Marc Ambinder points us to Tommy Thompson’s campaign radio ad running in Iowa.  He outlines his three-point plan for “winning the peace in Iraq.”   

He says that the “Al-Maliki government” should vote on whether we should remain there.  Of course, the Maliki government already certifies the U.N.-authorised presence of the “multinational” force; members of the Iraqi parliament are working to reject that presence later this year, but so long as Maliki gets the final say the outcome of this process has already been determined.  So Step 1, which sounds good, may change nothing at all, since Maliki has been “legitimising” our presence there for some time. 

Step 2 is to have 18 “state governments” in Iraq where “each major ethnic group can elect their own people.”  Minor ethnic groups in some provinces are evidently out of luck.  Rather incredibly, Thompson claims that “this would bring an end to much of the strife that currently divides Iraq.”  Why?  Because national elections also helped improve relations between sects and ethnic groups?  We might call this part of the plan federalising sectarianism.  Provincial elections are already on the Iraqi parliament’s agenda, but like everything else it has been stalled and seems unlilkely to move forward anytime soon.  So, in fact, step 2 is not new and may actually be a very bad idea. 

Step 3: “they must share their oil profits with every person in Iraq.”  Well, this would be ideal.  The hydrocarbon law remains stalled in the Iraqi parliament as well.  It is interesting to know what Thompson’s priorities for “winning the peace” are.  These points do demonstrate some minimal understanding of the problems of Iraq, which puts him way ahead of many of his rivals for the nomination (e.g., Giuliani, Romney), who think it shows expertise to be able to say the word Shia.  The problem is that Thompson’s proposals seem to mirror the current strategy, if so it can be called, and give no indication that the administration is already trying (and so far failing) to get these things done.  How would President Tommy Thompson do things differently?  We don’t know.  Will Iowa caucus-goers care that his plan is vague and insufficient?  Maybe not.  It might be a breath of fresh air for Iowans to hear someone besides Ron Paul talk about Iraq without once mentioning a caliphate or fascism.

Not to belabor my regular point about keeping at least one blood-soaked American promise, it’s worth reiterating that the ice-cold realist question remains whether or not independence for Kosovo is likely to destabilize various awkward world regions where ‘breakaway’ and ‘separatist’ statelets (Transnistria, Abkhazia), aspiring statelets (South Ossetia), and has-been states (Taiwan) might take one look at an independent Kosovo and start agitating their way into International Crises. I submit this is not so. Kosovo is, like Iraq, a planetary aberration with a recent history too exceptional and twisted to merit any kind of comparison [bold mine-DL]. Kosovo has roughly nothing in common with any other zone of disgruntled sovereigntists — with the possible exception of Kurdistan. But no amount of sovereignty for Kosovo will move the United States or anyone else an inch toward support for a Kurdish state complete with flag and UN microphone. ~James Poulos

Fortunately, no matter what Mr. Bush says to his adoring fans in Albania, Kosovo independence is not guaranteed.  Obviously, the Russians are opposed for their own reasons, to which James alludes above, and there are even Albanians in Kosovo unhappy with the deal because it requires a continued European presence for several years.  Albanians in Kosovo want independence immediately, and the Russians will never let it happen.  Even with strong EU support for the separation of Kosovo, Mr. Bush has all of the clout of a wet noodle with Moscow right now.  This suggests impasse.

The bad precedent Kosovo independence would set has, in a sense, already been set with East Timor.  In an extremely bad move, East Timor was recognised as an independent country, which has hardly dampened separatist causes elsewhere within Indonesia.  It took a tsunami to quiet the Acehnese revolt.  There is fundamentally nothing, not even post-tsunami relief efforts, that is going to make Acehnese rebels more resigned to remaining part of Indonesia over the long term.  Timor Leste’s success can only encourage the Acehnese, whose state is hardly less viable as a polity than East Timor.  This is the sort of real danger that independence for territories or provinces of existing states has for international stability: the recent success of small, basically non-viable states to become independent will encourage more of the same in that country’s own region.  In Kosovo’s case, independence will be one step towards either joining Albania or a move to agitate for the “liberation” of their fellow Albanians inside Greece and Macedonia.  Forget about Abkhazia for a moment, or an even more serious separatist question, that of Kashmir.  Independence for Kosovo will have definite destabilising effects in the Balkans (to say nothing of the playground for narco- and human traffickers and worse that such a mini-state will become).  From the perspective of European law enforcement and security, European support for Kosovo independence is insane.  If stability in the Balkans is supposed to be an American goal, undermining that stability seems unwise.

