Only Obama – with his dismissive view of the Cold War as a relic distorting our thinking and his attenuated commitment to America’s exceptional role in the world – would spurn German president Angela Merkel’s invitation to attend. ~Rich Lowry

Perhaps Chancellor Merkel is offended by Obama’s non-attendance, but I rather doubt it. The fall of the Berlin Wall, like the other popular movements that occurred during 1989 throughout central and eastern Europe, was a great and wonderful moment in the history of Europe and the world. It is also worth mentioning that it was an event created entirely by Germans. Germans in Berlin tore down that wall and elected to rebel against the Soviet domination that it represented. They did so knowing full well that it was only East German and Soviet loss of nerve in quashing such a demonstration that prevented them from being killed or imprisoned. Had Gorbachev responded as Brezhnev had in 1968, the West would have complained loudly, but would have rationally refrained from taking any action that might lead to military conflict. In the end, the communist governments of central and eastern Europe fell because their nations no longer accepted them and their Soviet masters and the men running those governments were no longer willing to perpetuate themselves in power with violence. It might very well be more appropriate that the American President not be there, lest we be treated to yet another self-congratulatory paean to how we Americans won the Cold War, which tends to obscure and marginalize the very central role that the peoples of the communist states of Europe had in toppling that oppressive and degrading system.

It would be typical of an American President to mark the twentieth anniversary of such an occasion by flying in to claim part of the credit on behalf of the U.S. While I doubt that there was actually all that much calculation involved in Obama’s decision to stay away, perhaps he intended to show that he understands that the event was not principally an American triumph and was not really about us. Given his endless talk of the interdependence of all nations, I admit that this is a stretch.

Of course, Obama could go and mark the occasion, but I think this would immediately be treated as an attempt to exploit a German and European celebration to provide yet another platform for yet another speech. If people are tired of hearing from Obama and tired of him inserting himself into so many things, as we hear so often from the GOP, his absence from Berlin this week should be a welcome sign that Obama is learning that he needs to have priorities in how he uses his time. Just a few weeks ago, we were hearing how outrageous it was for Obama to shirk his duties and go to Copenhagen, and now it is supposed to be outrageous that he is not going on yet another foreign trip.

Republicans object to so many irrelevant things that Obama does and they treat absolutely everything as some supreme, unpardonable error that it is impossible to take any of their criticism seriously.

Andrew:

On the specific matter of Trita Parsi: I have no long-term knowledge of the dude (and for quite a while thought he was a woman) and have never met him. I just know that when the Dish was covering Iran’s revolution, few people were as committed or as devoted to the Greens as Parsi or his organization. To conflate him with the dictators he so actively exposed and resisted and who murdered or tortured people he loves and cares about is just wrong. After the trauma of last June, it’s deeply hurtful and offensive.

Andrew is correct about all this, but this doesn’t go quite far enough. The attack to which he is responding is fundamentally dishonest. Parsi has argued against additional sanctions on Iran on the reasonable grounds that additional sanctions would not force Tehran to make any concessions, would not undermine the regime and would not advance the cause of reformers. I don’t believe Parsi has argued for an end to all sanctions currently imposed on Iran, but even if he were to make that argument he would have legitimate reasons for thinking that sanctions have helped to weaken Iranian opposition forces and consolidate the regime’s hold on the country. If Goldberg had any interest in being fair to Parsi, he would have to acknowledge that Parsi has also argued for a pause in pursuing any engagement with Tehran in the wake of the June crackdown. That means that Parsi has changed his position on engaging Tehran to take a somewhat harder line than he once held. Whether or not this is the right move, this put him among those opposed to engaging the Iranian government under its current leadership at the present time. As far as I know, this remains Parsi’s position today. Obviously, he is nothing like “the AIPAC of Iran,” and referring to him as a lobbyist for Tehran is false and reprehensible.

Now that I am back from Greece, I have been trying to catch up on the electoral news for tomorrow’s off-year and special elections. As far as most political bloggers seem to be concerned, the gubernatorial races have faded into the background and the genuinely less significant special House election in New York has been consuming everyone’s attention. This seems to be true regardless of the political views of the blogger. Hoffman’s insurgency seems to have become the focal point of tomorrow’s voting, which is hard for me to explain.

