A Few Foreign Policy Items

1) Commandant of the Marine Corps announces part of justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan: “where we have gone, goodness follows.” Pat Lang is displeased.


2) Glenn Greenwald observes that in Foreign Policy magazine’s survey of leading public intellectuals who write about foreign policy, the United States is tied with Somalia and Iran for second place in the category “Most Dangerous Country in the World.”


3) Afghanistan is an ideologically cross‐​cutting issue. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) praises Cato’s Afghanistan study on Fox News’ On the Record, saying

…I’m against any further taxes to pay for this war. But I think it has to be pointed out, this isn’t a left‐​right issue. I mean, here’s the Cato Institute, hardly a left‐​wing organization, wrote a piece called “Escaping the Graveyard of Empires,” and they have a plan, and I’ve met with them, that gets us out of Afghanistan, with advisers and a new approach to intelligence and also a new drug policy.

Meanwhile, the liberal Center for American Progress has produced a statement on Afghanistan that offers some empty rhetoric about an exit strategy but contains no actual plan–or even a call for a plan–for exiting. Instead, their proposal for when to leave is limited to calling for a multinational effort that merely will “have all Afghan forces in the lead within four years, or the 12‐​year mark of our engagement.” CAP is also offering a pretend plan to cut the Pentagon budget, urging Obama to spend more than $600 billion on defense for each of the next several years.