Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fred Kaplan and James Der Derian. (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3)

Fred Kaplan, the “War Stories” columnist at Slate, reminds us in his trashing of the Bush-Cheney neo-cons, Daydream Believers, not only that his barbed book title comes from T. E. Lawrence, but that Lawrence had aimed the dagger at his own over-reaching imperial self.
“All men dream: but not equally,” Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
In our studio / classroom with James Der Derian‘s global security students at Brown’s Watson Institute, Fred Kaplan extends his argument about “a few grand ideas” that “wrecked American power.” Among the bad ideas, in Kaplan’s reading, were the oversold “revolution in military affairs” and the Rumsfeldian dogmas it spawned about the political utility of super-high-tech weaponry. Another one, he says here, was the notion that United States came out of the Cold War stronger — not perhaps unhinged by the loss of a balance wheel in world affairs. Kaplan’s conversation picks up where Parag Khanna‘s left off, as to the sins of the Bush years and the depth of the Obama predicament today:
The U. S. Government’s recent actions — the willful disregard of international treaties, the documented instances of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, the often-arbitrary detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the illegal “renderings” of suspected terrorists on foreign soil, the harsh treatment of civilians under the occupation of Iraq, in the eyes of some the fact of the occupation itself — have undermined America’s authority as a moral or legal arbiter.
Quite apart from questions of war, these actions have also tarnished America’s stature as a beacon of democracy. In many parts of the world, especially in the Middle East, the word “democracy” is now discredited. Sadder still, the smattering of individuals and movements struggling for Western-style reforms shun association with the United States, knowing it would only hurt their cause…
Fred Kaplan in Daydream Believers (Wiley), p. 197
There’s a great cameo appearance here by Sergei Khrushchev, historian son of the late Soviet Premier Nikita and a longtime fellow at the Watson Institute. Quoth Sergei:

About Afghanistan, what is happening now reminds me, one by one, of what happened with the Soviet Union. Soviet generals were against the invasion of Afghanistan. But then after, when they entered there, each two months, they said: an additional division… and maybe we will take over. At last it was finished with 150,000 [troops] that could not control Afghanistan at all. The biggest mistake, what I think is happening now, is this illusion — and your illusion also — that anybody can control Afghanistan. Nobody can control Afghanistan from outside, because we are alien and they will be united against us.
Sergei Khrushchev with Fred Kaplan in James Der Derian’s seminar at Brown, March 4, 2009.