plight of the Kurds, for example, and now the prospect of ethno-religious cleansing of the Sunnis once we leave Iraq. And as the Iraq episode illustrates, moralistic interventions that are not in the national interest turn out to be counterproductive for the very people they're meant to save, and they do nothing to enhance America's security--quite the opposite.
In saying all of this, I don't want to give the impression that I have no empathy for the Cubans who were expropriated and persecuted by Castro; for the nationalist Chinese who, whatever their faults, at least were anti-Communists; or for the Israelis, who have every right to defend their country and their lives. All of these groups have sound reasons for attempting to influence American policies. And of these three, Israel is the most capable of succeeding in its objectives with or without American subvention and military support: Israel has won every war she has fought and possesses a nuclear arsenal. It would be a false statement to claim that Israel would be destroyed, that there would be a second Holocaust, without American support. Israel's survival is not dependent on the success of the Israel lobby. If it were, the moral issue might trump questions of narrow national interest.
Instead, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, the Israel lobby and the more-Likudnik-than-Netanyahu neocons here in the United States have been pushing policies that are ultimately detrimental to Israel and that run counter to America's interests. Leslie Gelb seems to be aware of this--he certainly presents evidence to that effect--but he can't bring himself to say it.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The Iraq War -- the "Snakes on a Plane" of Interventions
This is the first of my reports on the conference "Troop Withdrawal: Looking Beyond Iraq" sponsored by The Independent Institute and featuring Leon T. Hadar, Ivan Eland, and David R. Henderson. First off, Leon Hadar on finding a new paradigm for dealing with the Middle East.
Leon Hadar has given us one of the aptest metaphors of the year: The Iraq war is to foreign policy what "Snakes on the Plane" is to cinema – a really bad idea that "bombed"… so to speak.
Unfortunately for us, Hollywood is much better than the U.S. government at handling disasters. With a real stinker on their hands, execs first cut their loses – i.e. release it quickly on DVD. Then, they go back to the studio and change the script. Even if Hollywood is often too eager to repeat lucrative formulas – how many indistinguishable teen horror flicks and cuddly romances with Jennifer Aniston can mankind really endure? – few would deny that the studios are highly skillful at not repeating obvious mistakes – "Snakes on a Plane," "Waterworld," and "Ishtar" have thankfully remained sui generis.
Not so with the U.S. government. Uncle Sam seems bent on reviving and remaking the most unsuccessful scripts – or at least one that simply cannot work in the contemporary world. For Hadar, this script is the British imperial project of the last two and half centuries. As with that grand institution on which the sun never set, the production costs of "America’s empire" far exceed the box-office returns.
While The Brits and the French set their empire to an Händelian tune of a "civilizing mission," Pax Americana has a "Wilsonian" soundtrack. The melody sings out that America will "make the world safe for democracy," or perhaps even install democracy by force. Underneath, there are less forthright, harmonizing lines that promise that global democracy will equal American hegemony, or at least will be "good for America."
Hadar retorts that the post-9/11 Pax Americana has not made the world safe for democracy but safe for the revival and intensification of tribal, religious, and ethno-nationalist identities. Furthermore, America’s imperial interventions have created little "Pax" and mostly succeeded in inspiring terrorism and violent resentment.
(One could certainly quibble here that in his hard-nosed "realist" framework, Hadar loses sight of the power of ideology and underestimates radical Islam – particularly as it has been defined by writers like Robert Spencer – as something more than a mere reaction to America’s meddling in Arab lands.)
While it’s now a clichéd to call America an empire – usually accompanied with much head-shaking and finger-waging – Hadar takes this comparison very seriously and integrates it into that most Hadarian of concepts, the "global paradigm."
Since 1945, the U.S. incrementally replaced Britain and France as the main imperial power – just as the U.S. subsidized and then succeeded France in South East Asia, it moved into the former Ottoman territory that had been carved up by the British.
For Hadar, whatever rationale Pax Americana had during the Cold War, it has little today, and will continue to unravel as the world transitions from a bipolar to a multi-polar global paradigm – the unipolar world dreamed up by Charles Krauthammer is a mirage, or at most, a "moment" that has past.
