WPR Blog Archive

To follow up on yesterday’s post about fighting Shinseki’s war with Rumsfeld’s Army, here’s Army vice chief of staff General Richard Cody on the Surge’s impact on the Army’s state of readiness (via Jason Sigger at Armchair Generalist): When the five-brigade surge went in . . . that took all the stroke out of the shock absorbers for the United States Army. In his Congressional testimony (.pdf), Cody also underlined something that I’ve flagged before but that I don’t think has gotten enough mention in the mainstream press: While our Reserve Component (RC) are performing magnificently, many RC units have […]

Thanks to Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark for flagging the Senate Foreign Relations Committee web page, which has surrounded next week’s Ryan Crocker/David Petraeus testimony with hearings on the military situation in Iraq, the political situation, some longterm goals (2012) and how we might reach them, as well as the question of negotiating a longterm relationship with Iraq once we draw down our forces. Marc has got some excerpts from Gen. William Odom, Nir Rosen, and Gen. Barry McCaffery, all of whom paint a pretty gloomy strategic context for Petraeus’ report, but there are also some more optimistic views (Stephen […]

According to Nikolas Gvosdev, the NATO summit was far from a failure for President Bush, who walked away with an alliance endorsement of his potentially divisive missile defense plans, as well as 700 French troops for Afghanistan. (For any French language readers, Jean-Dominique Merchet of Secret Défense explains that when you factor in previous French training commitments and their rotating command of the OHQ in Kaboul, that will actually come to more than a thousand new French boots on the ground.) Gvosdev thinks that by fobbing the defeat of Ukraine and Georgia’s MAP’s on Germany, France and “Old Europe”, Bush […]

I just finished reading Spencer Ackerman’s American Prospect piece, The Obama Doctrine, and I have to admit that while I like Obama’s foreign policy approach, and I like Ackerman’s piece, the article reflects a certain confusion that seems prevalent in the way we parse the complicated causal matrix that links poverty, security and political repression to terrorism. Ackerman follows up a passage summarizing the various liberal critiques of President Bush’s democracy promotion agenda with this: What’s typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of […]

“Beware the twelve-division strategy for a ten-division Army.” The man who spoke those words is probably the only person in America who actually suffered for being right on the Iraq War from the very start: Gen. Eric Shinseki. It’s worth remembering Shinseki’s maxim, especially in any attempt to re-vision American foreign policy in the post-Iraq War era. Because eventually we’ll leave Iraq, but unless we address the temptations that led us to invade that country in the first place, we’re likely to give in to them again. According to Dissent magazine’s tribute to Gen. Shinseki, the dispute between him and […]

The result in Basra clearly did not reflect well on the Iraqi Security Forces. But American officials and other prominent advocates of the idea that victory is within reach — or at least possible — in Iraq are saying in the wake of the Basra fighting that the Iraqi Security Forces’ poor performance was more a consequence of the poor planning of ISF commanders and Iraqi government officials — all the way up to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — than of ground-level combat unreadiness. In an essay title “Maliki’s Missteps” on the Web site of the neoconservative journal Commentary today, […]

From a House Foreign Affairs Committee press release this afternoon: . . . the House today voted overwhelmingly to expand the landmark U.S. effort to combat HIV/AIDS worldwide that, during the past five years, has saved millions of lives. . . . The 2003 law provided the U.S. global health effort $15 billion over five years; the legislation passed by the House today authorizes $50 billion for the next five years. The President had called for only a $30 billion reauthorization, and the White House renewed that call just after the February committee vote; nevertheless, yesterday the Administration issued a […]

WorldPublicOpinion.org reports that a BBC World Service poll has found an international uptick in positive attitudes about the United States: After years of becoming progressively more negative, public views of the United States have begun to improve, according to a BBC World Service Poll across 34 countries. While views of US influence in the world are still predominantly negative, they have improved in 11 of the 23 countries the BBC polled a year ago, while worsening in just three countries. The average percentage saying that the US is having a positive influence has increased from 31 per cent a year […]

