Cathy Young is worried about “a generation that is being taught to see national greatness in a bully state that inspires fear abroad and tramples the individual at home.”  Surprisingly, she isn’t talking about the College Republicans, and the “bully state” she mentions is not the U.S. government.  She refers instead to Russian youths who belong to a group called Nashi, and the state is the Russian Federation (which has not, strangely enough for a bully state that spreads fear abroad, invaded even one other country in the last 15 years).  From her description, this group sounds as if it has many of the vices that would be associated with any group of nationalists.  It isn’t clear why it merits this much attention.  Think about it: Putin theoretically has at his disposal the entire military, intelligence and internal security apparatus of the Russian government, so how on earth could a band of occasionally thuggish nationalist youths be of greater concern to someone who opposes Putin?  

If you want to get exercised about the treatment of Estonia (whose own government’s removal of a Soviet war memorial started the whole fracas), you might focus on the massive cyber-war waged against E-stonia rather than the bussed-in protesters who threw rocks at an embassy.  But there’s no anti-Nazi cachet in that.  Drawing attention to Russian cyber-warfare would emphasise that these are not just some dusty bunch of old commie-Nazis, but represent something different.  Writing an article about “Putin’s young brownshirts” is much catchier, because it allows the audience to avoid thinking. 

Presumably Ms. Young is no more of a fan of our own President-worshipping, “national greatness” chauvinist, rights-trampling and Constitution-shredding types in this country, but when I read things like this I am tempted to ask: “Why does this matter?”  Or, more to the point, I am compelled to reply: “Why do you suppose a generation who grew up in chaos would rally around an authoritarian populist who shakes his fist defiantly at foreigners and seeks to restore national prestige?  Could it be that incredibly bad U.S. Russia policy, the follies of Russian liberals and the rampant criminality of the ’90s taught a generation that the liberalism being offered them was designed to ruin and humiliate their country?”  It’s a bit like the growing revolt of my generation against the GOP because of its failures and corruption, but multiplied by a factor of ten.   

No doubt many of the young nationalists Ms. Young mentions here are making standard nationalist errors: you can see the reflexive attachment to the state, the confusion of government and country, the conflation of patriotic love and nationalist hatred, and the overcompensation for an awareness of vulnerability with bluster and tough talk.  Above all, the source of this nationalist zeal is a sense of rage caused by past humiliations and the focus of that rage on those who are believed to have been responsible for that humiliation.  It occurs to me that if the popularity of authoritarian nationalism in another country disturbs you, you would want to be someone who very actively denounces all of your own state’s policies that contribute to the fear, anger and resentment that fuel that nationalism.  Perhaps that will be Ms. Young’s next column.  For somereason, I won’t be holding my breath.

India was also a real country before the British colonized it, whereas Iraq was a colonial contrivance from the outset. ~Fred Kaplan

Keeping the human losses of the Partition in mind as many throw around ideas of how to decentralise or partition Iraq is something worth doing, and much of Kaplan’s article makes for interesting reading, but I had to marvel at this statement.  Which India does Kaplan mean?  I don’t object to making distinctions between polities that have meaning for their inhabitants and those that have little or none–this is a significant difference between what we can call “artificial” states and “real” ones.  It is the difference between largely fictitious, failing states, such as Bosnia or Somalia, and more “real,” successful ones, such as a Slovenia or a Thailand.  Of course, it is important to recognise that all modern nation-states are to some extent founded on the ruin and death of other even more real countries that they gobbled up and suppressed, but even so there are nation-states today that actually have meaning for their citizens and many that mean next to nothing at all.  At some point, every nation-state is a contrivance and something imposed, because it seeks to unify any number of polities and peoples who have previously not identified or united with one another.  A crucial difference between successes and failures may be related to who is engaged in the contrivance.  With Iraq, the contrivance was largely introduced from outside, the product of gutting the Ottoman Empire and the need for an additional place on which to fob off another Hashemite on the locals.  In India’s case, the contrivance was less sudden, slightly less arbitrary and done with the participation of more of the people.  A longer experience of empire had fashioned a greater sense of identity and solidarity than could have been the case in Iraq.   

Still, Kaplan is attributing a pre-existing “reality,” unity and identity to “India” that certainly did not extend across all or even much of what is today’s India.  This may seem to be tangential to the main argument, but it is actually the crux of the issue.  What makes a state “real” and how it becomes “real” (i.e., able to inspire loyalty and something with which its members identify) are the two basic questions for Iraq today.   

