An Open Letter to the American People from S3FP

A group of foreign policy specialists (mostly academics, some of whose names I recognize, including Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber and Wendy Brown) have issued a collective statement critiquing the Bush Administration's foreign policy:

We, a nonpartisan group of foreign affairs specialists, have joined together to call urgently for a change of course in American foreign and national security policy. We judge that the current American policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period, one which harms the cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists. One result has been a great distortion in the terms of public debate on foreign and national security policy—an emphasis on speculation instead of facts, on mythology instead of calculation, and on misplaced moralizing over considerations of national interest. [1] We write to challenge some of these distortions.

Read the whole thing. Much of the critique is similar to what Kerry's been discussing in the debates: lack of prewar planning, going to war without proof that Saddam Hussein had WMD, etc., but the letter goes into a little more detail about conditions in Iraq now and the U.S.'s international reputation.