Mona Charen recycles the old complaint that the administration didn’t do enough for the Green movement:

The fall of that regime would be the greatest victory imaginable against worldwide terror (to say nothing of what it would do for Iranians). Yet when the regime was rocked by weeks of protests, Obama let the opportunity to support the demonstrators (and possibly affect the outcome) slip through his fingers.

It’s not clear what the opportunity was that Obama missed. For the sake of argument, let’s grant that the U.S. could have “possibly affected the outcome” of the election protests by showing more public support for the protesters. Further, let’s assume that the effect of U.S. support for the Green movement would not have been counterproductive, but would have made the Green movement more successful than it was. This last point is almost certainly false, but let’s accept it for the moment. It still doesn’t follow that the current Iranian leadership would have been replaced, and it is even less likely that the entire regime would have fallen, so there never was an opportunity to be exploited. What we can know with some certainty is that the leadership of the Green movement did not differ greatly from the current leadership on disputed issues concerning Iran’s nuclear program and its support for proxies outside Iran, so we would have no reason to expect changed regime behavior had the Green movement had prevailed and Mousavi had been accepted as the new president.

Back in the real world, we know that the Green movement was not a revolutionary movement dedicated to regime change, but was focused overwhelmingly on domestic political grievances within the existing political system. We also know that the Green movement did not wantforeign backing. The standard complaint about the U.S. response to the 2009-10 protests in Iran is that the U.S. failed to provide the protesters with support they didn’t want that would have changed nothing in the hopes of achieving something (i.e., regime change) that the opposition wasn’t seeking.

Aaron Goldstein responds to Clark Stooksbury:

My point here is that neither supporters nor detractors of the War in Iraq foresaw the emergence of Iran and it is this emergence which prompted my question about Saddam as our military forces prepare to leave Iraq.

This is clearly untrue. One of the most obvious consequences of deposing Hussein was that it would increase Iran’s regional influence by removing the anti-Iranian bulwark that Hussein’s regime represented. Opponents of the invasion certainly mentioned this in the months before the war started, and many of us pointed it out quite frequently in the years that followed. While skeptics sometimes imagined more direct Iranian interference in Iraq than there has been, they correctly predicted that Iran would benefit significantly from Hussein’s overthrow. Contrary to Goldstein’s claim, the Margolis article Clark cited touched on this as well:

This chronically unstable “Pandora’s Box,” as Jordan’s King Abdullah calls it, is the nation the U.S. plans to rule. When Saddam falls, Iraq will almost certainly splinter. This is the very reason why Bush père wisely decided against marching on Baghdad in 1991. President Bush Sr. and his Arab allies concluded Iran would annex southern Iraq.

The fear of annexation was unfounded, but the basic understanding that Iran would wield greater influence in a post-Saddam Iraq was correct. Considering the links between Tehran and the leading Shi’ite parties in Iraq, increased Iranian influence was inevitable once those parties were permitted to run the Iraqi government. Not only was this increased influence foreseeable, it was foreseen as long ago as 1991.

Bill Kristol cannot give up on the dream of new presidential candidates:

So: The race seems to be more open and fluid than conventional wisdom has it. In particular, it strikes me that as everyone focuses (understandably) on Romney, Cain, and Perry, Gingrich is increasingly well positioned for a serious challenge. And mightn’t at least one of Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, or Jeb Bush be rethinking his decision not to run?

No. We should have been finished with this nonsense weeks ago, but let’s quickly review why this makes no sense. For starters, the filing deadline for New Hampshire is this Friday. Florida’s deadline is next Monday, and South Carolina’s deadline is a week from today. It doesn’t matter how undecided or uncommitted primary voters are if the new candidates aren’t going to be on the ballot. Thanks to Florida’s primary re-scheduling, there is even less time to organize a campaign in the early states, and New Hampshire will probably schedule its primary for January 10. Put another way, there are ten weeks left until the Iowa caucuses. Anyone trying to start up a campaign at this late date would be guaranteeing his own defeat. This pointless chatter was mildly amusing two months ago, but now it’s just sad.

P.S. All of this applies to Jindal, too.

Update: Daniel Halper offers this defense:

The only question would be whether there is time for another candidate to establish himself, raise funds, and establish an effective campaign. But those details have nothing to do with the obvious lack of enthusiasm for the Republican presidential candidates.

