In an earlier post, I raised the possibility that Obama may not live up to his campaign promise to leave Iraq more responsibly than we entered it. I am hardly alone in wondering about this, but I haven't seen many attempts to document the ways that the exit is resembling the entry.

A few caveats are worth mentioning up front. The exit is still a work in progress and so there is plenty of time for things to go better (or worse) than might be forecasted now. Any judgment I or anyone else makes on the subject is provisional at best. Moreover, most of the critiques of the entry into Iraq owe more to partisan (or academic) mythology than to actual fact. But they have wide currency -- indeed, in some quarters, they are accepted as self-evident truths -- and so it is worth investigating the extent to which they might apply to the exit.

One of the earliest entry critiques was the charge that President George W. Bush hurried up the confrontation with Iraq in 2002 so as to distract from economic scandals and thus score an electoral advantage in the midterm elections. This allegation was made at the time by two people who later became high-level White House officials in the current administration. First, current WH spokesman Jay Carney, then a reporter for Time, raised the possibility that Karl Rove was orchestrating the Iraq timetable for political advantage. The second j'accuse was even more famous, Illinois State Senator Obama's speech explaining why he opposed the Iraq war. Prominent in his speech was this remarkable accusation:

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income -- to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

At a time when the economy is suffering from some of the worst years since the Great Depression, the echo is unmistakable, and many critics believe that the Iraq decision was dictated by the 2012 election calendar. President Obama would have a hard time getting reelected based on the awful domestic conditions, but a campaign based on "ending the wars" might resonate with voters. The administration even has a couple of Enrons of their own to fuel the wackier versions of a conspiracy theory.

If you find it plausible that Bush let the difficult economic circumstances and the 2002 electoral calendar shape his approach to entering Iraq, shouldn't you find it more plausible that Obama has let his far more daunting economic troubles and the higher stakes 2012 electoral calendar shape his Iraq exit?

Then there is the charge that President Bush failed to command the process and instead out-sourced his Iraq policy to his Vice-President who spoke triumphantly about the mission but ham-handedly interfered with the delicate diplomacy running up to the confrontation. Well, President Obama adopted an even more hands-off approach to Iraq and formally tapped Vice-President Biden to be in charge of Iraq policy. Biden certainly has been the most triumphalistic) Administration figure about Iraq. And, sure enough, critics have charged that Biden fumbled the account. One of those critics is me, for I am on record worrying that Biden may have stepped on the delicate diplomatic negotiations for a more enduring U.S. military presence back in August.

Shouldn't critics who say that the failure of the UN process in the run-up to the 2003 invasion "proves" that Cheney was really the one calling the shots, and misfiring while doing so, likewise believe that the failure of the renegotiation process in the run-up to the exit "proves" that Biden misfired, too?

Finally, there is the charge that President Bush put in place the wrong team to handle his Iraq policy and these early failures doomed the effort.  Even Secretary Rumsfeld concedes in his memoir that picking Lt.Gen Ricardo Sanchez to head up the military side was a bad choice and Rumsfeld's critique of the civilian head, Ambassador Bremer, is scathing.  The team struggled to work together and to understand the situation in Iraq.  The crucial early period was squandered, sowing the seeds that reaped the bitter fruit of the sectarian violence of 2004-2006. By all accounts, the Bush administration finally got the right personnel in place when the President tapped General Dave Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to implement the new surge strategy and their ability to achieve unity of effort contributed considerably to the surge's success.

The Obama echo is striking.  Midway through his first term, Obama may have finally assembled a solid team with General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Jim Jeffrey.  But he started out with a choice that left many people, including myself, scratching our heads: picking Chris Hill to be the Ambassador.  Ambassador Hill certainly had a distinguished career, but he had no direct experience with Iraq and so was starting from square one.  Sure enough, within months credible reports were circulating about the poor civil-military coordination on the ground.  Perhaps the nadir was the description from one of his former subordinates of Ambassador Hill's alleged wasteful distraction to grow a lush lawn on the embassy compound.  Perhaps the complaints were petty, but the more fundamental charge that the Obama team squandered valuable time that undermined future success rings nonetheless.  

Shouldn't critics who traced the difficulties of the entry to the inability of the Bush team to work together effectively find similar connections between the difficulty of the exit and the troubles inside the Obama team?

America's entry into the European theater of World War II was a military disaster at Kasserine Pass. We suffered heavy casualties and were pushed back over fifty miles. Taking the measure of this force, the Axis powers were smug -- the Americans might be fresh to the fight and have enormous resources, but there was little reason to believe any of their advantages would make a difference.

But after his initial successes against the U.S. military, Rommel wrote worriedly to his wife that although the Americans made mistakes, they were learning from them. And indeed, after our losses in the Tobruk campaign, the American military replaced ineffectual commanders, reorganized units to improve operational control and coordination, trained better fundamental soldiering skills.

Looking back across the decade of America's response to the al Qaeda threat that resulted in the attacks of September 11th, both our government and our military made assessments and improvements of similar magnitude: revamping our intelligence collection and assessment, developing strategies for countering insurgencies, building intellectual capital on the nature of the threats and means for disrupting and destroying them, finding ways to balance liberties and security in ways our public will support and sustain.

We have made grievous and well-documented mistakes: circumventing legislative and judicial oversight of executive authority, underestimating the difficulty of successful regime change and its associated costs, isolated instances of brutality, misreading what we look like to friends and enemies. We responded to the attacks in ways expensive to ourselves and others.

Yet it is also important to note that our response has for the most part defanged the narrative of our enemies. We have fought our wars with an extraordinary care for being a positive force in shaping those societies. We have had domestic debate about the wars, as every society should, but still demonstrated the determination to prosecute those wars and bear the losses they imposed on us -- something our enemies believed we were too dissolute to do. We have demonstrated the resilience to question our own choices and find better solutions with time. We are not the brittle and overbearing leviathan they thought.

