Yet if we carried out a targeted campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, against sites used to train and equip militants killing American soldiers, and against certain targeted terror-supporting and nuclear-enabling regime elements, the effects are just as likely to be limited.

It’s unclear, for example, that Iran would want to risk broadening the conflict and creating the prospect of regime decapitation. Iran’s rulers have shown that their preeminent concern is maintaining their grip on power [bold mine-DL]. If U.S. military action is narrowly targeted, and declared to be such, why would Iran’s leaders, already under pressure at home, want to escalate the conflict, as even one missile attack on a U.S. facility or ally or a blockade of the Strait would obviously do? ~Jamie Fly & Bill Kristol

One need only think about how our government would react if a state or group launched unprovoked “targeted” attacks on major military and energy facilities to see how foolish this is. It wouldn’t matter to our government if the attack was “targeted” or not, and it wouldn’t matter to the American public what absurd rationalizations the attackers used to justify what they were doing. If a foreign military started bombing Sandia and LANL and assorted military bases throughout the Southwest and declared ahead of time that it would do this, I doubt that Washington would respond with a shrug. “Oh, they’re only attacking our nuclear labs and military facilities–that’s all right, then!” Americans would not respond to this by casting blame on their government for inviting attack, but would instead become excessively deferential to whatever course of action the government proposed and would mute whatever other criticisms of the government they may have had in the past. We would be fools to think that Iranians would respond differently.

If most Iranians support the nuclear program, and all Iranians oppose foreign military attacks on their country, what makes Fly and Kristol think that the government will have any choice except to retaliate to satisfy popular anger and demands for retribution? The hard-liners and hawks within Iran’s government would be greatly aided by any foreign attack, and they would exploit the opportunity to increase their hold on power and to quash any political opposition by portraying dissent as subversive. American hawks should be familiar with how this works, since they have practiced doing these very things against their domestic opponents.

The current Iranian government is under pressure at home right now, but everything that it can use to deflect attention away from itself and towards a foreign enemy is a gift to the regime. Obviously, an unjustified foreign attacks is ideal for the regime’s purposes. Barring a large-scale war aimed at toppling the Iranian government, which the American public would not support for very long and which our military would be hard-pressed to carry out given its already excessive obligations, the Iranian government might end up benefiting politically from a war that all Iranians would see correctly as a war of national defense against unwarranted attack. The Iranian military and security forces will not simply fold and disintegrate, and the growing power of the military and IRGC within the Iranian government may make it impossible for the civilian government to avoid launching retaliatory strikes.

If the Iranian government is most concerned with retaining its grip on power, as opponents of sanctions and military action have been saying for years, that means that it will act in its own basic self-interest. If regime preservation is its main priority, that suggests that any nuclear weapons program it might be pursuing is principally intended as a deterrent against attack. If retaining power is its main concern, the Iranian government is not at all likely to embark on suicidal or self-destructive paths that would lead to its certain annihilation. Note that Iran hawks attribute different degrees of rationality to the Iranian regime depending on the specific argument they happen to be making at any given moment. Yesterday Iran could not be trusted with nuclear weapons because it is run by a millennarian death cult and deterrence is of no use against religious fanatics, but today we can safely start a war with Iran that it will not dare escalate because it is too preoccupied with the survival of the regime. Both claims cannot be right, but both can be and are wrong.

Escalating a conflict that the U.S. starts would not definitely result in the regime’s defeat or overthrow, so it is much harder to argue that an Iranian government interested in self-preservation and consolidating its hold on power would not escalate. It is hard to see how any government with regional power ambitions could refrain from retaliating against an unprovoked attack, which is what U.S. military strikes on Iran would be. It doesn’t matter if many or most Americans do not see the proposed strikes this way. What does matter is that this is how Iranians and much of the rest of the world will see the strikes. When counting the costs of unnecessary, unjustified military strikes on Iran, we have to acknowledge the disastrous damage that a full-scale war against a united Iran would do to U.S. interests, armed forces and allies in the region. Pretending that military action against Iran will have minimal costs is as delusional as the action is reckless.

Update: Scoblete has more.

