Personally, I like it. ~Robert Kagan on Obama’s foreign policy

It’s hardly a secret that Obama is a rabid interventionist.  He didn’t exactly hide this in the past, and with his foreign policy speech last week he has made it clear just how far out there he is.  Not that this should surprise anyone–Obama is a progressive internationalist working in a long, bad tradition of progressive internationalists from Woodrow Wilson to George Bush.  It is typical, and typically wrong, for Kagan to treat Obama’s speech as some sort of departure from his left-liberalism.  It is entirely consistent with his left-liberalism, and that’s yet another problem with his foreign policy. 

If the Post, the establishment’s unofficial propaganda organ, has nice things to say about it, look out.  If Robert Kagan likes someone’s foreign policy, it’s fair to say that this policy will be bad for this country.  That alone is reason enough to hope for Obama’s defeat.  It would also seem to render completely absurd recent attempts to portray Obama as some sort of wimpy dove.

Kagan confirms my reading of the speech and stresses just how insanely interventionist Obama is:

It’s not just international do-goodism. To Obama, everything and everyone everywhere is of strategic concern to the United States. “We cannot hope to shape a world where opportunity outweighs danger unless we ensure that every child, everywhere, is taught to build and not to destroy.” The “security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people.” Realists, call your doctors.

They are like people quietly marching to their doom. ~David Brooks on the GOP

Brooks’ observation about the miserable state of the GOP is interesting, but does he really think that the presidential candidates for ’08 are competing for the “George Allen” vote?  No one would compete for the “George Allen” vote as such if you put a gun to his head.  Which brings me to the other point I wanted to make: how did the GOP fall so far that George Allen has come to symbolise mainline conservatism?  I am not exactly what you might call a fan of the Republicans, but even I would not smear them with this association at this point.

On the plus side, Brooks’ column does have one very funny line that I think my readers will appreciate:

The libertarians and paleoconservatives have been losing for so long they are suddenly quite interesting.

But I do think that those who claim the gentleman from Kansas is such a conservative rock star (see our previous posts on the silliness of the Conservative Messiah Watch) ought to be a little more careful given that his views on the most pressing issue of our time–the war against jihadists who want to kill us–more closely resemble those of a Democratic also-ran than anyone else’s. ~Charles Mitchell

I know it is some sort of job requirement for Romneyites to say things that embarrass the cause of their champion, but I have been fascinated to watch as they keep trying to find something about Sam Brownback that is actually supposed to offend conservatives who are inclined to support Mitt Romney.  It is possible for conservatives to take aim at Brownback’s many weaknesses on immigration, foreign policy and the like, but it is only possible to do this when your conservative policy alternatives are actually better and more conservative than those being offered by Brownback.  In almost every case, Romneyites cannot do this, because their man proposes policies that are at least as foolish or wrongheaded as anything Brownback has; since he is not a conservative, he cannot really credibly propose policies that are demonstrably more conservative.  If Sam Brownback happens to agree with Joe Biden that partition of Iraq is the right solution to the present mess, he may well be wrong, but he is not obviously wrong simply because Joe Biden takes the same view.  Partition is a bad idea, but I wouldn’t expect Romney to be able to explain why.  Romney, for his part, has no plan for Iraq, and only mentions Iraq obliquely and rarely in a speech that focuses overwhelmingly on Iran.  Romney replaces his impressive lack of any attention on Iraq with a lot of alarmism and deception:

Whether it’s Hamas or Hezbollah; Al Qaeda or Shia and Sunni extremists, there is an overarching goal among the violent Jihadists – and it transcends borders and boundaries.  That goal is to replace all modern Islamic states with a religious caliphate, to destroy Israel, to cause the collapse of the West and the United States, and to conquer the entire world.

This is what we in the business like to call “crazy,” or more simply stunningly wrong.  Shi’ites by definition don’t want a caliphate–the whole caliphal project didn’t work out well for them the first time, now, did it?  Not that Mitt “Patria O Muerte” Romney, master of the ignorant soundbite, would know this.  Hizbullah wants power in Lebanon.  It actually doesn’t care about the United States, except insofar as we are involved with Israel and actively opposing them inside Lebanon; the rest of the West is entirely irrelevant to Hizbullah’s goals.  Only in the broadest sense that all of these people are Muslims is it true to say that they want to conquer the world at some point, in that it is imperative to seek the reduction of all lands to the rule of Islam.  However, that requirement would extend to all Muslims and not simply the ones that happen to fall in certain countries that some folks have decided must be our enemies.  Romney’s vision is Santorumesque in its zany breadth and ideological fervour.  If I were a Romneyite, I would be doing all I could to make sure that no one read this speech, lest they think my candidate was nothing more than a clueless regurgitator of the bad slogans of others.  His continued inability or unwillingness to articulate any plan on what to do in Iraq makes him a candidate who refuses to speak about the preeminent and immediate policy question of the day.  He can talk about jihad all he likes, but if he has virtually nothing to say about Iraq one way or the other at this point in the campaign he is not fit to be President.

