Jim Antle makes a persuasive case that Mitt Romney is the 2012 Republican front-runner, and he makes a good argument that the GOP should not repeat past mistakes by nominating him:

Conservatives rightly value tradition, but this GOP custom is one they need to rethink. Romney is a spectacular mismatch with the Republican base of 2012. There are also good reasons to think he would struggle mightily in a general election against Barack Obama, or at least hopelessly muddle key parts of the Republican message. Republicans have gone down this road before, most recently when they nominated John McCain.

Jim is right that the GOP shouldn’t hand the nomination to Romney, but the 2008 race shows us some of the reasons why they probably will. Looking at the likely 2008 field in early 2007, it would have been easy to conclude that McCain had huge, probably insurmountable problems in his relationship with his party. During 2007, those problems became more obvious and glaring as McCain led the push for the immigration bill favored by the Bush administration, which McCain and his allies in the Senate defended largely by labeling its opponents as bigots. Many conservative activists were understandably hostile to his candidacy, and Romney (the very same supposedly fatally flawed, mandate-loving Romney) had become the default alternative for many movement conservatives. By the fall of 2007, McCain’s campaign seemed to be on its last legs, and it seemed that it would not be “his turn” in 2008.

Huckabee was able to divert enough social conservative support away from Romney that McCain kept besting him in one state after another. Romney was strongest with activists and did very well in contests that disproportionately rewarded superior organization, so he tended to dominate in caucuses except for Iowa, and fell short in primaries with larger electorates. Thanks to a field that split the conservative vote, McCain was able to eke out important early victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, and from there went to win most of the larger primaries in early February. McCain managed the Florida win partly by lying about Romney’s position on the Iraq war, and partly thanks to the last-minute endorsement from the then-popular Charlie Crist. The Republican winner-take-all system permitted McCain to wrap up the nomination without winning more than 40% of the vote in any competitive contest.

To avoid a similar outcome this time, the GOP has tried to change its primary calendar so that better-known or better-funded candidates can’t grab the nomination so quickly. One problem is that many of the first contests are scheduled too early in the year and conflict with national party requirements. As The Boston Globe reported last month:

More than a third of the states have early Republican presidential primary elections scheduled next year that would violate national party rules, throwing the campaign calendar into disarray and risking sanctions that would diminish their influence at the nominating convention.

While confusion over the schedule makes it more difficult for campaigns to plan for these early contests, we could end up seeing something very similar to 2008 as the candidate with the greatest name recognition and/or greatest resources takes a prohibitive lead. The longer other, lesser-known candidates take to get into the race, the harder it will be for them to raise money and compete with Romney’s organization.

Had movement leaders and activists been in charge of determining the nomination, there would have been no way that McCain could win. As it turned out, Republican voters were far more likely to cast their votes for the two candidates that activists declared unacceptable, namely Huckabee and McCain. Many activists and pundits have re-drawn the boundaries of party orthodoxy in the last few years, and they have decided that any support for an individual mandate anywhere at any time is a serious flaw. Romney now finds himself on the wrong side of the line, but for once Romney has stayed the same while the attitudes of the party’s ideological enforcers have changed.

Because of the politics of health care, Romney now seems to have an equally disastrous liability that is supposed to wreck his candidacy in the same way that immigration legislation should have ended McCain’s campaign. In the end, McCain recovered, and he did so mainly by talking about immigration as little as possible, and opportunistically claiming that he had learned his lesson and appreciated the importance of enforcement. It didn’t matter that these claims were contrary to everything he had said previously on the issue. Romney has done more than that by arguing for repeal of the health care legislation.

Another important difference between them is that Romney has a lot more goodwill among conservatives than McCain ever had, and he pursued the nomination in 2008 as a conservative alternative to McCain. He may not have been very credible in that role, but he definitely didn’t run against conservatives in the way that McCain did in 2000. During the health care debate, Romney was obviously an opponent of the federal legislation, and so as far as most Republicans are concerned he ended up on the right side of the issue. Yes, I find his efforts to reconcile his health care legislation in Massachusetts and his opposition to federal health care legislation desperate and frequently disingenuous, but I am not one of his likely supporters or someone Romney needs to win over. In addition to the moderate Republican voters he should be able to win, Romney will probably be able to retain enough conservative supporters from last time to hold off his challengers. Romney should have the means to dominate most early contests, and he should also have the fundraising to compete effectively if the nomination fight is drawn out. Romney’s greatest problem within the GOP and as a general election candidate is that he is perceived (correctly!) as an unprincipled opportunist who can’t be trusted. That said, how many Republican and Republican-leaning voters are there who regard Romney as untrustworthy and don’t see Obama as even worse?