Even if Pax Americana is costly and unsustainable, this does not stop the U.S. from pursuing what amounts to imperial projects. Of these, Hadar focused on the U.S.’s designs for controlling the oil in the Middle East by having a large military presence throughout the region. This is not done so much to line the pockets of the oil companies (although this motive should not be dismissed out of hand) but to control the source of energy for America’s future competitive rivals.
When many talk of "energy independence," they seem to assume that the U.S. is supinely reliant on a collection of shifty-eyed Saudi Princes and/or Ba’athist dictators for those SUVs to keep running. The fact is, the U.S., for intents and purposes, already has energy independence from the Middle East. Only 12 percent of the U.S. energy comes from the Middle East and of this, only three percent from Iraq and Kuwait. Contra Greenspan, "controlling the oil" in the Middle East is entirely unnecessary.
It’s a different story for the established European powers, Japan – and, most importantly, the rising powers of China and India. From Hadar’s Realpolitik perspective, he speculates that the U.S. seeks to control the rising powers’ source of oil – being that China’s energy needs are mushrooming, the very prospect of perfidious Uncle Sam doing such a thing will not exactly please Bejing.
Putting aside any moral questions of occupying the Middle East to get at China, Hadar argues that the U.S. drive for oil hegemony is misguided. Given that the various dynamics and conflicts in the Middle East will make the region highly unstable for the foreseeable future, America’s empire amounts to the U.S. military being forced to deal with problems that have little to do with America’s national interest. Given that China, India, Europe, and Japan all have much more at stake in the region, America’s empire amounts to Washington’s sending American soldiers to die for causes that have much more to do with the energy needs of foreign powers than American security.
After the conference, Hadar mentioned to me that he thought that France’s Sarkozy and Kouchner are eager to talk of "confronting Iran" not because they’re closet neocons – as yours truly has speculated – but because they want to keep Uncle Sam’s eyes on Iran, to keep the notion that Iran is a threat to the world swirling within Americans’ heads, so that Wahsington – and not Paris – will be the one to do something if a problem arises. France can thus continue to outsource its foreign policy – and spend the dividend on guaranteed six-week vacations and public laser-light shows. I personally think Hadar goes too far here, but this speculation is helpful in crystallizing his fundamental point.
How can Washington change course? Firstly, it must form concrete political objectives. Hadar’s focus in this regard was the prospect of opening up talks with Syria, in building a "diplomatic road to Damascus." If Washington can cease worrying about the fact that Syria is not exactly democratic and drop the whole "Islamofascism" nonsense, Washington can wake up to the fact Syria desires a stable, viable Lebanon – which was the very reason for its thirty-year occupation of the country – that it could work as a Sunni counterweight to Iran, and that it would be willing to help stabilize Iraq.
Interestingly, Hadar does not see the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group as offering much of a real alternative – even if he agrees with many of its recommendations. For Hadar, ISG amounts to a fantasy of returning to the cost-free Pax Americana of the 90s: "if we just leave Iraq, then everyone will love us again and we can rule the region." But those Dances with Wolves-The English Patient days are over, and it would be impossible to film a sequel whether we exit Iraq now or not. The global paradigm has changed, and this means that we need to work hard at writing a new script.
Leon Hadar has given us one of the aptest metaphors of the year: The Iraq war is to foreign policy what "Snakes on the Plane" is to cinema – a really bad idea that "bombed"… so to speak.
Unfortunately for us, Hollywood is much better than the U.S. government at handling disasters. With a real stinker on their hands, execs first cut their loses – i.e. release it quickly on DVD. Then, they go back to the studio and change the script. Even if Hollywood is often too eager to repeat lucrative formulas – how many indistinguishable teen horror flicks and cuddly romances with Jennifer Aniston can mankind really endure? – few would deny that the studios are highly skillful at not repeating obvious mistakes – "Snakes on a Plane," "Waterworld," and "Ishtar" have thankfully remained sui generis.