Oh, well, if that’s “the only question,” there’s no problem. A lack of enthusiasm for the current field doesn’t mean that there is room for new candidates. The race may be “fluid” in that voters keep shifting from one anti-Romney candidate to another, but it isn’t realistically open to new candidates, and it’s silly to suggest that it might be.

Does the announced withdrawal from Iraq prove that the U.S. is not an empire? No, not really, but it is more useful to think about U.S. foreign policy in terms of hegemonism. Most of the people who would vehemently deny being imperialists will eagerly admit to being hegemonists, even if they don’t use that word to describe themselves, because they regard hegemony (leadership) as something desirable and admirable. Some hegemonists drop the pretense that there is a meaningful difference between hegemony and empire, and they fully embrace the idea of America as a liberal (and therefore benevolent) empire. Others eschew the label of empire, but they are nonetheless adamant that U.S. hegemony (which they usually call leadership) must be “undisputed.” In practice, the self-identifying neo-imperialists and the empire-denying hegemonists favor almost all of the same policies.

Almost everyone can agree that the U.S. is still the world’s hegemonic military and political power, and the main points of contention here in the U.S. concern how to use that power and whether the U.S. should try to maintain “undisputed leadership” of the world. Obviously, global hegemony is a much more ambitious goal in some ways than traditional territorial/colonial empire, and it is based in what may possibly be an even more arrogant vision of America’s proper role in the world, but it shares many features with imperial projects. The U.S. considers the internal affairs of other states to be the legitimate concern of our government, and it asserts the right to interfere in those affairs to influence them.

The U.S. treats several key regions of the world as privileged space where it is supposed to have military and political supremacy, and regional challengers to that supremacy are treated as potential threats to the U.S. because they infringe on what our government considers its sphere of influence. U.S. military commands divide up the world, because it is taken for granted that the U.S. has some proper military role in every part of the globe, and the U.S. has hundreds of bases scattered around the globe. The President has the ability to wage war largely on his own authority, and when he condescends to consult Congress it is now little more than a formality, so that the phrase “imperial Presidency” is as appropriate now as it has ever been. What the U.S. does not do is to establish direct political and administrative control over territories overseas. That sort of colonial empire became unfashionable and politically untenable in the decades after 1945, and the U.S. has not tried to bring it back. U.S. hegemony is a form of indirect empire, and an indirect empire is one most suited the idea of an empire dedicated to the liberal principle of self-determination.

Withdrawal from Iraq doesn’t demonstrate that the U.S. is not an empire. Just because a state withdraws its forces from a country it has invaded and occupied for years doesn’t mean that it hasn’t acted as an empire does. After toppling a country’s government, installing a new government that it initially believed would be more cooperative and subservient, and occupying its territory against the will of most of the population for almost a decade, the U.S. certainly acted imperially in Iraq, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes. When a government reserves the right to overthrow other governments that oppose its policy goals, it assumes that other states’ sovereignty is so limited that it can and should be violated when it suits the more powerful state. This is how many empires have acted in the past, and so it seems appropriate and accurate to refer to a contemporary American empire. If we call it hegemony instead, the substance of what we are talking about doesn’t change at all, and the criticism of hegemonist policies remains the same. Hegemonists who reject the label of empire really do protest too much.

Update: Prof. Paul Schroeder addressed the question of imperialism and the proposed invasion of Iraq in one of the first issues of TAC in 2002:

Imperialism means simply and centrally the exercise of final authority and decision-making power by one government over another government or community foreign to itself. Empire does not require the direct annexation and administration of a foreign territory or its people; in fact, it usually does not mean that at all. Imperial rule is normally indirect, exercised through local authorities co-opted by the imperial regime.

Lee Smith delivers the predictable (and predicted) “on to Damascus, then Tehran” argument. He also asks a very strange question:

So why is the Obama administration wasting valuable time seeking support from Moscow and China in its efforts to isolate Iran?

Maybe this is a trick question. The answer to this is that in order to isolate Iran, one would need the cooperation of its largest trading partners, including Russia and China. Perhaps that cooperation won’t be forthcoming, or it may not be as extensive as an Iran hawk would like, but the reason for making the effort is obvious. One reason why past attempts to “isolate” Iran have fallen short is that Iran has many trading partners in Asia that have no desire to isolate it. This is partly because they see an advantage in continuing to do business with Iran, and partly because they do not have the same irrational obsession with Iran’s nuclear program that Western governments have. Smith’s real problem with “wasting valuable time” with all of this is that it delays the start of military action.

