The End

National Security (continued) and Transition

Nelson labels Bush's argument on preemptive war as "The Bush Doctrine." Actually, four different ideas have come under that label.

Nelson also equates "preemptive" and "preventive" war. (p. 298). Many have tried to draw a distinction. According to a RAND report:

"Reduced to its essence, a preemptive attack is one that is launched based on the expectation than the adversary is about to attack, and that striking first will be better than being attacked.
...
"Preventive attacks have much in common with preemptive ones, but they are launched in response to less immediate threats. Both types of attack are alternatives to waiting for an expected enemy blow to fall, but preventive attack is motivated not by the desire to strike first rather than second, but by the desire to fight sooner rather than later."

More Gibson interview, on Iraq (first two minutes):

Timing and the Honeymoon:

"Change" we can believe in?

Barack Obama spent much time on the campaign trail calling for "change." As it turns out, "change" has a lot of familiar faces. Many liberal ideologues are upset.

New LBJ Tapes!

Foreign Policy: The Bush Years

President Bush reflects (start at 4:00):




President Bush the elder launches Desert Storm:




Powell had such influence during the Gulf War because of Goldwater-Nichols.

We went into Afghanistan because of 9/11. Why did the intelligence community fail to foresee or prevent it? From the report of the 9/11 commission:

Commenting on Pearl Harbor,Roberta Wohlstetter found it "much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals.After the event,of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."...With that caution in mind,we asked ourselves, before we judged others,whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably
have known or done. We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures in:

• imagination (see bin Laden memo)
• policy (see NBC report)
• capabilities (see Washington Post on translators)
• and management (see map of intelligence community)

Faulty intelligence also affected Iraq policy, as the WMD Commission concluded.

In the fall of 2007, President Bush responded to the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (full transcript here):

QUESTION: My question, sir, is are you feeling troubled about your standing here today about perhaps facing a credibility gap with the American people?
PRESIDENT: No. I'm feeling pretty spirited -- pretty good about life. And I made the decision to come before you so I could explain the NIE. And I have said Iran is dangerous. And the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary. I'm using this NIE as an pportunity to continue to rally our colleagues and allies. The NIE makes it clear that the strategy we have used in the past is effective.

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Chris Matthews, the great constitutional scholar, on Hamdan:

Foreign Policy & National Security

As we approach the end of the course, think back on two familiar quotations:

• “Frequent war and constant apprehension, which require a state of as constant preparation, will infallibly produce [standing armies]. It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.” -- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 8.
• "If the Union’s existence were constantly menaced, and if its great interests were continually interwoven with those of other powerful nations, one would see the prestige of the executive growing, because of what was expected from it and of what it did."-- Tocqueville, Democracy in America

JFK taped meetings on the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, JFK discussed the Cuban Missile Crisis on national TV.

As you reflect on JFK's decisionmaking, think about Peter Drucker's dictum: “The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision without disagreement.”

A couple of years later, LBJ dealt with the Gulf of Tonkin.Bad intelligence contributed to the US reaction in the Gulf of Tonkin -- as Robert McNamara later acknowledged.

It also led to other problems in future decades. One "remedy" has been the reorganization of the intelligence community.