The rise of Romney as a national Republican leader has been a strange thing to observe. By all rights, he should be as irrelevant to national Republican politics as Olympia Snowe, but in his eagerness to pander to the right and the conservative movement’s desperation to find a candidate to rally around Romney acquired a national leadership role in the party to which he is not very well-suited. His emergence as the 2012 front-runner is a reminder of the ongoing unfortunate effect that John McCain has had on the GOP for the last decade. By his presence in the 2000 and 2008 presidential fields, McCain has helped to drive conservatives to support alternatives in Bush and Romney that have been and will be disastrous for most conservative policy goals, and because of that Romney is in a leading position for the 2012 nomination that should be impossible for him to win.

Note that this is a real change. Israel has always had more sympathizers than the Palestinians, but pre-9/11 a kind of neutralism was the predominant view. ~Matt Yglesias

I wasn’t going to comment on the latest Gallup findings on American attitudes toward Israelis and Palestinians, but Yglesias overlooks something important here that needs to be mentioned. Looking at the data from the last 23 years, it is correct that the American public’s sympathy with Israelis as opposed to Palestinians became extremely lopsided after 9/11, and a more balanced/indifferent attitude prevailed prior to the attacks. What these results don’t show is what the public believed the U.S. role in the conflict should be both before and after 9/11.

If we go back to earlier Gallup polls that asked this question, we find that up through 2003 Gallup also asked what respondents thought the U.S. role should be. They phrased the question in terms of taking sides: should the U.S. be on one side or the other, or on neither side? The results were always very similar both before and after the attacks in 2001: approximately two-thirds to three-quarters of respondents wanted the U.S. not to take sides in the conflict. This is entirely consistent with other pollingon the conflict that has been done since then.

Here is Gallup’s June 2003 poll question:

In the Middle East conflict, do you think the United States should take Israel’s side, take the Palestinian’s side, or not take either side?

BASED ON 510 NATIONAL ADULTS IN FORM B

		Israel’s side	Palestinian’s side	Not take either	No opinion
		%	%	%	%
2003 Jun 12-15 ^		18	4	74	4
2002 Apr 29-May 1		24	2	68	6
2002 Apr 5-7		22	2	71	5
2001 Sep 14-15		27	1	63	9
2000 Jul 6-9 ^		16	1	74	9
2000 Jan 25-26		15	1	72	12
1998 Dec 4-6		17	2	73	7
1998 May 8-10		15	2	74	9

Neutralism wasn’t just the predominant view before 9/11, but was the consistent overwhelming majority view before and after the attacks. I have been unable to find more recent results from Gallup on this question, but WPO’s findings suggest that Gallup would get similar responses to those they had at the turn of the century.

As these results show, there is a significant minority of somewhere between 15-25% of the public that definitely favors the U.S. taking Israel’s side, they greatly outnumber those taking the opposite, pro-Palestinian position, and they are almost certainly more energized, organized, and interested in the issue than the broad, unmotivated majority. If Americans are asked where their sympathies lie, most will now declare their sympathies to be with the Israelis, but only a fraction of the sympathizers actually want U.S. policy to be the one-sided affair that it is. The good news is that public opinion is broadly in favor of the U.S. taking neither side. The bad news is that a position endorsed by a majority of the public has very little to do with making policy and has minimal representation in Washington, which is why we have a policy towards the conflict that reflects the preferences of no more than 25% of the population.

Defying his reputation as a 1950s square, the new, more casual Mitt Romney is popping up around the country as he readies a second run for president. He’s going tieless on network TV, strolling NASCAR pits in Daytona and sporting skinny Gap jeans bought for him by his wife.

