Freedom and Culture

One of Bush’s more asinine theories of foreign policy, a theory at the heart of much of neoconservatism, is the idea that everyone everywhere wants American-style freedoms and American-style democracy.  As he said in his 2007 speech on the surge:

The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy, by advancing liberty across a troubled region. It is in the interests of the United States to stand with the brave men and women who are risking their lives to claim their freedom, and to help them as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East.

But is this really what a great many Iraqis want?  They surely want order, commerce, fair treatment, and the good of their individual tribes.  But freedom? And if they celebrated the fall of Saddam, hasn’t it been clear that for some this was a signal that they now could oppress their erstwhile oppressors?

The sorry history of liberal movements in 19th Century Europe and South America should give some pause to those who believe that people everywhere desire freedom.  That desire has often been fleeting or coexstensive with darker desires of envy, revenge, and license.  We’ve seen this in our own times, particularly in Eastern Europe, where misguided notions of freedom left a great many Russians, Poles, and others with unfortunate disrespect for free markets, borne by the rapidity of the social change and the inclusion of accidental aspects of free societies that could have been disregarded in deference to national cultures and other goods.

I recently read Tocqueville’s excellent work The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution and was struck by the relevance of the following passage:

I see quite clearly that, whenever nations are poorly governed, they are very ready to entertain the desire for governing thesmelves.  But this kind of love for independence, which has its roots only in certain particular and passing evils brought on by despostism, never lasts long; it disppearas along with the accidental circumstnaces which caused it.  They seemed to love freedom; it turns out they simply hated the master.  When nations are ready for freedom, what they hate is the evil of dependency itself.

At home and abroad, a desire for security by the lower classes above all is the main competitor of freedom.  Instead of looking to export this difficult to maintain good overseas by military force, America would be better served to cultivate its own national independence at home.  But instead of the Republican evils of imperial adventures abroad and the false freedom of unproductive financial gimmicks at home, Obama promises humanitarian interventions overseas and crippling debts at home in the name of economic stimulus.  Having replaced the old stawart American people with a newer breed through mass immigration, and having accelerated that old breed’s decadence at home with the welfare state begun in the 1930s, the various effects of liberalism have rendered the old American type that “hate[d] the evil of dependency itself” in short supply to say the least.

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No News is Good News

You can usually tell things are going well in Iraq when the media is silent; they have been for weeks, focusing their attention instead on the economy. As always, their silence on important matters is a few steps behind the eight ball. They said little of al Qaeda’s growing reign of terror when Bill Clinton was in charge, nor much criticism of his assertion of Iraqi WMDs during his periodic bombing campaigns, and on the economy, they had little to say when the seeds of that disaster were being planted in the name of expanding home ownership. Nonetheless, here we are.

This small window of tactical success should permit us to make up for the strategic failure that is Iraq, a failure premised on the twin pillars of “democratic nation building” as a means of reducing al Qaeda’s appeal and disarming terrorist-supporting states of WMDs, even when those WMDs are nonexistent.  Yesterday’s mistakes should not be continued simply out of fear of embarrassment, particularly if they can be undone in a way that does not have substantial collateral damage to other strategic interests. Further, developments in Pakistan, Russia, and elsewhere demand a more substantial strategic reserve than the last five years in Iraq have permitted.

The always curmudgeonly Bill Lind makes the point as follows:

The only source for additional troops for Afghanistan is Iraq. The September 2008 issue of Army magazine quotes Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen as saying, “I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq.”

Without railways running on interior lines, we cannot move three brigades from Iraq to Afghanistan this week, then move them back to Iraq again a few weeks later if the situation there demands them. That means any shift of forces requires long-term stability in Iraq.  Neocon voices in Washington are now claiming “victory” in Iraq, which, if it were true, would release American forces stationed there for redeployment. This appears to be what Secretary Gates is counting on when he says we should be able to meet commanders’ request for 10,000 more troops in Afghanistan next spring or summer.

But I fear this represents a falsely optimistic reading of the situation in Iraq. In my view, the current relative quiet in Iraq is merely a pause as the parties there regroup and reorient for the next phase of the war. Unless we have the good sense to get out of Iraq now, while the going is good, we will be stuck there when that next phase starts. We will not then be in a position to shift forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, because without interior lines, any such shift much be long-term.

