My latest column for The Week on Libya went up late last week.

Jim Antle reaches a somewhat dispiriting conclusion on the state of foreign policy debate in the GOP field (via Andrew):

Both Huntsman and Johnson have favored fighting with social conservatives over rethinking foreign policy — with dismal poll numbers to show for it. So despite initial impressions that much has changed since 2008, the Republican foreign policy debate may remain Paul versus everyone else.

For the most part, this is right. It is a measure of how little has changed that two of the most prominent people Antle identifies as challengers of the party consensus on foreign policy are Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels. Whatever his reservations about nation-building, Christie has endorsed Romney, so there is nothing in Romney’s foreign policy agenda to which he objects strongly enough to keep him from supporting Romney’s nomination. There is much less to the idea of Christie as a skeptic of activist foreign policy than meets the eye, but even if there weren’t Christie has made it clear that re-thinking America’s role in the world is not a top priority. Gov. Daniels was probably the most outspoken advocate of cutting military spending and re-examining overseas commitments, but he was also known to be one of the people most eager to see Paul Ryan run. Ryan has made clear that he has no interest in reducing military spending or re-examining foreign entanglements.

It’s true that foreign policy isn’t the reason why these two have expressed support for Romney and Ryan. In both cases, it is economic policy and entitlement proposals respectively that have trumped everything else, which points to something more significant about the new batch of Republican skeptics. Christie called for greater discrimination in what the U.S. tries to accomplish abroad, but that doesn’t matter to him all that much so long as Romney’s economic policy is satisfactory. Ryan’s entitlement proposals mattered far more to Daniels than the former’s full embrace of hegemonist arguments. Even when a leading Republican is willing to advance arguments for restraint and prudence in foreign policy, there are usually other issues that take much greater precedence. This is one reason why unabashed hegemonists often receive the backing of more skeptical Republican politicians, and why the 30-40% of Republicans who are now regularly opposed to military adventures and nation-building are continually under-represented in the presidential field and the party’s national leadership: most of the skeptics care far more about other issues, so they’re willing to support candidates whose foreign policy they don’t support.

On a related point, one reason why the debate keeps returning to “Paul versus everyone else” is that Rep. Paul doesn’t repeat standard mantras about supposedly grave, existential threats from other states when common sense tells him that the threat is minimal. Almost everyone else (except Johnson) feels compelled to repeat what many of them must know is nonsense because it is expected that they should demonstrate “toughness.” At the Ames debate earlier this year, Paul put the supposedly great Iranian threat in perspective by comparing it to the threat that the USSR once posed, and noted that the U.S. managed to contain and deter the much greater Soviet threat. He went on to say, “Iran is a threat because they have some militants there, but believe me, they’re all around the world and they’re not a whole lot different than others.” So here we have Paul acknowledging a threat from Iran, but refusing to exaggerate it or hype it into something that it isn’t. This leads Antle to make the untrue statement that he “sometimes sounds as if he is suggesting Iran is a benign power.” Of course, there is a world of difference between saying that the minimal Iranian threat to the United States is something that can be managed and claiming that the Iranian regime is “benign.” The relevant question is whether the threat from Iran is so intolerable that it requires the U.S. to adopt policies of ever-tightening sanctions or preventive war. The answer is clearly no, but that doesn’t stop almost all of the Republican candidates from backing such policies. So long as the others feel that they must at least pay lip service to the idea that Iran is a monstrously powerful threat to the United States, Republican foreign policy debate is going to remain heavily biased in favor of confrontation and war.

Jon Huntsman’s campaign has been drowning, and today Dana Millbank throws him an anchor:

It’s probably too late for Huntsman. His campaign is in debt and he’s getting 1 to 2 percent in national polls. But in New Hampshire, Huntsman has finally found a compelling message. He has shifted from his initial dubious theme — the need for civility — to the worthier goal of fighting for the political center [bold mine-DL].

Millbank may not realize it, but “fighting for the political center” is practically identical to the other dubious theme. The cult of centrism and the festishization of civility are closely linked, and in both cases they usually amount to endorsing whatever the Washington consensus happens to be. This message is not very compelling. Indeed, as Huntsman’s poor showing in polls suggests, it means nothing to most people.

