The delegation included Representatives Mark Kirk of Illinois, another leader of the moderate coalition; Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania; James T. Walsh of New York; and Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri. Mr. Kirk, Mr. Walsh and Ms. Emerson declined to discuss the meeting. ~The New York Times

They were part of a delegation of “moderate Republicans” who had come to express their concern over Iraq.  They were telling Mr. Bush what their constituents think about the war–their districts have turned hard against the war, in some cases dramatically so.  There was also this item: “One told Mr. Bush that voters back home favored a withdrawal even if it meant the war was judged a loss.”  That sounds like a pretty strong endorsement of a withdrawal policy, at least as far as that district goes.  If this is true in moderate Republican districts, what do you want to bet that this is representative of general national opinion? 

Obsessive election watchers from last fall will remember that Kirk and Walsh survived strong challenges and there was a brief moment where it seemed possible that Walsh would get swept out to sea along with the other 30 Republican House members ousted in November.  Now these “moderates” are scrambling to find some cover before the next election, because they know that the next wave will take them if they don’t.

The years after September 11 have seen a welcome surge in the number of faculty positions and courses devoted to Islam and the Middle East, without producing any charges of a distorted intellectual agenda. ~David Bell

Well, yes and no.  There have not usually been charges of a “distorted intellectual agenda” from people who have something to do with these areas of study, but there are routinely accusations of a “distorted intellectual agenda” aimed at Middle Eastern Studies departments around the country.  The accusers both do and do not have a point.  They do have a point that scholars of the Middle East do not actively ridicule and belittle most of the peoples they study, and they have a point that people who know rather more about the region–and who have actually been to the region–tend be surprisingly less reflexively pro-Israel than many of their fellow citizens who do not even possess a passport.  On a more grave note, they have something of a point when it comes to Islamic studies, where scholars of Islam enjoy the luxury of studying something both supremely interesting to the public at the present time and something about which relatively few non-experts can effectively challenge their interpretations, however misleading or simplistic some of them might be.  This gives them a flexibility and level of control over the public debate that is less possible in other areas of study.  Most of the accusers are not concerned about the influence of Turkish denialist policy on Middle Eastern studies, since the Armenians and other such peoples do not interest them very much, but it is true that most Turcologists tend to be very tight-lipped or agnostic about the Armenian genocide because they cannot afford to be publicly associated with something that is illegal to talk about in the country where they must do their research.  This is very unfortunate.  This is not principally what Mr. Bell is talking about (he is writing about the decline of military history), but inasmuch as it does pertain to the history of WWI it is an interesting aspect of another part of the historical record that suffers for both obvious political reasons and reasons of shifts within the discipline.

When I studied alongside other social science students who were not historians, I was impressed by how they wanted to reduce history to nothing but a story of “kings and wars,” as they dismissively put it, so that they probably assume on the basis with their acquaintance with the History Channel (a.k.a., The Nazis We Have Known And Killed Channel) that the only kind of history that exists is political and military!  How disappointed they would be to find that there are so few classes that fit their idea of what history is.  It is interesting that they assume that history was nothing but talking about “kings and wars” and it is also interesting that it was because of this that they had decided years ago that they didn’t like it.  How many sociologists now pester the world because they became convinced of the uselessness of history because of this perceived preoccupation with nothing but political and military history?  This loss of interest in history (which is obviously the most interesting subject anyone could ever study), as I have said repeatedly over the years, is proof that they had poor or unimaginative history teachers. 

