Count me as a skeptic whenever administration allies begin claiming that the White House is guided by ideas derived from Catholic social thought, or indeed from any form of theological reflection. Via Kevin Sullivan and Laura Rozen comes this report from Religion News Service:

McDonough helped craft Obama’s landmark address to Muslims last June in Cairo, and the robust defense of American foreign policy—including the waging of “just wars”—during the president’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Norway [bold mine-DL].

A key component of Obama’s foreign policy is the Catholic concept of the common good, McDonough said. “It’s a general posture of seeking engagement to find mutual interests, but also realizes that there is real evil in the world that we must confront,” he said in an interview at his West Wing office. “The president also recognizes that we are strongest when we work together with our allies.”

The most obvious reason to be skeptical here is that the previous administration had any number of willing helpers who were happy to dress up whatever injustice or error it was committing as being either entirely consistent with Catholic teaching or an expression of Catholic moral theology. Whether it was George Weigel re-inventing just war theory to approve of preventive warfare or Michael Gerson declaring Bush’s immigration policy to be the embodiment of solidarity, we have been inundated with people appropriating Catholic teaching for very bad or questionable causes. Marc Thiessen is the most recent and perhaps most egregious example of this, but he is hardly alone. Those are admittedly extreme examples, but they serve as a warning whenever administration allies begin claiming theological guidance for their policies.

Obviously, McDonough wasn’t going to be able to dictate the content of Obama’s speech, but I do find it odd that the two speeches he did help to write are remarkable for their failure to say anything meaningful about the gross injustices that have occurred in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. (He did at least manage to acknowledge that there was a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.) All that Obama did say about Iraq in Cairo was that it was a war of choice and it was now coming to an end, and all that he said about it in Oslo was that the war “was winding down.” He never even mentioned the name of the country we had invaded and occupied in a war that he had originally opposed. One of the reasons I found the Cairo speech underwhelming is that it specifically omitted any reference to Lebanon or Gaza. His Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech likewise never touched on either conflict.

Yes, we all know Obama was limited politically in what he could say. Besides, it would be difficult for someone who supported the Lebanon and Gaza campaigns to find fault with them, but he might have said something to acknowledge the human costs of these conflicts. A view informed by the idea of the common good, which is related to the principle of solidarity and inspired by a spirit of charity, would not pass over these things in silence. A defense of the common good may sometimes require the use of force, but what of the terrible damage to the common good when force is used illicitly, unjustly, excessively and disproportionately? On this the “Christian realist” Obama had nothing to say in the two speeches where it would have been most natural to address such questions. At the same time, he specifically endorsed the criminal war against Yugoslavia that had no justification in law or morality while speaking in Oslo.

Someone will object that this holds Obama to an unrealistic standard. After all, he is a head of state and a politician, not a theologian! That’s true, but when the administration or its advisors begin spreading the word that Obama’s foreign policy is informed by Catholic social thought it seems more than fair to judge policy and public statements accordingly. Just judging by the two speeches McDonough helped write, to say nothing of any actual policy decisions Obama has made in the last year, the “key component” has not been all that important to administration foreign policy.

Greg Scoblete and Andrew address why Palestinians receive so much more attention when there are people in other parts of the world who suffer far more. As far as American attention is concerned, I think they are right that U.S. financial and diplomatic support and especially military aid account for why there is as much attention paid to Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the United States as there is. What is interesting is that the American public is relatively less aware of and less concerned about Palestinian grievances despite being far more directly implicated in the policies that create those grievances. One might think that Americans would be unusually attentive to the results of policies they are subsidizing, but as we all know the reverse is true. As far as worldwide attention is concerned, there are many other reasons for greater attention, most of which also have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

What Mead does not seem to understand is that the greater attention paid to Palestinian woes is a product of the ridiculously disproportionate attention paid to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is not actually all that important, but the constant attention it receives has made it strategically important for reasons that have nothing to do with the establishment of a Palestinian state or the delineation of borders. One of the reasons for the fixation on this conflict is that at least some Westerners take tremendous interest in supporting Israel. As they have focused more of their attention on the conflict, others have done the same.

