Tbilisi-based journalist Paul Rimple comments on the plea bargain deal and release of the Georgian photogaphers accused of espionage:

The Georgian photographers arrested for espionage on July 7 were released under a plea arrangement on Friday. While many are relieved at the sudden turn of events, few accept the guilty verdict because this is Georgia.

It might have seemed like a good idea to hook up four photojournalists for spying for Russia to show just how omnipresent its military intelligence is, but things didn’t go as planned. Authorities underestimated the tempest they would create by jailing journalists. They should have immediately reassured the public that the arrests had nothing to do about media repression (instead of waiting a day) and backed that up by providing concrete evidence. Releasing a list of employees at Georgia’s United Nations mission is hardly spy material because it can easily be found online.

The televised confessions were supposed to be damning evidence, but they hark back to Soviet days when coerced confessions were standard [bold mine-DL]. Nobody trusts them. Irakli Gedenidze was the first to crack while his wife was in the holding cell next to him. Then Georgy Abdaladze suddenly confessed after vowing to fight to the end. Zurab Kurtsikidze’s confession soon followed. Then came the plea bargains. The vast majority of plea bargains involve a defendant’s confession.

Georgian plea bargaining is a great thing for everyone but the accused. For one, it means not having to go to appeals court so many times. It is also a great revenue maker, because defendants can buy their way out of prison before they are proven guilty, like President Eduard Shevardnadze’s son-in-law, Gia Jokhtaberidze, who was charged with embezzling $350,000 from the state and paid $15 million to secure his release in 2004, according to Eurasianet.org. For the defendant, the plea bargain means not facing a court that has a conviction rate of 99.8 percent.

These are some of the reasons why Georgia continues to be regarded as a semi-authoritarian and “partly free” country. It is also why anything the Georgian government has to say about espionage and Russian agents must be viewed with extreme skepticism.

My new column for The Week on U.S.-Indian relations and the nuclear deal’s new obstacles is online.

Pawlenty certainly walked into this attack:

Today Bachmann fired back. “Executive experience is not an asset if it simply means bigger and more intrusive government,” she said in a statement. “Governor Pawlenty said in 2006, ‘The era of small government is over… the government has to be more proactive and more aggressive.’ That’s the same philosophy that, under President Obama, has brought us record deficits, massive unemployment, and an unconstitutional health care plan,” Bachmann added.

Bachmann criticized Pawlenty for “praising” the individual health care mandate and TARP, supporting cap-and-trade, and “leaving a multi-billion-dollar budget mess in Minnesota.”

“Actions speak louder than words,” Bachmann said, pointing that she had “fought against irresponsible spending … [and] cap-and-trade,” and on TARP, had “worked tirelessly against it and voted against it.”

This is just what I assumed Bachmann would say against Pawlenty:

I wouldn’t be surprised if Bachmann turns Pawlenty’s accomplishment attack around on him as Obama turned the experience criticism around on Clinton and McCain. Obama insisted that experience wasn’t what mattered; it was judgment that mattered, and both Clinton and McCain had judged poorly on Iraq. Bachmann might start saying, “It isn’t enough to get things done if they’re the wrong things or if they’re not done well,” and then she can rehash Pawlenty’s record of quick-fix budgets and talk up Minnesota’s current budget problems. Bachmann’s list of things that she has “fought” also draws attention to all of the things that Pawlenty has tried to disavow since he started organizing his campaign: she voted against the TARP and cap-and-trade, and Pawlenty conspicuously favored both at one time.

Pawlenty’s campaign is reduced to complaining that Bachmann has relied on “incorrect” opposition research, but the problem for Pawlenty is that what she said about his record is basically true. He did approve of the idea of an individual mandate (and declared Romney to be an “outstanding” governor at the same time). What Pawlenty said was that an individual mandate is “potentially helpful, but not an answer by itself.” It may be a stretch to call that praise, but at one time he considered it a useful mechanism. This is not someone who can credibly denounce Romney for the very “potentially helpful” thing that Pawlenty once thought was worthwhile. If Minnesota’s current deficit woes are not entirely Pawlenty’s fault, it is fair to say that his fiscal policies did not avert them. We know the claims are true because he has been actively running away from some of the very things that Bachmann mentioned. He has been hoping to immunize himself against this attack through preemptive pandering.

