The American Conservative

Glenn Greenwald points to this interview with Vali Nasr, who describes the dangers of escalating Iran sanctions:

As Nasr says, the sanctions apply “massive pressure,” but they aren’t changing Iranian regime behavior. Meanwhile, the “massive pressure” is proving to be very harmful to Iranians of all classes (via Jasmin Ramsey):

Few escape hardship these days. The educated liberals who joined the protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election in 2009, the business elite afraid of upheaval and Ahmedinejad’s natural constituency of poorer, working Iranians are all feeling the impact of galloping inflation, a sinking currency and rising joblessness to varying degrees.

I wasn’t persuaded by Charles Murray’s proposal for reducing cultural inequality, but David Brooks’ answer to the division Murray describes is ghastly:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

It’s not surprising that Brooks’ solution would involve a mandatory government program. How exactly is conscription the remedy for any of the things Murray identifies as problems? How does he imagine that values are going to be “spread”? If this works the way most national service programs elsewhere do, the people in the program will have already picked up the habits and values of their respective “tribes.” Does Brooks suppose that a one or two-year service program is going to have a significant impact on the habits of the people in it? If the country keeps becoming more socially and economically stratified, “jamming” people from different classes together is probably a good way to heighten tensions between them. All of this seems like a deliberate effort to avoid addressing problems of wage stagnation, rising cost of living, and other factors that prevent stable family formation.

Update: Via Rod, Brad Wilcox’s review of Coming Apart includes an acknowledgment that there is a bit more to Murray’s argument:

There are at least two ways to close this cultural divide and renew the cultural foundations of the American experiment. First, policy makers and business leaders need to shore up the economic foundations of working- and middle-class life. Globalization has paid huge dividends for the upper class, but it has undercut the earnings and job security of men (and their families) lower down the social ladder [bold mine-DL]. Public policies designed to strengthen the educational opportunities (e.g., better vocational programs) and economic security (portable health-care plans) of ordinary Americans could help in renewing the economic foundations of the nation’s virtues.

The policies proposed here are underwhelming and they sound a lot like the answers that neoliberals were giving back in the ’90s when challenged on the disruptions caused by globalization, but at least there is some acknowledgment of economic insecurity as a significant factor in all of this.

Michael Shifter finds that most Latin Americans don’t care for Republican exaggerations of Iran’s role in the region:

Latin Americans believe Iran’s moves in the region should be closely watched, but that, given their hard-earned democratic peace and prosperity, they do not offer fertile terrain for nefarious, destabilizing acts. They further believe that Washington should be careful not to exaggerate Iran’s influence in the region, as Santorum did when he said, “Iran is organizing a Latin terror network.” Within an increasingly self-confident and assertive Latin America, Newt Gingrich’s reference in Florida to Iran’s “overt violation” of the (long-defunct) Monroe Doctrine must have sounded especially outlandish and insulting.

It doesn’t help that Gingrich doesn’t seem to understand what the Monroe Doctrine was. I can see why his comments would not be well-received in Latin America. Gingrich’s position is that Latin American governments should not be able to reach security/military agreements with other states unless the U.S. approves of their partners, which is another way of saying that he thinks the U.S. should dictate the foreign policy choices of the rest of the hemisphere. This happens to be the opposite of the Monroe Doctrine, which was originally based on respecting the sovereignty and independence of the other republics in our hemisphere. Exaggerating Iranian influence in the Western Hemisphere and beyond is what Santorum does best. Of course, the candidates making these exaggerations are doing so because exaggerated Iranian influence provides a pretext and justification (at least in their eyes) for more intrusive U.S. policies aimed at “countering” this influence.

Andrew cites James Fearon’s finding that nuclear-armed states becomes less aggressive internationally than they were before they acquired nuclear weapons, which is consistent with what Kenneth Waltz has said on the subject before:

Every country that has had nuclear weapons has behaved moderately. If you think of the Soviet Union and China, both behaved much more radically before they had nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, Andrew’s post has the title, “Would a Nuclear Iran Start More Wars?” While I understand it is not the intent of the post, this creates the impression that Iran has been in the business of starting international wars before now, and that isn’t the case. In order to believe in a crazed first-strike-launching Iranian government, one would need to account for how a very cautious regime interested above all in self-preservation would become much more aggressive and reckless once it acquired a nuclear weapon. Advocates of preventive war need to be able to argue that Iran’s government is demonstrably more reckless than the USSR or Maoist China when they were at their most confrontational, and the evidence isn’t there.

Dave Weigel noticed an odd part of a recent Marco Rubio interview:

After you became the first Cuban-American speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, in 2006, your mentor, Jeb Bush, presented you with a sword. What was that about?

Chang is a mythical conservative warrior. From time to time, if there’s a big issue going on, you’d see Jeb say, “I’m going to unleash Chang.” He gave me the sword of Chang.

From which mythology does this conservative warrior hail?
I think it’s a Jeb Bush creation.

