Clearly Bush’s people were not watching enough Yes, Minister, or they would have known already that it is the bureaucracy’s job to govern and the politician’s job to get elected:

Defiance of Bush’s mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.

“It’s our policy,” the official said.

“What do you mean?” the bureaucrat asked.

“Read the president’s speech,” the official said.

“Policy is not what the president says in speeches,” the bureaucrat replied. “Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings.”

Using the word “imperial” to describe what great powers have been doing for decades pretty much strips the term of any concrete meaning. ~Daniel Drezner

This doesn’t seem to make very much sense, since great powers usually are imperialistic.  This is part of how they operate as “great powers”: by dominating other powers and using force when they deem it necessary to enforce their will. 

But what, after all, do we mean by imperialism?  Here‘s one definition that sounds right to me:

The policy of extending a nation’s authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.

There is something of a technical debate out there over whether you can be a hegemonist without being an imperialist.  Empire usually implies sovereignty and direct control (people inevitably think of Rome or the little pink bits on the map representing British mastery), while hegemony need only imply supremacy and the ability to dictate policy to satellites.  Hegemony is supposed to be more morally acceptable because it is simply “leadership” and supposedly not coercive–the hegemon’s lackeys are willing servants, rather than subjects.  In practice, the policies of an empire and a hegemony are often so similar that the distinction is one of rhetorical presentation: to be an empire-builder today is considered unjust, but to be a hegemon “expanding freedom’s frontiers” is basically fine. 

However, if the definition of imperialism is not limited to direct control and administration of territories outside the Home Country, and it seems that it does not have to be, supporting policies that shore up U.S. economic and political hegemony could be very fairly described as imperialist.  (Never mind that we do actually wield what is effectively direct control over territories overseas in a quasi-colonial relationship with the locals.)  Indeed, the policies of Ethiopia and Eritrea towards each other and the surrounding region could also be described this way, especially since the conflict between them is centered around territorial acquisition and regional dominance.  At its most basic meaning, for a state to be imperialistic is for it to seek control and domination over others and to be willing to use violence to maintain that control and domination.  American empire is fairly unique today in that the U.S. is the only great power that states publicly that the entire globe should follow American “leadership” and that all policies that reinforce that “leadership” (i.e., superpower hegemonic status) are justifiable and serve the greater good.  

Obviously, the foreign policy establishment that has crafted and implemented the policies that have created and preserved this hegemony are dedicated to its continued preservation, which is Greenwald’s point.  Obviously, those who object in principle to this hegemonic status and regard it as the bane of this country are not to be found inside the “foreign policy community.”  Drezner’s counterargument that someone such as Scowcroft opposed the Iraq war is not at all persuasive.  Most foreign policy “realists” who objected to the Iraq war did so for pragmatic, technical reasons.  Above all, they feared that the war would weaken our ability to act as a superpower in other parts of the globe and that it would contribute to the decline of our status as the hegemon.  Scowcroft is reliably internationalist and has no qualms about U.S. hegemony in the region and in the world–he opposed the war at least partly because he wants to keep the hegemony going for as long as possible.  Those of us from left and right who regard this as deeply wrong are not fooled by such a person’s opposition to any particular conflict.  Obama always opposed the war in Iraq, but has demonstrated in all his foreign policy speeches that he is a true hegemonist.  Like the opposition between rival British advocates of a ‘forward’ posture and an approach of ‘masterly inactivity’ with respect to Central Asia, the opposition between antiwar internationalists and prowar internationalists is simply a disagreement over how to best secure the continued dominance over the region.  What Greenwald describes is most definitely hegemonism, and to the extent that hegemonism is simply a kind of imperialism Drezner’s reply on this point does not hold up very well.

Since most nations gain independence in armed struggle of one sort or another, armed struggle in which some civilians inevitably suffer, then by the “logic” of the ranteurs about “Naqba Denial” the existence of all those states should also be deemed catastrophes. But Israel alone is singled out for condemnation. ~Steven Plaut

Is it really?  Not by everyone.  The Greeks and Armenians remember their experiences with the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of their people for the sake of an ethnically homogenous nation-state in much the same way, or in even stronger terms: as the Megali Katastrofi or as the Tseghaspanut’yun respectively.  The Turkish government goes out of its way in the case of the Armenians to actively deny genocide and prosecutes those of its citizens who even hint that the extermination of the Armenians was planned and deliberate (as, of course, it was).  Naturally, any state that understands that its foundation lies on the graves of the innocent or is based on the forced expulsion or relocation of hundreds of thousands of civilians will be keen to ignore the record or deny the memory of these events.  Do such past crimes “delegitimise” the current state?  I don’t think so.  But the continued refusal to recognise the crimes for what they are is certainly not a legitimate method of defending a state against unreasonable or excessive attacks.   

