My favorite spot in RI

Second Beach, Middletown

Balanced piece on China's rising military profile

ARTICLE: "China Military Marks 80th Anniversary," by Christopher Bodeen, Associated Press, 31 July 2007.

Most articles note the spending increase, some note the growing wariness of neighbors and especially the U.S., fewer describe the attempts of outsiders to demand more transparency from the Chinese, and almost none describe Chinese PLA responses to those calls.

This article does it all, providing some real context, so it's worth more than most.

The USN&WR "Commentary" is on shelves

Buffet is on the cover, with a red (naturally) band above him asking, "Is China Taking Over the World?"

The special report begins on p. 38 and my commentary wraps it up on page 46.

The commentary (2 columns) includes the old PNM author's photo (I miss that hairline), which reminds me that I'll need a new photo sometime next year for the next book.

Bought six copies from a Barnes & Noble in Middletown RI, after signing one paper PNM and three BFAs.

First time back since 4 February 2005

New rule set

PRESS RELEASE: Remarks by Acting Under Secretary for International Affairs Clay Lowery on Sovereign Wealth Funds and the International Financial System, Department of the Treasury, June 21, 2007

Good sign of anticipating the need for a Core-wide rule set on government-run investments.

As the statement notes, this is a new problem/opportunity that is--itself--a reaction to the currency crises of the mid-1990s.

So the adjustments never end, the rule sets simply get refined.

Thanks to greg for sending this.

Successful surge is small stuff

OP-ED: A War We Just Might Win, By Michael E. O’Hanlon And Kenneth M. Pollack, New York Times, July 30, 2007

As I have stated from the start of the surge: it was (finally) designed to work and it would (is finally) working. Throw enough bodies (with the contractors, we approach Shinseki's desired number) at the problem and we'll get progress with someone as smart as my favorite "monk of war."

And yet it's one thing to send just enough to settle the situation, but quite another to realize that, with the rotational strain coming to a head, there's still no question--despite the expected operational success of the surge--that the drawdown and pullback must occur, so the larger issue remains: What have we done diplomatically in the region to adjust to that inevitable pathway?

Here the news is far less sanguine: we've done little to nothing, instead teeing up Iran for air strikes that are unlikely to get us what we want in either Iran or Iraq, and with Gaza in shambles, this would likely flare too.

So yes, kudos to Petraeus in particular and CENTCOM in general for finally getting the strategy right in Iraq, but it comes so late (blame to Rummy and Cheney) that the strain on our forces dictates the drawdown unfolds no matter what, and with Bush & Co, not prepping the regional security environment at all for this outcome, our current gains are unlikely to be sustainable.

Petraeus's "victory" I can define: stabilize Iraq just enough for the drawdown/pullback to unfold with grace on our side and no bloodbath on our heels.

We can call this a "loss" or an "aborted victory" if you like, even though none of those terms apply (How do we "win" a war where we are only the biggest of many "tribes" there?). But I've always found calling it "our war" and worrying about our "victory" seemed odd and out of place.

It's Iraq's "peace" that's being fought over, and who'll get to control that.

Like I wrote in BFA, pretending this "war" is ours to win or lose is like the midwife acting like it's her baby being born.

The real question for us strategically is, What role does Iraq play for us in perpetuating and expanding the big bang? Many answers can legitimately flow from the question, and if we just get over this need to declare a "win" (however illusory) in Iraq, we can begin to strategize more clearly.

The game is still on: We committed to Iraq to trigger positive regional change (and please, hold your horses on democracy). The only "victory" in Iraq keeps that process alive enough for the next president to do something about it. The only "loss" I fear is the complete shutting down of those potential pathways prior to Bush's departure, and I think ineffective, feel-good strikes against Iran are the shortest route to that undesirable strategic cul-de-sac.

So good news to hear and excellent tactical analysis, but we're talking the small stuff here while still ineffectively debating the larger strategic issues, which neither party's candidates are effectively exploring right now, instead filling airwaves with fanciful declarations that we must "end this war now" (as if!) and "stop Iran's quest for nukes!" (ditto).

Don't believe the critics on "Sunshine"

I am a huge Danny Boyle fan (esp. "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later," and "Millions" too) and this sci-fi thriller does not taper off into incoherence, as many critics allege.

I saw it tonight with Vonne and we both thought it worked from start to finish. Cilian Murphy, as always, was great, and it's always good to spend time with Michelle Yeoh.

I simply loved it.

Makes me realize I've never seen "The Beach" with Leo.

