The Defense Department today (Monday) announced 27-year-old 1st Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich of Walpole was killed yesterday (Sunday) when an improvised bomb exploded while he was on a patrol in the Salah Ad Din Province.

His father — Andrew J. Bacevich — is a Boston University professor and a vocal critic of the war. ~WPRI 12 News

Via Chronicles

My most sincere condolences go out to Prof. Bacevich and his family.  May God grant the soul of his servant rest where the righteous repose.  Vechnaya pomyat.

As a novice, Cox is under the mistaken impression that presidential campaigns are about ideas. ~Matt Labash

As a friend to no-hope presidential candidates everywhere, I have to applaud John Cox for undertaking what has to be one of the more pointless presidential campaigns in recent memory.  Even running on the Constitution Party ticket will get you some already-established ballot access, but to run a more or less solo protest campaign against the powers-that-be, well, that’s simply awe-inspiring.  Truly, it is.  Quite a few people know who Ron Paul is, regardless of what they think about him, and he can get some funding from a small but devoted group of supporters.  Mike Gravel at least has been elected to office, which gives him a certain “legitimacy” in the eyes of the media that normal citizens do not possess.  John Cox is truly building from scratch.

John Cox can be forgiven if he works on the assumption that campaigns are about ideas.  Pundits, who know better, are constantly talking about the ideas and proposals that candidates are offering, or complaining when they are failing to offer any “new” or “interesting” ideas, and the main candidates themselves encourage this illusion by saying, as Brownback does all the time, “our ideas” will win the election.  Actually, as Samnesty well knows, you win elections with votes, and as I have tried to argue many, many times, voting and policy ideas have almost nothing to do with each other.  But everyone is constantly talking about ideas, especially on the GOP side, such that it was even the boast of President Bush last year before the midterms that the GOP was the “party of ideas.”  It is tempting for a disaffected Republican to believe that this supposed “party of ideas” should actually embrace conservative ideas and should then even enact conservative policies. 

Where Jon Cox is at his most admirable is when he says, in all sincerity, “I’m just a believer in the U.S. Constitution.”  Unfortunately, that is a serious drawback for any candidate trying to compete for the GOP nomination.

Why would a putatively conservative magazine and its audience care whether Western feminists care about Islamic women?  That is the question that has occurred to me after seeing some of the reaction to The Weekly Standard‘s cover story this week.  First, it would appear that the claim is false or grossly exaggerated anyway.  However, suppose that it were true.  Wouldn’t the conservative response be to be just as skeptical of feminist criticisms of traditional societies overseas as conservatives are normally skeptical of feminism here at home?  Of course, not all traditions are equal, and no one would confuse The Weekly Standard for a bulwark of traditionalism anyway, but this seems to be one more instance of a conservative magazine trying to prove that it actually cares more about women’s rights or racial equality or any other given cause normally more associated with the left than those hypocritical liberals do.  This is an interesting polemical tactic and can go some way towards undermining credibility of political adversaries, but it helps if it is a) true and b) in some way remotely consistent with everything else you claim to believe.  This particular claim would appear to fail on both counts. 

George Kennan had an outstanding remark about “that curious law which so often makes Americans, inveterately conservative at home, the partisans for radical change everywhere else.”  This is often on display in mainstream conservative rhetoric vis-a-vis Islam or any non-Western society: traditional and customary structures at home are good, admirable and have stood the test of the time, testifying to their importance and meaning, while traditional structures elsewhere must be torn down and those living in those structures must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into enlightened modernity.  The cultural radicalism we conservatives presumably deplore at home becomes a gift of liberation for the peoples of the world.  There must be some sort of happy middle ground between this combination of domestic social conservatism and radical emancipationism abroad and a D’Souza-like call for American conservatives to discover their abiding common ground with traditional Muslims.

Via Yglesias 

The times change, but nationalism never ceases to be ignorant and obnoxious. 

