Here is a good Telegraph review of A Shameful Act.

I have seen a lot of dishonest cheerleading for Ankara, but this Houston Chronicle piece is right up there when it says:

The country’s leaders have been single-minded in building a new national identity that sets religious and ethnic differences aside [bold mine-DL].

That’s absurd, as anyone with a scintilla of knowledge about Kemalist Turkey knows.

Denialism is alive and well on the Web.  Here is a specimen of the type, complete with references to Kevorkian and “crafty” Armenians.  Naturally, this brave character does not publish his name–nor would I if I were in the business of spewing filth.

To recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly andmake appropriate strategic choices [bold mine-DL]. Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others [bold mine-DL]. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods [bold mine-DL], the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force [bold mine-DL]. ~Joshua Muravchik

Via Ross

Ross notes that there is nothing uniquely neoconservative about these tenets, and he’s right.  A great many people share these tenets, several of which are misguided or confused.  That is one of the reasons why the foreign policy of any future administration will be generally unchanged from the current administration–a depressing thought, I know, but true nonetheless.  There is a lot wrong with several of the tenets, and even more wrong with the way in which actual neoconservatives and internationalists employ them.  If these tenets represent the “only game in town,” as Muravchik claims, the country is in serious trouble.  In this post I will try to sketch out why these tenets aren’t, or don’t have to be, the “only game in town.”  The troubling thing is that most people “in town” are only too happy to keep playing the same, losing game. 

First, the moral struggle.  No one disputes that the methods employed by jihadis are vicious and evil, and virtually no one would deny that their ultimate goals are essentially contrary to our vision(s) of the Good.  Where the language of moral struggle becomes a liability is when it actually clouds our discernment and causes us to associate all manner of cruel or repressive regimes and groups with our specific enemies.  Indeed, this moralising tendency often causes us to make the wrong strategic choices, making us focus on a cruel or despotic regime that may not, in fact, pose any meaningful or uncontainable strategic threat.  The moralistic-legalistic streak, as Kennan called it, in our foreign policy thinking leads many of us to exaggerate the threats from such regimes and groups because we reduce them to forces of unreasoning malevolence.  The more we reduce these other regimes and groups to veritable embodiments of evil, the greater will be the temptation of an annihilationist or total war campaign against entire populations.  The “moralising” tendency has led our government, and will keep leading the government, to undertake policies of aggression that are immoral and indefensible.  To draw on Prof. Schroeder’s recent arguments in TAC, the problem with the Iraq war wasn’t that it went wrong, but that it was wrong, and this fundamentally morally wrong war derived from the rhetoric of “moral clarity” and “an end to evil” espoused by Muravchik’s confreres.       

One of the problems in ceding, or appearing to cede, the language of morality in foreign policy to those who have weak moral imaginations (for whom virtue entails willpower and violence combined with good intentions) is that it has made it more difficult to distinguish between a moral foreign policy and an unjust, domineering foreign policy that wears the mantle of morality. 

Second, the dimensions of the conflict.  Though I have also sometimes referred to the conventional phrase “global counterinsurgency” approvingly, I have to say that the conflict is not really global.  It is international, or rather transnational, and there is an important difference.  The conflict is not limited to just one country and it involves non-state actors, but it is not a struggle that encompasses the entire globe.  The Cold War was the closest to a complete global conflict or rivalry that has ever unfolded in modern history, in that it significantly affected every part of the world and, of course, had the potential to obliterate human life on this planet.  Right away we see the difference in scale and scope with the present conflict, which has neither the potential for destruction nor the fully global dimension that the “WWIV” crowd claim.  To grant that the conflict is in a meaningful sense “global” is to grant one of the interventionists’ dangerous assumptions without giving it much consideration.  Conceiving of the conflict as “global” makes it easier to engage in the aforementioned conflation of our specific enemies in Al Qaeda and their allies with any or all other despotic regimes.  The now unfortunately widespread language of “Islamofascist” or “Islamic fascist” that has gained currency among the presidential candidates and their advisors also serves to further this notion of a global threat, since the word fascist carries with it ideas of world mastery and conquest.  Applying it to the jihadis, while absurd on so many other levels, also exaggerates the extent and nature of the threat posed by them, since it suggests that they have it within their power to dominate the globe.

This brings into question the entire language of “theaters” and their interrelationship.  If we are fighting non-state actors, whose organisation is almost by definition loose and decentralised, it is as much of a mistake to talk about theaters as it is to talk about “fronts.”  If jihadis make up a transnational insurgency, there are no fronts and to the extent that we can speak of “theaters” they are going to be only very indirectly connected.  Indeed, the main thing connecting the “theaters” of fighting some handful of jihadis in Anbar and jihadis in eastern Afghanistan is our military, by which I mean that they are theaters in the “same” conflict only to the extent that we are engaged in a conflict in both places.  Otherwise, the “theaters” are not connected, and our relative failure or success in one will have negligible, if any, effects in the other.

We should always prefer nonviolent methods, which is how we can tell that this tenet has nothing to do with the neoconservatives.  These are the people who hardly ever prefer nonviolent methods when they are available, and are always looking for some way to justify recourse to violence.  One of the few nonviolent methods neoconservatives will prefer, at least rhetorically and superficially, is democracy promotion, which has resulted time and again in the strengthening of those forces that the neoconservatives in particular regard as our enemies.  It has certainly strengthened Islamists in essentially every part of the Islamic world where it has been introduced under the auspices or influence of the “freedom agenda.”  Perhaps someone could propose another justification for democracy promotion, since democracy promotion has not resulted in the weakening of “our foe” and the reduction in the need for force.

