There have been quite a fewinterestingposts andcolumns about Avatar in the last few days, so I thought I would revive my bad habit of discussing film commentaries without having seen the movie in question. What most caught my attention in the responses to the film was Ross’ discussion of the role of pantheism:

Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

From everything I have read about Avatar, this is not the most remarkable and theologically subversive aspect of the story. Some reviews have mentioned in passing where the word avatar comes from, noting that it is the Sanskrit word used to refer to a deity that has taken human (or animal) form. The great Hindu epic cycles revolve around such avatars, chief among them Rama. In Sanskrit, the word means “descent,” and its equivalent in Christian theological language would be sunkatabasis, which means condescension. The interesting thing about the word’s use in this film is the implication that the human who takes on the form of one of the aliens is actually vastly superior to the kind of being his mind is inhabiting, and that he is willingly lowering himself to their level. In the end, he decides to protect them against others of his own kind, but this is not all that different from the idea of a deity manifesting himself to defeat the demonic forces that are menacing his people.

The humans in the story are raised up above the aliens, and their use of avatars gives them something of a god-like quality, and it seems as if the depiction of them as “crude, one-dimensional native stereotypes” helps maintain this difference very well. We see this in sci-fi stories all the time: well-meaning human visitors must come to the aid of the noble, spiritually enlightened but ultimately more primitive, somewhat helpless people who are being threatened by the exploitative humans and/or their allies. One of the first to come to mind, and one of the most obnoxious, treacly paeans to the virtues of liberal humanitarian interventionism, is Star Trek: Insurrection, whose basic storyline seems almost identical to that of Avatar.

Otherwise, the film seems to be a major studio version of Captain Planet, complete with blue-skinned heroes and devotion to Gaia, or a more technologically-savvy version of Princess Mononoke.

Jay Cost argues that another “Jacksonian moment” may be upon us:

We might be on the verge of another Jacksonian moment: a time when the people awake from their slumber, angrily exercise their sovereign authority, and mercilessly fire the leaders who have for too long catered to the elites rather than average people. The first time this happened was in 1828 – when the people rallied to the cause of Old Hickory to avenge the “Corrupt Bargain” of four years prior. It’s happened several times throughout the centuries. Most relevant to today, it happened time and again in the 1880s and 1890s, as the people hired then fired one Republican and Democratic majority after another in search of leaders who could attend to the people’s interests instead of the special interests. That age saw the birth of the Populist Party. It was a time when so many felt so disgruntled by the political process that young William Jennings Bryan – just thirty-six years old and with only two terms in the House – came within a hundred thousand votes of the presidency.

I wonder if we’ve returned to that kind of dynamic. In true Jacksonian fashion, the country fired the Republicans in 2006 and 2008 because they bungled the war in Iraq and allowed the economy to sink into recession. They might soon have another Jacksonian moment, and fire these equally useless Democrats for hampering the recovery, exploding the deficit, and playing politics with health care.

Cost may be right that the public will punish the Democrats severely for perceived and real mishandling of economic, fiscal and health care matters. Looking at the House and Senate race ratings, it seems improbable, but the midterms are still almost a year away and things could change. It could be that the collusion with insurance companies that is producing the current health care legislation, the ongoing government alliance with financial interests and the ever-growing public debt will provoke a major political uprising. The trouble is that the opposition party is almost perfectly ill-suited to take advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction. If someone with Andrew Jackson’s or William Jennings Bryan’s politics arrived on the scene today, the first people to try to run them out of town would be mainstream Republicans and conservatives. There is a growing anti-Fed movement on the right, which is probably the closest thing to a Jacksonian faction among conservatives, but it receives nothing but disdain from party and movement leaders. It is true that all but one of the nays on Bernanke’s confirmation in the Banking Committee were Republicans, but this is just as much a function of reflexive partisan opposition as it is proof of any understanding why Bernanke should not have been re-confirmed. Even then, three Republicans, two of whom are from safe Republican seats, voted aye.

