In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration judged incorrectly that Iran was on the verge of revolution and decided that dealing directly with Tehran would provide a lifeline to an evil government soon to be swept away by history’s tide. A valuable opportunity to limit Iran’s nuclear program may have been lost as a result. ~Richard Haass

Haass then proceeds to use the rest of his article to argue that we should now do exactly the same thing that failed so miserably under the previous administration. He argues this on the questionable assumption that Iran is on the verge of revolution and he seems to think that dealing directly with Tehran will provide a lifeline to an evil government soon to be swept away by history’s tide. Granted, there is more reason now to think that Iran’s government is threatened by internal opposition than there was seven or eight years ago, but there is little reason to expect that the current regime is going to fall to its internal opposition.

What Haass’ article reminds us is that predictions of major political upheaval in Iran are becoming very much like the consistently wrong string of warnings that Iran is just a few years away from a nuclear weapon. An Iranian bomb is always just over the horizon, and it has been just over the horizon for almost twenty years. It seems that the next Iranian revolution is also always just around the corner, and this always seems to be an excuse for delaying diplomatic engagement that ought to have started years ago. Obviously, opponents of meaningful engagement exploit prospects for internal political change Iran to kill off a policy option they reject anyway. That’s to be expected. What doesn’t make sense is why so many supporters of engagement have begun abandoning a policy that was scarcely tried and has been given no time to work.

Haass represents something no less frustrating than the hawks who exploit internal dissension to push hard-line policies. Haass is one of many advocates of engagement who have lost all confidence in a policy option that they endorsed when Iran was a brutal, authoritarian state with a thin veneer of quasi-democratic practices. Its internal repression and violence did not deter them then, because they concluded that there was little that could be done about this and it was not directly relevant to the most contentious security issues. Since the crackdown after June 12, Iran continues to be a brutal, authoritarian state, but now it no longer wears that thin veneer, and all of a sudden some supporters of engagement cannot call for regime change quickly enough.

Fundamental Iranian state interests have not changed in the last seven months, nor has the compelling logic of engagement with Tehran become any less so. In 2008, the bankruptcy of demonizing and isolating Iran was obvious, and it was associated with a deeply unpopular administration, and so for a time it became unfashionable. For all of six months, engagement was trendy when Obama was widely liked and the policy involved sending Nowruz messages and doing nothing meaningful. It has taken much less time for pro-Green advocacy to displace engagement as the preferred fashion. Incredibly, the impulse to isolate Iran has regained much of its former strength despite its record of abject failure. Politically, pro-Green sympathizers are making it much easier for hawks to advance measures designed to isolate and punish Iran, because they are resisting the one alternative course of action that will avoid the imposition of more sanctions or military action. Sanctions will, of course, mainly harm the Green movement and do nothing to change regime behavior, and scrapping engagement will ensure that Washington continues to have zero influence over what Tehran does inside or outside of the country.

Moreover, if regime change becomes the stated goal of U.S. policy, it seems probable that the Green movement will be split over how to respond to this, and whatever strength that it does have will be diminished. After all, if it is true that the Green movement is divided, and if it is true that it is principally a civil rights movement rather than the beginning of a revolution, a policy of regime change that is tied directly to support for the Green movement will risk dividing dissidents against one another and staking out a position far more radical than what most members of the movement would or could support.

Hooman Majd’s very smart article is a good resource for thinking about all of this. Of the movement, he writes:

However, the radical elements claiming to be a part of the green movement only speak for a small minority of Iranians. The majority still want peaceful reform of the system and not necessarily a wholesale revolution, bloody or otherwise. That’s why, in the most recent Ashura demonstrations, for example, large groups of peaceful marchers actually prevented some of the movement’s radicalized elements from beating or attacking security forces. Although accurate polling information is not available, based on what we hear and see of the leaders of the green movement and many of its supporters, radicalization is still limited to a minority of protesters.

The green movement’s leaders recognize that any radicalization on their part will only bring down the state’s iron fist. They are also cautious because they know that if movement leaders call for regime change rather than reform and adherence to the Constitution, they will only have proven the government’s assertion that the movement’s goal all along has been to topple the system [bold mine-DL].

