Ilan Goldenberg calls me out over this post and he has the goods:

In fact, that’s exactly what they did.  Ten minutes after the President’s speech ended yesterday 40 reporters from many of the key mainstream media outlets got on a press call sponsored by the National Security Network with with General John Johns, General Robert Gard, Rand Beers, Larry Korb and Steven Simon (Of the hated Council on Foreign Relations).  For over an hour these experts took the time to explain to the press why the President’s comparison to Vietnam was bull.

These stories don’t write themselves.  There is a reason the speech got trashed yesterday  by the media and the clerisy had a great deal to do with that.

I’m afraid a bloggerish tendency toward sarcasm, in-group lingo and a proclivity to write in haste and a degree of anger got the better of me here. I wanted to make a point about Brookings and about Peter Rodman and I should have just made it and not gotten re-entanged in this larger and increasingly vague debate about clerisies. I think the people at the National Security Network do great work and deserve more support and attention.

As Mark Kleiman says “More Iraqis will probably die of violence just after a U.S. withdrawal than are dying violently now,” but “that’s not a good enough reason to hang around, unless at some point it stops being true: that six months, or a year, or two years, or five years from now we would be able to withdraw and not have civil war and massacre follow. If all we’re spending blood and treasure on is postponing a catastrophe we can’t prevent, the “humanitarian” argument against a fairly rapid withdrawal collapses.” It is, in fact, worse than that. Our continued presence in Iraq is probably making things worse. Take a look at this slice of counterinsurgency in action:

Slowly but deliberately, U.S. forces are enlisting groups of armed men — many probably former insurgents — and paying cash, a strategy they say has dramatically reduced violence in some of Iraq’s most dangerous areas in just weeks. [...]

“People say: ‘But you’re paying the enemy’. I say: ‘You got a better idea?’,” says Balcavage. “It’s a lot easier to recruit them than to detain or kill them.”

But U.S. forces also say the militia — dubbed the Concerned Citizens Programme, or CCP, — is only a temporary measure. If the comparative peace is to hold, the mainly Shi’ite government must offer the fighters real jobs in its army and police force.

As far as Colonel Balcavage’s area of operations is concerned, this is a smart policy. But the jigsaw puzzle doesn’t fit together. The central government has no intention of incorporating these people into its security forces. Under the circumstances, as Greg Djerejian says:

Arming Sunni militias (sorry, Concerned Citizens Programmes) rather than the national army, as nascent and pitable as it is, will almost certainly lead to more intensified Sunni–Shi’a fighting. Meantime, these bolstered Sunni forces (some of them simply ex-Baathists we supposedly went in to topple) will eventually be fighting for primacy against the very Government we’ve been trying to prop up in Baghdad. I find this mind-boggling in its short-sightedness and lack of overarching strategic direction (unless we’ve truly become Machiavellian, and are plotting to return the Sunnis to power to contain Iran!)

And thus goes all the talk of “training” Iraqi troops. The longer we stay, the more guns and training we hand out to multiple sides of the brewing conflict. This stuff matters. There’s a big difference between a civil war fought with sticks and stones and one fought with tanks and aircraft. Iraq is, obviously, somewhere in the middle. But as of now the one saving grace of the situation is that all the parties in Iraq (save the USA) are relatively lightly armed. With each passing month, though, we shift it to a deadlier and deadlier situation with better armed forces on all sides. We need to be doing the reverse — moving our troops out, ceasing the arming and equipping of militias, and acting aggressively on the diplomatic front to try to make sure that other countries don’t step into the armaments-providing breach.

Am I reading this right? John Warner thinks we should bring the troops home from Iraq but “said he still would not support Democratic legislation championed by [Carl] Levin that would call for Bush to bring troops home by a certain date.”

Now Warner has surely noticed that George W. Bush favors an open-ended US military presence in Iraq, and, in fact, believes that we never should have withdrawn troops from Vietnam. And Warner favors, in his capacity as a member of the United States Senate, giving Bush a free hand to conduct Iraq policy as he sees fit. Thus, if Warner gets his way legislatively, as many American soldiers as the Pentagon can logistically manage will be in Iraq in January 2009. Between now and then hundreds will die, thousands will be seriously injured, and hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent. Warner, unlike 99.999 percent of the American population, is actually in a position to stop Bush from carrying out his plan to prolong the war. But he intends to let Bush do it.

Why on earth, if Warner really does think we need to withdraw troops, does he intend to do that?

I’m very sympathetic to the view articulated by Brad DeLong and John Quiggin (here and here) that international law and the United Nations Charter essentially provide a sufficient basis for thinking about when the United States should and should not use force in world affairs.

