In Russia ’s case, it has been easy for Putin to tarnish liberal democrats by associating them in the popular mind with past policies of accommodation and even subservience to the United States and the West. ~Robert Kagan

Putin didn’t need to do any of the tarnishing or the associating.  The Russian liberals did that themselves by enabling and then openly cavorting with the criminals who looted the country during the plunder that was privatisation.  Russian liberals were, are, accommodating and subservient to the U.S. and the West.  Indeed, that seems to be the essence of what passes for Russian liberalism (which is, in reality, about as liberal as the “colour revolutions” were democratic).  “Russian liberalism” simply means the transplanting of western European and American managed democratic capitalism in which they, the “liberals,” will serve as the managing elite and organise things according to their particular interests.  This would inevitably require  them to ignore what most Russians want and what most Russians believe.  Not surprisingly, because of the very nature of what they believe and the policies they have endorsed and would support in the future, these liberals cannot make it very far in Russia.  This is not some cunning ruse by Putin–they brought it on themselves when they effectively turned against their countrymen.

In Europe and the United States, the liberal world cheered on the “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan and saw in them the natural unfolding of humanity ’s proper political evolution. In Russia and China, these events were viewed as Western-funded, CIA-inspired coups that furthered the geopolitical hegemony of America and its (subservient) European allies. The two autocratic powers responded similarly to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and not only because China’s embassy was bombed by an American warplane and Russia’s slavic orthodox allies in Serbia were on the receiving end of the nato onslaught. What the liberal “West” considered a moral act, a “humanitarian” intervention, leaders and analysts in Moscow and Beijing saw as unlawful and self-interested aggression. Indeed, since they do not share the liberal West ’s liberalism, how could they have seen it any other way? ~Robert Kagan

Those who cheered on the “colour revolutions” were gullible and usually were not paying very close attention to the people being brought to power in the process.  Whether or not the CIA was involved in any of these (I tend to think they were not involved, since these revolutions succeeded), Western governments openly supported one side against the other and cast each one in terms of movement towards the West and away from Russia.  The bombing of Yugoslavia was aggression.  These do not seem to me to be debatable (especially the latter), and seeing them in this way is not an expression of a different ideological bias.

If two of the world’s largest powers share a common commitment to autocratic government, autocracy is not dead as an ideology. ~Robert Kagan

That would be interesting, if autocracy were an ideology and not a catch-all term for one-man rule.  Viewed this way, neither Russia nor China is actually an autocracy (Ross has made this argument about China already).  Autocracy implies that there is a sovereign who personally wields power over the entire apparatus of government because all legal and constitutional authority rests with him.  Autocrats are not typically term-limited, since they recognise no law above themselves.  Absolute monarchs might fairly be described as autocrats (Byzantine emperors would sometimes use the title of autokrator to refer to themselves).  Of course, there have not been many truly autocratic regimes for a long time, and today no major power has one. 

Unless Putin disregards the constitution or has his majority in the Duma rewrite the relevant passage, he will leave office after two terms in accordance with the law.  Of course, in addition to his popular support, Putin represents a power structure of the state intelligence services, the military and oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin.  Russia has a democratic authoritarian nationalist regime that is managed by members of the internal state security and military apparatus.  Authoritarian regimes are conventionally conflated with autocratic ones, because both are “non-democratic” in the way that Westerners think of it, but authoritarian regimes very often go out of their way to give the appearance and institutional structure of consultative and/or populist government.  Authoritarians love plebiscites, and they much prefer some formal body to do the dreary work of pushing legislation.  They are almost always in thrall to democratic ideals and make a point of casting themselves as “true” democrats–autocrats not only would feel no need to do this, but would find any concession to democratic principles inherently offensive.  

Russia’s government does not really fit the “autocratic” bill, but then most modern states don’t actually fit this description.  Genuine royal absolutism went the way of the dodo in central Europe in 1848, and disappeared from Russia in 1905-06; the last genuine modern autocracies ruling major powers vanished in the 1908 revolution in the Ottoman Empire and the 1911 Chinese Revolution.

War could erupt between Russia and Georgia, forcing the United States and its European allies to decide whether to intervene or suffer the consequences of a Russian victory. ~Robert Kagan

Whenever Kagan moves from description to prescription or prediction, what is an otherwise unremarkable analysis of the current state of affairs quickly turns into a veritable self-parody of neoconservative foreign policy views.  Whatever would we do if we suffered the consequences of a Georgian defeat?  Imagine, Tbilisi in Russian control!  Why, it would be…just like it was for close to two uninterrupted centuries before the collapse  of the USSR.  Somehow the world survived Russian control of Georgia before, and I suspect we would manage to muddle through in the event that Russia acquired the territory again.  It would annoy all of those folks who went to the trouble of routing a major oil pipeline around Russia and sending it through the Caucasus, but otherwise I cannot imagine why anyone (outside Georgia, that is) would be unduly troubled.  The idea of intervening against the other major nuclear power over Georgia is simply mad.  Is the independence of Sakartvelos worth risking WWIII or anything like it?  Of course it isn’t.  

