Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, Mr. Bush shot back: “Because it has to.” ~The New York Times

At The Plank, Issac Chotiner nails Lieberman to the wall on his ability to change positions at the drop of a hat to maintain his unswerving support for the Iraq war.  Before Mr. Bush’s “surge” speech, Kagan and Gen. Keane said that at least 30,000 soldiers were needed to avoid failure, and Lieberman publicly endorsed their view last week.  Then, after Mr. Bush proposed sending a little over 20,000 more, Lieberman embraced the proposal as “courageous” and “correct.”  He backs Mr. Bush even when, by the standards of the people he was praising last week, Mr. Bush has just embarked on a course that the leading proponents of a “surge” themselves believe will probably not work.  Of course, it is very questionable whether an additional 30,000 or Andrew Sullivan’s suggestion of 50,000+ would be that much more effective.  Still, you almost have to admire Lieberman’s talent for backing whichever policy is most likely to prolong the conflict the longest.

I did not watch the much-anticipated Bush speech.  The contents seem to have dribbled and leaked out ahead of time to such an extent that it seemed pointless to see the real thing.  As far as I can tell, I didn’t miss very much.  Still, it has been the cause of quite a lot of blogging and commentary, so let’s review some of the responses. 

Reaction has been decidedly mixed.  Was Mr. Bush’s speech a “clarion reaffirmation” of and “a defiant and ringing rededication” to his foreign policy goals and “Bush at his best,” or was it anemic, old hat, shockingly banal and laced with fear?  It would appear that those who have always been or who have become opponents of the war found the speech to be unusually bad, even by Mr. Bush’s standards, while those who remain among the true believers continue to thrill at Mr. Bush’s “unrelenting” and “defiant” approach to foreign affairs.  Notice that no one can describe Mr. Bush’s policies with words such as “successful,” “intelligent” or “well-designed,” but must always resort to adjectives that describe his sheer brute willpower and his refusal to yield.  He may be a horrible President, but he is unrelenting, so that makes it okay!  Like everything else in this administration, competence and success are eschewed in favour of striking the pose of profound resolve and unswerving determination.  Their motto might be: “We may not know what we’re doing, but we will never stop doing it no matter what happens.” 

Surprisingly, one true believer and Bush-lover who did not exult in Mr. Bush’s performance was the legendary bootlicker John Hinderaker, who said of the speech:

In the past, I’ve often said that President Bush has been more effective in televised speeches than he has been given credit for. Not tonight. I thought he came across as stiff, nervous, and anxious to get it over with. The importance of the issue seemed to overwhelm the President’s ability to communicate. I suspect that only a few listeners absorbed more than a general impression of what the new strategy is all about.

Meanwhile, Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times, was virtually choking on the overuse of the phrase “not only…but also!”  The speech accomplished so much in Mr. Baker’s estimation that it is a wonder that Mr. Bush was not able to reorganise matter on a mollecular level simply by speaking the proper incantation.  Conclude the Iraq war?  Why, that’s child’s play for the startlingly clear and defiantly unrelenting Mr. Bush. 

What exactly did he do in the speech?  He has defied his critics yet again–how does he do it?  Oh, right, by continuing to ignore any and all contrary arguments and doing whatever it is he thinks needs to be done.  According to some people, that is bold leadership.  Apparently, Mr. Bush’s great accomplishment is to remain steadfast against his critics.  His critics may be right about most things pertaining to Iraq, but still he defies them!  It is quite a sight to behold.  

Isn’t it odd that Mr. Baker seems to enthuse over Mr. Bush’s ability to defy his critics, as if it were difficult for a man with such tremendous power to defy other people in this country?  Behold, the President of the United States has not yielded to some bloggers and pundits–what courage!  Before you know it, Mr. Baker will be congratulating Mr. Bush for defying other equally powerless people: “Mr. Bush has defied the civilians of Iraq again!  Amazing!”  If Mr. Bush could put just a tenth of the energy he puts into defying his critics into his decision-making, he might be able to propose something for Iraq that does not seem absurd on its face.

Finding all things Putnam-related, Steve Sailer points us to this 2004 Economist story, which reported:

Less back-slapping will occur during Mr Putnam’s return visit next week, to a private seminar organised by the home secretary. That is because his research has taken a dismal turn. A large ongoing survey of American communities seems to show, uncomfortably, that levels of trust and co-operation are highest in the most homogenous neighbourhoods. People living in diverse areas, it turns out, are not just more suspicious of people who don’t look like them; they are also more suspicious of their own kind. Because of that, they suffer socially, economically and politically. 

