The cables show that for several years, as Georgia entered an escalating contest with the Kremlin for the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway enclaves out of Georgian control that received Russian support, Washington relied heavily on the Saakashvili government’s accounts of its own behavior. In neighboring countries, American diplomats often maintained their professional distance, and privately detailed their misgivings of their host governments. In Georgia, diplomats appeared to set aside skepticism and embrace Georgian versions of important and disputed events.

By 2008, as the region slipped toward war, sources outside the Georgian government were played down or not included in important cables [bold mine-DL]. Official Georgian versions of events were passed to Washington largely unchallenged. ~The New York Times

Eli Lake has continued this tradition of setting aside skepticism and embracing Georgian versions of events. He has reported on leaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi, which was depending heavily on the Georgian government for its information and uncritically reporting back what the Georgians told our diplomats, and he has done this without doing much to contextualize the reports he is citing. The Weekly Standard‘s John Noonan is pleased by this:

Lake’s piece is a narrative buster. For the past two years, a growing false narrative has emerged about how the Russian invasion was morally reprehensible but ultimately “provoked by the Georgians.”

Actually, it isn’t a “narrative buster” or anything close to it. Pretty much everyone accepts that the Kremlin kept trying to bait Saakashvili into escalating the conflict over the republics, and that he was finally stupid and reckless enough to turn a manageable dispute into a full-scale war with disastrous consequences for South Ossetia and Georgia. U.S. policy of backing Saakashvili no matter how reckless and confrontational he became enabled him to wreck his country. Turning Georgia into a front-line state as part of a general anti-Russian policy backfired badly, and it was the Georgians who suffered because of this. The U.S. failure to question or doubt Saakashvili and his government was an important contributing factor to the escalation of hostilities in 2008. U.S.-Georgian relations between 2004-08 are an excellent example of what happens when a government combines unwise foreign policy and diplomatic malpractice.

Incredibly, our government’s practice of taking the Georgian government’s word at face value as reflected in these cables is now being cited as “proof” that the Georgian government was not responsible for the provocations it obviously engaged in. It was the Georgian government that escalated hostilities in August 2008, and one would expect that information derived from the Georgian government’s own views of previous episodes would tend to confirm a pro-Georgian interpretation of the years leading up to August 2008. As the NYT article reminds us:

The [OSCE] observers, in the heart of the conflict zone, did not report hearing or seeing any Ossetian artillery attacks in the hours before Georgia bombarded Tskhinvali. Rather, they reported to an American political officer that “the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali began at 2335 on Aug. 7 despite the cease-fire.”

No Westerner critical of Georgia’s government has denied that there were ongoing tensions between the separatist republics and Georgia that sometimes erupted into violence, no one denies that separatist militias had been launching small-scale attacks against Georgian positions in the months prior to the 2008 war, and no one denies that Russia was encouraging the separatist republics in their activities for the last several years. I don’t doubt that Russia armed the separatist republics, but it is hard to separate this from U.S. efforts to arm and train the Georgian army. What is lacking in this account is any mention on the ongoing reckless, confrontational attitude of the Georgian government under Saakashvili since he first came to power. It is impossible to understand Russian intensified activities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia without seeing it primarily as a reaction against Saakashvili’s rise to power, his preoccupation with “reintegration” of the separatist republics, and his insistence on aligning Georgia with NATO with Washington’s obvious encouragement.

It is worth noting that the cables sent home by our embassy in Tbilisi on the eve of the 2008 war were quite unreliable:

The last cables before the eruption of the brief Russian-Georgian war showed an embassy relaying statements that would with time be proved wrong.