Of course, the “inevitable” suffering of the civilian population during such conflicts is rather more inevitable when there is a plan of expulsion that results in massacres.  The final justifications in Plaut’s article, citing the far worse death tolls in the mayhem after the Partition or the ethnic cleansing and starvation of Germans after WWII, are typical diversionary moves.  Plaut does not, of course, care a whit about the German victims of these expulsions, nor would any attention be brought to their case except that the scale of suffering and devastation helps to make what happened to the Palestinians seem unimportant.  Rather than an old stand-by excuse that “lots of bad things happened in that war,” Plaut has offered a different excuse: “lots of worse things have happened in other wars, which means that these events are irrelevant.”  He can impugn the integrity of some (though not all) of the revisionists, but he cannot wish away evidence.

Via Ambinder, here’s an interesting bit of information culled from Mark Penn that relates nicely to this post:

There are 10 million Protestant Hispanics in the U.S. today. 90 percent of them adhere to a variant of Pentecostalism. It was this subgroup of Latinos who helped George W. Bush increase his margin among Hispanics in 2004 — “the percentage of Bush voters among Hispanic Catholics remained exactly the same.” Penn’s own surveys suggest that Protestant Latinos are largely values voters; Catholic Latinos are much more likely to respond to economic issues.

If the GOP wants to work Rovian electoral “magic” via bad immigration policy, they would need to get on the ball and begin bringing in Guatemalans by the hundreds of thousands, since Guatemala has become something like 30% Pentecostal.  They would also have to somehow manage to keep the non-Protestant Hispanics out.  The point is that most of the Hispanics coming here are not “natural” GOP voters, just as most of the Hispanic Catholics already here are not.

Michael reminds us of an excellent piece he did for TAC from an issue ago on one of my favourite foreign policy punching bags, Rick Santorum.  Here’s an excerpt:

After dipping gingerly into the differences between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam, Santorum concluded that Iran poses the greatest threat to the United States. In previous centuries, he explained, Shi’ite regimes had been at peace with the West [bold mine-DL]. But ever since Khomeini re-interpreted that tradition of Islam, Iran had been radicalized. “And so now we have Iran in a position to project power and to use Sunni-like theology, if you will…” he lowered his voice, “to conquer the world.”

After those last four words, you expect a laugh track to kick in, but it never comes [bold mine-DL]. Instead, the speech grinds on as Santorum warns of the “gathering storm” and draws parallels between our time and the late 1930s and early ’40s. Warning that America will face an array of exotic threats alone, Santorum begins to quote the June 1940 address of Winston Churchill to the British people in which the prime minister girded them for the coming battle of Britain. In the audio recording sold by Focus on the Family, as Santorum’s voice solemnly quiets, the ghostly crackle of Churchill’s original rises. Santorum closes by explaining that defeat means to “sink into the abyss of a new dark age.” Dobson emerges to speculate that this may be some of “the most prophetic work” his ministry has brought to its audience, saying, “Rick Santorum gets it. He may have been the finest senator we have had in many decades. He is part of the heritage of Winston Churchill.”

This bit about “Shi’ite regimes” being at peace with “the West” is curious, since it is not a very meaningful statement.  “Shi’ite regimes” in the early modern and modern period have been limited to the Zaydi imamate in Yemen (overthrown in 1962), the Safavids in Iran, the Qajars in pre-constitutional Iran, and (if you want to be generous in how you define the phrase) the interrupted rule of the Pahlavis in post-1920s Iran.  Except for the Zaydis and Safavids, who had fairly limited contact with the West, these regimes were at peace, or rather they were often under the thumb, of Western powers for all that time.  In any case, it was in the strategic interest of pre-WWI Iran to be friendly to European powers, since many of the Europeans shared with Iran a common enemy in the Ottomans.  Iran then effectively became a client of the British and Americans during WWII and afterwards until 1979, despite the brief attempt of the elected Iranian government to say differently. 

