Since August 2006, Eunomia has increased by over 1,900 posts.  That’s an average of 250 posts per month since last August.  Since Eunomia began in December ’04, it has averaged 120 posts per month.  Here’s to the next 3,500.

He’s a nationalist…he will stand on the side of the Chinese.  That’s why they call themselves Nationalists. ~Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber) in The Painted Veil

Ross points to a David Frum post that explains some of the reasons just how bad of a political death sentence that the new Senate immigration bill is for the GOP.  On one point, the scurrilous labeling of opponents of the bill as bigots, one member of the Senate GOP was already vindicating Frum’s prediction before he had made it.  It’s worth remembering that the administration used the same “if you don’t support this policy, you’re a racist” rhetoric in arguing for democratisation in Iraq.

Frum is right about some of the political consequences.  The impact of immigration on wages is real and hurts American workers, and the GOP just sided against those workers.  Rather than pursuing what some might call a “lower-middle” political strategy by defending the interests of American labour here, the GOP showed that its true loyalties always rest with employers.  This was a missed opportunity for a sane conservative populism and a gift to the Democrats.  It confirms that the GOP is competing for the mantle of Party of Immigration (but it will never win that particular competition), which will turn off millions of their voters, without actually winning over the voters they are trying to win over.  The slow-motion implosion of the GOP proceeds apace. 

It does expose the Terrible Trio as pro-amnesty or as latecomers to the issue, and it can only remind core Republican voters that the only reliable candidates on immigration with anything like long records are Hunter, Tancredo and Paul.  Whether or not this is “unhelpful” to the GOP depends a lot on whether you think the GOP has a remote chance of winning in 2008 (I don’t).  Damaging the “electable” candidates is only a bad thing if, well, you want one of those people elected President (I don’t).  If there is a pro-amnesty candidate nominated, many core voters will not be enthusiastic or mobilised behind him, based on the old “we want a choice, not an echo” logic, and any one of the “electable” ones will go down to ignominious defeat anyway.  Recent polls show that immigration is a priority for only about 7% of Republicans, but that’s a 7% the GOP needs to have energised and working for them.  Also, just because immigration does not take first place for a lot of people more concerned about the war doesn’t mean that it isn’t an important issue to them.  Just when you thought Mr. Bush couldn’t do any more damage to his party, he manages to come up with a body blow that could cripple it for the next few years.

He would face huge fundraising and organizational hurdles if he ran in the Republican primary, not to mention the fact that most Republican primary voters aren’t likely to warm up to Hagel given his opposition to the war in Iraq [bold mine-DL]. ~Chris Cillizza

Mr. Cillizza’s post helps explain the realist gap in the GOP field in a couple ways.  The first is political: realist critics have no popular constituency large enough to beat the opposition within the party.  The second is the imagined linkage of realist criticism of Bush to some purported opposition to the war.  The one does not necessarily entail the other.  Indeed, the one may have nothing to do with the other.  In treating opposition to the administration and opposition to the war as one and the same, GOP leaders and activists have helped to push more Republicans away from the party’s position on the war, because they are desperate to separate themselves from Bush even more than they are desperate to separate themselves from the war.  Supporting the war can be defended with all of the usual appeals to being patriotic and pro-military (even though this war is bad for the military and the country), so what nervous Republicans have wanted more than anything is to find a way to support the war without endorsing Mr. Bush’s leadership.  This is tricky and perhaps impossible to manage, but what many people take as Hagel’s opposition to the war is, in fact, his opposition to the administration’s handling of it.  The failure to discern between the two has led a lot of people to make mere administration foes into war opponents, which has in turn mislead others into thinking that Republican disenchantment with Mr. Bush means that there is a rebellion against war policy in the offing.  Of course, the rebellion never materialises, because these members typically come from districts where support for the war runs above even the GOP average.

There are no “internationally-minded realists,” as Ross described them, in the GOP presidential field, because the “internationally-minded realist” critique of Bush’s foreign policy does not hinge on strict opposition to the Iraq war.  Indeed, it is possible for the “internationally-minded realist” Baker-Hamilton consensus to recommend something very much like the “surge” in concert with diplomatic initiatives.  If realism acquired a bad name in neocon circles because it prized “stability” before the war, it is acquiring a bad name in antiwar circles because it prizes “stabilising” Iraq before attending to American interests (assuming as it does that trying to “stabilise” Iraq is in our interest). 

