We often hear about the Brits boffo counterinsurgency in Malaysia. But are the British still in Malaysia? Yes, it was a communist insurgency, which they defeated. But they also left, which presumably sapped the nationalist dimension from equation. ~Josh Marshall

As others have pointed out before, the Malayan case is much less encouraging for us, since the communist insurgents came primarily from the Chinese minority and so did not have nearly as much of a popular “sea” in which to swim.  It was more like a small pond.  The Muslim Malay majority was not sympathetic to their goals, and Malay nationalists supported the British effort in exchange for a promise of independence, which made the insurgents’ political marginalisation and defeat much, much easier.  Decolonisation and independence were already in the works, while communist revolution seemed both unnecessary and undesirable to the majority. 

Both Malaya and Vietnamese insurgencies grew out of the resistance to Japanese occupation, but the chief difference was that the Vietminh could appeal to national identity in ways that the communist insurgents in Malaya could not.  In other words, the Malayan insurgency lost in part because it could not count on a nationalist dimension in its fight, since the insurgents were not representing a nationalist cause, but rather an ideological one and one associated with a small minority group.  (Comparing the Malayan and Vietnamese cases seems to confirm Prof. Lukacs’ view that nationalism is the far more powerful and therefore potentially more dangerous modern ideology when compared to socialism and communism.)  Had the British opted to stay in Malaya indefinitely, as the French chose to try to do in Indochina, there might have been a broader-based anti-colonial rebellion, which would have probably been very different in its outcome. 

The Malayan case was also significantly different in the number of insurgents involved:

In the end the conflict involved up to a maximum of 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops against a peak of about 7–8,000 communist guerrillas.

Estimates of the insurgency’s size in Iraq vary, but I have seen figures this year as high as 60,000.  (As I understand this estimate, this refers only to Sunni insurgents.)  That’s seven to eight times the number of insurgents, while we have approximately four times as many soldiers fighting them.  If the optimal size of a counterinsurgency force is 10x larger than that of the insurgents, the British were much closer to the ideal and had the overwhelming support of the majority, and it still took them nine years before the crisis was formally ended.  The lesson from the Malayan experience is that you should fight very unpopular, isolated, highly ideological insurgencies and you should ally with the local nationalists if you want to win.  It is very difficult for a government, especially one backed by a foreign power, to compete with nationalist insurgents in the intensity and credibility of their nationalism.

Via James comes this claim:

Contemporary Japan and India, among other non-Christian countries, have also embraced the Great Separation.

This is pretty demonstrably untrue in the case of India, since Indian politics has been nothing if not suffused with religiosity of all kinds since independence.  It is technically true to the extent that the religious communities in question do not have institutional “churches” as such, but pretty clearly nonsense to the extent that religious activist associations wield enormous clout in Indian politics.  There is an idea that this has been bad for “Indian secularism,” but Indian secularism has not meant the separation of religion and politics but the incorporation of all communities into the political process.  Where Hindutva seems to some to threaten the system is in its majoritarianism and exclusivism.  But the Great Separation has nothing to do with it one way or the other.  Japan is more straightforward in that the divinity of the emperor was officially repudiated, but large numbers of people still respect the emperor intensely and the symbolic value of the emperor is incalculable.  The clearest example of actual separation is in Turkey, which is where the separation is being actively undermined by the democratic process, because the “separation of church and state” or the separation of religion from politics is fundamentally hostile to democratic principles in a religious country. 

Then there is this even more extraordinary claim:

Separating church and state works; mixing them tends toward disaster.

This is where the messy details and historical contingencies come in handy.  First of all, it depends on which church or religion and what kind of state, which this formula ignores.  I can also say, with just as much confidence, that mixing church and state works, while separating them tends towards disaster.  I can say this because I can think of cases that support both claims, just as Ms. Goldstein can think of cases that support hers.  To my mind, Rome (renowned as the most punctilious of religious societies) and Byzantium “worked” and the Soviet Union failed–consider their respective lifespans as political systems and “experiments” in having different answers on the church/state relationship question.  Byzantium wins, hands down.  Does that mean that we should all prostrate ourselves before an emperor?  Perhaps not.  What it does mean is that taking the particular experience of certain nations as a universal rule is probably unwise.  The details of church-state relations are extremely important in distinguishing between excessive subordination of church to state or subordination of the state to the church.  Separation works, except for all the times that it doesn’t and symphoneia works better.

Neuhaus draws attention to the rather more unsavoury elements of Collier’s The Bottom Billion, namely its insistence on military interventionism as a solution to African ills.  It shouldn’t be necessary to explain why military intervention is just as misguided, counterproductive and destructive as the evils of developmentalism, but apparently it needs to be said.  Just as developmentalism stunts and distorts the economic development of client states, as both Easterly and Collier argue, intervention does the same to the political life of “beneficiaries” of interventionist aid. 

