The "reinvention of imperialism"

OK, so I went out of town and forgot to tell you.

No charge this week.

Yesterday, I attended a party in honor of Nayef Samhat, Professor of Government and International Relations at Centre College -- and, of course, the coauthor of Democratizing Global Politics, featured in the right hand column of this blog. I missed the AP story from April that quoted him about the Iraq insurgency:

"The invasion was clearly unprovoked and can be easily seen by many in the Arab-Islamic world as nothing more than the reinvention of imperialism," Samhat said. "The images, too, are quite similar to those of Israeli military actions against Palestinians.

"Arabs will see the similarity," Samhat said, "and associate the two quite easily."

The story goes on to quote a number of other political scientists, including Joseph Nye of Harvard, Ole Holsti of Duke, Dan Caldwell of Pepperdine, and George Lopez of Notre Dame. But Nayef is quoted first.

It's old news now, but Nye had a pretty juicy quote too, concerning the pre-war predictions about the size of the US force needed in Iraq:

"It turns out Wolfowitz was wildly wrong," said Joseph Nye, a former assistant defense secretary who is dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

"If they had put in more troops, they would have prevented the looting and the situation from deteriorating," Nye said.

Army General (and chief of staff) Eric Shinseki had guessed that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq, the neocons disagreed, and only 150,000 were deployed for the war.

Pre-war, Wolfowitz said Shenseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark."