One of the many things wrong with the financial bailout bill passed last September, George Will argues, is its unconstitutional nature: it vested the executive branch with powers reserved solely to Congress. For much the same reason that the line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional and why modern war resolutions ought to be considered unconstitutional (that will be the day), the legislative branch cannot delegate authority specifically granted to it by the Constitution to another branch. Arguably, separation of powers has been a dead letter in some respects for a very long time. The notion of checks and balances was a clever Federalist trick to make it seem as if their proposed usurpation and concentration of power successfully attempted at Philadelphia was actually a guard against usurpation and concentration of power. The Federalists were nothing if not good salesmen! Patrick Henry memorably and correctly observed the flaw of the “checks and balances” argument in favor of a more powerful central government during the ratification debates:

There will be no checks, no real balances, in this Government. What can avail your specious imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances.

The idea that members of the federal government would work to counterbalance and limit one another, rather than collaborate to enhance their collective power, sounded very nice, but it was always pretty far-fetched. That said, the impulse to resist concentrating additional power in any branch of the federal government is a welcome and long overdue one.

Congress has delegated its equally vital warmaking powers to the executive branch for decades, so I find it hard to imagine that any court is going to strike down the EESA. Indeed, if anyone were to file a suit contesting the constitutionality of the Act my guess is that the fig leaf of a Congressional vote would be treated as proof that EESA is consistent with separation of powers, just as war resolutions are used to provide some minimal cover for illegal wars. One of the reasons the Framers insisted that the power of the purse be held solely by the legislative was to prevent the executive from arbitrarily disbursing money, and so acquiring power for itself, unaccountably and without consent of the legislature.

As with war powers, Congress has preferred once again to hand over its proper role to the executive. It is not an accident that such a dreadful bill came out of a rushed process in which alarmist cries of doom panicked much of the public and most members of Congress into a stampede to give the executive whatever it wanted. Legislation passed in haste and fear tends to enhance arbitrary power, while patience and deliberation are necessary guards against it. This is why our system was designed to be slow-moving and filled with obstacles to action, which is a system that now seems utterly unsuited to the character of an impatient people.

William Brafford has an interesting post on the dangers of hubris (or, as he puts it, undue confidence and ignorance of the limits of one’s knowledge, which are all part of this flaw) and on how to understand ideology. Brafford is right that one of the attractions of ideology is that it seems to offer “a schema for predicting the consequences of events.” I would emphasize that ideology only seems to do this, because one of the key features of any ideology is its horrific powers of oversimplification and its impressively narrow perspective on historical events. That is, ideology will not reliably predict consequences of events, but it will condition the mind to force every event into the mold provided by the ideology. If a person approaches the world with an ideological frame of mind, whatever events dominate the historical memory of his fellow ideologues are perceived as constantly recurring again and again as part of a progressive narrative of successive triumphs, each one more important than the last. The simple framing, the certainty of victory and the quick and easy interchangeability of extremely different groups as different faces of the same enemy are all very useful for purposes of propaganda and the acquisition and exercise of power.

This is one reason why so many ideologues express great confidence that History will judge their endeavors to have been worthwhile and why they always avoid accountability for the consequences of their own policies and actions: their grasp of historical contingency is poor, and their knowledge of history is usually limited to a narrow range of approved opinions about major events. These were the people Popper derided as historicists in The Poverty of Historicism and elsewhere. It is therefore endlessly entertaining that some of the most obnoxious ideological snake-oil peddlers hurl the label historicist at anyone who questions their grand theories. When Popper’s historicists accuse their opponents of historicism, they are attacking respect for contingency and context, skepticism of moralizing, self-congratulatory narratives of national virtue, and hostility to grossly anachronistic celebrations of certain historical figures as precursors of enlightened modernity. Ideology thrives on ignoring contingency and context, and on embracing self-congratulatory narratives and rampant precursorism.

The ideology to which Bacevich refers in The Limits of Power has a certain appeal because it offers a flexible rationale for action, which is to say that it can provide rationalizations for just about any exercise of power, and in the case of national security ideology this is the exercise of executive power. This ideology is able to draw readily on a well-established tradition of justifying presidential power-grabs in emergency situations. It was only a matter of time before the emergency would be made permanent, so that the continual expansion of executive power would become more or less unquestionable and seemingly irreversible.

