The New Diplo History: Treading Lightly with Concern to the MIC

"Politics and Foreign Relations"

Fredrik Logevall

Journal of American History, 95 no. 4

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.4/logevall.html

Professor Logevall assays the health of Diplomatic History as a craft, and makes the case for the role of domestic politics in the foreign policy making. This seems fair enough, but my question is what kind of domestic politics? In Logevall's recently co-authored America's Cold War, there is a bit of ambiguity on this point. Throughout, the authors argue that "domestic variables predominate over foreign ones" (6), and in general they argue that party or electoral politics were behind the systematic hyping of the Soviet threat. But they also argue that the military-industrial complex “became a power within itself, a vested interest largely outside the perimeter of democratic control, and arguably the single greatest factor in post-1941 economic life in the United States” (8). But they do not offer any explanation for of the relationship between party or electoral politics and the MIC. Presumably, or implicitly, they are arguing that domestic political concerns are paramount, and that the MIC has its thumb on the domestic political scale (thereby precluding the emergence of a truly Realist, George Kennan style foriegn policy - but that's a different argument, see Stephanson's critique). But this is never made explict. As a consequence there is a critical ambiguity concerning the democratic basis of American foreign policy. Is US fp shaped by electoral politics (which are presumably democratic, at least until that myth is dismantled), or the MIC - which they explicitly state is not subject to democratic controls.

As a consequence Stephans critqued the book for holding to anti-democratic assumptions - that a Realist fp is corrupted by domestic (presumably democratic) influences. The authors respond that they never said that the domestic influences corrupting US policymaking were democratic - they are rather highly undemocratic (see the exchange here). However, this was never made exlpicit in their book, which is unfortunate.

The "vision thing" again

The Democratic Party could learn a lot from the Right:

Can You Say, Fascism? The Political Consequences of Stagnation

by Walden Bello

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/02-6

"The blunder was Obama's taking responsibility for the crisis in a gesture of bipartisanship, in contrast to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who "refused to take any blame for the economic hardships." Reagan and Thatcher devoted "the early years of their government to convincing voters that economic disaster was entirely the responsibility of previous left-wing governments, militant unions, and liberal progressive elites." "

The "vision thing" again. It must really sting Democrats to realize that all the "Hope and Change" rhetoric was just so much vacuous sloganeering. A rather cynical exercise in exploiting the anxiety of the electorate for short-term political gain:

"But progressives should not take comfort from the dead end offered by tea party economics. They should try to understand what has led to the failure of Obama's pallid Keynesianism. Beyond the tactical mistake of taking responsibility for the crisis and the failure to advance an aggressive anti-neoliberal narrative to explain it, the central problem that has plagued Obama and his team is their failure to offer an inspiring alternative to neoliberalism. ... For progressives, the lesson to be derived from the stalling of Obamanomics is that technocratic management is not enough. Keynesian moves must be part of a broader vision and program. ... such a program cannot simply be dished out from above by a technocratic elite, as has been the fashion in this administration, one of whose greatest mistakes was to allow the mass movement that brought it to power to wither away. The people must be enlisted in the construction of the new economy, and here progressives have a lot to learn from the Tea Party movement that they must inevitably compete against in a life-and-death struggle for grassroots America."

The Democratic Party is an Abomination

I, for one, hope the Democrats are absolutely trounced in the November elections. Democratic politicians are enablers for a craven system.

Harry Reid's Anti-Islamic Agenda

Wednesday 01 September 2010

by: Stephen Zunes, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/harry-reids-anti-islamic-agenda62863

"When Sen. Joseph Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, tried to alter the wording of the war resolution so as not to give President Bush the blank check he was seeking and to put some limitations on his war-making authority, Reid, as assistant majority leader of the Senate, helped circumvent Biden's efforts by signing on to the White House's version. As the Democratic whip, Reid then persuaded a majority of Democratic senators to vote down a resolution offered by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin that would authorize force only if the UN Security Council voted to give the US that authority and to instead support the White House resolution giving Bush the right to invade even without such legal authorization. (By contrast, a sizable majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives - under the leadership of then-whip Nancy Pelosi - voted against the Republican resolution.)

...

Iraq is not the only area where Reid is willing to support mass violence against Muslim peoples. Reid co-sponsored a Senate resolution defending Israel's massive onslaught on the predominantly Muslim Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 and of an earlier resolution defending the 2006 Israeli attack against predominantly Muslim southern Lebanon, wars which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 Muslim civilians. Reid directly contradicted findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and various UN agencies in insisting that Israel's attacks against civilian population centers was legal. But when it comes to killing Muslim civilians, the facts don't matter to Reid. Just as the facts about the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center don't matter to Reid. Just as having a bigot as their leader doesn't seem to matter to Senate Democrats."

