A little over a week ago, Spencer Ackerman wrote:

After all, is there any foreign leader once held closely by the U.S. that Obama has more visibly snubbed than Hamid Karzai? The Obama team’s Afghanistan strategy can be fairly-if-simplistically described as a broad attempt to circumvent Karzai by bolstering Afghan institutions at and especially below the national level. There’s no shortage of outrage by Karzai over being denied so cosmetic a gesture as a White House visit until he does X, Y and Z. And this is a guy whose government is both perilously weak and has powerful impact over what will soon be about 140,000 U.S. and allied troops. So where’s the Karzai Kaucus on the right? Why don’t we see Sarah Palin on Facebook stickin’ up for our Afghan friend’s right to exercise his sovereignty and govern his country as his people have sort-of elected him to see fit?

As it turns out, Karzai’s defenders were just a little late to get started, but now they can’tstop talking. Adding Karzai to the list as one of the many allied leaders Obama has supposedly insulted and betrayed was only a matter of time. It fits into the preposterous framing of an Obama foreign policy of “coddling our enemies while alienating allies,” as Palin put it, but as soon as one pays any attention to U.S. interests and objectives in the regions where these so-called betrayals have occurred the framing completely collapses.

One way of replying to the Cheney/Palin criticism is to give the answer Ackerman offered last week:

When stated that way, the answer is fairly obvious: Karzai gets a lot of economic, security and political assistance from the U.S. while inconsistently demonstrating his commitment to ostensibly mutual goals of good governance that are important for U.S. interests in the region. An American administration that didn’t press Karzai would be a negligent steward of those interests. The fact of the U.S.-Afghan closeness just strengthens the case for candor and firmness — not high-handedness, certainly, but urgency.

From the administration’s perspective, recalcitrant allies that are resisting the U.S. over issues that the administration believes are essential to the success of American policy in their regions of the world are harming both U.S. and allied interests in the long term. So the administration is trying to goad, pressure or otherwise push these allies to cooperate. In other cases, such as the scrapped missile defense plan, Washington was actually doing Poland and the Czech Republic a favor by not making them a primary target of Russian animus.

The difficulty we face in Afghanistan is one that Leon Hadar outlined in his column applying the idea of moral hazard to foreign policy: allies that believe themselves to be important for achieving U.S. goals in their regions and therefore take U.S. backing for granted act with impunity and often act in reckless, destructive or short-sighted ways. The allies reap the benefits, such as they are, while the U.S. will bear the costs of the actions and risks the allies take.

Dr. Hadar described the hazard this way:

Indeed, while Americans have been considering the moral hazard of their government bailing-out the American International Group (AIG) and other irresponsible risk-takers in Wall Street, they could also have pondered the way American global intervention in support for foreign governments and groups tends to encourage them to engage in risky behavior — Georgia provoking a conflict with Russia; Pakistan supporting radical Islamists; Israel building-up settlements in the West Bank — whose costs end-up being paid by American soldiers and taxpayers, and could therefore be considered a case of moral hazard.

The most recent example has been the decision by President Barack Obama to escalate the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. Notwithstanding the Obama administration’s announcement of a timeline for a start of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, America’s top client there, the government led by Hamid Karzai, concluded that Washington was making an open-ended commitment to maintain U.S. military presence in the AfPak region.

While administration critics are satisfied with descriptions of Karzai’s bruised feelings and resentment, we can better understand Karzai’s latest outbursts as evidence of his belief that the U.S. needs him more than he needs the U.S. Indeed, the “poor” treatment of Karzai is what in another context Obama’s critics might call an attempt to ensure some accountability. The commitment in Afghanistan isn’t unconditional and it isn’t open-ended, and the “poor” treatment of Karzai has been an attempt to make that clear to him while also working around him when necessary. Now that Karzai is trying to compel Washington to be more accommodating and solicitous by making very loud public protests, he is finding allies in hawks here at home who seem to wish Obama to adopt the approach of the previous administration, which consisted of paying Karzai a great deal of attention while letting Afghanistan fall apart. These are the people who are always game for another troop escalation wherever and whenever (and they are usually keen to relax the rules of engagement, too), but they seem to have no patience for any of the political and diplomatic legwork needed to complement and consolidate the security gains made by the additional forces. Their newfound concern for Karzai’s contentment should be viewed in this light.