Support for the Long War requires support for a war of “no exits and no deadlines,” as Prof. Bacevich has described it. Support for a specific military mission in Afghanistan does not necessarily require one to endorse the concept of the Long War or the fundamentally flawed strategy behind it. The debate has been framed in such a way that most people seem to assume that endorsing the concept and strategy of the Long War is an essential part of what it means to support U.S. national security interests and even our current war effort in Afghanistan, which is just about as misguided as it gets.

One can, of course, support the campaign against Al Qaeda without the dangerous and unsustainable Long War framework, but it might require rethinking how to wage that campaign. As Bacevich said in his review of Accidental Guerrilla:

If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?

When it comes to dealing with Islamism, containment rather than transformation should provide the cornerstone of U.S. (and Western) strategy. Ours is the far stronger hand. The jihadist project is entirely negative. Apart from offering an outlet for anger and resentment, Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk have nothing on offer. Time is our ally. With time, our adversary will wither and die—unless through our own folly we choose to destroy ourselves first.

There is a split in the country that is very much like the difference between supporters of rollback and containment during the Cold War, but unlike in the Cold War the advocates of containment seem to be a small minority. Even though containment was the wiser, superior policy during the Cold War, it has somehow lost its appeal. During the first two decades of the Cold War advocates of rollback considered it insufficiently “robust” (to use a word that ideological fantasists like to throw around a lot) and not nearly aggressive enough, and current partisans of the Long War concept seem intent on not making the “mistake” of opting for containment, which is to say that they are intent on embarking on fool’s errands.

The Long War is, as Bacevich says in The Limits of Power, “both self-defeating and irrational.” If we wish to secure our country and to get our economic and fiscal houses in order, one thing we have to do is start by scrapping the Long War concept and focusing on national security strategy that has limited, achievable objectives.

Andrew Nagorski indulges one of the worst habits of Russia watchers in this new article in Newsweek, framing his entire analysis around the supposed crazy unpredictability of the Russians. I’m not sure what it says about all those “closest observers of Russian foreign policy” that they cannot make sense of fairly straightforward acts of bluster (threatening to put Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad) and accommodation (welcoming the “reset” in relations), but it is just about as reassuring as hearing Secretary Gates brag that he and former Secretary Rice were two Russia experts at the top levels of government who had no clue what was going on in Russia. I could have told them that many years ago. Russian actions are not hard to understand, and they are not unpredictable. In fact, one can predict what Moscow will do with surprising frequency by paying attention to what the Kremlin says it will do in response to provocations or conciliatory gestures. Much of the rest of Russian policy can be understood by recognizing the power structures in the Russian government, paying attention to Russian history and understanding that Moscow sees its relations with its former satellites much as Washington has traditionally regarded Latin America. That is, as an area in which we may meddle at will, but where foreign meddling, no matter how minimal, is viewed with deep suspicion as a threat to our influence.

All the hemming and hawing about Manas assumes that the Russians have some stranglehold over Bishkek and that our lease of the base would have been renewed without Russian involvement. If we can believe the former Kyrgyz ambassador who served under Bakiyev’s rival (hardly a cheerleader for the new regime), this is doubtful. More to the point, everyone who brings up Manas as a piece of evidence in indictments of Russia has failed to notice or mention the SCO Afghanistan conference going on right now at which the Russians, the central Asian states, SCO observer nations in the region, and observers from NATO and the United States, among others, are discussing possible resupply alternatives. Alexander Lukin explains:

The SCO includes Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan as full members, and India, Iran, Pakistan and Mongolia as observers. One of the key objectives of the Friday SCO conference is to team up with the West and international organizations to address the Afghanistan problem. Among the participants will be: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; Mark Perrin de Brichambaut, secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Patrick Moon; and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. In addition, there will be representatives from the Group of Eight countries, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the European Union and the Organization of The Islamic Conference.

The participation of NATO and its allies at the SCO conference indicates a significant shift in their approach to the Afghanistan problem. There is a good reason for this. NATO understands that it has a better chance of getting what it wants from Russia and other SCO members by cooperating with them rather than by confronting them. The U.S. and NATO wish list includes finding an acceptable format to somehow bring Iran into the dialogue [bold mine-DL]. It also includes securing transit routes for nonmilitary — and ultimately military — supplies to coalition forces in Afghanistan through SCO countries and placing NATO troops on the territories of SCO member states.

