While the calls for intervention in Zimbabwe grow louder, it’s worth remembering that no less than McCain himself has already essentially ruled out meddling there.  On the main blog, Patrick Ford responds to the interventionist arguments, noting renewed enthusiasm for international institutions in them:

The real novelty is that the go-it-alone liberators are looking to the United Nations for help. NR wants the UN involved, and if not the blue helmets, then the British should stop “posturing” and get in there themselves. The Right–even the neocon Right–used to rightfully criticize the UN for sending peacekeepers everywhere and achieving progress nowhere. Now they want peacekeepers in Zimbabwe, at the behest of the U.S. government.

One of the legacies of the Blair years, as I’m sure Freddy and others could attest, is that the British military, particularly the Navy, has been gutted by spending cuts and was straining to maintain operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan as it was.  Under these circumstances, sabre-rattling against Mugabe from London would be nothing more than an empty threat.  Of course, it is up to the British people and their government to determine whether they have an obligation to their former colony, and whether they wish to imitate the intervention in Sierra Leone and the French intervention in Ivory Coast in recent years, but to my mind the argument for British involvement rings hollow.  If the case cannot be made for British intervention, how much less of a case is there for American?

Oborne invokes the dubious “responsibility to protect” standard that retroactively justified the intervention in Kosovo to stop (non-existent) genocide, but beyond compromising the principle of state sovereignty it asserts a new sort of sovereignty of the protector over those whom he protects.  If other states have a “responsibility to protect” the people of other states, they are to some extent responsible for the government of those other states, and not only in times of crisis.  The de facto two-tier system of protector (i.e., dominating) and protected states that would result exposes dozens of other small, reasonably well-governed nations to interference by more powerful neighbours and regional powers on various pretexts framed in terms of protecting their populations.  That the pretexts will often be transparent will not change the instability that can and will result when major powers begin acting as if the state sovereignty under certain conditions is essentially meaningless.  As Kosovo should have taught us already, the claims made by outside governments about conditions inside another country are often unreliable or patently false, but there is nothing to stop other powers from engaging in the same exaggerations and propaganda to justify their interference in the affairs of other states.    

The invasion of Iraq was framed partly in this way, yet the hundreds of thousands dead, the millions displaced and the tens of millions living in greater insecurity than before all remind us that such protection can be worse than the danger.  The refugee crisis in Kosovo that started only after the NATO bombing campaign began serves as another reminder that those who are supposedly being protected are often among the first to suffer the most from such “help.”  This is not just a question of unintended consequences, but of obviously foreseeable calamities that will result from taking specifically military action to remedy an internal political problem.  Zimbabwe seems to offer a relatively clear case of a despotic maniac and his ruling party brutalising the opposition, but surely Iraq ought to have taught everyone some humility that outsiders do not necessarily understand the internal political struggles of other countries very well. 

We should remember that Westerners in particular tend to valorise one side in an internal struggle and act as if their acquisition of power will resolve conflicts that may be rooted in much more enduring structural divisions based on ethnicity, tribe or religion that are obscure to us and hidden behind simple labels of democrat and dictator.  The international complications that would arise with any intervention in Sudan or Burma are also there in Zimbabwe as well, since everyone knows that Zimbabwe has become one of China’s clients in Africa. 

The MDC and Tsvangirai are unusual in that they are actually reasonably sympathetic representatives of political opposition to Mugabe, as opposed to the rather dubious list of crooks who have been lionised as champions of political reform in the various “colour” revolutions, but it is not clear why their cause is particularly more deserving of armed intervention than that of the Luos in Kenya, Darfuris, Nepalis and Burmese, whose plight briefly caught outside attention and then faded into the background.  Interventionists are always insisting that we must act now, and the urgency of their appeals is one of their political strengths, because it short-circuits serious thought and forces people to pick sides on the issue quickly, but the demand for action fades almost as quickly as it comes.  Had we heeded the call for going into Burma we, or rather our soldiers, would still be knee-deep in the floodwaters, having embarked on another hazardous, open-ended mission with no obvious connection to U.S. interests.    

What we are seeing in Zimbabwe is just one in a series of imploding post-colonial governments ushering in political strife and the early stages of civil war.  Does it then become the new standard that each failing, violent kleptocracy around the world becomes the ward of other states?  It is not at all clear how this actually aids any of the peoples in question over the long term, if their political conflicts must be perpetually adjudicated and resolved by the use of outside force.  Nothing could be more effective in stunting political development in these countries, and the domestic political opposition already suffers enough from the accusation of being the puppet of foreigners without foreign intervention seeming to confirm that the opposition’s cause and that of outside powers is the same. 