It surprises me that this non-story about Petraeus’ “mild, unsurprising” remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to generate any reactions. I don’t have much more to say about the original dispute, and there is no need to respond in detail to Andy McCarthy’s lengthy denunciation of Petraeus (via Andrew), but as part of a larger pattern I find hawkish conservative attacks on Petraeus both fascinating and depressing. The attacks are fascinating in that they show how exacting and unreasonably high the standards are to be considered truly “pro-Israel” in some conservative circles, and they are depressing for the same reason. If Petraeus, or Tom Campbell, or even Obama and Biden cannot be acknowledged as perfectly conventional supporters of Israel, and if their views are going to be warped and distorted beyond recognition as “anti-Israel,” what chance does anyone else have of critically thinking about the relevant issues without receiving even worse treatment? Then again, the attacks have become so unreasonable and the misrepresentations so severe that the enforcers may be losing their touch.

It is also worth noting that Max Boot, who has been Petraeus’ lead defender in all of this, seems to think that he has been policing the extremes of conservatism by repudiating anti-Petraeus conservatives just as others had done before in denouncing Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran. What Boot misses is that McCarthy and other Petraeus attackers are the ones assuming the role of ideological enforcers against another ostensibly “anti-Israel” figure. The bile being directed at Petraeus is the same that has been directed at Buchanan and Sobran for decades. The one ultimately derives from the other. The vicious habit of casting out people for legitimate differences of principle and policy in the most hateful way has started coming back to haunt movement conservatives in unexpected ways. What is remarkable is that Petraeus’ “deviation” is so minimal as to non-existent. Whatever “red lines” there are on the subject that one is never supposed to cross, Petraeus hasn’t even come close to crossing any of them.

To borrow a phrase from Philip Klein, it’s pretty amazing the lengths that some extreme “pro-Israel hawks” will go to in order to distort the facts.

This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections. ~Charles Krauthammer

Yes, I’d say that full-scale conventional bombardment and the wreckage of major cities with air strikes and shelling is comparable to community service, wouldn’t you? I often associate carpet bombing and working at a soup kitchen. There’s nothing “loopy” or “bizarre” about that comparison, is there?

There is some crazy thinking in this debate, and it is to be found among those who seem to think that a refusal to nuke Argentina in response to the highly improbable Argentinean sarin gas attack on the U.S. (or make up whatever scenario you like) is equivalent to lying down and dying. One need only look over the list of NPT signatories and consider which states have both the desire and the means even to launch such a strike. I doubt anyone can find a plausible candidate. Even if there were a state that might want to launch such an attack, when faced with massive conventional retaliation none of them would risk it.

After having spent decades dismissing the possibility of deterring “rogue” regimes, Krauthammer and his colleagues cannot stop talking about deterrence all of a sudden, but they aren’t willing to acknowledge that vast conventional military superiority is also a deterrent against attack. All that Obama has committed to with this review is that the overwhelming retaliation such an attacker would face would not include nuclear weapons. That isn’t saying much, and it is actually no different from the status quo.

We can now expect an innovative surge in global production of chemical and bioweapons–which have effectively just become a cheaper way to attack the U.S. (and its allies). ~Claudia Rosett

Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. Reasonably well-informed people already know that Rosett’s “preemptive disarmament” argument is silly, and everyone else will react to it along partisan and ideological lines regardless of what anyone else says, but there’s something about the irrationality and alarmism in the reactions to Obama’s foreign policy and national security decisions that demands a more thorough response. The number of states exempted from nuclear retaliation and both willing and able to launch biological or chemical weapons attacks on the United States and our allies is zero. If there are any states capable of doing this, the massive conventional retaliation they would inevitably face would be more than enough to prevent them from making the attempt. All that the review does is commit the U.S. to not nuking non-nuclear states we are most likely never going to fight in the highly unlikely event that one of them launches an unconventional attack on us.

