Iraqi PM al-Maliki told Lara Logan of CBS Evening News in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that he has a real fear of a coup by the Iraqi army. ~Raw Story

“The Korean model is one in which the United States provides a security presence, but you’ve had the development of a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and, therefore, the United States is there as a force of stability,” Snow told reporters. ~Reuters

Maybe the White House is thinking of these Iraqi army coup plotters as the local version of Chun Doo-hwan?  Fred Kaplan expresses his disbelief at the unending ignorance on display in this administration.  Yglesias is also fairly baffled.

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors’ rebellion over President Bush’s immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions [bold mine-DL] and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee’s chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times. ~The Washington Times

Via Dan McCarthy

Seventy-two per cent of the American public disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war and 76 per cent believe that the ‘surge’ is not improving matters. Even normally loyal Republicans are making clear that their patience is limited. A rapid British withdrawal would therefore make the Bush administration’s position politically untenable. One senior Republican congressman warns, ‘If Britain pulls out, it’s game over.’ In these circumstances, the update on the progress of the surge that the new US commander, General Petraeus, is due to deliver in September would become largely academic. Bush would not just be a lame duck; he would be a paralysed president, with Congress refusing to fund the war except on its terms. ~James Forsyth

This would be a very bold move in an area of policy where Brown has no particular claim to credibility or ability.  That is one reason why I am skeptical that he will do it.  In my estimation, Brown seems to like to be in control of a situation and does not normally seem to be one given to rash or precipitous moves.  If others are urging him to make this decision, he will hold off and make it in his own good time.  It would be enormously popular, but it would also cause him to be compared unflatteringly in Atlanticist papers with Spanish PM Zapatero (the last left-wing leader who pulled out of Iraq immediately after taking office).  The Economist would tut-tut, The Financial Times would wag its finger, the Times would shake its head, the Telegraph would go absolutely ballistic and the Mail would be, well, the Mail.  There are virtually no actual war supporters left in Britain (it has collapsed to the low teens in recent polling), but this establishment reaction wouldn’t be about support for the war.  It would be a reaction against the perceived slight against Washington and the endangerment of the connection with America.  Indeed, the more significance observers regard Brown’s decision as having, the more likely the establishment reaction to his decision will be negative.  Poland can withdraw its troops because there is no sense that Poland was that vital to the overall effort; Spain can pull out and not be missed.  When Britain pulls out, not even neocons in all their Churchillophilia will be able to stifle cries of “perfidious Albion”–indeed the Churchillophiles will be among the first to condemn Brown as a new Chamberlain.  Britons will love Brown for this.  Many in the establishment, whether or not they actually agree with the substance of the decision, will not be pleased.  

There is something a bit absurd about all of this talk of the significance of Brown’s move.  Supposing that Britain’s full, post-haste withdrawal from Iraq did destroy Mr. Bush’s position here at home even more, it is a pretty sorry statement on the quality of American government.  According to this story, our own elections and elected representatives can’t achieve a thing, but Tony Blair’s resignation ends up having monumental impact.  This doesn’t really make much sense.  If the British leave Iraq, I’m sorry to say that this makes the current plan no less likely to succeed.  More to the point, if all we are waiting on to pull the plug on the war is Gordon Brown’s say-so, why are we continuing to waste the lives of Americans on a plan whose American political support hinges on the decision of a rotund Scotsman?   

However, I’m afraid that some of our British cousins have convinced themselves of their government possessing greater importance than their government, in fact, has.  Tony Blair used this claim of tremendous influence that ultimately earned him the sobriquet of poodle and yielded no tangible results for Britain.  Most people there and here know better than to think that London’s moves these days have much impact in Washington at all.  We are talking about the Bush administration here, and they have never let anything so inconvenient as political change get in their way in the past.  A few more Senators and House members may voice their opposition, but if a total collapse in Mr. Bush’s support is coming it will come because of something else.

Conservatives and liberals will fight unto eternity over whose notions of the law, society and justice are right. But the one idea owned by conservatives is the market.

For many Democrats in politics, the market–the daily machinery of the private economy–is a semi-abstraction. ~Daniel Henninger

To normal people, “the market” is a full-blown abstraction.  No semi-abstractions here.  Conservatives are supposed to be allergic and opposed to abstractions.  Therefore, it seems implausible that conservatives “own” one of these abstractions and still remain conservatives.  How does one own an abstraction anyway?  Wait, I know–the market will provide the deed! 

