A remarkably fatuous argument. Surely it was constructed as part of an ironical lampoon of the FP analysis community, yes?
So, if I follow the logic of your thinking, if we hadn't foolishly invaded Iraq in 2003, but, given Saddam's predilections and the endemic complications of the region, we had been required to do so a few years latter, of course only in accordance with principles you judged legitimate, that that war, because it wasn't conceived by fools, would have gone swimmingly and no insurgency would have dared arise. In other words, insurgencies only happen to bad people.
Likewise, again, if I grasp your line of reasoning here, if we hadn't screwed the pooch in Tora Bora but rather had delivered unto OBL on those windswept rocks the full reckoning he deserved, then Islamic radicalism and its necessary dependency on asymmetric warfare and adjunct affiliation with Taliban-like fundamentalism would have vanished with him. In other words, jihad and its appurtenances only happen to bad people.
I now understand your enthusiastic embrace of Obama: the comfort of history and human nature re-imagined not to express the things that are but rather the things we wish had been. It's all so simple.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
My catty response to Walt, a real lefty foreign policy guy, who wrote a critique of COIN [which I myself have certainly done] based on assumptions that were absurdly simplistic. I guess this is his way of saying that Obama wouldn't be making such a mess of his erstwhile commitment to the Afghan effort if there were no Afghan effort to make a mess of - ie if he's making mistakes that's only because Bush created an environment where those mistakes could be made, therefore, in a sense, the mistakes don't really exist. I can't wait to tell my ex-wife that I don't owe her alimony because if we had never been married I could never have cheated on her.
