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A few notes on returning NSC official Robert Blackwill:
UPI, Juan Cole and others have reported that the recent US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill is being promoted to head the NSC 'crisis' team charged with trying to salvage the US Iraq mission. Indeed, sources cited by UPI suggest that Blackwill is essentially to become Paul Bremer's top deputy. (This I doubt. More likely, Blackwill will be a kind of Old Executive Office building-based trouble shooter Condoleeza Rice trusts to manage Bremer, the CPA, and the Iraqi Governing Council.)
"The future of the Iraq governing council will be on the agenda of talks that U.S. National Security Council official Robert Blackwill will be conducting with Bremer soon," UPI reports. "According to sources in Baghdad, Blackwill will visit Iraq to explore the possibility of enlarging the Iraq council, or dissolving it and setting up a new body."
A few notes about Blackwill, who I knew as Professor Blackwill in grad school a few years ago.
--By the standards of this administration, Blackwill is not at all a bad choice to be sent to Iraq to knock heads together on the Iraqi Governing Council.
For the purposes of assisting Bremer, Blackwill is vastly more qualified than the legions of campaign-approved, well-connected PR and campaign hacks Bremer seems somehow to have acquired as "special advisors" in Iraq.
As much drill sergeant as diplomat, Blackwill is difficult, abrasive, and vastly bright and experienced. (His embassy in New Delhi was a famously unhappy post for State Department foreign service officers). He exudes an aura of carrying the weight of the free world's survival on his shoulders. That said, as I'll describe more below, I think that, like many who held high national security positions in the Bush I administration (and in Bush II for that matter), Blackwill does not really have a vision for US national security that fits the real threats and needs of the post-Cold War, and now the post 9/11, world. Blackwill, James Baker, Blackwill's protege Condoleeza Rice, and others in that circle, seem stuck in the Cold War, great-state-struggle paradigm, more than a bit adrift since.
As Blackwill said during his Senate confirmation hearing for the post of US ambassador to India, "During those years in government and through my teaching, articles and books while at Harvard, I have concentrated my intellectual and conceptual attention on the relationships between and among the great powers in the international system. If the Senate confirms me, I believe that this particular strategic preoccupation of mine will be intensely relevant to my new responsibilities."
The problem is, the post Cold War, post-9/11 world, is not really chiefly about the struggle and relationships between the great powers. The post 9/11 world is a different animal that these Cold Warriors can't quite seem to get their heads around. (As one can see in this administration's virtual abandonment of the war on Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the more conventional war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq). And in their contempt for peacekeeping/nation building, international treaties, and their commitment to old-style US control of energy-rich regions, these realpolitik post-Cold Warriors are stubbornly blind to how being able to fix Iraq, for instance, after breaking it, is as important to the U.S.' success, even from the most pragmatic point of view.
Blackwill, 64, rose through the ranks of the Foreign Service, serving for 22 years, did stints as a US arms control negotiator against the Soviets, taught for fifteen years at Harvard, and became a deputy national security advisor during the Bush I administration.
It was in that role that Blackwill became a mentor to Condoleeza Rice who worked under him covering Europe and German integration for the NSC under Bush I. I would expect that Rice will personally trust and rely on Blackwill's judgment more than most any other figure at the NSC or in the administration.
--Blackwill is a Republican hawk, but from the school of realpolitik, not of neoconservative idealism. He is not an idealist, he is a realist. Closer to George Schultz and Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft than Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle. (That said, for all of Blackwill's hard-nosed realism, I have sometimes found his judgment to be just plain wrong. For instance, during 1998-9, when I was simultaneously studying with him while spending much of my time on the ground in war-time Kosovo, Blackwill predicted as near certainty that within a year or two, Kosovo was headed for independence. It just hasn't happened, and there was little reason at the time to think it would).
--He certainly at that time, 1998-1999, was also among the group of prominent Bush I foreign policy "refugees" convinced that the Clinton policy of containing Saddam Hussein was not working, and believed that the US would have to move to topple Saddam, the sooner the better.
--To his credit, Blackwill was also among a (bi-partisan) group of foreign policy practitioners and intellectuals prominent at Harvard who were warning early loud and often about grand or super terrorism. But then again, this group was more concerned with terrorism using nuclear, chemical and biological weapons than with the kind of attacks the US saw on September 11th.
--This obsession with the big terrible things that were coming to kill us, among Blackwell and other Bush I and Clinton I Pentagon/NSC refugees I studied with at Harvard, sometimes led to a kind of blindness to the real conflicts the US was getting caught up in - at least politically - at the time, including the Bosnia genocide. People like Blackwill just didn't get why Bosnia was of any national security interest to the United States, except perhaps towards the end when it threatened to unravel Nato. Any concern for ending genocide was considered by him, in my estimation, as pure sentimentality. "U.S. national security interests" were defined most narrowly. (Then again, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger from Clinton years were hardly more inspiring about bravely facing the threats of the post-Cold War era).
-- Blackwill can be really difficult to deal with. Clearly he'd been through the ringer more than a few times both personally and professionally. Nevertheless, despite this, and my differences with him over issues like Bosnia and Kosovo, I liked Blackwill. He cared about getting the smartest and best people into US government, and having them perform at their best.