The American Conservative

Ed Husain doesn’t think Assad is danger of being overthrown, but adds this:

Already, calls for military intervention are being made by Syrian opposition activists in meetings at the White House and US state department.

If that’s correct, that is a cause for concern. If a lot of Syrian activists begin calling for military backing, that will remove one significant obstacle on the path of escalation. However, everything I have seen so far points in the other direction. Syrian opposition activists in Syria have usually been explicitly rejecting military intervention. If there have been activists here in the U.S. agitating for military action, it appears that they are speaking for themselves and not representing what most of the Syrian opposition wants. That is just as well, since there appears to be no interest on the part of the administration or any European allies to start another war.

Jeffrey Lord makes an unusual claim:

Ron Paul is what might be called a “Neo-Liberal.”

This is a silly argument in many, many ways, and by the end Lord’s article has devolved into the most baseless and despicable smearing. That’s not surprising. This is what Lord does: he imputes vicious attitudes to those he criticizes, and he never has the evidence to support it. It is best just to stop reading after the first two pages.

Let’s start with the term neoliberal itself. The word neoliberal means a few different things, and there is only one definition that could conceivably apply in any way to Ron Paul. In the domestic political context, American neoliberals have been those on the left or center-left concerned to criticize and change the existing agenda of the 1980s Democratic Party on crime, welfare, trade, and foreign policy. Neoliberalism was a main part of the American “third way” represented by the Clinton administration, which entailed a more activist foreign policy, support for expanded free trade, and the adoption of relatively pro-business and pro-finance positions compared to where the party had been in the past. Because there was some overlap between neoliberals and Democratic “centrist” hawks, progressive critics of the Iraq war began using neoliberal as something of a curse word to refer to liberal interventionists specifically and pro-war Democrats in general.

Finally, neoliberal can refer more broadly to policies designed to promote economic globalization and the word can also fairly be used to describe supporters of multilateral trade talks and organizations. Properly speaking, none of these definitions fits Paul, and it is only in his support for free trade that he has anything in common with neoliberals, and that similarity is not all that meaningful. While Paul favors commerce and trade, he is also wary of any agreement or multilateral organization that infringes U.S. sovereignty, and he has typically opposed most privileged trade agreements as barriers to free trade (which, in fact, they are).

Lord’s only real evidence in support of this incorrect label involves complaints that many progressives in both parties have sometimes also endorsed a foreign policy of neutrality and non-intervention. By the same token, many progressives from both parties favored overseas expansion and entry into European wars. Lord forgets to mention this second part.

Lord conveniently ignores the long history that links the pre-FDR Democratic Party and the Democratic-Republicans before them to the Anglo-American Country political tradition that opposed centralized power and rejected foreign wars. If there was any clear tradition of conservative political instincts in the United States, it must be the Country tradition that was mostly represented up until 1912 by members of the Democratic Party. Between 1869 and 1921, there was probably no more politically conservative President than Grover Cleveland, and Cleveland happened to be one of the most outspoken anti-imperialists of his age. Cleveland was for sound money, opposed the annexation of Hawaii, and fiercely opposed the Spanish War and the annexations that followed it. That Lord thinks William Jennings Bryan was “left-wing” tells us more about the uselessness of such labels than it does about Bryan or his support for neutrality.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft reminds us that one of the early examples of antiwar argument in the English-speaking world came from one of the writers most closely associated with the Country tradition of Bolingbroke and the Tory Opposition of the early eighteenth century:

In the first years of the eighteenth century, the War of the Spanish Succession saw Jonathan Swift publish The Conduct of the Allies, denouncing the conflict, the way it was waged by the government in London….

Isaac Kramnick explained Tory opposition to the war in Bolingbroke & His Circle:

Tory opposition to the war became a political outlet for their grievances against what the Tory writers called the “modern Whigs.” The modern Whig with his war and his new financial order was undermining the country. Land taxes, national debt, the Bank, the moneyed corporation, stockjobbers, the Dutch-Emperor alliance, redcoats trudging through foreign lands–all were sponsored and defended by the “modern Whig.”

Many of Ron Paul’s arguments have strong precedents in the Country tradition. This is an Anglo-American conservative tradition of which Lord seems quite unaware. The idea that Ron Paul is a neoliberal is simply nonsense, as is the rest of Lord’s article.

