In the forthcoming TAC, Prof. Schroeder continues his essay on Iraq that he started in the last issue.  To my mind, the second part is even better and offers more of his typically excellent analysis.  Here’s a small sample:

A credible American commitment to real withdrawal both removes those incentives and restores traditional rivalries–Turk versus Kurd, Shi’ite versus Sunni, Iranian versus Saudi, Iranian nationalism versus Iraqi–while still permitting general co-operation against the Islamic radicalism that threatens all.

There is a more challenging section towards the end:

We also need a changed American public, one that in regard to world affairs is both smarter and better (the two qualities go so closely together in international politics as to be almost indistinguishable)–a public better informed, more honest and open to the truth, less self-preoccupied and self-centered and therefore able to discern and willing to follow better leadership and make more exertions for better long-range goals.

Rusty Houser likes McCain’s stance on the war; when I ask him why we are in Iraq in the first place, he tells me, “To get rid of Al Qaeda.” When I point out that Bush himself has admitted there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Houser shrugs. Bush, he assures me, “doesn’t always let people know what he knows.” ~Matt Taibbi

If some people want to talk about “nutty” candidates and their followers, they could do worse than to read some of the comments from McCain’s people.

Michael Crowley has been doing good work keeping track of the politicking and lobbying surrounding the Armenian genocide resolution, and he has a round-up of the latest news.  Most ridiculous (and depressing) line comes from the White House: “the determination of whether or not the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation.”  This comes from the same administration that has felt no compunction about labeling the conflict in Darfur a genocide and the House joined the administration in declaring it as such, whether or not that really is the most accurate term for it.  Mr. Bush has no problem invoking the Cambodian genocide in a tendentious and dishonest revisionist account of the end of the Vietnam War.  Yet the administration and its allies in the House are utterly spineless when it comes to properly describing the genocidal crimes of a regime that no longer even exists because it will offend an allied state.  This is all another very helpful reminder that for all together too many people that the recognition of a genocide that occurred in the past depends heavily on whether it serves or harms present political interests. 

Do you suppose that PM Erdogan would be received in the same way that Ahmadinejad was last month?  I doubt it.  He would be welcomed, cheered as a “moderate” and “reformed” Islamist and a strong ally of the United States, and so on.  He denies a genocide about which relatively few people care, and his government is allied with Israel, which makes his government’s affront to moral and historical truth rather more acceptable to a lot of the very same people who wanted to bar Ahmadinejad from setting foot on U.S. soil.  Erdogan is the head of government in a state that prosecutes people for engaging in just such “historical inquiry,” which is why Turkish historians who wish to speak truthfully about the genocide, such as Taner Akcam, have had to leave Turkey.  When Bush says that there should be more “historical inquiry” into the matter, what other politician does he sound like?

I don’t know Matt Continetti at all, so maybe that’s why I shared Chotiner’s puzzlement about Continetti’s response to this episode:

Ryan Spidell, 19, who works in the kitchen at the Midtown Cafe in Newton, Iowa, asked Thompson about “Sen. Kennedy’s bill on college debt.”

Spidell was referring to Kennedy’s Student Debt Relief Act, which would cut interest rates on student loans and cap loan payments.

Thompson had never heard of it.

Continetti takes the Politico reporting as evidence that the media are now underestimating Thompson.  How you can underestimate someone who consistently underperforms all expectations is a bit of a mystery, but there it is.  Continetti then says at the conclusion:

And you gotta wonder whether elite media circles in New York and Washington are seriously underestimating the power of Thompson’s cultural appeal to Sunbelt conservatives.

But is ignorance about the relevant pending legislation actually culturally appealing to Sunbelt conservatives?  As a conservative who hails from what I suppose counts as part of “the Sunbelt” and still votes in New Mexico, I would have to say no.  The larger point is that this is how Thompson answers almost every question.  It usually goes something like this: “Well, you know, when I was driving around Tennessee during my Senate campaign, I learned that the American people love freedom and that they want the government to do good things, not bad things.  I’m not familiar with the specifics of what you’re talking about, but I am confident that we can unite as a people to handle anything that comes our way.  No, I’m not interested in talking about what my rivals have said on this subject, because I have no idea what they said, and it doesn’t matter anyway.  What matters is that we secure this country against threats, and that’s what I’ll do.” 

