Ross:

It’s also important to note that the ideological critique of Catholic immigration wasn’t necessarily crazy. The 19th-century Vatican really did have a very public problem with liberalism and democracy, and it wasn’t unreasonable for Protestant Americans to worry about Catholicism’s ability to conform itself to democratic pluralism. The parallel to the debate over Islam today should be obvious: It’s foolish and bigoted to suggest that Muslims can’t be good Americans, but it isn’t unreasonable to suggest that American Muslim leaders, like Catholic prelates before them, have a particular obligation to embrace the separation of church and state, to distance themselves from Islamist currents overseas — rather than, say, endorsing the basic premises of the Iranian theocracy [bold mine-DL] — and so on.

On the first point, a qualification needs to be made. The Vatican had a problem with liberalism and democracy in no small part because for most of the 19th century European liberals had an obsession with attacking the Catholic Church and trying to strip it of its influence and property. The original Kulturkampf was almost entirely an exercise in liberal and nationalist hostility to Catholic institutions and Catholicism as such. The fear of a Canossarepublik was the same fear that motivated a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment in the U.S. In other words, the fear in this country was not simply that Catholics could not be both faithful Catholics and good Americans, but that the nature of Catholicism was incompatible with Americanism (for lack of a better term here) and represented a threat to American independence. If this wasn’t exactly a crazy belief, it was unreasonable and false. Even so, it was a lot more plausible than the claims of Gingrich et al. that the Cordoba Initiative’s mosque represents a celebration of Islamic conquest and an assault on American civilization.

In Ross’ original column, he distinguishes between an America understood as a political and constitutional project and America as a distinctive culture. Obviously, I am far more sympathetic with this latter, “second America” for many reasons, but what I find remarkable about this mosque controversy is how blatantly, narrowly political the opposition to this particular construction project has been. It has been an exercise in manipulating public anger and using it for the purpose of waging an ostensibly anti-Islamist political campaign by organizing against harmless Muslims and their organizations. A distinctive American culture isn’t under threat from this mosque, the Cordoba Initiative or Imam Abdul Rauf. Rauf and those like him do represent a threat to lazy conservative anti-jihadism that treats every Muslim to “the right” of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a potential fifth columnist and would-be enforcer of creeping shari’a.

Regarding Rauf’s comments on the Iranian election last year, Ross’ mischaracterization of them is significant. Ross claims that Rauf is endorsing the premises of Iranian theocracy, when what he was actually doing was appealing to the Obama administration to seize an opportunity for rapprochement with Iran. Agree or disagree with the proposal, the only thing Rauf seems to be endorsing in his comments is the idea of reconciliation between the United States and Iran, which appears to be broadly consistent with the goals of his organization.

This mischaracterization fits into Ross’ larger point that Muslim leaders in America must not say politically controversial things or express views outside the political mainstream. Presumably, instead of making this appeal to Obama, Rauf was supposed to jump on the bandwagon denouncing the Iranian government as illegitimate and dismiss the election result as a coup. That would have demonstrated his “moderate” status all right. Likewise, Rauf must not say that American policies were accessories to the crime on 9/11, because it is still not really appropriate for any “good American,” regardless of religion, to say that. Apparently, it doesn’t matter if the statement is true or even debatable. It isn’t enough if Muslims peacefully practice their religion, reject violence and embrace their new countries, but they must also become pro-government loyalists. Perhaps if Rauf really wanted to show how moderate he was, he would provide token support for the next U.S. attack on a Muslim country.

What we’re talking about here isn’t a question of assimilation to the norms of American culture or an acceptance of the principles of constitutional government, but a question of conforming to the limits of approved political discourse. Of course, there is no way for Rauf to satisfy his critics in a way that will not destroy his credibility with most other Muslims, which I have to assume is the point. Anti-jihadists are always lamenting that moderate Muslims are too quiescent, passive and silent, but the moment that one of them says anything that they don’t like they dismiss him entirely. Little wonder that many Muslims here and around the world find anti-jihadists’ professions of common cause with them hard to take seriously.