It was not very long ago that Pawlenty was trying to build up his reputation as a proponent of activist government on domestic policy. This was not a secret, and he made no effort to conceal it. He was supposed to represent “a little something new.” Matt Continetti profiled Pawlenty as “the first Sam’s Club Republican” in 2007:

Back then his embrace of his state and regional populist tradition was a curiosity, a political epiphenomenon lost in a national sea of regnant Bush Republicanism. Today Bush Republicanism is on its way out. The most successful GOP governors–Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Rick Perry in Texas, Charlie Crist in Florida, and former governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts–like their conservatism à la carte. They emphasize certain conservative policies–low taxes most of all–but dismiss others. Meanwhile, in Washington policy circles, wonks and flacks are busy sketching out an alternative Republican agenda that combines social conservatism with an active government tailoring economic policies to help working families.

It was probably his willingness to present himself as a big-government conservative that allowed him to be competitive at the state level in Minnesota. If that’s right, it is hard to take Pawlenty seriously when he implies that his weak election victories in three-way races in a blue state prove that he is the right candidate to run against Obama.

Pawlenty launched his campaign as a bold “truth-teller” who was going to challenge entrenched interests, and he started by attacking ethanol subsidies in Iowa. That may be bold, but it’s also not very consistent with how he governed in Minnesota. Four years ago, Pawlenty the “truth-teller” couldn’t say enough about his promotion of state support for alternative energy:

He talks with rare interest about biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol and wind power. “Under my watch we’ve doubled the proposed requirements for ethanol in gasoline here,” he says. “We implemented the first in the nation biodiesel requirement in our diesel fuel, 2 percent soy oil. We’re one of the nation’s leaders in wind energy production. And it’s largely part of some tax credits we put into law on my watch as governor.”

For some reason, Pawlenty doesn’t seem as interested in these things anymore. Of course, Pawlenty is allowed to change his mind on one or all of these issues, but he shouldn’t be allowed to mislead voters into believing that his cap-and-trade position was his only self-proclaimed “clunker.” His positions on a range of issues have changed in just the last few years. It’s understandable that Pawlenty wants to pander to conservative voters now that he is running for the nomination, but everyone should realize that this is what he is doing. When he is running on his record of executive competence, he should be expected to account for all of that record. In 2007, Pawlenty had confidence that he could bring others to see the value of some of his unconventional views:

So I tried to–and I enjoy trying to–at least appropriately and gently and constructively try to get people to think a little bit. And so I don’t want to go, you know, in your face, but at least be . . . constructively provocative, and maybe get some of them to have a light go on and say, ‘Well, maybe that’s worth thinking about.’

No one today is accusing Pawlenty of trying to get anyone to think. That is a problem for Pawlenty for obvious reasons. It is also a worrisome sign that the alternatives for the GOP are intellectual stagnation on the one hand and veering off into misguided government activism on the other.

Hooman Majd’s The Ayatollahs’ Democracy begins rather jarringly with a series of brief, jumbled scenes set during the Iranian presidential election and its immediate aftermath, but it soon becomes much more readable. One passage from the first chapter sums up the fundamental misunderstanding that many Western observers had about the protest movement that began in June 2009. It is also a misunderstanding that continues to muddle the American debates on Iran policy, democracy promotion, and the role that the U.S. supposedly could have had in “helping” the Green movement. Majd wrote:

In the fall of 2009, perhaps the most perspicacious slogan of the Mousavi Green Movement was one completely ignored by both the Western media and most Iranian exiles, many of them agitating as best they could for the downfall of the entire regime. “Na dolat’e coup d’etat, na menat’e Amrika!” Mousavi proclaimed, while green-wearing Iranians abroad joined former Iran-bashers such as former vice president Dick Cheney and Senator John McCain and countless right-wing talk-show hosts in demanding that President Obama offer overt support for the “pro-democracy” protesters on Iran’s streets. “No to a coup d’etat government,” Mousavi’s slogan said, and we heard that, but we did not hear the rest: “no to an indebtedness to America.” Menat is a Farsi word that is actually impossible to translate, and “indebtedness” is hardly the most accurate indication of its meaning. It can be a state of indebtedness or of begging a favor, of being in an uncomfortable state of owing. As far as most Iranians who did hear the message were concerned, though, Mousavi couldn’t have been clearer in his sentiments. Iranians may have wanted sympathy from the West, but they did not want help, and they wanted to owe no one, in their quest for their own form of democracy. (p. 58-59)

