The GOP Ames straw poll is tomorrow, which means that it must be time to make bold and foolish predictions.  The outcome will probably not be taken very seriously by most observers because of the absence of three of the four supposedly major contenders, but here are my slightly educated guesses anyway.

Romney will win a plurality, but it will be embarrassingly weak when compared with his massive advantages over the second-tier candidates in fundraising, organisation and name recognition.  Let’s say that he manages a not-so-respectable 30%.  Ron Paul will fare reasonably well, pulling in maybe 15-18%, and I think he probably will claim the second spot in what will be a fairly divided field.  Tommy Thompson will actually do much better than his dreadful debate performances and otherwise horrible national campaign would lead you to think.  He will manage 12-15%, but not the 20% he hopes to get.  He will probably drop out after this.  Brownback is making his big push here, and if he can’t make it in Iowa he can’t make it anywhere.  I’ll guess that he gets 10-12%, which will be enough to keep his campaign alive, but it will also show how limited his appeal is in what ought to be a natural environment for him.  Huckabee keeps making a good impression on voters in every debate, but he doesn’t translate this into much actual support.  He will probably scrounge together 8-10%.  Tancredo might manage 5%, and Hunter could get a smattering of support, maybe 3-5%.  Both of these candidates, while excellent on many things, seem to have gone nowhere all year.  They have both said they will stay in regardless of the result tomorrow, so we can expect them to be around at least through New Hampshire.  

Assuming Thompson is out after this, where will his supporters go?  They seem likely to drift towards either Huckabee or Romney.  The straw poll will give some indication of the strength (or lack thereof) of the Romney campaign, but will be of little use in predicting what happens in the caucus when the other three major candidates get into the mix.  All of those three have certainly damaged their appeal in Iowa by ignoring Ames, but perhaps not fatally (except for McCain, whose campaign is already dead).

Via Ross, I came across this old Ignatieff article, in which he wrote:

If Jefferson’s vision were only an ideology of self-congratulation, it would never have inspired Americans to do the hard work of reducing the gap between dream and reality.

I know it is redundant to say that the things Ignatieff says do not make sense, but this one stood out for me as exceptionally poor. 

Ideologies of self-congratulation are the ones that win support and paint flattering pictures of the people who adhere to them.  That is an essential part of any ideology, and if Ignatieff is going to insult Thomas Jefferson by attributing an ideology to him he should at least recognise that “ideologies of self-congratulation” are the kind that spread, endure and, yes, inspire better than any others.  By planting supposedly high-minded, abstract notions in the minds of adherents, modern ideology typically reassures its followers that they are on the cutting edge of progress, the pioneers of a new world and a new age or in some other way superior and unbeatable.  This then gives them the confidence to go forth and do things to make these abstractions reality, which frequently involve destroying a great many things and killing many people, which they might have shrunk from doing before they had been told that they were simply part of the direction of history.  Ideologies of self-congratulation are precisely the kinds that inspire people to action and discourage the kind of sane humility and self-criticism that is necessary for a stable, humane society.  This is why they are dangerous.    

See also Poulos’ withering critique of the Ignatieff article everyone loves to hate.

Bill Richardson may be a joke in so many ways, and the idea of him as President fills me with unmitigated horror, but his article on foreign policy (while mind-numbingly conventional in many, many ways) is many things that Obama’s was not: focused, organised and specific.  When he talks about reforming international institutions, he lays out at least a couple specific proposals:

US leaders also must restore their commitment to international law and multilateral cooperation, which means many things. It means promoting expansion of the UN Security Council’s permanent membership to include Japan, India, Germany, and one country each from Africa and Latin America. It also means ethical reform at the United Nations so that this vital institution can help its many underdeveloped and destitute member states meet the challenges of the 21st century. Finally, it means expanding the G8 to include new economic giants like India and China.

These may or may not all be terrible ideas.  I think that an expanded Security Council, if we have to have one, is more desirable than the current anachronistic arrangement.  I might challenge the list of countries to be included, but in principle there is no reason why a country as large as, say, Brazil should be ruled out for consideration for a permanent seat.  “Ethical reform” is still too vague, but it is more than what Obama has offered.  The G8 proposal is as intriguing as it is far-fetched and unlikely to be accepted in the other G8 states.  Then again, if you are including Russia for geopolitical reasons, why not bring in the two largest countries?  The short answer for why you would keep them out is that you don’t want China dictating any part of world currency policy.  Even so, compared to Barack “Pie In The Sky” Obama’s foreign policy, where the health of every Indonesian chicken will be looked after, Richardson’s article is strangely refreshing and seems almost sane by comparison.  Richardson’s priorities are often the wrong ones, and I wouldn’t support many of the things he proposes, but at least he has some minimal grasp on what he’s talking about.  Obama had best watch out.  The “New Mexican” may surprise him before all is said and done.

