Ocelopotamus

The April issue of Harper’s Magazine has a lengthy transcript of remarks by Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 1.

Brzezinski was the National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration, and is currently a professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University. I’m no expert on Brzezinski, and reading over his Wikipedia entry I’m not sure he’s someone I’d normally find myself nodding along with, but in this transcript he comes across as remarkably clear-eyed. (Maybe it’s just perceptual contrast compared to the level of analysis we get from mainstream media pundits these days.)

Harper’s doesn’t have the piece online, but I wanted to quote a couple of passages here because Brzezinski puts things in such well-framed and compelling terms that the effect is crystallizing.

SENATOR JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR. (D., DEL.): Thank you very much. The argument the president is making is that the conflict with Islam intensifies if we withdraw. You’re making the argument that continuing to be bogged down in Iraq is more likely to result in that outcome.

BRZEZINSKI: Conflict, by its very nature, is not self-containable. It either diminishes, because one side has prevailed or because there’s an accommodation, or it escalates. If we could prevail militarily and in a decisive fashion, even though I opposed the war, there would be a strong case to be made for it. But I think we know by now that to prevail we will need to have 500,000 troops in Iraq, wage the war with unlimited brutality, and altogether crush that society because it would probably intensify its resistance. So that’s a nonstarter. Escalating the war as a consequence of protracting it is hardly an attractive option for the United States, because before too long, we could be facing a twenty-year-long involvement not only in Iraq but in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And think how precarious Pakistan is and how uncertain the situation in Afghanistan is becoming. So it’s in our interest to isolate the conflicts and to terminate them.

BIDEN: You’re confident the present course will not succeed.

BRZEZINSKI: The situation is worsening, hostility toward the United States is intensifying, our isolation worldwide is both being perpetuated and in some respects becoming more culturally grounded. Now, I realize there are risks in a strategy whereby the goal is to find an outcome other than a military victory. But at the same time, we shouldn’t become prisoners of apocalyptic and horrific scenarios, in some respects reminiscent of those described and drawn in the latter phases of the Vietnam War, scenarios that did not take place. I’m not sure that if we were to disengage from Iraq the consequences would be this kind of horrific set of dominoes falling all over the Middle East.

Twenty-year involvement.

Pick up a copy of the April Harper’s to read the rest.