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Which Internationalism?

Fouad Ajami contrasts Obama’s wishful thinking internationalism with McCain’s American-exceptionalist neo-imperalism:

[During the Nixon-Kennedy election of 1960] The national consensus on America’s role abroad, and on the great threats facing it, was firmly implanted. No great cultural gaps had opened in it, arugula was not on the menu, and the elites partook of the dominant culture of the land; the universities were then at one with the dominant national ethos. The “disuniting of America” was years away. American liberalism was still unabashedly tethered to American nationalism.

We are at a great remove from that time and place. Globalization worked its way through the land, postmodernism took hold of the country’s intellectual life. The belief in America’s “differentness” began to give way, and American liberalism set itself free from the call of nationalism. American identity itself began to mutate.

The celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington, in “Who Are We?,” a controversial book that took up this delicate question of American identity, put forth three big conceptions of America: national, imperial and cosmopolitan. In the first, America remains America. In the second, America remakes the world. In the third, the world remakes America. Back and forth, America oscillated between the nationalist and imperial callings. The standoff between these two ideas now yields to the strength and the claims of cosmopolitanism. It is out of this new conception of America that the Obama phenomenon emerges.

The “aloofness” of Mr. Obama that has become part of the commentary about him is born of this cultural matrix. Mr. Obama did not misspeak when he described union households and poorer Americans as people clinging to their guns and religion; he was overheard sharing these thoughts with a like-minded audience in San Francisco.

Nor was it an accident that, in a speech at Wesleyan University, he spoke of public service but excluded service in the military. The military does not figure prominently in his world and that of his peers. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention, as was the case on the campaign trail, he spoke of his maternal grandfather’s service in Patton’s army. But that experience had not been part of his own upbringing.

Ajami seems to think Americans like McCain because he’s the more competent imperial administrator.  While that is true of some, I think the fact that he wraps his imperial vision in the rhetoric of nationalism is why he’s effective.  Between an anti-American cosmopolitan, and a bellicose ideological neo-imperalist, Americans, particularly Americans of a conservative bent, will choose the latter.  Why?  Because for conservatives who are uneasy about imperialism, it is still better to be in charge, even if the endeavor is self-defeating than to let other people, with similar but opposing imperial visions, to be in charge of us.

The standoff that Ajami speaks of is a tragic one, an unfortunate consequence of the domination of the Republican party by the neoconservative vision of foreign policy, a vision that demands intervention, the continuation of American power, and the erasure of distinctions of the nation and the foreigner. 

Missing from both candidates’ views, and the political scene generally, is a true nationalist voice that is neither excessively indebted to nor overly influenced by the rest of the world.  A humble view that is aware of our limitations and jealous of our advantages.  A view that does not seek to manage or influence world with the exception chiefly of providing a good example to others and protecting what is ours. 

This tradition, stretching from George Washington and James Monroe, to the so-called Know-Nothings, and more recently to Charles Lindbergh, Robert Taft, and Pat Buchanan has been the abiding idiom of American conservatism.  It’s absent from both parties, yet it finds support in what is likely a numerical plurality of working class ethnic whites, business-oriented conservatives, many Vietnam veterans, as well as a swath of anti-war Americans who come from a variety of traditions.

The nationalist is against the continuation of the Iraq War not because it is wrong or an evil to the Iraqis, but because it distracts us from our chief concern, which is our own flourishing as a people and the protection of that people and our way of life.

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McCain’s Rhetoric of Public Service

McCain often identifies America’s problems in moral terms as opposed to ideological differences on policy. Is this really the root of political friction? Liberals of good will justify most of their proposed impositions on the market economy with the same language of community, sacrifice, and public spiritedness. For them and McCain too, America is a cause and a project, not just a place, a people, and an extended family. McCain’s defenses of free markets and limited government stand uneasily alongside rhetoric like this:

We have to catch up to history, and we have to change the way we do business in Washington.

The — the constant partisan rancor that stops us from solving these problems isn’t a cause. It’s a symptom. It’s what happens when people go to Washington to work for themselves and not for you. . . .

Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier, because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

This rhetoric is reminiscent of Ross Perot’s. He was a similarly self-confident figure and an old-fashioned patriot who thought our policy differences could be easily resolved if only people of would abandon their blinders of self-interest. This is a natural enough instinct about personal vocation from McCain, whose entire life has involved government service, including honorable service in the military. But as a diagnosis of what’s wrong with our politics and how to solve them, this formulation seems wrong.

Bush, Clinton, and McCain’s triangulation obscures that there are deep disagreements since the 1960s about core values on issues ranging from free trade and abortion to immigration and the Iraq War. People’s disagreements on these issues, as often as not, do not flow from narrow self-interest so much as disagreements about policy, history, identity, and priorities. After all, self-interest is not why white males like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden support affirmative action or massive destruction of our economy to combat the alleged crisis of global warming.

McCain’s rhetoric, in spite of its superficially unifying character, invites greater conflict and acrimony. His confidence in his own pure motives and the call of history invites crude put-downs of his opponents, which he has indulged in repeatedly, as if folks what want to keep America’s population and demographics stable for cultural reasons are merely a selfish faction.

It’s true, the Democratic Party’s rhetoric often invites narrow self interest: join us and take money from the rich people! But Republican rhetoric does in some respects too: you should keep your money and do what you want with it. It’s better kept with you than the government. While pork barrel spending offends McCain’s sense of national interest, large and expensive government projects, such as “transforming the Middle East” or “defending democracy in Georgia,” do not. He seems a bit blind to the ways even well-meaning government programs can harm our collective interest in being able to pursue our individual goals, plans, and concerns. He also seems not to realize that one man’s pork barrel interest is another’s necessary local project to benefit “his community.” In other words, McCain’s lack of principled conservatism leads to a kind of dissonance in policy and does not equip him to resist calls for grand historical government projects that are exceedingly expensive. Prosaic, but necessary, big cuts in spending on entitlement programs do not appeal to his sense of grandeur and historical mission. For example, nothing in McCain’s view of the world would find anything wrong with the New Deal or the Great Society.

An authentic conservative political vision must acknowledge a few things about our times. While government is not the only problem, it is an impediment. The government has become too big, and its goals are often hostile to civil society’s institutions like private enterprise, religion, and the traditional family. Government is out of control only partly for reasons of narrow self-interest. Indeed, grand altruistic projects based in the “selfless” goal of equality like social security and Medicare cannot be easily reigned in through rooting out corruption. Their problems are structural; we need to make tough choices about priorities and spending and the purpose of government, and those tough choices will require shrinking government rather than expanding its commitments in the name of concern for the public good. McCain’s shown little appreciation for these difficulties the redistributionist agenda imposes on the private sector, partly, no doubt, because he is completely insulated from economic worries and the suffocating impact of taxes and regulation. Finally, in our ethnic politics, everyone is playing by the rules of power and self-interest except for whites.  What, after all, is the meaning of groups like the National Council of La Raza or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  McCain, however, to show his own bona fides is silent on affirmative action and repeatedly supports massive amnesty as a grand historical gesture.  Unfortunately, amnesty and continued mass immigration will an opening for greater disunity and stress our over-generous welfare state and public health resources.  The diminution of America’s traditional majority and leadership class will ultimately lead to a cruder, more Balkanized ethnic politics that we see in corruption-ridden places like Los Angeles and Chicago.  If McCain truly cared about America and could somehow connect the dots, he’d realize that keeping this country populated with native-born Americans is part of the formula for having the kind of national political culture he desires.

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Obama’s Big Trip

I know we bloggers are supposed to say something profound about every news item that comes down the pike, but I have little to say about Obama’s big Mideast and European trip.  It seems like the kind of thing wonks get super-excited about that has little long-term impact.  I do think it’s surprising he’s making so many specific commitments, and I think there’s something conceptually off about his desire, essentially, to import the troops, tactics, and procedures of Iraq into Afghanistan.  In other words, he embraces the nation-building approach whole-heartedly, he just thinks it’s a waste of time in Iraq.  This suggests a natural, calculating politician whose deeds will fall short of his high-falutin’ rhetoric.

