Ramesh Ponnuru counters the GOP’s spending myth, but acknowledges the reality behind it:

There are elements of truth in the conservative story. Bush-era Republicans did spend too much, refusing to make room for increased security budgets by cutting anything else. Bush’s sincere belief that K-12 education could be reformed from Washington was naive. The Republicans’ almost uniform rejection of President Barack Obama’s stimulus and health-care legislation really did contribute to their victories in 2010.

But there’s little evidence that big government was the reason, or even an important reason, for Republican defeats at the end of the Bush years.

Obviously, I agree with this, since I have been saying it for many years, and I was making a version of this argument just last week. Big-government Bush-era programs and policies were not conservative in any meaningful sense, but these were not the things that caused movement conservatives to break with Bush. It is natural for activists and high-information voters to believe that their preferred policies will help their party win elections, and it is understandable that they interpret electoral defeats as punishments for following the wrong policies. It makes sense that they define defeats in terms of abandoning principle. All of us would like to think that our “side” can regularly have political success while still being rooted in principle, but there is usually little or no reason to believe that holding fast to principles in making policy helps very much to win elections. It would be excellent if good policy were rewarded with electoral success, but the belief that this is what happens is a delusion that there are no trade-offs between the two. It is part of a mentality that says that we can have it all, which is the same mentality responsible for overwhelming public support for entitlement programs combined with strong hostility to paying for them.

Creating the myth about excessive spending as the cause of defeat after the 2006 midterms was an exercise in changing the subject. The excessive spending was real enough, but it wasn’t what made the party so deeply unpopular. In 2006, the pro-war Republican need to find an explanation for a major defeat caused mainly by the war in Iraq was strong, and the myth that excessive spending had driven the GOP from power was useful in many ways. It was an issue that could unite Republicans while they were in the opposition, it provided them with a convenient narrative to account for what had happened, it flattered conservatives without demanding that they re-think or learn anything, and it served as a ready-made distraction from the disastrous foreign policy errors that the administration and its GOP supporters had made. Of course, post-2006 and post-2008 Republican rhetoric about the evils of excessive spending was mostly just that (see the 2010 demagoguing of Medicare cuts), which points to an awareness on the part of elected Republicans that fiscal restraint and responsibility are actually quite unpopular.

Fiscal restraint and responsibility also happen to be what the country desperately needs, but that doesn’t mean that the party willing to embrace them will be rewarded by the public.

While everyone is marveling at yet another display of how little Herman Cain cares or knows about foreign policy, Michael Cohen’s review of Saturday’s foreign policy debate reminded me of something Romney said that is actually far more foolish:

Look, one thing you can know– and that is if we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And if we elect Mitt Romney, if you’d like me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon.

There is no way that Romney can back up this guarantee, and there’s also no way for him to know that Iran will acquire a nuclear weapon in the next few years. It could happen, but hawks have been saying something like this for decades, and so far they have been wrong every time. Consider the most recent examples of nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea, Pakistan, and India. What could have been done by an administration of the other party that would have made the slightest difference in any of those cases? There was nothing that another administration would or could have done that would have halted these states’ development of nuclear weapons.

Romney’s statement is foolish in a number of ways. First of all, it sets him up for endless mockery if he is elected and Iran tests a bomb during his time in office. Contrary to his bluster, nothing he proposes doing will stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon if the Iranian regime decides to develop one. That includes military strikes on Iran’s facilities. Having declared that he will definitely stop something that he cannot stop, he opens himself to the standard charges of “weakness” and failure of the sort that he flings with such abandon right now. Preserving credibility is overrated, and it’s not something that seems to worry Romney very much, but Romney’s statement undermines his credibility by promising something he can’t possibly guarantee. Bizarrely, Romney continues to treat an issue on which there is (unfortunately) considerable bipartisan consensus into a partisan dispute. He seems compelled for some reason to insist that there are profound differences of substance between him and Obama, which forces him to belittle Obama’s policy when it is almost identical to his own. At the same time, Romney’s confrontational Iran policy makes it even more likely that Iran will decide that its needs a deterrent if Romney is elected, which makes it that much more likely that Romney’s words are going to come back to haunt him.

The one place where Romney seems to differ with the administration is in his repeated calls for supporting “insurgents” to help overthrow the government. My guess is that this would involve resuming Bush-era support for separatist militias and terrorist groups in their fight with Tehran. This isn’t likely to “encourage regime change” so much as it is going to outrage most Iranians that the U.S. is waging covert war against Iran with the help of separatists and terrorists. I wonder if one of the “insurgent” groups that Romney has in mind is the MEK. Someone should ask Romney where he stands on the question of de-listing the MEK.

