George Packer on Karl Rove’s departure

by | Aug 15, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America

Over at the New Yorker’s blog, George Packer (whose December 2006 piece played a big part in bringing counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen to prominence) is reflecting on Karl Rove’s departure from the White House at the end of this month:

Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an Administration official who genuinely wanted to hear my account of why the Iraq war has gone so badly.

In a word, I said, “politics.” At every turn, the White House has tried to use the war, and the larger war on terror, to consolidate power, to reward ideological and political loyalists, to win electoral advantage, to push the Democrats into a corner, to divide the country into patriots and defeatists. President Bush insisted on pursuing a highly partisan domestic agenda rather than unite the country around the war in the spirit of F.D.R. (who said that “Doctor New Deal” had been replaced by “Doctor Win the War”). So many disastrous wartime decisions can be traced back to the original sin: policy mattered less than politics. The message in Washington was more real than anything happening in Iraq…

The Rove approach to governing helped lose Iraq. That may be the most enduring legacy of this supposed political genius.

Afghanistan: glass half empty or half full?

by | Aug 15, 2007 | Conflict and security, Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa

My CIC colleague Barney Rubin has an excellent post this morning comparing the recent New York Times and Wall Street Journal [subscribers only, annoyingly] op-eds on Afghanistan, which have sharply divergent perspectives: broadly speaking, half empty and half full respectively. (See also Barney’s mostly approving discussion yesterday of the NYT article.)

But, Barney argues, the half empty / half full metaphor misses the point. The problem with it, he implies, is that the kind of change needed is a transformation that either does or does not take place, and which is therefore not well captured by an incremental ‘steps in the right direction’ image like that of a half full or empty glass.

“We are in Afghanistan to achieve some vital objectives. If we fail to achieve them, no one will give us an ‘A’ for effort.”

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