The nomination of Najib Mikati as prime minister-designate signals that a Saudi-Syrian deal remains near to blunt the crisis over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a number of analysts said Wednesday.

A politician and businessman as shrewd as Mikati would not have allowed the March 8 political alliance to name him unless he had received assurances from high-ranking Saudis that the kingdom was still willing to reach an agreement on the tribunal, said Paul Salem, head of the Carnegie Middle East Center. ~The Daily Star

Meanwhile, here in the U.S. we have hysterics talking about the “conquest of Lebanon by Iran,” when what we are seeing is something more like a Saudi-Syrian settlement in which a candidate favorable to both governments becomes prime minister. For those who assume Miqati is nothing more than a yes-man for Hizbullah, the Star article goes on to say this:

Because of his Saudi and other external support, Mikati will have a significant say in selecting the ministers for his government, Hanna added. “He is in a stronger position vis-à-vis March 8,” Hanna said. “They need him.”

The point here is not to cheer for a March 8-led government. Properly speaking, none of this is America’s concern, and it has little to do with American security. However, we should observe that a lawful, basically peaceful change in government in Lebanon that benefits a political coalition Westerners dislike is not the end of the world, nor is it even necessarily that bad for Lebanon. No one has “lost” Lebanon, because Americans never possessed Lebanon. It is not ours to lose.

Hizbullah’s nefarious puppet speaks:

“I am not going to make any move against the tribunal without full Lebanese consensus,” said Mr. Miqati, well known here as a politician and philanthropist.

Asked if Hezbollah would accept such a stance, he replied indignantly: “I am the prime minister and I will decide. If they do not accept, let them not accept.”

All caveats apply. Yes, he could be telling Western journalists what Westerners want to hear, or he could simply be lying to create the appearance of independence, or he could be buying time to make it easier to form a functioning government. It could also be that Miqati is not automatically going to do Hizbullah’s bidding on an extremely controversial issue. The point is that we don’t really know as much as many of us are pretending we know.

What I find remarkable is that in the Western press pretty much everyone, and I mean everyone, who has written something about Lebanon in the last month has automatically assumed that Miqati as prime minister is unacceptable, Hariri and his allies must be supported by Western governments, and failure to de-stabilize the new government by supporting Hariri’s opposition is tantamount to a complete abandonment of Lebanon. This is why it is supposedly imperative that we side with the coalition that has not commanded popular majority support in ages, and it is why we apparently must rally against a unity government that has some chance of avoiding renewed civil strife. Count me as a skeptic.

What about the people of Lebanon? Or of Egypt? Don’t they deserve support too? ~Max Boot

These are maddeningly stupid questions.

For one thing, the outgoing Hariri government didn’t represent the majority of the “people of Lebanon.” Thanks to the rigged way that Lebanese elections work, the March 8 coalition received far fewer seats than the 2009 results would have merited in a more balanced system. In 2009, the March 8 coalition received 55% of the vote and 45% of the seats. I won’t pretend that a more representative and majoritarian Lebanese government will be a better one, but then I’m not the one throwing a fit over our government’s lack of overt support for the “people of Lebanon.” In the days before the fall of Hariri’s government, the administration stated its support for Hariri’s government, and we can see how unimportant that was.

Now that Hariri’s government has fallen thanks to the defection of Hizbullah and Jumblatt’s PSP, the administration is supposed to lend support to a political opposition that represents a minority of the population and has just been driven from power by legal parliamentary means? On what grounds? The administration is supposed to state publicly that the only acceptable government of Lebanon is one governed by the March 14 coalition? In other words, they want Obama to tell the Lebanese that elected governments are all very well, so long as the elected government has the right foreign patrons. On the other hand, the critics want the administration to embrace the Egyptian protesters because the Egyptian people “deserve support” regardless of the possible damage to U.S. interests that could come from undermining Mubarak. Neither criticism makes much sense on its own, but together they are incoherent nonsense.

Let’s also consider that the Egyptian “day of rage” was scheduled for yesterday, and the large scale of the protests was an unexpected development that happened on the same day that Obama was giving his address. Assuming that he and his advisors had nothing better to do yesterday than re-write the speech to tack on some reference to Egyptian protests, what should he have said that the government wasn’t already conveying through official channels? For that matter, the Obama administration officially supports the current Egyptian government, just as the five administrations before it did. Critics of Obama’s relative silence on Egypt either want him to undermine an allied government, or they want him to engage in meaningless happy-talk in which he professes support for protesters without any intention of providing them actual support.