It is possible that some of the earlier cables contain correct information, and the Georgian government fed more misinformation to our embassy in 2008 than it had before, but something that all these cables should remind us is that foreign governments are going to give our diplomats information that they want us to have and report things to our diplomats as they want the U.S. to see them. If our diplomats accept the other government’s statements uncritically and do not check them against other sources, as they apparently did in Tbilisi, that will leave Washington blind to realities that the other government doesn’t want the U.S. to see. For a new client state with a reckless foreign policy such as Georgia, misinforming its patron might be a vital part of maintaining U.S. support for the client while it carries out its “reintegration” policy. Similarly, the “true” beliefs of a foreign ruler or head of government conveyed to U.S. diplomats and reported back in diplomatic cables may simply be what he thinks the U.S. wants to hear, and not necessarily what he “truly” believes but can only say in private. Leaked cables are not necessarily giving us new or more reliable information. They are often conveying the same propaganda and sycophantic appeals in a different medium.

Mitt Romney has written another tiresome anti-ratification op-ed:

Does New START limit America’s options for missile defense? Yes. For the first time, we would agree to an interrelationship between strategic offensive weapons and missile defense. Moreover, Russia already asserts that the document would constitute a binding limit on our missile defense program. But the WikiLeaks revelation last weekend that North Korea has supplied Iran with long-range Russian missiles confirms that robust missile defense is urgent and indispensable.

Is this just a rehashing of discredited objections that Romney mindlessly repeats? Yes. For the umpteenth time, the preamble to the treaty is non-binding, and the preamble’s acknowledgment of a relationship between strategic arms and defense capabilities is a statement of the blindingly obvious that in no way impairs U.S. ability to pursue missile defense. Whatever the Russians are saying, the actual treaty doesn’t do what Romney says it will. It is telling that treaty opponents must rely on the rhetoric of Russian officials over the testimony of our military officers. As Romney has been corrected numerous times on this point, his persistence in this error is a bit strange. A former Deputy Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff of U.S. Strategic Command, Ret. Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson wrote the other day:

Some critics have attempted to muddy the waters with questions that have already been addressed. They claim the treaty restricts American missile defense, an argument that does not hold water. Lt. General Patrick O’Reilly, Director of the Missile Defense Agency testified that the treaty, “has no constraints on current and future components of the Ballistic Missile Defense System.” Frankly, their concerns have been put to rest.

These “red herrings” are presented wrapped in ever more demanding commitments from future legislators that no arms control treaty past or future could meet.

As for the “revelation” Romney mentions, there is good reason to believe that the alleged transfer of BM-25 missiles to Iran doesn’t mean much of anything, since it is not at all clear that these longer-range missiles work. So the treaty doesn’t limit missile defense, and the missile threat from Iran and North Korea has been significantly overhyped in recent days. This is the core of Romney’s opposition to the treaty, and it is laughably wrong. The rest of the op-ed rattles off more of the red herrings Lt. Gen. Jameson correctly dismisses.

If we instead refuse to raise taxes right now, we will be setting a stage in which cuts in federal spending are the only path. Cutting spending will seem inevitable, like something that will actually happen. This will give rise to hope. There’s a way out! We can do it! ~Peggy Noonan

This is silly. Maybe there is a case that extending all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is desirable for spurring economic growth, but the idea that extending the tax cuts will compel spending reductions is pretty clearly nonsense. Spending cuts won’t “seem inevitable.” As always, they will seem readily avoidable, as they have been for decades. During the 1999-2000 presidential primary debates, Bush explicitly invoked the “starve the beast” argument to guard against attacks that he was not fiscally conservative enough. We know how that worked out. Taxes went down, spending exploded, and the deficit soared. As Bruce Bartlett argued last week, the “starve the beast” theory is nonsense. The tax debate offers a very simple test for all those newly-converted deficit hawks who claim to care so much about mounting federal debt: Republicans can refuse to extend some or all of the tax cuts if they genuinely wish to tackle the problem of debt, or they can make clear that this problem doesn’t really matter to them right now. Senate Republicans have made clear that they want to increase the deficit, and will hold up legislative action on everything else until that happens.

Coming back to Noonan, spending cuts will not be “the only path.” The other path of growing the deficit is the path that both parties always take. They do this because it is true that most voters don’t care about deficits, and any party that makes any effort to impose real austerity or reduced spending is punished. This is part of what just happened at the midterms: one party proposed cuts to Medicare as part of its health care legislation, and the other energetically demagogued the issue to its advantage. The demagogues won in a big way. The House GOP leadership issued a “pledge” that, if taken seriously, would address no long-term, structural problems and would increase the deficit in the near term. Most voters were probably unaware of the “pledge,” but despite being widely mocked on all sides it certainly did the Republicans no harm on Election Day.

