Foreign Policy‘s Joshua Keating laments the possible break-up of Belgium:

Belgium may indeed be held together only by “the king, the football team, and a few beers” as would-be prime minister Yves Leterme has said, but I’ll take that over a country held together by race and religion any day. Bonne chance and veel geluk to those working to keep the place together.

Not to be too severe, but I think that what Joshua Keating or any non-Belgian foreign policy observer would “take” or accept should have no bearing on the situation.  Nation-states that have no meaning for their inhabitants are not boons for humanity–they are artificial constructs that the people who live in them regard as injurious to their own interests.  The real point is that whatever Mr. Keating would “take” is completely unrepresentative of what most people, whether in Europe or elsewhere, will actually “take.”  In the end, the break-up of Belgium along ethnic and linguistic lines is a function of democracy and self-government itself.  If a European identity is at odds with these political values, that European identity will receive very little respect among the people.

Now the balance has tipped. Unleashing riot police on demonstrators, leaving dozens in hospital, then declaring a state of emergency, seem an inexplicable overreaction to protests that posed no threat to public order. Blanket bans on demonstrations and on anti-government radio and television are tactics that would raise blushes even in the Kremlin [bold mine-DL].

Mr Saakashvili claims his country was facing a putsch organised by outside provocateurs. Though Georgia has certainly suffered much from Russian mischief-making, he has produced no convincing evidence that it has played a decisive part in recent days. Having cried wolf, he may find it harder to win outside attention when his country faces a genuine threat. ~The Economist

Wow.  When even The Economist criticises Saakashvili this bluntly, you have to know that he has fallen pretty far from grace.  Then again, Saakashvili’s entire foreign policy consisted of little more than yelling in his most shrill voice, “The Russians are coming!  The Russians are coming!”  His latest excuse-making is just more of the same.  That suited Washington well enough since 2003, and apparently still does.  It’s interesting to see that it has been enough to embarrass some of his most vocal Western supporters.

Still, it wouldn’t be The Economist if it didn’t have this:

This is not just about salving Western governments’ wounded feelings. Failure to criticise Mr Saakashvili’s mistakes will undermine the West’s cause throughout the region.  Russians will wonder whether outside support for Georgia in recent years was a cynical bit of Kremlin-bashing and energy politics, rather than good-hearted help for a country yearning for security and freedom.

Gosh, why would anyone have come to that conclusion?

Insanely, The Economist still favours bringing Georgia into NATO at some point.  So, in short, they have learned nothing from the last two weeks of Saakashvili’s misrule.

Reid Wilson at RCP points to polling for the New Mexico Senate race.  According to this poll, which was done for the Udall campaign, in the (likely) event that Tom Udall wins their nomination, he would trounce either Heather Wilson or Steve Pearce (52-36 and 50-33 respectively).  The “good news” for the Republicans is that there seems to be no difference in support for Wilson or Pearce against Udall–they pick up the regular minimum 33-36%, roughly the same percentage of New Mexicans registered as Republicans, but are not competitive with Udall.  Marty Chavez becoming the Dem nominee is the Republicans’ best hope (polling shows him actually losing to Pearce, but with a hefty part of the vote undecided), and this isn’t likely to happen.  The GOP needs a Chavez-Pearce match-up, which is the least likely outcome in the primaries.  A Udall-Pearce competition would basically be over before it began.  Perversely, the GOP needs a candidate who has Wilson’s moderate-to-liberal positions if they are running against Udall, but Wilson is personally disliked by so many New Mexicans (including me) that she is effectively no more competitive than Pearce. 

Some actual good news for the Republicans: the Democratic primary is early next year to aid in Richardson’s futile quest for the vice presidency (he was so awful in last night’s debate that I felt embarrassed to be from the same state), so the Democratic Senate nominee will be known for months before the June 6 Republican primary.  That will allow Pearce to reconsider his Senate run and go back to running for re-election, and this will let Wilson become the nominee.  She can then go down in flames against Udall, while likely House nominee Darren White secures NM-01 for the Republicans.  That is the most likely good outcome for the Republicans next year. 

