George W. Bush

As the book club on Tom Ricks' The Gamble comes to a close, Barack Obama announced his future plans for Iraq. 

What's fascinating is the effect of the surge on the political reaction to Obama's proposal to scale down the U.S. presence to 55,000 troops by August 2010.  It has received bipartisan support in the United States.  Iraqi officials have by and large endorsed it (though see here and scroll down).  Obama has even earned the always-crucial Foreign Policy blogger vote. 

Think about this for a second.  If I had told you two years ago that there would be a broad domestic and international consensus on U.S. strategy in Iraq, you would have laughed me off the Foreign Policy web site. 

Ricks argues that the surge has not led to political achievements in Iraq, and he may very well be right.  What it has accomplished, however, is changing the political optics in three crucial ways.  First, it has given Republicans cover for supporting a withdrawal, arguing that it is being done from a position of strength rather than weakness. Second, it has blunted the Democrats' zeal for immediate withdrawal.  So long as things in Iraq are going relatively well, the political pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW! has abated.  Finally, the surge has given the Iraqi government the confidence to believe that a significant U.S. drawdown will not lead them back to the abyss. 

I don't know whether the withdrawal will actually prove to be good policy -- but the fact that we've reached a political consensus that it is good policy is nothing short of astounding. 

Please do check out Foreign Policy's Book Club discussion of Tom Ricks' The Gamble, his excellent and contrarian follow-up to Fiasco.  Here's a link to Marc Lynch's take, and that is followed by Christian Brose.

My take just went up.  The point I want to stress: 

[T]he ways in which the architects of the surge got their way seems like an exact replay of how the architects of the invasion and initial occupation got their way -- operating through bureaucratic backchannels and endruns, ideologically simpatico think tanks, and -- of course -- Dick Cheney's office. For those of us who want the policymaking process to work, this looks like another fiasco. Petraeus's decision to co-opt the Sunni insurgents, for example, was made without consulting the president. Doesn't that echo J. Paul Bremer's disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military without consultation? Petraeus, Odierno, and Jack Keane might have been right on the merits, but to get their way they bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CENTCOM commander, the State Department, and the NSC interagency process. The Gamble argues that these actors were impediments to the right strategy. All well and good, but what is to stop another cluster of bureaucratic "insurgents" from bypassing the chain of command and telling political leaders what they want to hear on, say, Afghanistan, North Korea or Iran? Is there a need for another, more ambitious version of Goldwater-Nichols?

Go check it out -- and Ricks will respond to all of these comments at the end of the week. 

First it was President Bush in Baghdad.  Now it is Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao at Cambridge University: 

 protester threw an athletic shoe at the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, during his speech at Cambridge University's concert hall on Monday, seven weeks after a similar incident involving President Bush in Iraq. The shoe missed Mr. Wen by at least 30 feet, but security officials promptly escorted the protester from the hall.

The police arrested the man on suspicion of a public order offense. Witnesses described him as a goateed European in his 20s or 30s speaking foreign-accented English. They said he blew a whistle as Mr. Wen spoke, causing him to pause and look up. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” the man said, according to witnesses. “How can you listen to the lies he’s telling?” he shouted, in a video of the incident shown on Sky News television.

Here's a video link. 

What's interesting about this is that while shoes have long been associated with insults in Arab culture, shoe-throwing has no cultural history in China.  This is a case of an insult gone viral.

Of course, this leads to a much more fascinating question -- which culture-specific insults would you like to see go global?  Shoe-throwing appears to have supplanted pie-facing as the insult du jour.  What should replace shoe-throwing as the way to take leaders down a peg? 

For some reason my thoughts run to this, though I recognize that what's being described is not exactly an insult. 

My latest column for The National Interest is now online.  It assesses the strategic legacy of Bush 43 (hint:  it's not pretty). 

In the last paragraph, I wade into the Stephen Walt-Peter Feaver brouhaha over Bush's management of the great powers:

Bush’s strategic blunders have been so massive that they explain his greatest tactical success—the management of great-power relations. From a Chinese perspective, George W. Bush was an unparalleled strategic gift. He was a leader of a rival power who accelerated his country’s relative decline, easing the way for a larger Chinese role in the Asia-Pacific region. Of course Beijing would be friendly with a regime like that. The cruelest irony of the Bush administration is that those who will miss him the most will be the other great powers. 

It seems kind of churlish to say goodbye on that note, so here's one positive Bushlink for today:  Norman Ornstein is correct in his New York Times op-ed today when he writes that, "there is one area where President Bush’s legacy will be strong and admirable — the way he is leaving office."

Enjoy the ranch, George!