If I were as silly as Andrew Sullivan, I would do just what he does whenever the target of his criticisms “fails” to respond: I would take his “failure” to respond to my review of his book as definitive proof that I have completely overthrown his entire argument.  It would be obvious to me that I have already anticipated his every reply and decisively routed him, so much so that he is embarrassed even to talk about it.  I would say things like, “Why is there such a deafening silence from Andrew Sullivan?  Clearly, he knows that I have his number!  Ha ha!”  But no one else could ever be as silly as Andrew Sullivan.

So they’re strong on foreign policy, except insofar as it involves actual policy. They tend to be much better, however, at comparing themselves to figures such as Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln. They make such comparisons incessantly. Last week, Giuliani said that Lincoln had “that ability that a leader has–a leader like George Bush, a leader like Ronald Reagan–to look into the future.” ~Jonathan Chait

So Mr. Bush can both see into men’s souls and see into the future?  The list of his impressive powers just keeps getting longer and longer.  But I do have a question: if Lincoln could see into the future, why did it take him so long to promote Grant? 

There have been a couple of people on the left who have seen through the “Giuliani has national security credentials” smokescreen his boosters and credulous pundits have been throwing up to distract voters from the candidate’s myriad flaws.  Matt Yglesias wrote two and a half years ago:

He’s never served in the military (or held a civilian job that entailed working with the military). He’s never held a job dealing with foreign affairs. He’s never held a job dealing with intelligence. Indeed, the closest he gets is time spent as a federal prosecutor working against the Mafia, precisely the law-enforcement model of counterterrorism that the nation has abandoned and that the Bush administration likes to accuse Democrats of being in thrall to. Nor does he have any experience with the problem of post-conflict stabilization, the area in which George W. Bush’s policies have most clearly fallen short.

In other words, Giuliani has no foreign policy or national security policy experience that should give him an advantage over any governor or any other mayor around the country.  Even among the current candidates coming out of state and local government, Giuliani is particularly lacking in these areas.  It is demonstrably true that he is far less qualified to be President than, say, Bill Richardson–consider that horrifying statement about the state of our presidential field for a moment–which ought to be virtually disqualifying for him as a candidate.  If the public doesn’t care whether the next President has any experience in relevant fields related to the looming problems of the next administration, I guess Giuliani’s image as a Brooklyn heavy and vindictive prosecutor will do.  Yet his rather remarkable lack of expertise in national security and foreign policy is all the more damning for him when it is his “leadership” in these areas that is supposedly going to offset his social liberalism and sketchy personal life.  If cleaning up Time Square, reducing crime and getting rid of the “squeegee men” are his signature accomplishments, I do fail to see how he is prepared to head the executive branch of government in wartime, especially when many of our alliances are in poor shape and our international relations are almost uniformly bad.   

Then again, I don’t know why someone whose chief accomplishments in foreign relations (very broadly defined) include denying security to the former President of Iran and organising the Olympics is today regarded as anything other than an amusing curiosity in an election that will focus on foreign policy questions.  If his record is anything to go by (and with Romney, we can’t exactly be sure of that!), Romney will respond to a foreign crisis by refusing police escorts to the political leadership of the other country and will then cut back on all that wasteful expenditure at state dinners by making everyone eat pizza off of paper plates.  He will also make very loud speeches threatening divestment.  That will break the Taliban’s will to fight!    

In fact, given his impressive lack of any relevant experience, Giuliani is a sort of latter-day Colonel Johnson, whose chief claim to fame and really his only qualification for being nominated as the 1836 Vice Presidential candidate was the claim (probably spurious) that he killed the Indian chief Tecumseh.  You all remember the winning slogan, don’t you?  “Rumpsy Dumpsy, Rumpsy Dumpsy, Colonel Johnson shot Tecumseh!”  Giuliani needs the consultants that the Colonel had.  In fairness to the Colonel, he was at least present at the right battle, so it is possible that he could have done what others claimed for him.  There is really no such plausible explanation, except apparently the desperation of the GOP establishment, for the building up of Giuliani into a leader on national security issues. 

