1. ‘California Prison Academy: Better Than a Harvard Degree‘, Allysia Finley, Wall Street Journal

This excellent article is number one are on our list for a reason. It clearly lays out just how out of whack California’s public prison system has become with disastrous effects on the state’s budget and other priorities, such as libraries, highways, and lower taxes.

Roughly 2,000 students have to decide by Sunday whether to accept a spot at Harvard. Here’s some advice: Forget Harvard. If you want to earn big bucks and retire young, you’re better off becoming a California prison guard.

The job might not sound glamorous, but a brochure from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations boasts that it “has been called ‘the greatest entry-level job in California’—and for good reason. Our officers earn a great salary, and a retirement package you just can’t find in private industry. We even pay you to attend our academy.” That’s right—instead of paying more than $200,000 to attend Harvard, you could earn $3,050 a month at cadet academy.

It gets better.

Training only takes four months, and upon graduating you can look forward to a job with great health, dental and vision benefits and a starting base salary between $45,288 and $65,364. By comparison, Harvard grads can expect to earn $49,897 fresh out of college and $124,759 after 20 years.

2. ‘Has the Media Totally Forgotten About the Unemployed?‘, Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

Is 9% unemployment the new normal? I sure hope not. Thompson’s article highlights this growing feeling in our country and features numerous charts that portray how poor our nation’s current job market has become.

Articles mentioning unemployment have plummeted nearly 70 percent since last summer, while articles mentioning the deficit have doubled over the same time, according to a National Journal report…

Unemployment duration ain’t what it used to be. In 1982, the last time unemployment tipped double digits, joblessness was more of a short-term affair. Across these four categories, the plurality of folks were unemployed for fewer than five weeks. In 2011, by contrast, about half the jobless have been out of work for at least 27 weeks. Just as striking, the number of people unemployed for less than five weeks remained under its historical average even during the worst months of the recession. In 1982, unemployment was a terrible cold, measured in weeks and maybe months. Today it’s pneumonia .

3. ‘Nearly 20 percent of new Obamacare waivers are gourmet restaurants, nightclubs, fancy hotels in Nancy Pelosi’s district‘, Matthew Boyle, The Daily Caller

This is the article that broke the Pelosi-waiver story (Pelosi-gate??). Exemplifies some of the extreme corruption, hypocrisy, and devastating policy impact of Obamacare.

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.

Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of luxurious, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.

For instance, Boboquivari’s restaurant in Pelosi’s district in San Francisco got a waiver from Obamacare. Boboquivari’s advertises $59 porterhouse steaks, $39 filet mignons and $35 crab dinners.

4. ‘Why Not Honesty?‘, Greg Scoblete, Real Clear World: The Compass

Scoblete is a realist’s realist when it comes to American foreign policy and in dissecting President Obama’s Middle East speech, and a conservative reaction to it, he finds many central questions that are being ignored:

Here’s my question: why even “endorse the vision” that our interests and values align in the Middle East? Why not treat the American people – and, indeed, the world – like adults and try to explain the basis for U.S. policies in the region? The president made a passing attempt at framing U.S. strategic interests in the region – terrorism, oil, Israel – in the beginning of the speech, only to drown it out in a lot of Wilsonian sanctimony. But a speech discussing the convergence of American values and interests in the Middle East that did not have a single word – not one – about Saudi Arabia, and only passing mention of the Gulf states, is self-evidently dishonest.

American “values” are clearly, and frequently, subordinate to strategic interests in the Middle East. No one can seriously deny this – nor is it something to necessarily be ashamed of! Rather than trying to dress this up in a lot of flim-flam, why not tackle it head-on? Why not explain to the U.S. and the world that in some places the U.S. cannot simply support “democracy” when it does not know what will spring forth from that democracy or that the U.S. has much more urgent needs to attend to – such as protecting Israel and ensuring the stability of the Saudi monarchy?

