The Sick Man of Eurasia

Strikingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Moscow's leadership is advancing into this uncertain terrain not only with insouciance but with highly ambitious goals. In late 2007, for example, the Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials, GDP will quadruple in the next two decades, and the Russian Federation will emerge as the world's fifth largest economy by 2020.

But history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline. It seems highly unlikely that such an ambitious agenda can be achieved in the face of Russia's current demographic crisis. Sooner or later, Russian leadership will have to acknowledge that these daunting long-term developments are shrinking their country's social and political potential.

Deterring Iran

"Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they'll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?"

It's not a nice risk to take, but it is one we've taken before. Once upon a time plenty of people talked about the Soviet Union in this way. Now clearly that doesn't mean that what worked with the Soviets will work with the Iranians either but, equally clearly, Tehran poses a much smaller threat than Moscow ever did and it is far from clear that the same nuclear imperatives that prevented war with the Soviets can't also be brought to bear upon Iran. 

Continue reading "Deterring Iran" »

Medvedev v. Putin?

The Church, AIDS and Africa, Cont.

... while I probably wouldn't accuse the Pope directly of causing "massive death and suffering," here are some facts: many, if not most, Catholic hospitals and dispensaries in Africa refuse to give out condoms. Their staff, both Africans and Westerners, constantly promote the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods about birth control that perpetuate early births, poor family planning, a whole host of STIs (including HIV) and, by extension of all this, crushing, grinding poverty and maternal and child mortality. This is fact in every African country I have worked in.

That the Catholic Church provides - through its hospitals, clinics, schools and organizations like Catholic Relief Services - many other incredibly valuable services to people in the developing world, including Africans, makes it deserving of praise; but equally, it does not excuse the Church from knowingly doing direct harm to public health efforts in the region of the world most affected by HIV/AIDS.

It seems that your main source of frustration is the hyperbolic - these comments will result in "massive death and suffering" - reaction to Pope Benedict's comments.  I wonder what you think about the more subtle assertion that Pope Benedict's comments may contribute to confusion and misperception about how HIV/AIDS is transmitted, whether or not condoms are effective in preventing transmission, and to what extent that confusion may counteract or negate the work of public health officials attempting to reduce the rate of transmission. Both here at home, and in Africa, providing education and accurate information about how HIV is transmitted is an important part of the battle ... Clearly the Pope has the obligation to advocate Catholic principles and dogma, but need that advocacy come at the expense (potentially) of established science/medicine?  Would it not have been possible to advance the Catholic position preferring abstinence without intimating that condoms are not an effective tool in preventing the spread of HIV? 

It seems to me that much of the anger directed at the Pope's comments is a response to something new (condoms are not the solution) as opposed to something old (we prefer abstinence).  I wonder whether a statement that ignored the condoms issue entirely would have been received as negatively, and attacked as ferociously.

A Rare Combination

There aren't many respected foreign policy machers who were right on the Iraq war (no) and on the surge (yes).

Hard Lessons

The Case For A Torture Commission, Cont.

Means and Ends

Lincoln, Wilson and FDR-each of them was responsible for far more deaths and far more destruction than Che Guevara or any of a number of Arab nationalist figures ever was, but two important things separate them in the eyes of the general public: they did not personally kill anyone, and the causes for which their armies killed and destroyed are widely considered to be the just and right ones. That is to say, the exact same moralizing, or rather anti-moralizing, that the ends justify the means that Che used in rationalizing revolutionary violence is employed to praise and sanctify approved figures who authorized much larger slaughters for the "right reasons." [emphasis mine - RD] Not only have sympathetic, shoulder-shrugging, anti-moralizing stories been told about these men, but we have built large physical monuments to them (or at least to two of the three mentioned above), which is rather more troubling in its way than silly people who wear T-shirts or directors who minimize the moral failings of their main characters.

The Pro-Cheney Case For A Torture Commission

Hamas, the IRA, and America

This comes back to the point I was making in an earlier assessment of the counterfactual. The IRA was a genuine terrorist group, but it was listed as such by our government most of all because it was a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms. That's the nature of things in the real world, I suppose, but it is something that none of the reponses to the counterfactual seems to be taking into account. Had things gone very differently in the last century and London and Washington became enemies once more, it is very easy to imagine that the IRA or similar groups would have been made into anti-British proxies of the U.S. government. In the unlikely counterfactual event that an independent Arab Palestine had emerged out of a very different '67 outcome, the official attitude towards the enemies of that state would have depended entirely on U.S.-Palestine relations. All of this is by way of saying that the official opprobrium heaped on Palestinian militants, for example, is primarily a matter of condemning the enemies of an allied state; their use of terrorist tactics is secondary to whether or not they are labeled this.

.... nationalist causes start out and end up with co-ethnics being their main sympathizers, and this forms the floor of their support, but when a nationalist cause is growing in strength and has appropriated the rhetoric of liberty (or democracy or some other favorable buzzword) its sympathizers will tend to come from many other groups who identify with the cause in a more abstract way. For that matter, think of the western European response to the Greek War for Independence-Philhellenes and political liberals supported the Greeks almost in spite of who they were, and rallied to the cause because of what they hoped the modern Greeks might become once they were free of the Porte. Obviously, Byron didn't die at Missolonghi because he felt strong ethnic ties to his comrades-in-arms, but because he was a romantic liberal.

Race and The Israel Lobby

It seems to me, from reading your blog post and from watching your Bloggingheads with Matt Yglesias, that part of your problem with The Israel Lobby is that, intentionally or not, it mimics certain anti-Semitic tropes. Isn't that exactly, though, the kind of argument that has been directed at conservatives regarding race, to their great consternation? With issues like affimative action or similar, conservatives have been accused of being near-racists, like racists, arguing in similar ways to racists.... And over and over again, conservatives have replied that nuance matters, context matters, intent matters, details matter. Surely the same is true when it comes to criticizing Israel and accusations of anti-Semitism. If nothing else, your opinion reinforces the notion that, when it comes to Israel, we don't play by the usual rules, and everyone has to be a little careful, not say too much, not go too far from the conventional path. That's not a good thing, I don't think.

The Walt Counterfactual, Revisited

Evangelical Christians' identification with Israel is not an "ethnic affinity." For starters, evangelical Christians do not actually believe they are descended from the ten tribes of Israel. (I suppose Mormons believe that, but they are a negligible fraction of Israel's supporters in America.) Is it not obvious that the affinity of evangelical Christians for Israel is religious and cultural?
 
And this business about how "almost all Americans see Israelis as sharing a common European cultural heritage that the Palestinians do not" because of something "rooted deeply in our genes" like "our selfish alleles"?  Maybe the identification with Israel as being part of a common cultural heritage is rooted deeply in -- oh, I don't know -- our common cultural heritage: Like that Israel actually is part of Western civilization, is a child of European cultural and political traditions, and belongs to the family of liberal democracies while Hamas is a theocratic terrorist organization bent on destroying Western civilization, or at least its influence in their neighborhood.
 
The answer to Stephen Walt's query is obviously "Yes" -- but not only because in his hypothetical scenario the Israel Lobby would not exist. It's also because American support of Israel, and even the Israel Lobby's support of Israel, is not unconditional, but based on these religious, cultural, and political affinities and principles. AIPAC and similar folks opposed those Jews who refused to evacuate Gaza to make way for a Palestinian state -- and those Jews were not nearly the lunatics and terrorists that Walt describes in his hypothetical.
 
Now, precisely because of cultural reasons, I don't think Walt's scenario would ever come to pass -- for cultural reasons, too, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands behave nothing like the Arab refugees from Israel -- but if it did, of course the United States would denounce the Jewish Hamas that Walt imagines. I would too.

Hope Is Not A Strategy

In recent days, however, Israeli moderates and the center-left have been faced a new and bizarrely troubling thought: What if this most denounced of wars actually does some good?

Lurking at the margins, are signs that this war may have positive downstream effects for Israel, and for Palestinian peace prospects as well. Much of this hinges on the effect it may ultimately have on Iran and its satraps. In fact, viewed against the report that the Bush administration forbade an Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, the war, as horrible as many of its direct results have been, may actually serve to break the momentum of the Iranian juggernaut. What can safely be assumed, is that if Iranian influence continues to grow in the Holy Land, peace prospects will be extinguished for years to come.

As if to emphasize the ambivalence that Israelis feel, polls have shown a large majority supporting the war, but only a tiny percentage believing that the offensive will achieve even the limited goal of ending Palestinian rocket fire into Israel.

Armageddon's Choices

At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would--should the safe and the letter need to be opened--have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.

Dwelling on it years later, I was prompted finally to explore what I said and its larger meaning. My purpose here is philosophical and historical. I had acted for many years, indeed most of the world had done so, on a premise which I celebrated that night as the primary agent for United States independence from the Soviet threat. We were safe (I said) because Reagan was Reagan, meaning, in this instance, a non-ambiguist on the critical question of deterrence. What I said in as many words, dressed for the party, was that Reagan would, if he had to, pull the nuclear trigger.

Twenty years after saying that, in the most exalted circumstances, in the presence of the man I was talking about, I changed my mind. Whether that change will in any way influence policy in the years ahead can't be said. But you may agree on the importance, to this author, at any rate, of the revised thinking. Mr. Reagan is not here to tell us - and I doubt that he told anyone his circle - that the critical moment having arrived, he would in fact not have deployed our great bombs, never mind what the Soviet Union had done.

"Why?" I heard Henry Kissinger say one night when the conundrum was discussed. "After all, what's the use?"

War: What Is It Good For?

I've been thinking back on some of the online disputes I've been having about Israel's attack on Gaza, and it occurred to me that what's missing from a lot of this is context. Not further context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but further context on the use of force in general ... over the past five years I've changed a lot of my thinking about national security policy and war and peace in general. I was skeptical of the merits of Israel's attack on Lebanon, skeptical about Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia, skeptical about Georgia's attack on South Ossetia, and skeptical about Russia's furious counter-attack on Georgia. Long story short, I'm strongly inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that the aggressive use of military force will accomplish their objectives, and also inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that bloodshed is morally justifiable.

If I had to predict, I'd say the invasion will be a mixed success in tactical terms, with Israel successfully liquidating a number of Hamas leaders and much physical infrastructure. Whether the Qassams stop falling entirely or not, Hamas will be operationally weakened for some time. I would not bet on Hamas losing control of the territory - and Israel had better hope Hamas does not lose control, lest she find Somalia on her doorstep. Nor would I bet on Kadima's political gambit working; it didn't work for Labor in 1996, after all. As for the more extravagant rationales being floated - this will strengthen Fatah in the West Bank? Or will strike a blow against Iranian prestige? Or is actually a dry run for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities - the less said the better. The tangible achievements from this war, and the great loss of life among the Palestinians may, at best, be a short respite from Qassam fire.

... The graver problem today is on the Palestinian side. If one strips away the institutional veneer--Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, various secular political groupings, the Palestinian Authority--what is left is largely empty shells with neither an agreed-upon program nor recognized leadership. The national movement, once embodied by Fatah and Arafat, is adrift. From its vestiges, the Islamist movement Hamas has flourished and, amid the flurry of negotiations between Abbas and Olmert over a putative albeit wholly theoretical deal, it cannot have escaped notice that the more practical and meaningful negotiations have been between Israel and Hamas--over a cease-fire, for example. Still, the Islamist movement cannot, any more than Fatah, claim to represent the Palestinian people or to be empowered to negotiate on their behalf. The rift between the two organizations, most visibly manifested in the increasingly deep split between the West Bank and Gaza, makes a two-state solution harder to achieve. Israel long complained it had no Palestinian partner and, at the outset, the complaint had the feel of a pretext. Increasingly, it has the ring of truth.

Among Palestinians, moreover, the prize of statehood is losing its luster. The two-state solution today matters most to those who matter least, the political and economic elite whose positions, attained thanks to the malpractices of the Palestinian Authority, would be enhanced by acquiring a state. To many others, the dividends of such a solution--a state in Gaza and much of the West Bank--risk being outweighed by the sacrifices: forsaking any self-defense capacity, tolerating Israeli security intrusion, renouncing the refugees' right of return, and compromising on Jerusalem.

Arafat embraced the two-state solution and sold it to his people. It took him fifteen years--from 1973 to 1988--to turn it from an act of betrayal and high treason to what most of his people saw as the culmination of the Palestinian national movement. He did so with a militancy his successors lack and which seemed to both defy and negate the concessions such a solution entailed. He exhibited perpetual defiance, which was one of the many reasons why the US and Israel distrusted him even in the best of times, and why Palestinians continued to be drawn to him even at the worst of them. With his passing, it is hard to see who among his heirs can acquiesce in the necessary compromises and still pull off a solution.

The Israel Lobby And Its Critics

Without refighting the battles over The Israel Lobby all over again, I'll say this much. Whatever the flaws of the essay, it was far from "lousy," and the book addressed and fixed many of the flaws in the original essay. It is true that the book did not take into account the role of other Near Eastern governments and their lobbies (from my perspective, more attention to the complementary influence of pro-Turkish and pro-Israel lobbies would have made their claims stronger), but if you want to talk about farragoes of oversimplification and half-truths I could recommend any one of a dozen reviews and columns that misrepresented and distorted the claims of the authors in the sloppiest and most tendentious ways. The reception of the essay and the book was irrational in the extreme, and did more to validate main parts of their thesis than anything they could have written or demonstrated.

A Jewish Gaza?

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War, leading to a massive exodus of Jews from the territory of Israel. Imagine that the victorious Arab states had eventually decided to permit the Palestinians to establish a state of their own on the territory of the former Jewish state. (That's unlikely, of course, but this is a thought experiment). Imagine that a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip. Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.

Here's the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?

The odd thing is that by Walt's own account, the answer would seem to be "Yes," since presumably the rump Orthodox Gaza - run, perhaps, by Verbover Jews - wouldn't have an all-powerful lobby shaping U.S. policy and public opinion to its specifications. Or am I missing something?

More seriously, this analogy - which Chris Brose critiques elsewhere on the FP site, and which comes complete with the staggering insinuation that the recent bombardment of Israeli towns (as opposed to, say, this business) is the only reason why the United States treats Hamas as a terrorist (sorry, "terrorist") organization - is a reminder of why when I say that the American Right needs a new realism, I really do mean a new realism, because so many of the old realists have failed to distinguish themselves in the debates of the decade just passed. That failure is the subject for an essay, rather than a blog post, but for now let me just say that on the one hand, you had figures in the broad realist firmament (from Henry Kissinger to George Will to Chuck Hagel) lining up to support the invasion of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration could have used a serious critique from the right (and then acquitting themselves less-than-impressively, in Hagel's case especially, in the debate over what to do with Iraq once things had fallen apart) ... while on the other hand you had figures like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer deciding that the best way to promote legitimately important "realist" ideas (like, say, that America should be pushing Israel harder to abandon the West Bank settlements, and that American Jews ought to play a more constructive role on this front) was to wrap them up in a farrago of oversimplifications and half-truths, ride the ensuing attention up the bestseller list, and then cry "persecution!" when anyone called them on it.

A New Foreign Policy

Just War and Modern Warfare

Terrorist attacks on Israel are indeed revolting and indefensible. But the bombing of densely populated areas, however accurate, is certain to cause the deaths of many innocents.

How then can it be defended? In what important way is it different from Arab murders of Israeli women and children?

One is directly deliberate. The other is accidental but unavoidable. I wouldn't say that was a specially important distinction, especially if you are a victim of it.

What Would Gore Have Done?

[Ross argues] that basically anyone other potential president in Truman's shoes would have done the same thing as Truman. But you simply can't make the same argument about Bush. Indeed, it's not even clear that every potential Republican president would have approved of water-boarding. I think you can fairly argue that Truman was in something of a historical--if not moral--bind. Some people will argue that Bush was also. But for the point Ross makes about Truman to be true of Bush, he would need to prove that Al Gore, and even John McCain, a torture victim himself, would have approved of water-boarding.

While the struggle to defeat Fascism and Communism were worthy endeavours for which America deserves historical credit, both wars were fought in ways that would have landed American presidents before a war-crimes tribunal, at least according to the human rights standards that Americans have helped to foster, America's struggle against fascism included the only military use of nuclear weapons by any nation and the firebombing of German cities for no strategic purpose other than terrorising civilians; America's war against Communism involved training our client states in the use of assassination and torture - often against very bad men who were torturers and murderers themselves.

The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: "Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'"

Thinking About Torture (III)

Thinking About Torture (II)

It may be clear that coercion is sometimes the right choice, but how does one allow it yet still control it? Sadism is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Every army has its share of soldiers who delight in kicking and beating bound captives. Men in authority tend to abuse it--not all men, but many. As a mass, they should be assumed to lean toward abuse.

... And how does one define "coercion," as opposed to "torture"? If making a man sit in a tiny chair that forces him to hang painfully by his bound hands when he slides forward is okay, then what about applying a little pressure to the base of his neck to aggravate that pain? When does shaking or pushing a prisoner, which can become violent enough to kill or seriously injure a man, cross the line from coercion to torture?

... when the ban is lifted, there is no restraining lazy, incompetent, or sadistic interrogators. As long as it remains illegal to torture, the interrogator who employs coercion must accept the risk. He must be prepared to stand up in court, if necessary, and defend his actions.

Thinking About Torture

The polemical energy of Mayer's book comes from her outrage at the violation of these values. In her introduction, she characterises the Bush Administration's conduct in the War on Terror as "a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and history," and "a dramatic break with the past." She invokes the judgment of the eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, that "no position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world - ever."