The desire to identify with Israel as a fellow Western democracy is matched by a desire to show solidarity with fellow Arabs and Muslims. There are no other ongoing decades-long conflicts between a Western state and a Muslim population under its occupying authority. Russia controls Chechnya and has brutally suppressed Chechen separatists while doing far more collateral damage, but with a very few exceptions Westerners do not identify Russia as being like “us” and Russian control over Chechnya is a long-established, universally accepted political reality that has nothing to do with the rest of Europe or the U.S. Add to this mix the Westerners who view the conflict as either a relic of colonialism or a remnant of Cold War proxy fights. This group is going to be more likely to sympathize with the Palestinians as another movement for national self-determination rather than seeing the conflict as a miniature version of civilizational or geopolitical struggles. At the very least, they are not going to engage in tortured rationalizations of unjust Israeli policies, and they are unlikely to pin all of the blame for the conflict on just the Palestinian side.

In addition, there is greater interest in the conflict because of the sacred geography of the disputed territories. The same cultural heritage and religious sentiments that foster sympathy for Israel in the West also make the world’s Christians and Muslims pay far more attention to a conflict taking place in the Holy Land. Depending on the theology and politics of the church in question, this attention will translate into zealous Christian Zionist support for Israel, social justice-driven concern for dispossessed, stateless people, the witness of peace churches against political violence or confessional solidarity with the small number of Palestinian Christians who remain.

There are other cases where U.S. allies are engaged in illegal occupations of land, such as Turkey in Cyprus, but in such “frozen” conflicts there are not new outbreaks of violence to generate headlines and remind outsiders that the conflict remains unresolved. There is not as much attention paid to the dispossession of Greek Cypriots because of Turkey’s strategic importance, the political circumstances in Greece that contributed to the Turkish invasion in 1974, and because there is not that much sympathy in Europe for old-fashioned nationalist causes like the one that tried to unite Cyprus and Greece. There is also less attention paid to this situation because there are no Greeks living under Turkish control, and so there is no question of resolving the political status of a subject people.

Once a conflict becomes a constant fixture in daily news reporting and becomes a permanent item on the agendas of many major governments, there will start to be established and approved narratives of the conflict that will vary depending on the politics of the observers and the governments involved. Over time, these narratives are going to generate critiques and alternative explanations that will pay more attention to the neglected sides of the story. One might also ask why South African apartheid captured so much Western attention in the 1980s and why certain sides in the Balkan Wars in the ’90s won sympathy around the world rather than others. After all, in terms of sheer human suffering these were not outstanding cases then or now. They captured the attention of outsiders, especially that of Westerners, because of where they were taking place and the people who were involved.

As we all know, the Balkan Wars attracted far more attention and direct intervention than equally or more destructive contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan or central Africa because they were taking place in Europe, and because Western governments decided first to recognize and then to align themselves with the breakaway republics of the former Yugoslavia. At the heart of this was the sentiment that wars and ethnic cleansing should not be happening in modern Europe. Added to this was sympathy for the apparent underdog in the struggle, the Bosnian Muslims, and the (mistaken) assumption that aiding Bosnian Muslims would improve the image of the United States among Muslims around the world. As for South Africa, it held itself out as a modern, industrialized Western democracy, but it retained an extensive system of racial segregation that was no longer accepted in the rest of the West. It was also an important Cold War ally. Had South Africa not been a major Western ally, or if it had not been ruled by descendants of Europeans, the attention and interest in ending the apartheid system there would have been considerably less. The same is true of Israel and Palestine today.

As usual, Nikolas Gvosdev has written an excellent analysis of the foreign and economic policy divergences between emerging-market democracies and the leading European and North American democracies. (Via Kevin Sullivan) Gvosdev makes many of the points I have been making on Iran policy, democratization, and the increasing anti-hegemonic effects of globalization for the last year and more, but I would like to go in a slightly different direction this time.

