Here’s a snip from John McCain’s Parade magazine essay on patriotism:
Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything. (emphasis mine)
Before anything? I always thought the Buckley clan had some insights on prioritization of duties.
Andrew Sullivan has been re-reading The War over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan’s pamphlet advocating for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. The first thing that leaps to mind is how utterly dismissive and contemptuous Kristol and Kaplan were of those who were sounding cautionary notes before the war. Here they are on Chuck Hagel, who voted for the war but whom Kristol and Kaplan deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about it:
“Iraq’s uncertain future, as opposed to its totalitarian present, has become the principle [sic] concern of many realists. ‘What comes after a military invasion?’ Senator Chuck Hagel would like to know. ‘Who rules Iraq? Does the United States really want to be in Baghdad, trying to police Baghdad for twenty or thirty years?’”
Kristol goes on to mock this question with his usual assurance:
“Predictions of ethnic turmoil in Iraq are even more questionable than they were in the case of Afghanistan.
“Unlike the Taliban, Saddam has little support among any ethnic group, Sunnis included, and the Iraqi opposition is itself a multi-ethnic force… [T]he executive director of the Iraq Foundation, Rend Rahim Francke, says, ‘we will not have a civil war in Iraq. This is contrary to Iraqi history, and Iraq has not had a history of communal conflict as there has been in the Balkans or in Afghanistan…’”
(Kristol and Kaplan fail to mention, of course, that Ms. Francke was not exactly an objective observer to this phenomenon; she was a lobbyist who spent years pushing for more U.S. action to oust Saddam Hussein.) This “there’s no history of ethnic turmoil in Iraq” trope was central to Kristol’s advocacy. In an article for The American Conservative in 2006 (not online, alas), I pointed out that
On–appropriately enough–April Fool’s Day 2003, on NPR Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol informed host Terry Gross that “there’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America…that the Shi’a can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shi’a in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”
The whole thing would be laughable if there weren’t so many corpses over there.
Jeffrey Goldberg looks in Matt Yglesias’ and my direction and declares that “it’s an odd phenomenon” that people care about the fact that Goldberg and James Kirchick are making false claims about what the president of Iran said. False claims that are leading people in the United States to want to go to war with Iran.
You know what else is an odd phenomenon? That Jeffrey Goldberg still hasn’t addressed the fact that he published a number of articles before the Iraq war falsely linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda that helped get 4,000 Americans killed, drive America’s reputation into the ditch, flush $600,000,000,000 down the toilet and enhance Iran’s position in the region. That’s odd.
Over at TPMCafe, M. J. Rosenberg points our attention to two pieces of legislation winging their way through the House and the Senate The matching pieces of legislation declare the sense of the House and the Senate that “preventing the Government of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means, is a matter of the highest importance to the national security of the United States and must be dealt with urgently” and call for President Bush to
initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program
Now, as Rosenberg reasonably concludes from reading the legislation, this sounds an awful lot like a blockade, which I’m pretty sure (I’m not a lawyer) qualifies as an act of war under international law. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which reportedly has been pushing the legislation through the House and Senate, replies to Rosenberg by asserting that
AIPAC supports sanctions on Iran and favors a voluntary international effort lead by the United States to stop selling Iran refined petroleum, not a blockade. Iran is highly vulnerable to such pressure. Sactions are the best way to persuade Iran to stop it’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capability. To suggest that AIPAC supports anything but tough economic sanctions on Iran is totally false…
I’m confused. The legislation calls for “prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran.” Now, what sort of mechanism would police such a “prohibition?” If the shipment of refined petroleum products to Iran has been “prohibited,” and a tanker sails toward it anyway, what happens? Who will be enforcing the “stringent inspection requirements on all person, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran?”
I’m sometimes amazed at the ability of generalist pundits in Washington to inveigh on a host of issues ranging from gay rights to foreign policy to constitutional law. I find it hard enough to keep track of the various facets of my own field, American foreign policy. But sometimes there are instances where the presence of the dilettantes is damaging to the discourse. For example, here is The New Republic’s James Kirchick sneering at Matthew Yglesias’ suggestion that when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared his desire to see Israel “wiped off the map,” he might not have envisioned the genocide of the Jewish people.
