The Libertarian’s percentage is greater than the difference between the Democrat and the Republican. We await the Obama campaign’s denunciation of Barr as a “spoiler” who’s taking away votes from their candidate. ~Robert Stacy McCain

This last line is meant as a joke, but it would certainly be very foolish for Obama’s campaign to draw attention to the Georgia numbers.  As I discuss in more detail in an upcoming column for the magazine, Barr’s polling in Georgia can be misleading for those who think that it holds out the chance of Obama winning the state.  Polls that include Barr see McCain’s numbers go down or it sees the undecided vote go up, but Obama’s numbers remain static in the 41-44% range.  If I am Obama trying to explain to my donors why the campaign is frittering away money on advertising in a state as unwinnable as Georgia (the impossibility of winning is driven home by McCain’s continued lead despite Barr’s inclusion in the poll), I would try to avoid mentioning specific numbers, much less cite polls that prove that the advertising is a waste of resources.

Those who engage in fearmongering about Iran usually save contradicting themselves for separate sentences, but not Robert Kaplan:

A nuclear arsenal will allow Iran to become a Middle East hegemon like the Great Persia of antiquity, yet it will also encourage countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to develop their own bombs.

Pretty clearly, if an Iranian nuclear arsenal inspired other regional states to acquire their own bombs, Iran would not become a Middle East hegemon of any kind, much less a hegemon like “the Great Persia of antiquity.”  Achaemenid Persia at its height ruled over all of what is today’s Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, as well as ruling over significant chunks of the Caucasus, Central Asia and modern Pakistan.  If several of those states acquire nuclear weapons in response to an Iranian bomb, and two already have them, what are the odds of Iranian regional hegemony beyond what it currently enjoys?  You can legitimately raise the concern that an Iranian bomb would trigger a regional arms race, but you can’t also say that Iran would also dominate the region as in the days of Cyrus and Xerxes at the same time. 

Kaplan continues:

Iran will represent the heretofore unseen and unconventional combination of being a nuclear-armed state which supports sub-state armies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip.

It is such an unseen and unconventional combination that only the Americans, Soviets and Pakistanis have done it before them.  Unlike those powers, Iran has apparently not yet mastered the powers of invisibility.

Kaplan then takes a detour through Crazytown:

But what if the Europeans don’t get the message?  Or what if Iran continues its cat-and-mouse negotiating mixed with intransigence? Israel’s future in this regard is indeed bleak.  For even if a moderate Republican realist like John McCain, or even worse, a liberal-left internationalist like Barrack Obama, is elected president, each is likely to subsume Israel to larger geopolitical considerations, rather than hold it up as an icon to be both supported and worshipped in the post-9/11 era [bold mine-DL], as George W. Bush has done.

God forbid the President of the United States put other geopolitcal considerations ahead of the supposed interests of a small Mediterranean ally.  For that matter, if I were to say that George W. Bush held Israel up as “an icon to be supported and worshipped” someone would say that I was exaggerating unfairly and that I was engaging in hyperbole.

Kaplan isn’t finished yet:

Because an air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities will roil world financial markets and thus provide Obama with even more of an edge over the Republican party, Israel may be less inclined to attack Iran before the election [bold mine-DL]. On the other hand, after the inauguration, Israel will be in the hands of a new American president who will show it much less sympathy than Bush [bold mine-DL].

If Kaplan could cite some instance where either McCain or Obama deviated even a micron from Mr. Bush’s Israel policies, that would help make this interpretation seem a little less absurd.  A skeptic might say that the kind of sympathy that has greatly empowered Iran and backed Olmert’s blunder in Lebanon is sympathy Israel might want to avoid in the future, but then McCain is indistinguishable from Bush on this score, and Obama’s sole difference with the administration with respect to policy goals in the region relates to the Iraq war, which did so much to undermine Israeli security.  Viewed that way, Obama might be fairly described as being even more pro-Israel than Bush.

Update: Meanwhile, Haaretz reports on a Telegraph article that any Israeli strike against Iran wouldn’t succeed anyway because both our government and Israel’s don’t know where many of the nuclear facilities are:

Senior United States defense officials fear that a much-anticipated Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would fail to destroy them due to lack of intelligence about their location, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

The British newspaper stated that evidence of the CIA and Mossad espionage agency’s dearth of knowledge on the matter emerged during recent Israel-U.S. talks.