The Tale has returned for another repetition, along with predictable invocations of the Divine Twins, O’Hanlon and Pollack, and even a nod to the ‘Bamster himself:

Do Democratic opposition leaders keep blaming each other for voting for the Iraq war? Or are they now talking about expanding military operations to other countries? Sen. Hillary Clinton once was damned for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. But her even more liberal rival Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., now expresses his own willingness to invade nuclear Islamic Pakistan.

This is, of course, stupid.  Obama’s remarks on Pakistan are predicated on his opposition to the Iraq war and followed a fairly involved discussion of how we would withdraw from Iraq.  Whatever you think of his Pakistan remarks, they are not evidence that opposition to the Iraq war has weakened or a sense that the public mood is shifting away from the antiwar crowd.  Far from it!  On the contrary, it may reflect a new confidence that withdrawal is inevitable and that it is necessary to begin planning for the future after Iraq.  This is not simply a case of Obama framing his belligerence in anti-Iraq war terms, but it is a clear case of someone who is vehemently against the Iraq war but who is nonetheless a committed interventionist.  The Democratic debate is so far beyond getting out of Iraq that there is hardly anything left to talk about.  Thus they have moved on to debating Pakistan policy.  Using Blankley’s method, I would say that a sure sign that the “surge” is certainly failing is that so many of its domestic backers are engaging in embarrassing, desperate arguments that seek to inflate even the slightest shred of good news into a major trend that favours their position.

Update: By the way, has anyone else noticed that this is Hanson’s millionth column in which he explains to us that the current debate has happened during previous wars and that many people change positions based on the ebb and flow of battle?  I suppose this is true, but doesn’t he get tired of saying the exact same thing again and again and again?  I know I get tired of reading it.

As I watch this clip of Dodd and Obama, I find, to my horror, that I think Chris Dodd is making sense in this particular case.  After all, what does it say for Obama’s credibility that the people who “helped to authorise and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation” (as he put it) seem to possess more common sense and wisdom than Obama when it comes to Pakistan?  If even these people understand why he was wrong, when they understand very little else, why should anyone else embrace Obama’s proposal?

The Postrallies ’round Obama.  They note that what Obama proposed is already established policy (which makes Obama look even more uninformed than he did last week), as if something being settled U.S. policy was an argument for its wisdom and sanity!  It must be relevant that, when presented with this “existing” U.S. policy in explicit terms, the Pakistani government has rejected the idea entirely.

My Cliopatria colleague Ralph Luker has a round-up of responses to the New York Times Magazine article by Michael Ignatieff (yes, that Michael Ignatieff).  Yglesias makes the necessary rebuttal:

But then someone pointed out to me that the whole thing is founded on the absurd premise that his errors in judgment have something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics.

This is, when you think about it, totally wrong. Academics in the field of Middle East studies were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Similarly, international relations scholars opposed the war by a very large margin. The war’s foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise — notably people who weren’t really on the left politically — were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really “independent” of political machinations.

I had not read Ignatieff’s article before this evening, but immediately on reading the opening paragraphs I was amazed by the stunning arrogance of the claim.  The claim was, in short, “Because I, Michael Ignatieff, an academic, was horribly, horribly wrong and misinformed because of grand theorising and abstraction, this is a general trait of academics and intellectuals as a whole.  Now that I am a politician, I now understand the superiority of practical politicking over intellectualism.”  In other words, Ignatieff may have been wrong in the past, but he is never, in the present moment, likely to be wrong.  Nice work if you can get it. 

Ignatieff’s precise words were these:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

I can’t imagine a more potent lie than this first claim.  Perhaps the main, if not only, thing that drives many academics and intellectuals is their interest in finding and defending ideas that they regard as true.  Naturally, you try to make them seem as interesting and relevant and applicable to your readers as you can, but if you are setting out to con your audience by spinning evidence and fabricating stories to make them more interesting you are not really engaged in scholarship or serious thought.  Perhaps of all the people on earth, politicians have one of the weakest claims to be devotees of the truth.  They are interested in what is expedient, what is popular, what is, to borrow a word from one of Ignatieff’s old pro-war confreres, “doable.”  It is Pilate, a political functionary, not Seneca or Tacitus, who asks, “What is truth?”  Princes can always find intellectual lackeys to sing their praises or write up theories justifying their crimes, but that does not mean that all scholars and intellectuals are servile lackeys who do the bidding of the ruler or the state, especially not in an era when government patronage is not as vital as it once was.   

There are good arguments that academics should steer clear of politics, mostly because politics can distort and warp scholarship, and perhaps because some academics are susceptible to this sort of Big Idea mania (see Wilson, Woodrow), but the idea that the war fever prior to the invasion was the fruit of an academic and intellectual mode rather the result of an ideological mode of thinking embraced by some academics is simply absurd.  Academics and intellectuals, though perhaps not always closely associated with what might be called “the real world,” have had a far firmer grasp of reality in recent years than most of the war supporters, among whose die-hard members there are, to put it mildly, not exactly all that many distinguished professors and public intellectuals.  Americans have always taken a sort of pride in their instinctive anti-intellectualism, so much so that some might even start to regard ignorance as a virtue, but a policy advanced by the ignorant and incompetent and cheered on by the uninformed cannot really be laid at the door of the academy.  