Mind you, if Obama had said something about Lebanon and Egypt, the same crowd would be asking why he didn’t say something about Belarus, and if he had included Belarus they would have demanded that he throw in Bahrain, too.

The list of what he didn’t mention is much, much longer than what he did: Egypt, Lebanon, the United Nations, the stalled peace talks, Hugo Chavez, the Green Movement, Syria, China (except as an economic competitor), Cuba, human rights outside of Tunisia, Russian occupation of Georgia, the trial of Sept. 11 terrorists or passage of the Panama or Colombia free trade agreements. ~Jennifer Rubin

As I said yesterday, this wasn’t a State of the Empire speech, and it wouldn’t have made any sense for Obama to spend time on most of these topics. My guesses on what he would mention proved to be mostly right, because I assumed that the focus of the address would be elsewhere. As it happens, Obama did mention the Panamanian and Colombian FTAs, but we can be fairly sure that at least one of those isn’t going anywhere (and for good reason).

Obama and his advisors must have judged that the public isn’t interested in and doesn’t care about foreign affairs very much, and the public is interested in such things only insofar as these matters relate to American security as the public understands it, and they are right. Let me suggest that the Russian military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia isn’t one of the first one hundred things in the world that relate to American security. Actually, it doesn’t relate to American security at all, but accepting this is a bit of reach for people who think that everything in the world is properly the business of the United States government. The official administration line is that it opposes the Russian “occupation” of these territories, and that’s much more than I would like and it is as much as anyone can expect them to say about it.

On a few of these issues, the State of the Union address is hardly a good place for discussing them. In the past, addresses that focused heavily on foreign affairs have often included statements that helped pave the way for extraordinarily bad policies (e.g., the “axis of evil” section of the 2002 SOTU). One advantage of saying relatively little about foreign policy in the address is that the President doesn’t step all over ongoing diplomatic and political efforts by making cheap rhetorical flourishes. On most of the issues, Obama had no reason to mention them last night. Chavez? Syria? The Green Movement? Really? Why would he mention any of these? Josh Rogin has his own list of things Obama didn’t mention, and for the most part my response to that list is the same. Can you imagine anything less interesting to most Americans than talking about Belarus? While we’re at it, why didn’t he talk about Polish visa waivers? Oh, right, because this isn’t a State Department briefing.

As I asked about Tunisia before Ben Ali fled:

Is publicly taking sides intended to help the protesters, or mainly to take a self-satisfying, ineffective stand?

Obviously, as it turned out the Tunisian protesters were able to drive out Ben Ali on their own. We know that “taking sides” or “taking a stand” on their behalf publicly would not have achieved anything that the Tunisians couldn’t achieve on their own. When it comes to Egypt, my earlier objections to publicly taking the side of Tunisia’s protesters are even more relevant:

Declaring U.S. government support for protesting opponents of Ben Ali isn’t likely to lead to a peaceful resolution, but probably would lead to escalating tensions and more riots. Making Ben Ali’s removal from power the goal of U.S. policy (!) wouldn’t hasten internal reform, but would put the regime into an even greater panic and inspire an even harsher crackdown. It would also wreck a reasonably solid relationship with Tunisia for no discernible reason except that “we are in favor of democracy.”

Replace Ben Ali and Tunisia with Mubarak and Egypt, and the argument remains the same, except that in Egypt the U.S. has more reason to fear political upheaval because it has more at stake, and there is more reason to expect a brutal crackdown by Mubarak because of the presumed loyalty of the military. “Taking a stand” in support of Egyptian protesters might not be ineffective so much as it could be positively dangerous for them. After hearing declarations of support, protesters might expect the administration to intervene with or against Mubarak, and this could prompt the sort of uprising that Mubarak would feel compelled to put down with excessive force. Calls for Obama to “take a stand” are little more than demands that Obama set the Egyptian protesters up for a fall.

The administration should urge the Egyptian government to avoid violence, and it should be willing to withdraw aid if Mubarak uses excessive force against protesters, but publicly backing the protesters simply contributes to an escalating confrontation that cannot end well for the protesters or the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.

