The American Conservative

The American Prospect has assembled a number of assessments of the reasons why violence in Iraq has declined relatively over the past year and a half.  Lost in the frequent back-and-forth over whether John McCain understands what the “surge” was or whether he knows when the Anbar Awakening happened (answers: apparently not and no) is the more basic point, made here by Matthew Duss, that the Anbar model has succeeded for the time being by pursuing the opposite of a sound counterinsurgency:

The “Anbar strategy” which is the center-piece of the surge violates a central tenet of counterinsurgency doctrine in that it does not redirect political authority toward the central government [bold mine-DL]. The deals that have been made are between Sunni tribal militias and U.S. forces, not the Iraqi government. There are still an estimated 90,000 Sunni militia members expecting government jobs, and little sign that the Shia-controlled Iraqi government intends to provide them. It’s true that security is a prerequisite for state-building, but if that security only comes at the expense of the legitimacy of the state we’re supposedly trying to build, then we have an entirely new problem on our hands.

This is one reason why the fabled “bottom-up” reconciliation–which was never a reconciliation at all, but a temporary alliance of convenience that avoided reconciling disaffected Sunnis to the Baghdad government–has never been a promising way to establish an enduring political settlement.  This is significant for a couple of reasons.  First, the “bottom-up” reconciliation became a standard line of war supporters when it became clear that reconciliation at the level of the national government was not forthcoming and was unlikely to be for a long time.  Focusing on this was, first and foremost, an attempt to change the subject and ignore that the political goals of the “surge” had always been unrealistic, which was what had informed the views of so many of the plan’s opponents and which is the key reason why the “surge” on the administration’s own terms has not succeeded.

Meanwhile, the horrific attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk offer a reminder why so-called “conditions-based” withdrawals are forever subject to revision and why timetables that can be revised by such contingencies are meaningless.  Tying withdrawal to conditions in Iraq places U.S. policy at the mercy of the worst elements in Iraq, which gives these elements every incentive to persist in trying to sow discord and engage in spectacular acts of violence.  Besides being seized on by war supporters as evidence that Iraq is not yet stable enough to permit a U.S. withdrawal (after having cited these same sorts of attacks last year as proof that the “surge” was working and terrorist groups were becoming desperate), they expose the position of contingent withdrawal to one of the strongest criticisms against it, which is that it allows American policy to be dictated by whichever group wishes to foment chaos and disorder.  If the Iraq policy debate is “converging” towards a ”conditions-based” withdrawal consensus, in the wake of these latest bombings this is the equivalent of saying that there is a consensus for remaining in Iraq more or less indefinitely.  Both candidates have committed the U.S. to ensure an elusive Iraqi stability that we have so far been able to advance only by undermining its long-term chances, which is to say that they have committed our forces to remain there for the foreseeable future.

As Ross said last week, the Pew numbers on white evangelical support for the major presidential candidates do show that McCain appears to be running poorly among these voters when compared to the support Bush received at this time four years ago.  Then again, according to a Post survey earlier in the year McCain was running ahead of Bush’s mid-2004 support among white evangelicals and was on track to replicate the latter’s overwhelming majority with this core constituency.  If the Pew numbers are right, the drop in evangelical support for McCain seems to be part of the generic “enthusiasm gap” between the two candidates, but in any case this has never translated into greater white evangelical support for Obama.  Instead, we are seeing white evangelical voters become part of the sizeable undecided vote, which may mean that McCain is failing to win them over, but it is certainly not the case that they are in danger of being “mesmerized” by Obama.  Indeed, Mr. Bass is simply wrong when he says that Obama fares better with these voters than Kerry did.       

One reason why the fear (or hope, depending on who you are) of Obama making inroads among white evangelicals is overblown is made clear by Obama’s embrace of a form of the faith-based initiative.  There is an assumption that this move will appeal to some religious voters who are normally wary of Democratic candidates, but even if this is so it will not meaningfully increase Obama’s share of the white evangelical vote.  To the extent that this initiative was welcomed by evangelicals when Bush proposed it, Bush’s own religious identification with evangelical voters reassured them that government support would not necessarily mean any change in how these people ran their charities and organizations.  Among more conservative evangelicals, the response to the initiative was much more hostile, however, because there was the reasonable fear that government rules would follow the acceptance of federal money, and among the most conservative critics of then-Gov. Bush the initative was viewed as a way for government to co-opt and undermine private and religious charities.  Those fears and criticisms are sure to increase if an Obama administration works to implement his faith-based proposal, and my guess is that they will tend to drive those undecided white evangelicals to McCain and motivate them to oppose Obama’s election with much more energy and enthusiasm than they would have ever been able to muster for McCain. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

At The American Scene, my colleague Peter Suderman has some interesting remarks on Obama’s cosmopolitanism that James Poulos and I critiqued last week.  Peter doesn’t think the phrase “citizen of the world” has much importance one way or the other, and characterized Obama’s use of it as an expression of this “trendy sentiment”:

a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism that suggests that, while one might identify as an American, that shouldn’t be the outer limit of one’s identity group.