Chait is right about the tendency of many Republican pols to strike the Churchillian pose (Santorum was only the most recent and most flamboyantly silly of these).  It is a strange habit to have.  I understand that each time a Republican invokes old Winnie he believes he is somehow partaking of the man’s glorified reputation, but more often the Churchill references (which Giuliani makes as often as possible) can only serve to remind the listener of the rather sizeable gap between the grand old man and the speaker.  I am hardly what you would call a Churchill fan.  The fetish Americans on the right have for him is weird and disturbing to me (only slightly less disturbing than the Tony Blair fetish many of the same people have).  Nonetheless, a modern pol who wants to give a boost to his own reputation for leadership by saying, “I like Churchill” as many times as possible can only suffer by the inevitable comparison between the two, since Churchill was nothing if not a very experienced foreign policy hand by the time he took over the Government.  In fairness to him, even the disaster of Gallipoli (Churchill’s idea) could be laid at the feet of the dithering naval commander on the scene.  As a strategist, Churchill occasionally had good instincts.  The point is that Churchill had at least been around the block in making and thinking about policy in some capacity before he became a wartime leader. 

You can spot the candidates who have scarcely given these problems much thought at all by their reflexive, unthinking genuflections before the image of Churchill.  Those are the candidates you don’t want within a mile of important policy decisions.  (That goes for the top three on the Democratic side, too, while we’re at it.)

Thanks to one of my regular readers, I was alerted to this Nation article about McCain’s trouble with the folks back in Arizona.  Abiding conservative loathing of McCain, especially over his betrayals on immigration, was not news to me, but the story does help convey just how unbalanced and egomaniacal McCain is–just another reason why every sane person should hope and pray for his defeat in the primaries.  What I didn’t know about was this little item mentioned in the story:

His makeover continues on February 23, when he is scheduled to speak before the Discovery Institute, the right-wing think tank that has attempted to introduce into public school biology classes the teaching of Intelligent Design.

This is embarrassing.  Are we now going to be treated to quadrennial rituals where presidential hopefuls make the trek to Seattle to pander to the non-scientific scientists of ID?  Will we be treated to McCain holding forth on irreducible complexity in the same snooze-inducing fashion with which he put the Federalist Societ members to sleep with his Civics 101 lecture on checks and balances?  Whoever talked McCain into doing this (I guarantee it wasn’t his idea!) is doing the man no favours.  It is one thing to be a religious conservative and feel some (misguided) obligation to encourage the absurdity of introducing ID into biology class, but for McCain to go there he might as well be carrying a big, flashing sign saying, “I will say and do whatever it takes to con you people into supporting me.”  It does more damage to his credibility with the very voters he is obviously desperate to win over than if he said nothing about ID.  No one really thinks that McCain, who is a fairly secular Republican, actually cares about or believes in Intelligent Design theory.  Even if he is as dim as his record at the Naval Academy would suggest, he couldn’t be so gullible as to fall for this stuff, could he?

It goes without saying that this argument can and should be, I think, at least partially contested on every point: it is not necessarily obvious either exactly how America’s culture and society fits into Western civilization’s historical Christian identity or how affirming that identity will strengthen us; a presidential election is far from a plebiscitary affirmation (and would Daniel even want it to be?); and the Mormon teachings on “the apostasy” are a good deal more nuanced and in flux then might at first appear, anyway. ~Prof. Fox

