I’ll offer a fuller reaction to Rudy Giualiani’s Foreign Affairs manifesto (short version: this man is batshit insane) tomorrow, but for now let me observe that I hadn’t quite realized the extent to which he intends to replace the War on Terror with a War on Usage: “We have responded forcefully to the Terrorists’ War on Us, abandoning a decadelong — and counterproductive — strategy of defensive reaction in favor of a vigorous offense.”

I’d known, of course, about the “terrorists’ war on us” but are the capital letters really necessary? Preventing the emergence of a world where this is a phrase we need to read regularly in our newspapers seems like reason enough to hope for Giuliani to be defeated.

Justin Logan strolls through the archives of The Washington Quarterly to find Pollack & Bynum arguing that “a multinational force of initially at least 100,000 troops” would suffice to “reassure Iraq’s Shi‘a and Kurdish communities that repression at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis is at an end” and also “reassure Iraqi Sunnis that the end of their monopoly on power does not mean their persecution and repression, minimizing their incentives to oppose the process.” No insurgency, no sectarian violence. If only we’d listened to them!

Oh, wait. . . .

The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy Is Failing by Stefan Harper and Jonathan Clarke is kind of a mixed bag, much weaker than their previous book America Alone, which I think never got as much attention as it deserves. Still, it’s discussion of the behavior of the think tank establishment during the run-up to the war is fascinating and directly relevant to recent blog conversations about the “foreign policy community”:

Brookings, for example, can certainly not be described as reflexively acquiescent to the Administration. The organization contains a spectrum of views. Yet the bulk of material specifically on Iraq being produced at Brookings in this period was coming from those, like Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack and others, whose international views had steadily evolved to accept neoconservative solutions.

In late 2001, for instace, O’Hanlon and Phillip Gordon, another Brookings scholar, had been writing cautiously about Iraq, noting that “for now, the costs and risks of Containment appear lower than those of attempting to overthrow Mr. Saddam.” [here] As it became clear that the United States was moving toward war, the same two scholars, now joined by Martin Indyk, a former Ambassador to Israel, seemingly underwent a change of heart: “with sufficient American leadership, commitment, and sacrifice, the military, diplomatic and nation-building challenges involved in regime-change in Iraq can all be met.” [PDF here] As the administration’s line grew harder, so did Brookings’s. Speaking about the fall of Saddam, Indyk said: “Wednesday, April 9, 2003, will be a day that will go down in history. You will probably remember and even tell your grandchildren what you did on this day.” A year later his tune had changed: “failure is not only an option but a likelihood.

In sum, they observe that the “post-9/11 period indicates that institutions such as Brookings are as much a product of the public space as their are a mechanism for its quality control.” This is, really, about the reverse of what elite institutions should be doing. Instead of shading commentary to align with the prevailing political wisdom, one looks to elites of this sort to provide a check on the fashions of the day. Instead, they tended to re-enforce it. Most skeptics kept quiet, those who didn’t tended to be ignored by the mass media.

Whole institutions just ducked and covered. “In 2002, for example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found time in its eighty-six events to discuss China six times, India four times, and Nepal and Kyrgystan twice each.” Iraq? One event in November 2002 where the “discussion was largely technical, concerning the possible ramifications of the use of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq.” They next discussed Iraq “on February 3, 2003, when its main conclusion was that war seemed likely.”

CSIS did not hold a single event on Iraq in 2002. In January 2003, CSIS published a long analysis “A Wiser Peace: An Action Strategy for Post-Conflict Iraq,” which, while it anticipated many of the problems which in fact occurred, included the point that “it takes no position on whether there should be a war.” A month later, open-mindedness was gone. At a time of intense public consternation about the unfolding course of American policy, CSIS provided a forum for Senator John McCain to make the case for war.

They observe that between the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2003, Foreign Affairs didn’t see fit to publish “a single article that raises moderate skepticism, let along fundamental questions, about the looming decisions.” Last, they say that “Scholars did not fail to notice that certain institutions, like Carnegie, engineered the departure of internal critics; others, such as Cato, which stood out against the war, had to deal with sharp questions from their supporters” which is something I wish they had said more about.

Late last week, Josh Marshall was noting some rhetorical switcheroos taking place on the right. Mitt Romney, for example, correctly notes that “There’s not a global war on terror” before adding “There’s a global war being waged by the terrorists and if I am president, there will be a global war waged on the terrorists and we will win.” Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, has taken to referring to “the terrorists war on us.”

