Patrick Ruffini wonders about the McCain strategy:
The issue I keep coming back to is Iraq. Why isn't McCain telling people that he is the key reason why things are turning around in Iraq? His decisive support for the surge was a key part of his message in the primaries, but has been nonexistent in the general.
This may seem like an odd issue on which to engage. Iraq is supposed to be toxic. And yet McCain has repeatedly engaged on it, most recently in challenging Obama to go to Iraq with him ... Bringing things back to the surge would actually allow McCain to trash the incompetence, etc. of the previous Iraq strategy, aligning himself with most voters. But by elevating the issue, he'd also be performing a public service -- aligning public support for the war with the partisan divide, hence increasing it, and getting the message out about the improving situation on the ground. At a minimum, an effort like this, even if it fell short, would render a rapid withdrawal under an Obama administration politically untenable.
The surge also happens to be a remarkable testament to McCain's judgment and his aptitude to be Commander-in-Chief. Though energy might be a more profitable issue in some respects, I don't know that McCain has room to get the contrast he needs on it given his past opposition to things like ANWR. McCain can get an election winning contrast on Iraq if he can use his positioning to improve the underlying optics of how the public perceives the issue.
I'd second the motion. If I were the McCain camp, I'd be running a slew of ads emphasizing 1) how bad things looked in Iraq in late 2006, 2) how much better they look today, and 3) the lonely role that McCain played in championing the surge. The ads should contrast McCain with Rumsfeld and with Obama (implicitly linking the Democratic nominee to the pre'-07 approach to Iraq), they should feature testimonials from U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, and they should hammer away at a single theme: We were losing, now we're winning, and John McCain made all the difference.
I'm skeptical that this will provide an "election winning contrast," as Patrick phrases it, but then I'm skeptical that there are any "election winning contrasts" available to McCain at this point. I am sure, though, that foreign policy is the GOP nominee's strongest terrain, and that if the foreign-policy debate boils down to McCain and Obama bickering over who has the best plan to capitalize on the success of the surge, then Obama can neutralize McCain's edge - both because his "withdrawal over 16 months" plan is closer to what most Americans say they believe than McCain's more open-ended position, and because Obama is politically skillful enough to finesse his way toward a Nixonesque "peace with honor" message that won't be easily dismissed as "cut and run." The only sure way for McCain to make the Iraq issue work for him is to make the debate about the recent past rather than the future, and to use the experience of the last two years - where (at least for the moment) he looks good, and Obama looks bad - to increase his advantage on the "who do you trust?" scale. This approach is fraught with risk, of course, because if the election becomes about the less recent past - i.e. the decision to invade Iraq in the first place - it's advantage Obama once again. But risk is something the McCain campaign needs to learn to live with.
The bad news at the Aspen Ideas Festival is that you can't attend two panels at once - which meant that while I was listening to David Brooks yesterday, I had to miss our own Jeff Goldberg moderating a discussion on Islam between Irshad Manji and Dalia Mogahed. Fortunately, Jennie Rothenberg (our crack web editor) was in attendance, providing commentary as well as the following clips:
“The mask slips,” Andrew writes of this Max Boot post, in which Boot argues that “in order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq – for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said.” What mask? Max Boot has never pretended to be anything otherthan a liberal imperialist, an advocate for the necessity of reshaping the American military dramatically to prepare us for a long series of “savage of wars of peace.” The real question is whether Boot’s neo-imperialist posture and the current left-of-centerposition on Iraq – the surge has succeeded, therefore we need to leave just as quickly as if it had failed – are the the only positions available as we debate the Iraq question in this election. Andrew thinks so, writing that Boot “helps us realize that this election is indeed at root a decision on whether to keep troops in Iraq for the next century or more.” But this strikes me as an overstatement: There are no decisions that John McCain can undertake, up to and including basing decisions, that a future administration can’t reverse as the facts on the ground change, and there’s no reason why McCain’s plan to gradually reduce our numbers in Iraq over the next four years can’t serve as a prelude to a minimal American presence in that country throughout the 2010s, with a complete pullout a possibility as a conditions on the ground (and the wishes of the Iraqi government) permit.
Andrew goes on:
This obviously isn’t about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It’s about an ever greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel.
Well, maybe. There are certainly people for whom the debate over troop levels in Iraq is ultimately about whether American foreign policy gets set on a more explicitly imperialist trajectory, and there’s no question that such voices will be more empowered under a McCain Administration than by a President Obama. The question is whether the likely practical results of a McCain Presidency – a Presidency that will be constrained by all kinds of factors, foreign and domestic – will so empower the Boot vision of America’s role in the world (which I do not share) as to make a vote for McCain a vote for Boot.The alternative, which seems more plausible to me, is that a vote for McCain under these circumstances is a vote for something for modest: Namely, a reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq that will proceed more gradually than the reduction Obama is promising, and that will leave the long-term question of the size and scope of America’s entanglement in the Middle East for future administrations to wrestle with.
Here's Ezra Klein, responding to this David Brooks column praising the President for the decision to implement (and stick with) the surge:
... the argument over the surge was never an argument positing that more troops couldn't lead to less violence. Folks forget this, but the surge was actually part of Howard Dean's 2004 candidacy, when he was running as an anti-war candidate. In June 2003, on Meet the Press, he said, "I can tell you one thing, though. We need more troops in Afghanistan. We need more troops in Iraq now." I disagreed with him, but that was the plan: More troops, leading to less violence, leading to withdrawal. It was a plan that Democrats, even liberal Democrats, supported. Would Brooks like to credit Dean as a military visionary?
This is a good point, but one that cuts both ways. Yes, Brooks' argument does imply that Howard Dean and John Kerry deserve credit for championing a surge-style increase of forces back in 2004. But what does it say about Dean and Kerry, and the Democrats in general, that they championed increasing America's footprint in Iraq only so long as doing so gave them a "we're tough too!" club with which to beat up Bush - and only so long as there seemed to be no chance that Bush would actually call their bluff?