Hawkish critics of Obama want to make two contradictory arguments against the administration. On the one hand, they say that he is too accommodating and too willing to believe that there are common interests among major powers that will lead to cooperation on supposedly “global” issues. This is one of the standard complaints against the administration by Robert Kagan in any one of a half-dozen articles and op-eds in the last year. The complaint goes something like this: “Doesn’t Obama realize that states have divergent interests? How can he be so naive as to expect cooperation from other great powers?”

To take their criticism seriously, we would have to believe that his critics accept the reality and inevitability of multipolarity, and we would have to believe that they also accept the relative decline in American power that this entails. Of course, they don’t really accept either of these things. For the most part, they do not acknowledge the structural political reasons for resistance to Obama’s initiatives, and they recoil from any suggestion that America needs to adjust to a changing world. They locate the fault for any American decline entirely with Obama, because he fails to be sufficiently strong in championing U.S. interests. “Decline is a choice,” Krauthammer says, and he accuses Obama of having chosen it. Such critics are not bothered by the reality that the Iran sanctions they want Obama to pursue are not possible without the cooperation of other states that they argue (correctly!) he will never be able to get. Naturally, this has no effect on what they think Iran policy should be. It simply becomes fodder for their next anti-Obama article.

At the same time, they obsessively ridicule Obama’s supposed conceit that all of America’s international problems were going to start disappearing once he became President, and they are always ready to point out that Obama has not somehow magically eliminated the divergent state interests that prevent him from succeeding in his foreign policy initiatives. They insist Obama is blind to structural barriers and divergent state interests, and in the next breath they mock him for not having dissolved them through force of personality. Here the complaint goes something like this: “The world still doesn’t love us, and Obama promised us that they would! Wah!” Once again, America is in decline and Obama is supposedly to blame, but this is simply because of “the arrogance of the president and his top advisers.” Oh, yes, and because Obama simply “doesn’t care whether [the nations of the world are] with us or against us.” At this point, we can probably cue up the moronic arguments about his rejection of American exceptionalism.

America is freedom, and freedom must be strong. ~Mitt Romney

I read this bit of nonsense last week, and it came back to me when I looked at Matt Continetti’s post on the Tea Party movement. What reminded me of Romney’s drivel was this passage (via Ross):

The lesson I draw from Raban’s essay [link added-DL] is that the Tea Party issues — spending, taxes, and American strength — have been the key to Republican fortunes over the last year [bold mine-DL]. They are the glue that binds a Republican-leaning independent in Arizona to a die-hard social conservative from Georgia to a Democratic-leaning independent in Massachusetts. They are the same issues that drove the Reagan Democrats to the polls in 1980 and 1984. They are the basis of the conservative revival — not any GOP attempts to copy whatever gimmick David Cameron’s Tories are deploying today (ineffectively, one might add). Deviate from these three, as the Republicans did during Bush’s second term, and you lose the Tea Party. And thus your majority [bold mine-DL].

There are several things wrong with this. First, there is the unfounded claim that Republicans deviated from an anti-tax position during Bush’s second term. They did not do this. Continetti cannot show us evidence of this, because it did not happen. Then there is an equally unfounded claim that “deviation” on spending in Bush’s second term had something to do with losing Republican majorities in Congress. Spending had little or nothing to do with this. The most egregious example of adding to our ruinous debt came in 2003 well before Bush’s re-election with Medicare Part D, and the Iraq war that cost hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars continued to be and remains to this day broadly popular in Republican and conservative circles. The worst of Bush-era spending excesses came long before 2006, and voters did not expel the GOP in 2006 because of spending deviations.

Next there is the idea that the second Bush term represented some “deviation” from “American strength.” This claim is partly true, but not for the reasons Continetti thinks. What Continetti means by this is that second-term Bush was more inclined to listen to foreign policy realists after he was chastened by setbacks in Iraq, and he backed off from the more aggressive, confrontational positions he had staked out in his disastrous first term. Bush stopped being quite so reckless, and even refused to escalate into full-scale war with Iran, and this disappointed the hawks and interventionists who had been cheering him on until then. So when Continetti says that Republicans in Bush’s second term deviated from support for “American strength,” he means that they stopped listening so readily to the incompetents who had encouraged them in their most aggressive instincts earlier.