This is totally backwards. War is a kind of organized, socially sanctioned violence. The people who destroyed the World Trade Center weren’t soldiers fighting a war against the United States, they were mass murderers. In response, yes, we went to war against their patrons in Afghanistan which the Bush administration proceeded to transmogrify into a horribly misguided “war on terror” but either way we were the side with the soldiers fighting a war. Guys blowing up train stations aren’t warriors. Shadowy networks that don’t control territory don’t prosecute wars.

James Fallows’ article on the need to declare victory in the war on terror (see also this and this) makes the point brilliantly — this habit of blowing things out of proportion for domestic consumption has a way of ennobling and glamorizing the terrorists’ actions. It’s important to keep some focus on the fact that what these people are doing is trying to kill unarmed people as they go about their lives and that whatever complaints one may have about U.S. foreign policy, what Osama bin Laden is simply encouraging random murder of the innocent, not masterminded a war.

I, for one, continue to find the scope and nature of the administration’s failures in Afghanistan rather shocking even if, at this point, nothing surprises me. One can indulge one’s morbid fascination with this by reading NYU professor and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin’s take on the recent New York Times feature on the subject. His “Saving Afghanistan” article in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs from earlier this year is also relevant and here on page six offers a rare instance of thoughts on US policy toward Pakistan that seems to go beyond wishful thinking.

Defense Department Photo

One underappreciated subject that came up researching my book was the extent to which segments of “liberal hawk” opinion not only endorsed the invasion of Iraq, but also some of the “incompetent” approach to occupation-management, that they tended to later portray as Bush’s blunders, responsible for screwing up the glorious wars that existed in their head. Here, for example, is the DLC’s Steve Nider on the brilliance of Don Rumsfeld’s light, small force theory of warfare:

The swift three-week victory in Iraq was a vindication of a vision of military transformation that began with pioneers like former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Owens, was picked up and championed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and former Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and is now being taken up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. What we witnessed was a new kind of warfare based on lightning speed, precise targeting, total information dominance and the adaptability and flexibility to react quickly to changing realities on the ground. [...]

The United States should accelerate the transformation it has pioneered. With the world’s most powerful industrial-age military, we have a buffer of capability that allows us the freedom to change. Even with an accelerated transformation, we could easily sustain and support enough old-era tactics to deal with any conceivable military challenge that might emerge during the transition. And, as the war in Iraq has shown, transformation brings more capability, not less. It might mean somewhat higher defense budgets in the near future to kick the defense establishment into a higher transformational gear. But once acceleration began, savings would emerge that are inherent in transforming a massive, slow-moving institution designed for attrition warfare into a smaller, faster, more agile force designed for quicker, decisive warfare — as we saw in Iraq.

I promise you that there’s nothing in there about how Bush obviously needs to send more troops to Iraq. Ken Pollack and Daniel Bynum, also writing for the DLC, envisioned “as many as 200,000 troops” that “should be replaced by a multinational force of 50,000 to 100,000 troops, including American and foreign forces” within one or two years.

This business, in short, short, about how maintaining security in an Iraq-sized country requires 450,000-550,000 troops, while it was something you could tell from the historical evidence, was ignored not just by Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, and George W. Bush, but by essentially all war proponents across the political spectrum. The reason is pretty clear — there would have been no war had its advocates made accurate forecasts about the levels of resources required. Among other things, someone might have noted that the US Army doesn’t have enough soldiers to deploy several hundred thousands troops to Iraq on anything resembling a sustained basis.

Norm Podhoretz thinks the United States ought to launch a preventive military strike on Iran. He’s also one of Rudy Giuliani’s official national security advisers. He also, apparently, thinks Rudy agrees with him about the need to launch a preventing military strike on Iran but “hasn’t asked him directly, because he doesn’t want to damage Giuliani’s candidacy with the inevitable controversy that an affirmative answer might arouse.”

As Sam Boyd points out, you’d really think one of the journalists covering the Giuliani campaign would want to dig into this a bit. Does Giuliani agree with Podhoretz? If not, why not? Does he think Podhoretz gives bad advice? And if Podhoretz’s advice is bad, what’s he doing advising the campaign?

Kingdaddy wonders why there’s an active duty two star Air Force general who’s running around to various publications saying we should bomb Iran as a key element of our counterinsurgency toolkit. In my non-expert view, this probably has something to do with the fact that the Air Force as an institutions seems very friendly to crazy people. Any organization that Thomas McInerney could have a successful career in has some problems.

(Or, to put this more fairly, the classic American strategic error of the contemporary era is having too much faith in firepower in general and in air power in particular; in some sense, Air Force personnel are the ones who are best-positioned to see the problem here, but anyone who sees the situation accurately is unlikely to succeed in the Air Force’s professional context which is going to be biased in favor of individuals who are strong believers in the utility of air power)