Prof. Fox is a long-time reader of and friend to Eunomia, and I appreciate his thoughtful engagement with my post on anti-Mormonism, especially when that post may have been more than a little irritating to him and any other LDS readers I may have.  First, an explanation about that post.  The article I was responding to seemed to say: “You either object to Mormon candidates out of the democratic identitarian belief that your candidate should be like you in most or all respects, or you are a bigot.”  This implies that, unless you take the “Christian majoritarian” or identitarian approach, you oppose a Mormon candidate because you actually hate Mormons.  I believe this to be profoundly untrue for the vast majority of Christians who are averse to voting for a Mormon candidate, since I find it difficult to believe that many people could work themselves up into a hatred for Mormons (who are, as a general rule, the most unhateable people you are ever likely to meet), and so I wanted to explain just what it is about a Mormon candidate that concerns me rather than my usual shtick of explaining others’ reservations.  Perhaps few will find my reasons convincing, but it seemed important to insist that there were a number of other arguments, some of them that I think are fairly reasonable, that went beyond the two options, “I prefer Christians” or “I despise Mormons.” 

We live in a mass democracy.  This is the unfortunate reality.  I wish that it were not so, and that we had something much more like the Old Republic in which the mixed constitution of our ancestors provided slightly greater balance and sanity.  A country this large should not be selecting its government this way, or rather there should be no central government for an entire country this large; it is doubtful that any polity can be this long without sinking into demagogic despotism (and some of us would say that it already has).  But for the present, a working alternative is not on offer. 

In this mass democracy, we make the election of Presidents into plebiscitary endorsements of what a certain candidate represents or at least what he claims to represent.  The Electoral College, while still legally binding, slavishly follows the mass of voters in each state.  Our debased, televised political culture makes the selection of a President absolutely into a plebiscite on the two charged symbols of the major candidates.  Part of the flaw of mass democracy in a large nation-state of semi-literate, largely historically ignorant people with no interest in civic duties is that most voters will respond to candidates viscerally and emotionally, which inevitably makes the candidates into symbols to which voters ascribe meaning.  I am, if you like, acknowledging this sorry state of affairs, of which I don’t really approve, and then arguing over what kind of symbols we should be endorsing given that our political system is a hulking mess.    

Our method of choosing chief executives undoubtedly invests presidential candidates with far too much importance (just watch as all of us, myself included, get terribly involved in tracking the peregrinations of a dozen mediocrities you would not entrust with the most basic responsibilities of the neighbourhood watch or street cleaning to get a sense of how inappropriate our fixation on these candidates is).  That does not change the reality that Americans will continue to invest such candidates with this excessive importance and will continue to attribute meaning to the victory of one or the other.  Since this is the reality, and since we should strive to work in the real world, much as we may find many of its traits obnoxious and distressing, we ought to make the best of it. 

In this case, it is something of a moot point whether or not I think the election of a Mormon President represents a vote of “no confidence” in Christian civilisation or, if you prefer, a vote that endorses the practical irrelevance of Christianity in this country, since no such President will be elected in the foreseeable future, but it seems to me to be an objection worth raising.  I will continue.

Obviously, this kind of symbolic plebiscite is an inexact and often error-riddled process in which evangelicals could confidently rally behind a man like Mr. Bush, who could talk a good game about his faith and had a life story familiar to many who have had dramatic conversion experiences, even though the man was culturally, politically and socially alien to their world and worldview.  Even though he had virtually no intention of doing anything for the causes to which they were devoted, these voters have loyally stuck by the man in no small part because he is “one of them,” which has helped Mr. Bush get away with all sorts of un-Christian mischief.  (Most of this mischief overseas, I would note, is something Gov. Romney endorses and wants to see more of, so this is hardly helping his claims to be a defender of moral “values.”)  So voting on the basis of such questions of identity is often not the smartest kind of voting with respect to getting the policies that this or that group of voters claims to want, but then it is precisely because of the secondary importance of policy in making these decisions that we wind up with identitarian voting in the first place.  Thus, Christian voters can be satisfied with extremely superficial similarities and overlook the deeper divergences of belief and even “values” that lie beneath the surface; they can empower bad representatives and base their selection on a candidate’s claims to share their faith and values.  However, this appears to be an inevitable characteristic of our mass democracy so long as a significant number of Americans remains fairly religious. 

