Either way, however, the extraordinary salience of partisan identity leads me to believe that things like George Will’s op-ed calling for withdrawal for Afghanistan and a recent admission from Reps. Rohrabacher and McClintock that “almost all” their Republican colleagues on the Hill think the Iraq War was a mistake are hugely important developments [bold mine-DL].

There needs to be room for conservatives and Republicans to believe that it is okay for “people like us” to hold antiwar beliefs. But as long as the public face of opposition to the war remains Nancy Pelosi and Code Pink, many conservatives and Republicans seem likely to continue in their passionate support for the wars. ~Justin Logan

Via Scoblete

Are these hugely important developments? As I have said before, George Will isn’t taking an antiwar position. He wants to extricate us from “nation-building” and replace a population-centered counterinsurgency with frequent use of air strikes and special ops teams. If that means more instability in the region and more dead Afghan civilians, well, those are the breaks. The result of this would be to continue to keep the American costs of meddlesome interventionism relatively low in order to make it possible to intervene more frequently in the future. Will’s call for withdrawal from Afghanistan does not tell us that he will oppose the next bipartisan consensus-backed war fever, and indeed there is nothing in his record that suggests that he would.

As much as I would like to believe that what Rohrabacher and McClintock are saying means something, even if the claim is true it has had almost no effect on the foreign policy thinking of most Republican members of Congress even as it relates to Iraq. Noah Millman described three groups of conservative Republican war supporters who have since come to the conclusion that the war was a mistake:

In my experience, conservatives who have changed their mind fall into three broad camps: minimizers, avoiders, and abandoners. Minimizers admit the war didn’t work out as planned, but spend their energies on damage control – arguing that intentions were good, or that knowledge was limited, or that some aspects did work out, or whatever. Avoiders show signs that they know the whole enterprise was rotten to the core – so they avoid the topic and avoid drawing any broader conclusions about, well, anything from the fiasco of Iraq [bold mine-DL]. And abandoners, well, they feel obliged, when they face the depth of their mistake, to abandon their political home altogether, either for the other side or for a relatively un-engaged posture.

In other words, there’s a general sense among conservative thinkers that the die was cast long ago: within the context of the conservative political world, it is not an option to seriously rethink the decision for war [bold mine-DL]. Doing so is tantamount to abandoning their political identity. Why that is, I’m not sure, though I suspect guilt has more to do with it than anything.

Aside from a few other members who I think may have genuinely come to see and really understand their error of supporting the war, such as Walter Jones and Dana Rohrabacher, we do not see the recognition of the “terrible mistake” translating into any re-thinking of any policy. If most Republican members of Congress now believe that the Iraq war was a “terrible mistake,” they have since become minimizers or avoiders. As Millman said, there has been no serious re-thinking. For his part, Rohrabacher has been a skeptic and critic of administration Afghanistan policy, and he has considerable familiarity with matters of Afghanistan policy, so I don’t easily reject what he proposes. What I do want to stress here is how incredibly unrepresentative Rohrabacher and those few other Republicans are when it comes to taking public policy positions at odds with the prevailing view inside the party.

As Millman suggests, support for the Iraq war has become an important part of modern conservative, and I would add Republican partisan, political identity. The Iraq war produced “the most polarized distribution of partisan opinions on a president and a war ever measured,” as Gary Jacobson says. The strong identification of conservatives and Republicans with the Iraq war was at first a point of pride and then a source of increasingly defensive self-justification as the vast majority of the country turned against the war and against conservatives and the GOP. Even if most Republican members of Congress recognize that the war was a “terrible mistake,” they refuse to acknowledge publicly that their support for the war and public discontent with the war were responsible for costing them their majorities in Congress. That tells me that even as a matter of crude electoral calculations the Congressional GOP has learned nothing. As a practical matter, mass Congressional Republican recognition of the error of invading Iraq has not led to any significant political or policy changes. As far as most Republican voters and conservatives are still concerned, “people like us” do not oppose foreign wars, and they especially don’t oppose the Iraq war in any meaningful way, and one reason for this is that the public face of opposition simply does not include mainstream Republicans, much less Republicans in any position of leadership or influence.

