Starting tomorrow, a massive group blog headed by the one and only Reihan will take over where the team of Douthat and Salam left off at The American Scene.  The site will be redesigned, there will be a cast of thousands (okay, more like a dozen or so) and, most importantly, it will still retain Reihan’s idiosyncratic and fun style.  Along with many far more worthy, entertaining and interesting colleagues, I will also be joining the Scene.  Some of the faces, or rather names, will be familiar to you, and some will be relatively new or unknown, but I think it should be a very good mix.  In his characteristically broad and eclectic way, Reihan has drawn in friends and associates from across the spectrum and from across different areas of interest.  The new American Scene–it’s not just for policy geeks and indy rock fans anymore!

All over Europe, the politics of identity threatens to trump the economics of individualism. ~Niall Ferguson

Is it possible that there is a connection between the leak in 2002 about the highly classified U.S. intelligence program — which the paper chose to publish despite the fact that it knew it was creating trouble for U.S. intelligence — and the recent arrests of Esfandiari and the others?  ~Gabriel Schoenfeld

I can see a reasonable argument for why it was probably not the best idea to have a big news story on a CIA recruiting operation, but it is a bit rich that we’re supposed to think that one newspaper story did more to put Iranian-American visitors under suspicion of espionage than, oh, the last five years of official sabre-rattling, “axis of evil” speeches, and loose talk about the use of tactical nukes…and a little thing called the invasion of Iraq.  Tehran might have deduced from these other things that the United States government was going to try to infiltrate and spy on their country quite apart from anything they learned in the newspapers here.  In Schoenfeld’s view, it is presumably not Washington’s belligerence and threats that would make Tehran suspicious of Americans in Iran, so why would a single newspaper story have made that much difference?  If government policy does not provoke hostile responses–if anti-American hostility just sort of happens for no rhyme or reason–what could one newspaper story do? 

If Tehran is so paranoid about the CIA, and I don’t doubt that it probably is (unlike Americans, people in other countries seem to be under the impression that the CIA is competent and good at what it does), why do we need to look any farther than the unreasonable, unrealistic anxieties of Iran’s government?  Surely, the Times story should have been confirmation of the appalling limits of the CIA’s reach into Iran.  If I were an Iranian government official, I would feel very relieved that this was the best the “Great Satan” could manage.  It might even make me lower my guard.  Who knows?  

Could it be that Schoenfeld takes the Iranian regime to be a relatively rational state actor when it allows him to score points against the supposedly subversive media?  Besides, to hear the Commentary crowd tell it, Iran is a totalitarian nightmare state filled with the very vapours of Hell (this is only a very slight exaggeration of what they and their allies say), so why would they expect there to be a rational reason for the regime’s behaviour that could be traced to a newspaper story?  They are not exactly the people who believe that activist U.S. foreign policy has adverse consequences for us, so why would they assume that U.S. journalism has adverse consequences for Americans overseas?  It sounds a bit like blaming American journalism first! 

On a more serious note, as anyone who reads the papers these days knows, Tehran is cracking down on everyone in the country, and has been tightening the screws on the population for many months, and for the last couple of years it has been an unusually poor time to be an American visiting Iran given the heated rhetoric of Ahmadinejad and steady efforts in some parts of the American press to gin up a new war fever against Iran.  Weak, repressive regimes also tend to be rather jumpy about foreigners, especially citizens of major powers whose governments have made it clear that they intend the destruction and/or overthrow of the regime.  It is quite possible that the causes of the current crackdown and the general anxiety about American spies that Tehran must have (given that we have two major military deployments on either side of their country and a small armada in the Persian Gulf) would have resulted in the arrests of these citizens in any case. 

