This Time article makes for depressing reading. It confirms my suspicions that meddling in Kashmir might very well figure into Holbrooke’s mission in South Asia, and it also makes me think that New Delhi is extremely insecure in its relationship with the U.S. after the change in administration. Three months ago when Obama was talking seriously about mediating in the Kashmir dispute, the Indian government and most media outlets there were horrified at the idea and also distressed that good relations with Washington were in jeopardy. Post-election enthusiasm for Obama in India in Indian political and media circles was not as great as in most other countries. Now after the reported success in keeping India off Holbrooke’s official agenda the Foreign Minister is cheering the closeness of the bilateral relationship and other government officials are crowing about the “respect” that New Delhi feels has been shown to its concerns.

That’s quite a swing in reactions and expectations in a fairly short time, and I think India is putting too much weight on its success in limiting Holbrooke’s official mission, and this is a point Ghosh, the author of the article, makes as well. For one thing, the administration has gone out of its way to claim, not all that credibly, that there was no Indian lobbying effort, which puts a bit of a damper on the idea that Washington is showing respect to Indian concerns. It’s not as if Singh went out and touted the success of Indian influence on U.S. decisions in Olmert-like fashion–to the extent that anyone in Singh’s government is talking about it, it is anonymously or in very vague terms. Indian concerns have at best been tolerated for the moment, and not necessarily heeded at all. If there was a serious chance that Kashmir might have fallen under Holbrooke’s mandate, that suggests a lack of understanding of and respect for the Indian position. This could lead to a very dangerous effort to insert the U.S. into the dispute at a moment when internal politics in Jammu & Kashmir, as shown by the recent state elections, are finally beginning to improve. (Interestingly, the Times of India editorial linked here cites the state elections as evidence that India can bear international scrutiny in Kashmir and should not necessarily fear internationalizing the issue.)

As I was trying to say in the column, we need a Pakistan policy that actually addresses the main problems in Pakistan, and believe it or not Kashmir is actually not near the top of this list, and it is also among the thorniest to resolve. There are far more immediate problems stemming from the financial crisis, popular discontent over our missile strikes, and separatist movements, and while it might satisfy elements in the Pakistani military to push some kind of Kashmir deal on India it is not going to contribute to the stability of Pakistan. That is the false promise of the “grand bargain” theories. On the contrary, trying to alter the current arrangements in Kashmir would precipitate conflict in Kashmir and possibly in the hinterlands of both countries. In the worst case, it could escalate a situation that is already very dangerous and sensitive, and given the arsenals of both states the dangers that result from failure are very great.

P.S. I did not have space in the column to dwell on bad Indian memories of the Clinton administration, which many Indians hold responsible for promoting the rise of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and worsening the situation in Kashmir. To the extent that they see Holbrooke as a return to old Clinton ways of handling South Asian issues, it will not be good for relations between our countries.

This Philip Weiss post on the role of Near Eastern affairs in Passaic County politics brought a question to mind: what has George Ajjan, our man in Passaic County, been doing lately? His latest post shows a promotional poster for the Inaugural in Senegal, where he travels from time to time, but we haven’t heard much from George over the last few months. If you haven’t read his blog before, I recommend looking back through his archives for very interesting discussions of Near Eastern politics and U.S. policy.

It continues to mystify me how John Boehner remains the leader of the House Republicans. The Republican stimulus vote was remarkable in how politically tone-deaf it was. The bill as presented to the House shouldn’t have passed, but it is striking how unwilling the Republican leadership was to back a popular piece of legislation. When confronted with a similar situation in September over the bill authorizing the TARP–the Democrats had a majority but wanted, indeed needed, Republican votes for provide bipartisan cover–the Republican leadership caved and backed a bill their constituents hated and endorsed a measure of dubious merit. Of course, that was four months ago when it might have done them some good electorally. Having blown the obvious opportunity to tap into populist outrage over the bailout, which was supported by perhaps a third of the electorate at most, the leadership now decides to make their stand opposing a bill that commands support from a broad majority of the country, and they do so at a time when their stand, such as it is, will be forgotten by the time the midterms come around.

