Only those who take an indecently dim view of historically marginalized groups would question the desire to promote minority homeownership or democracy in the Middle East. After partisan passions recede, it will become increasingly awkward to challenge what Bush was trying to accomplish. ~Austin Bramwell

Never mind that one contributes to numerous foreclosures, defaults and financial wreckage for many institutions, and the other so far tends to empower sectarian parties and foster ethnic and religious conflict. It cannot be that these desires are misguided and unrealistic and result in bad outcomes. If good intentions pave the road to hell, you have to be some kind of troglodyte to point out where the road is going. Glad to have that cleared up.

It will be so “awkward” to challenge these things that most of Bush’s own supporters have already been condemning the former practice (while conveniently omitting Mr. Bush’s role in the mess), and a solid majority seems united behind the idea that democracy promotion, particularly as it was practiced by Mr. Bush and his administration, was a terrible and destructive thing.

Conor:

What Barack Obama failed to address in his remarks, however, is that some political disagreements are real — grounded in principle, or differences in judgment, or varying emphasis on different priorities, or the inescapable fact that human beings have different preferences.

This is why the claim that we only care whether government “works” or not, and supposedly do not care about its scope or size, rings false every time. This is the pragmatism or competence dodge that annoys some of Obama’s supporters as much as it annoys me. As they understand correctly, a dedication to competence does not tell you what is important, why something should be done (or not be done) or why it should take precedence over other things, but at best leads to the best way to achieve a certain end. The competence dodge involves pretending that we all want the same thing–a government that “works”–and assuming that we all agree on what the government ought to be doing and not be doing. The pragmatist of this sort cannot explain why the President should not have the power to detain suspects arbitrarily and hold them without trial for years while subjecting them to torture, except perhaps to say that torture does not work (if it did, the pragmatist would have nothing to say about it). If warrantless wiretapping “works” to some degree as a means of counter-terrorism, why should the pragmatist care whether it is illegal?

This is the most frustrating thing about “pragmatic” rhetoric–at best, it obscures the real differences and so suffocates the debate under the pretense that we all want the same things, and at worst it severely narrows the range of the debate to two marginally different status quo alternatives and thus deprives most of the country of real representation. This is the political universe in which bipartisanship is the highest virtue, because if we all really want the same things the only thing that can thwart political action is random partisan rancor. Even though Obama knows and we know that he knows that he holds certain principles, and these principles define the role of government and the appropriate limits of state power, and we also know that his definitions vary greatly from those of conservatives, it is as if he cannot mention them. This is not his famous aversion to ideology, but more basically an increasing reluctance to espouse political principles that he has already publicly embraced earlier as he comes closer to wielding executive power.

I can understand why some of his supporters would find this irritating. It is the reverse of the problem conservatives have had with Republican Presidents: the latter often paid lip service to limited government, and some of them, including Bush, stressed the importance of strict constructionism (!), but not one of them really ever governed as if they were serious (because they weren’t). Obama offers the opposite combination: a President who will probably carry out at least some of the policy agenda that progressives want while studiously avoiding all language that suggests that the policy has anything to do with progressive ideas. Perhaps that is the more tolerable combination, but it is still weirdly limiting. One of the advantages in getting a politician to adopt your rhetoric is that it may force him in certain directions in which you want him to go; the danger is that it simply associates you with him publicly and tars you with whatever he ends up doing.

I am fairly sure I have heard him say that he believes health care is a right, so he must believe that it is a matter of justice that everyone have some insurance or access to care and that it is therefore not only appropriate but necessary for the state to intervene to ensure that no one is “denied” his “right” in the future. That has huge implications for public policy, obviously, and it derives from fundamentally different views of what government is for and what citizens should have as a matter of right. So it is not just a matter of finding what “works” and disagreeing about how best to achieve that end, but it is a mattter of disagreeing whether or not justice demands that the government do anything. This is repeated again and again in many different areas of policy. For instance, does the so-called “responsibility to protect” oblige our government to intervene in the affairs of basketcase, ruined states such as Zimbabwe, or is that far beyond the proper responsibilities of our government? Does the “responsibility to protect” extend to members of other polities at all? Saying that we all want a government that “works” answers none of these questions, but prompts many more: to do what? for whom? for how long? A pragmatist must love the “surge” and all associated tactical plans, because these are the sort of small-bore cases of problem-solving that pay no attention to strategic goals or national interest. Rather than ask why we are still in Iraq and what possible purpose the war serves, focus on whether a given tactical plan “worked” and pretend that this resolves the debate. That is where an emphasis on pragmatism and competence leads–to what Sammuelson once described as the “sanctification of the status quo.”

