Karen Hughes, our PR agent head of public diplomacy to the world, has good news: Al Qaeda’s popularity in Islamic countries is dropping even more quickly than our own.  She has to be able to boast about something , since it has been on her watch (though it is obviously out of her control) that unfavourable attitudes towards the United States have risen sharply in some of the very countries she cites in this op-ed.  When 64% of Turks view the U.S. as the greatest threat to Turkey, it’s fair to say that the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs has not been very successful.  Of course, it’s impossible for public diplomacy to work when the government is pursuing a disastrous and wildly unpopular foreign policy. 

But here’s a different point: if such an overwhelming majority of people in both Iraq and Afghanistan hate Al Qaeda so, there seems little chance of a terrorist haven being established in either place.  How can anyone still believe the claim that our soldiers must remain to prevent the creation of an Al Qaeda sanctuary?  If the people are the center of gravity in insurgency, jihadis in Anbar have already lost, which does not necessarily mean that we win.  These figures seem to be an encouraging sign that, whatever happens in the wake of a withdrawal from Iraq, an Al Qaeda safe haven is not in the cards.  If our soldiers are going to continue to risk their lives in Iraq, the administration should be clear about why: it will be to keep warring Iraqi factions from destroying each other.  This is not enough to justify an ongoing American presence, however large or small.

He also told the United States that it should set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq as this would spur the Iraqi Government into meeting its own security needs. Without a time-frame, he said, there would be no pressure for the necessary political and security measures. ~The Times

If the West wants to support the Orange movement, let them pay for it. Do you think we are idiots? ~Vladimir Putin

This is refreshingly to the point.

What’s that?  Eli Lake grossly misrepresents and distorts someone’s position on a Near Eastern policy debate?  He perceives accusations of bad faith and conspiracy-mongering where none exists?  He becomes virtually unhinged in the process?  How unusual.

The report further stated that the date of preference for an attack against Iran is in eight to 10 months – after the US presidential candidates for both the Democrats and the Republicans have been chosen, but before the major presidential campaign kicks off. ~The Jerusalem Post

This seems like strange timing, and it is almost enough to make me discount the story.  The reported timing does not match with any of the other rumours that have been circulating about an attack on Iran. 

Starting a war in the middle of an election year seems like the worst of all possible options for Mr. Bush, since it would not have the same political effect as a late October strike.  A late 2007 or early 2008 strike might give a Republican nominee time to recover from any public backlash.  However, it might sway the primary electorate to choose one of the more hard-line candidates and thus make the GOP’s chances in ’08 even worse.  If done in late spring or summer, there would be months between the start of operations and the election for the public to see the costs that such a decision unleashed, but not enough time for the damage to be undone.  It would work almost entirely to the detriment of the GOP, even though all of the leading Democratic candidates in principle support attacking Iran.   

Mr. Buchanan and Dr. Wilson are also discussing the possibility of an Iranian war.

Putin observers have been banging their heads against a wall in frustration as they try to understand his selection of Viktor Zubkov to head a new government as prime minister.  Rather than look for the simple explanation that you might use for any other quasi-democratic authoritarian regime (the last government was not seen to be performing well and needed to be replaced), the move has spurred on endless speculation: what does it all mean?  The Rise of Zubkov has become the latest in a string of events that serves as the pretext for trotting out all the old cliches about Russia–it’s baffling!  it’s mysterious!–which never seem to embarrass the people who employ them.  It means that Viktor Zubkov will be prime minister.  That’s what it means.  Mystery solved. 

It seems to me that everyone has become so caught up in the idea that the FSB runs everything that it genuinely stuns people when Putin chooses a non-silovik for a job.  They had finally come up with an explanation for how the Russian state worked, and a lot of it even seemed to make sense, and then Putin goes and makes a perfectly boring, non-sinister choice for prime minister.  How do you fit that into the narrative of Putin the Monster?   

Why does any executive choose a nonentity who will do his bidding?  So that he will have a nonentity who will do his bidding.  It’s really very simple.  Why did George Bush select Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General?  It wasn’t because of his great legal mind.  He had Gonzales’ loyalty right to the end, and knew that Gonzales would do as he was told.  He might do his job very badly, but he would not do it with any trace of independence! 

