John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett professor of history and political science Yale University and Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Dilworth professor of history at the same school. In this NY Times Book Review interview, the two debate their views on American foreign policy. The entire piece is well worth reading, and the following are a couple of tidbits of their insights:

How Did 9/11 Change America’s Thinking About Foreign Policy?
GADDIS. The whole premise of our thinking had been that threats come from states. Then suddenly, overnight, levels of damage were done exceeding those at Pearl Harbor by a gang most of us had never heard of. That is a profound change in the national security environment. It exposes a level of vulnerability that Americans have not seen since they were living on the edge of a dangerous frontier 150 years ago.
KENNEDY. I’d agree, and then add another slant. The whole system of international law was predicated upon states. There’s no thought given in the U.N. Charter to nonstate actors. There needs to be agreement on what states can do now with threats from nonstate actors.

Does the United States Have an Empire?
GADDIS. The really important question is to look at the uses to which imperial power is put. And in this regard, it seems to me on balance American imperial power in the 20th century has been a remarkable force for good, for democracy, for prosperity. What is striking is that great opposition has not arisen to the American empire. Most empires in history have given rise to their own resistance through their imperious behavior. For most of its history as an empire, the United States did manage to be imperial without being imperious. The great concern I have with the current administration is that it has slid over into imperious behavior.
KENNEDY. John has put his finger on something very interesting, which is this dominant position of the U.S. not yet causing the emergence of counterweights. And I say ”yet” because I think there’s quite a considerable danger that it will. We now have a Europe with a larger G.D.P., and we have a China growing so fast you can hardly keep your eyes on it. Our great power status is unchallenged at the orthodox military level. But it’s beginning to look a little bit more fragmented in other dimensions.

Stephen Sestanovich is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University. From 1997 to 2001 he was United States ambassador at large for the former Soviet Union.
In this intelligent NY Times Op-ed, Professor Sestanovich points out that key foreign policy decisions are often the product of imperfect intelligence and government officials’ reaction to it. Sensitive intelligence is often too weak to guide important decisions, and if the information fits what the governmental officials already believe — or what they want to do — it often gets too little scrutiny. He then relates a humorous story:

Most anyone who’s worked in government has a story – probably re-told often these days, given the Iraq debate – about facing a big decision on the basis of information that then turned out to be wrong. My favorite is from August 1998 when, with Bill Clinton just three days away from a trip to Moscow, the Central Intelligence Agency reported that President Boris Yeltsin of Russia was dead.
In 1998 the news that Mr. Yeltsin had died was, of course, no more surprising than the news, in 2003, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It matched what we knew of his health and habits, and the secretive handling of his earlier illnesses. Nor was anyone puzzled by the lack of an announcement. Russia’s financial crash 10 days earlier had set off a political crisis, and we assumed a fierce Kremlin succession struggle was raging behind the scenes.
In the agonizing conference calls that ensued, all government agencies played their usual parts. The C.I.A. stood by its sources but was uncomfortable making any recommendation. National Security Council officials, knowing Mr. Clinton wasn’t eager for the trip, wanted to pull the plug immediately. The State Department (in this case, me) insisted we’d look pretty ridiculous canceling the meeting because Mr. Yeltsin was dead – only to discover that he wasn’t.
Eventually we decided that the Russians had to let the deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who was in Moscow for pre-summit meetings, see Mr. Yeltsin within 24 hours or the trip was off. Nothing else would convince us: no phone call, no television appearance, no doctor’s testimony. The next day Mr. Yeltsin, hale and hearty, greeted Mr. Talbott in his office, and two days later Bill Clinton got on the plane to Moscow.

When the trip was over, I phoned the C.I.A. analyst who had relayed the false report. He was apologetic – sort of. “You have to understand,” he said. “We missed the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests last spring. We’re under a lot of pressure not to miss anything else.”

So, what do governmental officials do with such imperfect information?:

When policymakers have imperfect information about a serious problem (which is almost always), what should they do? The answer, then as now, is to shift the burden of proof to the other guy. If we had been denied that meeting with Mr. Yeltsin, it would hardly have proved that he was dead. But we would have canceled the trip all the same. Russian uncooperativeness – not our poor intelligence – would have left us no choice.

And how does that relate to the current debate over the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq on the basis of imperfect intelligence?:

Going to war and canceling a trip are vastly different matters, but what the Bush administration did with Saddam Hussein in the run-up to war followed the same rule: it challenged him to prove that American intelligence was wrong, so that the responsibility for war was his, not ours.
Clearly, President Bush and his advisers did not expect Saddam Hussein to cooperate in this test, and might still have wanted war if he had. But even if the administration had handled other aspects of the issue differently, it would still have been necessary to subject Iraq to a test. In our debate about the war, we need to acknowledge that the administration set the right test for Saddam Hussein – and that he did not pass it.
When America demanded that Iraq follow the example of countries like Ukraine and South Africa, which sought international help in dismantling their weapons of mass destruction, it set the bar extremely high, but not unreasonably so. The right test had to reflect Saddam Hussein’s long record of acquiring, using and concealing such weapons. Just as important, it had to yield a clear enough result to satisfy doubters on both sides, either breaking the momentum for war or showing that it was justified.

