Back in 2009 I made a remark to the effect that John McCain’s response to the August 2008 war in Georgia was partly responsible for convincing voters that he was unfit to be President. One of the commenters correctly pointed out that McCain’s response to the war in Georgia basically made no difference to his electoral chances. I would still say that his response was a good indicator of the crazy way he would respond to international events, but on reflection I have to agree that as far as the 2008 election was concerned the impact of the August war was basically nil. The war in Georgia involved a client state that received American aid, and one whose troops were among those deployed in Iraq, and McCain immediately staked out a fanatically pro-Georgian position. Given all these things, it’s all the more interesting that it had no meaningful impact on the election. This came back to me when I saw Jennifer Rubin discussing the impact of Libya on the 2012 election:

Libya may therefore become a critical issue in one of two circumstances. First, if — as some conservatives fear — it devolves into a bloody, prolonged civil war and casualties mount, this foreign policy debacle could well become a stunning example of President Obama’s foreign policy ineptitude and of the perils of excessive reliance on multilateralism. We have yet to get a credible casualty count or see vivid depictions of the violence, but when those inevitably surface, the outrage over American passivity may well heighten.

Even if the Libya situation does not devolve into genocidal war, Libya may simply become one more item in the growing list of foreign policy failures. When viewed in conjunction with Obama’s fixation on Israel’s settlements, attempts at Iran engagement, his backing of Hugo Chavez’s crony in Honduras and his deferential stance toward a wide array of autocrats (from Bashar al-Assad to Vladimir Putin), voters may come to see that Obama’s foreign policy is hastening the decline of American influence.

To take the worst-case scenario first, a “genocidal” war in Libya would be a truly awful outcome, but for it to have political effects at home the American public would have to believe that the Obama administration should have intervened early on. As far as anyone can tell, most Americans want no such thing. If anything, most Americans want the opposite: to stay out of a conflict that has nothing to do with the U.S. Unless the U.S. inserts itself into the war, Libya is not going to become much of an issue in the 2012 election, much less a “critical” issue. The reason? Unfortunately, Americans barely pay attention to the major wars the U.S. is already fighting, and to the extent that the public is frustrated with those wars the mainstream GOP offers them no alternative to current policy. Non-intervention in Libya isn’t going to win Obama many votes, but it isn’t going to lose him very many, either. The people who believe the things listed above count as Obama’s “failures” are already dead-set against his re-election, and most voters either don’t care about these issues or the issues aren’t top priorities for them.

If Obama keeps the U.S. out of the fighting, that matches up with what most Americans say that they want, and outside of their cocoon Republican hawks are going to have a hard time using non-intervention in Libya to attack Obama. For them to make that attack, Republican candidates would need to be able to explain why starting yet another foreign war is a good use of American resources and a necessary risk to American military personnel. There is not actually an argument for this. According to the hawks, intervention is simply something that the U.S. “must” do.

Even if Obama made the horrible mistake of intervening, which we can still hope that he won’t do, Libya would not be an issue that Republicans could exploit very effectively. If Obama started an unnecessary American war in Libya, his main Republican challengers have boxed themselves into a corner by insisting that this is exactly what Obama must do. There is significant political pressure to make this horrible mistake, but it is not coming from the American electorate.

Could 2012 be the Republican version of what happened to Democrats in 2004? ~Chris Cillizza

If it is, that is another argument for Romney as the nominee. After all, what happened to the Democrats in 2004? The field was full of rather drab “centrist” and hawkish Democrats, and all of the candidates coming from the Senate in 2004 had voted for the Iraq war resolution and had only belatedly become critics of the management of the war. Dean had started off as a little-known “centrist” governor whose main interest was health care reform, but quickly tapped into intense antiwar sentiment among activists and donors by becoming an outspoken critic of the Iraq war.

As interesting as Dean’s brief surge was, he didn’t have the organization or depth of support on the ground in Iowa to translate that early enthusiasm into a victory, and after finishing third in Iowa it was all downhill from there. As a result, Kerry eventually came away with the nomination, and the Democratic ticket could draw no clear contrast with Bush on Iraq. Despite that, Bush was re-elected with the weakest winning result for a modern incumbent President. It may be that the Democrats squandered their chance to beat him by opting for the safer, more conventional candidate. Regardless, the Republican candidate in the likely 2012 field who most resembles Kerry and represents the conventional, establishment choice is Romney.

