Ross:

Also, Obama’s own exercise in interventionism isn’t over yet. Even under worst-case scenarios, our quasi-Libyan war is almost certainly less risky (thank God) than the invasion of Iraq. But it’s still possible — not likely, but possible — that this administration will actually lose its Middle Eastern war of choice.

Geographical quibbles aside*, I agree that this is possible, but only because victory in the Libyan war has been defined in two competing ways that practically guarantee that the war can be declared a failure. War supporters defended the intervention on humanitarian grounds. Protecting civilians in Libya was the goal, and the war’s success was to be measured by how well the intervening governments protected civilians in Libya. As the intervention prolongs the war in Libya, it becomes increasingly plausible that more civilians across more of Libya are suffering and dying than would have been the case otherwise. The longer the intervention drags on without a settlement, the more likely it is that the intervention will have ended up doing as much harm or possibly even more harm than good.

The other definition of victory by the three most significant intervening governments is that the military intervention will end when Gaddafi is no longer in power. According to Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy, the intervention will continue until he has been removed. Pursuing this goal has meant that the intervening governments have repeatedly ruled out any cease-fire or political settlement, no matter how temporary, which might provide an opportunity for relief supplies to reach civilians suffering in besieged cities and those displaced from their homes by the fighting. The rebels’ non-negotiable precondition for any cease-fire is the final overall objective of the U.S., Britain, and France. From the beginning, it has been taken for granted that protecting the population and defeating the regime were one and the same thing, but in practice the insistence on defeating the regime has prevailed at the cost of seeking a cease-fire that would protect civilians from the effects of continued warfare.

Gaddafi can deny the intervening governments victory simply by remaining where he is and continuing to press the rebels in their besieged strongholds (one of which just suffered a major blow to its fuel supplies from pro-Gaddafi forces). Because the stakes are so very high for Gaddafi and remarkably low for the intervening governments, it is hard to see why he is going to yield first. The reality is that non-U.S. allies do not seem to be prepared politically or militarily to outlast him, and the U.S. is appropriately unwilling to increase its involvement in a war that was at best of tangential concern to America all along. As we now enter the fifty-second day of this undeclared, unconstitutional war, it is well past time to begin thinking about how to bring this conflict to a halt and to minimize the costs to NATO and the Libyan population.

* It’s bad enough when we refer to the eastern Mediterranean as “the Middle East,” but what can the name of the region possibly mean if it applies to countries that are due south of Italy? Unless the phrase has simply become a misleading shorthand for “places where many Muslims live,” it doesn’t apply to North Africa.

And as a general election strategy running to the left of Obama on foreign policy and the right on domestic policy might be tempting. In his brief pre-campaign campaign, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour seemed inclined to go down that path. Sarah Palin has now discovered her inner Robert Taft. And most distressingly, the otherwise highly capable and thoughtful Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is suggesting, much like Obama, that the Pentagon could use some chopping and, like the liberals in Congress, that we need to pare down our overseas commitments, not for national security reasons but simply on the basis that they cost too much.

A nominee sporting such an outlook, I would suggest, will tear the GOP asunder. Religious conservatives (who take seriously the unique role and obligation of the United States in the world) and defense hawks would be aghast to hear a Republican nominee trying to match (or even outbid) Obama’s defense reductions. And those Republican lawmakers who are bravely resisting the drumbeat in favor of slashing defense would be undercut by their party’s standard-bearer, leaving them vulnerable to attack by Democrats eager to throw the presidential nominee’s positions up in their faces. ~Jennifer Rubin

It is tedious to have to keep repeating this, but there are no isolationists in the Republican Party (nor anywhere else in America, for that matter)*. There are people calling for an end to prolonged foreign wars and voicing opposition to new, unnecessary wars, and there are some who regard bloated military spending and outdated, superfluous foreign commitments as burdens that the U.S. does not need and cannot afford. Isolationism is a meaningless pejorative term, but if it did mean anything it would have to mean that its adherents favor cutting America off from the rest of the world. It is only by labeling all these things as isolationist that one can say that any of the candidates, including Johnson and Paul, can be counted as isolationists.