Matt Continetti’s fantasies aside, there is no Jackson-Bryan political tradition in the modern GOP. There isn’t even a LaFollette tradition in the modern GOP anymore. That’s a terrible thing, but that is how things stand right now. As far as domestic politics are concerned, Republicans are not really Jacksonians, and most of them wouldn’t know how to be Jacksonians if they wanted to be. It is not enough to be angry at people back East and resent “elites.” What Rod has called Palin’s conflicted populism simply becomes pseudo-populism at the national level, because the GOP is simply not built as a vehicle for seriously challenging entrenched and highly concentrated economic interests. While a small-state Western governor might recognize the danger of collusion between corporations and government, a national Republican leader has to deny or minimize that danger at every turn.

Tim Carney has been doing outstanding work critiquing such collusion for years, and he has apparently done so again in his new book Obamanomics, but the political difficulty with leveling this critique at Obama from the right is that he is simply continuing the practices of the administrations that came before him. Another problem is that the actual Republican leadership in Congress has a poor record in opposing such collusion. This started long before controversies over bailouts. Anyone who supported the prescription drug benefit, which greatly benefited pharmaceutical corporations at the public’s expense for decades to come, is in no position to complain that the other party is trying to enrich insurance companies at our expense. It would be rich indeed to hear from Bush loyalists that Obama is trying to push legislation through for nakedly political reasons when Medicare Part D was jammed through Congress for no other reason than to try to buy votes for Bush’s re-election. It is possible that outrage over the shape of health care reform will generate a backlash because it will directly and pretty quickly affect everyone in a way that the prescription drug benefit did not, but all those would-be Jacksonians out there did not rise up and throw out the Republicans because of that legislation. They did not rise up, even though the liabilities they and their descendants will owe because of that benefit far exceed anything being discussed right now.

Leon Hadar has a good column applying some of the lessons of the financial crisis to an analysis of flaws in U.S. foreign policy:

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.

Dr. Hadar is right to stress the problem that U.S. backing enables other states to pursue foolish, counterproductive or ruinous policies that they might be less willing or able to pursue otherwise, but I think he is not entirely correct when he says that Americans bear the costs of risky allied behavior, or at least he characterizes those costs in the wrong way. It is absolutely true that irresponsible advocacy for Georgian admission into NATO and the promise given in Bucharest last year to Georgia that it would one day join NATO encouraged Saakashvili in his reckless path and contributed greatly to the tensions that led to the August war between Russia and Georgia. However, what Georgia discovered last year was that all of the official Western talk of support for Georgia was just talk, because neither Washington nor any European government would want to go to war with Russia for the sake of Georgia. When faced with actual conflict with Russia and the huge dangers and costs involved, Washington was not really willing to bail Georgia out. Georgia was, if you like, small enough to fail, or at least small enough to be left to its chosen fate. So the price Americans paid is a somewhat different one. We badly damaged relations with Russia by maintaining the illusion of support for Georgia without any desire to intervene directly, which proved how meaningless the Georgian alliance had always been to our government. The war last year showed that NATO did not really have any vital security interests in Georgia and reminded everyone why Georgian membership made no sense.

Our government enables bad behavior by our allies by refusing to pull the plug on military, financial and political support and defending virtually every allied act no matter how dangerous or destructive, which puts Washington in a bind of being ultimately responsible for policies that it cannot really control. Americans were already paying the price of the aid being sent to these allies, which allied actions do not affect one way or the other, but on top of that we assume the diplomatic and political costs of damaging relationships with other states that Washington feels obliged to ruin to maintain the appearance and sometimes the reality of steadfast support.

The case of Georgia is particularly instructive for how foolish this can be. Georgia suffered because Washington allowed its government to believe that implicit Western guarantees existed for Georgian security, and Washington then revealed at the last possible minute that those guarantees did not exist. Instead of a bailout, which would have been catastrophic for all involved and could have conceivably spiraled out of control into a major international war, Georgia was forced to take the losses from its high-risk gamble. Obviously, had Washington not encouraged the Georgian government in all its worst instincts and provided Saakashvili with unflinching support, the escalation of the conflict might not have occurred, but had it persisted in its reckless enabling of that ally far worse things would have resulted.