This will be my last post for at least a couple of weeks. I’m getting married this weekend, so I’ll be away from writing for a while. In the meantime, check in at the main blog. If you are able, please support the magazine and the website by donating during our current fundraising drive.

“I’m not a class-warfare guy,” Santorum tells National Review Online in reaction to Pawlenty’s remarks. “That’s the Democrats’ gig. They like to divide and play the class card. We don’t have classes in America — I don’t even like the term ‘middle class.’ People are lower income or middle income, and the dynamism of this country is that you can rise, and sometimes fall, but you are not stuck in classes [bold mine-DL]. We should not get into that kind of rhetoric, or showing some sort of prejudice.” ~Robert Costa

This isn’t quite as detached from reality as Marco Rubio’s insistence that America is the only country in the world where social mobility exists, but it is wrong all the same. Santorum’s claim can be refuted just as easily as Rubio’s was when David Frum wrote:

The sad fact is that as best we can measure, present-day America offers less upward mobility than many other advanced countries, including Denmark, Germany, Canada and Australia.

I have no great confidence that Tim Pawlenty has better answers for how to increase upward mobility in America, and I am fairly sure that Pawlenty was merely engaging in the same kind of pseudo-economic populism that Huckabee deployed in the 2008 primaries, but it is simply untrue that there is no such thing as class in America or that one cannot be “stuck” in a class. To combat Pawlenty’s rather self-serving working-class identity politics, Santorum has chosen to take refuge in a fantasy world of the classless society. My guess is that Santorum’s remarks will be welcomed by many of the same people who are also cheering Angelo Codevilla’s manifesto for resentment, which advances the idea of a sharply bifurcated society in such stark language that it makes Jon Edwards’ “Two Americas” rhetoric seem mild and optimistic by comparison. Acknowledging that class exists and admitting that they are becoming more stratified rather than less does not mean that one needs to stoke resentment and conflict between classes, but if Republicans want to appeal to most Americans living in the country as it really exists they need to start recognizing how America has changed (in some part thanks to economic policies promoted by the GOP and other followers of neoliberalism).

Social and economic opportunity in America is significantly constrained by education, and the quality of education available to people from the lower and lower-middle classes tends to be worse, which generally works to reinforce that limited opportunity. This certainly doesn’t stop upward mobility all together, but it does make it much more difficult. Social and economic stratification is happening, reflected by growing income inequality, and it is being exacerbated by changes to the U.S. economy that are raising barriers to upward mobility and by the mass immigration of poorly educated, unskilled workers that are at risk of being trapped in a perpetual underclass. As Ross has discussed recently, the selection process at highly selective colleges and universities also tends to limit access for poor and working-class white students:

But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

In many respects, these ought to be constituencies whose interests Santorum would want to defend, since many of them also happen to be socially and culturally conservative, but he is so preoccupied with affirming America as a land without classes and brimming with boundless opportunity that he cannot move beyond the easy point-scoring against Pawlenty’s self-promotion to see this. These are constituencies that are poorly represented overall, they are scarcely represented at all by their Republican elected officials, and they respond favorably to conservatives who can appeal to both their social conservatism and their economic interests. They would be better-served if the politicians that claim to represent them followed Prof. Deneen’s advice in his recent TAC article:

The best way is to connect explicitly the massive inequalities fostered by the new meritocratic arrangements that Connecticut enjoys with the bleeding-heart claims of its own purported liberalism and thereby—like the prophets of old—call them to account.

Presumably, Santorum would be well-suited to making arguments linking family stability and education with social and economic opportunity, and he could return to some of the ideas about Catholic social obligation that made him an advocate for anti-poverty causes. Of course, that was before he started railing against “Islamic fascism” and became obsessed with the growing menace of Venezuela. It’s a shame that one of the few national Republicans who might have actually understood and appreciated the constructive arguments Patrick Deneen, Phillip Blond and our friends at Front Porch Republic have been making for stronger social obligations feels compelled to endorse such myths.