Update: Lord attempts to defend his terrible article to Jack Hunter by pretending that non-interventionists do not accept wars of self-defense. This is absurdly and painfully wrong.

Michael Brendan Dougherty has a long profile of Jon Huntsman in the next issue of TAC. As Michael explains, Huntsman’s record on fiscal and social issues is actually quite conservative, so much so that it will probably shock some of his new admirers, but there are some obvious exceptions. One thing that caught my attention was the Huntsman campaign’s belief that these exceptions aren’t all that important:

“The ‘moderate’ label will fade away as people get to know his record,” says Whit Ayres, a Huntsman campaign pollster, “There are a few instances here or there, like on civil unions where he strays from what’s thought to be conservative orthodoxy, but Republicans don’t select their presidential nominee by going down a list of litmus test issues and disqualifying people.

Well, yes and no. Some Republicans do exactly this, and they tend to be the ones in influential positions that they can use to build up or tear down particular candidates. Ever since Huckabee and McCain won the vast majority of primary contests in 2008, I have been very skeptical of the ability of movement and party elites to prevail on the rank-and-file to reject candidates they consider to be too heterodox and/or “moderate,” but they can successfully disqualify candidates before they become well-known. Romney in 2008 showed how weak carefully constructed “consensus” candidates can be, and his first campaign revealed the limits of having the approval of these elites. On the other hand, had Romney never received this approval after he re-invented himself, it is doubtful that he would be as competitive as he is now.

Over the last few years, Huntsman has made a point of doing the opposite of what Romney did between 2005 and 2008. He has not been cultivating movement conservatives, and he has acquired the reputation of being the mainstream media’s favorite candidate. This is similar to McCain’s 2000 campaign, but McCain had two things that Huntsman currently doesn’t: a high national profile, and the very vocal backing of many neoconservatives and hawks. Huntsman’s foreign policy views are often quite sensible, which is unfortunately one of the reasons why he has no comparable cheering section among movement and party elites. On top of all this, strong partisans count his service as ambassador in Beijing as a liability and take it as proof of his “moderate” status.

Sensible views notwithstanding, Huntsman dodges questions on the Iraq war, which is one of a handful of the most important foreign policy issues of the last decade. It is an issue that should still be a major test of a candidate’s judgment, and Huntsman’s answer on this is essentially that he doesn’t want to talk about it. This is how Michael reports it:

“Listen, I don’t want to re-litigate the Iraq War,” he says, admitting that he wishes to simply get past this question. “I visited [Iraq] three times as governor, and I’m very, very proud of all our troops in the National Guard. I was their commander in chief. And to this day, all I can say is that I’m grateful for the role that they played and the sacrifices they made, including families who lost and made the ultimate sacrifice. I’ll say no more.”

This is a very unsatisfactory answer, and it is even more when this area of policy is supposed to be one of Huntsman’s strengths. If he supported the war as most Republicans and almost all elected Republicans did when it started, that would hardly be surprising, but it would be worth hearing what Huntsman thinks the U.S. should have learned from it. I’m sure there aren’t many Republican candidates interested in re-litigating the Iraq war (except the opponents who got the question right the first time), but Huntsman has more of an obligation to answer the question than many of the others do. After all, Huntsman endorsed one of the most stubborn Iraq war hard-liners for President in the last election.

Even more troubling is Huntsman’s recommendation for U.S. policy in Iraq now:

Whatever he makes of the original rationale for the Iraq War, Huntsman does believe that the presence of 50,000 U.S. troops “makes it rather difficult for Iran to have a direct shot over to Syria.” It’s an irony. With America having knocked Saddam out, Huntsman concludes that, for now, we must now play the disruptive role he had played in the Shia crescent.

Why? When the Iraqi government is publicly siding with Assad, does anyone believe that an American military presence would stop Iraq’s government from facilitating Iranian activities inside Syria? Why should the U.S. provoke a new insurgency by keeping a large number of soldiers in Iraq beyond the current deadline? As it is, Sadr has even threatened to target military trainers. Keeping U.S. forces in Iraq after the end of this year was an awful idea when Pawlenty endorsed it earlier this year, and it remains so now.

