A lot of the reaction to my conservapedia piece falls along the lines that you would expect – essentially that I’m painting with too broad a brush.  I probably was in that post.  Obviously a lot of conservatives are thoughtful, independent-thinking, and honest people.  It’s primarily, therefore, a reaction to the conservative leadership that leads me to write posts like that one.  To the movers and shakers on the quasi-populist right.

What I think we’re seeing and have been seeing now for some time is the heating up of an internal war within the GOP and the broader conservative movement, which includes the Tea Parties and other grassroots efforts that may or may not be directly affiliated with the Republican Party.  This was bound to happen after the McCain loss.  It gave the real right-wingers in the party (and outside of it) a chance to blame the moderates for the loss, and it gave the GOP insiders a chance to settle old scores.  I’m not at all sure that the factions here are really “moderates vs conservatives” so much as a certain brand of right-winger vs. another.

I’m not really entirely sure of Sean Scallion’s break down of the sides involved as Conservative Inc. vs. the establishment.  I think that they overlap far too much, and I think that it is a certain faction within the establishment that is also at the heart of the Tea Parties, warring against other factions within the establishment.  In other words, the grassroots base is not its own entity but rather part of a larger faction.

Nor is it simply social conservatives vs. fiscal conservatives, or neoconservatives vs. realists, or neoconservatives vs. social conservatives.  The factions at play here are not the old divisions, and the old rules don’t apply.  People like David Frum are pushed to the margins for entirely different reasons than people like Daniel Larison. [Read more →]

Stranger things have happened, but this is still worth noting.  It turns out that a slim majority of Republicans now believe [pdf] that it is not America’s responsibility to “actively promote democracy around the world.”  I’m not sure Republican leadership has quite caught up with this sea change, but the sooner they do the better.  Even George W. Bush, despite his inevitable legacy as nation-builder, began implementing a more realistic foreign policy in his second term.

Apparently Americans are catching up:

According to AEI’s Datapoints:

A bare majority of Republicans (51 percent) and strong majorities of Democrats (63 percent) and independents (62 percent) agree that democracy promotion is not America’s responsibility. Americans have always been reluctant internationalists, aware of the global role that the United States must play, but at the same time, concerned about the costs that come with such responsibility.

So now that the neocon fervor is being supplanted by a more cautious foreign policy both in the oval office and in public opinion, what should we expect?  How do we begin to redefine not only American interests, but our pursuit of those interests?   “Democracy promotion” may be off the table (at least after Afghanistan), but a myriad other reasons to flex our military muscle still exist.  Genocide, natural resources, terror havens, piracy, and a plethora of other conflicts and will continue to test American resolve and restraint. [Read more →]

Mark Levin’s response to The Weekly Standard’s Peter Berkowitz is surprisingly good.  I find myself truly befuddled by the apparent twin-personalities of the man who is Mark Levin – the thoughtful, reasonable essayist vs. the talk-radio bloviator.  Perhaps each medium requires its own panache.  Maybe I just don’t get talk-radio.  In any case, I found myself warming a great deal to the man when I discovered that in his book he calls Bill Kristol a neo-Statist.  And in many ways, Levin’s description of neoconservatism as neo-statism is right on the money.  I wonder how he squares his own support for international exuberance in foreign policy – it seems less than “prudent” to me given the inevitable tangles we find ourselves in whenever idealism outdistances pragmatism.  Certainly the Iraq debacle bears this out….

I came across Levin’s response via Stacy McCain, who writes about the Iraq War:

My position on the Iraq war was nuanced, as the liberals would say. Unlike Kerry, I was against the war before I was for it. Basically, from 2002 until the war started, I was very skeptical toward arguments for the invasion and conquest of Mesopotamia. However, the time for arguing ended when the first shot was fired. My attititude about war is, “If you’re in it, win it.”

No nation ever benefitted from losing a war. Military defeat tends to demoralize a nation and, if repeated, can result in absolute decadence. (Cf. France.)