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Obama’s Foreign Policy Triangulation

Obama’s flip-flopping is more dangerous than it is for most candidates because it cuts against the central theme of his campaig:  that he was a new kind of politician who would speak plainly, deliver bad news, and work in good faith with both sides to address persistent long-term problems that are politically costly to address.  It’s not just a question of inconsistency or whether he is a closet liberal.  He is and inconsistent but quite obviously open and avowed liberal, when you listen carefully.  It’s a question of whether he is a coward, exemplified by his numerous “present” votes in the Illinois legislature and federal Senate.

Consider his latest statement on Iraq:

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

Talk about triangulation.  This 95% draw down of troops coupled with training cadres may be a good compromise.  But it does not match his primary rhetoric, which was explicitly against any involvemetn in Iraq.  Leaving troops to fight al Qaeda and train Iraqis is a huge exception that could easily metastasize into logistics support, force protection troops, etc.  Let’s not forget, Vietnam began with training troops and the addition of U.S. Marines to protect airfields in Danang, something I doubt Obama is too familiar with. 

I would ordinarily applaud the prudence of Obama on something like this, but I don’t think his more ardent anti-war supporters would.  And I’m reluctant to see anything all that encouraging, as I think on Iraq, as on everything else, his domestic political goal of accruing and keeping political power drives all of his decisionmaking, including on sensitive matters of foreign policy.  If McCain is driven by the politics of honor and grand historical gestures, Obama is driven by the small politics of popularity.

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Obama’s Raison d’Etre

Obama excited the Democratic base for several reasons.  He is young, obviously smart, thoughtful, a good speaker, and charismatic.  He is black, which excited blacks who are unusually tribal in matters political, but he also excited younger whites indoctrinated in multiculturalism since their infancy and unimpressed with the GOP’s conventional choices.  FInally, and most importantly, he was forthright on the war, an issue that seperated him dramatically from the cynical Hillary Clinton.  Even anti-war conservatives have given him serious consideration on account of this stand.  Now he’s damaged his credibility on this issue after weeks of damaging his credibility in general by making a move to the center. 

Daniel Larison remarks:

[I]t seems to me that the charge that Obama committed a first-class political blunder going into a long weekend is basically right.  Having already given substance to the idea that he will abandon important pledges made during the primaries with his flips on the FISA legislation and public financing, and having apparently reversed himself on at least a couple other questions in the space of a few weeks, it was an unusually poor time to be “inartful,” as they like to call it, about one of the central policy questions of the day.  Even if Obama’s remarks were completely consistent with past statements, which I think is not the case, he had nonetheless set himself up over the last few weeks to be attacked for yet another shift on a major policy.  If the McCain campaign has a problem coming up with a coherent message, Obama’s campaign has its own problems with message discipline.  Having just shaken the confidence of many of his supporters over the FISA bill and having opened himself up to being portrayed as opportunistic on something as fundamental as constitutional protections, this was hardly the time to start talking about “refining” anything.  The Obama campaign wants the candidate to display thoughtfulness, but they don’t seem to think very much about how the candidate’s phrases will be interpreted by supporters and critics alike. 

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Making It All Fit

One mark of ideological thinking is a strong strain of rigid consistency. All the facts must fit. The past must be re-written to reflect today’s goals. If the Catholic Church committed some evils in the priest scandal, it was evil back to the time of Christ. If the Iraq War is wrong, so was WWII, WWI, the Vietnam War, and even the War of 1812. Bad means in the pursuit of a noble goal, well-meaning mistakes, incompetence rather than malevolence,  and all forms of moral complexity and human error are consigned to either the realm of the elect and the damned.