Intervention does absolutely nothing to solve the fundamental political woes of any given state, but at best simply locks them in place.  It may even exacerbate them by drawing one group or another into the orbit of the intervening power, making the different responses to intervention grounds for future conflict.  Undertaken in an emergency as a “temporary” measure, outside intervention becomes a persistent habit of major powers (which are, of course, not intervening out of their goodness of their collective hearts, but for some other reason), and it becomes the default “solution” to every significant domestic crisis in these countries.  Forever being “aided” and “helped,” the peoples that “benefit” from this interventionist regime end up being no more capable of coping with the internal divisions and problems of their countries than they were before and may prove to be worse off.  They become permanent protectorates of the “international community,” global wards that get progressively worse the more “help” they receive. 

Rather than developing the institutions and skills necessary for running their own affairs successfully, these states are forever being artificially propped up, simply deferring more permanently stable arrangement indefinitely.  To those who think outside intervention brings order from chaos, I say simply this: Wait and see what happens in a year or two.  It is at best a stopgap measure that averts some terrible event here or there.  Above all, this interventionist idea says that some nations have the right to trample on the sovereignty of others.  It is inconceivable how a peaceful international order can survive with this kind of two-tier system of states.  A very few states may embark on “genuine” humanitarian missions, but the rest will be pursuing aggrandisement and influence.  Wars of aggression will be dressed up as efforts to “restore order” and “bring peace,” and the war in Iraq has already shown the way.  

From the American perspective, intervention is also a very sure way to fritter away lives and resources on problems that we cannot solve.  Americans have shown time and again that we do not really have the inclination, patience or training to do the work that intervention requires, and even if we did it would not be in our national interest to use our resources in that way.  Under the circumstances, it is actually immoral to urge intervention, knowing that the public will not be willing to bear the cost and see it through–we would be committing the errors of encouraging the miserable and making false promises.  There is also something truly condescending in the assumption that other nations of the world need our intervention.  It is at least partly this mentality of Western obligation and non-Western blame for Western “failure” to act that hampers entire regions from improving local conditions on their own.

If Ross is right that “the Putin era, in one fashion or another, probably still has decades left to run,” it seems to me that the smart course of action for Western governments is to start working out a modus vivendi with Putin-era Russia on areas of common interest and smoothing out those main points of contention (Kosovo, Iran, Ukraine, Georgia, etc.) that seem most likely to generate conflict in the near term.  Then again, that’s what I think we ought to do while Putin is still the Russian President.

Apparently, I’m Lucius Vorenus, which makes a lot of sense.

RCP reports a SurveyUSA poll that shows Mark Warner either destroying or totally destroying his Republican opposition next year.  Tom Davis can at least argue that his name may not be widely known in the Southside and the Valley.  Gilmore is as well-known as Warner in the state, and he gets absolutely annihilated (is a 28-point margin still a landslide, or does it count as an avalanche?).  That is probably because people do remember his tenure as governor.  George Allen polls at 37%–how are the mighty fallen. 

Yes, of course, the election is over a year away, the numbers will change, the margins will get smaller and no one should forget the fate of George Allen as a reminder that individual elections turn on the strangest things.  However, if some Republicans are already effectively writing off New Hampshire as a lost cause, and Shaheen only polls at 54%, is Virginia really even competitive at this point?  On New Hampshire, another RCP item had this to say:

Shaheen’s entry into the contest against Sununu has cast a pall over many Republican strategists around the country. “That seat’s done. That’s over,” said one GOP strategist. A recent poll showed Shaheen leading incumbent John Sununu, 54%-38%. “She’s over fifty [percent,” the GOP strategist said, “which is the hardest thing of all. That means they have to pull people away from her.

Scott Paul explains why Romney, who has sent a statement of his demandsletter to the United Nations, is a buffoon when it comes to foreign policy.  I agree entirely.

Consider how Kissinger distorts the past while conjuring up his nightmare post-withdrawal scenario:

Within Iraq, the sectarian conflict could assume genocidal proportions; terrorist base areas could re-emerge [bold mine-DL].

Of course, there were no “terrorist base areas” in the country prior to the invasion (except in those areas of the country that were outside of Baghdad’s control).  They cannot “re-emerge” if they did not exist before.  Much of the rest of his list of disastrous outcomes is misleading, exaggerated or simply unrealistic.  He writes:

Under the impact of American abdication, Lebanon may slip into domination by Iran’s ally, Hezbollah; a Syria-Israel war or an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities may become more likely as Israel attempts to break the radical encirclement; Turkey and Iran will probably squeeze Kurdish autonomy; and the Taleban in Afghanistan will gain new impetus. Countries where the radical threat is as yet incipient, as India, will face a mounting domestic challenge. Pakistan, in the process of a delicate political transformation, will encounter more radical pressures and may even turn into a radical challenge itself.