NY-23 is similar in some respects to NY-20, which earlier this year elected the Democrat Murphy over Tedisco in the special election there to replace now-Sen. Gillibrand, in that NY-23 has been a solid Republican district for a long time that voted for Obama in 2008. It makes sense that more conservative candidates would be winning significant support in these districts, and it also makes sense that candidates taking advantage of public frustration with the administration would be able to tap into feelings of disappointment among voters who took a chance on Obama and now somehow claim to be surprised by what he has been doing. In other words, a conservative candidate ought not to have much difficulty rallying support in an off-year special election in a district that has routinely sent Republicans to Congress. Low turnout elections ought to benefit candidates who represent mobilized, discontented voters, and that seems to describe Hoffman’s backers very well.

That should mean that a Hoffman victory, which is still by no means assured, would not be a great surprise and would not mean much beyond the confines of northern New York. Indeed, one wonders if Hoffman’s standing in the polls would be all that newsworthy if he were not a Conservative Party insurgent fighting against the local GOP leadership. My guess is that NY-23’s location in the Northeast will give many people on the right the wrong impression that Hoffman’s chance at success proves that movement activist-style conservatism can win or at least compete in the Northeast generally, but northern New York is not like most of the rest of the region. Travis Childers’ election in a special election last year was not and never would have been proof of the viability of progressive politics in the Deep South. The significance of a Hoffman victory would be similarly limited.

Something I don’t understand about the national GOP’s elevation of the NY-23 race to such a high profile is why they think nationalizing House races favors them. Nationally, the GOP remains toxic and its party ID continues to be very low. Nationalizing the race gains the GOP nothing in a traditionally supportive district, but it potentially saddles their preferred candidate with all of their baggage from the past several years. It is also mimicking the absolutely failed Republican tactics of almost every special election of the last three years. With depressing regularity, GOP attack ads have warned voters against such-and-such a candidate siding with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, when most people outside of Washington don’t know and couldn’t care who these people are. The leading role Palin has had in backing Hoffman, which has also triggered something of a stampede of other national Republicans to try to match her bid for conservative activist support, has to be something of a dream come true for Chris Van Hollen and the DCCC considering her genuinely poor ratings with non-Republicans.

The GOP seems to be making what ought to be an easy win into a national Phyrrhic victory in which the relative strength of conservative activists inside the party becomes vastly exaggerated and identifies the flailing, failing party even more closely with its conservative members. This will make it very difficult for conservative activists to disassociate themselves from the outcome of the midterms next year. What I find strange in the fixation on NY-23 is that the off-year gubernatorial elections probably serve as a much better indicator of large-scale movements in public opinion. Larger, more diverse electorates in large states are involved in Virginia and New Jersey. If things go as I expect them to with a Republican pick-up in Virginia and a Democratic hold in New Jersey, the message will be rather muddled. It will mean that Virginia will have chosen a Northern Virginia moderate who successfully ran away from his earlier social conservatism while New Jersey re-elected an incumbent who was thought to be highly vulnerable and discredited by corruption. Those results could be explained by pointing to the nature of the electorates in both states, but this does not lend itself to a triumphant narrative of Republican resurgence fueled by true believers. The point here is not to write off conservative insurgents or reject protest candidacies provoked by the failures and mistakes of state and local party leaders. These are appropriate and sometimes necessary responses to elected and party officials’ blunders. What also matters is being willing to acknowledge that the political landscape is not necessary what we wish it is or think it ought to be. Hoffmania and its attendant privileging of ideology over actual local interests suggest that a great many conservatives cannot and will not acknowledge this.