Even though the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is an ally of the United States, it would be jarring if Obama makes no mention of this unrest in his speech tonight, or in some other public statement. ~Michael Scherer

I would be surprised if the word Egypt appears anywhere in the State of the Union tonight. For one thing, if he mentions Egypt he will almost certainly feel compelled to mention his Cairo speech, and a lot of administration policy matches up pretty badly with many of the statements in the Cairo speech (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing!). Probably everyone in attendance knows that Obama has not made a priority of human rights or political reform in his dealings with Mubarak, so what does Obama say about the protests? When it has had to choose between not inserting itself into a foreign political crisis and “speaking out,” the administration has more or less consistently chosen the former. That was the right decision regarding Iran in 2009, and it was the right decision on Tunisia this winter.

People can call it neglect if they want (I happen to think saying as little as possible is wise), but the other plausible alternative is declaring some sort of support for protesters as they are chanting for the downfall of an allied government. If he chooses not to undermine Mubarak in public, Wilsonians here will berate him for it, but he will have made the wiser decision. If he throws his weight behind the protests, anything that happens in Egypt will be linked (fairly or unfairly) to his statement, and most of the possible outcomes are not good for the protesters or for Obama. It makes sense that Obama would say as little as he can about Egypt, and he may not have much to say about Tunisia, either, and there is nothing right now that requires him to address it in this speech.

Looking back at the 2010 SOTU, we should remember that foreign policy and foreign affairs did not make up a large part of the speech (these subjects accounted for just nine paragraphs). That was appropriate, since the speech is intended to be a statement about the state of the United States, and that is what we should expect to hear again tonight. Those looking for a State of the Empire speech will be disappointed. Last year, Obama touched on terrorism, Afghanistan, the military, arms control with the Russians, Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, the G20, and Haitian reconstruction.

Now that New START has been ratified, we should expect to hear much more about that this year, as well as other areas of cooperation with Russia (e.g., the 123 agreement). Obama will probably also mention the Korean free trade agreement, and coming on the heels of the state dinner with Hu Jintao he may make some general comments about the U.S.-China relationship. We can expect some boasting about U.N. sanctions on Iran. If Obama refers to any current events, my guess is that he is more likely to mention the airport bombing in Moscow in order to stress the importance for international security cooperation (and, however implausibly, try to justify airport security procedures here in the U.S.). As policy on Israel-Palestine has more or less completely flopped, Obama may mention it, but it won’t receive much attention in the speech. Since this is the year that U.S. forces are supposed to leave Iraq at the end of 2011, and the mid-2011 deadline for Afghanistan has been pushed back, Obama will probably emphasize the former and skirt around the delay in withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Our analysis reached three conclusions:

There is no “isolationist” wing of the GOP. Of the Republicans’ 47 senators and 242 representatives, only 5 percent (15 members) expressed support for cutting defense spending. Adding those in the “ambiguously for” category makes it 13 percent. Forty-one percent are against cutting defense spending; with those ambiguously against, it’s 60 percent.

Only 10 Republicans, or 4 percent, are against the war in Afghanistan, and none are senators. Including the skeptical members, 10 percent are somewhat antiwar. Eighty percent support the war.

The tea party is not mellowing Republican militarism. If it were, freshman Republicans, who mostly proclaim allegiance to the movement, should be more dovish than the rest. That’s not the case. Five of the 101 Republican freshmen and 10 of the 184 who aren’t newcomers support cutting defense spending. That’s about 5 percent of each group.

No new Republican opposes the war in Afghanistan outright. Including skeptics, 9 percent of freshmen and 11 percent of the rest are against the war.

Fewer new Republicans have defined positions on these issues. Veteran Republicans are more likely to be in the clearly “against cuts” and “for the war” categories; freshmen are more likely to be ambiguous or have no position. This ambiguity is a silver lining for advocates of military restraint: Many tea-party Republicans were elected without saying much about foreign policy and may yet emerge as non-interventionists. ~Benjamin Friedman

Via Conor

Instead of repeating earlier arguments that support Friedman’s findings, I will try to find something more encouraging in all of this than Friedman’s rather thin silver living*. First of all, it could be that Friedman is looking at the wrong things. I agree that positions on military spending and Afghanistan are usually “a good proxy for general foreign-policy views,” but this is potentially misleading.

Measuring someone’s non-interventionist leanings based on support for or opposition to the war in Afghanistan is potentially quite confusing. Even among some of the reliable non-interventionists in the House, opposing the war in Afghanistan was not always an obvious or necessary position to take. During the Bush years, there was essentially no reliable Republican opposition to the war in Afghanistan, as opposed to a small core of Iraq war opponents in the House. Rep. Walter Jones is a good example of a House Republican moving from a hawkish supporter of both Afghanistan and Iraq to an opponent of both. Indeed, making opposition to the war in Afghanistan into a meaningful indicator of a conservative’s overall foreign policy views is a fairly recent and somewhat arbitrary move. Assuming that support for the war in Afghanistan is inconsistent with generally non-interventionist views, it is still possible that statements of support for the war in Afghanistan do not tell us nearly as much about someone’s foreign policy inclinations as one might initially think.