The one part of the Inaugural that I found simply absurd, the only part that caused me to laugh out loud, was when the President said this:

and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

In other words, thanks to the extensive use of coercion and power in our history, we know that other people can also be broken and forced to submit to new, more uniform political orders. Our common humanity shall reveal itself through still more coercion, and we shall make a desert and call it peace. Or is that too “cynical” of a reading?

There is something very appropriate about Ralph Peters’ new column having the title “The Lies of Gaza.” That is, it is an appropriate description of several of the claims Peters makes, and would represent a remarkable case of truth in advertising, except that the title is supposed to refer to other claims that Peters is supposedly debunking. Almost everything that Peters has to say about the conflict can be refuted by these lines from Fisk’s latest:

And history was quite forgotten. The Hamas rockets were the result of the food and fuel siege; Israel broke Hamas’s own truce on 4 and 17 November.

In other words, the central claims that support the conventional “pro-Israel” argument for the conflict are either unfounded or misleading. The “lies of Gaza” are, on the whole, the claims made by defenders of the military operation. Naturally, these small problems with the story Peters is trying to tell do not slow him down. What has been absolutely crucial to support for this effort here in America is the characteristically short American attention span. For most people, there is little or no awareness of the details of what has been happening in another part of the world until the conflict breaks out, at which point the most simplistic and digestible explanation gains the widest currency with a big assist from journalists and pundits who have been conditioned by the last several years of “war on terror” etiquette to endorse any actions deemed necessary for anti-terrorist purposes.

It has been typical that the siege never appears in any supporter’s account of the origins of the conflict. The people who lament very loudly whenever Russia reduces its gas subsidy to Ukraine–because this is supposed to be considered cruel and horrible economic oppression!–are curiously the same ones who do not so much as blink at the blockading of over a million people from the outside world for years. The former is outrageous aggression, you see, while the other is so perfectly acceptable that it need not even be mentioned in discussing the current round of fighting. Indeed, Peters does not mention it even in passing with the sort of dismissive lip service that one has come to expect from militarists. The miserable fate of most of Dr. Abu al-Aish’s family, which has become one of the most well-known episodes of needless suffering in this conflict, accuses every apologist who has tried to minimize or explain away civilian deaths during this operation.

This brings me back to something Prof. Mearsheimer said in the cover story for the new issue:

Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims.

It has taken longer than a few years to drive me from that position of complete sympathy, which I once held approximately ten years ago, to one where I have become increasingly critical. Believe it or not, I used to believe all the standard political pieties that The Wall Street Journal issued about this subject, and I grew up in what could only have been described as a “pro-Israel” home. At the time, I was a teenager and not terribly well-informed. Then I actually learned something beyond the regular talking points on the subject, and at the same time I was generally becoming very skeptical of entangling alliances of all kinds. It became increasingly clear, especially as I watched duelling protests between Israel and Palestine supporters here on campus during the second intifada, that Americans should not take either side and that the conflict was none of our concern. It followed quite readily from this realization that there was absolutely no reason to take the side of the far more powerful party to the conflict at the expense of a long-suffering refugee population.