Far from “deviating” from what Continetti thinks “American strength” means, Republicans up until 2006 backed an aggressive, confrontational foreign policy that repeatedly yielded bad results. The electorate recoiled from the disaster they had unleashed in Iraq and grew disgusted with their inability to cope with the mess they had helped make. Republicans lost their majorities in Congress. Even after 2006, Republicans continued to endorse the same morally and intellectually bankrupt foreign policy ideas they had supported all along. Romney’s ridiculous foreign policy arguments and Continetti’s claim about the importance of “American strength” as an issue show that these people have learned absolutely nothing.

In reality, American strength was waning during the last half of Bush’s presidency because it was being wasted needlessly in an ongoing occupation of Iraq. This was when Iraq was consuming itself with sectarian violence that was partly enflamed by the democratization the administration insisted on carrying out. The invasion of Iraq had also empowered Iran by eliminating one of the main checks on its influence. Relations with Moscow were in deep freeze as the administration frittered away American credibility with its provocative backing for NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia, which the 2008 war exposed to be meaningless. Administration policies of indefinite detention and torture had badly damaged America’s reputation around the world. A combination of ideological blindness and rank incompetence helped ruin Iraq even more and drove the majority of the public fleeing from the party that had identified itself completely with the war and the administration. It was actually the GOP embrace of what Continetti calls “American strength” (i.e., destructive, counterproductive policies that harm American security) that led to the party’s political failures. This so-called “American strength” position involves supporting policies that exhaust our resources, alienate allies and needlessly antagonize other major powers. Obviously, Continetti is oblivious to the domestic political consequences of the foreign policy he advocates, or else he might acknowledge that it was the so-called “American strength” issue that did most of the work of discrediting and defeating the Republican Party four years ago.

Ponnuru and Lowry defend their essay on American exceptionalism. I will confine my remarks to responding to just three points. This is Lowry and Ponnuru in the original essay:

As president [Obama] has been unusually detached from American history: When a foreign critic brought up the Bay of Pigs, rather than defend the country’s honor he noted that he was a toddler at the time.

This is their claim now:

We do not think Obama was under any obligation to defend the Bay of Pigs; it would have been fine for him to say that he did not consider it worthwhile to debate any country’s decisions from the early ’60s.

There is no explanation how Obama was supposed to defend “the country’s honor” without defending the military action that Ortega was criticizing. Now they claim that it would have been fine if he dismissed the subject all together, provided that he did it without referring to himself. What about “the country’s honor” that Ortega had so outrageously insulted? Clearly, the authors made a ridiculous criticism that completely failed to show the alleged “detachment” from American history they were attempting to show, and now they have been forced to change the nature of their criticism. The new nonsensical argument is that this was “not the only occasion on which Obama has implied that American history has begun anew with his presidency.” Of course, he didn’t imply or say anything of the kind.

One of their replies to Damon Linker’s critique suggests that they did not read Linker very closely. Linker had remarked on the definition of the American creed Lowry and Ponnuru cited. Linker wrote:

This is what the authors tell us: Americans affirm a creed that upholds “liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics.” These principles then combine with “other aspects of the American character—especially our religiousness and our willingness to defend ourselves by force—to form the core of American exceptionalism.”

Some of this is faintly ridiculous. (Is anything less exceptional in human history than a country’s willingness to defend itself by force?) As for the rest, it’s either a string of American banalities and clichés—or an abstract of the Republican Party platform [bold mine-DL]. The next several paragraphs of the essay make it very clear that it’s the latter. That’s right: Lowry and Ponnuru expect their readers to believe that what makes our country exceptional is that large numbers of Americans affirm the ideology of the modern conservative movement.

Lowry and Ponnuru responded:

That Linker considers these commitments unacceptably right-wing tells us more about his views than ours.