But Mayer overplays her hand, going on to write that "in fighting to liberate the world from Communism, Fascism and Nazism, and working to ameliorate global ignorance and poverty, America had done more than any nation on earth to abolish torture and other violations of human rights." Here Mayer confuses the fact that America has always supported human rights in principle with the idea that it has always championed them in practice.

The tactics of the New Paradigm, after all, did not have to be invented from whole cloth. After September 11, Cheney turned to the CIA's archives in search of examples that had worked in the past. "He was particularly impressed," Mayer writes, "with the Vietnam War-era Phoenix Program.

"Critics, including military historians, have described it as a programme of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon contract study later found that 97 per cent of the Viet Cong it targeted were of negligible importance. But as September 11, inside the CIA, the Phoenix Program served as a model."

Mayer doesn't have another word to say about the Phoenix Program, and her reticence is telling, in a book that is otherwise so exhaustive in the way it details the histories of its major players and the institutional background of the responsible agencies. The Phoenix Program was a CIA-directed operation to interrogate, detain or assassinate a network of Viet Cong insurgents who were themselves torturing and assassinating South Vietnamese officials. A Senate investigation later concluded 20,000 Viet Cong were killed in the process.

Mayer doesn't specify what Cheney took from the Phoenix Program, but he certainly found confirmation that we had done these things before, and on a massive scale. CIA interrogation manuals issued in 1963 and 1983 and used by American client states in the proxy battles of the Cold War in Latin America and elsewhere also listed ways to force a recalcitrant subject to talk. She quotes a historian of the CIA noting that our latter-day torturers not only used those techniques, "they perfected them" - underscoring the fact that they were already there to be perfected.

Mayer is too scrupulous a reporter not to mention these departures from American values. But she is also too committed to a particular narrative - in which America's status as the country that "had done more than any nation on earth to abolish torture and other violations of human rights" has been suddenly hijacked by bad men in the Bush administration - to follow that disclosure to its conclusion.

Which is simply this: America has always remained true to its values - except in the rather numerous instances when it has violated them.

Yang describes this as one of "the genuine paradoxes of power that no nation-state aspiring to global leadership can evade." And indeed, the most compelling and intellectually-consistent condemnations of the Bush Administration have come from precisely those factions - on the left, and also the small-r republican right - who believe that the United States should not aspire to global leadership, because such aspirations require unacceptable compromises with the bloody realities involved in power politics and empire.

For those of us, though, who persist in the belief that some sort of American global leadership is better, for all its inherent problems, than most of the alternatives, Yang's analysis has to be reckoned with in ways that go beyond simply describing Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the CIA "black sites" as unique affronts to American values. These and other Bush-era sins have to be considered in the context of previous moral compromises that we've found a way to live with.

For instance: The use of the atomic bomb. I think it's very, very difficult to justify Harry Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any kind of plausible just-war framework, and if that's the case then the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities - and indeed, the tactics employed in our bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan more broadly - represents a "war crime" that makes Abu Ghraib look like a trip to Pleasure Island. (And this obviously has implications for the justice of our entire Cold War nuclear posture as well.) But in so thinking, I also have to agree with Richard Frank's argument that "it is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs" - in so small part because I find it hard to imagine myself being in Truman's shoes and deciding the matter differently, my beliefs about just-war principle notwithstanding.

The same difficulty obtains where certain forms of torture are concerned. If I find it hard to condemn Harry Truman for incinerating tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, even though I think his decision probably violated the moral framework that should govern the conduct of war, I certainly find it hard to condemn the waterboarding of, say, a Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in the aftermath of an event like 9/11, and with more such attacks presumably in the planning stages. I disagree with Charles Krauthammer, who has called torture in such extreme circumstances a "moral duty"; rather, I would describe it as a kind of immorality that we cannot expect those charged with the public's safety to always and everywhere refrain from. (Perhaps this means, as some have suggested, that we should ban torture, but issue retroactive pardons to an interrogator who crosses the line when confronted with extreme circumstances and high-value targets. But I suspect that this "maybe you'll get retroactive immunity, wink wink" approach probably places too great a burden on the individual interrogator, and that ultimately some kind of mechanism is required whereby the use of extreme measures in extreme circumstances is brought within the law.)

Yet of course the waterboarding of al Qaeda's high command, despite the controversy it's generated, is not in fact the biggest moral problem posed by the Bush Administration's approach to torture and interrogation. The biggest problem is the sheer scope of the physical abuse that was endorsed from on high - the way it was routinized, extended to an ever-larger pool of detainees, and delegated ever-further down the chain of command. Here I'm more comfortable saying straightforwardly that this should never have been allowed - that it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral, and that it should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on.

But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved - because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do.

Oh, not in every particular: As was often the case with the Bush Administration, I didn't envision many of the stupidities involved (reverse-engineering interrogation from training exercises designed to prepare for ChiCom brainwashing? really?); or the way that the debates over torture would intersect with controversies over executive power, the design of military tribunals, and so forth; or the precise scale and scope that any "torture-lite" program would take on. But I certainly remember how I felt about interrogation in the aftermath of 9/11: I felt that we were all suddenly in a ticking-bomb scenario, that the gloves have to come off, and that all kinds of things needed to be on the table. When Dick Cheney said that we have to work on "the dark side" in the post-9/11 environment, I thought that he was only stating the obvious. When Cofer Black, the CIA man who's depicted, perhaps unfairly, as a blundering fool in Mayer's account, appeared in accounts of Bush's late-2001 cabinet meetings as the guy who said of Al Qaeda, "when we're through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs," my instinctive reaction was hell yeah. And when Bowden walked Atlantic readers through the debate over torture-lite, I knew whose side I was on. Read it for yourself:

The word "torture" comes from the Latin verb torquere, "to twist." Webster's New World Dictionary offers the following primary definition: "The inflicting of severe pain to force information and confession, get revenge, etc." Note the adjective "severe," which summons up images of the rack, thumbscrews, gouges, branding irons, burning pits, impaling devices, electric shock, and all the other devilish tools devised by human beings to mutilate and inflict pain on others. All manner of innovative cruelty is still commonplace, particularly in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East ...

Then there are methods that, some people argue, fall short of torture. Called "torture lite," these include sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.

The Geneva Convention makes no distinction: it bans any mistreatment of prisoners. But some nations that are otherwise committed to ending brutality have employed torture lite under what they feel are justifiable circumstances. In 1987 Israel attempted to codify a distinction between torture, which was banned, and "moderate physical pressure," which was permitted in special cases. Indeed, some police officers, soldiers, and intelligence agents who abhor "severe" methods believe that banning all forms of physical pressure would be dangerously naive. Few support the use of physical pressure to extract confessions, especially because victims will often say anything (to the point of falsely incriminating themselves) to put an end to pain. But many veteran interrogators believe that the use of such methods to extract information is justified if it could save lives--whether by forcing an enemy soldier to reveal his army's battlefield positions or forcing terrorists to betray the details of ongoing plots. As these interrogators see it, the well-being of the captive must be weighed against the lives that might be saved by forcing him to talk. A method that produces life-saving information without doing lasting harm to anyone is not just preferable; it appears to be morally sound.

Reading Mayer's book, the recent Senate report, and other sources, it seems clear that this was roughly the logic that motivated much of what was authorized in CIA prisons, in Gitmo, and eventually in a suicide-bomber-raddled Iraq - a logic that convinced figures like Rumsfeld and George Bush that they were stopping short of torture (think of Rumsfeld's dismissive margin comment, as he authorized long-term standing, that he stood for 8-10 hours a day, so why shouldn't prisoners?) even as the the practices they authorized led inexorably to abuse, violence and even death.

Some of the most passionate torture opponents have stated that they never, ever imagined that the Bush Administration would even consider authorizing the sort of interrogation techniques described above, to say nothing of more extreme measures like waterboarding. I was not so innocent, or perhaps I should I say I was more so: If you had listed, in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the things that have been done to prisoners by representatives of the U.S. government, I would have said that of course I expected the Bush Administration to authorize "stress positions," or "slapping, shoving and shaking," or the use of heat and cold to elicit information. After all, there was a war on! I just had no idea - until the pictures came out of Abu Ghraib, and really until I started reading detailed accounts of how detainees were being treated - what these methods could mean in practice, and especially as practiced on a global scale. A term like "stress positions" sounds like one thing when it's sitting, bloodless, on a page; it sounds like something else when somebody dies from it.

Now obviously what I've said with regard to the financial crisis is also true in this arena: With great power comes the responsibility to exercise better judgment than, say, my twenty-three year old, pro-torture-lite self. But with great power comes a lot of pressures as well, starting with great fear: The fear that through inaction you'll be responsible for the deaths of thousands or even millions of the Americans whose lived you were personally charged to protect. This fear ran wild the post-9/11 Bush Administration, with often-appalling consequences, but it wasn't an irrational fear - not then, and now. It doesn't excuse what was done by our government, and in our name, in prisons and detention cells around the world. But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us - not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn't get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds - to return to where I began this rambling post - the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

Too Big To Fail, World Edition

... Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public,  (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won't have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

The public rhetoric from Team Obama seems to treat history as having ended in early October, which is understandable; the priority right now is on the liquidity crisis, the structure of government and the peopling of the administration and the domestic economy.  Most of the administration's major policy voices don't have the luxury of time to game out scenarios. Now -- it can fairly be said that Treasury nominee Tim Geithner, himself an assistant secretary for international economic affairs during the Clinton administration, is aware of the precarious state demand in certain critical countries, as is Larry Summers.  The question: what's the administration's policy in this area? Which countries can we afford to let fail? Which unstable states would concern us the most? Is there something the U.S. can do, in advance, should do, in advance, to forestall the collapse of other economies?

Learning From (Recent) History

Of course, people get antsy when you won't cough up a grand ideology to match your grand strategy, but that's sort of the point; and now I'll make what looks like an about-face and suggest that, for someone not tethered to realism or neoconservatism as a matter of ideological principle, the Iraq war was not terribly chastening, even if it was formative, because some of us suspected from the beginning that there was really only one Iraq, and that the perfect storm of possibility, capability, timing, interest, and passion developed there in a way that simply won't appear in any other country any time soon -- especially given the way Iraq went down. Yes, for a minute there it looked like we could tip the extremely weak and craven regime in Damascus out of power, but in all the really serious cases -- North Korea, Iran, Burma, or even Zimbabwe or Sudan or Somalia or Pakistan or Venezuela or Cuba! -- the Iraq model of foreign policy simply won't, because it can't, apply. Iraq was a world-historical one-off that should offer a host of wisdom about what sort of businesses the US should and shouldn't be in. But in the main I think the "lessons learned" in Iraq are ones we already knew or should have known, and that includes the lessons that could have made the occupation of Iraq far more successful.

A Hamiltonian By Any Name ...

Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the U.S. and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond.

Surviving In A Terrorized Hotel

The Millman Chart and the GOP

Mumbai

Earlier, Suketu Mehta, who compared Mumbai to New York in his book Maximum City, attempted to put the scale of the attack in Mumbai in perspective for New Yorkers, saying that it would be "as if terrorists had taken over the Four Seasons and the Waldorf=Astoria and then were running around shooting people in Times Square."

Why The Right Needs Realists

The liberal internationalists, led by Hillary, will also be a powerful force in the new administration, and in their battles with Obama's realists they may find willing allies among the neocons on the right. After all, liberal internationalists have been allied with out-of-power neoconservatives before, most notably during the fight inside the Clinton administration over U.S. policy in the Balkans.

That Didn't Take Long

Obama already made fans of Niall Ferguson and Eli Lake; by 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if he's converted Max Boot as well.

As someone who was skeptical of Obama's moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments , most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain ... Only churlish partisans of both the left and the right can be unhappy with the emerging tenor of our nation's new leadership.

Trade-Offs

While McKiernan is quick to tell reporters that "Afghanistan is not Iraq", the program he outlines for the country looks a lot like the one adopted by military officers in Anbar province, where "insurgents" were broken off from al-Qaeda "terrorists" and brought into local governing coalitions ...

McKiernan faces obstacles in making his plan work. A Washington Post article of November 19 detailed these obstacles, focusing on Taliban attacks on the supply route into Afghanistan from Pakistan. But that's only a part of the problem. The other was caused by the Bush administration. "We should have alternative supply routes through the north and not have to rely on the roads from Pakistan," a senior serving army officer says, "but we can't get a northern route because the Bush administration pissed off the Russians in Georgia."

Negotiations with the Russians over a northern resupply route that would be place the 67,000 US and NATO soldiers at the end of "a secure tether" have been stalled, according to this officer. "This is typical of the White House, they can't see beyond tomorrow. They have never been able to plan ahead, to think through the consequences of their actions. They're so proud of themselves, and we're the ones who suffer."

Getting Out of Iraq

Barack Obama, Liberal Hawk?

A phased withdrawal from Iraq plus a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan wouldn't be a lurch to the right, that's what Obama's been calling for throughout the campaign. And, indeed, way back in 2002 he was saying that instead of invading Iraq, we should have a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But add "authorize airstrikes against Iran" to the mix, and then you're talking about something entirely different. Obama made repeated, explicit promises during the campaign for a new approach to Iran, and the new approach wasn't "bomb, bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

Eyes on the Prize

So Joe Lieberman is keeping his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee on the say so of 42 Senate Democrats AND President Obama; his Secretary of State might be Iraq War supporter and preconditionless-summit opponent Hillary Clinton; no one will be prosecuted for waterboarding, Bush's guy John Brennan may take over at CIA and Bush's man Robert Gates may stay on as Defense Secretary.

I don't know how the liberals feel, but so far the Obama administration rocks.

Pardoning Lieberman, reaching out to Clinton, and keeping on Gates -- perhaps things won't be as bad as we feared.

The Iraq War and the GOP's Fortunes

Biden's Epic Gaffe

In the 2008 election we were participating in circa August, Sen. Joe Biden's musings would have traversed the river separating gaffe from Gaffe. If the economy weren't collapsing, if Barack Obama's national security credentials were still suspect, if the conflict in Russia and South Osettia had yet to be resolved, then one can envision a scenario where Biden's comments would be given a gloss a la Gerald Ford's freeing Eastern Europe.

A Win For McCain

Another Country

Georgia and Democratic Realism

The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy. Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.

Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts.

Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.

Where does it count? Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted. Why? Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom in midcentury--fascism--and then were turned, by nation building, into bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism.

Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.

... [American foreign policy] must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic globalism to a democratic realism. It must be targeted, focused and limited. We are friends to all, but we come ashore only where it really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.

Unrealpolitik

It is also important to give Georgia the wherewithal to defend itself. It has a small but capable military which has received lots of American training and equipment in recent years (and has paid us back by sending a sizable contingent to Iraq). But it may not have two key weapons that would enable it to wreak havoc on the Russian advance. I am thinking of the Stinger and the Javelin. Both are relatively small, inexpensive, handheld missiles. The former is designed for attacking aircraft, the latter for attacking armored vehicles. The Stinger, as we know, has already been used with devastating effectiveness against the Russian air force once before-in Afghanistan. The Javelin is newer, and the Russians haven't yet seen its abilities demonstrated. But there is little doubt that it could do a great deal to bog down the Russians as their vehicles advance down narrow mountain roads into Georgia.

If Russia doesn't call off its offensive right away, the Pentagon should rush deliveries of Javelins and Stingers to Georgia. If the Russians insist on committing acts of aggression, at least let their victims defend themselves properly-and make the Russians pay the kind of price they paid once before in Afghanistan. As we've learned recently, with Iran supporting anti-American attacks in Iraq, proxy warfare is a fiendishly powerful way of fighting. If it is used against us, it should also be used by us.

To his credit, Boot goes on to note the obvious objection that Russia might be in a position to make life miserable for us if we started treating Georgia as '80s Afghanistan, take two. Here's his rebuttal, starting with the Iranian front:

On Iran ...Russia has been more hindrance than help. It has helped Iran to develop its nuclear program and it has been selling Iran high-tech surface-to-air missiles. Russia has gone along grudgingly with weak sanctions at the UN but, along with China, it has blocked more robust action. If Russia delivers important aid in the war on terrorism or other areas, I'm not aware of it. Increasingly the Russians have adopted a confrontational tone with the West, and they have backed it up with bullying of our allies. The Bush administration and other Western governments have tried their best to get along with Russia. That has been interpreted by Putin not as a sign of goodwill but as a sign of weakness. It is time to send a different message by making clear that Russia has crossed a red line in Georgia.

Will Russia send high-tech munitions to insurgents fighting American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq? ... Given the problems that Russia has had (and continues to have) with Islamic extremists within in its own borders, if I were running the Kremlin I would be extremely careful about handing out missiles that could be used to bring down Russian aircraft. Al Qaeda, the Mahdist Army, and the Taliban are not exactly Russian allies at the moment, and it is doubtful that they could ever be reliable proxies.

Will Russia disrupt fuel supplies to the West--in particular the natural gas supplies on which Germany and so many other European nations rely? ... Perhaps. It has certainly flexed its muscles in the past by disrupting energy supplies to Ukraine and other customers. The problem with that strategy is that it costs Russia a lot of money and runs the risks that its customers will find alternative suppliers in the future. Russia might well try this tack, but I doubt it would be a long-run success.

Assessing Putin's Russia

Running On The Surge

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.

U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway.

Who Speaks For Islam?

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:

Continue reading "Who Speaks For Islam?" »

Iraq and False Choices

“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 other than 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-center position 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.

The Consequences of the Surge

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.

Europe's Catholic Problem

Noah Feldman on Europe's Islamophobia:

... 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.

Inside the Empires

From Jim Fallows and Alex Massie, two complementary meditations on being abroad in China and in America.

