He is his own vision. ~David Axelrod on Barack Obama

So, when people complain that Obama’s campaign is mostly just a lot of egocentrism, gauzy sentimentality and meaningless drivel without any strong or coherent policy elements, don’t worry: that’s the master plan!

So I’m thinking of taking intensive Arabic this summer, since facility with that and related Semitic languages has obvious importance for Byzantine studies, and I have been dabbling a little with it so far.  My early dabbling reminded me that the Arabic word for ‘right’ or ‘correct’, sahih, was taken into Hindi (presumably by way of borrowings from Persian and/or Islamic influence) along with its antonym, galat, which I happened to come across also in my Armenian reading earlier this week.  The main reason I know that these words are in Hindi is that I have seen Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, everyone’s favourite Bollywood movie, so all those hours spent watching Indian flicks have not been entirely in vain.

On a lighter note, here is where Lebanese pop meets Bollywood: the pop star Nawal al-Zoghbi singing Gharib el-Ray.  There are more random foreign locales than in a Yash Raj spectacular (I guess because she is wandering, gharib).  Here is a video filled with apparently random scene changes–now she’s in Prague, now she’s surrounded by badly rendered computer-generated helicopters.  Perhaps if I spoke Arabic, it would make more sense?  At least the music’s enjoyable.  Meaningful blogging will resume later.

If a Martian came down and read Charles Krauthammer and you asked him whether what he had read made any sense, he would be be baffled and would wonder why you had even asked the question.  “Of course not,” the Martian would say.  “How can you earthlings read this junk on a regular basis?” 

It seems to me that Krauthammer brings in his argumentum ad Martianum whenever he’s feeling particularly strapped for bad excuses for the policy he is defending in a column, but I have no solid evidence that he trots out his Martian friend with that much regularity (he has so many columns filled with bad excuses for general belligerence).  Perhaps this is why he is so concerned to continue the space program and put a man on Mars?  So that he can finally meet all those Martians who somehow always manage to support whatever cracked idea he happens to be selling?  He certainly needs to find someone who thinks he knows what he’s talking about, so perhaps looking to inhabitants of other planets would be the way to go.

What follows seems like a pretty obvious objection, but it would appear that Krauthammer has so far largely gotten a pass on his most ludicrous column of this year.  One of Ezra Klein’s guest bloggers takes a shot at it, but really doesn’t do much with it.  What does Krauthammer’s conference with the Martian tell us?  Iraq is much more important than Afghanistan!  (How did I know he was going to say that?)  Krauthammer writes:

Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer — a Martian — and point out to him that the United States is involved in two hot wars against radical Islamic insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources, no industrial and no technological infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure which, though suffering decay in the later Saddam years, could easily be revived if it falls into the right (i.e. wrong) hands. Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait ,and the Gulf states. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question. 

If you were to then tell the “Martian” the rest of the information that would show the true significance of the two theaters, even the “Martian” would have to agree that Krauthammer doesn’t understand the first thing about geopolitics or strategy.  What rather strategically significant country borders Afghanistan and could be affected rather signficantly by a resurgent Taliban in the borderlands?  That would be Pakistan.  That would be the Pakistan that has a nuclear arsenal, and which has a highly unstable authoritarian government and the Inter-Services Intelligence branch that is heavily compromised by sympathies with and ties to jihadis forged over decades of sponsoring jihadis in Afghanistan and India.  Western Pakistan also now serves as the base for the Taliban and, to the extent that it is centered anywhere, the center of the leadership of Al Qaeda.  Of course top Al Qaeda figures would talk up Iraq as the main front–all other things being equal, if you could convince your stupid enemy to fight you far away from where you are and make him think that he was dealing you a death blow in the process, you would do this, especially when the effect of this is to reduce his attention on the far more pivotal battle going on in the supposed backwater.    

There is a very real possibility that jihadis of one sort or another could seize control of the government of Pakistan and its nukes, precipitate a war with India or use jihadis as couriers for nukes to attack targets abroad.  There is virtually zero possibility of Sunni jihadis controlling any of Iraq’s oil resources, and no chance of them controlling a large, somewhat effective military or a nuclear arsenal, since Iraq doesn’t have either of these (on the military, Krauthammer is recycling things that used to be true about the relatively “advanced” Iraqi military infrastructure, but which really ceased to be true in 2003). 

American withdrawal from Iraq will very likely be bad for many Iraqis, but failure in Afghanistan and the added destabilisation of Pakistan that would result from it would probably create evils so many times greater and so much more numerous that even the comparison between the two might strike the thoughtful observer as rather silly.  If you explained all that to the “Martian,” he would probably wonder why it is you are wasting so much time, energy, money and men in Iraq.  Some of us aren’t even from Mars, and we already knew this.

Update: Writing a little bit after I wrote the above post, Michael Crowley at The Plank gets it:

But is Afghanistan really so “geographically marginal”? I would say that Martian might take careful note of Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan. He might wonder why Americans aren’t downright panicked that an unstable nation infested with Islamic radicals constantly trying to assassinate its dictator has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons. And moreover that a top Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, has shared nuclear secrets with America’s enemies. And that other Pakistani nuclear scientists are reported to have met with Osama bin Laden himself.