America’s unconfirmed ambassador to Syria keeps busy:

The United States’ top envoy in Damascus defied the Syrian government Tuesday by making an unannounced visit to the restive town of Jassem, where he met with members of the opposition movement, State Department officials confirmed.

As gestures go, these visits by Ambassador Ford are probably the right thing to do. Meanwhile, there is still concerted opposition to Ford’s confirmation in the Senate. This doesn’t make very much sense. Opposition to Ford’s appointment last year was misguided, but at least it was consistent with overall hostility to engagement with Syria. The previous policy of engagement is obviously finished, and Ford’s presence in Damascus now represents something quite different. In spite of this, there is still enough resistance to Ford’s appointment that he will never be confirmed. Josh Rogin reported yesterday:

Though Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) reversed himself and now supports keeping Ford in place as ambassador, there are still multiple GOP senators who have no intention of letting Ford’s nomination get through the Senate.

Given these dynamics, Ford’s unauthorized visit to Jassem represents a win-win scenario for the State Department. On the one hand, it bolsters the State Department’s case that Ford is a crucial link to the Syrian revolution. And if he gets thrown out of Syria, State can avoid a messy confirmation fight they are almost sure to lose.

Spencer Ackerman posed some questions to Ford’s opponents:

What principle is possibly at stake here? What interest could possibly trump having Ford in Damascus?

Had hawkish Republicans had their way, Ford would never have gone to Damascus, and the U.S. would have even fewer options in Syria. As it happened, Ford received a recess appointment, which is why his confirmation has come up again in now. Bizarrely, the opponents of confirmation are the ones supposedly most interested in pressuring Assad and wielding U.S. influence, but they seem intent on reducing what little influence the U.S. has inside Syria. Opponents of engagement understandably made Ford’s appointment into a symbol of the policy they rejected, but now it seems that some of them are insisting that his appointment still be viewed as a symbol of that policy after it has been abandoned. Withdrawing Ford now to make a point about a policy that no longer exists seems like the most pointless form of score-settling.

Shadi Hamid cites the importance of the Libyan war’s demonstration effect:

Finally, it is worth noting that one of the rationales for the Libya intervention — that it would have a powerful demonstration effect across the Arab world — is being vindicated (after being much maligned by Daniel Larison and others critics of the war). In the face of overwhelming repression in Syria and Bahrain and setbacks in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, Arabs needed a victory. There was a growing sense that the euphoria on February 11 — the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down — was rather premature. It was. But, now, all across the region, protesters and revolutionaries are once again emboldened, reminded that the unlikely is still possible.

The danger here is that emboldening protesters in the absence of any prospect of outside backing is just the sort of irresponsible thing that “rollback” advocates did in Hungary and the first Bush administration did in southern Iraq after the Gulf War. The scandal of American inaction in those cases was that Washington had led people to believe that the U.S. would side with them if they rose up. However, our government had no intention of doing this. That empty promise of support prompted them to take risks that they would probably never have taken without this encouragement, and they suffered greatly because of it. Outside intervention in Libya has always had the potential to mislead other protest movements into expecting direct backing from the U.S. and other governments. It might also conceivably encourage protest movements that the best way to gain outside backing is to provoke harsh crackdowns by taking up arms. Viewed this way, it is not an entirely good thing that protesters and revolutionaries are emboldened. Of all the supposed demonstration effects that the Libyan intervention was supposed to have, this is the one that I have rarely discussed.

The “demonstration effect across the Arab world” that I “maligned” the most was the notion that intervention in Libya would have a deterrent effect on other authoritarian governments. As Marc Lynch put it:

One of the strongest reasons to intervene in Libya is the argument that the course of events there will influence the decisions of other despots about the use of force.

The course of events in Libya so far has not influenced the decisions of other rulers for the better. Unless other rulers believed that they would face the same intervention by outside powers, it never made much sense why it would:

Suppose that a Libyan war sends a very different message from the one that its supporters want to send. Instead of sending a message to authoritarian governments around the world that they must not use violence against protesters, suppose that it sends the message that authoritarian rulers need to clamp down even more right now and react even more violently when protests erupt.

The other demonstration effect that Libya was supposed to have was to improve the reputation of the U.S. by aligning America with an Arab protest movement. Apparently, Obama’s handling of Libya has not done that, and may have had the opposite effect.

