“I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman,” quipped Romney while campaigning in New Hampshire. ~The Evening Bulletin

Well, that works out nicely, since I think the presidency ought to be held to a higher level than allowing it to be sought by a smiling robot.

While Kevin Drum continues to embarrass himself, Ross has another good post on one particular angle of the debate over the designation “progressive.”  The “meme” of progressives as supporters of eugenics and sterilisation comes from the history of early 20th century progressivism.  (Or you can try the short version: just watch Gattaca and see whose politics seem to have prevailed in that world.)  You can merely glance at this period and find progressives who endorsed or upheld either segregationist or sterilisation or eugenics policies: Woodrow Wilson, Oliver Wendell “Three Generations Of Idiots Are Enough” Holmes, and Margaret Sanger.  Sanger saw birth control as a means to reduce the reproduction of undesirable populations.  Every time someone on the left endorses the “right” to abortion today he does accept the idea that there are some who should never be born.  Progressive arguments on behalf of sterilisation and eugenics took it one step further: there were those who should never be allowed to conceive in the first place.   

Those three are not minor, fringe figures in the history of American progressivism.  They are part of the legacy that progressives today call to mind when they use this name.  Today, I assume progressives would abhor state-coerced sterilisation and overtly racist and eugenics rationales for birth control, but it was not always so.  Now there are those on the left who favour a “positive” eugenics that is supposed to be qualitatively different from the bad, old eugenics.  If Kevin Drum doesn’t know about that, that’s hardly Ross’ fault.

I agree with Djerejian–any description of the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran as a second Cold War is just ridiculous.  Are we involved in a similar “cold war” with Venezuela?  Maybe we should ask that master strategist, Rick Santorum!  Yeah.  To label every standoff between Washington and a regional power as a “new Cold War” is at once to make light of the significance and scope of the Cold War and to engage in a kind of foreign policy myopia similar to the disease that causes pundits to see a potential Hitler in every foreign regime they dislike.  These comparisons are not very substantive.  They seem deliberately excessive, almost as if the author wants to make a splash by saying outrageous things. 

While I appreciate Djerejian’s point about not having time to set straight every ludicrous foreign policy argument out there, this one seems to cry out for special attention.  Wright begins by stating certain obvious facts: Iran has gained in strength because its regional opponents have been deposed by the U.S., and its proxies have enjoyed some successes in the region.  After that Wright loses me.

According to Wright, a “Green Curtain” is descending, or rather is being draped by the U.S.  Why green?  Well, I suppose several of the allied states are fairly repressive and, in a few cases, openly fundamentalist, but this would make a hash of the “moderation” vs. “extremism” scheme that is supposed to define who is on either side of the “curtain.” 

The only similarity between what is happening today and the Cold War is that both do involve containment doctrines of a sort, which is to say that both situations involve adversarial relations between Washington and another power.  That’s it.  Before the invasion, standard U.S. policy in this part of the region was “dual containment,” targeting both Iraq and Iran.  Now that containing Iraq is not in the picture any longer, containment has focused entirely on Iran.  Obviously.  The recently announced weapons sales to the GCC states are a new part of this long-standing policy of anti-Iranian containment.  In other words, the only thing remotely Cold War-like in Iran policy has been going on for years before 9/11, and most of our Iran policy is not really anything like U.S. Soviet policy during the Cold War. 

Administration Iran policy is far more of a “forward” strategy and far more confrontational than the Truman Doctrine was towards the Soviets, and it actively seeks the deposition of the current regime where containment doctrine dictated holding the line against the other side’s aggressive foreign policy.  The biggest flaw in the comparison is the idea that Iraq’s government is essential to the “Green Curtain,” which would be like saying, if we wanted to pursue this comparison a bit further, that the Ukrainian SSR was a vital ally in holding back the Soviet menace.

The article is not entirey clear whether the “Green Curtain” notion is actually the way that the administration conceives of what it is doing, or if this is Wright’s projection of inapt comparisons onto their standard anti-Iranian policy.  Both are quite possible.  The administration’s fondness for inappropriate and ridiculous historical analogies is well-known.  If these bad analogies are still infecting the policymaking process, as they probably are, it is important that they are met with as many challenges and rebuttals as possible.

Hey, Fred, Where’s The Cattle?