It’s almost as if making some effort to accommodate and heed Russian concerns might have significant, concrete benefits for U.S. interests! It’s as if needlessly alienating Russia for all these years was actually harmful to our own war effort, but then that might mean that the confrontational, anti-Russian posture of the last decade was deeply misguided and informed by hubris and ideological hang-ups left over from the Cold War. That couldn’t be right, could it? Note that line about bringing Iran into the mix. As I suggest in my forthcoming column on Iran for The Week (now online), involving Iran in Afghanistan policy makes sense for the purposes of our war effort and serves as a good way to begin rebuilding relations with Iran. As Lukin notes, Moscow has already agreed to allow the transport of non-military freight, which is a beginning for cooperation in central Asia.

One of Andrew’s readers chided him for for describing Afghanistan as a place with an “an utterly alien culture, institutions, religion and polity,” and in this follow-up post Andrew qualified his claim. This reminded me of the Ralph Peters column that I mocked for its “thought experiment” that Pashtuns were for all intents and purposes from another planet. Without question, Peters’ “experiment” is far, far worse than Andrew’s overstatement and it is significantly different from it, because Peters’ column was not an attempt to acknowledge profound cultural and religious differences, but on the contrary was a very clear effort to essentialize those differences and claim that they were practically differences according to nature. The purpose of this was to vilify Pashtuns in the Taliban to such an extent that their humanity was in question, which is another way of claiming that anyone who does not happen to embrace our “values” or our power projection into their part of the world cannot really share our nature, because we “know” that our “values” are universal.

Recognizing vast, significant differences between cultures and religions is sane and necessary, and I can understand very well the impulse to push back against the fantasies of universalist theories that hold that these differences are superficial and unimportant, but it is vital that we understand the distinction between what Peters was arguing and what Andrew is arguing. Essentialist arguments betray their basic hostility to history and culture in that they are blind to the possibility of change over time within and across cultures, they cannot fully accept that culture is a human invention, and hold instead that cultural difference must be rooted in essence rather than in will, which in turn denies the importance of human agency in history and endorses one of a variety of determinisms. The equally fantastical universalist notion that traditional tribal societies from a very different religious tradition can and should be molded and remade into a post-modern managerial democracy, because such a regime represents the inevitable, single model of human progress, substitutes an ideologically-defined determinism for other kinds. These two fantasies, the essentialist and the universalist, seem to co-exist in complementary tension with one another in their shared antipathy to real respect for culture and historical contingency. Andrew was indulging neither fantasy, and Peters was to some extent indulging both.

David Brooks seems to put aside all of the reasons for skepticism about grandiose plans for Afghanistan that he correctly describes at the start of this column, and apparently he allows himself to ignore his properly skeptical instincts because so many of the people he met in Afghanistan are so very optimistic. Brooks concludes:

I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:

After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.

Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.

Infected may be a far more appropriate word than Brooks imagined. As I have said before, optimism is very much like a disease of the mind, and it is contagious. It inhibits lucid thought, it shuts down core reasoning centers and seems to inflict terrible damage on memory. It is optimism that continually causes us to lose our respect for limits and to have unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve, which leads us to set ourselves up for failure and disaster by encouraging us to overreach and believe that we can find a solution to every problem. There are certain realities in Afghanistan to which there are no American or NATO solutions (the drug trade springs to mind, as does the weak central government in Kabul), because they are not really problems, or at the very least they are not our problems. Their “solution” is so far beyond what our limited national security goals are that we are not going to find the solution in any reasonable amount of time at anything like an acceptable or reasonable cost.

If it was a fantasy in Iraq “to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states,” it remains a fantasy today. It makes no difference what label one gives to it, and it is certainly not a fantasy that only neoconservatives embrace. If Americans have not learned by now that such efforts are folly, and more important that they would not be worth it even if they turned out to be successful, it may indeed say something about our national character. What I fear is that Obama, who has always been an interventionist with great confidence in this fantasy of what American power can achieve, believes that the “energetic and ambitious response” is what the American public desires and will support for years to come. I worry that he will discover midway through his term that the public that voted to bring the war in Iraq to an end really is sick of frittering away our resources to no apparent purpose and for no real national interest, and they will turn on the entire mission in Afghanistan because it has been defined at once too broadly as a grand nation-building exercise and too narrowly in its preoccupation with forces based in western Pakistan.

