Rubin: Pakistanis on Pakistan

Scott Horton of Harper's has interviewed Ahmed Rashid, whose book "Descent into Chaos" has just come out, on Pakistan and the Taliban:

The CIA, we learned in a report today, has compiled damning evidence of the Pakistani military’s complicity with the Taliban. But this is hardly news. Indeed, one analyst has repeatedly warned that Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence service have been taking America for a ride, pretending to support U.S. counter-terrorism operations while sheltering and supporting the Taliban and numerous other extremist organizations. That analyst is Ahmed Rashid, and he is the most articulate of the observers of the region between the Oxus and the shores of Karachi. Based in Lahore, Rashid combines scholarly excellence with popular appeal, as demonstrated by his book on the Taliban, which is Yale University Press’s all-time best-seller. Rashid’s latest book, Descent into Chaos pulls back the cover on American operations in Afghanistan, which were hampered from the outset by chronic bad judgment on the part of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

The following article by Afrasiab Khattak, the head of the Pashtun Nationalist Awami National Party in the Northwest Frontier Province (Pakhtunkhwa) appears in Dawn today. I have not been able to find it on the website yet. Khattak is provincial head of the party that heads the elected government of NWFP and has been appointed Pashtun Peace Envoy by the NWFP Provincial Assembly.

FATA’s growing disconnect

By Afrasiab Khattak

IT is hardly an exaggeration that the security of Pakistan, Afghanistan, the entire region and indeed that of the whole world will be defined by developments in Fata over the next few months. Different scenarios are being painted by military strategists and political experts.

Al Qaeda, after regrouping in the militant sanctuaries of the area, is acquiring the capacity to repeat attacks in North America or Europe similar to those carried out in 2001 in the US.

If reports about the exchanges between Pakistan and the US at the highest level are anything to go by it is pretty clear that the US will retaliate against Pakistan, probably even more severely than it did against the Taliban-dominated Afghanistan. Similarly the use of these militant sanctuaries for cross-border fighting is so large in scale (in fact all the six political agencies bordering Afghanistan are being used) that denial in this regard is no longer plausible.

The federal government has to either admit defeat or muster the political will to resolve the problem, or else justify the existence of militant sanctuaries by explaining their usefulness to the national interest. We have run out of time and this decision cannot be delayed any more as there are no takers of the denial line.

As if this were not enough, armed lashkars (armies) from militant sanctuaries in Fata are poised to penetrate/invade the contiguous settled districts. The events in Hangu some three weeks back are a case in point. The Hangu police arrested four Taliban commanders from a car that also contained weapons, explosive material and manuals for making bombs in a place called Doaba not far away from the Orakzai Agency border.

Hundreds of Taliban surrounded the Doaba police station and demanded the commanders’ release. They also blocked the Hangu-Kurram highway. During this confrontation the Frontier Constabulary was ambushed near Zargari village and 16 security personnel were killed. Subsequently the army was called in to launch a military operation in Hangu. This action was not just in retaliation for the murder of 16 FC men but also came in view of the threat of attack by four to five thousand Taliban from Orakzai and Kurram agencies.

By now the said military operation has been completed and the targets achieved to the extent that the Taliban have been chased out of Hangu. Nevertheless, they have fled to Orakzai Agency where they are regrouping and preparing for future attacks.

The NWFP (Pakhtunkhwa) government is in a quandary. It has to call in the army whenever armed lashkars threaten to overrun a district as the police force simply does not have the capacity to fight an ever-expanding insurgency.

After Swat the army has also been deployed in Hangu. In view of the militant sanctuaries situated nearby, the army cannot be withdrawn in the near future. Imagine if the story is repeated in other vulnerable districts. Will the army also have to be deployed in all these other districts? Will such measures not bring the existence of the civilian provincial government into question?

Is it not amazing that in spite of such high stakes the presidency that has a monopoly over governance in Fata seems to show no anxiety over the prevailing situation? It is continuing with the policy of keeping Fata a black hole where terrorist groups from across the globe run their bases. It is still a no-go area for the media and civil society, and so far there is no corrective measure or policy change in sight. So much so that we have failed to take even the most preliminary step of extending the Political Parties Act to Fata.

It is only natural that we are perturbed when attacks are launched from across the border. But should we not be equally sensitive to the loss of our sovereignty over Fata to militant groups? Strangely enough we do not seem to be bothered about the militants’ total control of Fata. When the international media carries reports about this situation we dismiss them as ‘enemy’ propaganda against Pakistan. We have failed to grasp the fact that in the post-cold war world there is a universal consensus about two things. One, that all assault weapons that can be used for launching a war cannot be allowed to be kept in private possession. Two, that no state will allow the use of its soil by non-state players against another state. The entire world is astounded by our fixation with the cold war mode. We have developed an incredible capacity to live in unreality. This is indeed dangerous for any state system but it can be catastrophic for a state dancing in a minefield.