This is the problem with projecting what many Westerners want (i.e., the collapse of the current Iranian government) onto what the Green movement is capable of or even trying to achieve. Majd’s comparison with U.S. civil rights protests in the 1960s is instructive. Foreign support was not crucial to the success of the civil rights movement, and had there been significant material and other foreign aid it would have been a major, probably fatal, liability to the movement’s credibility. We can take the comparison one more step and recognize that the success of a domestic civil rights movement does not have to lead to the collapse of the existing system. In other words, even if the movement prevails as a civil rights movement, it is not going to result in the kind of political transformation that Westerners are expecting it to produce.

Majd states that “neither side is looking to reform the regime into oblivion,” and he holds out the possibility that some compromise could conceivably be struck this year. That might be unduly optimistic, but if there any truth to it the things Haass is advocating could very easily destroy any willingness inside the regime to compromise. Majd also made another valuable observation: “Lacking relations with Iran, Obama can do little to help the green movement, but plenty to hurt it.” Isolating Iran and engaging in anti-regime agitation have left the U.S. in a position where it can affect little or nothing inside Iran. Instead of using the Green movement as an excuse to repeat the errors of the past, Washington might begin to work towards normalization of relations first, and then our government might acquire some real clout that could work to the benefit of Iranian dissidents and might eventually lead to some sort of understanding on proliferation and terrorism.

Few could be less qualified to interpret the public’s disaffected mood than Harold Ford, the would-be Senator from Merrill Lynch, so naturally The Wall Street Journal has given him a platform to do just that. After all, who better to interpret the message of populist discontent than an investment banker whose acquaintance with the people he wants to represent extends to seeing them on the ground as his company executive’s helicopter flies overhead?

Peter Beinart has already leveled a devastating critique against Ford’s potential primary challenge to the appointed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand:

He knows nothing about New York. What he knows about is the American overclass, a large chunk of which happens to reside in the Empire State. His campaign is the brainchild, in large measure, of rich donors who went searching for someone to run against interim Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. His economic agenda consists of defending Washington’s bailout of Wall Street, proposing a large corporate tax cut, and opposing caps on executive pay.

Nothing could be more at odds with the public mood and more removed from the dissatisfaction voters expressed last Tuesday than Ford’s agenda of keeping Washington safe for Wall Street. Some of Ford’s proposals might have arguments in their favor, but taken all together and combined with his last-minute parachuting into New York politics they represent a blatant insult to the voters. Even a majority of Scott Brown’s voters believe that Democratic economic policy is oriented towards helping Wall Street, and this is clearly not viewed favorably. It is not as if Democrats in Washington need another member of Congress who is quite eager to make government policy even more agreeable to his banking and investment colleagues. It is particularly rich that he now presents himself as someone who will be an “independent” representative of his constituents, when his entire agenda and the backing for his candidacy show that he has no capacity for independence at all.

What could be more unlike Brown’s candidacy than a carpetbagger backed by wealthy interests who is coming in to oust a New York-born politician from his own party? Who is more poorly positioned to connect with voters dissatisfied and distrustful of major institutions than a member of the distrusted financial industry who thinks that his own, newly-adopted city is just another part of “flyover country”? Democrats may have laughed at Brown’s slogan that he lives in Wrentham and drives a truck, but clearly it resonated to some extent with voters. Just imagine how negatively voters will respond to Ford, the limousine “centrist” who eats at luxury hotels when he happens to be in town.

There is a pattern I have noticed in much of the commentary on Obama’s foreign policy: what Obama says in his speeches is taken as definitive and meaningful for understanding his “doctrine” or real purpose, and then his deeds are interpreted so that they fit into the meaning that interpreters give to his words. There is an odd unwillingness to judge the statements against what Obama has actually done or not done. Thus you can have both Kagan and Hachigian asserting in different ways that Obama intends to manage American decline from its status of global primacy. Kagan thinks this is a disaster, Hachigian thinks it is a correct departure from the failed “primacy strategy” of his predecessor, but both mistake Obama’s efforts aimed at perpetuating and preserving U.S. primacy for something else.

Kagan and Hachigian rely on some of the same Obama phrases to support their incorrect analysis. Hachigian cites a larger portion of Obama’s remarks, which he first gave at Cairo and has since repeated elsewhere:

[G]iven our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game — progress must be shared.

