The American Conservative

Eric Garris looks at the House roll call on the Iran petroleum sanctions bill and discovers that just 12 voted against it and only three of these were Republicans. These were Jeff Flake, Jimmy Duncan and, of course, Ron Paul. That’s not exactly an overwhelming number from the opposition party, and notably missing from the list of nays was that heroic “antiwar” figure Jason Chaffetz. Of course, why would Chaffetz oppose imposing sanctions on Iran? He and many of his Republican colleagues are interested in starting a war with Iran, so imposing additional sanctions, no matter how counter-productive and doomed to fail, would hardly bother him.

To look at the larger policy question for a moment, it is remarkable that such an egregiously flawed sanctions measure can command the near-unanimous support of the House. There are reports that the administration has asked Kerry to delay the bill in the Senate until next year, so there will be some time before this becomes law, but given the depressingly broad bipartisan consensus behind this bill I don’t see how it will be defeated. This measure will do great economic harm to average Iranians, and it will help undermine whatever remains of the protest movement, and it will tighten the grip of leading members of the military and civilian establishments on the Iranian economy. Iran’s government will become more powerful relative to its people, and it will become even more resistant to making any concessions over the nuclear program.

P.S. I previously noted Chaffetz’s support for the Iran sanctions bill.

Thomas Friedman’s new column reminded me of the line from Casino Royale: “Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go hand in hand.” In the same column in which he complains that Westerners treat Muslims as nothing more than objects and deprive them of agency and responsibility, he urges on the mass slaughter of said Muslims by other Muslims to get them to stop believing “bad things.” In short, he won’t credit them with being morally responsible agents until they embark on a bloody religious war of his design.

Ackerman responds appropriately:

Yes, what problem can’t be solved by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, egged on from the sidelines by a newspaper columnist?

There are many, many problems with urging on a “civil war” among Muslims. I don’t expect Friedman to be careful in his choice of words, but his use of the phrase “civil war” shows how confused he is. A civil war is fought between citizens of the same polity for control of its government. By speaking of a “civil war” within Islam, he unwittingly writes as if he accepts a global Islamic polity as a reality and something over which Muslims of various stripes can fight one another to control. Obviously, such a polity does not and never will exist.

As he did late last month, Friedman is carelessly reproducing pan-Islamist ideas as part of his own effort at looking for red herrings because he doesn’t want to “look inward.” In his case, the red herring is the lack of Muslim outrage. Maybe Muslims should be expressing more outrage over jihadist atrocities, but Friedman is demanding impassioned reaction from hundreds of millions spread out across four continents in response to events that are mostly abstract and far removed from them. It could be that large numbers of these people appear indifferent or quiescent not because they approve of the atrocities or fear the jihadists who commit them, but simply that they are indifferent to events that occur thousands of miles away in other lands. What we have seen in Iraq and Pakistan is the revulsion local populations come to feel for jihadists who target their people. Unless I miss something, the only way Friedman is going to get the war he wants is for jihadists to become much more numerous and widely distributed throughout Muslim-majority countries so that every Muslim society can be terrorized and then react against the attackers. That would mean a dramatic increase in terrorism worldwide and all of the attendant excesses that various national governments would engage in to combat these threats.

What Friedman is trying to avoid looking at are all those aggressive policies that he has vociferously backed for years that have done so much to sow distrust of the U.S. among Muslims. If jihadists have been making gains, it is partly because we have provided them abundant provocations and attacks to use as fodder for their propaganda. These policies have radicalized entire populations. That is what wars do: they radicalize and intensify political and/or religious beliefs, and they typically empower maximalists and fanatics. As destructive as the conflicts he would wish upon all Muslims would be, the end result could still very well be a larger population of deeply radicalized people, which would be disastrous for the welfare of all these societies and likely damaging to the security of the U.S. and allied nations.

On what basis should we believe that if Iran’s Green movement were to prevail, it would mean the end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Put another way, if the Green movement had succeeded in forcing the Supreme Leader to hold another election and Mousavi won, would Rubin and company believe that the threat from Iran’s nuclear program had been substantially mitigated? ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete asks the right questions, and just by asking them he pretty effectively demolishes Jennifer Rubin’s argument. Rubin maintains that “human rights, support for democracy, and regime change might actually enhance our objectives and afford us a solution to the problem of an Islamic fundamentalist state’s acquisition of nuclear arms.” Of course, the reference to regime change does most of the work here. The “solution” to the problem of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear arms is to change the government to such an extent that an Iranian bomb will no longer be the threat that Rubin imagines it to be.

