Allan, holy cow, gotta work today. I very much want to get to your questions, without assigning myself a term paper or anything. There are some good ones in there too, questions about FISA, torture/rendition, how to combat an clandestine, asymmetric enemy (surrogate army?), and the role morality plays in our FP over the long-term.
Here’s quick summation on this realism issue: Bush nation-building in Iraq is a bold, rather Wilsonian (for what it’s worth), idealogical and interventionist approach to American foreign policy. Definitely not conservative. McCain is lining up for the inheritance.
Key “Define the Mission? What is Success?” questions have never been answered about our adventure in Iraq. What is the return on investment for America in its heroic, misconstrued and conflated struggle against ‘Terrorism’, as potrayed on the MSM. Not that anyone from the realpolitik school believes Iraq is about anything other than establishing major military bases in the center of the Middle East to influence the allocation of oil resources. Cheney’s energy committee was the first WHIG.
Energy and oil aside (a huge foreign policy liability, BTW), the more urgent matter for American foreign policy involves Al Qaeda, and the center of gravity on this is and always has been Afg/Pak, with the tacit and ongoing idealogical, logistical and financial support from Saudis and other Wahhabi Muslims.
Obama’s call to focus on AQ in A/P over nation-building in Iraq is a more ‘realistic’ approach to this central question, the CORRECT ordering of priorities. It is a more accurate assessment of the immediate challenges we are confronting, and will lead to a more effective approach and a safer America in the years ahead. The Iraq move is about Oil Hegemony.
Adjacent issue, the Isr/Pal issue complicates our ability to put pressure and wage war against the central AQ matter, because we have cashed in our chips and ‘sided’ with Israel on idealogical grounds. Do we think there is an immediate solution to I/P? Do we care? Again, peace in I/P is not as important in real terms as being engaged in the region and pressing the two sides towards peace. As part of the process, we have inherently more leverage with the Arab states in the region who want to see a resolution to this issue.
Same thing with diplomacy in Iran, which I’ll skip over for now. Sum is we don’t care if the diplomacy works because it is part of a larger picture and it greatly increases pressure on the hardline Iranian regime, as well as supporting other functions such as intel collection. Again, idealogy before effective reality-based foreign policy.
With torture/rendition, FISA, etc. — that’s one of the central issues of our time. I’m reminded of the New Yorker piece on General Taguba, inside Rummy’s DoD, and also of the new Jane Mayer book “Dark Side”. I don’t believe we can effectively wage a counter-insurgency war, or suffocate and dismantle a terrorist organization, dragging America into the moral gutter, from the dark side. Terrorism is like a brush fire. It happens from time to time. You take precautions, and when it flares up, encircle it, close it out and suffocate. Timothy McVeigh was terrorism. Columbine was terrorism. How do you stop it? How do you stop Al Qaeda?
Allan — you said yourself you had thought for a long time about these issues with no clear insights. I think that’s the terrible truth of the matter. There is no easy answer. It is one of the truly hard dilemmas we face. And I think the *courageous* and honest answer is that we don’t sink to their level. We’re going to take some hits in the short-term, but if we want to win the war, we have to stick to the moral high ground. America has changed the world in the past hundred years, and the primary means has been through prosperity and example.
One of Bush’s mistakes, IMHO, has been to lie and dissemble about the issues before us, and to play politics and divide the electorate on issues of war and peace. EVERY AMERICAN would have accepted a course of action that included some ‘dark side’ measures, had they been openly debated, negotiated and implemented with bi-partisan support. The lack of credibility and use of McCarthy-esque partisanship (Democrats are the enemy) has just killed us. The decisions that have followed have been utterly incompetent and lack the support of the majority of the American people. Let me say this in all caps because I want to emphasize how utterly insane this is: WE ARE WAGING A WAR AS A NATION DIVIDED. It has long since gone beyond incompetence. It is dereliction of duty at the highest levels.
Back to Obama and “American Realism” in foreign policy. I think we have been idealogical and overly-ambitious in our foreign policy under GWB, to great expense, and to grave peril. I think Obama more correctly assesses the risks and opportunities, and is advocating for an approach that more accurately focuses our scarce and precious resources — capital/money, military assets, intelligence capabilities and diplomatic leverage — on specific and immediately threatening targets. His positions and approach towards AQ in A/P, Iraq and the broader ME is why I would characterise Obama as having a more pragmatic and realistic, even conservative, approach to American foreign policy.
I’ll point out something else I like, which is that Obama’s call for open negotiation and bi-partisan development of solutions is long overdue. Particularly in matters of foreign policy, politics MUST stop at the water’s edge. In Afghanistan earlier this week, in response to a question from a reporter about American foreign policy, Obama’s answer was, and I’m paraphrasing here: ‘There’s only one President of the United States at any point in time.’ Obama, as Susan Eisenhower has correctly pointed out, is our best chance to get past the irresponsible idealogical polarized narcissism that has characterized the Clinton/Bush Boomer generation and return to a functional democracy.
BTW, energy policy is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL. We desperately need leverage and flexibility in our dealings with the ME right now. Instead, we’re in a huge bind, a oil and debt addict in need of another hit. Obama’s connecting the dots between energy and foreign policy is once again, pragmatic, realist and even ‘conservative’ in the true sense of the word. I think it is by design that Gore has gotten out front and taken a ‘wing’ position on this. So has Schwarzeneggar. Most of us see the writing on the wall…