Indeed, East Timor serves as a good warning to all who would elevate tiny quasi-polities to the level of independent nations that this is most undesirable.  These new states are inherently unstable and, even with the enormous gas reserves theoretically at Timor Leste’s disposal, horrendously underdeveloped.  Even if they should acquire nominal independence they will effectively be dependencies of the United Nations, regional powers and the relevant regional organisations for years and perhaps decades to come.  Independence does not solve the problem, nor does it put the question behind us, but instead makes it the business of the major powers for the foreseeable future.  Nothing is actually gained by most players by granting independence to these mini-states.  The major powers would agree to it either to score points against governments that the “international community” dislikes or promote a new nation as an exercise in nation-building. 

As for the exceptional nature of Kosovo, I respectfully submit to my learned colleague that its situation is all together too typical of the post-Cold War period.  The independence of Eritrea springs to mind as a good example of a case where the rest of the world unwisely said, “Oh, what’s the harm?  There will be one more independent nation to enrich the display of flags on First Avenue!  What could go wrong?”  Tens of thousands of Eritrean-Ethiopian war dead later, Eritrean independence doesn’t seem like a very bright idea.  As the two states’ recent fishing in troubled Somali waters shows, recognising the independence of a state that will inevitably be a persistent rival and enemy of a neighbour is a good way to make sure that there are more regional conflicts and crises rather than fewer.

Separatist and rebel causes all over the world, especially in India (Kashmiris, Nagas, Naxalites, etc.) and Sri Lanka (Tamil Tigers), can only be encouraged by the international recognition of Kosovo.  The point is not that any of these separatists will receive the support of major powers to gain independence, but that they will take the example of Kosovo as a model and will act in such a way to try to achieve the same result.  This means an increase in violence and the undermining of any political solution for these various rebellions. 

The Kosovo intervention, bad as it was, was not done so that Kosovo could be independent.  Washington does not owe Kosovo Albanians anything more.  Autonomy will have to be enough, as no one else has any real interest in their independence.

Republicans should’ve beaten the Dems to this long ago. A whipping operation with an ounce of discipline could have nipped this entire thing in the bud simply by telling the President in public what he failed to hear privately: Gonzales is a marshmallow with eyes and hair and ought to be dismissed accordingly. He is a witless oaf at Justice and a lead-footed albatross round the neck of the Republican Party. ~James Poulos

I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us. ~Rudy Giuliani

James Joyner reasonably asks: “What the hell does that mean, exactly?”  Mr. Joyner goes through Giuliani’s “twelve commitments,” all of which are equally vague, and asks the right questions in response.  There is also a rhetorical problem with Giuliani’s re-branding of the “war on terror.”  If it is “the terrorists’ war on us,” this automatically gives the sense that we are already on the defensive, which renders his warnings about Democrats’ putting us on defense meaningless.  Ignore for a moment how simplistic and ridiculous this sort of thinking is (should we rename the drug war “drugs’ war on us”?), and just note that Giuliani’s first act to “keep us on offense” is to adopt a name that carries the connotation of being on the defensive.  Rhetorically, it is a total failure.  It conveys an idea that directly contradicts the message that Giuliani wants to send.  If he can’t even manage to get the phrasing right, why would anyone think that he knows how to handle actual policy challenges?  

It is amusing to think that all the polls and many pundits have held up Giuliani as the frontrunner, and yet he has not even made a formal announcement and has not given a single policy speech worth mentioning.  If these “commitments” are what he will be campaigning on for the next several months, he won’t remain in front of the pack for very long.

Democrats have opened up as much as a 15-point lead in party identification, a gap not seen since the Nixon-Ford days of the 1970s. ~Frank Donatelli

The opening of this gap has probably been the most significant change on the political scene taking place over the last couple of years.  Even in the absence of Democratic fundraising advantages thus far this cycle, this could have a devastating effect on Republicans in Congress in ’08.  As I said last month:

As Clausewitz might have said if he were a political blogger, “Voter identification is to fundraising as three to one.”

The gap is significant because it reflects the morale of party regulars and hints at future voting habits.  Obviously, the gap occurs and then widens when one side is energised and the other side is dispirited.  The latter needs a nominee that can inspire voters and generate tremendous enthusiasm.  The problem is that the political environment is so poor for the GOP that very few politicians are capable of generating enough enthusiasm to make up for this deficit in party ID.

Hundreds of single straws, each in its own right not strong enough to effect change, could quickly become a broom. ~Natan Sharansky

Yes, Sharansky then talks about “sweeping” away the tyrannies of the world.  Very clever.  But there is a small problem here: a bundle of straws does not make a broom, but a pile of straw.   

