We’ve been hearing a lot of empty but heated rhetoric from Obama and McCain on Iran. Now, listen to the words of a consummate diplomat and expert political operator—SecDef Robert Gates [e.a.]:

The top uniformed US military officer told Congress Tuesday that Iran is directly jeopardizing peace in Iraq, prompting fresh calls from senators that the US pursue diplomatic talks with Teheran. …

Gates said he supports sitting down with officials from Teheran, but only after the US has developed significant leverage. In such cases as Libya and North Korea, these countries were seeking to relieve economic pressures imposed by sanctions, Gates said.

“The key here is developing leverage, either through economic or diplomatic or military pressures on the Iranian government so they believe they must have talks with the United States because there is something they want from us, and that is the relief of the pressure,” Gates said.

See how easy it is to demand preconditions while sounding reasonable? Obama should pay attention.

Thanks to Steve Clemons, who sees this as a way to pressure Barack Obama, who has said that he would not engage Hamas, we now have a list of “great Americans” who endorse talking to the terrorist organization Hamas, which is dedicated, via its charter, to the destruction of our ally Israel:

They all signed a letter at the time of the Annapolis Summit to President Bush and Secretary of State Rice that said that:

As to Hamas, we believe that a genuine dialogue with the organization is far preferable to its isolation; it could be conducted, for example, by the UN and Quartet Middle East envoys. Promoting a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza would be a good starting point.

While he didn’t sign our letter, Colin Powell has also said that Hamas should not be isolated and must be engaged.

The roster of American leaders who led the letter are:

BRENT SCOWCROFT, ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, THOMAS PICKERING, CARLA HILLS, LEE HAMILTON, THEODORE SORENSEN, ERIC SHINSEKI, NANCY KASSEBAUM BAKER, and PAUL VOLCKER.

Others that are included on the roster of signatories are:

US AID Deputy Administrator HARRIET “HATTIE” BABBITT, former USIA Chief JOSEPH DUFFEY, former US Senator GARY HART, former US Senator LINCOLN CHAFEE, RAND Corporation Board Member and New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Chair RITA HAUSER, former Assistant Secretary of State JAMES DOBBINS, former State Department Policy Planning Director MORTON HALPERIN, former Deputy Ambassador to the UN WILLIAM VAN DEN HEUVEL, former Israel Foreign Minister SCHLOMO BEN-AMI. . .
former US Senator BIRCH BAYH, former Congressman and Corning CEO AMO HOUGHTON Jr., former National Intelligence Council Chairman ROBERT HUTCHINGS, Fletcher School Dean and former U.S. Ambassador STEPHEN BOSWORTH, former Assistant Secretary of Defense LAWRENCE KORB, former American Political Science Association President and Columbia University professor ROBERT JERVIS, Kings College Terrorism Chair and New America Foundation Senior Fellow ANATOL LIEVEN, former National Security Agency Director Lt. General WILLIAM ODOM. . .

Committee for the Republic President WILLIAM NITZE, Brookings Visiting Senior Fellow DIANA VILLIERS NEGROPONTE, Former CIA Deputy Director JOHN McLAUGHLIN, former US Ambassador JOHN MALOTT, former EU Commissioner for Foreign Relations CHRISTOPHER PATTEN, former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East PAUL PILLAR, former US Senator LARRY PRESSLER, former US Ambassador FELIX ROHATYN. . .

MIT Center for International Studies Director RICHARD SAMUELS, retired Marine Corps General JOHN J. “JACK” SHEEHAN, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, Former Congressman STEPHEN SOLARZ, former First USA Bank CEO and Adagio Partners CEO RICHARD VAGUE, Former US Senator and UN Foundation President TIMOTHY WIRTH, and former US Ambassador and AIG Vice Chairman FRANK WISNER. . .

former New Jersey Governor and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN, Nixon Center President and National Interest Publisher DIMITRI SIMES, former National Security Advisor to Vice President Al Gore LEON FUERTH, Brookings Senior Fellow PHILIP GORDON, former US Ambassador to NATO ROBERT HUNTER, former Malaysia Deputy Prime Minister ANWAR IBRAHIM, former CIA Deputy Director JOHN McLAUGHLIN. . .

former State Department Chief of Staff LAWRENCE WILKERSON, Lehman Brothers Managing Director THEODORE ROOSEVELT IV, former US Ambassador JOSEPH WILSON, former Chief Monitor of the Middle East Roadmap at the Department of State JOHN S. WOLF — among others.

Reuel Marc Gerecht has a piece in the Washington Post suggesting that Iraq may yet prove to be a decisive victory against Osama bin Laden:

It’s way too soon to call Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda spiritual outcasts among Arab Muslims, but they have in fact sustained enormous damage throughout the region because of Iraq. The lack of holy-warrior manpower coming from the Muslim Brotherhood is surely, in part, a reflection of this discomfort with al-Qaeda’s [ferocious Muslim-on-Muslim] violence, the complexity of Iraqi politics and America’s not entirely negative role inside the country. If bin Ladenism is now on the decline — and it may well be among Arabs — then Iraq has played an essential part in battering the movement’s spiritual appeal.

Gerecht has a much longer piece in the Weekly Standard, about the new Middle East, which is also worth a read if you’re interested in what the next president of the United States will actually face when he or she takes office in January 2009.

——–

George Packer has an entirely different kind of foreign-policy piece: the good old-fashioned liberal kind, the kind that is full of empathy and which centers on foreigners as fellow human beings:

In this national ruin, any act of kindness, even as small as offering someone a ride, created solidarity. You were always meeting someone who had run out of options, and someone else who would risk far more to help than he would in normal times. Perhaps it was part of their culture, and perhaps these were not normal times, but Iraqis lacked the sense of shame about heartfelt declarations and naked emotions that people in more secure, better functioning places possess naturally. All of this made them harsh and lovable, and it was possible to spend an hour with Haithem or Muna, or to see Abu Malik once every six months, and feel that more human business had been transacted than over a hundred New York lunches or dinners.

Whippersnapper Matthew Yglesias proves Packer’s point by immediately attacking Packer’s “lame pleas for open-mindedness.” His commenters attack Packer as a neocon fellow traveler. So much for Packer’s attempt to get his fellow liberals to actually look at foreign policy from, you know, foreigner’s eyes.

For Yglesias and his crew, Iraq is all about who’s right  and who’s wrong (and, of course, who’s up and who’s down) here at home—further proving Packer’s point that to most Americans, even those who purport to know enough about foreign policy to write books about it, Iraq is all about us.