I’m at the Madrid airport with just a few minutes before boarding begins, but I wanted to say something about Ross’ last column and Noah Millman’s response to it. My impression is that Ross wanted to discuss Pope Benedict’s outreach to conservative Christians, whether they are tradtionalist Catholic or Anglican, and he would usually settle for seeing these moves in terms of Western culture wars, but perhaps he wanted to be a bit provocative and make more out of the outreach than it requires. Just as the Pope’s Regensburg address was frequently misconstrued as principally anti-Islamic rather than a meditation on the Christian understanding of reason, Ross seems to be making forthright Catholic proselytism into something other than what it is to make it seem relevant to non-Catholic readers. I would take the same event and see it as another step in the progression of pan-conservative ecumenism in which political-cum-cultural issues carry more weight than theological ones. Of course, Pope Benedict is engaging in this consistent with his obligations as pontiff, so it is not quite that watered down, but it is these political/cultural issues that are the fault lines that have created the opportunity to lure conservative Anglicans away from the Communion.

Whether or not Anglican conservatives in the “global south” and throughout the world crave Pope Benedict’s type of leadership (and it wouldn’t surprise me if some did), we should bear in mind how swiftly the Vatican backtracked in the wake of the Regensburg address. Stressing that it was an exercise in philosophical reflection, the Vatican actively distanced itself from the claims of both protesters and admirers that the address represented a great intellectual blow in a clash of civilizations. It’s also worth considering that any ecumenical anti-jihad of this kind has the same problems as the “ecumenical jihad” to which it bears some resemblance: it is fundamentally negative in its foundations and attempts to give a religious character to what is primarily a political project. Were there to be a “united Anglican-Catholic front” against Islam, my guess is that it would be as damaging and destructive to the integrity of these confessions as Byzantine unionism was to the integrity of Orthodoxy in the 13th and 15th centuries. One need not prefer the turban to the mitre to see that attempting to end schisms even partly for anti-Islamic purposes does nothing to heal Christian divisions and instead tends to deepen and embitter both parties.

Obama’s handling of the policy reversal on missile defense, in particular, has drawn sharp rebukes from the region, mostly on the execution rather than the policy itself. A Polish official was quoted by United Press International proclaiming that, “Waking Czech Prime Minister Fisher at midnight European time, and calling President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Tusk — who refused to take the call — 70 years to the day that Russia invaded Poland — is politically inept and very offensive.” Another official added, “this simply confirms how unimportant Europe is to the U.S., despite President Obama’s words to the contrary.” ~James Joyner

James calls this “somewhat overstated,” when it seems to me that absurdly overblown would be a better way of describing it. You cannot gauge the importance or unimportance of Europe to the United States on the largely cosmetic, superficial and procedural clashes Washington has had with various European states in the last nine months. Under the previous administration, Europe continued to be “important” to the U.S. even when major EU powers opposed administration policy in very public, dramatic ways. To the extent that Obama is losing ground with Europeans, he had far more goodwill and support to lose; in almost every European country, he continues to rate higher after the drop-off from unrealistic expectations than Bush did at almost any point. Obviously relations were and remained far more strained under the last administration than they have been so far under this one. We notice the minor clashes that have taken place because there was a widely-shared, unreasonable expectation that amity and concord with Europe would prevail under Obama.

Just as Obama’s policies have not changed very much from those of his predecessor, neither have the points of contention with European allies changed. NATO members were uninterested in committing more forces to Afghanistan last year, and they remain uninterested in doing so. Complaints of having to wait for Obama’s decision are a cover for the indecision and unwillingness of most European governments to participate more fully in the mission. Had Obama speedily decided on an increase in troop levels, the same governments that complain of delay would probably be annoyed by Obama’s hastiness.

European and especially German interests were flatly ignored by Bush when it came to handling Russia. Promises to Ukraine and Georgia of eventual membership in NATO were given over strenuous German opposition. Were European interests and opinions being heeded then? No. The missile defense ploy prompted Moscow to threaten abandoning its commitments under the European conventional forces treaty and elicited a great deal of bluster from Medvedev about targeting Russian missiles on European soil. Was European security strengthened by any of this? No. What matter then if Bush went through the motions and observed the right formalities when he was getting the major decisions wrong?

