Continuing the discussion, Noah Millman offers an interesting alternative counterfactual:

Imagine, if you will, that the Third Crusade was a smashing success. Richard Lionheart wins a huge and surprising victory over Saladin and recaptures Jerusalem. Saladin’s dominion splinters, and the Saracens are unable to make a renewed assault on the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Instead, an Anglo-French Catholic island survives for twelve generations, succumbing only in the 15th century to the Ottoman assault.

After the Ottoman conquest, the Angevins, as they come to call themselves, scatter across the empire, settling primarily in Syria, Egypt and western Anatolia. There is a brief flurry of enthusiasm for the restoration of their lost kingdom at the time of the Greek revolt, and while it comes to nothing at the time, over the course of the 19th century there is a steady migration of Angevins, promoted by Catholic knightly orders, back to the Levant. Dreams of restoration do not become a reality until after World War I. In the wake of Turkish massacres of Angevins, Britain demanded the League of Nations restore the Kingdom of Jerusalem under British protection. In spite of protests from the Sharif of Mecca, the French government, and the World Zionist Congress, the proposal was accepted and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, stretching from Tyre in the north to Jerusalem in the south, was restored in 1922.

I’ll pass briefly over the next 70-80 years of history – riots by the Samarian Arabs in the 1930s; occupation by, resistance to and collaboration with the Axis; the lopsided victory in the Suez War and its complex aftermath; the abdication and the ascendancy of the Protector . . . By the end of the 20th century, the erstwhile Kingdom of Jerusalem is locked in a seemly endless conflict with the Samarian Arabs. Back when it was a bulwark against Soviet influence, the Angevin state was a logical ally of the United States. But now, realist critics of the Angevin-American alliance argue that it is a millstone around America’s neck – an unnecessary embarrassment and a cause of friction between America and the far more important Gulf oil states. And yet, as the Angevin position gets more and more difficult, America binds herself ever more strongly to her odd little ally.

Why should that be? Obviously, for reasons of affinity. And yet, that affinity itself needs a bit of unpacking. The Angevins speak a different language (Norman French), and have a wildly different culture. They were never a colony of the United States. The traditional Catholicism that predominates in the Kingdom is a relative rarity in America, where most Catholics are tied to the faith by ethnic identity as much as anything. America’s Jews for obvious reasons have always resented the existence of the Angevin state, and the Irish, in spite of a common religion, have never warmed to what many of them see as a relic of British imperialism, medieval and modern. It’s really only among a slice of the American elite – old-line Anglophilic WASPs and traditionalist Catholics – that the affinity is profound. But as these segments are overrepresented in the elite relative to their percentage of the American population, their affinity has an outsized impact on American policy and, as well, on national perceptions.

This is a very imaginative alternative history, but my guess would be that there would not be an especially strong American affinity for this Angevin state. As the successor of the actual Crusader states, the Angevins would be regarded by most Americans as embodying the worst of the Old World, and in the latter half of the 20th century their traditional Catholicism would not inspire feelings of affinity and identification outside of a very small number of Catholics here. On the contrary, as with most Christians in the East, they would appear to most Americans to be very foreign and unlike “us.” It is typical that Americans know little and care less about Near Eastern Christians, including the Catholic communities who still live in the region right now, and where evangelical Protestants see Israel as the fulfillment of God’s promise and the continuation of the covenant they would see a restored Angevin kingdom as something of a usurper in the Holy Land and, in their most extreme Hagee-like expressions, as a forerunner of Antichrist.

Coming back to the original description Noah provides, it is improbable that the Ottomans would have harmed Catholic subjects en masse during this counterfactual WWI, seeing as how they did not touch them during the actual war. Ottoman massacres of Christian populations were primarily limited to members of the Greek and Armenian millets (as well as the Assyrians of Anatolia and Iraq), because these communities were either under the protection of Allied powers or were seen as sympathetic to the cause of the Allies, while attacks on Catholics, even Francophone descendants of the Crusaders, would have harmed relations with Austria. Therefore, it would be unlikely that the Angevins would have suffered the sort of persecution that would give their cause automatic sympathy, and so there would not be the sort of awareness about their plight or their history in the American public as there was about the Armenians or the Greek refugees from Anatolia. It is equally unlikely that the Third Republic, which in reality did take Mandate Syria and Lebanon partly because of the Catholic populations dwelling there, would not want to have some control over the new Angevin territory as well.