Udall will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee, and I would have thought that before seeing these striking poll numbers.  Chavez’s failed gubernatorial bid was not so long ago that Democrats have forgotten it, and Udall has the connections with the DSCC and has better access to fundraising.  Udall wasalways going to be the strongest candidate on the Democratic side if he chose to run.  As representative of the Third District, he is naturally quite liberal, but he is also white, which does help him in Albuquerque and in the southeast, and he is Mormon, which makes him more competitive in the northwest around Farmington, which is a fairly heavily Mormon area.  The NRSC may as well write this one off and focus on races that they can conceivably win. 

Update: Earlier polling by American Research shows approximately the same advantage for Udall.  This polling shows Udall’s impressive strength in pulling away a large number of Republicans from the other side: 19% of Republicans go for Udall, while only 10% of Democrats choose Wilson, and the numbers are the same vs. Pearce.  Udall is winning these match-ups 55-38 and 54-37 respectively.  Obviously, it’s early, yes, but these are huge deficits for Republicans to make up in a difficult year.

The Democratic and Republican Parties have become merely opposite wings of the same bird, and it’s the American people who are getting the bird as our elected officials serve their corporate masters and the special interest groups that dominate both parties. ~Lou Dobbs

Can Pat Buchanan sue for copyright infringement over this “wings of the same bird” rip-off?  In the original, it was “two wings the same bird of prey,” which was a much better way of putting it.  It seems, as virtually everyone has alreadynoted, that Dobbs is floating the idea of an independent presidential bid when he says:

I believe the person elected a year from now will be an Independent populist, a man or woman who understands the genius of this country lies in the hearts and minds of its people and not in the prerogatives and power of its elites.

And again:

I believe next November’s surprise will be the election of a man or woman of great character, vision and accomplishment, a candidate who has not yet entered the race.

Okay, I guess he really believes it (and he really believes that he has a book that you’d like to buy), but it’s still not clear to me why he believes it.  Yes, foreign policy is a mess, the price of oil is staggering, the dollar is depreciating, people keep making unpleasant comparisons between the current state of the market and the autumn of 1987, and the economy may well be on the verge of recession.  But why should we expect there to be another Ross Perot-like figure leaping into the mix?  I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be a welcome development–it would be.  But I expect that the candidate would have to be quite wealthy and capable of self-financing the entire campaign, and you just don’t have that many billionaires who get worked up about the evils of corporate influence and mass immigration.  There is real support for strong restrictionist and “protectionist” policies out in the country (ground that the Democrats are already partly beginning to occupy on trade), but an independent who made his campaign primarily an anti-corporate, pro-sovereignty and anti-immigration one could not realistically expect a flood of large donations.  Only a Giuliani or McCain nomination on the GOP side could trigger the kind of mass exodus of restrictionist Republican voters that the Independent Populist of Great Character would need to make his candidacy competitive.  He would draw dissatisfied Democratic voters as well, but the core of this kind of independent bid would be Republican and independent restrictionists.  And what would the Independent Populist of Great Character’s foreign policy look like?  If it is deemed too “isolationist” by the great and the good (i.e., if it is sane on Iraq and Iran), he probably loses many of his nationalist, “Jacksonian” voters to the Republican, and if he is too jingoistic he will be even less popular than the Republicans.

P.S.  The scenario imagined by Dobbs’ friends, in which he enters the race after a Bloomberg candidacy starts, is also highly implausible, not least since Bloomberg will almost certainly not be running.  It also makes no sense–why would Dobbs wait until the man with virtually endless financial resources enters the race?  Dobbs would not only be letting Bloomberg steal his thunder, but guarantee that his campaign would be outmatched in resources by not just two established party candidates but by a billionaire as well.    The billionaire meanwhile frames his campaign around pragmatism and problem-solving and pulls away some significant portion of Dobbs’ protest vote (which is what some part of his support would be).     

As Mr. Kelley’s disdain for “so-called moral issues” suggests, the roles he and Ms. Williams play in politics are connected. Since the Reagan era, conservative Christians have grown in prominence as Republican foot soldiers. Voters like Ms. Williams have elevated “values” concerns in a party once associated more with the Chamber of Commerce than the church. “I’m pro-life. Basically, that’s why I’m Republican,” Ms. Williams says [bold mine-DL]. 

