If there’s one thing that missile defense zealots can’t stand, it’s the implementation of missile defense plans. Josh Rogin reports:

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gets to Istanbul on Friday, senators and their staffs will be watching closely to see if she moves the ball forward on an agreement to station U.S. missile defense radar there, an agreement many Republicans oppose.

“We write with concern over recent reports that the administration may be nearing completion of a bilateral agreement with the Turkish Government to base a U.S. AN/TPY-2 (X-Band) radar in Turkey,” wrote Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) in a July 12 letter to Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta obtained by The Cable.

The senators want the radar to be based in either Georgia or Azerbaijan, which they argue are better locations for defending against a missile attack from Iran. But more broadly, they are concerned that Ankara will place a number of onerous restrictions on the radar, such as demanding that no data be shared with Israel. The senators have also accused Turkey of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, which they said calls into question their reliability as a partner in organizing a missile defense system aimed at Tehran.

There are a few points to make here. First, I have to note with some amusement that the Azerbaijan suggestion is one that was originally proposed by no less than Vladimir Putin as an alternative to the now-cancelled installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. Azerbaijan already feels neglected and ill-used by the U.S., and it’s not obvious that the way to remedy that is to ask it to take an adversarial stance towards its next-door neighbor. The idea of putting a missile defense installation in Georgia is obviously a non-starter for political reasons. Perhaps most important is the small matter than neither Georgia nor Azerbaijan is part of NATO. For that matter, Georgia has been trying to cultivate improved ties with Iran for several years now, and it can afford to antagonize Iran much less than Turkey. It wouldn’t be doing Georgia any favors to put the radar there, and it would needlessly increase U.S.-Russian and Russian-Georgian tensions. The entire exercise is rather pointless, since there isn’t much of an Iranian missile threat to defend against, but that’s all the more reason not to set up the system in a way that’s bound to create political problems for all parties involved.

When you strip away the few half-hearted “practical” arguments space partisans offer (it turns out that the space program didn’t even give us TANG, by the way) you’re mostly left with sentimental piffle. Listening to some of them, I’m half-tempted to mount a First Amendment challenge to the space program as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. ~Gene Healy

I’m compelled to agree with Healy. On the whole, manned space flight as it has existed up until now is an inordinately expensive government project that yields next to nothing in return. Ever since it ceased to serve as a symbol of competition with the USSR, it can’t even be poorly justified by invoking major international rivalry. If it weren’t for all of the sentimentality, it is hard to see how the funding would have ever been approved for it.

Healy also has a column for The Washington Examiner that expands on this, which gives us this memorable line on Charles Krauthammer’s love affair with space flight:

Krauthammer’s obsession makes sense, in a way, since federally funded spaceflight is the quintessential neoconservative project: a giant, wasteful crusade designed to fill Americans’ supposedly empty lives with meaning.

Inasmuch as it tries to make people find meaning in and through the activities of the state, this makes government-run space flight into something of an idol.

Libyan war advocates claimed many things in support of military intervention. Two claims in particular stand out for the importance some interventionists placed on them. One of the “strongest reasons” for intervention, we were told, was that it would have a deterrent effect on other authoritarian regimes and provide encouragement to other protest movements. No other governments have been deterred from doing whatever they wish to their own protesters, and there was little reason to think that they would be. Another benefit of intervention was supposed to be that it would change the waythat Arab publics saw the United States. The Libyan uprising had becomecentral to the “Arab Spring,” and U.S. support for it would align it with the vast majority of Arabs throughout the region. According to Marc Lynch, Libya had become “a litmus test for American credibility and intentions.”

According to a new poll conducted for the Arab-American Institute (via Scoblete), none of this appears to be the case. The establishment of a no-fly zone in Libya rates very low on the list of priorities that respondents had. Respondents were asked “which is the most important for the U.S. to address in order to improve ties with the Arab world,” and intervening in Libya was the choice of no more than 6% in any country except Lebanon, where there was a much higher figure of 20%. Only in Saudi Arabia does a clear majority believe that Obama’s handling of this policy contributes to the improvement of U.S.-Arab relations. A plurality in Lebanon believes the same.

