Listening to the performances of traditional muwashshahsongs by Zein al-Jundi and reading a bit about the genre, it has been a pleasant, not entirely surprising, discovery that three of the principal instruments in muwashshah ensembles are the oud, qanun and kamancha, which are also central to traditional Armenian music.  This makes perfect sense, when you consider the proximity of Syria and Armenia and the longstanding patterns of exchange between the two lands, but it nonetheless seemed like something worth noting.

In yet another test of the viability of a late-start campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, Fred Thompson went before conservative leaders Saturday night to discuss law and order – for the nation, not a TV show.

People from the crowd of more than 400 said the topic played well because it goes to the heart of what unites economic and social conservatives. ~Politico

Apparently what unites economic and social conservatives is boilerplate rhetoric.  Thompson turned back to “first principles,” beginning with the rule of law.  That’s right, the rule of law.  Fred Thompson, lead cheerleading defender of Scooter Libby, wants to talk to you about the rule of law.  Of the Libby case, Thompson once famously said:

This is a trial that never would have been brought in any other part of the world [bold mine-DL]. This is a miscarriage of justice.

Fred seems to have an unusually high opinion of the justice systems of all other countries.  In his view, there is apparently not one dictatorship or corrupt regime in the entire world that would have prosecuted someone in Libby’s position.  By implication, he apparently thinks that the justice system of every country on earth is more just than our own is, at least when it comes to Scooter Libby.  But fortunately he can talk with credibility about the rule of law, because he’s not just a lawyer, but he also played one on TV.

From his re-pre-launch speech, there was also this:

“It is a sad irony that a nation that is so dedicated to the rule of law is doing so much to undermine the respect for it,” Thompson said.

Do you suppose that Thompson has ever focused on the deeds of the administration when it comes to the undermining of the rule of law?  Of course he hasn’t.  Likewise, it doesn’t matter to him that Libby got up on the stand and gave demonstrably false testimony under oath.  Even though no one made Libby say the things that he did, it is an “injustice” to hold him accountable when he breaks the law.  That’s what the “law and order” candidate believes.

Vice President Cheney was asked on Fox News about concerns that the Iraq war was hurting Republicans. “We didn’t get elected to be popular,” Cheney said. “We didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican party.” ~Bill Kristol

It is true that voters do not elect representatives out of purely partisan interest, but presumably think that they are acting in the best interests of the country.  It is not always the case that the voters are right about the latter, but Cheney is right that narrow partisan gain is not the main reason why voters elect members of Congress and Presidents.  If he is so indifferent to questions of popularity, it is strange, then, that for the better part of its first five years the administration has governed with a very keen eye to using every lever and mechanism at its disposal to maximise Republican gains.  They didn’t get elected to be popular, but they were surely going to do everything they could to game the system and turn everything to their advantage and to magnify their popularity as much as they could.  This is called politics.  It was a particularly aggressive and nasty form of politics at times, but politics all the same.  There would have been a time when nothing would have commanded the administration’s attention more than the fortunes of the party–sustaining and expanding the Republican majority were the explicit goals of the Rove political machine and became the overriding goals in setting domestic policy.   Now that the “permanent majority” machine has broken down and lies wrecked on the side of the road, behold how high-minded and concerned about the common good Mr. Cheney has become!  See how he stands above the petty grasping pols who worry about their positions of power–not like the noble sage of the Naval Observatory!  Of course, Mr. Cheney has the luxury of never having to run for election again and can be unusually dismissive of public opinion in a way that elected representatives cannot and should not be.

I imagine that the 11 “moderate” Republicans who approached Mr. Bush about the damage Iraq was doing to the GOP were trying to speak to Mr. Bush in a language he might be able to understand: they tried to explain Iraq in terms of electoral politics, because no other kind of appeal was reaching Mr. Bush.  Instead of showing appreciation for their sounding of the warning bell, the administration seems to think it is more appropriate to cast them as selfish cynics.

