The American Conservative

I have been struck by a few things about the responses in Britain following the release of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry’s findings.

Some top Iraq war supporters remain unrepentant and as deluded as ever. Tony Blair affirms that he would invade Iraq again if he had to do it all over, and seems to be more preoccupied with the criticism that he was dishonest in selling the war than he is interested in facing up to the horrible costs of the war he helped to start. That is no different from many of our own Iraq war dead-enders, but the interesting thing is that Blair is still being criticized in the strongest terms across the political spectrum and his reputation is widely seen as being completely ruined. Voters in the U.K. didn’t have the same chance to deliver the same electoral repudiation of Blair’s government that our voters had in 2006 and 2008 with Bush’s GOP, so perhaps that is why Blair receives more scorn now.

The leader of Blair’s party, Jeremy Corbyn, apologized on behalf of the party for its past support for the war (which Corbyn opposed at the time). That is the first such public expression of regret from the leader of any major Western party that backed the invasion thirteen years ago, and it is a shame that it has taken this long for a major party leader to say so. There is no chance that a leading figure from either of our major parties would apologize for their role in supporting the war, not least because hawkish members in both parties are allergic to admitting that the U.S. has ever done something wrong. Obviously a belated apology doesn’t undo any of the enormous harm that the war has done, but it does mean admitting failure and accepting responsibility for a horrendous policy, and that is more than we have managed here in the U.S.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all this is that there was an official inquiry into the origins of the war and how it was conducted. As important as the Iraq war has been in British politics, it has been even more so here for ours, and yet our government has never attempted anything like this inquiry and I am confident that it never would. Iraq was always principally an American intervention, and the U.S. military suffered the largest coalition losses by far, but there has never been much interest in Washington in learning much of anything from the debacle.

NBC News reports that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is being considered for Trump’s running mate:

Those inside the Trump campaign are also looking at Pence because of his resume. Before running for governor in 2012, Pence had served 12 years in the U.S. House. For part of that time, he was the head of the House Republican Conference — number four in the party’s House leadership, and he also worked for ten of those years on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Pence, a man with a calm but warm demeanor, is also not new to the media circuit — he had, for years, his own syndicated radio talk show and a Sunday TV program in the Hoosier state.

There also may be reason for Pence to take the chance at the national level. He is up for his own gubernatorial re-election this November, squaring off in a rematch against the Democrat he faced four years ago and beat by just three percentage points.

In sharp contrast with Christie and Gingrich, Pence would be a solid choice to be Trump’s VP nominee. He has both relevant executive and Congressional experience, and he has no obvious personal or political baggage that I’m aware of. He is arguably better qualified to be president than either of the major party nominees this year, and is probably better prepared than Romney or Ryan were four years ago. He isn’t especially popular at home, so the VP slot would offer him a way to give up on his re-election bid. If that is the plan, he has until July 15 to withdraw his name from the ballot.

Pence’s foreign policy is unsurprisingly hawkish, so he doesn’t help Trump at all on those issues. He voted for the 2002 Iraq war authorization, and generally backed Bush’s foreign policy while in Congress. I doubt that adding him to the ticket delivers any states that Trump wasn’t already going to win, but choosing him would represent more of a break with the Bush years on domestic issues than any other available choice. Pence was notable in his House career for voting against major pieces of legislation supported by Bush (e.g., Medicare Part D), and unlike many of his colleagues from that time he can point to a mostly fiscally conservative voting record.

Trump could do a lot worse than to choose Pence, and given his limited options I don’t know that there is anyone who would be a better choice. That raises the question: why would Pence want to be Trump’s running mate? That would make him the VP nominee on what is likely to be one of the least successful Republican tickets in living memory, and it would burn his bridges with a lot of people in the GOP. If Pence ever has any aspirations for higher office, joining Trump as the VP nominee would seem a good way of making sure that never happens.

The Chilcot Inquiry finally released its findings this week:

Tony Blair committed to an invasion of Iraq almost eight months before receiving parliamentary and legal backing, and began military action before diplomatic alternatives were exhausted, a much-awaited inquiry into the conflict has concluded.

None of that is really news to anyone that was paying attention in 2002-03. It is good to have these fairly obvious truths confirmed in the official record, but the inquiry doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know. Many of us saw at the time that the U.S. and British governments were determined to invade Iraq and were simply searching for a pretext that would give them political cover to do so. Of course the U.S. and its allies started military action before diplomatic alternatives were exhausted. The governments involved weren’t interested in finding a diplomatic solution, and Bush and Blair went the U.N. route only so that they could obtain authorization for their war (which they still didn’t receive).

