It was moving and beautifully filmed, and the subplot about the leftist revolutionaries who are so dedicated to ideology that they forget the humanity that made them leftists in the first place could probably fit into a reactionary film. ~Amanda Marcotte

I hesitate to guess what Ms. Marcotte thinks would qualify as a “reactionary film,” since hers is apparently such a hard-core leftism that she would probably find fault in the politics of Doctor Zhivago.  Speaking as an actual reactionary, I can assure Ms. Marcotte that no reactionary filmmaker would ever make the mistake of hinting that people became leftists out of a concern for other human beings.  They might become leftists out of a devotion to Humanity, perhaps, but for so many dedicated leftist revolutionaries of the past and present the old Sartre line (“l’enfer, c’est les autres“) is perfectly appropriate and true.  Of course, it probably was P.D. James’ original purpose to depict this indifference to the fate of actual people as a trait unique to people on the left.  However, it is actually a malady that afflicts all ideologues who make their cause into an idol to which they are willing to sacrifice any number of people (being an ideologue of sorts herself, Ms. Marcotte might be able to recognise the symptoms).

Not one to be chastened or humbled by the recent controversy surrounding her past blogging in connection with her new position at the Edwards campaign, Ms. Marcotte uses this review of Children of Men to unload again on Christians and our “super-patriarchal” religion:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

So many errors, and so little time in the day to refute them.  Can Ms. Marcotte manage to be more wrong and more offensive at the same time?  I’m not sure that she can, but I expect that she will keep trying to outdo herself in the future.  Where to start…let’s start with the stunning idea that the Church’s teaching of the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ reduces the Theotokos Mary to “nothing but a vessel.”  Of course, in the scene of the Annunciation the Theotokos is far more than “a vessel”–it is her voluntary acceptance of her role that makes salvation possible, and it is because of her that God was able to become man for the sake of the whole world.  Far from being “nothing but a vessel,” she becomes second only to Christ Himself with respect to importance in the economy of salvation.  Christian iconography makes her central to the understanding of the Faith, while St. Joseph, respected and venerated as he was and still is, serves mainly in a supporting role.  As far as elevating and respecting women go, it seems to me that there could hardly be a better teaching than that of the Virgin Birth.  The theological importance of the birth being from a virgin is at least twofold: it fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah and removes all doubt about the divinity and sinlessness of Christ. 

It has essentially nothing to do with God’s power, except insofar as it tells us that God, while being omnipotent, refused to compromise the freedom of the Theotokos and left the choice to accept this awesome responsibility up to her.  I suppose there could be a religious teaching that empowers and honours a woman’s choice more than this, but it isn’t leaping to mind.  If this is what super-patriarchy looks like (where a woman’s free will is respected and she is honoured above all others), it might just make feminism entirely irrelevant. 

Update: Ben Smith, blogging at The Politico, has this latest reaction to Marcotte’s post:

Brian O’Dwyer, a New York lawyer and Irish-American leader, who attacked Edwards the first time round, just came out with a statement:

“The blogger’s continuing hostility to Catholics and other Christians, especially in the centrality of the Virgin birth, is both morally wrong and, for Senator Edwards, politically stupid. Senator Edwards was horribly flawed in refusing to see the importance of how offensive the blogger’s earlier comments were to people of faith. This latest so-called review, published after Edwards refused to fire her for earlier anti-Catholic writings, should now wake him up and lead him to finally do the right thing as his campaign tries to move forward. Bigotry of any kind should have no role in the Democratic Party, or in any presidential campaign.”

O’Dwyer, also, is hard to cast as a GOP hitman. He’s the chairman of the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, the Democratic Party’s official white-ethnic grouping; close to some labor union leaders; and a leading member of a prominent New York democratic [sic] family.

Mr. O’Dwyer makes an important point.  Mocking, insulting or in any other way disrespecting the Virgin Birth of Christ–and thereby insulting and mocking both the Lord and the Theotokos–doesn’t simply offend Catholics with strong Marian devotions, but demonstrates a contempt for the Christian Faith and the core of that Faith in the Incarnation.  It is, of course, especially appalling to Christians, particularly Catholic and Orthodox Christians, who venerate and honour the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, but it is a symbolic attack on all Christians and all forms of Christianity.  What is remarkable about this is just how unsurprising all of it is to me.  Of course left-wing feminists have appallingly bigoted, anti-Christian views.  Of course they couple their pathetic commitment to freedom of religion and tolerance to the most venomous hatred for actual religious people and religious faith itself. 

The more interesting question that remains unanswered is this: why do so many ethnic Catholics, such as Mr. O’Dwyer, continue to belong to and work for a party whose activists and leaders have such a low opinion of their religion?  They could potentially be the future building blocks of a pro-life, pro-family, pro-labour populist party that could defend Christian social teaching, repudiate cultural radicalism and combat the culture of death, whether it is pushed by abortionists at home or militarists abroad.  It is not written anywhere that they must continue to support a party that favours and enables the Marcottes of the world.

What rankles is that it is leveled as a charge. When given voice by the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer [bold mine-DL], it suggests that the loyalties of millions of American Jews are evenly split and that, in extremis, the Israeli loyalty could win out over the American one, posing a permanent risk of betrayal or treason. ~Bret Stephens

This isn’t correct at all.  Mearsheimer and Walt didn’t make their claims about “millions of American Jews,” nor did they focus only on American Jewish supporters of Israel (since they and everyone else who can read knows that there are a great many more non-Jewish supporters of Israel in this country).  They never made the sloppy and easily disproven equation of the American Jewish community with those who hold the fairly hard-line, often militaristic attitudes that inform much of American Israel and Near East policy.  In fact, the question of “dual loyalty” does not form a part of the Mearsheimer-Walt article.  On this point, they have this to say:

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

The phrase “dual loyalty,” of course, appears nowhere in the article.  To put it bluntly, to say that claims about “dual loyalty” form a part of the article is to tell a lie (or it is to admit that you have never read the article).  To say that Mearsheimer and Walt give the “charge” of dual loyalty “voice” is to tell a lie.  Mr. Stephens links them to this argument about “dual loyalty” as a way of trying to smear them yet again.  Virtually every critic of the article has circulated the falsehood, whether wittingly or no, that Mearsheimer and Walt were making arguments about “the Jews” or “the Jewish lobby” or that they said, “A small group of Jews controls the government.”  They did not say these things, but it has served the turn of those, like Mr. Stephens, who wish to stymy and suppress debate to claim that they did say them.  Everyone would recognise these claims just mentioned as both false and of a piece with oddball conspiracy theories, which is why these claims are falsely and (I suspect) maliciously attributed to Mearsheimer and Walt.  Now comes this new lie about their “giving voice” to the charge of dual loyalty with the obvious implication that they are spurring on their fellow Americans to regard Jewish Americans as being inherently disloyal to this country.  They have not made this claim and they do no such thing, and it is an appalling falsehood to suggest otherwise. 

