Mark Thompson responds with an interesting post, arguing that overturning Roe would deprive absolutists on both sides of the debate of the power that they currently possess:

In most places, the pro-choice and pro-life absolutists will no longer find themselves with quite as much power, as the majority in the mushy middle will wind up crafting most state regulations. Simply put, sending abortion back to the states would have the effect of drastically reducing the unity that exists within the two identity groups.

There will be changes in the composition of the two sides. No doubt there will be many formally pro-life secular conservatives interested in a federalist compromise who will be less inclined to ally themselves with religious pro-life absolutists, and there will be moderate suburbanites who don’t like the idea of “taking away” a woman’s right entirely but who are supportive of some limited restrictions who will drift into a more vaguely-defined pro-life camp. The groups will reorganize along somewhat different lines. As with most issues, however, it is the activists who define the debate and they are going to continue to do so at the state level, and they tend to be more absolutist in their views. One of the basic characteristics of the “mushy middle” is not just that they do not hold absolutist views on this or most subjects, but that they are not motivated to organize and mobilize other moderates to counterbalance the absolutists. Over time, the moderates will be drawn back to one camp or another as state ballot initiatives and elections present them with choices that will still be fairly stark.

There are going to be many organizations and lobbying groups whose existence depends to a large extent on continuing to pressure politicians and shape public opinion to justify their fundraising, and they’re not going to vanish overnight and are going to try to remain relevant in the new landscape. While it is possible that some of these groups would be diverted into the losing cause of trying to re-nationalize the issue one way or the other, and I can imagine pro-life splinter groups forming to keep pushing for the HLA, my guess is that they would reorganize and redirect their efforts toward state governments in states where the “mushy middle” was most malleable. As we saw with outside LDS funding for Prop. 8, culture war initiatives and legislation will attract the attention of donors and activist groups from across the country, and while each state electorate will have their say the two sides are going to be inundated by outside funding, advertising and attempts to mobilize voters one way or the other.

There might be some irritation about out-of-state interference, but I am guessing that this would not be important to that many people. At most, it would be a complaint registered after the fact by the losing side, which would only encourage them to cultivate fundraising networks of their own for the future. States where absolutist views on either side do not hold sway will become the battlegrounds for activists in both camps, and I think you will have the most contentious fights in the most evenly-divided states where the incentive to polarize the population will be greatest. As the Prop. 8 debate and its aftermath have shown, putting contentious questions to a vote does not quell passions and does not deprive absolutists of power, but on the contrary seems to allow them to define the tone and public image of their respective sides. The push to constitutionalize one view or another in state constitutions would begin in earnest, which would recreate the same problem of seeming to close off debate at a more local level. Whichever side enjoyed majority support at a particular time would try to lock that into their state constitutions, which would give the losing side something to keep fighting to repeal in every election that follows.

Would returning the issue to the states allow for the possibility of democratic consensus? Yes, and the very fact of allowing the issue to be regulated by the voters and the representatives of the people would be a significant improvement in itself. But it would also mean that whatever consensus each state reached would be viewed as temporary, and there would be a constant effort to try to push and pull state electorates in opposite directions. Even if state constitutions were amended as a result, this would not necessarily settle the issue and would certainly not make the issue less contentious.

Of course, all of this assumes that one can get enough independents and liberals to support the overturning of Roe after having drilled into their heads that the ruling provides fundamental protections for women. Since most people do not understand, or do not understand very well, the constitutional questions involved, this would be a very hard sale, and there are so many groups on the left with a vested interest in the status quo that it would be politically very dangerous for national Democrats to propose a federalist solution.

As long as you’re not too picky about some details (it was South Dakota, not North Dakota, where the abortion restriction initiative failed), Damon Linker is making a certain amount of sense here (via Chris Dierkes):

How could Obama — how could liberals, how could supporters of abortion rights — both win and end the culture war, once and for all? By supporting the reversal or significant narrowing of Roe, allowing abortion policy to once again be set primarily by the states — a development that would decisively divide and demoralize the conservative side of the culture war by robbing it of the identity politics that holds it together as a national movement.

