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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (206695)	10/22/2006 3:09:55 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Is he a Brit? Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University I only posted it as I thought some of the comparison numbers were interesting. For example, I always thought it would take a lot more troops (10X)to help get Iraq back under control. You can post comments to the article, and his email is there too.

To: Ilaine who wrote (206695)	10/22/2006 6:15:16 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 281500

Actually, Ferguson's article is a pretty good one, you should read it. Or even better, read his book, American Colossus. If it were true that the US wanted Iraq to be a vassal state, his critique would be at least interesting, but in point of fact, it's always been the other side who made that accusation, never the proponents of the war. You misunderstand him. Actually, he was, at the beginning a proponent of this war, and a more aggressive foreign policy. He wants to US to take over Britain's 19th century role as policeman of the world, though he was very aware of the reasons why that might not be done, spelled out in his book. One good reason is that people in the US don't know enough history, and understand even less. Not that I agreed with his analysis. But at least he knows some history. Back in 2003, I argued that this kind of error could be corrected if only America's leaders would learn some history. I now realise that this was naive. For policy over Iraq has never been based on a rational assessment of that country's needs. Secretary Rumsfeld's paramount concern appears to have been to win the Washington turf wars between the Defence Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department — just as Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief concern was to satisfy the appetites of the Republican "base" for big tax cuts and cheap victories. Writing in the 1920s, the German historian Eckart Kehr argued that the foreign policy of the Kaiser's Germany was the defective product of the "primacy of domestic politics". Decisions about diplomacy and strategy, he argued, were determined not by rational international calculation but by short-sighted political machination: whether a bigger navy would satisfy the heavy industrial lobby, whether a higher tariff would square the Prussian landowners. I have come to see that American foreign policy suffers from a similar pathology. The primacy of domestic politics, in the form of bureaucratic in-fighting and electoral manipulation, explains why the Iraq enterprise has, from the outset, been so chronically undermanned.