Instead of internationalizing a small, fairly insignificant regional conflict, which would have been the foreign policy equivalent of socializing risk, Washington stepped back from the brink and allowed the relevant actors to suffer the consequences of their decisions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Saakashvili has learned anything, but Georgia suffered enough economically and politically that he will not be able to engage in the same reckless behavior as before. It is when allied actions have no consequences, as they seem not to with Pakistan and Israel, that you get deeply dysfunctional relationships in which our policies wind up being at the mercy of our clients and we receive a share of the blame for subsidizing allied mistakes.

Most of this recent column by Victor Davis Hanson didn’t interest me very much, but there was one line that was so strained and desperate that it caught my attention. Hanson:

Then there is Iran, which, many argued, was supposed to be have been empowered after we removed its nemesis Saddam Hussein. And, indeed, it sure looked that way when Iranian agents were stirring up violence in Iraq.

Yet this year, a million Iranians went out in the streets to demand free and fair elections of the sort they hear constantly about across their border. In other words, perhaps the democratic experiment in Iraq — where Shiite Muslims enjoy freedom — will prove destabilizing in the long term to the Iranian theocracy.

Deposing Hussein did increase Iranian influence and power in the region. That is simply what has happened. Groups that have long received official Iranian state backing, such as ISCI, have become major players in Iraqi government, and the sectarian cast of Iraqi politics since the 2005 elections has worked to the advantage of the Shi’ite parties that are either closely aligned or friendly with Tehran. It would be refreshing if Iraq war supporters could at least attempt to make an argument that greatly expanded Iranian influence was an acceptable price to pay for whatever goods they think the invasion brought about, but they simply cannot allow that their war was strategically disastrous for U.S. interests according to their definition of those interests. These are the same people who are terrified when Iran tests a medium-range missile that can go no farther than their earlier medium-range missiles, but Iraq war supporters won’t own up to making the Iranian regime they detest far more powerful in the region.

Why would anyone conclude that Iraq’s political experiment, which has so far yielded mass sectarian bloodletting, political deadlock and an ongoing foreign military presence that is only gradually coming to an end, would recommend itself to Iranian voters? What drove so many Iranians to protest against their government was the realization that even the limited, highly-controlled electoral process their government permitted them to have could be abandoned as soon as it became inconvenient for leading members of the regime. The protesters believed that they had previously enjoyed free and fair elections, or something closely resembling them, and they were outraged by the corruption of a system that they had trusted to some degree in the past. Had Ahmadinejad and his allies not been so heavy-handed and blatant in their fraud, Iran’s quasi-democratic elections would have resulted in another “reform” president acceptable to the regime’s permanent leadership, there would have been no large-scale protests, and the regime would not be even slightly destabilized right now. The influence of Iraqi elections on Iran continues to be as minimal as ever, and in fact it is partly through those elections empowering the Shi’ite majority that Iran is able to wield as much influence in Iraqi politics as it does. The fantasy of a democratic domino effect remains just that.

Responding to Friedman’s latest, Scoblete reminds us of something important:

Your run of the mill moderate may be disgusted by al Qaeda attacks against America and may find the idea of slaughtering infidels abhorrent, but he may also think that we’re getting what’s coming to us and so isn’t very motivated to get himself killed purging the radicals from his midst.

In addition to everything else that was wrong with that column, Friedman seems to take for granted that the more active repudiation of jihadists by non-jihadist Muslims will mean a convergence of interests between the latter and the U.S. government. This is somewhat similar to the idea that as authoritarian states become more liberalized and democratic the more amenable to U.S. goals and policies they will be. Many Westerners like to maintain the illusion that reformers and “moderates” who operate in the context of another country’s politics or another religion’s internal debates are therefore necessarily somehow aligned with us and on our “side.” This is not so, and one reason why it is not so is that non-jihadists quite understandably resent the frequent interference in and occasional domination of their countries. They may find extremist responses to this interference excessive and wrong in their methods, but they certainly must find it infuriating when someone else invades their country, stokes sectarian and religious passions in the process, provokes fanatical retaliation, turns their country into a killing field, and then has the gall to tell them that they have not done enough to combat jihadism, which, at least in the case of Iraq, was hardly present before our forces attracted it and stirred it up. They might find jihadist atrocities appalling, but from their perspective these might seem to pale in comparison to the far larger numbers who are killed or displaced by military offensives ordered or backed by our government. The point is not that we must excuse or approve of these attitudes, but we should understand them.

