Ambinder:

Now — an Obama campaign spokesperson did not mention one area in Obama HAS gone outside of his comfort zone, and that’s with his support for the FISA compromise. Liberals are pissed off; Democrats in Congress are angry, and Obama went ahead and did what he thouht was right. So FISA’s a good talking point for him. I’m surprised the Obama campaign isn’t using it.

I assume Ambinder is being sarcastic, since the FISA compromise, like Obama’s NAFTA waffle, is a perfect example of how Obama never strays from his comfort zone.  It’s not a question of breaking ranks with liberals, but of breaking ranks with those who have the power to damage his career.  When the primaries were being contested and Obama needed the netroots to rally to his side, he said all of the things that they wanted to hear (not, as he often claims, the things they need to know), and then abandoned those positions when they came into conflict with the much more powerful entrenched interests with respect to trade or this FISA bill.  On most things, he hews more or less to the progressive line because that is how he receives most of his support (and I expect he also believes in what he’s saying), but on the policies where either a majority of the electorate he’s trying to win over takes a certain position or entrenched interests support a certain position he winds up taking the easy way out and siding with the majority or the entrenched interests.   

The FISA legislation is a perfect example of the sort of Broderian bipartisanship I constantly lament and have ridiculed Obama for promoting: the collusion of the two parties to produce horrible legislation and destructive policies that a majority of the people either already oppose or will eventually oppose once their costs become known.  What people seem to be missing is that Obama did not break with the left on FISA legislation when his nomination was still in doubt, but did so now in order to avoid taking the position of a minority of the public and to avoid riling the telecom industry.  Missing from this point of Ambinder’s is the recognition that standing by his pledge to filibuster a piece of national security legislation during the general election would have been the bold, risky and courageous thing to do.  Of course, Obama did the opposite, as he always does. 

In this sense, yes, Obama is pragmatic and not ideological, but what a lousy kind of pragmatism!

Bob Barr talks with Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake on bloggingheads about FISA, civil liberties and the presidential race.

If this McCain spin is even close to being right and the L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll had something like 22% Republican party ID, there is something seriously wrong with it and it almost certainly underrepresents McCain’s strength.  Republican party ID has declined, but there is no reason to think it has dropped by 14 points since 2006.  That would help to account for McCain’s fairly anemic showing in that poll.  The Newsweek poll also uses a pool of respondents with just 22% Republican party ID (23% among RVs).  So the model of both the LAT and Newsweek polls is questionable, and both seem to be underrepresenting Republicans–hence the large leads for Obama.  I have seen several people suggest that the LAT poll might mean that the Newsweek result was more reliable, but both are based on what seems to be a seriously flawed model of the electorate.  Polling registered voters is potentially misleading enough as it is, but these results require you to believe that fewer than one in four voters in America identifies as a Republican.  While not unimaginable (GOP party ID sank to these levels after Watergate), it is pretty unlikely.

P.S. The surveys that rely on a pool of adults or RVs tend to have the lowest Republican party ID, while polls of LVs tend to have considerably higher ones.  The party ID flaw in these polls derives from polling registered voters rather than likely ones.  I should add, however, that the Gallup daily tracking poll is also a survey of registered voters, and shows the election tied at 45.

Contra Philip Klein, I don’t need a “Bat Signal” to find the latest attacks on critics of Israel or U.S. Israel policy–I just need to read his blog entries, which are disproportionately filled with such criticism.  If I didn’t read AmSpec‘s blog regularly, I might never have seen Joe Klein’s post, and were it not for the over-the-top responses to the post I wouldn’t have seen much reason to comment on it.  Joe Klein did write a follow-up post after I had written mine, and he does indeed make the charge of “divided loyalties.”  That’s unfortunate, it shows I was wrong about that part of my earlier post, and I think it’s not true for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, but even this charge is far short of accusing someone of “treasonous disloyalty” (as one response put it) or anything of the kind.  Treason is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and neither Joe Klein nor, for that matter, any critic of the war has claimed that any war supporters have aided America’s enemies (except perhaps in terms of unintended consequences that resulted from the blunder of the invasion).   