I had a similar take, actually, though I was far more than skeptical.  I was downright appalled – as much by my fellow countrymen who touted the “love it or leave it” faux patriotism, as by the Bush administration’s nonsensical arguments for invasion (and the Democrats’ cowardly compliance).  I was still reeling from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the advent of the Patriot Act.  The Iraq rhetoric – and the broader “war on terror” language – seemed only to add to the overall Orwellian spookiness of those days.

Like McCain, once the war began my attitude shifted as well – at least toward the Iraq war in particular.  (The “war on terror” which might “last decades” still scared the hell out of me.  Now that the Obama administration has made the Doublespeak even more glaring by renaming it the Overseas Contingency Operation, I think the chill has in fact deepened.) [Read more →]

“Iran’s green awakening may end awfully. But if it succeeds, it will be everything the neocons had hoped to achieve in Iraq – and also a demonstration of neoconservatism’s core fallacy, which is that freedom can be forced on anyone; or somehow force-fed into maturity. It thus vindicates and refutes neoconservatism at the same time.” ~ Andrew Sullivan on the vindication and refutation of neoconservatism

A lot of things jump to mind after reading this post.  First of all, I fail to see how any of neoconservatism’s tenets are actually vindicated by a successful Iranian revolution.  None of the neoconservative strategy would have entered into the overthrow of Ahmadenijad, and perhaps just as importantly, none of the neocons’ goals would have been achieved by such a revolution.  A somewhat more moderate Moussavi in charge of a still theocratic republic still intent on nuclear armament hardly qualifies as a victory for the hawks.

And even if actual reforms did take place and a freer and more democratic and less hostile Iran did emerge, all of it would have happened without U.S. intervention or use of force, further undercutting the neoconservative claim to the necessity of hard power to overthrow dictatorial and anti-democratic regimes.  The fact that Iran could “promote” its own democracy should be enough of a refutation in and of itself to the neoconservative agenda.

[Read more →]

At the tail end of our Cover It Live discussion about technology and the Iranian election, Chris prompted me into the only commentary I provided on the issue as the moderator. I didn’t so much have something to say about about the elections and the resultant upheaval themselves, so much as I had some concerns around how people state-side are responding and reacting to events as they unfold and why my earlier call for some patience in developing an analysis was more than just me being curmudgeonly.

To quote myself,

One thing that has occurred to me, is that there is some part of me that gets a bit queasy watching Andrew Sullivan howl about democracy and the overthrow of fascism. I think his heart is in the right place, no doubt, and I want to be there with him. But we’ve made some pretty horrendous mistakes by making unwarranted and unjustifiable claims about how democratic states actually emerge. I worry that the germs of that thinking still exist and that they could transmorph and come back in even more hideous and seeming altruistic forms. I do worry about how all of those guilt ridden impulses will wind up being exorcised and I worry that they will be draped in a Gersonian flag of benevolence, only to do as much, if not more harm than before.

As if on cue, Andrew quotes As’ad AbuKhalil expressing concern about double standards in American analysis about current events in Iran, especially vis-a-vis tyrannical dictaters who are liked and those who are not,

Of course, there is so much hypocrisy in the Western coverage and official reactions to the developments. Most glaring for me was the statement by the secretary-general of the UN who insisted on the respect of the will of the Iranian people. Would that US designate utter such words, say, about Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and other dictatorships that are approved by the US? The role of Faqih in Iran undermines any claim of democracy in that country: but I am in no way sympathetic to Moussavi. He is a man who suddenly discovered the virtues of democracy. When he was prime minister back in the 1980s, he presided over a regime far more oppressive than Ahmadinajad’s. And why has no Western media really commented on his rhetoric during his own campaign: the man kept saying that he wants a “return” to the teachings of Khomeini. I in no way support a man who wants a “return” to the teachings of Khomeini. But Western media are always quick to pick villains and heroes: especially when one side is identified against Israel.

Andrew responds by saying,

Because Iran actually has a population capable of sustaining democracy; and Mousavi is as good as we’ll get. I also suspect that all judgments about who these people are need to be held provisionally. These events are surely changing the mindset of everyone in that country, most of all Mousavi. In a moment of extreme flux, we have to look at intimations of the new, not recitations of the old.

