Ross says:

I think McCain’s pre-existing popularity makes him more appealing than Dole ever was, but I’m not sure what “Prodigal policy offerings” Kilgore has in mind; so far, the McCain message seems to boil down to his biography, the Surge, and … that’s about it.

Don’t forget that vital issue of earmark reform! 

Seriously, though, I think a heavily biographical campaign is McCain’s best chance, just as it was his best chance during the primaries when his main rival was a technocratic governor who liked to get into the weeds (“the weeds are important,” Romney told us).  Obama has already set up the opposition of past and future, and to the extent that there are many Americans who think the present and future look bleak the candidate who is supposed to represent the past might do quite well.  In the mid-’90s, a bridge to the past had limited appeal outside cultural conservative circles.  Right now the past may be looking pretty good to a lot of voters.  Of course, Clinton tried something similar and failed, so maybe it is a bad idea, but what works with Democratic primary voters and what works with the general electorate may be very different.

Update: Ambinder has more details on the biography campaign.

Jim Antle adds his latest response to the discussion of pro-lifers and the GOP.  Bringing it back to where it all started, Jim agrees with Ross on the original point of contention and says:

And I agree with Douthat that antiwar conservatives who are hoping that a Democratic president will fundamentally change U.S. foreign policy [bold mine-DL] are engaged in more wishful thinking than the most optimistic pro-lifer.

Certainly when put that way, it is hard to object to the conclusion, and on this point they’ll get no argument from me, but I do want to remind everyone that this isn’t what Prof. Bacevich said, and no one else in this recent debate on abortion has suggested anything of the kind.  The hope that Bacevich has put in Obama is of such a minimal, grudging kind that it has been somewhat misleading to call the article an endorsement.  Better than most, Bacevich understands the extent of the institutional support for the empire, and he understands that support for it transcends party lines, so he would not expect fundamental change from any future administration.  Indeed, his original article is so filled with caveats about the flaws of Obama’s foreign policy that it is absolutely clear that absolutely everything hinges on his pledge to get most of our forces out of Iraq:

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.

On Obama’s foreign policy, he says quite bluntly:

When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.

Beyond Iraq, Bacevich offers this suggestion: 

Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama’s age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.

One of my objections to this argument is that Obama’s “internationalist bromides” and “the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place” are all part of the same thing, and implicitly calling something into question is not nearly enough to dislodge these habits.  A President who does not come away from the Iraq war years with a much more limited vision of the scope and reach of American power (and Obama clearly has not come to this conclusion) is potentially more dangerous than even the hot-headed old man who thinks that we are winning.

Is there any evidence that most, or even a singficant chunk, of Obama’s supporters are academics? ~Jonathan Chait

Chait asks in response to this Barone column.  Considering that he has received something in the neighbourhood of 14 million votes (including all caucus and disqualified states), that would be an awful lot of academics if they constituted a large percentage of his support.  Even if there are that many graduate degree-holders running around out there, there are probably still a lot fewer full-time academics.  Besides, this isn’t a mystery.  We have exit polls that can give us some rough idea of how many Obama supporters have post-graduate educations and how many do not.  Furthermore, we have all talked to death the “beer-track”/”wine-track,” working class/creative class divisions among these voters. 

What does Barone mean when he says “academic” anyway?  As near as I can tell, his category of “academics” includes college students, whom we already knew disproportionately supported Obama in these elections, and seems to extend to upscale voters as well.  Barone writes:

In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians. 

We knew that Obama gets a lot of his support from professionals, students and young people, all of whom are going to be concentrated in “academic and state capital enclaves.”  We also already knew that Obama was winning the endorsements of many public sector unions.  Clinton’s relative strength among downscale white voters, particularly the Scots-Irish and Midwestern ethnic communities from southern and eastern Europe, is not news, either.  So besides being redundant where it is even somewhat correct, this talk of “academics” and “Jacksonians” creates categories so broad and imprecise as to be meaningless.  (By the way, why do people frequently apply the name “Jacksonian” to things that have no meaningful connection to Andrew Jackson, except for, in this case, the accident of similar ethnic background?)

Now it’s true that if you are an academic and you’re voting for one of the two Democrats, you are probably for Obama, since academics or academics-in-training will tend to fit the Obama voter profile in multiple ways: younger, professional, (too) many years of education, urban, probably secular.  They will also be more inclined to identify with someone whose intellectual style is more familiar and agreeable to them.  It helps that he has at least briefly been an instructor, and his biography pushes all the right buttons.  That much is true, but it’s hardly a revelation at this point.   