It is possible that some “skeptics” and opponents of the war in Afghanistan are not actually in favor of reduced military spending or a smaller warfare state, but have come to object to the war because it is useful to position themselves against a signature part of administration foreign policy, because they dislike “nation-building” but have no problem with starting wars, and because they believe that the rules of engagement are too restricting and “politically correct.” It may be that generally more hawkish members have been quicker to join the small number of consistent non-interventionists in questioning the war in Afghanistan for entirely different reasons, and it is possible that potentially more dovish members nonetheless support the war in Afghanistan. It is also possible that members, especially new members who did not discuss these issues much during the campaign, have staked out positions in favor of high military spending to guard against the inevitable charge that they are “weak” on defense in the event that they are critical of U.S. policies and wars overseas.

According to Friedman, “[f]orty-one percent are against cutting defense spending; with those ambiguously against, it’s 60 percent.” Those numbers are lower than I would have expected. That still leaves a significant bloc of Republicans in Congress that might be willing to consider cutting military spending. If anything, these findings show that definite support for high levels of military spending is not overwhelming, which creates the possibility that a substantial number of Republicans will be willing to question the need for current spending levels and to oppose spending increases in the future. It may be that there is a significant room for improvement as fiscal hawks and non-interventionists combine at least to hold the line on military spending and possibly start questioning an expansive U.S. role in the world.

*I call it a thin silver lining because it is highly unlikely that freshmen without well-defined views on these subjects are going to opt for the position shared by 5-10% of their colleagues rather than the one held by 80-90%. Unless they represent districts where military spending is unimportant and antiwar sentiment is strong, or unless they are already convinced by non-interventionist and realist arguments, their lack of well-defined views will make them easily influenced by members who hold the prevailing view. In any case, this argument from members’ silence is not much to go on.

Update: Friedman follows up on his op-ed at The National Interest’s blog.

Because it has banked on this approach, the administration has consistently played down U.S. support for the opposition Green movement, which has been dormant in recent months. Yet Mr. Jalili’s behavior in Istanbul suggests that the regime remains more concerned about appearing weak to its domestic opposition than about the consequences of defying the Security Council.

By doing more to support the Iranian opposition, the United States could press the regime where it actually feels threatened. It could also send an important message to Iranians: that the international coalition seeks not to punish them but to weaken the government they despise. ~The Washington Post

In the world of the Post’s editors and columnists (and foreign policy hawks generally), it is always necessary to support foreign governments’ opposition movements and it is always imperative to avoid negotiations with them. It doesn’t seem to matter whether supporting the opposition aids U.S. goals or not, and it doesn’t even matter if the opposition is capable of bringing significant pressure to bear on the government in a way that is useful to U.S. policy. “Support the opposition!” is the reliablecry. It is the same advice, and it makes no difference if it is an allied government, a rival, or another major power. This recommendation is a substitute for a policy recommendation rather than a serious alternative. It is the foreign policy equivalent of calling for re-training and education as the answer to any and all economic problems.

This proposal might make sense if anyone advocating it could explain how it aids U.S. policy goals or U.S. interests. It would be helpful if the Post’s editors could offer a plausible account of how lending direct support to the failed Green movement would translate into more concessions from Iran on its nuclear program. There is no plausible account available, because there seems to be no meaningful connection between the two, and there is little reason to believe that a stronger Green movement would make Iran more cooperative. It wouldn’t hurt if Diehl or Kagan could point to something that the Egyptian government can’t do for the U.S. now that a politically reformed Egyptian government would be able to do. Of course, neither one tries to do this. Diehl dubs the administration’s “silence” on reform “dangerous,” and Kagan complains that Obama has “said nothing about the dangers of a similar eruption in Egypt,” but Diehl always thinks silence on political reform is a bad idea, and Mubarak is probably more aware of the dangers of a popular uprising than anyone in the U.S. is. Harping on the administration’s lack of support for political reform in Egypt is simply what an administration critic has to do when the administration isn’t mishandling relations with Egypt.

