…because every day everything in Iraq is getting better and better.

Rich Lowry actually has a moderately interesting article on liberalism and Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:

American history no longer appeared to be a benign process, but a twisted story of rapine and oppression. “With such a bill of indictment,” Piereson writes, “the new liberals now held that Americans had no good reason to feel pride in their country’s past or optimism about its future.”

There are some problems with this interpretation, not least of which is that the liberal acceptance of a narrative of continuing progress did not actually end in November 1963.  The glossing over of Vietnam, as if it were incidental to the changes on the American left, seems inexplicable.  To the extent that Piereson is right that liberalism became less comfortable with a simple narrative of American history as the advance of freedom and goodness (I think Obama’s understanding of American history, shared by plenty on the left and right, proves that this thesis is actually pretty weak), the disillusionment that resulted confirms that it was the previous naively optimistic view that set liberalism up for any so-called Fall.  Only an absurd kind of patriotism makes taking pride in your country a function of its purity and sinlessness (you might call this the “moral proposition nation” view).   Naturally, no such country has existed or ever will exist in this world, and anyone who starts with the assumption that his country is such a pure and untainted one, somehow outside history or beyond the fallen state of man, will either spend his entire life deluded or will see this fantastic illusion destroyed before his eyes sooner or later.  This is a patriotism that inculcates love of an imaginary place, rather than the actual place where you live, and it encourages disappointment with the reality because it continually fails to live up to the high (and unrealistic) standards of the imaginary world.  Having embraced an insubstantial myth, such a person is unprepared to face the complex reality of his country’s history.  If he cannot see his national story as the unfolding of a morality play, he loses interest or becomes alienated from his own country’s past. 

Perversely, and this is where Piereson appears to have gotten the interpretation wrong, the disappointed optimist becomes even more obsessed with the future (which, as we remember from Camus, authorises every kind of humbug) because the past now appears to him as a string of injustices that mar the image of his country.  In the future, there is the possibility of improvement, while the past offers little or nothing.  His patriotism will be one projected towards a future country in which various “ideals” have been realised.  The more that history fails to match mythical fantasies about the past, the more the optimist will abandon more and more of his country’s past as virtually irredeemable (except for those few precursors and seeds of what came later).  Yet the one thing that the optimist will never abandon fully is the madness that is optimism itself.  Like an addict, the optimist becomes progressively more dependent on the destructive drug of optimism even as it steadily ruins his life.  The worse things get, the more that optimism is shown to be a lie, the more the optimist feels compelled to believe in the lie.

As a political and diplomatic stunt, it had all the characteristics we have come to associate with Mr Putin’s presidency. It was clumsy, childish, recklessly confrontational, and at least mildly psychotic. ~David Warren

Given that I have sometimes noted the similarities in the governing styles of Messrs. Putin and Bush, I might be inclined to agree with some of these descriptions, since I think almost all of them fit Mr. Bush perfectly.  Putin does have a tendency to be unduly confrontational.  Unlike Mr. Bush, he is also capable of adjusting and maneuvering that balances and augments his confrontational style.  This is one of the reasons why Russia’s international position has been improving and why Putin is as widely supported as Bush is widely disliked.  But clumsy?  Childish?  Certainly, it was a symbolic move, and one we might associate more with the late 19th century and the Great Game, but it is a huge improvement in subtlety and execution from the incompetent handling of the Kursk disaster.  In a country where our President has been known to offer such gems of wisdom as, “Bring ’em on,” I find it difficult to declare this action to be childish.  Compared to what?  Rudely imperialistic?  I suppose that would be a fair description.  Most of these others do not apply.

American foreign policy is broken. It has been broken by people who supported the Iraq War, opposed talking to our adversaries, failed to finish the job with al Qaeda, and alienated the world with our belligerence. ~Samantha Power

Remember that this statement comes in the wake of an Obama speech in which the candidate managed to outrage and, well, alienate a major U.S. allied government by making fairly belligerent noises about “taking the fight” to Pakistani territory. 

Of course, American foreign policy is broken, but it has actually been broken by people who think in very much the same way as the person who said:

In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well.

The Iraq war is the result of thinking of other people’s problems as our own.  The war is the result of mistaking distant, potential threats for approaching, gathering dangers that require immediate action.  It is the result of making foreign policy based on hopes and fantasies, rather than on solid knowledge of the world.  It is the result of audacity.  We do not need any more of this.

Over the last few weeks, Barack Obama has once again taken positions that challenge Washington’s conventional wisdom on foreign policy. And once again, pundits and politicians have leveled charges that are now bankrupt of credibility and devoid of the new ideas that the American people desperately want.