Because Zubkov is not from the inner circle or an old secret police man, people are perplexed, apparently forgetting that Putin was mayor of St. Petersburg and probably wants to have someone from that city running the government. 

P.S.  It turns out that he and Zubkov are old colleagues from city government days.  The great riddle has been answered.

“Local matters, generally speaking, should be left to the locals,” Thompson said Thursday in what seemed to be a gentle way of suggesting that Congress had overstepped its bounds. “I think Congress has got an awful lot to keep up with.”

Thompson also made sure not to impugn the motives of any of the religious conservatives whose support he now needs for his presidential campaign. “I know that good people were doing what they thought was best,” he said.  ~ABC News

He is referring to Congress’ intervention in the Schiavo case.  Fred is actually taking what always seemed to me to be the right view.  Above all, this was not a matter for any part of the federal government, and it wasn’t properly a matter for the Florida legislature or the governor.  All those opponents of judicial activism who want judges to “follow the law” have to accept when judges “follow” laws of which they disapprove or which they would like to see changed. 

However, the symbolism of this statement will be bad for Fred with a lot of activists who made the Schiavo case into a litmus test of how truly pro-life someone was.  It’s not as if Fred can afford to alienate a lot of pro-life voters, but he has already made some moves this year that could be interpreted as slights to pro-lifers.  Instead of showing up at the NRLC meeting this year, he jaunted off to London to meet Baroness Thatcher and deliver a bad speech on foreign policy.  Now he says this about the Schiavo case, which I think will go over poorly with any really ardent pro-lifers who might have been inclined to support him.  On the other hand, it will probably only help him with those Republican voters who watched the hysteria over the Schiavo case with something akin to dread and horror.

Maybe George Shultz believes what he writes about Mearsheimer and Walt, which shows that he isn’t even acquainted with theiroriginal essay, much less the book they have published.  My guess is that he either skimmed the work or decided that he already knew what it said and wrote this attack without checking to see if any of his charges make any sense.  For instance, he has this “damning” statement:

Anyone who thinks that Jewish groups constitute a homogeneous “lobby” ought to spend some time dealing with them.

Of course, what the essay said on this point was:

We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them.

Hm, let’s see…it isn’t about “Jewish groups” and it isn’t homogeneous.  It’s a loose coalition, its members don’t always agree and it has no overall organisation.  “The Lobby” serves as a term of convenience, a catch-all to refer to these various groups together.  Yes, that sounds very much like what Shultz said, except for all of the completely different ideas contained in the two statements. 

The responses this idea of “the Lobby” receives are bizarre.  It’s as if someone wrote about the role of “the tobacco industry” and was then accused of believing in a monolithic corporate alliance in which there was absolutely no difference of opinion about anything.  Generalising about groups that have common interests and goals is now seen as promoting conspiracies.  To call these responses sloppy would be a bit too generous.  

Sec. Shultz almost certainly knows better than this, of course, but he chooses to lend his prominence to the public effort to smear and insult two academics who make inconvenient arguments for people who support a misguided foreign policy.  If “questioning” is legitimate, and “lies” are not, what should we make of Shultz’s article?  A legitimate difference of opinion, or a scurrilous pack of lies?  Is that really the standard Shultz wants to use? 

In between his hyperventilating breaths about “underhanded Jewish plots” (which is clearly not what Mearsheimer and Walt are describing) and the like, he argues that comparisons between Israel the South African Nationalist apartheid regime are ludicrous.  This is true in a way–the Nationalists were running their system inside the territory of the country that their government legally ruled, while Israel illegally occupies territory and imposes a restrictive, discriminatory system on the inhabitants.  (For the record, I think all territories occupied in violation of international law should be abandoned by their occupiers–the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus is another outstanding example of a U.S. ally being permitted to continue breaking the rules without suffering any real consequences.)  Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in territories it does not even rightfully hold would be like the old South African government imposing its policies inside the borders of Namibia.  From the perspective of international law, Israel’s policy in the territories is not quite like apartheid; it is in a way worse because it does not even take place within the state’s recognised borders.  This makes it one of the more outstanding examples of persistent international lawlessness of the last four decades.   

