I find it hard to imagine that if we had found that Iraq was, say, eighteen months from having a nuclear bomb, we would be seeing the same national debate we have now. If troops had found a decent sized stockpile of uranium, or designs for a bomb, or what have you, the majority of Americans would now think that the war was a good idea, even if all other events had unfolded the same way. Jim and Julian, presumably, still would not. But they would have lost the national debate. ~Jane Galt (Megan McArdle)

Unfortunately, I think Ms. McArdle is right, which tells you a lot about just how little actual argument has to do with our “national debates” and how they are “won.”  This is the anatomy of an American “national debate”:

One side advocates for X with great urgency and warnings of future doom, and the other side lays out all the reasons why X is horrible and foolish.  The first side laughs off all these warnings as fantastic nonsense uttered by the naive or the immoral.  The public pays no attention to the arguments and listens to the fearmongering by the first side, convincing themselves that the people on Side A are decent, upstanding types (not like those maniacs from Side B) who would never steer “us” wrong.  Once X has started and done its damage (whatever that might be), it is only when literally everything that Side A said has been proven false with a vengeance that the public begins to reconsider that Side B might have had a point.  Not that Side B was “right,” mind you, but that they were not quite the band of clowns that the public had taken them to be (at the insistence of Side A).  At this point someone notices that if Side A had been right about anything at all, particularly about one of the potentially more worrisome warnings of danger, the entire “debate” would have swung back to Side A, in spite of their having made a colossal mess of the entire project, because the public still believes that “we” had to “do something.”  This urge to “do something” can only be outweighed by the sheer incompetence with which the government actually does things.  This is small consolation, since the experience of numerous past failures never convinces the public to stop trying to have the government “do something” about this or that. 

The structure of our “national debates” is powerfully and completely biased in favour of unwise, rash policy innovations and against deliberation and patience.  It is also strongly biased in favour of the activists in this or that area of policy, which tends to produce bad results because said activists are typically long on enthusiasm and short on understanding.  They know just enough to know that their policy proposal must prevail, or else all is lost.  More than this, they do not know.

In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well. ~Barack Obama

Actually, our security is not “inextricably linked” to that of “all people.”  Really, it isn’t.  Our security is not “inextricably linked” to that of people in Zimbabwe or Darfur or Nepal or Colombia.  He might argue that it is important to help resolve the smouldering civil war in Nepal or support the MDC opposition, but he would have to acknowledge that these things are only distantly and tangentially related, if at all, to U.S. security.  In some cases, our security is scarcely linked at all. 

Are Americans endangered by rebel Naxalites in east-central India?  Is American security at risk because of Sri Lanka’s civil war?  If this were true, every crisis and conflict on earth would be a threat to national security and would merit American involvement and intervention.  This is crazy.  This is not a responsible retreat from delusions of grandeur, but simply more of the same in a slightly less menacing form.  Obama’s foreign policy is a more charming hegemonism, but hegemonism it remains.  He would rather have the hegemon be liked and have many willing servants, rather than recognising that the work of a hegemon is itself detrimental to America and the world (but especially to America).  This is, in its way, far worse than a blundering interventionism that reveals its wrongs for all to see, because a more subtle hegemonism has a much better chance of enduring (at least for a little bit longer). 

It might be the case that the United States should act in certain circumstances abroad even when our security is not directly concerned, but Obama does not make that appeal, because I think he knows that people have had enough of this sort of excessive idealism.  But then he makes the far less credible appeal that national security is bound up with the fate of democracy in Latin America.  Quite the contrary.  The regular workings of democracy in Latin America have produced one of the more virulently anti-American, albeit pitifully weak, rulers of the last decade.  What does Obama make of the opposition of Bolivian President Morales to the drug war if narcotrafficking is the bane of Bolivian democracy?  At least he didn’t refer to the “quiet violence” of flu-infected Indonesian chickens. 

Obama believes that by stressing interdependence and globalisation that he has seriously addressed complexity in foreign affairs, but he has simply replaced one rigid scheme with another, and in that scheme every problem on earth is potentially our problem.  If every problem is our problem, and everyone’s security is “inextricably linked” to our own, how can any President set priorities or address one crisis rather than another when all are potentially just as relevant and connected to American security?           

It cannot now be said that Obama does not make policy speeches.  But he does make bad policy speeches.

