That Iraq could possibly grow into a freer, more pluralistic and even prosperous Mideast democracy is a wonderful prospect. But it is not the reason the United States invaded Iraq, and if we don’t keep that in mind every time someone such as Goldberg decides to see silver linings in the policy clouds we will only make similar mistakes over, and over and over again. ~Kevin Sullivan

This is right, but what I would insist that we question the claims of silver linings as well. When Goldberg talks about how “noble” it was to put Iraq “on a path to democracy and decency,” he is making a more modest version of Wehner’s triumphalist claim that invading Iraq ranks high among the noblest acts in American history. Beneath all of it, there is still the conceit that launching an unnecessary war of aggression is right and noble. This is why I find this misguided and premature victory talk to be very foolish. Not only is this an attempt to see a silver lining in a very dark cloud, but it is also a bid to vindicate the entire misbegotten war. There will be no chance of avoiding the same mistakes in the future if the pro-war triumphalist argument about Iraq prevails. For these people, the mistake was not that our government invaded Iraq. At most, these people believe that the mistake was in how the government invaded or what it did afterwards.

Something else that we need to watch carefully is whether Iraqi political developments have anything to do with a “path to decency.” The standard by which war supporters want to judge progress in Iraq is a very, very low one. If Iraq has a reasonably peaceful election day, they are ready to claim complete success. Consider what was required to make the election yesterday as uneventful as it was:

By some estimates more than 1m Iraqis now wear a uniform. The government spends almost a fifth of its budget on wages for security people, and benefits from American help. Improvements in training and equipment have led to the fortification of much of the country. Baghdad alone has an estimated 1,500 checkpoints as well as hundreds of miles of cement blast-walls. The city is more militarised than it was under Saddam Hussein.

One can say that all of this is necessary and unavoidable, and that may be right, but one of the last things fledgling democracies in countries with a history of authoritarianism need is a massively oversized military and security apparatus. It is often the case in developing countries that the military can serve as an institution that unites and integrates the nation. This will tend to make it the one institution most of the population trusts and respects. However, with greater prestige and respect comes a willingness to intervene in politics when the elected civilians prove themselves to be incapable of governing effectively and/or relatively honestly. When experiments in liberalism, democratization and privatization go awry or are associated with extremely negative economic conditions, public confidence in these things disappears. If democratization is followed by dysfunction, corruption, misrule and lack of basic services, military or authoritarian government becomes very attractive. Given the extent of the sectarian politicization of Iraq’s military and police that already exists, and considering the harsh and arbitrary practices of security forces right now, the differences between an authoritarian and a democratic Iraq are not nearly as great as they are supposed to be.

Post-WWI American disillusionment with the war they had just fought was the result of many factors, but a very important factor was the recognition that the war to “make the world safe for democracy” was for nothing. Far from securing democracy anywhere, the war accustomed free nations to wartime authoritarian measures and unleashed the most terrible, destructive political forces in human history. The world has only in the last two or three decades begun to recover from the consequences of the catastrophic decisions that led to WWI, U.S. involvement and the post-war settlement that followed. That should always be a reminder to us that governments are capable of tremendous destruction in a short period of time with grave consequences for years and decades to follow, and so we should be extremely sparing in the government’s use of force and coercion. We should therefore be extremely wary of arguments for starting wars and also strained ideological arguments claiming success despite few gains and enormous costs.

If the war has provided no strategic gains for the United States, and it has not, the quality of Iraq’s democracy becomes the last thing war supporters can rely on to find some small redeeming feature for an otherwise terrible, unjustifiable policy. Should Iraq’s democratic experience prove to be brief or marred by corruption and violence, that last redeeming feature will vanish. There is not much right now that is very encouraging that this will not happen.

Bigotry cannot explain, however, why Mr Obama’s approval rating among white Americans has fallen since he took office, from roughly 60% to 40%. As the president pointed out in September: “I was actually black before the election.” White voters have changed their view of Mr Obama not because of his skin colour, but because of what he has done—and what he has failed to do—since he took office. And although he is not on the ballot this year, this matters. The less people admire the president, the less likely they are to vote for his party in the mid-terms. ~Lexington

According to CNN’s national exit poll, 43% of whites and 41% of white men voted for Obama, and this is approximately where his approval among these groups is now. What needs to be explained is what that approximately middle 20% of whites were thinking when they said they approved of Obama when they had not voted for him. Perhaps it was simply goodwill for a new President and relief that our long national nightmare was finally over. Perhaps it was something else. Whatever the reason for this gap between approval and actual voting habits, the fall in Obama’s approval among whites was a function of the broad but extremely shallow base of a lot of those early high approval ratings.