Indeed, the sudden unanimous opposition of House Republicans to this bill mainly accomplishes one thing, which is to remind everyone of how gutlessly the Republican leadership acquiesced to whatever the Bush administration wanted and how they only managed to discover some interest in resisting massive expenditures when someone from the other party is in the White House. This highlights the past fecklessness and opportunism of the current Republican leadership. Given the current mood in the country, the House GOP in ’10 will probably be received in the country about as well as the House GOP was received during the ’98 midterms. The lesson to draw from the Democrats’ defeat in 2002 is not that cooperation with the White House loses the opposition party seats in the next elections, but that challenging a very popular President on a major piece of legislation (especially when the legislation is also popular) usually ends up costing the opposition party seats.

P.S. Republican leaders may also be putting too much stock in polling that shows greater support for tax cuts as opposed to spending. Posing the question this way can produce misleading results. Naturally, most people likes the idea of receiving tax cuts, but the stimulus bill they just voted down had tax cuts–so why does the leadership think they are on the winning side of this? Even if tax cuts did not account for as much of the bill as the GOP would like, there they were. Voter identification with the GOP has already been sinking–how is opposing this measure going to turn that around? None of this is to deny that the bill in question really was terrible (which is why 11 Democrats could not bring themselves to vote for it), but the poor quality of pieces of legislation has never been a bar to Republican leaders putting their support behind bills in the past.

Update: Good news for Obama: Mark Halperin blames him for the unanimous Republican opposition. As the CW master, Halperin can be counted on to get things about as wrong as possible with great consistency, and here he could not be more wrong. The reality is quite different: House Republicans have just given Obama license to ignore them in future negotiations on the budget and on other major questions. Granted, Obama had the numbers in both houses to do that anyway, but the only thing that will really keep him from writing off the GOP members now is his own interest in being seen as a consensus-builder (or at least someone trying to build consensus).

Second Update: Jim Antle finds it strange that I would criticize the GOP leadership for opposing a bad bill and thinks this makes less political sense than the GOP leadership’s opposition. As I hoped I had made clear in the original post, I was questioning the leadership‘s impressively bad political judgement. Obviously, the House members who voted against the bailout were right in voting against the stimulus in its present form. What I find incredible is the leadership’s utter inability to provide, well, leadership, and Jim acknowledges as much. This is largely the same top leadership in Boehner and Cantor that backed an awful piece of legislation that they themselves didn’t think was worth passing but wanted to be seen doing something, deepening their voters’ disgust with them and possibly making House GOP results worse than they needed to be thanks to depressed turnout. Then, having backed the worst bill of the several they have voted on in the last few months, they have opted to engage in some kind of suicidal penance by opposing bills that are at least perceived to be beneficial to a much larger part of the public and which enjoy the backing of a President with approval ratings 65%+.

Similar to the bizarre McCain campaign’s efforts to appropriate middle-class symbolism while supporting the financial sector bailout, the House leadership managed to associate themselves with the TARP, which their constituents found outrageous, and subsequently have tried to make up for it by resisting measures that a large part of the public is likely to believe are designed to benefit them rather than a select few. It’s as if the leadership wants to strike a populist chord that resonates with middle-class Americans, but no longer has any clue how to do that and manages to oppose only the lousy measures that people tend to like while backing the ones they loathe. If that seems like a smart or effective way to rehabilitate the toxic Republican brand and facilitate a revival of a vehicle for conservative policies, Jim must be seeing something that I am not. Working to thwart the administration’s attempt to use the next tranche of the TARP would be a beginning towards making real amends for the leadership’s initial colossal blunder last fall.

There is something else about the stimulus business that annoys me. The newfound zeal for fiscal responsibility, such as it is, reveals one of the fundamental problems of the GOP leadership, which is its completely unfounded notion that the GOP is now on the skids because of wasteful spending (and earmarks!). This sounds nice, but there seems to be no reason to think this has any merit as a matter of electoral politics. The anti-earmark mania that dominated the presidential campaign and which seems to control the minds of House leaders has prevailed yet again, suggesting that once again Republican leaders have learned absolutely nothing about why they have suffered two major electoral drubbings. The leadership’s flailing, much like McCain’s during the early days of the financial crisis, sends the message that the GOP has nothing to say to the public that cannot be summed up by the phrase wasteful spending. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t oppose wasteful spending, of course, but when they have absolutely nothing else to talk about (except, God help us, the return of the Fairness Doctrine) it is more than a little frustrating to watch.