Forecasting America's decline has become a mainstay of punditry, yet the analyses almost always overlook the fact that our political culture and our political system are attuned to solving problems. Granted, it is difficult to see up close, amidst the dust and noise of our messy domestic debates; and our mistakes are many. But we are an impatient culture, one that demands solutions and excels at building better mousetraps.

In other words, America is a society that often doesn't have it right, but given a little time, generally gets it right. Fortunately, because of our prosperity and strength, our country has a wide margin of error that generally leaves us time to adapt. Whether future conditions will sustain that margin is an important question, but a question for another day. For now, it is enough to be thankful we have had the space to find solutions that have kept our country remarkably safe despite the threats to us.

On this sad anniversary for our country, let us mourn the people, the freedom, and the innocence we lost on September 11th, 2001. But let us also be proud of the vitality of our people and the institutions of our government. For all our mistakes, we have done passably well. And to America's enemies -- al Qaeda and others -- that should be as worrying as what Rommel observed in the aftermath of the battle at Kasserine Pass.

When Texas governor George W. Bush began to gather his network of informal national security and foreign policy advisors around him in 1999, neither he nor they initially had much to say about nation building. Bush himself certainly seemed disinclined to raze enemy countries and then spend decades and billions reshaping them. Rather, he spoke of a more "modest" and humble American stance in the world. Condoleezza Rice, who led the small team of advisors whom she had dubbed the Vulcans, went further when she articulated a decidedly negative view of nation building in a major article that appeared in the January 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs.

I was a Vulcan. I was, in other words, one of the original members of a group of eight who advised Bush on foreign and national security policy issues as he made his first run for the White House.

Read the rest of the article here.

When drama fills the headlines, reason deserts the pundits. Here are just a few thoughts:

1. Egypt says nothing about Obama. The United States had no control over events in Egypt. It is silly to proclaim that events in Egypt proved Obama either feckless or brilliant in his foreign policy. All he could do is watch, make carefully-moderated public statements, and place a few private phone calls. Making that a test of his foreign policy acumen is like judging the Super Bowl by the coin toss. Obama's foreign policy mettle is tested on issues in which he actually has a role to play, like the war in Afghanistan.

2. If Obama gets any credit, so does Bush. Obama rightly sided (albeit cautiously) with the protesters. His pro-democracy rhetoric would have been stupendously hypocritical and opportunistic if George W. Bush hadn't given Obama legs to stand on. Bush reversed decades of U.S. foreign policy by publicly criticizing Egypt and Saudi Arabia for their political oppression. Obama sounded more plausible as a result when he threw Mubarak under the bus and reached out a hand to the protesters.

3. Despite the basic goodness of people rallying against autocracy and corruption, their movement won't seamlessly usher in a golden age of good governance. Recent pro-democracy movements across the developing world are largely discouraging about the long-term effects of such popular outbursts.

• The Georgian government never succeeded in exercising full control over its territory after the 2003 Rose Revolution. Disputes with breakaway regions helped trigged the 2008 war with Russia, which hobbled Georgian sovereignty.

• Six years after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine toppled Viktor Yanukovych for corruption and fraud, Ukrainians reelected him.

• The 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon created an ephemeral sense of national unity that vanished in 2007. The national assembly couldn't agree on a President, the office went vacant, violence erupted in Beirut, and the country veered towards civil war. A national unity government was patched together in 2008. It collapsed last month.

• The 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan installed Kurmanbek Bakiyev as President on a platform of reform and clean government. Bakiyev was as bad as his predecessor. He faced down violent protests in 2007, rigged his reelection in 2009, and finally caved to more protests and violence when he fled the country in 2010.

4. Be careful what you ask for. Every day I expected The Onion to run the headline, "Egyptians Demand Military Rule," because that, for now, is exactly what they have got. Democracy is possible, contrary to cultural determinists who think Arabs are barred by the laws of history from self-government -- but neither is it inevitable, or even particularly easy. The eventual emergence of good government and democratic elections would be a better test of Obama's handling of Egypt than parsing his utterances of the last month.

5. No one knows how the Muslim Brotherhood will react, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Elections have a track record of blunting the hard edge of some revolutionary, illiberal movements (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), and empowering others (the Nazis). The Brotherhood's greater freedom of action in the post-Mubarak Egypt is something to watch closely. The Brotherhood's choices in the coming months and years will be more important to Egypt and the Middle East than the toppling of one autocrat. They may be a bellwether for political Islamist movements across the world.

6. James Clapper should resign.

The conventional wisdom about the pre-holiday lame duck Senate debate of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is that Republican leaders lost control of a bitterly divided caucus, handing President Obama a much-needed foreign-policy victory.

The reality, however, is closer to the view put forth by Senator Bob Corker, who, during the final floor debate prior to ratification, termed New START the "Nuclear Modernization and Missile Defense Act of 2010."

Although many key Republicans, including Sens. Jon Kyl, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and minority leader Mitch McConnell, ended up voting against ratification, the work they did behind the scenes in the months and weeks prior to the vote vastly improved the U.S. strategic situation post-ratification.

New START itself is a rather minor arms control agreement, with only minimal cuts to U.S. and Russian nuclear forces. Therefore much of the debate about the treaty was about ancillary issues the Russians attempted to bring into the treaty or about strategic issues not addressed by the treaty.

In two of these areas, Sen. Kyl and his colleagues did yeoman's work by prodding the administration to improve nuclear and missile defense policy. Through months of negotiations, he extracted a commitment from the Obama administration to provide $84.1 billion of funding over the next ten years to ensure that the aging U.S. nuclear stockpile is modernized. And during the final days of the Senate debate, Sen. Kyl, joined by Sen. McCain and others, obtained assurances from Obama regarding his long-term commitment to develop effective missile defenses.

