Via Brad Plumer, a new paper for Cato by Dr. Jeffrey Record on the US military’s counterinsurgency problem. Specifically, Record argues that effective counterinsurgency strategies run against deep-seated elements of American military culture (“the American way of war”) and that the defense establishment is essentially incabable of learning lessons about how to do this better no matter how many times the problem is pointed out to them. Record’s conclusion is that whenever possible — and it’s usually possibly — we should simply avoid embarking upon actions that are going to put us in the position of waging counterinsurgency warfare. Fascinatingly, Rich Lowry calls the paper “excellent” while also saying he doesn’t “agree with [Record's] bottom-line that we should give up trying counter-insurgency campaigns altogether.” Then I wonder what he thought was excellent about it?

At any rate, if I may make a slightly idiosyncratic point about this, I think that at least some of the American military’s cultural aversion to counterinsurgency is related to the strong Southern cultural influence on the US Army and to the peculiarities of the American Civil War.

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Apparently, Tony Blair’s in all kinds of trouble and will leave office soon. Isaac Chotiner sees this as some sort of tragic turn, and I suppose there’s a sense in which he’s right. Still, I can’t help but feel that, in the USA at least, Blair has tended to escape his fair share of the blame for the Iraq mess. I’d forgotten about this myself, but a little while back I was having dinner with my grandparents and my grandfather mentioned that he’d been against the Iraq War but turned out and decided to support it on the strength of Blair’s endorsement. I can’t totally reconstruct what my thought-process was at the time, but once he mentioned it it seems to me that similar considerations played a role in my own (badly wrong) thinking about the issue.

People tend not to be up front about this kind of thing, but clearly in the real world decision-making is highly heuristic. When leaders you think of as smart and admirable get behind a bad idea that ought to reflect poorly on the leader, but what it often does is make you think better of the idea. In that sense, I tend to think Blair was more influential than is often recognized in terms of moving American public opinion in Bush’s direction.

Of course the same thing could be said about many of the congressional Democrats. They backed the war in large part out of perceived political expediency. But the fact that the Democratic leadership — Daschle, Gephardt, etc. — was supporting the war served to make the anti-war position look marginal. So the politics of the issue became largely circular — the leaders of the opposition were supporting the war because it was the politically safe bet, but it was the safe bet in part because the leaders of the opposition were supporting it.

As promised, some further analysis of Bush’s contention that torture is awesome because torturing Abu Zubaydah led him to “identif[y] one of KSM’s accomplices in the 9/11 attacks — a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh.” Spencer Ackerman writes:

A Nexis search for “Ramzi Binalshibh” between September 11, 2001 and March 1, 2002–the U.S. captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002–turns up 26 hits for The Washington Post alone. Everyone involved in counterterrorism knew who bin Al Shibh was. Now-retired FBI Al Qaeda hunter Dennis Lormel told Congress who Ramzi bin Al Shibh was in February 2002. Abu Zubaydah getting waterboarded and spouting bin Al Shibh’s name did not tell us anything we did not already know.

That’s a month before Zubaydah’s capture, for the record. And, presumably, the FBI knew something about this matter before revealing it in public statements to congress. Bush is, once again, just making stuff up. Will he get called on it? I’m not optimistic. Obviously, it will be difficult to convince the American people of this, but Bush-style routine application of torture is a genuinely unsound investigative technique. There’s a reason this is the best example Bush can come up with of the utility of his methods — his methods don’t work. Historically, the main use of torture has been to generate bogus confessions. Sometimes, this is deliberate policy — Stalin very much wanted a lot of bogus confessions and using torture he got them. Why, exactly, Bush is so interested in ginning up this kind of pseudo-information I couldn’t say, but pseudo-information is precisely what he’s getting.

Kevin Drum was making the argument the other day that Democrats aren’t really divided about national security issues. There’s something to what he’s saying, but I also think it’s problematic in a variety of ways. I guess I’ll try to do an opus on this subject at some point, but for now let me just note something minor, an LA Times op-ed by Nancy Soderberg, a Democratic Party foreign policy practitioner in good standing — the number three official on the NSC in the first Clinton administration and the number two member of our UN delegation during his second administration — the sort of person who’ll very plausibly have an important job in the next Democratic administration.

The subject of the op-ed is that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina are forming an aliance to create a regional alternative to the International Monetary Fund and also that, back in January 2005, Argentina used its power as a sovereign state to essentially default on some debt it had incurred. Soderberg thinks this is bad. Very bad. So bad that she breaks out the classic Americanism that “Democracy is at risk in Latin America.” As Robert Farley says “Argentina’s position on loan repayment has absolutely nothing to do with its status as a democracy.” Chavez really is an anti-democratic leader in many respects, but obviously the United States of America — like all countries — makes diplomatic agreements with non-democracies on a regular basis.

One could go on, but the basic shape is clear. America needs to use its power in the region in order to maintain its power in the region and occassional deploy that power on behalf of international lenders and we need to engage in a lot of bogus rhetoric about how what we’re really doing is standing up for democracy. And this is, as I started off saying, a Democrat’s position. Now does that mean “Democrats are deeply divided over Argentina?” Of course. Most people never think about Argentina and don’t have opinions one way or the other. But the difference in underlying attitudes is very clear. A lot of Democrats are peddling what you might call neoconservatism with a human face, or promising us a smarter, more effective imperialism rather than putting forward genuine alternatives to current policies.