Iraq

At Inside Higher Ed today, Scott Jaschik follows up on my FP colleague Marc Lynch's excellent post regarding the expected influx of Iraq and Afghan veterans into Middle East Studies. 

The obvious benefit of this migration of talent is the local knowledge about Iraq or Afghanistan that such veterans would bring to the table.  Thinking about academia more generally, however, there's another massive benefit that's overlooked. 

To put it bluntly, most top political scientists don't have a lot of experience beyond being political scientists.  That is to say, the top Ph.D. students often enter graduate school straight from undergraduate programs.  They might have interesting summer internships, but otherwise have limited hands-on experience with politics or international relations. 

Now, this isn't always a bad thing.  I'm guessing most patients would prefer a doctor who is single-mindedly focused on medicine rather than a doctor who has taken "time out" to travel the globe.  I know plenty of IR scholars who have produced outstanding work without, say, ever serving a day in government. 

The problem comes when everyone in a profession pursues the identical career track -- to the point where those who deviate from the career track are thought of as strange or different.  At that point, the profession loses something ineffable. 

So, former members of the military should be ecouraged to enter Ph.D. programs -- as should those who worked on the ground for NGOs and civil affairs branches of the government.  I can't guarantee that it will lead to better scholarship.  At a minimum, however, it improves the quality of the teaching and the conversations that take place between colleagues.  And I'm pretty confident that that leads to better research.   

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. 

The latest Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey of international relations scholars has been released (I've blogged about a prior TRIP survey here).  The part that jumped out at me: 

On the policy side, we see several important changes from previous surveys. In 2008, for instance, we see fewer than half as many scholars (23 percent of respondents in 2008 compared to 48 percent in 2006) describing terrorism as one of the three most significant current foreign policy challenges facing the United States. Most surprisingly, while 50 percent of U.S. scholars in 2006 said that terrorism was one of the most important foreign policy issues the United States would face over the subsequent decade, in 2008 only 1 percent of respondents agreed. American faculty members are becoming more sanguine about the war in Iraq, as well: in 2006 76 percent said that the Iraq conflict was one of the three most important issues facing the country, but in 2008 only 35 percent of U.S. respondents concurred. Concern over several other foreign policy issues is also declining markedly: when asked about the most important problems facing the country over the next ten years 18 percent fewer respondents chose WMD proliferation, 12 percent fewer said armed conflict in the Middle East, and 13 percent fewer indicated failed states. At the same time, 17 percent more respondents in 2008 than in 2006 believed that climate change will pose a serious challenge, 6 percent more worried about global poverty, and 4 percent more said that resource scarcity is one of the most significant foreign policy challenges.

Basically, my colleagues have mellowed a bit on the standard threats everyone has fretted about for the past eight years.  Now they're more worried about threats emerging from the global political economy. 

Which puts them in line with the Director of National Intelligence: 

The new director of national intelligence told Congress on Thursday that global economic turmoil and the instability it could ignite had outpaced terrorism as the most urgent threat facing the United States.

The assessment underscored concern inside America’s intelligence agencies not only about the fallout from the economic crisis around the globe, but also about long-term harm to America’s reputation. The crisis that began in American markets has already “increased questioning of U.S. stewardship of the global economy,” the intelligence chief, Dennis C. Blair, said in prepared testimony.

Mr. Blair’s comments were particularly striking because they were delivered as part of a threat assessment to Congress that has customarily focused on issues like terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Mr. Blair singled out the economic downturn as “the primary near-term security concern” for the country, and he warned that if it continued to spread and deepen, it would contribute to unrest and imperil some governments.

“The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests,” he said.

It's great to get this kind of attention, but I fear that part of it is faddish.  All it will take is one conventional interstate war or one spark across the Taiewan Straits, and the focus will shift back towards more conventional security threats. 

Both Matt Yglesias and Ryan Powers are going after Condoleezza Rice for the following comments she made in a CNN interview: 

QUESTION: Do you regret your role in the Iraq war? SECRETARY RICE: I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq. QUESTION: Really? SECRETARY RICE: Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that this different Iraq under democratic leadership (emphasis added).

Both Matt and Ryan make the argument that since most political scientists opposed the war in Iraq -- and they did -- Rice is out of bounds here.  The CAP boys have half a point, but let's not go overboard.  First, their half-a-point --I agree with Matt and Ryan that Iraq was not a geostrategic threat.  It is worth remembering, however, that Iraq was causing some major strategic headaches at the time of the invasion.  That said, I also think Matt and Ryan are misreading Rice a little here.  In the follow-up to the excerpted portion above, Rice says, "we are at a place now where because of difficult decisions that the President took we have an Iraq that is well on its way to being a multiethnic, multiconfessional democracy."  So what Rice is talking about is the potential benefits of having a democracy spanning the Tigris and Euphrates.  And on this point, Rice is correct to assert that there were/are political science-y reasons for thinking that a stable, democratic Iraq was a Good Thing for the United States and the rest of the world.  Don't just take my word on this -- let's go to Shadi Hamid: 

Middle Eastern states, almost all of them dictatorships, constantly bicker amongst themselves and enter into relatively childish diplomatic rows over perceived and personal slights. There is no common Arab policy to any regional or international problem, because there seem to be little structural incentives to induce Arab leaders to make an effort to agree on big issues. Part of the problem is when foreign policy is largely determined by either one person, or a very small coterie of elites around the royal court, then foreign policy initiatives have less force of legitimacy and are less sustainable because they can always be reversed fairly easily. One could posit - as I will right now - that if Middle Eastern countries were relative democracies, they would be much more willing to cooperate with each other, and would be more willing to play strong, confident leadership roles in tacking difficult regional issues. Turkey, of course, is a good example of how this might look in practice. 

Now, let me stress that the political science consensus on this point is hardly uniform.  Most realists would dismiss the notion that regime type matters all that much.  And even some democratic peace proponents would point out that while consolidated democracies are just peachy, consolidating democracies are often more trouble than they are worth.  That said, however, based on these comments Condi Rice does not need to turn in her APSA card anytime soon. 

Kevin Drum articulates what was in my brain when I read about the Iraqi cabinet approval of the new Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq: 

This is good for the Iraqis, who really do need the U.S. presence for a little while longer; good for George Bush, who's getting a slightly longer timetable than Barack Obama would have negotiated; and good for Obama, since this essentially makes his decision to withdraw into a bipartisan agreement.