The evidence also shows great, gaping weaknesses. Giuliani’s penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now. ~Amanda Ripley

Hm…secrecy, loyalty rather than merit and hyperbolic rhetoric–sound like anyone else we know?

I will have to second Josh Patashnik’s post, in which he replies to Mr. Krikorian:

I’m going to offer the rival prediction that if and when the Iranian government falls, there will be no mass conversion to Zoroastrianism [bold mine-DL], no widespread beheading of Christians, and Iran will…remain Muslim.

The point about Zoroastrianism is basically guaranteed, since Zoroastrianism today is unique among the ancient world religions that originated in the Near East in that its adherents actively discourage conversion.  Also, it has not had any noticeable or significant presence in the land of its birth for many centuries.  Quixotic attempts by the Pahlavis to consciously revive pre-Islamic Iranian traditions and names were, shall we say, not wildly popular, associated as they were with a rather brutal dictatorial regime.  (For that matter, rampant Baha’i revivals are also unlikely, since the Baha’i faith hardly seized the imaginations of Iranians during the rule of the Pahlavis.)    

This reminds me of two things that would be widely considered major drawbacks to the separationist plan.  The first would be that an embargoed, isolated Islamic world (were such a thing possible) would almost certainly have a massive backlash against the native Christian populations, and the refugees we have seen fleeing Iraq for Syria would soon be fleeing the entire Levant for Cyprus and points west.  The second would be that it would make Israel’s position totally untenable in the long term.  No one would confuse me with an enthusiastic booster of the U.S.-Israel connection, to be sure, but the likely extinction of Judaism andChristianity in their native lands following the implementation of such a plan would be an unacceptable price for whatever “strategic goals” such an arrangement might serve. 

Fundamentally, the hope of this plan is that Muslims will judge the merits of Islam based on earthly successes and failures.  Though I cannot claim to know the minds of so many different kinds of Muslims throughout the world, my guess is that people raised up in a tradition that teaches them a theodicy in which trials and rewards are God’s will are not going to conclude that political tyranny or disastrous misrule are evidence that Islam needs to be fundamentally changed or abandoned all together.  It didn’t happen for the entirety of Ottoman rule, and it isn’t likely to happen in the future.  On the contrary, the woes of this world will make traditional Muslims all the more likely to turn to their deity for justice and mercy in direct proportion to the extent of the misery experienced.

If push comes to shove, Mr. Bush will face Moscow all alone. There is a great deal of dissent in Europe, from Madrid to Athens to Bucharest and Bratislava, but not even those Europeans who are nominally pro-independence—notably, the Germans—would sacrifice a single day’s supply of natural gas over Albanian claims. By contrast, this is, for Serbia, an existential issue and, for Russia, a litmus test of her ability to be a great power once again.

The most important reason the United States should not support Kosovo’s independence is and always has been cultural and civilizational; but trying to explain that to the chief executive who is fanatically supportive of a blanket amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens in the United States is as futile as trying to reform Islam.

George W. Bush has painted himself into a tight corner in the Balkans, and he will get a bloody nose if he does not relent. That is bad news for the church-burning Albanian Muslims of Kosovo, and bad news for their heroin-financed lobby in Washington, but it is very good news for America and the civilized world. ~Srdja Trifkovic

Dr. Trifkovic’s article is simply excellent, and it sums up all of the strongest arguments against Kosovo’s independence.

But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted, and it played a role in the Soviet advances across the Third World during the rest of the 1970s – from Ethiopia and Mozambique to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, with various other proxy wars thrown in for good measure. ~Ross Douthat

Well, this may be a bit of quibbling, but something close to half of Indochina/southeast Asia (Thailand and Burma) did not turn communist, and instead of turning red Indonesia under Suharto became a (rather nasty) anticommunist bulwark and Malaysia was not seriously affected.  The Pacific Rim allies were basically fine after Vietnam.  For domino theory to have been right, many more dominoes would have had to be knocked over.  For all the warnings of ever-advancing communism, communism acquired those strategic gems of Cambodia and Laos and then contested for the various backwaters (no offense, Nicaragua) mentioned by Ross.  Having just detached China from the Soviets, America could reasonably afford to risk setbacks in such vitally important places as Mozambique.  (One problem of withdrawing from Iraq is that we have yet to have a foreign policy crew interested in or capable of pursuing anything like a China-style detachment of a formerly hostile regime.) 