What really rankles pro-Israel people about the Mearsheimer-Walt article itself is the following claim:

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally.

Talk about an inconvenient truth.  It is Israel’s status as a “reliable ally” that many critics of the alliance doubt, and it is this status that pro-Israel activists work overtime to defend.  That’s why we don’t talk about what happened to the Liberty in 1967, and that’s why we try to forget the insult of the Pollard case even when Netanyahu pleads for the man’s release over a decade later, and that’s why we often politely ignore it when Israel sells sensitive military technologies to China, and that’s why some of us treat the indictments of AIPAC officials who took confidential information from Larry Franklin as a witch hunt rather than the proper defense of national security.  It isn’t that Washington would cut off support for Israel if more people knew about the unprovoked attack on the Liberty, for example, but the problem is that it would probably damage the public’s view of Israel, and support or at least acquiescence from the American public is crucial if pro-Israel activists are to succeed in influencing policy.  Therefore we must continually pretend that Israel and America are always on the same side working towards complementary goals, even though no two nations anywhere on earth will always be pursuing complementary goals.  To point out all the times when Israel has not been a loyal ally or, to put it more simply, when Israel has pursued its interests regardless of how they impact the United States would be to shatter this myth and open up our level of support to Israel for revision and possible reduction (just as we would rationally do with any other state, ally or no). 

To the extent that anyone might make the charge of something like “dual loyalty” today, the charge would be that anyone who has a strong affinity or attachment to another nation (for whatever reason) is liable to imagine that the interests of the two countries are usually compatible when they are not and frequently overlap when they do not.  Such a person is liable to advocate policies that he believes, probably sincerely, are in the interests of both countries, but which are, in reality, in the interests mainly of the foreign country.  His emotional attachment to this other country, whether based in religion, ethnicity, or what have you, blinds him to the unpleasant reality that his native country and the country to which he feels such strong attachment often have conflicting or mutually exclusive interests.  In other words, to pursue what is actually in the best interest of his native country he must agree to policies that would sacrifice at least some of the interests of the other country, which would be very painful and something he would continue to deny in the face of the evidence, so he feels obliged to make sure that as many people as possible continue to see the interests of the two countries as being strongly complementary and harmonious.  He will do this even if this means advocating for his native country policies that may actually bring his native country harm.  He does this not out of malice towards his native country, but out of the confusion of the interests of the two that comes from his unduly strong attachment to the other country.  Such a person’s loyalties are not “evenly split,” because he does not perceive a split at all.  He believes–erroneously, but in all probability quite seriously–that it is possible to be 100% faithful to American interests and 100% faithful to the interests of the other country.  This becomes even more obvious to him if the two countries are allies.  (Incidentally, I have never quite understood why pro-Israel activists resent the charge of devotion to Israel, since they insist that Israel is such an important ally.  It therefore ought to be considered–at least by them–a positive thing that they are strongly devoted to the security and interests of a U.S. ally, but for whatever reason they always take this as an insult.) 

The problem with strong attachments to other nations–and this goes for Anglophiles c. 1914 or 1940–is that it can convince Americans that the best interests of the United States are served by serving the best interests of another country on the false, emotionally-clouded assumptions that those interests are more or less identical and their strong attachment is simply “subsidiary” rather than taking an unacceptable dominating role in their decisionmaking.  That is why it would be best to avoid such strong attachments if possible, and the next best thing would be to temper them when they do arise.

What Mearsheimer and Walt’s article argued was that reflexive support for Israel of the kind we have seen over the past generation is not in the national interest.  That should be a more or less empirical claim.  Can pro-Israel activists actually demonstrate the real value of the close connection to Israel they insist that we have?  Can they explain how our reflexive support for Israel’s aimless bombardment of Lebanon last year advanced any American interests in the region?  Must they resort to a lot of hand-waving sentimentalism about our “fellow democracy” and accusations of anti-Semitism against critics, or does Israel actually offer enough to the United States to make the costs of the alliance worth our while?  This is a calculation of costs and benefits, and it is one that we make with far less hysteria when it comes to other allied states.  That they seem unable to make a positive case, but are frequently just tearing down and smearing the critics of current policy, speaks volumes about the weakness of their claims.

Finally there is Judis’s point about the supposed attempt to “suppress debate.” How does joining a debate become an effort to suppress it? I am not aware that Mearsheimer and Walt have been sent from the field to cower behind the bleachers. Indeed, nothing so perfectly gives the lie to their claims about the vast power of the Israel lobby as the fact that they have now been contracted–by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, no less–to turn their article into a book.

Still, were it up to me Judt, Mearsheimer, Carter et al would be run out of polite society. What’s wrong with that? A decade ago, Judis himself tried to do the same to Charles Murray for the “ominous racial theory” suggested by The Bell Curve. The plain fact is that some ideas simply foul our public discourse. Some “controversies” open doors to scoundrels. Some small truths serve as vehicles for big lies. It is not a resort to censorship to ask of the people who hold the keys to magazines like The New Republic or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal to exercise judgment and discretion. Indeed, it is the essence of our responsibility. ~Bret Stephens

That’s right, Bret.  Imagine how “foul” our public discourse might become if we didn’t have appointed guardians such as yourself (erroneously) declaring the opponents of your preferred policies vile bigots!  Thank goodness we have people like Bret Stephens to keep our public discourse free of anything low and base.   