Most western European allies were not seriously consulted, nor were their objections given much weight, when the Bush administration decided to push ahead with the missile defense plan. In all of the new commentary claiming that Europe has soured on Obama, this seems not to count at all. The last administration probably would have preferred not to have these missile defense arrangements made bilaterally, but they had to be because most major NATO nations wanted nothing to do with it, which was why the system had to be set up as a joint venture among the three states involved. In fact, on the substance of the decision most Europeans and a plurality of Poles and Czechs welcomed Obama’s reversal. It remains true that Obama has stepped on some toes and handled things poorly when it comes to matters of protocol, but the U.S.-European disagreements of the last few years have centered on substantive and frequently major differences in worldview. Many of these remain, because the interests and values of America and Europe are not identical. That will always be true, no matter who is in the White House.

P.S. James also claims that Bush made eastern and central Europe a “priority” and cites the missile defense plan and proposed NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia as examples. It is true that Bush paid a great deal of attention to this part of Europe by way of stoking irresponsible nationalist politics in all of the states involved and provoking Russia in ways detrimental to the security of these states. God protect these nations from any more of that kind of attention. The last administration also recognized Kosovo’s independence, which contributed significantly to Russia’s later partition of Georgia. If the last administration “prioritized” eastern and central Europe in such dangerous and counterproductive ways, perhaps a certain degree of neglect would be better.

In the short of it, President Obama’s cancellation of America’s agreements with the Polish and Czech governments was a serious blow to the hopes and aspirations of millions of Europeans. ~Dick Cheney

Cheney’s recent speech at the Center for Security Policy is much what you would expect from him, but that is not what interests me here. What I find interesting is how obsessed Republicans have become in making the missile defense decision into a central part of their foreign policy indictment of Obama. Pence, Romney, Santorum and Pawlenty have all taken a whack at it, leading members of the conservative movement have denounced the move, and it has been one of the favorites in many columnists’ repertoires. You have never seen so many people suddenly discover the necessity of consulting with allies. Of course, these allies are not counseling Washington against rash, foolish actions, but they are instead helping Washington to antagonize another major power and encouraging our government in its own worst instincts. Naturally, the latter appeals to people who cheered on one blunder after another for the last eight years.

So far, the missile defense decision is one of the very few major substantive foreign policy acts Obama has made, and it was clearly the right one as far as relations with Russia, European security and American spending were concerned. Using this as the cudgel with which to batter Obama’s “foreign policy drift” is a sign of how far removed the GOP has become from common sense in this area. Were it limited to Cheney, one could write it off as sour grapes from a failed, old man, but it isn’t. It’s as if the Democrats had fixated on the nuclear deal with India (one of the few genuinely constructive moves the last administration made in regulating proliferation and shoring up relations with India), and then began mouthing Islamabad’s talking points on why this was a disastrous course of action. Had they done so, they would have made it clear that there was absolutely nothing the administration attempted that they would not subject to pathetic, reflexive opposition. As it happens, while there were critics of the deal, it never became a significant part of the list of Bush’s foreign policy errors, much less a leading, central element of the attacks against him.

There is no sense of proportion in Cheney’s remarks on this decision. He refers to an irrelevant interceptor system designed to counter a threat that doesn’t exist in the same breath as the Soviet invasion of Poland, which was ruinous for Poland and one of the great crimes of the last century. Aside from a coincidence in timing, there was and is no connection between the two things and it is pure demagoguery even to mention them together. Cheney speaks of the Czechs and Poles “walking the plank,” which implies execution and destruction, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Washington’s guarantees to central and eastern European NATO allies are as meaningful as they ever were, and this decision does not make the Czech Republic and Poland even slightly more vulnerable to Russia than they were before. As proponents of the missile defense system kept saying ad nauseam, the system posed no real threat to Russia, and they would have us believe that it was not even aimed at antagonizing the Russians. Now that this system will never come into existence, we are supposed to think that Obama has handed over two allied nations to Russia on a plate, when all that it does is return things to the status quo of 2005-06. What is so infuriating about the criticism of the missile defense decision is that it is the criticism actually creates the doubts about Washington’s willingness to fulfill American obligations that the critics are trying to lay at the administration’s door.

