His battalion was not sent to Iraq for the invasion, which he said was “a huge leadership challenge.” DAVID BERGER tells NatSec Daily that 20 years ago, he was a battalion commander deployed to Okinawa. WHERE WERE THE JOINT CHIEFS?: Marine Corps Commandant Gen. is now “reaping the consequences of over-investment” in the greater Middle East having failed to adequately prepare for strategic competition with China. Kahl, who later became VP Biden’s national security adviser, believes the U.S. “And so I decided to apply for the Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellowship, which I would call an embedded nerd program that essentially takes junior academics and puts them in a policy setting for a year or so.”Įven though he was a Democrat who had opposed the Iraq war, Kahl was placed at the Pentagon led by DONALD RUMSFELD with PAUL WOLFOWITZ and DOUG FEITH in other top positions. invasion of Iraq in 2003, I became increasingly dissatisfied with only residing in the ivory tower,” said Kahl, who was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota at the time. “After 9/11, and then especially after the U.S. Other senior members of Biden’s current team, like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy COLIN KAHL, also saw their careers changed by the war. policy, thousands of miles away, and that decisions that are made here can have extraordinary impact on real people’s lives and that that should never be far from the thought process of decision makers,” Finer said. “It’s been a constant reminder that there are people on the other end of U.S. forces from Iraq.Ī whole generation of Democratic foreign policy wonks emerged chastened from the Iraq experience and eager to avoid another catastrophic war of choice. In 2011, as a Middle East adviser to then-Vice President JOE BIDEN, he helped oversee the drawdown of U.S. BUSH’s fateful decision has affected Finer’s work again and again. “It’s probably the main thing that led me to want to work in government in the first place: to see how that worked and hopefully to help do it better.” “It made me much more interested in how foreign policy decisions get made since that one was so consequential,” he told NatSec Daily in an interview. Today, 20 years after the invasion began, Finer sits in the White House as the deputy national security adviser. What he saw there - the war, the chaos, the dysfunction - made him want to leave journalism and join the U.S. In March 2003, newly minted Washington Post staff reporter JON FINER embedded with a Marine infantry battalion to cover the U.S. A whole generation of Democratic foreign policy wonks emerged chastened from the Iraq experience and eager to avoid another catastrophic war of choice.
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