It would be interesting and healthy if the first successful Arab revolution in over a generation happened, and democratists and their preferred policies had nothing to do with any of it. As Tunisian riots continue and possibly threaten the survival of Ben Ali’s regime, Marc Lynch asks where all the democracy promoters have gone:

Barely a month goes by without a Washington Post editorial bemoaning Egypt’s authoritarian retrenchment and criticizing the Obama administration’s alleged failure to promote Arab democracy. But now Tunisia has erupted as the story of the year for Arab reformers. The spiraling protests and the regime’s heavy-handed, but thus far ineffective, repression have captured the imagination of Arab publics, governments, and political analysts. Despite Tunis’s efforts to censor media coverage, images and video have made it out onto social media and up to Al Jazeera and other satellite TV. The “Tunisia scenario” is now the term of art for activist hopes and government fears of political instability and mass protests from Jordan to Egypt to the Gulf.

But the Post’s op-ed page has been strikingly silent about the Tunisian protests. Thus far, a month into the massive demonstrations rocking Tunisia, the Washington Post editorial page has published exactly zero editorials about Tunisia. For that matter, the Weekly Standard, another magazine which frequently claims the mantle of Arab democracy and attacks Obama for failing on it, has thus far published exactly zero articles about Tunisia (though, to his credit, frequent Standard contributor and ex-Bush administration official Elliott Abrams has weighed in on it at his new CFR blog). Why are the most prominent media voices on Arab democracy so entirely absent on the Arab reform story of the year?

The easy answer, but possibly also the right one, is that they have nothing to say about it because it is something much more like a genuine, indigenous popular movement that is not working to advance “pro-Western” or “pro-American” policy goals, and it is therefore irrelevant or even unwelcome in their view. Most of the “color” revolutions were directed against governments that were seen as hostile to U.S. and allied interests or at least too closely aligned with Russia and (in Lebanon’s case) Syria, and the “color” revolutionaries were always identified as “pro-Western” reformers regardless of the accuracy of this description, and so advocates of “democracy” responding accordingly with enthusiastic support for the protesters. When a pro-Western secular autocrat faces a popular uprising that is almost certainly not being encouraged and backed from outside, these advocates of “democracy” have nothing to say because democratic reform was simply a means for advancing regime changes in several countries that the advocates wanted to bring into a Western orbit. Ben Ali’s downfall represents quite the opposite. If Lynch looked back at the reactions from most democracy-promoting outlets after the elections of Morales or of Chavez, which came at the expense of pro-American oligarchies, he would likely find a similar silence and indifference to the empowerment of those countries’ poor majorities.

Lynch effectively answers his own question later in the post:

If U.S. advocates of Arab democracy don’t step up to draw attention to Tunisia’s protests, it will only reinforce the skeptical view that their advocacy of Arab democracy is mainly about putting pressure on Hosni Mubarak or scoring points against the Obama administration.

For the most part, democratist advocacy is this selective, cynical, and unprincipled, or rather it is guided by another set of priorities in which promoting democratic political reform in its own right does not figure as very important.

I would disagree here and say that it’s quite relevant (politically) and quite unhelpful to Norquist’s cause. In my understanding of mainstream conservative sentiment on the issue, Reagan made a huge mistake in pulling out of Lebanon in response to Iranian attacks on U.S. marines. In the conventional wisdom that has taken hold among many conservative analysts, the Beirut bombings marked the beginning of the Islamist “war against the West” and Reagan’s act of loss-cutting served only to embolden our enemies. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete is correct in that much of the mainstream right remembers the withdrawal from Lebanon as a disaster or a prelude to a disaster. Hawkish interventionists and most conservatives in the GOP view the withdrawal from Lebanon so negatively that Norquist may have scored an own-goal when it comes to persuading mainstream conservatives to turn against the war. One reason I didn’t mention this in the original post was that I assumed that anyone who views Lebanon this way would never be remotely receptive to arguments for withdrawing from Afghanistan. Norquist’s target audience has to be conservatives who are not ideologically committed to U.S. power projection everywhere in the world, conservatives opposed to “nation-building” and conservatives worried about deficit spending, and among them this misguided understanding of the withdrawal from Lebanon doesn’t have as much influence. It’s true that Norquist didn’t help himself with people who believe this, but most of them are going to reject his message anyway.