The point has been made many times before, but one of the persistent, fundamentally wrong beliefs that many Westerners heave held about the Iranian opposition is that the opposition eagerly wanted outside backing and that “we” failed to provide it. Of course, this is paired with the complete misunderstanding of what the Green movement has been, which was never a revolutionary or regime-toppling movement. Besides grossly exaggerating what “we” can do for any foreign political movement, this belief that the U.S. “missed” an opportunity to undermine the Iranian government continues to distort the arguments over everything from engaging Tehran to the correct response to Syria’s current crackdown.

Pawlenty remains what he’s always been: a candidate, perhaps the only one in the field, who can appeal to every faction within the Republican Party and draw an attempted veto of none of them. He remains a very viable candidate in a field without many of them and with no strong frontrunner. ~Jonathan Bernstein

Via Andrew

Bernstein makes the best case for Pawlenty that can be made, and it is possible that Pawlenty has it in him as a candidate to recover between now and the caucuses. The question is whether he will be able to continue raising money through the fall. If he does as poorly at Ames next month as his own campaign suggests he might, that seems unlikely. Christian Heinze pointed out a few days ago how Pawlenty’s campaign is lowering expectations for his showing next month:

And again — by starting at an artificially low point, the campaign is trying to spin a 2nd, 3rd. or 4th place finish as a game-changing rise from the ashes.

It makes sense that the Pawlenty campaign wants to do this. They would naturally want to put an end to the drumbeat of stories saying that Pawlenty is doomed, but that doesn’t work very well when the campaign is desperately trying to spin what would normally be considered a failure as a revival in his political fortunes. The official, declared field includes eleven candidates, but of these there are only eight candidates that are going to have any significant impact on the race, and just five of these will compete in the straw poll. According to Pawlenty campaign spin, a result that is just a little better than an awful sixth- or seventh-place finish next month should be considered a success. No one else believes that.

Alex Roarty at Hotline observed:

It’s a meager expectation for a candidate who has pinned his hopes of winning the Republican primary on succeeding in the Iowa caucuses.

The straw poll winner doesn’t always win Iowa, and sometimes the eventual nominee doesn’t do well in Iowa, but I don’t know of any candidate who staked his campaign’s fortunes on Iowa who went on to win the nomination after flopping in the state. It’s true that the elder Bush finished third in the straw poll and the caucuses in ’87-’88, but he was the Vice President and he hadn’t made Iowa the centerpiece of his campaign. Anything less than a second-place finish for Pawlenty will be a signal to donors and voters that the “best campaign organization in Iowa” doesn’t amount to very much.

Scott Conroy’s report on the straw poll described Pawlenty’s predicament:

A win in Ames — or, just maybe, a close second-place showing — could finally provide some momentum for Pawlenty, but anything less would likely be regarded as the first nail in his political coffin.

Someone could object that managing expectations is what a smart campaign does, but the need to lower expectations so dramatically tends to confirm the impression that the campaign is going nowhere fast. In the weeks leading up to the straw poll four years ago, Huckabee was telling reporters that he needed to finish in the top three to be credible as a candidate. Pawlenty has tried to brush off his poor polling by pointing to Huckabee’s example, but the Pawlenty campaign is now announcing to the world that they are in worse shape than Huckabee was at this time four years ago. Pawlenty now aspires to be as much of a success in Iowa as Sam Brownback, and he may not achieve even achieve that.