Had it been a French-run Mandate territory, it is not hard to imagine how the kingdom, like other French territories in the Mediterranean, would have come under control of the Vichy and given their background the Angevins might have been quite ideologically inclined to support the Vichy regime. As such, the state probably would have suffered the taint of collaboration, but unlike in Greece there would be no exiled monarchy to restore in place of the collaborators, and unlike in Greece there probably would not have been a broad resistance movement led by communists. Instead, the monarchy of the Jerusalemite kingdom would have been abolished, and a left-leaning secular republic would have been established in its place, and the anticommunist political right in the Angevin state would be tarred with collaboration for a long time after the war. Once independent after WWII, it is not hard to imagine how this Jerusalemite republic then becomes part of the Non-Aligned Movement and its conflicts with neighboring Arabs become mostly a regional concern, rather than a global one that involves the superpowers.

Following up on the last post, I wanted to say a few things about Dr. Gottfried’s response to Ilana Mercer. Dr. Gottfried does a very good job explaining why most European nationalist parties take a more neutral or more conventionally “pro-Israel” stance. Incidentally, for those inclined to take foreign policy cues from our European counterparts, I would remind them that Vlaams Belang (then Vlaams Blok) in particular had no real objections to the war in Iraq, as they were interested in demonstrating their solidarity with the United States and wished to distinguish themselves from the positions of other parties in Belgium and throughout Europe. That is, they were conventionally defined as “pro-American,” which is unfortunately defined most of the time by a willingness to accept Washington’s official line, while many other European governments (and their publics) were deemed to be “anti-American.” Thus, our “friends” acquiesced in our government’s ruinous policy, while our supposed foes gave us good advice that we as a nation should have heeded. As I’m sure we all see by now, the government’s policies may have nothing to do with what is in the best interests of the country and people in question. We are faced once again with the question of what constitutes hostility to or support for another state.

Dr. Gottfried refers to paleos who take an “anti-Israeli stand,” which is a rather remarkable claim. Perhaps this is not what he means to say, but it is very reminiscent of accusations against immigration restrictionists that they are “anti-immigrant.” That is, it takes opposition to a policy or set of policies and makes it into hostility towards an entire group of people. This might be correct in a handful of cases, but as a general statement it is extremely misleading. Elsewhere in his response Dr. Gottfried claims that some paleos show a “virulent hostility toward Israel” (going so far as to say that such hostility “characterizes some elements…of the humiliated Old American Right”), but this seems to be an exaggeration unless we are defining hostility and sympathy to mean opposition to or support for a certain set of policies or the actions of the government. For my part, I try not to have sympathies for either side in foreign conflicts, because they are or ought to be none of our concern, and to the extent that I criticize allied governments I try to do so as a U.S. citizen concerned about how our allies are using the military forces that we have subsidized, trained or armed and how allied actions reflect on the United States. Does it influence me that most apologists for these allied government actions are also apologists for U.S. military interventions, expansion of government power and abuses of the security state, while critics of allied governments tend to be equally critical of all of the latter? I’m sure it does, but speaking for myself I have tried to judge these matters on their merits as much as possible.

Were it not for ongoing pursuit of hegemony that involves these allied governments, Americans would have little or no business holding forth on the rights and wrongs of foreign conflicts, but as Dr. Gottfried says we must live in the present where this is the case.

The new issue of TAC is online. Glenn Greenwald discusses the general uniformity of the political and media class when it comes to Israel’s operation in Gaza. Prof. Mearsheimer has the cover story, which I found very interesting in light of this remark by Shimon Peres as reported by The Jerusalem Post (via Andrew):

Israel’s aim, he [Peres] said, was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel.

