Hagel And The Republicans

In the early 70s the Scoop Jackson Foreign Policy interventionalist wing of the Democrat party was purged from the Democratic Party after the debacle in Vietnam.  They found a new home in the Republican Party and became neoconservatives.  Over time they took over the military/foreign policy ideology of the Republican Party pushing aside the pragmatic realists.  James Joyner thinks the Republican's critique of Chuck Hagel embodies all that is wrong with the neoconservative driven foreign policy. 

Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, Hagel's views on most foreign policy issues of the day are well in the mainstream of the professional foreign policy establishment. It's why so many legends of the business -- Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Zbigniew Brzesinski, Robert Gates, Jim Jones, and so many more -- have lauded his nomination.
Problematically, while Scowcroft, Powell, and Eisenhower are admired by professionals in their field, their party's leadership views them as Republicans in Name Only -- if not outright apostates. It's a status they share with Richard Lugar, George H.W. Bush, Jon Huntsman, and, yes, Chuck Hagel.
Either the Republican Party has to re-embrace its traditional foreign policy agenda, or those of us who have been left on the outside looking in will have to conclude that it's no longer our party.
While the transition has been remarkably fast, today's Republican Party is simply not the party of Dwight Eisenhower or even Ronald Reagan. Scowcroft advised Presidents Nixon, Ford and George H.W. Bush. Hagel and Huntsman both served in the Reagan administration. But, just as the Tea Party is now the de facto domestic policy face of the GOP, the neocons are its foreign policy face.
Unless there's a course correction and soon, those of us who describe ourselves as "Eisenhower Republicans," "Chuck Hagel Republicans," or "Jon Huntsman Republicans" will have to face up to the fact that the modifier negates the noun.

Daniel Larison agrees:

The predicament James describes is one that has been at least 10-15 years in the making. Obviously, it became much worse during the Bush years, but instead of abating once Bush left office it continued to intensify. Moderates and realists might be partly forgiven for thinking that the second Bush term hinted at the possibility that the GOP was slowly returning to its senses, but that gave Bush’s second term too much credit and underestimated the extent to which many self-described realists inside the administration contributed to its disastrous record. Except for Powell, almost all of the self-described realists that served in the Bush administration remain firmly in the Republican orbit and are in no danger of leaving the party. Indeed, many of them served as advisers in some capacity on the Romney campaign, but clearly had little or no influence on the candidate’s policies. Some Republican realists went out of their way during the campaign to find hints of prudent thinking in Romney’s camp that were notable for being so rare and isolated. If party leaders are going to take seriously the possibility that they are in danger of losing current supporters, Republican realists and conservative voters have to stop making excuses for deeply flawed, hawkish candidates and refuse to support future nominees that hold reckless and aggressive foreign policy views.
It’s understandable that the party couldn’t suddenly switch so quickly from Bush-era foreign policy between the repudiation in 2006 and the next presidential election, but it would have been a normal and healthy reaction to the failures of the Bush years to make some significant changes by the next presidential election. That didn’t happen. Worse than that, the eventual nominee was so desperate for shore up his partisan support that he seemed to revert to the rhetoric and many of the ideas of the first Bush term as if Bush’s failures had never happened or had already been forgotten. The party has a chance in the next few years to start recovering from these mistakes, but that recovery won’t be possible as long as the energy, activism, and organization remain on the side of Republican hard-liners.

Now I don't disagree with anything James or Daniel are saying but they are missing an important factor here - the tail that's waging the dog.  Tune into FOX news on any given day and you will see the John Boltons, Charles Krauthammers, Bill Kristols etc spouting the same ideology that proved so disastrous during the Bush administration.  What you will not see is any critique of that foreign policy or any Republican realists.  Rupert Murdoch and FOX news are are setting the Republican Military/ Foreign policy.  The politicians know that the base gets all of it's "information" from FOX  so they must go along.  As long as the tail continues to wag the dog I don't see how anything can change.