Andrew comments on neoconservatives and Obama:

To think that these hateful nutcases are taken seriously in Washington reveals just how skewed our foreign policy is. Obama is trying to move past it – for the sake of America and Israel – but he was checkmated in his first term. One powerful reason to re-elect him is that he can try again.

There’s no question that our foreign policy is skewed very badly, and neoconservatives are a significant part of the reason why that is so, but the “powerful reason” to re-elect Obama would be to deny the Presidency to the likely nominee who is surrounded by advisers drawn from their ranks. There isn’t much reason to expect that Obama’s second term would be substantively better on foreign policy than his first term was. If he was “checkmated” in the first term, he will continue to be stymied in the second. Even if neoconservative critics cannot or will not acknowledge it, administration policy towards Iran has become increasingly confrontational, and almost everything that distinguished Obama on foreign policy has disappeared.

Unfortunately, as I have been saying for some time now, the substantive differences between Romney and Obama on many foreign policy issues are few, and their respective Iran policies are virtually indistinguishable. That isn’t an argument for Obama, nor is it a “powerful” reason to support his re-election. It is little more than a “lesser of two evils” argument. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t say much for Obama. He may have been “checkmated” on some issues by opposition at home, but it doesn’t change the reality that Obama has been actively contributing to the skewing of U.S. foreign policy through continued militarization and the strengthening of the imperial Presidency. The main argument in his favor is that his likely replacement would be far worse.

Matt Steinglass helps to make my earlier point about Romney and Bush for me:

Neither of these moves were particularly non-conservative, unless you come from Mr Larison’s emphatically anti-federalist branch of conservatism: NCLB is based on a traditionally conservative emphasis on test scores and teaching “the basics”, while Medicare Part D was a massive government giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry. Most conservatives themselves didn’t see them as non-conservative until Mr Bush became unpopular in 2006 and the self-serving narrative began to coalesce that his failure was due to insufficient ideological purity.

Yes, the turn against Bush after 2006 was self-serving: movement conservatives were trying to extricate the movement from its deep complicity in the failures of the Bush administration. Naturally, many movement conservatives gave this an ideological spin, which doesn’t mean that their support for or acquiescence to earlier Bush administration policies proves the conservatism of those policies. The self-serving narrative was a way of claiming that movement conservatives had somehow managed to remain principled and conservative while the Republicans they supported had gone astray. It’s closer to the truth to say that the Bush administration pushed through un-conservative policies, and most movement conservatives weren’t terribly concerned about the substance of the policies so much as they were interested in keeping their side in power and winning elections.

If we take conservative arguments about the size and role of government even remotely seriously, a large increase in the government’s unfunded liabilities to expand a federal entitlement is not a conservative policy. If there is any substance to conservative complaints about cronyism and collusion between government and corporations, engaging in a “massive giveaway” to certain corporations is hardly a redeeming feature of the policy. A major intrusion of the federal government into an area previously reserved to the states and localities is obviously not a conservative policy. Among other things, it offends against principles of local control and subsidiarity. I suppose one could claim that support for centralized regulation and fiscally irresponsible corporatism are conservative, but I think one would be hard-pressed to find many self-styled conservatives eager to identify themselves with either of these things.

Perhaps it’s fruitless to try to characterize the policies of the Bush administration in these terms, but I think Steinglass’ observation supports what I was saying before. What Steinglass is really saying here is that most conservatives (like most Republican voters generally) weren’t terribly concerned about the content of Bush’s domestic policy. The GOP was a party in which it was commonplace to advocate for the abolition of the Department of Education in 1999 and 2000, and Bush pushed for a vastly increased federal role in education. Even though these policies were far from what conservatives actually wanted, the substance of his domestic policies did not alienate them, perhaps because many of them don’t care about policy substance and perhaps because other things (e.g., wartime nationalism, deference to the executive branch, post-9/11 solidarity, partisanship, etc.) made them supportive of Bush in spite of these policies. Whatever the reason, Bush could increase the size of the welfare state more than any President since LBJ, and most self-styled conservatives rallied behind his re-election anyway.

Ezra Klein considers the contradictions of the Huntsman campaign:

To many, his candidacy looked like an effort to prove that the Republican Party could still make space for moderates. But Huntsman has taken precisely no moderate positions. When the debate moderators asked if any of the Republican candidates would reject a deal comprised of $10 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases, Huntsman was right there raising his hand. When it came time to release economic plans, he proposed massive tax cuts for the rich. He has called for a balanced budget amendment.

In perhaps his boldest moment, he tweeted, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” But like the other candidates on the stage, he opposes policies to actually reduce carbon emissions. In a sense, that really is crazy. It’s certainly crazier than someone who doesn’t believe in global warming opposing policies to reduce carbon emissions.