If Mr. Henninger means to say that many modern conservatives have traditionally tried, at least to some degree, to guard property rights, defend the claims of private enterprise against regulation and argue for the more effective distribution of goods and services via a relatively less regulated process of providing such goods and services, then he might say something more like that.  To speak about “the market” as if it were a concrete entity in opposition to an abstraction is to take a term that is specifically designed to abstractly describe a vast, complex system of exchange and make utter nonsense of it.  But then if I were trying to pretend that providing cheap labour for business interests (a.k.a., exploitation) was a “core” American value, I would probably wind up talking a lot of nonsense in the process as well.

At What’s Wrong With The World, I talk about Vietnam/Iraq comparisons, presidential politics and the meaning of hawkishness.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don’t like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don’t like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from “Too bad” to “You’re bad.” ~Peggy Noonan

I can sympathise with Ms. Noonan’s disillusionment with Mr. Bush.  Of course, to be disillusioned requires that you had illusions and therefore failed to see things as they really were and are.  Impugning the motives of political opponents started at least in 2002.  Those who did not sign on for the full range of warfare state measures, including the abuses and excesses of the PATRIOT Act, were denounced and their patriotism denied.  Imputing villainy to political opponents was a major feature of the 2002 elections.  This was something that the GOP as a whole engaged in quite actively.  It was a Khaki election, and it was a good time to be a Bush cheerleader.  It wasn’t as if Mr. Bush dragged them kicking and screaming down this path.  They didn’t have their party and movement stolen from them–they gave them gleefully as if they were tributes to an overlord. 

In fact, this tendency in casting political disagreement as the result of the moral deficiency of the opponent dates back to the beginning of Mr. Bush’s first presidential campaign when he accused Congress of “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.”  The tendentiousness, the dishonesty, and the preference for liberal rhetorical tropes (“racist,” “sexist,” “elitist” are some of the favoured terms of abuse hurled by the administration and its lackeys) were all there from the start.  They re-emerged on a regular basis: those who were against democratisation in Iraq were racists who believed Arabs were not fully human, or something of the sort; those against the appallingly bad Harriet Miers nomination were sexist elitist chauvinist pigs, and so on.  In smearing antiwar conservatives, of course, Mr. Bush had, still has, many willing helpers in the movement.  Then there were all those in positions of some influence who saw what was happening, knew it was wrong and said nothing.  The betrayals and compromises of the previous five years were no less horrible, no less significant and no less damaging in their different ways to this country than this amnesty bill, but those things were all bearable so long as they greased the wheels and kept the GOP in power in Congress.  That seems to be the thinking of more than a few pundits who are now outraged at the treatment of Bush’s immigration critics.  Now, having lost Congress, there is a sudden discovery among Republicans that Mr. Bush and his loyalists are dishonest, obnoxious and buffoonish.  It took them long enough to admit this.   

As myriad liberals have been pointing out this week as conservative complaints about the rough treatment Bush and his allies have meted out to opponents of the amnesty bill, there is absolutely nothing  new in the methods that the administration is using.  Mr. Bush has a long record of attacking his enemies by disparaging their patriotism, decency and common sense.  He has learned well from the example of the masters of deceit and chutzpah–Wilson, FDR, Clinton–who were always sure to accuse their political opponents of the very things of which they were far more likely to be guilty.  Opponents of amnesty on the right, who have mostly been more tolerant of Mr. Bush’s other projects (and some of whom have actively joined in with Mr. Bush in his past attacks or have made the attacks on his behalf), have now discovered that vilifying political opponents, denigrating their good faith and intimating that they are possessed of hateful prejudices are undesirable and unacceptable methods of debating policy. 

Again, I sympathise in this case, since I also find the amnesty bill appalling.  A great many conservatives, be they enforcement-first or restrictionist or some mix of the two, are finally in agreement that the administration has gone mad.  Of course, he has been intent on doing this since 2001.  There are no surprises here.  From the day Mr. Bush signed No Child Left Behind, he had declared his hostility to the beliefs and interests of large numbers of people in his coalition.  Everything that followed was merely a continuation of this.  Now Mr. Bush and his allies in the GOP leadership declare their own constituents bigots, and apparently, finally, those constituents have started losing patience with these frauds.  It’s about time.