There are many assumptions packed into Rubin’s statement, most of which are very questionable. The first assumption is there is a political movement in Iran that would transform it from being an “Islamic fundamentalist state” into something else. The Green movement has appropriated the language and symbols of the Islamic revolution for its own purposes, but this necessarily limits and defines it as an Islamist or Islamist-sounding movement. Islamist parties from Turkey to Yemen have identified themselves with principles of justice and reform in opposition to authoritarian and/or military regimes, but when Iranian reformers define themselves in this way they are closely imitating the revolutionaries whose successors they are trying to combat. The point is that reformers have acquired the authority to criticize the regime because they use its own principles and official ideology against it, so it would be very difficult for those reformers to produce an Iranian government that is not reproducing that ideology even as they are putting the government under slightly different management. As we know, Mousavi himself was once among the hard-liners in government and has entered the opposition ranks because he believes the current leadership had betrayed the revolution. This is not normally the kind of person who ushers in a radically different type of regime.

Second, Rubin assumes that Iran’s foreign policy would change significantly if it were no longer an “Islamic fundamentalist state,” which gives far too much importance to professed state ideology and does not pay nearly enough attention to Iranian national aspirations. Most Iranians are not preoccupied with foreign and security policies, just as most people in other countries are not, but if they believe as Iranian nationalists that building up their nuclear program is a matter of national right and pride they are going to continue backing their government as it pursues this. If Iranian nationalists see their government attempting to act as a regional power, enough of them are probably going to support it regardless of the character of that regime to make changing that policy politically difficult.

The third questionable assumption is that a more democratic Iranian regime would be less interested in waging proxy wars abroad on the shaky grounds that relatively more democratic governments are less prone to using force against other states and especially against other democracies. As hawks never tire of telling us, they fear that Iran might hand off a nuclear weapon to one of its proxies. If that were a likely scenario, why would a change of government in Tehran make it less likely? If it is highly unlikely (and it is), changing the government is irrelevant. If enough Iranians see support for Shi’ite militias abroad as an expression of religious solidarity, their government might be under greater pressure to continue this policy to keep that part of the electorate satisfied. If a population has been conditioned and whipped up to see certain other states as their natural enemies, they are going to be more resistant to compromise with and concessions to those states. In this way, a more democratic Iran could conceivably be less willing to give up its backing of Hizbullah et al.

Had Mousavi won and been allowed to take office, there would not have been meaningful “regime change” and there would have been even fewer changes to how the Iranian government conducted itself abroad. During their debate, Mousavi faulted Ahmadinejad for his obnoxious behavior and statements, because he saw these as detrimental to Iran’s pursuit of its interests. He did not question Iran’s right to develop nuclear power, and on this point there was essentially no difference between him and his opponents. No one in the Iranian government openly boasts that it is trying to build a nuclear weapon, so why should we think that Mousavi or someone else like him would not be pursuing both nuclear energy and nuclear arms?

At the heart of Rubin’s statement is the most questionable assumption of all, which is that the promotion of democracy automatically aligns with maximal hawkish national security objectives. Of course this is a key assumption at the heart of neoconservatism for at least the last twenty years: American “values” and interests (as defined by neoconservatives) advance and retreat together. This is frequently not the case, and Iran is a good example of where the two to some extent work at cross-purposes. If severely limiting or eliminating Iran’s nuclear program is an important objective for American hawks, the Green movement is on the other side of the issue, which means that providing aid to that movement makes halting Iran’s nuclear program even more difficult.

Larison, whose claim to fame is the many links Andrew Sullivan bestows on him, is supposed to be a “paleoconservative” expert on foreign affairs, and yet if his latest postings are any indication, he’s gone over to the Dark Side. (I guess this explains that interview with The Economist, which has never before shown such interest in the foreign policy views of a small and nearly invisible sector of the American Right). ~Justin Raimondo

Yes, we wouldn’t want non-interventionist arguments to be found anywhere except in our own echo chambers. It must be the powerful lure of dark forces that has caused me to articulate the exact same view I have always held on the war in Afghanistan. As I have stated explicitly several times, the proposed Afghanistan plan seems to me to be the best and most realistic way of creating conditions that will allow us to depart Afghanistan sooner. I am open to arguments to the contrary, which Raimondo naturally never provides, but what does not interest me is the lazy, reflexive opposition to the plan displayed by the likes of Rep. Chaffetz, Arlen Specter and their newfound admirers.