Romney gave his speech at Yeshiva University and uses the word chutzpah within the first two paragraphs.  At least he didn’t say that la ilaha ill’allah is an inspiring phrase that should belong to Judaism.

I would never have thought it possible, but Cornel West is actually making some sense about Obama and the other presidential candidates.

Recently, there have been a few statements about pre-war Iraqi society that would appear to flatly contradict each other.  One comes from Ali Allawi’s new book The Occupation of Iraq (via Fouad Ajami’s review in The New Republic and a helpful reader of this blog):

Essentially, it was based on the recognition by the Shi’a elite that they might have some share of central power, within limits that would satisfy the more ambitious of their leaders. But they should not aspire to control or run the state, even though their numbers might warrant this. At the same time, the state, dominated by the Sunni Arabs, would recognize and acknowledge the props of Shi’a identity, and would not move to alter or shrink them in any significant way. Essentially, the Sunni Arabs controlled the state, while the Shi’a were allowed to keep their civil, mercantile and religious traditions. It was a precarious balance, but it held the potential for improvement and progress towards a common sense of citizenship, duties and entitlements. Successive governments in the 1960s and 1970s, however, foolishly destroyed this. The state removed the elements that kept a vigorous Shi’a identity alive in parallel to a Sunni- dominated state. Nationalizations, emigration and expulsions destroyed the Shi’a mercantilist class; the state monopoly on education, publishing and the media removed the cultural underpinnings of Shi’a life; and the attack on Najaf and the religious hierarchy came close to completely eliminating the hawzas of Iraq. When the state embarked on the mass killings after the 1991 uprisings, Iraq became hopelessly compromised in the minds of most Shi’a.

Christopher Hitchens, in full jingo-exculpation mode, has latched on to Allawi’s book as proof that Iraq would have collapsed (presumably complete with mosque-bombings and massacres) whether or not there had been an invasion.  This might well be true, just as it was probably true of Yugoslavia that artificial, post-WWI entities that no longer commanded the loyalty of most of the inhabitants over and above their more immediate identities could survive in a world of resurgent ethnic, religious and national politics.  This in no way makes it any more justifiable that Western powers helped to speed up the process of dissolution in both cases.  Besides being flatly the opposite of everything the jingoes said before the invasion (in their telling, Sunni would lie down with Shia and usher in an age of harmony), the strange thing about this argument is that it seems to say that just because a man is already dying from cancer it is acceptable to slip polonium into his tea (he was going to die anyway!) or that it is appropriate to inflame the grievances between estranged friends until one of them kills the other because they were already on pretty bad terms.  Perhaps Hitchens would justify murder in this way by saying, “Well, we’ve all got to go sometime,” as if the act of murder didn’t have some direct impact on the timing and nature of the departure! 

About this “inevitable collapse” argument, I have two things to say: 1) deep cultural and religious loyalties never preclude the exercise of agency, though they will constrain and shape it; 2) the active politicisation of sectarianism and ethnicity in the vaunted democratic elections (the “purple finger” that Hanson et al. want to see so much more of in news coverage) was a direct cause of the violent contestation for supremacy between the sects in Iraq.  Once sect and ethnicity were confirmed as legitimate political dividing lines and those identities were invested with significance as markers of political status, rather than being deemphasised as much as possible, violence was unavoidable.  The nightmare that Iraq has become undoubtedly owes much to its fragmented society and brutal history, but it owes a great deal to the inflammation and mobilisation of rival religious and ethnic identities in the “democratic” present as well.  The nationalist expulsions and massacres of the late 19th and early 20th century across central and eastern Europe and Anatolia did not just “happen” as if by some chemical reaction–they were actively fomented by those ‘progressive’ nationalist elements who sought to build their identity and their nation on the blood of others.  If a given country is a powerful mix of explosive and conflicting identities that could erupt into a hellish mess, it would seem that the people who come into that country by way of setting off a lot of explosions and introducing a lot of instability, both physical and figurative, bear a whole lot of responsibility for starting the chain reaction.  Hitchens would very much like to deny this now, since he was and remains a proponent of lighting the fuse.

