At the same time, the Republicans’ conservative base doesn’t have much taste for the realists who dominated foreign-policy thinking in past GOP administrations (except for über-adviser Henry Kissinger, who has managed to transcend these divides with the same aplomb he has shown in past campaigns). For Republicans “there’s no upside in declaring, ‘These are my advisers.’ The base hates realists, and neocons are too controversial,” says sometime Romney adviser Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. “So the thinking is, don’t define yourself by foreign-policy advisers.” ~Michael Hirsh

It’s not entirely clear to me why “the base” would be so hostile to foreign policy realists (hate seems like an especially strong word), given the way things have gone over the last few years, but then I suppose I have a hard time understanding a group of people that still supports the President.  I guess year after year of talk radio, blogs and pundits telling Republican audiences that “stability” and “realism” are basically codewords for treason and defeatism has a corrosive effect after a while.  If you were someone who read and watched and listened to daily “conservative media” reports that are telling you incessantly that Islamofascism is on the march and that the restored caliphate (with Venezuelan help) is blazing a trail straight for Dubuque (or wherever), it is quite natural that “realism,”‘ grounded as it is in some measure of actual knowledge about the rest of the world, would not seem very good to you. 

If this claim is true about “the base,” it confirms my suspicion that there are no GOP “realist” candidates running for President because foreign policy realism doesn’t go down well with the primary voters and activists these days.  The “realists” supposedly refuse to “name the enemy” and do not “understand the threat” as such luminaries as Rick Santorum and Norman Podhoretz do.  The voters and activists have definitely become members of Bush’s Republican Party, and the majority of the candidates could not break out of this stranglehold even if they wished to do so.  Of course, in one important respect, it wouldn’t matter whether there were candidates being advised by foreign policy realists or not.  As I have said before:

Among politicians, all of the “realists” more or less embrace the continuation of the war.  Their very balance-of-forces, stability-centered view of foreign affairs dictates that they support an American presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future.  

Because while Obama is still seen as the insurgent candidate challenging Hillary’s Democratic establishment camp, he has actually been recruiting ex-Clintonites in large numbers. Behind the scenes, Obama and Hillary have been engaged in a vicious battle for the best and brightest officials of the 1990s, those who mastered “working the system in Washington” a decade ago. The competition has grown so fierce that several Obama officials who were once Friends of Bill tell me they have been threatened with becoming pariahs by the Hillary camp if she wins the nomination. In response, the Obama campaign has only revved up its recruiting effort of midlevel former Clinton officials. “The Obama pitch is, ‘You’ll never be in the inner circle’ with Hillary,” says Gene Sperling, Sen. Clinton’s top economic advisor. ~Michael Hirsh

Obama’s “transformed,” “unconventional” foreign policy will be steered by former Clinton officials and the odd Brookings advisor.  His foreign policy will manage to combine all of the excessive ambition and overreach of his progressive internationalism and the destructive, interventionist instincts of “centrist” Democratic foreign policy staffers.  On foreign policy, Obama and Clinton are becoming almost indistinguishable.

“Maybe the times have changed, and the Webcast and his celebrity are enough. Maybe he and his tactics are the wave of the future,” Cullen said, adding a stinging comparison between Thompson and the failed 1985 launch of a new Coca-Cola formula. “Or maybe he’s the New Coke.” ~The Washington Post

Well, Thompson does want to rekindle ’80s nostalgia, so a New Coke candidacy sounds just about right.

George Ajjan’s blog on Syrian politics, syriapol: A Syrian Democracy Project, is a great resource for commentary and news about the country.  He also has a very interesting post that reproduces an article of his on Syrian identity and history.  The following exchange seems crucial for grasping how Syrians (broadly speaking) understand their identity:

Sometimes Lebanese, Jordanian, or Palestinian friends will ask me what my origin is:

“Halabi,” I proudly reply.
They respond with a confused look. “Souri, yaeni…”
“La, halabi.”
“I don’t understand, why don’t you just say that you are Syrian?”
“Why don’t you?”

