Quitting the Senate was a no-lose move for the presidentially ambitious Bayh, since he can now crawl away from the political wreckage for a couple of years, plausibly alleging that he tried to steer the party in a different direction — and then be perfectly positioned to mount a centrist primary challenge to Obama in 2012, depending on circumstances. ~Charles Lane

Lane is correct that Bayh’s retirement was calculated to do maximum damage to Obama and the Senate Democrats, but that’s what makes Lane’s speculation here so bizarre. Bayh’s decision makes a certain amount of sense if we conclude that he no longer wants to make a bid for the White House, but if he still has hopes of higher office it is madness. If Bayh thinks he is saying, “You won’t have Evan Bayh to kick around anymore” before launching a comeback presidential campaign, he is quite mistaken. Parties tend not to reward shirkers and deserters with promotion. Party politics may be infuriatingly, mind-numbingly tribal much of the time, but that is definitely something one can always rely on it to be. To retire from the field at a time when his party can’t afford to have any more vulnerable seats and then to do so without warning and at virtually the last possible minute before the filing deadline for candidates will mark him for the special loathing of progressive activists and donors for years to come. Think of how movement conservatives feel about McCain or the way progressives feel about Lieberman, and you can begin to imagine the problem Bayh faces if he ever wants a shot at his party’s nomination.

Let us also consider the implausible idea of a “centrist” primary challenge. Bear in mind that for a large number of Democratic activists and voters the current Obama administration is already far too “centrist.” They believe, and not entirely unreasonably, that Democrats are disheartened and independents disgusted because there has been far too much continuity with the last administration and far too much accommodation with entrenched interests. From their perspective, “centrist” Democrats have received far too much deference and already have far too much influence in determining the direction of the party. Many Democratic activists and voters would view a Bayh challenge to Obama in much the same way that a lot of New Yorkers view Harold Ford’s odd challenge against Gillibrand: it would be received as either an insult, a bad joke or an amazing display of arrogance.

By their nature, “centrists” tend to be out of step with their party bases, and they are usually very proud of this. It is one of their defining traits. McCain in 2000 is one example of a “centrist” who spent the entire primary season running against the core constituencies of his party. This won him a lot of media attention and enduring affection from journalists long after he found common jingoistic ground with other Republicans, but it also ensured that he never won anywhere outside of New Hampshire until he became the de facto establishment candidate and heir apparent in 2008. Howard Dean’s insurgency in 2003-04 was as successful as it was because he moved away from his reputation as a relative “centrist” and became the champion of antiwar Democrats. Does anyone think we would have been aware of Dean had he tried running to the “right” of Kerry on domestic and foreign policy?

“Centrists” do not run insurgent campaigns very well*. There are no passionate, vocal groups of voters eagerly demanding that government be more solicitous of corporate interests and more willing to start wars overseas. There are not many large voting blocs requesting the offshoring of whole industries. To be a “centrist” is necessarily to champion the interests of concentrated power and wealth and to ignore and deride as “populist” insanity anything that stands in the way of those interests. Who has ever heard of an explicitly anti-populist political insurgency? Insurgents always set themselves up as the independent outsiders who will stand up for the people against the establishment. Just imagine Bayh trying to sell himself as the establishmentarian who wants to tone down the “radicalism” of Obama’s Rubinite economics and his Clintonian hawkish foreign policy. What Lane proposes is that an old DLC-type Democrat will be positioned to win over a party that is increasingly disgusted by the overrepresentation of DLC-type Democrats in the current administration. This misreads the mood of the party and the substance of administration policy very badly.

* It is worth pointing out here that intra-party insurgencies against incumbent Presidents typically don’t succeed no matter who the insurgent is, but Democratic “centrists” typically don’t even do well in open contests for party nomination.

Evan Bayh’s retirement announcement makes it more likely that Republican gains in the Senate could grow to as many as seven seats, but what I find interesting about the move is its total irrationality as a political decision. Any national ambitions Bayh might have once entertained are now absolutely finished. As acts of partisan disloyalty go, Bayh’s last-minute, surprise move is second only to those of Lieberman and actual party-switchers such as Specter, so he can forget about winning over Democratic primary voters in any future presidential elections. Unlike Dorgan’s retirement, Bayh’s departure is really entirely voluntary. Coats was potentially a serious challenger, but hardly an overwhelming favorite to win. If an incumbent with $13 million cash on hand isn’t safe in this environment when faced with opposition from a lobbyist for Bank of America, none of them is safe.