Noonan asks, “Will the American people, over the next few years, act seriously on their own beliefs?” Yes, they will. The trouble is that these beliefs do not include large spending cuts and entitlement reform. Everything Republican leaders have been doing over the last few months tells us that they understand this far better than the people who have become fashionable fiscal conservatives. This is why they put everything controversial off limits in their “Pledge.” Republican politicians know that their constituents will punish them for real fiscal responsibility, but the constituents will reward those politicians who offer them the illusion that they can have it all. This is the same illusion Noonan is offering: you can have lower taxes, which will supposedly force the government to rein in spending, so you can feel as if you are fiscally responsible when you absolutely are not.

Noonan insists that things are different now. We are in a crisis! “It can engender a spirit of unified action and sacrifice.” Maybe it can, but have you seen any evidence of such a spirit? No, you haven’t. Noonan allows that “it will take leadership to make that spirit concrete,” but while she is waiting for this concretized spirit to appear she might do well to notice that none of the leaders in her party has any intention of appealing to a spirit of “unified action and sacrifice.” Over the last month since the election, the leaders of her party have made clear that it wants as little unified action as possible (except to unite in opposition to the administration), and wants to avoid making any sacrifices. After all, why would they want to do that? If they can receive credit for being fiscally responsible when they are not, why risk trading political support to be fiscally responsible in reality?

Noonan then goes on to give Obama some remarkably bad advice:

Barack Obama should startle everyone right now. He will win on New Start. He should confound everyone, and give a headache to his foes, by bowing to the spirit of 2010 and accepting the Bush tax cuts, top to bottom. It would be electrifying. It would seem responsive, and impress the center. And it would help Mr. Obama seem credible, not ideological or partisan but reasonable and moderate, when he weighs in on taxing and spending in the future.

It wouldn’t confound everyone. It would hardly surprise many of us. It would confirm that Obama is so willing to accommodate his political opponents that there is nothing he would not accept if it meant building a consensus. At that point, Obama would have declared to the world that the second half of his term would not be defined by triangulation, but instead by abject capitulation. This wouldn’t impress “the center,” but would thrill his most determined foes and disillusion anyone who still had confidence in his abilities. His credibility on taxes and spending would not be enhanced. In his party, his credibility would be badly damaged if not destroyed, and the other party would not give him credit for coming around to their view, but would instead ridicule him for taking so long to embrace their position.

What doesn’t make much sense is Noonan’s confidence that Obama will prevail on New START. Despite some more positive hints from a few Senate Republicans that they might be willing to consider the treaty this year (and even this is thin gruel), it remains the case that Obama has reached this point through unfailing accommodation and yielding on every demand Kyl has made. Kyl has reasonably concluded that he can keep dragging his feet, and Obama will simply keep giving him more, and the more that Obama insists that the treaty must be ratified the more eager Kyl becomes to extract a larger price. In other words, Obama has been reliably willing to give in on every demand on this issue, and it is partly because of this that the treaty is much more likely to be delayed and to fail than it is to be ratified. DeMint’s wild-card filibuster threats make the treaty’s delay and death that much more likely, and DeMint is the sort that will not be satisfied by any concession that Obama makes.

It is becoming fashionable to declare that New START is “irrelevant” or the result of Obama being stuck in a “time warp.” These articles are useful mainly for reminding us that we shouldn’t take these authors too seriously when it comes to national security issues. Over at Arms Control Wonk, Michael Krepon points out another danger that failure to ratify this treaty presents:

Treaty trashing undermines norms protective of our eyes and ears in space. NTM [“National technical means”] will be placed at further risk by pursuing the space warfare capabilities that some treaty opponents seek. Instructing the Obama administration to go back to the drawing board to improve verification is a simple dodge; we all know that it may take years of logrolling to do so. In the meantime, there will be no inspections and no reaffirmation of the norm against harmful interference with NTM. Without treaties in force that allow on-site inspections and affirm norms protective of monitoring satellites, complaints about the need for better verification ring hollow.

