Dean Barnett at the Weekly Standard blog steps up the rhetoric against “diploweenies” who don’t want to be conscripted for service in Iraq, adding a casual slander to the schoolyard-level insults:

Why would a professional diplomat care to engage the most urgent diplomatic challenge of the 21st century when he could instead be inflating the ego of some third world potentate while being feted as some kind of royalty? Besides, since Iraq lacks a functional government that’s hostile to American interests, “going native” isn’t even an option.

Thank God for the past seven years our policies have been driven by the manly-men of the Standard and not the treasonous goons at Foggy Bottom! Ignoring the advice of America’s foreign service professionals has, thus far, reaped massive benefits in terms of unprecedented international isolation. But it gets crazier as Barnett endorses a Duncan Hunter plan to really stick it to the diploweenies by pulling wounded soldiers out of their hospital beds to redeploy them to Iraq, but this time to conduct diplomatic missions they’re not trained for. That’ll show ‘em!

Meanwhile, previously-hyped-in-this-space congressional candidate Dan Grant (Texas-10) is a former diploweenie himself who served in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq before coming home to run for congress and is now airing his first ad:

I think I’d rather listen to him than to the Standard.

I’m all for attacking Rudy Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy, but I’m not sure I’m ready to join David Klinghoffer in the view that the problem with Giuliani is his failure to recognize that abortion and gay marriage are what’s going to let the terrorists destroy America:

In the run-up to this tragedy, was he out banging the drum for a tough anti-Babylonian stance, sponsoring a “Babylo-Fascist Awareness Week” a-la-David Horowitz? No. On the contrary, he was accused of treason by the war party among his fellow Jews. He warned that, in the context of Israel’s corrupt moral culture, it was useless to resist Babylon. [...]

If you are not a believer, it should still be possible to appreciate the accumulated wisdom of three thousand years as found in the pages of Scripture; men who faced outside enemies far more dangerous than Islamic terror, concluded that the real peril came from within.

I appreciate the effort to put a sense of perspective around the Islamoscaryboogiefascist menace, but this particular branch of the blame America first crowd doesn’t really make very much sense. I mean, surely there are more Godless countries out there than the United States; how come the Lord wasn’t inflicting his wrath on idolatrous Denmark?

Tyler Cowen directs my attention to Chris Coynes’ new book After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy. The prognosis isn’t good:

What do the data indicate regarding the effectiveness of reconstruction as a means of achieving liberal democracy? In short, the historical record indicates that efforts to export liberal democracy at gunpoint are more likely to fail than succeed. Of the twenty-five reconstruction efforts, where five years have passed since the end of occupation, seven have achieved the stated benchmark, resulting in a 28 percent success rate. The rate of success stays the same for those cases where ten years have passed. For those efforts where at least fifteen years have passed, nine out of twenty-three have achieved the benchmark for success, resulting in a 39 percent success rate. Finally, of the twenty-two reconstruction efforts where twenty years have passed since the exit of occupiers eight have reached the benchmark, resulting in a 36 percent success rate.

It’s worth saying, of course, that you’re unlikely to ever find the United States actually invading other countries in order to turn them into democracies. Rather, it so happens to be the case that pretty much all of the good candidates for “enemy” status are dubiously democratic regimes, so that rhetorical invocation of democratic values becomes an attractive strategy. The poor record, in practice, of armed democratization is just a further reason to think that such rhetoric should be basically ignored. Sometimes situations may arise where using military force to topple a foreign government is the right thing to do (Germany during World War II and Afghanistan after 9/11 come to mind) and then I think we have an obligation to do our best to bequeath a decent new regime to the place we’ve conquered. But the prospects for success aren’t nearly good enough to make this the reason for launching a war.

This Gail Collins column is a mixed bad, and readers will know that I disagree with her about Social Security, but I think she nails this point:

“Well, first of all, I am against a rush to war,” she said. That would have been disturbing even if she had not attacked the idea of “rushing to war” twice more in the next 60 seconds. Being against a rush to another war in the Middle East seems to be setting the bar a tad low. How does she feel about a measured march to war? A leisurely stroll?

Right. The Bush administration itself doesn’t appear to be pursuing a “rush to war” with Iran. Given the very long period of time — over a year — during which the saber-rattling has played out, there’s really no question of a “rush” at this point. But the strategy still embeds a logic of confrontation and, yes, war. The key point here in many ways is less the Kyl-Lieberman vote as such than the way Kyl-Lieberman fits into a broader package — hawkish on Iraq, attacked Obama from the right on Iran, seemed to rule out normalization of relations with Iran even in exchange for verifiable disarmament in a Foreign Affairs article — of hawkish Iran-related measures even in the midst of a primary campaign.

Ilan Goldenberg asks what’s the president’ strategy for Iraq:

Iraq still does not have a functional central government. Half of the cabinet has quit and the national government has essentially given up on reconciliation. Moreover, the Iraqi government opposes the Administration’s “bottom up” approach in Anbar and has been actively working to undermine it. It is also not clear how the approach in Anbar, where American forces and Sunni tribes agreed to fight foreign extremist elements, translates to the rest of the country. It does not explain how warring Shi’a factions who are fighting a civil war in the South might reconcile or how to overcome the conflict between Kurds and Arabs over Kirkuk. In effect, while the central government is willing to work with the United States and the Sunni tribes are willing to work with the United States, there is no indication that they are willing to work with each other. If these questions are not addressed, the situation in Iraq may deteriorate further and in the long run we may find that the arming, organizing, and training of various Sunni and Shi’a groups will only exacerbate the civil war.

Seems like a problem. Of course, insofar as you create a situation where you have three different factions who all dislike and distrust each other more than they dislike and distrust the United States, then you’ve laid the groundwork for a situation in which a long-term American military presence will be tolerated, if not exactly welcomed. This is one of the paradoxes of our current policy in Iraq. Insofar as the establishment of permanent military facilities in Iraq is one of the goals of the policy, national reconciliation is probably a bad thing since a unified Iraq would be more likely to tell us to get lost.

With Karen Hughes stepping down, some questions get asked about why she’s so ineffective:

Q So in your mind, she has succeeded in her goal of outreach to the Arab world, based on those numbers that I just cited?

MS. PERINO: Look, I’m not going to comment or respond to a poll that you just read out. I don’t know about those numbers, I don’t know the questions that were asked; I think it’s inappropriate. What I can tell you is that she has done amazing work. Let me give another example. She started a women’s outreach effort with the Middle Eastern countries and started a breast cancer initiative. And just last week Mrs. Bush went and highlighted that initiative and went to four different countries in the Middle East, had a very successful trip in explaining that women have tools at their disposal when they find out that they have breast cancer, early detection and treatment. That is precisely what the President was hoping Karen Hughes would achieve, and she has.

Q So in your view, the U.S. image in the Arab world has improved under Karen Hughes?

MS. PERINO: We are making progress. I know that we have a long way to go.

And indeed we do have a long way to go.

I’ve tried in the past to draw attention to the substantial continuities between the “neoconservative” foreign policy of George W. Bush and the classical imperialism of the late-19th and early twentieth centuries. “D” at Lawyers, Guns, and Money notes some linkages in terms of the rhetoric of gender anxiety as a motivating factor in foreign policy adventurism. And I think there’s something to do. This sort of consideration doesn’t drive strategic thinking, but it does help create a mentality wherein the destructiveness of war counts as a benefit rather than a cost of a war policy (see also “suck on this”). That skewed approach to accounting obviously sends the whole debate off-kilter in very bad ways.