Sarah Palin wasn’t channeling Robert Taft in recent days. She was offering a rehashed version of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine that her new advisor gave her. Thus we have the spectacle of contemporary Republicans labeling isolationist a doctrine on the use of force originally created by Reagan’s Secretary of Defense. As ever, so-called “neo-Reaganites” have no use for the actual foreign policy of Reagan when it doesn’t suit their aggressive instincts. All that Haley Barbour asked, as far as I can tell, was why the U.S. was in Libya. As I said before, if that is all it takes to make one an isolationist there must be tens of millions of “isolationists” in the country. Daniels has opened the door to reevaluating U.S. commitments around the world, but he has yet to outline which commitments he thinks are necessary and which are not. Much to the irritation of impatient militarists, he hasn’t said much of anything on this subject. It is telling that simply raising questions about new, unconstitutional wars and the mere suggestion or slightest hint that reducing military spending at all invite the derisive application of the isolationist smear. We can just imagine what these critics will say if any of the candidates proposes reducing military spending to something more in line with what it was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, it is inevitable that militarists would want to raise the alarm about non-existent isolationists as a way of defending their preferred policies from any criticism or challenge. There is an element of panic in all this that is somewhat encouraging. Republican militarists are looking at the current and prospective GOP field, and they are not finding very many candidates they can easily accept. When Rubin says that a more skeptical or realist nominee would tear the party asunder, what she is saying is that she and those who share her views will do their best to tear it asunder if there is such a nominee.

* To be precise, the supposed inter-war “isolationism” that gave us this annoying term didn’t involve much in the way of international isolation:

The interwar years were in fact marked by intense American extraversion: cultural, economic, and political. A quarter-million American tourists spent over $300 million traveling Europe in 1929, while Ernest Hemingway, Joseph ine Baker, and T.S. Eliot took their acts abroad. Overseas missionary activity exploded. By 1930, the United States had more foreign direct investment than France, Holland, and Germany combined. Even with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, trade between the U.S. and Latin America tripled in the decade before 1941. The United States, emerging from the Great War as the world’s largest creditor nation, negotiated British, French, and German war debts with the Dawes Plan in 1924 and the Locarno Convention of 1925. This is isolationism?

One of the ironies of this legend is that those interwar senators retrospectively tagged as isolationists—known in their time as “Peace Progressives”—were among the most outward-looking politicians of their era. The Peace Progressives were mostly Western and Midwestern Republicans, most prominent among them Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, William Borah (“The Lion of Idaho”), and Hiram Johnson of California. They successfully rolled back longstanding U.S. military occupations in the Caribbean and Central America, and their efforts arguably averted war with Mexico in the 1920s. Borah took the lead in forging multilateral arms-reduction treaties with Great Britain and Japan.

Update: There is something grimly amusing about Rubin’s description of a restatement of the Weinberger Doctrine as isolationist, since Weinberger’s original statement of the doctrine was overflowing with warnings about the supposed evils of so-called isolationism. The point here isn’t just that the use of the isolationist smear is wrong in this instance, but that the smear has been deployed for decades as a useful foil for whatever position the person using the smear wants to advocate.

Is Syria less important than Libya? Just the opposite: Regional experts agree that Damascus is a pivoting point for the Arab Middle East. If the Assad regime crumbles, Iran will lose its closest ally and its bridge to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The Iranian shadow empire could collapse; the dictatorship in Tehran would be in mortal danger. ~Jackson Diehl

If the Assad regime crumbled, why would the next Syrian government break out of Iran’s orbit? What incentive would any future Syrian government have to give up on such a connection after thirty years at a time when Iranian influence generally seems to be increasing? More to the point, what incentives are the U.S. and Israel willing to offer to make sure that happens? Since everything in any case for meddling in Syria hinges on this outcome, it matters that we have good reasons for expecting that this is what would happen.

