HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT KAPLAN on how America should operate around the world. Excerpt:

In fact, one of the stories that got some attention, but perhaps not as much as it should have, is the number of visits by high-level Pentagon officials to Dearborn, Michigan, which is kind of the center of the Iraqi-American community. People in the U.S. government have been increasingly reaching out to Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles, to Iraqi-Americans in Dearborn, hopefully to Palestinians in northern New Jersey. They recognize that we aren’t tapping the “hyphenated Americans,” and increasingly we’re making progress. But just think about it. We have the most international country in the world. Large communities of Armenians, of Iranians, of Laotians, of Vietnamese, and of Arabs. Given this population base, there is no excuse for us not having a diplomatic and military corps that is the most erudite and linguistically sophisticated in the world. And we do, to an extent. But we have to get a lot better at it.

Yes. In an interestingly related post, Trent Telenko says that Rumsfeld and Shinseki are both wrong about the number of troops needed to rebuild Iraq.