Obama's "Inner Machiavelli"

David Ignatius complains that he doesn't see evidence of President Obama's Machiavelli - that is, he believes Obama needs a Kissinger or Brzezinski to craft secret plans and engage in behind-the-scenes, off-the-record negotiations with groups that range from being nominally to explicitly enemies of the state. He admits that such an approach can result in blowback....

When an emboldened Soviet Union marched into Afghanistan, Brzezinski crafted a secret intelligence alliance with China and Pakistan to check the Soviets. Here, too, we are still living with some of the negatives. But it must be said, the Soviet Union is no more.

Even if we assume that the secret operations in Afghanistan and "Charlie Wilson's war" were the sole causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, by stating that we're "living with some of the negatives" - a radicalized Pakistan, our nation's longest war ever in Afghanistan - Ignatius displays a gift for the understatement. He also mentions how Kissinger accepted Syrian intervention in Lebanon's civil war as something "that arguably still causes trouble". Yeah. Arguably. No mention, for some reason, of the secret war in Cambodia. Or the coup in Chile.

But his poor choice of examples aside, let's give Ignatius the benefit of the doubt - because he's correct that secret negotiations of one sort or another have helped and can help the U.S. in its conflicts around the world. (I suspect that he wanted to illustrate his point big, splashy, well-known examples; they were just poorly chosen.) To one degree or another, every U.S. administration has engaged in that type of behind-the-scenes operation. If a President announced his secret, "Machiavellian" operations, they would no longer be secret.

Where was Ignatius when the political right was savaging Obama for being an appeaser and being willing to "talk to our nation's enemies"? He was and remains in a powerful position to speak against that type of rhetoric, which he plainly believes can be damaging to the nation if it in fact deters secret contacts. I don't recall that Ignatius said a word.

Perhaps all of these diplomatic corkscrews are already at work. It's in the nature of successful secret diplomacy that you don't know about it until it's over -- and maybe not even then.

Right. So let's lament that Obama may not be doing something that he may in fact be doing, and which must be kept secret in order to be effective, but not the fact that political operatives have made it harder for him to reach out to hostile players and much more politically dangerous if he's "caught".

Update: Tim Fernholz has commented on the editorial at Tapped. He suggests that, "More often than not, the secretive aspects of our foreign policy are the most damaging", perhaps true but difficult to debate given that we're dealing with secrets and examining the known failures with the benefit of hindsight. That said, it is reasonable to admit that there are plenty of examples that support Fernholz's point.

If the solution to a foreign-policy problem involves Kissinger-level secrecy, it's probably the result of a previous blunder or fear of facing political consequences, not because secrecy is necessary. If conservatives in the United States, for instance, hadn't spent years baselessly demonizing the liberal foreign-policy establishment for "losing" China to the evil Communists, there would have been no need for a secret mission to open the country's relations to the U.S. Secrecy can be useful as a tactical tool, but when you make it a strategic objective, it's often a sign that you've already failed.

That's largely true. Contacts and negotiations that would be politically difficult may be kept secret for just that reason - but I think it's an overstatement to suggest that an administration's response to political realities is often a sign of failure. First, public backlash could end negotiations before they get off the ground. Second, many administrations will choose the politically safe approach, whatever the need for outreach, such that negotiations never occur. In Fernholz's specific example, yes, rhetoric about how the political left "lost" China made it politically difficult and dangerous for a Democratic President to reach out to China. But as a sign of failure, it seems to better illustrate why that type of rhetoric is dangerous - the same type of rhetoric I highlighted above, being used against Obama - as opposed to why secret negotiations weren't helpful or appropriate.

Cutting Afghanistan Into Pieces... With Honor?

No surprise here.... Henry Kissinger has crawled out of the woodwork to warn us of the perils of abandoning a "war forever" approach to Afghanistan:

We have a basic national interest to prevent jihadist Islam from gaining additional momentum, which it will surely do if it can claim to have defeated the United States and its allies after overcoming the Soviet Union. A precipitate withdrawal would weaken governments in many countries with significant Islamic minorities. It would be seen in India as an abdication of the U.S. role in stabilizing the Middle East and South Asia and spur radical drift in Pakistan. It would, almost everywhere, raise questions about America's ability to define or execute its proclaimed goals.