On each point in the last few weeks, Barack Obama has called for a break from a broken way of doing things. On each point, he has brought fresh strategic thinking and common sense that break with the very conventional wisdom that has led us into Iraq. ~Samantha Power

Power’s memo is a clever attempt at damage control, but I don’t think many people will be biting.  On so, so many things, Obama isn’t unconventional, fresh or challening at all–his previous statements on foreign policy before this past week mark him as a ludicrously ambitious interventionist.  Knowing that about him, his statements about “acting” in Pakistan go from appearing careless to appearing rather horrifying. 

In principle, there was nothing wrong with Obama saying that he would meet with leaders of “rogue” states and there was potentially quite a lot right with it, especially when it comes to Syria and Iran.  It was the context in which he gave that answer and the particulars of the answer that made what might otherwise be a refreshing departure from the last six years into an occasion for head-shaking.  The question he was asked was admittedly ridiculous, but he neither challenged the question for being a stupid hypothetical gotcha question nor did he say anything that suggested that he understood the purpose of top-level meetings between heads of government.  He wanted to distinguish the symbolism of an Obama Administration from that of Mr. Bush.  Besides, does any President ever have direct meetings with tinpot dictators, whether friendly or hostile, in his first year?  Generally speaking, no.  There are quite a few more important leaders for him to be meeting at that time.  Then there is the Kennedy precedent.  Bold, brash JFK thought he could stare down Krushchev in Vienna and managed to come off in the eyes of the Soviets as a fool and a pushover.  The next year was the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The good news for Obama is that none of the states he was talking about are anywhere near as powerful or important as the USSR was.  The fallout from a failed Obama-Assad meeting would be minimal.  Then again, this makes prioritising meetings with them seem especially daft.     

Simply saying or doing something rash for the sake of doing something different from what had been done previously is exactly the sort of approach that got us into Iraq.  Obama used to be against doing and saying rash things–now what is rash has been redefined as “unconventional.”  Invasion became a respectable option because there were a great many “unconventional” arguments being made against the containment of Iraq, which was the received wisdom at the time.  A few years ago, foreign policy “realism” was supposedly bankrupt, because the promoters of the war and the “freedom agenda” said it was.  They represented the new prevailing wisdom.  The Bush Doctrine, though it had its roots in earlier interventionism, represented a fairly significant change.  Not all change is desirable, and sometimes the changes instituted as responses to events are, because they are being made quickly and recklessly, the wrong ones to make. 

That is the sort of thing you will get when you want to be seen as trashing conventional assumptions and have no good ideas with which to replace them.  Obama wants to pitch himself as the “change candidate,” and he claims that his statements reflect the “change” he’s going to bring to government.  The trouble he has is that plenty of us believe that this is the case, and the change he is bringing seems to be mostly for the worse.  Overall, the government would not be less interventionist under Obama, it would actually be less respectful of some of our major allies (if that is even conceivable) in the event that Washington deemed that those allies had “failed to act” inside their own countries to our satisfaction, and the new administration would also seem to be out of its depth in coping with the diplomatic brushfires that it would keep setting. 

There are two principal reasons why Obama’s remarks on Pakistan in particular were wrong.  First, they demonstrated the error of someone who is half-informed, someone who has just enough information (in this case, the new NIE) to be confident in pushing forward into a blunder, as he clearly has little sense of why it is that Pakistan has been unsuccessful so far in suppressing what he calls a “sanctuary.”  Additionally, they show that he believes that the sovereignty of all states, both allied and hostile, should be irrelevant when Washington says that it is.  He has made an argument here that takes for granted that all other governments exist to one degree or another to provide America with security–and why wouldn’t Obama believe that, if he believes that the security of everyone on earth is tied into the security of the United States?  Liberal internationalism of the ’90s wanted a “human rights” exception to state sovereignty, and now Obama has added to this an expansive U.S. security exception, which states that no state is really sovereign and our forces may come and go as they please in any of them if the President deems it appropriate.  Arguably, this is not so much of a change as a continuity with some of the worst aspects of the Cold War, which would make sense for a candidate who continually models himself after JFK.

Power continues:

We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes. 
 

Yet that is exactly what almost everyone criticising Obama is doing–they are judging the merits of his proposal and find that proposal to be, well, a bit loopy.  Whether pro-war, antiwar, imperialist or anti-imperialist, most people seem to be in agreement that Obama erred badly.  It is, of course, possible for most people in this country to be wrong, but it does not necessarily follow that Obama is always right because he has a knack of siding with unpopular foreign policy views.  In the past, he took the then-unpopular view of opposing the Iraq war, as I and many others did, and he was right to do so, because the Iraq war was senseless and unjust and ruinous for our interests.  There is a virtue in being able to defy conventional wisdom and establishment assumptions (one wishes that he would challenge more of them, but do so in a less obviously ridiculous way), but rejecting conventional wisdom is one thing and proposing a different, but potentially much more dangerous course is another.  It would have been one thing if Obama had said that current Pakistan policy was unacceptable and that reflexive support for Musharraf was getting us nowhere, but instead of pursuing that kind of criticism in a much smarter direction he chose to offer a re-edited version of the Bush Doctrine.  

