There’s much more tolerance for serious freethinkers — the Johns Hopkins scholar Eliot Cohen was just hired at State. ~David Brooks

Is Brooks trying to be funny?  Did he just use the words “serious” and “freethinker” in the same sentence with Eliot Cohen’s name?  This Eliot Cohen, who wrote this?  If he’s a freethinker, what on earth does a mindless conformist look like?  I didn’t realise that Eliot Cohen now works for the State Department.  That is a very depressing thing to learn.

Dan McCarthy is similarly unimpressed by Will’s column and doubts that the experience of addressing NYC’s problems in the last decade has any bearing on the problems of the nation today.  He asks:

Is Ruday gonna save the country from the legions of menacing squeegee men rampant in Peoria and Albuquerque? 

Hey, that’s squeegeefascist!  Some people clearly don’t take the threat of militant squeegeeism as seriously as Rudy does.  How many times have I been driving around Albuquerque when I am at home and been beset by the roving hordes of squeegeefascists?  How many times have Albuquerqueans of all classes and races cried out, “How long, O Lord, until Thou shalt send us a deliverer from the torment of the squeegee?”?  Too many, let me tell you.

Rudy will probably also be able to fix the plague of jaywalking that is currently crippling Hyde Park.  He may prove to be completely incompetent when it comes to doing anything required of the President, but he has urban reform down pat.

I’m not sure why George Will and other boosters of the Terrible Trio feel obliged to point out all of Reagan’s worst deeds in state government.  They seem to think that what Reagan did on economic and social policy shouldn’t disturb us much because we all know that he became a paragon of conservatism.  If he could become a great conservative icon after signing legalised abortion and no-fault divorce bills, surely Giuliani can become another icon!  Of course, this does nothing but to drive home just how unduly flexible and unprincipled our use of the word “conservative” will have had to become if we want to whitewash Reagan’s past mistakes in the name of hero-worship.  It’s also worth pointing out that Reagan did not actually become the nominee until a lengthy, decent interval had passed between his Californian errors and his 1980 campaign.  If Reagan was engaged in rank opportunism as he moved somewhat to the right on social issues, he did not benefit from it without having to wait for a while.  Romney would like to skip the decade-long wait and the failed nomination challenge, and McCain and Giuliani would prefer to not play the role of Reagan at all.  They are all obviously unusually power-hungry men who radiate an exceptionally dangerous sense of self-importance, and voters would have to be either drunk or mad to give any of them the kind of power they want to have. 

Will seems to see nothing wrong with the possibility that Romney is merely cynically manipulating voters with this appeal.  But Romney knows that Mr. Bush didn’t have to govern anything like a conservative and still won re-election; he simply wants to get a shot at the White House, and he thinks he has found his way to do that.  Once he’s in, he can govern however he likes while still mouthing all the right platitudes.  As long as his reversion to form isn’t too blatant or sudden, he will not suffer too much politically.  He doesn’t have to turn back into a full-blown pro-abortion, tax-hiking pol to betray the people whose support he wants now; he simply needs to not act on any of the things that matter to conservatives, and he will have shown himself to be a con-man.  Having been burned by one massive fraud of a conservative President, whose lack of conservatism some of us could see from a mile away, many more on the right are now unsurprisingly not content to go through it all over again. 

