Greg Djerejian is a very sharp guy, so when he said that Obama’s foreign policy remarks in this NYT interview were worth looking at I decided I had to read it.  Djerejian is not necessarily backing Obama here, but he says that Obama offers a relatively better foreign policy vision than the rest.  Let’s say that I was less impressed. 

His support for phased withdrawal is something, but I agree with one of my commenters on another post that the “we must withdraw so that Iraqis can reconcile” argument is not persuasive.  It isn’t persuasive because it is very likely untrue that this will happen.  At first glance, it seems at least remotely possible, but then you ask: what incentive do the stronger factions have to reconcile at that point?  No incentive at all.  That is not to say that reconciliation is going to happen with a large U.S. presence in the country, because the factions likewise have little incentive to reconcile, because the presence of U.S. forces is simply delaying the inevitable. 

Supporters of withdrawal in the Obama mould are trying to make withdrawal seem like the hopeful, optimistic option, when it really cannot be that.  Perhaps this is a calculation that Americans only respond to optimistic plans, and so withdrawal has to be cast as a “problem-solving” alternative.  Yet the underlying assumption in favour of withdrawal from Iraq is that the problems of Iraq are either not ours to fix or they cannot be fixed by us.  We cannot claim simultaneously that we cannot referee their civil war and that our willingness to depart will more effectively bring their civil war to an end and forge a political settlement.  It really is one or the other, and if the first is true we have to take into account that withdrawal means that the civil war goes on, and may get worse.  The response to the “we broke it” argument at this point is that we are continually re-breaking the country, like someone who went into a china shop and began knocking off more and more pieces from the shelves in a harried, clumsy effort to clean up the original broken pieces already knocked to the ground.  If we “own” much more of what we have broken in Iraq, we might as well annex the country outright and keep it in perpetuity.  The other response to this objection is that we cannot actually “pay for it” or “fix it,” and eventually we will withdraw, at which point the same dynamic of political rivalries inside Iraq will still be there. 

One place where Obama does seem to be on the right track is when he says this:

But what I don’t want to do is to make our withdrawal contingent on the Iraqi government doing the right thing because that empowers them to make strategic decisions that should be made by the president of the United States.

It has to be one of the greater ironies of this irony-laden administration that the “tough” nationalists and unilateralists, who claimed that America had to be able to act alone if necessary, have been the ones to give us foreign policy outsourcing and entrusting what they believe to be vital national security matters to dysfunctional foreign governments.  Obama does make some sense here.  However, I still find his broader foreign policy vision not pertaining to Iraq deeply troubling.

The Commentary symposium on Podhoretz’s World War IV is not pleasant reading, at least not if you value sane reflection on the affairs of the world, but it does serve as a helpful summary of what leading neoconservatives and their allies actually claim to believe in their own words.  This can serve later as a useful resource should you need a quick refererence to explain what the dangerous interventionists hold to be true.  This is useful, since they will probably later try to say that their views have been distorted by their enemies.  

Here’s a taste of what I mean from Claudia Rossett:

In this context, Islamofascism is clearly the most virulent and immediate danger. But the threat hardly ends there. If I have a criticism of Podhoretz’s superb tour and analysis of the hot front in this new world war, it is that he underestimates the damage done to us in this war by some of the major non-Islamic despotisms, which in their own efforts to deflect democracy are only too pleased to strike back-scratching deals with Islamofascist regimes.

Along with such obvious candidates as the totalitarian munitions-merchant North Korea, or our near-neighbor Venezuela [bold mine-DL], these regimes include the two great powers of Russia and China. Lest that list sound too alarmist, or simply too overwhelming, let me add that I agree with Podhoretz’s warning that we cannot simultaneously tackle every villainous government on earth. But in understanding why we had to topple Saddam early on, and why democracy is the only real answer, I think we must keep in mind that behind Islamofascism is a brew of interests that, however disparate, have this in common: they shun democracy and in various ways tend to support each other in fighting and subverting its spread. Thus do we find China and Russia, our erstwhile allies against Islamo-terrorists, blocking one U.S. attempt after another to shut down or stymie the regimes that produce these killers and their medieval creeds [bold mine-DL].  