Pax Americana

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.

Iraq in Theory and Practice

I'm broadly sympathetic to the non-interventionist critique 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 whether just war tradition accommodates the invasion; by liberals arguing (sometimes with themselves) over whether it fits within the Truman paradigm, by everybody arguing about neoconservatism's place 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.

America Alone

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 ...

McCain and the Bush Legacy

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.

Redeeming Dubya (II)

I think Daniel Larison is misconstruing the point I was making in this piece on Bush's potential rehabilitation. I wrote:

... 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.

To which Larison responds:

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.

Burma and the Liberal Hawks

Matt has an interesting post on the questions that Burma raises for liberal internationalism of the sort he advances in Heads in the Sand:

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.

The Ferris Wheel Gap

Jim Manzi thinks we may have been living with it for longer than even noted ferris-wheel alarmist Fareed Zakaria would have us believe.

Somehow, this clip seems appropriate:

Critiquing Zakaria

Poulos and Manzi weigh in perceptively on the subject.

Neocon America?

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.

Death and the Trade Unionist

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.

The "Toughness" Factor

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.

The Two Faces of Neoconservatism

Reihan has a pair of interesting posts 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.

No Babies, No Problem

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 ...

The Wrong War

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?

Iraq in 2008 (And Beyond)

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.

Continue reading "Iraq in 2008 (And Beyond)" »

Annals of American Decline

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.

Swords Do Furnish A Room

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.

Tony Blair, President of Europe?

So the rumors have it. I defer to my learned co-blogger's old friend William Hague for the last word on the matter:

(With a tip of the cap to Alex Massie.)

Sharon and Sharansky

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 ...

AIDS, Africa, and the National Interest

It seems that nobody much cares 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.

Pakistan and the American Presidency

JPod, on Bhutto and the American presidential election:

American politics would dearly love to take a holiday from history, just as it did in the 1990s. But our enemies are not going to allow us to do so. The murder of Bhutto moves foreign policy, the war on terror, and the threat of Islamofascism back into the center of the 2008 campaign. How candidates respond to it, and issues like it that will come up in the next 10 months, will determine whether they are fit for the presidency.

This seems to be the conventional wisdom on the domestic political fallout of Bhutto's assassination, with the obvious corollary being that the turmoil in Pakistan helps those candidates running on foreign-policy experience (i.e. McCain and Hillary, and possibly even Biden) and hurts the candidates running on domestic-policy change (Obama, Huckabee, and arguably Romney). This view of the situation is probably right, but it seems worth airing an alternative possibility: That yesterday's tragedy, which leaves the Bush Administration's delicate plans for stabilizing to Pakistan in fragments, will prompt at least some voters to view America's attempts at managing the affairs of complex, chaotic, and far-off nations - places about which even the McCains and Bidens of the D.C. community presumably know relatively little - not as a hard duty that requires toughness and experience, but as a folly to be avoided.

"How candidates respond" to Bhutto's assassination, JPod suggests, should determine their fitness for the Oval Office. Well, all the leading contenders have responded, and all of them have dodged, in one fashion or another, any strategic question about where U.S. policy should go from here, beyond platitudinous references to supporting democracy and opposing terror. Not that I blame them: 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.

How Many Divisions Have the Europeans?

A few days ago, Mark Steyn had this to say about the American military presence in Old Europe:

Absolved of the core responsibility of sovereign jurisdictions - defense of the realm - Europe decayed, almost inevitably, into a kind of semi-non-aligned status, and persuaded itself that it had developed a higher model of nationhood, not realizing that its lavish social programs were, in effect, subsidized by the Pentagon. This has been bad for Europe - and bad for America, too, in that most of the Democratic Party would like to introduce the European model here, apparently unaware that it depends on a strong America to render it viable.

The Continentals are so insulated from reality they don't even value the US presence in strategic terms. German politicians speak of US military bases mainly as an economic issue - all those German supermarkets and German restaurants that depend on American custom. At the risk of igniting old controversies, the Continentals are the defense equivalents of those wealthy S-CHIP families: They would function better as adult nations if they had to accept the responsibilities of adulthood.

This is, I think, a very interesting geopolitical question: To what extent would Europe re-arm if America suddenly stopped garrisoning the continent? I think Steyn is right that the European model - small military, big welfare state - was originally rendered viable by the U.S. military presence. But I'm not sure that's true any more, now that the Cold War is over and the old national rivalries have given way to an end-of-history moment. What "responsibilities of adulthood" would Germany, for instance, suddenly feel compelled to take on if the U.S. closed its bases? A Franco-German arms race seem pretty unlikely; so does a sudden push to re-arm against the Polish menace to the east. Putin's Russia is a slightly-more-plausible catalyst for continental rearmament, but only by comparison with the alternatives. Moreover, if you look at defense spending around the world, countries like Germany and its neighbors are already spending much more on their militaries than many nations that live in rougher neighborhoods and don't have the U.S. to look out for them. (The much-mocked Italians, for instance, spend more on defense than Turkey, Israel and Iran put together.) It's awfully hard to imagine the absence of American troops from European soil would cause those expenditures to rise much higher.

What's more plausible, I think - so plausible that I'm just cribbing the argument from lots of other people - is that the overall rate of U.S. spending on defense (rather than the location of our garrisons) is so high and so unmatchable that it drives defense spending down for everybody else (not just the Western Europeans). If you can't compete with the hyperpower, why bother trying? (Especially when you can count on fear of the hyperpower's military to prevent the kind of large-scale cross-border attacks that used to be common, and have now all but disappeared.) The Pentagon's budget isn't just subsidizing Europe; it's subsidizing the whole world. And this would be true no matter where we stationed our troops.

Photo by Flickr user klika100 used under a Creative Commons license.

Libertarians of Arabia

Bryan Caplan wonders why so many libertarians supported the Iraq War, given their typical opposition to militarism and overseas crusades. Megan offers an opinion:

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.

Larison, of course, has a snappish rejoinder on behalf of non-interventionism. I would only say that even if Megan's right, this would better explain why libertarians backed the broad conception of a War on Terror than why they lined up to support the invasion of Iraq. If the end of the Cold War vindicated anything, surely, it was containment rather than "rollback," which was roughly the policy that the Bush Administration adopted vis-a-vis Saddam.

My own explanation would be that the character of the post-9/11 threat - an anti-modern, anti-liberal religious movement - dovetailed perfectly with the shifting character of American libertarianism, which with the decline of socialism and the rise of lifestyle politics was already increasingly inclined to view a resurgent religious conservatism, rather than Marxist-Leninist statism, as the greater threat to its worldview. This dovetailing, in turn, bred a distinctly un-libertarian zeal for a crusading foreign policy among people who otherwise wouldn't have bought into it. Just as Evelyn Waugh's traditionalist Catholic Guy Crouchback privately rejoiced at the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, because it meant that "the enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off ... It was the Modern Age in arms," many libertarians instinctly leaped to interpret the 9/11 moment the way Andrew did - as the opening salvo in a grand "religious war," with secular modernity ranged on one side and every kind of "fundamentalism" on the other. Inevitably, it was Christopher Hitchens, a crypto-libertarian of sorts, who captured this spirit best:

... here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan ... On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials.

With such visions in the air, overreach was inevitable.

A Pro-Choice GOP?

Hadley Arkes, on the prospect of a Giuliani nomination:

... there is in his campaign a sobering truth that cannot be evaded: The nomination and election of Rudy Giuliani would mark the end of the Republican party as the pro-life party in our politics. And that would be the case regardless of whether pro-lifers respond to his nomination by refusing to vote for Giuliani, forming a third party, or folding themselves into a coalition that succeeds in electing Giuliani.

... What is engaged here is a truth about the nature of political parties that has gone remarkably unappreciated: Parties have the means of changing their own constituencies or their composition. By altering their appeals, they drive some groups out and bring others in. If a Republican party, reconstituted in this way, manages to win, the Republican establishment will readily draw the lesson that they can win convincingly without pro-lifers and their bundle of causes: the destruction of embryos in research, assisted suicide, the resistance to same-sex marriage. Indeed, a Republican party shorn of those people and their baggage may seem to offer a stronger, more durable majority than the party that eked out victories by narrow margins in 2000 and 2004.

Pro-life voters may subordinate their concerns and join the new coalition, but the lesson extracted will be the same … for all practical purposes, nearly any interest will trump the interests of the pro-life community.

Arkes' mordant analysis calls to mind the WSJ article that prompted my back-and-forth with Larison over the GOP and Roe. To highlight the shifting demographics of the two parties, the Journal featured Angela Williams, a Hispanic union member who makes $39,000 a year and votes Republican because she's pro-life, alongside Jim Kelley, a private-equity big shot who leans Democratic in part because he doesn't like the GOP's focus on the social issues. This juxtaposition prompted Matt Continetti to write: "So far the GOP hasn't come up with a reformist agenda to cater to voters like Williams. They may want to do so before Election Day 2008." Which of course is one of my hobby horses - but let's play devil's advocate for a moment, and imagine a Republican that takes regaining the Jack Kelleys of the world as its principle goal, rather than expanding its support among the Angela Williamses. Is such a GOP imaginable? More importantly, would such a GOP, to borrow Arkes’ words, “offer a stronger, more durable majority” than the current Republican incarnation?

Continue reading "A Pro-Choice GOP?" »

Do the Republican Need Iraq?

Ezra gets provocative:

I genuinely hope Joe Klein is right and Iraq's improvements are durable. And contrary to Joe's implication, I don't think, politically, this is something for Democrats to fear. The better Iraq is doing, the less of an issue it will be in the election. The less of an issue it is in the election, the more issues like the health care crisis, the mortgage meltdown, inequality, and global warming will come to the fore. Indeed, the less Iraq dominates the agenda, the more alternative foreign policy visions can emerge, and be tested, and become the new context for the discussion All that is good for the Left.

Indeed, I occasionally believe that Republicans know that once American troops leave Iraq, the country's need for the Republican Party, at least temporarily, will cease. The Iraq War has increasingly come to define the Republican party. They've sacrificed almot everything else for it, from fiscal discipline to social conservatism (see the Giuliani campaign). So long as troops remain in Iraq, the Republicans can at least argue that they need to finish the job they've begun, and that the Democrats lack sufficient commitment to victory. End it, and you end their relevance, at least until they can reinvent themselves as the party of closed borders. My sense is that, consciously or unconsciously, some of the GOP knows this, and it underpins their unwillingness to even begin drawing the conflict to a close. At this point, the end of the war would be existentially unmooring for the Party.

I think this is right on a philosophical level: Shared support for the war papers over all sorts of messy internal divisions within American conservatism; it isn't the unifying force that the Cold War was, since there are more right-wingers off the reservation on Iraq than there were on the Red Menace, but it's close. But politically, the Republicans need Iraq like they need a hole in the head. The Cold War was a unifying force for the Right and a political winner; the Iraq War is a unifying force that prevents the party for engaging with swing voters on foreign policy, which is supposed to be the party's bread and butter, let alone on domestic issues. It's true that if Iraq recedes in '08, issues like health care and the environment that increasingly favor the Democrats will come to the fore, but that's still better for the GOP than having those domestic issues floating around plus a disastrous occupation to contend with, which is the combination that gave us the '06 sweep. Yes, the end of the war would be existentially unmooring for the Republicans, but when your party's in serious trouble, sometimes an unmooring is exactly what you need.

Musharraf and the Future of Pakistan

Your required reading for this weekend: Joshua Hammer's "After Musharraf," from the October Atlantic. Here's an interview with Hammer; here's an excerpt:

The threat of an outright Islamist revolution—by gun or ballot—is low today, and so too is the threat that nuclear weapons could fall into the wrong hands. The army is not dominated by jihadists, and its controls on its missiles are strong. Yet the course of Pakistani politics remains vital to the United States. Military rule in Pakistan may have been helpful to U.S. interests for a time, but it isn’t any longer. The benefits have diminished, while the corrosive effects on society have grown—and continue to grow.

The military’s younger generation has exhibited some of the same unsavory tendencies as Musharraf: an inclination toward authoritarianism, contempt for civilians, indulgence of military corruption, and an unequivocal belief in the military as the country’s savior. It also appears more sympathetic to Islamist causes and more hostile to India than is Musharraf. Pakistani officers in their 30s do not believe that the U.S. wants a long-lasting relationship with Pakistan; they have little camaraderie with U.S. soldiers, and they feel little empathy for U.S. political or diplomatic positions.

And while the military aims to do the opposite, it is slowly destabilizing Pakistan. Eight years of usurpation of power by Musharraf have weakened secular parties, corrupted the judiciary, and implanted army men in every facet of civilian life. Pakistan’s population is now doubling every 38 years, creating severe social pressures. If the political process remains stunted, the Islamists may continue to gather strength until the country reaches a tipping point. “We are not going to collapse if Musharraf goes tomorrow; Pakistan will go on, insha’allah,” I was told by Mohammed Enver Baig, a senator with the Pakistan People’s Party. “But the 2007 elections could be a turning point for all of us. If the elections are not fair, don’t be surprised if next time—after five years—you come and see me, I might have a long beard myself.”

Read the whole thing. It will cost you just $14.95, which is a steal when you consider that you also get a whole year's worth of the Atlantic into the bargain.

The Shock of Recognition

Gail Collins:

I would love to give you all the arguments about the virtues of the Law of the Sea Treaty, but it seems like a cruel thing to do to readers on a Saturday. One problem with the debate is that the earnestness of the proponents is equaled only by their lack of pizazz. (The opponents call the treaty “LOST,” causing many innocent journalists to open their e-mails in hopes of getting new information on what really killed Mr. Eko in Season Three. The advocates call it “The Law of the Sea Convention.”)

A sub-Maureen Dowd pop-culture reference, you say. And I'd agree ... except that the LOST/Lost confusion has actually happened to me several times in the past month.

Meanwhile, defying Collins' claim that opponents of LOST can't "come up with any rational arguments," against it, Tyler Cowen offers a few here. Opponents of Lost, on the other hand, are probably beyond his help.

Iraq as Success Story

Matt's right; this Brian Doherty piece on why the Iraq War may yet be regarded - wrongly - as a good idea is very smart. And I basically agree with its premise - that we shouldn't let any successes achieved from here on out blind us to the absolutely disastrous consequences of the initial invasion. Eventually, as Julian Sanchez notes, Iraq is bound to settle down, in some sense at least - but this settling down, if and when it comes, won't prove that the war was a good idea in the first place.

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. Back in September, when Petraeus was testifying and the fur was flying, Matt was making roughly the same point that he and Julian and Brian Doherty are making now, except that he was saying things like "maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced." Now it's less than two months later, the violence has continued to diminish, and Matt's response is: "After all, internecine violence in Iraq won't continue forever and since most ethnically mixed neighborhoods have already been cleansed, it's at least plausible that the worst is behind us." And he's right - it is at least plausible. But given that only six weeks ago he 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'm not nearly as optimistic ("Iraqtimistic"?) on that count as this gentleman, mind you, but I'm hopeful.

"The Only Thing That Worries Me About You Is Your Optimism"

That would be Jose Maria Aznar to George W. Bush, a month before the invasion of Iraq. Read the whole thing.

Foreign Aid and Tax Credits

Justin Muzinich is a friend of mine, but don't let that dissuade you from reading the very sharp op-ed he's co-penned in today's Times.

The Art of the Possible

Jonah G., on the question of whether we should have taken down the Soviets circa 1947, instead of wimping out, Kennan-style, and reconciling ourselves to two generations of enervating containment:

Before one engages the question of what was possible, it makes sense — and is very clarifying — to address the question of what was most desirable. And on this score, it seems to me any realistic examination of costs and benefits would find that it would have been far more preferable to take care of the Soviets at the time. It would have saved lives, reduced misery, unleashed prosperity, diminished fear and improved the lives of millions if not billions of people for two or more generations in innumerable ways. Contrafactuals are often childish because we never know what resides behind curtain number 2 when we retroactively decide we shouldn't have opted for curtain number 1. But, it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that if we'd forced regime change on the Soviet Union in, say, 1946, that there would have been no Vietnam and, perhaps, no Korean War and no permanently Red China (which alone would have reduced the pile of 20th century corpses considerably). Eastern Europe would not have been immiserated and enslaved. While the space program would have suffered without the Space Race, it seems a sure bet that the net gain of liberated human genius would more than have compensated for that.

The reason this is important is that there seem to be lots of people who think the Cold War was not merely the best we could get, but the ideal policy option period. It wasn't. The Cold War consensus agreed to kick the can down the road for half a century, leaving open all sorts of terrible possibilities regime change would have foreclosed. It maintained a balance of terror, and wrote-off millions of decent freedom-loving people to economic misery and political tyranny and warped our own politics and economy in not entirely healthy ways.

I certainly don't disagree that the Cold War was very, very bad for America in myriad ways, but I’m skeptical about Jonah’s formulation that we should always address the question of what’s “most desirable” before engaging the question of what’s actually possible. Yes, considering the ideal outcome can be clarifying in some cases, but it’s just as likely to degenerate into an exercise in fantasy politics. Of course it would have been desirable for the U.S. to find some relatively low-cost way to “take out” Russia’s Communist Party in the late 1940s and install a more democratic, pro-American government in Moscow; of course managing this trick would have spared our country, and the world, countless miseries over the next five decades. (Though the law of unintended consequences is a harsh mistress, and a different set of miseries might have come rushing in to fill the breach.) But low-cost regime change in late-1940s Russia was so far outside the realm of possibility (even before Stalin acquired atomic weapons) that I don’t see what’s gained by insisting that we give the ideal outcome its due; I don’t think it’s all that meaningful, frankly, to talk about “ideal policy options” that weren’t really options at all. Particularly since history is littered with policymakers who spent so much time meditating on the awesomeness of the the “desirable” option that they persuaded themselves to ignore all the reasons that it wasn't actually possible and go for it anyway.