This is an amazingly weak retort. It seems quite clear that Linker was saying that these commitments may be “banalities and cliches,” since virtually everyone in the mainstream of American politics would endorse most if not all of these commitments. In this way, their essay is a more elaborate version of the Mount Vernon statement. “We believe in a limited government under the rule of law!” “We believe in liberty!” Well, yes, but who couldn’t claim to believe these things? The alternative is that the definition is supposed to be understood as an identification of modern conservative views with the core elements of the American creed, which the authors claim are at the heart of American exceptionalism. They say that it is “the pillars of American exceptionalism” that American conservatives are supposed to be conserving. It is hardly a reach to conclude that the authors believe that their political principles and the American creed are identical when the authors have said as much. Linker seems to object on the one hand to the conservative appropriation of these commitments and on the other he objects to the reduction or limitation of American political principles that a conservative interpretation of these commitments could entail.

Lowry and Ponnuru distinguish between “the Wilsonian project of relocating American greatness not in our fixed constitutional principles but in our supposed ability to transcend those principles.” This helps make Linker’s point for him. As Samuel Goldman has said:

The difference between “Wilsonian” exceptionalism and the NR kind doesn’t revolve around transcendence of constitutional principles. It’s a disagreement about what those principles are, and the rank order among them. Does the Constitution’s promise of a “more perfect union” trump its formal limitations of government? Are the blessings of liberty material as well as political and juridical? To condemn progressivism as hostile, as such to founding principles is to avoid the argument on the merits, and to ignore the long history of sincere attempts to articulate a left-wing conception of American values. Regrettably, that’s the tendency of the whole piece [bold mine-DL].

Of course, Wilson is one of the most obnoxious American exceptionalists in our entire history. The self-righteous, priggish, missionary desire to save the world from itself through American leadership and force of arms was obviously closely associated with Wilson and his understanding of American greatness. It has been a blight on American foreign policy ever since, but there is no denying that it originated here at home. Of course, this is the part of Wilson’s legacy that the authors like very much. In their original essay Lowry and Ponnuru describe America’s role in the world: “It is also, in keeping with its missionary history, the chief exponent of liberty in the world.” This is a straightforwardly Wilsonian conviction. They are annoyed by Obama because, among other things, he has seemed to be “positively allergic to the word democracy.” Put another way, he has not repeated it mindlessly as a mantra like his unabashedly Wilsonian predecessor. In short, the authors would like to deride Obama for being a progressive at home and for being insufficiently Wilsonian abroad.

This drives home the point that their argument is not really with Obama’s belief in American exceptionalism, but something much more basic. They do not much care for his domestic policy, and they have a sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong with his foreign policy even though they cannot actually prove it. For whatever reason, instead of advancing policy arguments against the administration’s agenda, they have concocted a half-baked theory to make American progressivism and American exceptionalism appear antithetical to one another when any halfway honest accounting of modern domestic and foreign policy tells us that they have been complementary and closely linked. From my perspective, that is one reason to be very skeptical of American exceptionalism, but there is no real reason why anyone who believes in American exceptionalism should doubt Obama’s belief in the same.

P.S. Just to make this point clearly, it is also quite silly for Lowry and Ponnuru to complain about the “Wilsonian project of relocating American greatness not in our fixed constitutional principles but in our supposed ability to transcend those principles” when they take for granted that the federal government ought to act as the “chief exponent of liberty in the world.” Quite clearly, on matters of foreign policy the authors subscribe quite happily to the idea that the role of the federal government will and should evolve as conditions require. It would not be hard to imagine that they or some of their colleagues believe that the American story has been moving towards America’s present status as global superpower and “chief exponent of liberty in the world.” Their claim that America is the “chief exponent of liberty in the world” reflects a vastly more expansive understanding of the role of the government than could be reasonably derived from our “fixed constitutional principles.” It is a pernicious, dangerous view, and it is also a very strange position from which to attack someone else’s progressive interpretations of constitutional principle.

He can make a respectable speech on a Normandy beach, but he’s probably the first U.S. president for whom the Allied landing is emotionally remote. ~Roger Cohen

Cohen’s column is filled with several of these incredibly insulting statements, which he probably thinks are neutral observations. He hasn’t been this helpful since he claimed that Obama could form a bridge with the Islamic world, or when he claimed that more needed to be written about Obama’s extended family.