Chilcot says of the March 2003 invasion that “military action at that time was not a last resort.” I don’t see how anyone could have ever honestly thought it was. It is not possible for a preventive war to be waged as a last resort, and that is one reason why there is no justification for waging preventive war. The Iraq war happened to be illegal, but more important it was profoundly unjust and unnecessary. There is no excuse for the unprovoked invasion of another country, and that is undeniably what the Iraq war was. That lesson has been almost completely lost on political leaders in Washington and London, and I suspect it will be for a long time.

A few additional things should be said about the Iraq war. I have said them before, but they need to be repeated frequently so that they aren’t forgotten. Even if Iraq had retained its unconventional weapons programs as Bush and Blair claimed, attacking Iraq would not have been justified. Even if the “threat” they identified had existed, it would not have justified the invasion and occupation of another country, the overthrow of its government, and the ensuing years of devastation and bloodshed. As it happened, the pretext for the war was a lie, and the threat was non-existent, but the Iraq war would still have been a colossal blunder and enormous crime regardless.

FBI Director Comey announced the findings of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server earlier today. While he won’t be recommending criminal charges against Clinton, he did say this:

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

It has been said many times already, but it bears repeating that almost anyone else in or around the government that mishandled classified information in this way would not be let off the hook so easily. There are clearly two standards of conduct for high-ranking officials and everyone else, and because Clinton is one of the former she is able to get away with behavior that would be career-ending for almost anyone else.

The picture Comey paints is one of an irresponsible Secretary of State:

She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

Clinton won’t be indicted for breaking any laws, but Comey’s statement is nonetheless an indictment of her poor judgment, negligence, and recklessness. This should be very damaging for Clinton, and maybe it still could be, but it can hardly come as a surprise to anyone that remembers how the Clintons have operated over the years. The sloppiness, sense of entitlement, and disregard for consequences are all only too familiar. We can expect several more years of this sort of behavior from a future Clinton administration.

A report on the failure of the Remain campaign included an interesting passage that relates to the “myth of cosmopolitanism” Millman and Douthat have been talking about:

But over the course of the campaign, the most senior remainers found collegiate sympathy in a shared world view [bold mine-DL]. As one put it: “We were the pluralist, liberal, centrist force in British politics.” Pro-Europeanism became a proxy for the fusion of economic and social liberalism that had been a dominant philosophy of the political mainstream for a generation, although its proponents were scattered across partisan boundaries. These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer [bold mine-DL].

The description here is a useful summary of how elite “centrists” of various parties often have more in common with one another than they do with their rank-and-file supporters. These “centrists” flatter themselves that they are the “moderates” under siege from fringe ideologues at the same time that they define themselves entirely in ideological terms. If they aren’t exactly a tribe, they nonetheless share more assumptions about how the world works (or should work) than they don’t. Whatever their disagreements may be, they are firmly within the fairly narrow limits of that consensus.

The conceit that the “centrist” position is the moderate and pluralistic one is useful for justifying their unconcealed contempt for the voters. It also blinds them to the reality that there are bound to be many competing priorities in a genuinely pluralistic political system, which leaves them unable to cope when voters choose to place a higher priority on things they consider unimportant or absurd. Remain advocates assumed that most people had the same set of priorities and would be motivated only by the things that “centrists” considered acceptable. They couldn’t address the concerns voters had about immigration, for example, because they automatically viewed those concerns as ignorant and déclassé at best, and so had no answer for them. The Remainers made technocratic arguments because they think these are the most compelling arguments despite ample evidence that they leave most people cold, and then condemned the latter for failing to respond to them in the desired way. As “centrists,” they couldn’t speak meaningfully to many of their countrymen about the things that mattered to them because they had long ago decided that no one should care about such things.

Gove in, Johnson out. The Telegraph reports on the state of the Conservative leadership race.

He who wields the knife never wears the crown. Philip Johnston comments on Boris Johnson’s political collapse.

The Benghazi report misses the real scandal in Libya. Ted Galen Carpenter reminds us that the Libyan war and its aftermath are the real scandal that Congress should be investigating.

5 attitude adjustments our foreign policy leaders need to make. Daniel Davis urges policymakers to scrap some of their worst recurring habits.

Don’t blame “Brexit” on U.S. policy in Syria. Michael Cohen chides hawkish critics of the administration that have tried to spin the outcome of the EU referendum as a consequence of American policy in Syria.

CNN reports on some of Trump’s possible VP choices:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are among the finalists to be Donald Trump’s running mate, sources confirmed to CNN on Thursday.

Trump is limited in his choices to the relatively few high-profile Republicans that endorsed him early and have stuck with him so far, so judged by that standard having Christie and Gingrich on the list makes a certain amount of sense. There simply aren’t many current or former Republican officeholders that would agree to be Trump’s running mate, but most of those that are willing have more than enough baggage to make them poor choices under normal circumstances.