Continue reading "The Art of the Possible" »

The Ahmadinejad Follies

From the LA Times, via Chris Suellentrop:

These critics not only disrespect such core American principles as academic freedom and freedom of speech, they disrespect the intelligence of Ahmadinejad’s audience. It isn’t likely that many were swayed by his wild-eyed questioning of the facts of the Holocaust or who was really behind the 9/11 attacks. The biggest laugh of the afternoon came when, in response to a question about the Iranian regime’s brutal treatment of homosexuals (a crime punishable by death), Ahmadinejad remarked, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” He also declared that “women in Iran have the highest level of freedom” even though they are forbidden from such basic social activities as attending soccer games, and said “we are friends with the Jewish people” while attributing nearly all the world’s ills to Jews. It’s hard to believe that anyone with a third-grade education would find him convincing.

In 1939, a journalist named Alan Cranston was outraged by a sanitized English-language translation of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” so he edited his own abridged version that bared the German dictator’s sinister soul. Cranston, who later became California’s longest-serving Democratic senator, understood something that Obama, Romney, McConnell et al do not: The best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words.

This is astonishingly dumb. As Matt says, "free speech" is not at stake in a private university's decision to invite speakers to address its student body. Nor, I hope, was anyone who opposed the Iranian President's appearance seriously worried that he was going to convert his Ivy League audience to Shi'a radicalism. But just because a bunch of Columbia students found him ridiculous doesn't mean that everybody else did - and it's the "everybody else" that he was playing to.

And yes, of course one shouldn't censor the rantings of a tyrant to make him sound moderate. But the notion that "the best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words" is just pious nonsense untouched by experience. A dictator's "poisonous words" are quite often the source of his strength, not a chink in his armor; so it was with Hitler, and so it is (albeit to a far, far lesser extent) with Iran's dinner-theater demagogue. Alan Cranston's more-accurate translation of Mein Kampf was an admirable contribution to the West's understanding of the Nazi regime, no doubt, but if I recall my history right, it didn't exactly bring Hitlerism to its knees.

Bollinger v. Ahmadinejad

Larison nails it:

On reading the blog account of the big to-do at Columbia today, it occurs to me that Ahmadinejad must have found Bollinger’s “sharp challenges” much as Francis Urquhart described Prime Minister’s Question Time: “very frightening -- like being mugged by a guinea pig.”

Consider this “challenge”:

Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and the civil society of the region?

You could almost imagine Ahmadinejad replying, “I thank the honourable gentleman for his concern for peace and democracy, which my government has always shared. We have always worked to bring peace and democracy to the rest of the world, because we love all of the nations of the world. Naturally, we abhor terrorism and I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer.”

In his speech, Ahmadinejad did actually say, “we love all nations.” ... The point is that posing such questions to a demagogue simply lends meaning and importance to whatever the demagogue says in response. It sets him up to blather on about whatever he would like to say. If he ignores the questions, nothing has been proved that we did not already know, and if he answers them he will invariably spin them to his advantage. Demagogues often have a good knack for turning a phrase and playing to a crowd - that’s how they got to be demagogues.

The core of the problem, to my mind, is summed up by Bollinger's remark, in his email to the school, that this was an opportunity for Columbia students to "listen to ideas we deplore." This sort of earnest liberal piety demonstrates a fundamental inability to grasp what someone like the Iranian President is all about. If Ahmadinejad were interest in making a serious, sustained case for political Islam, or even if he were presenting a David Irving-style brief on the Holocaust, there might be some value in having him appear at Columbia and face questions - perhaps not from the university president, but from someone well-suited to engage with his arguments. (If Sayyid Qutb were alive and writing, for instance, I would be very interested to watch him debate a liberal, secular Ivy League political philosopher.) But the Iranian President was never going to actually elucidate or defend his most controversial ideas before a Western audience - and certainly not at Columbia University, of all places! Not when he could further his objectives by refraining from saying anything at all.

So ask him about the Holocaust, and he'll say that further research is needed, and besides, why should the Palestinians suffer for whatever may or may not have happened to Jews sixty years ago? Ask him if he wants to destroy Israel, and he'll tell you: "We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people." Ask him about women's rights, and he'll say: "Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom." Ask him about the execution of homosexuals, and he'll tell you that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Ask him about nuclear weapons, and he'll tell you that Iran wants to live in peace with its neighbors and the world. And so on and so forth. There are no controversial ideas here; there are, in fact, no ideas at all. Which is why it didn't matter what Bollinger said: He was being played for a fool right from the beginning.

Power and Weakness

Ezra:

I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?

I think it's worth distinguishing between two inter-related objections to Ahmadinejad's Columbia appearance. The first, which is mine, is that it's shameful for a great American university to supply a prominent platform to an odious figure like Iran's President, particularly at a time when his government is almost certainly involved in attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. The second, which can follow from the first but doesn't necessarily, is that the act of inviting Ahmadinejad to speak is a manifestation of American weakness that may eventually contribute to our destruction at the hands of our enemies. For hints of the latter take, see this Roger Kimball post, in which he quotes from Bagehot:

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Were the year 1938, and the speaker in question Adolf Hitler as opposed to Ahmadinejad, this quotation would feel more apropos. But this is where I part ways with some of my confreres on the right: I don't think it's accurate or useful to suggest that the American intellectual class is preparing our country for "destruction" by extending a nauseating degree of courtesy to a poisonous Iranian demagogue. The German Fuhrer was actually an existential threat to the free nations of the West, and the failure of the chattering classes of his era to reckon with that threat did prepare their nations for the destruction visited on them in World War II. Whereas Ahmadinejad is a tinhorn rabblerouser with a tenous grip on power, and the country he attempts to rule is a paper tiger whose quest for nuclear weapons is a manifestation of its weakness, not its strength. I despise him, and I fervently wish that I inhabited a country whose great universities had the good sense not to treat his appearance in New York as an occasion for a lesson in "free speech." (Particularly given the slight double standard that occasionally seems to be at work in American academia these days.) But I don't fear him, because I think that America is easily strong enough - and our enemies weak enough, more importantly - to survive the folly on display at Columbia University today.

Update: See also Reihan's thoughts.

Obama and the World

Marc goes inside the candidate's head:

In private, Obama likens himself to Reagan, according to some of his friends. He believes that the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America's original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could, and ... you get the idea.

Okay, so this is ridiculous and overblown and self-serving, but ... it isn't totally wrong. To the extent that the President isn't just the leader of our country, but the face of America and our chief overseas PR man - a role that Reagan and Bill Clinton both played well, and that Bush has displayed little facility for - Obama is probably the most attractive candidate in either party's field. (So long as he stops talking about bombing Pakistan, of course.) This is not the sort of consideration on which elections should turn, but neither is it worth dismissing out of hand.

Update: Larison, as is his wont, prefers to emphasize the negative.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Gotta agree with Kristol on this one.

Other People's Liberty

Sigh. When I saw the Post was running a short "fact-check" piece on Fred Thompson's claim that "our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world," I thought, hey, good for them. But then I saw this:

The number of overall U.S. military casualties, while high, is still relatively low in comparison to those of its World War I and World War II allies. In World War II alone, the Soviet Union suffered at least 8 million casualties, or more than 10 times the number of U.S. casualties for all wars combined. According to Winston Churchill, the Red Army "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine." It can be argued that Soviet troops were primarily fighting to free their homeland from Nazi occupation. After fighting its way to Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed its own dictatorship over Eastern Europe. Even so, Soviet sacrifices contributed greatly to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi domination. Soviet forces died for their own country and their own tyrannical government, but they also spilled blood on behalf of their Western allies.

If you want to rebut Thompson's claim, might I suggest that arguing that Stalin's Red Army was fighting for "other people's liberty" probably isn't the best way to do it?

Continue reading "Other People's Liberty" »

More Allies, More Problems

Expanding NATO to include Australia, Japan, Israel, India, and various other friendly nations is a marginally better idea, I'd say, than trying to start a "League of Democracies" from scratch. Maybe. But I'm going to have to agree with the paleocons and pomo-cons: It's still a really lousy idea.

Leave aside the issue of whether it's wise to belong to a treaty organization that might require us to intervene on India's behalf if they were attacked by Pakistan, or send troops to Lebanon the next time Hezbollah launches a major assault on Israel. I'm afraid I just don't see what pressing problem an expanded NATO is supposed to solve. Have we conducted any military operations lately where we slapped our forehead and said "wow, if only we had the Japanese locked into a mutual-defense pact, everything would be going much more smoothly?" Back when the Clinton Administration was struggling to convince the Western European powers to intervene more forcefully in Bosnia, did anyone think to themselves "if only we had the Israelis, the Australians, the South Koreans and the Singaporeans at table as well, this would be a piece of cake?"

I suppose one possible idea is that adding India to our primary military alliance would give us more local credibility if NATO wanted to intervene in, say, Bhutan, or that adding Singapore would give our potential operations in Borneo more multilateral cred. (Let's leave aside the question of what adding Israel would do to NATO's credibility in certain areas of the world.) But isn't that what we have diplomats for? When we needed to intervene in Afghanistan, we persuaded the Pakistanis and the Uzbeks and the Russians to go along with it, even though they weren't NATO member states; conversely, when we felt we needed to invade Iraq, we couldn't persuade the French and the Germans to sign on to the invasion, even though they were theoretically our "partners" in NATO. In neither case did the military alliance, or lack thereof, matter nearly so much as old-fashioned diplomatic skill (or, in the latter case, the lack thereof).

Maybe there's some important military advantage to a bigger, badder NATO that I'm missing - smoother joint anti-terror operations, maybe? But more likely, it's just pointless chest-thumping - the equivalent of Romney's pledge to "double Guantanamo" or Thompson's brag about how we're better at defending liberty than everybody else in the whole wide world put together.

Putin After Beslan

Via a reader, here's a video clip from the Putin speech that's cited in that Paul Starobin profile I mentioned. No subtitles, but you don't need them to get the idea.

Why Iraq Has No Army

I've always thought that while we were wrong to disband the Iraqi army, it was nowhere near such an obvious a decision as the chattering class's 20-20 hindsight would have you believe. Christopher Hitchens' latest contrarian foray confirms both of these judgments - I'm not persuaded by his arguments, but neither are they easy to dismiss.

The Democrats' Real Iraq Problem

It isn't Fordization or the stab-in-the-back narrative. It's this:

Can I just point out that if Hillary Clinton—or really, anyone—wins the Presidency and then tries to "end the war and bring our troops home" without, you know, completely ending the war or bringing all of our troops home (or at least reducing US casualties to zero), The Left isn't going to take it any more. As Kevin Drum points out, Clinton leads Democrats on the question of who is "best at ending the Iraq war", which means that if she doesn't, she will disappoint a lot of her fans by the time 2010 or 2012 rolls around.

The Dirty Fucking Hippies—and I'm not talking about Code Pink, but the 25% of the public that's always been against the Iraq War without marching in the streets about it, plus the 30-35% of us who have become convinced there's nothing more that the US military presence can accomplish in Iraq—will have put up with a Kerry/Edwards ticket that sold itself as "Bush with better management" on Iraq, sat patiently as a Congress caved after the withdrawal veto, and endured serious dissembling from Clinton on the question of the US mission in Iraq. If Iraq continues to be a quagmire with no signs of progress or intent to withdraw, anti-war voters (and again, not just scruffy college kids but Midwesterners who don't see what we're accomplishing) will stay home in 2010 and find a primary challenger in 2012. Hell, I'd get on the Russ Feingold bandwagon at that point.

Since I think there's about a two percent chance that Hillary Clinton will have all U.S. troops out of Iraq - or U.S. casualties down to zero - by 2010, you can expect to hear a lot more of this in the days and years ahead.

Pondering Putin

Re-reading that Starobin profile I mentioned, and then this article from the Times of London (via Larison), I thought of the memorable Perry Anderson essay on Putin's Russia from earlier this year - and particularly this passage:

... there is another, less obvious side to his charisma. Part of his chilly magnetism is cultural. He is widely admired for his command of the language. Here, too, contrast is everything. Lenin was the last ruler of the country who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin’s Georgian accent was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev’s vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more or less correct idiom, comes as music to many Russians.

In a strange way Putin’s prestige is thus also intellectual. For all his occasional crudities, at least in his mouth the national tongue is no longer obviously humiliated. This is not just a matter of cases and tenses, or pronunciation. Putin has developed into what by today’s undemanding standards is an articulate politician, who can field questions from viewers on television for hours as confidently and lucidly as he lectures journalists in interviews, or addresses partners at summit meetings, where he has excelled at sardonic repartee. The intelligence is limited and cynical, above the level of his Anglo-American counterparts, but without much greater ambition. It has been enough, however, to give Putin half of his brittle lustre in Russia. There, an apparent union of fist and mind has captured the popular imagination.

I think there's little question that Putin has been one of the most successful world leaders of the new century, and I've always had the impression that this success is related to his being smarter, in some meaningful way, than most of his rivals and partners on the world stage. But sometimes I wonder if my high estimation of his intelligence isn't partially a function of the freedom that he's afforded by his semi-autocratic position - a freedom to be honest, to talk explicitly in the language of power politics, and to eschew the kind of pious cant that's required of politicians in the West (and particularly in America). I remember being particularly struck by this passage from the Starobin profile, describing Putin's response to the Beslan massacre:

On the day after the bloodbath Putin addressed the nation on television from the Kremlin. He seemed stripped raw; the brief clip I caught on the news was painful to watch. "It is a difficult and bitter task for me to speak," he began. "During these last few days each one of us suffered immensely." The thrust of his message was shame and embarrassment that Russians, "living in conditions formed after the disintegration of a huge, great country," had failed to pay enough attention to their defenses. "We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten." His face was drained of color. I wondered if he was in shock.

Now obviously this kind of language, and the worldview it betokens, is connected to many of the Putin era's excesses, from the Chechen war to the partial rehabilitation of Stalin. But even so, it's hard to help feeling a sneaking admiration for a leader who can respond to a tragedy without resorting to either bluster or bathos, and who can acknowledge weakness and humiliation without immediately seguing into the narrative of self-congratulation and moral uplift that American Presidents automatically reach for in such circumstances.

It will be very interesting to watch what he does after 2008 - both how he continues to exercise power in Russia (as he assuredly will), and what his de facto political dominance will mean for the leaders who succeed him. He will only be fifty-six when his term ends - younger than any of the front-runners for the GOP nomination, it's worth noting - which means that the Putin era, in one fashion or another, probably still has decades left to run.

Photo by the Presidential Press and Information Office.

Reversing the Carter Era?

Chris Orr links to some interesting data on a leftward (or Ron Paul-ward) shift in political contributions among military families. It's far too small a sample size to be dispositive in any way, but it's at least suggestive that the Democrats have a chance to regain some of the ground they lost in the 1970s and '80s, when the post-Vietnam collapse in military morale, followed by the Reagan-era restoration, pushed the military's political allegiances rightward.

But of course, for that to happen, liberals would need someone to play Reagan to Bush's Carter.

The Ghost of Gerald Ford

Juan Cole on why Iraq could spell political doom ... for the Democrats.

If the Democrats cannot prevail in withdrawing before Bush goes out of office (and they cannot), and if they then rapidly draw down the troops on taking office in 2009, they face the real prospect of a "Gerald Ford meltdown" of the sort that occurred in 1975 when the North Vietnamese and their VC allies took over South Vietnam.

You will note that Ford only served a couple of years as president and lost his election bid to a relative unknown named Jimmy Carter. Although economic stagflation and the stain of Watergate contributed to his defeat, I think the spectacle of the debacle in Indochina harmed Ford a great deal. The United States lost a war, and lost out to its ideological rival in an entire subcontinent of Asia in the midst of the Cold War. That would cause at least some Republicans to stay home in 1976, a sure way for Democrats to win an election.

Could 2010 look for Iraq like 1975 looked in Vietnam? Yes. I just do not see evidence that either the new Iraqi political class or the Iraqi security forces are likely to have the maturity to avoid a conflagration when the US military withdraws.

... In all likelihood, when the Democratic president pulls US troops out in summer of 2009, all hell is going to break loose. The consequences may include even higher petroleum prices than we have seen recently, which at some point could bring back stagflation or very high rates of inflation.

In other words, the Democratic president risks being Fordized when s/he withdraws from Iraq, by the aftermath. A one-term president associated with humiliation abroad and high inflation at home? Maybe I should say, Carterized. The Republican Party could come back strong in 2012 and then dominate politics for decades, if that happened.

Such an outcome is possible, but is it really plausible? It assumes, to begin with, that the next President will effect an immediate, tails-between-our-legs withdrawal, when everything the Democratic candidates are saying a much more slow-moving retreat. I think it's safe to say we won't have 150,000 troops in Iraq two years into a Hillary administration, but I wouldn't be surprised if we have 80,000 troops there, or more; as long as the public has a sense that the numbers are trending downward, I tend to think that the Robb calculus is more or less correct. And I think Cole's wrong, as well, to suggest that the Democrats will "own" whatever chaos follows in the wake of a drawdown of U.S. forces. That might have been true had John Kerry won the White House in '04 and attempted a hasty exit, but at this point the public's sense of Iraq-as-disaster is so deeply associated with George W. Bush that I'm hard-pressed to imagine it turning on a dime once he's out of office.