The West has a lot at stake in the outcome of the Iranian crisis. Were the regime to fall, a Green successor government–most likely to be headed by Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi for at least a while–would end support for terrorism in such hot spots as Iraq and Afghanistan and, at a minimum, cut back on the deals that the Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Ahmadinejad have made with Venezuela, Syria and Turkey. ~Michael Ledeen

This is comical stuff. What we do know of Mousavi’s views on Iranian foreign policy tells us that none of this is certain and most of it is highly unlikely. Much would depend on the structure of the next government and the role of the military and IRGC in influencing policy, but even if a Green government could come to power without having to make any concessions to the military and security forces it is not at all obvious that it would end its support for militias in Iraq. Why would it? Because that is the friendly, pro-American thing to do? It would have even less reason to scale back agreements with these or any other states. Ledeen would like to see these things happen, and so he claims without any support that they would happen under a Green government.

Concerning the most recent deal negotiated with Turkey, Mehdi Khalaji pointed out that Mousavi has attacked the fuel-swap agreement because it conceded too much:

Yet despite the introverted nature of their struggle, both sides recognize the potential domestic political impact of a nuclear agreement — even the controversial trilateral Turkey-Brazil-Iran proposal — with the international community. The leaders of the opposition Green Movement are against such a development, believing that any deal with the current regime would lend legitimacy to Ahmadinezhad’s presidency and weaken their pro-democracy movement. Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of last year’s presidential candidates and now an opposition leader, disapproved strongly of both the October 2009 and May 2010 fuel-swap proposals for the Tehran Research Reactor. He even described last month’s Turkey/Brazil-brokered agreement as “another Treaty of Turkmenchay” [bold mine-DL] (an 1828 accord with Russia signed by an incompetent Iranian king and seen as humiliating to Iran).

The opposition believes it has a vested interest in the failure of any nuclear agreements negotiated by the current government, but it is going to frame its criticism in terms that make the opposition seem like the true defenders of Iranian sovereignty and national rights. The current government isn’t going to fall anytime soon, and there would be no way of knowing for sure what any successor government would like or what it would do, but what we know about Mousavi from his record and his current positions tells us that he may feel obliged to be less compromising on security and foreign policy issues than Ahmadinejad.

In almost any country, policy continuity from one administration to another is the rule. If the opposition’s leaders remain as committed to the legacy of the Islamic revolution as they seem to be, any government headed by them would still be working within a policy consensus that will not permit them to make radical, sudden changes in foreign policy orientation. To the extent that there are meaningful differences on foreign policy between the government and opposition leaders, these are disagreements over tactics and methods rather than sharp divisions over policy goals. Trusting in the accommodating attitude of a future Green government that may never come into existence is not an Iran policy. It is an illusion designed to mislead Americans into believing that many of the difficulties in U.S.-Iranian relations can simply be eliminated without any concessions on the part of our government.

Something that I don’t quite understand about Mitch Daniels’ proposed “truce” on social issues is why he thinks it is necessary. The Iraq war in 2006-07 and then the financial crisis and recession since 2008 sucked up all the political oxygen in the country and they have attracted almost all of the attention of political activists in one way or another for much of the last four years. The standard “hot-button” issues have not been at the center of most of the political debate for some time now. Across most of the country, gay marriage debates have been settled one way or another, and Roe v. Wade has so far not figured prominently in the confirmation battles for Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. A truce is redundant when these issues have receded into the background on their own and seem likely to stay there for some time. The very conditions Daniels invokes as the reason for the truce have made the truce unnecessary.

For that matter, it isn’t clear that the political importance of social issues necessarily distracts from or harms the emphasis on fiscal responsibility. The one time when social issues have become a major point of contention in recent debate was during the health care debate concerning federal funding of insurance policies that would pay for abortion procedures. To the extent that health care legislation was stalled by the resistance of pro-life Democrats on account of this, one could argue that the lack of a “truce” over social issues made it somewhat more difficult for the majority to pass health care legislation, and on the whole fiscal conservatives would regard that as a good thing. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how the two are even related closely enough that a social issues truce will make it easier to reduce the debt and reform entitlements.

Regardless, it is not as if the country has been so roiled by social issues in the last few years that we are in desperate need of a cease-fire. We aren’t failing to tackle the debt and entitlements because we are too consumed by divisions over social issues. We are failing to tackle the debt and entitlements because there are powerful constituencies that will react strongly to any attempt to rein in spending, because there is absolutely no political will to impose fiscal restraint and discipline in Congress, and because the opposition party has become a cynical defender of the entitlement status quo as part of its bid to regain power. Daniels needs to explain the mechanism by which de-emphasizing social issues makes Congressional Republicans less opportunistic and unprincipled in their embrace of Medicare. If he has a way to do that, we would all like to hear about it.

