Bernard-Henri Levy dukes it out with Francis Fukuyama over American virtues and vices, neoconservatives, religion, the future of American muscular internationalism, and the role of intellectuals in a free society.

It Doesn't Stay in Vegas | The American Interest

I would like to draw your attention to the Gold Star that I added to the Iraq article in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs.

Further, I would observe that the findings of the Iraqi Perspectives Project, on which this article is based, rather strongly vindicate the people who argued (generally unsuccessfully at the time) for more HUMINT worldwide in the wake of 9/11.

Despite widespread and persistent (dogged, even, and eventually desperate) efforts to link Iraq to al Qaeda, apparently it never occurred to the Administration to work on better HUMINT in Iraq. It is hard to believe they made an effort on par with that against al Qaeda; based on post-war interviews of the military leadership and bureaucracy, it seems likely we could have turned enough of them to get a sense of the organization's hollowness. Even one might have been enough, depending on the source.

The Cold War may be history, but the Hall of Mirrors yet persists.

My favorite part of the article is about the flowery language:

Besides outright lying, there were further impediments to the flow of information within the regime. One was the requirement to embellish even the simplest message with praise for Saddam, as evidenced by the minister of defense's memo following a training exercise called Golden Falcon:

In reference to your Excellency's instructions regarding the large exercises at the Public Center, having strong faith in the only God of our hearts, and God's permanent support to the believers, the faithful, the steadfast, and with great love that we have for our great homeland and our Great Leader, our Great Leader has won God's favor and the love of his dear people in the day of the grand homage.

Your enthusiastic soldiers from our courageous armed forces have executed Golden Falcon Exercise number 11. In this exercise we have tested our readiness and confrontation plans against any who attempt to make impure the lands of civilization and the homeland of missions and prophets. This exercise is the widest and most successful in achieving the required results. Soldiers from the III and IV Corps have participated in this exercise.

There is no indication that the two corps actually conducted any significant exercise during this period.

This kind of bureaucratic embellishment extended to every level of military organization. While this type of flowery language is not unknown in the region, it was taken to such extremes in Iraq that it often replaced all substance in reports and orders.

Michiko Kakutani calls Fukuyama's new book "tough-minded and edifying."

In "America at the Crossroads," Mr. Fukuyama questions the assertion made by the prominent neoconservatives Mr. Kristol and Robert Kagan in their 2000 book "Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy" that other nations "find they have less to fear" from the daunting power of the United States because "American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality." The problem with this doctrine of "benevolent hegemony," Mr. Fukuyama points out, is that "it is not sufficient that Americans believe in their own good intentions; non-Americans must be convinced of them as well."

That's where the General Memetics Corporation comes into the picture.

Fukuyama writes:

"Bureaucratic tribalism exists in all administrations, but it rose to poisonous levels in Bush's first term. Team loyalty trumped open-minded discussion, and was directly responsible for the administration's failure to plan adequately for the period after the end of active combat."

NYT Review of 'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama

I previously mentioned that Francis Fukuyama had a new book on the way. A certain someone said they were looking forward to it. FYI, it's now on sale everywhere.

Francis Fukuyama’s criticism of the Iraq war put him at odds with neoconservative friends both within and outside the Bush administration. Here he explains how, in its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, the administration wrongly made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction to its exercise of “benevolent hegemony.” And finally, it failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq.

When I read that, I couldn't help but see it as yet another unfortunate missed opportunity for the General Memetics Corporation.

Fukuyama explores the contention by the Bush administration’s critics that it had a neoconservative agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the president’s first term. Providing a fascinating history of the varied strands of neoconservative thought since the 1930s, Fukuyama argues that the movement’s legacy is a complex one that can be interpreted quite differently than it was after the end of the Cold War. Analyzing the Bush administration’s miscalculations in responding to the post–September 11 challenge, Fukuyama proposes a new approach to American foreign policy through which such mistakes might be turned around—one in which the positive aspects of the neoconservative legacy are joined with a more realistic view of the way American power can be used around the world.

America at the Crossroads | Francis Fukuyama

A concise distillation and sober analysis of a veritable mountain of evidence about pre-war Iraq, based on official documents and recordings, eyewitness testimony, and other interviews.

A special, double-length article from the upcoming May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, presenting key excerpts from the recently declassified book-length report of the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources. Drawing on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents (hundreds of them fully translated), this two-year project has changed our understanding of the war from the ground up. The study was partially declassified in late February; its key findings are presented here.

...

As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far, there was no national plan to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of a military defeat. Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such a plan as its world crumbled around it. Buoyed by his earlier conviction that the Americans would never dare enter Baghdad, Saddam hoped to the very last minute that he could stay in power. And his military and civilian bureaucrats went through their daily routines until the very end.

Only slowly did Saddam and those around him finally seem to realize that they were suffering a catastrophic military defeat.

Update: Gold Star.

Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside

Most Americans tread lightly in discussing ethnicity and religion, and we do it so habitually that it's nearly unconscious. Some might call this dishonest, and maybe it is, but it also holds moral truth: until you've walked in the shoes of other people, you can't really grasp their frustrations and resentments, and you can't really know what would and wouldn't offend you if you were part of their crowd.

The Danish editor's confusion was to conflate censorship and self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing, the latter is what allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the former; to keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in the moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things are imaginable.

Robert Wright: Silent Treatment

Fukuyama has a new book. It goes on sale in March.

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly.

What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.

Got Ideas?

After Neoconservatism

In Pakistan, America is held responsible for the local reaction to the Danish cartoons. And our odious import duties on discount brassieres are adding fuel to the tire fires.

"Pakistan didn't used to be like this. All this extremism that you see here now is because of Afghanistan."

He meant the Afghanistan war that started in 1979, not the one that came after Sept. 11.

"Textile trade, not F-16's, is the only thing the US should do if at all US wanted to mellow extremism here."

Pakistani factories make everything from bras to shirts and sheets for companies like Wal-Mart, Polo Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

For Pakistan, American Aid Is All Guns, No Butter

Bolivian president Evo Morales has a 74 percent approval rating.

He has long opposed American eradication efforts and championed the coca leaf, which without significant processing has no mind-altering effects and is chewed here to mitigate hunger and increase stamina. He has pledged to push the foreign governments to open their markets to the many legal products that can be made from coca, like soap, shampoo, toothpaste and flour. He also wants to open markets to coca tea, which is legal and popular in the Andes.

"If there's one thing the international community should do, if only out of deference because he won the election, is to take seriously his arguments that coca products have a place in the international commodities market."

"One of our most important products is granola, fortified with coca. Right now, we are selling everything in Bolivia, but the hope is to sell in China."

"What we want to show is that the coca leaf is not just for cocaine."

No to Cocaine, but Yes to Coca

Tom Friedman referenced this quote in a recent essay.

Thumbing his nose at the impotent west, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taunts us: "Our enemies cannot do a damn thing. We do not need you at all. But you are in need of the Iranian nation." And he is absolutely right.

Iran Does Not Need You