Barone becomes almost comical when he describes Jacksonians, as if they were some Melanesian tribe that he has been studying for National Geographic:

Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor.  If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.”

Of course, a lot of people who are public sector employees also believe this.  They are called soldiers. 

Then Barone just starts lying:

His standard campaign statements on Iraq seem to suggest that all honor should go to the opponents of the war and none to the brave men and women who have waged it.

That’s simply not true.  He has said:

Our men and women in uniform are performing heroically around the world in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable.

And:

And it’s about honoring our veterans by giving them the respect and dignity they deserve and the care and benefits they have earned.

He says these sorts of things all the time.  Barone should know that, and it’s ridiculous for him to make such a claim when the evidence to the contrary is just a click away. 

It is also not terribly convincing when Barone says:

Go back to 1995, and look at the polls that showed that most Americans would support Colin Powell for president. I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of resistance by Jacksonian voters to the Powell candidacy.

That’s because Powell didn’t run and no votes were cast for or against him, and certainly not in a straight-up one-on-one race such as we have had the past two months.  You can’t find evidence for it, because polling is probably pretty unreliable on this question even today and may have been even more so 13 years ago.

There are probably some people with Scots-Irish Democratic backgrounds who will be drawn to McCain because of his military service, but speaking as someone with such a family background I can say with confidence that “Jacksonians” don’t necessarily support McCain.  The academic in me can’t rationalise a path to backing Obama, either, but in my case it isn’t because he lacks some intangible fighting spirit.  If anything, he is too willing to use force or endorse its use when it is unnecessary or misguided.  Meanwhile, the “Jacksonian” side fears that McCain will bog us down in so many conflicts that it will expose our country to grave dangers that we will have much greater difficulty warding off.

As I started reading this Joe Klein column, I kept expecting him to start saying that Obama’s “patriotism problem” was one of perception, and that Obama was being falsely characterised by his enemies obsessed with flag pins and demonstrative hand-over-heart enthusiasm.  Klein could then go on to describe how Obama’s foes were crafting a narrative out of meaningless, isolated incidents and making use of Wright, Obama’s wife and the rest to portray the candidate in the worst light.  Instead, Klein basically agrees that Obama seems to be insufficiently patriotic, or at least doesn’t make enough of a show of it:

This is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right. When Ronald Reagan touted “Morning in America” in the 1980s, Dick Gephardt famously countered that it was near midnight “and getting darker all the time.” This is ironic and weirdly self-defeating, since the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature. Obama’s hopemongering is about as American as a message can get — although, in the end, it is mostly about our ability to transcend our imperfections rather than the effortless brilliance of our diversity, informality and freedom-propelled creativity.

I agree that it seems ironic that self-described conservatives act like optimistic liberals, and liberals often appear to play the role of the dour pessimist, but this misses the point that everyone involved in the debate peddles optimism to some degree.  (It is one of my long-running complaints against many mainstream Republicans and conservatives, typified by Limbaugh, that they portray optimism as some kind of conservative view, when it is one of the least conservative things in the world.)  Suitably pessimistic conservatives may point to structures in the world or in human nature and say, “This cannot be fixed; this is just the way things are in this world.”  The liberal optimist will point to various problems and complain that they haven’t been solved; he will lament the “crisis” in this or that part of the country, and demand that something be done, because he fundamentally believes that virtually every problem can be solved.  So the liberal’s rhetoric comes across as “negative,” because it is critical of existing flaws in a given system, but it is anything but pessimistic. 

Conservatives assume, or should assume, that some “problems” have no solution, and so tend to be less interested in worrying about things that they don’t think can be fixed anyway.  Because liberals tend to believe that things can be significantly improved, if not necessarily perfected, they are constantly busy alerting everyone to all the things that could be made better.  This constant obsession with improvement may have something to do with these reports of the greater average unhappiness of liberals.  Meliorism seems not to improve one’s mood.  I should note that The Economist article makes the same errors of associating satisfaction with your quality of life or contentment with the status quo with optimism, when they really have nothing to do with each other.  Optimism is not a belief that your life is good or that contemporary society is fair and decent (the latter sentiment is extremely common among conservatives, and frequently absent among liberals); it is a belief that all things will perpetually get better over time.  There may be something to the idea perceiving deep structural inequalities in society contributes to a feeling of powerlessness, which probably could be depressing, but on the whole most liberals assume that even deep structural problems can be changed through government action.  I would guess that liberals tend to be more unhappy because they are certain that significant improvement (however they define that) is possible, but they find themselves continually thwarted and frustrated.  To the extent that most conservatives are not activists and are not striving to change much of anything, the potential for this frustration is not nearly as great. 

