John McCain and the "Transcendent" War

John McCain, during the recent Republican debate, says:

I also firmly believe that the challenge of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism. It is a transcendent issue. It is hydra-headed. It will be with us for the rest of the century.

Josh Marshall, who is skilled at doing this sort of thing, lucidly analyzes the absurdity of the remark:

Now, think about that. That's ninety-three years. My old graduate school advisor Gordon Wood used to say that humans have a very hard time seeing more than fifty years into the future. Of course, even a year into the future is difficult. But more than a few decades and we haven't the slightest idea what the world is going to look like ...

But John McCain states it as a matter of fact that the war against militant Islam will still be the defining national security threat for this country in 2099 and for years after.

I know we customarily give a rather wide berth to rhetorical excess in the theater of politics. But what on earth is McCain talking about? Not long ago it was enough to sate the historical vanity of the War on Terror mongers to dub it a 'long war' or 'generational struggle', which it may well be. But apparently even that is now insufficient. Only an entire century will do. It is almost as if as the concept in the real-world present looks more and more ill-judged and foolhardy its credentials must be buffed up by giving it more and more ridiculous lifespans ranging off into the unknowable future.

The Carpetbagger Report expands on this:

We’re engaged in an undefined, open-ended war against an undetermined enemy that spans several continents and is unaffiliated with any specific nation-state. I’m rather surprised McCain was willing to limit his vision to just the 21st century.

Indeed, as long as we’re looking at this in a big-picture kind of way, a McCain-like vision of a “war on terror” can’t end until we’ve “won.” I’m curious how those who share McCain’s ideology would define “victory” in this context.

When the Middle East is dominated by democracies? That won’t do it; people can vote for terrorists. When al Qaeda is destroyed? There are other networks that can and would take its place. When religious extremists are no longer motivated by their faith to commit acts of violence? That might, um, take a while.

The two writers note other aspects of the "transcendence" of this struggle: for one thing, as Marshall points out, it puts McCain, Bush, and their ideological fellow-travellers beyond the realm of mere evidence -- and ultimately beyond judgment and consequences altogether: "the future is the only territory where empirical evidence or -- more plainly put -- reality can't be brought up to contradict you." I've suggested before that "victory" in Iraq, as it is postponed ad infinitum into the future by its neoconservative devotees -- always just around a corner or two -- is a similarly unassailable concept. Lest we forget, our travails in Iraq are, in the minds of the neocons, bound up conceptually into the general "long war" McCain was describing during the debate; indeed, there's no particular reason to believe that, given the unity and "transcendence" of the war as described by McCain, we should expect "victory" in Iraq to arrive at any point during the front end of that 93-year struggle. If Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, and the war on terror is expected to last a century, well...

Of course, the front line may shift. To where? It hardly matters. That's the fun of transcendent war -- it has little to do with actual circumstances or actual decisions or actual people with actual lives to be lived and lost.

From what has this war transcended? And to where? It has transcended, I think, from being a collection of actual issues, often only tangentally related to one another, and subject to management by competent people using empirically-tested methods, to being a holy cause, given rhetorical unity and subject first and foremost to the demands of faith (and political advantage). The claims to competence of the actual experts are degraded, and the experts themselves frequently become convenient and amusing subjects of abuse at the hands of the initiate. And for the nonbelievers, there's a lake of political fire.

Why does it seem so important for American conservatives to have a transcendent war to wage?

Perhaps because American conservatism -- that peculiar strain of hyper-aggressive, bowdlerized right-liberalism punctuated by bouts of Burke-inspired self-loathing -- has accomplished some things, but as a whole and on its own, it lacks a convincing internal logic (even though it believes strongly in the importance of such a logic) and is uninspired by the duties and challenges of actually governing. It seems to me that Democrats -- right back to the days of Andrew Jackson -- have generally been the party of the incoherent, non-ideological, pragmatic majority. Seekers of transcendence, on the other hand, have tended to be much more attracted to the Republican party. This has given us abolition, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and progressivism, but it has also given us Prohibition, "the Evil Empire," and the Moral Majority. It's difficult for the right to get by, politically speaking, without a transcendent cause to which it can attach. If the details of the cause -- the actual people, the actual circumstances, the fact that it can't really be described as a "cause" at all -- get in the way, said details should be rubbished and ignored. This is the mindset of the faithful.

What's the cash value of these ruminations? I don't know. But Prohibition and the Moral Majority went away sooner than many people thought they would. I imagine that neo-Reaganism will, as well. Transcendence feels great when you first inhale it, but the high never lasts as long as it should, and the real world comes rushing back hard.

