Category: US foreign policy

So as you may all have gathered, I’m deeply into a bit of Realist thinking this week. This is all part of the intellectual work that is mulching down into Ch.6 of my current book project. But since the final text itself will have to be the merest digest of all my thinking, I thought I would share with you this fine table I made today, for which I have now figured the book won’t in the end have room. (You’ll see, though, that it is all still written in the kind of past-simple tense that I have to use for a book that won’t be in readers’ hands before next spring. This, even though many of the processes it describes are still ongoing.)

One of my aims here is to chart the ways in which the actions of the Bush administration in the international arena– reckless? criminal? immoral?– have considerably set back the true interests of the US citizenry (in contradistinction, as I shall explain in greater length in Ch.7, to the interests of the handful of big US corporations whose interests have driven most of the administration’s actions to date.)

So I made this little table that you see below, in which I teased apart what has happened to each of the main elements of “national power” during the Bushite era. In most of these dimensions, as you can see, there was an actual– sometimes precipitous– decline. Not all of these decreases were caused by the Bushites’ own actions (or, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, inactions); but most of them were.

But in addition something else was happening at a broader level– and once again, this was largely the result of the Bushites’ own actions. And this was a significant decline in both the actual and the perceived utility of raw military power (see line 3.) In other words, in the world of 2007-2020, the other, non-military elements of national power will almost certainly come to count for considerably more, relative to military power, than they have until now.

In a way this is a quite foreseeable result of one of the main phenomena of the present age: the sheer interconnectedness and transparency-to-each-other of nearly all the different parts of the world. And that phenomenon is surely going only to increase, not decrease, as the years go by.

Another thing I was doing with this table was trying to tease out what “soft power” actually means these days. I broke it out into four different dimensions here. What do any of the rest of you think about that scheme?

Okay, here it is:

Update, Thursday morning: I think that for completeness the table should include a line for “National unity”. Also, I think that item 4-d here should really come higher in the listing of soft power attributes since it includes the key attribute of international legitimacy.

So what would that well-known Vietnam war-evader George Bush have wanted the US actually to do in Vietnam rather than withdraw when it did??
That excellent question was raised by a very good friend of mine this evening after we watched the TV news item about Bush’s appearance today at the annual convention of the “Veterans of Foreign Wars” organization, and the way Bush brought into his speech there strong “warning” that a too-hasty US withdrawal from Iraq might have consequences for Iraqis and others in the Middle East just as bad, or perhaps worse, than the “consequences” that he claimed resulted from the US’s too-hasty withdrawal from Vietnam…
Bush was explicitly picking up there on the argument to that effect that recently retired Pentagon official Peter Rodman and liberal uber-hawk Will Shawcross made here earlier this summer.
Bush said:

Recently, two men who were on the opposite sides of the debate over the Vietnam War came together to write an article. One was a member of President Nixon’s foreign policy team, and the other was a fierce critic of the Nixon administration’s policies. Together they wrote that the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq would be disastrous.
Here’s what they said: “Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.” I believe these men are right.

He acknowledged– how could he avoid doing so?– that Vietnam ” is a complex and painful subject for many Americans.” He also did not, for that audience of veterans, say anything about his own semi-service in those years in the Texas Slackers’ Air National Guard.
He said,

The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.
The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism — and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people…
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”

Read that carefully. First of all, none of those was really a new phenomenon, or even, really, a new term.
Second, the terms of the Paris Peace Accords were that, after the “decent interval”, the North Vietnamese could have the whole of Vietnam and exercise sovereignty within it. Maybe Nixon and Kissinger should have driven a harder negotiating bargain that would have included some guarantees for the welfare of those previous collaborators who were “left behind.” But they didn’t. And actually, though thousands of former Vietnamese collaborators with the US forces did suffer from “re-education” etc, that suffering was of a completely different order of magnitude to what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s.
So what could a longer-lasting US presence in Vietnam have done to prevent the Cambodian genocide?
One can make a very strong case indeed that it had been the US’s previous actions in Southeast Asia– and principally, the horrendous aerial bombardments that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed against the country from their bases in Vietnam and elsewhere– that fatally weakened Sihanouk, empowered the Khmer Rouge, traumataized/brutalized untold thousands of Cambodians, and thereby set the stage for the genocide that followed.
And in the end, it was the army of united Vietnam that ended the genocide, by marching in to Phnom Penh and toppling the Khmer Rouge regime.
So again, as my friend asked: What would George W. Bush have done differently, if he had been president in Nixon’s place and had kept the US troops in Vietnam for even longer, that could have prevented the Cambodian genocide?
Bush didn’t tell us that. Instead, he used the speech to try to wrap himself in some of the glory of General Douglas Macarthur and thus present himself as a wise and idealistic– if sometimes sadly misunderstood– wartime leader of the nation.
(One final note: Rove may be gone from the White House. But the Bushite spinmeisters are seeming a lot more agile these days than the Democrats. Too bad that Bush seems so easily able to use this whole “aura of war” business to out-maneuver them. One thing it shows is that they all, except Kucinich, seem really unwilling to stand up and present any kind of a compelling alternative to the whole testosterone-soaked “bellophilia syndrome”. Instead, they’re all just playing along with it, desperately trying to present themselves as “just as tough as Bush” on war/peace issues. Sad. Very sad indeed.)
Update/correction, Fri. evening: Add Bill Richardson to the list of clear thinkers on Iraq among the Democratic Party hopefuls. That makes two.