As I read Stephens here, I take it that he very much wants to run these individuals out of “polite society,” and so we can take it for granted that his heavy-handed attempt to impute anti-Semitism to these individuals (or claiming that their work has an “anti-Semitic effect”) in his editorial of some months ago was just such an attempt to run them out of polite society.  It is therefore not so far-fetched that everyone else who more directly accused them of anti-Semitism (such as, say, Eliot Cohen) was also trying to “run” them “out of polite society.”  By “run out of polite society,” I would have to assume that this doesn’t just involve being ostracised from nice parties in Manhattan or snubbed by the guardians of morally superior opinions at social gatherings, but that it probably has more significance than that.  I would guess that it means what Stephens’ opponents take it to mean: to be “run out of polite society” would mean virtual professional and personal exile or the severe curtailment of future career opportunities at any institution that prides itself on having the “right” views on these and other politically charged questions (which is to say almost any influential or widely well-regarded institution in Washington and New York).  In other words, Stephens admits a desire to suppress his opponents, and he has acted in his official capacity as a member of the editorial board of a major newspaper to aid in the suppression of that debate by tarring his opponents’ views with either hateful intent or hateful consequences.  He uses as his main counterargument against the attempted suppression of debate evidence that some of his targets have not yet  had their careers visibly and largely ruined by the kind of false allegations that he and his colleagues routinely make against their political enemies.        

I would also have to conclude that he thinks it was quite appropriate to try to run Charles Murray out on a rail as a racist for The Bell Curve.  Presumably he thinks the avalanche of angry dismissals and denunciations that The Bell Curve received is another example of people who are just “joining” the debate! 

Having failed to completely demonise and marginalise two people [Mearsheimer and Walt] with the anti-Semite label in one instance–in other words, having failed to suppress and intimidate all contrary voices on Near East policy–it is obvious to Stephens that there is no attempt at suppression and intimidation going on.  But then they never claimed that it was absolutely impossible for critics of Israel or American Israel policy to get published.  Obviously, being such a critic can make it much more difficult to get published and be heard, and it is more difficult because of the significant influence of pro-Israel interests in politics and the media.  You need only to remember the hurricane of negative responses that their article generated to recognise a widespread effort to condemn Mearsheimer and Walt and to intimidate anyone else from taking up the same line of argument.  As far as the latter has been concerned, the demonisation campaign has been unusually successful: essentially no one has taken up for Mearsheimer and Walt on the substance of their claims, but at best in the name of “academic freedom.”  Academic freedom is certainly a good reason to come to their defense, but it is hardly the same thing as risking one’s own neck to make the same kinds of arguments they made.  

It is no surprise that others would hesitate to join the debate, since Mearsheimer and Walt’s enemies achieve effective suppression of the debate mainly by discouraging anyone else from joining.  That is how suppression usually works in the “open society”: make it clear to all that you will have serious difficulties if you adopt certain opinions, and the ready conformism and self-interest of members of the “open society” will take care of most of the suppression of undesirable ideas far more efficiently than pillorying and humiliating dissenters.  Of course, it is necessary to beat down those dissenters with as much damning rhetoric and as many politically damaging labels as the guardians can muster.  The debate becomes as lopsided and absurd as it is today because it is difficult to find many people interested in taking up one of the sides, because there is no incentive in taking up that side and a large number of disincentives in doing so.  The overwhelmingly hostile reaction of the majority of political magazines and newspaper editorials to their article, to cite just the most obvious examples, testifies to the considerable power of the lobby Mearsheimer and Walt described to shape and control public debate about American-Israeli ties and the role of pro-Israel interests in shaping U.S. Near East policy.  

Middle Eastern Studies programs in academia make up one oasis relatively free from the effects of this intimidation, but this is mainly because these programs have filled up with people who are almost as reflexively hostile to Israel as pro-Israel advocates are pro-Israel and represent something of a lost cause to the lobby.  This obvious tilt in these programs is nonetheless why there have been moves from some prominent figures on the right to try to bring political pressure on these programs.   

No, there’s no suppression of debate when your contribution to the debate is, “The learned gentleman’s contribution to this debate is the product of insane hatred and the vilest bigotry, and I am relieved of having to address his substantive claims in any way because of this.”  If more people would “join” the debate in this way, the debate would be over very quickly indeed.

This Stephens-Judis debate should be instructive for many on the right about some of the people who claim to represent their views.  Stephens represents the acceptable right, the sort of spokesman for a supposedly conservative newspaper that the respectable center-left can do business with.  The New Republic represents a center-left publication that “conservatives” of the WSJ type can live with.  In the quote above we have a good example of one of the foundations of this convivial relationship: Stephens implies that he has no problem if liberals want to falsely smear people as racists (the preferred rhetorical club of the left), so long as they remember that they should allow “conservatives” such as Stephens to falsely smear people as anti-Semites (or as those whose works have an “anti-Semitic effect”–this is the same kind of attack that leftists used against The Passion, as you might recall).  Stephens is saying that the “responsible” guardians of the political “center” need to keep up their solidarity against the “foul” opinions of those on left and right and make sure that they never gain any traction.

Last year, he [24 creator Joel Surnow] contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.” ~The New Yorker

That’s great, except that communism wasn’t “solved” by war, at least not in any conventional sense of communism being defeated in a shooting war.  To a very large degree, communism collapsed because of its own political and economic failures.  It was aided in its collapse by meaningful external pressure and the reality of potentially very strong military resistance to any future foreign adventures, but its end had primarily domestic causes.  Slavery in the world continued in Brazil until 1888, when it was outlawed without recourse to war, and serfdom in Russia was outlawed by a single command from the Tsar.  (Slavery still continues to exist in some parts of Africa and Asia, so speaking generally slavery has been severely reduced worldwide but not ended.)  In other words, even when war “solves” something, it usually wasn’t necessary, involves tremendous costs and may contribute to greater evils that come out of the wreckage of societies ruined by the war.  Had it not been for foolish and reckless governments that believed their international disputes could be “solved” through war in 1914, fascism, Nazism and communism could never have come to power in Europe.  Put me down as a skeptic about war being able to solve more problems than it causes. 

On the plus side, Surnow is apparently against the Iraq war and a self-styled “isolationist,” but that does make you wonder what he thinks of Santorum’s batty fears about Iranian world domination.  Unfortunately, in the same breath, his weird global hegemonic paternalism kicks in and he says fairly crazy and demeaning things like this:

In his view, America “is sort of the parent of the world, so we have to be stern but fair to people who are rebellious to us. We don’t spoil them. That’s not to say you abuse them, either. But you have to know who the adult in the room is.”

