Paul Pillar argues that ideology was more of a factor driving the Iraq war than meritocrats’ arrogance:

But some indications that there is more to the blunders than Douthat describes can be seen in one of his examples: the Iraq War. Ideology was a big part of what drove the war. You don’t need a one-party state for ideology to play such a role—just control for a time by one party of some of the functions of the state. And although the war makers certainly had excessive confidence that they knew what they were doing, the launching of the war involved the rejection of much relevant expertise. The excessive and misguided risk taking that was involved was due less to meritocracy than to some people getting in a position—through whatever means, not necessarily merit—in which they could place big bets with other people’s money, and in this case with other people’s lives.

This is related to what I was saying about expertise last week. Experts and technocrats can get things badly wrong, but the Iraq war is a good example of what happens when people embark on a large project while ignoring all the many experts who said that it was folly. Something similar could be said about the European project that Ross mentions in the same breath with Iraq. There were many people before and since the adoption of the euro who saw that a monetary union without comparable fiscal and political union would not function very well for long. The creation of the euro was an important part of the ideological project of forging European unity in defiance of historical experience and despite the resistance of many Europeans. In both cases, the people involved in crafting these projects were there because they endorsed the project’s ideological goals, and critics of both projects were ignored or dismissed largely because they did not have the correct ideological commitments. To the extent that any system makes ideological conformity a high priority, merit will tend to lose out, and the system will soon be run by less competent yes-men.

There was something else Ross wrote that caught my attention:

In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme.

It’s true that Lord Raglan represented many of the worst traits of British aristocratic military leadership, but the debacles of the Crimean War had their ultimate origin in the meddlesome spirit represented by Palmerston and the liberal interventionists of his age. Had it not been for ideological factors and the delusional belief that Russia threatened British interests, those soldiers would never have been there. It was the decision to send them that was the greatest blunder, and that decision owed a great deal to the increasingly democratic politics of Britain at the time. Offensives in WWI were all to one degree or another disastrous debacles, but this was as much a function of modern mass warfare as it was of a particular kind of leadership.

The New Inquiry invited me to discuss Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind, with him. I enjoyed talking about the book at some length. Our conversation went on for some time, so the edited version doesn’t include everything we discussed, but the most important part is there. I hope readers will find our exchange worthwhile. You can read our discussion here, and follow Corey’s online writing here. John Derbyshire has reviewed the book for the latest issue of TAC.

Peter Beinart is attracted to the benefits of militarism in the name of peace:

Why is their system working when ours did not? In Israel, as in the United States, military and intelligence officials are generally more cautious than civilian leaders when it comes to war, largely because they know firsthand how crude and unpredictable an instrument war is. But the Israeli system is less hierarchical. The military and intelligence agencies in the United States certainly leak to the press, and use bureaucratic tactics to box in their civilian overlords. At the end of the day, however, soldiers and intelligence analysts are trained to give their professional advice and then get out of the way. In Israel, the lines are more blurred, and bureaucrats are more freewheeling in speaking to the press. This has its disadvantages, but in a case like this, it gives the antiwar generals and spies greater leverage to fight back.

As Andrew Exum observes, this is a horrible idea. Imitating the arrangement Beinart describes here isn’t going to produce better foreign policy. On the contrary, he says it is “a prescription for turning yourself into Pakistan.” Exactly right. Beinart is treating political and policy dysfunction in Israel as proof that their system “sometimes functions better than ours” because the dysfunction is creating an outcome (i.e., opposition to war with Iran) of which Beinart approves. What Beinart conveniently overlooks is that this is the same system that waged the disastrous 2006 war in Lebanon, which should tell all of us that there is nothing inherent in the organization of the Israeli system that makes it more averse to waging self-defeating, stupid wars than ours.

We should also note that the “restraint” that Beinart is praising is not all that impressive. An Israeli attack on Iran would be quite difficult to pull off, it would probably not be all that effective, and it would likely invite major retaliation from Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Gaza. It is natural that Israeli military and intelligence officers would be cautious about starting a war with Iran under the circumstances. An Israeli war with Iran would not achieve its objectives, it would probably be very costly, and it would alienate most of the few countries still friendly to Israel. Despite all of this, there is still a remote possibility that the Israeli government might make the attempt, which brings us back to the basic irrationality at the heart of U.S. and Israeli policies towards Iran. In the end, it is the absurd exaggeration of the threat from Iran that is the major failure of both systems, and that is the root of bad Iran policy. Given all of this, it is small consolation that there is a “new crop” of officials “pushing back hard against war.” I’m glad that there is resistance to starting yet another unnecessary war, but a better question should be why there is anyone pushing for war.