A future Syrian government would probably see the same benefit from an Iranian connection that the Assads have seen. If most Syrians still want their government to be aligned with the so-called resistance bloc, why is Syria going to split from Iran in the event that the Syrian government managed to become more democratic? In the event that a new Syrian government distanced itself or became openly opposed to Iran, it might be targeted for destabilization by Iran. The Syrian military would probably end up having great influence on the future relationship with Iran, and I haven’t seen anyone explain why Syria’s military would want to break with Syria’s main patron. On the other hand, if Syria collapsed into sectarian violence, that would give Iran serious headaches, but it would do the same to other states in the region, so it’s not clear that the benefits of Syrian regime change would outweigh the costs.

Diehl’s complaint is that the Western response has been too sluggish. Of course, he always thinks the response to such things is too slow. He continues:

No one in Syria has asked for a Libya-style military intervention, and nothing else the United States and Europe could do, even in concert, would probably be decisive. But why do so little, and so slowly?

Er, because there is not much to be done that would have any effect on the outcome? Inevitably, if Assad does not fall, critics of the slow Western response will claim that he would have fallen had the administration only done more, despite the fact that they know full well that there was not much more that could have been done at the time. If Assad is bound to fall anyway, as one of the opposition figures claims later in Diehl’s column, there is nothing more that Western governments need to be doing to assist this process.

Writing at First Things, Joe Carter objects to Ron Paul’s federalist position on abortion, which leads him into a more extensive attack on federalism itself. Unfortunately, he uses the Schiavo controversy from six years ago to do this:

Subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty also can prevent a central failing of federalism: the tendency to allow squabbles over power to trump matters of justice. One of the most disheartening and shameful examples from the last decade was when so-called conservatives claimed that the Terri Schiavo case should have been left solely to the state of Florida, and that it was illegitimate for the federal government to intervene to protect her. The charitable view is to assume that had these federalists known that a woman was being killed by the state without due process of law, they would have sided with justice over judicially mandated involuntary euthanasia. The less generous opinion is that they simply haven’t considered how federalism relates to conservative principles.

According to the supporters of then-Gov. Bush’s intervention and the later Congressional intervention, justice demanded that the rule of law, the separation of powers, and state jurisdiction all be swept aside in the Schiavo case. If the Floridian judiciary happened to be interpreting the laws of the state of Florida correctly, that didn’t matter, and it also didn’t matter that Schiavo’s husband was still her legal guardian. What Carter refers to as “squabbles over power” were legitimate disagreements about rightful jurisdiction and the encroachment of Florida’s other branches on the independence of the state judiciary.

Carter chooses a number of provocative phrases to describe what happened six years ago, but I don’t believe they match up very well with what happened. Terri Schiavo was not being “killed by the state.” The court approved her husband’s decision to stop providing artificial means to keep alive a woman whose recovery was not forthcoming. To invoke sphere sovereignty or subsidiarity in support of federal usurpation in this case just makes Carter’s argument that much harder to take seriously. Not only do I doubt that the principle of subsidiarity would support the federal government’s direct involvement in an intra-family dispute over end-of-life decisions, I have a hard time understanding why anyone should want to argue for a greater role for the federal government in deciding such matters under any circumstances.

Thomas Fleming stated many of the appropriate objections to interfering in the Schiavo case at the time. Here is an excerpt:

The question then becomes not “What is the right thing to do,” but “Who is to decide?” As in so many human affairs, it is easier to have moral knowledge than knowledge of facts. We do know that, in our tradition, spouses are next of kin and empowered by law to make decisions when their wife or husband is incapable. That is why Mr. Schiavo, when the physicians concluded the case to be hopeless, was free to decide his wife’s fate. To change this legal tradition, in the heat of a passionate case, is a perilous undertaking.

I do not know what Mrs. Schiavo’s husband ought to do, but I do know that the decision belongs to him and not to either Jeb or George Bush.