Does that sound an awful lot like Kissinger's laundry list of reasons for why we had to stay in Vietnam? And yet after U.S. forces withdrew his parade of horribles did not come to pass. Yes, the consequences were horrific for the allied Vietnamese we left behind. But it was in fact Vietnam that brought an end to the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and despite being one of the five remaining communist nations on the planet (Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, China, and North Korea) it now welcomes tourists from the U.S. and is a trading partner. (Kissinger should perhaps think long and hard about the list of the five remaining communist nations, and contemplate whether all of them would still be communist but for the policies and interventions he favored.)

In many ways Kissinger is engaged in the same exercise that others engaged in before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, presenting apocalyptic hypothetical scenarios of what could happen if the U.S. proceeded with the wars. Yes, we could get the worst case scenario. But we could get something that looks quite different and, let's be honest, the accuracy of Kissinger's prognostications have historically been abysmal, including in relation to the Iraq war.

The people who deserve credit for their predictions are those in the first Bush Administration who advised Bush the Elder that having accomplished our military goals for Iraq it was best to depart as opposed to toppling Hussein's regime and getting bogged down in endless war. No doubt, there were some extremely ugly consequences to that decision, which Bush the Elder was willing to accept. Where was Kissinger when the "candy and flowers", "it'll be a cakewalk" crowd got the ear of Bush the Younger, and talked him out of wars that focused on narrow military objectives and into "regime change".

Don't get me wrong, I have long held the position that top-down democratization of a nation without either a democratic tradition or institutions was unlikely to succeed. It's much easier to impose a steel-fisted tyrant, with or without a velvet glove. Russia's experience indicates such a tyrant is unlikely to maintain his hold in Afghanistan absent significant outside military support. But let's pretend that Karzai's regime were about to flower into a progressive democracy. Is it not self-evident that the military commitment necessary to support and nourish a nascent democracy would be far greater than that needed to support a tyrant? To look at it another way, western powers have a long track record of imposing, supporting and otherwise backing various leaders in the post-colonial era. When we compare the number of flourishing democracies that resulted to the number of tyrannical regimes, how do things stack up?

At the start of the Iraq War, CWD and I had several discussions about the Bush Administration's approach, why it was unlikely to succeed even if it abandoned its grandiose ambitions to simultaneously attempt shock therapy-style privatization on the nation, how building democracy at the local level would make sense, and why that would not be acceptable to the Bush Administration. There are no state secrets in any of that. What was amazing is how we were supposed to take seriously the "it'll be a cakewalk" crowd - the idea that post-war occupation could be done on the cheap, and that Bush's hand-selected proposed leaders for both Iraq and Afghanistan would be welcomed by willing, grateful nations with showers of candy and flowers.

So now, as the Afghan War becomes the longest in U.S. history, Kissinger wants to take a bottom-up approach to reinventing its government. Or perhaps it's "start at the bottom and stay there," with regional warlords kept in check with the perpetual placement of U.S. occupation forces, as opposed to by a national government or military. Many of those local governments would look like, no, they would be the Taliban. Many others would be non-Talibani, but would take an approach every bit as oppressive to the rights of girls and women. War advocates seem to flip-flop between "We can't leave because it will be horrible to women," and "We really can't do much even if we stay" - for most of them the human rights side of the war has always been an argument of convenience, not belief. Kissinger, on the other hand, isn't making a human rights argument and makes no argument that his ideas will result in democratization - his record suggests that he has interest in neither.

The difference between the Afghanistan of days gone by, in which local warlords ignored, imperiled, and even overthrew a central government, while trying to amass as much wealth and power as possible, and the one that Kissinger envisions is... well, his warlords would apparently behave themselves. Beyond that, Kissinger's ideas sound a lot like what one might read in an annual report, were Afghanistan a corporation....

A regional diplomacy should seek to establish a framework to insulate Afghanistan from the storms raging around it rather than allow the country to serve as their epicenter. It would also try to build Afghanistan into a regional development plan, perhaps encouraged by the Afghan economy's reported growth rate of 15 percent last year.

Kissinger's notion that the U.S. would be less able to engage Iran, as opposed to more able, were its military not bogged down in a perpetual Afghan war, is laughable - and should the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan I would not be surprised if he's one of the loudest voices arguing "Don't bring them home when Iran's right there, next door, waiting to be invaded." His fear seems to be less that Afghanistan might devolve into chaos, or that it might again provide safe haven for international terrorists, and more that a competing power might manage to take control of the nation and its resources.

