Galbraith has long been a consultant to the Kurds and, long before that, a passionate advocate for their cause. Still, an objective case can be made that the United States has a moral and strategic interest in Kurdish independence. Redeploying troops to the Kurdistan region accomplishes four goals, Galbraith argues. It “secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western.” It deters “a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war.” It “provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories.” And it limits “Iran’s increasing domination.” ~Fred Kaplan

Kaplan is referring here to Peter Galbraith’s NYRB article on Iraq.  Personally, I’m a bit wary of anything offered by passionate advocates for Kurdish independence.  Kurdish independence attracts a pretty odd motley crew, many of whom do not generally show what I would call good judgement.  What other idea could unite Paul Wolfowitz, Marty Peretz, Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway in something like common cause?  As a stateless nation, the Kurds have been on the receiving end of plenty of oppression (and some Kurds dished out their share as well–ask the Assyrians and Armenians), and despite my criticisms of the “Kurdish exception” rhetoric and my objections to the unduly optimistic assessments of what an independent Kurdistan would mean for the region I have no argument with the Kurds themselves.  However, it is quite legitimate to question the judgement of “passionate” advocates for the national cause of another people when they are calling on the U.S. government to do something for that people.  Galbraith talks about discharging our moral debt to the Kurds–have we not actually already done that in destroying the regime that terrorised them?   

Kaplan anticipates this objection and says that an objective case can be made for an independent Kurdistan.  What the points quoted above demonstrate is not that there is a case for an independent Kurdistan, but that a U.S.-occupied Kurdish protectorate might achieve the goals Kaplan mentions.  Almost by definition, a Kurdistan that requires an American presence, even a relatively small one, to guarantee its existence against outside invasion is not fully independent, and a Kurdistan that exists as a forward U.S. base and a sort of buffer zone between Turkey and central and southern Iraqi chaos will not necessarily remain stable or pro-Western (and it already isn’t really very democratic) for very long.  Kurds are “pro-Western” to the extent that they are (and I would not assume that it is a very great extent) because they have enjoyed protection and stability thanks in part to the U.S. military, but like any other people–and perhaps more than most–a desire for independence and the continued presence of American forces, even if they are there in a purely defensive and supporting role, will probably create increasing resentment and hostility towards that presence.  It seems to me that it is not a coincidence that the one group in Iraq that still has generally favourable views of the U.S. is the one that has had rather less contact with the military presence in Iraq.

Though the Bush Administration is glibly mocked for making Mr. Musharraf an “exception” to the Bush Doctrine, the U.S. has no interest in destabilizing a nuclear-armed government already under a jihadist threat. ~The Wall Street Journal

Without pre-empting any of my forthcoming column, let me say very briefly on a separate question that it is not the toleration of Pakistan that bothers critics nearly as much as the Bush Doctrine itself.  By the standards of the Doctrine (regime change carried out against supposed and real proliferating, terrorist-supporting rogue states), if so it can be called, Pakistan ought to be one of our top state enemies, since it has done both in spades.  Since that would clearly be insane and inimical to actual U.S. interests, the Bush Doctrine doesn’t actually have a lot to recommend it in the real world.  Its application against a regime that fits the Doctrine’s description least well of all the possible candidates simply drives home the hollowness of the Doctrine.

The Journal concludes with the obvious analogy and displays its sudden acquisition of profound understanding of cultural difference: 

Jimmy Carter made that mistake with the Shah of Iran, another imperfect Muslim ruler whose successors were infinitely worse. Pakistan is not the Philippines, a Catholic country with long ties to the U.S. whose political culture we well understood when Reagan pushed Marcos from power in 1986.

The difference between Iran then and Pakistan now is, obviously, that we did not bring Musharraf to power by overthrowing the local democratically elected government–Musharraf did that all on his own.

This Noam Scheiber op-ed makes some interesting points about the DLC and its increasing irrelevance to the debates within the Democratic Party.   He is not arguing quite the same thing as I was in my TAC article on neoliberalism (sorry, not online) a couple months ago, and I may have given the DLC more credit as a going concern than he does, but our conclusions are not all that different.  The New Democrats are on the wane inside the Democratic Party, and with them go the fortunes of at least one variety of neoliberalism that they represented.