Treaty trashing in the Senate has taken a significant toll. If irreconcilable Senators have their way, prohibitions against interfering with monitoring satellites will rest on a 37 year-old treaty that can be axed every five years and two treaties from which Moscow may seek to withdraw.

Bearing that in mind, it seems to me that ratifying the treaty does more than “provide minor increases in intelligence,” as Cote and Friedman argue here in an op-ed that should be read and taken seriously. On the whole, Cote and Friedman conclude that the arguments of treaty opponents are nonsense, and I recommend reading their entire piece. A large part of their objection is not to the treaty itself but to the negotiations designed to win over Kyl and reluctant Republicans. To the extent that they object to the treaty’s substance, they complain that it requires little in the way of arms reduction. Cote and Friedman object to the unnecessary and costly nature of the modernization demands Kyl has made and the administration has accepted, and they are right to object to this. It seems to me that this is a good argument for Kyl and his colleagues to support ratification without conditions and an ever-increasing price tag. Of course, we know that there is no chance of that.

At the end, Cote and Friedman outline their vision:

We can do without ICBMs and nuclear bombers, letting the U.S. Air Force exit the nuclear business. A submarine only force would provide all the deterrence we need at far less cost.

Needless to say, if this treaty fails, we will be that much farther away from Cote and Friedman’s goal. It’s not as if more ambitious arms reductions will be possible when a treaty as modest and limited as New START has this much trouble being ratified. Cooperating with the Russians to secure nuclear materials could be hampered and negotiating on tactical nuclear weapons would be delayed indefinitely. The U.S. gains something by ratifying the treaty, and loses a great deal if the treaty fails. The nuclear weapons complex is bloated, but there will be even less chance of reducing its size and cost in the future if the Senate does not support the so-called “distraction” of New START.

Quite a few writers have repeatedly argued that it was some sort of fantasy that Arab leaders were fearful enough of the Islamic Republic to favor airstrikes on nuclear facilities, and that Israel is the mover behind all hawkish opinion on this topic. They have been proven wrong. It doesn’t necessarily follow that bombing Iran is a good idea (I tend to suspect that covert sabotage is having the effect of delaying Iran’s progress on the nuclear front while averting the risks that airstrikes entail), but it does strengthen the straightforward case that a more powerful Iran is a serious threat. ~John Tabin

Tabin is responding to Michael Brendan Dougherty’s new item in Newsweek. Having severely criticized the grand Israel/Palestine-Iran linkage idea more than once, I have no problem agreeing that some Gulf state governments have been supportive of an attack on Iran. This wasn’t really much of a secret even before the leaks. Over a year ago, there were credible stories that the Saudis were willing to allow Israel to use its airspace for just such an attack. People arguing for a specific kind of linkage (i.e., “solve” Palestine to give Gulf states cover to support harsh measures against Iran) were already pretty clearly wrong about tying the issues together before any of these documents were made public. That doesn’t prove that they were wrong to argue that most of the support for attacking Iran was coming from the Israeli government and its hard-line supporters here in the U.S. Indeed, Tabin attributes claims to “quite a few writers” that some of those writers did not make, or at least did not make in such oversimplified terms.

Attacking Iran is not something some of these Arab governments are reluctant to support and have to be bribed into backing. On the other hand, there are other Gulf state allies that are genuinely worried about military conflict and fear the effects that war would have:

Although the UAE regards Iran as one of its most serious threats to national security, UAE officials are reluctant to take actions that could provoke their neighbor and compromise their extensive trading relationship.

And again:

Commercial ties between Dubai and Iran are significant (Dubai is Iran’s largest non-oil trading partner), and as a result the UAEG walks a fine line between maintaining and encouraging this trade and working to prevent suspected Iranian proliferation activities. Although the UAEG is worried about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its short-term policy decisions regarding Iran center on not provoking its neighbor.

