Yeah, that’s right. “Terrible Dan Drezner”, as I often call him—or, sometimes, illiterate Daniel Drezner—has been doing my job—bashing “the Blob” on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and trashing the hawks/neocons on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Okay, neither my nor Dan’s schedule has been that tight, but, still, he has been working hard. One of my principal complaints about Dan is that, while often right on the money with his advocacy of a cautious, non-moralistic and therefore distinctly un-Blobish foreign policy when he speaks of specifics—like China—but would turn around and throw a monstrous shit-fit if any “outsider” dare to deliberately criticize the Blob—aka the foreign policy establishment—in explicit terms. When he wrote a pair of such columns in a month, I turned around and threw a monstrous shit-fit of my own, Dan Drezner, you shall not escape my wrath!, rambling unconscionably for umpteen thousand words and basically just stomping all over that Blob. And now Dan’s done the same thing, far more economically!
Dan first weaves his magic in his recent piece, Sept. 11 and the foreign policy establishment, bouncing it off a column/wet kiss to the rump o’ the Blob applied by Mark Landler in the New York Times, With Afghan Retreat, Biden Bucks Foreign Policy Elite and a similarly placed moist osculation\ applied by WashPost guy Max Boot. As Dan notes, Mark finished off his column by quoting Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, thusly:
The foreign policy establishment did get it wrong in Iraq, where the U.S. overreached. We got it wrong in Libya, we got it wrong in Vietnam. But over the last 75 years, the foreign policy establishment has gotten most things right.
Then, Dan continues, Max followed with a similar orotundity: “we can confidently say that, overall, the foreign policy establishment has served America well over the past 76 years,”
Then Dan himself takes over:
As someone who writes and teaches about American foreign policy, I very much want Haass and Boot to be true. Technically, they are. But they are also framing it in a disingenuous way, and on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it is worth pondering why that is.
Well, in fact, as Dan goes on to explain, one need not ponder very long or very hard. The 45-year-long Cold War, commencing immediately after the conclusion of World War II, ended in an overwhelming triumph; from 1990 to September 11, 2001, well, there were quite a few soft sport—(very soft spots, in fact, which would quickly catch up with us)1—but nothing disastrous. But since 2001, nothing but le Deluge, all of it self-willed.
But, Dan continues, post-2001, Uncle Same has continued to fuck up even when he didn’t intervene:
This foreign policy slump goes far beyond military interventions, however. There have been concrete accomplishments in the past two decades — PEPFAR, KORUS, the response to 20082 — but there are not a lot of them. The list of failures is longer: the failure to prevent the 2008 financial crisis, the presence of far too many sanctions programs, the rise of illiberal populism in this hemisphere. Name a trouble spot: Yemen. Myanmar. Belarus. Venezuela. Turkey, and so forth — it is hard to see how U.S. foreign policy has helped in any of these places. The past two decades have been defined by the rise of two long-term threats — China and climate change — and it would be difficult to say the United States has done a great job responding to either challenge.
I’m afraid I depart company from Dan pretty radically with regard to his last sentence, The notion that the U.S. could or should have somehow prevented the “rise” of China over the past 20 years is as stupid as saying that Great Britain should have prevented the “rise” of the United States following our Civil War. And I continue to maintain that the climate change “crisis” exists vert largely in the mind of the beholder—and I am a skeptic.3
Dan goes further off the track by saying that Richard Haass’s statement, quoted by Mark Landler, “would have been far more accurate if he had said it in 2001. Back then, the United States seemed to have established a pretty effective record of military intervention in Panama, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans.”
Well, no, no, and no. I am, well, staggered—staggered and disgusted—that Dan, a supposedly intelligent and well-informed specialist in foreign affairs, should gulp the Kool-Aid with such vigor—and very stale Kool-Aid it is—when it comes to Panama, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans.
The “military intervention” in Panama—aka illegal invasion—to remove “strongman” Manuel Noriega cost hundreds of Panamanian lives—and, of course, no one consulted the Panamanians on whether they wanted to be invaded. It’s true that Noriega was widely unpopular in Panama, but so what? There are lots of countries with unpopular rulers. Bush conducted the invasion largely for domestic political reasons—to convince Americas that the arbitrary use of brute force could be fun.
This led quickly to the first invasion of Iraq, which taught Americans—particularly the press—that blowing shit up was cool! The media coverage of the invasion was a disgusting exercise in innocent blood-lust, the cable news networks in particular treating the whole thing as a glorious football game that the U.S. won by the score of 100 to 0. USA! USA! USA!
It is a great tragedy of contemporary American politics that the Democratic Party swallowed almost as much of the neocon/hawk poison as the Republicans. The “shocking” truth is that the repeated US intervention in the Balkans, and, later, Ukraine, were far more morally dubious than the mainstream media has ever reported.
Daniel Larison, the Dan who always gets it right, discusses the hidden downsides of the Panamanian invasion here. I discuss George H. W. Bush’s deeply flawed moral legacy here and here. Is Prof. Drezner aware, for example, that “Aigh Dublya” deliberately goaded the Kurds to revolt against Saddam before the first Gulf invasion, even though it was settled policy within the Bush administration that Saddam would be kept in power, allowing him to murder the Kurdish rebels at his leisure once the bombs stopped falling? Bush repeatedly denounced Saddam as “worse than Hitler” and privately told administration officials that he would conduct the invasion even if Congress voted against it, because Saddam was so depraved. So “depraved” that he was deliberately kept in power and allowed to murder the Kurdish rebels at his leisure. In addition, more than a million Kurds fled to Turkey to escape Saddam’s wrath. But CNN didn’t care. They had cool video of shit blowing up! USA! USA! USA!