Perhaps Mr. Surnow sees the sabre-rattling directed at Iran as an international version of the father yelling at his teenage son, “Don’t make me come in there!  I said turn that music [or uranium enrichment] down!”  This is as wrong-headed as when he referred fondly to President Reagan as the “father” that the country needed.  President Reagan was an improvement in leadership over his predecessor and someone who made some very good policy decisions (along with quite a few pretty bad ones), but he was not a national father. 

America is neither father nor mother to the world.  It is ridiculous that this even needs to be said.  States that oppose or even mildly criticise the conduct of our government are not rebellious teenagers thwarting our paternal rights or cheeky children talking back to us.  They are sovereign and co-equal nation-states that have had quite enough of this attitude that the world is somehow ours to rule.     

Historically speaking, America is a sort of overambitious twenty-five year old who wants, at least under the present management, to tell his elders what’s what and force all the old folks to start adapting to his way of doing things.  The twenty-five year old may even have a lot of good ideas (though he hasn’t had many recently), but he thinks that the way to fix the old folks’ problems is to bust down their doors, smack them around a little, set fire to their furniture and declare, “You’re free!  Now clean up this mess quickly, or I’ll have to write you off as hopelessly backward.”

Hegemony and imperialism always encourage these attitudes in the people who have political and economic supremacy.    They do not simply encourage a paternalistic condescension towards other peoples, which might exist anyway, but they introduce all the worst possessive instincts that parents have towards their children into the realm of international relations where these attitudes have no place at all.  It is one thing to think of your nation as being “the adult” of the world, which is bad enough when it seems obvious to many other nations that yours is the one throwing a three-year old’s temper tantrum, but it is even worse to think that the pursuit of legitimate interests by other states is an expression of rebellion and ingratitude towards you.  First of all, this is an incorrect assessment of what those states are doing, and second it infuses the entire debate with this emotional rubbish about how the rest of the world “owes” us for keeping the peace and “leading” the rest of the world. 

If America is the country primarily responsible for keeping the peace, and let’s grant that this is the case for the sake of argument, this is simply the fulfillment of the obligation that comes with great power.  I am reminded of a saying from an Indian movie: “It is the tree’s duty to shelter.”  If America is the last superpower, would other nations expect us to do any less?   Obviously, many states have come to expect the superpower to do this as part of the duty attached to our international power.  In my view, it is a duty that Americans do not want and should not have, and it is because Americans do not want to be the world’s leader, but find their country compelled (mostly by their own political class) to occupy this role, many Americans begin to exhibit the attitude that comes with the possession of great power and no sense of obligation towards anyone else.  This is the attitude that other peoples around the world should feel grateful that we are so benevolent and that we treat them as well as we do–the implication is that they are in our power, we are their masters and we could just as easily start treating them very poorly if they don’t watch what they say.  There is no way for other peoples to receive this attitude except as an insult and a veiled threat. 

One of the themes that comes up in Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act is the Ottoman Turkish sense that the Christian peoples of the empire did not show the appropriate gratitude to the Turks for whatever reforms or benefits they had received.  The idea that subject peoples should be grateful to the ruling people is obviously a paternalistic one premised on a presumed natural inequality.  The language of rebellion and ingratitude only comes up in the context of supremacy and the assumption that it is a gift and an indulgence towards less-developed beings to treat them with the appropriate respect and consideration. 

This language of ingratitude frequently came up among neocons immediately after 9/11: “Why don’t these ingrates appreciate all that we have done for Muslims around the world?  We aided jihad for decades, and there’s not even a thank you note!”  It is almost possible to conceive of neocon war fever in the Near East as the acting out of a spurned lover–except, of course, that we understand their other objectives in the region and this is not among them.  Talk of ingratitude reappeared during the row with the Europeans, especially the Germans.  This involved some extremely selective memory and collective ignorance on a grand scale, aided by the substandard historical educations we have all received in this country.  Many Americans would say of German opposition to the Iraq war: “We rebuilt Germany [having leveled it] and those lousy Krauts don’t even have the decency to help us attack another country!  Where is all that good German longing for war we remember?”  Never mind that we simply supplied loans to the Germans for some of their rebuilding and that they rebuilt their own country–they somehow “owed” us, almost sixty years later, for what we had done in our own strategic best interest and were therefore obliged to pay up by way of support for our unprovoked invasion of another country.  Never mind that they were trying to do us a favour by keeping us out of the disaster that Iraq surely would (and did) become.  One of the greatest dangers of a government viewing international opposition to its position as the rebellion of ungrateful subjects is that it makes the government even more likely to pursue the ill-advised course that provoked the argument in the first place, as if to prove to everyone that this government really is master of the world and that the others really are your subjects.  This is incredibly stupid and, as Jack Bauer might say, “we don’t have time for this.”

There are a lot of things I like about John Howard.  Naturally, his robust support of Dobleve in Iraq isn’t one of them, but I had thought that the veteran Liberal Australian PM had a bit more political sense than to rally to defend the Iraq war against…Obama.  Obama?  Good grief.  The man hasn’t been in the presidential race officially for more than forty-eight hours and already his every utterance is being given international consideration!  Edwards wants to withdraw 40,000 troops yesterday, but John Howard does not feel moved to speak.  Tom Vilsack demands that Congress put forward binding defunding legislation, and John Howard remains mute.  But Obama mentions withdrawing from Iraq, and suddenly it’s a matter of international concern.  Did I miss something?  Did Obama become Secretary of State while I was asleep Friday night?  What’s going on?

The answer, to which the CBS story only briefly refers, is the possible end of the Howard Era in Australia.  On many fronts, barring the idiocy of participating in the Iraq war, Howard has been a relatively good Prime Minister for Australia.  He has even recently engaged in a bit of patriotic enthusiasm over the Australian flag and a desire to recover the “old Australia” that puts George “Family Values Don’t Stop At The Rio Grande” Bush to shame.  Of course, his recent bouts of demonstrative patriotism are connected to the same thing that seems to be motivating his shot at Obama: his party’s current sorry standing in the polls. 