The conservative responses to Jacob Heilbrunn’s Foreign Policy article, “The End of the Establishment,” have been almost uniformly negative. Heilbrunn slips up in a couple places, especially when he sets up a fairly simple opposition between “pragmatic” internationalists on one side and neoconservatives and unilateralist nationalists on the other. Many neoconservatives are often unilateralist and internationalist at the same time, and some very aggressive hawks are not necessarily nationalists, if we assume that nationalists are primarily concerned with the national interest. Nonetheless, the phenomenon he is describing is real. There is an older generation of Republican realists that is now largely at odds with younger Republican political leaders, policy analysts and activists. At least when it comes to ratifying START, the former seem to have most of expertise and the latter have most of the influence on the right.

Jamie Fly’s response is the most amusing, as he concludes with the following passages:

What Heilbrunn fails to grasp is that his desired foreign policy (and President Obama’s) is at odds with the views of the American public. Americans don’t accept that the United States is in decline. They like the idea that there is something exceptional about their country. They have no problem with cutting deals with countries like China and Russia, but they want their President to make sure that we get the best deal possible and only cede as much as necessary. They want their president to speak out in support of those fighting for democracy and human rights. And they don’t like to see their government neglect democratic allies while negotiating with repressive regimes.

Americans want a values-based foreign policy, not a cold, calculating one. This, not a neocon sponsored coup, is why there is a broad foreign policy consensus on the Right today.

This is amusing because Obama’s handling of foreign policy is consistently one of his strongest areas in polling. It simply isn’t true that Obama’s foreign policy is “at odds with the views of the public.” For that matter, there is no evidence that Obama accepts that the U.S. is in decline. There is ample evidence that Obama believes in American exceptionalism. The START agreement ceded very little in the service of American security. Obama has not “spoken out” in support of dissidents when doing so might jeopardize their cause, and for the millionth time the administration has not “neglected democratic allies.” Fly takes for granted that the public supports his objections to the Obama administration when they do not, and he then conjures up errors the administration has not committed to back up his original false claim. In other words, there is “broad foreign policy consensus on the Right today” because most Republicans and conservatives have simply been inventing claims about mistakes that Obama has not made, attributed views to him he does not hold, and imagined that most Americans reject administration policies that do not exist.

No, Russia is not “in the lead” in isolating Iran. Yes, the “reset” is working in other ways, but it is still correct to argue that the last round of sanctions was significantly weakened in order to gain Russian and Chinese support. Anything resembling “biting” or “crippling” or severe sanctions of any kind was never going to receive their support. That is what matters, and on that point skeptics of all stripes were proved right. Hawks like to focus on Iran sanctions and Russia’s reluctant support for them when they argue that the “reset” has not paid off for the United States because they are anti-Russian and they are therefore offended by the “reset” itself. They like to make hay out of the purported linkage between Iran sanctions and shifting missile defense out of Poland and the Czech Republic because they want to bludgeon Obama for “selling out” allies to Russia. All of this is nonsense, but it has more to do with their dislike of Obama’s Russia policy than anything else.

What has prompted Moscow’s recent chastisement of Iran is the obvious displeasure with Ahmadinejad in the Kremlin after it did a significant amount to protect Iran from harsher sanctions only to be berated by Ahmadinejad for its supposed treachery. It is a fairly superficial diplomatic spat caused by the typically careless rhetoric of Iran’s demagogic president. Naturally, The Jerusalem Post gave the story a more dramatic headline to give the impression that Iran is losing its patrons, but if we look at the substance of the story we find that Moscow issued a stern rebuke and did nothing more. The Russian “turn” against Iran is about as real and significant as the “rift” between the U.S. and Israel over settlements, which means that it isn’t real or significant.