There are two big problems with Will’s use of Reagan here: the very examples Will cites remind us that Reagan was never that paragon of conservatism in all respects, and breathless invocations of him as such are bound to come off sounding a little strange; even if Reagan were that paragon, what sort of accomplishment would it be for conservatives to be right back where they were 27 years ago in terms of their choices for leadership?  That is what Will and other party establishment types are insisting upon: after a generation of building a (rather largely unsuccessful) movement, conservatives should be willing to accept these three astonishingly poor, unelectable candidates because Reagan, who was actually a strong, electable candidate who showed more respect than offering mere lip service to conservatives, also failed to live up to social conservative orthodoxies that had not yet become prevailing concerns of what had been hitherto primarily a government-shrinking, constitutionalist political movement.  Because at least some of the most radical innovations in social policy had not yet occurred, there was not yet a groundswell of religious conservative opposition to those innovations, so it is no wonder that there would have been a greater tolerance for new and possibly opportunistic “converts” in those days.  Now one might expect to be able to find someone much more reliable and credible on these matters.  Meanwhile, these three, unlike Reagan, have all had the chance to see the bad fruits of past mistakes and the disintegration of social order attendant upon socially liberal policies that they have all supported or still support and yet they were/are completely unconcerned about the consequences of the bad policies they favoured/favour.  They have all demonstrated decades-long persistence in anti-conservative views on some of the more important questions of the day; only Romney has had the unusually poor taste of pretending that he is now truly “one of us.”  According to Will, because Reagan, who was always of a more socially “libertarian” bent when it came to government, made similarly gross deviations particularly from social conservatism (a social conservatism that had not yet become politically important), their gross deviations should be accepted today in the vague hope that maybe, just maybe, one of these three might also…cut our taxes! 

In fact, Will seems to be confirming what social and religious conservatives are already saying: whether or not conservatism comes in quite as many flavours as Will thinks (including those delicious non-conservative and faux conservative flavours), the social conservatives don’t much care for the taste of any of these three.  Will here simply tells them to shut up and eat their socially liberal vegetables.  In short, the establishment doesn’t care at all whether the rank-and-file like the options being forced down their throat, and it is telling them: you’d better get used to it, because we’re not going to allow any of these other candidates to go anywhere.   

But it isn’t just the folks primarily concerned with abortion who are unhappy.  If you’re an antitax man, Romney and McCain are definitely bad bets; if you’re a restrictionist, Giuliani and McCain are far beyond the pale, and Romney can’t be trusted (just as he can’t be trusted on anything).  You can do this on every policy question, and you will discover just how horrendous these three are.  It is not for nothing that an amnesty-backing humanitarian interventionist such as Brownback can gain some traction when he portrays himself as a “full-scale conservative.”  He isn’t any such thing, but he is so much more believable than these other three and so much more reliable on a host of issues (notably not including immigration) that it is laughable than the others are leading the field. 

Even understanding their establishment ties and their contempt for the broad mass of conservative voters, it is still somewhat bizarre to watch Republican pundits push these candidates.  It is as if many of the major Democratic talking heads and writers rallied around an unreconstructed Southern Democrat, Joe Lieberman and a recently-converted liberal zealot, James Inhofe, who just “discovered” that Kyoto is imperative for planetary survival and wants to campaign on a “Share Our Wealth” platform.  Far from being treated as the natural or obvious top three candidates for the Democratic nomination, virtually no one would give them the time of day, since they would be either completely unrepresentative of the party they were trying to lead or completely untrustworthy.  “I have learned from experience that global warming is not the elaborate conspiracy and hoax that I have been saying it was for all those years,” Inhofe would say, and perhaps little websites would be started up called Greens for Inhofe.  Perhaps someone will say that this is the virtue of the “broad-minded” “big tent” of the GOP that you can have three leading candidates who don’t believe in most of the things the rank-and-file believe (or whose convictions cannot be trusted), but I imagine that would simply confirm for everyone that the “big tent” rhetoric was always just a way to foist unwanted candidates and policies on the voters.

Shorter pro-Giuliani argument: Because of 9/11, pro-life conservatives have to support someone who will make sure that the government kills a lot of people overseas.

Shorter Belle Waring: What if we lived in a world where everything was completely different from the real world, human beings were nothing like actual human beings and there was never any danger of crime?  What if we lived in Aldous Huxley’s head?

Via Ross Douthat

Dr. Trifkovic’s latest confirms what I thought to be the case about the “surge” back in January.  He begins:

During a recent White House meeting, the Washington Post reported on March 5, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq if the current “surge” fails. The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B; or, as Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee put it, “Plan B was to make Plan A work.”

As I wrote on 30 January:

If we’re playing a “field position” game, as Sen. Lugar absurdly describes it, that means we had better have an awfully good “punt kicker.”  In the real world that means we would have to be something like a back-up plan when the surge (sorry, “draw play”) fails.  (For those paying attention, we don’t have any such back-up plan.) 

