Richard has an article on Israel in Gaza that included this line:

The recent conflict is the “frontline” (where have we heard that before?) in a struggle between “the West”—that great abstract, vacuous construction we’re supposed to defend—and “those waging holy war” on “civilization.”

Richard was describing the view put forth by Melanie Phillips, but it could just as easily have come from Ilana Mercer’s recent VDARE piece calling on paleos to rally to Israel’s defense. More on that in a moment. As Richard’s statement suggests, “the West” is a phrase that can have many different meanings. One of the advantages of its vacuity is that it can be used by just about everyone living in western Europe and North America to refer to whatever they happen to value. Thus Christopher Hitchens can claim to be defending “the West” (i.e., secular modernity) against religious fanaticism, while John Hagee, say, could claim to be defending “the West” against Islam by glorifying the bombing of Lebanon and I could claim to be defending “the West” by opposing Christopher Hitchens and John Hagee in their respective obsessions. Hitchens, of course, is extremely critical of Israel, and Hagee is slavishly supportive of Israel adopting the most militaristic policies imaginable (which is to say that he is considered “pro-Israel” in Washington), and both could probably come up with some way to claim that each position is a true expression of their commitment to the values of “the West.” If we are going to get anywhere, I think we will first have to stop using this evasive, imprecise phrase and talk about what it is, really, that we want to defend. For the most part, “the West” has been a phrase used to justify dragging Americans, directly or indirectly, into other people’s wars for several generations. We should be concerned about the American interest and leave defenses of “the West” to someone who puts some stock in this meaningless concept.

Where Mercer goes wrong is in her assumption that paleos actually took the Serb or Russian side during the ’90s and ’00s in their conflicts. It is worth noting that interventionists frequently invoked Western “values” in both the Balkan and Chechen wars as reasons to side with the separatists or at least punish the government attempting to suppress a rebellion, so it is natural that we should be a bit wary of arguments that are couched in similar terms. She describes the paleo position as supporting “Western interests” in these conflicts (and includes Cyprus to boot), when the general paleo position on the Balkan and Chechen wars was one that said that the United States should not side with separatists against their governments (nor should the U.S. side with the governments against their separatists–they are internal matters!). Because there was no American interest in intervening on either side, much less on the side of rebels (and particularly rebels with connections to jihadism), paleos counseled neutrality and non-intervention in these cases. Of course, it is true that there was sympathy for Serb and Albanian civilians when they were being bombed by NATO, and there was sympathy for Russian victims of Chechen terrorism, but generally there was an understanding that these conflicts were internal or regional problems that were best solved by those directly involved and by the nations most directly affected by the conflicts. What we objected to most strenuously was taking the side of these rebel groups and in some cases even actively aiding them with military action. In the absolutely implausible event that NATO or some international force intervened on behalf of the Palestinians against Israel, I imagine that most of us would be among the first to oppose the action.

Part of our sympathy with and respect for Europeans is the conviction that European conflicts are for the Europeans to settle. Whether or not they are capable of settling the conflicts, it is their business, not ours. It is the consistent failure to remember this that has cost America so much over the last century. If I can speak for most paleos, our view of Near Eastern conflicts is much the same: just dealings with all nations combined with neutrality. Of course, a pragmatic compromise position would be one that recognizes that we are not going to depart from the region anytime soon, and so we should maintain good relations with the allies we have but should not therefore endorse foolish, counterproductive and ultimately self-damaging policies by those allies that end up harming both them and us. Mercer’s argument does not allow for the possibility of a position that permits criticism in the context of continued support. This, of course, is the same false choice that has been presented to Americans time and again: endorse foolish government policy X or be deemed anti-American or unpatriotic.

Mercer certainly does not want to play the Near Eastern Christian card in her argument in the wake of the war in Lebanon, unless the Maronites and other Christian communities there are to be ignored in all of this. No one I know among paleos has any illusions about the status of Palestinian Christians. We know that the PA discriminates against and harrasses Palestinian Christians, but then we also know that Christian churches are subject to harrassment from the Israeli state in part because of the Arab ethnicity of their members and bishops.