Jim Antle answers my criticisms of recent Republican and conservative critics of the war in Afghanistan:

I’d only offer two rejoinders. The first is that any successful political movement is going to include its share of opportunists. In the 1990s, the last time conservative Republicans opposed wars and nation-building exercises in large numbers, you saw a mix of people who were genuinely trying to move the right’s foreign policy in a less interventionist direction (Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, John Hostettler), partisan Republicans who simply disliked “Democrat wars,” GOP members of Congress trying to preserve their legislative power agaisnt a Democratic executive, and hawks who didn’t think Haiti and Kosovo were the best use of our military in light of other threats. That kind of coalition-building is necessary in practical politics.

Second, full-throated non-interventionism is not going to be the majority position among conservative Republicans in the foreseeable future. Reintroducing ideas like costs, unintended consequences, the intractability of various foreign conflicts, and even the level of restraint anticipated by the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine would all be steps in the right direction for conservatives who reject the idea of benevolent global hegemony.

These are sound points. Successful political movements do not require universal agreement on every policy, and the more successful a movement is the more opportunists it is likely to acquire. Such movements also require compromise and an ability to recognize the limited appeal of a purist message. Bringing a large number of Republicans around to being very reluctant to start wars and to use force by having them focus on the long term consequences of such actions would undeniably represent an improvement over the status quo, and it would create an additional obstacle that interventionists would have to overcome when they try to launch a new war.

However, it seems to me that a successful movement, if it is going to be an enduring movement, also requires some shared agenda beyond agreeing on the one policy it opposes. Even if we all agreed that it is now imperative to oppose the war in Afghanistan (and I don’t agree), a tactical alliance with impatient Iran hawks and reflexive opponents of Obama would last only as long as Afghanistan delayed confronting Iran or as long as Obama was still in office. For the sake of argument, let’s say that all non-interventionists cut new “antiwar” Republicans a lot more slack, stop pointing out their flaws, and encourage and support them in the future. Are they in turn going to become less aggressive towards Iran or Russia or whatever their preferred target of vilification happens to be that week? Probably not, because they believe those are the “real” threats we are ignoring while we are preoccupied elsewhere. That strikes me as a bad deal. So I am generally wary of war criticism that says, “We are being distracted from the real threat over there!” In the 1990s, one of the principal “real” threats opponents of Balkan interventions kept citing was Iraq, and within the first two years of a Republican administration the U.S. was invading Iraq. In exchange for a few years of largely ineffective, half-hearted resistance to Balkan adventurism and nation-building, the U.S. plunged into the worst foreign policy debacle of the last generation.

Many of my non-interventionist friends see the new Republican skepticism about nation-building as a bridge that can bring hawkish conservatives more towards our view, but what keeps worrying me is that the same people who now find nation-building wasteful and futile never seem to think that far ahead when it comes to starting wars that ruin whole nations. Instead of a recognition of limits on American power, impatience with nation-building (or even with the most minimal reconstruction efforts) seems just as often to be an unwillingness to take full responsibility for the decision to use force. While this reflects a desire to minimize costs to the U.S., which is a good start, this perversely makes the decision to use force easier and less politically risky, and that in turn tends to make interventions more frequent rather than less. Becoming more conscious of the costs of prolonged wars doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be more reluctance to use force next time. All that it does guarantee is that there will be less patience with any attempted reconstruction afterwards.

Jim was writing his original article on the Tea Party, so it is appropriate to consider the recent forays that Tea Party-aligned politicians and organizations into foreign policy debates. The Tea Party Caucus in the House could conceivably be one of the building blocks of the movement Jim describes, so it was unfortunate that almost half (22) of the 46-member caucus were among the co-sponsors of H.Res. 1553 the other day. (Via Scoblete) As you will remember, this is the resolution expressing support for an Israeli strike on Iran. Many other Republicans not identified with the Tea Party co-sponsored the resolution as well, but self-identified Tea Partiers among House Republicans disproportionately supported this resolution.

