Quin Hillyer disagrees with me and argues that Santorum is right on Iran policy:

Yes, Iran is indeed a country that must be confronted. And yes, one can oppose the regime while befriending the people. Indeed, to say that one is doing both is almost redundant. For many years now there has been a very sizable percentage in Iran, especially among younger Iranians, who admire the West and yearn for freedom.

I appreciate Hillyer’s response, and I’ll be glad to explain what he called a “sort of strange line” in my previous post. I wrote:

Santorum’s statements last Thursday were typical of someone hostile to Iranian national interests, but one who nonetheless insists on presenting himself as a friend of the Iranian people. He insisted that “Iran is a country that must be confronted.”

Santorum and Paul were debating sanctions on Iran last week. In order to have any chance of coercing changes in Iranian regime behavior, these are sanctions that are going to have a significant adverse effect on the Iranian economy, which punishes the Iranian population for what its government is doing or may do in the future. Hawkish members of the Senate are now proposing sanctioning Iran’s central bank. Barbara Slavin points out that this will have negative effects on the population and possibly on the global economy:

Sanctioning the Central Bank would punish ordinary Iranians, something the Obama administration has said it wants to avoid, and could undermine what had been a growing international consensus against the Iranian nuclear programme. It could also jack up oil prices at a time when the global economy is teetering on the verge of a second recession.

Even when limited to the imposition of sanctions, confronting Iran exacts a significant toll from the Iranian population, it makes it more difficult for the Iranian middle class to flourish, and creates opportunities for the government to consolidate its power. In practice, confronting the Iranian government entails harming the Iranian people and undermining the opposition’s political struggle against the regime. Gasoline sanctions have not achieved the desired results, and the Iranian government has been able to turn them to its advantage at the expense of middle-class Iranians, many of whom are supportive of the Iranian opposition’s demands. As The Wall Street Journalreported last month:

Much of the opposition to the president’s 2009 re-election came from Iran’s middle class and merchants, many of whom criticized the president’s populist economic policies and believed his religious views bordered on heretical. It is this segment of the population—which owns the factories and the cars—that is feeling the most pain from the subsidy cuts, argue these analysts, while Mr. Ahmadinejad’s power base, the poor, is in the position to gain.

U.S. policy towards Iran is certainly not benefiting the Iranian people, and to the extent that Iranians perceive U.S. policy as an effort to prevent them from exercising their national rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty they resent our intrusion into their affairs. Even Green movement leaders have attacked Ahmadinejad for being too willing to make concessions to the U.S. on the nuclear issue, and Mousavi personally has a long history of supporting Iran’s right to enrichment.

The nuclear issue is one area where the regime and the population are generally on the same side, and by confronting Tehran on the nuclear issue the U.S. helps the regime at home. According to one survey of Iranian public opinion last year, U.S. favorability plummeted between 2008 and 2010, and 68% of Iranians perceived the U.S. to be the greatest threat to their country. Confronting Iran alienates the Iranian people and fosters anti-American sentiments. The survey also found majority support for developing nuclear weapons, which is more support than these surveys usually find, and very limited support for making any deals on the nuclear program.

What makes Santorum’s claim of friendship for the Iranian people harder to take seriously is his statement that they were free prior to 1979. Not only would most Iranians today reject this, but as far as political freedom is concerned it simply isn’t true. Viewed from the U.S., the Shah was clearly preferable to what came after him, but there are remarkably few Iranians in the country who would agree.

Obviously, I disagree with the basic assumption that Iran must be confronted. Iran currently poses no threat that cannot be deterred, and even if it had a nuclear weapon it could still be deterred. Regardless, there is a contradiction between confronting the Iranian government on an issue where it has popular support and claiming to be on the side of the Iranian people. Confronting Iran comes at the cost of strengthening the regime at home, sabotaging the Iranian middle class that has been at the heart of the opposition, and rallying the majority of Iranians behind the government against unwanted foreign interference.

Stephen Hayes reports that Paul Ryan is seriously considering giving in to the crazy, inexplicable demand that he run for President:

Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan is strongly considering a run for president. Ryan, who has been quietly meeting with political strategists to discuss a bid over the past three months, is on vacation in Colorado discussing a prospective run with his family.