Politico reports on the unhappy conservative elites whom Paul Ryan has spurned (via Antle). The story recounts the Ryan and Daniels enthusiasms, and then says this:

When Daniels turned his back on the draft movement, Tim Pawlenty sought to move into the Hoosier’s wonky space.

Is that what Pawlenty was doing? I can agree that Pawlenty was eagerly pandering to the editors of The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary, and they provided some of the most positive and glowing coverage of his policy speeches, but this seems very different from inhabiting Mitch Daniels’ “wonky space.” If Daniels’ refusal to pander was refreshing to some policy intellectuals, Pawlenty’s desperation to pander was rewarded with frequent praise. If anyone looks at the content of Pawlenty’s policy speeches, however, what one finds are not really the products of a wonkish candidate and policy-oriented campaign. Instead, we find a fantastical economic plan and Bush-era retread foreign policy ideas.

Politico‘s account describes the speeches quite differently:

The former Minnesota governor gave substantive speeches on taxes and spending as well as foreign policy.

Well, I suppose it depends on what one means by substantive. The speeches certainly had content. The content just happened to be easy to ridicule and dismiss as unrealistic on economics and dangerous on foreign policy. It is true that many hawks cheered on Pawlenty’s speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the WSJ editors celebrated Pawlenty’s plan, but that just confirmed that they were much more interested in having Pawlenty say the things they wanted to hear. Pawlenty’s economic plan was the kind of proposal that leaves actual domestic policy wonks on the right shaking their heads. As Ross put it back in June:

Instead, most of Pawlenty’s agenda is a mix of “half-remembered bits of Reaganism,” transparent gimmicks (a balanced-budget amendment that caps spending at 18 percent of G.D.P.) and straightforward magical thinking, in which cutting taxes on business, investment and high-earners leads to 5 percent growth every year for a decade — something that neither the Reagan nor the Clinton booms came close to achieving — which in turn goes a long way toward closing the budget deficit, happily, before we have to start in on painful cuts.

The article today quotes Ross as saying that conservative intellectuals were comfortable with Pawlenty. He said, “You got the sense that he was interested in public policy.” Perhaps. The impression I had from a distance was that he was interested in appearing interested in public policy to win approval from conservative elites. He seems to have succeeded in that, but it may have been one of the reasons why he fared so poorly with everyone else.

I wasn’t going to bother responding to this, but since it has come up again I will say a few things about it. Yes, I repeatedly referred to a stalemate in Libya. That is what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs called it on July 25, and it was only very recently that this description became inaccurate. Libyan war supporters never liked the word stalemate, perhaps because it weakened public support for the war, but for much of the spring and summer it was the appropriate word to use. Admiral Mullen said, “We are generally in a stalemate.”

When I wrote, “We are no closer to finding a means by which Gaddafi would be forced to ‘go’ than we were four months ago,” that was informed by reports earlier in the month that the rebel military leadership had no expectation of a rapid rebel advance on Tripoli. C.J. Chivers wrote in one of his reports that “expectations of a swift rebel advance out of the mountains toward Tripoli are unrealistic, barring a collapse from within of the Qaddafi forces blocking the way. The rebel military leadership has admitted this much, too. A force equipped as they are, they say, cannot expect to undertake an arduous open-desert march against a dug-in, conventional foe with armor, artillery, rockets, and more.” What changed? Gaddafi’s forces collapsed, and they collapsed so quickly that the speed of it reportedly startled NATO officials. At the time that I wrote that line, it was a fair description of the situation, and it seemed a reasonable response to vague demands to “finish the job” that included no explanation for how that was to be done. It doesn’t matter very much, but it wasn’t a prediction.

One of the reasons that I wrote the line that Beauchamp cited was that the U.S. and NATO had no clear idea how to achieve their desired end. Robert Farley addressed this quite well yesterday:

It was also apparent that the decision-makers in Washington, Paris, and London didn’t have the faintest what to do in case of a failure of Gaddafi to collapse. ”Pound away until the bombs run out, the aircraft carriers have to go home, and the allies get bored” isn’t a strategy.

That is related to what I said in the July 27 post:

Obviously, driving out Gaddafi has always been the real goal, but there has been no plan for how this would happen except to keep bombing and hope for luck.