History for these social science students was literature done up with a scientific apparatus.  Indeed, I would not argue strongly for the scientific quality of history in the way that this word is applied to the hard sciences or even something like sociology.  For me, contingency and unrepeatability define historical experience and so make the study of history decidedly unscientific by design, but I do understand the impulse of historians who wish to use social scientific methods to advance their craft because they are very much concerned to establish history as a reputable discipline that can match up with any of the social sciences.  History requires rigour, evidence and accuracy, but it obviously cannot involve experimentation.  Even though there are plenty of historians who understand that you have to have a grasp on chronology, narrative and the “kings and wars” to make sense of anything else, they also want to make clear that history is not “just” a story of “kings and wars” (even though it is inevitable that enrollements for classes about “kings and wars” are always much higher than they are for Gender in Renaissance Florence or what-have-you).  Consequently, while every amateur historian wants to talk about Valmy, Gettysburg, Verdun and Kursk, among others, the professionals want to show you how much more there is to the craft of history by talking about things like “Meaning And Identity In The Romanian Fin-De-Siecle” or “The Construction Of Community In Early Modern Tuebingen” or, more obscurely, “The Implications Of Demetrios Of Lampe For Armenian Church Union.”  Most people look at these things and think, “How boring.”  Many of us working in this or that field of history look at the same things and think, “Why didn’t I think of that title?”  (These may not be the best titles, by the way, but they will do for now.)  This isn’t because we don’t think wars are important (they are supremely important as engines of social, cultural and political transformation; they define entire epochs, they change the “course” of history in dramatic ways) or even that battles are unimportant (the fate of entire regions has sometimes turned on the outcome of a battle), but because we are, I think, attempting to fill out the rest of the story that is not comprehended by the dismissive description of “kings and wars.”

Yglesias and Drezner have a conversation about the French election and have an interesting exchange over anti-Americanism in Europe.  Yglesias thinks it’s overhyped and largely centers around Iraq, Drezner doesn’t.  I tend to agree with Yglesias on this point, though he does flub the point a bit when he conflates France and Germany as both having had “leaders of the right” c. 2002-03.  The point is that the French and German people are generally not exuberantly and vehemently anti-American in the sense that they despise America and Americans and all our works.  Quite the contrary in many cases.  “Anti-Americanism” in the way many people use it today simply means, “So-and-so doesn’t endorse U.S. foreign and/or trade policy and is therefore anti-American.”  It is possible for there to be people who couple the critique of policy with a general rejection of everything to do with America (Hugo Chavez comes to mind), but even many European social democrats can find things about America they like–these just happen to be things that are not being stressed as much or as often as they would like.  It is lucky for us that the ties with the U.S. and reservoirs of goodwill of European peoples exist to sustain relationships between America and Europe that foolish governments on both sides of the Atlantic will try from time to time to abuse or sever as they see fit. 

It seems to me that Drezner also fumbles when he says that realists don’t care about public opinion.  They don’t care about it in the way that people who want to intervene on behalf of the longsuffering democrats of Uzbekistan (or wherever) care about it, but they acknowledge that it is a relevant factor in the domestic politics of other nations and they recognise that domestic politics can and will shape the definition of another nation’s foreign policy, though perhaps it will never radically reshape it in ways that make the actions of foreign governments highly unpredictable.  It seems to me that it is the realists who are quite concerned about widespread hostility to American policy among different peoples around the world, because they recognise that this poses a threat to U.S. interests in the long term, while it is interventionist-cum-idealist view that other nations’ anti-Americanism is just a function of their governments spewing out propaganda on the assumption that there could not be anything that “we” have done that would merit such opprobrium.  In the latter view, “anti-Americanism” (i.e., opposition to U.S. policy) is created and whipped up by foreign governments and would otherwise be much more mild.

An uncommitted GOP strategist went further, saying Thompson’s approach to a possible bid needs to be sharpened. Citing ballot access in early primary and caucus states as an example, the strategist said Thompson’s team shows a “lack of understanding of what it takes to get in the race. It’s not just traveling around the country giving speeches.” ~Politico

Well, I think that for the sake of Fred Thompson, all of the relevant states would just give him an exemption from these “laws” and allocate funds for statues to be built in his honour instead.    Perhaps all fifty states could send delegations to pay homage to him, rather than wearing out the deliverer with all of this traveling.  They could bring offerings representative of the different peoples and regions of the country, and it could all be inscribed in a giant rock carving celebrating the glory of Fred Thompson (which would, of course, have to replace all of the figures on Mount Rushmore).  He has at least deigned to think about possibly running, so how could we do any less?

Did I mention I’m not a fan?

David Frum makes something like an interesting point when he says that the GOP presidential field ought to be considered one of the strongest ever, but the problem is that the candidates are making a mess of things by ignoring all those things that are supposed to be their natural advantages.  According to this reading, all of the major candidates are failing to play to their strengths, and the rest of the field is…well, he doesn’t explain why they’re not exciting anyone, but it isn’t hard to see why they aren’t. 

