Category Archive

This WSJ poll is about six weeks out of date, so it is pretty useless for tracking the presidential race.  There are some other results that have more lasting relevance.  58% say that the globalisation of the American economy has been on the whole “bad,” with just 28% saying the opposite and 11% declaring it a wash.  That is pretty clearly bad news for the party most closely identified with globalisation at present.  The number for those saying globalisation has generally benefited “the American economy” has dropped 14 points from a poll 10 years ago.  There are as many dissatisfied with their financial circumstances (33%) as there have been since the wake of the ‘01-’02 recession.  52% said that immigration “hurts more than it helps” the United States, up eight points from last summer and back at the same levels two years earlier.  As of mid-December when the poll was taken, 56% said that victory in Iraq was not still possible.  All of the pro-”surge” talk affected the respondents over the course of 2007, but as of last December 44% said it had made no difference and 14% said that it had made things worse.  57% agreed with the statement that most American soldiers should be withdrawn from Iraq by the start of 2009.  Except for immigration, obviously, the Republicans are on the unpopular side of every one of these questions.    

The poll also has two interesting figures on anti-Mormonism.  59% could correctly identify that Romney was a Mormon, and 26% “felt uncomfortable” about Romney’s  Mormonism and its possible effect on his presidential decisions (this was how the question was phrased), which was slightly higher than the percentage “uncomfortable” about his religion in the abstract. 

It’s like this, James: if you push for more neoliberal policies in Latin America, that will magically reduce the popularity of the “false populism” that has flourished on account of the backlash against the last round of neoliberal policies pushed by Washington, whereas if you don’t support those policies “false populism” will run wild.  That’s clear, isn’t it?

Compassionate conservatism was, in practice, nothing more than spin and a vague gesture at a higher-order justification for corruption. ~Matt Yglesias

Speaking as someone who viewed “compassionate conservatism” as something more than spin, I would note that from a conservative perspective the first term proposals of “compassionate conservatism,” whether NCLB or the “faith-based initiatives” or something else, were a form of corruption all their own–a corruption of schools on the one hand, and a corruption of churches and charities on the other.  But to divide the high Gersonian rhetoric from the corruption and policy disasters of the Bush years is a mistake that allows both to escape from real censure much too easily.  Gersonism facilitates corruption, because it breeds a sense of entitlement and a loss of restraint in how power and resources are used.  Gersonism almost has to lead to policy disasters, because its assessment of ends and means is horribly wrong.  Fundamental to the entire project is an unreflective optimism and self-confidence that says, “I know I’m trying to save the world (and I will save the world), and anyone who doesn’t appreciate that is a moral monster.”  The obvious danger with self-appointed revolutionary transformers of the world is that the only thing they see more clearly than the rightness of their own view is the depravity of their foes, which makes for the perfect recipe for fanaticism and abuse of power.

This is the trouble that both cynics and progressives have in trying to make sense of Bush.  People will assume that he is using “compassion” and “democracy” talk as cynical cover for something else or that he’s cloaking his allegedly deep right-wing commitments (ha!) beneath a lot of talk about government moving to assist hurting people.  What is difficult for Bush’s critics, myself included, to appreciate is just how obliviously sincere they are that they think they really are caring for people and helping people by laying waste to their countries, imposing absurd unfunded mandates on their schools, frittering money away on feel-good foreign aid projects that leads directly to more corruption abroad, etc.  They feel they are doing good, and so the consequences do not concern them, which is probably why they apparently give so little thought to consequences and the possibility that things will go awry.

Romney told the crowd of roughly 150 at the Jorge Mas Canosa youth center that he ‘’would never give money to Fidel Castro'’ — prompting a swell of cheers. ~The Miami Herald

Perhaps I haven’t been following Florida politics as closely as I thought I was–is there a live controversy about subsidies for Castro that has eluded my attention?  Now that Liz Cheney is advising him on foreign policy, perhaps he can also pledge that he will not fund Bashar Al-Assad.  Before Cuban-American voters get too swept up in these bold promises of not funding Castro (that’s some bold leadership for America, Mitt!), I would remind them that this is the same master of the pander who insisted that patria o muerte, vinceremos! was a wonderful, patriotic message that free Cubans should “reclaim” as their own.  Who let the dogs out, indeed. 

Watch out, Romney supporters: Liz Cheney, fresh from badly advising Fred Thompson on foreign affairs, is backing your candidate.  It’s only a matter of time before the cold, creeping touch of Matalin follows and brings political doom with it.  In the endorsement race, McCain has picked up nods from two popular Floridian politicians who endorsed him out of annoyance with Romney’s sleeve-tugging, and Romney has the support of…Liz Cheney.  Those who have proposed that Romney represents some meaningful break with the Bush administration in foreign affairs might want to reconsider that view.

Despite this, Mandell Ganchrow, a former Orthodox Union president and longtime leader of a major pro-Israel political action committee, recently posted an item on his Web site suggesting Obama’s early exposure to Islam could make him a danger to Israel.

“In the Jewish religion when someone is far away from observance, however at a certain time he has a spark of Jewishness, we call it a ‘pintele Yid’ — a smattering, or a deep-seated unconscious attachment to one’s roots,” Ganchrow wrote. “With a Muslim father, and being surrounded in his early youth in a Muslim environment, is there such a thing as a ‘pintele Muslim,’ with deep-seated feelings which could color decisions re: terrorism and the Middle East?” ~The Jewish Week

Via Sullivan

This wouldn’t be quite so ludicrous if Obama had ever shown the slighest hint of disagreeing with most U.S. policies in the Near East and had ever gone beyond beyond standard left-liberal criticisms of the treatment of Palestinians.  Of course, except for Iraq (which a rather large number of non-Muslims who actually knew something about the Near East also opposed), he hasn’t.  I have argued before that this perception of an affinity for Muslims or attachment to the Islamic world would hurt him politically, and that it was crazy for him and his supporters to keep emphasising his foreign roots and attachments.  Whatever else you want to say about this, it really isn’t a vote-getter. 

I would like to use some of my personal history to explore just how ridiculous this line of criticism of Obama is.  First, as any long-time readers know, I am not a fan of Obama and I think he would make a terrible President.  The problem with his foreign policy views is not that they are too passive or “friendly” (or whatever counts as a grave sin in the eyes of such people) to Near Eastern and Islamic countries, but that he is essentially indistinguishable from the foreign policy consensus views of Washington, except when he overcompensates out of fear of looking “weak” by proposing sending American forces into Pakistan whether or not Islamabad agrees.  In other words, when he isn’t being merely conventional, he may be more dangerous than the people we have in power now.  This is not the result of his family background or upbringing, but a result of his inexperience and his misguided ideas about the U.S. role in the world that many of his colleagues share. 

As has been brought up elsewhere, for a very short time (about six months) I professed Islam (albeit pretty idiosyncratically–I doubt if my “conversion” would have ever been recognised as a proper one), mostly out of an attraction at the time to a somewhat coherent monotheism that was neither Jewish nor Christian, since I had been raised with no real religious education and had been conditioned by my multiculti private schools to an aversion to Christianity about whose teachings I knew relatively little and which I understood even less.  After a few years of syncretistic dabbling in various religious literatures, I came to Islam, mostly through the English translations of Rumi and the like, but rather like the dabbling before it this was not, on reflection, a serious conversion and it was one I could never enter into fully.  (Incidentally, anyone who would like to make more out of this than that is wasting his time.)  In a way slightly similar to Obama’s conversion to Christianity, I approached Orthodoxy at first intellectually that then became more firmly grounded in a practicing Orthodox parish.  So while I have no sympathy with Obama’s politics, I have found the persistent effort to label him falsely as a Muslim or crypto-Muslim, when he very definitely decided, as I did, to become a Christian (however liberal a denomination he may have joined), and the credulity of stupid voters to believe this falsehood, to be obnoxious.  There are dozens of reasons not to support Obama.  But the problem is not that he was raised for a few years in Indonesia with an Indonesian step-father or that his grandfather was a Muslim, but that he actually claims that living for a few years in Indonesia in his youth and having a Kenyan grandmother still living in a village in Kenya give him relevant foreign policy experience.  The problem is not where he grew up, but that he is substituting a kind of symbolic capital for expertise.   

As for the effect of my brief time as a self-described Muslim on my policy views, my attitude towards the world overseas had been poisoned much more by reading The Economist and The Wall Street Journal than by reading the Qur’an.  I had far more sympathy for Bosnian Muslims and Chechens as an ignorant American teenager than as a putative Muslim thanks to interventionist agitation on their behalf.  By the time of this brief Islamic phase, I had stopped thinking of foreign policy as a morality play in which other countries could be simplistically portrayed as incarnate evil.  Indeed, perhaps this kind of thinking only really works for thoroughly secular people who must find their great moral struggles in politics rather than in asceticism and worship.  Who knows?  In any case, Western media reported incessantly that the perpetually evil Slavs were the villains of the story, and that  it was as simple as that, and, young, foolish kid that I was, I believed them.  Mujahideen in the Balkans?  Why worry?  Truthfully, as a result of reading Chronicles more regularly, becoming better educated in European and Near Eastern history and becoming more familiar with Christianity, I began to move away from the pro-jihadist positions of the WSJ, Weekly Standard and the like, while the war against Yugoslavia and its aftermath finally brought me around to the non-interventionist views that I have held ever since.  I base my current views on what is in the American interest and how justice obliges us to act towards other nations.      

If there were anything to this idea that Obama’s experience of growing up around and among Muslims (for a relatively shot period of his life in his earliest youth) would have an effect on his policy views, he would have to have policy views that were not virtually identical with every other conventional Democratic hawk.  

P.S.  Ross, Yglesias and Ambinder talk about Obama and the Muslim charge.

Mike Huckabee recites from the warmonger hymnal, plus weird references to Jordan!  Why hawks have a problem with Huckabee, I will never understand.  Opponents of the war are the ones who should find Huckabee to be unacceptable.

The Republican field (save Ron Paul) marches in support of the war to their eventual political doom. 

Huckabee likens WMDs to easter eggs–Pinkerton, call your office!

“A superpower, if you will,” Romney says of jihadis.  It makes Huckabee’s easter egg remark seem informed.

By the way, whatever you think of Paul’s monetary views, his statement that wars produce inflation is absolutely right and pretty much irrefutable.  At some point, you have to be either pro-dollar or you can be pro-war.

Dennis Kucinich has dropped out of the race, and so departs the last consistent antiwar Democratic candidate for President.  It has puzzled and dismayed me that so many Republican antiwar voters have backed McCain in defiance of all logic, but at least there is a core of voters in the Republican primaries that has rallied to the real antiwar candidate on the right.  Meanwhile, Democratic antiwar voters mostly divide among those candidates who would bomb Iran and those who would invade Pakistan, all of whom endorsed the war against Lebanon in 2006.  By all rights, Kucinich ought to have been able to pull together 10% of the vote in every vote, but instead was usually drawing less than half the support given to Ron Paul on the other side.  However bad you think the GOP is, and I think it is pretty bad, don’t ever let anyone tell you that the Democratic Party is a party opposed to needless and illegal wars. 

Prof. Bainbridge preaches ashes and sackcloth:

Coupled with losing Congress in 2006, losing the presidency in 2008 will provide a pair of defeats that surely will prompt “attentiveness” on the part of the GOP leadership and the intellectual base of think tanks and academics who helped lay the foundation for the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.

But attentiveness to what?  There is something frustratingly vague about Bainbridge’s complaint, just as there was always something frustratingly vague about Thompson’s campaign message.  Going back to first principles is a fine idea (assuming that you have sound first principles), but Thompson never made clear how he would differ from the current administration in those areas where it was most ruinous for the reputation of the party and the name of conservatism.  There is reason to think, given what he has said and who is advising him, that Thompson would have been worse and more prone to the same mistakes of this administration on foreign policy than would Romney or Huckabee.  In other words, in the one area where a return to first principles seems most necessary, Thompson plainly failed to deliver.    

2006 should have been a deafening wake-up call to the GOP that most of the country was not with them on Iraq, but that wasn’t the lesson they learned at all.  They decided to hang it all on corruption and overspending, as if Indiana ousted three Republican incumbents and New Hampshire turned into a Democratic state because of Abramoff and earmarks.  Depending on the nominee, the aftermath of an ‘08 defeat will result in slightly different conclusions, but whatever explanation “the intellectual base” gives to account for the defeat they will remain oblivious to the party’s blind spots on the war and foreign policy, and so will be unable to fix what is wrong.  Remarkably, many of the same people who have winked and nodded at executive usurpation and infringement on civil liberties, the ones who mock Paul’s constitutionalism as hopelessly antiquated, are all the more rigidly, inflexibly adhering to the memory of “the Reagan coalition,” as if conservatism existed for the sake of the coalition rather than the other way around.          

As America marks the first anniversary of the troop escalation in Iraq, at least one thing has become clear. Although the “surge” is failing as policy, it seems to be succeeding as propaganda. Even as George W. Bush continues to bump and scrape along the bottom of public approval, significantly more people now believe we are “winning” the war.

What winning really means and whether that vague impression can be sustained are questions that the war’s proponents would prefer not to answer for the moment. Their objective during this election year is simply to reduce public pressure for withdrawal, which is still the choice of an overwhelming majority of voters. ~Joe Conason

This is pretty much in line with what I argued in one of my TAC columns last month (sorry, not online).  As others have noted, the real political goal of the “surge” seems not to have been to stabilise a viable Iraqi government, but to shore up collapsing support for the war here.  Even so, the domestic political effects have mostly been limited to Washington.  Public opinion remains as resolutely against the war as it was a year ago.  Three quarters of Americans do not want a “large number” of troops in Iraq two years from now, and half the country wants most of our forces out in less than a year. 

Ross agrees with James on the foreign aid debate: 

I might even go further than this, though, and suggest that even when these sort of efforts turn out to be ineffective at fostering the sort of order we ought to be concerned with, their effectivness as public diplomacy shouldn’t be underestimated.

Ross is right about the effect on foreign public opinion of even limited assistance, especially in cases of disaster relief, whether it is the Kashmir earthquake he refers to or the assistance for the Southeast Asian tsunami over three years ago.  In this respect, foreign aid to Africa has made Africa into an unexpected success story, if you measure success by how favourably many African nations view the U.S. relative to the rest of the world.  Then again, there also seems to be a general correlation between how much Washington generally ignores a part of the world, except to give aid packages, and how much the people in that region view America favourably.       

However, unless these programs really do help to foster some order and unless the goverments of the countries receiving aid are capable of maintaining some basic order on their own, I don’t think I have to tell you that American public opinion will sour on giving money to these governments over time.  There was a strong and understandable reaction here to the chaos in Pakistan after Bhutto’s assassination, which was actually much less pronounced and grave than the civil strife going on in Kenya, and to the extent that the American public thinks about aid to Pakistan I would guess a large plurality, if not a majority, was asking itself, “Why are we giving them all this aid?  What’s the point?”  In the case of Pakistan, there are good answers to that question, but the damage done by civil disorder to American support for this kind of aid, even when it may be strategically justified (as I doubt it is in many parts of Africa), should not be underestimated. 

Thank goodness it’s Friday–there must be another insipid Michael Gerson column to read!  And indeed there is.  This week, he’s complaining about mean, ol’ Fred’s remarks on government funding for AIDS in Africa:

While he is not an isolationist, he clearly is playing to isolationist sentiments. 

It is now “isolationist” to oppose foreign aid for disease prevention on a continent where the United States has negligible interests, because apparently our resources are as infinite as the ever-multiplying “interests” that the Gersons of the world discover for us in every problem around the world.  More than that, Gerson tells us, Fred has revealed his lack of “moral seriousness.”  For Gerson, governing isn’t a matter of making choices and setting priorities in the American interest, but of unburdening his conscience about suffering on the other side of the world with someone else’s money.  I can understand why Gerson is annoyed–this kind of foreign aid was one of his favourite administration policies–but the reasoning here is beyond laughable:

America is engaged in a high-stakes ideological struggle in Africa, where radicals and terrorists seek to fill the vacuum of failed and hopeless societies. Fighting disease and promoting development are important foreign policy tools in this struggle, which Thompson apparently does not appreciate or even understand.  

Now the overwhelming bulk of the foreign aid in question goes to sub-Saharan and East African countries, where there are not actually very many of these “radicals and terrorists.”  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t violent, brutal militias and governments, and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t political instability in some of these countries, but it does mean that the political woes of these countries do not figure in to any larger, much less “high-stakes,” ideological struggle.  Uganda, one of the recipients of our current aid, suffers from a long-running insurgency in the north, but this is not connected to a broader “ideological struggle,” unless you assume that the “ideological struggle” is being waged everywhere on the planet and can be used to retroactively justify any do-gooding overseas that comes under reasonable scrutiny.  If health-related foreign aid is a weapon in this “ideological struggle,” shouldn’t we at the very least be targeting it at countries that are more strategically significant?  But no, Thompson must be engaged in some kind of “isolationism” because he doesn’t favour frittering away resources on what are frankly, from the perpsective of the American interest, low-priority issues.  

Reading Gerson’s moral hectoring, you have to conclude that there is no logical limit to the outpouring of state-funded compassion that he would support, since to limit it would be to declare someone, somewhere, less of a priority for the U.S. government than someone else, and that would be evidence of a hardness of heart rather than responsible government.  In trying to lay a guilt trip on Thompson for expressing what I have to assume is the view of a substantial number, if not a majority, of Republicans, Gerson reminds us why so many of us on the right are instinctively averse to foreign aid proposals: the arguments used to advance them are usually loaded down with this self-important moral preening that says Americans must be concerned with the problems of people on the other side of the planet and that they are necessarily shameful and despicable people if they prefer primarily to help their own.  This is not simply an insulting way to make the argument, but it suggests a frankly deranged set of priorities in the one making the argument.  Gerson, like Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House, seems to be able to see nothing closer than Africa.

The requirements of charity do call us to help the sick and the poor (which Thompson never denied, but rather took for granted), but what Gerson is talking about is almost the opposite and negation of charity.  Invoking the tradition in Christendom of public authorities providing for the poor, Gerson implicitly takes for granted that the United States government has the same obligation to provide for the poor of other continents that it may have for its own citizens, which suggests that he thinks that our government is the public authority for all the world.  Abandoning persuasion, the redistributionist resorts to coercion to send money to whatever cause he believes is most deserving, and here Gerson is no different.  This is his “heroic conservatism,” which does not conserve much of anything but fancies itself very heroic for wasting things that belong to other people.  As sure as public money always tends to drive out private money, foreign aid spending, when it is not misappropriated by the receiving government, will tend to reduce and limit the extent of private philanthropy dedicated to a particular country or problem.  It might just be that the public policy Gerson supports will ultimately hamper the development of private institutional and charitable support and so perpetuate dependency on this aid indefinitely.  As with so many proposals of state support, the helping hand of government, even when offered in good faith and with the best of intentions, can have a long-term crippling effect on the recipients who are “benefiting” from the aid.  

Update: James makes the much more cogent case for ths kind of aid on the grounds of promoting or preserving stability and social order in these countries.  It still seems debatable to me that doing this is the U.S. government’s responsibility or that the stability of Uganda or other such African nations should be a priority of our government, but this is the only kind of argument for this aid that will persuade and it is the just about the only kind of argument for it that can be defended coherently.  That said, Peter makes the good pragmatic case against the actual aid program that the government has.  Before throwing money to corrupt governments, it would be wise to know whether the money will ever assist the people for whom it is being donated.  Americans generally and conservatives in particular would have far fewer objections to foreign aid if there was much confidence that the money would not be wasted or stolen, and that it would accomplish the things that the government says that it will.  In principle, containing the spread of disease strikes me as a far more useful and humane use of our resources than invading and occupying other countries that pose no threat to us, but there need to be cogent arguments as to why we should focus on one region rather than another and why our government is the one that should be doing this.  Given the current state of the federal government’s finances, I’m not sure that we can afford to keep throwing good money after mostly bad on programs that are being minimally effective. 

Roger Cohen repeats a meme that has been getting on my nerves, especially since McCain did better among antiwar voters than among supporters of the war, who voted for Romney in both New Hampshire and Michigan:

McCain was politically dead six months ago, his campaign undone by his backing of President Bush’s Iraq policy. His remarkable resurgence, which has put him in the lead among Republican candidates, according to recent polls, is one measure of the Iraq shift.

This first sentence is a complete media fantasy.  His campaign was undone by his support for the immigration bill last summer.  Opponents of the war in the mainstream press don’t like McCain’s position on the war and so conclude that this must be what has brought him down, but they are judging the war’s popularity by the entire population, continually neglecting to note that most Republicans still support it.  It wasn’t as if he was terribly popular with conservatives before the immigration bill, but that pushed a lot of people away from him and destroyed his status as the “next-in-line” nominee.  Also, his “remarkable resurgence” was tied to his victory in New Hampshire, which had to do with his personal popularity in New Hampshire that has endured since 2000 and his ability to attract independent voters.  Public opinion about the success of the “surge” hasn’t changed very much, so it is difficult to trace McCain’s resurgence to anything Iraq-related.  If his resurgence were a result of getting credit for his position on Iraq, he ought to be winning most of the war supporters rather than a plurality of the opponents, wouldn’t you say?

An agreement spanning hard-line Shia Muslims, secularists and Sunni representatives set the outlines for a broad-based alliance capable of mounting a parliamentary challenge to the ruling coalition led by the prime minister Nouri al-Malaki.

A shared platform welded together the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the moderate former prime minister Ayad Allawi and even a Sunni leader, Salah al-Mutlak.

A statement said the parties would resist proposals to grant regional governments control over oil resources and push for the abandonment of a referendum on the disputed city of Kirkuk. ~The Daily Telegraph

When the administration has pressed for Iraqi political reconciliation, I do not think this is what they had in mind.  Now, in addition to the fractiousness within the government and the reluctance of Maliki to press very hard on these measures, there is an organised bloc dedicated to thwarting the legislative agenda that the “surge” was supposed to make possible. 

On MTP Clinton reasonably questioned Obama’s self-serving story about his allegedly bold and consistent opposition to the war, noting that he has built his reputation in foreign policy on opposition to the war when his opposition has been, at least since he entered the Senate, largely rhetorical and bereft of leadership before he started running for President.  This is true, even though Hillary Clinton has said it.  If you want a real antiwar Democratic leader, you might look to someone like Russ Feingold, who has actually consistently opposed the war by, well, voting against it and voting to end funding for it. 

It is all very well that Obama spoke against the war when he was at no political risk as a state senator in one of the most liberal districts in a Democratic state.  He then subsequently distanced himself from that opposition when the war was initially popular and it seemed that being antiwar was a political loser for an ambitious politician and embarrassing to someone chosen to give the keynote address at a convention that was nominating two war supporters, only to rediscover his previous ”superior judgement” once the country had turned against the war and he was gearing up to run for President.  Because Hillary Clinton is so deeply unpopular with so many political observers, many do not want to credit these criticisms, but they are pretty accurate.  On this specific point, it is, dare I say it, Obama and his campaign that have played the part of the Clintons and the Clintons who have (for entirely self-serving reasons, of course) opted to tell the truth.

I just heard Fred Thompson berate Huckabee for his complaint that the Pakistanis misappropriate our aid money to their military for purposes other than combating Al Qaeda.  Of course, what Huckabee was actually referring to, unless I am very much mistaken, was the problem that Pakistan has been using military aid funding to bolster their military strength on the border with India.  Contra Quin Hillyer, Thompson came off sounding like a buffoon.  Remind me again why we’re supposed to think Huckabee is weak on foreign policy and Thompson is not?  Because he’s advised by the Vice President’s daughter?  Not much of a recommendation.

P.S. I think I have been a bit too hard on Huckabee’s foreign policy views because of his NIE blunder.  He has been improving in this area over the last couple of months.  As I said before, his Foreign Affairs essay did show some decent understanding of Pakistan, and tonight’s performance confirms that.  As for Fred, anyone advised by Liz Cheney is going to make foolish statements.

Update: Thompson really is desperate to go after Huckabee tonight.  He knows that he has to tear the man down to survive in South Carolina, but it’s just not working.

Second Update: Via Ambinder, Joe Scarborough makes it clear that he doesn’t like Fred Thompson’s debate performance.  I think that invite to Chuck Norris’ ranch won him over to Huck’s side.

In the wake of New Hampshire, I know we’re all supposed to ignore polls and pretend that they tell us little, but it seems useful to look at the most recent Iraq war polling again in response to this Jennifer Rubin piece.  Rubin wrote:

To look ahead to the general election, the surge may also have changed the landscape for the Republicans as a whole. If progress continues, the GOP will not face searing headlines and escalating body counts. The traditional image of the GOP as the more responsible and less skittish party in national security may be restored somewhat and the Democrats’ willingness to “cut and run” again becomes a viable campaign issue.

So the lessons of the surge are familiar ones, but ones repeatedly forgotten by politicians anxious to seek safer ground in any controversy. Short-term political gain does not always translate into long-term electoral success [bold mine-DL]. The public in the end will reward political courage — in part because it is so rare.

With all the usual caveats that the election is still ten months away and many things may change, I confess that I don’t see where Rubin is getting this impression that the “surge” stands to benefit the GOP.  Obviously, “surge” supporters hope that it does, and anything is possible, but there is little reason to think that it has had any meaningful impact on public opinion about the war.  On the surface, yes, McCain is doing better (because he won in a state he had won eight years ago, though with almost 30,000 fewer voters this time), while bizarrely losing to Romney among strong supporters of the war 44-23%.  Huckabee has probably temporarily benefited in the GOP primaries from being unequivocally for the “surge” while Romney was more skeptical about its success, but this may, in fact, prove to be a liability should he win the nomination.  It is worth noting that Romney’s very modest skepticism and caution actually put him closer to the majority of the country than does McCain’s mantra “we are winning.”  McCain’s best electoral asset seems to be that he wins the votes of Republican war opponents, as he did in New Hampshire, in spite of his close identification with the war–this is probably a function of the weakness of Republican war opponents’ opposition rather than McCain’s ability to appeal to those on the other side of the debate.  It seems implausible that non-Republican war opponents will be as willing to support him.

In the NBC/WSJ poll from Dec. 14-17, opposition to the war remained as strong as ever.  63% disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war.  That would have to include, as of last month, the “surge” as well as everything that came before.  56% believe victory is not still possible.  44% believe the “surge” has made no difference, and 14% believe that it has made things worse.  These numbers are virtually unchanged from earlier months.  57% want to remove most troops by 2009.  In a Dec. 16-19 ABC News poll, 62% say they believe was not worth fighting.  More recent polling by Rasmussen from Jan. 2-3 tells us that 51% believe the war will be judged a failure in the long-term, and only 34% believe that things will improve over the next six months (this group includes 61% of Republicans, but only a fifth of Democrats and a quarter of “other”).  Barring fairly major shifts in public opinion in coming months, the relative military gains of the “surge” seem to have had no effect whatever on opinions about the war.  Since several polls last month showed that the public had more confidence in the Democrats on the Iraq war, it is not at all clear where anyone would get the idea that the “surge” is helping the GOP electorally.

Jim Antle has a very good article on “The Paleocon Dilemma” in the current TAC, and he outlines three tactical approaches that dissident conservatives have been pursuing:

Some paleoconservatives prefer to work within the mainstream movement, hoping to take it back from those they view as squatters.  Others believe that movement is either too far gone, or was fatally flawed from the beginning, and instead seek to forge a “real Right” that will supplant mainstream conservatism.  A third group believes that changing American foreign policy should take precedence over all other ideological concerns and therefore favors the creation of a Left-Right anti-neoconservative coalition.

Ron Paul is the obvious candidate for paleos, and, as Jim notes, in Paul’s campaign ”there are elements of all three approaches—each of which has obvious flaws.”  It remains an open question whether Paul’s campaign is the beginning of a new effort to “recapture” the movement from within, or marks the last attempt to work within the party and the movement before paleos completely reject this first approach.  I have some thoughts on this question, but I am saving them for my next column.  I am personally most inclined to the second approach, even as I am acutely aware of the limitations and problems of that route.  I can see some ad hoc value in the third, but the third approach has a number of even more serious problems. 

Depending on the degree of one’s disaffection, the Bush Era has either transformed the movement into something awful or it has simply revealed internal flaws that have been there for a long time.  Certainly, I think the administration has done grave, probably irreparable, damage to the movement and to the reputation of conservatism in this country.  As I think Sullivan said recently, Bush has managed to betray and discredit conservatism at the same time, which is far worse than his father’s indifference to the movement’s priorities and his moderate Republican proclivity to make deals with the left.  Unlike his father, Bush effectively redefined conservatism in the eyes of most Americans as center-left meliorism at home and Wilsonian interventionism abroad.  Depressingly, it has mostly been the first part of this redefinition that has generated the most movement opposition, while it is the latter that has probably done more damage to our country and more harm to the credibility of conservatives on vital policy questions.  However, I also think that Bush could never have done what he did had the movement and party not been so acquiescent and willing to yield.

If foreign policy is the area in which the most damaging changes have occurred, it would seem reasonable that an alliance to counteract neoconservative influence on foreign policy would be most urgent and desirable, at least in the short term.  That is the rationale for the third approach mentioned above, and it is initially an attractive one.  But the third approach has two problems beyond the one that Jim mentioned (”all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing become left-wing over time”).  The first is that it has very little chance of succeeding.  Divorced from some significant power base and/or voting bloc, a coalition organised around a foreign policy agenda would be extremely unstable and would would not be able to draw much support beyond the relatively small numbers of progressives and conservatives who have found some way to cooperate in opposition to this particular war.  If it grew it numbers, it would become increasingly fissiparous because of the limited number of goals holding the coalition together.  As a generically anti-neoconservative coalition, it would have a broader appeal and could conceivably include realists and internationalists of various stripes, but within that coalition you would continually have friction between those internationalists and the non-interventionists.  The latter would not see many sharp distinctions between the “multilateralists” who supported Kosovo but opposed Iraq and the neocons (perhaps because there are not many real distinctions), while the former would continually be frustrated by right non-interventionists’ opposition to the U.N. and any international treaty that was seen as a threat to national sovereignty.  The candidacy of Obama is a good case in point illustrating this divide: many progressives who are against the Iraq war are nonetheless not terribly concerned about the insane, overreaching, hubristic nature of Obama’s overall foreign policy or his support for Israel’s war in Lebanon, while the antiwar Right sees very little about Obama to admire.  Where some starry-eyed antiwar progressives (and perhaps even a few conservatives) see Obama representing a dramatic change in how the world will see America, we see someone who believes the U.S. has the right and indeed obligation, justified by our limitless security interests that are “inextricably” linked to everyone else’s security interests, to intervene anywhere and everywhere, guaranteeing more of the same disastrously arrogant treatment of other states. 

