The Hebrew prophets have a political vision and it is not neoconservative.  ~David Klinghoffer

You have to laugh at Klinghoffer’s description of a prospective attack on Iran as “aggressive defense.”  What’s next?  Peaceful violence?  Charitable hate?  Lawful crime?  (Klinghoffer must be an expert in stating absurdities, since he is a fellow at the Discovery Institute.)

You do have to admire Klinghoffer’s intellectual contortions to justify the moral abomination of the “new fusionism.”  Aggression and moral reform marching side by side is a hard thing to defend, but he gives it his best shot. 

Then again, Klinghoffer never wrote (probably unwittingly) truer words than these:

Idolatry manifests itself in every age.  Its essence lies in setting up moral authorities in competition with, or to the negation of, God.

Quite.  That might be a powerful lesson on which the various warfare state-lovers could reflect and meditate.  Of course, it is precisely the neocons surrounding Rudy Giuliani who embrace the idolatry of nationalism, and it is those religious conservatives who ignore their own convictions in the name of fighting “Islamofascism” who are complicit in the same error.   

There was also this:

Yet the prophets had little to say against Assyrofascism or Babylofascism.

I wonder why.  Maybe because they weren’t morons.

I have been a pretty relentless critic of Obama, whose foreign policy generally strikes me as being dangerously similar to that of Mr. Bush in a number of ways.  Nonetheless, I have to give him some credit when he says things that make some sense:

Senator Barack Obama said he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran if elected president, and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek “regime change” if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues.

It’s not actually that much in terms of substance, but it is a huge departure from his heretofore rather pathetic belligerence against Iran.

So, to Andrew Sullivan and others: explain what’s happening here…. ~Marc Ambinder

“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.” ~The International Herald-Tribune

Well, as they say, time heals all wounds, and nothing encourages reconciliation like the promise of a return to the bonanza days of muckraking, anti-Clinton paranoia.  Plus, when you have lived through years of the truly appalling, the merely horrible seems like sweet deliverance.

Mr. Colbert met the Democratic filing deadline of noon today to send in some paperwork and a check for $2,500.

But the party’s executive council just voted 13-3 not to certify him.

Carol Fowler, chairwoman of the state party, told us that the council “really agonized over this because they really like him, they love his show and everyone thinks it’s wonderful that he cares about us.”

But, she said, they decided he did not meet two basic requirements: that the person be generally acknowledge or recognized by the media as a viable nationwide candidate; and be actively campaigning for the South Carolina primary. ~The Caucus

Some people are complaining that 52% of Americans support a military strike on Iran.  While I am entirely sympathetic to the laments about public ignorance and the gullibility of the average citizen, and I find it appalling that a majority would support such an obviously horrible idea, I would hasten to point out that this is actually a slightly lower percentage than we have had in the past.  Crazy anti-Iranian jingoism is somewhat less persuasive than it used to be almost two years ago, and that seems like marginally good news to me.

Thanks to my Scene colleague Nick Desai, I have come across the most remarkable and simultaneously unspeakable article.  There are bad articles, Christopher Hitchens articles, Gerson articles and then there’s this, which is in a class all by itself.  It has practically every lazy assumption and misguided polemical trope that you’ve ever encountered.  There is, naturally, Lincoln-worship involved, and a hefty dose of Teutonophobia, which are the usual prerequisites for truly execrable historical analysis.  I am almost overwhelmed by its breathtaking awfulness, but I will try to make a few points.  Let’s start at the beginning:

In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.

Spot the nonsense.  It isn’t hard.  By March 1861, several states had seceded from the Union in protest against this “revolutionary” policy, and rather than being “poised to carry all before them,” according to Lincoln 1861 was the year in which free institutions were supposedly on the verge of being subverted and wiped from the face of the earth.  It was so endangered, in fact, because of the dangerous principle that voluntary Union was actually voluntary, which Lincoln made sure would not stand.  There was certainly a coercive reaction to the idea of the voluntary Union, and it was the so-called Unionists who did the coercing.  The “war to save the Union” was, of course, the assassination of the very principle that made it a Union. 