Of course it's possible to mount an argument, as many liberals did in 2006, that the seeming inconsistency stems entirely from dispassionate analysis: The surge was a good idea back when Democrats favored it, you see, but the changing facts on the ground made it a bad idea in '06. In other words, the surge just happened to become the wrong thing to do around the time George W. Bush got around to embracing it. But this argument seems awfully convenient, to say the least ...
Ezra goes on:
The argument over Bush's surge was in fact an argument over whether we needed a strategy which continued the war indefinitely, or a strategy where success was defined in an achievable way, and an end was sought to the conflict. The former won out, and administration replaced political goals with security goals. But given sufficient manpower and treasure, America could tamp down on violence in Iraq indefinitely. We could start up a draft, and deploy 7 million troops to the country, which would probably quiet down daily squabbling pretty quickly.
I'm sorry, but this is just revisionist history. A large part of the surge debate was about whether it would work - and not whether it would work "given sufficient manpower and treasure," but whether it would work given the more limited and within-our-means escalation of forces that the White House was proposing. Meanwhile, saying that the anti-surge voices on the left were calling for "a strategy where success was defined in an achievable way" is a polite way of saying that they were calling for a strategy in which we declared defeat and got the hell out. Unlike some people on the right, I don't think that this point of view was dishonorable and/or treasonous; my own support for the surge was of the deeply lukewarm variety, and part of my mind inclined toward the view that accepting defeat sooner rather than later represented the best way forward. But let's not pretend that this approach was something other than what it was: It was a blueprint for giving up on Iraq, cutting our losses and leaving, and calling it "a strategy where success was defined in an achievable way" is just a way of talking around the reality of defeat.
Ezra goes on to quote Matt Duss on "why many of us felt an endless deployment in Iraq was a frankly bad idea":
Leaving aside the fact that [the surge's] "victory" ... in addition to obviously representing a monumental climbdown from each and every one of the numerous justifications previously offered for the war, does not actually add up to "an Iraqi state" as much as to "a series of armed militia communities we're going to call Iraq," was this outcome really worth 4,000 American dead, over 28,000 wounded, and, by the end of 2008, some $600 billion in American treasure? Was it worth over half a million Iraqi dead, many times that maimed, and some 3 million displaced? Was it worth creating an open source laboratory for terrorists to develop and sharpen their tactics against the most technologically advanced military in the world, enabling them disseminate those tactics around the world via internet? Was it worth losing a thousand dollars at poker just to win twenty at blackjack?
And then here's Ezra himself on the same point:
We've sacrificed long-term strategy at the altar of short-term security. That made sense for the Bush administration, which didn't want to be judged a historic failure and so needed to wrestle the everyday metrics till they showed some semblance of an upward trajectory (fans of the Wire will recognize this strategy). But the political question -- which is, as it's always been, the central question -- remains unanswered. A few months ago, Maliki, the putative head of the government launched an assault on Sadr, who's arguably the most popular Shia leader in the country. CFR's Stephen Biddle, who's an optimist, thinks the military would overthrow Maliki if given the chance. And he sums up the situation saying, "What is achievable is sustainable stability, a sense of an end to large-scale violence that holds over a long period of time. That I think is potentially doable in Iraq if the United States expends the necessary effort. If we fail in that, there's a danger that this war could spread throughout the region. And that's a really powerful threat to U.S. interests." That's the universe of outcomes we went to war for? Defeat means catastrophic failure, and success means an absence of genocide?
These are strong arguments, but they're considerably stronger as points against having gone to war in the first place than as points against the surge. Was the invasion worth all the blood and treasure it's cost us? I say no. (Here's the most recent argument to the contrary, incidentally, which I'll try to take up a later date.) Was the surge worth the blood and treasure it cost us? That's a separate question, and one to which Duss and Ezra are largely non-responsive. When you've already lost a thousand dollars at poker, why wouldn't you take the opportunity to win a few of those dollars back? (Particularly when those "dollars" are counted in actual human lives.) Or again, the "absence of genocide" in Iraq may not be the outcome we went to war for in the first place, but in a landscape where genocide seemed like a real possibility it doesn't look all that shabby. And while it is of course quite possible that the surge will look like a long-term strategic failure, I would find arguments to that effect considerably more persuasive if they didn't seem so blase and dismissive ("some semblance of an upward trajectory" ... "the altar of short-term security" ... "twenty on blackjack") about the thousands and thousands of Iraqi lives that appear to have been saved, however temporarily, by the decision to add troops in 2006 rather than withdraw them.
... a hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures — even intolerant ones. There is something discomfiting about a selective respect that extends to the Roman Catholic Church, with its rejection of homosexuality and women priests, but excludes Islam for its sexism and homophobia.
If you find this parallel persuasive, you may be persuaded by the rest of the piece as well - up to and including Feldman's suggestion that Europe would be having an easier time assimilating Muslim populations if the continent were still home to millions of Jews.
Daniel McCarthy, unsurprisingly, uses my remark that "unless you’re a very stringent non-interventionist" almost any foreign-policy theory can provide grounds to argue for a given overseas intervention to mount a brief for non-interventionism. He writes:
Yes, exactly — which is why some of us at TAC (by no means all) counsel “very stringent” non-interventionism. Douthat is correct that whatever the theoretical differences between neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, and a variety of other interventionist perspectives may be, they all give policymakers — specifically, the executive branch — wide discretion for waging war. Stringent noninterventionism and pacifism provide a check against that. Douthat criticizes Michael by saying, “the paleocon lens tends to obscure some very real distinctions between neocons and liberal internationalists,” but Douthat himself acknowledges that, performatively, those “real distinctions” aren’t so real after all. I think Douthat would have to agree with Michael that Yglesias is wrong when he says, “America traditionally hasn’t engaged in Iraq-scale blunders.” Over 50 years, liberal internationalism, Cold War conservatism, and neoconservatism have engaged in many such wars, some rather bigger (Vietnam, Korea) and others somewhat smaller (Gulf War I, Kosovo) than our present neocon adventure.