It is worth noting that this superficiality problem is also precisely the problem with Romney and his appeal to “shared values.”  In the same breath he tells us, “My faith teaches me my values, but let’s not get hung up on any of the details of what that faith is, because my particular religion is actually irrelevant to the question.”  Frankly, if Romney were truly confident that his religion was really fundamentally in agreement with Christianity on the essentials of these “values,” he would not have to engage in this double game.  Like many a “values” dodge, be it the “Judeo-Christian” or “family” variety, the appeal to “shared values” presupposes that, for instance, people coming from a significantly different religious cultures and backgrounds will actually be able to acquire the same “values” that are nonetheless tied into and linked to a specifically religious source.  This makes them eminently flexible and changeable while also retaining the sheen of immutable truth–but this is also obviously nonsense.  It is first of all this assumption that differences of religious culture are irrelevant to the shaping of political and cultural “values” that seems quite questionable.  If your religious culture and my religious culture appear to wind up producing the same generic “values,” the odds are that we haven’t come to agreement about these “values” because our religions are terribly similar (except in Romney’s lowest common denominator way) but because we have come to these “values” by another route and have convinced ourselves that our respective religions endorse these probably thoroughly secular “values.” 

This usually involves a lot of backtracing of basically secular political ideas back to some putative or real religious source, which can somehow be done by people of any number of religious backgrounds, or it involves the attempt to pare back doctrine and worship to get to the bare bones of “values,” usually meaning morality.  Yet you would be hard-pressed to find conservative-minded moral theologians who actually think that you can somehow abstract moral reasoning from within a religious tradition to get the “value” nuggets that you can then present to people from outside that tradition as generic and obviously desirable “values” on which everyone can agree.  Even the claim that there is a natural law accessible to the reasoning of every person comes from within a religious tradition and hinges on any number of potentially contestable assumptions about the nature of reason and its relationship to revelation that remain unspoken or out of view.  This is not a scandal for people who recognise the tradition-boundedness of all things, particularly all religious things, but it makes it difficult to believe that people from what are basically radically distinct religious traditions even use the same language and references when they discuss moral or other questions.  In many cases, they do not.  That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try to discuss them and even seek those areas where they may be in agreement, but it does mean that you cannot take for granted that people of various religious traditions all mean the same things when they speak in terms of generic “values.” 

The “people of faith”/”person of faith” dodge signals to someone like me that the “values” under discussion are so nebulous as to be almost indiscernible.  Take “marriage,” for instance.  All kinds of people are “for” it in the abstract, which is fine, but we would be kidding ourselves if we claimed that different religions all value and understand marriage in the same way–that would require us to believe as well that they all understood the roles of men and women, among other things, in essentially the same way.  It may be that some religions do have appreciably similar understandings of certain things, but that is a claim that has to be demonstrated.  The appeal to “shared values” takes it as a given that no demonstration is necessary.  In this view, what you mean by morality in your tradition is automatically what I mean by it in mine, but this isn’t true and, I would have to insist, can’t be true if either the teachings of your religion or mine have any significance and importance in the real world.  Whatever we think of the other fellow’s religion, we would have to acknowledge that the teachings of our religion are meaningful and important for how we conduct ourselves–otherwise, what are we doing in this religion? 