No doubt the UAE government is “nervous,” as the cable says. It is incredibly short-sighted and foolish for any governments in these countries to favor military action against Iran. In the event of a war with Iran, their countries (and any U.S. military facilities in those countries) would be prime targets for retaliation, military action would guarantee that Iran tries to develop nuclear weapons, and the attack would merely delay rather than prevent that outcome. It would be very costly, and it would ultimately be for nothing. It may be that the rulers of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are reckless enough to invite yet another destabilizing, futile war into their region, but I wouldn’t assume that the rulers of all of the Gulf states are so dim. Even if they are, there’s no reason to oblige their wishes.

It still seems true that advocates of attacking Iran have been exaggerating the extent of support for this among our Gulf state allies. The leaked cables confirm that they are not simply making this up out of thin air, which is something of an achievement given the lousy track record of some hawks when it comes to making claims about foreign affairs. None of this changes the reality that “pro-Israel” hawks and the Israeli government remain the dominant forces pushing a confrontational U.S. policy towards Iran. The report that some Arab governments agree with this reckless, disastrous course of action isn’t really news, and it doesn’t make military action against Iran any less harmful to the entire region.

What is odd is the new concern for the fears and concerns of Arab governments from people who have spent the better part of the last decade deliberately ignoring or in some cases actively opposing the interests of those governments. As Michael wrote:

Formerly considered an untrustworthy ally for its financial support of Wahhabi Islam, Saudi Arabia is enjoying a strange new respect.

Michael is not finding fault with democratists who no longer indulge their former ideological enthusiasm, but rather drawing attention to the absurd and unworkable nature of their earlier ideas. At one point, Michael writes:

This is hardly the persistent clarity of pushing a regional democratic revolution. It is diplomatic and foreign-policy realism.

In case Tabin missed it, this is a compliment. Michael doesn’t want “the persistent clarity of pushing a regional democratic revolution.” Part of what he is saying is that people who talked about an “end to evil” and ridding the world of tyranny were pursuing a destructive fantasy. He could have added that supporters of war with Iran are pursuing a new destructive fantasy, but this one is not even dressed up in the supposed idealism of democracy promotion. It is a policy dedicated to shoring up decrepit autocracies and preserving Israel’s regional dominance at the expense of U.S. interests and regional stability.

Ross has qualified the claims he made in his column, and explains how he thinks partisanship affects political opinions in a new post. He writes:

So the great T.S.A. debate doesn’t show that conservatives are about to repudiate everything the Bush administration did on national security….What it does show, though, is that conservatives are increasingly open to criticizing security policies that are specific to Obama from a libertarian rather than a national-security perspective (something you could also see happening a bit in the debate over assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki), if the libertarian argument offers the more plausible and popular case.

That makes some sense. Even so, it is worth pointing out that conservative critics of the executive’s claim that it has unreviewable power to order the death of U.S. citizens on the basis of secret evidence have been relatively few and far between. The al-Awlaki case has been one where the Obama administration has expanded on the power grabs of the Bush administration in a genuinely dangerous and destructive way, the libertarian argument against this power grab is the only plausible one there is, and yet for the most part there has not been any real backlash, not even from a “hypocritical and inconsistent opposition.” What that tells me is that most conservatives are not unduly concerned about Obama claiming powers to order the deaths of citizens without due process or judicial review, but many seem very agitated that they must go through an obnoxious airport ritual that they and the TSA agents and everyone else knows has nothing to do with thwarting terrorism. Consistency may be overrated, but one would think that the priorities would be the other way around.

