The American Conservative

The rivalry between democratic capitalism and state capitalism is not like the rivalry between capitalism and communism. It is an interdependent rivalry. State capitalist enterprises invest heavily in democratic capitalist enterprises (but they tend not to invest in each other). Both sides rely on each other in interlocking trade networks.

Nonetheless, there is rivalry. There is a rivalry over prestige. What system works better to produce security and growth? What system should emerging and struggling democratic nations aim for? ~David Brooks

Brooks is discussing Ian Bremmer’s The End of the Free Market, which Greg Scoblete also reviewed recently. (Greg has some more critical remarks on Brooks’ column here.) The rivalry Brooks describes is not really between state capitalism and something that isn’t state capitalism (“democratic capitalism”), but between a state capitalist arrangement that includes public ownership of certain major industries (mainly energy companies) and a state capitalist arrangement in which corporations influence the state’s regulatory and policy apparatus to create favorable conditions for themselves. Dr. Clyde Wilson has defined the latter sort of state capitalism as “a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government.” In practice, that is what we have here and throughout the industrialized world. As Blond puts it, “We’ve created a condition in which large businesses dominate—via a rigged market of rent-seeking capital—in an economy that cuts off for the majority the path to mobility and prosperity.”

One can approve of this, as I am guessing Brooks ultimately would, or one can see it as a dangerous system that unduly concentrates economic and political power into relatively few hands and invites frequent abuses and misallocations of resources, but it is important that we understand what it is we’re contrasting with Putinism, Chavismo, and other systems in which there are some government-owned and run industries. Obviously, there is a meaningful and real difference between governments that own and operate major industries and governments that collude with corporate interests, but these are really two species of state capitalism that differ from one another in degree and not in kind.

When Bremmer refers to the rise of the more statist state capitalism, Phillip Blond would respond that the free market ended long ago and the concentrated wealth and power of government and corporations make sure that it doesn’t revive. Relative to our system, wealth is even more concentrated and power is even more centralized in what Brooks and Bremmer are calling state capitalism, but our system is already far removed from the free market of what Blond calls popular capitalism. In other words, Blond’s objection to “democratic capitalism” is that it is precisely not democratic or anything like it. Perhaps that is an obvious point, but so far it is one that I have not seen made.

Brooks has other questions that actually point to the increasing similarities between the two systems or are simply off topic all together:

There is also rivalry over what rules should govern the world order. Should countries like Russia be able to withhold gas from Western Europe to make a political point? Should governments be able to tilt the playing field to benefit well-connected national champions [bold mine-DL]? Should authoritarian governments like Iran be allowed to nuclearize?

To take the last question first, Iran’s authoritarianism has nothing to do with it, nor is its corrupt, cronyist economic model relevant here. If Brooks is asking whether Iran should be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, the “rules” that govern this are clear enough, but there is no practical means of preventing Iran from acquiring these weapons if it decides to do so. If Brooks is asking whether Iran should be allowed to develop its nuclear program for energy, the “rules” already permit this under the NPT. Were Iran not a signatory to the treaty, there would be no legal mechanism to prevent Iran from doing whatever it wanted in developing nuclear technology. Proliferation issues are even less relevant when we realize that a country’s economic model has nothing to do with whether a government is permitted to develop nuclear weapons or not.

As far as Russian gas cut-offs are concerned, the cut-offs have had a political dimension in the past when there were tensions between Ukraine and Russia, but on the whole the pricing and shipment disputes behind the cut-offs have centered around Russian attempts to reduce state subsidies, which naturally resulted in higher prices for the consumers. As Paul Robinson explained in The Spectator four years ago, Gazprom has been trying to bring its pricing into line with what the EU wants:

The reason the EU dislikes the low prices charged by Gazprom to CIS members is that these are considered an unfair subsidy to CIS industries, which gives them a competitive advantage over European companies.

And he added later:

In short, the increase in gas prices is fully in keeping with the West’s desire to complete the process of creating a genuine market economy in Russia, Ukraine and the other countries of the CIS, as well as progressing towards fulfilling the environmental demands of the Kyoto accord. It is an entirely welcome gesture from the perspective of any free-market economist, not to mention any environmentalist.

So two of Brooks’ examples of how state capitalism affects international order are either unrelated to the question of state capitalism or actually concern the greater “marketization” of the Russian energy sector and the reduced role of state subsidies in the functioning of Russian energy exporters. As for governments tilting the playing field to benefit the well-connected, we have been seeing this happen here in the U.S. for the last two years on a depressingly regular basis (and it didn’t start two years ago). It is not at all clear that tilting playing fields in the name of collusion and cronyism is a unique trait of state capitalist systems run by authoritarian governments.

Update: In fairness to Bremmer, Greg noted this in his review:

Bremmer’s picture of global state capitalism is nuanced – he acknowledges that even free market democracies interfere in markets for political purposes, as is the case with Europe and America’s generous farm subsidies and tariffs. The signature difference is the degree and scope of state interference and the lack of democratic transparency in the countries that practice state capitalism.