Of course, speaking as an Orthodox Christian, I think it would be terrible for there to be a war between Russia and Georgia, and I have deplored the acrimony fostered by both governments.  However, if there were a war, I can also say with confidence that it would not meaningfully damage the United States or Europe at all.

In places like South Korea and Germany, it is American plans to reduce the U.S. military presence that stir controversy, not what one would expect if there was a widespread fear or hatred of overweening American power. ~Robert Kagan

As far as South Korea is concerned, this is a remarkable, false claim.  Most South Koreans resent that American soldiers who violate their laws remain under U.S. military jurisdiction, especially when there are incidents involving military personnel that result in the deaths of South Korean civilians.  The deaths of the two girls in 2002 sparked general outrage, and the episode likely still sours some on the American presence.  Many South Koreans are not what you would call fans of the U.S. military, and this long-standing resentment has been stoked by the combination of the withdrawal of some soldiers from South Korea all together and the movement of other U.S. forces to new bases.  The abandonment of the “tripwire” has understandably created some controversy of its own, but this takes place against a backdrop of strong opposition to the military presence among a large minority of the population. 

Five years ago, at least 44% of South Koreans had an unfavourable attitude towards the United States, and this year only 58% of South Koreans expressed a “positive” view of the U.S.–only a slight improvement over five years ago, and one that still implies a lot of resentment and dislike.  Five years ago, South Korea was among the ten most “anti-American” countries in the world:

Survey data suggests that South Koreans have been increasingly critical of the US since the 1980s, and that negative views have become more widespread since George W. Bush took office. An August 2002 poll by the Pew Research Center revealed that South Korea ranked eighth among the 44 countries surveyed in terms of unfavorable attitudes toward the U.S, with higher rates of disapproval than Indonesia and India.  

In the realm of pop culture, South Korean horror films connecting the American military to the spawning of evil creatures have done booming business. 

Evidence for significant South Korean opposition to the American presence is abundant.  Naturally, South Korea’s political elite does not express such sentiments, just as most allied states’ political leaders say the things Washington wants to hear rather than what will most satisfy their own people.  Kagan’s handling of evidence here is typical for his foreign policy tradition: whenever a regime expresses pro-American sentiments in defiance of large numbers of its people, the regime’s position is taken as the more meaningful one.  It was in this misleading way that war supporters invented “New Europe” as a concept, even though the governments who represented this supposedly different Europe and supported the invasion were overwhelmingly opposed by their constituents.

Chinese rhetoric has been, if anything, more tempered during the Bush years, in part because the Chinese have seen September 11 and American preoccupation with terrorism as a welcome distraction from America’s other preoccupation, the “China threat.” ~Robert Kagan

China certainly does welcome the prospect of an America distracted by terrorism, and they have to be fairly excited at the prospect of an America bogged down in Iraq for the foreseeable future, but the “China threat” is not “America’s” preoccupation.  It is largely the preoccupation of the same people who advocated most loudly for invading Iraq.  Much like their calls for intervention in the Near East, their sabre-rattling against China is unwise and dangerous.

Tim Ash is on a roll (and not in a good way):

Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.

I’m hardly banging the drum for intervention in any other places, but who actually thinks that the mess in Iraq is a more “comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster” than the nightmares that Congo, Sudan and Zimbabwe have been over the last five to ten years?  Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of southern Africa, now essentially produces no crops thanks to the insane land-grabbing ways of ZANU-PF and friends.  After wiping out four million people through violence and disease, the two Congo Wars continue to have significant aftershocks.  Those have been man-made disasters on a grander scale, partaking of a kind of irrationality that is difficult to equal.  We do not notice them, because we do not even pretend to care about central and southern Africa the way that some of us pretend to care about Darfur.  Then there is Darfur, where the mass killing and refugee crisis together constitute a “more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster” than what has happened in Iraq, and its effects have spread to some of Sudan’s neighbours.  This is not to say that the Iraq war is not an appalling waste or that it will have calamitous effects for years to come, but this is to say that it is still not, in fact, the worst thing that has happened in the last 25 years.  Unlike those others, however, the geniuses in Washington can look at the Iraq disaster and say, “We did that!”

It is my view that the same kind of hysteria that originally made Iraq into the most threatening foe has now started to transform itself into a new hysteria.  This new hysteria claims that the ending of the Iraq war will become the source of the most calamitous destruction and chaos, an unparalleled disaster, just as before the old hysteria caused people to think that starting the war would usher in a new era of freedom and wonder throughout the region (I exaggerate only slightly). 