Smith also seems confused by what the phrase “collective action” means:

Collective action does not mean bringing the unmovable Russians and Chinese on board. It means going after Revolutionary Guard camps. It means destabilizing Iran’s ally Syria by creating a no-fly zone there that protects the Syrian opposition and helps bring down Bashar al-Assad. Collective action means using every possible method and tactic to destabilize the Iranian regime by working with allies inside and outside of Iran. It means doing everything possible to ensure that Ayatollah Ali Khameini, stripped of his clerical robes, is the next Middle East dictator dragged from a hole in the ground.

In other words, Smith doesn’t want “collective action” at all, but very much wants unilateral, aggressive U.S. action to topple two governments in open defiance of the U.N. Charter. Smith’s version of “collective action” is a repudiation of everything on which the idea of collective security is based, and it is a recipe for regional conflagration and chaos.

David Schenker objects to conditioning support for Syrian protesters on their continued non-violence:

While the U.S. can be excused not for wanting to jump into another conflict, it is both strange and inappropriate for the administration to be lecturing Syrians on how they shouldn’t defend themselves. Moreover, the administration may be correct in its assessment that a militarization of the revolt would be unsuccessful, but given the increasing number of regime-perpetrated atrocities a demand for pacifism seems neither realistic nor reasonable. Indeed, the ultimate result will be simply to place the U.S. in a tight spot should the opposition decide to take up arms. And in the meantime, knowledge that the leading international supporter of the opposition does not countenance, and in fact will penalize violent retaliation against the regime provides Assad and his cronies with a seeming carte blanche.

It’s not so strange. One of the many problems with the intervention in Libya was that it created the impression that the U.S. would intervene militarily against a regime once anti-regime protesters took up arms. That would have the unwelcome effect of encouraging protest movements to resort to violence, which would simply lead to a larger loss of life without much chance of success for the opposition. The administration seems intent on discouraging Syrian protesters from drawing that lesson, because intervention in Syria has never been a real option, and there is no reason to give the protesters false hope. Syrian protesters can and presumably will ignore whatever the administration says that doesn’t suit them, but the “lecturing” that Schenker finds so strange and inappropriate might discourage the protesters from taking up arms in a struggle that they are unlikely to win without outside support. Since outside support is not forthcoming, the “strange and inappropriate” lecturing may be designed to avoid making a mistake similar to the one that the first Bush administration made after the Gulf War. Urging people on to launch a doomed armed uprising just sets them up to be crushed, and it provides the regime with the excuse that it actually is fighting an armed insurgency.

Erica Chenoweth wrote an article revisiting some basic assumptions about non-violent resistance earlier this year, and she argues that non-violent resistance isn’t as futile or ineffective as most of us usually think it is:

The truth is that, from 1900 to 2006, major nonviolent resistance campaigns seeking to overthrow dictatorships, throw out foreign occupations, or achieve self-determination were more than twice as successful as violent insurgencies seeking the same goals. The recent past alone suggests as much; even before the Arab Spring, nonviolent campaigns in Serbia (2000), Madagascar (2002), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), and Nepal (2006) succeeded in ousting regimes from power.

The reason for this is that nonviolent campaigns typically appeal to a much broader and diverse constituency than violent insurgencies. For one thing, the bar to action is lower: Potential recruits to the resistance need to overcome fear, but not their moral qualms about using violence against others. Civil resistance offers a variety of lower-risk tactics — stay-aways (where people vacate typically populated areas), boycotts, and go-slows (where people move at half-pace at work and in the streets) — that encourage people to participate without making enormous personal sacrifices.

Chenoweth also disputed the conflation of non-violence and pacifism, and she specifically addressed the Syrian situation to argue that non-violent resistance still makes more sense:

Syrian activists have also so far largely avoided the temptation to respond to regime provocations with violence — a critical decision, not only because taking up arms may undermine their domestic bases of participation and support, but also because it makes security forces more likely to obey orders to repress the movement [bold mine-DL]. Because the regime has expelled journalists and cut off electricity in cities under siege, Syrian activists charge their laptops using car batteries and make fake IDs to get close to security forces so they can document human rights abuses and share them online. The continued mobilization resulting from these acts may help the opposition forge indispensable links with regime elites.

Taking up arms might appear to be the correct response to regime violence, but it would make it less likely that security forces will defect from the regime, and it makes them more likely to follow orders. Ultimately, without defections from the security forces, or at least a refusal on their part to carry out the orders they are given, the opposition doesn’t have much of a chance, but taking up arms eliminates what little chance they do have.