Labels: Iraq, John McCain, Neoconservatives, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:05 PM 1 comments

  Talking Up an Iran-Al Qaeda Connection

I haven't read the new National Intelligence Estimate (as if! I'm on vacation), nor have I read much of the reporting on it. But the mainstream reports I've seen so far do not allude to the subject at the center of this article in the neocon New York Sun: an alleged link between Iran and Al-Qaeda. Sun correspondent Eli Lake says:

One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure.

I have no information to give context to this allegation, so I merely note it for the record, with the warning that we may end up hearing a lot more about this from Iran-warmonger types.

The Corner, for instance, is already flogging it.

Labels: Iran, Neoconservatives, New York Sun

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:00 PM 1 comments

  The Bleating of the Hawks

Writing from the parallel universe in which neoconservative foreign policy ideas haven't been comprehensively and humiliatingly discredited, Joshua Muravchik takes to the Op-Ed pages of the Wall Street Journal today to beat the Iran war drum. Following on the heels of Normon Podhoretz's addled little screed in Commentary, Muravchik's piece seems to represent an even further regression into a kind of dreamlike, bellicose haze -- a warm and cloudy place where unreconstructed neocons are free to release their gasses without consequence or accountability. Neither Podhoretz nor Muravchik give any indication of having made an effort to understand what a US military conflict with Iran would actually entail. Nor are they even making much effort anymore to protect their historical analogies from strain. We're told that war with Iran is in the cards simply because Iran's regime is obnoxious, because the bad guys are "feeling [their] oats," and because ... something about appeasement:

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. Often democracies have fed such beliefs by their own flaccid behavior. Hitler's contempt for America, stoked by the policy of appeasement, is a familiar story. But there are many others. North Korea invaded South Korea after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Korea lay beyond our "defense perimeter." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after our ambassador assured him that America does not intervene in quarrels among Arabs. Imperial Germany launched World War I, encouraged by Great Britain's open reluctance to get involved. Nasser brought on the 1967 Six Day War, thinking that he could extort some concessions from Israel by rattling his sword.

That authoritarian regimes have often underestimated the warmaking capacities of democracies is certainly true. But that truism has fermented and now fuels the fantasies and revisionist hallucinations of the neocons, who go on to burp out bad history to support their arguments. For instance: on which planet was it that the Second World War began because of Hitler's "contempt" for an America practicing a "policy of appeasement"? In fact, can we come up with a variation on Godwin's Law for the term? Can we ask that advocates for yet another war be required to justify said war without resorting to the word "appeasement"?

And I'm not even going to get into Muravchik's use of "flaccid."

Labels: Iran, Joshua Muravchik, Neoconservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:19 AM 1 comments

  Return to the Planet of the Manicheans

Glenn Greenwald responds to Chris Floyd (briefly) here.

Chris responds to me here. I don't think I disagree with what he says in any substantial sense. I wonder if he comes a bit too close to suggesting that anti-communism per se was a Manichean mindset, but I think I'm probably misreading him there -- he's certainly right to point out that today's neocons are the inheritors not just of the paranoid postwar right, but of the Scoop Jackson school of vigorously anti-communist Democrats. Indeed, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliott Abrams all worked for Jackson before joining the GOP during the Reagan administration. I still think that you can trace a distinct history of Manicheanism in American postwar foreign policy (as opposed to applying the term over-broadly), but Chris is right to observe that part of that history runs through the Democratic party.

Labels: Chris Floyd, Foreign Policy, Glenn Greenwald, Neoconservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:47 AM 2 comments

  Re-Reading Reagan: Commentary Reacts

A few weeks ago I noted Jonah Goldberg's puzzlement over the lack of reaction among neoconservatives to John Patrick Diggins's new biography of Ronald Reagan (which I still haven't read yet). The point was that Diggins, a liberal, apparently makes the case that Reagan was a great president - but, on the foreign policy front, this was very much in spite of, rather than thanks to, the efforts of the Gipper's neoconservative advisors. Goldberg took this thesis as an attack on the current neocon resurgence, arguing that much of the Diggins book was preoccupied with "tendentious, odd or as ill-advised attempts to find the roots of the Iraq war in the Reagan Administration." And he wondered at the silence from neocon organs like Commentary and the Weekly Standard.

Commentary, anyway, has finally fired back - though rather half-heartedly. Diggins's work is relegated to the back end of Dan Seligman's brief two-part review of Reagan-related books (the first being John O'Sullivan's panegyric). Seligman reports scornfully that Diggins is committed to arguing "the folly and perfidy of neoconservatism and all its outlets (not excluding COMMENTARY)."