This strikes me as the perfect metaphor for why democracy activists in many countries around the world labour and will continue to labour in vain: all the dissident “straws” in the world are useless without the social and political foundations needed to make a dissenting political vision into an effective, reasonably just government.  Countries that lack a political culture that instills respect for the rule of law, transparent and accountable institutions and basic constitutional protections for citizens against state abuses are not going to be able to sustain whatever political changes these dissidents manage to make.

Reportedly, it took Mr. Sharansky’s personal intercession to get Mr. Bush to come to Prague against the advice of the State Department, a depressing indication of where things stand with what used to be called “the freedom agenda.” ~Bret Stephens

What’s actually depressing is the idea that Mr. Bush would choose to listen to Sharansky rather than to the advice of the State Department.  The people at State probably wanted to save him the embarrassment of giving the speech that he gave.  They were probably trying to avoid occasions where Mr. Bush would publicly chide American allies.  It’s not as if our government is overwhelmed with expressions of goodwill and cooperation these days that it can afford to alienate still more foreign governments. 

It’s strange how interventionists very selectively pick the dissidents whom they lionise and promote.  Solzhenitsyn is also a great Soviet dissident, but I suspect that Mr. Stephens and his crowd would not be terribly interested in having the President defer to him when deciding how to manage the foreign affairs of the United States government.

Russia’s Garry Kasparov is here, as is Egyptian academic Saad Eddin Ibrahim, former Syrian parliamentarian Mamoun Homsy and others from Iran, Palestine, Belarus, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and China. They mix easily with a half-dozen Israelis led by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who, with the Czech Republic’s Václav Havel and Spain’s José María Aznar, is chairing the event. The idea is to put together what Mr. Sharansky describes as “a trade union for dissidents,” which can do to the various tyrannies of our day what Poland’s Solidarity movement did to the great tyranny of its time. ~Bret Stephens

This meeting in Prague seems to have been, among other things, an international Who’s Who of past and present Iraq war supporters.  Offhand, I’d say that alone is a pretty good reason to be deeply skeptical of any policy recommendations that have the stamp of approval of Aznar, Sharansky, Havel and Kasparov. 

Take Sharansky’s “trade union for dissidents” notion for starters.  This is a tired rip-off of actual trade unionism that expressed the legitimate grievances of Polish dockworkers against the communist regime in Warsaw and its masters in Moscow.  Unlike that actual trade unionism, which had to do with protesting ideologically-imposed injustices for the benefit of Polish labourers, Sharansky is proposing a talking shop where various dissidents, some more real than others, gather to indulge in ideologically-charged rhetorical backslapping.  Somehow I just don’t see the similarities.

Update: You’ll also notice that, despite these cliched references to Polish Solidarity, Lech Walesa was nowhere to be found at this “dissidents’ conference.”

It’s crucial to recall that the Taliban was not just a religious movement, but also an expression of Pashto [sic] nationalism, and that that the Taliban had a lot of trouble expanding into areas where other ethnicities predominated. ~Matt Yglesias

Well, that’s sort of true, but it isn’t really, when you consider that the Taliban had quite effectively established control over 95% of the country by 1996 and was in no great danger of losing that control until the combined U.S.-Northern Alliance assault in October 2001.  I accept Yglesias’ other point that Al Qaeda is unlikely to prevail against Anbari Sunni tribesmen, provided that those tribesmen remain more or less united in their efforts to eliminate Al Qaeda.  One reason why this is right is simply raw numbers: as a foreign operation, Al Qaeda will not have the numbers or local connections to overcome solid local opposition by force of arms.  Where the comparison with the Taliban is useful is in the dissimilarity of the two situations.  Unlike the Taliban in the 1990s, Al Qaeda in Iraq does not actually have the backing of a major regional government, a natural recruiting base or the military means to conquer and hold very much territory. 

The Taliban was, first of all, not entirely foreign, though it was backed by the Pakistani government, and had a significant base of local support among fellow Pashtuns.  Its difficulty in dominating the rest of Afghanistan beyond the south and east was rooted partly in the hostility of Tajiks and Hazaras to their rule, but it had far more to do with the persistent military resistance of opposing warlords and the Northern Alliance, supplied by Russia and Iran.  When the military forces of the Alliance were driven to the north, local ethnic minorities did not engage in prolonged resistance.  In the end, the Taliban had military superiority and, even more crucially, successfully restored order to the parts of the country they controlled.  This was an important factor in solidifying their control over a country that had suffered from more or less continuous warfare for more than fifteen years.  Unlike the Taliban, Al Qaeda has been actively alienating its presumed natural constituency among Sunnis in western Iraq.  Unlike the Taliban, it has no means to offer any modicum of social or political order, and so has little or nothing to offer that would encourage locals to yield to their control.  The clear dissimilarity between Al Qaeda in Iraq today and the Taliban in the 1990s is one reason why claims that an Al Qaeda statelet will establish itself in Anbar province after we leave are ridiculous.