Where does all this leave the people of Fata? They are victims and not perpetrators as some people would like us to believe. They are in fact in triple jeopardy. Firstly they are groaning under the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) of 1901. They have no access to the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of Pakistan since they are not justiciable outside of the jurisdiction of the higher judiciary.

Secondly the tribal belt has almost been occupied by foreign and local militant organisations that are better equipped, better trained and better financed than the local population. More than 160 tribal leaders have been killed by terrorists in North and South Waziristan who operate with total impunity. Today’s Fata is not dissimilar to the Taliban and Al Qaeda controlled Afghanistan before 9/11.

Thirdly, the people of Fata get caught in the crossfire between militants and security forces from both sides of the Durand Line. The so-called collateral damage has seen a cancerous growth in Fata. The people of Fata have lost the support and protection of the state. They have no access to the media, courts and hospitals or to humanitarian assistance. The only intervention by state players takes place through their armies and air forces in which people of the tribal area are mostly on the receiving end.

For any informed and sensitive Pakistani, the situation in the tribal area is the top-most priority when it comes to policy formation and implementation. We must realise that the question of dismantling militant sanctuaries in Fata and taking short-term and long-term measures to open up the area and integrate it with the rest of the country needs urgent national attention if we are to avoid the impending catastrophe.

Read more on this article...

Rubin: Patriotism and War on Drugs Remain the (Last?) Refuge of Scoundrels

Gary Kamiya tells it like it is at Salon:

Maybe we really are doomed to elect John McCain, remain in Iraq forever and nuke Iran. Nations that forget history may not be doomed to repeat it, but those that never even recognize reality in the first place definitely are. Last week's ridiculous uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons proves yet again that America has still not come to terms with the most rudimentary facts about race, 9/11 -- or itself.

The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright's sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land. Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America," talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches?

Scott Horton goes back to the Faulkner source of Obama's quote in the speech to tell it like it was and is but doesn't have to be:

What do two short stories by William Faulkner published by Harper’s in the fall of 1940 have to do with the 2008 presidential campaign? Faulkner finalized them in the midst of a presidential election campaign, as Franklin Roosevelt sought his third term, a fact which breaks through in a few spots. These stories seem to be a simple narrative of life in the rural South, one is a rite of passage story and the other a strange tragi-comedy. But these stories are indeed intensely political, and their message was one that the readership would hardly have been prepared to cope with, in those dark days as the specter of war loomed over America. It seems we have to go forward seventeen presidential elections to come to the day when they become a matter of public discussion.

Last Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama, facing a withering assault over his relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, delivered a carefully measured and thoughtful speech on race relations in America. The speech was by almost every measure something extraordinary. It was delivered against the advice of Obama’s advisors, who felt—probably correctly—that any discussion of the race issue would only be used to isolate him in public debate. But more significantly, the language of the speech was not measured and shaped by focus groups. It proceeded assuming an educated and intelligent audience. As Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan reminded us in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, no political advisor would ever hear of such a thing. She points to two give-aways: the use of the word “endemic” and a quotation from Faulkner.

The words quoted were

‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’

But actually the language is just off. The actual words are “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” They come from Requiem for a Nun. But the meaning and use that Obama takes is taken straight from an earlier Faulkner novel, Go Down, Moses, a brave and profound work about race relations in America. Being bound to, but struggling to overcome the past is a key message of that work. In fact these words could be taken as a sort of moral test that he has put to a focal character: will he remain a servant to the past, or will he succeed in shaking those chains free? The protagonist fails that test, with his very Southern attitudes and bigotries. In fact, Faulkner did himself at least once–in an outburst in an interview in the fifties, which Faulkner later attributed to too much alcohol. But Faulkner left a transcendent message: Some day, he tells us, some day the people will rise above these divisions and will recognize the ties that bind all. They will recognize the fundamental lie of racism. This was not, of course, a message which could be easily delivered to an American audience in 1940. Today, however, the message finds people ready to listen and to believe.

On another topic: UNODC has published the discussion paper on poverty and opium production that they promised would respond to the criticisms I made of their claim that poverty is not linked to opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. Of course the paper does no such thing. It once again indicates that while UNODC is very skilled at estimating cultivation and yields, it does not understand social structure. Furthermore, while superficial analysis is unfortunate, UNODC Director Antonio Maria Costa continues to present this analysis misleadingly in a way that supports the "War on Drugs" approach to counter-narcotics.