Jim Geraghty has imagined a scenario in which Jon Huntsman launches his 2012 candidacy by launching a major attack on Obama’s conduct of foreign policy. Here is a sample:

And then, in detail, Huntsman paints a picture of an administration that is flailing, frozen with indecision, short-sighted, often at war with itself, disorganized, and ultimately lacking any sense of what it wanted to do after Obama had finished his apology tour.

He says things like, “The charm offensive wasn’t just this president’s first foreign-policy tool; it was his only one. And when it failed to achieve significant concessions from either our allies or our foes, the president and the team around him had no plan B.”

He points out that Obama and Hillary’s constant invocation of a “reset” button reflects an immature yearning to go back to some earlier, simpler time, out of a misplaced nostalgic belief that foreign-policy challenges were easier to solve in past years, and a tacit admission that they cannot make progress in current circumstances. “We have to deal with the world as it is; yelling ‘do-over’ doesn’t even work in the schoolyard.”

Huntsman sets a record for talking out of school, sharing a series of anecdotes that make Joe Biden look cloddish, Hillary Clinton frustrated, dismissed, and quick to lash out, David Axelrod meddling in areas he doesn’t understand, and the man at the top so far out of his league he terrifies Huntsman.

Huntsman shares frustrating tales of trying to be the voice of reason while the president tried to tailor his foreign policies to the whims of congressional Democrats [bold mine-DL]. He laments that Obama’s Middle East vision begins and ends with Israeli settlements, that he effectively sold out Iranian democracy protesters in pursuit of a Quixotic dream of a summit with Tehran, and that in two short years he has snubbed India and insulted almost every major ally.

Put another way, let’s suppose that Huntsman starts off his 2012 candidacy by telling making a lot of false claims and indulging the most demagogic misrepresentations of what Obama has done. Would this “inflict serious damage” on Obama? It would probably inflict some damage if the accusations didn’t sound like Republican boilerplate. It would help even more if there were much substance to any of these claims. There was no apology tour. He “snubbed” India so much that he publicly endorsed their desire for a permanent seat on the Security Council. Say whatever else you want about that gesture, but it was one that the Indian government greatly appreciated. There are two allies that might be included among the “insulted.” These would be Japan under Hatoyama and Turkey after the negotiation on the nuclear deal, but that isn’t what Geraghty means when he puts this claim in Huntsman’s mouth. The idea that Obama’s foreign policy has been an exercise in placating Congressional Democrats is quite funny. There is hardly any decision one can point to that was made out of deference to Democrats in Congress.

The “reset” with the Russians in particular was a deliberate effort to try to repair some of the damage that the previous administration had caused to the U.S.-Russian relationship. As far as I can tell, it had nothing to do with nostalgia for a simpler time, but stemmed from a desire to avoid policies that needlessly provoked Moscow and undermined securing shared interests. To a limited degree, the “reset” has done what it was supposed to do, and it has yielded arms reduction and nuclear cooperation agreements as well as some support for U.S. policies on Iran and Afghanistan. Huntsman could not make a detailed indictment on these counts, because the specific claims are largely or wholly untrue.

Instead of inflicting damage on Obama, it would annihilate the rationale for Huntsman’s candidacy as Huntsman’s supporters understand it. As misguided as Huntsman would be in seeking the Republican nomination, it makes even less sense for him to seek it by indulging in exactly the sort of pettiness and demagoguery that he and his supporters evidently see as serious flaws in contemporary politics. I suspect the gap between what mainstream conservatives believe about Obama’s foreign policy and what Huntsman would actually say about it is large, which is one more reason why Huntsman’s candidacy doesn’t make any sense.