The second and perhaps more significant problem is that it subordinates all domestic policy priorities and disputes to the goal of agreeing on changing U.S. foreign policy, which most of the constituent parts of this coalition would find deeply dissatisfying in many ways.  It seems improbable that people who aready dislike the compromises required by the current Democratic and Republican coalitions would be likely to ally with others even farther from them in domestic politics.  Personally, I see some substantial common ground between paleos and greens, but the number of paleos and greens who see this same common ground is even smaller than the already rather small numbers of both groups.   While most right non-interventionists see their foreign policy views as the logical extension of their general anti-statism and constitutionalism, which puts them at odds with the welfare state, many of the progressives in this coalition would want to pursue expansions of the state in the name of social justice.  Those on the right who chafed at the conservative movement’s acquiescence to a massive federal bureaucracy during the Cold War and in the decades since 1991 are unlikely to want to tolerate a similar bargain with progressives in the name of thwarting hegemonism.  One of the reasons that most of us will ultimately not be able to go along with such an alliance is that we assume that there is something fundamentally progressive and left-wing about the neoconservative project (and further that this is one of the reasons why it so pernicious), and that it is because of its progressive, leftist origins that neoconservatism misunderstands human nature, society and politics so badly.  We also assume, I think correctly, that as soon as the Iraq war is over neoconservatives will regain, or perhaps will never have lost, their reputation on the left as the “reasonable” and “respectable” Right, the sorts of people that “decent liberals” can work with and not feel guilty.  Once the Iraq war is over, progressives will resume (not that they have ever really stopped) their denunciations of the “nativists” and “isolationists” on the right whom they will always make a point of loathing more than the mainstream Republicans whose policies we all oppose (albeit obviously for different reasons in most cases).        

Here’s a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier today (via Yglesias):

When asked about a Palestinian state, Gov. Huckabee stated that he supports creating a Palestinian state, but believes that it should be formed outside of Israel. He named Egypt and Saudi Arabia as possible alternatives, noting that the Arabs have far more land than the Israelis and that it would only be fair for other Arab nations to give the Palestinians land for a state, rather than carving it out of the tiny Israeli state.

Huckabee’s frequent references to “Islamofascism” and now his adoption of an ultra position on the Palestinians are meant to placate the critics who believe that his foreign policy agenda is either too thin, too naive, too weak or too liberal (or some combination of these).  “Transferring” (a.k.a. forcibly expelling) Palestinians to various Arab countries is a curious way to have U.S. foreign policy ”change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out.”  Who would have guessed that this meant adopting a harsher tone and attitude towards Arabs?  Perhaps that will be Huckabee’s new mantra: Reach out and strike someone.  Huckabee has taken this rather dreadful position of his own accord–just imagine what he would be willing to embrace once “national security” conservatives started supporting and advising him.  Not only would a position like this make him a natural fit for the “new fusionist” alliance of social conservatives and neocons, but in its injustice and hubris it is actually even worse than the current administration. 

Apparently the cover of the latest TAC has annoyed some Giuliani supporters.  That is distressing.  How will we get on without the approval of David Frum and Martin Kramer?  We’ll probably manage somehow. 

There has been an excessive deployment of the term fascist in our political discourse over the last ten years or so, almost all of it coming from neoconservatives and their allies, especially in the context of foreign policy arguments.  I argued late last year against the nonsensical nature of the term Islamofascism, which neoconservative writers use on a regular basis, which belongs to the subtitle of Podhoretz’s latest volume and which forms a central part of neoconservative “analysis” of the threat to this country.  Podhoretz, as you will recall, is an advisor to the Giuliani campaign, so there is something more than a little rich about other Giuliani advisors complaining about the reckless and inappropriate use of references to fascism.  Their entire foreign policy view is little more than an elaborate version of shouting, “The new Hitler is coming!”  Yet they have the temerity to complain when we portray an aggressive, authoritarian, jingoistic nationalist as somehow akin to aggressive jingoistic nationalists?  Remarkable.

In America and Europe in the last fifty years or so, the term fascist has normally been used against traditional conservatives and rightists who value national sovereignty and who want to avoid foreign wars whenever possible.  Apparently unaware of the irony, Republican admirers of FDR, architect of American state capitalism, have been glad to fling the f-word at the heirs to his Old Right enemies, because we respect the non-interventionist principles of America Firsters.  The depiction of Giuliani in brownshirt seems more apt than not in that he has publicly stated his willingness to leave open the first-strike use of tactical nukes against another country, he has made a joke out of torturing detainees and he is on record (along with most conservative pundits) endorsing the aggressive invasion of another country.  Giuliani is nothing if he is not a nationalist who believes in exerting strength through war and using the power of the state.  According to a proper, specific definition of fascism, Giuliani is not a fascist, because fascism died in 1945 and as a phenomenon it has ceased to exist, but then Giuliani and his supporters long ago abandoned any such proper definitions of the term. 

Meanwhile, on a related note, Michael has been a blogging up a storm during my absence from the old tubes. 

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination yesterday in Rawalpindi deserves some comment, and actually deserves much more than I will be able to give in the short time I have today.  Djerejian has interrupted his hiatus and said much that needs to be said.  In short, I am still convinced that Musharraf is a liability to the stability of Pakistan, as I have argued twice before in TAC, and I agree that it would be wise to watch what Kiyani does in the coming weeks.  With no disrespect intended to Bhutto, I think we have (as usual) personalised our view of Pakistan policy far too much and many now seem to assume that Bhutto’s death makes civilian government in Pakistan unfeasible.  That strikes me as a mistaken conclusion.  If the structures of Pakistani civil society, such as they are, are so weak that a single assassination can so badly undermine them, they will not be prepared for the task of a return to civilian rule in the next many years.  I think this places far too much importance on one party leader and stands as an example of how we routinely misunderstand the politics of other countries by investing hopes for reform, democratisation or Westernisation in a single person, who then is either killed or badly disappoints the people who foolishly placed so much emphasis on one leader.  That said, the current situation in Pakistan is unstable enough that any elections held in the next few weeks would be plagued with violence and be the cause of still more outbreaks of civil unrest. 

On the effects of the assassination on our presidential politics, Ross makes an interesting point:

Our Pakistan problem is a vexatious question, ill-suited to being addressed in sound bites and press releases. But it’s precisely because it’s so impossibly vexatious, and likely to remain so no matter who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania, that the news from Rawalpindi fleetingly inspired me to greater sympathy not for “ready to lead” politicians like John McCain or Hillary Clinton, but for the “come home, America” candidacy of one Dr. Ron Paul.

To the extent that most pundits and journalists are not reacting this way, but are instead playing up McCain and Clinton, any effect this assassination will have on our politics will be determined by the willingness of our media to accept at face value the campaign narratives of these candidates.  As it happens, McCain was saying some uncommonly sane and sober things about Pakistan yesterday in an interview with Laura Ingraham, swatting down Obama and Huckabee’s Kaganesque lunacy of ordering American soldiers to go inside Pakistan. 

If the events in Pakistan have any impact on caucus-goers and primary voters, which I very much doubt in light of the extremely limited attention most will have been paying to foreign affairs, much less Pakistani affairs, they will benefit candidates who appear to understand Pakistan and who have not made provocative or dangerous statements about Pakistan policy.  (Huckabee’s provocative statements cancel out his surprisingly well-informed grasp on Pakistan’s internal politics.)  By all rights, Paul, Biden and, indeed, McCain ought to gain if the late-deciding, uncommitted voters are actually moved to make their decision based on what happened on the other side of the world.  That is almost certainly not the case.  What it will change is the relative kid-glove treatment that all the major candidates have received concerning their foreign policy ideas.  The candidates coming out of Iowa who will likely have prevailed on their domestic policy agenda, namely Edwards and Huckabee, will have to demonstrate some competence on foreign affairs if they are to avoid even more intense criticism.   

The war remains enormously unpopular and major political liability for the Republican Party. The new ABC-Washington Post Poll finds Democrats favored over Republicans on the war by a 16 point margin, slightly higher than the Democratic margin earlier this year and last year.

The claim that public opinion has shifted on the war appears to be based almost entirely on a small uptick on one measure–opinion about how the war is going. There has been a small improvement on this question, presumably in response to reports of decreasing violence and, most importantly, decreasing U.S. casualties. But this shift is not indicative of any broader shift in public opinion toward the war. Opposition to the war remains as high as ever as does support for a withdrawal timetable. And Iraq clearly remains the most salient issue in the 2008 election. ~Alan Abramowitz

Maybe something drastic has changed in public opinion in the last four weeks, but I don’t think so.  If there are larger liabilities for the GOP than the war in Iraq, they are in even worse shape than I think they are, since that would mean that they have at least two huge electoral liabilities.

I’m the last person to say that this administration is subject to an arrogant, bunker mentality that is counterproductive here and abroad. ~Mitt Romney

Where was it again, James, that Romney was “offering a greater departure from Bush’s foreign policy than any Republican save Ron Paul”?  This is someone who wants to try Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention for giving his anti-Israel speeches.  He prattles on about incipient caliphates just as the President does.  On any issue where he has put forward his own view, it is usually an endorsement of the principles of the current administration.  Most of Romney’s proposed changes to the status quo are improvements in managing and implementing Bush’s broken foreign policy vision. 

His attacks on Huckabee are also rather remarkable.  In his actual essay, his concrete proposals are almost all the same in principle as Huckabee’s, and his essay is much more deficient in addressing Iran and Pakistan or indeed much of the rest of the world.  Does Romney really want to get into a fight in an area where his experience is no greater and his ideas, especially on Iran, are demonstrably worse?  What Republicans seem to dislike the most about Huckabee’s essay are the unprofessional language and the attacks on Bush.  Certainly, serious foreign policy arguments might stand fewer references to Brer Rabbit, but you’d be very unwise as a candidate to tie yourself as closely to the President as Romney is doing.  Republicans apparently love this, but the other almost two-thirds of the country might have different ideas. 

I suppose one can say that Giuliani also offers a “departure” from Bush’s foreign policy, in that it is entirely, and not just mostly, divorced from the real world.

The news story covering Huckabee’s FA essay has taken his opening lines about the administration’s ”arrogant bunker mentality” and made them half of the entire story.  The blog right is, predictably, throwing a fit, with more than a few declaring that they cannot support Huckabee.  It probably cannot help Huckabee in the early voting that the only person I have seen praising the essay is…Joe Klein.  The remarkable thing is that Huckabee’s essay, while I have problems with a lot of it, does some of what the Republicans need to do politically (balance GOP support for the war with a broader break with at least some of the more egregious flaws of Bush’s foreign policy) and it demonstrates some reasonably good understanding of Iran and Pakistan.  Some of his proposals (launching attacks into Pakistan, remaining in Iraq, etc.) seem terrible to me, but they are exactly the kinds of things that Republican voters should appreciate about this essay. 

On the GOP’s largest general election liability and its worst policy position, the war in Iraq, Huckabee remains a loyal yes-man, so what do they really have to complain about?  His opposition to the Law of the Sea Treaty is red meat for the base, while his general interest in more robust diplomacy otherwise should satisfy more moderate Republicans.  Most of the opposition to the essay, I suspect, has been driven by a visceral reaction against the knock on the administration, as if criticising Mr. Bush were some unpardonable error.  If Republicans are going to make criticism of the current administration’s foreign policy completely off-limits and punish the candidates who make those criticisms, they are going to lose and they will deserve to lose.  My guess is that Huckabee’s foreign policy, whatever its substantive merits and problems, will sound reasonable and it will provide a refreshing departure for Republicans who don’t want to give up on the war but who also don’t want another four years of blustering militarism.  It isn’t the foreign policy I would prefer, but for a lot of disillusioned Republican voters it might be just right. 

Nonetheless, if he wants to shore up his reputation here, he really has to stop analogising international relations to family quarrels.  There is a way to make the argument he wants to make on Iran that doesn’t involve referring to reconciling with your estranged brother or what-have-you.

Update: James thinks the “arrogant bunker mentality” line has everything backwards–it is the administration’s enthusiasm muck about in the rest of the world that is the problem.  That’s true, but it doesn’t entirely rule out something like the mentality to which Huckabee is referring.  If I understood him right, the mentality in question is one that believes that the world is unipolar, we are indispensable and must be involved in everyone else’s business, but which also thinks that we are under dire threat from tinpot dictatorships on the other side of the planet.  The first part is the arrogance, and the second is the bunker mentality, and the administration displays elements of both.  Indeed it justifies its activist foreign policy in terms of its paranoia about overblown foreign threats.  Obviously, there must be a much, much better way to say it than he did (as with so many things Huckabeean), but there is something to this critique.

Philip Klein is also right that there is something in the essay to alienate all factions (conversely, there is something in the speech to reassure most factions).  It is true that it is incoherent, but that is what you will get when you are a candidate trying to shore up a pro-war base with a foreign policy that isn’t simply a reiteration of what we have now.  When every feint in the direction of realism is greeted by hostility, it will not be surprising that the would-be realist has to keep zig-zagging with promises to invade Pakistan and reject the Law of the Sea right after he denounces arrogance and the “bunker mentality.”  Also, the critique that he is proposing “a foreign aid program that would make Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society look like a trivial domestic initiative” must also be aimed at Romney, who proposed something very similar in his FA essay:

 I envision that the summit would lead to the creation of a Partnership for Prosperity and Progress: a coalition of states that would assemble resources from developed nations and use them to support public schools (not Wahhabi madrasahs), microcredit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic health care, and free-market policies in modernizing Islamic states. These resources would be drawn from public and private institutions and from volunteers and nongovernmental organizations.  

Huckabee’s Foreign Affairs essay appears to be a rehash of the speech he gave at CSIS several months ago.  The people who hated that speech because it talked about containing Iran (one of Huckabee’s better ideas) will probably also hate this essay.  As I said about that speech, there are a few things that interventionists will reject (but they will reject them fiercely), a few things realists might find acceptable and virtually nothing that a non-interventionist would like. The entire essay is something of a grab-bag and reads very unevenly.  It has its moments, and it remains the case that his foreign policy views are much more substantive than conservative media outlets have acknowledged, but it still needs some work.  (The sections on Russia are not nearly detailed enough, and there is no attention paid to China, India or Latin America.) 

Once again, he supports the Powell Doctrine.  He also mentions Shinseki by name, which is one of those things that Republican loyalists hate.  

Huckabee said:

The first thing I will do as president is send Congress my comprehensive plan for achieving energy independence within ten years of my inauguration. We will explore, we will conserve, and we will pursue all types of alternative energy: nuclear, wind, solar, ethanol, hydrogen, clean coal, biomass, and biodiesel. 

I am reminded of Brownback’s pledge to cure cancer in ten years.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with this proposal, but you have to know that it’s going to take longer than ten years to develop our own sources to replace all foreign sources of energy.  That said, this is a big step up from his “no more valuable than their sand” line that he always uses about the Saudis, which is probably a great crowd-pleaser but which confirms in the minds of an informed audience that he is trivial.  Like Romney, he wants to expand the intelligence services and the armed forces. 

He admits the obvious about the strain on the military:

We still do not have enough troops in Afghanistan and are losing hard-won gains there as foreign fighters pour in and the number of Iraq-style suicide attacks increases. Our current active armed forces simply are not large enough. We have relied far too heavily on the National Guard and the Reserves and worn them out.

He then promises a huge increase in government spending:

Right now, we spend about 3.9 percent of our GDP on defense, compared with about six percent in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan. We need to return to that six percent level [bold mine-DL]. And we must stop using active-duty forces for nation building and return to our policy of using other government agencies to build schools, hospitals, roads, sewage treatment plants, water filtration systems, electrical facilities, and legal and banking systems. We must marshal the goodwill, ingenuity, and power of our governmental and nongovernmental organizations in coordinating and implementing these essential nonmilitary functions.

His views on Iraq are standard, party-line stuff:

Seeing Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar, Diyala, and parts of Baghdad reject al Qaeda and join our forces, often at tremendous risk to themselves, has been a truly extraordinary shift. Those who once embraced al Qaeda members as liberators now see them for what these radicals are: brutal oppressors who want to take Iraq back to the seventh century. And this development is serving as a model for turning Shiite tribes against their militants. Despite what the gloomy Democrats in the United States profess, reconciliation is happening in Iraq, only it is bottom up rather than top down, and since it comes directly from the people, it can end the violence faster. Benchmarks are being reached in fact, if not in law. As Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Congress last September, oil revenues are being distributed, de-Baathification is being reversed, and the Shiite-dominated government is giving financial resources to the provinces, including Sunni areas.

Not surprisingly, he is against withdrawal.  His remarks on Iran are, once again, unusually sane, and then he says this:

I support going forward with the current plan to set up ten missile interceptors in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic to protect Europe from Iranian missiles.

This is a pointless proposal, and one that has been nothing other than a provocation to the Russians. 

Huckabee does seem to show some understanding of the situation in Russia:

But I see him [Putin] for what he is: a staunch nationalist in a country that has no democratic tradition. He will do everything he can to reassert Russia’s power — militarily, economically, diplomatically.

His fears of Russian imperialist ambitions (outside of its near-abroad at least) are unfounded, and I would have been interested to hear him say more about his views on what our policy towards former Soviet republics should be and whether he supports continued NATO expansion.  Finally, his views on Pakistan are some of the best and most informed I have heard from a candidate.  That may not be saying much, but it’s something.  Except, that is, when he borrows a line from Obama:

Rather than wait for the next strike, I prefer to cut to the chase by going after al Qaeda’s safe havens in Pakistan. 

This is a very dangerous proposal.  His rationalisation is worrisome:

The threat of an attack on us is far graver than the risk that a quick and limited strike against al Qaeda would bring extremists to power in Pakistan.

Actually, no.  If an American attack inside Pakistan brought about that result, it would be far, far worse than almost any attack.   

Those who have been spreading the idea that Huckabee’s foreign policy is that we “be nice” to everyone have basically been lying to the public.  There are sections where he talks about using American power in a less arrogant and self-defeating way, and he does want to engage Iran, but his foreign policy has much more to it than his establishment foes are allowing.  Arguably, Huckabee is starting to appear as the closest thing the Republicans have to a realist.  He is still locked into supporting the war in Iraq, but unlike his major rivals he occasionally displays some understanding.  In many other places, though, he is also just pulling together ideas that have no logical relationship. 

The word is that Huckabee will be getting a big foreign policy endorsement tomorrow that is supposed to shore up his (non-existent) credibility on national security and foreign affairs.  If it’s anywhere as surprising and incomprehensible as the Gilchrist endorsement, I think we should fully expect to see Henry Kissinger up there in the snows of New Hampshire alongside him.

P.S.  The Kissinger bit was a joke, of course, but now that I think about it more it occurs to me that the recent Chafets profile may have given us the answer.  The profile said something about how Huckabee had ”visited” with Richard Haass once.  So, for lack of any plausible alternative, I am going to guess that it will be Haass.  That would be something of a feather in Huck’s cap, but it would also reinforce the loathing for him in the party.  Just consider–Huckabee consorting with realists!  Then again, a Haass endorsement would deflate a lot of the ill-informed “his foreign policy is just like Jimmy Carter’s” garbage that establishment voices are spreading around. 

This is a pretty memorable section from Zev Chafets’ profile of Huckabee:

The price of oil took us to foreign affairs, which Huckabee knows is not his strong suit. He quoted Pat Buchanan’s crack from the 1992 presidential campaign that Bill Clinton’s foreign-policy experience came from eating at the International House of Pancakes. But Clinton circa 1992 — who had worked briefly for Senator William Fulbright and studied the ways of the world at Georgetown, Yale and Oxford — was Prince Metternich compared with Huckabee.

Then the horror washes over you when you read this:

At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy.

Insipid and dangerous!  What a combination!

Appearing on National Public Radio’s light-hearted quiz show “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me,” which aired over the weekend, Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis — and she didn’t know what it was.

“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

So she consulted her best source. “I came home and I asked my husband,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dana.’ ” ~The Washington Post

Via Isaac Chotiner

Not exactly the best messenger for delivering warnings about Iran’s nuclear program and the dangers of WWIII breaking out, is she?  It’s enough to make you miss Tony Snow.

Audio here.

P.S.  She said later, “I feel like I’m in school everyday.”  I’m sure that’s true. 

My personal attitude, wholly consistent with that of my Church, is that I believe in peace on earth, good will to men, and that no country has a right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country. I recognize the right of no church to ask armed intervention by this country in the affairs of another merely for the defense of the rights of a church. ~Governor Alfred E. Smith, c. 1927

Via Ross

The rights to which he was referring were those of Catholics in Mexico being persecuted by the revolutionary government.  Quite apart from anything else relating specifically to the “religious issue” Smith was addressing, I thought this statement deserved special attention.

He restates this conviction again at the end of the article:

I believe in the principled noninterference by this country in the internal affairs of other nations and that we should stand steadfastly against any such interference by whomsoever it may be urged.

“The Republicans as a whole lose because of these revelations,” said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington. “If Chuck Hagel were running, he would be the beneficiary, but there’s no one like Hagel on the Republican side.” ~Helene Cooper

Yes, we get it.  Steve Clemons really likes Chuck Hagel.  A lot.  Remarks such as these are part of the reason why I am frequently so hard on Chuck Hagel: the man is built up by his admirers into a champion of a foreign policy vision that he has never, well, actually championed.  There is nobody like “Chuck Hagel” in the Republican Party, including the Senator from Nebraska named Chuck Hagel, because the Chuck Hagel you hear about from his boosters doesn’t really exist.   

Clemons also seems constitutionally incapable, both here and on his blog, of noticing that there is an antiwar Republican candidate in the race who has argued against targeting Iran, who has argued against illegal treatment of detainees, and who has argued against the entire aggressive foreign policy approach that Clemons also deplores.  Based on his policy views, Ron Paul is the most obvious political beneficiary of these revelations, but you would never know that from listening to coverage of the last week.  It is true that there’s no one like Chuck Hagel on the Republican side this cycle.  While Chuck Hagel was voting for the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war resolution, Ron Paul was voting against them.  While Hagel was making critical remarks, Ron Paul was actually voting against failed policy.  While Hagel was making quips about “tough jobs” and shoe-sellers, Ron Paul was about to start running for President and providing a challenge to the GOP establishment on foreign policy.  While Chuck Hagel made jokes about being Mike Bloomberg’s running mate and appeared on the covers of men’s magazines, Ron Paul was representing the dissenting view in the Republican primary debates. While Hagel dawdled, Ron Paul spoke out and acted, and when Hagel started finally to speak out more forcefully Ron Paul started running his insurgent campaign to protest all the abuses that Chuck Hagel helped to create.

Iran is the most striking example. As recently as June, a debate question for GOP candidates was whether they would use tactical nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nukes. That none of the major ones ruled it out now looks excessively hawkish in light of the latest intelligence estimate that Iran ended its atomic weapons program in 2003. ~Michael Goodwin

Now it looks excessively hawkish?  What did it look like back then?  The voice of reason?

No reasonable and reasonably informed person could have missed that the persons most involved in whipping up anti-Americanism were Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac and  Jean Chrétien, all of whom were replaced by leaders far less corrupt and far more sympathetic to American positions than their predecessors. ~Clarice Feldman

Schroeder, Chirac and Chretien were the ones “most involved” in whipping up anti-Americanism?  I guess that means that public approval of the United States must be soaring worldwide now that they are gone.  Or not.  Is that why Turkish public opinion is more anti-American than at any time in post-war history?  Because Jean Chretien said some critical things?  To put it mildly, someone who thinks that a mildly critical Liberal Prime Minister of Canada is one of the greatest sources of anti-U.S. feelings in the world is not in a position to lecture anyone on being out of touch with current affairs.  By all means, oppose Huckabee, but please don’t base on such a bizarre view of international affairs. 

During the Cold War, you were a hawk or a dove, but this new world requires us to be a phoenix, to rise from the ashes of the twin towers with a whole new game plan for this very different enemy. Being a phoenix means constantly reinventing ourselves, dying to mistakes and miscalculations, changing tactics and strategies, rising reborn to meet each new challenge and seize each new opportunity. ~Mike Huckabee (from his official campaign site, no less)

Via Alex Massie

So Mike Huckabee promises us a foreign policy that will make sure that America repeatedly bursts into flame for all of eternity.  That’s the kind of bold, new thinking you don’t get from just any candidate.  You do almost have to admire how this strained metaphor sits awkwardly beside the call for a “whole new game plan,” while said plan is, of course, nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, Sweden should be concerned:

When I make foreign policy, I want to be able to treat Saudi Arabia the same way I treat Sweden, and that requires us to be energy independent.

Implicit in this statement is that he would really like to treat Saudi Arabia badly (on behalf of, as he says, “the good guys,” who remain conveniently unnamed), but cannot because of oil dependence.  What did Sweden ever do to Mike Huckabee?

P.S.  Lost in the jungles of Huckabee’s rhetoric are at least a couple reasonable views (e.g., support for the Powell Doctrine in the event of military action).  Unfortunately, I fear that Huckabee’s national security and foreign policy ideas are as muddled and incoherent as his domestic policy proposals.  One moment he will say something refreshingly sane, and then start barking about Islamofascism.

Maybe there’s a better reason than I thought that others haven’t taken Mike Huckabee seriously on foreign policy.  It doesn’t help that the man is apparently oblivious to one of the biggest foreign policy news stories of the last year:

Kuhn: I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday …
 
Huckabee: I’m sorry?

Kuhn: The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it —

Huckabee: No.

Kuhn: Have you heard of the finding?

Huckabee: No. [bold mine DL; ed.-doesn’t he read the newspaper?]

Kuhn then summarized the NIE finding that Iran had stopped work on a clandestine nuclear program four years ago and asked if it “adjusts your view on Iran in any sense.”

Kuhn: What is your concern on Iran as of now?

Huckabee: I’ve a serious concern if they were to be  able to weaponize nuclear material, and I think we all should, mainly because the statements of Ahmadinejad are certainly not conducive to a peaceful purpose for his having it and the fear that he would in fact weaponize it and use it. (He pauses and thinks) I don’t know where the intelligence is coming from that says they have suspended the program or how credible that is versus the view that they actually are expanding it. … And I’ve heard, the last two weeks, supposed reports that they are accelerating it and it could be having a reactor in a much shorter period of time than originally been thought. [bold mine-DL; ed.-this ought to discredit him utterly, and maybe it will.]

Wow.  There goes my idea that Huckabee could exploit the NIE to demonstrate that he has the more sober, responsible approach to U.S. foreign policy.  He literally had no idea what it was or what it said.  Obviously, it’s out of the question that he would have had any idea how this might have reflected well on remarks he had made in the past.  This makes Huckabee’s rise take on a new, fairly horrifying dimension: he is wedded to Gersonism, seems to be just as clueless about foreign policy as Bush was and is, and people are starting to take a real liking to him (he now leads the Rasmussen daily tracking poll 20-17%). 

Update: Huckabee has an excuse that is almost worse than the original blunder:

I had been up about 20 hours at that time, and I had not even so much as had the opportunity to look at a newspaper. We were literally going from early in the morning until late that night and talking to guys like you. And so I had not had an opportunity to be briefed on it. There are going to be times out there on the campaign trail, Wolf - you’ve been on the trail, you know - that candidates are literally driven from one event to the next. And it would have been nice had someone been able to first say here’s some things that are going on, that are taking place. That didn’t happen. It’s going to happen again.

That’s great, except that the NIE story broke on Monday.  Essentially, Huckabee is saying that a long, gruelling day of public and media appearances prevented him from remaining informed about one of the more significant policy issues of the day.  If that is supposed to increase confidence in his ability to be President, it isn’t working.  

Ediitor and Publisher (via Sullivan) has a round-up of some of the more egregiously wrong statements on Iran’s nuclear program from various prominent pundits and think tank “experts.”  Somehow one of the most ridiculous of them all seems to have faded into obscurity.  It was such a gem of hysterical alarmism that it deserves to be brought to our attention again.  I mean, of course, Bernard Lewis’ warning of the coming Apocalypse (which, as you may have noticed, did not arrive).  He already took it as a given that Iran had or soon would have nuclear weapons:

It seems increasingly likely that the Iranians either have or very soon will have nuclear weapons at their disposal, thanks to their own researches (which began some 15 years ago), to some of their obliging neighbors, and to the ever-helpful rulers of North Korea. The language used by Iranian President Ahmadinejad would seem to indicate the reality and indeed the imminence of this threat.

You would think that no one would take what Ahmadinejad said as an indicator of the reality of anything.  Yet that was a significant part of the basis for Lewis’ speculation.  The rest of the article explained why the regime’s apocalypticism was so intense that traditional nuclear deterrents would not be enough to stop Iran from using its weapons…three years after Tehran had apparently yielded to the far more intimidating powers of the IAEA.