Daniel McGroarty points out something important:

As for disarmament, leave it to one of the scientists to note: “Ironically, it’s possible that the retirement of 4,000 or more U.S. warheads under the Moscow Treaty [of 2002] and other retirements ordered by George W. Bush may exceed anything Obama does in terms of disarmament.”

An important point to emphasize is that if Bush or a President McCain or any Republican President had issued the same nuclear review, most Republican hawks would point to it proudly and cite it as evidence that America was a wise, benevolent world power that would only unleash nuclear devastation in the most extreme circumstances. They would laud it as another example of the fine Reaganite tradition of “peace through strength,” and so on. For that matter, the utterly unremarkable, status quo nature of the review and the Prague START signed today is just what most Republicans would normally applaud if the President were not a member of the other party. Indeed, as McGroarty writes:

If the version being backgrounded now reflects a shift left from a Bush Era orientation, the first draft must have been written by Donald Rumsfeld.

As usual, Obama governs in a rather dull, “centrist” fashion where continuity with the Bush years is far more noticeable than any change and he is accused of the worst perfidies of left-wing extremism. Obama’s “centrism” often isn’t a good thing, and with respect to extraordinary executive power grabs, state secrets, indefinite detention, illegal surveillance and the unconstitutional treatment of U.S. citizens (including assassination orders!) Obama has matched or even outdone Bush in illegal excesses, but it doesn’t really make much sense to oppose an administration for doing things one doesn’t actually oppose and attacking it for things that it will never do.

Let’s remember that Rosett belongs to the crowd of hawks that believes deterrence is impossible against certain regimes, but now she leans very heavily on the importance of deterrence when she thinks she can get away with claiming that Obama has undermined it. According to the standard hawkish line on Iran, Iran cannot be deterred or contained because it is ruled by fanatics and lunatics, but a nuclear review that does not exempt Iran from potential targets of nuclear retaliation (even though Iran is far from becoming a nuclear-weapons state itself) has somehow badly undermined American deterrence vis-a-vis Iran.

One wonders where Republican hawks can possibly go from here. They have almost three more years of an Obama Presidency to endure, and already they have gone mad with alarmism, hysterics and overreaction to fairly ho-hum policy decisions. Obama needs a credible, sane opposition to keep him in check and challenge him when he is actually wrong. Right now, he doesn’t have that, and all of us will suffer for it. His own party will not hold him accountable, because a President’s party never does, but in any contest between an erring Obama and a mad GOP the latter will keep losing.

Noah Millman has a very thoughtful, long post exploring the reasons for the so-called “closing of the conservative mind.” As I have said before, I am skeptical that the movement conservative mind was ever open in quite the way that Millman or Sanchez means it. The conservative mind of the sort described by Kirk is one that is both grounded in principle and also very capable of critical thinking and self-criticism, but what I think we have seen in recent years is not much the closing of such a mind as its replacement by an ideological mentality that is basically hostile to a conservative mind. To say that the conservative mind has closed leaves open the possibility that it might open someday. Perhaps I am wrong, but once such a mind is obliterated by ideology I’m not sure that it can recover.

Millman’s argument is persuasive that something has changed in degree, but I’m not at all sure that much has changed in kind. What has changed is the relative strengthening and consolidation of movement institutions compared to twenty or thirty years ago, and there has typically been greater access to Republican administrations and majorities and involvement with them during a general period of Republican ascendancy. Where conservative intellectuals once had to prove themselves by the strength of their arguments, they could now increasingly get along by repeating not much more than slogans and audience-pleasing half-truths. By the start of the last decade, there was considerable complacency, which the myth of the “center-right nation” helped to encourage by making intellectual bankruptcy seem to be politically cost-free, and then after 2006 there seems to have been general disbelief and horror that the ascendancy to which the movement had tied itself so closely was now coming to a close.

