I suppose I understand why Rep. Tancredo has once again taken the view he has on the retaliatory nuking of Mecca and Medina, but I have to say that it makes no sense to me.  Indeed, I would have to say that it is deeply wrong.  First of all, it doesn’t function as a deterrent to a religious person to say, “If you don’t stop what you’re planning on doing, I will desecrate and destroy what you consider sacred.”  This rather confirms in the mind of the religious man, especially if he is a fanatic already inclined to violence on behalf of his religion, that you have no respect for basic civilised norms.  Whether or not you actually have such respect is beside the point–you will have telegraphed to the world that you are willing to obliterate a place considered holy by one of the major religions in the world.  This makes the probability of devastating terrorist strikes against this country more likely rather than less, because it will convince that many more Muslims that our government is warring against all of them in the most fundamental way.  Should you threaten this, or worse yet carry out your threat in the event that the situation arises to do it, you will have confirmed every worst idea that the fanatic has about you, and you will have won him a thousand sympathisers where before he had ten.  Then there is pesky international law regulating that belligerents show respect for religious sites and make every effort to spare them from being targeted in wartime.  To make the targeting of major religious sites and central shrines of a world religion a standing policy is to say that you don’t think that anything should be off-limits in warfare. 

Before he ran fleeing to hide behind Samantha Power’s skirt and declare his bold unconventionality, Obama had briefly grasped that using the strategic equivalent of a sledgehammer for a job better suited to a needle was foolish.  There ought to be some things that we are not going to do.  Nuking the Islamic holy sites and killing hundreds of thousands of people seem to fall into that category of things we ought not to do.

This may have already occurred to everyone, but what was the casting director thinking in putting James McAvoy in the male lead in Becoming Jane?  His most recent and famous screen credit is as the lascivious Scottish doctor to Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.  This isn’t to belittle McAvoy, who did a brilliant job in a central role in what was one of the truly superior films of last year, but it is to ask a question: do Jane Austenites want Nicholas Garrigan as their heroine’s Mr. Darcy? 

(And, yes, I understand that actors by definition pretend to be other people all the time and can play a wide variety of roles, but it still seems strange.)

None of the responders [bold mine-DL] has specifically denied that the administration has been making more moderate appointments (except for valid objections regarding Negroponte’s role in Honduras, which, I agree, was anything but moderate, although in his current incarnation he has been fighting the Cheneyites). Nor do they deny that the State Department’s policies in Asia and on Iran, as well as Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates’ efforts to close Guantanamo, are policies that Democrats have been advocating for some time. The seeming inability to recognize these facts reflects a destructive partisanship that makes it almost impossible to give the other side credit for anything — and that demonizes party members (on the right and the left) who dare to break that taboo. ~Ann-Marie Slaughter

Perhaps Dean Slaughter makes the first claim because she is talking about responses from the left, and I am not on the left, so I suppose my fairly specific answers to her claim that Gates, Negroponte and Zoellick are “seasoned moderates” don’t count.  From my perspective, a fervent advocate of the Doha round of free trade talks is by definition not a moderate in his political and economic views.  His views may be conventional, but just because something is common in the establishment doesn’t necessarily make it politically moderate.   She has a point that Gates and Negroponte have been less baleful influences in their current positions, but this is to define “moderation” as the virtue of being only slightly more sane than Dick Cheney.  Saying that they are “more moderate” means that they appear more moderate when compared to, say, John Bolton or Feith, which does not necessarily make them moderates as such. 

If no one denies that the new State Department initiatives are moves towards what have been Democratic positions, how has anyone shown an inability to recognise these realities?  Her claim about these initiatives in foreign policy did not strike me as controversial, but once again it was defined poorly–it was not an example of reaching across the aisle, but one of intra-Republican policy struggles between the “realists” around Rice and the “Cheneyites” as Slaughter dubs them.  I cannot speak for anyone else, but my criticism focused on the rather bizarre definition of partisanship that Slaughter used throughout the first op-ed.  That is, after all, what most of the article was about: complaining, as the title would suggest, that partisanship was out of control and was poisoning our politics. 

