One point that I think it’s sometimes easy to overlook is the extent to which a policy of imperialism somewhere or other is compatible with that country remaining nominally sovereign in many respects. You probably know, for example, that Vietnam used to be a French colony. You may not, however, realize what a glance at yesterday’s edition of Robert Farley’s “Deposed Monarch Blogging” will tell you, namely that Vietnam was technically under the control of the Nguyen dynasty whose scion Nguyen Phuc Anh was embroiled in conflict with Tay Son peasant rebellions when he “asked for and received support from France, which helped him unify Vietnam in 1802.” Over the course of the nineteenth century the dependence of the Nguyen regime on French support led to a situation where “by the 20th century, the monarch was seen as little more than a French puppet” but the last emperor didn’t actually abdicate the post until 1945 and even then the French tried to have him installed as Head of State in South Vietnam.

Similarly, the United States effectively controlled Cuban affairs through the Platt Amendment and Dominican affairs through the US-Dominican Treaty for Assistance in Governing. An important part of the psychology of the Middle East is that the monarchies in the region are all successors to Vietnam-style arrangements where noble families secured control of their patches of land thanks to military assistance from Western powers who then allowed the Sauds, Sabahs, Husseins, etc. to sub-contract as local monarchs and the continuing pro-American orientation of those regimes combined with American support for the regimes can be understood as the United States simply taking the place of the British Empire. Along the same lines, Nasser rose to power in Egypt after participating in a coup that deposed a similarly situated monarch, and the decision of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak to make peace with Israel, accept US foreign aid, and adopt a generally America-friendly foreign policy is open to criticism as moving backwards from the anti-colonial tradition of Nasser.

Needless to say, few Americans see things this way, but Americans aren’t well-known for our deep understanding of the history of foreign countries. But once you understand this view of the region’s history, you can see that from this context the idea of the United States coming in to overthrow Iraq’s Baath regime (another country that, like Egypt, once had a semi-colonial monarchy before it was replaced with an anti-colonial dictatorship) and install a new one more sympathetic to American foreign policy goals in the name of democracy wasn’t going to have much credibility.

Guess who’s behind the Bush administration’s uncritical embrace of Musharraf? That’s right: “Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him.” Also — bonus incompetence!

The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney’s office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American “drugs and thugs”; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia.

Excellent.

John Richardson writes a profile for Esquire:

In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm — not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what people didn’t realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn’t wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say.

For further reading on what Richardson terms the “secret history of the impending war with Iran” I’d recommend Gareth Porter’s “Burnt Offering”. If you’re interested in an account of why “War with Iran would be a catastrophe that would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq” read Fallows.

Some good writing on this subject elsewhere:

• Brian Ulrich at American Footprints.
• Robert Farley at Tapped.
• Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings.
• Juan Cole looks at the Urdu press.
• Barnett Rubin’s continuing coverage.

To the layman’s eye, Musharraf appears to be conducting a stunningly audacious bait-and-switch of employing a lot of rhetoric about Islamic extremism to justify a coup conducted agains the Supreme Court of Pakistan though there’s no indication that the Supreme Court is some kind of hotbed of extremism. Indeed, unlike in some other countries (Egypt or Saudi Arabia, say) I don’t believe Islamists are the main opponents of the regime at all. Indeed, Musharraf didn’t stage his original coup against Islamic extremists, he staged it against Nawaz Sharif who’d come into conflict with the military because of his efforts to promote reconciliation with India.

I believe John Edwards is delivering a speech on Iran and “the lessons of Iraq” right now. I only have some excerpts from the speech, so I can’t fully evaluate it, but this seems like an important point:

But there is a difference between doing everything in our power to keep America safe and a reckless, belligerent policy that actually makes us less safe. The preventive war doctrine was a stunning departure from the policy that had kept America safe during both world wars and during the Cold War. It is wrong on the merits, wrong on the morals, and wrong for America.

Good for Edwards. I’ve found it infuriating how little the leading Democrats seem inclined to engage with the key strategic elements of Bush’s response to 9/11 and this is the biggest nail that needs hammering down. Bush replaced decades of non-proliferation policy, to say nothing of centuries of good sense and basic morality, to decide that unilateral preventive military action should be at the center of our approach to dealing with the world. This is nonsense. The United States has long got along fine without waging such wars, and our effort to wage one has been a disaster. And yet somehow Bush has managed to recenter the American political debate so that an idea that would have seemed shocking ten years ago — waging aggressive unilateral warfare against countries that haven’t attacked us or anyone else — is now meekly accepted by all as a vital part of the toolkit.

Again, good for Edwards.

I strongly agree with two of the points Ilan Goldenberg makes about the politics of foreign policy. He’s right that “today Democrats have an opportunity to seize the national security mantle back from Republicans and potentially own the issue for the next generation” and he’s right that it simply can’t be fully seized except by actually winning an election and then having a Democratic president prove that progressive policies can deliver results. As Ilan says, “All the chest thumping and tough talk in the world is meaningless without a Democratic President who is successful on this issue.”

I don’t, however, think his interim solution of “more fear mongering” is all that sound. “Democratic fear mongering,” he says “needs to focus on how scary it would be to have another Republican President and how much that could endanger all of us.” There’s room for some of that kind of thing, but fundamentally one thing I think Ted Nordhause and Michael Shellenberger get right (unfortunately their book, which says a lot of insightful things, is yoked to some pretty dubious policy ideas about climate change) is the idea that “resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse.” And, indeed, I think Ilan’s example of LBJ’s famous “Daisies” ad sort of makes the point — Lyndon Johnson won the election, but while ’64 set up great liberal advances on the domestic front it led to a fiasco in foreign policy terms. Similarly, the Democrats’ somewhat demagogic campaign for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security just set the table for a much-more-demagogic and ultimately much-more-successful GOP counter-campaign.

At any rate, I have a whole book that’ll be coming out about what kinds of mistakes I think Democrats have been making, but the main thought I’d leave you with for now is that you do need to return to the initial two points: Ultimately, the most helpful think would be for a progressive president to successfully implement progressive ideas under circumstances (unlike those of the Clinton administration) when the public is paying attention. That means dropping the assumption that liberal ideas won’t fly politically and need to be kept hidden under layers of macho posturing and, instead, actually try to build progressive messaging around progressive ideas.

It’s remarkable the extent to which you almost never see leading Democrats articulate commonplace notions like “starting a war with Iran would be a strategic disaster for the United States,” “expending finite resources investigating people who there’s no probable cause to suspect is probably a waste of time,” “we should focus on fighting al-Qaeda rather than other Muslims who haven’t attacked us,” “invading Iraq was a huge mistake,” “Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt founded the UN because a strong UN is good for America,” “getting other countries to follow non-proliferation agreements is going to require us to follow them too,” or “reviving the Israeli-Arab peace process would make ti easier for us to find Muslim allies.” Now I’m not going to promise anyone that those exact phrases are ones it would be smart to use. But the ideas are important ones, and the real political professionals need to think about finding the best ways to express them.

More generally, I think progressive politicians — but also progressives more generally — need to make the point that good things can happen inforeign policy and will happen with smart leadership, it’s not just a realm in which scary people do scary things and we try to stop them.