Steven Cook describes the background to the protests in Egypt expected to take place later this week:

It is no wonder that the revolutionary groups are going out into the streets. They have a lot to be angry about in addition to the aforementioned slow pace of justice. Indeed, much of what the demonstrators have accomplished since Hosni Mubarak’s fall has been tangibly symbolic without being tangible. To be sure, Mubarak and his sons are in the dock along with a variety of their advisors, henchmen, and corrupt enablers. Yet there is a strong sense of frusrtation among activists that while they were able to topple Hosni et al, the regime they rose up against remains remarkably resilient. They only have to point to the behavior of the police and Central Security Forces to drive home the point that when it comes to the Ministry of Interior at least, not too much has changed. Indeed, people who did Mubarak’s bidding remain firmly entrenched throughout Egypt’s vast bureaucracy. Some are, of course, entirely innocent of the regime’s crimes doing what they had to do to get by in a soul crushing political environment, but others—especially those in important ministries like Interior, Defense, and Finance—are well placed to try to undermine efforts to build a new, decent, political order. In other areas, the revolutionary groups who instigated the uprising have found themselves on the losing side whether it was the March 19 referendum, efforts (so far) to delay parliamentary elections, or the broader effort to establish accountability during the transitional period.

The frustration is understandable, but the reasons for that frustration should also make us remember that Egypt’s military regime has never gone anywhere. The military directly, openly rules the country as it has for roughly the last five months. Before the protesters’ revolution can be “saved,” it first would need to achieve something beyond dethroning of the old ruling family.

Reading Paul Pillar’s reflections on patriotism and nationalism earlier today, I was reminded of related comments on the nature of modern nationalism in George Kennan’s The Fateful Alliance. Kennan described the nation-state at war and the effect of modern nationalism on the conduct of war:

The nation, as distinct from the dynastic ruler of earlier times, is–even in theory–a secular force. Ready as it is to invoke the blessing of the Almighty on its military ventures, it cannot claim the divine right of kings or recognize the moral limitations that right once implied [bold mine-DL]. And it is outstandingly self-righteous–sometimes to the point of self-adoration or self-idealization–in its attitudes towards any country that appears to oppose its purposes or threatens its security. The kings and princes of earlier times were usually cynical, indeed; but their cynicism often related in a disillusioned way, to themselves as well as to their rivals. The nation-state is cynical, too, sometimes pathologically so, but only in relation to opposing military-political force. In the view it takes of itself it is admiring to the point of narcissism. Its symbols always require the highest reverence; its cause deserves the highest sacrifice; its interests are sacrosanct. The symbols, causes, and interests of its international rivals are, by contrast, unworthy, despicable, expendable. Once involved in a war, regardless of the specific circumstances that gave rise to the involvement in the first place, the nation-state fights for vague, emotional, essentially punitive purposes. They, the opponents, must be punished, made to regret their recalcitrance, made to be sorry. We, on the other hand, must be vindicated by victory; the justice of our cause must be confirmed (as though this proved something) by its very military triumph; our admirableness must be documented by their ultimate recognition of our superiority. (p. 256-257)

Pillar recognizes what Kennan was describing. Pillar wrote:

This [nationalism] includes not only the pursuit of ever more power but also a self-righteousness and a conviction that one’s own way of doing things is superior to everyone else’s and is universally applicable. As we engage in the worthy and pleasurable expression of patriotism—“devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life”—not only on the 4th of July but all through the year, let’s stick with pure patriotism and, keeping Orwell’s distinctions in mind, not let it get confused with our nationalism.

I recently had breakfast with FrumForum proprietor and smart issues strategist David Frum who said that if the GOP was really an oligarchy, then Mitt Romney would come out on top. If the party was a democracy, the someone else — anyone else — would get the Republican presidential nod because the rank-and-file viscerally disliked Romney. ~Steve Clemons

Romney is likely to come out on top for a number of reasons, one of which is the tendency of Republicans to defer to the best-known national politician in their presidential field, but it is not correct to say that the rank-and-file viscerally dislike Romney. I would be pleased if they did, but Romney actually has quite good favorability numbers among Republicans. Among Republicans who know who Romney is, he has a rather lopsided 73/19 favorability/unfavorability rating, and among declared candidates only Newt Gingrich has comparable name recognition. Unfortunately, it is not most of the party rank and file that viscerally dislike him. Just 3% have a strongly unfavorable view.

Frum hopes that the party is an oligarchy, because he would much rather have Romney as the nominee than almost any of the alternatives, and it seems to me that Clemons accepts this reading of the party’s mood because he is “running into top tier, propertied Republicans who think Romney is the only choice and have disdain for the rough and tough, populist currents that are gaining attention.” In other words, Clemons has been talking to many of the “oligarchs” of the party who cannot stand the politics of the rank-and-file, and they mistakenly assume that the rank-and-file have the same contempt for the candidate they prefer. This creates the odd situation in which Romney could be the popular favorite of the party, but his victory would be interpreted as a triumph of the “oligarchic” establishment against what the party’s supporters really wanted.

