You don’t need to be Dr Strangelove to think that striking Iran would be better than letting it go nuclear. ~James Forsyth

No, you could be John McCain or Hillary Clinton.  It is debatable whether their states of mind would be much of an improvement over Strangelove.

Arnaud de Borchgrave had this item in his latest:

A ranking Swiss official, speaking privately, said, “Anyone with a modicum of experience in the Middle East knows that any bombing of Iran would touch off at the very least regional instability and what could be an unmitigated disaster for Western interests.”

This is the crucial point–anyone with a modicum of experience.  Of course, none of the major candidates for President really has this, and the foreign policy advisors whom the major candidates are consulting seem to have had a pretty appalling record when it comes to policies they have supported in that region.

Supporters of Sen. Larry Craig with the American Land Rights Association are calling for a boycott of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport.

The Battle Ground (Washington) based association says airport police who arrested the senator in a men’s room sex sting are responsible for weakening private property rights in the West. Craig is a Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. ~Seattle P-I

And I thought I had trouble when I was a kid with people who couldn’t spell my last name properly.  This is just bizarre.  Good to know that the Chavistas are tackling the crucial problems of the day.

Via The Plank

His announcement is something strange to behold.  He tells us that he thinks that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are “not outdated.”  Well, that’s a relief.  Rehashed Reaganisms follow.  He is in favour of low taxes, free markets and life.  I’m glad that he’s running a “different kind of campaign,” as I might otherwise have difficulty detecting the new and interesting angle that Fred brings.  Much of the ad is Fred rattling off his resume, which doesn’t make much sense (people already know that he is on Law & Order!).  The entire thing feels like a mock-up, as if Fred will come out the next day to say that it was all just a big joke at our expense, or maybe a new kind of reality entertainment.  He then brings in the meaningless pablum about unity that you’ve probably already seen.  And why does the man shake his head as if he’s having some sort of mild seizure?  Isn’t he an actor?  Can’t he deliver a recorded speech better than this?  More unity babble follows.  All in all, I don’t think it’s going to satisfy very many people who have been waiting patiently for the start of his campaign.  As for me, I just find the entire thing to be hilarious.

P.S. The announcement video is quite long for an online announcement at roughly 15 minutes.  He just keeps talking.  I think Mike Gravel’s YouTube video of the campfire was shorter. 

P.P.S. He bobs his head around all the time.  It’s very distracting.  In his other public appearances, he hasn’t done much of this.

Since he has never imputed bad faith or shabby motives to his opponents, I guess this Will Wilkinson post really puts Ezra Klein in his place.  Oh, wait…never mind.

Concerning the specific dispute over why respectable economists routinely put their arguments on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page, I don’t think that either Klein’s incredulity or Wilkinson’s mockery gets anywhere near the real answer.  It isn’t a question of credible people lending support to a “laughable ideology” or credible people who are ideologically inclined towards the paper’s editorial views publishing in a comfortable venue.  Prominent, respectable economists submit articles to the WSJ op-ed page because the paper is one of the most widely-circulated national newspapers whose main focus is reporting on business and finance.  A huge percentage of WSJ readers, whose politics are happily not always that of the immigration-cum-imperialism crowd who write the paper’s editorials, is made up of people who make their living working for corporations or investing in the market (or both) and who want to have informed commentary about developments in the economy.  Economists publish their op-eds in the WSJ to reach an audience that is going to be interested in what they have to say.  And supposedly clever schemes of building up the empire of the supply-siders really has nothing to do with it.

But his supposed “visit to Anbar Province” was in some ways even more cynical — and accepted even more gullibly by the media — than his June 2006 visit to Baghdad. There, at least, he actually set foot on Iraqi soil.

This time, Bush visited Al-Asad Air Base — an enormous, heavily fortified American outpost for 10,000 troops that while technically in Anbar Province in fact has a 13-mile perimeter keeping Iraq — and Iraqis — at bay. Bush never left the confines of the base, known as ” Camp Cupcake,” for its relatively luxurious facilities, but nevertheless announced: “When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like.” ~Dan Froomkin

Thank goodness we have the Kagans of the world to inform us of the profound significance of such events, since we might otherwise mistake them for absurd PR stunts designed to deceive and mislead the public (as usual).