James Poulos thinks he has identified the reason why Huntsman’s campaign has gone nowhere:

Look at Huntsman mastermind John Weaver, best known for his time atop Campaign McCain. His contempt for the conservative establishment falls like poison rain from nearly every remark he offers the (salivating) press. “It’s a fork in the road between seriousness and circus,” he told Dana Milbank last month.

Really? If so, Huntsman would be better off not running at all. Not only is it impossible to purge politics of its silliness. It’s unseemly to portray oneself, Obama-style, as the only adult in the room. The politicization of the culture war is a two-way street. What does it say about an essentially mainstream conservative like Huntsman that he entrusts his brand and his electoral fortunes to a man who wants him to run against his own appeal to the Republican base broadly understood?

The plan to copy the McCain 2000 campaign has never made much sense to me, but this is really more of a symptom than a cause of Huntsman’s electoral woes. Had Huntsman surrounded himself with an entirely different staff and run an entirely different campaign, it is doubtful that he would be doing much better. Huntsman started receiving favorable national coverage in early 2009 when he made a point of distancing himself from the preposterous Republican leadership in Washington. At the same time that he was ridiculing them as hopeless, which they really were, they were capitalizing on popular discontent with the administration that Huntsman soon decided to align himself with when he accepted the post in Beijing. When the rest of the party was embracing reflexive opposition to Obama as the key to political success, Huntsman was serving in the Obama administration, and nothing he did after he got back from China was going to bridge that gap. He also bet heavily on the belief that the party’s mood was going to change dramatically in a way that would reward the candidate of “seriousness,” and that clearly didn’t happen. The Weaver-led, McCain-style campaign is just a continuation of this basic misreading of the party’s direction over the last few years.

Michael has done his best in his original TAC profile of Huntsman and his latest article to present the former governor and ambassador’s conservative record, and he has a solid argument on the merits. Unfortunately, Huntsman wasn’t all that well-known nationally, and for the most part he has been introduced to the primary electorate as the Republican who has received the most glowing profiles from Washington-based media outlets and “centrist” and left-leaning journalists. If most Republicans know much about him, they know that he was appointed ambassador by Obama, and they probably know that he tacked to the left on a few issues despite being an overwhelmingly popular governor in an overwhelmingly Republican state. Many conservatives would say that it is bad enough when Republicans in “purple” and “blue” states do this, but at least one can understand that it might have been politically expedient, but to do it in Utah seems inexplicable.

While commenting on Herman Cain, Rod makes this remark:

George W. Bush might not have been the second coming of Metternich, but his national security team was taken straight from the GOP foreign policy elite — and they gave us Iraq. Expertise does not guarantee wisdom.

It’s true that expertise doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but this needs to be qualified. First, the people in and around the Bush administration decidedly were not experts in the politics, culture, or history of the Near East. For the most part, the people who were most knowledgeable about this part of the world were the ones shouting loudest not to invade. Bush himself was not quite as ignorant as Cain seems to be when it comes to foreign affairs, but he wasn’t that much better even after years of being tutored by Rice. For her part, Rice’s official expertise was in Soviet and Russian affairs, and her earlier familiarity with the part of the world that preoccupied the Bush administration for most of its eight years was not all that great. That alone doesn’t explain the failures of the Bush administration or the Iraq war, but it goes a long way towards accounting for how the debacle in Iraq could happen. There is always a danger that experts will believe that they can successfully implement policies that should never be tried, but a good way to recognize someone with genuine understanding of a subject is his recognition of the limits of what he knows and his respect for the limits of what expertise can accomplish. On the whole, the less that people know about another part of the world, the more confident they are that “we” can reshape it to “our” liking.

Josh Barro defends the merits of the TARP:

There are numerous policy areas where the hegemony of the Washington Establishment is the only thing saving America from popular but terrible ideas—trade, immigration, foreign aid. But perhaps the best example is TARP. This is a program that looks better every day, having prevented an acute collapse of the financial system at very little cost. But in the popular mythology, TARP was a grievous and expensive error that created the Too Big To Fail concept, rather than simply recognizing its existence.