Understanding this view seems to me to be a basic prerequisite for understanding the politics within and relationship between the Syrian Republic and Lebanon in particular.

P.S.  Halab is Aleppo, for those who might not be familiar with the Arabic name.

Ross has some good remarks on the previous post, and he’s right to note that WWII casualty estimates vary.  My original statements were based on this source, while the Wikipedia entry gives some different numbers.  While the figures are different, the other source does show that British, French and Commonwealth forces suffered more losses in absolute terms and in proportion to their national populations.  Let me repeat: I do not point this out to denigrate American sacrifice in WWII, which deserves the highest respect, but to insist that Americans remember the sacrifices of the other nations that were on our side in the war.  That shouldn’t be too much to ask from candidates aspiring to be President, or have I missed something?

Ross mentions that Thompson was responding to a question about the declining popularity of the United States.  His complete answer was this (quote near the bottom of the page):

Well, part of that comes with being the strongest, most powerful, most prosperous country in the history of the world.  I think that goes with the territory.  We’re more unpopular than we need to be.  That’s for sure, but our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples in this country [sic] than all the other countries put together….And I don’t feel any need to apologize for the United States of America. 

America was also “the strongest, most powerful, most prosperous country in the history of the world” during earlier periods in the last century and this did not cause as much widespread hostility.  If some resentment and envy come with the territory of being a superpower, even this cannot account for the extent and depth of negative feeling towards our government (and perhaps towards our country).  Thompson says that he feels no need to apologise for the U.S., which is fine as far as it goes, but apparently he does feel the need to trumpet our vast moral, military and political superiority in just the sort of arrogant way that drives so many people around the world to resent America, or at least to resent our government.  It isn’t enough to say that we have more power and wealth than any country ever, but on top of that he feels he has to make the (false) claim that our nation has more accumulated virtue than all other nations on the planet put together.  For those seeking the beginning of an explanation of why even formerly relatively favourably inclined nations now have very sharply negative views (e.g., Turkey) of our government and our country,  they could do worse than to look at the mentality expressed in Thompson’s remarks.

During his appearance on The Tonight Show, Fred said something that is rather stunningly and obviously untrue:

Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together.

There’s nothing terribly edifying in this kind of claim of national nobility-through-high body counts, but you have to wonder what the man could possibly have been thinking that would cause him to say this.  Even leaving aside WWI, where the claims to fighting for liberty are a bit more strained (and where all other belligerents lost far more people than America), this claim is demonstrably false.  It requires either an amazing ignorance about the past or contempt for American allies in WWII. 

Britain and France entered WWII at least officially to safeguard the independence of Poland, which I think gives them some right to claim that they suffered their losses for the sake of the “liberty” of other peoples.  In 1940 alone in a war fought on behalf of Poland, the French lost 90,000 KIA, and the British lost over 68,000.  The British, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers who died during the war were certainly fighting at least in part for “the liberty and freedom of other peoples,” and the number of their fatalities and casualities was necessarily higher than that of the United States.  Our casualties were on the order of 600,000 killed and wounded, while British and Commonwealth casualties (not including India’s 100,000) were approximately 915,000, which does not include civilian deaths in Britain and France.  If we were to judge these losses according to the size of the populations of the different countries, the disparity would be even greater.  Given how much smaller its population was, Britain’s losses were proportionally over three times as great as ours. 

None of this is to minimise the sacrifices that Americans have made.  But leave it to some showboating politician to take something noble and admirable and distort it as part of his talking points, insulting the war dead of our best allies in the process.  This claim of Thompson’s is just the sort of nationalist mythologising that we could stand to have much less of nowadays.  It doesn’t speak well for the management of foreign relations in any future Thompson Administration that the man has no idea how much the rest of the Allied nations sacrificed in WWII.