So Daniels’ proposed truce is fairly harmless in its effects, because it isn’t going to change very much in practice. Obviously, what it probably will harm is any Daniels presidential campaign that has to compete seriously in Iowa and South Carolina. The problem for Daniels is not that it will make him seem less credible to social conservative activists, as he has as good a record on their priorities as anyone. If Romney can be taken seriously as a social conservative, Daniels should have no difficulty assuaging any doubts this truce talk might create. Daniels’ problem is that the truce idea will sound like another call for social conservatives to accept that their priorities are going to be relegated to the bottom of the agenda once again. This does not change much in practice, because social conservative priorities have been at the bottom of the Republican agenda forever, but politically it sends another signal to social conservatives that they are expected to support the GOP reliably no matter how little they get for their steadfast support.

It is fitting that it is Huckabee who has already started attacking Daniels’ proposal. It was Huckabee’s presidential campaign in 2007-08 and the reactions it generated among Republican and conservative leaders that taught social conservative activists a lesson about how unwilling party and movement leaders were to have one of the social conservative activists’ own as the nominee and party leader. Were Huckabee to be nominated and were he somehow to win the election in 2012, Huckabee would not govern all that differently than Daniels would with respect to social issues, so this is all just a matter of positioning and image management. It is a rhetorical maneuver, but it is not entirely meaningless. Daniels is presenting himself as the “reasonable” conservative who will say that he wants to put aside culture wars and focus on fiscal and economic problems, which gives the impression of wanting to avoid political divisiveness while actually emphasizing policy priorities that will end up being far more controversial and divisive. Meanwhile, Huckabee is playing to the social conservative activist base that made him a competitor in the primaries last time.

So Daniels seems to be trying to occupy the ground vacated by Jon Huntsman when the latter went to Beijing. If it weren’t associated with political disaster, Daniels’ motto might be, “Competence, not ideology.” His own solid record as a social conservative may make him think that he has the option of appearing less combative on social issues. As a popular and reasonably successful governor, Daniels wants to fill the role of the competent, problem-solving executive that all other potential 2012 contenders have left open. This is the role that some of Mitt Romney’s supporters wished he had tried in 2008 and it is the role that Romney seems dedicated to avoiding with his insipid foreign policy views and his shameless pandering to the base on a bailout he previously supported and a health care bill modeled on legislation he signed. To right-leaning independents Daniels seems to want to say that he is conservative, but not overly zealous, and to rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives he is holding himself out as the sort of candidate Romney would be if the latter had any stable convictions.

One of the more absurd responses to the flotilla raid during the last two weeks has been the sudden discovery of the importance of Armenian genocide commemoration by many of the same people and institutions that used to go out of their way to cast doubt on the reality of the genocide or to mock efforts to commemorate it with a non-binding resolution in Congress. Three years ago, when the new Democratic majority under Pelosi was seriously considering bringing the genocide resolution to a vote (partly because of the strong influence of Armenian-Americans in California politics), The Washington Times published one of the most appallingdenialist op-eds by Bruce Fein. Today Turkey has become the new target of vilification, particularly on the American right, and so recognizing the genocide has suddenly become so great an imperative that The Washington Times has published an op-ed by Raffi Hovanissian that joins in the vilification campaign while also arguing for genocide recognition. Indeed, bashing Turkey has apparently become important enough that the reason why Turkey is being vilified seems to have been lost on the editors at the Times, as Hovanissan writes this:

Israel’s blockade of Gaza is wrong and requires resolution. Palestine, like mountainous Karabagh, has earned its right of sovereign statehood.

If the blockade is wrong and requires resolution, how exactly was Turkey in the wrong by permitting or even encouaging activists to try to break it? If Hovanissian thinks Palestine and Karabakh should both have status as sovereign states, why would he take this opportunity to side with the government that is doing to Palestinians the same thing he complains that Turkey is doing to Armenia and Karabakh? The initiative to re-open the border between Turkey and Armenia has stalled, but does anyone think that Ankara is going to be more inclined to relent in its pro-Azeri position in the future if Armenians, especially former Armenian foreign ministers, choose this moment to jump on the anti-Turkish bandwagon? Hovanissian may not appreciate how bizarre it is for him to take to the op-ed pages of a newspaper that happily entertained the arguments of pro-Turkish lobbyists who were working to quash recognition of the genocide just a few years ago, but the cynicism on the part of the newspaper’s editors is awesome to behold.

