Clemons on the candidates' foreign policy stances
Steve Clemons has an interesting piece in The Washington Note on where the 2008 presidential candidates stand on major foreign policy issues. He suggests that the best way to determine this is by taking a look at their campaign advisers, and gets into some interesting analysis of those advisers' big policy ideas, which we don't get much of in the media coverage of the primaries. Excerpt:
". . . sometimes the 'person' that the candidate is just doesn't matter all that much -- at some point, the candidate becomes a franchise of so many interests and perspectives, sometimes in internal conflict with one another, that what the candidate really thinks or feels becomes less important.
That is why I spend a lot of time looking at advisers, funders, and other interests that surround these candidates. Each is somewhat of a free trade zone unto himself or herself for political interests vying to steer him or her this way or that."
"Agonizing Over the Candidates and Who They Really Are" [The Washington Note]
Year-end thoughts on Iraq
I haven't blogged about the War in Iraq much lately. There are a couple reasons for this.
First, to be honest, I don't even know what to say about it at this point. During 2002 and early 2003, I was against the war mostly because of what could happen. Invading Iraq without just cause could damage our standing in the world, it could leave a divided wasteland torn by sectarian violence, it could cost way more in American lives and tax dollars than it would be worth. Half a decade later, everything I thought could go wrong has gone wrong (I actually assumed that it would go better than this), and while most Americans have come around to agreeing that it was a mistake, there's very little evidence of any "lessons learned" on Capitol Hill.
The President's still in office, and the other officials responsible for the war are either still working for him, or they've moved on to private sector jobs that seem to reward them for their involvement in this whole mess, like teaching foreign policy courses at Georgetown. [Washington Post] Most of Congress voted for the war, and that crowd isn't known for admitting mistakes publicly. Conservative commentators act like there should be absolutely no accountability or admission of mistakes, and have resorted to pitiful tactics like blaming the media every time it reports an attack or bombing (which are the kinds of things it should cover during a war - after all, that's what history books of past wars cover), and saying things like "the anti-war crowd wants us to lose in Iraq."
To the contrary, watching the War in Iraq spiral out of control has easily been the least satisfying "I told you so" I've ever experienced. It has taught me that being right about something can be just as frustrating as being wrong. Every American death hits me in the gut, and seems to underscore how powerless citizens are when it comes to our Nation's foreign policy.
Fortunately, while Capitol Hill and conservative commentators won't admit that Iraq was a mistake, most of the American public has come around, and it is becoming increasingly clear that President Bush's legacy will be an incredibly negative one. At this point, instead of dwelling on the mistakes that were made, and the frustration of having no voice in the process, we should focus on the future. I have tried to forgive President Bush and the neocons to the extent that I can (don't worry, I mean "forgive" and not "forgive and forget"), and to remind myself of how lucky I am to have been out of harm's way. The Americans who have truly felt the brunt of the war are our troops and their families, and one thing we can do is to promise to remember what they've been through for the rest of our lives.
This leads me to the second reason I've avoided blogging on the Iraq War lately, which is that I've been of two minds on the surge. A few weeks ago, Congressman John Murtha sparked a controversy when he told reporters that he thought the surge in Iraq was working. As recently as July 12, Murtha had called President Bush's surge policy "delusional." [Politico]
Does this make Murtha a "flip-flopper," as some have suggested? I don't think so. Being rational requires looking at the facts and making your decisions based on them, and not your personal ideology. So if recent visits to Iraq have convinced Murtha that the surge is working now, I would argue that he is obligated to tell us the truth, and change his view.
More broadly, I don't think there's anything hypocritical about having been against the war, and now supporting the surge. The surge actually corrects one of the biggest criticisms of Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq War, which is that he underestimated the size of the force we would need to stabilize Iraq (in some cases, ignoring advice from generals who thought we would need a much larger force).
One of the most compelling lines in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack was Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn rule" of foreign policy, which he used to warn the President about the dangers of invading Iraq: "You break it, you own it." [Int'l Herald Tribune] Well, we broke Iraq, and now we own it.
I was against the war, and initially, I was against the idea of a surge. But now it is underway, and if it can help us leave the country in better shape than an immediate pull-out would, it's worth a shot, because leaving Iraq completely destabilized would only exacerbate violence in the country, and further inflame anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and the rest of the world. So while I seriously doubt anything could happen which would change my mind about the initial decision to invade, I am open-minded about the surge, and I'm following it with hopes that I was wrong about it.
War averted?
The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) brings the reassuring news that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in late 2003, but the report raises as many questions as it answers. Note that while the full NIE will remain classified, the declassified "key findings" are available on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's website.
The most obvious question is why the report contradicts previous reports, like the 2005 NIE which described Iran as "determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure." [Washington Post] The intelligence community has not revealed the nature of the new information behind the shift, but it should not be surprising that the outlook has been blurry, given that the US has "few actual spies on the ground and no consular presence in Tehran, relying on satellite imagery and intercepts." [cfr.org] It seems that Tehran may be more concerned about international pressure than it has let on.
The second big question is whether this new NIE should be considered credible, when so much of our intelligence has been shaky during the last few years. There's a temptation to hail the report as a sign that the intelligence community is becoming more independent from the White House than it was during the pre-Iraq era, and while that might be the case, there's no way to know whether that is the case at this point.
Third, there's the issue of whether Iran could restart the covert weapons program it had until late 2003. The report expresses "high confidence" that, even if Iran restarted its program now, it could not produce enough plutonium for a nuclear weapon until 2015. However, some observers have pointed out that Iran could always get plutonium from another source.
Finally, one has to wonder how much (and how long) Bush and the neocons have known about the intelligence community's newly-declassified findings, especially considering the bellicose tone they have often taken during the last two years.
"[President Bush] said he was first told about the new information in August by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, but not in detail because analysts needed to evaluate it before intelligence agencies reached a formal consensus last week. He made clear it did not change his view and would not have changed his rhetoric, including his October warning about the possibility of World War III if Iran builds nuclear weapons." [Washington Post]
PDF of November 2007 NIE's "Key Findings" [odni.gov]
Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder on the NIE [cfr.org]
"U.S. Renews Efforts to Keep Coalition Against Tehran" [Washington Post]