As the sociologist Manuel Castells generalized, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.” People with university values favor intermingling. People with neighborhood values favor assimilation.

What’s made the clashes so poisonous is that many members of the educated class don’t even recognize that they are facing a rival philosophy. Many of them assume that anybody who disagrees with them on immigration and such must be driven by racism, insecurity or some primitive atavism. This smug attitude sends members of the communal, nationalistic side into fits of alienation and prickly defensiveness. It’s what makes many of them, in turn, so unpleasant. ~David Brooks

I like the sociologist’s generalisation, since it seems to suggest that elites aren’t actually people.  It also suggests that “elites” have to be conditioned to accept rootlessness and “cosmopolitan” attitudes, as these are the farthest things from normal.  This would help explain how they manage to hold such strange views about the world and their fellow citizens.  Of course, this idea of town v. gown as the explanation for our political conflicts is a reprise of Brooks’ opposition between so-called “progressive globalists” and “populist-nationalists.”  Generally, I think he describes the division correctly, though I don’t necessarily buy the prog-globs’ self-description of themselves as being “cosmopolitan.”  Many of them are not cosmopolitan in the sense that they are genuinely “open” to or curious about other cultures and peoples.  They espouse universal ideals and values, so what need is there to trouble themselves with foreign traditions that should be cast aside in favour of these values?  They are convinced that no one could actually prefer their own customs and religion to the exciting world of individualistic self-definition and anomie.  According to this view, all people naturally desire what we already have.  We are the mountain, and Muhammad will, must, come to us.  A more unpleasant and hateful idea is difficult to imagine. 

They are cosmopolitan in reaction against the definitions of their own native culture, but many of them usually find very little of value in foreign cultures that extends beyond exotic food and textiles.  They are the ones alienated from their homes, but they cannot truly be at home anywhere else, either.  Trying to belong to the whole world, they find no place for themselves anywhere.  This makes them rather obnoxious and domineering, as they seek to make everyone else just as rootless as they are–and so they advance policies of “openness” and “integration” that are aimed at nothing so much as breaking down cultural, ethnic and religious lines and dis-integrating nations.  This sort of cosmopolitanism is almost entirely negative.  In the West, it comes partly from a rebellion against any distinctive forms of Western and Christian identity and partly from an attempt to identify the creations of our civilisation with the universal aspirations of all people.  These are the people who never think that they are harming other people by attacking their cultures and traditions–it is always an emancipation.  “Look, we are making you more open and worldly!  You should thank us!”  The natural, normal reaction of most people to throw things and shout abuse at such “benefactors” is the “unpleasantness” that Brooks describes.  (Unmentioned in this discussion of a conflict of “values” is the deeply undemocratic nature of the bill that was almost foisted upon the country and the tyrannical refusal up till now to enforce the laws of the land–you don’t have to be a “neighbourhood” guy to see what is wrong with these things.) 

As for being unpleasant, there is nothing quite so unpleasant as the rich, Eastern transplant legacy frat boy telling the people of this country that they don’t want to do what’s right for America.  What would he or any other member of the elite know about America?  Except for political campaigning, changing planes or vacationing at their enormous ranches and ski lodges, these people hardly venture out into the interior of this country.  Whether they are in business or government, such “cosmopolitan” people have the cosmopolitanism of having been to two dozen airports where they encounter the same globalised junk pseudo-culture wherever they go.  These are the sort of people who don’t just fly over the interior because it is quicker–they truly don’t want to go to any of the places between the coasts.  This is generally fine by the rest of us, since we wouldn’t want them to visit anyway.

These people are legitimately cosmopolitan in that they would like to think that they are not citizens of any particular place.  To be a “citizen of the world” is the epitome of meaningless, oceanic detachment from your origins and your home.  It has never been clear to me why someone should become more like this the more educated he becomes, since the more education you have the more likely it is that you realise how wildly abnormal this sort of detachment is.  Perhaps I take this view because I am a product of many (maybe too many!) years of formal education and have somehow not bought into this nonsense about “openness.”  It is a little story that globalists tell to flatter themselves with the idea that they are more “open” and inquisitive and interested in the rest of the world, but mostly they just want to make the rest of the world as bland, self-referential and provincial as Manhattan and D.C.