Israel had every right under international law to stop and board ships bound for the Gaza war zone late Sunday. Only knee-jerk left-wingers and the usual legion of poseurs around the world would dispute this. ~Leslie Gelb

The “usual legion of poseurs” at this point includes many of the governments currently on the Security Council, most especially Turkey, whose flag the attacked ship was flying. The Erdogan and Netanyahu governments have gone out of their way in the last year and a half to provoke and insult one another to their mutual detriment, but this is all together more serious and dangerous. If the activists on the flotilla should have expected violence, as Gelb argues, what were the Israelis expecting the activists to do when they boarded their ships? Give them a hug?

The alliance between Israel and Turkey has been weakening for years, but something like this could be enough to damage it more than anything we have seen so far. That would have negative repercussions mostly for Israel, as it already has few significant allies and no other Muslim allies, and it cannot afford to keep provoking and alienating the relatively few governments that have had good relations with it in the past. Having flouted international institutions and international law for a long time, it will not be easy for Israel to take cover behind the protections of the latter. It’s not at all clear to me that Israel had any legal right to board civilian ships in international waters, but then I don’t have much sympathy for blockading an impoverished enclave that the blockading government spent several weeks devastating with an excessive military response.

The people who should be most furious about this are Israel’s reflexive defenders. They are reduced to making excuses for the inexcusable consequences of a bungled raid carried out in support of a misguided blockade policy that has been damaging Israel’s reputation every day since it began. It ought to make them more critical of the recklessness and stupidity of the Netanyahu government, but on the whole this has not been their response.

Gelb resorts to the oldest, most tired argument in the “pro-Israel” arsenal: the double standard used against Israel. Of course, it would be ideal if Turkey were as outraged by the sinking of the Cheonan as it is about this, but we all know things don’t work that way. The Mavi Marmara was a Turkish-flagged ship, everyone knows the AKP government has taken a strong interest in Gaza and that it has some sympathy for Hamas, and Israel is supposedly Turkey’s ally. That makes this raid more politically significant for obvious reasons. It is simply present-day reality that most governments have or pretend to have more interest in the conflict in Israel and Palestine than they have in other conflicts. For that matter, North Korea’s provocative and outrageous actions are what we have come to expect from the dictatorship there. Does Gelb really want to start having Israel judged by the same standard applied to North Korea?

The North Korean sinking of the Cheonan was also outrageous and inexcusable, but there are few things that can be done in response that would not disastrously escalate the conflict. When confronted with such an aggressive outrage, it is understandable to wish to respond in kind, but one has to consider the consequences of retaliation. The attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the Mumbai attacks provided India with more than enough justification to take military action against those responsible inside Pakistan, but it wisely and admirably chose restraint instead of the path of escalation that Israel seems intent on choosing repeatedly.

Indulging in outrage when there is nothing one can do and the state responsible will not respond to any penalty imposed is fairly useless. The outraged reaction to Israel’s raid suggests that most governments still regard Israel as a more or less responsible power that will attempt to correct its mistakes, or else many of them probably wouldn’t waste their energy complaining. Regardless, Gelb should regard the outrage as a good sign. It means that most governments around the world have not resigned themselves to thinking of Israel as nothing more than a dangerous pariah. It will be a far worse day for Israel when the reaction to the next blunder is the sigh of resignation, “Well, really, what can you expect?”

Perhaps most galling about the overall defense of the raid is the constant invocation of self-defense. Everything Israel does is always done in self-defense, no matter how excessive, disproportionate, unnecessary, wrong or aggressive it is. When everything becomes a matter of self-defense and the proper distinctions between actual legtimate self-defense and reckless excesses are erased, pretty soon most of the rest of the world won’t pay any attention to Israeli claims of self-defense even when they are legitimate. There was not much of a reservoir of goodwill for Israel in the world after the war in Lebanon, but successive Israeli governments have done everything they can to exhaust what little remains in that reservoir. We are not watching Israel defend itself. We are watching Israel slowly destroy itself.

But it does not change the fact that one reason liberals (especially those of a European persuasion) have fallen out of love with Israel is that it — along with the United States — was founded on and persists in maintaining a democratic and nationalist vision.