A nasty strain of this has emerged among the anti-war right. The left, of course, has long had a large body of supporters whose criticisms of the western world and the United States are intemperate, because the philosophy is rooted in an anti-western fetishization of the Other.  But now the anti-war right, frustrated perhaps by the support received by Bush among a fairly large constituency, has undertaken to extremes of rhetoric, culminating in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Lawrence Auster exposed this nonsensense quite trenchantly in a piece he wrote some time ago in Front Page Magazine where he wrote, inter alia, about the strange turn of Antiwar.com to anti-Americanism after its initial, powerful condemnation of the Kosovo campaign:

But then something very strange happened with Szamuely, and with Antiwar.com itself. Not content with merely opposing the U.S.-led war on Serbia, he began retrospectively attacking America’s entire effort in the Cold War against the former Soviet Union. He did this by denying that Communism had ever represented a threat that needed to be stopped. It was as though, once he had switched into an oppositional mode against what he saw as the unjustified use of American power in the case of Serbia, he was compelled by some mysterious dynamic to see any use of American power abroad as wrong or imperialistic, even when that power had been used for such a righteous and necessary cause as resisting the spread of Communism, and even though he himself had previously been an anti-Communist and a supporter of the Cold War.

This came as a shock to me. And the shock didn’t end there. I soon noticed a similar adversarial stance among other antiwar rightists, a wild denunciatory quality that did not confine itself to particular wrongs committed by the United States, but eagerly embraced any assertion against America, no matter how ridiculous.

I strongly recommend the article.  Auster correctly notes that significant numbers of the paleoconservative right, resentful perhaps over their lack of influence and professional success, have turned into nihilist haters of all things American.  It’s ridiculous, of course, and far out of kilter with what should be conservative instincts, particularly when natural patriotism and unease with the paranoia of the fringe left is why so many normal people remain encamped on the right side of the spectrum.

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Some Recent Writings

I’m splitting my time here over at Takimag.com, where I’m writing most of my longer pieces.

Here is a piece I wrote on why liberalism makes its adherents incapable of criticizing the stark failures of liberalism:  once liberalism is imbibed, a liberal cannot give appropriate consideration to non-liberal political good.

A piece on Afghanistan and why our “nation-building” strategy there may be the wrong tack.

How Obama’s gun control position shows that he’s a conventional liberal more than a moderate technocrat, and some thoughts on why he wants to keep his family background, in particular his wily father, under raps.

Finally, here and here, I express skepticism of Pat Buchanan’s argument that WWII was avoidable and that Britain’s security guaranty to Poland under Churchill was a major precipitating factor, making the war an avoidable epiphenomenon of British bellicosity.  Since ethnic Germans were scattered throughout Europe, there is little reason to believe they would have been satisfied with the Sudetenland, or the Anschluss, or Danzig, or with anything less than an Eastern Empire with which Germany would have become a world power.

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Attempted Anbar Redux in Afghanistan

Interesting article about Marine operations in Afghanistan.  Veterans of the successful (for now) Sunni Awakening strategy are trying to recreate those results in Southern Afghanistan.  As in Iraq until very recently, locals fear to work with the US and Afghan troops because they are  “here today, gone tomorrow” leaving peasants to the tender mercies of the Taliban.

There are a fraction of the numbers of troops in Afghanistan as there are in Iraq, and the war presents many of the same strategic and operational challenges.  Even with the surge and the intelligent leadership of General Petraeus, at most the conditions of some kind of stability and success have been created in Iraq.  America has little power or ability to shape the Iraqi political settlement, which our leaders have always acknowledged requires reconciliation that can only come from the Iraqis themselves.  Without more troops–which are unavailable and will be for the foreseeable future–there is little hope even for this level of “success” to transpire in Afghanistan.  The country is nearly as large, requires more troops to patrol due its spread-out rural population, and yet there are only 23,000 US troops there, a fraction of the 130,000 plus in Iraq.  Even if the overall “hearts and minds” strategy focused on security succeeds, it is at best an intermediate goal.  As in Iraq, nothing stable will come of it that will not require a continued US presence,  because the end-state will be a power-brokered democracy.  Yet that presence is entirely unrealistic considering our modest-sized “peace dividend” military.  The Afghan people are entirely sensible to be wary of US offers of support and protection.  The Marines themselves surely know that politicians will break faith with these forlorn people far more readily than local commanders would.

We truly have a situation of lions led by donkeys.

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What’s On the Internets?

I’ve been a bit busy to write anything major.

Here is something I wrote about why the war in Afghanistan faces the same strategic challenges as Iraq.  In other words, it’s a bit facile for Obama and others to propose a mere shift in resources without more.  Unfortunately, the posting got invaded by 9/11 Truthers.