Incidentally, Obama’s timing is also fairly terrible–Musharraf has, I think foolishly but also at some risk to himself, resumed the deployment of soldiers to western and northwestern Pakistan in a repeat of the policy that proved so unsuccessful before.  Obama at once ignores an allied government doing something requested of it by Washington (regardless of how misguided that request may be), but he also provides Musharraf with an opportunity to shore up his own position with the administration and so ensure that any of the necessary reforms will be deferred into the future still longer.  Obama has managed to promote a bad Pakistan policy and reinforce the worst elements of the existing one, and all in one week just by giving a speech.  Imagine what he could do in four years as President.

I suppose I understand why Rep. Tancredo has once again taken the view he has on the retaliatory nuking of Mecca and Medina, but I have to say that it makes no sense to me.  Indeed, I would have to say that it is deeply wrong.  First of all, it doesn’t function as a deterrent to a religious person to say, “If you don’t stop what you’re planning on doing, I will desecrate and destroy what you consider sacred.”  This rather confirms in the mind of the religious man, especially if he is a fanatic already inclined to violence on behalf of his religion, that you have no respect for basic civilised norms.  Whether or not you actually have such respect is beside the point–you will have telegraphed to the world that you are willing to obliterate a place considered holy by one of the major religions in the world.  This makes the probability of devastating terrorist strikes against this country more likely rather than less, because it will convince that many more Muslims that our government is warring against all of them in the most fundamental way.  Should you threaten this, or worse yet carry out your threat in the event that the situation arises to do it, you will have confirmed every worst idea that the fanatic has about you, and you will have won him a thousand sympathisers where before he had ten.  Then there is pesky international law regulating that belligerents show respect for religious sites and make every effort to spare them from being targeted in wartime.  To make the targeting of major religious sites and central shrines of a world religion a standing policy is to say that you don’t think that anything should be off-limits in warfare. 

Before he ran fleeing to hide behind Samantha Power’s skirt and declare his bold unconventionality, Obama had briefly grasped that using the strategic equivalent of a sledgehammer for a job better suited to a needle was foolish.  There ought to be some things that we are not going to do.  Nuking the Islamic holy sites and killing hundreds of thousands of people seem to fall into that category of things we ought not to do.

This may have already occurred to everyone, but what was the casting director thinking in putting James McAvoy in the male lead in Becoming Jane?  His most recent and famous screen credit is as the lascivious Scottish doctor to Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.  This isn’t to belittle McAvoy, who did a brilliant job in a central role in what was one of the truly superior films of last year, but it is to ask a question: do Jane Austenites want Nicholas Garrigan as their heroine’s Mr. Darcy? 

(And, yes, I understand that actors by definition pretend to be other people all the time and can play a wide variety of roles, but it still seems strange.)

None of the responders [bold mine-DL] has specifically denied that the administration has been making more moderate appointments (except for valid objections regarding Negroponte’s role in Honduras, which, I agree, was anything but moderate, although in his current incarnation he has been fighting the Cheneyites). Nor do they deny that the State Department’s policies in Asia and on Iran, as well as Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates’ efforts to close Guantanamo, are policies that Democrats have been advocating for some time. The seeming inability to recognize these facts reflects a destructive partisanship that makes it almost impossible to give the other side credit for anything — and that demonizes party members (on the right and the left) who dare to break that taboo. ~Ann-Marie Slaughter

Perhaps Dean Slaughter makes the first claim because she is talking about responses from the left, and I am not on the left, so I suppose my fairly specific answers to her claim that Gates, Negroponte and Zoellick are “seasoned moderates” don’t count.  From my perspective, a fervent advocate of the Doha round of free trade talks is by definition not a moderate in his political and economic views.  His views may be conventional, but just because something is common in the establishment doesn’t necessarily make it politically moderate.   She has a point that Gates and Negroponte have been less baleful influences in their current positions, but this is to define “moderation” as the virtue of being only slightly more sane than Dick Cheney.  Saying that they are “more moderate” means that they appear more moderate when compared to, say, John Bolton or Feith, which does not necessarily make them moderates as such. 

If no one denies that the new State Department initiatives are moves towards what have been Democratic positions, how has anyone shown an inability to recognise these realities?  Her claim about these initiatives in foreign policy did not strike me as controversial, but once again it was defined poorly–it was not an example of reaching across the aisle, but one of intra-Republican policy struggles between the “realists” around Rice and the “Cheneyites” as Slaughter dubs them.  I cannot speak for anyone else, but my criticism focused on the rather bizarre definition of partisanship that Slaughter used throughout the first op-ed.  That is, after all, what most of the article was about: complaining, as the title would suggest, that partisanship was out of control and was poisoning our politics. 