Diggins’s main point is that Reagan’s neoconservative advisers were unrealistically fearful of Soviet military might, and darkly suspicious of any efforts to negotiate with the Russians. In the story line that follows from this, Reagan became a peacemaker only because in his second term he finally chose to break away from the “neocon hard-liners” on his staff who counseled “victory, not peace,” and instead decided to negotiate with the Russians.

Seligman argues that Reagan's $2 trillion military buildup - and the fact that he appointed all those neocons in the first place - make a mockery of the notion that the president was ever trying to avoid confrontation.

That buildup, of course, was begun by Jimmy Carter - a fact that conservatives never fail to conveniently forget. And the fact that Reagan hired hawks doesn't negate the fact that he may later have broken with them. But what interests me most about Seligman's review is its defiantly single-minded reading of history:

In his introduction, Diggins squarely rejects the common view that Reagan was a lucky bystander, that the USSR was crumbling anyway, and the President just “happened to be in the right place at the right time.” Yet as the book progresses, he takes a completely different tack. “The process of liberalization that Gorbachev introduced in Moscow,” Diggins writes at one juncture, “eventually brought down the entire edifice of the Communist state.” At another junction, he declares that “It was not Western policy that caused the breakup of the Soviet Union but the failure of the political process within the Soviet Union.”

Reagan’s reputation will undoubtedly survive these wobbles. Diggins’s reputation as an intellectual historian may not fare so well.

Diggins's thesis, implies Seligman, refuses to acknowledge Reagan's "key contribution" to the USSR's downfall. But even if one accepts that Reagan played a role in that collapse, how is that admission betrayed by the recognition that many - indeed, most - of the immediate and underlying factors leading to fall of the Soviet Union were internal? Must we now give Reagan all the credit? This is great-man historicizing taken to a ludicrous extreme: let's just go ahead and erase every other actor and factor from the history books.

It may not be Seligman's intent to make that point, exactly. But it is the rhetorical effect of his argument, and it reflects the extremely dangerous neoconservative mindset - Manichean, self-aggrandizing, and obsessively single-minded. It's no wonder these people got us into the disaster in Iraq.

Labels: Commentary, John Patrick Diggins, Neoconservatives, Ronald Reagan

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:35 AM 0 comments

  Bolton: "Wolf! Wolf!"

When the true believer is confronted with evidence that his beliefs are wrong, he doesn't change his beliefs - he ups the ante. For instance: everyone's favorite "ambassador" has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which he's looking to counter the damage from last week's revelations about the Administration's catastrophic blunders in Korea.

As you'll recall, the US abandoned the Agreed Framework in 2002, over American contentions that North Korea was developing a highly enriched uranium (HEU) program. Once the US had ditched the Agreed Framework, the Koreans went ahead and made nukes - real nukes - from the plutonium program that the Framework had been keeping in check. Now the Bush Administration is admitting that it did not have solid evidence of an HEU program to begin with.

Bolton responds as neoconservatives typically do when presented with facts: by attacking the messenger and doubling down on the argument. Criticizing the Times article for being short on "attributable sources," Bolton argues that there was not

any reversal on actual facts, only an apparent shift in the "confidence level." My understanding is that the decrease in confidence stems from the absence of significant new or contemporary information about North Korea's activities. This lack of new information may be attributable to a loss of sensitive sources and methods, or it may be attributable to the effectiveness of President Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative, or its creative financial sanctions, in drying up North Korea's procurement activity.

Of course, Bolton is deliberately missing the point: to have sacrificed a successful agreement and allowed North Korea to develop real plutonium nuclear weapons, on the basis of debatable evidence about an HEU program that either did not exist, or was embryonic compared to the plutonium program, was a criminally stupid blunder.

As Jacob Weisberg has pointed out, there's a reason for this sudden Administration admission about the HEU intelligence:

Why are senior officials suddenly saying that North Korea might not have an enriched-uranium program? No new information has come to light on the issue. They are saying this for one reason: President Bush recently agreed to a nuclear deal with the North Koreans; the deal says nothing about enriched uranium (it requires them only to freeze their plutonium-bomb program); so, in order to stave off the flood of criticism from Bush's conservative base, senior officials are saying that the enriched uranium was never a big deal to begin with.

As Weisberg says, at this point the Administration's intelligence is so politicized as to be completely useless. Who knows if there was an HEU program or not? All we get is intelligence tailored to suit the daily political needs of the White House.