This is why the liberal critics bracket Israel and the U.S. They claim they do so because the U.S. supports Israel. Actually, they do it because they reject the worldview on which both nations are founded, the worldview that has motivated the U.S. to support Israel. For the critics, democracy and nationalism must ultimately be in conflict. ~Ted Bromund

This could apply to some liberals, but it doesn’t seem to apply to Beinart at all, and it misses the larger point rather badly. Some critics of Israel on the left may be genuinely post-Zionist and regard Israeli nationalism as a fundamental problem that perpetuates conflict, but if we are speaking of liberals, and especially American liberals, this does not seem to be true at all. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find evidence over the last twenty years that most liberals believe democracy and nationalism are necessarily in conflict. As much as anyone, liberals have sympathized with, or openly advocated on behalf of, separatist and national independence movements around the world. This often involved exaggerating the liberal and democratic credentials of those movements, but there was no question that liberals have gone out of their way to regard many nationalist separatist movements as democratic movements. If self-determination was, as Bromund says, the “essence of liberalism,” most liberals today continue to embrace the “essence” of their worldview.

Liberal support for the principle of self-determination has been undeniable since the end of the Cold War, as we saw most dramatically in Bosnia and Kosovo. Liberal criticism of Israel focuses heavily on the denial of Palestinian independence, which is to say that many of these critics find fault with Israel because it is preventing the self-determination and self-government that they believe both Israelis and Palestinians should have. Obviously, in their support for a Palestinian state American liberals were among the first in the U.S. to arrive at the conclusion that the Palestinians were a nation that should govern itself back when more hawkish “pro-Israel” figures were still denying that Palestinians existed as a distinctive group of people. There were quite a few American liberals who gushed over the “Rose” and “Orange” revolutions in 2003 and 2004. They convinced themselves along with many others that the intensely anti-Russian nationalist demagogic leaders heading those revolutions were nonetheless good democrats, “reformers” and pro-Western. They took for granted that nationalism and democracy could complement one another, at least so long as the nationalism in question included hostility to Russia.

It seems to me that ethno-nationalism and democracy in a multiethnic state are in conflict, and pretty obviously and immediately so. One can have an ethnocracy in a state where one ethno-nationalism dominates at the expense of the rights of minorities, or one will tend to end up with a largely ethnically homogenous state that can retain both its ethno-nationalism and its democracy. What is strange about Bromund’s critique is that it doesn’t apply to Beinart in the least. Beinart remains a liberal convinced of the importance of preserving both Zionism and democracy together. In other words, Beinart does not believe that democracy and Zionist nationalism must ultimately conflict, but instead wants to find a way to keep them in balance without having to accept the agenda of someone like Avigdor Lieberman. Beinart wants to preserve a Zionism strong enough to keep Israel as a predominantly Jewish state, but not a Zionism so strong that it will never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state and one that must eventually expel, transfer or de-naturalize its Arab citizens.

I don’t know how adamant the Chinese leadership is about the issue, but I suspect that it would rank rather high as a national security issue. If the price of winning over China on Korea is a pledge to withdraw U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula after Korea was made whole, would neoconservatives embrace the trade-off, or damn the administration that made such a deal as selling out America’s interests in Asia and allowing China to expand her sphere of influence? ~Greg Scoblete

Anything is possible, but it is very likely that most American hawks generally and not just neoconservatives would be appalled by the suggestion of an American “retreat” from Korea and what would inevitably be called the “sell-out” to China. That would probably be the reaction to such a trade-off, even though there is arguably already no reason for U.S. forces to be in South Korea 57 years after the ceasefire. South Korea is considerably more populous and wealthier than the North, and it is more than capable of providing for its own defense. As Haass’ op-ed makes clear, there are no realistic options for compelling changes in North Korean behavior. The sanctions route has been tried and has been shown once again to be completely useless. Military retaliation would almost certainly lead to rapid escalation and a disastrous war.