Peace Is At Hand....

One of Henry Kissinger's finer moments:

In October [of 1972] Kissinger euphorically reported to the world that "peace is at hand" in Viet Nam. Then, as it has so many times before in America's longest and strangest war, the peace proved once again elusive. As the Paris negotiations dissolved in a fog of linguistic ambiguities and recriminations, Richard Nixon suddenly sent the bombers north again. All through the year, Nixon and Kissinger labored at a new global design, a multipolar world in which an equilibrium of power would ensure what Nixon called "a full generation of peace." But at year's end, the design remained dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seemed no early exit.

If you don't study history, or even if you do, you may find that it repeats itself - today, Henry Kissinger "has McCain's back", and argues that peace is at hand in Iraq.

This is an example of a smart man, even one whose foreign policy mistakes are something of legend, lowering himself to writing a base, simplistic diatribe - something one might expect in an undergraduate speech class, but that somebody of Kissinger's background and intelligence would have to know is an unadulterated heap of crap. But Kissinger's not trying to convince himself. He's trying to convince people at the margins of the Republican party who are sick of the war that they should back McCain. And he's counting on them not to think very hard about his claims and assertions.

Kissinger opens with one of the famously nebulous "They say"-type assertions, that allow you to fabricate a claim that you put into the mouths of people who don't actually exist.

Above all, [supporters of a deadline for withdrawal] argued, the war was lost, and withdrawal would represent the least costly way to deal with the debacle.

I'll grant that you will be able to find isolated individuals who took that position, but they're exceptions. Which of course is why Kissinger fails to identify any actual people who hold this position - to do so would only serve to highlight how exceptional it is. He's also conflating two issues - the question of whether the war is lost, and the question of whether withdrawal is the "least costly" (and here it's not clear if we're talking lives, dollars, political influence, something else, or some combination thereof) option. It's possible to believe that we're winning, but that we should still get out of Iraq on a short timetable.

Kissinger attempts to argue that there are three reasons why "events" have overtaken arguments in support of withdrawal. He claims that al-Qaeda (and here he seems to mean the real thing, not "al-Qaeda in Iraq") "seems on the run"; the Sunni insurrection "has largely died down"; and the Shiite dominated central government has "at least temporarily" suppressed Shiite militias that challenged its authority. In other words, even in pitching this as a great success, Kissinger can't bring himself to claim any concrete achievements. He couches his claims in appearances or as temporary. He continues, "Of course, we cannot tell now whether these changes are permanent or whether, and to what extent, they reflect a decision by our adversaries, including Iran, to husband their forces for the aftermath of the Bush administration." That's kind of important, don't you think? If we're going to be declaring that "peace is at hand", we don't want to be in a situation where "at year's end, the design remain[s] dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seem[s] no early exit" - do we?

Kissinger apparently has forgotten the mantra of the past five years, "Iraq is not Vietnam". He quickly resorts to the standard, Vietnam War line that we must try to mind read our enemies, and we can't do anything that could potentially make our enemies see us as weak.

Any appearance that radical Islamic forces were responsible for a U.S. defeat would have enormous destabilizing consequences far beyond the region.

This may sound incredibly empowering to our enemies - they get to dictate our foreign policy. Except, of course, that it's not really about what our enemy might want - it's about Kissinger. If the shoe were on the other foot, and somebody were telling him "Your policies strengthen the enemy" - for example, "Staying in Iraq provides terrorists with a powerful recruiting tool, in attracting people to plot against us, kill our soldiers, and potentially attack civilian targets," he would be dismissive. If the enemy flat-out said something like, "I'm trying to draw you into a protracted, unwinnable war in the Middle East in order to weaken your military", they would presumably be deemed to be lying. Facts, schmacts - the enemy never benefits from Kissinger's policies, but always benefits from the policies of those who oppose him.

Kissinger paints a portrait of how he sees things magically unfurling from this point forward, concluding,

American deployment is transformed from abdication into part of a geopolitical design. Its culmination should be a diplomatic conference charged with establishing a formal peace settlement.

Hey - let's hold it in Paris!