The pictures tell you everything: an exuberant, peaceful massive demonstration in a Muslim country for secular democracy. It seems to me that the most important ally the United States now has is Turkey: critical for maintaining the survival of Kurdistan; critical for stemming the tide of Islamism in the Mulism world; pivotal in helping Europe integrate its new Muslim immigrants in the ways of pluralism and secularism [bold mine-DL]. But let’s stop from a moment to look at all these people in the near east, loving democracy, cherishing freedom from theocratic diktats, celebrating the equality of women. Know hope. Freedom is more powerful than fundamentalism. In the long run. ~Andrew Sullivan

Never mind that the exuberant demonstration is a demonstration against the ruling party that represents most Turks and is made up of people committed to Kemalist secularism.  Their ace in the hole is the army, and they know that if the Islamists go too far the army will step in.  Then we’ll see how the survival of Kurdistan works out.   

Just consider whether the other points make any sense.  Turkey is critical for maintaining the survival of Kurdistan?  Well, I suppose it might be, if we mean that its refusal, so far, to invade Kurdistan means that Kurdistan will survive a little longer.  Turkey’s government doesn’t want Kurdistan to survive; if it had its way, it wouldn’t want Kurdistan to exist.  Turkey will stem the tide of Islamism in the Muslim world?  How?  The “reformed” Islamists are in power in Turkey, and have no particular interest in stemming the tide of Islamism elsewhere.  Ankara was notorious in backing Bosnian and Albanian Muslims in the ’90s, even though both groups had ties to jihadis from the Near East.  Is there any evidence that the Turkish government is actively working against Islamism in other countries?  On the contrary, the sympathy for Hizbullah itself last summer was hard to miss.  Turkey is pivotal in helping Europe integrate their Muslim populations?  How?  The Muslims in France do not by and large come from Turkey, and most Europeans don’t even want to bring Turkey into the EU–why would they accept Turkish advice on integrating Muslim immigrants if they don’t want to integrate Turkey into Europe, and why would the Turks give advice to people who clearly want to keep them at arm’s length?  Aren’t those elevating Turkey as the great synthesis of East and West simply projecting what they hope to see developing in the Islamic world?  Aren’t these protests expressions of a secularism under siege that feels itself to be on the wane and endangered by the rise of political Islam?  Why do we take them as signs of confidence and health of a secular Turkey?

The people in these demonstrations may be rebelling against imaginary “theocratic diktats” (of which there has been none in Turkey for at least 73 years), but they also represent the political forces that enforce secularist and nationalist diktats.  Relatively few people in Turkey are on the side of freedom as such.

The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law—derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex. In the late 1990s, it seemed as if the Idiot were finally retreating. But the retreat was short lived. Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct. ~Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Far be it from me to defend the wisdom of crowds and the virtues of democracy.  If Mr. Vargas Llosa wants to say that the policy preferences of mass democratic electorates are often foolish and unsound, I will not contradict him.  However, I tend to find the anti-populism of the liberal democrat a little hard to take, since it is so transparently inconsistent with his own confidence in democratic government.  There is often nothing obviously more purely rational and less self-interested about the preferences of the liberal democrat that puts him in the position to laugh at the populist and socialist as an “idiot.”  Carl Schorske’s cultural history of fin-de-siecle Vienna was one work that revealed to me this contempt of the 19th century liberal and his sympathisers for the conservative Catholic, the nationalist and the socialist: in this telling, liberals conceived of themselves as embattled heroes of rationality, and their foes were foolish crowds stupidly pursuing “magical” answers that could not be explained by anything other than irrationality.  In fact, the backlash against classical liberalism across all of Europe and, to some extent, also here in America was the result of the failure of liberal policies to address the interests and needs of huge numbers of people.  There is good reason why Christian democracy and social democracy became the dominant forces in European politics in virtually every country: most constituencies did not benefit from and did not want the liberal order.  The story of modern Europe is the story of how liberty and democracy are frequently mutually exclusive, but it also offers an important reminder that there are social and political goods that most people will privilege ahead of fairly abstract notions of liberty. 