In the aftermath of the Tibet uprisings, India’s External Affairs Minister called on the Dalai Lama, whose government-in-exile India hosts, to refrain from “. . . any political activity in this country that harms India-China ties.” Meanwhile, there’s news out of Xinjiang that Uighur “extremists” were arrested as they attempted to incite an uprising. I’ve argued before that this is a great advantage America has in the globalized age over multicultural countries that either, a) inherited their minority populations from arbitrary colonial maps (India); or else b) absorbed them through expansion (China). There’s still racism and xenophobia in the States, […]

Here’s another take on last week’s Basra fighting, this time from Asia Times Online’s M K Bhadrakumar, who intelligently identifies the overlapping templates of what was at stake in the fighting: Iraq’s future as a unitary state; the parameters of acceptable federalism, if any; attitude towards the US; control of oil wealth; overvaulting political ambitions. . . In other words, not just a sectarian battle, but a complex matrix of conflict. That notwithstanding, Bhadramakur ultimately paints Maliki’s offensive as a U.S.-backed power move to secure Basra’s oil wealth. Take away the edge of glee Bhadrakumar betrays at the setback it […]

According to EurasiaNet’s Joshua Kucera, President Bush really is committed to leaving Bucharest with Membership Action Plans (the last step before you get the NATO secret handshake) for Ukraine and Georgia. If you look at where the internal faultline lies, it’s pretty much England & New Europe for, and Old Europe (led by France and Germany) against. Remind you of anything? One official called it the “. . .success of the Gazprom foreign policy.” Turn it around, though, and it can be seen as the failure of the “With us or against us” policy. Either way, what’s surprising is how […]

Eric Umansky’s CJR article (via The Interpreter) on the failure by the American press to cover Iran’s 2003 backchannel overtures, and the Bush administration’s refusal out of hand to consider them, has re-opened the question of whether a “Grand Bargain” with Iran is possible, what it would look and how we might get there from here. It’s admittedly a long row to hoe, but this Congressional hearing from last November on “Negotiating with the Iranians: Missed Opportunities and Path Forward” (Subcommittee forOversight on National Security and Foreign Affairs) is a good place to start. To begin with, I think it’s […]

Parag Khanna wrote an article for WPR recently about the challenges facing India as it rises to global prominence. This post on Indian education (via Think Change India) adds some more color to the image. With over half a billion students, the sheer size of the Indian education system orients thinking towards top-down models. But as the post’s author, Neil Patel of the Siksha Foundation, suggests, that sheer size also renders the system more resistant to top-down change. Siksha offers a different model, typically NGO and decidedly bottom-up: microfinanced scholarships for individual students with team-oriented follow-up. In his post, he […]

A few quick links from our afternoon blog reading: –Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic gives McCain the benefit of the doubt on his “100 years” comment. –Russia Blog says McCain’s view of Russia is doublethink. –The Washington Realist highlights conservative criticisms of a League of Democracies. –EURSOC says Carlamania continues in Britain in the wake of Sarko’s trip. –The FDD blog highlights a WSJ opinion piece diagnosing Bush’s real intelligence failure. –Daniel Drezner (guest-blogging for Megan McArdle) predicts the long-term Zimbabwe news cycle. –James Gordon Meek at the Counterterrorism Blog looks at CIA Chief Hayden’s seeming confirmation of reports that […]

Back in February, the Foreign Policy Association’s Curt Ricci wondered whether Afghanistan would turn out to be the giant-slayer that brought down both the Warsaw Pact and NATO in the space of a generation. At the time, Robert Gates was busy browbeating the alliance to poney up more troops for the Afghanistan mission: NATO is a collective security agreement, a military alliance. The members have signed up with certain obligations in this regard. But if it were to become the case that some allies are not prepared to fulfill their military obligations, while others continue to do so, I think […]

The dust is starting to settle in Basra, and the consensus that’s emerging is that we know who won, and we know who lost, but we don’t know what happened. Now if that’s not a metaphor for the Iraq War in general, I don’t know what is. First up among the unanswered questions seems to be, What the heck was Maliki thinking in pulling the trigger on this one? Retired Major William “Mac” McCallister writing over at Danger Room suggests that the battle was a form of “negotiation” between Maliki and al-Sadr: The short-term objective is to assist Sadr in […]