I have been debating whether I should say anything about Pajamas Media’s ridiculous publicity stunt important contribution to the world of journalism. Because it is clearly a publicity stunt and the sort of thing an organization comes up with mainly for fundraising purposes, I don’t want to invest it with very much significance and give the farce more attention than necessary, but there are a couple things worth saying. First, this does say something important about the miserable state of the conservative blogosphere as a journalistic medium, and it also tells us something about the thorough Palinification of the right. Palin was praised and embraced because of her perceved ordinariness, and her lack of expertise was regarded by her admirers as an advantage and a desirable trait, and now we are treated to the journalistic equivalent of Palin’s qualifications for the position she sought. In journalism as in politics, standards, qualifications and expertise are now to be thrown out; average-ness, ordinariness and ignorance are to be prized as proof of one’s authenticity. Like Palin’s pseudo-populism, which actually helps preserve and strengthen the hold the establishment has by making populism idiotic, this sort of “amateur” journalism does more to discredit amateurs and reinforce the pretensions of professional journalists than anything else. Far from marking the beginning of a serious rivalry with such outfits as TPM, this heralds the irrelevance of the conservative blogosphere as a vehicle for journalism.

Perhaps even more significant is the complete misunderstanding of the reaction to Joe the Correspondent, according to which Joe is to be admired because he annoys liberals. Unlike Palin, who really did inspire a visceral and vitriolic reaction among many liberals, the ascendance of Joe the Plumber has generated mostly confusion and bafflement mixed with delight that conservatives are so out of it that they have made such a person their icon. Much as many on the left fervently hope that the GOP is foolish enough to nominate Palin in the next election, they can only be overjoyed that the conservative blogosphere, rather than turning into an effective vehicle for political opposition, investigative journalism or policy advocacy, is turning into a caricature of the McCain campaign by continuing to elevate this man in such a prominent way.

Like the McCain campaign, PJTV’s correspondent decided to go to war with the rest of the media on his first day in Israel. By now I imagine most people are familiar with his call for journalists to be banned from war coverage, following by his pining for the good old days when government propaganda films were the order of the day. Indeed, in light of the Israeli elections committee’s decision to ban two major Arab parties in the forthcoming elections, I wonder if Joe was similarly “reminded” of the harrassment and imprisonment of dissenters that were official policy during WWI or perhaps he also fondly “remembered” the closing of opposition newspapers and jailing of dissenting editors and politicians during Lincoln’s war. Presumably these tactics would meet with his approval–we wouldn’t want to “down” our soldiers, after all.

One of the claims that I have seen made quite often over the last two weeks is that Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas and so ought to be “held responsible” for that decision. In other words, the idea is that they brought whatever they are suffering upon themselves. I have already discussed why this is the wrong view to take, but something else occurred to me over the weekend: when the Russians were responding to Georgian escalation in August and they wrongly began hitting targets outside South Ossetia, I don’t recall anyone saying that the Georgian people deserved what they were getting because they had voted so overwhelmingly for Saakashvili. On the contrary, the near-unanimous nature of support for Saakashvili was part of what lent his government legitimacy as the “democratically-elected government of Georgia,” as every Saakashvili defender insisted on calling it, as if the mere fact of being democratically elected invested the Tbilisi government with moral superiority. Putin and Medvedev’s elections did not count, of course, because they were manipulated and so not genuinely democratic, which formed the basis for the simple morality play that Saakashvili partisans wanted to fashion for us.