I see the Pakistani bomb as a greater near-term threat to my own life than anything that might happen in Iraq in the next few years. Given the proximity of Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the way Islamic radicals play the two countries off one another, it seems to me that creating stability and a climate inhospitable to anti-American terrorists there is no “marginal” thing at all. Surely Krauthammer’s Martian could understand that.

It doesn’t tell us why other people are supporting Obama, but this “diavlog” from bloggingheads featuring the very pro-Obama Rosa Brooks from the Open Society Institute has her saying exactly the sort of nonsense about his transcending the divisions within this country and around the world that is supposedly merely the projection of Obama observers.  Instead, Ms. Brooks makes it explicit that she thinks Obama would be good for the country’s image around the world partly because of his race.  See the seventh section of the diavlog at 3:20 and after.

Via Poulos, I see that Ron Paul is polling better (3%!) than several of the other better-known, somewhat more-hyped second-tier candidates, such as Hunter, Huckabee and Tancredo.  (Poor Tommy Thompson pulls a whopping 1%.)  Granted that this is Zogby, and granted that it is a phone poll of adults, but it seems noteworthy that Brownback doesn’t even show up in the results and Ron Paul is already pulling a third of the support of the super-hyped Fred Thompson and the money-laden, media-soaked Mitt Romney.  Brownback’s absence makes me a little skeptical of the poll’s reliability, since he will be a player in Iowa even if he fails everywhere else, but if accurate it would mean that Ron Paul is in a solid fourth place among actual, declared candidates for the Republican nomination.  You never thought you would read that sentence, did you?  I expect that National Journal will be changing their presidential rankings accordingly.  Yeah, that’ll happen.

Reihan says that he has a problem picking sides between Sullivan and Brooks in a new Sullivan fit over a recent Brooks column, but there really is an easy solution: I think Brooks is wrong, but Sullivan is out of his mind.   

Unlike Reihan, I have no qualms about criticising both of them.  Brooks starts:

There is an argument floating around Republican circles that in order to win again, the G.O.P. has to reconnect with the truths of its Goldwater-Reagan glory days. It has to once again be the minimal-government party, the maximal-freedom party, the party of rugged individualism and states’ rights.

Actually, there’s a lot of talk going around about the need to “get back to Reagan,” but what that means in concrete terms is never spelled out very clearly.  No mainstream pundit or columnist I know of has even mentioned “states’ rights”–what a quaint idea to talk about federalism in a serious way!  There are some, such as Ryan Sager, who talk vaguely about the “libertarian” side of the fusionist mix and regard big spending Republicans and Christians alike as internal enemies to be beaten down.  But very few people are really proposing anything that anyone could call Goldwaterite or small-government conservative.  So Brooks’ analysis starts off with a pretty flawed premise. 

Sullivan responded:

So far, nothing but rhetoric and cliches from David. “Rugged individualism”? Why the “rugged”? Why not just freedom to live one’s life as one chooses, as opposed to the way in which David’s allies in the religious and authoritarian right want to boss us around?

So far nothing but hysteria and name-calling from Sullivan (as usual).  Why not “rugged”?  What’s wrong with “rugged”?  It’s the individualism part conservatives should have a problem with, not the ruggedness or lack thereof.  David Brooks has allies on “the religious and authoritarian right”?  I must have missed the latest staff meeting down at Religious Authoritarian HQ, since no one except for the excitable Andrew Sullivan could ever mistake David Brooks for being an ally of these people.  This is right down there with the time Sullivan declared in person to Brooks that “your magazine” (he meant The Weekly Standard) was founded for the purpose of promoting religious fundamentalism.  Brooks is a defender of the administration’s unconstitutional and abusive policies in many cases, but it is impossible to take seriously Sullivan’s arguments thanks to his habit of reducing every disagreement he has with someone to their servitude to dark fundamentalist forces.

Brooks writes a bit later:

In short, in the 1970s, normal, nonideological people were right to think that their future prospects might be dimmed by a stultifying state. People were right to believe that government was undermining personal responsibility. People were right to have what Tyler Cowen, in a brilliant essay in Cato Unbound, calls the “liberty vs. power” paradigm burned into their minds — the idea that big government means less personal liberty. 

Here Sullivan has bigger targets, and he even manages to hit some, since it seems plain that liberty must wane as government increases:

But bigger government always means less personal liberty. This is simply a fact, not an opinion.

More amusing is Sullivan’s “I’m a small-government Goldwater conservative, but” section, in which he manages to explain exactly how he is no such thing:

I’m a small government Goldwater conservative, but I think compulsory high school education is worth the trade-off of freedom. I think universal healthcare insurance is an infringement of liberty, but since we have committed to providing emergency healthcare for all, it’s a trade-off worth making for fiscal and moral reasons. Small government conservatives don’t want to abandon government. We want it small – but strong and focused on what government really ought to do.