Neither item may seem like a concession, given that both actions are fully in line with positions taken by previous administrations of both political parties.

Read on

With former President George W. Bush's memoir being released today, Steve Walt yesterday launched a preemptive strike against the Bush record. In this article, my fellow Foreign Policy blogger attempts to blame Bush for just about everything that went wrong in the last decade, while crediting Bush with nothing that went right. One suspects that Walt might even hold Bush responsible for the Texas Rangers' recent loss in the World Series -- according to Walt, as owner of the Rangers, Bush "wasn't particularly good at that job either."

Walt offers up a 14-point indictment against Bush (perhaps it's a sign of how animated some Bush opponents get that even the realists start imitating Woodrow Wilson, at least when it comes to writing 14-point documents). The more spurious accusations merit responses -- and the omissions bear noting as well:

• Walt singles out the Bush administration for "insufficient attention" and a "cavalier attitude" towards Osama bin Laden and terrorism in the eight months before the September 11th attacks, and notes accusingly that "9/11 happened on Bush's watch, and the buck stops at his desk." Yet Walt fails to mention the Clinton administration's preceding eight years of relative inattention to the threat from bin Laden (including missed opportunities to kill or capture him). Nor does Walt give Bush any credit for one of his administration's signal achievements in the 7.5 years following September 11th: protecting the United States from any further large-scale terror attack.
• He calls the "Global War on Terror" a "rhetorical catastrophe" because of the vagueness of the term "terrorism" and the purported inaccuracy of the term "war," since terrorism allegedly is not a "military problem." This ignores the fact that the Bush administration deliberately made the strategic choice to focus on "terror" precisely to make clear that the conflict was not with Islam itself -- a matter of first-order importance in the battle of ideas. Of course the administration knew that terrorism is just a tactic, and that this didn't mean a new U.S. campaign in Northern Ireland or Sri Lanka. Moreover, both Walt and the Bush White House would agree that the conflict demanded stepped-up intelligence efforts, new law enforcement tools, domestic security measures, and multilateral cooperation - all of which the Bush administration embraced. But al Qaeda also declared war on the United States and followed through with the bloodiest act of war on U.S. soil in our history, under the sponsorship and protection of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. If that doesn't qualify as a "military problem," then nothing does.
• He accuses Bush of "sabotaging peace in the Middle East," while neglecting to mention that Bush was the first president to declare that official U.S. policy supports the creation of a Palestinian state. This was a paradigm shift in the U.S. posture, a notable affirmation of Palestinian aspirations, and continues to be a key pillar of the otherwise-troubled peace process today. Moreover, Bush articulated another uncomfortable truth necessary to the cause of peace: Peace would not be possible as long as the Palestinian leadership (read: Yasir Arafat) was compromised by support of terrorism and unaccountability to the Palestinian people. For all of his limitations, current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is a more credible and capable negotiating partner in helping build a viable Palestinian state -- a vindication of Bush's insight.
• Walt cites the Bush administration's refusal to recognize the Hamas victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections as evidence of a cynical, selective approach to democracy. But an essential pillar of democracy is the renunciation of terrorism and peaceful participation in the political process -- terms which Hamas refused to embrace, and the reason why the EU and the Obama administration don't recognize the Hamas government either.
• He says that Bush administration policies "unwittingly encouraged" nuclear proliferation by North Korea and Iran under the myth that if only more concessions and inducements had been offered by the United States, Pyongyang and Tehran would have disavowed their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Yet this implicitly ascribes an unrealistic omnipotence to the United States (i.e. U.S. actions are the most important factor in determining other nation's behavior) and ignores several other crucial variables, such as the serious flaws in the Clinton administration's 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea; the fact that both the North Korean and Iranian regimes decided to pursue nukes in part to divert domestic attention from their own misrule and to assert their power in their respective regions; or the many concessions and incentives the Bush administration did offer in both cases. Not to mention that any discussion of the Bush record on non-proliferation needs to include the significant success of persuading Libya to give up its nuclear program.
• And yes, no litany of accusations against Bush would be complete without blaming him for the global financial crisis (though to be fair, Walt admits that Bush "does not deserve all the blame," just most of it). Again, what Walt fails to mention is telling, including factors such as the Clinton administration's irresponsible expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act and sub-prime mortgage lending, the categorical blockage by Congressional Democrats of any efforts to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the longstanding bipartisan support for the Fed's easy money policies. Scholars will no doubt spend decades trying to understand the causes of the economic crisis, and few actors, including the Bush administration, will emerge faultless. But any serious effort to understand the crisis needs to go beyond simplistic polemics.

And what of Walt's omissions? Well, any fair assessment of President Bush's record also needs to take into account his robust support for free trade (including the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and increasing the number of bilateral FTAs from three to 14); his multilateral efforts to combat WMD proliferation through the Proliferation Security Initiative; his landmark development policies such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the $15 billion committed to HIV/AIDS relief, and indispensable support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; and especially Bush's successful management of great power relations such that the United States pulled off two delicate trifectas of solid relations with Asian powers Japan, China, and India, and (by his second term) with European power centers France, Germany, and Britain.

Perhaps most telling is a fact that Walt concedes, and laments: the significant number of Bush administration policies and strategies that the Obama administration has adopted. If this continues to be the case, then critics of the Bush administration record will have to shift their critique to U.S. foreign policy in general.

How did Obama do in his Iraq speech on those Four Essential Items I was tracking? Better than I feared, but not as well as I hoped.

Gimmickry vs. Candor? He did not say "mission accomplished" but he did say mission completed and responsibility met (specifically: "The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given" and "we have met our responsibility"). The emphasis is all on what has been done and not on what still needs to be done. If what remains to be done is light and easy, the speech is strong enough to sustain it. But the speech did not prepare Americans for any hard and dangerous  tasks to come in Iraq.