I will post a complete analysis soon. Read more on this article...

Rubin: Harpers Interviews Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan Elections

Scott Horton of Harpers interviews Ahmed Rashid (see my related post):

American interest in Pakistan picked up suddenly when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and then came back briefly as the Pakistani elections produced surprising results. In a word, they were a clear-cut defeat for Pervez Musharraf. I turned to the foremost commentator on Pakistani politics for some predictions, to Ahmed Rashid. Operating out of Lahore, Rashid is the author of three books including the best sellers ‘Taliban’ and most recently ‘Jihad.’ He has covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia for the past 25 years and writes for the ‘Far Eastern Economic Review,’ the ‘Daily Telegraph’ and ‘The Wall Street Journal.’

Read the whole interview here. Read more on this article...

New Year's Vow: Not Another Step!

Scott Horton at Harper's is calling attention to an important reflection on where we are as a nation and where we are as citizens:

In a truly extraordinary editorial, the New York Times measures what the country has lost and presents the challenge that it faces in the election year 2008:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001. The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer. In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review. Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

On October 5, 2001, I made a mistake. Less than a month earlier, I had been walking around Greenwich Village on my first day back from a European vacation, watching the Twin Towers burn. Thousands of people were walking north from the financial district like war refugees. I said to a colleague, "It's like a war zone," before I realized, "It is a war zone."

I went up to the roof of a friend's apartment building, together with a friend of hers whom I did not know. It was about noon. The Towers had collapsed, and we saw the huge clouds of smoke. At that time we didn't know about the heroic achievement of the New York Police and Fire Department in evacuating people from the buildings. I thought I was watching the death of 10,000, maybe 20,000 people. And I was pretty sure who was responsible. I had been writing about the "Arab Islamists in Afghanistan" since 1989. Now I knew why Ahmad Shah Massoud had been assassinated two days earlier, on September 9, 2001, in Afghanistan's first suicide bombing.

My old friend (she had been a fellow student of my wife at the University of Chicago 30 years before), knowing of my "expertise," asked me the question I dread, What happens now? My standard answer is that I am not an expert on the future; I have never even been there. But on September 11, 2001, I lost my pessoptimistic irony. I didn't know what would happen. But I knew what I feared: that the U.S. would lash out in anger, blaming Afghans for an act planned in their country by a group they did not control. "I hope we don't just carpet-bomb Qandahar," I said. I don't recall what my friend's friend said exactly, but it was something like, "Kill them all." And this was within shouting distance of where Bob Dylan and Joan Baez started their careers when I was in junior high school....

On Friday, October 5, I was in Washington. That morning I went to a part of the Hart Senate office buildings that was not quarantined because of the still unsolved anthrax attacks to meet Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) in his temporary office. One of my former students from Yale, where I taught in the 1980s, had set up the meeting. She was working for Wellstone and wanted to help him think through his position.

We knew the start of the military operations was not far off; they began the next Sunday. I have no notes from that meeting, but one exchange sticks in my mind. By then over three weeks had passed since September 11 without military action.

Though I had not supported George W. Bush, I was starting to feel relieved. The contrast with the Clinton administration's response to the bombing of US embassies in August 1998, which included immediate rocket strikes, had somehow encouraged me. The team of national security veterans around Bush would know how to use military power for strategic goals. Sure of their credentials, they could resist the public sentiments like those I had heard on the Greenwich Village roof.

As I was leaving Wellstone's office, we had a moment alone. "For once," I said, "I'm glad the Republicans won the election." Wellstone raised his eyebrows. I explained, "I'm not sure that a Democratic president could have resisted the pressure to lash out from a Republican Congress baying for blood." He appeared to consider my remarks and finally concluded, "I'm not there yet."

A little more than a year later, on October 25, 2002, Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, and five others died in a plane crash in Minnesota. It was a great loss for many, but it took years before I realized how great a loss it was for me. I never had the chance to tell Paul Wellstone how wrong I was.

Horton again:

The developments of the last three years have exposed the leaders of the current Administration. . . . .They are driven not by concern about our security (which they undermine with every breath) but by their own monomaniacal accumulation of power.

And their nobility of character can be encased in a few scenes. They do not stand up and take responsibility for their decisions. Instead they cower behind deception and falsehood. They offer up 19-year-old soldiers, whom they have sent into battle without guidance or support, as sacrifices to be consumed by the anger of the public and the world. They deride these young soldiers as “rotten apples,” and send off-the-record spokesmen out to imply that we’re recruiting too many criminals into the Army today. We watched this happen in the wake of Abu Ghraib, but no one could muster the fortitude to say what was obviously passing before our eyes. Their lies reverberated in stereo and on HDTV.