Remember GSAVE? That was the clunky abbreviation for Donald Rumsfeld’s brief, ill-fated replacement name for the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as the “global struggle against violent extremism,” which was slightly less ridiculous than warring against an abstraction and yet even more amorphous and aimless. Little wonder it didn’t catch on. In his Inaugural, President Obama referred to a war against a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” That would be the WAFRNOVAH. Somehow I don’t think this is going to become a useful shorthand when referring to U.S. anti-terrorist policy. I bring this up after reading Yglesias’ article in which he argues against the continued use of the phrase “war on terror” and Roger Cohen’s column in which he claims that Obama’s Al-Arabiya interview demonstrated that the “war on terror,” or at least its role as the rhetorical frame of U.S. policy, was over.

Yglesias is making sense when he lays out the reasons why the phrase and the concept behind it are deeply flawed, but seems to miss an obvious reason why the “war on terror” framing is going to survive and probably thrive. Like its open-ended, ill-defined and misguided cousins, the drug war and the war on poverty, the “war on terror” is a rhetorical frame and set of policies that may not be very good at achieving the objectives for which it was created, but it is very valuable as an ongoing, never-ending pretext for concentrating additional power in the federal government and as a justification for preserving and expanding bureaucratic territory and budgets. If these “wars” were judged on whether they met their stated objectives in a reasonable amount of time in an affordable way, not only the phrases but most of the policies related to them would have been eliminated long ago. Whatever their initial ideal purpose and whatever the intentions of their creators, these “wars” become self-perpetuating rackets whose preservation becomes the priority of all those institutions and interest groups with a stake in the policies in question. More to the point, even if the “war on terror” language was dropped most of the policies of what is called the Long War would remain intact, because the Long War, as Prof. Bacevich has argued in several places, is not confined to combating Al Qaeda and likeminded groups but has a much more expansive scope. The Long War is not simply a response to blowback, but is an expression of domestic impulses:

The impulses that have landed us in a war of no exits and no deadlines come from within. Foreign policy has, for decades, provided an outward manifestation of American domestic ambitions, urges, and fears. In our own time, it has increasingly become an expression of domestic dysfunction–an attempt to manage or defer coming to terms with contradictions besetting the American way of life. Those contradictions have found their ultimate expression in the perpetual state of war afflicting the United States today.

(The Limits of Power, p. 5)

As Prof. Bacevich observed correctly last May, Secretary Gates has endorsed the concept of the Long War entirely. In this respect, he is no different from former Secretary Rumsfeld (he is, arguably, less anxious about large, prolonged deployments of American soldiers in hostile countries than Rumsfeld). As some may still recall, Robert Gates will continue to be Secretary of Defense for the foreseeable future, and Gates has shown no signs of breaking with his earlier embrace of the Long War, which suggests that Obama has no real disagreements with it. What is the Long War? Bacevich explains:

Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the “Long War” has been about all of these things and more.

Cohen’s claim that Obama has signaled the “war on terror” to be over is very questionable. Leaving aside the missile strikes in Pakistan last week, which suggest that the “war on terror” is doing just fine, mindset and all, we had numerous statements from Obama and Biden during the campaign in which they emphasized that Afghanistan, and not Iraq, was the proper “central front” in this war. Obama said this during his trip overseas during the summer of 2008, and he said something very similar earlier this week, except this time it was the “central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.” How does OESATAE strike you? Incidentally, his remarks from earlier this week confirm pretty much everything I feared about Obama’s policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, including talk of a “regional appoach,” which conjures up the prospect of the “grand bargain” I warn against in the new column.

In any case, there is no reason to think that the “war on terror” mindset is going away, because the government is not going to repudiate the Long War, and this is part of the ongoing deferral of responsibility and refusal to accept limits that plagues our country in many other ways. No, I’m afraid the “war on terror” is here to stay for the time being, complete with misleading references to fronts–as if speaking about conventional fronts makes any sense in a war that must by definition lack conventional fronts–and false promises of military solutions to problems that are ultimately rooted in how we live.