Cheney’s speech is useful as an example of how government activists always operate. They propose a scheme that is costly, unnecessary and probably dangerous to the common good, their successors attempt to scale back or modify the wasteful baggage with which they have been saddled, and then allies and members of the previous administration wail about the “abandonment” of this group and the “betrayal” of that one to defend the scheme they concocted, when no one was benefiting from the scheme in the first place and never would have benefited. Indeed, more often than not the scheme will hurt those it is supposed to aid, its costs will be far higher than originally projected, and it will create a number of negative consequences for which the schemers are unprepared and never considered. Where Republicans are concerned, this activism tends to be limited to military schemes and foreign policy boondoggles, but it applies just as well in other areas of policy. The constant ratchet effect this has ensures that no new scheme or proposed spending can ever be eliminated without tremendous effort and expenditure of political capital, and the end result is to make the state larger, more activist and an entity with its own set of interests increasingly divorced from the people it governs.

Looking at some larger questions, I find the missile defense quarrel to be a good example for thinking about the place of dissident conservatives in contemporary debates. Defending Europe from an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be directed at them if it did with a system that probably wouldn’t work is the sort of thing that one would think American conservatives would find laughably unnecessary. It is the purest sort of irrelevant government activity that does nothing for the United States, wastes the public’s money, and inflames other nations against us. The system’s relative, albeit still quite limited, popularity in the countries in question feeds off of Old World antagonisms that most Americans neither understand nor care to learn about. For most mainstream conservatives, none of this matters. The decision is “weak” and it is “appeasement,” therefore they oppose it.

There is a quote from George Kennan that is relevant here. Kennan was speaking of popular anticommunists of his day, but he could just as easily have been referring to anti-jihadists during this decade or Republican hawks generally right now:

They distort and exaggerate the dimensions of the problem with which they profess to deal. They confuse internal and external aspects of the communist threat. They insist on portraying as contemporary things that had their actuality years ago [bold mine-DL]….And having thus incorrectly stated the problem, it is no wonder that these people consistently find the wrong answers.

Replace the word communist with jihadist, Russian, Iranian or, God help us, Venezuelan, and you have a succinct description of what ails Republican and mainstream conservative foreign policy thinking. The anachronistic thinking may be the worst thing of all, because it means that they are taking foreign policy positions that have no bearing on the world as it is. People haunted by Saigon and Munich have little to tell us about a world in which Europe is united and communism is moribund. People haunted by Yalta, as the critics of the missile defense decision seem to be, have even less to tell us.

Many of us here at TAC and elsewhere have ended up as “dissident” conservatives often enough because of intense disagreements with mainstream conservatives over foreign policy. Iraq did not so much create ruptures between conservatives as it clarified why those ruptures already existed. Instead of subsiding as Iraq has (temporarily) moved to the periphery of our national debates, these ruptures are perhaps greater than ever. Aside from a general agreement that containing the USSR was desirable and common defense was a legitimate function of government, a great many people in the conservative movement don’t really share that many assumptions about the use of force, international relations and national security. Anyone following these things with any regularity knows this, but it might be useful to be reminded of it again.

Unlike almost every other area of policy under Bush, foreign policy remains one where most mainstream conservatives do not claim that Bush was insufficiently conservative. Despite reasonable arguments that Bush was not a conservative in any important respect, mainstream conservatives have shown no desire to distance themselves from him when he was at his most revolutionary and destructive. This is important to keep in mind, because it tells us that mainstream conservatives did not simply “go along” with Bush’s disastrous foreign policy primarily for reasons of tribal or partisan “team” loyalty. They embraced it and believe to this day that it was essentially correct, even if it was perhaps poorly managed here and there.

