The one thing I will never understand is why do national security elites always pretend they don’t know what the public wants. The public wanted out of Afghanistan. 3 presidents ran and won on it. I think what is happening in Afghanistan is awful but natsec elites have to stop pretending that the American people don’t matter…
The one thing I will never understand is why do national security elites always pretend they don’t know what the public wants. The public wanted out of Afghanistan. 3 presidents ran and won on it. I think what is happening in Afghanistan is awful but natsec elites have to stop pretending that the American people don’t matter or that “if a leader would just lead” people will not ask “why are we still paying 10b a month for a war that isn’t going anywhere?” Americans wanted out. Our leaders wanted out. Getting out was a complete clusterfuck but it had to happen.
If you want to see the pitfalls of natsec elites never ever facing up to reality: look at the current nature of our politics on fp. Americans want no part in wars in Israel or Ukraine or Taiwan because Iraq and Afghanistan turned out so badly. I honestly don’t know what the right strategy would have been because I think in 2001 if you told the American people that they would be at war in Afghanistan for 20 years I really don’t think bush could have gone to war. It’s a conundrum because if you tell Americans the truth they will not support what natsec elites want to do around the world.
People like to pretend that every conflict is WW2 and we can create a new Marshall Plan, forgetting that Europe and Japan had coherent national identities before they were destroyed. They were both also developed economies.
But how do you create a national identity for a region that has none? Seems like it would have been feasible to dismantle terrorist organizations without a full scale invasion.
It sort of irks me how much heat Democrats get on foreign policy when Republicans invaded two nations with seemingly no real plan (or a really naive plan). Bush was warned - if you break it, you own it.
They depleted the "political patience" of the American public by signing onto wars that they couldn't win on short enough timelines. I don't know why Pentagon planners don't think about that part, but they ought to. A lot of it came from Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule" concept (you break it, you buy it) concept where if we were going to do regime change then we were on the hook for a nation-building mission thereafter, which I always thought was dumb as hell--especially compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait. George Bush the senior finished two large-scale conflicts--one of which included regime change, the other didn't--within a 4-year period. Know why? Because he avoided regime changes where he could, and didn't stick around for nation-building missions when he couldn't.
Of course, if Colin Powell were alive today and were confronted with this post-hoc argument he would still probably waive off any kind of personal accountability for pushing that kind of mindset into the Bush admin, because it's like JFK once said: "success has many fathers, failure is an orphan."
Travis, since I have all of you FP experts here do you think it would make any difference if Bush would speak out against Trump. I was very disappointed to hear John Bolton speak today. Yes he said Trump was a danger to America but he also said Biden was too. Arrgh. As an Activist I try to find all the ammunition I can use against Magas in my Red state. Thanks in advance.
I don’t think it would make a difference because the MAGA base hates neocons, the Bush people, and old guard NatSec experts in general. The only people they seem to like in the NatSec realm are guys like Mike Flynn and Allen West who speak out against the old guard. Everyone else is either considered suspect or openly hated.
Very very interesting. I honestly don’t know what the “right” thing to do is but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in.
I mean it took a huge attack from Japan to force our hand in ww2. It’s amazing that people think that Americans would concern themselves with how women are treated in Afghanistan or Iraq (I’m not saying this as a positive thing just that it is how we are).
"...but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in."
I think they knew this--which should have been enough to not do it--but I think they also worried about a repeat of the post-WWI situation that led to WWII. Germany had to foot the bill for WWI, leaving them impoverished and susceptible to populist autocrats riding "stab in the back" narratives to power. But even then, that's the German people's fault rather than the allied power's fault in my book. People have agency and choices after wars and we can't absolve them of that by blaming ourselves for not supporting them better via nation-building--which can be done from afar rather than through occupation as it was done after WWII via the Marshal Plan. An alternate scenario to imagine is if we had left after capturing Saddam and discovering no chem weapons (besides the American ones we sent him in the 80's) and then just sending money to whoever filled the vacuum via a kind of neo-Marshall Plan.
It’s why I don’t judge Biden to harshly when it comes to Ukraine (beyond that the republicans wouldn’t do shit for Ukraine). I try to listen to a lot of fp podcasts and I always get mad because every analysis goes “what Biden needs to do is to tell the American people what is at stake and that we want Ukraine to win.” I’m always like are you guys fricking nuts? Do you have any idea who votes? They couldn’t point out Ukraine on a map and couldn’t give a shit if it was run by islamists. You really want to tell Americans how much it will cost for how many years? You want a quick NO or a HELL NO.