Steve Kornacki once againcompares Tim Pawlenty to Phil Gramm, and says that Pawlenty has the same flaw of being “the guy who looks really good on paper, but not as an actual candidate.” I agree with the Gramm comparison, and I have made it before. My thought last month was that it would take a loss to Bachmann in Iowa for Pawlenty to suffer Gramm’s fate, but he has already started fading fast before any votes have been cast.

Comparing him to Gramm is slightly misleading in that Gramm was a more credible and prominent contender in the 1996 field, and he was able to raise money accordingly. Gramm was widely and correctly perceived as a candidate advaning economic conservative themes. If I recall correctly (and this old report confirms it), one of his pet issues was property rights. These were issues that were good for fundraising (Gramm had raised far more by this point in that cycle than Pawlenty has), but they were rather ill-suited to rallying social conservative voters in early contests. Gramm was also generally the antithesis of Buchanan on trade and immigration in a year when Buchanan was still gaining some traction on these issues.

The comparison with Gramm isn’t perfect. Oddly enough, it is not because Pawlenty is too populist on economics, but because he pretends to be a populist when he is not. Pawlenty is caught in the bind of trying to be a conventional free trader and economic conservative after having defined himself with pseudo-populist rhetoric about “Sam’s Club Republicans” and trying to identify himself to some extent with Huckabee (including hiring his daughter as a senior political adviser). Pawlenty has no distinctive political identity without what one of his former opponents referred to as his “whole class-warfare shtick,” which is a problem when Pawlenty wants to run on an economic agenda that heavily favors corporate and wealthy interests. At the same time, the shtick is just that and nothing more, so there is nothing that would attract working- or middle-class voters who might initially think that Pawlenty would represent their interests.

Speaking of Bachmann, it is not really news that she is a hawk and sometimes takes advice from McCain. What I have found so striking about Bachmann’s position on Libya is that it is not something I would have expected from her, and this is why I referred to her in my column as “reliably hawkish.” When I have discussed the foreign policy views of many Tea Party-affiliated politicians, I have usually made a point of mentioning Bachmann’s support for an Israeli attack on Iran, which is another deeply misguided expression of hostility towards the Iranian government. That’s what makes her dissent on Libya more than a little surprising. Many of her other foreign policy positions are so dangerous and wrongheaded that it is that much more noticeable when she gets something right.

P.S. The funny thing here is that the idea that Bachmann is an “isolationist” would never have gained any currency if McCain and Graham had not been working overtime to define opposition to the Libyan war as an expression of “isolationism.” Interventionists are needlessly dismissing and mocking people who are frequently on their side through the very stupid rhetoric they use to enforce their ideology. As Justin Logan observed last week, the same people who exaggerate and over-hype foreign threats have a habit of exaggerating the power and significance of “isolationism” as well.

The bizarre enthusiasm for the Mujahideen-e Khalq keeps growing in Washington. Trita Parsi describes the terrorist group’s intense lobbying efforts to have the group removed from the government’s list of terrorist organizations (via Chris Bodenner):

Since early January 2011, the MEK has spent millions of dollars on lobbyists, PR agents and communications firms to build up pressure on Secretary Hillary Clinton to take the group off of the terrorist list. Their argument is that the MEK rejected violence and terrorism in 2001 and as a result should be de-listed.

But this is not true, according to the FBI. A recently disclosed FBI report from 2004 reveals that the group continued to plan terrorist acts at least three years after they claimed to renounce terrorism.

No one should be surprised — not even DC’s “unwitting members of Congress” — as the FBI calls the group’s supporters on Capitol Hill. The State Department has documented the MEK’s disturbing record: killing Americans and Iranians in terrorist attacks; fighting for Saddam Hussein against Iran and assisting Saddam’s brutal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds and Shia; its “cult-like” behavior; the abuses and even torture it commits against its own members; and its support for the U.S. embassy takeover and calls for executing the hostages.

And let’s not forget, the MEK suppresses and holds captive its own members – more than 70 percent of the MEK members in Camp Ashraf in Iraq are held there against their own wishes, according to a RAND Corporation study.

