Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 161 – Info, analysis, discussion

Washington-Iraq update

It’s been a very Iraq-focused week here in Washington DC. Herewith, some quick notes.
Note 1.
Yesterday, the Prez made his appeal for support ( = congressional funding) of a plan– let’s not call it a “strategy”– whereby the number of US troops in Iraq would be rolled back to their pre-surge level of around 130,000 by next July.
Bottom line: if Bush gets what he wants, then he would have succeeded in “buying” himself an extra 18 months– between Dec 2006, when he desperately had to come up with some alternative to the Baker-Hamilton plan, and July 2008, when the situation will, he hopes, return to what it was in Dec. 2006.
In US political terms, this would buy him a very valuable period of time on the political calendar. It has also, to some extent, tied the Democrats in knots and revealed splits in the Democratic Party.
In US human terms, 773 US service members have been killed in Iraq so far this year. If that attrition rate continues through next July, then we could estimate that Bush’s time-buying “surge-then-desurge” maneuver would cost a total of 1,550 additional US families their loved ones’ lives.
In Iraqi political and human terms, the first 9 months of the “surge” up until now have been disastrous.
Note 2.
I was only able to watch a few portions of the hearings earlier this week, when Petraeus and Crocker appeared before large sessions of first the House and then the Senate. (Then, they worked the big MSM very intensively for what looked like nearly a full further day.)
The Senate hearings looked much more serious than the House ones. The Senators have a lot more self-confidence, authority, experience, and gravitas when they deal with witnesses– even witnesses as “august” (and cocksure) as David Petraeus.
I did see the great moment when our Senator, John Warner, leaned craggily forward and asked Petraeus whether he could truly say that what he was doing in Iraq was actually serving US national security, and Petraeus notably could not answer with any form of a “Yes.”
(Crocker looked like a scared apparatchik throughout the whole thing.)
Note 3.
As readers are all probably well aware, Bush’s big “buddy” in Anbar province, Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, was killed there yesterday. Abu Aardvark had some interesting background material on Abu Risha on his blog on Tuesday.
Here on JWN, commenter Alex contributed some even deeper historical background about the Abu Risha tribe:

Note 4.
The buzzword that Petraeus and Crocker were seeking to get into circulation for how the “politics” of their approach in Iraq is supposed to work is that it’s a “bottom-up” approach. This reminds me unavoidably of the long-told story of Andrei Gromyko’s slight mis-stating of the well-known drinker’s toast of “Bottoms Up!” …As told, though not very effectively, in the third paragraph ~~here~~.
Small update Saturday: That link broke. The short version of the story was that when Dean Rusk was the Secretary of State (early 1960s), there was a big state dinner in Washington for Gromyko. And when Gromyko made his toast, he addressed it to Rusk’s prim and proper wife saying “Up your bottom!”
Anyway, for some reason I have been reminded of this story every time I hear Petraeus on TV earnestly talking about having discovered a “bottom-up” strategy for Iraq.
Note 5.
Meanwhile, in terms of true grassroots organizing in Iraq, this item from the BBC looks to me like excellent news.
It has a picture of Iraqi nationalists standing with their national flags and anti-sectarianism banners atop one of the 20-foot-high concrete blast walls with which the occupation forces have been attempting to “quarter off” many of the neighborhoods of Baghdad.
Here’s the lead of the story:

What do you see when you see photos of citizens waving banners on top of walls imposed by outsiders and demanding that the walls be brought down? I see something to celebrate. But I’m thinking maybe the people who are running the occupation see it as a big potential threat to their extensive “quadrillage” ( = movement control) plan for Baghdad and potentially the whole of the country.
The word “quadrillage”, of course, comes de la langue francaise, where it was used to describe the counter-insurgency strategy the French used to such destructive but unsuccessful effect in Algeria and Vietnam. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, eh?

A 9/11 Blessing

(This is Scott writing)
For the past six years, I haven’t had any birthdays. 9/11’s come and go – mostly go. It just hasn’t seemed right to celebrate anything on a day when every American will remember the searing horrors of six years ago.
Lately, I’ve been reminded anew of life’s fragility. An admired Professor recently lost her husband of many decades. Then a brilliant friend lost precious two-year-old son Jude after a tragic pool accident. He and his family now head back to Lebanon, where ironically, I pray they can find peace and “home.” My own long-time mentor is facing a serious heart surgery soon; he has too many much needed books, from Jefferson to Iran, yet to write!
Yet I met a sweet little angel just a few hours ago who already has changed my outlook on life, and 9/11 in particular. Her name is Jessica Anne Harrop, and she’s all of 7 lbs, 2 oz.
Forgive my happiness; she’s beautiful.