Lincoln was wrong, as he often was, but from the perspective of Mr. Beran 1861 seems an unusually poor year to mark the impending triumph of what he calls “free institutions.”  In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs was realised by the order of an autocrat.  A Christian, humane and decent-minded autocrat, probably the finest Russian ruler of the century, but an autocrat.  Free institutions?  In any meaningful sense, they did not yet exist in Russia.  Indeed, one might observe with some irony how much more easily an autocracy embraced a policy of emancipation than did a democracy, which might tell us something about democracy’s flaws, but no matter.  Meanwhile, in Germany the liberals became the allies of the Junkers, the Prussian “caste” to which Bismarck belonged, and Bismarck was himself the champion of a combination of liberal nationalism (down with all the reactionary Reichsfeinde and no Canossarepublik, he said) and nationalist and anti-socialist social legislation.  Those champions of “free constitutional principles” were the architects and leading cheerleaders of the Kulturkampf against German Catholics.  In this, German liberals exhibited precisely the same hostility that many American Catholics perceived in the Red Republicans, so called by Orestes Brownson and others because of the clear similarities with European liberal revolutionaries.  It is not surprising that many German exiles who had fled the suppression of the ’48 revolution were sympathetic to the principles of the GOP.  By the way, none of this appears to me to be a compliment to Lincoln.

Beran isn’t done:

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. 

Egads, reaction!  There is something truly strange about trying to associate the Republican Party with something other than privilege.  As a party, it represented (and Lincoln represented), and to some considerable extent still represents, the interests of corporations and finance, just as the Whigs had represented commercial and mercantile interests before them.  The causes of the War are many and complex, but if you said that it boiled down to a conflict between the landed and moneyed interest you would not be far wrong.  The latter won, and it replaced one kind of hierarchy and stratification with another while brutally centralising power into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  Someone will need to explain to me how this represents the victory of “free institutions,” since I have a funny idea that arbitrary, coercive government is not really compatible with “free institutions.”

It gets even funnier:

The paternalists, Lord Macaulay wrote disapprovingly, wanted to “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed.”

It should be painfully obvious, but it was in Republican Party-dominated regions of the country where the uniform public school first appeared, and it was among Republican progressives at the turn of the century that you found some of the greatest advocates of regulation of business.  If there were paternalists in the post-War period, they were very often Republicans, the heirs of Lincoln.  Certainly, Southern aristocrats also accepted paternalistic ideas, but the Red Republicans wished to be paternalists for everyone in the country.

And again:

The second idea was militant nationalism—the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their wills on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamed of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces into a new German Reich [bold mine-DL]. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Panslav nationalists sought to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium.

It was the Republicans who preached American nationalism over against federal and decentralist principles, and it was Republicans who waged a war of unification–not unlike Bismarck, actually–to enforce that nationalism.  (Note that the “Danish, French and Polish provinces” in question were filled mostly with German-speaking Germans.)  It was, again, the Republicans who most forthrightly stated America’s imperial and civilising mission to “inferior” peoples, and who launched our imperialist wars in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  But don’t let that get in the way of a good story.  The Pan-Slavists were a force in Russian politics, and their objectives were shared by no less than that reformer, Tsar Aleksandr II, who waged war on behalf of the Slavs of the Balkans during the 1875-78 crisis. 

Speaking of imperialism, Beran writes:

Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, American slavery might have survived into the twentieth century, deriving fresh strength from new weapons in the coercive arsenal—“scientific” racism, social Darwinism, jingoistic imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism.    

But, again, it was the esteemed Party of Lincoln where imperialists and progressives espousing such views very often found their home.  The devastation and ruination of the South and the elimination of slavery did nothing to stymy any of these things, but rather allowed them to prosper.  Lincoln’s political heirs embraced most, if not all, of them and promoted them.  It was in the name of both racial and cultural superiority that Americans sought to provide “uplift” for our “brown brothers” in the Philippines (minus those who died because of the war, naturally).

Then comes the ultimate idiocy:

The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

It is amusing to consider that the one counterfactual author who has done the most to play around with the ideas of “what if the South won?”, Harry Turtledove (a Byzantinist by training!), comes to the exact opposite conclusion and held, I think correctly, that an independent CSA would have allied itself, tothe extent that it was willing to go against the Jeffersonian grain against entangling alliances, with Britain and France.  Britain and France had been interested, for economic and strategic reasons, to see the Confederacy succeed, and had the South won it is easy to see the Confederacy having become, if anything, a strong supporter of either Britain or France in foreign policy.  It was the Unionists who were very cosy with the Prussian military during the War, and the Republicans who best represented the politics of Bismarck and the National Liberals on the American scene.  The Confederates were, however, heirs of the heritage of Jefferson and Jackson.  They were continentalists, and had a tradition of distrusting the British.  It is likely they would have pursued a strategy of influence and occasional expansion in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, but the odds of their linking arms with the Germans are very poor indeed.  The Yankees always had more in common with the Germans culturally and politically than did the Southrons.  However, since I am not a stupid Teutonophobe, I do not hold this against the Yankees.  I am not so desperate to vindicate the Confederate position, as Mr. Beran clearly is desperate to glorify Lincoln, that I feel compelled to vilify the political evolution of other nations and then randomly link that history with American historical figures that I dislike.   