One of the counterarguments employed against Mearsheimer/Walt is that there are also other influential lobbies that sometimes also get their way and wield tremendous power in Washington.  You don’t say!  This is apparently supposed to prove that pro-Israel groups do not have much influence, or that they are sufficiently counterbalanced by other interests to make complaints about their undue influence seem foolish.  If “the Lobby” does not rule with absolute power over every decision made by the U.S. government, it must not exist, or its existence doesn’t matter!  Of course, we all know that oil interests, the Saudis and defense contractors, among others, have great influence in Washington as well.  These are, on the whole, not terribly desirable influences, and they deserve similar scrutiny.  Then again, no one is denounced as a neo-fascist for simply mentioning these other lobbies, and there is no immediate charge of conspiracy-mongering when someone argues that the goals of the “the Lobby” do not coincide with the interests of the United States.

Shultz says “those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support are wrong.”  That’s very interesting, except that this is not what Mearsheimer and Walt have done.  They are not “blaming,” they are analysing and trying to understand the rationale for what would otherwise be utterly irrational policies (e.g., the invasion of Iraq).  They do not single out or “blame” Israel’s Jewish supporters.  They state that there are many groups, including Christian evangelicals and the like, that advance what these groups believe are in Israel’s interests (which the groups also believe are in America’s interests), and they attribute to these groups significant influence in shaping policy in the Near East.  (If someone made the argument that “the Israel Lobby” significantly affects our Cuba policy, he would be rightly laughed out of the room.)  Hard as it is for many to understand the difference, understanding a phenomenon and imputing some evil to it are two very different things. 

At every stage, Mearsheimer and Walt have stated very clearly that they believe there is nothing “improper,” much less underhanded or malign about efforts to lobby on behalf of Israel.  They do believe these efforts are badly mistaken in the context of advancing U.S. national interests.  It is because the most ardent supporters of Israel in this country refuse to tolerate any questioning of U.S.-Israel relations or U.S. Near East policy that they refuse to have the debate over whether or not supporting Israel to the extent and in the manner that our government has done is actually serving the national interest.  Perhaps these supporters suspect that they would not win such a debate on the merits and so must continually throw out these outrageous charges against critics.  If that is the impression supporters of Israel would like to give, they should keep engaging in the same histrionics as they have done for months. 

A query: do those who deny the existence of “the Lobby” think that Christian evangelicals have much political influence on other issues?  If they do, why would that influence not be similarly significant when it is deployed on behalf of putatively pro-Israel policies?  Do they deny that many Christian evangelicals are rather intensely pro-Israel in sentiment?  If they do not deny it, what is so strange in arguing that there are groups and individuals that represent the interests of Christian evangelicals when it comes U.S. policy concerning Israel (the latest of which is Christians United for Israel)?  What if someone were to say that the policies advocated by these pro-Israel evangelicals, which tend to be on the militant and aggressive side, are contrary to the American national interest?  Would supporters of Israel simply deny the existence of their numerous allies?  No, they would have to explain why supporting the bombing of Lebanon serves American interests, which they cannot do.  They would have to explain how illegally settling land that does not belong to Israel serves American interests.  They would have to explain how subsidising and arming the Israeli armed forces serves American interests.  In other words, they would have to defend the policies they support on their merits, and this they have never been able and have scarcely tried to do.

I was thinking this week about how the mood now, among normal people and political figures, is so different from the great burst of feeling that marked the early days of the war–the 17 days to Baghdad, the unstoppable Third Infantry Division, the dictator’s statue falling. The relief that Saddam didn’t use poison gas, as he had against the Kurds, that he collapsed like an old suitcase and got himself out of Dodge. There was a lot of tenderness to those days, too–the first tears at the loss of troops, the deaths of David Bloom and Michael Kelly. Still, the war seemed all triumph, a terrible swift answer to what had been done to us on 9/11 [bold mine-DL]. ~Peggy Noonan

To whom did it seem a “terrible swift answer to what had been done to us on 9/11”?  What kind of answer could it have been besides the wrong answer?  One might have thought that the month-long campaign in the autumn of 2001 against the Taliban would have had this effect.  How in the world could people watch the invasion of Iraq and think, “Ah, yes, it’s payback time for all those things that Iraqis did not do to us!  Come, let us celebrate!”  If there were people who felt that attacking Iraq was payback, this was because the government had deceived them into thinking that Iraq and Al Qaeda were in league together.