Wasn’t one of the lessons of the Iraq debacle supposed to be that we should avoid initiating military operations on the basis of shoddy and/or incomplete intelligence?   

While Webb had made his sentiments perfectly clear some time ago, he made his refusal to be a VP candidate official today.  (Hat tip: Jim Antle)  This is good news for Virginia and for the Senate Democrats, and it’s probably good for Obama for reasons I have stated before.  This is also good news for the country, because Webb will be much more effective in advancing both foreign policy realist and economic populist causes in the Senate than he ever would have been able to do as Vice President. 

On a Webb-related note, Sen. Webb has an article in the 6/30 issue of TAC on foreign policy in the Near East (sorry, not online).  Here is an excerpt:

Journalism has its flaws, particularly when one comes to a situation with a preconceived political bias.  But good journalism, coming from honest, perceptive journalists, has a far better track record with respect to the challenges of the Middle East than do the policies of our political leaders.  Sometimes it is easier to comprehend harsh realities when one is able to observe them closely without direct involvement and without having to feel accountable for their end results.  And sometimes politicians are so blinded by their policy positions and by the filtering process through whicfh they receive their information that they will never fully understand the realities of the problems they are trying to fix.

In any event, I came away from this experience [in Beirut] with a strong feeling that the United States should tread softly in the Middle East, that it should never give up its military or diplomatic maneueverability by occupying territory in a region so fraught with multilayered conflicts.

There is much more in the article in addition to this.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I would much prefer to have an independent-minded Sen. Webb who can produce the insights in this article rather than see Jim Webb be obliged to defend the next dubious intervention in Sudan or God-knows-where as a member of the Obama administration. 

Update: I should note that the article in the magazine is an excerpt from Webb’s new book, Time to Fight.

Here is the poll I was looking for, and there are some interesting things to be found in it.  While it is true that only 12% of Americans agree with the statement that the U.S. should “withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems,” that is actually tremendously strong support for a degree of withdrawal from the globe that even most non-interventionists wouldn’t support.  There are, after all, humanitarian, financial, commercial and diplomatic means to address international problems that would not necessarily violate the counsel of Washington and Jefferson to avoid permanent and entangling alliances.  It is a caricature of the non-interventionist and neutralist positions that they would involve some kind of autarchic separation from the rest of the planet, and even then 12% would embrace such a policy. 

That 12% of the American public supports withdrawing even from many of these efforts is an impressive indication of how uninterested Americans are in the role of hegemon.  Only 10% of Americans endorse the statement that the U.S. “should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems.”  The Washington consensus on American “leadership” in the world is shared by one in ten Americans.  This is unsustainable at home.  

The majorities in Argentina and the Palestinian territories that prefer American withdrawal from most international efforts and the strong support for that option in Russia, Armenia and even Ukraine give another clue as to why hegemony is also unsustainable around the world.  What these nations have in common is a great antipathy to the way that the U.S. has exercised “leadership” in the world, since it has tended to come at their expense, or they associate their own problems with U.S. “leadership.”  The few nations that have large constituencies that support U.S. hegemony tend to be those that probably believe they have some stake in continued American preeminence (e.g., South Korea, the Philippines, Israel) or those rising powers, such as India, that see an advantage in aligning themselves with the hegemon.  In the other countries in the survey, support for U.S. withdrawal from international efforts typically exceeds support for hegemony, and we can expect the former to grow stronger the longer Washington persists in its pursuit of preeminence.

While trying to track down the poll that Beinart refers to here, I found a remarkable international poll that showed the general consensus around the world that other nations should not take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Those favouring support for the Israeli side was greatest in India (24%) and, as might be expected, here in the U.S. at 21%, but an overwhelming majority (71%) thinks the U.S. should not take sides.  Certainly, when Americans are asked whether they support Israelis or Palestinians, they will tend to prefer the former when compelled to make a choice between the two, but the striking thing about this poll is that most Americans are uninterested in picking a side.  There were two nations where supporting the Palestinian side commanded a majority (Iran at 63% and Egypt at 86%), but they were distinctly in the minority of the eighteen countries included in the poll.  Naturally, Muslim nations lean towards the Palestinians, but there are also sizeable constituencies in Turkey and Indonesia that support neutrality.  For all of the endless talk about how “pro-Israel” policies have the support of the American public, those who endorse a simple pro-Israel line are a distinct minority even in the United States.