Fred Thompson plans to announce Tuesday that his committee to test the waters for a Republican presidential campaign raised slightly more than $3 million in June, substantially less than some backers had hoped, according to Republican sources. ~The Politico

Via Jason Zengerle

The funniest part of the article comes a little later:

He attracted support from such top-shelf party figures [bold mine-DL] as Mary Matalin, Liz Cheney, George P. Bush and other GOP stalwarts who saw him as a potential Hillary Clinton slayer.

Not to be flippant, but since when have these people been “top-shelf party figures”?  (If these are top-shelf party figures in the GOP, today’s GOP really is in much worse shape than I thought.)  A Cheney loyalist and failed former campaign manager, Cheney’s daughter and the President’s nephew do not constitute a band of power brokers.  This is the quintessential band of courtiers, filled with servants and connected First and Second Family members.  These people are there to show that Bush and Cheney have been willing to give Fred their indirect backing, and bizarrely Fred, like McCain, has accepted the poisoned chalice.   These supporters have been thrown at Fred in the same way that the old Bush ’04 campaign team was thrown at McCain.  The latter really worked well, didn’t it?  Now that one of Fred’s new co-campaign managers is Spence Abraham (you all remember Spence, don’t you?) and he has Larry Lindsey as his economics advisor, it looks as if the first-term band is getting back together!

David Corn has a pretty good critique of Fred the Neocon, but he doesn’t delve deeply enough for my taste.  You don’t have to go back to early days of the Iraq war to find Fred’s sympathy with aggressive, interventionist foreign policy.  He has been declaring it for all to hear for the past few months.  His recent London speech is a good place to start, and one of his foreign policy consultants (her name starts with a ‘c’ and ends with “heney”) is another clue.  Fred is, as I have called him before, a kind of “deep fried Cheney.”  Corn is absolutely correct that neocons can have no complaints about the four leading GOP candidates.  Come to think of it, they cannot really have many complaints about any of the candidates, except for Ron Paul (obviously).

What is Washington to do in the dilemma of two friends battling each other on an unwanted new front in Iraq? The surprising answer was given in secret briefings on Capitol Hill last week by Eric S. Edelman, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and now under secretary of defense for policy. A Foreign Service officer who once was U.S. ambassador to Turkey, he revealed to lawmakers plans for a covert operation of U.S. Special Forces helping the Turks neutralize the PKK. They would behead the guerrilla organization by helping Turkey get rid of PKK leaders that they have targeted for years.

Edelman’s listeners were stunned. Wasn’t this risky? He responded he was sure of success, adding that the U.S. role could be concealed and always would be denied. Even if all this is true, some of the briefed lawmakers left wondering whether this was a wise policy for handling the beleaguered Kurds who had been betrayed so often by U.S. governments in years past.

The plan shows that hard experience has not dissuaded President Bush from attempting difficult ventures employing the use of force. On the contrary, two of the most intrepid supporters of the Iraq intervention — John McCain and Lindsey Graham — were surprised by Bush during a recent meeting with him. When they shared their impressions with colleagues, they commented on how unconcerned the president seemed. That may explain his willingness to embark on a questionable venture against the Kurds. ~Robert Novak

Let me guess that this will not make Peter Galbraith very happy.  Reihan said a mouthful when he wrote:

An American presence in Kurdistan will be more than a gesture of goodwill; it will likely be very costly.   

What backers of the Kurdish option (i.e., redeployment of U.S. forces to Kurdistan) and opponents have both not really been expecting is for the administration to use force in Kurdistan against the PKK.  Backers of the redeployment idea don’t want to upset the Kurdish political leadership, with whom they sympathise, and opponents or skeptics of the idea (including myself) have assumed that any U.S. military presence in Kurdistan would function as a screen for the PKK, not as a hammer to be used to smash them.  While the proposed action against the PKK may be as potentially explosive as a redeployment to the region (in this case, it will be the peshmerga, not the Turkish army, we will have to worry about more), it probably exposes U.S. forces to fewer threats in the north. 

Some distinctions need to kept in mind.   Novak writes of a venture “against the Kurds,” but it isn’t aimed indiscriminately at “the Kurds” and specifically focuses on one band of Kurds that, officially, the KRG condemns.  An Irishman from the Republic might broadly sympathise with his coreligionists in Ulster and could still refuse to endorse the methods of republican terrorists.  In theory, the KRG attempts to hew to this line of deploring mistreatment of Kurds in Turkey without endorsing terrorism against Turks.  Whether they will hold to that line should joint U.S.-Turkish operations start hitting PKK bases is less clear.  Needless to say, should something in this covert operation go awry and local opinion turns sharply against the U.S. (especially if there should be very many civilian casualties), the government may find that it has no good place inside Iraq’s borders where it can redeploy U.S. forces.