I don’t like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I think he is a dangerous simpleton who should not be in charge of anything more portentous than perhaps municipal garbage collection in Shiraz. But he does enough repulsive things that he need not be accused of additional ones.
French television followed up with Mr. Ahmadinejad, doing an interview with him in 2007, in which the reporter asked him about this controversial remark. (Clip is in French, exchange begins about 6:00 into the clip.) In it, the interviewer references the quote and asks Ahmadinejad about whether he can understand why people are afraid of Iran’s nuclear program in its context. Ahmadinejad responds:
Why are you worried? Where is the Soviet Union? It has disappeared, has it not?
Ahmadinejad goes on to demagogue the issue, talking about democracy across all of Palestine, which for obvious reasons would cause Israel to be “wiped off the map.” But the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union did not involve the genocide of the Russian people, or even any military action against the USSR. Instead of haranguing about analogies to Poland, Kirchick would be better served researching what analogy Ahmadinejad himself has used on the matter.
Now, maybe Ahmadinejad is lying. That’s a fair debate to have. But since the discussion is about what Mr. Ahmadinejad said, it seems relevant to pay attention when someone asks “hey, what did you mean by that remark?” and the speaker responds.
I think this is the danger of having generalists parachute into all manner of debates over national policies. As I said, it’s hard just to keep track of my little world. I can’t imagine thinking I had the breadth to contribute to the debate on many more issues than my own.
Matt Yglesias posts this list of members of Barack Obama’s “National Security Working Group.” Interesting to see that it includes William Perry, who wrote this in 2006, when North Korea was preparing to test a ballistic missile:
if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched. This could be accomplished, for example, by a cruise missile launched from a submarine carrying a high-explosive warhead. The blast would be similar to the one that killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. But the effect on the Taepodong would be devastating. The multi-story, thin-skinned missile filled with high-energy fuel is itself explosive — the U.S. airstrike would puncture the missile and probably cause it to explode. The carefully engineered test bed for North Korea’s nascent nuclear missile force would be destroyed, and its attempt to retrogress to Cold War threats thwarted. There would be no damage to North Korea outside the immediate vicinity of the missile gantry.
[…]
We should not conceal our determination to strike the Taepodong if North Korea refuses to drain the fuel out and take it back to the warehouse. When they learn of it, our South Korean allies will surely not support this ultimatum — indeed they will vigorously oppose it. The United States should accordingly make clear to the North that the South will play no role in the attack, which can be carried out entirely with U.S. forces and without use of South Korean territory. South Korea has worked hard to counter North Korea’s 50-year menacing of its own country, through both military defense and negotiations, and the United States has stood with the South throughout. South Koreans should understand that U.S. territory is now also being threatened, and we must respond. Japan is likely to welcome the action but will also not lend open support or assistance. China and Russia will be shocked that North Korea’s recklessness and the failure of the six-party talks have brought things to such a pass, but they will not defend North Korea.
…The United States should emphasize that the strike, if mounted, would not be an attack on the entire country, or even its military, but only on the missile that North Korea pledged not to launch — one designed to carry nuclear weapons. We should sharply warn North Korea against further escalation.
North Korea could respond to U.S. resolve by taking the drastic step of threatening all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. But it is unlikely to act on that threat. Why attack South Korea, which has been working to improve North-South relations (sometimes at odds with the United States) and which was openly opposing the U.S. action? An invasion of South Korea would bring about the certain end of Kim Jong Il’s regime within a few bloody weeks of war, as surely he knows. Though war is unlikely, it would be prudent for the United States to enhance deterrence by introducing U.S. air and naval forces into the region at the same time it made its threat to strike the Taepodong. If North Korea opted for such a suicidal course, these extra forces would make its defeat swifter and less costly in lives — American, South Korean and North Korean.
President Bush did not, of course, launch airstrikes against North Korea. Rather, the North went ahead with the missile test and it failed.
John McCain might want to be careful about criticizing Obama too much for this, though: After all, it was John McCain who took to the pages of his favorite magazine in 2003 to make this argument about North Korea:
The use of military force to defend vital American security interests must always be a last resort, as it is in this crisis. But if we fail to achieve the international cooperation necessary to end this threat, then the countries in the region should know with certainty that while they may risk their own populations, the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people. And spare us the usual lectures about American unilateralism. We would prefer the company of North Korea’s neighbors, but we will make do without it if we must.