Kevin Sullivan raises a fair objection to my post on Karzai:

I’m sympathetic to this argument, and he’s probably right, but so what? Obviously, the president is going to make policy mistakes, and if your fallback position is to simply attack everything that he does, eventually, you’re going to get one right! Blind squirrel —> nut.

But if the United States is truly invested in securing and nurturing Afghanistan’s fragile young democracy, what then is the point in publicly humiliating the democratically elected-ish leader of said investment? There’s nothing wrong with pressuring Karzai behind closed doors; publicly equivocating when asked if Karzai is even a U.S. ally is another matter entirely.

It’s true that Obama’s Republican critics will eventually get something right, even if it is simply a function of constant rejectionism, but one of the flaws of constant rejectionism is that everyone begins to assume that Republican foreign policy arguments are nothing more than reflexive partisan whining. Perhaps as far as public opinion is concerned, reflexive partisanship is what matters most, but when it comes to judging arguments on their merits the habit of reflexive partisan opposition makes it so that reasonable criticisms and absurd ones are blurred together.

The necessary, appropriate warning that Obama is doing something foolish will be ignored after so many ridiculous warnings have proven false. Suppose for a moment that Obama has blundered in his handling of Karzai and that it could prove costly for the United States. If that is the case, most of the people saying so have spent at least the last year and a half crying wolf, and now the rest of us are accustomed to ignoring them or treating their arguments with disdain. I don’t say that this is a wise response, but it is hard to avoid. It is exceedingly difficult to take this kind of criticism seriously when some of its loudest exponents are known to be either profoundly wrong (Cheney) or staggeringly ignorant (Palin) about U.S. foreign policy.

That said, just because foolish people happen to take a position does not necessarily make the position foolish. Just because hawkish Republican interventionists always favor troop escalations and therefore favored the escalation in Afghanistan did not necessarily make the troop escalation in Afghanistan the wrong thing to do. Now that some of their allies have decided that Karzai must be treated with kid gloves, it is not necessarily wrong to agree. Nonetheless, I still find Ackerman’s argument for pressing Karzai far more persuasive.

Zakaria recently made an argument that the administration has been treating Karzai the wrong way, and it is probably just about the best case can be made for this view, which is why I find the “hands off Karzai” argument so unpersuasive. Most of Zakaria’s argument is that Karzai cannot be replaced, and his successor would be no better and probably worse. As it happens, I already made the “no alternative” case for Karzai after the fraud-marred presidential election last year, so Zakaria will get no argument from me on that score. The idea of replacing Karzai is a distraction. No one is proposing such a thing, and no sane person would attempt it. However, if Washington accepts that there is no alternative to Karzai, and if he believes that as well, he will assume that he can do anything and Washington will tolerate it. If there is no realistic alternative to Karzai, we do have to make the best of having Karzai as Afghan president, and part of that means bringing pressure to bear on him when necessary.

For quite some time, we have been in the very odd position of insisting that this or that policy is absolutely vital to American interests and then effectively putting ourselves and the success of our policy largely at the mercy of the local client government. We must never think of applying significant pressure, we must never even raise the possibility of reducing or cutting off aid, we must never feud with the client in public, and we must never make the client unhappy. Of course, the client state is effectively free to do whatever provocative thing it wishes. The client will continue to benefit just as before, and U.S. support must continue to be for all intents and purposes unconditional because of the even more vital interests that the client supposedly helps us to secure. Client states want all the benefits and privileges of independence and sovereignty, but they also want all of the security and political advantages that come from being a client and aid recipient. If they want the former, they have to be willing to risk losing the latter, and the U.S. has to be willing to take support and aid away from them if the American interest requires it.