Chaffetz and Specter do not oppose the plan because they object to empire or U.S. power projection abroad. Their records and recent statements make that clear. At least these might be principled objections I could respect and understand. Chaffetz opposes it because it is Obama’s plan and because he does not like fighting a limited counterinsurgency in which we do not inflict mass death on a foreign population. Chaffetz believes that the rules of engagement that are beginning to prevent the disastrous bombings of civilian centers are tying the hands of the military, and in any other case Raimondo would want to keep those rules in place, but for whatever reason Chaffetz’s dangerous ideas on this score get a pass because he winds up favoring withdrawal. Specter opposes the plan in a desperate bid to keep his job by trying to satisfy progressive voters unhappy with the administration. They may be imitating some of the arguments that I and others have used against the Iraq war, but this does not derive from any understanding of Afghanistan that they have. The situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same, and the reasons why the “surge” was unlikely to achieve its stated goals do not necessarily apply to the Afghanistan plan. Not only do the wars differ in legitimacy, but the strategic importance of each is very different.

One of the most damning things opponents of the Iraq invasion argued against its supporters was that they were pursuing ideological fantasies and were ignoring the realities of the places they were trying to transform. For those ideologues, war always seems necessary and escalation is always the right answer. It is no wonder that Kristol, Kagan and the rest have endorsed sending additional forces to Afghanistan, because they always call for sending additional forces under any and all circumstances. The nature of the conflict does not interest them–just like Chaffetz, they always favor using more force than anyone else favors.

If non-interventionists believe that force can sometimes be used justly within limits for limited, specific ends, it is a mistake to adopt the same habit of always opposing every single increase in forces when the war is a legitimate one that most of us have theoretically been supporting all along. By all means, let’s hear a strong argument why the plan is wrong, or better yet let’s hear why the Afghan war is no longer justified or legitimate. My view on Afghanistan could be wrong, and I might be persuaded that this is the case, but I’m not going to be persuaded by shoddy arguments from the Chaffetzes and Specters of the world when they have no credibility on such matters. For the sake of argument, let’s say that I have gone over to “the Dark Side.” If that’s true, what doesn’t make any sense is cheering on long-time Iraq war supporters such as Specter or advocates for bombing Iran such as Chaffetz. If I have gone over to “the Dark Side,” they have never left.

For the record, Sestak ran and won in 2006 in no small part on his opposition to the war in Iraq. He contrasted his support for the war in Afghanistan, in which he had served, with his opposition to that unjustified war. In his case, this was not just rhetorical posturing, but a view derived from making a reasonable distinction between a retaliatory war against the hosts of a group that attacked the United States and an unnecessary and unjust war of aggression. (Sestak did not necessarily describe Iraq in exactly those terms, but he did see invading Iraq as a terrible mistake.) His current primary opponent, Arlen Specter, voted for and supported the Iraq war steadfastly for as long as he was a member of the GOP. It is the Iraq war that Raimondo has repeatedly claimed was among the greatest foreign policy blunders in U.S. history, and strangely it is supporters of that war (and in Chaffetz’s case a possible war against Iran) that he now seems to be championing against those of us who correctly opposed invading Iraq while understanding that the war in Afghanistan was a legitimate and unfortunate necessity. It is absurd to say that the victory of the insurgent progressive, anti-Iraq war Sestak against the Washington-backed “centrist,” opportunistic hawk Specter would represent a “rather large feather in the War Party’s cap.” That is how far out Raimondo has had to go to keep his argument from unraveling completely: he has to make established antiwar voices out to be agents of dark forces and he also has to credit reliable hawks with antiwar views they don’t actually hold.