Who says there’s nothing these campaigns can agree on!
I’m reminded that today is the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin:
It’s a useful reminder that while Reagan included key neoconservatives in his administration, particularly in his first term, most of them always suspected that he was a fool, incapable or unwilling to take the heels-dug-in position that would bring down our Soviet adversaries. Even in 1982, at the height of the neocons’ influence on Reagan and just five years before this speech, neocon capo Norman Podhoretz was accusing Reagan of “following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire, rather than … encouraging the breakdown of that empire from within.”
I could bore you with umpteen more examples of these sorts of (neo-)conservative denunciations of Reagan, but the man knew an opportunity when he saw it, and wasn’t going to listen to the naysayers and pessimists when they told him it wasn’t so. Reagan by no means got everything right, but on the big questions, he would be a welcome respite from today’s Republican Party, which has been handed over to the neoconservatives in exchange for the mess of pottage that is our Iraq policy.
Readers may recall Condi Rice’s 2000 Foreign Affairs article in which she declared, among other things, that with respect to regimes like Iraq and North Korea,
These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence — if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.
My own favorite 2000-vintage Riceism is still “Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do. We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.”
But you get the idea that there is a fairly profound disconnect between the 2000 Condoleezza Rice and the 2008 Condoleezza Rice. And sure enough, the Secretary has an article in the current Foreign Affairs that serves as a broad denunciation of her earlier incarnation, and an attempt to cloak airy Wilsonianism in the guise of tough-minded realism. My friend Kara Hopkins over at The American Conservative takes the editorial equivalent of a belt-sander to the piece and is left with little more than a pile of sawdust for her efforts.
[I]n Rice’s convoluted calculus, stability, once the grail in international relations, is no longer a worthy end of itself: “Freedom and democracy are the only ideas that can, over time, lead to just and lasting stability.” To secure peace, we must first, in true revolutionary fashion, destabilize: “the process of democratization is likely to be messy and unsatisfactory.” How else to explain away the electoral successes of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood? Temporary “untidiness.” She sees this upheaval as a transitional period in a “generational” project—which means she has time to get out of town.
Realism, also overdue for a revival, fares no better in the Rice rebranding scheme. Surely no resident of the reality-based community believes that “what will most determine whether the United States can succeed in the twenty-first century is our imagination.”
[…]
Were these the delusions of a streetcorner radical, they might be silly. But coming from the Secretary of State, they’re dangerously mad–-and appropriating sound labels doesn’t make them less so.
I liked the old Condoleezza Rice quite a bit better, too.
According to this site, the Iraq correspondent Richard Engel’s book has some pretty startling words from the Commander-in-Chief in it. Try a few of these on for size:
Looks like there will be lots to chew on in there. And we’ve got at least 35 or so more years to chew on it.
The editors of the New Republic say we have a “moral responsibility” to invade Burma in order to distribute disaster relief. The editors observe that no one taken seriously is seriously advocating doing this and lament:
This is, put simply, an unacceptable abdication of our moral responsibilities. Even though our standing in the world has been severely diminished by Iraq, we should at least be debating intervention in Burma. There are, no doubt, many logistical complications and unintended consequences that would follow from such a policy. But there are also reasons why it should be a live option. The goal of such an intervention need not be regime change; it should simply be to make sure that a vulnerable population receives the supplies it desperately needs. Of course, if violating the sovereignty of a murderous regime happens to undermine that regime’s legitimacy, then that would not be such a terrible result. But this does not necessarily have to be our goal.
One should not, I suppose, be too surprised that this sort of slipshod advocacy still emanates from the epicenter of liberal imperialism, a publication that was as influential as any in urging the Iraq war on the American people. (Neither should the fact that its leadership attempted to make their non-apology apology for Iraq look magnanimous.) The piece’s curtsy at post-Iraq reality is even sort of endearing, in a child-like way.