As I acknowledged in the comments to my earlier post, mainstream conservatives have had it drilled into them that leaving Beirut in 1983 was a sign of weakness. What I was trying to say the first time was that pulling out of Lebanon wasn’t a sign of weakness, but was instead proof of intelligence. Lebanon and Afghanistan aren’t actually comparable, which is why Norquist’s use of Lebanon as a starting-point for sparking debate over Afghanistan seems misguided to me. To the extent that mainstream conservatives accept that the two missions are comparable, it will be in a way that is damaging to Norquist’s goal. So Norquist’s Lebanon example may be useless, or it may be very harmful to the cause of opposing the war, but we can agree that it isn’t going to start a conversation that is going to go Norquist’s way.

A prominent conservative thinker is calling on Republicans to begin a serious debate about the war in Afghanistan, its costs and what Ronald Reagan would do in the same circumstances.

And while Grover Norquist stopped short of personally calling for a rapid withdrawal, he made it clear Tuesday night that he thinks an honest conversation on the right would inevitably lead to that conclusion.

“I’m confident about where that conversation would go,” he told attendees of a dinner sponsored by the New America Foundation. “And I think the people who are against that conversation know where it would go, too.”

Norquist said he was aiming his plea to “the people who voted for Ronald Reagan, or would have.” And he pointed out that Reagan’s response to the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, which cost 241 American lives, was not to occupy Lebanon.

“His reaction to the Lebanon bombing was not to stay, it was to leave,” Norquist said. “Ronald Reagan didn’t decide to fix Lebanon. I think that’s helpful in getting the conversation going on the right.” ~The Huffington Post

Via Andrew

It’s not so clear to me where such a conversation would go. If there is a prevailing view among conservatives today, it is not one that favors either full withdrawal or the current level of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Instead, the dominant view seems to be one that endorses continuing the war for the foreseeable future with fewer resources, which is George Will’s worst-of-both-worlds position that I have been arguing against for the last year. Given the choice between that and continuing the current war effort, most policymakers are going to choose the latter, because it becomes a choice between waging incompetent, perpetual war and waging a war that is at least limited in its objectives and its timeline. Since that has been the real choice before us for the last two years, I remain convinced that the latter makes more sense than reverting to Bush-style “counter-terrorism” and mismanagement.

As Greg Scoblete noted today in his post referring to an Afghanistan Study Group poll, there aren’t that many conservatives or Tea Partiers that endorse the war in Afghanistan as it is currently being fought (24%/28%). Large majorities of both conservatives overall and Tea Partiers believe the war costs too much (71%/67%), and they want reductions in the numbers of troops (66%/64%), but a substantial plurality also believes that the U.S. can continue to fight the war effectively with fewer troops (39%). In other words, a plurality wants to resume the Bush-era war effort that keeps us in Afghanistan with insufficient resources and heavy reliance on air power, and another 24% supports the war at its current levels, and just 27% favor full withdrawal. The position endorsed by the 39% is perpetual war on the cheap, and there is even less chance of fully extricating the U.S. from such a conflict when its direct costs are minimal or hidden. An honest conversation on the right would reveal that approximately two-thirds of people on the right don’t really want to end the war, but around half of those don’t want to pay for it, either.

Let’s consider Norquist’s Lebanon argument. If we are having an honest conversation, the first observation I would make is that very few people are going to see the relevance of what the Reagan administration did after blundering into the middle of an Israeli invasion of its neighbor when it comes to thinking about Afghanistan one way or the other. U.S. involvement in Lebanon should never have happened in the first place, as the U.S. had no security interests at stake. Reagan’s recognition and correction of his earlier error were good, but the lesson to learn from Lebanon was that we should never have been involved. Very few people on the right agree that the U.S. should never have become involved in Afghanistan, and it seems to me that almost everyone on the right, including almost all opponents of the war in Iraq, believed that the war in Afghanistan was at least initially justified and appropriate, and almost all of them continued to believe this up until very recently. The Lebanon example doesn’t help get the conversation going, because it isn’t a particularly relevant example for the subject we’re discussing. If Norquist is trying to appeal to people who would have voted for Reagan, as he says, he isn’t off to a very good start.