Continue reading "The Ghost of Gerald Ford" »

The Long Run

John Robb explains why we'll be staying in Iraq for a long, long time.

Romney and the War

David Freddoso:

Romney may be leaving a door open, in case he wins the nomination, to say that while America still cannot run from Iraq, he would probably not have become involved to begin with, knowing what he knows now. Such a position would be invaluable when debating Senator Clinton, who spoke out for and voted for a war that 57 percent of Americans now say was a mistake.

Future presidents, like the current one, will face agonizing choices over whether to become involved in foreign wars. For that reason, the eventual Republican nominee will be forced to answer the “hypothetical” question about this war. He may need to give an answer that many Republicans don’t want to hear.

You could take this as evidence of Romney's possible crypto-realist tendencies, or of his eye for the main political chance (or both). Either way, though, I think Freddoso's broader analysis of the political dynamic facing the GOP is pretty astute - as is his point that Newt Gingrich's latest take on the war on terror amounts to a sotto voce rejection of the original push to invade Iraq.

Iraq: An Opinion

I just wrote a long, rambling, back-and-forth and back-and-forth post about Iraq that started nowhere, went nowhere, and made no coherent sense. I won't inflict it on you. Instead, I'll just associate myself with an actual position on what we should do - specifically, the position David Kilcullen articulates in George Packer's New Yorker piece this week:

In Kilcullen’s view, allowing the surge to run its course into next spring, while doing as much damage as possible to Al Qaeda in Iraq in the meantime, would make it likelier that a gradual withdrawal of troops would not leave behind the chaos of previous drawdowns—from Falluja and Mosul in 2004, from Tal Afar and Baquba in 2005, and from Baghdad in 2006. He said, “The longer you stay there doing police and counter-intelligence work, the more long-term stability there is once you leave.” He compared the surge to a course of antibiotics: “You keep taking it as long as possible, even after the symptoms are gone, to kill the underlying infection.”

... Kilcullen argued that next summer, when the surge is scheduled to end, American forces could be reduced to a level—say, eighty thousand—that might allow most of the core interests to be protected. Such a move would involve difficult calculations: as American commanders pull back from more stable areas—starting in the northwest, the west, and the south, where there are fewer sectarian divisions—they will risk a return to higher levels of violence. On the phone from Baghdad, General Petraeus said, “There’s an issue of what you might call ‘battlefield geometry.’ Where do you thin out and how do you do it? It’s not as simple as ‘Put in five brigades, one each month, take out five brigades, one each month.’ You might want to thin out in one place and not another. As you do that, you do want to modify your mission.” He added that “you may still be emphasizing protecting the population in one area,” while in more secure areas American forces might take on a role of supporting and advising Iraqi Army units. The changes in mission will come sector by sector and incrementally, with commanders hoping that today’s local ceasefire or the formation of a friendly Sunni militia in one town somehow holds and leads to long-term stability.

But, when the surge ends, there will have to be a strategic turn, away from Americans in the lead. An indefinite war in Iraq “costs us moral authority across the world,” Kilcullen said. The occupation of Iraq remains hugely unpopular with America’s democratic allies and throughout the Arab and Muslim world. “We need that moral authority as ammunition in the fight against Al Qaeda,” he added. “If we’re not down to fifty thousand troops in three to five years, we’ve lost the war on terror.”

The situation in Iraq obviously balances dozens of competing American interests against one another, but the two interests that weigh most heavily in my mind these days are 1) our obligation to mitigate the death toll in a civil war that we ourselves created, and 2) our obligation to minimize the number of Americans who are asked to die for what will almost certainly be remembered as a mistake. (This is why the Huckabee-Paul face-off was so riveting to me: I sympathized with both of them.) Obviously, these obligations push in opposite directions - the former militating for a long-term presence (because, as Reihan says, even if you're making the civil war less bloody only at the margins, those "margins" might mean tens of thousands of lives saved), the latter for an immediate withdrawal. I see the Kilcullen strategy as an attempt to balance the two: I freely admit that it's imperfect in almost every possible way, but today, at least, it seems like the best course.

The question then becomes whether this strategy requires a timetable for withdrawal, in which troop levels are required, by Congressional fiat, to drop consistently from 130,000 in the spring of next year to 80,000 in, say, the following spring. There are good arguments against such timetables, but without them, I have no confidence that this White House - and possibly even the next one - will ever be willing to take the plunge into the unknown that dramatically reducing troop levels requires. Because that's what it is: A leap in the dark, with the possibility that what comes next will be much, much worse than the awfulness we have now. But it's a plunge we have to take.

So that's my opinion, at the moment at least. Have at it.

Photo courtesy Joint Combat Camera Center.

A Guide To Recognizing Your Candidates

Michael Hirsh, on the GOP field's foreign-policy advisers:

The Republican candidates have the opposite problem: with the president's popularity at Nixonian lows and his foreign policy in broad disfavor with the electorate, nobody is rushing to hire the president's team. Normally, candidates would rush to seek the counsel of high-powered alumni of the president's foreign policy team. But so many of its members—like neocon hawks Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—are now thought to be tainted, their views are not widely welcomed. (An exception: the highly respected Robert Zoellick, former U.S. trade rep and deputy secretary of state. But Zoellick took himself out of the game when he replaced Wolfowitz as World Bank president in May.) At the same time, the Republicans' conservative base doesn't have much taste for the realists who dominated foreign-policy thinking in past GOP administrations (except for über-adviser Henry Kissinger, who has managed to transcend these divides with the same aplomb he has shown in past campaigns). For Republicans "there's no upside in declaring, 'These are my advisers.' The base hates realists, and neocons are too controversial," says sometime Romney adviser Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. "So the thinking is, don't define yourself by foreign-policy advisers."

This seems about right, although I'm not sure how often candidates do define themselves by their foreign-policy advisers - save when, like George W. Bush in 2000, their lack of foreign-policy experience is so painfully apparent that they need to surround themselves with steady (or steady-seeming) hands to make up for it. But even if none of the GOP candidates are exactly trumpeting the names of their foreign-policy gurus to the skies, we know enough about who's advising whom to indulge in some informed speculation about the current foreign-policy divisions in the field. Sure, all the top-tier candidates may be talking about foreign affairs in the language of Rick Santorum, because that's what the base seems to want, but there are almost certainly real differences, and subtleties, at work behind the scenes.

Continue reading "A Guide To Recognizing Your Candidates" »

America The Boastful

I like making jokes about how if it weren't for us, all those stuck-up French waiters and hoteliers would be speaking German as much as the next Yankee. But having a Presidential candidate respond to a question about why we're hated overseas by going on about how "our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples ... than all the other countries put together" just comes across as weirdly defensive braggadocio. Particularly since - as Larison, scourge of American triumphalism, points out - it's probably not true:

Even leaving aside WWI, where the claims to fighting for liberty are a bit more strained (and where all other belligerents lost far more people than America), this claim is demonstrably false. It requires either an amazing ignorance about the past or contempt for American allies in WWII.

Britain and France entered WWII at least officially to safeguard the independence of Poland, which I think gives them some right to claim that they suffered their losses for the sake of the “liberty” of other peoples. In 1940 alone in a war fought on behalf of Poland, the French lost 90,000 KIA, and the British lost over 68,000. The British, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers who died during the war were certainly fighting at least in part for “the liberty and freedom of other peoples,” and the number of their fatalities and casualities was necessarily higher than that of the United States. Our casualties were on the order of 600,000 killed and wounded, while British and Commonwealth casualties (not including India’s 100,000) were approximately 915,000, which does not include civilian deaths in Britain and France. If we were to judge these losses according to the size of the populations of the different countries, the disparity would be even greater. Given how much smaller its population was, Britain’s losses were proportionally over three times as great as ours.

In Fred Thompson's defense, estimates of World War II casualties do vary a bit, and you could argue that his overall estimate looks a bit more accurate if you factor in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq. Except, as Larison says, for the pesky matter of World War I, where the Brits - whose defense of poor hapless Belgium gives them at least as solid a claim to have been fighting for the liberty of other peoples as Woodrow Wilson's "make the world safe for democracy" posturing - took eight times as many casualties as we did, and more than we took in the whole of World War II as well.

Obviously this sort of obnoxious mythologizing isn't confined to Fred Thompson, but it doesn't do him any credit either.

(Still) Looking For A Political Strategy

Jim Geraghty responds to the (qualified) praise I offered Sam Brownback for bringing up the possibility of a soft partition in last night's debate:

I think there’s a reason no other candidate made any kind of stab at addressing the political problem. They had a window of ninety seconds before an audience looking for applause lines, not exactly the ideal venue to lay out a detailed strategy to sort out violent differences between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds and their Turkish neighbors. I mean, in a perfect world, Brownback would have the time and audience attention span to get into how the oil revenues from around Kirkuk will affect the Turkmen minority, but if you go into a debate looking for that, you’re invariably going to be disappointed.

Two points. First, it's certainly true in a debate forum like last night's, there's a strong incentive for politicians to stick to potential applause lines, and avoid going deeper into the weeds. But that doesn't mean that pundits and journalists should just treat the event like a boxing match, root for the devastating punch or the best one-liner, and make fun of anybody who tries to elevate the discussion even a little for missing an opportunity to win some easy applause. I wasn't disappointed that the debate didn't offer a high-minded discussion of oil revenues and Kirkuk; I was disappointed that when Sam Brownback tried to go at least some distance toward addressing the political problem America faces in Iraq - rather than just insisting that the surge is working, full stop, end of story, no dissent allowed - he got dumped on for being a loser.

Second, maybe a Fox News debate wasn't an ideal venue to lay out "a detailed strategy to sort out violent differences between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds and their Turkish neighbors." But Brownback's remarks on a soft partition were more detailed, on that front, than anything I can find on, say, John McCain's entire website. Or Rudy's. Or Romney's. McCain's site offers the most material on Iraq of any of the major candidates, but it's all just a defense of staying the course with the surge, followed by this:

John McCain believes that only by controlling the violence in Iraq can we pave the way for a political settlement. But once the Iraqi government wields greater authority, it will be incumbent upon Iraqi leaders to take significant steps on their own. These include a commitment to go after the militias, a reconciliation process for insurgents and Baathists, more equitable distribution of government resources, provincial elections that will bring Sunnis into the government, and a large increase in employment-generating economic projects.

All well and good, but it seems clear that whatever the surge's military successes, this kind of political follow-through from the Maliki government just isn't happening. So we need to decide what to do next. Sam Brownback tried to make a contribution to that debate last night. Nobody else did.

Political Theater

Andy McCarthy, watching Sam Brownback propose a soft partition of Iraq during tonight's debate:

... is Sam Brownback insane? Chance to pounce on Paul after Wallace cleared the path, he's blathering.

Jim Geraghty, on the same moment:

Brownback totally whiffs on chance to whack at anything Paul has said, and cites Thomas Friedman's call for a political surge. Urrrrrgh. Seriously disappointing. We had some serious drama going there. Okay, who's gonna swing away at Ron Paul, since Brownback won't?

Look, I get where they're coming from: It's good when the candidates mix it up and actually address what one another are saying, and Brownback generally seems lost in the crowd during these debates, and from a tactical perspective he ought to be throwing more punches. (Or getting out of the race entirely.) But - but - what Brownback did, in his non-response to Paul, was offer an actual strategy for moving forward politically in Iraq, addressing the central problem of our occupation head-on in a way that almost nobody else did during tonight's debate. His plan for partition may be a terrible plan (or at best, a plausible endpoint of a "stay till it burns out" strategy), but it's an infinitely more substantive contribution to the argument over Iraq than, say, Rudy Giuliani's famous slam of Paul a few months back, and Brownback deserved better - as do we all - than to have his response scored a failure because he didn't use it to score cheap points against a fellow also-ran.

Continue reading "Political Theater" »

Failing Upward

I missed this bit of Labor Day Weekend intelligence:

Three of the eight announced 2008 Republican presidential campaigns are considering retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks as their pick for vice presidential candidate, according to Republican Party operatives.

Gen. Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command until he retired in 2003, orchestrated the military campaign that ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The choice of Gen. Franks as vice president would be a direct affront to antiwar Democrats, who plan to make opposition to the Bush administration's handling of the war the main plank of their campaign platforms.

Um, actually, it would be a gift to antiwar Democrats, and an "affront" to anyone who knows anything about Tommy Franks' record in Afghanistan and Iraq. Short of picking Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Bremer for the veep's slot, I can't imagine any better way to tie the next GOP nominee to the current Administration's blunders than to nominate the guy who let Osama Bin Laden get away for VP in '08.

Your Semi-Regular Scottish Independence Update

Ben Crair makes the interesting suggestion that "historians might look back at the war in Iraq" as the catalyst for Scottish secession from the United Kingdom. But Alex Massie isn't buying.

(I'm going to be terribly disappointed, incidentally, if the push for Scottish independence ends with a boring Parliamentary vote instead of "rough wooing"-style border campaign, followed by a rematch of Culloden.)

Why We Fight?

Citing this Newsweek piece on the ethnic cleansing that's ongoing even during the "surge," both Kevin Drum and Matt suggest that, in Matt's words, "it's worth considering the possibility that the essential 'plan' in Iraq is just to stay there, in force, vaguely allied with whichever side (or sides) we perceive to be willing to ally with us, until, eventually, the civil war ends, a brilliant victory is portrayed, and the hippie peacenik scum are told to beat it. After all, civil wars do end if you just wait long enough."

Take out the sneering and yes, this is the case for staying in Iraq that seems most persuasive to me at the moment. By remaining there in force, this argument runs, the U.S. can mitigate the violence associated with ethnic cleansing, degrade al Qaeda's capabilities, and prevent the bloodletting from spreading beyond Iraq's borders - with the long-term goal of ensuring that the civil war burns itself out with as few civilian casualties and as little collateral damage to U.S. interests in the region as possible. The hope would be that Iraq eventually settles into a relatively stable state of de facto partition, with a weak central government and strong regional power centers, and with the various fault lines policed by a much-reduced American force. And were this goal achieved you would declare victory, not to stick it to the hippies but because that's what you would have won - not the victory we hoped for in 2003, certainly, and the not the kind of victory that lends itself to Gettysburg analogies, but victory of a certain kind nonetheless.

Now it may be that the American presence in Iraq, far from mitigating the violence, is actually making it worse (by effectively funneling arms to sectarian militias, etc. etc.). And it may be, as Matt says, that the civil war could take decades rather than years to burn itself out. Both of these possibilities, along with the ongoing loss of life, the cost of the occupation, and so forth, militate against the "stay till it burns itself out" strategy. But given that most of the plans for phased withdrawal that I've seen run the risk of ending up as a more-ineffectual variant of exactly the same strategy we're employing now - with a much-reduced U.S. presence trying to, well, fight al Qaeda and mitigate the ongoing violence - it's hard for me to dismiss the idea that staying in strength might be the lesser of two evils.

Update: I should note that this Hilzoy post, despite some fuzzy math in the title, is the most comprehensive rebuttal I've seen to the "stay till it burns out" point of view.

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Scott Taylor.

Warrior Politics

Joe Klein, in a post entitled "Heroes Trashed":

Well, I suppose it was inevitable that the Weekly Standard would figure out some way to trash the 7 enlisted men from the 82nd Airborne, who wrote the courageous Op-Ed piece about the unreliability of our Iraqi allies in the New York Times last Sunday.

By all means, read the Standard piece in question, written by seven Iraq War veterans: Whatever you think of its arguments, it's a model of respectful disagreement. (No thuggery here!) That Klein takes this as an example of "heroes" being "trashed" is emblematic of the difficulties involved in having soldiers, whether generals or enlisted men, take part in political debates as soldiers - a problem that extends to parents and relatives of military personnel as well, and runs from Cindy Sheehan on the dovish left to these commercials from the hawkish right. In each case, there's an assumption that our soldiers are invested with a unique political as well as moral authority, and that to question this authority is to disrespect (or "trash") their sacrifice.

Writing for the Atlantic earlier this year, Andrew Bacevich argued that this state of affairs owes something to the "irresponsible politicking of generals and admirals," something to "the abdication by Congress of its constitutional duties on matters of peace and war," and something to the foreign-policy blunderings of "an imperial, irresponsible, and habitually dissembling administration." But he suggested that it's also a predictable consequence of the move to all-volunteer force:

Military service, once viewed (at least nominally) as a civic obligation, has become a matter of choice. As a result, the burden of “defending our freedom” no longer falls evenly across society. Those choosing to serve do not represent a cross section of America, and most are presumably well aware of that fact.

To assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America’s fighting men and women to the top of the nation’s moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer—or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement—has now come to rest upon the soldier.

Bacevich's conclusion ought to be appended to any "veterans speak out" op-ed or advertisement that appears from now till the conclusion of the war:

On matters of policy, those who wear the uniform ought to get a vote, but it’s the same one that every other citizen gets—the one exercised on Election Day. To give them more is to sow confusion about the soldier’s proper role, which centers on service and must preclude partisanship. Legitimating soldiers’ lobbies is likely to warp national-security policy and crack open the door to praetorianism.

You have to subscribe, of course, but the full piece is well worth reading.

Photo courtesy of the Defense Department.

The Domino Theory, Then and Now

Matt writes:

I think I (and others) have actually been too easy on Bush's unhinged analogies speech yesterday. He'd like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America's collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.

Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds -- emboldened -- were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.

It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.