Obviously, I have no idea whether the Normandy landing is “emotionally remote” for Obama, and neither does Cohen, but the point is that no one would claim such a thing about Obama’s Boomer predecessors for whom WWII was just as far removed from their experience. That didn’t stop Clinton and Bush from trotting out WWII precedents and repeated warnings about the next Hitler, the next fascist enemy, or the next Munich to justify military actions all over the world. Despite their relative lack of political experience during the Cold War, they remained captive to security structures and foreign policy commitments Cold War Presidents before them had created. Whether they were “marked” by Cold War events or not, their policies were certainly shaped by their embrace of Cold War mentalities with respect to Russia and NATO expansion. Viewed one way, it might be a very good thing if Obama were not nearly as haunted by WWII and the Cold War as so many foreign policy hawks seem to be. Even so, he is operating under the same constraints and in the shadow of the same precedents as Clinton and Bush, and his actual policies vis-a-vis Europe have hardly differed at all.

Let’s remember that the Allied landing at Normandy occurred almost 66 years ago. A full three generations have been born and come of age since then. There are many tens of millions of Americans, some of whom had ancestors fighting in Europe, who have no particular connection to Normandy. My grandfather fought at Kasserine, Salerno and Monte Cassino, and my great-uncle died fighting at Iwo Jima, so Normandy has far less meaning for me. One might say that it is “emotionally remote” for us. What is unusual is the degree to which our Presidents continue to pay special attention to D-Day over six decades after it happened and out of all proportion to its effect on the outcome of the European war. There is no particular public veneration for the Inchon landing for a number of reasons, but that changes nothing about U.S. policy on the Korean Peninsula. If Obama’s “feelings” are more tied to “the Pacific,” does that connect him more to the experience of the Korean and Vietnam Wars? Those were fairly significant Cold War events that had less to do with Europeans, but apparently these do not count. Do his supposedly Pacific-tied feelings make the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa more emotionally meaningful to him?

At heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist. ~Roger Cohen

For Cohen, this is merely an observation, but he has to know that this is one of the most damning insults one could say about Obama. What makes this even worse is that it is utter nonsense. Being a Westerner cannot be measured by the emotional attachment one has to important WWII and Cold War events. If Atlanticism has any value, it is rooted in shared security interests. “Misty-eyed visions” should have nothing to do with it.

Cohen’s remarks are not all that much better than the Ponnuru/Lowry complaint that Obama failed to defend America’s honor when Ortega denounced the Bay of Pigs. All of them are judging Obama on what they assume his emotions to be rather than on the substance of his views. Quite a few pundits seem to have Bush-like vision into the souls of other men, and they seem eager to draw sweeping conclusions from what they think they see. This is inherently unfair, and there is no way to respond to it rationally. Where some find Obama to be lacking in American exceptionalist cheerleading, others find this a sober-minded adjustment to the way the world is, but all of them invest far too much meaning into very slight differences.

Obama believes in American exceptionalism, endorses U.S. hegemony, believes in the inevitability and necessity of global interdependence, and accepts the reality of multipolarity, and for him all of these are interlocking and interconnected ideas. He is both as “post-Western” and as Western as the rest of the political class to which he belongs; he is both an Americanist and a globalist, because it has been the custom in our politics for several decades to be both. This is not hard to understand, but it seems to escape most observers when they try to make sense of Obama’s views. The truth is that Obama’s views are really rather boring and conventional, but then they would have to be for him to be elected President. There is a great desire to make Obama either extremely threatening or extremely interesting, but as far as his public, political persona is concerned he is neither of these things. This may be a relief to some and a letdown to others, but it is reality.

