Some months ago, I had written a post about The Lost City that was swallowed up by a fickle browser and I never got back to giving my impressions of this truly excellent movie.  I was first inspired to see it by this Leon Hadar post, which I had commented on before after seeing The White Countess.  The Lost City has much in common with the latter, and both are outstanding antidotes to Casablanca-style abstract idealism.  Fico Fellove (Andy Garcia) is in many ways the opposite of Bogart’s Rick.  He is a lover of music and dance for their own sake.  He is one who cultivates a life apart from politics and causes not because he has become embittered and cynical in the worst sense, but because he appreciates beauty and the culture of his native city.  “Have you ever thought of living for your country?” the elder Fellove lectures his hotheaded son, Ricardo–Fico does exactly this, and he is not surprisingly the only one of the three sons who lives to the end of the story.  Once Castro comes to power, he does not go off to join a resistance movement, but instead goes to make his own way in America, to build up a life and find a way to get the rest of his family out of Cuba.  It is a moving film that still does not pretend to take itself too seriously.  So that no one becomes too philosophical, Bill Murray’s anonymous “Writer” is always ready to lighten the mood with cornball antics.   

“I don’t have a loyalty to a lost cause,” says Fico Fellove, “but I do have a loyalty to a lost city…and that’s my cause and my curse.”  Fico’s loyalty to place, even a lost place, a place to which he can never return, is inspiring to behold.  Would that more people had a tenth of the devotion.  Fico is a true family man, in that he places his loyalty to his family ahead of everything else.  Unlike his brothers, who either get themselves killed fighting for abstract freedom and democracy or join the sinister forces of Castroism, he places his loyalty to them and the rest of his family first.  If there is one moment where Fico puts principle ahead of these relationships, it is when he realises that “madness” has come to Cuba with the rise of Castro and that he cannot afford to stay, despite his love for the beautiful Aurora (Ines Sastre).   

The Lost City is a tribute to the Havana and the Cuba that were lost in 1959 and afterwards, but it is also a hint of what might eventually be there once again once the deadening shell of party rule is dismantled.  In the end, The Lost City is a sad film lamenting the disappearance of a vibrant and rich world, but it diagnoses very clearly how such places enter into oblivion: through the rigidity of ideology, revolutionary claptrap and promises of the future.

America’s public and intellectual elites do not know history. How can we say we know our enemies or know ourselves. [sic] Sun Tzu would be ashamed, no? ~Michael Brendan Dougherty

Perhaps, or perhaps he would take it as evidence that we were pushovers ripe for an invasion.

More seriously, Michael’s post, inspired by Scott McConnell’s article comparing Iraq and Algeria (which Scott discusses at length on Antiwar Radio here), makes an important point about our collective historical ignorance creating the paucity of our foreign policy and geopolitical thinking.  A greater acquaintance with history, whether military or not, would be an invaluable resource for policymakers, pundits and the public alike.  Those familiar with the Mesopotamian campaign or the post-WWI rebellion in Iraq might have given more thought to meddling there in the first place.  Those who knew something of Valmy and Jena and Verdun would not belittle French martial prowess or courage, nor would someone actually familiar with the sweep of French history create preposterous narratives about eternal French enmity towards the Republic they helped to create.  The less educated in history a people is, the more easily it will be misled and confused by the half-learned ramblings of chauvinists and opportunists, and the less able it will be to scrutinise the rival claims of disputing controversialists.  Understanding of and respect for history are vital to remain free of the shackles of propagandists and ideologues who are constantly splicing, editing and redacting the story to serve their present goals (unfortunately, just as so many chroniclers over the centuries have also done).

In Riverbend’s case, perhaps, we can excuse all this. As I said, she’s had to live with the situation, and we haven’t. But it also has to be kept in mind that she presents a special, one-sided, and in some ways quite misleading perspective–that of the Sunni Arab minority, and especially its urban professional classes. ~Jeff Weintraub

I don’t know Mr. Weintraub’s own views on the war, and it could well be that he has similarly taken to task as self-interested, U.S.-bought special pleading every utterance of Iraqi Shi’ite exiles on the U.S. dole.  We can hope.  Certainly there is nothing any less one-sided and biased about the perspective the exiles brought to the debate about going to war or what has happened in Iraq since the invasion.   