Well, okay, the fall of Vietnam didn't lead to a Red Dawn-like scenario, with America standing alone - actually, alongside "six hundred million screaming Chinamen," if I remember the movie right - against the Soviet juggernaut. But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted, and it played a role in the Soviet advances across the Third World during the rest of the 1970s - from Ethiopia and Mozambique to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, with various other proxy wars thrown in for good measure. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the world wasn't really going the Soviets way in the late '70s, as people on both sides thought it was - or at least that their internal contradictions prevented them from capitalizing on the opportunities that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam afforded them, and eventually led them into their own Vietnam-style overreach. Similarly, our enemies in al-Qaeda, Iran and elsewhere probably won't make the kind of gains that, say, Rick Santorum and other feverish voices anticipate if we pull out of Iraq, and they simply aren't strong enough to pose an existential threat to the U.S. over the long run. But they will win a real victory, just as Soviet Communism won a real victory in the early 1970s, and that victory will have real repercussions around the globe. I think we were right to pull out of Vietnam when we did, and wrong to be there in the first place, but it's too simplistic to say that the domino theory looks "completely wrong" or "crazy" in hindsight; there are an awful lot of dead people in Indochina, Latin America and Africa who would quibble with that assessment.

The Iraq Debate, And My Place In It

Matt Feeney, on my last post:

I feel a certain unease with Ross Douthat’s disquiet with Jon Chait’s unhappiness happiness with Bill Kristol’s anger with certain liberals’ dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq. Seriously, Ross’s objection to Chait – or, more accurately, Ross’s unwillingness to wrestle with Chait’s argument – seems to rest entirely on the fact that Chait’s magazine, The New Republic, has a wishy-washy, passive-aggressive, hard-to-pin-down position on the war ...

The underlying mystery here is hardly a mystery. At TNR, Peretz remains a vigorous defender of the war. Chait and some others were for the war and have become critics of its execution. Foer and others were against it from the start. I’m not sure how you would synthesize these positions into Weekly Standard­-style editorial calls-to-arms or what, in the nature of magazines, obliges TNR to do so. TNR and the Standard are simply different kinds of magazines.

Larison chimes in:

By the same token, Ross’ critique of Chait would be considerably more powerful if it were possible to discern clearly what Ross’ own view on the war was at the present time. It isn’t that Ross never writes about the war, but he doesn’t say much about what kind of Iraq policy he thinks would be best. In his bloggingheads appearances, he will often make a point of declaring himself to be something of an agnostic on the “surge,” and thus ends up, by default, with a “wait and see” position. That’s fair enough, but it is a bad position from which to criticise someone else’s reticence about Iraq policy.

Meanwhile, Chait himself writes that I'm guilty of a non sequitur for using his attack on Kristol as an excuse to gripe about TNR's recent silence on the Iraq War. I take his point, but I don't think that my turn was exactly a non sequitur so much as an expression of disinterest in a controversy that's completely tangential to the much-more important debate about what to do next in Iraq - a debate from which TNR, both in its editorials and in the essays it chooses to run, has largely absented itself of late. Kristol accused The New Republic of giving up on success in Iraq - indeed, of choosing to ignore evidence of success because of a commitment to a narrative of defeat - and cited the Beauchamp piece as his prime example, and I think Chait is absolutely right to call that criticism unfair and unfounded. (Though I think Chait's larger attempt to draw a contrast between the old neocon idealism and the new neocon thuggery is considerably weaker, as are some of his other swipes). But it's unfair and unfounded in part because it's impossible to tell what TNR does think about the war, which in turn gives the whole debate a sideshow quality that makes me inclined to tune it out.

Continue reading "The Iraq Debate, And My Place In It" »

Which Side Are You On?

Jon Chait's attack on Bill Kristol's supposed "thuggery" in support of the current American strategy in Iraq would be considerably more interesting if it were possible to discern where Chait's own magazine stands on the question. The new issue of TNR, in which Chait's anti-Kristol broadside appears, contains articles on Mitt Romney and Karl Rove, the netroots and the psychology of Bush voters, and sundry other topics. It leads with editorials on Sudan (which expresses support for "an outright NATO invasion of Darfur") and Presidential library fundraising. And it marks the seventh straight issue in which TNR's editors - who passive-aggressively endorsed the surge back in May - have seen fit to say exactly nothing about what the United States should be doing, whether militarily, politically or diplomatically, about the minor difficulties we currently face in Iraq. Which leaves the reader with the impression, fairly or not, that TNR's take on the most important foreign-policy question facing America is that Bill Kristol is a jerk.

Up in the Air

My instinct is to agree with Matt when he suggests that post-9/11, "airplanes have become relatively unattractive targets for terrorists," which means that "endlessly piling on more and more security measures to air travel is pointless." That said, there seems to be a persuasive argument (via Reihan, a few months back) for implementing different security measures than the ones we have now, focused less on passengers at the metal detectors and more on the planes sitting unguarded on the tarmac.

It's also worth noting that while one would assume that terrorists recognize that it's now easier, as Matt writes, to "blow up a train or a bus, open fire on a crowded subway station, try to hijack a truck carrying deadly chemicals, or do any number of additional things" than to muck around with airports and hijackings, it isn't entirely clear that they do recognize this. The lure of the airline attack (and the spectacular attack in general) seems to persist even in a climate where attacks on lower value targets would be far easier to pull off, and arguably just as damaging. From Richard Reid to the the British bomb plot to the idiots who wanted to attack JFK to the car bomb at the Glasgow airport, a disproportionate percentage of post-9/11 plots have involved planes and airports, even though trains, buses, shopping malls and other low-security targets would seem like more logical places to wreak havoc. Why this is I'm not sure - force of habit? a desire to disrupt global transportation? the symbolic appeal of striking at one of Western modernity's more visible technological achievements? - but it's something to keep in mind when you're suffering through the agonies of airport security.

The Politics of Fear

Color me underwhelmed by the social science research cited by John Judis in this article, which purports to show how sub-rational responses associated with the fear of mortality explain the political success of George W. Bush specifically, and social conservatism more generally, in the wake of 9/11. On the one hand, it seems unsurprising to the point of banality to suggest that a heightened awareness of one's own mortality can increase the attraction of religious traditionalism, in-group solidarity, and so forth. On the other hand, the specific examples Judis cites to demonstrate how these psycho-political tendencies have impacted the politics of the last six years seem tissue-thin:

For instance, because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives ... and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage. This may well explain why family values became more salient in 2004--a year in which voters were supposed to be unusually focused on foreign policy--than it had been from 1992 through 2000. Indeed, from 2001 to 2004, polls show an increase in opposition to abortion and gay marriage, along with a growing religiosity. According to Gallup, the percentage of voters who believed abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2002 and would still be at 19 percent in 2004. Even church attendance by atheists, according to one poll, increased from 3 to 10 percent from August to November 2001.

Moving backward point by point, there's no evidence that the post-9/11 spike in church attendance persisted beyond a very narrow window of time. On an issue where polls vary as wildly as they do on abortion, a three percentage-point swing would seem to be at most barely meaningful, and probably just statistical noise. Maybe the debate over gay marriage was more salient in 2004 than 1996 because of "worldview defense" in the wake of 9/11, but Occam's Razor would suggest that a certain Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, and the predictable public backlash against judicial activism that ensued, might have had at least something to do with it. (Gay marriage wasn't much of an issue in the '02 midterms, you'll recall, when "worldview defense" should have been at its height.)

The rising hostility toward illegal aliens sounds like a better example of what Judis's researchers are talking about, since immediately after 9/11 there was a spike in the percentage of Americans who suggested that we should admit fewer immigrants every year. But by the time immigration surfaced as a major political controversy, in the autumn of last year, the numbers had settled back to around pre-9/11 levels, which suggests that the salience of the issue lately has far more to do with normal politics - specifically, voter hostility to a sweeping immigration reform proposal championed by none other than President Bush - than with some atavistic hangover from September 11.

Finally, I don't know how much outright "rage" there was toward France and Germany - I think it was more a question of people jumping at the chance to crack jokes about effete, weaselly Europeans - but sure, the whole "freedom fries," pouring-out-French-wine business was dumb and chauvinistic, so I'll give that one to Judis. It doesn't change the fact that much of his piece seems like typical liberal heavy breathing about how certain voter preferences - for security over liberty, and tradition over experimentation - are illegitimate and dangerous because they tend to favor conservatives, and because they helped George W. Bush win re-election.

Undoing 1707?

Is it my recent trip to Scotland (where the above, totally un-ridiculous photo was snapped; that's the tartan of Clan Burberry I'm wearing around my head, I believe), my affection for Braveheart and Rob Roy, or my undying loyalty to the House of Stuart that keeps me intrigued by the progress of the Scottish National Party?

Which ever it is, Alex Massie (your source for all things Scottish, and a confirmed Braveheart-hater, the philistine) has the relevant details and analysis.

Wanted: A Political Strategy

Max Boot has a long piece in the next Commentary that's essentially a critique of every available plan for rapid or semi-rapid withdrawal from Iraq, followed by a brief defense of the surge. He concludes:

Notwithstanding some positive preliminary results, the surge might still fail in the long run if Iraqis prove incapable of reaching political compromises even in a more secure environment. But, for all its faults and weaknesses, the surge is the least bad option we have. Its opponents, by contrast, have been loudly trying to beat something with nothing. If they do not like President Bush’s chosen strategy, the onus is on them to propose a credible alternative that could avert what would in all probability be the most serious military defeat in our history. So far, they have come up empty.

This is not satisfactory. Those of us on the fence about the surge are well aware of the potential consequences of withdrawal, but we are also aware that at some point, unwinnable wars must be given up as lost. As bad as admitting defeat would be, it's preferable to asking thousands more Americans to die for what ends up being judged a mistake. Avoiding that outcome, as Boot and the rest of the surge's proponents acknowledge, requires a political solution that seems, for now at least, to be beyond the grasp of the Iraqi government. So if we are to continue on our current path, we need to have less talk about the dangers of the alternative military approaches, and more talk about our options on the political front. Merely saying that "it's up to the Iraqis" and referencing the ghost of Ngo Dinh Diem as a warning against too-overt American meddling is unsufficient. If we're risking further American casualties on a high-risk military strategy in the hopes of averting defeat, we need to be prepared to consider high-risk political options as well. I don't know what these options might be - moving up the elections? a soft partition? - but if they don't exist, or if Boot and other surge proponents are too cautious to argue in their favor, then the surge's opponents will win the debate by default, and deservedly so.

Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense.

Office-Seeking, Ctd.

I wanted to say a bit more on Matt's post on careerism in the foreign policy community, particularly this passage:

There are plenty of positions for people interested in foreign policy and national security issues that aren't like that -- there are career jobs in the foreign service, the intelligence agencies, and the military. There's also academia. But if you aren't as interested in serving your country or pursuing disinterested scholarship as you are in trying to get a political appointment, it might be a great idea to secure a post as a Brookings or CSIS fellow. Which is fine on one level, obviously, those jobs need to be filled ... But what I didn't understand years ago, and that many people still don't understand today, is that this means these people are, in fact, politicians rather than scholars or analysts

He goes on to write that "you find a much higher level of candor and intellectual honest[y] when you look for experts who aren't life-long job seekers," and cites as examples "guys like Rand Beers and Richard Clarke and Flynt Leverett who were all professionals who had jobs until they quit them because the Bush administration was determined to steer the ship of state into the rocks." I think you can debate the extent to which Clarke and Leverett, in particular, might have had careerist motivations for quitting their jobs (and even Beers' resignation, while impressively principled, ended up setting him up to be National Security Adviser in a hypothetical Kerry administration), but even granting their intellectual honesty, these guys are well known precisely because it's so rare for career bureaucrats, whether in the foreign service or the intelligence community or wherever, to break ranks with whatever administration they're serving. If anything, the pressures of careerism seem stronger among the professionals than in the world of office-seekers.

Continue reading "Office-Seeking, Ctd." »

Beauchamp, One More Time

In a graphic illustration of how the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal is tearing Washington apart, neoconservative and sometime-TNR contributor Eli Lake more or less agrees with me about the significance of the Beauchamp controversy, while neoconservative and sometime-TNR contributor Charles Krauthammer agrees with Ace of Spades and company.

The most telling moment in Lake's conversation with Mike Crowley, I think, comes when Lake says something about Beauchamp being a creep, and Crowley responds that he doesn't really know the guy, but that his wife, the TNR staffer Elspeth Reeve, is "absolutely the sweetest person that I know." This could be construed as further support for the "Frank Foer is risking his magazine's reputation and his job because he doesn't want to tell a junior staffer that her husband is a liar" theory of the case. But it really suggests, once again, that this was a case of a magazine giving a break to a young writer not because his work "fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar left," as Krauthammer would have it, but because the young writer's likeable wife asked them to. They got burned as a result, and deservedly so. But not because they hate America.

Thank You, You May Be Quiet Now

Having said what I just said, TNR's inappropriate silence on what to do about Iraq today is vastly preferable to Michael Ignatieff's ridiculously prolix mea culpa for having supported the invasion in the first place. I'm with Poulos:

... like many people Ignatieff's piece left me with ... a creeping sensation of dread, an actual intellectual dampness and a dankness of the soul. Rarely does one see so many grotesquely obsequious yet arrogantly obtuse self-assurances crammed into a single apology.

Indeed. This is one of those rare cases where the ranting, pleased-with-itself HuffPo takedown of the piece more or less spoke to my feelings as well.

The Captive Mind

While linking to a Jason Steorts dispatch from Tibet, John Derbyshire writes:

One of the most depressing things about the Tibet story is that is shows the power of propaganda. If a totalitarian state tells its people X for half a century, permitting no other point of view, people will end up believing X, however patently false X may be. Ordinary Chinese people are baffled if you suggest that the Chinese authorities give Tibet independence, or at least genuine autonomy. "But Tibet has always been a part of China," they say, genuinely surprised that you don't know this "fact." Obvious ripostes ( e.g. "If Tibet has always been a part of China, how come they don't speak Chinese?") bounce right off.

On a related theme, I was having drinks last week with a journalist who's spent the last five years in China, and he was remarking on the widespread Chinese ignorance of what, exactly, happened at Tiananmen Square. It's something that he's frequently asked about by young Chinese, he said, and when he tells the story, the response often goes something like this: "Well, then it's a really good thing the government covered it up, because otherwise there would have been a revolution."

Of course, given the history of what revolutions have meant for China over the last two centuries, this isn't quite as morally callous as it sounds at first.

A Question of Motives

Matt, on the Pollack-O'Hanlon pro-surge op-ed:

... it's worth noting the incentives that O'Hanlon and Pollack face. If they bow to reality and say the US should move rapidly to start cutting our losses in Iraq, then they're people who advocated in favor of a disastrous policy and this'll be bad for their careers. If, by contrast, they say the surge is looking good, and then work together with Bush administration officials and The Weekly Standard to construct a stab in the back narrative about Iraq, then they can hope to salvage their professional reputations at the expense of liberals.

I think the professional incentives cut in precisely the opposite direction. O'Hanlon and Pollack's current reputations depend on their perceived status as centrist wise men who write for places like, well, the Atlantic. Associating themselves with the dwindling faction that still hopes for victory in Iraq, or with a "stab in the back" narrative once the war is over, might make them popular guests on the right-wing talk show circuit, but it's likely to undercut their current status in the D.C. commentariat, not enhance it. From a professional standpoint, it would be far safer for them to take a Peter Beinartesque route, apologize for their mistakes, and bash Bush whenever the subject of Iraq comes up than to associate themselves with a strategy that only Bill Kristol, Joe Lieberman and David Petraeus seem to think has any chance of succeeding. That's what the "serious" people and would-be wise men on the center-left are doing these days, so far as I can tell - backing a (very slow) withdrawal from Iraq, while concentrating their fire on both the precipitous-withdrawal crowd and the proponents of the surge. And besides, isn't a common complaint on the anti-war left (and right) that hawkish pundits who reverse course don't suffer, career-wise, for having "advocated in favor of a disastrous policy"?

There are personal incentives - the desire to be vindicated against all odds chief among them - that cut in favor of O'Hanlon and Pollack supporting the surge, to be sure. But unless they define professional success as a sinecure somewhere in the vast right-wing conspiracy, which I doubt, I don't think they can be accused of careerism.

Update: Jon Chait makes a similar point.

The Blame Game

Robert Novak:

Karl Rove, President Bush's political lieutenant, told a closed-door meeting of 2008 Republican House candidates and their aides Tuesday that it was less the war in Iraq than corruption in Congress that caused their party's defeat in the 2006 elections.

Rove's clear advice to the candidates is to distance themselves from the culture of Washington. Specifically, Republican candidates are urged to make clear they have no connection with disgraced congressmen such as Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley.
In effect, Rove was rebutting the complaint inside the party that George W. Bush is responsible for Republican miseries by invading Iraq.

Obviously I find this rebuttal less-than-convincing. (How many people, I wonder, have even heard of Duke Cunningham?) But while Rove is wrong, he isn't all wrong. The important thing to recognize is that all of the GOP's problems in '06 - Iraq, Katrina, and scandals in DC - reinforced one another, fitting easily into a single overarching narrative of misgovernment, incompetence, fecklessness and corruption. Or put another way, the Republican Party found itself on the ropes from '05 onward because of Iraq (and the rising appeal of a a new-model populism), and first the Katrina response and then the various Beltway scandals, from Abramoff to Foley, were the body blows that kept them there.

Going forward, though, the notion that Congressional Republicans need to mainly worry about distancing themselves from Capitol Hill corruption, rather than the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, is at best unpersuasive, at worst absurd. Sure, the lingering memory of scandal will probably play some role in the '08 race, but voters' memories are short, particularly once a party loses power. (The indictment of Dan Rostenkowski wasn't a big issue in the '96 and '98 elections, for instance.) At the very least, Foley and Abramoff and Cunningham won't be in the public's face in '08 the way they were in the midterms. Whereas Iraq will be.

