Let’s review the membership of Obama’s growing militarist fan club: Kagan, Peretz, Giuliani, the Post and even The Wall Street Journaleditorial page.  Anyone who thinks Obama represents some meaningful departure from the foreign policy insanity of the last six years is kidding himself.    

Update:  Somehow I overlooked the bit at the end of the Kagan/Daalder op-ed that tells us that Daalder is an unpaid advisor to the Obama campaign.  This makes perfect sense.  Kagan likes Obama’s foreign policy, which is fairly crazy, and Daalder is probably one of the people who helped put the finishing touches on the craziness.  They really do belong together.  The only thing that is incongruous in all of this is Obama’s continuing opposition to the war in Iraq, which neither Kagan nor Daalder shared in the beginning.

Coming so soon after the War Party’s O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed swoon, this Kagan/Daalder op-ed may be more excitement than the average jingo can handle.  I suppose this would be an example of some of the precious bipartisanship that has become so scarce in Washington.  Better yet, it must be more evidence that “Even The Liberal Brookings Institute” has begun to come around on the question of the circumstances of when the government should use force overseas.  Why, Daalder’s co-written an op-ed with one of the Kagans in favour of interventionism!  On the editorial page of The Washington Post!  In the popular conservative imagination, the Post is only slightly to “the right” of The Nation, so this must be a significant blow to the forces of defeatocracy (or whatever they call it).  Bill Kristol’s next column practically writes itself.  That would all be the case, except that Ivo Daalder, like those “far leftie” colleagues of his, is a rabid interventionist now, and he has been for years.  The Brookings Institute, that redoubt of peacenik radicalism, is one of the most staid, establishment consensus think tanks out there.  If they are out there flacking for the war or interventionist foreign policy generally, it is not surprising in the least.     

It has been fascinating to watch the war supporters’ excitement around the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, which continues today with Barone.  Shorter Barone: “Why, look, a brief blip in public opinion in a less antiwar direction!  Why, look, an op-ed about Iraq that is not completely filled with predictions of doom!  Things are looking up!  The Democrats are in trouble now!”  Like Continetti’s article yesterday, Barone recites the Tale of Nancy Boyda, which seems likely to become the regularly cited piece of evidence in every indictment of antiwar views from now on.  The Tale recounts Boyda’s “refusal” to hear positive news from Iraq.  Now, not only do the media not report the “good news,” but antiwar politicians won’t even stand to listen to it–that will be the theme. 

What is striking about it is that it does not represent the nature of the debate at all.  It has hardly been the characteristic trait of the antiwar side of the debate to ignore evidence that did not match with our views.  Recently, I have seen many people talking about how antiwar pols and war opponents are “deeply invested” in seeing the war end badly, which, besides being insulting, is a stupid charge to make.  If the Iraq war comes to anything resembling a decent, stable conclusion (i.e., if Iraq were almost nothing like what it is today), a great many war opponents, including myself, would actually be relieved.  We would marvel at how, in spite of the chronic lack of proper support and supply, the epic incompetence of the government, the unceasing dishonesty of the political class and the completely adverse conditions in Iraq, the outcome was not as bad as we feared.  It is, of course, because we are not so foolishly optimistic to believe, yet again, in the false hopes and misleading promises of the government and its cheerleaders that we do not expect such an outcome. 

Of course, how many times have we been told about the impending corner that will soon be turned and the “good progress” we have been making, only to see Iraq get progressively worse?  When Baghdad is getting a few hours of electricity per day and other parts of the country are cutting off Baghdad from their power plants in order to provide for their own needs, the O’Hanlon/Pollack tours of Ramadi and Ghazaliya are, at best, of marginal importance.  When the Iraqi parliament is incapable of passing any law of consequence that might provide for some political settlement that could at least lessen the fighting, optimistic reporting from Tal Afar (where there was another suicide bombing not too long ago) should hardly impress anyone.  That it seems to have deeply impressed a number of prominent war supporters is more an indictment of their judgement than it is of O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s own credibility. 