I wonder if any of those who have wrapped themselves in a St George banner and chanted objectionable, racist slogans, ever realised that the man himself was a Turkish Arab? ~Jack Straw

A “Turkish Arab”? In the third century? Over 300 years before the birth of Mohammed, and the Arab conquest of the Byzantine Empire?

Are the Armenians “Turkish Arabs” too…

Don’t these people have editors? ~Mr. Eugenides

Via The Debatable Land

Leave it to the pathetic Jack Straw to take two somewhat sensible points (1) there are Christians in Palestine who should not be ignored; 2) St. George is not only an English saint) and completely spoil them with a level of ignorance that seems surprising even in a politician.

Tomorrow is April 24, the day on which Armenians traditionally commemorate the genocide committed against their people.  That genocide began 92 years ago this month.  April 24 was chosen as the day of commemoration because it was on April 24, 1915 that the leading members of the Armenian community in Constantinople (Polis to the Armenians, Konstantiniye for the Turks) were arrested and taken away to be executed in the days and weeks that followed.  That gave the signal for the beginning of the organised attempt to annihilate the Armenians in all those places where they constituted more than 5-10% of the population; the goal was nothing less than the destruction of the Armenians throughout most of Anatolia.  Obviously, the Ottoman triumvirs directly responsible never publicly admitted their responsibility, much less were they punished for their crimes, and all attempts to hold other involved in the genocide were by and large stillborn thanks to post-WWI politics.  The new national government in Ankara early on rejected attempts to hold “the Turks” collectively responsible (this is understandable, in a way), and this hardened into the full-fledged policy of denialism that we see today.  At this point, denialism and Turkish republicanism have unfortunately combined; the hyper-nationalists today are only the most obnoxious of the denialists.  The Turkish Republic is the only ostensible democracy that I know of in which it is a crime to state publicly well-established historical facts.  In other democracies they make it a crime to deny genocides–in Turkish democracy, they make it a crime to use the word genocide.  It is a bad joke that the administration that wants to intervene in Sudan to stop a civil war that they (mistakenly) deem a genocide actively opposes a minimal effort to acknowledge a genocide that only Ankara and their apologists refuse to call by that name. 

Tomorrow Congress is preparing to pass still considering a resolution recognising the Armenian genocide as genocide and acknowledging the role of the Turkish government in it.  If West Germany had had a law on the books criminalising anyone who spoke of the Holocaust or the responsibility of the German government, it seems unlikely that Washington would respond well to threats from Bonn to the effect that relations would sour dramatically should Congress pass a purely symbolic resolution acknowledging the historical reality of the crime their government actively denies.  Today Ankara so threatens Washington with very real retribution for such a symbolic measure, when it is Ankara whose denialist law and repressive government combined to inflame public opinion against Hrant Dink, leading directly to his death.  That is only the most recent and dramatic example of how this genocide denialism has served as a mechanism for suppressing freedom of speech and whitewashing past crimes in Turkey.  It is appalling that such a government believes it is fit to join the nations of Europe as an equal; it is even more depressing that so many Americans are interested in currying favour with such an ally.

The ‘politics of and’ understands that tender policies don’t require an abandonment of tough policies. ~ConservativeHome

Via Reihan

This is something that bothers me about Tory modernisers, Cameroons and domestic comp-cons, such as Sam Brownback.  First of all, these are the sort who use such words as ‘tender’ in the context of public policy (kisses are tender, but policies are clumsy, blunt-force instruments wielded by government).  Here in America they refer to themselves, as Brownback does, as “compassionate conservatives” and “bleeding-heart conservatives,” as if there were anything conservative about a bleeding heart.  A heart that bleeds will do an unusually poor job of conserving sufficient blood supply to function properly!  Bleeding hearts are not normally good secular images for the defense of life.  The other thing that bothers me is the desire to create unified themes that supposedly bridge all areas of policy (thus being pro-life has something to do with art programs or Darfur) or the tendency to imagine that it is possible to ‘have it all’.  Hence the “and” in “And” conservatism. 

I remember how a few years ago Stoiber ran on a program of “capitalism and solidarity,” which sounds good at first and has a certain tradition in Christian Democratic circles of the past few decades.  Ultimately, it does not convince many.  This “and” talk is supposed to be an attempt at balance, but it always translates into an inability to make decisions, set priorities or gauge the importance of different policies (or, worse, it is the lamest and most transparent pandering to the other side’s constituents with cheap buzzwords).  Worst of all, it is intrinsically optimistic in its assumption that it is possible to address one set of problems effectively while simultaneously addressing all other sets of problems with the same vigour.  Man is finite, time is limited, resources are scarce and choices have to be made. 