Note also the focus not on the particular policy of invading and taking responsibility for disaster relief in Burma, but rather on the importance of “debating” such a policy. After all, the New Republic’s writers aren’t going to be the ones to invade the country and deliver the aid. Rather, the important question is whether the political climate will allow for TNR’s writers to churn out tough-minded and uncompromising articles that allow them to stretch their rhetorical legs yet still keep them within the beloved Broderian mainstream of American politics.
But maybe the most disappointing point of that paragraph is that instead of the rote “to be sure” formulation, the editors chose to dodge completely the substance of the policy they’re advocating for by using the more indirect “there are, no doubt, many logistical complications…” phrasing. Write what you know, guys.
A few weeks back, David Brooks was telling George Packer that philosophies of limited government were “politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American.” Now we have Mike Huckabee telling the Huffington Post the same thing:
The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it.” Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it’s not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people. That’s not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.
If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it’s going to result in a more costly government … police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What’s the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say “yes, we shouldn’t be funding that stuff.” But what you’ve done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before.
First, there’s nothing “new” about libertarianism, although it appears someone’s just alerted Mike Huckabee to the phenomenon. Second, this business of the “un-Americanism” of libertarianism is ahistorical, although not particularly surprising coming from a Know Nothing demagogue like Mike Huckabee. Someday, advertising one’s own ignorance about the world won’t be considered a mark in one’s favor by conservatives. Until then, Mike Huckabee.
As we all know, if you just put the word “defense,” or “homeland” or “security” anywhere in the name of a government program, its fiscal impact is immediately zeroed out. But if this mystical transformation didn’t take place, President Bush’s fiscal legacy would be looking darker and darker each day. Noah Shachtman gives us a rundown:
The Pentagon’s internal watchdogs can’t keep up with the explosive growth in military spending. Which means $152 billion’s worth of contracts annually aren’t being reviewed for fraud, abuse and criminal interference by the Defense Department’s Inspector General, according to a newly-unearthed report to Congress. The result: “undetected or inadequately investigated criminal activity and significant financial loss,” as well as “personnel, facilities and assets [that] are more vulnerable to terrorist activities.”
Since fiscal year 2000, the military’s budget has essentially doubled, from less than $300 billion to more than $600 billion. Two wars have begun. But the number of criminal investigators and financial auditors at the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD IG) has stayed more or less the same. So there are now “gaps in coverage in important areas, such as major weapon systems acquisition, health care fraud, product substitution, and Defense intelligence agencies,” according to the report, obtained by the Project on Government Oversight.
[…]
The DOD IG’s office has certainly stayed busy. In just the last few months, the DOD IG caught a Philippine corporation bilking $100 million from the military health care system; nabbed a trio trying to bribe their way into drinking water contracts for troops; busted an Air Force general who tried to steer a $50 million deal to his buddies; and launched investigations into the Pentagon’s propaganda projects and the youthful arms-dealer who sold tens of millions of dollars’ worth of dud ammunition to the government.
Shachtman then observes: “The question is: How much more could they have done, with a bigger staff?” It’s almost like you sink a half a trillion dollars a year into one massive bureaucracy and it’s hard to keep track of it all. President McCain’s going to have to find a lot of earmarks to offset this sort of thing.
Gene is too modest to link to it himself (I wouldn’t be!), but George Will’s column in this week’s Newsweek centers on Caesaropapism and, Gene Healy’s new book. Here are the first few paragraphs:
Barack Obama recently said, “I believe in our ability to perfect this nation.” Clearly there is something the candidate of “change” will not change—the pattern of extravagant presidential rhetoric. Obama is trying to replace a president who vowed to “rid the world of evil”—and of tyranny, too.
But then, rhetorical—and related—excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year’s most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power,” by Gene Healy of Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute.
Healy’s dissection of the delusions of “redemption through presidential politics” comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d’être, “agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility.” Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls “Caesaropapism” as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.
“Faux conservatives” is just right. Elsewhere, Gene has demonstrated that conservatives have shamefully prostrated themselves at the totem of executive power, a position that would have nauseated their intellectual forebears.
Couple of notes on recent David Brooks-related program activities. First, he calls the small-government wing of the conservative movement un-American. No, honestly, he does:
At the end of [1995], when the radical conservatives in the Gingrich Congress shut down the federal government, they learned that the American public was genuinely attached to the modern state. “An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American,” Brooks said. “People want something melioristic, they want government to do things.”