And he thinks government ought to compel your children to go to state schools and force you to sign up for health insurance, a la RomneyCare, whether you want it or not.  In other words, when it comes to things that he deems “moral” and “necessary,” he is an even bigger statist than the people he constantly berates as authoritarians and fundamentalists and oppressors.  He wants to expand government even more than the hated “Christianists” have ever proposed doing when it suits his doubt-ridden convictions. 

Sullivan then cites another bit from Brooks and makes this hilariously oblivious comment:

Normal, nonideological people …

Please. This is a straw man. Everyone who differs from David is ideological and abnormal?

But, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the entirety of Andrew Sullivan’s book several hundred pages of saying, in a shrill, excited voice, that virtually everyone in the conservative movement besides Andrew Sullivan is ideological and abnormal?  His book might very well be called, “Everyone Except For Me Has Betrayed Conservatism, Embraced Fundamentalism And Must Be Ideological And Abnormal,” right?  Not quite as catchy of a title, I grant you, but far more reflective of the contents of the book.

Sullivan actually has the better of the philosophical argument, to the extent that he is even engaging in argument, but he responds to Brooks in such a fashion that it comes off seeming unconvincing even to those of us small-government conservatives who instinctively reject whatever it is that David Brooks has to say about anything.  Maybe that’s because Sullivan says things like this:

Could it be that David’s project of bringing in a cohort of religious zealots has tarred the GOP as a bunch of intolerant, bossy bigots?

Again, where is the evidence for any of this?  He calls it “David’s project,” as if Brooks had ever met a “religious zealot” he didn’t automatically loathe.  Note also that what Sullivan calls “religious zealot” other people would call “weekly suburban churchgoer.”  He repeats this canard again:

No, they’re simply registering that the Brooks experiment in turning the GOP into a religious, statist party for cronies and incompetents has been a disaster for Republicanism and a catastrophe for conservatism.

Can anyone in his right mind believe that whatever superficial religiosity there is in the GOP has anything to do with David Brooks or a “Brooks experiment”? 

He does manage to get one bit right:

Brooks was an intellectual architect of both visions – massive intervention abroad, and warmed-over socialism at home.

Indeed, and both positions are repugnant.  Which is what makes Sullivan’s ham-fisted, often buffoonish reply to one of their leading advocates so painful to read.

Sununu is trailing Shaheen by ten points in an early N.H. Senate poll.  It might have been a good idea for Sununu to either vote in support of the anti-“surge” resolution or for the latest supplemental/withdrawal bill.  Without something real he can take home to show that he isn’t married to the GOP on the things that are most of concern to New Hampshire voters, he will have a difficult time hanging on.

Bush’s low approval ratings are an illustration. Some experienced GOP campaign strategists believe that there is virtually no chance that a Republican can succeed Bush if his approval ratings remain mired in the 30s. The Democratic strategy of investigating administration scandals and policy blunders is calculated to achieve exactly that goal — and the burgeoning controversy over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys has given Democrats in Congress yet another inviting target. ~The Politico

Come to think of it, has the outgoing President’s party ever won the next election when he has approval ratings below 40%?  I don’t think modern approval rating-taking existed before Truman, but we can also see from the fairly lopsided Harding victory in 1920 that unpopular Presidents consistently drag down their succeeding nominees down to defeat.  Relatively more popular Presidents, such as T.R., Coolidge and Reagan, have been able to hand over control to someone from their own party (though not always necessarily their Vice President), which also makes Gore’s inability to match these examples particularly bad. 

All this seems obvious enough, but for some reason much of the commentary on ’08 has been treating the election as if we still lived in the 50-50 nation and it’s anybody’s guess which way the election will go.  All generic polls and common sense tell us that the Democrats will once again do pretty well, barring some catastrophic failure or scandal on their side.  Even if we were not still in Iraq, it seems probable that Mr. Bush’s low approval ratings and the GOP’s generally poor reputation these days will make the GOP nominee this time around a dead man campaigning.   

That once again makes 1920 the more appropriate model for understanding what is likely to happen next year (with all of the obvious caveats about significantly different electorates, circumstances and issues taken into account, lest I be accused of young blogger naivete).  Another comparison would be 1952, which technically included Truman early on in the election but was effectively an election without an incumbent from either party.  In terms of the final margin of victory, 1952 is probably the better comparison than 1920, which saw a massive blowout that does seem unlikely given recent voting patterns.

Clark offers his pessimism as an antidote to any excessive optimism experienced at Charlottesville.  I do have to confess I share Clark’s puzzlement about Prof. Deneen’s reference to people being “wildly optimistic” about human nature.  It is not necessarily true that all or even most people at the conference would share my enthusiasm for active pessimism, but as something of an arch-pessimist I would have thought I would be able to detect if anyone was a believer in the unspotted goodness of mankind.  Perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps I simply drank too much vodka and was no longer discerning much of anything.