The need for thoughtful discourse

Joe Nye has a blog, it turns out, with the Huffington Post. And he writes another excellent article on the discourse about the Iraq war that I found myself nodding with.

Our Impoverished Discourse

Money shot, as Andrew Sullivan would say:

"If Republicans and Democrats continue to ignore soft power and our public discussion is limited to a competition about who can sound tougher, our truncated debate will remain like the sound of one hand clapping. America's current partisan atmosphere has ossified our foreign policy debate. What the nation needs is a discourse that recognizes the importance of both hard and soft power and debates a smart strategy to integrate them."

Joe's argument, that Democrats and Republicans need to be smarter with power rather than tougher and that our discourse should be about how to use soft and hard power to tackle the situation in Iraq and other policy objectives, is a welcome and important one.

Joe opposes a surge, which I think is a mistake, and seriously humbles any sense I have that anyone really knows what will improve the situation in Iraq (I still support a surge, at this point, because I think Frederick Kagan's arguments on the matter, that a pull-out will undermine the necessary security for Iraq to negotiate a political settlement, are the strongest I have encountered).

And as I watch the most brilliant policy minds in the world disagree about how to best approach this situation in Iraq, I think, "Why would we think, given the diversity of opinion on something as serious and as clearly a matter of goverance of any question that we face, that somehow we have divined the ability that has eluded every past generation to know exactly what matters upon which we should force, pressure, repress, and otherwise impose our will?"

We don't, is the answer. What we maintain is the hubris to believe that we do, and the shortsightedness to think that doing so will have no impact on the credibility, the soft power, of governance.