It is all very well to talk about a future unified Korea, and there is nothing wrong with discussing this with China and South Korea, but if we lack the means to bring this about it is mostly just an expression of hope for what might be. Haass’ discussion of North Korean regime change isn’t very different from Haass’ belated enthusiasm for the Green movement, which he started arguing was critical to changing the Iranian regime at the time when it became clear that the movement was in no position to do this and was in any case not all that interested in being America’s cat’s paw. As in Iran, we cannot wish away the predicament by pretending that our solution is regime change, especially when there is no readily available means to change the regime. If neoconservatives want to claim this sort of wishful thinking as their own, they’re welcome to it.

Considering how poorly Haass seems to understand Chinese self-interest in connection with the Iranian nuclear issue, it is also not a good sign for his recommendations that almost everything in his proposal hinges on correctly understanding and appealing to Chinese self-interest. Perhaps China will intervene in the succession struggle after Kim Jong Il dies, but the kind of North Korean government that will suit China is one similar to the one led by Kim Il Sung: a government that heeds Chinese recommendations and does not create problems for Beijing. Such a pliant client North Korea could be an improvement, but it isn’t necessarily going to lead to the sort of settlement Haass has in mind.

Haass’ practical recommendation that Congress pass the South Korean free trade agreement to “send a message” demonstrates how limited our options are. I am skeptical that pushing ahead with a free trade agreement would meaningfully signal U.S. solidarity with South Korea. Trying to tie a trade agreement that isn’t really connected to the relevant security issues would probably end up sending a very mixed message. There would still be strong, concerted opposition to the agreement coming from labor and other groups, and it would not be very popular with an electorate that is generally dissatisfied with the effects of previous free trade agreements. Instead of showing American solidarity, this would create the impression that the country was evenly divided over support for South Korea, when that would be a significant exaggeration of any divisions that may exist. Having framed support for the agreement as proof of U.S. support, the strong opposition the agreement would certainly encounter could unintentionally signal the opposite of what Haass intended.

South Korean President Lee may have hinted at a desire for regime change in North Korea, but it is not at all clear that Lee would be willing to risk renewed warfare to make this happen. Any sustainable policy would have to enjoy the support of a broad consensus of South Koreans, but South Korean opinion over the last two decades has generally been trending against confrontational policies and the alliance with the U.S. The sinking of the Cheonan may have temporarily changed some minds, but on the whole Haass is arguing that the U.S. should press the South Korean government to pursue a course that is increasingly unwelcome in South Korea.

Moscow is not only seeking assurances from these countries that they will not seek to join the West. It is also seeking assurances from Western nations that they recognize this alleged sphere of special interest – and potentially give their tacit agreement to such new notions of limited sovereignty. That is one of the main issues embedded in a series of Russian policy pronouncements and the European security proposal of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. While no Western leader has yet endorsed this idea as official policy, one doesn’t have to travel very far in the diplomatic corridors before running across diplomats who are asking out loud whether some new and modern version of “Finlandization” might become an acceptable policy for countries whose prospects for Western integration seem to be sinking. ~Ronald Asmus

Something that never ceases to annoy me about Asmus’ sort of argument is the obliviousness to U.S. efforts to employ concepts of “balance of power, sphere of influence, and limited sovereignty” in its policies in different parts of the world. Humanitarian interventionists of the last two decades have taken it for granted that some states are not permitted to pursue their own internal policies free of interference. The idea of limited sovereignty was used to justify intervening in Kosovo, and it was the unspoken assumption behind the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq for twelve years. Neither of these had any international legal sanction. They were all obvious violations of state sovereignty, and hardly anyone in the political classes of the U.S. and western Europe batted an eye at any of them.

So it isn’t true that these concepts were abolished by a “belief in a new cooperative European security structure.” The vision the previous three Presidents pursued was one in which only the U.S. and our allies were permitted to put these concepts into practice. Over the last decade, especially after the recognition of Kosovo independence, Moscow started working on turning our own interventionist rhetoric and practice against neighboring states that the U.S. had made or was trying to make into clients. NATO expansion had brought the U.S. sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders, and Washington wanted to continue expanding this sphere even farther into the former Soviet Union, despite the fact that pluralities or majorities in the relevant countries did not want to align themselves with the U.S. at the expense of good relations with Russia.