So I stand partly corrected. Bremmer does acknowledge these points, and Greg made a point of mentioning this.

Thomas Friedman manages to write an entire column on the deterioration of U.S.-Turkish relations and never once mentions the Iraq war, the PKK (which has revived since the start of the Iraq war), the weak U.S. response to the flotilla raid, or the Tehran nuclear deal that he and the administration both dismissed with contempt. If we’re apportioning blame for what has encouraged Turkey on its more independent course, we can assign quite a bit to both the Bush and Obama administrations, but that is not the only thing that interests me here. Friedman passes over U.S. mistakes in silence, because this makes it easier to portray Erdogan as the sole culprit responsible for wrecking U.S.-Turkish relations and it helps the misleading “the Islamists are coming!” narrative take hold.

A useful counterpoint to Friedman is a recent column by Ömer Taspinar, who provides what seems to me to be one of the more persuasive explanations for why the Turkish government has been acting as it has over the last several years. Taspinar starts by questioning the handy, potentially misleading Islamic/secular distinction that practically every Western observer, including myself, has used at one time or another:

I believe one of the major mistakes in analyzing Turkish foreign policy is done when analysts speak of a “secular” versus “Islamic” divide in Ankara’s strategic choices. While the growing importance of religion in Turkey should not be dismissed, the real threat to Turkey’s Western orientation today is not so much Islamization but growing nationalism and frustration with the United States, Europe and Israel.

Of course, for many analysts referring to this divide is not so much intended to describe what is going on as it is aimed at demonizing the direction Turkish foreign policy has taken. The so-called “Islamic” turn is mostly cited by those who want to minimize or deny the role that Western governments have had in sabotaging the Western orientation of Turkey they claim to find so valuable. Most American observers are only too happy to blame the EU for alienating the Turks, as Secretary Gates did just this month, and Friedman is even willing to acknowledge some Israeli responsibility, but most Americans refuse to acknowledge that Washington had any role in weakening ties. Writing shortly after Erdogan’s Davos blow-up, I said:

The episode summed up the growing frustration in Turkey’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) government with Israeli policy and showed the strain that the conflict in Gaza had put on Israel’s only alliance with a Muslim country. More than that, though, it reflected growing Turkish disillusionment with all of its Western allies over the last decade. The greatest danger to Turkey and the West now comes from failing to recognize how Western policies have alienated the Turks and misinterpreting their disillusionment as simple rejection [bold mine-DL].

There is something else that Taspinar said that is very important for Westerners to understand:

Until a couple of years ago, I used to argue that Western-oriented Kemalist elites had traded places with the once eastward-leaning Islamists on the grounds that it was the AK Party that seemed more interested in maintaining close ties with Europe and the United States. The AK Party, in my eyes, needed the West more than Turkey’s Kemalist establishment for a simple reason: It needed to prove to the Turkish military, to secularist segment of society at home and to Western partners in the international community that it was not an Islamist party.

Now, however, I increasingly believe that the AK Party, too, has decided to jump on the bandwagon of nationalist frustration with the West. After all, this is the most powerful societal undercurrent in Turkey, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an needs to win elections. As the events of the last couple of weeks have shown, America and Europe should pay attention to Turkey’s Gaullist inclinations. In the past, Americans and Europeans would often ask whether Turkey had any realistic geopolitical alternatives and complacently reassure themselves that it did not. But today such alternatives are starting to look more realistic to many Turks. The rise of Turkish Gaullism need not come fully at the expense of America and Europe [bold mine-DL]. But Turks are already looking for economic and strategic opportunities in Russia, India, China and, of course, the Middle East and Africa. It is high time for American analysts to stop overplaying the Islamic-secular divide in Turkish foreign policy and pay more attention to what unites both camps: Turkish nationalism.

Taspinar’s concept of Turkish Gaullism is quite helpful in making sense of Turkish foreign policy and the unreasonable hostility it has generated here in the U.S. Turkey today is acting very much as France did in the early 2000s, and it is provoking the same irrational backlash that characterized the response to French opposition to invading Iraq. The U.S. is fortunate to have allies that are not satisfied to serve as nothing more than lackeys, and we are also fortunate to have allies that try to create obstacles when we are heading down a self-destructive or foolish path. In 2002-03, the French government was a better ally to the United States in resisting the Iraq war than the British government was in facilitating it. Today Turkey is a better and more useful ally when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program than any of the governments that voted with the U.S. for the new round of sanctions. In protecting their own national interests, the Turkish government is providing the U.S. with opportunities to avoid a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. So far the administration seems to have learned nothing from the previous experience with difficult, independent-minded allies.

It seems to be easy for a lot of people in the U.S. to forget, but the AKP came to power on an agenda of integration with Europe and economic reform. For its part as far as economic reforms are concerned, the AKP has mostly delivered, and during Erdogan’s tenure Turkish trade has boomed. If it happened in almost any other country the combination of neoliberal economic policies and a relatively conservative, religiously-oriented ruling party would be well-received in the U.S., and for a time the AKP was well-received until it showed that it was going to use its increased economic and political clout to pursue Turkish national interests and regional ambitions. Turkey liberalized and democratized just as Western globalists wanted, and now they are annoyed at the results because it did not weaken their national identity or their nationalism as many of them expected that it would.