If the partisan mindset were so very powerful, surely the executive’s claim to have unreviewable assassination power should generate more pushback than obnoxious scanning devices at airports. The assassination power claim is a new issue, and one that has far more frightening implications and potential for abuse than anything that the TSA is doing, but it goes largely unnoticed or even wins applause from the right. To make sense of this, it helps to compare it to mainstream conservative critiques of the war in Afghanistan, which usually take aim at its “nation-building” aspect. These critics are frustrated with nation-building as wasteful, but remain basically supportive of nation-destroying: the former is time-consuming, expensive, and complicated, while the latter can be quick, relatively “cheap” and “easy” and largely painless (at least for most Americans). Likewise, the TSA procedures are time-consuming, inconvenient, obnoxious and more directly affect people we know, and the other issue is remote and mainly affects other people. Whatever virtue there is in having a “hypocritical and inconsistent opposition” to act as a check on the concentration of power in the executive and in Washington would seem to be lost if the opposition can’t bring itself to protest against the truly egregious power grabs by the executive.

For most of the last two weeks, I have been arguing for START ratification, and I have been insisting that ratification will boost American and allied security. One of the advantages that treaty supporters have had is that arguments in support of the treaty have generally been well-grounded in reality. It is therefore remarkably unhelpful to have advocates of the treaty say ridiculous things like this:

So quick approval of this treaty goes beyond questions of national security. It’s about national survival. The terrorist attacks nine years ago were unspeakable, but America could withstand more Sept. 11’s. It can’t survive one major nuclear attack.

God willing, we will never have to test the limits of American endurance, but can Harrop actually be serious? Besides being almost comically alarmist, Harrop’s claim betrays an amazing lack of confidence in the nation’s ability to survive even one catastrophic attack. Something that ties together the worst hawkish opponents of the treaty with its most alarmist defenders is the largely irrational fear they have of North Korea, as if these states are going to hand off weapons they have spent years developing at enormous cost and risk retaliation from the U.S. in the event one of them is used. The far greater dangers are unsecured nuclear materials in Russia that might be stolen or sold. Failure to ratify potentially jeopardizes cooperation in securing those materials, and it makes it impossible to negotiate the reduction or elimination of tactical nuclear weapons. Obviously, we have a very real security interest in both of these things, and both are at risk if the treaty goes down, but the petty fearmongering of some treaty advocates is absurd and harmful to the already-poor prospects for ratification. Neither North Korea nor Iran is going to subject the U.S. to a “nuclear holocaust,” and it is reckless and foolish to say so. This isn’t going to make treaty skeptics more likely to support the treaty; it will simply prove to them that the administration has not been “doing enough” on these other fronts, and that its preoccupation with arms control is a waste of time.

It’s certainly true that failing to ratify this treaty is harmful to U.S. interests, and in combination with the Wikileaks debacle it will make the conduct of foreign policy extremely difficult for the rest of Obama’s term and beyond. It is shameful to pursue partisan advantage at expense of the national interest, but it is nonsense to describe this as treason, which is effectively what Harrop says Kyl has committed. If this is what supporters of the treaty are reduced to arguing to get a hearing at this stage, the treaty is in even worse condition than I thought.

Really? Because I’m fairly certain a lot of voters sort of expected Obama to be better on civil liberties than his predecessor. I’m quite certain that Obama did not in fact run on expanding the scope and intrusiveness of the TSA to include naked scanners and groping. I’m quite certain that many of the people defending the TSA and Obama’s various security efforts – from assassinations to drone attacks – would not be defending them were a Republican in the oval office. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure Obama himself wouldn’t support Obama policies if he were still a Senator rather than the Commander-in-Chief. ~Erik Kain

It was always going to be a pretty low bar for Obama to clear to be “better on civil liberties” than Bush. Regardless, whether a lot of people expected that or not, we need to remember that Obama voted for PATRIOT Act renewal in 2006, and went along with the FISA bill in 2008 that he had previously vowed to filibuster. It’s important to distinguish between primary-season rhetoric and what Obama actually voted for when he was in the Senate. If Obama promised one thing to Wisconsin primary voters in the winter of 2007-08 and then did the opposite in the spring when it came time to vote, it’s a bit of stretch to compare the Obama administration to the primary candidate’s rhetoric rather than the Senator’s voting record. There was little reason to assume that Obama would be a civil libertarian in office, and he has confirmed most of the worst fears that civil libertarian skeptics had about him. If many people expected that he would be a civil libertarian, that helps explain why they are dispirited and disillusioned, but it doesn’t refute the core of Fallows’ argument. An important part of that argument is this:

A harder case is Guantanamo, use of drones, and related martial-state issues. Yes, it’s true that some liberals who were vociferous in denouncing such practices under Bush have piped down. But not all (cf Glenn Greenwald etc). And I don’t know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama’s policy — as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate [bold mine-DL].