The contradictions don’t stop there. After all, why did someone with a largely solid conservative record attempt to follow McCain’s campaign strategy from 2000, which confirmed so many conservatives in their enduring contempt and hostility to McCain? Why would the foreign policy realist in the race make the inexplicable error of endorsing preventive war against Iran? How could someone with the most direct foreign policy experience in the race completely fail to hold the ideologues in the field accountable when they have endorsed reckless and dangerous policies? In short, how does a candidate with so many natural advantages manage to fritter them away so quickly? These are some of the things that continue to puzzle me about the Huntsman campaign.

The Huntsman campaign has been something of a puzzle from the start, but the conservative response to Huntsman’s candidacy has also been rather bizarre. On substance, Huntsman is hewing much more closely to current movement conservative line on fiscal and social issues than Romney, but he is widely perceived and treated as if his positions are well to the left of Romney’s. Huntsman has more relevant policy and political experience than Romney, and his record of accomplishments in office is longer, more significant, and more in keeping with current conservative views than Romney’s. He has far more real foreign policy experience than Romney (who has none), and he has a fair amount of specialized knowledge about foreign policy while Romney is famously prone to embarrassing himself when he speaks on major foreign policy questions. There is a division in the current field between several shameless demagogues and a competent, rational candidate with executive experience, but what most people seem to overlook is that Romney is one of the former. In many respects, Huntsman is the anti-Romney so many conservatives keep demanding, but Romney’s reflexive anti-Obamaism is still more viscerally satisfying than Huntsman’s conviction that public service should transcend partisan tribalism.

One of the many annoying things in Romney’s recent Wall Street Journalop-ed on Iran was his abuse of the phrase “si vis pacem, para bellum.” This takes the valid principle that a lack of military readiness can invite attack and twists it into a propagandistic slogan to justify a war of aggression. Romney may say that he wants peace, and perhaps he even believes that he wants peace, but the policies he proposes necessarily lead to confrontation and conflict.

Threatening military action against Iran to delay the development of its nuclear program is not a policy that is likely to produce a peaceful outcome, because it is unlikely Iran is going to respond well to such threats, and it is very unlikely that threats are going to force Iran to do as it is told. It is an ultimatum that the other state capitulate to outside demands or face attack, and no self-respecting government could accept it. If there is going to be a war with Iran, it will most likely be because the U.S. and/or Israel starts it. That has nothing to do with peace through strength, and it has nothing to do with restoring the tranquility of order that can justify some wars. It will be a perfect example of how strength and power can be abused to simply destructive ends, and it will be an example of destroying peace unnecessarily.

Put another way, advocates of unnecessary “preventive” war desire peace only in the sense that they wish Iran to yield without offering any resistance. Otherwise, everything they are doing and saying tells us that they are intent on starting a war. Romney seems unable or unwilling to grasp that it is threats of military attack like the one he is making that makes a nuclear arsenal seem that much more attractive to the Iranian government. It is threats from Romney and other leading figures in the West that will reinforce the belief that the only way that Iran can hope to have peace and avoid future attacks is to acquire a nuclear deterrent.

Paul Pillar reviews the history of successful and failed efforts to discourage states from pursuing nuclear weapons, and he makes this observation about the bombing at Osirak:

Muravchik invokes the Israeli strike on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 as a supposed example of successful use of military force, but it instead was a distinct failure and clearly not an instance of getting a regime, in Muravchik’s words, to “turn away from nuclear weapons.” The Iraqis instead responded by redoubling their nuclear efforts using an alternative route to the production of fissile material; a decade later they were far closer to having a nuclear weapon than they were in 1981.

I was reminded of something else Pillar had written about this as I was wading through the WSJ’s tedious Iran editorial this morning. The WSJ editors wrote this about Osirak and Iran:

Opponents of a pre-emptive strike say it would do no more than delay Iran’s programs by a few years. But something similar was said after Israel’s strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, without which the U.S. could never have stood up to Saddam after his invasion of Kuwait.

In fact, the strike on Osirak focused Hussein’s attention on a nuclear weapons program, and caused the Iraqi program to advance far more than it would have otherwise. As Pillar wrote back in July:

The resulting clandestine program to build nuclear weapons using enriched uranium as the fissile material accelerated through the 1980s and brought Iraq much closer to a nuclear-weapons capability than could have been projected from anything Iraq was doing prior to the Israeli attack.