Zakaria is correct that venting is not foreign policy, but calculated displays of disapproval do not have to be mere venting. Voicing dissatisfaction behind closed doors can only achieve so much, and for that matter public expressions of dissatisfaction can only achieve so much, but no administration should be expected to limit itself solely to making objections in private if this has little or no effect. So long as the leader of a client state assumes that he and the client state are indispensable, and as long as he believes that there are no consequences to ignoring or rejecting U.S. requests and pressure, nothing in the relationship or the client government will change for the better. For the sake of the interests of both countries, both need to improve, and laying off Karzai isn’t going to make that happen.

Masscare may be to Romney in 2012 what abortion was in 2008—an issue where a critical mass of conservatives don’t quite buy his explanations (and I say this as someone who likes and respects Romney and wishes him well). The best thing for Romney to say, I think, is that he flat-out made a mistake, that he tried an idea that ran off the rails. It would also have the advantage of being true. But he can’t bring himself to go there yet. ~Rich Lowry

Jim Antle ably points out the problems with this, but I would add two other observations. Whatever appeal Romney has is built around his reputation for competence and policy wonkery. When it is a subject he has actually bothered to learn something out (i.e., not foreign policy), he can speak very knowledgeably and in great detail. Given that reputation, how could the competent, wonkish executive sign off on a piece of legislation that he should have known would create a fiscal nightmare for the state in a few years’ time? There is another point related to this. Romney does not have much experience in political office, and so has leaned heavily on his record in the private sector to supplement his short time in government. His signature achievement does not include any of the containment or reduction in costs that was typical of Romney’s work for Bain. If MassCare is the result of bringing Romney’s business acumen to government, what exactly would be the benefit of his election as President?

When Romney is being “himself,” we are told, he is the problem-solving pragmatist, but all that he really did in Massachusetts was to exacerbate the problem of health care costs and now he desperately hides behind federalist arguments to excuse his remarkably poor judgment. Indeed, the federalist argument for state-by-state health care legislation requires that the person making it point to Massachusetts as an example of a terrible, failed experiment. If we want to liken states to laboratories, Romney set his lab on fire on the way out the door. That hasn’t stopped him from proudly pointing to the burning structure he left behind as evidence of his effectiveness as an executive and a reason why he should be entrusted with even greater power.

One advantage that Romney’s perpetual position-switching used to give him was that it created the impression that Romney was very pliable and would not persist stubbornly in a position out of deep-seated conviction or arrogance. The argument went something like this: however untrustworthy Romney seemed, and no matter how much he would pander to every audience to win votes, he would never be as willfully blind to reality as Bush was. Since the beginning of the health care debate, Romney has started to combine the worst traits of his previous presidential campaign and that stubborn obliviousness that defined Bush: he cannot let go of the Massachusetts health care bill, he cannot really acknowledge the mistakes that he helped to make, and yet he wants to make himself the standard-bearer of the opposition to the very same kind of thing he supported just a few years ago and still will not repudiate.

This is related to what distinguished Romney from other panderers and opportunists. All politicians tell us what they think we want to hear, and many of them will engage in the most absurd contortionism to run away from previous positions that are no longer popular or useful, but very few of them will do all of that and then claim to be some high-minded, principled, newly-converted opponent of all the things that they endorsed yesterday. There is a passage in Game Change about Romney’s presidential campaign that sums this up nicely:

Unlike Giuliani, Romney had no reticence about slashing at his rivals. But the perception of him as a man without convictions made him a less-than-effective delivery system for policy contrasts. The combination of the vitriol of his attacks and his apparent corelessness explained the antipathy the other candidates had toward him. (p.294)

So Romney now insists that the Massachusetts legislation is working when it isn’t, and that he never made an error in judgment when he did, and he will probably then start denouncing anyone on his side who does not want to make repeal the heart of the Republican platform. What is important to remember here is that the policy issue could be almost anything. It need not be health care. Romney would still engage in the same holier-than-thou latecomer routine that he has been practicing for at least five years.