Certainly, there is something a bit odd about accusing Obama of any kind of pessimism, but you hear this often enough from Obama’s mainstream Republican critics.  He and his wife are just so negative, they will say.  Never mind that the overwhelming majority of the man’s campaign is so overflowing with great expectations for the future that it threatens to drown us all in a flash flood of hope.  If Obama’s aides understand that the Wright controversy was mostly about the pastor’s “anti-Americanism,” they have hit on the heart of the problem.  But Democrats don’t want to get into a race to see which candidate can be more cloyingly Americanist.  McCain will win that competition, and it won’t be that close.  That’s why Obama has to steer clear of clumsy Americanist pandering (think John “Reporting For Duty” Kerry) while also avoiding the pitfalls set out for him by his own supporters that he is the personification of globalised America.

Jim Antle has written a smart, balanced post on Israel and Palestine, and I agree with a lot of what he has said.  To the extent that I think there is any conflict between being paleo and being pro-Israel, it is in the degree to which being pro-Israel entails support for the United States enabling an ally to continue to pursue policies that seem unjust, plainly detrimental to its long-term welfare in the region and also harmful to America’s reputation and interests elsewhere in the region.  More to the point, I think it should be a general rule for paleos and for anyone who wants to adhere to the advice in Washington’s Farewell Address about passionate attachments to other countries to not align oneself as pro-this or that country.  It would make no more sense if the United States had a decidedly pro-Syrian or pro-Iranian bias when it came to making policy in the region.  One of the things that would help the entire debate over policy towards Israel and Israeli policies would be to stop speaking of the opposing perspectives as pro- and anti-Israel or pro- and anti-Palestinian, when one of the problems here as elsewhere is the impulse to align our government’s policies too closely with one side or another in a foreign conflict.  It is pretty much inevitable that people are going to have some sentimental attachments to different nations, but these must be kept in check, which is why this language of being pro-this or anti-that is not helping at all.

Philip Klein expresses his reservations about some critics of Israel.  I’d like to add a few remarks to clarify my views on all of this.  For the reasons stated above, I would not call myself pro-Israel, nor would I call myself anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian.  In my view, their conflict is such a minor one and of such little relevance to the United States that I sometimes find it hard to believe that our government is as bogged down in it as it is.  Israel and America have common interests, but they are scarcely greater than those that we have in common with many friendly states, and the strategic value of the alliance seems to me to be much less than most Americans believe.  Over the long term, Israeli dependence on American aid and American backing is crippling and stunting its internal development and its pursuit of normal relations with all of its neighbours, which it will eventually have to establish.  States that Washington clutches to its bosom have a mixed record when it comes to their own prosperity and well-being.  I might call this is the “real” pro-Israel view, since I think it stands a chance of being much better for the people who actually live in Israel, but as I just said I am not interested in how pro-Israel a policy is, but whether it makes sense for America.  The relationship in its current form doesn’t seem to do very much for America.  Then again, Washington is in the habit of maintaining all sorts of essentially permanent alliances that have long since ceased to serve any useful function (see NATO), but which we don’t end for reasons of inertia, institutional vested interests, and misguided ambitions and fears.  There are, or should be, no permanent alliances, only permanent interests, and it should not be nearly so controversial to say that the interests of our two states are diverging and that it is a mistake to keep pretending that they are extremely similar. 

Klein concludes:

I fear that the pushback by Israel’s critics is slowly but surely creating an environment in which anti-Semitic views are becoming acceptable as long as they are framed within a discussion of Israel and are said to arise from sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians.