Jessica is also my first grand-child.
Special thanks to my son Keith and his lovely wife Rachel for such a present! Rachel is doing well, though she’s understandably very tired after a delayed and rather long delivery.
Yet it was especially considerate of Jessica to take her time – an extra week – in arriving so she could share a birthday with her… hey, what am I now?
A grandpa? I am sooooo not ready for this. Folks think I’m not old enough; my career’s on hold; I’m not even “gray” yet.
Not to worry Jessica dear, panic attack over. You’re a bright and inspiring new Light in our lives. May our world yet be a saner and happier place with you in it.

“Consider the blameless; observe the upright; there is a future for the man – and woman – of peace.”
— Psalm 37:37

Petraeus and Crocker do the House

I did watch a bit of the Petraeus-and-Crocker show on C-SPAN this afternoon. Oh how handy for the administration to have this whole thing happening during the week of September 11, eh?
Today it was a joint hearing of the House Foreign relations and Armed Services Committes. I guess the main thing that struck me was the cock-a-hoop way that Petraeus preened his way around the hearing room, gladhanding everyone like a seasoned politician… Whereas Crocker looked anguished, concerned, and very uncomfortable.
Also, whenever the Congress members asked questions that were not specifically directed to one or other of the two “witnesses”, Petraeus jumped right in and answered them without even seeming to ask Crocker if he wanted to go first. Even when they were on clearly political (as opposed to more military) subjects.
It was alpha-doggist discourse-hogging of the first order. Fairly nauseating, all in all.
A number of the members of Congress who asked “questions” prefaced their orations (that were often light on interrogatory content) with lengthy statements about how they had met Petraeus on trips they’d made Petraeus to Baghdad, or Mosul, or wherever, and how heroic he had seemed to them then.
The US military, of course, has huge budgets for congressional relations, and relatively huge logistical capabilities within Iraq to greet and host visiting Codels (congressional delegations). Whereas the US diplomatic service… ? It’s chronically starved of funds and capabilities by comparison.
The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung had an interesting piece in today’s paper, in which she started off by noting the different way in which the two men had arrived in the US:

One arrived last week from Baghdad aboard a military aircraft, flanked by a bevy of aides and preceded by a team of advisers assigned a suite of Pentagon offices. The other flew commercial, glad that the flight was long enough to qualify for a business-class government ticket…

Here’s a little excerpt from the current draft of Ch.2 of my in-process book:

Ah! We so, so sadly need a new paradigm here… This militarism thing is just pathetic. (And very harmful, in so many different ways.)

If US citizens truly believed that all persons are created equal…

The US’s Founding Fathers famously declared that
” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are
created equal…”

Our national population makes up somewhere under 5% of the world’s
total. Each US citizen, on average, was responsible in 2004 for
the puffing out of 20 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (for a national
total of 5.91 billion metric tons.) Actually, that last
link, which is to an official US Department of Energy database, understates the real dimension of the problem, since
it’s an Excel file that charts only CO2 emissions from the consumption
and flaring of fossil fuels– leaving out other causes of CO2 emissions. But no matter.

So if all 6.3 billion people in the world really are equal, then each
should also have the “right” to emit their own 20 metric tons of CO2
into the atmosphere every year… Right?

That would come to 126 billion metric tons… Nearly five times the current
world emission rate.

Last fall, the UK government’s chief economist, Nicholas Stern, pulled
together the best information available anywhere on human-induced
climate and the foreseeable costs of (a) not doing anything about it,
and (b) doing something to truly bring the problem under control.
The scientists he consulted said that worldwide CO2 emissions need to
be brought down beneath five
billion metric tons a year if very damaging, potentially speciescidal, human-induced climate change
through CO2 emissions is to be ended.

George W. Bush asserts the “right” of the US to emit just as much CO2
as it pleases… But the Founding Fathers told us that all men [and
women] are created equal. Can both claims be upheld? If we
renege on one of them, which should it be?

