Below are belated links to many articles that will be of interest to regular Eunomia readers: 

Now online from recent TAC issues:

From the current online issue: Prof. Kurth’s fine article on the effects of demographic change on foreign policy and international order, Nicholas von Hoffmann on Clinton, Michael on the Christian Zionists of CUFI, Paul Belien on the effects of past immigration amnesties in the Netherlands, Claude Salhani on Chinese electronic and satellite warfare and Pat Buchanan on the “ideological war.” 

From the previous issue: John O’Sullivan on immigration politics, Caleb Stegall‘s much-discussed review of Deep Economy, Paul Robinson on the “surge,” and James Bovard on legal challenges to administration detention and torture policies.  I have previously mentioned Michael’s article on Rick Santorum and William Lind‘s argument for rapprochement with Iran, but I’ll list them again anyway.

New in the last couple of weeks at the Chronicles’ site:

Dr. Trifkovic has a new article on the demographic impact of current immigration levels, another on Pakistan, another on Kosovo, and another on the current situation in Iraq.  Mr. Buchanan writes on U.S. de-industrialisation, and writes here on the Newark killings and here on Karl Rove.  Paul Craig Roberts writes on China and U.S. media hyping “the China threat.”  From the August issue, Fr. Hugh Barbour has an article on Josef Pieper and liberality as the basis of culture.  Here is Tom Piatak on Harvey Mansfield’s “Straussian piffle.”

I have long been skeptical about the prospects of success for the “surge,” but I don’t see any reason to go around insulting Gen. Petraeus by comparing him to Wesley Clark.  Unlike Wesley Clark, it appears that Gen. Petraeus received his current command because of his ability and his intelligence, rather than on account of cronyism and ties to the President (which is rather striking, given the general pattern of personnel choices by the current administration).  Unlike Wesley Clark, it seems unlikely that Gen. Petraeus is in any danger of trying to start WWIII on a whim.  Unlike Wesley Clark, it seems to be generally accepted that Petraeus’ superior and subordinate officers do not loathe him.  All of this makes Petraeus’ future chances as a political candidate much, much better than Clark’s, but then almost anyone’s chances as a candidate would have to be better, since they could scarcely be much worse.

When I first saw the story that several GOP campaigns were contemplating Gen. Tommy Franks as a choice for VP, my first reaction was incredulity.  As we all know, he has to his credit the initial phase of the Afghan War, which was followed by a less satisfactory conclusion in eastern Afghanistan.  He was also head of Central Command during the initial, well-executed invasion of Iraq, which was followed by quite unsatisfactory post-invasion security (there seems to be a pattern here), on which more in a moment.  Certainly, a fair part of this can be laid at Rumsfeld’s door, and Franks was executing the orders he received, but it seems frankly bizarre to me that any GOP nominee would want to fight an election with a running mate who gives the other side free shots to make “Tora Bora” and “Phase IV” into shorthand for Republican incompetence in military affairs.  Why bring up all that old baggage and give the other side such an easy target?  (The short answer is that there are not all that many credible elected Republicans at the state or federal level who want to sacrifice their future political prospects in what many probably regard as a lost cause–nobody wants to be next year’s Geraldine Ferraro.)

Any reader of Fiasco will come away with a much-diminished impression of Gen. Franks, who comes across as having no grasp on what the difference between strategy and tactics is.  That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in his ability to fulfill the duties of President, should the need arise.  (On his behalf, I should say that most of the jokers who would head the ticket are probably even less qualified.)  Indeed, there is an entire subsection in Fiasco entitled “Franks flunks strategy” (p. 127-129), part of which reads:

The inside word in the U.S. military long had been that Franks didn’t think strategically.  For example, when the general held an off-the-record session with officers studying at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in the spring of 2002, not long after the biggest battle of the Afghan war, Operation Anaconda, one student posed the classic Clausewitzian question: What is the nature of the war you are fighting in Afghanistan?  “That’s a great question for historians,” Franks side-stepped, recalled another officer who was there.  “Let me tell you what we are doing.”  Franks proceeded to discuss how U.S. troops cleared cave complexes in Afghanistan.  It was the most tactical answer possible, quite remote from what the officer had asked.  It would have been a fine reply for a sergeant to offer, but not a senior general.  “He really was comfortable at the tactical level,” this officer recalled with dismay.