Pawlenty theoretically “can appeal to every faction within the Republican Party and draw an attempted veto of none of them,” which is what makes him “very viable” in Bernstein’s estimation, but his appeal to each faction often feels forced, and especially on foreign policy he has badly misread the public mood. He has embraced neoconservatism without wanting the baggage that goes along with it, but his denunciation of “isolationism” and support for “moral clarity” create the impression that he is just reciting the lines he has been given. He has crafted his foreign policy rhetoric to satisfy a small group of the party’s foreign policy pundits and wonks, which might not normally be a problem, but he is doing so at a time when the substance of what he’s offering is not appealing. His economic plan was a deficit-expanding supply-side fantasy. It was as if his campaign put it together for the sole purpose of pleasing the editors of The Wall Street Journal rather than voters in Iowa (or middle-class voters anywhere for that matter). Testimonials about his evangelical Christianity notwithstanding, Pawlenty hasn’t had that much to say that addresses the priorities of social and religious conservatives.

The most important obstacle Pawlenty faces is that he is mainly running on competence in a field where the front-runner has an equal or better claim to being an effective executive, so the voters that care most about competence are already gravitating to another major candidate. If he wants to be able to compete, he needs to rally a lot of the voters more interested in ideology than competence. Before Bachmann entered the race, that was plausible. Now those voters have somewhere else to go, and Pawlenty isn’t going to win them over by emphasizing Bachmann’s inexperience.

Update: Weigel commented yesterday on Pawlenty’s “better than sixth place” plan:

Two of those candidates, Romney and Gingrich, are not buying space or tickets for Ames. Pawlenty’s “better than sixth” goal is ridiculously achievable — he needs to stay ahead of Santorum and McCotter, who are competing, and not fall behind Perry, who’s doing well in polls but probably won’t be in the race yet. The point of “better than sixth” is to tee us up for a fourth place showing or spin a third place showing behind Bachmann and Paul as a victory against a candidate who’s going to burn out and a candidate who can only do well in straw polls.

Doug Bandow describes the fortunes of Palestinian Christians in an article for the new issue of TAC:

The abuses are real, but they have not been systematic as in Iraq and elsewhere. Palestinian Christians themselves emphasize Israel’s policies. While Israel is a democratic oasis in what remains, despite the “Arab Spring,” a dictatorial desert, Palestinians suffer under Israeli military rule. At dinner in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, frustrated Palestinian Christians spoke of inconvenience, hardship, and discrimination.

One family can no longer farm ancestral land since it is on the other side of Israel’s security wall. Several families used to worship in Jerusalem, just 15 minutes away, but now are denied permission to visit even on holy days. Checkpoints can add hours to the most routine trip. I visited an orphanage that often lacks water—never a problem at nearby Israeli settlements. The daily indignities add up under occupation, where everything ultimately is subject to someone else’s control.

I have just started reading Richard Miles’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. I’m not very far into it, but it seems promising so far. Some of Miles’ comments in the introduction caught my attention. Miles describes here the enduring value of Carthage as a model for stereotyping other nations as untrustworthy or perfidious:

Many of the prejudices first found in Greek and Roman texts were enthusiastically adopted and adapted by the educated elites of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America, who had grown increasingly interested in classical antiquity. The attitudes that they found in the Greek and Roman literature that they read quickly became their own. Thus the idea that the British–the inhabitants of ‘La perfide Albion–were in fact the Carthaginians of contemporary Europe firmly took hold in Republican France. The sentiment soon spread across Europe and beyond. Thomas Jefferson, president of the United States in 1801-09, wrote of Britain, ‘Her good faith! The faith of a nation of merchants! The Punica fides of modern Carthage.’ A nation of shopkeepers could not be trusted to keep its word. (p. 9-10)

It is fairly common to impute treachery and double-dealing with foreign adversaries, but the recurring habit of choosing Carthage as the model is interesting. Miles relates how some on the receiving end of foreign domination also identified themselves with the fate of Carthage, including certain Irish scholars:

Eighteenth-century Irish antiquarians, reacting against Anglocentric assertions that the Irish were descendants of the Scythians, an ancient people from the Black Sea famed for their barbarity, counterclaimed that in fact their forebears were the Carthaginians. Serious scholarly attempts were made to attribute megalithic passage tombs in the Boyne valley to the Phoenicians, and to link the Irish language to Punic. (p.11)

Miles concludes that these uses of Carthage all rely on the persistent habit of pairing Carthage and Rome, so that Carthage serves as the natural antagonist and opposite of the Rome that crushes it:

The continued ‘relevance’ of Carthage has always been contingent on our abiding obsession with Rome.