Last year I remarked on the divisions the war would eventually create within the GOP, dubbing the hard-line Victory Caucus types the Dolchstoss faction on the assumption that they, or those who agreed with them, would begin making this kind of accusation.  You can already hear the refrain, “We were never defeated on the battlefield!”  Which, as Gen. Giap once noted after the war, was true but irrelevant. 

Perhaps I was a bit off in assuming that there would be some greater division among Republicans by this point.  However, related to the Dolchstoss faction, I said:

The Iraq failure will cut through the party and divide it into three very unequal parts.  The major schism will be the alienation of the hard-liners, represented in the ‘08 field by McCain and Gingrich, who are so much more aggressive on Iraq and foreign policy questions generally that they seem to inhabit their own universe.  They will ironically be perhaps the most disgruntled Republicans after an Iraq defeat, because they maintain the illusion that if their more aggressive, heavy-handed and brutal tactics were employed victory would be the inevitable result.  Call them the Dolchstoss faction.  Incredibly, they will spin the failure in Iraq as an example of what too much diplomacy and consultation cause, and they will tap into the resentment of a core nationalist constituency that will make the primaries very hotly contested.  Expect to hear a lot of talk from the hard-liner candidates who will claim that they are both smarter and ”tougher” than Bush was.  They will say, “Bush let us down because he failed to live up to our hype–but we will live up to our own hype!”  Since this involves starting many more wars and ruining the country, we may take them at their word that they will certainly try.  

I guess I didn’t realise just how much of the GOP would belong to this faction at this point.  Judging from the presidential field, it would have to be something like 60-70%.

I remember hearing that Guantanamo Bay and the war on terror were allowing Vladimir Putin to terrorize Chechnya. ~Isaac Chotiner

Obviously, saying that would be silly, but the point of saying something like that would be to argue that whatever human rights violations were being committed in the name of the “war on terror” undermine the credibility of the U.S. government to criticise Russian conduct in Chechnya.  That would be a true statement.  (Not that I think pestering the Russians about fighting terrorists and insurgents in their own country should one of our top priorities in foreign policy.)  This is rather like saying that embarking on preventive wars to stop future, potential threats invites other states to do the same–it is true.  In so doing, Washington does not “allow” China to launch a “preventive war” against Taiwan, but it severely undermines its ability to condemn that invasion and rally international opinion against future wars that are essentially wars of aggression.  This is why people argue against setting bad precedents, because they, well, set bad precedents that others can invoke as justifications for their own bad behaviour later. 

There is no question of actually “allowing” or “disallowing,” however, since Russians had been fighting in Chechnya for years before there was a “war on terror.”  Also, Washington doesn’t actually rule the world, but there is a hegemonist assumption behind all of this talk of “allowing” this or that to take place in the world.  Stupid interventionists use this language of “permitting” and “allowing” all the time when they are complaining about inaction in the face of this or that crisis.  Why has the West “allowed” the situation in Darfur to unfold as it has?  Why does the West “allow” the Burmese regime to abuse its people?  And so on.  To speak of allowing or permitting is to claim the power and right to stop it, whether by force of example or by action.

This came up, bizarrely, in the context of complaining about how poor Wolfowitz has been treated in some commentary and press reports, which cast the scandal with his girlfriend’s raise as an obstacle to advancing an anti-corruption and anti-poverty agenda.  The anti-corruption part is easy to understand, while the other one makes sense if you understand that Wolfowitz has been so politically damaged that he cannot continue to function effectively.  Think of him as international lending’s answer to Alberto Gonzales: he may not have actually done anything illegal or even necessarily technically wrong or unethical, but at this point keeping him at Justice is ridiculous.  So long as a politically damaged person is at the head of an organisation, that organisation doesn’t function as well as it could or should.  Just ask the other President.

