by Jim Lobe

If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as via Lobe Log

by Jim Lobe

If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as ideological as his deputy, Jackson Diehl (although he did hire Jennifer Rubin), his basic belief in U.S. exceptionalism, his rejection of “retrenchment” and “limitations” (on U.S. power), and, above all, his implicit equation of international “engagement” with military intervention demonstrates how his version of liberal internationalism is so easily co-opted by neo-conservatives:

But the dominant impression among foreign officials [read Hiatt himself] is of a policy of retrenchment. They see a steady reduction in the size of U.S. armed forces that will mean less ability to intervene and influence. They watched Obama withdraw all troops from Iraq, failing to negotiate an agreement that would have preserved some U.S. role in that now-unraveling country. They see him preparing to withdraw most — or all, his spokesman has said; the size of any residual force has not been announced — troops from Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]

Consider the logic of this passage. He seems to be saying (through his unnamed “foreign officials”) that U.S. influence in world affairs is directly correlated with the size of its military and the willingness of its commander-in-chief to use it to intervene in foreign countries. In this very Kaganesque view of the world, hard power is really the only power that really counts. The notion that military power must necessarily rest on a strong economic foundation — or even that “soft power” may also play an important role in gaining influence overseas — seems to him or his foreign officials to be secondary at best.

He goes on to cite the U.S. intervention in Libya as “a case study in the policy of limitations” to which Hiatt now strongly objects.

Obama acted only when pressed by French and British allies and then insisted on withdrawal instead of committing to help a new government establish itself. The predictable result is an unstable country, riven by militias and posing an increasing danger to its neighbors through the spread of arms.

And then, of course, he blames Obama’s failure to intervene decisively in Syria last year for “the degenerat[ion] [of the conflict] into something so savage that it’s no longer clear what, if anything, might help.”

The question these observations raise, of course, is what would Hiatt have Obama do? Does he seriously believe that the U.S., at this juncture in its history, has the resources to “nation-build” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria (presumably Mali now, too) all at the same time? And, given what the U.S. has accomplished with the hundreds of billions of dollars it has devoted to “nation-building” in Afghanistan and Iraq, does he really think that Washington — and especially the Pentagon, which has disbursed the great majority of those funds — even knows how to go about “building nations?” Has he read the reports of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), and his counterpart in Afghanistan? His assumption, of course, is that U.S. intervention — especially military intervention — must automatically make things better for the natives, even if the evidence consistently suggests that the natives may hold a different opinion.

Admittedly, Hiatt does insert a qualification:

During the Cold War, too, Americans fought bitterly over the size of the defense budget, the wisdom of interventions and the morality of supporting unsavory but friendly dictators. Over the decades the country made terrible mistakes overseas. But U.S. engagement and influence also helped to gradually open the world to more democracy and more prosperity.

Again, we see in this passage the assumption that big defense budgets, military or covert interventions, and U.S. support for friendly dictators — as controversial and even mistaken as those policies might have been — have all somehow contributed to a better world, that all’s well that ends well. But I think many Vietnamese, Cambodians, Iranians, Central Americans (especially Guatemalans), Brazilians, Chileans, Congolese, Iraqis, Indonesians, and citizens of other countries who have been on the receiving end of the U.S. defense budget, military or covert intervention, and those unsavory dictators may take exception to that conclusion. Certainly even a cursory reading of Shibley Telhami’s new book, The World Through Arab Eyes, which summarizes more than two decades of his work on public opinion in the Arab world, should disabuse him of how U.S. interventions in that part of the world has been perceived by the people there.

On this subject, Steve Walt’s latest on the “Top Ten Warning Signs of ‘liberal imperialism’”, which offers some sage observations, also notes that:

[L]ike the neocons, liberal imperialists are eager proponents for using American hard power, even in situations where it might easily do more harm than good. The odd-bedfellow combination of their idealism with neocons’ ideology has given us a lot of bad foreign policy over the past decade, especially to intervene militarily in Iraq or nation-build in Afghanistan, and today’s drumbeat to do the same in Syria.