This fear seems to me to be misplaced, at least when it comes to the debate in the United States, for a couple of reasons.  First of all, the stigma against anti-Semitic views is as strong today as it has ever been.  These views are not becoming more acceptable; they are not sneaking in under the radar.  No one of any consequence tolerates such views, and essentially every public critic of the U.S.-Israel relationship and Israeli policies makes a point of stating up front that he repudiates and condemns anti-Semitism.  Unless, of course, one insists on labeling anything remotely critical of the influence of “pro-Israel” groups and individuals as anti-Semitic or reminiscent of the ideas of Henry Ford, in which case it will appear as if anti-Semitic views are becoming more acceptable because perfectly reasonable and mainstream views are being classified as anti-Semitic.  This has to do much more with reading in old tropes into arguments that have an entirely different purpose and different context than it does with critical arguments employing old tropes.  When utterly mainstream figures are denounced with some vehemence for alleged anti-Semitism, whether we are speaking of Mearsheimer and Walt or McPeak, people begin to tune out the accusation because it is so clearly being used as a political bludgeon and nothing more.  None of those men even claims to be “anti-Israel,” yet they have now been frequently attacked as anti-Semites, and it has reached such a pass that conventionally pro-Israel politicians receive no credit for the positions they actually take and are treated as suspects who need to justify themselves if they once made the “mistake” of speaking of Palestinian suffering when other people were around.  When the position of the utterly pro-Israel Barack Obama can be seriously doubted, despite taking every conventional view that is expected of national politicians (as a matter of record, he holds literally the same policy views as George Bush with respect to Israel), the search for “anti-Israel” Americans has clearly spun out of control.  In theory, all of that could make people much less likely to take notice of actual anti-Semitism when it does appear, because we have heard voices crying, “Wolf!” so many times for so long that a lot of people have stopped paying attention.  I would submit that if anything is creating an environment in which anti-Semitism can flourish, it is the overuse of the charge and the rather obvious uses of the charge for intra-party or partisan political ends.   

P.S. Klein also wrote:

Today, the argument is that wealthy Jewish donors from New York City influence politicians in both parties, and no politician is willing to challenge them on Israel.

But to the extent that this is part of the argument today at all, it is actually a very, very small part of the argument.  That isn’t the argument of The Israel Lobby, and that isn’t really the argument that McPeak was making, either.  The quote from McPeak that caused such a stir was clumsy and imprecise at worst, which didn’t stop people from attacking him for being “bigoted,” for which there is no evidence whatever.  Of course, there are some of these donors in New York City, which Wesley Clark once had the misfortune to mention in public, thereby ensuring the demise of his already long-shot presidential campaign, but the broader observation that it is political suicide to go against voters all over the country who have strong feelings about Israel, many of them Christians, is so right that it would be unremarkable to say it if we did indeed have “an open and honest debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”  Obviously, it is true that politicians dare not challenge the status quo on Israel, and a number of interest groups have a lot to do with that.  Yet routinely “pro-Israel” voices react with horror when someone notes the broad institutional support current policy has and the power that “pro-Israel” groups and individuals wield in keeping that policy in place.  Rarely do people react with such outrage at the observation that their preferred position is institutionally well-entrenched and supported by a broad political consensus.  It’s almost as if they know how flimsy the rationale for the policy is and are afraid that it will evaporate if anyone looks at it too closely.

True patriotism is defined by the boundaries of your affection, not the boundaries of a real or potential political unit: Your country can extend just 20 miles from your home or all the way to Ottawa, depending on your roots, mood, and experiences.  Nationalism can transcend borders as well, but it does so in a much bloodier manner. ~Jesse Walker

On the whole, I agree with this.  Here are some of the main differences between the two things.  One is the difference between the immediate and particular on the one hand and the distant and the abstract on the other.  Another is the difference between the patriot, who typically does not have designs of someone else’s territory, much less justifying those designs on the grounds that the land “really” belongs to his nation.  A Mexican patriot is interested in the welfare of Mexico and has no cause to start fights with anyone, but the irredentist dreaming of Aztlan will have expansionist ambitions that can readily lead to conflict if enough people embrace that goal.  Patriots are typically content to take pride in their own country, while nationalists tend to need to triumph over someone else.  (There can be exceptions, but these seem to be pretty reliable general statements). 

Euskadian patriots could find Basque nationalism to be a threat to their country, and would reject groups such as ETA because they love their country.  That points to something else important: patriots are not necessarily compelled to seek political independence, while for nationalists it is almost a requirement.  Nationalists usually aspire to a state of their own, and nationalist historiography places great emphasis on the periods that included past “national” states as the best periods of specifically national history.  A history of one’s country, however, might include much that nationalist historiography wants to obscure or erase, especially if it involves settlement of the land by other peoples, and a patriot would, I think, be able to acknowledge and take account of these other parts of the story more readily than a nationalist, or rather you can tell the difference between the two positions based on their responses.      