P.S. It might also be noted that Americans, like all other nations, did not enter the wars of the 20th century primarily because they were interested in fighting for the “liberty and freedom of other peoples.”  Those justifications followed once the country was already involved.  In the process of fighting for our own national interests, we also happened to be defending the cause of the “liberty and freedom of other peoples,” but had we not been provoked and had our government not already been so eager to intervene America would not have done much in the way of fighting on behalf of others’ freedom.  The reasons given for our involvement in the world wars were those of self-defense and retaliation, just as other nations were technically fulfilling their treaty obligations to allied states or fighting in self-defense as well.

While I’m on an anti-Brownback theme, I noticed a bit of election-year pandering by Sen. Whole Life.  Brownback voted for the Ensign amendment to the appropriation bill for the State Department.  The amendment eliminates a small rise in U.N. peacekeeping funding.  Personally, I think this amendment is just fine.  What is a little surprising is that Brownback, the champion of Darfur, would vote to weaken proposed funding for U.N. peacekeeping when a new peacekeeping mission has been authorised for Darfur.  It isn’t really that surprising when you consider that no Republican presidential candidate wants to be seen voting for increasing U.S. funding of U.N. operations when he has primaries that he wants to win.  Nation-building and peacekeeping may be all the rage in certain limited circles on the right, but rank-and-file Republicans don’t care for them and they really don’t like the U.N.  The amusing thing is that Brownback has voted the right way this time, but his career of internationalist activism and “bleeding-heart conservatism” will still be held against him.  Given how poorly he’s doing overall, he might as well have voted against the amendment and remained true to his sappy foreign policy vision.

Ross noted approvingly that Sam Brownback once again argued for his three-way “soft partition” plan at the debate yesterday, and followed up here.  Well, yes, Brownback did that, but then he has done this at virtually every debate since the campaign started.  That would mean, as a matter of making a “contribution” to the debate about future Iraq policy, that Brownback has apparently won every debate this year for lack of meaningful competition.  You don’t need to be an enthusiast for this year’s debate formats or a Brownback critic to question this assessment.  Tommy Thompson also made similar “contributions” to the debate about political strategy. His “contributions” included calling for impossible things to be done (Maliki should call a vote on the U.S. presence! provincial governments! they should share oil revenues!) without giving any explanation of how any of these things would happen.    

Along with Joe Biden, Sam Brownback is one of the main proponents of “soft partition” and has been since the beginning of the year.  He flirted with Sen. Warner’s modified “surge” plan, which earned him no end of grief from the jingo platoons of the blog and talk radio right (“don’t embolden the enemy!” they cried), and he was even confused by some with someone who marked the beginning of the Great Antiwar Republican Crack-up.  The reactions to Brownback’s very minimal moves away from the administration’s position do tell us how miserable the state of the debate inside the GOP is, but they also draw our attention to the superficiality of the proposals Brownback has endorsed.  I mention these things because it has been my impression that Sam Brownback’s Iraq proposals have been concerned with positioning Brownback as one who can be critical of the way the war is being waged without having to explain why his proposals would achieve the goal of “victory” that he has declared to be necessary.  I get the impression that he has embraced “soft partition,” just as he dabbled with Sen. Warner’s “Anbar, not Baghdad” mini-“surge,” because he would like to say that he does not support the status quo and instead supports some other unworkable scheme whose merits he cannot actually explain.  If a united Iraq has been the fetish of the administration, a federalised Iraq has become the fetish of “realists” and centrist Democrats alike.  There is no sense that those arguing for a federal or partition solution can say why their “solution” is going to stabilise Iraq.  If one of the fears of the anti-withdrawal crowd is that the country will collapse into chaos and warlordism, nothing in a federalising or partition plan prevents this, and indeed any partition, whether “soft” or “hard,” will encourage the centrifugal forces already unleashed in the country.  (Incidentally, the “Awakening” and the arming of Sunni insurgents are also contributing to centrifugal tendencies in the name of pacifying Iraq; what they are doing is setting up nicely, well-armed enclaves of people who have even less incentive to collaborate with other Iraqi groups than before.)  Supporters of “soft partition” support it for the same reasons the ISG report received support–it is something different!  It is a change!  So, you will pardon me if I find Brownback’s “contributions” underwhelming as usual. 