It is significant that the modern nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is heavily, though not exclusively, North Indian in its definition of Hindutva and in its electoral support.  The preeminent place of the Hindi language is also representative of the connection between North Indian culture and the definition of national identity.  (Hochdeutsch played a similar role in unified Germany, and likewise the Tuscan dialect in Italy.)  While it is possible to speak of a shared Indian civilisation in which all of the Subcontinent (including Pakistan) participates, I think it goes too far to say that “India” was a “real country” in the way Kaplan means it.  In a political sense, and as a matter of the self-identification of people living there, it was no such thing.  “India” was mostly an administrative fiction or more appropriately, as Metternich might have put it, a geographical expression in, say, 1800. 

The regions, polities, cultures and communities with which people identified (and this is true of so many places) were not on such a grand, abstract scale.  This is normal, and it even applied to our own country in the nineteenth century.  Our country, which Kaplan might grant possessed a certain reality, was a number of countries and a number of states bound together in a political federation.  In India, colonial-era railways served and increased political centralisation and more closely connected different parts of the Subcontinent; the shared experience of colonial domination also helped to forge a political-national identity across communities and regions.  Arguably, the numerous, more “real” countries of the Subcontinent were subordinated to the construction of a nation-state, which follows to some extent the model of modernisation and centralisation in Germany and Italy. 

It is true that the Mughals ruled over an expansive stretch of the Subcontinent prior to the arrival of the EIC (and it was a stretch that continued to expand up through the late eighteenth century), and it is true that the last Mughal emperor became a symbolic figurehead associated with nascent anti-colonialist “nationalism” during the Mutiny, but there are large parts of modern India (much of the Deccan, for example) where Mughal writ never ran (and where British influence took longer to be established).  Political fragmentation and weakness (the Peacock Throne didn’t up and leave Delhi on its own!) were the norm prior to colonisation, and it was the centralising, organising activity of British colonialism that created an administrative unit out of a number of very different regions, cultures, languages and polities.  Colonisation brought about administrative and political unification of a number of countries and states (which, I would hasten to add, are also not the same things), and also created the conditions for the forging of something closer to a shared identity.  There are two ways to look at this question: either the British colonisers stayed too briefly in Africa and the Near East to achieve the same results that they did in India, or they did tremendous violence to the many more “real” places and polities out of which they created what became India and Pakistan.  As the violent history after Partition suggests, war has a major role in building up nation-states as “real” states and inculcating shared national identity (which is why so many nationalists are typically very favourably disposed towards war, as they see it, to some extent correctly, as a glue for a variety of peoples who might otherwise see fewer and fewer reasons to remain in political union).

The GOP Ames straw poll is tomorrow, which means that it must be time to make bold and foolish predictions.  The outcome will probably not be taken very seriously by most observers because of the absence of three of the four supposedly major contenders, but here are my slightly educated guesses anyway.

Romney will win a plurality, but it will be embarrassingly weak when compared with his massive advantages over the second-tier candidates in fundraising, organisation and name recognition.  Let’s say that he manages a not-so-respectable 30%.  Ron Paul will fare reasonably well, pulling in maybe 15-18%, and I think he probably will claim the second spot in what will be a fairly divided field.  Tommy Thompson will actually do much better than his dreadful debate performances and otherwise horrible national campaign would lead you to think.  He will manage 12-15%, but not the 20% he hopes to get.  He will probably drop out after this.  Brownback is making his big push here, and if he can’t make it in Iowa he can’t make it anywhere.  I’ll guess that he gets 10-12%, which will be enough to keep his campaign alive, but it will also show how limited his appeal is in what ought to be a natural environment for him.  Huckabee keeps making a good impression on voters in every debate, but he doesn’t translate this into much actual support.  He will probably scrounge together 8-10%.  Tancredo might manage 5%, and Hunter could get a smattering of support, maybe 3-5%.  Both of these candidates, while excellent on many things, seem to have gone nowhere all year.  They have both said they will stay in regardless of the result tomorrow, so we can expect them to be around at least through New Hampshire.  

Assuming Thompson is out after this, where will his supporters go?  They seem likely to drift towards either Huckabee or Romney.  The straw poll will give some indication of the strength (or lack thereof) of the Romney campaign, but will be of little use in predicting what happens in the caucus when the other three major candidates get into the mix.  All of those three have certainly damaged their appeal in Iowa by ignoring Ames, but perhaps not fatally (except for McCain, whose campaign is already dead).

Via Ross, I came across this old Ignatieff article, in which he wrote:

If Jefferson’s vision were only an ideology of self-congratulation, it would never have inspired Americans to do the hard work of reducing the gap between dream and reality.

I know it is redundant to say that the things Ignatieff says do not make sense, but this one stood out for me as exceptionally poor. 