Years ago, Brad DeLong explained that this derived from the elder Bush’s habit of mocking hard-line anticommunists for calling on the U.S. to “unleash” Chiang Kai-shek on the mainland. He added:

But George H. W. Bush’s sons–even the smart one, Jeb–never got the joke. They, you see, didn’t know enough about world history or even the history of the Republican Party to know who Chiang Kaishek was, or what “Unleash Chiang!” meant. Hence Jeb Bush’s explanation that twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator Chiang Kaishek was a “mystical warrior… who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.”

This is a good example of how a tradition can be reinvented when its original meaning ceases to be useful. It is a bit amusing to see Rubio, who has been cultivating a reputation as one of the new foreign policy hard-liners in the Senate, on the receiving end of a Bush family tradition grounded in the elder Bush’s dislike for the anticommunist hard-liners of his day. What is today’s equivalent of a similarly unrealistic hard-line foreign policy slogan that could be treated the same way? I can think of a few examples (“we are all Georgians now” comes to mind), but they’re a bit clunky to reuse in a joke.

Jim Antle makes the understatement of the year:

Santorum has also given little indication of having learned from the foreign policy blunders of the Bush years.

What makes Santorum a bit different from other hawkish candidates this cycle is that he doesn’t avoid the subject of Bush-era foreign policy. Gingrich was every bit as much the vocal proponent of invading Iraq, but you don’t hear him talk about it now. Most of the things that Antle and I would call foreign policy blunders Santorum still supports today as much as he ever did, and he is happy to tell people about it. I don’t think any other 2012 pro-war candidate has presented his support for the Iraq war as an example of his support for spreading freedom as Santorum does here:

I supported America’s security and freeing Muslims and others from oppression in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Santorum has been an outstanding example of an Iraq war supporter who not only never learned from the mistake of the war, but also continues to repeat talking points from 2003-2004 as if he really believes them to be true. Invading Iraq seriously damaged U.S. interests, wasted thousands of American lives, left tens of thousands of Americans wounded, destroyed Iraq’s ancient Christian communities, and resulted in the deaths of 100,000+ Iraqis and the displacement of millions. Iraq is an unfree country ruled by a semi-authoritarian, sectarian government, but it is also a much more dangerous and poorer place to live than it was before the war. Santorum voted for a policy that devastated an entire people and cost the U.S. greatly in lives and wealth, and even now he boasts about it as if it were something admirable.

Santorum is probably one of a handful of former or current office-holders convinced that the biggest problem with Bush’s foreign policy was that it wasn’t always as aggressive as it could have been. Like Republican hawks who thought that Reagan had gone “soft” on the USSR in his second term (or, for some of them, as early as December 1981), Santorum positioned himself as a critic of the Bush administration after 2005 because Bush was not calling the enemy by its proper name and wasn’t doing enough to confront Iran. Santorum would probably say that the main “blunder” of the Bush era was not challenging Iran more directly. He still thinks that his landslide defeat in 2006 is a testament to his political courage rather than proof that the public rejected the hard-line ideology he was peddling. The “lesson” Santorum learned from 2006 is that he was right all along, and didn’t need to make any changes to the way he thought about the U.S. role in the world, which is why he continues to advocate horrible policies with all of the zeal of an Iraq war supporter in 2003.

David Frum manages to write a defense of the “axis of evil” line in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address without accounting for Iraq’s part in the so-called axis. That’s fairly extraordinary, since one of the principal objections to the statement was that it was absurd to describe Iraq and Iran as being on the same side, since everyone in the world understood that Iran and Hussein’s Iraq were bitter enemies. The full statement from the speech also represented the beginning of the Bush administration’s public agitation for war with Iraq:

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.

All of the worst, most misleading features of later pro-war arguments are here. There are the references to Iraq’s past weapons programs, which had since been dismantled, and the baseless hint that Iraq might hand the weapons it wasn’t actually developing to terrorists. Iraq’s sponsorship of international terrorism is likewise exaggerated throughout. There is the fearmongering that deterrence is insufficient, and there is the usual exaggeration of the threat that the administration would later use to build up their case for “preventive” war. Bush was already laying the groundwork for that case when he said this:

We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.

This was yet more irresponsible fearmongering designed to make it seem as if “preventive” war would be necessary. Time was not on our side? That might have seemed plausible to a lot of Americans just four months after the 9/11 attacks, but as we look back on this speech ten years later we can see that this was a massive overreaction. The Iraq war that followed from the ideas outlined in the speech proved to be the worst mistake in U.S. foreign policy in a generation. In retrospect, Bush’s assertions that Iraq was arming itself with unconventional weapons were completely wrong. As we discovered later, Hussein wanted to create the impression of a weapons program to balance Iran, which was the rival state that Bush stupidly lumped together with Iraq in his speech. The “axis of evil” line was part of a larger argument in favor of preventive warfare to halt alleged proliferation by “rogue” states, and this has since been discredited by the invasion of Iraq.

