November 01, 2006

Mailbag

An academic who knows Michael Rubin writes in, in reaction to this post where I beat up on Rubin some:

I recently read your post regarding Mike Rubin's attack on the Baker-Hamilton commission. I don't care to get into the nuances of the spat, because Mike has bones to pick and is thoroughly disgusted with a great many people in Washington, as are you. Your comments about Mike's piece are informative and certainly worthy of discussion. But I thought I should correct you on the imputations in your piece that Mike is being hypocritical for criticizing those who do not leave the Green Zone.

I know Michael, not from his time in Washington but because we were at Yale in graduate school together. I do not share his political views, and when I write this I do so not an apologist for his role in the Office of Special Plans or support of the administration.

Mike is no stranger to danger in the region, as even his critics would concede. He spent two summers as an intern in the 'Stans with the State Department in the 1990s, at a time when everyone--including the interns--had security escorts. Mike even grew his beard out and in 1999 or 2000 (I cannot recall now) went on his own to Kabul for research. While there he repeatedly violated the Taliban's requirement that foreigners have Taliban escorts, and, ditching the escorts waiting at his hotel, repeatedly explored Kabul on his own. That was an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do (especially for someone with a last name of "Rubin" on a passport) before 2002. And, as you point out, he spent a considerable amount of time in Kurdistan, as well as a few other places in the region that I won't go into.

All of this is to say that while you're spot on to criticize what he wrote, the pissing match over danger is unnecessary.

Look, as someone who has been to the 'Stans in the '90s (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, to be precise, all of which seemed perfectly safe to me!) and been to places like Peshawar (if memory serves, even sporting a few days stubble!) in that time frame too, I'm not particularly impressed by this recitation above, but regardless, I don't doubt Michael has been in some hairy parts of the world. Good on him! But the fact remains he opened himself up for this criticism, by opining that the Baker-Hamilton Commission folks dropped the ball by not leaving the Green Zone (especially given the Red Zone was much safer when Rubin was living in Iraq). But look, was my correspondent's letter really necessary? After all, I wrote in my post I was not interested in a pissing match about time logged in the Green or Red Zones, and I wasn't trying to paste some chickenhawk label on Michael Rubin. It must be said, however, it takes quite a bit of cheek, especially for someone quite closely associated with the failed war policy that got us into this mess like Michael, to preemptively piss on the Baker-Hamilton Commission--a congressionally mandated bipartisan effort meant to try to find ways to extricate us from this blunder without Iraq capsizing into total chaos (if that's even possible). In the main, that was my point. Sorry if it got a tad garbled amidst the exclamation points, profanity, and heated asides--but I'm only human--and I think Rubin was way out of line (and, btw, some very senior Republican and Democrat foreign policy figures have indicated to me they agree).

Meantime, another reader writes in:

Good stuff on Michael Rubin. I've followed his work for a while now and have long found him to be a deeply silly and superficial man - and an irritating hypocrite to boot. A good friend of mine who shall remain nameless but who occupies a fairly senior position at [ed. note: omitted for privacy] has had stand up rows with him a couple of times and notes that he displays the dangerous combination of intelligence coupled with arrogance and a complete lack of judgement.

Keep up the good work - you may take a bit of a hammering for it from the ideological types, but in my experience most of the real grown-ups (including those who initially supported the war) would find little to disagree with in the points you've made recently.

I know a lot of the "ideological types" aren't big fans of mine. But frankly, I don't give a damn. Having seen how their ideological blinkers and faith-based utopic adventurism have rendered them delusionally incorrigible and indeed radically wedded to profoundly misguided foreign policy prescriptions, I would in no way wish to be affiliated with them ever again, despite the fact that I felt the neo-cons were very much on the side of justice during the Bosnia imbroglio. As I worked in that region for two years during the conflict, and the carnage profoundly disturbed me, I grew to respect various neo-cons who at the time were calling for the U.S. to lift the arms embargo on the Bosniaks and use robust NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb gunners terrorizing so-called 'safe havens' like Sarajevo and Gorazde. But no more. The sane ones, like Fukuyama, have fled. The ones still hanging around the Standard and NRO and such are hugely discredited. Indeed, I consider it quite important we try to keep them far from any policymaking levers going forward. They've well proven they don't deserve our trust or respect.

MORE: David Rieff writes in:

This is absurd. I was frequently in Central Asia in the 90s (as you know) and every foreigner there---and there were many more than your interlocutor seems to think---laughed at the Americans' security precautions and at the sight of young interns going around protected by Marines or DOS guards when there was no danger whatsoever. As for Rubin's intrepid trip to Kabul, again, such venturing out without Talib minders was absolutely standard at the time. We all did it and, as far as I know, nothing untoward befell anyone who did. In any case, the worst that would have happened to Rubin would have been that he would have been expelled (yes, even with his last name---whatever your interlocutor may imagine).

I couldn't agree more.

Posted by Gregory at November 1, 2006 04:27 AM