And there are certainly libertarians who think Obama will be better on the war and on foreign policy, on executive power and on surveillance than McCain. ~David Boaz

Via Sullivan

These libertarians are the ones who are already being proven wrong.  In any case, this reminds me of the recent Rasmussen item that studied support for the general election candidates according to different fiscal and social “ideological” pairings.  This offers some interesting information that works to undermine the Cato thesis that libertarian-leaning voters make up as much as 13% of the electorate, and even more strikingly it accomplishes this while using the same flawed “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” definition for libertarians that Kirby and Boaz were using last year.  According to Rasmussen’s numbers, such fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters make up just 4% of likely voters.  It seems to be the case that Obama is considerably more popular among these voters, leading 53-38 over McCain. 

Interestingly, the unnamed “other” candidate does not get his strongest support from this “libertarian” group, which gives a third candidate just 3%, but gets it from those who consider themselves fiscally liberal and socially conservative (9%).  It’s not clear which third-party candidate, if any, such voters would support, so it’s possible that more of these social conservatives could be brought into McCain’s camp.  Naturally, the fisc-lib/soc-con group is Obama’s weakest among fiscal liberals, and it is also a group with a significant number of undecided voters. 

How many “Obamacons” are there?  I’m surprised to find that there are more than I thought there would be, though there are very few fiscally conservative, socially conservative Obama supporters.  Prof. Kmiec does not have a lot of company.  All together, variants of fiscal conservative, including the “libertarians,” make up 16% of Obama’s support.  If you add the fiscal moderate/social conservative support, that comes to 24% of his support.  Here’s the thing: Obama is neither fiscally conservative nor fiscally moderate, and he certainly isn’t socially conservative.  If these voters put any store at all by how they have labeled themselves and what these labels mean*, it seems possible that a huge part of Obama’s current coalition and the basis for his five-point lead in Rasmussen’s tracking poll can be poached or driven away from him mainly by focusing on how expensive and unaffordable his spending proposals are.  These voters represent almost 12 points in the general election tracking poll.  If McCain can win over just half of them, he can win narrowly.  McCain’s coalition is much more concentrated on the right with just 11% of his supporters coming from the left or from groups with uncertain ideological leanings, which gives him a more stable floor of support he can build on. 

*I know most people don’t vote according to ideological labels or paradigms, but those who are able to define themselves with these pairings must have some policy preferences that more naturally align with one candidate rather than another.

In a deeply misguided effort to save the reputation of Hancock, Yglesias compares it to Starship Troopers, which proves that he actually wants everyone to regard it as a horrendous waste of time and an embarrassment for all those involved.  (Starship Troopers was the movie that made me wish that an alien bug race destroyed humanity, simply so that the movie would end and we could be put out of our misery.)  I should say that I once wasted what seemed like an eternity driving from my Southside Virginia college to somewhere in the general Richmond area to go to the movies one night in my first semester away at school.  The movie we saw at the end of our sojourn up, down and around Route 360 was the risible, horrible Starship Troopers.  If Hancock is anything like that, run for the hills!

It is more than a little remarkable that few have observed that Obama’s proposal to direct government funds to religious charities is as undesirable as Bush’s proposal.  Viewed through a distorting lens of bringing religion back into the public square or using religion as a vehicle for political point-scoring, faith-based initiatives have always seemed appealing, but neither religious traditionalists nor strict church-state separationists want such a venture to succeed, and for good reason.  The conservatives who saw the faith-based initiative idea as the welfare state’s co-optation of religious groups and as a threat to the independence of churches and charities have been vindicated with Obama’s embrace of the same takeover masked as a helping hand.  There is no way that such power will not be abused to the detriment of religious conservative groups.  The hard-line separationists must also be enjoying its success in showing the basic undesirability of such public-private cooperation in this particular area.  Meanwhile, Obama wins plaudits for having moved to the “center” on this question, which is to say that he gets credit for adopting the left-of-center position that the Bush administration adopted seven years ago.  That is ultimately what “the center” means: it is whatever the political class embraces. 

In a recent column, Sullivan says of Obama’s newfound “centrism”:

His pledge of a fixed timetable for withdrawal was always going to be subject to empirical shifts on the ground in Iraq.

But then it is hardly a fixed timetable, now, is it?  It’s like saying that there is a firm deadline, except that it can be adjusted depending on cirumstances.  It’s a bit like saying that there is an absolute cut-off date, except that we allow for some leeway.  It rather empties the word pledge of all meaning, doesn’t it?  Without that, what does Obama actually offer that is worth supporting? 