She also agrees with Republican criticism of Democrats’ economic policies. “Democrats are all for social programs which raise my taxes,” says Ms. Williams, who lives in a working-class neighborhood. “I’m not working to pay for people to sit at home watching cable all day.” ~The Wall Street Journal

That’s right.  She’s working so that the government can create a prescription drugs boondoggle to benefit pharmaceutical companies.  That’s why it makes sense for her to be a Republican. 

I understand why pro-life voters typically align with the Republicans.  In theory, it makes sense: we pro-lifers vote for you Republicans, and you work to overturn Roe and generally oppose abortion itself (and, by extension, euthanasia and ESCR and so on).  It sounds like a fair deal, until you, the pro-lifers, realise that you never really get very much out of it in all these years.  But what about getting a majority on the Court, someone will ask.  Well, pro-lifers have helped put Republicans in executive power for what will soon be twenty of the last twenty-eight years, during which time these Presidents have nominated seven Supreme Court justices, five of whom are still on the Court today.  There has been a Republican-appointed majority on the Court for most of my lifetime, and most of the Republican appointees came in during the Reagan years or later, and yet Roe is realistically farther away than ever from being overturned than it was fifteen years ago.  The latest two justices made it clear in their confirmation hearings that they accepted Roe as established precedent–and their nominations are supposed to represent the great clout and triumph of pro-life voters!  Someone might point to the various bad choices and disappointments among the nominees in the past (Souter, O’Connor, etc.) and claim that pro-lifers just need to remain patient and gradually build up that anti-Roe majority they have imagined for such a long time. 

Given the record of the last three decades, what makes them think that anything will change in the next administration or the one after that?  The trouble with pro-life voters is that most routinely vote for the GOP, so the latter have no real incentive to keep them interested or give them anything more than symbolism or limited measures designed to keep them just attached enough to retain their loyalty for another cycle.  Someone will say, “Well, that’s politics for you,” but my point would be that pro-life voters need to be much more shrewd in their willingness to withhold support and extract concessions.  Yes, this is politics we’re talking about, which is why pro-lifers should play the game a lot better than they have been doing.  Those who follow the path of Pat Robertson to pay obeisance to Giuliani are declaring to the party, “Please, exploit us for your own advantage!” 

Now maybe pro-life voters have other reasons to be drawn to the GOP, as Ms. Williams does, but the question is whether those other reasons are still real.  There used to be a certain rational method to how the Republican Party operated.  They might play social conservatives for fools and give their causes little more than lip service, but you could generally count on them to be less profligate in (most kinds of) spending, less reckless overseas and good for business.  Now they have virtually none of that going for them and must rely on the idea that they are the pro-life party (which, officially, they are) to remain even remotely competitive.  If they aren’t even all that good on delivering for pro-life voters, what, exactly, is the rationale for voting Republican?

The grimly amusing thing about the WSJ article is that the “affluent voters” who are trending Democratic are doing so partly because of the perception of a social conservative chokehold on the GOP, when whatever real political hold social conservatives may have ever had on the party has rarely been weaker in practical terms than it has been over the last few years.  The party’s embrace of social conservative rhetoric has made it appear as if the GOP is beholden to social conservatives, when it has never been more apparent than in this cycle that almost the exact opposite is true.

But why isn’t the U.S. standing up for Pakistan when we need it most? Is America even listening to us? We are calling them Busharraf now. They are the same man. ~Parveen Aslam

Having Musharraf step down would be the appropriate move.  The fact that this plays into the hands of the cynical Bhutto is unfortunate in some ways.  Even though she is self-serving, she also happens to be right that Musharraf will continue to destabilise and worsen the situation in Pakistan.  The most dangerous thing about Musharraf right now is that he genuinely seems to think that emergency rule is helping combat the forces in western Pakistan, when this is not the case.  As the article says, emergency rule is apparently distracting the government from real security threats by focusing so much attention on domestic political opposition.  That would make this emergency rule doubly foolish, making Pakistan both more vulnerable to internal attacks and less politically stable at the same time.