In every other Arab country surveyed, a plurality in the rest (Morocco, Jordan, UAE) and a majority in Egypt (56%) believes that Obama’s handling of the Libyan intervention has worsened U.S.-Arab relations. Just 13% of Moroccans, 7% of Egyptians, 21% of Jordanians, and 32% of Emiratis see Obama’s handling of this issue as improving relations. The other respondents said that the intervention had no impact on U.S.-Arab relations. If Libya was a litmus test for American credibility throughout the region, shouldn’t that be reflected in public opinion?

This was not hard to foresee. In fact, to his credit, Marc Lynch predicted this development:

But if that action takes military form, including the kind of bombing would actually be required to implement a No-Fly Zone, I suspect that the narrative would rapidly shift against the United States.

The people surveyed in the AAI poll mostly live in countries ruled by U.S.-allied monarchs and military regimes, so it would be understandable if respondents tended to be dismissive of any and all policies carried out by the Obama administration. Of course, this is why there was never much reason to believe that intervening in Libya would improve America’s reputation in the region. There are too many other deeply unpopular U.S. policies overshadowing any other policy that might have initially been welcomed by a majority of Arabs across the region. The administration reportedly believed that intervening in Libya represented an opportunity to align “values” and interests, but barring radical changes in U.S. policy in the entire region that alignment cannot be achieved. It certainly can’t be achieved by one policy in isolation, especially when that policy is another questionable resort to the use of military force.

Update: Eric Martin didn’t buy the interventionist argument when it was first made, and comes to much the same conclusion as I have.

Second Update: Via Patrick Appel, Adam Serwer notices the same thing, and comments on the poll that “this is particularly bad given that part of the administration’s underlying rationale for intervening in Libya was to shift the regional narrative that the U.S. only supports brutal dictators and not the democratic aspirations of Arabs.” Contra Serwer, the poll suggests that the Libyan intervention has made things worse for the U.S. insofar as a majority of Egyptians believes that the administration’s handling of the intervention has worsened U.S.-Arab relations. 56% of Egyptians accounts for a huge proportion of the Arab population in the region. The net result from the entire survey is a negative one for U.S.-Arab relations. The negative Egyptian reaction is significant for another reason: the Libyan war was premised on protecting Egypt from destabilization. Most Egyptians appear to reject that. It isn’t just that the promised improvement didn’t materialize, but the intervention had the opposite effect asexpected.

In the latest of a series of extraordinarily self-defeating moves, Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, has just adopted the so-called “Boycott Bill,” penalizing any call within Israel to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The new law allows for civil suits against boycott supporters, denies them state benefits, and prevents the Israeli government from doing business with them. For a society terrified of what it sees as an international campaign of “delegitimization,” its own parliament could not have produced a more stunning blow to Israel’s legitimacy by conflating Israel as such with the settlements and the occupation. ~Hussein Ibish

Paul Pillar and Steve Clemons have similar reactions with more of a focus on the chilling effect this has on free political expression. There’s no question that the legislation is both illiberal and self-defeating in that it will confirm opponents of settlement policy in their resistance and make it that much harder for Western supporters to defend Israeli government behavior. What I haven’t seen from anyone is an acknowledgment that the passage of this legislation (which Israel’s High Court may find unconstitutional in any case) is clear proof of the self-defeating nature of boycott and divestment tactics by opponents of Israel’s illegal settlements. The so-called BDS movement has little chance of compelling a change in settlement policy for the same reason that attempts to penalize a state with sanctions of one sort or another usually fail in achieving their principal goals. As I wrote last year:

To the extent that these measures succeed in isolating a government, they allow that government to use international hostility as a bludgeon against its domestic critics and they make it easier to rally the population in support of the very policies that the boycotts and sanctions are targeting.

Conflating Israel and the settlements may be very bad for Israel in terms of its international reputation and its dealings with other states, but it is very useful to the cause of supporting the settlements. Of course, that is the point of the legislation: to raise the costs to Israelis and foreign companies when they oppose the settlements, and to bind settlements and Israel together to blunt challenges to the former. I have seen nothing that suggests that they are going to be unsuccessful. This is a reminder that boycotts and punitive measures do not change minds, and they are not really meant to change them. Their purpose is to make a statement of disapproval that the relevant government is bound to regard as a badge of honor.