Liberal economic policies were geared for the benefit of liberal middle-class voters and promised, eventually, benefits for others as well, but in the short term the rural and labour interests were quite rationally and sensibly opposed to policies that privileged the interests of buergerlich city-dwellers and the interests of capital and finance.  Liberals are always caught in the paradox that they endorse all of the contractual and egalitarian theories that must lead inexorably to universal suffrage and mass democracy, knowing at the same time that their definition of good government and freedom is not shared by the overwhelming majority of people in the world and will likely be repudiated once everyone has a vote.  Nowadays they possess a charmingly naive faith in the virtues of democracy, but reserve the right to declare the exercise of the franchise in ways they dislike to be the workings of idiocy.  This role today is taken up by the inheritors of the American Freisinnigen, the Republicans, who are quite happy to extol the glories of democracy and “people power” at every turn when it seems to vindicate their policy preferences until the demos turns against them, whereupon they rediscover that America is supposed to be a republic and the madness of crowds is a dangerous and worrisome phenomenon.  It is as some of them are Jacobins who are willing to pose as Federalists when the occasion requires; the centralising tendencies of both Jacobin and Federalist make this contradictory stance less absurd than it might otherwise be.  But that is another story.         

Back to Latin American idiocy.  What is striking about this analysis is not its rude dismissal of the recurring preferences of large numbers of Latin Americans, but the treatment of the resurgence of “the Idiot” as if nothing in the 1990s happened that might have caused many Latin American nations to question the neoliberalism that was being promoted as the answer to “the Idiot.”  Latin American electorates did not turn on neoliberalism out of a fit of pique or whimsy–like its original, neoliberalism introduced any number of strains and upheavals into the societies where neoliberal policies were implemented and austerity budgets alienated those who depended on government largesse.  Like classical liberalism, neoliberalism has proved to be wildly unpopular.  The disasters of neoliberalism in Argentina in particular seemed to vindicate increased hostility to such policies.  Even though the Argentinian government could be fairly blamed for the overspending that pushed their country into the debt crisis that led to the meltdown that impoverished many Argentines, the association of the ruling party and the government with neoliberal policies tainted the entire theory with the failures of their mismanagement. 

If “the Idiot” has returned with a vengeance, it is because neoliberal politicians also acted pretty idiotically in their own right and discredited the alternative to old-fashioned populism.  To the extent that neoliberalism was associated with pro-American attitudes, its failure made hostility to U.S. policy fashionable once again.  Rather than face up to any of these political realities, Vargas Llosa goes so far as to declare outside sympathisers with this backlash to be guilty of “intellectual treason” (whatever that means). 

The author takes the easy road of bashing Hugo Chavez, who is so ridiculous that criticising him is a bit like calling in an airstrike on a barrel of fish.  He cites Chavez’s admiration for Chomsky and Chomsky’s admiration for Chavez.  That is a surprise–two radical leftists admire each other!  In other news, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair get along, and Christopher Hitchens does not believe in God.  Somehow Foreign Policy thought it worth publishing an article that tells us that (contrary to all of those numerous Western claims of success) Venezuelan social and economic policies are not working very well.  Plus, did you realise that some sociology professor from Binghampton University (where?) has defended the Cuban government?  How could you not know–he is apparently an “American opinion leader.”  Continuing to show the vast influence of “idiot” sympathisers in the industrialised West, Mr. Vargas Llosa has dug up a lecture by Harold Pinter (he’s still alive?) in which Pinter rallies to the side of the old Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas (because it’s never too late to justify communist atrocities).  Of course, it’s dreadful to have people still defending the Sandinistas, but in an age when Trotsky admirers appear in the pages of National Review it might just be that old leftists rehashing debates of the 1980s are not the most pressing concern of our time.