Look at this another way.  Instead of giving the Times grief for reporting news, however unwise the decision may well have been, we should ask the obvious question: this is the CIA’s idea of developing human intelligence “assets”?  No wonder we never know what’s going on in other countries, since the cunning plan for extracting information from countries such as Iran is to ask ethnic Iranians to spy on the old country.  This is not exactly an unexpected way of gathering information in another country.  The Iranian government must already presume every American visiting is a potential spy; this story simply confirmed what they were already going to assume anyway.  Note that this is another bad consequence of maintaining a sanctions regime that makes the presence of Americans in Iran highly unusual and therefore that much more subject to official scrutiny and paranoia, since the reasons for Americans being in Iran today are very few. 

You pretty much have to laugh when you read this bit, though it is actually quite depressing:

The article explained just how the agency hoped to use emigres to get at their relatives in Iran. “If family members trust each other, they’ll tell you things you can’t know otherwise, can’t get [from satellites]. If you’re really lucky, you might recruit somebody involved in the nuclear-weapons program,” was how one former CIA officer explained it.

Sure, Cousin Mahmoud might even take you on a tour of Natanz! 

The question we should really be asking at this point is: why on earth should the public have ever believed intelligence claims about Iraqi WMDs when it comes via unreliable channels similar to those being encouraged here?  For that matter, given the still-parlous state of our human intelligence resources in Iran, why should we trust government claims about Iranian weapons programs now?

Just as the diversity within the communist world ultimately made it less threatening, so the many varieties of Islam weaken its ability to coalesce into a single, monolithic foe. It would be even less dangerous if Western leaders recognized this and worked to emphasize such distinctions. Rather than speaking of a single worldwide movement—which absurdly lumps together Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India, Shiite warlords in Lebanon and Sunni jihadists in Egypt—we should be emphasizing that all these groups are distinct, with differing agendas, enemies and friends. ~Fareed Zakaria

That soundsfamiliar.  So the question for Romney, Giuliani, et al., is this: why do you want to strengthen our enemies and fight the war on their terms?  Why does Romney want to help the cause of jihadism with his blundering remarks that “it’s about Shia and Sunni”?  Why does Giuliani want to take us into a jihadi-laid trap?

Our research for Democracy Corps finds that a majority of voters are looking for an America that promotes the values of strong community and a sense of togetherness over individualism and self-reliance. ~Stanley Greenberg

Via Ross

The critical flaw here is that Greenberg still seems to think (in spite of the data discussed later in the piece) that preference for strong community has something to do with preference for a more activist state.  If those on the right have ceded the language of community and solidarity to liberals or allowed them to define it in terms of government action, we have given up on one of the most enduring and powerful elements of conservatism.   

In the battle between solidarity and dislocation, conservatives should naturally be on the side of the former, and it should be conservatives who benefit from the public’s interest in “strong community” and even, yes, “a sense of togetherness.”  (For some reason, the latter sounds much less ridiculous when you call it solidarity.)  Conservatism’s “failure” has been that conservatives have defined themselves or allowed themselves to be defined as individualists and advocates for the interests of the self.  A conservatism of place and virtue has very little to do with these things.  These numbers suggest that a conservatism that is both skeptical of government action and that also encourages the building up of community life and a politics of solidarity would fare very well.  It would not be the slash-and-burn, “every man for himself” anti-government style of certain libertarians, nor would it be an endorsement of the effects of “creative destruction.”  Settling people in a location, a place, not dislocating people through the constant flux of what some might call “cosmopolitan dynamism” and what we call social insanity, is the conservative way forward.  This is necessarily very general at the moment, but it is the appropriate way that is neither an accommodation with the central state nor an embrace of self-defeating individualism that only ultimately ushers in more government regulation later.

Under the provocative headline, “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)’s personal financial and political ties to India,” the three-page document attacks his leading opponent point-by-point for her allegedly too-cozy ties with businesses and business leaders who are profiting from the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to the Asian nation.