Back on the fateful day when nothing happened, I wrote:

Of course, in Iran’s case there is a real possibility of using a civil nuclear program to create a weapons program, and Iran has strategic interests that make acquiring these weapons understandable and even, in a sense, rational.  They might, like Pakistan did, be playing the world for fools, buying time and waiting for the moment to unveil their nuke program.  But what is so amazing about the entire debate going on in the West is that none of us–including the government that supposedly “knows more than we do” as the delightfully servile phrase has it–has any reliable information to confirm this theory, except that we think their President is looney, our government despises theirs and many of us actually believe that Iranians–and we’re talking about Iranians here–are some set of wild-eyed, suicidal maniacs who will just as soon annihilate themselves in some kamikaze nuclear war as look at us.  In just the same way that the government railroaded the country into a war in Iraq on premises that were always preposterous, the administration and a sizeable part of the population of this country are once again positive that they know what Iran intends, when we are merely supposing and guessing–just as we did with Iraq.  In fact, what is going on is the making of policy based in paranoia and fear, which is by definition not all together rational or well considered.

Of course, as long as we have an establishment preoccupied with the supposed “Iranian threat,” we will never have a rational Iran policy, because perceiving Iran as a threat to the United States is grossly mistaken and leads to all manner of wrong conclusions about what our policy should be.  So long as our government considers Iran our enemy, when it is not our natural enemy, we will keep pursuing the wrong course of action.  On the question of Iran’s nuclear program, Peter Hitchens made some appropriately skeptical comments for TAC after visiting Iran:

I am not equipped to judge such things technically. I could not tell uranium from plutonium or a centrifuge from a capacitor. But I have been subjected to enough state-sponsored panics about evil dictators and weapons of mass destruction to have become a little dubious when I am told that a Middle Eastern state is plotting my imminent death or a first strike on Tel Aviv. And I have become aware that many real, well-informed experts are highly skeptical about Iran’s ability in this field. The Tehran government appears to exaggerate the number of centrifuges it has in operation. Its capacity to enrich uranium is pitifully short of that needed to produce weapons-grade material. Its elderly nuclear reactor at Bushehr has yet to produce a watt of electricity after more than 30 years. Iran’s claim to need nuclear energy may not be false. This supposed energy superpower imposes frequent power blackouts, as I can confirm from personal experience.

The Iranian state is, in any case, famous among its own people for being very bad at delivering grand projects. Tehran’s new Khomeini Airport has just opened after 30 years under construction. A supposedly ultra-modern TV and telecommunications tower stands unfinished on the capital’s skyline after 20 years of work. Several cities, promised metro-rail systems years ago, have yet to see a single train run. Tehran’s metro, sorely needed in that traffic-strangled megalopolis, is operating a few lines, but they opened years late, and there are far too few of them.  

The latest news about the apparent suspension of any weapons program suggests that there may be a new opportunity for taking the first steps in rapprochement with Tehran, which could provide a way out of Iraq for us as well.

This post makes an important point that has been lost in the back and forth over the NIE and the reaction, mine included, focused on who benefits from the news: the latest report simply confirms what reasonably well-informed citizens could have gleaned from basic news reports over the last several years, and so long as an interventionist mentality grips Washington and so long as Washington persists in portraying Iran as a threat to our national security no intelligence report, no matter how bluntly it contradicts the claims of those who want to promote conflict with Iran, will change the inclination of supporters of launching military strikes.  (Indeed, the President remains open to such strikes against Iran.)  Those of us who remember just how shoddy and wrong the 2002 NIE on Iraq was should be very cautious about waving around intelligence reports that happen to favour our view (though there is some reason to think that the latest report was more rigorously and responsibly sourced and checked than previous reports). 

Fundamentally, the question in 2002, like the question today, was not really one about what a weak government of a small state on the other side of the planet was able to build, but whether you believe that such a state posed a threat to the United States even if it had been able to build all of the things that interentionists claimed and had, in fact, built them.  Concerning Iraq, the answer was pretty transparently that it didn’t, and the answer about the “Iranian threat” should have been the same all along.  In the present political climate, conceding the claim that a given regime poses a threat to U.S. national security is to concede the entire argument about what should be done–it yields the initiative to those inclined to a military response and hamstrings the opposition, just as the pre-war opposition was hamstrung during the Iraq debate.  The opposition seemed trapped into beginning every sentence with the caveat, “Yes, Hussein is a monster and poses a grave threat to our country, but…”  Any debate on Iran policy that starts with the assumption that Iran is a threat and an enemy of our country will usually have just two possible ends: war or a punitive sanctions regime.     

Remember how the administration used uncertainty and lack of information about Iraq’s WMD programs to conjure up the worst possible scenarios and present these scenarios as if they were reasonable and plausible?  This was one of the most consequential arguments from silence made in recent times.  Then there was, of course, the technically correct and rhetorically unethical line from Rumsfeld, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”  Those who are intent on stirring up conflict with these states as a matter of policy and as a means of overthrowing their governments will take whatever information they may find and exaggerate its importance, or they will take a lack of information as proof that the other government is hiding something and “deceiving the world.”  Once it is taken as a given that the other government is a purely malevolent player on the world stage and one that cannot be checked by the creation of incentives and disincentives, every action or any lack of action on the part of the other government will be fitted into a story that portrays the other government as a danger.  Even when it is confirmed beyond a doubt that the weapons programs of a regime were dismantled or inactive, as we discovered them to be in Iraq, you will still have people who will invoke some vague, future potential danger from the regime.

Romney seems eager to tie himself to the administration position on Iran:

Acknowledging some good news in a recently released National Intelligence Estimate saying Iran stopped actively pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003, Mitt Romney said the country remains a threat, even with only a peaceful nuclear energy program. “They, of course, are continuing making the ingredients which would be used in a nuclear weapon,” Romney told Politics Nation today. “If they had stopped both I would feel a great deal more confident about their intentions. But their continuing to produce enriched uranium is of great concern to the world.”

Essentially, Romney’s position is that sanctions have worked, so he concludes that continuing to engage in punitive sanctions is obviously the thing to do.  In other words, Iran should be punished when we think they’re developing nuclear weapons, and Iran should be punished when we know with some confidence that they aren’t.  Apparently, Iran should always be punished.  That pretty well sums up Romney’s views.  You can imagine that he would say the same thing if Iran gave up the fuel cycle all together: “They might start up a program in the future, so they’re still a threat, if only in my mind.” 

Romney made clear that the NIE would not have too much influence on his thinking about Iran:

My perspective on matters of importance is that you don’t look for a homogenized view. You look for people who have different perspectives and you want to listen to the debate between them and see the basis of their thinking.

In short, he will listen to more accurate information as well as listening to nonsense as if they were equally valid sources.

Ross may be right that the NIE causes the issue of Iran policy to recede into the background during the election next year, but it seems to me that it still pretty badly compromises several of the leading Republican candidates.  In fact, the one leading Republican candidate whose foreign policy ideas on Iran aren’t completely absurd, and the leading candidate who stands to be vindicated the most by the NIE on the Republican side is (yes, that’s right) Mike Huckabee.  Certainly, Ron Paul has taken the most unequivocal (and correct) line that Iran does not pose a threat to the United States, so he may also benefit from this news, but Huckabee is in the best position to take advantage of his relatively more sane Iran position.  Like the others, he assumed that Iranian proliferation was happening and posed a threat, so he cannot be credited with some great prescience or insight on the proliferation question itself, but unlike his leading competitors he had a very different view of how to treat Iran.  In his CFR speech, Huckabee said of the Iranian regime:

While there can be no rational dealing with Al Qaeda, Iran is a nation state looking for regional power, it plays the normal power politics that we understand and can skillfully pursue, and we have substantive issues to negotiate with them. 

Negotiate!  No wonder neoconservatives were uninspired by his remarks.  He has since been derided for his “naive and unconvincing” foreign policy ideas by those most invested in the idea that Iran is not a rational state actor, but rather an apocalyptic land of crazy people.  They appear to have been demonstrably wrong in their judgement, while Huckabee and other more “realist” observers appear to have been right.  Compared to John “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain, Mitt Romney, who is apparently on a mission to indict Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention, and Giuliani, whose campaign is advised by the likes of Norman Podhoretz and who has said  that we need to stay “on offense,” Huckabee’s recommended approach to Iran is a picture of sanity.  You will object that this may not be saying much, but it’s still the case that the one currently leading Republican candidate who espoused containment of Iran (albeit combined with continued support for the war in Iraq) was Huckabee.  He was the one whose foreign policy credentials were supposed to be non-existent and whose ideas were supposed to be unacceptable to “national security conservatives.”  Huckabee comes away from this latest news looking more responsible and competent–at least on Iran–than the other leading candidates.

Update: I keep forgetting that Republican voters don’t like responsible and competent foreign policy ideas.  60% of Iowans, according to Pew’s latest, choose one of the four other leading candidates as the best candidate on Iran, and 11% select Huckabee (graphic on page 8).  Of the top five, Huckabee is tied for fourth here.  The crazy guy leads the pack on Iran, followed by McCain.  Sometimes I just really don’t understand this party.  It’s even worse in New Hampshire (page 10)–69% select Romney, Giuliani or McCain as the best candidate on Iran, while Huckabee and Paul together get 8%.

Putin’s reelection, Larison says, “is a fact that should be viewed with some dispassion.” (Er, why exactly?) ~Michael Moynihan

Since Putin himself wasn’t being re-elected yesterday (it was the election for the Duma, and Putin headed United Russia’s list), as Moynihan knows, this sentence is strange enough, but the implication that non-Russians should have something other than fairly dispassionate reactions to an entirely unsurprising (and, yes, obviously rigged and inflated) United Russia election is stranger still.  The original article’s thesis didn’t really merit comment in my first post, because the thesis, particularly as it related to international affairs and Russian politics, was ridiculous.  I addressed his characterisation of Laughland’s TAC piece, because it seemed quite misleading and the article is not available online where it can be easily checked.  Here’s Moynihan’s opening line to his original article:

On December 2 voters in Russia and Venezuela will go to the polls, choosing to either accelerate the Sovietization and Sandinistaization of their respective societies or—an eventuality that seems less likely—to curtail the centralization of power in the hands of increasingly villainous chief executives. 

But a vote for United Russia wasn’t a vote for an accelerated “Sovietization” of Russian society.  Call it the entrenchment of Putinism or populist authoritarianism, or call it proof of illiberal democracy, but one thing it was not was an acceleration of “Sovietization.”  “Sovietization” is what you might expect from the Communists, who are now the lone opposition party.  The use of the word “Sovietization” in this context is absurd, and the statement in the concluding paragraph isn’t much better when he says, “Both Chavez and Putin are attempting to reset the clock on the Cold War…”  This takes symbolic use of Soviet nostalgia as proof of “Sovietization,” and seems to assume that this supposed “Sovietization” makes Russia into a threat and Putin into a villain, whom, it practically goes without saying, we are supposed to oppose.  The assumption behind the article seems to be that developments in the domestic politics of Russia and Venezuela pose some sort of threat to the West, presumably comparable to those posed by the USSR and its satellites.  This is basically fearmongering of the kind that has clouded our debates on foreign policy for years.  The generally awful results–for both America and the “beneficiaries” of our policies–of marrying power projection and “freedom agenda” meddling speak for themselves. 

We should view the Russian election results from yesterday with “some dispassion” for many reasons.  First of all, it is really none of our business and railing against it will change nothing, but more than that the proper approach to Russia that is clearly dominated by Putinism is to try to find some way to cultivate good relations with Russia, since it is obviously in the American interest to have good relations with a Eurasian power with which we have common security interests and whose continued political and economic stability we have an interest in supporting.  Continually lecturing the Russians on the deficiencies in their political system seems a good way to promote anti-Russian sentiment at home and give the impression that Westerners are intent on meddling in the internal affairs of Russia, which gives the Putin regime many pretexts for claiming that the West is trying to subvert and weaken Russia through the promotion of liberal political forces.  If Russian liberals are closely associated with the West and receive vocal support from Westerners, as they now are, they will never gain any traction inside Russia, and the attempted promotion of Russian liberals by outsiders will simply strengthen anti-Western attitudes within Russia that are also detrimental to the cultivation of good U.S.-Russian relations.  One of the points I was trying to make is that articles that try to revive Cold War mentalities, or articles that pretend that a new Cold War is upon us, as Moynihan’s certainly seemed to do, partake of an imprudent alarmism and vilification of other states that have very real damaging effects on the quality of foreign policy thinking in this country.  There are already voices in Washington who would like to imagine Russia as our enemy, and those who would like to avoid renewed confrontation and tension between our two countries should all do what we can to challenge what these voices are saying. 

Moynihan cites Laughland’s past works, which I was not defending in my post, but which he takes as vindication of his claim that Laughland is  writing as an apologist in this particular case.  Indeed, he can’t be bothered to find the article he was criticising.  The article in question was not an apology for Putin.  It was a corrective against the steady stream of vilification that we have become used to (and to which Moynihan’s article was another contribution), for the reasons I laid out before.  Moynihan needed to cite someone in the West as a “supporter” of Putin’s regime to show some relevance, and so he read into Laughland’s TAC piece the support he wanted to see in it.     

Another TAC piece from earlier this year by an author Moynihan will have a harder time trying to demonise was this cover article by Anatol Lieven:

And in contrast to the launching of the Cold War, for the U.S. to take these risks is not remotely justified by vital American interests. In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was the heartland of a revolutionary ideology that threatened to suppress free-market democracy, freedom, and religion across the world and, by dominating Western Europe and East Asia and fomenting revolution in Latin America, to pin the U.S. within its own borders, surround it, and eventually stifle it.

Today’s Russia is like many U.S. allies past and present: a corrupt, state-influenced market economy with a partly democratic, partly authoritarian system. Russia has no global agenda of ideological or geopolitical domination but mainly wants to exert predominant influence (but not imperial control) within the territory of the former Soviet Union and the centuries-old Russian empire [bold mine-DL]. Moves by the state to dominate the oil and gas sector are unwelcome to Americans but entirely in line with world practice outside the U.S. and U.K. Russian corruption is extremely serious, but on the other hand, the fiscal restraint of the Putin administration holds lessons for the present U.S. administration, not the other way around. Like India, Turkey, and many other democratic states, Russia has used brutal means to suppress a separatist rebellion.

Like Turkey for several decades when it was a member of NATO, Russia combines an increasingly independent judiciary and respect for the rule of law with selective repression (both formal and covert) against individuals seen as threats to the state or the ruling elite. The media scene is rather like India until the 1980s—a combination of state domination of television with a free and vocal, but much less influential, print media.

Above all, when it comes to the main lines of its foreign and domestic policy, the Putin administration has the support of the vast majority of ordinary Russians, while the Russian pro-Western liberals we choose to call “democrats” are supported by a tiny minority—mostly because of their association with the disastrous “reforms” of the 1990s. Thus, far from rallying democratic support in Russia, American attacks on Putin in the name of democracy only foment the anger of ordinary Russians against the United States.  It does not help when criticism of Russia’s record on democracy and freedom comes from that notorious defender of human rights Dick Cheney or when these statements are immediately followed by warm and public American embraces of even more notorious ex-Soviet democrats like President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

Russia today is by no means a pretty picture, but to compare it in terms of repression and state control with the Soviet Union—or indeed with contemporary China—is grotesque [bold mine-DL]. We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who envisioned Russia as it now exists would have been received with incredulous joy by the West as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniacal, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

That is the voice of intelligent realism speaking.  It is worth noting this last point about comparisons with the USSR being grotesque, since this is exactly what Moynihan was doing.  It was against just such grotesquerie, and the hostility to the Russian government that it represented, that I was objecting.

P.S.  Later in the piece, Lieven said this, which is especially relevant to the Laughland piece, since it was Putin’s pragmatism that Laughland was trying to stress:

In fact, we should be very glad that the Putin administration is as pragmatic as it is in its international policy and as relatively law-abiding at home. During the 1990s, given what was happening to both Russian living standards and Russian national power and prestige, I and many other Western observers in Russia feared an eruption of outright fascism, with catastrophic results for Russia and the world.

This is one reason that present U.S. attacks on the Putin administration are so over the top. The other is that the post-Cold war era should have begun with a presumption of Russia’s innocence on the part of the West. After all, two years before it collapsed the Soviet Union had already withdrawn peacefully from Eastern Europe on the informal promise that these countries would not be incorporated into NATO. This withdrawal removed the original casus belli of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, which began not because of anything that the Soviet state was doing within its own borders but because of its domination of European states beyond its borders in ways that were clearly menacing to Western Europe and vital American interests there.

This last sentence drives home the point that the success of United Russia on Sunday likewise has nothing to do with a restart or return of the Cold War, since the Cold War, if we are to be precise about what the name means, referred to U.S.-Soviet great power rivalry centered in Europe. 

It’s good news for Venezuela and good news for the general sanity of outside commentary on Venezuela that the constitutional referendum in Venezuela did not pass.  Perhaps now we can start to shelve silly talk about the “Cold War’s return”?  As Alex Massie notes, this was an unexpected outcome.  I certainly expected the referendum to pass.  I assumed that if Chavez could do one thing right, it would be to rig his own power-enhancing referendum to make sure that he wins the chance to keep being re-elected (and that those “re-elections” would also be thoroughly rigged).  However, I had to remind myself, as I have written in the past, that Venezuela really is a democracy.  Unlike some, I do not bestow this label as a form of praise, but as a description.  Venezuela is a populist, illiberal democracy, but a democracy all the same.  Sometimes demagogues and populists overreach and do not receive the popular support they expect, and this seems to be one of those times. 

I would add that this makes the prospects of the Venezuelan-Bolivian military threat to Argentina and the rest of South America, feared by some, less likely, but I suppose there isn’t much point in discussing the changing likelihood of an impossibility.  

Keeping Alex Massie’s caveats about Economist editorials in mind, this part of the latest Lexington column on Obama seems right to me:

He sometimes looks more like the junior professor he once was than a political heavyweight, and his policies are sometimes half-baked, as when he contemplated sending troops into Pakistan, a sovereign state, and a particularly fragile one, to kill or capture al-Qaeda chieftains [bold mine-DL].

My view is that most of his foreign policy is half-baked, and even when it is complete it is filled with all manner of unappetising ingredients.   

Yglesias captures the frustration with Hagel quite well:

But of course he is a Senator from Nebraska, and instead of finding myself admiring his work in that capacity I find myself thinking that Hagel would make a damn good “reasonable conservative” blogger.

In the past, I have been pretty relentless and unforgiving in my criticism of Hagel’s relative inaction.  Certainly, for the first three years of the war he was far too complacent.  But I think that both Hagel’s boosters and his critics, including myself, have invested the man with much more power and influence than he really has as a Senator.  Granted, he could have probably done more than he has, and he could have at least stayed for one more term, and he could have followed through on his criticisms of the plan to invade Iraq and voted against the authorisation resolution, but even if he were doing more than he is doing there is painfully little that he can do so long as the Senate Republican caucus remains wedded to the perpetuation of the war and the general deformation of U.S. foreign policy.  On most things pertaining to Iraq, Hagel has voted with the Democratic majority, and he has publicly said fairly intelligent things about negotiating with Iran.  If the Democratic majority in the Senate has been unable to move antiwar legislation, the blame cannot be laid at Hagel’s door.  Calling on him to run for President, as many did, was always bound to end in disappointment one way or another.  If he did run as an independent, he would get little traction with Republicans disaffected over the war, because he has never been unambiguously against the war despite having foreseen so many of the calamities that have happened, and he has voted with the White House so often in the last several years that he could not credibly represent an alternatve to Bushism as a whole, much less be a “more credible version” of Ron Paul. 

Yglesias refers to Hagel’s missed opportunity “to offer the country a more credible version of Ron Paul’s efforts to break the Bushist orthodoxy,” but on so many of the things that conservatives and independents find offensive about “Bushist orthodoxy” Hagel has generally been right alongside the President.  Opponents of Bush shower Hagel with praise because he, too, is an opponent of the President in a few very select areas–this is unfortunately a mirror image of the way that Republicans shower Lieberman with praise because he agrees with them in a few very select areas.  There are worse things to be than the anti-Lieberman, but this is not the basis for a “more credible version” of an effort to break Bushism.

Hagel is a ”more credible” anti-Bush than Paul in the way that establishment figures dub various experts or politicians “serious” more or less arbitrarily: Hagel is ”more credible” as an anti-Bush figure, but he is, in fact, very rarely anti-Bush and very rarely anti-Bushist.  If we measure credibility in this way, Michael O’Hanlon is a “more credible” antiwar voice than people who actually oppose the war and Rudy Giuliani is a “more credible” opponent of abortion than the pro-life candidates.  That is, someone is dubbed credible when he is actually quite content with the status quo in most respects and is sufficiently unthreatening that he is considered the acceptable face of opposition or criticism.  

Take notes, Obama: Condi Rice dug deep into her bag of tricks and…recycled her “childhood in Birmingham as source of foreign policy insight” argument that she has used far too many times already:

Rice began by saying she did not want to draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective [bold mine-DL], but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Ala., “at a time of separation and tension.”

She noted that a local church was bombed by white separatists, killing four girls, including a classmate of hers.

“Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to go to your church,” she said.

But, she added, as a black child in the South, being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she also understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians.

“I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,” she said. “I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”  

“There is pain on both sides,” Rice concluded. “This has gone on too long.”

She knows what it is like to hear that you “can’t go through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian”?  Did she have trouble making it through checkpoints on the interstate?  What is she talking about?  She says she doesn’t want to ”draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective” right before she draws historical parallels and reflects on her own childhood as a window onto the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  Does this mean, despite her insistence that she wasn’t drawing historical parallels, that she was making a comparison between segregation and the treatment of the Palestinians?  Was she (gasp!) implying that there is some kind of apartheid system over there? 

Michael Moynihan’s article, framing Chavez’s power-grab and the upcoming Russian elections as evidence of “the Cold War’s return,” wouldn’t merit much comment, except that he makes this claim as he tries to tell his audience why they should care about what happens in the domestic politics of other countries:

Despite their obvious contempt for democratic institutions, both leaders still command a disturbing, though hardly overwhelming, level of Western support; defenders who will doubtless welcome a Chavez or Putin electoral victory and retrenchment.

He cites John Laughland’s TAC article on Putin (not available online) and a couple HuffPo columnists.  I’ll leave the latter until another time or perhaps to someone else, because the columns are available online and can be judged for themselves.  Moynihan attributes to Laughland “support” for Putin that would make him “welcome” electoral victory and retrenchment for United Russia, when Laughland’s article is an attempt to provide some balance and perspective about Putin’s regime, about which there have been more than a few breathless and hysterical Reason articles in the past.  There was no question of welcoming or dreading United Russia’s victory, since every informed person knows it is certain to happen and is a fact that should be viewed with some dispassion.  For some people, attempting to understand foreign governments and leaders in a sober way–free of provocative references to the start of another Cold War–is evidence of endorsement and support and “defense” of a foreign government.  To the extent that these observers want to avoid hostility and conflict between the West and these other governments, they will try to get past the (frequently self-serving) propaganda that would seek to make every insufficiently (or, in the case of Russia and Venezuela, arguably excessively) democratic government around the world into a dire threat or villains to be opposed. 

We should be clear about a few things.  No one needs to applaud Putin’s authoritarian populism (and no one is applauding it) to understand why it prevails in Russia and will continue to do so, no matter how many hectoring Western articles are writtenn against it, and that it is part of the political reality of our time.  We can respond to it rationally and according to our interests, which dictate that we do not get into another escalating confrontation with Russia, or we can respond to it viscerally and stoke such fruitless confrontation by making the internal politics of Russia our business. 

Since Laughland’s article isn’t online, it is difficult for non-subscribers to check Moynihan’s claim that it offers support and defense of Putin.  It seeks to get past caricature and vilification, yes, but the article is generally descriptive, not apologetic.  It allows Putin to speak for himself, rather than having Western pundits impute motives to him based on their own preoccupations with curtailing Russian power and backing U.S. hegemony in Eurasia.  If I were someone preoccupied with vilifying a foreign government, I might also find this “disturbing,” since it interferes with the generally unified message from Western media that we must fear and loathe Russia under Putin.   

Laughland starts by noting the excessive demonisation that seems to be focused on certain Slavic nations (typically when their governments do not play ball with Washington):

Is there such a thing as Slavophobia?  To be sure, not all Slavic nations are vilified in the West, but the recent demonization of the Serbs and Russians has an especially vicious quality….the Western mind attributes to them the most sinister of motives, as  if they were the embodiment of evil itself.

He then describes a meeting he had with Putin, noting:

The contrast between the image of Putin in the West and Putin in the flesh could hardly be greater.

This would almost have to be true, since the image promoted by many Western pundits is that of Stalin risen from the grave. 

Laughland says later:

Lack of ideology is the new Russian ideology, and Putin has a lot to be non-ideological about.  In his eight years in power, Russia has gone from being a semi-bankrupt state to having the largest gold reserves in the world and some $300 billion in foreign currency reserves besides….The Putin boom cannot be reduced to oil and gas revenues alone, for it has lifted many sectors and many different regions of this, the largest country in the world….Putin specifically referred to the abandonment of ideology during his long talk with us [bold mine-DL].  Asked what Russia’s role should now be in the world, he replied that neither the Tsarist model of support for Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire nor the Soviet model of support for socialism were remotely appropriate for Russia today.  Lenin, he said, had cared nothing for Russia itself but only for world revolution.  Putin spoke firmly to as he told us, “I have no wish to see our people, and even less our leadership, seized by missionary ideas.  We need to be a country that in every way has a healthy self-respect and can stand up for its interests but a country that is at the same time able to reach agreements and be a convenient partner for all members of the international community.”  Putin sees it as his mission to make Russia a normal country.

Again, this is not “lauding”–it is describing what has happened and quoting what Putin says.  Now you can be skeptical, and we should always be skeptical when politicians say any of these things, but the point of Laughland’s article is to report what Putin said at this meeting, to try to understand the current Russian government as one that is not nearly so far removed from modern Europe as its critics would make it out to be and to appeal to people in the West to be more reasonable in their attitudes towards the Russian government.  As both Moynihan and Laughland would acknowledge, the current form of regime in Russia is not going anywhere anytime soon.  It is realism and common sense to see Putin and Russia as something other than “villainous” (Moynihan’s word for Putin) enemies to be thwarted and checked.  Putin and Putinism will remain, so it is probably wiser to seek a modus vivendi rather than endlessly provoking and perturbing Moscow.  If that constitutes a “defense” of Putin, we have watered down the meaning of apologetics pretty thoroughly. 

For the record, I don’t approve of Putin’s squelching of independent media and most of his so-called “managed democracy,” and I don’t approve of Saakashvili and Musharraf’s declarations of emergency rule and everything that goes with them, but what ought to matter most in determining our relations with all these states are our interests and theirs and the points of agreement between them.  Where Putin’s rule has been promoting stability in Russia, Saakashvili and Musharraf have promoted instability and have in the process jeopardised real U.S. interests in their respective regions.  It seems to me that Americans should be a great deal more concerned with what our feckless client states are doing that may harm U.S. interests, and we should be much less concerned with what a very powerful potential ally does within its own borders.  Most pundits and politicians in America seem to have this exactly backwards.

To hear the pronouncements about Ukraine that issue from that establishment’s nodes every time the country makes it through another election without mass violence, you’d think this was Switzerland. Brussels and Washington pat Ukraine on the head for its ‘maturity’ and its ‘evolving democracy’. The smart locals know they live in a klepto-oligarchy, and that the West will trumpet Ukraine’s ‘robust democratic culture’ as long as capital keeps flowing in and out of the country. It’s meaningful that every time populist Ukrainian politicians have made noises about renationalising industrial properties stolen by oligarchs, the screaming from the West has been such to make you think a return to Stalinist terror had been proposed.

And it’s telling to watch Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the Orange revolution’s villain restored now to power, smiling a thousand-watt smile as he consorts with sheepish Western leaders. He knows where his bread gets buttered. Ukraine has achieved that sine qua non of the second-tier country whose elite wants to prosper in the global order — it’s managed to unlink politics from the economy. ~Andrey Slivka

I used to like Josh Trevino, too, and I was unaware that my views–which haven’t changed an iota since I started writing this blog–seemed so terribly false and misguided to him.  They apparently weren’t so false when he invited me to participate in our now-defunct group blog, Enchiridion Militis, for whose successor, What’s Wrong With the World, I am pleased to still be a contributing member.  Something changed, but I don’t think I was the one who changed.  Ron Paul really does bother these people, doesn’t he?   

In fact, I had no idea that Trevino supported attempting to starve and expel monks from their monastery (the treatment that has been afforded to the monks of Esphigmenou for their refusal to commemorate the Patriarch of Constantinople), nor did I realise that he favoured constitutional usurpation.  Evidently, he does, or he has strong objections to those who are opposed to both.  For the record, I have linked to the site of Holy Esphigmenou Monastery because I have found it disgraceful that the Ecumenical Patriarchate has resorted to the use of state coercion and violence to impose its authority over the monks there.  I have not written about it on the blog before, but I feel compelled now to say something.  If the monks of Esphigmenou are in the wrong canonically and legally, as they may be (it is actually not my place to say), the way they have been treated has nonetheless been a scandal and an embarrassment.  Even if I did not regard ecumenism as an error, I would think that the treatment meted out to the monks of Esphigmenou would merit the sympathy of Orthodox Christians, even if they disagreed with the monks’ stand.  Until I had been (it seems to me pretty baselessly) accused of sympathy for schism, I have never once written a single word disparaging the Patriarch of Constantinople or lending support to the monks of Holy Esphigmenou Monastery, and I will not say more against the Ecumenical Patriarchate now.  I am obviously such a proponent of schism that I have written many posts against attacks on the bishops of the Russian Church Abroad for their willingness to reunite with the Patriarchate of Moscow, and I am such a fan of the “dead purity of antiquity” that I have been a vocal supporter of the reunion of the separated parts of the Russian Church.  If I were what Mr. Trevino claims that I am in the sphere of religion, I would have broken with the Russian Church and joined a splinter group by now.  Mr. Trevino is simply wrong here, and he has to have known that he was grasping at straws when he made this charge.  This is all the more sad because it is pretty obviously spurred on by political and policy differences.