But, some protest, does not this approach treat Saddam Hussein as guilty until proven innocent?:

They’re right. But the Bush administration did not invent this logic. When Saddam Hussein forced out United Nations inspectors in 1998, President Clinton responded with days of bombings – not because he knew what weapons Iraq had, but because Iraq’s actions kept us from finding out.

A decision on war is almost never based simply on what we know, or think we know. Intelligence is always disputed. Instead, we respond to what the other guy does. This is how we went to war in Iraq. The next time we face such a choice, whether our intelligence has improved or not, we’ll almost surely decide in the very same way.

The Bush Administration deserves much criticism on a variety of issues. However, its decision to go to war with Iraq — and its overall prosecution of tha war — are not issues that deserve the criticism that some politicos are heaping upon the Administration during this political season.
Hat tip to Bill Hesson for the link to this fine op-ed.

/Victor Davis Hanson’s latest NRO column is another outstanding history lesson the inevitable mistakes of conducting warfare. Good stuff.

Richard Z. Chesnoff has long been one of America’s leading correspondents on Middle East affairs, and his pieces have been noted here on several previous occasions.
In this NY Daily News op-ed, Mr. Chesnoff comments on the new ideas that are springing from Israel and Jordan regarding a resolution to the Palestinian problem. Although not yet the subject of widespread political support, the ideas are are notable in that they do not include relying on Yassir Arafat for support, as Mr. Chesnoff notes:

[The] extreme ideas are not welcome among Palestinians, Jordanians or most Israelis. But in between there may be a meeting of the minds. Why not offer financial compensation to West Bankers willing to to move to unsettled parts of Jordan? Why not a border secured in part by Jordan? Why not a Palestinian West Bank and Gaza (minus border areas Israel needs for security) linked to Jordan with an economic union bonding both to Israel’s burgeoning economy?
Anything would be better than the options Arafat & Co. offer: more blood, more corruption, more hatred, more suffering for all sides.

Amen. Read the whole piece.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest NRO piece addresses that portion of American society that belittles President Bush and the administration’s policy toward Iraq and the Middle East without providing any meaningful alternative other than the continuation of the disastrous policies that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. The entire article is well worth reading, and the following will give you a taste for it:

Do the trivialists want Saddam and the Taliban back in power? Does a Mr. Allawi repulse them? Do they wish 10,000 American troops back in Saudi Arabia? Perhaps they want Libya to resume its work on nukes? Do they care whether Dr. Khan returns to his lab? Or do they think it is child’s play to hike back through the Dark Ages into the Pakistani borderlands looking for bin Laden? And is it all that easy to have prevented another 9/11 attack for almost three years now of constant vigilance? Perhaps they would like to deal with the corrupt, duplicitous, and tottering Saudi Royal family, which just happens to sit on 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves ? without whose daily production the economies of Japan, Korea, and China would almost immediately grind to a halt.
Only belatedly has John Kerry grasped that his shrill supporters are often not just trivial but stark-raving mad. If he doesn’t quickly jump into some Levis, shoot off a shotgun, and start hanging out in Ohio, he will lose this election and do so badly.
The war that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards once caricatured as a fiasco and amoral is now, for all its tragedies, emerging in some sort of historical perspective as a long-overdue liberation.

. . . For over a year now, we have witnessed a level of invective not seen since the summer of 1964 ? much of it the result of a dying 60’s generation’s last gasps of lost self-importance. Instead of the “innocent” Rosenbergs and “framed” Alger Hiss we now get the whisk-the-bin-Laden-family-out-of-the-country conspiracy. Michael Moore is a poor substitute for the upfront buffoonery of Abbie Hoffman.

. . . It was politically unwise and idealistic ? not smart and cynical ? for Mr. Bush to gamble his presidency on getting rid of fascists in Iraq. There really was a tie between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein ? just as Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton once believed and Mr. Putin and Mr. Allawi now remind us. The United States really did plan to put Iraqi oil under Iraqi democratic supervision for the first time in the country’s history. And it did.
This war ? like all wars ? is a terrible thing; but far, far worse are the mass murder of 3,000 innocents and the explosion of a city block in Manhattan, a ghoulish Islamic fascism and unfettered global terrorism, and 30 years of unchecked Baathist mass murder. So for myself, I prefer to be on the side of people like the Kurds, Elie Wiesel, Hamid Karzai, and Iyad Allawi rather than the idiotocrats like Jacques Chirac, Ralph (the Israelis are “puppeteers”) Nader, Michael Moore, and Billy Crystal.
Sometimes life’s choices really are that simple.

Read the whole piece.