The hyperventilating about Joe Klein’s posts (and the rather absurd refusal to refer to him by his last name) does come back to the broader problem that it is apparently still unacceptable to say that Iraq war supporters supported the war to some significant degree because they believed it would make Israel more secure.  Yet back in late 2002 and early 2003, one often heard far-fetched but presumably sincere claims that toppling Hussein would make it easier to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.  It is, as Sullivan says, an “increasingly obvious fact that the Iraq war was in part launched to assist Israel.”  Obviously, I don’t think we should be fighting wars even partly for other countries and I don’t think we should be starting wars at all, but why would staunchly “pro-Israel” war supporters who do believe this find such claims so troubling? 

It is disgusting to impugn others’ patriotism, which is why I’m sure Philip Klein was as disgusted by and vocal about the attack on the patriotism of Pat Buchanan et al. in 2003 for having supposedly “turned their back” on America.  The problem is not one of divided loyalties, as if Israeli interests are being put first and American interests second, but the mistake of seeing the interests of both states as largely or entirely complementary and almost identical.  When Anglophiles made this mistake in 1917 and plunged the U.S. into WWI, they were not exhibiting “divided loyalties,” but had a fundamentally mistaken understanding of what the American interest was.  Talk of “divided loyalties” comes up because the interests of any two states are not nearly so close or complementary, and those who conflate the interests of two states can end up making poor judgements about what the national interest of their country really is.  In the case of the Iraq war, you did have people, including neoconservatives of various backgrounds, making such a poor judgement because they misunderstood what was in the interest of both the United States and Israel.  It is not a question of loyalty, but of judgement.  Having first misunderstood and then identified the interests of the two states too closely, they ended up harming both.  The real issue is not motives, but the effects of terrible policies.   

Update: This response by Robert Stacy McCain doesn’t even make sense as an insult.  If one were inclined to stupid conspiracy theories, wouldn’t the Mossad be trying to crash my blog?

The argumentover who was for the “surge” first misses several important points.  It’s true that there were doubts about the efficacy of deploying additional forces into Baghdad, since it seemed to be no different from previous increases in the number of soldiers there, but the more significant objections were to the proposal that the “surge” be temporary and that this temporary measure would facilitate political reconciliation.  The latter has still, for the most part, not occurred, nor was there ever much reason to expect that it would occur.  Even the Pentagon’s own more positive report has little good to say about the Iraqi government.  According to the administration’s standards, the “surge” has generally not yielded the results that it was supposed to yield–that’s normally what we call failure.  Meanwhile, the GAO says that the measurements that the administration is using to show progress in Iraq are either flawed or show a less positive picture than the one currently being trumpeted.  Then there’s this:

Over all [sic], the report says, the American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration’s goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines.

That is the real point, and one that the defenders of the “surge” carefully avoid whenever they discuss the issue.  “Violence is down!” they cry.  Well, yes, but then these were often the same people who declared every suicide bombing to be a sign of the desperation of the enemy and proof that we were winning.  It was good when violence was up, and now it is good that violence is down, and it will be good when violence is at a steady level, because there will never be anything to persuade the most die-hard defenders of this war that it should be brought to an expeditious end.  Furthermore, the very temporary nature of the “surge” reveals it as something of a stunt, which critics have noted has more to do with shoring up the war’s political viability at home with the political class than it does with the long-term political stability of Iraq.  However, ironically the “surge” may end up achieving the opposite result, since a decline from the nightmarish violence of 2006 to the merely horrible violence of today has made Iraq seem more stable and thus more capable of surviving an American withdrawal.  Antiwar sentiment remains as strong as it was in January 2007, and now there is not the daily reminder that Iraq could fall to pieces after our forces leave.  The “surge” has failed by administration standards, but it may have worked well enough to ensure McCain’s defeat.  That would be an unusually fitting end.

To the exent that the “surge” is working to improve security, as virtually everyone agrees it has to some degree, it makes little sense to then reduce force levels to pre-“surge” levels while remaining in Iraq indefinitely.

As Prof. Bacevich stated very well last year:

That is, if the commitment of a modest increment of additional forces —the 30,000 troops comprising the surge, now employed in accordance with sound counterinsurgency doctrine —has begun to turn things around, then what should the senior field commander be asking for next?

A single word suffices to answer that question: more. More time. More money. And above all, more troops.

