I remember a time when Marc Lynch was a junior professor blogging pseudonymously as Abu Aardvark at least in part because he feared negative consequences for his career (Campus Watch on other institutions exist for the sole purpose of trying to intimidate Middle East Studies professors out of expressing insufficiently hawkish political opinions) and occasionally having his ideas quoted by liberal bloggers. And now what’s in my morning Tom Friedman:

€œWe have created a real case of moral hazard in Iraq,€ said Marc Lynch, a Middle East specialist at George Washington University. €œBecause all the key players think the Americans are going to bail them out, they have no incentive to make any real concessions to one another.€

In the aftermath of 9/11 there were a lot of people out there in academia and in the government and to some extent in the think tank world as well who had a lot of knowledge to offer the country. Unfortunately, though, those voices mostly weren’t heard by people who matter (many of them were, however, featured in the November 2002 Atlantic). Not just by the people running the government, but also by the broader community of opinion leaders including many left-of-center people. That we’re seeing voices like Lynch’s start to get heard in prominent fora like a Tom Friedman column is a good sign and I like to think the progressive blogosphere’s played a role in making it happen.

Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY, indeed, my home district) and William Delahunt (D-MA) are circulating a letter to colleagues about their “American Anti-Torture Act of 2007.” Time was one would assume an act with that title was some kind of scheme to prevent torture abroad — some set of measures aimed at sanctioning regimes who practice torture or something like that — though these days of course we recognize that Nadler and Delahunt are talking about preventing the United States from torturing people. The basic point of the act is to expand the McCain Amendment’s prohibition on torture to all government agencies, so that, for example, detainees in CIA custody will also be governed by the interrogation standards called for in the Army Field Manual. Full text below the fold:

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I briefly considered responding to Christopher Hitchens’ defense of “Islamofascism” (the term not the doctrine) via a roundabout discussion of Orwell fetishism, but suffice it to say that I identify with the pragmatist tradition and the thing to ask about a term like this is what does “Islamofascism” do.

And it’s pretty clear what it does, namely provide a spurious patina of unity and sameness to diverse phenomena involving Muslims Behaving Badly so that al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Assad, Saddam, Iraqi insurgents, Somali Islamists, plus sundry oppressive folk practices common in portions of the Islamic world like female genital mutilation in parts of Africa, “honor killings” in parts of South Asia, etc. The question to ask ourselves is what, if anything, is accomplished by devising and deploying a term that unites all those phenomena. If you want to use emotional outrage at 9/11 to leverage political support for an invasion of Iraq, then the answer is obviously “yes.” Similarly, if you want to leverage outrage at 9/11 into political support for a bombing campaign in Iran then the answer is “yes.”

But I don’t want to do either of those things, and, indeed, I think the people who do like to do those things are having an immensely detrimental impact on our ability to understand events in the contemporary world and pull the United States out of the foreign policy tailspin we’ve been in recently. Which is a long way of saying, I’m not buying.