Greg Scoblete asks how Washington can possibly restrain Israel with respect to Iran’s nuclear program when it cannot even keep the Netanyahu government from pushing ahead with new settlement construction. That’s a fair question, but I think putting the question this way overlooks the enabling effect that the stated “no space” guarantee to Israel has on the behavior of the Israeli government. This relates to the application of the idea of moral hazard to foreign policy that Leon Hadar proposed and I have mentionedbefore. Many Americans might reasonably assume that by making unconditional, explicit security guarantees to Israel Washington could expect greater flexibility and accommodation from the Israeli government on points of contention, but this is not how it works. The moral hazard of unconditional backing is not only that the ally being supported will engage in reckless behavior, but that it does so knowing that it will pay no real price for this behavior as far as the relationship with the U.S. is concerned. The temptation is to focus criticism on the ally that is taking advantage of this, but the one deserving the most blame is our own government.

If the federal government can be counted on to rescue firms that are “too big to fail,” it can be expected to tolerate just about any allied behavior because of the ostensible strategic value the ally has to offer. Hawks were quick to point out that the administration’s demand for a settlement freeze encouraged Palestinian leaders to be less inclined to compromise, but if this is right imagine how uncompromising and inflexible decades of unconditional support have made Israeli leaders. Indeed, on settlement policy that is exactly what we have seen for over thirty years.

The Georgian government believed that it enjoyed the same sort of unconditional backing, only to discover far too late that it has misinterpreted the signals coming from Washington, but the moral hazard effect is even worse for those allies that can actually count on being bailed out by Washington. Unlike Georgia, Israel does not have to make a leap of faith that Washington will come to its aid, but can take that support for granted. The result is that Israel can ignore Washington when it wants and demand Washington’s help when it needs it. The British have started to appreciate the one-sided nature of their relationship with us. One wonders how long it will be before we understand that our relationship with Israel is much the same.

So long as the benefits from the alliance keep flowing uninterrupted, Israel has no incentive to make concessions that Washington requests. After reducing or halting aid was automatically taken off the table, Washington’s requests fell on deaf ears because the Netanyahu governmen had no reason to listen to them. While the timing of the settlement announcement was probably coincidental, it was a useful reminder that the the benefits of the alliance tend to flow in one direction. Our government has only itself to blame for this. Unless there is at least the possibility of negative consequences for undesired behavior, that behavior will continue. This is not something unique to the U.S.-Israel relationship. It is true of all imbalanced and unhealthy political relationships defined by dependence and unaccountability.

The conduct of U.S. foreign policy is really quite a comedy show. Washington insists on trying to make regimes over which it has no leverage and no influence do things that they are never going to do, and it refuses to use what leverage it has over its allies to achieve its stated goals in their part of the world. A better question might be this: if Washington cannot convince an ally, client state and largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid to halt settlement construction on contested and controversial land, what makes anyone believe that our government can make the Iranian government accede to its demands?

Ever since the Massachusetts Senate election, we have frequently heard that the public is recoiling from Obama and his agenda. The story of the horrified independent voter fleeing to into the Republican embrace has been told and re-told many times in the last two months. Last week Lexington offered a variation on this theme with his emphasis on Obama’s alleged alienation of white voters. After I had written a response to that article, I wanted to identify which voters Obama actually did seem to be alienating far more than others.

When we look at Gallup’s approval numbers and compare them with the presidential exit poll from 2008, we can begin to identify which demographic groups have disproportionately gone from being Obama voters to disapproving of his performance. By far, most of the largest slippage between November 2008 and now has come among core Democratic constituencies: women, liberals, and unmarried and secular voters.

Obama won 56% of women, and now receives just 51% approval, which is more than twice the decline among men. Obama won 89% of liberal voters, and has 79% approval from liberals now. The decline among moderates is negligible (60% of the vote vs. 58% approval). More self-described conservatives now approve of Obama (26%) than voted for him (20%). Fit that into the narrative of the “single greatest pushback in American history” if you can. We have heard a lot about the flight of independent voters, and there may be some truth to this (52% of the vote vs. 44% approval), but what this cannot tell us is why those independents are fleeing. 67% of people who say they never attend church voted for Obama, and now just 57% approve. Obama has also lost more ground with occasional church-goers (57% of the vote vs. 51% approval) than he has with weekly attendees (43% vs. 39%). Obama has lost some support among married voters (47% vs. 43%), but far more among unmarried (65% vs. 58%). Of course, there are small declines in practically every demographic, but the largest drops come among core Democratic constituencies.