Ideologies of self-congratulation are the ones that win support and paint flattering pictures of the people who adhere to them.  That is an essential part of any ideology, and if Ignatieff is going to insult Thomas Jefferson by attributing an ideology to him he should at least recognise that “ideologies of self-congratulation” are the kind that spread, endure and, yes, inspire better than any others.  By planting supposedly high-minded, abstract notions in the minds of adherents, modern ideology typically reassures its followers that they are on the cutting edge of progress, the pioneers of a new world and a new age or in some other way superior and unbeatable.  This then gives them the confidence to go forth and do things to make these abstractions reality, which frequently involve destroying a great many things and killing many people, which they might have shrunk from doing before they had been told that they were simply part of the direction of history.  Ideologies of self-congratulation are precisely the kinds that inspire people to action and discourage the kind of sane humility and self-criticism that is necessary for a stable, humane society.  This is why they are dangerous.    

See also Poulos’ withering critique of the Ignatieff article everyone loves to hate.

Bill Richardson may be a joke in so many ways, and the idea of him as President fills me with unmitigated horror, but his article on foreign policy (while mind-numbingly conventional in many, many ways) is many things that Obama’s was not: focused, organised and specific.  When he talks about reforming international institutions, he lays out at least a couple specific proposals:

US leaders also must restore their commitment to international law and multilateral cooperation, which means many things. It means promoting expansion of the UN Security Council’s permanent membership to include Japan, India, Germany, and one country each from Africa and Latin America. It also means ethical reform at the United Nations so that this vital institution can help its many underdeveloped and destitute member states meet the challenges of the 21st century. Finally, it means expanding the G8 to include new economic giants like India and China.

These may or may not all be terrible ideas.  I think that an expanded Security Council, if we have to have one, is more desirable than the current anachronistic arrangement.  I might challenge the list of countries to be included, but in principle there is no reason why a country as large as, say, Brazil should be ruled out for consideration for a permanent seat.  “Ethical reform” is still too vague, but it is more than what Obama has offered.  The G8 proposal is as intriguing as it is far-fetched and unlikely to be accepted in the other G8 states.  Then again, if you are including Russia for geopolitical reasons, why not bring in the two largest countries?  The short answer for why you would keep them out is that you don’t want China dictating any part of world currency policy.  Even so, compared to Barack “Pie In The Sky” Obama’s foreign policy, where the health of every Indonesian chicken will be looked after, Richardson’s article is strangely refreshing and seems almost sane by comparison.  Richardson’s priorities are often the wrong ones, and I wouldn’t support many of the things he proposes, but at least he has some minimal grasp on what he’s talking about.  Obama had best watch out.  The “New Mexican” may surprise him before all is said and done.

The Tale has returned for another repetition, along with predictable invocations of the Divine Twins, O’Hanlon and Pollack, and even a nod to the ‘Bamster himself:

Do Democratic opposition leaders keep blaming each other for voting for the Iraq war? Or are they now talking about expanding military operations to other countries? Sen. Hillary Clinton once was damned for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. But her even more liberal rival Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., now expresses his own willingness to invade nuclear Islamic Pakistan.

This is, of course, stupid.  Obama’s remarks on Pakistan are predicated on his opposition to the Iraq war and followed a fairly involved discussion of how we would withdraw from Iraq.  Whatever you think of his Pakistan remarks, they are not evidence that opposition to the Iraq war has weakened or a sense that the public mood is shifting away from the antiwar crowd.  Far from it!  On the contrary, it may reflect a new confidence that withdrawal is inevitable and that it is necessary to begin planning for the future after Iraq.  This is not simply a case of Obama framing his belligerence in anti-Iraq war terms, but it is a clear case of someone who is vehemently against the Iraq war but who is nonetheless a committed interventionist.  The Democratic debate is so far beyond getting out of Iraq that there is hardly anything left to talk about.  Thus they have moved on to debating Pakistan policy.  Using Blankley’s method, I would say that a sure sign that the “surge” is certainly failing is that so many of its domestic backers are engaging in embarrassing, desperate arguments that seek to inflate even the slightest shred of good news into a major trend that favours their position.

Update: By the way, has anyone else noticed that this is Hanson’s millionth column in which he explains to us that the current debate has happened during previous wars and that many people change positions based on the ebb and flow of battle?  I suppose this is true, but doesn’t he get tired of saying the exact same thing again and again and again?  I know I get tired of reading it.

As I watch this clip of Dodd and Obama, I find, to my horror, that I think Chris Dodd is making sense in this particular case.  After all, what does it say for Obama’s credibility that the people who “helped to authorise and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation” (as he put it) seem to possess more common sense and wisdom than Obama when it comes to Pakistan?  If even these people understand why he was wrong, when they understand very little else, why should anyone else embrace Obama’s proposal?