But hope springs eternal for Douthat. Five decades of blundering interventions doesn’t convince him that interventionism in general is a bad idea. Like Doug Feith and everybody else, he just wants smarter interventions, prudent interventions — better management ... But where is this caution going to come from? Who counsels it? There was at least a minority of liberal internationalists who opposed the Iraq War, and I tend to agree with Douthat that if Gore had been president we would not have invaded Mesopotamia. But I think it’s quite probable that Gore would have taken us into Darfur or Somalia (which, unlike Iraq, actually was and is an al-Qaeda base), and I doubt such an intervention would have proven much more prudent or successful than Bush’s Iraq farrago. Liberal internationalists have at least as bad a record as the neocons ...
If you want a prudent foreign policy that keeps America out of unwinnable wars in places like Iraq and Somalia, you should support noninterventionism. Neither neoconservatism nor liberal interventionism nor old-fashioned Cold War conservatism will ever be cautious enough to avoid such entanglements. To hope that any of these ideologies of intervention will “proceed with greater caution” than they have in the past half-century is as vain as to hope that visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles will one day, under the right management, be an efficient and pleasant experience.
I think my disagreement with the non-interventionist point of view comes down to the question of whether the benefits that flow from the Pax Americana that's been created by America's quasi-imperial role in the world are worth the blunders that more-or-less inevitably accompany it. If you think that the international scene over the last sixty years would have looked roughly the same without a large American presence abroad - without the doctrine of containment and its sometimes-effective, often-clumsy implementation, and without the likelihood that the American military would intervene to punish cross-border aggression and the possibility that the American military would intervene to prevent humanitarian tragedies - then non-interventionism makes a great deal of sense. If, on the other hand, you believe - as I do - that the Pax Americana is largely responsible for the absence of major cross-border wars and the general upward ascent in human affairs since the calamities of the early twentieth century (an ascent from which the United States itself has benefited enormously), then you'll be more inclined to look at the various disasters we've waded into as arguments for greater caution in exercising our quasi-imperial function, rather than arguments for giving up our present role entirely. So I think that Harry Truman blundered, obviously, when he order American troops across the 38th Parallel; likewise, I think George H.W. Bush blundered (though to a lesser degree than Truman) when he left the U.S. stuck garrisoning Saudi Arabia following the first Gulf War. But overall, I think better a Korean War and the two Iraq Wars, however badly executed, than the more, shall we say, freewheeling international order that prevailed prior to the Pax Americana - better for the world, and better for America.
As for the secondary point of whether it's vain to hope for the sort of caution I'd like to see in foreign policy without a purist non-interventionism as our north star, I'm afraid I don't agree. There have been plenty of reckless decisions undertaken by American leaders over the last half-century, but there have also been plenty of leaders who proceeded with an admirable caution in committing American troops abroad, without being anything close to purist non-interventionists in spirit or in practice. The presidencies of Reagan and Eisenhower, in particular, stand out as eras when a broadly internationalist spirit proved compatible with avoiding large-scale blunders overseas. But there are plenty of other examples within specific Presidencies: I'm no admirer of John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman, but they showed admirable caution in refraining from invading Cuba and bombing China, respectively, when many hawkish voices were urging such a course. Likewise, George H.W. Bush refrained from occupying Iraq in 1991 (though of course that created other problems down the road), Bill Clinton refrained from intervening in Rwanda (wrongly, in my view, but that's an argument for another day) and from committing ground troops to the Kosovo War, and even George W. Bush has displayed a great deal of caution (albeit only after the chastening experience of Iraq) in his approach to North Korea and Iran, among other states. All of which is to say that the notion that we cannot hope for prudence in our leaders unless they explicitly renounce interventionism in all (or almost all) cases seems to me to borne out by neither logic nor experience.
I'm broadly sympathetic to the non-interventionistcritique of the Yglesias thesis - namely, that Matt's book is trying to draw a bright line between Bush-style crusading neoconservatism and liberal internationalism, when they're actually both aspects of the same hawkish and interventionist spirit that has run through American foreign policy for generations now. To Michael Brendan Dougherty's points, though, I do think that the paleocon lens tends to obscure some very real distinctions between neocons and liberal internationalists: the two worldviews do have significant commonalities, but there are differences as well, which manifest themselves in the sort of interventions the two groups tend to end up championing. (You'll rarely hear, for instance, many liberal hawks waxing eloquent about how we must prepare for war with China.) Thus it isn't quite so outrageous as Dougherty suggests for Matt to present the invasion of Iraq as an "isolated freakout" on the part of the liberal foreign-policy establishment. Yes, there was some overlap between Clintonian hawks and PNAC signatories in the 1990s, and yes, the whole foreign policy establishment was technically committed to "regime change," but the neoconservatives were always vastly more interested than the liberals in the cause of toppling Saddam, and without the impetus of 9/11, things probably would have stayed that way. (Likewise, had Al Gore been President instead of George W. Bush, it's possible that the U.S. would have still invaded Iraq ... but I'm not sure it's all that likely.)
That being said, I do think that the ease with which many liberal hawks who would have been cool to the idea of invading Iraq circa 1999 went over to the interventionist position after 2001 suggests a deeper problem with Matt's attempt - or any attempt - to build systematic theories for international engagement: Namely, that unless you're a very stringent non-interventionist (or a pacifist), no matter what theory of foreign policy you choose, you'll always be able to find justification within the confines of that theory whenever a particular intervention seems like a good idea. In this vein, I sometimes think too much of the debate over the Iraq War has been bogged down by arguments over theory - by Christians arguing over whetherjust war tradition accommodates the invasion; by liberals arguing (sometimes withthemselves) over whether it fits within the Truman paradigm, by everybody arguing about neoconservatism'splace in American political history - when to my mind the chief lessons of the war have to do with issues of prudence and practicality, and more specifically with the question of when the costs of war, in lives and treasure, are worth the risk involved and the gains that might be won.