That raises a different question apart from whether the phrase is objectionable, and this is whether holding to ”a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism” can be electorally successful in a presidential race when pitted against an opponent who seems intent on deploying nationalist-Americanist rhetoric, even if this rhetoric is designed to compensate for his [i.e., the opponent's] otherwise abysmal, aimless campaign.  One of the many important observations John Lukacs has made about nationalism is its role in the presidential politics of the United States, and he has speculated that the reason why Republicans tend to prevail in these contests in the postwar era is that they represent the more nationalist of the two major parties.  Post-1968, this was usually defined in terms of national security policies, and we saw a resurgence of this again after 9/11, and this also relied heavily on the use of nationalist language and imagery apart from any substantive policy disagreements.  While both parties are split between what Brooks has called “populist nationalists” and “progressive globalists,” the Republicans remain, at least when it comes to their supporters, the relatively more populist-nationalist party. 

Not surprisingly, it is on trade policy where this is least true (ask Duncan Hunter) and where there is a much larger constituency for a populist-nationalist candidate, which is what has made Obama’s support for most free trade agreements (except when campaigning in Ohio) an intriguing case of how Obama has accommodated himself quite readily to global trade neoliberalism over the objections and complaints of many progressives.  Regarding Obama and trade, Peter adds:

Seems to me it’s pretty tough to tout a citizen-of-the-world ethos while fighting to make it more difficult to interact with our neighbors in the global economy.

Yet this is why it seems to me that the phrase and the general themes of the Berlin speech, in which every kind of wall comes crashing down, are unusually ill-suited for an American public anxious about the effects of globalization, because Obama clearly is endorsing economic globalization and to the extent that he is making nods towards “free and fair trade” he is framing it in terms of lifting up the poorest regions of the world. 

As James Joyner has noted, McCain takes essentially the same positions and is even more ardent in his support of free trade agreements than Obama, so it might seem as if there is no danger to Obama here.  However, because of the reputations of the two parties, because of a perception that Democrats are more inclined to ”a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism,” there is greater risk for Obama in adopting positions that clash with populist impulses in his own party and in the general electorate. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

They may have been unaware of it, but Matt and Ross have stumbled upon some old Orthodox Church wisdom in their rejection of fourth marriages.  While even second marriages were discouraged by the Orthodox Church, particularly in the Byzantine era, the canons did permit some flexibility and oikonomia in practice, and third marriages were allowed in extreme cases where a couple could produce no heir or in the event of a spouse’s death.  Fourth marriages, however, were utterly beyond the pale, and this applied to the emperor just as it did to everyone else. 

Leo VI had married three times without producing any offspring, which threw the succession into doubt, but the canons strictly forbad marrying a fourth time for any reason.  The emperor’s concubine, Zoe Karbonopsina, gave birth to the future heir, Constantine, but even this did not lead to a compromise, but instead resulted in the emperor being banned from the Great Church.  Once Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, who had opposed the marriage, had been deposed, oikonomia prevailed again, but the ensuing rivalry between the factions of the two patriarchs disrupted ecclesiastical and political life in Constantinople for more than a decade. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Gregory Scoblete outlines a number of ways that Obama could adopt foreign policy views he will never adopt to reassure wary antiwar voters.  This was perhaps the most striking:

He could, for instance, echo the arguments made by Edward Luttwak from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the British magazine Prospect, and argue that “We devote far too much attention to the Middle East, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created….” Rather, he wrote, “with neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the Middle East should finally be allowed to have their own history.”

Virtually no one in Washington would want to go anywhere near endorsing Luttwak’s argument for benign neglect, and certainly it is not a view that will be embraced by a candidate who already has to persuade the political class, the media and the voters that his election is an acceptable risk.  This has always been the limit imposed on Obama’s candidacy, imposed as much by the candidate himself as it has been by others, which is that a younger, less experienced relative newcomer to the national political scene was never going to be able to pursue a genuinely transformative agenda in the area of U.S. policy that most desperately needs it, namely foreign policy.  There are three straightforward reasons for this.  Overcoming concerns about a lack of foreign policy experience necessarily requires defending most of the status quo.  Every Democratic nominee will be targeted with claims that he is the new McGovern and so has to eschew any radical breaks with most established policies.  Most importantly, the Obama who gave the recent speech in Berlin and spoke to the Global Affairs Council in Chicago last year clearly has no intention of transforming the American role in the world, except perhaps to expand it.

