> Dismiss Rubin as a liberal imperialist if you want.
Well, yes, I do. I spent a melancholy hour today skimming through some of the great man's work, available on the Web. Here's a sample, taken at random, from a 2007 Foreign Affairs article presumptuously entitled "Saving Afghanistan":
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62270/barnett-r-rubin/saving-afghanistan
> Washington and its international partners must rethink their strategy
> and significantly increase both the resources they devote to
> Afghanistan and the effectiveness of those resources' use. Only
> dramatic action can reverse the perception, common among both Afghans
> and their neighbors, that Afghanistan is not a high priority for the
> United States -- and that the Taliban are winning as a result.
> Washington's appeasement of Pakistan, diversion of resources to Iraq,
> and perpetual underinvestment in Afghanistan -- which gets less aid
> per capita than any other state with a recent postconflict rebuilding
> effort -- have fueled that suspicion.
No doubt he's a smart fellow, and well-informed. But everything I've seen from him is built on the tacit and apparently unexamined assumption that it's the right and duty of the US to "do something" about places like Afghanistan. Since I consider this mission-civilatrice a criminal enterprise, it's difficult to know what common ground we might have.
It's possible, of course, that if apologists for "smart" intervention like Rubin (and his fans here on lbo-talk), and anti-interventionists like me, were to confine our discussions to questions of fact and reasonable inferences from fact (like "why did so-and-so do such-and-such") we might be able to have a constructive conversation. But frankly, even this seems unlikely. The basic premises from which we respectively begin affect our reading of events too strongly. You can certainly see that in action if you review this thread.
> I first met him twenty years
> ago, and everything he said about Afghanistan that night turned out
> to be right. If Reagan, Casey, and the rest had been listening to
> this liberal imperialist, we could have saved ourselves and others a
> world of hurt.
I'm curious -- what splendid insights did he share on that occasion?
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org