… Okay, here’s another similar conundrum. I don’t need to
repeat the famous (and in my view extremely important) claim made by
our nation’s Founding Fathers.

So in 2005, the US spent $1,637 on military goods and service for each
citizen of the Republic. (Next highest per-capita rates among
significant world powers were France and the UK, neither of which spent
more than $860 per head.) Those figures are all from my copy of
the IISS’s Military Balance 2007.

So if every country in the world asserted a “right” to engage in
per-capita military spending at the same rate as the US, then total
world military spending would be $10.3 trillion…
Instead of $1.2 trillion, which was what it actually was in 2005.

And instead of the world having just twelve US carrier
battle groups and a few other nations’ naval formations rushing around its
oceans, there would be 228 additional carrier battle groups also clogging up
the seas. (Do you have any idea how much sea a whole carrier
battle group occupies?) And many of those additional CBGs would likely be
steaming around as close to our coastlines as our CBGs
like to go to the coastlines of, for example, China or Iran…
And if this whole global hyper-arming business were really evened out
on a population-proportional basis, then 48 of those CBGs would indeed be
Chinese.

Somehow, the whole world has gotten itself into this quite
unsustainable position whereby US military power has become quite
disproprtionate to any notions of human fairness or equality. And
what’s more, this bloated US military is not actually very good any more at winning (and
holding) any worthwhile strategic goals. That’s the dirty little
secret of US military power, that has been exposed more than ever
before by the still-unfolding, horribly tragic debacle in Iraq.

(Just as Israel’s much-vaunted military power was incapable of winning
any worthwhile strategic goals in Lebanon, last year.)

The world has changed. It actually started changing back in
August 1945, which was the world’s inaugural (and ultimate) “shock and
awe” moment. In 1946, the brilliant strategic thinker Bernard Brodie
looked back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wrote “Thus far the chief
purpose of our military establishment has been to
win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can
have almost no other useful purpose.” The Cold War dulled the
impact of Brodie’s basic message somewhat for the next 45 years–except
that, of course, the strategy of war-deterrence that he
advocated was indeed the organizing leitmotif of the whole Cold
War…

But what we are seeing now, I think, is that Brodie’s message applied
much more widely than “just” to the Soviet Union. And we should
remember, anyway, that when he expressed his important judgment about
the need to focus on war-aversion, the Soviets still didn’t have any
nuclear weapons.

Anyway, the return of Brodie-ism is the subject of another JWN post I’m
kind of planning… Under the title, perhaps, of “US militarism: The
God that failed.” The point of this present post, though, is to
call my fellow Amurrcans back to some deep thinking about whether we
really do still hold to the ideal of human equality… and what that
should mean for the kinds of policy that our country pursues today.

(Important to note: When the Founding Fathers talked about people being
created equal they notably did not restrict that to US
citizens. They did, unfortunately, restrict it to “men”– and of
course, they did not at the time extend it in practice to non-white men or even in
any meaningful way to white men who were not also property
holders. But still, the fact that they talked about all “men”
being equal, and not only the citizens of the then-colonies, was
important for their argument at the time. And it is equally
important for my argument– my call to conscience on the issue of human
equality– today.)

Yo navego en ti…

I’ve been think a lot recently about interdependence. In particular, the specific form of interdependence that exists between the (less than) 5% of the world’s people who happen to be US citizens, and the more than 95% who are not.
In Meeting for Worship this morning, I kept thinking of the great Peter, Paul and Mary song on this theme: Somos El Barco. (Words here.) I looked for a version of someone singing it on Youtube. This was all I could easily find: here. I think that version is mainly in Japanese. It sounds good.
(Talking of interesting nuggets of multilinguality, I was folding one of my husband’s shirts yesterday when I noticed that on the label it said “Made in Pakistan / Hecho en Pakistan.” Hecho en Pakistan, huh? Shouldn’t Sam Huntingdon now be called on to throw another hissy fit about the growth of Hispanophonia.)
… Anyway, the interdependence of all the world’s peoples is a big theme in the book I’m currently writing– which will be on US foreign policy after Bush. The past couple of evenings I’ve been reading Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and The World, by Kishore Mahbubani, previously Singapore’s ambassador to Washington and the UN. It’s a fascinating, very well-informed and passionately argued book in which Mahbubani, a long-time admirer of “the American idea” agonizes over how incredibly provincial, self-referential, and ignorant Americans can be about the huge effects that their (our) power has on the rest of the world.
I’ve been interested to note the frequency with which Mahbubani, too, refers to the important little fact that US citizens make up only 5% of the world, and should really do a lot more sustained thinking about– and listening to– the views of the other 95% .
(I think my first mention of this idea on JWN was here, in November 2003. But at the time and in many subsequent posts on the theme I’d rounded the US population to being closer to four percent of the world’s total than five. Right now, I’m too tired to do a definitive recount. But in the interests of being logically conservative about the estimate, let’s say it might be five percent.)