If NATO (the U.S. Sixth Fleet in practice) can’t take out Libyan air defenses at no or minimal cost, we should all start studying Arabic and spending an hour a day with our foreheads pressed to the floor. ~Conrad Black

Via John Tabin

Black is free to do what he likes, but in what universe does that sentence make any sense? Gates was making a point of emphasizing what would actually be required to enforce a no-fly zone, partly as a way of responding to people who blithely talk about “taking out” other states’ air defenses when they have not actually done anything to provoke the U.S. Black is insisting that the U.S. government should never be reluctant to use its military superiority to intervene in another country’s civil war, and he implies that failure to do so is not far removed from inviting the forcible foreign conquest and conversion of the United States. There is a word for this: insane. The question is not whether the U.S. military can “take out” these defenses, but whether it makes any sense for the U.S. to insert itself in another country’s civil war. It clearly doesn’t make sense, which may explain why Black’s response to Gates’ testimony is so unhinged.

It wouldn’t just be the Sixth Fleet “in practice,” but of necessity, because there is no agreement among NATO governments in support of military action. The completely unjustified bombing of Serbia commanded much broader support inside NATO, which should tell us something about how little justification there is for an intervention in Libya. Both permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council, including Brazil, object to military intervention. What everyone needs to understand is that military intervention in Libya would be an almost entirely American intervention, it would be widely (and correctly) perceived as illegal, and there is no consensus from any of the regional and international organizations representing those countries that have the most at stake in Libya. The costs may not only be casualties, which would be serious enough, but additional damage to relationships with allies and other states and unknown costs arising from complication, escalation, or blowback.

One wonders what Black thinks is “minimal cost.” This is fairly important, since it is the standard tactic of interventionists to minimize the risks of every military action to make intervention seem easy and relatively cost-free. Gates’ warnings are a valuable corrective to the impulse to ignore those risks.

Jim Antle makes a persuasive case that Mitt Romney is the 2012 Republican front-runner, and he makes a good argument that the GOP should not repeat past mistakes by nominating him:

Conservatives rightly value tradition, but this GOP custom is one they need to rethink. Romney is a spectacular mismatch with the Republican base of 2012. There are also good reasons to think he would struggle mightily in a general election against Barack Obama, or at least hopelessly muddle key parts of the Republican message. Republicans have gone down this road before, most recently when they nominated John McCain.

Jim is right that the GOP shouldn’t hand the nomination to Romney, but the 2008 race shows us some of the reasons why they probably will. Looking at the likely 2008 field in early 2007, it would have been easy to conclude that McCain had huge, probably insurmountable problems in his relationship with his party. During 2007, those problems became more obvious and glaring as McCain led the push for the immigration bill favored by the Bush administration, which McCain and his allies in the Senate defended largely by labeling its opponents as bigots. Many conservative activists were understandably hostile to his candidacy, and Romney (the very same supposedly fatally flawed, mandate-loving Romney) had become the default alternative for many movement conservatives. By the fall of 2007, McCain’s campaign seemed to be on its last legs, and it seemed that it would not be “his turn” in 2008.

Huckabee was able to divert enough social conservative support away from Romney that McCain kept besting him in one state after another. Romney was strongest with activists and did very well in contests that disproportionately rewarded superior organization, so he tended to dominate in caucuses except for Iowa, and fell short in primaries with larger electorates. Thanks to a field that split the conservative vote, McCain was able to eke out important early victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, and from there went to win most of the larger primaries in early February. McCain managed the Florida win partly by lying about Romney’s position on the Iraq war, and partly thanks to the last-minute endorsement from the then-popular Charlie Crist. The Republican winner-take-all system permitted McCain to wrap up the nomination without winning more than 40% of the vote in any competitive contest.

To avoid a similar outcome this time, the GOP has tried to change its primary calendar so that better-known or better-funded candidates can’t grab the nomination so quickly. One problem is that many of the first contests are scheduled too early in the year and conflict with national party requirements. As The Boston Globe reported last month:

More than a third of the states have early Republican presidential primary elections scheduled next year that would violate national party rules, throwing the campaign calendar into disarray and risking sanctions that would diminish their influence at the nominating convention.