There is no question that Ankara’s efforts to quash genocide recognition in Congress here is infuriating and wrong, and I have written many times over the last three years against this lobbying and the state-enforced genocide denial in Turkey. For years and decades, “pro-Israel” figures, hawks and hegemonists all rallied against the genocide resolution because they claimed they did not wish to damage our valuable alliance with Turkey. I have normally ridiculed the assumption that a non-binding resolution, even one with great symbolic importance, was going to damage a major military and political alliance significantly, and I still take that view. Until the last two weeks, I could at least take seriously that there were many reasonable people who opposed the genocide resolution because they feared it would unnecessarily strain relations with Turkey. With some important exceptions, I no longer think that’s true.

Now some of the very same people who pretended that a non-binding resolution commemorating the victims of a CUP government that ceased to exist ninety years ago was going to be a terrible blow to the U.S.-Turkish relationship are working overtime to destroy that relationship. These hawks are now so intent on wrecking the relationship that they are even trying to co-opt genocide commemoration simply to score points against the Turkish government. And why is Turkey the new villain? Because it has not been as subservient to U.S. policies and because it has been unduly critical of Israel. Unfortunately, because genocide commemoration has been stymied for so many years by many of these hawks and their allies, there is going to be an impulse to capitalize on the situation, push through the genocide resolution when resistance is at its weakest, and thereby guarantee that Turkish-Armenian relations will remain in limbo for years and decades to come.

There is an opportunity here for the Republic of Armenia and Diasporan Armenians to generate some goodwill in Turkey by supporting Turkey’s complaints over the raid and the blockade, and possibly revive the chances of Turkish-Armenian rapprochement. That opportunity will be lost if Armenia and American supporters of genocide commemoration effectively throw in their lot with a government that has subjected a large civilian population to immiseration and poverty and has killed civilians who were attempting to bring them aid. Congress should pass the resolution, but it should do so in an atmosphere in which it is clear that it is not part of a petulant attack on the modern Turkish republic, and it certainly should not pass it as part of the general anti-Turkish hysteria building in Congress on account of Congressional support for Israel’s wrongdoing against Turkey.

It was the summer of the “Twitter Revolution,” it was 1979 redux, it was the beginning of the end of the 30-year Islamic regime in Iran. The year, we were assured, marked the demise of clerical reign; it was merely a matter of time before the Shia Humpty fell. Iran had a new face—youths who, armed with cell phones and Facebook accounts, were about to wipe the aged Islamic revolutionaries off the Persian map. And the world was momentarily bathed in their color, green—the color of candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign to unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—in solidarity with the peaceful demonstrators who deplored their stolen election. There was no point engaging a regime that was on its way out, we were told, because the regime was fatally wounded not by Western sanctions or by a military strike, but by millions of its own citizens demanding to know, “Where is my vote?” It was June 2009, a year ago this week, and for several weeks, even months, those ideas seemed unassailable.

Obviously, they were wrong. ~Hooman Majd

Earlier this year, Majd wrote what was by most accounts the best analysis of the Green movement. He can probably be best described as a skeptical sympathizer: he wants Iranian opposition efforts to secure political reforms and civil rights to succeed, but he doesn’t harbor unrealistic ideas that the entire movement is some radical, anti-regime force that is poised to topple the government. The last six months since he wrote that analysis have vindicated his claims.