If liberals were persuaded by this proposal, I would be very surprised, because it is an abandonment of the status quo where pro-choicers hold all the cards. Ending the culture war “once and for all” will not follow the reversal of Roe, and liberals would resist that reversal as strongly as they could. First of all, pro-choice interest groups have at least as much invested in keeping Roe/Casey as the law of the land, and there is a parallel identity politics that has emerged on the left that insists that it is a matter of a woman’s fundamental rights that must be upheld at the federal level and enforced nationwide. I assume most pro-choicers believe this, or at least none is willing to deny it openly, so it is difficult to see why they would accept an argument that returns the matter to the states. After all, I can imagine someone arguing that liberals would not submit other constitutional rights–which is what they believe Roe upholds–to state electorates to limit or eliminate as they saw fit.

Allowing the issue to be returned to the states would satisfy a large part of the electorate, including many conservatives interested in reviviving federalism, but it would not end the culture war over abortion. It would decentralize the culture war and make it part of democratic debate in each state, which means that the issue would retreat from debates in presidential elections and in Congress but become even more intense as an issue in state legislative and gubernatorial elections. It might be for the next few decades that most states would maintain legalized abortion with few restrictions, but the pressure to change that in many states would be constant and intense. The more politicized and involved in the democratic process a contentious issue becomes, the more it becomes the basis for identity politics and polarization. There is certain “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” quality to this: keeping the issue as a matter for the judiciary and keeping Roe in place generates tremendous opposition and perpetuates the culture war, but overturning Roe would probably intensify the culture war.

At present, pro-lifers might reasonably question what purpose is served by basing their voting on an issue that is not even directly under the control of elected officials, and over time pro-lifers’ support for the GOP is bound to wane as they see little action in exchange for their steadfast support. In a post-Roe future, the GOP might have to make itself much more accountable to pro-life voters by pushing for restrictions on abortion, and the alliance between pro-lifers and the GOP might be solidified. One exception to this might be extremely zealous pro-lifers, who would insist on re-nationalizing the issue on their terms, but their influence would likely fade over time. To the extent that many pro-life activists fall into this category, there would be some internal division on the right, but it would hardly have the crippling or demoralizing effect Linker wants to see.

Contrary to the cynical take that the national GOP needs to keep Roe intact to maintain its coalition, which was a view for which I had some sympathy in the past, I am beginning to think that the last thing the GOP wants is to have to answer to pro-lifers on a regular basis and be judged on the basis of meaningful legislative action. Keeping Roe in place allows the GOP to pay lip service to the issue and win a certain number of votes, but this also prevents pro-lifers from putting even more pressure on state Republican parties, which is what they would do if the ruling were overturned. The shape of post-Roe social and religious conservatism would change, and its pro-life activists would have to adapt to an entirely different landscape, but if Linker thinks that the reversal of Roe in the context of continued legalized abortion in most states would cause “the religious right” to diminish I think he has misjudged things. Certainly, I can see many advantages in the reversal of Roe, but I find it hard to believe that Linker would welcome it. If he does, this could be the basis for a limited compromise, in which the two sides agree to submit the debate to the electorates of the several states.

Alex Massie slaps Jonah Goldberg around for this item extolling the “Churchillian” courage of the House GOP. Massie refrains from mocking the “apparently compulsory Churchill reference,” but I cannot. There really ought to be a rule for Americans, especially when they’re writing from Britain, that they cannot compare their own politicians to Churchill under any circumstances unless that comparison touches on a politician’s wartime decision-making, drinking or party-switching. It would be a corollary to Godwin’s Law such that the first person to invoke Churchill for rhetorical purposes automatically loses the argument. Presumably, the House GOP’s vote against the stimulus is supposedly “Churchillian” because it demonstrates some steely-eyed refusal to surrender (unlike, one assumes, the Chamberlain-like capitulation of others). If the House GOP plays Churchill in this story, someone must be Chamberlain and therefore weak and spineless and so forth–that is inevitably how these comparisons work on the American right. David Cameron and the Tories are made to serve the latter role:

For instance, Tory party leader David Cameron has a circus-act flexibility when it comes to ideological principles. No adjective is too constraining for his brand of shmoo-like conservatism; “Green,” “compassionate,” “progressive,” “radical,” even “libertarian paternalism,” his conservatism can fit into them all, for his philosophical invertebracy is boundless. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, the mop-topped conservative mayor of London and former editor of the indispensable conservative journal The Spectator, seems to see conservatism as a mere facet to his own charming eccentricity. Both men have a politician’s love of popularity, rather than an ideologue’s love of principle, so both are scrambling like teenagers who’ve spotted Paris Hilton at the mall to ingratiate themselves with Barack Obama, the ex officio president of the United Kingdom.