If we applied the standard being used to judge the Gazan population as complicit in Hamas’ wrongdoing to the situation in the Caucasus, we would have to conclude that the Georgian people were complicit in and should be “held responsible” for the actions and intentions of their government. Of course, we would recoil at doing this, because in that case we can see how absurd it is to blame an entire nation for the excesses of a hot-headed demagogue and his allies. Because we are not inclined to demonize the Georgian people, instead of identifying the people with the state’s wrongdoing we identify the state with the legitimacy that we believe flows from the consent of the people. Even though the very thing that supporters praise in the Georgian government–its democratic character–might lead us to hold the people responsible for its government’s actions, instead many of us are inclined to give the Georgian government a pass on the grounds that it is supported by the Georgian people, whom we have already determined should not be vilified. (Indeed, it is good that we are not vilifying them as we vilified the Serbs, but the point remains that we choose for entirely different reasons how we will treat a certain nation that has nothing to do with what its political leaders do or have done.)

The vital distinction between people and government will usually be blurred or erased for one of two reasons: the state needs to use the people as a shield against criticism, or a foreign state needs to reduce the population to an extension of the state in order to make war on it more completely. Realizing this should make us even more wary of rhetoric that invests democracy and elections with some moral significance. It should also warn us that the natural complement to valorizing popular sovereignty and democratic government is the demonization of entire peoples by identifying them with their political leadership in an indistinguishable mass.

Responding to my post on Walt and Mearsheimer, Ross cited a number of reviews of their book that he thinks should dissuade its defenders from so easily dismissing the mostly hostile critics. The first, by Leslie Gelb, came to my attention when it first came out. Because it was not hysterical, Gelb’s review was treated as if it fit the bill of a critical response that addressed the arguments that the authors actually made. However, as Daniel Levy noted at the time, Gelb’s review counted as one of the very shoddy responses that I was talking about. In Levy’s words, it was the “most disappointing and inexcusable” example of the book’s treatment. Levy’s discussion of the book’s shortcomings in his introductory post is very much worth reading, as is his review in Haaretz, which Prof. Walt has cited among the generally favorable reviews the book received.

The Lazare review from The Nation largely faults the authors for failing to take seriously enough the role of oil and empire in their arguments, which is to say that they failed to take up the arguments most frequently found in The Nation and in this magazine. There is a small problem in invoking Gelb and Lazare together, as Ross does, since it is all but certain that Gelb would reject almost everything in Lazare’s claims about empire and oil reserves, and Lazare would probably find Gelb’s position even more blind to reality than he found Walt and Mearsheimer. It is fine to cite the anti-imperialist left-wing critic to dispute all the ways in which Walt and Mearsheimer seem to maintain their fidelity to mainstream assumptions about U.S. regional hegemony, but to cite at the same time the center-left establishment figure to repudiate any flirtations with a radical critique of U.S. foreign policy in the region doesn’t add up. If Lazare is right, the book is lacking because it was an incomplete indictment of the causes of misguided U.S. policy in the region, while Gelb finds the entire argument to be off-base and wrongheaded. However, if Lazare is right, Gelb would be even more in error in his view than Walt and Mearsheimer. To read Lazare’s review is to come away with the impression that Walt and Mearsheimer were definitely on the right track, but made a mistake in limiting their argument to just one highly controversial subject. Of course, had the authors been inclined to go the route recommended by Lazare, Ross and a great many others would find the book to be even more unacceptable. The irony is that the things that Lazare finds troubling or simplistic in the book would not be contested by most foreign policy realists. One of the things that Lazare finds most troubling is the frequent claim that U.S. policy in the region would, all else being equal, be inclined to diplomatic engagement:

The United States as inherently diplomatic and nonconfrontational? Few people, on either the right or left, would take such a notion seriously.

In fact, almost everyone outside of the far left and far right would assume that this is the case, or would at least claim in public that they believe this. This is the myth of the reluctant superpower that Prof. Bacevich critiques so effectively in American Empire coupled with the myth of the benevolent enforcer of Pax Americana that I assume most realists would accept. What is so amusing about Ross’ inclusion of Lazare’s review is that Walt and Mearsheimer are proving their mainstream, realist bona fides in taking a position that appears to Lazare (and to me) as incredible.

