Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson’s intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was “inconceivable” that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

The attack “couldn’t be anything else but deliberate,” the NSA’s director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.

“I don’t think you’ll find many people at NSA who believe it was accidental,” Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an interview.

“I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were doing,” said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. ~The Baltimore Sun

Ezra Klein makes the obvious, but apparently still necessary point:

Walt and Mearsheimer, by contrast, are arguing that there exists a powerful political lobby, ranked second in multiple surveys of Congressmen and staffers, that exerts disproportionate power over American policy towards Israel, in much the way AARP, the NRA, or the Cuban Lobby does on their issues. This Lobby, they argue, does not represent the expressed opinions of most Jews, and it includes a large constituency of Christian Zionists. That is not anti-Semitism. You may disagree with it, but it is not an attack on the shared characteristics of Jews. And it is disgusting and cheapening to pretend otherwise because marginalizing the authors as anti-semitic is more effective than arguing back their viewpoint.

What’s most bizarre about the polemical response to the book is that, if the critics of the book are largely right about the many egregious exaggerations, mistakes and oversights Mearsheimer and Walt have made, there should be no need to resort to these tactics.  If the argument were as weak as critics simply assume it to be, the denunciations for alleged prejudice would be as redundant as they have been frequent.    

As I’ve said before, I think the authors do overreach when they downplay the influence of the Saudis and oil interests, but the existence of these other interests by no means proves their larger arguments wrong.  On the contrary, evidence of significant influence from other lobbies makes claims about the role of pro-Israel groups in shaping policy that much more reasonable.  If others have shaped policy, then surely a “loose coalition” of some very influential groups, including one of the most effective lobbies of all, will be quite successful as well.  The claims the authors make may be in need of qualification, but citing the influence of these other lobbies comes nowhere near refuting their position.  Dan McCarthy drives this point home:

But it doesn’t follow that if the Saudis have tremendous, and probably detrimental, influence on American foreign policy in the Middle East, the Israelis must not have similar influence. The Saudi and Israeli lobbies disagree on much–though certainly not everything–but the one does not negate the other.

Those who are critical of the book are very big fans of Leslie Gelb’s review, which some seem to take as a definitive smackdown.  Those who stop to read the mighty Gelb review discover that it does nothing of the sort, and instead unwittingly backs up much of what the book argues.  As Dan McCarthy puts it:

Actually, Gelb is not comparing the Israeli lobby to the Cuban lobby–he’s comparing the claims made by Mearsheimer and Walt to Fidel Castro’s contention that the U.S. can’t really be a democracy because a small number of Cuban expatriates shapes our policy toward Havana. Trouble is, Castro has a valid point, and Leslie Gelb, of all people, knows it.
 

I share Klein’s frustration that it hasn’t been possible to have a real discussion of the merits (and flaws) of the book.  (There are rare moments when the occasional critic makes a partly substantive argument, but this tends to merge with the general wave of irrational hostility that the book’s release has provoked and get lost in the noise.)  A proper discussion about the book hasn’t been possible because the entire “debate” has turned into a clash between polemicists denouncing the authors and distorting their words and the rest of us attempting simply to defend the principle that the authors hold a legitimate point of view that ought not to be demonised.

When I said that as President I would lead direct diplomacy with our adversaries, I was called naïve and irresponsible. But how are we going to turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to our adversaries if we don’t have a President who will lead that diplomacy? ~Barack Obama

By electing someone other than Obama, someone who might know how to frame and present the issue well?  Framed this way, it appears to be part of a reflexive endorsement of whatever it is that Bush didn’t do.   

He continued:

When I said that we should take out high-level terrorists like Osama bin Laden if we have actionable intelligence about their whereabouts, I was lectured by legions of Iraq War supporters. 

And by many Iraq war opponents, too, who thought the idea as stated was batty.  Because it was batty–and dangerous.  Pakistan policy requires special finesse because of the internal political problems of the state, and instead of a scalpel Obama brought a sledgehammer to the problem.  That was his idea of introducing a new approach to foreign policy? 

Obama:

They said we can’t take out bin Laden if the country he’s hiding in won’t. A few weeks later, the co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission – Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton – agreed with my position.

It is conceivable that Tom Kean and Lee Hamiton–old establishment hands and kings of conventional wisdom that they are–are just as wrong as Obama.  Shocking, I know.  They were on a blue-ribbon investigative commission; they are not necessarily trained Pakistan experts (indeed, I feel confident in saying that they are not) and are endorsing a general principle that would, in this particular case, be potentially very counterproductive, if not disastrous.  Context is everything in these matters.  Ignoring context is part of the reason why the Bush Doctrine has been such a flop–it attempted to apply a universal standard to a kind of problem that needs to handled differently on a case-by-case basis.     