The gestures towards reality -- "Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission" -- felt like nothing more than gestures. And the breezy confidence -- "But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals. Iraqis are a proud people. They have rejected sectarian war, and they have no interest in endless destruction. They understand that, in the end, only Iraqis can resolve their differences and police their streets"  -- seemed disconnected from the real challenges still confronting the Iraqi people, and therefore the United States.

Defining the mission going forward? The way forward seemed dotted with hopes and aspirations -- a vague commitment to "support Iraq as it strengthens its government, resolves political disputes, resettles those displaced by war, and builds ties with the region and the world" -- rather than with hard-headed strategies for achieving realistic goals. He also doubled down on the promise that all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year, leaving no flexibility for responding to the expected Iraqi request for a post-2011 American presence.

Honesty about what worked and what hasn't? Without saying it directly, the entire speech was an acknowledgment that the surge had worked. In that sense, it was implicitly honest. But Obama avoided saying it, and indeed avoided most of the expected explicit discussion of his own record on Iraq. He reminded the audience that he had opposed the war initially, but left unmentioned that he had opposed the surge on which all that he had accomplished depended. More importantly, he did not discuss at all the failure of the "timetable as leverage" tactic -- his primary contribution to Iraq strategy and the centerpiece of his Afghanistan strategy.

He did mention President Bush in a fairly positive light and I am willing to believe that his handlers thought they offered a gracious gesture. Certainly his call to "turn the page" on Iraq debates had a statesmanlike ring to it, even if on the very next page he leveled a campaign-theme attack line about money spent in Iraq not being available to be spent at home. Yet on balance, I am willing to credit this as his most gracious Iraq speech ever.

Speaking to the toughest audiences, those who lost loved ones? His peroration was moving and well delivered. He improved on the radio address by spending more time talking about  military honor and less time talking about military compensation. But he also spent all of his time talking to and about the troops that had left Iraq rather than the troops that remained. I think they and their families would have appreciated a bit more explanation of why it is worth running the risks they must run, and bearing the burden they continue to carry.

Perhaps this will be the last speech he gives on Iraq in 18 months. If Iraq steadily improves, he may not need to say much more. If Iraqis consistently stand up, Americans can consistently stand down. If so, then this will be remembered as his best Iraq speech. But if the gains thus far in Iraq suffer serious setbacks and if the American military are obliged to do more than ferry equipment out of theater, this speech may be remembered as an ill-starred spiking of a ball that is very much still in play.

President Obama's West Point speech on Saturday provides a great example of the structural continuities in American foreign policy. As president and commander-in-chief, Obama now embraces and owns policies that he previously eschewed. For example, after running his campaign denouncing the Iraq War and doubting the surge, he is now essentially declaring Iraq a victory ("this is what success looks like: an Iraq that provides no safe-haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.") After spending much of his first year in office downplaying if not ignoring democracy and human rights promotion, he is now making democracy and human rights promotion one of the four pillars of his national security strategy. After previously rhetorically distancing himself from American exceptionalism, he now says that a "fundamental part of our strategy is America's support for those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding."

In short, through a combination of the burdens and responsibilities of office, prevailing geopolitical realities, the deep cultural currents of U.S. foreign policy, the bureaucratic systems that reinforce those cultural currents, and the crucible of learning that takes place every day in the toughest job in the world, the President Obama of today acts and sounds considerably different than the one elected in November 2008. (John Hinderaker over at Powerline -- a site never hesitant to criticize the Obama administration -- makes a similar favorable observation about the speech and its essential continuity with U.S. foreign policy). This is not at all to say that his foreign policy is identical to that of his predecessors -- in important ways it does differ, and as I have written elsewhere, often not for the better -- but only to point out that truly profound structural changes in American foreign policy are very rare. And generally for good reason.

Some media coverage, such as Peter Baker's New York Times article, attempts to portray the speech as a "repudiation" or at least distancing from the Bush administration's grand strategy, and makes much of the fact that he did not emphasize "unilateral American power" or affirm "pre-emption" or "prevention." Baker is one of the very best, and best-sourced, White House correspondents around, so it may be that his article reflects some additional background conversations with Obama administration staff attempting to advance a particular message. But at least when it comes to the text of the speech, here I think Baker's article overshoots. 

For example, in the midst of discussing the importance of international cooperation, Obama described American leadership in "steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice" -- in other words, a polite way of saying that American power and influence will continue to shape the international order. Or the fact that President Obama did not explicitly affirm the possibility of the preemptive use of force does not mean that his Administration actually rejects it. As historian John Gaddis has shown, since the days of John Quincy Adams (while Secretary of State to James Monroe), American presidents have reserved, and sometimes used, the right to take action against looming threats. Unless President Obama were to explicitly reject the possibility of ever using force in a preemptive or preventive manner to protect the nation (highly unlikely), it will remain an option within American national security doctrine. 

In his speech, President Obama also previewed his soon-to-be-released National Security Strategy, ostensibly built around the four pillars of connecting renewal at home with strength abroad, integrating diplomacy and development, building international cooperation and international institutions, and promoting human rights and democracy. As basic principles, these are sound. Whether they will amount to a coherent strategy (which needs to identify end goals, identify threats or obstacles to those goals, and explain how and why the tenets of the strategy will defeat those threats and overcome those obstacles) remains to be seen, once the NSS document itself is released.

My former White House colleague Pete Wehner has taken up the gauntlet thrown by the provocative leftwing pundit David Corn. Corn listed a number of what he claimed to be unambiguous lies by President Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war and he dared, and then double-dared, anyone to rebut them.