Huntsman is most interesting and relevant when he breaks with the prevailing consensus, as he has on the question of withdrawing from Afghanistan, and he is most disappointing when he embraces it, as he has on Iran policy. Huntsman remains enough of a foreign policy “centrist” that he cancontemplatestarting a war with Iran, but enough of one to be considered reliable by the Republicans who previously accepted or at least tolerated McCain. This is why a candidate whom Leon Hadar has correctly identified as being in “the Republican tradition of a prudent foreign policy and a strong role in the global economy” can be so readily dismissed as a would-be McGovernite without winning much support from the natural constituency of Republicans and conservatives who agree with him on many things.

Kevin Drum makes an odd statement in support of the deployment to Uganda (via Barganier):

We can’t go after everyone, but the United States has been committed for some time to the integrity of both Uganda and the newly created South Sudan. If we’re going to go after anyone, the LRA surely deserves to be near the top of the list.

This doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. The LRA is monstrous, as I said yesterday, but the same might be said about any number of militias that have been roaming eastern Congo over the last 15 years. If the U.S. is going to “go after” such groups, the U.S. would start with groups that threaten American interests, and then it would move on to groups that threaten strategically important allies, and then, somewhere very, very far down the list, it would do something about groups that threaten the integrity of Uganda and South Sudan*. When people refer to these states as allies, it underscores how misleading that word can be. These states are dependents, and they are not contributing much, if anything, to U.S. security. That South Sudan can’t effectively control its own territory and already needs assistance from the U.S. is an argument against U.S. backing for a ready-made failed state. It’s true, as several people have pointed out, that Uganda provides soldiers for the African Union’s mission in Somalia, but I’m not sure why this suddenly requires the U.S. to help Museveni fight his own decades-old battles. It is all the more puzzling when a lot of the weapons that the U.S. has provided to Ugandan troops in Somalia have ended up in the hands of the Islamists they are supposed to be opposing.

On a separate note, Americans often refer to what “we” are doing when they actually mean that the government is doing something. It’s a pervasive habit, and I’m sure I’ve fallen into doing it from time to time, but it is a bad one. It identifies citizens with their government in a rather unhealthy way, which tends to reinforce deference to whatever the government is doing, and it is a bit of make-believe, as if “we” here at home are participating in U.S. military activities on the other side of the planet. “We” aren’t “going after” anyone. The Ugandan military and other military forces in the region are “going after” the LRA, and some American soldiers are advising them.

Update: John Glaser made an important observation on the deployment to Uganda yesterday:

In 2009, when the US teamed up with the Ugandan army to coordinate a series of raids on LRA encampments – codenamed “Operation Lightning Thunder” – it failed miserably and let LRA forces escape only to go on a killing spree in surrounding areas, resulting in somewhere between 600-900 slaughtered and many more raped and maimed. Ivan Eland has compared this to “needlessly poking a hornet’s nest.”

David Axe has more background on the LRA and previous failed attempts to combat it:

Though the danger to American lives is probably minimal, any effort against the LRA poses serious risks. Previous operations targeting Kony have ended badly. In 2006, a squad of Guatemalan commandos trained by the U.S. infiltrated an LRA encampment. But Kony was away. In the ensuing firefight, LRA troops wiped out the entire eight-man commando force and beheaded their commander.

Three years later, a small team from U.S. Africa Command helped the Ugandan army plan a complex series of raids on LRA camps, codenamed “Operation Lightning Thunder.” But the Ugandan air and ground forces could not coordinate their attacks. The enraged rebel survivors fanned out, killing more than 600 civilians as they fled deeper into the forest.

After the disastrous Operation Lightning Thunder, Africa Command assumed a lower profile in Congo, sending small numbers of trainers on short-term missions aimed at boosting the Congolese army. Meanwhile, aid groups and civilian militias ramped up their efforts to guard against LRA attacks, employing homemade shotguns and a DIY radio warning network. And advocates of greater U.S. involvement continued pleading their case, culminating in today’s announcement.

* That is, this is what the U.S. would do if it had boundless resources and an obligation to provide internal security for most countries on the planet.

