Obama’s Iraq speech today makes many of the right points, but his current Iraq position remains quite unsatisfactory and his broader foreign policy views border on terrifying.  I think the compromise “residual forces” position that he and the other major Democrats have taken is a mistake, both substantively and politically.  It seems to me to contain the worst of both worlds by eliminating the ability of American forces to do much of anything inside Iraq while also failing to remove the vast majority of our soldiers out of the country.   

Part of the argument of my column in the latest TAC available online is that Obama has been using his long-standing opposition to the war as a kind of screen to block antiwar voters from seeing his hyper-ambitious, unrealistic foreign policy ideas about everything else besides Iraq.  The expansiveness of Obama’s idea of what is in the national security interest of the United States is no less dangerous and no less irresponsible than Mr. Bush’s belief that the freedom of America depends on the freedom of the rest of the world. 

His position on Iran is really no less belligerent and no less misguided than that of Giuliani in its basic assumptions about the Iranian government.  For instance, he said about Iran:

And it’s time to deliver a direct message to Tehran. America is a part of a community of nations. America wants peace in the region. You can give up your nuclear ambitions and support for terror and rejoin the community of nations.  Or you will face further isolation, including much tighter sanctions.

As George has pointed out in connection with Giuliani’s FA essay, Iran already is a member of the “community of nations.”  They never left.  George argued:

But bellicose statements do not alone remove a nation from the “international system;” rather, uncooperative nations must be dealt with through the tools of that system, be they diplomatic, political, economic, or yes, military in cases where America’s sovereignty is directly threatened.

Nearly every other nation, including staunch American allies, retains diplomatic relations with Iran. And America too should consider re-evaluating the diplomatic freeze that has lasted nearly 3 decades. In addition to a mere consular presence that could facilitate people-to-people cultural exchanges, a full-blown embassy would enable espionage and the gathering of more reliable information than we tend to obtain from unsavory exiles, as Ted Galen Carpenter has argued.

(Incidentally, this echoes William Lind‘s calls for rapprochement with Iran.) 

Later in his speech, Obama quotes Brzezinski, who introduced him at the rally and whose role in the campaign has caused the Senator some grief in pro-Israel circles.  As the Politico story relates, Obama’s position on Israel and Iran is solidly pro-Israel/anti-Iran and ever so conventional.  More worrying still, Obama’s vision for American meddling, er, leadership has not been dimmed in the least by the chastening experience of Iraq:

When we end this war in Iraq, we can once again lead the world against the common challenges of the 21st century. Against the spread of nuclear weapons and climate change. Against genocide in Darfur. Against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair. When we end this war, we can reclaim the cause of freedom and democracy. We can be that beacon of hope, that light to all the world. 

 Unconventional?  Hardly.

In case you haven’t seen enough refutations of Giuliani’s crazy Foreign Affairs essay, George Ajjan offers his own commentary that eviscerates Giuliani’s claim to be any kind of credible candidate on foreign policy.  Zeroing in on Giuliani’s chatter about globalisation in the Middle East, George writes:

As for the Middle East, Giuliani has it wrong there too. Modernization and globalization do not at all go hand-in-hand with approval of the political/military plans of the United States. I suppose it never occurred to Giuliani that a young Muslim’s ability to enjoy a shake from McDonald’s subtracts nothing from his admiration and hero-worship of an evil man whose claim to infamy is his commitment to the taking of innocent American lives, as my Dubai experience illustrated.

George has shown Giuliani’s invocation of the “international system” to be a lot of hot air, since he consistently misunderstands what “the international system” actually is.  (He seems to use “international system” to mean “policy goals of Washington,” thus emptying it of its real meaning just as others like him have done to the word “democracy,” as George noted.)   While superficially consistent with the preoccupations of his chief foreign policy advisor, Charles Hill, Giuliani’s “international system” talk is mostly window dressing for self-defeating, hyper-aggressive interventionism that seeks to lump non-state actors together with those states Giuliani et al. deem to be worthy targets. 

P.S. There is also more than a little irony in one of the leading backers of the invasion of Iraq talking about the importance of the same system for the survival of civilisation.  The invasion was a fundamental attack on the structures and rules of the actual international system and a violation of international law.  Supporters of the invasion have had great fun speculating about how “international law doesn’t really exist” (except when it can be twisted and manipulated to justify an invasion of a sovereign state), but watch how they wrap themselves in the mantle of preserving international order after they have done so much to undermine that order.  If the great conflict of the moment is between non-state actors and the stability of the international state system, who would be worse to have as a defender of the latter than someone who supports policies of violating other nations’ sovereignty, dismantling existing state apparatuses and turning stable countries into lawless zones where no legitimate authority holds sway?

