What is most interesting about this article is not what it says, but who is saying it. If a conservative were to write such an article, the skeptics most assuredly would immediately dismiss it as repeating White House talking points. But the fact that two severe critics of the Bush administration’s management of the war — from a think tank usually described as liberal to boot — have published such a piece in the New York Times of all places might, under normal circumstances, give opponents of the war pause. ~Mackubin Thomas Owens

Via Dan McCarthy

For those whose memories do not stretch back to that distant year of 2002, I would offer the reminder that The New York Times endorsed the invasion and its news division was one of the worst offenders in pushing government talking points as the reporting of facts about the real world.  You could quite reasonably lay a significant part of the blame for the media’s complicity in the build-up to the invasion at the door of the NYT.  With their editors having finally come out for a pro-withdrawal position over four years after the war began, the NYT is supposed to be taken as a redoubt of intense antiwar conviction.  Yeah, and Chuck Hagel is antiwar.  Tell me another one. 

Meanwhile, Brookings, which is one of the most “centrist” of all establishment “centrist” think tanks, is supposed to be taken as some woolly left-wing outfit, and the participation of O’Hanlon and Pollack–who have never ceased being war supporters–is supposed to impress us. 

War opponents are supposed to feel thunderstruck by the revelation that these two war supporters still hold the same basic position that they have held for years (pro-war, the war can still be won and it is absolutely vital to win it).  In one sense, I do feel a little shocked that there are still people who support the war with any of the same intensity as before, but that is not what Owens means.  Of course, criticism of the management of the war is something for which Sen. McCain, one of this NRO symposium’s participants, is quite well-known.  Criticising the management of a disastrously mismanaged war makes you no more of an opponent of the war than is a Sam Brownback or John Warner, and it actually predisposes you towards overvaluing evidence of improvement in the situation, no matter how slight it may be. 

Of course, John Warner is one of those Republican Senators with an impeccable “pro-military” record and a long tenure on the Foreign Relations Committee who has now signed on with Lugar, Domenici, et al. in saying that the “surge” is not working and that the political process in Iraq is more or less hopeless.  (On this latter point, you will find few dissenting voices.)  When solidly internationalist Republicans say these things, they are just as readily dismissed as O’Hanlon and Pollack’s remarks are uncritically embraced, because those Republicans are saying the “wrong” things as far as a pro-war audience is concerned.  These are the Republicans who are, in Owens’ estimation, “enabling” a defeat that would otherwise not happen.  Of course, if things were actually going so swimmingly, you would likely not have a stampede of these old GOP warhorses towards redeployment and declaring Iraq policy to be in need of significant change.

Finally, as Djerejian has shown to devastating effect, O’Hanlon and Pollack seem to have had a much less positive view of the situation in Iraq as recently as June in O’Hanlon’s case, and many of the descriptions in the op-ed do not seem to agree with a lot of the rest of the evidence.

At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker points to a fine post by one of our fellow Cliopatria colleagues, Manan Ahmed.  He and I seem to be on the same page regarding Obama’s recent speech at the Wilson Center and what it means for his foreign policy.  We are also mostly in agreement about Pakistan policy, or at least we are in agreement that invading Pakistan in the event that the government there “fails” to act is crazy and dangerous.  Obama likes to get a lot of mileage out of his pose as a sober-minded realist, someone who doesn’t oppose all wars, but only “rash” and “dumb” ones.  What label does he think applies to his proposed “action” in western Pakistan?   

One part of the post stood out for me as being perhaps the most important:

This national discourse comes from a deep Orientalism that has been a staple of our political lives prior to and since that “bright and beautiful Tuesday morning”. It is what enables us to question the sanity and the patriotism of anyone who dares raise the long history of American involvement across the globe as a contributing factor. It enables us to collapse real geographies from Leeds and Glasgow to Karachi and Islamabad into “wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains”.

I would add one thing to this: it is not only an illusion of an undifferentiated other that confuses American thinking, but an overwhelming sense that “we” can never have contributed to anything that has ever happened to “us.”  Not only can you not “blame America first,” you are not really supposed to blame America at all, because the nationalist story tells us that “we” as a nation are never really to blame.  This is the story we have told ourselves long before “we” ventured into the Near East or gave much of a thought to the Islamic world.  “We” are always provoked, pushed too far, attacked, insulted, forced into a fight that “we” did not want, etc.  Even though the U.S. declared war on Britain first in 1812 and invaded Canada, it is remembered and still taught as a response to provocations (never mind that the most keen War Hawks had little stake in the “free trade and sailors’ rights” of war slogan fame and wanted to grab land).  The invasion of Mexico was cast in the same light, and was more plainly a land grab.  The Spanish War, the Philippine War, and even American participation in WWI fit the pattern of the government launching or entering wars that were quite unnecessary (and, in the case of WWI, opposed by a huge majority of Americans).  Despite what might appear to the outside observer to be a record of a number of poorly justified invasions of other states, the memory is one of being bullied, put upon, victimised and threatened.  Someone is always forcing our hand, and there is always the constant lament: “Why are you people doing this to us?”  We then provide our own answer when the answers that other people give us are unsatisfactory, because the latter are unflattering and unwelcome.  Our answer is that They are essentially and in all ways opposed to our very existence, because nothing else could explain hostility to those as beneficent as “we” are.  Delusions about who “we” were and are combine with fantasies about “them” and produce the reliable consensus across most of the political spectrum that gives the same shallow, ill-considered answers to problems of diverse kinds.  Thus, “if Hussein does not act, we will” can be easily replaced with “if Musharraf does not act, we will.”  The political class in this country always speaks to other governments in what you might call the conditional of hegemony: your country’s sovereignty, or perhaps even its existence, is dependent on the degree of your subservience, and failure to comply will merit you the label of “anti-American” or “rogue” or both.