The Republican realist critique usually seems based in objections to the flaws in the generally aggressive neoconservative interventionist posture and associated hostility to international institutions that goes with that posture.  Relatively few establishment realists actually object to many of the goals that neoconservatives have in the Near East with respect to the major questions of stabilising Iraq and containing Iran and preventing Iranian proliferation.  It seems to me that most Republican realists would prefer attempting to reach those goals through greater use of diplomatic exchanges and international institutions and so on, but I think most Republican realists are committed to keeping the “Game” in the Near East, described so well by Prof. Bacevich, going for as long as they can.  They cannot offer a fundamentally or even significantly different alternative because they are deeply invested in most of the same projects that the neoconservatives want to pursue.  In the current atmosphere, realists find themselves offering what Jim Pikerton described Hagel as supporting: “hegemony lite,” whose slogan might be: “Great diplomacy, less militaristic.”  Such a view becomes background noise–why settle for the watered-down version, when you can have the full-strength foolish foreign policy?  

In short, anti-Bush realists suffer from the same problem from which skeptical realists and liberals suffered before the invasion: they accept almost all of the assumptions and goals of the more activist, aggressive party, but want to go about pursuing the goals in a different way.  This is the “yeah, but” foreign policy approach, and it always loses debates, because it has already conceded the moral and strategic high ground to the activists.  Antiwar arguments lost because they so often started by conceding, “Saddam Hussein is a threat” or “Hussein is evil, but…,” when it should have been strongly denied that he was a threat and declared to be immaterial whether or not he was evil.  Realist critiques fail to gain purchase today because they begin, “Of course, we can’t just leave Iraq…” or “Of course Iran is a huge, enormous, gigantic threat that I am really afraid of…”  If realists would stop conceding these points, they might get somewhere.  But they concede these points because they basically agree with the view that says Iran poses a dire threat to the United States.   

Hagel’s political predicament is related to the woes of the realists.  If observers across the spectrum are persuaded, or tricked, into thinking that Chuck Hagel actually opposes the Iraq war (rather than quibbling about how it is being fought and actively denying that he wants to withdraw), Hagel is still unable to gain traction as a realist critic of Bushian foreign policy because the GOP overwhelmingly still supports the war (as does Chuck Hagel in almost every respect) while war opponents think that a serious critique of Bushian foreign policy has to begin with opposition to the war.  Since he does not oppose the war, but everyone seems to think that he does, he wins over no constituencies on either right or left.  For Republicans, he is weak and “defeatist,” while as far as attentive antiwar observers are concerned he cannot be taken seriously.  He does not really speak for the disenchanted realists on the right, because his only enunciated difference with Bush’s foreign policy is the management of the war and the implementation of the new “surge” plan, and these are things that many of the disenchanted realists have been willing to support for the time being.  Meanwhile, other Republican realists do not launch into a full-scale critique of Bush’s foreign policy, because they still support the war and they realise that any coherent critique of Bush would have to involve taking a distinctive position on Iraq.

Peggy Noonan wrote in her column (which was actually all about Fred Thompson):

While the other candidates bang away earnestly in a frozen format, Thompson continues to sneak up from the creek and steal their underwear–boxers, briefs and temple garments.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best joke ever told, but it wasn’t terrible.  Hugh Hewitt, pretending that he cares about religious prejudice because he has a pro-Romney book to sell, retorts in faux outrage:

If an orthodox Jew was in the running, would Peggy have added “yarmulke?” Or if a devout Catholic, a mention of a rosary or a scapula? I doubt it.  There are acceptable bigotries and unacceptable bigotries.  Anti-Mormon drive-bys that are good for a laugh play well in some circles –the same circles that used to indulge Catholic and Irish jokes.

Where on the body exactly does Hewitt think yarmulkes are worn?  And it plays well in those sinister Irish joke circles!  Not that!  Yes, I understand that Mormons take these garments very seriously and invest them with real religious significance, which is their business, but if Mormons or their would-be defenders (who are typically much more sensitive about these things than actual Mormons, because they are working overtime to show how enlightened and inclusive they are) want Mormonism to become better known and more widely accepted in American society they could all really do without the humourless whining of Hugh Hewitt.  The main problem that Romney has with his Mormonism, outside of the dedicated anti-Mormons who will never vote for a Mormon, is that he simply refuses to talk about it in any detail.  By trying to overcome prejudice or aversion to what some people see as a “cult,” he treats it as a very secretive, almost embarrassing subject–in other words, he acts as if he belongs to a cult, and not in a good way.  Instead of seeing Noonan’s column as part of a process of normalising and “mainstreaming” Mormonism as an everyday part of American life, making it into something that pundits can poke fun at the same as any other American religion, Hewitt naturally assumes the worst.  Perhaps this is because he knows that among many conservative voters Romney’s Mormonism is a deal-breaker, so he overreacts to any instance of potential anti-Mormon sentiment in the conservative press because he already knows how dire the situation is for his chosen candidate.