As with the other multiethnic state that Washington has helped to break apart in the last fifteen years (Yugoslavia), policymakers actively select which biased, tendentious accounts of the affairs in said state they are going to accept and then treat these accounts as if they were sacred truth.  Once a ‘good’ side, ‘our’ side, has been so anointed, many Americans have a very bad habit of adapting their perspective of events in their country as our own.  Thus when Albanian lobbyists and KLA spokesmen said that something was so, our political and media took it–and still take it–as gospel.  When representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which opposed the rule of Milosevic, would speak against U.S. Balkan policy and call it counterproductive and ignorant of political realities in the region (which had the virtue of being true), they would be denounced as apologists for the regime.  The point is not that the Serbs were necessarily always right and the Albanians always wrong in every instance, but that there was a near-automatic presumption that if a Serb or Serbian-American said something about Yugoslavia he was engaged in nothing more than an ethnic apology, while Albanians and Albanian-Americans were heroic and gallant defenders of human rights, etc.  I remember stories about Albanian-Americans going to Kosovo to join up with the KLA depicting them as if they were volunteers going to help fight for a free France against Hitler–had a foolish Serbian-American attempted to show the same solidarity with his cousins, he probably would have been thrown in prison.  That the observable reality of Kosovo was almost completely the reverse only made this unfortunate need to endorse one side’s narrative as reality that much more painful.  

It seems to me that something similar is going on here, where Riverbend’s credibility as a witness is being impugned (ever so gently, but impugned nonetheless) because she is a Sunni from the professional classes of Baghdad and for no other reason.  In other words, she represents precisely the kind of educated Iraqi that was supposed to be integral to the new Iraq, and might well have been one to contribute to that new Iraq had Washington not chosen quite deliberately to throw Sunni bureaucrats and soldiers out of work in an idiotic fit of “de-Baathification” and then empower the exiles in the provisional government (whom Riverbend correctly called the Puppets) and then ensure that Shi’ite majoritarian domination would follow.  It is hard to see how any Sunni, no matter how sanguine his or her view of the invasion, was supposed to respond to this “bottom rail on top now” approach to “liberation” except with bitterness and resentment.  More importantly, the account she gave in her final post, in which she said that the stories about eternal Sunni-Shia rivalries had no bearing on pre-war Baghdad, was all the more powerful for being rather obviously true.  Before the invasion, no one could doubt that Shi’ites were a marginalised and put-upon group that had suffered horribly in 1991, but likewise no one could doubt that intermarriage, coexistence and cohabitation in the same neighbourhoods were all part of the social fabric of pre-war Baghdad.  This is to be expected in any large city in which communalism is not mobilised for political purposes.  The reason why there has been such a hideous orgy of destruction and marauding in the name of driving sectarian enemies out of different neighbourhoods is that Sunnis and Shi’ites did live alongside one another, did intermarry and didn’t make their sectarian identities the most significant aspect of their lives.  Now having the wrong name (Omar instead of Ali) will mean that you end up in the river with a hole in your head. 

That is a major difference that the war created, and anything else you want to say about the war really has to take account of that.  When outsiders help precipitate conflict between different groups in another country, the outsiders are among the first to discover the “deep” structural causes behind these conflicts, as if to say, “These people have always been maniacs–but we had no idea until just now!  Why, of course, it all has to do with Karbala, and they have been killing each other for centuries.”  Except that they hadn’t been killing each other for centuries.  Indeed, I have heard very persuasive arguments that prior to the Safavid mobilisation of Shi’ism as its political weapon in Mesopotamia, and the resulting Ottoman mobilisation of Sunnism in response, the Sunni-Shi’ite schism had very little political significance and open sectarian conflict did not occur, because the political salience of these identities is closely tied to having powerful backers who are vying with the other group’s powerful backers. 

