While trying to track down the poll that Beinart refers to here, I found a remarkable international poll that showed the general consensus around the world that other nations should not take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Those favouring support for the Israeli side was greatest in India (24%) and, as might be expected, here in the U.S. at 21%, but an overwhelming majority (71%) thinks the U.S. should not take sides.  Certainly, when Americans are asked whether they support Israelis or Palestinians, they will tend to prefer the former when compelled to make a choice between the two, but the striking thing about this poll is that most Americans are uninterested in picking a side.  There were two nations where supporting the Palestinian side commanded a majority (Iran at 63% and Egypt at 86%), but they were distinctly in the minority of the eighteen countries included in the poll.  Naturally, Muslim nations lean towards the Palestinians, but there are also sizeable constituencies in Turkey and Indonesia that support neutrality.  For all of the endless talk about how “pro-Israel” policies have the support of the American public, those who endorse a simple pro-Israel line are a distinct minority even in the United States.

And there are certainly libertarians who think Obama will be better on the war and on foreign policy, on executive power and on surveillance than McCain. ~David Boaz

Via Sullivan

These libertarians are the ones who are already being proven wrong.  In any case, this reminds me of the recent Rasmussen item that studied support for the general election candidates according to different fiscal and social “ideological” pairings.  This offers some interesting information that works to undermine the Cato thesis that libertarian-leaning voters make up as much as 13% of the electorate, and even more strikingly it accomplishes this while using the same flawed “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” definition for libertarians that Kirby and Boaz were using last year.  According to Rasmussen’s numbers, such fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters make up just 4% of likely voters.  It seems to be the case that Obama is considerably more popular among these voters, leading 53-38 over McCain. 

Interestingly, the unnamed “other” candidate does not get his strongest support from this “libertarian” group, which gives a third candidate just 3%, but gets it from those who consider themselves fiscally liberal and socially conservative (9%).  It’s not clear which third-party candidate, if any, such voters would support, so it’s possible that more of these social conservatives could be brought into McCain’s camp.  Naturally, the fisc-lib/soc-con group is Obama’s weakest among fiscal liberals, and it is also a group with a significant number of undecided voters. 

How many “Obamacons” are there?  I’m surprised to find that there are more than I thought there would be, though there are very few fiscally conservative, socially conservative Obama supporters.  Prof. Kmiec does not have a lot of company.  All together, variants of fiscal conservative, including the “libertarians,” make up 16% of Obama’s support.  If you add the fiscal moderate/social conservative support, that comes to 24% of his support.  Here’s the thing: Obama is neither fiscally conservative nor fiscally moderate, and he certainly isn’t socially conservative.  If these voters put any store at all by how they have labeled themselves and what these labels mean*, it seems possible that a huge part of Obama’s current coalition and the basis for his five-point lead in Rasmussen’s tracking poll can be poached or driven away from him mainly by focusing on how expensive and unaffordable his spending proposals are.  These voters represent almost 12 points in the general election tracking poll.  If McCain can win over just half of them, he can win narrowly.  McCain’s coalition is much more concentrated on the right with just 11% of his supporters coming from the left or from groups with uncertain ideological leanings, which gives him a more stable floor of support he can build on. 

*I know most people don’t vote according to ideological labels or paradigms, but those who are able to define themselves with these pairings must have some policy preferences that more naturally align with one candidate rather than another.

In a deeply misguided effort to save the reputation of Hancock, Yglesias compares it to Starship Troopers, which proves that he actually wants everyone to regard it as a horrendous waste of time and an embarrassment for all those involved.  (Starship Troopers was the movie that made me wish that an alien bug race destroyed humanity, simply so that the movie would end and we could be put out of our misery.)  I should say that I once wasted what seemed like an eternity driving from my Southside Virginia college to somewhere in the general Richmond area to go to the movies one night in my first semester away at school.  The movie we saw at the end of our sojourn up, down and around Route 360 was the risible, horrible Starship Troopers.  If Hancock is anything like that, run for the hills!

It is more than a little remarkable that few have observed that Obama’s proposal to direct government funds to religious charities is as undesirable as Bush’s proposal.  Viewed through a distorting lens of bringing religion back into the public square or using religion as a vehicle for political point-scoring, faith-based initiatives have always seemed appealing, but neither religious traditionalists nor strict church-state separationists want such a venture to succeed, and for good reason.  The conservatives who saw the faith-based initiative idea as the welfare state’s co-optation of religious groups and as a threat to the independence of churches and charities have been vindicated with Obama’s embrace of the same takeover masked as a helping hand.  There is no way that such power will not be abused to the detriment of religious conservative groups.  The hard-line separationists must also be enjoying its success in showing the basic undesirability of such public-private cooperation in this particular area.  Meanwhile, Obama wins plaudits for having moved to the “center” on this question, which is to say that he gets credit for adopting the left-of-center position that the Bush administration adopted seven years ago.  That is ultimately what “the center” means: it is whatever the political class embraces. 