Mr. Krikorian is correct when he says:

First of all, it is simply inarguable that the Ottoman Empire tried to eradicate the Armenian people under the cover of World War I.

Why then do so many prominent Americans keep arguing against it, hedging their statements or tying themselves into knots to trivialise the events?  Of course, it is, or rather ought to be, inarguable, but so long as Ankara’s apologists are able to retain any credibility and cast doubt on the matter there will be a continuing “debate.”

He’s also right when he says:

Our policy toward modern Turkey should have nothing whatsoever to do with acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. But caving to Turkish pressure never to use “Armenian” and “genocide” in the same sentence is what has given the current resolution its impetus.

Critics are right that Congress has no business weighing in on historical controversies. But there is no controversy here [bold mine-DL]. This isn’t even a matter of the polite fictions necessary to international diplomacy. Denying the Armenian Genocide is simply a lie, and a lie propagated at the behest of a foreign power. It’s unworthy of us.

Amen to that.

“They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the idea of ‘on the one hand and the other hand,’ ” he said. “That’s very attractive on campuses to say that you should hear both sides of the story.” While Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn’t favor censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it is important to expose “the collaboration between the Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote this denialist argument.”

To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these calls for debating whether a genocide took place are coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the period — based on unprecedented access to Ottoman archives — provides even more solid evidence of the intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the Armenians [bold mine-DL]. This new scholarship is seen as the ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of those who committed the genocide — which counters the arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide view relies too much on the views of Armenian survivors.

Even further, some of the most significant new scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish, not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars have faced death threats as well as indictments by prosecutors in Turkey. ~Inside Higher Ed

Via Cliopatria

Well, there goes any respect I might have had for Bruce Fein (who works, it should be noted, for the Turkish Coalition of America, founded in that august, ancient time of February 2007):

Like Benito Mussolini, Armenians believe truth is an assertion at the head of a figurative bayonet.

Yes, don’t you see–the Armenians are deceitful and treacherous.  You can’t trust them.  Sound familiar?  Note that any similarly gross overgeneralisation about another group of people would be met with fierce denunciations from all sides.  The upshot of Fein’s article is that lots and lots of Turks died in the same period (true), there were atrocities carried out by Armenians in eastern Anatolia (also true) and there have been many Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish targets in the 20th century (true again).  The purpose of the article, of course, is to make light of the genocide and to equate the organising massacring and death march of over a million civilians by their own government (it is, of course, the intent and organised extermination, not the number, that ultimately matters) with the devastating consequences of near-total war between sovereign governments.  Sounds curiously like arguments that go something like, “Lots and lots of Germans died fighting in WWII, so state-run genocide isn’t that big of a deal.” 

My favourite bit is the accusation of religious bigotry (that would be bigotry against the Muslims, you see), the praise of the notorious genocide denier Shaw for his “academic courage,” and the immediate invocation of none other than Bernard Lewis.  Of course, it was in no small part religious bigotry and supremacism on the part of the perpetrators that fueled the genocide, as Akcam has made clear, and I suspect that it has been the fact that the Turks are Muslim and the Armenians Christian that has kept the genocide from being more widely publicised and recognised for what it was.   

Update: The Turkish Coalition of America takes mendacity to all new lows.  Consider this description of H. Res. 106:

[it] targets Turkish history and heritage, hurts US-Turkish relations and the US national interest.

Impressive how they hardly ever mention anything about the substance of the resolution.  That might make the “Turkish history and heritage” bit a little too hard for some folks to swallow.  This “Action Alert” section is also quite hilarious in a depressing, sickening way:

Sadly, our voice has mostly been absent in this debate.

If you believe that, they have a bridge in Istanbul to sell you.

Query: what is the position (at the moment) of the magnificent dancing fraud (i.e., Romney) on the genocide resolution?  This is, after all, someone who wants to indict Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention because of his menacing remarks towards Israel.  Surely someone so deeply concerned about genocide as Romney would be a vocal proponent of the resolution’s passage.  What’s that, you say?  He’s never talked about it?  He was “largely indifferent” to Armenian-American concerns when he was governor in Massachusetts?  That’s strange.  It’s almost as if he were taking his positions on a purely opportunistic basis!

Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure in a 24-hour period ending Tuesday night, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some made clear that they were heeding warnings from the White House, which has called the measure dangerously provocative, and from the Turkish government, which has said House passage would prompt Turkey to reconsider its ties to the United States, including logistical support for the Iraq war. ~The New York Times

Here’s a true champion of the moral high ground:

“We simply cannot allow the grievances of the past, as real as they may be, to in any way derail our efforts to prevent further atrocities for future history books,” said Representative Wally Herger, Republican of California.

That’s a good one.  Acknowledging genocide is now just a matter of “grievances of the past.”  This is what people are reduced to saying.  What else can they possibly say?   

Rep. Sherman, a resolution supporter, took the words right out of my mouth:

Since when has it become fashionable for friends to threaten friends?