There’s an interesting conversation over at Matthew Yglesias’s place, prompted by Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the new Atlantic, in which he seems to suggest (I haven’t had time to read the piece myself yet; but I am interested in the tenor of the conversation about the topic) that the only foreign policy alternative Bush could turn to other than the neocons’ was the realists’, as represented by the reprehensible (my characterization, not Goldberg’s) Brent Scowcroft [e.a.]:

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers mine Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article on the future of Iraq for the hilarious section where he reports that Norm Podhoretz doesn’t know what a Kurd is, but I thought I might say something about a more serious issue Goldberg raises. In particular, this near the end:

It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “She says, ‘We’re going to democratize Iraq,’ and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing, that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The other thing Scowcroft fails to note, of course, is that just because “we’ve had peace,” there hasn’t been peace in the region for 50 years.

Some of Yglesias’s commenters agree with me:

But Scowcroft’s point of view at least reaches a minimal standard of coherence.

What? Scrowcroft’s point of view is asinine. “We’ve had 50 years of peace”? Really? Which 50 years were those?

For a “realist”, Scrowcroft sure has some pretty unreal notions of “peace”.

Posted by Al | January 24, 2008 2:35 PM

=========

I actually have to agree with Al. 50 years of peace, if you don’t count all the wars and stuff.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | January 24, 2008 3:55 PM

Moreover, this was a point driven home in August 2002 by none other than Bill Keller, today editor of the New York Times but at the time a columnist for the paper.

August 24, 2002

The Loyal Opposition

By BILL KELLER

If candor counted for as much as courtesy, the author note under Brent Scowcroft’s now famous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week, the one arguing against war with Iraq, might have said something like this: ”Mr. Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, now makes his living advising business clients, some of whom would be gravely inconvenienced by a war in the Middle East. And by the way, he thought Saddam Hussein was finished after the gulf war in 1991.”

The fact that the Scowcroft Group, his consulting and access-peddling firm, advises global corporations does not mean his motives are impure, and the fact that, like the president he served, he underestimated Saddam last time does not necessarily mean he is not worth listening to now.

But in the debate over the next round of war — a debate that is now, thank heaven, bursting into full flower – it is worth considering what baggage the critics bring, especially when they wear the badge of statesman. The histories, interests and attitudes of the war skeptics are as relevant as whatever psychodrama President Bush may be playing out by finishing off his father’s archenemy, or whether the drive against Iraq represents some dubious alignment of American interests with Israel’s.

It would be nice if this conversation would continue rationally, because, if you’re really interested in what happened leading up to the decision to topple Saddam, why the Iraq mission didn’t work, and what a better foreign policy might look like, bashing the neocons only takes you so far.   

[[ updated and reposted due to technical difficulties encountered while posting "campaign fever," which got cut off halfway. This is the entire post I intended for publication yesterday, January 18.]]

I’m starting to see signs that certain not-starry-eyed Democratic partisans do indeed see the forest for the trees. But first, let me set this up with an observation from Mr. Hitchens about the fog of excitement that prevents a lot of observers who should know better from seeing reality during this exciting but also totally over-hyped run-up to the election:

I remember going to several of the mass events generated by Colin Powell’s memoirs a few years ago, and being very touched by the eagerness with which young and old “white” people hoped he would give them the chance to elect (what would in fact have been) our first West Indian president. It was all book-tour hype as it turned out — I could have told you that then — but now it has resurfaced in a similarly naÔve way. Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama’s Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets . . . what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified “white” candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

And now let me get back to my point. The other day, I noticed (and noted) Arianna Huffington’s surprising tack toward Iraq and the war on terror as a continuing issue for Democrats.

As Arianna Huffington wrote yesterday, Iraq and the ìwar on terrorismî are still major concerns for the electorate. Today, sheís declaring Hillary the winner in the debate last night and encouraging Hillary to stay on this theme. (I donít know why Arianna is taking this pro-Hillary stance. I thought she was a Hillary hater. Goes to show you how much I know. I havenít been following along to see who in the media is on whose side in the campaign.)

Now comes Tom Edsall, also (coincidentally? I think not) writing in the HuffPo about the possibility that the Dems might get “blindsided” by “terror issues”:

While many Democratic strategists are confident that the deteriorating economy virtually assures the victory of their presidential candidate on November 4, there is a quiet debate over whether the party and prospective nominee are likely to get blindsided by Republicans raising issues of terrorism and national security. …

Anyone who read what Karl Rove had to say (I wrote about it here, in a post titled “Resurrecting Rudy“) will, of course, not be surprised to hear that the Republicans still consider national security their strong suit—so when this comes up in the national election, it will not be a matter of the Dems being blindsided but rather of their misreading the electorate. See, there are a lot of people in America who are actually deeply concerned about national security (I didn’t say fearful of terrorism; I said deeply concerned about national security). We read the papers, we read widely on the Internet, we read blogs, we watch TV, we read books, we think for ourselves, and we see external threats to America—not as “Republican talking points” but as real. And then there’s the rest of the electorate—the uninformed masses. They too get some information—a lot of it in the form of reductive crap that I call “infotainment”—but they get the message. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about: punchy and straight to the point:

You may laugh at this, dear readers, since you are such an educated bunch. But you overlook its impact at your peril if you’re a Democrat who says “phooey!” about the “war on terrorism,” because unless your candidate acknowledges this issue as deeply important, he or she will lose.

Let us not forget, for example, that the United States is still engaged in a war in Iraq. Primary voters may be looking for “change,” but the electorate has not forgotten that change in Iraq, for example, will come slowly—for us and for Iraq.

Various Dems and liberals (a catch-all) tell Edsall not to be alarmed—the electorate is interested in lots of issues, especially the economy. But Brian Katulis tells Edsall something else entirely: that the Dems still have no coherent “narrative” about national security [e.a.]:

“I wouldn’t say that Democrats have avoided national security as much as they have not yet developed a coherent narrative that simply goes beyond ‘Bush screwed things up.’….Conservatives have an overarching story when it comes to talking about national security - it’s not dissimilar to Bush’s narrative: there are bad people out there, we need to go out there and try to kill them ourselves before they get us. Simplistic, and applied to many different threats, but it’s kind of an easy story line….

“It’s those political consulting classes on the Democratic side who are particularly wounded and still operating on the defensive when it comes to national security - which is truly a stunning thing when you think about it, given all of the strategic errors conservatism is responsible for on the national security front the last seven years.

“So I think there’s a sweet spot for Democrats to actually say something that connects the dots on the national security and terrorism front - one that actually responds to a need from the American people to hear a viable alternative - but we’re just not hearing it yet at that political communications level.”