Put another way, I don't think the lessons of Iraq necessarily discredit liberal internationalism, or realism, or neoconservatism, or any of the many theories of U.S. engagement with the world that were invoked to justify support for the war. I don't come away from the events of the last five years convinced that we should never intervene abroad on purely humanitarian grounds, or that we should never go to war without an international body's authorization, or that the whole of American Middle East policy since 1991 (or 1945) has been discredited, or even that we should never launch wars of pre-emption. I come away from them convinced of a point that's simultaneously narrower in scope, but more universal in its application: That whatever theory we take as our guide to international affairs, we need to proceed with greater caution than America displayed in the aftermath of 9/11 about the efficacy of military force, and the costs and consequences of using it.
I have to say, I find it somewhat remarkable that the first story the New York Times has deigned to publish on the despicable farce ongoing in Canada - the Steyn affair, I mean - includes almost no analysis of the actual article in question, and indeed seems calculated to leave the reader with the following two impressions: First, that Mark Steyn (and, by extension, the world of "conservative magazines and blogs") belongs to roughly the same universe of public hatemongering as the American Nazi Party, and second, that the First Amendment is a peculiar and quite possibly outdated feature of the American political system, along the lines of, say, the Electoral College or the District of Columbia's lack of congressional representation.
Maybe I'm overreacting. You could also read the piece as the essence of balanced journalism, in which the reporter sets aside all preconceptions - including any preconception in favor of the First Amendment - to craft a studiously neutral take on a hot-button issue. But at the very least it's interesting to imagine how the Times would be covering the Steyn case if he were, say, an earnest atheist a la Sam Harris being brought up for censure by a Mexican "human rights commission" created to protect Catholics from hateful or offensive speech. Slightly differently, I imagine ...
If, as I suggested yesterday, any rehabilitation of George W. Bush depends on 1) the post-2006 turnaround in Iraq continuing and 2) his getting credit for it, then I wonder whether a McCain victory in November would raise the chances that Bush's reputation will improve once he leaves office - as Bill Kristol, among others, has argued - or diminish them. To my mind, the biggest reason to expect that over the long run Bush won't get much credit for the turnaround in Iraq, assuming it persists, is that by late '06 he had become so (deservedly) unpopular that the selling of the new Iraq policy essentially had to be outsourced to other figures - John McCain chief among them. And if the Arizona Senator is elected President on the strength of his support for the Surge (while insisting that he had the right Iraq policy all along and Bush only came to it reluctantly, and when it was almost too late), then the election results will reinforce an already-existing narrative that associates the policy more with McCain than with Bush. Whereas if Barack Obama is elected President, after attacking the Surge and proposing a swift and complete withdrawal instead, and then finds himself - as I suspect he will - continuing the Bush approach (a very, very gradual drawdown) rather than taking the path he's advocated on the campaign trail, it may throw into relief for posterity Bush's ownership of what, with any luck, will be remembered as the best decision of his Presidency.
... for history’s judgment to turn favorable, America’s intervention in Iraq eventually needs to come out looking like a success story rather than a folly.
This seems improbable, to put it mildly. But the crucial word here is eventually. The Bush administration has often seemed bent on vindicating, in the short run and by force of arms, Francis Fukuyama’s famous long-term prediction that liberal democracy will ultimately triumph. Now Bush’s hopes for vindication depend on the Middle East’s following a gradual, Fukuyaman track toward free markets, democratic government, and the “end of history.” And just as crucially, they depend on American troops’ staying in Iraq for as long as it takes for that to happen. If these events come to pass—if the Iraq of 2038 or so is stable, democratic, and at peace with its neighbors, and if American troops have maintained a constant presence in the country—no one should be surprised to hear hawkish liberals as well as conservatives taking up the idea that George W. Bush deserves a great deal of the credit.
There is something a bit strange about this paragraph. If Bush’s hopes for vindication rest on the old long-term evolution towards the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, which will, if we believe Fukuyama, happen because there are no viable rival doctrines or systems that can compete with these things, and the attempt to force that vindication through the war in Iraq was the wrong way to promote this, how exactly does it aid in Bush’s vindication over the long term to keep American forces in Iraq? Either Fukuyama’s long-term argument about the effects of modernisation is basically correct, in which case the U.S. does not need to maintain a neo-colonial steward role in shepherding Iraq towards continued modernisation, or it isn’t, which raises the prospect that liberal democracy and capitalism will not endure in Iraq without a perpetual American presence propping up an alien and artificial system that will collapse as soon as we leave. The latter alternatve is neither realistic nor desirable, and the former theory is almost certainly false, but in either case vindication by Fukuyama’s long-term theory necessarily means that a continued U.S. presence is unnecessary, just as the war was actually unnecessary in the first place on the terms most favourable to Fukuyama’s original argument, or Fukuyama is wrong and our forces will have to stay there indefinitely, which is not a politically or militarily viable possibility.
I may not have expressed myself as precisely as I should have. My point was not that the combination of a gradual upward ascent in Iraqi affairs (which I consider a stronger possibility than Larison does, being more sympathetic to the Fukuyaman thesis and more encouraged by recent developments in Iraq than he) and a long-lasting American presence in that country would actually vindicate Bush's decision to invade that country; it was that the combination of favorable developments in Iraq and a constant U.S. military presence would provide grist for the American tendency to take the credit for good long-range outcomes and ignore the blunders and crimes along the way. (Hence my remark later in the piece that "if LBJ or Nixon had only found a way to prop up South Vietnam until the 1990s, they might have been forgiven the outrageous cost in blood and treasure, and remembered as Trumanesque heroes rather than as goats," which was emphatically not intended as a vindication of either President's Vietnam policy.) As I said, I think this tendency is generally a bad one, not least because it often rests on logical fallacies of the sort that Larison takes apart above. But that doesn't mean it won't be potent enough to redeem the seemingly unredeemable reputation of our current President.
Realistically, you're not going to see a forceful U.N. intervention in Burma because no country capable of mounting such an operation (basically the U.S. and maybe Britain and France) would want to mount one, while Russia and China (and probably even post-colonial democracies like India) would be opposed to anyone mounting one, and democratic countries would be secretly glad that Russia and China would block a move like this because they could blame inaction on Russia and China ... for a domestic audience even though they wouldn't want to step in themselves.