5. ‘Obama’s $250,000 Question’, William McGurn, Wall Street Journal

When the budget you lay out has government spending growing at such a high rate, as the Obama administration’s budget for the next 10 years has, there is only a matter of time before taxes are raised, not just on the ‘rich’, but on the rest of us:

In the New Republic, the Brookings Institution’s William Galston zeroes in on the fuzzy math. “Unless Obama is prepared to tolerate huge deficits indefinitely,” he writes, “or to emulate arch-conservatives and curb the budget deficit with spending cuts only, he will have to break his unsustainable tax pledge at some point. The only question is when.”

More remarkable still, Mr. Galston was jumping off from an article in National Review by Reihan Salam, who made the same point about the mathematical impossibilities of Mr. Obama’s present tax pledge. Mr. Salam, a policy adviser at the pro-market think tank Economics 21, observes that the revenues Mr. Obama needs to pay for his agenda fall in the rung just below the super-rich—that is, Americans earning between $100,000 and $200,000

Bring your comments and own recommendations to us in the comments.

I would like to highlight Walter Russell Mead’s recent piece on America’s war in Libya, ‘The Shores of Tripoli: Our Latest Wilsonian War‘. As usual, Mead’s take is thoughtful, fair, historically grounded, and brings to light aspects of the situation that I at least haven’t thought of before. Here’s an excerpt:

We will, I very much hope, be lucky enough to come out of this Wilsonian war in Libya with a decent result.  What follows, though, will not be a Wilsonian peace.  The Libyan adventure is a lot of things: a noble effort to protect innocent civilians from horrifying goons, an experiment in a new kind of indirect American leadership, a last desperate throw of the dice by a hyperactive French president whose people increasingly loathe him, an attempt by flustered Arab establishmentarians to get on the right side of popular fury, a demonstration of Britain’s enduring if tortured moralism, a slugging match in the sand, and a nailbiting distraction for a White House that has repeatedly failed to convince voters that it is ‘focused like a laser’ on the economy and has much more to lose if this goes bad than it has to win if things work.

But there is one thing it won’t be, even if it “works”: the start of a new age of multilateral cooperation under the rule of law.  The UN-blessed response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait failed to start the new age of peace, collective security and law; similarly the liberation of Libya is a fluke not a trend.

Mead also clearly layouts the realpolitik aspects behind the individual decisions made by Russia, China, and France to lead, abstain, or reject an activist policy in North Africa. In other words, this war is not a Wilsonian one for those guys. Here is Mead’s conclusion:

We will, I very much hope, be lucky enough to come out of this Wilsonian war in Libya with a decent result.  What follows, though, will not be a Wilsonian peace.  The Libyan adventure is a lot of things: a noble effort to protect innocent civilians from horrifying goons, an experiment in a new kind of indirect American leadership, a last desperate throw of the dice by a hyperactive French president whose people increasingly loathe him, an attempt by flustered Arab establishmentarians to get on the right side of popular fury, a demonstration of Britain’s enduring if tortured moralism, a slugging match in the sand, and a nailbiting distraction for a White House that has repeatedly failed to convince voters that it is ‘focused like a laser’ on the economy and has much more to lose if this goes bad than it has to win if things work.

But there is one thing it won’t be, even if it “works”: the start of a new age of multilateral cooperation under the rule of law.  The UN-blessed response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait failed to start the new age of peace, collective security and law; similarly the liberation of Libya is a fluke not a trend.

We have had Wilsonian wars before and I have no doubt we will have them again.  You can, sometimes, wage Wilsonian war.  What you cannot do, at least not yet and probably never, is build a Wilsonian peace.

Woodrow Wilson discovered this almost a century ago.  He could fight a “war to end war” and make the world safe for democracy; but a fatal combination of American political resistance at home and the cold calculations of national self interest by leaders abroad thwarted his attempt at Versailles to create a new global order on Wilsonian lines.

Like Wilson, President Obama is going to find it easier to fight for humanitarian ideals than to make them prevail.

Thoughts? Critiques?

Many of my favorite IR and US foreign policy issues are provocatively covered in the current book I’m reading, Robert Kagan’s ‘Dangerous Nation‘. Though I’m barely a 1/3 the way through the major themes, and their relations to my favs, are vividly clear:

1. The still too little covered story of the rise of the United States as a great power, with a strong emphasis on its understated early foreign policy strategy. Kagan potently asserts that far from being an ‘accidental’ great power, the citizens of the young republic saw themselves as indeed Founding Fathers of a great nation and acted accordingly.