What this does do is re-confirm that national Democrats are very easily rattled, quickly intimidated and prone to pre-emptive political surrender. Dorgan’s retirement unsettled them, and Brown’s victory terrified them, and their irrational fear following last month is now costing them seats they could have otherwise held. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that Bayh would not have retired had Brown lost in Massachusetts, which may mean that Brown is responsible for flipping two seats to the GOP. I don’t believe that Bayh retired because he was tired of the way things were being done in Washington. My guess is that he started to believe the other side’s propaganda that the country had turned against his party, and preferred to jump ship instead of spending most of this year in what he probably mistakenly regarded as a doomed cause.

As I was thinking about Bayh’s decision, I was reminded of the line from the TV adaptation of House of Cards when the PM sacks his party chairman in what is described as a “fit of pique or a fit of panic.” Bayh’s decision is a bit of both, and it is definitely a product of the national Democratic panic that set in over the last three weeks. The trouble for the majority now is that this panic will start to snowball as politicians in other basically safe-but-competitive seats begin to think that quitting is a better option. The GOP is still a long way from winning back control or either house, but it is receiving one unexpected gift after another courtesy of the administration’s tired “centrism” and “centrist” Democrats such as Bayh.

Rather than war, gasoline sanctions on Iran are “the true alternative” to current Iran policy, says David Frum. It is strange that Frum spends no time laying out what the enforcement of such a sanctions regime would require. He discussed very thoroughly how military strikes might escalate into a wider war and have many adverse consequences for U.S. interests, and then concludes with a call for gasoline sanctions, as if arbitrarily embargoing another country would not have just as many dangerous, foreseeable consequences.

Amid the back-and-forth over whether Sarah Palin can comprehend complex arguments, an important point in Pat Buchanan’s recent column on Iran was lost. Gasoline sanctions would mean that U.S. and other military forces would be involved in enforcing an embargo on Iran of economically vital supplies, and this would set the U.S. on a path to war. An attempted gasoline embargo would be and would be perceived as an act of war, and it could provoke a response every bit as deadly and significant as military action. People who are calling for gasoline sanctions either don’t understand the consequences of what they’re demanding, or they wish to provoke a war with Iran. Presenting gasoline sanctions as a viable alternative to launching military strikes is at best misleading. The main difference between the two is that gasoline sanctions may put Iran in the position of firing first, which will allow Washington to pretend that its own aggressive policies were not responsible for causing the conflict that follows.

But it would be a lie to pretend we doves never enjoyed our work. Do you think I didn’t have any fun at all explicating the absurdity of the arguments for starting and continuing the conquest of Iraq, digging into the monthly electricity statistics, cataloguing the endless examples of RSN Syndrome or explicating the government’s transparent lies about torture and treatment of civilians? People. I did that for six years. Nobody puts that much effort into something that isn’t satisfying on some level. Of course it was fun, for certain grim and bitter kinds of “fun.” ~Jim Henley

This is true up to a point. What is important to remember here is that any satisfaction that we took after the invasion was at the expense of the people who had cheered on and backed the war. Any fun we had came from pointing out their failures and deceptions. This is not because we were indifferent to the suffering their errors caused, but because we were all too aware that the suffering was unnecessary and could have been avoided. There was no glee or satisfaction in having our opposition to the war vindicated with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement and suffering of millions more. Indeed, the prevaling feeling during that time and even now was not satisfaction that we were largely right, but an abiding anger at what our government has done and continues to do in our name. Unless it can make the next foreign policy blunder less likely, it really makes no difference whether we were right or not.

Coming back to Iran, when it comes to Western enthusiasm for and confidence in the Green movement we have seen much the same bandwagon effect among pundits and policymakers that occurred in the months leading up to the invasion in Iraq. Fortunately, the consequences of this have so far been far less grave than it was seven years ago, but all the same bad habits that plagued us then have reemerged. We see the tendency to identify U.S. interests and the interests of the Iranian people, which usually means replacing the real interests of the latter with Washington’s interests, and we see once more the conceit that regime change is the only solution to major international disagreements. Anyone who tries to pour cold water on the new enthusiasm is usually treated at best as a moral idiot, if not a “useful idiot” for an authoritarian government, and at worst as a regime “apologist” or an “objective” agent of a foreign government’s goals.

