I don’t mean to lodge this as a specific complaint about John Edwards, but I was just having a conversation with Spencer in which he said people shouldn’t be allowed to use the phrase “vital interests” in Foreign Affairs essays without giving some kind of which interests they see as the vital ones and, ideally, why they’re so vital. Then he walked out the door and I read Ari Melber’s blog post about John Edwards’ Foreign Affairs essay and it contains, at a key juncture, the phrase in question:

There is no question that we must confront terrorist groups such as al Qaeda with the full force of our military might. As commander in chief, I will never hesitate to apply the full extent of our security apparatus to protect our vital interests, take measures to root out terrorist cells, and strike swiftly and forcefully against those who seek to harm us.

The essay is almost 6,000 words long, but Edwards doesn’t name any vital interests. In his defense, Barack Obama’s manifesto also says that “We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests” but doesn’t say anything about which interests are the vital ones.

And yet, this seems like an important question! Without answering it, these formulae take on a pretty tautological quality. The question isn’t would you use force when you thought it was vital to do so, the question is when is it vital to use force? I think this now-meaningless phrase acquired its talismanic powers back during the Cold War when “protecting our vital interests” in some country or region was a thinly veiled euphemism for “not letting Communists take over.” That doesn’t mean that every statement made about “vital interests” was correct or reasonable, or that preventing a pro-Soviet regime in Angola really was a vital interest, but one at least knew what one meant.

By contrast, when Edwards or Obama talks about vital interests I actually have no idea what they’re talking about. You have a very wide range of substantive disagreement as to what our interests are (and, of course, which of our interests are the vital ones) as well as how best to advance them, and I also here people trying to stretch the notion of an “interest” to encompass other kinds of policy priorities like genocide prevention. An essay on the subject of “what I think America’s vital interests are” (heck, even a numbered list) would tell us a lot more about where these candidates are coming from than do these essays.

That’s George Packer’s theory:

Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an Administration official who genuinely wanted to hear my account of why the Iraq war has gone so badly. In a word, I said, “politics.” At every turn, the White House has tried to use the war, and the larger war on terror, to consolidate power, to reward ideological and political loyalists, to win electoral advantage, to push the Democrats into a corner, to divide the country into patriots and defeatists. President Bush insisted on pursuing a highly partisan domestic agenda rather than unite the country around the war in the spirit of F.D.R. (who said that “Doctor New Deal” had been replaced by “Doctor Win the War”). So many disastrous wartime decisions can be traced back to the original sin: policy mattered less than politics. The message in Washington was more real than anything happening in Iraq.

This’d be a kind of fun thing to throw into kitchen-sink style critique of the Bush administration, but I don’t think it’s very well supported.

For one thing, it lacks explanatory power as an account of White House decision-making over the past 18-24 months. It was widely believed in late 2005 and early 2006 that Bush was going to start some kind of slow-motion downscaling of the American presence in Iraq in order to lessen the extent to which it was a millstone around the congressional GOP’s neck, but it didn’t happen. Similarly, Bush responded to electoral rebuke not by trimming on Iraq, but by doubling down. The evidence suggests that Bush pursued maximalist Iraq policies in 2002-2005 for the exact same reason he pursued them in 2006-2007 — because of his maximalist views on Iraq. He was a maximalist when Iraq-as-wedge-issue cut in his favor, and he was a maximalist when Iraq-as-wedge-issue cut against him.

That’s not to say that within the parameters of the agreed-upon policy the White House political team didn’t try to milk the issue for maximum political advantage, but that’s a different matter.

Of course, the question of “why the Iraq war has gone so badly” does admit of a few different interpretations. I would say it went badly primarily because the underlying concept of invading and occupying a diverse, medium-sized country in order to topple a long-entrenched dictatorial regime and replace it with a stable, pro-American one that would be a stepping stone toward larger regional transformation was fundamentally unsound. Any policy designed to achieve those goals was bound to fail. It probably did, however, go as badly as it did (“so badly”) in large part because responsibility for implementing this policy was handed over to people who were too dumb, too crazy, or too irresponsible to realize what a mess they were making and abandon the policy objectives.

The notion, however, that if Bush had just made Joe Lieberman Secretary of Defense, not pushed for further tax cuts, invited Paul Berman over for coffee, and given Joe Biden a hug that this all would have turned out well doesn’t seem very plausible. Maybe had the administration not disbanded the Iraqi Army, not issued the de-Baathification order, and not made all kinds of noises about marching on Damascus and Teheran we could have installed a stable-but-repressive Sunni neo-Baath regime that made nice with the Gulf Cooperation Council states but liberal hawks wouldn’t have been happy with that and I don’t think it’s clear that it would have worked anyway.