His latest campaign book, just out in paperback, opens with a regular-guy scene: wealthy Mitt in a Wal-Mart checkout line, buying gifts for his grandsons and comparing the surroundings to Target, another discount store he says he’s familiar with. ~The Los Angeles Times

Romney would do so much better if he weren’t constantly changing to try to please people. As egregious as his numerous position switches have been, and as embarrassing as his pandering to foreign policy hawks over the last two years has been, Romney’s pandering was mostly limited to questions of policy and rhetorical style. He has a public image as a somewhat stiff, technocratic businessman, and that is the most genuine thing about him for the last five years.

If there is anything that would be more insufferable and hard to believe than Romney the zealous social conservative or Romney the foe of excessive government, it would have to be Romney the “regular guy.” One of the few things Romney has going for him is that he is not a “regular guy.” As ignorant or ideological as some of his positions can be, no one can deny that he is a very intelligent person. Romney and Bush are both MBAs from Harvard, but the difference is that Romney actually seems to have learned something while he was there. He has had a privileged life, he has been reasonably successful in the corporate world, and he is personally very wealthy. There is virtually nothing “regular” about him, and it is silly for him to pretend that there is. Refashioning Romney’s public image is just as likely to invite unwelcome comparisons with Al Gore as it will make voters react more favorably to him.

To understand what is at stake in this war, it is best to see Libya as a large drinking well in the desert fiercely contested by various tribes, but finally brought under the control of a powerful sheikh. Access to the well means life for the sheikh’s allies, and to be denied it means death for his rivals. Because that well is filled not with water but oil, global powers also have a stake in the outcome. The conflict gathering strength in Libya is not over who gets to rule the tribes along the Mediterranean coast and desert interior of a North African country, but who gets to own Libyan oil. It is also about the chances for democracy in the Levant, and whether dictators can massacre their own people at no cost. ~Lee Smith

To recap, when interventionists want the U.S. to topple a government in a country that happens to have enormous oil reserves, the war has absolutely nothing to do with oil. When there is a conflict that interventionists want the U.S. to enter, they are more than happy to exaggerate the importance of a country’s oil to make the conflict seem much more important to America than it actually is. It’s true that there are some foreign corporations that have significant stakes in Libyan oil production, but the main stake that other states have is in the overall supply of oil, and conflict in Libya doesn’t threaten a very large part of this supply. Libyan oil accounts for approximately 2% of global oil production. At present, most of the Libyan oilfields and pipelines are located in the eastern part of the country outside of Gaddafi’s control, and so for all practical purposes the rebels already possess the bulk of Libya’s oil production. That may change, but in the end determining who owns Libya’s oil is not a reason to go to war.

Just so that his argument doesn’t hinge entirely on oil, Smith throws in a nod to helping democracy “in the Levant.” For one thing, I would point out that Libya is not in the Levant as it is usually defined, nor are most of the other countries where these protests have been taking place in the last few months. Leaving that aside, arguing that the U.S. must intervene against Gaddafi to discourage other autocrats from resorting to large-scale violence ignores that the U.S. seems to be succeeding for the most part in restraining allied governments from using force against protesters without needing to intervene in Libya. Contrary to Smith’s earlier laughablecritique that Obama sees all Muslims as an undifferentiated mass, the U.S. seems to be tailoring its response to each country according to individual conditions and the degree to which the U.S. has perceived strategic interests there.

The argument that we need to intervene in Libya for the sake of protesters elsewhere isn’t remotely credible, not least because no one is proposing that the U.S. make armed intervention against internal crackdowns a standing policy to be applied in all cases. If intervention in Libya were to deter other unfriendly governments from trying to crush protest movements with violence, Washington would have to make these governments believe that it was prepared and willing to do the same thing to them. Pushing unnecessary war with Libya is bad enough, but if it were just the first in a series of unnecessary wars it becomes even more undesirable.

The U.S. can lend assistance to Tunisia and Egypt in coping with refugees from Libya, and it is appropriate to provide humanitarian aid for the civilian population in Libya where it is possible to deliver it, but there is no reason to become more involved than that.

Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon – Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons. ~George Will

I assume Will is describing Gingrich and Huckabee in that last passage, but the description fits the last Republican nominee just as well. On Libya, we are seeing what McCain’s first, second, and third responses to a foreign conflict are and what they likely would have been had we been unfortunate enough to have him as President, and they all involve military escalation. We can’t rule out that Obama will eventually succumb to the endless agitation for another war, but I am confident that if McCain were in his place the bombing would be starting any day now. The next election probably isn’t going to turn on foreign policy issues, but Libya is a good test for judging the prudence and wisdom of members of the Republican 2012 field. Pawlenty and Gingrich have spoken about Libya publicly, and they have re-confirmed that they should not be entrusted with any significant power, much less the Presidency.