If Raimondo would like to defend career hawks who have been wrong on every major foreign policy question of the last decade and who are now very, very latecomers to opposing the one recent war that is legitimate, he is free to do so, but it won’t change the reality that these hawks do not oppose any military interventions in principle or in practice. Chaffetz’s sudden discovery that it is politically useful to oppose “Obama’s war” by complaining that the rules of engagement in Afghanistan are too stringent and limiting is the opposite of any coherent ideas on how to reduce civilian casualties and weaken the hold of Taliban militias. Chaffetz has called for withdrawal from Afghanistan because he apparently cannot grasp that there is anything between withdrawal and total war, and he knows that he will not get the total war and “victory” he insists on seeking. If Chaffetz had his way exactly as he wanted it, the escalation in Afghanistan would be larger, the Afghan civilian death toll would be far higher, and the mission would be even closer to failure. Specter’s realization that some Pennsylvania progressives might punish Sestak for taking a controversial position in his party on Afghanistan is just more of Specter’s utterly unprincipled maneuvering.

For his part, Sestak still supports the war in Afghanistan as he has always done, and I am trying to do the same. If that puts me on “the Dark Side” in Raimondo’s book, I must have always been there, because my arguments on this have not changed over the years. I’d rather be there than siding with a shabby old pol who would do and say anything to win another term and a foolish House member urging us to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran is a case in point: Wishing to show flexibility, Obama put Iran’s demand for uranium enrichment on the table, effectively reversing three unanimous or near unanimous Security Council resolutions reaffirming the illegality of the Islamic Republic’s program. Tehran promptly rejected Obama’s deal but claimed victory because Obama had inadvertently affirmed Tehran’s right to enrichment. ~Anna Borshchevskaya

This is why our debate on Iran policy is so poor. Iran policy hawks falsely claim that Iran does not have a guaranteed right to enrichment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the rest of us are supposed to pretend that these people have some credibility discussing these matters. In fact, the NPT requires that Iran follow IAEA guidelines while it is enriching uranium. The resolutions in question have ordered suspension of enrichment on account of those technical violations. They do not claim that Iran’s program is itself illegal, nor do they claim that Iran does not have a right to enrichment, but that Iran has violated certain safeguards. In other words, it is no great concession to accept that Iran has a right to enrichment.

The relevant issue as far as the administration has been concerned is whether Iran will abuse that right to build nuclear weapons. To insist that Iran should not even have the right to enrichment for peaceful purposes is not only to be extremely unreasonable, but it also requires ignoring what the NPT permits. Little wonder that the Iranian government has threatened to leave the confines of the NPT. Iran sees that states that are not bound by the treaty can acquire quite large nuclear arsenals and proliferate as much as they like, and it also sees that there is an excessive opposition even to Iran’s right to enrichment, so it may not be much longer before Iran takes the perfectly predictable and self-interested step of abandoning the treaty and thereby circumventing the only legal framework there is to compel Iranian compliance.

The rest of Borshchevskaya’s article isn’t much better. She stresses the importance of the Lebanese elections earlier this year, which basically endorsed the status quo of a closely divided country in which the March 8 forces actually represented a majority of Lebanese voters. Jumblatt’s party was part of the winning March 14 coalition, and almost immediately he was talking about bringing Hizbullah in as part of a unity government. The triumphant narrative reported in the Western press of some sort of electoral “victory” over Hizbullah was simply wrong. Hizbullah has become increasingly influential in Lebanese politics, especially since the war in 2006, and Suleiman is in no more position to oppose this than were his predecessors. Suleiman became president because he was an acceptable unity candidate, and he has the difficult task of preventing the country from slipping back into civil war. Borshchevskaya would have the administration ignore the political and military realities of Lebanon, pretend that the March 14 forces represent a majority view of Lebanese and believe that the only thing keeping them down is Syrian influence. As it is, the administration seems to be trying to help the Lebanese president keep his country from descending into renewed civil strife, and somehow this is counted as a “failure” of Obama’s foreign policy.

Many also scoff at the notion that a responsible Iranian leader would risk using or transferring nuclear weapons or technology. We are told that Ahmadinejad (who most acknowledge is crazy enough to use such a weapon) won’t make the final decision. But the regime is remarkably opaque, and shifting power centers ensure that even capable intelligence agencies have low levels of certainty about decision-making in Iran’s nuclear program. ~Danielle Pletka

As one of the scoffers, I would add something else. That parenthetical statement about Ahmadinejad’s insanity does a lot of the work in a piece aimed at instilling fear in its audience. We heard quite often how “mad” Hussein was in the years prior to the invasion. As we now know for certain, he was so utterly preoccupied with self-preservation and projecting an image of strength that he went out of his way to appear more dangerous than he was to make enemies think twice about attacking him. As the rigged election and crackdown this summer have shown, Ahmadinejad is concerned above all with keeping himself and his allies in power.