When people point to Obama’s “low” approval numbers among whites, which do indeed hover around 40%, I am unsure what they mean. Give or take a couple of points, whites who disapprove of Obama’s performance are whites who did not vote for him. The genuinely disaffected white independent voter who voted for Obama and has since been scandalized by his agenda is rarer than gold. The whites who did not vote for Obama have also not voted for Democratic nominees for many previous cycles. In other words, the change that needs to be explained is not why McCain-voting whites disapprove of Obama (after all, they wanted the other candidate and almost always vote Republican for President!), but why for a period of several months millions upon millions of McCain-voting whites said that they approved of Obama as he embarked on an agenda they presumably did not support at the polls.

White approval, or lack of it, is very close to white voting in 2008. Democratic House candidates ran slightly ahead of Obama in 2008 with these voters. According to the national House exit poll, Democratic House candidates received 45% support from whites and 43% support from white men. In Rasmussen’s generic ballot poll, whites favor Republicans 50-30 with 5% choosing “other” and 14% “unsure.” What seems likely is that most of this undecided and would-be third-party vote will come back to Democrats. 53% of whites backed Republican House candidates last time, and it seems reasonable that roughly that many will back them this year. White 65+ voters backed 2008 Republican House candidates 53-44. They are likely going to do the same thing this year. The difference is that they will make up a larger share of the electorate than they have in the last two cycles. Added to this is the shift among all 65+ voters away from the Democrats and towards those stalwart Republican champions of unsustainable entitlements.

The story of the 2010 elections is not that Obama has been losing that many white voters, because the disapproving whites were mostly never Democratic voters anyway. The story is that the electorate will be disproportionately made up of those groups who had not been voting for Democrats all along, namely whites and specifically whites 65 and older. The GOP’s completely shameless but politically effective defense of the sanctity of Medicare has also managed to pull away other 65+ voters who had been preferring Democratic House candidates by a narrow margin in the last two cycles.

Whenever possible, I refer to the Iraq war as a war of aggression, because that is what it is and has always been. One thing that has often puzzled me about the reflex to declare victory in Iraq, as a Newsweek cover story did recently, is that I don’t know what it could possibly mean to achieve a victory that anyone would want to celebrate as the result of a war of aggression. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans are dead. Tens of thousands of Americans are injured, some of them severely, and Iraq now boasts one of the highest percentages of disabled people in the world. Millions of Iraqis were turned into refugees or displaced within their own country. All of this has come about because of a war that did not have to happen. All of this has come about because of a war we started. It is bad enough that our government unleashed this hell on people who had never actually done America any harm, but it is unconscionable that any of us celebrate what has been done as if it were something good and worthwhile.

Of course the new administration will try to make the best of it, claim progress and take credit for anything it can. That is in the political self-interest of this administration. Having inherited a mess that the political class has convinced itself was improving, it would not be advantageous to be the one overseeing the unraveling. The rest of us are not burdened by such considerations.

I don’t think it is particular noble to destroy another people’s country on the basis of unfounded, paranoid fears that its small, economically weak, militarily inferior government posed grave threats to the global superpower. There are many words that come to mind to describe this, but noble is not one of them. It is not especially noble to do this with no meaningful plan for restoring order and governance in the wake of the invasion. There is no nobility to be found in the afterthought of poorly constructing a democratic regime whose elections served as the trigger for massive bloodshed. Likewise, there was not much nobility when our government belatedly recognized its incompetence and failure long after it could do the civilian casualties any good and proposed a plan that would temporarily reduce violence long enough for the previous administration to get out the door. It is also hard to find anything noble in a sectarian-dominated governing coalition that oversees a politicized military and police force that has begun reviving the nastier bits of the old regime. As The Economist reported last fall:

Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.