While it’s a bit of a departure from the foreign policy focus of this blog, Jennifer Rubin’s take on the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital controversy is worth reading, if only for comedy value. Virtually all observers across the political spectrum have concluded that the Bain Capital story has inflicted serious [...]]]> via Lobe Log

While it’s a bit of a departure from the foreign policy focus of this blog, Jennifer Rubin’s take on the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital controversy is worth reading, if only for comedy value. Virtually all observers across the political spectrum have concluded that the Bain Capital story has inflicted serious damage to Romney — even Bill Kristol has been pleading with Romney to release more of his tax returns to staunch the bleeding. But while opinions might differ about whether the Bain scandal will prove a fatal blow for Romney or merely a glancing one, Jennifer Rubin seems to be literally the only human being on planet Earth who thinks that the whole hubbub in fact marks a triumph for Romney and a sign of his glorious impending victory.

This is hardly surprising coming from everyone’s favorite neocon propagandist. After all, aside from her strident Likudist politics and her continuing problems with the truth, Rubin’s defining quality is a never-say-die belief in the inevitability of Republican victory reminiscent of Monty Python’s Black Knight. As I wrote shortly after the Washington Post hired Rubin away from Commentary in 2010:

Ever since Obama came to prominence, [Rubin] has spent several posts a day prophesying impending doom for his political fortunes. I actually came to enjoy reading her analysis during the 2008 presidential campaign — every time the McCain-Palin campaign hit another pothole, Rubin would invariably come forward with a strained explanation for why this was only an insignificant setback, and the collapse of the Obama campaign was surely right around the corner. (Like Bill Kristol, I’ve often thought that Rubin would have made an excellent Soviet agitprop officer.) Of course, in recent months Obama’s popularity has indeed sagged — a stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. But even if Obama recovers and successfully serves another six years in office, we can expect Rubin to use her perch at the Post to offer daily predictions of Obama’s impending collapse until the moment he leaves office in 2017.

Part of the problem is that, aside from Israel, Rubin simply doesn’t seem to have much interest in actual policy aside from its impact on the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party. In the last year, she has solidified her status as the most shameless Romney booster in the mainstream media, going to absurd lengths to dump on Romney’s Republican primary rivals in addition to the usual glut of pro-Israel and anti-Obama material. Rubin’s calculation was pretty transparent: by making her Post blog a one-stop shop for Romney campaign spin, she could stand to become his administration’s favored journalist — recipient of all the “exclusive” leaks and interviews that go along with it — in the event of a Romney victory in November.

The irony of the situation is that the Post originally hired Rubin to serve as a voice for conservatives in its opinion section. (For more background on Rubin’s hiring and its disastrous aftermath, see Eric Alterman’s recent piece as well as Ali Gharib’s excellent piece from 2010.) During the course of the primary, however, movement conservatives largely became disgusted with Rubin’s shilling for Romney, correctly perceiving that on all issues other than Israel she is simply a mouthpiece for the Republican party establishment. See, for instance, RedState’s influential Erick Erickson, who lampoons her as the “unofficial official Mouth of Romney” and elaborates:

For the past year, Rubin has done more to hinder the Washington Post in the eyes of conservatives as a place willing to treat conservative views honestly than even hiring Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent, both activist leftists who can, at least, put aside partisanship to occasionally engage in good reporting….When a majority of conservatives have rejected Mitt Romney and the Post’s in-house conservative blogger not only routinely assails all the Republican candidates but Romney (with the caveat that she will praise non-Romney candidates whose actions benefit Romney) and does so while showing no understanding, no matter how nuanced, of basic conservative positions like abortion and life issues, the Washington Post needs to rethink its strategy.

The Post wanted a hack and they got a hack. It’s becoming increasingly clear, however, that Rubin is not the hack they were looking for.