Consider what Friedman says about this, and just marvel at the lack of understanding:

If we want a peaceful, tolerant region more than they do [bold mine-DL], they will hold our coats while we fight, and they will hold their tongues against their worst extremists.

Does Friedman really think that our interventions in majority-Muslim countries have brought them closer to being peaceful and tolerant? Maybe he does, and that’s part of the problem. Does he believe that the majority of Muslims perceives the creation of a “peaceful, tolerant region” as our goal? If so, he is badly misinformed. This is why Friedman’s obliviousness to the role U.S. policies have had in this dynamic is so damaging to his argument.

Of course, he is wrong when he says that “no one really calls them out” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as public opinion in Pakistan has turned sharply against jihadists as their cities have come under attack, but many Afghans and Pakistanis must wonder why there are relatively so few Westerners who voice criticism when attacks by our forces or allied forces result in large numbers of civilian casualties. Even if it were true that no one was calling out the jihadiast mass murderers of Muslims, what have people in, say, western Pakistan experienced for the most part? On the one side, there are Taliban militias that are brutal and repressive in many ways, but they are also more local and connected to the population than either the Pakistani army, whose military campaigns have so far displaced hundreds of thousands, or the U.S. government, which people in western Pakistan encounter more directly through drone strikes and indirectly through the Pakistani forces that our government is pushing to campaign in their territory. Meanwhile, Pakistani army tactics are heavy-handed and conventional, which have in turn caused numerous civilian casualties during their campaign in Swat and have even turned its sympathizers against the government. Not only does this receive little notice in the West, but it certainly doesn’t generate any of the outrage Friedman demands of Muslims worldwide.

Hawks like to talk about the danger of emboldening enemies and discouraging friends, but what could be more discouraging than having one’s ostensible ally pushing for military operations that drive you from your land? Are the refugees displaced in western Pakistan “holding our coats” while we create a “peaceful, tolerant region”? Does anyone think they would see it that way? They have been displaced as a result of the insistence of our government that Islamabad be more aggressive against the Taliban. Whom do you suppose they will hold responsible for their predicament? How will that work out for us and our Pakistani allies? How are they going to be bothered to condemn bombings in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, when these bombings are often targeting figures in the military and civilian government that have made them refugees?

It is worth noting here that the new emphasis on more restrictive rules of engagement and the importance of population security as part of the Afghanistan war plan is intended to avoid making the numerous, costly blunders inside Afghanistan that we were making before and which our Pakistani allies continue to make at our urging. Look at the heavy-handed and counterproductive tactics of the Pakistani army in western Pakistan and the politically disastrous and ideologically radicalizing refugee crisis that they are creating, and you then have a good idea of what “antiwar” figures complaining about “political correctness” that ties the military’s hands would like to see instead.

The greatest problem with our “Af-Pak” strategy is that we seem to understand the importance of keeping the population secure and more or less aligned with our allied government, but this understanding then disappears once across the Durand Line, and suddenly we start signing off on some combination of the methods used by the Ethiopians in Somalia (i.e., invade and create chaos) and an imitation of the missile strikes our forces have used in Yemen.

Eric Garris looks at the House roll call on the Iran petroleum sanctions bill and discovers that just 12 voted against it and only three of these were Republicans. These were Jeff Flake, Jimmy Duncan and, of course, Ron Paul. That’s not exactly an overwhelming number from the opposition party, and notably missing from the list of nays was that heroic “antiwar”figureJason Chaffetz. Of course, why would Chaffetz oppose imposing sanctions on Iran? He and many of his Republican colleagues are interested in starting a war with Iran, so imposing additional sanctions, no matter how counter-productive and doomed to fail, would hardly bother him.

