A parliamentary hearing on the origins of the war between Georgia and Russia in August ended in a furor on Tuesday after a former Georgian diplomat testified that Georgian authorities were responsible for starting the conflict.

Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Tbilisi’s former ambassador to Moscow, testified for three hours before he was shouted down by members of Parliament.

A former confidant of President Mikheil Saakashvili, Mr. Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia. ~The New York Times

By itself, this would not be definitive, but it confirms what all of the other evidence we have suggests. The timing of the decision detailed in this testimony is important. What had happened in April? The NATO summit was held in Bucharest in early April. There the U.S. pushed for a promise that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually becomemembers of the Alliance. Whether it was this support for Georgia’s future NATO accession that Tbilisi interpreted (or misinterpreted) as a “green light” or there was another, specific endorsement of a campaign in South Ossetia, we have another piece of evidence that Washington directly contributed to the Georgian decision to escalate.

Ilan Goldenberg writes:

What is interesting in my view is that what you now see forming is a broad consensus among liberals, liberal hawks and realists. There is relatively universal agreement among these groups that we need to begin withdrawing from Iraq, focus more on Afghanistan, opt for direct diplomacy with Iran, reengage with the world, improve our image, strengthen our alliances, close Guantanamo and deal with global warming and energy security.

For some reason, he excludes the so-called “neo-isolationists,” because Goldenberg evidently does not understand our view at all. He describes our view this way: “the view of complete disengagement held by some on the far right and far left.” No one who could fairly be classed with us believes in “complete disengagement” (whatever that would mean). This was the point of Ron Paul’s argument throwing the “isolationist” label back in the faces of the hegemonists who impose sanctions on and refuse to engage in diplomatic relations with state after state: we don’t favor disengagement, but interventionists practice it punitively all the time. We do refuse to define “engagement” in terms of a willingness to invade and bomb foreign lands and meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. These things are not engagement–they are power projection and attempted domination.

Indeed, if one had been reading TAC for the last six years or this blog for the last four, one would have found arguments for practically every one of these new “consensus” items months or years before they were championed by people outside of the far right and far left. These items command broad support today because they are now among the most obvious things to do, and they represent the beginning of a turn toward sane foreign policy, but by themselves they represent little more than slight modifications.

Of course, there are important differences between us and this emerging consensus, and they are to be found in the minimal nature of the new consensus’ departure from current policy. We don’t assume that engagement with Iran is an alternative means to dictate terms to the Iranian government, because we don’t think we should be dictating terms to them. We don’t think our image abroad can be improved simply by pursuing hegemony in a less heavy-handed and more consultative fashion, but by ceasing to pursue it. We think we should engage the world with respect for other states’ sovereignty, and not as a benevolent and paternalistic landlord. While this new consensus view is somewhat less blinkered than the one it is replacing, it will remain as fundamentally flawed as the current establishment consensus that it superficially modifies.

John Cole urges me to say something about Max Boot’s latest display of cluelessness, so how can I refuse? Boot is evidently stunned and “gobsmacked” by Obama’s national security and economic policy appointments, and their “moderation” overwhelms him. His administration already “exceeds expectations”! Well, I suppose if you were a fool who thought Obama represented McGovernite “neo-isolationism,” or whatever it was interventionists were calling it, and thought, as Ralph Peters did, that Obama’s Presidency would be a series of retreats and capitulations abroad, you would be stunned. Then again, this is the genius who tried to tell people that he is not a neocon and has tried to claim that various American deployments in the Caribbean and Latin America in the early 20th century were not driven by an effort to secure U.S. business interests. As John noted, Bacevich derided Boot in The Limits of Power for his hyperbolic praise of American military power:

Boot dubbed this the Doctrine of the Big Enchilada. Within a year, after U.S. troops had occupied Baghdad, he went further: America’s army even outclassed Germany’s Wehrmacht. The master displayed in knocking off Saddam, Boot gushed, made “fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison.”

All of this turned out to be hot air [bold mine-DL]. If the global war on terror had produced on undeniable conclusion, it is this: Estimates of U.S. military capabilities have turned out to be wildly overstated. The Bush administration’s misplaced confidence in the efficacy of American arms represents a strategic misjudgement that has cost our country dearly. Even in an age of stealth, precision weapons, and instant communications, armed force is not a panacea. Even in a supposedly unipolar era, American military power turned out to be quite limited.