Some Green movement sympathizers have tried very carefully to distinguish themselves from the pro-sanctions and pro-bombing crowds that have been exploiting the protests for their own ends. I don’t doubt their sincerity in rejecting sanctions and military action, because they understand just as well as the protesters do that either course of action would be disastrous for that movement. What I continue to find troubling is the rhetorical and political cover they are unintentionally providing for the push for sanctions and/or military action. Movement sympathizers view the current Iranian government with contempt and strongly desire its defeat. That is understandable, and even commendable after a fashion, but as a practical matter this means that the only other main policy option that will not directly harm the Green movement has automatically been taken out of consideration. Even though the Green movement has faltered and will likely continue to weaken, sympathy for the movement has already made meaningful, sustained engagement politically impossible here at home, and the moralizing rhetoric of its sympathizers has provided the political protection for whatever destructive “anti-regime” measures might come from Congress. Much of this has come about because sympathy for the movement has led to very poor analysis concerning the stability and strength of the Iranian regime and the prospects for internal political change, and it has also led to the creation of a new political consensus that says that there should be no negotiated settlement with Tehran. This means that the worst policy options gain additional support.

As I said before, none of the skeptics can be pleased with what has happened. Once again, we seem to have been largely right, and this gives us no real satisfaction. It seems fitting to quote Henley’s conclusion here:

Lastly and most importantly, it doesn’t matter how awfully gleeful doves are or aren’t. It doesn’t matter how gleeful Larison and I were or weren’t about being right about the disaster the Iraq War became, or how happy the Leveretts are or aren’t to have the better case about the strength of the Green Revolution in Iran. It doesn’t matter exactly how much that intellectual pleasure is swamped by horror at the suffering of the victims. The premise of liberal society is that arguments stand or fall on their merits, not the state of the souls of the arguers.

Andrew:

But there is a glee with which the Leveretts write about this that I find somewhat callous given the suffering and deaths and torture of so many young lovers of freedom in that imprisoned country.

This is extremely unfair. The Leveretts are not expressing “glee” or anything like it when they say that the regime is not going anywhere. They are acknowledging a reality that far too many Westerners have had enormous difficulty acknowledging.

Iraq war opponents were not gleeful when the political chaos and sectarian violence some of them predicted broke out. We were not pleased when the disaster we opposed unfolded. They were going to draw attention to the mistaken judgments of the people who up until the previous hour had denounced them as so many water-carriers for despotism and agents of foreign governments. The Leveretts are doing no more than re-stating their original arguments and pointing out that all those legions of pundits and bloggers who mocked them were rather impressively wrong on the main questions of the strength and potential of the Green movement and of the endurance of the current regime. Of course, the Leveretts know just as well as everyone else that there is no real accountability in foreign policy commentary. Their basically correct analysis will not make people more interested in their arguments, and the basically flawed analysis of dozens of others will not prejudice the reading public against their arguments in the future.

There is not much yesterday that happened in Iran that most people in the West should find encouraging. Green movement sympathizers were confronted with the reality that the regime was able to disperse, divide and control protesters fairly effectively. As they had already done before, government forces dominated public space and dictated its use to the dissidents. It is remarkable that protesters were able to do as much as they did, which is to their credit, but the lopsided nature of the contest became even more clear than it had been last year. “Recovering realists” such as Richard Haass now have even less of an argument than they did before that internally-driven regime change is now the best hope for U.S. interests. That hasn’t stopped Haass from repeating his call for siding with a protest movement that is, if anything, even weaker than it was a month ago. Haass stated that it was not a “decisive moment,” but when there are no decisive moments things tend to work on behalf of the status quo. The regime can afford to wait, but the protest movement at some point has to make some tangible gains or be slowly whittled away over time.

Advocates of sanctions and/or military strikes remain at odds with the interests of the Iranians in the streets. What they propose to do would make the lot of these people even harder and add to the burdens they already bear. Unfortunately, according to the twisted logic that seems to govern our Iran policy debate sanctions and/or military action have become much more likely now that the possibility of internal political change has receded that much more. There is no good reason why this should be the case, but supporters of sanctions and/or bombing have not needed good reasons so far. Our Iran policy debate is severely limited by the unrealistic goal of halting Iran’s nuclear program, and our options keep being reduced to the push for sanctions or military action for that reason. The third option of domestic political change was never likely to occur, and once that became clear the same dead-end answers were there waiting to be given.

Those of us who have been skeptical of the size and potential of the Green movement should also find yesterday’s events discouraging. The case for real, sustained engagement with Tehran is more compelling now than it was before. Nothing has better demonstrated the lack of U.S. influence than the meaningless debate here at home over how best to aid the Green movement when the U.S. has no leverage and no means to help them. Cutting ourselves off from Iran has achieved none of our government’s goals, it has failed to alter the Iranian government’s behavior in the slightest, and it deprives the opposition of the political and economic oxygen that such movements need to flourish. What is most discouraging about yesterday, then, is that there will be even fewer people who will be willing to pursue a policy of engagement.