Dr. Trifkovic was very clear-eyed about the “surge” two months ago:

What was really new in the President’s address? It was his statement that he would establish certain benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet, and that if they fail to do so there would be certain consequences, presumably unpleasant consequences for Mr. al-Maliki and his team. What is also new is not a “strategy” but a tactical military matter. Instead of simply going into neighborhoods, cleaning them up and then going out and thus enabling the insurgents to come back again, the President now says that U.S. troops will have sufficient numbers to retain a presence in the neighborhoods from which the insurgents had been expelled. Presumably those neighborhoods would then be transferred to the Iraqis’ control once a modicum of stability has been achieved. Let me emphasize, this is a purely tactical issue, nothing to do with “strategy.”

In strategic terms, the only novelty is the stress on the behavior of the Iraqi government, and in particular its commitment to end the sectarian strife. But this is an element that does not depend on the will and the resources of the United States. In other words, the President is basing his “new strategy” – such as it is – on a “known unknown,” to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld. He is basing it on the assumption that the Shia-dominated government of al-Maliki (who is a protégé of Muqtada al-Sadr) will work for the establishment of a truly unified Iraqi security force that will eliminate all militias regardless of their sectarian coloring and regardless of their core allegiance. In my opinion, that expectation is completely unrealistic.

Dr. Trifkovic argues in his new article for containment of the Iraqi civil war within Iraq and a sort of dual containment of the insurgency and the Shi’ite majority inside Iraq combined with containment of Iran.

He also writes that Iraq “did not attack us,” ignoring the multiple instances of it trying to shoot down our airplanes that were enforcing the no-fly zone created not unilaterally by the United States but under U.N. auspices. ~Quin Hillyer

I’m sure Mr. Hillyer must believe this claim, as so many war supporters seem to, since it is one of those claims repeatedly thrown in the face of war opponents.  It is, however, simply untrue that it was under U.N. auspices.  Perhaps proponents of the war do not believe that the no-fly zones should have needed U.N. authorisation, and perhaps they think U.N. authorisation and operating under the organisation’s auspices are vastly overrated, but they cannot claim U.N. authority for the no-fly zones.  They were set up quite unilaterally, or trilaterally if you like, by the United States, Great Britain and France.  By my reading of the U.N. Charter, they were pretty clearly illegal infringements on Iraqi sovereignty.  No-fly zone defenders have claimed that these actions were legal under UNSCR 688, but the text of this resolution does not even begin to authorise ongoing air patrols.  The resolution was a statement about repression of minorities and humanitarian crisis.  It does not say that other member states can or should intervene to stop this repression and it specifically states in its opening sections:

Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Iraq [bold mine-DL] and of all States in the area…   

Perhaps all of that doesn’t matter to war supporters, and they think that Washington and the allies did the right, albeit illegal, thing.  But what none of them can do is claim that the no-fly zones were anything other than American and allied intervention done without legal sanction under international law.  If they really want to argue that responses to such repeated, systematic violations of another state’s sovereignty constitute an attack by that state on our forces and thus constitute a cause for war, they can do so, but it won’t be convincing.

Quin Hillyer and Robert Dreyfuss square off over the question, “Is Iraq Worth Fighting For?”  Mr. Dreyfuss makes many arguments about the implausibility of victory that seem to me to be fairly sound (I have made more than a few of them myself), but Mr. Hillyer is correct that Dreyfuss doesn’t exactly answer the question at hand: is Iraq worth it?  Mr. Hillyer says yes, because he regards the fight as not only honourable and noble, but as being in the national interest.  That last point seems to me to be the most important. 

If there is/was a compelling national interest in success in Iraq, it might very easily be concluded that the fight is/was worthwhile.  That wouldn’t necessarily change any of the prudential arguments about whether the fight could actually be won (thus making the whole discussion a bit academic), nor would it address whether any of the pre-invasion goals were ever achievable, but it would mean that the fight had not been entirely without some legitimate purpose.  It might imply that Americans should even be willing to tolerate more American deaths in pursuit of a worthy cause, but even this hinges on practical questions of the likelihood of success. 