Richard Cohen seems to confuse Iranian willingness to use proxies to launch attacks with the incompetence and stupidity of the alleged assassination plot:

The mistake with Iran is the tendency to think its leadership is rational.

Yes, that’s it. If there’s one thing that unduly affects Western views of the Iranian government, it must be the tendency to credit them with too much rationality. After listing numerous instances of Iranian-sponsored attacks using their proxies, Cohen completely misses that the alleged plot breaks with the pattern of how Iran’s regime has operated in the past. Cohen doesn’t realize it, but he is making the skeptics’ argument for them. It is the skeptics who find the alleged plot hard to believe because it was such a risible attempt, and it doesn’t make sense because of how greatly it differs from the successful attacks Cohen lists. The attacks Cohen refers to aren’t proof of irrationality. They are evidence of hostility and even malevolence, which aren’t the same as irrationality. Irrational in the sense of being self-destructive is exactly what these other attacks aren’t, which is what makes the alleged plot so puzzling. That doesn’t prove that the government’s claims aren’t true, but the government’s claims concerning this plot don’t imply what Cohen thinks they do.

Americans have been regularly told by pundits and officials that various third- and fourth-rate authoritarian rulers over the last twenty years should be viewed as mad and irrational. If we were talking about the morality of their actions or their politics, these descriptions might have merit, but when we are talking about a regime’s inclination to engage in self-destructive or suicidal acts they are typically misleading. When one tries to apply lessons from the alleged plot to what Iran might do with a nuclear weapon, as Cohen does, it is simply ridiculous.

Daniel Trombly explained why last week:

That said, some of the takeaways from those believing Iran to be an undeterrable, uncontainable state are even more confusing. Two pieces here posit that because Iran was willing to undertake an assassination on US soil, deterrence will not work when it has nuclear arms, because either it will not be able to control its weapons or because it does not believe the US has a credible retaliatory capability.

This argument, quite frankly, is not borne out by the evidence. An Iranian strike against the US would prove that terrorism is not easily deterrable, which has been the case for a long time. It hardly proves war beyond covert action is inevitable, as Haddick states. Pakistan has aided and abetted terrorist groups which have conducted multiple mass casualty attacks against India, including against the Indian government itself. This has not significantly undermined conventional and nuclear deterrence. In fact, it’s the effectiveness of deterrence that has led Pakistan to shift its strategy from using conventional assaults on India to fidayeen and terror attacks by proxy – the famed stability-instability paradox.

In response to these outrages, which actually happened and which were indisputably linked to terrorist groups operating out of Pakistan (and with the acquiescence and/or help of Pakistan’s government), the Indian government has responded carefully and soberly in the knowledge of what an escalating confrontation with Pakistan could mean. Meanwhile, we’re seeing a great deal of agitation for war with Iran on the basis of some remarkably flimsy evidence.

Before I get to why I think it is a mistake, there are a few good things to say about the decision to send 100 U.S. military advisors to Uganda to assist in combating the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). According to the letter the White House sent Congress, the advisors will have no combat role. The LRA is a monstrous organization, and there is nothing good to say about it. Paul Pillar makes an important point when he writes, “The LRA is a destroyer of order, not a provider of it.” Unlike most other interventions of the last two decades, a successful effort against the LRA might make several countries in central Africa more stable than they were before, and the U.S. is providing assistance to governments that have requested it. The usual concerns about meddling in the affairs of other states, ignoring their sovereignty, fueling regional instability, and trampling on international law do not seem to apply here.

The first and most important objection to this deployment is that it has absolutely nothing to do with American security. Contrary to the letter Obama sent to Congress, there is no reason to believe that the deployment “furthers U.S. national security interests.” I suppose the good news is that it does not obviously harm them. One can refer to combating the LRA as furthering U.S. national security interests only by expanding the definition of those interests until it ceases to mean anything. Technically, there is authorizing legislation from Congress. The bill in question was passed by unanimous consent and a voice vote, presumably because no one ever contemplated the possibility that it would ever lead to anything, so it’s not as if most members of Congress gave any thought to this measure when it passed. It is something of an exaggeration to say that the authorizing measure received Congressional approval. One of the main allied governments that the U.S. is assisting is the authoritarian government under Yoweri Museveni, whose government was partly responsible for plunging the Congo into catastrophic war from which it is still recovering. There is something more than a little perverse in aiding Museveni’s government in suppressing its enemies in the name of humanitarianism and regional stability when Museveni and his proxies have inflicted as much or more suffering on the people of the Congo and have done more to destabilize the region than the LRA ever has.