As he did over the last two weeks, Friedman has chosen to portray independent Turkish foreign policy decisions as anti-Western and/or anti-democratic moves. Even though he claims to want Turkey to function as a bridge to its eastern neighbors, Friedman was sickened by the Tehran nuclear deal mainly because it was a deal made with the authoritarian government of Turkey’s main eastern neighbor. Friedman very much wants Turkey to mediate between its western and eastern neighbors, but he does not want it to mediate on its own terms and he does not want it to do any of the things that give it the credibility to be seen by its neighboring governments and other nations as an acceptable mediator. This is significant because Friedman’s reactions to recent Turkish government moves are entirely typical of most mainstream pundits and politicians. In fact, they don’t want a “bridge” and they don’t want Turkey to provide a “balancing role.” Quite clearly, they want Turkey to line up, shut up and not cause any disturbances. In other words, they want things to go back to being the way they were fifteen or twenty years ago, but Turkey and the region surrounding it have changed too much for things to be like that ever again.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing in discussing Turkey and its relationships with Western governments is just how oblivious most Western critics of Turkey are to how one-sided and biased the U.S. and Israel are and are perceived as being when it comes to any of the concerns of other nations in the Near East. European governments do not contribute as much to this, but that is because they are less activist and interventionist in the region. If Turkey is supposed to provide a “balancing role,” that will sometimes mean putting its weight behind the concerns and complaints of other nations in the region that the U.S., EU and Israel ignore or reject out of hand. Viewed from anywhere other than the U.S. or Israel, Turkey’s condemnation of Cast Lead, its opposition to the blockade of Gaza, and its fuel-swap agreement with Iran are all fairly reasonable, normal, and even Western positions. If Washington insists on making those positions into reasons to weaken the relationship with Turkey, it will be the U.S. that is pushing the U.S.-Turkish alliance over the cliff. That doesn’t have to happen, but at some point it will if the administration does not start correcting its mishandling of Turkey very soon.

Whereas the Reagan administration in the 1980s could do little to help Iranians (Ronald Reagan’s determined efforts to engage the clerical regime over the hostages in Lebanon certainly didn’t strengthen “moderates” in Tehran), Mr. Obama could do vastly more. By throwing in his lot with the freedom movement, he would surely increase the odds that we won’t have to live with a nuclear bomb controlled by virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic clerics. Democrats, once the champions of promoting pro-democracy movements, need to understand that the good that they can do for the people of Iran far exceeds the great harm that comes from doing nothing. ~Reuel Marc Gerecht

As Andrew says, this Gerecht op-ed is not at all persuasive. All of the usual baseless assertions are there: Obama can “throw his lot” in with the Green movement (how?), this will increase the odds that a non-existent Iranian bomb won’t be controlled by the current batch of clerics (why?), and Obama can do “vastly more” than Reagan did (what?). It is very much like Stephens’ column in simply presuming that Obama had the ability to help the Green movement constructively and chose not to use that ability.

When the Bush administration basically stood by and watched as the Burmese junta crushed the peaceful protests in Rangoon three years ago, few people were daft enough to claim that Bush had failed to act aggressively enough on behalf of the “Saffron” revolution. Sane people recognized that there was not much that Bush or anyone else in the U.S. could do. Something worth remembering here is that sanctions imposed on Burma to punish the regime have simply suffocated the opposition and destroyed the middle class. Anyone who did attack Bush for failing to “throw his lot” in with Burmese protesters while also urging ever-stricter sanctions on the regime would now look quite ridiculous. Of course, the same ridiculous combination of rhetorical support for Iran’s opposition combined with a vindictive desire for “crippling sanctions” can be found in the writings of practically every Iran hawk.

Another baseless assertion that Iran hawks like making is one that Gerecht makes a little later:

The movement is no longer just about liberalizing the state: it is now all about regime change.

If Hooman Majd and Mehdi Khalaji understand Iran, and I am persuaded that they understand far more about it than most people commenting on the subject in the Western media, this “regime change” interpretation of the Green movement is fundamentally, horribly wrong. If “Green activists insist that they seek reform and not revolution or regime change,” as Khalaji wrote, no one in the West is doing them any favors by ignoring what they claim to seek and substituting an entirely different agenda as if it were their own. Gerecht makes another mistake when he writes:

Ayatollah Khamenei is far more likely to compromise on nuclear weapons if he feels he’s about to be undone by the Green Movement.

This makes no sense. A government secure at home and certain that its opponents cannot threaten it has the confidence to take risks in negotiating and compromising with other states on important security issues. If the threat from the opposition ever became great enough that the survival of the current government was in doubt, regime leaders would become extremely inflexible in their positions on anything they perceive as relating to national security. Compromising on Iran’s nuclear program could make the current government appear weak and provide an opening for the opposition to channel nationalist discontent against the government.