So, is Iraq worth it?  Is this war actually a just one?  Is this war in the national interest? 

In a word, no.  Quite plainly, I have always believed, and have argued since the beginning in whatever forum I could find before I had this blog, that Iraq was not worth one American life.  Not one.  That remains as true today as it was in 2002.  There is no real American interest that required or even hinted at the need for an invasion of Iraq, and I am convinced that the United States should never risk the lives of American soldiers except where some real American interest requires that risk.  There can be arguments over what constitutes a “real” American interest, but I would like to think that there ought to be a general consensus, at least among conservatives, that if there is no such interest our government has no business getting involved. 

I know what the foreign policy and political establishment types have said and what they continue to say about “threats” to this country from countries in the Near East, and they are almost always wrong.  They were spectacularly wrong about Iraq, but not simply in the obvious “bad intelligence” ways.  Almost every assumption they made about how Iraq supposedly threatened the United States was wrong.  In no conceivable way did it threaten the mainland U.S., nor was there any real threat to Europe, nor was there an uncontainable threat to Israel or the Gulf states.  A weak, fractured despotism that had been economically half-starved into compliance not only didn’t pose a serious threat to anyone, but couldn’t even begin to do so.  We might as well regard Zimbabwe as a major threat to the world by the standards used to judge Iraq to be a threat.  Whether these establishment folks are very bad at what they do, or whether they are dishonest, I cannot tell for most of them, but wrong they certainly are.  I say “almost” in these statements simply because I do not want to rule out entirely the possibility that they may, at some point, get something right.  But it has been a while since that happened. 

Besides, any invasion of Iraq was inevitably going to be a war of aggression, which cannot be squared with a commitment to international law or justice.  As it happens, the war is also unconstitutional and is being run by executive fiat, which ought to trump everything else in conservative circles, but I have long since given up hope of trying to convince war supporters of anything related to the Constitution.  People who believe the executive has broad, undefined “inherent powers” will believe just about anything. 

This is, I suppose, about as hard-line antiwar as you are likely to find, but the reasons for this position seem to me to be abundant.  There are three elements to my position: strategic, legal and moral.

For there to have been anything in the national interest that actually might compel the government to invade Iraq, at least one of the following three things had to be true: 1) Iraq was an uncontainable threat to vital resources or allies; 2) Iraq was an uncontainable threat to the United States itself; 3) Iraq was working hand-in-glove with Al Qaeda.  Some opponents of the war (rightly) never believed government claims about WMDs, and many correctly dismissed claims about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda as being essentially inherently absurd.  (Interestingly, having pushed this falsehood as strongly as he could, watch how Feith now runs from this position as quickly as he can.)  This latter claim was entirely untrue as far as any meaningful or active cooperation between the two were concerned.  The WMD question was somewhat more vexed, but there were inspectors who correctly claimed prior to the invasion that the weapons had been eliminated and the programs shut down.  It is therefore not true if anyone should say that we did not have good reason to think government claims were false.  These claims, which were by far the most accurate, were simply ignored or brushed aside.

Success in its most optimistic, pre-invasion terms of a genuinely liberal democratic Iraq that would make peace with Israel and serve as a model for the region was not actually ever possible for many of the reasons antiwar conservatives gave before the war, but suppose for a moment that it was possible.  Wouldn’t that great dream have been worth it?  No, not at all.  Two reasons: 1) America should never, barring an attack or uncontainable threat from that country’s government, attempt to dictate through the use of force the political future of any other country; 2) even the most optimistic scenario of liberal democratic Eden serves no compelling U.S. interests. 

Does it actually matter to American security whether people in the Near East vote in their bad governments or not?  Well, no, it doesn’t.  Latin American countries are going hog-wild with democratic mass movements, most of which seem antithetical to U.S. interests and liberal values, just as would be the inevitable outcome of any kind of democracy in the Near East. 