Think for a moment about just how arrogant that is. The Japanese should ignore how well their government is, you know, governing and instead make their electoral decisions based on how well their leaders serve what right-wing U.S. pundits think are our interests in the area. Clearly, after all, the most important thing for the average Japanese citizen is how aggressively his country expands it’s [sic] military. ~Sam Boyd

Boyd is right that it is supremely arrogant, and reflects the notion, common among hegemonists, that everything in the world either is or should be about America and American foreign policy.  When the Germans elected Merkel, it was interpreted as a move “towards” America; when the Socialists won in Spain, it was an “anti-American” result.  Gordon Brown’s tenure means nothing to them if it cannot be shoehorned into the all-important question: will he do our bidding?  The French election was not of interest to these sorts of people because it potentially represented a change in how France was governed domestically, how its regulatory apparatus functioned and what it meant to be French, but caught their eye purely because Sarko was allegedly more “pro-American” than his predecessor and his rival.  And so on. 

What all of this “analysis” seems to miss is that very few other countries have elections in which foreign policy plays a role as dominant as it does in our presidential elections, and that when they do talk about foreign policy it does not always center around the U.S.     

This “analysis” also fails to take into account that most other nations do not think that an “activist international role” of the kind that AEI prefers is all that desirable.  This is especially true in Japan, where it was pounded into the heads of the Japanese for two generations that war was never an appropriate instrument of policy.  After having sufficiently beaten down the Japanese, some would appparently like to see the Japanese built back up as a military power to serve Washington’s regional goals.  If there were referenda around the world on this question of having a pro-American “activist international role” (a.k.a., being an imperialist running-dog), the activist side would lose eight times out of ten.  The AEI folks should be pleased that most foreign electorates do not place as much importance on foreign policy and U.S. relations, or else the LDP under Abe might suffer an even greater defeat.  It is a strange world where hegemonists think it is to their advantage to empower intense nationalists, especially when the domestic agenda of the latter involves the sort of historical revisionism that directly attacks the hegemonists’ own ruling myths about America overcoming the evils of Japanese militarism and transforming Japan into what it is today.

In an otherwise superb piece on the (often cynical) political and lobbying battle over the Armenian genocide resolution, Michael Crowley has this unfortunate line:

Most Armenian-Americans are descended from survivors of the slaughter and grew up listening to stories about how the Turks, suspecting the Orthodox Christian Armenians of collaborating with their fellow Orthodox Christian Russians [bold mine-DL] during World War I, led their grandparents on death marches, massacred entire villages, and, in one signature tactic, nailed horseshoes to their victims’ feet.

This is almost entirely right, which makes the mistake all the more glaring.  Diasporan Armenians often do talk of nothing else when it comes to politics, and the official Turkish line is that Armenian collaboration with the Russians was the “justification” for the deportation of Armenians “away from” the front lines.  However, the main descriptive error here is obvious, or should be, since Armenian Apostolic Christians are of a different confession from the Russians and have been for a very, very long time.  Ironically, this allowed the Armenians inside Russia to enjoy relatively greater ecclesiastical independence as a non-Orthodox church than other non-Russian Orthodox churches, such as the Georgian, but that is a different matter.  The difference here is crucial because the genocide occurred against the “loyal” millet, the one Christian community that could not be directly implicated in the designs of Russian or Greek or some other Orthodox state’s foreign policy, because they were not Eastern Orthodox and were under their own religious authority that had no ties to Moscow or any other center of Orthodoxy.  There were some Armenian revolutionaries who sided against the Central Powers in the war, but they were not representative of Armenians in general, much less could the entire community be reasonably held responsible for the actions of a relative few.  This is what made the genocide that much more shocking and terrible to the Armenians–unlike the other Christian minorities, they had by and large remained loyal and law-abiding subjects.  For the ideologues of the CUP, however, one Christian minority was as much of a threat as any other.  To do full justice to the history of the genocide, it is exactly the difference between Armenian and Orthodox Christians that must be kept in mind.