Critics called it “nativist” and “a racist, xenophobic hit,” and the chairman of the United States India Political Action Committee sent a letter to Obama’s headquarters in Chicago decrying the dissemination of “hurtful stereotypes.” ~Eric Zorn

In the case of Hillary v. Obama, experience turns out to be most useful as a proxy for the vast sociological chasm between the two camps. On the one hand, many of Hillary’s most loyal supporters lack college degrees and toil away at low-skilled jobs. Now if you happen to be a poorly educated worker who’s nonetheless eking out a decent living, no prospect is more alarming than the thought of losing out one day because someone a little younger, a little flashier, leapt ahead of you in line. There is a comforting order to the world you know. And that order demands that people pay their dues before getting promoted. The alternative is a bitter competition between you and your co-workers–and who knows how you’ll fare in that?

In the eyes of working-class Democrats, Hillary is someone who’s paid her dues–first in the White House, where she weathered a terrific, eight-year assault from conservatives, then as the scrupulously dependable senator from New York. If, after all this, Hillary doesn’t win the nomination, then the system they’ve bought into their entire working lives will have been turned upside down. ~Noam Scheiber

How does Obama’s anti-Hillary, Indian-bashing memo relate to what we might call the “seniority” question?  It’s pretty straightforward, actually.  It is classic “upper-middle” v. “lower-middle” politicking (over to you, Reihan).  Obama has something of a record of opposing free trade deals that Clinton’s base of supporters tends to dislike, but for the reasons laid out by Mr. Scheiber these people take a dim view of the relative youngster cutting to the front of the line.  Therefore, the social profile of his base of supporters matches up rather poorly with his policy views, which are actually more in line with the policies that tend to be preferred by the people w ho are more inclined, for entirely different reasons, to support Clinton. 

Clinton, meanwhile, has had a history of backing free trade deals and has apparently done very nicely for herself as well in the process.  The D-Punjab memo was aimed at highlighting Clinton’s hostility to the interests of her political base, while highlighting Obama’s slightly better record on opposing outsourcing and free trade.  Unfortunately, Obama keeps stumbling (in this case, offending Democratic desisall over America and making very negative headlines in India) because of the very inexperience and overeagerness that make him seem too green and too ambitious to the very people he is trying to reach.  In the end, he loses all around: he appears unduly hostile to foreigners and trade, which hurts him with his more globalist, Kumbaya-singing base, he sullies himself with the typical “old style” attack politics that he was supposedly going to transcend in his hyperean moral purity, he ends up having to back off of the attack so as to avoid completely losing supporters in the Indian-American community, and the attempt conveys an image of opportunism that doesn’t sit well with the voters he is trying to win over.  In the end, he did not even see the attack through to undermine Clinton with the targeted audience of lower middle class workers.  As this episode reveals, the question is not whether Obama is theoretically electable, but whether he is actually capable of running a national election campaign.  Never having run a really competitive campaign before on such a large scale, he is bound to make mistakes like this one. 

In the end, because he has boxed himself into the corner with his high-minded “transformative” message, attacks on other candidates will be even harder for him to do successfully, which means that there will be more of these errors or miscalculations in the meantime.  Obama’s original attack on Clinton makes good sense, but it is one he either has to stand by or outsource to an independent group.  Associating himself with the attack and then abandoning it make him appear indecisive and unready–the exact opposite of the image he has to project to be competitive.  Yet another reason why it was a mistake for him to run this time around.

At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design. ~Barack Obama

And at every opportunity, the Democrats and their allies have obliged by disrespecting Christian “values” and disliking traditional Christian churches, and have made a point of demonising and belittling conservative Christians because they care about, among many other things, abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.

As if to confirm my earlier, mocking references to the similarities between the piety of Evan Almighty and Obama’s speeches, Obama also said:

But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart.

He even managed to figure that out without building a boat by hand.  It’s a miracle!

We are not living a replay of 1938.

———-

But if one sees our current problems in less apocalyptic terms, then another kind of “trahison des clercs” comes into view: the blind cheering on of a sometimes foolish military power embarked on unnecessary wars that cost more lives than they were intended to save. ~Ian Buruma

This article seems to read at least partly as a riposte to Paul Berman’s virtually novel-length essay on Tariq Ramadan in The New Republic earlier this month, in which he mainly lays into Buruma.  Even if this isn’t intended as a reply to Berman’s arguments about the confluence of Islamism and fascism, it is mercifully much shorter and also makes a good deal more sense.  At the end, I am also not left with the question, “So what?”  Buruma makes many of the right points that should encourage everyone to keep the scope of the threat from jihadis in perspective.  Misdiagnosis is a barrier to coming up with the proper remedy, and for years neocons and their confreres have been badly misdiagnosing the problem of jihadism.  A first step to understanding the nature of the threat is to stop talking about fascism.