Tom around the web

+ Military Blog linked Managing China's Ascent.
+ So did Outside the Beltway.
+ So did Pajamas Media.
+ So did Heritage Tidbits.

+ ZenPundit linked The American Way of War.
+ New Yorker in DC linked Wrong thinking on "fragile" Cuba and Another good look-ahead on Cuba post-Castro.
+ et alli. linked Turkey's inevitable re-emergence.
+ I, Hans. linked Code compromise, even in Israel.

+ Politics & Soccer wanted to know more about shrinking the Gap.
+ ‚àûFouroboros linked PRTs are the embryonic SysAdmin/DoEE.
+ Bradford Plumer linked The Americans Have Landed.
+ So did Jack Rice in the Cross Hairs.
+ Sepia Mutiny linked PNM.
+ Big Lizards mentioned the Core and Gap.
+ Hydro-Logic linked Connecting Africa is about much more than water.
+ And wrote about Tom a little.
+ Fraters Libertas thought Tom was slumming by going on the Jack Rice show.

+ Brad DeLong linked Two humiliating whiffs for Krauthammer.
+ So did Indistinct Union
+ Indistinct Union also linked Two quick I-told-you-so's.
+ So did Wizards of Oz.
+ Light Seeking Light linked Another sophomore heard from ....
+ DeLong also linked Wouldn't it be great....

+ Discovered Today embedded the TED video.
+ anja merret linked it.

More on "Corporate Solution to Global Poverty"

Weak ending that proposes World Development Corporation that would be built on backs and bucks and skills of MNCs.

I like the proposal, and the description of the make-up attracts my attention as a good model for Sebastian Mallaby's International Reconstruction Fund that focuses on post-conflict situations (in my proposed A-to-Z rule set on processing politically-bankrupt states).

Focus would be on Collier's bottom billion (or my center of the Gap), but here is the problem: no discussion whatsoever on conflict as obstacle or potential role of this WDC in post-conflict situations.

As a result, it comes off as rather abstract, with no linkages to security, as if poverty is somehow rather calmly endured in these regions.

Still, overall, a very helpful, stimulating book for me right now.

Ad astra per aspera

ARTICLE: Nigeria to send astronaut to space, By Taye Obateru, Chris Ogbonna, Vanguard, July 26, 2007

In line with my post of goals driving reading, I guess New Core and their associated wannabes like Nigeria need similar JFK-like reaches to inform their development ideology.

Good, bad, ugly?

Necessary but insufficient, I would say. Animating but hardly compelling.

Then again, kill aspiration and rule out happiness. There is no joy in just surviving. There has to be some sense of progress.

Nigeria's made it's declaration, following the audacious example of its era: China. Legitimate? Depends on execution, especially in the realm of funding, as Nigeria's got its problems with corruption. But there is the utility, however strange it may seem to outsiders, to create that dynamic (part aspirational, part critical) that allows people to say, "If they can X, then they should be able to Y."

America needs to ask itself: what are the similarly ambitious goals we should be setting now?

Because our ideological brand is clearly in need of rejuvenation. We've got to get some rejuv in our nation!

Thanks to MountainRunner for sending this.

Saudis protecting their equities

ARTICLE: U.S. Officials Voice Frustrations With Saudis, Citing Role In Iraq, By Helene Cooper, New York Times, July 27, 2007

More evidence of what I've been talking about for a while. No surprise. Saudi Arabia's doing the same thing Iran is doing: protecting its equities.

The main difference is how we treat them.

Actually, the better comparison is probably Syria in terms of letting foreign fighters flow through.

Train or shun?

ARTICLE: UN requires 'better' peacekeepers, BBC, 28 July 2007

Sounds good, at first blush, but then you ask yourself: How best to raise professionalism of suspect militaries? By cutting them off from interacting with better militaries or by drawing them into such situations?

If you isolate these militaries from such learning situations, how do you expect them to improve?

You'd think the focus should be on better training, and not on excluding suspect militaries.

Thanks to Terence Hill for sending this.

Why the grand strategist/visionary needs the discipline of books [Updated]

Echoing a recent off-hand comment from ZenPundit regarding books, I'm reading this great (but awkwardly written, style-wise) book entitled, A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty (Lodge & Wilson).

Absent the recent meeting of minds with Neil Nyren and Putnam (negotiations continue on details), I don't think I could have made head nor tails from this book. It is dense, a bit esoteric, and challenging. I probably would have skimmed most and gotten very little from it.