I have more to say about Pakistan in an upcoming TAC column, so I will leave it there.

If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it [bold mine-DL]. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world. ~Roger Cohen

You know, the South Side has its share of problems, but this is ridiculous.  Obama “gets” the problems of globalisation because he lives on the South Side?  Or does he “get” it because of his ancestry?  Do all people living on the South Side possess such special globalisation-understanding powers? 

Also, what is all this talk about Obama bridging the “violent chasm” between the West and the Islamic world?  How does he do that?  By saying, “I used to live in Indonesia, but by the way, in case you were wondering, I am not and never have been a Muslim”?  Perhaps he bridges the chasm by reminding inattentive foreign audiences that he supported the bombing of Lebanon, has proposed sanctions and divestment schemes aimed at Iran and has vowed to launch strikes on Pakistani territory without that government’s permission.  How’s that bridge looking now? 

The other problem with this talk of Obama as a bridge-builder with the Islamic world is that people might take it rather too seriously and see him as being too close to the Islamic world.  The logic of “only Nixon could go to China” applies here as well.  Someone who is already seen, rightly or wrongly, as personally close to or understanding of the ‘other’ has much more difficulty engaging in the kinds of negotiations or contacts that Obama proposes to have.  This may seem like an absurd aspect of domestic politics, but if Obama’s supporters were interested in his chance at being a viable national candidate they would stop saying these things right now.  Having combated the false reports that he was a Muslim as a child, Obama has also been conflated or associated with two major hate-figures in the American mind, namely Hussein and Bin Laden.  To portray him as the natural bridge-builder with the Islamic world unwittingly reinforces the negative associations that various chain-mailers, bloggers, pundits and candidates have been making.  Above all, it stresses how dissimilar and to some extent unique Obama’s background is for most Americans, which makes for interesting magazine copy and punditry but does very little for a candidate’s electoral prospects.  “Vote for Obama–he’s not like you in so very many ways” is not a winning slogan in a mass democracy.  Identitarianism is one aspect of democracy that is one of its most deplorable features and one of its most basic and unavoidable.  Being able to identify with a candidate is essential, and anything that weakens this hurts the candidate.  Selling a candidate who already has a reputation for being a bit aloof and “above it all” by referring to his ability to understand other parts of the world makes the candidate seem even more removed and distant from the crowd.  (Today’s lesson: democracy typically produces poor leadership for sound foreign policy–which is not to say that Obama’s foreign policy is sound.) 

Michael Ignatieff, never tired of being absurdly wrong about matters outside Canada’s borders, is quoted saying:

Outsiders know it’s your choice. Still, they are following this election with passionate interest. And it’s clear Barack Obama would be the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins.

It seems to me that this is a very tricky and potentially politically suicidal line of argument to use if you actually want Obama to win any of the primaries.  When Obama advances this idea, he does it in a smarter way by stressing that “his story” is an “American story.”  Most Americans are souring on certain aspects of globalisation, so what makes anyone think that portraying a candidate as a “globalised leader” is a good idea?  Obviously, Obama is embracing the “nation of immigrants,” “diversity is our strength” rhetoric that we hear all the time, and for a sizeable portion of the population this is an attractive or at least unobjectionable message, but even here he is on potentially treacherous ground. 

What Ignatieff said, and what Cohen is arguing, exposes Obama to a rather fierce backlash if people begin to believe it: having “internationalism in the veins” may imply some kind of hybridity that reduces the person’s connection to his country (this is the “vaguely French” attack against Kerry taken to the nth degree), and simultaneolusly identifies a policy perspective with ‘otherness’, which unwittingly hints that this “internationalism” is not really fully American.  Many of the arguments advanced in Obama’s favour along these lines are rather recklessly identifying in Obama things that I am not sure that he would even say about himself.  Armed with quotes about his being a “globalised leader,” you can just imagine what his opponents would say in a tough general election fight.  Obama’s actual policy positions on immigration, for example, will be hard enough for him to overcome in a general election (should it somehow come to that) without foreign observers taking about how agreeable he is to foreigners.  The attack ads write themselves. Remember Kerry’s ill-fated boast about all of the foreign leaders who supported his election? This does not play well in most parts of America.