Marty Peretz seems equally enamoured of two articles that flatly contradict one another.  Naturally, he has nothing to say about the merits of either argument, except to say that the dispute is “fascinating.”  This has the sound of the cheerful co-ed in a philosophy class who opines, “I think that everyone can have his or her own opinion and everyone is, like, totally right.”  Earlier, Peretz thought Lewis was absolutely right and obviously so:

This is the history of Western responses even to terrorism, especially to terrorism. We know the consequences.

According to Peretz, Lewis had penned a “cool analysis” and Lewis had forgotten more than his critics will ever know.  Well, his critics seem to include Efraim Karsh, who may not know as much as Lewis forgets, but he seems to know all of the things that Lewis has already forgotten. 

I suppose it is fascinating how Bernard Lewis can be shown in devastating fashion to be completely wrong about the modern history of the region about which he claims expertise.  Despite this, he will still be taken seriously by historically ignorant conservatives (and Marty Peretz) in this country as someone with almost oracular authority on things related to Near East policy.  Bernard Lewis takes a Munich-centric view that American problems in the Near and Middle East are the result of weakness, conciliatory gestures and appeasement (not like those tough Soviets), while Efraim Karsh (writing in the Sun, no less) completely repudiates virtually everything Lewis said, but still manages to make the conflict with jihadis into an unavoidable, epic struggle that apparently had nothing to do with U.S. policies.  Pick your interventionist poison.

Other takes on the Lewis piece are here and here.

What I should have said is that Friedman holds a special place in my development.  I took a class from him at college on ‘globalization’, and read most of his books.  In 2002, he and Ken Pollack were the two people that I relied on for guidance with regards to Iraq.  I trusted him.  I believed in him.  And he got it one hundred percent wrong.  And while honest people tend to admit their mistakes, and when the mistake is particularly soaked in blood, do a lot of soul-searching and apologizing, he never has.  My mistake in looking at the Iraq war still pains me, and though I was a 24 year old kid with no experience in foreign policy or politics, my gullibility and the betrayal from my former guides still colors my thinking.  For someone like Friedman, who should know better and occupies the most valuable opinion space in the world, it’s stunningly immoral to pretend to having no responsibility in this quagmire.  All of us are responsible, and the first step is to admit error.  Maybe if I said this he finally would have understood where we come from, though I doubt it.  But I didn’t say it. ~Matt Stoller

Mr. Stoller may now understand that the short path to making errors in foreign policy judgements is to listen to foreign policy establishment wonks and newspaper columnists, but I should have thought that would be rather more obvious to someone on the left than to others.  But I suppose I can sympathise a little.  When I was 11 and 12, I saw how excited everyone was to go to war with Iraq the first time, I heard all of the rationales (the only convincing for me one was false: oil prices could go through the roof if we don’t act!) and I took my cues from the adults, most of whom seemed to be certain that getting in the middle of an Arab war was the smart and necessary thing to do.  Most of Congress agreed with the President, and the country was overwhelmingly in favour (as Americans have tended to be about post-Vietnam conflicts at the beginning).  Over the years, I discovered that all of the people I had come to respect and listen to since then, such as the editors at Chronicles, Russell Kirk and the like, had actually been opposed to the first Gulf War, since it in no significant way served American interests.  About this they were completely right, but, of course, this was a war that was not really being fought under the pretense of defending the interests of the United States.  (The Saudis had a fairly huge army of their own, some of the best military hardware oil money could buy, plus any number of Afghanistan-hardened mujahideen, so the idea that they “needed” American help in the event of an Iraqi invasion was, on reflection, ridiculous.)  In the event, I supported the Gulf War, albeit not in any public or recorded way (I was 12), and I have been sorry for that for a long time.  In subsequent years, as the illegal no-fly zones were set up, the sanctions kicked in, and “we” launched a few cruise missile strikes on Baghdad now and again, it began to dawn on me that getting into that conflict in the first place probably wasn’t very smart.  Remaining there indefinitely, trying to starve out the Iraqis for having the audacity to be oppressed, seemed unsustainable, immoral and stupid, and after thinking about it for about five minutes it occurred to me that invading Iraq would be even more foolish, so it seemed that the only sensible thing to do would have been to leave.  Of course, the government went ahead and did the more foolish thing.

Interventionists have sometimes latched on to the very Bin Laden statements that Ron Paul referred to in the debate as proof that the Iraq status quo was unsustainable.  According to these people, this was why we had to invade!  They were right that the status quo was unsustainable, but the answer wasn’t invasion. 

