Trita Parsi, who is also an occasional contributor to TAC, has a smart article in The Nation on Iran that employs that rare element in Iran policy debate, common sense:

Creating a new regional order, in which the carrot of Iranian inclusion is used to secure radically different behavior from Tehran, is neither a concession to Iran nor a capitulation of American (or Israeli) interests. Rather, it is a recognition that stability in the region cannot be achieved and sustained through the current strategy of pursuing an order based on the exclusion of one of the region’s most powerful nations. To change Iran’s behavior, we must change our own.

The Atlantic has an informative article on Pakistan (I believe it is subscription only) that provides some interesting exchanges with members of the Pakistani military.  This part seemed most relevant to an American audience:

“Major Khaled,” as I’ll call him, grew up in northern Punjab—the “martial belt” that has traditionally provided the vast majority of soldiers and officers in the army—and he received his training at the Pakistan Military Academy. His career mirrored that of many other ambitious young Pakistani officers, and until recently, he had followed his orders without questioning them: He had participated enthusiastically, for instance, in the 1999 invasion of Kargil. All of that changed after Pakistani troops were deployed in the tribal agencies along the border to put down local insurgents and foreign fighters.

“I’ve met people of all ranks, in the line of fire, and nobody is happy with this way of solving the problem in Waziristan,” he told me. “The terrain is hard. It’s difficult to hold the ground. The insurgents know every inch of the area.” Major Khaled told me he resented the implication, which he felt the U.S. government had fostered, that Pakistan was serving as the main refuge for Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. “The terrain around Kabul is similar, so why do they say that the only hideouts are in Waziristan?” he said. “Why is Pakistan singled out? Pakistan has suffered a lot. I’ve lost colleagues in ambushes, to time bombs, to improvised explosive devices. The Pakistan army is bleeding for you people.” I asked Khaled if his doubts about the mission had ever caused him to disobey the commands of higher-ups. He shook his head. “I’m not a policy maker. We just have to follow the orders, but people down below don’t go into battle from their hearts. There could have been other options. This is not our battle. This is your battle, and we’re paying the price.”

Bear this in mind the next time you hear some pundit complain about Islamabad’s “appeasement” in Waziristan.  (In principle, their deal with the tribes was fundamentally no different from the deal we have struck in Anbar, with the main difference being that we cajoled Musharraf to resume using failed tactics against the tribes.)  The article is a smart, balanced one that makes it clear that Musharraf and the latest bout of militarisation of Pakistani politics have become a liability to Pakistan and America.  I had hinted at how we should start looking beyond Musharraf in one of my early columns this summer (sorry, not online).  Obviously, with the state of emergency that Musharraf declared, the dangers of sticking with Musharraf have become clear for all to see, but it may now be too late to remedy the error of putting virtually all of our chips, so to speak, on Musharraf.

Rudy Giuliani, who leads most national GOP polls, had the most support at the outset. But several who initially favored the former New York mayor acknowledged that they were torn between admiration for the leadership skills he displayed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and concern about his support of abortion and views on gay marriage [bold mine-DL].

The group, as a whole, knew far less about Fred Thompson, who only entered the race in September. “He’s not comfortable in his role yet,” said June Beninghove, 67, a retired secretary, who nonetheless said she favored the former Tennessee senator.

Others cited his personal characteristics, calling him conservative and fatherly and, in one case, “more like [the late President Ronald] Reagan.”

But when the group was asked toward the end of the evening to choose between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Thompson, most – including several initial Giuliani backers – raised their hands for Mr. Thompson, despite uncertainty about him and his views. ~Carl Leudbsdorf

This is just from one small gathering in suburban Virginia, but this struck me as a slightly strange development (which also happily confirms my increasingly implausible prediction of a Thompson nomination).  What could persuade people who don’t know much about Thompson to change their support from Giuliani to Thompson in the course of an evening?  Evidently, Giuliani’s social liberalism, which more than a few have been saying doesn’t really matter this time, really is killing him with these voters.  However, it is worth noting that nobody was completely put off by Giuliani’s views, saying that they would all vote for the eventual GOP nominee.  Because of his religion, the support for Romney was pretty shaky, but everyone at the gathering agreed that Romney as nominee was still preferable to a Democrat:

Being a Democrat “is worse than being a Mormon,” Mr. Armstrong said. “There’s Mormons, and there’s insects, and there’s Democrats,” he added, extending his arm and then lowering it to indicate his decreasing regard for each group. 

That isn’t really a ringing endorsement for Mormons, but it’s what Romney has to face out there.  This man reminds me of a history lecturer we had back in undergrad days who explained the Great Chain of Being to us, and at the bottom of the Chain he placed North Carolina Tarheel fans (he was also a Virginian). 

It should also be noted that this was in the northern Glen Allen suburb of Richmond, which I believe is pretty solid GOP country.  I assume NOVA Republicans would have significantly different preferences.

