U.S. Foreign Policy: June 2008 Archives

Today I have another post up over at the DMI Blog about some of the connections between the ICE deaths in detention scandal and Tom Lasseter's recent McClatchy article investigating the dozens, possibly hundreds, of innocent people wrongfully imprisoned at Guantanamo. 

Check it out!

Last night I went to see two heroes of the progressive blogosphere, Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias, promoting Yglesias’s new foreign policy book, Heads in the Sand at the Strand bookstore in New York City.

The book is a critique of the gutless, ineffective reaction of the Democratic Party to executive branch overreach, unprovoked war, and demonization of the “other,” all policies the GOP has used effectively to consolidate political power since 9/11. 

Well, “had used effectively” may be more accurate in 2008.  Yglesias, with some satisfaction, predicted last night that the GOP would be “wiped out” in Congressional elections this fall due to their failure to distance themselves from the Bush fiasco in Iraq after the 2006 elections when they had the chance. 

I’ve only just now started the book, but I’ve already learned that the movie Groundhog Day has much in common with the writing of Nietzsche (I see that I’m not the first to make this connection, though it seemed novel to me on the train ride home).  The book looks promising, and Yglesias continues to cogently argue for a return to sanity in U.S. foreign policy, something that can only be achieved if Democrats support a coherent alternative to the failed policies of the last eight years. 

The core of Yglesias’s argument is that the U.S. had a good thing going back in the ‘90s supporting the liberal international institutions that Roosevelt and Truman had built and that the U.S. had supported throughout the Cold War.  Then Bush and the neoconservative opportunists he enabled saw an opening after 9/11 to push forward their vision of a hyperpowerful U.S. that was strong enough to cast aside the shackles of multilateralism.  That promptly led to disaster, but the center-left foreign policy establishment has been too deeply invested in the flawed assumptions Bush was working from to engage in any effective pushback.

But would bringing back the ‘90s really be a return to sanity?