As Lazare says before he begins his critique:

So, yes, there is a pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Yes, it is powerful. And yes, critics like Mearsheimer and Walt are hardly out of bounds in asking if the lobby, which they go to great pains to demonstrate is composed of both Jews and gentiles, is truly serving what the authors consider to be the American national interest.

To hear most of the authors’ other critics tell it, though, the lobby either does not exist or is not all that powerful, and they maintain that the entire exercise certainly is out of bounds and also tantamount to echoing, as Ross put it, “tropes of classical anti-Semitism.” So, it’s true that there are serious critiques of the book–Lazare and Levy would have to be counted among them–but if you take the arguments in either of those critiques seriously you cannot simultaneously dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer as “fundamentally unserious” (that’s Ross again). It is not enough to say, “Even The Nation reviewer didn’t like the book,” while neglecting to mention that the reviewer accepted the main thesis of the book almost as a given.

My apologies for light blogging this week. Christ is Born! Glorify Him!

Between Nativity on Wednesday and (yet another) computer failure, I am just getting back up to speed today. The story of my many laptops during this year would make for an entertaining post all in itself, but I’ll leave that for another time. It’s amazing how much more reading one can do when not absorbed in following commentary and news every day. Last night I polished off Fleckenstein’s Greenspan’s Bubbles (admittedly, a quick read) and read most of Fooled by Randomness, both of which had been sitting on my shelf mocking me for months, and I definitely recommend reading them together. While they are not that close in subject matter, they share a common theme of how people foolishly confuse information (or noise) for knowledge (signal). Given Taleb’s hostility to actual journalists, the implications of Taleb’s book for blogging are obvious and not encouraging for those of us who do this on a daily basis.

In continuing Gaza coverage, Leon Hadar points us to this extraordinary op-ed from the WSJ (a publication, incidentally, that comes in for a fair amount of abuse in both of the aforementioned books for different reasons). Bisharat’s point that we should not permit border skirmishes to be redefined as legitimate cause for large-scale military escalation is an important one. As far as the two camps that invoke just war theory are concerned, Bisharat is certainly part of what I have called the barrier crowd, and I imagine that his op-ed will generate no end of caterwauling from the loophole crowd.

Barack Obama, who takes over as U.S. president from George W. Bush on January 20, broke his silence about the violence in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, calling the loss of civilian lives in Gaza and in Israel a “source of deep concern for me.” ~Haaretz

Michael Crowley reports that Shibley Telhami told him that he believed this signalled that something significant was going to change under the new administration:

“Given how he’s tackled human rights, humanitarian issues and the kind of position he wants to take globally in terms of a signal of where we stand, it’s clear he’s going to be much more sensitive to civilian casualties,” Telhami told me. “You can say we’re going to go in and not repeat certain policies, do things like close Guantanamo, and not be sensistive to the kind of civilian casualties that have people demonstrate in the street around the world. That doesn’t tell you what policies he’s going to pursue, but in terms of how he projects himself, that tells you something.”

Of course, this is the same Obama who had essentially nothing to say about the even larger civilian death toll and massive displacement of refugees from the war two years ago, which he supported without reservation. It seems clear enough to me that voicing expressions of deep concern is the sort of minimal lip service that Obama feels compelled to give, perhaps because he is at least somewhat aware of the tremendous damage these casualties are causing Israel and, indirectly, the United States, but there is little or nothing in his record or public statements that should cause us to expect any departure from the sort of unflinching support the current administration has shown for any and every Israeli military operation for the last eight years. Politically, it is pretty close to unimaginable that Obama would start his term of office by making particularly bold or dramatic moves in this area.