I would not describe the conflict simply as one of victimizer and victim. That is in its way an equally easy way out of the predicament, and it partakes of the same moralistic strain in our foreign policy thinking that we need to root out rather than take in another direction. I happen to find the language of victimhood misleading, just as I find the adoption of the poisonous phrase “moral clarity” by either side to be distorting, because both sides very much want to engage in victimization and strike poses of self-righteousness. The Balkan Wars–and Western media and government treatment of these wars–taught me to steer clear of this kind of loaded terminology and self-serving narratives. In the official version of the Balkan Wars, they were not conflicts between mutually antagonistic nationalist causes stained by previous crimes and embittered by memories of brutality from WWII, but were a contest between glorious Western, multiethnic democratic capitalism and evil Slavic fascists, and this justified any number of crimes against innocent Serbs as a result. That this was not only an overly simplified picture, but actually almost a reversal of the reality, need not detain us here. Conflicts such as these are tragic because all parties have some claim to being in the right, and all parties continually mistake that partial claim to be a complete vindication. The consistent American mistake is not simply that we involve ourselves in conflicts where we have no real interest at stake, but in adopting entirely the myths and narratives of one side.

One of the common refrains, which Peters also makes, is that critics of the operation had no alternative for the Israeli government–what would you have them do? India’s non-military response to far worse terrorist outrages during one extended attack in November offers an obvious and telling counter-example of how a government in a similar situation might respond. Obviously, just about everyone in the U.S. condemns the atrocities in Mumbai, and I assume pretty much everyone believes that India has a right to defend itself, but India’s genuine restraint in the wake of a massacre of hundreds of people in one of their largest cities stands as a rebuke to all those who claim that Israel’s government had no choice but to resort to force. India could have responded with military strikes inside Pakistan with much greater justification, and like Israel’s government PM Singh’s government is standing for election in the early part of this year and had all the same political incentives to shore up a reputation for national security to fend off a challenge from the nationalists, but Singh seems to have quite correctly understood the disastrous consequences this could have for India, Pakistan and the entire region. Olmert, desperate for a comeback at any price, couldn’t have cared less about the consequences, while Singh, who may still have a political future, is not ready to bestow a failed policy on his country just to gain some votes in the short term. As it turns out, Olmert’s party is probably not going to benefit from this after all, just as I suspected it would not.

Many people were making nervous comparisons to the July crisis of 1914 after the attacks in Mumbai; no one in the world really believes that the conflict in Gaza could precipitate a wider war. The imbalance of power is so glaring that it is not remotely possible that any other state will come to the direct aid of the Palestinians. Something that is quite revealing in this comparison is the recognition of how unimportant the Israel-Palestine conflict really is: Israel can act more or less with impunity against neighboring peoples because there is little chance of a regional conflagration resulting, while India is constrained by geopolitical realities from pursuing a retaliatory course against the group(s) responsible for the atrocities in Mumbai. It is much more useful to look at things this way, which is to acknowledge the vast imbalance of power between the two sides, rather than to dwell on the idea of victimizer and victim.

As the last 24 hours of the Bush Presidency approach, I suppose it is time to say a few words about the tiresome meme that Bush’s legacy will be that “he kept us safe.” Others have noted how bizarre it is that his defenders have chosen to hold up one of the areas where Mr. Bush oversaw unprecedented, catastrophic failure and determine that security was his crowning achievement. I might also question the claim depending on how one defines “us.” European allies and Westerners abroad were obviously much less secure as a direct result of Mr. Bush’s decisions. The charnel house that Mr. Bush made out of Iraq is omitted from the discussion on the implicit and appalling assumption that the devastation of that country is justified in the minds of many Bush supporters on the dubious grounds that it was done for the sake of American security, despite the great likelihood that the invasion and occupation have created a generation of newly-radicalized enemies who will seek to harm Americans in the future. To the extent that FEMA’s insufficient response to natural disaster revealed the government’s utter lack of preparedness and lack of appropriate leadership up through late 2005, the more appropriate way to describe the approximately four years between 9/11 and Katrina was that we as a nation happened to be fortunate during that period that the behemonth Department of Homeland Security was never called upon to respond to a major terrorist attack.

When supporters begin blithely claiming that the war in Iraq is over and we won, or declare that history will vindicate Mr. Bush, they are naturally not taking into account that this war may very well lead to even more terrible blowback in the years and decades to come. Indeed, the full costs of Mr. Bush’s failures will not be known for many years. In the terrible event that there are more disastrous consequences of Mr. Bush’s policies, will his apologists at that point acknowledge that he was a failure, or will they construct new arguments to claim that he cannot be held responsible for what happened later on? We already know the answer to that.

