When I first saw this, I was inclined to say, “Well, at least something good has come out of this dreadful mess.”  Alex Massie (via Ross) has saved me from making the mistake of thinking that anything good could really come from the Iraq war.  His post also serves as an important reminder of something that American observers of foreign politics should always heed: domestic political concerns are almost always more important to people in other countries than is U.S. foreign policy (which happens to be true of American voters as well).  We will generally not understand political events in other parts of the world if we try to understand them through such dim, cracked lenses as “pro-/anti-American” or “pro-/anti-Iraq war” and the like.  (Can I tell you how tired I am of stories that try to spin Gordon Brown as a vigorously pro-American Atlanticist?)  Contrary to our own impression of ourselves, other people really aren’t that preoccupied with us and our wars, even when their governments are involved in one of our misadventures.

While listening to Eli Lake busily distorting and lying about Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt and the argument in their original essay, it occurred to me that they never made anything like the main claim to which he objects so strenuously and which, according to Lake, make it perfectly appropriate to associate them with the likes of David Duke.  (You have the admire the gall of someone actively engaged in using the guilt by association tactic accusing other people of McCarthyism and “John Birch Society” tactics.)  Becoming ever more agitated, Lake continually repeated that they were accusing certain individuals of being “foreign agents,” which is what I would call a lie, since anyone can read the essay and see that it makes no such claims.  The essay does make the claim at one point that AIPAC is “a de facto agent for a foreign government,” which a perusal of AIPAC’s own website would tend to support to the extent that it very explicitly lobbies for the interests of Israel.     

First, on the terminology of “the Lobby,” the authors wrote:

We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them.

So it is a catch-all term to refer to diverse individuals and organisations, and does not refer to a “Jewish lobby” or conspiracy of Jews in high places or any of the other mischaracterisations that critics have made.  Those who say that the essay says any of these things either have not read the essay or are out to deceive. 

Defining “the Lobby” further, they write:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy [bold mine-DL]: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.

So it is an interest group, or an umbrella term to refer to a number of groups all working towards broadly shared goals.  It is engaged in a legitimate activity, at which it excels.  For some reason, this sends people into apoplectic fits.

What does “the Lobby” do?  They write:

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy. 

All of this is pretty uncontestable.  This is what pro-Israel groups do, and they make no bones about what they are doing.  Christians United for Israel, for instance, is quite explicit about its goals.  I think the name gives it away. 

On the role of “the Lobby” in pushing for the war in Iraq, they write:

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical [bold mine-DL]. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

Of course, Zelikow did say something close to this, in that he did acknowledge that a likely target of any Iraqi WMD arsenal would be Israel, which is to state a fairly common view.  Are we really supposed to believe that Israeli security was not a critical factor in deciding whether or not to go to war against Iraq?  That is what the critics of Mearsheimer/Walt would have you believe.  You are supposed to believe that Mr. Bush, who has on the whole aligned Washington with Israel more than any other modern President, made such a decision without Israeli security having much to do with it at all.   

Something I have never understood about the hysterical reaction to this claim that war advocates supported the invasion because of expected advantages for Israel is simply this: why should pro-Israel Americans regard this claim as either false or malicious?  If Israel really is a strategically valuable, reliable ally, a fellow democracy to which we have such deep obligations and all the rest of it, surely its security would be of concern to our government and to citizens who support the connection with Israel.  The supposed threat from Iraq would have been greater to Israel than to the United States–this much is common sense.  You would expect close intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and an allied state in the months prior to a major military action against a nearby state, and I think you would be shocked if it did not take place.  Yet any suggestion that U.S. officials and activists believed this and acted accordingly is considered equivalent to accusing someone of treason.  That this reaction is a bit unhinged is putting it mildly.  

One point of the essay, of course, is to deny that Israel is a strategically valuable, reliable ally.  The authors argue that it is neither very valuable nor reliable.  Once you reject this assumption (which is really what it is), what used to appear right and proper might now seem wasteful and pointless.  A close U.S.-Israel connection might seem desirable if pro-Israel forces were correct about the merits and mutual benefits of the relationship.  The essay argues that they are not correct, and says instead that the connection is damaging to U.S. interests.  You might think that supporters of the invasion would hotly contest the basic idea that the Iraq war is contrary to U.S. interests, and perhaps some have done so, but unless you think the war actually is very bad for America (and it is) there would be little reason to express concern about the role of “the Lobby” in promoting said war. 