I am not a completely independent observer -- Wehner is a friend and I reviewed his response in draft -- but to my eyes he does a careful and thorough job of demolishing Corn's critique. Of particular value is Wehner's painstaking effort to show how Corn's critique involves cherry-picking intelligence quotes out of context that suit his thesis and ignoring the broad conclusions of those cherry-picked reports or the broader-still findings of the 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD.  

I don't for a minute think that Wehner has put the matter to rest once and for all, however. Even though he convincingly shows that each of Corn's major claims rests on a distortion or outright falsehood, in my experience this business is very much like playing whack-a-mole. The purveyors of the "Bush lied" myth never admit that they have made false claims and never concede when you show their charges to be false. They simply shift the focus a bit and say, "but what about this" and raise a whole new episode.

Nevertheless, I think Wehner has done a service in "re-litigating the past." Democracy flourishes best when there is a healthy marketplace of ideas and the propagation of conspiracy theory myths -- whether it be the "Bush lied" myths or the "9/11 truther" myths or what-have-you -- has a corrosive effect on that marketplace.

Finally, as Wehner himself acknowledges, exposing the myth of "Bush lied" does not whitewash the Iraq story, the truth of which is sobering and painful enough. Some of the key premises on which the Bush administration based the 2002-2003 Iraq policy turned out to be wrong. And the conduct of the war had its share of problems. I think most experienced Bush hands would agree that the administration did not adapt fast enough to the evolving Iraqi insurgency. There are plenty of hard lessons for current and future administrations in the truth about Iraq. There is no need for the policy community to be mired in debating untruths.

Karl Rove is back in the news with his memoirs doing something that he claims the Bush administration did not do vigorously enough: re-litigating the past. I will have more to say when I finish reading the book, but for now I want to talk about one of the highlights flagged in several interviews: Rove's claim that if the administration had known the true extent of Iraq's WMD stockpile and programs it would not have pushed the use of force resolution in October 2002 and invaded in 2003.

This claim leapt out at me because I remember President Bush giving a somewhat different answer a few years ago. For instance, in December 2005 Bush was asked more or less this exact same question and he gave this response:

HUME: Can you say today that if you had known then what you know now about the weapons, that you would have made the same decision.

BUSH: I said it today, and I said it at the last speech I gave. And I've said it throughout the campaign to the American people. I said I made the right decision. Knowing what I know today, I would have still made that decision.

HUME: Now if you had this -- if the weapons had been out of the equation, because the intelligence did not conclude that he had them, it was still the right call?

BUSH: Absolutely.

In a valedictory interview, he was asked this question again and his answer was less dogmatic:

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.

BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.

At some level, of course, this is an impossible hypothetical counter-factual and so there is nothing sinister in the fact that one of Bush's key advisors would give a different answer from the president nor even in the fact that the President would give a different answer at different times. Bush is at work on his own memoirs and so doubtless he is wrestling with this very issue himself and so his views may evolve still further.

And we should not exaggerate the contradictions in these various answers. Both Bush and Rove say that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein and both would say that if Iraq continues on the basically positive trajectory it has been on since the surge decision the war will have been "worth it."

But I think Rove's point is important and basically right. There were good reasons to promote regime change in Iraq and good reasons to oppose it. But the strongest case for the urgency of dealing decisively with Iraq in 2002 hinged on Iraq's WMD arsenal and its pursuit of capabilities to expand that arsenal. Had the true condition of that arsenal (limited) and the true status of the pursuit (ongoing but slower than suspected and put on a somewhat slower track deliberately pending the final collapse of the sanctions regime) been known by the Bush administration, the president's national security team would have pursued other more urgent priorities in the war on terror. And had it been known more widely in Congress, there would not have been such strong bipartisan support for the use of force resolution; all of the major Democratic senators in 2002 with ambitions for the 2004 presidential run supported the use of force resolution because they agreed with the consensus view that Iraq had a formidable WMD arsenal and was seeking to expand it still further. And had it been known more widely in the international community, the argument with our allies would have been over the existence of an Iraqi threat rather than over the best strategy for dealing with it.

There were a few iconoclasts who guessed more accurately the truth about the Iraqi WMD program in 2002, but they were outliers -- not unlike the outliers today who claim that Iran has no nuclear weapons ambitions whatsoever. Then, as now, it would seem quite a gamble to base an entire security strategy on an iconoclastic view that, if wrong, would be disastrously wrong. And, of course, we only know these truths because  the Duelfer report provided the intrusive fact-finding that was impossible while Hussein was in power. The situation in mid-2002 was one of a non-existent inspection regime and a collapsing sanctions regime; those and other dots pointed to the consensus that formed the basis of the Bush policy.

Rove's point is important in one further respect -- it rebuts a core tenet of the most fervent Bush-haters, those who believe that Bush wanted war in Iraq for any number of reasons, none of them having to do with the threat Bush claimed Iraqi WMD posed to the national interest of the United States. Those who think the Iraq war was about some Freudian impulse to best the father, or about seizing Iraqi oil, or about boosting Halliburton's profits, or what-have-you must believe that Rove is wrong -- that Bush would have figured out some other way to generate a war. These canards live on and, in some circles, may even enjoy the status of conventional wisdom. Given those circumstances, Rove is right to litigate the matter again.

On the eve of Groundhog Day, it is worth asking whether President Obama's terrorism policy is facing six more weeks of bitter chill. Obama has been forced to backtrack on several signature initiatives -- the commitment to close Guantanamo by Jan. 19, 2010, the commitment to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in lower Manhattan, and the hounding of Department of Justice lawyers from the Bush era over interrogation-related rulings -- and it has gotten so bad that over at Politico.com they are asking whether Obama's entire terrorism policy is unraveling. It does appear that the triangulation at the heart of Obama's terrorism policy is in trouble, but it is not yet clear what will replace it.