The Postrallies ’round Obama.  They note that what Obama proposed is already established policy (which makes Obama look even more uninformed than he did last week), as if something being settled U.S. policy was an argument for its wisdom and sanity!  It must be relevant that, when presented with this “existing” U.S. policy in explicit terms, the Pakistani government has rejected the idea entirely.

My Cliopatria colleague Ralph Luker has a round-up of responses to the New York Times Magazine article by Michael Ignatieff (yes, that Michael Ignatieff).  Yglesias makes the necessary rebuttal:

But then someone pointed out to me that the whole thing is founded on the absurd premise that his errors in judgment have something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics.

This is, when you think about it, totally wrong. Academics in the field of Middle East studies were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Similarly, international relations scholars opposed the war by a very large margin. The war’s foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise — notably people who weren’t really on the left politically — were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really “independent” of political machinations.

I had not read Ignatieff’s article before this evening, but immediately on reading the opening paragraphs I was amazed by the stunning arrogance of the claim.  The claim was, in short, “Because I, Michael Ignatieff, an academic, was horribly, horribly wrong and misinformed because of grand theorising and abstraction, this is a general trait of academics and intellectuals as a whole.  Now that I am a politician, I now understand the superiority of practical politicking over intellectualism.”  In other words, Ignatieff may have been wrong in the past, but he is never, in the present moment, likely to be wrong.  Nice work if you can get it. 

Ignatieff’s precise words were these:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

I can’t imagine a more potent lie than this first claim.  Perhaps the main, if not only, thing that drives many academics and intellectuals is their interest in finding and defending ideas that they regard as true.  Naturally, you try to make them seem as interesting and relevant and applicable to your readers as you can, but if you are setting out to con your audience by spinning evidence and fabricating stories to make them more interesting you are not really engaged in scholarship or serious thought.  Perhaps of all the people on earth, politicians have one of the weakest claims to be devotees of the truth.  They are interested in what is expedient, what is popular, what is, to borrow a word from one of Ignatieff’s old pro-war confreres, “doable.”  It is Pilate, a political functionary, not Seneca or Tacitus, who asks, “What is truth?”  Princes can always find intellectual lackeys to sing their praises or write up theories justifying their crimes, but that does not mean that all scholars and intellectuals are servile lackeys who do the bidding of the ruler or the state, especially not in an era when government patronage is not as vital as it once was.   

There are good arguments that academics should steer clear of politics, mostly because politics can distort and warp scholarship, and perhaps because some academics are susceptible to this sort of Big Idea mania (see Wilson, Woodrow), but the idea that the war fever prior to the invasion was the fruit of an academic and intellectual mode rather the result of an ideological mode of thinking embraced by some academics is simply absurd.  Academics and intellectuals, though perhaps not always closely associated with what might be called “the real world,” have had a far firmer grasp of reality in recent years than most of the war supporters, among whose die-hard members there are, to put it mildly, not exactly all that many distinguished professors and public intellectuals.  Americans have always taken a sort of pride in their instinctive anti-intellectualism, so much so that some might even start to regard ignorance as a virtue, but a policy advanced by the ignorant and incompetent and cheered on by the uninformed cannot really be laid at the door of the academy.  

It occurs to me that Ignatieff’s rather bold generalisations about academia apply least of all to the discipline of history, especially when he writes:

Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

Yet every trend in modern historiography has been to run screaming away from generalising “particular facts” as “instances of some big idea.”  In history, specifics are not quite everything, but they are about 95% of everything.  Theory can be helpful, but it is no substitute for a solid command of the sources and a significant collection of evidence.  In some cases, theory can get in the way if the scholar follows it too rigidly and dogmatically by trying to make the evidence “fit” what he assumed beforehand must be true.  In politics, on the other hand, details are not what win elections, but rather vague, generic symbolism and empty rhetoric are what matter.  Politicians love to use commonplaces and boilerplate, and they avoid giving detailed plans as often as they can.  In a television age, politicians thrive on generalities and, as the last few years have shown, they make policy based on vague, gauzy sentiments about “values” and “security” with no concern for the practicability, wisdom or prudence of the policies being support.   

Something else struck me:

Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq — or anywhere else — as it is.

Yet large parts of our political class have been cocooning themselves for years with respect to Iraq and continue to do so.  (A majority of members of Congress persist in the illusion that something can be salvaged from Iraq.)  They confuse the world as they wish it to be for the world as it is all the time.  This is a common flaw in our politicians, and it is particularly acute because of the optimistic assumptions of our politicians and of our culture.  Certainly, the pols have enablers in the chattering classes, but the fault is mainly theirs.  If the virtue of politicians is that they have a keener attachment to reality, why is it that the politicians always seem to be the last to grasp what everyone else seems to get so much sooner?