But did you know that there are occasionally news stories written about Chavez that do not roundly condemn him and all his works?  Clearly, there are terrible and sinister forces at work!  That is not all.  He goes on:

Populists share basic characteristics: the voluntarism of the caudillo as a substitute for the law; the impugning of the oligarchy and its replacement with another type of oligarchy; the denunciation of imperialism (with the enemy always being the United States); the projection of the class struggle between the rich and the poor onto the stage of international relations; the idolatry of the state as a redeeming force for the poor; authoritarianism under the guise of state security; and “clientelismo,” a form of patronage by which government jobs—as opposed to wealth creation—are the conduit of social mobility and the way to maintain a “captive vote” in the elections.     

This is all perfectly true, and it is also a pretty good definition of every welfarist, progressive and social democratic political movement that has come to power in North America and Europe for the last seventy years.  Give or take a point, it could be a very good description of FDR and the New Deal.  These movements are routinely very wrong about the efficacy of the policies they promote, they are often quite stupid about economics and they often end up worsening the conditions of the people they set out allegedly to help, and they are, of course, vehicles for ambitious men to acquire power for themselves, but they came into being in response to the inadequate representation and inadequate response of governments dominated by other forces.  It may be the case that Latin American governments working on behalf of the interests of the wealthy oligarchs pursue policies that are better for the economic development of their respective countries, and it may often be the case that populist backlashes harm these countries, but it is entirely understandable and predictable that marginalised, dispossessed and poor people who see relatively few obvious benefits from this order are going to seek some kind of change.  There is not even a hint that there might be some explicable cause for the resurgence of populism–it can only be idiocy. 

Now, obviously Western sympathy with Chavismo is fairly idiotic, but it is also highly unrepresentative of most Western opinion, just as Chavismo itself is largely unrepresentative of most Latin American left-populism.  Most Latin American nations have turned left without indulging in the more absurd excesses of Venezuela and Bolivia, and they will benefit from their moderation.  The “threat” described in this article is not really that threatening, since it refers to the political sympathies of mostly marginal and far-left Western figures who have limited influence, if they have any at all, on policy.  The regimes for which they have sympathies are themselves relatively weak and have already begun to suffer the economic consequences of their flawed policies.

Nobody denies the manifest disaster of the past four years. ~The Economist

This line comes in a leader that aims to praise Tony Blair’s record, which makes the rest of the piece so much harder to take.

It still seems like a decent idea to me, though: current events are intrinsically interesting, and learning about them make you genuinely curious about why the world ended up the way it did. If the lessons are structured with curiosity about causes in mind, this will make you interested in the Cold War, which in turn makes you interested in World War II, which in turn makes you interested in the Great Depression, etc. It’s a solution to the most obvious problem of teaching history: without any context, why should a 16-year-old care about dusty topics like the Missouri Compromise or the rise of the labor movement? ~Kevin Drum

It is hard to exaggerate how much I dislike this attitude towards the study of history.  In addition to confusing students about the workings of causality, giving them a completely skewed understanding of historical significance and basically endorsing quasi-Hegelian, teleological readings of history as the unfolding of some necessary, predetermined outcome and anachronistic “precursorism” as the desirable ways to think about the past, which ought to discredit the method right there, it betrays the assumption that there is something more intrinsically interesting about present events (which may or may not be terribly historically significant) than about events that we know are historically significant.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this method would take the music of System of a Down as a point of departure for talking about the Armenian genocide, rather than trying to show the causes for the genocide and mentioning, in passing, that modern Armenians still consider this to be a defining event in their history. 