Against the “inevitable collapse” argument, we have the final post of Riverbend, who has opted to leave the country:

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. [bold mine-DL] They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq’s history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven’t been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

Not only does Riverbend tend to carry more authority in my eyes than the dreadful Christopher Hitchens and the self-justifying Iraqi exile (we didn’t ruin Iraq–it was already too far gone!), but her statement about pre-war Iraqi society makes a lot of sense. 

A crucial thing about these sorts of identities is that they do not often become points of contention unless power, status and wealth are directly associated with belonging to this group rather than that.  Even when belonging to a certain group entails relative marginalisation, this does not necessarily create inevitable enmity between the ruling and the marginalised groups. 

Some will object that I am being too reductionist here.  I don’t mean to say that these identities do not have any meaning independent of these other factors, when they clearly have very powerful meaning in and of themselves and only exist because they give people meaning, but the causes for actual conflict between different groups are closely tied to contestation for power.  Some may object that this absolutely obvious, but it is surprising how few people appreciate this.  In the rather limited thinking of some, religious fratricide is possible only if the two sides have had a blood-feud dating back to medieval times and ethnic cleansing and genocide can only be explained by “centuries” of hatred, when the causes are almost always much more immediate and proximate.  There are those who insist on an essentialist understanding of identity, according to which being X must have always entailed being against those who are Y (abstract nationalists tend to be the worst essentialists, because they are always defining themselves by their perpetual opposition to some other people), while others believe that a constructivist account renders identity, especially a religious or ethnic identity, to be ultimately nothing more than the product of other socioeconomic factors.  The former have a hard time believing that coexistence has ever been possible in the past (in nationalist histories, these periods are always periods of national decadence and foreign pollution), while the latter have a hard time believing that anyone can actually care about something so supposedly meaningless.  Both are wrong and obviously so. 

In societies in which less immediate or more universal identities take precedence, more immediate loyalties and identities tend to get deemphasised or they are actively suppressed by the enforcers of the broader identity.  It is when those broader identities break down or lose their significance that some form of the more immediate loyalties rushes to fill the cultural space they abandoned.  Thus party loyalty and “Yugoslav” solidarity gave way to more immediate ethnic and religious attachments; once the fragile shell of Iraqi nationalism and the lid of Baathism were removed and public authority broke down, a return to tribal and sectarian loyalties was bound to happen, if only as a means of self-preservation amid chaos.  However, the outsiders who actively helped subvert and destroy every basis for unity and common identity in the name of “liberation” have a bloody cheek to talk about how the fratricidal horror unfolding before us was “inevitable.”

Heidi, a recent college graduate from Florida, wonders whether the war will eventually collapse on the Green Zone, the way it did on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. But she doesn’t let that occupy her for long. Looking down at the empty glass in her hand, she smiles and says, “Let’s do a shot.” ~Brian Bennett

Why is it that that I can imagine that many of the top policymakers in the executive branch have done the same thing for the last several years?

Turn on the television and the reporting is all hate:  a Middle Eastern Muslim is blowing up someone in Israel, shooting a rocket from Gaza, chanting death to America in Beirut, stoning an adulterer in Tehran, losing a hand for thievery in Saudi Arabia, threatening to take back Spain, gassing someone in Iraq, or promising to wipe out Israel. An unhinged, secular Khadafi rants; a decrepit Saudi royal lectures; a wild-eyed Lebanese cleric threatens — whatever the country, whatever the political ideology, the American television viewer draws the same conclusion:  we are always blamed for their own self-inflicted misery. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has here reached some new plane of neocon propaganda that almost defies description.  Having been among those who insisted that “the swamp” of anti-Americanism was one of the reasons that we had to go into Iraq–to build the transformative model Arab democracy that would inspire a thousand ballot initiatives or some such nonsense–and having painted this virulent and widespread anti-Americanism as a product of the foreign policy that privileged stability over reform, and having rung the alarm bell about about the crazy Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese et al. who want us and our families dead, we are now being told, basically, that the media is not reporting all of the good news from the entire region about how much Muslims like us deep down.  Americans would understand just how grateful and appreciative the Iraqis are if only those lousy journalists would report the real news! 