The point is simply that there is nothing inherently more peaceable or pro-Western about pre-radicalised Iranian Shi’ism or Shi’ism generally, but it is rather the relative distance and/or weakness of Iranian rulers in relation to the West that has determined the nature of the relationship.  Indeed, most pro-American regimes in the Near and Middle East are either nominally or are very seriously Sunni (which should apparently, by Santorum’s reckoning, make them more dangerous).  Meanwhile, one of the typically most pro-American populations is that of Iran, which might suggest that Khomeini’s radicalism did not sink in very deeply among most Iranians (thus casting some doubt, if any needed to be cast, on the world-conquering aspirations of the Iranians).  It would also suggest that it is the regime that determines hostility or good relations, and perhaps also that the sectarian affiliation of the regime may matter less in understanding its practical interests and goals.  In other words, don’t expect them to try to usher in the coming of the Mahdi, but focus instead on concrete strategic interests.  Santorum unfortunately badly fails here.

One of the most telling parts of Michael’s article is this line:

According to Santorum, the West must witness to Muslims, not for Christ but for Modernity.

It is important to remember the historic clash between Islam and Christendom, certainly, but it seems to me that an evangelising modernism of this kind is bound to fail.  The Islamic world already has modernised after a fashion, but the results have not been what apostles of Modernity would have expected or desired.  The character of modernisation, like that of a reformation, depends on the nature of the original thing being changed.  

Obviously, I regard Santorum’s obsession with Venezuela as bizarre, and his animosity towards Russia is lamentable and depressing.  More troubling is the degree to which Santorum personally embodies the horrible contradictions and compromises of what Joseph Bottum dubbed the “new fusionism.”  Not being a terribly great fan of the original, I was not very enthusiastic about the new version of fusionism, since I saw in it the inevitable marginalisation of social conservative concerns and the primacy of aggressive, militaristic foreign policy in the name of “moral clarity.”  This new fusionism was exactly what Santorum is now peddling: it is a fusion of, in Michael’s words, “neoconservative foreign policy and traditionalist social policy.”  It is an unholy alliance, if ever there was one.  The most troubling thing about Rick Santorum is that I think he is entirely in earnest and personally quite a decent man, which makes his support for these policy views all the more discordant and harder to understand. 

Here‘s a pretty thorough and compelling rebuttal not only of the reliability of the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed that has had war supporters swooning for weeks, but also of every report from visitors to the limited confines of secure facilities and the Green Zone.  Finer writes:

The Brookings pair, self-described in their Times op-ed as “two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq,” are also longtime backers of the invasion and the recent troop surge. Before the war Pollack wrote a book subtitled “The Case for Invading Iraq,” and he has found fodder for hope on every visit.

It goes without saying that everyone can, and in this country should, have an opinion about the war, no matter how much time the person has spent in Iraq, if any. But having left a year ago, I’ve stopped pretending to those who ask that I have a keen sense of what it’s like on the ground today. Similarly, those who pass quickly through the war zone should stop ascribing their epiphanies to what are largely ceremonial visits.

The question here is not one of honesty or careerism or bias, though a good part of the debate over the op-ed centered around whether or not the authors were spinning or distorting the “reality” of what they saw because of ideological or professional blindspots.  The question is whether anyone has the ability to learn much significant or valuable about what is happening in Iraq given the short time of the visits, the limited access to much of the country and the highly controlled atmosphere surrounding the visits.  The answer seems pretty clearly to be no. 

It is also telling just how desperate war supporters have become that they latched on to this misleading glimmer of positive news (which, of course, simply “confirmed” what they had supposedly “known” all along) with such zeal.        

Update: This report of a fairly significant battle outside Ramadi underscores how tenuous things are in precisely one of the areas highlighted by O’Hanlon and Pollack as secure.

Thomas Friedman discovers what opponents of the “surge” understoodmany, many months ago and still manages to make himself sound rather ridiculous in the process.

The fact is Hispanics are conservative on cultural issues, entrepreneurial on economics, and intensely patriotic. ~Fred Barnes

Which is why New Mexico has been predominantly Republican at the state and local level for 75 years, right?  Oh, wait, it’s been solidly Democratic for all that time.  How could that be?  It isn’t that New Mexican Hispanics are necessarily all that different from the description Barnes gives here (though it seems as if someone should point out what a grossly simplistic stereotype of an entire ethnicity this is), but that there is no necessary or obvious connection between these things and supporting the Republican Party.  First of all, being “conservative on cultural issues” is determined to a very great extent on what your own cultural identity is, and if you take pride in a distinct culture aside from, or alongside, a generic Anglo-American one you might very well be a cultural conservative and have entirely different attitudes towards a party that theoretically represents a different cultural conservatism.  “English only” and English as the official national language are usually thought of as culturally conservative positions of sorts, but they will not be greeted with much enthusiasm from many Hispanic voters. 