First, I think Ygelsias is somewhat misrepresenting that dominant conservative position. I’d argue that conservatives seem to agree that some aspects of the world are indeed positive sum: the U.S. military as a global police force protects our interests but also lets allied states peacefully pursues theirs. They do not see the accumulation of U.S. power as a zero-sum affair because American power supports the positions and interests of a host of other nations. ~Greg Scoblete

One reason why Yglesias might think that conservatives typically view international relations as a zero-sum game is that many of the top foreign policy conservative commentators insist that this is how they see the world (and that this is how Obama should see it, too). Robert Kagan has an entire series of articles dedicated to mocking Obama’s supposed rejection of the zero-sum view, based originally on one throwaway line in Obama’s Cairo speech that I very much doubt he meant.

Nonetheless, Greg is partly right here, and I have argued before that defenders of Pax Americana and U.S. hegemony or primacy frequently assume that what is good for America (as they understand this) is good for the world, so much so that they have some difficulty grasping that other nations might resist U.S. “leadership” out of anything other than ideological fanaticism, anti-American hatred or greed. As I said in January:

For believers in Pax Americana, the only time when there are “zero-sum games” is when other states resist the supposedly benevolent intervention of the U.S.

Put another way, when other nations align themselves with the U.S. and do what Washington wants, these people believe that everyone benefits (even if the U.S. and our allies are embarked on a disastrous course that harms international stability and security). It is only opposition and resistance to the U.S. that create the conflicts where only one side can gain. A key difference between right and left, or rather between the prevailing view on the right and progressive realism, is that the former tends to see (or imagine) far more opposition and resistance to the U.S. around the world and it seems far more likely to view this opposition in terms of threats, challenges and unwavering ideological hostility. A key difference between the non-interventionist right and progressive realism is that progressive realists still insist on trying to solve all of the same “problems” through international institutions and “smart power” that the interventionist right believes can be solved through power projection and freedom-babble, whereas the non-interventionist right is much less likely to see these “problems” as American problems in the first place.

In the last ten years, something else has distinguished the prevailing foreign policy views of right and left, and this is their relative amount of respect for state sovereignty and international law. While there continue to be humanitarian interventionists preaching the “responsibility to protect,” humanitarian interventionism has been losing ground on the left as the terrible costs of these interventions have increased. The absurdity of destroying entire countries as a way of aiding and freeing them has begun to dawn on more people on the left. As Mark Mazower has observed in his interesting World Affairs essay:

But the more thoughtful of them [interventionists] have come to realize that the way leaders treat their people is not the only problem that counts in international affairs. On the contrary, if the history of the past century showed anything, it was that clear legal norms, and the securing of international stability more generally, also serve the cause of human welfare [bold mine-DL]. Let alone the fact that it is much easier to destroy institutions than to build them. Liberalism’s characteristic indifference to institutions, both domestic and international, has thus been called into question. In short, the ending of the era of humanitarian interventionism may come to be seen as a sign of the waning of Western power, and mourned as consigning more of the world’s peoples to the mercies of the tyrants who rule them. But it is possible to view it more positively, as the belated emergence of a new maturity in international relations.

Contrast this more sober-minded progressive realism with the interventionist sabre-rattling and freedom-babble of Michael Barone, who cited Mazower’s essay to use as his foil for reciting an already very tired complaint against Obama. You see, Obama’s foreign policy “has shown a cold indifference to human rights that contrasts vividly with those of his five predecessors.” Leave aside the accuracy of this observation for a moment, and consider that it is the Republican and supposed conservative writer here who is complaining that a President is not engaged in enough preaching, lecturing and warmongering on account of human rights abuses in other countries.

Yglesias claims that mainstream conservatives don’t actually believe the human rights rhetoric they’ve been using in the last decade, and he says that their “professions of humanitarian concern” are “hollow and opportunistic,” but in my view the far more worrisome possibility is that they are absolutely sincere and have no idea what a dangerous position it is that they have taken, tied as it is to hegemonism and support for perpetual war. No doubt some mainstream conservatives simply use human rights claims as a cudgel with which to beat their opponents, and some use other regimes’ human rights abuses as a pretext for aggressive policies they already want to see realized, but for the time being humanitarian interventionism is not so much dying as it has simply migrated from its theoretically more natural home on the left to its new environs on the mainstream right.