And now, in these very weeks, we see it again with the scandal surrounding the destruction of the torture tapes, done with the full complicity of the White House at the highest levels. Now they busily prepare again to scapegoat some young case officers at the CIA, and perhaps some middle management figures. For what? For crimes that they designed, worked out and ordered to be performed. These men have long forfeited any claim to moral leadership. They are staining our nation and its high offices. But we cannot despair over the task of purging these stains.

I too feel a vision of America slipping away. It’s the Founder’s vision of America, of a republic erected as a bulwark against tyranny with individual freedom as its aspiration, and the threat of accumulation of power in the hands of a few men acting in concert—or of a sole tyrant—as its nemesis. The protections that the Founders put in place to defend us against the one true nemesis—the internal one–are being disassembled one by one. First habeas corpus is abolished, and then the protection against warrantless intrusion sputters and fades. To cover their vandalism they maintain a drumbeat of fear, encouraging every cowardly and servile impulse. The media who should be our watchdogs have gone silent. In their place come corporate interests playing a siren’s song, luring us all to complacency, to sleep.

When I hear people talking about the need for "bi-partisanship," I think back to my own bi-partisan mistake. The bi-partisanship we need right now is a clear repudiation by conscientious Republicans of the crimes and catastrophes of the Bush administration. I have heard that at times from Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and former Senator John Danforth of Missouri. Danforth has a lot to answer for, notably his sponsorship of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court, but unlike many of his colleagues, when he speaks I can recognize the country whose values I remember being taught in school:

Danforth said he remains a Republican but finds little cause for optimism among the current GOP candidates. "My party is appealing to a real meanness," he said in an interview, "and an irresponsible sense of machismo in foreign policy. I hope it will be less extreme, but I'm an American before I'm a Republican." Danforth has also written critically about the impact of religious conservatives on the Republican Party.

He's getting there -- toward a bi-partisan repudiation of this administration. But if Republicans can't deliver it, I'll settle for a partisan repudiation. It will take a tough, determined new administration to expose even a part of what this administration has committed, not an administration committed to comity above all. When the truth comes out, we may finally get that bi-partisan repudiation. But the truth must come out.

So I endorse Scott Horton's vow for the New Year:

So let’s put one resolution at the top of our list: Not another step! We will not abide one more step in the destruction of our civil liberties. We will defy the forces of tyranny that are vandalizing our Constitution and traditions. We will guard the Founders’ vision. In 2008, the time is here to give expression to values we want to retain, or see them vanish forever. It starts with remembering what we have lost. It continues with thought, word, action and vote.

I seek the consent of my learned colleague to amend the proposed resolution by addition of the following clause to the second sentence, following "destruction of our civil liberties":

Nor will we tolerate further contempt for what the Founders called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" by destroying international law in the name of security.

I hope Paul Wellstone, wherever he may be, and all his heirs and assigns, will accept this amendment in his memory.

Remember, we have 366 days this time. So no excuses.

UPDATE: My learned colleague has adopted (and posted) the amendment with unanimous consent. Read more on this article...

WSJ: The Musharraf Problem

My article, The Musharraf Problem, appears in today's Wall Street Journal:

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was probably a strategic attack by al Qaeda and its local allies—the Pakistani Taliban—aimed at achieving Osama bin Laden’s and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s most pressing political objective: destabilizing the government of Pakistan, the nuclear-armed country where al Qaeda has re-established the safe haven it lost in Afghanistan.

Many in Pakistan nevertheless will blame their own military, which has failed to stop the suicide bombings over the past five years, including that of Bhutto’s motorcade in Karachi in October. Pakistani intelligence now claims to have intercepted a phone call from Baitullah Mahsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, offering congratulations for the operation. It may be true. But the skepticism with which this announcement was greeted in Pakistan shows that the Bush administration’s strategy of trying to shore up the power of President (former general) Pervez Musharraf cannot work. Even if it is innocent of involvement in this assassination, the Pakistan military under Mr. Musharraf has no intention of ceding power to civilians.

The complete article is password protected for subscribers only.

Scott Horton of Harpers interviews me on this article for his No Comment blog:

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has quickly brought the chaotic situation in Pakistan back in the public’s eye. To help understand the developments out of Pakistan and to help put the whole situation in a better policy perspective from an American point of view, I interviewed Dr. Barnett Rubin, one of the nation’s premier experts on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rubin, the author of eight books, is currently Director of Studies at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. He recently live-blogged the military crackdown from Islamabad, providing some of the best insights available from the scene of the action.

Read the rest here. Read more on this article...