A good piece on the herky-jerky nature of military procurement, with a specific discussion of controversies surrounding the new Marine body armor.

Larry Auster compares Obama’s Church to a Nuremberg Rally.  Nice.

William Lind reminds us that Fourth Generation Warfare and terrorism are not only features of the Middle East, as illustrated by the degeneration of state authority in Mexico.

Finally, a piece showing how the candidates’ positions on Iraq are nearly identical.  If the Democratic Congress is any indicator, expect many weasel-worded statements of caution rather than a precipitous withdrawal.

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Feith’s Bad Faith

Doug Feith is a piece of work. Compare his recent attempts to pain himself as the Cassandra uttering realist warnings to Bush about Iraq in 2004 with his saccharine pro-democracy rhetoric uttered at the time. I agree with his criticism today that Bush’s rhetorical shift from WMDs to democracy confused the American public and resulted in a wrong turn by redefining the mission as “freeing Iraq.” Bush’s talk of liberation obscured the chief pre-war rationale for the war as a self-defensive action based on the reasonable view that Iraq had WMDs coupled with the reasonable reduction in tolerance for risks posed by troublesome and provocative nations like Iraq after 9/11. Bush’s rhetoric in 2004 almost exclusely emphasized the democratization efforts. Too bad for Feith–and Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Perle–all of the administration people were all sayings the same things as Bush at the time. It wasn’t lying per se. Democracy always made an appearance in lists of reasons to attack Iraq. But a tertiary rationale became the main rationale, and no one bothered to acknowledge this change in forthright terms. It’s as if “Elections for Bavaria” replaced “Remember Pearl Harbor” in May of 1943.

More important, whether or not the administration’s unacknowledged change in emphasis constituted ethical rhetoric, no one in the administration dissented about the idealist rhetoric’s major premise: that with or without WMDs, a democratic Iraq was a worthy and achievable goal that furthered American national security.

I confess, before the war, I thought all of this democracy talk was merely window-dressing to justify our realist motives. I only realized later that the Bushies were bona fide foreign policy idealists with general indifference to the welfare of Americans. For Bush and other liberals, fidelity to liberal principles is the chief mark of strategic success.

Feith is a liar and an Israeli spy. He belongs in jail, not on the pages of America’s newspapers. It’s one thing to make mistakes. Everyone does, particularly in the complicated world of foreign policy. But, like Sanchez, Rumsfeld, and George Tenet, his lack of character consists in his unwillingness to acknowledge his own barely hidden dual loyalties and consequent dual motives in promoting and managing a huge failure of an operation that rested on mistaken intelligence and sought to obtain ridiculous goals.

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Bacevich on Iraq

Andrew Bacevich–West Pointer,  conservative, father of KIA 1st Lt. Bacevich–criticizes the war in a way that should be persuasive to conservatives, including conservatives like me who initially supported the war for punitive reasons. Namely, it’s now clearly a waste of resources and a strategic error to continue on this course. It’s important not to continue this path, even though leaving Iraq would violate a normally good means to discover good policy: staying would enrage liberals.

Just because many anti-American liberals oppose something, doesn’t make it right. This war, like others, might be wrong for reasons pacifists and unpatriotic globalists don’t appreciate. As Bacevich observes, the war is a strategic failure and will continue to murmur along without any real progress indefinitely:

The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.

What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.

Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed. Rather than showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the United States.

Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats swiftly, decisively, and economically—Saddam Hussein’s removal providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our presence in the Middle East—the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S. power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine hasn’t worked. Saddam is long gone, but we’re stuck. Rather than delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.

I would add that the absolute worst reason to stay in this war is for some emotional notion of national honor and commitment to the troops, impulses that undergird the very unstrategic thinking John McCain and numerous buck sergeants. We don’t go to war to do the conquered a favor. We don’t stay to avenge deaths like some armed camp of Zulus. A nation goes sends its army to war to accomplish foreign policy goals. This same nation can and should withdraw these troops when it’s in our interests to do so, when those goals are out of reach, no longer important, or too costly. It’s not like Iraq is sacred American soil; this is a foreign land, half way around the world, in a very bad neighborhood, populated mostly by uncivilized people whom we do not understand and who do not understand or appreciate our soldiers’ sacrifices.