I agree that the Iraq war and the greater post-9/11 ideological rigidity movement conservatives embraced have worsened matters considerably, but what we have seen over the last eight or nine years is really just an intensification of past habits, which new forms of online media and the growth of distinctively conservative media over the last twenty years have facilitated and brought to a much larger audience. The cocooning instincts were always there (because any group that sees itself as an embattled minority is prone to this), but the means to create a large enough cocoon was not present until the 1990s and afterwards. The creation of the conservative media as an “alternative” to mainstream media gave way to conservative media as a near-complete substitute for their conservative audience. At one point, there was a desire, which I think was partly very genuine, for greater fairness to the conservative perspective, but this soon morphed into the need to construct a parallel universe of news and commentary untainted by outsiders.

Millman contrasts the expulsion of the “unpatriotic conservatives” (i.e., mainly paleoconservatives) with earlier movement expulsions, and sees a difference between expelling “extremists” as opposed to expelling “dissenters.” As far as movement conservatives were concerned then and now, paleoconservatives who opposed the invasion of Iraq (and at least some elements of the “war on terror” more broadly) were like the “extremists” of the past in that we were/are radicals, but we paleoconservatives were considered worse than these others because we were/are also basically reactionaries in many ways when compared to mainstream conservatives. We were and are very sympathetic to the Old Right on both foreign and domestic policy, and we have tended to find fault with movement conservatives on account of their myriad compromises with the welfare and warfare states. Whatever they say now that it is useful, mainstream conservatives tend to abhor the Old Right in both spheres, but they are particularly offended by the desire to return to anything remotely resembling pre-WWII neutralist foreign policy. It may or may not be an important element, but paleoconservatives also tend to be cultural pessimists and many are traditional Christians, and both pessimism and traditional Christianity have helped keep us grounded and wary of any form of triumphalism, be it nationalist or democratist or “conservative.”

Millman mentions that the expelled are expelled from “conservative respectability,” but one reason for engaging in these expulsions is to preserve the respectability of mainstream conservatism in the eyes of the broader public. Another reason for going through the expulsion exercise is to reaffirm one’s own credentials as the True Conservative and Real American, which I suppose must be gratifying in its own right. Opposing the invasion of Iraq was already a minority view during 2002-03, and on the right opposition to the war commanded almost no support, so it was not politically risky to cast out people who were already on the margins of the movement. As far as most non-conservatives were concerned, this was simply a matter of conservatives policing their own extremes, which is what “centrist,” establishment figures are always asking movement leaders to do.

What was noticeable this time was that the supposed radical reactionary extremists were actually the far, far more reasonable ones who were not advocating all of the things that have become so important to movement conservatives: aggressive war, reckless power projection, expansion of state surveillance and detention, exaggeration of the nature and scope of foreign threats, and absolute deference to the executive in “time of war.” In this respect, we have become much more like the anti-anticommunists beginning in the ’50s (e.g., Lukacs, Viereck), who were not really expelled from movement circles so much as they were ignored completely.

Something that people expelled from the movement have tended to have in common is a profound distrust of the federal government and wariness of the expansion of its powers. At least as far as the national security and warfare state is concerned, that is simply not acceptable, because growing and using that state apparatus is the one thing that seems to unite most movement conservatives during and since the Cold War. The expelled have also been just as likely to criticize and oppose Republican politicians and policies as they have those on the Democratic side, and sometimes in even stronger terms because Republicans rely on conservative support. The expelled are very bad partisans and are not “team players.” Another reason for bothering with these expulsions is to show those who remain “inside” how far they are allowed to go until they will no longer be tolerated. At one level, this is standard boundary maintenance that any group practices, but it is also a means of imposing a degree of uniformity and discipline on those who remain.

On the whole, the practice works to keep those “inside” in line, but what it also does is signal to anyone with much intellectual curiosity to stay far away or to leave now. If the quality of conservative thought is worse today than it was ten or twenty or thirty years ago, and I agree that it certainly seems that way, I would attribute this to the triumph of the ideological spirit that has afflicted movement conservatism from very early on and to the strong disincentives ideological rigidity creates for anyone who might be interested in conservative ideas.

I despair of this latest episode of gestural theater designed to make the U.S. look exquisitely reasonable (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?), but which in truth results in the U.S. looking flaccid, or worse, complacent. After all, who gains from a presidential posture that has, in effect, stigmatized our most potent deterrent?