Kissinger imagines himself clairvoyant, presenting a parade of horribles that a deadline would supposedly create:

• "It will encourage largely defeated internal groups to go underground until a world more congenial to their survival arises with the departure of American forces." We're supposed to assume this hasn't already happened? Or that the factions presently paid for cooperating and working with the U.S. won't turn their backs on our interests (if not take up arms against us) the moment the payments stop? How is this changed by the presence or absence of a deadline?

• "Al-Qaeda will have a deadline against which to plan a full-scale resumption of operations." Again he seems to be playing the cheap parlor trick of conflating "al-Qaeda" with "al-Qaeda in Iraq". The former group wasn't in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, and seems perfectly happy with us stayin in Iraq forever. But if Kissinger's describing the latter group, and if it's truly about to pop up like a jack-in-the-box the moment any pressure is taken off the lid, this argument belies Kissinger's claims about the success of the surge and how ready the Sunni factions are to join a unity government. Even if he means that Sunnis might again invite and support foreign fighters from al-Qaeda proper, his claim speaks ill of his notion that the nation is ready to reconcile.

• "And it will give Iran an incentive to strengthen its supporters in the Shiite community for the period after the American withdrawal." Who are Iran's supporters in the Shiite community? I mean, other than people like Maliki and Chalabi? Really, we're going to have to deal with the fact that Shiite-controlled Iraq is going to be close with Shiite-controlled Iran, and continued occupation isn't going to create a magic separation barrier between the two states.

• "Establishing a fixed deadline would also dissipate assets needed for the diplomatic endgame." For instance? (But making conclusory statements is more fun than, you know, making substantive claims.)

Kissinger goes on to explain that with a timetable, you might not have sufficient combat forces in place if things go to Hades in a handbasket. But he ridicules the notion that the withdrawal of forces could be measured against any new insurrection or resurgence of violence, with troops kept in place for longer if needed. He then proposes that McCain is going to withdraw a secret number of troops - presumably just the right number to keep anything bad from happening while giving us more manpower for fighting in Afghanistan - but that this mystical troop withdrawal won't threaten the stability of Iraq. Wonderful - not only is "peace at hand", we are now counting on McCain's secret plan to deliver it!

Toward the end, he delivers a real gem:

These considerations explain Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's conduct on the occasion of Obama's visit to Iraq. Maliki is negotiating with the Bush administration about a status-of-forces agreement for the residual forces to remain in Iraq. Given popular attitudes and the imminence of provincial elections, he probably wanted to convey that the American presence was not planned as a permanent occupation. The accident of the arrival of a presidential candidate, who had already-published views on that subject, reinforced that incentive. To reject the senator's withdrawal plan in front of a large media contingent would have been to antagonize someone with whom Maliki might have to deal as president.

At least it's not a repeat of the absurd "Maliki was ambiguous" argument raised by other McCain shills. But get this - Kissinger concedes that Iraqis want our forces out on a timetable, meaning that the Iraqis apparently see none of the dangers proposed by Kissinger or see them as a good thing. (If it's the former, it's classic Kissinger narcissism - nobody could know the situation better than him, even if they're living through it. If it's the latter, it undermines his entire thesis.) But beyond that, he's arguing that Maliki was happy to spit in the eye of the sitting President, and undermine the position of the Republican presidential candidate, because the Democratic candidate might win. Why wasn't Maliki concerned about antagonizing the President, or the other person "with whom Maliki might have to deal as president"? Kissinger's rationalization is insipid.

As you would expect, for his closing statement Kissinger falls back on Vietnam.

Thirty years ago, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam and Cambodia two years after American troops had been withdrawn and local forces were still desperate to resist. Domestic divisions had overcome all other considerations. We must not repeat the tragedy that followed.

Of course it could be that but for our war in Vietnam, that country would not be one of the five remaining communist nations in the world (Vietnam, Laos, China, Cuba, North and Korea). It could be that, but for the illegal war Kissinger supported in Cambodia, Pol Pot would never have come to power. It could be that a continued war in Vietnam would have resulted in a worse outcome than we presently see - a nation that is still communist and oppressive, but which has become our trade partner instead of our military adversary.

If the worst case scenario for Iraq was that it would end up, after twenty-five or thirty years, looking like modern Vietnam, would Kissinger truly want to roll the dice on endless war? (I suspect so, but he should at least have the honesty of admitting that he's gambling, and could bring about a much worse outcome.)