Yet every example she gave was not an example of runaway partisanship, but sharp divisions within both parties over foreign policy.  Progressive criticism of the DLC is not primarily that it is excessively bipartisan, but that the policies it supports are bad and destructive policies, especially in international relations (these happen to be policies endorsed by a majority of the GOP, but their association with the other party is not the main reason why many of these critics find such policies terrible).  Likewise, Lind’s criticism of Daalder et al. was not that they were collaborating with Republicans, but that they embraced the toxic ideas of “liberal hegemonism” and “democratic imperialism” that were, according to Lind, giving liberal internationalism a bad name.  For daring to disagree with other members of their own party, several individuals merited Slaughter’s scorn for their “partisanship,” when, as Yglesias pointed out at the time, their intra-party feuding was a sign of a lack of partisan loyalty and a refusal to suppress disagreements for the sake of party unity. 

In each case, the “partisan” was reacting against a policy decision or argument or position that he thought was foolish and dangerous; whether or not it involved a move towards or away from the other party actually was a distant secondary or perhaps tertiary concern.  Those named in the op-ed otherwise had nothing in common: Bolton and Wurmser on one side represented ueber-hawks in the GOP that have been losing some strength in the administration, while Smith and Lind represented what might reasonably be called the progressive and moderate liberal critiques of the Democratic foreign policy establishment’s complicity in Bush Era foreign policy disasters.  The same process is going on in both parties, though it is less thoroughgoing in the GOP: irresponsible, incompetent and belligerent foreign policymakers are feeling a backlash from their opponents within both parties and are being marginalised as relatively more sane ideas begin to prevail.  The GOP “partisans” she cites are, for the moment, on the losing side of this battle in their party, while the Democratic “partisans” she cites are the ones attacking the irresponsible “centrists” who did enable the architects of the Iraq war and who advocate for an equally dangerous foreign policy direction in the future.  This does not mean that administration policy c. 2007 has become “moderate” or even really very bipartisan (Joe Lieberman working with the White House does not count), but simply that it has become less appalling than it was in 2006.

In the course of a generally awful article, Byron York makes one claim that seems worth talking about:

But Reid and Pelosi lose if Bush wins. Given the position they have staked out for themselves, the best possible outcome is for Gen. David Petraeus to give a downbeat report on the surge when he comes before Congress in September. That would give tremendous momentum to those who want the quickest possible U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Perhaps this is the thinking in Washington.  Perhaps this is what the Democrats themselves believe.  Clearly, it is what York thinks will happen.  In any case, it is wrong.  A “downbeat report” on the “surge” by Petraeus and Crocker will not give momentum to supporters of withdrawal.  By the crazy logic of the “centrist”, ISG-loving consensus developing in both parties now, a “downbeat report” on the “surge” will encourage most members of Congress to continue to support the war, but probably on the condition of changing the deployment inside Iraq.  Lugar/Warner will be up, McLieberman will be down, but support for withdrawal will continue to be found among a minority of the Democrats and hardly any Republicans. 

A “downbeat report” will mean that the security situation in Iraq is worse than “surge” backers have been claiming throughout the year (not that this will make them stop talking about how the next new plan will succeed and should be given plenty of time, etc.) and that Iraq is therefore not substantially closer to being capable of providing for its own internal security.  Since the ISG-lovers of the Lugar/Warner/Levin persuasion believe that leaving Iraq without such a capability would be “irresponsible,” they might very well push for yet another change in tactics but would become even more adamant in rejecting arguments for withdrawal.  Thus this foreign policy “centrism” guarantees that the more ineffective the current plan is, the more essential it will be to remain in Iraq until the right plan is found, which means that the war will never end.  It’s a strange concept, but one essential to understanding the idiocy of our rulers: continuing wars no matter what is the wise and prudent course, and ending them (even when they cannot be won) is dangerous.