Both views rely on the assumption, which continues to go unexplained and unproven, that Iraq is extremely geopolitically significant and political events in Iraq will have tremendous significance for the wider region and the world.  If that were the case, Baathism should have spread like wildfire and the Gulf War should have triggered regional bloodletting on a massive scale.  In the event, the first never happened and the bloody aftermath of the Gulf War was contained within Iraq.  It seems to me that Americans on both sides of the debate frequently fall into the habit of thinking that Iraq is really important in one way or another, since this makes our government’s obsession with the place over the last 17 years make a little more sense, which blinds us to its relative unimportance–both to our country and to the rest of the world.  To the extent that Iraq has become geopolitically significant, it is because Washington has been focusing so much of its energy and attention on it.  Other major powers, with perhaps the exception of Britain, do not imagine that the world revolves around Iraq and they never regarded the old regime as some singularly world-threatening force.  Perhaps it is time for Washington to walk away.    

Consider the list of consequences Ash cites to demonstrate his claim that it is the “most comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster” that he can remember.  He begins:

Besides the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand; the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shiite, “a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition”

Every one of these things has already taken place or is taking place right now, well before the war has come to an end and Americans have gone home (which once again forces me to ask why we need to remain).  The Iraqi state in any meaningful sense was destroyed and/or disbanded in 2003.  The ramshackle Iraqi government that attempts to fill the void is about as much of a “state” as the Federal Government of Somalia (the Maliki government has nicer office buildings, though).  “Militant Islamism” and the Al Qaeda “brand” have already been revitalised and enhanced respectively.  That’s what was bound to happen when you destroy a secular state in the Islamic world and occupy a Muslim country.  The latter danger–the enhancement of Al Qaeda’s “brand”–is still somewhat within our control.  It may be the case that withdrawal will at least diminish the appeal of said “brand” by depriving Al Qaeda of one of its major rationales for its propaganda and recruiting.  The internecine war is, of course, already here.  You can argue that it may get worse, at least until one side or the other wins pretty decisively, but the conflict has already “erupted.”  (Also, depending on your definition of “modern history,” this statement isn’t accurate in any case, since conflicts between Sunni and Shi’ite powers did occur with some regularity since the 16th century: these were the wars between the Safavids and Ottomans, which in turn sharpened and politicised the sectarian divide to a much greater degree than before.) 

Ash then finishes the list:

the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

Again, this has already happened.  There is not anything now that can fundamentally change the outcome in which Iran is greatly strengthened (which is we should have rapprochement with Iran).  Washington can choose a path of confrontation, in which it organises a regional concert of powers to oppose Iranian influence as it has been (rather unsuccessfully) trying to do for the past few years, or it can turn things to its advantage by bringing the rising regional power into our orbit.  In fact, the most plausible path towards achieving some measure of stability in Iraq is to have Iran shoulder the responsibility that goes with the influence that Tehran wants to have in Iraq.  Iran wants greater regional power, and Washington wants a way out of Iraq without chaos being the result.  If it is possible to come to some understanding with Tehran, in which Washington “hands off” Iraq to Tehran, both could achieve their immediate goals and many of the worst evils might be limited and contained (though they would probably not be prevented all together).

Among the possible consequences of the collapse of Iraq, Tim Ash mentions this item included by Fred Halliday:

the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there

As opposed to the waves of pro-Western good feeling and galloping liberalism that currently characterise the Turkish body politic?  Say what you will about the rest of the region, but the idea that the Turkish political mood will become meaningfully more anti-Western after Iraq disintegrates is an odd one, simply because it is difficult for Turkish public opinion to become any more anti-Western than it already is.  Any previous enthusiasm for EU entry inside Turkey has cooled–many Turks have heard from Europeans that they are not really welcome in the club, and they have decided that they don’t really want to join anyway.  Turkish politics is often a competition over which party can be, or at least appear, the most authoritarian nationalist (here is Erdogan trying to out-nationalist the Nationalists).  It’s not as if a regime that criminalises speech and expression and represses its minority populations is currently in any danger of not being an authoritarian nationalist one.  To the extent that instability on its southern border strengthens the hand of the Turkish military (which is to say that the military would gain almost complete control, rather than its current significant level of control), greater chaos in Iraq might make the military more assertive in some ways.  Otherwise, it is pointless to worry about the possible anti-Western and authoritarian turns in Turkish politics–that ship has sailed.

These days, Mr. Hagel is no longer feeling so alone.

As he walked across the Capitol, one day after the latest chapter of the Senate war debate ended, he said he is receiving fresh encouragement to consider a presidential candidacy. He intends to study the landscape and disclose his intentions “in the next few weeks.”

“There is no Republican presidential candidate with this point of view [bold mine-DL]. There might be an opening for me on this,” Mr. Hagel said. “I’ve had three very significant Republican fundraisers come to me this week, all of whom said I should look at running.” ~The New York Times

If the “point of view” to which he refers involves a lot of talk about tactical disagreements for the last four years and relatively little action on anything more substantive, he would be correct that this point of view continues to be unrepresented.  The war “opponent” who does not, in fact, favour ending the war is an unusual profile, but it is one that he has staked out with gusto.  Indeed, Chuck Hagel fits the slot of Serious Republican Leader Who Does Not Lead perfectly.