I could go on for a while about Goldberg’s genuinely absurd contradictions-in-terms “ideological principles” and “an ideologue’s love of principle,” but there is only so much time in the day. Suffice it to say that principles and ideology are not the same, and conservatives should eschew the latter, so if the complaint is really that Cameron is not an ideologue then so much the better for his reputation as a conservative. Many times I have criticized the Cameroons for adopting what seems in many respects to be watered-down New Labour policies, but I think it gets things quite wrong to think of Cameron as simply a popularity-seeker. Massie covers some of the following points, but I want to elaborate on them a bit more.

Cameron and the Cameroons are adopting arguably more “moderate” policies because they come from the modernizing wing of the party where people adhere to such policies because they find them superior, and they have come to prevail in intra-party squabbles at a time when such policies seem to be attractive to a large part of the electorate. More crucially, as a matter of electoral politics, the Tories are no longer automatically loathed by quite so many people, and some part of this is the result of Cameron’s attempts to reorient the party. There is an important difference between being a shameless popularity-seeker and reveling in one’s marginal status, and for a time the Tories seemed to be heading in the second direction. Cameron has undoubtedly also benefited from Brown’s tremendous unpopularity and failure, both of which worsened significantly over the last year, just as Obama benefited from Bush’s, but the modernizing trajectory he is setting for the Tories is one that the left of the Conservative Party has been pushing for at least since 1997. The label modernizer can give a biased impression in favor of the Cameroons, but this is what their faction has been called on a regular basis for years.

Between New Labour’s implosion and Cameron’s make-over of the party, the Tories have been making huge gains in local elections and notably won the Crewe and Nantwich by-election by picking up support among working-class voters who had been lost to the Tories for decades. Granted, Cameron has not yet won a national election, but one reason for this is that Cameron has so successfully revived the Tories that Brown was frightened away from calling an election in ’07. As things stand now, Cameron may be on the verge of orchestrating the Tories’ comeback after 12 years in the wilderness–clearly, there is nothing that Republicans could learn from this example!

There are many reasons why the kind of changes Cameron has introduced on policy and image may not work as well in the U.S. for Republicans. There are reasonable arguments to be made that center-right parties ought not always copy one another’s positions. Indeed, if Goldberg’s complaint is with “compassionate conservatism” it might be worth noting that the Tories started adopting Bush-like rhetoric about “compassionate conservatism” many years ago under Hague’s leadership. They also adopted a hawkish foreign policy modeled on that of Mr. Bush, making them a completely ineffective opposition against Blair’s backing of the war in Iraq and his egregious violations of civil liberties, while persisting in a kind of monomania about Europe that never resonated with a broad section of the electorate. A combination of a lack of credibility, lack of an imaginative and relevant agenda, poor leadership, terrible public relations and backing an overwhelmingly unpopular war ensured that the Tories gained no traction despite increasing discontent with Blair’s government.

Indeed, one can exaggerate the differences in substance between Cameron and his predecessors, and one can place too much emphasis on policy change as the chief means to electoral revival. The interests of the parties’ constituencies may not necessarily be aligned, so different center-right parties will have to fashion their policies accordingly and may end up heading in significantly different directions. Symbolism, image and presentation count for quite a lot, as does the ability to acknowledge past failures, and it is in all of these areas that the Cameroons probably have the most to teach the GOP. Above all, the willingness to adapt is something that the Cameroons have brought to the Tories and have made them seem as if they are a credible governing party again. Cameron has done this not so much because he talked about “hugging a hoodie” or because he enthused about his love of bicycling, but because he demonstrated that Tories were capable of speaking to the British public about things that mattered to many more of them than they had done in the recent past. In any case, to appropriate language and terminology normally associated with the other side in a political debate is not necessarily to sign off on the policy solutions one’s opponents propose. There is nothing contradictory or necessarily supportive of extensive state regulation in conservatives’ describing themselves as “green.” Decentralization has become one of Cameron’s better themes, which can be entirely consistent with “green” policies, and “green” ends can be pursued in very different ways. The delight that some significant part of the GOP and conservative movement takes in denying or belittling green issues is part of the reason why the rising generation finds them intolerable.