Ahmadinejad has shown himself to be the most cynical, self-serving political operator. This is hardly the kind of person who would hand over a nuke to a third party even if he were in a position to do this, much less order a nuclear attack when he and his allies would stand to lose everything in the retaliation that would follow. It is improbable that a constitutionally weak president, who does not have authority over the security apparatus or foreign policy, would be in a position to make a decision as crucial as the sale or use of nuclear weapons, but even if he were making that decision we have little reason to think that he would willingly hand over such a powerful weapon and even less reason to think that he would order an attack with such a weapon. So Iran policy hawks have to trot out the “crazy dictator” line to get around the problem that all of their frightening scenarios are far-fetched and unreasonable.

The Iranian government is relatively opaque, but like any modern regime it is made up of a large number of people and institutions that have their own interests in self-preservation. Even if Iran one day had a nuclear weapon (which it doesn’t have right now!), and even if Ahmadinejad were in a position to give away, sell or use such a weapon, you have to assume that there would be a near-unanimous consensus inside the upper echelons of the Iranian government that this is a desirable thing to do. More to the point, you have to assume that there would be no violent attempt from within the regime to stop such action. As Pletka herself acknowledges, the regime’s structure is opaque, so we cannot assume that there is anything like a consensus inside their government about what Iran should do with any nuclear weapons that it might acquire. This is understandable, since it does not yet possess these weapons and won’t have them for many years. Even if Ahmadinejad were “crazy,” as Pletka assumes without any real evidence*, that doesn’t mean that all of the people in the military, the IRGC and the clerical establishment are suicidal.

Pakistan is a useful counter-example that disproves the hawks’ fantasies. Pakistan is a state that has used terrorist and militia proxies against it enemies for decades. Pakistan is at a significant disadvantage against India in conventional warfare, which is why it has relied on terrorism and proxy warfare since the loss of Bangladesh. It has actually possessed a sizeable nuclear arsenal for over a decade. If ever there were a candidate for a nuclear-armed state giving nukes to terrorists to achieve its political goals, Pakistan is it, and Pakistan has not done this and is not likely to do this. While there was a dangerous moment during the Kargil war when the conflict almost escalated disastrously and there were extremely heightened tensions earlier this decade, the Pakistani military had complete control over its arsenal and it was not about to hand off one of its weapons to Lashkar-e-Taiba or one of its other proxies. Not only would this deprive Pakistan of control over how and when the weapon would be used, but it would still make Pakistan responsible for the weapon’s use, the weapon would be traced back to Pakistan, and this would lead to serious Indian retaliation against Pakistan. When nuclear weapons are involved, deterrence seems to prevail every time.

As Greg Scoblete makes clear, the “the real fear is not that the lives of Americans are in any concrete danger when Iran goes nuclear but that the power balance in the Middle East might tilt in Iran’s favor.” The thing to bear in mind is that the power balance has been tilting in Iran’s favor for the last six years thanks to the rise of pro-Iranian Shi’ite parties as the leading parties in Iraq’s government. Iran is a leading regional power, and it is going to exercise more influence over time. It is going to seek and eventually acquire nuclear weapons to counter-balance the numerous other nuclear powers in its neighborhood, several of which are openly hostile.**

We already have the means to contain Iran. Except when we have toppled their worst rivals and empower their proxies, we were already containing Iran. What so many Westerners seem not to understand is that if Iran pursues a nuclear weapon, it is doing so to acquire a deterrent to limit the aggressiveness of hostile states. In other words, the question the Iranian government is asking is how it can “contain” and deter the U.S. and our allies.

* Treating Ahmadinejad as a “crazy” person is a mistake, because it means that we believe that only a madman would hold the beliefs that he does. We don’t quite know what to do with an urban engineer apparently in complete control of his faculties who nonetheless holds some of the most obnoxious political views. Indeed, when most people label this or that foreign leader as “crazy,” I’m guessing they don’t mean that he is out of his mind. They mean that they don’t like him. As a descriptor of political leaders, crazy is fast becoming as meaningless as fascist already is.