It never ceases to amaze me how interventionists on the right can damn the U.N. as irrelevant, useless and corrupt and then turn around and start demanding that it do something to address this or that crisis.  Even so, the appeal to the U.N. and other nations is partly a rhetorical frame to set up the inevitable “reluctant warrior” argument that America must step into the breach because those lily-livered Europeans and globocrats have failed yet again.  This is how those who were eager to “crush Serb skulls” could portray intervention in the Balkans as a grudging act of necessity, rather than the obviously gratuitous and arbitrary act that it was.   

P.S.  It is technically true that ZANU-PF came to power through elections, but they held an overwhelming advantage in the post-independence era as the major anti-colonialist resistance movement.  The lesson to draw from the tragedy of Zimbabwe is not simply that elected governments can also commit terrible crimes against their peoples, but that political movements that once enjoyed international admiration or sympathy can become–or, more likely, always were–dangerous and repressive.  Not only does this tell us that democratic governance is not a panacea for more fundamental political conflicts, but that often enough the main thing that distinguishes an opposition figure and a tyrant is that the former has not yet acquired power.

On the heels of the Politico item detailing the snubbing of two Muslim Obama supporters, the NYT runs a story describing the more systematic snubbing of Muslims by the Obama campaign, including this notable passage:

Mr. Ellison believed that Mr. Obama’s message of unity resonated deeply with American Muslims. He volunteered to speak on Mr. Obama’s behalf at a mosque in Cedar Rapids, one of the nation’s oldest Muslim enclaves. But before the rally could take place, aides to Mr. Obama asked Mr. Ellison to cancel the trip because it might stir controversy. Another aide appeared at Mr. Ellison’s Washington office to explain.

“I will never forget the quote,” Mr. Ellison said, leaning forward in his chair as he recalled the aide’s words. “He said, ‘We have a very tightly wrapped message [bold mine-DL].’ ”

Now if I were Obama, I would steer clear of Keith Ellison, too, and not necessarily because he’s a Muslim, but rather because he is all together too cozy with CAIR, as I detailed in a news piece for Chroniclesseveral months ago.  Not very surprisingly, Obama has not been keen to be seen with Muslims or in mosques:

While the senator has visited churches and synagogues, he has yet to appear at a single mosque. Muslim and Arab-American organizations have tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with Mr. Obama, but officials with those groups say their invitations — unlike those of their Jewish and Christian counterparts — have been ignored.   

It is difficult to say that being described as a Muslim is a smear without annoying Muslim voters, but, of course, it is a smear because it is intended as one and it is repeated for the purpose of undermining and discrediting the candidate.  At the same time, one just feels rather sorry for the people involved when you read this:

The committee’s president, Mukit Hossain, said Muslims in Virginia were drawn to Mr. Obama because of his support for civil liberties and his more diplomatic approach to the Middle East.

His support for civil liberties and more diplomatic approach to the Middle East!  Tell it to the opponents of the FISA bill and the dead civilians in Lebanon.  These people are embracing a fantasy.  While it may be understandable, disillusionment is the only thing that can result.  I do have to wonder whether this will contribute to Nader’s influence on the election in certain swing states.  The disaffection seems real and widespread, and it could end up costing Obama in unexpected ways.

This latest result from Pennsylvania ought to put a damper on any Rendell VP speculation, since according to this poll putting Rendell on the ticket would be a net loser of votes for Obama, while adding Clinton allows the ticket to break even.  Ridge adds nothing on the Republican side, which probably should be the final nail in the coffin of that terrible idea.  More sobering for the Obama camp has to be the numbers related to concern about the candidate’s associations: 55% are very or somewhat concerned (40% are very concerned), including 44% of Democrats, 46% of independents, 59% of moderates and 35% of liberals.  The makeup of the undecided vote is worth noting: 9% of Democrats and 11% of independents remain unsure which candidate they prefer, and overall Obama has the support of just 69% of Democrats.  If I am the Democratic nominee with just a four-point lead in Pennsylvania,  I am not reassured by the fact that I have improved on my even more anemic two-point lead from a month ago.  There has been some Democratic movement toward Obama in the last month (the awful 69% figure is up from 63%), but it has been fairly small.