Fights over influence in Latin America and Africa were not new in the post-Vietnam era (see Egypt, Zaire, Angola), and Soviet-backed Cuban mischief overseas had already been going on for a while.  Soviet aggression became much greater in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.  At the time, that was a huge loss.  It was the failure of the Carter Administration to cope with the challenge in Iran that helped embolden the Soviets into invading Afghanistan (similarly, it was Carter’s failure that damaged the Democrats’ reputation on foreign policy leadership immeasurably more than anything related to ending the war in Vietnam, contrary to the popular myth circulated by some GOP talking heads).  A comparable Iran-like setback, a really serious blow to our strategic interests, would be an expressly jihadist revolution in Pakistan, which would make any consequences of an Iraq withdrawal as a matter of U.S. strategic interests look small and irrelevant.  Indeed, as a matter of U.S. strategic interests–and it is this, and not, I’m afraid, the casualty count that traditionally governs great power foreign policy–the consequences of an Iraq withdrawal will be damaging but hardly devastating.  In Realpolitik, the loss of a Cambodia or a Laos is not all that important.  (Someone will say that Iraq and many of its neighbours are different and much more important, to which I say: re-read Luttwak.)  Since domino theory was meant to describe the strategic consequences of the failure to contain communism in southeast Asia by military intervention, it does not say much for domino theory that every strategically important country in Far East that should have turned communist did not actually turn.   

Domino theory related to communism was an updated version of old British paranoia dating to the Great Game: today the Russians have Tashkent, tomorrow they will have Delhi!  To the extent that the British were fairly crazy to worry about the Tsar’s armies marching over the Khyber Pass and across northern India to Delhi and through Baluchistan to the sea, the domino theory was also pretty crazy.  In its time, it was also dreadfully respectable, the sort of serious thinking that foreign policy intellectuals love. 

It was also the product of ignoring a Kennan-like approach to international affairs and accepting that the enemy was actually driven by a transnational ideology that could traverse boundaries of nationality and culture without difficulty and which would present a united, pro-Soviet front against the West.  The detachment of China, and the Sino-Vietnamese war that followed shortly after the fall of the South were proof that this idea was wrong in its core assumptions about international communism.  It was proof that Kennan’s attention to nationalism and nationalist policies in understanding communist states was the fundamentally correct analysis of how these states acted.  Wild-eyed notions of universal communism spreading around the world like wildfire (or was it fire in the minds of men?) once the fire was lit somewhere proved to be wrong, because they vastly overestimated the appeal of transnational ideology when compared to the much stronger draw of nationalism.  Having mistaken nationalist revolutionaries for true-believing commies, domino theorists could never grasp the implications that the domino theory could not happen in the real world because of the barriers created by ethnic, cultural and religious difference.  There is comparably mistaken thinking today inasmuch as those predicting the worst following a U.S. withdrawal believe that some unified global jihadism exists and will sweep all before it.  Having mistaken the particular interests of various state and non-state actors for a more or less unified jihadist (or, God help us, Islamofascist) front, these people see disastrous post-withdrawal outcomes that are unlikely to occur.  They think we are in an “ideological struggle.”  In fact, we are not, or at least it is not of the kind they are describing.  Their analysis is necessarily going to be flawed as a result.

But they cannot so easily dismiss The Economist, an avowedly conservative voice that is among the oldest and most respected periodicals in the world. ~Joe Conason

Conason refers to The Economist‘s leader on the pro-Democratic political trends in the country.  The leader lays out a compelling case that the country is trending towards the Democrats and, in certain ways, does seem to be headed leftwards.  The merits of the article speak for themselves, and the magazine’s political leanings are really beside the point.  But this description of The Economist is just absurd. 

The Economist is so “avowedly conservative” that it endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and has long maintained a position as a ‘wet’ British liberal magazine, and in many ways it has become much wetter over the last 15 years.  If Portillo and Blair could have a baby together, its name would be Economist.  Its politics are globalist, internationalist and Europhile, its economics are right of center in a pro-corporation, pro-globalisation mode, its social views are squishy center-left with hints of libertarianism, and it is conventionally multiculti on questions of immigration and diversity.  It favours military interventions for both humanitarian and supposed international security, it is positively exuberant in its support for democracy promotion and when it comes to the Near East it is skeptical about the virtues of untrammeled Israeli nationalism.  (In spite of much of this, it is still probably one of the better international news magazines around, if only because its competition is minimal.)  In neither the American nor British contexts would someone say that The Economist is “avowedly conservative,” unless we are speaking of it in comparison to Le Monde. 

But don’t take my word for it.  In their own words:

What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? “It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper’s historical position.” That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage.

They describe themselves as latter-day classical liberals, which they are to some degree.