Ryan still officially denies having any intention to run, but it seems that the incessant clamoring that Ryan has a “duty to serve” could be luring him into the presidential race. If so, that would be very unfortunate for Ryan. He won’t win the nomination, and he will probably fail to gain much traction in the primaries. That isn’t just because of his support for Medicare Part D and the TARP, but also because of more defensible things that many conservative voters nonetheless dislike. All the other candidates (except Huntsman) opposed raising the debt ceiling, which was the wrong but popular position to take. Ryan voted to raise the debt ceiling. This was the appropriate thing to do, but it will be one more thing that Bachmann et al. will hang around his neck.

If Ryan wanted to pursue the nomination, the best time to do so has long since passed. Jonathan Bernstein comments on the latest expressions of longing for better Republican candidates:

Here’s what you need to know about the Republican candidate field: this is it. No one starts running for president in August, less than six months before the voters start getting involved in Iowa and New Hampshire, and has any chance at all. At least, it’s never happened since the modern process has been fully in place (say, by 1980). And there’s no reason to expect it now.

A Ryan presidential bid would have been crazy when people first started suggesting it in May, but at this point it would definitely go nowhere. It would be a waste of Ryan’s time, and it would most likely harm the things he has been working on in the House. If Ryan has a duty to serve anyone, it is the constituents who voted him into office, and they didn’t elect him for this.

George Friedman observes that political change in Arab states this year has been much less than advertised:

It is important to begin with the fact that, to this point, no regime has fallen in the Arab world.

The old regimes are still largely intact in Tunisia and Egypt. Authoritarian rulers and their families have been deposed in more or less “soft” coups. In Tunisia, the army is not as strong and does not directly rule the country, so Tunisia may gradually move to a more open and competitive political system. In Egypt, the military regime has been consolidating its power, and Mubarak’s fall was mostly a means of placating the protesters to keep the regime intact. Turning to the countries where they are under the most severe strain, Friedman offers some words of caution:

More important, what regime changes that might come of the civil wars in Libya and Syria are not going to be clearly victorious, those that are victorious are not going to be clearly democratic and those that are democratic are obviously not going to be liberal.

He also notes the Western habit of exaggerating the amount of popular support that anti-regime forces have and repeatedly underestimating how much support the regime retains. This miscalculation is one reason why the Libyan war has dragged on as long as it has. The good news is that Westerners seem reluctant to in repeat their Libyan mistake in Syria:

First, following the Libyan intervention, everyone became more wary of assuming the weakness of Arab regimes, and no one wants a showdown on the ground with a desperate Syrian military. Second, observers have become cautious in asserting that widespread unrest constitutes a popular revolution or that the revolutionaries necessarily want to create a liberal democracy.

Western observers need to re-check their assumptions and recognize that the “Arab Spring” has not been quite what many have wanted it to be:

As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support.

Finally, it is not enough to have good intentions and sympathy for protesters:

The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are.

Needless to say, the U.S. and our allies didn’t have much clarity at all on this when the Libyan intervention started, and it seems that there is even less in the Syrian case.

The Boston Globepities Tim Pawlenty:

Pawlenty wasn’t a perfect candidate – or even, necessarily, the best option for the GOP. That’s an assessment voters should make.

It is fashionable to blame Pawlenty’s failure on Ames and its “corn-dog hokum”, but it’s just not true. Yes, Ames delivered the knockout blow, but he had been weak and staggering for weeks and even months before last Saturday. Other than Santorum, no one spent more time, devoted more resources, or built a more significant organization in Iowa than Pawlenty. This was what he had to do, because his path to the nomination required him to do very well in the Iowa caucuses, and whether people like it or not the straw poll does provide a useful test of a campaign’s ability to organize for the real contest.

Whatever the reason for their indifference, very few Iowan Republicans responded favorably. This was reflected in Pawlenty’s consistently poor polling, which was getting worse over time, and it created the impression that he was not inspiring any enthusiasm among the people he was meeting. Both of these compounded his existing fundraising woes. Most engaged Republican voters in Iowa looked at him and shrugged. These were the voters Pawlenty had been targeting for months, and they just weren’t interested. Donors noticed this, and withheld their support. After the bad showing at the straw poll, Pawlenty could expect that fundraising would become much more difficult, and he had already poured most of what he had into the last push at Ames. The prospect of poor fundraising in the months ahead was what actually killed Pawlenty’s campaign, just as it has killed Brownback’s and Quayle’s in the past. I don’t recall any lamentations accompanying their departures from the race.

Even some of the people voting for Pawlenty on Saturday were unenthusiastic about their choice:

“I did vote for him today,” she said. “He sounds like a good man. He sounds like he’s got the same Christian values.”

She’d come in with a group from the River of Life Church that was all voting Pawlenty, she explained. She was not in Ames out of any kind of personal passion for him.