So now we know why Arianna greeted Hillary’s “ready to take on Al Qaeda from day one” debate-scoring point with such enthusiasm. (Whew. I hate mysteries. And bravo to Arianna for trying to rescue the Democrats from the deep pile of shit they’re about to drown in.) Katulis sums up the Democrats’ big problem: they have no story about how they’re going to deal with national security.

[From the Democrats, we're] seeing and hearing tick lists that make the broader public’s eyes glaze over. On the conservative side, we hear a story line - a batshit crazy one for the most part that got us in the predicament that we’re in now, but hey, it’s a story. Most people would rather go to a movie that has a plot.“

This may sound silly to you, dear readers, but it is the crux of the election: 9/11 woke up our government and many of its servants to the reality of the external threats facing America. Every day there is ample evidence that hot spots the world over could flare up at any moment, drawing the United States into their fury. It is beyond foolish to think otherwise, and to try to tell the American electorate, as the Dems are doing, “Don’t worry. We’ll deal when the time comes.” It will not wash.

For an indication of just how confused the progressive community is on the issue of foreign policy, check out these dueling posts from Matthew Yglesias, for whom it is utterly clear that the United States has no business messing in the affairs of any other nation, and Shadi Hamid, who begs to differ.

Their argument appears to be between old school liberal interventionists (Hamid) and new isolationists/realists (Yglesias), and it probably mirrors the incoherence inside the Democratic Party and the progressive community about America’s foreign policy (I don’t know for sure, because I don’t follow their arguments: I was on the interventionist side in Kosovo and Iraq; I don’t need to make up my mind again).

It will be interesting to see which way the eventual Democratic candidate goes, and what ensues in the party afterward. Either way, there is no excuse for the Democrats to get blindsided. There are only ways for them to be blind.

[[links on this post are screwed up, and a lot of text is missing. I'll repair the damage when I get to another computer and will repost this]]

I’m starting to see signs that certain not-starry-eyed Democratic partisans do indeed see the forest for the trees. But first, let me set this up with an observation from Mr. Hitchens about the fog of excitement that prevents a lot of observers who should know better from seeing reality during this exciting but also totally over-hyped run-up to the election:

I remember going to several of the mass events generated by Colin Powell’s memoirs a few years ago, and being very touched by the eagerness with which young and old “white” people hoped he would give them the chance to elect (what would in fact have been) our first West Indian president. It was all book-tour hype as it turned out — I could have told you that then — but now it has resurfaced in a similarly naïve way.

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama’s Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets . . . what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified “white” candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

And now let me get back to my point. The other day, I noticed (and noted) Arianna Huffington’s surprising tack toward Iraq and the war on terror as a continuing issue for Democrats.

As Arianna Huffington wrote yesterday, Iraq and the “war on terrorism” are still major concerns for the electorate. Today, she’s declaring Hillary the winner in the debate last night and encouraging Hillary to stay on this theme. (I don’t know why Arianna is taking this pro-Hillary stance. I thought she was a Hillary hater. Goes to show you how much I know. I haven’t been following along to see who in the media is on whose side in the campaign.)

Now comes Tom Edsall, also (coincidentally? I think not) writing in the HuffPo about the possibility that the Dems might get “blindsided” by “terror issues”:

While many Democratic strategists are confident that the deteriorating economy virtually assures the victory of their presidential candidate on November 4, there is a quiet debate over whether the party and prospective nominee are likely to get blindsided by Republicans raising issues of terrorism and national security. …

Anyone who read what Karl Rove had to say (I wrote about it here, in a post titled “Resurrecting Rudy“) will, of course, not be surprised to hear that the Republicans still consider national security their strong suit—so when this comes up in the national election, it will not be a matter of the Dems being blindsided but rather of their misreading the electorate.

See, there are a lot of people in America who are actually deeply concerned about national security (I didn’t say fearful of terrorism; I said deeply concerned about national security). We read the papers, we read widely on the Internet, we read blogs, we watch TV, we read books, we think for ourselves, and we see external threats to America—not as “Republican talking points” but as real. And then there’s the rest of the electorate—the uninformed masses. They too get some information—a lot of it in the form of reductive crap that I call “infotainment”—but they get the message. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about: punchy and straight to the point:

You may laugh at this, dear readers, since you are such an educated bunch. But you overlook its impact at your peril if you’re a Democrat who says phooey about the “war on terrorism,” because unless your candidate acknowledges this issue as deeply important, he or she will lose. Let us not forget, for example, that the United States is still engaged in a war in Iraq. Primary voters may be looking for “change,” but the electorate has not forgotten that change in Iraq, for example, will come slowly—for us and for Iraq.

Various Dems and liberals (a catch-all) tell Edsall not to be alarmed—the electorate is interested in lots of issues, especially the economy.

But Brian Katulis tells Edsall something else entirely: that the Dems still have no coherent “narrative” about national security [e.a.]:

“I wouldn’t say that Democrats have avoided national security as much as they have not yet developed a coherent narrative that simply goes beyond ‘Bush screwed things up.’….Conservatives have an overarching story when it comes to talking about national security - it’s not dissimilar to Bush’s narrative: there are bad people out there, we need to go out there and try to kill them ourselves before they get us. Simplistic, and applied to many different threats, but it’s kind of an easy story line….

“It’s those political consulting classes on the Democratic side who are particularly wounded and still operating on the defensive when it comes to national security - which is truly a stunning thing when you think about it, given all of the strategic errors conservatism is responsible for on the national security front the last seven years.

“So I think there’s a sweet spot for Democrats to actually say something that connects the dots on the national security and terrorism front - one that actually responds to a need from the American people to hear a viable alternative - but we’re just not hearing it yet at that political communications level.”

Seven years into your presidency is a little late to start doing diplomacy, but George W. Bush is trying. He’s providing photo ops, at any rate.

In Riyadh today, the president participated in a traditional sword dance with one of the princes of the royal family.

Jim Watson / AFP/Getty Images

It was a public — and a little awkward — display of affection, all part of Bush’s first visit to Saudi Arabia aimed at repairing strained relations between the world’s biggest oil producer and the world’s biggest oil consumer.

And he’s also trying to plant the seeds of his legacy:

My image [is] ‘Bush wants to fight Muslims.’ And, yes, I’m concerned about it. Not because of me, personally. I’m concerned because I want most people to understand the great generosity and compassion of Americans,” he said.