Washington wanted to create a balance of power that is distinctly unfavorable to Russia on Russia’s borders, and it wanted to secure a sphere of influence maintained by openly anti-Russian governments. It also wanted to make Kosovo an exceptional case, because it was fine to continue violating Serbian sovereignty, but it is now absolutey wrong to violate Georgian or Ukrainian sovereignty. The U.S. cannot trample on state sovereignty some of the time, actively expand its sphere of influence in the vicinity of other major powers and declare publicly an intention to create “a balance of power that favors freedom,” and then react with outrage and shock when other major powers imitate the U.S., attempt to limit the expansion of America’s sphere of influence and attempt to shift the balance of power back again in their direction.

As for this Finlandization talk, arguably the only country to which this really applies today might be Georgia. Very clearly, Russia does not want Georgia in NATO, and thanks to Saakashvili’s recklessness it has now made it virtually impossible for Georgia to gain admission to the alliance. As much as some Georgians may want to pursue a pro-Western orientation including membership in NATO, the reality is that NATO will not take Georgia in and Georgian foreign policy truly is constrained by what Russia will permit. No one in the West has to like this, but it is the reality. We can formally maintain the fiction that small states that are economically dependent on major powers are free to set their own foreign policies, but we are kidding ourselves if we think this is how things are going to work.

The separatist republics now under Russian protection are the important, complicating factors that Asmus does not discuss here. Prior to the war, Georgia was committed to “reintegrating” them, and theoretically the Georgian government is still committed to this virtually impossible goal, which created a major flashpoint between Georgia and Russia. Under those circumstances, Washington’s push to bring Georgia into NATO was disastrously provocative, because it raised the possibility that Georgia could gain Western protection and cover for forcibly reintegrating the separatist republics and because it would have provided a Western security guarantee to a government headed by someone who was virulently and vocally anti-Russian. Indeed, even before Georgia had gained membership Saakashvili believed that he could count on Western support in the event of a conflict over these territories. It is clear that the promise of “further enlargement of Western institutions” encouraged him in this reckless, ruinous course, and so it is hard to understand what could be gained by any of the parties involved by continuing the push for more enlargement.

I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another. ~Peggy Noonan

Of these three things, only the handling of the oil spill has the potential to be as much of a political disaster for the administration as it has been an environmental disaster for the Gulf coast. Oddly enough, Obama is in this position partly because he had tacked towards the center on offshore drilling as part of a bid to win Republican support for climate change legislation. Had he been adamantly against offshore drilling all along, he might have been called an environmentalist ideologue and “out of touch” with the blessed center, but he could point to the oil spill as an example of why he took that view. Were he actually the left-winger Republicans like to pretend that he is, his response to a major oil spill by a multinational corporation would have been much more aggressive and angrier, but that isn’t who he is. Unfortunately, he is all too often “in sync with the center,” by which I mean the Washington centrists’ center, and that means accommodation and support for entrenched and powerful interests. It is largely because of his instinct to accommodate that he finds himself in this mess. The latest Gallup poll finds that 53% regard Obama’s handling of the spill as poor or very poor, so there’s no question that most of the public does not approve. Even so, his average approval rating remains 47%, which is more or less where it has been during the three “disasters” Noonan thinks no one can survive.

It’s also probably true that his opposition is uniquely unsuited to take advantage of the administration’s vulnerability. The party of “drill here, drill now” is a strange one to lead the fight against an oil corporation and an administration perceived as being too deferential and easy on said corporation. Republicans have spent the last two years trying to be more pro-drilling than the oil companies and more hostile to financial regulation than the financial industry, but they also want to complain about administration collusion with corporate and financial interests. They can’t quite get their demagoguing script worked out, and so one day it is an attack on Obama the corporatist, which has the virtue of being the most accurate, and then the next it is an attack on Obama the radical leftist who hates capitalism. Amid all the contradictory and confusing messages, Obama seems to escape the attacks with minimal damage.