** The amazing thing about the Iran debate is that many of us in the West talk about the possibility of bombing Iran the way other people talk about the weather. It might rain later today. Israel might launch military strikes on Iran. I recall an article in The Wall Street Journal over two months ago outlining the technical difficulties of an Israeli air strike, the armaments that would be used and the targets that would be attacked. There is a remarkable non-chalance about aggressive war against Iran that would send the very same people into apoplectic fits of rage if state-run media in one of these authoritarian states blithely discussed attacking installations in our country. Hawks would take such talk from the Iranian media as proof of hostile intent and a justification for “pre-emptive” action.

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. ~Ryan Lizza

After reading his ridiculous Rolling Stone article on Obama’s “sell-out” to Wall Street, I am persuaded that Matt Taibbi should be forced to write these two Ryan Lizza sentences a few thousand times by hand until he has absorbed their message. The problem is not Taibbi’s reporting on the administration’s actions and personnel, but with the overall interpretation he gives to the facts. No one believed that Obama was “standing up to Wall Street” when Tim Geithner and Larry Summers were appointed to top economic Cabinet and advisory posts, and everything that has happened since then is consistent with the modern Democratic Party’s accommodation with Wall Street that has been steadily intensifying for the last fifteen years or so. Obama’s support for the financial bailout last fall was just one more instance of this.

As far as Washington pundits and most of the political class are concerned, Obama has taken the “responsible” positions in response to the financial crisis, because he has embraced the solutions offered by the very people from Wall Street, the central bank and the Treasury who contributed greatly to the causes of the crisis. It is very important to understand that Obama campaigned on these “responsible” positions, and he made no promises to challenge the government’s collusion with financial interests. His supporters have exactly what they voted for as far as these things are concerned. He had no mandate “to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy,” because he never really proposed to do either of these things. If he had, he probably would not have voted for the financial sector bailout. It is a bit rich for Taibbi to complain about the Citigroup deal as if it represented something different from the bailout passed earlier in the fall. None of this is to say that Taibbi is wrong in finding the deal outrageous, but it was hardly a sharp break with the things Obama had already supported.

Some progressives are just as invested in the idea that Obama has “sold out” to corporate and financial interests as neoconservatives are committed to the fantasy that Obama’s foreign policy has recently undergone dramatic change. The reality is that Obama never had to “sell out” to these interests, because he never challenged them in any serious way in his national political career before he became President. We are not witnessing “one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history.” We are seeing Obama do pretty much exactly what he did during the general election and the months before his Inauguration: he has been careful to position himself squarely as a conventional center-left politician, and he has done this most of all as far as it concerns the financial sector.

As for trade policy, he has not pushed for new trade agreements, but neither has he actively tried to change any existing agreements. The primary candidate who raised the possibility of re-negotiating NAFTA vanished even before the nomination was his. Even Austan Goolsbee, whom Taibbi makes out to be one of the good, banished economic advisors, effectively admitted in the spring of 2008 that, as Taibbi puts it, “Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA.” Taibbi may not want to remember, but at one time it was Goolsbee’s presence on the Obama campaign that served as the kind of reassuring signal to corporate and financial interests that the Furman and Geithner appointments were later on. The idea of re-negotiating NAFTA had been dead for months by the time Furman came on board. Furman’s appointment confirmed a policy view that already existed. It did not represent a change or a departure on trade policy. Taibbi writes as if he didn’t know that Obama was a committed free-trade globalist. Nowhere can Taibbi provide any of Obama’s statements or legislation to support the idea that his embrace of the policies and personnel of Rubinism and globalization as President is any way different from the policies he favored before his election. Instead we are treated to a lot of hand-waving like this:

A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy.

Obama didn’t run on a platform of “fundamental” change of the economy. He was very careful not to scare anyone with anything as dramatic or interesting as that. He didn’t run on a platform of “fundamental” change in foreign policy, either. The man isn’t interested in fundamental change. My guess is that this is not just because this kind of change is far more difficult and risky, but because he really thinks it is undesirable. This is how he has gone from political obscurity to the White House in a decade. That was Lizza’s point all along.

Recently, I answered a few questions from The Economist on foreign policy. You can read my responses here.