For the most part, Republicans continue to retreat ever deeper into fantasy, imagining that they lost power because of “spending like drunken sailors,” to use an old McCainism, identifying earmarks as one of the great causes of our time and answering every question with a tax cut proposal. That is why there is little reassuring or gratifying about their vote on the stimulus bill, because it is just the sort of thing you would expect them to do if they had learned nothing from the last two elections. Hague and Duncan-Smith were arguably right on Europe, asylum-seekers and crime as a matter of policy, but politically they were clueless and ensured not only their continued opposition status but also the eventual marginalization of the issues they did consider important. These other issues were eventually marginalized even within their own party because they could not talk credibly about anything else. Not only do Republicans evade all responsibility for their contributions to the current financial crisis, an evasion that the mainstream conservative movement is largely happy to enable (“Greenspan? Who’s Greenspan?”), but also seem to have lost all connection to the parts of the country outside their core states. They are reduced to the districts where someone like Sarah Palin is taken seriously as a future national leader, and instead of pondering why the rest of the country finds them ridiculous they simply redouble their commitment to all of the things that make them seem ridiculous. In other words, there is no interest in and possibly little understanding of how they appear to the rest of the country. The Tories were in pretty miserable shape after 1997, but I’m not sure that even they were as bereft of vision and ideas.

One last point about the stimulus. I think it is the case that the current stimulus bill passed by the House is not very good, and I can see the merit of additional tax cuts as a faster and more effective way of providing economic stimulus, but the political failure of the GOP more broadly is that this (and hostility to earmarks) was and is their answer to almost everything on domestic policy. The greatest problem with the GOP leadership is that I suspect they think they have corrected the one flaw that they assume was responsible for their past defeats, and now that they are opposing “wasteful spending and earmarks” they will make no effort to rethink anything else.

Michael Crowley correctly observes that India’s diplomatic victory in limiting Holbrooke’s official mission, about which India is “exulting” according to the Post, is an illusory one. Crowley thinks that Kashmir will be an inevitable part of Holbrooke’s work. I agree that it probably will be, but not because it has to be. It will be because this is apparently something the administration wants to include on its agenda, and evidently nothing seems to dissuade them. There are no Indian foreign policy analysts that I have seen who think that there is any necessary connection between Kashmir and issues related to the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Someone will say that this is a function of Indian nationalism and the taboo against bringing up Kashmir as an international issue, which is partly correct, but that just drives home how misguided it is to try to internationalize the issue, especially when doing so is to give in to a kind of extortion from the Pakistani side.

As a practical matter, it is not clear what good raising the issue would do besides encouraging Kashmiri separatists and providing an incentive to groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba to stir up trouble in the state and inside India to try to pressure India. What few in Washington seem to appreciate is that the status of Jammu & Kashmir is non-negotiable for India, which makes the inclusion of it in any “grand bargain” a prescription for the failure of the other parts of the bargain. Imagine if Calderon tried to enlist China or Russia to have Washington revisit the status of the Southwest, and consider what the American view of that would be, and then you have an idea of what a non-starter this idea is.

It is true that the ISI has promoted both Kashmiri militants and the Taliban as proxies, and just as there are elements withint the ISI that continue to support the Taliban there is an even stronger attachment in the military to the cause of Kashmir, but this does not explain why it should be U.S. policy to intervene in the Kashmir dispute, which is an old legacy of Partition, as part of efforts to address the much more recent and unrelated problem of the Taliban. It is as if you tried to resolve the division of Cyprus by revisiting the status of western Thrace that had been settled at Lausanne. There would certainly be some people in one of the countries involved who would insist that this is vital to resolving the more modern point of contention, but to grant this is to allow hard-liners in one country to make you accept that satisfying one of their long-standing goals or addressing one of their older grievances regarding an issue where they have little, if any, moral and legal standing will make them more interested in giving ground in an entirely different dispute. For the third party, whose connection to the current problem is incidental and indirect, the idea of reopening a territorial issue that they consider closed seems not only unacceaptable but positively dangerous for all parties.