Even if you never met him, you know this guy.  He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by. ~Karl Rove

Sullivan seems to see this as a case of resentment stemming from an inferiority complex, which is possible but not really the point, while Chris Orr remarks:

On the plus side, this presumable means Rove is giving up on the whole radical-Muslim-foreigner-outsider frame.

Doubtful.  That’s part of the reason why framing Obama that way can be crudely effective, because it can be combined fairly easily with the portrayal of him as the aloof, arrogant elitist.  This is why I have long marveled at his admirers’ willingness to brag about Obama as globalisation personified in an era when most Americans are not very keen on globalisation.  (Incidentally, this is also what makes his pandering on NAFTA potentially much more damaging to him than it might usually be, since it seems to confirm Obama as a champion of economic globalisation and a personification of cultural globalisation, and the anxieties and discontent about both then combine and bleed into each other to create an even more powerful backlash.) 

Indeed, that is how the portrayal of elites tends to work: it is not disparity of wealth, power and status in itself that is used to criticise them, but all the ways that this disparity creates social or cultural distance from a majority of people in the country.  This is why it was more politically harmful for Kerry to be seen as a Francophile and someone who had gone to school in Europe than it was that he had married into great wealth.  This is why the phony populism of Fred Thompson in his pickup truck or George Bush aw-shucksing his way around the country while talking about his “favourite philosopher” works even for those politicians who are obviously wealthy and well-connected.  Everyone knows that the phony populism is an act, but it is the sort of condescension that flatters rather than dismisses, and most voters are as susceptible to flattery as anyone.  If identity is central to mass democratic politics, things that create barriers to identification between the candidate and voters can work in complementary fashion even when they may seem to be contradicting one another.  

That it is strictly speaking illogical does not matter, because this tactic is not supposed to make sense.  I think this is one reason why fearmongers and warmongers succeed as often as they do–their critics attack their arguments logically and show them to be absurd and reveal their facts to be inaccurate, but this does nothing to allay the fears that such arguments generate.  To some extent, the sheer absurdity of the idea that Iraq posed a threat to the United States, for example, is what made is such a compelling idea in the wake of 9/11, when paranoid hallucinations of danger were considered the sober, responsible reaction to terrorism.  When McCain’s campaign talks about someone exhibiting a “September 10th mindset,” they are really saying, “This person is not showing enough hysterical fear and no longer imagines enemies hiding behind every tree.”  And we are supposed to think that this is a very bad thing!   

Think of this another way: outsiders can be demonised or caricatured, but for the most part they are seen as less threatening because they come from the margins or from some other “outside,” while portraying someone as an outsider who is also the consummate insider can generate a number of different kinds of anxiety and fear.  To the extent that Obama claims to be the political outsider, claiming that he is a foreign or marginal outsider of a different kind turns his call for change into a threat of takeover, while dwelling on his arrogance or insiderish qualities also isolates him from voters, weakens his credibility as a reformer and undermines his fav ratings, which are one of his greatest sources of political strength.  As long as enough people like Obama, McCain will keep struggling and probably won’t win.  If that can be damaged (and it has already been damaged to some extent), it improves McCain’s chances.   Insiders, such as Rove, use the insider attack to distance Obama from voters, just as it was mostly elites who hammered Obama for his elitism.  Even though this acknowledges that Obama is really a paid-up member of the political class and the Washington “club” to which so many of his critics belong, it ties him to the system he proposes to change, while the elitist charge can be deployed in another way to make Obama seem alien and unfamiliar.  The arrogance meme has been gaining strength lately thanks to such idiotic mistakes as that travesty of a seal, and it would not hard to imagine how the seal episode could be spun to impugn Obama’s Americanism in a way that would mesh with the chain e-mail attacks.  The attack would go something like, “He wants to be President, but he doesn’t even have respect for the presidential seal,” and then the bogus charges about his lack of respect for the flag, or the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem or what-have-you would be tacked on to “prove” the point.  This latest shot from Rove is just the first punch in a combination, so we can expect to see a number of different lines of attack being used in combination over the next few months.

