Stopping three decades of unnecessary bungling.There is a feature of my seminars on U.S. Middle East policy at Princeton that I call "déjà vu all over again" -- with apologies to Yogi Berra. I ask students to assess the bungled efforts and missed opportunities of generations of U.S. diplomats and seek in them lessons for the future. They examine the hubris that drove the U.S. government to engineer the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq's democratically elected government in Iran. This traumatic episode was conveniently forgotten by 1979, when National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to use force against the opposition, ignoring the warnings of U.S. diplomats on the ground in Iran that the shah's reign was doomed. Similarly, the United States forgot the lesson of the limited and United Nations-approved 1991 war in response to Iraq's aggression in Kuwait when it launched an ideologically inspired invasion of Iraq in 2003. Likewise, in 2006, Washington seemed to have forgotten the fiasco that followed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Rather than learn from the past, Washington backed Israel's ill-advised attempt to deliver a knockout blow against another Lebanese foe, this time Hezbollah. My students and I conclude -- only half-jokingly -- that U.S. policymakers ought to take the class before taking office.
Political Geography:
United States, Washington, Middle East, and Kuwait
When President Hugo Chávez was first elected, in 1998, his critics, many of whom have published in these pages, argued that he would slowly move Venezuela away from democracy. After 12 elections, including the December 2007 referendum, which he narrowly lost, that claim has finally crumbled under the evidence. Now the argument against Venezuela has shifted, and instead of being called undemocratic, Chávez's social programs are labeled as inefficient and his economic management categorized as catastrophic. Much like the first accusations against Chávez, the new criticisms, put forth by Francisco Rodríguez in "An Empty Revolution" (March/April 2008), simply do not stand up to the facts.