Consider the basic assumption of the “grand bargain” theory: Pakistan has spent decades trying to destabilize Afghanistan and India through armed proxies, and presumably rogue elements of its military and security service continue to do this in Afghanistan partly to strike at India’s influence there just as other rogue elements were likely involved in the Mumbai attacks, so to get the official, non-rogue Pakistani military to do what is already in its interest and what it has already pledged to do (i.e., stabilize Pakistan in the west) the U.S. must get India to reward the rogue elements for their troublemaking by trying to get India to make concessions over something it considers non-negotiable. Because the rogue elements are far more extreme and unaccountable, they have no reason to accept any deal that India makes and have every incentive to pursue maximalist goals, so even if you somehow persuade India to do something it will never do it will have no positive effect on stability in Pakistan.

On the contrary, it will encourage precisely the elements within the Pakistani state that have been fomenting instability, and it will encourage the same sort in Kashmir itself. Meanwhile, having strengthened rogue elements inside the ISI and military, the official military leadership will be even less inclined to assist in combating the Taliban, which will have necessarily grown stronger as its rogue patrons have grown stronger, for fear that the rogue elements will become powerful enough to overthrow them. Including Kashmir as part of the “solution” will not consolidate the Pakistani military’s divided attention and resources, but will exacerbate the very problem it is aimed at solving. For their part, the official leadership would be happy to see outside pressure brought on India, as their attachment to Kashmir is also quite powerful, and the civilian government will faithfully toe that line and argue, as President Zardari did earlier this week, that Kashmir is comparable to Palestine. Zardari’s comparison is clever, as he is using another example where a local conflict has already needlessly been turned into a regional and international question to urge similar treatment of the dispute in Kashmir, which conveniently avoids acknowledging that linking Israel-Palestine to practically every other regional problem (which is done to emphasize the supposed strategic importance of the conflict) has made resolution of all these problems more, not less, difficult.

There is a great desire in U.S. foreign policy thinking, perhaps most pronounced among liberal internationalists who love to demonstrate their understanding of how interrelated everything is, to link issues that do not need to be linked to address any particular question. Attention to complexity is desirable, but the mania for “comprehensive” solutions helps to make all of the individual problems harder to solve because it lends so much more weight to each dispute. Indeed, in the case of Kashmir, it would be attempting to solve something that one of the parties involved–India–does not see as a problem in need of being solved. Simply by having a third party raise the issue in the context of a regional “solution,” Pakistan acquires vastly more leverage than it would or should otherwise have and perversely makes Pakistan less likely to cooperate on the other issues where the U.S. actually needs cooperation. Now that Obama has floated the possibility of mediating in Kashmir, and as it seems likely that Holbrooke will raise the issue, the Pakistani government can claim that its hands are tied on assisting against the Taliban until the Kashmir mediation makes progress, and Washington will be in a position where it has to agree because it has already insisted that the two issues are fundamentally linked.

This Time article makes for depressing reading. It confirms my suspicions that meddling in Kashmir might very well figure into Holbrooke’s mission in South Asia, and it also makes me think that New Delhi is extremely insecure in its relationship with the U.S. after the change in administration. Three months ago when Obama was talking seriously about mediating in the Kashmir dispute, the Indian government and most media outlets there were horrified at the idea and also distressed that good relations with Washington were in jeopardy. Post-election enthusiasm for Obama in India in Indian political and media circles was not as great as in most other countries. Now after the reported success in keeping India off Holbrooke’s official agenda the Foreign Minister is cheering the closeness of the bilateral relationship and other government officials are crowing about the “respect” that New Delhi feels has been shown to its concerns.