This “strong blow” is what Friedman the other day preferred to call “education.” Note how the story reports that Peres identifies the rocket attacks with the people of Gaza as a whole, as if they all had the “appetite for shooting” and as if being subjected to attack would make them lose it. One thing seems certain–many who did not have such an appetite are going to acquire it, and those who already had it are unlikely to be interested in renouncing violence.

Prof. Mearsheimer already identified as the larger goal of the operation in his article:

But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future.

To force another people to accept that it is defeated once and for all requires so much brutality that I doubt the Israeli government is really willing to inflict it, which means that the strategy will fail and will strengthen the Palestinians’ culture of defeat (to use Schivelbusch’s phrase). That is, the Israeli government may be willing to inflict massive pain on Palestinians, but it is never going to be willing to inflict enough to make them accept total defeat (this is a good thing). However, the attempt will reinforce the culture of defeat that Palestinians have cultivated and will continue to cultivate, and if other cultures of defeat are any guide Palestinians will tend to become more, not less, revanchist.

Indeed, insofar as Palestinians come to see Israeli actions as part of an effort to compel them to accept this their resistance will intensify until and unless they are utterly defeated, and it may be that the latter is not even possible. The goal is one consistent with the methods of total war, but the use of such methods, in addition to the profound injustice involved, would be an act of geopolitical madness on the part of a state that already suffers from intense international scrutiny and criticism. It is therefore always strange to me to think that the people imploring Israel not to do what it is doing are considered “hostile” to the state and its people, while those encouraging it on a path to ruin are friends and well-wishers.

When our government was intent on invading Iraq, many European governments opposed it for various reasons. Some were warning the administration against the folly of an invasion because they were our friends. Whether they genuinely desired what was best for us or were trying to keep us from blundering out of their own self-interest, their cautionary counsel was correct. Our government should have heeded friendly criticism and opposition and avoided making a terrible, criminal blunder, and we would have been spared a great many costs and troubles, but instead the allies who opposed our government were treated as if they were hostile and interested in doing America harm. The opinion of generally friendly governments provides some necessary perspective for a state that sees itself as besieged and under attack. What appears to be an appropriate and necessary action to the latter is sometimes seen more accurately–because it is seen more dispassionately–as an overreaction by the state’s allies. This is why the predictable, near-universal support for any Israeli military action in our political class is so harmful to Israel: those who are in a position to dissuade an ally from making a terrible mistake play the part of enablers of its worst habits. As much as we might understand why the Israeli government is acting as it is, just as a European might understand why our government acted as it did in 2002-03, that is not excuse for letting an ally charge ahead on the wrong path. Looking at it as pragmatically as we can, it is clear that the current course will be bad for the U.S. and Israel, and will ultimately be the cause of rejoicing for those groups and states that it is supposed to be chastising. How then can support for this course of action be considered a friendly or supportive act?

One of the dangers in wrapping up your arguments in claims of “rights” is that it tends to encourage self-righteousness and a blindness to the flaws on your side of the debate. When you believe that the other side is not merely opposed to your position and the law or policy you would like to see enacted, but is dedicated to denying you your “rights,” well, it becomes much easier to justify all kinds of things. When Rod explained why he finds the prospect of harassment and theoretically perhaps even violence done to him and his family because of a political donation to be chilling and worrisome, Andrew responded with this:

Rod needs some help. This stuff is just deranged sexual panic – mixed up with fantasies of anti-gay violence.

Suffice it to say that whenever a writer finds himself declaring that someone else’s considered opinion is “just deranged sexual panic,” he has lost perspective on the matter at hand. Denying completely the rationality of your opponent is certainly not going to persuade him or anyone else. That said, what exactly is the reasonable case for harassing supporters of a constitutional amendment with which you disagree? It would be intriguing to see that argument, because I don’t think it exists. Had the outcome been reversed and the identities of supporters of No on 8 were publicized as part of a campaign to intimidate and punish them socially and economically, I tend to think that Andrew would find this to be very objectionable.