“Ending the crisis entails the departure of Qaddafi from power,” Mr. Juppé told France Info radio. “This was absolutely not a given two or three months ago.” ~The New York Times

This is an odd thing to say. The joint op-ed by Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama that demanded Gaddafi’s removal as the condition for ending the war was published on April 15, which was almost exactly three months ago. I know Western publics have short attention spans, but does Juppé think that we can’t recall what his government was saying about this war as recently as April? If we believe Juppé’s latest statement, there would have been no reason to continue the war this long. What we are seeing here is a bit of sloppy revisionism that is trying to claim that it was not the NATO-supported maximalist demand that Gaddafi’s departure be a precondition of any cease-fire or talks that has prolonged the war. As Juppé tells it, there was no such precondition, and Gaddafi’s removal has only recently become unavoidable. I’m not sure what the point of making such an obviously untrue statement could be.

Micah Zenko recently commented on the bizarre habit of both sides in the conflict to make public statements that were easily shown to be false. He concluded:

But the doublespeak coming from both sides of the fight is Libya is remarkable in its divergence from publicly available information gleaned from less biased sources.

Burjanadze’s openly pro-Moscow posturing and career of textbook political opportunism suggests that there is probably some truth to the government’s charge. But the government’s diminishing restraint toward its opponents is hardening the perception that Georgia’s ruling elite have no intention of incubating a genuine democratic system. ~Michael Cecire

I know that you will find this just as surprising as I do. The erosion of political freedoms and consolidation of power in what has become increasingly a one-party state are not new developments. They were evident as early as 2004, and arguably there was reason to expect them from the beginning. What is worth noting is not that Georgia under Saakashvili has reverted back to what it was before, but that in terms of political freedoms Georgia is now worse off than it was in 2003. Cecire writes:

Although Georgia’s Freedom House score improved slightly this year — mostly due to better positioning from an outmatched but increasingly savvy parliamentary opposition — its report card on political freedoms remains worse (.pdf) than during the waning days of former President Eduard Shevardnadze’s kleptocratic regime.

The enthusiastic support for Saakashvili and for bringing Georgia into NATO was always deeply misguided. While the latter no longer has any chance of being realized, there continues to be considerable backing for the Georgian government in Congress that depends heavily on the illusion that Georgia represents a political model for the region. Reforming the semi-authoritarian or hybrid regime in Georgia shouldn’t be our concern, but that government also doesn’t need to be a client of the U.S.

This isn’t because it is semi-authoritarian, but because there was never any good reason for the U.S. to have Georgia as a client. The connection with Georgia remains a holdover from the failed “freedom agenda.” It serves no U.S. interest, and it has encouraged the Georgian government in self-destructive behavior for the last several years.

So despite the funny phrasing, at the heart of the idea of leading from behind is the empowerment of other actors to do your bidding or, as in the case of Libya, to be used as cover for a policy that would be suspect in the eyes of other nations if it’s branded as a purely American operation. ~Ryan Lizza

Maybe that’s what the administration adviser thought it meant, but if so it is a lousy description of what has been happening. The administration’s handling of the various uprisings has not been one of empowering other actors to do its bidding. The Saudi-led GCC intervention in Bahrain was not something that it wanted. It’s not clear how the administration “empowered” Erdogan to condemn Assad’s crackdown. The U.S. facilitated the Libyan intervention, which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, but it was Britain and France that pulled the U.S. along.

There was never a chance that the Libyan war would be a “purely American operation,” and had it not been for Anglo-French calls for action there might not have been a policy of intervention in Libya at all. The administration adviser was trying to square the circle of letting other governments take the lead with the claim that the U.S. was still exercising leadership. The mistake that the administration made in Libya wasn’t that it was “leading from behind,” as opposed to leading the charge, but that it was supporting a foolish policy.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the so-called realist turn in American politics is its confusion of populism for realism. To be blunt, anybody hoping for realism and restraint in American foreign policy is setting themselves up for failure if they put their trust in the inherent wisdom of the mass public to provide a sound guide for foreign policy. It is true that after serious disasters in American foreign policy or prolonged wars, the public does tend to tack a seemingly “realist” course in foreign policy matters. However, a “realist’ inclination that only evinces itself in a politically meaningful way after enough time has passed for thousands of lives have been lost or billions of dollars spent is not a very useful constraint on the interventionist tendencies of the US government. ~Daniel Trombly

Via Scoblete

Trombly is right about this. He has effectively made an excellent case that there is nothing inherent in popular or democratic government that encourages restraint or discourages the use of force. As both of us have suggested before, public ignorance is another important factor in making it relatively easy to launch military interventions with public support:

At the same time, popular parochialism and ignorance of foreign politics and cultures enables the inflation of threats abroad just as easily – if not more so – as it provokes skepticism.