Foreign policy is not the only source of intense disagreement, but it tends to be a prominent point of contention because it is of particular importance to many of the dissident conservatives, because it is one area of disagreement where fundamental differences are not tolerated on the right, and because it is the only time when dissident conservative arguments seem to interest non-conservatives. As such, foreign policy has an outsized role in defining dissident conservative arguments, and this is probably most true for my own commentary, which has the perverse effect of letting mainstream conservatives classify us as crypto-leftists whenever it suits them because they have already defined any non-hawkish, non-nationalist, non-hegemonist position as left-wing and therefore absolutely unacceptable. The point here is not to rehearse all the reasons why hawkish, nationalist and hegemonist views are antithetical to a conservative disposition and damaging to all of the things conservatives claim to want to preserve, true as these claims are, but to recognize that there is no persuading such people when many of the fundamental assumptions they hold are diametrically opposed to ours and utterly wrong. There no longer seems any value in making the effort to persuade them.

Andrew Stuttaford cites a new Rasmussen poll of Republican presidential preferences showing some sizeable support for Huckabee, and he wonders if this means that the GOP will become the “party of Huckabee.” I think this is extremely unlikely. While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.

Approximately a third of Republican primary voters backed Huckabee, and slightly less than a third of the Republican respondents would now like to see him as the nominee, so he retains a considerable base of support that he had built up last year. Does this mean that the GOP is or is going to be the “party of Huckabee”? Only in the sense that in terms of sheer numbers Huckabee’s voters and sympathizers make up the largest bloc of Republicans. The trouble is that Huckabee consolidates this bloc behind him at the expense of losing most others. The strange thing is that Huckabee’s charisma and style make it less likely that this would be replicated in a general election: where Palin won enduring Republican devotion by being strident and combative, the good culture warrior, Huckabee has typically cultivated a style on the national stage laced with humor and self-deprecation that seemed to make him less polarizing.

He is able to do this because his record on social issues is already solid and does not need to be emphasized (as McCain’s was), exaggerated (as Palin’s was) or invented out of thin air (as Romney’s was). I have thought for a while that Huckabee’s personality could have some of the appealing all-things-to-all-people quality that Obama had during the election. If the economy remains a major issue in the next election, as it most likely will be, the sheer disgust economic conservatives still have for him could be worn almost as a badge of pride in the general election. An early opponent of the bailout, Huckabee could tap into populist dissatisfaction with the coziness of corporations and government without being pigeonholed as nothing more than an obsessed tax-cutter.

Huckabee isn’t going to have that chance. Even if it seems irrational, movement activists who are not primarily interested in social issues distrust Huckabee intensely, and they will work to block him and deny him funding just as they did last time. The anti-Huckabee sentiment among movement activists is a useful reminder that all the Republican culture war defenses of Palin during the general election were aimed at mobilizing all the people whose candidate, Huckabee, they had just spent the previous 18 months mocking and ridiculing with all of the same language used against Palin. For turnout purposes, the GOP still finds Huckabee’s people useful, but its leaders and activists will not tolerate Huckabee taking the lead in the party as the nominee.

The effect this will have, as Stuttaford’s post suggests, is that most Catholic, mainline Protestant and secular Republicans will rally to whichever anti-Huckabee candidate appears strongest. This will most likely mean a coalition of voters arrayed behind Romney, who will then be a far weaker draw in the general election than Huckabee would have been. At first, that sounds implausible. Surely the more “moderate,” less “sectarian” candidate should be able to win more support, right? No, not really, because the things that make Romney more attractive to non-evangelicals in the GOP also force him to spend more time trying to prove that evangelicals and social conservatives can accept him. Aside from the complication that his religion introduces into this, this means that Romney has to emphasize social issues, on which he has no credibility, and public professions of religious faith, which are some of the things that so many Republicans and independents find viscerally unappealing about what they perceive to be the norm in Republican politics. Huckabee does not need to do as much of this because he would already have much of the right locked down. Like McCain, Romney will continually be trying to satisfy people on the right who cannot muster much enthusiasm for him, but who will wrongly conclude that he is more “electable.” That could involve another desperate VP nomination to generate interest or a campaign that actually moves right after the primaries are over. Fear of their own evangelicals could lead Republicans to embrace a technoratic wonk whom most voters will not be able to trust and whom most conservatives grudgingly accept because he is not Huckabee.