Then there was Mexico’s foreign minister, in what I have to assume is an unwitting display of irony:

My sense is the symbolism in Mexico of a dark-skinned American president would be enormous. We’ve got female leaders now in Latin America — in Chile, in Argentina. But the idea of a U.S. leader who looks the way the world looks as seen from Mexico is revolutionary.

A U.S. leader who “looks the way the world looks” is supposed to have great symbolic resonance.  That’s the other side of Obama-as-international-wonderworker argument.  It is necessarily a superficial and rather insulting thing to say about the rest of the world: you cannot identify with America because we just haven’t elected the right symbolic candidates, and now you can!

There is also the small matter that Obama’s foreign policy, which does stress interdependence to the point of insanity (“the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people”), is one of the craziest, most hubristic and dangerous foreign policies on offer in this election cycle.  If the rest of the world is hoping for Obama to win, maybe they should think again.

Chris Orr points out this Ambinder transcript from Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, in which the executive director of the NRLC lamely explains Fred Thompson’s supposed electability:

But he’s running strong in Nevada and South Carolina.

Oh, well, if he’s running strong in Nevada, let’s just declare him the winner now and save everybody some time and money.  O’Steen, the director, also kept coming back to Thompson’s national poll numbers, but relying on these is a major error.  I think my WWWTW colleague Lydia McGrew has the most convincing explanation for this endorsement:

The obvious, and probably the only, answer is this: Once you are the friend of the folks at NRLC, you are their friend forever. 

Yes, the sectarian government in Baghdad is the main obstacle to political progress in Iraq and a major impediment to the success of the “surge,” as someof us foresaw when this entire charade began.  The “surge” of brigades did what it could and made some gains in improving security.  It was of necessity a temporary fix to “buy time” for the alleged reconciliation and security training that would make the Iraqi state reasonably viable and self-sustaining.  The time has been bought at great price, and it is being frittered away.  That is why the overall plan  As Ricks reports:

A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but “it’s unclear how long that window is going to be open.”

And again:

Indeed, some U.S. Army officers now talk more sympathetically about former insurgents than they do about their ostensible allies in the Shiite-led central government. 

And again:

The latest news of declining violence comes as the U.S. troop contingent in Iraq has reached an all-time high. This week, the U.S. troop number will hit 175,000 — the largest presence so far in the 4 1/2 -year war [bold mine-DL] — as units that are rotating in and out overlap briefly. But those numbers are scheduled to come down rapidly over the next several months, which will place an increasing burden on Iraqi security forces and an Iraqi government that has yet to demonstrate it is up to the challenge, senior military officials said.

Now this presents an occasion to make realistic assessment of what the U.S. can actually accomplish in the absence of coordinated Iraqi political efforts.  It seems to me that the U.S. can achieve very little.  If that’s right, this offers an opportunity for many war supporters to say, “We did what we could, we tried to do the right thing by these folks, but we can’t fix their country for them and we can’t achieve anything if their government isn’t entirely on board.”  This offers them a way out of the cage of the “Pottery Barn” thinking that has trapped them.  The question is: do they want to take that way out?

Also, here’s something to keep all of the recent “surge” boosterism in perspective:

Indeed, after years of seizing on every positive development and complaining that the good news wasn’t being adequately conveyed, American military officials now warn against excessive optimism. “It’s never as bad as it was, and it’s not as good as it’s being reported now,” said Army Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, chief of strategic operations for U.S. forces in Iraq.

One should always be wary of optimism, whether excessive or not.  More often than not, it sets you up for a nasty fall.

Update:  As for that “bottom-up reconciliation” you’ve doubtless heard so much about, Ricks’ report has some reasons to be skeptical about its long-term value:

Also, some outside experts contend that U.S. officials still don’t grasp how their empowerment of militias under the bottom-up model of reconciliation is helping tear apart Iraq. Marc Lynch, a George Washington University expert on the Middle East, argued recently on his blog, Abu Aardvark, that partly because of U.S. political tactics in Iraq, the country is drifting “towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state.”