This is certainly true. Threat inflation and invention happen in every powerful country, but inflating threats and inventing enemies are much easier when the public knows next to nothing about the part of the world where the threat is supposed to be located. While government officials may know more, this is also not nearly enough in most cases. This was one of Figes’ observations in his history of the Crimean War: Russophobia had an extremely powerful effect on British public opinion, but actual knowledge of Russia was negligible. Public opinion was instead shaped by the wildest of alarmist claims fueled by the forged “Testament of Peter the Great,” and these claims also shaped the making of policy among the supposedly well-informed:

The documentary basis of this ‘Russian menace’ was the so-called ‘Testament of Peter the Great’, which was widely cited by Russophobic writers, politicians, diplomats, and military men as prima facie evidence of Russia’s ambitions to dominate the world. Peter’s aims for Russia in this document were megalomaniac.

—————-

The ‘Testament’ was a forgery. It was created sometime in the early eighteenth century by various Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian figures connected to France and the Ottomans, and it went through several drafts before the finished version ended up in the French Foreign Ministry archives during the 1760s.

—————-

Nowhere was its influence more evident than in Britain, where fantastic fears of the Russian threat–and not just to India–were a journalistic staple….These travel books not only dominated public perceptions of Russia but also provided a good deal of working knowledge on which Whitehall shaped its policies towards that country. (p. 70-72)

Americans also have a history of overreacting once they have been pulled into conflicts overseas, and this tends to push arguments for restraint to the side or out of the debate all together. This is an overreaction that feeds of public ignorance about the rest of the world and America’s geographic distance from the regions where these conflicts are being fought. Before U.S. entry into WWI, there was no overwhelming popular agitation for entering the war, but once America was in the war there was a strange transformation. George Kennan describes the wartime mood very well in the prologue to The Decision to Intervene*:

American society had no tradition that could help it accept a foreign war with calmness and maturity. Its political philosophy–optimistic, idealistic, impregnated with the belief that an invincible progress had set in with the founding of the American state–had no comfortable place for mass killing and destruction as an end of American policy. There was no explanation for America’s involvement in the war which fitted with the basic assumptions of the American outlook and at the same time permitted the adoption of a realistic image of the enemy and recognition of the war as an integral part of the process of history. It could not, in the American view, be anything generic to human nature that had produced this confusion. Only a purely external force–demonic, inexplicable, evil to the point of inhumanity–could have put America in this position, could have brought her to an undertaking so unnatural, so out of character, so little the product of her own deliberate choice.

—————-

There was a sort of mass running for cover; and “cover” was an impressive show of noble indignation against the external enemy, coupled with the most unmeasured idealization of the American society whose philosophic foundation had been thus challenged.

—————–

The result was an hysteria, a bombat, an orgy of self-admiration and breast-beating indignation, that defies description. In one degree or another it took possession of press, pulpit, school, advertising, lecture platform, and political arena….Never, surely, has America been exposed to so much oratory–or to oratory more strained, more empty, more defensive, more remote from reality. All was righteousness and hatred. (p. 6-7)

So there’s no question that changes in public mood are unreliable and won’t form the basis for establishing a foreign policy of restraint and prudence. Still, I think Trombly does overlook something. In between the orgies of self-admiration and breast-beating there are openings for realist arguments to be heard and gain traction. Public war-weariness does not by itself indicate anything about how the public will respond to future agitation for war, but it opens up political space to challenge assumptions about the wisdom and necessity of military interventions and of confrontational foreign policy more generally.

* The intervention discussed in Kennan’s book was Wilson’s decision in 1918 to send American soldiers to Siberia as part of the absurd Allied intervention after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Tim Pawlenty’s national security views have often been likened to those of McCain, but this is a bit unfair to McCain. Pawlenty recently told Marc Thiessen that he is a much more fanatical and immoral hard-liner than McCain:

But he points out that he and McCain have differences — especially when it comes to handling captured terrorists. “He supports closing down Guantanamo; I don’t. He’s against enhanced interrogation techniques; I’m in favor of them under limited and controlled circumstances,” Pawlenty tells me. As for trying captured terrorists, Pawlenty says that “the proper place for [an enemy combatant] to be processed and questioned and prosecuted is not our civilian courts.” That sounds a lot more like Dick Cheney than John McCain.

As a leading defender of torture, Thiessen would know better than most.