It is all the more remarkable that things have reached this sorry state now, when the Turkish government is probably more favourable to Kurdish rights and the public use of the Kurdish language than at any time in living memory (which isn’t saying much, but still) and when a sizeable number of independent Kurdish deputies were elected to the parliament in the last election.

Egemen Bagis, foreign policy advisor to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Turkish forces were prepared to mount operations against Kurdish PKK fighters who had taken refuge in Iraq, because the US had failed to intervene.

“We are hoping we will not have to do it. We are hoping that our allies will start doing something, but if they don’t we don’t have many options,” he said.

“Our allies should help us with the threat, which is clear and present. If an ally is not helping you, you either question their integrity or their ability.” ~The Daily Telegraph

Thank goodness the reform-minded, “pro-Western” Erdogan government was returned with a large parliamentary majority.  Otherwise, we would have had to worry about U.S.-Turkish tensions increasing over Kurdistan.  Ahem.

The time may soon be upon us when the “redeploy to Kurdistan” solution favoured by Galbraith, Sullivan, et al. will be like every other Iraq policy fix to date: it will start far too late and will have missed the window of opportunity where it might have achieved some of the goals envisioned by the advocates of the change.  The other problem with the “Kurdish option” is that it was never intended to be a redeployment that included the goal of curtailing the activities of the PKK; the redeployment would have been, and would have been seen as, a transparent case of putting Americans in between the Turks and Kurds to prevent the Turks from entering Kurdistan.  Such a deployment would be a deterrent against immediate action, at the expense of good relations with Ankara, but it would leave the Turks with no means of redress for their grievances.

Incidentally, the electorate that just voted AKP a big majority is the same electorate that doesn’t much care for the U.S., or at least U.S. government policy:

A poll last week by the US-based Pew organisation found that 72 per cent of Turks regarded terrorism as the key issue facing the country. The same poll showed that only 9 per cent of Turks had a positive view of the US, with more than three quarters concerned that the Americans could pose a military threat to their country. Many Turks believe that the US has been supporting the Kurds.

Is it just me, or is this Yglesias post about his first ever visit to West Virginia this weekend really strange?  I suppose it’s really not that important, but it strikes me as a little unusual that someone who has been living in D.C. for years would have never gone to, or at least through, West Virginia at some point at least once.  This jumped out at me since I have driven through WV at least six times in the last ten years, and I was usually starting a bit farther away than Washington.  A New Yorker-inspiredjoke might be appropriate at this time.

Both Obama and Paul are internet-driven candidacies, crammed with small donations and hyper-enthusiastic volunteers. They are also representative of a budding and clear revival of what can only be called neo-isolationism. And they have the wind in their sails. ~Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan’s discussion of this “neo-isolationism,” if you want to call it that, has some interesting points, but I draw the line at the inclusion of Obama.  If he is an “isolationist,” the word really doesn’t mean anything anymore (not that it means much).  (It doesn’t really apply to Ron Paul, either, since he thinks the government should foster trade and diplomatic relations around the world–almost no one believes that America should actually be “isolated” from the rest of the world.)  Here is Obama a few months ago:

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.

I keep citing this quote because it expresses so well the tiresome glibness and excessive ambition of Obama.  Obama takes a view that is essentially no different from Bush’s Second Inaugural in its key assumption that American security (or freedom) is dependent on the security (or freedom) of everyone else on earth.  If it is evidence of madcap idealism and near-utopianism in Bush, it is certainly the same with Obama.  Obama is not a candidate who pledges a policy of “opting out,” as Sullivan describes it.  He pledges the exact opposite–he stresses, as a progressive internationalist would do, interdependency and the need for greater involvement abroad.  Obama would probably also argue that involvement overseas needs to be done in different ways and more often by way of international institutions than has been the case in the past few years.  Whether or not his supporters rally to him because of this or because of his opposition to the Iraq war, Obama himself does not represent anything like a “neo-isolationism.” 

Incidentally, it is hilarious to listen to standard GOP attacks on antiwar Democrats that use such words as “McGovernite” to criticise their adversaries, since there is no major Democratic candidate who espouses anything remotely like a “come home, America” platform.