Perhaps the most misleading part of Gerecht’s op-ed is the part that seemed at first to be almost a throwaway remark, but which he intended to be central to his argument. Gerecht wants us to side with the “friends of Karl Popper,” and he concludes that the Green movement is filled with “friends of Karl Popper” because some reform leaders and movement intellectuals are interested in Popper’s ideas. This is a quick sleight-of-hand on Gerecht’s part as he mentions how Khatami and Soroush have engaged with some of Popper’s ideas, and then transfers their interest in Popper to the entire movement, and this is supposed to lead us to believe that the entire movement is made up of “friends of Karl Popper.” Leaving aside how shaky a lot of Popper’s own analysis in The Open Society and Its Enemies was, I doubt that the simplistic opposition between the “open society” and totalitarianism that made sense to Popper in the mid-twentieth century will be all that useful and appropriate for Iran’s opposition, many of whose leaders still value the legacy of Khomeini.

For their part, the Iranian “friends of Karl Popper” should be very wary of the heirs of the people that Popper called the historicists, who confidently proclaim that their ideology is going to prevail and that history is on their side. The historicists that Popper was referring to believed that they had gleaned the fundamental principles of history and therefore understood how to implement these principles to create an imagined just society. Perversely, many of the latter-day Western enthusiasts of the “open society” and supposed admirers of Karl Popper regularly indulge in the historicist error that Popper deeply loathed.

The comparison hadn’t occurred to me until today, but what is striking about the endless whining serious criticism concerning Obama’s response to the Green movement is how much it resembles the criticism of his handling of the Gulf oil spill in unreasonableness, pathetic need for executive activism, and overconfidence in the power of the Presidency. There seems to be no understanding that Presidents cannot address, much less solve, every problem that makes headlines. The U.S. government is not omnipotent, and Presidents do not work magic, but for whatever reason some people think it is reasonable to expect these things. Bret Stephens’ column this morning is a good example of what I mean.

Stephens concluded that Obama had a “fighting chance to alter the dynamics of Iranian politics,” but “flubbed” his chance. This is no less absurd than claiming that Obama squandered an opportunity to plug the oil leak with his powers of telekinesis. Small wonder that Stephens never explains how Obama could have successfully “altered the dynamics of Iranian politics” in a way that would not have harmed the opposition more than it helped, except by invoking a lot of heavy-handed sanctions measures that would have harmed the opposition more than they helped. Most of the consequences Stephens dreams up for punishing the Iranian government were not in the administration’s power to impose, and those that it could have imposed, such as gasoline sanctions, would have been destructive of the very opposition forces they are supposedly meant to aid.

The critics who think that the administration was too passive in its response to the post-election protests last summer had and still have no plausible proposal for what Obama could have done differently, except that they wanted to hear more fiery deunciations and more forceful rhetoric. This would have changed nothing, but it would have exposed the gap between the administration’s lofty sentiments and its lack of action. There was nothing that the administration could have practically done to put pressure on the regime that would not have been a disaster for the Iranian people (e.g., gasoline sanctions), but despite this Obama is being faulted because he did not “do something” and show that he cared by taking decisive, counterproductive and stupid action.

For most of the last twenty years, NATO has functioned as the vehicle and the pretext for continued U.S. involvement in European affairs despite the obsolescence of the alliance after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hawks and interventionists have been enthusiastic supporters of the alliance, they defended NATO’s Balkan interventions that had nothing to do with mutual defense, and they were glad to support the use of NATO for “out-of-area” operations that had even less to do with the alliance’s original purpose. For nearly twenty years, U.S. hawks have championed each round of NATO expansion, they dismissed and mocked Russian complaints about expansion, they vehemently demanded the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia, and they have damned Obama for effectively yielding to the reality that neither Ukraine nor Georgia will ever be part of the alliance. As recently as last month, American hawks were moaning about the supposed lack of Atlanticism of the leaders of the new British coalition government, but if Atlanticism means tolerating allies that do not function as nothing more than U.S. lackeys it seems that some hawks here want nothing to do with it.

All of a sudden, some hawks have determined that NATO is a dangerous relic, and the main split among hawks on the American right seems to be between those who want to throw Turkey out of NATO and those who want the U.S. to leave NATO first. Of course, dissolving or leaving NATO would be the right thing to do, but it is telling that this thought never occurred to these people when they were urging the U.S. to be willing to go to war with Russia for the sake of Georgian control of South Ossetia. Hawks find NATO dangerous and outdated only when NATO allies act with any measure of independence and according to their national interests.

Via Andrew I came across this Hanson interview with Michael Totten. A lot of it is ridiculous, and some of it is appalling, but it is an instructive glimpse inside the cocoon where Europeans are apparently all perfidious anti-Semites, Obama is even weaker against foreign threats than the weak Europeans, and Obama simply goes along with whatever the prevailing global mood happens to be.