Barro wrote this at Reihan’s blog, which I found more than a little amusing. As I recalled when I read this, Reihan didn’t much care for the TARP at the time that it was passed. Indeed, looking back, I see that Reihan denounced the TARP as a “lazy, cowardly bailout.” He also referred to an essay by Prof. Luigi Zingales, which I had cited around the same time. In that essay, Zingales made a very reasonable expert argument against the bailout and in favor of a practical alternative, and it was based in his principled objection to the perversion of the market that it represented. Reihan described his argument:

In a stinging essay, Zingales essentially argued that Paulson was offering welfare to the rich. Rather than pay premium prices for toxic assets, Zingales called for the federal government to craft a restructuring plan that would involve some amount of debt forgiveness or a debt-for-equity swap, saving taxpayers billions and imposing well-deserved financial pain on the reckless creditor who created the mess in the first place.

Then Reihan asked:

So why did the GOP go along with such a profoundly flawed approach? If you can think of a better reason than laziness or cowardice, let me know.

Prof. Zingales laid out what was at stake in the TARP debate:

The decisions that will be made this weekend matter not just to the prospects of the US economy in the year to come. They will shape the type of capitalism we will live in for the next fifty years. Do we want to live in a system where profits are private, but losses are socialised? Where taxpayer money is used to prop up failed firms? Or do we want to live in a system where people are held responsible for their decisions, where imprudent behavior is penalised and prudent behavior rewarded?

For somebody like me who believes strongly in the free market system, the most serious risk of the current situation is that the interest of few financiers will undermine the fundamental workings of the capitalist system.

Zingales articulated very well at the time why the TARP was fundamentally wrong and corrupting. Nothing has happened in the last three years that suggests he was mistaken. One of the reasons that the TARP did not result in the massive loss of public funds was that it was never used for its stated purpose to purchase toxic assets. It is now fashionable to declare the TARP a “success” because it achieved its goal of rewarding private failure with public funds, but this was the very thing that opponents of the TARP thought was wrong with it. It doesn’t say much for the Washington consensus that this disgraceful measure is supposed to represent one of its great successes.

Update: Yves Smith discussed the “success” of the TARP earlier this year:

But there is a way in which the TARP was a complete success. It was a de facto financial coup. The regulations put the Secretary of the Treasury outside the law. The Fed has run quasi fiscal operations outside normal budgetary processes with hardly a peep from Congress (the Audit the Fed was a helpful effort to increase transparency but still fell well short of dealing with the usurping of Constitutionally mandated approvals). And this isn’t our view; Simon Johnson was early to see what was really at stake in his May 2009 Atlantic article, “The Quiet Coup.”

And we see an continuation of government dominated by financial interests in the passivity of the Obama administration at continued high levels of unemployment, when Reagan went into aggressive action at lower trigger points. Instead, we have bond vigilantes driving policy when the lessons of Latvia, Ireland, and Greece are again proving that austerity only makes debt hangovers worse.

What we need is debt reduction via restructuring and offsetting stimulus, but that means imposing losses on banks. So no matter how you try to cook the books, the political “success” of TARP is an economic disaster for everyone except its immediate beneficiaries, which include writers who have made themselves scribes to the oligarchs.

Rod noticed a report that the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta is preparing to re-consider case of Pelagius. What caught my attention wasn’t the theological revisionism at work as much as the tediously reductionist historical interpretation that the resolution uses. It reads in part:

Whereas the historical record of Pelagius’s contribution to our theological tradition is shrouded in the political ambition of his theological antagonists who sought to discredit what they felt was a threat to the empire, and their ecclesiastical dominance [bold mine-DL], and whereas an understanding of his life and writings might bring more to bear on his good standing in our tradition;

What I find tedious about this is the assumption that fifth-century council fathers who condemned Pelagius were not mainly motivated by genuine theological concerns, but that Pelagius represents “the struggle for theological exploration.” In fact, all competing factions in the ancient Church were fully convinced that they were the orthodox party and their rivals were badly wrong about something fundamentally important. If Pelagius’ followers could have prevailed, they would have wanted to set down their teachings as correct doctrine. Obviously, remaining the dominant party in the church was an essential part of prevailing in the controversy. Pelagius’ opponents viewed his teachings as a “threat to the empire” only in the sense that they would have considered the success of his heresy an invitation to divine retribution, but for the most part Pelagius’ opponents rejected his teachings because they believed them to be so far removed from correct doctrine that they endangered the salvation of fellow Christians. Unfortunately, this resolution reads as if it had been drafted after one too many viewings of that dreadful King Arthur film from a few years back.