Patriotism entails attachment to and affection for a certain piece of ground and the people who live on it, and it requires you to desire the good of your country.  We can imagine how either a centralising or expansionist nationalist or an invading irredentist could threaten your country and try to divide it with political boundaries on the basis of old historical claims, the ethnic make-up of the population or simply in terms of expansion and conquest.  In those cases, the patriot will defend his piece of ground, but there is no way that I can see that a patriot would ever wish to start a war for any reason.  Nationalists seem often to be on the lookout for pretexts for picking fights, perceiving threats where they don’t exist and exaggerating them when they do.  Countries can straddle political boundaries, but it is usually the mark of the nationalist to want to align political boundaries to include multiple different countries, either in part or in full, within a single state.  Nationalism advances  at the expense of numerous local patriotisms.  (The unification movements in Italy and Germany are good examples of this, and the experience of southern Italy and Sicily at the hands of the liberal nationalists is typical of regions that resist consolidation.)

Reihan has written an interesting post on Jhumpa Lahiri, and now The New Republic has an entire article on her fiction, so it is time that I dusted off my remarks on the film adaptation of her novel, The Namesake, which I started writing months ago but never finished.  I haven’t read the novel, so I can’t comment on how successful Mira Nair’s adaptation is, but I can congratulate Mira Nair on making another outstanding film. (Warning–spoilers follow.)

Given my interests in Indian cinema and Russian literature, you might have thought that I would have seen The Namesakemuch earlier than I did, but in fact I had only found the time to watch it on video when it first came out.  After the first viewing, I had the impression that it was excellent, so excellent indeed that I felt compelled to watch it again soon afterwards.  I still think it is very good and certainly worth watching more than once.  Directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair), one of the better directors of our day, The Namesake tells the story of a Bengali family in New York and particularly the story of the relationship between the father, Ashok (Irfan Khan), and his son (Kal Penn), whom he named Gogol after his favourite author.  The son’s name remains a source of constant anxiety and discontent until he finally comes to understand the more personal reason why his father gave him the name.  Those familiar with the BBC miniseries Second Generation will find many of the same themes of the tension between father and child and the strains of assimilation on cultural tradition, but The Namesake, working from the novel of the same title by Jhumpa Lahiri, obviously does not have the King Lear references nor does it touch on the problems of religious intercommunal divisions (though both are focused on the lives of Bengali immigrant families).  The Namesake paints a much more intimate portrait of a small, nuclear family in the New York suburbs.  Again, like Second Generation, the film concludes with the return of one of the parents to Calcutta, which represents a homecoming and also a sort of refuge from the “lonely country” that had nonetheless briefly become the family’s home.

The aspect of the story I found particularly powerful was the problems attached with marrying within the community.  After the death of his father and the alienation of his white girlfriend that results from preparation for the funeral rites, the main character, Gogol, or Nikhil (his shubh nam), as he prefers to be known once he becomes an adult, is re-introduced to a Bengali woman whom he had met years before, Moshumi, whose condescending attitude towards all things American was matched only by her anti-social, bookworm habits.  Moshumi has transformed herself during her time in France, becoming both an accomplished academic and more of a worldly, ‘liberated’ woman.  Gogol is taken in by her sensuality, and to a large degree because of their shared Bengali heritage they wed quickly.  Too quickly, as it turns out, as Moshumi falls back into her libertine ways and has an affair with an old French boyfriend.  When she admits the affair to him, she says, “Maybe it isn’t enough that we’re both Bengali.”  As he says, that wasn’t why he married her, but the pressure to marry within the community created the conditions for an unusually bad marriage that had been undertaken for the wrong reasons.  This struck me as the most poignant moment in the story.

In their last meeting before his father’s death, Ashok tells Gogol why he had given him the name of the Russian author.  He tells the story of reading Gogol’s The Overcoat on the way to visit his grandfather by train, and of the train wreck that had nearly killed him.  Gogol asks if his father thinks of the accident when he thinks of him, and Ashok says, “Not at all.  Because every day since then has been a gift.”  Naming his son after the eccentric and brilliant 19th century writer had been his tribute to his own survival during that accident; it had been his gift to his son.  When Gogol was graduating from high school, his father had given him a book of Gogol’s short stories, which the son had ignored until after his marriage had failed, only to discover it at the last party to be held at the family house before his mother went home to Calcutta.  The dedication read, “The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name.”  Finally, Gogol was reconciled to what his father had intended by giving him that name–a celebration of his survival and of his love.