What is remarkable about the interview is that Totten and Hanson simply feed off one another and reinforce each other’s nonsense. There is not one probing or challenging question for Hanson in the entire interview. Totten does not object when Hanson says, “We’re only 65 years from the Holocaust. Europe is still anti-Semitic, and Israel is on its own except for the United States.” This sort of blanket condemnation of an entire continent for rank prejudice is as sloppy and false as it gets, and it gets dropped into the conversation as if Hanson were discussing the weather.

There is a casual, automatic anti-Europeanism in the U.S. that has mutated in the last decade into something truly rancid and destructive. It shouldn’t need to be said, but anti-Semitism in Europe has been removed to the margins of society and politics in pretty much every EU member state. There are some protest parties that traffic in this garbage, but they remain marginal because of it, and even some of the nationalist and anti-immigration parties in western Europe go out of their way to declare support for Israel because this aligns with their own opposition to Muslim immigration. Americans don’t have to like European views on Israel and Palestine, but we shouldn’t employ cheap, baseless smears of all Europeans as the “explanation” of why they take a different view.

No less nonsensical is the discussion Hanson and Totten have regarding Obama and foreign policy. This passage captures just how far removed from reality both of them seem to be:

VDH: This a confusing period. There’s a lot of irony. Look back at the period when Europe had it both ways, when we defended them while they mouthed off, when they undermined us and Bush pushed back.

Now compare that to what Obama is doing. He’s almost smiling while selling out Europe. He’s trying to become even more left than they are on foreign policy [bold mine-DL]. On one hand, the Europeans are getting what they deserve, but they are Westerners, they are a positive force in the world, and what we’re doing is dangerous.

MJT: It seems to unnerve the Europeans now that Obama is to their left.

VDH: It does.

MJT: They seem uncomfortable being to the right of the United States in some ways.

Of course, neither of them elaborates on any of this, because there is nothing they can cite as evidence for this silly idea. Even though there is no reason to believe any of this, they are content to agree that Obama is trying to be more left-wing on foreign policy than Europeans. They say this at the same time that Obama continues to push harder on Iran’s nuclear program and missile defense in Europe than most governments in Europe actually want, and they completely ignore that Obama has been dragging NATO allies to support the war in Afghanistan very much against the popular desires of most European nations. They talk about Obama “selling out Europe” as if this were an obvious reality, when it is an insane, ideological distortion of the last year and a half to say that the administration has been “selling out Europe.”

Selling out Europe to whom? To the Russians with whom Europeans have been steadily expanding their trade over the last decade? Most members of NATO never wanted the Czech/Polish missile defense installations, which is why they had to be negotiated through bilateral agreements. Most European governments did not want to try to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO (and Germany made sure that it didn’t happen two years ago). At most, Obama has moved the U.S. slightly in the direction of most of Europe with respect to continued NATO expansion, but officially Washington remains far more interested in expansion than the Europeans are. Very few European governments perceive Iran’s nuclear program to be the threat that Washington does. Obama is foolishly pushing for Iranian isolation at the same time that some European countries are increasing economic exchange with Iran, so how has he been trying to get to “the left” of Europe?

For his part, Totten doesn’t seem to know what’s going on:

If ganging up on Israel is the popular thing to do, he’ll do it. If the Organization of American States wants to isolate Honduras, Obama doesn’t want to be only the head of the state in the hemisphere doing the opposite. That might make the United States look it’s returning to Yankee imperialism again, even if it’s not true.

Each time there has been widespread international condemnation of Israel since Obama took office, and long before that, Obama has quite conventionally and predictably taken Israel’s side or at the very least said nothing. Totten will search in vain for administration condemnations of Operation Cast Lead, but he will find Obama specifically rejecting the Goldstone report. The administration had essentially nothing to say about the Dubai assassination, and obviously in the aftermath of the flotilla raid the U.S. has sided quite clearly with the Israeli government. Even in squabbles over settlement policy when Netanyahu deliberately and repeatedly ignored and publicly defied Washington, the administration relented quite quickly. Initially, the administration joined the OAS in condemning Zelaya’s deposition as a coup. I thought this was a serious mistake, but it ultimately didn’t amount to much. The provisional government stepped aside, elections were held, and Honduras now has a new, legitimate president. Ever since Lobo’s election, Washington has defended the results of the new Honduran election despite the vocal protests of Brazil and many other Latin American governments. Totten has taken two good examples of how Obama does not just “go along to get along” and used them to claim that he does exactly this.

The nonsense that Totten and Hanson casually spout in this interview is worth addressing because it is unfortunately quite typical and representative of the quality of foreign policy analysis and discussion on the right these days: heavy on ludicrous assertions and extremely light on any supporting evidence.

Yet if we carried out a targeted campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, against sites used to train and equip militants killing American soldiers, and against certain targeted terror-supporting and nuclear-enabling regime elements, the effects are just as likely to be limited.