As we come to the end of an absurd effort based on weak arguments, it’s worth reviewing a few things one more time. The effort to which I’m referring is, of course, the Paul Ryan for President boomlet, which Rep. Ryan mercifully put out of its misery earlier this week. Despite all the pleading and begging coming from The Weekly Standard, Ryan has chosen to stay where he is. That’s the right decision for Ryan, his constituents, the GOP, and the advancement of the issues most closely associated with him. Ryan’s boosters are fortunate that he has rejected their entreaties. Dave Weigel summed up why the boomlet never made any sense:

You take a politician who, currently, is in the busy and low-risk position of writing (and arguing for) budget proposals that advance the GOP’s arguments. You take him from the land of think tanks and friendly interviews, and throw him into Iowa and New Hampshire, where he gets drilled to death about his TARP vote, the fact that Medicare cuts are included in the 2012 budget, the not-good-enough-for-the-Tea Party progress toward a balanced budget, etc and etc. And you leave a less-idolized, less-media-savvy person in charge of the Budget Committee. Great idea! The Ryan hype was always the cult of the presidency/presidential elections blown up to Scientology-sized proportions.

In light of that, Christian Schneider at NRO has one of the more unusual reactions to Ryan’s announcement:

The office is too small for him. The microscope on the presidency takes small ideas and makes them look big; Ryan’s ideas are big enough to be seen from a mile away.

Ryan’s fans naturally believe that it would have been this easy for him to succeed and enter the White House in 2013, which is why they have been calling on him to run. Schneider is no different, but I believe this is the first time that anyone has expressed the view that Presidency is too limited of an office for someone of Ryan’s caliber. It seems that Ryan correctly understood that his presidential bid would be too late, quixotic, and faced with a difficult uphill climb the whole way. No one could have lived up to the preposterously high expectations that Ryan’s enthusiasts were setting for him, and he was wise not to try.

Greg Scoblete notes that apparent success does not make foolish wars any wiser:

Taking the country to war when vital U.S. interests are not at stake is not a good idea even if the U.S. manages to skate by without investing much in blood and treasure.

Likewise, starting wars against states that do not threaten and have not attacked the U.S. or our allies is the wrong thing to do. Starting a war against a government that had abandoned unconventional weapons and terrorism in exchange for normal relations makes even less sense. For over 150 days, the U.S. and our allies have bombed a country whose government and people had done nothing to any of us for a very long time. This may or may not lead to the establishment of a better political order in Libya, but it is one more disturbing expression of a militarized and unrestrained foreign policy that routinely treats the internal affairs of other states as our business. The Libyan war set the bar for future military action very low, and the direct costs were not very great, which means that the U.S. will likely find itself engaged in more interventions in the coming years.

Here in the U.S., the administration acted as if it had the authority to wage war on its own authority. At the same time, it denied that it was claiming this authority, and went so far as to pretend that the U.S. was not waging war in Libya. Despite some murmuring and a few mostly symbolic votes in the House, Congress utterly failed to meet its constitutional obligations, and it has provided to future administrations a ready-made precedent for launching arbitrary wars. The war in Libya has been an illegal one that made a mockery of our system of government. What could Americans possibly have to celebrate about this?

Starting their war in the name of protecting the civilian population, the intervening governments prolonged and expanded the ongoing civil war for the sake of achieving regime change, and then they pretended that this wasn’t what they were doing. The Libyan civil war arguably didn’t qualify for military action under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, and the intervention exceeded its legal mandate months ago. As I wrote for World Politics Review in June:

Unfortunately, because the intervention long ago exceeded its mandate, it has likely contributed to greater evils than those it was intended to prevent, and its chances of success in protecting the population have therefore diminished greatly.

It is more than a little curious that some Libyan war supporters would now insist on arguing for “the utility, necessity, and morality of” R2P when the governments waging the Libyan war have done more than any of the doctrine’s critics to discredit it in the eyes of many other governments. Toppling Gaddafi does not vindicate the doctrine. It confirms that the Libyan war stopped having much to do with the doctrine several months ago.

You were transfigured on the mountain, O Christ God, 
revealing Your glory to Your disciples as far as they could bear it.
Let Your everlasting Light also shine upon us sinners, 
through the prayers of the Theotokos. 
O Giver of Light, glory to You!