Kirchick takes an even more odd view, linking critics of Wolfowitz with a view that, for liberals, there should be “no friends to the right.”  For this critique to make sense, Wolfowitz would have to have been a pretty good World Bank President, which, as Yglesias points out, Mallaby (not one normally to be confused with a half-crazed Kossack) is explicitly denying.  Then there is the political reality that the Europeans and Asians don’t like Wolfowitz, while he has a cheering section from the African delegations who like that he has sent them great big wodges of cash.  This is a bad dynamic in any kind of banking (even development lending): the depositors hate you, but the borrowers love you.  You have messed up somewhere.  It means that the people who put up a lot of the money dislike the head of the bank, and they are willing to pull their money out of the bank as a result.  If the World Bank disappeared tomorrow, the world would probably be a better place in certain respects, but for those who actually want the thing to function “properly” (whatever that would look like) the need to get rid of Wolfowitz appears to be both vital and perfectly obvious.

Today, we know the substantive problems with compassionate conservatism. It involved blending church and state in ways that made people on both sides uncomfortable. It was too small an agenda to build an entire domestic policy around. ~David Brooks

Now some of us sensed the problems with “compassionate conservatism” right away.  It wasn’t that it blended church and state, but that it wrapped up the same old welfarism in quasi-religious language and sought to centralise things that were best left local.  It wasn’t that the agenda was too small or too large–the agenda was wrong, because it had the government trying to do things “compassionately” that conservatives theoretically didn’t want government doing in the first place.  If Mr. Bush “saved” the GOP from big government conservatism, he had a funny way of doing it, since one might have called “compassionate conservatism” a kinder, gentler form of neoconservative social policy.   

Going back over the 22 July 1999 speech, I was reminded of many of the catchphrases from his camaign (“armies of compassion” was one that always rubbed me the wrong way for some reason).  I also remember that later that same year he complained that Congress was “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.”  At that moment, I knew that there was something seriously amiss with Mr. Bush’s candidacy.  Later he complained about conservatives who spoke of America “slouching toward Gomorrah” in a clear shot at Robert Bork.  How sad and also strangely amusing that Mr. Bush should now be regarded by some as some sort of obsessive religious conservative and an incipient theocrat, when he made his start in the national campaign often running against the voices of moral reproach.  He was the obnoxiously self-satisfied John McCain lecturing his fellow Republicans from a position of righteous “moderation”–at least, that’s what he was before he discovered that he had to compete with the real McCoy, er, McCain.  That was what “compassionate conservatism” seemed to be: a Third Way for Republicans; rhetorical distancing from actual conservative positions to show that he wasn’t really one of “them”; a sort of neoliberalism on the right.  In practice, that is more or less what it was.  It wasn’t anything really new, but presented a new face: it was moderate Republicanism that had a friend in Jesus.  Of it a cynic might have said, “It’s not your daddy’s Rockefeller Republicanism anymore.”

If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions. The Church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests. Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere. To form consciences, to be the advocate of justice and truth, to educate in individual and political virtues: that is the fundamental vocation of the Church in this area. And lay Catholics must be aware of their responsibilities in public life; they must be present in the formation of the necessary consensus and in opposition to injustice. ~Pope Benedict XVI

In 1988, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger published a collection of essays under the title of Church, Ecumenism and Politics. In it, he argued that capitalism is little better than national socialism or communism, in that all three propose false idols (prosperity, the Volk, and the state, respectively). Ratzinger said that to build a humane civilization, the West must rediscover two elements of its past: its classical Greek heritage and its common Christian identity.

From the classical era, Ratzinger wrote, Europe should rediscover objective and eternal values that stand above politics, putting limits to power. Ratzinger used the Greek term eunomia to describe this concept of the good. In that sense, one could say that Ratzinger proposed a eunomic, rather than capitalist, model of Western culture.