In a recent column, Sullivan says of Obama’s newfound “centrism”:

His pledge of a fixed timetable for withdrawal was always going to be subject to empirical shifts on the ground in Iraq.

But then it is hardly a fixed timetable, now, is it?  It’s like saying that there is a firm deadline, except that it can be adjusted depending on cirumstances.  It’s a bit like saying that there is an absolute cut-off date, except that we allow for some leeway.  It rather empties the word pledge of all meaning, doesn’t it?  Without that, what does Obama actually offer that is worth supporting? 

The analysis gets weaker from here:

And by conceding a “refinement” of his policy the day before the July 4 holiday, Obama avoided short-term attacks on his policy “flip-flop” while making a necessary adjustment.

But he didn’t avoid “short-term attacks.”  The Sunday shows were filled with talk of Obama’s “refinement” in far from flattering terms.  Perhaps he made a “necessary adjustment” according to a narrow, electoral calculation, but what he definitely did not do was to avoid attacks for “flip-flopping.”  Indeed, the complaint against the MSM is that it has run with the story of Obama’s Iraq flip-flop without due regard for evidence.  There may be some truth to this, but not nearly as much as his defenders would like.

Sullivan goes on:

And there’s a point to the successive shifts: Obama is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for Republican candidate John McCain.

That would be clever, except that it is entirely misguided.  The reason to vote for Obama, perhaps the only reason, is that he represents something significantly different from McCain in terms of policy.  In the absence of that, Obama hasn’t got a lot to offer besides an interesting biography and the odd pretty speech. 

This remark is hard to defend:

He cannot ignore the pressing need for good intelligence gained through wire-tapping after 9/11.

Someone will need to explain to me how someone can muster extraordinary moral outrage at immoral policies (e.g., torture), but can at the same time countenance manifestly illegal, unconstitutional ones.  The latter are more corrosive to our system of government and the way that our government operates, because they are less obviously outrageous, yet collusion with illegal surveillance does not begin to compete with collusion with a torture regime in the Obama supporter’s reactions.  If Obama had “moved to the center” away from his position condemning the Military Commissions Act, would we be hearing about how Obama was a shrewd, clever politician, or would we instead hear outraged cries about betrayal and lack of principle?  Do Americans’ civil liberties matter less than opposition to torture?  Some Obama supporters’ reactions would suggest that they are. 

Update: Sullivan responds, but I think he has not understood my objection:

Er, yes: in my view, congressionally approved wire-tapping is morally preferable to torture and less constitutionally and legally corrosive. It is very difficult for me to understand a worldview in which it weren’t. My major concern with wiretapping was the executive branch’s unilateral and unaccountable power-grab.

So when two branches of the government collude in unconstitutional activities, that isn’t a power grab?  More to the point, I am not saying that illegal wiretapping is morally worse than torture, but that both are illegal and abuses of power and only one seems to merit any outrage from Sullivan.  His disproportionate reactions to these two outrageous things, even if they aren’t equally outrageous, are remarkable.  The important point, which I may not have made as clearly as I should have was this: if Sullivan thinks supporting illegal wiretapping is a shrewd electoral “adjustment,” what cannot be justified in the name of such adjustments?  What else could Obama “adjust” before shrewdness degenerates into simply cynical manipulation?

Reading this (via Yglesias) reminds me that what most people mean to say when they complain about “propaganda” in schools is that they dislike the propagations of views other than their own.  Certainly, I think there can be cases where a focus on politics can distract from the purpose of a class, but that simply isn’t the case with the Al-Kitaab books themselves.  If instructors supplement the book with other material, that may be an entirely different story.  Even so, the demand for even-handedness in American Arabic textbooks because they unduly give Arabs more than a fair shake for once strikes me as fairly ridiculous. 

I cannot say whether or not later parts of Al-Kitaab omit Israel from their maps, but for the first part that introductory Arabic students use it is misleading to say that Israel is not on the map.  The territory on the map in my copy is labeled Filistin, which probably grates on the ears of “pro-Israel” people the way that continuing to call the West Bank Judea and Samaria grates on the ears of a lot of other people, but the boundaries of the State of Israel are acknowledged. 