Putting it the way that he did, Obama makes it sound as if the unwilling government is actively aiding and abetting Bin Laden, when this isn’t obviously the case.  The government may be unwilling to have American military strikes inside their territory for entirely different reasons.  Declaring your intention to ignore an allied government about military actions inside their country doesn’t sound as if you are “turning the page” of the Bush-Cheney era, but rather sounds more like an extension of the same ham-fisted approach to international relations: we rule, you obey; your sovereignty means nothing if we say it means nothing.     

Also, if the “foreign policy elite” failed us, as Obama says, why does he have so many members of the “foreign policy elite” that got it wrong advising him?

Obama:

And when I said that we can rule out the use of nuclear weapons to take out a terrorist training camp, it was immediately branded a “gaffe” because I did not recite the conventional Washington-speak. But is there any military planner in the world who believes that we need to drop a nuclear bomb on a terrorist training camp?

Almost certainly not, but that is to miss the entire point.  There is no “conventional Washington-speak” on this question, because you don’t talk about it in public!  If no one with any expertise believes that we should do it, and no one has proposed doing it, why even talk about it?  When it comes to nuclear weapons, you don’t talk about when you would use them–the uncertainty actually can add to their deterrent effect.  Ruling out such things, even though we might all agree that doing them is fantastically stupid, is the equivalent of MacArthur and Acheson describing the U.S. defense perimeter and excluding Korea from it, implying that everything outside the perimeter was up for grabs.  Result?  The Korean War.  But the officials of the Truman Administration was “straight” with the people, all right, and that’s what matters! 

Is it just me, or does Obama’s latest speech come off sounding rather too narcissistic?  Granted, I am not an Obama fan, so I tend to respond as negatively to his speeches as other people respond positively, but he spends the first half of the speech talking about how insightful and prescient he was and then launches into how the mean establishmentarians have been picking on him for his allegedly bold, new ideas.  It isn’t until the second half of the speech that he gets down to any of his really substantive proposals, including some that are actually sensible (his work with Lugar on securing nuclear materials is to his credit and ought to have had a much larger role in this speech).  His idea about making the DNI a position with a fixed term and semi-independence has some merit.  However, his talk about “strengthening” the NPT seems like rather wishful thinking to me.  Does Obama intend to scupper the nuclear deal made with the Indians, since that deal pretty blatantly violates the NPT? 

We don’t know the answer to that, because he immediately goes back to talking about Obama’s wonderful experiences in life.  I do realise that personality and personal history are relevant and are important factors for many voters, but this speech seems to be far too much about the man and far too little about what he will do.  Some of the things he does tell he will do will invite yawns if they do not invite derision.  For instance, this seems odd:

I’ll give an annual “State of the World” address to the American people in which I lay out our national security policy.

How better to underscore one’s interventionism than to make what will be perceived as a claim that the President rules the world?  Why not include this as part of the State of the Union, or incorporate it into the standard speech at the U.N.? 

And perhaps I am not appreciating the cleverness in this proposal:

I’ll draw on the legacy of one our greatest Presidents – Franklin Roosevelt – and give regular “fireside webcasts,” and I’ll have members of my national security team do the same.

I’m sure most political bloggers will find this proposal interesting, since it will give them new online material on a regular basis, but what’s the point?  In an Obama Administration (something that will, of course, never come to pass, but just for fun let’s imagine), do we really want the National Security Advisor doing webcasts, or do we want him to do his job well?  Viewed skeptically, this proposal seems to be an attempt to make national security officials into part of a P.R. effort, when we have already had quite enough of this sort of fluff from the current batch.

Not surprisingly, five of the six sitting Senators currently running for President decided that absence was the better part of valour in the defense appropriation vote: Obama, Biden, Dodd, Clinton and McCain all managed to miss it.  Feingold, Byrd and Coburn were the only three to vote against the measure.

P.S. Can anyone explain Tom Coburn’s ‘nay’ vote?

Sayeeda Warsi, given a peerage by David Cameron to enable her to join his front bench as spokesman on cohesion, has taken on the issue head on, volunteering her view that immigration has been “out of control” and that people feel “uneasy” about the pace of immigration into Britain. Her intervention has outraged black groups who say she is using the language of the BNP. It also threatens to derail Mr Cameron’s attempts to shake off the Conservatives’ “nasty-party” image, while exposing divisions between left and right.

“What this country has a problem with is not people of different kinds coming into this country and making a contribution, but the problem that nobody knows who is coming in, who is going out – the fact that we don’t have a border police; we don’t have proper checks; we don’t have any idea how many people are here, who are unaccounted for,” she says. “It’s that lack of control and not knowing that makes people feel uneasy, not the fact that somebody of a different colour or a different religion or a different origin is coming into our country.” As her press officer squirms in his chair, she continues: “The control of immigration impacts upon a cohesive Britain.”