Honestly, I don’t quite understand how there can so much fuss about this essay, since the role of pro-Israel activists in pushing for this war is no different from Anglophiles pushing for entry into WWI and WWII or the Hearst machine and American imperialists pushing for war with Spain.  They were not “agents of a foreign power.”  They were horribly, horribly mistaken Americans who were horribly mistaken because they had become too attached to the cause of another country (whether England or Cuba) or conflated the interests of two different nations.  Critics of Mearsheimer/Walt claim that there is an accusation of bad faith, but the essay makes no such charge.  On the contrary, the frightening thing about pro-Israel activists today or Anglophiles in the past is their utterly sincere conviction that the interests and destinies of America and another nation are bound up together.  The dangerous thing about them is that they are typically not arguing in bad faith or acting cynically.  What makes them dangerous is that they are absolutely convinced that they are doing right by America by doing right by the other country.  It is their judgement about what is right for America that is so deeply flawed.  That is the point.  Naturally, they dislike this claim, as anyone might object to being characterised in this way, but what is never said in the essay is that any of the people in “the Lobby” are “agents of a foreign power.”   

Rather crucial for understanding this whole question is recognising that the perceptions of what is in Israel’s interest by pro-Israel advocates in this country are sometimes horribly wrong.  There were pro-Israel, pro-war pundits who believed that Israel’s position would be greatly improved by the overthrow of Hussein and said so in 2002-03 (“the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad,” and all that rot), and instead the aftermath for Israel has proven to be almost as harmful as the post-invasion has been for us.  The expansion of Iranian power that has resulted has been detrimental to Israeli security, and this was brought home by the war last year.  (Of course, this reality feeds anti-Iranian jingoism in this country, but it is difficult to see how Israeli security would be actually aided by spreading the war to Iran.)  It is also important to distinguish between what American pro-Israel activists are doing on behalf of what they think is right for Israel and what any particular Israeli government desires.  These may coincide from time to time, as they tend to do on policies relating to the Palestinians and the settlements in the territories, but there seems to be no question that the most hard-line pro-Israel activists are far more aggressive and militaristic towards Israel’s neighbours than people who actually live in Israel can afford to be.  Many Israelis are interested in the possibility of negotiating with Syria for a peace settlement, while for many pro-Israel activists here the idea is madness.   

P.S.  Early 20th century Easterners interested in promoting Chinese interests and connections with China also stand out in this long, bad tradition of boosters for other countries who wind up plunging us into unnecessary wars.

“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary,” Richardson, New Mexico’s governor, said at the Northwest Iowa Labor Council Picnic. ~Des Moines Register

Via Zengerle

Knowing our governor, you almost have to think that it was a big joke at the expense of the current nominating system.  After all, many of the current system’s defenders do sometimes talk as if God and the Constitution both mandated Iowan primacy in American presidential politics.  Then again, knowing our governor, I would guess that this was a classic example of Richardson telling the audience whatever it was he thought they wanted to hear.  He threw in the Constitution and God to cover all the bases–it’s patriotic and religious and absolutely sycophantic.  If he were speaking to a group of die-hard war supporters, he might have said that keeping Iowa in first place was essential to defeating jihadism.

Via Greenwald, I see that Fred “The Surge” Kagan has gone completely mad.  In an article called “The Gettysburg Of This War,” Kagan writes about (wait for it) the President’s surprise trip to Anbar (which, Kagan tells us, “should have surprised no one who was paying attention.”), about which he has this to say:

If ever there was a sign that we have turned a corner in the fight against both al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency, this was it.

Yes, friends, he did say that.  Turned a corner!  Viewed another way, one might conclude from the location of the visit that Baghdad and even the Green Zone have become so dangerous that the President dared not go there.  Kagan continues:

It should be recognized as at least the Gettysburg of this war [bold mine-DL], to the extent that counterinsurgencies can have such turning points. Less than a year ago, it was common wisdom and the conclusion of the Marine intelligence community in Anbar that the province and its people were hopelessly lost.