Now, while I appreciate the sentiment that judgments need to be held provisionally, that all seems like so much momentary back tracking on Andrew’s part for the sake of dealing with some solid criticism in one blog post. Let’s face it, actions speak louder than words. And as much as I commend Andrew and the rest of the Dish crew for their exceptional coverage of events in Iran, their actions have not been those of a group of people running a blog that is holding its judgments about what is going on in Iran particularly provisionally. [Read more →]

I used to believe in humanitarian intervention.  I used to truly believe that the right thing for America to do as a global superpower was to intervene where necessary to stop violence or genocide, to promote democracy, to be the generous benefactors of freedom…and so on and so forth.  I was a pretty fervent supporter of Israel against what seemed to me at the time, a wide sea of hostile forces, nestled as that small country is in the cradle of both civilization and the Muslim world.  (I still support Israel though I cannot support their settlements).  I was either a neoconservative or a liberal hawk, I’m not really sure.  I wasn’t really sure at the time, though the neoconservative brand seemed fitting enough, and especially my UK counterparts – neoconservatives but also very socially libertarian – seemed like rational, well-meaning people with a real desire to change the world for the better.  And yes, I even blogged about this at one point on a now defunct site that I no longer am willing to pay to run since I no longer blog there.

And then a few things began to trouble me about all of this.  I realized, for one, how utterly naive this belief in American power (and goodness) was.  Not only did I lose faith in the idea that meddling in the name of “humanitarian intervention’s” could be effective, but in the belief that it was even humanitarian to begin with.  The neoconservative agenda, it turned out, was far more about expanding military might than it was about bringing peace or sanctuary to the weak and oppressed.  The liberal hawks were essentially the same – all part of the larger neoliberal economic and globalist agenda. [Read more →]

“If Nixon could go to China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, which was a hundred times more brutal and appalling than anything we have seen in Iran over the last few days, Obama can and should persist in engaging Iran.” ~ Daniel Larison talking some sense

[Read more →]

Let’s start with “isn’t” first:

________________________________________

• It’s not a war just about spreading democracy.
• It’s not a war just about oil.
• It’s not a war just about stopping a brutal dictator who supposedly had weapons of mass destruction.
• It’s not a war of humanitarian intervention.
• It’s not a plot cooked up by some secret cabal of Israeli Zionists and American neocons.

***

• It is a war partially about oil, partially about spreading democracy, and partially about ousting a brutal dictator.
• It is a war that reflects poorly on the cultural shift toward perpetual growth and expansion of American economic and military interests.
• It is a war fueled by skewed notions of national security and humanitarian intervention.
• It is a war about American military dominance in a region that has American economic interests – in oil, trade and so forth, at its heart.
• It is a war pushed very strongly by the brand of politics known as neoconservatism, which most blatantly embraces such military and economic expansion, but which is certainly not unique in this – only, perhaps, more unabashed.

Look, I opposed the Iraq War in the beginning.  I thought it was ludicrous, and the government’s case seemed paper thin.  Later, I opposed artificial time tables for withdrawal of American troops, because it struck me as cruel and imprudent and even cowardly to leave a nation in a state of civil war that we essentially instigated.  I still oppose withdrawing too quickly, lest the country be sucked into an ever more brutal cycle of civil war and chaos.

But I become more and more dubious that our continued presence is anything more than prolonging the inevitable; that no matter how long we stay, in the end we’ll have to exit, and when we do, the Iraqis will simply have to figure things out on their own.  And it will be bloody, and awful, and the violence will last a long, long time.  Likely enough, the “democratic government of Iraq” will become ever more despotic, and the country will become even more divided along sectarian lines.  No length of stay on the part of the American military can avoid that.  Even if we do achieve stability that lasts beyond our own occupation, the only way that stability will be achieved for long will be through the suppression of the Sunnis by the Shiite majority.

[Read more →]

Attempting to defend neoconservatism these days is a bit like walking out of the house naked, many strange looks and pointing ensues. That reaction is of course not wholly unwarranted, there are many fronts on which neoconservatism has failed miserably and many ways in which it has helped to bring the U.S. to its current state of disrepair. No one can say that neoconservatives’ hands are clean with a straight face, or condescend to attribute the troubles of the country to unforeseeable and unavoidable consequences that would have lay in wait for any administration.