More to the point, the idea that introductory language classes always eschew controversial political topics is silly.  The difference is that when you use Le chemin du retour for your first year of French, virtually everyone accepts the idea that it is a very bad and unpleasant thing to have had an ancestor who collaborated with the Nazis under the Vichy regime, but that is still political propaganda about a fairly controversial topic (it is particularly controversial in France!).  In general, a little more fortitude and little less whining are in order.

But, yes, Maha and Khalid were annoying, and it had nothing to do with their politics or those of anyone else in the story.

P.S. Previous thoughts on the sinister power of Al-Kitaabhere.

Those of us who believe in free markets, small government, peace, capitalism, civil liberties and the Constitution will lose, no matter who wins in November. ~Steven Greenhut

That sums it up quite well.  All the more reason to vote for Barr.

Bascially, he [Obama] made a complete hash of things this evening heading into the holiday weekend. ~Tom Bevan

To be fair, the charge of inconsistency on Iraq can be exaggerated.  That said, it seems to me that the charge that Obama committed a first-class political blunder going into a long weekend is basically right.  Having already given substance to the idea that he will abandon important pledges made during the primaries with his flips on the FISA legislation and public financing, and having apparently reversed himself on at least a couple other questions in the space of a few weeks, it was an unusually poor time to be “inartful,” as they like to call it, about one of the central policy questions of the day.  Even if Obama’s remarks were completely consistent with past statements, which I think is not the case, he had nonetheless set himself up over the last few weeks to be attacked for yet another shift on a major policy.  If the McCain campaign has a problem coming up with a coherent message, Obama’s campaign has its own problems with message discipline.  Having just shaken the confidence of many of his supporters over the FISA bill and having opened himself up to being portrayed as opportunistic on something as fundamental as constitutional protections, this was hardly the time to start talking about “refining” anything.  The Obama campaign wants the candidate to display thoughtfulness, but they don’t seem to think very much about how the candidate’s phrases will be interpreted by supporters and critics alike. 

While I think the latest remarks did indicate some change in position, it is worth remembering that Samantha Power had already said that the 16-month timetable was a “best-case scenario.”  That had occurred back around the same time as the Goolsbee/NAFTA business, which overshadowed it, and since Power was no longer formally associated with the campaign the remarks did not create that many waves.  In the heat of the Clinton v. Obama contest, journalists were inclined not to dwell on this acknowledgement that the timetable was ultimately meaningless.  If the timetable is meaningless, and withdrawal is contingent on the stability of Iraq, the withdrawal can and will be deferred for many years.  There is a reason why war supporters are happy with Obama’s recent remarks, and it is not purely a matter of partisan spin, just as there was a reason why neoconservatives were very excited by his Council of Global Affairs speech last year and his AIPAC audience was very excited by his remarks about Jerusalem.  They can detect concessions to their position, even if his starry-eyed supporters cannot.  So I suppose you can count me as one of those who never thought much of Obama’s position on Iraq, so for me these latest remarks just confirm that his earlier position was as unattractive as I thought it was.  

This question of timetables touches on an important point: candidates who want you to think they will end a deployment talk about timetables to prevent just this sort of “pragmatic” kicking of the can down the road based on changing conditions.  Withdrawing combat forces from a war zone will always involve risk and there will be consequences, both foreseeable and unforeseeable, to such an action, but the point of following a timetable for withdrawal is to ensure that there will be a certain date after which the withdrawal will be complete.  This keeps an administration accountable to its pledges, yes, but it has a more practical value as well.  The potential dangers to the soliders from a withdrawal make it all the more important to make the withdrawal as fast as possible.  Withdrawal that can be interrupted or halted because of changing conditions in the country is the worst of both worlds: having signalled the readiness to leave, you then stop leaving and put yourself in a position where you may even have to recall some of the forces you have already withdrawn.  The desire to appear empirical and “pragmatic” is so great in the Obama campaign, as part of its ongoing bad habit of adopting certain positions simply to demonstrate how un-Bush-like the candidate is, that it is pushing them to adopt what is substantively probably the worst of three options.  Those three are expeditious withdrawal, indefinitely maintaining a large military presence in Iraq and the half-a-loaf withdrawal-only-so-long-as-there-is-stability position that Obama has staked out.  This is why any administration that tries to to both end the war in Iraq and premise withdrawal on stability in Iraq is not likely going to be able to end the war, because it has put Iraqi stability ahead of the American interest and defined acceptable conditions for withdrawal in such a way that withdrawal will never be possible.   