So when the U.S. “stood up” to Hussein in 1990-91, it was confronting a regime that was closer to acquiring nuclear weapons than it would have otherwise been partly because of the attack on Osirak. That’s worth bearing in mind whenever someone invokes Osirak as proof that a regime’s nuclear program can be halted or “taken out” by military strikes. Since the Osirak bombing is also often cited by those defending Israel as a strategic asset for the United States, it’s worth noting that Israel’s decision to attack Osirak had the opposite effect of the one intended.

Ali Vaez injects some sanity into the discussion of the IAEA report on Iran:

Many Iran-watchers expected the report’s biggest news to be evidence that elements of a nuclear program were not shut down in 2003, as previous U.S. intelligence reports claimed. But the report only described dispersed activities, mostly related to dual-use technologies. The scale and scope of these experiments appear much smaller than Iran’s pre-2003 program, which was better structured and more vigorously pursued [bold mine-DL].

The one big thing this report tells us is that there is still time to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. Targeted sanctions and export controls have succeeded in seriously hampering Iran’s uranium enrichment activities, as their centrifuges continue to underperform. After a decade of Iran’s program waxing and waning, and under rigorous surveillance by the intelligence services of at least ten countries, Iran’s goal of securing the ultimate weapon remains as elusive as ever. Most importantly, all evidence suggests that the decision to make a nuclear weapon has not yet been made [bold mine-DL].

One certain way to make sure that the Iranian regime decides to build nuclear weapons is to make it believe that the acquisition of such weapons is imperative for the regime’s security and survival. The best way to do this is to seek to impose increasingly harsh sanctions on Iran leading eventually to the possibility of conflict. Paul Pillar made the same point earlier today:

Commentary such as that heard this week entrenches the further theme that Iran is on an inexorable march toward building a nuclear weapon, with no consideration to all the influences, many of which are in the control of the United States, that will help to determine whether or not Tehran ever takes that step.

Because of this, it matters a great deal whether Americans, especially American officials, accept that the Iranian regime is rationally self-interested, wants to survive, and will respond to incentives. If people in our government operate on the assumption that none of these is true, it is hard to see how our policy towards Iran won’t keep leading us down the path to unnecessary conflict. As ever, belief in the inevitability of a future war makes it much more likely that the parties involved will fail to seize the many opportunities to avoid it.

Update: Barbara Slavin discusses the IAEA report in some detail here. Her assessment:

Thus the findings appear to be consistent with a much maligned 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate which expressed “medium confidence” that Iran had not restarted a weaponisation programme at that time.

A new essay in Foreign Affairs urges the administration to “take out” Iran’s nuclear program. Bizarrely, the authors present the massive imbalance between the Israeli nuclear arsenal and whatever small arsenal Iran might one day build to insist that Iran must not be allowed to have such weapons:

From the very start, the nuclear balance between these two antagonists would be unstable. Because of the significant disparity in the sizes of their respective arsenals (Iran would have a handful of warheads compared to Israel’s estimated 100-200), both sides would have huge incentives to strike first in the event of a crisis.

That makes absolutely no sense. Neither side would have any incentive, much less huge ones, to escalate a crisis into a nuclear war. Israel has no reason to start a nuclear war in which it would be widely perceived as the militarily superior aggressor. Try to imagine the international consequences for Israel if its government launched a large-scale nuclear first strike on another country. The political and economic costs to Israel would be staggering. Iran obviously has no incentive to launch a first strike, because it would then be annihilated by the overwhelming retaliation from Israel’s much larger arsenal. As Robert Farley argues, the Iranian regime is not going to pursue a policy of national suicide:

While Iran undoubtedly exerts a negative influence in the region, it has not in any way indicated that it plans to undertake national suicide. To bully its neighbors or to provide an umbrella over Hezbollah, Iran would have to credibly threaten the use of nuclear weapons, which means — given overwhelming Israeli and American nuclear superiority — that it would have to credibly threaten national suicide. The phrase is self-contradictory, and as Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed out, even the Israelis don’t believe that Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel.

Farley makes a good case that fears of Iranian regional domination and a regional arms race are both exaggerated.

On the other side, Edelman, Krepinevich, and Montgomery have presented an especially bad case for attacking Iran. Hawkish alarmists often make exaggerated and unfounded claims, but they usually try to avoid making transparently ridiculous ones. The same alarmist claims about Iran have been made for almost as long as there has been a revolutionary government in Iran. Joseph Cirincione explains:

What’s significant actually is that there isn’t that much currently going on, almost all this work is pre-2003. It’s all old data. It all came from that laptop you referred to, the laptop of death, that was disclosed in 2004. There’s suspicions of some work and there’s evidence of some work still going on, particularly computer modelling, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a crash program to build a warhead. That’s what’s so significant.

P.S. Ali Gharib notes that one of the essay’s authors, Eric Edelman, is a Romney campaign adviser.