It may be worth noting that this lack of trust also functions as an obstacle to the creation of social democratic welfare systems, as a lack of social homogeneity seems to make people less willing to support such a system when it is for the benefit of a different group of people.  Scandinavian welfarism has succeeded, if we can call it success, because of their (until recently) almost entirely homogenous populations.  Thus it is often in those countries with the most elaborate dole systems that mass immigration causes the greatest resentment.  Earlier in the same week in February 2004, The Guardian published David Goodhart‘s essay, in which he advanced this argument that promoting and celebrating ethnic diversity actually weakened support for social welfarism.  Thus Goodhart:

Evolutionary psychology stresses both the universality of most human traits and – through the notion of kin selection and reciprocal altruism – the instinct to favour our own. Social psychologists also argue that the tendency to perceive in-groups and out-groups, however ephemeral, is innate. In any case, Burkeans claim to have common sense on their side. They argue that we feel more comfortable with, and are readier to share with and sacrifice for, those with whom we have shared histories and similar values. To put it bluntly – most of us prefer our own kind.  

But what if you are like Bagehot, who finds “his own kind” to be tyrannical and an impediment to an exciting, creative life?  To explain, here’s The Economist again:

Even if there were a stark choice between diversity and social solidarity, it is not clear that the latter would be better. In 1856 Walter Bagehot, deprived of the diversity which the past century and a half has brought, railed against his tight-knit society, which he thought stifled excitement and innovative thinking. “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius,” he wrote, “but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour.”

Certainly one can sympathise with Mr. Bagehot’s neighbours, who probably felt just as strongly about the frequent impositions of his views that he made upon the community, but what we have here is nothing so much as the perfect example of someone not knowing how good he has it.  There was a fair amount of innovative thinking going on in mid-19th century Britain, as Steve Sailer notes, so what can it possibly mean to say that a tight-knit society of Bagehot’s day “stifles excitement and innovative thinking”?  Presumably, the “excitement” Bagehot sought is not that of what people euphemistically call “vibrant” neighbourhoods (on why writers should avoid using the word vibrant, see here).  As for “innovative thinking,” why would it be the case that increased diversity would produce it?  If diversity helps to weaken bonds of trust between and within groups, it probably also encourages people to retreat into ever-more comfortable and lazy assumptions as effective communication and the exchange of information go the way of trust.  It adds nothing to “innovative thinking” if the different groups in a city or country do not speak much to each other because of fear and suspicion, and it adds nothing if they do not even use the same language.    

Usually whenever a multiculti makes comparisons between the “tight-knit” homogenous society and what would have to be the “threadbare” diverse society, he summons a vision of an impoverished village of illiterate pig farmers on the one hand and the pulsating energy of pre-1997 Hong Kong, and then asks his urbanite audience, “Where would you rather live?  In a penthouse in Hong Kong or in a thatched hut with no floor among the pigs?  See, diversity is great!”  Somehow I suspect the average person’s experience of the boons of diversity is more like the mutual suspicion and hostility of modern L.A.  For what’s worth, I would wager that people living in Baghdad today would prefer less “excitement” and more real neighbourliness.  Baghdadis do have to worry about the “tyranny of the neighbour,” but this is mainly because their neighbours are of a different sect in a time when sectarian identity has become far more pronounced and meaningful.  Obviously, when there is no social cohesion, people have a hard enough time surviving, much less engaging in “innovative thinking.”

Voters may be able to get comfortable with Mormonism once they learn more, but their judgment about Massachusetts politicians has been made over and over again. ~Chuck Todd

Mr. Todd has a good point here.  How have notorious “flip-floppers” from the Bay State done in presidential contests?  Before it’s over, Romney may be wishing that the only thing he had to worry about was the public’s reaction to his religion.

The true significance is that Ponuru [sic] is a bellweather for the Religious Right.  If he’s uncomfortable with Romney because of his religion, than [sic] Romney is toast.  More importantly, given Ponuru’s [sic] insensitivity on this issue, the potential for a anti-Mormon “whisper campaigns” and rhetoric by Romney’s opponents seems high. ~cityduck 

I have previously commented on the Ponnuru post that provoked this rather odd (and totally link-free) Kossack response.  Noting that K-Lo posted the email of an irate Mormon reader, who also seems to have been unable to understand what Ponnuru was saying, Cityduck believes s/he has found evidence of some new fragmentation on the right.  Call it the Mormon crack-up, if you will. 