Warming to her theme, she declares that the decision to house large groups of migrants on estates in the north of England “overnight” has led to tension in local communities. Similar tensions have been found in the London in Barking and Dagenham, where the far right has been making political in-roads. “The pace of change unsettles communities,” she says.

Lady Warsi’s outspoken intervention is somewhat surprising as she is the daughter of immigrants herself [bold mine-DL]. Her father is a former Labour-supporting mill-worker from Pakistan who, after making a fortune in the bed and mattress trade, switched his allegiance to the Tories. The lawyer, 36, who is married with a nine-year-old daughter, devoted her early career to improving race relations, helping to launch Operation Black Vote in Yorkshire and sitting on various racial justice committees. So her analysis of race relations on the eve of the Tory conference cannot be dismissed as a right-wing rant [bold mine-DL].

In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, Lady Warsi claims that the conspiracy of silence on the subject of immigration plays into the hands of the far-right British National Party.

“The BNP will look at what issue it is locally that they can exploit and the other political parties are not seen to be dealing with and they will play to that,” she says. Far from ignoring the issue of immigration, she thinks it should be confronted head on. “I think we need to have the debate. One of the problems why the BNP has been allowed to grow is sometimes certainly the Labour Party took the view that if we ignore them they will just go away,” she says.

But while BNP supporters, including the English National Ballet dancer Simone Clarke, have been sharply criticised for backing a racist party, Lady Warsi says that BNP voters should be listened to. “The BNP and what they represent, they clearly have a race agenda; they clearly have a hate agenda. But there are a lot of people out there who are voting for the British National Party and it’s those people that we mustn’t just write off and say ‘well, we won’t bother because they are voting BNP or we won’t engage with them’,” she says.

Indeed, she says, people who back the extreme-right party, criticised for its racist and homophobic agenda, may even have a point. “They have some very legitimate views. People who say ‘we are concerned about crime and justice in our communities – we are concerned about immigration in our communities’,” she said. ~The Independent

This has apparently annoyed many people in Britain (not least of which was probably David Cameron, who wanted his conference week to be blissfully free of anything remotely interesting).  What could the shadow community cohesion minister be thinking, talking about, well, community cohesion like this?  How could someone whose career has been in race relations make statements about, er, race relations?  Obviously, it is considered unpardonable to suggest that immigration restriction or even modest reform is legitimate, which is why these remarks are even considered that noteworthy, and it is considered even worse when it is done by the daughter of immigrants, even though it cannot be dismissed as easily when she says it.  Not just a “right-wing rant,” you see, because no daughter of immigrants could actually have come intellectually to see any reasonableness in “right-wing” views.  (It is the fact that it cannot be dismissed out of hand, as would normally be done, that I think really vexes Baroness Warsi’s critics.)  If all immigrantss started assimilating and respecting the opinions of their fellow citizens, where would it lead?

Here‘s some grist for James‘ mill:

John Redwood, the right-wing frontbencher who supported Mr Cameron as leader, told The Independent on Sunday that Mr Cameron will begin to set out policies in keeping with “some of our eternal values [bold mine-DL] like ‘yes to lower taxes’

I think the left is in a deep crisis in Europe because of their lack of willingness to confront the racist ideology of Islamism [bold mine-DL]. ~Flemming Rose

This is every bit as absurd describing someone’s criticisms of Islam as an expression of “racism.”  Race is not the main issue for either side.  Race isn’t the subject at all.  This is an example of invoking “racist” as others invoke “fascist”–it is a descriptor that has long ceased to have any content besides meaning “really bad.”  “Islamism” might be less worrisome if it were explicitly racist and insisted that only people from a certain ethnicity or nationality were “real” Muslims, since this would limit its potential reach quite a lot, but, of course, such an idea is pretty much entirely at odds with Islamic tradition. 

As it happens, I sympathise with many of Rose’s views on removing limits on free speech, and I, like so many others last year, argued that his paper was perfectly within its rights to print the cartoons that it printed.  It was gratifying that my Danish cousins resisted attempts to intimidate them into silence.  But this blather about racism suggests that even now Rose is unclear on what the question really is, which is a bit shocking given his personal, central role in such a prominent controversy.

Watch McCain pander:

I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, that’s a decision the American people would have to make, but personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith.

Watch him completely abase himself:

I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

Whenever I hear the claim that “this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles,” much less that the Constitution “established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” I have to wonder what people are thinking when they say these things.  In McCain’s case, it’s easy: he’s repeating what he thinks primary voters want to hear.  Never in his entire career, so far as I know, has McCain ever held forth on America as a Christian nation.  It would never have occurred to him.  The people who champion this or related ideas have been his adversaries within the GOP. 