That’s quite a swing in reactions and expectations in a fairly short time, and I think India is putting too much weight on its success in limiting Holbrooke’s official mission, and this is a point Ghosh, the author of the article, makes as well. For one thing, the administration has gone out of its way to claim, not all that credibly, that there was no Indian lobbying effort, which puts a bit of a damper on the idea that Washington is showing respect to Indian concerns. It’s not as if Singh went out and touted the success of Indian influence on U.S. decisions in Olmert-like fashion–to the extent that anyone in Singh’s government is talking about it, it is anonymously or in very vague terms. Indian concerns have at best been tolerated for the moment, and not necessarily heeded at all. If there was a serious chance that Kashmir might have fallen under Holbrooke’s mandate, that suggests a lack of understanding of and respect for the Indian position. This could lead to a very dangerous effort to insert the U.S. into the dispute at a moment when internal politics in Jammu & Kashmir, as shown by the recent state elections, are finally beginning to improve. (Interestingly, the Times of India editorial linked here cites the state elections as evidence that India can bear international scrutiny in Kashmir and should not necessarily fear internationalizing the issue.)

As I was trying to say in the column, we need a Pakistan policy that actually addresses the main problems in Pakistan, and believe it or not Kashmir is actually not near the top of this list, and it is also among the thorniest to resolve. There are far more immediate problems stemming from the financial crisis, popular discontent over our missile strikes, and separatist movements, and while it might satisfy elements in the Pakistani military to push some kind of Kashmir deal on India it is not going to contribute to the stability of Pakistan. That is the false promise of the “grand bargain” theories. On the contrary, trying to alter the current arrangements in Kashmir would precipitate conflict in Kashmir and possibly in the hinterlands of both countries. In the worst case, it could escalate a situation that is already very dangerous and sensitive, and given the arsenals of both states the dangers that result from failure are very great.

P.S. I did not have space in the column to dwell on bad Indian memories of the Clinton administration, which many Indians hold responsible for promoting the rise of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and worsening the situation in Kashmir. To the extent that they see Holbrooke as a return to old Clinton ways of handling South Asian issues, it will not be good for relations between our countries.

This Philip Weiss post on the role of Near Eastern affairs in Passaic County politics brought a question to mind: what has George Ajjan, our man in Passaic County, been doing lately? His latest post shows a promotional poster for the Inaugural in Senegal, where he travels from time to time, but we haven’t heard much from George over the last few months. If you haven’t read his blog before, I recommend looking back through his archives for very interesting discussions of Near Eastern politics and U.S. policy.

It continues to mystify me how John Boehner remains the leader of the House Republicans. The Republican stimulus vote was remarkable in how politically tone-deaf it was. The bill as presented to the House shouldn’t have passed, but it is striking how unwilling the Republican leadership was to back a popular piece of legislation. When confronted with a similar situation in September over the bill authorizing the TARP–the Democrats had a majority but wanted, indeed needed, Republican votes for provide bipartisan cover–the Republican leadership caved and backed a bill their constituents hated and endorsed a measure of dubious merit. Of course, that was four months ago when it might have done them some good electorally. Having blown the obvious opportunity to tap into populist outrage over the bailout, which was supported by perhaps a third of the electorate at most, the leadership now decides to make their stand opposing a bill that commands support from a broad majority of the country, and they do so at a time when their stand, such as it is, will be forgotten by the time the midterms come around.

Indeed, the sudden unanimous opposition of House Republicans to this bill mainly accomplishes one thing, which is to remind everyone of how gutlessly the Republican leadership acquiesced to whatever the Bush administration wanted and how they only managed to discover some interest in resisting massive expenditures when someone from the other party is in the White House. This highlights the past fecklessness and opportunism of the current Republican leadership. Given the current mood in the country, the House GOP in ’10 will probably be received in the country about as well as the House GOP was received during the ’98 midterms. The lesson to draw from the Democrats’ defeat in 2002 is not that cooperation with the White House loses the opposition party seats in the next elections, but that challenging a very popular President on a major piece of legislation (especially when the legislation is also popular) usually ends up costing the opposition party seats.