Despite the views of someone like Gen. Zinni, who believed that containment was “working,” containment “worked” only if Americans were willing to keep cutting Iraq off from the outside world and bombing it on occasion.  Given the alternative of invasion, containment would have been much better, but it was absolutely true that the presence we had and the policies we were enforcing in the region were contributing factors in motivating terrorist attacks against U.S. targets.  Iraq war hawks did not usually make these arguments publicly (it was so much more fun to deceive the public about other reasons to go to war), but this was Wolfowitz’s view and it is recorded in Ricks’ book Fiasco (something else about which Rudy Giuliani probably has never heard and knows nothing).  Besides, it wouldn’t do to basically say, “We’re starting this war so that we will be able to eliminate the causes of Al Qaeda’s complaints.”  Never mind that attacking and occupying a Muslim country ranks rather high on the old jihadi-aggravator scale.  Looked at this way, we can see that the administration not only “gave in” to Al Qaeda’s demands (at least inasmuch as leaving Saudi Arabia, ending the no-fly zones and stopping the sanctions were all concessions to Bin Laden’s laundry list of complaints), but then gave them something else to use as a rallying cry. 

Far from demonstrating resolve to show that terrorism “doesn’t work,” the administration practically gave up on the same policies that non-interventionists were calling for Washington to give up on before 9/11 and engaged in a new policy that was sure to magnify the very jihadi threat that the other “concessions” might have weakened.  To the extent that these “concessions” “showed weakness”–that perennial hegemonist fear–the administration clearly “showed weakness,” even desperation, in its haste to relocate the forces then in Saudi Arabia to Iraq.  The administration admitted in practice that the Ron Pauls of the world were right all along about the dangers of the policies we had been pursuing during the 1990s, and then proceeded to compound their past errors by embarking on our equivalent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  If even the administration could acknowledge the dangerous and counterproductive nature of deployments and policies that contributed to 9/11, why was the solution one of actually invading–quite illegally–another Muslim country?

President Bakiev was in no position to disagree. Kazakhstan, whose income per person of $3,800 is eight times Kyrgyzstan’s, is the country’s largest foreign investor. Many successful Kazakh entrepreneurs already think of Kyrgyzstan as pretty much a province of Kazakhstan, anyway. ~The Economist

Here is an interesting example of what is effectively a personal dictatorship flush with oil money functioning as a mostly benevolent actor in the troubled, impoverished pseudo-democracy of the region.  That income figure means that the average Kyrgyz earns about $470 per year–might there be other priorities for Kyrgyzstan besides pointless tribal conflict dressed up as respectable democratic change?

Incidentally, this would probably have something to do with the numbers that show “unfree” states growing at a faster rate than “free” ones, since Kyrgyzstan would have to have been absurdly designated “more free” than Kazakhstan on account of its fake, Washington-approved revolution.  When developed, slow-growing countries get lumped in with massively impoverished, very low-growth countries, the authoritarian oil states in developing countries are going to look pretty good.

Which is all fine and dandy—except that last year a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, came to exactly the opposite conclusion. Their study found that insecure and fearful children were more likely to grow up into conservatives, and that confident kids were more likely to become liberal. Clearly, as scientists are so fond of saying, more research is needed. ~The Economist

Via Isaac Chotiner

Besides, the new UNM study proposes that it found conservatives at UNM, which anyone from Albuquerque would find automatically suspicious.

On a more serious note, the opposing UNM results make more intuitive sense to me, since I grew up with both parents in a stable, pretty low-stress environment and some might say that I have become a bit conservative.  It makes intuitive sense in another way, which is that children who grow up in stable families are likely to think that those family structures are normal and the behaviours associated with maintaining them normative.  It seems to me they are more likely to acknowledge and respect parental authority than kids raised in more chaotic or difficult surroundings.  Indeed, their entire attitude towards authority would probably be different, and this could incline them towards the traditions their parents were handing down to them. 

On the other hand, growing up I knew a whole lot of kids from fairly well-off families, who grew up with both parents and had few worries in life.  They followed their parents’ example and the general cues from their teachers in high school to become nice conventional left-liberals, as it seems to me quite a lot of people in my generation in Albuquerque did to one degree or another.  In my case, it probably helped that there were shelves full of books by Russell Kirk, Mel Bradford and Kuenhelt-Leddihn and I heard my dad talking about Voegelin’s opposition to “immanentizing the eschaton” (true story) when I was in middle school.  So my childhood was not, you might say, exactly typical of the average New Mexican.

If you are treading close to “the edge of the abyss” and you then “turn a corner,” doesn’t that mean that you are just as likely to turn towards the abyss as you are to turn away from it?