Happy New Year

Anthony has been doing a nice job of shouldering the slack of the remaining old man (read: me) on the blog. As one of my many New Year's resolutions, I'll try to take up some of the blogging burden. This of course, however, will probably drive away the site's remaining fan base. Oh well.

Summer Parameters

The summer 2005 issue of Parameters is out. If you have never looked at this journal, I highly recommend it. There is usually something of interest for a variety of intellectual palettes. In this particular issue, I suggest taking a look at Canadian Forces LTC Pierre Lessard's article on campaign planning and Antulio Echevarria's piece on historiography.

Realism vs. Idealism, Take 37

Henry Kissinger has a worthwhile piece about the "realism" vs. "idealism" debate in today's International Herald Tribune. The key paragraphs, to me, are:

The implementation of the freedom agenda needs to relate the values of the democratic tradition to the historic possibilities of other societies.

We must avoid the danger that a policy focused on our domestic perceptions may generate reactions in other societies rallying around patriotism and leading to a coalition of the resentful against attempts at perceived American hegemony.

A strategy to implement the vision of the freedom agenda needs consensus-building, both domestically and internationally. That will be the test as to whether we are seizing the opportunity for systemic change or participating in an episode.

I also highly recommend Rich Lowry's piece "Reaganism vs. Neo-Reaganism" in the current The National Interest.* He does a nice job of clarifying and disentangling the key arguments in the "neocons" vs. "realists" debate.

* For those who haven't been following it, a new journal under the helm of Francis Fukuyama and the very capable editorship of Adam Garfinkle, The American Interest, will shortly be standing up. You can read about this here and here.

Pushing

I thought that Mackubin Thomas Owens did a great job on the piece that Anthony references below -- and mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for not reading Anthony's comments in full yet, it's been one of those days. And I think Owens' points are well taken and exceedingly appropriate. I'd just argue that there is a difference between the uniformed military arguing whether or not to go to war and the uniformed military arguing over how to wage the war -- which doesn't necessarily contradict anything in the piece. Pushing back about waging war, bad, pushing back about how to wage war, perhaps not bad. Argue to the point of decision and then execute. I think there is an interesting convergence of political schadenfreude and mythmaking about how this is Rumsfeld's war and how if only we had listened to the Chief of Staff of the Army none of this would happen. As my friend Frank Hoffman has argued/is arguing at Carlisle Barracks yesterday/today, there was kind of a collective "look to the east on the morning of the 5th day" attitude about Phase IV in OIF whose responsibility extended beyond what did and did not happen in the halls of OSD.

Furthermore, I would argue that I find it slightly disheartening that The Soldier and the State is still a fixture of professional reading lists. No disrespect to Professor Huntington, and there is much of value in the book, but I still hold that the issue of extolling purist (purely military) over fusionist (socio-economic-politico-military) military advice is not helpful and, in fact, is very damaging when dealing with socio-politico-military environments such as Mindanao or Afghanistan or Iraq. I think that feeds into the pushing kinetic vice kinetic/non-kinetic solutions to problems on the ground. Of course, pushing for fusionist advice does not mean that military officers veto foreign policy, rather it just allows them to offer advice in hopefully a better context.

Compare and Contrast

For two different perspectives, compare this bit

A Media Intelligence Failure (subscription req)
Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2005, Pg. 10

We'll need time to dig through the details in the 600-plus-page Robb-Silberman report on intelligence that was released yesterday. But one important conclusion worth noting, even on a quick reading, is that the report blows apart the myth that intelligence provided by Iraqi politician and former exile Ahmed Chalabi suckered the U.S. into going to war.....

to this bit from General Jack Keane (USA ret), former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, in front of the House Armed Services Committee on July 15, 2004:

SKELTON: Well, why didn't it happen? Why was

KEANE: If I could comment on that.

SKELTON: Jack -- General.

KEANE: Well, let me add to that, because I participated in this process. And this represents the space, the intellectual capital that we expended to take the regime down. This represents the space for the intellectual capital to deal with it after. I mean, that was the reality of it.

And when I look back on it myself, and having participated and contributed to it, one of the things that happened to us -- and I'll just speak for myself. I don't want to speak for others, is many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be.

SKELTON: We're all going to be treated as liberators, right?

KEANE: That's correct. So, therefore, the intellectual capital to prepare ourselves properly for an insurgency was not there. Nor was -- there were very few people who actually envisioned, honestly, before the war, what we are dealing with now after the regime went down.

Prospect: Theory

Owen Harries, retired diplomat and the former editor-in-chief of the National Interest, has an interesting essay entitled “Power and Morals” in the April 2005 issue of Prospect. If IR, or political, theory are your bag, I recommend it. Here is a taste:

The characteristic fault of realism is that it believes the application of a morality to foreign policy to be negligible, if not entirely irrelevant. The characteristic fault of liberalism is that it considers the application of morality to foreign policy to be easy. In fact it is both necessary and difficult. And as the balance shifts between a world vertically divided into sovereign states and a world horizontally connected by interdependence, it is likely to become even more necessary and more difficult.

Are you not entertained?????

See Daniel Drezner about the Russell Crowe-Al Qaeda imbroglio....