Rollout to War with Iran: An Update

Update: Since I posted the original note on this topic Wednesday night, there have been several developments. Several more well-informed people have called to discuss it -- all of them with confirming information. No one called to say I was wrong.

The original cross-post that I put on DailyKos at 11:26 PM Wednesday night sank off the front page in the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole wide world was fast asleep. On Thursday, however, DailyKos diarist Scientician saw Juan Cole's plug on Informed Comment. He checked me out on the web and determined that I was a "respectable foreign affairs academic" (not always a compliment on DailyKos). That morning he nonetheless posted a diary that made it to the top of the recommended list, finally garnering 561 comments, many of them by people who appear not to be lunatics.

Then on Friday New Yorker contributor George Packer called. After our conversation he wrote about it on his blog Interesting Times:

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington.

His evaluation: "True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely."

Later he put up a postscript:

Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: “I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I’m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”

Today, the first day of Magical September (hat-tip to openthread at DailyKos), Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine picked up the story on his No Comment blog, under the title, The New Rollout. Horton summarized my post and Packer's entry and then adds:

And no sooner does this appear in the blogosphere than we see what may be the first bit of ground-preparation for the rollout: Michael Ledeen’s new book, set for release right on schedule a week after Labor Day, and it’s called—get this–Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction. What’s the point in being subtle when you’re trying to run herd on what Nietzsche called the “bovine masses?” Here’s the blurb:

“Michael A. Ledeen has written a knowing book about Iran’s ways. His is a book that lays bare the cruelties of the radical theocracy and its ambitions beyond its borders. After Ledeen’s book, the illusions about Iran should finally be put to rest. A smart and unsentimental work.”

Ledeen, the author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, among other classics, is a fluent Italian speaker with curious connections to the Italian state security and the yellowcake uranium caper. No doubt Michael thinks that somewhere out in the ethersphere, Niccolò is smiling. I think that Niccolò was smarter than that: he’s wincing.

Somewhere in the etheral blogosphere, diarist WilyFlorentine is preparing to post a few lessons:

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.

Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

And finally:

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

Since Ledeen is an expert on Machiavelli, the latter quote might argue that the rollout proves that war talk is a bluff designed to pressure Iran into agreeing to the demands of the European negotiators over nuclear enrichment. But brinkmanship works only when the other side has something to gain by conceding. That might be true if the administration's goal really was to prevent Iran from gaining full control of the nuclear fuel cycle. Rhetoric like President Bush's speech to the American Legion and Ledeen's book, however, only further convince Tehran that nothing short of forcible regime change will satisfy Washington.

Perhaps the war party will answer with another quotation from Chapter 17 of The Prince:

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

In a speech delivered in Macchiavelli's native Florence, "The Danger of Being Hated," Scott Horton provided a fitting answer. He reminded his audience that the original formulation "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us," comes not from Macchiavelli, but from the insane Roman Emperor Caligula. Horton comments:

In chapter 17 of The Prince Machiavelli says that “it is much safer to be feared than loved”–a very shrewd rearrangement of Caligula’s statement. But he doesn’t stop there–he goes on immediately to say that the one of the worst mistakes a prince can ever make is to be hated; for in this way he converts himself to a target. He compounds the risks he personally and his subjects must face.

The balance that Machiavelli commends to us is this: don’t strive to be loved, but at all costs avoid being hated. A modern state need not flinch from being feared, but its position is strongest when it exhibits the values of virtue of which he writes. A state which is seen as virtuous, strong and decisive is best able to assure its security.

But there is one counsel of Macchiavelli's that even those who (unlike me) consider the Islamic Republic of Iran an irreconcilable enemy, ought to remember: that any injury done by the Prince should be so great that the victim is "unable to retaliate." And that is why the public and the press must at least ask the questions posed by Packer:

Does the Administration expect the Iranian regime to fall in the event of an attack? If yes, what will replace it? If no (and it will not), why would the Administration deliberately set about to strengthen the regime’s hold on power? What will the Administration do to protect highly vulnerable American lives and interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world against the Iranian reprisals that will follow? What if Iran strikes against Israel? What will be the strategy when the Iranian nuclear program, damaged but not destroyed, resumes? How will the Administration handle the international alarm and opprobrium that would be an attack’s inevitable fallout?

Writing on the futility of relying solely on force, Machiavelli counseled:

For this reason the best possible fortress is--not to be hated by the people, because, although you may hold the fortresses, yet they will not save you if the people hate you

That is why today, more even than when this Republic was founded, we owe “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Today the U.S. is less loved, less respected, and after the debacle in Iraq, less feared but for its folly, than ever before. And that is the greatest threat to our security. Read more on this article...