If the health care bill and the recent immigration debate have been political disasters for Obama, it doesn’t show. Obama’s opposition to the new law in Arizona was a mistake in that it did put him at odds with the majority, but it hardly counts as a disaster until he makes the real blunder of trying to get an immigration bill passed ths year. When seen from outside the camp of its opponents, the passage of the health care bill was one of the largest victories any President of either party has had in decades. Aside from a slight drop in polling numbers for Obama and the Democrats between January and April, the political damage does not appear very great. Noonan is making the mistake of confusing things Obama has done that she dislikes with political disasters.

There are other things that Noonan claims in this column that are misleading. For example, she writes:

The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic.

It is hard to know what it means that the people have been worrying about this. They haven’t changed their views on government spending. Majorities consistently want more spending in almost every area, except for dreaded foreign aid, and large pluralities oppose any spending cuts in almost every area. It would be excellent if the American people had as much republican zeal in the form of deficit hawkishness as Noonan thinks, but it isn’t the case.

Noonan also declares the oil spill a disaster also for Obama’s political assumptions. This is the part that makes the least sense:

His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

The trouble is that when we look at what Obama has actually done, or rather failed to do, we do not see someone pursuing a philosophy that the federal government should “occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America.” The actual complaint against the administration is that it has been too hands off, too uninvolved, too passive! Americans have conditioned themselves to think of Presidents as problem-solvers who are supposed to take an active role in addressing any and every major event that occurs, and conservatives no less than liberals have invested the Presidency with a moral and national leadership role quite apart from constitutional responsibilities.

If a President does not actively “take charge” and is not seen as “doing something,” he is ridiculed as weak and ineffective, when according to any vision of a less activist, less interventionist, less intrusive government the President would not involve himself closely in most events similar to this oil spill. It is a bit more absurd in the conservatives’ case. They are horrified by the tyranny of the individual mandate, but most otherwise seem content to demand the firm smack of a strong executive and the protections of an omnicompetent managerial state. Having mocked Obama’s more enthusiastic supporters for wanting him to be a savior of sorts, some Republicans seem genuinely annoyed that he has not been able to work miracles.

P.S. It didn’t occur to me until just now, but I realized that Noonan’s column reminds me very much of the Saturday Night Live character who keeps demanding that he wants someone to “fix it!”

Since June 12, U.S. realists and idealists have had an Iranian field day. The realists have dismissed the Green Movement, proclaimed a stolen election fair, and urged President Obama to toss aside human rights concerns and repair relations with Tehran in the American interest.

The idealists have rained renewed fury on Ahmadinejad, called for his overthrow and urged Obama to bury outreach and back Moussavi.

Both are wrong. ~Roger Cohen

Cohen then goes on to say that the U.S. should pursue engagement and give the Turkish-Brazilian deal “skeptical consideration,” which is to say that on the main points of contention in the Iran policy debate right now Cohen has sided quite clearly with the realists. He doesn’t like that some realists have dismissed the Green movement, even though these realists were apparently right all along that the Green movement was unrepresentative and was growing weaker as time went by. Those of us who said this did not take any pleasure in the weakness and setbacks of the Iranian opposition, but we refused to pretend that emotionally-satisfying boosterism for a protest movement that was not going to succeed was an acceptable substitute for critical thinking about what U.S. Iran policy should be.

Cohen doesn’t like that some realists have argued that Ahmadinejad would have avoided a run-off even without fraud, but there is reason to believe this is correct and there is not much evidence supporting the “coup” interpretation of last year’s election. Since a large part of the argument against engagement hinges on whether or not the Iranian government is seen by most Iranians as legitimate, it is very important to make the correct determination about the extent of the government’s support at the last election. If Cohen starts from the assumption that fraud changed the election’s outcome, he will also assume that there is a much broader base of support for the opposition protesters than there actually seems to be. This distorts everything else in his analysis, and causes him to find fault with the realists who have been almost entirely right on the most important points of contention for the last year.