In terms of foreign policy—or, better put, foreign clout—the U.S. is going through a startling period of auto-emasculation. Barack Obama has discarded his predecessor’s big stick—the wielding of which should have confirmed the flaws not of big sticks but of his predecessor—and replaced it with a mission of almost messianic outreach to our foes and most adamant competitors (while, at the same time, snubbing allies like Britain, Israel and India…~Tunku Varadarajan

Shorter Varadarajan: The substance of Obama’s positions is unchanged from the previous administration, but it is imperative that I make him appear as a weak buffoon, so I will simply invent a complaint about entirely superficial appearances that mean nothing.

Varadarajan is just one among many conservatives thrown into apoplexy by basically nothing. He is different from most in that he acknowledges up front that he has no substantive disagreement with what Obama has done with respect to the Nuclear Posture Review, but proceeds to complain about “auto-emasculation” nonetheless. Obviously, some of this is just partisan and ideological opportunism. Republicans and mainstream conservatives destroyed their credibility on foreign policy and national security, they have done nothing to improve on the bad ideas and policies that helped destroy that credibility, and so they have to try to position themselves as opponents of a new Carter. They do this even though they have few grounds for any serious objections to what the administration has done, because it is crucial for them to re-establish the link in the minds of the public between Democratic Presidents and perceived or real weakness abroad. This will allow them to posture as the nationalist defenders of the country, which might be enough to make people forget their remarkable failures in the past.

These critics are laboring under the false impression that by constantly emphasizing their hawkishness and imputing to Obama a dovishness he does not possess that they will turn the public against him. Because Obama continues to be consistently “centrist” and relatively hawkish in his foreign policy, which is mostly a bad thing, he does not provide any real openings for legitimate hawkish criticism. So they are reduced to inventing the “apology tour,” simply lying about the “appeasement of Russia,” hallucinating a “soft” approach towards Iran, constructing a ludicrous narrative of hostility to allies and accommodation with enemies, and topping it off with the silly claim that Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism. Given enough time, I’m sure they will declare that Obama was somehow responsible for Bakiyev’s downfall in Kyrgyzstan and will accuse him of “undermining a critical ally in the war on Afghanistan.” Like all of these other things, this will be rubbish, but it is rubbish they can use.

Criticism of the administration’s clumsy, needless provocation of Britain over the Falklands would carry far more weight if the same people had not already concluded that Obama had been “snubbing” the British by returning Churchill’s bust. Perfectly reasonable criticism of the mishandling of the Honduras crisis is lost in all the caterwauling about the “betrayal” of Poland and Czech Republic on the missile defense decision. Real administration mistakes are drowned out and pushed to the background by the endless yelping about policy decisions that are correct, or boringly conventional or in line with what the critics themselves claim to want. If these people had had any credibility left after the Bush years, they would have already squandered it all in the last 14 months of frivolous, hyperbolic, contradictory complaints about every single thing Obama has done.

These days such critics don’t even attempt to explain how Obama has “snubbed” India, whose prime minister was the guest of honor at the first Obama state dinner. Instead, they just rattle off a list of allied states and simply declare that they are offended. Apparently, India does feel somewhat neglected by the administration. Granting that India feels neglected, does the Indian government have good reason to complain? We should remember that this is also the administration that confirmed the nuclear deal negotiated under the previous one, and it effectively gave up on any idea of mediating in Kashmir after New Delhi protested. Aside from some early, unnecessary public quarreling over climate change regulation and the odd blunder by Holbrooke, there isn’t much that should displease India. As for Ganguly’s claim that Obama is “backpedaling” on the nuclear deal, that isn’t what Bhadrakumar was saying just last week:

The relationship between the United States and India, which lately showed signs of stress, was revamped on Monday with the announcement that the two countries have completed the “arrangements and procedures” for US-origin spent nuclear fuel to be reprocessed in India.

Bhadrakumar went on to say that there might be an agreement ready for signing as early as this week when PM Singh is in Washington for the non-proliferation summit. He added, “Without doubt, Obama is putting his personal stamp on the US-India strategic partnership.”