It seems that apologetics for killing Armenians is more popular in hawkish “pro-Israel” circles than I’d realized. American Enterprise Institute scholar and contributor to various publications MIchael Rubin condemnts Abe Foxman here for changing his view to the genocide happened position. He also links to a couple of articles published in The Middle East Quarterly which he edits that deny the genocide. MEQ, in turn, is produced by Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum.

It bares mentioning that no less a figure than Adolf Hitler himself cited Turkey’s success at evading accountability for what happened to the Armenians as part of his case that liquidation of European Jewry was feasible. Now, I doubt there’s an actual causal link here (Hitler would have been Hitler either way) but it sure is an unseemly business. As I say, I don’t begrudge the actual Israeli government its right to engage in some realpolitik here, but there’s no reason for Jewish civil society groups to be going down this path.

Here’s a Guardian column on Bush’s Asian analogies speech. I’ll quote my own conclusion, then you can follow the link and see the reasoning:

For months now, many conservatives have been fundamentally positioning themselves for the post-war era, readying the arguments that will blame the failure of the venture in Iraq on its opponents rather than its architects. That Bush himself has chosen to join them is, perhaps, on some level the clearest reflection of the reality that the president knows perfectly well that the war is unwinnable, and blame-shifting now the best hope for saving his historical legacy.

While you’re there, check out Spencer Ackerman on Carl Levin’s irresponsible Maliki-bashing.

Bush is going to give a speech blaming Vietnam War opponents for the fact that lots of Vietnamese people died and/or became refugees. Jim Henley points out the minor fact that “Millions of people died while we were there. A fair proportion of them were people we ourselves killed. In any reckoning of the costs of intervening and withdrawing from Indochina, those people count too. It’s a bizarre, narcissistic blind spot to imagine otherwise.”

Indeed, the 1.7 million or so people reckoned to have died during the main American phase of the Vietnam War (1965-1973) outpaces the Cambodian genocide (among other things) by a healthy margin. It’s hard to imagine that leaving Vietnam sooner wouldn’t have saved lives, whereas staying in Vietnam longer would have gotten even more people killed before ending in the same result. Tons and tons of Iraqi civilians are getting killed or fleeing the country right now; continuing the war indefinitely won’t help them.

Photo by Flickr user Flydime used under a Creative Commons license

One of the fundamental laws of political punditry is that for every post praising Jon Chait on domestic issues, an equal and oppose post must attack his views on foreign policy. To wit, his TRB column about Bill Kristol’s shameful and dishonest attacks on TNR and its editors. His critique is sound, but his framing of the issue is way off. Here’s the first graf:

It’s hard to believe that, not so long ago, neoconservative foreign policy thinking overflowed with ideas and idealism. The descent has been steep, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the pages of The Weekly Standard–particularly in William Kristol’s editorials, which have come to consist of stubborn denials of any bad news, diatribes about internal enemies, and harangues against the cowardice of Republican dissenters.

And here’s the penultimate one:

There was a time when neoconservatives sought to hold the moral and intellectual high ground. There was some- thing inspiring in their vision of America as a different kind of superpower–a liberal hegemon deploying its might on behalf of subjugated peoples, rather than mere self-interest. As the Iraq war has curdled, the idealism and liberalism have drained out of the neoconservative vision. What remains is a noxious residue of bullying militarism. Kristol’s arguments are merely the same pro-war arguments that have been used historically by right-wing parties throughout the world: Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all.

But this is silly — neither Kristol nor The Weekly Standard has changed. It’s just that The New Republic used to join up with neoconservatives to bully people who disagree with its foreign policy views and now TNR is being bullied. It wasn’t The Weekly Standard that this article calling John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt un-American. Nor was in The Weekly Standard that published this article about how liberals don’t want to invade Iraq because they don’t like advancing America’s interests. Nor was it The Weekly Standard that analogized MoveOn to Stalin-controlled Communist agents.

Seeing criticism of Kristol’s tactics is great, but this is just a new target not a new game for Kristol.

Looks like the Anti-Defamation League is now acknowledging that the Armenian genocide was “tantamount to genocide” (which, admittedly, has a kind of partially pregnant ring to it, but whatever).

Senator Carl Levin says “said yesterday that Iraq’s parliament should oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet if they are unable to forge a political compromise with rival factions in a matter of days.” Today, President George W. Bush made “a striking attempt . . . to distance itself from the Maliki government before September, when the president’s troop buildup faces an intense review on Capitol Hill.”

This is crazy talk. As Eric Martin points out we went through this exact cycle just last year. Back in the day some crazy and unserious persosn such as myself wondered what good “ousting” Ibrahim Jafari and replacing him with another member of the same political coalition would do. But no! George Bush and David Ignatius assured us that Maliki was the man. Now Maliki’s not the man! But the man’s not the problem. There’s a structural problem here about what sort of leadership is possible given the objective correlation of political forces on the ground. We can go through a half dozen coups and 17 prime ministers and if it does anything it’ll make things worse.