In his latest NRO column, Victor Davis Hanson is bullish on the prospects for a successful conclusion of the Iraqi front of the war against the radical Islamic fascists, but more bearish on American society’s capacity to sustain the effort necessary to achieve that successful conclusion:

As we neared three years of fighting in World War II, Patton was stalled near Germany for want of gas, V-2 rockets began raining down on England, and we were fighting to take the Marianas in preparation for future B-29 bases. In comparison, what exactly is our current status in this, our confusing third year of war against Islamic fascists and their autocratic sponsors?
Unlike the Cold War, when our tactical options were circumscribed by nuclear enemies, today the world’s true powers are decidedly unfriendly to radical Islam ? and growing more so daily.
Two-thirds of al Qaeda’s leadership are either dead or in jail. Their sanctuaries, sponsors, and kindred spirits in Afghanistan and Iraq are long gone. Detention is increasingly common for Islamicists in Europe and America. The Hamas intifada has failed. Its implosion serves as a warning for al Qaeda that Western democracies can still fight back. There is also a lesson for America that even in our postmodern world most people still admire principled success: No one is lamenting the recent targeted killings of Hamas bullies or the preemptive assassination of suicide bombers.
We are winning the military war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists are on the run. And slowly, even ineptly, we are achieving our political goals of democratic reform in once-awful places. Thirty years of genocide, vast forced transfers of whole peoples, the desecration of entire landscapes, a ruined infrastructure, and a brutalized and demoralized civilian psyche are being remedied, often under fire. All this and more has been achieved at the price of political turmoil, deep divisions in the West ? here and abroad ? and the emergence of a strong minority, led by mostly elites, who simply wish it all to fail.
Whether this influential, snarling minority ? so prominent in the media, on campuses, in government, and in the arts ? succeeds in turning victory into defeat is open to question. Right now the matter rests on the nerve of a half-dozen in Washington who are daily slandered (Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz), and with brilliant and courageous soldiers in the field. They are fighting desperately against the always-ticking clock of American impatience, and are forced to confront an Orwellian world in which their battle sacrifice is ignored or deprecated while killing a vicious enemy is tantamount to murder.
No, we ? along with those brave Iraqis who have opted for freedom ? could very easily still lose this war that our brave troops are somehow now winning.

Read the whole column.

Daniel Drezner reports good news on the Iraqi front.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest is up at NRO and, as usual, his historical perspective is right on the money:

As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos’s monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion ? as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn’t show up to wreck the arrangement.
Ever since the storming of the Tehran embassy in November 1979 we Americans have been paying the same sort of human tribute to grotesque Islamofascists. Over the last 25 years a few hundred of our own were cut down in Lebanon, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, and New York on a semi-annual basis, even as the rules of the tribute to be paid ? never spoken, but always understood ? were rigorously followed.
In exchange for our not retaliating in any meaningful way against the killers ? addressing their sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, or Syria, or severing their financial links in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia ? Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and their various state-sanctioned kindred operatives agreed to keep the number killed to reasonable levels. They were to reap their lethal harvests abroad and confine them mostly to professional diplomats, soldiers, or bumbling tourists, whose disappearance we distracted Americans would predictably chalk up to the perils of foreign service and exotic travel.
Despite the occasional fiery rhetoric, both sides found the informal Minoan arrangement mutually beneficial. The terrorists believed that they were ever so incrementally, ever so insidiously eroding America’s commitment to a pro-Western Middle East. We offered our annual tribute so that over the decades we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience.
But then a greedy, over-reaching bin Laden wrecked the agreement on September 11. Or did he?

Read the entire piece.

Michael Scott Doran is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In this Foreign Affairs article, Professor Doran analyzes the political paradox that confronts the leaders of Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis, but its elite is bitterly divided on how to escape it. Crown Prince Abdullah leads a camp of liberal reformers seeking rapprochement with the West, while Prince Nayef, the interior minister, sides with an anti-American Wahhabi religious establishment that has much in common with al Qaeda. Abdullah cuts a higher profile abroad — but at home Nayef casts a longer and darker shadow.

In this Washington Post op-ed, Thomas Lippman, a former Washington Post correspondent in the Middle East, is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, frames the conflict in the following fashion:

Saudi forces will win their gun battles with the terrorists. The greater challenge before the House of Saud is to satisfy the aspirations of the majority — and maintain their security and economic ties with the United States — without further inciting the religious extremists whose rhetoric gives cover to the terrorists. The task is especially difficult because the royal family’s sole claim to legitimacy is its role as the upholder of Islam. To the extent that the regime embraces social progress that can be depicted as un-Islamic, and especially if it appears to do so at the behest of the United States, the backlash could elevate the violence of the past year into a full-scale insurrection.

Hat tip to Craig Newmark for the links to these insightful pieces.

This NY Times article reports on the investigations into how hundreds of millions of dollars in new U.S. bills found their way into the Iraqi central bank during a period of extreme economic sanctions? As the story relates, there are no final answers at this stage, but the search for those answers is proving to be quite interesting.