People who make an idol out of “pragmatism,” as many Obama supporters now feel compelled to do, are making a similar kind of blunder as those who make an idol out of “resolve” or “bipartisanship” or “toughness.”  In themselves, these things may or may not be desirable in a given situation.  It is the context and the end to which pragmatism is being put that determine whether or not it is desirable to be pragmatic.  In fact, there are times when it pays to be resolute, just as there are times when it pays to be flexible, but typically pragmatists are frequently in danger of always opting for flexibility and “refinining” things in perpetuity.

The problem, of course, is that the essentially open-ended nature of the three “S”s (Safety, Security, Stability) entails that there will always be a perceived need to keep significant numbers of troops on the ground, and so that any policy “dictated” by anything other than a principled commitment to pack up and go as fast as possible – which is to say, very fast – is a recipe for nothing less than an indefinite occupation. Things are getting better? Better keep the troops there, so we can keep up the progress. Getting worse? Can’t pull them out now, or it might all go to shit. Reached a plateau? Good – let’s keep troop levels just where they are, lest we should awake a sleeping giant. Until Iraq looks like Albuquerque – and trust me folks, it ain’t gonna happen – pretty much all of the “refining” Obama and the commanders do is going to involve further rationalizations for keeping our boys and girls in the desert. ~John Schwenkler

John has more here.  This has always been the problem with a strategy, so called, that makes success dependent on the political stability and internal security of Iraq, since a significant part of the argument for withdrawal is that both of these things are going to be lacking for a very long time and also probably cannot be achieved while Iraqis have a large foreign military presence on their soil.  To make our withdrawal contingent on an independent, functioning Iraqi military and police force, which is effectively what stability and security in Iraq will reasonably require, is to admit that we are staying there for years and probably more than a decade, because pretty much no one believes that either force can operate successfully on its own now or in the next several years.  To make a timetable for withdrawal contingent on such developments is to give up on withdrawing most, much less all, combat troops in the next four years.  Contrary to the claims of Krauthammer, without any greater likelihood that the war will be over by 2013 under Obama than under McCain (who has also said, incredibly, that the war will be over in 2013) there is hardly any reason based in foreign policy to choose him.  In theory, if the election does not turn on Iraq, but turns instead on domestic issues conventional wisdom takes it for granted that Obama has the advantage, but it seems to me that Obama will not be able to justify the budgeting for any part of his domestic agenda so long as the war in Iraq continues.  If Obama cannot be relied on to end the war fairly quickly, his entire agenda becomes politically unworkable.  In light of his flip on the FISA legislation, why anyone would now believe that Obama would follow through on the much more dangerous and politically explosive course of withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, when many voices in the Washington establishment are clearly telling him not to do this, is honestly beyond me.     

Frankly, the new statement is a significant shift from the statements Obama made at the debate back in September when he said he couldn’t promise to have combat troops out by 2013.  Leaving residual forces and leaving the door open to a new intervention in the event of genocide were already fairly watered down positions on withdrawal, but at least the timetable (which most people, apparently except for Obama, understood was supposed to be fixed) was supposed to deliver on the promise of an expeditious withdrawal of combat troops.  It’s true that Obama left open the possibility of delay depending on contingencies, but until this week he had not defined them in terms that are essentially indistinguishable from those of the administration, right down to consulting with the “commanders on the ground.”  (Update: Apparently, he has used this phrase repeatedly in the past.  It is still the case that this basically contradicts meaningful support for withdrawal.) 

Mr. Bush used this phrase so often as a code for endless occupation that it has become laughable.  That Mr. Bush does not adjust well to changing circumstances is well known, but what Mr. Bush did with this mantra about “commanders on the ground” was to mask failed strategy behind a pose of prudence and empiricism.  He also replaced the President’s strategic judgement with reports about the tactical situtation, or rather allowed whatever he heard or said he heard from the “commanders on the ground” to serve as the excuse for why there was no coherent or feasible strategy.  If you have listened to Mr. Bush over the years (“as they stand up, we will stand down”), you will find someone who says that American forces will be in Iraq only as long as they are needed to provide for security and maintaining stability.  Obviously, in light of the permanent basing agreement Washington has been foisting on the Iraqis, this has always been misleading, but it’s not clear to me why Obama should not receive criticism for essentially echoing this position. 

When Gen. Petraeus could not, or did not, answer the obvious question from Sen. Warner about whether the war in Iraq is making America safer, he could be forgiven for not having an answer–how can he assess whether U.S. strategy in Iraq is advancing national security when the President has consistently defined success in Iraq entirely in terms of conditions in Iraq?  The refusal to think of the war in terms of the American interest, which has so confused the administration’s every move in Iraq, also afflicts Obama.  The questions ought to be the following.  Will remaining in Iraq beyond the 16-month timeline advance the national interest?  If so, what are the gains we can expect?  Are the expected gains worth the continued strain on our military?  It seems to me the answers are: no, none and no.  The proper pro-withdrawal argument has always been that remaining in Iraq any longer will be an unnecessary and unjustifiable drain on our resources and an abuse of our military, and that it serves no American interest.  Unless Obama can persuasively argue otherwise, tying our withdrawal to conditions in Iraq is all but identical to the administration’s line. 