As for the 2012 field, Will is engaged in some wishful thinking. He thinks highly of Mitch Daniels, so he includes him as one of the five plausible prospective candidates. It would be good for the quality of the debate if Daniels ran, but with each passing day I find it harder to believe that Daniels will take up the thankless task of trying to lead his party when so many of its activists seem intent on finding reasons to dislike him. At first glance, Barbour seems plausible as a presidential candidate, but he really isn’t. My guess is that he wouldn’t be competitive outside the South during the primaries, and he doesn’t have the built-in advantages that Huckabee had with evangelicals. Were he somehow to make it to the general election, he would be second only to Palin as a Democratic propagandist’s dream come true. Huntsman isn’t going anywhere, and Will must know that.

Of Will’s five, that leaves the last two, and both of them are definitely running, which is something that we can’t say for the other three. That doesn’t mean that the field has been winnowed down even more. Instead, it is going to be very different from Will’s list of competent current and former state executives. Will seems to take it for granted that Huckabee and Gingrich have disqualified themselves by saying false and stupid things. Evidently, Will has not been paying close enough attention to the quality of debate inside the GOP among its would-be leaders, including the “plausible” ones in Romney and Pawlenty. Will underestimates how much the primary candidates are going to have to accommodate themselves to the “vibrations of weirdness.” That doesn’t mean that Huckabee will run, and it doesn’t follow from this that Gingrich will be competitive, but we’re going to see the 2012 field trying to outdo one another in denouncing Obama and all his works with increasingly implausible, far-fetched claims.

Indeed, one would think that after missing the boat during the Green Movement’s June 2009 uprising and standing idly by as Lebanon slid under Hezbollah’s boot that the administration would welcome the opportunity to lend a hand to oppressed Muslims struggling for their lives and for self-determination.

And if the “realists” in the White House aren’t moved by humanitarian appeals, one would think they would at the very least see there is geopolitical advantage in demonstrating that America is willing to flex its muscles. Iran is watching. Those who will come to power in new governments throughout the region are watching. We are being tested, and so far have been found wanting. ~Jennifer Rubin

Yes, this is what pro-war arguments are reduced to: unfounded claims that the U.S. has a moral obligation to take sides in a Libyan civil war, and the desire to have the U.S. “flex its muscles.” Interventionists rely on the moral obligation argument to cover up for the fact that the U.S. will not gain any advantage from intervening in another country’s civil war. Most likely, the U.S. would acquire another international ward, and in the process America’s reputation as a lawless, meddling hegemon would be confirmed. After the last decade, the U.S. and the world could do without additional American muscle-flexing. These people talk about foreign policy as though it were a body-building competition rather than the pursuit of American security interests and valuable international relationships. That may explain why their responses to foreign crises are what we might expect from steroid addicts rather than intelligent analysts.

Fly notes that previous no-fly zones didn’t have explicit U.N. authorization. That’s right. They were illegal. A Libyan no-fly zone, in addition to being inadvisable and not in the American interest, would likewise be illegal. As long as the major members of NATO capable of assisting the U.S. militarily insist that U.N. authorization is required, as a practical and political matter it is required.

Fly claims that it is in America’s interest that the Libyan people overthrow Gaddafi. What Fly means is that it would be a good thing if the Libyan people (or the greater part of them) overthrow Gaddafi. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is definitely true. This is a good example of how interventionists confuse something that would be a good outcome for the people in another country with something that affects U.S. security and interests. There is a significant difference between the two, and the failure and indeed refusal to recognize that difference is the sort of thing I was talking about yesterday. For example, it would be a very good thing for Zimbabweans if Zimbabwe were not ruled by Mugabe and his henchmen, but the U.S. has essentially nothing at stake either way. It is actually none of our business. This is troubling for people who believe that everything everywhere is our business, but the reality is that there are desirable political developments that could happen in a great many countries that have no implications for U.S. interests.

