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A two-fer:

What Goes Around, Comes Around
The Plame kerfuffle has made hypocrites of just about everyone:

The Republicans who drafted and proposed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in the early days of the Reagan administration, in a vain attempt to end the career of CIA defector Philip Agee, could not have known that their hasty legislation would one day paralyze the workings of a conservative wartime administration. Nor could the eager internationalist Wilsonians who rammed through the 1917 Espionage Act--the most repressive legislation since the Alien and Sedition laws--have expected it to be used against government officials making the case for an overseas military intervention.

But then, who would have thought that liberals and civil libertarians--the New York Times called for the repeal of the IIPA as soon as it was passed, or else for it to be struck down by the courts--would find these same catch-all statutes coming in handy for the embarrassment of Team Bush? The outrage of the left at any infringement of CIA prerogatives is only the least of the ironies in the indictment of Lewis Libby for discussing matters the disclosure of which, in and of itself, appears to have violated no known law.

Mr. Stability
The wrongness of Brent Scowcroft's realism:

Scowcroft, sounding "realist" enough, announces to Goldberg that he is "a cynic about human nature." Well, so would I be, if I were a former partner in the firm of Kissinger Associates who now runs his own consultancy, introducing unpleasant regimes to the corporations that love them. But "cynicism" of this kind often masks a certain naiveté. Those who elected to keep Saddam in power in 1991—Scowcroft prominent among them—imagined that they would keep him in a "box." Instead, Saddam turned the sanctions regime into a racket that hugely augmented his own power and wealth, while the sanctions themselves killed innumerable people and created an immiserated underclass in Iraq that is the source of many of our present woes. And, perhaps more important, would have become the source of many woes. Like all of his co-thinkers, Scowcroft appears to imagine that the Saddam regime would just have continued, in its cynical way, providing some version of predictability and stability. Whereas it is as clear as day that the regime was crumbling and would have imploded with ghastly results that would have given many openings to "bad guys." You can say that this has happened anyway, as it has, but realist statecraft often involves the realization that there are no good options. That realization ought to prompt, surely, some reflection on the policy that led to an option-free outcome. That was exactly the mistake that the "realists" made with the Iran of the shah, whose implosion came to them as if out of a clear blue sky.

Posted by Bill at November 7, 2005 08:11 AM | TrackBack (4)

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