The Schiavo case was one where many pro-life conservatives lost their bearings and became so fixated on doing what they saw as the right thing that they saw any barrier, no matter how legitimate or appropriate, as an unacceptable obstacle. The controversy over Schiavo’s case also created a wedge between fairly zealous pro-life conservatives who believed federal intervention inappropriate and those maximalists who would settle for nothing less. Frankly, I don’t see how Ron Paul’s federalist position can satisfy such a crowd. Indeed, Carter makes clear that this position is intolerable to him:

If conservatives are willing to put the rights of the government ahead of the rights of the individual, to let adherence to procedure trump our dedication to justice, and to give the state the power to decide whether one can kill an innocent woman or an unborn child, then conservatism has lost all meaning.

Of course, it isn’t true that Ron Paul is willing to put the rights of the government ahead of the rights of the individual. By the standard Carter sets up here, there are a lot of pro-life conservatives, myself included, who cannot possibly measure up. Ron Paul accepts that reducing the power of the central government and returning some power back to state governments is a good in itself, and it is also something that should make regulation of abortion generally stricter across much of the United States, as it will allow states to make laws that better reflect the wishes of their electorates. Short of a broader change in moral and political attitudes in much of the country, which would be desirable but remains elusive so far, a national ban on abortion is nothing more than a dream. The federalist position will not get pro-life conservatives all of what they seek, but it may be able to get them the larger part of it. Rejecting it and attacking it in such overwrought terms won’t help protect unborn life.

At the Republican presidential debate on Thursday Rick Santorum was asked about Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s suggestion that there be a social truce. Santorum answered, “Anybody that would suggest we call a truce on moral issues doesn’t understand what America is all about.”

That is wrong. In fact, it’s the precise opposite of what America is about. ~Jennifer Rubin

They’re both wrong in different ways. America is not “about” anything in the way that these two mean it. America isn’t a creedal or proposition nation, and it isn’t an idea or an ideological project. Genuine constitutional conservatism is worthwhile, and it involves more than Berkowitz’s warmed-over fusionism, but it isn’t reducible to individual liberty or limited government, and one cannot claim that America is “about” either of these things. Despite their wishes to the contrary, Christian and especially Catholic conservatives cannot correctly attach moral or religious significance to the founding principles of a Whiggish republic.

What I will say in Santorum’s defense is that he has made this mistake because he considers moral issues, especially those that concern the protection of life and family stability, to be vitally important to a healthy and flourishing culture. At times, Santorum seems to want to argue that eternal verities and pre-political loyalties should take priority in how we organize our society and our polity, and he is probably one of the few Republicans to have held federal office recently to understand that obligations to a community and the common good are not the same as accepting the encroachment of the state. Then he often veers off on some strange militaristic tangent or, as he did the other night, endorses the use of torture on detainees, because he has already made the earlier mistake of attaching too much significance to the nation-state. That in turn leads him to support measures that directly contradict the moral principles that he normally defends. Santorum’s views are the unfortunate mish-mash that results from combining Catholic social teaching with Americanism and militarism, as the latter two tend to overshadow anything interesting that Santorum might have to say from his understanding of the former.

On the specific question of Daniels’ proposed “truce,” Santorum is mostly knocking down a strawman, since the “truce” doesn’t really mean what he thinks it means, but his hostility to it is driven by the conflation of moral principles with the ideology of Americanism. This is the strain of Americanism favored by some Christian conservatives that holds that American “greatness” is a function of American “goodness,” and this strain does include the desire to engage in criticism and demand reform on moral issues, but it ultimately leads to another exercise in self-congratulation because it assumes that American power and the use of it are inherently morally justified and possibly divinely sanctioned. More than that, it yokes social conservatives together with supporters for U.S. hegemony, which reminds us that Santorum’s mish-mash of ideas is just an expression of the unfortunate “new fusionism” created to define the relationship between socially conservative Christians and militarists within the Republican Party.

For those who have been lucky enough to forget about this, “new fusionism” was the name Joseph Bottum gave to the marriage of convenience deeply principled alliance that had developed in the Bush years between pro-life conservatives and national security hawks:

Down somewhere in the deepest understanding of what America is for—somewhere in the profound awareness of what it will take to reverse the nation’s long drift into social defeatism—there are reasons that one might link the rejection of abortion and the demand for an active and moral foreign policy. Things could have fallen into different patterns; our current liberal-conservative divisions are not the only imaginable ways to cut the political cake. But neither are they merely accidental.