Why don’t we have more politicians like Saakashvili? ~Andrew Sullivan

Because God is merciful and does not want to punish us with such a terrible scourge?

I jest, but only slightly.  I don’t dislike Saakashvili just because of his strange admiration for Stalin (apparently de rigueur for Georgian nationalists these days), his belligerent posturing, his lickspittle relationship to Washington or the calamity of a “reformist” government that he runs.  His “national” movement is also a creature of the Open Society Institute, that Soros-created monstrosity, and he is a close chum with the likes of both McCain and Soros.  For that matter, he seems to be one of those Westernised people who go back home and try to impose foreign models on their home countries.  Something about these people bothers me at a visceral level.  Did I forget to mention the part about his wife saying how he is like Beria?  She said, in a moment reminiscent of something Elizabeth Uhrquhart might have said, ” I think my husband is the right person to frighten people.”  Yes, why can’t we have more politicians like Saakashvili?

I have also seen a member of his government in action at a recent conference on the Caucasus, and let me just say that I was not impressed.  His Minister for Education had come to tell us about all the wonderful new reforms instituted by the government.  One of the audience members, herself of Georgian descent and a self-declared friend of reform, challenged the minister with a question about the closing down of rural schools under Saakashvili’s education reforms.  She asked very simply when the government intended to reopen these schools.  The minister responded with the kind of dismissive character attack that is only too familiar, accusing the questioner of being a sneaky admirer of the old system under Shevardnadze, which was, of course, complete nonsense.  The conversation deteriorated from there.  Nonetheless, Georgian government propaganda had been delivered, and her job was done.  Why can’t we also have an Education Secretary as condescending and oblivious as Georgia has?

When I first saw this, I was inclined to say, “Well, at least something good has come out of this dreadful mess.”  Alex Massie (via Ross) has saved me from making the mistake of thinking that anything good could really come from the Iraq war.  His post also serves as an important reminder of something that American observers of foreign politics should always heed: domestic political concerns are almost always more important to people in other countries than is U.S. foreign policy (which happens to be true of American voters as well).  We will generally not understand political events in other parts of the world if we try to understand them through such dim, cracked lenses as “pro-/anti-American” or “pro-/anti-Iraq war” and the like.  (Can I tell you how tired I am of stories that try to spin Gordon Brown as a vigorously pro-American Atlanticist?)  Contrary to our own impression of ourselves, other people really aren’t that preoccupied with us and our wars, even when their governments are involved in one of our misadventures.

While listening to Eli Lake busily distorting and lying about Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt and the argument in their original essay, it occurred to me that they never made anything like the main claim to which he objects so strenuously and which, according to Lake, make it perfectly appropriate to associate them with the likes of David Duke.  (You have the admire the gall of someone actively engaged in using the guilt by association tactic accusing other people of McCarthyism and “John Birch Society” tactics.)  Becoming ever more agitated, Lake continually repeated that they were accusing certain individuals of being “foreign agents,” which is what I would call a lie, since anyone can read the essay and see that it makes no such claims.  The essay does make the claim at one point that AIPAC is “a de facto agent for a foreign government,” which a perusal of AIPAC’s own website would tend to support to the extent that it very explicitly lobbies for the interests of Israel.     

First, on the terminology of “the Lobby,” the authors wrote:

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.

So it is a catch-all term to refer to diverse individuals and organisations, and does not refer to a “Jewish lobby” or conspiracy of Jews in high places or any of the other mischaracterisations that critics have made.  Those who say that the essay says any of these things either have not read the essay or are out to deceive. 

Defining “the Lobby” further, they write:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy [bold mine-DL]: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.

So it is an interest group, or an umbrella term to refer to a number of groups all working towards broadly shared goals.  It is engaged in a legitimate activity, at which it excels.  For some reason, this sends people into apoplectic fits.

What does “the Lobby” do?  They write:

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy. 

All of this is pretty uncontestable.  This is what pro-Israel groups do, and they make no bones about what they are doing.  Christians United for Israel, for instance, is quite explicit about its goals.  I think the name gives it away. 