Matt Yglesias recommends to us an old Robert Kaplan article on the virtues of the AKP.  Since I am a pretty convinced AKP-phobe, if that is what we can call it, I thought I would take a look.  Within two sentences I decided that the article cannot be a very credible source of insight on modern Turkey, since it manages to get late Ottoman history so profoundly wrong:

The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire, like the coeval multi-ethnic Hapsburg Austrian one, was more hospitable to minorities than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it. The Ottoman caliphate welcomed Turkish, Kurdish, and other Muslims with open arms, and tolerated Christian Armenians and Jews.

First of all, you cannot seriously compare Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire on this point.  During the same period of time in the late nineteenth century, before anyone had ever heard of Young Turks, the two empires treated their minorities in very different ways.  In the 1890s, there were large-scale, government-aided massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which had followed the massacres of the Bulgarians in the 1870s.  In Austria, nothing of the kind was happening–the emperor was the mediator and protector of all the subjects in his domains, and was a force working against, not with, any nationalist or supremacist forces within the empire.  Obviously, the Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire did not regard Ottoman rule quite so highly as Kaplan does in retrospect.  Second of all, it is not exactly true that the empire was more tolerant than the republic, since the empire had done most of the heavy lifting of genocide and expulsion of minorities from Anatolia.  The failure of the Greek invasion of 1919-22 and the Treaty of Lausanne did the rest of the damage.  The main difference is that the empire engaged in a lot of killing of non-Muslim minorities, while the republic turned its attention to oppressing non-Turkish minorities regardless of religion.  In a really twisted way, that’s a kind of progress.  

Kaplan would very much like to distinguish between the Young Turks who “brought down the empire” (small point–it was the Allies who “brought down the empire” and it was the Young Turks who were stupid enough to get into the war that destroyed the empire) and the quasi-constitutional monarchy that existed before 1908, which would be interesting, except that this is mostly a lot of rot.  Anyone familiar with Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act will know that things cannot be divvied up quite so nicely.  The Young Turks were by turns Pan-Turanian, Islamist or Ottomanist, depending on what the circumstances demanded, and to call them “secular-minded” as Kaplan does is to mistake later Kemalism for what the CUP represented when it came to power.  Kemal emerged out of the Young Turk movement, but it is rather obvious that this movement was not really “secular-minded.”  It was a fusion of Islam, nationalism and progressive reformism in one nasty bundle.  The triumvirate wasn’t being purely opportunistic in calling for a jihad during WWI. 

Why does this matter (besides getting the history right and shooting down weird pro-Ottoman sentiments in the West)?  It matters because AKP has been very keenly cultivating a neo-Ottomanist ideology–one that follows up on and goes beyond the neo-Ottomanism of Ozal that Kaplan thinks is so wonderful–that naturally regards the pre-republican period fondly as a time of Turkish greatness and relative Islamic (Sunni) unity.  It is also relevant that the poem that got Erdogan jailed in the first place was written by Ziya Gokalp, the leading ideologist of the CUP and one responsible for many of the nasty ideas that subsequently led to genocide.  Perhaps it tells us something that Erdogan chose to cite that particular author.  I am confident that if a European politician started publicly quoting from the works of fascist or Nazi writers, he would not be winning a lot of sympathy from Western audiences.

Those unfamiliar with this history can be forgiven for indulging in misplaced sympathy for the AKP, but Kaplan almost certainly knows better.  Like many a Western Turcophile, Kaplan finds the integration of Turkey into Europe a wholly good thing and seems willing to concoct the necessary arguments to make this most unpalatable idea go down more easily.

Update: Here is an April post of mine pouring cold water on another one of Yglesias’ “but the AKP isn’t so bad” arguments.

But on the whole, Rowling’s wizarding society conforms to boringly conventional gender roles. Dads, like the loveable Mr. Weasley (father of red-headed sidekick Ron), go off to work while steadfast moms stay home cooking, cleaning, and rearing large families. ~Dana Goldstein (some Deathly Hallows spoilers included)

Via Steve Sailer

Of course, there’s every reason in the world to reject in its entirety this latest stab at dissecting the politics, sexual or otherwise, of Harry Potter and Rowling.  If there is something boringly conventional going on, it is the need of pundits to find a political message beyond the rather tendentious “Nazi-like wizards are as bad as the Nazis” theme that runs throughout the series.  Then again, nothing could be more boring than loading down a fantasy series with the WWII preoccupations of the Anglo-American mind, but to complain about this would be once again to dwell on the politics of the story to the detriment of the story’s important themes.  Preferably, these pundits need to find a message with which they strongly disagree, so as to appear quite unconventional and different in their discovery of a reason to loathe Harry Potter‘s subtle signals of, in this case, cultural conservatism. 