But, armed with the agreed-upon thesis of Vol. III, this book is a bit of a revelation, tripping all sorts of wires.

My point? You need some guiding arc for the encapsulation of your current thinking for your reading to have real impact. You need some governing dynamic for where you're hoping to go intellectually.

An example from this book: Alexander Hamilton was our Deng Xiaoping, or America's Lee Kuan Yew. I have Chernoff's bio on my desk, ready to be read. Now I know why.

Somebody like me, without this sort of overarching focus, can get very anxious, almost depressed (lotsa insomnia this summer, for example, which I didn't fear particularly, because I sensed the basic driver). With it, everything always seems to be snapping into place, or very exciting.

I told Neil I simply needed a book deal in place by Labor Day to give order to my life--so to speak. The release date meant little to me; the start date was everything.

That was just an instinctive guess on my part, but now reading this book I realize how imperative it was for me.

Upshot?

The visionary type is incapable of what most would call "pleasure reading." The pleasure comes from connecting the reading to goals, the "discovery" factor being everything.

Know yourself, know your happiness.

This week's column

Looking for victory in all the wrong places

Dueling headlines last week in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal got me thinking about how we should realistically define victory in this long war against radical extremism. Most people think it’s killing terrorists and incapacitating their networks, but to me it’s less about draining the swamp than about filling that space with something better. The only exit strategy I recognize is local job creation.

On July 18, the Times led with “Bush Advisers See a Failed Strategy Against Al-Qaida.” Here’s why I don’t find that headline particularly surprising or disheartening.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

Iran has its uses

ARTICLE: 'U.S. Plans New Arms Sales to Gulf Allies: $20 Billion Deal Includes Weapons For Saudi Arabia,' By Robin Wright, Washington Post, July 28, 2007; Page A01

Now comes the goodies list for Israel and all our allies in the region. Iran does have its uses, yes?

Boomer knee-jerks

ARTICLE: U.S. and India Finalize Controversial Nuclear Trade Pact, By Robin Wright and Emily Wax, Washington Post, July 28, 2007; Page A14

The thing about this is, Russia's going to want the same package on Iran.

I mean, India's a country that's blustered quite ominously about nuking Pakistan and yet we trust them in this way. India doesn't sign the NNPT and develops weapons and we trust them.

Fine by me, as I see India as a key future ally.

Then again, neither Pakistan nor Israel signs NNPT and both develop weapons (Israel has a couple hundred) and they're both trusted friends.

So Moscow and Beijing are going to argue similarly for Tehran--just watch.

None of that will change the minds of Israel's staunch supporters in the U.S., like new Giuliani top-adviser and full-time advocate for war with Iran, Norm Podhoretz, so expect them to press the case for strikes like none of this exposes us to charges of hypocrisy--much less being pawns of regional powers Israel and the House of Saud.

Isn't it great to live in the age of Boomers, where every other government (don't forget all the terror nets) except our own seems to run our foreign policy? Don't your knees get tired from all the jerking?

Wouldn't it be nice to run toward a future of our own creating instead of constantly running away from the past?

Think the Boomers will get any better as old men and women?

Thanks to Vonne Meussling-Barnett for sending this.

Yes, I am trying to get my rocks off . . . err out!

Just in case you detect a certain tone today, I will confess a certain distress is fueling some of my bile.

It's such a weird package: intense pain that you deal with best by intense physical activity designed to make it worse. A masochist's dream date!

Time to run a time trial with Kevin. To make it fun, I push Vonne Mei in our Burley.

Another sophomore heard from ...

ARTICLE: "Gorbachev accuses U.S. of imperialism," by Alex Nicholson, Indianapolis Star, 28 July 2007, p. A9.

Here's the killer putdown:

The Americans want so much to be the winners. The fact that they are sick with this illness, this winners' complex, is the main reason why everything in the world is so confused and complicated.

Does it get any more simplistic than that?

If America's more humble, the world's no longer confused and complicated.

I'm not arguing against the humility that Bush promised and then most definitely did not deliver. I'm not arguing against a more multipolar understanding of the world.

But pretending we're all the same in this globalized economy and security situation is truly sophomoric. The reason why America must lead in military matters is that we have the ONLY military that can project power anywhere. Contextualizing that employment within a larger rule set is the main problem, not simply our having it. But that contextualization is a multipolar "street," so to speak. We can't manage that rule-set adjustment on our own, although we can definitely start the process.