Sure, we can pig-headedly spend $20 or $30 trillion over another decade, but even if everything turns out for the best, it will be a strategic benefit worth some fraction of that. And then what? We’ll still have al Qaeda to worry about. We’ll still have North Korea. Our borders will be too porous. Our ranks of third world immigrants will remain too numerous. The Middle East will still have large numbers of pissed off young men who are given sanction to vent their anger by their religion.  The deterrent value of staying or leaving is a wash. Iran knows we won’t easily commit to a similar adventure on its territory. Russia and China will still be ascendant in their spheres of influence. Oil will still be scarce and in the hands of unstable autocrats and their resentful subjects.

Vast swaths of people all around the world will not appreciate Iraq as a model, it ends up as stable as Pakistan or Indonesia when all is said and done. Instead of seeing idealistic U.S. sacrifices for democracy, most Arabs and Muslims will perceive a marginally successful bid for power and domination of Iraq’s oil wealth. Most of the worlds peoples will continue to be more passionate about religion, nationalism, ideology, wealth, prosperity, and tribalism than democracy and the rule of law. Not only that, they’ll treat these tangible goods as more desirable than democracy–whether originating from bloody revolutions at home, or imposed from without by an idealistic and ideological United States.

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The Nightmare of Foreign Policy “Idealists”

Most of George Bush’s foreign policy mistakes have been caused by what may be termed excessive foreign policy idealism.  Though Bush is rightly criticized for his incompetence and failure to learn from events, no amount of competence would have saved him from the pathetic, ongoing insurgency in Iraq. This outcome was a natural consequence of the situation that he put himself in due to foreign policy idealism:  our ambitious plans to change Iraq’s people and culture, the lack of an Iraqi center of power or leader to which we could appeal, and the inherent friction of a proud, ancient people in the face of foreign occupation. 

Bush misjudged where we should intervene (Iraq, Ukraine’s elections, Kosovo Independence), how long we should stay (forever), and what kind of results we could expect (flowers) because of this idealism. In the world of Bush and the neoconservatives, we should concern ourselves not merely with security or commerce, but high ideals like democracy and human rights among both our allies and our enemies.  The lack of concern for such things has undergirded our historical alliance with folks like Saudi monarchs and Indonesian dictators.  The idealists respond that these regimes fuel terrorism amongst their resentful and downtrodden people.  So, we must democratize places like this by force, including Iraq, as a matter of englightened self-interest. 

McCain believes all of this in spades.  Pat Buchanan describes what we can expect in a President McCain:

Like Condi Rice, who regularly disparages the policies of every president from FDR to Bill Clinton, McCain enjoys parading the higher morality of his devotion to democracy-uber-alles.

“For decades in the Middle East we had a strategy of relying upon autocrats to provide order and stability. We relied on the Shah, the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi royal family. … We can no longer delude ourselves that relying on these outdated autocrats is the safest bet.”

Speaking of self-delusion, does McCain believe the “democrats” lately elected in Pakistan will be tougher on al-Qaida and the Taliban than Pervez Musharraf, who has twice escaped assassination for having sided with us?

Does McCain think this new crowd in Islamabad will be more pro-American than the general, when the people who voted them in are among the most anti-American in the Islamic world?

From Richard Nixon to George Bush I, we expelled Moscow from Egypt, won the Cold War, brought peace between Egypt and Israel, and created a worldwide alliance, including Hafez al-Assad of Syria, that drove Saddam’s army out of Kuwait.

What has the Bush-McCain democracy crusade produced, save electoral victories for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas? And if we dump the sultan of Oman, President Mubarak, and the king of Saudi Arabia, who does McCain think will replace them?

The “idealists” are the most war-mongering bunch around.  Their idealism has no respect for the diversity of political arrangements in the world, nor the benefits of tolerating injustice compared to initiating the horrors of war. Idealists are behind such varied campaigns as Kosovo, Iraq, and Vietnam, as well as the current call to intervene in Sudan.  Without a sustained focus on America’s abiding interest in peace and the avoidance of trouble, the idealism of a Clinton or a Bush or a McCain will always get us into wars.   The “no war for oil” folks have it all wrong.  That at least would make some crude sense.  The neoconservative ideaslists are seeking not power or lucre, but the satisfaction of standing up for a noble cause.  For them, every threat is Hitler, every decision Munich, every threat of world historical importance.  This same idealism does not give a leader the analytical tools to realize our predicaments and extricate ourselves. 