Meanwhile, Bolton's off with the dead enders. He cites Nick Eberstadt, the AEI analyst who has been denouncing the six-party agreement and demanding that the Bush administration repeat its mistakes of 2002. And he actually quotes Rumsfeld: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Sure. But neither is it evidence of absence of the real frigging nukes that were the North Koreans' prize for your little neocon word games.

Let's rephrase that Rumsfeldism into something more accurately describing the neconservative mindset. Perhaps: "the absence of evidence is evidence for whatever the hell we want it to be."

Labels: Foreign Policy, John Bolton, Neoconservatives, North Korea

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:48 AM 0 comments

  Revenge of the Vulcans II

Excellent piece by Craig Unger at Vanity Fair, outlining the path to war in Iran. "The Bush White House has already built the fire," says Unger, "whether it will light the match remains to be seen."

There's a lot to digest in the article, but one of the many interesting aspects is Unger's explanation of how the neoconservatives have been rehabilitated in the Bush administration, after the briefest of exiles. The article also helps illustrate the way conservative think tanks - especially AEI - and journals have played a major role in shaping Bush's disastrous Middle East policy. As this blog matures, I hope we'll begin to be able to capture some of that process in real time. Meanwhile, here's an excerpt from Unger's piece, just after he describes the release of the Iraq Study Group Report, which was generally well-received:

The only American whose opinion mattered, however, was not impressed. Bush, Salon reported, slammed the I.S.G. study as "a flaming turd." If Rice even delivered Scowcroft's message, it had fallen on deaf ears.

Just eight days later, on December 14, Bush found a study that was more to his liking. Not surprisingly, it came from the American Enterprise Institute, the intellectual stronghold of neoconservatism. The author, Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the A.E.I., is the son of Donald Kagan and the brother of Robert Kagan, who signed PNAC's famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. According to Kagan, the project began in late September or early October at the instigation of his boss, Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at A.E.I. She decided "it would be helpful to do a realistic evaluation of what would be required to secure Baghdad," Kagan told Vanity Fair.

The project culminated in a four-day planning exercise in early December, Kagan said, that just happened to coincide with the release of the Iraq Study Group report. But he rejected the notion that his study had been initiated by the White House as an alternative to the bipartisan assessment. "I'm aware of some of the rumors," Kagan said. "This was not designed to be an anti-I.S.G. report.… Any conspiracy theories beyond that are nonsense."

[...]

In one sense, the neoconservative hawks—including the authors of "A Clean Break"—have been kept aloft by their failures. The strategic fiasco created by the Iraq war has actually increased the danger posed by Iran to Israel—and with it the likelihood of armed conflict. "[Bush's wars] have put Israel in the worst strategic and operational situation she's been in since 1948," says retired colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department. "If you take down Iraq, you eliminate Iran's No. 1 enemy. And, oh, by the way, if you eliminate the Taliban, they might reasonably be assumed to be Iran's No. 2 enemy."

"Nobody thought going into this war that these guys would screw it up so badly, that Iraq would be taken out of the balance of power, that it would implode, and that Iran would become dominant," says Martin Indyk.

Read the rest here.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, Craig Unger, Frederick Kagan, Iran, Neoconservatives, Vanity Fair

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:25 PM 0 comments

  Revenge of the Vulcans

LA Times: The neocons are back already, and they're behind the "surge."

But now, a small but increasingly influential group of neocons are again helping steer Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week — a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort — has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

This group — which includes William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick W. Kagan, a military analyst at a prominent think tank, the American Enterprise Institute — was expressing concerns about the administration's blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago.

Kristol and Kagan are the definitive neoconservatives, though the article notes the split within neocon ranks:

Some leading neoconservatives do not embrace the troop surge proposal.

Wolfowitz, for instance, ridiculed the notion that more troops would be needed to secure Iraq than were used in the invasion.

And Richard N. Perle, a former top advisor to the Pentagon who also advocated for smaller troop numbers at the time of the invasion, is known to be skeptical of the idea of a surge.

The plan's advocates acknowledge the split.

"Before the war, I was arguing for a quarter of a million troops in expectations we'd be there five or 10 years," said Gary J. Schmitt, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute who has worked closely with Kristol and Kagan. "Richard Perle, obviously somebody else who's thought of as a neocon, thought we should go in" with far fewer U.S. forces.

It is, of course, also a repudiation of the Rumsfeld doctrine.

Still, despite the disagreements, this is the same crowd. Only the bad ideas have changed.