As most have probably heard by now, Culture11 is shutting down. David Kuo explains why here. This is an unfortunate turn of events, and I am very sorry to see it happen. I was pleased to be among C11’s earliest contributors, I very much enjoyed the conversations spurred on by their many bloggers, and I was hoping to continue to write for them in the months and years to come. It was an interesting, irreverent, eclectic and wide-ranging site that brought together smart commentary and an impressive number of quality writers and bloggers, and it will be sorely missed. I wish the C11 staff all the best in their future endeavors.

My first column for The Week discusses the appointment of Richard Holbrooke and the pitfalls that may trip up the new special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the administration’s apparent Pakistan policy.

E.D. Kain and Helen Rittelmeyer have been discussing religious conservatism and fundamentalism. As I will try to explain in a moment, these are not the same things at all. Indeed, there are few more misleading errors than the conflation of the two and the treatment of all expressions of religious conservatism as examples of fundamentalism.

In Kain’s first post, they are treated as interchangeable and set in opposition to cultural or civilizational conservatism. The association or equation of the latter two might also be debatable, but I’ll leave that for another time. Ms. Rittelmeyer defends what she describes as her kind of conservatism, but temporarily accepts the fundamentalist label. According to Kain, the main difference is that cultural conservatism takes account of the possibility of change and does not “necessarily frame [a] political worldview on a vision of religious infallibility,” while so-called fundamentalist conservatism needs nothing more than “a dogmatic approach to [a] particular religion.”

It might depend on exactly how Kain means to use the word dogmatic here, since the promulgation of dogmas is a product of religious tradition. Unlike actual fundamentalist Christians, it has been the high liturgical churches that have developed extensive intellectual and interpretive traditions that are most attached to dogmas, which they are fully aware came into existence over time and in particular historical contexts. While some theologians in those churches choose to describe this in terms of “progressive revelation,” which is not entirely right, it is the churches that have the most developed sense of church tradition that take the greatest interest in the historical development of doctrine and cultivate the strongest attachment to ecclesiastical history on the assumption that God continues to work through and in history, which is an obvious implication of the Incarnation and Pentecost, and that God continues to guide and inspire the Church.

The key characteristic of a genuinely fundamentalist mentality is its hostility to complexity, historical context and the possibility of a text being multivalent; fundamentalists are to some extent the terrible simplifiers of rich dogmatic traditions. I assume Kain uses dogmatic here to mean inflexible or uncompromising, but this does not take into account the inherent flexibility and minimalism of dogma. Dogmas are minimal statements that provide correct guidance regarding religious matters, most of which are ultimately mysterious and not fully comprehensible. Given the nature of their subject, they cannot always be exhaustive, but they can nonetheless provide the right guidance and serve as sign-posts to the proper destination of the believer. A fundamentalist is like someone who tries to navigate using a map without ever looking at his surroundings. Someone instructed in a dogmatic tradition will pay attention to those surroundings and understand how to relate the map to those surroundings. Religious conservatives are those interested in defending such a tradition and holding it up as a guide to the world.

The different senses of Scripture are a good marker for distinguishing fundamentalists from religious conservatives. Religious conservatives assume that there is more than one, while fundamentalists are intent on the literal or plain reading alone. Something that purely historicist and literalist readings of Scripture have in common is their exclusion of other meanings. Historicists will tend to exclude the moral sense, dismissing ancient commandments as the product of the period when the text was composed and therefore “irrelevant,” as well as the typological sense, which they regard as deliberate anachronism. Meanwhile literalists are anxious about the possibility of interpreting Scripture in any figurative or spiritual sense. Both are mistaken and at odds with the richness of the religious tradition whose real meaning each will claim to be defending against the other even as each wanders off the royal road into its own ditch.

Update: Thanks to Alan Jacobs for the link and the interesting follow-up post.

George Mitchell’s appointment as special envoy for Israel and Palestine has naturally prompted a flurry of comparisonsbetween his efforts in negotiating a peace in Northern Ireland and the prospects of doing the same in his new position. Alex Massie gives the most sober and thorough assessment I have seen, and I think his skeptical view is basically correct. Massie concludes:

Perhaps a similar level of exhaustion will prevail in Palestine, too. But right now, in the immediate aftermath of the latest military engagements, that seems a dubious proposition. In Northern Ireland weary combatants recognized, however reluctantly, that they would have to live with one another. Without that awareness there would have been no peace process at all.