Having critiqued foreign policy realism rather harshly late last year, I might normally be sympathetic to Ross’ complaint about it, but if his indictment against realists over the last 10-20 years is that most of them failed to distinguish themselves on the major questions of the day Walt and Mearsheimer make for unlikely examples of what he’s talking about. Unlike Chuck Hagel, Profs. Walt and Mearsheimer actually did oppose the invasion of Iraq, and they did so publicly when most of their colleagues took far more muddled stances, actually supported the invasion or kept quiet. On the short list of foreign policy realists who have distinguished themselves, these two would have to be among them. Even Hagel, whose claim to the title “unserious” has far less to do with his thinking on foreign policy than it does with his political theatrics, had more foresight and understanding of the matter than most of his Republican colleagues in Washington put together. The frustrating thing about Hagel is that he saw all the reasons why the war was a mistake, articulated many of the problems the U.S. might encounter and then voted for the war anyway. It is because he failed to follow through and show some independence when the right desperately needed more of it that Hagel should be criticized. Meanwhile, the legions of presumably “serious” people marched merrily along repeating the absurd case for the invasion with little reflection.

Without refighting the battles over The Israel Lobby all over again, I’ll say this much. Whatever the flaws of the essay, it was far from “lousy,” and the book addressed and fixed many of the flaws in the original essay. It is true that the book did not take into account the role of other Near Eastern governments and their lobbies (from my perspective, more attention to the complementary influence of pro-Turkish and pro-Israel lobbies would have made their claims stronger), but if you want to talk about farragoes of oversimplification and half-truths I could recommend any one of a dozen reviews and columns that misrepresented and distorted the claims of the authors in the sloppiest and most tendentious ways. The reception of the essay and the book was irrational in the extreme, and did more to validate main parts of their thesis than anything they could have written or demonstrated. No one could have observed the debate, or almost complete lack thereof, during the summer of 2006 during the bombing of Lebanon and still seriously believe that their thesis did not correctly describe, however imperfectly, the state of U.S. policy debate concerning Israel and its neighbors. As lopsided as the debate still is, Walt and Mearsheimer did manage to make it less so with their book and the arguments it provoked, which is one reason why the discussion of the conflict in Gaza is slightly better than the discussion of the war in Lebanon.

To take Prof. Walt’s thought experimentseriously for a moment, if Israel had lost in 1967 and the positions of Israelis and Palestinians were essentially reversed it is unlikely that Washington would pay that much attention to the Palestinian state or to the Israeli refugees. If we were going to push this counterfactual to its logical conclusions, the close U.S.-Israel relationship would never have formed in the wake of the ’67 war, as there would then be no anti-Soviet, Cold War rationale for allying with Israel, and there would never have been an occasion for Nixon to order the massive airlift of supplies and military hardware to help fend off the the ’73 attack. (Would LBJ have done the same thing a few years earlier? That is far from certain.) Washington’s view of a religious fundamentalist resistance movement struggling against Palestinian occupation would depend entirely on whether or not Palestine became a U.S. or Soviet proxy. If counterfactual Palestine tilted to Moscow, the refugees in Gaza would be considered freedom-fighters in much the same way that the mujahideen were later labeled this way, and if Palestine tilted toward Washington they would be derided as zealots and criminals. This is not hard to fathom–the KLA was officially listed as a terrorist organization until it became expedient to say that they were not, and Mujahideen-e-Khalq was not considered a terrorist group when its patron, Hussein, was still on our good side, after which time it magically became a terrorist group again. Conversely, SCIRI (now ISCI) was an evil terrorist agent of Tehran, but became rather more acceptable when Hussein was an official enemy; Da’wa likewise was considered and really was a terrorist group responsible for American deaths, and now its leader is our good friend and ally Nouri al-Maliki. There is some legitimate question whether the East Turkestan Islamic Movement is the violent Islamic movement Beijing portrays it to be, or whether it is a Uighur religious and cultural movement that Beijing wants to suppress as part of their colonization policy, but to satisfy Beijing we list it as a terrorist group.