These two sentences cited above capture for me the heart of the matter: because Rowling’s society “conforms” to  “boringly conventional” (i.e., traditional or normal) gender roles, the story’s veritable overflowing with liberal cliches and feel-good affirmations of multicultural and multiethnic Britain count for almost nothing with Goldstein.  Thus, despite the fact that we do not really want it credited to our view of things, Harry Potter is delivered, gift-wrapped, to the doorstep of patriarchal reactionaries.  This seems odd to me.  It is as if a conservative writer went out of his way to criticise Tolkien’s supposed radical feminism because he made Eowyn into a substantial and heroic character.

The core complaint Goldstein has about the stereotyping that goes on in Potter is that it actually takes diversity too seriously.  The story assumes that creatures that are not entirely human will behave differently from humans, and it suggests that there are ingrained differences between the groups that can be traced back to the different natures they possess.  If progressives believe that all talk of beings having common natures is “reactionary,” this will put progressives in an odd bind of explaining why it is that they should think that there are such things as human rights.  Had Rowling kept her nods toward diversity at the merely tokenist, superficial level, and never attributed any significance to difference, all would probably have been well.

Eschewing their former role as advocates for and enforcers of GOP political suicide (as leading champions of anti-fundraising efforts and promoters of primary challenges against moderate “surge” dissidents), the Victory Caucus is reborn as the pure propaganda outfit that it was always meant to be.  The great imitators of MoveOn have settled for their much more natural role of water-carriers for the Pentagon and the White House.

Rod asks which of our previously held beliefs the Iraq war changed.  Initially, I thought that nothing in my views had really changed all that much, but as I reflect on my views five years ago at the start of the war debate I realise that a number of important assumptions that I once held (and some of which I held fairly strongly) were wrong.  The constant in all of these beliefs was unfounded idealism, optimism and confidence in the basic soundness of democratic government.  Anyone who knew me in 2002 would never have mistaken me for an idealist or an optimist, but I retained enough of these foolish habits of mind that the disillusionment that followed was fairly severe.      

On conservatism and American politics:

1)  First among these was my assumption that most Americans who called themselves conservatives distrusted government and feared the expansion of government power.  That was the conservatism I had been raised with, and it seemed to be the one that had a visceral appeal to a large number of conservatives during the ’90s.  Obviously, this conservatism is held by only a fairly small number of conservatives, and, as wiser people than I have known all along, the popularity of a “roll back the state” message is extremely superficial. 

2)  One of my other false beliefs connected to this was that most conservatives were conservatives first and GOP partisans second (if at all), and would therefore be just as outraged by GOP government activism and overreach as they had been in the 1990s.  This was the worst sort of naivete on my part, and it was repeatedly shown to be false.  To point out that some of the same people who wanted to attack Iraq opposed aggression against Yugoslavia was almost useless–partisans are well aware that they use a double standard, and they have no problem with it.  Again, I mistook the attitudes of conservatives whom I knew for what was true for “conservatives” generally–this was just sloppy analysis. 

3) Another false belief that I held was that most conservatives were conservative as a result of custom and reflection, with rather more emphasis on the latter, and to discover that most conservatives were such on the basis of little more than visceral dislike of various hate figures was something that took some time to accept. 

4)  Another mistaken assumption was that most conservatives were likewise wary of government power overseas and that they would therefore be extremely skeptical of foreign adventurism.  It seemed obvious to me that if I and others who took this view simply pointed out the bizarre Wilsonian pretensions of the administration, that would cure them of their enthusiasms.      

5)  Yet another false belief was that most conservatives were not nationalists, when obviously the defining feature of most Americans who call themselves conservatives is that they are, in fact, nationalists.  Had I been reading more Lukacs in my younger days, I would have already known this.

6) One more false belief was that the power of nationalism and hyper-nationalism in America generally was fairly weak.  I’m not sure why I ever thought this was the case.  This was one where I could not have been more wrong.  This was the result of wishful thinking and not much else. 