Then there is the refugee crisis to bear in mind:

Officials identified other potential problems flowing from reductions in violence. Military planners already worry that if security continues to improve, many of the 2 million Iraqis who fled the country will return. Those who left are overwhelmingly Sunni, and many of their old houses are occupied by Shiites. How would the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army and police handle the likely friction? “Displaced people is a major flashpoint” to worry about in 2008, said Fetter.

Ross is right that the war in Iraq is a political albatross for the GOP.  The damage from 2006 to public support for the war has been done, and much of it is not going to be undone.  The middle 20% of Americans has shifted against the war.  54% said as of two weeks ago that winning is not possible, which is roughly the same as in April.  Those are the “good” results on support the war from this year in that poll.  Security in many parts of Iraq has improved, at least temporarily, and this has actually been reported with increasing frequency for a good two months now.  The change in public opinion has been minimal.  This 54-55% seems locked in to the assumption that the war cannot be won in any meaningful sense, and while the numbers on the other side fluctuate they remain trapped at 40-42% or below.  I point all of this out to say simply that whether the war begins to “go well” or “get worse,” the verdict on what U.S. policy should be has been handed down long ago: get most, if not all, of our people out. 

The political class has either decided to ignore this verdict or part of it has been unable to change policy.  The deadlock over war policy between Congress and the White House is probably frustrating the public (and this frustration will increase with another Bush veto of an Iraq-related bill), which will persuade enough of them to risk unified government one way or the other.  Given the majority’s views on the war and the views of most GOP voters and candidates, we can guess that the unified government they select will not be a Republican one.  That bodes ill for talk of a Republican “comeback” in Congress and for the hopes of the ’08 nominee. 

One of the crucial problems with the internal debate within the GOP on Iraq, to the extent that there is now a debate, is that a large majority of Republicans are the same people who want to “remain until the country [Iraq] is stable,” as this 11/1-11/5 NBC poll put it.  They are therefore likely to nominate a candidate who thinks the same, or who at least mouths the appropriate phrases.  But that is decidedly not what most Americans want.  Most Americans (55%) want “most troops” out of Iraq by 2009, so you can bet that they are unlikely to turn around and elect a President who cannot or will not promise large-scale withdrawal within the first two years or so.  They are even less likely to back a Republican who continues to make a long-term commitment of a large number of soldiers to Iraq when there is relatively less violence.  So long as the mayhem was nightmarishly frequent, it could be used to instill fear of worse things that might happen when we left (which, I would add, probably will happen), but as it subsides, at least in some areas for the next little while, the fear of post-withdrawal disaster recedes and it is more difficult to paint apocalyptic scenarios that will sway the public. 

What happens in Iraq in the next year will be less important to voters than the reality that our soldiers are still in Iraq in large numbers and that at least one of the major parties is committed to keeping them there for God knows how long.  The other party may at least make gestures towards withdrawal, and that may be all that is needed.

P.S.  Which party the public trusts more is also going to be a major factor next year.  In the 10/29-11/1 Post poll, 50% trusted the Democrats more on handling Iraq, while only 34% trusted the GOP.  That’s obviously a huge gap, and it represents the loss of trust that the Republicans have suffered on their signature foreign policy position.  The point is that even with dramatic improvements in Iraq over the next year (and I am skeptical that these will materialise), the public isn’t going to trust the GOP to be a good steward of U.S. foreign policy.  It is probably not the best way to rebuild that trust by nominating either an extremely bellicose candidate who seems intent on starting new conflicts (Giuliani) or one closely identified personally with the war (McCain).  Also, when 63% are saying that the war wasn’t worth it, that represents a huge obstacle to a party that overwhelmingly still believes that it was. 

P.P.S.  Remarkably, public opinion on the effectiveness of the “surge” seems to be nothing like the growing elite consensus that it has made some gains, i.e., which has to be very narrowly defined as having “made things better” than they were at the start of the year.  In a 10/12-10/16 CBS poll 54% thought that the “surge” had either had no impact or had made things worse, while only 33% believed that it had made things better.  In short, people who think there is no possibility of winning aren’t buying the pro-“surge” rhetoric (which, as I noted at the time, was overselling the gains of the “surge” early on and talking it up far too soon in the year), or at least they weren’t as of a month ago.