Rick Santorum is still stuck in 2002:

Radical Islamists oppose us not because of our policies, but because of our freedom.

This was a silly slogan when Bush and his supporters were using it ten years ago. It takes a certain willful blindness to keep saying it today. If the slogan were true, it would mean that perpetual war for the U.S. I understand that interventionists don’t want to acknowledge that policies they favor provoke violent resistance that can endanger Americans, but how does Santorum square his slogan with the reality that policies are frequently what jihadists cite when giving their justifications for their attacks? More to the point, why would anyone who doesn’t share Santorum’s ideological views agree with him about the correct policy response to jihadism when he misunderstands the phenomenon so badly?

Santorum’s article includes many of his other standard claims. I thought this one was remarkable for its self-importance:

I stood for the Green Movement in Iran when President Obama sat down.

What did Santorum do to “stand” for the protesters in Iran? It’s true he did write some op-eds, and in those op-eds he was already making the “missed opportunity for regime change” argument that would later become a favorite Republican talking point. This wasn’t so much a case of “standing” for the protesters as it was one of completely misunderstanding their goals. Iranians aren’t going to help the U.S. overthrow their government now, and they weren’t going to do it in 2009. There were a lot of Iran hawks in the summer of 2009 eager to exploit the protests to undermine the regime, because they projected their desires for regime change onto the protesters and saw an opportunity that didn’t exist.

Newt Gingrich has no idea how other people see him:

This is a campaign about the future of America and the future of the Republican party. Do you want an insider who’s part of the city which has been accepting huge amounts of taxpayer money to prop up giant institutions [bold mine-DL] or do you want somebody who’s prepared to challenge our system head on and insist on very dramatic change in Washington? I think that’s worth a serious debate and I think that debate will go all the way to the convention.

He must think that he is the outside challenger of the system. I can’t imagine why he would choose to frame the contest this way, since the opposition Gingrich sets up here obviously works to the benefit of every candidate not named Newt Gingrich. To everyone not already on the Gingrich bandwagon (and perhaps even to more than a few of them), Gingrich is undeniably a Washington insider. He has been one for most of his adult life. He started serving in Congress thirty-three years ago, and he stayed in the D.C. area in the twelve years since he left Congress. There could hardly be more of an “insider” figure in this race than Gingrich. The only thing more pathetic than Gingrich’s pretense that he isn’t is the apparent willingness of tens and hundreds of thousands of Republicans across the country to buy into his rhetoric.

During the last debate, Romney repeated one of his standard criticisms of Obama on Israel and Palestine:

This president went before the United Nations and castigated Israel for building settlements. He said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip.

This is one of Romney’s favorites. He has been using a variant of this line for years. The problem for Romney is that it was never really true, and Obama has mentioned rocket attacks from Gaza in every address to the U.N. that he has given. If we go back to Obama’s first address to the U.N., which is what Romney has been referring to for more than two years, we will find a reference to rocket attacks on Israel:

We must remember that the greatest price of this conflict is not paid by us. It’s not paid by politicians. It’s paid by the Israeli girl in Sderot who closes her eyes in fear that a rocket will take her life in the middle of the night.

If we want to be very technical and generous to Romney, we could say that it’s true that Obama did not mention the number of rocket attacks, but that’s not the point. Romney wants people to think that Obama simply ignores these attacks all together, and that is not true.

The 2010 U.N. address contained the most explicit references:

And efforts to threaten or kill Israelis will do nothing to help the Palestinian people. The slaughter of innocent Israelis is not resistance — it’s injustice. And make no mistake: The courage of a man like President Abbas, who stands up for his people in front of the world under very difficult circumstances, is far greater than those who fire rockets at innocent women and children.

A little later in the speech, there is another specific reference to Sderot:

Or, we can say that this time will be different — that this time we will not let terror, or turbulence, or posturing, or petty politics stand in the way. This time, we will think not of ourselves, but of the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams, or the young boy in Sderot who wants to sleep without the nightmare of rocket fire.

Romney’s claim has been a basically false one since he first started making it, like many of his other criticisms of administration foreign policy, and more than that it is a foolish mistake. It is extremely easy to check and disprove this claim, and Romney doesn’t need to use this claim to make the standard Republican attack on Obama’s handling of Israel and Palestine issues. It’s an unforced error that Romney has been making for the better part of the last two years.

Update: Chait’s assessment is worth reading:

Even by the standards of politicians, Romney seems unusually prone to dishonesty. Again, you can ascribe this to circumstance rather than character. I see him as a patrician pol, like George H.W. Bush, who believes deeply in public service but regards elections as a cynical process of pandering to rubes. I think you can plausibly make other interpretations, and you can separate Romney the man or even Romney the president from Romney the candidate. But I don’t see how you can paint Romney the candidate as in any way scrupulous about the truth in any form.