Trevino writes:

Too many Orthodox Christian converts in America — and especially those who participate in the public square — seem pulled toward perceived originalism or anachronism in the political realm. This has the appearance of being motivated by the same aesthetic sensibility that appears to draw them toward Orthodoxy: the sense of a necessary fidelity to the foundational faith is basically the same, translated from the religious to the political sphere. But in both spheres, it leads them to falsehood.

Mr. Trevino’s objections to my and others’ support for Ron Paul are no more credible.  If there are cases where Ron Paul’s constitutional views are not perfect, his willingness to adhere to the Constitution according to strict constructionist and originalist interpretations–the interpretations conservatives are supposed to respect and follow–is so much greater than that of his rivals that it seems absurd that someone could find fault with him for lacking in fidelity to the Constitution.  Which candidate can Trevino find who is more faithful to more provisions of the Constitution?  Of course, there is none.  It is not as if Trevino has found himself a more faithful constitutionalist whom he can support–his complaints against Paul on this score are basically groundless.  Not that it matters, but my affinity for strict constructionism and constitutionalism predated my conversion to Orthodoxy by many years.  My embrace of Orthodoxy was a result of coming to recognise, through the working of the Holy Spirit, that it was the fullness of Christian revelation.  It has nothing to do with being drawn toward the “dead purity of antiquity,” and no one should know that better than a fellow convert to Orthodoxy.  

Trevino’s appeal to living Orthodox tradition is all very well and good, but then he has no evidence whatever that I disagree with this understanding of Orthodoxy.  I find it more than a little bizarre that he opts to attack fellow Orthodox in this fashion over what appears to be primarily a political disagreement.  The implication inherent in his remarks that we should also embrace some “living Constitution” interpretation of our fundamental law is a perfect example of what is wrong with conservatives who strive to evolve and adapt with the times. 

He cites the Carlton quote on foreign policy that has been harmful to our fellow Orthodox around the world and calls it “ridiculous.”  He does not actually dispute that U.S.-backed policies in Kosovo and Israel-Palestine contribute to persecution and hardship for our brethren, but simply dismisses it.  Perhaps the churches and monasteries that have been destroyed by the KLA do not concern him?  He does not dispute the reality that Iraqi Christians were better off before the invasion, because he cannot dispute this.  In short, he has no rebuttal.  He speaks of an “abdication of moral sense” concerning the governments of Serbia and Russia, when it is nothing of the kind. 

My opposition to meddling in Serbian and Russian affairs comes, and has always come, from a non-interventionist and realist-informed view that their affairs are none of our business and that American interests are best served by not interfering and destabilising the Balkans still more and by not provoking and threatening Russia by meddling in its “near-abroad.”  I am fully aware of and opposed to the repression that has taken place in Milosevic’s Serbia and Putin’s Russia, but I am also aware that it is not in our national interest to quarrel with these states over their internal affairs.  For that matter, we should stop meddling in Georgian affairs and leave the Orthodox in Georgia well enough alone as well.  Trevino again has no evidence that either Prof. Carlton or I have abdicated our moral sense.  He takes our opposition to hegemonism as proof that we are somehow endorsing every practice of the foreign governments in question, when our responsibility as citizens is to challenge the misguided policies of our government.

In tonight’s debate McCain lambasted Ron Paul for “isolationism” of the kind that “led to caused WWII.”  Since the topic in question was the war in Iraq, James notes that this was an absurd comparison.  But leave aside how far-fetched the comparison was.  Just consider the thinking behind this.  Interventionists routinely complain that their opponents “blame America first,” but there is no more obvious attempt to blame America for something for which our country was not responsible than the outrageous lie that our “failure” to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or our “failure” to join the League of Nations–the usual charges against American “isolationism”–led to caused WWII.  If this were a true charge, that would be one thing, but it isn’t even accurate. 

Let’s be very clear about this: WWII in Europe came out of revanchism stoked by resentments over the post-WWI settlements and in both Europe and Asia resulted from the territorial revisionism of second-tier powers as they tried to become great powers.  The way that WWI ended and the way the effectively losing side was treated had a significant impact on interwar political developments inside Germany that had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy during the 1920s and 1930s.  To the extent that America was involved with German affairs during this period, we were attempting to lighten the burden of the reparations and ameliorate the radicalising effects of the Treaty on German public opinion.  Had America belonged to the League of Nations, it would not have made the League any more effective at deterring Japanese aggression in Asia, Italian aggression in Africa or German aggression in Europe.  Furthermore, it is a caricature and a distortion of interwar U.S. foreign policy to refer to it as “isolationist.”  Our government was regularly involved in diplomatic activity, international relief efforts and international renegotiations of the terms of reparations under Versailles.  The Dawes Plan was not the product of an “isolationist” government, whatever you might think of its merits.  The Kellogg-Briand Treaty that “outlawed war” was quite stupid and pointless, but it was not the product of “isolationism.”  When hawks such as McCain complain about “isolationism,” they are complaining about a refusal to send Americans to fight and die in wars that usually have nothing to do with the United States.  By that standard, then, America was “isolationist” in this period, and we should be proud of it.  But by any honest assessment of U.S. foreign policy during this era, “isolationism” is a complete misnomer for what happened under the Harding, Coolidge and even Hoover administrations. 

Update: Via Cilizza, I see that McCain also said something else to Ron Paul, which I must have missed at the time: “We allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude and appeasement.”  Of course, “we” did not “allow” Hitler to come to power, since Hitler came to power by being appointed Chancellor following elections in which his party won a plurality.  The attitudes and views of foreigners were utterly immaterial to Hitler’s rise to power.  Practically everything McCain said was just plain wrong.

But Georgia, on the other hand, presents a set of dilemmas which are lesser in scope, which have a smaller impact on U.S. policy because of the willingness of much of the U.S. media to ignore developments in Georgia which do not suit dominant U.S. paradigms and ambitions. Of course, objectively speaking, the geopolitical risks and moral embarrassments involved in supporting the Saakashvili regime in Georgia should be condemned more than those involved in supporting Musharraf because they are to a great extent gratuitous: they are not compelled by truly vital U.S. interests.

The risks for the U.S. in Georgia are essentially twofold. The first is already occurring: the Saakashvili administration could become so authoritarian at home that it will reduce the entire U.S. democracy promotion agenda in the former Soviet Union to a farce. The second is much more serious: It is that faced with growing domestic discontent, Saakashvili will seek to rally the nation behind him through an attack on one of the two Russian-backed separatist territories, Abkhazia or (more likely) South Ossetia. The president could gamble that faced with the humiliation of seeing a favored client crushed by Russia, the U.S. will feel impelled to come to Georgia’s aid.

If Saakashvili ever does make that grave decision, it will be the last one he makes as Georgian president. For in practical military terms, there is almost nothing that the U.S. could or would do to help Georgia in these circumstances. Nonetheless, this would indeed represent a humiliation for the U.S., as well as a very great and totally unnecessary crisis in U.S.-Russian relations. It would also have serious implications for Russian behavior in other areas of truly vital U.S. interest, like Iran.

Fortunately, in the case of Georgia the danger of this happening is to some extent mitigated by the fact that—at least judging by the remarks of European officials—recent events have made it much less likely that Georgia will join NATO. Therefore one reason for Russian hostility to Georgia will fade, or at least not grow further.

Above all, Georgia illustrates a fundamental historical truth about client states: a great power should only adopt them when it has no other choice to defend vital interests, or when they are strong enough to act as an effective buffer against a real enemy. Pakistan meets the first of these criteria; Georgia meets neither. Georgia might qualify as at least an important interest if there were a real chance of the energy of Central Asia (and not just Azerbaijan) flowing through Georgia to the West. But for a long time to come, a mixture of geographical reality, legal ambiguity, and Russian, Iranian and Chinese power seems almost certain to prevent this from happening. ~Anatol Lieven

Via James Poulos

James has his own thoughts on Georgia here.

I’d say that the fall of the Soviet Union discredited several ideas on the left and the right: on the left, the idea that the state should own most of the means of production; on the right, the idea of isolationism, or non-interventionism. It is now patently obvious that if the US had not drawn a proverbial line in the sand through Germany, the Soviets would now own large blocks of Western Europe that would be struggling in the same way that Eastern Europe now does. ~Megan McArdle, responding to Bryan Caplan

Yet it is the fall of the Soviet Union on account of its own internal weaknesses that suggests just how unnecessary interventionist policies really are from the perspective of the American interest.  Had it been taken over by the USSR after the war, western Europe would have been more, not less, indigestible than eastern Europe and might well have hastened the break-up of the Soviet empire.  One might say that it is “patently obvious” that had the United States not entered WWI, at least one of the great totalitarian nightmares of modern history would probably have never come to pass.  Looked at this way, U.S. interventionism hasn’t really been a credible foreign policy since its inception, and the upheavals of the end of WWI and the interwar period ought to have made it disappear forever.  However, even if it were the case that the Cold War was exceptional and required a different response, the Cold War ended twelve years before the invasion of Iraq.  It isn’t as if the ’90s offered overwhelming proof of the efficacy and wisdom of intervention.  Furthermore, our experience in the Cold War argued for continued containment of Iraq rather than an adaptation of the irresponsible doctrine of rollback.  In short, there is almost nothing about the Cold War or post-Cold War experience that explains why some libertarians supported an aggressive  invasion of a Near Eastern country ruled by third-rate dictatorship.  If libertarians were wrong to be non-interventionist in the ’70s and ’80s (I don’t think they were, but let’s just suppose), it is remarkable how a good number of them could then turn out to be wrong by becoming supporters of intervention in Iraq. 

James Forsyth’s view of the prospects for the Annapolis peace conference make a good deal more sense than making comparisons to Munich.  The Economist also thinks it will probably lead to very little.  Bret Stephens is pretty clearly vehemently opposed to the idea, but at least grants that the gathering, or meeting, or whatever it is, is “pointless.”  That is why the crazed reaction of Melanie Phillips (linked above) that talks of the “betrayal of the Jewish people” is particularly bizarre.  You can’t betray an entire people with a photo-op, no matter how freighted with significance it is supposed to be.  Granted, Ms. Phillips has been getting awfully agitated of late about Annapolis and Israel, but what puzzles me is why she is so bothered by a conference that will almost certainly change nothing at all.  Cal Thomas joins the chorus that the conference represents the “selling out” of Israel, which is absurd.  Andy McCarthy’s objections to the participation of the Syrians may be misguided, but at least it has a certain coherence by comparison. 

McCarthy and Phillips seem to agree that Syria’s participation renders the Bush Doctrine void, which would have to be a relief for sane people everywhere.  A foreign policy doctrine that insists that Syria is our mortal foe makes no sense.  To the extent that this conference helps weaken this idea about Syria, it may have done some good after all.  If it finally drives home the obvious–Secretary Rice really doesn’t know what she’s doing–we might be grateful for the clarification.   

Rasmussen’s latest polling on the war again shows strong pro-withdrawal sentiment: 63% want American soldiers out of Iraq within a year, which nearly matches a mid-October result of 64%.  Public opinion about the war in November 2007 is virtually unchanged, despite many fluctuations back and forth, from where it was just after the midterms.  Whatever else it may have done, the “surge” has not changed public opinion about staying in Iraq. 

Some notable things compared with the most recent weeks: 28% now want immediate withdrawal, slightly higher than last week (26%); 41% of Republicans now want the soldiers brought home either immediately or within a year, as opposed to “staying until the mission is complete.”  The latter still commands a small majority of Republicans (53%), but this is the lowest level of Republican support for staying in Iraq that there has been since Rasmussen started taking this poll.  It is ten points lower than last week, six points lower than two weeks ago and four points lower than the mid-October poll.  Since last year at this time, Republican support for staying in Iraq has dropped five points.  Support for immediate withdrawal is limited on the GOP side and fluctuates a bit (17% favoured it two weeks ago, 10% last week, 16% this week), but there is now a combination of increased support for immediate withdrawal and withdrawal within a year among Republicans at the same time (25% of Republicans want out within a year this week) and .  Republican support seems to be trending back downward gradually after it had increased during the “surge.”  71% of Republicans wanted to “stay until the mission is complete” in late September.  This week’s result among Republicans marks an 18-point drop since then.  For a bit of perspective, last November’s poll using the same questions showed 58% of Republicans supported ”staying until the mission is completed.”   

So over the last year we have seen a firming up and strengthening of the pro-withdrawal position with some slight erosion of Republican support for remaining in Iraq.  The percolation of information about improved security conditions has not weakened support for withdrawal, but may have instead started to undermine what little support for the war that remained.   

Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact that I spent four years living overseas when I was a child in southeast Asia. ~Barack Obama

I forgot this is supposed to be reassuring and make us want Obama to be President.  I’ve been reading The Economist since I was 10–do I get to be Secretary of State? 

So his strongest experience isn’t the work that he’s done with Sen. Lugar on Russian nukes, or his time on the Foreign Relations Committee–it’s a four-year period in his childhood.  It’s bad enough that he’s made this silly claim before, but it’s just sad that he’s making it into a sort of centerpiece of his foreign policy credentials.

P.S.  Living overseas offers a different perspective, I grant you, but how it could be his “strongest” experience really is a mystery. 

I must have turned off the debate, or perhaps I was simply overwhelmed by stupefying boredom, by the time Chris Dodd gave a bad answer at last week’s debate.  He said (via Sullivan):

Secondly, this doesn’t mean — elections are only one note, as they say, in the tune of democracy. Be careful what you wish for. If there were totally free elections, in many of the countries we’re talking about today, the Islamic Jihad or the Islamic Brotherhood would win 85 percent of the vote.

This post is a pretty good summary of what was wrong with this statement, but let me just add a couple more points.  The question Dodd was answering was about Pakistan, where the specific groups Islamic Jihad and Al-Ikhwan do not exist.  There are Islamist parties in Pakistan and there are jihadists in Pakistan, as we all know, but in the context of talking about Pakistan Dodd’s answer was even more awful than it appears to be out of context.  Here I definitely agree with Hamid that Dodd is just lumping together every kind of Islamist no matter the country, which is the same sloppy analysis that gives rise of the nonsense term “Islamofascism” that I wrote about for my column in the 11/19 TAC.  Worse still, his answer contributes to this general sense of looming disaster that Washington cultivates to justify supporting Musharraf indefinitely, regardless of how destabilising Musharraf’s own rule has become.  If many Republicans have been obsessed with Tehran 1979 and “Iran’s 28-year war” against America, as the more fanatical of them see it, leading Democrats this year are not above invoking the spectre of the Shah to scare people into paralysis and an acceptance of aimless, dangerous Pakistan policy.  Call it “Carter’s Revenge.”    

Critics of democratisation, including myself, generally have a few reasons for urging caution and skepticism about democracy promotion as a foreign policy tool and as a foreign policy goal.  One is the argument from national interest, which is quite clear: promoting democratisation in a country that will lead to an increasingly hostile or uncooperative government is unwise.  Another is a pragmatic argument that tries to consider the welfare of the people in the country: democratisation can empower those forces in the society that are most likely to turn the instruments of mass politics into the power base of an illiberal and repressive system.  A related concern is that democratisation will be forced on a society too rapidly and it will end up falling back on pre-existing family and communal structures in political organisation, fragmenting and dividing the country along ethnic, sectarian or other lines.  Yet another is that democracy promotion in practice has little to do with cultivating institutions of representative government and civil society, but very often involves propping up hand-picked lackeys whose purpose is to align their countries with Washington’s economic and political objectives in a given region.  Unfortunately for many nations, this is frequently what democratisation actually means.    

I still think it makes no sense, but here is Paul Weyrich’s explanation of his endorsement of Romney.  The section on Romney’s foreign policy views strikes me as the weakest in the defense of the endorsement.  On the life and gay marriage questions, there are obviously going to be social conservatives who believe Romney is now sincere in his very newly discovered beliefs and those who think he cannot be trusted.  It seems futile to rehash all the reasons why Romney isn’t credible on those questions, since many people simply take him at his word that he just happened to change his mind at the same time that he was contemplating higher office.  Those who are already willing to look past the man’s naked opportunism, or who see it as a genuine conversion, will not be persuaded by another round of the same arguments. 

However, it is on foreign policy where there seems to me to be the greatest gap between the views of someone inclined towards a non-interventionist or even realist foreign policy and those of Romney.  First, Romney’s foreign policy receives fairly faint praise:

In the defense arena, Mr. Romney is a strong supporter of missile defense. I believe he would make President Reagan’s vision of a strategic defense initiative come true. I also believe he would be far more cautious than the current administration when it comes to nation-building. He is much more realistic than those who believe in making nations safe for democracy.

This last part may be true, though it is a little hard to discern from what Romney has said publicly.  What can be said is that Romney’s understanding of the Near East is both ignorant and incoherent, and his hostility to Iran is well-known.  What is striking about this section is that these are presumably the best things that Mr. Weyrich can say about Romney’s foreign and defense policy views.  We get no sense of what Romney’s views on the war are (for one thing, he doesn’t think that the war is a “disaster,” as Messrs. Weyrich and Lind have correctly described it), nor will the audience hear about his loopy idea of indicting Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention.  We hear only about missile defense and a soothing claim that Romney is much more “realistic” about nation-building and democracy promotion without any particulars to support this.  The trouble is that Romney is otherwise not terribly “realistic” in the rest of his foreign policy views, and doesn’t really see a meaningful distinction between ”realists” and “neoconservatives.”  As he said in his FA essay:

More broadly, lines have been drawn between those labeled “realists” and those labeled “neoconservatives.” Yet these terms mean little when even the most committed neoconservative recognizes that any successful policy must be grounded in reality and even the most hardened realist admits that much of the United States’ power and influence stems from its values and ideals.   

You couldn’t ask for a more typical Republican establishment interpretation than this.  Romney believes that “even the most committed neoconservatives” understand that policy must be grounded in reality–those are the words he and his campaign have used.  That seems irreconcilable with the record of many leading neoconservatives, whose grasp on reality was and remains tenuous. 

Later, Romney makes clear that he thinks that large-scale post-1991 demobilisation and defense reductions (which were actually begun under a certain Defense Secetary whose name begins with C and ends with -heney) were mistakes.  He evidently believes that maintaining the size of our Cold War-era military was something that we needed to do in the early ’90s, even though there was no rationale for having such a large force.  Indeed, unless one thinks that we should be engaged in multi-year occupations of other countries with no clear end in sight, a larger military makes little sense even today.  There is relatively little that an antiwar conservative or simply a foreign policy realist could find in Romney’s views that would be reassuring.

George Ajjan had additional comments on Romney’s essay at the time.  

Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating laments the possible break-up of Belgium:

Belgium may indeed be held together only by “the king, the football team, and a few beers” as would-be prime minister Yves Leterme has said, but I’ll take that over a country held together by race and religion any day. Bonne chance and veel geluk to those working to keep the place together.

Not to be too severe, but I think that what Joshua Keating or any non-Belgian foreign policy observer would “take” or accept should have no bearing on the situation.  Nation-states that have no meaning for their inhabitants are not boons for humanity–they are artificial constructs that the people who live in them regard as injurious to their own interests.  The real point is that whatever Mr. Keating would “take” is completely unrepresentative of what most people, whether in Europe or elsewhere, will actually ”take.”  In the end, the break-up of Belgium along ethnic and linguistic lines is a function of democracy and self-government itself.  If a European identity is at odds with these political values, that European identity will receive very little respect among the people.     

Now the balance has tipped. Unleashing riot police on demonstrators, leaving dozens in hospital, then declaring a state of emergency, seem an inexplicable overreaction to protests that posed no threat to public order. Blanket bans on demonstrations and on anti-government radio and television are tactics that would raise blushes even in the Kremlin [bold mine-DL].

Mr Saakashvili claims his country was facing a putsch organised by outside provocateurs. Though Georgia has certainly suffered much from Russian mischief-making, he has produced no convincing evidence that it has played a decisive part in recent days. Having cried wolf, he may find it harder to win outside attention when his country faces a genuine threat. ~The Economist

Wow.  When even The Economist criticises Saakashvili this bluntly, you have to know that he has fallen pretty far from grace.  Then again, Saakashvili’s entire foreign policy consisted of little more than yelling in his most shrill voice, “The Russians are coming!  The Russians are coming!”  His latest excuse-making is just more of the same.  That suited Washington well enough since 2003, and apparently still does.  It’s interesting to see that it has been enough to embarrass some of his most vocal Western supporters.

Still, it wouldn’t be The Economist if it didn’t have this:

This is not just about salving Western governments’ wounded feelings. Failure to criticise Mr Saakashvili’s mistakes will undermine the West’s cause throughout the region.  Russians will wonder whether outside support for Georgia in recent years was a cynical bit of Kremlin-bashing and energy politics, rather than good-hearted help for a country yearning for security and freedom.

Gosh, why would anyone have come to that conclusion?

Insanely, The Economist still favours bringing Georgia into NATO at some point.  So, in short, they have learned nothing from the last two weeks of Saakashvili’s misrule.

But why isn’t the U.S. standing up for Pakistan when we need it most? Is America even listening to us? We are calling them Busharraf now. They are the same man. ~Parveen Aslam

Having Musharraf step down would be the appropriate move.  The fact that this plays into the hands of the cynical Bhutto is unfortunate in some ways.  Even though she is self-serving, she also happens to be right that Musharraf will continue to destabilise and worsen the situation in Pakistan.  The most dangerous thing about Musharraf right now is that he genuinely seems to think that emergency rule is helping combat the forces in western Pakistan, when this is not the case.  As the article says, emergency rule is apparently distracting the government from real security threats by focusing so much attention on domestic political opposition.  That would make this emergency rule doubly foolish, making Pakistan both more vulnerable to internal attacks and less politically stable at the same time.

I have more to say about Pakistan in an upcoming TAC column, so I will leave it there.

If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it [bold mine-DL]. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world. ~Roger Cohen

You know, the South Side has its share of problems, but this is ridiculous.  Obama “gets” the problems of globalisation because he lives on the South Side?  Or does he “get” it because of his ancestry?  Do all people living on the South Side possess such special globalisation-understanding powers? 

Also, what is all this talk about Obama bridging the “violent chasm” between the West and the Islamic world?  How does he do that?  By saying, “I used to live in Indonesia, but by the way, in case you were wondering, I am not and never have been a Muslim”?  Perhaps he bridges the chasm by reminding inattentive foreign audiences that he supported the bombing of Lebanon, has proposed sanctions and divestment schemes aimed at Iran and has vowed to launch strikes on Pakistani territory without that government’s permission.  How’s that bridge looking now? 

The other problem with this talk of Obama as a bridge-builder with the Islamic world is that people might take it rather too seriously and see him as being too close to the Islamic world.  The logic of “only Nixon could go to China” applies here as well.  Someone who is already seen, rightly or wrongly, as personally close to or understanding of the ‘other’ has much more difficulty engaging in the kinds of negotiations or contacts that Obama proposes to have.  This may seem like an absurd aspect of domestic politics, but if Obama’s supporters were interested in his chance at being a viable national candidate they would stop saying these things right now.  Having combated the false reports that he was a Muslim as a child, Obama has also been conflated or associated with two major hate-figures in the American mind, namely Hussein and Bin Laden.  To portray him as the natural bridge-builder with the Islamic world unwittingly reinforces the negative associations that various chain-mailers, bloggers, pundits and candidates have been making.  Above all, it stresses how dissimilar and to some extent unique Obama’s background is for most Americans, which makes for interesting magazine copy and punditry but does very little for a candidate’s electoral prospects.  “Vote for Obama–he’s not like you in so very many ways” is not a winning slogan in a mass democracy.  Identitarianism is one aspect of democracy that is one of its most deplorable features and one of its most basic and unavoidable.  Being able to identify with a candidate is essential, and anything that weakens this hurts the candidate.  Selling a candidate who already has a reputation for being a bit aloof and “above it all” by referring to his ability to understand other parts of the world makes the candidate seem even more removed and distant from the crowd.  (Today’s lesson: democracy typically produces poor leadership for sound foreign policy–which is not to say that Obama’s foreign policy is sound.) 

Michael Ignatieff, never tired of being absurdly wrong about matters outside Canada’s borders, is quoted saying:

Outsiders know it’s your choice. Still, they are following this election with passionate interest. And it’s clear Barack Obama would be the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins.

It seems to me that this is a very tricky and potentially politically suicidal line of argument to use if you actually want Obama to win any of the primaries.  When Obama advances this idea, he does it in a smarter way by stressing that “his story” is an “American story.”  Most Americans are souring on certain aspects of globalisation, so what makes anyone think that portraying a candidate as a ”globalised leader” is a good idea?  Obviously, Obama is embracing the “nation of immigrants,” “diversity is our strength” rhetoric that we hear all the time, and for a sizeable portion of the population this is an attractive or at least unobjectionable message, but even here he is on potentially treacherous ground. 

What Ignatieff said, and what Cohen is arguing, exposes Obama to a rather fierce backlash if people begin to believe it: having “internationalism in the veins” may imply some kind of hybridity that reduces the person’s connection to his country (this is the “vaguely French” attack against Kerry taken to the nth degree), and simultaneolusly identifies a policy perspective with ‘otherness’, which unwittingly hints that this “internationalism” is not really fully American.  Many of the arguments advanced in Obama’s favour along these lines are rather recklessly identifying in Obama things that I am not sure that he would even say about himself.  Armed with quotes about his being a “globalised leader,” you can just imagine what his opponents would say in a tough general election fight.  Obama’s actual policy positions on immigration, for example, will be hard enough for him to overcome in a general election (should it somehow come to that) without foreign observers taking about how agreeable he is to foreigners.  The attack ads write themselves. Remember Kerry’s ill-fated boast about all of the foreign leaders who supported his election? This does not play well in most parts of America.

Then there was Mexico’s foreign minister, in what I have to assume is an unwitting display of irony:

My sense is the symbolism in Mexico of a dark-skinned American president would be enormous. We’ve got female leaders now in Latin America — in Chile, in Argentina. But the idea of a U.S. leader who looks the way the world looks as seen from Mexico is revolutionary.

A U.S. leader who “looks the way the world looks” is supposed to have great symbolic resonance.  That’s the other side of Obama-as-international-wonderworker argument.  It is necessarily a superficial and rather insulting thing to say about the rest of the world: you cannot identify with America because we just haven’t elected the right symbolic candidates, and now you can!

There is also the small matter that Obama’s foreign policy, which does stress interdependence to the point of insanity (”the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people”), is one of the craziest, most hubristic and dangerous foreign policies on offer in this election cycle.  If the rest of the world is hoping for Obama to win, maybe they should think again.    

Yes, the sectarian government in Baghdad is the main obstacle to political progress in Iraq and a major impediment to the success of the “surge,” as some of us foresaw when this entire charade began.  The “surge” of brigades did what it could and made some gains in improving security.  It was of necessity a temporary fix to “buy time” for the alleged reconciliation and security training that would make the Iraqi state reasonably viable and self-sustaining.  The time has been bought at great price, and it is being frittered away.  That is why the overall plan  As Ricks reports:

A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but “it’s unclear how long that window is going to be open.”

And again:

Indeed, some U.S. Army officers now talk more sympathetically about former insurgents than they do about their ostensible allies in the Shiite-led central government. 

And again:

The latest news of declining violence comes as the U.S. troop contingent in Iraq has reached an all-time high. This week, the U.S. troop number will hit 175,000 — the largest presence so far in the 4 1/2 -year war [bold mine-DL] – as units that are rotating in and out overlap briefly. But those numbers are scheduled to come down rapidly over the next several months, which will place an increasing burden on Iraqi security forces and an Iraqi government that has yet to demonstrate it is up to the challenge, senior military officials said.

Now this presents an occasion to make realistic assessment of what the U.S. can actually accomplish in the absence of coordinated Iraqi political efforts.  It seems to me that the U.S. can achieve very little.  If that’s right, this offers an opportunity for many war supporters to say, “We did what we could, we tried to do the right thing by these folks, but we can’t fix their country for them and we can’t achieve anything if their government isn’t entirely on board.”  This offers them a way out of the cage of the “Pottery Barn” thinking that has trapped them.  The question is: do they want to take that way out?

Also, here’s something to keep all of the recent “surge” boosterism in perspective:

Indeed, after years of seizing on every positive development and complaining that the good news wasn’t being adequately conveyed, American military officials now warn against excessive optimism. “It’s never as bad as it was, and it’s not as good as it’s being reported now,” said Army Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, chief of strategic operations for U.S. forces in Iraq.

One should always be wary of optimism, whether excessive or not.  More often than not, it sets you up for a nasty fall.

Update:  As for that “bottom-up reconciliation” you’ve doubtless heard so much about, Ricks’ report has some reasons to be skeptical about its long-term value:

Also, some outside experts contend that U.S. officials still don’t grasp how their empowerment of militias under the bottom-up model of reconciliation is helping tear apart Iraq. Marc Lynch, a George Washington University expert on the Middle East, argued recently on his blog, Abu Aardvark, that partly because of U.S. political tactics in Iraq, the country is drifting “towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state.”

Then there is the refugee crisis to bear in mind:

Officials identified other potential problems flowing from reductions in violence. Military planners already worry that if security continues to improve, many of the 2 million Iraqis who fled the country will return. Those who left are overwhelmingly Sunni, and many of their old houses are occupied by Shiites. How would the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army and police handle the likely friction? “Displaced people is a major flashpoint” to worry about in 2008, said Fetter.

Ross is right that the war in Iraq is a political albatross for the GOP.  The damage from 2006 to public support for the war has been done, and much of it is not going to be undone.  The middle 20% of Americans has shifted against the war.  54% said as of two weeks ago that winning is not possible, which is roughly the same as in April.  Those are the “good” results on support the war from this year in that poll.  Security in many parts of Iraq has improved, at least temporarily, and this has actually been reported with increasing frequency for a good two months now.  The change in public opinion has been minimal.  This 54-55% seems locked in to the assumption that the war cannot be won in any meaningful sense, and while the numbers on the other side fluctuate they remain trapped at 40-42% or below.  I point all of this out to say simply that whether the war begins to ”go well” or “get worse,” the verdict on what U.S. policy should be has been handed down long ago: get most, if not all, of our people out. 