Of course, the proper pro-withdrawal argument is that there is no “right plan” because the political track in Iraq is hopelessly paralysed and useless, so there is nothing significant that even marginal improvements in security and security training will change.  The “surge” may be ameliorating some of the symptoms of Iraq’s political ruin, but it cannot solve them, and it cannot on its own overcome the levels of violence that continue to wreck that country.  The pro-withdrawal argument is that we should come home because nothing more can profitably be done at acceptable cost to the United States.  To call this betting on failure, as York does repeatedly, is a typical misrepresentation.  For these pro-war people, American soldiers really are just chits to be thrown on a gaming table, except that, unlike in gambling, you cannot win any of your losses back.  Like a gambling addict, the dedicated war supporter will never step away from this hated table, because for this obsessive to cut his losses and stop before he loses even more is to admit failure, when failure has already been staring him in the face for a very long time.

What is most interesting about this article is not what it says, but who is saying it. If a conservative were to write such an article, the skeptics most assuredly would immediately dismiss it as repeating White House talking points. But the fact that two severe critics of the Bush administration’s management of the war — from a think tank usually described as liberal to boot — have published such a piece in the New York Times of all places might, under normal circumstances, give opponents of the war pause. ~Mackubin Thomas Owens

Via Dan McCarthy

For those whose memories do not stretch back to that distant year of 2002, I would offer the reminder that The New York Times endorsed the invasion and its news division was one of the worst offenders in pushing government talking points as the reporting of facts about the real world.  You could quite reasonably lay a significant part of the blame for the media’s complicity in the build-up to the invasion at the door of the NYT.  With their editors having finally come out for a pro-withdrawal position over four years after the war began, the NYT is supposed to be taken as a redoubt of intense antiwar conviction.  Yeah, and Chuck Hagel is antiwar.  Tell me another one. 

Meanwhile, Brookings, which is one of the most “centrist” of all establishment “centrist” think tanks, is supposed to be taken as some woolly left-wing outfit, and the participation of O’Hanlon and Pollack–who have never ceased being war supporters–is supposed to impress us. 

War opponents are supposed to feel thunderstruck by the revelation that these two war supporters still hold the same basic position that they have held for years (pro-war, the war can still be won and it is absolutely vital to win it).  In one sense, I do feel a little shocked that there are still people who support the war with any of the same intensity as before, but that is not what Owens means.  Of course, criticism of the management of the war is something for which Sen. McCain, one of this NRO symposium’s participants, is quite well-known.  Criticising the management of a disastrously mismanaged war makes you no more of an opponent of the war than is a Sam Brownback or John Warner, and it actually predisposes you towards overvaluing evidence of improvement in the situation, no matter how slight it may be. 

Of course, John Warner is one of those Republican Senators with an impeccable “pro-military” record and a long tenure on the Foreign Relations Committee who has now signed on with Lugar, Domenici, et al. in saying that the “surge” is not working and that the political process in Iraq is more or less hopeless.  (On this latter point, you will find few dissenting voices.)  When solidly internationalist Republicans say these things, they are just as readily dismissed as O’Hanlon and Pollack’s remarks are uncritically embraced, because those Republicans are saying the “wrong” things as far as a pro-war audience is concerned.  These are the Republicans who are, in Owens’ estimation, “enabling” a defeat that would otherwise not happen.  Of course, if things were actually going so swimmingly, you would likely not have a stampede of these old GOP warhorses towards redeployment and declaring Iraq policy to be in need of significant change.

Finally, as Djerejian has shown to devastating effect, O’Hanlon and Pollack seem to have had a much less positive view of the situation in Iraq as recently as June in O’Hanlon’s case, and many of the descriptions in the op-ed do not seem to agree with a lot of the rest of the evidence.