To look at the larger policy question for a moment, it is remarkable that such an egregiously flawed sanctions measure can command the near-unanimous support of the House. There are reports that the administration has asked Kerry to delay the bill in the Senate until next year, so there will be some time before this becomes law, but given the depressingly broad bipartisan consensus behind this bill I don’t see how it will be defeated. This measure will do great economic harm to average Iranians, and it will help undermine whatever remains of the protest movement, and it will tighten the grip of leading members of the military and civilian establishments on the Iranian economy. Iran’s government will become more powerful relative to its people, and it will become even more resistant to making any concessions over the nuclear program.

P.S. I previously noted Chaffetz’s support for the Iran sanctions bill.

Thomas Friedman’s new column reminded me of the line from Casino Royale: “Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go hand in hand.” In the same column in which he complains that Westerners treat Muslims as nothing more than objects and deprive them of agency and responsibility, he urges on the mass slaughter of said Muslims by other Muslims to get them to stop believing “bad things.” In short, he won’t credit them with being morally responsible agents until they embark on a bloody religious war of his design.

Ackerman responds appropriately:

Yes, what problem can’t be solved by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, egged on from the sidelines by a newspaper columnist?

There are many, many problems with urging on a “civil war” among Muslims. I don’t expect Friedman to be careful in his choice of words, but his use of the phrase “civil war” shows how confused he is. A civil war is fought between citizens of the same polity for control of its government. By speaking of a “civil war” within Islam, he unwittingly writes as if he accepts a global Islamic polity as a reality and something over which Muslims of various stripes can fight one another to control. Obviously, such a polity does not and never will exist.

As he did late last month, Friedman is carelessly reproducing pan-Islamist ideas as part of his own effort at looking for red herrings because he doesn’t want to “look inward.” In his case, the red herring is the lack of Muslim outrage. Maybe Muslims should be expressing more outrage over jihadist atrocities, but Friedman is demanding impassioned reaction from hundreds of millions spread out across four continents in response to events that are mostly abstract and far removed from them. It could be that large numbers of these people appear indifferent or quiescent not because they approve of the atrocities or fear the jihadists who commit them, but simply that they are indifferent to events that occur thousands of miles away in other lands. What we have seen in Iraq and Pakistan is the revulsion local populations come to feel for jihadists who target their people. Unless I miss something, the only way Friedman is going to get the war he wants is for jihadists to become much more numerous and widely distributed throughout Muslim-majority countries so that every Muslim society can be terrorized and then react against the attackers. That would mean a dramatic increase in terrorism worldwide and all of the attendant excesses that various national governments would engage in to combat these threats.

What Friedman is trying to avoid looking at are all those aggressive policies that he has vociferously backed for years that have done so much to sow distrust of the U.S. among Muslims. If jihadists have been making gains, it is partly because we have provided them abundant provocations and attacks to use as fodder for their propaganda. These policies have radicalized entire populations. That is what wars do: they radicalize and intensify political and/or religious beliefs, and they typically empower maximalists and fanatics. As destructive as the conflicts he would wish upon all Muslims would be, the end result could still very well be a larger population of deeply radicalized people, which would be disastrous for the welfare of all these societies and likely damaging to the security of the U.S. and allied nations.

On what basis should we believe that if Iran’s Green movement were to prevail, it would mean the end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Put another way, if the Green movement had succeeded in forcing the Supreme Leader to hold another election and Mousavi won, would Rubin and company believe that the threat from Iran’s nuclear program had been substantially mitigated? ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete asks the right questions, and just by asking them he pretty effectively demolishes Jennifer Rubin’s argument. Rubin maintains that “human rights, support for democracy, and regime change might actually enhance our objectives and afford us a solution to the problem of an Islamic fundamentalist state’s acquisition of nuclear arms.” Of course, the reference to regime change does most of the work here. The “solution” to the problem of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear arms is to change the government to such an extent that an Iranian bomb will no longer be the threat that Rubin imagines it to be.