I remember the early days of the war very well.  I remember how many people whom I knew were very anxious about the lack of major resistance at the outskirts of Baghdad.  It seemed to them like a trap, assuming, of course, that the dire warnings about the grave Iraqi threat were not so much nonsense.  So many people bought into the propaganda about Iraq’s nefarious weapons arsenal that they were expecting gas attacks to come at any time.  In the event, there was nothing, which was a good first indication that we would find none of the weapons that were supposed to be there in vast quantities.  This was a relief of sorts and certainly good news for the soldiers, but it was the first tangible evidence that the entire thing was a wild goose chase.

Ms. Noonan goes on:

At one point Gen. Petraeus was asked by Sen. John Warner if Iraq has made America safer and said, “Sir, I don’t know actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind.” Later, invited to expand on this by Sen. Evan Bayh, said he’d been surprised by Mr. Warner’s question and added that “we have very, very clear, very serious national interests” in Iraq.

That of course is the great question. History will answer it.

No, actually, people answer this question.  They answer it all the time.  Petraeus just answered it (I think incorrectly).  I have a very different answer.  History doesn’t actually do anything in this regard.  History is a record of events and the interpretation of that record.  It does not issue final answers.  No interpretations in history are ever entirely settled, because the interpreters keep changing and the times in which they live differ so widely.  Historians in the 2020s may look back on Iraq as a moderate success of sorts, if it seems that no long-term damage has been done to the U.S., while historians of a generation later may see it as the beginning of some destructive process that comes to fruition only decades from now and so regard it as a colossal blunder of epic proportions.  The annexation of the Philippines looked much less foolish in 1920 than it did in 1941.  Many people had come to recognise the terms of the Treaty of Versailles as too harsh by the late 1920s, but too late for it to do any good.  Sending Lenin to Russia seemed clever to people in Berlin in 1917; it seemed much less clever in retrospect in 1944-45. 

We do not need to wait for historians to tell us whether the current course of action is wise; we do not need to wait for them to tell us whether it is working.  What we cannot know right now is the long-term historical significance of these events.  That does not mean that we cannot assess success or failure, justice or injustice, right or wrong.  Judging historical significance is a judgement of what effects resulted from a particular event or series of events.  Judging the merits and justice of an invasion, for example, is a question of political prudence and moral theology.  Judging whether or not a war is in our national interests is a matter for policy analysts in the here and now.  Future historians will only be able to fully vindicate the invasion of Iraq if there is a time in the future when people no longer view aggressive war as wrong.  Even if some future historian comes to accept that our government was defending legitimate interests by remaining in Iraq for years and years, that does not necessarily make it so.   

History is not a conscious being that wills and acts and answers questions.  (Yes, I know Ms. Noonan is speaking figuratively, but this constant appeal to history in lieu of trying to make our own judgements is a kind of secular fatalism.)  If our national interests were so very clear and very serious, it would not be difficult for someone, somewhere, to elaborate on what they are.  I have yet to see an argument along this line that did not boil down to one of two things: “I don’t like the Iranian government” and “there’s oil in them thar dunes!”  Far from being “very, very clear” and “very serious,” our interest in remaining in Iraq is utterly obcure and the importance of remaining in Iraq to U.S. national security seems to be anything but serious.  Iraq’s centrality to the region may be exaggerated; its centrality to our national security definitely is.  For that matter, the Near East’s centrality to geopolitics is vastly overblown.  This is not something that only History (or Mike Huckabee’s future historians) can determine.  Sound, informed analysis will do the trick.  When we abdicate judgement like this, we are acting irresponsibly.  So let us have no more of this grand talk about what history will tell us years from now, and perhaps pay a good deal more attention to the history of places that we propose to save from themselves by means of fire and sword.