The resentment of Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaeda’s highhanded brutality predated the surge — but the surge gave those leaders the confidence and ability to oppose al-Qaeda. ~Michael Gerson

By more or less common agreement, the Awakening began in or around November 2006.  It was spurred on by the smart counterinsurgency work of American soldiers.  It was not a product of the “surge” of brigades that the President announced in January.  Typically, in the study of history we don’t assume that cause comes after effect.  Either our people were already succeeding in Anbar before the “surge,” making the “surge” redundant and potentially unwise, or they were not and the “surge” was vitally necessary.  (Or both efforts are fundamentally unsustainable because they rely on empowering elements who are violently opposed to the new order our government has been trying to establish in Iraq.)   

Some will say that counterinsurgency success is counterinsurgency success, but if we are judging the merits of a particular tactical plan details are of the essence.  If the change of fortune in Anbar was beginning without the “surge,” that suggests that the “surge” was unnecessary in the one area that has seen marked improvement, while “surge” boosters struggle vainly to demonstrate sufficient satisfaction of the administration‘s standards of success.  Ifthe emerging wisdom is that pinning the success of the “surge” on Iraqi political reconciliation was foolish and a misguided waste, then war supporters are finally coming around, eight months too late, to the conclusions that opponents had reached in January.  If political reconciliation at the center is now made out to be so very last winter (the fall fashion is arming sectarian killers for future mayhem), that is not what “surge” supporters have been saying all year long. 

Skeptics may be forgiven for doubting claims of success, since boosters have made every event into some kind of vindication for the “surge.”  When bombings and deaths were on the rise, we were told that this was proof that the “surge” was working; when bombings and deaths were declining, the “surge” was working.  When Sadr disappeared, the “surge” was working, but now that he’s back it is working even better.  When the Iraqi parliament gets bombed, it shows that “we” are getting to “them”; when the Yezidis of Erbil are massacred in multiple bombings, victory is at hand.  And so on ad nauseam.  This week the story is that conditions are improving and that this is proof that the plan is working, but you can bet your last cent that if things begin getting uglier the same people will find an entirely new way to explain why the plan is still really working, but in a new, unexpected way.

Overwhelmingly in Europe, and to a lesser but still large extent in the United States, the vastly unpopular Iraq war has been conflated with the broader war against radical Islam. ~Tony Blankley

This is true about American attitudes, if we’re talking about what supporters of the Iraq war routinely say about it.  As we all know, war opponents have been ridiculed for years for claiming that the two are distinct conflicts that have little or nothing do with one another.  I know that war supporters would also very much like to make opposition to Iraq into opposition to the very different fight against jihadis, but almost the only ones conflating and confusing the two have been defenders of the invasion of Iraq.  Indeed, they have to lean very heavily on this claim, since there is no rationale for remaining in Iraq that really captures the public’s attention quite like the fear of an “Al Qaeda stronghold” being established in Iraq.  Never mind that this has become entirely unlikely–what matters is the constant repetition of it to cow the public into submission and support.  

Meanwhile, the Europeans and others around the world might reasonably be confused by our government’s deliberate conflation of the two conflicts.  If Mr. Bush and so many in the political class insist that Iraq is the “central front in the war on terror,” the argument might go, who are they to say that the two are not one and the same?  For the many opponents of the war around the world, the distinction between Iraq and “the war on terror” does tend to get lost because the administration and its supporters have worked overtime to make sure that the lines are blurred.  As a result, if they oppose Iraq they might find themselves drawn towards opposition to anti-jihadism as such.  Mr.  Blankley has helped demonstrate here how Iraq has undermined and jeopardised the real fight. 

Of course, as a matter of policy, all NATO countries remain officially committed to the mission in Afghanistan, and several of our European allies have been collaborating with us all along in the Horn of Africa and in running interdiction efforts in the Red Sea.  European governments and peoples are not persuaded that jihadism is the “existential threat” alarmists make it out to be because, well, the threat isn’t nearly that grave.  Talk of WWIV is ludicrous on its face, but that doesn’t mean that those who mock the WWIV crowd don’t believe that jihadis are very dangerous.  Having been warned about new totalitarians and new Hitlers ever since the Cold War ended, there really is a strong inclination to disbelieve the alarmists when they begin talking about jihadis as new totalitarians, because they have been wrong so many times before in their dire warnings.  (In fact, jihadis are totalitarian in a sense, but precisely because they are religious fanatics who have a totalising view of the role of religion that subsumes everything to it; they are unlike secular totalitarians in significant ways and our inability to speak about them except in 20th century ideological terms continues to be a great hindrance in understanding and countering them.)  Disbelief turns to bewildered astonishment when they begin speaking of “Islamofascism” and other such absurdities.   