Rod and Amy Sullivan appear on bloggingheads, discussing evangelicals and politics (and Kirkpatrick’s recent Times magazine article) and the intersection of religion and politics generally.

While I’m on the subject, the idea that Obama has “the right allies on foreign policy questions” and the “right enemies,” too is a strange one when you consider that his foreign policy has received praise from Robert Kagan, Marty Peretz, The Washington Posteditors and the occasionally encouraging word on Obama’s bad ideas about Pakistan from Rudy Giuliani and The Wall Street Journal.  It’s a Who’s Who of people you don’t want endorsing your foreign policy proposals, and Obama has them all.  Obviously, Obama can’t necessarily be held responsible if people with horrible ideas say that they agree with him, but it should be very worrying that they agree with him.  This would be less troubling if Obama’s foreign policy weren’t a hyper-ambitious disaster waiting to happen, but it is just that.

Sullivan’s essay on Obama is now up, and for those who want still more discussion of Obama’s special qualities this is the essay for you.  It’s an interesting read, but this line of argumentstill puzzles me:

There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

(Side note: are we now assuming that the average Pakistani youth is our enemy?)  Not to dwell on the point too much more, but even supposing that a young Pakistani Muslim responds favourably to the appearance of a candidate who threatens to launch strikes at his country against his government’s wishes, it is not at all clear that this will outweigh the objections to U.S. policies around the world, almost all of which Obama pledges to continue.  Obama is simply less belligerent towards Iran than his rivals, and he backed up the bombardment of Lebanon virtually without qualification, and we’re supposed to think that his “phased redeployment” plan is going to inspire goodwill? 

It seems to me that all this does not give much credit to the audience that Obama is supposed to be so good at reaching, and it seems as if this endorses the idea that anti-American sentiment is to some significant degree a product of packaging and the perception of “who we are” and that anti-Americanism derives from hatred of “who we are” (or who we are perceived to be).  Obama’s advantage, then, seems to be that he changes the perception of “who we are,” and thus reduces anti-Americanism by saying, “Yes, well, you hated us in the past, but you had it all wrong–we weren’t really like what you thought we were.  Just look at the President!”  But anti-Americanism in particular does not generally derive from opposition to “who we are,” but pretty clearly derives from what we do.  When it comes to “what we do,” Obama is not terribly different from the other candidates, so again I don’t see how he really brings about a major change in this area. 

For good or ill, this formulation of Obama’s ability to appeal to the rest of the world, assuming that it is true, becomes a huge domestic liability for him, despite what his well-wishers and advocates of sane foreign policy everywhere might believe.  If “only Nixon” could go to China, Obama is actually the last person who could effectively make rational foreign policy towards Syria, Iran or any other country, because any concessions or moves made in their direction would be interpreted as showing that he is too comfortable with the rest of the world.  For goodness’ sake, just remember how easily vilified Kerry was for having French relatives, and then consider what Obama would be facing.

Via Yglesias, James Traub talks about the alleged differences between the foreign policy groups advising Obama and Clinton and the candidates’ respective views:

As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, “There’s a feeling that this is a guy who’s going to help us transform the way America deals with the world.” 

Note that this is Ivo Daalder who is saying this.  I wouldn’t have thought that this would need to be pointed out, since we’re all well aware of what Daalder thinks, but it is not at all encouraging that Ivo Daalder and the like have a feeling that Obama will “transform the way America deals with the world.”  Their idea of how America should deal with the world is generally terrible, so why should we want someone to make it a reality?

Greg Djerejian is a very sharp guy, so when he said that Obama’s foreign policy remarks in this NYT interview were worth looking at I decided I had to read it.  Djerejian is not necessarily backing Obama here, but he says that Obama offers a relatively better foreign policy vision than the rest.  Let’s say that I was less impressed. 

His support for phased withdrawal is something, but I agree with one of my commenters on another post that the “we must withdraw so that Iraqis can reconcile” argument is not persuasive.  It isn’t persuasive because it is very likely untrue that this will happen.  At first glance, it seems at least remotely possible, but then you ask: what incentive do the stronger factions have to reconcile at that point?  No incentive at all.  That is not to say that reconciliation is going to happen with a large U.S. presence in the country, because the factions likewise have little incentive to reconcile, because the presence of U.S. forces is simply delaying the inevitable. 

