Bacevitch: "..For Cheney-Rumsfeld, transformation implied dominion & hegemony. For Bush-Wolfowitz, it meant the removal of Tyrants.."

Andrew Bacevich's "The Limits of Power", in FiredogLake, here

"...My own view is this: the object of the exercise is to transform the Greater Middle East, thereby ensuring that this part of the world will no longer breed terrorists intent on killing us while also ensuring our access to strategically critical resources.

My guess is that different members of the administration entertained different meanings of
"transformation." For Cheney / Rumsfeld, transformation probably implied dominion or hegemony. For Bush / Wolfowitz, it probably meant something closer to the removal of tyrants and the export of democracy -- pacification rather than dominion.

Regardless, the intent was to use American power -- hard and soft -- to bring about big change expected to be conducive to our interests.

Because the Bush administration both failed to understand the region of the world they set out to change and wildly overstated American power this scheme never had a chance of succeeding.

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Whether Obama will embrace or junk the Global War on Terror as the organizing principle of US national security policy is certainly one of the $64 questions of the next six months. The repudiation of the Iraq War that was at the center of his campaign early on made me hopeful that he'd junk the entire Bush approach to foreign policy.Of late, I'm less hopeful -- the promises to send more troops to Afghanistan strike me as simple-minded at best, more likely outright stupid.

...I've come to believe that American Exceptionalism is the root of all evils.

Once you decide that you're God's new Chosen People, self-awareness becomes very difficult.

We need to shed our sense of uniqueness and our sense of entitlement. We need to become a normal nation. Of course, that's akin to saying that we should abandon our identity -- which isn't likely to happen.

...If Obama persists in the GWOT -- persistence is likely to mean gradual draw-down from Iraq combined with an intensified military effort in Afghanistan / Pakistan -- then collapse will come when the army and the Marine Corps finally fall apart. That this has not already occurred is a tribute to the remarkable durability of the force. But that durability has limits. Once the services begin to deteriorate, the GWOT will be unsustainable.

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Advice on Afghanistan: pay attention to history. Effective governance has never been exercised from Kabul. Local tribal leaders have always run the place. That should be okay with us so long as Al Qaeda is denied sanctuary. We should provide incentives to local leaders so that they will see it in their interest to keep Al Qaeda out.

[Condoleezza Rice] not worth evaluating. She was an utter failure as national security adviser and is the least consequential secretary of state since Cordell Hull spent World War II being ignored by FDR.

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On David Petraeus. . .Very smart, savvy, and politically sophisticated. His achievements in Iraq are real but less significant (and probably less permanent) than the current conventional wisdom suggests. A failure, in my mind, in his inability or refusal to face up to the defects of the GWOT as a basis for policy..."