The domestic-security apparatus is at its busiest since Saddam was overthrown six years ago, especially in the capital. In July the Baghdad police reimposed a nightly curfew, making it easier for the police, taking orders from politicians, to arrest people disliked by the Shia-led government. In particular, they have been targeting leaders of the Awakening Councils, groups of Sunnis, many of them former insurgents and sympathisers, who have helped the government to drive out or capture Sunni rebels who refused to come onside. Instead of being drawn into the new power set-up, many of them in the past few months have been hauled off to prison. In the most delicate cases, the arrests are being made by an elite unit called the Baghdad Brigade, also known as “the dirty squad”, which is said to report to the office of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.

I suppose there is some kind of brutish justice to having the oppressed assume the role of the oppressors, but it is hardly noble.

When I refer to the Iraq “surge,” I usually make a point of emphasizing that its political goals have still never been met. The promise of facilitating political reconciliation was central to the purpose of the “surge.” Perhaps this was always an unrealistic claim, but it was the one the previous administration made. This was the thing that was supposed to make the “surge” different from previous escalations in troop levels, and it was one of the main ways to measure the success of the plan. As far as security was concerned, the “surge” of brigades did help improve things. This was aided by successfully turning Anbar Sunnis against jihadists that were killing their people. The Awakening was a product of successfully applying counintersurgency doctrine, but it predated the arrival of the additional brigades, whose presence was temporary and which ended over a year and a half ago.

During the presidential campaign, no one in the media wanted to hear an explanation for decreasing violence that did not endorse the conventional wisdom that the “surge” had achieved this all by itself. When Obama attempted to argue that the previous sectarian violence and mass expulsions were responsible for the lower levels of violence in 2007-08, this was derided as a refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth that the “surge” was genius. It was, in fact, a temporary fix and something addressing the symptoms of Iraqi political dysfunction. “Surge” enthusiasts are a lot like TARP defenders. Numerous other factors were involved in stabilizing the respective situations, the stated goals of the plan were never realized, and then when some measure of stability was restored the proponents of the plan declare that their plan succeeded beyond all expectations.

Contrary to Wehner’s claim, the “passion for the democratic process” and the revival of sectarianism are not mutually exclusive. In Iraq’s experience, one is the product of the other. In an already deeply divided country, the politicization of sect and ethnicity through elections has been and will continue to be a cause for disorder and violence. Let’s also remember that the levels of political violence in Iraq would be considered unacceptable in most other countries. It is only by comparison with the nightmarish conditions of 2006 that things seem “peaceful.” As The Economist reported last week:

A month or more can pass without an American killed in action and civilian casualties are at their lowest in six years—though this still means that nearly 300 civilians are dying from political violence every month [bold mine-DL].

Reviewing the deeply corrupt and ineffective government Iraq has, The Economist article continues:

Iraq’s citizens are the losers. They cannot rely on their government for basic infrastructure. Baghdad has no flights to Mosul, the country’s northern hub, since rival leaders are in charge there. The road south to Amara and Basra is littered with half-built flyovers, seemingly never to be finished. By the side of the road lie toppled power masts. No wonder only 25% of Iraqis get the electricity they need. The same percentage has access to adequate health care; 22% are malnourished [bold mine-DL]. In world rankings of income per head, Iraq comes 162nd.

Iraq is as much of an economic basketcase as you might expect a war-torn, corruptly-governed country to be:

Only one thing is preventing a humanitarian crisis: public-sector employment. The state accounts for three out of five jobs, and 70% of this year’s budget will be spent on salaries and pensions. Capital expenditure is rare, admits Iyad al-Samarraie, the parliament speaker. His office is decorated with gilded chairs and extravagant mouldings, ordered by his predecessor. “This is what passes for investment,” he says.

The private sector is in even worse shape. Few middle-sized businesses have emerged since the invasion. Companies are either small family affairs or sclerotic behemoths. The non-oil industries, still partly state-owned, should soak up labour. But they account for only 13% of GDP (the regional average is 33%). Mass idleness is the result. American soldiers stationed in rural areas with few government jobs say the unemployment rate there approaches 80%. The national rate is 45-47%, including the underemployed—and, because of the high birth rate, the workforce is growing by 240,000 a year.

