Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski is giving the lunch address at this conference, and he really is a striking example of the kind of foreign policy leaders to whom we should listen. He opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, has years and years of experience in government, and he remains interested in improving the U.S. role in the world.

He talks about specifics, which is weirdly rare when the discussion turns to Iraq -- he just mentioned the importance of people like Hakim and Sistani, in contrast to observers who know little about the internal dynamics of Iraq but nonetheless strongly advocate positions based only on their thoughts about America's role. And he speaks cogently and reasonably about the importance of understanding the regional impact of Iraq.

A continuing theme in the discussion of Iraq is the failure to look at the potential negative consequences for staying in (rather than just the potential problems after withdrawal). The recent bombings of bridges in Iraq indicates an improved insurgent learning curve -- going after infrastructure has far more strategic benefit than attacks against soldiers, whether American or Iraqi.

NOTE FROM JOHN: I worked for Brzezinksi as a researcher when I was in graduate school at Georgetown's Foreign Service program. Amazing man. And nice too. Though the few times he called me into his office I was quaking (hey, I was 23). Actually, I'd never realized this before now but he taught me, or at least reinforced, a powerful political tool. Research of minutiae. We were working on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (it was the late 80s) and he had me reading the FBIS reports (Foreign Broadcast Information Service). Basically, they were transcripts of anything and everything being broadcast from official government sources around the world. Mind you, this was pre-Google and even pre-World Wide Web. Brzezinksi believed in scouring the details and looking for the tidbits that you could tie together to form a picture of what was going on behind the curtain. Of course, being a Soviet expert, that's exactly the kind of skill you needed - watching for lights in the windows of the Kremlin late at night to get a sense of whether a crisis was looming. But the skill is useful for far more than Soviet-watching. It's really what many blogs do on a daily basis. Whether Paris Hilton's gossip, or Chris Bower's detailed look at local races, or our own AJ's dissection of every detail from Iraq, or even the exposing of Jeff Gannon (which happened because of minutiae discovered by scores of blogs working together with scores of readers), it's all about spotting details and then stringing them together to paint a picture no one realized was there. It's a fascinating skill. And in many ways, I can thank Brzezinski for helping me hone it. Really had never thought about that till now.