These very intellectuals really think it’s another time where a president can mold public opinion (shit Roosevelt was an astounding politician who literally had super majorities in both houses and still couldn’t convince anyone to send shit to Britain for 5 years). Obama who was an amazing political figure couldn’t get more than 52% of the vote. We just live in very different times.
If republicans think their voters will go to war in Iran or Taiwan I got a bridge to know where to sell them
Vietnam started off as a funding/advising campaign until the Turner Joy/Maddox. What happens if Russia starts getting desperate if we ramp up weapons deliveries and decides to hit an American-flagged ship delivering the weapons via a submarine-launched torpedo while denying they did it? I've yet to hear anyone in NatSec land talk about that scenario, and it could potentially draw us into that conflict. At best we'd start sending Navy escort vessels alongside the weapons deliveries and then hope that Russia doesn't engage the delivery ships with the escorts in place.
I still don’t get how these people are still giving us opinions on foreign affairs though. When you fuck up as much as they did you got to question their judgement. Have you noticed that everything is a nail to these idiots
So were the 9/11-era neocons when you give the recent pass a real look. See my comments in this thread about Powell's "pottery barn rule" and all the neocons who got on board with it as compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait where we broke things and then left. Somehow Bush senior was able to get through 2 conflicts in 4 years by avoiding the pitfalls that the Bush Jr neocons fell into via Powell's logic.
Yea but Panama and Desert Storm worked out far better than most expected. The big mistake was Bush, Sr urging the Shia and Kurds to rise up when he knew darn well we weren’t going to do a thing to help. The Iraqi Shia never forgave us for that.
Yea that part was a terrible sidebar choice in the Kuwait conflict, but we now know what it looks like when Saddam *does* get removed (a chaotic civil war on top of a power vacuum on top of an insurgency). Turning the entire Iraqi military into unemployed men with military experience paved the way for the insurgency that raged there from '04-'08 and the civil war that raged there from '06-'08, which was another terrible choice by guys like Paul Bremmer.
In the end, at least Iraq has a 30/100 on Freedom House's democracy index now--still a "not free" rating--which is better than flat out autocracy I suppose. But now Iran has a partner instead of a competitor in the region as well on the greater geopolitical side of things.
Really it goes all the way back to the Picot-Sykes agreement and the colonial period after WWI--especially in Israel, but places like Iraq are no exceptions.
Travis you have to explain to me how the same elites that were part of the administration that did Afghanistan and Iraq (eric and Eliot…cough cough) now talk about how we should do the same crazy thing in Iran. I feel like I’m losing my mind. How could you watch those disasters and then look at our citizens and say “you know what this complete clusterfuck of politics needs (rubs hands): let’s go into Iran. Americans will love that!!!!”
Iran would make Iraq look like a walk in the park. The terrain (mountains *and* urban sprawl), areal extent of the county (3 times the size of Iraq), unified larger populace (double the size of Iraq's pop and not divided), strategic partner in Iraq (Shia-led gov with western-supplied/trained military full of veterans), and much more advanced military capabilities would be insane to deal with. Good luck with that shit.
And what's the great prize at the end if we could even pull it off? A marginally-safer Israel via less funding for Hamas/Houthis/Hezbollah, and temporarily fewer drones in Russia's arsenal until they build out their own capacity? It'd be a win for Saudi Arabia more than anyone else, even if it didn't go completely sideways along the way.
All four administrations have dropped the ball. Biden is probably less than others, but his handling of Afghanistan hasn't been deft. I concur on the problems of 9/11-era neocons. I have a working theory: this is a byproduct of the All-Volunteer Force. People just don't have any concept of war anymore because they don't have skin in the game. Just my .02 cents.
All volunteer force or conscription, either way you don’t abuse your fighting men and women the way we did in Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11. We have the best military in the world and when you go you either go big and get it done or don’t go at all.
Zero Americans wanted a nation building expedition in Afghanistan and most certainly saw right through the Iraqi WMD bullshit being dumped on them. We should have blown into Afghanistan and killed OBL right there and left.
The consequences of those wars cannot be overstated. As a Reagan Republican I am pissed beyond words at my party.