Politico has a quote of him actually saying much the same:

Let’s keep doing what works and quit doing what doesn’t work.

An equally telling point would be that Thompson’s answer seems to show complete tone-deafness on a topic (cost of college education).  He seems give no indication that he understands that Republicans need to try to be competitive among precisely those voters who are liable to have large amounts of student debt and limited resources with which to pay it off.  These are the folks who may be favourably inclined towards the party that works to alleviate that burden.  Thompson’s answer will be more satisfactory for those whose parents did just “write a check for college” to the extent that those people are not terribly concerned about efforts to ease student debt burdens.   

Thompson could have made the federalist case that education shouldn’t even be part of the federal government’s concern–it’s a state matter, he could have said, and just look at the godawful mess Kennedy and Bush made when they started trying to tinker with lower levels of education with NCLB!  Instead, he managed to show that he knew nothing about the current state of the policy debate while also appearing indifferent to the anxiety that lower-middle and middle-income voters have about racking up debt for their children’s education.  If that is the ticket to winning over a lot of Sunbelt conservatives, I’m still not sure that this is a good thing.

The new CFTR is predicated on the belief that “the conditions of the party today are almost identical to what they were in 1977,” the official said. “By 1977, the party had been betrayed by corruption and betrayal of conservative principles.” ~Marc Ambinder

Citing this report, Yglesias draws attention to an old 2006 op-ed by Craig Shirley, who is heading up the new effort.  One of the sources of resentment that Shirley identified that makes no sense to me whatever is the presence of “a League of Nations mentality” in the GOP.  Is this some roundabout way of saying Wilsonian idealism?  It’s hard to tell, since the main Wilsonians in the GOP today are Max Boot’s so-called “hard Wilsonians” (a.k.a., neocons, whom Boot believes do not exist) whose attitudes towards international institutions are rather closer to those of the Imperial Japanese or the Italians towards the actual League of Nations c. 1937.  If there were a lot of Republicans espousing a “League of Nations mentality,” it might very well create resentment, but I have to say that this is one element of a GOP crack-up that I don’t see. 

Whatever else one might say about Lincoln (and I could say a great deal), I think this is mistaken.  You can cheer on Lincoln until your voice gives out, I suppose, but you will have a devil of a time inventing the Garibaldi from Springfield as a font of American conservative thought.  Their enemies called them the Red Republicans for a reason.  Reihan, continuing to blog up a storm while Ross is away, helps explain the thinking that would draw meliorist/reform conservatives towards Lincoln as a model. 

A modern conservative appropriation of Lincoln seems mistaken to me since, obviously, I think Lincoln’s politics are the antithesis of the decentralist, distributist-cum-populist tradition that properly makes up what best approximates a native conservative tradition in America.  If judged according to Burkean hostility to Jacobinism and “armed doctrines” generally, Lincoln would have to be classified as an enemy of the permanent things. 

The “native” American tradition to which I refer is the Country tradition, which, like everything almost everything in early republican America, has its origins in Britain.  This tradition even had some latter-day representatives inside the Party of Lincoln, such as La Follette, and post-New Deal and post-WWII decentralists began to look to the GOP as an alternative, but it has never been their natural home and has never really been receptive to their message for very long.  If modern conservatives wish to belong to the Country tradition, Lincoln is necessarily out of the picture, and if they wish to embrace Lincoln they pretty much have to turn their back on virtually the entirety of that tradition.  Nationalism, centralism and government working on behalf of corporate and industrial interests (tendentiously dubbed by its early advocates as “the American system”) are all aspects of “Lincolnianism” that are directly opposed to the Country tradition.  In the American context, what would that tradition include?  I think it would include love of place and tradition, constitutional and federal republicanism, support for regional diversity, conserving local communities, keeping a broad distribution of property as a safeguard against abuse of power, and preventing the concentration of power and money in a few hands.  Lincoln represents the tendency to uproot, level or destroy pretty much everything that a great many traditional conservatives believe that we should be conserving.