This is something that is deeply troubling about war supporters’ handling of evidence from the very beginning: they seem to have no sense of what is significant and what is irrelevant or marginal.  For them, if a bomb goes off in the parliament building and a school is re-opened, these are events that they seem to think are of political–and therefore journalistic–importance.  Hence the constant lament about the “failure” to report the “good news.”  In this view, to focus on the former and “ignore” the latter, as if the resources of news agenices were infinite, is to express bias.  Well, I suppose it is a bias of a sort–it is a bias in favour of covering important stories rather than unimportant ones.  The O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed offers war supporters the kind of reporting they prefer: anecdotal, impressionistic, experiential and therefore often unverifiable, and above all the describing of things that are of lesser importance (or things already known for some time) and treating them as evidence of a meaningful change or a new trend that you, the idiot public, have yet to take fully into account.   

You will recall the recent craze among some on the right for a revival of teaching military history.  One day, these enthusiasts will (mistakenly) tell you how much more vastly significant a few days of battle were than whole decades that preceded it, contrary to the flim-flam from all those miserable academics.  Then they or their colleagues will come back the next day and complain that the lousy liberal journalists are reporting about primarily military and political events.  “They’re not writing feel-good stories about repaired soccer fields and kite-flying!  Obviously they hate all that is good and true.”  Something is amiss there.

Perhaps having learned their lesson from embarrassing cheerleading like this, war supporters are now once more keen to show that they are very much focused on security and any reports of declining civilian casualties.  Wasn’t it the standard talking point back in the spring that a surge in casualties was proof that the “surge” was working (because it was proof that the insurgents were desperate)?  If that was true then (which is doubtful), a decline in civilian casualties would be a sign that the insurgents are calm, relaxed and not even bothered to launch as many attacks–except, of course, that they are launching more attacks and often more devastating attacks than ever before.  In the end, the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed doesn’t tell us much at all, because the most relevant factors determining whether security and stability will be established in Iraq are precisely those that cannot be observed while strolling, without body armour, down the streets of Ramadi, because that is no longer where the main security problem is.  It is like going to a building that had already mostly burned down before the fire was extinguished, taking a good look around at the sopping wet wreckage and declaring, “Yes, sir, the fire is certainly out here!  We can therefore safely say that the danger of fire everywhere else in the country is also less than it was.”

Alex Massie points to this item from a Cheney television appearance:

“I’m totally neutral in the upcoming presidential contest. I will support the Republican nominee. And the fact that others have signed on with Fred or John McCain or Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, they’re all good men. I hope one of them is the next president of the United States. But I haven’t gotten involved in any of those efforts.”

Clearly, Cheney understands that Fred needs no last or other names, since his fame and reputation are already legend.  After all, he has…delayed the announcement that he will be entering the race until September and basically done none of the work needed to build a campaign organisation.  The Cheney-Fred connection becomes more clear by the day.

The radio host interviewing Romney in this video, Jan Mickelson, raises some of the same objections to Romney’s “wall of separation” logic that I assumed conservative Christians would be making all along.  Here you have someone who wants to run as a religious conservative, but who won’t talk about his religion, and who explicitly denies that his religion is connected to his candidacy (except insofar as it allows him to portray himself as a “person of faith”).  When Romney endorses Kennedy’s handling of his Catholicism, Mickelson responds: “the pro-life community here in Iowa call him [Kennedy] a cafeteria Catholic.”  In other words, you aren’t likely to win over religious conservatives by running away from or ignoring your religion (even if it is a religion that said conservatives may not care for).  Romney then goes on to say that he isn’t there to talk about “a religion or the principles of a religion,” but at the same time he wants to trade on the points of agreement that he has with religious, particularly Christian, conservatives, who hold the views on life that they do, at least in part, because of their religious teachings.  Romney wants to make distinctions that make it possible for him to maintain this balance, while the religious conservatives whose votes he needs and whose votes he is presumably trying to win don’t accept the validity of these distinctions.  Indeed, to the extent that they think they are real distinctions and not merely rhetorical dodges, they believe them to be misguided or perfidious.

During one of the ad breaks (while the camera kept rolling), Mickelson says: “I think you’re make a big mistake when you distance yourself from your faith.”  (As it happens, I agree with Mickelson’s point here.)  Part of Romney’s response: “There are Mormons in the leadership of my church who are pro-choice.”  I’m not sure why he feels compelled to mention this, since it clouds the issue for his potential supporters.  If Mormon church teaching permits the possibility of Mormons being pro-choice (and I’d grant that it does), Romney’s fidelity to his Mormonism will hardly reassure pro-life conservatives, since it is no way guarantees that he would remain pro-life as a matter of policy, but his awkward handling of questions pertaining to his religion gives the impression that he doesn’t think it should even be part of the debate.  He could turn this to his advantage by saying, “My church’s teachings do not require me to be politically pro-life, but I have taken this position anyway (or at least made a mildly convincing pander to that effect), so you should look at the political position I have taken and not dwell on what my church does or does not permit.”  That would be the smart way to handle it, but this is not how he handled it.  Instead, he seems offended that people keep talking about his religion.  He continues to give the impression that he finds it embarrassing or unsuitable for public conversation, as if to say, “The public square has nothing religious in it, and that’s the way I’d like to keep it, thanks very much.”