The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn’t they grow toward each other? The desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in one realm can breed the desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in another.

Of course, when it comes to starting new wars or escalating old ones, militarists are not the least bit shy in exploiting the rhetoric of “what America is for” to make opposition to the war seem anti-American. Rubin’s denunciation of Santorum is a useful reminder that things remain much as they have been for at least the last fifteen years in Republican intra-party politics. Many Christian conservatives go out of their way to align themselves with the militarists in the GOP, which includes making terrible compromises of principle to rationalize support for various wars and national security policies, but they get no credit for this from their supposed allies. For their part, militarists are free to ignore or disparage them and their issues. The moment that the Christian conservatives’ rhetoric or moral critiques become unwelcome to the militarists, the militarists make sure to put them in their place.

David Bosco points to a poll of Turkish public opinion on NATO, notes the rising anti-NATO sentiment in the country, and comments:

One of the real strategic costs of the decision to force the Libya operation into the NATO framework may be an acceleration of this trend.

That’s probably right. The cost to NATO in terms of future political support in member states is hard to estimate, but it seems safe to assume that it will be significant. What is also interesting in the poll is the finding that anti-NATO sentiment has increased least among supporters of the ruling AK Party from 32% in 2004 to 52% in 2010 saying that NATO is no longer essential to Turkey’s security. This has tripled (24% to 72%) among Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) supporters. The main Kemalist opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has occasionally been the most anti-NATO party between 2004 and 2010, but trailed the MHP in 2010 with just 59% saying that NATO is not essential. For all of the talk about how Erdogan and the AKP have been moving Turkey away from the West, AKP voters have remained relatively more supportive of NATO than their opponents. While NATO and the EU have been losing support in Turkey since the beginning of the century, there is a significant anti-Western and/or Turkish nationalist surge that has happened recently. It seems to have spiked between 2009 and 2010. While Erdogan has been willing to demagogue and exploit the changing public mood, the ruling party and Erdogan’s government have been trailing and trying to keep up with Turkish public opinion.

Stronger support for NATO in the AKP might exist because it is currently the ruling party, and supporters of ruling parties tend to be more favorably inclined towards the status quo. Members of opposition parties express their displease with the ruling party by objecting to whatever the government endorses. Even so, it seems likely that Turkish foreign policy would become even less closely aligned with that of the U.S. and Europe in the event that the CHP somehow succeeded in replacing the AK government at the next election. The next general election is this June, and the CHP continues to trail AKP badly in polling, so it seems that NATO and the U.S. are going to be stuck with Erdogan and the AKP for at least a few more years.

Unless NATO, including the United States, get more serious, Libya’s liberation war could turn into a prolonged, bloody stalemate. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is ruthless, and rebel forces are weak and disorganized. NATO still has the military means to help tip the balance if it can summon the unity and the will. ~The New York Times

What needs to be recognized at the beginning is that the Libyan war is already a prolonged, bloody stalemate. Do the NYT editors think that summoning “unity and will” is all that will be required to “tip the balance”? What they are calling for when they demand that NATO “get more serious” is an intensification and further escalation of the war, which is bound to undermine both “unity and will” in the alliance. Specifically, they want the U.S. to become much more directly involved, and they are calling for U.S. planes to take on the riskiest assignments. The administration is unlikely to do this. NATO cannot speak with “one clear voice” because there is nothing remotely resembling consensus among its members. Nothing that the editorial calls for would significantly “tip the balance” such that Gaddafi would be driven from power or overthrown, but seems likely to make the war bloodier and deepen U.S. involvement in it.