The political class has either decided to ignore this verdict or part of it has been unable to change policy.  The deadlock over war policy between Congress and the White House is probably frustrating the public (and this frustration will increase with another Bush veto of an Iraq-related bill), which will persuade enough of them to risk unified government one way or the other.  Given the majority’s views on the war and the views of most GOP voters and candidates, we can guess that the unified government they select will not be a Republican one.  That bodes ill for talk of a Republican “comeback” in Congress and for the hopes of the ‘08 nominee. 

One of the crucial problems with the internal debate within the GOP on Iraq, to the extent that there is now a debate, is that a large majority of Republicans are the same people who want to “remain until the country [Iraq] is stable,” as this 11/1-11/5 NBC poll put it.  They are therefore likely to nominate a candidate who thinks the same, or who at least mouths the appropriate phrases.  But that is decidedly not what most Americans want.  Most Americans (55%) want “most troops” out of Iraq by 2009, so you can bet that they are unlikely to turn around and elect a President who cannot or will not promise large-scale withdrawal within the first two years or so.  They are even less likely to back a Republican who continues to make a long-term commitment of a large number of soldiers to Iraq when there is relatively less violence.  So long as the mayhem was nightmarishly frequent, it could be used to instill fear of worse things that might happen when we left (which, I would add, probably will happen), but as it subsides, at least in some areas for the next little while, the fear of post-withdrawal disaster recedes and it is more difficult to paint apocalyptic scenarios that will sway the public. 

What happens in Iraq in the next year will be less important to voters than the reality that our soldiers are still in Iraq in large numbers and that at least one of the major parties is committed to keeping them there for God knows how long.  The other party may at least make gestures towards withdrawal, and that may be all that is needed.

P.S.  Which party the public trusts more is also going to be a major factor next year.  In the 10/29-11/1 Post poll, 50% trusted the Democrats more on handling Iraq, while only 34% trusted the GOP.  That’s obviously a huge gap, and it represents the loss of trust that the Republicans have suffered on their signature foreign policy position.  The point is that even with dramatic improvements in Iraq over the next year (and I am skeptical that these will materialise), the public isn’t going to trust the GOP to be a good steward of U.S. foreign policy.  It is probably not the best way to rebuild that trust by nominating either an extremely bellicose candidate who seems intent on starting new conflicts (Giuliani) or one closely identified personally with the war (McCain).  Also, when 63% are saying that the war wasn’t worth it, that represents a huge obstacle to a party that overwhelmingly still believes that it was. 

P.P.S.  Remarkably, public opinion on the effectiveness of the “surge” seems to be nothing like the growing elite consensus that it has made some gains, i.e., which has to be very narrowly defined as having ”made things better” than they were at the start of the year.  In a 10/12-10/16 CBS poll 54% thought that the “surge” had either had no impact or had made things worse, while only 33% believed that it had made things better.  In short, people who think there is no possibility of winning aren’t buying the pro-”surge” rhetoric (which, as I noted at the time, was overselling the gains of the “surge” early on and talking it up far too soon in the year), or at least they weren’t as of a month ago. 

Ukraine is pressing to have the United Nations recognise the Holodomor as genocide, and has called on Israel’s support for the resolution.  Though I am no fan of Yushchenko himself, I wish them luck.  The Ukrainian famine, the result of deliberate state starvation of millions of people, is one of the great genocides of the 20th century and should be called what it is.    

I await the outpouring of commentary that declares that the Ukrainian genocide is a matter that should be left to historians and kept out of politics, as all of Ankara’s apologists have argued for so long.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll be hearing from many of them this time, since they are presumably not working for the Kremlin as well.  Perhaps some will maintain a kind of grim consistency and talk about how the kulaks provoked the authorities into starving them, but I doubt it.  Making apologies for Talat and Enver is one thing, since most people have no idea who they are or what they did, but not too many people want to stand up for Stalin these days.  It would, of course, be no more outrageous and dishonest than what some have said about the Armenian genocide.  Obviously, when the perpetrator was the Soviet regime and the modern-day successor is a government that Washington disapproves of, it suddenly becomes much easier to speak of past genocides and point out the internal repression by the regime.  It suddenly becomes much less “controversial” to state the obvious.   

The tactics of denial are the same in Moscow as they are in Ankara: claims of genocide are deemed “propaganda” and the province of a particular ethnic group.  Yet both official denials of genocide are equally wrong and equally pernicious.  I applaud Ms. Shymko for her article.   

Ms. Shymko writes:

It’s time for Russia to make peace with its past, by showing a willingness to make peace with its neighbors. Acknowledging Stalin’s genocidal complicity in the 1932-33 state-sponsored Famine in Ukraine would be an important first step.

Note that this article is calling for the Russians to acknowledge the famine as genocide, which is a far more “provocative” step than calling on our own President to do so.  Moscow should acknowledge the Ukrainian genocide, but I think we all know that it will not.   

Fatima Bhutto reminds us that the cover girl for democracy in Pakistan was awful in her own right when she was in power and remains an utterly cynical politician who will try to manipulate everyone for her own advantage.  Both of these claims are true.  I think she is also right that if Bhutto were to come to power the democracy that she would be promoting there would be as farcical as it has been in the various “colour” revolution states.   

Only people bewitched by the myth of “People Power” could think that given Georgia’s disillusionment any good come from another coloured-coded revolution endorsed by the same journalists and “human rights” activists who have praised Georgia as a model for change. Many of the Western groups who funded and trained the so-called “rose revolutionaries” in Georgia in 2003 have been behind the scenes of the “saffron revolution” in Burma. If Burma’s military rulers should go the way of Eduard Shevardnadze will Burma fall through the floor into the same politics of corruption, drugs smuggling and backstabbing which have pock-marked Georgia’s tragic post-Soviet history.

Proponents of “People Power” from the Caucasus to South-East Asia ignore the poverty, oppression, disease and death which have followed events like the “Rose Revolution.” Western media like The Economist and so-called human rights watchdogs like the Council of Europe have a lamentable record of fellow travelling with successive corrupt and cruel regimes in Tbilisi since 1991. It is not too much to say that there isn’t any bad situation which the nexus of Western intelligence agencies, media and human rights agencies cannot make worse, while singing their own praises as the proponents of a new dawn of human happiness.

The infighting and mutual accusations of crime, corruption and killings among the Rose Revolutionaries is the starkest case yet of the reality of a post-People Power country contrasting with the myth peddled abroad in the Western media. No journalists who painted a rosy picture of the new rulers of Georgia has yet come forward to correct, let alone apologise for their myth-making under the guise of reporting. ~Mark Almond

Mr. Almond has an extremely long, but very important post detailing how things have come to the current pass in Georgia.  He also had this to say:

However disillusioned Georgians and other long-suffering people around the world may be with the West’s cult of revolution, so long as bogus revolutions to suit geo-strategic purposes can be passed off as the work of the people, then Georgians will have to suffer another false dawn of freedom and prosperity.

My thoughts exactly.

For it was not merely predictable that Georgia would somehow go wrong, it was a certainty: Just about all revolutions, even peaceful ones, somehow go wrong. In the decade following 1989, for example, communists were elected to power in pretty much every Central European country. ~Anne Applebaum

Ms. Applebaum notes that it is a “disgrace” that the President has said nothing about Georgia all week.  Well, until she published her column, the Post hadn’t said anything either, and even then it wasn’t much.  Most Western papers have kept shtum on the colossal embarrassment that is their social engineering project gone haywire.  Consider the quote above.  Yes, it’s true that communists, or “ex-communists” and “reformed” communists as they have been called by journalists, took power in many eastern and central European countries after the initial enthusiasm for full-on democratic capitalism, but in most former Warsaw Pact and ex-Soviet countries they didn’t send policemen on baton charges against civilian protesters. 

This sort of excuse-making for Saakashvili is particularly embarrassing, since it reduces what he has done to some inevitable outcome of the revolutionary process, which ignores the fact that many other former communist states have adjusted without anything like Saakashvili’s heavy-handed rule.  Saakashvili’s failure was not determined by geography or geopolitics, but by the nature of his “revolution” from the beginning. 

P.S.  There was no “counter-revolution,” because the “revolution” was a scam all along.  A “revolution” doesn’t become a “counter-revolution” just because it turns ugly.  The ugly government of Saakashvili was there from the start.

NRO blogger Tim Graham has a stunning piece of news: FoxNews isn’t the jingoistic party-line conduit for pro-administration spin that you think it is, because Judge Napolitano gave a positive blurb to a non-interventionist book.  (The book actually looks pretty good.) 

Yes, that sure throws me for a loop.  After all, what are years of shameless warmongering and administration loyalism compared with a book blurb?  The premise of Graham’s “observation” is silly.  Judge Napolitano, author of The Constitution in Exile (not exactly Cheney’s bedtime reading), is probably one of the last people still associated with FNC who speaks publicly about civil liberties in defense of them (rather than seeing them as obstacles on the path to Victory), so he is not exactly representative of the network’s news and commentary.  FoxNews also still employs Alan Colmes, which must similarly prove that there is no pro-war, pro-administration bias at the network generally. 

P.S. By Graham’s standard of political analysis-by-book-blurb, Sean Hannity’s blurb for Napolitano’s book would represent some actual sympathy with the argument that the federal government has overreached in the PATRIOT Act and detaining citizens without charge, when we all know that this is absurd.  Hannity’s blurb, meanwhile, is just two blurbs away from Alan Colmes’ blurb.  A product of media consolidation or an elaborate ideological web that unites both Hannity and Colmes?  You decide.

Turkey’s strategic interests are much more dependent on good relations with the United States than vice versa. If we tolerate Turkey’s blackmail, we actually weaken our position in the strategic relationship and embolden others in the region to blackmail us. ~Roxanne Makasdjian

This is pretty much my view of the matter as well.

Like many failed regimes dependent on foreign aid and playing one power off against another, Georgian politicians learned to pre-echo what Uncle Sam and the Eurocrats think. Some of it they meant. Our knee-jerk Cold War suspicion of the Kremlin made their Russophobia seem natural. But playing up nationalism even when it has a real emotional basis is not the way to stabilize a society, not [sic] to stabilize its regional relations. 

Anti-Armenian and anti-Azeri rhetoric worried the near neighbors. Saakashvili demolished both the neo-classical building that had housed the Imperial Russian gendarmerie and a district of Armenian houses to make way for his new palace.

Georgians noted the contrast with his claims in 2003 that he only needed a “three room apartment,” but the neighboring nations heard his apologists say that the new government’s massive re-ordering of old Tbilisi only “affect Armenians, Azeris, Kurds and foreigners.”

Whereas the authoritarian Aliev clan running neighboring Azerbaijan has enough oil revenue to fund a stable state system and many Azeris have jobs, Georgia’s much-praised reforms have boosted unemployment and mass migration. The only surviving industry from Soviet days seems to be massaging the statistics.

The oil pipeline across Georgia to Turkey from the Azeri oil fields in the Caspian has been a nice cash cow for the Georgian government and its appointees, but it hasn’t provided any boost to the rest of the economy. In fact, now that the Baku-Ceyhan project is finished, lay-offs - not new jobs - are the result. Part of the political infighting in Tbilisi is to control the transit fees. ~Mark Almond

Almond’s basic message is that we should stop meddling in Georgia’s affairs.  I couldn’t agree more. 

How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only “them or us”, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against “world terror” on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. ~Robert Fisk

It is still a little strange to find myself agreeing with Robert Fisk as often as I have in recent years, but on the subject of the Armenian genocide he has been absolutely right.  Fisk makes many of the points that I did in my column on the genocide last month (10/22 issue).  We have all heard the arguments claiming that “no one denies” that what happened to the Armenians was genocide (I have heard another one of these today), when there is a small industry dedicated to just this kind of denial and our government evidently cowers in fear of them.  Some people, who have gotten their history from some of the denialist historians, come to the debate misinformed and so react very strongly against charges of denialism, since they think (erroneously) there is some legitimate doubt about what happened.  There really isn’t.  Some who are better-informed, but apparently still unaware of the denialists, think it is redundant to say yet again what they believe everyone already acknowledges.  Yet the absurdity of the situation is clear: if “no one” denied the genocide, there would be no controversy over acknowledging it as genocide, since no one would have any stake in preventing recognition.  Clearly, some interested parties are very intent on preventing that recognition, or else there should scarcely have been much attention paid to a House non-binding resolution. 

Speaking of the Turkish threats against our supply lines, Fisk correctly notes: “In the real world, this is called blackmail…”  Exactly so.  And the administration yielded to it without hesitation.    

But we will not do it under anyone’s instruction. I want to tell both our friends and ill-wishers – I will not take orders from anyone. Because I have responsibility not towards a foreign minister of any foreign country, but I have responsibility for the country’s future historical legacy for the next thousand years [bold mine-DL]. ~Mikhail Saakashvili

It’s tough out there for a egomaniacal demagogue.

Update: Here is some loyalist propaganda for the glorious leader, emphasising his courage!

But McCain-Lieberman, Thompson-Lieberman, Romney-Lieberman, Huckabee-Lieberman–those sound like winning tickets to us [bold mine-DL]. It’s true, given the behavior of the congressional Democrats, the GOP nominee might well win with a more conventional running mate. But why settle for a victory if you can have a realignment? ~Bill Kristol

This seems unhinged to me.  Realignment?  Because of Joe Lieberman?  In the context of a presidential election, realignment implies a landslide with 40+ states lining up behind a ticket, a dramatic, sudden shift in the balance of power from one party to another.  1932, 1968, 1980 are often given as the elections where major realignments occurred, which involved the building of broad electoral coalitions.  What Kristol proposes is that nominating Lieberman would create the conditions for such a massive victory for the Republicans, when the woes of the latter are closely tied to the foreign policy decisions that constitute the chief reason why Kristol admires Lieberman and thinks he should be a VP nominee.  In short, the very things that make Lieberman attractive to interventionists in the GOP are the things that make the rest of us want to run screaming from the room.  Adding Lieberman to a ticket that already included a candidate who blathers about ”Islamofascism” or takes an ueber-hawkish line on Iran would be the closest thing to a deliberate act of self-destruction by a party that we would have ever seen. 

On another note, I look forward to Fred Hiatt declaring his outrage at the fraudulent democracy in Georgia, since he was so deeply concerned about Kocharian’s one-man rule in neighbouring Armenia that he felt the need to trivialise the Armenian genocide and efforts to recognise it for what it was.  Hiatt’s enthusiasm for Caucasian democracy being what it is, I’m sure the ringing denunciations of Saakashvili will be forthcoming any day now.  Still, somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen, since the Post was nearly as egregious in its Saakashvili-boosterism in the past as the WSJ has been.

While I’m thinking about Georgia, readers will remember that Saakashvili, the demagogic despot who had civilian protesters beaten and power-hosed down in Tbilisi last week, was an occasional contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, and the editors of the WSJ were ardent supporters of Saakashvili’s government.  The editors of The Wall Street Journal have so far stayed unusually quiet about the embarrassing antics of their favourite Caucasian strongman over the past few days, and it’s no wonder.  Just four weeks ago they named him on their list of deserving recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize:

Or to Presidents Viktor Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili who, despite the efforts of the Kremlin to undermine their young states, stayed true to the spirit of the peaceful “color” revolutions they led in Ukraine and Georgia and showed that democracy can put down deep roots in Russia’s backyard [bold mine-DL].

How are those deep roots looking now?  It’s not as if the WSJ couldn’t have known that Saakashvili’s rule was increasingly brutal, authoritarian and corrupt, since this has been a mark of his government for years.  Yet they published the cited editorial on October 14!

The point of the editorial was to complain about the awarding of the Noble Peace Prize to someone whom the editors believed undeserving.  The standard complaint on the right against the Nobel Peace Prize is that it always goes to someone undeserving, but this editorial takes the whining to a new level by proposing nominees for next year, which in this case reveals a lot about what the WSJ thinks peace, democracy and human rights mean: they mean whatever the editors want them to mean if they advance the editors’ preferred geopolitical goals. 

The company in which they lumped Saakashvili is notable for just how radically different they are from the megalomaniacal lawyer: Burmese monks, Morgan Tsvangirai, who has suffered torture and persecution for his resistance to a tyranny far more brutal than anything Saakashvili ever had to face, dissident Catholics in Vietnam, women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia, Chinese bloggers, Ayman Nour and many others.  They also list that other WSJ favourite Kasparov, who has more right to be on the list than these two.  I don’t much care for Kasparov’s promotion of hostility towards his own country, nor do I find his political associations (both inside and outside Russia) of late terribly attractive, but even I would not class Kasparov and Saakashvili together in anything except their antipathy to Putin.  Even Uribe, whatever you think of his government, doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with such characters.  To include Saakashvili or the criminal oligarch Yushchenko with these others, most of whom really are genuine patriots and heroes, is an insult to all of the latter.  That the editors could seriously include Saakashvili on this list a mere four weeks ago shows how cynical their use of the causes of genuine dissidents and democrats actually is.

P.S. Here was another exercise in Journal agitprop for their boy, dated August 25 2007.  The Journal and its contributors were loyal Saakashvili-boosters until last month, despite the evidence growing over the past several years that he was not the democratic hero and Georgia not the “shining star” his apologists claimed.  One assumes that they have remained his supporters until now.  I expect that we can expect some two-faced editorial in the near future declaring their disappointment with Saakashvili, who supposedly had so much potential.  Here was an earlier contribution from the same Melik Kaylan, who was enthusing about the “Prague Spring”-like atmosphere of Tbilisi in those halcyon days following Mr. Bush’s insane Second Inaugural.  The folly of the democratists in this case is a matter of record.

Another reason the WSJ may be unusually reticent when they have an occasion to try to stir up anti-Russian hysteria as they like to do is the pending acquisition of DowJones by NewsCorp, which has just had one of its local networks shut down by the local tinpot dictator champion of freedom.  Murdoch and company may not be very happy with the situation right now.  Also, Patarkatsishvili, the co-owner of Imedi, the network in question, has been accused of being behind the alleged attempted “coup” against Saakashvili, which probably also doesn’t endear NewsCorp to the current government.  They probably don’t like having their business partners accused of treason. 

This weekend, the Bush administration dispatched an envoy to Tbilisi to probe Georgia’s use of tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets and truncheons to disperse demonstrators Nov. 7, its shutdown of two television stations and its imposition of a state of emergency that put troops on the streets of the Georgian capital. ~The Chicago Tribune

The cynic in me would say that the administration was looking for tips on how to handle the protests and media coverage at next year’s national convention. 

There was also this:

“I don’t feel any improvement; things have just gotten worse,” says Irina Khurashvili, a mother of two who makes about $300 a month selling clothes at a Tbilisi market. “Corruption is worse now than it was during Shevardnadze’s time. We weren’t satisfied with Shevardnadze, and Saakashvili has proved to be no better.”
   

As I have said before, Saakashvili and Putin share many things in common.  They seek to eliminate independent media, marginalise or jail opponents, cultivate nostalgia for the Soviet and pre-revolutionary past and generally govern in an authoritarian fashion. One difference is that hardly anyone in the West cared that Saakashvili was doing this until it became so blatant that no one could afford to ignore it, while Putin was supposed to be Stalin reincarnated, and another is that Saakashvili has been able so far to stay in the West’s good graces by adopting a “pro-Western” and explicitly anti-Russian stance.  All of this employs the logic of Cold War geopolitics, but without the overriding rationale of containing an actual threat.

Walter Shapiro reiterates this artificial division between the allegedly combative Obama of the Jefferson-Jackson dinner and the meek Obama of the following morning.  The differences between these two performances are deceptive.  Obama’s use of “code words” and circumlocutions to criticise his opponents is not really any more pointed or combative than what he said this morning.  If virtually the only people who understand Obama’s references are journalists and insiders, he has accomplished nothing, except to generate media coverage in which observers ridicule his supposed “uneven” and “zigzag” campaigning.  Instead of tearing down his opponents, he has simply exposed himself to another round of critical commentary and missed another opportunity to wear down Clinton’s lead.   

Of course, Saakashvili’s “Rose Revolution” never was a democratic movement.  That much is obvious.  It would be deeply mistaken to describe the continued U.S. backing of Saakashvili as a contradiction or betrayal of the “freedom agenda”–the “freedom agenda” has always been aimed at the empowerment of local oligarchic stooges who will align their governments with ours, and Saakashvili has certainly fit the bill.  That is the whole point of the “agenda,” and how these lackeys rule at home has never been Washington’s concern.  The internal affairs of other states concern Washington in inverse proportion to those states’ alignment with the United States. 

In this way, we can understand why Washington continues foolishly to back Musharraf and will persist in its hostility towards Venezuela’s Chavez, despite the marked similarities in their styles of government and the clear destabilising effects all three rulers are having on their respective countries.  Chavez doesn’t play ball, Musharraf occasionally does what Washington (again often foolishly) calls on him to do, and Saakashvili is a reliable lackey, and they are treated accordingly.   

Cross-posted at Antiwar.com Blog

Okruashvili said opposition parties would likely agree on a candidate in the next several days. But he said the early election day and the intimidation of potential candidates and their financial supporters all but ensure a victory for Saakashvili.

“There will not be a competitive environment and he will have a 100 percent chance to keep power,” Okruashvili told AP Television News in Germany. ~AP

As I noted before, nothing dramatic would change if one of Saakashvili’s opponents took power, but it would be fitting for Saakashvili to be voted out. 

This story from Reason’s interview with Matt Taibbi was worth noting:

Taibbi: People are steadily growing disenchanted with red state versus blue state—this really aggressive storyline where if you’re conservative you have to hate liberals, and if you’re liberal then you have to hate conservatives. For the first time on the campaign trail that I’ve seen, people are saying, “I haven’t spoken to my liberal brother in years but we’re actually talking now because we’re both disappointed in our respective parties, and we’re both getting behind Ron Paul.” There’s more on-the-ground energy for Ron Paul than there is for the rest of the candidates combined.

I think Paul is simply tapping into these different constituencies that have had much more in common with each other all along than any of them realised.  Distracted by party affiliation and the absurd tribalism that it encourages, at least a few people from right and left are recognising the bankruptcy of the old alliances and the compromises they have had to make as part of their respective coalitions.

Until now, Mr. Saakashvili has been something of a hero in Washington for his championship of free markets, his unabashedly pro-American foreign policy and his forthright resistance to Russian meddling in Georgia’s affairs. ~The New York Times

This should be a reminder for years to come that the Washington establishment’s judgement of the merits of foreign political leadership is badly wrong with frightening frequency.  It’s also a reminder that the hero-worship treatment shown to Saakashvili by the West was a real factor in enabling his abusive government.

Shorter Wall Street Journal: Because other people have come to the right conclusions about Pakistan for prudential reasons and we didn’t, that must mean that our wrong, ideologically-driven conclusions about Georgia, Lebanon, Ukraine and Iraq (which have all gone up in smoke) make sense.

P.S. The absurdity of the WSJ preaching the good word of democratism while sneering at realism in the same week that their golden boy Saakashvili has put 500 civilians in the hospital is obvious, but really needs to be stated once more.

Glenn Greenwald makes the obvious and right point:

If the violence in Iraq continues to decrease — and even if one accepts the most dubious of premises in order to see it all in the best possible light (the decrease will endure, it’s because of the Magical Surge, the de facto ethnic cleansing can reverse itself, etc.) — that rather obviously doesn’t mean that the war has achieved anything positive, either in that country or for our own. It just means that we have begun to contain some of the monstrous harm which our invasion unleashed there.

As I have said before, returning violence in Iraq to its late 2005 levels is hardly a clear-cut triumph.  It’s as if to say, ”Well, we’ve stopped the bleeding from this gaping wound, so that means that the other seventeen wounds will also soon heal.”  It is an accomplishment as far as it goes, but hardly one that changes anything fundamental about the overall futility or injustice of the war.

While I’m talking about polls today, the Pew survey from the end of last month has many interesting pieces of information.  On party ID, including leaning independents, the Democrats have a 14-point advantage, and the Democrats win every comparison between the two parties on questions of ethics and competence.  As the summary says:

And the Democrats’ advantage over the Republicans on party affiliation is not only substantially greater than it was four years ago, but is the highest recorded during the past two decades.  

The survey reveals extensive demoralisation in the GOP as well. 

In a Clinton/Giuliani match-up, Clinton wins 51-43%.  Broken down by region, Giuliani gets only 43% of the vote in the East.  Giuliani’s best region is, strangely enough, the West, where he manages to get 45%.  Giuliani loses every region, every age group (among 18-29 year olds, he gets trounced 59-40), and every education level.  Despite being the most liberal Republican on immigration on the national stage he only receives 38% support from Hispanics (perhaps we can lay the old chestnut of liberalising immigration policy for votes to rest now?).  Despite his nominal Catholicism, he loses the national Catholic vote by 6 points, though he does prevail among white Catholics.  He is underperforming among men (49%) relative to past GOP candidates, and he does far worse among women (37%) than Bush ever did, reducing the GOP share of women’s votes to Dole-esque levels.  So much for social liberalism broadening the party’s appeal.  Giuliani actually performs worse than Bush did among both urban and rural voters, and loses to Clinton among both urban and suburban voters.  Surely one of the rationales for Giuliani’s candidacy is that he would improve the GOP’s standing with urban voters, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.  As I’m sure has been noted elsewhere, Giuliani supporters are largely voting against Clinton rather than for Giuliani, and I don’t blame them.  Who could actually be for Giuliani anyway?  

Some of the results on the Democratic presidential race are also worth noting.  Clinton actually does better among voters who want immediate withdrawal from Iraq (50%) than she does among proponents of staying and supporters of gradual withdrawal.  Simultaneously, two of the most outspoken antiwar candidates of this cycle, Edwards and Richardson, actually lose support the more antiwar the voters are.  In other words, the more fiercely antiwar Democratic voters are, the more irrational their voting patterns become, in that they are supporting the objectively least antiwar candidate in the field at a greater rate than their less antiwar fellows.  And then they wonder why the Democratic Party is dominated by people who don’t take them seriously.

They are inclined to see international problems as a result of America’s engagement with the world and are viscerally opposed to the use of force – the polar opposite to the self-confident and idealistic nationalism of the party I grew up in. ~Joe Lieberman

Take away some of the polemical edge, and what you have here is someone who seems to have missed out on the internal political evolution of his party for the last four decades, only discovering it recently thanks to Ned Lamont and the gang.  You’d think that he had been in a coma during the ’70s and ’80s.  If you qualify his statements a little so that they resemble a view that actual human beings in America hold, many people are viscerally opposed to unjustly using force and think that repeated unjust or unwise uses of force have contributed significantly to many problems.  Are there some people who simplistically attribute everything that’s going awry in the world to the U.S. government?  Maybe, but no one of consequence holds this view. 

Yglesias makes some good points, and I see what he means when he says that Bush and Lieberman aren’t internationalists.  If you defined internationalism by a very weak standard of whether someone supports projecting power overseas, they would be, but this is really what interventionism or hegemonism is.  Lieberman’s move is to collapse them all together into one.  Internationalism and hegemonism are, however, connected in that the former provided all of the tools and assumptions that the hegemonists have used to pursue their agenda, and there is a more or less straight line from Truman’s universalised containment doctrine to Kennedy’s hawkish anticommunist New Frontier to the Vietnam hawks who eventually became disillusioned with the Democratic Party over Vietnam and other matters and broke off to become neoconservatives.  More old-fashioned liberal internationalists, such as Michael Lind, recoil at what is being done and said in the name of liberal internationalism in the Democratic Party today (by plenty of people other than Joe Lieberman, I hasten to add), but the seeds of the current madness were always there within liberal internationalism.  They can be found in Wilson and Kennedy.  Where the modern jingoes have gotten even worse is in their embrace of the latter-day equivalent of rollback and their denigration of the idea of containment.  

No one will confuse me with a fan of Kevin Drum, but I share his annoyance at this response to this post.  Responding to an observation about rising opposition to the war despite changing opinions about the fortunes in the war, the NYT Opinionator’s Tobin Harsaw said:

It’s a good point, but I suspect some will feel Mr. Drum shows a bit too much pleasure in making it.

Drum objects, rightly, to the roundabout, weaselly invocation of “some” as the move of someone who refuses to take ownership of his own words and claims, and rejects the claim that he was showing any pleasure in making the observation.  He was, in fact, making an observation about polling trends that he found interesting because they were, well, interesting and noteworthy.  It actually is interesting that opposition to the war is going up despite “improved” attitudes about progress in the war, because it seems to show that public opinion is not so easily swayed by a few months of positive trends after years of catastrophic mismanagement.  That’s a compliment to the American public, if you ask me. 

There is, of course, also the implication that war opponents must never derive satisfaction of any kind from the overwhelming support of the public for their position, but must always cower in the shadow of respectable elite opinion that says that war must go on indefinitely no matter what.  “Some” might call this view obnoxious, and I would be one of them.

Alex Massie notes Obama’s relatively more sane approach to Cuba policy and Steve Clemons’ enthusiasm for any candidate who gets Cuba policy right.  (Clemons reiterated his preference for Obama’s Cuba position over that of Clinton just this week.)  Any candidate, that is, except for the one who has been calling for a complete end to the embargo for years and years, and the same one who generally opposes counterproductive and ineffective sanction regimes.

Incidentally, Cuba policy stands out as one of the more obvious examples of where Ron Paul favours engagement and Washington has preferred futile isolation.

Ross makes the argument why Ron Paul should run as a third party candidate:

Second, if it wasn’t clear already it should be clear now: Paul ought to run as a Libertarian in the fall. Those Republicans who say that Paul is too far outside the party, ideologically-speaking, to be running for its nomination aren’t that far wrong: I suspect that if the Democrats take the White House, certain elements in the GOP will rediscover their 1990s-vintage fealty to a Quincy Adams foreign policy, but for now at least Paul’s positions are at once popular enough for him to run a well-funded campaign and almost completely unrepresented in the mainstream of either party.