Mickelson catches him on this and, it seems to me, nails him to the wall as far as many religious conservatives are concerned: “When you bifurcate politics from religion, and you have this hermetically-sealed….you make a political category over here and a spiritual one over here.”  Shortly after this, Romney said, “My religion is for me and how I live my life.”  Perhaps that is a view of religion that most Americans share, but it is not a popular one among religious conservatives.

This is great.  In this one rather long YouTube video (via Eric Kleefeld) lie the seeds of doom for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Update: To clarify, I don’t necessarily think that this one video will wreck his campaign, but watching Romney attempt to square the circle of running as a “person of faith” who doesn’t want to talk about his religion because he isn’t running “as a Mormon” while saying that his opposition to abortion is a secular position is devastating to the rationale for his candidacy.  Brownback, Huckabee et al. have just had their prayers answered. 

Second Update: This exchange may help to convince people that he is, in fact, a human being who gets frustrated and angry because of criticism rather than a robot or mannequin.  This could help him win more voters who are not strongly opposed to Romney’s Mormonism, but who might find his normal plastic demeanour off-putting.  It is also fascinating to see Romney run up against hard-line strict constructionists and have no idea how to handle their views.  It’s as if he’s never even heard of the idea that judicial review is a usurpation (in fairness to him, he probably never has).

Separately, Rasmussen shows that only 35% of Republican voters think Romney is conservative, and only 54% of Republicans have a favourable view of the man.  Only McCain among the big four has worse fav/unfav numbers.  If Romney were to somehow win the nomination, GOP voters would probably be pretty unenthusiastic about his candidacy.

Update: Kleefeld receives word from Romney’s campaign manager on why the Romney campaign put this video on YouTube:

Because it shows Governor Romney standing his ground and making his case to an interviewer that took him head-on over the issues. He is confident and engaging during a tough inquiry. Folks who have seen the video says it is Governor Romney at his best, so we felt others should have the chance to see it.

This is Romney at his best?  I can’t say that I am surprised to hear that, but I find it curious that his campaign manager would be claiming it.  This episode is potentially very bad for Romney, so it is bizarre that his people would be spreading it around the Web deliberately.

…because every day everything in Iraq is getting better and better.

Rich Lowry actually has a moderately interesting article on liberalism and Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:

American history no longer appeared to be a benign process, but a twisted story of rapine and oppression. “With such a bill of indictment,” Piereson writes, “the new liberals now held that Americans had no good reason to feel pride in their country’s past or optimism about its future.”

There are some problems with this interpretation, not least of which is that the liberal acceptance of a narrative of continuing progress did not actually end in November 1963.  The glossing over of Vietnam, as if it were incidental to the changes on the American left, seems inexplicable.  To the extent that Piereson is right that liberalism became less comfortable with a simple narrative of American history as the advance of freedom and goodness (I think Obama’s understanding of American history, shared by plenty on the left and right, proves that this thesis is actually pretty weak), the disillusionment that resulted confirms that it was the previous naively optimistic view that set liberalism up for any so-called Fall.  Only an absurd kind of patriotism makes taking pride in your country a function of its purity and sinlessness (you might call this the “moral proposition nation” view).   Naturally, no such country has existed or ever will exist in this world, and anyone who starts with the assumption that his country is such a pure and untainted one, somehow outside history or beyond the fallen state of man, will either spend his entire life deluded or will see this fantastic illusion destroyed before his eyes sooner or later.  This is a patriotism that inculcates love of an imaginary place, rather than the actual place where you live, and it encourages disappointment with the reality because it continually fails to live up to the high (and unrealistic) standards of the imaginary world.  Having embraced an insubstantial myth, such a person is unprepared to face the complex reality of his country’s history.  If he cannot see his national story as the unfolding of a morality play, he loses interest or becomes alienated from his own country’s past. 