2. The perpetual battle, or should I say ‘relationship’, between idealism (the spread of democracy, liberal values, and American exceptionalism) and realism in American foreign policy.

3. The lessons that can be learned about today’s foreign policy challenges by studying our human history. ‘Dangerous Nation’ is full of national security challenges paralleling many that the United States and the world sees today (i.e. The Piracy of the Barbary Pirates – International Terrorism).

Here is a quote from the book that hits on all three of these points:

The statesman of the founding era were not unfamiliar with the ways of power politics, however. They were idealists in the sense that they were committed to a set of universal principles, the defense and promotion of which they believed would improve the human condition as well as further American interests. But they were practical idealists. In their moment of weakness they employed the strategies of the weak. They viewed alliances as necessary but dangerous. They denigrated so called power politics and claimed an aversion to war and military power, all realms in which they were far inferior to the European great powers. They extolled the virtues of commerce, where Americans competed on a more equal plane. They appealed to international law as the best means of regulating the behavior of nations, knowing that they had not other means of constraining the great powers of Britain and France. They adjusted themselves to an unhappy reality that they knew to be very much at odds with their aspirations. They looked forward to the day when, as a more powerful nation, they might begin to shape the world to conform more closely to their ideals. Fortunately for the young United States, the world was configure in such a way as to make this possible.”

Robert Kagan’s ‘Dangerous Nation’, Page 57

If you want to have some fun, replace all the US/America’s with EU/Europe.

Two quick items today:

A. I would like to give a hearty recommendation to Real Clear World’s ‘The Compass‘ blog. It has two main contributors, Greg Scoblete and Kevin Sullivan, with guest writers chiming in from time to time (like Rob and Hubbel, hey what happened to that guy?). The Compass brings a Realist perspective to pretty much every foreign policy issue of the day facing the United States and world. Though I am at times in disagreement, their critiques of neo-conservative and liberal internationalist rhetoric and policy perspectives is always clear, concise, and based on what they see as basic American or another state’s national interests. So check out The Compass, Real Clear World for links to numerous foreign affairs articles, and well you’re at it visit Real Clear Politics, my favorite domestic political site!

B. After the attack occurred, there was much written about the Jordanian double agent suicide strike that killed 7 CIA personnel and injured several others. Over the past month the story has inevitably faded from the newsstands and our conscience, but thankfully former CIA operative Robert Baer has kept the tragic incident and its important implications on his mind. Baer has written the definitive piece on the topic that I have seen so far and he finds many lessons that need to be relearned (yes, re-learned) by the CIA to prevent future ‘Khost’s from happening. Using his contacts in the intelligence world, Baer does his best to recreate the how the whole process of Humam Khalil Abu-Malal al-Balawi’s recruitment, infiltration of Al Qaeda, and finally his successful attack against the Khost CIA base. Weaved in this dramatic story is a harsh critique of Clinton era CIA Director John Deutch’s decision to downgrade the importance of and future prospects for, on the ground operatives. This process included ‘scrubbing’ all nefarious contacts (drug dealers, arms dealers, dictators) of the CIA’s slate and depending more on local intelligence groups to do the dirty work (i.e. Jordan’s intelligence operatives in the Balawi case). A provocative claim in a dramatic retelling of an important event. (Yes! 3 adjectives to 3 different nouns in one sentence! Too bad it’s not a good sentence )

The Hawk and the Dove is a compelling and accessible dual biography of Cold War strategists Paul Nitze and George Kennan.  Nicholas Thompson, the author, is Nitze’s grandson, but Thompson doesn’t allow this familiar attachment to cloud his objectivity.  Instead, Thompson respectfully analyzes, compares, and contrasts the views held by Nitze and Kennan throughout their lives.