It’s unclear, for example, that Iran would want to risk broadening the conflict and creating the prospect of regime decapitation. Iran’s rulers have shown that their preeminent concern is maintaining their grip on power [bold mine-DL]. If U.S. military action is narrowly targeted, and declared to be such, why would Iran’s leaders, already under pressure at home, want to escalate the conflict, as even one missile attack on a U.S. facility or ally or a blockade of the Strait would obviously do? ~Jamie Fly & Bill Kristol

One need only think about how our government would react if a state or group launched unprovoked “targeted” attacks on major military and energy facilities to see how foolish this is. It wouldn’t matter to our government if the attack was “targeted” or not, and it wouldn’t matter to the American public what absurd rationalizations the attackers used to justify what they were doing. If a foreign military started bombing Sandia and LANL and assorted military bases throughout the Southwest and declared ahead of time that it would do this, I doubt that Washington would respond with a shrug. “Oh, they’re only attacking our nuclear labs and military facilities–that’s all right, then!” Americans would not respond to this by casting blame on their government for inviting attack, but would instead become excessively deferential to whatever course of action the government proposed and would mute whatever other criticisms of the government they may have had in the past. We would be fools to think that Iranians would respond differently.

If most Iranians support the nuclear program, and all Iranians oppose foreign military attacks on their country, what makes Fly and Kristol think that the government will have any choice except to retaliate to satisfy popular anger and demands for retribution? The hard-liners and hawks within Iran’s government would be greatly aided by any foreign attack, and they would exploit the opportunity to increase their hold on power and to quash any political opposition by portraying dissent as subversive. American hawks should be familiar with how this works, since they have practiced doing these very things against their domestic opponents.

The current Iranian government is under pressure at home right now, but everything that it can use to deflect attention away from itself and towards a foreign enemy is a gift to the regime. Obviously, an unjustified foreign attacks is ideal for the regime’s purposes. Barring a large-scale war aimed at toppling the Iranian government, which the American public would not support for very long and which our military would be hard-pressed to carry out given its already excessive obligations, the Iranian government might end up benefiting politically from a war that all Iranians would see correctly as a war of national defense against unwarranted attack. The Iranian military and security forces will not simply fold and disintegrate, and the growing power of the military and IRGC within the Iranian government may make it impossible for the civilian government to avoid launching retaliatory strikes.

If the Iranian government is most concerned with retaining its grip on power, as opponents of sanctions and military action have been saying for years, that means that it will act in its own basic self-interest. If regime preservation is its main priority, that suggests that any nuclear weapons program it might be pursuing is principally intended as a deterrent against attack. If retaining power is its main concern, the Iranian government is not at all likely to embark on suicidal or self-destructive paths that would lead to its certain annihilation. Note that Iran hawks attribute different degrees of rationality to the Iranian regime depending on the specific argument they happen to be making at any given moment. Yesterday Iran could not be trusted with nuclear weapons because it is run by a millennarian death cult and deterrence is of no use against religious fanatics, but today we can safely start a war with Iran that it will not dare escalate because it is too preoccupied with the survival of the regime. Both claims cannot be right, but both can be and are wrong.

Escalating a conflict that the U.S. starts would not definitely result in the regime’s defeat or overthrow, so it is much harder to argue that an Iranian government interested in self-preservation and consolidating its hold on power would not escalate. It is hard to see how any government with regional power ambitions could refrain from retaliating against an unprovoked attack, which is what U.S. military strikes on Iran would be. It doesn’t matter if many or most Americans do not see the proposed strikes this way. What does matter is that this is how Iranians and much of the rest of the world will see the strikes. When counting the costs of unnecessary, unjustified military strikes on Iran, we have to acknowledge the disastrous damage that a full-scale war against a united Iran would do to U.S. interests, armed forces and allies in the region. Pretending that military action against Iran will have minimal costs is as delusional as the action is reckless.

Update: Scoblete has more.

The West has a lot at stake in the outcome of the Iranian crisis. Were the regime to fall, a Green successor government–most likely to be headed by Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi for at least a while–would end support for terrorism in such hot spots as Iraq and Afghanistan and, at a minimum, cut back on the deals that the Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Ahmadinejad have made with Venezuela, Syria and Turkey. ~Michael Ledeen

This is comical stuff. What we do know of Mousavi’s views on Iranian foreign policy tells us that none of this is certain and most of it is highly unlikely. Much would depend on the structure of the next government and the role of the military and IRGC in influencing policy, but even if a Green government could come to power without having to make any concessions to the military and security forces it is not at all obvious that it would end its support for militias in Iraq. Why would it? Because that is the friendly, pro-American thing to do? It would have even less reason to scale back agreements with these or any other states. Ledeen would like to see these things happen, and so he claims without any support that they would happen under a Green government.