That said, if you could sort of bracket the logistics/will/capabilities issues, with any proposed humanitarian military intervention I've come to think that we need to think seriously about two issues - legitimacy and sustainability. We really might be greeted by the Burmese as liberators ... The trouble is what happens the day after you're greeted as a liberator. An occupying foreign power is naturally going to come to be viewed with suspicion by the occupied. This is in many ways an intrinsic problem, but it can be ameliorated a lot by legitimacy -- especially the kind of legitimacy you get from the U.N. where precisely because the UNSC decision-making process is cumbersome you can be ensured that a UNSC authorization reflects a broad international consensus ...
The other thing is sustainability. The international system needs to have some kind of recognized rules of the road. "The United States topples foreign regimes when we decide their government is bad" isn't a reasonable proposal for us to ask people in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Teheran, Brasilia, or anywhere else to live by. By "any large country topples any foreign regime when it decides their government is bad" is a terrible rule that would lead to a lot of destructive conflict of various sorts. At the end of the day, great power conflict -- even if it "only" takes the form of cold war-style standoffs -- will do immense humanitarian damage to the world and avoiding it should be a very high priority. Does that mean we should do nothing? No, it doesn't, it means American officials (and, indeed, civil society figures) should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world. But it has to be done in a reasonable consensual way that tries to stitch together America and its traditional allies with new emerging powers in various regions ...
I think this argument captures what I take to be the central difficulty with Matt's thesis: Namely, the extent to which it's offering a long-term agenda as a response to a question - how, when where and why the U.S. and our allies should intervene abroad - that tends to manifest itself as a series of discrete and very immediate challenges. It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."
Now, that may be the right answer, but it's an answer that's more likely to appeal to realists and non-interventionists of the left and right than to the liberal internationalists to whom Matt's addressing himself. Basically, it amounts to telling people who are ideologically invested in the idea of interventions to halt wars, genocides, famines and so forth that they need to accept today's famine, and tomorrow's genocide, and the day after that's bloody civil war ... and someday, if the U.S. plays its cards right and invests heavily enough in a multilateral framework for international relations, the other great powers will come around to "rules of the road" under which it's plausible to imagine the UN conducting humanitarian interventions inside the borders of its more misgoverned member states. And while the Iraq invasion has made this Yglesian, "choose the UN, and patience" approach to world affairs much more appealing to the liberal-internationalist set than it was in, say, 1999 or 2002, as time goes by and more Burmese-style crises pass without an international response, I expect that most liberal hawks will default back toward the more aggressive and UN-skeptical approach to the world's troubles that at present is defended primarily by neoconservatives.
This is a long way of saying what I was trying to get at, clumsily, in my conversation with Matt about his book - namely, that he's trying carve out a "liberal internationalist" middle ground between the sort of liberal hawkery that helped give us the Iraq War and the non-interventionist (or pacifist) left, but that in practice (at least when the U.S. isn't just coming off a disastrous overseas intervention) this middle ground tends to get very narrow very fast: From JFK down to Bill Clinton and the liberals who agitated for the invasion of Iraq, it's hard to find all that many prominent liberal internationalists (at least within the Democratic Party) who resisted the temptation, when it presented itself, to choose interventionist ends even when the multilateral means that liberal internationalism is theoretically committed to weren't available.
There is a broad sense in which I agree with Robert Kagan’s essay on our “Neocon Nation” in the latest issue of the surprisingly-interesting new World Affairs. I agree with his contention that neoconservatism is not an alien virus injected into the American political bloodstream by a cabal of perfidious ex-Trotskyite Straussians; rather, it's a particular manifestation of an interventionist spirit in American affairs that runs all the way back to the founding era. And I agree, as well, with his argument that this spirit continues to dominate our politics, and probably will continue to do so – that the post-Iraq rediscovery of various forms of non-interventionism, realism and anti-imperialism on the part of the American center-left is likely to be temporary, that many of the Iraq War’s current crop of conservative critics discovered their aversion to spreading democracy by force of arms only well after things went badly in Iraq (Kagan singles out George Will, effectively, on this point), and that in a fundamental sense, “in 2008, as in almost every election of the past century, American voters will choose between two variations of the same worldview.”
But there are two major problems with the essay. The first is the broadness of its argument, which elides the fact that those “variations” within the interventionist camp can be very significant indeed, and that the shared belief in "American power and the ability of the United States to use that power to beneficial ends in the world" is for many critics of neoconservatism the beginning of the argument, rather than the end of it. The second problem is the weird is/ought fallacy that pervades the entire piece, in which the long-running marginality of the anti-interventionist critique – and its tendency to be employed with 20/20 hindsight, after interventions have gone badly, and then abandoned when the next chance to flex America’s might rolls around – is treated as evidence that policymakers and intellectuals should ... continue to ignore it. If America is by its very nature prone to foreign misadventures - and I think Kagan somewhat overstates this case, but for the sake of argument let's concede the point - then surely the task of policymakers and intellectuals, in the wake of one such misadventure, is to draw lessons from What Went Wrong that might be profitably applied to future debates and crises, and that might strengthen the (weak) hand of the anti-interventionist camp the next time war fever grips the nation. At times in the essay Kagan allows that such a discussion might be useful, but only when he's complaining that the Iraq War's critics aren't actually interested in having it; his own contribution to the argument over what lessons we should draw from the Iraq War consists of variations on this concluding peroration:
... the expansive, idealistic, and at times militaristic American approach to foreign policy has produced some accomplishments of world historical importance—the defeat of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Communism—as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achievements, as well as the failures, derived not from innocence or purity of motive, and not because Americans abided by an imagined ideal of conduct in the world, but from the very qualities that often make Americans queasy: their willingness to accumulate and use power, their ambition and sense of honor, their spiritedness in defense of both interests and principles, their dissatisfaction with the status quo and belief in the possibility of change. Are we really interested in abandoning this course?