The follow-up column is also worth reading in its entirety, and I will come back to it, but I wanted to address Majd’s observation about the “unassailable” ideas he describes. He is absolutely right that these were the prevailing, overwhelmingly dominant ideas at the time, and to some extent they continue to be the default view of Western Green movement sympathizers. Iran hawks and other opponents of engagement with Iran took shelter behind these “unassailable” ideas in order to ridicule Obama for “weakness” and “appeasement” or to position themselves as idealistic friends of Iran’s democrats rather than the shabby, amoral, deal-making realists. To assail these ideas was to be considered a supporter of the Iranian regime, an apologist for Ahmadinejad, and all the rest of the insults opponents of the Iraq war had hurled at them seven and eight years ago. One of the reasons why I kept making counter-arguments against claims that the Green movement was going from strength to strength was that these arguments seemed to be built mostly on exaggeration and emotion, and there was never much evidence to persuade a skeptic that these arguments were correct. You were supposed to believe in the power of the Green movement because it felt like the right thing to believe, or else you were just a heartless villain rejoicing in the deaths of protestors. That was more or less the quality of the debate. Critical thinking and sober analysis didn’t matter a year ago, and they didn’t matter for much of the last year when it came to this subject. What mattered was demonstrating empty solidarity with a movement most Westerners misunderstood and one that many wanted to use for their own ends.

One of the reasons I spent as much time as I have over the last year attacking and questioning the claims of Green movement sympathizers here in the U.S., is that it was quite clear to me that isolating and vilifying Iran can only strengthen the hand of the Iranian government at home, split the opposition, and distract Iranians from domestic grievances by creating an external challenge to Iranian sovereignty and nationalism. Nonetheless, this approach of isolation and vilification was exactly what most Western sympathizers urged the administration to adopt. Because there was so much outrage at how the Iranian government had treated its dissidents, Green movement sympathizers wanted nothing to do with engagement any longer, and this ended up aligning them in the debate with Iran hawks who saw the Green movement as a useful short-cut to “solve” the problems they have with Iran. The goal of regime change was still there, but the heavy lifting was going to be assigned to the Iranian opposition.

One small problem with this was that this was not what the Iranian opposition wanted. As Majd explains, this is what Iranian exile groups and their Western supporters wanted the Iranian opposition to want, and it is what the exiles and Westerners claimed that they wanted. The exile groups were trying to turn what could have conceivably turned into a broader-based political protest movement into a politically non-viable anti-regime force. As Majd writes:

A raft of Iranian opposition groups and individuals, mostly abroad, have jumped aboard the Green train—in some cases even claiming the mantle of leadership—and their basic agenda (overthrow of the Islamic regime) invariably contradicts the Green Movement agenda (electoral transparency and civil rights). Statements of support from the much-despised Mujahedin-e Khalq, based in Paris, and the green wristband worn by the shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, were godsends to the government, which has from the start labeled the Green Movement a “velvet” or “color” revolution backed by foreigners. Green leaders have taken pains not to advocate the end of their government, since this is clearly the regime’s most potent charge against them. Though a few of their ranks may harbor seditious dreams, the movement writ large is about civil rights, not pro-Western revolution.

On the whole, Green movement sympathizers in the West provided endless ammunition to the Iranian government that wanted to weaken the opposition’s true claims that the opposition was an entirely Iranian phenomenon. Majd continues:

Commentators abroad who desperately wanted to help the Green Movement not only hindered but actively hurt it. To begin with, there was the sheer inanity of equating the Iranian opposition with revolution and a movement to overthrow the Islamic system [bold mine-DL] (not recognizing that even Ahmadinejad, and certainly Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, still enjoy a fair measure of support).

By celebrating them as radical revolutionaries and ignoring or downplaying the insider credentials of many of the movement’s figureheads, Western admirers imputed their own hopes to the movement and thereby did some significant political damage to the movement by portraying it as a subversive, anti-regime force. It would probably have been better to remain completely aloof and skeptical than offer this sort of harmful “support.” On the whole, the administration responded wisely for the first few months by saying as little as possible, but gradually came under pressure to pay more attention to the Green movement from the usual quarters that are always insisting that the U.S. “do something” about everything on the planet. Of course, this is a crucial part of the problem with much of the Western sympathy for the movement: unless it is an anti-regime force, it is of no use to the U.S. and the West, and it is therefore of little interest. As we have seen in recent years in their reactions to political changes in Turkey, Japan, Brazil and other countries throughout Latin America, many democratists quickly lose interest in democratization abroad when it threatens to complicate things for the U.S.