Anti-jihadists have exaggerated and overreached so much in their rhetoric, and they have tended to support questionable or foolish policies to such an extent that they have created a backlash of intense skepticism about the scope and scale of the threat and anti-jihadist proposals for addressing that threat.  One might conclude that if many anti-jihadists were so badly wrong about Iraq, for instance, or if they indulge in fantasies in lieu of analysis that anti-jihadism in its entirety is not credible.  This would be a terrible mistake to make, since there is a serious threat from jihadis, but this mistake is one that many anti-jihadists have encouraged people to make.

TAC‘s 9/10 issue is available online, including my column on Obama and foreign policy.  Also online are Jim Pinkerton’s cover essay on a revived Christendom, Michael’s article on Huckabee, and Fred Reed’s column.  The print issue has some very good pieces as well, such as Clark Stooksbury‘s review of Elites for Peace and Trita Parsi on the causes of U.S.-Iranian rivalry.

After reading this (via Ross), I was reminded at once of the following scene from Brazil:

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?

HELPMANN: Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we’re fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I’d say they’re nearly out of the game.

INTERVIEWER: But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.

HELPMANN: Beginner’s luck.

I have no doubt that future administrations might try to perpetuate the war in Iraq, and I have equally little doubt that the media would, for the most part, roll over and accept this tyrannical imposition on our country just as they did when the Iraq war started.  We must be “responsible,” after all.  Mustn’t withdraw “precipitously,” you see.  Mustn’t do anything that would indicate that we are still, at some minimal theoretical level, self-governing citizens of a republic.

In fact, I think Mr. Robb is entirely right on the military matters he discusses, but does not judge correctly what the political implications of an indefinite continuation of the Iraq war will be.  It is because the war cannot be resolved in any traditional way that will make it politically impossible for it to garner meaningful public support for much more than another two or three years.  Our debates about progress and benchmarks in 2007 will seem quaint and ridiculous if in two years things are much as they are today, and I see little reason to think that the situation will be any better.  If it does not end in 2009, the incumbents will suffer badly in ’10.  If the next President does not end the war, he (or, perhaps, she) will not be re-elected, the successor will end it and will have likely also campaigned on such a platform.   

Pro-military and hegemonist pols will not continue to permit the wreck of the Army that a continued presence in Iraq would entail.  That will crack the base of the war’s support.  A couple more years of this, and you will finally have the open defection of many reliably internationalist politicians who will come out strongly against the war.  The public will grow weary of the futility of the entire exercise, even though most of them don’t know anyone who is fighting overseas.  Some event will dramatically symbolise just how pointless the Iraq war has become and will drown out the chatter from “serious” people. 

If there were some prospect of a satisfactory, victorious conclusion to the war, Mr. Robb might well be right that all of the factors he outlines would encourage prolongation of the conflict, but there is not and the public is on the verge of realising this.  The major candidates all favour continuing the war, but many of these are the same people who judged the original question of the invasion so poorly.  Their judgements are not sure signs of anything, except their own brazen complicity.

At his blog, George Ajjan has a good article on what the U.S. should with respect to Syria that originally appeared in Quarterly Review.  In it he has many important points, but this one stood out for me:

 Expending whatever remains of America’s regional credibility on behalf of the unproven Saudi stooges currently governing Lebanon must come to a halt, because it is simply not in the interests of the United States.

George also argues that negotiating a peace between Israel and Syria would help to detach Syria from Iran, which seems to me the most practicable way of limiting Iranian power short of full rapprochement with Tehran (which would, in any case, much more difficult). 

The accompanying piece that replies to George’s article, written by one Jillian Becker, does not seem terribly persuasive.  So much of it is the usual, bankrupt, unimaginative stuff you’ve seen a thousand times before.  Ms. Becker makes no attempt to distinguish between the retaliation for 9/11 of the Afghan War and the unprovoked invasion of Iraq that certainly did come about in no small part because of neoconservatives and Mr. Bush’s “hopes and wishes,” to use her phrase.  This makes everything else she has to say suspect.  She makes no attempt to distinguish, because I assume she does think there is any real separation between the one and the other. 