Last night we were in DC, and we got to see No End in Sight, a movie released about three weeks ago that relentlessly tracks one key aspect of the war in Iraq, namely the woeful lack of planning within the Bush administration for the administration of post-invasion Iraq.
The film notably does not delve into the US decisionmaking on the issue of whether to invade Iraq. Nor, really, does it say much at all about Iraqi politics, history, and society. It is a movie about Americans, with Iraq as the backdrop to that. For a good film about Iraq, we’ll need to go elsewhere.
What the film does, though, it does brilliantly. Charles Ferguson produced, directed, and wrote the film, which is a full-length feature. Probably more than half of what we see on the screen is interview material. He uses a technique very similar to the one Errol Morris used in his 2003 movie about Robert McNamara and Vietnam: The Fog of War. That is, Ferguson has one interview subject on the screen at a time, placed over to one side of the screen as we watch; the subject is photographed fairly close up, though sometimes we see his or her hands. We don’t see the interviewer at all, and we generally never even hear his voice, though we do hear his questions on a couple of occasions. And in between the interview segments there’s some illustrative news footage with a voice-over that helps to tell the story.
The difference is that FOW was about one man and his decisionmaking, while NEIS is much, much more of a group montage. There are about three dozen interview subjects, of whom maybe half are former officials in the Bush administration… Some of these now have very serious misgivings indeed about the job they were tasked to do implementing the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy in Iraq.
That is, of course, both very similar to the moral tenor of the McNamara movie and somewhat different from it. Different, because the people in the NEIS movie were not as high up the totem-pole as McNamara… More like, people at the second-through-fourth echelons of policymaking.
It’s a very human movie, because you see people who took jobs where they wanted to do what they thought was “the right thing” but were prevented from doing it by the recklessly (or perhaps actually criminally) faulty decisions made by the people above them.
Most human of all, for me, was Col. Paul Hughes, who was the principal military advisor to Jay Garner right at the beginning of the occupation. (Hughes is the guy nearly at the end of this YouTube trailer who says “There are nights when I don’t sleep very well.”) He tells how in his early weeks in Baghdad he had been in touch with high officers in the still-in-hiding Iraqi army who assured him they could bring 137,000 soldiers in the Baghdad area to help keep the peace in the country… and he was all ready to start to set that process in train, ending the paroxysm of lawlessness that had taken hold of the country, when he was abruptly told by the newly arrived Bremer that the whole Iraqi army would be disbanded and all its members tossed out on the street. Just like that.
The movie has a great section where parts of the interview Hughes made on that point are intercut with pieces from an interview with Walter Slocombe, who before Bremer’s arrival in Baghdad had worked with him in Washington formulating the plan to disband the Iraqi army.
Slocombe comes out of the movie looking dishonest, ignorant, arrogant, and deeply manipulative. (Just the kind of person Bremer would get along with, I suppose.)
Ferguson does have a great, long list of people who “declined to be interviewed for the movie.” Bremer is on it. Also Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rice. If Slocombe has a little intelligence– which from the evidence, he may well not have– he is probably right now wishing he had declined as well.
The highest-ranking people who appear in the movie are Jay Garner, the first administrator of Iraq, and Rich Armitage, who was Powell’s deputy as Deputy Secretary of State. Garner comes out looking like perhaps a decent fellow, but not terrifically swift. Armitage pulls his punches a lot, repeatedly saying he doesn’t want to comment on various aspects of the affair.
As I said, what the movie does, it does very well. But I think there are things it should have had in the picture, even just to adequately tell the story it did seek to tell. For example, there is no substantive mention of the crimes and scandal of Abu Ghraib at all– even though there is one small, suggestive mention of the prison, and even though the story is taken, certainly, through to (and a little beyond) that flash-point in April-May 2004 when that scandal burst out in the middle of the battles of both Fallujah and Najaf.