No contribution to the “Obama is dragging America down” genre would be complete without the completely loopy claim that Obama intends to slash military spending. Varadarajan even drags out Charles Hill, who happens to be a former Giuliani campaign advisor, and quotes him at length as he embarrasses himself by describing Obama’s “solution”:

Close out the wars, disengage, and distance ourselves in order to carry out the real objective: the achievement of a European-style welfare state. Just as Reagan downsized government by starving it through budget cuts, Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex [bold mine-DL] by directing so much money into health care, environ-o-care, etc., that we, like the Europeans, will have no funds available to maintain world power. This will gain the confidence of those regimes adversarial to us as they recognize we will no longer be a threat to them and that we will acquiesce in their maintenance of power over their people.

This is so far removed from reality that I don’t really know what to say. Once upon a time, even Robert Kagan affirmed that Obama embraced the “arrogant interventionism” Varadarajan claims that Obama opposes. Apparently, that is just one more thing that movement conservatism requires be sent down the memory hole.

The news out of Kyrgyzstan is awful, and the latest events there should serve as yet another reminder that the Bakiyev regime has been significantly worse for Kyrgyzstan than the government Western governments and media outlets were so happy to see overthrown in yet another “color” revolution. Of all the governments challenged by “people power” protests in the last decade, Akayev’s was probably the most inoffensive and Akayev himself was a fair sight better than some of the other Central Asian rulers Washington continues to embrace to this day. Akayev’s overthrow never had much to do with “people power” or “democracy vs. dictatorship,” but was simply a contest between the ruler and the country’s elites and the replacement of one family’s control of the government with that of another. As Leon Hadar wrote after Akayev’s fall:

In fact, there are actually a few American experts on Kyrgyzstan and several Western journalists even traveled to Bishkek, and after a day or two they succeeded in getting their message across, and we discovered that, as the New York Times concluded, the uprising looks now less like a democratic revolution and more “like a garden-variety coup, with a handful of seasoned politicians vying for the spoils of the ousted government,” that is, “a plain old coup.”

The ousted Mr. Akayev is now being described as one of the more progressive political figures in Central Asia, while its opponents are depicted as members of the political and economic elite, mostly politicians from the country’s southern and northern provinces, trying to overturn the results of the last parliamentary elections and inciting mobs to commit acts of vandalism.

Bakiyev has since imitated Akayev’s authoritarian habits and became even worse than Akayev ever was. The dead protesters in Bishkek are proof of that. The good news in all of this is that Bakiyev seems to have fled, but not before his forces have killed at least 17 and perhaps as many as 100 people according to AP reporting of the opposition’s death toll claims. These are the fruits of yet another “color revolution” that far too many Westerners enthused about out of misguided idealism, weird anti-Russian hang-ups or ideological fantasies of a global democratic revolution. Perhaps the most absurd expression of the enthusiasm for the so-called “Tulip Revolution” was a Chicago Tribune op-edcelebrating Akayev’s downfall and lauding John Paul II (no, really) as being somehow ultimately responsible, but there was virtual unanimity in the Western press that one more bad authoritarian was succumbing to the inevitable, glorious triumph of democracy. As it turned out, Akayev may have been the best Kyrgyzstan was going to be able to get, and ever since he was deposed Kyrgyzstan has been less stable, governed less well, and now joins Georgia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a new scene of violent repression of civilian protesters by a U.S.-allied government. Might we begin to learn from this that foreign political clashes are not usually clearly-defined ideological contests between democrats and authoritarians, and that there is not much reason to celebrate the destabilization, political upheaval and disorder that such things usually involve?

If you really move the goal posts, defining up “success” as the Surge having not only reduced levels of violence and addressed immediate drivers of conflict but having also managed to fix all the problems in Iraq’s political process, then yeah, it failed. But I don’t recall that ever being the aim of the operation in 2007, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the U.S. military and its friends in the diplomatic corps to be able to settle the political affairs of a host nation. ~Abu Muqawama

That’s a bit of hyperbole on his part, which is necessary for his objection to hold up. No one claims that the “surge” was ever supposed to “fix all the problems in Iraq’s political process.” However, it was supposed to facilitate political reconciliation, and by Bush’s own standards a plan that did not include political reconciliation on major points of contention would not be a successful one. It was not the critics of the plan who put these measures of success in place–it was the authors of the plan.