Peter Pham (via Joyner) makes the case for the deployment on strategic grounds as well, and here the case gets much weaker. Pham writes:

Third, the mission to reinforce the African militaries’ foreign internal defense capabilities in the face of a threat like the LRA goes to the raison d’être of AFRICOM, which has the mission to advance the “national security interests of the United States by strengthening the defense capabilities of African states and regional organizations…to provide a security environment conducive to good governance and development.” It also underscores—pace Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s off-the-cuff remark in Congressional testimony just last Thursday, that should automatic spending cuts be forced on the Pentagon by the budget impasse, Africa would be one of the areas where the cuts would come—the value of AFRICOM’s engagements across the continent as modest investments in terms of personnel, skills, and equipment which can reap large dividends and that, even in the current lean times, funds need to be found to maintain the readiness of America’s armed forces to carry out such missions.

This helps explain why reducing military spending is so difficult. Even when it comes to parts of the world that everyone acknowledges have little or nothing to do with U.S. security, “funds need to be found.” Funds always need to be found, don’t they? This mission doesn’t underscore the “value of AFRICOM’s engagements.” It is an effort to justify a significant U.S. role in Africa at a time when the U.S. cannot afford taking on problems there. If reinforcing African militaries’ capabilities is a major part of the raison d’etre of AFRICOM, the question isn’t whether this particular mission makes sense, but whether there is any reason for AFRICOM to exist. Instead of allies taking a greater share of the burden for regional security, the U.S. in this case is taking up some of the burden that allied governments should already be bearing on their own. Current “lean times” require that the government become better at setting priorities and making use of the resources that we have. If reducing U.S. involvement in Africa is part of what reduced military spending means, that requires the U.S. to take on fewer missions in Africa rather than adding on new ones.

Mark Lagon has written an essay in World Affairs Journal that criticizes the administration’s “soft power” failures. Since the administration has pursued an equally militarized foreign policy as its predecessor in most respects and the reputation of the United States in many parts of the world continues to be quite poor, this should not have been a hard case to prove. Amazingly, Lagon chooses administration policy towards Iran, Russia, and Egypt as his prime examples. These are some of the countries where American soft power is most useless (because the U.S. government is deeply distrusted and resented by the vast majority of people there), and Lagon takes the administration to task for failing to make use of it. Along the way, Lagon recycles some very tired arguments.

The first of these is the standard complaint that the administration did not do enough to help the Green movement:

Early and active US backing for a more unified opposition might have buoyed and strengthened the Green opposition and helped it to better take advantage of subsequent divisions in the regime: parliamentarians petitioning to investigate payoffs to millions of people to vote for Ahmadinejad, friction between Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and efforts by the Revolutionary Guard to assert prevalence over politics.

By supporting the opposition in Iran through soft power, the administration would not only have associated the US with the aspirations of the people in the streets of Tehran but also advanced the objective of dislodging a potentially nuclear rogue state.

As I was saying in response to Mitt Romney’s ideas on how to aid the Iranian opposition, critics of administration inaction don’t have very many specific proposals that go beyond “speaking out” in support of the movement. All of this overlooks that the Green movement didn’t and doesn’t want outside “help.” Citing Richard Haass’ support for regime change in Iran is all very well, but it doesn’t follow that a policy is feasible or wise just because a prominent realist favors it. Haass’ argument didn’t make much sense when he made it, and it looks worse in hindsight. It is doubtful that “early and active U.S. backing” of the Green movement would have changed anything, but it is fairly certain that the regime would not have been dislodged (because the Green movement was not seeking regime change), and it is more certain that a change in government would have made no difference in the official Iranian position on its nuclear program. The current Iranian leadership is divided over whether to develop nuclear weapons, and the next government would likely be similarly split. Any new government would resent outside pressure on the nuclear issue, and any new government would be very wary of making any concessions that could be used to discredit it in the eyes of the public.