It is one of the oldest principles of generalship: when you find an opportunity, exploit it. Where you gain success, reinforce it. When you have your opponent at a disadvantage, pile on. In a letter to the soldiers serving under his command, released just prior to the congressional hearings, Petraeus asserted that coalition forces had “achieved tactical momentum and wrestled the initiative from our enemies.” Does that reflect his actual view of the situation? If so, then surely the imperative of the moment is to redouble the current level of effort so as to preserve that initiative and to deny the enemy the slightest chance to adjust, adapt, or reconstitute.

Yet Petraeus has chosen to do just the opposite. Based on two or three months of (ostensibly) positive indicators, he has advised the president to ease the pressure, withdrawing the increment of troops that had (purportedly) enabled the coalition to seize the initiative in the first place.

The clock has run out on the “surge,” and the additional brigades have departed or are departing.  Given that nothing fundamental about Iraq has changed, why would returning to more or less pre-“surge” levels not eventually lead to greater violence and increased instability?  Even with changes in tactics, the problem of insufficient forces that has plagued the U.S. mission remains.  The premise of the Brooks column is that Bush stubbornly resisted the advice of his generals (and everyone else), but in fact he simply chose a new general whose advice he now follows to the letter.  For all of last year, you might have thought that David Petraeus had become the President, so often did everyone in the administration defer to him.

Here is Prof. Bacevich again: 

The general has now made his call, and President Bush has endorsed it: the surge having succeeded (so at least we are assured), it will now be curtailed. The war will continue, albeit on a marginally smaller scale. As events develop, it just might become smaller still. Only time will tell.

Petraeus has chosen a middle course, carefully crafted to cause the least amount of consternation among various Washington constituencies he is eager to accommodate. This is the politics of give and take, of horse trading, of putting lipstick on a pig. Ultimately, it is the politics of avoidance. 

Indeed, the politics of the “surge” has all along been an effort to avoid answering the question, “What are we doing in Iraq?”  We all know the standard answers, but none of them is credible any longer.  You could tell from the beginning that there was no good answer to this question, not least since most of its supporters described the “surge” as a new “strategy,” when it was simply a new set of tactics in pursuit of the same pointless, aimless strategy that we have been pursuing in that unfortunate country for five years. 

As the NYT article relates:

Still more important, the report asserts, the administration’s plan is not a strategy at all, but more a series of operational prescriptions scattered among various documents reviewed by the accountability office.

The bureaucrats understand that there is no strategy here.  Do the President and the generals?

21% of Atheists believe in god. What this means is that Atheism has become a cultural designation, rather than a theological statement. Some are likely declaring themselves atheists as a statement of hostility to organized religion, rather than to God. ~Steven Waldman, on new Pew survey numbers

What it means is that one out of every five “atheists” doesn’t know what the word atheist means.  It is certainly some kind of statement–an ignorant one.

Suburbanites, independents, and others who were fed up not just with the war and corruption, but also with the Republican drift toward big-government who stayed home, or even voted Democratic, on election day 2006. ~Michael Tanner

Wouldn’t it have been nice if that were true?  There is, in fact, no exit poll data that I know of that corroborates that independents turned against the GOP because of the “Republican drift toward big government.”  In any case, wouldn’t it be more likely that big-government measures would have driven down Republican turnout, since you would expect at least some Republicans to be most opposed to such policies? 

Yet Republican turnout in 2006 remained fairly steady (36% in CNN’s national exit poll, of whom 91% voted for the GOP).  The party ID figures were almost identical to 2004 (37%-D; 37%-R; 26%-I), which also suggests that independents did not stay home in large numbers compared to earlier elections.  The difference between 2006 Republicans who voted for the House GOP and Republicans who voted for Bush is a statistically insignificant two points.  To be more precise, since party ID in itself is not conclusive, consider how self-described conservatives voted in 2004 and 2006: they backed Bush’s re-election 84-15 and backed the House GOP in 2006 78-20.  There is some slight decline, but the more significant decline came among self-described moderates–45% of them supported Bush in ’04, just 38% supported the GOP in ’06, and according to these exit polls they made up a significantly larger part of the electorate (45% in 2004 and 47% in 2006 to 34% and 32% conservative respectively).  Does anyone think that the realistic way to capture a larger percentage of this larger group of self-described moderates in the current election cycle is to hew to small-government line? 