The Green movement has been struggling for Iranian rights and for the sake of their own country. Perhaps someday they or their successors will have some success, but whatever happens it has nothing to do with us. Unlike many of the “pro-Western” movements Washington has enthusiastically backed in the last ten years, the Green movement is not interested in dragging their countrymen against their will into a Western orbit in ways contrary to their national interests. What we cannot seem to abide here in the U.S. is the idea that there is a political reform movement in Iran that has emerged and developed pretty much entirely on its own, does not owe Washington anything for its existence, and does not particularly harbor “pro-Western” inclinations on contested issues. For a lot of its sympathizers, it has to be pursuing the same goals of regime change and compliance with Western demands, or it doesn’t really count. I agree with Majd that the assumption that the Green movement somehow needs U.S. support is insulting to Iranians, and more than that it reflects the fundamentally self-absorbed assumption of so many of our politicians and pundits that every great political change in the world can only be brought about through the exercise of American power and influence.

But even a gathering of experts won’t accomplish much unless a skilled leader uses their perspective to guide the recovery. So far, it has been the CEO of BP who has been managing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The president surely can’t rely on BP — its track record is suspect at best: Its management of this crisis has been characterized by obfuscation and lack of preparation. And BP’s responsibilities to its shareholders conflict with the greater responsibility to the nation and to the planet.

The president must personally lead the effort to solve the crisis. He cannot delegate this quintessential responsibility of his presidency in the way he delegated the stimulus bill, the cap-and-trade bill and the health care bill. It may be an instance of learning on the job, but it is a job only he can do. ~Mitt Romney

Perhaps nothing has more completely captured everything I dislike about Mitt Romney than this op-ed. It is shallow, opportunistic, demagogic, and yet at the same time overflowing with technocratic arrogance. Romney seems to think that Presidents are capable of working miracles, and the failure to do so is the result of a lack of will. If only Obama were willing to lead, all would be well! One of the great mistakes that some Presidents have made is a failure to delegate and an insistence on personally inserting themselves into everything. There are some responsibilities that cannot be shouldered by anyone but the President. This isn’t one of them, and if Romney thinks that it is he has no business seeking or holding the office of President.

Behind all of Romney’s criticisms is a creepy desire to have a Leader who shows us the way in every single thing, and who is responsible for responding to every accident and mishap that occurs. It is all the more absurd coming from the person who cannot stop boasting of the wonders of market economies and the virtues of freedom. Romney apparently wants the President deeply involved in cleaning up after a private corporation when there is practically little or nothing he can do. On one day he claims to hate government interference, which is supposedly why he now supports the repeal of health care legislation, and on the next he is demanding the firm smack of executive overreach.

Since when is it the “quintessential responsibility” of Obama’s Presidency to fix an oil spill caused by corporate negligence? If this sort of micromanagement and megalomania is what we can expect from a future President Romney, we should be glad that he is not in office and that the current President at least has some minimal sense of the limitations of government power.

Andrew quoted this from Tony Judt’s short interview with Tablet magazine:

But this does seem an opportunity to point out that if Israel is a normal state then it just can’t behave this way and be our favorite ally. I think that the present moment may be propitious because the fact that it was Turkey—once Israel’s closest friend in the region, a NATO partner, a Western-oriented Islamic state which is also democratic and one with huge and growing influence in the region—that was affected, offended, and insulted meant that even the White House could not ignore what happened.

This is a nice thought, and I would like Judt to be right, but quite clearly the White House has done as much as it could to ignore what happened. Not only has the administration done nothing to acknowledge that it was Turkey that was “affected, offended, and insulted,” but it has also actively sided against Turkey on every one of its demands thus far. There is a coordinated campaign to vilify and demonize Turkey in the press, and the administration has made no public effort to combat the exaggerations and misrepresentations of Turkey’s critics. Turkey is the the eighth-largest non-U.S. NATO contributor to the war in Afghanistan, and Washington is effectively indifferent when another ally kills eight of its citizens. An ally that has largely become a strategic liability has seriously wronged a much more important ally that actually contributes to regional security and has approximately 1,800 soldiers in Afghanistan, and predictably the administration has sided with the former. We can hope that Turkey won’t withdraw its soldiers to protest the shabby treatment it has received on this and other issues, but it wouldn’t be surprising and it is entirely avoidable.