It isn’t clear what the point of Scoblete’s exercise in advising Obama is except to remind antiwar voters that Obama does not generally hold non-interventionist views and instead has always argued “within the status quo” and framed his positions as the best way to advance American ”leadership” in the Near East and throughot the world.  Even so, Scoblete’s recommendations are interesting in that they remind all of us how little actually separates McCain and Obama when it comes to foreign policy when compared to truly transformative alternative policy views. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Of course, this is pure nonsense.  Maistre hated scientists most of all?  He was a philosopher of science and wrote a serious critique of the materialism of Bacon, so to say that he hated scientists is absurd.  Meanwhile, no one with an iota of understanding about modern American conservatism could confuse its views with anything Maistre said, and you can be fairly sure that mainstream conservatism today has no relationship with his thought given that most mainstream American conservatives, to their discredit, find Maistre to be horrible.  Maistre was, like Burke, a fierce opponent of the Revolution, but unlike Burke he was also a leading Counter-Enlightenment figure.  Many, if not most, mainstream conservatives today prefer to define themselves ultimately as classical liberals, and they find most of European conservatism to be more offensive to them than they do American liberalism or, if they are pressed, they will treat them as two sides of the same coin. 

My earlier Eunomia posts on Maistre are here and here.

As James is being attacked from all sides (most especially in his own comboxes) for ridiculing the phrase “citizen of the world” as nonsense, I have to say a few more things beyond what I have already said.  The least compelling arguments advanced against James’ view are that former Presidents have used this same phrase.  Well, yes, former Presidents have used vapid phrases many times, so I suppose you could say that Obama gave a good audition for his prospective position, but what can it mean to say that one is a citizen of the world?  The most compelling argument I have seen is…well, actually, there isn’t any particularly compelling argument in support of this phrase.  That phrase implies that all “citizens” of the world have obligations of one kind or another to the rest of the non-existent world-polity, even though “citizens of the world” do not share in the same political life. 

It has become a conventional line that presumably well-meaning people say, but it has no substance, not least because it was coined by a man for whom all forms of loyalty were arbitrary and irrational*.  While its modern usage often suggests an affinity for or loyalty to other places besides or even in addition to one’s own community, the word came into being to define the repudiation of political and social bonds.  To trace kosmopolitis back to its origins is to trace it to those who believed all forms of social and political obligation to be worthless, which is often the opposite of what people who fancy themselves “cosmopolitan” actually support.  In fact, the broad and universal sort of character that acknowledges and respects the diversity of the world that people think has something to do with cosmopolitanism is more appropriately defined by such words as ecumenical or catholic.  Strangely, though perhaps not so surprisingly, those who identify with some form of cosmopolitanism tend to be the same people who would like to see the world’s political and cultural diversity reduced to a monoculture of managed democratic capitalism, which confirms that there is something essentially intolerant and destructive of established cultures and traditions in the cosmopolitan view.  The phrase is meaningless, but the idea that the phrase hints at is quite undesirable. 

*This is not a total rejection of Cynicism, which bears some intriguing similarities to modern philosophical pessimism and Christian asceticism.

Like clockwork, McCain’s campaign is responding to Obama’s Berlin speech in almost exactly the way I expected they would:

While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a ‘citizen of the world,’ John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election [bold mine-DL].  Barack Obama offered eloquent praise for this country, but the contrast is clear. John McCain has dedicated his life to serving, improving and protecting America. Barack Obama spent an afternoon talking about it.

Also, they are hitting Obama for his cancellation of the “inappropriate” visit to Landstuhl, which is an inexplicable blunder by Obama.  If he was not speaking to the Berliners as a presidential candidate (not credible, but that’s the official line), how can he then invoke his candidacy as a reason to not go to visit an American military base in Germany?   

P.S.  The line about being a ”fellow citizen of the world” was just the most prominent example of how Obama blundered in this speech.  Obama misjudges the public mood here in the U.S. quite badly if he thinks that “this is the moment” when Americans are interested in tearing down walls and embracing globalisation.  The policy implications of this laundry list of trouble spots are serious:

Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words “never again” in Darfur?  

If voters think that electing Obama President will mean doing a lot of heavy-lifting with foreign aid, sheltering refugees in Africa and protecting Burmese dissidents and the Zimbabwean opposition party, they will not be terribly interested in putting him in that office.  I would have thought that he would have understood the public’s weariness with the Iraq adventure better than this.  Does he not understand that one important source of discontent with the war is its costliness and the diversion of resources to Iraq rather than having them used and invested here at home? 