In a strange move, Barone then drags in Walter Russell Mead’s article declaring the twilight of liberal internationalism to try to counter Mazower, but Barone seems not to understand that Mead is to a large extent talking about something else. Mead’s main point was this:

The world is inexorably developing in directions that undermine the authority and efficacy of big international institutions, and American power (not, I think, doomed to decline) will increasingly have to operate outside of institutional frameworks, like it or not.

If Mead is right, and there are reasons to doubt this, that does not necessarily contradict what Mazower says in his essay. On the whole, Mazower’s essay was descriptive and provided an account of developments over the last twenty years. Indeed, if the authority and efficacy of international institutions are being undermined, that could improve the stability of internationally recognized borders and reduce the chances of future humanitarian interventions. After all, it is U.N. sanctions and Security Council resolutions that have served as the legal fig leaves for unnecessary and illegal warfare in the recent past. The developments that are undermining international institutions, and which are making the fictions of an “international community” and “rogue states” more preposterous every day, are also developments that will tend to reinforce state sovereignty. Regardless of the efficacy and authority of international institutions, it was unipolarity that made humanitarian interventionism possible, and the shift to multipolarity means that there will probably be fewer and fewer states that can be treated as Yugoslavia and Iraq have been treated in the last twenty years. Other major and rising powers, such as Russia, China, India and even Brazil and Indonesia, have no interest in encouraging more border changes, especially not if they are in service to ethnic separatist causes. Almost all of them have enough concerns with ethnic tensions and separatist movements already that they have no incentive to intervene on behalf of separatists or repressed ethnic groups inside another state.

On the whole, it has not been the non-Western states that have engaged in gross violations of international law and state sovereignty in the last twenty years. Even the partition of Georgia by Russia was a direct response to the partition of Serbia, which was entirely the work of western European and American governments. It has been European and American governments that have been intervening in strictly internal affairs, carving up sovereign states and occupying other states. Strange as it may seem, it has been the non-Euro-Americans, to use Mead’s term, plus the Russians that have consistently opposed these moves. For whatever combination of reasons, it has been Europeans and Americans who have wanted to increase international instability, foment political upheaval and spread revolution. The relative decline of Europe and America may not lead to a situation where “rising new powers will continue to lead the world down the path the Americans laid down,” but it very well could lead to a world in which certain international norms, such as state sovereignty, are more fully respected and where international stability has increased.

P.S. On a related note, I recommend picking up the new issue of TAC or subscribing and reading online our Left/Right symposium on the prospects of forging a left-right alliance against empire and the warfare state.

U.S. policymakers increasingly view Central Asia as a transit point to somewhere else. ~Tom Malinowski

, “How Not to Run an Empire”

We can grant that concerns about the abuses of Bakiyev’s regime took a backseat to the need to retain an air base for supplying Afghanistan. But why was it necessary to seek Bakiyev’s favor so obsequiously in order to keep the U.S. lease at Manas? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Early in 2009, not long after Obama had been sworn in, the Kyrgyz parliament voted to end the U.S. lease at Manas, because the U.S. military presence in Kyrgyzstan was the cause of some accidents and civilian deaths in the vicinity and so was deeply unpopular. Of course, it didn’t help that any of the business generated by activity at the base primarily benefited members of the ruling family, whether it was Akayev’s or Bakiyev’s. All of this predated Bakiyev’s electoral fraud and the discontent that exploded this past week on account of utility rate hikes. Analysts obsessed with the sinister power of Moscow focused entirely on a Russian loan to Kyrgyzstan, which was supposed to have been the reason why the U.S. would have to leave, and missed the broad popular discontent with Kyrgyzstan’s role as a transit point for an American war. When Bakiyev changed his position and permitted the continuation of the lease in exchange for more rent, the U.S. became reliant on Bakiyev even more than it had ever been on Akayev. The habit of definining U.S.-Kyrgyz relations around the basing issue to the exclusion of everything else and the unpopularity of the base itself predated Bakiyev and they long predated the political turmoil of recent years.

