Via Sullivan: Ron Paul’s November 5 fundraising drive raked in $3 million.  That means his fourth quarter fundraising has already brought in approximately $5.7 million, almost half of his goal for the quarter.

Update: According to the campaign site, fourth quarter fundraising stands at $6.5 million, and the Nov. 5 total is now closer to $3.5 million.

As promised, George Ajjan has written up his meeting with Ron Paul at the Arab-American Institute conference in Dearborn and has a video (here are parts 2 and 3) and transcript of Rep. Paul’s speech.

Trita Parsi, who is also an occasional contributor to TAC, has a smart article in The Nation on Iran that employs that rare element in Iran policy debate, common sense:

Creating a new regional order, in which the carrot of Iranian inclusion is used to secure radically different behavior from Tehran, is neither a concession to Iran nor a capitulation of American (or Israeli) interests. Rather, it is a recognition that stability in the region cannot be achieved and sustained through the current strategy of pursuing an order based on the exclusion of one of the region’s most powerful nations. To change Iran’s behavior, we must change our own.

The Atlantic has an informative article on Pakistan (I believe it is subscription only) that provides some interesting exchanges with members of the Pakistani military.  This part seemed most relevant to an American audience:

“Major Khaled,” as I’ll call him, grew up in northern Punjab—the “martial belt” that has traditionally provided the vast majority of soldiers and officers in the army—and he received his training at the Pakistan Military Academy. His career mirrored that of many other ambitious young Pakistani officers, and until recently, he had followed his orders without questioning them: He had participated enthusiastically, for instance, in the 1999 invasion of Kargil. All of that changed after Pakistani troops were deployed in the tribal agencies along the border to put down local insurgents and foreign fighters.

“I’ve met people of all ranks, in the line of fire, and nobody is happy with this way of solving the problem in Waziristan,” he told me. “The terrain is hard. It’s difficult to hold the ground. The insurgents know every inch of the area.” Major Khaled told me he resented the implication, which he felt the U.S. government had fostered, that Pakistan was serving as the main refuge for Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. “The terrain around Kabul is similar, so why do they say that the only hideouts are in Waziristan?” he said. “Why is Pakistan singled out? Pakistan has suffered a lot. I’ve lost colleagues in ambushes, to time bombs, to improvised explosive devices. The Pakistan army is bleeding for you people.” I asked Khaled if his doubts about the mission had ever caused him to disobey the commands of higher-ups. He shook his head. “I’m not a policy maker. We just have to follow the orders, but people down below don’t go into battle from their hearts. There could have been other options. This is not our battle. This is your battle, and we’re paying the price.”

Bear this in mind the next time you hear some pundit complain about Islamabad’s “appeasement” in Waziristan.  (In principle, their deal with the tribes was fundamentally no different from the deal we have struck in Anbar, with the main difference being that we cajoled Musharraf to resume using failed tactics against the tribes.)  The article is a smart, balanced one that makes it clear that Musharraf and the latest bout of militarisation of Pakistani politics have become a liability to Pakistan and America.  I had hinted at how we should start looking beyond Musharraf in one of my early columns this summer (sorry, not online).  Obviously, with the state of emergency that Musharraf declared, the dangers of sticking with Musharraf have become clear for all to see, but it may now be too late to remedy the error of putting virtually all of our chips, so to speak, on Musharraf.

Rudy Giuliani, who leads most national GOP polls, had the most support at the outset. But several who initially favored the former New York mayor acknowledged that they were torn between admiration for the leadership skills he displayed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and concern about his support of abortion and views on gay marriage [bold mine-DL].

The group, as a whole, knew far less about Fred Thompson, who only entered the race in September. “He’s not comfortable in his role yet,” said June Beninghove, 67, a retired secretary, who nonetheless said she favored the former Tennessee senator.

Others cited his personal characteristics, calling him conservative and fatherly and, in one case, “more like [the late President Ronald] Reagan.”

But when the group was asked toward the end of the evening to choose between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Thompson, most – including several initial Giuliani backers – raised their hands for Mr. Thompson, despite uncertainty about him and his views. ~Carl Leudbsdorf

This is just from one small gathering in suburban Virginia, but this struck me as a slightly strange development (which also happily confirms my increasingly implausible prediction of a Thompson nomination).  What could persuade people who don’t know much about Thompson to change their support from Giuliani to Thompson in the course of an evening?  Evidently, Giuliani’s social liberalism, which more than a few have been saying doesn’t really matter this time, really is killing him with these voters.  However, it is worth noting that nobody was completely put off by Giuliani’s views, saying that they would all vote for the eventual GOP nominee.  Because of his religion, the support for Romney was pretty shaky, but everyone at the gathering agreed that Romney as nominee was still preferable to a Democrat:

Being a Democrat “is worse than being a Mormon,” Mr. Armstrong said. “There’s Mormons, and there’s insects, and there’s Democrats,” he added, extending his arm and then lowering it to indicate his decreasing regard for each group. 