As Scoblete says, this is part of the effort to “make American primacy more palatable to the rest of the world.” I said something similar just after the Cairo speech:

For a president who claims to prize empathy, he certainly failed to put himself in the other’s shoes when he composed that line. It should be obvious that many in his target audience see the present world order as the elevation of America and its allies over them. Indeed, many of the more accommodating, diplomatic parts of the president’s speech can easily be read as attempts to reconcile his audience to this unwelcome arrangement.

Kagan leans more heavily on Obama’s “zero-sum” remark, and he has written countless op-eds and articles detailing why he finds this intolerable. Doesn’t Obama know that states have divergent, sometimes conflicting interests? Like the sentence that preceded that one, we cannot take the apparent rejection of a “zero-sum game” in international affairs at face value. On most if not all policies, the practice of U.S. foreign policy has scarcely changed, and there is still the same presumption that Washington’s definition of U.S. interests matches up very closely what the interests of all other nations. There is still the same idea buried deep down that Washington is doing other states favors by meddling in their affairs, dictating terms to them and making demands that their governments do as Washington says.

What Kagan omits in his complaint is that the last two administrations blithely assumed that they were not elevating America over the rest of the world (they were providing “leadership”!), and they also assumed that they were pursuing policies that served the interests of all. Antiterrorism, nuclear proliferation and democracy promotion have been the triad of issues that Clinton, Bush and Obama all agree on in principle, and all of them take for granted that the first two are global threats that require coordinated international responses. Where Obama differs from them, or where Clinton and Obama differ from Bush, is in the execution. Moreover, all of them believe, or claim to believe, that American “leadership” is necessary to address every global issue of importance, which means that they understand the exercise of U.S. primacy as something that benefits the entire world.

The belief in Pax Americana was very real to Obama’s predecessors, as it is real for him, and this belief easily reconciles the perpetuation of U.S. primacy (or hegemony) with a conviction that nations have shared interests and should be engaged in cooperative action. Pax Americana is supposed to make competition between states, especially security competition, unnecessary and redundant. The frightening thing about hegemonists is that many of them sincerely think they are doing right by the world, and they are especially certain that they are helping those nations that their policies torment. 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.

Of course, Iran stands out as proof that Obama still makes policy on the assumption that there are “zero-sum” scenarios: Washington insists that Iran abandon nuclear ambitions and that it submit its nuclear program to rigorous oversight, and Iran must either accede to the demands or be punished. Obama has indeed given engagement with Iran a bad name, because Obama’s engagement pursuing the same unrealistic nonproliferation goal while offering Iran nothing in the process. Obama justified using a diplomatic approach as an effort to exhaust other options before inevitably penalizing Iran.

Methods, style and rhetoric may differ at times, but the real test is what Obama and his administration do. By this measure, they appear to be working to preserve U.S. primacy, and this involves conserving resources rather than recklessly expending them on matters of no importance. We will see whether Obama will choose to continue trying to preserve U.S. primacy or gamble it away in a fruitless, unnecessary confrontation with Iran.

According to the new Washington Post poll of Massachusetts voters, between approximately one-third and one-half of Brown’s voters claimed that neither Obama (52%) nor the Democratic agenda (29%) in Washington was a factor in their vote. The difference in opposition to Obama among Brown voters (43%) and opposition to the Democratic agenda (65%) is fairly remarkable, as if one could cast a vote to convey displeasure with the agenda without also sending a message of opposition to Obama. Inexplicably, a small percentage of Brown voters (4 and 5% respectively) said that they were voting for Brown to express support for Obama or the Democratic agenda. We also find that 29% of Brown’s voters had voted for Obama, and 33% still approve of Obama’s job performance. 24% of Brown voters are enthusiastic or satisfied with administration policies! They have a funny way of showing it.

It is clear that two-thirds of Brown’s voters wished to express their opposition to the Democrats’ agenda, which is to say that pretty much everyone who did not vote for Obama in 2008 does not support Obama’s agenda and wanted to express their opposition to it. I think we knew that before Tuesday. Over a third of Brown’s voters (37%) were dissatisfied or even angry with Congressional Republican policies, which is what you might expect when almost that many of Brown’s voters approve of Obama’s performance and the Congressional GOP is dedicated to thwarting Obama in everything he does.