Cross-posted at The American Scene

Like many a celebrity profiler, Kurtz casts the most mundane act, when undertaken by a famous person, as an almost heroic manifestation of extraordinary character. Marveling at the fact that when Russert interviewed Yogi Berra, he got the Hall of Famer’s autograph for his son and father, Kurtz writes that the event “makes clear that Tim Russert, media superstar, hasn’t forgotten where he came from.” ~Paul Waldman

The criticisms aimed at Russert are well-deserved (Michael and Ross have more), but it’s this last phrase of Kurtz’s that struck me suddenly as odd.  It’s a common phrase that we all know and use, but it occurs to me that there’s no reason why it should have such a positive meaning.  People who loathe their birthplace or hometown also remember where they came from, which is why they try to stay far away from that place.  (In this way, where you are from makes an indelible mark on you, just as belonging to any tradition will shape who you are, even if you rebel against it.) 

Naturally, the implication in the phrase is that you still feel some attachment or loyalty to the place where you grew up, that you haven’t “sold out” and forgotten your “roots.”  But this entire vocabulary of selling out and the roots of the unrooted has evolved to describe people who very definitely have sold out, or bought in, traded up, or however you would like to describe it, and then moved on.  You don’t need to “remember where you came from” if you actually still come from there.  If your roots were in that place, you would be planted, as it were, in that piece of ground and would not be flitting around elsewhere.

Even having the memory of it says that you have separated yourself from the place and must keep it in your mind.  Your life is somewhere else now.  The cultivation of the memory of a lost place can often be quite moving and beautiful, and in diasporas and among emigres you can find people who have the most impressive love of their lost country, but to some degree it is always going to be an imagined place and unreal, a fiction and an ideal to which one looks for consolation in a new place.  The ancients regarded exile as being not much better than death, whereas many of us seem to take a kind of perverse delight in alienation. 

Take Russert as a perfect example: he may not have forgotten where he came from, but he certainly isn’t going to go back there and enjoys his life after having “escaped” from his hometown.  This brings us to the nebulous idea of settled authenticity in a hyper-mobile society and the epidemic of frequent mobility and the routine abandonment of one’s hometown, particularly by professionals.  Obviously, if you settle somewhere and make that place your home (which is what, failing a return to your hometown, seems the best way), that’s rather different, but to live in one place for a long period of time while maintaining that you aren’t really from there creates this strange need to find deracinated people who are good at making gestures of rootedness rather than actually being rooted somewhere.  So Russert makes his gestures by mocking and harrassing politicians to show that he is still one of the humble folk.  He shows that he remains tied to Buffalo not by any clear attachment to Buffalo, but rather uses his hometown as a kind of pass to distinguish himself from the urban coastal elite and politicians among whom he mingles, and also as a way of receiving a kind of condescending acclaim from these same people, much in the way members of high society have found amusement and pleasure in a member of the lower orders who strives to become one of them while still retaining some charming air of rusticity.

Via Ross, I see that it’sbecomeGerson–bashingweek.  It’s nice to be a trend-setter.  If his latest column is any indication of what his book has to offer, I don’t think “heroic conservatism” is going to take off.  For instance, saying things like this naturally open him up to withering criticism from all sides:

Traditional conservatism has a piece missing — a piece that is shaped like a conscience. 

The article describing Gerson’s book has strange echoes of a different account of Gerson’s gloryhounding when he was a speechwriter:

Time and again, Gerson depicts a lonely struggle to advance measures that would benefit AIDS patients, impoverished children or prisoners reentering society.

Gerson is always engaged in a lonely struggle, undoubtedly waged from his base camp from deep inside some social democratic beanery, at least when he is not single-handedly writing Inaugural speeches at Starbucks.   

Update: Gerson appeared on The Daily Show this week.  He seems to have been on the verge of tears half the time.

Ross writes:

However, something like the reverse is also true: Just because the initial invasion was almost certainly a mistake doesn’t necessarily mean that the continued presence of U.S. troops is a mistake as well. And I detect some goalpost-shifting here among the partisans of immediate withdrawal.