Stop for a moment and think about the claim that Paul is “too far outside the party, ideologically speaking,” and reflect on how bizarre that is.  I’m not saying it isn’t a correct assessment about the party, but it is a remarkable transformation (or rather deformation) that has taken place in the last decade.  Twelve years ago, there was a freshman House class whose ideas about sovereignty, foreign policy and most other major policy questions were an awful lot closer to Ron Paul than to the modern Bush-afflicted GOP, and seven years ago (as Paul never ceases to remind us) the Republican nominee, old what’s his name, ran at least as a foreign policy realist with limited ambitions overseas.  On issue after issue, Ron Paul espouses the strict construction constitutionalist line that other Republicans pretend to believe when it’s election-time, while also defending objectively popular positions opposing illegal immigration and free trade agreements and also affirming his opposition to abortion.  Social conservative, economic conservative, populist, libertarian–you would think that he has something for all of them, and ought to be winning support from most factions of the party.  Of course, the war trumps everything and drives these potential supporters away, and so we have the strange spectacle of possibly having a pro-abortion social liberal as the nominee while imposing a litmus test on whether we should perpetuate an aggressive war and occupation of another country.  The endless pursuit of the “real” conservative candidate continually disappoints voters, because they seem intent on ignoring the one candidate who actually agrees with conservatives on everything where modern conservatives don’t radically abuse the Constitution (particularly relating to war and civil liberties).

Okay, so given that the majority of the GOP is pretty much completely hostile to Paul and his message, should Paul break away and run on a third-party ticket?  Certainly, he could serve as a pro-life protest candidate if Giuliani were the GOP nominee, but if that were going to work it would also be necessary for him to gain the Constitution Party’s nomination to keep the two “third parties” of the right from splitting that protest vote and thus maximise the protest’s effectiveness behind one candidate.  However, as he keeps telling us, Ron Paul has no intention of running on a third party ticket or as an independent, and I think this is the right judgement.  It is also entirely consistent with how Paul has campaigned to date.  

Throughout the campaign, Paul has stated that his foreign policy views belong to the tradition of the Republican Party and that Bush Era interventionism is a departure from that tradition.  He has made what I think is much more than a tactical appeal to Republican Party political fortunes, insisting that the GOP has to embrace non-interventionism (or at least turn against the war) if it is going to fare well in the future.  He has cast his candidacy as the one that represents the best of Republicanism and the one that will make the GOP the most competitive.  Whether or not you find these claims convincing, he wouldn’t have made the claims if he didn’t mean them (this is one of the fairly refreshing things about Ron Paul).  Besides, to split off into a third-party campaign and guarantee a Democratic victory that is likely to happen anyway will simply provide the militarists with an excuse for their repudiation at the polls and will change nothing.  The campaign more likely to steal Ron Paul’s issues would be the Democratic one, especially if Clinton is the nominee, as this would be a way of neutralising the threat of disaffected antiwar progressives who will be unhappy with a Clinton nomination defecting to a third party.  A third party run would make sense only to the extent that it could realistically force the Democratic nominee to become seriously antiwar and less belligerent on Iran.  Both of those seem unlikely. 

George Ajjan writes about his panel (which included my Scene colleague and polymath Reihan Salam) at the Arab-American Institute conference, complete with video of his remarks and notes on the other presidential candidates’ appearances. 

As promised, George Ajjan has written up his meeting with Ron Paul at the Arab-American Institute conference in Dearborn and has a video (here are parts 2 and 3) and transcript of Rep. Paul’s speech.

Trita Parsi, who is also an occasional contributor to TAC, has a smart article in The Nation on Iran that employs that rare element in Iran policy debate, common sense:

Creating a new regional order, in which the carrot of Iranian inclusion is used to secure radically different behavior from Tehran, is neither a concession to Iran nor a capitulation of American (or Israeli) interests. Rather, it is a recognition that stability in the region cannot be achieved and sustained through the current strategy of pursuing an order based on the exclusion of one of the region’s most powerful nations. To change Iran’s behavior, we must change our own.

The Atlantic has an informative article on Pakistan (I believe it is subscription only) that provides some interesting exchanges with members of the Pakistani military.  This part seemed most relevant to an American audience:

“Major Khaled,” as I’ll call him, grew up in northern Punjab—the “martial belt” that has traditionally provided the vast majority of soldiers and officers in the army—and he received his training at the Pakistan Military Academy. His career mirrored that of many other ambitious young Pakistani officers, and until recently, he had followed his orders without questioning them: He had participated enthusiastically, for instance, in the 1999 invasion of Kargil. All of that changed after Pakistani troops were deployed in the tribal agencies along the border to put down local insurgents and foreign fighters.

“I’ve met people of all ranks, in the line of fire, and nobody is happy with this way of solving the problem in Waziristan,” he told me. “The terrain is hard. It’s difficult to hold the ground. The insurgents know every inch of the area.” Major Khaled told me he resented the implication, which he felt the U.S. government had fostered, that Pakistan was serving as the main refuge for Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. “The terrain around Kabul is similar, so why do they say that the only hideouts are in Waziristan?” he said. “Why is Pakistan singled out? Pakistan has suffered a lot. I’ve lost colleagues in ambushes, to time bombs, to improvised explosive devices. The Pakistan army is bleeding for you people.” I asked Khaled if his doubts about the mission had ever caused him to disobey the commands of higher-ups. He shook his head. “I’m not a policy maker. We just have to follow the orders, but people down below don’t go into battle from their hearts. There could have been other options. This is not our battle. This is your battle, and we’re paying the price.”

Bear this in mind the next time you hear some pundit complain about Islamabad’s “appeasement” in Waziristan.  (In principle, their deal with the tribes was fundamentally no different from the deal we have struck in Anbar, with the main difference being that we cajoled Musharraf to resume using failed tactics against the tribes.)  The article is a smart, balanced one that makes it clear that Musharraf and the latest bout of militarisation of Pakistani politics have become a liability to Pakistan and America.  I had hinted at how we should start looking beyond Musharraf in one of my early columns this summer (sorry, not online).  Obviously, with the state of emergency that Musharraf declared, the dangers of sticking with Musharraf have become clear for all to see, but it may now be too late to remedy the error of putting virtually all of our chips, so to speak, on Musharraf.

While I’m on the subject, the idea that Obama has “the right allies on foreign policy questions” and the “right enemies,” too is a strange one when you consider that his foreign policy has received praise from Robert Kagan, Marty Peretz, The Washington Post editors and the occasionally encouraging word on Obama’s bad ideas about Pakistan from Rudy Giuliani and The Wall Street Journal.  It’s a Who’s Who of people you don’t want endorsing your foreign policy proposals, and Obama has them all.  Obviously, Obama can’t necessarily be held responsible if people with horrible ideas say that they agree with him, but it should be very worrying that they agree with him.  This would be less troubling if Obama’s foreign policy weren’t a hyper-ambitious disaster waiting to happen, but it is just that.

Sullivan’s essay on Obama is now up, and for those who want still more discussion of Obama’s special qualities this is the essay for you.  It’s an interesting read, but this line of argument still puzzles me:

There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

(Side note: are we now assuming that the average Pakistani youth is our enemy?)  Not to dwell on the point too much more, but even supposing that a young Pakistani Muslim responds favourably to the appearance of a candidate who threatens to launch strikes at his country against his government’s wishes, it is not at all clear that this will outweigh the objections to U.S. policies around the world, almost all of which Obama pledges to continue.  Obama is simply less belligerent towards Iran than his rivals, and he backed up the bombardment of Lebanon virtually without qualification, and we’re supposed to think that his “phased redeployment” plan is going to inspire goodwill? 

It seems to me that all this does not give much credit to the audience that Obama is supposed to be so good at reaching, and it seems as if this endorses the idea that anti-American sentiment is to some significant degree a product of packaging and the perception of “who we are” and that anti-Americanism derives from hatred of “who we are” (or who we are perceived to be).  Obama’s advantage, then, seems to be that he changes the perception of “who we are,” and thus reduces anti-Americanism by saying, “Yes, well, you hated us in the past, but you had it all wrong–we weren’t really like what you thought we were.  Just look at the President!”  But anti-Americanism in particular does not generally derive from opposition to “who we are,” but pretty clearly derives from what we do.  When it comes to “what we do,” Obama is not terribly different from the other candidates, so again I don’t see how he really brings about a major change in this area. 

For good or ill, this formulation of Obama’s ability to appeal to the rest of the world, assuming that it is true, becomes a huge domestic liability for him, despite what his well-wishers and advocates of sane foreign policy everywhere might believe.  If “only Nixon” could go to China, Obama is actually the last person who could effectively make rational foreign policy towards Syria, Iran or any other country, because any concessions or moves made in their direction would be interpreted as showing that he is too comfortable with the rest of the world.  For goodness’ sake, just remember how easily vilified Kerry was for having French relatives, and then consider what Obama would be facing.       

Via Yglesias, James Traub talks about the alleged differences between the foreign policy groups advising Obama and Clinton and the candidates’ respective views:

As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, “There’s a feeling that this is a guy who’s going to help us transform the way America deals with the world.” 

Note that this is Ivo Daalder who is saying this.  I wouldn’t have thought that this would need to be pointed out, since we’re all well aware of what Daalder thinks, but it is not at all encouraging that Ivo Daalder and the like have a feeling that Obama will “transform the way America deals with the world.”  Their idea of how America should deal with the world is generally terrible, so why should we want someone to make it a reality?

Greg Djerejian is a very sharp guy, so when he said that Obama’s foreign policy remarks in this NYT interview were worth looking at I decided I had to read it.  Djerejian is not necessarily backing Obama here, but he says that Obama offers a relatively better foreign policy vision than the rest.  Let’s say that I was less impressed. 

His support for phased withdrawal is something, but I agree with one of my commenters on another post that the “we must withdraw so that Iraqis can reconcile” argument is not persuasive.  It isn’t persuasive because it is very likely untrue that this will happen.  At first glance, it seems at least remotely possible, but then you ask: what incentive do the stronger factions have to reconcile at that point?  No incentive at all.  That is not to say that reconciliation is going to happen with a large U.S. presence in the country, because the factions likewise have little incentive to reconcile, because the presence of U.S. forces is simply delaying the inevitable. 

Supporters of withdrawal in the Obama mould are trying to make withdrawal seem like the hopeful, optimistic option, when it really cannot be that.  Perhaps this is a calculation that Americans only respond to optimistic plans, and so withdrawal has to be cast as a “problem-solving” alternative.  Yet the underlying assumption in favour of withdrawal from Iraq is that the problems of Iraq are either not ours to fix or they cannot be fixed by us.  We cannot claim simultaneously that we cannot referee their civil war and that our willingness to depart will more effectively bring their civil war to an end and forge a political settlement.  It really is one or the other, and if the first is true we have to take into account that withdrawal means that the civil war goes on, and may get worse.  The response to the ”we broke it” argument at this point is that we are continually re-breaking the country, like someone who went into a china shop and began knocking off more and more pieces from the shelves in a harried, clumsy effort to clean up the original broken pieces already knocked to the ground.  If we “own” much more of what we have broken in Iraq, we might as well annex the country outright and keep it in perpetuity.  The other response to this objection is that we cannot actually ”pay for it” or “fix it,” and eventually we will withdraw, at which point the same dynamic of political rivalries inside Iraq will still be there. 

One place where Obama does seem to be on the right track is when he says this:

But what I don’t want to do is to make our withdrawal contingent on the Iraqi government doing the right thing because that empowers them to make strategic decisions that should be made by the president of the United States.

It has to be one of the greater ironies of this irony-laden administration that the “tough” nationalists and unilateralists, who claimed that America had to be able to act alone if necessary, have been the ones to give us foreign policy outsourcing and entrusting what they believe to be vital national security matters to dysfunctional foreign governments.  Obama does make some sense here.  However, I still find his broader foreign policy vision not pertaining to Iraq deeply troubling.

The Commentary symposium on Podhoretz’s World War IV is not pleasant reading, at least not if you value sane reflection on the affairs of the world, but it does serve as a helpful summary of what leading neoconservatives and their allies actually claim to believe in their own words.  This can serve later as a useful resource should you need a quick refererence to explain what the dangerous interventionists hold to be true.  This is useful, since they will probably later try to say that their views have been distorted by their enemies.  

Here’s a taste of what I mean from Claudia Rossett:

In this context, Islamofascism is clearly the most virulent and immediate danger. But the threat hardly ends there. If I have a criticism of Podhoretz’s superb tour and analysis of the hot front in this new world war, it is that he underestimates the damage done to us in this war by some of the major non-Islamic despotisms, which in their own efforts to deflect democracy are only too pleased to strike back-scratching deals with Islamofascist regimes.

Along with such obvious candidates as the totalitarian munitions-merchant North Korea, or our near-neighbor Venezuela [bold mine-DL], these regimes include the two great powers of Russia and China. Lest that list sound too alarmist, or simply too overwhelming, let me add that I agree with Podhoretz’s warning that we cannot simultaneously tackle every villainous government on earth. But in understanding why we had to topple Saddam early on, and why democracy is the only real answer, I think we must keep in mind that behind Islamofascism is a brew of interests that, however disparate, have this in common: they shun democracy and in various ways tend to support each other in fighting and subverting its spread. Thus do we find China and Russia, our erstwhile allies against Islamo-terrorists, blocking one U.S. attempt after another to shut down or stymie the regimes that produce these killers and their medieval creeds [bold mine-DL].  

Naturally, Venezuela leaps to mind as one of the great threats of our time.  But she neglected Bolivia, which I think is a wildly irresponsible oversight.  When will we begin to fight the coca masters of La Paz?*   

This is almost as complete an expression of everything that is wrong with democratism and interventionism as you can get in two paragraphs.  The added hostility to Russia and China is what tops it off so well, since it is, of course, Russia and China that are doing the most to prop up the House of Saud and President Mubarak.  Oh, wait.

The symposium also shows a remarkable general consensus (with perhaps one or two mild dissents, including one actually from Bill Kristol) about the name “World War IV,” which virtually everyone contributing to the symposium thinks is either an acceptable or excellent name.  Even those who do not accept the name accept the basic assumptions about the war so described, which is just as unfortunate.  The amazing thing to me is that literally no one questions the word included in the subtitle, Islamofascism.  This word seems far more ridiculous than “WWIV,” which is saying something, so it is a far more damning statement about the paucity of neoconservative foreign policy thinking that not one of the participants raised an objection against such patent nonsense.  In my next TAC column I explain why it seems ridiculous and misleading to me.

* This is as close to a Ledeenesque vilification of Bolivia as I could get. 

The Hebrew prophets have a political vision and it is not neoconservative.  ~David Klinghoffer

You have to laugh at Klinghoffer’s description of a prospective attack on Iran as “aggressive defense.”  What’s next?  Peaceful violence?  Charitable hate?  Lawful crime?  (Klinghoffer must be an expert in stating absurdities, since he is a fellow at the Discovery Institute.)

You do have to admire Klinghoffer’s intellectual contortions to justify the moral abomination of the “new fusionism.”  Aggression and moral reform marching side by side is a hard thing to defend, but he gives it his best shot. 

Then again, Klinghoffer never wrote (probably unwittingly) truer words than these:

Idolatry manifests itself in every age.  Its essence lies in setting up moral authorities in competition with, or to the negation of, God.

Quite.  That might be a powerful lesson on which the various warfare state-lovers could reflect and meditate.  Of course, it is precisely the neocons surrounding Rudy Giuliani who embrace the idolatry of nationalism, and it is those religious conservatives who ignore their own convictions in the name of fighting “Islamofascism” who are complicit in the same error.   

There was also this:

Yet the prophets had little to say against Assyrofascism or Babylofascism.

I wonder why.  Maybe because they weren’t morons.

I have been a pretty relentless critic of Obama, whose foreign policy generally strikes me as being dangerously similar to that of Mr. Bush in a number of ways.  Nonetheless, I have to give him some credit when he says things that make some sense:

Senator Barack Obama said he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran if elected president, and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek “regime change” if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues.

It’s not actually that much in terms of substance, but it is a huge departure from his heretofore rather pathetic belligerence against Iran.

Some people are complaining that 52% of Americans support a military strike on Iran.  While I am entirely sympathetic to the laments about public ignorance and the gullibility of the average citizen, and I find it appalling that a majority would support such an obviously horrible idea, I would hasten to point out that this is actually a slightly lower percentage than we have had in the past.  Crazy anti-Iranian jingoism is somewhat less persuasive than it used to be almost two years ago, and that seems like marginally good news to me.   

Ross writes:

However, something like the reverse is also true: Just because the initial invasion was almost certainly a mistake doesn’t necessarily mean that the continued presence of U.S. troops is a mistake as well. And I detect some goalpost-shifting here among the partisans of immediate withdrawal.

And:

But given that only six weeks ago he [Yglesias] was throwing out “4 or 5 more years” as a timeline for when Iraq might start to settle down, I think it’s also “at least plausible” that when we look back on the last year of American military operations in Iraq, we’ll judge them to have played a major role in putting the worst behind us earlier than most people anticipated.

I suppose I must chime in with my usual dose of pessimism.  The “continued presence of U.S. troops” would only not be a mistake if there were reason to think that the changes that have yielded some marginal, temporary improvement in security were going to continue and serve as the foundation for some enduring security.  As Prof. Bacevich has said:

The general has now made his call, and President Bush has endorsed it: the surge having succeeded (so at least we are assured), it will now be curtailed. The war will continue, albeit on a marginally smaller scale. 

This goes to the heart of Prof. Bacevich’s criticism of Gen. Petraeus, which is that the plan that seems to be producing some results is being brought to a close because it was not politically viable under the current circumstances to keep it going, much less expand it.  Bacevich again:

Petraeus has chosen a middle course, carefully crafted to cause the least amount of consternation among various Washington constituencies he is eager to accommodate. This is the politics of give and take, of horse trading, of putting lipstick on a pig. Ultimately, it is the politics of avoidance. 

And again:

Yet Petraeus has chosen to do just the opposite. Based on two or three months of (ostensibly) positive indicators, he has advised the president to ease the pressure, withdrawing the increment of troops that had (purportedly) enabled the coalition to seize the initiative in the first place.

This defies logic. It’s as if two weeks into the Wilderness Campaign, Grant had counseled Lincoln to reduce the size of the Army of the Potomac. Or as if once Allied forces had established the beachhead at Normandy, Eisenhower had started rotating divisions back stateside to ease the strain on the U.S. Army.

Having achieved modest gains with a half-measure, Gen. Petraeus counsels us to go back to our trusty quarter-measures.  As I have said earlier, the “surge” is necessarily temporary in its application and in its effects.  Its temporariness is implicit in its official propaganda name of “surge” and in the stated policy of the U.S. government, in that the “surge” was always going to come to an end.  Its purpose was to buy time, which it seems to have done.  However, this time is basically worthless–though bought at too high a price in American blood–if it is not going to be used well.    

We have seen temporary increases in force levels before, and they did not ultimately halt Iraq’s downward spiral.  The ”surge” was, by the account of its own backers, supposed to be completely different from these earlier efforts. This time, there would be political reconciliation, and this time Iraqisation would happen, and this time the lambs would lay down with the lions.  Okay, they didn’t say that last part, but the other two were just as likely to happen as the third.  Unsurprisingly, none of them has come to pass, nor does any one of them seem likely to happen anytime soon. 

During the “bad, old days” of “clear, hold and build” you would read stories about how one neighbourhood of Baghdad would be secured, life would begin to resume and then the U.S. deployment would be shifted to another part, whereupon the stabilising neighbourhood reverted to violent chaos.  What is supposed to be different when force levels drop and whatever pressure that the “surge” did exert weakens?  

Now the paired element with the “surge” of brigades was always the old “Iraqis standing up” bit.  We don’t hear a lot about this part of the plan, because this is the part–the fundamentally more important long-term part–that isn’t working very well.  We all know that the political reconciliation part is a farce.  If anything, I’d have to say that Yglesias’ estimate of 4-5 years before Iraq “settles down” may be unduly sunny and positive, because there is nothing to keep things from unraveling again once the “surge” ends.  There was never going to be anything to keep things from unraveling once the “surge” was over, which is why the “surge” was a mistake in the beginning.  It perpetuated the worst-of-both-worlds approach that Mr. Bush has applied to Iraq for years: too few soldiers to properly stabilise the country, but too many to avoid all the costs and burdens of being an occupier.  There are two coherent positions that can be taken (huge increases in force levels or large-scale withdrawal), and one of them is politically and practically feasible.  Or we can continue to muddle through as we have done until some calamity throws Iraq into a new round of upheaval. 

I have given Chuck Hagel a lot of grief over the past year, but today I’m willing to give him a lot of credit.  Via Steve Clemons, I see that Hagel has apparently called on the President to consider “direct, unconditional, and comprehensive talks with the Government of Iran.”  Common sense is infiltrating the Washington Iran policy debate!  No doubt, the administration will file this in the trash can, but it is significant that someone in government is arguing for direct talks with Iran.

So Karen Hughes has had enough and is going home.  (Mark down another departure, James.)  It has been easy to give Karen Hughes a hard time, and it hasn’t really been fair to her.  The administration has made an art form out of cronyism, and the President has chosen some of the most inappropriate people for fairly important tasks based on their close relationship with Mr. Bush.  Rather than a former ambassador or someone accustomed to the work of diplomacy, Mr. Bush thrust Karen Hughes into a role for which she wasn’t terribly well prepared and which was already going to be monstrously difficult for the most qualified person.  It is some consolation for Ms. Hughes that administration policy had already done so much damage to our international reputation that there really was little that she could do, and so perhaps it is not very surprising that she didn’t try to do very much.

And on yet another level, that issue highlights the way the West, including the U.S., has been preoccupied with the killing of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by mostly Muslim Turks and Kurds. ~Leon Hadar

Certainly, there has been some attention drawn to the genocide in the West over the last 90 years, though the attention tended to be greatest when it was happening and has since settled into the background or vanished from collective memory.  But preoccupied?  The West has been anything but preoccupied with the Armenian genocide.  But for active lobbying by Armenians, scarcely anyone would give it a second thought.

Ron Paul once again reframes the idea of “isolationism” in his discussion of Cuba policy:

Our isolationist policies with regard to Cuba, meanwhile, have hardly won the hearts and minds of Cubans or Cuban-Americans, many of whom are isolated from families because [of] this political animosity.

This echoes his statements in his response to the Union-Leader’s attack on him.

Kagan manages to put together an entire column in which he never once shows that he understands the difference between “liberal autocracy” a la Singapore and illiberal democracy.  For the truncated democratist imagination in which there is liberal democracy and everything else lumped under “tyranny,” this oversight is typical.  No one, or at least no one of any consequence, thinks that Putin, Hu Jintao (or whoever will succeed him) or Chavez represent “liberal autocracy,” and only committed opponents of Putin’s and Chavez’s regime prefer to call their political systems autocratic.  I’m prone to throw around the word autocracy to make a polemical point, too, but it is plainly imprecise and does not describe the form of government that prevails in these countries.  

In China, the government is oligarchic and authoritarian and still significantly party-based.  Russia’s government is oligarchic and authoritarian and based in the security services, but retains a number of formal democratic and constitutional features.  Venezuela’s government is a much more straightforward illiberal democratic one, whose claim to being democratic has been denied by many American observers because the government is illiberal and quasi-socialist, which is to show that these observers cannot make basic distinctions in political theory. 

So it is difficult for “autocracy” to be resilient in a place where there isn’t actually an autocracy.  The authoritarianism in Russia and the populist demagoguery in Venezuela are both products of the very elections Kagan boosts.  The fact is that liberalism has a small constituency in both countries (outside of a very few western European, Anglophone and North American countries, this has often been the case), and when put before the electorates of Russia and Venezuela liberalism fares very poorly.  Some of this has to do with the fact that relatively liberal politics was associated with the wealthy elite and tycoons, and the effects of policies carried out in the name of liberalism were generally poor or even disastrous for the people who now back authoritarian populist leaders.  There will be objections that Russian elections in particular are not fully “free and fair,” but against this I would note that even with fully free and fair elections the overwhelming majority would still want nothing to do with the Russian liberals.  This is hardly surprising: in mass democracy, the politics of liberty tends to lose and lose badly, while one form of demagoguery or another (be it nationalist or revolutionary socialist) usually prevails. 

Update: Ross has more.

One of Ross’ commenters makes what I assume he thinks is a clever remark:

This is really important work you’re doing. Thanks. Now that we know Venezuela is not an “autocracy” I can go to sleep tonight, comfortable that my children will not improperly label the various oppressive governments around the world.

Very droll.  Of course, one might observe that misunderstanding the nature of a regime and then building an entire argument off of that misunderstanding will lead to the wrong conclusions.  One might suppose that sloppy and inaccurate use of language reflects poorly on an argument.  Suppose that someone thinks that the answer to the problems of Russia and Venezuela is a lack of elections, when the current regimes are at least partly the product of elections, and then that someone opts, whether out of laziness or sloppiness, to label these elected governments autocracies.  Suppose that he also has a record of promoting confrontational policies against other such “autocracies.”  Might it matter then that we give things their proper names and try to address the world as it is, rather than as it appears in the democratist comic book version?

Second Update: I have written on Kagan’s autocracy talk before.

Something very strange has happened.  Christopher Hitchens writes about the Armenian genocide resolution and actually makes sense:

If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would ensue from our Congress affirming the truth).

This has generally been my view since the debate heated up again this autumn.  I have more to say along these lines in my next column in TAC.

Via Djerejian, I see that Kakutani of The New York Times reviews Podhoretz’s World War IV:

Instead of trying to produce a reasoned argument for a forward-leaning foreign policy, he has served up a hectoring, often illogical screed based on cherry-picked facts and blustering assertions (often made without any supporting evidence), a book that furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism and sheer venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine, be they on the right or the left.

In other words, it’s a typical piece of modern neoconservative argumentation.

P.S.  It occurred to me after it showed up in the news that Mr. Bush made a very careless reference to “World War III,” which obviously was not part of the script.  As Podhoretz would tell us, WWIII has been over for some time, and now is WWIV, which means that Bush was actually meaning to warn us about the outbreak of WWV.

Looking at the relationship between the GOP and Arab-Americans, it is remarkable how much has changed in just seven years.  The time was when Candidate Bush was the one opposed to “secret evidence,” and he actually ended up getting 44.5% of the Arab-American vote in 2000.  He had Spence Abraham in his Cabinet.  The appeal to Arab-Americans was actually the only example of early Bush Era “minority” outreach that really worked come election-time.  Since most Arab-Americans are Christians from Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant backgrounds, and many of them are middle-class, it was fairly natural that there would be a Republican constituency among them.  Fast forward to the present, post-Iraq, post-Lebanon, and it is fairly amazing that there still are sizeable numbers of Arab-American Republicans.  Of course, many Arab-Americans are thoroughly assimilated, and those inclined to vote Republican are probably less prone to think in identity politics terms about policy quiestions, but it can hardly have helped the image of the GOP to be the leading force in support of the invasion of one Arab country and the excessive, indiscriminate bombing of another. 

This year Steve Clemons reports on the Arab-American Institute’s National Leadership conference, finding that no leading presidential candidates appeared there in person, with only Ron Paul, Gravel, Kucinich and Richardson making appearances.  Here is another example where Ron Paul is keeping the Republican flag flying in communities where it would otherwise be missing.  Of course, it probably helps with this group to be a candidate who opposed both the PATRIOT Act and the invasion of Iraq.  The three leading Dems sent representatives and taped messages, but no leading GOP campaigns were represented (Michigan “native” son Romney had a few brochures available). 

Clemons finds this absence of the major candidates ”outrageous,” and as these things go I suppose it is.  I think it is representative of a general disdain for Arabs and Americans of Arab descent, and it is a function of the ignorance about the Arab-Americans here that is just as appalling as the ignorance about the Christian communities in the Near East to which many of these Americans trace their descent.  In an odd dynamic, the very policies that are uprooting these communities in the Near East are bringing more Arab immigrants to America.  They are in turn going to be ignored by our political class here just as they were in the Near East, but I think this will ultimately be to the detriment of the party that adopts the most aggressive and hawkish policies in the Near East. 

Then again, if I were someone being advised by a Podhoretz or Pipes (Giuliani), a Liz Cheney (Thompson), or a Max Boot (McCain), I wouldn’t expect a favourable reaction to attending such a meeting, because if I were any one of these candidates I would end up saying things that the assembled audience would find either laughable or horrifying.  Romney could go on his riff on how ”it’s about Shia and Sunni” and be laughed off the stage.  All of the leading GOP candidates hold policy views that I assume must be very offensive to large numbers of Arab-Americans, so this may be an instance, like McCain ducking CPAC, where the campaigns saw no upside and a lot of potential problems.  Of course, no one in serious contention for the GOP nomination wants to be associated with this event, because I suspect they fear it would hurt their fundraising and their public image with core voters.  I assume Tancredo and Hunter didn’t go as a matter of some principle or other.  Besides, Tancredo is on the record having said multiple times that we should threaten nuclear strikes on Mecca and Medina as a way of “deterring” nuclear terrorism.  Even though most of the audience at this gathering was probably not Muslim, the idea itself is so awful that it is hard to see Tancredo getting anything other than a hostile reception.

Clemons has an interesting observation on the proceedings:

The room seemed majority Republican — but one could feel the tectonic shift of the community to the Democrats — or to Ron Paul — and away from the Republican frontrunners in a number of cases.

This is natural.  When the leadership and leading representatives of a party choose to adopt destructive, wrong-headed policies that harm both Arab-Americans and Arabs, it is only a matter of time before that translates into political changes in domestic party affiliation and support.  At least Ron Paul offers the audience an alternative face of the Republican Party, even if it is one that most Republicans don’t like. 

Obviously there is going to be a vast difference between the influence and draw of AIPAC and the Arab-American Institute.  One can bestow great favours and inflict serious political damage on a candidate, while the other simply hasn’t the clout to do either.     