I have marveled at the willingness of numerous former government officials, retired military officers, and elected representatives to embrace the MEK. There’s no question that they are motivated by their loathing of the Iranian government, but their hostility to the regime had led them to endorse a group that most Iranians loathe. Michael Rubin has been sharply critical of MEK boosters here in the U.S. for some time now, and he most recently called out Michele Bachmann for her foolish support for the group, which she refers to as “one of the bravest Iranian dissident groups” and “freedom-seeking.” Bachmann is hardly alone in her folly. She has quite a lot of company, as Muhammad Sahimi tells us:

Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is one. President Obama’s former National Security Adviser Gen. James L. Jones is another. Others include Bill Richardson, former energy secretary and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Michael Mukasey, attorney general under President George W. Bush; Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania and homeland security secretary under Bush; Gens. Peter Pace and Hugh Shelton, former vice chair and chairman, respectively, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Louis Freeh, former FBI director; Lee Hamilton, former Democratic congressman; Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA; Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of the Central Command; Frances Townsend, homeland security adviser in the Bush White House; and Brad Sherman and Dana Rohrabacher of the House of Representatives.

In the past, the U.S. has supported ethnic separatist groups inside Iran in their armed opposition to Tehran, and some of these groups have resorted to attacks on civilian targets. When Jundullah was added to the list of terrorist organizations, it seemed as if that policy of subversion through sponsoring terrorism might have been abandoned. If the effort to de-list the MEK is successful, it seems more than likely that the group will be used as a proxy to launch attacks against Iranian interests. As Parsi explains:

First, the desire to de-list them in Washington seems partially driven by gravitation towards covert military action against Iran. Neither sanctions nor diplomacy have yielded the desired results on the nuclear issue, and some in Washington are advocating using the MEK to conduct assassination and sabotage campaigns inside Iran.

As one former State Department official put it, the “paradox is that we may take them off the terror list in order for them to do more terror.”

This will not only help the regime to consolidate power in the name of anti-terrorism, but it will be an unexpected propaganda boost for the regime by convincing most Iranians that the U.S. has sided with a group they understandably regard as an enemy of their country.

And while we owe a great debt to Ike as a soldier, his record as a president is more chequered. In later life, he identified his failure to support Britain over the Suez affair as the single greatest mistake of his career, and he was right: what misery the Middle East might have been spared had the Anglosphere stood united against Nasser. ~Daniel Hannan

As Alex Massie said, the push by some British Conservatives to “elevate Reagan to saintly status is embarrassing.” To do so by trashing Eisenhower is even worse. When it comes to embarrassing the British right, Daniel Hannan neverfails, but his paean to Reagan is excessive even by his standards.

One of the most important moments of Eisenhower’s genuinely sane, responsible leadership was his response to the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt. Had the attack succeeded in forcing Nasser to yield, and had the U.S. acquiesced in the attack, it would have changed nothing in the modern Near East for the better, but it would have guaranteed that the entire world saw the U.S. as not much more than an enabler of latter-day Anglo-French colonialism. Any pretensions the U.S. made to respecting international law would have been shown to be a joke. Britain and France might have been more satisfied, but the region would hardly have been better off.

The point is, there’s an awful lot of expanse within Reagan’s actual foreign policy record for a GOP candidate to camp in. William Kristol, Robert Kagan and others who brand the term “Reaganite” to equal neoconservatism do a disservice to history. ~Dan Drezner

They are also trying to obscure their past disagreements with Reagan so that they can claim his successes for their sort of foreign policy. It isn’t just that Reagan didn’t make policy in the way that so-called “neo-Reaganites” want to do today, but that when it came to foreign policy Reagan received harsh criticism from the “neo-Reaganites” when they believed him to be going “soft” on this or that issue. Alex Massie recounted some of the instances when neoconservatives accused Reagan of things that they reserve for abusing Obama today:

Norman Podhoretz published a famous essay in the New York Times titled “The Neoconservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy” while in Commentary, Podhoretz’s magazine, Robert Tucker denounced Reagan’s approach to the Middle East as “Carterism without Carter”.

I dug up the old Podhoretz article in the NYT archives, and it makes for amusing reading. Bearing in mind that it was written in May 1982, we already encounter the familiar refrain that the administration inexplicably squandered golden opportunities to undo evil, oppressive systems through the power of wishing (and, of course, more sanctions):

Of the many ironies involved here, none is more biting from a neoconservative point of view than the contrast between what is happening in Central America and what is happening in Eastern Europe. A democratic movement develops in Poland; the Soviet Union, acting through local puppets, suppresses it; and despite crocodile tears and a few rhetorical gestures, the members of the Western alliance – some explicitly, some implicitly – acquiesce on the ground that Poland is in the Soviet sphere of influence and that the Russians have a ”right” (supposedly recognized by the Yalta agreements of 1945) to friendly regimes on their borders.

——–

Of course the Reagan Administration does not agree with this view of the world. On the contrary, the President has even said that he welcomes the signs of an impending breakup of the Soviet empire from within and he has looked forward to a time when Communism itself will disappear. Yet presented with an enormous opportunity to further that process, what has President Reagan done? Astonishingly, he has turned the opportunity down. This is all the more astonishing in that the risks of seizing that opportunity were and are minimal.