In spite of what Ponnuru clearly said as a clarification, the Kossack takes Ponnuru’s observation to be an indictment of Romney’s religion when it isn’t and asserts, in what must be a surprise to all, that if Ponnuru is against Romney’s religion it is all over for the governor’s chances to become the nominee.  Well, pretty clearly Ponnuru didn’t say what many people seem to think he said.  Even if he did bang the anti-Mormon drum as loudly as some of us have, that would not mean a thing if the broad mass of Republican primary voters was indifferent to the question of Romney’s religion.  However, as I have been saying for some time, a huge proportion (43%) of all voters will never consider voting for a Mormon.  This has nothing to do with a so-called “Theocratic Right” and everything to do with tens of millions of Americans of all stripes (including roughly half of evangelicals) who are unusually put off by a presidential candidate who confesses a religion they regard, and not without some reason, as non-Christian.  That is why Romney’s candidacy is “toast,” and not because of anything Ramesh Ponnuru does or doesn’t say about Mormonism.  However, it would probably help his supposed anti-Mormon campaign if he actually wrote something that could be reasonably construed as anti-Mormon.

Defeatists argue that the nature of this war is different — that it is sectarian violence involving fighters who slip in and out of the civilian population, who are highly difficult to recognize in the midst of that population, and who are particularly vicious and heedless of their own lives.

To me, that sounds like parts of New York City before Rudy Giuliani took over and made things right in just a few short years.

If that response sounds too flippant, then consider that insurgencies are not by their nature somehow invincible. In modern times, insurgencies that once seemed at least as unstoppable as the violence in Iraq have been defeated in all corners of the globe, from the Communist insurgency in Greece after World War II to the failed Marxist insurgencies in Central America in the 1980s. ~Quin Hillyer, The American Spectator

Yes, I think we all remember when the car bombs used to go off in Times Square and the police would daily dredge up five dozen or so bodies of Mets fans who had been tortured, killed and dumped in the East River by irate Yankees fans.  The cleansing of the ethnic Italian neighbourhoods was particularly grim.  Instead of Moqtada, you had Milken, but the carnage was much the same.  It was a tough town back in the ’80s!  If only Maliki would outlaw jaywalking in Baghdad, I’m sure that the death squads would cease their killings forthwith.   

As for the absurd claim about successful counterinsurgencies, let’s recall that the civil war in Greece came to a close in no small part because Tito stopped supporting the Communist guerrillas.  A sudden change in support from an outside backer sealed the fate of the Greek Communists.  This was not a case of the Greek government successfully suppressing a full-blown insurgency, but of snuffing out a badly weakened one.  Had Tito continued to support the KKE, perhaps the Greek government would have won, or perhaps the war would have ground on for years and years with no end in sight.  What we do know is that the KKE lost because it lost its major foreign support, something that seems entirely unlikely to happen in Iraq since so much of the mayhem is homegrown.  As for Central America, the kinds of atrocities used to suppress the communists there might give anyone pause about the costs of successfully suppressing insurgencies.  Against these relative few (bad) examples, you have most of the other Third World insurgencies since the end of WWII as counter-examples of insurgencies that were not defeated.

The question ultimately is not whether Americans might theoretically be able to restore order to Iraq, but whether we believe doing so to be worth the life of one more American.  As it has been from the beginning, my view is that Iraq has never been worth one American life, much less 3,000 American lives and tens of thousands more Americans injured.  The continued waste of American lives in Iraq is profoundly immoral and serves no greater good.  Mr. Bush’s half-baked “surge” plan is simply more of the same, and it ought to embarrass his supporters that this is literally the best “solution” their hero can devise.

Doug Bandow points us to this remarkable column by Jeffrey Lord at AmericanSpectator, noting the prevalence of hyperbole in political rhetoric today and the tendency of those on the modern right to use pejorative names to smear war critics as traitors.  What he might have also remarked on was the odd habit that some of Mr. Bush’s supporters seem to have in comparing him to the tyrant Lincoln as a way of praising his leadership or urging him to follow Lincoln’s example.  (Perhaps the comparisons between two Presidents who routinely violated the Constitution and launched aggressive wars are just too obvious to be ignored.) 

He could also have noted how utterly bizarre it is for a conservative columnist to write admiringly of RFK and his utopian use of the line, “I dream of things that never were and ask ‘Why not?'”  The conservative answer to that question is, of course, because those things have never existed before and are not likely to exist in the future.  That’s why not.  Take Arab democracy, for instance–please!  It has never really existed anywhere, and there are very good reasons why it has never existed.  Arab societies appear to lack the habits, social structure and political traditions that are amenable to the creation of such a political regime.  More basically, other things seem to take priority over the establishment of such a regime; even if they are theoretically suited to the regime, they may not do what is necessary to create it.  The reality that something has never existed is a good indication that it probably cannot be brought into existence.  The conservative takes the lack of precedent for something to be as meaningful and important as the inheritance of precedents.  RFK’s quote of Shaw should horrify conservatives, and if Mr. Bush can be said to be following RFK’s lead conservatives should be horrified by Mr. Bush. 