Centcom chain of command losing its integrity?

The WaPo had an interesting big front-page article today, in which a large team of their good reporters was writing about evident differences of opinion on the surge being expressed in intra-administration discussions by Gen. Petraeus and his own immediate superior, Centcom Chief Adm. William Fallon.
Fallon– oh, did I mention that he’s Petraeus’s superior officer?– is reported as favoring a much faster and deeper drawdown of US troops from Iraq than Petraeus has been willing to think of.
The reportorial team, led by Peter Baker, writes this:

Actually, whether the two generals get along well or not is not the central issue. The central issue is surely what on earth has happened to the integrity of the chain of military command?
The answer is, of course, George W. Bush. He has reached down deep inside Centcom, going past Adm. Fallon to establish a direct relationship with Petraeus and having Petraeus report directly to him and to Congress.
Of course, in terms of having a rational military/strategic decisionmaking process, this is a disaster.
Peter Baker and Co. wrote this about Fallon’s position:

Fallon, who took command of Centcom in March, worried that Iraq was undermining the military’s ability to confront other threats, such as Iran. “When he took over, the reality hit him that he had to deal with Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and a whole bunch of other stuff besides Iraq,” said a top military officer.

That, of course, is the important part of the whole story here. The prolonged and large-scale deployment in Iraq is actively harming Centcom’s ability to “deal with” these other areas. Indeed, it is harming the ability of the Army and Marines to do any sensible long-range force-planning at all… Fallon has responsibility for the whole of Centcom’s area of operations, whereas Petraeus has only to worry about Iraq (and about becoming Tony Blair’s replacement as Presidential Lapdog-in-Chief.)
The WaPo article also had this to say about Fallon:

Fallon was also derisive of Iraqi leaders’ intentions and competence, and dubious about the surge. “He’s been saying from Day One, ‘This isn’t working,’ ” said a senior administration official. And Fallon signaled his departure from Bush by ordering subordinates to avoid the term “long war” — a phrase the president used to describe the fight against terrorism.

Interesting.
I think that, to do their jobs properly, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees– and the US voters as a whole!– now need to hear from Adm. Fallon directly, and not just from his underling who has already, apparently, been suborned by the President.
It is bad enough that we have this huge, extremely lethal US military apparatus barging around the world taking unilateral offensive actions whenever and wherever the POTUS pleases. But how much more scary of a prospect is it if we cannot even be assured that that military has a single and recognizable chain of command?
Who does Gen. Petraeus report to? We need to know. We also need to hear, and give appropriate weight to, the views of the Centcom head.

Senator Chuck Hagel to “retire”

The New York Times web site is reporting that Senator Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, will not run for re-election to the Senate, nor for the White House.
We’ve written about Senator Hagel here before, in general admiring his status as a rare Republican foreign policy maverick, a clear-thinker with the credentials, the experience, and most importantly, the nerve to stand up to the neconservative infiltration and takeover of the Republican Party.
Hagel was anti-war on Iraq, when being anti-Iraq war wasn’t cool…. in either party. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hagel early on warned of Vietnam ghosts in Iraq.
Yet Hagel has been a creature of the US Senate, and in that political role, he’s often bent with the wind, (such as on the habeas corpus for detainees issue) perhaps in hopes of living to fry bigger political fish. That earned him the back-handed compliment from one Nebraska blogger:

“He’s Chuck Hagel, folks – the thinking man’s unthinking Republican. And, you almost have to like him; you just can’t count on him.”

I think that’s too harsh, but I find myself disappointed that he apparently hasn’t found a viable way to run for national office next year.
So what’s behind Hagel’s decision not to run for anything next year – at least not at this time?

