Matt Yglesias

The Hussein Factor

There’s some sensible stuff in this Tom Friedman column, but I don’t think one can condemn those who were chanting “vote McCain not Hussein!” and then let this go by without comment:

So, I was speaking to an Iranian friend about what a mind-bending thing it must be for people in the Middle East to see Americans, seven years after 9/11, electing someone named Barack Hussein Obama as president. America is surely the only nation that could — in the same decade — go to war against a president named Hussein (Saddam of Iraq), threaten to use force against a country whose most revered religious martyr is named Hussein (Iran) and then elect its own president who’s middle-named Hussein.

I mean, look. Obama’s not a Muslim. He’s not a Muslim when people are trying to smear him by suggesting he is, and he’s also not a Muslim when people are trying to suggest that he shares a secret connection with the Islamic world in a good way. Obama’s just not a Muslim. His dad was from a Muslim family, but he didn’t practice the religion and wasn’t involved with raising his son. Meanwhile, the idea that there could be no Hussein-on-Hussein violence is belied by the fact that Iran and Iraq fought a vicious war with each other in the 1980s. Nor was there any love lost in the 1990s between the America-aligned King Hussein of Jordan and Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

Thomas Friedman is Making Me Feel Bad

I’ve written some not-so-nice things about the guy over the years, but this is a pretty great column, eh?

Nevertheless, the part about Sarah Palin not being any more capable of reforming Washington “than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook” did make me wonder if Brookings’ well regarded health and budget expert Henry Aaron is in the DC phone book. I don’t want to put a link to the guy’s information up on the blog, but suffice it to say that the answer is “yes” and given his name (those of us whose family names start with the letter “y” are ultra-sensitive to who among us is walking around with privileged names) he’s very plausibly one of the first 100 listings in the DC phone book, and probably knows a great deal about how we could improve Washington.

That digression aside, the larger point is that Friedman is making a lot of sense.

Blaming NATO Expansion

I appreciate Tom Friedman’s effort to eschew simplistic Russia-bashing and try to put the Georgia crisis in some sort of larger context. I don’t, however, think that Friedman’s monomaniacal focus on the initial decision to expand NATO really makes a ton of sense. The first wave of Central European states — Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic — came on board back in 1997 and tons of additional stuff went down in the intervening years. What’s more, the NATO expansion process actually accomplished something useful in terms of helping to consolidate democratic norms (especially in the field of civil-military relations) in a swathe of countries that’s now pretty big and prosperous and somewhat important.

Contrast that with alienating Russia over, say, the Bush administration’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and subsequent determination to plow ahead with a national missile defense system. That angered Russia and accomplished nothing. Similarly with the Bush administration slow-and-steady moves toward the militarization of space. Then we recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence even though Russia specifically said that would lead to consequences for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then we helped Georgia upgrade its military at a time when Georgia’s political leadership wanted to re-assert control over those territories by force while simultaneously pushing for Georgian (and Ukrainian) membership in NATO.

That’s a whole lot of stuff and suggests to me that we could have given more consideration to Russian interests without conceding nearly as much as Friedman seems to think we should have. Suppose Russia agreed to recognize Kosovo independence and to allow a genuine independent peacekeeping force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and in exchange we agreed to drop the missile shield, leave Ukraine and Georgia out of NATO, and sharply reduce military assistance to Georgia with the understanding that that assistance would be stepped up if Russia tried to coerce Georgia — who would that have left worse off? That deal would address Russia’s strategic concerns much better than a tenuous occupation of Gori does. It would have saved the United States money and allowed us to focus our bilateral relationship with Russia on Iran and terrorism issues. It would have saved Georgia from devastating Russian attack. It would have put Kosovo independence on a firm footing, and as best one can tell (which, admittedly, isn’t that far) it would have reflected the desires of the Ossetians and the Abkhaz. Georgian nationalist sentiment wouldn’t have liked it, of course, but look where nationalism has gotten the Georgians.

But the contours of that specific proposal aside, the point is simply that you can’t draw a straight line from the initial NATO enlargement decision to war in the summer of 2008. There were any number of points at which wiser leadership could have prevented the situation from deteriorating to the current point, and any number of bargains that could have been struck that would have better-served everyone’s interests.