Brownback’s strength is that he is a dedicated social conservative leader, but he often chooses to exploit his reputation on this by talking about Darfur and prison reform and the like.  Instead of making him seem like a fresh, interesting, reform-minded social con, it makes him seem flaky and weird.  Set aside for the moment whether these are important things, as prison reform might well be in principle.  They are transparently bad politically (Republicans don’t care about Darfur–they really don’t care), yet he just won’t stop talking about them, undoubtedly because he thinks they’re important.  Mike Huckabee has been as solid an activist governor on marriage policy as you can imagine, and he even makes sense when he tries to portray himself as a conservationist, but he caricatures himself by talking about art programs as part of the pro-life agenda.  The attempt to seem different and fresh again comes off sounding weak and desperate.  Tom Tancredo has led on immigration just about as well as anyone could have hoped for under the circumstances, but does he think that anybody outside a very hard-core restrictionist constituency cares about his pet cause of freeing Compean and Ramos?  (It is my impression that restrictionist championing of two apparently genuinely bad border agents on the grounds that “they’re border agents and we’ve got to support them” would be as damaging to restrictionist positions as the Schiavo case was for pro-lifers if anybody in the general public knew very much about it.) 

Even the candidate whom I like and admire and support, Ron Paul, has a tendency to talk about the gold standard more often than might be advisable for an insurgent campaign that already has everything going against it.  The less said about Tommy Thompson, the better for him.  Duncan Hunter is right about trade with China and right about trade generally, but he has to understand that a Republican base brainwashed for the past thirty years that Free Trade Is Good will not hear him on this.  More to the point, donors will actively shun him, if they haven’t already.  If he is a message candidate, rather than someone trying to win a lot of votes, this makes sense, but that tends to reinforce the impression that you get that a lot of these people are out there to fly their respective flags and not actually take the lead of their party.  The end result is that people who believe nothing (Romney) or believe the wrong things (Giuliani) stand much better chances of becoming the eventual nominee, in which case these flag-fliers will find themselves stuck with another Republican campaign that has no time for their concerns.  It may be a moot point, since the GOP ticket is almost bound to get crushed next year anyway, but it tells us something about why the GOP is so moribund this time around. 

There is nothing fundamentally different from previous cycles here: in each one, the party anoints an expedient standard-bearer whose past record hardly inspires confidence among core constituencies, but who seems to demonstrate the bare modicum of political skill to justify his elevation, whereupon all of the core constituencies duly pretend that their latest standard-bearer is an embodiment of all they have ever wanted.  This is not a flaw with the candidates, but with the entire structure of the Republican Party and with the two major political parties in this country.  The conservative activists have gotten tired of playing the role of cheerleaders for people who actually couldn’t care less about their respective agendas.  They are in a funk because they realise that the system to which they have contributed so much energy to build is something of a farce that almost guarantees that the eventual nominee will be horribly disappointing.  This is particularly acute today in a way that it wasn’t in 1999-2000 or 1995-96 because there is now no Congressional majority to fall back on and there is a keen awareness that the movement has sold itself into indentured servitude to a party that will not lift a finger to advance most of what the movement wants advanced.  

Nonetheless, it is questionable whether it is actually to McCain or Romney’s advantage in the primaries to stress their past moments of moderation and bipartisanship.  Barack Obama does not, for instance, mention his endorsement of Joe Lieberman’s re-election at all, since he knows that this is poison for any Democratic presidential candidate, even though it would supposedly represent Obama’s ability to transcend conventional political divisions over the war.  When one of the major objections activists have against McCain is his role in the “Gang of Fourteen,” talking about his record of working with Democrats hardly seems desirable.  Romney obviously isn’t a conservative, but the only reason he’s even competitive at this point is that he has conned enough people into believing that he has become one.  

Described in the abstract, the candidates do sound impressive, provided that you describe each one in the most flattering terms imaginable, but then you actually see the people attached to the impressive-sounding descriptions and you begin to realise why virtually no one is enthusiastic. 