Not so with the U.S. government. Uncle Sam seems bent on reviving and remaking the most unsuccessful scripts – or at least one that simply cannot work in the contemporary world. For Hadar, this script is the British imperial project of the last two and half centuries. As with that grand institution on which the sun never set, the production costs of "America’s empire" far exceed the box-office returns.
While The Brits and the French set their empire to an Händelian tune of a "civilizing mission," Pax Americana has a "Wilsonian" soundtrack. The melody sings out that America will "make the world safe for democracy," or perhaps even install democracy by force. Underneath, there are less forthright, harmonizing lines that promise that global democracy will equal American hegemony, or at least will be "good for America."
Hadar retorts that the post-9/11 Pax Americana has not made the world safe for democracy but safe for the revival and intensification of tribal, religious, and ethno-nationalist identities. Furthermore, America’s imperial interventions have created little "Pax" and mostly succeeded in inspiring terrorism and violent resentment.
(One could certainly quibble here that in his hard-nosed "realist" framework, Hadar loses sight of the power of ideology and underestimates radical Islam – particularly as it has been defined by writers like Robert Spencer – as something more than a mere reaction to America’s meddling in Arab lands.)
While it’s now a clichéd to call America an empire – usually accompanied with much head-shaking and finger-waging – Hadar takes this comparison very seriously and integrates it into that most Hadarian of concepts, the "global paradigm."
Since 1945, the U.S. incrementally replaced Britain and France as the main imperial power – just as the U.S. subsidized and then succeeded France in South East Asia, it moved into the former Ottoman territory that had been carved up by the British.
For Hadar, whatever rationale Pax Americana had during the Cold War, it has little today, and will continue to unravel as the world transitions from a bipolar to a multi-polar global paradigm – the unipolar world dreamed up by Charles Krauthammer is a mirage, or at most, a "moment" that has past.
Even if Pax Americana is costly and unsustainable, this does not stop the U.S. from pursuing what amounts to imperial projects. Of these, Hadar focused on the U.S.’s designs for controlling the oil in the Middle East by having a large military presence throughout the region. This is not done so much to line the pockets of the oil companies (although this motive should not be dismissed out of hand) but to control the source of energy for America’s future competitive rivals.
When many talk of "energy independence," they seem to assume that the U.S. is supinely reliant on a collection of shifty-eyed Saudi Princes and/or Ba’athist dictators for those SUVs to keep running. The fact is, the U.S., for intents and purposes, already has energy independence from the Middle East. Only 12 percent of the U.S. energy comes from the Middle East and of this, only three percent from Iraq and Kuwait. Contra Greenspan, "controlling the oil" in the Middle East is entirely unnecessary.
It’s a different story for the established European powers, Japan – and, most importantly, the rising powers of China and India. From Hadar’s Realpolitik perspective, he speculates that the U.S. seeks to control the rising powers’ source of oil – being that China’s energy needs are mushrooming, the very prospect of perfidious Uncle Sam doing such a thing will not exactly please Bejing.
Putting aside any moral questions of occupying the Middle East to get at China, Hadar argues that the U.S. drive for oil hegemony is misguided. Given that the various dynamics and conflicts in the Middle East will make the region highly unstable for the foreseeable future, America’s empire amounts to the U.S. military being forced to deal with problems that have little to do with America’s national interest. Given that China, India, Europe, and Japan all have much more at stake in the region, America’s empire amounts to Washington’s sending American soldiers to die for causes that have much more to do with the energy needs of foreign powers than American security.
After the conference, Hadar mentioned to me that he thought that France’s Sarkozy and Kouchner are eager to talk of "confronting Iran" not because they’re closet neocons – as yours truly has speculated – but because they want to keep Uncle Sam’s eyes on Iran, to keep the notion that Iran is a threat to the world swirling within Americans’ heads, so that Wahsington – and not Paris – will be the one to do something if a problem arises. France can thus continue to outsource its foreign policy – and spend the dividend on guaranteed six-week vacations and public laser-light shows. I personally think Hadar goes too far here, but this speculation is helpful in crystallizing his fundamental point.