It is not an argument on behalf of all liberals and Democrats to point out that Ross’ equivalence does not stand up to scrutiny. It is very hard if not impossible to find conservatives and Republicans who were supportive of or indifferent to Bush’s security policies on detention, interrogation, and surveillance, but who have since become passionate opponents of the same under Obama. If anything, Obama’s continuation of these policies makes them feel vindicated. For that matter, the civil libertarians who vigorously opposed these policies are by and large still opposing them now. There are fair-weather friends who might have mouthed some slogans about Bush-era policies and now say little or nothing, and that can be attributed to misguided partisan “team loyalty,” but on the whole these are not people who were speaking out much against the Bush administration on civil liberties. It is also fairly difficult to find as many active defenders of Obama’s most outrageous security policies on the left. If there are “centrist” Democrats defending Obama’s authoritarian policies against progressive critics today, it is probable that they defended these policies against those critics in years past, because “centrists” already favor these policies and use that support as proof of their “credibility” on national security.

Update: Mark Thompson explains the unworkable nature of a profiling system:

Instead, I think it’s pretty clear that the reason a “profiling” system would not work and indeed has not been attempted in the US is that it’s not scaleable. Israel has one major airport, which by US standards would only be “mid-sized.” Yet look at the security line at that airport, which is more befitting of Newark or Atlanta than it is of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. A good profiling system is labor-intensive in a way that 0ur system simply does not have the capacity to implement, and would unacceptably undermine the numerous sectors of our economy that rely heavily on air transportation. And this says nothing of the direct economic costs of appropriately training and paying security officers charged with conducting the profiling. Nor, as the article above suggests, does it say anything about eliminating the bureaucratic infighting and secrecy amongst American intelligence agencies in a manner that would allow tens of thousands of airport security personnel access to the intelligence necessary to adequately do their jobs.

Ross:

In the 1990s, many Democrats embraced Bill Clinton’s wars of choice in the Balkans and accepted his encroachments on civil liberties following the Oklahoma City bombing, while many Republicans tilted noninterventionist and libertarian. If Al Gore had been president on 9/11, this pattern might have persisted, with conservatives resisting the Patriot Act the way they’ve rallied against the T.S.A.’s Rapiscan technology, and Vice President Joe Lieberman prodding his fellow Democrats in a more Cheney-esque direction on detainee policy.

But because a Republican was president instead, conservative partisans suppressed their libertarian impulses and accepted the logic of an open-ended war on terror, while Democratic partisans took turns accusing the Bush administration of shredding the Constitution.

At first glance, this seems plausible. On closer examination, it doesn’t hold up well at all. As James Fallows notes, on the specific question of absurd security theater Ross’ claim is wrong. On the whole, people on the left who are not troubled by the obnoxious TSA scans and pat-downs have not been terribly troubled about most of the other infringements on constitutional protections carried out over the past nine years, and most of the people on the right who have discovered “libertarian impulses” in this case have shown no signs of such impulses until the last year and a half. These impulses were not suppressed during the Bush years. They did not exist. Instead, they have materialized out of nowhere.

Ross sets up the column by citing conservative responses to Clinton-era policies, but what he fails to do is show that the same responses are occurring this time. There would have to be a similar shift on the right under Obama, and it is largely not happening, so the distorting effects of partisanship don’t really account for that much. Aside from the backlash against obnoxious TSA procedures, can anyone point to a significant movement of conservatives towards more non-interventionist and libertarian positions on national security issues? Where Obama has continued Bush-era security policies, conservative commentary has ranged from the disingenuous claim that “Obama is turning out to be better on these issues than I thought” to the mocking attack that “the silly left-winger Obama has been forced to face harsh reality.” Where Obama has rejected or modified Bush’s policies in any way, mainstream conservative criticism has typically been that Obama is indulging his base and/or jeopardizing national security.