1. Was it his disgust with his own Republican Party? I’ve seen reports that neoconservatives were raising mountains of out-of-state cash for a nasty challenge to Hagel in the upcoming Republican primary.
2. Was it a sense that the Republican Party stands on the threshold of being crushed next year in the US Senate? That prospect, perhaps ironically, increases with Hagel withdrawing. If fellow veteran Bob Kerry indeed returns to Nebraska, the Democrats might well add Hagel’s seat to their Senate winnings next year. (They could also take John Warner’s seat here in Virginia, provided they can find another “maverick” like Jim Webb.)
3. If that indeed is his assessment, might Hagel be calculating that it’s more prudent for him to sit this slaughter out, and be available as the elder “realist” statesman to help with a Republican reconstruction by 2012?
4. Or is Hagel “thinking” yet again — that there might still be a chance for re-surfacing on a serious third party ticket for the White House next year? Perhaps Sam Waterston’s “Unity08” might yet persuade him. Or maybe New York’s Mayor Bloomberg might draft him — as David Broder recently suggested.

In my opinion, the Republican Party is in crisis mode, even as it refuses to admit it. It has strayed dangerously far from its own grand heritage as the Party of Lincoln, “TR,” “IKE,” and even “the Gipper.” Worse, it has abandoned all too many fundamental American values.
With most of the Republican Presidential candidates, including Fred Thompson, now running hawkishly to the right of Dick Cheney, Chuck Hagel could take a huge chunk of disaffected “Eisenhower Republicans” with him, wherever and whenever he goes. I sense many anti-war-party Democrats also admire and might support Hagel, should the Democratic candidates self-destruct in kow-towing to the neocon returnees into their ranks. Ah, wishful thinking?
Hagel’s formal announcement on Monday should be interesting. I’m counting on him not to go quietly.

Cartoon: Iranians as Cockroaches!?

I learned today of a particularly disturbing political cartoon published on September 4th in the Columbus (Ohio) Post-Dispatch. Drawn by Michael Ramirez, the cartoon very much illustrates themes I’ve written about here several times before — that when all else in the Middle East fails, the change-the-subject Bush/Cheney Administration and friends can resort to the fail-safe “blame Iran game” as the root of all such troubles.
The cartoon in question displays a regional map with Iran and a sewer pipe at its center, the source of hordes of cockroaches infesting the region. You can see the Dispatch version here. I have since discovered that the cartoon was first published on June 25th, in full color, in the internationally circulated Investors’ Business Daily. (click here or here)
Before presenting additional details about the artist and the controversy, I am pleased to publish here an eloquent and courageous open letter to the Columbus Post-Dispatch, from Marsha B. Cohen, a scholarly colleague at Florida International University in Miami. (with my emphasis added)
————————–
From: Marsha Cohen
To the Editor: Columbus Post Dispatch

For over four decades, Fidel Castro has been considered one of the most odious leaders in the Western hemisphere. After he took power, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled their island home for Miami (where I live and work), and where they have prospered. Many of them have been among the most vocal opponents of any moves by the US government to normalize relations with Cuba. Even now that Castro is old and sick, and at death’s door, he remains a hated symbol of a revolution gone wrong, that rapidly morphed into a detested enemy of the interests and values of the US.
Nevertheless, no Florida newspaper would ever dare to depict Cuba as a sewer, with cockroaches from it spreading out across North and South America. The outrage expressed, even by the regime’s most vociferous opponents, to the insult to their Cuban identity and beloved homeland, would put the police on crisis alert, and make headlines throughout the entire country.
Yet in an editorial cartoon, published on Sept 4. the Columbus Dispatch had no compunctions about portraying Iran as a sewer, and Iranians as cockroaches. Its decision to do so–regardless of the political motives of the editorial board, of the artist, or the message they were trying to convey–is unfortunate, and reflects more shamefully on the values and integrity of your newspaper than on the Iranian people, both in Iran and and those who have made their home in this country and other parts of the world, that this cartoon (whether intentionally or unintentionally) maligned and demeaned.
I hope that every organization that considers itself a champion of civil and human rights will express its outrage at the publication of this cartoon. Had the “cockroaches” been designated Jews, Blacks or Hispanics, the cartoon never would have made it into print in a respectable newspaper. And if it did, the objections and the fury generated throughout the community would have been loud, swift and resonant.
Anyone who would not want to see themselves and their ethnic group depicted in this way by a cartoonist is morally obligated to vociferously object to its publication. While the rights of a free press may extend to the promotion of racism, hatred and dehumanization, this does not mean you, as a newspaper, are obligated to exercise that right, or that decent people everywhere should not denounce your decision to do so when you do. Your disgusting representation of Iranians–irrespective of their regime–deserves nothing less than nationwide condemnation.
Sincerely,
Marsha B. Cohen
Miami, Florida

