{"id":4144,"date":"2008-01-16T15:26:52","date_gmt":"2008-01-16T22:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/16\/living-in-a-dream-world\/"},"modified":"2008-01-16T15:26:52","modified_gmt":"2008-01-16T22:26:52","slug":"living-in-a-dream-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/16\/living-in-a-dream-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in a Dream World"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Visit Lobelog.com<\/a> for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.<\/i><\/p>\n

If you need an example of just how sophomoric both Bill Kristol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Weekly Standard<\/em> and AEI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Michael Rubin can be, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miss Rubin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s latest article in the Standard<\/em>, entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Living in a Dream World: The Political Fantasies of Foreign Service Officers\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Rubin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s target is the contents of a regular column in the State Department\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in-house monthly magazine, State<\/em>, in which diplomats overseas offer brief descriptions of life in their host countries. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very difficult to figure out why Rubin, a talented polemicist and Rudi Giuliani\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Senior Iran and Turkey advisor\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, would spend much time going over old issues of the magazine to prove what he calls the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sheer inanity of Foreign Service thinking.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Perhaps he had an intern with a lot of time on his or her hands, and the Standard <\/em>needed some filler. On the other hand, most neo-conservatives, especially proteges of Richard Perle, believe there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s never a bad time to bash the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153realists\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the State Department. (Indeed, in his new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons<\/em>, Jacob Heilbrunn quotes Douglas Feith, Rubin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boss during Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first term, as saying that his family\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history as Holocaust victims made him understand the true nature of foreign policy, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153unlike the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWASPs in the State Department.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d With an attitude like that, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no wonder the Feith and the Pentagon civilians tried so hard to keep the State Department out of the loop.)<\/p>\n

Of course, it was Rubin more than any other neo-con who repeatedly assailed Gen. David Petraeus for trying to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153appease\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ba’athists in his efforts in 2004 and 2005 to pacify Mosul and al-Anbar provinces, as I pointed out in a post last October on the Likudist cast to Giuliani\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s foreign-policy team. As late as 14 months ago, Rubin, a de-Ba’athification hawk and Chalabi acolyte from the get-go, was still complaining bitterly about Petraeus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 early efforts to co-opt the Sunni insurgency. That those efforts are now given credit \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even by Rubin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fellow-neo-cons and most especially Kristol, who named Petraeus the Standard<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Man of the Year\u00e2\u20ac\u009d just last month \u00e2\u20ac\u201d for what progress has been made in reducing the violence in Iraq over the past year is ironic to say the least. Indeed, the relative success of Petraeus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 tactics also suggests that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just foreign service officers who inhabit dream worlds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe. If you need an example of just how sophomoric both Bill Kristol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Weekly Standard and AEI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Michael Rubin can be, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miss Rubin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s latest article in the Standard, entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Living in a Dream World: The Political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4144"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}