It is true that America derives her religious culture from European Christianity, and it is true that Americans have been overwhelmingly Christian all along.  I think this religious heritage should be defended and extolled.  It is an integral part of American cultural identity.  What I really don’t understand is the need to make up these myths that the Republic is founded on “Christian principles” or that you can somehow find this claim in the Constitution.  First of all, these myths are unnecessary.  Second, it is an example of the mistaken drive to locate national and cultural identity in our political institutions and key political texts, when those identities really must be defined in other ways if we are not going to reduce them to ciphers or subordinates part of some political creedalism.

Via Yglesias, I see that Perlstein has a good review of revisionist books on Vietnam.  Not that it will matter to Perlstein, who cannot recognise a basically sympathetic, if perhaps poorly phrased, argument when he sees one, but I happen to find the nationalist habit of revisionism in support of policies of ever-greater militarism and slaughter to be as abhorrent as he does.  His review also succeeds in drawing attention to the revisionists’ comfort with mass killing when it is being done by the ‘right’ people for the ‘right’ reasons, which should help put the crocodile tears many of the same people conveniently shed over the victims of the Cambodian genocide in perspective.

The young whippersnapper Matt Zeitlin makes a good point in his reply to my latest round of Obama-bashing:

The million or more deaths from Malaria each year, millions of people infected by preventable water borne diseases and the approximately one billion people in extreme poverty doesn’t negatively impact our national security, strictly defined, as much as say the ungoverned tribal regions of Western Pakistan being lousy with Taliban and Al-Qaida.  And, if you talk privately to most people who say that extreme poverty of “tropical diseases” are threats to America’s national security, they’ll –after enough drinks — probably admit that they’re playing fast and loose with what “national security” means.  The reason people do this, however, is that America tends to act in the international arena when it thinks that the action will make us safer — and when we do act, we act big.  This is why NGOs, activist and academics in work in the areas of development and international public health have re-tuned their message — governments are more likely to listen if you’re presenting something that’s not just killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners, but is a threat to the US.

Zeitlin is right that our government tends not to act overseas unless it sees an international problem as a potential security threat (or at least as a cause of later security threats).  I suppose it’s understandable that people who want the U.S. government to take some action on a variety of international woes would try to cast those problems as threats to the United States.  It also doesn’t make Obama’s apparent inability to prioritise real security threats over high-minded concerns for the well-being of foreign peoples any less troubling.  If he doesn’t believe that public health problems in other countries affect our national security, he is trying to play the public, and if he does believe it he is very confused about what our national security interests include.  

It also doesn’t make these claims any more  true, and it seems to me that this sort of “dishonest altruism,” as Zeitlin calls it, will come back to hurt any cause that attempts to frame itself as an aid to national security.  This seems to be a more likely danger for such “altruism” in the wake of an administration that tried to justify anything and everything that it did under the banner of national security and antiterrorism.  If activists and academics cannot make the substantive case that there is some sufficiently good reason for our government to act on this or that question of development or public health by itself, it is implausible that they will be able to win any sustainable support or action from the government by tying themselves into knots to come up a national security rationale.   

It’s also all very well to talk about global interdependency, but this is just another way to spin intervening in someone else’s business as part of our self-interest.  What this kind of thinking will lead to in practice is not a U.S. government engaged in ever-greater levels of international cooperation, as I imagine many people would like to see, but instead one that uses every kind of international problem as a pretext for meddling and intruding on other states’ internal affairs.  Setting a standard of national security interest limits government action overseas to some extent, though we have already seen how expansively “national security” can be defined by ambitious policymakers (especially when it is joined to talk of “values”).  If the definition of national security is permitted to be inflated even more by extending it to climate change or health epidemics or education, there will be no end to the occasions for U.S. meddling.  If future interventions do for combating epidemics what the invasion of Iraq has done for regional stability and nonproliferation, we should be very worried about anyone who wants the U.S. government to take an active interest in the question.  (As the last few years have shown, government is equally incompetent on both sides of the ocean.)         

This convenient invocation of security is worth bearing in mind when some people begin hyperventilating about certain liberal claims that climate change is a greater security threat than terrorism.  This has been a favourite punching bag of some folks on the right, who will, in the same breath, very seriously say that we are in the middle of WWIV against the “existential threat” of Islamofascism.  In fact, climate change doesn’t represent that much of a security threat, but then (and here’s the kicker) the threat of terrorism has also been vastly overblown.  The climate change activists who are now talking in terms of national security are simply seeing the terrorism alarmists and raising them with some extra exaggeration.  “The threat you worry about isn’t existential, but the one I worry about really is!”  This is accompanied by vocal critics on the opposing side: “The threat you describe hardly even exists!”  Terrorism alarmism and climate change alarmism both overwhelmingly benefit the state at our expense.  They continue to exist because each kind of alarmism has a dedicated constituency that is quite happy to yield to the state’s demands in order to, in one way or another, “save the world.”