It could be that the U.S. could speak out about abuse and pursue engagement at the same time, but what if making engagement the priority provides the U.S. with leverage and influence to improve the treatment of dissidents that it currently does not have? Even if it required some temporary silence on the subject of government abuses (at least in public), wouldn’t that move towards Cohen’s goal more effectively than condemning abuses while simultaneously trying (and failing) to engage with Iran’s government? Would it be acceptable to Cohen for the government to try to end the isolation that Cohen says “only serves the horror merchants” before engaging in a lot of public criticism of human rights abuses? If isolation “only serves the horror merchants,” doesn’t engagement serve the interests of dissidents and the regime’s other victims? What if engagement leads to significant long-term improvements in the treatment of dissidents, but comes at the price of briefly suspending public criticism? Is that a trade-off sympathizers with Iranian dissidents could make, or will they insist on putting their anti-regime rhetoric ahead of getting the policy right?

Cohen has been right on Iran more often than he has been wrong, but supporters of engagement aren’t going to get anywhere with Cohen’s odd brand of anti-realist realism that is mixed with his anti-idealist idealism.

Consider China, by many measures the most significant emerging country in the world. It wants to maintain preferred access to Iran’s energy resources, but if conflict results from Iran’s nuclear aspirations, China will be paying much higher a price for those resources. The prospect of a threat to the stability of the greater Middle East and to the flow of oil should give China an incentive to support robust sanctions against Iran. But it is not clear whether China’s leaders will recognize this and act in their country’s own long-term self interest. ~Richard Haass

Put another way, China ought to align itself completely with America’s diplomatic agenda on Iran sanctions, because the U.S. or one of our allies might attack Iran and create serious economic difficulties for China if sanctions are unsuccessful in getting Iran to limit a nuclear program that Iran is never going to limit. Of course, as far as Chinese economic interests are concerned, sanctions are already a form of conflict that will raise their costs. “Robust” sanctions would involve choking off vital supplies to Iran and making normal economic life in Iran very difficult, which would in turn harm Chinese economic interests. China doesn’t recognize that “robust” Iran sanctions are in its long-term self-interest because they aren’t, so it is hard to see why China is going act in a way that conflicts with their self-interest.

Haass’ position is that China should go along with a confrontational diplomatic track that conflicts with its interests under threat that the U.S. could pursue an even more confrontational military track that will conflict with its interests even more. This is essentially an ultimatum, but Haass overlooks that following through on the “threat” is something that will harm the U.S. and our allies just as much as, if not more than, it will harm China. Once we get to the heart of the argument (“Do something you don’t want to do because we say so, or else we will make things very difficult for you”), it is no wonder that China wants no part of “robust” sanctions. It seems that China is acting fairly rationally as far as its own interests are concerned. The real question we should be asking is why we are pursuing a policy course that is both futile and could ultimately lead to a conflict that would do significant damage to us and our allies. Perhaps if we spent less time assuming that we know the long-term interests of other states and more on assessing what is in America’s interest, we would not find ourselves in these ridiculous predicaments.

Speaking of ideology and petty exercises in enforcement, Lee Siegel calls out Paul Berman for being one of the worst offenders:

In the sense that it recalls the heated solipsism of Partisan Review’s early politicized days, Mr. Berman’s “smackdown” reflects the worst tendencies of intellectual life, not the best. He has a simple point to make: Tariq Ramadan-a Muslim intellectual based in Oxford and taken up by some Western intellectuals as the spokesman for a moderate Islam-is a secret fanatic and a dangerous fraud. The intellectuals who defend him have betrayed Western civilization. On the other hand, Ayan Hirsi Ali-a Muslim intellectual, now based in Washington, D.C., who is highly critical of Islamic culture and is criticized by some of the same Western intellectuals for what they regard as her belligerent posturing-is a hero. The intellectuals who attack her have betrayed Western civilization. Though Berman sees Munich-like appeasement everywhere, there are, to my mind, good arguments, constructed in good faith, to be made for and against both these figures. But the arguments are irrelevant to the point of being ludicrous.