In particular, the seemingly commonsense objection that this is airy idealism that can’t be put into practice because the bad guys of the world can’t be trusted to play along turns out to hold very little water. It’s true, of course, that the bad guys of the world can’t be trusted to play along, but the Charter itself and international law more generally provides amply justification for the use of force to punish bad actors who insist on waging aggressive war. There’s no question of seeking a “permission slip” to literally defend the country against attack, the question of permission slips acts, rather, as a constraint against more grandiose forms of meddling.

I do, however, have two worries about this doctrine. One is that some of our thorniest foreign policy issues — in particular Taiwan — have a somewhat murky legal status. The other is that saying one should act in accordance with what the UN Security Council is prepared to authorize doesn’t actually answer the question of what the United States, as a leading member of said Council, should be trying to get permission to do. In general, though, I’m very much in agreement with Quiggin about this question and especially with the points he makes in his followup.

Ross responds on the domino theory, and I’m totally unconvinced.

I’ll just say it again. The case for staying in Vietnam had nothing to do with Mozambique (and I think Ross’s assumption of a tight causal link between events in Vietnam and events in Africa lacks evidence) and everything to do with American security. But as to the key issue of American national security, the hawks were completely wrong. Indochina going Communist had no deleterious effect whatsoever on the physical security or material living standards of Americans. The effort to prevent Indochina from going Communist, by contrast, had a large and very deleterious effect on the physical security of a huge quantity of Americans.

Communist victory in Indochina was, obviously, a disaster for Indochinese anti-Communists, but by the same token US military involvement in Indochina killed and maimed vast quantities of Indochinese people.

UPDATE: Check out Michael Hirsch’s column.

This was my plan for a blog post. I was going to observe that there are certain circumstances under which it might be a good thing indeed to have a “foreign policy clerisy.” In particular, a bipartisan, yet also non-partisan, group of experts would be a useful thing to have on hand if, for example, both the President of the United States and a leading Republican candidate for President were to endorse a lunatic revisionist view of the Vietnam War. Members of this clerisy, Democrat and Republican alike, could set the country straight on the facts.

Then I was going to observe that the clerisy we have has done no such thing and has, in fact, stayed utterly silent on this small question that happens to rest at the center of the Bush administration’s justification of its policies.

Then, being a responsible blogger, I sauntered over to the Brookings website to confirm my guess that there’s be no commentary on this issue.

Well, I was half right. There’s nothing new up on their site, but there is a July op-ed by Senior Fellow Peter Rodman endorsing the lunatic revisionist view. Who’s Peter Rodman? Why he was an Assistant Secretary in the Don Rumsfeld Pentagon. Why the Brookings Institution would look at the past five years and think that it ought to reposition itself on foreign policy further to the right by handing out sinecures to veterans of the Rumsfeld Defense Department is something I couldn’t really speculate on.

Joe Lieberman says that “Whereas a year ago, Iraq’s Sunni Arab community was largely allied with the insurgency, more and more Sunnis are coming over to our side, to fight against al Qaeda.” I don’t know if Lieberman is ignorant or being misleading here, but this is badly wrong.

There’s not an “insurgency” that Iraq’s Sunni Arabs have abandoned in favor of joining “our side.” Rather, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs are the insurgency — a violent rebellion against the Shiite-dominated new political order in Baghdad. The US government spent years trying to suppress these insurgents before, eventually, we stopped doing that and started cooperating with the insurgency to fight al-Qaeda. The insurgents have not, however, given up the political ideals that have motivated the insurgency from the beginning — namely hostility to foreign (be it al-Qaeda or American) domination of Iraq, and hostility to the Shiite ascendancy in Baghdad.

What happened is more like us switching sides than the Sunnis switching sides. We stopped trying to kill insurgent groups and started arming them instead. Today, that seems to be working well as a means of fighting AQI. Tomorrow those guns will probably be turned against the central government and maybe against us as well.

I can’t say I’m in the habit of reading Today’s Zaman on a daily basis (indeed, I’m very unclear on what that means), but Brian Ulrich is right: “I’ve long wanted to read up on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which I see an awful lot of in my current affairs reading. Fortunately, Mehmet Ogutcu has put together a good overview of the group and its implications.”

Rick Perlstein emails to recommend this Corey Robin essay as “the most brilliant thing” he’s read about the rhetoric of American interests. I think you can’t actually read it unless you’re a London Review of Books subscriber (or someone emails the text to you), but I offer the suggestion as food for thought. It’s called “Protocols of Machismo” and appeared in the 19 May 2005 issue.

My take is that the world really could use a brilliant examination of the rhetoric of “vital interests” in American political discourse but that Robin doesn’t quite have the goods here. If others have suggestions for further reading on this topic, I’m interested.

I think I (and others) have actually been too easy on Bush’s unhinged analogies speech yesterday. He’d like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America’s collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.

Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds — emboldened — were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.

It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct. The application to Iraq should be clear enough, but in case it isn’t here’s Justin Logan’s argument from February that the extent to which simply giving up in Iraq would damage our “vital interests” is vastly overstated.