But the larger takeaway from Kagan's essay is that there's absolutely no danger of our abandoning this course, because we are a "neocon nation" by our very nature. And if this is the case - if the current vogue for foreign-policy modesty among our politicians is as opportunistic and temporary as Kagan thinks it is - then maybe, just maybe, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion would be a good time for foreign-policy commentators to ponder what distinguishes our successes from our failures, and how we might temper our crusading spirit with enough humility and caution to avoid certain types of debacles in the future. Put another way, if Kagan is right about the fundamentals of America's character and America's foreign policy, then his own argument suggests that those fundamentals need more critics, rather than more champions.
I have little knowledge and therefore no settled opinion on what the murder rate among Colombian trade unionists says about the wisdom of ratifying a free trade pact with that country, but the debate between Chris Hayes, Ezra Klein on the one hand (with Matt chiming in) and Alex Massie and Edward Schumacher-Matos on the other is well worth your time.
Looking at some numbers from the latest Pew poll - specifically, that 43 percent of Americans think that Obama's foreign policy approach is "not tough enough," compared to just sixteen percent who say the same of John McCain's - Matt writes:
They don't, on the face of things, seem like very good news for Obama. But they come in the context of a poll that shows Obama beating McCain by a large 50-43 margin. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the best argument McCain has available to him is to try to persuade voters that Obama isn't tough enough on national security issues. Conversely, Obama's people will try to argue that McCain is too much of a warmonger. Given that a lot of what McCain is going to be looking to accomplish has been done already and he's still losing, this looks like trouble to me.
Maybe so. But it still seems possible for McCain to gain ground on this front even if the underlying "toughness" numbers don't change that much: He just needs to raise the salience of the public's already-existing perception that Obama isn't sufficiently tough/seasoned/etc. on foreign affairs, to the point where it becomes an issue that determines which way people vote. I think this will be a difficult thing to do in the current foreign-policy landscape, but it's way to soon to say it's impossible. Obama has yet to face off against a candidate (unless you count Joe Biden) who can attack him for his foreign-policy inexperience without it seeming like at least something of a stretch - and that "red phone" ad would be an awfully lot more effective if it ended with John McCain picking up the receiver.
Basically, McCain isn't going to win this election without 1) making the race turn on foreign policy to a greater extent than it looks like it will right now, and 2) persuading a large chunk of the American public that his instincts about Iraq might be better than theirs. If he can't pull this twofer off, he doesn't have a chance; if he can, though, then those "toughness" numbers will end up mattering a lot more than Matt hopes.
Reihan has a pair of interestingposts on this Peter Berkowitz op-ed, which argues that in their headlong rush to champion the invasion of Iraq many neocons weren’t being true to neoconservatism’s skeptical view of government action and human nature, and this Mark Lilla review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right, which argues that the Iraq War was the fulfillment of neoconservatism’s tendency toward a politics defined by manichaeism, chest-thumping and hysteria.
Who’s right? Why, both of them. From its inception, neoconservatism has been distinguished by both pragmatic and apocalyptic strains, which have coexisted not only in the same movement but often in the same people. There are a host of factors driving this “two-faced” tendency, but I think Lilla’s point about neoconservatism being essentially a politics of reaction is a useful place to start. I don't mean to use the term “reaction” pejoratively here, and I think Lilla goes too far arguing that a politics of reaction must perforce lead to either nostalgic quietism on the one hand or "eschatological dreams of a counter-revolution" on the other; to my mind, calling the neocons reactionaries is just a simple way of describing the fact that neoconservatism began by defining itself primarily by what it wasn’t - namely, the late-60s and ‘70s Left. That Left tended toward utopianism in domestic policy and permissiveness in the social and cultural arenas; thus neocons were skeptical and empirically-minded on domestic policy (Lilla notes the modest founding motto of the old Public Interest - "to help us all, when we discuss issues of public policy, to know a little better what we are talking about") and more moralistic, pessimistic and declinist than the left on matters cultural. On foreign policy, things were more complicated, since neocons perceived the '70s liberalism to be simultaneously too utopian in its confidence in a foreign policy founded on the promotion of human rights and peaceful cooperation, and too ineffectual and weak-minded in its insistence on the limits of American power. Thus the neocon reaction tended toward hardheaded realism on the one hand, epitomized by Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which Berkowitz's op-ed references, and a sweeping faith in American power on the other, epitomized by ... well, a host of recent examples spring to mind.
As that host suggests, over time the messianic and apocalyptic strands in neoconservatism have tended to crowd out the pragmatic and the realist strands - because the Cold War ended and American power seemed temporarily unlimited; because the neocon domestic policy agenda made more headway than the cultural agenda; because, as Steve Sailer notes, the earlier generation of neocons were more likely to be social scientists and the later generation has been more likely to be pundits; and a variety of other reasons besides. But like Reihan and Berkowitz, I'm hopeful that the chastening impact of the Iraq War and the changing of the generational guard provides an opening the revive the pragmatic, empirical meliorist style of neoconservative politics - a style that I would associate myself with, and that seems increasingly like the only plausible alternative to a resurgent and ambitious liberalism.
I'm with Rod Dreher: I went into this Nation piece on conservative demographic panic hoping for a smart, nuanced left-wing take on the thorny problem of the West's changing demographics - one that took some jabs at the "demographic winter" hype and accused social conservatives of using the spectre of population decline to justify their nostalgia for pre-modernity and the patriarchy (which would be a fair accusation, in some cases), but also acknowledged that demography is going to cause some real problems for developed societies over the next century, and grappled seriously with the possibility that falling birthrates might be one of the larger challenges facing the socialist, tolerant, post-historical paradigm so dear to readers of The Nation.
Instead, the piece basically reads: Patriarchy patriarchy patriarchy, Catholic evangelical fascist, Mussolini Hitler, racist racist racist. I guess The Nation knows its audience, but still ...