The battered wife syndrome analogy is only too apt, since one of the symptoms of that syndrome is to exist in a state of denial, constantly blaming oneself and finding excuses and reasons to justify the abuse.  “The President has been under a lot of pressure at work.  We haven’t shown our appreciation for the tax cuts as much as we should have.  Plus, we didn’t laugh at all of his jokes, and we mildly criticised him about McCain-Feingold…We were basically asking for a beating.”  Worse than any excuse-making were the arguments that conservatives had to embrace Mr. Bush’s big-government conservatism as the inevitable future of the movement.  Whether for pragmatic reasons or genuine changes of mind, many Bush supporters went along with this.  Those whom the gods would destroy they first make into presidential loyalists.

“Her view is the old, classic, European caricature that we describe of big government, big taxation, welfare state,” said the former Massachusetts governor.

“She gave a speech a couple of days ago and laid out her vision for America. And as I listened to her I figured her platform wouldn’t even get her elected in France,” Romney, who was a missionary in France, said to chuckles and applause. ~AP

So he really is going to run his campaign on Francophobia and lame welfare state-bashing. Well, he’ll run on that and on his preposterous “it’s about Shia and Sunni” foreign policy chatter and his “caliphate” boilerplate. Mind you, I don’t have anything against welfare state-bashing, but if I were the candidate who had signed universal health care (with insurance mandates for all!) into law as governor I think I would be taking a different approach to the debate over the role and size of government.

Naturally, being Romney, he cannot even make this criticism properly (this may have something to do with not really understanding the conservative critique of the welfare state and simply mouthing poll-tested slogans that he thinks conservatives want to hear). He says that Clinton’s view is “the old, classic, European caricature that we describe of big government, big taxation, welfare state.” Taken literally, Romney’s words seem to mean that Clinton’s view is an old, classic caricature that had been drawn by someone in Europe. We know what Romney wanted to say here, but he didn’t really say it. He doesn’t seem to know what the word caricature means.

When you say that something is such-and-such a caricature of something, you are actually saying that the caricature is a distortion of the real view of the person and you are using the modifier to describe who or what kind of person is drawing the misleading caricature. Thus you would say, “the liberal caricature of Christian conservatives” or “the conservative caricature of liberal academics,” etc. According to Romney, there apparently used to be an old European caricature of Hillary Clinton’s policy views. In fact, part of Romney’s remarks becomes a string of disconnected phrases. If he has been correctly quoted, he just begins uttering phrases at the end of that one sentence: “big government, big taxation, welfare state.” Grog no like welfare state.

Opponents of the First Gulf War, for instance, would argue that the events of 9/11 vindicated their concerns – because the Gulf War created a permanent U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, providing grist for anti-Americanism across the Islamic world – but there hasn’t been a massive post-9/11 backlash against George H.W. Bush or Brent Scowcroft, to say the least. Or to take a more remote example, I’m inclined to think that our intervention in the First World War was a strategic mistake and that both the Spanish-American War and the Mexican War violated just-war principles – but had I been an anti-war politician in 1914 or 1899 or 1846 I would have suffered politically for taking these stances, regardless of whether I was right on the merits. ~Ross Douthat

Ross is right: there has not been a backlash against Bush the Elder-style “realism” in recent years, since the “realists” have come to consider themselves something of the obvious, default alternative foreign policy position after the discrediting of aggressive idealism and neoconservative power projection.  There has also not been a terribly big eruption of thoroughgoing anti-interventionist sentiment.  Since the connection between post-Gulf War policies and 9/11 has been kept as obscure as possible by all interested parties, including the mass media, there is no reason why there would be a strong backlash against the foreign policy that brought us containment of Iraq, sanctions on Iraq, the stationing of forces in Saudi Arabia and maintenance of the (illegal) no-fly zones.  There has been no anti-Scowcroftian backlash because most people do not acknowledge that the first Bush administration’s policies had anything to do with what happened later.  The popular (and also the neocon) narrative is that of Clintonian fecklessness and inaction–it is quite acceptable in Republican circles to speak of these policies “inviting” terrorist attacks, because these are not the favoured policies of the most aggressive interventionists.  Their idea is that foreign threats and attacks are always the product of insufficient interventionism and insufficient power projection–there is nothing that a firmer hand and a greater demonstration of willpower will not overcome. The neocons’ problem with Clinton’s foreign policy was not that it used force indiscriminately, one might even say promiscuously, but that it used force only half-heartedly and without the full intensity that was necessary to show our national “resolve.”