————————————
Well said and thanks Marsha Cohen.
A few additional tidbits on the cartoonist and the controversy:

Continue reading “Cartoon: Iranians as Cockroaches!?”

Riverbend, posting again!

Riverbend has posted again. Hat-tip to D. Mathews. She’s safe (apparently) and has been in Syria since June (I think.)
This post is her usual blend of the wryly intimate and the deeply reflective. And her usual beautiful writing.
Read it and weep.

What have the Bushites done to US national power?

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:

The fate of the basic elements of US national power under the Bush administration by Helena Cobban for ‘Just World News’
Element of national power	The US situation at the end of 2000	The US situation by fall 2007
1. Economic performance	Very strong, both relatively and absolutely.	Still very strong absolutely, but noticeably less strong in the “relative” stakes. The amount of US government and private debt held by foreigners had increased greatly. Of the federal government’s external creditors, Japan and China held first and second place.
2. Human resources	Our skill-set was strong but our numbers were nowhere near those of China or India!	The skill-set was still strong– though many other countries had been catching up. The EU’s expansion had meanwhile increased its (very well-educated) population to more than 50% greater than ours.
3. Military power	Unassailable, and either respected or feared by all others around the world.	Significantly dented, since Washington by then held almost nothing in reserve for contingencies; but otherwise still unmatched in technical and power-projection capacity. However, the usefulness of raw military force as a factor that, on its own, can realize important strategic objectives came under strong new questioning after Israel’s experience in Lebanon and our country’s, in Iraq.
4. “Soft” power:
4-a. Appeal of US ideals and culture	Our ideals were widely shared and even more widely respected. Our culture was generally (though not everywhere) considered appealing	Both our ideals and the sincerity with which our leaders held them were strongly questioned by many people around the world. The violence and hypersexualized nature of our culture had become widely commented on and reviled.
4-b. Recognition and appreciation of US achievements	The US had a strong reputation as a competent, “can-do” nation that had put a man on the moon, helped topple the Soviet empire through largely peaceful means, and provided a decent life and good opportunities for its own people.	The gross incompetence that our country demonstrated in rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, and in our national response to Hurricane Katrina, shocked even many of the US’s staunchest friends around the world. Actions undertaken by US government and non-governmental bodies that did provide good, solid services to others went largely unrecognized.
4-c. Perceived truthfulness of US leaders	President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky raised some eyebrows around the world. (It also generated laddish smirks from many men). But that episode did little to dent a broad perception of US leaders as more open and truthful than most of their counterparts around the world.	The ideological zeal with which Bush was seen as bending the evidence regarding Saddam’s WMDs and links to Al-Qaeda generated a very broad international questioning both of his truthfulness, and of the integrity of a national political system seen as having failed to hold him to adequate account at any stage along the way to, or since, the invasion of Iraq.
4-d. Reputation of US leaders as fairminded upholders of global norms.	Many around the world were mystified and concerned that the US had stayed out of so many global treaties in the 1990s– and also, that our agricultural and other subsidies seemed to violate strong norms on fair trading. But many non-US people were still prepared to cut us some slack on these issues because of our strength on factors 4a, 4-b, and 4-c.	The Bush administration’s decisions (i) to invade Iraq in the absence of any compelling casus belli and then (ii) to commit so many serious jus in bello infractions there, in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere shocked nearly all those around the world who had hitherto seen Washington as a broadly status quo-preserving power that at least stuck by the existing rules and norms of international behavior. The Bushites almost completely shredded this dimension of the US’s soft power. It might take his successors a long time to reconstitute it.

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.

The fate of the basic elements of US national power under the Bush administration

The fate of the basic elements of US national power under the
Bush administration