Boycotts I might be able to understand. Obviously, a person is free to patronize or not patronize establishments whose owners take political stands that offend him, and business owners are taking risks with their business that they don’t have to take when they support measures that are highly controversial in their town or city. Boycotting stores over these questions seems like a dreadfully dreary way to go about life, but at least it does not cross over into the potential for intimidation. More to the point, Andrew has often written about how ruinous he finds culture war debates to be to the quality of political discourse in America, but nothing could be more likely to deepen culture war divisions than these polarizing tactics and the rhetoric employed to justify those tactics. “Suffer the consequences of your donation” is a rather grim slogan, and one that intensifies hostility between political camps. It should be obvious that this sort of treatment will harden people in their views and alienate middle-of-the-road voters who previously sympathized with you; it will invite imitation from your opponents and will eventually come back to haunt the people who defended it. As a purely political matter, this sort of overreaction is a gift to the opponents of gay marriage, but for my part I see nothing good coming from broadcasting such information to angry activists who believe that the people on a certain list or map are depriving them of fundamental rights.

Commenting on Razib Khan’s brief against the term “Judeo-Christian,” with which I very much agree, Samuel Goldman makes an important point:

The political Hebraism that emerged in the 17th century is a major and often unacknowledged source for American principles and institutions.

When I read this, Algernon Sydney’s Discourses Concerning Government came to mind. As I am sure Mr. Goldman and others know, Sydney’s Discourses was indeed one of the major influences on the thought of many of the Founders and particularly on the thought of Jefferson, and it is one of the most extensive arguments by a republican drawing heavily on the Bible. This was a main reason why he was chosen as one of the Whig heroes whose name went into the name of my alma mater. His Discourses was both prior to and more influential in its way than Locke’s treatise of the same name (it also led to his execution). In it he polemicized against Filmer’s Patriarcha (which is a much more interesting text) by going through the Old Testament very methodically and using it as his historical proof that monarchs did not inherently possess a divine right to rule. His defense of popular sovereignty (i.e., that God invested the people with sovereignty, who then chose how they were to be ruled) was, of course, as ahistorical as it was extremely useful in justifying the execution of Charles I after the fact. His popular sovereignty theory went on to have great influence on the post-1688 Whigs and on the political thought of the colonists. Nonetheless, even Sydney’s heavy reliance on the Old Testament was primarily a function of his Protestantism and the shape of his political theory was tied to his Presbyterian ecclesiology.

Ross responds to my post on the IRA:

It’s that “entirely” that I don’t buy. Yes, pure realpolitik considerations enter into which terrorist organizations are labeled as such and which are not, and which groups the U.S. government works with and which it tries to marginalize. But so do other considerations – including not only ethnic, cultural and religious affinities (and the activity, yes, of domestic pressure groups), but moral considerations as well, and the extent to which the aims and deeds of a given insurrection can be read as being in consonance with American principles.

At the risk of beating this issue into the ground, I have just a couple more points. It might be going too far to say that the official government attitude of the government toward the enemies of another state always depends entirely on the state of relations between the U.S. and that state, but in most cases I would say that it does depend entirely on those relations. The Irish republican example shows that there can be some significant domestic political pressure that works against support for the interests of an ally, but even so relations with an allied state usually win out. Conversely, when groups that we would otherwise normally consider as threats (be they narcotraffickers, terrorists or some combination of the two) prove useful as proxies against pariah states we see Washington adopt their cause or at least provide them with support–the use of Jund’ullah against Iran makes no sense if you assume that Washington always opposes brutal, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Then there are other cases where significant domestic political pressure drives official policy towards a certain pariah state, such as Cuba, and provides a cloak of protection to those suspected of committing terrorist acts against citizens of the pariah state. I will grant that there are some terrorists who may be more easily romanticized as “freedom fighters” than others. European and Latin American militants who draw on the rhetoric of Western revolution are more effective at pushing the right buttons than are Islamists, who tend to cast their struggle in what is for us a largely alien idiom. That being said, it seems to me that if we were able to romanticize Pashtun warlords and their ISI paymasters into freedom fighters against communism there is scarcely any limit to the kinds of groups who can be re-made into the champions of liberty.