Of course, last year it did seem hopelessly lost, and barring the remarkable change in local attitudes that did, in fact, happen it would have remained so.  The Marines don’t throw in the towel unless things are genuinely hopeless.  What changed was an extraordinary shift in local opinion against putative “Al Qaeda” elements.  Some of this was facilitated by U.S. forces before the “surge” began (as those paying attention already knew), but it was essentially a move by insurgents to side with their enemy (our armed forces) against an even worse enemy.  Kagan dismisses all of this and more, of course, which is how he can say cracked things about Gettysburg and turning corners.  Then again, I suppose if I were prominently associated with authoring some form of the “surge” plan, as Kagan is, I might look for anything that would vindicate what I had advocated.

The Poston a “surge” showcase.

If you can’t get enough of Brookings members’ NYT op-eds on Iraq, here’s another one.  Not very surprisingly, it basically cannot deny the overwhelming problems:

Unfortunately, at the moment the political paralysis seems to be a more powerful force than the military momentum, and progress in security is unsustainable without sectarian compromise among Iraq’s Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites. The country remains very violent, and the economy rather stagnant.

In the end, the authors are forced to say:

Given the continuing violence, and the absence of political progress, Iraq is not now on a trajectory toward sustainable stability — and America is not yet on a clear path to an exit strategy.

Not much more than a month ago, O’Hanlon and Pollack wrote:

As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

It seems plain to me that the two statements flatly contradict each other, or at least the latest article undermines a main claim of the earlier op-ed.  I suppose there could be “potential” for sustainable stability, and still Iraq might not yet be on a “trajectory” towards sustainable stability, but the implication of the earlier statement is that there is a real likelihood of success and the implication of the later statement is that things generally look quite bad despite some marginal improvements here and there.  Somehow I don’t expect this item to be cited by excited war supporters as the latest revelation of the Oracle.  Somehow I expect that it will be very carefully ignored, but then I’m an awful cynic.

Ross follows up on thedebateoverhislatest Atlantic piece on future Democratic electoral prospects, and he explains quite clearly what he means by populism and how his reform ideas relate to it.  I think Ross’ analysis of electoral trends makes sense, which is why I wrote in defense of it.  However, I am actually sympathetic to those, such as Will Wilkinson, who do not like the substance of the policy proposals endorsed by economic populists, as I do not care for many of them myself.  I disagree with some libertarian critics of this populism, to the extent that they even allow that it actually exists, concerning some specific areas of policy and more general assumptions about the legitimacy of the claims of national sovereignty and national interest.  While I have some right-populist inclinations in matters of trade and immigration and I have a very old-fashioned Bolingbrokean-Jeffersonian hostility to concetrated wealth and power, which makes for some common anti-corporate ground with more conventional left-populists, in practice I am not that much of a populist.  You will not see me voting for Edwards-style populism or “compassionate” conservatism or “Sam’s Club Republicanism” now or ever.  For that matter, I neither shop at Sam’s Club, nor am I a Republican, so that makes me a pretty unlikely supporter of this sort of politics, since I rather rather regard the former as a symptom of moral and economic disorder and regard the latter as, well, not my favourite organisation.  Yet I still do recognise that there are people who might just go for such reformism, and these really are the sorts of people the GOP needs to win over and keep if it wants to remain competitive going forward.   

As I have made abundantly clear over the years, I am a small-government constitutionalist and a Ron Paul man, which puts me in a fairly small group.  (I am also very sympathetic to corporatist ideas of solidarity and a conservationist ethic, which may put me in an even smaller subset of this group.)  Despite an appreciation for some of the aspects of corporatism, the kind of economic intervention by the state on offer these days leaves me completely cold.  (Non-intervention is very often the wise course, in foreign policy as in domestic affairs.)  However, my preferences do not really give me the luxury to pretend that people in this country are not looking for some sort of intervention by the state in the field of health care, because they plainly are.  You hear this anecdotally from friends and colleagues, and you see it backed up in polling.  The desire is there, and the main dispute seems to be over whether you have a mostly state-run or a more state capitalist-run program.  Mike Huckabee talks vaguely about having a solution that involves none of the above, but he is typically blissfully free of specifics when he says this.  (Based on anecdotal impressions, I would say that young, educated professionals might be even more worried about health care than many other groups, but I wouldn’t press that too far.)  These people are acting on the assumption that the U.S. government is “their” government (if only!) and that it exists to provide them with certain things they need, or at the very least to provide them with the “opportunity” to acquire what they need. 