In short, Boot has been wrong about almost everything he has commented on over the last decade, and his neo-imperialist nostalgia for pith helmets and jodhpurs, which he expressed early on after 9/11, is fueled by a fundamentally flawed understanding of American power and the ends to which that power should be directed. Today’s post is not so remarkable in light of that record. Had Boot been paying any attention over the last year and a half to Obama’s actual policy statements, he would have also noticed that no less than Robert Kagan was praising the exuberant interventionism in Obama’s earliest foreign policy addresses. Obama’s Chicago Global Affairs Council speech from last year prompted Kagan to go so far as to say this:

America must “lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.” With those words, Barack Obama put an end to the idea that the alleged overexuberant idealism and America-centric hubris of the past six years is about to give way to a new realism, a more limited and modest view of American interests, capabilities and responsibilities.

Indeed, compared to the content of that early speech the selections of Gates and Jones to his national security team are “moderate”–but only when compared to Obama’s own interventionist rhetoric in the past. There is some reason to think that there we will see some combination of a new Scowcroftian realism, represented by Gates, and the ambitious interventionism that Obama has laid out in more than just this one speech. There are plenty of reasons for concern that even Gates does not really have “a more limited and modest view of American interests, capabilities and responsibilities,” given his continued reckless support for NATO expansion, but if anything Gates and Jones are likely to have a restraining influence on the activist foreign policy Obama has laid out time and time again. Contrary to Boot, the national security appointments do not spell an end to proposed withdrawal timetables and negotiations with “rogue” states, but then people who have never understood how modest and qualified Obama’s withdrawal position was and who have never understood that negotiations with Iran are aimed at the same goal of halting Iran’s nuclear program would not be able to see this.

P.S. Clemons makes some important points about what keeping Gates will mean.

By supporting and signing the current version of FOCA, Obama would reignite the culture war he so deftly sidestepped throughout this campaign. ~Melinda Henneberger

More to the point, he would reignite it in a way that would not be to his or the Democratic Party’s advantage, and that is particularly the case if the legislation would lead to the shutdown of just some Catholic hospitals across America. Even if the the latter did not happen, signing such a bill would feed into every hostile portrayal of him as a pro-abortion extremist (a portrayal, by the way, that is not an exaggeration of his record), and it would be exactly the sort of distraction from larger priorities that Emanuel has hinted the new administration will avoid. Whether or not Obama has already made a fool of Prof. Kmiec by promising to sign such a bill–a promise that renders absurd any hope of compromise or pragmatic problem-solving that was at the heart of Kmiec’s argument–he would assuredly be wrecking his Presidency for no good reason if he fulfilled that promise. If most people say they support Roe, even if they don’t know what they’re supporting, there is definitely not a majority in favor of such sweeping pro-abortion legislation.

Obama may be able to avoid having to decide whether or not to break his promise. As Henneberger notes earlier in the piece, just as I said in the closing days of the campaign, it is not at all certain that FOCA will pass. House members elected from marginal districts will not want the headache that voting for such legislation would inevitably bring them. This is the sort of legislation that would inspire intense grassroots opposition, and as with most issues the more vocal, focused and active side will sway many of these members in marginal districts. Bringing up such legislation for a vote would give Republican leaders an easy target and an occasion to pull away Blue Dog Democrats from the majority to deliver an early defeat to the other party. You would start seeing a media narrative of liberal overreach and establishment punditry would begin kvetching, “Where did the pragmatic, reasonable Obama agenda we saw during the transition go?” Besides, Obama’s own instincts to avoid political risk should tell him that he will profit nothing by signing this bill and will stir up intense opposition that he doesn’t need and should want to avoid. In certain cases, including this one, Obama’s desire to accommodate the status quo is preferable to the alternative.

P.S. One thing that almost all of FOCA’s co-sponsors have in common is that they come from absolutely safe Democratic seats.

McKiernan faces obstacles in making his plan work. A Washington Post article of November 19 detailed these obstacles, focusing on Taliban attacks on the supply route into Afghanistan from Pakistan. But that’s only a part of the problem. The other was caused by the Bush administration. “We should have alternative supply routes through the north and not have to rely on the roads from Pakistan,” a senior serving army officer says, “but we can’t get a northern route because the Bush administration pissed off the Russians in Georgia.”

Negotiations with the Russians over a northern resupply route that would be place the 67,000 US and NATO soldiers at the end of “a secure tether” have been stalled, according to this officer. “This is typical of the White House, they can’t see beyond tomorrow. They have never been able to plan ahead, to think through the consequences of their actions. They’re so proud of themselves, and we’re the ones who suffer.” He adds: “They can’t be gone soon enough.” ~Asia Times

This is worth remembering. In order to pursue a useless and provocative policy of NATO expansion and democracy promotion in post-Soviet space, Washington is jeopardizing a potentially very valuable relationship with Moscow that could contribute directly to the security and greater success of our soldiers in Afghanistan. As the hijacking of a supply train in Pakistan in recent weeks should remind us, U.S. and NATO forces are being resupplied along a route that has become less reliable and secure. It is high time to start setting our policy priorities straight. Squabbling for influence in the north Caucasus is nowhere near the top, and Afghanistan is.