Update: James Joyner was at the same New America Foundation gathering, and he explains that Norquist made use of this poll when he made the remarks about the war. Here’s Joyner on Norquist and the poll:

Now, as I told Clemons and Norquist during the Q&A session, I think the poll is a publicity stunt of dubious probative value. (I may have used more colorful language.) The truth of the matter is that most Americans have only the vaguest notions of how much our government spends and therefore have no context whatsoever against which to judge numbers. “$119 billion” is a scary number to bandy about but it’s a tiny fraction of a $3.69 trillion budget. One could imagine that, if people were told that the Department of Labor spends $117.5 billion a year, they’d wonder whether we couldn’t get by without that, too. Much less $915.5 billion for Health and Human Services. I’m guessing NAF won’t be polling on that, though.

Whether we’re getting good value for our investment in Afghanistan isn’t a matter of uninformed reaction to big numbers but rather an assessment of costs and benefits. Indeed, Norquist readily acknowledges this, saying we need to have “a conversation” “about the vast expenditures of cash, the vast expenditures of other people lives, and the opportunity cost.” He insists that, while everyone, himself included, agreed that we needed to go to war to “hit back at those who hit us on 9/11,” we’ve not really had an honest dialog about the years-long rebuilding effort that followed toppling the Taliban.

While we’ve certainly talked about it — rather a lot in fact — over the years, it’s mostly been at the level of platitude. We’ve got to “finish the job” and “achieve victory,” however that’s defined. And, Norquist’s least favorite, “we have to support the troops.” The heated political environment, in which openly talking about ending the mission short of achieving our lofty goals would bring catcalls of “surrender” and “appeasement” and “betrayal,” makes an adult conversation difficult.

So, Norquist is trying to use the cost issue as a means of getting around this dilemma. But, while fiscal issues are his bread and butter, it’s not what’s driving his opposition to the war.

Rather, he argues, “Being tied up there does not advance American power.” He explained, “If you’ve got a fist in the tar baby Iraq and you’ve got a fist in the tar baby Afghanistan, then who’s afraid of you?” While HuffPo’s Dan Froomkin cringes at the loaded metaphor, it’s Norquist’s belief that our long adventures in the region weaken our leverage against the likes of Iran and North Korea [bold mine-DL].

As with so many other conservatives claiming to be “antiwar” because of their objections to Afghanistan, Norquist wants to free up military resources so that they might be turned toward the “real” threats that he identifies elsewhere. Afghanistan is arguably the one place where U.S. military power should be deployed overseas right now, and Norquist is concerned that it is distracting us from confronting states that we already effectively deter.

A few days ago, I noticed that Michael Gerson was once again in his usual high dudgeon, and this time Wikileaks was his target. Hardly anyone could make me find Wikileaks very sympathetic, but Gerson is a man of rare talents. Perhaps sympathetic is the wrong word, but I certainly object to Gerson’s sloppy conflation of what Assange and his allies are trying to do with the kleptocratic despotism of Robert Mugabe. First of all, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out recently, the cable concerning Tsvangirai that Gerson mentions was published by The Guardian over a year ago. No doubt Gerson would condemn The Guardian in similar terms for having “provided ammunition to a tyrant as surely as if he were an arms dealer.” For Gerson to say that “Assange has chosen the side of Mugabe” is just the most recent lazy identification of Western opponents of U.S. and allied policies with foreign dictatorships. Gerson complains about Assange’s ” limited and simplistic view of colonialism” and then produces an even more limited and simplistic binary opposition in which Assange and Mugabe are supposedly on the same anti-colonialist side because they are both opposed for very different reasons to U.S. policies overseas.

Regardless, what is most striking about all of this is that the leaked cable does not reveal what Gerson says that it does.

Gerson writes:

Another cable detailed a secret meeting between Western officials and Tsvangirai in which he supported continued economic sanctions to pressure Mugabe, even though Tsvangirai needed to publicly oppose sanctions for political reasons.