At this point, someone usually says something saccharine about empowerment, which is usually where they finally lose me, since it is never the government’s role to empower its citizens.  This idea of government empowering people is the root of all swindles.  Indeed, citizens’ power stands in an inverse relationship with that of the government,and the government never “gives back” the power it has taken.  The more “empowerment” we have, the more servility we have.  This is naturally not a popular view (for confirmation, see the political history of the 20th century or just the 1964 presidential election), and it is not one that is normally associated with populism, though I think a case could be made that it is the ultimate populist view, insofar as it is one that places the best interests of the people ahead of popular enthusiasms.  It is the view most consonant with a decentralist understanding of political liberty, and such an arrangement would ultimately be far better for the common good, a humane, sane way of life and the flourishing of more self-supporting communities. 

As George Grant observed forty years ago, though, political decentralisation without economic decentralisation is simply submission to corporate oligarchy, which I think he regarded as worse than a living Hell (in which case, he would have been too generous).  Consequently, he was known as the “Red Tory” for his harsh criticism of the dissolving acid that capitalism and technology poured on social bonds.  Also, the Loyalist and Anglo-Canadian Conservative tradition never knew the reflexive hostility to state action that our political tradition initially did, and strangely enough Canada now enjoys more effective decentralisation in certain respects than we do (even though it also has more in the way of government services).

All of this got me to thinking about how strange it is that the Democrats have become the party of the economic populists, since they have historically been the less nationalist of the two parties and appear to be in no danger of changing, yet this kind of populism almost always goes with a strong dose of nationalism.  Most economic populist complaints today focus on a few general areas: free trade, the effects of globalisation (e.g., outsourcing, etc.), related government favouritism for corporate interests and immigration.  The Washington-New York political elite is largely in agreement that free trade, globalisation, state capitalism and mass immigration are fundamentally desirable.  There may be disagreements about how to manage them, but there is only minority support for rejecting or opposing any of them on a large scale.  (This is still true in the current presidential fields.)  You would expect the historic party of labour to be more concerned about immigration, but as chance would have it, they are also the historic party of immigrants.  You would expect the more nationalist party to be more skeptical of free trade and globalisation, but they are also the party of corporations.  On each issue where populists might gain traction, the party leadership has tended to reject the populist position and endorse the globalist one, because their true corporate masters desire it.  This remains true.  What is striking today is the extent to which Democratic candidates are willing to buck corporate America at least a little when it comes to free trade, which suggests that the populist critique of free trade and globalisation, which was smothered during the incredibly boring, issue-free 2000 election, might break through this time and cause a change in the political landscape.

At APSA, Prof. Patrick Deneen had a critique of Prof. Dienstag’s Pessimism, which I have discussed many times before, and of philosophical pessimism itself.   He said:

Memory and hope, Christopher Lasch argued – and not pessimism – are the proper antidotes to optimism.

I agree with this, or at least I almost agree.  Pessimism seems to me to be the antidote to the poison of optimism, and then memory and hope function as the proper nourishment that human nature needs to flourish.  Even if undiluted pessimism is a poison of its own, and I might grant that it is in its most extreme despair of any meaning in life, St. John of Damascus said of his heresiological work that it is necessary to make use of poisons to create antidotes. 

I have said many times that the virtue of hope has nothing to do with optimism, and Christians who routinely mistake hope for optimism are very badly confused about what hope is and what they are supposed to be hoping for in this life.  Indeed, to hope for salvation in Christ is almost the opposite of the optimist’s view.  The optimist says, “I will be saved, and I can save myself.”  The Christian says, “I may yet be saved, if it be God’s will.”  Hope and optimism are in fact antithetical, which reinforces my sense that optimism is as vicious as hope is virtuous.  Optimism is as demonic as hope is divine.

My own view is that the pessimists are as close to being right as secular philosophers are likely to be, but that in their denial even of the hope of salvation and their denial of all meaning they have missed the heart of why they are right about so many of their other observations.  They have seen clearly through the vanity of this world and the promises of those who would seek to realise some kind of salvation here below, and we would all be better off if there were more people inclined to see these promises as the hollow deceptions that they are.  However, the only possible pessimism that escapes the ultimate emptiness of this secular pessimism (the pessimists would see it not as emptiness, but as possibility) is a Christian pessimism that understands that redemption is still possible, but it is not one that can be fulfilled in this world.