Schenker continues:

And when it comes to the possibility of intervention, there is little benefit to Washington in needlessly limiting its options [bold mine-DL]. After all, should the situation deteriorate further, there may indeed come a time when either multilateral or unilateral military intervention on behalf of the Syrian people is called for.

Now this is strange. I can see how someone could argue that there is little benefit to the Syrian protesters in ruling out U.S. military intervention, but the benefit to Washington and to the United States is significant: the U.S. will not be committed to a new war in a predominantly Arab country. The U.S. doesn’t need and shouldn’t want a full range of options for entangling itself in an internal Syrian conflict. Since the Syrian opposition leadership doesn’t want outside intervention, the only people who seem to be disappointed by the decision to rule it out are Americans who have never seen a foreign political struggle they didn’t think the U.S. ought to shape or direct in some way.

Barry Stentiford rails against the creation of ethnically-based nation-states in Small Wars Journal:

One problem with the idea of the ethnically-based nation-state is that it is a-historical—based on a false understanding of the creation and nature of the nation-states of Western Europe. France is usually held as a model of the natural nation. But France was hardly more natural than the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, a minority of subjects of Louis XVI could be described as ethnically French—an ethnicity created over many centuries through a combination of various Germanic, Gallic, and Roman peoples—who were settled over a large oval in northern France centered on Paris. Most subjects of Louis were, and if they thought about it at all, considered themselves to be, Provencial, Breton, Norman, Alsace-Deutch, Flemish, Italian, or a host of smaller identities. The borders of France in 1789 were the result of a millennium of wars and marriages, wars fought and marriages arranged to expand territory, not out of any consideration for the language or culture of the people who lived in those territories.

Stentiford might have gone on to add that it was regional resistance to a centralizing and nationalist revolutionary regime that accounts for a significant part of conflicts after 1789 inside France, and the political contours of modern France have been shaped in part by regional resistance to Parisian government dating back at least to the late sixteenth century during the wars of religion. There is nothing “natural” about nation-states, they are typically the product of suppressing regional political, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity for the sake of greater uniformity and centralized control. Effective nation-building is an extremely coercive and brutal business. As Robert Farley observes, Stentiford’s argument is a familiar one, but Stentiford presents it very well. However, he adds a few words of caution:

Focus should indeed be on developing the capability of states to accept and govern ethnically heterogeneous populations, and we shouldn’t buy the argument that changing borders will solve all problems. However, it is possible that some ethnic identities have become so salient, and some relationships between identity communities so poisoned, that reconciliation is effectively impossible on any reasonable timeframe. But this probably constitutes a distinct minority of the cases under discussion.

All of this reminds me of an exchange at The National Interest a few weeks back between Ted Galen Carpenter on one side and Morton Abramowitz and James Hooper over the question of partitions in the Balkans. The short version of their disagreement is that Abramowitz and Hooper are absolutely against any additional partitions in the region (e.g., detaching Republika Srpska from Bosnia), but they are firmly in support of the states created by the rounds of separatism and partition that have already occurred, and Carpenter sees merit in continuing the partition process to separate unreconciled populations in Bosnia and Kosovo. Carpenter noted the others’ fairly new hostility to revising borders:

But those gentlemen, and most others in the foreign-policy community who share their views, are marvelously selective about their outrage regarding the acceptance of secession and partition as a policy tool. Relatively few among the European or U.S. political and policy elite had any problem when the NATO powers helped break up Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Even fewer expressed qualms about forcibly detaching Kosovo from Serbia.

This is certainly true, but then supporters of ethnic self-determination have usually been selective in where they want the principle to apply. That has been the case since the time of Wilson, when self-determination applied only to certain nations and came at the expense of others whose rights of national self-determination were simply ignored or denied. The redrawing of the map of Hungary to satisfy post-war Allied territorial claims and to punish Hungary is one of the more outstanding examples of how this worked in practice. Had the Allies had their way, the Treaty of Sevres would have imposed an even more egregious settlement on the Turks partly in the name of providing self-determination for the non-Turkish nations of Anatolia. Unless a partition is negotiated and accepted by all parties, it will always remain a potential source of future conflict, because one of the parties will always feel with some justification that it was forcibly robbed of territory that it considered its own. Partitions are usually imposed rather than negotiated.