P.S. Rubin makes no argument as to what Obama could or should have done to prevent the legal formation of the new government led by Miqati. Apparently he should have told the Lebanese majority that they are only permitted to have governments approved by Washington. That would have been right after he magically gave Mousavi a majority of the vote by snapping his fingers.

It was on Feb. 23 that President Obama said regarding Libya that the United States would “stand up for freedom, stand up for justice, and stand up for the dignity of all people.” And on Feb. 25 Secretary Clinton asserted that, “This is a time for action. Now is the opportunity for us to support all who are willing to stand up on behalf of the rights we claim to cherish.” On Mar. 2, she observed that the events in the region demanded a “strong and strategic response.” They were right, but so far our actions have not matched these words. ~Michael Singh

Singh makes a strong case that the administration has erred by making such excessive statements, not least because it provides an opening to arguments for intervention. What he doesn’t do is make a persuasive argument that the U.S. should intervene in Libya. These statements create expectations that the U.S. is willing to lend direct support to opposition forces in a number of countries, and it doesn’t seem that this is actually going to happen. The administration should match up its public rhetoric more closely with what it is prepared to do, but it doesn’t follow that it should follow through on general promises of help with specific military actions in Libya.

According to Singh, the U.S. risks its credibility by not acting. Aside from the fact that this is what interventionists always say about every crisis everywhere in the world, the main thing that jeopardizes U.S. credibility is pledging support for foreign political causes prematurely before we know what we’re endorsing and making promises that the U.S. cannot or will not keep. We have heard this before. Before NATO intervened in Kosovo, we frequently heard the argument that NATO’s “credibility” was at stake.

It’s helpful to reflect on how bogus that argument was. Kosovo was part of Serbia, and the fighting in Kosovo didn’t threaten any NATO members. One of the closest NATO members that might have been affected, Greece, didn’t really want to intervene against its historic ally. NATO’s credibility was never at risk. What interventionists did by using this credibility argument was to invent a new political obligation by arbitrarily re-defining NATO’s role in Europe. For the sake of protecting the so-called credibility of NATO, the U.S. and its NATO allies launched an illegal, unprovoked war against another state to take the side of separatists inside that state’s territory. In other words, to save its credibility NATO had to destroy its credibility as a purely defensive alliance. The situation in Libya is very similar, except that instead of separatists the anti-regime forces are rebels that intend to replace him and his government in Tripoli. Needless to say, the U.S. hasn’t the remotest legal pretext or justification to intervene, just as it had no justification for what it did in 1999. No one bothered to pay much attention to the forces we were siding with in Kosovo, and no one seems to be considering what forces the U.S. would be empowering if it intervened in Libya.

The Russians have been quite clear that military action is not acceptable to them, and neither the Poles and the Turks support intervention, so there is no question of a mission authorized by NATO or the U.N. Egypt objects to military action, which is understandable, since it will would be one of the countries most directly affected by an intensifying refugee crisis that military action would inevitably cause. If the U.S. were to take action, it would be done in collusion with a handful of other allies against the wishes of Libya’s neighbors, without support from a significant numbers of its European allies, and contrary to international law. U.S. credibility would hardly be served by once again trashing our national reputation with yet another unilateral, illegal military action. It is not clear how many of the rebels actually welcome intervention and how many reject it. We don’t really understand what is happening in Libya, and it is absolute folly to plunge ahead without becoming much better informed.

Singh identifies another possible consequence of inaction:

As the fighting drags on and the violence deepens, the risk that extremist groups will enter the fray as they have in other conflicts in the region increases as well, which has serious implications for our future relations with whatever Libya that emerges from the fighting.

That’s a possibility, but for all those who imagine how Libya might turn into a “giant Somalia,” it is worth recalling that the state of Somalia today and the problems of disorder and piracy resulting from it are the effects of a major intervention by the Ethiopian army in 2006. Back then, Ethiopia (with Washington’s approval) was trying to dislodge an Islamist group from its stronghold in Mogadishu. They succeeded in the immediate goal, and anarchy and protracted conflict have followed. Somalia was in very bad shape before the invasion, but it has been a disaster afterwards. Failure to think beyond the initial intervention is a recurring problem with pro-war advocates.