Weekend Book Review - Kaboom: Embracing The Suck In A Savage Little War

I graduated from college in June, 1968. This was a few months after the Tet Offensive. The United States still had a draft and I was caught in it. I received my draft notice in September and I was ordered to report in November. If I went the draft - two year route it was almost guaranteed that I would end up as a grunt in Vietnam so I went down to the local recruiting office and enlisted for Army Intelligence. I gave up another year of my life to possibly save it. I never saw Vietnam or combat. I served with other college graduates on the frontiers of freedom in downtown Munich, Germany. Most of us opposed the war and opposed being in the Army. We might not have been in or near combat but we had a relationship I had not experienced before and have not experienced since.



Fast forward forty years and some things have changed but others are the same. There is no draft but there is a futile war managed by men who don't know what they are doing. The situation on the ground in Iraq is the subject of Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War by Matt Gallagher. Kathrine Tomlinson of California Literary Review tries to compare Gallagher's book to other war literature - she misses the point. Ms Tomlinson has never been in the military or close to war and doesn't understand that this is not a book about war but a book about soldier's relationships in war. It's about what they refer to in the military as esprit de corps. It's about those personal relationships - looking out for others in your unit regardless of politics because of the shared "suck".


So who is Matt Gallagher?

I was born into a class, in a time, to a people, in a place where someone else's sons and daughters served in the armed forces. While I wasn't a politician's boy or a spurner of old money like in the fables, a child of two lawyers still qualified as a Fortunate Son in most parts of the world. I was raised in that curious subculture of Americana enslaved to emo music, new friend requests on Facebook, and lots and lots of Internet porn-part of the generation that the "An Army of One" slogan supposedly appealed to, due to our obsession with all things self. I didn't come from the breadbasket of rural America or the urban ghettos like most of my men, and I didn't seek out the military for glory or for country. I came from the West Coast suburbs, modern white collar contentment at its most gnarled and escapist, and happened to read too many damn books about soldiers.

While Gallagher was from a different world he easily became one with his men - that is esprit de corps or shared "suck" at work. One of the things they shared was a disdain for incompetent field officers and civilians. You can appreciate that if you have been in the military but even if you haven't you have probably had experience with incompetent middle mangers in the civilian world.


In December, 2007 Gallagher and his platoon, The Gravediggers, found themselves NE of Baghdad in Saba al-Bor doing counterinsurgency as part of "the surge".

Just another day in the Suck. Just another day of counterinsurgency tedium, solving a nonconventional, nation-building, political problem with a conventional military used to nation destroying that sometimes forgot it was trying to be nonconventional. Just another day of our dismount teams walking with me between creeping Strykers, winding through the back alleys and alley backs of Saba al-Bor. Just another day of talking to the locals and listening to their multitude of gripes, bitches, and complaints. Just another day of "mistah, mistah, gimme-"
"Please, sir, I want some more."

Gallagher gives is a first hand account of the nuts and bolts of the counterinsurgency effort during the "surge". He does very little editorializing and I will leave it up to you to decide the wisdom and effectiveness of the policy.


More important for me was not the war itself but the relationship of men thrown together 24 hours a day, seven days a week in an alien and hostile place far from home.


The majority of Americans have no idea what war is all about. I recommend Kaboom because it may well help in a small way facilitate that understanding.  It's also a good read as Matt Gallagher also has a pretty good way with words and adds some humor to what should be a humorless situation.
Cross posted at The Moderate Voice





Note:

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for this review.

Weekend Book Review - Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story

Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould is a must read book for anyone who wants to understand world geopolitics since the Vietnam war and even before.  It might be surprising what  an important part the small country Afghanistan played in the politics of the cold war.  This was a difficult review simply because there is so much information. Some of it contains information I knew nothing about.  In some cases I had little knowledge but most striking was how much of what I thought I knew was wrong. 

The first quarter of the book covers Afghan history up to 1960 and I did not fully appreciate the country's importance.