Perversely, and this is where Piereson appears to have gotten the interpretation wrong, the disappointed optimist becomes even more obsessed with the future (which, as we remember from Camus, authorises every kind of humbug) because the past now appears to him as a string of injustices that mar the image of his country.  In the future, there is the possibility of improvement, while the past offers little or nothing.  His patriotism will be one projected towards a future country in which various “ideals” have been realised.  The more that history fails to match mythical fantasies about the past, the more the optimist will abandon more and more of his country’s past as virtually irredeemable (except for those few precursors and seeds of what came later).  Yet the one thing that the optimist will never abandon fully is the madness that is optimism itself.  Like an addict, the optimist becomes progressively more dependent on the destructive drug of optimism even as it steadily ruins his life.  The worse things get, the more that optimism is shown to be a lie, the more the optimist feels compelled to believe in the lie.

As a political and diplomatic stunt, it had all the characteristics we have come to associate with Mr Putin’s presidency. It was clumsy, childish, recklessly confrontational, and at least mildly psychotic. ~David Warren

Given that I have sometimes noted the similarities in the governing styles of Messrs. Putin and Bush, I might be inclined to agree with some of these descriptions, since I think almost all of them fit Mr. Bush perfectly.  Putin does have a tendency to be unduly confrontational.  Unlike Mr. Bush, he is also capable of adjusting and maneuvering that balances and augments his confrontational style.  This is one of the reasons why Russia’s international position has been improving and why Putin is as widely supported as Bush is widely disliked.  But clumsy?  Childish?  Certainly, it was a symbolic move, and one we might associate more with the late 19th century and the Great Game, but it is a huge improvement in subtlety and execution from the incompetent handling of the Kursk disaster.  In a country where our President has been known to offer such gems of wisdom as, “Bring ’em on,” I find it difficult to declare this action to be childish.  Compared to what?  Rudely imperialistic?  I suppose that would be a fair description.  Most of these others do not apply.

American foreign policy is broken. It has been broken by people who supported the Iraq War, opposed talking to our adversaries, failed to finish the job with al Qaeda, and alienated the world with our belligerence. ~Samantha Power

Remember that this statement comes in the wake of an Obama speech in which the candidate managed to outrage and, well, alienate a major U.S. allied government by making fairly belligerent noises about “taking the fight” to Pakistani territory. 

Of course, American foreign policy is broken, but it has actually been broken by people who think in very much the same way as the person who said:

In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well.

The Iraq war is the result of thinking of other people’s problems as our own.  The war is the result of mistaking distant, potential threats for approaching, gathering dangers that require immediate action.  It is the result of making foreign policy based on hopes and fantasies, rather than on solid knowledge of the world.  It is the result of audacity.  We do not need any more of this.

Over the last few weeks, Barack Obama has once again taken positions that challenge Washington’s conventional wisdom on foreign policy. And once again, pundits and politicians have leveled charges that are now bankrupt of credibility and devoid of the new ideas that the American people desperately want.

On each point in the last few weeks, Barack Obama has called for a break from a broken way of doing things. On each point, he has brought fresh strategic thinking and common sense that break with the very conventional wisdom that has led us into Iraq. ~Samantha Power

Power’s memo is a clever attempt at damage control, but I don’t think many people will be biting.  On so, so many things, Obama isn’t unconventional, fresh or challening at all–his previous statements on foreign policy before this past week mark him as a ludicrously ambitious interventionist.  Knowing that about him, his statements about “acting” in Pakistan go from appearing careless to appearing rather horrifying. 

In principle, there was nothing wrong with Obama saying that he would meet with leaders of “rogue” states and there was potentially quite a lot right with it, especially when it comes to Syria and Iran.  It was the context in which he gave that answer and the particulars of the answer that made what might otherwise be a refreshing departure from the last six years into an occasion for head-shaking.  The question he was asked was admittedly ridiculous, but he neither challenged the question for being a stupid hypothetical gotcha question nor did he say anything that suggested that he understood the purpose of top-level meetings between heads of government.  He wanted to distinguish the symbolism of an Obama Administration from that of Mr. Bush.  Besides, does any President ever have direct meetings with tinpot dictators, whether friendly or hostile, in his first year?  Generally speaking, no.  There are quite a few more important leaders for him to be meeting at that time.  Then there is the Kennedy precedent.  Bold, brash JFK thought he could stare down Krushchev in Vienna and managed to come off in the eyes of the Soviets as a fool and a pushover.  The next year was the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The good news for Obama is that none of the states he was talking about are anywhere near as powerful or important as the USSR was.  The fallout from a failed Obama-Assad meeting would be minimal.  Then again, this makes prioritising meetings with them seem especially daft.     