Since the earliest days of his administration, Obama has attempted a deft triangulation: he has rhetorically framed his terrorism policy as a bold departure from the Bush era, but he has kept the lion's share of the terrorism policy infrastructure that was operative under the second-term Bush administration. The "change" was dramatized with high-profile moves drenched in symbolism -- the promise to close Guantanamo, the promise to investigate "abuses" from the Bush era, the release of inflammatory material over the objections of his CIA director, or the insistence on talking about terrorism with the language of law enforcement rather than war. The "continuity" was played down with quiet steps, like using Bush era arguments against habeas corpus or defending military commissions, and less quiet steps like a robust Predator drone strike campaign.

The triangulation worked as long as the media played along, letting Obama's caricature of Bush era policies go unchallenged, rebutting the occasional critique from conservatives like Vice President Cheney by listing areas of continuity, and crediting the symbolic changes with all sorts of positive results like the improvement in global polling on America's reputation.

This triangulation survived the nicks of a number of self-inflicted wounds, most notably the early recognition that the Guantanamo promise had been naïve. But it does not look like it will survive the harsh klieg light attention paid to Obama's terrorism policy in the wake of the Underwear Bomber.

The triangulation depended on Obama having found the Goldilocks strategy -- keeping all the good parts of Bush policies and making changes that only improve, without undermining, those policies. Obama, in reversing course on so many issues, is now implicitly conceding that the counter-terrorism porridge he had been serving was most definitely not "just right."  Indeed, the evidence suggests the contrary -- that the promulgation of "treat terrorism as a law enforcement rather than a war problem" produced the very problems Cheney and others worried about.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden documents several vital errors.  First, the rush to Mirandize the Underwear Bomber, and the decision to do so without any input from responsible authorities, deprived officials of the chance to do a meaningful interrogation of the captured terrorist. Valuable and time-sensitive intelligence was lost, and is likely unrecoverable.  Second, the Obama administration had failed to stand up the new interrogation unit it claimed was needed to replace the "flawed" Bush approach,  and the Obama team had not even anticipated that the unit might be needed to interrogate terrorists caught on U.S. soil.

More remarkably, current NCTC Director Michael Leiter revealed in congressional testimony another vital error: in the days prior to the terrorist attack, the analysis units responsible for "connecting the dots" were distracted by the need to implement a 20 percent reduction-in-force -- cuts so deep that they would disrupt the effectiveness of any bureaucratic organization, at least temporarily.  The Obama administration has quietly rescinded those cuts and is instead beefing up the analytic capability, but not before the damage to triangulation politics has been done.

To my ear, the most telling indication of the collapse of the triangulation comes from the changed tone from congressional "moderates," centrist Democrats and Republicans who form the base for this Goldilocks approach. On the Democratic side, Senator Feinstein has been subtly but insistently messaging a wake-up call in the form of a warning that more terrorist attacks are in the offing.  On the Republican side, Senator Collins issued a blistering attack on Obama's terrorism policy.

If Obama has lost Feinstein and Collins, he has lost the political props of triangulation.  But the overall political damage to the president is not fatal for the simple reason that the national security damage done by the policies is not yet irreversible.  The administration has taken some good remedial steps, such as coming clean on the botched interrogation effort, rescinding the NCTC cuts, and changing the venue for the KSM trial.

Moreover, there is reason to hope that the Obama administration is now more focused on uncovering and preventing the next attack than in scoring partisan points with its witch hunts into Bush administration "missteps."

In this hopeful scenario, the Underwear Bomber is a "bing" moment enabling Obama to avoid the other Groundhog Day curse: repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

A story out of Pakistan today shows that the rhetorical/policy trimming that marred President Obama's Afghan escalation speech has done some damage to the prospects for the policy. The bottom line: the Pakistanis are not doing what we need them to do because they interpreted the escalation-plus-timeline as an indication of Obama's irresolution. Or, as the reporter put it:

The core reason for Pakistan's imperviousness is its scant faith in the Obama troop surge, and what Pakistan sees as the need to position itself for a regional realignment in Afghanistan once American forces begin to leave."

This story provides a timely, if unfortunate, rebuttal to the president's own efforts at post-speech spin control. Obama went on "60 Minutes" on Sunday to offer a vigorous defense of the West Pont speech.

What struck me was this exchange recorded in the transcript:

KROFT: The West Point speech was greeted it was a great deal of confusion.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I disagree with that statement.

KROFT: You do?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I absolutely do. 40 million people watched it. And I think a whole bunch of people understood what we intend to do.

KROFT: But it raised a lot of questions. Some people thought it was contradictory. That's a fair criticism.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I don't think it's a fair criticism. The situation in Afghanistan is complex, and so people who are looking for simple black and white answers won't get them. And the speech wasn't designed to give those black and white answers.

Part of my job here, I believe, is to make sure that the American people understand what we're getting into. What we where we've been and where we're going. And they're not simple. I think that what you may be referring to is the fact that on the one hand I said, "We're gonna be sending in additional troops now." On the other hand, "By July 2011, we're gonna move into a transition phase where we're drawing out troops down."

KROFT: Right.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: There shouldn't be anything confusing about that.

KROFT: Well--

PRESIDENT OBAMA: First of all, that's something that we did in Iraq. And we executed over the last two years in Iraq. So, I think the American people are familiar with the idea of a surge.

In terms of the rationale for doing it, we don't have an Afghan military right now, security force, that can stabilize the country. If we are effective over the next two years, by putting in these additional troops -- clearing enough space and time for the Afghan security forces to get set up in an effective way -- that then frees us up to transition into a place where we can start drawing down.

The alternative is to stand pat where we are, in which you never have a stable Afghan security force. And we are potentially signed up for being in Afghanistan for the next decade.