Over the years, Obama has carefully calibrated his political message, and he has won a grudging respect among some conservatives. In The New Republic, Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the Reagan and Bush père Administrations, writes that “Obamacons”—libertarians, disillusioned neoconservatives, even a few supply-siders—have been pushed “into Obama’s arms.” In The American Conservative, Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, complains, “To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion.” ~Dorothy Wickenden, The New Yorker

Unintentionally, I think, this paragraph demonstrates perfectly how the “Obamacon” phenomenon is driven pretty much entirely by a negative and anti-Republican impulse.  I know I have made this point before, but this passage serves as an excellent example of what I mean, because even when Ms. Wickenden proposes to show examples of how Obama has won over conservative supporters she ends up demonstrating that Obama didn’t win them over, but rather that the Republicans have driven them away.  The “grudging respect” for Obama turns out to have no connection with Obama at all, except for the fact that Obama’s opponents are McCain and the Republicans.  His conservative admirers have been “pushed into his arms,” which implies that there is no respect, grudging or otherwise, but rather a desperate, necessary embrace of the other major party candidate out of sheer contempt for the alternative. 

Prof. Bacevich’s article is a powerful indictment of the GOP and gives the best account you could want for why conservatives should stop supporting that party, and it is only by the accident of the two-party system that the conclusion of this argument is that conservatives should of necessity, according to the argument, support the GOP’s major opponent.  Obamacons have taken the lesser-of-two-evils argument to an extreme conclusion that the Democrats are now the lesser of two evils, but in coming to that conclusion they are offering the most empty endorsement of the actual Democratic agenda that the candidate they are grudgingly supporting (but not necessarily respecting) will try to advance. 

This position must be incoherent, because it is equally true to say, “To believe that President Barack Obama will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion.”  It must therefore come down to Iraq, so you have the single-issue antiwar voters on the right arraying themselves against the single-issue pro-life voters who will always line up behind the GOP no matter what for fear of the alternative.  The only meaningful difference between these two single-issue rationales is that the antiwar voters have a slightly better chance of being vindicated, because a new President will have the authority to withdraw American forces from Iraq, but all of that hinges on Obama not meaning what he says when he says that he will leave some forces in Iraq and that he is willing to return to Iraq to prevent civil war and genocide.

Reihan:

A culture that is plagued by materialist excess won’t be cured by taxes. It can only be cured, if at all, through a revival of postmaterialist values — that is, a revival of hippie values.

It was interesting to read Reihan’s discussion of the new hippies, but as much as I enjoy his ongoing one-man war against the Prius and his energetic denunciation of Planet Green–a channel that seems to inspire mockery and loathing across the spectrum–I was surprised that he made no direct references to the convergence of hippie and traditionalist values or the moves (and false starts) of socially conservative greens (or green social conservatives).  The “crunchy cons” are one example of this, but along with them would be the broader array of neo-agrarians, Wendell Berry devotees and Christian homeschooling families.  Reihan briefly alluded to homeschooling families, but took it no further.  There is to some extent a cultural overlap between hippies, greens and American converts to Orthodoxy that is a very small phenomenon in American society, but I think it is representative of a more general trend within socially conservative Christian churches in the rising cohort of 18-29 year olds.  I would be interested to hear where Reihan thinks these people fit into his analysis.  

This subject has been on my mind in recent weeks, and has caught my attention again now that I am starting to look through Anestis Keselopoulos’ Man and the Environment, which is an Orthodox study of the relationship between man and creation in the thought of St. Symeon the New Theologian.  As Keselopoulos says in his foreword, “The relationship between man and the environment, which it [Orthodox patristic thought] puts forward as alone being true and salutary, is one that passes through man’s relationship and communion with God.”  Ultimately, it seems to me that a “revival of hippie values” will not create an enduring post-materialism, because a diffuse “hippie” culture on its own has no stable spiritual foundation, and because there is no particular rationale for the ascetic discipline that such post-materialism requires.    One of the arguments of Keselopoulos’ work is that St. Symeon’s ascetic, spiritual life is the path to understanding the right relationship between man and nature.  “The oppressive and tyrannical congtrol which man feels from material goods is due to the effort he makes, whether consciously or unconsciously, to make them autonomous from their Creator.”  It will be through asceticism, festivity and koinonia that people will overcome their own attempts at autonomy from God and will cease to treat the natural world as a separate object either to be enshrined or exploited.

Kansas’ 2nd District may be turning into a safe seat for the Democrats, according to this result.  Generic approval for Congress is an abysmal 12% these days, but the personal job approval ratings for new Democratic incumbents  appear to be very good, and we all know that the generic Congressional ballot is overwhelmingly pro-Democratic.  As far as Nancy Boyda is concerned, there does not seem to be voter’s remorse over her 2006 election, which supports my earlier guess that her seat was not as vulnerable as the race rankings suggest that it is.  Pretty clearly, contrary to what I was saying earlier this month, her endorsement of Obama has had no meaningful effect on support for her in the district.  KS-02 ought to be one of the GOP’s best chances to retake a seat lost in the midterms, and that possibility seems more remote by the day.  Things may change once the Republicans settle on a nominee, but there is no reason right now to think that a Boyda-Ryun rematch would yield a different result.