“I’m sure people view me as a warmonger and I view myself as peacemaker,” the president said. “They view me as so pro-Israeli I can’t be open-minded about Palestinian peace, and yet I’m the only president ever to have articulated a two-state solution. And you just have to fight through stereotypes by actions.”

The president said he hopes to change that image by opening a dialogue and letting “the results speak for themselves.”

“I mean, when this democracy in Iraq solidifies and emerges and is whole, people will understand what I meant about the democracy agenda. People will know that my view is not American democracy, but it’s freedom based upon certain principles that honors the traditions and culture of the host country.”

What a clumsy oaf.

Since my primary topic on this blog is media coverage of events and pseudo-events, I am well aware of the fact that Bush’s trip to the Middle East has gotten almost no media and/or blogospheric play. Everyone would rather do horse-race coverage of an election campaign that has been under way for a year and still has almost a year to go—because it’s way more entertaining.

However, the silence from the usual suspects (that is: all pundits) about Bush’s trip to a part of the world that is perpetually on fire has been astonishing even for me.

Now Matthew Yglesias hints at something that may be going on in PunditWorld^TM. He would love to rip Bush on Israel-Palestine, he says [e.a.],

but I’ve been convinced by people active in these issues that it’s important to provide positive reenforcement. Bush is moving in the right direction and deserves to secure some credit for his troubles.

Enquiring minds want to know all about this conspiracy of silence suggested by an unnamed cabal that has had such a powerful influence on young Mr. Yglesias.

In the past, he has not been so shy with his opinions. Why, he knew it all!

Were Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians resolved, other challenges like Hezbollah would soon melt away. The idea of firing rockets into Israeli towns would appear absurd. Iran and Syria would have nothing to gain from supporting groups that behaved in that manner. Arab public opinion would no longer applaud the firing of rockets at random into Israeli cities.

Who is offering the advice to young Mr. Yglesias to say nothing if he hasn’t anything nice to say? Do they believe in the same fairy tales that he believes in?

Chavez praises the terrorist group FARC, which has been holding hostages in the jungles of Colombia for more than a decade:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Colombia’s biggest guerrilla group, identified by the U.S. as a terrorist organization, is an “army” with political goals that is worthy of the world’s respect.

“They’re a real army that occupies territory in Colombia, they’re not terrorists,” Chavez said today in his annual state of the nation address to the National Assembly. “They have a political goal and we have to recognize that.”

Chavez, who yesterday helped negotiate the release of two hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also said the rebels production of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine, is a viable “economic and social system.” His unambiguous support for the group is likely to ratchet up tensions with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who has made military gains against the guerrillas in the past five years.

Everybody’s got their eye on the Middle East. I wonder if Obama, Clinton, Giuliani, Romney, and McCain (the candidates who, as of this writing, still seem to have a chance at the nomination of their respective parties) have a policy regarding South America, because we’re gonna need one.

Hey! Somebody noticed that Huckabee, great performer that he is, doesn’t know anything about anything. So his team has just hired some help:

Huckabee has risen to become one of the GOP’s top presidential contenders almost completely by virtue of his own rhetorical talents and retail political skills. But he has written most all of his speeches, and his bare-bones campaign has been woefully lacking in terms of policy ideas.

Pinkerton will help fill that void.

A Newsday columnist and Fox News contributor, Pinkerton worked in both the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses as well as the presidential campaigns of each. As a respected voice among right-leaning pundits, he’ll bring instant credibility to a campaign that has drawn scorn from the conservative establishment.

And he’ll ensure that Huckabee suffers through no more moments like last month when he hadn’t heard about the NIE report on Iran a day-and-a-half after it was made public.

Well, if Brad Pitt can bone up on his “knowledge” of the world so that he can be a more credible and effective celebrity, then the least one of the guys running for president can do is figure out which end is up after you turn right at the Atlantic Ocean.

Though John Podhoretz loved what Huck had to say about Israel the other day …

We’ve got one true ally in the Middle East, and that’s Israel. It’s a tiny nation. I’ve been there nine time. I’ve literally traveled from Dan to Beersheba, and I understand something of that nation and the vulnerability of it.

And for us to give the world the impression that we would stand by if it were under attack and simply say, “It’s not our problem,” would be recklessly irresponsible on our part.

And if I were president, you can rest assured that we would not let an ally be annihilated by those enemies which is surround it, who have openly stated it is their direct intention to destroy that nation. It would not happen under my presidency.

Take that, Jimmy Carter! (Apparently, the two fellas have differences about how to be a good Baptist, too.)

Michael Oren notes [$$ ?] that Israelis are feeling both stumped and betrayed by Bush’s mystifying new “policy” toward the Israelis and the Palestinians:

No wonder Israelis are stumped. While the old George Bush deemed the end of terror as imperative for peace and the containment of Iran as the prerequisite for eliminating terror, the new George Bush focuses on Israeli settlement-building and hesitates to confront Tehran. It is uncertain which of the two is visiting Israel today and what policies he may pursue. …

Presidential visits are always characterized as “historic,” but Mr. Bush’s trip to the Jewish state is marked by a lack of momentousness. Cross-signals and contradictory policies have clouded a celebration for one of Israel’s firmest friends. Israelis will greet Mr. Bush exuberantly, but his departure may leave them grappling with terror largely on their own.

Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer are still pissing all over Israel and its American “false friends” who (conspiratorially, through the media and the power of money) insist that America support Israel without qualifications. This time they’ve added to the conspiracy Jewish voters, who are heavily represented in states with many electoral votes [e.a.].

Such pandering [by all presidential contenders] is hardly surprising, because contenders for high office routinely court special interest groups, and Israel’s staunchest supporters — the Israel lobby, as we have termed it — expect it. Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or “Christian Zionists,” two groups that are deeply engaged in the political process. Candidates fear, with some justification, that even well-intentioned criticism of Israel’s policies may lead these groups to turn against them and back their opponents instead.

If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts. Israel’s friends in the media would take aim at the candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel individuals and political action committees would go elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in states with many electoral votes, which increases their weight in close elections (remember Florida in 2000?), and a candidate seen as insufficiently committed to Israel would lose some of their support. And no Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel subset of the Christian evangelical movement, which is a significant part of the GOP base.

What would Walt and Mearsheimer suggest as a solution to the vexing problem of the sinister influence of Israel, Zionism, and American Jews on the American voter, citizen, and imagination? Allow only a certain number of Jewish voters into polling places, perhaps? Or none at all?

What’s this the L.A. Times is reporting? cooperation between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq?

Despite persistent sectarian tensions in the Iraqi government, war-weary Sunnis and Shiites are joining hands at the local level to protect their communities from militants on both sides, U.S. military officials say.