On Thursday, a suicide car bomber hit a truck carrying Frontier Constabulary troops through a crowded area of Mingora, killing 19 soldiers and a civilian, and wounding 35.

The devastating attack underlined the worsening security situation in Pakistan, particularly in the conservative region near the border with Afghanistan where militants linked to the Taliban and al-Qaida increasingly hold sway. The rise of militancy in the region has shaken the authority of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally in its war on terror. ~AP

Andy McCarthy throws a fit:

Can someone explain to me what is “conservative” about a revolutionary movement that seeks, by mass-murder, to overthrow the established order and set up a tyrannical sharia state?

First of all, McCarthy has read something that isn’t in the story.  The story refers to the “conservative region near the border with Afghanistan.”  As those even a little familiar with these Pashtun borderlands know, the society there is very conservative, certainly by the standards of local tribal customary practice and religion.  According to their traditions, they are the conservatives in Pakistan.  The story was not even describing the Taliban or Al Qaeda.  It was describing the region.  Perhaps McCarthy might argue that its customary conservatism or lack of it is irrelevant to the story and should not have been included, but a good argument can be made that it is precisely this local traditionalism and adherence to patterns of loyalty that take priority over ties to the state that make this region such a valuable area in which pro-Taliban and Al Qaida forces can operate.  Interestingly, later versions of the story have eliminated the designation “conservative” from the relevant sentence, though they have applied it to another, neighbouring region.

Charles Kesler wrote:

[T]he GOP has its own looming problem. Sticking with the surge buys time but little else. What comes after the surge? The answer is the 2008 elections, which the party will lose, and deserve to lose, if it doesn’t separate itself from the administration’s stand-pat case for the war…. Conservatives have to prove that they can reason their way to an improved policy on Iraq, as on other issues. And they need to do so soon, before the primaries are over effectively in February or March.

Wehner at Commentary’s Contentions blog responds:

Professor Kesler insists that “sticking with the surge buys time but little else.” But how does he know?

Most of Wehner’s post is a detailed demonstration that he doesn’t actually understand what Kesler meant by this.  When Kesler refers to ”time,” Wehner takes him quite literally, as if the time being “bought” were somehow separate from improved security.  He takes him so painfully literally that you have to wonder whether this is another exercise in the new Contentions blogging habit of deliberately misconstruing others’ statements and then reacting vehemently against the falsified version that the Contentions blogger created out of thin air.  

I imagine that Prof. Kesler knows this because “buying time”–for political reconciliation, training of Iraqi security forces and reconstruction–through moderately improved security was the entire rationale of the “surge.”  If there are some additional benefits arising from the “surge,” they were unexpected and unintended.  (If unrelated things happened, such as the Anbar Awakening, that’s all very well, but is something quite distinct.)  Buying time was the goal of the “surge.” 

In other words, even if you credit that the “surge” has succeeded, you have to have something with which you can follow the “surge,” because the “surge” was necessarily a temporary, stopgap measure designed to shore up a deteriorating situation.  Improved security (the “calmer and safer nation” bit of Wehner’s response) is the temporary benefit that is what actually buys time.  Because the improvements are going to be temporary, the time that has been purchased at great price needs to be used constructively and wisely.  What is the standard response to this?  It is: the “surge” is working!

Wehner then thinks that he has somehow undermined Kesler by saying that the latter probably did not anticipate the Anbar Awakening, but then essentially no one in America anticipated this “Awakening,” which was why it was especially remarkable.  He then demonstrates that he doesn’t know what the word strategy means:

But of course the administration does not have a “stand-pat” policy; the Petraeus strategy is a significant break with the Rumsfeld-Sanchez-Abizaid-Casey strategy that preceded it.

He is referring to plans of tactical deployments and operations.  He is not referring to different strategies.  His response is a perfect embodiment of what Prof. Kesler calls the “stand-pat case for war” and a good example of the kind of thinking that will sink the GOP come next year.

We remain surprised that the U.S.-Turkey relationship is thought to be so fragile that this non-binding resolution or other verbal acknowledgements appear to pose a problem. ~Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian

Oskanian went on:

“Armenia has been careful not to voice an opinion on the resolution. We have maintained that this is a matter between those in the U.S. Congress and their constituents [bold mine-DL],” he said.

“But when Turkey and its lobbyists dragged us in, implying that such a resolution would hurt some non-existent bilateral process between Armenia and Turkey, then we spoke up.”

“We’ve held out our hand for more than a decade. Turkey has kept the door shut tightly. Worse, Turkey has become more radical and extreme in its denialist policies.”

This is a helpful corrective to the story being told by some opponents of the resolution that its passage will “set back” efforts at Armenian-Turkish reconciliation.  Ankara isn’t engaged in reconciliation efforts.  For there to be a “setback” there would actually have to be a process that is being set back. 

Here it is again.  There is the idea circulating out there, it seems mainly among neoconservatives and interventionists, that Huckabee’s foreign policy is simply unacceptable.  Krauthammer:

Yes, I know. I’ve left out Huckabee, whom some of my colleagues are aggressively trying to promote to the first tier. I refuse to go along. Huckabee is funny, well-spoken and gave a preacher’s stemwinder that wowed the religious right gathering in Washington last Saturday. But whatever foreign policy he has is naive and unconvincing. In wartime, that is a disqualification for commander in chief.

Now that you’ve stopped laughing after seeing Krauthammer describe someone else’s foreign policy as naive, I’ll continue.  He thinks Huckabee would be a good Interior Secretary.  That’s the harshest backhanded compliment I’ve seen in a while.  This is frankly bizarre.  Does Krauthammer mean to say that Mitt ”It’s About Shia and Sunni” Romney is a more serious candidate than Huckabee on foreign policy?  I’d be glad to throw the lot of them out, but this rejection of Huckabee seems very odd.

Opposition is cropping up more and more now that he has become a semi-serious contender (who also still has next to no money).  John Fund at The Wall Street Journal doesn’t like his claim to be a conservative (no surprise there).

Come to think of it, Huckabee occupies some of the same foreign policy space that Candidate Bush did in 2000 in that he is a “compassionate” conservative governor with no real foreign policy experience.  Where Bush tried to play the role of a Republican realist during the campaign, Huckabee has simply adapted to the more belligerent and interventionist ideas prevalent in the party today.  Just as McCain was The Weekly Standard’s candidate of choice in 2000, the leading candidates, all of whom are being advised by neoconservatives or interventionists, have been deemed acceptable on foreign policy.  It is that the “inexperienced” governor who seems to have at least a few foreign policy ideas that aren’t terrible, unlike his top-tier competition.  Of course, he still has many ideas that are terrible, but this is why I find it hard to understand why he is being shunned by the people who specialise in terrible foreign policy ideas. 

I’d like to see Giuliani and Clinton square off because she can beat him given how narrowly he is defining his candidacy. And the fact that David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Pipes are advisors to Giuliani makes folks like me salivate.

Whether the Republican Party knows it or not, a Romney/Hagel ticket or Romney/Huckabee ticket would be much harder for Hillary Clinton to tackle.

Steve Clemons here makes the mistake that is always a danger for all observers of the political scene (I have made this mistake myself more than once): confusing the objectively horrible quality of the candidate and his advisors with his electoral viability.  According to this thinking, candidates who are being advised by loopy militarists will never get elected in a presidential election.  What makes me think this is untrue?

If we trust the head-to-head matchup polls as much as we trust the nationwide primary polling, Giuliani is one of the more competitive candidates and more of a threat to the Democrats than most of the others.  I think both sets of polls are probably misleading and are still driven by name recognition, which is why McCain and Giuliani consistently outperform their rivals, but if we are going to grant Giuliani the status of frontrunner on the basis of such polls we have to acknowledge that he is polling as one of the better-performing Republicans vs. Clinton.  According to the current polling, every Democratic matchup against Romney means a Democratic landslide (against Edwards, the margins have gone from an amusing 15 or so to the ridiculous 25+), while Giuliani is supposed to be reasonably competitive against any Democrat.  We really should not trust much of this national polling on the candidates, but given what evidence we have it seems positively crazy for a Democrat to hope for a Giuliani nomination to avoid the terrible threat of Romney. 

Commenting on the weird internecine fighting between fiscal and social conservatives that leaves the neocons unscathed, Ross said:

It’s true: As in the Cold War, foreign-policy hawkishness has become the glue holding the fragile GOP coalition together, even as Iraq has made foreign policy a general-election liability for the Right, instead of the asset it was in the Reagan years.

One of the reasons why hawkishness held together the coalition during the Cold War was in part a shared belief in anticommunism, which animated all parts of the coalition for different reasons, but the coalition was also held together by the related fear of appearing “weak” towards the Soviets.  It was also an asset because the form of that “hawkishness” was significantly different from the hawkishness of today.  Then hawkish rhetoric served some rational purpose in helping to provide the leverage for the negotiation of bilateral disarmament agreements and the gradual de-escalation of the Cold War.  Today advocates of hawkishness are devoted very simply to riling up the country to start wars, rather than providing for a strong defense for the sake of deterrence and preventing the outbreak of conflicts.  Such are the things done in the name of a “neo-Reaganite foreign policy,” as some interventionists dub their monstrosity.  

No more do you hear of peace through strength, and instead you hear a great deal about “Strength Through Willpower” or “Showing Our Resolve” and other morally dubious, vitalist phrases.  It isn’t just because Iraq went badly that hawkishness has become a political liability, but that the militarism the new hawkishness has created is fundamentally unwise and dangerous.  Key parts of this problem for the GOP are the exaggeration of the threat and the general hysteria about the extent of the threat, which has induced a kind of panic-stricken bunker mentality among many conservatives, which in turn gives off a disquieting air of desperation and anxiety.  Where a foreign policy of containment and strong defense seemed both eminently feasible and reasonable, expressing steady, sober confidence in America’s endurance and success, and the threat seemed sufficiently great to most to justify the costs of the policy, the modern equivalent of rollback-through-perpetual-war seems crazy and unsustainable, and seems all the more bizarre given that the jihadi threat is nowhere near as dangerous as the Soviets actually were.     

Today, there is also more or less a shared belief in anti-jihadism, but the embrace of hawkishness has become a mechanism for policing the coalition as much as it is an actual stance on policy.  Your fitness to belong to the coalition is called into question if you do not jump through the requisite hoops of declaring your abiding support for the warfare state–even Mike Huckabee, who never misses a chance to mention suicide bombers when he talks about the culture of death, has been branded as being potentially too “soft” and “weak” on foreign policy (perhaps because he shows signs of having a brain).  Hence the increasingly common fashion among Republican leaders, including Huckabee, to bow before the stupid idol of the term “Islamofascism” and the use of rhetoric about an “existential threat.”  These are not things that you say when you wish to describe the enemy and his capabilities accurately, but when you wish to build yourself up as clear-eyed, anti-fascist saviours, instill fear of ideological deviation among your peers and breed loathing of the “unpatriotic” ones who oppose you.  Even more than during the Cold War, when it was still at least remotely possible to carry on an intelligent conversation about foreign policy, today hawkishness is part of a statement of political identity even more than it is an approach to policy. 

According to Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior, violence in Iraq as a whole since the end of June has declined 70%.  (One might point out that the media that allegedly never report “the good news from Iraq” have been…reporting some good news when there has been some to report.)  If correct, that’s good news for Iraqis, though it only returns the situation to its 2005-level misery.  Had someone said to you, “In late 2007, we will just be getting back to the awful situation we had in late 2005,” would that have inspired confidence in you to be willing to remain in Iraq?  It has taken two years to go nowhere, and this is now being described as “progress.”   

The problem with the jingoes isn’t that they want America to succeed, since that is actually what all of us want (for most of us, the sooner the better so that we can bring our people home), but that they are so chronically optimistic that they are also still expecting Sisyphus to get his boulder to the top of the incline and keep it there.  Perhaps when the boulder rolls back down the hill, they will find a way to blame it on the “MSM” and the antiwar movement. 

In other words, they always believe that there is progress and good news, and would believe it no matter what.  (This is why I consider optimism to be a species of mental illness.)  Once in a great while, there actually is a little good news (it was bound to happen sooner or later), and from their braying about it you’d think these people possessed oracular powers.    

A large part of the decline seems to be the changed situation in Anbar, where “violent deaths” declined 82%.  Assuming that all of these figures are basically accurate (that’s a big assumption), that means that much of the “progress” (a.k.a., getting back to where we already were) being touted derived from the Awakening in Anbar, which, as we have had to say over and over, was incidental to and not part of the “surge.”  Good news?  Certainly.  A vindication of the “surge”?  Not nearly so much as crowing jingoes would have you think.  The “surge” has had some modest and perforce temporary success, but it has yielded no political results and cannot conjure up a professional Iraqi police force or independently effective Iraqi Army by sheer willpower. 

As we know, the police force is a shambles, and the army remains still largely inadequate to the task of providing security on its own.  The elements needed for long-term stability and victory, such as it is, are not present, and there is little that has happened in the last ten months has made them more likely in the coming year.  The “surge” was intended to “buy time,” and so it has bought a little–only in this very narrow sense can it be declared successful.  As most of us already know, and all of us should know, that time bought with American lives will be frittered away to no good purpose by the different factions.  Of course, if Turkey invades Kurdistan, all bets are off anyway.  

The part of the story that doesn’t seem to be getting nearly as much attention is this:

However, in the northern province of Nineveh, where many al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab militants fled to escape the crackdown in Baghdad and surrounding region, there had been a 129 percent rise in car bombings and a corresponding 114 percent increase in the number of people killed in violence.

While the figures confirm U.S. data showing a positive trend in combating al Qaeda bombers, there is growing instability in southern Iraq, where rival Shi’ite factions are fighting for political dominance. 

This really is not an exercise in being a naysayer.  This is to keep in mind that every time we have been told that there has been progress in Iraq, some other part of Iraq has soon enough started going to hell after one part had seen a modicum of order restored.  This is not a coincidence, and we have seen the same pattern since the first battle of Fallujah: success in one place simply pushes insurgents and bombers to some other part of the country, where they begin their attacks anew.  As Nineveh province goes to pieces, we are being told about success in Anbar and Baghdad.  As soon as forces are shifted to face the problem in Nineveh, where they will be at least moderately successful, Baghdad or Diyala or somewhere else will probably start deteriorating again.  This is the very definition of running around in the circles, and there is a large part of the population that sees this abuse of our military as a policy that treats them with respect and honour.  Excuse me if I don’t buy it. 

The fundamental flaws of the “surge” that have been criticised since the beginning have always been: 1) insufficient numbers of soldiers to accomplish the counterinsurgency task assigned to them, and 2) a hopeless local political mess that shows no real sign of resolving itself.  The deeply compromised and sectarian nature of the “Iraqi government” has always been at the heart of the latter problem.  The “surge” will at some point come to an end, as has always been the case, which means that the old evils that the “surge” was meant to combat will return once the “surge” has ended.  As Prof. Bacevich pointed out a couple weeks ago, ending the one thing that might have been doing some good on the security front makes no sense by the standards of the supporters of the “surge”–yet this is what Gen. Petraeus has recommended. 

It is the manipulative propaganda of the administration and the hopelessly confused nature of the strategic planning of this war that make it unsustainable and indefensible.  No doubt, our military can execute very smart, effective tactical plans until the end of time (I believe that is the unofficial target date for ending the war at this rate), but if it is in the service of no larger, coherent, feasible plan it is a waste of lives, money and resources.  The strategic goals have remained unchanged for the duration of the occupation (the frequent talk of the “surge” as a “new strategy” has revealed just how few understand what strategy is), and they remain just about as far-fetched and distant as they have ever been.  It is high time to end the war.

Cross-posted at Antiwar.com Blog

Heads were turned, for instance, when Giuliani suggested expanding NATO membership to Singapore and Israel. Unfortunately for the mayor, heads were turned because British Tories were thinking, “Is he mad?” not “What a capital idea.” ~Alex Massie

Even when confronted with how wrong he was, Schoenfeld presses on undeterred with still more dishonest descriptions of James Fallows’ position:

But I am still wondering: why does he arrogate to himself and to his faction the right to determine what American interests are? And why does he cast aspersions of disloyalty on those with whom he disagrees about what constitutes those interests, saying of an American Jewish organization, for instance, that in pressing for a “military showdown” with Iran, “it is advancing its own causes at the expense of larger American interests”?

It could be that it is pretty obvious that war with Iran is not in the interest of the United States and those who think that it is are badly mistaken, but let’s step back a bit.  Fallows at no point cast aspersions on the loyalty of anyone.  He made no claims that anyone was being disloyal; he has made the far more powerful charge that these lobbies are mistaken and wrong in the things for which they advocate.  Neither, for that matter, have Mearsheimer and Walt questioned anyone’s loyalty.  They also go out of their way to distinguish sharply between pro-Israel activists and the American Jewish community.  The two authors object to certain policies and criticise the influence of the people who argue in favour of those policies, because they think those policies do not serve the national interest.  It takes a pretty strange mind to turn that into an accusation of disloyalty. 

In other words, the authors (and, I suppose, Fallows also) accuse these activists of misunderstanding what the American interest really is, when this is what these activists say about their opponents on a regular basis.  That’s the state of the argument, which only one side confuses with a great deal of hand-wringing about alleged prejudice. 

This is the DCI Counterterrorist Center’s logo.  I didn’t realise that bayonets now came in scimitar form, or that all terrorists were, in reality, the black-goo creature Armus from Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Via Yglesias

You have to appreciate the kind of fierce dishonesty that allows the people who routinely try to delegitimise opposing perspectives with smears to complain (incorrectly at that!) about their opponents’ attempts to delegitimise them.  At no time, of course, did Fallows question anyone’s loyalty or their legitimacy, but denying the legitimacy, loyalty and patriotism of others (usually because they are unwilling to cheer on the unprovoked slaughter of foreigners) is what the jingoes do to others all the time.  In fact, apart from stoking the flames of war, that’s just about all they do. 

In response to this reasonable Fallows post, in which he observed that many different interest group and ethnic lobbies, including the Armenians and Cubans in his example, can have significant and undesirable effects on U.S. policy to the detriment of American interests, you get the following nonsense:

But why is this game played only one way, with America’s Jews the primary target?

It’s simply baffling to me how anyone believes a word such people say.

James Fallows makes some good observations about the influence of ethnic and interest group lobbies and the legitimacy of criticising the potentially adverse effects of their recommended policies on American interests.  He is correct that opposition to the genocide resolution doesn’t make someone anti-Armenian.  Then again, I would make a point of noting that no one who supports the resolution has made such a stupid charge.  That’s one place where there seems to be a significant difference in the treatment of different lobbies. 

Of course, the chief difference between the Armenian lobby, so called, and the Cuban and “pro-Israel” lobbies is that the latter two actually get concrete policies enacted that they want to see enacted in the face of the obvious costs and disadvantages those policies involve.  According to the harsher critics, the “pro-Israel” lobby has enough influence to propel America into regional wars or at least to acquiesce in Israel’s own excesses, helping to alienate us from most of the world and contributing to security threats to our own country.  The Armenians can’t even get a symbolic resolution through one side of Congress, the only consequence of which would be the irrational overreaction of one ally.  Does anyone really think that Armenian-Americans could effectively shape U.S. policy in the Caucasus or our relationship vis-a-vis Azerbaijan?  Could they get Washington to recognise Karabakh?  Of course not, and therein lies all the difference in the magnitude of the influence of different lobbying groups.

The supposed right of secession is a part of the imagined right of self-determination, a fantasy drawn from the absurd political theories of Locke and Rousseau and given immortality by Jefferson’s utterly fatuous platitudes with which he began the Declaration. Applied universally, it means Montenegro–backed by foreign interests–had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, the Brda region on the border with Serbia to secede from Montenegro, and any three-man pro-secession village to secede from the Brda, until the Russian Mafia owned every square inch of the county. To speak of rights, in such circumstances–that is, when American corporations are busily breaking up nations and federations into weak little entities they can exploit–is not only nonsense but dangerous nonsense. ~Thomas Fleming

Meanwhile, after our government has pathetically yielded to Turkish threats over the genocide resolution, Washington has utterly failed to take seriously enough Turkey’s genuine security concerns about the PKK, which have just become more acute with the latest attacks inside Turkey.  A Turkish invasion now seems very likely, which will do vastly greater damage to efforts to stabilise Iraq and will endanger our forces in Iraq far more than anything that might have resulted from Ankara following through on its threats over the resolution. 

Washington has yielded to moral blackmail and simultaneously failed to avert potential strategic disaster.  Mr. Bush has effectively been protecting PKK terrorists while lending cover to a policy of genocide denial.  He has not managed to shore up U.S.-Turkish relations, which his administration has done so much to ruin over the years, and has managed to take the most dishonourable and dangerous positions available to him.  The mind boggles at how the administration’s toleration of both terrorism and genocide denial can be confused with wise and prudent statecraft.

I gave up on the dreadful Florida GOP debate before they ever got to foreign policy, but apparently Tom Tancredo had the nerve to attack the genocide resolution at one point.  Nothing new there, you might think, except that Tancredo was one of the original co-sponsors of the bill.  He very quickly abandoned it once it became controversial.  Quoth Tancredo:

We can’t continue to go back to the dust bin of history to condemn actions by empires that no longer even exist.

It seems to me that this is what we do all the time.  We pore over the “dust bin” and dwell on the crimes of the Nazis and Soviets, and repeatedly, endlessly talk about those crimes and compare our present-day enemies with the perpetrators of these crimes.  Earlier this year, the President went to the Holocaust Museum and condemned the actions of an empire that no longer exists.  American politicians condemn the evils of Soviet communism as a matter of course, and are not concerned that this might hurt relations with the Russians.  Of course, there is usually an assumption that post-Soviet Russia is in significant ways still quite different from the old Soviet Union, which means that criticism of the latter need not extend to the modern successor state of the criminal regime. 

Yesterday I said in another post:

I suspect, but I cannot definitely prove, that another element is a weird, unseemly desire to keep the Nazis in the public imagination as the fons et origo of genocidal killing (which would also have to conveniently ignore the genocide of the Ukrainians) to sustain the mythology surrounding the entire WWII period.

Part of my point here was to make the point that the mythology about WWII to some extent requires holding up the Nazis as uniquely and especially evil in some unprecedented way.  They must remain the ultimate villains to better reinforce the memory of WWII as the ‘Good War’.  Part of the novelty and uniqueness of Nazi evil, according to President Bush’s own description, is that the Nazis allegedly introduced state-planned genocide:

Yet in places such as Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald, the world saw something new and terrible: the state-sanctioned extermination of a people — carried out with a chilling industrial efficiency of a so-called modern nation.

To argue that there was actually a precedent and a previous state-sanctioned, organised and planned extermination of a people is effectively to deny the newness and uniqueness of the Nazis’ crimes.  To acknowledge the Armenian genocide as genocide, then, endangers a key part of a certain narrative about WWII, because it means that there had already been something similar in nature to the Nazis’ genocidal killing.  For some bizarre reason, there really does seem to be a need on the part of Armenian genocide deniers to resist acknowledging that the Armenian genocide was the “first genocide of the 20th century,” which would at the very least make the Holocaust the second, as if some special or superior status were attached to being the first one.  The distinction is obviously chronological, not moral.  Later genocides do not matter less because they came after others, nor are earlier ones more significant.  However, the debate over this resolution seems to take it for granted that some are more important than others and some are more worthy of commemoration than others. 

The San Francisco Chronicle sullies its op-ed page with more of Bruce Fein’s denialist prattle.  Armenians in the Republic are taking a keen interest in the resolution’s fate.  Jay Tolson in U.S. News and World Report makes the obvious, but necessary point:

The question is whether Turkey will ever enter a debate in which the consensus of scholars holds that the killings and mass deportations of Armenians did indeed constitute a genocide. According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the historical record on the Armenian genocide is “unambiguous”: In the years approaching World War I, a new breed of Ottoman officials, the Young Turks, heirs to two centuries of imperial decline, saw themselves as the defenders of the Turkish remnant state in the Anatolian core of the empire. Embracing an ultranationalist and supposedly secular ideology, Young Turk leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress pointedly excluded non-Muslim minorities, particularly Armenians, from their vision of Turkish purity. The outbreak of war allowed these leaders to paint all Armenians as pro-Russian fifth columnists (which only a small number were) and undertake organized and widespread massacres and deportations that led to further deaths from starvation and disease.

The resolution is opposed by the Bush administration, not necessarily because it disagrees that genocide occurred nearly a century ago, but because such a resolution will inflame passions at a time when there are passions enough in the neighborhood. ~Cal Thomas

Via Sullivan

That must be why the White House said, “the determination of whether or not the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation.”  It doesn’t take a genius to come up with the formulation, “Yes, it was a genocide organised by a state that no longer exists, but this resolution is badly timed, provocative and strains an important alliance in wartime.”  That is not the White House’s position.  In fact, that is a fairly rare position in this debate–it is a view held, shockingly enough, by none other than Charles Krauthammer.  Meanwhile, the White House is taking the Ahmadinejad “we need more research” view of the question.  We call Ahmadinejad’s maneuver the tactic of a Holocaust denier.  The same standard should apply to the administration.

For those who value their sanity and general peace of mind, NRO has long since ceased to be part of their regular reading, but recently there has been a small hubbub over the objections raised by Mark Shea to this effort at promoting softcore pro-Israel propaganda.  For what it’s worth, the ad ought to be as distasteful to Orthodox Christians, who find any trivialisation or denigration of the Theotokos to be something deplorable.

In response to the criticism, Shea has written:

Now the amazing thing to me is that, of all the things NRO could be doing, they chose to go to bat for *this*. And not just go to bat for it, but claim that criticism of it is an attempt to “turn us against a brave ally”. Because, of course, anything less than uncritical acceptance of anything the Israelis might choose to do–right down to a blasphemous jiggle ad–is endorsement of the idea of pushing Israel into the sea.

Shea is beginning to understand how many of the people at NRO see things. 

In his original post, Shea wrote:

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder how long American Evangelicals (and even some Catholics) can be snookered by the notion that Israel is something other than a secular nation-state.

That is the real question.  If it is really just a secular nation-state with all that this entails, the religious enthusiasm about it at some point becomes absurd.  That was the point of Shea’s original observation.  The point was not to ”turn us against a brave ally fighting a just war.”  The complete inability to distinguish between critiques of sleazy or offensive “pro-Israel” P.R. and attacks on “a brave ally” is one of the reasons why many so-called “pro-Israel” pundits seem less and less credible all the time.   

He [Huckabee] also hit on the right subject areas – abortion, gay marriage, immigration, appointment of federal judges — and was the only candidate to drop the word “Islamofascism” into his speech this weekend. ~Kate Sheppard

Clearly, Huckabee is quite happy to use crazy neocon and Santorumesque rhetoric in making his pitch.  In the end, despite his occasionally reasonable statements, Huckabee is definitely not a candidate for foreign policy realists and non-interventionists.  Anyone who uses the word Islamofascism without irony cannot be taken seriously, and should never be entrusted with any policymaking responsibilities.

The new advocacy of containment may stem from a substantial gap between Russian and U.S. aspirations. U.S. diplomacy seeks to transform what Washington considers “nondemocratic” governments around the world, reordering entire regions in the process. Russia, with its experience with revolution and extremism, cannot subscribe to any such ideologically driven project, especially one that comes from abroad. The Cold War represented a step away from the Westphalian standard of state sovereignty, which placed values beyond the scope of intergovernmental relations. A return to Cold War theories such as containment will only lead to confrontation. ~Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Matt Continetti notes economic and business conservatives’ wariness about Huckabee, but then goes on to add that Huckabee’s foreign policy may actually be insufficient for “national security conservatives.”  As Continetti puts it, these people have “reason to doubt Huckabee’s seriousness in prosecuting the war on terror and carrying the Bush Doctrine into the next administration.”  Since Huckabee’s feints in the direction of a “humble” foreign policy have never seemed very compelling to me, I confess that it had never occurred to me that he could have exposed himself as weak in the eyes of interventionists.  What terrible things did the man say that have apparently put him in such a bind? 

At the CFR CSIS he said:

This Administration’s bunker mentality has been counter-productive both at home and abroad.  They have done as poor a job of communicating and consulting with other countries as they have with the American people.   

This seems to be a basically true observation.  Huckabee could very easily be making these criticisms as a hawk who thinks that the administration has failed to “name the enemy,” to use a favourite jingo phrase, and has failed to “explain to the people” the stakes and costs of the war.
It’s true, he did say this:

We don’t merely tolerate diversity, we embrace and celebrate it. 

But he is making his drippy remarks in the context of talking about how different we are from “Islamic extremists.”  Huckabee went on to say:

It takes an enormous leap of imagination to understand what these people are about, that they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it.   

This should put him right at home with the people Continetti is talking about.  The man name-checks Sayyid Qutb and talks about the need to understand the thinking of the enemy.  Granted, for some interventionists any call to understanding is painful and alien, but it’s not clear how Huckabee has failed the “seriousness” test as seriousness is defined by these folks.  He even comes back to his favourite theme of linking the jihadis to the culture of death–it’s new fusionism in action!  (In case I need to make it clear, I don’t think this is a good thing.)  Where did Huck go wrong?

Huckabee talks about the failure of European integration of its Muslims while praising the wonders of assimilationism here.  This stuff was supposed to be music to the ears of “national security conservatives.”  But, wait, I think I am seeing a weakness in Huckabee’s otherwise solid jingo wall:

We have to understand that while educated Muslims in Europe may not be materially deprived, many of them feel socially and emotionally deprived by a lack of acceptance. 

Anytime you use the phrase “emotionally deprived,” your favourability with the voters Continetti is talking about is going to go down.  This sort of language veers dangerously towards the idea that policies have some relationship to terrorism and the prevention of terrorism.  It also sounds a little too therapeutic for most people on the right.  Then there was this:

We can’t ‘export’ democracy as if it was Coca Cola or KFC, but we can nurture native moderate forces in all these countries where Al Qaeda seeks to replace modern evil with medieval evil.