Fortunately, we don’t need to rely on anyone’s memory for this. We can refer to Bush’s January 10, 2007 address to the nation, and we can review the White House’s “fact sheet” that summarizes the “key elements of the new approach.” In his address, Bush said:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

What were these? Bush continued:

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend 10 billion dollars of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution.

One or two of these have occurred, but the rest remain elusive. As I wrote in my TAC column in December of 2007:

The Washington Post declared in an editorial, “By every metric used to measure the war, there has been an enormous improvement since January.” Every metric, that is, unless you include measures of rebuilt and functioning infrastructure, political progress, or public opinion—all of which are as vital to success
as physical security.

Some of the political elements that the previous administration considered “key” to their “new approach” were these:

Strengthen the rule of law and combat corruption.

Build on security gains to foster local and national political accommodations.

Make Iraqi institutions even-handed, serving all of Iraq’s communities on an impartial basis.

Is anyone going to argue seriously that there has been significant progress on any of these “key elements”? These are political elements of the plan that the administration itself emphasized as essential, and I don’t think anyone can say that the goals have been reached. There are other political elements listed on the “fact sheet” that are still neglected over three years later. If anyone wants to separate the security gains that have occurred in part because of the additional brigades present in Iraq during 2007-08 from all of the other stated goals of the plan, he is free to do so, but it is absurd to say that it is not credible to judge the success of the plan according to the standards set up by the administration that proposed it.

Will over at the League has picked up on two completely contradictory NRO responses to Obama’s nuclear posture review announcement. The first response from Giuliani is suitably hysterical and preposterous, which is what we would expect from him, and the second from Henry Sokolski is appropriately sober and credible. Giuliani proclaims the announcement a disaster, and Sokolski acknowledges that there has been no real change in policy. Only one of the two can be right, and it isn’t hard to determine which one that is. One need only read the relevant passage carefully to see that Obama has not so much removed ambiguity as he has stated the obvious:

For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty [bold mine-DL], even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

In other words, Obama has committed to not escalate any future conflict to nuclear war in the improbable event that Brazil or South Africa or Japan decides to attack us with other unconventional weapons or cyber-warfare. Oh, the wretched appeaser! How will we ever survive the long night of Brazilian domination? Ahem.

Will’s contrast of the two also helps to set the stage for discussing Roger Kimball’s rather silly post on the same subject. Naturally, Kimball falls into the Giuliani camp of hysterical over-reaction:

The posture in question, though, is self-abasement. Nuclear weapons are fearsome things. We wish they didn’t exist. Therefore we will take steps to reduce our threatening posture in order to appear more emollient. Has no one in Obama’s inner clique heard of the Roman military historian Vegetius: “Si vis pacem, para bellum“: “if you want peace, prepare for war.” The possession of weapons facilitates war: no doubt. But history demonstrates that pacifism and signs of weakness precipitate war. The choice, in other words, is between rhetoric that celebrates peace and comity, and policies that actually achieve it. Obama has once again plumped for the former.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that there is a reasonable conservative reaction to this announcement, which is basically to shrug one’s shoulders, but it is inevitably drowned out and overwhelmed by the cacophony of foolishness that passes for foreign policy commentary on much of the right. I could even understand the criticism that there is no need to make an announcement when nothing has actually changed, but that isn’t flashy and provocative enough when responding to a dull, reasonable Obama decision.

Coming back to Kimball, it isn’t at all clear how more or less preserving the status quo in this case sends a sign of weakness to anyone. Unless the North Koreans are under the mistaken impression that they are in compliance with a treaty they withdrew from years ago, this announcement will make absolutely no difference to North Korea. The administration is still promising overwhelming retaliation against any state that would attempt this, which will certainly keep the Ukrainians on their toes, and the threat of a massive conventional response should manage to keep the Kazakhs and Belarussians in check. In fact, pretty much every state to which this statement applies is either a client, a purchaser of U.S. arms, or a member of some treaty or partnership organization to which the United States belongs, so it seems unlikely that there would ever be a conflict with any of them that would require a future administration to have to follow through on this commitment.