The problem with all of this epitheting is that as Andrew Sullivan has noted of his own blogging, we have come to use the term neoconservative/ism as a sort of short hand to indicate everything that is wrong with country, and in some moments of fanciful hyperbolizing, everything that is wrong with the world. As careful as I try to be with nomenclature, I know that I have been guilty of such meaning dilution, as well. It is not at all clear to me that we have a common and clear lay person definition of what we mean when we speak with condemnation about neoconservatism, though it is commonly understood that our reference tends to be about foreign policy and the  debacle, to put it euphemistically, that was the invasion of Iraq and the larger War on Terror.

In many ways neoconservatism is a victim of its own success, as are most ideologies when the rubber hits the road. Given its influence over the last few decades, we often forget that neoconservatism was originally a dissenting impulse. Left leaning intellectuals who felt that Johnson’s Great Society liberalism had lost its way, the neocons may well have foreseen the destructive end point of the boomer-era culture wars in their disdain for counterculture and its in your face change tactics, actively digging in their heels against that mounting trend. Timing being everything, the neocons found themselves on the wrong side of history in terms of the domestic struggles of the era, but their real politik critiques of the broad and shallow analysis of the anti-war movement foisted them to power with the advent of the Cold War. It was in the decades that followed where the over-zealousness and overreach of their vision was allowed to fester, in some senses truly coming to fruition with George W. Bush. By the lights of a certain perspective, the neocons are not unlike any group of dissenters who come to power. Often times ill-equipped to take their critiques and mold them into prescriptive and coherent policy the temptation to over-correct when the opportunity arises is too great and undermines the very strength of the ideas that have lit the way to power.

And so the sober, realistic assessment of foreign policy provided by neoconservatives has given way to imperialistic, geo-political chess game. The black and white of the players belies the nuance present in the dynamics on the board and the unitary vision of a stable and peaceful world assembled at the barrel of a gun becomes a God project to remake the world in one’s own image. It is, to my mind, in this regard that neoconservatives have most badly warped the tracks in their own journey of discovery, thus informing my own insistent kid gloving of the cultural dynamics that make up the world’s diversity. Preservation of those differences in each element of modernization’s realization, it seems clear now, is not just a preferred course of action, but a vital element to any kind of meaningful success.

But the nagging question at the back of my mind, the one that forces me to walk about of the house naked, is to inquire what useful remnants we might pull from the flaming wreckage of neoconseravtism’s contemporary crash site? Ironically, my own estimation is that it is neoconservatism’s emphasis on moral clarity, the hubris that has spelled its intermediate doom, that offers the greatest strength we might cull from its many wolves (and perhaps not ultimately very ironic at all as circumstances have shown us often enough that an ideology’s Mjöllnir seems ever destined to become its Achilles heel).

While applied in a overzealous and dangerous manner, I don’t think the moral clarity sought by neoconservatives is in itself wrong headed. While it might be true that the diversity of perspectives present in the world require from us a quantum leap in attenuation and sensitivity than we have often offered, this doesn’t mean that we ought to abandon all hope or efforts in the direction of being able to accurately and effectively deliver normative claims about the actions of different geo-political actors. Indeed, we rarely do give up such prescriptive announcements in full, but rather learn to apply a certain cultural and moral relativisms to those analyzes with which we disagree, while sheltering our own prefered pronouncements from the debilitating onslaught of such devices. The logical end result is a morally relative morass that effectively disables us from making any meaningful determinations about right and wrong actions by degrading all such conclusions to mere proclamations of preference.

The audacity of the neoconservtive is to then stand athwart this kaleidoscoping of ethics and yell, “Stop!” The reality to which the neoconservtive adamantly points is that beyond the necessities of cultural sensitivity (and such sensitivity is indeed necessary in the truest sense of the word), there are the banal facts of sincerely detestable actors who, if explained away by the shattering of a coherent moral analysis, will propagate truly horrific acts against innocent people who deserve better in a world where the stable luxury of the American living room is a realized benchmark. In short, where we can act to avoid such tragedy we ought to develop the moral fortitude to act, lest we engage in some kind of tacit abrogation through our lack of action.