Lagon seems not to know that Michael McFaul has been one of the main architects of “reset” policy, or if he knows this he fails to appreciate what this means for his criticism. After explaining that McFaul is known for his advocacy for democracy promotion, Lagon quotes McFaul saying that the U.S. should seek to integrate Russia into Western institutions and push for a more democratic Russia, and then he concludes:

But in its haste to “hit the reset button” on bilateral relations, the Obama White House ignored McFaul’s counsel.

More accurately, administration policy towards Russia reflects a lot of McFaul’s advice, but not all of it. Lagon’s problem is that the “reset” did not manage to improve Russia’s legal and political culture, which it was never going to do. McFaul assumes that a “democratic Russia” would be a stabilizing force. That could be true, but a “democratic Russia” isn’t going to cease to be a nationalist one, and it is still going to define Russian national interests in similar ways. Lagon assumes that there is a way for the U.S. to encourage political reform inside Russia by hectoring it over its corruption, arbitrariness, and rights violations, but there is no evidence that this worked when the previous administration tried doing just that.

The section on Egypt may be the weakest of the three. Essentially, the case here is that the administration was too slow to throw its support behind the protesters, and then it didn’t do enough to back the liberal and secular opponents of the constitutional amendments in the referendum earlier this year. One might call critics such as Lagon members of the “Not Enough!” movement. It doesn’t seem to matter to Lagon that the opponents of the referendum were vastly outnumbered, or that the administration was actually remarkably hasty in aligning itself with a protest movement against an allied ruler. Lagon writes:

The “inner Obama” failed to place America squarely behind the relatively weak non-Islamist forces in Egyptian civil society when it would have counted.

As usual, the administration’s efforts were insufficient to…do what exactly? Swing the referendum the other way? Take an ineffectual stand for Egyptian liberalism? Considering how controversialthe minimal ties between April 6 movement organizers and American lobbyists have been in Egypt, and considering how widely loathed and distrusted our government is among Egyptians, does anyone seriously believe that placing America “squarely behind” the referendum opponents would have improved their result?

In all three cases, greater U.S. government advocacy on behalf of opposition forces would not have done them any good, and it could very easily have undermined them. It would not have enhanced U.S. soft power to make public displays of American support for these groups, because in each case the domestic opposition was likely to have lost credibility and support in the process. We cannot keep trying to guide and manipulate the politics of other nations at the same time that we claim to respect their self-determination. The problem is not just that the governing authorities would exploit the connection to stoke nationalist sentiments against the opposition, but that the majority of the population in each country is very unlikely to look favorably on political movements that have direct public backing from the U.S. government. One reason for this is the frequent habit democratists have of pretending that democracy promotion will somehow achieve other U.S. policy goals at the expense of other countries’ perceived interests, which gives local nationalists that much more reason to be wary of Western-backed opposition forces. In each country, what the demos wants is very often the opposite of what Western democratists want for them, and promoting democracy in these countries is more likely to harm our preferred reformers by linking the reformers to the U.S. and empowering the majority at their expense.

A recent Washington Postarticle describes Mansour Arbabsiar, the central figure in the alleged assassination plot (via Scoblete):

Within the small Iranian American community in this Gulf Coast city, Arbabsiar, 56, was well known and well liked. But he was also renowned for being almost comically absent-minded, perpetually losing keys, cellphones, briefcases, anything that wasn’t tied down. He failed at a succession of ventures from used cars to kebabs.

He certainly sounds like a natural recruit for a high-stakes assassination attempt, doesn’t he? Even as dubious government claims go, the story about this alleged plot is hard to take seriously. Sponsoring such an amateurish plot doesn’t make much sense. The official U.S. line, conveyed to us by David Ignatius, is not very compelling:

The Iranians are stressed, at home and abroad, in ways that are leading them to engage in riskier behavior.