I am traveling today and over the weekend, so I am not following events in Iran as closely as others. As always, Andrew and his assistants Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner are providing constant and interesting coverage. Greg Scoblete and Kevin Sullivan at The Compass have several good interviews with Hooman Majd,Alireza Nader and many other posts on Iran. NIAC’s blog has extensive coverage of the entire day. The Leveretts will likely be discussing the events of the day soon. Those are some places to start, and I will try to have more to say late tonight.

Unless Washington and Brussels believe that a Georgia, circa 1996, is in their best interests, they would be wise to rethink their Georgia policy. ~Michael Hikari Cecire

I hadn’t considered the dire consequences. A Georgia circa 1996! That really does call for drastic action. Whatever would we do if Georgia were in Russia’s orbit? It would be very much like it was before 2003. For all of the talk of Georgia as “the last truly Western-oriented country in a highly strategic, critical region,” its Western political orientation is almost entirely at odds with its economic relationship with Russia. If Turkey has become more “unreliable” (i.e., it pursues its own interests even when Washington does not like it) and Ukraine’s flirtation with integration into Euro-Atlantic structures has been put on hold if not abandoned entirely, why is a much smaller, poorer, more economically dependent country such as Georgia going to sustain its “Western” orientation? More to the point, why is it worth damaging a far more important relationship with Russia to make sure that Georgia continues pursuing the illusion of membership in Euro-Atlantic structures?

There are never answers for these questions. It is simply assumed that this is something that we have to do so that we do not “lose” Georgia. The truth is that the West should never have been trying to “win” Georgia. EU members have more reason to be interested in finding alternative sources of natural gas, and they are less willing to provoke Russia over Georgia than Washington is. The people who have to risk the most in damaged relations with Russia are not very concerned about “losing” Georgia, so why should the U.S. take an active interest in a region that matters even less to Americans?

The apparent victory of Viktor Yanukovych in yesterday’s Ukrainian presidential election is yet another setback to the idea that the world is rapidly becoming a more democratic place. ~Walter Russell Mead

Via Scoblete

I don’t assume that the world is rapidly becoming a more democratic place, but the Ukrainian election is a very strange example to cite as a “setback” to this idea. According to national and international observers, the election was free and fair, and there were no significant irregularities to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the result. Free and fair elections are not the end-all and be-all of democracy, but they are a start. At worst, Yanukovych’s tenure will continue the same cronyism and corruption that flourished under Yushchenko, but it does appear for the moment that Kuchma-era quasi-authoritarianism has been weakened significantly. As we have seen over the last five years, democratic election does not mean that the government produced by the election will be competent or effective, and Ukraine may endure another five years of ineffective government, but it will pretty clearly be a democratic one. That doesn’t rule out that it might become a more illiberal state, but we do not yet know whether that will happen or not.

What we do see in the Ukrainian result is that democratic elections do not automatically lead to the most “pro-Western” or Washington-favored outcomes, and it suggests that as democratization progresses the divergence of interests between the West and Westernized or developing countries will become sharper and more pronounced. As Western and Westernized countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America have become more fully democratic and matured as democratic states, they have usually become more assertive and less likely to fall into the predictable behavior of satellites. Turkey, Japan and Brazil are the most obvious examples of states that have begun charting more independent courses abroad consistent with national interests as their political systems have become more fully democratic. In Ukraine’s case, the Orange coalition was trying to chart a more independent foreign policy course that directly conflicted with its economic relationship with Russia, and this election suggests that Ukraine will be rebalancing its interest in European integration with the reality that it remains very closely tied to Russia.

Russia is a populist authoritarian state, but it does not necessarily follow that its neighbors must mimic its political model in order to cultivate good relations with Moscow. Ukraine might gradually become a more democratic state, and that could in turn lead to a continuation of a close relationship with Russia because this proves to be what most of the electorate prefers. We should not make the mistake of confusing democratic states for reliably pro-U.S. or pro-European ones, just as it does not follow that authoritarian governments will automatically want to align with Moscow or Beijing.

If Yanukovych’s election is a setback for U.S. and EU influence in post-Soviet space, it is not therefore a setback for democratization in that space. It should make Western policymakers consider whether democracy promotion actually complements or hinders the promotion of our interests. On the other hand, as allied and developing nations become more confident in pursuing their own national interests, the U.S. might begin to see what interests of ours are really vital and necessary and what interests are not very important.