Just like DoD has to get the rest of the USG to grow up and take on the responsibilities of what comes next, the U.S. is forced to do similarly with rising powers like Russia, Brazil, India and China. Admittedly, Bush has done this poorly in many ways, but not too bad in others.

But it's the larger alarmism that I find so silly, much like Krauthammer's asinine specter of Chavez haunting our presidential photo-ops: this is a "confused and complicated world" that features the biggest, broadest and fastest growing global economy we've ever seen. It also includes the least amount of mass violence, world-wide, than we've enjoyed in decades. Deaths from natural disasters are down about 98% from 1900 (per capita and over 90% in absolute terms--according to research Bjorn Lomborg compiles in his brilliant Skeptical Environmentalist). The great powers are integrating their economies like never before (and puh-leeze, do not pull out those Germany-Britain stats from 1910s, because if you think Wal-Mart's global supply chain can be compared to that simplistic stuff, then it's back to International Economics 101 for you!) and we've got global cooperation on stuff that was simply unimaginable as recently as two decades ago.

Look around you! Our big fights are over farm subsidies, tainted products and unfloating currencies. We've even got space to debate global warming responses ad nauseum. All this while terrorists are allegedly "running our world"!

Yes, yes, a "confusing and complicated world" for Gorby, but as we know, a lot of things confused and complicated Gorby's worldview. As useful idiots go (yes, the old Leninist chestnut), Gorby was the very best: so misundereducated that he knew in his heart of hearts that he could rebuild Soviet socialism from within--God love him!

So, sure, give him his Nobel and leave him where he belongs--in the 20th century.

Two humiliating whiffs for Krauthammer

OP-ED: "Foreign policy rookie makes public gaffe," by Charles Krauthammer, Indianapolis Star, 28 July 2007, p. A16.

No offense to Krauthammer, but his scolding of Obama comes off as weak and ill-informed, making graduate student mistakes that betray a lifetime of learning through others instead of actual experience.

We are told Obama's answer on meeting baddies without preconditions would put the country at risk by making situations worse.

Then the killer put-down:

Moreover, summits can also be traps if they're not wired in advance for success, such as Nixon's trip to China, for which Henry Kissinger had already largely hammered out the famous Shanghai communique. You don't go hoping for the best.

Bullshit on several levels, because that's exactly what the Nixon team did: they went hoping for the best. Remember the timeframe: We're sinking on Vietnam, Nixon's under attack at home from war protestors, and Mao's nuttier than a fruitcake, debilitated by all sorts of maladies and still in a buzz over the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, which he could have revived at a moment's notice.

Proof? Imagine Zhou does not come to greet Nixon at the airport. Imagine no televised state dinner. Imagine no F2F with Mao.

Think the Shanghai communique would have saved the summit? Only the perpetual grad student would swallow that nonsense.

First, the Shanghai communique is hardly "famous" or consequential. Like most communiques, it contained a lot of platitudes signifying nothing. It was not what constituted the success of Nixon's trip. If you got the graduate student history book on the subject, you might have come to that conclusion, but read Margaret McMillan's great When Nixon Met Mao and tell me that trip was "wired" to be an automatic success. Nixon's entire mania across the week was the photo-ops, not the communique. It was the symbolism of the trip: Who would meet him at the airport? Would he get to meet Mao? How would the toasts go?

Second, none of this was "wired" and all came down to last-minute scheming and finessing, all well captured in this book that shows that people make foreign policy, not organizations. You read your average grad-level foreign policy history and its a load of impersonal forces. You actually live through any of it, and it's all personal and amazingly so.

The main reason why I wanted to pen a history from inside of what it was like to participate in the formulation of the Navy white paper "From the Sea ..." is because the grad-level versions were so comically off the mark, with great man Admiral Snuffy Smith bequeathing the entire document, fully-formed, like some grand strategy Zeus, out of his head. The truth was messy, very personal, and full of all sorts of accidents and feuds and semi-goofy stuff. The neatness factor simply wasn't there.

Nixon's performance made that summit, as did Zhou's. The communique is what the wonks swoon over in retrospect, but pretending that constituted the success of that summit is truly grad-level analysis.

The second whiff?

Obama enthusiasts might want to write this off as a solitary slip. Except that this was the second time. The first occurred in another unscripted moment. During the April 26 South Carolina candidates' debate, Brian Williams asked what kind of change in the U.S. military posture abroad Obama would order in response to a hypothetical al-Qaida strike on two American cities.

Obama's answer: "Well, the first thing we would have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response--something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans."