People in mixed societies caught in civil wars will always tell the story that the different groups used to coexist more or less peacefully, because the different groups often did coexist peacefully.  That isn’t to say that there weren’t always tensions, injustices and occasionally hostility and bitterness, but that rampaging sectarian death squads were unthinkable.  This is what civil wars do to diverse societies that fracture along ethnic or religious or political lines: people who once more or less normally lived cheek by jowl find that they are being told that they must slaughter one another or risk being slaughtered by their former neighbours.  (The explosive potential of multiethnic and multireligious societies in time of crisis should give every enthusiastic multiculti and open borders activist pause.)

Since SCIRI has long been known as a group in the employ of Tehran, it was hardly strange that she would regard many of the new leaders as agents of Iran.  That is to say, many of the people she accused of being Iranian agents were Iranian agents; many of the people she called U.S. dupes and puppets were exactly that.  Those she thought were out to feather their own nests through corruption often were corrupt.  She hasn’t said that things were “basically OK” under the old regime, but that they were manifestly better than they have been since the invasion.  No one can really dispute that, and no one even tries to do so anymore, which is why we get efforts to dismiss someone like Riverbend because she comes from the wrong background.

Stephanopoulos: If this now declared deadline of Gen. Petraeus of September, if the political goals haven’t been met by then, do you see large scale Republican defections at that point?

Will: Absolutely. They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, “Are you going to vote for Nixon in ’60?” “No, I don’t like Hoover.” The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they’ve had since the ’68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited. ~RCP Blog

And I thought I was pessimistic!

The RCP Blog also points to this Buckley column that has already been widely discussed elsewhere.  The column ends thus:

The general [Petraeus] makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

There is probably a part of me that would cheer at the prospect of either one of the major parties being consigned to the ash-heap, though just a few years ago more than a few people began to think that it would be the other party that would shrivel and weaken unto death, so I don’t accept these forecasts of utter devastation and annihilation.  As things stand, the GOP is going to get shellacked again in 2008, and it will be up to the people in that party to decide whether they will learn their lesson or continue down the path to self-destruction that they are currently on. 

But not even the most soul-crushing electoral defeats normally prove to be the cause for a party’s elimination from the scene.  The Tories have suffered about as many humiliating consecutive defeats as a party can in the space of ten years and they continue to persevere in spite of themselves.  In parliamentary systems, parties may break up or rebrand themselves more often, but in our system the core interests of the Federalist-Whig-GOP continuum have remained surprisingly constant despite some marginal changes here or there.  The heart of their support has shifted geographically, but at bottom it has remained a party of corporations, finance and the Court tradition; it draws its popular support from rural, suburban and exurban America, but it remains the quintessential metropolitan party and now seems intent on forcing its metropolitan candidates down the voters’ throats. 

So long as these interests exist, there will be some party representing it, and it may as well be the same one that represents them now.  The loss of the nearly four-decade edge in national security debates will certainly hurt, since Republicans unfortunately have pinned so much on their reputation for national security and responsible foreign policy that they have allowed it to become a crutch.  For many decades the GOP could always say, “No, you may not like our social or economic policies, but we know how to handle foreign threats and run the ship of state better than those yahoos.”  Now they are “those yahoos” and have nothing left with which they can salvage their position.  In truth, aside from paying their occasional lip service to cultural issues, national security/foreign policy has become the GOP’s single unifying issue, and this has only become more true the worse Republican-managed foreign policy has been.  Iraq has simply shown the perverse lengths to which Republicans will go to maintain unity in the one area where they still command some credibility, at least with their own people.  The one thing that will absolutely ensure that Iraq makes the GOP brand unacceptable for decades is the virtually universal determination of Republican leaders and mainstream conservative pundits to keep defending and supporting the war in Iraq.  There would be appear to be no inclination to move away from these positions.  Will is not yet right about the permanent damage this war will do to the GOP, but before the end he might be.