Even Reagan bailed on Lebanon after the Beirut Bombing and the civil war raged there through the rest of the 80's and into 1990. Funny how we don't count that one as a botched withdrawal that's at least up there with Somalia, if not others.
As I recall that was a UN peacekeeping mission. I think Reagan wanted nothing to do with it but got talked into it. Somalia was also a UN mission until Clinton expanded the mission, something Sr never would’ve done.
Obama/Trump/Biden all share blame in this as well--I don't mean to absolve them of any of their own mistakes, and there were many--but they were given a problem that wasn't of their making and so they don't share responsibility for the original sin, which starts with the Bush admin and the pottery barn rule in my estimation (YMMV).
And yes, I've long held the opinion that the end of the draft was going to water down our collective shared experience of war and concentrate it among a small group of peoples. Nixon basically ditched the draft as a way to stomp out the protest movement to buy himself more time in yet another conflict (Vietnam) where we decided that nation-building was in our best interests. Panama and Kuwait were contract force conflicts like the GWoT ones were, but the regime change and nation-building aspects were either not done or kept very limited, and so the conflicts were much shorter and tolerable for the American public's patience meter. Bush senior still lost reelection after deftly handling those two conflicts, which is kind of crazy in retrospect.
Bush Sr lost because the economy dipped in 1992. And if Perot hadn’t run Bush might have won. Here’s the real question—what if Gore beats W and then 9/11 happens?
I know Bush lost over issues not related to ForPol, but it's a little crazy post-GWoT that we ditched a guy who pulled that kind of thing off.
Yea I often wonder the same thing about what a post-9/11 world would have looked like with Gore in place rather than "Bush" (read: Cheney). We'll never know.
Good podcast.
The one thing I will never understand is why do national security elites always pretend they don’t know what the public wants. The public wanted out of Afghanistan. 3 presidents ran and won on it. I think what is happening in Afghanistan is awful but natsec elites have to stop pretending that the American people don’t matter or that “if a leader would just lead” people will not ask “why are we still paying 10b a month for a war that isn’t going anywhere?” Americans wanted out. Our leaders wanted out. Getting out was a complete clusterfuck but it had to happen.
If you want to see the pitfalls of natsec elites never ever facing up to reality: look at the current nature of our politics on fp. Americans want no part in wars in Israel or Ukraine or Taiwan because Iraq and Afghanistan turned out so badly. I honestly don’t know what the right strategy would have been because I think in 2001 if you told the American people that they would be at war in Afghanistan for 20 years I really don’t think bush could have gone to war. It’s a conundrum because if you tell Americans the truth they will not support what natsec elites want to do around the world.
People like to pretend that every conflict is WW2 and we can create a new Marshall Plan, forgetting that Europe and Japan had coherent national identities before they were destroyed. They were both also developed economies.
But how do you create a national identity for a region that has none? Seems like it would have been feasible to dismantle terrorist organizations without a full scale invasion.
It sort of irks me how much heat Democrats get on foreign policy when Republicans invaded two nations with seemingly no real plan (or a really naive plan). Bush was warned - if you break it, you own it.
Absolutely. Republicans are good at breaking things and dems are force to clean it up.
They depleted the "political patience" of the American public by signing onto wars that they couldn't win on short enough timelines. I don't know why Pentagon planners don't think about that part, but they ought to. A lot of it came from Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule" concept (you break it, you buy it) concept where if we were going to do regime change then we were on the hook for a nation-building mission thereafter, which I always thought was dumb as hell--especially compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait. George Bush the senior finished two large-scale conflicts--one of which included regime change, the other didn't--within a 4-year period. Know why? Because he avoided regime changes where he could, and didn't stick around for nation-building missions when he couldn't.
Of course, if Colin Powell were alive today and were confronted with this post-hoc argument he would still probably waive off any kind of personal accountability for pushing that kind of mindset into the Bush admin, because it's like JFK once said: "success has many fathers, failure is an orphan."
Wonder where General Powell is? I'm waiting for him to speak out.
That dude has been dead for like 3 years now
Travis, since I have all of you FP experts here do you think it would make any difference if Bush would speak out against Trump. I was very disappointed to hear John Bolton speak today. Yes he said Trump was a danger to America but he also said Biden was too. Arrgh. As an Activist I try to find all the ammunition I can use against Magas in my Red state. Thanks in advance.