Finally, via Yglesias, a sensible, critical and intelligent response to Mearsheimer/Walt by Daniel Levy.  This is exactly the kind of thing I have been hoping to see, and I applaud Mr. Levy for it.  It will certainly not satisfy the book’s critics over here, but neither is it a full endorsement or apology for every claim the authors make.  Levy makes some excellent preliminary remarks in this post that also includes his book review:

Some of the commentary, by the way, has just been plain shoddy – a word hurled too often at Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer. Leslie Gelb, reviewing the book in the NY Times is the most disappointing and inexcusable example of this [bold mine-DL]. Gelb for instance claims that the official American policy against settlements and in favor of a Palestinian state proves the limitations of the lobby. Hardly! If anything it suggests the opposite – 40 years and over 400,000 Israelis living beyond the green line later – there is perhaps a disconnect and might this not require an explanation.

Quite.  I’m glad Mr. Levy drew attention to the Gelb review, since it is considered by more than a few of the book’s critics to be some gold standard of serious engagement with the book’s arguments.  Levy also draws attention to what is actually very confused terminology in the entire debate, namely the designation “pro-Israel”:

Without himself being an Israeli, my friend MJ Rosenberg probably captures the essence of this position best when he writes: “There is nothing pro-Israel about supporting policies that promise only that Israeli mothers will continue to dread their sons’ 18th birthdays for another generation.”

To which one might add parenthetically along the same lines that there is nothing pro-American about foreign policy decisions that continually expose us to increased hostility overseas and put our soldiers into unnecessary wars.

He makes an important point on the Iraq war:

Understandably, Walt and Mearsheimer’s chapter about the Iraq war has drawn the most fire and ire – and with no small degree of justification. Yes, as Leonard Fein argues, the book does go too far in conflating the Israel lobby with neocons. But that act of conflating does not exist only in the minds of Walt and Mearsheimer.  As I argue, the mainstream lobby allowed itself to be co-opted and it moved so far to the right and made such dubious alliances, that the co-option gave the impression of being almost seamless [bold mine-DL].

In his Haaretz review Levy notes:

Their more shrill detractors have either not read the book, are emotionally incapable of dealing with harsh criticism of something they hold so close (certainly a human tendency), or are intentionally avoiding a substantive debate on the issues.

As Levy makes clear from the beginning, his review is going to be very different, and it is.  He also cuts to the heart of the question of Israel-as-strategic liability:

It is not Israel per se that is a liability, but Israel as an occupier: “If the conflict were resolved, Israel might become the sort of strategic asset that its supporters often claim it is.” The distinction should be on the radar screen of Israel’s strategic planners.

Levy makes a number of good points, and you should read the entire review, and he makes a subtle but, I think, basically correct distinction here:

Walt and Mearsheimer place them four-square inside the Israel lobby. The reality seems more complicated than that. Many leading neocons, by their own admission, care greatly about Israel, but they want to impose their policy, not follow Jerusalem’s. Unlike, for instance, AIPAC, which takes its lead from the Israeli government, and then tends to give it an extra twist to the right, the neocons adhere to a rigid ideological dogma and are not afraid to confront a government in Jerusalem they view as too “soft.”

This is another place where the general term “pro-Israel” obscures too much, since it can include both those, like the neocons, who support Israel-as-it-ought-to-be (or as they imagine it to be), and those who support the policy of the existing state.  However, Levy does say (as he also suggested in his post):

It is more likely that the neocons co-opted the Israel lobby, and Israel itself, to their own vision of regional transformation. Still, most of the Israel lobby were willing accomplices, and this represents their historic error.

And again:

The picture is complete when the role of Ariel Sharon, then Israeli premier, is added. Sharon was a hawk, but no neocon. He viewed dreams of regional transformation, democratization and regime change with scorn and disdain, but he could spot a useful political ally when he saw one. The neocons would be his bulwark against being dragged into a negotiating process with the Palestinians or Syrians, as America re-calibrated its approach to the Middle East post-9/11. Negotiations were Sharon’s “Room 101.” The Dov Weissglas-Elliott Abrams channel saved him the trouble. Walt and Mearsheimer describe a damning end product, policies that are a disaster for America and Israel alike, but in over-conflating the neocons with the Israel lobby they overlook a dynamic and nuance that might have implications for the future.