Presumably it is precisely the conservatives in each religion who are most confident that their doctrines and forms of worship are not mere frippery or there for the sake of elaborate decoration, but rather they assume that these things are at the heart of their religion and form the basis of their understanding of everything else pertaining to the religion.  If, in the Orthodox context, for example, Orthodox doctrine and mystical theology pervade the liturgy, and liturgical action forms a key component of ethical action and if sacramental life and prayer are inextricable from the life of the virtues, it is impossible to conceive of talking about moral “values” as some sort of category that is anything but integrally linked to the teachings of the Church.  Put bluntly, when I speak of justice as an Orthodox Christian, I am also indirectly confessing the Holy Trinity as the model of perfect interrelationship of persons.  Someone’s doctrine of God is pertinent to how he, as a religious person, engages in moral reasoning and it is relevant to his understanding of reason itself, as Pope Benedict’s inclusion of Manuel II’s provocative quote in his Regensburg address suggested.  If you do not have the same doctrine of God, let’s say, or do not have the same understanding of the Word Incarnate and His relationship to the Godhead, that will affect what you have to say about other matters.  Conservatives have tended to shun theological reflection, which I regard as one of the great failures of modern conservatism, since this effectively cuts conservatives off from the living water that nurtures their entire intellectual and cultural history or its forces them to turn back to this source of cultural renewal only sparingly in the most sporadic and arbitrary ways.  Yet it seems to me that it is only through a thorough reacquaintance with that theological inheritance that conservatives can once again make coherent arguments about the nature of society, human nature and political life that are not utterly dependent on false liberal assumptions.  As a matter of cultural renewal, it also seems unlikely that any enduring Christian culture can be built up in the modern wasteland without drawing on the deep wells of patristic wisdom that we have at our disposal.  To the extent that Christian conservatives are willing to chase after a superficially appealing non-Christian candidate out of nothing more than a mix of desperation and media hype, when that candidate is cut off from those sources and the tradition they represent, they commit themselves and this country to a path that is ultimately fruitless if the building up of a Christian culture is actually what Christian conservatives desire.   

Going back again to Romney, he says that he is not a spokesman for his church, but as a public figure and someone trying to put on the mantle of religious conservative leader, that is exactly what he is trying to be, because he wants to get the credit for being a faithful member of his church without accepting any of the potential political ramifications of that membership.  He wants to say that his faith and values are integrally linked, but not so integrally linked that anyone needs to consider what his faith is.  Having wheeled his faith into view, he tells us we cannot look at it and that he is not speaking on behalf of his religion, when the core of his credibility, such as it is, as a man of good “values” is his religious faith.  He just wants to avoid the inevitable complications that bringing his religion into public discourse has, while reaping the benefits of being a “person of faith.”  Since a great many Christians take it for granted that Mormons are not Christians, how he links his faith and “values” becomes a pressing question that goes to heart of the entire matter.        

All of this ought to be troubling to Christian conservatives, especially when they take it for granted (or at least I think they do) that the origins and underpinnings of their civilisation and the roots of American order are closely bound up with our Christian inheritance and are inexplicable without constantly referring back to that inheritance.  This sometimes leads to pious absurdities where modern Christians bend over backwards to show that the fairly conventional religiosity of many of the Founding generation “proves” the Christian foundations of our polity, that is, the confederation of the United States, when this is a quite distinct and very different sort of claim from the claim of being a Christian people in culture, history and habits.  Related to this assumption, then, would be an unwillingness to speak of “Western civilization’s historical Christian identity” and a desire to speak of Christian civilisation instead. 

Prof. Fox is right to point to Mark Davis’ telling remark that “a candidate’s faith is of no consequence…unless it harbors the possibility of guiding his or her actions in a way I would disapprove of.”  Even though I read things like this all the time in articles on this topic, I confess that I cannot quite understand such a statement.  What can it mean to say that a candidate’s faith is “of no consequence”?  At some level, if a candidate’s faith compels him to worship a radically different deity, surely that is consequential.  How you understand and relate to God has a great deal to do with how you treat and relate to your fellow man; a distorted image of God will lead to flaws in your relationships with others.  Mr. Davis’ statement is so all-encompassing that one might reasonably think that his disapproval might extend to actions including the worship of a radically different deity, but we can tell from the context of his article that he has absolutely no interest in such things.  This statement is a roundabout way of saying, “I wouldn’t trust a potential jihadi, but a Mormon is pretty harmless.”  Nonetheless, it is a remarkable statement for the extremely low opinion of faith it expresses.  In this, I assume that Mr. Davis is highly unrepresentative of conservative voters. 