As Thompson readily admits in the book’s introduction, “[n]either of these idiosyncratic and original men conformed exactly to the hawk and dove labels, of course.”  Kennan, the alleged dove, thought the U.S. should have gone to war over the Iran hostage crisis and once wrote, “Perhaps the whole idea of world peace has been a premature, unworkable grandiose form of daydreaming…” Nitze, the alleged hawk, rejected SIOP-62, which advocated obliterating the Soviet Union after a Soviet attack, favoring “flexible response,” in which the U.S. would respond proportionately and hopefully avoid a broader conflict.  Sometimes Nitze and Kennan’s policy prescriptions were actually in synch.  Both helped create the Marshall Plan, both supported U.S. involvement in the Korean War and opposed crossing the 38th parallel, and both opposed the Vietnam War relatively early in the conflict.

Thompson even argues that Kennan and Nitze deliberately constructed fictional personas, a phenomenon demonstrated by the Nitze-Kennan disagreement over the nature of containment.  Kennan, who prescribed containment in his Long Telegram and his Foreign Affairs X article, believed the tools of containment should be primarily economic and political.  Nitze, in NSC-68, which he co-authored, favored militaristic containment, advocating a massive conventional arms build-up.  However, as Thompson probes deeper, the line between the hawk and the dove blurs.  Thompson notes that Nitze based his NSC-68 arguments on a paper Kennan had penned.  Also, in the 1970’s, Kennan was trying to portray himself as a proponent of peace and began to actively suppress documents that might lead people to believe that he supported militaristic containment. Kennan was not as dovish as he claimed.

However, Thompson does not intend for his book’s title to be ironic.  Despite the aforementioned hawk-and-dove line-blurring, Thompson hopes to draw a sharp contrast between Kennan and Nitze.  In Thompson’s narrative, the two strategists drift slowly away from one another, and the bifurcation reaches its apogee in the late 1970’s, “when nuclear weapons haunted every element of America’s foreign policy, Nitze and Kennan seemed to agree on nothing.  Now they truly became the hawk and the dove.”  But Thompson struggles to back this claim.  He notes that in the early 1980’s Kennan advocated a 50% reduction in nuclear stockpiles and a two-thirds reduction in arsenal size.  However, he also writes earlier that Nitze, participating in the second round of SALT talks under Nixon, advocated proposing a 40% reduction in nuclear arsenal size.  Furthermore, Nitze believed Kennan’s 1980’s proposal could work, as long as the “throw weight” factor was taken into consideration. Such examples lead the reader to wonder if Thompson has merely bought into the fiction of the hawk-dove distinction.

Thompson also examines the Nitze-Kennan disagreement over the nature of America, and this debate actually proves more compelling than the hawk-dove distinction.  Thompson successfully traces Kennan’s authoritarian bent throughout his career.  Kennan wrote an essay in the 1930’s about the positive aspects of authoritarianism and wrote in the 1950’s that the West “could be saved from itself only by 50 years of benevolent dictatorship which would, like a doctor, restore the patient to a reasonable state of origin and then put him on his own again.”  Freed from the constraints of U.S. idealism, Kennan could see the flaws in American democracy.  He once compared democracy to a “prehistoric monster,” for “[h]e is slow to wrath – in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.”  Nitze, on the other hand, could not see such problems as clearly.  Pondering Japanese conduct in World War II on his way to visit the devastation of Hiroshima, Nitze concluded that the Japanese were “the most hateful of all people on earth.”  The irony of such a statement, made en route to a site where the U.S. killed tens of thousands of civilians, is lost on Nitze, but made clear to the reader by Thompson.  Nitze was so enamored by his country that he could not see its flaws.

On the question of the U.S.’s moral superiority, Thompson keeps to his usual objectivity, flirting with both sides of the argument.  At times, Thompson paints the Soviet Union as the U.S.’s foil.  For example, he contrasts Joseph McCarthy’s hearings over Robert Oppenheimer’s alleged communist activities with the Soviet Union’s execution of Lavrenti Beria.  Oppenheimer was an intellectual who opposed the hydrogen bomb.  Beria was a torturer and a rapist who found himself embroiled in a power struggle in the wake of Stalin’s death.  Oppenheimer faced harsh congressional hearings and had his security clearance revoked.  Beria was executed with a pistol.  With this example Thompson insinuates that McCarthyism, though unfortunate, was far more civil than parallel struggles in the Soviet Union.  However, Thompson finds frequent similarities between U.S. and Soviet foreign policy.  Both countries were willing to do whatever it would take to win the Cold War, no matter the moral costs, and were thus moral peers.  Thompson leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions about where they fall on the realism-idealism spectrum.