Update: Steve Balboni reviews the history of tenuous supply lines through what is today’s Pakistan and reminds us of the British military disaster that ended with the massacre at Gandamak.

Second Update: Some good news for a change. Germany and Russia have negotiated a bilateral resupply deal for their forces in Afghanistan. Of course, Germany is one of our allies most in favor of engagement with the Russians and most opposed to expanding NATO. This is rather peculiar behavior for the rebuilders of a neo-Soviet empire, wouldn’t you say? This is what constructive engagement looks like, and it can yield real benefits. Washington would do well to follow this example.

At TPMCafe, I am participating in a discussion of Charles Homans’ new Washington Monthly article on an investigative commission concerned with, among other things, administration policies of interrogation, detention and surveillance.

Illustrating the absurdity of conventional (or at least conventionally sloppy and pejorative) left-right descriptions in foreign policy discussions is Ed Morrissey’s labeling of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Robert Malley as “radical leftists.” Robert Malley is maybe a couple of microns outside the establishment consensus on Israel and Palestine, and is therefore deemed here a “radical leftist.” As for calling Rice and Power this, well, I don’t know where to begin. Power is essentially a liberal interventionist, who, if anything, thinks that the government should generally be more aggressive in using force for humanitarian ends. Unless I am confusing her with someone else, she was a supporter of the war in Kosovo; the “radical left,” as I understand this term, was not or was certainly not unified if some did support it.

Morrissey is not satisfied with that, but opts for a partisan distinction that means next to nothing:

I’ll take Brent Scowcroft any day of the week over the Carter/Brzezinski model.

This contrast of Scowcroft and Brzezinski, who are virtually indistinguishable these days in their views, is just plain odd. When you consider how much in agreement Brzezinski and Scowcroft are, as the NYT reviewer of their conversation-turned-book put it, on “a remarkable number of basic strategic and diplomatic principles,” there is no great Obama movement or shift to Scowcroft away from Brzezinski. When you consider that Scowcroft also supported the Kosovo war (using the bogus regional stability and NATO credibility arguments), the lines get blurrier still between him and the aforementioned “radical leftists.”

Andrew comments on Shadi Hamid’s remarks:

One the worst legacies of the Vietnam boomer syndrome has been turning complex foreign policy decisions – which should ultimately be pragmatic actions in defense of national self-interest – into idiotic left-right, patriot-traitor, soldier-hippie dichotomies.

It is understandable to associate this with Vietnam, but it is a habit of mind developed over many decades before Vietnam. It was perhaps more prominent during Vietnam in ways that had not occurred in many decades, but it is hardly unique to the last forty years. Before U.S. entry into WWII, and for decades afterward, opponents of entry into the war were derided in similarly abusive ways, and during WWI opponents were not simply denounced but were also sometimes jailed on account of their supposed radicalism. Were we to identify pro-war factions with political affiliations in the early 20th century, the left or center-left was typically more interested in intervening in foreign wars. Proponents of confrontational foreign policy and adherents of what Bacevich calls the “ideology of natioinal security” came from across the spectrum after WWII, facilitated by the anticommunist focus of policy, and the right or center-right adopted equally aggressive or even more aggressive policy views. Misinterpreting reality and inflating threats, which Bacevich identifies as two recurring themes in policymaking in the post-WWII era, became and remain the marks of what passed for serious, responsible foreign policy thinking.

What Kennan called the legalistic-moralistic strain in our foreign policy thinking, which may have existed before Wilson but has become much more pronounced ever since Wilson’s administration, forces the debate into these unsatisfying and distorting categories. As Lukacs said in his biographical study of Kennan:

Beliefs in world law, the outlawing of war, Leagues of Nations, United Nations, World Government, etc., are all outcomes of that–as is their consequence of “total war” against “Evil.”