In addition to all of the usual difficulties, risks, and pitfalls of military intervention, what is the plan for what comes later? Let’s assume that the operation goes reasonably well and succeeds in deposing Gaddafi. Does U.S. involvement end at that point, and Washington wishes the rebels’ new government good luck as our forces leave the area? Or does the U.S. take on responsibility for post-conflict peacekeeping and reconstruction once Washington has decided to take the rebels’ side in trying to oust Gaddafi? Do the U.N. and AU take over instead? I have not seen anyone give these questions any serious thought.

Another recurring theme in pro-war arguments is how little intervention will cost the U.S. Military action is being sold to the public and the government as something that will not turn into a prolonged mission, but the same people who insist that we get involved will make all of the same arguments against leaving Libya to its own devices after the initial fighting is over. Americans have also become spoiled by two decades of wars in which the U.S. has achieved overwhelming and immediate air superiority, so many people think of air campaigns as low-risk exercises. Libyan air defenses are substantial, and U.S. forces may suffer some casualties and prisoners of war from enforcing even something as “limited” as a no-fly zone.

Advocates of military action are primarily recommending it as a solution to the government’s excesses and crimes, but suppose instead that outside intervention triggers the mass slaughter that the intervention was intended to prevent. What then? Once U.S. forces are committed, it will be virtually impossible politically to halt the intervention, but it is easy to imagine how intervention could worsen the situation and the U.S. would legitimately receive part of the blame for that outcome.

Via Scoblete, Paul Miller complains that the Obama administration is needlessly rushing into Libya:

The administration looks to me like it is being driven by the CNN effect. Libya is in the headlines, dramatic events are afoot, so the administration believes it must do something, it must act, probably to demonstrate resolve, or exercise leadership. It isn’t leadership to let the media drive your foreign policy. If the exact same thing were happening right now in Equatorial Guinea, no one would care and we would not be contemplating a no-fly zone.

The administration is blundering into an unnecessary crisis, setting unrealistic expectations about our ability to drive events in Libya, and exposing itself to the dangers of unplanned escalation and mission creep. If we’re to have a grand strategy centered on building the liberal democratic peace — which is not a terrible idea — it should start from more considered reflection, not lurching overreaction to a crisis over which we have little control. Secretary Gates, ever the pragmatist, appeared to be walking back the administration’s aggressiveness on Wednesday morning. He is probably aware that using foreign policy to bolster one’s public standing has a venerable pedigree, but that does not make it wise.

I agree with Miller on several points, but he seems to be attaching too much importance to these minimal moves. As the report he cites states, and as Miller acknowledges in his post, there does not seem to be any intention of actual military intervention:

But officials in Washington and elsewhere said that direct military action remained unlikely, and that the moves were designed as much as anything as a warning to Colonel Qaddafi and a show of support to the protesters seeking to overthrow his government.

Miller makes a fair point that the warning won’t carry any weight if government officials tell the media that there is no intention of using force. It would be better to do nothing than to engage in empty gestures, but there isn’t much political support in Washington for doing absolutely nothing. Almost all of the arguments have been on the side of more direct U.S. action, and the administration has so far resisted giving in to the clamoring for war.

Miller clearly regards the use of force in Libya as a terrible blunder, so wouldn’t it be more unsettling and more disturbing if the administration were seriously considering attacking Libya? It would be much better if the U.S. were not trying to influence events inside Libya at all, but if some ultimately meaningless gestures help keep the U.S. out of this conflict I’ll settle for that. One could object that there is no need for Washington to go through the motions of a review of options when the Pentagon and many NATO governments are pretty clearly against intervention, and other permanent members on the Security Council will never support it. It would be much better if Obama simply ruled out all of these options from the start, but if going through a review process leads to that conclusion it won’t have done any lasting harm.

There’s no doubt that hardly anyone would be seriously discussing intervention of any kind if Libya’s civil war had broken out last year, or next year, or at almost any other time. Forget Equatorial Guinea. There’s an incipient civil war brewing in Ivory Coast right now between pro- and anti-Gbagbo factions. Gbagbo’s forces have killed civilian protesters, and Gbagbo is a bit of a fanatic who promotes hostility to Burkinabe and other foreigners. Just this week, Gbagbo’s thugs have been attacking foreigners in Abidjan. As far as I know, no government recognizes Gbagbo’s election, but Ivory Coast has nothing to do with the uprisings sweeping through Arab countries, and so it is not the political crisis that anyone cares about at the moment. Libya and Ivory Coast are equally (un)important to the U.S., but one of the crises is on television and dominates the news cycle, and the other draws blank stares and questions asking “where’s that?” What should make us all stop contemplating intervention in Libya is that Western governments probably understand the situation and the competing factions in Ivory Coast much better than they understand what’s happening in Libya, which means that they don’t know very much at all what’s happening there.