At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker points to a fine post by one of our fellow Cliopatria colleagues, Manan Ahmed.  He and I seem to be on the same page regarding Obama’s recent speech at the Wilson Center and what it means for his foreign policy.  We are also mostly in agreement about Pakistan policy, or at least we are in agreement that invading Pakistan in the event that the government there “fails” to act is crazy and dangerous.  Obama likes to get a lot of mileage out of his pose as a sober-minded realist, someone who doesn’t oppose all wars, but only “rash” and “dumb” ones.  What label does he think applies to his proposed “action” in western Pakistan?   

One part of the post stood out for me as being perhaps the most important:

This national discourse comes from a deep Orientalism that has been a staple of our political lives prior to and since that “bright and beautiful Tuesday morning”. It is what enables us to question the sanity and the patriotism of anyone who dares raise the long history of American involvement across the globe as a contributing factor. It enables us to collapse real geographies from Leeds and Glasgow to Karachi and Islamabad into “wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains”.

I would add one thing to this: it is not only an illusion of an undifferentiated other that confuses American thinking, but an overwhelming sense that “we” can never have contributed to anything that has ever happened to “us.”  Not only can you not “blame America first,” you are not really supposed to blame America at all, because the nationalist story tells us that “we” as a nation are never really to blame.  This is the story we have told ourselves long before “we” ventured into the Near East or gave much of a thought to the Islamic world.  “We” are always provoked, pushed too far, attacked, insulted, forced into a fight that “we” did not want, etc.  Even though the U.S. declared war on Britain first in 1812 and invaded Canada, it is remembered and still taught as a response to provocations (never mind that the most keen War Hawks had little stake in the “free trade and sailors’ rights” of war slogan fame and wanted to grab land).  The invasion of Mexico was cast in the same light, and was more plainly a land grab.  The Spanish War, the Philippine War, and even American participation in WWI fit the pattern of the government launching or entering wars that were quite unnecessary (and, in the case of WWI, opposed by a huge majority of Americans).  Despite what might appear to the outside observer to be a record of a number of poorly justified invasions of other states, the memory is one of being bullied, put upon, victimised and threatened.  Someone is always forcing our hand, and there is always the constant lament: “Why are you people doing this to us?”  We then provide our own answer when the answers that other people give us are unsatisfactory, because the latter are unflattering and unwelcome.  Our answer is that They are essentially and in all ways opposed to our very existence, because nothing else could explain hostility to those as beneficent as “we” are.  Delusions about who “we” were and are combine with fantasies about “them” and produce the reliable consensus across most of the political spectrum that gives the same shallow, ill-considered answers to problems of diverse kinds.  Thus, “if Hussein does not act, we will” can be easily replaced with “if Musharraf does not act, we will.”  The political class in this country always speaks to other governments in what you might call the conditional of hegemony: your country’s sovereignty, or perhaps even its existence, is dependent on the degree of your subservience, and failure to comply will merit you the label of “anti-American” or “rogue” or both.

Then again, an even more important part may be this:

Why are we, four years after our indefensible invasion of Iraq and nearly six years after the attack on us, still unable to comprehend our enemies as capable, rational, modern agents?

It is reassuring to some, I suppose, when we do not allow our enemies to be fully rational or modern.  This is also an element of what Kuehnelt-Leddihn called nostrism.  It confirms in the minds of everyone in this country that, regardless of how misguided or clumsy or destructive our government’s policies may be, we will always retain this sense of superior rationality and modernity.  It is even better if we can claim that the enemy is from another time all together, people who are “from the seventh century,” when a part of the problem is, surely, that they are very much from our own time.  It is this need to cast the enemy as the embodiment of irrationality that leads to the ridiciulous overuse of the word fascist, since the labeling of others as fascist is the fast-track to denying them rationality and sanity.  Those who read history as one long march towards inevitable victory for their politics will necessarily see adversaries as throwbacks who will, must, end up on the “ash-heap of history” with the empire serving the function of progressive chimney-sweep.  Such people take no interest in the details of this other world they oppose, because they are bound to see these details as little more than curiosities and quirks of a system or civilisation that they assume is already doomed to fall.