Certainly, none of the Democrats who voted against the Gulf War authorisation has since been lionised for his principle and far-seeing vision.  Then again, how many of the Democratic Senators in particular who voted against the Gulf War authorisation were kicked out by voters in 1992, 1993 or 1994?  Not many.  If there were any who lost their seats in 1994, it was not principally because they had opposed the war with Iraq.  Likewise, Kerry and Edwards would not have lost re-election (even if they had been running) in 2002 or 2003 had they voted against the AUMF.  In any case, how many incumbent Senators lose races for re-election?  Not many.  Cleland was ousted only through a unique combination of extremely dirty politicking and a very pro-Bush Georgia electorate.

The issue is always one of presidential and national politics. Gore got on the ticket because of his foreign policy “expertise,” but more importantly he got on the ticket because he had voted the politically ‘right’ way on the authorisation the previous year, and all the other ambitious Senators then and later noted this and meditated on it whenever the question of using force came up after that.  When it came time to choose what to do in the fall of ‘02, Kerry and Edwards must have been thinking about what this vote would mean for future presidential chances, whether in the ‘04 cycle or later.  They knew that no opponent of the Gulf War had won the nomination of their party, so it would not have been difficult for them to think that opposing a new Iraq war would have been curtains for their presidential aspirations.  As with so many, many other things, Kerry and Edwards were wrong.  In the event, Kerry’s late transformation from pro- to anti-war man dogged his campaign and probably cost him the election; given the alternative of voting for a dithering, confused man, enough voters still refused to pick John Kerry.  Had he been antiwar all along, he might have claimed some clarity and superior judgement.  Instead, he had to play the wounded victim–”Ooh, George tricked me!”

As for the other wars, Ross’ politician double would have done very poorly running as an antiwar candidate in any of the European countries in elections in the early years of the war.  Nationalist democratic fervour for the war on both sides was intense and had a significant role in pushing all of the governments involved to enter into war and then to persist in it. Were Ross an American politician confronted with the question of WWI entry in 1916-17, he not only would have prospered as an antiwar politician (unless he had been arrested by the government for his subversive activities) but would probably have been wildly popular nationwide.  A supermajority of Americans opposed entry into WWI.  Their pathetic representatives lined up behind the President, as most pathetic Congresses have done down through our history, to support a declaration of war with the exception of one member of the House. With the Spanish and Mexican wars, it would have mattered a great deal where Ross the politician lived.  Had he been a Democrat in 1899, he probably would have done well for himself to oppose the war, and certainly to oppose annexation and the Filipino counterinsurgency that followed.  Had he been a Northern Whig in 1846, he might have survived the pro-war hysteria that swept over the country. Similarly, Democrats in 2002 in secure seats had little to fear from their constituents, because their voters tended to be less in favour of the war and were less likely to oust an incumbent on account of his opposition.  The strange thing about Democrats backing the Iraq war is that they were voting as if they all lived in deepest Alabama or Idaho, when they actually lived in very different parts of the country where people had significantly different views of the necessity and rightness of the war.

He tried to explain away his state’s low rankings on high-school dropout rates, poverty, and crime during his tenure, his bold statements as energy secretary that turned out not to be true, his 72-hour change of mind on the immigration bill, his stance on guns, the stock he once owned in an oil company, his brief support of Alberto Gonzales, his résumé padding on his baseball career, and the story he tells on the stump about a dead soldier whose mother has asked him to stop telling it. ~John Dickerson

In spite of my past claims that I thought Richardson was going to be the surprise dark horse candidate of the Democratic field, I initially ridiculed his presidential campaign because I knew perfectly well what all of his “experience” and his “record” amounted to.  His time at the U.N. was useless, his tenure at Energy was a disaster and his time in Congress, when he wasn’t jet-setting to various “crisis” situations, was entirely unremarkable.  At the same time, Richardson can hardly be blamed very much for New Mexico’s low rankings “on high-school dropout rates, poverty, and crime,” since New Mexico always ranks low (or high, depending on how we’re listing the states) in these things.  I love my home state, but I have no illusions about the condition of my state. 