Ricks then goes on to explain how this inability to think strategically led Franks to a war plan that “was built on the mistaken strategic goal of capturing Baghdad, and it confused removing Iraq’s regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.”  In fairness to Franks, Rumsfeld had had no intention of sticking around long to change the entire country, which was one of the reasons why there were so few soldiers sent into Iraq and why “Phase IV” was so risibly unplanned and lacking in preparations.  Speed, flexibility,”get in, get out, a man alone” (so to speak)–this was Rumsfeld’s approach to warfighting, and it had no place for intensive, large-scale occupations.  As far as Rumsfeld and Franks were concerned, the only objective was destroying the regime.  According to the theories of Wolfowitz et al., the Iraqis should have been able to take things over almost immediately, making a prolonged presence in Iraq unnecessary.  For the Pentagon, it was in any case undesirable.  Needless to say, someone who is reputedly not good at thinking strategically and who is, as Arkin puts it, “not known as especially interesting or smart” does not strike me as the sort of man you would want as first in the line of succession to the Presidency. 

P.S. Do my eyes deceive me, or is Brent Scowcroft advising the McCain campaign?  Evidently, so is Powell.  I suppose that doesn’t surprise me all that much, but I had not heard this before today.  I really don’t want to hear very much complaining from Republican “realists” about the lack of “realists” in the GOP presidential field when some of the foremost supposedly “realist” and “moderate” figures in the party are advising one of the most die-hard militarists in the race.  These two may be advising him out of GOP establishmentarian solidarity, since McCain was supposed to be the presumptive favourite, at least until the activists and donors had something to say about it, but it is still telling that the prominent “realists” and militarists overlap and mingle so easily.

Whenever I try to chart a course between the “Iraq would have been great if we’d just had smarter people in charge of the occupation” and the “Arabs can’t handle democracy” school of thought, I tend to come back to things like this — the great difficult [sic] Belgians have in creating a viable, legitimate binational democratic state. Or think of the Canadians. Or the endless problems in Spain with the Basques. It’s genuinely difficult to work these kinds of things out. And then there’s the former Czechoslovakia where it couldn’t be worked out, or else Northern Ireland where it also couldn’t be worked out but where there proved to be no adequate line of partition. ~Matt Yglesias

Looked at another way, the problem in all of these cases isn’t the creation of a viable, legitimate binational state.  Even Czechoslovakia functioned as some kind of viable, legitimate binational (or actually trinational before they kicked the Germans out) state for approximately eighty years until the local power bosses on either side of the Slovakian border decided that it would be easier and/or more advantageous to them politically to hive off the Slovaks into their own state.  This suited the Slovak nationalists and the Czech leadership, which was just as glad to have that much less competition for running Bohemia and Moravia.  As many Czechs and Slovaks will tell you even now, the “velvet divorce” was something that many people on both sides of the border did not want.  Czechoslovakia may have been some arbitrarily made-up country, but it was their arbitrarily made-up country and it was the only one they had known.  Suddenly friends and relatives became citizens of a foreign country.  As someone who visited the newly independent Slovakia in 1993, I can testify to the sort of absurd “nation-building” pettiness that accompanied this process, as our perfectly good Czech koruna bills had to be exchanged for virtually indistinguishable Slovak koruna bills, as if the little stamp on the Slovak money made any real difference.  

The trouble in these cases arises when the political class tries to maintain a binational state in such a way that appears to one party of the union to unduly privilege the interests of the other party.  To many Flemings, the Belgian state appears to be a mechanism to rob them to support Wallonia (which, for the most part, seems to be true).  You then combine this with a growing sense of alienation and nationalism of the party that feels as if it is being ignored or abused, and you suddenly have a very difficult situation.  In Belgium, matters have reached such a boiling point because, among other things, Flemish nationalists feel that they subsidise the rest of the country and they think they do not have sufficient representation at the federal level.  It has not helped that the consensus parties have banned one Flemish nationalist party and have worked assiduously to contain Flemish nationalist political power.  This has only helped to encourage the view that Belgian “democracy” means having the ‘right’ elections results and enacting the ‘right’ policies rather than having any kind of self-determination or popular government.

What do almost all of these places have in common?  They are almost all the legacies of conquest/colonialism or the products of international congresses that drew fairly arbitrary lines on maps to suit Great Power vendettas and interests.  Of these, the most “manageable” have been those arrangements where there has been significant decentralisation to meet demands for regional or provincial autonomy.  The more accurate comparison for Iraq, however, is not with Spain or Canada or even Belgium, which have a relative wealth of history as united countries compared to Iraq, but rather with Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, which were created in the same period as part of the same foolish Allied empire-carving process and which dissolved into their constituent parts (though Yugoslavia’s dissolution had a good deal of help from outside meddlers).  Iraq seems bound for the same fate, if only because the local power bosses in different parts of Iraq are going to become interested in partition for the same reasons their counterparts in Czechoslovakia were: it allows them to be bigger fish in the necessarily smaller ponds.