Naturally, if the media tried to portray Near Eastern societies as complex and changing structures in which admiration for America coexists with hatred for American policy, they would then immediately be hit by some other propagandist for “hiding the truth” about rabid anti-Americanism, “blaming America first” (by pinning blame for anti-Americanism on the bad policies that Hanson et al. advance) and for their egregious liberal and multiculti biases that cause them to regard people in the Near East as human.  This is really stunning to see: someone who has spent the last several years whipping up chauvinism and contempt for many of the people in the Near East now wants to tell us that the people over there aren’t all that bad.  More pitiful is the running theme of the entire column, which seems to be a complaint that life isn’t fair. 

Then consider this part:

And various other polls reveal that only about 20% of Americans are in sympathy with the Palestinians. Egypt alone of the major Arab countries rates a favorable impression; most others — Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia — evoke high levels of American negativity.

Why might that be?  It couldn’t have anything to do with the propagandists who daily churn out anti-Syrian and anti-Palestinian rhetoric!

Not long ago I talked to a right-wing hardnosed fellow in a conservative central California town about the need to stay and finish the task of stabilizing the democracy in Iraq and rectifying the disastrous aftermath of 1991. He wasn’t buying. Instead he kept ranting about the war in the ‘more rubble, less trouble’ vein. And his anger wasn’t only over our costs in lives and treasure.  So I finally asked him exactly why the venom over Iraq. He shouted, “I don’t like them sons of bitches over there — any of ’em.” His was a sort of echo of Bismarck’s oft-quoted “The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” ~Victor Davis Hanson

It’s very likely true that Bismarck didn’t much care for people who lived in the Balkans, since they were Slavs and he was a junker from East Prussia, but I would suggest that there is a world of difference between Bismarckian calculation about the strategic value of the Balkans to Germany and the heated remarks of Hanson’s interlocutor.  There are those of us, including myself, who have held that Iraq was never worth the life of a single American, but the people who tend to hold this view also have a funny way of not despising the Iraqis as “them sons of bitches.”  On the other hand, those who take this latter view seem to be the folks who cheer for Mr. Bush and continue to (grudgingly) support the war and whose support for the war is only undermined to the extent that Mr. Bush does not order the Air Force to level the entire place and be done with it. 

It seems to me that Hanson’s “hardnosed fellow” is precisely the sort of unfortunate Republican voter we have in spades in this country, for whom “them sons of bitches” are equally deserving of aggressive war, carpet bombing and the odd tactical nuke (“more rubble”) as they are of dismissive contempt and impatient frustration.  I would hazard a guess that Hanson’s “hardnosed fellow” was perfectly happy to back the Iraq war to show “them” who was in charge and he probably belongs to the school of “thought” that holds that Vietnam should have been won by the indiscriminate use of H-bombs. 

I cannot think of a mentality less likely to understand, much less share, Bismarck’s view of national strategic interests.  One is born of an understanding of the national interest and the realities of the region; the other is the angry tantrum of someone who understands neither, but knows that he doesn’t like “them.”  It is a mentality that is not at all averse to meddling in the affairs of other nations that have nothing to do with us, provided that the casualties are mainly on other side.  It is a mentality that does not consider whether or not a war is actually in the vital interests of America, but whether it will crush some uppity band of foreigners about whom these “hardnosed fellows” know nothing and care less.  None of this should surprise Hanson, since it has been the endless burbling about Islamofascism-this and 1938-that by Hanson and company that have helped to inculcate an arrogant contempt for “them sons of bitches over there,” since it has been the more or less explicit purpose of inventing the phantom of Islamofascism to lump together every possible political tendency in the Near East that hegemonists find offensive (which is basically all of them) and to reduce every question of policy in western Asia to one of whether you are an “appeaser” of the rampaging Islamofascist juggernaut or one of the few, the proud, the Hansonian 300.

Private House Democratic polls of the 50 most competitive congressional districts project a gain of 9 to 11 seats in the 2008 elections that would be an unprecedented further surge by the party following its 2006 gain of 30 seats that won control of the House.

All previous major surges of House seats have been followed by losses in the next election. The 54-seat Republican gain in 1994 that produced GOP House control was followed by an eight-seat loss in 1996. However, the current Republican political slump, fueled by President Bush’s unpopularity, would reverse that pattern if the election were held today, according to the Democratic polls. ~Robert Novak

When you think about it, this isn’t as surprising as it might seem at first.  When in American history has any party been hitched to the reputation of a two-term President during a war that will have lasted three-quarters of the entire presidency by the time of the next election?  (Just consider that, barring drastic changes in policy, the Iraq will be almost six years old when the new President is inaugurated.)  This has never happened.  Unless you count the Kennedy and Johnson years together as a single presidency, you have to go back to 1816 to find something similar (the two-term President Madison had just concluded a divisive and largely calamitous war), but the political dynamics of the aftermath of the War of 1812 are obviously so far removed from modern American politics as to make any comparison meaningless.  Even if you use the 1968 comparison, which I have used before, the comparison is misleading insofar as the fully escalated Vietnam War was primarily the product of the Johnson administration.  If the 1968 model should have applied to any election, it ought to have applied to ’04. 