Because Obama is setting far too ambitious goals for Afghanistan with too few resources, while largely neglecting (or exacerbating) more significant problems inside Pakistan that are gradually making our position in Afghanistan untenable, he runs the risk of jeopardizing public support for the much more limited and achievable security goals that are in our interest and the interest of Afghanistan’s neighbors. In the end, he will have the support of the fantasists who led us into Iraq and liberal internationalists who are still invested in the idea of nation-building, and he will have to face the growing numbers of people who have grown weary of a Long War that has ceased to make any sense (if it ever made sense in the first place). These people are not “isolationist” (as they will inevitably be labeled by the fantasists), but will have no interest in subsidizing open-ended missions in service to a ‘forward’ policy that seems unsustainable and which also seems far inferior to a containment approach.

Consider this the first in a series of reflections on the now-concluded Battlestar Galactica. Obviously, numerous spoilers follow for those who have not yet caught up with the end (or even the beginning) of the series, so caveat lector.

Peter and Matt are not wrong to see in the final episode hints at a “crunchy” or agrarian critique of a hyper-technological civilization, but I tend to agree with Matt that the “transparent craving for the supposed authenticity of the land will seem so pat to future generations.” At its best, the “crunchy” or agrarian critique should not be based in such a craving, as if there is an authenticity of the land that liberates us from the artificiality of technology, but instead be based in the recognition that man should be using techne to shape a landscape rather than objectify an “environment” for exploitation or pure preservation without any use. After all, it is not techne, which is part of human culture and cultivation of the land, but the glorification of techne, that leads to the abuses that agrarians and neo-traditional conservatives find so troubling.

One of the most annoying things about Battlestar Galactica is its tendency to insist on choosing between a primitivist society or a technological civilization doomed to destroy itself. The mythology of the series takes for granted that the latter will always happen, sooner or later, and in the final scene of the last episode the writers engaged in an unusually blunt, embarrassingly heavy-handed effort to drive home that we are just a hop, skip and a jump removed from the Cylon rebellion ourselves. In the least credible plot device of the entire series, we are supposed to believe that the incredibly fractious, disunited Colonial population will submit meekly and unquestioningly to some flight of fancy by Lee Adama to return to the land, despite his heretofore insufferably pious attachment to high-minded democratic principles and procedure. If only to insist on the importance of self-government, I have to protest at the idea that the conclusion of BSG has anything to do with a genuinely agrarian, decentralist or neo-traditionalist view of things. It has more in common with revolutionary dictates forcing intellectuals to go out into the fields and villages than it does with a real respect for the way of life that the cultivators and villagers have. In the end, the return to the land is treated as a therapy for alienated space-exiles, who have no knowledge of cultivation of crops or the raising of livestock, except, of course, for Gaius Baltar.

Following up on the previous post, I wanted to say a few things about how the debate over drug policy offers a good example of how our political debates tend to function regardless of the policy in question. The lopsided nature of these debates is most pronounced when it comes to one of the various “wars” the government has declared against abstractions and nouns, but it is not limited to these. If the government declares a “war” on drugs, or poverty, or terrorism, skepticism about or outright opposition to the actual policies employed by the government in the “prosecution” of said “war” is treated as implicit support for the target of the “war.” This is the one part of all of these “wars” that can be deemed successful, namely its propaganda, which frames criticism of “war” policies, no matter how counterproductive, failed, illegal or even immoral, as something akin to collaboration with “the enemy” in the “war.” Likewise, to have doubts or raise red flags about invading Iraq was to be an apologist for despotism at best and pro-Saddam at worst. We see this pattern replicated again and again in debates over the war in Georgia last year or Gaza this year.

This framing works very well for defenders of the policy being criticized, as it forces the critics to operate at a double disadvantage. They are first of all reacting to bad policy, which makes their arguments necessarily negative and more easily dismissed for that reason as mere “naysaying,” and second the critics must qualify the beginning of all their arguments with some emphasis on how much they, too, loathe the official enemy in said “war.” This means the critics are reduced to pragmatic and frequently much more complicated critiques that lack the rhetorical and emotional power of the simplistic, ideological line that the government is pushing, and they are reduced to arguments from circumstance, which tend not to pack the same punch as arguments from definition even when the latter are founded on falsehoods or, more often, on far more destructive half-truths.