Of all the interventionists out there, Robert Kagan should know better than to claim that the Oslo speech represented some sort of “shift” in Obama’s foreign policy. As Tomasky made clear in his article, Obama was saying things that he had been saying for years. There was nothing new. There was no “shift.” Kagan should know better because he was one of the few neoconservatives who recognized early on that Obama was an ambitious interventionist. Kagan liked Obama’s early foreign policy speeches, as well he should have. Most of his complaints since then have been baseless (he once claimed Obama was cutting the Pentagon’s budget) or focused on a disagreement over process and means, which are the only significant disagreements that separate most neoconservatives from liberal internationalists. Obama made no “course adjustment.” His Nobel speech, like his war plan speech, was defined by a particular occasion, but he could have given most of the speech two or even seven years ago.

None of this stops Kagan from making a fool of himself:

He would not be the first president to make the transformation from skeptic to champion of a war.

Obama has never been a skeptic of the Afghan war! There has been exactly one war where Obama’s skepticism outweighed his normal hawkishness, and this was Iraq. As it happens, he was absolutely right to be skeptical about that. It could turn out that he ought to have been more skeptical of what the U.S. can accomplish in Afghanistan, but all of this commentary I see claiming that Obama has somehow been “half-hearted” or not a fully convinced supporter of the war in Afghanistan is completely wrong.

The comparison with Wilson is silly. Wilson was lying when he claimed that he was trying to keep the United States out of war, and once he was secure in office after the 1916 election and had a good enough pretext he could not enter the war fast enough. His second inauguration was in late March, and the war declaration was passed in early April. Wilson’s voters would have had a right to feel betrayed by Wilson’s sudden volte-face; Obama’s backers are getting exactly what Obama promised them. Obama has never claimed as a candidate or as President that he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan under present circumstances; he did not campaign on suddenly ending the war in Afghanistan. Unlike Wilson, Obama did not blatantly lie about his intentions regarding Afghanistan. What seems to amaze so many people is that Obama evidently meant what he said when he argued for providing the Afghan war with more resources and soldiers. All of the campaign rhetoric that Obama wanted to “retreat” or “surrender” to or “appease” America’s enemies has been exposed as the lies that they obviously were at the time, and so now there is something of a desperate race to claim that Obama’s foreign policy has changed from what it was and, if possible, to take credit for the change.

The Oslo speech also does not represent a “turning point in Iran policy.” Obama’s idea of engagement with Iran has always included the possibility of punitive measures, and of course Obama has never absolutely ruled out the use of force against Iran. Engagement was one tool among many to achieve a certain end. Obama’s goal has always been the dismantling or strict limitation of Iran’s nuclear program. Obama’s Iran policy is continuing on the same trajectory it has been on since the beginning, and so long as the severe limitation or elimination of Iran’s nuclear program is the official goal the administration will employ increasingly harsh measures to try to extract concessions. This will fail, and Iran will never make those concessions. Obama’s approach is not what I have in mind when I think of engagement with Iran, but Obama’s Iran policy has not turned anywhere, nor has it changed. It continues on its straight line to confrontation and conflict. At least this last part obviously pleases Kagan and Kristol, which is the lesson to take away from neoconservative praise of Obama’s speech: they will embrace anything, even a Democrat delivering his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, if it makes aggressive war more likely.

At the risk of piling on, I wanted to follow up on Erik Kain’s response to Abe Greenwald. Erik writes:

Even more absurd is the idea that because these people support Obama’s Afghanistan strategy that now a slim majority don’t share the conception of morality advocated by liberals. What does that even mean? Neocons like Greenwald assume that the only people who could possibly oppose war are liberals. Such is the state of affairs on the right, I suppose. But even worse, to weigh someone’s morals on their support for war (and to call the lack of support immoral) strikes me as fairly awful. The old trick is to question someone’s patriotism, and that’s cynical and arrogant enough, but to define an entire group’s morality based on their belief that interventionist wars are wrong is absurd.

It is absurd, but what makes Greenwald’s article deserving of even more ridicule is the content of this “morality” that Obama and others are supposed to have embraced in the past. According to Greenwald, Obama “has held fast to a comprehensive model of right and wrong.” What model is this? He goes on:

It is the present-day liberal model, wherein right comprises those things accomplished or pursued without approval from the West and wrong covers most anything America and Europe hope to effectuate outside their own borders; right is that which strives for peace, even at the cost of long-term suffering, and wrong is any American act of war.