Over in the food tent, Lavada Dennis, 74 and from Cedar Falls, was similarly noncommittal. “I’m a Pawlenty supporter. But it’s a long way from the election,” she said while eating a sandwich from Famous Dave’s BBQ. Texas Gov.

Maybe Pawlenty sympathizers can tell themselves that this is because he never really ran on his record, or they can console themselves with the fiction that he lost because he was too “nice,” but the reality is that Pawlenty presented himself to Iowan Republican voters early and often and still got nowhere. For some reason, many people regard this as unfair, but that is mainly because far too many people regarded Pawlenty as a major contender from the beginning. If he was a victim of any unrealistic expectations, it was the consensus that he was the plausible, acceptable alternative to Romney that did him in. Had everyone been judging him as the long-shot, unknown candidate that they judged Huckabee to be at this point in 2007, his third-place finish might have seemed perfectly respectable. Instead, he was inexplicably considered a top-tier competitor, this year’s near-equivalent of the 2007-08 Romney, and the expectations were therefore much higher than they probably ought to have been.

Rick Perry begins his apology tour (via Igor Volsky):

A few hours after unveiling his campaign for president, Perry began walking back from one of the most controversial decisions of his more-than-10-year reign as Texas governor. Speaking to voters at a backyard party in New Hampshire, Perry said he was ill-informed when he issued his executive order, in February 2007, mandating the HPV vaccine for all girls entering sixth grade, unless their parents completed a conscientious-objection affidavit form.

As Volsky shows, Perry claimed on multiple occasions that he believed that the order was the right thing over the last four years. Suddenly, the decision he has defended all this time has become an “ill-informed” one. In fact, as Reihan notes in his discussion of Perry’s record here, Perry’s original decision was an ill-informed one:

Mann doesn’t even mention the fact that many public health advocates considered Perry’s decision to mandate Gardasil unwise, as the vaccine had only recently been deemed safe enough for widespread use.

That suggests that Perry’s original paternalistic decision, which he regularly defended for years, was a blunder, but it has only been because of the new scrutiny he faces as a presidential candidate that he was willing to admit as much publicly.

A more serious policy blunder, and one that has had significant consequences for Texas’ budget, is the misguided “business-margins tax,” which taxes the gross income of businesses rather than taxing just profits as the old franchise tax did. Reihan quotes from an article in The Texas Observer:

The idea was to cut property taxes and replace the lost revenue with a new business tax.

This 2006 tax “swap” was the one instance during Perry’s decade as governor when he proposed a wide-ranging plan and successfully pushed it through the Legislature mostly unchanged. It’s perhaps his signature legislative accomplishment.

Problem is, it’s been a disaster. Small businesses don’t like it. Some conservatives hate it—in fact, a few believe Perry’s business tax is unconstitutional. Worst of all, the tax doesn’t generate enough revenue. The tax swap has cost the state $5 billion a year for five years running. The Texas budget now faces an ongoing structural deficit because of the underperforming business tax.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses denounced the tax as a failure earlier this year:

“We look at the tax as an abject failure,” said Hoke, “because it’s crippling the small and mid-sized businesses without bringing in what (the legislators) thought. It’s a lose-lose scenario.”

How much of a difference has the change in tax law made to small businesses? According to the NFIB communications director, quite a lot:

And although some have had increases of only $200 or so, “Most companies have seen a 100-500 percent increase,” she reported.

Yes, Perry certainly sounds like the natural candidate to address mounting federal debt and tax reform.

Update: Peter Suderman explains how Perry has been papering over the structural deficit his failed tax law has created. Last year, he used $6 billion in stimulus funding to make up almost the entire deficit, and he has resorted to Pawlenty-esque budget gimmicks in other years:

According to a report by ABC News, Perry’s budget also closed a big part of its budget gap by delaying a $2.3 billion education payment a single day. Thanks to that one-day delay, the payment will fall into the next budget year, and therefore will not technically affect the current year’s budget.

Rich Lowry revisits the crazy, inexplicable demand for a Paul Ryan presidential bid:

If Ryan ever wants to run for president, he should definitely do it now.

Paul Ryan is 41 years old, and a member of the House, so he has no need to run yet, and he wouldn’t get very far if he did. If Ryan wanted someday to launch a presidential bid, he might first seek statewide office to demonstrate that he can appeal to a broader electorate. Should he have no chance of winning statewide office in Wisconsin, that tells us something about the limitations of Ryan as a national candidate. In four years, unless the Republican nominee wins, there will be an open field and Ryan could take his chance then without having to face an incumbent President in the fall. Depending on what happens over the next few years, Ryan might be able to shepherd some important legislation through the House, which would let him have some significant accomplishments he could tout as a candidate later on.

