Despite the feverish speculation, Nibras Kazimi isn’t buying it. His take:
These are the usual amateurish stunts that US diplomats and spooks resort to when trying to arm-twist a Middle Eastern ‘flunky’.
Perhaps he should go the whole hog and call it public diplomacy…
With the new edition of Foreign Affairs now out, we can gorge ourselves on the feast that is Rudy Giuliani’s essay about his national security priorities. And what a smorgasbord it is. Some highlights:
Rudy on Iraq:
America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South.
Rudy on the UN:
The organization can be useful for some humanitarian and peacekeeping functions, but we should not expect much more of it. The UN has proved irrelevant to the resolution of almost every major dispute of the last 50 years. Worse, it has failed to combat terrorism and human rights abuses. It has not lived up to the great hopes that inspired its creation. Too often, it has been weak, indecisive, and outright corrupt.
Rudy on prospects for a two state solution in the Middle East:
Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians — negotiations that bring up the same issues again and again. It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism.
Rudy on public diplomacy:
The time has come to refine the diplomats’ mission down to their core purpose: presenting U.S. policy to the rest of the world. Reforming the State Department is a matter not of changing its organizational chart — although simplification is needed — but of changing the way we practice diplomacy and the way we measure results. Our ambassadors must clearly understand and clearly advocate for U.S. policies and be judged on the results. Too many people denounce our country or our policies simply because they are confident that they will not hear any serious refutation from our representatives.
And finally, Rudy on why the Cold War ended:
Companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Levi’s helped win the Cold War by entering the Soviet market. Cultural events, such as Van Cliburn’s concerts in the Soviet Union and Mstislav Rostropovich’s in the United States, also hastened change.
If anyone knows who Van Cliburn is, please email us. His country needs him.
Over at the New Yorker’s blog, George Packer (whose December 2006 piece played a big part in bringing counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen to prominence) is reflecting on Karl Rove’s departure from the White House at the end of this month:
Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an Administration official who genuinely wanted to hear my account of why the Iraq war has gone so badly.
In a word, I said, “politics.” At every turn, the White House has tried to use the war, and the larger war on terror, to consolidate power, to reward ideological and political loyalists, to win electoral advantage, to push the Democrats into a corner, to divide the country into patriots and defeatists. President Bush insisted on pursuing a highly partisan domestic agenda rather than unite the country around the war in the spirit of F.D.R. (who said that “Doctor New Deal” had been replaced by “Doctor Win the War”). So many disastrous wartime decisions can be traced back to the original sin: policy mattered less than politics. The message in Washington was more real than anything happening in Iraq…
The Rove approach to governing helped lose Iraq. That may be the most enduring legacy of this supposed political genius.
My CIC colleague Barney Rubin has an excellent post this morning comparing the recent New York Times and Wall Street Journal [subscribers only, annoyingly] op-eds on Afghanistan, which have sharply divergent perspectives: broadly speaking, half empty and half full respectively. (See also Barney’s mostly approving discussion yesterday of the NYT article.)
But, Barney argues, the half empty / half full metaphor misses the point. The problem with it, he implies, is that the kind of change needed is a transformation that either does or does not take place, and which is therefore not well captured by an incremental ‘steps in the right direction’ image like that of a half full or empty glass.
“We are in Afghanistan to achieve some vital objectives. If we fail to achieve them, no one will give us an ‘A’ for effort.”
Meanwhile, James Wolcott alerts us to lively goings-on at the snappily titled blog ‘John Cole’s Balloon Juice‘, where the combined intellectual might of the US blogosphere is still musing aloud about the (generally reckoned to be rubbish) CNN / YouTube question time for Democrat candidates.
More specifically, they’re wondering how the show might be improved upon if there were to be a Republican variant – and they’re busy dreaming up questions that hard-ass conservatives in the audience (or indeed sending in videos via YouTube) might put to their beloved GOP candidates. Now read on…