The Nitze-Kennan disagreements are a useful lens through which to examine America’s rise to global prominence after World War II.  As John Lewis Gaddis notes on the book’s back cover, Kennan and Nitze were “the Adams and Jefferson of the Cold War.”  Though their disagreements did not always result in drastically different policy prescriptions, their contrasting worldviews present two very different ways to approach international politics.

Rob Grace blogs for the Foreign Policy Association at http://lawandsecurity.foreignpolicyblogs.com.  He has an MA in International Relations from NYU and a BA in Drama from Vassar College.  He is also an award-winning playwright whose work has been produced around the globe.

'The name's Robert Gates, and I'm a damn fine Secretary of Defense'

In a speech to NATO officers at the National Defense University, US Secretary of State Robert Gates made this statement:

“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.”

Gates went on to warn that the perception of European weakness could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers. These comments of course come on the heels of what appears to be a Dutch troop retreat from Afghanistan in the coming year. Gates went on to say that financial and man power shortcomings by many NATO members was “directly impacting operations” in Afghanistan. Also noted by Gates in his address, was the fact that only 5 of the 28 NATO members have reached the established target: 2 percent of gross domestic product for defense spending. Polls have shown a growing gulf between how Americans and Europeans see the world, and especially the use of force in international politics.

These are strong statements from a strong leader from NATO’s leading country and should not be taken lightly.

Looking from and IR theory standpoint, we have clear signs of realism and liberalism here. Realists would argue that of course the European states are bandwagoning and letting the United State foot the bill, both in lives and treasure. After all, it appears the Americans are willing to make the sacrifices in Afghanistan no matter the overall NATO commitment. Realists would also not be surprised to see Secretary Gates lament this situation. This current predicament also has strong IR liberal ties. To a certain extent, America’s European NATO partners live in a post-realist world, where international law, globalization of economic goods, technology, and ideas, and a greater emphasis on diplomacy are much more effective tools in fomenting world peace and stability. Of course, when one does not have a powerful military, promoting these facets, one’s you are strong in, just makes sense. As Robert Kagan has argued, the US wishes to live in this world with Europe, but is too busy facing a realist world with problems and actors that may require realist tools, such as the use of military force and deterrence. The US believes without the presence of such tools, as Gates states ‘achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st’ may not be possible.

The philosophical influences of President Barack Obama, like all the American presidents before him, has a critical impact on how his administration sees international relations and accordingly sets forth a foreign policy to match. The main arguments one hears regarding Obama’s foreign affair’s viewpoint are whether or not he is a realist, liberal internationalist, or something in between. Scholar Walter Russell Mead offers up a deeper analysis of the current president, one steeped in American history and culture. Mead sees American foreign policy sprouting forth from four schools, all named after influential American figures: Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian. Mead describes these four schools and how they each have helped the United States rise from a tepid and weak group of colonies to the superpower we see today in his fantastic work ‘Special Providence‘.

Back to President Obama. Mead has just published a significant piece on how he views the current president in terms of the aforementioned four schools of US foreign policy outlooks. Mead sees Obama as a leader with split personalities (nothing surprising as most Americans, including our leaders, share many aspects and beliefs from 2 to 3 of the schools), with one foot strongly entrenched in a Jeffersonian world and the other more loosely fit into a Wilsonian sock. Here is Mead’s cogent description of Obama the Jeffersonian:

Obama comes from the old-fashioned Jeffersonian wing of the Democratic Party, and the strategic goal of his foreign policy is to reduce America’s costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments wherever possible. He’s a believer in the notion that the United States can best spread democracy and support peace by becoming an example of democracy at home and moderation abroad. More than this, Jeffersonians such as Obama think oversize commitments abroad undermine American democracy at home. Large military budgets divert resources from pressing domestic needs; close association with corrupt and tyrannical foreign regimes involves the United States in dirty and cynical alliances; the swelling national-security state threatens civil liberties and leads to powerful pro-war, pro-engagement lobbies among corporations nourished on grossly swollen federal defense budgets.