Had Ryan been contemplating a presidential campaign at any time this year, his best moment passed several months ago. Before June, when Bachmann and Perry had not yet entered, Ryan might have established himself as an interesting minor candidate. His candidacy would continue to be constrained by his record of fiscal irresponsibility, his budget wonk expertise, and his association with unpopular Medicare reform, but there would have been more of an opening for him early on. In a field with Perry and Bachmann, Ryan would become the other candidates’ favorite pinata. Perry considers Medicare Part D a gigantic mistake, so Ryan’s talking points about its supposed cost control benefits wouldn’t be left unchallenged. Bachmann has made her opposition to the TARP one of her favorite applause lines, and Ryan voted for the program.

Lowry sees this opening for him:

Ryan could occupy the Pawlenty space in the field, or what seemed as though it would be the Pawlenty space–the potential consensus candidate from the Upper Midwest.

It is an understatement when Lowry says that sounds “very unappealing” right now. Maybe the “Pawlenty space” just isn’t very big. Suppose that it is a large space. Why doesn’t Bachmann occupy this space right now? Apart from the debt ceiling increase (which all the other candidates except for Huntsman also opposed), which position has she taken that seriously offends a major faction of the Republican Party? She is a three-term House member best known for her opposition to unpopular legislation. Paul Ryan is a fiveseven-term House member who was best known prior to this Congress for being complicit in every major deficit-expanding policy of the previous administration. Neither one stands much chance in the general election, but one was badly compromised by profligate Bush-era policies.

Update: The post has been corrected to show that Ryan is a seven term Congressman. He was first elected in 1998. I regret the error.

Philip Klein objects to Tim Carney’s appeal to take Ron Paul more seriously. Unsurprisingly, he still doesn’t like Paul’s foreign policy views:

To be clear, it isn’t a matter of him being against sending troops to Iran, or bombing Iran — he is even against imposing sanctions, or taking any other actions to attempt to stop them from getting nukes.

Imagine that! Not even sanctions! It’s almost as if he thinks it’s none of our business.

John Derbyshire had an interesting post earlier today that touched on this question. Since sanctions are an ineffective mechanism for preventing the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon (if there were a consensus inside the Iranian government in favor of building one, which there isn’t), Derbyshire asks why Paul’s “more honest” statement of the Iran policy all of the other candidates share comes in for so much criticism:

It seems clear to me that given Iran’s resources (and Chinese and Russian duplicity), any system of sanctions would leak like a sieve — as, in fact, pretty much all systems of sanctions against unpopular nations always have. The only way to prevent Iran from going nuclear if she wants to is therefore by military action. In fact, since one-off strikes would have uncertain effect, the only true way would be full-scale military invasion and long-term occupation.

Which Republican candidate advocates such a course of action?

If the answer is “None” (which of course it is), then what, in effect, is the difference between Dr. Paul’s Iran policy and that of Romney, Bachmann, Perry, and the rest?

If no U.S. leader or potential leader is willing to do the one thing sure to kill Iran’s nuclear ambitions, then how is it eccentric, much less worthy of mockery, for Dr. Paul to say we should leave them to it and rely on deterrence?

As Paul Pillar remarked after last week’s debate, no one has to be a Ron Paul enthusiast to recognize that he was speaking plain sense on Iran’s nuclear program:

Whatever else you may think about Paul and his candidacy, there is no refuting three truths he stated regarding the hysteria-inducing subject of Iran and its nuclear program. One, as Iranians look at what is surrounding them in their own neighborhood, they have good and understandable reasons to be interested in nuclear weapons. Two, even if they were to acquire a nuke, any capability they then had would pale in comparison with what the United States faced in the form of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or China for that matter. Third, as U.S. dealings with the Soviets demonstrated, an adversary’s nuclear capability does not constitute a reason to stop talking and start making a war.

This means that even if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, it would be a manageable, containable problem. It would not be ideal, but it would be vastly preferable to the escalation of tensions that would follow from a policy of increasing sanctions and confrontation.