As The Economistreports this week, the Liberals are trailing Labor under its new leader Kevin Rudd by 12 points.  The new leader has overseen a sudden reversal of Labor’s position, and Howard’s appeal has waned.  It is, however, not entirely clear how trumpeting his support for the Iraq war–a decidedly unpopular cause in Australia in the beginning and definitely still very unpopular–and bashing a Democratic nobody (which is, let’s face it, what Obama is right now) does anything to boost his party’s political fortunes, when this row just reminds Australians that they have soldiers in Iraq because of Howard and Obama is proposing to make it possible for those soldiers to go home.  This dispute can only work to make most Australians think that Obama and the Democrats are making at least a little more sense on Iraq, while confirming the public in their opposition to Howard’s most unpopular policy.  Yet it seems that Howard must be hoping that it will somehow help the Liberals in this year’s election.  It doesn’t really make any sense.   

Update: PM Howard has at least one defender here in the States–Duncan Hunter!  While a few in Congress have said that foreigners shouldn’t meddle in our elections, Hunter has managed to somehow take a losing position on this and thus help to make his already implausible presidential bid that much more far-fetched:

“I think the Aussies have earned a right to comment on the world stage about their partner in this endeavour because they’ve been fighting side-by-side with us in Iraq,” Congressman Hunter said.

Obama hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory, to put it mildly, as he managed to show off all that knowledge and experience he gained as an international relations major:

Obama was quoted as saying: “I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops in Iraq, and my understanding is Mr Howard has deployed 1,400, so if he is … to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq.”

Downer responded on behalf of the government, saying a commitment of 20,000 troops would be impossible for Australia.

“That would be half of our army,” Downer said. “Australia is a much smaller country than the United States and so he might like to weigh that up.”

I will hazard a guess that this is the most ridiculous international dispute, such as it is, that we have seen in the last ten years.

His keynote’s attempt at playing the God card seemed lukewarm when he said that American ideas are, “ideas that come from God,” prompting applause only from about only [sic] one-third of the ballroom’s 800-plus people. ~Hotline

Maybe someone can help explain why Giuliani, not normally one known for the political God-talk, would choose to float this somewhat odd phrase while campaigning in California of all places.  It strikes me as an odd phrase in itself (what are “American ideas,” and what makes him thing that they come from God?), but it is even more odd that Giuliani would use it at all.  It is strange that the man would choose to use it, because it manages to avoid being too religious, much less Christian, while nonetheless indicating a view of historically contingent, tradition-bound ideas remarkably similar to Mr. Bush’s view that freedom is God’s gift to the world.  It is bland enough to leave believers cold, but spicy enough to disquiet Giuliani’s more reliable secular supporters. 

It is similar enough to Mr. Bush’s ahistorical liberation theology to worry all traditional, skeptical and secular conservatives, but not specifically Christian enough to give anyone the impression that Giuliani is now trying to take up the “Christian nation” argument.  It is also similar enough to vague nods towards some connection between “the Founding” and theism that would satisfy some of the scholars at The Claremont Institute, but it simultaneously would worry anyone remotely familiar with American history.

Yes, there is a figurative or even philosophical sense in which you might argue that all ideas (or at least all good ones) come ultimately from God.  There is the conventional sense in which people attribute great ideas to divine inspiration, but coming from someone like Giuliani it simply sounds like a sort of tired platitude that he thought he would take out for a test spin to see how the audience reacted.  There is a sense in which you can praise something as worthy by attributing a divine origin to it (even if you positively know that “American ideas,” which I assume here refers to American political ideas, come most immediately from, well, Americans, who are not, in spite of the confusions of some interventionists to the contrary, divine beings). 

Even acknowledging all these things, you still run up against the core of the claim, which is a fairly crazy thing to claim.  To say this is to say that “American ideas,” namely ideas of government by consent, equality before the law, no taxation without representation, the need for a division of competing and balancing powers to preserve liberty and prevent corruption, etc. (most of which are actually English ideas in their 17th and early 18th century forms), come from God, when they plainly come to us from English constitutional traditions and then from the minds of English and French political philosophers by way of learned American landed gentlemen without any hint of revelation having anything to do with it.  

This is not to say that all these ideas would necessarily contradict the truths that God has revealed, but it is simply to say that there is something quite wrong and foolish about attributing a divine character to political ideas that have their share of virtues and flaws.  To invest any set of political ideas with the importance of having their origin in God is to make them into another set of scriptures and to make a certain claim of absolute truth for the political creed one espouses, which has an ugly tendency of investing the political authority that theoretically embodies that creed with a sanctity that it does not really possess.  To make such a claim is to make the political creed into more than a political creed, and to make it also into a set of maxims instituted by the Creator.  The view implied in Giuliani’s throwaway line is intellectually sloppy and potentially quite dangerous.   

I don’t presume that Giuliani actually believes what he said here; I would be willing to guess that he couldn’t explain what he meant if he were pressed on the point.  For Giuliani, as for so many other people, I assume the phrase “ideas that come from God” is simply a grand way of saying, “really good ideas.”  I assume this is a prime example of something we are going to see more and more often: a robustly secular, East Coast Republican who happens to be nominally Catholic trying to speak in the unfamiliar idiom of generic American piety as a way of convincing the continental folks whose votes he needs that he is really not that different from them (sure, he’s been married three times and occasionally cross-dresses in public, but who hasn’t?).  We may as well also get accustomed to watching him fail in these attempts, as he did in this case.

“Social conservatives may come to see one of the leading candidates as solid enough on their values issues, while keeping the national focus on the major issue of the day — defeating Communism for Reagan, and fixing Iraq and winning the war on terror for a McCain or a Romney,” Mr. Dallek said.

Yet this outcome seems an unlikely prospect to some political analysts.

In a survey of voters in the 2006 elections, the Pew Forum found that so-called values issues like opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights mattered the most to white evangelical Protestant voters. Forty-five percent of them ranked values issues highest; 17 percent chose the war in Iraq; and 12 percent cited illegal immigration.