Over the years, Ratzinger has been close to the Communio school within Catholic theology, which stresses the need for cultures to take their point of departure from the Christian gospel rather than secular ideologies. Its primary exponents have repeatedly criticized capitalism for promoting an ethos of individualism and “survival of the fittest” that is at odds with the communitarian thrust of Catholic social teaching. ~John Allen

Via Bettnet.com

First, the most important issue of his presidency, the war, has not gone as well as people want. Second, the war has sucked all the oxygen out of the president’s domestic agenda. Few today, when they think of the president, even remember faith-based initiatives, the Medicare reform law or even the “Bush tax cuts” that have helped create an almost unthinkably healthy economy of historic low unemployment and 41 consecutive months of growth. ~Tom DeLay

I didn’t realise that Politico was actively trying to live up to its negative reputation as the official online GOP smoke-blower, but then I have seen that Tom DeLay is apparently now a regular columnist for them, which would seem to confirm all the worst thing Politico’s critics have said and then some.  Couldn’t they have chosen an unindicted Republican instead?  I have it on good authority that there are still a few left out there!

DeLay’s column is surreal, which is what you might expect from someone who has inhaled as many insecticide fumes as he probably did in his previous career.  The war “has not gone as well as people want,” he says, as if it were simply a question of a particularly finicky public that demands impossibly high standards for effectiveness in war leadership.  Perhaps if people weren’t so unreasonably demanding, DeLay seems to be saying, they would see how well everything has actually gone.  Next, DeLay says that the war has “sucked all the oxygen out of” Bush’s domestic agenda (which implies that this agenda was full of air), to which the obvious reply would have to be: Bush has a domestic agenda?  Yes, he used to have one, but whatever he didn’t get passed in his first term died on the vine.  Except for amnesty, he already had nothing left on the domestic agenda at the start of 2006, and now even that seems unlikely to go anywhere for the time being.  No one remembers faith-based initiatives because that program was, by and large, a flop, and one derided by several people who used to work in the office for FBIs.  Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, the changes to Medicare are only too familiar to some–those would be the ones who remember the largest expansion of federal entitlements in a generation, the huge cost of the new program and the shameless arm-twisting the administration (and Tom DeLay) engaged in to make sure that it passed. 

DeLay’s advice is for Mr. Bush to now “move past Iraq [bold mine-DL] and return to a domestic agenda that is being hijacked by overreaching liberal Democrats.”  Indeed, in the words of DeLay’s moral exemplar and personal favourite, it’s time for the country to move on.  Why should the Commander-in-Chief (a position about which he never ceases us to remind us) get mired down in the exhausting and tiresome details of the war he started?  There is, in DeLay’s estimation, “nothing more he can do, except report back to the American people about the progress.”  Let’s move along.

I’ve always been partial to the Filipino analogy, but it’s worth remembering that the Phillipines [sic], like the Transvaal, was a distinctly peripheral theater in the early 1900s, which substantially reduced the war’s ripple effect on geopolitics; Iraq, on the other hand, is rather more centrally located, and sits athwart a region that matters a great deal to the global order (Edward Luttwak’s provocations aside), at least until its oil wells run dry. So there’s always a chance – albeit a small one, I think – that the Iraq War will prove a prelude to a larger conflagration of some kind, playing the Spanish Civil War to a Mesopotamian World War II. ~Ross Douthat

I take Ross’ points.  The comparison with the Filipino insurgency does make some sense and, if this is the right comparison, actually supports his second suggestion more than he has granted.  It is true that the Filipino war was peripheral to world politics at the time it was being fought, but a few decades later American possession of the Philippines would become a significant factor in the Japanese decision to attack the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor.  While it might not definitely be the case that the U.S. would not have been drawn into the Pacific War but for the possession of the Philippines, without U.S. annexation and control of the Philippines the Japanese would have had far less reason to fear direct American involvement in the war in East Asia and would have had that much less reason to provoke open war with the U.S.  So it is conceivable that the Iraq war could end up having similarly significant consequences if American forces remain there in large numbers to serve as a tripwire for a future, larger war with, say, the Moscow-Tehran-New Delhi bloc.  