Such actors and their corresponding moral requirements persist in no uncertain terms, despite the ensuing horrors of the decision to invade Iraq (and Vietnam before it). Americans wallow in a certain masochistic guilt complex about their role in destabilizing a country that had done nothing to instigate such a misguided overreation, and rightly so. That such a fundaental decisions was allowed to be co-opted by as a crude a barometer as anger and resentment is indeed a damning national pox that demands the kind of self-reflection now under way.

However, at some point that inner turmoil has to come to an end and lessons have to be learned for application in the future. I think one of those lessons ought to be that rather than seeing the struggle for moral clarity in geo-politics as a necessarily flawed form of idolatry, the generation of such clarity is an extremely difficult task  full of pitfalls and the tempatation to subjegate sober assesment to national interests and that it requires much in the way of rigor and honesty. All of that said, such moral clarity may well prove indespensible to us at some point in the future, so our project of rescuing this vital element of neoconservatism from burning to ash with the rest of the fuselodge can’t start soon enough. So as not to leave one with the sense of a whitewashing, a good deal of that project involves understanding how the neocons of recent past have utterly failed in this mission.

Scott wonders again whether there isn’t a place for humanitarian intervention, or a sort of anti-imperialist version, and asks if perhaps the problem is not so much the idea behind such a foreign policy, but rather the timing:

If there is one thing that trumps all it is context. And the context right now is that with the devastating mistake of Iraq and the complexity of Afghanistan so squarely in view, notions of interventionism are so entangled with notions of neoconservatism that meaningful discussion about separating the two and reformulating our notions of interventionism seems all but impossible.

Earlier, Scott quotes Lawrence Kaplan, whose opinions on Darfur seem to nicely align with this evaluation.

I also think that the Iraq experience has set back the cause of idealism in American foreign policy and the willingness of Western countries to intervene for humanitarian reasons. Take Darfur: I think it’s because of Iraq that nobody wants to intervene there.

First, Kaplan is wrong–about this, and about so much more.  The reason nobody is intervening in Darfur is China, plain and simple, though Iraq certainly has rendered the option even less palatable.  As others have, Kaplan also brings up the notion that other non-Middle-Eastern peoples were once considered inhospitable to democracy, like the Germans (who had already successfully implemented democracy) or the Catholics of South America.  This argument fails to note that these people were never forced into democracy against their will, or that Germany and the South American countries in question all had some piece of democracy in their traditions, or some connection to democratic patron states, etc.  Everything is situational, and the complexities of any given people or conflict are almost inevitably too diverse and culturally impenetrable for a foreign power to fully understand.

I think the trick with interventionism, even of the most idealistic, “humanitarian” variety, in practice, if not in theory, is that we’re always playing with one house of cards or another.  Remove one piece, and who knows what will fall?  This is something I struggled with for a long time in my own political evolution.  Seeing the crying babies or burned villages in photographs from from whichever war-torn African country, or hearing of one genocidal struggle after another, how could we not want to intervene in this or that nation’s brutal, futile civil war?  Of course we feel compelled as the richer, stronger nation, to let our might be felt, to topple dictators and implement our own sense of justice and freedom. [Read more →]

I found myself nodding my head when Andrew Sullivan described E.D.’s piece on the “democracy fallacy” as a summation of neoconservatism. So too, I felt, was E.D.’s post that was in direct response to my ruminations on Iraq a take down of neoconservatism, which was ironic insofar as the post I referenced and quoted was entitled, “Interventionsm = Neoconservatism? Articulating A Cleaner Interventionism” and was an attempt to formulate an interventionism beyond the canons of neoconservatism.

The hang up seemed to be on my mention of democracy in Iraq, which tied in because of the current situation in Iraq — the provincial elections were a useful and topical segue into the arena of discussion around interventionism in which E.D., Mark, and I had been previously engaged. Chris’ exploration provides a pretty persuasive argument about my over estimation of the possible outcomes of those elections in Iraq, and so in that regard I’m inclined to retreat some. I think it’s worth noting, though, that the title of the post was “Some Big Ifs”, indicating that I didn’t take the hypothetical therein presented to be a determinative prediction in any regard.