“White evangelical Protestants are not only still a real component of the Republican Party, but they are also concentrated in key primary states like South Carolina, Florida and Virginia,” said John Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum. “They are not going away, and it’s too soon to say how fractured they will be.” ~Patrick Healy

But there is a road, and in a weird year with a weak field, I wouldn’t be shocked to see him [Giuliani] pull it off. ~Ross Douthat

I appreciate Ross’ comments on my recent Giuliani post, and I agree that Giuliani’s likely slippage of support because of social issues is not overwhelming when we are looking at the national electorate as a whole as the Gallup poll was doing.  I also agree that there is a road to the nomination for Giuliani.  It is a muddy, hole-filled road frequently beset by banditos and highwaymen, and it has many treacherous switchbacks high in the mountain passes where there are often avalanches and attacks from wild animals, but there is a road.  I would be shocked to see Giuliani make it on such a road, but then I’m fairly surprised that he’s embarking on the journey at all.    

I am surprised because of the figures from that Pew report and because of that list of primary states where evangelicals wield significant influence.  If approximately three times as many evangelicals placed “values” ahead of Iraq in 2006 (when, by almost everyone else’s standards, Iraq was far and away the most important single issue), that suggests that Giuliani’s potential for making inroads among these evangelical voters on the basis of some vague “leadership” or “security” appeal has a fairly low ceiling.  These “values voters” won’t ever vote for guys who have gone in drag–you can quote me on that one.  Some have told us that 2006 was the eclipse of the “values voter” and that the old red-meat appeals on “values” issues did not succeed as they once did, but this is to mistake GOP defeat at the hands of alienated independents for a lack of zeal among religious conservatives on these traditional issues.  Come the primaries, these people will be out in force to try to weed out the candidates that do not see things their way. 

If Republicans voted in a national primary, Giuliani’s chances would be greatly improved, not least because the traditional kingmaking early primary and caucus states where Giuliani is going to have a very hard time would be overwhelmed by the numbers from the more urbanised and homogenised parts of the country.  In a national primary, instead of being forced to win over social conservatives in the early states, such as South Carolina (and even Iowa) where they pack a strong political punch, he would be able to draw on a variety of secular and moderate Republicans and would not feel obliged to assuage the doubts of social conservatives to the same degree; his fate would be much less in their hands.  This is just one more reason why a national primary would be very bad (for many of the same reasons why eliminating the Electoral College would be disastrous): it would privilege urban, secular candidates and significantly weaken the campaigns of religious conservatives.  Today something like a Brownback or Huckabee candidacy is a long shot; in a national primary, it would simply be an absolute no-hope absurdity.  The profoundly “unrepresentative” quality of the early primary and caucus states is one sure way to make sure that the rest of the country–normally left more or less for dead by Washington, New York and L.A.–receives at least some modicum of representation in our political process, which is otherwise overwhelmingly geared to the policy agenda and interests of major urban centers.

Consequently, Giuliani will have to explain to libertarians and conservatives in New Hampshire why they should want an anti-gun candidate as their man in ’08, and he probably will not be able to satisfy them.  He will have to face significant evangelical blocs in Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, Virginia and across the South and, to a lesser extent, in the West.  He will have to go to state after state where they have voted down gay marriage and explain why he marched in gay pride parades and supports “civil unions.”  When he tries to change the subject to other topics where he is stronger, his critics will grow emboldened and start hitting him with all manner of negative ads saying, “Stop trying to change the subject, Giuliani!” 

If his strength right now vis-a-vis McCain is the counterintuitive appeal that he has for conservatives (even though by every measure McCain is vastly more conservative than Giuliani–reflect on that horrifying thought for a moment), the effect of a competitive social conservative on his levels of support would be devastating.  If he had a chance of succeeding, Giuliani would have to be able to sell himself, as Bush improbably did, as the “real conservative” alternative to McCain.  McCain, after all, inspires distrust and loathing among conservatives unlike almost any other figure, so the only way to beat McCain in a head-to-head contest is by coming at him from the right.  But Giuliani has so much more distance to make up and so much more baggage than Bush ever did that he will never be able to pull it off.  Romney has positioned himself to attack McCain in this way, but as I have detailed in many other posts he has some problems of credibility and identity politics that are in some ways even more damaging than Giuliani’s liabilities. 

Because of the distrust and uncertainty they also inspire, McCain and Romney, despite their fairly impressive organisational achievements, fundraising and strings of endorsements, will similarly have great difficulty in South Carolina.  I suspect the Palmetto State will give us surprises in both contests next year.  (Biden and Brownback victories, perhaps?)  The momentum the S.C. primary gives or takes away may well be what decides things for both parties.  

If Giuliani hopes to get the nomination, he has to hope that South Carolina, where he will probably fare very poorly, is entirely overshadowed by the other states that have been pushing their elections to early February.  After weak third place finishes or worse in Iowa and New Hampshire, Giuliani will be in the sorry situation of Lieberman, whom he resembles quite a lot as a would-be nominee for his party, as he will find himself boasting of his three-way split decision for third place.  As has been noted in more than a few places, Lieberman was the anointed frontrunner and obvious favourite in all of the polls at this same time in 2003.  Then came Howard Dean virtually out of nowhere.  He obviously failed to win the nomination, but he and Edwards did manage to effectively knock out Gephardt and Lieberman, who had been treated as leading candidates until that point.  Something similar could very easily happen to any of the anointed frontrunners on the GOP side next year, and Giuliani will be just about the easiest of the three to knock down.   

Speaking of Dean, Vilsack is attempting to position himself as the Dean of this cycle (the small-state governor who attacks the war to win over progressive activists), but Richardson really has the makings of the successful centrist-but-antiwar Democratic candidate.  (I don’t say this with any great satisfaction, since I think he would be a terrible President.)  He can campaign against the war as Dean did, but by using a much more polished campaigning style and invoking his foreign policy resume (which is not to say that his resume is worth anything).  I don’t say this out of home state favouritism, since I wish it weren’t the case, but Richardson begins to look like an increasingly credible challenger on the Democratic side.  

Update: I forgot to mention Giuliani’s greatest liability with all decent-minded voters: he is a Yankees fan.  There are some things that will simply not allow for any compromise, and resistance to the Yankees, their fans and all their works is one of them. Besides, what respectable man from Brooklyn of his generation could be a Yankee fan? To millions of old Brooklyn Dodgers fans and their children (such as yours truly), there could be no greater betrayal.