It is a useful reminder that neoconservatives are rarely satisfied with any U.S. administration response to a foreign government’s crackdown. Reading Podhoretz on Reagan’s response to the crackdown in Poland is instructive. Podhoretz attacked Reagan’s response on the crackdown Poland as weaker than Carter, and suggested that the Reagan administration (quoting George Will, whom he then dubbed as a “neo-conservative by doctrinal affinity”) “loves commerce more than it loathes Communism.” After considering Will’s accusation, Podhoretz finds it to be an incomplete explanation. It was something much worse than that. Podhoretz identified the real problem:

There is a strategy being pursued and it bears a surprisingly close resemblance to the original strategy of detente as conceived by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1972.

Reagan had scarcely been in office for a year, and he was already being accused of embracing the policy that he has been denouncing for the previous six! At least this time Podhoretz thought Reagan compared favorably to Carter:

It is, to be sure, detente in the sophisticated Nixon-Kissinger form, not the corrupted adaptation, so often indistinguishable from appeasement, pursued by the Carter Administration.

According to such people, there is always more that could be done to change other governments’ behavior, and it is something the U.S. can do at very low risk. This is worth remembering now when there is a strongly-held belief among adherents of the same ideology today that Obama has been “turning down” similar opportunities in Iran in 2009 and in Syria today.

Reagan was supposedly guilty of “acquiescing and even cooperating” in stabilizing Soviet control over Poland. Naturally, all was not lost. There was still a chance for Reagan:

Is it too late for the President to put a classically Reaganite stamp on the foreign policy of his own Administration? I do not think it is, but I do think that time is running out, and we neoconservatives are not the only group in the Reagan coalition growing daily more anguished over the slipping away of a precious political opportunity that may never come again.

Note that neoconservatives tried to argue that Reagan’s actual conduct of foreign policy while in office could be something other than “classically Reaganite,” as if the substance of Reaganism in foreign policy were somehow separable from the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Little wonder that Podhoretz’s successors have no problem appropriating Reagan’s name for policies he would not have supported. Neoconservatives have been doing that for thirty years, and they have even done it when in opposition to Reagan himself.

Prof. Russell Arben Fox has contributed to a debate on whether Republicans ready for a Mormon President, and speculates that Huntsman may have an advantage in the contest with Romney:

Mr. Huntsman doesn’t have the legacy of a previous run for president shaping his campaign, freeing him to craft different responses to Republican primary demands, moderately employing his Mormon identity while still drawing on the socially conservative reputation of the faith.

My guess is that Huntsman will face the worst of both worlds politically by being Mormon by background and being someone with a reputation of greater religious eclecticism than Romney. For those not alienated by theological differences, Romney at least has the reputation for being more closely attached to his church, and that will probably recommend him to more primary voters than Huntsman’s “different types of philosophies” language.

Earlier, Prof. Fox made a questionable claim about Romney’s 2008 campaign:

During the 2008 election cycle, Mr. Romney put his faith at the center of his campaign, insisting that it was as thoroughly American as that of any other Christian faith.

This is not exactly how it happened. Romney talked a lot about generic faith, and he emphasized the importance of religious liberty and tolerance, but he was positively allergic to any discussion of what it was that his faith taught. He was usually careful not to refer to his religion by name. His religion’s American identity can hardly be disputed, and it is in any case not what troubles many Christians about Romney’s religion.

As Ramesh Ponnuru points out, and as I have said many times before, the difficulties that a Mormon presidential candidate face are not limited to the Republican primary electorate. It is an obstacle that goes well beyond evangelical Christian distrust of and competition with Mormonism. The proper question is whether enough Americans are ready for a Mormon President, and at present the answer would seem to be, “Probably not.”

Jeremy Lott suggests in a column in the new issue of TAC that this may not be such a bad thing for Mormons:

Winning the presidency would finally confer a sense of national acceptance on the Church Formerly Known as a Cult.

Yet that didn’t work out so well for Catholics—or other religious minorities, for that matter. Forget the mythologizing of Camelot: the Kennedy clan played the religion card for cynical purposes only. They brought some of the worst aspects of Irish-American power politics to the national stage, and they became a de facto liberal Catholic aristocracy that the bishops were reluctant to challenge. Evangelicals could tout Jimmy Carter as our first “born again” president—but the less said of that, the better. And in Barack Obama, members of the many African-American churches could claim not only a parishioner but an eloquent and educated convert. Then the Rev. Jeremiah Wright cleared his throat.

This is a bit overstated, but the basic observation is valid. Few religious groups have benefited much from the degree of scrutiny that a presidential campaign and victory entail. For that matter, it hasn’t usually helped many national candidates to be closely identified with a religious group that most Americans barely know and don’t understand very well.