Even if Iraq’s democracy did not labor under these burdens, democratization has always been an insufficient reason for turning Iraq into a killing zone for seven years and risking and losing the lives and limbs of tens of thousands of Americans. Greg Scoblete has written in response to Wehner:

The invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot be justified solely on the basis of our love for democracy.

Of course, there is nothing else that war supporters can point to other than the quite meager fact that Iraq’s new heavy-handed, illiberal government happens to be an elected one favored by a majority of the population. Had another major power launched such a war for the explicit purpose of toppling Iraq’s government, most Westerners, including most war supporters, would be demanding that its leaders be tried for war crimes. Instead we are treated to the absurdity of dressing up an illegal, unjust war of aggression that has laid waste to an entire country as a noble victory of which we are supposed to be proud.

By a one-vote margin, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the Armenian genocide resolution, but if what happened last year is any indication it will either not be brought to a vote or it will be voted down. We already know this, because this is what happens every year. This annual ritual includes the usual protestations and threats from Ankara. These always have their desired effect, because every Speaker yields to the President, and every administration yields to the Pentagon, which reliably implores every administration every year to scrap the resolution. Depending on the state of Israeli-Turkish relations, the resolution has relatively more or fewer backers. Given Erdogan’s treatment of Israel in the last year, there might be a few more than usual.

There is one good reason why the House should not pass the resolution, and at least a dozen bad ones. Max Boot rehearses some of these. The good reason is that the resolution would antagonize Turkey at a time when there might yet be a breakthrough in Turkish-Armenian relations. That would be a good outcome for both countries and for the region. It would honor the vision of Hrant Dink, who worked intently to improve relations between Turks and Armenians in Turkey and between the two republics. Dink argued that Diasporan Armenians should devote all their energy and time to building up the Hayastan that exists and cease dwelling on the genocide, as real and terrible as it was. Incredibly, it was the complete misunderstanding of his statements on this point that inspired his Turkish nationalist killer to murder him. The Republic of Armenia could use the economic and diplomatic links with Turkey, and this might work to lessen the tensions in the southern Caucasus that linger from the Karabakh war. If Turkish-Armenian rapprochement continues, the House should not pass the resolution.

Otherwise, the resolution ought to be passed. After all, it is actually not the business of Turkey whether our House of Representatives passes symbolic non-binding resolutions on any topic. One can argue that the House should never pass symbolic resolutions, but no one ever makes this argument except when it comes to defeating this resolution. Virtually no one who is not working for Ankara or pro-Turkish lobbying groups claims that the genocide did not happen or that it was not a state-organized genocide, so there is no good historical argument against recognition. We do not usually accommodate genocide deniers, and it continues to escape me why we should indulge them in this instance. It’s true that the resolution will do nothing for the victims, but then the resolution is really for the descendants of the survivors who support its passage. They wish to commemorate the attempted destruction of their people and their ancestors’ expulsion from their ancestral lands, and I cannot think of one other group of people in this country we would try to prevent from doing this. It is true that the resolution does not provide any justice for the victims, but then it also does nothing to harm or burden the modern Turkish state. Ankara’s constant opposition is not only shameful but also utterly irrational.

The alliance argument doesn’t hold up very well, either. After all, Turkey makes its own foreign policy and often does so in ways that are quite irritating to Washington. That is Turkey’s prerogative, and generally I have no problem with that, but it does undermine the claim that the U.S. must not displease solidly reliable Ankara with a symbolic, toothless resolution. Ankara annoys Washington and Washington infuriates Ankara on far more substantive issues. Somehow, the alliance survives the real rifts that these disagreements create, because the interests of both states dictate that the alliance is more valuable than the points of contention between our governments. It would survive recognition of the genocide, and once the recognition was done it need never disturb U.S.-Turkish relations again.

Boot mentions needing Turkish aid on Iran sanctions, when it is already virtually certain that Turkey has no intention of supporting a new round of sanctions. If the resolution is scrapped tomorrow, Turkey’s vote on the Security Council will still go against Washington’s proposal because Turkish interests diverge from Washington’s on this question. Since a new round of sanctions is misguided and probably futile, this isn’t so bad, but we need to understand that scrapping the resolution will not yield any substantive gains on policy elsewhere because Turkish cooperation on sanctioning Iran, for example, will not be forthcoming anyway.