Given the enthusiasm of plenty of movement activists for Romney, we can already see that some of these folks prefer chasing after the superficially satisfying “values” candidate rather than looking for someone representative of the broad Christian tradition.  Whether or not many Christian conservative voters will be willing to make that same leap will tell us a great deal about just what it is these voters are interested in building.

Our political imagination of evil is impoverished, and nowhere is it more impoverished than in Iraq. Even today, when the blood of innocents flows so richly and regularly, we do not seem to grasp its origins, or its power. That is, we do not seem to grasp the centrality, and the perdurability, of culture. ~Marty Peretz

What is it about being an interventionist, whose preferred methods often include aggression, the killing of the innocent and generally obnoxious self-righteousness, that makes interventionists feel entitled to hold forth on the moral understanding of anything?  Certainly someone‘s political imagination of evil is impoverished if he still cannot see the injustice of this war, but it isn’t “our” imagination that fails.  What do people who cheered on the devastation of Lebanon (this was the one where Marty showed that he could use $.50 words and not know what they meant) have to say about the blood of innocents that is anything but extremely two-faced and dishonest?   

What is it about being an Iraq war supporter that allows the supporter to make sweeping generalisations about what “people” have recently discovered to be true or about what “we” have failed to understand, when it is invariably the supporters of the war who have only recently discovered the brutishness of fallen human nature or been late in recognising the centrality and “perdurability” of culture?  Why do they get away with foisting off their late discoveries on vague, general groups of people?  Why do they get to attribute their failures of imagination and understanding to an indeterminate “us”?

France is in trouble. It’s a choice between more taxes and less social benefits [bold mine-DL].  Simple. No, complicated. I don’t know enough about the specific circumstances of la belle France. ~Marty Peretz

Here are three questions a critic of Mearsheimer and Walt might ask. First, is there such a thing as the national self-interest of the United States? Second, is there such a thing as the national self-interest of Israel? Third, are these interests distinct, so that there may be points at which they diverge? If the answers to all these questions are yes, then a fourth question arises. Is it permissible to speak of such a divergence in public discussions? If not, why not? But, if so, what have Mearsheimer and Walt done to violate the canons of decency approved by Herf? What is their offense beyond asking that discussions be more frequent, candid, and permissible without incurring the charge that by recommending such discussions at all, the recommender proves his anti-Semitism?

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The cowardice of Brandeis University in threatening to cancel an invitation to a former president of the United States unless he would consent to a “counterpoint” response, is, as Wolfe properly says, entirely in keeping with the opinion-discipline enforced at other universities by advocates of creationism, feminism, race studies, and so on. We expect no better of institutions, perhaps; but individual scholars ought to hold themselves to a less pliable standard. In this respect, the accusation that is offered “more in sorrow” about a supposed former friend is far uglier than a head-on accusation. The purpose of the slander is to exact conformity without being seen to want to silence opposing views. The procedure is gutless, and its effects are stupefying. ~David Bromwich

Forget innovation and transformation.  Here it is: “My kids and grandkids this! My kids and grandkids that!  Did I mention that I have a lot of kids and grandkids?”  He manages to refer to his “kids and grandkids” five times in the space of one answer.  I smell a focus-group-tested phrase.

Romney tackles the religion issue head-on by becoming extremely vague and mushy:

Well, I think religion is a separate sphere in terms of a particular brand of faith, but I think the principles of all faiths have [bold mine-DL], as their foundation, the idea that there is a supreme being, that this supreme being is a heavenly father, and that all the people in our country and in all countries are sons and daughters of the same supreme being.