Okay, this is really far too easy to ridicule, but this Bill Kristol line jumped out at me:

Bush stood with Israel when he had no political incentive to do so and received no political benefit from doing so.

There are ways one could qualify this to make it less ridiculous, but as it stands this statement is entirely inaccurate. Bush, like every President for approximately the last forty years, “stood with Israel” for a number of reasons, not least of which were the many political incentives for him to do so and the reasonable expectation of political benefits to be received (and political risks to be avoided). There are many reasons why evangelicals supported Mr. Bush so overwhelmingly in 2004, and the perception that he was firmly “pro-Israel” was an important one.

For that matter, between the influence of groups such as CUFI, as well as more long-established lobbying groups, and the overwhelming, conventional “pro-Israel” views of most Republican voters, it is arguably the case that Republican politicians today have far more incentive to adopt the most uncompromising form of this position than their counterparts on the other side of the aisle. Leaving aside the virtual unanimity of the conservative commentariat and the last GOP primary field when it came to U.S.-Israel relations. There was absolutely no political risk domestically for Bush in “standing with Israel,” and whatever it cost him internationally was obviously irrelevant to him because adopting that position was so politically advantageous here at home. I assume Mr. Bush believed and still believes that it was also “the right thing to do,” but it never hurts a politician when “the right thing to do” also happens to be the most expedient and rewarding thing to do. Had he pursued a more “even-handed” or neutral course, this might have won him compliments from overseas, but it would have been the far more politically risky move where it mattered here at home.

It takes a special kind of ideological blindness after the last three weeks of fighting in Gaza to insist that the “freedom agenda” that helped bring Hamas to power (and thus put Israel and Gaza on their present course) needs to be revived. When it comes to such blindness, few are more special than Fred Hiatt:

Yet the incoming Obama administration seems to be inclining, in its foreign policy, toward a philosophy that says: Voting matters, but maybe not as much as economic development, or women’s rights, or honest judges. Its adoption as U.S. policy would be a terrible mistake, for America’s security as well as its moral standing.

In fact, as Hiatt is forced to acknowledge several times, democracy promotion remains on the new administration’s agenda, but it is no longer going to be made into the rhetorical centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. While the new administration’s other priorities may or may not be the right ones, making the mere holding of elections a lower priority seems very reasonable. Unfortunately, as Obama himself makes clear in a quote later in the column, democracy promotion more broadly defined is here to stay.

This is not a good thing. Democratization in recent years has not generally contributed to U.S. interests, and it certainly has not contributed to greater peace and security. From empowering Hamas to building up an aggressive nationalist demagogue in Georgia to boosting socialist “people power” in Bolivia and Venezuela to provoking ethnic conflict in Kenya, genuine democratic elections have produced a number of undesirable outcomes for the nations involved and for U.S. interests in their respective regions. The idea of “democratic peace” is a myth, and the politicization of ethnicity and religion that democratization has involved in many parts of Africa, Latin America and the Near East has led to terrible results. Why we should want more of this is a mystery, but like much related to the management of the empire this is something we are not supposed to challenge.

Update: Fortunately, European countries are all democratic, so they are not havingany serious problems.

One of the strangest things of the last few years has been the passionate intensity of Libby defenders. There are few causes that seem to stir up as much devotion in some circles on the right as Libby’s. Henninger was practically weeping in his op-ed on Friday, and Quin Hillyer warned gravely that Bush’s failure to pardon Libby “will confirm a terrible tendency of conservatives failing to protect and defend their own when their own aren’t guilty of much of anything.” If it were true that Libby wasn’t guilty of much of anything, it stands to reason that a jury would not have found him guilty. If, on the other hand, he did lie under oath and impede a federal investigation–regardless of why he did this or whether there had been anything criminal about the original leak–then that is exactly why he should not be pardoned. The reliability of witness testimony under oath is essential to the proper functioning of the system, and cooperation with investigators is an equally important part, and it is unacceptable to undermine this. Obviously, the justice system is not perfect, juries can come to the wrong conclusion and prosecutors can engage in misconduct, and no doubt some true believers will insist that the latter is the case, but Libby’s defenders usually have no doubts about the system’s integrity. It is precisely and only when “their own” are in danger of being penalized for things they actually did that we hear all these heartfelt appeals for clemency. Bush already commuted Libby’s sentence. As was clear at the time, Bush was washing his hands of the matter once and for all when he did that.