While confusion over the schedule makes it more difficult for campaigns to plan for these early contests, we could end up seeing something very similar to 2008 as the candidate with the greatest name recognition and/or greatest resources takes a prohibitive lead. The longer other, lesser-known candidates take to get into the race, the harder it will be for them to raise money and compete with Romney’s organization.

Had movement leaders and activists been in charge of determining the nomination, there would have been no way that McCain could win. As it turned out, Republican voters were far more likely to cast their votes for the two candidates that activists declared unacceptable, namely Huckabee and McCain. Many activists and pundits have re-drawn the boundaries of party orthodoxy in the last few years, and they have decided that any support for an individual mandate anywhere at any time is a serious flaw. Romney now finds himself on the wrong side of the line, but for once Romney has stayed the same while the attitudes of the party’s ideological enforcers have changed.

Because of the politics of health care, Romney now seems to have an equally disastrous liability that is supposed to wreck his candidacy in the same way that immigration legislation should have ended McCain’s campaign. In the end, McCain recovered, and he did so mainly by talking about immigration as little as possible, and opportunistically claiming that he had learned his lesson and appreciated the importance of enforcement. It didn’t matter that these claims were contrary to everything he had said previously on the issue. Romney has done more than that by arguing for repeal of the health care legislation.

Another important difference between them is that Romney has a lot more goodwill among conservatives than McCain ever had, and he pursued the nomination in 2008 as a conservative alternative to McCain. He may not have been very credible in that role, but he definitely didn’t run against conservatives in the way that McCain did in 2000. During the health care debate, Romney was obviously an opponent of the federal legislation, and so as far as most Republicans are concerned he ended up on the right side of the issue. Yes, I find his efforts to reconcile his health care legislation in Massachusetts and his opposition to federal health care legislation desperate and frequently disingenuous, but I am not one of his likely supporters or someone Romney needs to win over. In addition to the moderate Republican voters he should be able to win, Romney will probably be able to retain enough conservative supporters from last time to hold off his challengers. Romney should have the means to dominate most early contests, and he should also have the fundraising to compete effectively if the nomination fight is drawn out. Romney’s greatest problem within the GOP and as a general election candidate is that he is perceived (correctly!) as an unprincipled opportunist who can’t be trusted. That said, how many Republican and Republican-leaning voters are there who regard Romney as untrustworthy and don’t see Obama as even worse?

The rise of Romney as a national Republican leader has been a strange thing to observe. By all rights, he should be as irrelevant to national Republican politics as Olympia Snowe, but in his eagerness to pander to the right and the conservative movement’s desperation to find a candidate to rally around Romney acquired a national leadership role in the party to which he is not very well-suited. His emergence as the 2012 front-runner is a reminder of the ongoing unfortunate effect that John McCain has had on the GOP for the last decade. By his presence in the 2000 and 2008 presidential fields, McCain has helped to drive conservatives to support alternatives in Bush and Romney that have been and will be disastrous for most conservative policy goals, and because of that Romney is in a leading position for the 2012 nomination that should be impossible for him to win.

Note that this is a real change. Israel has always had more sympathizers than the Palestinians, but pre-9/11 a kind of neutralism was the predominant view. ~Matt Yglesias

I wasn’t going to comment on the latest Gallup findings on American attitudes toward Israelis and Palestinians, but Yglesias overlooks something important here that needs to be mentioned. Looking at the data from the last 23 years, it is correct that the American public’s sympathy with Israelis as opposed to Palestinians became extremely lopsided after 9/11, and a more balanced/indifferent attitude prevailed prior to the attacks. What these results don’t show is what the public believed the U.S. role in the conflict should be both before and after 9/11.

If we go back to earlier Gallup polls that asked this question, we find that up through 2003 Gallup also asked what respondents thought the U.S. role should be. They phrased the question in terms of taking sides: should the U.S. be on one side or the other, or on neither side? The results were always very similar both before and after the attacks in 2001: approximately two-thirds to three-quarters of respondents wanted the U.S. not to take sides in the conflict. This is entirely consistent with other pollingon the conflict that has been done since then.