There are many assumptions packed into Rubin’s statement, most of which are very questionable. The first assumption is there is a political movement in Iran that would transform it from being an “Islamic fundamentalist state” into something else. The Green movement has appropriated the language and symbols of the Islamic revolution for its own purposes, but this necessarily limits and defines it as an Islamist or Islamist-sounding movement. Islamist parties from Turkey to Yemen have identified themselves with principles of justice and reform in opposition to authoritarian and/or military regimes, but when Iranian reformers define themselves in this way they are closely imitating the revolutionaries whose successors they are trying to combat. The point is that reformers have acquired the authority to criticize the regime because they use its own principles and official ideology against it, so it would be very difficult for those reformers to produce an Iranian government that is not reproducing that ideology even as they are putting the government under slightly different management. As we know, Mousavi himself was once among the hard-liners in government and has entered the opposition ranks because he believes the current leadership had betrayed the revolution. This is not normally the kind of person who ushers in a radically different type of regime.

Second, Rubin assumes that Iran’s foreign policy would change significantly if it were no longer an “Islamic fundamentalist state,” which gives far too much importance to professed state ideology and does not pay nearly enough attention to Iranian national aspirations. Most Iranians are not preoccupied with foreign and security policies, just as most people in other countries are not, but if they believe as Iranian nationalists that building up their nuclear program is a matter of national right and pride they are going to continue backing their government as it pursues this. If Iranian nationalists see their government attempting to act as a regional power, enough of them are probably going to support it regardless of the character of that regime to make changing that policy politically difficult.

The third questionable assumption is that a more democratic Iranian regime would be less interested in waging proxy wars abroad on the shaky grounds that relatively more democratic governments are less prone to using force against other states and especially against other democracies. As hawks never tire of telling us, they fear that Iran might hand off a nuclear weapon to one of its proxies. If that were a likely scenario, why would a change of government in Tehran make it less likely? If it is highly unlikely (and it is), changing the government is irrelevant. If enough Iranians see support for Shi’ite militias abroad as an expression of religious solidarity, their government might be under greater pressure to continue this policy to keep that part of the electorate satisfied. If a population has been conditioned and whipped up to see certain other states as their natural enemies, they are going to be more resistant to compromise with and concessions to those states. In this way, a more democratic Iran could conceivably be less willing to give up its backing of Hizbullah et al.

Had Mousavi won and been allowed to take office, there would not have been meaningful “regime change” and there would have been even fewer changes to how the Iranian government conducted itself abroad. During their debate, Mousavi faulted Ahmadinejad for his obnoxious behavior and statements, because he saw these as detrimental to Iran’s pursuit of its interests. He did not question Iran’s right to develop nuclear power, and on this point there was essentially no difference between him and his opponents. No one in the Iranian government openly boasts that it is trying to build a nuclear weapon, so why should we think that Mousavi or someone else like him would not be pursuing both nuclear energy and nuclear arms?

At the heart of Rubin’s statement is the most questionable assumption of all, which is that the promotion of democracy automatically aligns with maximal hawkish national security objectives. Of course this is a key assumption at the heart of neoconservatism for at least the last twenty years: American “values” and interests (as defined by neoconservatives) advance and retreat together. This is frequently not the case, and Iran is a good example of where the two to some extent work at cross-purposes. If severely limiting or eliminating Iran’s nuclear program is an important objective for American hawks, the Green movement is on the other side of the issue, which means that providing aid to that movement makes halting Iran’s nuclear program even more difficult.

Larison, whose claim to fame is the many links Andrew Sullivan bestows on him, is supposed to be a “paleoconservative” expert on foreign affairs, and yet if his latest postings are any indication, he’s gone over to the Dark Side. (I guess this explains that interview with The Economist, which has never before shown such interest in the foreign policy views of a small and nearly invisible sector of the American Right). ~Justin Raimondo

Yes, we wouldn’t want non-interventionist arguments to be found anywhere except in our own echo chambers. It must be the powerful lure of dark forces that has caused me to articulate the exact same view I have always held on the war in Afghanistan. As I have stated explicitly several times, the proposed Afghanistan plan seems to me to be the best and most realistic way of creating conditions that will allow us to depart Afghanistan sooner. I am open to arguments to the contrary, which Raimondo naturally never provides, but what does not interest me is the lazy, reflexive opposition to the plan displayed by the likes of Rep. Chaffetz, Arlen Specter and their newfound admirers.