Would a majority of Americans sympathize with such groups in the absence of official government support and a steady drumbeat of negative media coverage portraying the groups’ enemies as embodiments of evil? Probably not, because most Americans would normally not be bothered by such conflicts without constantly being prodded and pushed to take sides. There would always be some degree of support for old proxies that Washington has abandoned (until Savimbi died, there were still plenty of old Cold Warriors who were ready to praise him and his fight against the Marxists in Angola), and there will always be ideological or religious enthusiasts who will rally to the cause of militant groups overseas. Just as the Sandinistas became a fashionable group to defend on the left, and the SPLA became a cause celebre of evangelicals, there will always be some number of Americans interested in advocating for some rather nasty groups for their own reasons or out of some naive identification with their cause. If there are enough sympathizers, as there were in the Irish republican case, it will have an effect on policy, or the sympathizers’ views may align with the official policy that an exile community has pressured the state to perpetuate (as in the case of Cuba). For the most part, however, what will drive state policy towards an individual terrorist or terrorist group is the relationship between our government and the government of the country in question.

Update: Matt Duss joins the discussion with a good post in which he makes a similar argument to mine.

Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias both have worthwhile posts on Tom Friedman’s latest column, in which he endorses inflicting as much devastation and suffering on the Gazan population as possible to “educate” Hamas. He cites the war in Lebanon as a desirable precedent, so it is worth reviewing what he thinks is acceptable in the name of “educating” a non-state actor: 1,000 dead (almost all civilians, almost all non-Hizbullah), an entire nation’s infrastructure heavily damaged and millions displaced from their homes.

As supporters of the strikes like to point out, Gaza is not Lebanon–unlike the war in Lebanon, which created a massive refugee population, a sustained war in Gaza will likely result in much higher casualties from both military action and disease, because the Gazans have nowhere to go and have limited, irregular means of acquiring humanitarian aid. The goal envisioned by Friedman is that the devastation and suffering will be such that the Gazans turn on Hamas and Hamas has to abandon its confrontational stance, which is a re-statement of the misguided goal of the blockade that has been imposed on Gaza for the last two years: “teach” the Gazans a “lesson” by making them suffer, and Hamas will be the loser. The trouble is that the reverse happens each and every time an outside force tries to “teach” a population such a “lesson.” Instead of saying to their leaders, “What have you done? You must change your ways,” the people in a besieged or bombarded city or country rally to those leaders. Ironically, the less open and less free the society, the more likely this is to happen. Political solidarity is a natural, if not always wise, response to danger, and when it is fortified by nationalism and outrage over being attacked it is even harder to break.

If the “education” process Friedman recommends actually worked, Hizbullah ought to be politically weaker today than it was before the 2006 war, but the opposite is the case. If such “education” worked, Americans ought to have turned on the Bush administration and the entire political establishment with a vengeance after 9/11. Instead, we gave Bush 90%+ approval ratings and trusted the government more blindly than we had done in decades. The reality that this response is irrational and usually leads to bad outcomes is irrelevant–this is the way that people under attack react. It is this reality that makes collective punishment, mass bombing campaigns and sanctions so unusually perverse: not only is it wrong to engage in such practices, but it is almost certain to have the exact opposite effect of the one desired. As a matter of mass psychology, rallying behind leaders, even leaders who are responsible for plunging you into your predicament, is instinctive. Elaborate rationalizations follow–the Germans in 1914 developed what Eksteins called the “ideas of 1914” to rationalize the terrible blunder their government had made by perceiving themselves as the victims fighting a war of self-defense. It is strange that people who witnessed the national reaction to 9/11 do not understand this and think that other nations can be cowed and cajoled with threats and violence into compliance with the wishes of outsiders. Even if the course of action the outsiders want you to take is a good course to take, you will sooner persist in self-destructive folly rather than give in to their demands. It takes all of half a minute’s effort to consider what we would do in the place of people in Gaza to know that the “education” Friedman recommends will not succeed.