Insh’allah.  Forget ecumenical jihad–Romney offers a more conventional ecumenical niceness.  Notice that little bit of rhetorical jujitsu he has pulled off here?  “[R]eligion is a separate sphere in terms of a particular brand of faith,” he said, which means that he seems to be claiming quite literally that his “brand” of faith has nothing to do with his politics.  He could just as easily be a Sikh and have the same “principles.”  Which is a nice way of saying that his particular religion has nothing unique or meaningful to tell him that cannot be found in the lowest common denominator of all religion, which seems to be not much more than the Golden Rule.  This is how he is going to avoid talking about Mormonism–he will declare it a “particular brand” that has nothing to do with the political sphere, which effectively says that his Mormonism ought to be off limits.  Thus will he attempt to walk the non-existent tight rope between his old moderate self in which no one imposes his beliefs on others and a religious conservatism where the conservatives rather assume that there will be a fair amount of imposing going on.  Apparently the only thing that informs his politics is a vague theism and a sense of the unity of mankind.  It seems to me that this would put off even more evangelicals than his Mormonism alone ever could.

As a candidate, he can appear slightly overproduced, a little too smooth for the hurly-burly of the hustings. Lately, Romney has been courting the evangelical vote, key to winning Republican primaries. He knows that some evangelicals regard his religion, Mormonism, as heresy (according to the National Journal, more than a quarter of self-identified evangelicals tell pollsters that they won’t vote for a Mormon). So last week, at a lackluster rally in the Bible belt of South Carolina where maybe 300 people half-filled an auditorium, Romney was trying, a bit unctuously, to show his down-home piety. As the crowd trickled out, Romney, his voice still at full decibel from his stump speech, grabbed the hand of state Rep. Bob Leach, a Baptist. “This man,” proclaimed Romney, “his prayers bring down the power of the Lord!” ~Jonathan Darman and Evan Thomas, Newsweek

Bob Leach must offer up some pretty impressive prayers.  So here’s a good example of what’s wrong with Romney.  He doesn’t just pander.  He panders really badly.  This is the religious version of “some of my best friends are…”  The thing is that you don’t get to play the diversity card when some old guy heckles you in Florida for being a “pretender” and then turn around and talk about how your political ally calls down the power of the Lord.  You don’t get to gin up the crowd with that old-time religion and in the same breath say, “We are blessed to have many persuasions and faiths in our great land!”  Something’s got to give.

Surge supporters have been making a lot of noise about the unconfirmed report that Sadr has gone to Iran.  Ralph Peters, that doyen of the “kill them all” school, was foremost among the people bragging that Sadr had fled.  Peters:

What’s changed? Plenty. Mookie’s probably sensed that President Bush is cornered politically and, with little left to lose, isn’t going to settle for more half-measures.  

Yes, “Mookie” is probably closely attuned to Mr. Bush’s poll numbers.  What’s this about no more half-measures?  Yet that is exactly what Mr. Bush did settle for.  The surge is the king of half-measures.  If there were an Olympic half-measure contest, Mr. Bush would get the gold for the surge without a doubt.  It does tell us something about Mr. Bush that, even now, with his reputation destroyed at home, his political capital repossessed by the bank called the American public and his dometic agenda in tatters, he will only commit just as few soldiers as he thinks he can get away with sending.  If the Powell approach used to call for overwhelming force, Mr. Bush has, for whatever reason, adopted a minimalist approach to warfighting and continues to hold to this minimalist approach in spite of the glaring problems with that approach.  When the original invasion probably required 400-500,000 men, he sent a third as many; when any realistic hope of stabilising Baghdad probably required a major new commitment, Mr. Bush sent 20,000 plus support troops.  It used to be that he could pin this sort of folly on Rumsfeld, but no longer.  What compels Mr. Bush’s minimalism?  Probably the knowledge that the kind of massive commitment to Iraq that would actually be required to make some noticeable difference would destroy whatever political standing he still has.  If a majority is so strongly against sending just 20,000 more soldiers into combat, imagine how deafening the cries of resistance would be if Mr. Bush tried anything more than a half-measure!