Idealists always paint vivid images of the future, a world characterized by law and right. Our present difficulties are always treated casually, necessary and bearable suffering that will be vindicated by the verdict of history.  Such “this worldly” optimism is reminiscent of the Hegelian-Marxist view of history, where any given state of society is only a step on the way to the Communist paradise. 

But sometimes it’s not December 1944. Sometimes the stakes are not existential.  And in these cases, hard-headedness is needed to go with softer-heartedness, in McCain’s case the admirable concern for others and a high sense of duty and persistence.  There is a time to throw in the towel, and that time has arrived in Iraq.

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Condy Rice as VP: Another Indicator of McCain’s Liberalism

Apparently, John McCain is seriously considering Condy Rice to be his Vice President, and she wants the job. I can’t say I’m surprised, but I do think she will do little to help him with moderates, and such a choice will further alienate real conservatives.  This issue is unusually important because of McCain’s age and health; his vice-president stands a reasonably good chance of assuming the office.

First, I think he is likely to choose her because he’s expressed unease about attacking Obama.  He can’t muster the same passion against him that he could against an Edwards or Clinton.  (Could you imagine McCain firing a staffer for an anti-Hillary youtube video?)  For McCain, Obama’s race is like a shield, and McCain acts like any other guilty white liberal on race, as evidenced most dramatically by his embrace of America-destroying immigration policies.  Condy gives him a get out of jail free card and also allows him to further his own vanity, proving to himself and everyone how progressive he is on racial matters.  

Second, there is no daylight between McCain and Condy on the war. It’s true the war is unpopular, and McCain’s reprise of Bush’s ’04 electoral strategy appears less likely to be effective this time around, but it’s clearly something the two of them are very sincere about. Far from balancing the ticket, McCain seems disposed to pick a lackey type who will not challenge his oversized ego and unorthodox ideas.

Finally, Condy is a messianic liberal who, like Bush, is able to paint the imperial policing job in Iraq in the grandest of terms:  the installment of sacred democracy and the expiation of our national “birth defect” of slavery.  McCain likes this sort of talk; it elevates his merely instinctual “politics of duty” to grander historical purposes.  Rice frequently ties this back to her own life, equating slavery and Jim Crow with any recognition of group differences, including the conservative criticism that Iraqis cannot profitably handle democracy and self-government.

Rice has no apparent leadership qualities, is a weak public speaker, is totally out to lunch on the Palestinians (often comparing their treatment to black civil rights activists) and has accomplished literally nothing at all as Secretary of State.   She is a race-obsessed liberal and incompetent, but McCain may still pick her.  Her race, her minimal qualifications, and her hawkish views on Iraq are enough for him.

Consider her record.  She failed after 9/11 to be a voice of reason by not defending racial profiling of Middle Easterners and distinguishing this from the Jim Crow policies of America’s past.  She failed as National Security Advisor to pull Bush off the rails by saying, “If we’re to pursue this ambitious course, we need many more troops regardless of what Rumsfeld is saying.”  In works like Fiasco and Cobra II, she appears to have done very little in her role at the NSA, being bulldozed and parried by aggressive folks like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, and Feith.  Since becoming Secretary of State, she has been tone deaf in our dealings with Serbia, Russia, Israel, China, and many other parties, the worst example of the “ugly American” we’ve ever seen in this role.  

Worst of all, when she is not insulting foreigners, she insults America and its past with half-educated bromides, usually dealing with slavery and discrimination.  Her habitual appeal to these examples show that she is far too traumatized and alienated by her youth in Alabama to be entrusted with stewardship over the country as a whole.  The United States is still a white majority country, where most of its people see much to admire in our history.  Most of us, particularly on the Republican side, view the Founding as a glorious chapter in our history, the exact opposite of a “birth defect.” 

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