I will have to assume that Mr. Hillyer is at least partly joking when he invokes the colour revolutions, since one of these was simply a jockeying for power between different clans (Kyrgyzstan), the other was a jockeying for power between different sets of oligarchs (Ukraine) and in the Georgian case it has raised to power a rather foolishly belligerent demagogue who likes picking fights with Russia over South Ossetia and who rallied his followers during the “revolution” at the birthplace of Stalin.  If this is the “light of freedom” spreading, I would prefer increased darkness.  That the Cedar “Revolution” precipitated the internal political upheaval that has been rocking Lebanon ever since and has worked to empower Hizbullah more than it already was would have to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm about its effects.  This is not just a matter of good revolutions going slightly awry.  These revolutions were never the great democratic movements that they were made out to be, if by democratic we mean anything remotely resembling our own system.  They were mob demonstrations of vested clan, sect or regional interests, and it is the political constitutions of these countries that have made these “revolutions” “fail” to live up to their promises, since most of the high-flown rhetoric serves simply as a screen for pursuit of power and the exploitation of the institutions of government for the benefit of their faction.  If democrats want to say that this is democracy and is desirable, they can, but I don’t see how that would encourage anyone to want to promote democracy.   

Let’s ask a different, related question: is it the proper business of the United States government to use its military so that people in other nations can be liberated from repressive governments?  Quite simply, no, it isn’t.  That isn’t what our government exists to do.  It should use its military to defend our country, any allies with which we may have defense treaties and vital resources.  It cannot be worthwhile to liberate other peoples because it is a kind of war that not only goes far beyond what our government is supposed to be doing and engages in conflicts that it has no right to involve our people in, but also because it quite clearly harms the United States in the process.

More basically, any such intervention is, by definition, an act of aggression by one state against another.  An intervention with the stated goal of regime change is even more obviously an act of aggression.  This has no justification in international law and clearly violates international law in its infringement on the sovereignty of another state. 

Aggressive war cannot be moral and it cannot be just.  To choose war, as our government indeed did, is to choose to unleash all the horrors of war on people who have done no lasting, grave or permanent harm to us.  They may or may not be wretched, awful people.  They may or may not be tyrants.  Whether they are or not is actually irrelevant to the question of whether our government has the right to commit aggression against another state.  The bottom line is that the attacked state has done nothing to deserve our attack on it.  How much less, then, do the civilians killed in the process deserve it?  How can a war of aggression ever be “worth” the moral stain and illegality that it entails?  How can unleashing hell on earth without cause ever be worthwhile?  It cannot be.  That is the answer Mr. Dreyfuss should have given. 

Update: In his response to Mr. Hillyer, he does make a few of these arguments as well.

The extremists understand only the language of power, and any reluctance or softness on the part of the Iraqi or U.S. government would only embolden them.  In this way the clearly voiced commitment of President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki was exactly the type of strong message that needed to be sent. ~Omar and Mohammed Fadhil

Apparently they also understand forceful language.  All we need to do is give them (“the extremists”) a stern talking-to, and everything could be straightened out.  That’s good to know.  It couldn’t be that with the Shi’ite militias going to ground (proof that the “surge” is “working”) we would see a replay of the rampant anti-Shi’ite carnage of 2003-2004 that originally caused these militias to begin carrying out revenge and sectarian killings, could it?  No, obviously not.

Tradition is another name for contingency. ~Andrew Sullivan

While I really don’t want to be too pedantic, this is ridiculous conceptual confusion.  Nothing new about that in Sullivan’s writing, I know, but this is a particularly bad example of dismissing an important concept (tradition) by completely misunderstanding what it is.  Tradition is contingent, historically, culturally, even to some extent geographically, but that does not mean tradition = contingency.  That would be like saying that history = contingency. 

This would also be like saying, “Sunlight is just another name for warmth.”  You couldn’t get away with saying something that silly, except perhaps in a poem, but I wonder whether everyone would be equally aware of just how silly this statement is.  You cannot take an attribute, make it into a substantive and then say that this substantive is identical with the thing that it modified when it was an attribute.   

This is to take a quality of a thing, even one of its major qualities, and confuse it for the thing itself.  This is to make an attribute the equal of its substance, which is a fundamental confusion of categories.  It is neo-Barlaamism, and we all know why Barlaam was wrong, don’t we?  Well, Sullivan probably doesn’t.