I don’t think it would make a difference because the MAGA base hates neocons, the Bush people, and old guard NatSec experts in general. The only people they seem to like in the NatSec realm are guys like Mike Flynn and Allen West who speak out against the old guard. Everyone else is either considered suspect or openly hated.
Just read that covid got him. That's probably why I missed it. Makes me sad. Thanks for the info.
Oh my I didn't know that. Guess I missed that one. My bad. I'm sorry to hear that. Damn. He was one of the good guys.
Very very interesting. I honestly don’t know what the “right” thing to do is but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in.
I mean it took a huge attack from Japan to force our hand in ww2. It’s amazing that people think that Americans would concern themselves with how women are treated in Afghanistan or Iraq (I’m not saying this as a positive thing just that it is how we are).
"...but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in."
I think they knew this--which should have been enough to not do it--but I think they also worried about a repeat of the post-WWI situation that led to WWII. Germany had to foot the bill for WWI, leaving them impoverished and susceptible to populist autocrats riding "stab in the back" narratives to power. But even then, that's the German people's fault rather than the allied power's fault in my book. People have agency and choices after wars and we can't absolve them of that by blaming ourselves for not supporting them better via nation-building--which can be done from afar rather than through occupation as it was done after WWII via the Marshal Plan. An alternate scenario to imagine is if we had left after capturing Saddam and discovering no chem weapons (besides the American ones we sent him in the 80's) and then just sending money to whoever filled the vacuum via a kind of neo-Marshall Plan.
I do too.
It’s why I don’t judge Biden to harshly when it comes to Ukraine (beyond that the republicans wouldn’t do shit for Ukraine). I try to listen to a lot of fp podcasts and I always get mad because every analysis goes “what Biden needs to do is to tell the American people what is at stake and that we want Ukraine to win.” I’m always like are you guys fricking nuts? Do you have any idea who votes? They couldn’t point out Ukraine on a map and couldn’t give a shit if it was run by islamists. You really want to tell Americans how much it will cost for how many years? You want a quick NO or a HELL NO.
These very intellectuals really think it’s another time where a president can mold public opinion (shit Roosevelt was an astounding politician who literally had super majorities in both houses and still couldn’t convince anyone to send shit to Britain for 5 years). Obama who was an amazing political figure couldn’t get more than 52% of the vote. We just live in very different times.
If republicans think their voters will go to war in Iran or Taiwan I got a bridge to know where to sell them
Vietnam started off as a funding/advising campaign until the Turner Joy/Maddox. What happens if Russia starts getting desperate if we ramp up weapons deliveries and decides to hit an American-flagged ship delivering the weapons via a submarine-launched torpedo while denying they did it? I've yet to hear anyone in NatSec land talk about that scenario, and it could potentially draw us into that conflict. At best we'd start sending Navy escort vessels alongside the weapons deliveries and then hope that Russia doesn't engage the delivery ships with the escorts in place.
I still don’t get how these people are still giving us opinions on foreign affairs though. When you fuck up as much as they did you got to question their judgement. Have you noticed that everything is a nail to these idiots
What the natsec elites never understood is that all the American people wanted was OBL’s head on a platter.
That's a big part of why the MAGA coalition lost no sleep replacing the NatSec elite leg of the GOP stool with the new conspiracy theory leg.
MAGA is clueless when it comes to national security and foreign policy.
So were the 9/11-era neocons when you give the recent pass a real look. See my comments in this thread about Powell's "pottery barn rule" and all the neocons who got on board with it as compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait where we broke things and then left. Somehow Bush senior was able to get through 2 conflicts in 4 years by avoiding the pitfalls that the Bush Jr neocons fell into via Powell's logic.
Yea but Panama and Desert Storm worked out far better than most expected. The big mistake was Bush, Sr urging the Shia and Kurds to rise up when he knew darn well we weren’t going to do a thing to help. The Iraqi Shia never forgave us for that.
Yea that part was a terrible sidebar choice in the Kuwait conflict, but we now know what it looks like when Saddam *does* get removed (a chaotic civil war on top of a power vacuum on top of an insurgency). Turning the entire Iraqi military into unemployed men with military experience paved the way for the insurgency that raged there from '04-'08 and the civil war that raged there from '06-'08, which was another terrible choice by guys like Paul Bremmer.