Er, who’s the “modern evil”?  That’s a bit of a puzzle, but otherwise Huckabee is on potentially solid ground as far as “carrying the Bush Doctrine into the next administration” goes.  He expresses some greater skepticism of democratisation, but doesn’t seem to fundamentally disagree with the assumptions of the Bush Doctrine.  Instead of Second Inaugural-style lunacy, Huckabee proposes a milder form of madness:

My goal in the Muslim world is to correctly calibrate a course between maintaining stability and promoting democracy.  It is self-defeating to try to accomplish too much too soon, you just have elections where extremists win, but it’s equally self-defeating to do nothing. 

He accepts the indictment against realism that the pursuit of stability is unacceptable, which is one of the reasons why I continue to find Huckabee unacceptable. 

Huckabee may have gotten himself into some trouble here:

First, we have to destroy the terrorists who already exist, then we have to attack the underlying conditions that breed terror, by helping to improve health and basic quality of life, create schools that offer an alternative to the extremist madrassas that turn impressionable children into killers, create jobs and opportunity and hope, encourage a free press, fair courts, and other institutions that promote democracy. 

“Underlying conditions” sounds an awful lot like “root causes,” which usually receive such mocking from the people Continetti calls “national security conservatives.”  On the whole, however, this doesn’t sound that far removed from what Romney has been saying.  However, he summons up an association he might have wanted to avoid:

As for the underlying dispute between them that’s been going on for almost fourteen hundred years, we don’t have a dog in that fight. 

References to dogs and fights grate on neocon ears, since this is the language used by James Baker about Yugoslavia (and he was right) and usually belongs on the indictment of realism.  But when you look closer, you can see that Huckabee is no realist (far from it!):

Our enemy is Islamic extremism in all its guises. 

Apparently that includes every “extremist” on earth, no matter whom he’s fighting or why.  Of course there’s no conceptual coherence to any of this–he belittles the Saudis for backing “Sunni extremists” while praising our efforts to support…Sunni extremists in western Iraq.  He does nonetheless occasionally say strangely intelligent things:

I’d rather have more people in Langley, so we can deploy fewer in Baghdad.   

Then he says things that must really annoy them over at the Standard:

The difference in America’s mission is that Al Qaeda must be destroyed as a movement, while Iran just has to be contained as a nation.

Obviously Huckabee didn’t get the memo that containment is for losers.  By mentioning containment, despite his perfect willingness to launch attacks on Iran, he has made himself seem less “serious” to the hawks, which is some evidence that he is at least not as irresponsible as they are.  Not to worry, though, he’s still sticking to the main points of the script:

To contain Iran, it is essential to win in Iraq. 

But then he goes and “ruins” it all by talking about robust diplomacy!  He then quickly “saves” himself with a pointless call for divestment from Iran.  But then he really hurts himself with the “national security conservatives” when he says:

While there can be no rational dealing with Al Qaeda, Iran is a nation state looking for regional power, it plays the normal power politics that we understand and can skillfully pursue, and we have substantive issues to negotiate with them. 

This sounds unusually sensible.  It will probably completely undermine his reputation with the Persophobes who think that there can never been any real negotiations with Iran, but it might just make him seem remotely sane enough to be entrusted with power.  He seems to be leaving the door open to restoring diplomatic relations with Tehran, while also stating his willingness to bomb them.  This is a terribly split-minded view of things, but it might be just the right balance of hawkishness and sanity to win over a good number of voters.  But, before anyone gets too excited, Huckabee really does go off the rails and begins making an extended argument for launching strikes into Pakistan without Islamabad’s approval.  As foolish as I think this is, Huckabee does also manage to say some sensible things about Musharraf that need to be said.  Then he turns around and recites the talking points about the “surge” and “bottom-up reconciliation.” 

There are a lot of things there that ought to satisfy interventionists, a few lines that realists will like, and very little to generate enthusiasm among antiwar conservatives.  Frankly, whatever you think about his policy proposals, his CFR speech is one of the most substantive addresses on foreign policy this year.  Any knock on Huckabee that he is “light” or weak on foreign policy seems plainly wrong to me.

Returning to Lerner for another response, I will try to explain how flawed the article is.  As an earlier commenter has noted, Lerner has already tried to stack the deck rhetorically by making a comparison between an exterminationist party and ideological movement and an entire nation:

We must do it, Armenian genocide proponents [sic] tell us, because the Armenian tragedy was the original Holocaust: Armenians in World War I were like the Jews in World War II; Turks in 1915 were like the Germans in the 1940s. Thus, the only moral choice is to condemn the Turks, as we condemned the Nazis.

In fact, it was not “the Turks” who filled the role of genocidaires during WWI, but leaders and members of the CUP, Kurdish irregulars and some Ottoman soldiers.  To make blanket statements about “the Turks” is to go down Goldhagen’s road of collective guilt and engage in precisely the kind of reckless identitarian vilification that, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn has argued in another context, leads to the dehumanisation of an entire people and thus makes it easier to wage campaigns of annihilation against them.  Lerner has phrased things in such a way as to endorse Ankara’s portrayal of the efforts to recognise the genocide.  In this view, it is not just a recognition of crimes committed by agents within the Ottoman government and military, but an indictment of the entire Turkish nation.  If that was what we were talking about, I would also have to object to it, but it isn’t.  “The Turks” as a whole were not responsible, just as “the Turks” today are not responsible for what was done in those years, but it was rather specific groups of Turkish nationalists and Kurdish tribesmen who were responsible for what happened.  So, right away, Lerner clouds the issue by inaccurately describing the terms of the debate.

Lerner says:

The only enemies at home [in Germany in WWII] were the Jews, and they were never a real threat. They were scapegoats, not objective enemies, and they were being methodically eliminated, without exception, in all German-controlled territory.

The implication is that all Armenians in eastern Anatolia were an “objective enemy,” because there were some Armenians who raised rebellions or fought with the Russians, which somehow makes the genocidal campaign against the civilian Armenian population of eastern Anatolia less than genocidal.  In Lerner’s world, it’s only genocide if there are literally no members of the targeted population engaged in subversive or rebellious activity.  In framing things this way, Lerner has already conceded the morality of collective punishment of civilian populations in retaliation for the activities of guerrillas.  Presumably, as she sees it, there was also no genocide attempted against the Serbian population under German-Croat occupation, either, because “the Serbs” were an “objective enemy” engaged in resistance.  For Lerner, deliberate exterminationist campaigns are something other than genocide when they take place in a war zone, which I’m pretty sure is the exact opposite of the way most people understand the term.  Organised killing of a particular group of civilians bound by ethnic and religious ties is not genocide for Lerner if it comes as a “punishment” for the rebellion of a minority of the population.  It’s certainly a different kind of view, but it certainly isn’t moral.

She then obscures the issue by describing the Dardanelles campaign thus:

Fighting there was fierce, and continued until January 1916, but, on this front, there were relatively few civilian casualties, and no massacres.

There were relatively few civilian casualties because the front was largely static and confined to the narrow strips of land near Gallipoli.  There were no massacres because the Ottoman forces had their hands quite full with British and ANZAC forces.  There was also no sizeable Armenian population in the immediate vicinity of the Dardanelles, which makes the comparison seem almost pointless.

While Lerner acknowledges that Armenians fought on the Ottoman side, being subject to the general mobilisation conscription, she does not mention that Armenians in Ottoman units were disarmed after the Ottoman defeat at Sarikamis.  They were then executed. 

Of the aftermath of Sarikamis, Akcam writes on p. 143-44:

The defeat at Sarikamis was a turning point in the treatment of the Armenians, especially those in the army and labor batallions, who were no longer mistreated but frequently murdered.  In many regions, propaganda claimed that the Armenians had stabbed the Turks in the back.  Enver Pasha himself attempted to attribute the defeat to Armenian treachery, and referred to Armenians as a “threat.”….the first measure taken after the Sarikamis disaster was the order sent to army units on 25 February 1915, instructing them to disarm all Armenian soldiers….Reports followed, claiming that the annihilation of Armenians serving in the army had begun. 

Akcam writes more on page 144:

German missionary Jakob Kunzler, who worked with the medical personnel at the Urfa missionary hospital, recounts that the Armenians taken into the labor batallions were killed in March 1915, and that, “mostly knives were used, because the ammunition was needed for the foreign enemy.”  Something similar was related by Ambassador Morgenthau:

In almost all cases, the procedure was the same.  Here and there squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from the village.  Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp.  Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes.  In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims’ sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot.

Other eyewitness accounts by foreigners serving in the area corroborate the fact that the murder of the labor batallions began only after the defeat at Sarikamis.

Sounds an awful lot like scapegoating to me. 

She also has nothing to say about the leading Armenians of Constantinople who were arrested on April 24, 1915 and subsequently executed.  She has nothing to say about these episodes because these would all point to an organised campaign of extermination.  In the end, Lerner cites the presence of Armenians fighting for the Russians (many of whom hailed from Russian Armenia all along, since the country was, as it has often been, divided between different empires) as if their possessing the same ethnicity gave the CUP or anyone else license to slaughter other, entirely unrelated Armenians.   

The only thing that Lerner can credibly claim is that the situations of the Armenians and Jews were very different.  The differences do not prove that there was no genocide, but only shows that genocide can take place under a number of different circumstances. 

Akcam has a passage on page 126 that happens to address the thrust of Lerner’s article directly:

It was not a coincidence that the Armenian genocide took place soon after the Sarikamis disaster and was contemporaneous with the empire’s struggle at Gallipoli.  As a rule, the acceleration of the process of a country’s decline and partition helps to strengthen a sense of desperation and “fighting with one’s back to the wall.”  As the situation becomes increasingly hopeless, those who have failed to prevent the collapse become more hostile and aggressive.  When the crisis deepens, they resort to increasingly barbaric means, and come to believe “that only an absolute lack of mercy would allow one to avoid this loss of power and honor.”  A nation that feels itself on the verge of destruction will not hesitate to destroy another group it holds responsible for its situation.

Update: Just to make another thing clear, there were also deportations of Armenians from western Anatolia and Thrace following the deportations from eastern Anatolia.  Those who would like to cast this as an eastern front wartime measure and leave it at that have no way to account for this. 

And why on earth should these public bodies lecture historians as to what they should be saying? ~Norman Stone

This is a standard line that I have heard a lot of these past few days.  Never have you encountered so many new passionate defenders of the independence of professional historians as in the last couple of weeks–the concern is truly touching.  Very clearly, Stone has never read the text of the resolution in question, or he would know that it has absolutely nothing to do with lecturing historians. 

The invocation of what we magical historians do bothers me most when someone talks about a matter “best left to historians” as another way of saying, “Let’s please stop talking about this subject publicly and leave it to those ghastly academics to worry about.”  Huckabee has done it before when it comes to debating the merits of the beginnings of the Iraq war (”it’s a question for historians to decide”), and it has now become the favourite refrain of the denialist.  Naturally, the denialist is not interested in proper historical research, nor does he care about interference with that research by “public bodies.”  The denialist complains about “political” interference with research when official bodies recognise the blatantly obvious, but will just as readily denounce as hopelessly biased any research that comes to conclusions that he dislikes.   

No one says that governments are “lecturing” historians when they commemorate the Holocaust or V-E Day or the Armistice or any other major historical event.  Governments commemorate things all the time, lending a certain sanction or authority to this or that reading of history.  As the Turkish government has shown, governments can use this power for distorting and corrupt ends.  That does not mean that we cease all commemorations and public acknowledgements of the past, but that we strive to be scrupulous in how we remember the past.  Certainly governments should not interfere with academics or dictate to them what they ought to say–that is fundamental.  That’s yet another reason to draw attention to the offically sanctioned denialism of the Republic of Turkey.  It is rather amazing to me how so many Westerners became so exercised over the threatened free speech rights of the people at Jyllands-Posten, but have suddenly lost all interest in free speech when it comes to Turkish academics and writers.  Many Westerners were put off by the idea that Muslims should apply the standards of their religion to everyone else and demand that others abide by those standards, but when it comes to abiding by the revisionist propaganda coming from Ankara they are more sanguine.        

It is not the government’s official approval or recognition, to address a concern my colleague James has raised, that adds any truth or significance to the event, and the historical reality would be the same whether or not it was ever officially acknowledged.  The genocide happened, whether or not Ankara and its small army of American and other lackeys will ever accept that reality.  But what we choose to commemorate and acknowledge does reflect on the kind of government one has and the kind of historical memory the citizens of a country have.  Refusal to commemorate and use the proper names for things also reflects on us. 

To cast the current (almost certainly now dead) resolution as a lecture to historians, as Stone does, is especially galling, since the main (indeed technically the only) intended audience of the resolution is the President, who is as much of an historian as I am a jet pilot.  The resolution is entitled: “Calling upon the President to ensure the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian genocide and for other purposes.”

Were the resolution to pass, not one historian would be obliged to do anything.  No historians will have been lectured by a public body.  Most historians of the subject, who already acknowledge the genocide, will be unfazed by the terrible burden of a non-binding resolution.  The only historians who would be troubled are those who have, for whatever reason, chosen to deny the genocidal nature of the events.  In any case, they have not yet been persuaded by evidence or conscience to recognise and speak the truth–a vote by the House of Representatives will not weigh heavily on them, either.

Stone invokes Lewy, whose arguments are pretty effectively undermined here, while ignoring the work that directly contradicts that of Lewy.  The Inside Higher Ed refers to a future Akcam work that will reportedly make the case even more clear.  From the article:

To those like Lewy who have written books saying that there is no evidence, “I laugh at them,” Akçam said, because the documents he has already released rebut them, and the new book will do so even more. “There is no scholarly debate on this topic,” he said. 

P.S.  Note to Cohen: the text of the resolution itself includes mention of Lemkin’s views on the Armenian genocide.

The Economist covers the resolution in an editorial and discusses Turkish-Armenian relations in an article.  Naturally, I don’t agree with the editorial, but I’ve already said plenty on that subject for now.  The article is a good overview of the state of affairs in Turkey.

Via Massie, I see that Fallows wrote:

The Armenian genocide was real; many Turks pretend it wasn’t. They are wrong, and we should stand for what’s right. But it’s hard to think of a more willfully self-indulgent step than lecturing Turkey’s current government and people 90 years late.

Er, so it’s willfully self-indulgent to stand up for what’s right?  What do you call it when you permit those in the wrong to prevail?  Virtuous self-sacrifice?  As the last couple of weeks has made quite clear, it isn’t just “many Turks” who deny the genocide, but a small army of water-carrying American apologists as well.  Is it “self-indulgent” to try to defeat willing collaborators in genocide denial?       

There is something deeper wrong with Fallows’ response.  He is not alone in making this kind of argument, so this isn’t aimed just at him.  There is the idea that unless you simultaneously condemn every act of genocide or anything that might reasonably be defined as genocide in the history of the world, you really shouldn’t say anything about one particular genocide.  This is a very strange view to take.  Rather than strengthening the case against recognition and drawing attention to the particular genocide, it simply reminds us of how many such exterminationist campaigns most people never give a second thought.  It reminds us how lopsided and arbitrary our commemoration of past genocides has been up till now, and underscores how poor and limited our historical memory is.  There is something particularly strange about those who actually know about these other slaughters and wish to cite them as reasons for not acknowledging this or that genocide.  They might cry, “What about the Ukrainians?”  But should it ever come time to commemorate the Holodomor, they will turn around and cry, after having belittled the Armenian genocide resolution and the history that it represents, “What about the Armenians?” 

The odd thing is that this push to recognise and acknowledge an historical event requires very little of a nation.  Americans are not being called on to intervene in someone else’s conflict, nor are we being asked to take sides in complex, little-understood struggles on the other side of the world.  The only costs that we might incur derive from the threats of a putative ally.  Americans are being asked to acknowledge, through their representatives, the basic and obvious truth about a terrible, state-organised act of terror and violence against innocent people, and in response their representatives are being intimidated with invocations of the importance of this so-called ally in the “war on terror.”  The absurdity of it is plain for all to see.         

The liars are out in force these days.  Does National Review really want to be known as a venue for genocide deniers? 

She seems to think that a people cannot be made into a scapegoat when things at home are going badly, but only when they are going relatively well.  This is a very unique understanding of what scapegoating is.  It is rather stunning that so many hacks and amateurs can confidently deny what honest scholars of genocide studies and history affirm.  As for those who “excel” at propaganda, Ms. Lerner does not need to look very far, since her article is a classic example of that very thing. 

P.S. Incidentally, it is articles just like this one that confirm my view that passage of the resolution is highly desirable.  Every day that this resolution is blocked is another small victory for these genocide deniers.  Whenever someone argues that the resolution is redundant or “gratuitous” because no one questions that the Armenians experienced a genocidal campaign against them, I will simply point to this article and others like it to show that denialism is flourishing. 

Like Cohen’s shambles of a column the other day, Lerner’s article insists on defining what genocide is based on its identity with the circumstances of the Holocaust.  Since no other genocide in modern history has ever been identical to the Holocaust, this style of argument implicitly denies all the other acknowledged genocides of the 20th century by emphasising dissimilarity of circumstances.  Lerner’s article is a blatant example of “blaming the victim,” pinning the blame for the actions of a relative few revolutionaries on an entire population.  And of course the trials of guilty officers were conducted by the non-CUP elements of the Ottoman government, yet Lerner uses these trials as exculpatory evidence to the advantage of the CUP leadership. 

I don’t know how many times one needs to say this: there was a deliberate and organised campaign of extermination authored by the leaders of the CUP and carried out in a series of massacres and death marches on their orders.  As Akcam has shown, the CUP leaders would send our duelling sets of orders, with one set ordering humane and decent treatment of the deportees and the other ordering their annihilation.  These are obviously war crimes–that much hardly anyone will seriously dispute–and they very clearly meet all but the most peculiar definitions of genocide.  It’s not clear to me what could actually motivate someone to engage in Lerner’s morally abhorrent contortions. 

I have seen a lot of dishonest cheerleading for Ankara, but this Houston Chronicle piece is right up there when it says:

The country’s leaders have been single-minded in building a new national identity that sets religious and ethnic differences aside [bold mine-DL].

That’s absurd, as anyone with a scintilla of knowledge about Kemalist Turkey knows.

Denialism is alive and well on the Web.  Here is a specimen of the type, complete with references to Kevorkian and “crafty” Armenians.  Naturally, this brave character does not publish his name–nor would I if I were in the business of spewing filth.

To recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make appropriate strategic choices [bold mine-DL]. Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others [bold mine-DL]. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods [bold mine-DL], the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force [bold mine-DL]. ~Joshua Muravchik

Via Ross

Ross notes that there is nothing uniquely neoconservative about these tenets, and he’s right.  A great many people share these tenets, several of which are misguided or confused.  That is one of the reasons why the foreign policy of any future administration will be generally unchanged from the current administration–a depressing thought, I know, but true nonetheless.  There is a lot wrong with several of the tenets, and even more wrong with the way in which actual neoconservatives and internationalists employ them.  If these tenets represent the “only game in town,” as Muravchik claims, the country is in serious trouble.  In this post I will try to sketch out why these tenets aren’t, or don’t have to be, the “only game in town.”  The troubling thing is that most people ”in town” are only too happy to keep playing the same, losing game. 

First, the moral struggle.  No one disputes that the methods employed by jihadis are vicious and evil, and virtually no one would deny that their ultimate goals are essentially contrary to our vision(s) of the Good.  Where the language of moral struggle becomes a liability is when it actually clouds our discernment and causes us to associate all manner of cruel or repressive regimes and groups with our specific enemies.  Indeed, this moralising tendency often causes us to make the wrong strategic choices, making us focus on a cruel or despotic regime that may not, in fact, pose any meaningful or uncontainable strategic threat.  The moralistic-legalistic streak, as Kennan called it, in our foreign policy thinking leads many of us to exaggerate the threats from such regimes and groups because we reduce them to forces of unreasoning malevolence.  The more we reduce these other regimes and groups to veritable embodiments of evil, the greater will be the temptation of an annihilationist or total war campaign against entire populations.  The “moralising” tendency has led our government, and will keep leading the government, to undertake policies of aggression that are immoral and indefensible.  To draw on Prof. Schroeder’s recent arguments in TAC, the problem with the Iraq war wasn’t that it went wrong, but that it was wrong, and this fundamentally morally wrong war derived from the rhetoric of “moral clarity” and “an end to evil” espoused by Muravchik’s confreres.       

One of the problems in ceding, or appearing to cede, the language of morality in foreign policy to those who have weak moral imaginations (for whom virtue entails willpower and violence combined with good intentions) is that it has made it more difficult to distinguish between a moral foreign policy and an unjust, domineering foreign policy that wears the mantle of morality. 

Second, the dimensions of the conflict.  Though I have also sometimes referred to the conventional phrase “global counterinsurgency” approvingly, I have to say that the conflict is not really global.  It is international, or rather transnational, and there is an important difference.  The conflict is not limited to just one country and it involves non-state actors, but it is not a struggle that encompasses the entire globe.  The Cold War was the closest to a complete global conflict or rivalry that has ever unfolded in modern history, in that it significantly affected every part of the world and, of course, had the potential to obliterate human life on this planet.  Right away we see the difference in scale and scope with the present conflict, which has neither the potential for destruction nor the fully global dimension that the “WWIV” crowd claim.  To grant that the conflict is in a meaningful sense “global” is to grant one of the interventionists’ dangerous assumptions without giving it much consideration.  Conceiving of the conflict as “global” makes it easier to engage in the aforementioned conflation of our specific enemies in Al Qaeda and their allies with any or all other despotic regimes.  The now unfortunately widespread language of “Islamofascist” or “Islamic fascist” that has gained currency among the presidential candidates and their advisors also serves to further this notion of a global threat, since the word fascist carries with it ideas of world mastery and conquest.  Applying it to the jihadis, while absurd on so many other levels, also exaggerates the extent and nature of the threat posed by them, since it suggests that they have it within their power to dominate the globe.

This brings into question the entire language of “theaters” and their interrelationship.  If we are fighting non-state actors, whose organisation is almost by definition loose and decentralised, it is as much of a mistake to talk about theaters as it is to talk about “fronts.”  If jihadis make up a transnational insurgency, there are no fronts and to the extent that we can speak of “theaters” they are going to be only very indirectly connected.  Indeed, the main thing connecting the “theaters” of fighting some handful of jihadis in Anbar and jihadis in eastern Afghanistan is our military, by which I mean that they are theaters in the “same” conflict only to the extent that we are engaged in a conflict in both places.  Otherwise, the “theaters” are not connected, and our relative failure or success in one will have negligible, if any, effects in the other.

We should always prefer nonviolent methods, which is how we can tell that this tenet has nothing to do with the neoconservatives.  These are the people who hardly ever prefer nonviolent methods when they are available, and are always looking for some way to justify recourse to violence.  One of the few nonviolent methods neoconservatives will prefer, at least rhetorically and superficially, is democracy promotion, which has resulted time and again in the strengthening of those forces that the neoconservatives in particular regard as our enemies.  It has certainly strengthened Islamists in essentially every part of the Islamic world where it has been introduced under the auspices or influence of the “freedom agenda.”  Perhaps someone could propose another justification for democracy promotion, since democracy promotion has not resulted in the weakening of “our foe” and the reduction in the need for force.

Mr. Krikorian is correct when he says:

First of all, it is simply inarguable that the Ottoman Empire tried to eradicate the Armenian people under the cover of World War I.

Why then do so many prominent Americans keep arguing against it, hedging their statements or tying themselves into knots to trivialise the events?  Of course, it is, or rather ought to be, inarguable, but so long as Ankara’s apologists are able to retain any credibility and cast doubt on the matter there will be a continuing “debate.”

He’s also right when he says:

Our policy toward modern Turkey should have nothing whatsoever to do with acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. But caving to Turkish pressure never to use “Armenian” and “genocide” in the same sentence is what has given the current resolution its impetus.

Critics are right that Congress has no business weighing in on historical controversies. But there is no controversy here [bold mine-DL]. This isn’t even a matter of the polite fictions necessary to international diplomacy. Denying the Armenian Genocide is simply a lie, and a lie propagated at the behest of a foreign power. It’s unworthy of us.

Amen to that.

“They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the idea of ‘on the one hand and the other hand,’ ” he said. “That’s very attractive on campuses to say that you should hear both sides of the story.” While Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn’t favor censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it is important to expose “the collaboration between the Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote this denialist argument.”

To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these calls for debating whether a genocide took place are coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the period — based on unprecedented access to Ottoman archives — provides even more solid evidence of the intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the Armenians [bold mine-DL]. This new scholarship is seen as the ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of those who committed the genocide — which counters the arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide view relies too much on the views of Armenian survivors.

Even further, some of the most significant new scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish, not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars have faced death threats as well as indictments by prosecutors in Turkey. ~Inside Higher Ed

Via Cliopatria

Well, there goes any respect I might have had for Bruce Fein (who works, it should be noted, for the Turkish Coalition of America, founded in that august, ancient time of February 2007):

Like Benito Mussolini, Armenians believe truth is an assertion at the head of a figurative bayonet.

Yes, don’t you see–the Armenians are deceitful and treacherous.  You can’t trust them.  Sound familiar?  Note that any similarly gross overgeneralisation about another group of people would be met with fierce denunciations from all sides.  The upshot of Fein’s article is that lots and lots of Turks died in the same period (true), there were atrocities carried out by Armenians in eastern Anatolia (also true) and there have been many Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish targets in the 20th century (true again).  The purpose of the article, of course, is to make light of the genocide and to equate the organising massacring and death march of over a million civilians by their own government (it is, of course, the intent and organised extermination, not the number, that ultimately matters) with the devastating consequences of near-total war between sovereign governments.  Sounds curiously like arguments that go something like, “Lots and lots of Germans died fighting in WWII, so state-run genocide isn’t that big of a deal.” 

My favourite bit is the accusation of religious bigotry (that would be bigotry against the Muslims, you see), the praise of the notorious genocide denier Shaw for his “academic courage,” and the immediate invocation of none other than Bernard Lewis.  Of course, it was in no small part religious bigotry and supremacism on the part of the perpetrators that fueled the genocide, as Akcam has made clear, and I suspect that it has been the fact that the Turks are Muslim and the Armenians Christian that has kept the genocide from being more widely publicised and recognised for what it was.   

Update: The Turkish Coalition of America takes mendacity to all new lows.  Consider this description of H. Res. 106:

[it] targets Turkish history and heritage, hurts US-Turkish relations and the US national interest.

Impressive how they hardly ever mention anything about the substance of the resolution.  That might make the “Turkish history and heritage” bit a little too hard for some folks to swallow.  This “Action Alert” section is also quite hilarious in a depressing, sickening way:

Sadly, our voice has mostly been absent in this debate.

If you believe that, they have a bridge in Istanbul to sell you. 

Query: what is the position (at the moment) of the magnificent dancing fraud (i.e., Romney) on the genocide resolution?  This is, after all, someone who wants to indict Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention because of his menacing remarks towards Israel.  Surely someone so deeply concerned about genocide as Romney would be a vocal proponent of the resolution’s passage.  What’s that, you say?  He’s never talked about it?  He was “largely indifferent” to Armenian-American concerns when he was governor in Massachusetts?  That’s strange.  It’s almost as if he were taking his positions on a purely opportunistic basis!

Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure in a 24-hour period ending Tuesday night, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some made clear that they were heeding warnings from the White House, which has called the measure dangerously provocative, and from the Turkish government, which has said House passage would prompt Turkey to reconsider its ties to the United States, including logistical support for the Iraq war. ~The New York Times

Here’s a true champion of the moral high ground:

“We simply cannot allow the grievances of the past, as real as they may be, to in any way derail our efforts to prevent further atrocities for future history books,” said Representative Wally Herger, Republican of California.

That’s a good one.  Acknowledging genocide is now just a matter of ”grievances of the past.”  This is what people are reduced to saying.  What else can they possibly say?   

Rep. Sherman, a resolution supporter, took the words right out of my mouth:

Since when has it become fashionable for friends to threaten friends?

Alex Massie is right on the mark again:

But of course Lemkin himself deliberately cited the suffering of the Armenians when he first wrote about genocide. He didn’t seem to share Mr Cohen’s belief that there is only one kind of genocide.

I appreciate Mr. Massie picking up on this point.  After all, if someone confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust had been looking for precedents of coordinated state extermination of its own population the Armenian genocide would have been an obvious example in the 1940s.   

What strikes me as so strange about all this is that virtually no one in the Washington political or media establishment has ever applied this same level of skepticism to talk about genocide in Darfur, to say nothing of the much more dubious case of Kosovo.  I expect that I will look in vain for Cohen’s citations of Lemkin from the spring of 1999.  All that needed to be said in 1999 was the word “Balkan” and suddenly everyone who was anyone was convinced that genocide was about to happen again (not that any of the people who wanted to “crush Serb skulls” ever gave a second thought to the genocide of Serbs during WWII at the hands of the forerunners of our good friends and allies in Zagreb). 

Pundits and pols are very free with the word when the regime being accused is one that they don’t much like, which is why I have tended to be very skeptical about people who describe something as genocide in the present.  It has frequently become a one-sided and tendentious political weapon that seems to be deployed for other reasons.  Yet in this case, when the evidence is clear, the government responsible is long gone and all that is being asked of anyone is to recognise the obvious, everyone becomes terribly anxious and reticent.     

Massie also notes a ridiculous Hiatt op-ed:

Then there’s Fred Hiatt, the WaPo’s editorial page editor  who thinks the resolution should be spiked because, well, modern Armenia isn’t properly democratic. Or something like that.

I had seen Hiatt’s op-ed, and my first response was simply to move on to something else.  Then it occurred to me that Hiatt’s column quite unintentionally helps explain why the resolution is necessary.  Hiatt’s argument, such as it is, is that the Armenian Diaspora could have used their time and resources for much better purposes than lobbying for this resolution.  Think of what all that money and attention could for Armenia, Hiatt exulted!  Armenia is a poor and corrupt state with a dysfunctional government, and the Diaspora could work to change that. 

Not that Fred Hiatt h