Living in the End Times

Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse

Zizek with Liz Else

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727751.100-slavoj-zizek-wake-up-and-smell-the-apocalypse.html?full=true

"For me, remember, apocalypse means revelation, not catastrophe. ...

I think that era of relativism, where science was just another product of knowledge, is ending. We philosophers should join scientists asking those big metaphysical questions about quantum physics, about reality."

Andrew Bacevich: The Umaking of a Company Man

"The starting point of critical elaboration is te consciousness of what one really is, and id "knowing thyself" as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without ever leaving you an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."
- Antonio Gramsci quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism (1978): 25.

The Unmaking of a Company Man:
An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate

By Andrew Bacevich

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175290/tomgram:_andrew_bacevich,_how_washington_rules__/

"By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high -- whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops -- is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.

...

These visits to Jena and Berlin offered glimpses of a reality radically at odds with my most fundamental assumptions. Uninvited and unexpected, subversive forces had begun to infiltrate my consciousness. Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations.

...

For me, the Cold War had played a crucial role in sustaining that worldview. ... [It] provided a framework that organized and made sense of contemporary history."

After retiring from the military Bacevich began to reflect on the nature and implications of American militarism:

"Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis. History -- especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War -- no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles.

...

George W. Bush’s decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended “global war on terror” without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords. During the era of containment, the United States had at least maintained the pretense of a principled strategy; now, the last vestiges of principle gave way to fantasy and opportunism. With that, the worldview to which I had adhered as a young adult and carried into middle age dissolved completely.

Prior to World War II, Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity. ... A people who had long seen standing armies as a threat to liberty now came to believe that the preservation of liberty required them to lavish resources on the armed forces."

Obama: The Nowhere Man who Stands for Nothing

A pretty good breakdown of the Obama debacle - and the dangers of posed by the lack of a overall political philosophy in politics. The public does not want "pragmatic government that works" - as if history had ended and there was no longer any need for public debate concerning what constitutes "the good" in contemporary society - it wants an overall philosophy of the role of government in society and the economy. There is no consensus on these matters, only live arguments. Obama has never been willing to make an argument, which is why I have never supported him.

I'm on record from the earliest days of the Obama Presidency (here) stating that Obama's presidency would make that of Jimmy Carter look like a towering success. The Left made a major misstep in not making any demands of Obama. We gotten nothing from him, but a major backlash. If Obama would have felt some push back on FISA, campaign finance, Afghanistan, the public option, etc... he would have got the message that he was going to have to stand for something - which would have left him on more solid ground from which to engage the Right .

Published on Monday, August 23, 2010 by Politico.com

Dems Urge Obama to Take a Stand

by John F. Harris and James Hohmann

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/23-0

"Obama's predicament: By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy - and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented "pragmatism" - he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies.

The president's reluctance to be a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan, who spoke without apology about his vaulting ideological ambitions, has produced an odd turn of events: Obama has been the most activist domestic president in decades, but the philosophy behind his legislative achievements remains muddy in the eyes of many supporters and skeptics alike. There is not yet such a thing as "Obamism."

...

By some lights, however, he and his team became so enthralled with the idea of a personality-driven "Obama brand" that they neglected the need to explain - and, in a modern media environment, to explain and explain again - the ideas behind the personality."

TomDispatch: The Cult of COIN

A great title, but not much analysis of the actual content of counterinsurgency:

The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die
Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan

By Robert Dreyfuss

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175266/tomgram%3A_robert_dreyfuss,_the_president_chooses_the_guru/

"On the other hand, Petraeus is not simply another McChrystal. While McChrystal implemented COIN doctrine, mixing in his obsession with “kinetic operations” by U.S. Special Forces, Petraeus literally wrote the book -- namely, The U.S Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

If the COIN cult has a guru (whom all obey unquestioningly), it’s Petraeus. The aura that surrounds him, especially among the chattering classes of the Washington punditocracy, is palpable, and he has a vast well of support among Republicans and assorted right-wingers on Capitol Hill, including the Holy Trinity: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman.

...

Still, it’s worrying. Petraeus’s COIN policy logically demands a decade-long war, involving labor-intensive (and military-centric) nation-building, waged village by village and valley by valley, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless U.S., NATO, and Afghan casualties, including civilians. That idea doesn’t in the least square with the idea that significant numbers of troops will start leaving Afghanistan next summer. Indeed, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer with long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, who headed Obama’s first Afghan policy review in February 2009, told me (for an article in Rolling Stone last month) that it’s not inconceivable the military will ask for even more troops, not agree to fewer, next year."