Micah Zenko has proposed an alternative that may be the least awful of the available options:

Qaddafi is most assuredly a vicious tyrant, and his ouster is a worthy goal. But it will not be achieved through incremental aid to the rebels and intermittent decapitation attempts. Given its current level of commitment, the United States should continue to use its military capabilities to support the no-fly zone, monitor and publicize killings of civilians by Qaddafi’s forces or the rebels, and respond with direct force to prevent or mitigate any mass atrocities. More importantly, however, the administration should work toward a negotiated end to the civil war, while starting to plan for the U.S. military assets, humanitarian assistance, and financial aid required to keep any peace.

I wouldn’t want any American soldiers as part of a peacekeeping mission in Libya in the future, and my guess is that most Libyans wouldn’t want them there, either. Other than that, Zenko’s recommendation makes much more sense if the goal is to bring hostilities to an end for the time being and to deliver relief aid to the civilian population.

These migrants, almost all of them black Africans who found refuge from such places as Chad, Eritrea and Sudan’s ravaged Darfur region in Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, say they are targets of rebels in the east, where they have all too often been mistaken for mercenaries in the pay of the colonel.

Their journey to Libya’s border is perilous. Many say they have witnessed massacres of other black Africans. Even the wounded are not welcome. Ahmed Muhammad Zakaria, a 20-year-old Chadian living in Benghazi, was shot in the leg by rebels, but says people in the local hospital, rather than treat him, told him to go to Egypt. A ten-year-old boy infected with HIV from a blood transfusion in Libya was told that he and his family were no longer welcome in the rebel-held east. “Burn them all,” said one Benghazi native of the blacks fleeing Libya. ~The Economist

The rebels must have missed Anne-Marie Slaughter’s lecture on values and Juan Cole’s public relations advice.

One of the reasons why it is misguided to take sides in another country’s civil war is that it implicates the intervening government directly or indirectly in the excesses of the side it supports. As civil wars unfortunately tend to produce atrocities, reprisals, and extra-judicial killings, picking a side in such a conflict entails lending support to one armed faction engaged in these actions. It largely means watching the principle of the “responsibility to protect” be abused to enable other crimes, and this is particularly true when the intervening governments are reluctant to do more than attack from the air and sea. As in Kosovo, there is no control over the forces that the U.S. and NATO are supporting, but on account of our intervention we now share in the responsibility for what happens to the people under the nominal control of the rebel authorities. Humanitarian interventions often end up intensifying conflicts and increasing insecurity for the civilian population, which is why they must be done in the last resort if they are to be done at all. In the Libyan case, the reprisals aren’t even always directed at actual regime loyalists, but instead the rebels have targeted the most vulnerable civilians in eastern Libya out of the mistaken belief (or convenient excuse) that they have confused these migrant workers with African mercenaries. It wouldn’t be significantly better if the people being targeted were regime loyalists or mercenaries, because we would still be talking about massacres of prisoners.

Ted Galen Carpenter has reminded us of the convenient double standards that past administrations have applied in condemning and opposing one side’s atrocities and ignoring the very same sort of atrocities by the other side:

A glaring example was the response to Operation Storm, the military offensive that the Croatian government launched in August 1995 against rebel Serb forces in the Krajina region of Croatia. That operation ultimately led to the flight or expulsion of some 200,000 Serb inhabitants—in some cases involving families that had lived in the region for centuries.

One would think that this action constituted ethnic cleansing at least as much as anything Serb forces had done in Bosnia, but the United States viewed matters differently. Washington supported Zagreb’s offensive, with President Clinton admitting in his memoirs that he “rooted” for the Croatian action. Nowhere in that book does he mention the unfortunate fate of Serb civilians in the region. And it appears that the U.S. government did more than root. There are indications that it assisted the offensive by providing intelligence information to the Croatian military.

Unlike Operation Storm, what is happening to migrant workers in eastern Libya doesn’t even have any remote connection to the stated political or military goals of the rebels. It appears to be little more needless slaughter carried out by some of the people Western governments have been supporting in the name of protecting civilians from slaughter.

P.S. Earlier thoughts on the “liberation movement” in Libya here.