All of this seems to confirm the story that some Democrats tried to advance in the wake of Virginia and Massachusetts: disaffection and disillusionment of their core supporters were major factors in the lopsided defeat in Virginia and the remarkable loss in Massachusetts. Most would acknowledge that Creigh Deeds ran an abysmal campaign, and at every setback he redoubled his emphasis on centrism and pandering to the middle that left a lot of Democratic voters cold and unmotivated. What is true at the state level also seems to be true nationally. The administration has been Creigh Deedsing its party to death.

Pointing out that Iraq is at present not very democratic, that Freedom House presently ranks it as unfree or that Transparency International ranked Iraq as the fourth most corrupt country in the world – these things could easily be turned on their head as a reason to stay in the country for an even longer stretch until we’ve brought it up to our standard. ~Greg Scoblete

Ideally, we would all agree on settling for an extremely watered-down definition of success, use this as a pretext for leaving the country fairly quickly, and write off the entire thing as a disaster that should never be repeated. Ideally, we would ignore the resulting cacophony of voices braying about the “betrayal” of the Iraqis and the “abandonment” of people who do not want us in their country. As Greg likes to remind us, however, we do not live in an ideal world, and a few people are already making the argument for keeping sizeable numbers of soldiers in Iraq beyond the negotiated SOFA withdrawal date next year.

Ricks makes a more straightforward argument for stability, which necessitates a prolonged U.S. presence, and Beinart holds out the prospect of remaining longer to keep Iraqi democracy from imploding. One could say that these are very realistic, sober-minded assessments of the situation. They do not partake of any of the triumphalist silliness we have been seeing recently. Unfortunately, they are effectively aiding the triumphalists who treat Iraq’s democracy as the sole rationale for a U.S. presence in Iraq. For his part, Greg thinks that Ricks’ argument will prevail. It will prevail “not because it’s terribly persuasive on the merits, but because it operates within the conventional wisdom about how the U.S. should interface in the Middle East.”

Perversely, the loudest voices declaring victory make it that much harder politically for the administration to abide by the agreement already reached with Iraq’s government. If there is nothing else to show for all of the cost of the war, Iraq’s democracy, such as it is, becomes that much more important as a symbol, and it becomes that much harder to leave to its own fate. If it deeply corrupt, fractious, dysfunctional and shot through with sectarian abuses of power, it will not be worth saving, but it will become all the more politically imperative that we try to keep it from fully collapsing into the sectarian majoritarian tyranny that it is already becoming or the military authoritarian state that it may yet become.

Therefore, all of us who want the U.S. out of Iraq need to emphasize that the Iraqi government is not just “democracy with Iraqi characteristics,” but that it is an abusive, illiberal, corrupt government that is not going to be substantially improved with time. Given the state’s gigantic role in the Iraqi economy and its role as the chief employer, Iraq’s politics will be dominated by divvying up public sector jobs to members of the ruling coalition parties and excluding the members of opposition parties. That will make the incentive for vote-rigging and fraud even greater, and the use of party militias for political violence cannot be far behind. Iraq’s enormous dependence on energy for what revenues it does have will have much the same effect that the “resource curse” has on other developing nations, which will be to enrich the state, crowd out private enterprise and investment and reinforce the public’s dependence on government largesse. This dependence will already be considerable on account of mass unemployment. Whether or not Iraqis go through the process of choosing the people who will preside over all this, the structural political and economic problems Iraq has are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

Remaining longer will simply reinforce the dysfunctional habits that are already practiced in Iraqi politics. Departing on schedule might hasten the end of Iraq’s democratic government and usher in a new authoritarian government, but for all of the reasons we havediscussed this would not be much of a change and it would not be much a loss. The most frustrating part of all this is that this was equally true five years ago, which was when we should have withdrawn when conditions were far more favorable.