Looking at what Brown’s voters want him to do with respect to health care, we see that they are divided right down the middle: 50% (47% strongly) do want Brown to work to halt Democratic health care efforts, and 48% (40% strongly) want him to work with Democrats to make changes to their proposals. Half of Brown’s voters want him to sink Obama’s agenda, full stop, and approximately half of them want him to collaborate with Democrats. That is what we might call a mixed message. Looking at Brown voters’ opposition to the health care bill itself, we see that two-thirds of them strongly oppose the bill, which is consistent with what we saw earlier, 14% “somewhat oppose” it and 13% actually support it. 26% of Brown voters believe government should be doing more “to solve problems.” 51% of Brown voters support MassCare. Perhaps most amusing, 52% of Brown voters approved of Ted Kennedy’s job performance.

So what we have here is a significant bloc of Brown voters, at least 24% of them, who approve of Obama, support his policies, and want more activist government, and some of them even support the bill Brown has promised to kill. On one level, it makes perfect sense that these people voted for Brown, because Obama and the Democratic agenda were apparently not factors in deciding how to vote. If they weren’t factors, Brown must have won their votes for some other reason. On another level, it seems bizarre and difficult to fathom that they would vote for someone campaigning on the promise to stop the policies and administration that they support. Perhaps had they been able to know how their votes would be interpreted, or rather misinterpreted, they might have voted differently, and Brown would have been limited to his core of McCain voters.

By contrast, Scott Brown commanded broad enthusiasm throughout the Republican Party, from libertarians to vegetarians, to borrow an old joke of John McCain’s. Does the breadth of enthusiasm bespeak a broadening of accepted views? If so, Tuesday’s big victory offers more than hope for a better quality of health reform. It offers hope that the Republican Party has truly recovered its center – and its way not only to win, but to be deserving of it. ~David Frum

It seems that the breadth of enthusiasm for Brown is not really a sign of the “broadening of accepted views.” As Frum noted, Brown is likely to be to the left of Specter once he starts voting in the Senate, and movement activists and party regulars were glad to be rid of Specter last year, so it might appear as if something has changed in atittudes toward moderates. However, the enthusiasm for Brown was not an expression of newfound acceptance of moderate Northeastern Republicans. It is not as if movement conservatives recognized an error in pushing Specter to switch parties and wanted to remedy it by replacing him with an even more liberal Republican from Massachusetts. As I mentioned earlier, the selective outrage that targets the less liberal Specter and Crist with serious primary challenges but leaves the more liberal Brown unscathed depends entirely on the degree to which the moderate Republican opposes or embraces Obama’s agenda.

Specter and Crist crossed the line by respectively backing and embracing the stimulus bill. Brown won boundless sympathy and admiration for pledging to kill the health care bill. There is still an “ideological straitjacket” limiting what Republican candidates can do, but its dimensions may be a little different than they were in the past. The most important factor in determining whether or not movement and party will rally behind a Republican candidate is his readiness to thwart Obama. Everything else is secondary and will be overlooked, so long as the candidate doesn’t have presidential aspirations.

Just look at how quickly the Huntsman ’12 talk evaporated almost as soon as he began to become a national figure. Huntsman went to Beijing as ambassador in part because he surveyed the political landscape and realized that there was too much resistance even to a pro-life Utah Republican candidate who had supported the Western Climate Initiative, backed civil unions and acquired a reputation for reasonableness. Bob Bennett is currently discovering that his positions on the environment and health care are not really welcome in the Utah GOP. The primary challenge against Bennett and the broad conservative enthusiasm for Brown actually stem from the same desire to oppose health care legislation. In other words, at least as far as national Republican and conservative support for Brown are concerned, Brown has profited from the same political pressure that sent Huntsman to China and made Specter a Democrat. As soon as Brown reveals that he really is a moderate Northeastern Republican, conservative enthusiasm will disappear.

Looking ahead to the midterms, this Politico report and this summary from the pollster PPP provide some perspective on how far the GOP has to go. As Politico reports, one important Republican problem is the weakness of their fundraising:

Privately, top Republicans tell POLITICO that they are most concerned right now about their bank balance. They are doing well in recruiting candidates but worry they might not have the cash to sufficiently fund them.

Consider the House. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has $15 million in the bank right now — nearly four times more than the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Officials say that, while small and large donors are still chipping in, the recession has caused a dip in contributions from middle-level donors — often the small-business types who are feeling the economic pinch.