Christie is staggeringly unpopular in his own state, he is widely disliked by most Republicans, and ever since he endorsed the nominee he has become little more than a punchline for jokes about being held hostage by Trump. He adds nothing to the ticket electorally, he brings with him his shoddy record as governor, and on top of it he knows only slightly more about foreign policy than Trump while holding the most predictably hawkish views. Adding Christie to the ticket might keep a few foreign policy hard-liners from voting for Clinton, but it would probably come at the expense of alienating a nontrivial portion of Trump’s core supporters. By Christie’s own admission from a few years ago, he isn’t qualified to be president because of his lack of preparation on foreign policy, and that remains true today. Christie would be a comprehensively terrible choice, and so it is entirely possible that he will be Trump’s selection.

Gingrich is a less obviously ridiculous choice, but it’s hard to see what he brings to the ticket. He is a former Speaker of the House ousted because of personal scandal, he comes from a state Trump should still be able to win without him, and he likes to indulge bizarre ideas (colonizing the moon) and alarmist warnings (the danger of an EMP attack!). One sign of Gingrich’s poor judgment is that he happens to be one of a small army of political has-beens that has shilled for the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), the “former” terrorist group and totalitarian cult that almost all Iranians around the world despise.

Gingrich’s MEK boosterism should be disqualifying all by itself, but it also reflects just how horrible his foreign policy judgment is. No one interested in a sane or responsible foreign policy should want someone like this on a national ticket or anywhere close to the office of the presidency.

As Noah Millman already mentioned, the race to succeed David Cameron as Conservative leader took a strange and unexpected turn today:

As late as yesterday afternoon, Michael Gove was trying to persuade fellow Cabinet Ministers to back Boris Johnson. This morning, he announced that not only that he was running but that ‘Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead’. Hours later, Boris – reeling from this blow – announced that he would not be running.

Gove reportedly came to view Johnson as too unreliable and flaky, which is a curious justification for abandoning someone he supported at the last minute to pursue his own leadership bid. The remarkable thing about Gove’s decision is that it probably wrecks any chance he might have had at the leadership, and he has very likely delivered it into the hands of Theresa May, the Home Secretary, who was already a competitive candidate before Johnson dropped out. Most people inclined to back Johnson presumably view Gove as a traitor and not to be trusted, and that seems to be the case. Isabel Hardman reports:

It is fair to say after talking to a number of Boris supporters that some of them are currently so white hot with fury at what Gove has done in turning on his colleague at the last minute that there is little chance of them supporting the Justice Secretary’s campaign.

If we assume that May is the favorite to win the contest, it is worth considering her views on what should happen next. In her announcement speech, May made clear that she intends to follow through on the referendum’s result:

First, Brexit means Brexit. The campaign was fought, the vote was held, turnout was high and the public gave their verdict. There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to re-join in through the back door and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the European Union and it is the duty of the Government and Parliament to make sure we do just that. Second, there should be no general election until 2020. There should be a normal Autumn Statement held in the normal way at the normal time and no emergency budget. And there should be no decision to invoke Article 50 until the British negotiating strategy is agreed and clear, which means Article 50 should not be invoked before the end of this year [bold mine-DL].

That last point will sit very poorly with EU leaders, who seem to want the process of British withdrawal to have started yesterday and aren’t interested in any further delays. Nonetheless, if May is serious about following through with leaving the EU that will at least provide some clarity about what the next government will try to do. May has a somewhat Euroskeptic reputation but was a supporter of Remain, and that could potentially make her a candidate acceptable to both factions in the party. Her announcement speech was full of praise for Cameron, so she isn’t positioning herself against him or his overall record, and that will probably also make her a better fit with members of the party that aren’t pleased that Cameron has gone. She struck a balance between being an advocate for Remain without having fallen into the alarmist nonsense that did that campaign so much harm:

Throughout I made clear that on balance I favoured staying inside the EU because of the economic risk of leaving, the importance of cooperation on security matters and the threat to the Union between England and Scotland. But I also said that the sky would not fall in if we left. I was open about the costs and the benefits and the risks and the opportunities of EU membership. So now the decision has been made, let’s make the most of the opportunities our departure presents and get out into the world and help British firms to do business all around the globe. Because the task in front of us is no longer about deciding if we should leave or remain. The country has spoken and the United Kingdom will leave the EU.

It remains to be seen if May can win the support of her party, but when compared with the clown acts of Johnson and Gove she certainly seems more credible and responsible than either of them.

Michael Cohen offers some advice to foreign policy policymakers and pundits:

To put it bluntly, not everything fits neatly into our preconceived framing devices, and certainly not everything is about the United States. Other countries have agency, too, and can make decisions that affect their national destiny, independently of the United States.