Yet every example she gave was not an example of runaway partisanship, but sharp divisions within both parties over foreign policy.  Progressive criticism of the DLC is not primarily that it is excessively bipartisan, but that the policies it supports are bad and destructive policies, especially in international relations (these happen to be policies endorsed by a majority of the GOP, but their association with the other party is not the main reason why many of these critics find such policies terrible).  Likewise, Lind’s criticism of Daalder et al. was not that they were collaborating with Republicans, but that they embraced the toxic ideas of “liberal hegemonism” and “democratic imperialism” that were, according to Lind, giving liberal internationalism a bad name.  For daring to disagree with other members of their own party, several individuals merited Slaughter’s scorn for their “partisanship,” when, as Yglesias pointed out at the time, their intra-party feuding was a sign of a lack of partisan loyalty and a refusal to suppress disagreements for the sake of party unity. 

In each case, the “partisan” was reacting against a policy decision or argument or position that he thought was foolish and dangerous; whether or not it involved a move towards or away from the other party actually was a distant secondary or perhaps tertiary concern.  Those named in the op-ed otherwise had nothing in common: Bolton and Wurmser on one side represented ueber-hawks in the GOP that have been losing some strength in the administration, while Smith and Lind represented what might reasonably be called the progressive and moderate liberal critiques of the Democratic foreign policy establishment’s complicity in Bush Era foreign policy disasters.  The same process is going on in both parties, though it is less thoroughgoing in the GOP: irresponsible, incompetent and belligerent foreign policymakers are feeling a backlash from their opponents within both parties and are being marginalised as relatively more sane ideas begin to prevail.  The GOP “partisans” she cites are, for the moment, on the losing side of this battle in their party, while the Democratic “partisans” she cites are the ones attacking the irresponsible “centrists” who did enable the architects of the Iraq war and who advocate for an equally dangerous foreign policy direction in the future.  This does not mean that administration policy c. 2007 has become “moderate” or even really very bipartisan (Joe Lieberman working with the White House does not count), but simply that it has become less appalling than it was in 2006.

In the course of a generally awful article, Byron York makes one claim that seems worth talking about:

But Reid and Pelosi lose if Bush wins. Given the position they have staked out for themselves, the best possible outcome is for Gen. David Petraeus to give a downbeat report on the surge when he comes before Congress in September. That would give tremendous momentum to those who want the quickest possible U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Perhaps this is the thinking in Washington.  Perhaps this is what the Democrats themselves believe.  Clearly, it is what York thinks will happen.  In any case, it is wrong.  A “downbeat report” on the “surge” by Petraeus and Crocker will not give momentum to supporters of withdrawal.  By the crazy logic of the “centrist”, ISG-loving consensus developing in both parties now, a “downbeat report” on the “surge” will encourage most members of Congress to continue to support the war, but probably on the condition of changing the deployment inside Iraq.  Lugar/Warner will be up, McLieberman will be down, but support for withdrawal will continue to be found among a minority of the Democrats and hardly any Republicans. 

A “downbeat report” will mean that the security situation in Iraq is worse than “surge” backers have been claiming throughout the year (not that this will make them stop talking about how the next new plan will succeed and should be given plenty of time, etc.) and that Iraq is therefore not substantially closer to being capable of providing for its own internal security.  Since the ISG-lovers of the Lugar/Warner/Levin persuasion believe that leaving Iraq without such a capability would be “irresponsible,” they might very well push for yet another change in tactics but would become even more adamant in rejecting arguments for withdrawal.  Thus this foreign policy “centrism” guarantees that the more ineffective the current plan is, the more essential it will be to remain in Iraq until the right plan is found, which means that the war will never end.  It’s a strange concept, but one essential to understanding the idiocy of our rulers: continuing wars no matter what is the wise and prudent course, and ending them (even when they cannot be won) is dangerous.

Of course, the proper pro-withdrawal argument is that there is no “right plan” because the political track in Iraq is hopelessly paralysed and useless, so there is nothing significant that even marginal improvements in security and security training will change.  The “surge” may be ameliorating some of the symptoms of Iraq’s political ruin, but it cannot solve them, and it cannot on its own overcome the levels of violence that continue to wreck that country.  The pro-withdrawal argument is that we should come home because nothing more can profitably be done at acceptable cost to the United States.  To call this betting on failure, as York does repeatedly, is a typical misrepresentation.  For these pro-war people, American soldiers really are just chits to be thrown on a gaming table, except that, unlike in gambling, you cannot win any of your losses back.  Like a gambling addict, the dedicated war supporter will never step away from this hated table, because for this obsessive to cut his losses and stop before he loses even more is to admit failure, when failure has already been staring him in the face for a very long time.