This is the crucial point, and it is an important one to remember in the coming months. Mitchell’s success in Northern Ireland depended on the right conditions, including the willingness of both parties to make concessions and the willingness of one side, the Unionists, to overlook the lopsided nature of the deal they were getting. Mitchell may be seen as an honest and effective negotiator, and he may know the best methods for defusing long-running conflicts, but the outcome does not depend primarily on him. The conditions he is facing are, as Mr. Massie points out, more complicated and more difficult than those he faced in Northern Ireland.

These are just a few of the additional difficulties that make Mitchell’s task much harder. First, there are more political movements involved, and there is less interest on the part of Israel and the U.S. to engage the most hard-line Palestinians. Where Sinn Fein clearly represented the extreme end of the republican camp and was included in the process at the beginning, it is highly unlikely that Hamas, which occupies approximately the same position in Palestinian politics, will ever be included in the same way. If Fatah is now to be treated as the acceptable face of Palestinian nationalism, it is likely that any deal with Fatah will have to come at the expense of Hamas, which will then have every incentive to persist in rejectionism. This means that Hamas will have to be included from the beginning. As in the Ulster case, engaging Hamas will mean empowering them in the long run. This prospect does not seem satisfying to any of the other parties at the moment, and it will become tolerable only if all of the other parties can imagine accepting a Hamas-led government as preferable to continued conflict. Engaging Hamas seems politically untenable for the administration here at home, and it is not clear how any Israeli government that comes out of the next election will be able to engage them without the significant embarrassment of backtracking on the rhetorical excesses in which both Livni and Netanyahu called for the elimination of Hamas.

Merely for talking to Hamas in another capacity, Malley was run off the Obama campaign as fast as possible, and Obama has stated that there will be no negotiations with Hamas until they take the sorts of steps that Sinn Fein and the IRA took only at the conclusion of the peace process. There is the additional factor that both Israel and the U.S. view Hamas only partly as a Palestinian political movement and tend to place more importance on its connection with Iran. By the late ’90s, the IRA did not enjoy meaningful foreign sponsorship of any kind, and it had never come to be seen by the British as a proxy for a foreign power that it believed was determined to do them harm. The differences between the IRA and Hamas are also worth considering a bit more. While sectarian in membership, the IRA never really possessed a religious character and was not bound in the minds of its leaders by anything like a religious imperative to continue fighting. To the extent that Hamas leaders are serious and uncompromising in their Islamism, and if they believe that this mandates continued conflict, they are less likely to reach the state of exhaustion that was a prerequisite to the Irish peace deal. If the Israeli government’s goal is not to end, but merely to limit and manage, the conflict while retaining effective control over the territories, it seems unlikely that Israel would be interested in negotiations with Hamas even if the latter were ready to make a deal.

P.S. Abunimah makes the point, related to the counterfactual discussion we were having earlier this month, that there was pro-republican political pressure from Washington. There is no counterpart to this pressure in the Israel-Palestine case. There is an added problem that almost everyone links Israel-Palestine to a more general Arab-Israeli settlement.

Update: Steve Clemons discusses Levy’s comparison of the two cases. Another significant problem in trying to apply an Ulster solution to Israel-Palestine is that the end state in Ulster was joint government of a province as part of the U.K. What the two-state solution requires, obviously, is the formation of a genuinely sovereign and viable Palestine, which would be equivalent to having created a Sinn Fein-ruled mini-Ulster independent of the U.K. and the Republic. Comparison with the Ulster example makes the most sense if you can imagine the territory of Israel-Palestine under control of a government that is neither Israeli nor Palestinian and which grants the inhabitants a measure of joint home rule. One of the prerequisites of a two-state solution, however, is the withdrawal of all settlers–the equivalent to this in Ulster would have been the repatriation of Protestants to majority-Protestant counties in Ulster or “back” to Scotland. That would have been infinitely more difficult politically for London to accept, and would have made any deal virtually impossible.