Tony Blair’s hard line on Iraq alienated three Roman Catholics who worked for him in Downing Street. All three, who were experts in foreign affairs, were deeply worried by what they saw as the rush to war in 2003, The Independent has learnt. ~The Independent

There is something strangely depressing about this news.  It is somehow less surprising that the unreflective and incurious Mr. Bush went ahead with the invasion of Iraq, when he was surrounded by either secular careerists or fellow evangelicals with no great grounding in ideas derived from the thought of the Fathers, and further encouraged by Catholic neoconservatives who provided the moral and intellectual fig leafs to assuage any doubts.  Likewise, while it seemed to be especially misguided that the then-head of the Union in Germany, Angela Merkel, backed the war despite the Vatican’s clear objections to the conflict, Merkel’s own East German Protestant background made some sense of her indifference to these objections.  There is something a bit more disturbing about Blair, who should hardly have been entirely ignorant of or completely indifferent to the words of Pope John Paul II or then-Cardinal Ratzinger on these matters given the background of his wife, the upbringing of his children and so on, and who had the advice of such skeptical Catholic foreign policy experts, nonetheless leading the way for the invasion.  It is no less disturbing that he is now apparently coming to Rome as if it were the most normal thing, while an aggressive war that he has helped to wage has been destroying the Catholic and other Christian communities of Iraq.  (There was also his endorsement of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon last year, which is another post in its own right.)  See, for instance, the fate of Fr. Ragheed Ganni and three of his deacons, who were slain in Mosul by Muslims.  Their story is described by Pat Buchanan and discussed in multiple posts by Andrea Kirk Assaf.  There you can learn more about one episode of the new Christian martyrs of Iraq.  The blood of martyrs is indeed the seed of the Church, but there is something just a little unseemly about a man who has helped to unleash the slaughter against his Christian brethren convert to a given confession when he is at least indrectly responsible for inflicting suffering and martyrdom on that confession’s members.  It would be almost as bizarre as Bill Clinton becoming Orthodox.

And, returning to Kosovo, he [Blair] insisted that the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states must give way in the face of genocide or ethnic cleansing. ~James Traub

Yes, he did insist on that, which would have really had something to do with Kosovo had either one of those things been happening there.  Since they weren’t, it was a uniquely bad example for the idea he was defending, but then the intervention in Kosovo was fairly unique in its total lack of justification.

As for Blair’s supposed rhetorical gifts, I have to say that I have always been unimpressed.  There is no doubt that he is an effective speaker as far as the needs of politics go, but no one will ever confuse him with the great orators of the past.

Then there is this silliness:

More than that, he believed that forcibly disarming the Iraqi dictator was wholly of a piece with the decision to confront Milosevic, another tyrant who posed a threat to his own people and to the West [bold mine-DL].

This is a particularly egregious bit of revisonism by Mr. Traub.  Nobody ever seriously tried to claim that Milosevic was a threat to the West, certainly not in any military or political sense.  Hence the need for prattling on about “values” and human rights.  According to Blair and friends, it was no longer sufficient in a world with Milosevices to defend concrete interests and provide for your own security, but you also had to look out for what other governments were doing internally and in their immediate neighbourhoods.  Sovereignty had to give way to “human rights,” because, as the humanitarian interventionists saw it, there were no longer meaningful external security threats directed at the West, and it was now time for the West to police the internal workings of other states.  Truly, no one claimed Milosevic to be a threat to the West, except in the most roundabout way that he challenged our “values,” which is another way of saying, “This government is not doing anything to us, but we really don’t like it anyway and want to find some reason to get rid of it.”