As I wrote in February 2009 in The Week:

The quality of the U.S.-Kyrgyz relationship had already worsened considerably long before the Russian offer of aid, and it was the base that was a major cause of the deterioration. As Kyrgyzstan’s former Ambassador to the U.S. Baktybek Abdrisaev explained in a recent Washington Post op-ed, U.S. interest in Kyrgyzstan became narrowly focused on the base to the detriment of all other issues, including human rights—which meant that the entire bilateral relationship was sure to suffer disproportionately once the base became a flashpoint of controversy.

If the U.S. would like to have sustainable and stable good bilateral relations with Kyrgyzstan, it should not reduce those relations to the issue of U.S. use of Manas. In other words, the U.S. should not treat Kyrgyzstan as a transit point or a satrapy, but should treat it as a sovereign state struggling with the political consequences of becoming a willing ally in the war in Afghanistan.

P.S. As it happens, Mr. Abdrisaev co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post that was published yesterday. It is also worth reading.

A little over a week ago, Spencer Ackerman wrote:

After all, is there any foreign leader once held closely by the U.S. that Obama has more visibly snubbed than Hamid Karzai? The Obama team’s Afghanistan strategy can be fairly-if-simplistically described as a broad attempt to circumvent Karzai by bolstering Afghan institutions at and especially below the national level. There’s no shortage of outrage by Karzai over being denied so cosmetic a gesture as a White House visit until he does X, Y and Z. And this is a guy whose government is both perilously weak and has powerful impact over what will soon be about 140,000 U.S. and allied troops. So where’s the Karzai Kaucus on the right? Why don’t we see Sarah Palin on Facebook stickin’ up for our Afghan friend’s right to exercise his sovereignty and govern his country as his people have sort-of elected him to see fit?

As it turns out, Karzai’s defenders were just a little late to get started, but now they can’tstop talking. Adding Karzai to the list as one of the many allied leaders Obama has supposedly insulted and betrayed was only a matter of time. It fits into the preposterous framing of an Obama foreign policy of “coddling our enemies while alienating allies,” as Palin put it, but as soon as one pays any attention to U.S. interests and objectives in the regions where these so-called betrayals have occurred the framing completely collapses.

One way of replying to the Cheney/Palin criticism is to give the answer Ackerman offered last week:

When stated that way, the answer is fairly obvious: Karzai gets a lot of economic, security and political assistance from the U.S. while inconsistently demonstrating his commitment to ostensibly mutual goals of good governance that are important for U.S. interests in the region. An American administration that didn’t press Karzai would be a negligent steward of those interests. The fact of the U.S.-Afghan closeness just strengthens the case for candor and firmness — not high-handedness, certainly, but urgency.

From the administration’s perspective, recalcitrant allies that are resisting the U.S. over issues that the administration believes are essential to the success of American policy in their regions of the world are harming both U.S. and allied interests in the long term. So the administration is trying to goad, pressure or otherwise push these allies to cooperate. In other cases, such as the scrapped missile defense plan, Washington was actually doing Poland and the Czech Republic a favor by not making them a primary target of Russian animus.

The difficulty we face in Afghanistan is one that Leon Hadar outlined in his column applying the idea of moral hazard to foreign policy: allies that believe themselves to be important for achieving U.S. goals in their regions and therefore take U.S. backing for granted act with impunity and often act in reckless, destructive or short-sighted ways. The allies reap the benefits, such as they are, while the U.S. will bear the costs of the actions and risks the allies take.