That is what is meant by “precipitate” withdrawal — a withdrawal in which the US loses the ability to shape events, either within Iraq, on the anti-jihadist battlefield or in the world at large.

What slippage towards Hizbullah “domination” there has been in Lebanon has come in no small part from the destabilisation created by the “revolution” of 2005 and the war last summer.  Of course, Hizbullah is not in a position to “dominate” Lebanon, on account of the fractious and changeable nature of political alliances in Lebanon.  (As more of the Christian population of Lebanon flees the country for points west, the demographic changes may work to create an outright Shi’ite majority, but that is the result of developments specific to Lebanon and not a product of our Iraq policy.)  Hizbullah “domination” of the entire country is mostly a chimera that is being used to alarm the public about the long arm of Iran.  Even in the event of withdrawal, the United States could very likely control the airspace between Israel and Iran.  If Washington did not want an Israeli strike on Iran, it can make it known to the Israeli government that an attempt will not be tolerated.  A Syria-Israel war would be substantially less likely if Washington would encourage the Syria-Israel negotiations that have been sought by the Israeli government.  It would be even less likely if Washington would work to separate Syria from Iran.  In exchange for lifting sanctions on Syria, Syria could agree to cease any support for militias in Lebanon, and Damascus and Washington might resume their former counterterrorist and intelligence collaboration of late 2001 and 2002.

Iraq withdrawal will have little or no effect on the strength of the Taliban.  This is just hot air.  India’s internal security problems will not be changed one whit by what happens in Iraq.  If there is still cross-border terrorism against India coming from Pakistan and carried out by groups that have the backing of at least some elements of the Pakistani security and military apparatus, that is a function of indulging Islamabad in its double game of feigning concern about jihadi terrorism in the north and west of Pakistan while helping it prosper in the south and east.  I should rephrase that.  Islamabad is genuinely concerned about the jihadis in the north and west, because those jihadis do not work with the government anymore, while those in the south and east still do. 

As for Pakistan’s radicalisation, it has been Musharraf’s ham-fisted and therefore ineffectual efforts at suppressing such radicalism that have created the internal security mess that Pakistan is now suffering.  The fear of Pakistan becoming an open enemy or “radical challenge” seems to me to be overblown.  Musharraf has cultivated this fear to maintain support for his tenuous position, and Americans who don’t know very much about Pakistan have accepted it for years because it seemed better to have the dictator we knew than whatever might replace him.  What makes it more likely would not be a withdrawal from Iraq, but the growing perception that the government in Islamabad is too closely tied to Washington and does not serve the interests of Pakistan.  Popular resentment against the political role of pro-U.S. militaries in major allied states is a major source of resentment against the United States in these countries.  AKP in Turkey gained so many seats because their success was seen as a rejection of the military’s threats to intervene in the presidential election.  Many AKP supporters were not necessarily enthusiastic backers of the party’s goals, but wanted to teach the military a lesson.  The party (or rather oligarchic clique) in Pakistan that can exploit resentment against the huge role of the militarty in Pakistani politics will also enjoy some success.     

Kissinger’s article is a classic of the internationalist op-ed genre: rattle off the names of half a dozen countries, demonstrate some superficial familiarity with the political conditions of each and then intimate an impending disaster unless your preferred course of action is not followed in each particular.  The regional chain reaction is a favourite of these sorts, and it is often effective in cowing dissenters against interventionist policy because it points an accusing finger at those who advocate for a different position: “Why do you want to throw the world into chaos?”  Kissinger is presumably not uninformed about the political realities of the countries he describes.  He and internationalists like him thrive on conjuring up these pictures of doom that will result from a “failure” to “engage” with a crisis somewhere or a move to “disengage” from this or that region.  It lends strength to the idea that “we” must be deeply enmeshed in world affairs, since everything would fall to pieces without “us.” 

This idea is mostly untrue, and I would bet that the internationalists who actually know something about the world know this.  They do not urge continued intervention because they believe it to be necessary for the world, but because they believe it is imperative that “we” remain the hegemonic power.  There is some irony that the strongest defenders of U.S. hegemony always deliberately underestimate America’s ability to shape events abroad through primarily diplomatic, economic and political means–this allows them to draw a picture of a world teetering on the brink of chaos that can only be saved by more and more direct intervention.  Leaving Iraq will not make us have less influence on events elsewhere, but will rather obviously free up our resources and attention for coping with other problems.

On foreign policy alone, some 200 experts are providing the Obama campaign with assistance of some sort, arranged into 20 subgroups. ~The Chicago Tribune

Given Obama’s foreign policy views, that doesn’t say much for the 200 experts, does it?  Does anyone put off by interventionist policies think that Anthony Lake is going to provide the right answers?