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I really, really love Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government blog. For my money, it’s the most rigorous and interesting conservative group blog about international affairs, presenting as it does the perspective of ex-policymakers in previous Republican administrations. Their criticisms of the Af-Pak strategy — see here, here and here for a taste — are valuable and insightful. Then Peter Feaver joins in.
Feaver is one of the most respected scholars of civilian-military affairs around. I’ve quoted him in the past and have consistently benefited from our conversations. The Bush White House hired him to serve on the National Security Council during the second term — he had worked for the Clinton NSC before that — where he focused on Iraq. It’s through that prism that Feaver interprets the element of the Af-Pak strategy that calls for congressionally-mandated benchmarks to judge success or failure. Feaver calls them a "double-edged sword."
Benchmarks are a fine way to tether a strategy to reality and identify how to evaluate the implantation of that strategy. But benchmarks are not a panacea. And they could become the petard on which the Obama team finds itself hoisted in a year or so.
What if NATO, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, or anyone fails to meet the benchmark goal within the specified time? Will Obama declare the strategy a failure? And then what? What bailout plan is there for a strategy that does not meet its benchmarks? Will Obama walk away from Afghanistan, as a recent editorial in the Economist feared?
Those who praise benchmarks in the Afghan strategy are the same folks who rushed to declare the Iraq surge a failure because certain benchmarks were not met by 2007. Thank goodness the Bush team had a better understanding of strategy and war than that.
This is a heady mix of grievance right here. No one who’s advocated for benchmarks has argued that they’re the "panacea" that Feaver describes. Rather, as Matthew Yglesias writes, "it’s important to have some policy offramps, some points at which we might conclude that we can’t achieve our biggest goals and need to radically scale back." It’s hard to see what’s objectionable about that.
Well, unless you worked for the Bush administration and resented the Democratic Congress telling you that your history of failure in Iraq merited the creation of metrics to judge the future success or failure of your approach. The snark that Feaver exhibits here pretty clearly comes from that experience. It’s conspicuous that Feaver considers a missed benchmark to be a public indicator of take-your-toys-and-go-home failure. There’s another option, of course: examining why a benchmark didn’t get reached and adjusting accordingly. If Obama doesn’t do that in such a circumstance, he’ll be exhibiting the kind of crimped and self-assured thinking that leads you to view outside criticism as hosility, and the policy will surely fail as a result. Where did we see that before?
Look, far be it for me to deny Feaver his attempt at getting back at the Bush administration’s critics. I can’t imagine how it must have felt to be greeted with relentless hostility just because everything you did was a disaster and you tried to pretend it was a glittering success. (OK, sorry about that.) But perhaps it’s more valuable to view Afghanistan on its own terms and not as an opportunity to relitigate the Iraq debate.
Crossposted to The Streak.
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The only reason that Shadow Government exists is exactly that, to relitigate the Iraq debate. You can boil it all down, including Shadow Government, all the pro-torture sniping, and the Republican carping over the stimulus, to the following image:
The Bushies spent eight years of uninterrupted shit-flinging around the world and now are pointing at Obama and saying, “See, he’s covered in shit just like we were.”
I don’t think that’s true. Where’s the relitigation here?
Really? You think the somebody from the Bush administration has the right to call out the Obama administration for budget deficits?
Let’s take that one apart. Levy says:
The Chinese aren’t worried about Obama’s stimulus plan or health care spending. Even the commies know that you have to do stimulus in the teeth of world wide recession and the Chinese are doing it. And they obviously don’t really object to state-sponsored healthcare. The Chinese aren’t afraid of U.S. budget deficits ten years down the road. No, what the Chinese are worried about is the Fed intentionally setting off a round of inflation by pumping up the money supply in ways that would be hard to reveres. Besides their dollar reserves, that would devalue all the Chinese assets in the U.S. Most of the money that was flowing into the U.S. economy over the last 8 years that paid for the Bush bubble was from China.
This article is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The Bushies, in their infinite stupidity and ideological blindness, bankrupted the country will a totally useless foreign war and direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the super-rich. The economy was kept afloat by a gigantic financial scam that was only possible because the regulators deliberately looked the other way. Now that their economic shell game is exposed, the Bushies are trying to pin all the blame on Obama. There may be a shred of intellectual decency in the Shadow Government, but this ain’t it.
No, what I said was they’re not all trying to relitigate the Iraq war.
Ok, when they’re not trying to relitigate the Iraq war, they’re trying to relitigate ‘the tax cuts for the rich and two foreign wars couldn’t possibly cause any problems in the future’. It’s all the same. The same sensibility that can write, without a trace of irony:
will write that China’s worried about Obama’s deficits ten years from now. It’s all part of the Bush legacy tour and it is as intellectually dishonest as the administration that tied Iraq to 9/11 and nukes. Nothing they write is valuable or insightful. It’s a bunch of Republican retreads who are trying to convince themselves that they didn’t take part in the biggest fraud in history. They provided cover for the Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, and Bolton. If they had any self-respect they would apologize to tht world and go to work for an NGO handing out bags of food or something, because nobody should trust them with anything more than menial labor.
Sorry to go all crotchety old man on you (you are about the same age as my oldest son), but you need to see these guys for what they are. They think torture is a ‘management issue’. They use nearly every post to claim that Obama’s policies are just like Bush’s (or McCain’s). And then there are the posts of unintentional honesty, like the one called ‘Six years later, we still aren’t debating the Iraq war honestly‘. That title is exactly right, but not in they way Feaver meant it. He spins a defense of the Iraq war that is outrageously dishonest and then accuses Iraq war critics of needing ‘a great deal more humility’. I find very little value to redeem the relentless shilling for the Bush legacy.