Naturally, Venezuela leaps to mind as one of the great threats of our time.  But she neglected Bolivia, which I think is a wildly irresponsible oversight.  When will we begin to fight the coca masters of La Paz?*   

This is almost as complete an expression of everything that is wrong with democratism and interventionism as you can get in two paragraphs.  The added hostility to Russia and China is what tops it off so well, since it is, of course, Russia and China that are doing the most to prop up the House of Saud and President Mubarak.  Oh, wait.

The symposium also shows a remarkable general consensus (with perhaps one or two mild dissents, including one actually from Bill Kristol) about the name “World War IV,” which virtually everyone contributing to the symposium thinks is either an acceptable or excellent name.  Even those who do not accept the name accept the basic assumptions about the war so described, which is just as unfortunate.  The amazing thing to me is that literally no one questions the word included in the subtitle, Islamofascism.  This word seems far more ridiculous than “WWIV,” which is saying something, so it is a far more damning statement about the paucity of neoconservative foreign policy thinking that not one of the participants raised an objection against such patent nonsense.  In my next TAC column I explain why it seems ridiculous and misleading to me.

* This is as close to a Ledeenesque vilification of Bolivia as I could get.

Three cheers for decent historians:

A Vatican-backed historian has attacked the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age as a “distorted anti-papal travesty” that risks dividing the West just when it should be rediscovering its “common Christian roots” in the face of Islam.

Stuart Reid at The Spectator‘s Coffee House blog is making sense:

Any depiction of those years that depicts Elizabeth as the good guy and Philip as the bad guy is comic-book history.

He is also even more hard-core than I am:

What a pity the Armada failed.

Reid and Cardini and I are not alone in our objections to the film:

The Catholic News Service, which is run by the United States Bishops Conference, said: “With the single exception of Mary, Queen of Scots, all the Catholics in the film are twisted, embittered intriguers.”

And even then their depiction of Mary Stuart isn’t exactly flattering.

The Hebrew prophets have a political vision and it is not neoconservative.  ~David Klinghoffer

You have to laugh at Klinghoffer’s description of a prospective attack on Iran as “aggressive defense.”  What’s next?  Peaceful violence?  Charitable hate?  Lawful crime?  (Klinghoffer must be an expert in stating absurdities, since he is a fellow at the Discovery Institute.)

You do have to admire Klinghoffer’s intellectual contortions to justify the moral abomination of the “new fusionism.”  Aggression and moral reform marching side by side is a hard thing to defend, but he gives it his best shot. 

Then again, Klinghoffer never wrote (probably unwittingly) truer words than these:

Idolatry manifests itself in every age.  Its essence lies in setting up moral authorities in competition with, or to the negation of, God.

Quite.  That might be a powerful lesson on which the various warfare state-lovers could reflect and meditate.  Of course, it is precisely the neocons surrounding Rudy Giuliani who embrace the idolatry of nationalism, and it is those religious conservatives who ignore their own convictions in the name of fighting “Islamofascism” who are complicit in the same error.   

There was also this:

Yet the prophets had little to say against Assyrofascism or Babylofascism.

I wonder why.  Maybe because they weren’t morons.

I have been a pretty relentless critic of Obama, whose foreign policy generally strikes me as being dangerously similar to that of Mr. Bush in a number of ways.  Nonetheless, I have to give him some credit when he says things that make some sense:

Senator Barack Obama said he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran if elected president, and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek “regime change” if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues.

It’s not actually that much in terms of substance, but it is a huge departure from his heretofore rather pathetic belligerence against Iran.