Her claims about Israeli public opinion seem surreal in light of this old story, which reports that 10% of Israelis favour full withdrawal from Golan and 40% favour partial withdrawal, with 44% opposed to any kind of withdrawal.  The same report confirms that most Israelis do not trust Assad, but it simply isn’t true that there is not much “public enthusiasm for conceding land.”  There is evidently some support for conceding some land.  The word “enthusiasm” does a lot of work here, as it is meant to discredit claims that there is some significant public support for some kind of “land for peace” arrangement with Syria. 

Ms. Becker notes that the Kadima government of Ehud Olmert is horribly unpopular, neglecting to mention that it was Olmert’s disastrous entry into and handling of the war in Lebanon that destroyed his government’s credibility.  It was hardly his government’s most recent drive to negotiate with the Syrians that has undermined him; Olmert has not exactly erred on the side of being too irenic.  Speaking of public opinion, we should remember that Kadima had earlier been elected on a peace platform.  The very existence of Kadima as a viable party, before the war ruined its reputation for competence, stemmed from public support for some settlement with the Palestinians.  If, as George correctly argues, the Golan Heights have less religious and symbolic significance, it is hardly so strange to think that the public that voted Kadima in would be willing to consider peace with Syria at the price of the Golan.

On something pertaining to church life for a change, I had the great pleasure of seeing the visiting Moscow delegation of bishops and the Sretensky Monastery Choir at our cathedral this past Sunday.  This was a remarkable event, and not only because the crowd at the cathedral was huge by our standards.  So far as I know, this marked the first concelebration of Moscow and ROCOR bishops at our cathedral.  The delegation’s world tour will take them to many of the major centers of Russian Orthodoxy abroad in celebration of the reconciliation among all Russian Orthodox.  Also present was the “Reigning” (Derzhavnaya) icon of the Most Holy Theotokos, whose appearance after the last Tsar’s abdication signified that Russia thereafter was under the sovereignty of the Theotokos.  The Tribunehas a series of photographs from the event, and the story is here.

The Choir performed exceptionally during the liturgy.  Their rendition of Mnogaya Lyeta filled the church with such a rich, resonating sound that I felt a sense of awe.  I then had the added enjoyment of hearing the Choir perform at the CSO Sunday night, where they offered both sacred and secular songs.  If any of you live in D.C., they will be performing in the vicinity tomorrow.  If you can still get tickets, I strongly recommend that you go.

Via this Economist Free Exchange blogger (via McArdle), whose arguments seem strangely familiar, comes a review of The Bottom Billion.  My guess is that Paul Collier, the author, and I would agree on many of the evils of “developmentalism” and would find some of the same problems with the organisations and institutions that allegedly promote development in poor countries.  The Free Exchange blogger refers to “Easterly’s jaded pessimism,” which is fair if he means Easterly’s attitude towards the institutions and ideology of development.  It might be misleading to those who are not aware that Easterly is, in fact, a tremendously optimistic booster of free trade (one might almost call his views on trade naive, but I do not) who believes that the surest way for “the developing world” to enjoy economic growth is for development agencies and foreign governments to stop engaging in their absurd obsession with “helping” them.  Much more help of that kind, and these countries are done for.  

At one point, the reviewer writes:

The Nobel laureate Robert Solow once wrote that economists are intellectual sanitation workers: their key contribution is to consign bad ideas to the trash.

So that’s what economists are good for!  I had been wondering.  The Free Exchange blogger goes on to promote mass immigration (or rather mass emigration from the poor nation-states) to free people from their “national prisons.”  Iraqi refugees have been thus “liberated,” and I assume that they would have preferred to stay in the “prison,” which makes this talk of prisons seem rather odd.  Some might think that people who live in these “prison” countries regard the place where they live as their home and might even say that they are not simply labour units to be reassigned to allow for greater efficiencies.  Mass uprooting and relocation of poor populations with migrants moving from the countryside to the city and from the home country to communities abroad, which has happened in virtually every impoverished, modernising nation-state from the independence of Greece on, is all very good for those who can get out, but dooms those who remain (and many will remain) to an even more miserable existence.  Dr. Wilson once remarked on this, asking a rhetorical question that went something like this: “What sort of country robs poor countries of their best and brightest people?”  This blogger’s kind of country, it would seem. 

This talk of “national prisons” is the sort of language applied to states that one wishes did not exist and would like to see dismantled.  Again, the example of Iraq (or that of the recent Ivorian civil war) stands out to show us what will follow the breakdown of the “national prisons” in Africa and elsewhere.  However, like the bold Wilsonians dispensing self-determination to the “imprisoned” nations of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, those who would destroy the prisonhouses may be quite unhappy with what results.