In the last two months, a U.S.-backed policing movement called Concerned Citizens, launched last year in Sunni-dominated Anbar province under the banner of the Awakening movement, has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland.

Of the nearly 70,000 Iraqi men in the Awakening movement, started by Sunni Muslim sheiks who turned their followers against Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are now more in Baghdad and its environs than anywhere else, and a growing number of those are Shiite Muslims.

Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government’s progress on mending the sectarian rift.

Of course if you’ve been reading Engram’s blog, you know that there was never, strictly speaking, a civil war in Iraq—it was way more complicated, and way less complicated—than that.

Norman Podheretz takes time out of his 24/7 job counseling that the U.S. bomb Iran to answer a charge brought by Andrew Sullivan and now spread further by The Economist:

Linking to the Economist post, Sullivan accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for failing to admit that I have made an “error” in relying on a “bogus quotation” to bolster my argument that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would not be deterred from using them by the fear of retaliation.

I do not usually bother responding to Sullivan’s frequent attacks on me, which are fueled by the same shrill hysteria that, as has often been pointed out, deforms most of what he “dishes” out on a daily basis. But in this case I have decided to respond because, by linking to a sober source like the Economist, he may for a change seem credible.

The Economist concludes its piece by challenging Amir Taheri to produce “the original source for this quote.”

In response to a query from me, Mr. Taheri has now met that challenge.

Sullivan responds by casting doubt on Taheri:

Taheri, whose reliability has come under suspicion before, says the remark was purged or censored or removed in subsequent editions of the book. I have no independent way of confirming any of this. Taheri, it should be noted, was the source of the story that Iran had recently required that Jews wear yellow stars in public, a story that was subsequently debunked.

Well, I hate to say it, but The Economist ’s counter-translator, Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, also seems compromised—not at all an disinterested party. He’s the husband of the Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who was detained in Iran this past year and, under great international pressure, released. I wouldn’t be surprised if Iranian agents haven’t put tremendous pressure on both Esfandiari and Bakhash to toe the line.

His comments in The Economist certainly sound different than these impassioned words, published in May 2007:

Once Haleh was arrested, however, silence was no longer an option. It is preposterous that she is accused of conspiring to overthrow the Iranian government by organizing conferences and encouraging dialogue between Iranians and Americans. The Wilson Center issued a fact sheet; Lee Hamilton, its president and director, held a news conference; and I began to speak openly about Haleh’s frightening predicament.

The extraordinary media attention, as well as the support for Haleh from presidential candidates and political leaders, from scholars and academic associations, from the students at Princeton University who she taught to love the Persian language, from women’s groups, human rights organizations and people everywhere have astonished and gratified her family and friends.

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of a state’s overweening power — especially a state that arrests, incarcerates and accuses its citizens at will. But the events of the last few weeks — the universal condemnation Iran has earned by imprisoning Haleh and others — have taught me that people also have power when they condemn injustice and stand up for wronged individuals. Is the Iranian government listening?

Americans are too naive about Iran, and about the Middle East. It’s time to get with the program.

Not having been subjected to his rule—and thus to the notorious spinning that came out of his office—I have the luxury of considering Tony Blair’s comments and arguments on their merits. He hasn’t moved an inch on Iraq:

In my view if it wasn’t clear that the whole nature of the way Saddam was dealing with this [WMD] issue had changed I was in favour of military action. And, I am afraid, in one sense it is worse than people think in so far as my position is concerned. I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now.” But did he feel remorse about a war and an occupation that left 4,000 Americans dead, 150 British dead, 75,000 Iraqis dead by the most conservative estimate and more than 3 million refugees?

“There’d be something wrong with me if I didn’t, or an acute sense of responsibility which I . . . will have for the rest of my life,” Blair said. “But I can’t say what I don’t believe about this; whatever it began as, it is part of this wider struggle today and . . . if there’s anything I regret. . . it is . . . not having laid out for people in a clearer way what I saw as the profound nature of this struggle and the fact that it was going to go on for a generation.”

And for once his conclusion was, very uncharacteristically, gloomy. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”

Read the whole thing.

Trying to explain rather than excuse Bush’s decisions since 9/11 is pretty much a losing proposition in the blogosphere (which is an entertainment arena as much as it is an information medium–and thus all the infotaining drama).

Nevertheless, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers dared attempt it, and another one responded:

Your reader wrote: “What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack?”

‘What if,’ indeed. On the first page of his excellent and disturbing book, “Nuclear Terrorism - The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe” - Graham Allison, a former deputy secretary of defense under Clinton (and no fan of the Bush administration), relays the following anecdote:

On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.

Think about it. A month after 9-11, you are president Bush.

You are still struggling to get to grips with the 9/11 attacks when you are told that the same people who have just destroyed twin towers have a nuclear weapon in New York city. What do you do? How do you defend the country?

A big scare like this is, to me, the only reasonable explanation of why Bush and his cadre of advisers have been so willing to push their response to the 9/11 attacks so far.

I agree that this is the only logical explanation for the administration’s actions (the well-advised and the ill-advised ones). And I try to be satisfied with the explanation rather than judge their actions.

After all, none of us are privy to the information they had and none of us are responsible the way they were. I cannot even judge them for overreacting. I can’t say how I—or anyone else—would have acted in their stead, with the benefit of their knowledge.

Sullivan is much harsher:

My reader suggested that this extraordinary shift in America’s constitutional balance - the creation of an extra-legal dictatorship within a putatively democratic society - was explicable only if you believe that the very existence of the U.S. is in peril. I believe Cheney believes that. In the hours after 9/11, you can understand why. The question then becomes: what evidence did they have that the danger was that grave?

He then goes on to suggest that the evidence the administration acted on was derived through torture—a “torture regime,” in fact—and therefore obviously unreliable. That’s not a crackpot theory; it’s certainly within the realm of the plausible. What I dislike about it is that it presumes that the evil warriors Bush and Cheney,  acting in bad faith, against the interests of Americans and America, didn’t care how far they went, even if they had to turn America into a dictatorship.

Sorry, but that is hysteria. Beyond that, it assumes that some Prince of Light—such as Obama, for example—can come and turn things right around and make everything all okay again. Which of course is beyond ridiculous.

The other day, I was watching a silly but diverting British series, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which puts a sensible woman who’s fed up with politicians’ incompetence into 10 Downing Street to succeed Tony Blair. (Yes. I did say it was silly, didn’t I?)

