Slaughter

Glenn Greenwald says, more or less, what needs to be said about Anne-Marie Slaughter’s attempt to sidestep talking about her rotten judgment in 2002/2003. He is too polite to add that Slaughter and her co-enablers of George W. Bush’s pointless war have blood on their hands. I am not so polite. Nor do I see any reason to be when someone as intellectually shallow as Slaughter – intellectual depth is as much a function of character as it is the willingness to deploy the term “metric” when it measures nothing real – holds an important, prestigious job she doesn’t deserve.

I’ve discussed Slaughter’s bad ideas before (and probably earlier as well). This time I was struck by how truly weird and manipulative her writing style is. Consider:

I’ll start by offering a metric for how to assess any candidate — and any expert’s — plan for Iraq. The test for the best policy should be the one that is most likely to bring the most troops home in the shortest time (to stop American casualties, begin repairing our military, and be able to redeploy badly needed military assets to Afghanistan), while also achieving the most progress on the goals that the administration stated publicly as a justification for invading in the first place: 1) ensuring that the Iraqi government could not develop nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction (done); 2) weaken terrorist groups seeking to attack us (this goal was based on false premises then, but is highly relevant now); 3) improve the human rights of the Iraqi people; and 4) establish a government in Iraq that could help stabilize and liberalize the Middle East. No policy can possibly achieve all of those goals. But the policy that offers the best chance on all five measures is the policy we should follow, in my view. And applying those measures to concrete policy proposals is the debate we should be having.

Let’s look closely at this remarkable statement.

It is not merely a typo that Slaughter enumerates four “metrics” and calls them five – it indicates the extent either of her fuzzy thinking or her dishonesty (or both). The missing measure seems to be before the colon, I suspect. But using plain speech as a criterion I count nine goals, all told (ymmv). The confusion comes because Slaughter plays a shell game. In “number zero,” she uses the liberal invocation to “bring the troops home” but in reality that’s the farthest thing from her mind; Actually, she wants to transfer the troops to Afghanistan. And in number 4, the real goal is not to “establish a government in Iraq” – we should be so lucky – but to “stabilize and liberalize the Middle East.”

But surely, our astute readers here at Hullabaloo have noticed that in reality, there is simply one “metric” Slaughter advances for judging candidates: Whether they’ll stay in Iraq ’til we find the pony.

But we’re not done. Slaughter purports to be a serious voice – she certainly has the credentials. But these are deeply unserious proposals. For one thing, Slaughter lives in a world where the United States acts in an entirely isolated manner. Not so much as a suggestion in her proposals that all foreign policy in the 21st century must, given the modern interdependency of nations, be multi-lateral.

Finally, let us ponder the first clump of proposals – return the troops to the US, repair the military, and ship “military assets” – she means “increase troop levels,” but tries to finesse it – out again to Afghanistan. What’s missing is any thought-out notion of time and expense. If we factor in her goals for Iraq, which require US troops, we are talking years before this transfer of assets could be effected. And billions upon billions of dollars. The US has neither the years nor the cash. And, more importantly, it shouldn’t have the interest in taking naive, expensive unilateral military action anywhere (and bringing up unilateral action in Rwanda, as she does in her post, is plain shabby rhetorical mush).

Let me put this another way. If Slaughter is the finest mind Princeton can find to be “Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,” then the bar for having a successful academic career in international affairs is set dangerously low. I’d like to nominate a replacement, if not for her job, then at least for her slot as a Huffington Post blogger.

I nominate Digby.