Paul Pillar observes that U.S.-led democratization in Iraq has created a government that is authoritarian at home and supportive of the Syrian crackdown:

And what is the posture of the Iraqi regime toward the Arab Spring, specifically next door in Syria, which is currently the hottest front line in the confrontation between freedom and authoritarianism? Maliki is maintaining a distinctively friendly posture toward the Assad regime, while that regime is gunning down protestors in Syrian cities. He has urged the protestors not to “sabotage” the regime and has recently hosted an official Syrian delegation. The would-be lead domino, far from inspiring freedom in a neighboring country, is on the side opposing freedom.

It never hurts to remind people that neoconservative policies of the previous administration failed, and that they did so on their own terms. Remember when the new democratized Iraq was supposed to continue being a bulwark against Iran? No one was ever able to explain why that was going happen. Meanwhile, Iraq’s sectarian politics is hardly an encouraging sign for the future of a democratic Syria. Before the invasion and during the early years of the occupation, the public was repeatedly told that sectarianism would not be a problem in Iraq, but it was. It was the natural product of state collapse, insecurity, and the politicization of communal identities through elections.

There are a few things to take away from this. The most obvious and the one that keeps being forgotten is that democratization is no protection against illiberal political culture or populist authoritarianism, and it can lead directly to both. It should also reminds us that democratically-elected governments are not always going to share the democratic missionary impulse that many Americans have, nor are they going to make the political crises of their neighbors their business unless they see some advantage in exploiting those crises. The last neoconservative fantasy about Iraq has been fully discredited when the government of “Iraq the model” is siding with the Baathist dictatorship of Syria against Syrian protesters. Even so, we shouldn’t get the wrong idea that the Iraqi government would take a different position if it were a liberal democratic one rather than a sectarian, authoritarian one. That would be to make the same mistake that informed the disastrous misjudgment behind U.S.-led democracy promotion in the previous decade.

Ross surveys the 2012 Republican field and finds it wanting:

No one doubts Romney’s intelligence or competence, but he has managed to run for president for almost five years without taking a single courageous or even remotely interesting position.

Then again, the reason that he has not taken “a single courageous or even remotely interesting position” over all these years is that he has been a presidential candidate desperately seeking the approval of his party’s base. It doesn’t say much for Romney that he opted to take on an entirely political persona in order to do this, but he understood that it was the only way for him to pursue the party’s nomination with any hope of success. I don’t think anyone would expect Romney to take a courageous stand on anything, but viewed another way this is proof of his ability to adapt quickly to changing political circumstances. The argument for Romney that several people have put to me over the years is that he is so flexible and reactive that there is much less danger that he would continue pointless wars indefinitely or plow ahead with politically toxic policies. I don’t really believe this, but I can see why Romney’s lack of core convictions is weirdly reassuring for some people after the last decade.

In any case, primary electorates don’t reward candidates for being courageous or interesting, especially when these things are normally defined in terms of breaking with party orthodoxies. If they did, they wouldn’t be partisan primary electorates. If taking bold and interesting positions weren’t politically self-destructive, Gary Johnson might be a serious contender this year. It might not seem like it, but Ross’ criticism of Romney’s dullness and lack of imagination suggests that Romney has succeeded in making himself into a boringly conventional center-right conservative politician. His goal has always been to make himself suitably inoffensive to enough primary voters to win the nomination, and he may have succeeded in this.

Ross goes on to suggest that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie should enter the 2012 race. Unlike many writers dissatisfied with the current group of candidates, Ross doesn’t overlook Christie’s political weaknesses:

Of course Christie has obvious weaknesses: the brevity of his gubernatorial experience, the fact that he’s more moderate than his party’s base, the fact that it’s been a hundred years since America elected a president with his avoirdupois.

Essentially, he has less executive experience than Romney or Perry, and he has a large “cheering section” among movement conservatives mostly because these people are always looking for a better alternative candidate to replace the ones they already have. Once he became a candidate, most of the cheering would die down quickly. If he were to run, Christie would effectively be running to Romney’s left, which is hardly a winning strategy. The best argument for a Christie campaign is that he is currently enjoying some success as governor, but this is why Christie should stay where he is at least through the end of his first term.

When Sarah Palin quit halfway through her first term, the common (and ultimately correct) reaction was that her political career was finished. If Christie were to do the same, it would not propel him to the nomination or the White House, but it would take him away from his state when he appears to be making some headway. One of the reasons why the 2012 field is so uninspiring is that the GOP has promoted its most successful governors too rapidly and has not been winning enough gubernatorial elections to create a large pool of candidates from which to draw. Another problem is that relatively few people outside New Jersey know who he is. The case for a Christie bid is not very strong, and I continue to marvel that his name keeps coming up in discussions of the presidential election.