This assumption that current events are more intrinsically interesting is one that I imagine the average teenager doesn’t share.  To the average teenager, what happens in contemporary European, Near Eastern or even American political life probably seems just as boring and irrelevant as the Missouri Compromise.  Indeed, the pursuit of relevance is misguided and doomed from the beginning–for example, WWII shouldn’t have to be relevant to you, the ignorant teenager, to make it worthy of study.  Besides, the job of the history teacher is to cause the students to take an interest in things that they would otherwise not be interested in.  Some might call this process “education” and others might call it “broadening” the “minds” of students.  There is nothing at all wrong in relating history to current events or using contemporary references to help explain a concept, but it is important not to muddle things or confuse students about chronology, when they often have a hard enough time appreciating the importance of chronology.  Teaching isn’t supposed to be spoonfeeding students what they already like and then hope, miraculously, that this translates into an interest into other things.

“The assumption has always been that Mr Bush was planning to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor and that the Republicans in Congress would go along with him,” says Charlie Cook, a leading political analyst. “But that looks increasingly difficult by the day. We could be facing a Nixon in 1975 situation where senior Republicans ultimately prevail on George Bush to change course [bold mine-DL].” ~TheFinancial Times

I have no idea what this refers to, since Nixon had been gone for approximately four months by the start of 1975 (there was apparently some scandal) and it was not Republicans prevailing on Ford to change course that concluded American involvement in Vietnam.  It was the progress of the North Vietnamese offensive and Democratic opposition to the aid requested by Ford for South Vietnam that brought about the conclusion.  This is like an American newspaper citing a British political analyst talking about a “Margaret Thatcher in 1991 situation”–you have to hope that the analyst was misquoted and the editors and fact-checkers simply forgot to read over this story.  I have seen more or less plausible attempts to create parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, but this one doesn’t make any sense at all.

2008 will be a unique election, but Leon Hadar makes an argument that suggests why it will share many of the characteristics of the election of 1920:

But a more appropriate historical analogy in discussing the impact of the war in Mesopotamia is the disastrous outcome of American fighting in World War I.

The Wilson and Bush administrations have many things in common, and once we started to see Bush’s galloping Wilsonian idealism in action it was easy to imagine his Presidency ending in just as much failure and public repudiation as Wilson’s had done.  The two make for an interesting comparison, since Mr. Bush’s War has so far resulted in comparatively far fewer American deaths, it probably will not end up leading to a much greater slaughter a few decades hence and in contrast to Wilson Mr. Bush has not (yet) engaged in widespread efforts to round up and imprison dissidents against his war.  It is striking just how weak Mr. Bush has been as a President compared to the rather imperious Wilson (not that anyone should want him to start demonstrating Wilson’s sort of “strength”).  Inflexibility defines both men, but the man in the administration who most resembles Wilson’s demeanour–right down to the perpetual scowl on his face–is the Vice President.  Meanwhile, Mr. Bush seems to resemble no one in the Wilson administration more than Thomas Marshall, the Vice President so ineffectual and ridiculous that he refused to assume the Presidency after Wilson was incapacitated with a stroke for fear that it might appear to be a coup.  Mr. Bush has played the role of incurious legacy admission to Wilson’s obsessive academic.  Mr. Bush’s errors have proceeded from knowing little and being interested in even less, while Wilson’s were the errors of presuming to know and see all (even when he didn’t know much at all about the peoples and lands he was helping to divvy up).  Both certainly drank deeply from the poisoned well of optimism, but unfortunately for the world Wilson’s optimistic preaching was received by a weary and disillusioned world as a new hope rather than the misguided folly that it was.  With the benefit of the experience of the 20th century, most nations were less willing to embrace similarly unrealistic talk of hope, reform and liberation when Mr. Bush was offering it.  Wilson could speak as the representative of an America only just stepping fully onto the world stage, while Mr. Bush speaks as the representative of the world’s predominant power.  What sounded like a blessing coming from Wilson ends up sounding like a veiled threat coming from Mr. Bush.  Thus, bizarrely, Mr. Bush will probably be remembered more poorly than Wilson–who is still surprisingly highly regarded by many historians and politicians–despite the fact that he is merely a second-rate imitator of the far worse original.  (Not, let me insist again, that we want to have another Wilson!) 