Ryan Lizza does a fine job of sketching out the contours of the debate over the GOP's future - Gingrich versus Norquist, Frum versus Gerson, reformers versus retrenchers, etc. - but his portrait of John McCain doesn't exactly inspire confidence in McCain's vision for how the Republican Party ought to be reinvented:
One day on the Straight Talk, McCain discussed what he was reading. It is safe to say that Gingrich, Norquist, Gerson, and Frum were not on his nightstand; McCain is almost always looking at military histories or political biographies. In the 2000 campaign, he seemed to be reading a lot about Theodore Roosevelt, and he frequently worked T.R. anecdotes into his conversations. These days, he often cites William Manchester, a former marine and a Second World War veteran, who has written biographies of Winston Churchill and General Douglas MacArthur ...
Recently, McCain said, he had read “The Coldest Winter,” David Halberstam’s account of the Korean War and its era. “I strongly recommend it,” he told the reporters. “It’s beautifully done. It’s not just about the war, but it’s a very good description, whether you agree with it or not, of the political climate at that time—the split in the Republican Party between the Taft wing”—Senator Robert Taft, of Ohio—“and the Eisenhower wing, and Harry Truman’s incredible relationship with MacArthur.” He added, “At least half the book is about the political situation in the United States during that period—the isolationism, who lost China, the whole political dynamic. That’s what I think makes it well worth reading.”
It was a telling reference and points to McCain’s transformation between 2000 and 2008—from a Teddy Roosevelt Republican to an Eisenhower Republican. In 2000, McCain railed against corporate power and the influence of lobbyists and money in politics. Today, the only mention of corporations in his stump speech is a demand that the corporate-tax rate be lowered. After 2000, McCain seemed briefly to be considering leaving the Republican Party, just as Roosevelt had. But, once terrorism and the war in Iraq became the preëminent issues, he decided instead to take over the Party, just as Eisenhower and the Republican moderates did when, in 1952, they vanquished the Old Guard isolationists who supported Taft. Instead of battling the corporate wing of his party, McCain has decided that it’s the isolationists—a group that he defines broadly, and which includes the left and the right—who are the real threat.
As someone who thinks that Eisenhower still doesn't get the credit he deserves as the finest twentieth century president whose name doesn't begin with an "R," I don't necessarily mind the idea of McCain attempting an Ike imitation, particularly on foreign policy. But the idea that the way to go about it is to make peace with the Club For Growth and make war on the GOP's "isolationists" seems fanciful at best, dangerous at worst. Especially since it's difficult to know which "isolationists" he has in mind. Immigration opponents? Mitt Romney, for using the word "timetable" with regard to Iraq? Conservative who disliked the immodesty of Bush's Second Inaugural Address - like Peggy Noonan, say? I mean, McCain can't be deluded into thinking that the "Ron Paul Revolution" represented a large-scale resurgence of non-interventionism on the Right, can he?
Apparently so:
One afternoon, McCain talked about his surprise at the resurrection of this element in his party, which has been particularly visible in the candidacy of the libertarian Texas congressman Ron Paul. “We had a debate in Iowa. I mean, it was, like, last summer, one of the first debates we had. It was raining, and I’m standing there in the afternoon, it was a couple of hours before the debate,” McCain said. “And I happen to look out the window. Here’s a group of fifty people in the rain, shouting ‘Ron Paul! Ron Paul!’ ” McCain banged on the table with both fists and chanted as he imitated the Paul enthusiasts. “I thought, Holy shit, what’s going on here? I mean, go to one of these debates. Drive up. Whose signs do you see? I’m very grateful—they’ve been very polite. I recognize them and say thanks for being here. They haven’t disrupted the events. But he has tapped a vein. And it’s a combination of isolationism, the old part of our party, and the conspiracy. You know”—McCain lowered his head and spoke in a mock-confiding voice—“ ‘We have made an important discovery: the headquarters for the organization that’s going to merge three countries into one—Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.—is in Kansas City!’"
How droll. But, um, Senator McCain, you did notice that Ron Paul topped out at about 5-10 percent of the vote, didn't you? And that every other candidate in the race (allowing for certain variations) took roughly the same foreign-policy line as you? Doesn't that at the very least suggest that there might be more pressing battles awaiting a politician looking to reinvent the Republican Party than a crusade against the isolationist menace? Please?
The polls I cited yesterday, showing minimal support for a sustained U.S. military presence in Iraq, go to what I think is an underlying misjudgment that many conservatives are making about the surge and its impact on the domestic debate about the Iraq War. John Podhoretz, for instance, wrapping up a lengthy and very much worth-reading essay on the GOP's fortunes and Iraq, argues that the Democrats' post-surge failure to push through legislation mandating withdrawal means that "when it comes to Iraq, [the Democrats], too, appear to be at cross-purposes with a substantial body of American public opinion." Which leads him to this optimistic conclusion:
It is a great irony that the best political news for Republicans in a notably unfavorable election year—with the public telling pollsters that it is desirous of change and prefers Democratic stands on most issues by margins ranging from ten to twenty points—may come out of Iraq. Should the surge’s progress continue and deepen, the Democratic nominee may find himself or herself in a very uncomfortable position come autumn. The Democratic base will not have changed its mind about the war’s evil, and it will not be happy with a leader who does. So the nominee will find it almost impossible to embrace the surge, and certainly not after having disparaged it caustically in the past. But if the nominee does not embrace the real possibility of victory in Iraq, he or she will run the risk of appearing defeatist, or worse, in the eyes of the same independent voters who fled the GOP in droves in 2006.
So the GOP can hope. But I think Podhoretz overstates the impact that the surge has had thus far on public sentiment about Iraq. “Absent the surge strategy and the new way forward that it offered,” he writes, “Democrats would probably have prevailed on their declared intention to force a pullback from Iraq in 2007.” I agree. But it does not follow from this statement that our recent successes have done anything to fundamentally reverse the dynamic that pushed independent voters into the arms of the Dems in 2006. The adoption of the new strategy in Iraq had two major effects on the domestic debate, so far as I can tell: First, it stiffened conservative support for the war effort, which had begun to waver around the '06 midterms, and thereby placed GOP legislators in a position where they could not cross party lines to vote for withdrawal without forfeiting the support of their own base. (See Gilchrest, Wayne) Second, by reducing the body count and arresting Iraq’s spiral down to civil war, it pushed the conflict off the front pages and often out of the public eye entirely. This achievement didn’t increase support for the war, but it did reduce, at least on the margins, the priority that Americans placed on ending it, and allowed closer-to-home anxieties – over health care, the mortgage meltdown, immigration and now the looming recession – to rise to the fore.