Concerning the most recent deal negotiated with Turkey, Mehdi Khalaji pointed out that Mousavi has attacked the fuel-swap agreement because it conceded too much:

Yet despite the introverted nature of their struggle, both sides recognize the potential domestic political impact of a nuclear agreement — even the controversial trilateral Turkey-Brazil-Iran proposal — with the international community. The leaders of the opposition Green Movement are against such a development, believing that any deal with the current regime would lend legitimacy to Ahmadinezhad’s presidency and weaken their pro-democracy movement. Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of last year’s presidential candidates and now an opposition leader, disapproved strongly of both the October 2009 and May 2010 fuel-swap proposals for the Tehran Research Reactor. He even described last month’s Turkey/Brazil-brokered agreement as “another Treaty of Turkmenchay” [bold mine-DL] (an 1828 accord with Russia signed by an incompetent Iranian king and seen as humiliating to Iran).

The opposition believes it has a vested interest in the failure of any nuclear agreements negotiated by the current government, but it is going to frame its criticism in terms that make the opposition seem like the true defenders of Iranian sovereignty and national rights. The current government isn’t going to fall anytime soon, and there would be no way of knowing for sure what any successor government would like or what it would do, but what we know about Mousavi from his record and his current positions tells us that he may feel obliged to be less compromising on security and foreign policy issues than Ahmadinejad.

In almost any country, policy continuity from one administration to another is the rule. If the opposition’s leaders remain as committed to the legacy of the Islamic revolution as they seem to be, any government headed by them would still be working within a policy consensus that will not permit them to make radical, sudden changes in foreign policy orientation. To the extent that there are meaningful differences on foreign policy between the government and opposition leaders, these are disagreements over tactics and methods rather than sharp divisions over policy goals. Trusting in the accommodating attitude of a future Green government that may never come into existence is not an Iran policy. It is an illusion designed to mislead Americans into believing that many of the difficulties in U.S.-Iranian relations can simply be eliminated without any concessions on the part of our government.

Something that I don’t quite understand about Mitch Daniels’ proposed “truce” on social issues is why he thinks it is necessary. The Iraq war in 2006-07 and then the financial crisis and recession since 2008 sucked up all the political oxygen in the country and they have attracted almost all of the attention of political activists in one way or another for much of the last four years. The standard “hot-button” issues have not been at the center of most of the political debate for some time now. Across most of the country, gay marriage debates have been settled one way or another, and Roe v. Wade has so far not figured prominently in the confirmation battles for Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. A truce is redundant when these issues have receded into the background on their own and seem likely to stay there for some time. The very conditions Daniels invokes as the reason for the truce have made the truce unnecessary.

For that matter, it isn’t clear that the political importance of social issues necessarily distracts from or harms the emphasis on fiscal responsibility. The one time when social issues have become a major point of contention in recent debate was during the health care debate concerning federal funding of insurance policies that would pay for abortion procedures. To the extent that health care legislation was stalled by the resistance of pro-life Democrats on account of this, one could argue that the lack of a “truce” over social issues made it somewhat more difficult for the majority to pass health care legislation, and on the whole fiscal conservatives would regard that as a good thing. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how the two are even related closely enough that a social issues truce will make it easier to reduce the debt and reform entitlements.

Regardless, it is not as if the country has been so roiled by social issues in the last few years that we are in desperate need of a cease-fire. We aren’t failing to tackle the debt and entitlements because we are too consumed by divisions over social issues. We are failing to tackle the debt and entitlements because there are powerful constituencies that will react strongly to any attempt to rein in spending, because there is absolutely no political will to impose fiscal restraint and discipline in Congress, and because the opposition party has become a cynical defender of the entitlement status quo as part of its bid to regain power. Daniels needs to explain the mechanism by which de-emphasizing social issues makes Congressional Republicans less opportunistic and unprincipled in their embrace of Medicare. If he has a way to do that, we would all like to hear about it.

So Daniels’ proposed truce is fairly harmless in its effects, because it isn’t going to change very much in practice. Obviously, what it probably will harm is any Daniels presidential campaign that has to compete seriously in Iowa and South Carolina. The problem for Daniels is not that it will make him seem less credible to social conservative activists, as he has as good a record on their priorities as anyone. If Romney can be taken seriously as a social conservative, Daniels should have no difficulty assuaging any doubts this truce talk might create. Daniels’ problem is that the truce idea will sound like another call for social conservatives to accept that their priorities are going to be relegated to the bottom of the agenda once again. This does not change much in practice, because social conservative priorities have been at the bottom of the Republican agenda forever, but politically it sends another signal to social conservatives that they are expected to support the GOP reliably no matter how little they get for their steadfast support.

It is fitting that it is Huckabee who has already started attacking Daniels’ proposal. It was Huckabee’s presidential campaign in 2007-08 and the reactions it generated among Republican and conservative leaders that taught social conservative activists a lesson about how unwilling party and movement leaders were to have one of the social conservative activists’ own as the nominee and party leader. Were Huckabee to be nominated and were he somehow to win the election in 2012, Huckabee would not govern all that differently than Daniels would with respect to social issues, so this is all just a matter of positioning and image management. It is a rhetorical maneuver, but it is not entirely meaningless. Daniels is presenting himself as the “reasonable” conservative who will say that he wants to put aside culture wars and focus on fiscal and economic problems, which gives the impression of wanting to avoid political divisiveness while actually emphasizing policy priorities that will end up being far more controversial and divisive. Meanwhile, Huckabee is playing to the social conservative activist base that made him a competitor in the primaries last time.