Of course, no Libby post would be complete without remembering the depths of absurdity to which some Libby defenders sank in the past: here is Fouad Ajami likening Libby to a fallen soldier.

On a much less serious note, via Yglesias I see that Julian Sanchez has come up with a crazy prediction about the rest of Battlestar Galactica. It’s a nice try, but I’m afraid Sanchez is way off on this one. BSG spoilers abound in Sanchez’s post and in the post below. If you don’t want to know what happened in Friday’s episode, don’t read this post.

Since I deleted the post from several months ago when I predicted that Ellen Tigh would be the final Cylon, I cannot prove that I saw this coming for a long time (maybe one of my readers can corroborate the claim), but once I had seen “Revelations” (the last episode prior to the mid-season break) it became clear that the list of candidates for the fifth of the Five was extremely short. In other words, it had to be someone who had died prior to the exodus from New Caprica, and obviously it also had to be someone who had not died after the hub had been destroyed, and there are only a very few high-profile characters who fit that description. Once Tigh was revealed to be a Cylon, making his wife one as well is the obvious, increasingly lazy move that the BSG writers have naturally resorted to (just as they explained away almost every other personal relationship with a Cylon by revealing the “human” participants to be Cylons).

Sanchez cites Dualla’s first name, Anastasia, as evidence that she will be revealed as the twelfth model, but this simply doesn’t hold up. I credit Sanchez with his understanding of what Anastasia means and his attention to detail, but he is wrong. First of all, we have important external evidence that Kandyse McClure’s contract was limited to 13 episodes, which means that we will not be seeing her again. As she played what was very nearly my favorite character, this annoys me very much, but there it is. The evidence from the show is also quite compelling. It explains why Ellen appeared out of nowhere in middle of season 1, and it is consistent with the claim that the fifth was not in the fleet by the middle of season 4. As Cylons are supposed to regard suicide as a sin, and we have never seen a Cylon successfully commit suicide, it is implausible that one of the Five would do this, so Dualla cannot be the fifth, as much as her fans might like to see her return.

P.S. It occurred to me after seeing Friday’s episode that the major female characters on BSG are far more likely to suffer violent death or injury, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed that BSG is overflowing with images of violence against women. I suppose I don’t have any great insight about this, except to note that this is the case and it seems very unusual.

It will seem a bit silly for a blogger to complain about a social networking site (a blog being in some ways merely a more verbose and self-important form of a social networking page), especially when I have been told that there is a Facebook group that is actually inspired by my blogging, but Alan Jacobs and Rod Dreher speak for many of us when they refuse to succumb (or succumb again) to the fashion. Like Rod, I already spend more time online than I probably should, and like Alan I find absolutely nothing appealing about Facebook (or any of the other social networking sites, for that matter). Of course, I once railed against the release of the iPhone, so you will conclude that I am simply uninterested in the latest uses of technology, but that’s just the point. For many people, the iPhone is very useful, but I don’t see any reason why I should have one. For goodness’ sakes, I resisted getting a cell phone until 2003, and only accepted using one of those because I make a few long, cross-country driving trips a year and I have fairly long commutes to and from my church. So when Farhad Manjoo tells me that Facebook is becoming just as common as cell phones, I am not impressed. We could all probably do with fewer cell phones, and I bet we could stand to do without these networking sites, too.

Facebook may be an excellent means of networking online, or maybe it’s just so-so, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t even like networking with people offline, so why would I want to sign up to do something I don’t enjoy? There’s only so much time in the day. This isn’t to make a statement against modernity or take a stand against ridiculous fads for its own sake (despite the title of the post, I don’t think Facebook is a menace–at least menaces are worth taking seriously), but simply to say that I see no value in the thing, which is why I persist in not joining despite the many entreaties of several of my long-time friends.