Then, in today’s column for the Times, Brooks points out how screwed up the legislative process is, a function of myriad rent-seekers, lobbyists and special interests. His foil? The farm bill:
Interest groups turn every judicial fight into an ideological war. They lobby for more spending on the elderly, even though the country is trillions of dollars short of being able to live up to its promises. They’ve turned environmental concern into subsidies for corn growers and energy concerns into subsidies for oil companies.
The $307 billion farm bill that rolled through Congress is a perfect example of the pattern. Farm net income is up 56 percent over the past two years, yet the farm bill plows subsidies into agribusinesses, thoroughbred breeders and the rest.
The growers of nearly every crop will get more money. Farmers in the top 1 percent of earners qualify for federal payments. Under the legislation, the government will buy sugar for roughly twice the world price and then resell it at an 80 percent loss. Parts of the bill that would have protected wetlands and wildlife habitat were deleted or shrunk.
My colleagues on The Times’s editorial page called the bill “disgraceful.” My former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page ripped it as a “scam.” Yet such is the logic of collective action; the bill is certain to become law. It passed with 81 votes in the Senate and 318 in the House — enough to override President Bush’s coming veto. Nearly everyone in Congress got something.
Funny thing, though: I bet I can think of a much, much better example of what Brooks is driving at here. After all, at least there was broad elite consensus that the farm bill was depraved. But where could we find an example of a legislative product where literally all interests are tied up in rent-seeking and resource extraction? Ah, right:
In current national security politics, there is debate, but all the interests are on one side. Both parties see political reward in preaching danger. The massive U.S. national security establishment relies on a sense of threat to stay in business. On the other side, as former defense secretary Les Aspin once wrote, there is no other side. No one alarms us about alarmism. Hitler and Stalin destroyed America’s isolationist tradition. Everyone likes lower taxes, but not enough to organize interest groups against defense spending. A scattering of libertarians and anti-war liberals confronts a bipartisan juggernaut. The information about national security threats comes to Americans principally from people driven by organizational or electoral incentives toward threat inflation.
Physician, heal thyself. Yet more evidence the that contemporary Right offers nothing of value to libertarians.
Matt Bai has a writeup in this Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine of McCain’s vision on foreign policy. Buckle up:
McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet….
[…]
[A]s we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?
“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”
For a look through the keyhole into the bizarre world of the Rumsfeld-era DOD establishment, take a look at these documents describing the DOD military analysts/”force multipliers” program. Or better yet, listen in to some of Rumsfeld’s Roundtables, with audio available here and here. Over the slurpings and mastications of people like Jed Babbin, now editor of Human Events who was then thought to be a reliable pitcher of “softballs” designed to defend the DOD line of the day, you can hear what your half-a-trillion per year pays for. (Sounds like expensive china their forks and knives are clinking against, at least.)
The topics of conversation range from Rumsfeld likening himself to Churchill, Rumsfeld grousing about obstruction to his ideas on the Hill, Rumsfeld grousing about Moqtada al-Sadr (”he’s not a real cleric!”), and various people (including Babbin) fawning over Rumsfeld. The discussion is peppered with Pentagon-speak, good-old-boys-club outbursts of laughter, and Rumsfeldian aphorisms (”you don’t want to eat your seed corn…”) It’s a little nauseating and a little enlightening. Bill Lumbergh meets Robert McNamara.
Steve Clemons posts a heartening little video of Bush père’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft responding to Steve’s question “What do you think about Cuba?” It’s a rare occasion for foreign policy folks to take heart and ponder whether the forces of reality may not be making progress on some issues, at least:
More common sense on Cuba here.
Here’s Michael Goldfarb:
As to whether Bush is a recruiting tool for terrorists–who cares? Al Qaeda was recruiting before Bush was in office and they will continue to do so after he’s gone. The important thing is that we keep killing those recruits. Eventually, one side will give up.
Do they edit this stuff before putting it up? By this logic, why don’t we airdrop a bunch of copies of Penthouse Letters into the Kabaa? After all, al Qaeda will continue recruiting whether we do it or not. Or maybe we could declare war on all of Islam. After all, al Qaeda was recruiting before we declared it. Or maybe we could send Senator McCain’s “moral compass and spiritual guide” onto al Hurra to tell Muslims that “America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.” After all, it’s not like al Qaeda’s not recruiting today.