There is absolutely nothing that unites these organizations in any programmatic manner except Romney’s ignorance, and the expansion of ignorance is insufficient to topple an American superpower. ~Spencer Ackerman

Via Patrick Appel

As Ackerman knows quite well, Romney’s ignoranceon this point has not lessened since he was running for the nomination last time. This is what I said about Romney’s foreign policy views almost three years ago:

Suffice it to say that a man who rattles off the two major sects of Islam in a list with various other Islamic groups, none of which has anything to do with the other, is profoundly unfit to head the executive branch in time of war with jihadis or indeed at any time. Someone who can look at the sectarian warfare in Iraq (or, say, Lebanon) and talk about how ”they” have all “come together” against “us” is hopelessly confused about the international scene. Someone who cannot demonstrate even the most basic understanding of the fissures and divisions in the Islamic world and the different political organisations within that world should not even be a party to the debate, much less should he be considered a viable “top-tier” candidate for a major party’s nomination.

I don’t revisit all of this just to attack Romney for sport, as entertaining as this can be, but to emphasize the real dangers that come from such profound misunderstanding of America’s jihadist enemies, their relative strength and the rivalries that exist among jihadist groups. Adopting an approach that conflates discrete and significantly different groups into a single force that the U.S. is supposed to combat will blind us to the political realities of the Near East and South Asia. As I said in response to Romney’s conflation of groups three years ago:

Rather than exploiting the cleavages that exist between different kinds of Muslims and different groups of jihadis, as a savvy George Kennan-like foreign policy thinker might propose, the insane plan of leading Republican candidates and the party leadership is to keep reinforcing the image of a monolithic, unified “worldwide jihadist effort.” The net result of this thinking will be that America will have that many more implacable enemies to fight and we will have missed that many more opportunities to turn jihadi against jihadi and use natural Baathist hostility to the same to our advantage. Rather than playing on national and sectarian divisions and exploiting opposition between relatively secular Muslims and their religious counterparts, talk of a “worldwide jihadist effort” helps to push these groups into collaboration where none existed before.

Unfortunately, we cannot simply dismiss Romney’s errors in the last campaign as the temporary product of a candidate trying to position himself as a foreign policy hawk in the tail end of the Bush era. His errors have persisted and his arguments have not changed in the slightest. His analysis was laughable three years ago, and it is even more so today.

Ackerman also draws attention to Romney’s bizarre view on how to conduct U.S. diplomacy, which seems to boil down to having one diplomatic attache for each regional command around the world. Ackerman writes:

Such an individual would “encourage people and politicians to adopt and abide by the principles of liberal democracy,” something that “would be ideal if other allied nations created similar regional positions, and if we coordinated our efforts with theirs.” That’s it for diplomacy, and he doesn’t have an agenda for global development. Why the world will simply do what America says simply because America says it is something Romney never bothers to consider. High school students at model U.N. conferences have proposed less ludicrous ideas.

Then again, those high school students have probably given the subject more thought. That is what I find most inexplicable about Romney’s decision to spend any time at all trying to fill in gaps in his record on foreign policy that he and everyone else know are there. He seems to think that making enough of the conventional noises on the right issues will persuade doubters and fence-sitters that he really does know what he’s talking about. As a political matter, this is folly. Bush was and remained famously clueless and incurious on foreign policy, but during the 2000 campaign he did not waste time trying to match Gore on national security and foreign policy credentials. He covered his glaring weaknesses by playing to the strengths that he did have. Romney seems to be intent on doing the opposite.

Ackerman also notes that the war in Afghanistan receives no mention in the book. As Romney still cannot make up his mind whether Obama has handled Afghanistan well or poorly, it is no surprise that he has not yet figured out how to demonize Obama for doing something that was promised and which Romney would normally support.

P.S. Faithful Romneyite Kathryn-Jean Lopez says of Romney’s book tour: “If you had any doubts about who he is, you’re seeing the real thing now.” Yes, yes, we are.