Regional conflicts in the Balkans led to continental, even global, war because the great powers decided to make these local conflicts into a matter of their security, thus magnifying the conflict into a much larger one than it need be (with several of the powers destroying themselves in the process).  This has ever since given people an outsized impression of the strategic importance of the Balkans (such that the ridiculous Bubba cited 1914 as a reason to start a war against Serbia, just as the Austrians had done 85 years before), which Bismarck correctly noted were not worth the bones of one Prussian grenadier.  The strategic importance of such-and-such a place is usually something that has to be constructed and argued for by various interest groups, since initially this is often not self-evident to policymakers.  When we saw that some place is strategically important, this often means in practice that influential groups back home say that it is, because they have investments or goals tied up in that place.  Viewed rather more dispassionately, the Levant has almost no strategic significance for the United States, yet the preoccupations of our foreign policy thinkers are often focused on the conflicts consuming this very narrow band of territory, because various factors of domestic politics contribute to the creation of the view that these conflicts have vastly greater global significance than they, in fact, have. 

In the German example, Bismarckian realism gave way to the interests of Weltpolitik, the naval lobby and Anglophobe nationalists who believed that Germany’s natural enemy was Britain, and, as part of the Kaiser’s new push to become friendly with the Ottomans and Berlin’s foolish rebuff of the Russians (leading in due course to the Franco-Russian alliance), we see that Bismarckian common sense about the Balkans gave way to encouragements to the Austrians to meddle there and then there was no discouragement of the Austrian move to invade Serbia in 1914.  (The Kaiser famously wrote in the diplomatic correspondence before the Austrian declaration of war, after receiving word of the Serbian concessions, “Every cause for war falls to the ground,” but infamously failed to stop the Austrians from plunging ahead.)  Unpleasantness ensued.  Bad policy decisions in a number of European capitals, many of which were taken in pursuit of placating domestic political constituencies, contributed directly to making the Balkans the “powderkeg of Europe,” rather than there being anything necessarily inherently important about the conflicts in the Balkans as far as outsiders were concerned (obviously, they were inherently important for the people directly involved in the Balkan Wars).  Iraq and the Near East are “central” to the “global order” because a consensus has formed about the “global order” that makes the Near East its center, but there is no necessary reason to believe the consensus-makers when they say this.  

The Near East was somewhat important during the Cold War, but it had nothing like the importance of Europe, because Europe was the place where the two largest powers stood face to face, as it were, and where they were most likely to come into direct conflict.  CENTO withered away, and hardly anyone one noticed, and I think few shed tears for its demise.  NATO persists in the face of all the reasons why it should have dissolved a decade ago.  That seems slightly significant.  Iraq’s geopolitical centrality will be defined by whether or not outside powers choose to make it their field of competition–there is nothing, not even oil, intrinsic to Iraq that makes it so vital and significant.  Regions of the world tend to possess geopolitical significance because they become battlefields for the great powers, and not because of their inherent value or location.  I do wonder whether we think of the Near East as having great strategic importance because we have embarked on policies that make it seem tremendously important, when any other part of the world might be made to seem just as important if the attentions of the only superpower were focused on it.  

The idea that there is a place in the world that yields disproportionate strategic advantage because of where and what it is has a venerable tradition in geopolitical theory, but I am not at all sure that this idea is correct.  Ross says that Iraq is more “centrally located” than South Africa or the Philippines, which is true to the extent that we recognise that many of the centers of economic and political power rest in Europe and South and East Asia, but it is Luttawak’s point that no country in the Near and Middle East is itself one of these centers and these countries are, taken together, fairly peripheral.  I would go perhaps even further and say that the Near and Middle East fit the economic profile of colonial Africa: sources of raw materials needed by different metropolitan powers, but in themselves not necessarily terribly politically significant.

Bruce Bartlett writes about Ron Paul, and Andrew Sullivan has begun talking about him.  All we need now is a third to start boosting Dr. Paul’s candidacy and we’ll have a pro-Ron Paul trend in the media.