It may also be that the abiding obsession with Rome demands that we try to see contemporary rivals as another Carthage. From what I can gather so far, what is most valuable in what Miles is trying to do is to recover Carthaginian history from this built-in opposition with Rome to reconstruct the history of this civilization on its own terms as much as possible.

“The Russians wanted to check the information … so the deputy to Borisov called the European Union monitoring mission in Georgia and offered help with the casualties after the explosion on the railway which never exploded,” Mr. Utiashvili said. “The European Union mission told us this.” ~The Washington Times

Joshua Kucera points out that the EU mission quickly distanced itself from this specific claim when the Georgian authorities made it late last year. According to this December 2010 report, the mission cannot confirm the claim:

EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM) said that “contrary to recent press reports” it was not in a position to confirm or deny the claims of Russian involvement in any of the explosions that occurred in Georgia in recent few months.

“The Mission has not conducted an investigation into these events as it is not in its mandate to do so,” EUMM said in a statement on December 9.

Georgia’s evidence, through which Tbilisi claims that an Abkhazia-based Russian army officer was behind series of explosions and one failed blast attempt, include, among others, an inquiry made by Russian forces in Abkhazia via hotline asking EUMM about explosion, which never happened.

So what we appear to have here is a Georgian official flat-out lying to Lake about the EU mission’s evidence in this case.

Kucera asks the logical questions:

A bigger question should be, why would Russia do this? What do they have to gain from setting off a bomb at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi? Reasonable people can doubt Russia’s intentions toward the U.S. and Georgia, but this sort of terror action would be extraordinarily self-defeating.

Anatol Lieven reviews Charles Kupchan’s How Enemies Become Friends (via Jacob Stokes), and notes that worries about U.S. decline mask that the “decline” is really a return to normal:

The current widespread perception of U.S. decline is to some extent an illusion built upon an illusion: That is to say, for a brief decade between approximately 1992 and 2003, American fantasies—Republican-led, but more bipartisan than many progressives would care to admit—of unipolar dominance and unlimited possibilities were so overblown that everything since must appear a “decline,” even if it is in fact only a return to the historical norm.

The apparent stalemate in Afghanistan is in many respects only a lower-intensity, slow-motion replay of the U.S. defeat by guerrillas in Vietnam, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, and so on. As for the fact that the Russians and their local allies have been able to block the idea of NATO expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, this too is a return to the historical norm, and something for which previous generations of U.S. statesmen would actually have been grateful—since an Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, or even Theodore Roosevelt would have regarded the idea of the United States making security guarantees to these countries as nothing short of barking madness.

Lieven also explains why Kupchan sees democracy promotion as misguided:

Drawing on the work of American scholars Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder on the relationship between nascent democracy and nationalism, Kupchan shows that far from being an essential underpinning of peace, democracy—or at least new democracies—can just as easily be a force for nationalist hysteria and aggression. Thus in the 1850s, the rise of democratic politics and the mass media in Britain, by bringing chauvinist pressure to bear on foreign policy, helped destroy what had been for the previous four decades a somewhat competitive but peacefully managed relationship between Britain and Russia. In today’s world, any American who thinks that a Chinese political system with a strong element of democratic nationalism would be a more accommodating U.S. partner than the existing China may be in for a very nasty shock, given the degree of militant nationalism that exists within the Chinese population at large. The implication for U.S. policy is clear, argues Kupchan: “[T]he United States should assess whether countries are enemies or friends by evaluating their statecraft, not the nature of their domestic institutions.”

This is all very sensible. Fixating on the nature of other regimes is a waste of energy. Assuming that changing the nature of the regime can reduce or eliminate conflicts of interest is simply wrongheaded. Kupchan’s description of the deterioration of British-Russian relations in the 19th century is very good, and I couldn’t agreemore.