This is remarkable and a bit scary, because Obama's defense is so fundamentally misleading. It is, if you will forgive the historical reference, a moment when President Obama channels the predecessor he usually avoids talking about, the one who answered a direct question with the memorable line: "It depends on what the meaning of the word is is."

For let's concede at the outset that President Obama, like President Clinton, may be technically correct. Because so many people watched the speech, and even more heard about the speech, it is almost a statistical certainty that "a whole bunch of people understood what [the Obama administration] intended to do," especially if we accept a conventional interpretation of "whole bunch" to be in the hundreds, thousands, or even ten thousands.

But Kroft's leading question is more honest than Obama's response was, because the confusion arising out of Obama's "deadline" was far, far more consequential than the statistical probability that some fraction of the audience got it.  For days after the speech, administration officials offered contradictory clarifications, with Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen clearly suggesting that the deadline was a token target that would not drive the withdrawal schedule and spokesman Gibbs talking about the deadline as "etched in stone."

The policy compromise embodied in the speech and the underlying policy decision was in fact intended to square a number of circles. It was an escalation-with-a-prearranged-deadline-for-beginning-a-withdrawal-but-vagueness-about-how-fast-and-the-conditions-under-which-the-subsequent-withdrawal-would-happen sort of compromise.

It was designed to let administration hawks say we are in this war to win it and administration doves to say that we are not making an open-ended commitment to win this war. 

It was designed to split Obama's opposition so that, as has happened, some Republicans praised the escalation part and other Republicans excoriated the artificial deadline part, and some anti-war Democrats bit their tongues over the escalation and clung bitterly to the artificial deadline while others saw the artificial deadline as a fiction and loudly denounced the escalation.

It was designed to confuse domestic political enemies and it achieved that goal. An unintended consequence was that it also confused international allies, as the Pakistan story makes clear. Reasonable people can debate whether President Obama had better options that were less confusing. Reasonable people can debate whether the benefits of the confusion outweigh the costs of the confusion. Reasonable people will conclude -- and I am one of them -- that on balance the speech and the underlying policy position were worth supporting.

But -- and here is the absolutely crucial part -- no reality-based observer can pretend that the speech and the underlying policy was not confusing. To pretend otherwise is either to peddle absurd spin or, worse, to be so infected with a bunker mentality that one is operating in a bubble.  

As a general rule, I don't like media interpretations that reduce to "the president and the White House team are in a fantasy world bubble." In my experience, that allegation has been leveled many times when I know for a fact that it has been untrue. But if the administration really believes that the "deadline" that is not really a deadline has not produced confusion at home and abroad, then I am hard-pressed to come up with explanations that do not mention bubbles.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Our sister blog, The Cable, reads the tea leaves and has concluded that President Obama has made his decision on Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 and is preparing for a roll-out sometime around the 19th or 20th of November. Senior officials are clearing their schedules, giving heads-up to allies, and generally girding their loins for a major public relations push. But a push for what?

McClatchey reports that, as expected, the president will split the difference between his warring advisors. He will embrace the counterinsurgency approach recommended by General McChrystal and other military advisors. He will reject the narrower approach favored by Vice President Biden and other political advisors. But he will not authorize the upper-bound of military resources McChrystal requested. If the McClatchey report is accurate, the final choice comes close to resembling the option dubbed "McChrystal light," but probably not light enough to avoid a political battle with the anti-war faction at home.

As slow and painful as the review process has been, the hard part is just beginning and the Obama team seems fully aware of this. According to the McClatchey report:

Administration officials also want time to launch a public relations offensive to convince an increasingly skeptical public and a wary Democratic Congress -- which must agree to fund the administration's plan -- that the war, now in its ninth year and inflicting rising casualties, is one of "necessity," as Obama said earlier this year.

"This is not going to be an easy sell, especially with the fight over health care and the (Democratic) party's losses" of the governors' mansions in New Jersey and Virginia last week, said one official.

Persuading the public to support his new strategy will be hard, and the clumsy review process has made it harder.  But it is not impossible.  President Bush faced far more daunting political odds in January 2007 when he opted for the Iraq surge. Some of the lessons the Bush team learned could be of value to the Obama team as they plan their roll-out:

• The media will focus on the numbers, but the President should focus on explaining the strategy and demonstrating his commitment to seeing it through because the numbers are likely to change. President Bush opted for the upper-most bound of the recommended surge of troops -- 5 Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) -- and yet when General Petraeus took over, he actually requested additional troops beyond those. Because Bush never publicly discussed the 5 BCT surge as the "uppermost bound," he could finesse these additional requests without triggering whole new "surge debates" each time. Obama should be careful not to paint this as the "last and final time we will send additional troops." That may be his fervent hope, but he should not handcuff himself to a hope.
• The president will need a convincing answer for why he is authorizing a smaller surge than McChrystal requested. It is the president's call to make, but the experience of the Iraq war is a painful one in this regard. Secretary Rumsfeld still faces scathing criticism for trimming the troop requests of the original invasion -- for appearing to have authorized a bit less than needed rather than a bit more than was required. Obama must persuade the public not to view him as a latter-day Rumsfeld.
• The president and his political appointees, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, should carry the lion's share of the political water in persuading Congress and the American public. But they cannot do it alone, because polls indicate that the public trusts the military far more than the president to "make the major decisions on overall military strategy and the number of troops needed" -- by a whopping 62-25 percent spread. That means that Obama will need General McChrystal to validate publicly Obama's decision, just as General Petraeus validated publicly Bush's surge decision. The Obama team must be ready to call the critics to account if the anti-war faction attempts to smear McChrystal the way they tried to smear Petraeus. As much as possible, the generals should be left to focus on the military fight and kept out of the political fight.
• The president should spend the political capital to preserve bipartisan support for the new strategy. Unfortunately, support for the Iraq surge came down to the slimmest of Republican-only margins (plus Senator Lieberman). Here Obama has a decided advantage and he should exploit it. Republicans are far more committed to a robust approach in Afghanistan than were Democrats in Iraq and Obama could bring them on board. To do so, he should drop the partisan trashing of the previous administration and finally deliver on his campaign promise to seek a genuine partnership with Republicans. On this issue, he will need robust support from the center and the right and he should take the requisite steps to secure it.
• The president will have to accept the unfairness of the media, which will scrutinize his proposal with excruciating rigor while giving a breezy pass to the alternative strategies promoted by his critics. The media never rigorously evaluated the proposals of the Iraq surge critics and so the political debate over the surge was never on a level playing field.  President Obama and his team should expect the same kind of treatment, and indeed may be facing the same chorus of critics. The opponents of the old Iraq surge are girding their loins to fight a new Afghan surge. The Obama team must do more than simply whine about it. Instead, they must take upon themselves responsibility for explaining the myriad problems with off-shore counter-terrorism, McChrystal Super Light, or any of the other alternatives that arm-chair generals promote. By and large, the watchdog media will likely give the critics a free pass.