A great deal of what is traditionally denoted in historical studies as Persian, Iranian, and even Indian history involves the cities and principalities of what is now Afghanistan. Composed of tribes that were even at the time recognized as ethnically and culturally distinct, such ancient cities as Kandahar, Bamiyan, Mazar, Herat, Kabul, Bagram, and Baikh played a leading role in the evolving history of the region and the civilized world. Over the millennia, rulers from these cities swept far outside their territories to conquer and for long intervals rule over kingdoms stretching from China to the Caspian Sea. At times Afghan dynasties controlled the fate of Indian and Persian empires, while no less a figure than Zoroaster (Zarathustra) is said to have gained renown as a priest-scholar in the northern Bactrian city of Baikh, now located in Afghanistan, not far from Mazar-e Sharif.
But the ancient apocalyptic religious teachings accredited to Zoroaster take on even more meaning when placed against a backdrop of today s holy war. For what may seem to our modern secular society a hopelessly anachronistic throwback to the past is in fact seen by its mystical holy warrior participants in Washington and elsewhere as the final act in an ancient historical drama.

Afghanistan become important to the west in early in the 19th century when Britain saw it as a buffer between Tsarist Russia and it's economic empire in India.  The most significant thing to come out of  the British actions in the 19th century was the Durand Line which sliced off a chunk of Afghanistan and divided the Pashtuns.  That was to remain a contentious issue to this day.

Moving forward to the mid 20th century Afghanistan was still seen as a buffer to Russia by the "B-Team", which I discussed here.  To the B-Team Afghanistan was more than a buffer, it was a way to further weaken the Soviet Union and pay back for Vietnam.  The Soviets did not want to invade and occupy Afghanistan but the B-Team forced their hand and made it impossible for them to withdraw when that was really what they wanted to do.

Dreyfuss writes, "In the Nouvel Observateur interview, Brzezinski admitted that his intention all along was to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan-even though, after the Soviet action occurred, U.S. officials expressed shock and surprise. 'We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would,' said Brzezinski." "'Now,' he told President Carter in 1979, 'we can give the USSR its Vietnam war.'"

To do this they supported and encouraged the very Islamic extremists that were responsible for 911 and we are fighting now in Afghanistan.  Even as the American's and their allies were fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban Pakistan's ISI was giving them support.

This entire effort required that the American people be fed what can only be described as propaganda.  Just like the lead up to the Iraq war the media was more than willing to play along.  The failure of the media to do their job is nothing new.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the Reagan, Bush 41  and Clinton administrations still assumed that instability created by religious extremists in Afghanistan was in the best interest of the United States and watched or even encouraged Pakistan's ISI and Saudi Arabia create the Taliban.  It was only after the bombings of the two US embassies in Africa and the near sinking of the USS Cole that they realized they had created a monster.  The events on 911 were icing on the cake.  But this was good news for the neocons and the military industrial complex - they had an enemy again which would justify military spending.

Fitzgerald and Gould close the book with some advice for President Obama:

President Obama will face the toughest foreign policy decisions of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. But among the toughest of those tough decisions will be how to handle the ongoing battle for Afghanistan.

Lest he fall prey to the popular misconceptions and the self-fulfilling delusions of Washington s current Beltway wisdom, he should be well advised that today's Afghanistan is more a creation of Washington, Islamabad and London than it is of Kabul. He should also be advised that achieving anything resembling a real victory will require much more than just additional troops or taking the battle into Taliban- and Al Qaeda-controlled areas of neighboring Pakistan. It will require rethinking some basic assumptions about both Afghanistan, and Pakistan and America's goals in
the region.

I see little evidence that Obama is willing to take the advice.  The same hawks are still in charge.

I repeat,  Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, is a must read for anyone trying to understand AF/PAK policy.  I have not even scratched the surface of what you will find in this book. And how about a teaser? - Pakistan's ISI was involved in the 911 attacks.

Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story
by Paul Fitzgerald