The screenwriter is not at all sympathetic to Blair or to the war in Iraq, but she is sensible. She shows, for example, just how many decisions, large and small, a political leader must make every day. It occurred to me that if only more people would watch this show, they would have a glimmer of understanding beyond their pet theories about BushHitler and the Vulcans.

But when people want to judge, to condemn, to castigate, and to punish, no amount of understanding will stop them. Their fury has a life of its own.

So it goes.

Richard Just, writing in the Globe and Mail, gets to the core of what so irritates Walt and Mearsheimer that they’ve mounted a campaign to denounce it as a conspiracy—America’s natural sympathy for Israel:

Israel appeals to different Americans in different ways, including some theological ones that are obviously absurd, not to mention offensive. But at root, most Americans like Israel for two reasons: first, because they sense correctly that, whatever the country’s imperfections, the moral claim of Jewish statehood is fundamentally just; and second, because, in ways large and small, in ways salutary and occasionally troubling, Israeli society accentuates, even exaggerates, the traits Americans most admire in themselves. We take pride in our vibrant democracy; Israel’s democracy is more than vibrant, it is spirited and contentious to the point of near-dysfunction. The U.S. psyche was strongly influenced by the frontier; Israel is nothing but frontier, and its national psyche has been defined by it. Americans like to think of themselves as tough; Israelis - well, you know.

Groups that support Israel skillfully exploit these similarities. On my 2004 trip, in order to be shown that Israel, like the United States, is a vibrant democracy, we spent a lot of time talking to politicians with competing viewpoints. To show us that Israel, like the United States, is a frontier society, we spent time on various borders. To show us that Israelis are tough, we did tough-seeming things, such as ride around in an armoured vehicle.

Some of this was heavy-handed, and some of the affinities Israel sought to exploit struck me as less appealing than others. For instance, the conservatives on my trip, all men, were quite taken with the frontier machismo of Israeli culture, a mentality to which my own reaction is much more complicated.

But whatever the merits of these various affinities, the point is that it doesn’t take a lot of trickery to sell Israel to Americans. In Israel, Americans see a country whose underlying rationale is just and whose instincts, aspirations and even foibles overlap more than a little with their own. They also understand what Mearsheimer and Walt ludicrously deny: that the threats to Israel’s existence have always been real, and remain so. [e.a.]

Indeed.

Philip Weiss has read Walt and Mearsheimer’s book [emphasis in the title is in the original]:

‘The Jungle,’ ‘Silent Spring,’ ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’–And Now, ‘The Israel Lobby’

Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby is being published today. I finished it last night. I said before that it was historic, but I did not realize quite what it was till I put it down: a great work of American muckraking in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (the meatpacking industry), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (pesticides), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (Detroit). An overkill moral beauty aimed at an outrage, some day this book will be legendary and dated. [e.a.]

Legendary And dated? As in superseded by even greater works of moral beauty by the same authors, something like, say, Our Kampf? or perhaps Our Jihad?

But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Meanwhile, Wess dares to dream:

So [The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy] will be passed around, it will be taught. Serious people will press it on other serious people. Political aides will hand it to other political aides. It may have to wear brown-paper covers in Congress, at the State Department and at Hillels, but it will be read hungrily. Young progressive Jews will read it. Arabs will translate it into Arabic. It will go like lightning around Europe. Israelis will snap it up (the book is actually very respectful of Israel; it’s America that has the big problem), and someday it will come out in Hebrew. It will work on people. It will show what independent people ought to do when they form ideas, and others will chime in. A politician will finally speak out, with Walt and Mearsheimer as his or her role model.

I can hardly wait. And I’m not alone.

Michael Gerson had a few choice words for Walt and Mearsheimer:

Walt and Mearsheimer are careful to say they are not anti-Semitic or conspiracy-minded. But their main inference [sic]– that Israel, the Israel lobby and Jewish neoconservatives called the shots for Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld — is not only rubbish, it is dangerous rubbish. As “mainstream” scholars, Walt and Mearsheimer cannot avoid the historical pedigree of this kind of charge. Every generation has seen accusations that Jews have dual loyalties, promote war and secretly control political structures.

These academics may not follow their claims all the way to anti-Semitism. But this is the way it begins. This is the way it always begins.

Ron Rosenbaum called bullshit on Walt and Mearsheimer’s alleged “realism”:

To me, the real problem is not whether The Israel Lobby pleases this Grand Kleagle or that, or the one-sidedness of its depiction of Israel and its supporters, so much as the profound failure of the moral imagination that the book reflects. A failure to connect with the historical experience of Jews that motivates their support of Israel. A failure to empathize with the real danger the 6 million Jews of Israel face: the threat of a second Holocaust.

Leslie Gelb excoriated them for roiling the waters purely to gain vindication for their views about Iraq:

The inevitable last question is this: Why have two such serious students of United States foreign policy written so weak a book and added fuel, inadvertently, to the fires of anti-Semitism? The answer lies in their treatment of the Iraq war.

Mearsheimer and Walt should feel very proud, indeed, for their foresight in opposing the Iraq war. Their writings were more on target than anyone’s, and they are justifiably mystified about how the United States could have been so stupid and self-destructive. They appear to have reasoned that a mistake of this magnitude could have been fostered only by some irresistible force. And the only such force they can conjure from the landscape of the powerful is the Israel lobby, as embodied by neoconservative gladiators like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the authors’ words, “the lobby did not cause the war by itself. … But absent the lobby’s influence, there almost certainly would not have been a war. The lobby was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a war that is a strategic disaster for the United States and a boon for Iran, Israel’s most serious regional adversary.”

Their vitriol about the Iraq war — about being so right while others were so wrong — is so overwhelming that they minimize two key facts. First, America’s foreign policy community, including many Democrats as well as Republicans, supported the war for the very same reasons that Wolfowitz and the lobby did — namely, the fact that Hussein seemed to pose a present or future threat to American national interests. Second, the real play-callers behind the war were President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. They hardly have a history of being in the pockets of the Jewish lobby (more like the oil lobby’s), and they aren’t remotely neoconservatives. The more we know, the clearer it is that the White House went to war primarily to erase the “blunder” of the elder Bush in not finishing off Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

The authors, however, are feeling so satisfied with themselves, if their remarks to the Los Angeles Times editorial board are any indication, that Walt now blames the limitations of language—”lobby” is a “crude” term, Walt admits—for their inability to get their point across.

In this formulation, it’s not their intemperate blanket condemnation of anyone who supports Israel that’s to blame for the hostile reaction to their so-called “argument”; rather, Walt suggests, Americans have been so thoroughly brainwashed by Israel supporters that we no longer have the language to describe such a magical group as the “lobby”—or, more precisely, “the Lobby,” as it was forever imprinted on the minds of those who follow such arcane debates.