“And” theories tell the thinking person that the “And” theorist is incapable of real leadership because he refuses to face up to the real costs and trade-offs of this or that policy.  Worse still is the apparent inability of “And” conservatives to recognise inherent contradictions in their proposed combinations:

A willingness to confront the Islamic roots of global terrorism and and more opportunities for mainstream British Muslims to set up state-funded schools.     

Perhaps the thinking here is that if the Treasury funds madrassahs there will be fewer openings for Saudi and Pakistani money and ideas, but if the “And” theorists are recognising the generically “Islamic roots” of global terrorism it seems downright stupid to devote state resources to funding Islamic schools, be they “mainstream” or not.

The “And” conservatives seem to enjoy rebelling against existing establishments, whether or not the establishments are pursuing obviously bad policies.  This would have some merit, if the alternative foreign policy opposed by the establishment figures was any good.  Another item from ConservativeHome identifies the flaws of the ‘triangulation’ approach (from which the “and” approach is supposedly distinct) and the vested interests that benefit from it:

Such voices include the public sector unions who oppose radical reform of schools and hospitals and the foreign office establishment that favours multilateralism and stability over pre-emption and regime change.

In other words, insofar as it is entirely unlike this ‘triangulation’ approach, “And” conservatism here is a sort of hybrid between the policy views of Mickey Kaus and Michael Ledeen: fight the bureaucrats/revolution in everything!  Elsewhere in foreign policy Cameron himself shows that “And” conservatism means a sort of oceanic attempt to care about everything equally, which will lead to being equally inattentive to all:

And when the Conservative Party talks about foreign affairs it can’t just be Gibraltar and Zimbabwe.  We have got to show as much passion about Darfur and the millions of people living on less than a dollar a day in sub-Saharan African who are getting poorer while we are getting richer.

To which the sensible Tory might reply, “Why?”

Joseph Cirincione seems to be rather excited at the prospect of four of the five permanent Security Council, nuke-wielding powers changing their executive leadership in 2009 (Hu Jintao will continue in his post) and thinks that this is an “opening” for changes in non-proliferation policies.  (He also notes that some old Cold War hands from both parties are interested in non-proliferation and eliminating nuclear weapons.)

Is the next administration likely to have a “very different nuclear policy”?  I suppose it’s possible, but what would lead anyone to think so?  More to the point, look at the probable political changes in the big five powers and consider whether these changes presage any real changes for proliferation policy.  

Imagine the combination, if you will, of Hillary, Sego, Gordon Brown, Hu and Some Guy Picked By Putin and ask yourself: is this the crowd that is likely to change significantly the world’s non-proliferation regime one way or another?  Another combination could be Edwards, Sarko, Brown, Hu and Some Other Guy Picked By Putin.  What a summit they could have!  Do any of these people give anyone the impression that they are going to pursue anything other than the status quo when it comes to conventional assumptions about Iranian proliferation?  If Bush’s policy is undesirable, as Cirincione says (and I would agree with him), which one of these new leaders is going to repudiate it? 

When Royal is not channeling Joan of Arc, Katherine Harris-style, she is demonstrating foreign policy ignorance that would make Mr. Bush seem like a globetrotting genius.  Sarko’s brief has never been foreign policy, and his interest has primarily been focused on integration, immigration and crime.  Brown willingly went along with Blair’s loonier crusades partly because he agreed with them, but also because he accepted that the deal with Blair allowed the PM to run foreign affairs pretty much as he saw fit while leaving the domestic side of things to him and the Treasury.  Foreign affairs are not his strong suit, and he will be presiding over a fractious and unhappy Labour Party that will have no patience for any more foreign adventurism.  If, as is likely, some Democrat gets elected over here, there may still be a great deal of noise made about Iranian proliferation, but there will be little action, if there is any at all, until the Iraq war has been concluded.  Fundamentally, however, all major Democratic candidates accept the outlines of Mr. Bush’s stance towards Iran, which is that its possession of nukes is unacceptable.  There will be no great change in U.S. policy should a Democrat win.  If the Republicans somehow pull it out, it will be on a platform of confrontation with Iran.  The new Russian President will be United Russia’s man and, therefore, Putin’s handpicked successor.  Moscow’s attitudes are unlikely to change much at all.  In each of the countries where leadership is changing, the mood has become introspective and there is a desire in each place to focus on internal ills.  It is possible that many areas of foreign affairs are going to be neglected by this next crop of leaders, or else some will embrace Mr. Bush’s approach all the more (if, for instance, a McCain or Giuliani should somehow win the election).