As Mr. Levy argues, disastrous Near East policy of the last few years was the result of a combination of factors:

Another way to look at it would be: This is the first Republican administration since the Christian evangelical Zionists emerged as a potent force in the GOP; since the mainstream pro-Israel community planted itself firmly on the Likud right, and with an executive that contained a sizeable and senior neocon presence. At the same time a hawk was ensconced in the Israeli Prime Minister’s residence (Sharon). Then came the shock of 9/11, followed by the swagger and hubris that followed an apparently easy military victory in Afghanistan. This was a potent mix. These actors can all be described with some accuracy as pro-Israel, but they are also all different, and charting a future course is helped by recognizing that difference.

I’ve been slow in getting together a response to Brooks’ latest (sorry, Rod), which I read just a little while ago via Sullivan.  The general argument makes sense: those who possess a traditional conservative mentality or temperament, the Burkean conservatives, are disillusioned by the reign of abstraction among the various factions of the GOP.  So far, so good.  He then uses this to explain the GOP’s political reverse:

To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.

Perhaps it is implicit in the rest of the column, but Brooks does not seem to stress enough that the reason why GOP support among these groups is collapsing is that ideologically driven policies take little account of present realities and attempt to shoehorn society into an imagined model.  GOP support isn’t simply collapsing because its increasingly ideological nature offends the temperamental conservatives in America, but because the policies it has managed to implement have generally failed even on their own terms.  It is in no small part ideology’s hostility to reality and the repeated, doomed attempts to force reality to conform to absurd expectations that makes the temperamental conservative flee from it.   

There are also some problems with Brooks’ remarks on several of the examples of “what the temperamental conservative believes,” and a whopping great problem with his final sentences when he says:

American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation.  But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is retrained by the caution of its Burkean roots.      

Some may even call me ideological for insisting on this point, but America isn’t a creedal nation.  I don’t think such a thing can exist.  More to the point, talk of a nation existing as a creedal nation is itself an ideological assertion, an attempt to construct a national identity that can be defined in abstract terms and whose membership is defined by adherence to abstract propositions.  To describe a nation as creedal is to a very large extent deny that “the individual is a part of a social organism and thrives only within the attachments to family, community and nation that precede choice.”  First and foremost, the confessing of a creed is an act of will, which means that a creed is something chosen.  If organic relationship defines our membership in a nation, creedalism is, at best, redundant or a bit of rhetorical icing on an already-baked cake, and at worst an attempt to repudiate the unchosen attachments and obligations to people and country in an effort to broaden or “open” national membership to whomever feels inclined to profess the creed. 

It seems to me that this creedalism, which refers to an imaginary creedal nation, is one of the sources of the conservative predicament today.  Indeed, Brooks’ agrees that it is part of the problem.  However, he believes that it is only because of the excesses of these supposed “conservative creeds” that things have gone awry, and not the insistence on creedalism itself.

There are also a number of other difficulties with the way that Brooks advances this argument.  

There is a problem with the choice of words that stems from the prior acceptance of creedalism: he describes the rise of various ideologies as the result of conservatism in America “becoming creedal” (because America is “creedal”).  This might give someone the impression that the lover of prudence and small platoons doesn’t actually believe (credo, credere) anything, lest he, too, becomes attached to a creed, but relies on tradition, prejudice and instinct alone.  The word creed has long been conventionally applied to a certain brand of nationalist ideology that I just talked about, but actually I think the word creed is ill-suited to describe it, and could actually be impious.  

Its religious and specifically Christian origins lead the person who uses it for a political identity to one of a few undesirable results: he either conflates his political cause with a religious creed, losing the merits of both, or he replaces his own religious creed with that cause, or he invests a political cause with godlike authority.  The implications of having a “national creed” are also rather worrisome, since it means that anyone who fails to embrace a certain set of ideas, usually political ideas, cannot be a member of the nation.  Like the religious creed from which this language of creeds derives, a national creed implies anathematisation for those who do not confess it.  A political creed cannot help but be ideological.  I am less certain that the same can be said about religious beliefs.