P.S. Republican leaders may also be putting too much stock in polling that shows greater support for tax cuts as opposed to spending. Posing the question this way can produce misleading results. Naturally, most people likes the idea of receiving tax cuts, but the stimulus bill they just voted down had tax cuts–so why does the leadership think they are on the winning side of this? Even if tax cuts did not account for as much of the bill as the GOP would like, there they were. Voter identification with the GOP has already been sinking–how is opposing this measure going to turn that around? None of this is to deny that the bill in question really was terrible (which is why 11 Democrats could not bring themselves to vote for it), but the poor quality of pieces of legislation has never been a bar to Republican leaders putting their support behind bills in the past.

Update: Good news for Obama: Mark Halperin blames him for the unanimous Republican opposition. As the CW master, Halperin can be counted on to get things about as wrong as possible with great consistency, and here he could not be more wrong. The reality is quite different: House Republicans have just given Obama license to ignore them in future negotiations on the budget and on other major questions. Granted, Obama had the numbers in both houses to do that anyway, but the only thing that will really keep him from writing off the GOP members now is his own interest in being seen as a consensus-builder (or at least someone trying to build consensus).

Second Update: Jim Antle finds it strange that I would criticize the GOP leadership for opposing a bad bill and thinks this makes less political sense than the GOP leadership’s opposition. As I hoped I had made clear in the original post, I was questioning the leadership‘s impressively bad political judgement. Obviously, the House members who voted against the bailout were right in voting against the stimulus in its present form. What I find incredible is the leadership’s utter inability to provide, well, leadership, and Jim acknowledges as much. This is largely the same top leadership in Boehner and Cantor that backed an awful piece of legislation that they themselves didn’t think was worth passing but wanted to be seen doing something, deepening their voters’ disgust with them and possibly making House GOP results worse than they needed to be thanks to depressed turnout. Then, having backed the worst bill of the several they have voted on in the last few months, they have opted to engage in some kind of suicidal penance by opposing bills that are at least perceived to be beneficial to a much larger part of the public and which enjoy the backing of a President with approval ratings 65%+.

Similar to the bizarre McCain campaign’s efforts to appropriate middle-class symbolism while supporting the financial sector bailout, the House leadership managed to associate themselves with the TARP, which their constituents found outrageous, and subsequently have tried to make up for it by resisting measures that a large part of the public is likely to believe are designed to benefit them rather than a select few. It’s as if the leadership wants to strike a populist chord that resonates with middle-class Americans, but no longer has any clue how to do that and manages to oppose only the lousy measures that people tend to like while backing the ones they loathe. If that seems like a smart or effective way to rehabilitate the toxic Republican brand and facilitate a revival of a vehicle for conservative policies, Jim must be seeing something that I am not. Working to thwart the administration’s attempt to use the next tranche of the TARP would be a beginning towards making real amends for the leadership’s initial colossal blunder last fall.

There is something else about the stimulus business that annoys me. The newfound zeal for fiscal responsibility, such as it is, reveals one of the fundamental problems of the GOP leadership, which is its completely unfounded notion that the GOP is now on the skids because of wasteful spending (and earmarks!). This sounds nice, but there seems to be no reason to think this has any merit as a matter of electoral politics. The anti-earmark mania that dominated the presidential campaign and which seems to control the minds of House leaders has prevailed yet again, suggesting that once again Republican leaders have learned absolutely nothing about why they have suffered two major electoral drubbings. The leadership’s flailing, much like McCain’s during the early days of the financial crisis, sends the message that the GOP has nothing to say to the public that cannot be summed up by the phrase wasteful spending. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t oppose wasteful spending, of course, but when they have absolutely nothing else to talk about (except, God help us, the return of the Fairness Doctrine) it is more than a little frustrating to watch.

Remember GSAVE? That was the clunky abbreviation for Donald Rumsfeld’s brief, ill-fated replacement name for the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as the “global struggle against violent extremism,” which was slightly less ridiculous than warring against an abstraction and yet even more amorphous and aimless. Little wonder it didn’t catch on. In his Inaugural, President Obama referred to a war against a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” That would be the WAFRNOVAH. Somehow I don’t think this is going to become a useful shorthand when referring to U.S. anti-terrorist policy. I bring this up after reading Yglesias’ article in which he argues against the continued use of the phrase “war on terror” and Roger Cohen’s column in which he claims that Obama’s Al-Arabiya interview demonstrated that the “war on terror,” or at least its role as the rhetorical frame of U.S. policy, was over.