Here is Gallup’s June 2003 poll question:

In the Middle East conflict, do you think the United States should take Israel’s side, take the Palestinian’s side, or not take either side?

BASED ON 510 NATIONAL ADULTS IN FORM B

		Israel’s side	Palestinian’s side	Not take either	No opinion
		%	%	%	%
2003 Jun 12-15 ^		18	4	74	4
2002 Apr 29-May 1		24	2	68	6
2002 Apr 5-7		22	2	71	5
2001 Sep 14-15		27	1	63	9
2000 Jul 6-9 ^		16	1	74	9
2000 Jan 25-26		15	1	72	12
1998 Dec 4-6		17	2	73	7
1998 May 8-10		15	2	74	9

Neutralism wasn’t just the predominant view before 9/11, but was the consistent overwhelming majority view before and after the attacks. I have been unable to find more recent results from Gallup on this question, but WPO’s findings suggest that Gallup would get similar responses to those they had at the turn of the century.

As these results show, there is a significant minority of somewhere between 15-25% of the public that definitely favors the U.S. taking Israel’s side, they greatly outnumber those taking the opposite, pro-Palestinian position, and they are almost certainly more energized, organized, and interested in the issue than the broad, unmotivated majority. If Americans are asked where their sympathies lie, most will now declare their sympathies to be with the Israelis, but only a fraction of the sympathizers actually want U.S. policy to be the one-sided affair that it is. The good news is that public opinion is broadly in favor of the U.S. taking neither side. The bad news is that a position endorsed by a majority of the public has very little to do with making policy and has minimal representation in Washington, which is why we have a policy towards the conflict that reflects the preferences of no more than 25% of the population.

Defying his reputation as a 1950s square, the new, more casual Mitt Romney is popping up around the country as he readies a second run for president. He’s going tieless on network TV, strolling NASCAR pits in Daytona and sporting skinny Gap jeans bought for him by his wife.

His latest campaign book, just out in paperback, opens with a regular-guy scene: wealthy Mitt in a Wal-Mart checkout line, buying gifts for his grandsons and comparing the surroundings to Target, another discount store he says he’s familiar with. ~The Los Angeles Times

Romney would do so much better if he weren’t constantly changing to try to please people. As egregious as his numerous position switches have been, and as embarrassing as his pandering to foreign policy hawks over the last two years has been, Romney’s pandering was mostly limited to questions of policy and rhetorical style. He has a public image as a somewhat stiff, technocratic businessman, and that is the most genuine thing about him for the last five years.

If there is anything that would be more insufferable and hard to believe than Romney the zealous social conservative or Romney the foe of excessive government, it would have to be Romney the “regular guy.” One of the few things Romney has going for him is that he is not a “regular guy.” As ignorant or ideological as some of his positions can be, no one can deny that he is a very intelligent person. Romney and Bush are both MBAs from Harvard, but the difference is that Romney actually seems to have learned something while he was there. He has had a privileged life, he has been reasonably successful in the corporate world, and he is personally very wealthy. There is virtually nothing “regular” about him, and it is silly for him to pretend that there is. Refashioning Romney’s public image is just as likely to invite unwelcome comparisons with Al Gore as it will make voters react more favorably to him.

To understand what is at stake in this war, it is best to see Libya as a large drinking well in the desert fiercely contested by various tribes, but finally brought under the control of a powerful sheikh. Access to the well means life for the sheikh’s allies, and to be denied it means death for his rivals. Because that well is filled not with water but oil, global powers also have a stake in the outcome. The conflict gathering strength in Libya is not over who gets to rule the tribes along the Mediterranean coast and desert interior of a North African country, but who gets to own Libyan oil. It is also about the chances for democracy in the Levant, and whether dictators can massacre their own people at no cost. ~Lee Smith

To recap, when interventionists want the U.S. to topple a government in a country that happens to have enormous oil reserves, the war has absolutely nothing to do with oil. When there is a conflict that interventionists want the U.S. to enter, they are more than happy to exaggerate the importance of a country’s oil to make the conflict seem much more important to America than it actually is. It’s true that there are some foreign corporations that have significant stakes in Libyan oil production, but the main stake that other states have is in the overall supply of oil, and conflict in Libya doesn’t threaten a very large part of this supply. Libyan oil accounts for approximately 2% of global oil production. At present, most of the Libyan oilfields and pipelines are located in the eastern part of the country outside of Gaddafi’s control, and so for all practical purposes the rebels already possess the bulk of Libya’s oil production. That may change, but in the end determining who owns Libya’s oil is not a reason to go to war.