McCain does need economic and small-government conservatives, but every indication from the actual voting habits of Republicans and most conservatives is that policies that expand the size and scope of government essentially do not change their willingness to support the GOP.  If Medicare Part D wasn’t a deal-breaker, choosing Tim Pawlenty as a running mate certainly isn’t going to do it.  On the other hand, ruling out someone like Pawlenty guarantees that McCain will have more difficulty making up the lost ground with moderates and independents. 

On policy, I am in agreement with Tanner about small-government conservatism, but I fear that if small-government conservatives and libertarians keep telling themselves fairy tales about how excessive spending lost the Republicans control of Congress we will never get very good at presenting our arguments in ways that will win over significant public support.

Michael’s cover story on the strange tale of Lieberman is a good read, and the article explains what drives Lieberman better than just about anything else I’ve read.  There are many things to say about the article, but one of the things I would have liked to see Michael push a bit more was the basic zaniness of Lieberman’s critique of his own party as one in thrall to neo-McGovernism, which is so wildly wrong that it would have driven home just how distorting Lieberman’s ideological lenses are.  Lieberman’s reaction to Obama’s foreign policy is the same reaction that virtually all interventionist hawks have when presented with a policy that does not endorse every single hawkish position: hilariously exaggerated and fairly hysterical.  Fail to support the most maximalist position on using force anywhere and everywhere, and you become another “isolationist” and “dove.”  Thus the candidate who has won praise from Robert Kagan, Marty Peretz and the almost comically hawkish Post editorial page under Fred Hiatt is treated by Lieberman as the second coming of George McGovern.  Perhaps the silliness of his position is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be articulated, but I think antiwar voters could be misled and set up for severe disappointment if they think that the choice in this election is really so stark as this. 

Michael concluded with these lines:

And while Lieberman may never again influence his party in a direct manner, a McCain victory in November, aided by Lieberman, could be used to frighten Democrats into accepting the neoconservative view of history: that doves will always lose, that America is fundamentally an activist nation. It’s up to Democrats to prove him wrong.

Certainly, Lieberman is wrong, but I’m not sure how the Democrats can prove it with an Obama victory.  The Democratic nominee is “dovish” only in the sense that he opposed invading Iraq, but not in any other way.  Yes, in the context of the Iraq debate, that aligns him with the “doves,” if you like, but he is the most activist and interventionist “dove” anyone has ever seen.  You can be sure that the neocons and Lieberman will be singing a different tune after the election, should their candidate lose, since they will then have every incentive to deny that their activist, hawkish foreign policy had been rejected by the country.  Just as they started doing as long ago as 2004 (and perhaps even earlier), when they declared that Mr. Bush flailed and failed in foreign policy because he wasn’t hawkish enough, they will say that the voters in 2008 elected another activist, interventionist President in Obama.  They will unfortunately have the evidence on their side (for once). 

This is what makes Lieberman’s journey truly bizarre, and this is what is so remarkable about the ideological blinders that he wears.  According to Lieberman, the candidate who wants to expand NATO’s borders to Pankisi Gorge and who endorsed the bombardment of Lebanon is the heir to McGovern.  Had the Democrats nominated a Dennis Kucinich, you might at least understand that Lieberman has significant differences on policy with the nominee, but that didn’t and was never going to happen.  The Democratic Party has swung so far to the “right” (as these things are convetionally defined) on foreign policy during Lieberman’s tenure in the Senate that figures such as Kucinich, perhaps the only candidate who deserved the mantle of McGovernite in this area, are essentially survivors from another era, reduced to the backbench rump that (more or less) consistently opposes U.S. entry into wars and infringement on civil liberties.  That this rump doesn’t call the shots on anything important was revealed most recently in the FISA vote, and it has been demonstrated again and again over the last five years.

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives–people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary–plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties [bold mine-DL]: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. ~Joe Klein

This was almost a throwaway line at the end of a post that was principally about the “surge,” but that hasn’t stopped Klein’s critics from unloading on him with bothbarrels.  What Klein actually seems to be saying is not that these people possessed divided loyalties, but that their support for the war created an impression and raised the question.  Well, it did raise the question.  That is the extent of what Joe Klein said.   