This combination was sufficient to blunt Democratic momentum on the issue, and it allowed a determined President to rally his own party to stay the course, at least for the time being. But winning a battle on Capitol Hill when you control the White House and enjoy a sizable Senate minority is very different from winning a debate in the general election, and on that front, at least, the most that can be said is that the surge has reduced the advantage that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will enjoy this fall on Iraq, by increasing support for the war (and thus turnout, presumably) among once-wilting conservatives, and diminishing, if only slightly, the struggle’s salience for independent voters.
The Times was all over the American empire's mortal splendor in the last week or so, from the darkening mood at home to our waning influence abroad. I highly recommend Matt Frost's thoughts on the former issue, and Daniel Drezner's on the latter.
The idea that political preferences are rooted in aesthetic preferences is ultimately pernicious, I think – but sometimes it’s hard to resist. Here, for instance, we have Will Wilkinson, rebutting a Virtue-boosting, libertarian-hating argument for the candidacy of John McCain:
I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up. The fundamental moral decency of liberal individualism seems, to the unserious mind that thinks itself serious, completely insipid next to very exciting big boy ideas about shared struggle, sacrifice, duty, glory, virtue, and (most of all) power. And reading Aristotle in Greek.
I sometimes think that liberal individualism is something like the intellectual and moral equivalent of the best modernist design — spare, elegant, functional — but hard to grasp or truly appreciate without a cultivated sense of style, without a little discerning maturity. National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much the kind of thing you get at the Committee for Social Thought. If you declaim the importance of virtue loudly enough, you don’t have to actually think.
Allowing for a certain amount of deck-stacking on Will’s part (I’d prefer that the carpets not be too garish, obviously, and I don’t care much for taxidermy), the den with the roaring fire sounds awfully homey and appealing, while even “the best modernist design” often seems to me essentially chilly and faintly inhuman, and thus better admired from afar than actually inhabited. As Will says, this preference almost certainly reflects my lack of “discerning maturity” and my failure to “cultivate” my sense of style. There is, though, the vanishingly small possibility that certain forms of modernist design, like the stringent libertarianism that Will compares them to, emerge from an impatience with, well, actual human beings – with their abiding messiness and irrationality, with their particularist loyalties and romantic attachments and juvenile yearnings for solidarity, for heroism, for transcendence. Rational, mature beings, after all, would be perfectly happy living in the spare, elegant functionality of, say, an enormous housing project; only reactionaries and adolescents would cling to the clutter and disorder and, yes, the outright tastelessness of the old ethnic neighborhoods, where worse monstrosities than wood-paneled dens abounded.
But perhaps I’m pushing the analogy too far.
To leave aesthetics behind for a moment, the real problem with the “Virtue and national greatness” theory of politics isn’t so much that it’s more impressed by John McCain’s wartime heroism than by Will Wilkinson’s “discerning maturity” about what really matters in life. It's that it frequently seems to confuse the virtues necessary for battlefield valor with those necessary for governance - and worse, that it sometimes seems tempted to make a national policy out of the pursuit of wartime heroism, or at least the contexts (i.e. near-perpetual warfare) in which such heroism can be attained.
Lots of people have picked up on the Norman Podhoretz "What's a Kurd, anyway?" line quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg's "After Iraq" feature in the latest Atlantic (now free and open to the public, as you may have heard) but I thought this passage was more telling, and the final quote more, well, quotable:
In December of 2006, I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington for a ceremony honoring Natan Sharansky, who had just received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, had become the president’s tutor on the importance of democratic reform in the Arab world, and during the ceremony, he praised the president for pursuing unpopular policies. As he talked, the man next to me, a senior Israeli security official, whispered, “What a child.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That’s what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan.”
After the ceremony, I spoke with Sharansky about this critique. He acknowledged that he is virtually the lone neoconservative thinker in Israel, and one of the few who still believes that democracy is exportable to the Arab world, by force or otherwise.
“After I came back from Washington once,” he said, “I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, ‘Mazel tov, Natan. You’ve convinced President Bush of something that doesn’t exist.’”
It's the "mazel tov" that makes the line, I think ...
It seems that nobodymuchcares for Michael Gerson's attack on Fred Thompson for questioning the wisdom of spending U.S. dollars fighting AIDS in Africa. I'm actually with Gerson, roughly speaking, on the substance of the issue, and I'd associate myself with these James Poulos remarks on the subject:
In this case, I have no problem with AIDS aid. I think standing idly by while one of the most damaging diseases in human history grows freely is not a very good idea on its face. I don't like suffering, and I do like charity, but I do not think that the purpose of foreign policy ought to be explained in terms of charitably fighting suffering. This clouds clear thinking, erodes sovereignty, and makes prudent prioritizing needlessly difficult. If their cause is as important as they say, AIDS activists should be able to make the 'hard case' for aid in these terms, and I think they can. Because the AIDS epidemic in Africa also happens to cloud clear thinking, erode sovereignty, and impede prudent prioritizing. Suffering is not a foreign policy problem; order is. And some things that cause significant suffering really do a number on order. An AIDS pandemic is one of those things.
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. Foreign aid isn't exactly cheap, but compared to some of our other foreign ventures it's a relatively inexpensive way to burnish America's image in the world's more unstable regions, and it's impact on public opinion tends to be considerably larger than all of Karen Hughes's junkets put together.
The problem with Gerson's column, of course, is that it barely attempts to make the case for AIDS aid on anything resembling strategic grounds (apart from a vague and unpersuasive reference to how "radicals and terrorists" will thrive in Africa if we let the continent down), preferring instead to bash Thompson over the head for being too "callous" to understand, as Gerson does, how Jesus's message is supposed to be applied to foreign policy.