…to be so insanely wrong in his characterisations of other conservatives that he makes me look like an ecumenical bridge-builder who looks for the best in everyone’s ideas.  I think there is a pretty big difference between objecting strongly to the betratyal of conservatism based on accurate assessments of what other people are proposing and the wild, scattershot style of condemnation that Sullivan likes to use. 

So, when will Ross apologise for his support for torture?  Oh, wait, that’s right–Ross doesn’t support the use of torture.  Neither does he obviously or necessarily favour “massive domestic spending and borrowing, aggressively religious social policy, utopian foreign policy, and evisceration of civil liberties.”  All of these things, except for the non-existent “aggressively religious social policy,” can be laid at the door of the administration and its reflexive supporters, but to imply that everyone who proposes less rigid or doctrinaire approaches to policy thinking (no matter what they are) must be headed down the same dark path is more than a little ridiculous.  Ross’ Sam’s Club Pawlentyism is the sort of politics that, in its concrete form, isn’t noticeably different from Sullivan’s agenda.  In certain areas (social policy, particularly Ross’ interest in natalism, immediately leaps to mind), it is probably much less leftist. 

Of course, to Sullivan “aggressively religious social policy” means a politician mildly suggesting in a stump speech that homosexuality may not be exactly what God intended.  As we all know from Sullivan’s dreadful book, this is not conservatism, but “fundamentalism,” which is an amazing social movement that happens to include everyone except for Andrew Sullivan and perhaps his two dogs (and we’re not so sure that the dogs aren’t just theocon agents in disguise). 

I’m a pretty relentless purist by the standards of most folks today, so I don’t object to these sorts of critiques as such, but there’s something more than a little comic about the man who wants a carbon tax and universal health care lecturing anyone about deviations from the conservative norm, much less accusing them of abandoning conservatism for holding positions not much more to the left than his own.  How exactly did a socially liberal Rockefeller Republican of Sullivan’s sort persuade himself that he is actually the last of the true Goldwaterites?

There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the latter produced beautiful monuments. ~Alexander Cockburn

Without going into the comparison to the sale of indulgences that he makes, I have to say that Mr. Cockburn is making a good deal of sense here.  He points out the much higher carbon dioxide concentrations that existed in the Eocene.  Somehow life went on and actually flourished.  Then there is this:

Water covers 71 per cent of the surface of the planet. As compared to the atmosphere, there’s at least a hundred times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the postglacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, just like fizz in soda water taken out of the fridge. “So the greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” Hertzberg concludes. “It is the warming of the earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse.” He has recently had vivid confirmation of that conclusion. Several new papers show that for the last three quarter million years CO2 changes always lag global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

But, no, pay no attention to any of this–there’s a scientific “consensus” and we all must run screaming (after ratifying Kyoto) into the night.

What’s more, McCain argues on the basis of unmatched experience, including real military experience. None of the other candidates has so much as tried on a uniform. ~Niall Ferguson

I suppose if you must be a madcap warmonger, it doesn’t hurt that you at least have served in the military in wartime and suffered tremendously as a prisoner of war.  Then again, nothing better debunks the idea that military experience yields foreign policy wisdom than the case of John McCain.

Ironically, the correct comparison is to the Republican Party in the United States. This is a political party that draws much of its support from the political mobilization of Christian sentiment. ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias is responding to a Michael Rubin item here, which was an update on his original post about anti-AK rallies.  The comparisons with Christian Democrats and Republicans alike are pretty sorry, and I’ll tell you why.  AK is an allegedly “reformed” Islamist party, which means that it has changed absolutely nothing about itself except for its packaging and rhetoric.  Christian Democratic parties are typically very secular outfits in practice, even if most of their voters are still nominal or active churchgoers.  The Republicans are even more secular in practice and more secular in the makeup of their constituencies in that even most “conservative Christians” in America are political secular liberals through and through when it comes to the relationship between government and religion.  Yes, there is a part of the GOP that is itself fairly religious and this occasionally carries over into the party’s policy prescriptions in very limited ways, but this part does not even constitute the substance of the whole.  