Dr. Hadar described the hazard this way:

Indeed, while Americans have been considering the moral hazard of their government bailing-out the American International Group (AIG) and other irresponsible risk-takers in Wall Street, they could also have pondered the way American global intervention in support for foreign governments and groups tends to encourage them to engage in risky behavior — Georgia provoking a conflict with Russia; Pakistan supporting radical Islamists; Israel building-up settlements in the West Bank — whose costs end-up being paid by American soldiers and taxpayers, and could therefore be considered a case of moral hazard.

The most recent example has been the decision by President Barack Obama to escalate the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. Notwithstanding the Obama administration’s announcement of a timeline for a start of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, America’s top client there, the government led by Hamid Karzai, concluded that Washington was making an open-ended commitment to maintain U.S. military presence in the AfPak region.

While administration critics are satisfied with descriptions of Karzai’s bruised feelings and resentment, we can better understand Karzai’s latest outbursts as evidence of his belief that the U.S. needs him more than he needs the U.S. Indeed, the “poor” treatment of Karzai is what in another context Obama’s critics might call an attempt to ensure some accountability. The commitment in Afghanistan isn’t unconditional and it isn’t open-ended, and the “poor” treatment of Karzai has been an attempt to make that clear to him while also working around him when necessary. Now that Karzai is trying to compel Washington to be more accommodating and solicitous by making very loud public protests, he is finding allies in hawks here at home who seem to wish Obama to adopt the approach of the previous administration, which consisted of paying Karzai a great deal of attention while letting Afghanistan fall apart. These are the people who are always game for another troop escalation wherever and whenever (and they are usually keen to relax the rules of engagement, too), but they seem to have no patience for any of the political and diplomatic legwork needed to complement and consolidate the security gains made by the additional forces. Their newfound concern for Karzai’s contentment should be viewed in this light.

It surprises me that this non-story about Petraeus’ “mild, unsurprising” remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to generate any reactions. I don’t have much more to say about the original dispute, and there is no need to respond in detail to Andy McCarthy’s lengthy denunciation of Petraeus (via Andrew), but as part of a larger pattern I find hawkish conservative attacks on Petraeus both fascinating and depressing. The attacks are fascinating in that they show how exacting and unreasonably high the standards are to be considered truly “pro-Israel” in some conservative circles, and they are depressing for the same reason. If Petraeus, or Tom Campbell, or even Obama and Biden cannot be acknowledged as perfectly conventional supporters of Israel, and if their views are going to be warped and distorted beyond recognition as “anti-Israel,” what chance does anyone else have of critically thinking about the relevant issues without receiving even worse treatment? Then again, the attacks have become so unreasonable and the misrepresentations so severe that the enforcers may be losing their touch.

It is also worth noting that Max Boot, who has been Petraeus’ lead defender in all of this, seems to think that he has been policing the extremes of conservatism by repudiating anti-Petraeus conservatives just as others had done before in denouncing Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran. What Boot misses is that McCarthy and other Petraeus attackers are the ones assuming the role of ideological enforcers against another ostensibly “anti-Israel” figure. The bile being directed at Petraeus is the same that has been directed at Buchanan and Sobran for decades. The one ultimately derives from the other. The vicious habit of casting out people for legitimate differences of principle and policy in the most hateful way has started coming back to haunt movement conservatives in unexpected ways. What is remarkable is that Petraeus’ “deviation” is so minimal as to non-existent. Whatever “red lines” there are on the subject that one is never supposed to cross, Petraeus hasn’t even come close to crossing any of them.

To borrow a phrase from Philip Klein, it’s pretty amazing the lengths that some extreme “pro-Israel hawks” will go to in order to distort the facts.

This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections. ~Charles Krauthammer

Yes, I’d say that full-scale conventional bombardment and the wreckage of major cities with air strikes and shelling is comparable to community service, wouldn’t you? I often associate carpet bombing and working at a soup kitchen. There’s nothing “loopy” or “bizarre” about that comparison, is there?