What’s crude here is not just the insult “Lobby.” It’s Walt and Mearsheimer’s continued slippery reluctance to define this amoeba-like group that they claim has “too much power” (by what measure?) and is asserting undue influence over American policy against the national interest. This group, they say under skeptical questioning by the L.A. Times’s editorial board, is forever changing its shape and its dimensions to include this person or that; this organization or that; this group of people or that. And all the while, Walt and Mearsheimer keep insisting, they’re not talking about a “cabal,” so what’s the problem?

Here’s the problem: when you describe a group with the mystical powers of a “cabal” but keep insisting that it isn’t a cabal because you’re not referring to it as a “cabal,” it gives off the unmistakable odor of skunk, and weasel.

Read this exchange and see if you don’t agree [e.a.]

Mearsheimer: … if you have a policy of unconditional aid, if you have a policy where you can’t criticize Israel in the United States without getting smeared, you’re going to give that state a lot of room to get itself in trouble. And our argument again is that it would be better if that aid were conditional and we were allowed to have an open debate about Israeli policy and the Israeli-U.S. relationship.

Walt: That is, something similar to the debate that happens in Israel itself, where you have a very wide-open debate about what their policies are and whether they make sense, and where you find lots more people willing to take positions similar to ours than you would here in the United States.

Tim: Then why is the book called The Israel Lobby and not The Pro-Settlement Lobby or The Likudnik Lobby?

Mearsheimer: For the very simple reason that the lobby is not monolithic or homogeneous. There are groups inside the lobby that are opposed to settlements; there are groups inside the lobby that are in favor of settlements. Also you want to remember, we’re not arguing that this is a Jewish lobby. Despite our best efforts to make the case clear that this is the Israel lobby and not the Jewish lobby, people continue to talk as if we’re only talking about Jews.

Who’s in the lobby?

Tim: You mentioned the uh, the non…mono…lithicism of the lobby. And looking through the book, it’s weird to me to think that there’s some team that comprises Martin Indyk, Daniel Pipes, you know, I’m trying to think of a third…I mean, this is really a wide-ranging group of, you know, Abe…

Mearsheimer: Henry Siegman. Do you know Henry Siegman? He was head of the American Jewish Congress. But again, there’s no reason why people inside the lobby can’t be very critical of Israel. Let me give you an example: One of the best reviews of our book, one of the most favorable reactions inside the United States, came from M.J. Rosenberg, who used to work for AIPAC. He said very nice things about the book.

Nick: My, one of my, one of the things that confuses me as I read the book is that you are, you talk in these, often about the lobby. The lobby does this, the lobby does that. The lobby seems so broad as you’ve defined it that it’s hard for me to, to know if that’s a meaningful group that you’re talking about. The differences go broader than Martin Indyk…

Walt: Martin got his start working for AIPAC. He helped found the Institute for Near East Policy.

Nick: He falls clearly in the…

Walt: And that’s not to say that he hasn’t advocated positions, both in his official capacity and outside it, that John and I would agree with. He’s a two-state-solution person; he understands that getting this thing shut down is in everybody’s interest. We might disagree on some other issues. That said, he’s not someone who would ever say the United States should make its support for Israel conditional on ending the settlements. He’s never advocated that, he… [e.a.]

im: So that’s what defines your presence in the lobby, is unconditional support?

Susan Brenneman: Yeah, and not just support but by support you mean aid?

Stephen: Aid and diplomatic support. And again, you’ve got, the way we define it… I think we laid this out as clearly as… You’ve got to be actively working. It’s not just somebody who has an attitude toward Israel. You’ve got to spend some part of your daily life trying to advance that particular goal. I’d also point out, like all other interest groups, these are fuzzy groups, right? I mean, there are people who are clearly in the core: Abraham Foxman, nobody’s really going to argue whether he’s a member. But you’re going to have some people who are further out, to where you get to people who are clearly not in the lobby. And there are going to be some cases in between where you can argue back and forth, and they might change their minds. I acknowledge that the term “lobby” has a certain crude quality to it, but almost due to the limitations of language. One of the things we did was we often used phrases like “groups within the lobby,” “organizations in the lobby,” “organizations and individuals in the lobby…” Trying to underscore to the reader that this is not a monolith. This is not a Comintern that gives orders to the followers. That there are issues where they genuinely disagree.

These two still cannot explain what they mean by “the lobby,” and they blame the constraints of language. Get this: The phenomenon they discern is so unique that language cannot even properly describe it. But they know it when they see it, and they know it’s very bad for America!

And Philip Weiss is eager to spread the seed of these “scholars.”

The mind reels.

A gift especially for you, from the New York Times:

I wonder how much “they” paid for the ad, and who “they” are.

Americans may watch a lot of TV, but the news isn’t a big part of their menu. The Pew Research Center tracked the news habits of Americans over the twenty-year period from 1986 to 2006 and concluded that

the average percentage of adult Americans following all stories “very closely” is 26%. …[This] suggests that, at least with respect to most day-to-day reporting, the American news audience is only modestly interested

Of the stories they followed, these were the most popular types:

disasters 39% followed very closely

money 34

conflict 33

political news 22

tabloid news 18

foreign news 17

Of particular interest to those of us interested in news-as-infotainment are this counterintuitive gem (p. 5):

Disaster News rivets audiences. … Tabloid News fails to do the same.

Journalists might well predict and easily accept that disaster stories always “sell.” But journalists might not predict that tabloid reporting sells so poorly. … Skepticism notwithstanding, both of these patterns of news interest have manifested themselves repeatedly during the last three decades: Disaster News engages audiences; Tabloid News, not so much.

This finding is more predictable, to me at least (p. 3):

Conflict News—stories about war, terrorism, and social violence—consistently elicits much more news attention than does Tabloid or even Political News.

Conflict—protagonist vs. antagonist—is the sine qua non of storytelling. TV “news” trafficks in these stories. They boil down complex issues into bite-size pieces. The result is lacking in nutrition, but it’s tasty. And it satisfies our need (a human need—that is to say: nonpartisan) to have easy answers, even (perhaps especially) when there is no easy answer.

These answers—the comfortable certainties of partisans on both sides—are provided both by pop culture (deliberate entertainment) and by infotainment (news served up via entertainment values), which, while serving people’s desire for distraction and need to be entertained, also imparts some information, rallies the faithful, infuriates the opposition, and ensures an audience hungry for more bread and circuses.

