Im quite pleased honored

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I’m quite pleased, honored really, to bring you our second guest post at TPM, this one from John Judis of the New Republic

HENRY KISSINGER WAS, perhaps, our most brilliant Secretary of State. Certainly he was one of the few who had an overarching theory of foreign relations, first articulated in his book on the Congress of Vienna. But his post-scholarly writing has been too corrupted by his own determination to remain a player in the Republican party. And he’s still at it as a member of Richard Perle’s influential Defense Policy Board Advisory advisory committee, which is leading the charge for an invasion of Iraq.

Yet Kissinger can never entirely abandon his European realism – his view of nations as rival centers of power rather than forces for good or evil – and so his books and columns have been exercises in equivocation. Witness his latest effort in today’s Washington Post. The Post’s op-ed editor, who seems to favor invasion, bills it, “How a preemptive war could lead to a new international order,” but a close reading reveals a war between Kissinger’s conviction and his opportunism. The former Secretary of State praises Bush’s “eloquent” address at West Point, and appears to argue for a pre-emptive attack against Iraq. But at the same time, he quarrels with the logic that produced that strategy and puts a set of onerous conditions in the way of its execution.

Before the U.S. can strike, the Bush administration must gain public and Congressional support. But also it must develop a “comprehensive strategy for itself and the rest of the world,” “a common approach” that would bring along America’s allies, and a “program of postwar reconstruction.” And, most important of all, it must “propose a stringent inspection system” through the U.N. That last condition means that Kissinger agrees with Senator Carl Levin and with European leaders like Tony Blair who want to see whether they can contain Saddam’s nuclear program through the U.N. before undertaking an invasion. By contrast, the administration, as Vice President Dick Cheney made clear last Friday, insists that an invasion will be necessary even if Saddam were to agree to arms inspections. So contrary to appearances, Kissinger completely disagrees with administration policy.

The real tip-off is what Kissinger says about Bush’s “eloquent” strategy of pre-emption. He calls it “revolutionary.” In Kissingerian terms, that is a synonym for reckless or irresponsible. And Kissinger takes issue with the administration’s most basic approach to Iraq. The administration has declared itself in favor of “regime change,” but Kissinger writes, “The objective of regime change should be subordinated in American declaratory policy to the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction as required by the U.N. resolutions.” That’s the Levin-Blair position. And he concludes, “A conspicuous American deployment in the region is therefore necessary to support the diplomacy to destroy weapons of mass destruction and provide a margin for quick victory if military action proves the only recourse.” “Proves the only recourse” – that is also the Levin-Blair position, not the Bush administration stance. But don’t tell the op-ed editor of the Washington Post.

— John B. Judis


(August 11th, 2002 — 12:28 PM EDT // link)


Saudi diplomat Adel al Jubeir made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows. But no one asked him about the incident early last year in which one of Paul Wolfowitz’s close advisors essentially threatened him after a meeting at the Pentagon. And there’s another dimension to the unfurling story of the anti-Saudi briefing to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Last December, in what I imagine was likely my final article for the American Prospect, I noted that Richard Perle was having it both ways: He was going on every talk show in the world as a “former administration official” or “AEI scholar” and attacking the more moderate administration policy stance emanating from the State Department. At the same time he was actually a de facto member of this administration. He has an office in the E-Ring of the Pentagon because he is Chairman of the Defense Policy Board – a once somnolent outfit which Perle has reshaped into a highly partisan and quite influential pressure group in the administration. The briefing in question was clearly given at Perle’s behest. Now that Perle’s actions are themselves becoming issues in our relations with foreign powers, isn’t it time he got a bit more scrutiny?

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