At the candidate level, if you tally up all the money for everyone running, Democrats have about $60 million more ($175 million to $114 million), according to numbers compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Money is one of the many reasons top GOP officials wish the party had not elected Michael Steele as Republican National Committee chairman. Senior Republicans don’t like his loose lips or his wildly improvisational style. But they could live with that if the RNC were a cash cow. It is not, in part because of Steele’s unwillingness to personally stroke top donors.

Poor Republican fundraising and a Democratic advantage in fundraising have been the story for the last two cycles of House elections. As the report says, the RNC has less cash on hand than its Democratic counterpart, and Steele’s erratic and often ridiculous leadership style is hindering efforts to make up the difference. Things can change, Steele might be forced out on account of his incompetence, and fundraising could pick up if it seems that the GOP has a fighting chance, but at present the GOP is at a significant disadvantage. The recent Court decision on corporate and union contributions doesn’t seem likely to help Republicans that much. Not only are they deep in the minority, but to the extent that they have posed as populists arrayed against bailouts and crony capitalism they have not exactly been giving corporations a lot of reasons to provide funding. If they opt to become defenders of Wall Street and banks against Democratic expressions of economic populism, they may win contributions at the expense of losing many votes.

Meanwhile, the public is largely dissatisfied with “the direction of the GOP”:

Our national poll this week found that only 19% of voters in the country are happy with the direction of the Republican Party, compared to 56% who are unhappy with it. Even among independents, who have voted overwhelmingly for Scott Brown, Chris Christie, and Bob McDonnell 58% say they don’t like the direction the GOP is headed in.

I know what you’re going to say. How can the public be unhappy with the GOP’s direction? Wouldn’t the party need to have a direction with which to make them unhappy? What this does confirm is that the party is still politically toxic, and according to a WSJ/NBC poll it has a favorability rating of just 30%. The Politico article also related another piece of information that makes the chances of a significant Republican resurgence seem pretty poor:

A recent Washington Post poll found 24 percent trusted congressional Republicans to make the right decisions for the country — 8 points fewer than Democrats and 23 points fewer than Obama.

Three out of four Americans don’t trust them to make the right decisions, and yet we’re supposed to believe that they’re on the verge of being rewarded with massive gains in both houses later this year? Of course, these are midterm elections, and under normal conditions likely Republican voters tend to turn out for these at a higher rate than Democratic voters, so the distrust that the overwhelming majority feels for the Congressional GOP could be blunted. However, if the problem the administration and Congress have is that the public does not trust them, doesn’t distrust of Republicans in Congress make it very unlikely that the public is going to put them anywhere near regaining power in Washington?

The story Republicans have told themselves since they were thrown out in 2006 is that spending and earmarks did them in. Despite having no evidence that this was the case, they have repeated this for years. Having misunderstood the real reasons for their political collapse, they are poor interpreters of voters’ intentions, which makes it unlikely that they understand why they prevailed in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts. If they don’t understand this, it is improbable that they are going to be able to replicate that success in the fall.

That brings us to trying to understand the public’s views on the health care bill. Everyone is citing the new Gallup poll showing a majority wants Congress to suspend efforts on the current health care bill and consider alternatives “that can receive more Republican support.” The topline result seems straightforward enough. Just like Brown voters, a majority wants to stop the current bill. What the Gallup poll does not ask is why respondents want to do this. Naturally, GOP partisans take the topline result at face value and conclude that it must mean that any and all “health care reform” is wildly unpopular. We have already seen that this is not what Obama/Brown voters meant in Massachusetts, and it seems reasonable to suppose that some nontrivial number of Gallup’s 55% are also saying something else.

One of the other questions yields a somewhat vague result, but it does cast some doubt on interpretations that independent voters are recoiling from Obama’s agenda. Asked whether they are pleased with Obama’s progress, disappointed that he did not achieve more, or upset that he is taking the country in the wrong direction, 39% of respondents said they are pleased and 20% are disappointed. 37% is upset with the wrong direction. Among independents, the numbers were 35/25/35. I say that the result is vague because it is not completely clear what the disappointed respondents mean exactly by “more progress,” but regardless of what they meant exactly the result suggests that they seem to be sympathetic to Obama’s agenda, but they find his execution and his product lacking.

If the prevailing interpretation were correct, we should see a much higher “upset” result among all respondents and among independents in particular. This poll does not show that the majority is outraged by Democratic overreach. Apparently, the majority does not think that Obama is moving in the wrong direction. Most independents are evidently not fleeing from the Democrats because they believe their agenda to be misguided, but approximately a quarter of them are disillusioned because they expected more results, more “progress.” To express their disappointment, some of them seem willing to defeat poor Democratic candidates to try to get the administration’s attention. Paradoxically, their disappointment may help ensure that he will produce even fewer results.