Matthew Barrett reviews Pelagius’ record, and concludes:

It is important to remember that Pelagius and his views were condemned in 416 at the synods of Carthage and Mileve, and again at Carthage in 418. Even the third ecumenical council in Ephesus in 431 would condemn Pelagius, placing him in the same category as Nestorius. To reinstate or approve of Pelagius and his views is to adopt heresy itself.

Joshua Foust has a couple helpful posts on Kyrgyzstan’s presidential election and why Americans shouldn’t place too much importance on the president-elect’s recent commentsregarding Manas air base. Ishaan Tharoor sums up why the Kyrgyzstan election matters to the region:

The Kyrgyz presidential election held this Sunday may mark the first fair and free transfer of power since the Central Asian republics won their independence following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Despite evidence of incidents of vote-fraud and ballot stuffing in some areas, international observers seemed content with the verdict: Almazbek Atambayev, Kyrgyzstan’s current prime minister and the front-runner during the campaign, will be the country’s next President, having won some 63% of the vote — a huge majority in an election where 17 candidates were on the ballot. The Obama Administration applauded the vote, saying the Kyrgyz people “have taken an important and courageous step on the path of democracy.” That path, though, may also lead to a waning of American influence.

Atambayev said that the U.S. lease at Manas would not be renewed when it expires in 2014, which shouldn’t be terribly distressing to Americans. The U.S. is supposed to be out of Afghanistan by 2014 anyway, and the base has become a major irritant in the U.S. relationship with Kyrgyzstan. Atambayev’s remarks are entirely in line with the position that outgoing interim leader Otunbayeva took, which bizarrely prompted Michael Rubin to wish for her premature death, and it is quite understandable that an elected leader would take a position that is overwhelmingly popular at home. The U.S. presence has been unpopular in Kyrgyzstan for most of the last decade, and the dissatisfaction with the U.S. presence has only grown over time and deepened as the use of the base was connected to U.S. support for Bakiyev. When we consider what the so-called Tulip Revolution and Bakiyev regime did to Kyrgyzstan, waning American influence in Kyrgyzstan is probably not such a bad thing for Kyrgyzstan. Perhaps once the base is no longer the main focus of U.S. dealings with the country, the relationship can become a more balanced one. Former Kyrgyz Ambassador Baktybek Abdriasaev concluded his 2009 op-ed on the Manas subject with these words:

But if the base’s closure results in the United States regaining its critical voice and once again taking seriously its advocacy of democracy and human rights, that would be a silver lining to this disappointing story. It would mean an America that values its allies’ long-term stability more than a single military installation — and that could be a better investment in a secure future for all of us.

Jonah Goldberg echoes Chotiner that Pawlenty missed his chance (via Joseph Lawler):

His problem stemmed from the fact that he’s a vanilla guy who thought he needed to convince conservatives he was a more exciting flavor. He should have waited, because vanilla may not be anyone’s first choice, but it’s almost everyone’s second choice.

While there is something to the common view of Pawlenty as a boring candidate, this gets Pawlenty’s political problem almost completely wrong. He didn’t think he needed to convince conservatives that he was something other than “vanilla.” He assumed that being a three-legs-of-the-stool cardboard cut-out candidate was all that was required, and he believed that his bland, official acceptability and Romney’s untrustworthy reputation would be enough to propel him to victory. He campaigned in much the same way that Romney did in 2007-08, except that he couldn’t conceal the weakness of his candidacy with impressive fundraising. When running to be the alternative to Romney in 2011, it probably would help not to run more or less as the earlier version of Romney.

There’s something quite odd about retrospectively arguing for the plausibility of a candidacy that has already failed. Expressing regret for Pawlenty’s supposed missed opportunity is a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the definitions of “plausible” and “credible” that many people have been using to talk about some Republican candidates are disconnected from political realities. Lamenting Pawlenty’s exit is an exercise in pretending that Pawlenty’s failure as a candidate didn’t actually happen.