The actual cable reported something rather different. According to The Guardian, the cable said:

In 2010 there must be some progress to show the people, but it will require actions by all parties, including the Western powers, to change the status quo. He expects the recently announced commissions to be installed in early 2010, and is satisfied with their makeup. ZANU-PF has implemented a strategy of reciprocity in the negotiations, using Western sanctions as a cudgel against MDC. He would like to see some quiet moves, provided there are acceptable benchmarks, to ‘give’ some modest reward for modest progress.

That indicates that Tsvangirai was calling on Western governments to ease sanctions to provide an incentive for continued progress inside Zimbabwe. There is something similar in a later report:

What is needed is some kind of concrete roadmap that all can agree on, linking easing of sanctions with identifiable and quantifiable progress.

U.S. diplomats were receptive to what Tsvangirai was proposing, and the embassy at Harare sent this recommendation:

As we’ve previously discussed (reftel), we think it might be in USG interests to consider some form of incremental easing of non-personal sanctions, provided we see actual implementation of some of these reforms.

As for the charge of endangering Tsvangirai, it is more than a little absurd to hold publishers accountable for what authoritarian governments choose to do with information that has been released to the public. If Mugabe in his paranoia chooses to persecute Tsvangirai yet again on account of these reports in which Tsvangirai is actually working to ease international sanctions on Zimbabwe, there is nothing that anyone else can do about that. However, the standard that Wikileaks has to meet to justify what it is doing is not simply that it is not actively aiding authoritarian governments by exposing dissidents’ secrets, but that it is actually aiding the cause of opposing authoritarian and abusive government. It has not met that standard, and I don’t think it ever will.

What is absurd about the heavy-handed, excessive crackdown on Wikileaks is that Wikileaks does not really threaten the U.S. government or its policies. It aspires to be a great threat to the status quo, and it simply isn’t.

Why wouldn’t we be on their side? Aren’t we in favor of getting rid of corrupt autocrats? Aren’t we in favor of democracy? ~Claire Berlinski

Berlinski asks this in response to the non-commital statement by Secretary Clinton that the U.S. is not “taking sides” over the unemployment riots in Tunisia. Clinton also criticized the Tunisian government for its use of force against the protesters, and she deplored the violence that has thus far claimed several dozen lives. It isn’t clear to me what more the administration could do in public that would be constructive.

Declaring U.S. government support for protesting opponents of Ben Ali isn’t likely to lead to a peaceful resolution, but probably would lead to escalating tensions and more riots. Making Ben Ali’s removal from power the goal of U.S. policy (!) wouldn’t hasten internal reform, but would put the regime into an even greater panic and inspire an even harsher crackdown. It would also wreck a reasonably solid relationship with Tunisia for no discernible reason except that “we are in favor of democracy.” This would be dangerous enough if Washington actually intended to lend support to the protesters, but it would be even worse if the administration claimed that it was on the “side” of the protesters only to demonstrate that it could do nothing for them. Even if we all agree that Ben Ali’s regime is very repressive (it is) and ought to undergo major reform (it should), public denunciation by American officials isn’t going to lead to that outcome.

Suppose instead that the administration might be able to work privately for an easing of the crackdown and addressing some of the protesters’ grievances, but that it could only do this by publicly appearing not to take sides. Would that make the administration’s public neutrality more acceptable? Is publicly taking sides intended to help the protesters, or mainly to take a self-satisfying, ineffective stand?

Update: Blake Hounshell has an article on the Tunisian unrest that includes this important point:

But U.S. officials admit privately they have few interests in Tunisia and little leverage. “The U.S. is not the most important external player,” said a State Department official, asked what more the United States can do to promote democratic change. “How effectively can you ‘push a country to the wall’ without other actors coming along?”

As Hounshell explains, France has far more influence as one would expect, and seems uninterested in using it to pressure Ben Ali. As this Time article relates, the French government is very free with its criticism when its interests are not directly at stake (which makes their government like most governments in the world):

The French rarely hesitate to loudly lament the smothering of opposition in Iran, Burma, and North Korea, for example, and continue to push Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo to step aside after losing an election he contests. But when it comes to staunch allies like Ben Ali getting rough with their people, Paris tends to get tight-lipped and look for excuses.