I am reminded of that memorable line from Cameron Crowe’s Singles when I look at the breakdown of my readership.  According to Alexa, Jordan, Egypt and the UAE still provide approximately one-fifth of my readers, and Bulgaria provides another 6%.  It was encouraging to find in a set of other statistics for the site that I had received visits from such diverse places as Ethiopia, Armenia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives and French Polynesia (and, yes, Belgium and Italy, too).  You are all most welcome.

I can imagine a few explanations. One is that most conservative pundits have allowed that portion of the brain that one uses to analyze a substantive question of national policy to atrophy to the extent that they don’t understand why this is something that conservatives should like. Another is corruption; this proposal would be bad interest group politics and the energy companies are major financiers of the right. A third is hackishness; this proposal would put you in disagreement with George W. Bush and other Republican Party politicians. Last is the politics of resentment; conservative pundits just hate environmentalists too much to see the forest for the trees. [sic] ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias proposes here some possible explanations why there aren’t many conservative pundits who advocate a carbon tax despite its purportedly great political advantages.  While listing those who do support such a proposal, Ross also offers an explanation for why pundits, whose job description rarely involves introducing interesting or new policy proposals, aren’t pushing this or any other potentially controversial proposal.  Ross’ explanation makes sense of pundit indifference, but Yglesias’ answers sum up fairly well most of the actual political reasons why a carbon tax proposal would go nowhere today on the right.  A proposal that goes against corporate interests, the administration and offends mainstream conservative knee-jerk anti-environmentalism all at the same time is obviously doomed from the start as far as most conservatives today are concerned.  As for the pundits themselves, they have no incentive to swim against the tide of anti-environmentalist, pro-administration sentiment that remains widespread in their regular readership.  A carbon tax is the sort of thing Mike Huckabee would probably propose, and that is exactly why conservatives will want nothing to do with it (much as they already want nothing to do with the rest of Huckabee’s tax policy).

There are at least three additional reasons why you will not see a lot of enthusiasm for the carbon tax on the right once the policy ideas begin to filter down from the wonks to everyone else.  There is the die-hard small-government response that lower taxes in one area shouldn’t be replaced by another tax.  “Starve the beast” isn’t a big vote-winner, I agree, but among the true believing anti-statists, who are actually disproportionately represented in the middle and lower echelons of movement conservatism, it remains one of their hoped-for goals.  Regardless of what a carbon tax is supposed to achieve, these are the people who will oppose it because it is a tax and the overall government take will not significantly diminish; the stated purpose of reducing consumption in something, regardless of what that something is, will offend another batch of economic conservatives who seem to think that consumption is man’s purpose here on earth.   There would also be a pretty intense reaction among voters against a tax that would obviously raise the cost of living for everyone, since this puts another financial strain on working and middle-class families that will feel as if they cannot afford it (and in many cases, whether for reasons of indebtedness or not, they actually cannot).  Direct taxes are no better for these people, but the voters who want lower taxes do not simply want to see their money extracted in a different way.  The middle-of-the-road, less obsessively anti-tax voters who might even be sympathetic to the goal of the policy (i.e., reducing carbon emissions) are not so sympathetic to the goal that they want to see higher energy costs.  

During a time in which economic populism is becoming more popular, because job security is worsening and outsourcing has become an ever-greater problem, it seems to me that the party of the carbon tax is the party that will implode all across the Midwest.  If conservative pundits are as reflexively pro-corporate, pro-administration and anti-environmentalist as Yglesias makes them out to be, they would just need to sit back and wait to reap the benefits of a backlash against a Democratic candidate proposing a carbon tax. 

The party of the carbon tax will probably not do very well elsewhere, but those areas hardest hit by the glories of free trade will probably not be eager to add yet another cost to doing business in the United States that will encourage still more industry to relocate in foreign climes.  Add to this the visceral, nay, reptilian response of the average suburbanite to the suggestion that their ability to consume ought to be challenged and questioned, all for the sake of the alleged benefits stemming from the reduction of carbon emissions, and you have the next great “populist” anti-tax movement just waiting to be directed by a savvy pol.  This last point may be the most important for explaining why this is an idea fit only for policy wonks: the powerful consumerist hatred of any conservationist appeal that says that consumption of anything ought to be reduced vastly outmatches in intensity any feeling of approval for something like the carbon tax.       