Of course, Peters writes on the assumption that the report is true and that he is not, as conflicting reports claim, actually residing in Najaf, where he dwelt during his last big anti-U.S. stand.  This story of Sadr’s flight, if true, is presumably as reassuring to us today as it was when members of the Viet Cong retreated into Laos to regroup, rearm and prepare for their next operation.  Depending on how you look at this, this is either a) proof that we’ve got “the enemy” on the run; b) proof that Sadr is smarter than we give him credit for and has decided to avoid risking himself as a target and has chosen to have his militia melt into the background for the duration; c) an example that the surge is succeeding in temporarily displacing one of the major political players in Iraq, thus contributing to greater instability and aiding Sunni attacks against Shi’ite targets. 

Once again war supporters are personalising the conflict to an absurd degree.  Remember how the insurgency would start dropping off if we just got Hussein and his sons?  Remember how we just had to get rid of Zarqawi, and the insurgency would go into decline?  This is more of the same–a weird Anglo-American trait of recent years to make every foreign policy problem into a stand-off with some mini-Hitler, which has the advantage of making the people taking on mini-Hitler into microscopic Churchills.  Once we defeat the mini-Hitler, as if he were the final challenger on a level of a video game, we will have triumphed!   

Once again war supporters are taking the most meager signs of progress as evidence that something fundamental has changed, when we are probably witnessing nothing more than the annual Feburary lull in violence.  How many times have we heard from these sorts of people that a relative low in U.S. fatalities was proof of the weakening of the insurgency?  How about the insurgency being in its “last throes”?  Every year violence has declined in February, with the exception of large, spectacular bombings such as the attack on the Golden Mosque, and every year it picks up again starting in the spring.  As I recall, there is a relative lull in August, when it is very hot in Iraq and generally unpleasant for anyone to do anything.  Both before and after August killing has ramped up to relatively higher levels.  The reason why nobody outside of an ever-shrinking circle of true believers listens to what war supporters have to say anymore is that each time there is the slightest progress they overhype it and declare that we have reached a fabled “turning point” or have “turned the corner,” which is frequently followed by things getting worse a month or two later.  Worse than crying wolf, which might at least accidentally alert someone to a threat, these people keep crying “victory is just down the road”!  Then, a little ways down the road, an IED blows up next to the convoy.  They are then forced to say, “See, they hate freedom!  We’re really starting to get to them!”  

If we are supposed to measure surge success by the decrease in daily slaughter, as some would like to do, it surely must count against the surge when spectacular bombings continue to hit Shi’ite neighbourhoods with as much savagery and ease as ever.  This is what will happen when you use your power to compel the stronger party in a foreign war to back down or pull back–their relatively weaker enemies exploit the opportunity to strike as hard as they can while the stronger force is constrained by our intervention.  In 1995, the script was: bomb the Serbs and thus successfully facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Krajina.  A noble achievement indeed.  Today, the surge briefly empowers the losing side in the war until the initiative returns to Sadr’s forces, as it inevitably will, when the revenge will be twice as severe because it will have been denied effective expression for so many months.  This is one reason why Americans have no business in middle of an Iraqi v. Iraqi war: our very successes, such as they are, prepare the ground for the perpetuation and escalation of the civil war, rather than bring about its end.

I anticipate that we will soon be offered a reprise of 2004 talking points, since we are currently engaged in little more than a reprise of 2004 tactics: the savage bombings of Shi’ite neighbourhoods show just how “desperate” the insurgents are and reveals just how “deeply worried” they are about our chances of success.  Maliki does not disappoint.  From the Times: 

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the bombings as a desperate act by ”terrorists” and ”criminals” who sense they are being squeezed.

Presumably, as the body count from their bombings rises, the insurgents become progressively more anxious about their impending defeat.