How can Washington change course? Firstly, it must form concrete political objectives. Hadar’s focus in this regard was the prospect of opening up talks with Syria, in building a "diplomatic road to Damascus." If Washington can cease worrying about the fact that Syria is not exactly democratic and drop the whole "Islamofascism" nonsense, Washington can wake up to the fact Syria desires a stable, viable Lebanon – which was the very reason for its thirty-year occupation of the country – that it could work as a Sunni counterweight to Iran, and that it would be willing to help stabilize Iraq.
Interestingly, Hadar does not see the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group as offering much of a real alternative – even if he agrees with many of its recommendations. For Hadar, ISG amounts to a fantasy of returning to the cost-free Pax Americana of the 90s: "if we just leave Iraq, then everyone will love us again and we can rule the region." But those Dances with Wolves-The English Patient days are over, and it would be impossible to film a sequel whether we exit Iraq now or not. The global paradigm has changed, and this means that we need to work hard at writing a new script.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Groton Boys Can't Lose
The Financial Times has a brief discussion of (among other things) the nexus of class and foreign policy in an interview with Louis Auchincloss this weekend. It's worth a quote:
“I used to say to my father,” he says, “ ‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” He pauses before invoking a 20th-century American foreign-policy who’s who: “There was Cy Vance, Bill Scranton, Ted Beale, both Bundys, Bill and McGeorge – they all got behind that war in Vietnam and they pushed it as far as they could. And we lost a quarter of a million men. They were all idealistic, good, virtuous,” says Auchincloss, “the finest men you could find. It was the most disillusioning thing that happened in my life.”
Auchincloss has struggled to understand just how their shared patrician background could have produced this disconnect. And the answer would appear to be that wars are lost, if not always made, on the playing fields of New England. “Bill Bundy and I shared a study at Groton, and one day he came in from a football game, and I said: ‘Who won?’ and he said: ‘We lost,’ and then he burst into tears. You cannot lose. Groton cannot lose. That’s what they believed in, no matter what,” explains Auchincloss. “They all would have all been willing to die, if they hadn’t already been in high positions. They believed America cannot lose. We stand for every virtue and right that’s in the world.”
I'm reminded that George Kennan, a Milwaukee boy, always felt like an outsider in such company. But I wouldn't say that the hubris Auchincloss describes is peculiar to the old East Coast elite. Bush's own pedigree aside, the present administration is no WASP preserve, yet a parallel belief in American invincibility and innocence, albeit in cruder form, has long prevailed among the president's popular conservative base. The WASPs came out of the Vietnam era disillusioned not just with the war and America's role in the world but with their own identities. Will something similar happen to conservatives--or ex-conservatives, as may then be the case?
They're talking about exit strategies -- and Exit-Strategies!
On a day that Exit-Strategies was linked on one of the most popular conservative blogs, The Independent Institute hosted an excellent conference on -- exit strategies. Leon Hadar, Ivan Eland, and David Henderson presented talks on forming a new paradigm for dealing with the Middle East, the lack of justification for “protecting the oil” with the military -- and why wars in the Middle East aren't "just about the oil" -- and the prospects for political de-centralization and partition in Iraq. These talks coincided with the release of longer white papers by the authors.
Each talk deserves a full report, and in the next two days, I’ll do my best to convey some of the more interesting moments.
More to come…
Each talk deserves a full report, and in the next two days, I’ll do my best to convey some of the more interesting moments.
More to come…
The Soft Sell
The New Republic was the most important center-left periodical to endorse the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Since at least the 1980s, the magazine has been a comfortable home for liberal hawks. In 2004, TNR's editors went so far as to endorse Joe Lieberman for the Democratic presidential nomination -- about two years before Lieberman's pro-war stance cost him the Democratic Senate nomination in Connecticut.
While many liberal hawks and neoconservatives remain on its masthead, the New Republic has recently been rethinking some of its foreign policy positions. This editorial endorsing soft partition as a way out of Iraq is part of that process. It expresses skepticism about the prospects for Iraqi "reconciliation" in any politically feasible timeframe. It treats the Bush administration's war aims as essentially unachievable. And it acknowledges that at some point in the not too distant future, the political pressure for leaving Iraq will become difficult to ignore.