The First Gulf War led naturally to the second, and the repeated U.S. interventions in the Balkans, beginning under Bush I and continued through the Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations, leading directly to Putin’s invasion of the Crimea, was nothing more or less than a thoroughly demonstration of the seemingly inevitable tendency of American idealism, innocently swollen with both virtue and wille zur macht in equal quantities, to expand indefinitely in a power vacuum. It is stunning how little most Americans know about our various Balkan and Eastern European crusades, which have uniformly led to disaster. I previously discussed this in a recent diatribe directed at guess who titled Terrible Dan Drezner. Terrible Dan Drezner! and, had I read Ted Galen Carpenter’s more than excellent study, Gullible Superpower U.S. Support for Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements, my post would have been ten times longer, and ten times more scorching, than it was. If you want to make yourself both well informed and utterly miserable, read Ted’s book.
Wow! Prof. Dan so ain’t perfect! Fortunately, he isn’t always such an ignorant asshole. In fact, he totally belts it out of the park in a recent post The decline and fall of Afghanistan hyperbole, which is very largely a crushing putdown of Commentary dude Noah Rothman’s frenzied beatdown of Joe Biden’s Afghan departure, The Worst Presidential Dereliction in Memory. Dan quotes Rothman as saying “From my vantage, leaving upward of 10k US citizens behind enemy lines to fend for themselves takes the cake.” Furthermore, he claimed that “There is no contingency to get American citizens out. And if they don’t get out under our protection, they’re bargaining chips. Lots of bargaining chips.”
Well, a month, and more, have passed, and Dan has the following to say:
Contra Rothman’s supposition, In the latter half of August, the U.S. military and allied forces were able to ferry considerable numbers of people out of Afghanistan. In his Senate testimony, Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that in August, the United States and its allies “completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with 124,000 people evacuated to safety.” This includes most of the Americans whom Rothman referenced in his tweets (though, to be fair, it is possible that he was unknowingly relying on inflated numbers at the outset).
Dan goes on:
I do not want to suggest that in retrospect the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was a raging success. It most certainly was not. Thirteen U.S. soldiers died in a suicide attack at the Kabul airport, and a U.S. drone strike killed 10 innocent civilians. The frenzied nature of the withdrawal is a blemish for U.S. foreign policy.
At the same time, let’s be clear: This was not even close to the most sordid example of U.S. government maladministration of the past four decades. Indeed, despite a tsunami of negative (but accurate) media coverage, the public polling on Afghanistan is clear: Surveys from Monmouth and Quinnipiac show that more than two-thirds of respondents approve of the withdrawal of U.S. troops regardless of how it was executed (roughly the same numbers as from two months ago). It is difficult to argue that this outcome represents the worst foreign policy decision in 40 years.
Furthermore, I will add, what neither Noah nor Dan mention, that the total collapse of the Afghan government, which the U.S.A. had spent thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, and twenty years of effort “building”, was a massive condemnation, not of Joe Biden, but the U.S. military and the CIA, who were caught utterly flat-footed by said collapse! If you want to point a finger, Noah, try pointing it at those guys!
Afterwords
As I have pointed over and over again, the continuing presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia was the direct cause of 9/11. Furthermore, our excellent adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria—the latter two courtesy of the supposedly non-stupid Barack Obama—generating millions of refugees, adding immeasurably to the reaction against globalism, particularly in Europe. All of this is entirely invisible to the Blob—including, too often, the often estimable Prof. Drezner. Sad!
The link I gave for Daniel Larison takes you to his “substack” blog. His contributions to “Antiwar.com” are here. Noah Rothman has been a bit of an outlier in the Commentary commentariat in that he isn’t a Trump worshipper, being instead a Liz Cheney Republican, a species more endangered, though more attractive, than the white rhino. But now it seems he’s devoting 90% of his pixels to pissing on Joe Biden, rather as if to prove that he isn’t a sissy.
1. The biggest soft spot was the First Gulf War, which convinced us that smart bombs were the Answer to Every Question. The baggage from that famous victory proved corrupting indeed. First of all, it filled neocons’ heads with visions of explicit U.S. dominance in the Middle East, to be initiated by “taking out” Saddam Hussein. Even worse, since Saddam didn’t quite obedient as Bush I had assumed, the U.S. was “forced” to maintain a continuous military in Saudi Arabia, which was in fact the “trigger” for 9/11. During the war itself, a committee headed by Richard Clarke stated that “A permanent U.S. presence will provide a rationale for, and could become a target for, the terrorist threat that will outlive the war.” Too bad no one in the Bush administration knew how to read. Later, during the Clinton administration, the intervention in Kosovo, which was not a war fought against “genocide”, encouraged many Democrats to believe that intervention was a vote-getting game that anyone could play.
2. The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the U.S. - Korea Free Trade Agreement. The international response to the 2008 Great Recession was seriously flawed, not because of the U.S.—Obama handled the domestic response exceptionally well, considering the fact that the entire Republican Party was actively seeking to drive the U.S. government into bankruptcy. But I guess that is another story for another time.
3. In an earlier post, bemoaning the faults of contemporary liberalism, I sneered/snickered as follows: “Environmentalism is the opium of the upper-middle class, transporting them into a world where “science”—science itself!—proves that they should be in charge. There is no doubt that there is ample scientific evidence to prove that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, and that it will have detrimental effects in the future, but this evidence provides no real guidance as to what “must” be done, and, above all, no proof that the endlessly prophesied apocalypse is approaching.