Then again, an even more important part may be this:

Why are we, four years after our indefensible invasion of Iraq and nearly six years after the attack on us, still unable to comprehend our enemies as capable, rational, modern agents?

It is reassuring to some, I suppose, when we do not allow our enemies to be fully rational or modern.  This is also an element of what Kuehnelt-Leddihn called nostrism.  It confirms in the minds of everyone in this country that, regardless of how misguided or clumsy or destructive our government’s policies may be, we will always retain this sense of superior rationality and modernity.  It is even better if we can claim that the enemy is from another time all together, people who are “from the seventh century,” when a part of the problem is, surely, that they are very much from our own time.  It is this need to cast the enemy as the embodiment of irrationality that leads to the ridiciulous overuse of the word fascist, since the labeling of others as fascist is the fast-track to denying them rationality and sanity.  Those who read history as one long march towards inevitable victory for their politics will necessarily see adversaries as throwbacks who will, must, end up on the “ash-heap of history” with the empire serving the function of progressive chimney-sweep.  Such people take no interest in the details of this other world they oppose, because they are bound to see these details as little more than curiosities and quirks of a system or civilisation that they assume is already doomed to fall.

Poulos expertly sums up the problems with the “Kurdish option” here.  We seem to be in complete agreement.  I strongly recommend it to you all.

But if Barack is talking about sending U.S. ground forces into Waziristan or Baluchistan, why would this not leave us in another mess like Iraq, with the U.S. Army bleeding and no way out? Would not Osama bin Laden rejoice in a border crossing by U.S. troops into Pakistan, enraging the Pakistani nationalists as well as the border tribes?

After half a decade of fighting in the Islamic world, has not the lesson sunk in with the hawks of both parties? U.S. troops in an Arab or Muslim country are more likely to create an insurgency than quell one. ~Pat Buchanan

Quite right.  This confirms my sense that Obama has taken this position because he was guessing that it is the position he needs to take to appear “serious” in the eyes of the media and the public.  He never gave much thought to what it might involve to do the things he has proposed, what the consequences might be and whether it had any realistic chance of succeeding.  Presented with hard and difficult realities, Obama retreats to the optimist’s dodge: “Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”  Well, no, but if something has a low chance  of success and significant costs, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there may be a better alternative.  Hope, as they say, is not a strategy–unless your name is Bush…or Obama.  

A great one for trumpeting his own prescience in 2002-03 when he happened to be right about Iraq, he seems now to demonstrate none of the same caution, deliberation or intelligence that I thought informed his views about that invasion then.  Someone must be telling him that he has to overcome the perception that he is some wobbly, wimpy dove and has to appear strong and decisive and supportive of military action, which is strange because Mark Penn is already employed by someone else.

Let’s just say that Obama has been having a bad time of courting the desi vote this year, but at least he’s been evenhanded about it–Indian- and Pakistani-Americans have some reason to dislike him now.  Put Obama in the White House, and the Kashmir question might be resolved out of sheer solidarity against the blowhard American.  Okay, maybe not. 

The latest from South Asia suggests that any Obama Administration would have to spend its first hundred days (and probably more than that) fixing the damaged relations that Candidate Obama frayed along the campaign trail.  Candidate Bush was actually not this sloppy, but then that was because he let other people do all the thinking for him that time around.  He basically said little that was controversial about any specific country–the most controversial statements he made about specific countries related to the ones whose names and presidents he did not know (remember his crack from way back about “good relations with the Grecians”?).  Haven’t we had enough of Presidents who cavalierly alienate other nations with sloppy and careless phrases designed for domestic consumption?  I eagerly await Obama’s “axis of quiet violence” speech.

Goodness knows I should probably be going to sleep now to get ready to recite the life story of Sayat Nova bil arabiyya (Kaan ya makaan sha’ir ismuhoo Harutyun Sayatyan…),but I am fascinated–and gratified–by Obama’s flailing.  No one of Obama’s gaffes, errors or foolish statements would have been that damaging to his campaign at this point, and even all of them together are not fatal, but they are a series of political wounds–all of them self-inflicted–that threaten to bleed Obama of momentum, time and resources as he has to battle back against his own ineptitude.  The harder he fights to catch up to where he was before these errors, the more likely he will again overreach or misjudge a question or fire off a foolish speech.  Hillary and Edwards are laughing all the way to New Hampshire, and suddenly Richardson’s preposterous role as the “candidate of experience and foreign policy expertise” becomes much more relevant, as he becomes the logical replacement among the top three.  Richardson does not deserve this; he is, as my last column said, ridiculous and incompetent, but Obama’s confusion is his gain.  I assume resistance to another Clinton is strong enough in the party that an anti-Clinton candidate will win.  Obama was supposed to be in the process of becoming that candidate.  Perhaps this is the beginning of the unraveling of his campaign and the rise of the eventual non-Clinton nominee.

Jim Antle has a good article that recaps and discusses Obama’s week of foreign policy follies.  Meanwhile, Jim’s AmSpec colleague and my Scene colleague, James Poulos, has an interesting post on Obama’s nuke-talk.  It appears, however, that Obama’s latest statements have put a damper on James’ predicted ’08 showdown.

ChroniclesMagazine.orgis having their fundraising drive.  Support the outstanding work they do there and help cover up Frum’s face.

I have to apologise for the delay in getting this up, since it has been available for several days.  Tom Piatak, who also often writes for Chronicles, has a superb, devastating review of Hitchens’ God Is Not Great.  If you haven’t already done so, you should read it.