Obama seeks a quiet world in order to focus his efforts on domestic reform — and to create conditions that would allow him to dismantle some of the national-security state inherited from the Cold War and given new life and vigor after 9/11. Preferring disarmament agreements to military buildups and hoping to substitute regional balance-of-power arrangements for massive unilateral U.S. force commitments all over the globe, the president wishes ultimately for an orderly world in which burdens are shared and the military power of the United States is a less prominent feature on the international scene.

Mead goes on to discuss the drawbacks and benefits of Obama’s approach to the world from this viewpoint and also showcases how the president is still invested and affected by the other schools, specifically the Wilsonian’s. Mead is concerned that these school’s inherent contradictions could negatively affect President Obama if not handled skillfully. In the end, Mead warns of Obama becoming a reincarnation of a certain, much maligned ex-president:

The contradiction between the sober and limited realism of the Jeffersonian worldview and the expansive, transformative Wilsonian agenda is likely to haunt this administration as it haunted Carter’s

Read the whole piece and let me know what you think.

(Picture courtesy of foreignpolicy.com)

Settle down Poland.

Though I have already voiced my concerns, and for the most part, disapproval, of the Obama administration’s decision to scrap the major missile shield in Poland and Czech Republic, I was pleased to see the rather quick move to sure up these Eastern European allies with Vice President Joseph Biden’s visits over the last week.  Biden made stops in Poland, Czech Republic, and Romania with reassurance high on the agenda.  These states were shaken by Obama’s decision and several key leaders from the region (including Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa)  wrote an open letter to the administration calling for the US president not to forget about them as they try to improve relations with Moscow.  While in Poland, Biden discussed a new plan which would place SM-3 anti-ballistic missiles at a former air base in the town of Redzikowo in northern Poland.  It was reported early that the US would also station numerous Patriot missiles in the country.  Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, and the other Eastern European don’t really fear a missile attack from Iran, but what they do fear are Russian boots on the ground.  Being close to the world’s superpower, better yet having its military personnel on your territory, is helpful in keeping the wolves at bay.  Hopefully, this Biden visit is followed by concrete measures that continue to tie these still nascent democracies towards the West and keep Moscow from fomenting any serious expansionist plans.  

While the relatively fast response to get back in line with our Eastern European allies was encouraging, a couple other recent developments by the Obama administration were a little, yes you got it, discouraging.  

With almost the first year of Obama’s presidency in the books it’s starting to become pretty clear that his administration is, in IR speak, part internationalist liberal, in the sense that they have strongly supported international law, the United Nations, multilateral rhetoric (if not action), and on the other hand, realist, as in stressing pragmatism, containment, and in de-emphasizing human rights and democracy in relations with other nations.  Kind of a Jeffersonian view of the world if you follow WR Mead’s view of American society.  Now this is a wide brush and I look forward to explaining it in more depth in later posts, but for right now I want to focus on the human rights aspect.  

The Obama administration is obviously in favor of human rights, but it has shown that it for the most part is taking a hands off approach.  In dealing with states such as Iran, Russia, Sudan, Egypt, China, etc., the issue of their internal human rights violations is a tricky subject to say the least, but so far the trend for the administration has been to put human rights and democracy issues second to more concrete, pressing problems such as nukes, security, economics, etc.  Obama’s decision to not see the Dalai Lama before visiting Beijing is a prime example of this policy.  Now, I disagree with this specific move and in terms of Iran, I think the administration may be blowing a major chance by legitimizing a nefarious government that could possibly collapse with more pressure, but I cannot reflexively denounce these moves out of hand.  I sympathize with the challenge of working in partnership with a leader and government that is authoritarian and violates human rights as at times it must be done. There are too many important security issues at stake and at times human rights and the spread of democracy must take a back seat.  