Leaving that problem aside, the logical connection is still very shaky.  Most Hispanics in this country are at least nominally Catholic, which would mean theoretically that they are “natural” supporters of the major (at least officially) pro-life, culturally conservative party, except that there is actually no necessary connection between being culturally conservative in private, family and community life and embracing a culturally conservative political agenda.  You can argue all you like that such people should support such an agenda, but they may find it unsuitable or undesirable to do so.  The GOP has been fighting to get a majority of the American Catholic vote for decades, and has enjoyed sporadic success–part of this is the result of GOP economic and social service policies that many Catholics find unappealing and undesirable, and part of this is the result of the diverse kinds of American Catholics out there.   

I am frequently reminded at my local Orthodox church that adherence to a traditional, liturgical, hierarchical, socially conservative church by no means leads you to support the GOP (and not just because the GOP’s practical support for social conservatism and traditional morality is all but nil).  At my church, you can usually spot the converts by their political conservatism and right-leaning party affiliations.  It is actually normal that more liturgical and catholic confessions would include people of widely varying political views, so there is no guarantee that belonging to a church that officially professes moral or social doctrines that are more consistent with cultural conservatism means that you are going to support a political expression of that conservatism.  The pro-immigration GOP view takes for granted that most immigrants are pious, hard-working family-centered people and that this makes them “natural” GOP voters.  Even assuming the first is true in most cases, the second does not follow at all.  There are three possible explanations for why it does not follow: either the voters do not see the GOP as being actually dedicated to protecting life, family, community and the like, or they are not basing their voting preferences on such things or they find any natural sympathy with a socially conservative agenda offset and overwhelmed by their negative reaction to economic, welfare or foreign policy positions held by the GOP. 

Someone who is personally entrepreneurial may not be at all interested in supporting the party of the moneyed interest.  He may be even very keen on the free market, which does not necessarily push him towards the party that glorifies state capitalism.  Being entrepreneurial and aspirational does not mean that you will necessarily agree with, say, reducing tax rates on wealthier people.  (Take a different kind of example to see this point: I expect few would call the folks in Silicon Valley lacking in entrepreneurship of a kind, but many of them are on the left politically.) 

Finally, it is not at all obvious these days that “intense patriotism” would or should inspire someone to pull the lever for the party that led the way into Iraq.  Barnes’ description could be completely accurate, and it still would not make these voters into “natural” supporters of the GOP.  In the end, the reality is that they are not “natural” GOP voters because most do not, in fact, vote for the GOP.  “Natural” constituents do not need to be bribed and cajoled to support a party, but will do so because they see this or that party already advancing their interests and “values.”  Say whatever you like about irrational voters (and I could say quite a lot), a majority of actual Hispanic voters do not perceive their self-interest being served by having GOP pols in positions of authority.  Of all the pathetic arguments for bad immigration policy, the argument that the GOP must pursue a pro-immigration line in order to win the votes of people who will never vote for the party is the worst and most unfounded.

What’s worse is many Republicans are oblivious to this or insist that losing Hispanic voters doesn’t really matter because they’ll never be reliable Republican voters anyway. These Republicans buy the notion that a sizable majority of Hispanics are and always will be Democrats. ~Fred Barnes

But they won’t be reliable Republican voters.  A sizeable majority (at least 60%) of Hispanics will always (or at least for a very, very long time to come) be Democrats.  Some will be Democrats because Democrats will always be more favourable towards mass immigration than the GOP can ever be.  Others will be Democrats because their parents and grandparents were Democrats and it is ingrained that this is the better party for them.  Still others will be Democrats because they are actually more in agreement with left-liberal ideas about “social justice” and economic fairness and greater Democratic support for government programs.  New Hispanic immigrants will also be possessing political values more in line with left-liberalism, as they will be coming from countries with stronger left-populist and revolutionary leftist political traditions, and it will be those traditions to which those migrating to this country are more likely to belong.  The GOP cannot compete with the Democratic Party for a majority this voting bloc, at least not without attempting to suddenly get to the Dems’ left on all of the relevant issues.  Any such attempt would guarantee the fragmentation and eventual death of the GOP.  Furthermore, failure to limit the rate of growth of a natural Democratic constituency will mean the marginalisation and permanent minority status of the GOP as it is currently constituted.