Even worse is the fact that Georgia is no longer the focus of NATO’s and the European Union’s interests. Georgia failed as a democratic state. It failed to have free media or an independent justice system. The country did succeed in locking up political prisoners, taking over private properties from independent business owners, and having the most corrupt government in the Caucasus.

According to Human Rights Watch, there are 86 political prisoners in Georgian jails. The recent arrest of Archil Benidze, who donated money to the strongest opposition movement for justice, the Georgian Labor Party, sent shockwaves through political circles. Benidze has since been sentenced to seven years in jail.

Then came the bailout: $4.5 million from U.S. taxpayers sent to Georgia for recovery and relief. Knowing Georgia’s history of corruption, it is doubtful that the money will actually go to those in need.

Georgians deserve a better future. Unemployment is at 68 percent. The best and the brightest have fled the country. Joining NATO now seems like an impossibility given Saakashvili`s international war crimes, hot and unpredictable temperament and disregard for the democratic ideals he once so fervently supported. ~Tsotne Bakuria

It is worth revisiting the question of how we determine what constitutes friendship and hostility towards another country. For the better part of the four years I have been blogging here at Eunomia, I have been a harsh critic of Saakashvili and U.S. support for him, and I strongly opposed bringing Georgia into NATO. This was primarily because I believe NATO no longer serves any useful purpose and because there is no American interest in guaranteeing the security of a state with contested borders, and also because it could do Russo-American relations no good. However, it became clear fairly quickly that Saakashvili represented a danger to Georgia, and it also seemed clear that everyone who wanted to see Georgia prosper would want to see him out of power. Naturally, when I made these arguments I was accused of wishing Georgia ill, much as anyone who points out that certain U.S. or Israeli policies are foolish is deemed anti-American or anti-Israel. Granted, Georgia’s welfare was not my top priority, but it never ceased to amaze me how the greatest “pro-Georgia” boosters were backing a government that seemed sure to damage the country irreparably.

In retrospect, I see that Saakashvili was playing the role of Deliyiannis, who led Greece to an utter, humiliating defeat in a lopsided, unnecessary war with the Ottoman Empire in 1897. Greece was saved from occupation then, much as Georgia was last year, thanks mainly to the intervention of the great powers. Greece and the Ionian Greeks later suffered an even worse disaster thanks to Deliyiannis’ heir, Venizelos, who was enabled in his reckless policies by Western backing. In fact, Saakashvili might be more like Venizelos. After the start of WWI, the Allied powers were pro-Venizelos, not necessarily pro-Greece. They defined Greece’s interests as Venizelos defined them, in part because he was willing to subordinate Greek interests to serve the Allied cause, but Venizelos proved badly wrong in foreign policy judgements on several critical occasions. The parallels with Saakashvili, the U.S. and NATO are fairly close.

Despite some genuine success in economic reforms, Saakashvili’s government was preoccupied with the separatist regions to an unhealthy degree, which caused him to engage in provocative rhetoric and actions that were designed to worsen relations with Moscow. One need only have observed how Karabakh became a consuming and costly obsession for the Armenian political elite since independence to understand that a poor, newly-independent country’s development can be badly stunted by efforts to claim or reclaim territory. (An important difference in Karabakh’s case is that at least the Armenian inhabitants wanted Armenia’s assistance.) Saakashvili’s bellicosity and authoritarian instincts were bound to lead to a bad end, and now that they have it is important to remember that the people who claimed to be Georgia’s best friends, such as Bush, McCain, Biden and, yes, Obama, had been instead Saakashvili’s best friends and had enabled his worst behavior to the ruin of Georgia. This is applicable in many other situations. Mr. Bush backed Musharraf in Pakistan fully (and so the general earned the sobriquet Busharraf) despite Musharraf’s increasingly untenable position and misrule, and ultimately Musharraf could not remain in power. Nonetheless, the U.S. had been tied right up until the end to a profoundly unpopular and failed leader, and Pakistan suffered for years under the U.S.-backed ruler to the detriment of all involved long after he should have stepped down.

At best, Washington enables bad behavior by client governments that reflects poorly on them and us, and at worst it actively aids client governments in the ruin of their own countries, which serves only the interests of those states and groups that are genuinely hostile to the client and to our government. With such American friends, our clients need no enemies.