So Daniels seems to be trying to occupy the ground vacated by Jon Huntsman when the latter went to Beijing. If it weren’t associated with political disaster, Daniels’ motto might be, “Competence, not ideology.” His own solid record as a social conservative may make him think that he has the option of appearing less combative on social issues. As a popular and reasonably successful governor, Daniels wants to fill the role of the competent, problem-solving executive that all other potential 2012 contenders have left open. This is the role that some of Mitt Romney’s supporters wished he had tried in 2008 and it is the role that Romney seems dedicated to avoiding with his insipid foreign policy views and his shameless pandering to the base on a bailout he previously supported and a health care bill modeled on legislation he signed. To right-leaning independents Daniels seems to want to say that he is conservative, but not overly zealous, and to rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives he is holding himself out as the sort of candidate Romney would be if the latter had any stable convictions.

One of the more absurd responses to the flotilla raid during the last two weeks has been the sudden discovery of the importance of Armenian genocide commemoration by many of the same people and institutions that used to go out of their way to cast doubt on the reality of the genocide or to mock efforts to commemorate it with a non-binding resolution in Congress. Three years ago, when the new Democratic majority under Pelosi was seriously considering bringing the genocide resolution to a vote (partly because of the strong influence of Armenian-Americans in California politics), The Washington Times published one of the most appalling denialist op-eds by Bruce Fein. Today Turkey has become the new target of vilification, particularly on the American right, and so recognizing the genocide has suddenly become so great an imperative that The Washington Times has published an op-ed by Raffi Hovanissian that joins in the vilification campaign while also arguing for genocide recognition. Indeed, bashing Turkey has apparently become important enough that the reason why Turkey is being vilified seems to have been lost on the editors at the Times, as Hovanissan writes this:

Israel’s blockade of Gaza is wrong and requires resolution. Palestine, like mountainous Karabagh, has earned its right of sovereign statehood.

If the blockade is wrong and requires resolution, how exactly was Turkey in the wrong by permitting or even encouaging activists to try to break it? If Hovanissian thinks Palestine and Karabakh should both have status as sovereign states, why would he take this opportunity to side with the government that is doing to Palestinians the same thing he complains that Turkey is doing to Armenia and Karabakh? The initiative to re-open the border between Turkey and Armenia has stalled, but does anyone think that Ankara is going to be more inclined to relent in its pro-Azeri position in the future if Armenians, especially former Armenian foreign ministers, choose this moment to jump on the anti-Turkish bandwagon? Hovanissian may not appreciate how bizarre it is for him to take to the op-ed pages of a newspaper that happily entertained the arguments of pro-Turkish lobbyists who were working to quash recognition of the genocide just a few years ago, but the cynicism on the part of the newspaper’s editors is awesome to behold.

There is no question that Ankara’s efforts to quash genocide recognition in Congress here is infuriating and wrong, and I have written many times over the last three years against this lobbying and the state-enforced genocide denial in Turkey. For years and decades, “pro-Israel” figures, hawks and hegemonists all rallied against the genocide resolution because they claimed they did not wish to damage our valuable alliance with Turkey. I have normally ridiculed the assumption that a non-binding resolution, even one with great symbolic importance, was going to damage a major military and political alliance significantly, and I still take that view. Until the last two weeks, I could at least take seriously that there were many reasonable people who opposed the genocide resolution because they feared it would unnecessarily strain relations with Turkey. With some important exceptions, I no longer think that’s true.

Now some of the very same people who pretended that a non-binding resolution commemorating the victims of a CUP government that ceased to exist ninety years ago was going to be a terrible blow to the U.S.-Turkish relationship are working overtime to destroy that relationship. These hawks are now so intent on wrecking the relationship that they are even trying to co-opt genocide commemoration simply to score points against the Turkish government. And why is Turkey the new villain? Because it has not been as subservient to U.S. policies and because it has been unduly critical of Israel. Unfortunately, because genocide commemoration has been stymied for so many years by many of these hawks and their allies, there is going to be an impulse to capitalize on the situation, push through the genocide resolution when resistance is at its weakest, and thereby guarantee that Turkish-Armenian relations will remain in limbo for years and decades to come.

There is an opportunity here for the Republic of Armenia and Diasporan Armenians to generate some goodwill in Turkey by supporting Turkey’s complaints over the raid and the blockade, and possibly revive the chances of Turkish-Armenian rapprochement. That opportunity will be lost if Armenia and American supporters of genocide commemoration effectively throw in their lot with a government that has subjected a large civilian population to immiseration and poverty and has killed civilians who were attempting to bring them aid. Congress should pass the resolution, but it should do so in an atmosphere in which it is clear that it is not part of a petulant attack on the modern Turkish republic, and it certainly should not pass it as part of the general anti-Turkish hysteria building in Congress on account of Congressional support for Israel’s wrongdoing against Turkey.