A few months ago, it was the received wisdom that Iraq was in the midst of a rapidly escalating civil war. That claim is no longer plausible. ~Michael Gerson

Well, actually, that was the “received wisdom” of many people last summer as well.  Rather than “rapidly escalating” now, the civil war has reached a plateau for the moment and has settled into a steady stream of sectarian bloodletting.  One wonders if Gerson reads the newspaper where his column appears.  He claims that sectarian killings in Baghdad have declined by 50%.  However, the Post reported on the draft GAO report yesterday:

The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. “While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced [bold mine-DL],” it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged [bold mine-DL]. It also finds that “the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved.” 

What does all this tell us?  That it may be the case that the new tactical plan had some decent success in certain areas, and that when the “surge” ends things will revert back to the way they had been before.  Since the “surge” is definitely going to end at some point, its main accomplishment will have been to halt the worsening of the situation and buy time for the political track.  As we all know, however, the political track is all but hopeless.  Why, then, do optimistic war supporters continue to give the public false hope?  We should give Gerson this much–at least he didn’t say we had turned a corner!

Update: Prof. Cole makes all the necessary points on this subject.

Fukuyama actually makes some sense about Russia:

What the West needs to do is watch Russia’s actual behavior, and not project onto it the West’s own hopes and fears as occurred over the past fifteen years. Many Westerners are angry with Putin and the Russia he is creating in part because they are jilted lovers: they hoped in the 1990s that the country would transition in short order to a full-fledged liberal democracy, and when it didn’t, they felt cheated. But the fact that a fully democratic Russia did not emerge does not means that a fully authoritarian Russia is now inevitable. Russia’s future will not be inevitably shaped by its past, but by the decisions that contemporary Russians will make, and the opportunities that the international environment provides them to make the right choices.

John Warner’s recent relatively outspoken stances on Iraq are evidently not the result of worries about his chances for re-election next year, as he has announced that he will not be running.  As John Judis has noted, Virginia is a vulnerable seat for the GOP with a Warner retirement, and it is also a state that has lately been trending Democratic in federal elections.  The Dems could quite plausibly wind up with 56 or 57 votes in the Senate come 2009 (including Sanders and Lieberman), sending the Republicans back to pre-1994 numbers in the Senate.  In a full rout for the GOP (which would involve highly unlikely losses in Texas and Alaska), they could be reduced to 40 Senators, which would be the fewest members since the 95th Congress.  My early guess (and that’s all) is that Collins and Smith hang on, but Coleman loses along with the GOP nominees in Colorado and Virginia.

And the fact is that the neocon crowd that took far too easily the helm of the foreign policy establishment away from the realist and liberal internationalist players in this game are almost entirely responsible for the dramatic erosion of America’s national security portfolio. ~Steve Clemons

Well, with the exception of rare figures such as Mr. Clemons himself, “the realist and liberal internationalist players in this game” allowed the neocons to take the helm or did very, very little to stop them from taking the helm, because at the time that the neocons were taking the helm in 2002 and 2003 “the realist and liberal internationalist players in this game” were largely on board with the general goals of the neocons with respect to the “war on terror” and Iraq policy specifically.  Certainly, concerning Iraq there were differences over methods, timing and process, which is why “the realist and liberal internationalist players in this game” lost control, because they had no fundamental and essential objections to what the neocons were proposing to do.  On Iran policy, where are “the realist and liberal internationalist players in this game” right now?  What are they doing to thwart an escalation of conflict with the Iranians?  Which presidential candidates (besides, naturally, Ron Paul) are challening the neocon line on Iran?  As of right now, none of the major candidates is firmly opposed to military action against Iran.  How did the neocons begin dictating the terms of the debate?  It was easy–almost everyone (with honourable exceptions such as Mr. Clemons) in the foreign policy establishment already accepted most of what the neocons were saying, or remained silent if they did not accept it.  

As the neocons have overreached again and again, there has been some resistance to executive usurpation, policies of detention and torture and the like.  However, I fear that as long as most of “the realist and liberal internationalist players in this game” accept so many of the same assumptions about America’s role in the world and approve of so many of the same means to reinforce American hegemony, there will never be a time when the neocons–or people just like them–will have been “purged from the American soul.”  When this particular group passes from the scene, we will find ourselves set upon by another and yet another group of hegemonists, because “the realist and liberal internationalist players in this game” are evidently unwilling to change very much about the way the United States government conducts foreign policy.

Strange but true: the Stars and Bars adorn this Pakistani fruit-seller’s stand (via Cliopatria).  What’s Urdu for Deo Vindice?

The Wall Street Journal (yes, you read that correctly) has a story on Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, and it is surprisingly favourable.