Peter Beaumont made this point very well earlier this week:

The reality is that we are rushing to make policy on Libya without knowing precisely what is happening here. That is not to say we do not know some of the broad details. Yes, people are being killed for demonstrating against the regime. People, too, are being taken from their homes amid a widespread policy of intimidation. Human rights abuses are unquestionably being committed. But it is a question of scale. And there is a requirement for a response that fits the reality of what is happening and does not exacerbate the country’s problems, or the region’s.

We should admit our ignorance and own it as we try to determine what is happening in Libya. When we have determined the reality of what we are dealing with then perhaps, and only then, can we talk seriously about appropriate measures to respond to it.

I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts, etched in stone. ~David Brooks

If Huntington may still be proved right, it isn’t clear that he has made very many mistakes. Saying that all people share certain aspirations doesn’t actually tell us very much. It is how people try to realize those aspirations, the way they prioritize them, and the importance they attach to them that reflect cultural values and contribute to cultural differences. When abstract terms are used for expressing those aspirations, it makes it much harder to know what these aspirations actually mean. I’m not sure that knowing that all people share certain aspirations is all that useful. At best, it is a truism, and at worst it can blind us to the deeper disagreements that lie behind these shared aspirations.

Time after time, middle-class political liberals (in the classical or European sense) have demanded an end to arbitrary government and the establishment of constitutional and representative government. They have quickly learned that the opening of the political system empowers majorities hostile to their interests. It is not an accident that political liberals have sometimes aligned themselves with monarchical, oligarchic or authoritarian systems in the fear that mass democracy will represent significant changes for the worse for them. Expanding the franchise has sometimes meant reviving the conservative forces that the liberals opposed earlier, and sometimes it empowers more social democratic and/or socialist movements, but in either case political liberals tend to lose as a result. That sometimes leads to support for coups and a return to a more restricted or advantageous electoral system. Anti-democratic backlash is one of the things Amy Chua warned about in World on Fire, and it is something that Kurlantzick has noted in his recent survey of the Asian nations that participated in the “third wave” of democratization. This backlash has been taking place in Thailand for the last five years. While Thailand is the clearest example of this, it isn’t limited to Thailand, as Kurlantzick explains:

During the eras of street protests, Filipino, Thai, South Korean, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Taiwanese middle classes stood at the forefront of demonstrations, much as middle class men and women are doing now in the Middle East. But less than a generation later, these same middle class men and women often now oppose democracy. In Indonesia and Taiwan, the middle class has continued to be a bulwark for reform, particularly in Jakarta. But in other nations, the middle class no longer always stands for reform and good governance.

Of course, reform and good governance are other terms that will mean different things to the middle class and the majority of the population. When democracy meant making the government more accountable to them, middle-class liberals were all for it, but when it means a government with economic and fiscal policies that challenge of threaten their interests they naturally become less enthusiastic. On the surface, the illiberal democratic majority and the liberal minority both want “freedom” and “democracy,” but what they mean by this is as different as can be.

Regarding nationalism, Huntington may have missed something, but if he did it wasn’t because he was paying too much attention to each civilization’s cultural values at the expense of “universal” values. If there was a mistake, it was in attaching too much importance to civilizational identities and not enough to more local and national identities. In other words, Huntington’s scheme is a useful corrective against universalism, but it can miss many of the other more particular values and attachments that matter as much or more. That said, the most effective protests movements we have seen so far are in the nation-states with some of the strongest national identities and relatively long traditions of secular nationalism. Libyan rebels claim to want to topple Gaddafi and establish a new government for all of Libya, but the heart of the rebellion remains in Cyrenaica, and the country is split by tribe and region. It’s very early to conclude that the primary attachment of most of the people in almost all of these countries is not religion. It would be quite strange if it were not one of the most important after immediate natural loyalties.

Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman, however, the administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom. ~Charles Krauthammer

In fact, this isn’t the “fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine.” It is at most an assumption that went into making the so-called Doctrine, which Krauthammer once defined here. In 2008, Krauthammer wrote:

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.

The fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine isn’t that Arabs desire dignity and freedom. That isn’t what distinguished Bush’s advocacy for democracy promotion from that of his predecessors. No one seriously contested the claim that all people desire these things. Krauthammer did famously dismiss the idea that people might value natural loyalties and religion less than they value abstract freedom, which was badly wrong, but that doesn’t mean that there is no desire for freedom. That has never been the objection to democracy promotion. It isn’t that some people don’t desire such things, but that the institutions and habits of democracy cannot be built up and learned rapidly, especially when they are introduced overnight from outside in the wake of an invasion. There is also the small matter that desiring freedom and desiring a democratic form of government are not the same thing, and can frequently oppose one another.

The heart of the doctrine, as Krauthammer himself defined it in the summer of 2008, is that “the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world.” That is indeed the last version of the Bush Doctrine as laid out in Bush’s Second Inaugural, and it is loopy. The Obama administration doesn’t seem to believe that, most Americans don’t believe that, and even a few neoconservatives don’t believe that this is the fundamental mission of U.S. foreign policy. Virtually no one in the U.S. has converted to the “freedom agenda,” because that agenda was a disastrous failure both in the way that it was implemented and in its assumptions about the U.S. role. One nation after the next has been rising up without much in the way of U.S. backing. Each time this happens, Bush’s assumption that it was necessary for the U.S. to be actively promoting democracy in Arab countries is made to look worse, not better. Those nations that have been “liberated” by the “freedom agenda” were mostly subjected to various degrees of semi-authoritarian or authoritarian misrule for years afterwards.

Krauthammer continues:

But whatever side you take on that question, what’s unmistakable is that to the Middle Easterner, Iraq today is the only functioning Arab democracy, with multiparty elections and the freest press.

It’s strange that Krauthammer would insist that “the Middle Easterner” is the one who would see it this way. It seems to me that these are the people least likely to see Iraq in these terms. It’s also not true. Lebanon has multi-party elections, it has more of a functioning democracy than Iraq, and its press is free. Recent political unrest aside, it is also a far better place to live than Iraq, which remains according to one ranking in the top ten of the world’s failed states. The result of this “functioning democracy” is a state that is listed by Freedom House as not free, and it is categorized by the Economist Intelligence Unit as barely qualifying as a “hybrid regime” rather than an authoritarian state. In the overall EIU score for Iraq, it leads such models of free government Madagascar and Kuwait by just .06 and .12 respectively. Those two are in the authoritarian category. The EIU rates the functioning of the Iraqi government at 0.79 on a scale of 10. Other countries on the list that boast similar “functioning of government” ratings are Liberia, Togo, Tajikistan, and Equatorial Guinea. A better term for Iraq would be the Arab world’s most dysfunctional hybrid state. Kazakhstan outscores Iraq on civil liberties, and Russia ranks ahead of Iraq in terms of electoral process and pluralism. For political culture, it is tied with Jordan and Azerbaijan.

Krauthammer believes that if Egypt were “to be as politically developed in, say, a year as is Iraq today, we would think it a great success,” which is simply mad. Egypt naturally rated worse than Iraq overall in 2010 according to the EIU, but their overall rankings were almost identical in 2008 (3.89 vs. 4.00). The point isn’t that Egypt was already doing well (it wasn’t), but that Iraq continues to do so badly. If Egypt improved to Iraq’s current level of political development, it wouldn’t have gone very far at all. It wouldn’t be seen as a great success, but would instead be regarded as a huge let-down.

War supporters have become so strongly attached to democracy promotion and the “freedom agenda” because they quickly ran out of excuses for the debacle in Iraq, but they are so intent on using Iraq’s political progress as their justification after the fact that they can’t see that Iraq is not free, barely democratic in the sense that we mean it, and sliding into a politics of authoritarian populism and sectarianism. They have to exaggerate that progress and pretend that Iraq is a “functioning democracy,” because the terrible costs inflicted on the Iraqi population and the terrible costs borne by the American military are completely inexcusable on the war supporters’ own terms if all that it has produced is an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian state increasingly in Iran’s orbit.