When Abramowitz and Hooper argue that they fear opening a “Pandora’s box” of future separatism, they deliberately ignore that the box was opened (or rather re-opened) twenty years ago. One of the strongest arguments against continued partition in the Balkans (or elsewhere) is that past “solutions” based on the selective application of the principle self-determination have created deeply dysfunctional and/or failed states. Trying to apply a bad principle more universally is unlikely to yield desirable results, and it will simply create new grievances that can be used to stoke conflict down the road. For that matter, there is no chance that the U.S. and EU will ever impose additional partitions on the unwilling states whose territory would be affected, which makes the question of continued partition moot.

Jim Antle isn’t ready to concede Romney’s inevitability just yet:

Has Rick Perry really shown any flaws that weren’t apparent in George W. Bush circa 1999? The principal difference seems to be Perry’s late entry.

Yes, he has. Perry entered later than Bush. By itself, that might not matter, but it has made his worse debate performances that much more damaging and noticeable, and his performances have been substantively worse than anything Bush did in 1999. The knock on Bush during his first campaign was that he didn’t know very much and that he was heavily coached. No one is saying the second part about Perry. While Bush started from a position of strength before facing a long-shot challenge from McCain by the end of 1999, Perry has moved rapidly from de facto front-runner to something more approaching an also-ran in the space of two months. Bush had the added advantage that he started the race as the relative moderate in the field, and then found his only significant challenger attacking him from the left, which made it that much easier for him to rally conservatives behind him in order to defeat McCain.

Perry came into the race in the hopes of being acceptable to both conservative activists and party establishment figures, and he has pulled off the impressive feat of alienating many of the former while embarrassing the latter. Cain currently has the backing of many conservatives, but he has neither sufficient money nor organization. Unless Cain scores a victory somewhere in the first month, it seems likely that Romney will build up a significant lead in delegates and Cain’s popularity will fade as voters in later contests begin to doubt that he can win.

Ross concedes the dreadful inevitability of Romney:

What’s more, Republicans have only themselves to blame for his inevitability. Romney owes his current position to two failures: the Bush era’s serial disasters, which left the Republican establishment without a strong bench of viable national politicians, and the Tea Party’s mix of zeal and naïveté, which has elevated cranks and frauds and future television personalities to the party’s presidential stage.

It’s true that Romney’s apparent inevitability is a legacy of the Bush era, but not quite in the way Ross suggests here. During all of the disasters of the Bush era, Romney was faithfully aligning himself with the late Bush-era party consensus, and he identified himself with the conservative movement when it was at its most complicit in the failures of the Republican Party. At a time when movement conservatism was defined largely by its embarrassing servility to the party in power, Romney was promoted as the acceptable movement candidate.

While some might hold out hope that the unprincipled Romney is to be preferred to an ideologue, Romney is perfectly capable of playing the ideologue, and he has shown that he will do so whenever he must. In Romney’s case, the ideology he has embraced is Bushism rather than a stricter or more conservative alternative, but that doesn’t make him any less ideological. Bushism endured in 2008, and it seems very likely to prevail in next year’s primaries. Of course, Republicans are responsible for this, because they put Bush in power, supported him or at least acquiesced in almost everything he did, and continued defending him even as his disastrous war in Iraq led them to major electoral defeats. Oddly enough, Romney has flourished in the post-Bush era because he has stayed more or less loyal to the Bush-era consensus that produced the “serial disasters” to which Ross refers.

The party consensus held (and apparently still holds) that the Iraq war was neither a disaster nor a mistake, but something that had simply been handled poorly for a little while. According to the consensus, the debacle in Iraq had no implications for foreign policy in the Near East or anywhere else. This is why Romney can safely surround himself with foreign policy advisers from the previous administration, and it is why he can propose to revive Bush-era foreign policy in some of its more aggressive forms without putting the nomination at risk. On the most controversial domestic issue of 2008, Romney aligned himself with the Bush administration and party leadership in backing the TARP. While he has naturally taken opportunistic shots at how the TARP has been administered since the start of 2009, he has gone so far as to defend the program in presidential debates.

Romney’s likely nomination does not represent the failure of the Republican establishment to produce an alternative to Romney, but rather represents the party establishment’s success in rewarding one of its own and heading off yet another insurgency from the rank-and-file. His apparent inevitability is proof that Republicans have still not begun to learn the real lessons of the 2006 and 2008 elections, which is why they seem to be ready to re-fight the 2008 election with the candidate that many of them wished they had nominated instead of McCain. They have not yet fully accepted that a majority of the country rejected Bush, how he governed, and what he represented, and they are hoping that American memories are extremely short.