Perhaps that is not how Prof. Walt imagined his thought experiment working out, but that is the more basic point of the experiment that Ross seems to have missed: groups are often enough labeled or not labeled as terrorists for very contingent and arbitrary reasons driven by other policy priorities. In reality, Hamas is genuinely a terrorist group because it uses the tactics and justifications that terrorists use: it targets civilians with violence to achieve its political goals, and insofar as it permits Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa to continue to do this from territory it controls it continues to do so. That being said, there have been more than a few groups that deserve this label that have not been so labeled, and some that have been labeled that do not necessarily deserve it. The more interesting question, it seems to me, is this: even if Palestinian militants targeted only military targets, is there any doubt that Washington would regard them as terrorists?

Since Ross is so disappointed by the contributions of foreign policy realists, here is an example of what he might call new realism to console him: Prof. Andrew Bacevich discusses U.S. foreign policy and his new book, The Limits of Power, at bloggingheads.

Can the standards of just war theory be applied so stringently that they become irrelevant to modern warfare? This is what concerns Ross about Peter Hitchens’ position on Gaza. As Hitchens’ position is more or less my position as well, I have a few thoughts about this. First, here is Ross:

Who gets to define what sort of harm is “lasting, grave, and certain” enough to justify going to war? Who decides when all means of preventing conflict “have been shown to be impractical or ineffective”? Doesn’t almost everybody enter a war convinced they have “serious prospects of success”? Isn’t every party to a war convinced that their actions won’t “produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated”? I’m being a bit glib, obviously, since serious thinkers have drilled down on all of these questions – but the fact remains that on a case by case basis, a shared commitment to just war theory doesn’t guarantee anything like a consensus on the justice of a given war or operation.

Well, that’s putting it mildly. George Weigel could claim, presumably with a straight face, that preventive war against Iraq is perfectly in line with the standards of a just war, and then-Cardinal Ratzinger could say that the “concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Obviously, I think the current Pope has a better understanding of the matter than the administration’s court theologian, which ought to bolster the claims of those who interpret just war requirements more narrowly, but this rather dramatically illustrates Ross’ last point.

There are, broadly speaking, two camps who appeal to the just war tradition: those looking for loopholes that permit the use of force as often as possible, and those looking for barriers to prevent the use of force as often as practicable. The loophole crowd seems to start from the assumption that every use of force, particularly when employed by governments with whom they sympathize, is licit and just and that just war tradition exists to provide the language and borrowed authority for the arguments to support this view. The barrier crowd starts from the assumption that there has to be an extraordinarily high standard met before force can be used. Naturally, as someone in the latter crowd, I think that the purpose of the standards set forth in just war theory is to make it as difficult as possible to meet them, because war, while sometimes necessary, is a great evil. It should not be easy to go to war even in self-defense, much less should it be easy to escalate or start wars. For the loophole crowd, the reason for invoking just war theory seems to be mainly to gain the political benefits of being able to claim to being on the right side, and preferably without having to meet most of the obligations that just war theory requires (or to lower the standards for meeting those obligations such that virtually every operation will meet them no matter what happens).

Of course, it is possible that applying high standards will simply cause those who wish to wage war for whatever reason to ignore the restraints of the tradition entirely, but then I thought that one of the purposes of establishing moral standards was not to accommodate the unjust in their desires. After the last six years, I would have thought that the tendency to water down these standards and thus make escalating and starting wars more morally and politically acceptable was the far greater problem that we face. We are not in danger, it seems to me, of “giving ammunition to the side of the debate that wants to do away with moral restraint in the struggle against terrorism entirely,” as these are the people who are perfectly happy to warp and distort the just war tradition (and the Constitution, international law and the basic meaning of words, among other things) to accommodate the virtual abandonment of that restraint. One could make a similar argument that opponents of the torture regime, by taking an absolute stance against torture as wrong in all cases, are giving ammunition to those who have defended and justified it as necessary, but I think Ross and I would agree that there is an obligation to oppose injustices that are carried out by the state, whether in isolated incidents or as a matter of systematic policy, that needs to be fulfilled whether or not apologists for those injustices can demagogue that opposition to their temporary advantage.