Asked to be commander in chief, Obama could only play first-responder in chief. Caught off guard, and without his advisers, he simply slipped into two automatic talking points: emergency response and its corollary--the obligatory Katrina Bush-bash.

When the same question came to Hillary, she again pounced: "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate."

So let me get this straight in this, the great asymmetrical struggle of our age: our strength is not found in our ability to withstand and mitigate attacks but in symmetrical--and often knee-jerk--retaliation against state-less enemies?

Talk about a grad student answer right out of the 20th century! Somebody is definitely beyond his analytical expiration date.

Our resilience is our deterrence in the 21st century. If you don't get that, you shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power in a moment of danger. If your answer is just to pull triggers to get your rocks off as quickly as possible, you might as well hand over power to the bin Ladens right now, because our future foreign policy will consist merely of those guys plucking our strings.

I say, go to the back of the class and write Robb's book out in chalk a couple of times til something different sinks in.

Krauthammer ends this embarrassing display of sophomoric analysis with the specter of America sharing the stage--unwittingly--with a "malevolent clown like Hugo Chavez."

Good God Almighty!

That's what we've come to after 8 years of Bush? Living in fear of Chavez?

Nixon sits down with Mao, a guy who killed about 80 million, but we're supposed to fear treading anywhere near the fantastically evil Chavez?

What kind of midget superpower does Krauthammer fear we've become that he's so entranced by such imagery?

Just chalk it up to another Boomer (and former Mondale speechwriter) infatuated with visuals over reality, armed with his graduate-level understanding of both history and the complexity of the world we now live in.

ZENPUNDIT MAKES A SOLID REJOINDER IN A COMMENT:

Hey Tom,

Krauthammer is simplifying because he doesn't want talks, granted but Nixon's trip was hardly improvisational theater. The diplomatic minuet began in Nixon's first term via all kinds of soundings in the Warsaw talks, through the Romanians, Nixon's speeches at state dinners where he sent signals to Beijing, through Yayah Khan, Kissinger's secret trip - there was real spadework done beforehand and much time and thought on Nixon's part for the strategic goals he wished to accomplish ( though I also will grant you, he clearly reveled in his photos on the Great Wall and toasting with Mao as a personal political triumph. Nixon was a complicated figure)

MY REPLY:
Zen, points all well taken and well documented in McMillan's book.

The point isn't about whether there was preparations. There can't be a summit without preparations, all fantastic, debate-posed-questions aside.

The point is whether we had preconditions in hand before committing ourselves to the summit and executing. Scan the communique and tell me we got anything other than a bunch of maybe's and sort of's and could be's. What exactly do we pin China down on prior to agreeing to meet with them? Mao will reform his country? They promise to bail us out on Vietnam? They promise alliance against the Sovs? China gives up its nukes or even speaking in insanely aggressive terms about their use?

None of the classic preconditions we were angling for were delivered either before or even after the summit. So in the end, we were indeed "hoping for the best."

And you know what? We actually got it.

What I rebel against in this exchange is this foggy, rose-colored view of history whereby the calculating Nixon and advance man Kissinger were risking nothing by the summit, because it had all been hard-wired in advance ("We can always fall back on the communique to save our asses!").

Nixon and Kissinger went knowing the symbolism of the opening would be the main gain. We weren't going to get any real goodies that conservatives or liberals were demanding, just the promise of further dialogue. Hell, Beijing barely dialed down the propaganda on many issues.

So compare that amazingly far-sighted and courageous act to our hear nothing-see nothing-say nothing diplomacy of today, where we expect potential dialogue partners to give up their nuke programs in advance before we'll deign to talk with them.

And then we wonder why we're so isolated and taking such cheap and easy shots from dinosovs like Gorbachev!

ZENPUNDIT AGAIN:

Gorby must be slipping into old man reverie, he used to be sharper than that.

As I read the background of writing the Shanghai Communique, it seemed to be at once a must-have saving of face gesture for Mao and Zhou and a pragmatic papering-over long-term differences in order to get on with more pressing business. Both sides were flexible and wisely no one insisted on backing anybody into a corner on language.

The communique certainly wasn't why Nixon went to China as Krauthammer contends, it was more of a price Nixon was willing to pay at home on his political Right in order to get to Beijing in the first place ( and the pro-Chiang Kai-shek China lobby Right went nuts - but to no lasting effect on Nixon). So you call out Krauthammer correctly there, he's locked in hindsight bias.