Americans are not the only ones that respond to foreign events this way, but it seems to be more common in the U.S., especially among people that pay the most attention to foreign affairs. Because the U.S. is involved in so many places, it is usually possible for some connection to be made between a given event and some recent U.S. action, but that doesn’t mean that the latter caused the former. Because our foreign policy debates treat almost every foreign problem as one that the U.S. is obliged to address, and because far too many people in those debates credit the U.S. with enormous power to “shape” events, many Americans take for granted that if something happens overseas that the U.S. is in some way responsible for causing or “failing” to prevent the event in question. It is not an accident that these arguments are almost always made by people that have never seen a crisis or conflict that they didn’t think the U.S. should take part in. Everything isn’t about the U.S., but they very much want the U.S. to be meddling in everything, and so they try to make everything be about us in one way or another.

Cohen happened to be referring to the absurd claim that U.S. policy in Syria led to the “Brexit” vote, but he could just as easily have been referring to any number of other events in recent years that have been blamed on the U.S. when many others are far more directly responsible. Syria hawks have often been the biggest offenders when it comes to making these accusations. They tell us that there would have been no conflict in Ukraine if Obama had just bombed Syria as they demanded. Whatever happens to be in the news at the time, they will seize on it and say that it happened because they didn’t get their way on intervening in Syria. All of the hawks’ claims are absurd on their face, but they are repeated often and shamelessly enough that they begin to influence how these issues are understood. Further, by claiming that every event they don’t like over the last few years is the product of not attacking another country they try to make an attack seem more desirable. Of course they deny the agency of other states and groups. The main thing that they’re trying to do is to get the U.S. more deeply involved in the Syrian conflict, and they don’t care how they do it.

If there is an “ISIS-inspired” attack somewhere in the West, they will declare that it is because the U.S. hasn’t ensnared itself deeply enough in Syria and because it earlier tried to extricate itself from Iraq. The more direct and logical explanation that these attacks are at least partly responses to the bombing of Iraq and Syria over the last two years is never even considered, because that would require admitting that military action can have adverse and undesirable consequences for our security. One thing we can reliably expect from hawks is that they will deny that the U.S. has responsibility for any of the things that it actually does overseas while gnashing their teeth over the responsibility we supposedly have because of the things that our government hasn’t done. That is why they will try to pin Syria’s horrific humanitarian crisis on the U.S. because of our “inaction” while completely ignoring the equally horrific humanitarian crisis in Yemen that the U.S. has been helping to cause. This is all part of the ludicrous kabuki show that our foreign policy debates have become. We don’t debate the administration’s actual record, but instead allow both sides to fight over an invented one while overlooking the real costs and consequences of U.S. actions.

For some reason, Ashe Schow isn’t buying Rubio’s claim that his re-election bid isn’t preparation for a future presidential campaign:

“It’s not the safest route forward. I’m running for re-election because I’m going to be a senator,” he added. “I’m going to spend six years in the Senate making my mark on behalf of the people of Florida, but also on behalf of the things that are important for America.”

Mmmmhmmm. This coming from the guy who for months said he wasn’t going to run for re-election.

Given Rubio’s past reversals and reputation for opportunism, it’s difficult to take his denials seriously. It is even harder to take those denials seriously when it seems obvious that the reason he decided to seek re-election after all was to position himself for a 2020 presidential run. It will be up to Floridians to decide if they want to send Rubio back to the Senate, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them are already tired of his ambitions for higher office. They may not be satisfied with the “mark” (or lack thereof) he’s made on their behalf in his first term, and may not want to give him another chance.

If Rubio does intend to run for president again (and everyone assumes that he does), he isn’t likely to benefit from being in the Senate. Josh Zeitz reviewed the record of unsuccessful first-time presidential candidates that returned to the Senate before a second run, and he noted that none of them was successful in later attempts:

More to the point, while many senators have run for the presidency and lost, a handful of onetime presidential aspirants have returned to the Senate after leaving it (or, in Rubio’s case, almost leaving it)—only to run for president again. Of those returnee candidates, none was successful in using the Senate as a platform for another run at the White House. Some found it impossible to shake off the loser’s reputation. Others found themselves bumped aside by newer, younger models.

Another recent example that Zeitz didn’t mention was Bob Dole, but if anything Dole’s example should be even more sobering for Rubio. Dole ran for president in 1980 and 1988, losing both times and returning to the Senate after each loss. He briefly became majority leader in the mid-’80s and again after the ’94 midterms. He ran again in 1996 and secured the nomination before being handily defeated in the general election. That is the most that Rubio can reasonably hope for, and even that would require putting in a lot more time in the Senate before he will be able to mount a credible campaign.

Most candidates that have done as poorly in their first presidential run as Rubio did usually don’t bother with a second one. If Rubio hadn’t made the mistake of running for president this year, his chances in a future election cycle would probably be much better. As it is, he’ll be lucky to keep the job that he claimed not to want anymore.