Brooks’ talk of creeds allows him to include religious conservatives among the ideologues, but they do not belong to the phenomenon he is describing.  He writes:

Over the past decade, religious conservatives within the G.O.P. have argued that social policies should be guided by the eternal truths of natural law [bold mine-DL] and that questions about stem cell research and euthanasia should reflect the immutable sacredness of human life.

But temperamental conservatives are suspicious of the idea of settling issues on the basis of abstract truth. These kinds of conservatives hold that moral laws emerge through deliberation and practice and that if legislation is going to be passed that slows medical progress, it shouldn’t be on the basis of abstract theological orthodoxy [bold mine-DL].   

Brooks is right that temperamental conservatives are wary of “settling issues” on the basis of “abstract truth.”  Put this way, most religious conservatives might also recoil from such settlements.  An essential element to religious conservatives’ thinking is that they believe God is the author of both natural and moral law and that they are necessarily complementary (just as truth is one, divine, natural and moral law are ultimately one).  Further, they would, and I think they do, argue that man discerns natural law through observation, rational deliberation and reflection no less than he does the moral law, and they would also hold that these are confirmed by revelation.  In someone of a conservative temperament, this does entail a fanatical and terrible simplification of the difficulties and complexities of contingent circumstances, but instead provides the guiding moral principle that informs and shapes all prudential judgements appropriate to the given case.  Moral casuistry is not situationalist ethics or relativism, and it cannot proceed without a grounding in eternal verities.  It was Kirk, the interpreter of Burke, who held that an essential element of the conservative mind was the recognition of a “transcendent moral order.”  I believe Kirk would have found the description of conscience–our moral sense integrally bound to natural law–and what Newman called “the illative sense” as a species of abstraction to be completely wrong.

As it happens, the opposition party in Burma, the one getting shot, is called the National League for Democracy. Not the National League for Stability, but Democracy. ~Daniel Henninger

That’s a really profound observation.  Very good.  Henninger has the critics on the ropes now!  Of course, the government calls itself the State Peace and Development Council, and it is clearly interested in neither peace nor development.  I don’t assume that the opposition is quite as dishonest in its choice of names, but obviously any dissident movement that wants Washington’s attention and support will invoke the magic d-word.  Every corrupt oligarch around the globe who wants to overthrow his government knows that much.

Henninger says later:

Instead, it’s that the president’s critics felt compelled not only to refute Iraq but every jot of the Bush foreign policy, including its espousal of democracy and freedom. They have come very close to displacing the Bush Doctrine with the idea that promoting democracy in difficult places is, very simply, a mistake.

But it is a mistake.  It was a mistake when JFK promoted it, and it will be a mistake should Obama continue to promote it in the future.  In its substance, it is actually a bad idea.  The Near East’s woes brought on, or rather exacerbated by, democratisation have sobered up people who just two years ago were saying silly things about an Arab Spring.  The attempt is misguided, and in most cases it is also likely to cause still more suffering.  It is certainly a mistake as it concerns American interests in almost every case, at least when the elections reflect the opinions of the people in the country, and it is also very likely a mistake for most of the countries proposed as “beneficiaries” of this great gift.  These are not things for us to promote, but they are instead things that we should practice and offer as examples.  If they are to have any meaning and to have legitimacy in many of these countries it is imperative that their promotion be indigenous and has nothing to do with us. 

Here’s the real gem:

Nations with freely operating political parties are likely to be centripetal; their energies bend inward, fighting with each other. In places without real politics, they sit in cafes plotting how to kill innocent civilians 2,000 miles outside their borders.

Which is, of course, why we didn’t invade Iraq (and Panama) and never bombed Yugoslavia–we were too busy fighting one another over school vouchers and Social Security reform!  In places without so-called “real politics” (whatever that means–politics are just as “real” when they are authoritarian, as people in Burma know only too well), people are usually preoccupied with targeting the government that denies them those “real politics.”  Or did I miss the Karen bomb attacks in Beijing?  The overwhelming majority of people in such countries does not engage in far-flung terrorist conspiracies against distant countries.  Instead, they endure and occasionally rise up against their own governments to attempt to free themselves, which is the only sort of liberation that ever truly lasts.