And:

But given that only six weeks ago he [Yglesias] was throwing out “4 or 5 more years” as a timeline for when Iraq might start to settle down, I think it’s also “at least plausible” that when we look back on the last year of American military operations in Iraq, we’ll judge them to have played a major role in putting the worst behind us earlier than most people anticipated.

I suppose I must chime in with my usual dose of pessimism.  The “continued presence of U.S. troops” would only not be a mistake if there were reason to think that the changes that have yielded some marginal, temporary improvement in security were going to continue and serve as the foundation for some enduring security.  As Prof. Bacevich has said:

The general has now made his call, and President Bush has endorsed it: the surge having succeeded (so at least we are assured), it will now be curtailed. The war will continue, albeit on a marginally smaller scale. 

This goes to the heart of Prof. Bacevich’s criticism of Gen. Petraeus, which is that the plan that seems to be producing some results is being brought to a close because it was not politically viable under the current circumstances to keep it going, much less expand it.  Bacevich again:

Petraeus has chosen a middle course, carefully crafted to cause the least amount of consternation among various Washington constituencies he is eager to accommodate. This is the politics of give and take, of horse trading, of putting lipstick on a pig. Ultimately, it is the politics of avoidance. 

And again:

Yet Petraeus has chosen to do just the opposite. Based on two or three months of (ostensibly) positive indicators, he has advised the president to ease the pressure, withdrawing the increment of troops that had (purportedly) enabled the coalition to seize the initiative in the first place.

This defies logic. It’s as if two weeks into the Wilderness Campaign, Grant had counseled Lincoln to reduce the size of the Army of the Potomac. Or as if once Allied forces had established the beachhead at Normandy, Eisenhower had started rotating divisions back stateside to ease the strain on the U.S. Army.

Having achieved modest gains with a half-measure, Gen. Petraeus counsels us to go back to our trusty quarter-measures.  As I have said earlier, the “surge” is necessarily temporary in its application and in its effects.  Its temporariness is implicit in its official propaganda name of “surge” and in the stated policy of the U.S. government, in that the “surge” was always going to come to an end.  Its purpose was to buy time, which it seems to have done.  However, this time is basically worthless–though bought at too high a price in American blood–if it is not going to be used well.    

We have seen temporary increases in force levels before, and they did not ultimately halt Iraq’s downward spiral.  The “surge” was, by the account of its own backers, supposed to be completely different from these earlier efforts. This time, there would be political reconciliation, and this time Iraqisation would happen, and this time the lambs would lay down with the lions.  Okay, they didn’t say that last part, but the other two were just as likely to happen as the third.  Unsurprisingly, none of them has come to pass, nor does any one of them seem likely to happen anytime soon. 

During the “bad, old days” of “clear, hold and build” you would read stories about how one neighbourhood of Baghdad would be secured, life would begin to resume and then the U.S. deployment would be shifted to another part, whereupon the stabilising neighbourhood reverted to violent chaos.  What is supposed to be different when force levels drop and whatever pressure that the “surge” did exert weakens?  

Now the paired element with the “surge” of brigades was always the old “Iraqis standing up” bit.  We don’t hear a lot about this part of the plan, because this is the part–the fundamentally more important long-term part–that isn’t working very well.  We all know that the political reconciliation part is a farce.  If anything, I’d have to say that Yglesias’ estimate of 4-5 years before Iraq “settles down” may be unduly sunny and positive, because there is nothing to keep things from unraveling again once the “surge” ends.  There was never going to be anything to keep things from unraveling once the “surge” was over, which is why the “surge” was a mistake in the beginning.  It perpetuated the worst-of-both-worlds approach that Mr. Bush has applied to Iraq for years: too few soldiers to properly stabilise the country, but too many to avoid all the costs and burdens of being an occupier.  There are two coherent positions that can be taken (huge increases in force levels or large-scale withdrawal), and one of them is politically and practically feasible.  Or we can continue to muddle through as we have done until some calamity throws Iraq into a new round of upheaval.

I have given Chuck Hagel a lot of grief over the past year, but today I’m willing to give him a lot of credit.  Via Steve Clemons, I see that Hagel has apparently called on the President to consider “direct, unconditional, and comprehensive talks with the Government of Iran.”  Common sense is infiltrating the Washington Iran policy debate!  No doubt, the administration will file this in the trash can, but it is significant that someone in government is arguing for direct talks with Iran.