Also, it truly was no “accident” that the US ended up with a ground force in Iraq that was quite insufficiently sized for the task of running an orderly occupation. Doing the invasion with a very small force had been an integral part of Rumsfeld’s planning for the war. He wanted to “prove” his (as it turned out, quite incorrect) theory that the US could indeed send its forces barging all around the world toppling opponents and transforming their countries into robustly pro-US democracies by using only very small– but agile and well-equipped– ground forces.
(Okay, that is the benign interpretation of what he was trying to do. Another interpretation is that he truly wanted Iraq to implode completely as a nation in the aftermath of the invasion– something that, certainly, many Israelis and many of the friends they had deeply embedded within Rumsfeld’s Pentagon wanted to see happen. from that point of view, I think Ferguson was dishonest to describe the Israeli scholar Amatzia Baram, who was one of his interview subjects, only as a “Historian of Iraq.” He has also long been one of Israel’s key government-advising intellectuals on the subject, too.)
If you watch Ferguson’s movie, you could come away from it thinking that it was all just a horrible mistake, the fact that the post-invasion planning had been so completely dysfunctional. Partly, I think, you get that impression from the sometimes very sympathetic and anguished way that people like Paul Hughes– and even more so, the other military officers interviewed– tell their story. I mean, those are all very sympathetic people. So the fact that they had volunteered to go and work in the occupation regime means that it must at one point have been a potentially admirable venture– no?
But even more important, I think, is the way Ferguson had framed the whole movie. He could and should have raised the question as to why the planning had been so poorly done (or, from another point of view, so well done– if the outcome actually sought by Rumsfeld and Cheney was the destruction of the unitary Iraqi state… ?)
As part of the misframing, Ferguson raises yet again the old canard of criticizing the administration for the fact that the post-invasion administration of Iraq was left to the Pentagon and not given to the State Department. The reason I think that’s a canard is because actually, under international law, it is the military’s job to administer occupied territories. It is the Israeli military that has that job within the OPTs… and earlier, it was the US and Allied militaries that administered occupied Germany and Japan.
If the Bushites did make a “mistake” in setting up that administration, it was by throwing out the planning that the State Department had done for the administration of a post-invasion Iraq. But it shouldn’t have been the State Department that did that administering. That was always, rightfully, the DOD’s job. Because of course, one of the main things that needs doing in an occupied area is the assurance of public security for all the residents. The State Department couldn’t have done that. The DOD could have and should have, but notably failed to.
Anyway, those criticisms aside, I’m glad I went to the movie. I saw quite a few people I know on-camera, which is always fun (Nir Rosen, George Packer, Samantha Power, Barbara Bodeen….) And you do get this tragic sense of some well-intentioned people– among the former US government officials– having gotten dragged into working for a really ill-intentioned (and not merely “dysfunctional”) project there in Iraq…. and the disquiet or discomfort some, but not all, of them came to feel about that.
Although I’m glad I went, it was not at all an enjoyable experience. It was extremely depressing just to hear that very, very familiar story being told again, and at times I felt angrier about the Bushites than I have let myself feel for quite a while. By and large, I think anger is an extremely unhelpful (and corrosive) emotion.
Ommmm.

There she was again, yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, talking to the audience of the CNBC t.v. channel about the fact that, regarding Iran, “all US options are on the table.”
But I think she went further than she or any other administration has gone before– and, I certainly hope, further than she really intended to go– when she said,

the President’s never going to take his options off the table

Never? Never? That is an immensely rash and foolish thing for anyone, especially the head of any country’s entire diplomatic body, to say.
Oh yes, she did go on to say that, “the President’s made clear that we believe that diplomatic solutions to the Iranian problem are very much possible.”
But what would that diplomacy be about if the President’s “options”– which in this context, as everyone fully understands, refer to the threat of a US military strike, including perhaps a nuclear military strike, on Iran– are all kept firmly welded to the top of the table?
So my question is, did Rice really mean “never”? If so, what is there to talk about? If she didn’t mean to say it, perhaps she should clarify. Loose lips on a top diplomat can sink a lot more than just a few ships.