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s op-ed in the Post makes about as much sense as all of those teary-eyed columns written last summer about how poor Joe Lieberman was being “purged” from his party by “extremists.”  It hails from the same ideological universe: this is the place where being “moderate” and “centrist” consists in adopting the most irresponsible and dangerous establishment ideas as your guiding principles and refusing to yield no matter how much evidence there is that these ideas are horribly wrong.  As a “centrist,” you believe that these ideas are inherently good, regardless of whether they make any sense, because they are not held by large numbers of people from both parties.  This proves that the ideas are sufficiently high-minded and unsullied by anything as unimportant as constituents’ interests, informed understanding of the relevant problems or effective methods of addressing the problem at hand.  It is not “extreme,” and it is reformist–this is enough.  It also involves being open to “bipartisanship,” which is the means by which the horrible “centrist” ideas are implemented.

For “centrists,” partisanship can be found in anything and everything that thwarts the “centrist” consensus.  Moderation is defined by adherence to that general consensus–in this way Secretary Gates, Negroponte and Zoellick can be described as “seasoned moderates,” even though they have been active participants in foreign and trade policies that could hardly be described as moderate.  Before he was U.N. Ambassador in the run-up to the invasion, Negroponte was an old Cold War Central America hand involved in some of the shadier operations down there and long before he was in the Pentagon Gates was the CIA deputy director tied up in Iran-Contra and someone who advocated bombing Nicaragua.  Whatever you think about the intervention in Nicaragua, Gates was not one of the “moderates” then and he still isn’t today.  It is only when compared with Rumsfeld that Gates has appeared as the steady, sane alternative.  Zoellick, in his former role as U.S. Trade Representative, was a leading cheerleader for the Doha round, which seems very sensible and “moderate” to the establishment and which strikes many of the rest of us as anything but that.

Another example of “bipartisanship” feted by Slaughter is CNAS, a think tank whose board includes a Who’s Who of undesirable old Clinton-era Cabinet members and the odd refugee from the Bush administration (Armitage).  There is one slight surprise–Gen. Newbold, the only one of the anti-Rumsfeld retired generals who retired before the invasion because he would not participate in it, is also on the board there.  Let’s just say he is keeping distinctly odd company, when the think tank’s advisors include the perpetually wrong Michael O’Hanlon (how does that guy still get taken seriously?).

The Bolton and Wurmser examples are funny.  Of course Bolton and Wurmser object to diplomatic tracks with North Korea and Iran.  They are people who always oppose diplomatic tracks with such regimes.  This is not an example of “partisan” pushback, but an intra-Republican fight between hegemonists and those more inclined towards “realism.”  Further, these criticisms came as the result of changes in administration policy, and not as a response to bipartisan talking shops or the appointment of Bob Gates to be SecDef.  For these things to be related, you would have to be able to show that Bolton and Wurmser said what they said as a protest against the appointment of the supposedly “seasoned moderates” to key positions.  Except that this doesn’t make any sense, since two of the “moderates” already served the administration in one capacity or another and the nomination of Gates was met with relatively little opposition on the right.

Tony Smith’s op-ed made a good deal of sense, since many neoliberals have been enablers of neocon foreign policy.  He did not say that they were the only villains in the story, but was drawing attention to the shocking staying power of a foreign policy view on the left, embodied in the DLC and its think tank, PPI, that has been shown to be woefully misguided.  These DLC types were practicing bipartisanship like it was going out of style, and it was bipartisanship in the service of a bad cause.  Lind’s argument was of an entirely different kind, and had little to do with bipartisanship or partisanship–he was criticising a tendency among some prominent liberal internationalists to embrace democratising, imperialistic and interventionist views.  His point was that these foreign policy figures were tainting liberal internationalism’s supposedly good name by taking it in dangerous, militant and unsustainable directions.  As I made clear at the time, I don’t think Lind’s own position makes much sense, but his argument concerned an intra-liberal quarrel that had to do with the merits of democracy promotion and interventionism as such.  As it happens, the people he labels “heretics” are reliable Democratic “centrists” on foreign policy (Ivo Daalder, for example), which is why Lind can be labeled as a “partisan”–because he criticises prominent “centrists.”

All in all, Slaughter’s op-ed is one more installment in the Post‘s never-ending series dedicated to the idea that nothing is so wrong with Washington or America that more Beltway collaboration and insiderism can’t set it right.