Responding to my POLITICO Arena post this morning about the Tea Party’s potency as a notional political force, David Biespiel, poet, editor, writer, and founding executive director of the Attic Writers’ Workshop in Portland, Oregon, points to opposition to the Iraq War as he argues that “the anti-war left were tea partiers before being tea partiers was cool!” Look here and scroll down a bit for Biespiel’s argument and my response.
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Defense and Foreign Policy
Isn’t ‘Seven Years of War’ a Distortion?
Since President Obama announced his plan to address the nation on Iraq, the news media and pundits have been buzzing about the “Iraq War” — the lives lost and the money spent over the past seven years. Seven? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to note that the Iraq War has been closer to 20 years? After all, combat operations have been pretty continuous.
The first phase of the War might be called the Kuwait or Gulf Operation. Wiki says Operation Desert Shield “began on 7 August 1990 when U.S. troops were sent to Saudi Arabia.” What if one started counting expenditures from 7 August 1990?
The second phase of the Iraq War might be called the No-Fly Zone Operations. Wiki says: “American and British aircraft continuously maintained the integrity of the NFZ, receiving anti-aircraft fire from Iraqi forces almost daily.” Here’s a snippet from when President Bill Clinton addressed the country from the oval office in December of 1998:
Earlier today, I ordered America’ s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.
Read the whole thing. Clearly there was no peaceful interlude during the Clinton years.
The third phase might be called the 2003 invasion.
It would be interesting to find out how much money has been expended over the course of the twenty year war. And then, of course, consider the lives lost and the number of persons injured. Wouldn’t that be a more fair-minded way of assessing the wisdom of American policy toward Iraq?
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War in Iraq Not Over
President Obama will not declare “mission accomplished” in his prime-time speech on Iraq tonight, nor should he. He should not claim that a flowering democracy has been created in Iraq. He should not make unrealistic predictions about the long-term prospects for that shattered country.
The war isn’t over for the 50,000 U.S. troops left behind in Iraq. The president should recognize the sacrifice of all our troops, who have performed admirably. The war won’t be over for Americans back home until every last man and woman in uniform returns home safely from a conflict that has claimed so many lives and consumed so much treasure.
The president should reaffirm the strategic rationale for the drawdown set in motion by the Bush administration in consultation with the Iraqi government. Leaving U.S. troops in Iraq for another seven years will not make Americans safer. U.S. troops should not try to fashion a functioning state in Iraq. That task is the responsibility of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people. Likewise, our troops should not serve as Iraq’s police force.
As our troops work hard to execute their mission, however, a rising chorus of voices is working diligently against the ultimate goal of U.S. withdrawal and Iraqi self-sufficiency. Some people are advising the president to leave a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, essentially arguing that the United States is the rightful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty, and that the Iraqis simply can’t be trusted with security matters. The president has wisely turned aside such recommendations in the past, and should do so again.
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How (Not) to Do Scholarly Research
Nuno Monteiro, now an assistant professor at Yale but once my preceptor at the University of Chicago, has an interesting note on two aphorisms of the French poet Paul Valéry and how they apply to scholarly research. My favorite is the second:
“A work is never achieved — meaningless word — but abandoned.” (“Un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé — mot qui n’a aucun sens, — mais abandonné;” sometimes also liberally translated as “A poem is never finished, merely abandoned,” or some such variation.)
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Nuno Monteiro[/caption]
Nuno goes on to apply this thought to his experience advising students (and I–perhaps as liberally as the errant translators above–read myself into this passage):
I have witnessed a great deal of unnecessary, counterproductive agonizing by students and other authors attempting to perfect their argument beyond what is feasible or useful. Like the poet, the researcher must know when to drop the project, call it done, and move on to the next question. One of the few certainties I have about research is that one will never feel one did a perfect job; that the project is finished, or achieved. The trick is to learn when to drop it; to learn to identify the point beyond which the marginal utility of additional effort becomes negative. Then it’s time to call it a day.
That’s perhaps a perfect note on which to pass along the paper I’ll be presenting at this year’s American Political Science Association annual meeting, available for download at SSRN. Should you happen to be attending APSA, please drop by the panel where it will be presented, or the panel I am chairing, which features a paper coauthored by another of my U of C advisers, John Schuessler, who’s now at the U.S. Air War College.
In other news, I will be doing a bit of live-blogging (well, sort of live), reporting on sessions I’ve attended during the APSA annual meeting over at the Cato defense and foreign policy team’s new blog at the National Interest magazine. Keep an eye out for APSA-related posts starting next Thursday.
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Obama on Human Rights in America
I’ve just sent a short post to “The Corner” at NRO on the Obama State Department’s new report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on human rights conditions in the U.S. In a word, we’ve got problems, especially concerning women, minorities, etc., but we’re trying to live up to the expectations of other human rights exemplars on the council — Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba.
Read and weep.
Time for a Diplomatic Presence in Pyongyang
Jimmy Carter is off in North Korea again. He’s supposed to bring home 31-year-old Aijalon Mahli Gomes, a Boston resident who was arrested in January for illegally crossing into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from China.
Obviously Kim Jong-il believes that allowing such high-profile rescue missions provides some propaganda value. Former President Bill Clinton visited for a similar reason last year. The little advantage that Kim gets from trying to appear magnanimous is a reasonable price to pay for winning the release of imprisoned Americans.
But the strange spectacle of regularly sending unofficial representatives to Pyongyang suggests that it is time to establish diplomatic ties. The North Koreans undoubtedly would try to present that as a great victory, but it would be an opportunity for Washington to gain an advantage.
If there’s any hope of negotiations getting anywhere over the North’s nuclear program—I’m skeptical, to put it mildly—offering this form of official respect might prove helpful. More important, opening even a small diplomatic mission in the DPRK would provide the U.S. with a window, however opaque, into the modern “Hermit Kingdom” as well as give North Korean officials occasional contact with Americans.
And having a channel of official communication would be helpful the next time an American wanders across the Yalu River into the North. You don’t have to like a regime to deal with it. The DPRK exists. It’s time to acknowledge that diplomatically.
Jimmy Carter’s presidency was nothing to celebrate. But he’s used his retirement to do good, as Mr. Gomes likely would attest. We should use the former president’s trip as an opportunity to open official ties with the North.
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We Fail More—So Put Us in Charge
The Washington Post reports today on an article coming out in Foreign Affairs in which Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III reveals a successful 2008 intrusion into military computer systems. Malicious code placed on a thumb drive by a foreign intelligence agency uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. military’s Central Command and propagated itself across a number of domains.
The Post article says that Lynn “puts the Homeland Security Department on notice that although it has the ‘lead’ in protecting the dot.gov and dot.com domains, the Pentagon — which includes the ultra-secret National Security Agency — should support efforts to protect critical industry networks.”
The failure of the military to protect its own systems creates an argument for it to have preeminence in protecting private computer infrastructure? Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security will reveal how badly it has been hacked in order to regain the upper hand in the battle to protect us.