On the role of “the Lobby” in pushing for the war in Iraq, they write:

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical [bold mine-DL]. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

Of course, Zelikow did say something close to this, in that he did acknowledge that a likely target of any Iraqi WMD arsenal would be Israel, which is to state a fairly common view.  Are we really supposed to believe that Israeli security was not a critical factor in deciding whether or not to go to war against Iraq?  That is what the critics of Mearsheimer/Walt would have you believe.  You are supposed to believe that Mr. Bush, who has on the whole aligned Washington with Israel more than any other modern President, made such a decision without Israeli security having much to do with it at all.   

Something I have never understood about the hysterical reaction to this claim that war advocates supported the invasion because of expected advantages for Israel is simply this: why should pro-Israel Americans regard this claim as either false or malicious?  If Israel really is a strategically valuable, reliable ally, a fellow democracy to which we have such deep obligations and all the rest of it, surely its security would be of concern to our government and to citizens who support the connection with Israel.  The supposed threat from Iraq would have been greater to Israel than to the United States–this much is common sense.  You would expect close intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and an allied state in the months prior to a major military action against a nearby state, and I think you would be shocked if it did not take place.  Yet any suggestion that U.S. officials and activists believed this and acted accordingly is considered equivalent to accusing someone of treason.  That this reaction is a bit unhinged is putting it mildly.  

One point of the essay, of course, is to deny that Israel is a strategically valuable, reliable ally.  The authors argue that it is neither very valuable nor reliable.  Once you reject this assumption (which is really what it is), what used to appear right and proper might now seem wasteful and pointless.  A close U.S.-Israel connection might seem desirable if pro-Israel forces were correct about the merits and mutual benefits of the relationship.  The essay argues that they are not correct, and says instead that the connection is damaging to U.S. interests.  You might think that supporters of the invasion would hotly contest the basic idea that the Iraq war is contrary to U.S. interests, and perhaps some have done so, but unless you think the war actually is very bad for America (and it is) there would be little reason to express concern about the role of “the Lobby” in promoting said war. 

Honestly, I don’t quite understand how there can so much fuss about this essay, since the role of pro-Israel activists in pushing for this war is no different from Anglophiles pushing for entry into WWI and WWII or the Hearst machine and American imperialists pushing for war with Spain.  They were not “agents of a foreign power.”  They were horribly, horribly mistaken Americans who were horribly mistaken because they had become too attached to the cause of another country (whether England or Cuba) or conflated the interests of two different nations.  Critics of Mearsheimer/Walt claim that there is an accusation of bad faith, but the essay makes no such charge.  On the contrary, the frightening thing about pro-Israel activists today or Anglophiles in the past is their utterly sincere conviction that the interests and destinies of America and another nation are bound up together.  The dangerous thing about them is that they are typically not arguing in bad faith or acting cynically.  What makes them dangerous is that they are absolutely convinced that they are doing right by America by doing right by the other country.  It is their judgement about what is right for America that is so deeply flawed.  That is the point.  Naturally, they dislike this claim, as anyone might object to being characterised in this way, but what is never said in the essay is that any of the people in “the Lobby” are “agents of a foreign power.”   

Rather crucial for understanding this whole question is recognising that the perceptions of what is in Israel’s interest by pro-Israel advocates in this country are sometimes horribly wrong.  There were pro-Israel, pro-war pundits who believed that Israel’s position would be greatly improved by the overthrow of Hussein and said so in 2002-03 (“the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad,” and all that rot), and instead the aftermath for Israel has proven to be almost as harmful as the post-invasion has been for us.  The expansion of Iranian power that has resulted has been detrimental to Israeli security, and this was brought home by the war last year.  (Of course, this reality feeds anti-Iranian jingoism in this country, but it is difficult to see how Israeli security would be actually aided by spreading the war to Iran.)  It is also important to distinguish between what American pro-Israel activists are doing on behalf of what they think is right for Israel and what any particular Israeli government desires.  These may coincide from time to time, as they tend to do on policies relating to the Palestinians and the settlements in the territories, but there seems to be no question that the most hard-line pro-Israel activists are far more aggressive and militaristic towards Israel’s neighbours than people who actually live in Israel can afford to be.  Many Israelis are interested in the possibility of negotiating with Syria for a peace settlement, while for many pro-Israel activists here the idea is madness.   

P.S.  Early 20th century Easterners interested in promoting Chinese interests and connections with China also stand out in this long, bad tradition of boosters for other countries who wind up plunging us into unnecessary wars.