Perhaps if the policy were sold as a step towards energy independence, it might manage to win the support of non-interventionist conservatives who already think we should extract ourselves militarily as much as possible from the Near East.  However, if we were to pursue the nuclear route and oil fields ceased to be strategically important for America, what rationale would the empire have left?  Has Krauthammer really thought this one through all the way?

There seems to be an idea out there that McCain has hurt himself politically with his little “bomb Iran” crack in a way analogous to Howard Dean’s infamous “scream” (which was, in fairness, more of a yelp).  This seems to be wrong for two reasons: 1) the episode merely confirms that McCain is apparently as nonchalant about the consequences of war as he seems to be much of the time (which many Republican voters consider to be one of his greatest traits), while Dean’s scream hinted that the man might be a little unstable and unfit to hold great powers; 2) the voters McCain most needs to win over right now are Fred Thompson-adoring Persophobes who believe, as the members of the audience in the video believe, that bombing Iran is the obviously right and necessary thing to do. 

What may work in his favour even more is the response to this episode and his response to the reactions the episode causes.  In and of itself, the episode would be quickly forgotten and of no importance whatever, but now that MoveOn has thrown itself into the mix and antiwar activists are drawing attention to the video, McCain will be able to spin the episode as a bit of humour or, better yet, as a bit of allegedly Reagan-like levity of the old “the bombing starts in five minutes” variety.  In fact, expect that to become a standard McCainiac talking point before too much longer. 

There will be those who find this incredible.  Surely, the Iraq war is dragging down John McCain, they will say.  So how can more warmongering help him?  My answer to these objections is this: the Iraq war is dragging down McCain’s reputation among journalists who are against the war but deeply want to stay in love with the “maverick” McCain they have idolised all these years, and it hurts him with independents and moderate Republicans, who have traditionally formed McCain’s core of support in national politics.  It helps him enormously with those voters to whom the name McCain is normally anathema.  Sad to say, these voters are the sort who not only think the “surge” is working (which makes McCain of McCain Doctrine fame look good to them) but they are also the sort who think that Mr. Bush has generally done a bang-up job all around.  The risk that McCain has with these voters is that they will think he was not being serious enough about the threats from the “mullahcracy” or “the terror masters” or whatever sloganeered name they have picked  up from the main anti-Iranian pundits.  In any case, these are the voters McCain needs to win the nomination, so he needs to remind them as often as he can that he is the most pro-war (not just in Iraq, but in general) candidate out there. 

I can already see Romney’s desperate bid to shore up his superior anti-Iranian credentials: “Bombing Iran is no laughing matter–I’m deadly serious about it!”  He will then point out that he refused to provide state police security to Khatami during his visit to Harvard and remind everyone of his sabre-rattling at Herzliya.  You can almost hear the pro-Romney spin now: “Gov. Romney was in Israel declaring enmity against Iran, but where was John McCain?  He was probably singing a tune and making jokes about our national security!”  Do I think Romneyites are that sorry?  Generally speaking, yes. 

Can something so trivial change the course of a campaign?  Maybe not, but then at the time I didn’t think a YouTube  video would bring down George Allen, either.

So Sarko and Royal have advanced, pretty much restoring French presidential politics back to its dreary pre-2002 normality, even though the major parties have hardly done or even said much to suggest that they are understand the deep apathy and disgust with government of so many of their citizens.  There are obviously two important differences between now and 2002.  The first is the existence of a sizeable center vote (18% for Bayrou) over which the major parties must compete.  The second is that Sarko has apparently found a way to pilfer Le Pen’s voters without actually doing all that much to get them, because Le Pen has thrown away his immediate political support from France’s native working-class population for the sake of making a bargain with the Muslims for the future.  The oft-mentioned 8% of Muslims backing Le Pen and Le Pen’s open embrace of the cause of the people who tried to burn sizeable parts of France to the ground probably went over badly with his natural constituencies.  Go figure.

Unfortunately, the competition over the center will make both Sarko and Royal pursue ever-less interesting and ambitious proposals.  It is not really that much in doubt that Bayrou himself and the people likely to have supported him are going to fall in line behind Sarkozy.  Given that Royal is fairly batty by anyone’s standards and evidently not very knowledgeable about the rest of the world, the election is Sarko’s to lose and he is not going to lose, as I said last week.  Sarkozy will extend the Gaullist/UMP control of the presidency at least through 2012.