Ignatius lists the reasons for the “stress,” but none of them mentions any of the attacks that have been taking place inside Iran for the last several years. Via Greenwald, some stories have mentioned the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists as part of an explanation for what might be motivating the alleged plot, but this would be just one part of any plausible explanation. There have been reports on U.S. support for anti-regime militants inside Iran circulating for many years. For example, The Daily Telegraphreported in 2007 on the previous administration’s policy of supporting armed ethnic separatist movements:

In a move that reflects Washington’s growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran’s border regions.

The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime [bold mine-DL].

In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.

In late 2009, Selig Harrison detailed Bush-era covert support for Baluch and Kurdish militants:

The result was a compromise: limited covert action carried out by proxy, in the case of the Baluch, through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate or, I.S.I. [bold mine-DL], and in the case of the Kurds by the C.I.A. in cooperation with Israel’s Mossad. My knowledge of the I.S.I.’s role is based on first-hand Pakistani sources, including Baluch leaders. Evidence of the C.I.A. role in providing weapons aid and training to Pejak, the principal Kurdish rebel group in Iran, has been spelled out by three U.S. journalists, Jon Lee Anderson and Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker and Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times, who have interviewed a variety of Pejak leaders.

Within the last year, the Baluch terrorist group Jundullah was still engaging in terrorist attacks inside Iran, and the group was added to the FTO list late last year. PJAK was the Kurdish group targeted by the recent military action undertaken by Iran. The activities of these groups may have nothing to do with the alleged plot, but I find it interesting that no one has bothered mentioning them.

Paul Pillar makes an important observation on the alleged Iranian plot:

Another salient feature of the plot as detailed by the Justice Department is that it appears to have been designed with the intention of being discovered. This is related to the overall inept tradecraft but in particular to the sending of traceable quantities of money into the United States and the spilling of beans about supposed Iranian government involvement in open telephone calls to untrustworthy foreigners. If the plot was intended to be discovered, then presumably the motive of whoever concocted it was to escalate further the tension between Iran and the United States. A couple of possible instigators outside Iran come to mind; the most plausible ones inside Iran would be rogue elements. Whoever the instigator was, for the United States to respond by pressuring Iran more, and thus raising further the tension in the relationship, would be playing right into the intentions of whoever put the plot together.

There are a few other things to bear in mind. If the allegations are true, and if this was an attack authorized by the Iranian government, Iran hawks are in the odd position of focusing on a plot that undermines their usual over-hyping of the threat from Iran. After all, the case for a major “Iranian threat” isn’t just that the regime has hostile intentions, but that it has the capability to threaten the U.S. If true, the plot suggests that the threat from Iran to the United States is even less significant than skeptics previously thought it was. Note that it is the skeptics of the plot arguing that it doesn’t add up because everyone assumes the Quds Force is much more lethal and competent. Iran hawks are reduced to admitting that the threat from Iran is effectively smaller than the one skeptics of this plot are willing to acknowledge.

This should go without saying, but the plot has no implications for how we should think about Iran’s nuclear program or Iran’s status as a “rational actor” where nuclear weapons are concerned. If the plot is true, sponsoring an assassination of a representative of an avowedly hostile government on foreign soil would be provocative and reckless, but it tells us nothing about about Iran’s willingness to build, much less use, a nuclear weapon. Nothing has been revealed in the last week that makes taking military action against Iran or Iran’s nuclear facilities any less disastrous and unwise. Nothing that we have learned in the last week changes the reality that regime behavior becomes more moderate after a state acquires nuclear weapons. If there are elements inside Iran who would like to see U.S.-Iranian relations deteriorate further, that should make us think twice before giving Iranian hard-liners what they desire.

Pillar suggests that the administration’s response so far may be intended to guard against attacks from hawks here at home. If so, that could be dangerous:

However sympathetic one might be to the president’s reelection bid, the administration is playing a hazardous game. First, by offering up this kind of red meat, it risks enabling the meat eaters to push the administration into even more dangerous actions toward Iran. Second, it lowers further the possibilities of improving the relationship and reaching deals with Iran. This is especially so if the Iranian leadership was not involved in this plot, in which case that leadership would have good and understandable reasons to consider the United States to be a liar. Third, it risks a big embarrassment and loss of U.S. credibility if further evidence turns up showing that the Iranian leadership was not involved.