Just so that his argument doesn’t hinge entirely on oil, Smith throws in a nod to helping democracy “in the Levant.” For one thing, I would point out that Libya is not in the Levant as it is usually defined, nor are most of the other countries where these protests have been taking place in the last few months. Leaving that aside, arguing that the U.S. must intervene against Gaddafi to discourage other autocrats from resorting to large-scale violence ignores that the U.S. seems to be succeeding for the most part in restraining allied governments from using force against protesters without needing to intervene in Libya. Contrary to Smith’s earlier laughablecritique that Obama sees all Muslims as an undifferentiated mass, the U.S. seems to be tailoring its response to each country according to individual conditions and the degree to which the U.S. has perceived strategic interests there.

The argument that we need to intervene in Libya for the sake of protesters elsewhere isn’t remotely credible, not least because no one is proposing that the U.S. make armed intervention against internal crackdowns a standing policy to be applied in all cases. If intervention in Libya were to deter other unfriendly governments from trying to crush protest movements with violence, Washington would have to make these governments believe that it was prepared and willing to do the same thing to them. Pushing unnecessary war with Libya is bad enough, but if it were just the first in a series of unnecessary wars it becomes even more undesirable.

The U.S. can lend assistance to Tunisia and Egypt in coping with refugees from Libya, and it is appropriate to provide humanitarian aid for the civilian population in Libya where it is possible to deliver it, but there is no reason to become more involved than that.

Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon – Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons. ~George Will

I assume Will is describing Gingrich and Huckabee in that last passage, but the description fits the last Republican nominee just as well. On Libya, we are seeing what McCain’s first, second, and third responses to a foreign conflict are and what they likely would have been had we been unfortunate enough to have him as President, and they all involve military escalation. We can’t rule out that Obama will eventually succumb to the endless agitation for another war, but I am confident that if McCain were in his place the bombing would be starting any day now. The next election probably isn’t going to turn on foreign policy issues, but Libya is a good test for judging the prudence and wisdom of members of the Republican 2012 field. Pawlenty and Gingrich have spoken about Libya publicly, and they have re-confirmed that they should not be entrusted with any significant power, much less the Presidency.

As for the 2012 field, Will is engaged in some wishful thinking. He thinks highly of Mitch Daniels, so he includes him as one of the five plausible prospective candidates. It would be good for the quality of the debate if Daniels ran, but with each passing day I find it harder to believe that Daniels will take up the thankless task of trying to lead his party when so many of its activists seem intent on finding reasons to dislike him. At first glance, Barbour seems plausible as a presidential candidate, but he really isn’t. My guess is that he wouldn’t be competitive outside the South during the primaries, and he doesn’t have the built-in advantages that Huckabee had with evangelicals. Were he somehow to make it to the general election, he would be second only to Palin as a Democratic propagandist’s dream come true. Huntsman isn’t going anywhere, and Will must know that.

Of Will’s five, that leaves the last two, and both of them are definitely running, which is something that we can’t say for the other three. That doesn’t mean that the field has been winnowed down even more. Instead, it is going to be very different from Will’s list of competent current and former state executives. Will seems to take it for granted that Huckabee and Gingrich have disqualified themselves by saying false and stupid things. Evidently, Will has not been paying close enough attention to the quality of debate inside the GOP among its would-be leaders, including the “plausible” ones in Romney and Pawlenty. Will underestimates how much the primary candidates are going to have to accommodate themselves to the “vibrations of weirdness.” That doesn’t mean that Huckabee will run, and it doesn’t follow from this that Gingrich will be competitive, but we’re going to see the 2012 field trying to outdo one another in denouncing Obama and all his works with increasingly implausible, far-fetched claims.