In each case, I made poor judgements about American politics because I substituted my understanding of conservatism for the conservatism held by tens of millions of people.  I remain convinced that the latter should understand conservatism more as I do, but it has been a long five years learning just how completely far from that most conservatives are.  I imagined that the brief outpouring of nationalism after 9/11 in which most of us were swept up was a passing phase, a fever that would lift quickly and leave few traces.  It had not occurred to me until later that 9/11 tapped into a vast reservoir of nationalism, and even in spite of Iraq nothing seems to be able to suppress it (and, perversely, withdrawal from Iraq may serve as yet another boost to it). 

On democracy and the media:

1) Despite some long-standing dislike for mass democracy, I continued to operate until 2002-03 under the assumption that a deliberative process of informed debate would bar the way to the launching of an entirely unjustified and unprovoked war.  Ha!  In other words, I had the strange idea that arguments and evidence mattered and that public opinion was responsive to reality.  Once again, I was not nearly pessimistic enough, and as certain as I was of the impossibility of spreading democracy in the Near East from the very beginning I remained until then embarrassingly deluded and blind to the profound inadequacies of democratic government.  For some inexplicable reason, probably the result of all those years of conditioning in civics classes, I thought that the transparently weak and false claims put forward by the government would be undone by our adversarial political system and the checks to executive abuse would prevent wanton aggression.  In short, I believed, against all better knowledge and judgement, that the structures of representative government would function to stop an unjust war from happening.  Never mind that this had never happened in the past–for some reason, I thought it was going to work this time.  At the time that the war started, I believed that the people in these structures had failed to do their duty, but as time went on I began to understand that the structures themselves are incapable of preventing executive abuses of power, because all of those structures have subordinated themselves completely to the executive in these matters.  Call it the death of my constitutional optimism. 

2)  I had the totally unfounded, naive, youthful idea that it was the duty of journalists to hold government to account.  They may theoretically have such a duty, but when it comes to questions of war most seemed to think that discretion was the better part of valour.  Perhaps because they were excessively worried that they would be pilloried as fifth columnists and subversives, many journalists who were otherwise not at all sympathetic to what Mr. Bush was trying to do simply rolled over and let a campaign of disinformation against the public succeed (and, what was worse, they became active participants in that campaign). 

Of course, I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I find it a bit humbling that I and other noninterventionists could have perceived the numerous misleading government statements, the likely pitfalls following the invasion, the absurdity of implanting alien political and social norms into an entirely different culture and unknown part of the world and the malign effects of the war on our political institutions, and yet at the same time I could be so mistaken about my countrymen and supposed political confreres.  As someone who opposed any invasion of Iraq from the day the idea was first floated (Jan. 29, 2002), I did not make many of the same mistakes that war supporters did, but I regret them all the same, since my failure to understand the political reality of my own country led me to make arguments in my letters and conversations that were not going to be very persuasive.  Antiwar activists were often effectively arguing past, or rather above, the public.  We were arguing the impracticalities and immorality of such a war; the other side could tap into a visceral desire for revenge and payback, regardless of the target.  War advocates understood the irrationality of democracy (including the crowd-pleasing lie that democracies are naturally peaceful) very well and exploited it for all it was worth.  Antiwar activists have been labouring for years under the delusion that popular attitudes can be affected by having better policy arguments and superior command of knowledge about a region.  Current war supporting pundits have much in common with this approach, since the standard refrain of pro-war commentators is something like, “The American people will never approve of a policy of surrender,” just as some antiwar commentators might effectively claim (as I know I did) that “the American people will never approve of a policy of aggression.”  I was wrong then in my judgement of the public mood; they are wrong now.  

It occurs to me that the reason why antiwar activists are so strongly attached to the mantra of “Bush lied” (besides the reality that he and his officials did lie on numerous occasions) is that they are attempting to square a nation that embraced a manifestly unjust, unnecessary war with their confidence in the functioning of our system of government.  In this view, if people will so easily embrace such an obviously wrongheaded policy, sane foreign policy will not be possible in a democratic system.  The government’s deceptions (which absolutely did occur) help to bear a lot of this burden, since they allow the majority of people to use the old “he tricked us” excuse to cover up for their own failures.  Absent those failures, however, no deceit would have been sufficient to propel a country entirely against its will into such a war.