AK is a party of political Islam, voted into power by Islamist voters and they make up virtually the entirety of the party.  AK (standing for the Turkish for Justice & Development: Adalet ve Kalkinma) is the redesigned, “acceptable” form of the National Salvation, Welfare, Virtue, Felicity and Motherland parties that came before it.  The constituencies of these successive parties are essentially the same–Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul as a member of Welfare.  If Islamist governments are generally undesirable or ultimately incompatible with constitutional government, the Turkish AK government must be found similarly wanting.  It might be that Kemalism is doomed to collapse and an Islamist Turkey is unavoidable, so it might be wise to learn how to live with that kind of Turkey, but pretending that AK is just the GOP or CDU with a headscarf is not the correct response.   

Or, as I wrote a couple years back:

The example of Turkey is not heartening, as it took a full seventy years from the establishment of the republic before a mostly free election could result in the election of a government the majority truly desired, and even that government was soon thrown out on account of its Islamism. Only by minimising its Islamism in public and in its rhetoric has Mr. Erdogan’s party been allowed by the army and the constitutional court to remain in power–this is hardly the ideal situation to hold up as proof of a successful synthesis of Islam and democracy. Turkey’s secular republic has succeeded in becoming more democratic to the extent that it has because its republican reforms very deliberately circumscribed the role of Islam in public and political life. The two are inherently incompatible–one must give way for the other to advance…

If the conservative movement’s domestic policy vision ran from Ponnuru on the right to Brooks on the left, well … Andrew might notbe happy with the result (though I think his differences with both men are often more a matter of emphases and rhetoric than policy substance), but I’m pretty sure the GOP wouldn’t be staring disaster quite so squarely in the face. ~Ross Douthat

I take what I think is Ross’ point about domestic policy inflexibility, but in what ways have the movement and the Republicans really refused to attempt to advance a domestic policy agenda that stretches from Ponnuru to Brooks?  Has it been too much on Ponnuru’s side, or too much on Brooks’?  As a dissident looking in, I have the sense that it may be the fact that the movement’s policy agenda is so narrow in that it can only join together people as “far apart” as Ponnuru and Brooks.  My impression is that you could fit such a “big tent” in the average backyard with lots of room to spare.   

Domestic policy is much more Ross’ cup of tea than mine, so I imagine he has examples I’m not thinking of, but what policy initiatives should they have undertaken that they have instead rejected out of fidelity to the imaginaire of the conservative champion Reagan and their alleged stubborn George Allen-like orthodoxy?  Also, would these desirable changes in domestic policy priorities have helped stave off or noticeably ameliorate Iraq and corruption-induced defeat last year?  Is savvy, inspired domestic policy ever enough to significantly reduce the damage from a failed foreign policy venture? 

If avoiding disaster is the goal (as one might assume it would be), shouldn’t conservatives and Republicans be thinking of ways to go “back to Taft” (or maybe back to La Follette!) in foreign policy rather than pursuing the somewhat chimerical Goldwater-Reagan redivivus?  The former would seem to have more of a natural constituency and more immediate practical application.  That being the case, isn’t it rather odd that almost all Republican presidential candidates are not terribly critical of the current direction of foreign policy, but all of them have numerous divergences from the old smaller government, lower tax mantra?  The presidential field seems to be taking stabs at the sort of domestic policy innovation I believe Ross is referring to in his post, but will any of it matter if they, the party and the movement remain overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in Iraq “until the job is done”?

The problem for Obama is that his failure to be more supportive of Israel will not be forgotten by those for whom this is a dealbreaker, which includes not only a fair share of Democratic donors, but also a significant voting bloc in states like New York and Florida. ~Susan Estrich

As I have already said, I thought Williams’ “name the top three allies” question was ridiculous.  Even assuming that this was not simply a roundabout way to set up a candidate to talk about the eternal bond with Israel that shall never be broken (or whatever it is you are supposed to say to satisfy some people), it was a terrible question.  If it was not much more than an indirect way to say, “So, Obama, how much do you love Israel?”, it is a bad joke.  On what planet is Israel one of our three most important allies?  More important than Britain, Germany and Japan?  Really?