Supporters of withdrawal in the Obama mould are trying to make withdrawal seem like the hopeful, optimistic option, when it really cannot be that.  Perhaps this is a calculation that Americans only respond to optimistic plans, and so withdrawal has to be cast as a “problem-solving” alternative.  Yet the underlying assumption in favour of withdrawal from Iraq is that the problems of Iraq are either not ours to fix or they cannot be fixed by us.  We cannot claim simultaneously that we cannot referee their civil war and that our willingness to depart will more effectively bring their civil war to an end and forge a political settlement.  It really is one or the other, and if the first is true we have to take into account that withdrawal means that the civil war goes on, and may get worse.  The response to the “we broke it” argument at this point is that we are continually re-breaking the country, like someone who went into a china shop and began knocking off more and more pieces from the shelves in a harried, clumsy effort to clean up the original broken pieces already knocked to the ground.  If we “own” much more of what we have broken in Iraq, we might as well annex the country outright and keep it in perpetuity.  The other response to this objection is that we cannot actually “pay for it” or “fix it,” and eventually we will withdraw, at which point the same dynamic of political rivalries inside Iraq will still be there. 

One place where Obama does seem to be on the right track is when he says this:

But what I don’t want to do is to make our withdrawal contingent on the Iraqi government doing the right thing because that empowers them to make strategic decisions that should be made by the president of the United States.

It has to be one of the greater ironies of this irony-laden administration that the “tough” nationalists and unilateralists, who claimed that America had to be able to act alone if necessary, have been the ones to give us foreign policy outsourcing and entrusting what they believe to be vital national security matters to dysfunctional foreign governments.  Obama does make some sense here.  However, I still find his broader foreign policy vision not pertaining to Iraq deeply troubling.

The Commentary symposium on Podhoretz’s World War IV is not pleasant reading, at least not if you value sane reflection on the affairs of the world, but it does serve as a helpful summary of what leading neoconservatives and their allies actually claim to believe in their own words.  This can serve later as a useful resource should you need a quick refererence to explain what the dangerous interventionists hold to be true.  This is useful, since they will probably later try to say that their views have been distorted by their enemies.  

Here’s a taste of what I mean from Claudia Rossett:

In this context, Islamofascism is clearly the most virulent and immediate danger. But the threat hardly ends there. If I have a criticism of Podhoretz’s superb tour and analysis of the hot front in this new world war, it is that he underestimates the damage done to us in this war by some of the major non-Islamic despotisms, which in their own efforts to deflect democracy are only too pleased to strike back-scratching deals with Islamofascist regimes.

Along with such obvious candidates as the totalitarian munitions-merchant North Korea, or our near-neighbor Venezuela [bold mine-DL], these regimes include the two great powers of Russia and China. Lest that list sound too alarmist, or simply too overwhelming, let me add that I agree with Podhoretz’s warning that we cannot simultaneously tackle every villainous government on earth. But in understanding why we had to topple Saddam early on, and why democracy is the only real answer, I think we must keep in mind that behind Islamofascism is a brew of interests that, however disparate, have this in common: they shun democracy and in various ways tend to support each other in fighting and subverting its spread. Thus do we find China and Russia, our erstwhile allies against Islamo-terrorists, blocking one U.S. attempt after another to shut down or stymie the regimes that produce these killers and their medieval creeds [bold mine-DL].  

Naturally, Venezuela leaps to mind as one of the great threats of our time.  But she neglected Bolivia, which I think is a wildly irresponsible oversight.  When will we begin to fight the coca masters of La Paz?*   

This is almost as complete an expression of everything that is wrong with democratism and interventionism as you can get in two paragraphs.  The added hostility to Russia and China is what tops it off so well, since it is, of course, Russia and China that are doing the most to prop up the House of Saud and President Mubarak.  Oh, wait.

The symposium also shows a remarkable general consensus (with perhaps one or two mild dissents, including one actually from Bill Kristol) about the name “World War IV,” which virtually everyone contributing to the symposium thinks is either an acceptable or excellent name.  Even those who do not accept the name accept the basic assumptions about the war so described, which is just as unfortunate.  The amazing thing to me is that literally no one questions the word included in the subtitle, Islamofascism.  This word seems far more ridiculous than “WWIV,” which is saying something, so it is a far more damning statement about the paucity of neoconservative foreign policy thinking that not one of the participants raised an objection against such patent nonsense.  In my next TAC column I explain why it seems ridiculous and misleading to me.

* This is as close to a Ledeenesque vilification of Bolivia as I could get.

Three cheers for decent historians:

A Vatican-backed historian has attacked the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age as a “distorted anti-papal travesty” that risks dividing the West just when it should be rediscovering its “common Christian roots” in the face of Islam.

Stuart Reid at The Spectator‘s Coffee House blog is making sense:

Any depiction of those years that depicts Elizabeth as the good guy and Philip as the bad guy is comic-book history.

He is also even more hard-core than I am:

What a pity the Armada failed.

Reid and Cardini and I are not alone in our objections to the film:

The Catholic News Service, which is run by the United States Bishops Conference, said: “With the single exception of Mary, Queen of Scots, all the Catholics in the film are twisted, embittered intriguers.”

And even then their depiction of Mary Stuart isn’t exactly flattering.