Ross:

It’s also worth noting that “race card” debates takes place in a different political context than “anti-Semitism card” debates. In today’s America, there simply aren’t any major political actors taking explicitly racist/segregationist positions, and in recent national elections the race debate has largely moved beyond even the arguments over racially-charged issues like busing, affirmative action and crime, and into the realm of symbolism and subliminal messaging. The debate over Israel, on the other hand, takes place in a context in which explicit anti-Semitism – anti-Semitism as policy, that is, and with at least a somewhat eliminationist edge – is a live and potent political force. The racist tropes that the McCain campaign stood accused of dabbling in – the black male as sexual aggressor, and so forth – are the stuff of underground white supremacist literature and subconscious suburbanite anxieties. But the anti-Semitic tropes that Walt and Mearsheimer stood accused of dabbling in are the stuff of everyday rhetoric in large swathes of the Islamic world, and they’re essential to the public worldview of Israel’s immediate political enemies. I’m not sure how much difference this reality should make in how carefully one treads around this nest of issues – versus how much care you take to, say, avoid putting a black politician in an ad with a white woman – but certainly it should make some difference.

This sounds plausible at first, but applies two extremely different standards to the two questions. Anti-Semitism is a live and potent political force…on other continents. It is obviously not a live and potent political force in the United States, but on the contrary it is political death to be associated with anything close to it. To use Ross’ formulation, in today’s America there simply aren’t any major political actors taking explicitly anti-Semitic positions, and in recent debates the question of anti-Semitism has become one of unintentional uses of similar tropes or remarks that might conceivably remind someone somewhere of actual anti-Semitism. Whatever else you want to say about The Israel Lobby, its authors were scrupulous in their absolute disavowal and pointed rejection of such attitudes. They stood accused of “dabbling” in anti-Semitic tropes in exactly the same unfair way that conservatives are frequently accused of using racist “codewords” and symbolism. That is to say, uncharitable critics who very much wanted to discredit the argument being made in the book misrepresented what the authors said specifically with respect to these stigmatized attitudes to make the evidence fit the indictment. It is very much as if a critic ignored the many disavowals and repudiations of racism that Ross and Reihan made in Grand New Party and said that they were still “dabbling” in racist tropes by reducing their statements about crime or welfare or immigration to an almost unrecognizable caricature. Regardless of the quality of the book in question, this is a plainly unfair way to treat someone else’s work.

Speaking of the Walt counterfactual from a few days ago, Ross turns McArdle’s IRA comparison against her:

And the example of Northern Ireland suggests precisely the opposite. Yes, even a stateless, terrorism-prone Jewish group in the Holy Land would doubtless have sympathizers in the United States, just as the Irish Republican Army did in the 1970s and ’80s. But despite the sympathies of some Irish Americans for the rebels in Northern Ireland, and the dalliances of the occasional American politician with Gerry Adams and Co., the IRA was on the State Department’s list of, yes, terrorist organizations until the Good Friday Accords.

Leave aside that at least one of those “dalliances” involved inviting Gerry Adams, head of the political wing of said terrorist organization, to the White House as early as St. Patrick’s Day in 1993, just weeks before the “Provo” IRA bombed London’s financial district. Despite this major attack on an allied capital, albeit by what was formally considered a splinter group, Adams was invited back to official St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in 1995. Sympathy for the republican cause and a willingness to entertain political leaders of Sinn Fein as legitimate figures were not simply a matter of Irish Catholics expressing solidarity with their kinsmen, but were consequently desirable poses for Democratic politicians to strike to solidify their support in these circles. The point here is that the political influence of Sinn Fein sympathizers was much greater than official government listings of the IRA as a terrorist group would suggest. The same could be said of the influence of pro-Albanian political pressure in the late ’90s that led not only to supporting the Albanian position on Kosovo but to treating the KLA as a military ally against Yugoslavia. Technically, the government listed the KLA as a terrorist group starting in 1998, but in practice the government treated it very differently.