This Hardball segment is a prime example of why cable talk shows and cable news generally are such useless venues for discussing politics. In the segment, Howard Dean refers to data from the Research 2000 Massachusetts post-election survey and makes an argument that a huge proportion of Obama voters who also voted for Brown were hostile to the current health care bill because they wanted a more progressive version of health care legislation. Matthews is left sputtering in disbelief, because the survey data would seem to show that Matthews and practically every other talking head and pundit in the land has missed what a significant number of independent Obama voters in Massachusetts were actually trying to accomplish by voting for Brown. Tom Bevan thinks this is one of Matthews’ great moments on televison. In fact, it is a display of how insipid and shallow so much political commentary can be, especially when it is reduced to the format of cable talk shows.

At one point, Matthews asked, “Are voters crazy?” The right answer is that voters know what they want, but sometimes have an odd way of expressing this when they vote. An overwhelming majority of Obama/Brown voters and Obama voters who did not vote on Tuesday favor a public option, a large plurality of both groups opposes the current bill, and most also oppose the mandate. Brown vowed to kill the current bill, and this is something that almost half of Obama/Brown voters wanted. These voters apparently wanted to kill it because they believed it was too compromised. Another 32% of them support the bill Brown has vowed to kill, which tells us that their votes were probably cast primarily as protests against Democratic establishments in Boston and Washington, but they were also among the 82% of Obama/Brown voters who favor a public option. Of Obama/Brown voters, just 14% oppose a public option. If the first priority of many of these voters is to scrap the current bill, and if voters are angry with the majority party because it crafted a compromised bill, there is an odd way in which a vote for Brown makes sense. It will certainly not get them what they ultimately want (i.e., the public option), but it may achieve the immediate goal of killing a bill they oppose or only support grudgingly.

The damning thing about this segment for Matthews is that he did not even attempt to consider the evidence being presented. All that he needed to know was that Brown won, Brown opposes this particular health care bill, and therefore it is obviously an endorsement of policy views on the national level that even Scott Brown doesn’t hold. The conventional wisdom has already become entrenched that Massachusetts independent voters recoiled from “statism” or “big government,” when the survey data indicate that the independent voters who backed both Obama and Brown expected much more from Obama than the shabby corporatist compromise in the Senate, and they were angry enough about his underwhelming performance to go so far as to elect a Republican to demonstrate the depth of their dissatisfaction. As Matthews’ and Bevan’s reactions show, their protest message is one that virtually no one is going to hear or understand.

Greenwald’s frustration with the prevailing wisdom that “the left” has been dominating the Democratic agenda is understandable. The opposition always seems eager to attack every administration by saying that it is in hock to its most ideological supporters, and it is usually nonsense. A party’s most ideological supporters almost always want to claim that an administration’s policy failures are tied to its compromises and betrayals of principle, and sometimes this is correct. Certainly as a matter of garnering enthusiastic support, generating turnout and mobilizing activists, an administration can hurt itself and its party by making too many concessions to the “center” or to the other side. What can often save an administration that violates principles or breaks with many of its loyal constituencies is the other party’s supporters and their accusations that the President is “too liberal” or “too conservative.” Progressives and conservatives tend to respond to these violations and accusations very differently.

Since at least 1981, conservatives have usually made the mistake of responding to this kind of attack on Republican administrations by identifying themselves very closely with Presidents who do not actually govern as conservatives would govern. For whatever reason, most conservatives have a strange need to be validated by Republican occupants of the White House, and so they engage in every sort of contortion to defend and justify whatever Republican administrations do. They have been keen to claim Republican presidential victories as vindications of their ideas, and they do this regardless of how the candidate campaigned and regardless of administration policies.

Except for very early on in 1999, when Bush was seen correctly as a moderate or, more accurately, as a “centrist,” conservatives flocked to Bush despite the latter’s lack of connections to the conservative movement, his record as governor and his “compassionate conservative” campaign theme. The fight with McCain in the primaries was a crucial moment when most conservatives decided that Bush was somehow “one of them” because he was under attack from McCain, who was running a campaign based on open hostility to the movement and an assiduous courting of the mainstream media. It was an instinctive, tribal response that made their much later complaints about Bush’s insufficient conservatism appear to have no credibility. This made Democratic charges that Bush was the “most conservative” or an “extremely conservative” President stick more easily, and it is unlikely that mainstream conservatism will ever recover from its corrupt bargain with a Bush administration that governed as corporatist, militarist “centrists.”