Where was I getting with this?  Oh yeah.  But I also found out about this and it did make me upset.  The Obama administration has decided to save 2-3 million dollars by stopping the funding for New Haven, Conn.-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, which does what its name implies, and Freedom House’s Gozaar project, an online Farsi- and English-language forum for discussing political issues.  These small projects and organizations work diligently to highlight the democratic/human rights problems in the Islamic Republic of Iran and, specifically in the case of Gozaar, provide a place where Iranian citizens can communicate with other people living in free societies.  I interviewed to work for Gozaar at one time and found their operation and staff inspirational.  At a time when the US government is spending like a teenager with a credit card, it was surprised me to hear that these programs where on the chopping block.  I don’t get it and I don’t like it.  

I was going to talk about Afghanistan too, but I think we all need a break.  Ok, Ok, I need a break.

Alright, I’m pretty sure I’ve got you confused already by the title.  Let me explain, or at least attempt to. Much has been leaked that the upcoming Obama policy plan for Afghanistan will take a ‘minimalist‘ approach to the crucial, yet troubling security situation in South Asia.  In other words, Obama may downplay talk and attempts to create a democratic and prosperous Afghanistan, and instead aim for the creation of a stable country that can defend against extremists and terrorist elements at home and keep them from reaching abroad, especially to American shores.  Now at this moment this is no sure policy-thing, as the report has yet to be released and Obama has used heavy rhetoric and significant troop commitments to the country to possibly suggest otherwise.  

However, others have already given their views of what policy the US should follow in Kabul and beyond. Many of these voices are already calling Afghanistan ‘Obama’s Vietnam’, advocating a lessening of goals, and poll numbers show a surprisingly negative view of a US military presence in the country, with about 50% believing we should start drawing down troops immediately.  Some of these people raise valid and thoughtful arguments that can be quite persuasive.  IR scholar and arch realist Stephen Walt lays out the realist approach to US policy in Afghanistan quite well,  Here is his succinct description of US national interests in Afghanistan:

“We have only one vital national interest in Afghanistan: to prevent Afghan territory from being used as a safe haven for groups plotting attacks on American soil or on Americans abroad, as al Qaeda did prior to September 11. It might be nice to achieve some other goals too (such as economic development, better conditions for women, greater political participation, etc.), but these goals are neither vital to U.S. national security nor central to the future of freedom in the United States or elsewhere. Deep down, we don’t (or shouldn’t) care very much who governs in Afghanistan, provided they don’t let anti-American bad guys use their territory to attack us. As I recall, President Bush was even willing to let the Taliban stay in power in 2001 if they had been willing to hand us Osama and his henchmen.”

Indeed, there are many people in this country that are sympathetic to this reasoning.  But there also many who would fight it vigorously.  Senator John McCain and Senator Joe Lieberman, both strong advocates for the ‘surge’ in Iraq, call for a similar strategy and commitment for Afghanistan.  They unabashedly believe that if the US is truly committed it can ‘win’, that’s right ‘win’, in Afghanistan, and this would include helping build a strong, representative government along with defeating the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  Here’s their side:

“The war in Afghanistan can be won. Success — a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary — can be achieved. Just as in Iraq, there is no shortcut to success, no clever “middle way” that allows us to achieve more by doing less. A minimalist approach in Afghanistan is a recipe not for winning smarter but for losing slowly at tremendous cost in American lives, treasure and security.”

They call on Obama to follow his campaign pledge that Afghanistan is a ”war we must win.”  The tone of the McCain-Lieberman is supportive, but also concerned, as you can tell they fear Obama may go the other way.  I call their approach ‘realist-liberal’ because they base their strategy on hard policies of more troops and political will, but have an end goal that Afghanistan become a pluralist, democratic state because that itself will help secure US national interests by keeping extremists marginalized.  Just like in Iraq, their argument basically states that if we take a minimalist approach in Afghanistan, we will just be back again and again.  This strategy is based on the belief that an open, democratic society will be more peaceful toward the US and its neighbors and through time erode extremism, all IR liberal viewpoints.  

Obama’s choice will probably be a tightrope between both of these policies.  His choice of language concerning the conflict will be vital.  Will he pledge to be there ’til the job is done’ or will he take a more subtle approach?  Americans will be listening, as the poll numbers show what they hear will be crucial, but even more important will be the fact that Afghans, Pakistanis, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban-led insurgents will be to.