Poulos expertly sums up the problems with the “Kurdish option” here.  We seem to be in complete agreement.  I strongly recommend it to you all.

But if Barack is talking about sending U.S. ground forces into Waziristan or Baluchistan, why would this not leave us in another mess like Iraq, with the U.S. Army bleeding and no way out? Would not Osama bin Laden rejoice in a border crossing by U.S. troops into Pakistan, enraging the Pakistani nationalists as well as the border tribes?

After half a decade of fighting in the Islamic world, has not the lesson sunk in with the hawks of both parties? U.S. troops in an Arab or Muslim country are more likely to create an insurgency than quell one. ~Pat Buchanan

Quite right.  This confirms my sense that Obama has taken this position because he was guessing that it is the position he needs to take to appear “serious” in the eyes of the media and the public.  He never gave much thought to what it might involve to do the things he has proposed, what the consequences might be and whether it had any realistic chance of succeeding.  Presented with hard and difficult realities, Obama retreats to the optimist’s dodge: “Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”  Well, no, but if something has a low chance  of success and significant costs, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there may be a better alternative.  Hope, as they say, is not a strategy–unless your name is Bush…or Obama.  

A great one for trumpeting his own prescience in 2002-03 when he happened to be right about Iraq, he seems now to demonstrate none of the same caution, deliberation or intelligence that I thought informed his views about that invasion then.  Someone must be telling him that he has to overcome the perception that he is some wobbly, wimpy dove and has to appear strong and decisive and supportive of military action, which is strange because Mark Penn is already employed by someone else.

Let’s just say that Obama has been having a bad time of courting the desi vote this year, but at least he’s been evenhanded about it–Indian- and Pakistani-Americans have some reason to dislike him now.  Put Obama in the White House, and the Kashmir question might be resolved out of sheer solidarity against the blowhard American.  Okay, maybe not. 

The latest from South Asia suggests that any Obama Administration would have to spend its first hundred days (and probably more than that) fixing the damaged relations that Candidate Obama frayed along the campaign trail.  Candidate Bush was actually not this sloppy, but then that was because he let other people do all the thinking for him that time around.  He basically said little that was controversial about any specific country–the most controversial statements he made about specific countries related to the ones whose names and presidents he did not know (remember his crack from way back about “good relations with the Grecians”?).  Haven’t we had enough of Presidents who cavalierly alienate other nations with sloppy and careless phrases designed for domestic consumption?  I eagerly await Obama’s “axis of quiet violence” speech.

Goodness knows I should probably be going to sleep now to get ready to recite the life story of Sayat Nova bil arabiyya (Kaan ya makaan sha’ir ismuhoo Harutyun Sayatyan…),but I am fascinated–and gratified–by Obama’s flailing.  No one of Obama’s gaffes, errors or foolish statements would have been that damaging to his campaign at this point, and even all of them together are not fatal, but they are a series of political wounds–all of them self-inflicted–that threaten to bleed Obama of momentum, time and resources as he has to battle back against his own ineptitude.  The harder he fights to catch up to where he was before these errors, the more likely he will again overreach or misjudge a question or fire off a foolish speech.  Hillary and Edwards are laughing all the way to New Hampshire, and suddenly Richardson’s preposterous role as the “candidate of experience and foreign policy expertise” becomes much more relevant, as he becomes the logical replacement among the top three.  Richardson does not deserve this; he is, as my last column said, ridiculous and incompetent, but Obama’s confusion is his gain.  I assume resistance to another Clinton is strong enough in the party that an anti-Clinton candidate will win.  Obama was supposed to be in the process of becoming that candidate.  Perhaps this is the beginning of the unraveling of his campaign and the rise of the eventual non-Clinton nominee.