So TNR advises that we let the major ethnoreligious factions in Iraq go their own way. That means adopting a plan to "radically devolve power to Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish regional governments with a central government securing the borders and parceling out oil revenues." As the editors note, this idea has broad bipartisan support. Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, both candidates for their parties' respective presidential nomination, each have plans along these lines. Partition has advocates among pundits across the ideological spectrum.
I'd like to favor a soft partition myself. The idea dispenses with the polite fiction that there is in fact a large number of Iraqis committed to a common cause or country. It is a "third way" approach aimed at mitigating the consequences of our invasion and eventual withdrawal, both for U.S. national prestige and for the Iraqis who might otherwise become victims in a humanitarian disaster. It has become more realistic as sectarian violence has made previously mixed cities more homogeneous. And even some surge supporters are willing, in effect, to go along.
Yet I'm skeptical. TNR acknowledges the pitfalls: "Aside from the Kurds and one Shia party (the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council), none of the main Iraqi players have any interest in carving up the country. The status of Baghdad would pose a Jerusalem-like obstacle to any federal agreement, to say nothing of the details of oil-sharing and shared security. If the plan failed to thread any of these needles, it could inflame sectarian tensions rather than calm them." If those are the obstacles in Iraq, the fact that soft partition could create a bipartisan consensus in Washington sounds rather less reassuring.
Such a plan would also require us to maintain large numbers of troops in Iraq for several more years, potentially increasing the risks that the conflict will spread to Iran and putting more American lives in danger. Certainly for it to be deemed preferable to withdrawal we would need a better indication that a soft partition can work -- and can be facilitated by the United States -- than the fact that we can get both Democrats and Republicans to support it.
UPDATE: AmSpec's John Tabin responds here.
While many liberal hawks and neoconservatives remain on its masthead, the New Republic has recently been rethinking some of its foreign policy positions. This editorial endorsing soft partition as a way out of Iraq is part of that process. It expresses skepticism about the prospects for Iraqi "reconciliation" in any politically feasible timeframe. It treats the Bush administration's war aims as essentially unachievable. And it acknowledges that at some point in the not too distant future, the political pressure for leaving Iraq will become difficult to ignore.
So TNR advises that we let the major ethnoreligious factions in Iraq go their own way. That means adopting a plan to "radically devolve power to Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish regional governments with a central government securing the borders and parceling out oil revenues." As the editors note, this idea has broad bipartisan support. Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, both candidates for their parties' respective presidential nomination, each have plans along these lines. Partition has advocates among pundits across the ideological spectrum.
I'd like to favor a soft partition myself. The idea dispenses with the polite fiction that there is in fact a large number of Iraqis committed to a common cause or country. It is a "third way" approach aimed at mitigating the consequences of our invasion and eventual withdrawal, both for U.S. national prestige and for the Iraqis who might otherwise become victims in a humanitarian disaster. It has become more realistic as sectarian violence has made previously mixed cities more homogeneous. And even some surge supporters are willing, in effect, to go along.
Yet I'm skeptical. TNR acknowledges the pitfalls: "Aside from the Kurds and one Shia party (the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council), none of the main Iraqi players have any interest in carving up the country. The status of Baghdad would pose a Jerusalem-like obstacle to any federal agreement, to say nothing of the details of oil-sharing and shared security. If the plan failed to thread any of these needles, it could inflame sectarian tensions rather than calm them." If those are the obstacles in Iraq, the fact that soft partition could create a bipartisan consensus in Washington sounds rather less reassuring.
Such a plan would also require us to maintain large numbers of troops in Iraq for several more years, potentially increasing the risks that the conflict will spread to Iran and putting more American lives in danger. Certainly for it to be deemed preferable to withdrawal we would need a better indication that a soft partition can work -- and can be facilitated by the United States -- than the fact that we can get both Democrats and Republicans to support it.
UPDATE: AmSpec's John Tabin responds here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)