As large as Iraq looms on the scene today, as politically significant as the war is today, and as much as it will sour the public on intervention in the near future, I think we may be surprised at how quickly the effects of the war pass away and recede into the distance.  Calamitous and awful as it has been, it still remains a war on a relatively limited scale and will wind up having a primarily regional impact.  It has acquired the prominence that it has because it involves the superpower, but it will ultimately probably possess the historical significance of the Boer War or some other colonial misadventure of the British Empire.  The disaster of Wilson’s intervention was global in nature, and it has continued to shape the history of the world ever since, almost entirely for the worse.  If the outbreak of war in 1914 was the most significant turning point in modern history (and it was), marking the end of old European civilisation and ushering in all of the horrors of the 20th century, American intervention in 1917-18 ensured that the consequences of the Great War would be even worse.  Princip’s bullet murdered nations, but Wilson’s overzealous conscience ruined whole continents. 

Mr. Bush’s legacy of failure will probably not be so enormous, but will be, like so much else he has touched, of minimal effect and importance.  Despite high ambitions and overblown rhetoric that mimic Wilsonian pretensions, mediocrity and smallness have been the chief characteristics of Mr. Bush’s policies.  Watching Mr. Bush trying to follow in Wilson’s disastrous footsteps is like watching someone of the stature and ability of Mussolini trying to reconstitute the Roman Empire.  Their ideological eyes are far bigger than their political stomachs.  Wilson really inaugurated and launched the idealist-interventionist school of American foreign policy, ensuring misery for many generations of Americans and foreigners, while Mr. Bush’s bungling will not even manage to kill off this dreadful thing. 

As Dr. Hadar suggests, there may well be a temporary “isolationist” backlash against the clumsy, mistake-ridden interventionism of the last several years.  Yet Mr. Bush will remembered as the head of an administration so incompetent in planning and execution that he could not even manage to fully discredit this approach to foreign policy, because he has ensured that the numerous mistakes in implementation will mask the fundamental mistake of meddling in other countries’ affairs.

This concerns the “surge” and the recent remarks by one Maj. Gen. Mixon about troop levels in Diyala and the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi government.  What seems striking about this story is how closely Gen. Mixon’s complaints about the Iraqi government seem to track with the warnings of certain war opponents who said that the “surge” was doomed to failure because of the weakness and compromisednature of the Iraqi government.  They do not seem to bear out the constantly optimistic assessments of war supporters who have interpreted every event for the past four months as some sort of vindication for the “surge.” 

As others have noted before, when things have seemed to improve temporarily, they say, “The surge did it!”  When things seem to be getting worse, they say, “The surge is making the enemy desperate!”  Presumably when Sadr stands beside Maliki in the center of the Green Zone in triumph, these people will say, “The surge has lulled them into a false sense of security!”  Even then, when someone at home criticises the “surge” as a bad plan, they will still say, “You don’t see the big picture.  This was just the first surge of many, with each one being ever more powerful and surgish than the last.  We may have lost the surge, but we will win the best-of-five surge series.” 

Taken together with the news that the Iraqi parliament may adjourn for a couple months and the report that the “surge” will continue well into 2008 (which means it isn’t much of a “surge,” and is actually an escalation, as David Corn and Jim Pinkerton pointed out recently), it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how all of this will turn out well.  If the Iraqi government keeps confirming just how useless it is, while our government continues to pursue a tactical plan that depends heavily on the Iraqi government not being useless and actually pursues this plan for over a year, Americans will have been dying at higher rates for roughly a year while the vital element of the entire plan has simply failed to materialise.  Meanwhile, political support for the effort has started crumbling because all of these problems are becoming common knowledge, and the start of September has become the much-discussed point when that support will begin to collapse rapidly.