Getting out of a perceived quagmire to plunge the nation into a firestorm seems like a very large step in the wrong direction, but this is what Chaffetz would have us do, and many members of the Tea Party Caucus aren’t all that interested in the first part. Opposing the war in Afghanistan while plumping for war with Iran isn’t just an inconsistency or a minor point of disagreement between like-minded people. It reflects a fundamentally distorted understanding of American interests and represents a typical exaggeration of foreign threats. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I confess that I don’t see many steps in the right direction when Republicans still claim to see an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist just as they saw an Iraqi threat that didn’t exist.

By chance, my column on Romney and START has come out on the same day that National Review has provided Romney with another opportunity to embarrass himself. Mitt Romney seems not to have learned anything from the thorough thrashing his first op-ed against START ratification received, as he has written a response to Sen. Lugar’s rebuttal that mostly just repeats previous errors and misleading statements.

For some reason, Romney continues to defend the odd claim that the language of the treaty’s preamble is binding and restrictive of missile defense. It isn’t either of these things. Romney is reduced to affirming the most pro-Russian spin on a non-binding preamble to make his objection seem credible. Romney also claims that “it [the treaty] accedes to Russia’s insistence that there is an interrelationship between strategic offensive weapons and missile defense.” This is not simply something that Russians insist on. There is a rather obvious interrelationship between the two things. Fred Kaplan addressed this in his thorough demolition of Romney’s original op-ed:

Yes, the treaty’s preamble notes that there is a relationship between strategic defense and strategic offense. This is Arms Control 101.

Acknowledging this in a preamble commits the United States to nothing in terms of limiting current or planned missile defense projects. There are no specific “missile-defense measures in the body of the treaty” that anyone responsible for our missile defense programs wants to have, and that includes the provision ruling out silo conversion. So there have been no real concessions to Russia here, and certainly no major ones. Kaplan also easily dismissed Romney’s objections to the treaty’s creation of a Bilateral Consultative Commission:

This is silly. Previous arms treaties—negotiated by Democrats and Republicans—have created similar commissions. This one, like the others, has no “broad latitude to amend the treaty.” In fact, Article XV of New START states explicitly that the commission can make no changes that affect “substantive rights and obligations.” Its purpose, as noted in several other sections (Articles V and XIII of the treaty, Part VI of its protocol), is to “resolve any ambiguities that may arise” over the 10 years that it remains in effect. These articles contain no “specific reference to missile defense,” by the way.

Romney re-states his vastly exaggerated claim of Russia’s advantage in tactical nuclear weapons, and he completely fails to address the argument that ratifying the new START is critical to making progress on negotiating on reductions in tactical nuclear warheads. Romney’s claim was misleading and factually incorrect earlier this month, and it is still misleading and factually incorrect. The same goes for his complaint that “America gives and Russia gets,” when this is an egregious distortion of the treaty’s provisions, and his objection about counting each bomber as one bomb is misplaced. As Kaplan said the first time:

New START counts each bomber as if it is carrying just one nuclear bomb, even though it almost certainly carries several. This counting rule was established for practical reasons. A bomber might carry three bombs one day, a dozen the next, with no need to alter its design. There’s no way to verify how many it’s carrying. So they agreed just to count one bomber as one bomb.

The thing is, this counting rule is to the United States’ advantage, not Russia’s. We have 113 heavy bombers; they have 77. So, if this is what Romney’s ghostwriter meant to take note of, it’s not a problem with the treaty, not from the U.S. point of view.

Romney remains fixated on the dangers of rail-based ICBMs, to which Kaplan already replied the first time:

First, neither Russia nor the United States has any rail-based ICBMs or launchers. Second, the treaty does deal with mobile ICBMs, in two ways. Article IV, Section 1 states that ICBMs can be deployed “only at ICBM bases.” If, in some perverse wordplay, the Russians claim that a railroad line is a “base,” Article III, Section 5b notes that an ICBM is counted under the treaty’s limits the moment it leaves the production facility (which other sections of the treaty place under constant monitoring); it doesn’t matter where the missile goes afterward, it’s still counted as an ICBM. So while mobile missiles might not be “mentioned” by the treaty, they are, in effect, restricted.