In all earnestness, please consider the premises of Chinese parenting as laid out in Chua’s own words:

a) Children are not allowed to 1) play any instrument other than the piano and violin, 2) not play the piano and violin, 3) choose their own extracurricular activities. (Even Socialist Realism permits greater freedom of expression.)

b) Children owe their parents everything (as do citizens to the State).

c) Parents know what is best for their children and therefore override all their children’s own desires and preferences. (The state knows what’s best for the little people and gets it done against their will, but with their best interests very much at heart. Isn’t this how the Communist Party of China justifies its autocratic rule to itself and to the rest of the world?)

In light of all this, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Amy Chua’s bestseller is subtitled “How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.” ~Kejda Gjermani

Gjermani was doing a fine job of exploding Amy Chua’s case for the superiority of her particular form of obsessive parenting, and then she had to ruin it all with this clumsy bit of ideological nonsense at the end. The person linking parent-child relations with relations between the citizen and the state is Gjermani. She is the one who makes the unfounded leap from relations within a family to relations within the polity, and it is she, not Chua, who has identified state and parental authority as being of the same kind to make a political attack on Chua as a would-be state socialist because she dislikes her disciplinarian parenting methods.

Obviously, Gjermani has never read nor even read about Chua’s book, which argues that rapid democratization in tandem with rapid privatization of the economy will create, well, ethnic hatred and global instability. For my part, this is a statement of the obvious, which is why I have usually been so skeptical of efforts at democracy promotion and why I have argued that neoliberal trade and economic policies are bound to create dangerous backlashes in democratizing countries. Despite her understanding of the dangers, Chua has repeatedly stated her support for promoting both democracy and capitalism, but she argues that it should be done in a more gradual way in order to avoid the worst of the majoritarian and authoritarian backlashes against capitalism on the one hand and against the “market-dominant minorities” who flourish in these societies. Chua’s argument identifies the weaknesses of the conventional Western promotion of “democratic capitalism,” and draws attention to the human costs of ill-considered, rapid democratization and privatization and the sharp increases of inequality that can result, which should make her argument a useful corrective for democratists’ more enthusiastic fantasies of remaking the world, but even this seems to contain too much realism for Gjermani to handle.

Michelle Goldberg wrote in her review of World on Fire:

Yet her argument, that rapid switches to majoritarian rule and free-market democracy in many Third World countries benefit certain ethnic groups over others and lead to vicious sectarian strife, is quite new, if occasionally overstated. Writers such as Robert Kaplan have long argued that the Western obsession with exporting democracy to countries without the institutions to support it is naive and often dangerous, fostering demagogues and communal hatreds. Chua builds on this argument in an essential way, showing how expanding markets exacerbate the problem by enriching already-dominant minority groups even as democracy empowers angry majorities.

Chua’s argument has been borne out in the experience of enough countries around the world just in the last two decades that I think we can conclude that her basic thesis has a great deal of merit. Gjermani would prefer not to engage that argument, and would rather get in some cheap shots against Chua for some alleged fondness for total state control.

The AU is rightly becoming more flexible. It recognises Sudan as exceptional. Its break-up does not threaten the rest of Africa. ~The Economist

This is always very easy for others with nothing at stake to say. Sudan’s break-up doesn’t threaten the rest of Africa until it provides the precedent in other countries for similar independence movements. Kosovo was supposed to be exceptional, too, until recognition of its independence more or less directly led to the effective partition of Georgia. When the U.S. and other states recognized Kosovo, few believed that it could have an effect on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but it did. How many countries will suffer from greater instability because self-determination prevailed in Sudan?

Once major powers start re-drawing borders to satisfy the demands of self-determination or other concerns, there is no obvious place to stop. Kosovo’s example isn’t supposed to have any effect on the situation in Karabakh, either, but why are the people in Karabakh and Armenia bound by this Western assumption? Supporters of the secession of South Sudan have to take into account the possibility that the success of the southern Sudanese in achieving independence will encourage other separatist and automomist movements in Africa and elsewhere. In many ways, African nation-states are among the most arbitrary, artificial creations in the entire world, but that doesn’t mean that splitting them up into equally artificial, less viable statelets will make things any better. Kosovo’s separation from Serbia and eventual independence empowered a gang of criminals. Is there much reason to hope for better in South Sudan?

Mr Putin is gambling that Western politicians are too weak and Western investors too greedy to stand up to him. They should prove him wrong.