Of course, the most important lesson is the most obvious one: pick the right strategy. President Bush was able to prevail politically over the surge opponents because, at the end of the day, the surge produced dramatic results on the ground. Had the surge not reversed the trajectory in Iraq, then no amount of domestic political resolve could have saved it.

If President Obama's choice is a similarly wise one, and if he devotes the concentrated effort to explaining his choice to a skeptical Congress and American public, Obama can reverse his Afghan slide. If not, our wartime Commander-in-Chief will face even more daunting decisions down the road.

NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

By Christian Brose

I asked earlier this week what the Bush administration got right and wrong, and what Obama (and the rest of us) should take away. This discussion will continue I'm sure, but one theme has emerged that's worth commenting on. It's the idea that the Bush administration actually got many of the most important points right, but then through bad execution, partisan hubris, internal sectarian fighting, ethically-dubious policies, or just the merciless intervention of events, what was more or less right in theory failed in practice.

Kori offers a good example on defense transformation:

The administration billed transformation as the way it would cut defense costs: skip a generation of weapons, find ways to substitute technology for personnel-intensive tasks, and promote innovators. If a battalion now has the accurate firepower a brigade used to, we should be able to find savings. But the Administration didn't. 

This is undoubtedly right. Other policies, however, were not just flawed in their implementation; they were flawed by design, and seeing errors only of execution lets the administration off too easy.

Philip sees the focus on democracy as one.

Most of the rhetoric of democratization was too narrow in the way it spoke to the issues that plague modern societies. Responding to wrenching, often horrifying struggles, the administration seemed to offer up answers that evoked generic recipes from America's political cookbook.

This dovetails with the question Peter raises about the "war of ideas."

While the Bush Administration deserves credit for seeking the struggle against Al Qaeda and the related terrorist network in a holistic sense, and not narrowly in military or in non-military terms, it is a sad fact that there was only modest progress in the war of ideas portion of the struggle. The President and many of his advisors rightly understood the problem and worked hard to advance the effort....

For whatever reason -- and I would argue that the reason was not lack of understanding -- we have left too much on the to-do list in this area for the Obama team. 

Here I think Peter's being a bit too generous. The "war of ideas" was for too long flawed as an idea, not just in the execution of it.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the administration cast the so-called "war on terror" as a "war of ideas," but for a majority of the time thereafter, conceived of it as public diplomacy. The problem with this is that public diplomacy is about explaining America, its values, and its policies to the world -- in short, trying to get people to like us. A worthy and necessary idea that, but when it comes to fighting Al-Qaeda, a misplaced one. Getting people to like us isn't the point. The point is stopping people from wanting to kill us. That's counter-radicalization, and it's not done through jazz concerts in embassies, well-written op-eds, and pressing the flesh and kissing babies on foreign trips. It's done by giving the angry young men who Al-Qaeda preys upon real alternatives to extremism. I'm still not sure there's a strategy to really do that broadly even now.

Broader still is the question of whether the administration was correct to treat the "war on terror" as the new organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. I'd argue that was another concept flawed in its design. In a world of failing states, rising and resurgent great powers, and globalization going off the rails, defining terrorism as the one issue around which our national efforts would revolve doesn't work. Indeed, what we have to accept, and what I think the Bush administration never fully did, is that there is no One Big Thing in our world today, a la the containment of communism, that can organize all of our foreign policy. That's just not the kind of world we live in today.

Where the question of execution flaws versus design flaws really rings true, I think, is in Bush's second term, where real changes were undertaken to the designs of many policies -- changes that, to me, were for the better; but to, say, John Bolton ... well, not so much. Either way, by then it was already mostly too late. America and the world had moved beyond the administration. And the great degree of continuity that will likely exist between Bush and Obama will be mistaken by many people for change, whether you believe in it or not.

And that, with respect to Jacob Weisberg, is for me the real Bush tragedy -- the sense of missed opportunity, of how far too often the administration's own actions set back the cause of the very ideas it correctly championed, and how by the time it rightly shifted course, it was mostly too late.

Iraq, thankfully, is turning around. But Afghanistan is an open question. North Korea has a nuclear weapon. Iran is on the doorstep. The window for a two-state solution is smaller. Liberty is a dirty word to many people, even many liberals. Talk of good governance, as Philip points out, is tainted by prisoner abuse. Free trade has become synonymous with rising inequality and financial calamity. And after one of the most self-proclaimed idealistic presidencies in recent memory, our public discourse is making a fetish out of pragmatism.

This judgment would seem harsh, were it not for the fact that it is based only on the very goals and standards that we set for ourselves.