Where I think Frum is mistaken is when he writes:

Have Republicans absorbed how much trouble their party is in? To the (limited) extent that we do, we tend to to attribute everything to Iraq — as if Katrina, the Schiavo affair, corruption in Congress, and the intensifying irrelevance of our domestic-policy agenda did not exist. And so we demand from our candidates ever more fervent declarations of fealty to an ideology that interests an ever dwindling proportion of the public.

Those other things are real problems, no doubt, but those other things would be manageable and it might be possible to address them effectively if there were no Iraq war.  The total failure of candidates, party leadership and most Republican voters to face up to that reality and the necessary change that has to be made (i.e., Republicans must lead the charge for withdrawal) is the thing that is killing GOP chances at the White House more than all those other things combined.    Yet to listen to the candidates and constituents tell it, you would think that continued ueber-hawkishness on Iraq and the Near East generally was a political winner.  Republicans may acknowledge that Iraq is weighing down their party, but they often acknowledge it in a way that lends itself to bitterness and resentment against the public, which has never exactly been a good way to win public confidence.  To the extent that they admit that the Iraq war is bad for them politically (they cannot fully admit it–see how many of them desperately cling to the false hope that withdrawal will be a political disaster for the Democrats), they think that this is simply proof of how right they are on the policy: we’re so confident that we’re right, we refuse to bow to public pressure!  It’s impressive, in a way, except that political parties don’t get extra points for flying in the face of public opinion on serious matters of policy.  Indeed, the more serious the policy question, the worse it is for the party that bucks public opinion. 

In 1968, the country decisively repudiated the incumbent party that had, among other things, led us into a pointless and frustrating war.  Forty years later, the Republican nominee may suffer the fate of Humphrey unless there is a sudden change either in Iraq or in the mainstream Republican position on Iraq.  However, as I have noted before, 2008 is unique and does not make for an easy, neat comparison with any other election.

France will be by the side of the oppressed of the world. This is the message of France; this is the identity of France; this is the history of France. ~Nicolas Sarkozy

Does he actually believe that?  If he does, that’s pretty scary.  Do the French actually believe that he believes that?  I assume they regard it as yet another dose of pompous rhetoric.  We can only hope that he is entirely insincere.

Here is where the administration has betrayed its own cause and disserved Americans. For four years, it has been incoherent, or flat-out AWOL, in making the public case about why military operations in Iraq are inextricably bound with victory in the greater war against jihadists and their state sponsors. ~Andy McCarthy

The other explanation is that they have not made the case, or have not made a coherent one, because such a case cannot be made.  Mr. McCarthy will strain mightily to fill the gap, but he cannot make a persuasive argument about this.  This is not his fault, since I don’t think anyone could make an actually persuasive rational argument that ties the war in Iraq inextricably to the fight against very specific jihadis with whom we are at war.  What advocates of this linkage must do is make the fight against these very specific jihadis into a war against any and all jihadis everywhere and then say, “Hey, there are some jihadis in Iraq, therefore Iraq has something to do with the larger war.”  This is, simply put, crazy.  There are jihadis in Kashmir, too, but the end of the Kashmiri insurgency has nothing to do with our fight. 

The Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR, despite the continued official control of China by the CCP, because everyone understood that China was not operating in the power-projecting, superpower mode that the USSR had been.  In the end, the Cold War was decidedly not aimed at fighting all communists everywhere, but was aimed at countering Soviet power and Soviet threats to Western and allied security. 

Are there declared members of Al Qaeda in Iraq?  Yes, obviously.  Does that actually mean that we can never end our military deployment in Iraq so long as there are members of Al Qaeda in Iraq?  Is our entire military policy abroad to be dictated to us in this way?  This doesn’t make any sense.  You don’t use and dull the fine blade of the U.S. military for the equivalent of tending to a few weeds in somebody else’s garden.  In any case, the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a direct product of the invasion advocated by the same people who insist on remaining–why should anyone trust their judgement and assessment of what will or will not aid Al Qaeda?  They have been stunningly wrong so far, and I see nothing in their analysis that suggests that they have changed their assumptions or methods in the least.  Besides, to stay in Iraq to get at Al Qaeda is to play their game: it gives them enormous propaganda advantages to have Americans occupying a Muslim country, it gives them priceless opportunities to make us look incapable of providing security to people we have said we will protect, and it has afforded them a natural pool of sympathetic people from whom they could draw new members.  They say it is their central front because they want us to stay there and keep providing them with priceless propaganda victory after priceless propaganda victory.  If we are indeed in a global counterinsurgency, this stream of propaganda can only aid their cause and harm ours. 
 