Secretary Paulson’s TARP prevented a systemic collapse of the national financial system. Secretary Geithner’s TARP became an opaque, heavy-handed, expensive slush fund. It should be shut down. ~Mitt Romney

Via Chris Dierkes

This is the same line that Thune uses now. This is a ridiculous position to take. One can either recognize that the original TARP was always potentially an opaque slush fund to be used for whatever purpose the executive branch wanted, and it was therefore an outrageous measure that ought to have been defeated, or one can accept the abuses of the TARP that inevitably followed from the absurd way it was designed. Even though the TARP was unnecessary and misguided, Thune and Romney want to get credit for supporting something they claim saved the day, but they don’t want to pay the political price for supporting something that has become play money for whatever strikes the administration’s fancy. Romney supported and Thune voted for a measure that made possible the slush fund they denounce.

Supporters of a policy or piece of legislation do not get to receive credit for the supposed benefits and avoid blame for the negative consequences. Thune and Romney supported a corrupt, unconstitutional giveaway of public funds to be used in an unaccountable way for arbitrary purposes. Lack of accountability and arbitrariness were built into the measure from the beginning. The problem of the original “troubled assets” for which the funds were intended has never been solved, and the TARP funds have never been used for the purpose for which they were appropriated. Naturally, Romney would like to have it both ways, but his distinction between Paulson’s TARP and Geithner’s TARP is specious and meaningless.

Shadi Hamid has written a thoughtful response to my post on weak and reckless democracies:

It is hard to imagine a powerful IRGC – being the apparently maximalist actor it is – ever allowing the Greens to take power, unseating its pro-Ahmedinijad allies in the process. A democratic Iran, if it comes to be, will be an Iran where the IRGC is neutralized or forced to become something it currently isn’t.

That’s possible, but then I have a hard time imagining the Greens taking power without having to make significant compromises with the IRGC, such as accepting their role in the economy and tolerating at least some political influence. There would probably be red lines that the new civilian government would not be allowed to cross, and if those lines were crossed it might mean the establishment of a military government. This might resemble the interventions of the Turkish military whenever a civilian government was perceived to be threatening the Kemalist system. Democratic transitions from authoritarian governments with powerful military institutions do not have to leave powerful military institutions intact, but these transitions have occurred when military leaders have accepted their reduced role. Then there are states where the military tolerates the return of civilian rule, but not at the expense of its own economic and political interests. It seems more likely that Iran will be one of these. All of this is probably moot anyway, since I doubt very much that the Greens will take power in the foreseeable future, but it is useful for thinking about what it is that we mean when we speak about democratization and its effects on international relations.

Hamid and I are in agreement that “democracies, particularly young ones, can and do take needlessly aggressive action in their foreign policy.” I think we can also agree that overreaching by Georgia and Israel is a function of Bush-era aggressiveness and the foreign policy moral hazard effect of unconditional U.S. support that Leon Hadar defined and I cited in my last column. I suppose there is some “cherry-picking” in that I am selecting the most prominent examples of reckless military action by democracies, but part of the selection also involved choosing governments that most observers would agree are democratic.

There are others that could be added to the list that would not be widely recognized as democracies. Venezuela has acted provocatively and dangerously towards Colombia with its support for FARC rebels and its occasional sabre-rattling, but usually the harshest critics of Chavez’s actions deny the democratic origins and nature of his government. At this point, I think everyone would agree that Ethiopia is effectively an authoritarian state, but it retains the trappings of a democracy. We can all probably agree that Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia had far more to do with the ambitions of Zenawi and U.S. support for an “anti-terrorist” military campaign than it does with whatever form of government it has. Similarly, I think that an unelected authoritarian Georgian leader with the same anti-Russian nationalist concerns might have tried the same thing as Saakashvili. A more interesting question is whether any Georgian government dominated by a nationalist desire to reclaim the separatist republics would have acted more prudently. It could be that a hugely distorting factor in all of this is the expectation of U.S. backing, but that backing was another kind of recklessness endorsed by both parties here at home.