Obama officially launched his ’08 campaign this morning down in Springfield, referring to it as an “improbable quest.”  You can say that again.  There were broad-brush outlines of the kinds of policies he claims to want to pursue.  Most of it was the same-old, same-old: “Jobs for everybody!  Health care for everybody!  Audacity for everybody!” 

What was apparently a rather sizeable crowd (the campaign claims 15-17,000) ate up everything he said (of course, the only people who would assemble in below-zero temperatures in Springfield to hear a speech they could watch on television would have to be fanatics of a sort).  They loved it, even though he didn’t say very much worth remembering.  But, as usual, he said it with his usual accomplished rhetorical flourish that makes Bill Clinton seem hesitant and bumbling in delivery.  He is undoubtedly very polished–the only time he stuttered was when he kept getting interrupted by the crowd’s cheers–but can he offer anything other than mouthing pious phrases about change and repeating bromides about creating a more perfect Union?  We have yet to see it.  There was one glaring mistake in his language.  Like so many journalists and other assorted illiterates today, he does not seem to know the appropriate time when he should say “number” instead of “amount.”  For example: 

“Our troops have performed brilliantly in Iraq,” Obama said, “but no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else’s civil war.”

This is not just a one-time flub, either, since he repeated this phrase word for word in his announcement speech today.  Perhaps some will consider this a pedantic objection, but if Obama’s greatest strength is his ability to communicate any inability to speak English properly will create a problem for him.  Fortunately for him, many of the people listening and reporting on the speech don’t know the proper use of “amount” and “number,” either.

The dreary Lincoln references and comparisons–as inevitable as they were sickening–and the disingenuous claim that it was Lincoln’s “will and words” that changed America (rather than, say, an army of hundreds of thousands destroying and pillaging the land of those Lincoln regarded as fellow Americans) could put any thinking conservative off his lunch, but the general electorate will eat it up. 

There were a few concrete items that he mentioned, such as his co-sponsorship of Lugar’s legislation on securing Russian nukes (something to which he has attached himself long after Lugar started his work on this) and his proposed legislation that would withdraw all American troops from Iraq by March 2008.  It was surprising, in fact, that the foreign policy section of his speech sounded at once the most credible (relatively speaking) while also remaining antiwar with respect to Iraq.  By credible, I mean that he didn’t say anything that induced fits of laughter.  That’s a big step forward for the man who said his international relations major was part of what gave him more “diverse” foreign policy experience than such competitors as Joe Biden and Bill Richardson.   

It was all the more surprising because he has essentially no foreign policy credentials and has in the last two years not demonstrated an iota of insightful or original foreign policy thinking.  In this, he is exactly like Mr. Bush was in early and mid-1999, but so far he has no high-profile foreign policy advisors who would give the impression that he recognises his own lack of experience (then again, Bush’s advisor was Condi, and look at all the good that did us!).  The problem is that he may think he doesn’t need help.  He may seriously think, “I’m an international relations major!  I can do this on my own!”  If so, he is in worse shape than even I believe him to be. 

As Gary Younge reminds us in The Guardian, Mr. Audacity even endorsed Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate race (something that only purple and red-state Democrats such as Salazar and Ford felt compelled to do), which still has to make every progressive rub his eyes in disbelief.  (Obama claims it was out of personal loyalty to Joementum, who had been friendly to him when he came to the Senate–gosh, that’s nice.)  This is the neophyte who thought sabre-rattling in Iran and Pakistan’s direction was a useful way to show that he was a “serious” foreign policy figure.  Given his 2005 comments, I would have to assume he still favours some form of military action against Iran, and he has said nothing that would persuade me that he no longer supports this.  Naturally, he had nothing to say about Iran or any other specific foreign policy problems.  Somewhat surprisingly, he had no Brownbackian urge to talk about Darfur or AIDS in Africa or any of those odd causes celebres that white Christians on the right now feel compelled to talk about. 

More interestingly, he made no effort, except for a few anecdotal items at the beginning, to push his “I’m a Christian, too” appeal.  I assume he recognises that this appeal is useful for appeasing people at Call to Renewal and persuading middle-of-the-road Catholics that he isn’t some sort of radical, but that it can only get in the way of winning the enthusiastic loyalty of Marcotte-like progressives around the country.  

When he said that there would be universal health care by the end of the next president’s first term, I had to laugh.  It’s fairly simple: you can be the candidate who wants to change the way politics is practiced in Washington (and therefore make yourself an embattled crusader who will meet entrenched resistance for four years) or you can be the candidate who wants to launch ambitious policy legislation that will also meet heavy resistance, but no one has enough political capital, time or energy to do both.  Many of his other domestic proposals are regular left-liberal fare, all of which will cost no small amount of money, but all of this proposed spending runs right up against his supposed concern about the national debt.  Tellingly, tax policy had no place in his speech.  That won’t satisfy anyone on any side.

Dissatisfaction with Obama’s lack of substance will become greater and greater on the left, and it will eventually also begin to annoy the center-left political writers in the major newspapers and magazines who have so far given Obama a free ride.  He will have to descend from the mountains of high-flown vacuous rhetoric into the valleys of policy wonk expertise, and while he may be capable of mastering policy details (we have no idea–he has never given a major policy speech since he came onto the national stage) there is no guarantee that he can demonstrate a detailed understanding of any policy question with the same smoothness and flair that have made his absurd candidacy even remotely possible.  Improbable quest?  It’s more like hopeless audacity.

The blithe assertion by many on the Right that Giuliani is not a viable candidate in the teeth of all available evidence showing him either to be the frontrunner or a co-frontrunner for the nomination has not been a sign of intellectual or political health.

It is a form of wishful thinking to disregard the genuine excitement and enthusiasm surrounding Giuliani across the country and deep into the Republican party’s roots simply because Giuliani’s views don’t conform with a kind of social-conservative checklist. It’s true that you wouldn’t expect someone with his views on social issues to be doing so spectacularly well. But he is, and a fact like that has to force serious students of present-day Republican politics to revisit their certitudes. ~John Podhoretz

From some of that “available evidence,” here are some fun Gallup results from last month (via Evangelicals for Mitt):

According to a Jan. 5-7, 2007 USA Today/Gallup poll, three-quarters [bold mine-DL] of Republicans nationwide (including independents who lean to the Republican Party) are unsure whether Giuliani favors or opposes civil unions for same-sex couples (he favors them, though he opposes gay marriage). Nearly two-thirds [bold mine-DL] are unsure whether he is “pro-life” or “pro-choice” on abortion (he was staunchly pro-choice as mayor).