Freddie’s frustration with Obama’s dismissive response to the large number of online questions about marijuana legalization is understandable, but it seems to me that legalization arguments will never gain much traction if advocates for it are constantly having to mention how they are not like the drug’s stereotypical users or regard the drug’s use as some grievous personal failing. Instead of coming across as a stronger argument, the standard “I’m in favor of legalization, and I’m the farthest thing in the world from a pot smoker!” argument ends up making the argument for legalization less compelling. This is because this kind of argument unintentionally reproduces the stigma against the drug and effectively endorses one of the key claims that supporters of criminalization make. While it is true that there are a great many practical and principled reasons why Americans of all stripes should oppose continued criminalization, for legalization to take hold as something more than a marginal issue that has the sympathies of more than relatively marginal political forces there would need to be a much larger constituency that regards criminalization as an intolerable imposition on one of their preferences.

Opponents of Prohibition in the ’20s and early ’30s were not called “wets” simply to dismiss or mock them, but to describe accurately that they wanted to be able to drink alcohol legally. A significant cultural obstacle that marijuana legalization faces is that even many leading advocates of legalization will decry the drug as unusually unhealthy and there are relatively few people who would use the drug once legalized who do not already use it. The irony of legalization is that it would probably lead to such a small increase in use of the drug that there is no large, untapped base of support to make support for continued criminalization a political liability. Criminalization is unusually irrational in this case, but there are not enough people directly inconvenienced or hassled by the criminalization of the drug to make politicians pay any price for supporting the status quo. On the other side, there is a fairly large number of people who remain committed to defending that status quo and penalizing politicians who entertain supporting legalization.

This is the familiar arc of a poorly conceived war. At first, it looks like necessary defense. The public rallies around in the adrenaline rush of solving an intolerable problem by force. The critics are few, or foreign, and easily dismissed. As time passes, it becomes more difficult to name what has been gained amid the horror. The moral price reveals itself. Criticism becomes mainstream and respectable and is entirely too late. ~Gershom Gorenberg

Gorenberg is referring to the Gaza conflict, but he could just as easily have been writing about the 2006 war in Lebanon or the Iraq war or the Georgian escalation in South Ossetia. What is striking about all of these episodes is how the experience of any or all of them seems to have no effect whatever on how most political and foreign policy elites respond to the next crisis or judge the next conflict. When the next crisis occurs, we hear the same justifications and arguments for the use of force, the pious intonations about the right to self-defense and the importance of national sovereignty (mind you, it is always our sovereignty and rights and those of our allies that count, and not those of the states or populations under assault) and the inevitable blaming of the victims of the campaign and whitewashing the excesses of the aggressor.

At the same time, there is always a great deal of commentary about how much has supposedly been learned from past mistakes without any acknowledgment that it was the decision to launch a major military campaign in the first place that was the key error. Because the elites have claimed that they learned their lesson, the different publics seem willing to put their trust in many of the same political and foreign policy elites who failed them in the past. However, time and again the elites do not address the fundamental flaws in their assumptions about policy or the decisions leading up to the crisis, and they are concerned mainly with managing the next crisis less clumsily and more “competently.” The mistaken consensus that preceded a disastrous or counterproductive campaign shields the elites and keeps them from being completely discredited, as they can always hide behind the vast majority of the government and population that wrongly sided with their poor decisions.

Those politicians who acknowledge their error and make some attempt to rectify it are mocked as opportunists or worse, while the ones that brazenly refuse to admit their failure somehow retain a reputation for conviction and steadfastness, as if great devotion to an utterly wrong-headed view of the world were exculpatory or admirable. This makes the political calculus the next time around very simple. Any national politician with ambitions of higher office will go along with the consensus and back whatever military campaign comes along, and even if he becomes a critic of how the campaign has been managed he will always frame his criticism as an expression of his desire to manage the campaign more effectively. For that matter, even in the rare event that an antiwar candidate rises to the highest level, he will have done so by making clear that his opposition to that particular war is the exception to his otherwise more or less reflexive support for the use of force in all other cases, and he will highlight his opposition to that particular war only when it has become overwhelmingly unpopular. In this way the political class keeps producing timid, consensus-following members who have no incentives to reject military campaigns outright from the beginning, which is why the leadership of all major parties is predictably and routinely in favor of almost all of these campaigns almost regardless of the circumstances.