I haven’t had anything to say about the Tuesday primary results from around the country. For the most part, there isn’t much to say about most of the races, but the California Republican primary results have generated some odd liberal commentary that I wanted to discuss. Beinart thinks the California GOP has missed an opportunity to defeat Barbara Boxer by nominating Carly Fiorina for Senate, and Harold Meyerson goes beyond that to declare Fiorina and Whitman unelectable. It’s strange that anyone is talking about the possibility of a Republican Senate pick-up in California, which is not very likely under any circumstances. It probably would have made no difference in the fall if Campbell had won the primary. Aside from some overenthusiastic conservative pundits, no one has ever seriously thought that Boxer was that vulnerable in the first place. It’s true that Fiorina is unelectable on the state level, but this is because of her record of incompetence as the CEO of HP more than anything else. That means that she is more unelectable than Campbell, but it doesn’t mean that Campbell could have actually won.

Unlike Fiorina, Whitman is not a failure as a corporate executive, and she is not running against an incumbent. There is a recent history of California electing Republican governors in the last two decades, including the current governor. California hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1986 (Pete Wilson), and California and the national GOP have been diverging politically ever since. Gubernatorial candidates can accommodate themselves to the political landscape of their state better than Senate candidates. The latter usually have to line up with most national party positions ahead of time, and they will be supporting the national party’s agenda in Congress. It is simply much harder to persuade Californians to send someone who will be a reliable vote for the Senate Republican leadership in Washington than it is to persuade them to bring in an executive to take care of the budget in Sacramento. That doesn’t mean that Whitman is going to win, but her chances were always going to be much better than any Republican running for Senate.

New Mexico is somewhat similar to California in this respect. Our state is heavily Democratic and predominantly Hispanic and Native American, but we periodically elect and sometimes re-elect Republican governors, including someone as fiscally conservative and libertarian-minded as Gary Johnson. When it comes to representation in the Senate, New Mexicans haven’t elected a non-incumbent Republican for Senate in over thirty years, and since Domenici retired Republican candidates have not done well here. This year Susana Martinez has a decent chance to defeat Lt. Gov. Denish in the gubernatorial race, but in an open race for Senate the Republican candidate would be fortunate to win 45%. In the 2008 open Senate race, Udall’s opponent Steve Pearce underperformed the McCain ticket and received just under 39% of the vote. Fiorina will be lucky if she does that well.

On the evening of April 28, 2003, a crowd of approximately 200 Iraqi civilians gathered outside U.S. Army headquarters in Fallujah to protest the occupation of their city. As tension grew, U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne stationed on the building’s roof began firing upon the crowd, killing at least 13 Iraqis and wounding more than 70. U.S. troops insisted that they fired only to defend themselves from gunfire coming from the crowd. The protesters claimed that they were unarmed and never fired at the soldiers.

The odds are that you have never beaten your breast or searched your soul over this incident in Fallujah. In fact, you have likely never even heard of this incident. And the odds are that you have never heard of the tens if not hundreds of incidents like it, in which civilians have been killed as U.S. soldiers fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. ~David Brog

Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am well aware of the “incident” Brog describes, I remember reading about it at the time, and I thought it was just the sort of terrible thing that was bound to result from invading and occupying another country. One of the reasons why I and many others opposed the invasion is that we wanted to keep such terrible things from happening. Though no one knew it at the time, that “incident” was an important provocation that helped make Fallujah a particularly strong center of the insurgency in western Iraq, so this “incident” that Brog thinks no one has ever heard of is better-known than he claims and far more important than he lets on. Yes, it was an outrage against the civilian population, but then so was the entire war! Fallujah was only one of the most well-known locations in all of Iraq, especially by the end of the second battle of Fallujah. Brog may have heard a few people complain about the war, of which this “incident” and the later destruction of much of Fallujah were products. Of course, Iraqi civilians had no government to protest on their behalf, as we had already destroyed their government.

It’s true that there was not as much attention paid to that particular event, and there are several reasons why “incidents” such as that one and others like it have not individually generated the same international outrage. Regardless of what one thinks about the wars in question, these have all happened in war zones. That doesn’t excuse them, but it makes them more understandable. War opponents rightly deplore them, and even some war supporters can see how harmful civilian deaths are to success in these wars, and almost all of them can agree on stricter rules of engagement that aim to prevent these things from happening. Because they happen in remote places in distant war zones, they are also harder to learn and report about, and the places where they happen do not have the built-in high profile of Israel and Palestine, which sympathizers of both sides unduly invest with extraordinary global significance.

