Irregular Analyses

Anthony has been doing a nice job of shouldering the slack of the remaining old man (read: me) on the blog. As one of my many New Year's resolutions, I'll try to take up some of the blogging burden. This of course, however, will probably drive away the site's remaining fan base. Oh well.

For two different perspectives, compare this bit

A Media Intelligence Failure (subscription req)
Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2005, Pg. 10

We'll need time to dig through the details in the 600-plus-page Robb-Silberman report on intelligence that was released yesterday. But one important conclusion worth noting, even on a quick reading, is that the report blows apart the myth that intelligence provided by Iraqi politician and former exile Ahmed Chalabi suckered the U.S. into going to war.....

to this bit from General Jack Keane (USA ret), former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, in front of the House Armed Services Committee on July 15, 2004:

SKELTON: Well, why didn't it happen? Why was

KEANE: If I could comment on that.

SKELTON: Jack -- General.

KEANE: Well, let me add to that, because I participated in this process. And this represents the space, the intellectual capital that we expended to take the regime down. This represents the space for the intellectual capital to deal with it after. I mean, that was the reality of it.

And when I look back on it myself, and having participated and contributed to it, one of the things that happened to us -- and I'll just speak for myself. I don't want to speak for others, is many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be.

SKELTON: We're all going to be treated as liberators, right?

KEANE: That's correct. So, therefore, the intellectual capital to prepare ourselves properly for an insurgency was not there. Nor was -- there were very few people who actually envisioned, honestly, before the war, what we are dealing with now after the regime went down.

Owen Harries, retired diplomat and the former editor-in-chief of the National Interest, has an interesting essay entitled “Power and Morals” in the April 2005 issue of Prospect. If IR, or political, theory are your bag, I recommend it. Here is a taste:

The characteristic fault of realism is that it believes the application of a morality to foreign policy to be negligible, if not entirely irrelevant. The characteristic fault of liberalism is that it considers the application of morality to foreign policy to be easy. In fact it is both necessary and difficult. And as the balance shifts between a world vertically divided into sovereign states and a world horizontally connected by interdependence, it is likely to become even more necessary and more difficult.

See Daniel Drezner about the Russell Crowe-Al Qaeda imbroglio....