Here Siegel is reviewing The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman’s book-length expansion of his impossibly long and not very interesting New Republic critique of Tariq Ramadan. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I actually read the entire critique when it came out, and then wondered why I had bothered. Nonetheless, I was curious to see what Siegel had to say after coming across it in a separate column by Jacob Heilbrunn (via Andrew). Then as now, what matters is not Berman’s argument against Ramadan or his argument for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but how Berman’s obsessive writing on this subject captures so perfectly the absurd, alarmist nature of so much anti-jihadist writing.

As Siegel points out, the true meaning of Tariq Ramadan’s ideas, whatever it may be, “poses no threat to Western democracy.” One of the main problems that many anti-jihadists have is that they want to liken anti-jihadism to anticommunism and anti-fascism, and they very much want to make the jihadist threat seem as threatening as, if not more threatening than, communism and Nazism at their strongest. These comparisons are all wrong and the power of jihadism is grossly exaggerated in the process, and so it isn’t surprising that the overreaction to Islamists in the West is similarly overblown. This is itself a sort of “idealistic posturing” that allows the people who engage in it to declare their own virtue and correct thinking while portraying themselves as defenders of an endangered civilization. Meanwhile, of course, all the risks and losses are taken by other people, and entire countries are ruined by the wars these people insist are absolutely vital. More than that, these wars are treated as vital not simply for specific security interests, which might at least be debated rationally, but for our very survival.

Several years ago, Berman’s arch-nemesis, Ian Buruma, wrote a good column in which he pointed to the true danger coming from certain Western intellectuals today:

But if one sees our current problems in less apocalyptic terms, then another kind of “trahison des clercs” comes into view: the blind cheering on of a sometimes foolish military power embarked on unnecessary wars that cost more lives than they were intended to save.

As we have discussed before, there has been a growing recognition on the left that the interventionism that this blind cheering enables has been disastrous, and as a result of that disaster liberal interventionism has been in decline for many years. We should welcome this, much as we should be glad that Berman’s irrelevant alarmism is receiving the scorn it deserves.

P.S. If you have nothing better to do, you may want to read Michael Totten’s interview of Berman from earlier this month to have a better appreciation of just how smugly self-righteous and wrong Berman is.

Republicans in Idaho’s First District had their primary election yesterday to determine the nominee who will face incumbent Democrat Rep. Walt Minnick. As I have mentioned before and many know already, Minnick has the distinction of being the only House Democratic candidate endorsed by a major Tea Party organization. This report by Kyle Trygstad helps to explain why: Minnick is a fiscally conservative former Republican and now Blue Dog Democrat who has voted with his party only 70% of the time. By comparison, even Joseph Cao, who represents deepest-blue LA-02, has voted with his party 82% of the time. Minnick is the least reliable partisan in the entire House (or the most independent politician in the House, if you prefer), which may also give him the best chance of all of the Blue Dogs to hold his seat in the fall. Following Raul Labrador’s decisive 48-39% win in a five-way race over the mistake-prone, ridiculous Vaughn Ward, Minnick’s task has become much more difficult than it would have been.

As Trygstad explained and as Dave Weigel has reported previously, Ward has suffered a number of embarrassing setbacks in recent months. The more significant problems were charges of plagiarism against him, including his near-verbatim recitation of passages from Obama’s 2004 keynote address as if it were his own. No less embarrassing, but possibly less politically damaging, was his claim that he thought Puerto Rico was a foreign country in the context of answering a question on Puerto Rican statehood.

There’s no question that Republicans are better off in this district with Labrador as the nominee. It looks bad for the NRCC that one of the ten top recruits lost the primary, and it doesn’t help Palin’s reputation that she keeps backing losers in House races, but the good news for Republicans is that they have come out of t this week with a better chance to retake the seat than if the national and state party leadership had had its way. Labrador’s platform is run-of-the-mill Republicanism, and I wasn’t expecting anything creative or refreshing, but what is mildly encouraging about Labrador’s win is that the clueless NRCC and party leaders were unable to foist such a poor candidate on people in ID-01. It is much better that the actual local Idahoan and state representative prevailed. Needless to say, ID-01 is one of the most vulnerable Democratic districts in the country, and any Republican hopes of major gains depend on their being able to recover a seat that is this heavily Republican.