The analysis gets weaker from here:

And by conceding a “refinement” of his policy the day before the July 4 holiday, Obama avoided short-term attacks on his policy “flip-flop” while making a necessary adjustment.

But he didn’t avoid “short-term attacks.”  The Sunday shows were filled with talk of Obama’s “refinement” in far from flattering terms.  Perhaps he made a “necessary adjustment” according to a narrow, electoral calculation, but what he definitely did not do was to avoid attacks for “flip-flopping.”  Indeed, the complaint against the MSM is that it has run with the story of Obama’s Iraq flip-flop without due regard for evidence.  There may be some truth to this, but not nearly as much as his defenders would like.

Sullivan goes on:

And there’s a point to the successive shifts: Obama is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for Republican candidate John McCain.

That would be clever, except that it is entirely misguided.  The reason to vote for Obama, perhaps the only reason, is that he represents something significantly different from McCain in terms of policy.  In the absence of that, Obama hasn’t got a lot to offer besides an interesting biography and the odd pretty speech. 

This remark is hard to defend:

He cannot ignore the pressing need for good intelligence gained through wire-tapping after 9/11.

Someone will need to explain to me how someone can muster extraordinary moral outrage at immoral policies (e.g., torture), but can at the same time countenance manifestly illegal, unconstitutional ones.  The latter are more corrosive to our system of government and the way that our government operates, because they are less obviously outrageous, yet collusion with illegal surveillance does not begin to compete with collusion with a torture regime in the Obama supporter’s reactions.  If Obama had “moved to the center” away from his position condemning the Military Commissions Act, would we be hearing about how Obama was a shrewd, clever politician, or would we instead hear outraged cries about betrayal and lack of principle?  Do Americans’ civil liberties matter less than opposition to torture?  Some Obama supporters’ reactions would suggest that they are. 

Update: Sullivan responds, but I think he has not understood my objection:

Er, yes: in my view, congressionally approved wire-tapping is morally preferable to torture and less constitutionally and legally corrosive. It is very difficult for me to understand a worldview in which it weren’t. My major concern with wiretapping was the executive branch’s unilateral and unaccountable power-grab.

So when two branches of the government collude in unconstitutional activities, that isn’t a power grab?  More to the point, I am not saying that illegal wiretapping is morally worse than torture, but that both are illegal and abuses of power and only one seems to merit any outrage from Sullivan.  His disproportionate reactions to these two outrageous things, even if they aren’t equally outrageous, are remarkable.  The important point, which I may not have made as clearly as I should have was this: if Sullivan thinks supporting illegal wiretapping is a shrewd electoral “adjustment,” what cannot be justified in the name of such adjustments?  What else could Obama “adjust” before shrewdness degenerates into simply cynical manipulation?

Reading this (via Yglesias) reminds me that what most people mean to say when they complain about “propaganda” in schools is that they dislike the propagations of views other than their own.  Certainly, I think there can be cases where a focus on politics can distract from the purpose of a class, but that simply isn’t the case with the Al-Kitaab books themselves.  If instructors supplement the book with other material, that may be an entirely different story.  Even so, the demand for even-handedness in American Arabic textbooks because they unduly give Arabs more than a fair shake for once strikes me as fairly ridiculous. 

I cannot say whether or not later parts of Al-Kitaab omit Israel from their maps, but for the first part that introductory Arabic students use it is misleading to say that Israel is not on the map.  The territory on the map in my copy is labeled Filistin, which probably grates on the ears of “pro-Israel” people the way that continuing to call the West Bank Judea and Samaria grates on the ears of a lot of other people, but the boundaries of the State of Israel are acknowledged. 

More to the point, the idea that introductory language classes always eschew controversial political topics is silly.  The difference is that when you use Le chemin du retour for your first year of French, virtually everyone accepts the idea that it is a very bad and unpleasant thing to have had an ancestor who collaborated with the Nazis under the Vichy regime, but that is still political propaganda about a fairly controversial topic (it is particularly controversial in France!).  In general, a little more fortitude and little less whining are in order.

But, yes, Maha and Khalid were annoying, and it had nothing to do with their politics or those of anyone else in the story.

P.S. Previous thoughts on the sinister power of Al-Kitaabhere.

Those of us who believe in free markets, small government, peace, capitalism, civil liberties and the Constitution will lose, no matter who wins in November. ~Steven Greenhut

That sums it up quite well.  All the more reason to vote for Barr.