As for his "splendid insights" two decades ago - what the fuck do you care? However smart and well-informed, they were no doubt vitiated by his defective basic premises.
MM
On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Jun 2009 14:19:35 -0500
> Michael McIntyre <morbidsymptoms at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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
> ___________________________________
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>