There is some crazy thinking in this debate, and it is to be found among those who seem to think that a refusal to nuke Argentina in response to the highly improbable Argentinean sarin gas attack on the U.S. (or make up whatever scenario you like) is equivalent to lying down and dying. One need only look over the list of NPT signatories and consider which states have both the desire and the means even to launch such a strike. I doubt anyone can find a plausible candidate. Even if there were a state that might want to launch such an attack, when faced with massive conventional retaliation none of them would risk it.

After having spent decades dismissing the possibility of deterring “rogue” regimes, Krauthammer and his colleagues cannot stop talking about deterrence all of a sudden, but they aren’t willing to acknowledge that vast conventional military superiority is also a deterrent against attack. All that Obama has committed to with this review is that the overwhelming retaliation such an attacker would face would not include nuclear weapons. That isn’t saying much, and it is actually no different from the status quo.

We can now expect an innovative surge in global production of chemical and bioweapons–which have effectively just become a cheaper way to attack the U.S. (and its allies). ~Claudia Rosett

Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. Reasonably well-informed people already know that Rosett’s “preemptive disarmament” argument is silly, and everyone else will react to it along partisan and ideological lines regardless of what anyone else says, but there’s something about the irrationality and alarmism in the reactions to Obama’s foreign policy and national security decisions that demands a more thorough response. The number of states exempted from nuclear retaliation and both willing and able to launch biological or chemical weapons attacks on the United States and our allies is zero. If there are any states capable of doing this, the massive conventional retaliation they would inevitably face would be more than enough to prevent them from making the attempt. All that the review does is commit the U.S. to not nuking non-nuclear states we are most likely never going to fight in the highly unlikely event that one of them launches an unconventional attack on us.

Daniel McGroarty points out something important:

As for disarmament, leave it to one of the scientists to note: “Ironically, it’s possible that the retirement of 4,000 or more U.S. warheads under the Moscow Treaty [of 2002] and other retirements ordered by George W. Bush may exceed anything Obama does in terms of disarmament.”

An important point to emphasize is that if Bush or a President McCain or any Republican President had issued the same nuclear review, most Republican hawks would point to it proudly and cite it as evidence that America was a wise, benevolent world power that would only unleash nuclear devastation in the most extreme circumstances. They would laud it as another example of the fine Reaganite tradition of “peace through strength,” and so on. For that matter, the utterly unremarkable, status quo nature of the review and the Prague START signed today is just what most Republicans would normally applaud if the President were not a member of the other party. Indeed, as McGroarty writes:

If the version being backgrounded now reflects a shift left from a Bush Era orientation, the first draft must have been written by Donald Rumsfeld.

As usual, Obama governs in a rather dull, “centrist” fashion where continuity with the Bush years is far more noticeable than any change and he is accused of the worst perfidies of left-wing extremism. Obama’s “centrism” often isn’t a good thing, and with respect to extraordinary executive power grabs, state secrets, indefinite detention, illegal surveillance and the unconstitutional treatment of U.S. citizens (including assassination orders!) Obama has matched or even outdone Bush in illegal excesses, but it doesn’t really make much sense to oppose an administration for doing things one doesn’t actually oppose and attacking it for things that it will never do.

Let’s remember that Rosett belongs to the crowd of hawks that believes deterrence is impossible against certain regimes, but now she leans very heavily on the importance of deterrence when she thinks she can get away with claiming that Obama has undermined it. According to the standard hawkish line on Iran, Iran cannot be deterred or contained because it is ruled by fanatics and lunatics, but a nuclear review that does not exempt Iran from potential targets of nuclear retaliation (even though Iran is far from becoming a nuclear-weapons state itself) has somehow badly undermined American deterrence vis-a-vis Iran.

One wonders where Republican hawks can possibly go from here. They have almost three more years of an Obama Presidency to endure, and already they have gone mad with alarmism, hysterics and overreaction to fairly ho-hum policy decisions. Obama needs a credible, sane opposition to keep him in check and challenge him when he is actually wrong. Right now, he doesn’t have that, and all of us will suffer for it. His own party will not hold him accountable, because a President’s party never does, but in any contest between an erring Obama and a mad GOP the latter will keep losing.