On a slightly related question of allegedly antiwar Republican Senators who are not, in fact, against the war, can I just say how strange I find Steve Clemons’ enthusiasm for Chuck Hagel?  Of course, I find anyone’s enthusiasm for Chuck Hagel to be very odd, but it is always stranger coming from such a vocal opponent of the war.  I might expect David Broder to lavish praise on Chuck Hagel’s willingness to “transcend” partisanship, but I still expect a little more from foreign policy experts.  Mr. Clemons notes that Hagel is probably retiring and will not fight another election.  This is more bad news for the GOP (Nebraska does not actually have much of a recent record of voting Republicans into the Senate), but I confess that I don’t see what it is that the Senate will be losing that is so invaluable with respect to foreign policy.  This is someone who, in his time in office, never saw an intervention that he didn’t like, even when he saw all of the potential problems that might arise from it.  His prescience about problems in Iraq in 2002, rather than making him seem wise and insightful to me, underscores just how irresponsible and conventional the man is when it came time for him to cast a vote.  From the perspective of a war opponent, Hagel’s retirement and likely replacement by a Democrat would make it that much more possible for the Senate majority to have enough votes to push for some real change in policy. 

Hagel has talked a good game at times, but consider this strange remark from Clemons:

Hagel was the boldest in my view in fighting George W. Bush on the war.

When exactly was he fighting Mr. Bush on the war?  When he voted for the authorisation?  When he gave his little speech about shoe-sellers?  I am genuinely mystified at this idea that Hagel has been some great champion of the resistance to Mr. Bush.  He has proved to be something of an annoyance to the administration, but that’s it.

A couple years ago I was discussing the question of Kosovo independence with a friend of mine (yes, this is what I talk about in my spare time), and I submitted that it was likely that an independent Kosovo would, sooner or later, be faced with Serbian military action.  He was skeptical that the Serbs would seriously contemplate such a course, but I thought it was a distinct possibility, and it is becoming only too likely.  Really, it is inconceivable how it could be otherwise, given the symbolic, historical and cultural importance of Kosovo to Serbs.  Given the significance that pious Orthodox believers attach to the death of Tsar-Martyr Lazar and the non-negotiable claims to the territory that Serbian nationalists have, no Serbian government could accede to the detachment of Kosovo even if that government were inclined to do so (and the current one is not).  The demand for Kosovo independence by the “international community” is obviously an outrageous one, an extraordinary example of meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign state in contravention of all of the rules by which the so-called “community” is supposed to be governed.  (There is a bad precedent for it in the separation of East Timor, which was an unwise move at the time and which created a scarcely viable ward of the “international community” whose example can only encourage the numerous separatists inside Indonesia, and repeating the error of Timor would be even more dangerous in a region where there is a very live Albanian irredentist movement.)  Kosovo independence also has potential for reigniting or exacerbating separatist battles around the world and serving as a precedent for revising territorial boundaries based on ethnic demographic change and majoritarian self-determination (something that might be of a little direct concern to us since Calderon declared that wherever there is a Mexican Mexico is also there).  The post-war international settlement has largely held because the major powers have not lent their support to revanchist, revisionist and irredentist political movements and have not tried to back up irredentist claims with their own power.  In the Balkans, this has not been the case.  Do the major powers really want to unleash another round of upheavals in the Balkans like those of the 1912-1923 and 1990-1995 periods?  If the Western powers do, they will pursue the reckless course on which they have been embarked in the drive to make Kosovo independent.