Leave aside for a moment whether the current President and war are popular (obviously, the unpopularity of both is killing the GOP), and just consider the relatively unique structure of this political situation.  There has never been a President elected twice in his own right who presided over a war this long.  Normally, Presidents either get re-elected before they get us into wars (Wilson), the wars are relatively brief (Tripoli, War of 1812, Mexico, Spain, Gulf War, Kosovo), or the wars are concluded successfully shortly after the President’s latest re-election (War of Secession, WWII).  The unpopular, less successful and/or unconstitutional wars of the modern era normally end up forcing Presidents into early retirement (Truman, Johnson).  Bush’s victory in 2004 has really thrown a wrench into the punditry works, because by all rights and according to the relevant precedents it should not have happened. 

The one bit of good news for the GOP is that the Vice President is not running, or else the presumptive Republican nominee would be directly associated with everything that has been dragging the party down.  Weirdly, every Republican candidate (except, of course, for Ron Paul) has been going out of his way to make sure that everyone knows that he associates himself with the disastrous foreign policy of this administration (subscribers can see Ross’ article from the March issue of The Atlantic that touches on this).  In some ways, this next election is shaping up to be a combination of 1920 and 1952: the repudiation of the legacy of an unpopular presidency and war (1920), but one that also takes place while the war is still going on (1952).  But in all its particulars, 2008 has no obvious parallels, which renders past patterns less useful for predicting the outcome. 

If there are already projections of additional Democratic gains in 2008, there is nothing in the presidential race at this point that suggests that there will not also be long presidential coattails for the likely Democratic winner.  Depending on events (and all other relevant caveats about predicting the future, etc.), the next election appears as if it will be something between a landslide and an epic blowout.  If 2006 was the tsunami, it appears that the GOP will still be suffering aftershock tidal surges in 2008.  What seems especially strange, then, is the sight of the Republican candidates and party leadership actively removing all of the dikes and protective barriers that might keep them from drowning when the surge comes in.

The most important speech at the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference, held in early March at a Washington hotel, didn’t come from any of the Republicans running for president. It came from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, one of the few Republican success stories in 2006–he was reelected with 47 percent of the vote–and a rising star in a party that’s been knocked back on its heels. ~Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard

Pawlenty is an interesting figure politically (and probably precisely the sort of non-Tommy Thompson Midwestern Republican governor who ought to be running for President instead of, say, Tommy Thompson), but I would qualify this statement about him.  Yes, Pawlenty was one of the few success stories for Republicans, but what’s important to remember is that Pawlenty himself has been extremely popular in Minnesota and still only managed to pull 47%.  (Mike DeWine in Ohio suffered from the same strange dichotomy of being widely admired in Ohio, but going down to ignominious defeat because of his partisan affiliation.)  There was a time late in the election last year when Pawlenty’s re-election, which was supposed to be a cinch, was very much in doubt, and the mismanagement of resources by RGA head Mitt Romney didn’t make Pawlenty’s life any easier.  Pawlenty’s case suggests that the 2008 battle will be fought primarily in the Midwest, since this is the region where the GOP is still hemorrhaging, it is the region that they desperately need to win back and it is one where they do have some resources with which to win it back.  Rebuilding in the Northeast will take longer and the Mountain West is both less crucial and less contested.

But what are Pawlenty’s proposals?  Well, he sounds a little bit like Brownback and a little bit like Reihan (no surprise, then, that the subtitle of the article is “Meet the first Sam’s Club Republican” and Pawlenty was among the first to invoke Sam’s Club as a symbol of what some might call “lower-middle” political interests):

And before you knew it Pawlenty took off, arguing for reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada and Mexico, for increased government subsidies for alternative energy, for more health insurance coverage, and for using government to cater to the needs of down-scale voters. At times the crowd was confused; at other times it seemed annoyed.

Here’s the interesting bit: Pawlenty thought that the purpose of speaking at a gathering of conservatives was to make them think.  It may be that every one of his policy proposals has no appeal for Republican voters, and it may be that these are all bad policies, but anything that might shake conservatives and the GOP out of their somnolescent stupour has to get at least a little credit.