In the end, the conviction that policy is a dedicated fight against Evil is not only used to justify all manner of wrongs, but ultimately it is used to justify ignoring and scrapping domestic and international law as and when the “fight against Evil” requires it. Left-right oppositions make little sense, and they are certainly insufficient to explain the divisions over the Iraq war. The legalistic-moralistic view leads to imputing vice to critics of policy and identifying support for the state’s policy with virtue. It also tends to lead to identifying opponents of a given intervention or the entire direction of policy as virtual fifth columnists. This is related to nationalist identification with the state, but even more important is the identification of the state’s policy with some higher good. This is what Claes Ryn described in America the Virtuous in the following way:

Power sought and exercised for the good of humanity is thought to be by definition virtuous and to need no restrictions. Today the result is the proliferation of militant, sometimes highly provocative but also moralistic political conduct and speech, as witness the uncompromising attitudes of so many leading American politicians and political intellectuals in discussing how to handle opposition to American aims in the world. What is creating arrogance and saber rattling is not adherence to old Western moral and cultural traditions but an unwillingness to heed them.

This adoption, or rather perversion, of the language of morality by supporters of aggressive policies abroad lends them an initial advantage in framing the debate and setting the terms. I cannot count the number of times that advocates for invading Iraq derided opponents for supposedly being unable to distinguish between good and evil or even for not recognizing the validity of such categories. On the contrary, I think opponents of the war were paying more attention to the line between the two, but what we objected to even more was the ready identification of a bad policy as an expression of Goodness and the idea that opposition to it was somehow morally corrupt.

Glenn Greenwald is correct that it is a bit mystifying that there have been as many complaints from the left about Obama’s appointments as there have been. Surely they understood, as I have come to understand, that he is an establishment-accommodating, consensus-oriented politician, so how can anyone be all that surprised or upset? That is how he won, and that is how he has ascended so quickly in politics. More idealistic Democratic politicians, such as Russ Feingold, probably never could have done what Obama has done, which seems to me to be an indictment of our system rather than evidence of the impracticality of Feingold’s refusal to compromise civil liberties or sign off on an unjust war, but the point stands. Then again, I am a bit surprised that there haven’t been more complaints. There are two distinct questions here. It seems to me that there should be fewer bewildered cries of betrayal, because there should have been no illusions about Obama, but there should be far more criticism of Obama’s selections and decisions when progressives find them dissatisfying for well-founded reasons. In other words, there ought to be even more criticism of the probable Brennan selection, but much less gasping in surprise and asking, “How could Obama do that?”

In Greenwald’s post, there is an excerpt from an email from Digby, and I thought this quote was the most telling:

Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn’t ask for anything.

This is what conservatives and progressives both seem to be reduced to in election after election: looking for cues that so-and-so is “one of us” and allowing that to make up for the rather uninspired, conventional policies the pol pursues. The problem with this is that the pols who seem to be most adept at giving these cues are also the ones most likely to take their core constituents for granted. Indeed, they are bound to take those constituents for granted, because they know that the cultural signifiers have bound the constituents to their politicians in such a way that they end up being the least likely to rebel against the pols. The response Digby describes here is much the same as what we have seen with conservatives and Bush and again with the conservative reaction to Palin.

Greenwald makes a fair point that progressives did not hold out for concessions or courting from Obama, but gravitated to him over the course of the primaries and now do not have much reason to expect that much from him. The conservative response to Bush in the 2000 primaries was somewhat similar, in that Bush became the rallying point for conservatives who were lured into thinking that Bush, previously considered a moderate, was now a “real conservative” alternative to McCain. Whatever progressives may have thought of Obama early on, perhaps the possibility of defeating Clinton was so tempting that they had no interest in holding out for more from Obama.

It is this, it seems to me, that is at the heart of what is wrong with most calls for “pragmatism.” At every stage, the “impractical” purist hears that he should not withhold his support from the marginally preferable candidate under any circumstances. He is urged to be realistic, and so he and those like him do not insist that the candidate make strong commitments on policy positions that are deemed by someone to be out of the mainstream. The candidate pays some minimal lip service to the purist’s “values,” and this is supposed to count for something. In the name of pragmatism, the purist decides that he has to support the candidate, because the candidate represents the best chance of advancing his views, but even before the election is held the purist has already given so much away in the name of pragmatism and realism that he and those like him have no leverage at all. Having yielded and given away their support in exchange for nothing more than lip service, the purists are scarcely in a much better position than before. They can take satisfaction in being on the winning side, but for the most part this means that they will bear the burden if the public turns against the candidate after he is elected and otherwise they will scarcely get much of anything. The purists-turned-pragmatists will receive the blame for enabling the administration in whatever it does, but they will receive no credit or acknowledgement that their support was important enough to merit meaningful concessions to their concens. Having refused in the first place to exact a price for their support, they have made their support worthless and ensured that they will have no influence.