P.S.  In North Carolina, the Democrat Kissell appears to be doing well in the Kissell-Hayes rematch in NC-08.

…which is why you shouldn’t trust any of them.  On its own, Obama’s support for the FISA legislation would be unremarkable.  When done in the name of antiterrorism, wiretapping is quite popular, and a candidate running in a general election campaign in which he cannot afford to have people challenge his national security bona fides successfully.  Further, someone who supported the reauthorisation of the PATRIOT Act is not exactly brimming with zeal for the Fourth Amendment in the first place, so those who expected Obama to take a different position may be some of those imaginary people “who think Obama is the messiah, capable of making the lion lie down with the lamb, cooling the planet with the touch of his hand, bringing the dead back to life…”  Or they may just be gullible enough to think that Obama is particularly interested in protecting civil liberties when doing so involves political risk. 

It seems to me that this is really why Obama boosters ought to be deeply concerned about his position on the FISA bill, just as they ought to be concerned about his zig-zagging on NAFTA and Iran policy on the one hand and his consistency regarding Israel/Palestine, because it fits into a pattern of avoiding confrontation and seeking consensus in the worst way imaginable in which consensus-building means surrendering to whichever interest group or faction in Congress has the most clout.  This is not just worldly pragmatism, but a pattern of avoiding fights, bruising or otherwise, on any issue.  If the bill was, as Feingold put it, a “capitulation” to the administration, Obama’s support for it seems to confirm the fears of his progressive doubters who thought there was something treacherous in all of this talk about unity and bipartisanship.  But in the area of national security and foreign policy, Obama has usually been quite clear that he is not opposed to that much of the status quo, and much as his few admirers on the right get the impression that he is interested in their ideas on certain domestic policies his admirers on the left have had a bad habit of imagining that he really agrees with them on national security and foreign policy much more than he does.  Both sets of admirers have tended to allow themselves to be fooled or at least disarmed by his rhetoric, even as they have been determined to show that he is a knowledgeable and substantive candidate who does more than give nice speeches. 

Yes, he is a politician who will disappoint many people because of some political need for various compromises, but the thing that should begin to worry them is whether he will ever do anything other than disappoint them.

The possibility that members of this administration will be brought up on charges in a foreign country seems extremely remote.  This is how war crimes prosecutions work: the only people ever prosecuted for war crimes are either the leaders of governments defeated in war or the former leaders of extremely weak and vilified nation-states that think they can get back some international respect by throwing the old ruler to the wolves.  Occasionally, you get a gratuitous case of a foreign judge engaging in moral self-importance, as you had with the whole sorry Pinochet episode.  If you are on the “right” (i.e., winning) side of a conflict, as far as international tribunals are concerned your government officials have not meaningfully authorised war crimes, no matter what your government has or has not done.  As vilified as our government may be in some parts of the globe, no elected European or any other allied government is going to provoke an international incident by allowing or ordering the arrest of Donald Rumsfeld (or any of the others), the other major powers wouldn’t want the headache, no one else cares enough to bother, and so the threat that any of them will be arrested and tried is entirely toothless.  

Megan McArdle is right about this–the public reaction to such an arrest, much less a trial, would be intensely hostile.  I would go so far as to say that it would create such hostility to the nation whose government carried out the arrest that citizens of that country would probably be advised not to visit the U.S.  Obviously, no future U.S. administration is going to sit idly by and allow such a trial to take place, not least since it would create all kinds of precedents that would make the sitting President and his officials vulnerable to prosecution for any decisions they may make.  You would see bizarrely popular boycotts of imports from said country that make the French wine boycotts of ’02-’03 seem like a friendly, low-key affair, and there would be random “Free Rumsfeld” (or whoever) banners strewn all over the place.  No doubt there would be some country-rock song commemorating popular outrage. 

This is the absurd double-standard that hegemonism requires that we impose: our government may do what it wants when it wants, and your government will do what is demanded of it or else; our officials are entirely unaccountable, while yours may be put on trial and may even be put to death if we are so inclined.  Even better than worrying about whether administration officials would be arrested and tried for their crimes overseas is to hold them accountable within our constitutional system, but that is even more far-fetched and unrealistic.