E.D. suggested that,

Scott takes an “ends justify the means” approach when musing over this matter of Iraqi stability and democracy.

Which I don’t think is exactly right. I went pretty well out of my way to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq was as massive a blunder as common wisdom dictates and went so far as to call the decision, “a text book case of what not to do.” Insofar as the means were deeply flawed, I recognize that the ends have also been far from what one might have hoped for. My musing, then, was to wonder if the very contingent hypothetical I proposed were to come true, would it tell us something about an ability to realize an end to interventionism that could be achieved by a better formulated means. That might seem like the splitting of hairs on my part, but let me say unequivocally that at the time I deeply opposed the invasion of Iraq and that continue to see the decision as a stunning mistake both strategically and, more importantly, ethically/morally. That said, I feel obligated to observe the unfolding of events and ask questions from which we might learn something for future application, even if those questions come off as unpopular given the current political climate.

E.D. raises some serious concerns about my attempted formulation by saying,

Scott claims that “responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution.”  Let us for a moment pretend that our vision of geopolitical evolution is not that of an American, but rather that of a fundamentalist Islamic leader, or perhaps of  the grand maestro of terror himself, Osama bin Laden.  Would these visions align with our own?  Would the stated impediments be the same?  Or consider the Soviet interventionism into Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  To the Russians, liberalism was the impediment to “the deeper forces of evolution.”

My concern here becomes a slide into the malaise of complete cultural relativism where the differences between cultures and regions renders our ability to make any judgment about whether actions are good or bad null and void because the truth of such claims are culturally dependent. To be sure, I’m not suggesting that one ought to ignore the different cultural dynamics that form divergent world views, but neither am I willing to remain neutral on the slughter of innocent Kurds based on some notion that the actions are just the idiosyncrasies of a particular cultural perspective. But I acknowledge the tension here to be incredibly difficult to resolve, so neither do I want to address it from a place flippancy. [Read more →]

Here’s a line of reasoning I simply can’t follow:

The Islamic world is nothing like the Western world.  We have few, if any, of the same values and virtually no historical commonality save our shared, centuries-old conflict with one another.  The Islamic world, by and large, has none of the laws or customs necessary to develop an organic democratic society the way Western nations have.  Therefore, the only way to achieve peace with the Islamic world is for them to adopt our notions of plurality, democracy, and humanism.  They won’t do this on their own because of their lack of shared values, and so it follows that we must intervene on their behalf to impose these values, and fashion democracies for them in our image.

This is the neoconservative philosophy, at least in regards to the middle east, in a proverbial nutshell.  One would think the fallacy here too apparent, and yet it has shaped much of our foreign policy in regards to the region for the past three decades.  The very fact that the Islamic world does not have a similar body of customs and laws, or a similar canon of shared values should disqualify it even as a potential for imposed democracy.  And if this is the only means by which we can ever achieve peace with the region, then it would follow that peace with the region is simply not possible since the region is inhospitable to such imposition.

In other words, the very premise for invading countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan in order to democratize them and thereby impose peace through war, is a false premise.

Of course, bound part and parcel to this philosophy is the notion that two democracies will never war against one another.  That democracies did in fact make war on one another during World War II seems to go unnoticed.  That democratically elected Hamas and democratic Israel are in a perpetual conflict also seems to go ignored, or white-washed with the mantra of terrorism.

In any case, I wonder constantly at the acrobatics involved in composing this sort of rhetoric.  If only the Muslim world would be more like us then we could all live in peace.  They’re nothing like us and never will be, so we have to foist it upon them.   Never mind the war this causes, because in the long run, contra to all historical evidence, the defeated and subdued peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan will shed their thousands of years of historical conditioning in favor of our happy, Western traditions, brought to them with all the compassion shock and awe can muster.

In another attempt at cynicism, let me postulate that we can do more to Westernize the Middle East with McDonald’s and television sitcoms than we’ll ever achieve through democracy promotion and war.  Whether that’s the part of our culture we ought to be exporting is another question entirely, but it certainly beats killing people.  Better fat and lazy than dead.