As usual, I agree with Steve Clemons’ take on Cuba policy.  But then he asked this question, and it wasn’t really rhetorical:

If serious conservatives can say this, why can’t the serious Dems running for the White House?

I’m sure Mr. Clemons knows the reasons, but let me give two of them in response: those serious conservatives aren’t running for President, and they aren’t going public and on the record with their complaints about Cuba policy.  Presidential candidates will get few rewards for taking an anti-sanctions position, and they will receive intense criticism and probably lose a lot of votes.  The Cuban-American community is divided in its opinions on the sanctions policy, but that doesn’t mean that all sides of the debate are equal in their political influence.  To the extent that Democratic candidates are still worried about appearing “weak” with respect to foreign affairs, they will not want to go too far out on a limb in support of opening up trade with what is still a despotic regime, and Republican candidates are under pressure both from voters and from ideologues who believe that any accommodation with such regimes is inherently wrong.  Probably unintentionally, Mike Huckabee summed up his changed position on Cuba sanctions best, “What changed was I’m running for President.”  One of the reasons why the debate is so lopsided and why the political advantages are all on the side of the status quo is that the serious conservatives (and probably plenty of other people) who talk privately to Steve Clemons aren’t going to attach their names to a call for lifting the sanctions.  Unfortunately, there is little political incentive for making smart and sound policy.  Far from being easy to change, Cuba policy is probably one of the more difficult things to change.  If it were easy to change a policy because of its irrationality and counterproductive effects, the sanctions on Cuba would have been lifted 17 years ago when the Soviet Union vanished.

That bit of Goldfarbian idiocy below was prompted by reaction to this bit of Max Boot foolishness*:

Just as Islamist militants were emboldened by the Soviet Union’s retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, so they would be encouraged by our premature departure from Iraq.

As Yglesias notes, what happened after the withdrawal is fairly relevant.  Yes, Bin Laden boasted about the withdrawal of the Soviets, so what did he do?  Within the space of a few years, he had decided that it was time to start targeting…the main Western patron of the mujahideen!  That sure showed Moscow what was what.  Of course, the reasons he gave for doing this were related to the presence of U.S. forces in his home country and he used that presence to rally supporters behind him, just as today he and his ilk use the ongoing occupation of Iraq to rally support to their cause.  So it is not really all that obvious that the answer is therefore to occupy Iraq indefinitely.

P.S.  Yglesias writes in response to Boot:

But to argue that Mikhail Gorbachev should have continued the occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely in order to prevent a terrorist attack in Manhattan twelve years later is absurd.

That is absurd, but slightly less absurd than Goldfarb’s implication that Gorbachev should have continued the occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely to prevent terrorist attacks committed by people completely unrelated to the war in Afghanistan.

* I should add that it is the entire op-ed that is foolish, and not necessarily this particular line.

But still, there is no doubt that the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war. The slaughter at Beslan, the apartment bombings in Moscow–there have been any number of terrorist acts perpetrated on Russian soil by people who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan [bold mine-DL]. ~Michael Goldfarb

The Chechens weren’t fighting against the Red Army in Afghanistan.  This is why I tend not to read The Weekly Standard‘s blog very often, because it is just full of nonsense.  It may come as some surprise to Goldfarb, but Chechnya belonged to the Soviet Union, Chechens were Soviets and it is more likely that there were ethnically Chechen conscripts in the Red Army fighting on the Soviet side than Chechens fighting alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan.  Foreign mujahideen fighting with the Afghans were overwhelmingly Arab and Pakistani.  Indeed, until the Chechen wars opened Chechnya to the influence of jihadis, Chechen separatism was principally a case of post-Soviet ethnonationalism and backlash fueled by long-standing resentment against the mass slaughter and relocation of Chechens that Stalin had carried out decades before.  The radical Islamicisation of the Chechen cause, typified by the rise of the bloody terrorist Shamil Basayev (ethnically Chechen, born in Chechnya) as one of the leaders of the Chechens (whose adopted name was meant to invoke Shamil, the major guerrilla leader against Tsarist Russia from the 19th century), has not stopped many of Goldfarb’s confreres and others making excuses for Chechen terrorism.  But to say that the Chechen terrorism of the late 1990s and early 2000s was some kind of blowback for the war in Afghanistan (or even more incredibly that withdrawal from Afghanistan is what invited Chechen terrorism) reflects just staggering ignorance.  There have been individuals, such as Khattab, who had fought in Afghanistan and who also fought with the Chechens, but the terrorist acts Goldfarb refers to were carried out by Chechens.

