May 20, 2004

Gaddis at the CFR

A must-read Q&A with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis.

I won't excerpt much here. Do go read the whole thing.

But do note how Gaddis punctures much of the hyperbole surrounding the September 2002 NSS (that it celebrated radical, unilateral preemptive gunslinging with gross abandon):

"It was also interesting for a reason that has been largely forgotten in the wake of Iraq events, and that was the extent to which it was multilateral in character. There was a surprising amount about multilateralism in this document. It was quite clear--the document made it very clear that, if multilateral action is not possible, the United States will proceed unilaterally. And that is what has gotten most of the attention. But the intent was to try to build an international consensus in support of going after both terrorists and tyrants, and to do this on a multilateral basis. That was the original conception. And pre-emption was the novelty that was here, because this was something that had not been visible--it was never absent, but it was not visible in our strategies during the Cold War."

Later, on another topic, a questioner (an old boss!) queries:

QUESTIONER: James Sitrick, Coudert Brothers. You said your problem was not with the grand strategy, but that there seemed to be too little thinking about what to do when the dog caught the car afterwards.

"The other is what seems to me to be a gap that is developing between the attitudes of the civilian leadership in the Pentagon and the professional military. And we only see glimmers of this, but if you watched the testimony of Wolfowitz the other day, or [the testimony of Major] General [Antonio] Taguba and [Under] secretary [of Defense for Intelligence Stephen] Cambone, you see distance between these two. You see signals being misunderstood. You see a different story. You see the military be a lot more candid about what's going on, and saying there are real problems here. And you see less of a tendency on the part of the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. This is not healthy for the civilian leadership in the Pentagon to be at odds with the military leadership. And these are the two great grounds for concern that I have about the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the way it's being run right now."

Needless to say, Gaddis has a lot of company on these concerns, B.D. included.