Romney made no effort to incorporate or answer the objections of his critics. He simply re-phrased a large part of his original op-ed, sent it to a different outlet, and reiterated his senseless opposition to ratifying the treaty. It is somewhat telling that even Fred Hiatt’s editorial page came out in favor of ratification and dismissed Romney’s argument as lacking in substance. Ratification opponents might almost conclude that the Post rigged the debate in favor of the treaty by allowing Romney’s nonsense to serve as the main argument against it.

The most impressive thing about Romney’s second attempt is how he has managed to ignore almost everything Sen. Lugar (and every other critic) said in the course of dismissing Romney’s arguments as ill-informed and discredited. As far as I can tell, Romney’s so-called response to Lugar never engages Lugar’s rebuttal at any point. Many people have argued that Romney’s total lack of guiding convictions is actually an improvement over the stubbornness of George Bush, because Romney is so malleable and self-interested that he would never defend a foolish, discredited position once it became a political albatross. What we are seeing is that in practice Romney’s self-image as a well-informed, wonkish executive makes him just as resistant to admitting error as Bush’s willful ignorance ever did. Romney’s idea of leadership is to take soundings from a select group of experts and then act on what they have told him. In this case, Romney has decided that mistaken Heritage Foundation staffers are the best experts he can find, and now that he has received their advice nothing is going to dissuade him from attacking a treaty that most arms control experts believe ought to be ratified.

The takeout, from a first, fast reading: the U.S. is frustrated by evidence of continued Pakistani support for Afghan insurgents, and the war is not going well, according to the soldiers fighting it.

Neither of those facts is breaking news to anyone who’s been paying attention to the war, but the coordinated delivery of the stories to outlets in three of the largest troop-contributing nations to Afghanistan and sourced by the media-savvy WikiLeaks suggests the goal here is to catalyze an emerging consensus against the war. ~Laura Rozen

Rozen goes on to mention that the documents that have been released cover the years 2004-09, so they are necessarily going to provide an overwhelmingly negative picture of the war in Afghanistan as it was being managed according to the previous policy. That was the status quo before the current administration implemented its present plan, that was the default alternative that would have prevailed had the administration not made its changes, and it is also the approach favored by many of the war’s belated opponents. In other words, much of what is included in the leaked documents seems to discredit the way the war was being fought then, and it tells us much less about how it is being fought now. If the goal is to create a consensus against the war in Afghanistan, it might help if the leak told us something significant we didn’t already know.

As far as Pakistani complicity and “duplicity” are concerned, this is both old news and also somewhat misleading. The ISI sponsored the Taliban in the 1990s and had the blessing of Bhutto’s government to do so, and prior to the September 11 attacks Pakistan was one of three states in the world that recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. There have been elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence services supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan all along after Musharraf officially turned against them. On the other hand, for the last several years the Pakistani military has been waging a major military campaign against Taliban militias inside Pakistan despite the misgivings of many Pakistani officers and their resentment of being asked to fight what many of them still see as a primarily American war. Despite public protestations against U.S. drone strikes, Pakistan’s government has permitted the launching of drones from within Pakistan.

It is difficult to square the careful, strict rules of engagement U.S. forces are expected to follow in Afghanistan with the massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of people resulting from Pakistan’s offensives, but we should be able to recognize that Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership are actually doing a lot of what Washington wants. So when we talk about Pakistani “duplicity,” we need to understand that what we are perceiving as duplicity is in large part a function of the fragmented nature of the Pakistani state in which some elements continue pursuing an earlier agenda that directly conflicts with current policy. We should also recognize that the top Pakistani military and civilian leaders are already doing more than most allied governments would do under similar conditions.

My new column on Republican opposition to START ratification for The Week is now online.