Shadi Hamid on Peter Baker’s weird theory that opposition from foreign service professions wrecked Bush’s strategy of democracy promotion:

Wait a second, wasn’t the State Department against another “new idea” in 2002? I seem to recall that there was some talk around then of invading a foreign country that had nothing to do with 9/11. I seem to also recall that the State Department bureaucracy was furious about this. President Bush was able, however, to overrule or circumvent this “resistance” because he wanted to. Iraq was his priority. I don’t doubt that Bush is sincere in his commitment to democracy, but I’m under no illusions that it was ever a top priority of his, or that it took precedence over more “tangible” strategic interests…like, um, supporting dictators with billions of dollars, something which Bush has proven quite fond of.

Right. Similarly, one doubts that the professional bureaucracy in the Treasury Department has been wildly enthusiastic about Bush’s tax-and-budget policies or that folks in the EPA love Bush’s environmental policies. The dominant views of the civil service, the foreign service, the uniformed military, and the intelligence community all really do matter in Washington, but Bush has time and again shown an ability to get his way when he’s determined to. The democracy agenda didn’t make it through the grinder because there was no agenda.

American Psychological Association says psychologists should stop participating in abusive interrogations. Good for them. On some level, it’s sad that it took them this long. On another level, it’s just so weird that they even need to address this in the first place that you can see how it might have taken a while to snap into action. Four years ago, I never would have guessed that the US government’s officially sanctioned systematic use of torture was going to be a recurring topic in my political commentary. I guess I was naive, but I think it was naive in a good way.

I think it’s interesting that when I wrote a long post criticizing Gideon Rose that mentioned as an aside that I think “Glenn Greenwald’s views are a bit too far to the left” mostly seemed to prompt comments calling into question my motives for making this observation. Well, I made it because I think Glenn’s views are a bit too far to the left! It’s a little hard to say, because he overwhelmingly does critique, but what I had in mind in particular was this:

But the notion that the U.S. should not attack another country unless that country has attacked or directly threatens our national security is not really extraordinary. Quite the contrary, that is how virtually every country in the world conducts itself, and it is a founding principle of our country. Starting wars against countries that have not attacked you, and especially against those who cannot attack you, is abnormal.

Re-reading, Glenn doesn’t explicitly endorse the view that all wars fought for reasons other than strict self-defense are illegitimate, but that’s what I took him to be saying, it’s something he very well may believe, and it’s not something I believe. To me, in addition to fighting wars in self-defense it’s also quite appropriate for us to engage in acts of collective self-defense in order to help other countries repel acts of aggression. The Korean War and the first Gulf War would be the key examples here. I also think there are circumstances in which it’s a good idea to deploy military forces with UN authorization as peacekeepers or possibly for other humanitarian purposes.

I took Glenn to be making a claim about the desirability of scaling America’s global role even further back than I would favor. Perhaps he doesn’t think that. Certainly, there are people I know and respect who do think that. My point was that whether or not one agrees with the strict self-defense doctrine, there’s ample reason to wonder why, exactly, the foreign policy consensus is so lopsided in terms of the vicious attacks it launches on dissenters from the left while tolerating and sometimes collaborating with the most egregious knee-jerk militarists imaginable.

One interesting thing from the Tony Cordesman op-ed I linked to yesterday was this disclosure statement:

Disclosure: the nonprofit organization I work for receives financing from many sources, including the United States government, Saudi Arabia and Israel. No one from any of those sources has asked me to write this article.

I often think the people who make these kind of conflict-of-interest disclosures often protest too much. It would be pretty ridiculous to think that Ehud Olmert or Crown Prince Whomever called Cordesman up on the phone and asked him to defend the Saudi/Israel arms package. The significance of looking into who funds foreign policy research in the United States is simply that funders in this field — as in any other field — are going to want their funds to flow toward people with congenial ideas. People with perspectives that aren’t congenial to anyone who invests money in foreign policy think tanks, meanwhile, aren’t going to be able to get think tank jobs.

I don’t really know what to say about Gideon Rose’s attempt to respond to his blogospheric critics.

Instead, let me observe this. During a week long guest-blogging stint for The Economist Rose seems to have written five blog posts. Two of them — forty percent of the total — were dedicated to how left-wing critics of the foreign policy establishment go too far and, in fact, are just as bad as those dastardly neocons. Zero percent of his posts concerned the current neoconservative effort to gin up a war with Iran. National Review‘s editorial proclaiming that we “will never be safe” until we change the ideology of the government in power in Iraq? Not mentioned. Anything in The Weekly Standard or Charles Krauthammer column or Bill Kristol’s many TV appearances worth criticizing? No.

Okay, so maybe liberal bloggers are both more pernicious and more influential than every single conservative opinion journalist in the country. Maybe rebutting Duncan Black is really more important than tackling the right-wing noise machine. But how about Rudy Giuliani? His senior foreign policy advisor Norm Podhoretz published a long article making “the case for bombing Iran” earlier this year. Podhoretz says he thinks Giuliani shares his views on this matter. Giuliani himself penned a foreign policy manifesto for Foreign Affairs (where Rose himself works so surely he’s read it) in which he came out of the closet as a raving lunatic whose idea of peace is to plunge the country into an endless series of wars.

Rose didn’t see fit to mention that, either.

This is why even someone like me who thinks Glenn Greenwald’s views are a bit too far to the left can heartily share his concerns about the nature of the foreign policy establishment. Given that Rose deploys “anti-war bloggers are like neocons” as an insult, I suppose he doesn’t admire the neoconservative worldview. And yet he can’t seem to muster the energy to actually oppose it, even at the very time it’s being espoused more loudly than ever by a leading presidential candidate, and the Bush administration itself is once again taking steps to lay a legal predicate for war with Iran.

Something is wrong here.