I just got the November/December issue of Foreign Policy (or The Poor Man's Foreign Affairs, as I like to call it) and there are two headlines above the cover story:
"The Tragedy of Colin Powell" by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, and...
"HOW BLOGS ARE CHANGING THE WORLD" by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell (CAPS EMPHASIS my own).
Re: the first -- I used to have a minor obsession with Christopher Hitchens, and to some extent, I still do. But in the couple of years, he's only made sense to me when explaining why he's an atheist. His justifications for the war in Iraq, in particular, have been comically disingenuous. (And yes, it hurts me to say that. Sort of.) In this issue of FP, he attempts a takedown of Colin Powell that really just boils down to the fact that he may have not spent enough time traveling and that his prescriptions for multilateralism were not always successful. If the Hitch managed to knock Powell off his supposed pedestal with that one, I think it's safe to say that Powell landed in a bed of marshmallows.
A sample:
From William Jennings Bryan to Cyrus Vance, history used to suggest a remedy for secretaries of state who became demoralized or disillusioned with the policies pursued by their presidents: resignation. More than just quitting, resignation also at least implies an acceptance of responsibility (as it did, for example, when Lord Carrington resigned as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's foreign secretary over the Falklands imbroglio). But with Powell, one has never been entirely sure whether he considers collective responsibility to be a part of his cabinet rank. Instead, he offers a grudging willingness to stay on, for a little bit at least, in invited--no, make that pressed--to do so. This attitude is normally associated either with insufferable guests, or with people who appear to believe thta they are performing the thankless task of holding up the sky....
Resignation does not always imply an acceptance of responsibility, and in this case, it would be more likely to imply an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to deal with the consequences of one's irresponsibilty. To the extent that Hitchens is right, it can in some cases, be the ultimate form of dissent, but it's a trump card that can only be played once. How often is "I don't like what you're doing, so I'm quitting" more valuable than "I don't like what you're doing, so I'm going to stick around and try to change it"?
Further on:
He may well indeed favor the venerable traditions of negotiation and multilateralism. Yet what reward has this touching faith brought him? The chief evidence against him would be his attempt to prolong the political life of Yasser Arafat, his reluctance to believe that Hussein was incorrigible short of war, his belief in the good faith of the Saudis, nad his willingness, right up until September of 2004, to extend deadlines in Sudan.
So much intellectual dishonesty here, I don't even know where to start (the failures of intellect or the plain dishonesty?) Re: Arafat--oversimplification to the point of distortion, and re: good faith of the Saudis--stand alone distortion without even the courtesy of oversimplification. So I'll just deal with the two most grating charges (to me, at least): (1) that Hussein was incorrigible short of war. If this were a point of fact, John Kerry's support base would be much smaller right now. Most of the conservatives I know aren't fully convinced that Hussein was incorrigible short of war, and the Realists so frequently identified with hawkish administrations (Mearsheimer, Waltz, and if Morganthau weren't dead, I'd wager...) vehemently opposed it, precisely because they thought Hussein was corrigible--or at least, deterrable. That Hitchens treats this as a given is outrageous. (2) extending deadlines in Sudan. I'll give Hitchens that Powell could have done more and sooner, but at least he called it genocide, which is more than could be said of the rest of the administration at the time. If that's the indictment, and it actually sticks, Powell's will be the first of many resignations, and certainly not the most senior.
I could review every paragraph in the article like this, but it all points back to the same fundamental flaw in logic: if Hitchens is going to make the argument that Powell's policy of "quiet diplomacy" is morally flawed on the basis that it's ineffective and/or insufficient, then he has to compare it to the shortcomings of the alternative (loud non-diplomatic actions, I suppose) and acknowledge that the relative distinctions imply an imperative to correct them in order of priority. And if inefficiency and ineffectiveness are the wages of that particular sin, then who's going to hell first? Powell or other members of the administration?
Now, onto the blogging article:
First of all, FP just discovered blogs? "Blogs," writes Drezner/Farrell, "(short for 'weblogs') are periodically updated journals, providing online commentary presented as a set of 'posts,' individual entries of news or commentary, in reverse chronological order." [Ed.--Three issues ago, they explained email as "a message, written traditional letter format, but electronically transmitted via the World Wide Web, an interconnected and decentralized public network." ... Oh, alright. Not really. I made that up.] I cannot imagine that anyone who would ostensibly be reading Foreign Policy would not know what a blog is, given the extensive coverage in all other tangential media of blogs at the Democratic and Republican conventions, presidential candidate blogs, TV anchor blogs, etc. You'd pretty much have to be reading FP and nothing else politically-related to avoid any collision whatsoever with blogs.
But on to rest of the piece:
Compared to other actors in world affairs--governments, international organizations, multinational organizations, multinational corporations, and even non-governmental organizations (NGOs)--blogs do not appear to be very powerful or visible. Even the most popular blog garners only a fraction of the traffic that major media outlets attract.
Not that visible, I'll give them. Not that powerful, I won't. Basing power assessments on size of readership and traffic is like arguing that the President of the United States isn't very powerful because there's only one of him. How many people are reading blogs isn't as important as which people are reading blogs. If the Bush and Kerry campaigns are reading ABC's The Note religiously, Mark Halperin is getting an audience for which high profile interest groups would and have paid millions. There are plenty of well-funded NGOs that are much less capable of affecting foreign policy agendas.
Another observation:
The blogosphere has no central organization, and its participants have little ideological consensus. [Ed.--Is that critical or merely irrelevant?] How then can a collection of decentralized, contrarian, and nonprofit Web sites possibly influence world politics?" [Ed.--This is apparently a big puzzle, yet the question of how decentralized, contrarian and nonprofit NGOs, also known as one of the examples invoked earlier for contrast, can possibly influence world politics is, it seems, self-evident.]
The article is ultimately very "rah-rah-blogging!" on the basis that it allows for the dissimination of niche expertise (i.e.,--UMichigan professor Juan Cole translating Arabic language newspapers) and the bypassing of foreign censorship laws (Bloggers in Iran! Bloggers in China!), but pretty shallow analysis overall-- though I do like the fact that it refers to Jeff Jarvis's Buzzmachine as "the single best source for information on the global expansion of the blogosphere." (Jarvis is the single best source for info on the global expansion of the blogosphere because he has probably engineered most of it himself. A hundred years from now, historians studying the mysterious proliferation of indie web media in the early '00s will be shocked to learn that it was masterminded by a guy in suburban New Jersey.)
And one final note, on FP:
If AIG ever stops advertising, they're going to have to remove the back page entirely, because it has become a fixture and the absence will be noticeable. It'll be like Paper magazine without Chloe Sevigny or the New York Times without the institutional self-loathing.