Chaffetz and Specter do not oppose the plan because they object to empire or U.S. power projection abroad. Their records and recent statements make that clear. At least these might be principled objections I could respect and understand. Chaffetz opposes it because it is Obama’s plan and because he does not like fighting a limited counterinsurgency in which we do not inflict mass death on a foreign population. Chaffetz believes that the rules of engagement that are beginning to prevent the disastrous bombings of civilian centers are tying the hands of the military, and in any other case Raimondo would want to keep those rules in place, but for whatever reason Chaffetz’s dangerous ideas on this score get a pass because he winds up favoring withdrawal. Specter opposes the plan in a desperate bid to keep his job by trying to satisfy progressive voters unhappy with the administration. They may be imitating some of the arguments that I and others have used against the Iraq war, but this does not derive from any understanding of Afghanistan that they have. The situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same, and the reasons why the “surge” was unlikely to achieve its stated goals do not necessarily apply to the Afghanistan plan. Not only do the wars differ in legitimacy, but the strategic importance of each is very different.

One of the most damning things opponents of the Iraq invasion argued against its supporters was that they were pursuing ideological fantasies and were ignoring the realities of the places they were trying to transform. For those ideologues, war always seems necessary and escalation is always the right answer. It is no wonder that Kristol, Kagan and the rest have endorsed sending additional forces to Afghanistan, because they always call for sending additional forces under any and all circumstances. The nature of the conflict does not interest them–just like Chaffetz, they always favor using more force than anyone else favors.

If non-interventionists believe that force can sometimes be used justly within limits for limited, specific ends, it is a mistake to adopt the same habit of always opposing every single increase in forces when the war is a legitimate one that most of us have theoretically been supporting all along. By all means, let’s hear a strong argument why the plan is wrong, or better yet let’s hear why the Afghan war is no longer justified or legitimate. My view on Afghanistan could be wrong, and I might be persuaded that this is the case, but I’m not going to be persuaded by shoddy arguments from the Chaffetzes and Specters of the world when they have no credibility on such matters. For the sake of argument, let’s say that I have gone over to “the Dark Side.” If that’s true, what doesn’t make any sense is cheering on long-time Iraq war supporters such as Specter or advocates for bombing Iran such as Chaffetz. If I have gone over to “the Dark Side,” they have never left.

For the record, Sestak ran and won in 2006 in no small part on his opposition to the war in Iraq. He contrasted his support for the war in Afghanistan, in which he had served, with his opposition to that unjustified war. In his case, this was not just rhetorical posturing, but a view derived from making a reasonable distinction between a retaliatory war against the hosts of a group that attacked the United States and an unnecessary and unjust war of aggression. (Sestak did not necessarily describe Iraq in exactly those terms, but he did see invading Iraq as a terrible mistake.) His current primary opponent, Arlen Specter, voted for and supported the Iraq war steadfastly for as long as he was a member of the GOP. It is the Iraq war that Raimondo has repeatedly claimed was among the greatest foreign policy blunders in U.S. history, and strangely it is supporters of that war (and in Chaffetz’s case a possible war against Iran) that he now seems to be championing against those of us who correctly opposed invading Iraq while understanding that the war in Afghanistan was a legitimate and unfortunate necessity. It is absurd to say that the victory of the insurgent progressive, anti-Iraq war Sestak against the Washington-backed “centrist,” opportunistic hawk Specter would represent a “rather large feather in the War Party’s cap.” That is how far out Raimondo has had to go to keep his argument from unraveling completely: he has to make established antiwar voices out to be agents of dark forces and he also has to credit reliable hawks with antiwar views they don’t actually hold.