While there were not any promises per se, both sides were facing the reality , especially the Chinese, of an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union, a matching of interests. Both sides profited immediately simply by demonstrating to Moscow that the China card was on the table. That symbolism was, in effect, substance by changing the " correlation of forces" as Gromyko, Brezhnev and the rest would have seen it. Given our Vietnam wind-down and problems in the Mideast and at home, we needed that breathing space at the time.

ME AGAIN:

Exactly, Zen, meaning both sides, as McMillan points out so well, were effectively reading the correlation of forces.

I really fear more years of Boomer presidency in which every possible diplomatic overture is pre-villified with charges of "capitulation," (Nathan's point). I do see numerous coming realignments globally, and I fear we'll be locked out of participating in many of them because of this zero-sum mentality on domestic politics that the Boomers inflict us with. We are mirror-imaging the worst of what we decry globally, and to me, that's the antithesis of leadership, but rather pure reactionism.

Maybe that's why I disdain the Boomer commentators most of all: they exemplify this reactionism in its purest forms. We no longer create visions of futures worth creating. We simply excel at tearing down those of others.

It really feels like we as a nation are still trying to find what should be our post-Cold War foreign policy, and I blame that on the Boomers. They are so infected with Cold War visions (and their upbringing) that they are unable to lead us past that historical moment. We are surrounded by the success of the containment strategy (the massive expansion of globalization modeled on us) and yet we have become so amazingly uncomfortable in this world of our own creation.

in the end, what impresses me most about Nixon's vision on China was that, despite some possible lightening of his load, the real payoffs would be decades down the road. Nixon here was playing for the ages (Kissinger, the pure operator, took a while to catch on), and that's not something I see the Boomers managing, except in the most escapist way (global warming as the Calgon-take-me-away alternative). Their great fault is their tendency to live in this moment, judging all political losses as the end of the world and all victories as judgment day--thus the absurd focus on preconditions, which tells me they value the appearance of leadership more than leadership itself.

Two quick I-told-you-so's

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "China-Iran Trade Surge Vexes U.S.: Technology Shipments Frustrate Bid to Curb Tehran's Nuclear Program," by Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal, 27 July 2007, p. A4.

OP-ED: "'It Didn't Happen: Democrats go soft on crimes against humanity,'" by James Taranto, Wall Street Journal 26 July 2007, p. A12.

First one I've been arguing for a while: China's rough doubling of energy requirements means it has to buddy up to anyone it can, and Iran is definitely there for the taking. So here's the losing equation on trying to isolate anyone with energy right now: global markets are simply too tight and China has no choice but to "hit 'em where the U.S. ain't," as I wrote in BFA.

Yes, China has the rules on the books, but it's in no great hurry to enforce them. And even if it were, it does not have the capacity we might assume it does. One thing to grab the right official and execute him, but quite another to control all those capitalists in Deadwood writ very very very large.

Second piece, an op-ed, was just so predictable:

Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere--and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making perfect the enemy of the good.

But isn't that where the heart and soul of the Dem party is heading?

Check out our Mr. Yglesias (whom, quite frankly, I had never heard of prior to Sean's post, but then again, I don't brag about being "desperately out of touch with the American mainstream" in my bio, despite my six years at Harvard) and his future book, "Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism" (described on his site bio as "deal[ing] with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement." [I will confess, I stopped reading "The Atlantic" about five years ago, which means I've missed Mr. Yglesias's entire career--ah, to be desperately in touch with the mainstream.]

Tell me if this crowd gets back in that they won't feel compelled to turn many blind eyes across eight long years. And, if so, are we not headed to the same ex post f--ktos as watching ex-prez Bill Clinton whine his way through Rwanda, telling everyone in sight he should have done something--anything?

Do you want to explain to your grandkids why your nation did nothing to counter the Holocaust-size totals in the Gap in the 1990s? Care to go through that again?

Why does Obama play to that base instinct? With Samantha Powers as one of his top advisers?

I sit back at times like this and realize there is no room for me and mine in either party: I don't demonize the military or interventions so I can't be a Dem, and I don't demonize China or want to invade Iran so I can't be a Republican.

And, frankly, I think that's good. I don't see how you can really be a grand strategist in this day and age and belong to either party. I think I'm going to formally make myself an independent and stop rationalizing the attraction either way.

[few minutes pass]

Ah, it turns out that when you register in Indiana you do not declare party affiliation, so you can vote however, which is cool by me.

Gotta love this country!

So I guess I gotta stop saying I'm a registered Democrat, because I'm not registered as anything.