This condition might have something to do with the fact that New Mexico has effectively been a one-party state for over seventy-five years, at least as far as the legislature is concerned, and it has a political culture of corruption and favouritism that seems mild only because it has to compete with Illinois and Louisiana.  As New Mexico governors go, Richardson has been better than some, which is hardly a good reason for him to become President.  Even so, a little perspective is required.  New Mexico is not Iowa, and it is never going to produce the results that Iowa produces, because the culture (or cultures, as the multicultis insist on reminding us) there is quite different and cultivates a very different mentality.  The huge impact of the federal government on the New Mexican economy means that most people in the state will be inclined to embrace a politics of state dependency and state activism.  This invariably has an overall negative effect on the politics and government of the state.

It seems to me that though democrats may be irritated by the relish with which Rove disdains them and infuriated by his habit, until now at least, of winning, to say that they find his cleverness insufferable is preposterous. So preposterous, in fact, that only a certain kind of Washington hack hellbent on ignoring obvious truths in the name of balance, objectivity or those famous cocktail party invitations, could write this. ~Alex Massie

It is something of a puzzle where Rove acquired his reputation for political genius.  This was the campaign consultant who made sure that Bush frittered away his late momentum in 2000 and turned a reasonably secure victory into an epic legal contest that his candidate just happened to win.  His candidate received fewer votes than the guy being advised by Bob Shrum, almost universally agreed to be one of the worst campaign consultants of all time.  The party he worked for picked up seats in midterm elections during a highly abnormal time of national rallying around the incumbent President in the wake of spectacular and unprecedented terrorist attacks and an initially more or less effective military response.  This had literally nothing to do with him or his “genius.”  Two years after that, he was very nearly responsible for running the unsuccessful re-election campaign of an incumbent wartime President, which would have been a first in American history.  Without the idiocy of the Massachusetts Supreme Court making gay “marriage” a live political issue and triggering a wave of state referenda that mobilised voters who were also likely to back Bush, the ’04 campaign would probably have failed.  Not only would no one have then confused Rove with a political “genius,” but they would have classed him with the other Bush loyalist hangers-on from the Texas years who were put in places of importance because of their relationship with the boss and not because of any significant ability. 

Rove’s contribution to political strategy (mobilise the “base,” pretend that independent voters don’t really exist) wasn’t really terribly insightful or really all that new, and it proved to be good for relatively short-term gains.  He did not build the structures necessary for the major realignment he purportedly wanted to create, but engaged in triangulation and the kind of petty symbolic politics in which Clinton trafficked.  The difference is that where Clinton used such small-time symbolic political gestures (e.g., support for school uniforms) to broaden Democratic appeal, Rove and Bush took the path of vilifying domestic opponents to such an extent that they ended up implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) vilifying and/or alienating large swing-voting blocs.  When in wartime and when belonging to a party reputedly competent in foreign policy and military matters, you can get away with this approach for a while, but once that image of competence vanishes you will suddenly find that your “clever” strategy of base mobilisation to the exclusion of almost everything else was not really very clever at all. 

The truly pathetic thing about the Rove approach is that the administration he helped get elected and re-elected has pursued policies that almost uniformly do not serve the interests of the core constituencies on whose support Rove placed so much importance.  He has managed to duplicate Hillary Clinton’s bad combination of extreme liberal image/actually centrist politics, but he has had Bush take it even farther.  That is, Bush endorses policies that are wildly at odds with his core constituencies’ desires while cultivating a reputation for being an insane far-out extremist who appeals to the most dangerous fringes.  Symbolically in many ways, Bush has sought to portray himself as fiercely conservative (hence all of the disillusionment and shock expressed by many pundits as they have discovered that he is not, in fact, conservative) while governing as the reincarnations of Wilson and LBJ combined.  The utterly superficial and meaningless nature of Bush’s symbolic appeals ought to have been obvious, but for many on the left it was simply too perfect to have a real Texan evangelical conservative as a foil for their arguments.  That he was actually an Eastern transplant Ivy Leaguer who loved business interests and the mass immigration that they wanted did not, could not, get in the way of the caricature, because that caricature was so satisfying.  Everyone (except actual conservative Christians) got something out of perpetuating this farce: Bush won reflexive conservative support as soon as liberals began bashing Bush for his evangelicalism and supposed conservatism, while the liberals had an ideal target and someone onto whom they could project all of their baroque and crazy fears of incipient Southern-fried theocracy.  His manipulation and their irrationality were a natural fit.  It hardly required a genius to pursue this strategy, which was good news for Bush, because he certainly didn’t have a genius advising him.