In the end, at least Iraq has a 30/100 on Freedom House's democracy index now--still a "not free" rating--which is better than flat out autocracy I suppose. But now Iran has a partner instead of a competitor in the region as well on the greater geopolitical side of things.
Exactly. The state of affairs in the Middle East is a direct consequence of the destabilization caused by our invasion of Iraq.
Really it goes all the way back to the Picot-Sykes agreement and the colonial period after WWI--especially in Israel, but places like Iraq are no exceptions.
Yup.
This….this times 10.
Travis you have to explain to me how the same elites that were part of the administration that did Afghanistan and Iraq (eric and Eliot…cough cough) now talk about how we should do the same crazy thing in Iran. I feel like I’m losing my mind. How could you watch those disasters and then look at our citizens and say “you know what this complete clusterfuck of politics needs (rubs hands): let’s go into Iran. Americans will love that!!!!”
Iran would make Iraq look like a walk in the park. The terrain (mountains *and* urban sprawl), areal extent of the county (3 times the size of Iraq), unified larger populace (double the size of Iraq's pop and not divided), strategic partner in Iraq (Shia-led gov with western-supplied/trained military full of veterans), and much more advanced military capabilities would be insane to deal with. Good luck with that shit.
And what's the great prize at the end if we could even pull it off? A marginally-safer Israel via less funding for Hamas/Houthis/Hezbollah, and temporarily fewer drones in Russia's arsenal until they build out their own capacity? It'd be a win for Saudi Arabia more than anyone else, even if it didn't go completely sideways along the way.
Oh it would go sideways and stay sideways for a very long time.
All four administrations have dropped the ball. Biden is probably less than others, but his handling of Afghanistan hasn't been deft. I concur on the problems of 9/11-era neocons. I have a working theory: this is a byproduct of the All-Volunteer Force. People just don't have any concept of war anymore because they don't have skin in the game. Just my .02 cents.
I agree. Could this also contribute to a La k of common purpose? On the other hand, a national military draft has issues.
Would a massive influx of short term (1-2 years) involuntary troops really serve the needs of a modern military?
lack of common purpose. Apologies for the typo
All volunteer force or conscription, either way you don’t abuse your fighting men and women the way we did in Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11. We have the best military in the world and when you go you either go big and get it done or don’t go at all.
Zero Americans wanted a nation building expedition in Afghanistan and most certainly saw right through the Iraqi WMD bullshit being dumped on them. We should have blown into Afghanistan and killed OBL right there and left.
The consequences of those wars cannot be overstated. As a Reagan Republican I am pissed beyond words at my party.
Even Reagan bailed on Lebanon after the Beirut Bombing and the civil war raged there through the rest of the 80's and into 1990. Funny how we don't count that one as a botched withdrawal that's at least up there with Somalia, if not others.
As I recall that was a UN peacekeeping mission. I think Reagan wanted nothing to do with it but got talked into it. Somalia was also a UN mission until Clinton expanded the mission, something Sr never would’ve done.
Obama/Trump/Biden all share blame in this as well--I don't mean to absolve them of any of their own mistakes, and there were many--but they were given a problem that wasn't of their making and so they don't share responsibility for the original sin, which starts with the Bush admin and the pottery barn rule in my estimation (YMMV).
And yes, I've long held the opinion that the end of the draft was going to water down our collective shared experience of war and concentrate it among a small group of peoples. Nixon basically ditched the draft as a way to stomp out the protest movement to buy himself more time in yet another conflict (Vietnam) where we decided that nation-building was in our best interests. Panama and Kuwait were contract force conflicts like the GWoT ones were, but the regime change and nation-building aspects were either not done or kept very limited, and so the conflicts were much shorter and tolerable for the American public's patience meter. Bush senior still lost reelection after deftly handling those two conflicts, which is kind of crazy in retrospect.
Bush Sr lost because the economy dipped in 1992. And if Perot hadn’t run Bush might have won. Here’s the real question—what if Gore beats W and then 9/11 happens?
I know Bush lost over issues not related to ForPol, but it's a little crazy post-GWoT that we ditched a guy who pulled that kind of thing off.
Yea I often wonder the same thing about what a post-9/11 world would have looked like with Gore in place rather than "Bush" (read: Cheney). We'll never know.