Update: As James notes, besides being grating the claim to be a citizen of the world is also meaningless.

Second Update: In James’ defense, and to answer to the generic response that “Kennedy and Reagan said it, too!” I would just add that the phrase “citizen of the world” is meaningless no matter how many former Presidents and famous people have said it.  Worse than suggesting some “post-nationalist” attitude, the phrase is simply false: no one is a “citizen of the world,” so what can it mean to claim to be one? 

There may be critics of Obama’s speech who object to this line simply because Obama said it, but I can say that James and I aren’t among them.  I have previously objected to conservative uses of Tom Paine-isms, and will continue to do so, because I consider Tom Paine to be a dreadful source of inspiration who was frequently wrong about fundamental things.  It is also not a vindication of the phrase that the idea of being a kosmopolitis can be traced back to certain Hellenistic philosophical schools, particularly the Stoics, in an era of absolute monarchies and empires–that just drives home how undesirable and how at odds with republican liberty the idea of being a “citizen of the world” is.  Claiming to be a kosmopolitis became fashionable when active citizenship and meaningful political participation were on the wane; world “citizenship” is typically the foe of engaged citizenship in one’s own community.

A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components.  I’m not sure people understand that `surge’ is part of a counterinsurgency. ~John McCain

Blogging will be light today and tomorrow, but this deserves brief comment.  This has already received a lot of derision, but what I found striking about McCain’s intransigence over his misunderstanding of how the Anbar Awakening happened (before the “surge,” as I have noted before) is that it grossly exaggerates any stubborn inflexibility that he has tried to impute to Obama.  “Why won’t he admit when he’s wrong?” has been McCain’s newest slogan, and it can be turned back around on him very easily. 

What most people understand by the “surge” is the increase in troop levels by five brigades.  If it were referring only to a certain sort of counterinsurgency tactics, such as those used to turn Sunnis in Anbar against the Islamic State in Iraq forces, it would not be temporary but would be ongoing, but the propaganda word ”surge” itself implies that it relates to troop levels.  The “surge” as such is now at an end, because these have been returning to their previous, pre-2007 numbers.  This seems to be a case where McCain does not understand a basic aspect of the Iraq war, and does not understand that he doesn’t understand it, but will somehow magically continue to get credit for supporting something that he doesn’t understand.  In his view, based on what he says in this quote, all counterinsurgency efforts make up the “surge,” which is itself part of another, still larger counterinsurgency.  In the broad sense that the war is a counterinsurgency, the second part might be true, but the first part is just nonsense. 

Update: Regarding this question, here‘s a reminder of what McCain has actually said about Iraq over the years.

At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. ~Karl Rove

Rove is remarkably clumsy in his defense of McCain on his changed position on tax cuts.  The official McCain mantra today is that McCain (always heroically) opposed Bush’s tax cuts because they were not offset with spending cuts.  His reliable stooge on talk radio, Michael Medved, repeats this deception on a regular basis.  The trouble is that Rove reminds his audience why, in fact, McCain opposed them:

He’d voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he’d “like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans.”

You might think that this would be something you would want to emphasise in an election year such as this, and you might think this is a perfectly good reason to offer opposition to tax cuts, but it’s not that simple.  Before McCain could become the nominee he had to portray himself as opposed to tax cutting simply because he was such a zealous budget hawk, rather than acknowledge that he had opposed a major Bush initiative out of 1) petty resentment over his primary defeat; 2) a boundless desire to get good media coverage, which tweaking a Republican President would do; 3) phony “bipartisan” concern about the inequities of the tax plan. 

The funny thing is that this is not lost in the mists of time.  You just need to type in the phrases “Bush tax cuts,” “John McCain” and “class warfare” into any search engine and you are inundated with conservative editorials and articles against McCain’s risible excuse-making on his changed position on taxes.  Here’s a Human Events attack on McCain from January.  What’s amusing about this is that McCain could really benefit from being portrayed as a tax-cutter for the working- and middle-class and a foe of “unfair” tax cuts, but the very “class warfare” attacks on McCain during the primaries that forced him to adopt his phony explanation for opposing the 2001 tax cuts prevent him from acknowledging what his real position was.  That this is revealed in a Rove op-ed designed to show the differences between the “flip-flops” of McCain and Obama is particularly rich, but it is also inevitable given McCain’s long record of changing positions on domestic policy to suit the moment.

If it is a matter of integrity and honestly acknowledging a change in position, rather than the relative merits of this or that policy view, the last thing you would want to highlight is McCain’s changed position on tax policy.