P.S. Another rather obvious point is that Chechen terrorism is a vicious part of the rebellion against Russian control of Chechnya and a response (not a legitimate one, but a response all the same) to the well-known brutal policies that Moscow has used to repress the rebellion there.  Russian brutality in Chechnya does offer a model for pacifying an insurgency, but it requires tactics that Americans would not and should not contemplate.

Update: Goldfarb also writes in this post:

And there’s no doubt that the shift in Chechnya from nationalist to religious-based opposition to Russian rule was heavily influenced by the success of the jihadists in Afghanistan.

Actually, it was heavily influenced by the influx of Saudi money and Arab volunteers.  You can argue that the radicalisation of the Chechen cause in some sense parallels the response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but you can’t argue that the radicalised native Chechens who committed these atrocities were “people who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan.”  If anything, Beslan, the hostage-taking at the Moscow theater and the apartment bombings are all evidence of the terrible cost of persisting in a policy of occupation.  Indeed, the Soviet experience after withdrawing from Afghanistan might have provided a model for Russian policy towards Chechnya.  The lesson seems clear: refusal to yield control of territory will result in terrorist acts, while withdrawal has no particularly noticeable after-effects for the state that withdraws that happen because of the withdrawal.

Second Update: Goldfarb responds:

Thanks for the geography lesson, Dan. But I was vaguely aware of this fact. I was referring to people who fought in Afghanistan, like say Abu Omar al-Saif, and later took their jihad to Chechnya.

Well, it seemed as if you needed it, Mike.  As I acknowledged, there were some Arabs who had previously fought in Afghanistan and then fought alongside the Chechens.  But that isn’t the same as committing acts of terrorism on Russian soil, which is what Goldfarb said they had done, when on the whole these were the acts carried out by Basayev and ethnic Chechens.  There are individual exceptions to this rule (mostly on the financing end), but the implication of Goldfarb’s original post was that these attacks were the result of withdrawing from Afghanistan (hence the title “they follow you home”), when they are, in fact, a result of continuing to control Chechnya.  Had there been no Chechen war, and no brutal repression of Chechnya, none of those attacks would have happened in any case.  In other words, the mujahideen who had fought in Afghanistan would have had absolutely no interest in striking at targets in Moscow or anywhere else in Russia but for an entirely new, different conflict involving Russia and a Muslim population.  Goldfarb has found a coincidence and thinks he has discovered something significant.  There is no reason to think that Basayev would not have employed terrorist tactics had no mujahideen from the war in Afghanistan ever set foot in Chechnya.  The example Goldfarb cites is simply evidence that jihadis tend to go wherever Muslims are fighting and not that “they follow you home.”       

Finally, I should also add that saying that “the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war” is a statement that invites derision and misinterpretation, since the vast majority of mujahideen in Afghanistan were Afghans or Pashtuns from the Pakistani side, who stayed right where they were when the war was over, which suggests that the vast majority of insurgents and terrorists in Iraq would either stay in Iraq or return to their home countries.  A handful of die-hard jihadis who bounce from one firefight to the next would move on to the next conflict, and conceivably they might even target Western interests, but you can’t make decisions about a war policy based on what some handful of the most fanatical people will or will not do; given the depth of their fanaticism, they aren’t going to stop fighting and plotting attacks under any circumstances.  U.S. foreign policy cannot be dependent on the what the Al-Saifs and Khattabs of the world might theoretically do ten or fifteen years in the future.  It certainly makes no sense to use their example as part of an argument for prolonging a conflict that we know to have a radicalising effect.  To state the obvious, for every Al-Saif that may be killed through the continuation of a war there are a dozen more ready to take his place because of the ongoing war. 

Had Goldfarb said what he can actually support–that there were a handful of Arab mujahideen who later went to Chechnya–there would have been nothing objectionable in it, but then it also wouldn’t support the notion that “they follow you home.”