So, to Andrew Sullivan and others: explain what’s happening here…. ~Marc Ambinder

“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.” ~The International Herald-Tribune

Well, as they say, time heals all wounds, and nothing encourages reconciliation like the promise of a return to the bonanza days of muckraking, anti-Clinton paranoia.  Plus, when you have lived through years of the truly appalling, the merely horrible seems like sweet deliverance.

Mr. Colbert met the Democratic filing deadline of noon today to send in some paperwork and a check for $2,500.

But the party’s executive council just voted 13-3 not to certify him.

Carol Fowler, chairwoman of the state party, told us that the council “really agonized over this because they really like him, they love his show and everyone thinks it’s wonderful that he cares about us.”

But, she said, they decided he did not meet two basic requirements: that the person be generally acknowledge or recognized by the media as a viable nationwide candidate; and be actively campaigning for the South Carolina primary. ~The Caucus

Some people are complaining that 52% of Americans support a military strike on Iran.  While I am entirely sympathetic to the laments about public ignorance and the gullibility of the average citizen, and I find it appalling that a majority would support such an obviously horrible idea, I would hasten to point out that this is actually a slightly lower percentage than we have had in the past.  Crazy anti-Iranian jingoism is somewhat less persuasive than it used to be almost two years ago, and that seems like marginally good news to me.

Thanks to my Scene colleague Nick Desai, I have come across the most remarkable and simultaneously unspeakable article.  There are bad articles, Christopher Hitchens articles, Gerson articles and then there’s this, which is in a class all by itself.  It has practically every lazy assumption and misguided polemical trope that you’ve ever encountered.  There is, naturally, Lincoln-worship involved, and a hefty dose of Teutonophobia, which are the usual prerequisites for truly execrable historical analysis.  I am almost overwhelmed by its breathtaking awfulness, but I will try to make a few points.  Let’s start at the beginning:

In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.

Spot the nonsense.  It isn’t hard.  By March 1861, several states had seceded from the Union in protest against this “revolutionary” policy, and rather than being “poised to carry all before them,” according to Lincoln 1861 was the year in which free institutions were supposedly on the verge of being subverted and wiped from the face of the earth.  It was so endangered, in fact, because of the dangerous principle that voluntary Union was actually voluntary, which Lincoln made sure would not stand.  There was certainly a coercive reaction to the idea of the voluntary Union, and it was the so-called Unionists who did the coercing.  The “war to save the Union” was, of course, the assassination of the very principle that made it a Union. 

Lincoln was wrong, as he often was, but from the perspective of Mr. Beran 1861 seems an unusually poor year to mark the impending triumph of what he calls “free institutions.”  In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs was realised by the order of an autocrat.  A Christian, humane and decent-minded autocrat, probably the finest Russian ruler of the century, but an autocrat.  Free institutions?  In any meaningful sense, they did not yet exist in Russia.  Indeed, one might observe with some irony how much more easily an autocracy embraced a policy of emancipation than did a democracy, which might tell us something about democracy’s flaws, but no matter.  Meanwhile, in Germany the liberals became the allies of the Junkers, the Prussian “caste” to which Bismarck belonged, and Bismarck was himself the champion of a combination of liberal nationalism (down with all the reactionary Reichsfeinde and no Canossarepublik, he said) and nationalist and anti-socialist social legislation.  Those champions of “free constitutional principles” were the architects and leading cheerleaders of the Kulturkampf against German Catholics.  In this, German liberals exhibited precisely the same hostility that many American Catholics perceived in the Red Republicans, so called by Orestes Brownson and others because of the clear similarities with European liberal revolutionaries.  It is not surprising that many German exiles who had fled the suppression of the ’48 revolution were sympathetic to the principles of the GOP.  By the way, none of this appears to me to be a compliment to Lincoln.

Beran isn’t done:

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. 