This is laughable. I can’t speak for liberals, but as I recall it is liberal internationalists who have been busily trying to do all kinds of things beyond our borders for as long as they have been around. On the whole, they believe in global interdependence and global governance more than even neoconservative globalists, and they have done a great deal of the disapproving of other regimes’ actions inside and outside their own borders. To this day, the illegal bombing of Serbia ten yeas ago remains sacrosanct for most liberals, and Obama endorsed it again in his Oslo speech. There were some honorable progressives who spoke out and opposed the bombing of Serbia as well, so I don’t want to overstate this, but by and large Kosovo was and remains a war that commands majority approval on the left just as Iraq has commanded it on the right. That was a case of the “responsibility to protect” and a defense of “human rights,” even though every premise for the military action was false, our government had no legal or moral authority to intervene in Serbia’s internal affairs, and the war greatly worsened conditions in Kosovo and throughout the region. The “morality” Greenwald attributes to liberals is not only one they would not recognize, but also one that has no basis in reality.

Historically, liberals have hardly been pacifists, and most of them today would have nothing to do with the “morality” Greenwald describes as theirs. Obama is even more hawkish than most liberals, as there is only one military campaign that he has opposed in his entire political career, and almost every foreign policy address he has given has been filled to overflowing with all the areas in which he thinks America must provide “leadership.” I think this is horrible, but there is no question that this has been the content of Obama’s foreign policy thinking for many years. There was nothing new in the Oslo speech to anyone who has been paying attention. Neoconservatives such as Greenwald are forced to caricature liberal internationalist positions because the latter are not all that different from their own as far as policy objectives are concerned, so they are forced to exaggerate or invent differences to make neoconservatism seem to be the only ideology around acceptable to the political class. Every liberal has to be portrayed as a McGovernite (and a caricature of a McGovernite at that!) to cover up the reality that liberal internationalists have largely occupied the policy and political ground on which Nixon and Republican realists once stood. In the meantime, neoconservatives have been dragging the GOP down a dead-end alley of increasingly aggressive confrontational policies. This has made the misrepresentation of rather boring, conventional center-left establishmentarians such as Obama crucial to maintaining the fiction that the GOP and the neoconservatives in it are the “serious” party on foreign policy.

P.S. I had not seen Michael Tomasky’s article making much the same point until after I finished this post. Tomasky observes the same thing I did:

The surprise — the happy surprise among conservatives, and the anger among some on the left — says less about Obama than it does about the presumptions of listeners in both camps.

Before Culture11 vanished into the ether, I had an article on Obama the day after the election that addressed the persistent habit people across the spectrum had in refusing to believe that Obama actually meant what he said on foreign policy:

Obama’s position on Israel and Palestine is a particularly apt example of how perceptions of the candidate’s policies diverge diverge wildly from his stated views. Some of his more progressive—and conservative—supporters want to emphasize the same ‘weakness’ on Israel that his critics want to prove. Trivial episodes—toasting Khalidi at a farewell party, having dinner with Edward Said, generic remarks about Palestinian suffering—are transformed into clues to understanding the hoped-for “real” Obama who will chart a different (i.e., a more “even-handed” or even pro-Palestinian) course in American policy. The same episodes are also cited as indictments alongside such equally meaningless things as Hamas’ so-called ‘endorsement’.

Both interpretations conveniently ignore Obama’s actual Israel policy positions, which mirror the Bush Administration in almost every detail, and Obama’s record, including his unequivocal support for Israeli military action in Lebanon in 2006. His antiwar supporters, who frequently tout his 2002 statement of opposition to “rash and dumb wars,” are unfazed by or unaware of his support for an equally counterproductive, rash and dumb war in Lebanon, just as his hawkish critics cannot or do not attempt to make sense of the fact that Obama is far more in agreement with them about Israel than he is with significant numbers of his own voters.

This process has been repeating for the last year. Whenever Obama reminds us that he is a hawkish liberal internationalist, neoconservatives and hawks gasp in amazement (and try to take credit) and many of his supporters express dismay at the “betrayal” they have experienced. It is understandable why some neoconservatives would want to treat Obama’s liberal internationalism as a result of “going neocon,” because as long as Democratic leaders adhere to something close to a pre-1968/post-1992 liberal internationalist foreign policy neoconservatism has no reason to exist, except perhaps as the distorted echo of liberal internationalism that it has always been.