If Raimondo would like to defend career hawks who have been wrong on every major foreign policy question of the last decade and who are now very, very latecomers to opposing the one recent war that is legitimate, he is free to do so, but it won’t change the reality that these hawks do not oppose any military interventions in principle or in practice. Chaffetz’s sudden discovery that it is politically useful to oppose “Obama’s war” by complaining that the rules of engagement in Afghanistan are too stringent and limiting is the opposite of any coherent ideas on how to reduce civilian casualties and weaken the hold of Taliban militias. Chaffetz has called for withdrawal from Afghanistan because he apparently cannot grasp that there is anything between withdrawal and total war, and he knows that he will not get the total war and “victory” he insists on seeking. If Chaffetz had his way exactly as he wanted it, the escalation in Afghanistan would be larger, the Afghan civilian death toll would be far higher, and the mission would be even closer to failure. Specter’s realization that some Pennsylvania progressives might punish Sestak for taking a controversial position in his party on Afghanistan is just more of Specter’s utterly unprincipled maneuvering.

For his part, Sestak still supports the war in Afghanistan as he has always done, and I am trying to do the same. If that puts me on “the Dark Side” in Raimondo’s book, I must have always been there, because my arguments on this have not changed over the years. I’d rather be there than siding with a shabby old pol who would do and say anything to win another term and a foolish House member urging us to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran is a case in point: Wishing to show flexibility, Obama put Iran’s demand for uranium enrichment on the table, effectively reversing three unanimous or near unanimous Security Council resolutions reaffirming the illegality of the Islamic Republic’s program. Tehran promptly rejected Obama’s deal but claimed victory because Obama had inadvertently affirmed Tehran’s right to enrichment. ~Anna Borshchevskaya

This is why our debate on Iran policy is so poor. Iran policy hawks falsely claim that Iran does not have a guaranteed right to enrichment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the rest of us are supposed to pretend that these people have some credibility discussing these matters. In fact, the NPT requires that Iran follow IAEA guidelines while it is enriching uranium. The resolutions in question have ordered suspension of enrichment on account of those technical violations. They do not claim that Iran’s program is itself illegal, nor do they claim that Iran does not have a right to enrichment, but that Iran has violated certain safeguards. In other words, it is no great concession to accept that Iran has a right to enrichment.

The relevant issue as far as the administration has been concerned is whether Iran will abuse that right to build nuclear weapons. To insist that Iran should not even have the right to enrichment for peaceful purposes is not only to be extremely unreasonable, but it also requires ignoring what the NPT permits. Little wonder that the Iranian government has threatened to leave the confines of the NPT. Iran sees that states that are not bound by the treaty can acquire quite large nuclear arsenals and proliferate as much as they like, and it also sees that there is an excessive opposition even to Iran’s right to enrichment, so it may not be much longer before Iran takes the perfectly predictable and self-interested step of abandoning the treaty and thereby circumventing the only legal framework there is to compel Iranian compliance.

The rest of Borshchevskaya’s article isn’t much better. She stresses the importance of the Lebanese elections earlier this year, which basically endorsed the status quo of a closely divided country in which the March 8 forces actually represented a majority of Lebanese voters. Jumblatt’s party was part of the winning March 14 coalition, and almost immediately he was talking about bringing Hizbullah in as part of a unity government. The triumphant narrative reported in the Western press of some sort of electoral “victory” over Hizbullah was simply wrong. Hizbullah has become increasingly influential in Lebanese politics, especially since the war in 2006, and Suleiman is in no more position to oppose this than were his predecessors. Suleiman became president because he was an acceptable unity candidate, and he has the difficult task of preventing the country from slipping back into civil war. Borshchevskaya would have the administration ignore the political and military realities of Lebanon, pretend that the March 14 forces represent a majority view of Lebanese and believe that the only thing keeping them down is Syrian influence. As it is, the administration seems to be trying to help the Lebanese president keep his country from descending into renewed civil strife, and somehow this is counted as a “failure” of Obama’s foreign policy.