Were it not for our very close postwar relations with London, it is hard to imagine that modern U.S. policy would have been all that different from the tolerance for Stateside Fenian and IRB organizers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the rapturous welcome accorded to the republican extremist De Valera when he visited the United States. Popular opinion in the U.S. was very much behind the Irish nationalist cause and it spread far beyond the Irish immigrant community. For a country nursed on Anglophobia, Irish republicanism appeared as a sister movement to our own fight for independence. This is one reason why comparisons with the Irish republican cause could make Walt’s counterfactual stronger (i.e., political or ideological affinities with a particular group will sometimes override moral and strategic considerations). This sentiment would have continued to be extremely strong, had more significant great power priorities taken over from midcentury on.

This comes back to the point I was making in an earlier assessment of the counterfactual. The IRA was a genuine terrorist group, but it was listed as such by our government most of all because it was a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms. That’s the nature of things in the real world, I suppose, but it is something that none of the reponses to the counterfactual seems to be taking into account. Had things gone very differently in the last century and London and Washington became enemies once more, it is very easy to imagine that the IRA or similar groups would have been made into anti-British proxies of the U.S. government. In the unlikely counterfactual event that an independent Arab Palestine had emerged out of a very different ’67 outcome, the official attitude towards the enemies of that state would have depended entirely on U.S.-Palestine relations. All of this is by way of saying that the official opprobrium heaped on Palestinian militants, for example, is primarily a matter of condemning the enemies of an allied state; their use of terrorist tactics is secondary to whether or not they are labeled this.

Update: Alex Massie has more.

Second Update: Goldberg chimes in:

And, truth be told, most supporters of Israel don’t make “ethnic” arguments either (which is a big hole in McArdle’s analogy to the IRA).

The more criticism McArdle’s analogy receives, the more I think it holds up quite well. As I was saying above, and as McArdle was implying in her remarks on the relative breadth of support Israel (i.e., including evangelicals among those who identify closely with Israel), sympathy for the Irish nationalist cause generally and the IRB/IRA in particular extended far beyond the Irish Catholics in America, because Irish republicanism was seen as an anti-imperialist, liberation movement and, best of all, a rebellion against Britain. Americans generally sympathized with the Irish for the same reason that they sympathized with the Afrikaners during the South African War–resistance to British imperialism by itself merited American enthusiasm. Our boosting of anti-British nationalists was more ideological, in that we were not imperial rivals with Britain, but it bore strong similarities to the adoration the British heaped on Abd-al Kadir when he was fighting the French and the encouragement the Germans gave to the Afrikaners and caliphalists in India. For that matter, Fenian rhetoric was always casting the cause of Irish independence as part of a universal struggle between liberty and tyranny; anyone who has ever heard “The Foggy Dew” or “A Nation Once Again” will understand this.

To sympathize with their cause, one need only believe that one was sympathizing with another people seeking liberty and independence, and at least up through WWII most Americans assumed that those two ideas were mutually reinforcing. The point, then, is that nationalist causes start out and end up with co-ethnics being their main sympathizers, and this forms the floor of their support, but when a nationalist cause is growing in strength and has appropriated the rhetoric of liberty (or democracy or some other favorable buzzword) its sympathizers will tend to come from many other groups who identify with the cause in a more abstract way. For that matter, think of the western European response to the Greek War for Independence–Philhellenes and political liberals supported the Greeks almost in spite of who they were, and rallied to the cause because of what they hoped the modern Greeks might become once they were free of the Porte. Obviously, Byron didn’t die at Missolonghi because he felt strong ethnic ties to his comrades-in-arms, but because he was a romantic liberal.

Third Update: Just one more point on American support for Irish republicanism. In addition to the ideological affinities that Americans felt with Irish rebels, even after the British became major allies there was a concerted effort from Washington starting with FDR to dismantle the British Empire as quickly as possible. For those still interested in that agenda, the continued British control of Northern Ireland represented one of the final holdouts of the empire, so support for Irish republicanism would have followed naturally from that.