As long as the Megali Idea dominated Greek foreign policy for most of the first century of independence, democratic Greek governments actively pursued irredentism and national unification, and eventually plunged Greece into a series of ultimately disastrous wars. Indeed, as Greece became more of a mass democratic state Greece became more assertive in its ambitions to capture historic Greek territory from the Ottomans. It was Greek liberal democrats who were pushing for entry into WWI to secure more territory, while it was the monarch who wished to keep Greece neutral. Greece embarked on its most ambitious and disastrous campaign when it had formally been a parliamentary democracy for almost ninety years and had at least fifty years of experience as a mass democracy. Of course, Greece was encouraged in this foolish course by all the great democratic Allied powers, and Greece landed troops in Smyrna under the guise of enforcing an international treaty, but that does not make Venizelos and the voters who supported him less responsible. It was not for lack of well-established institutions and experience with democratic politics that Greece blundered into Anatolia. I mention the Greek example to make the point that the incentives for democracies with territorial claims against their neighbors are very different from democracies without them, and nationalist territorial and security objectives will have a destabilizing effect regardless of regime type.

The first is that acknowledging Russia and China’s unwillingness to help would strike the most powerful blow yet to Obama’s central foreign-policy message: that his personality and eagerness for engagement would open up doors for America that were slammed shut by the Bush administration’s alleged arrogance and quickness to go to war. Acknowledging that the Security Council will never allow strong sanctions would be tantamount to admitting that the very logic and premises of Obama’s foreign policy is flawed. Thus, this isn’t really about Iran. It’s about the politics of failure and Obama’s increasingly desperate attempt to shield his presidency from the hard realities of the world. ~Noah Pollak

Via Scoblete

It’s true that Russia and China have no intention of supporting new sanctions on Iran. I have been saying this for well over a year. This is one reason why “crippling” sanctions will never be effective. The Chinese will work to fill the void that other states leave behind, and the pressure the sanctions are meant to impose will never come about. The “crippling” sanctions favored by many Iran hawks are an unworkable option. Notice that Pollak fails to say anything about this.

What I have also said is that trying to build a coalition to support sanctions will not work because too many other states don’t share U.S. objectives and most simply don’t care about Iran’s nuclear program. Many are like Brazil, which is building an economic relationship with Iran and officially accepts Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is peaceful. Another reason these other states don’t share U.S. objectives is that those objectives are unrealistic and unreachable. This has always been the problem behind Obama’s “engagement” policy, which has had precious little to do with actually engaging Iran in a sustained way. Obama wanted to change the means the U.S. used to pursue the same unreachable end, namely the elimination or severe limitation of Iran’s nuclear program. What the administration and its hawkish critics have been unable to see is that it is the end, not the means, that needs to be changed. Acknowledging this would force Iran hawks to admit that pretty much everything they have said about Iran policy has been wrong.

Five months ago I wrote a column for The Week in which I argued that the GOP needed to stop reflexively rejecting every foreign policy decision Obama made. As I said at the time:

In the short term, the Republican credibility gap means that Obama will have little effective domestic opposition to his foreign policy. The GOP’s recent hysteria over Obama’s decision to cancel the Central European missile defense system confirms this. Unfortunately, an administration that lacks credible critics is far less likely to be held accountable for its misjudgments. By failing to make credible, accurate arguments against Obama’s decisions, Republicans will make it far more difficult to resist the administration when it does err—as it inevitably will.

Occasionally, when the administration has genuinely been doing the wrong things, his Republican critics have landed some solid blows, but this has been entirely by accident. Mishandling the deposition of Zelaya was one time when Obama’s habitual attackers stumbled upon the right critique, because they are always aiming to find fault with every move and to misrepresent his foreign policy at pretty much every turn. The botched handling of a Falklands issue that shouldn’t even be on Washington’s agenda is another.

Despite its impeccable Reaganite pedigree, neutrality over the Falklands already seemed like a betrayal of a Britain his permanent critics were convinced Obama disliked. After all, they would say in all seriousness, he sent back the bust of Churchill! This was insipid criticism that could be easily overcome. Now Clinton’s ill-considered remarks provide them with some real ammunition. For the last year the GOP has been muttering darkly about Obama’s desire to undermine U.S. allies. On the whole, this has been utter nonsense, much like the “apology tour” lie that accompanied it, but every once in a while the administration blunders and provides some small confirmation of this otherwise fantastical claim. As bad as it is to harm relations with Britain over something that is none of our business, it might be even worse if it helps to revive an unrepentant, unreformed, incompetent nationalist opposition.

My new column for The Week on the Dubai assassination and its aftermath is now online.