If you look through James Dobbins’ article in Foreign Affairs, you will look high and low for any admission that policy experts, think tanks and public intellectuals dropped the ball.  Almost everyone else in Washington comes in for criticism, and “the entire nation” receives some generic blame, but the policy wonks and pundits escape all censure.

Indeed, you can argue that over the past month, Obama has been shaping the foreign policy debate for the Democrats — and getting the best of the arguments. ~David Ignatius

You could argue that, if you didn’t know anything about foreign policy.

I appreciate Mark Krikorian’s fair description of my post criticising this idea of his about how to combat and defeat “radical Islam.”  We are still in disagreement about his proposal, but let me say a couple of things about his response.  He wrote:

Islam will change, but only (or at least sooner) if we pursue some variation of what Larry Auster calls “separationism.” “Separationism” is the isolation of Islam from the rest of the world through military action, restrictions on immigration, and other means, presumably including a radically more aggressive search for alternative automobile fuels.

I grant Mr. Krikorian that Islam will change, as any religion with so many adherents spread across the globe would inevitably change over time, and it has changed before.  The first difficulty is that certain kinds of Islam already have changed in the past, and many of the changes wrought by revivalism and Salafism have been to take Islam in quite the opposite direction of the “moderate” Islam Mr. Krikorian envisions emerging in the aftermath of this apparently militarised embargo of the Islamic world.  As a kind of glorified sanctions regime, it would have many of the adverse, undesirable effects of a sanctions regime.  Militarised embargoes are also not generally known to help bring down their targets, but rather reinforce the more hard-line and radical elements inside a country while the population is cut off from the outside world and forced to fall back on whatever the local authorities tell them.     

I think the separationism described here (with which I do not entirely disagree, at least as far immigration is concerned) would certainly cause a change in the Islamic world.  It is not clear to me, however, that the change would necessarily be the kind Mr. Krikorian hopes to see.  If such an isolation of the Islamic world from the West were possible, the isolation of that world from the rest would never be complete in any case, as large parts of the rest of the world are not interested in isolating themselves from the Islamic world.  India cannot isolate itself from that world without cutting itself in two and closing itself off from markets for its labour.  China would probably opportunistically try to fill any void left by Westerners.  A policy of isolation combined with military action would seem to combine the worst of both worlds, since it would reinforce the most violent instincts among jihadis and build up sympathy for them while rejecting any alternative connection.  It would be our Cuba policy writ large, but with an added refusal to take in refugees.  I suppose the idea here is to create sufficient internal pressures within the Islamic world such that something gives way in dramatic fashion, but if the end result would be to encourage internecine strife inside this isolated Islamic world it seems as if this would simply strengthen the worst elements and produce an Islamic world in far worse shape, politically, socially and economically, than exists today.  Everything that fuels jihadism would remain, and the indigenous forces that oppose it would probably have been swept away and purged in the process.

There’s an ideagoing around that calls for Maliki’s (political) ouster are bad, and that Maliki is being made into a scapegoat.  I disagree with this latter claim, since a scapegoat has to have a plausible chance of ridding a people of its sins, and I don’t think Maliki is up to the job.  I certainly agree that replacing Maliki with another member from his party or the old SCIRI would hardly improve matters, since it is the sectarian nature of the government and its close ties to Sadr (who has now abandoned Maliki to the wolves) that have compromised it from the beginning. 

Talking about dropping the Maliki government is premised on a mistaken idea that the supposedly conciliatory legislative agenda that has been stalled can actually be pushed through the Iraqi parliament, provided that we just find the right political helmsman to take the wheel of government.  This is the mistaken view that the political situation in Iraq is salvageable in a form agreeable to Washington.  It is the same kind of mistake that led Washington to endorse Maliki’s ministry in the first place.  As far as it goes, forcing Maliki out would help some American pols score some points in the “blame the Iraqis, don’t blame me” game, but it would achieve little else.  It would also help the White House by providing the President with a new pretext to say that “we must give the Iraqis more time.”  A new prime minister would probably be followed by a change of other ministers, and there would be some delay before the government was ready to try to do much of anything.  Those complaining about the slowness of political reconciliation would actually find themselves frustrated by the even slower movement as the new PM got his act together (assuming that he did).  In the end, Maliki is not likely to have a successor any more capable of or willing to foster political reconciliation, since the major Shi’ite parties still thrive on communal conflict and the promise of continued Shi’ite predominance in government.  The deep flaws of the current Iraqi government are a good argument not for Maliki quitting his job, but rather for us to quit Iraq.