Yglesias is making sense when he lays out the reasons why the phrase and the concept behind it are deeply flawed, but seems to miss an obvious reason why the “war on terror” framing is going to survive and probably thrive. Like its open-ended, ill-defined and misguided cousins, the drug war and the war on poverty, the “war on terror” is a rhetorical frame and set of policies that may not be very good at achieving the objectives for which it was created, but it is very valuable as an ongoing, never-ending pretext for concentrating additional power in the federal government and as a justification for preserving and expanding bureaucratic territory and budgets. If these “wars” were judged on whether they met their stated objectives in a reasonable amount of time in an affordable way, not only the phrases but most of the policies related to them would have been eliminated long ago. Whatever their initial ideal purpose and whatever the intentions of their creators, these “wars” become self-perpetuating rackets whose preservation becomes the priority of all those institutions and interest groups with a stake in the policies in question. More to the point, even if the “war on terror” language was dropped most of the policies of what is called the Long War would remain intact, because the Long War, as Prof. Bacevich has argued in several places, is not confined to combating Al Qaeda and likeminded groups but has a much more expansive scope. The Long War is not simply a response to blowback, but is an expression of domestic impulses:

The impulses that have landed us in a war of no exits and no deadlines come from within. Foreign policy has, for decades, provided an outward manifestation of American domestic ambitions, urges, and fears. In our own time, it has increasingly become an expression of domestic dysfunction–an attempt to manage or defer coming to terms with contradictions besetting the American way of life. Those contradictions have found their ultimate expression in the perpetual state of war afflicting the United States today.

(The Limits of Power, p. 5)

As Prof. Bacevich observed correctly last May, Secretary Gates has endorsed the concept of the Long War entirely. In this respect, he is no different from former Secretary Rumsfeld (he is, arguably, less anxious about large, prolonged deployments of American soldiers in hostile countries than Rumsfeld). As some may still recall, Robert Gates will continue to be Secretary of Defense for the foreseeable future, and Gates has shown no signs of breaking with his earlier embrace of the Long War, which suggests that Obama has no real disagreements with it. What is the Long War? Bacevich explains:

Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the “Long War” has been about all of these things and more.

Cohen’s claim that Obama has signaled the “war on terror” to be over is very questionable. Leaving aside the missile strikes in Pakistan last week, which suggest that the “war on terror” is doing just fine, mindset and all, we had numerous statements from Obama and Biden during the campaign in which they emphasized that Afghanistan, and not Iraq, was the proper “central front” in this war. Obama said this during his trip overseas during the summer of 2008, and he said something very similar earlier this week, except this time it was the “central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.” How does OESATAE strike you? Incidentally, his remarks from earlier this week confirm pretty much everything I feared about Obama’s policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, including talk of a “regional appoach,” which conjures up the prospect of the “grand bargain” I warn against in the new column.

In any case, there is no reason to think that the “war on terror” mindset is going away, because the government is not going to repudiate the Long War, and this is part of the ongoing deferral of responsibility and refusal to accept limits that plagues our country in many other ways. No, I’m afraid the “war on terror” is here to stay for the time being, complete with misleading references to fronts–as if speaking about conventional fronts makes any sense in a war that must by definition lack conventional fronts–and false promises of military solutions to problems that are ultimately rooted in how we live.

As most have probably heard by now, Culture11 is shutting down. David Kuo explains why here. This is an unfortunate turn of events, and I am very sorry to see it happen. I was pleased to be among C11’s earliest contributors, I very much enjoyed the conversations spurred on by their many bloggers, and I was hoping to continue to write for them in the months and years to come. It was an interesting, irreverent, eclectic and wide-ranging site that brought together smart commentary and an impressive number of quality writers and bloggers, and it will be sorely missed. I wish the C11 staff all the best in their future endeavors.

My first column for The Week discusses the appointment of Richard Holbrooke and the pitfalls that may trip up the new special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the administration’s apparent Pakistan policy.