TTWOU?

Is it just me, or is the Giuliani campaign's insistence on renaming the post-9/11 conflict with al Qaeda "the Terrorists' War on Us" easily the worst coinage of this election season? It doesn't just tie up the tongue; it makes it sound like America's in a defensive crouch and getting pummeled, which is hardly the image that Rudy's "peace through ass-kicking" candidacy is trying to project. The "War on Terror" is dumb for all kinds of reasons, but at least it's pro-active.

Dangerous Nation (II)

I am, however, in agreement with Robert Kagan when he argues that American predominance will persist long after the Iraq War:

... foreign policy failures do not necessarily undermine predominance. Some have suggested that failure in Iraq would mean the end of predominance and unipolarity. But a superpower can lose a war — in Vietnam or in Iraq — without ceasing to be a superpower if the fundamental international conditions continue to support its predominance. So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy and the predominant military power, so long as the American public continues to support American predominance as it has consistently for six decades, and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: one superpower and many great powers.

One note of caution, though: Kagan persistently refers to our main potential challengers, China and Russia, as "autocratic" nations, which strikes me as a confusion of terms. And this confusion makes him less attuned than perhaps he should be to the possibility that the current Chinese model of government, in particular, might increasingly inspire sympathy (and emulation) as well as fear. I'm no China expert, obviously, but it seems to me that the People's Republic has moved steadily away from the autocratic model of Mao and Deng, and toward what might be described as a one-party meritocracy - a rule by the best and the brightest in which the path to power for a talented individual is open enough to co-opt precisely the kind of people who would ordinarily be leading agitators for democracy. Whether this model is sustainable in the long run remains to be seen, but if you're a developing nation looking for a path to modernization (or, perhaps, a particularly anti-populist EU bureaucrat), the Chinese system promises all the benefits of liberal democratic capitalism without the messiness of, well, democracy. I'm still enough of a Fukuyaman, even now, to suspect that China will eventually democratize, but in an unstable world with an interconnected global elite, I think we underestimate the ideological appeal of an undemocratic meritocracy at our peril.

Dangerous Nation (I)

Robert Kagan:

Historians will long debate the decision to go to war in Iraq, but what they are least likely to conclude is that the intervention was wildly out of character for the United States. Since the end of World War II at least, American presidents of both parties have pursued a fairly consistent approach to the world. They have regarded the United States as the “indispensable nation” and the “locomotive at the head of mankind.” They have amassed power and influence and deployed them in ever-widening arcs around the globe on behalf of interests, ideals, and ambitions, both tangible and intangible. Since 1945 Americans have insisted on acquiring and maintaining military supremacy, a “preponderance of power” in the world rather than a balance of power with other nations. They have operated on the ideological conviction that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government and that other forms of government are not only illegitimate but transitory. They have declared their readiness to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation” by forces of oppression, to “pay any price, bear any burden” to defend freedom, to seek “democratic enlargement” in the world, and to work for the “end of tyranny.” They have been impatient with the status quo. They have seen America as a catalyst for change in human affairs, and they have employed the strategies and tactics of “maximalism,” seeking revolutionary rather than gradual solutions to problems. Therefore, they have often been at odds with the more cautious approaches of their allies.

This is true but deceptive. Yes, every American President since 1945, and several before it, have shared similar premises (at least publicly) and employed similar rhetoric about the United States' role in the world. But our chief executives have differed significantly in how they went about implementing the "indispensible nation" vision that Kagan limns in this passage. America's finest postwar Presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan, were distinguished by their restraint in the use of military force; they intervened frequently around the world, yes, but surgically rather than sweepingly, and they deliberately avoided investing large numbers of American soldiers to open-ended commitments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Bush, by contrast, seems likely to be remembered as part of a tradition of American overreach that runs from the Phillipine-American War through Woodrow Wilson, the decision to drive to the Yalu in Korea, the disastrous slow-motion escalation in Vietnam, and now the attempt to democratize Iraq. If you abstract far enough upward, Bush is squarely in the post-WWII American foreign-policy tradition. But so is every President before him, which suggests that abstracting this far hides the distinctions that make all the difference.

A Modest Proposal

Via Larison, here's Jim Pinkerton:

... with all due respect to former Vice President Al Gore, we might as well just say it bluntly: Muslims with atomic weapons are a greater threat to America than global warming.

When kids see "Harry Potter," they should be thinking first about defending their country, and their civilization, against evildoers wielding weapons of mass destruction. After that's taken care of, they can then worry more about carbon dioxide.

Or perhaps left and right could agree that children should be brought up to live in fear of neither global warming nor weapons of mass destruction. Would that be too much to ask?

The Truth Will Set You Free

James Poulos:

... instead of fearing a revolt that will never come, Republicans running for president should do Ron Paul one better and carry out the smartest preemptive attack ever conceived -- pledging as a central part of their campaigns to abandon Bush on Iraq, immigration, and big government. Within the party, only Iraq will be a pill that goes down sideways, at least at first. But watch. Repudiating the president is so firmly grounded in fact and prudence that it will be contagious. What the candidates have already gotten away with, in the way of tepid criticism of tactics in Iraq, has gone over like a dream. Mitt Romney's more adventurous knocks against Bush's leadership have gone unanswered. This is because everyone knows they are accurate. They want more. They want to stop living a public lie. Instead of the national reign of fear predicted by the president's leftist critics, it is the political right that suffers silently in dread. This is a needless shame and waste, and the clock is ticking. Repudiating Bush everywhere he has erred will be something like going to confession. The great wave of relief to come will power the energy needed to turn from defending the indefensible by awkward half-measures to promoting in full measure true conservative government.

No Republican candidate who hopes to win the nomination can join the Dick Lugars of the world in hinting at phased withdrawal from Iraq, not so long as the base still believes in victory as strongly as it does. But one could imagine a leading contender at least taking a line suggested by this Rich Lowry post - defending the current military strategy in Iraq and holding out hope for victory, that is, while simultaneously attacking not only the President's handling of the war (as McCain has done explicitly, and others have implicitly) but his unconservative ideological premises as well. Yes to Petraeus, in other words, but no to Bush. It's not the full Poulos, but it's something.

Knifed In the Ankle?

Jonah chides me for lending legitimacy to the comparison, which he suggests is implied by the term "stabbed in the back," between American conservatives today (or after Vietnam) and post-World War I German right-wingers. This was certainly not my intention: I didn't mean to "gamely go along" with any such comparison, but merely to acknowledge what I think is the self-evident reality that many conservatives blamed our defeat in Vietnam on liberals who undermined the war effort at home, and that a similar narrative seems to be developing on the Right where Iraq is concerned. If there's a better, less historically-loaded shorthand for this narrative than "stabbed in the back," I'm happy to propagate it. But while obviously there are lefties who would love to draw the Republicans-to-Nazis analogy, I think the term has a general application that's independent of the connotations Jonah imputes to it. (For instance, when Max Boot - no Iraq-War dove or liberal lapdog he! - wrote a column criticizing this narrative earlier this year, he used precisely the same language, writing that "Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America's valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.")

Jonah also writes:

I think Ross is basically wrong when he says that the Vietnam syndrome didn't help conservatives. Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, become the party of American confidence. "Morning in America" makes little sense without Vietnam.

I didn't mean to imply that the need to kick the Vietnam syndrome, get back on our feet and start kicking ass again wasn't part of the narrative that Republicans rode to power in the 1980s; obviously it was. But I think that when this narrative was deployed most successfully, by Reagan and others, it didn't involve blaming liberals for losing Vietnam so much as it involved blaming them for being overly traumatized by our defeat and acquiescing to American decline as a result of that trauma. It's a subtle distinction, maybe, but I think an important one.

The Stab in the Back

Two out of two Matts agree: If the U.S. pulls out of Iraq or fails to bomb Iran, the "stab in the back" narrative is going to become the centerpiece of a revived post-Bush conservatism, and progressives need to steel themselves to combat it.

Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance. Yes, many conservatives have long nursed the belief that we could have won in Vietnam if liberals hadn't turned gutless and anti-American, but this belief hasn't won the Right any elections: Not in a country where large majorities consistently say that the Vietnam War wasn't worth fighting. The association of conservatism with foreign-policy strength and liberalism with foreign-policy weakness emerged from the Vietnam era, true, but it emerged because the trauma of Vietnam pushed liberalism to the left of the country on foreign policy and defense in general, not because the majority of Americans were mad at liberals for losing Indochina specifically. (They were more likely to be mad at liberals for getting us into the mess in the first place.) And the successful conservative foreign-policy rhetoric of the last forty years has traded on Democratic weakness in the face of the Soviet/Islamist threat, not on rehashing the battles of 1966-75. Ronald Reagan didn't go around giving speeches about the Tet Offensive and the Treason of Walter Cronkite - he talked about Iran or Afghanistan, Star Wars or defense spending, Central America or the Berlin Wall. So when Dinesh D'Souza tells conservative cruisegoers that "it's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'? ... The left won by demanding America's humiliation," he isn't broadening conservatism's base - he's shrinking it. Which is what a post-Bush conservatism that obsesses over how the liberal media undid the Iraq Occupation by failing to "report the good news" would do as well.

America The Fortunate

In our enemies, that is. The latest group of terror plotters seem to be smarter than the idiots from New Jersey who were planning to attack Fort Dix - at the very least, they picked a more intelligent target to go after than a military base - but geniuses they aren't. Here's one of them explaining why hitting JFK Airport would be more damaging to America than the attack on the twin towers:

"Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow ... they love John F. Kennedy like he's the man ... if you hit that, this whole country will be mourning. You can kill the man twice," Defreitas said in another conversation.

Yep, they've got America figured out, all right ...

Wrong But Popular

Reviewing Bob Shrum's book, and discussing Shrum's now-famous admission that he convinced John Edwards and John Kerry "to opportunistically endorse a war they knew was wrong," Matt writes:

Indeed, in retrospect what’s shocking about the miscalculation on the war vote is less its simplistic nature—the war authorizing resolution was high-profile and popular, so Shrum advised his clients to vote for it. But neither Kerry nor Edwards was in a tough 2002 reelection battle. It didn’t matter whether or not the resolution was popular. A politician who took a stand against it would have two years to wait for events to vindicate his view. As, indeed, the skepticism about the war that Shrum attributes to Kerry and Edwards was vindicated by election day 2004. Which might have done them some good had they actually made the right call. The view that good policy is good politics sounds sappy and naive, but on this kind of issue it’s true—the first thing you need to ask yourself when trying to decide whether or not backing some invasion will be politically savvy is what you think will happen if the invasion actually takes place.

The only flaw in this line of reasoning is that it's possible to think that a war will prove both misguided and enduringly popular. Maybe, as Matt suggests, Kerry and Edwards thought that Iraq would be a disastrous mess by 2004, in which case he's right: Their votes made no sense as policy or politics. But maybe they thought that the Iraq War was a bad idea because the doctrine of pre-emption set a dangerous precedent, or because they thought that invading Iraq was a distraction from the hunt for Bin Laden, or because they feared long-term blowback from further U.S. adventures in the Middle East - all of which would have been reasonable reasons to oppose the war, but none of which would have given them confidence that they would be vindicated in the court of public opinion any time soon. Opponents of the First Gulf War, for instance, would argue that the events of 9/11 vindicated their concerns - because the Gulf War created a permanent U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, providing grist for anti-Americanism across the Islamic world - but there hasn't been a massive post-9/11 backlash against George H.W. Bush or Brent Scowcroft, to say the least. Or to take a more remote example, I'm inclined to think that our intervention in the First World War was a strategic mistake and that both the Spanish-American War and the Mexican War violated just-war principles - but had I been an anti-war politician in 1914 or 1899 or 1846 I would have suffered politically for taking these stances, regardless of whether I was right on the merits.

Nobody can know for sure, obviously - and Edwards' own explanation of his vote for war, as Matt points out, is further muddling the issue - but I suspect something like this thought process was at work in the Shrumian assumption that opposing the invasion of Iraq made for bad politics.

Peace With Honor II

A commenter points out that to compare the 1968 election to '08, and public opinion on Vietnam to public opinion on Iraq, you have to factor in the role of the Tet Offensive: Support for the Vietnam War was higher in 1967 than support for the Iraq War is in 2007, but Tet hadn't happened yet, and when it did it drove the "Vietnam was a mistake" numbers way up.

Here is a useful (if somewhat difficult-to-parse) comparison, from 2005, of public opinion on Vietnam versus Iraq; the Vietnam data starts in August 1965; the Iraq data in March 2003:

After the Tet Offensive, the percentage of the public saying that the Vietnam War was a mistake rose from around forty percent toward fifty percent, reaching 53 percent in August of 1968 (If James Joyner's analysis of this data is right) and continuing to rise slowly throughout the Nixon years. (However, the "mistake" numbers for Vietnam didn't reach today's "Iraq was a mistake" levels until around 1973, five years after the first Nixon campaign). So the Iraq War will be about 5-10 percentage points more unpopular in this election than the Vietnam War was during the '68 race - assuming, that is, that the Iraq War numbers don't worsen (or improve) in the next six months.

Update: More thoughts from Jonah here.

Peace With Honor

Jonah makes the point that Nixon could make his appeal for an honorable end to the war in Vietnam because his right-wing, hawkish bona fides were unimpeachable, and adds that since none of the current crop of Democrats have the national-security chops to pull a Nixon in '08, "the most likely candidate to run the most persuasive Nixonian strategy would be one of several Republicans." I'm not sure. Given where the GOP base seems to be, I doubt a "peace with honor" candidate on the Republican side would get much traction in the primary field, however hawkish he might be on other fronts. And while Jonah's right that the none of the Dems have anywhere near the hawkish cred that Nixon enjoyed, the Iraq War is so much more unpopular going into '08 than the Vietnam War was going into 1968 - 61 percent of Americans think the Iraq War was a mistake as of this month, whereas in July of 1967 only 41 percent of Americans thought sending troops to Indochina had been a mistake - that the Democrats may not need as much foreign-policy credibility as Nixon enjoyed to run a successful "peace with honor" campaign.

28,000 Words Later

I did it. I read - with, okay, some skimming here and there - Paul Berman's behemoth of an essay on Tariq Ramadan. And you know what? There's a pretty good piece buried under all those words, one that uses Ian Buruma's favorable treatment of Ramadan, and his unfavorable treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to illustrate the tendency of Western liberals to prefer Islamists of a seemingly-moderate stripe to anti-Islamists, like Ali, who seem too strident. Such a piece would have been a valuable contribution to the debate over whether Western liberalism should seek dialogue with the more moderate elements within political Islam - with Ramadan a prime example - or pursue confrontation instead, along the lines suggested by Ali. I'm by no means certain which side of that debate I'm on, Buruma's or Berman's, but that's all the more reason for TNR to run an essay that contributes substantially to the argument.

But such a piece could have been about, oh, I don't know, 5,000 words long. A 28,000-word essay, by contrast, needs to do more than raise troubling questions about Tariq Ramadan (which Berman successfully does); it needs to demolish him, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the debt he owes to Qutbian thought and beyond Qutb to National Socialism, to lay bare his sympathies for global jihad and expose his desire to bring the whole edifice of European liberalism crashing down. It needs to include more meat, less hemming and hawing ("I have no way to resolve this quandary, except to hazard a guess that all these writers, friend and foe alike, may have arrived at a truth ...), fewer forays into portentous speculation ("And does he dream in secret of something larger? Maybe he does, on some theological level, which would not be unusual. All great religions dream great (and dangerous) dreams") and equally portentous understatement ("a fascist label, or some reasonably similar term, seems faintly applicable--or more than faintly--even now ...). It needs to include, above all, fewer passages like this one:

Caroline Fourest, in Brother Tariq, makes the argument that, in the end, the ambiguity in Ramadan's outlook can only serve to confer legitimacy on the revolutionary Islamist idea, which is willy-nilly bound, in turn, to elevate ever so slightly terrorism's prestige. Fourest pictures a young man from North Africa in France, attending a lecture by Ramadan, and she wonders what ideas somebody like that might take away. Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, scoffs at Fourest's argument and observes that, for all the accusations against Ramadan, nothing has ever been proved, and out of the many thousands of people who have in fact attended his lectures, only a single person, a man from the Lyon district, is known to have ended up in Al Qaeda's Afghan training camps. Who is right in this dispute?

Hamel, the scoffer, would carry the day in a court of law. Still, it is easy to imagine that, in a small way, Fourest may be on to something.

"Ever so slightly ... it is easy to imagine ... in some small way." When Berman writes of Ramadan's discussion of Salafist terror that "a veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether," he could just as easily be describing his own essay, which builds up great expectations but turns out to include nothing that could not have been argued more tightly, more briskly, and more convincingly at a fifth the length.

The Iraq Endgame

Rich Lowry reports that "an influential Republican strategist" tells him that "if Iraq looks the way it does now in September, Bush will lose about 25 Senate Republicans on a bill with some sort of timetable for withdrawal." Meanwhile, via Rod Dreher comes this (possibly dubious, obviously) nugget about the President's mindset:

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

For some time now, George W. Bush's determination not to give an inch on Iraq has made it ever more likely that his successor will take office with a large American force still deployed in that country - which has in turn made it ever more likely that we'll still be occupying Mesopotamia, in some sense at least, deep into a Clinton or an Obama Presidency. No matter what they're saying about withdrawal now, I suspect that if either of the main Democratic contenders inherits a substantial occupation, they'll sustain it longer than anyone suspects - out of inertia, out of fear of the alternatives, out of hope that a corner will get turned and they can claim the credit, and for a host of other reasons as well. (Many of these same forces, you'll recall, kept America in Vietnam for seven long years after Nixon was elected promising to end the war.)