On foreign policy, he said that he’s a “water’s edge” kind of guy. He is sure that the President is in a position to know a lot more about what’s needed in Afghanistan than he is. He said he didn’t think Obama had “made the case” for the Libya intervention, though this doesn’t mean there is no case. Pressed to say something critical about Obama’s foreign policy, he said that he was “uncomfortable” with the President’s “apology tours.” But he didn’t look comfortable saying it.

Jamie Rubin asked him a clever question, right out of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”: if he had just one phone call to make about some foreign policy issue and he could call either Richard Lugar or John McCain, which would it be? After a little hemming and hawing, he said that he is “always comfortable” talking with Lugar. Though of course he respects McCain, too, he hastened to add. Maybe he was just being nice about his state’s senior senator, but I hope he was expressing a preference for diplomacy (Lugar’s M.O.) over warmongering (McCain’s).

Asked about what else he was doing while on the East Coast, he said he was going to Washington to accept an award from the Arab American Institute. “I happen to be one,” he said—an Arab American, that is. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Syria. Somehow I hadn’t registered that aspect of Daniels’s background before. I guess it makes Daniels even less likely to traffic in the kind of disgusting, racially-tinged, Muslim-baiting, xenophobic hate-mongering that some of his “brethren” (and sistren) have flirted with. ~Hendrik Hertzberg

Via Andrew

To take the last point first, it is likely that Daniels isn’t going to engage in demagoguery about “Ground Zero mosques,” “Islamofascism” or “creeping sharia” because he doesn’t have the temperament of a demagogue, and not because his grandparents were Syrian Christians. Incidentally, Hertzberg’s remark reinforces the conflation of Arab and Muslim that conveniently obscures the existence of Arab Christians. That said, the argument from biography or genealogy is not very compelling. Daniels has not yet addressed many of these questions, so we can all project onto him whatever it is that we would like to see. Likewise, his critics can impute all sorts of views to him that he may not hold.

During his speech at the Arab-American Institute, Daniels said, “May Syria and all the lands near it soon become places of peace, and freedom and self-determination.” That’s fairly unremarkable, anodyne stuff, which is entirely appropriate to the occasion and unobjectionable in itself. It also doesn’t give any clues as to whether Daniels thinks there is a U.S. role in any of these developments or what it would be if there is one. Meanwhile, Daniels’ attendance at an AAI event in his honor will be held against him by the people in the GOP who care about such things*. I have no idea what Daniels’ views on Israel and Palestine might be, but it is fairly certain that if he doesn’t adopt hard-line positions he will be subjected to the same sort of attacks that have been leveled at Obama for more than four years.

Daniels has been very reticent on foreign policy, which hasn’t bothered me. Still, if his silence is the product of a lack of interest or lack of detailed knowledge of the subject, what are the odds that he is going to turn out to be an unconventional Republican on foreign policy questions? Isn’t it more likely that Daniels will feel the need to minimize his differences with the rest of the field on other issues in order to separate himself on the fiscal issues that do interest him? As the rather lame effort at criticizing Obama for non-existent “apology tours” shows, Daniels may not have his heart in using these standard Republican lines on foreign policy, but he appears to be willing to use them anyway.

It is somewhat encouraging that Mitch Daniels would prefer Lugar’s advice to McCain’s, but this can also be explained by personal loyalty and familiarity with Lugar. Daniels was once Lugar’s chief of staff. Assuming that there is more to it than that, it isn’t quite as encouraging as one might think. Recently, Lugar has been right on some high-profile issues, such as the arms reduction treaty and Libya, but he also backed the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Yugoslavia. Those aren’t minor oversights. On some of the biggest policy errors of the last fifteen years, Lugar has been on the wrong side, which is to say that he has been on the same side that McCain was.

* Daniels’ association with the AAI doesn’t automatically mean anything about his foreign policy views one way or the other.

Update: Following the appearance of the Hertzberg story, Erick Erickson has declared Daniels to be the “anti-Tea Party candidate.” The Tea Party has nothing to do with any of this, but it’s interesting how one of the most outspoken fiscal conservatives in elected office has been disqualified on the grounds that he was merely associated with Lugar and the AAI.