Egads, reaction!  There is something truly strange about trying to associate the Republican Party with something other than privilege.  As a party, it represented (and Lincoln represented), and to some considerable extent still represents, the interests of corporations and finance, just as the Whigs had represented commercial and mercantile interests before them.  The causes of the War are many and complex, but if you said that it boiled down to a conflict between the landed and moneyed interest you would not be far wrong.  The latter won, and it replaced one kind of hierarchy and stratification with another while brutally centralising power into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  Someone will need to explain to me how this represents the victory of “free institutions,” since I have a funny idea that arbitrary, coercive government is not really compatible with “free institutions.”

It gets even funnier:

The paternalists, Lord Macaulay wrote disapprovingly, wanted to “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed.”

It should be painfully obvious, but it was in Republican Party-dominated regions of the country where the uniform public school first appeared, and it was among Republican progressives at the turn of the century that you found some of the greatest advocates of regulation of business.  If there were paternalists in the post-War period, they were very often Republicans, the heirs of Lincoln.  Certainly, Southern aristocrats also accepted paternalistic ideas, but the Red Republicans wished to be paternalists for everyone in the country.

And again:

The second idea was militant nationalism—the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their wills on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamed of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces into a new German Reich [bold mine-DL]. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Panslav nationalists sought to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium.

It was the Republicans who preached American nationalism over against federal and decentralist principles, and it was Republicans who waged a war of unification–not unlike Bismarck, actually–to enforce that nationalism.  (Note that the “Danish, French and Polish provinces” in question were filled mostly with German-speaking Germans.)  It was, again, the Republicans who most forthrightly stated America’s imperial and civilising mission to “inferior” peoples, and who launched our imperialist wars in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  But don’t let that get in the way of a good story.  The Pan-Slavists were a force in Russian politics, and their objectives were shared by no less than that reformer, Tsar Aleksandr II, who waged war on behalf of the Slavs of the Balkans during the 1875-78 crisis. 

Speaking of imperialism, Beran writes:

Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, American slavery might have survived into the twentieth century, deriving fresh strength from new weapons in the coercive arsenal—“scientific” racism, social Darwinism, jingoistic imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism.    

But, again, it was the esteemed Party of Lincoln where imperialists and progressives espousing such views very often found their home.  The devastation and ruination of the South and the elimination of slavery did nothing to stymy any of these things, but rather allowed them to prosper.  Lincoln’s political heirs embraced most, if not all, of them and promoted them.  It was in the name of both racial and cultural superiority that Americans sought to provide “uplift” for our “brown brothers” in the Philippines (minus those who died because of the war, naturally).

Then comes the ultimate idiocy:

The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

It is amusing to consider that the one counterfactual author who has done the most to play around with the ideas of “what if the South won?”, Harry Turtledove (a Byzantinist by training!), comes to the exact opposite conclusion and held, I think correctly, that an independent CSA would have allied itself, tothe extent that it was willing to go against the Jeffersonian grain against entangling alliances, with Britain and France.  Britain and France had been interested, for economic and strategic reasons, to see the Confederacy succeed, and had the South won it is easy to see the Confederacy having become, if anything, a strong supporter of either Britain or France in foreign policy.  It was the Unionists who were very cosy with the Prussian military during the War, and the Republicans who best represented the politics of Bismarck and the National Liberals on the American scene.  The Confederates were, however, heirs of the heritage of Jefferson and Jackson.  They were continentalists, and had a tradition of distrusting the British.  It is likely they would have pursued a strategy of influence and occasional expansion in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, but the odds of their linking arms with the Germans are very poor indeed.  The Yankees always had more in common with the Germans culturally and politically than did the Southrons.  However, since I am not a stupid Teutonophobe, I do not hold this against the Yankees.  I am not so desperate to vindicate the Confederate position, as Mr. Beran clearly is desperate to glorify Lincoln, that I feel compelled to vilify the political evolution of other nations and then randomly link that history with American historical figures that I dislike.   

Cross-posted at The American Scene