This distancing from the US introduced an element of incoherence into Conservative foreign policy. A Thatcherite hand-bagging of Europe only really makes sense emotionally and strategically if it is balanced by a warm embrace of the US [bold mine-DL]. But Mr Cameron knows that many British voters now associate the special relationship with involvement in unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bureaucrats of Brussels may not be particularly popular in Britain: but at least the price for Britain’s membership of the EU is not paid in blood.

The Tories have a particular problem with the US because their sister-party is the Republicans. Like many youngish politicians, Mr Cameron would dearly love to embrace President Barack Obama and to drink deeply from his aura – if such a thing is possible. But the Tory leader has to pretend that the US politicians he is closest too are the likes of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

This is a pretence that is increasingly painful. The special relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was based on a genuine meeting of minds. The two leaders shared core beliefs in anti-communism and small government. But, since then, the Republicans have moved right and the Tories have moved left. The Republican party has just made it clear that it regards state-run healthcare as on a par with Satanism. But Mr Cameron tells British voters that he treasures the National Health Service. Only last week, the Tory leader gave a speech on community organisation in which he explicitly praised the late Saul Alinsky – a Chicago-based social organiser who is a bogeyman for many Republicans, who regard him as Mr Obama’s socialist Godfather. ~Gideon Rachman

Rachman does a fairly good job describing the divergence between Tories and Republicans, and he makes several good points as he defines the Tory predicament, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Tories have become incoherent. On foreign policy at least, my impression is that Cameron is attempting to achieve a difficult balance between an Atlanticism that is not mindless and reflexive (as Blair’s was) and a Euroskepticism that is likewise not unreasonably hostile to Europe. Blair was really the worst of both worlds: inflexibly Europhile (and therefore badly out of step with his country) and insanely supportive of every American initiative (and therefore badly out of step with his country). Cameron is unlikely to please the extremes of his party on these questions, but it seems to me that his views on relations with the U.S. and the EU are no more incoherent than what the British public prefers.

I am not British, so perhaps the idea that Britain must choose between subservience to Washington or subjugation to Brussels makes more sense to those who are, but it doesn’t seem as if Britain should have to confuse a “warm embrace of the U.S.” with total support for whatever Washington wants to do no matter the cost to Britain. As I mentioned in my last column, Cameron has shown an interesting willingness to criticize U.S. policy when he thinks it necessary, and he has repeatedly stated that a good alliance between two states depends on frankness and criticism from time to time.

What we see is that the party of British Unionists and nationalists has become alienated from its former federalist partners in Europe. Short of completely gutting their party’s identity, I’m not sure how the Tories were supposed to maintain the pretense that they embrace Euro-federalism. If pretending to be of like mind with Sarah Palin is painful, pretending to favor more concentration of power in Brussels when one does not would be excruciating. We are also seeing a party that prides itself on its support for the alliance with the U.S. becoming appropriately skeptical about how readily Britain should lend its support to U.S. efforts. An ally is not an automatic yes-man; a real friend does not indulge his friends in stupid, self-destructive behavior.

Perhaps the more interesting break Rachman describes is the much greater Tory interest in communitarianism and more self-sufficient communities. The influence of Philip Blond’s very interesting ideas on Cameron’s thinking is probably quite overstated, but an important difference between Britain and America is that Blond’s “Red Toryism” would cause most American conservatives to run screaming from the room even though there is not that much that is really “red” in Red Toryism. Even if one holds that “Red Toryism” is itsef incoherent and leads to adopting a grab-bag of policies, the genuine Red Tory concern for the adverse effects of state capitalism on society is important and absolutely necessary right now. Such a view is rarely tolerated in Republican circles, unless it is harnessed to another centralist initiative, and it is never seriously adopted by party leadership. What is most striking is the degree to which so-called “Red” Tories are far more supportive of the decentralization of power and wealth than their ostensibly more right-wing Republican counterparts. This disagreement may not have an impact on U.S.-U.K. relations, but it wouldn’t be surprising if Republicans started mocking a Cameron-led, Tory-governed Britain with the same insults they normally reserve for France.