It is raining and overcast here in Athens (Koukaki), so I am inside this morning and thought I would check in. As I’m on vacation, I won’t be writing much over the next couple of weeks, but I did see something that I wanted to address. Philip Klein complained that National Security Advisor Jim Jones (Gen., U.S. Army-Ret.) was going to speak at an “anti-Israel conference.” I thought that sounded odd, so I read on and found that he will be addressing J Street. J Street, Klein informs us, is “a liberal organization actively campaigning against Israel’s right to defend itself.” The second part of this is absolutely false, and it is one of the most tired tropes in the book. The first part is less debatable, since it is largely true that the place where you are most likely to find anything like a remotely sane view of Israel-Palestine, among other Near Eastern matters, is among American liberals and progressives. If J Street is overwhelmingly liberal, this is a result of how ideologically committed most Americans have become to dead-end, counterproductive and harmful policies that work against the long-term interests of Israel. These policies also work against U.S. interests in the region and the world to the extent that our government is tied to the enabling of the policies. I don’t think these policies are the source of most of our troubles in the Near East, and I don’t think those troubles would end even if these policies were changed for the better, but the perception and reality that our government tacitly permits them are aggravating factors that make things harder for the U.S. around the region than they need to be.

There is one reliable thing about the label “anti-Israel” when it is used to refer to other Americans in debate: the people being so described are almost guaranteed to believe that Israel has a right to defend itself, a right to exist and, more often than not, a right to constitute itself as an officially Jewish state. In other words, they accept all of the basic assumptions that every “pro-Israel” person accepts. For what it’s worth, I don’t really disagree with any of those propositions, either, but that won’t keep me from being labeled “anti-Israel.” What makes J Street “anti-Israel” in Klein’s view is that they believe that the Israeli government cannot simply do whatever it pleases to its neighbors and to the people under its occupation benevolent protection, and they might even suggest that continuing to violate every agreement Israel has ever made on settlements is not necessarily ideal. If one is ideologically driven to define support for Israel in such a self-defeating way, anything outside those exceedingly narrow boundaries has to be counted as “anti-Israel.”

This is what I find so irritating about these labels: they are used deliberately to avoid discussing the merits of the respective policy views, because there is clearly a fear among hawks that their policy preferences cannot withstand scrutiny and have to be pushed through debate with this sort of browbeating. Klein could reasonably argue that he thinks J Street’s recommendations are misguided, wrong and bad for the U.S. and Israel, and I assume he thinks this, but he isn’t satisfied unless he has completely delegitimized and insultewd his opposition by saying that they are “anti-Israel” as such.

On the other side, J Street et al. make plain that they regard the recommendations of Israel hawks to be disastrous, but to the best of my knowledge they refrain from accusing their opponents of being “anti-Israel.” They do challenge the idea that hawks have some monopoly on real support for Israel, and they point out how damaging to Israeli security their preferred policies have proved to be, but even when they do this they take for granted that hawks believe themselves to be working in the best interests of America and Israel. The issue, of course, is whether they actually are working in the best interests of both countries, but even if they are mistaken their positions cannot be written off as inherently “anti-Israel.” Likewise, those who advance aggressive and hawkish policies for the U.S. are not therefore “anti-American” despite the very real damage their policies have done to the United States. They are in error, but they are not opposed to the existence and security of their country. Of course, it seems to be in the nature of being a hawk that the same respect must never be extended to the other side.

P.S. Klein also finds it obnoxious that the conference will also include Salam al-Maryati, who made a statement immediately following September 11 which he regretted making and for which he quickly apologized. Typically, Maryati’s one mistake made at a time when feelings were running exceptionally high is enough to make him politically radioactive forever in the estimation of many “pro-Israel” advocates, which is one of the many reasons why fewer and fewer people listen to what such advocates have to say and why organizations such as J Street are gaining a hearing.

Later today I’ll be flying to Athens for a two-week visit to see my girlfriend in Greece. I may check in once or twice from the road, but I will be away most of this time. Check in at The Week to see my next couple of columns.