From the start, Republicans had been labeling Clinton a radical leftist, when he was on the whole the most “centrist” Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland. The 1994 result itself was the product of a number of factors, including a huge number of retirements in the House, but these included the demoralization of union members and party activists in the wake of NAFTA and the failure of health care legislation. I very much doubt that the midterm elections are going to be anything like ’94, but one similarity that exists is the disillusionment and loss of enthusiasm among party activists and rank-and-file voters. On the whole, aside from a few badly-handled, largely symbolic culture war controversies, Clinton governed as a “centrist” more or less from the beginning, and he moved even farther away from liberals after 1994, which did not stop the charges that he was a huge leftist.

Many progressives always remained cool to Obama throughout the primaries and the general election, and many netroots and other activists on the left never really embraced him as one of their own. They discerned correctly that Obama was running a primary campaign that put him to the right of his other two main rivals, and the best observers on the left realized that Obama did not have a record of challenging entrenched interests. As Election Day approached, Obama pursued the safe course of becoming ever more conventional and comfortable with the ideas of the Washington establishment, and his most prominent economic advisors and Cabinet members were mostly drawn from the friends and disciples of Rubin. As the health care debate continued, progressives kept losing ground, and the rank corporatism of the Senate version finally precipitated serious protests and discontent on the left. This was not a case of ideological activists and voters making even greater demands on an administration that was already doing what they wanted. It was instead a sign that some progressives were losing patience with the substance of the bill and the nature of the reform being proposed. Whatever else the last year has shown us, it has not shown us that the administration and the Democratic Party is currently in thrall to the left.

The impulse to label an opponent as an extremist is a common and tempting one. It is a very easy thing to do, provided that you are not concerned with accuracy or persuading undecided and unaffiliated people that you are right. These labels are not descriptive. They are a way to express the extent of one’s discontent and disaffection with the other side in a debate. When some Republican says that Obama and his party have been governing from “the left,” he might even believe it inasmuch as Obama and his party are to his left politically, but what he really means is that he strongly disapproves of how Obama and his party have been governing. He may or may not have a coherent reason for this disapproval, but declaring it to be leftist or radical leftist conveys the depth of his displeasure. That is, it is not analysis of political reality. It is therapy for the person making the statement.

The same thing goes for progressives who were trying to find words to express how outraged they were by Bush. Inevitably, many resorted to using labels such as theocrat, extreme right, radical right and the like. These did not correctly describe the content of Bush’s politics, but they did express the critics’ feelings of disgust and loathing for Bush’s politics. That doesn’t mean they weren’t right to be disgusted and outraged, but the words they used to express these sentiments typically had no relationship to the substance of what Bush was actually doing. Likewise, there could be merit in objecting to Obama’s agenda, but if critics begin by using the wrong definitions and descriptions they will not be critiquing an agenda that really exists, but it will instead be a fantastical one that they have imagined. Where this creates problems in understanding political reality is when partisans begin believing their own inaccurate descriptions of their opponents and then when they draw conclusions about the political landscape based on their misinterpretations of their opponents’ beliefs.

But I’m more interested in what happens after America attacks Iran. What if the government collapses? Do we occupy the country? Do we allow a power vacuum? Do we let a Revolutionary Guard commander assume control? A cleric? Could we exercise any control in Iran following an attack? And if the current regime hangs on and then redoubles their nuclear efforts, do we subject them to another pounding five years hence? As a famous general once observed, “tell me how this ends?”

We know from our rueful experience in Iraq that conservative defense intellectuals don’t pay much attention to the immediate aftermath of a conflict (with the exception of Max Boot). It’s apparently sufficient to start a war and then let the chips fall where they may. Not that we should have too much confidence in their predictive abilities on that front either, but it would be nice if those clamoring for a war with Iran could provide us with just a scintilla of analysis regarding U.S. policy in the aftermath. ~Greg Scoblete

In his critique of James Phillips’ call for war with Iran, Scoblete is picking up on something I was discussing in my last column. Describing the flaws of conservative internationalism, I focused on George Will’s Afghanistan arguments of the last few months:

Will’s view is often mistaken for that of a war skeptic, or even of a war opponent. It is in fact the opposite. He simply represents the conservative internationalist preference for air power (and the unavoidable civilian casualties that go with it), along with a lack of patience for the long grind of stabilizing and securing a country once the initial combat phase is completed.