Over at The American Conservative blog, Jim Antle points out that Rep. Walter Jones, an antiwar Republican incumbent, as well as another antiwar Republican, B.J. Lawson, won big in last night’s North Carolina primary.
Although the Republican establishment in Washington seems to have sacrificed every other governing principle at the altar of reckless militarism, it appears that a contingent of Republican voters haven’t. Maybe Bill Kauffman is onto something…
In its infinite wisdom, C-SPAN chose to commit this Hudson Institute panel to celluloid. Of course, I can’t get the dang video to work right, but I had the fortune to catch most of the panel last night on the teevee. Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Senor, and Peter Rodman got the old gang back together in an effort to pretend-examine What Went Wrong in Iraq.
The line that Feith advances is that we shouldn’t have done a, y’know, occupation. Wolfowitz supports this position, expressing amazement that “the term ‘occupation’ sticks with us today, even though the occupation ended in June 2004.” These are cute semantic games, but they’re an affront to reality. So Wolfowitz turns to this move, as reported by Eli Lake:
And I do think a real failure — I assign responsibility all over the place — was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the population.
This sends Abu Muqawama, the pseudonymous U.S. military veteran and proprietor of a popular counterinsurgency blog, into apoplexy. What’s a real shame is that Lake’s own question, which was excellent, didn’t elicit a serious response. Lake observed that even under close tutelage from the Americans, galling depredations had been committed by the ISF, such as torture conducted by the Ministry of Interior, etc. Why, then, if we had handed more control over sooner, wouldn’t we have expected much more of this kind of thing to have happened?
Feith’s response? I’m paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of “I just don’t think it would have.” So presumably under the Feith-Wolfowitz plan, we invade, grab Saddam, and then just turn the reins over to “external” Iraqi leader/charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his band of 700 supporters? Or perhaps Wolfowitz meant his remark as an “assume a can-opener” joke? Wolfowitz’s claim that “a real failure…was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough” begs the question How on Earth could we have just had enough committed Iraqi troops “early enough and fast enough”???
Wolfowitz then ups the ante with his claim that “nobody could have foreseen the insurgency,” an insurgency which he attributes almost entirely to Saddam Hussein. Reading from Feith’s new book, Wolfowitz agrees with Feith that neither of them saw “a CIA assessment stating that after their ouster, the Ba’athists would be able to organize, recruit for, finance, supply, and command and control an insurgency, let alone an alliance with foreign jihadists.” This is an absurd over-attribution of responsibility for the insurgency to that Most Unitary of Evils, Saddam Hussein. As for who could have predicted that the intractable confessional disputes may have caused problems, Feith and Wolfowitz may want to look up Paul Pillar.
These points represent just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, if Hudson had had somebody on the panel who did not fundamentally agree on the basic justice, prudence, and strategic genius behind the war, all of this could have been exposed as nonsense in front of the cameras. But that’s not how the game is played, I guess.
Peggy Noonan has a column in today’s WSJ in which she reports having given a speech in Lubbock, Texas that was tough on the current president and of the attendees at the talk “no one–not one–defended or disagreed.” She closes this way:
I finally understand the party nostalgia for Reagan. Everyone speaks of him now, but it wasn’t that way in 2000, or 1992, or 1996, or even ‘04.
I think it is a manifestation of dislike for and disappointment in Mr. Bush. It is a turning away that is a turning back. It is a looking back to conservatism when conservatism was clear, knew what it was, was grounded in the facts of the world.
The reasons for the quiet break with Mr. Bush: spending, they say first, growth in the power and size of government, Iraq. I imagine some of this: a fine and bitter conservative sense that he has never had to stand in his stockinged feet at the airport holding the bin, being harassed. He has never had to live in the world he helped make, the one where grandma’s hip replacement is setting off the beeper here and the child is crying there. And of course as a former president, with the entourage and the private jets, he never will. I bet conservatives don’t like it…
Dana Milbank, who reports on Washington as a visitor might report on the monkey house at a zoo, attended Doug Feith’s talk about his new book at CSIS last night and reports on the results. His title? “Iraq War Is Everyone Else’s Fault, Feith Explains.”