As Robert Stacy McCain’s response makes clear, pro-Israel war supporters think it is right to “support America’s ally against America’s enemies,” which is why I have never quite understood the hypersensitivity about the claim that war supporters backed invading Iraq because they thought it was good for Israel.  Yes, of couse, they also thought it was good for America.  As it happens, they were quite wrong on both counts, but to see the reaction to the suggestion that the war was waged for Israel’s benefit or at least to some degree on Israel’s behalf you would never know that these are the people who support a strong alliance between the U.S. and Israel.  According to such people, it is a smear or an accusation of treason or “dual loyalty” to say that someone supports a particular policy because he believes it is in the best interests of the U.S. and Israel, when that same someone is profoundly mistaken about the strategic interests of the U.S. and Israel.  But the heart of the critique is not an attack on loyalty, but on the kind of judgement and ideological obsession that concluded that invading a Near Eastern state essentially without provocation and installing majoritarian democracy in Iraq would benefit American and Israeli security.  In fact, it freed Iran’s hand and made life much more difficult for Israel; the costs to the United States are obvious.  The real point is that these people have terrible judgement when they are assessing what is in the interests of both the U.S. and Israel, and as Mearsheimer and Walt argued the policies that “pro-Israel” hawks advance are generally damaging to the security of both countries.  The even better answer to the question cui bono? when discussing neoconservative foreign policy is this: nobody.       

If you believed that one of our allies was being threatened by a particular state, it seems to me that you would make defending that ally an important part of your argument to go to war against that state, or at the very least you would acknowledge that defending that ally against a perceived threat was an important part of the rationale for the war.  The angry reaction to the mere idea that the war in Iraq had something to do with Israel, much less the more robust Mearsheimer/Walt argument that the war would not have happened but for “pro-Israel” forces pushing for it or another form of this argument stated in TAC, reveals a very strange attitude towards the relationship with Israel.  The relationship is supposed to be fundamental and non-negotiable, but we have to pretend that the rest of our Near Eastern policy is not driven to a significant degree by sustaining that relationship.  Also, we simply must denounce anyone who questions whether American and Israeli interests converge as often as official policy implies they do. 

The entire discussion is surreal.  It’s as if we were discussing North Korea policy without ever referring directly to South Korea and Japan, for fear of making it seem as if our policy has something to do with the security of our allies.  Thus we have had the absurd contortions that require people to say that third-rate despotisms on the other side of the world pose a threat to the United States, when the real concern is the security of allied states that can, of course, defend themselves perfectly well without our aid.

While the calls for intervention in Zimbabwe grow louder, it’s worth remembering that no less than McCain himself has already essentially ruled out meddling there.  On the main blog, Patrick Ford responds to the interventionist arguments, noting renewed enthusiasm for international institutions in them:

The real novelty is that the go-it-alone liberators are looking to the United Nations for help. NR wants the UN involved, and if not the blue helmets, then the British should stop “posturing” and get in there themselves. The Right–even the neocon Right–used to rightfully criticize the UN for sending peacekeepers everywhere and achieving progress nowhere. Now they want peacekeepers in Zimbabwe, at the behest of the U.S. government.

One of the legacies of the Blair years, as I’m sure Freddy and others could attest, is that the British military, particularly the Navy, has been gutted by spending cuts and was straining to maintain operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan as it was.  Under these circumstances, sabre-rattling against Mugabe from London would be nothing more than an empty threat.  Of course, it is up to the British people and their government to determine whether they have an obligation to their former colony, and whether they wish to imitate the intervention in Sierra Leone and the French intervention in Ivory Coast in recent years, but to my mind the argument for British involvement rings hollow.  If the case cannot be made for British intervention, how much less of a case is there for American?