(h/t to chasm at Daily Kos)

Labels: Frederick Kagan, Iraq, Neoconservatives, William Kristol

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:45 PM 0 comments

  What's the Deal with those Peacenik Dems?

Over at the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti ponders the mystery of the partisan divide in American foreign policy. "Never have the differences between the two parties on issues of war and peace been so distinct," he frets.

For Continetti, American politics is currently divided between a "peace party" and a "power party:"

Together, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq seem to have accelerated a shift begun some 30 years ago: The Democratic party is increasingly linked with the attitudes, tendencies, and policies of peace, whereas the Republican party is increasingly linked with the maintenance and projection of American military power.

His analysis traces this partisan divide to the years after the withdrawal from Vietnam, using historical poll data to note general bipartisan consensus on both getting in and getting out of that war. For Continetti, the mysterious split began during the Reagan years, when registered Democrats tended to oppose Reagan's arms buildup, his meddling in Central America, and the dispatch of Marines to Lebabon - while Republicans tended to support these policies. Under George H.W. Bush, registered Democrats supported the Gulf War less enthusiastically than Republicans, while Democratic representatives in the House and Senate mostly opposed the war resolution.

Then, Continetti kind of undermines his whole point, when he observes that, during the Clinton Administration, it was the Republicans who opposed the use of American military power abroad. But, see, it's not because Republicans were a "peace party:" no, they felt this way "when they thought the 'national interest' was not at stake."

But, of course, it's not possible that, when Democrats oppose an adventure abroad, it's because we don't think that the national interest is at stake.

Of course Continetti is right in discovering partisan differences on foreign policy questions. But his framing is ludicrous. Even the notion of a "peace party" and a "power party" is fallacious - as though power were something that could only be exercised by endorsing every single war and intervention dreamed up the neocons in the Pentagon. Continetti's dishonesty pervades the piece, as when he describes Democrats in Congress as "emphasiz[ing] negotiation without the threat of force" - as if any Democrats support unilaterally removing the threat of force from every diplomatic problem. Force is always implicit in negotiation. The difference is that Democrats believe in negotiating at all.

But Continetti's point is to try and paint the Democrats as inexplicably opposed to the projection of American power, based on Democrats' mixed feelings about neoconservative adventurism. The party divide about which he is so disingenuously mystified is not the product of some dovish Democratic mutation. It's the product of a carefully orchestrated and viciously partisan effort to sell the Republican party as the patriotic party, versus the traitorous Democrats.

If the divide began in the Reagan years, perhaps it's because the entire Reagan mythos was based on the Rambo story of American resurrection, which was in turn based on the stab-in-the-back myth of Vietnam. The Reagan revolution needed to demonize liberals as pacifist, and therefore traitorous.

With the return of the neocons under Bush the Lesser, we've seen this pattern repeated with far greater intensity. Continetti dishonestly traces the current partisan divide to 9/11 (this, particularly, is an infamous lie), and to "the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq." But that's not when the partisan divide began. The entire country was united after 9/11. Opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan was marginal at best. And, despite all the flagrant foolishness and dishonesty peddled in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the war resolution passed both houses of Congress by large majorities.

Even the 2004 election, which Continetti frames as a referendum on the Iraq war, was not that. Only as the war dragged on and slipped dramatically futher into failure during 2005 and 2006, have mainstream Democrats felt comfortable opposing it.

Yes, prior to the invasion, registered Democrats preferred to build support among our allies and give weapons inspectors time to work, and yes, over the course of the war, Democrats have increasingly observed that things are not going well. These are reality-based positions. They reflect reasonable attitudes.

The partisan divide that Continetti observes is not a Democratic phenomenon. It's the result of a massive and intense campaign to energize the Republican base by tying the "culture war" to the cause of American interventionism abroad. It's the product of a highly focused effort to help the GOP defeat the Democratic Party in elections by using politics beyond the water's edge to demonize the domestic opposition. It's the product of a conservative movement that has taught its base to march in lockstep.

The neoconservative movement has a number of problems at the moment, and that base is eroding as Rovian jingoism loses steam. What we're left with, for now, is the lamentations of neocon intellectuals trying to retroactively frame their bastardization of American political discourse as a problem of the perfidy of the left. Their attempt to make their own reality in Iraq and in Washington has failed. But they can still find comfort in the land of make-believe between the pages of the Weekly Standard.

Labels: Democrats, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Matthew Continetti, Neocons, Neoconservatives, Republicans, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:23 AM 0 comments