On the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship in last summer’s disastrous war in Lebanon, for example, I disagree with their denial of responsibility on Washington’s part — the original impulse to take some form of action may have come from the Israeli leadership, but as I made clear at the time, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the scale and objectives of the operation became defined by Washington, and they were plainly goals for which Israel had not prepared its forces. ~Tony Karon

Indeed, it is surprising that Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt would argue that Washington was not at least partly responsible for the Lebanon debacle, since the war in Lebanon–and the U.S. political class’s virtually unanimous support for it–seems to me to serve as a principal example of how the Lobby’s definition of U.S. and Israeli interests skews and shapes U.S. policymaking in ways that are actually detrimental to the interests of both states.  The way that the war in Lebanon was cast in much of the U.S. media–very simply as Iran and Syria’s proxy war against Israel and Israel’s purely righteous retaliation against this proxy war–had a lot to do with Lobby influence in creating an impressive bipartisan consensus here that everything Israel does can be described as “self-defense” and a similarly broad consensus that Iranian influence in the Near East is the great danger of our time.   

In addition to Washington’s role in exacerbating the war in Lebanon, a clear demonstration of Lobby influence was in its control of the public debate about the campaign.  (We routinely heard how “the American people” support Israel, but few bother to wonder why this support remains as strong as it does.)  This public relations offensive was led by numerous denunciations of the idea of proportionality in the commentary pages of major newspapers, reliable anti-Vatican criticism from prominent pro-Israel Catholics and Christians, Rev. John Hagee’s declaration that the bombing of Lebanon was a “miracle of God” (Hagee is now the head of Christians United for Israel, which aspires to mobilise pro-Israel evangelicals and wield AIPAC-like influence), the U.S. Ambassador’s statement that “we are all Israelis now,” Secretary Rice’s infamous “birth pangs” quip, and on and on.  Obviously, this was not all coordinated or synchronised, as critics of Mearsheimer and Walt accuse them (falsely) of claiming about Lobby activities, but resulted from the shared objectives of numerous different interest groups in this country in boosting for Israel.  (The crucial point of the argument against the Lobby is that these interest groups that belong to it are highly unrepresentative of the interests of most Americans, and not surprisingly they advocate policies that serve their narrow interests rather than U.S. national interest.)  It was, of course, technically possible to speak out against the rampant anti-Lebanonism that swept the country last summer (which was wrapped up in the nicest qualifications), but you didn’t find many people doing it, and certainly not many politicians and foreign policy intellectuals. 

I agree with Mr. Karon that some of this response is ingrained and habitual now.  It is mixed up to some extent with our own nationalists’ paranoia about so-called “Islamofascism,” and it dovetails nicely with the goals of hegemonists in the Near East.  Then again, most hegemonists are themselves very keenly pro-Israel and are as interested in U.S. regional hegemony in the Near East for the sake of Israel’s security (as they understand it) as they are for reasons of projecting U.S. power, and it seems likely that they not only see no conflict between the two priorities but assume that the two are quite complementary.  In any case, reflexive support for Israel obviously gets constant reinforcement from the media and politicians, which is how it became reflexive in the first place, and the coverage and commentary in this country on the war in Lebanon were perfect examples of how “the Lobby” works.

I hadn’t seen this until today, but I think it sums up nicely everything that is wrong with our foreign policy establishment today:

On the second point, Quiggin is trying to frame the debate by using the Very Scary Terms “aggressive war” or “non-defensive” war.  Aggressive to whom? One state’s “aggressive” or “non-defensive” war is another state’s “defensive” or “prudential” action.

Of course.  The Japanese invasions of East Asia were really just defensive (and were part of an effort to free East Asia from perfidious colonialism!), after all, and who’s to say whether the invasion of Poland was really aggression?  The German government said that the other side had fired first, and who are you going to believe?  Come to think of it, one state’s experience of brutal conquest is another state’s war of liberation.  

During WWI, Germans cultivated the “ideas of 1914,” chief among them being the belief that they were engaged in a purely defensive war.  They would be pleased to know that Drezner would agree with them.  Likewise, our invasion of Mexico was really just “retaliation” for Mexican “aggression,” and our conquest of the Philippines was a “prudential” response to the crazy Filipino notion that they should have an independent country, which was clearly a very dangerous idea for them to have.  Hundreds of thousands of them had to die before they learned to stop being so aggressive.