Oborne invokes the dubious “responsibility to protect” standard that retroactively justified the intervention in Kosovo to stop (non-existent) genocide, but beyond compromising the principle of state sovereignty it asserts a new sort of sovereignty of the protector over those whom he protects.  If other states have a “responsibility to protect” the people of other states, they are to some extent responsible for the government of those other states, and not only in times of crisis.  The de facto two-tier system of protector (i.e., dominating) and protected states that would result exposes dozens of other small, reasonably well-governed nations to interference by more powerful neighbours and regional powers on various pretexts framed in terms of protecting their populations.  That the pretexts will often be transparent will not change the instability that can and will result when major powers begin acting as if the state sovereignty under certain conditions is essentially meaningless.  As Kosovo should have taught us already, the claims made by outside governments about conditions inside another country are often unreliable or patently false, but there is nothing to stop other powers from engaging in the same exaggerations and propaganda to justify their interference in the affairs of other states.    

The invasion of Iraq was framed partly in this way, yet the hundreds of thousands dead, the millions displaced and the tens of millions living in greater insecurity than before all remind us that such protection can be worse than the danger.  The refugee crisis in Kosovo that started only after the NATO bombing campaign began serves as another reminder that those who are supposedly being protected are often among the first to suffer the most from such “help.”  This is not just a question of unintended consequences, but of obviously foreseeable calamities that will result from taking specifically military action to remedy an internal political problem.  Zimbabwe seems to offer a relatively clear case of a despotic maniac and his ruling party brutalising the opposition, but surely Iraq ought to have taught everyone some humility that outsiders do not necessarily understand the internal political struggles of other countries very well. 

We should remember that Westerners in particular tend to valorise one side in an internal struggle and act as if their acquisition of power will resolve conflicts that may be rooted in much more enduring structural divisions based on ethnicity, tribe or religion that are obscure to us and hidden behind simple labels of democrat and dictator.  The international complications that would arise with any intervention in Sudan or Burma are also there in Zimbabwe as well, since everyone knows that Zimbabwe has become one of China’s clients in Africa. 

The MDC and Tsvangirai are unusual in that they are actually reasonably sympathetic representatives of political opposition to Mugabe, as opposed to the rather dubious list of crooks who have been lionised as champions of political reform in the various “colour” revolutions, but it is not clear why their cause is particularly more deserving of armed intervention than that of the Luos in Kenya, Darfuris, Nepalis and Burmese, whose plight briefly caught outside attention and then faded into the background.  Interventionists are always insisting that we must act now, and the urgency of their appeals is one of their political strengths, because it short-circuits serious thought and forces people to pick sides on the issue quickly, but the demand for action fades almost as quickly as it comes.  Had we heeded the call for going into Burma we, or rather our soldiers, would still be knee-deep in the floodwaters, having embarked on another hazardous, open-ended mission with no obvious connection to U.S. interests.    

What we are seeing in Zimbabwe is just one in a series of imploding post-colonial governments ushering in political strife and the early stages of civil war.  Does it then become the new standard that each failing, violent kleptocracy around the world becomes the ward of other states?  It is not at all clear how this actually aids any of the peoples in question over the long term, if their political conflicts must be perpetually adjudicated and resolved by the use of outside force.  Nothing could be more effective in stunting political development in these countries, and the domestic political opposition already suffers enough from the accusation of being the puppet of foreigners without foreign intervention seeming to confirm that the opposition’s cause and that of outside powers is the same. 

It never ceases to amaze me how interventionists on the right can damn the U.N. as irrelevant, useless and corrupt and then turn around and start demanding that it do something to address this or that crisis.  Even so, the appeal to the U.N. and other nations is partly a rhetorical frame to set up the inevitable “reluctant warrior” argument that America must step into the breach because those lily-livered Europeans and globocrats have failed yet again.  This is how those who were eager to “crush Serb skulls” could portray intervention in the Balkans as a grudging act of necessity, rather than the obviously gratuitous and arbitrary act that it was.   

P.S.  It is technically true that ZANU-PF came to power through elections, but they held an overwhelming advantage in the post-independence era as the major anti-colonialist resistance movement.  The lesson to draw from the tragedy of Zimbabwe is not simply that elected governments can also commit terrible crimes against their peoples, but that political movements that once enjoyed international admiration or sympathy can become–or, more likely, always were–dangerous and repressive.  Not only does this tell us that democratic governance is not a panacea for more fundamental political conflicts, but that often enough the main thing that distinguishes an opposition figure and a tyrant is that the former has not yet acquired power.