Mr. Bandow could also have noted the weird non sequitur in the column when Mr. Lord writes:

The premiere example of this, of course, is Lincoln. Seeing disunion and slavery as what it was, he not only said “why not?” to their opposites, but grimly went about the task of making those imagined opposites reality. As with the Bush-haters of today, those who despised Lincoln for actually daring to make his dream of union and freedom for blacks a reality were relentless in their attacks. With the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq hovering north of 3,000, it is worth recalling the absolute furor whirling around the sixteenth president as he devoted himself to making his vision a reality of American life, a vision that finally cost over 600,000 dead in four years.

The recent trials and tribulations of the suddenly-famous Miss USA, Tara Conner, remind that centuries of bad human experience with alcohol and the fast life cannot save an individual human in modern times from making the same mistakes with alcohol and the fast life all over again. There is a similar version of Ms. Conner’s experience in the world of politics and government, with smart people who are supposed to have some understanding of history nonetheless falling into precisely the same traps that history warns those smart people repeatedly against. Presidents daring to ask “why not?” are besieged by those who will insist that the President in question has mismanaged the vision — blundered, listened to fools and otherwise shown himself to be one of the worst presidents in history.

And the critics are always right, to a point. Being human, it is simply impossible for any president to implement a war policy (or any other policy) without mismanaging, blundering, or listening to fools somewhere along the line. Flyspeck the historical records of the great presidents and these moments are glaringly obvious.

But so is something else. That something else is the utterly dependable voice of critics who simply do not have the will to carry through with the hard work of making a vision reality, critics who will abandon constructive thought altogether and head for the figurative sidelines to carp, moan, whine, and quiver.

So because Miss USA has had problems with alcohol, apparently in spite of the previous existence of the temperance movement and AA, we should not be surprised that critics of abusive, warmongering presidents fail to learn to be quiet and defer to the great man’s vision.  Like Miss USA, the critics await a great man like Donald Trump to rescue them from the consequences of their own self-destructive habits!  So thank goodness that we have a President with the insight and wisdom of a Donald Trump helming the ship of state.  I think that was the point of this bizarre example.

Well, not quite.  The real point was, I suppose, that at least Mr. Bush and other wild-eyed dreamers are trying to “do something” while their critics are not being part of the solution.  They are naysayers, which is supposed to mark them as limited or failed men who do not want to do what it takes to realise the great vision.  Never mind that the “vision” may be insane or undesirable and that the best thing good men can do is to tear it down and destroy it before it can be realised. 

Mr. Lord really enjoys the Lincoln-Bush comparison:

Yet Lincoln stood fast by his vision even as his critics lacerated him as a bumbling incompetent when he wasn’t busy being a tyrant, precisely the portrait painted by Bush’s legion of noisy critics.

But Lincoln was a bumbling incompetent and a tyrant.  He did have the virtue of being able to learn from his many mistakes, and he shared with Mr. Bush an immense reserve of psychological endurance that enabled him to press on in realising his horrible, bloody vision.  In fairness to Mr. Bush, he has been in some ways less tyrannical than Lincoln was (dissident editors and politicians have not been imprisoned by this administration), and his war has possibly resulted in fewer deaths, but where exactly the Copperheads have actually been wrong about what Lincoln did or where his critics are wrong about Mr. Bush are things Mr. Lord does not see fit to tell us.  He takes it as a given that the means they undertook to try to achieve their noble goals, if such they are, are more than justified by those goals.  All that’s missing is a reference to omelettes.  If that is leadership, then leadership be damned.

In The Atlantic last year, Ryan Sager, author of the book “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party,” noted that Republicans were suddenly finding themselves losing elections in the Rocky Mountain states. Today Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming all have Democratic governors.  Mr. Sager attributes the sudden Democratic surge in the “Purple Mountains” to religious conservatives gaining control of the policy debate within the Republican Party. In Mr. Sager’s view, the GOP has lost the libertarian-leaning conservative voters whose politics tend to mirror the rugged individualism of those he suspects inhabit the region. ~Brendan Miniter

Put the emphasis on “suspects.”  Show me someone from the urban parts of the modern West and I will show you someone more likely to consider himself a “centrist” or an “independent” than he is likely to consider himself a ruggedly individualistic libertarian.  The trouble I have with people who talk about Republicans losing “the libertarian West” is that I am not sure they have ever been to some parts of the West, since they seem to think that people living in “the mountains” of the West are all Scots-Irish backwoodsmen just itching to shoot the revenuers and flatlanders. 