I’m no Milbank partisan, but when he’s on, he’s on.
Below are a couple of interesting slides from Shibley Telhami’s latest polling in the Islamic world (click for larger versions):
Earlier this week, Matt Yglesias remarked at “the arrogance of the hawks” and expressed his frustration that
In response to 9/11, the hawks launched a war that’s killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden ever could, at the cost of over 1 trillion dollars; they’ve done nothing to impede nuclear proliferation, nothing to build democracies in the Middle East, failed to kill or capture al-Qaeda’s top leadership, made Hamas and Iran more powerful than ever before, and brought American prestige and influence to a new low ebb.
Now obviously a lot of the folks who adhere to the ideas that have brought all this about somehow think they’re right anyway. And fair enough; there’s just no accounting for some people. But the attitude of thoughtless, unreflective scorn that you see from the [Noah] Pollacks and [James] Kirchicks and [Michael] Goldfarbs of the world is like it comes from some weird alternative reality where their ideas have generally been deemed vindicated, rather than one where 178% of the public says we’re on the wrong track.
Today, Andrew Sullivan links to this video chronicling Douglas Feith’s contorted non-apologies and notes “one wonders whether anyone in the Bush establishment actually believes they ever made an error.”
In this vein, it’s worth wondering what things would look like if things had turned out basically the mirror image of what’s happened today…
Responding to Charles Krauthammer’s call to make Israel a formal U.S. protectorate, David Frum dissents:
An Iranian nuclear force would be small and inaccurate: a terror weapon, not a weapon of war to be used against an opponent able to respond in overwhelming force. Israel is not the target. So who is?
The short answer: The world oil market.
In 1986, the US waged an undeclared proxy naval war to deter Iran from attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The US won of course and Iran lacked any effective riposte. This US operation played a decisive role in compelling Iran to accept peace in the Iran-Iraq war.
And it may have prompted Iranian leaders to decide: We need an effective counter-deterrent against the US. The US would have been much more reluctant to protect Kuwaiti tankers against a nuclear Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would act as a “Keep Out” sign to frighten the US away from a now truly Persian Gulf.
In other words, an atomic bomb would serve Iran’s hegemonic ambitions rather tha its apocalyptic fantasies. It is a useful weapon sought by rational people. That is precisely why it is dangerous and must be stopped.
Frum packs a lot of problems into a short piece. So Iran is going to use nuclear weapons to try to hold Arab oil from making its way onto world markets? Interesting. A few questions:
1) What do we think the Chinese may think about the resulting skyrocket in world oil prices? Japan? Frum paints the familiar image of a lonely US hanging by a thread to its oil lifeline in the Middle East. Things have changed a lot since 1986. What do we think the rest of the world may have to say about this business?
2) What target are the Iranians holding at risk in this scenario? Ras Tanura? Israel? Iraq? Who’s going to be threatened?
3) Who is going to believe that Iran will pull the trigger? If we believe, as Frum and I do, that Iran is run by “rational people” who are seeking nuclear weapons because they are “useful,” why would we believe that the Iranian regime would bring about its own end by using nuclear weapons against any of the above targets?
I can think of one paper on the topic that Frum might want to read.
There’s a spirited debate going on at National Review. Mark Krikorian, NRO’s resident immigrant-basher, supposed yesterday morning that maybe one more reason we should keep immigrants out is because the grandchildren of Hispanic-American Catholics might turn out to less supportive of Israel than their Anglo coreligionists (a condition he calls “anti-Semitism”).
Charging to challenge this thesis is John J. Miller, coauthor of a book calling, umm, France, “America’s oldest enemy.” (Strangely enough, the book was published around the beginning of the Iraq war.) Bernard-Henri Levy “characterized the book this way:
the whole book is a mad charge (whose only equivalent I know is the fascist French literature of the 30’s) against a diabolical nation, the incarnation of evil, bearing in the body and soul of its citizens the stigmata of an ill will the only aim of which throughout the centuries has been the humiliation of America the great.
Good Lord, what’s happened to American conservatism? The debate between these two reminds me a bit of Henry Kissinger’s remark on the Iran-Iraq War.
