I just found this, and it’s great. “The Guns of 17th Street”, a review of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy edited by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan published in the spring 2001 issue of The National Interest. The author is Jonathan Clarke, a former British diplomat and conservative foreign policy analyst who, as you’ll see, was hating on neoconservatives before it was cool.

UPDATE: FYI, both The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute are located on 17th Street here in sunny Washington, DC. Clarke’s book, co-written with Stefan Harper, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order is very good but a bit dated at this point.

One of the weird ticks of our current political culture has been a tendency to embrace characterizations of Muslims or Arabs that, at the end of the day, are just truisms about human culture but then turn around and attribute these characteristics to Islam or Arab nationalism specifically. In his book, for example, Andrew Sullivan quotes Bernard Lewis:

What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society and the flouting or even abrogation of God’s law.

Strip this of the portentious rhetoric and Islam-specificity and what you have here is the banal objection that people prefer to be members of political communities where their own faith is dominant. Here in the USA, Christians chafe at public policies they see as imbued with the spirit of secular humanism. More secularly oriented people, meanwhile, are happy to let Christians go about their merry way but greatly fear and loath public policies inspired by the spirit of evangelism or orthodox catholicism. Israelis want to live in a state of their own — a Jewish state — and not be a minority in some Muslim-dominated Middle Eastern polity. Just a bit north, Lebanon’s Christians long fought — and quite violently — to maintain Christian domination of Lebanese politics.

In short, this is not some quirk of Islam, it’s how the world works — people don’t like to be ruled over by Others, but tend not to mind the idea of ruling over Others. People are, in other words, self-interested and a little hypocrtical. Muslims, too! The fascinating question is why folks influenced by this view of the Islamic world thought it would be a good idea to conquer a patch of Muslim land and try to rule it. The common thread, I suppose, is an extreme level of condescension.

In a strange convergence, William Greider in The Nation endorses (without calling it that) the Jonah Goldberg referendum plan for Iraq, doing us the kindness of specifying what question he wants to see. Namely, Iraqis should choose between these three options:

1. I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within six months of the date of this referendum.

2. I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within one year of the date of this referendum.

3. I ask that the government of Iraq determine some time in the future when all coalition forces should be withdrawn.

Like any referendum-based plan for Iraq, this seems to me to founder on the details. Ask three questions and there’ll probably be no majority. And suppose option three winds in a plurality grounded in overwhelming Kurdish support but clear majorities of Iraqi Arabs want us to leave in a six or twelve month timeframe. Then withdrawing loses legitimacy (we held a referendum!) but staying also loses the relevant sort of legitimacy in the Arab-populated areas where we’re actually operating (we voted for y’all to leave and you’re still here). Ultimately, this whole notion strikes me as a rather desperate casting-about, a desire to somehow evade the rather ugly policy choices facing the nation.

Call it the populist counterpoint to David Ignatius’ call for “less partisan bickering” as the solution to Iraq.

Greg Easterbrook:

I suspect one reason the Iraq death toll elicits so little concern is that exaggerated estimates exist. Americans can say of the exaggerated estimates, “Oh, that’s way too high” and skip over thinking about the more probable numbers. The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to “unknown causes.” The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have dismissed the Lancet study, and they should. It’s gibberish.

Well, no. That is not it at all. The authors used a statistical method that, as they perfectly well knew, doesn’t generate especially precise results. That’s why when they calculated the confidence interval for their estimate it turned out to be rather wide. The 654,965 number is the middle point of the confidence interval. The true number could very easily be thousands higher or lower than that, but the true number is extremely likely to fall somewhere within the band they laid out. This isn’t hard stuff and it certainly isn’t gibberish.