That requires a show of principle and a change in tactics. The West should recognise that this marks a new, more repressive phase of Mr Putin’s rule, and treat Mr Nemtsov as a prisoner of conscience. America has complained, as have some members of the European Parliament, but European leaders have been shamefully silent. Of course, Russia will continue to reject any protests—as it did over Mr Khodorkovsky’s sentence—but if the Europeans are silent, Mr Putin will assume that they acquiesce. The EU’s interests may differ from America’s in dealing with Russia, but its values do not. Fabricating cases against political opponents is unacceptable whether you are in Paris, Berlin or Washington. If Russia continues to act in this way, it should be chucked out of the G8. ~The Economist

Other than making themselves feel better, what would this harder line from European leaders change in Russia? The answer is nothing. As the leader says, Russia will reject all protests, so it’s not as if a concerted campaign on behalf of Nemtsov is going to lead to significant changes in the Russian government’s conduct at home. Expelling Russia from the G8 would certainly send a message, but it isn’t the one that The Economist thinks will be sent. The message it sends is that the leading industrial powers of the world are prepared to expel one of the world’s major governments from their ranks to protest political conditions that do not deter them from doing considerable business with even more repressive governments in various corners of the world. Attempts to to isolate and punish other governments over their internal behavior tend to go nowhere, as they mostly cut off Westerners from the countries whose governments they are trying to influence, and in the meantime the Russians will cultivate stronger ties with emerging-market countries and rising powers.

Voting in Sudan on southern Sudan’s independence referendum began on Sunday, and there have already been some armed clashes and a couple dozen people killed in skirmishing. The oil-rich enclave of Abyei had its voting on its status delayed indefinitely because of disagreements about voter eligibility. As this CSIS report by Richard Downie explains, the resolution of Abyei’s status is will be important for preventing renewed fighting along the new border. The outcome of the referendum will most likely be a vote in favor of independence, and the government in Khartoum publicly claims that it will respect that result. Howevere, the referendum would be just the beginning. As Maggie Fick explains:

So while its people are celebrating, Southern Sudan’s leaders are eager to get back to the negotiating table with Khartoum, where a long agenda awaits after the voting finishes. If international attention wanes after the votes are cast, those negotiations could easily take a turn for the worse.

There will not be much time for those negotiations to proceed. Fick continues:

The African Union-brokered negotiations between the ruling party in Khartoum and the governing party in the south — now on hold while the voting takes place — have to be completed by the summer. The 2005 north-south peace agreement governing the referendum calls for an “interim period” between the voting and secession, to expire on July 9, 2011. This is also the date the south will declare independence if the referendum passes.

The problems to be worked out between now and July are considerable:

That leaves just a few months for some of the most contentious issues in Sudan’s recent history to be resolved. The parties will have to decide who becomes a citizen, a tricky question since tens of thousands of southerners now live in the north. A security arrangement along the border will have to be worked out — as will the actual border demarcation itself. It’s also not clear yet how north and south Sudan will share oil wealth, much of which will be concentrated in the new independent state. But perhaps most controversial of all is the status of Abyei, which lies along the disputed border. Oil rich, ethnically diverse, and politically explosive, Abyei was supposed to hold its own referendum this week over whether to be in Sudan or the new Southern Sudanese state. Disputes over who would be able to vote, however, have delayed the polls. Clashes have broken out there in recent days between settler and nomad populations, the former preferring to go with the south and the latter favoring the north. The situation on the ground on Monday was reportedly calm, but any further flaring of violence in the area is likely to raise tensions between Khartoum and Juba over an issue on which neither side wants to cede ground.

Supposing that all of these hurdles are overcome, this will lead to the creation of a large state that will have all of the problems of a failed state and petro-state and few advantages. Southern Sudan has also become a target of the displaced Lord’s Resistance Army, and there are suspicions that the LRA could be operating as Khartoum’s proxy. Even if that is not the case, the LRA’s attacks underscore the severe weaknesses of any new state in southern Sudan. The default U.S. policy towards all of this seems to be full backing for a ramshackle South Sudan, but it is far from clear that this aids regional stability or peace, to say nothing of whether it is an appropriate use of U.S. resources.