That isn’t really a ringing endorsement for Mormons, but it’s what Romney has to face out there.  This man reminds me of a history lecturer we had back in undergrad days who explained the Great Chain of Being to us, and at the bottom of the Chain he placed North Carolina Tarheel fans (he was also a Virginian). 

It should also be noted that this was in the northern Glen Allen suburb of Richmond, which I believe is pretty solid GOP country.  I assume NOVA Republicans would have significantly different preferences.

Rod and Amy Sullivan appear on bloggingheads, discussing evangelicals and politics (and Kirkpatrick’s recent Times magazine article) and the intersection of religion and politics generally.

While I’m on the subject, the idea that Obama has “the right allies on foreign policy questions” and the “right enemies,” too is a strange one when you consider that his foreign policy has received praise from Robert Kagan, Marty Peretz, The Washington Posteditors and the occasionally encouraging word on Obama’s bad ideas about Pakistan from Rudy Giuliani and The Wall Street Journal.  It’s a Who’s Who of people you don’t want endorsing your foreign policy proposals, and Obama has them all.  Obviously, Obama can’t necessarily be held responsible if people with horrible ideas say that they agree with him, but it should be very worrying that they agree with him.  This would be less troubling if Obama’s foreign policy weren’t a hyper-ambitious disaster waiting to happen, but it is just that.

Sullivan’s essay on Obama is now up, and for those who want still more discussion of Obama’s special qualities this is the essay for you.  It’s an interesting read, but this line of argumentstill puzzles me:

There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

(Side note: are we now assuming that the average Pakistani youth is our enemy?)  Not to dwell on the point too much more, but even supposing that a young Pakistani Muslim responds favourably to the appearance of a candidate who threatens to launch strikes at his country against his government’s wishes, it is not at all clear that this will outweigh the objections to U.S. policies around the world, almost all of which Obama pledges to continue.  Obama is simply less belligerent towards Iran than his rivals, and he backed up the bombardment of Lebanon virtually without qualification, and we’re supposed to think that his “phased redeployment” plan is going to inspire goodwill? 

It seems to me that all this does not give much credit to the audience that Obama is supposed to be so good at reaching, and it seems as if this endorses the idea that anti-American sentiment is to some significant degree a product of packaging and the perception of “who we are” and that anti-Americanism derives from hatred of “who we are” (or who we are perceived to be).  Obama’s advantage, then, seems to be that he changes the perception of “who we are,” and thus reduces anti-Americanism by saying, “Yes, well, you hated us in the past, but you had it all wrong–we weren’t really like what you thought we were.  Just look at the President!”  But anti-Americanism in particular does not generally derive from opposition to “who we are,” but pretty clearly derives from what we do.  When it comes to “what we do,” Obama is not terribly different from the other candidates, so again I don’t see how he really brings about a major change in this area. 

For good or ill, this formulation of Obama’s ability to appeal to the rest of the world, assuming that it is true, becomes a huge domestic liability for him, despite what his well-wishers and advocates of sane foreign policy everywhere might believe.  If “only Nixon” could go to China, Obama is actually the last person who could effectively make rational foreign policy towards Syria, Iran or any other country, because any concessions or moves made in their direction would be interpreted as showing that he is too comfortable with the rest of the world.  For goodness’ sake, just remember how easily vilified Kerry was for having French relatives, and then consider what Obama would be facing.

Via Yglesias, James Traub talks about the alleged differences between the foreign policy groups advising Obama and Clinton and the candidates’ respective views:

As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, “There’s a feeling that this is a guy who’s going to help us transform the way America deals with the world.” 

Note that this is Ivo Daalder who is saying this.  I wouldn’t have thought that this would need to be pointed out, since we’re all well aware of what Daalder thinks, but it is not at all encouraging that Ivo Daalder and the like have a feeling that Obama will “transform the way America deals with the world.”  Their idea of how America should deal with the world is generally terrible, so why should we want someone to make it a reality?