Simply saying or doing something rash for the sake of doing something different from what had been done previously is exactly the sort of approach that got us into Iraq.  Obama used to be against doing and saying rash things–now what is rash has been redefined as “unconventional.”  Invasion became a respectable option because there were a great many “unconventional” arguments being made against the containment of Iraq, which was the received wisdom at the time.  A few years ago, foreign policy “realism” was supposedly bankrupt, because the promoters of the war and the “freedom agenda” said it was.  They represented the new prevailing wisdom.  The Bush Doctrine, though it had its roots in earlier interventionism, represented a fairly significant change.  Not all change is desirable, and sometimes the changes instituted as responses to events are, because they are being made quickly and recklessly, the wrong ones to make. 

That is the sort of thing you will get when you want to be seen as trashing conventional assumptions and have no good ideas with which to replace them.  Obama wants to pitch himself as the “change candidate,” and he claims that his statements reflect the “change” he’s going to bring to government.  The trouble he has is that plenty of us believe that this is the case, and the change he is bringing seems to be mostly for the worse.  Overall, the government would not be less interventionist under Obama, it would actually be less respectful of some of our major allies (if that is even conceivable) in the event that Washington deemed that those allies had “failed to act” inside their own countries to our satisfaction, and the new administration would also seem to be out of its depth in coping with the diplomatic brushfires that it would keep setting. 

There are two principal reasons why Obama’s remarks on Pakistan in particular were wrong.  First, they demonstrated the error of someone who is half-informed, someone who has just enough information (in this case, the new NIE) to be confident in pushing forward into a blunder, as he clearly has little sense of why it is that Pakistan has been unsuccessful so far in suppressing what he calls a “sanctuary.”  Additionally, they show that he believes that the sovereignty of all states, both allied and hostile, should be irrelevant when Washington says that it is.  He has made an argument here that takes for granted that all other governments exist to one degree or another to provide America with security–and why wouldn’t Obama believe that, if he believes that the security of everyone on earth is tied into the security of the United States?  Liberal internationalism of the ’90s wanted a “human rights” exception to state sovereignty, and now Obama has added to this an expansive U.S. security exception, which states that no state is really sovereign and our forces may come and go as they please in any of them if the President deems it appropriate.  Arguably, this is not so much of a change as a continuity with some of the worst aspects of the Cold War, which would make sense for a candidate who continually models himself after JFK.

Power continues:

We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes. 
 

Yet that is exactly what almost everyone criticising Obama is doing–they are judging the merits of his proposal and find that proposal to be, well, a bit loopy.  Whether pro-war, antiwar, imperialist or anti-imperialist, most people seem to be in agreement that Obama erred badly.  It is, of course, possible for most people in this country to be wrong, but it does not necessarily follow that Obama is always right because he has a knack of siding with unpopular foreign policy views.  In the past, he took the then-unpopular view of opposing the Iraq war, as I and many others did, and he was right to do so, because the Iraq war was senseless and unjust and ruinous for our interests.  There is a virtue in being able to defy conventional wisdom and establishment assumptions (one wishes that he would challenge more of them, but do so in a less obviously ridiculous way), but rejecting conventional wisdom is one thing and proposing a different, but potentially much more dangerous course is another.  It would have been one thing if Obama had said that current Pakistan policy was unacceptable and that reflexive support for Musharraf was getting us nowhere, but instead of pursuing that kind of criticism in a much smarter direction he chose to offer a re-edited version of the Bush Doctrine.  

Incidentally, Obama’s timing is also fairly terrible–Musharraf has, I think foolishly but also at some risk to himself, resumed the deployment of soldiers to western and northwestern Pakistan in a repeat of the policy that proved so unsuccessful before.  Obama at once ignores an allied government doing something requested of it by Washington (regardless of how misguided that request may be), but he also provides Musharraf with an opportunity to shore up his own position with the administration and so ensure that any of the necessary reforms will be deferred into the future still longer.  Obama has managed to promote a bad Pakistan policy and reinforce the worst elements of the existing one, and all in one week just by giving a speech.  Imagine what he could do in four years as President.