The flotilla was sailing under the flags of states that were not at war with Israel. Indeed, several of them sailed under the flag of an official military ally. The ships were in international waters bound for a territory under a blockade of very questionable legality. It is doubtful that Israel had any legal right to board the ships, and in any case the decision to do so resulted in nine civilian deaths. The standard to which Israel is being held right now is a pretty simple one, and it is not terribly high: do not attack civilians in international waters when they are on a relief mission. This shouldn’t be a hard standard to meet.

Video records also make a difference in how people react to events. People have talked about the WikiLeaks video much more and for much longer than they have talked about almost any other “incident” in Iraq, because there is video to watch rather than reported accounts to read. There are now interviews with people who were aboard the Mavi Marmara who can confirm or reject earlier accounts, and most of them have much readier access to media outlets than people in Iraq and Afghanistan. That combined with the greater interest in matters related to Israel and Palestine creates the conditions for more attention, more reaction and commentary, and more criticism.

The people who laud Israel as the region’s only democracy, America’s “reliable ally”, and talk about it as a front-line state of the West contribute to the extraordinary attention paid to everything that happens in Israel and the territories as much as anyone else. Perhaps if we acknowledged that Israel is a “tertiary strategic interest” for the United States, as Anthony Cordesmann put it recently, then we could also acknowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just one of at least a dozen intractable political disputes with minimal strategic significance. That would probably help ensure that Israel receives less attention, both positive and negative. Somehow I don’t think “pro-Israel” people will accept that proposal.

On a slightly different point, one of the sillier complaints in the last week and a half has been that the U.N. is slow to act on complex, contentious, difficult international issues with potentially enormous implications for international stability one way or another, such as Iran’s nuclear program or the sinking of the Cheonan, but it was quick to issue condemnations of Israel’s unnecessary and outrageous attack in international waters. It is not hard to see why. There is no international consensus on Iran’s nuclear program, and to the extent that a consensus is beginning to form it is taking a very different shape than the one Washington wants to create, so it is necessarily more time-consuming and difficult to agree on how to proceed. It is important to get the response to North Korea’s outrage right so that it doesn’t lead to war, and it is necessary to get China to agree to that response so that it will be somewhat more effective. In other words, the U.N. has difficulty handling problems that are very difficult to solve. Recognizing this is treated by Israel’s reflexive defenders as some kind of deep insight into international affairs.

Practically every government concluded that the raid was wrong, and most governments have long since concluded that the blockade was wrong, so they are unlikely to be sympathetic to the argument that Israel was enforcing its blockade. The other governments know it was enforcing the blockade, which is a large part of what they find objectionable. Condemnation of the raid was swift not because Israel is being held to an impossibly high standard, but because this was a rather obvious case in which reaching a judgment was fairly easy. As it is, the weakened resolution condemning the “actions” on May 31 is purely symbolic. There are no penalties attached, and it is doubtful that the U.S. will allow any penalties to be imposed.

P.S. Later in his article, Brog does his best Jonah Goldberg imitation:

Many of my friends are horrified by Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Yet these same people never once questioned the United States’ blockade of Saddam-controlled Iraq throughout most of the 1990s.

I’m very doubtful of that, but let’s suppose this is true. That could mean one of a few things. Brog’s friends might have been uninformed about the consequences of Iraq sanctions, or they might have been foolish enough to believe that those sanctions were “working” to achieve some desirable goal rather than inflicting needless suffering on an entire nation. Maybe they came to recognize that Iraq sanctions had been a terrible, destructive policy and they would never make the same mistake of unquestioningly approving of another such policy. If they are Americans, perhaps they were less willing to admit that policies of their own government were so inhumane. Who knows? Brog’s many friends are not available to speak for themselves, and so we are left to rely on hearsay evidence as the core of Brog’s entire argument.

Towards the end, Brog writes:

The path toward terrorism begins with the erasure of moral lines. It starts with the equation of terrorists — who seek to kill civilians — with the armed forces who seek to stop the terrorists.

Actually, the path towards terrorism begins with the erasure of the lines between combatants and non-combatants and with the belief that everyone in an enclave, city or country is complicit in the actions of their regime and therefore equally culpable for its actions and its crimes. It seems as if defenders of the raid want to erase, or at least blur, that line, and they seem to endorse the idea of collective guilt on which all terrorism is based.