Continue reading "The Iraq Endgame" »

Rudy the Libertarian

David Boaz points out that he isn't one. Matt points out that this calls into question the Boaz thesis that there's a large "libertarian vote" out there waiting to be claimed. Rather, Matt writes, "there's a medium-sized constituency for lower taxes plus less government regulation of sex," which is basically what Rudy's selling when he isn't talking about terrorism and 9/11.

Andy Ferguson, as usual, got here first, when he pointed out that Rudy has positioned himself as the candidate of "every voter who is at once pro-choice and pro-war, pro-gay rights and pro-Patriot Act, against guns and in favor of privatizing Social Security." Whatever else this is, it shouldn't be confused with libertarianism.

The Democrats and the War

Matt writes:

To me, the only real explanation for Democratic behavior is this. The party's leadership and political thinkers simply can't conceive of national security issues as anything other than a source of potential political problems to be coped with, never as a set of potential political opportunities. Since congress can't unilaterally end the war, then, there's no reason to have a confrontation with Bush; national security debates are just pure downside. Overwhelming polling data backing the liberal position isn't a reason to go on offense, it's a reason to think Democrats can succeed in slinking away.

I know the conventional wisdom on the left is that all the Republican politicians who are talking about September as a hard deadline for the surge to show results will end up falling in line behind Bush when the crucial moment arrives. But if the GOP is still staring at numbers like these come the fall, well, I don't are how many Victory Caucuses Hugh Hewitt founds, a lot more Republicans besides Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith are going to decide that Iraq isn't worth their jobs, and as Rod says, the end-the-war wind will be at the Democrats' back from then on out.

From my "give the surge a chance" point of view, waiting till the fall is the right thing to do, and from the country's perspective there's a lot to be said for having a controversial occupation come to an end under something approaching bipartisan auspices. From a purely partisan-Democratic point of view, though, I take Matt's point: If the Democratic Party were conditioned to think of foreign-policy debates as things to be won, rather than avoided, I don't think you would have seen so swift a climb-down on a question where public opinion is clearly on their side, and I certainly don't think you would have seen so much fretting in the Democratic ranks about the need to get a bill to Bush's desk by Memorial Day Weekend. E.J. Dionne is right that ultimately, the Dems can't end the war without defunding the troops, and they aren't going to do that (yet) - but he's also right that as a matter of tactics, the Democrats had more to gain than to lose by forcing an unpopular President to veto popular legislation at least one more time. It's hard not to think that if the Republicans had a wartime issue where 63 percent of the country agreed with them - which is the percentage of the public that wants a timetable for leaving Iraq - they would be thinking more about how to go for the jugular, and less about the risks associated with having a President whose approval rating is mired in the low 30s accuse them of being unpatriotic over a holiday weekend.

Two Faces of Libertarianism

It's interesting that the most compelling moment of the Presidential campaign so far involved a face-off between Rudy Giuliani and Ron Paul, because the two men demonstrate just how much two candidates can diverge on policy matters and still both be cast as the "libertarian" in the race. Paul is a libertarian of process and results, you might say: He wants a system of government designed to maximize individual freedom, which to his mind involves a return to lost constitutional principles that strictly circumscribe what the federal government can and cannot do. Giuliani, by contrast, is a libertarian of results alone, and only on certain issues. He wants to maximize "reproductive freedom," for instance, and doesn't care if doing so involves ceding enormous authority to unelected judges; he wants taxes to be low, but doesn't question the principle of income taxation (as Paul does), and so forth. On other issues, meanwhile, he's decidedly authoritarian, which is why it's passing strange to see so many self-described libertarian conservatives - Ryan Sager, for instance - swooning for a guy who has the potential to be Dick Cheney Part II on civil liberties, except with a zest for gun control thrown in.

Passing strange, but perhaps a sign of which face of libertarianism has the broader appeal these days. When the Davids (Boaz and Kirby) at Cato did their analysis of the "libertarian vote", they largely bracketed questions about foreign policy and the national security state, and defined their subjects as voters committed to "economic dynamism and social tolerance" - a description, not coincidentally, that fits Giuliani to a tee. Insofar as there's a constituency for something called "libertarianism," then, it may be a constituency that's comfortable with the sort of libertarianism that Rudy represents, authoritarian tendencies and all. In the world of think tanks and punditry, there are plenty of libertarians (Andrew, for instance) who find Rudy's views on social issues appealing and his views on civil liberties appalling, but I'm not sure there are that many voters who share that consistency. Instead, it seems - at least based on Giuliani's poll numbers compared to Ron Paul's - that a libertarianism that's pro-choice, pro-growth and pro-"enhanced interrogation techniques" is the only libertarianism that has any mass appeal these days.

Of course, one could argue that a libertarianism that's comfortable with wiretaps, gun bans, waterboarding and so forth is no libertarianism at all - which is why when John Tabin frets about whether libertarianism "can survive Ron Paul," I think he's somewhat missing the point. If anything, the question is whether a principled, consistent libertarianism (which I don't endorse, but do admire) can survive Rudy Giuliani, whose candidacy may invite Americans with libertarian inclinations to accept an expansive interpretation of executive power and a dim view of civil liberties in exchange for lower dividend tax rates and the right to abortion - and may demonstrate that this is a trade that today's "libertarian" voters are happy to make.

Apocalypse Now

I hope I am not being unkind to our sister publication when I say that I find National Journal's cover story on American decline almost entirely unpersuasive. Or rather, I find it persuasive that the Iraq War, the rise of China, and growing anti-Americanism from Moscow to Caracas are reducing American influence relative to where it stood in, say, the late 1990s or early 2003. But this is not at all the same thing as the beginning of the end of the American era. Yes, we may not be a "lone superpower leading the world" forever, but we weren't a "lone superpower" from 1945 till 1991, and yet that span of time is still regarded, rightly, as part of the "American Century." Great powers often acquire rivals, and even get defeated by rivals for that matter, without being understood as being in decline: nobody dates the beginning of Rome's eclipse to Crassus's defeat by the Parthians at Carrhae, and the heyday of the British Empire still had over a hundred years to run when they were beaten by the Franco-American alliance in the the 1770s. The fact that, say, India and Brazil "don't hesitate to assert narrow national interests that often have little to do with Washington's agenda" tells us very little about whether America's headed for a long-term slide, any more than the mere existence of France, Austria, Spain and Prussia spelled Gibbonesque doom for the eighteenth-century Britain.

Both neoconservatives and their foes, it's worth pointing out, have a vested interest in inflating the current crisis: The neoconservatives because it lets them argue that defeat in Iraq means defeat for all time, the realists and liberals because it lets them suggest that their wise counsel is all that stands between us and a Bush-created abyss. But while this is a tough moment for America, no question, it's still the case that we'll probably leave Iraq with our long-term advantages - economic, military, geographic, demographic - over our rivals more or less intact. And for all the current polarization, we're enduring almost none of the kind of internal instability that actually did make our institutions totter in the early 1970s. So maybe everyone - from the Zbigniew Brzesinskis who think that our Iran policy leaves us "one miscalculation away from catastrophe" to the Donald Kagans who claim that "our very existence could be at risk" if we pull out of Iraq - should take a deep breath and lay off the doomsaying. (Though to be fair to them, the NJ piece starts out with an apocalyptic frame, and clearly went out looking for quotes to suit that theme.)

Also, it's a small point, but I really don't follow this bit:

Could the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI have guessed, awakening to the sound of battle trumpets on a May morning in A.D. 1453 to find a Turkish fleet amassed outside his city walls and Turkish soldiers tunneling under his city, that the scales of history hung in the balance? Probably not.

You know, I bet he had a pretty good idea. And when we wake up with a Chinese fleet in San Francisco Bay and Hugo Chavez's air force bombing Florida, I'll be happy to admit that the American era hangs in the balance. (And also, that Rick Santorum was more prescient than anyone ever imagined.)

Where Are The Realists?

I think Andrew is getting a little too excited by the Ron Paul phenomenon. The idea that Paul should be removed from the debates is ludicrous, obviously - so much for that vaunted Republican intellectual diversity! But while it's interesting to have Paul's hard isolationism represented in the conversation, his views don't come close to representing a viable present-day alternative to Bush-style crusading interventionism; he's a curiosity rather than a serious corrective. Indeed, the attention that Paul's getting isn't, pace Andrew, a sign of the hidden strength of conservative opposition to Bush's Iraq policy - it's a sign of its weakness, and the vacuum that's opened in what used to be the space between neoconservative interventionism and Paul-style isolationism. Nor are the Hugh Hewitts going after Paul because they're "afraid" of him, as Andrew would have it; they're going after him because he's a poor spokesman for opposition to the Iraq War - sure, it's intellectually consistent to oppose the 2003 invasion and the first Gulf War and the creation of NATO, but it's not a plausible position for the contemporary GOP to take - and because they can use his tendency to stray into deep right field as a way to discredit any criticism of the Bush Administration.

The vacuum that Paul currently occupies is supposed to be filled by an internationally-minded realism. Indeed, it's precisely the coexistence of realism and idealism in Republican foreign policy, the fruitful tension between the two strains of thought, that has long made the GOP the party to be trusted in international relations - because the idealists elevate the realists, and the realists keep the idealists grounded. When the pendulum swings too far in one direction or another, this tension has usually produced a correction, of the kind that, say, the original neocons and then Reagan provided to the cynical machtpolitik of Kissinger. But there's no sign of a realist corrective in the current GOP field: There were ten candidates on that stage besides Ron Paul yesterday night, and not one of them was willing to call the Iraq War a mistake, which seems to me like the place that a serious realist critique of his Presidency's foreign policy needs to begin.

It's a sorry, sorry sign for Republican foreign-policy realism that the closest thing to a champion it has on the national stage is Chuck Hagel - a self-promoting buffoon, so far as I can tell, and a politician whose grasp of current foreign-policy debates leaves much to be desired.

Talent on the Military

Regarding my earlier post on whether we should increase the size of the military, Jim Talent writes in:

Ross Douthat ... disagrees with my claim (in the March 5, 2007, National Review) that the Army should be larger. He asserts that the Army would be adequately sized already if not for the nation building exercise in Iraq, which he does not support. I don’t begrudge him or anyone their discontent with the Iraqi operation but I would point out the following:

Continue reading "Talent on the Military" »

Our Boer War?

Daniel Larison, in the course of arguing - rightly, I think - that Woodrow Wilson's foreign-policy legacy was far more disastrous than George W. Bush's will prove to be, makes a provocative comparison:

As large as Iraq looms on the scene today, as politically significant as the war is today, and as much as it will sour the public on intervention in the near future, I think we may be surprised at how quickly the effects of the war pass away and recede into the distance. Calamitous and awful as it has been, it still remains a war on a relatively limited scale and will wind up having a primarily regional impact. It has acquired the prominence that it has because it involves the superpower, but it will ultimately probably possess the historical significance of the Boer War or some other colonial misadventure of the British Empire.

One might also conjure up an analogy from America's own past - our long counter-insurgency in the Phillipines, which dragged on for more than a decade and cost more than 4,000 American and hundred of thousands (!) of Filipino lives, only to be completely forgotten by most people a century later. I've always been partial to the Filipino analogy, but it's worth remembering that the Phillipines, like the Transvaal, was a distinctly peripheral theater in the early 1900s, which substantially reduced the war's ripple effect on geopolitics; Iraq, on the other hand, is rather more centrally located, and sits athwart a region that matters a great deal to the global order (Edward Luttwak's provocations aside), at least until its oil wells run dry. So there's always a chance - albeit a small one, I think - that the Iraq War will prove a prelude to a larger conflagration of some kind, playing the Spanish Civil War to a Mesopotamian World War II.

If no such wider conflagration ensues, though, the best analogy for Iraq may be the one everyone always falls back on already, Vietnam - a war whose geopolitical significance proved negligible in the long run, and whose most profound consequences played themselves out on the American home front.

Oh, and just as Vietnam didn't mean the end of America's status as a global superpower, neither will the Iraq War. That outcome, at least, I'd be happy to put money on.

Uncle Sam Wants You

Let me add my voice to the skepticism about what seems to be the consensus position - running from Rudy through Romney, McCain, Obama, and Hillary - that we need a much larger army. I'm open to the possibility, but I'd like to have the whys of it explained a little bit more clearly.

I know that the Rumsfeld theory - that America needs a smaller, lighter, more-agile military, rather than a bigger one - is assumed to have been discredited by Iraq, but it's only been discredited by Iraq if you think that the U.S. should be committing itself to the pacification and democratization of more large Middle Eastern countries in the near future. This does seem to be the theory of at least some of the proponents of a larger army. For instance, Jim Talent, in a long print mag-only piece for National Review calling for a larger military, framed America's current national-security challenge this way:

Continue reading "Uncle Sam Wants You" »

The Middle East Doesn't Matter

So says Edward Luttwak, writing in the British Prospect. Here's an excerpt:

The third and greatest error repeated by Middle East experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence ("the Arabs only understand force") compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.

Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.

The operational mistake that Middle East experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the Middle East should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.

I can think of a number of problems with this line of argument, not all of them having to do with our dependence on foreign oil. But it's certainly appealing at our present pass. (hat tip: Rod Dreher)

The Seamless Garment of Death

Memo to Dean Barnett: If you're looking to persuade me that torture is a necessary wartime evil, it's probably not a good idea to start by comparing it to abortion and the firebombing of Dresden. Just a thought.

(Mark Shea has a more thorough response to Barnett's weird exercise in right-wing relativism.)

Zero Grazing

Like most conservatives, I'm all for a little hypocrisy now and then - it's the tribute that vice plays to virtue, the glue that holds society together, and all the rest of it. It does seem, though, that the Bush Administration's abstinence advocates have stretched this principle to the breaking point.

I don't really have much to say about the fate of Randall Tobias, the Deputy Secretary of State who seems to have frequented escort services when he wasn't out promoting the ABC method of AIDS prevention ("abstain, be faithful, use a condom"). If you're curious about the question of how best to fight AIDS in Africa, though, I highly recommend this New York Review of Books essay from two years back on Uganda, which has been something of a success story in the effort to drive down HIV rates. The author, Helen Epstein, argues that neither abstinence education nor condom distribution really addresses the root of the problem, which has more to do with the consequences of polygamy, formal and informal, than any other single factor:

Continue reading "Zero Grazing" »

The GOP and History

Robert Novak explains why it may get worse for the Republicans before it gets better:

Continue reading "The GOP and History" »

The Case of Scott Ritter

He makes an appearance in the new Bill Moyers documentary about the press and the war, and Matt flags this quote:

And when I first resigned and spoke out, you know, I was treated as the darling of the right-wing media especially, because it was the time of the Clinton administration. And I was basically Clinton-bashing, or at least that's how they chose to interpret it. When it turned out that I wasn't Clinton-bashing, I was bashing, you know, American policy objectives-- some of which were endorsed by the right wing, the conservative side, I no longer was the darling of the media.

Having been pushed into a corner as a Clinton basher, there are certain elements of the media now that, you know, the analysis put me in another corner, didn't know how to deal with me. So, you're not getting-- the message out. I wrote a book. I made a documentary film. I did everything I could to get the data out there to the public and it wasn't working.

"What can you say?" Matt asks. Well, you can say that Scott Ritter had trouble getting his message out because 1) he took $400,000 from a pro-Saddam Iraqi businessman to fund his documentary film, money that turned out to have been funneled from the Oil-for-Food program, 2) he had been accused of sex crimes about a year before the Iraq War debate started up and 3) the tone of his film, book, articles and testimony tended to be, well, slightly hysterical. (He also insisted repeatedly that he hadn't changed his mind about Iraq when a substantial paper trail suggested that he had, which didn't exactly enhance his credibility on the subject.) Of course Ritter turned out to more right than, well, almost anybody in the world about the state of Saddam's arsenal, but that doesn't change the reality that he was a lousy spokesman for that point of view, especially when he was almost the only person who seemed to hold it. The media didn't marginalize him because he stopped bashing Clinton and started bashing Bush - they marginalized him because everyone who disagreed with him seemed credible, and he didn't. This was a failure on the press's part, sure; as Tim Noah put it once Ritter was vindicated, there's no reason someone couldn't be "wrong on the age of consent" but "right on Iraq." But I'm not sure it's a failure that could have been plausibly avoided.

A Fine Whine

I'm glad to see both Isaac Chotiner and Kevin Drum griping about the Democrats' whiney, "stop questioning our patriotism" reaction to Rudy Giuliani's "America would be safer with the GOP in charge" speech from earlier this week. There's an almost infinite litany of justifiable complaints you could make about the era of George W. Bush, but the notion that Republicans are somehow engaging in dirty pool by repeatedly insisting that the country would be safer with them in charge is one of the lamest arrows in the liberal quiver. Has the GOP politicized foreign policy in the Bush years? Of course it has - because foreign policy is a political issue, and a terrain in which politicians have every right to draw sharp distinctions with their opponents, and argue about which party will do more to keep the country safe. And with the country knee-deep in a disastrous war, an opposition party should have no trouble making that case on the merits, instead of whining endlessly about how the GOP needs to play fair and stop questioning their patriotism.

If the Democrats had spent half as much time hammering George W. Bush for failing to catch Osama Bin Laden as they did kvetching about, say, how awful it was that the GOP put Bin Laden's face in an anti-Max Cleland ad in 2002, John Kerry might be in the White House today, instead of trying to rehabilitate himself with a mediocre Al Gore impersonation.