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The same January poll asked Republicans who they would prefer to see win if the Republican nomination narrows down to just Giuliani and McCain. Given this choice, 50% prefer Giuliani while 42% choose McCain. Notably, Giuliani does particularly well with self-described conservative Republicans (52% for Giuliani vs. 39% for McCain), while “moderate” Republicans prefer McCain (52% vs. 43%).

However, when Republicans are told in the context of the survey that Giuliani supports same-sex civil unions and holds a pro-choice position on abortion, the net effect on their expressed chances of backing him is negative. Knowing his social views, more than 4 in 10 Republicans indicate a reduced willingness to support Giuliani. Twenty-five percent say they would be less willing to vote for him, and 18% say they would rule out voting for him entirely.

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The theoretical impact of Giuliani’s social views on Republican voter preferences is better seen by looking at the results to this question according to Giuliani’s own supporters. Of those favoring Giuliani in the two-way match with McCain, a little over one-third say they would either rule out voting for Giuliani entirely (10%) or be less likely to support him (25%) as a result of knowing his positions on abortion and same-sex civil unions.

No comments from me on what these results mean for the political or intellectual health of early Giuliani boosters.  Of course, the contest won’t be just a two-way Giuliani-McCain grudge match, which makes Giuliani’s loss of potential supporters because of these social issues pretty damaging, since he is losing supporters from the self-described conservatives in the poll who will be inclined to gravitate to a different anti-McCain candidate. 

My favourite result from that poll is the 16% who think Giuliani is pro-life.  Hello!  I sometimes forget that the gap in political knowledge between the average voter and the political junkie is stunningly vast, but then polls such as this one remind me that just because everyone in the chattering/typing classes knows something about a candidate means absolutely nothing about the rest of the country.  (Obama’s cocaine use, like Rudy’s adventures in transvestiture, is probably not widely known.)  For the political junkie, Giuliani’s pro-choice, gay pride parade-marching drag queen days are old news.  Surely, everyone has already taken that into account and they are supporting Giuliani in every early poll because they value his crime-fighting abilities and his tax-cutting zeal!  Conservatives are very complex people with complex motives!  Well, actually, no, not in this case.  Many people support him because they recognise his name and project their own views onto the political blank slate that he represents.  I suspect that the 16% who believe in the mythical pro-life Giuliani are not going to be happy when they discover that he never was what they thought he was.

Taner Akcam’s talk tonight on his book, A Shameful Act, was very interesting and powerful.  If you know little or nothing about the Armenian genocide and late Ottoman history, you should all read this book.  If you know a fair amount or even a lot about these things, you should read this book. 

Having read the first part of the book, I was already familiar with many of the main lines of what he was presenting about the role of the CUP (Committee on Union & Progress) and the state apparatus in organising the genocide of the Armenians.  Then he made an impressive argument–which I assume will appear in later parts of the book–that illuminated the single greatest problem of ensuring justice for all such episodes of states committing atrocities against their peoples.  As in the Turkish case immediately following the war, so it is today in various parts of the world: the refusal of some states to hold war criminals and genocidaires accountable is normally closely tied to the political threats being made against that state by outside powers.  In these cases, claims of atrocities or genocide past or present become immediately bound up with the fears of the government and the majority in the state that the security of their state is in jeopardy if they conform to outside demands to stop whatever repressive or destructive policies they are employing.  This has two perverse effects of accelerating whatever destructive policies aimed at the targeted groups there are and almost guaranteeing that later governments of that state (except in rare instances, such as Rwanda, where the army of the targeted ethnicity seizes power) will never pursue those engaged in those policies and will probably also never acknowledge the crimes that took place under previous administrations as crimes.  Indeed, the more intervention targets the existence of a regime, the stronger the refusal to acknowledge any atrocities committed by that regime or its immediate predecessors.  Indeed, the impulse will be to justify, rationalise or even ennoble the murderous acts done by earlier leaders as being essential to the existence of the state (whether or not this is even remotely plausible).  

Because humanitarian interventionists very often frame their pleas for intervention in explicitly anti-regime and often regime-change terms, they all but ensure that the policy they seek to halt will continue and they absolutely guarantee that there will be no justice for those who have been killed or those who manage to survive (barring an invasion, occupation and victors’ justice).  Sanctions regimes fail for much the same reason, though they tend to be less dramatic and obvious in their failures, because they play into the hands of whatever regime outsiders are trying to punish.  Likewise, virtually every humanitarian intervention allows the regime to redouble its efforts against its targeted victims and may actually provoke the regime to harsher measures than it would have otherwise done, while it uses foreign meddling as yet another justification for the repression of a minority, whose loyalty to the state comes under question each time a foreign power demands that a regime treat these minorities better.  The majority will tend to rally to the state and any preexisting hostility to the minority will seem to them to be vindicated by the linkage of the minority-as-enemy and minority-as-foreigner and the foreign interventionist.  It is therefore almost always the case that intervention will make things worse and will ensure that later there will not even be the possibility of justice or accountability barring a foreign occupation of the country in question. 

This is true during such mass atrocities and also true after.  Dr. Akcam cited examples where the Turkish nationalists in the immediate post-WWI period agreed that the individuals responsible for the killings of Armenians should be brought to justice–that is, they agreed until the Allies made clear that partition of Anatolia and punishment of entire Turkish people because of the genocide would go forward.  At that point, denial of the genocide and defense of the new national state became intertwined: to acknowledge the killings as a crime, and therefore punishable by both trial and partition, was to accept the claim of the Allies to divvy up what was left of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia.  By tying justice to the political aspirations of the powers that are objecting to the atrocities, which occurs in virtually every such intervention, I would argue that humanitarian interventionism always sabotages itself even when the objections are principled and genuine rather than excuses for projecting power.  Like so many other well-intentioned government exercises in do-gooding, it fails to achieve its goals and typically exacerbates the problem it set out to solve.