P.S.  Obviously, the idea of delaying withdrawal on account of the safety of the soldiers, as Obama does in his latest statement, is rather bizarre.  If their safety is one of the main issues, withdrawing them from a war zone as quickly as possible would make the most sense.  In practice, however, their safety takes second place to pursuing the chimerical goal of Iraqi stability, as it always has.

Update: Crowley’s article on Obama’s Iraq policy makes another important point that should not be forgotten:

A recent Rasmussen poll found that 65 percent of Americans want to see the United States out of Iraq within a year. At least that many people would likely expect Obama to follow through on his 16-month pledge. Failure to do so could be a political disaster.

Meanwhile, my pessimistic skepticism of Obama’s antiwar position seems to be more justified all the time.

Second Update: Josh Marshall writes:

Reporters who can’t grasp what Obama is saying seem simply to have been permanently befuddled by George W. Bush’s game-playing over delegating policy to commanders.

But thatis effectively what Obama is also doing.  If the “commanders on the ground” say that American forces cannot be withdrawn safely and without undermining Iraqi stability, and Obama has made withdrawal contingent on these things, Obama will allow his policy to be “constrained” by what the “commanders on the ground” tell him.  It is almost exactly the same deference to military officers that Mr. Bush has practiced.  As Crowley notes:

Obama has also said repeatedly that he would consult with “commanders on the ground” to set his strategy. Right now, that doesn’t seem entirely consistent with his withdrawal plan. “If, indeed, a President Obama were to listen to his ground commanders, right now as the situation stands, without dramatic change, they would not be recommending withdrawal,” the veteran Time Iraq correspondent Michael Ware explained on CNN last month, echoing a common view. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen told reporters last month that a precipitous withdrawal “would concern me greatly.” (Mullen’s two-year term doesn’t expire until August 2009.)    

Senator Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot sustain a long-term military presence in Iraq, but added that he would be open to “refine my policies” about a timeline for withdrawing troops after meeting with American military commanders during a trip to Iraq later this month. ~The Caucus

The undesirable influence of Lippert seems to be growing ever greater.  Meanwhile, the commanders “on the ground” (as opposed to where?) have made their predictable reappearance in Obama’s remarks:

And when I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I’m sure I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.

At this rate, they will be refined right out of existence. 

Tom Bevan correctly notes:

This is may not [be] a flip-flop by the technical definition of the term, but it certainly is a substantial walk back on perhaps the defining issue of the election that will draw fire from both the right and the left.

Obama does a lot of backward walking these days, and so it’s not surprising that he keeps tripping all over his own promises.  Of course, there are two ways to look at this latest news: either Obama’s original antiwar stance was never very strong and any “refinements” he makes now are just small modifications to an originally weak position, or he has started yielding to the conventional wisdom that his position on Iraq has to change because of the “success” of the “surge” (whose success, as I have said before, might better described as failure).  This either confirms that he was never much of an antiwar leader, or it means that he will align himself more and more with the Washington consensus the closer he comes to being elected.    

Actually, there are three ways to look at this: there are these two interpretations, and the one that most Obama supporters will probably choose.  According to the third view, this is proof that Obama is a pragmatist and open to evidence rather than someone who runs away from fights, avoids risk and eschews leadership.  Then again, it is these latter qualities that usually give pragmatists such a bad name.     

P.S.  On Obama’s own campaign site, this is how they describe the relevant part of his position:

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq.  He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.

Though it was never a full withdrawal position, at least it was something.  It would appear that this is no longer the case.

Update: Ambinder adds some important detail:

One way to figure out what’s going on is to look at the talking points the Obama campaign has sent to surrogates about Iraq. As of 7/3, those TPs say that Obama will “immediately” begin to withdraw combat troops. The TPs don’t say anything about consulting with generals or facts on the ground. 

Second Update: On cue, Sullivan says:

I don”t think that’s fair: there’s a distinction between cynical and pragmatic. 

That’s true.  “Pragmatic” is what a politician’s supporters call one of his cynical moves.  The distinction is clear.  There is another.  Cynicism at least presupposes that all firm commitments and ideals are empty and meaningless.  Pragmatism takes for granted that there are principled positions that the pragmatists refuse to adopt.