Maybe Ross is right, though I suspect Ms. McArdle is making more sense in this case, but can someone please smack the AFP writer who penned this drivel:

Aristotle may have been more on the mark than he realised when he said that man is by nature a political animal.

(Crankish intellectual mode on.)  For the love of all that’s holy, if AFP writers must refer to Aristotle, could they at least consult their Cliff’s Notes (or appropriate French substitute) first?  This is not a clever play on words or an amusing joke, but a kind of bowdlerised Aristotle for morons.  This is obviously not what zoon politikon means, and never could have done, since ta politika for Aristotle meant something that encompassed a wide range of social, ethical and religious life.  When he said that man is a political animal, he meant that man was naturally inclined to live in political community with others. (Crankish intellectual mode off.)

It has never been clear to me that liberals are all that much more interested in “ambiguity and complexity” than the average conservative (those on our side did not come up with the phrase “knee-jerk liberal” out of nowhere), and it is not at all clear that many of the people who call themselves conservatives today are actually politically conservative, which complicates things a bit.  The kind of bizarre dogmatism and blindness to reality exhibited by many soi-disant conservatives these days seem to be traits of an ideological cast of mind, but it doesn’t seem to me that this is conservative or that it is associated with a recognisably conservative politics.  The modern king of stubbornness and inflexibility, Mr. Bush, is probably temperamentally less conservative than Woodrow Wilson, and his politics are lamentably similar.   

Ross offers his explanation:

It isn’t just that the left, far more than the right, tends to tell brainiacs what they want to hear – that they were born to rule, that the world is just waiting to be reshaped for the better by their combination of smarts and expertise. (Though of course right-wingers sometimes give in to this temptation as well.) It’s that we live in a society that makes an aggressive attempt to select for intelligence in the formation of its elite, and then educates that elite in a university system that is liberal to the core – not left-wing, necessarily, or not anymore, but certainly not conservative either, unless you think (as some fools do) that Thomas Friedman qualifies as a man of the right. The modern meritocracy has evolved to bring up most of its pupils to be Friedmanites, a minority to be Chomskyites, and a vastly smaller minority to be actual conservatives. Small wonder, then, that if you’re brainy in America, you probably call yourself a liberal – you were raised that way, after all. Whereas conservatives are the stupid party – the party of the Boston phone directory, not the Harvard Faculty Club, with some crankish intellectuals thrown in for ballast.

This sounds plausible at first.  God help me, I was raised that way in many respects, but fortunately I managed to survive with my mind intact and free of sympathies with the “great” Friedman and the like.  Certainly, preparatory schools try their best to indoctrinate “future leaders” with the very latest hogwash, but it is this kind of constant reinforcement that creates the elite Ross is talking about. 

After thinking about Ross’ claims about “brainiacs” and being “born to rule” for a moment, I realised that we might observe that the left has so often argued for nothing of the sort.  It has traditionally told everyone that no one was born to rule, not even the intellectuals, and the more far left the revolution the more leveling, anti-intellectualism and cutting down of the tall flowers you would have.  There is a reason why the left-liberal Karl Popper identified the root of evil in Plato and Hegel, not exactly champions of rote repetition or plebeian yahooism, and it is because there is actually a presumption against the importance of intelligence and rejection of superiority of any kind in most leftist thinking. 

Social engineering does require smart technocrats, I suppose, and so those inclined to this sort of thing will be drawn towards liberal politics, but I would guarantee you that if the incentives of power, influence and status favoured a different politics many of the smart fellows, being smart fellows, would suddenly discover the virtues of right-wing ideas (or whatever was in fashion).  Rather by definition, left-wing ideas tend to be seemingly newish ideas, which makes them fashionable and thus attractive to the up-and-coming, so there may be a tendency for people who spend a great deal of time pondering ideas to fall for the latest nonsense simply because it has arrived recently on the scene.  Even so, academia was once the redoubt of relatively politically conservative people until not all that long ago, and its members were not therefore necessarily rigid or unimaginative.  

It certainly can’t be the inherent plausibility of liberalism that draws smart people to it, since it has little or none.  Today it has value as a marker of social status and in-group membership, and most who hold to its presuppositions do so out of rote and habit and unthinking allegiance, because it is expected and much more risky to reject outright.  Unless the reasonably smart person is either unusually cranky or oblivious to the social and professional costs of espousing a strong traditional conservatism, he will find a way to accommodate himself to the prevailing views of his peers.  This is how the social and political elite maintains its status–it co-opts those who might threaten it if it can and marginalises the rest.  At present, this means liberals are in, but this has to do with the changes in the kinds of people who acquired and held power in the past much more than the “cognitive style” of members of the different groups.