Take, for instance, the place of New Mexico (or even Colorado) in the list of current Democratic governors.  This is supposed to be some indication of Republican weakness in these states today, when a Democratic governor in New Mexico since the Depression is historically far more the norm than the exception.  It is true that since 1975 there have been two Republican governors, Carruthers and Johnson, for a total of twelve years, but there have been four Democratic governors in Apodaca, Anaya, King and Richardson for what will be a total of twenty years.  Just look at the death-grip Democrats have had on the statehouse for seventy years and you will understand that any Republican statewide victories in New Mexico are rather remarkable achievements in themselves.  (As some of us like to joke back home, with the demise of the PRI’s lock on power in Mexico, the New Mexico Democrats in our legislature are probably now the longest-ruling one-party system on earth.) The state continues to change, but it remains one of the three minority-majority states in the country and thus serves as a natural habitat of Democrats.  Of all the states on this list, the one that absolutely doesn’t need the scapegoating of religious conservatives to explain Democratic success is New Mexico. 

New Mexico is still a default Democratic state and typically goes for Republican presidential candidates only when that candidate wins nationally.  Were it not for the odd make-up of Albuquerque with its heavy core of professionals, scientists and military personnel, the GOP would get routinely trounced in every statewide election.  Perhaps ironically, it seems to be the heavy footprint of the federal government in Albuquerque that gives the Republicans a fighting chance.  How do you suppose “libertarian-leaning” candidates would do in a state that is heavily dependent on the federal government for a sizeable part of its economy?  Probably not very well at all.

This brings me a bigger problem with Mr. Sager’s entire thesis.  How can evangelicals be costing Republicans support in the mountain West unless evangelicals are increasingly prominent in local GOP politics and the Republicans there are failing?  The supposed “Southern” and “religious” character of Republican politics elsewhere should not have any obvious effect on whether people in another part of the country vote for “moderate,” pro-business, pro-Pentagon Republicans (think Heather Wilson).  In New Mexico, there are certainly evangelicals in the state GOP, but they seem to have unusually limited influence on the selection of nominees for statewide office or even for House members outside of their heavier concentration in southeastern New Mexico.  In other words, it might be true that the GOP is now struggling in this part of the country more than it was, but the supposed cause (too much religion!) seems to have nothing to do with it.

It seems almost certain that the intense evangelical culture of parts of Colorado has served as a boost to Republican prospects in the state.  This deserves closer scrutiny, but I wonder if the concern over the GOP losing the “libertarian West” (a “libertarian West” that includes Colorado Springs!) is not a bad case of alarmism based on a very few electoral defeats.  Consider that the only Colorado House losses in a very bad year were in open seats with weak Republican candidates.  Marilyn Musgrave (CO-04), whose seat was endangered late in the cycle, certainly represents the social and religious conservative wing of her party, but managed to survive and win re-election.  Beauprez ran a less than thrilling campaign, which was obviously insufficient in the year of the Democratic wave, but a lot more analysis would need to be done to determine why he lost before we can credit sweeping theories of religious conservatism dooming the party’s chances.

So Iran burns its candle at both ends, producing less and less while consuming more and more.

Absent some change in Iranian policy, a rapid decline in exports seems likely. Policy gridlock and a Soviet-style command economy make practical problem-solving almost impossible.

The regime could help itself by making it easier for foreign firms to invest in new production. Remarkably, it has not done this even though the decline in exports, which provide more than 70 percent of state revenue, directly threatens its survival.

While signs of a petroleum crisis in Iran, are numerous, neither the Bush administration nor its critics have recognized them.

Even Iran’s nuclear power program, dismissed by the U.S. administration as a foil for weapons development, is a symptom of petro-collapse. ~Roger Stern

The serious problems in Iran’s oil industry have hardly been a secret to those paying attention.  The Economist reported on dwindling Iranian oil production years ago, demonstrating an understanding of the actual energy needs of Iran that has continued to elude most of the people convinced that an Iranian nuclear program could exist only for destructive purposes.  Iran could use any civilian nuclear program as the means for building nuclear weapons, but the long-standing assumption of most people debating Iran policy has been that Iran could not possibly have any legitimate reason to develop nuclear power except as a cover for a weapons program.  Just look at their massive oil and gas reserves!  Why would they need more energy generation?  Well, this is why.