It occurs to me that Ignatieff’s rather bold generalisations about academia apply least of all to the discipline of history, especially when he writes:

Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

Yet every trend in modern historiography has been to run screaming away from generalising “particular facts” as “instances of some big idea.”  In history, specifics are not quite everything, but they are about 95% of everything.  Theory can be helpful, but it is no substitute for a solid command of the sources and a significant collection of evidence.  In some cases, theory can get in the way if the scholar follows it too rigidly and dogmatically by trying to make the evidence “fit” what he assumed beforehand must be true.  In politics, on the other hand, details are not what win elections, but rather vague, generic symbolism and empty rhetoric are what matter.  Politicians love to use commonplaces and boilerplate, and they avoid giving detailed plans as often as they can.  In a television age, politicians thrive on generalities and, as the last few years have shown, they make policy based on vague, gauzy sentiments about “values” and “security” with no concern for the practicability, wisdom or prudence of the policies being support.   

Something else struck me:

Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq — or anywhere else — as it is.

Yet large parts of our political class have been cocooning themselves for years with respect to Iraq and continue to do so.  (A majority of members of Congress persist in the illusion that something can be salvaged from Iraq.)  They confuse the world as they wish it to be for the world as it is all the time.  This is a common flaw in our politicians, and it is particularly acute because of the optimistic assumptions of our politicians and of our culture.  Certainly, the pols have enablers in the chattering classes, but the fault is mainly theirs.  If the virtue of politicians is that they have a keener attachment to reality, why is it that the politicians always seem to be the last to grasp what everyone else seems to get so much sooner?

Democratic presidential hopeful Barak Obama on Wednesday stressed the need for the U.S. and Pakistan to be “constructive” allies in fighting al-Qaida, but softened earlier talk in which he pledged to unilaterally hunt down terrorists in the south Asian nation.

Obama and his spokesman offered measured criticism of the Bush administration’s actions and policies on Pakistan. The candidate declined an opportunity to explain the difference between his proposals and the White House’s, but he expressed sympathy for Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who faces a growing militant backlash in his Muslim nation.

“President Musharraf has very difficult job, and it is important that we are a constructive ally with them in dealing with al-Qaida,” Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, said. ~AP

Fred Thompson may have a bit of a conjured image and a thin record, but I don’t believe that he was 100% produced in a factory, specifically for consumption by whatever conservative Republican primary voters  don’t have access to Google, the ability to distinguish between black and white, or a memory that extends beyond two weeks ago. ~Liz Mair

George Ajjan did yeoman’s work in actually suffering through the Sunday GOP presidential debate.  He offers some excellent commentary on that and recent events in Lebanon here.  He quotes a priceless Romney answer on promoting democratisation:

I think when there’s a country like Lebanon, for instance, that becomes a democracy, that instead of standing by and seeing how they do, we should have been working with the government there to assure that they have the rule of law, that they have agricultural and economic policies that work for them, that they have schools that are not Wahhabi schools [bold mine-DL], that we try and make sure they have good health care [bold mine-DL].   

Those universal mandates aren’t just for schlubs in Massachusetts anymore–now the Bekaa Valley can also benefit from Romney’s grand vision!  “Great Society on the Mekong” ring any bells, Willard? 

George makes many fine points about Lebanon in particular.  For starters, he notes that representative government in Lebanon did not begin in 2005, and U.S. support for the government did not seem to extend to defending it when it opposed the Israeli bombing campaign of Lebanon last summer.  U.S. acquiescence in the Israeli attacks on all of Lebanon contributed directly to the weakening of the Siniora government and the wreckage of major infrastructure.  We “stood by” all right, but in such a way as to ensure that the forces within Lebanon that the government supports would be harmed the most and those the government loathes would be strengthened.  Also, if huge numbers of your people are refugees who have been driven from their homes or into neighbouring countries, “economic policies that work for them” are not quite as important as they might otherwise be.  After watching the appropriate outrage over the I-35 bridge collapse this past week, it occurs to me that Americans might be even slightly more agitated if a foreign government blew up the port of Long Beach, knocked out the runways at O’Hare, took out multiple bridges across the Mississippi, bombed some of our military installations and displaced 25% of our population in the name of self-defense and helping the American government with its internal security.

I would have thought that Romney’s remark about Lebanon having schools that are “not Wahhabi schools” would have merited some comment from George.  I’m not saying that Saudi/Wahhabi influence in Lebanon doesn’t exist, but it is a rather strange thing to focus on in a country where Sunnis make up perhaps 25% of the population.