I mention this not because it’s the theme of this blog. Not this time anyway. I intend it as a response to Shadi Hamid, who, in response to this post of mine, wonders why liberals can’t educate the electorate rather than respond to it.

I responded in the comments, but I’ve got more to say, if you’ll permit me to equate, even if just for the sake of the argument, the electorate with the news-viewing (or non-news viewing) audience. At the very least, these two groups overlap.

The Pew Center’s study makes one of my points for me: the electorate isn’t looking to get educated—it’s looking to be entertained. At any given time, about 75% of the television audience (many voters, presumably) are not watching the news (which is where we’re likely to be offered the kind of information affecting policy that Hamid wants to get across to people).

When they are watching “news,” mostly they’re mostly interested in rubber-necking the tragedies of others (disasters) or in tracking their finances (or prospects for making or losing money) or in being spectators to some kind of fight (conflict). They just don’t want to know from government policies (much less foreign policy, which is among the categories of least interest to Americans,+++ along with celebrity and political scandals ***).

Louis Menand, in his July 9 New Yorker review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, makes another point for me.

Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.” [e.a.]

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). …

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith,

I note that Caplan is an economist, and addresses only the economic prejudices of voters. But if Caplan is right about this—and I think he’s on to something—the electorate would be expected to have other prejudices, too. (I recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on the subject of contemporary prejudices.)

It is some of those prejudices that Rudy Giuliani is appealing to, both in his public image and in the foreign-policy stances outlined in his Foreign Affairs article. Whatever, he’s doing, by the way, it’s working (and note that his strongest opponent is Hillary Clinton, who is the most hawkish among the Democrats).

Hamid’s problem—the problem of all ideologues trying to sway the public this way or that through a cogent debate about the issues—is that people have prejudices. They are not necessarily open to reason; rather, they’re given to emotional responses. To me, Americans seem to be feeling rather more hawkish than dovish—which was where I entered the conversation with Hamid.

—————-

+++ This particular finding is a bee in my bonnet. Americans have always been wrapped up in themselves. But the extent to which they continue to be wrapped up in themselves post-9/11, in the face of all we have learned since then about the dangerous world outside our shores and in the face of all we have to do to engage with that world, is nothing short of astonishing to me.

But then Caplan suggests a reason for that in his book, too. Menand writes:

Even apart from ignorance of the basic facts, most people simply do not think politically. … And, over time, individuals give different answers to the same questions about their political opinions. People simply do not spend much time learning about political issues or thinking through their own positions. They may have opinions—if asked whether they are in favor of capital punishment or free-trade agreements, most people will give an answer—but the opinions are not based on information or derived from a coherent political philosophy. They are largely attitudinal and ad hoc.

[e.a.]

*** It would be interesting to examine what accounts for the amount of interest in the various categories. My guess about the audience’s lack of interest in celebrity and political scandals is that people expect celebrities and politicians to behave badly. We may fawn over them, but when they get in trouble …yawn. It’s dog-bites-man: not news worth following.

Tell me something I don’t know or didn’t expect: that is something I’ll watch.

Spencer Ackerman, back from being embedded in Iraq, has some words of wisdom for the Democrats:

The uncomfortable reality is this: nothing in Iraq worth fighting for remains achievable, and nothing achievable in Iraq remains worth fighting for [I respectfully disagree: political freedom is always worth fighting for. --ed.] Democrats have made the decision—rightly, I think—that withdrawing from Iraq is the least bad of many bad options. But they shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that a majority of the troops doing the fighting agree with them. For soldiers like Lieutenant Wellman, this will be hard to accept. As he told me of war doubters back home, “I don’t want them to just support the troops. I want them to support the mission.” This matters, because pretending that in ending the war they’re doing the troops a favor hurts Democrats politically. They risk looking condescending, and, worse, oblivious—which has the broader effect of undermining public trust in the Democrats to handle national security. …

Democrats would do much better to speak honestly: to acknowledge that many fighting men and women want to stay in the battle and would be willing to do so for years longer. There’s nothing wrong with saying that, nor in emphasizing that this is part of what makes us so proud of our military. We wouldn’t want soldiers who were unwilling to fight to the bitter end.

The Dems won’t listen, because their base clearly isn’t proud of our military. The military doesn’t do dialogue, you see. It kills people (more than 650,000 Iraqis along, according to the ignorant but representative rabidly partisan Democrat Rosie O’Donnell). It trashes things, usually irreparably.

The American military, according to that point of view, is the problem. That’s how fucked-up the Democratic base is and has been ever since Vietnam. And my gloomy prediction is that the Dems will go down in 2008, and in every election thereafter, until they can show, rather than just say, that they support the troops.

Kudos to Ackerman (one exception to the under-30-know-nothings category) for trying, though.

p.s. on my queue: a bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Ackerman and Eli Lake.

Apparently, Kevin Drum believes pro-war hawks have been so completely discredited that after we leave Iraq, the United States will have a “non-war-based foreign policy”:

I agree completely with [Pam] Hess about one thing: there are national security questions involved here, and I wish the national media would spend more time seriously talking about them. The big one is: once we leave Iraq — as we will — and decide that invading other countries is not generally the right way to fight jihadist terrorism, what strategy will take its place? Conservatives really, really don’t want to talk about what a non-war-based foreign policy would look like, and it seems to scare off all but the hardiest mainstream pundits too. It just seems so dovish, doesn’t it? But it’s time to start anyway.

Knock yourself out, Mr. Drum! And then brush up on 4G war: it’s all the rage.

By the way, this guy explains it right, but he comes to the wrong conclusion.

[G]uerrilla wars are fought in the moral sphere. This means that the side that can hold together its moral cohesion the longest, while simultaneously fragmenting its opponents, will come out the winner ….

So far so good.

From this grain of truth, the US government/military reached (primarily due to hindsight bias re:Vietnam) the conclusion that moral conflicts are won through propaganda.

Well…partly

In other words, the side with the better propaganda machine wins the war.

Um, no.

The side with the better propaganda wins the war.

We are failing on that score so far, and the solution is not, as blogger John Robb suggests, to end the propaganda campaign and become utterly transparent. That is beyond ludicrous, particularly when the enemy is so skillful at propaganda.

The solution is better counterpropaganda—subtle and utterly opaque counterpropaganda. It will happen, and much of it will come from the culture rather than from the heavy-handed unskillful hand of government. For now, the culture is lagging behind. It is shedding its 30-year-old skin. It hasn’t caught up to the reality of 21st-century war. That will change.