I would argue that much of the conservative criticism of Clinton’s foreign policy that we saw in the ’90s was not a tilt towards non-interventionism at all, but instead represented frustration with military interventions that did not strike at what these critics saw as the “real” enemies of the United States. Part of this was indeed just a partisan reflex to criticize the administration no matter what it did, but this meant that for every conservative critique of the Balkan interventions (of which only a very few were non-interventionist critiques) there were two attacks on Clinton for not taking a hard enough line against Iraq or Iran or North Korea or Russia or China, depending on which regime happened to be the preferred focus of outrage. The initial response on the right to intrusive legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing may have struck many of the right constitutionalist and libertarian notes, but this vanished within a year or two when it became much more useful to bash Clinton for being too soft on terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular.

Today the story is not that different. Even when some conservative hard-liners have objected to the TSA procedures, it is usually not because they have rediscovered their inherent distrust of the national security state’s power (which they never had!), but because these procedures have simply underscored for them how silly it is to screen all passengers at airports. The uproar over obnoxious TSA methods has presented them with a new opportunity to revisit their calls for profiling. At best, most of these protests are complaints against inconvenience rather than objections against intrusive government, and many of them do not reject authoritarian practices, but simply want to change the form of authoritarian practices. To that end, rhetoric about preserving American liberty is useful, but these are often the same people who have tended to justify every government encroachment on liberty and every expansion of the warfare and national security state in the name of “defending freedom.” This is all fitted into the larger Republican attack that Obama refuses to “name” the enemy, and that he has erred by no longer referring to the “war on terror.”

There are other ways to test Ross’ claim. PATRIOT Act renewal came up for a vote earlier this year. If the “partisan mindset” is indeed awesomely powerful, it should have been the case that Republicans voted overwhelmingly against renewal. Instead, renewalpassed the House 315-97 with 90% of the nays coming from the Democratic side. The measure passed the Senate by unanimous voice vote after privacy reform amendments were stripped out at the insistence of some Senate Republicans. That tells me that aside from a handful of honorable exceptions, including Ron Paul, Walter Jones, and Jimmy Duncan, there simply aren’t very many Republican representatives who object to intrusive and authoritarian anti-terrorist legislation no matter which party controls the White House. For that matter, there aren’t enough Democratic representatives who object to this sort of legislation on principle, but there were 87. If the “partisan mindset” changed national security views as dramatically as Ross suggests, there should have been many more anti-Obama Republicans resisting renewal of the PATRIOT Act than Democrats.

We could go down the list of relevant issues, and the pattern would be the same. Partisanship does not change that much in terms of the positions taken by members of the two parties. What it can do is change the intensity of feeling. This means that antiwar activists and civil libertarians are caught in an odd bind: many of them are genuinely appalled by Obama’s continuation of Bush-era security policies on detention and surveillance (and especially by his outrageous new claim of assassination powers), they are disgusted that his administration is hiding behind the state secrets privilege to cover up for the Bush administration, and they object to escalating the war in Afghanistan. However, they know very well that the alternative to Obama is to have all of these things, plus torture, aggressive foreign policy in all directions, and possibly war with Iran.

Of course, people should be outraged by the intrusiveness of these new procedures (because the entire process is an absurd overreaction to a real, but limited threat), just as they should have been outraged by the damage done to constitutional liberties for the past decade and more in the name of anti-terrorism, but one of the reasons that there are so few members of Congress willing to cast votes against excessive anti-terrorist legislation is that their constituents do not value constitutional liberties as highly as they claim they do. More to the point, when it does not directly affect their constituents it is clear that there is even less concern for the constitutional liberties of others. Indeed, what we might conclude about a significant part of the backlash is that the slogan of the protesters is not so much “Don’t Tread On Me” as it is “Why Won’t You Leave Me Alone and Go Tread On Them?”

My new column for The Week on the consequences of New START’s failure is now online.