Conservative defense intellectuals tend not to pay much attention to the post-combat phase because they don’t believe the military should remain for very long after concluding “major combat operations” (as Mr. Bush described them six and a half years ago). There was little or no Phase IV planning in Iraq, as Ricks documented in Fiasco and Zelizer has noted in Arsenal of Democracy, because many of the top officials responsible for that planning had no desire and no real intention of remaining in Iraq long enough to need such planning.

Scoblete credits Boot with paying attention to post-combat planning, but we should remember that the reason Boot does this is that he is a neo-imperialist who openly advocates for pursuing an imperial role in the world. While Boot’s so-called “hard Wilsonians” are very willing to think about U.S. post-conflict policies, in that they have no trouble supporting prolonged or even permanent deployments all over the world, their policies are mostly informed by arrogant presumption, naive universalism and cultural ignorance. This usually dovetails with the conservative desire to do as little nation-building as possible, because most of Boot’s neoconservative colleagues assumed that Iraqi democratic government would spring up and flourish almost immediately on its own with a ready-made exile leadership. Other conservative internationalists may or may not have believed this, but it provided them with the reassurance that the war would not “devolve” into a nation-building exercise. As the mission largely became more focused on nation-building, most conservative internationalists did not abandon support for the war, but this was a function of undue conservative loyalty to the executive, especially when the President was from their own party.

A quick war to topple a dictatorial regime and install a friendly replacement appealed to a broad cross-section of conservatives, but the badly flawed predictions of what would happen after the invasion revealed the error of both the “light footprint” approach and the democratist political fantasy that made that approach seem workable. We heard all about how modernized, secular and educated Iraqis were, which made nation-building seem unnecessary and it made post-conflict policies seem redundant. More often than not, the “stabilization” the “hard Wilsonians” propose to bring to the country was not necessary before the war, and their willingness to stay does not reflect an interest in repairing the damage to the country devastated by their war. It is instead an opportunity to project U.S. power and to create new responsibilities for the military and national security state, which make it that much harder to reduce and/or reform both.

Conservatives such as Will are no less hawkish and no less willing to enter and start wars than they were six or seven years ago, but they don’t like tying down so many of our forces in ongoing military campaigns, and they don’t like the political opposition to aggressive foreign policy that long campaigns generate. Prolonged campaigns with large ground forces potentially hamstring U.S. power projection and limit how and where Washington can intervene. For neoconservatives, the solution is simply to expand the size of the military, while many conservative internationalists prefer to withdraw in order to be able to intervene elsewhere. Both are trying to perpetuate U.S. hegemony, but they sometimes disagree about how this should be done.

Neoconservatives are more willing to support long campaigns and risk public backlash, because they tend to be more contemptuous of public opinion when it does not support their policies and because they have an even greater fondness for executive power and an ideal of “strong leadership” that requires a President to ignore public opposition to a war. Conservative internationalists are more concerned about losing public support inasmuch as they don’t want any one military deployment to undermine long-term support for activist foreign policy. The “surge” became sacrosanct and beyond criticism for most conservatives partly because it satisfied the needs of these groups. It combined a refusal to end the war with the sending of additional forces, which pleased neoconservatives, and it also held out the promise of reducing American casualties and making public opposition to the war less urgent and therefore less politically dangerous.

That brings us back to Iran. “Preventive” war against Iran unfortunately has considerable support, especially on the right, and one reason for this is the perceived low cost such a war would have. The cost is perceived to be low because it would initially be largely waged as an air war, and the memory of past U.S. air wars in the last twenty years is one of total dominance, success and very few American casualties. Of course, a war against Iran would not be an easy, short or cheap one, but I think the majority that supports such a war assumes that the costs would be few and the fighting would be over quickly. My guess is that James Phillips does not discuss what might or might not happen after the strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites because he does not think there is anything to discuss. This is another shared flaw that many conservatives who write on foreign policy and national security share, which is simple indifference to the consequences of our military actions.