However, the bottom line is that Mr. McCarthy believes that the war is just because he firmly believes, in spite of everything that people connected to reality know, that Hussein’s regime had meaningful links to anti-American jihadis when this is not true.  The war isn’t just, and Hussein’s regime didn’t have those links, which makes all the rest of his defense of the Iraq-“war on terror” link that much more strained and pointless.  He doesn’t help himself when he offers “insights” about Iraq’s sectarian warfare such as these:

It is infighting stoked by al Qaeda and the Iranian enablers with whom al Qaeda has colludedsince the early 1990s [bold mine-DL].

This claim of collusion is, not to put too fine a point on it, garbage.  Al Qaeda and the Taliban not only hate Shi’ites and theoretically want them all dead, but the Taliban actively persecuted the Shi’ite Hazaras of Afghanistan, while Iran actively backed the mortal foes of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Tajik and Hazara Northern Alliance.  We all know this.  Iran activelyaided the invasion of Afghanistan by granting overflight rights and could not have been more pleased to see those people overthrown.

If Mr. Bush made a steady effort to tell people about the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq, they would probably be shocked to hear that these people make up perhaps 5-10% of hostile forces.  If this is the “central front” of the “war on terror” that is supposedly more important and dangerous than any other conflict in American history (which is also obviously untrue) and Al Qaeda is only managing to put this small and relatively limited presence in Iraq, they are not only not the epic, global threat the administration has been making them out to be, but they are indeed not much more than the annoyance–a nasty annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless–that Edward Luttawak recently described the problem of terrorism today as being.  That is why it has been so important for war supporters to conjure up vast forces of “Islamofascists” from all over, why it is imperative to lump in Iran, Jaysh al-Mahdi, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas into one giant blob of jihad that knows no distinctions: because the actual enemy of Al Qaeda is neither so vast nor so threatening as it was originally depicted and must be continually added onto by including new, entirely unrelated enemies.  Al Qaeda is dangerous, and ought to be countered through actual counterterrorism, intelligence and domestic security work, but to frame this–as everyone who uses the Islamofascist label has effectively done–as a sort of WWII replay against Nazislam is to admit that you have no idea what you’re up against and no idea how to counter it.  To admit all this is to admit that the alarmist and well-nigh fanatical vision of a “global war” under these circumstances is ridiculous, as is the attempt to link the Iraq war to such a “global war.”

For the rest of us, the desired new direction is the word that is such anathema to both the Left and the foreign-policy establishment: Victory. ~Andy McCarthy

It is almost amusing to watch someone who supports a policy roundly endorsed by the foreign policy establishment effectively complain about the weakness and stupidity of the foreign policy establishment, but the picture of war supporters playing the part of the marginalised anti-establishmentarians is just too absurd.  If anything, we will remain in Iraq forever because the foreign policy establishment of both center-left and center-right will insist that it would be “irresponsible” to leave.  It must be strange to belong to a group that believes starting wars is the responsible thing to do, and ending them is wildly reckless.

Yes, there is indisputably a vibrant antiwar movement. Thanks to its sympathetic media megaphone, it is influential beyond its numbers. ~Andy McCarthy

Yes, thank goodness we have all the big corporate media guns on our side.  Oh, wait…that’s all a lot of nonsense.

There is a certain lovely irony that Nicolas Sarkozy is one of the foremost opponents of Turkish entry into the EU, since part of his family comes from Salonika (mod. Thessaloniki, classical and Byz. Thessalonika), which happens to have been the hometown of Mustafa Kemal and the heart of the CUP in its early days before the Balkan Wars restored it to the Greeks. 

Then again, it is quite appropriate that an heir to minor Hungarian aristocracy should be resisting the incorporation of Turkey into Europe, since it was long the mission of the Hungarians to keep Europe from being incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.  In those days Belgrade (Mag., Nandorfehervar) was the front line fortified point protecting the Hungarian Plain from invasion.  As someone who also has Hungarian ancestry, let me say to the soon-to-be President of France, Isten aldd meg a magyart.