For his part, Kagan asserts, “After the “Jasmine Revolution” in nearby Tunisia, the Egyptian pot is about to boil over.” Anything’s possible, but despite the impressiveprotests taking place in Cairo this week, Kagan is simply guessing. He insists that the administration needs “to press Mubarak and his government to open the political system and avert impending disaster,” which takes for granted that there is an impending disaster (i.e., an Egyptian revolution).

It is quite possible that trying to compel political reform in Egypt now will weaken Mubarak’s government just enough to de-stabilize it without making sufficient changes to satisfy opponents of the regime. Instead of averting a disaster, Kagan’s recommendations might hasten its arrival. Opening up an authoritarian political system in such a way that it does not completely collapse is extremely difficult, the U.S. has little experience in how to facilitate this (acquiescing in the transition of a handful of allied dictatorships in the 1980s in countries with quite different political cultures doesn’t offer much guidance), and usually the result is the complete collapse of the system. Why are Mubarak and his allies going to set in motion the dissolution of their regime? Unless an advocate of reform can answer that question, calls for pushing political reform in Egypt or elsewhere shouldn’t be taken seriously.

The news out of Lebanon is that the March 8 coalition-backed nominee for prime minister, Najib Miqati, will attempt to form a government after the collapse of Hariri’s government earlier this month. The last time Miqati was prime minister, he oversaw the transitional government that prepared the parliamentary elections in 2005. The “Hizbullah-backed” leader is a Sunni* telecom billionaire whose last brief stint in Lebanese government facilitated bringing the March 14 coalition to power. As the NYT article explained:

The government he forms may in the end look much like past cabinets in this small Mediterranean country and, indeed, Mr. Miqati struck a conciliatory tone, calling himself a consensus candidate.

His small party, Harakat Majd (Glory Movement), is a predominantly Sunni party and it was not a member of the March 8 coalition at the time of the last elections in 2009**. Miqati is a representative from Tripoli in the north, and he is a graduate from the American University in Beirut. There’s no question that Hizbullah is ascendant in Lebanon right now, but all of this is worth keeping in mind. It should help temper wild claims about Hizbullah’s dominance and an “Iranian government” in Beirut.

* In the Lebanese system, the office of prime minister has to be filled by a Sunni.

** The new PM actually ran on Hariri’s list in 2009.

Update: Bloomberg’s report has a little more on the new prime minister:

Mikati “is seen as a genuinely neutral figure,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a research adviser at the Doha Institute in Qatar. He “is balanced and enjoys good relations with Syria and Saudi Arabia,” the two main powerbrokers in Lebanon, she said.

Damning as these true statements are, it’s a bit weird to see them offered, apparently as criticism, by a guy who runs a magazine that often as not takes an expansive view of executive power and doesn’t care much about due process when accused terrorists are involved. ~Conor Friedersdorf

Yes, it is a bit weird, which is how you know that Lowry isn’t offering these observations as criticism. He is engaged in a fairly uninteresting re-statement of things that have been obvious to a lot of us for years. It is damning that the Obama administration endorses unreviewable, unchecked presidential power to authorize the assassination of U.S. citizens on the suspicion of terrorism, but that isn’t why Lowry mentions it. He isn’t even pretending to be concerned with the executive branch’s overreach, the destruction of the rule of law, or the encroachment of the government on constitutional liberties. This isn’t one of those cases of conservative rediscovery of civil liberties during Democratic administrations–it is a celebration that the Obama administration has become as destructive of civil liberties as the Republican administration that preceded it. The entire column is an exercise in Cheney-like “we were right” gloating. To understand just how pitiful this is, consider the reasoning behind it: if Obama has continued or added to authoritarian and illegal Bush administration policies, those policies must therefore be “necessary” and appropriate. It couldn’t possibly be that different administrations from different parties could endorse the same immoral and illegal policies and that both could be equally wrong.

Naturally, it doesn’t bother Lowry and his allies in the least that Obama is doing these things, because they take all of this as vindication. Their party trashed the Constitution when it was in control of the White House, and now the other party is doing the same. According to the warped view Lowry is endorsing here, that isn’t a disgrace or a disaster for the U.S., but a gratifying victory for people who supported all of the Bush administration’s worst abuses. It doesn’t even matter that Lowry undermines the popular false narrative that Obama rejects American exceptionalism (so much for the “assault on American identity”!), because in the end the effort to portray Obama as hostile to American exceptionalism was simply a way of policing political discourse and pushing the definition of American exceptionalism in a more obnoxious nationalist direction.