The Edwards Interview

My interview with Edwards is here, and I encourage you to read it. It's a happy fact of online publishing that I can just dump a full transcript on the web, rather than force you all to interpret his answers through my filter. But so far as analysis goes, here's what we've got:

Iran: His position here is more thoughtful and nuanced than his comments at the Herzliya conference revealed. "what happens," he asked, "if America were to militarily strike Iran? Well you take this unstable, radical leader, and you make him a hero—that’s the first thing that’ll happen. The Iranian people will rally around him. The second thing that will happen is they will retaliate. And they have certainly some potential for retaliating here in the United States through some of these terrorist organizations they’re close to, but we’ve got over a hundred thousand people right next door. And most people believe that they have an infrastructure for retaliation inside Iraq. So, that’s the second thing that’ll happen. And the third thing is there are a lot of analysts who believe that an air strike or a missile strike is not enough to be successful. To be successful we’d actually have to have troops on the ground, and where in the world would they come from?"

Iraq: I suggested in my earlier post that the lessons Edwards drew from Iraq were somewhat less fundamental than those I took. His regret is over two elements of his decision, at least that he'd reveal to me. The first is the credulity with which he approached the intelligence. Everything he's told me indicates that that was a genuinely searing experience for him, and a mistake he's unlikely to replicate. The second was his decision to give Bush the authorization to go to war. "I felt a great conflict then about giving George Bush this authority," he said, "because I didn’t trust him. And I resolved that conflict on the side of voting for it. Now seeing what’s happened, I would not resolve that conflict that way."

The lesson I think Iraq teaches is that toppling Middle Eastern governments, occupying their societies, and trying to impose pluralistic democracy is an almost impossible endeavor, one with far more potential for catastrophe than completion. It isn't just that the WMDs weren't there, but that we fundamentally overestimated American power. That's not to say we can't strike or invade a country if faced with imminent attack or threat, but given our basic inability to guarantee success, the overwhelming presumption should always be against the use of force, particularly for vague, socio-political engineering purposes (i.e., replacing tyranny with liberal democracy). That isn't a lesson Edwards would cop to, though given that he's running for president, it's not necessarily true that he doesn't agree with it. All that said, the interview does illuminate a fair bit about his foreign policy thinking, and touches not only on Iraq and Iran, but AIPAC, and Israel, and Tom Friedman, and Sbarro, and much more. It's well worth a read for those interested in John Edwards.