People who didn’t get my reference the other day to a “wave of pretty odd demographic hysteria” sweeping the country should definitely check out Johann Hari’s review of Mark Steyn’s America Alone. Alternative, you could read Steyn’s book and experience the hysteria first hand. For a much less hysterical (and less racialist) take that still sees falling birthrates as a huge problem, pick up Philip Longman’s The Empty Cradle.

It seems to me that the Longman version of the thesis, where population decline creates serious economic problems, at least could be true. To be convinced, though, I’d want to see more in the way of models that explicate the argument. Also relevant in this regard is Megan McArdle’s non-alarmist take on the aging of the baby boom generation. In the greater scheme of things, replacing “maybe a proxy war will spin out of control and Soviet ICBMs will destroy major American cities” with “maybe a rising dependency ratio will lead to flat GDP per capita” as a problem scenario seems like a change for the better.

Funny stuff:

On a less amusing, but more substantive note, it’s worth understanding that these out-of-context snatches of McCainiana really do fit into the broader context of his career. They’re not random gaffes and they’re not primary season rhetoric aimed at ingratiating himself to the GOP base. McCain was arguing in favor of a much more aggressive American military posture when it was unfashionable from 1999-2001, he was in favor of it when it was wildly popular in 2003, and he continued to argue for it when it became a narrowcast message appealing only to hardcore Republicans by 2006-2007. This is more-or-less what he thinks.

Back in 1999, for example, he broke with much of his party’s leadership not to support the Clinton administration’s policy in the Balkans, but to criticize it as both insufficiently forceful and insufficiently ambitious. Rather than a bombing campaign against Serbia with limited objectives, McCain wanted a full-scale ground invasion, arguing on hardball that we ought to “do everything necessary to gain victory” and heartily assenting to Chris Matthews’ invitation to define “victory” as “not to go to the negotiating table with some guy and beg him for a deal, but to tell him what to do.” I think it was clear then and continues to be clear now that launching a land war aimed at Slobodan Milosevic’s unconditional surrender would have shattered NATO, stripped the war of its tenuous international legal legitimacy, and likely gotten us bogged down in a very messy post-war situation in Serbia proper. But McCain wasn’t chastened by the success of a more limited venture in the former Yugoslavia and he wasn’t chastened by the failure of a more grandiose venture in Iraq. This is just what he thinks.

Watch in amazement as George W. Bush, President of the United States, explains that we must refrain from punishing lawbreaking telecom firms because if they get punished for breaking the law, they might not be willing to break it again in the future. There’s certainly a part of that analysis I’m prepared to endorse.

The Navy denies it but it seems that rumors are circulating that the United States will step into the breach of stalled India-Russia negotiations about getting India an aircraft carrier by having us give them the USS Kitty Hawk, which is slated to be decommissioned. Robert Farley explains why this is a good idea.

There’s a substantial “international public good” aspect to much of what the US military does, and I think that’s particularly true of the Navy. That’s good for us, as far as it goes, but it makes sense for us to find ways to do that stuff in ways that allows for cooperation and burden-sharing. Helping friendly countries improve their naval capabilities in ways that both brings our countries closer together and save us money would seem like a big step in the right direction.

Andrew writes that “McCain insists on not revisiting the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.” Instead, “He wants a debate solely on the surge. I can understand why; but I doubt it will work.”

I’m by no means sure it will fail. A certain notion of can-do pragmatism is deep in American political culture, and that kind of forget the problems of the past let’s roll up our sleeves and talk about what’s working now attitude has a certain appeal. But it shouldn’t work. And the reason it shouldn’t work is that a given military strategy doesn’t just “succeed” or “fail” in a vacuum, it needs to be understood in some kind of strategic context. If you understand the war as a giant mistake which created a large problem that’s now in need of a solution, that creates one set of ideas about what counts as a solution. If you understand the war as an opening salvo in a campaign to use the U.S. military to remake the Persian Gulf, then working becomes a very different matter.

That said, the politics of the war will depend, crucially, on the actual situation. Surge proponents presumably think things will get better and better, whereas skeptics are inclined to see these stormclouds on the horizon and wonder if it’s about to start pouring again. Thus you have two different political strategies built in large part out of different substantive ideas about how events are likely to play out. There’s just no way to do the political analysis without adding a substantive analysis.

David Ignatius says that “politicians who talk about the terrorism threat — and it’s already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign — should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman.” The good news, from my point of view, is that based on Ignatius’ writeup, Sageman’s new book doesn’t sound all that different from his previous book, Understanding Terror Networks. Bottom line:

[W]e are not facing what President Bush called “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation,” but something that is more limited and manageable — if we make good decisions.

The trouble is that ever since 9/11, we’ve adopted a set of incredibly harmful and counterproductive policies (the war in Iraq has, of course, been considerably more costly in terms of lives lost, people crippled, and stuff destroyed than was 9/11). Rather than taking a focused, disciplined approach to a dangerous-but-manageable situation, the Bush administration has engaged in a series of flailing overreactions that have, improbably, actually made it possible for a relatively small group of people to dramatically alter the course of the world without expending any vast resources. The whole thing’s been a disaster. James Fallows points out that you can find much material along these lines in his great 2006 cover story on the need to back off from the idea of a “war on terror.”

In my forthcoming book, Heads in the Sand I observe that there’s a substantial political problem here as well. Given how firmly entrenched the wrongheaded framework is, it’s generally not worth any particular politician’s while on any particular day to stick his or her neck out and try to prick the conceptual bubble Bush has erected around these questions. It’s risky. It makes more sense to try to just come up with ideas that make sense within the Massive Ideological Struggle framework. But as long as that framework goes unchallenged, it’s incredibly difficult to make the case for liberal alternatives to the policies we’ve been implementing.

That’s where outside pressure and things like primary campaigns can make a difference — they create situations in which the balance of incentives can flip and people have reason to start trying to dismantle the sort of grandiose vision that Bush and now John McCain have been propounding. However it gets done in the end, however, the main point is that it’s absolutely vital to do it over the long run. Trying to cram good policies into a framework that was designed to support bad policies is a thankless and ultimately futile task.

House Republicans pissed that standing up for telecom immunity hasn’t been the fundraising bonanza they were hoping for. But, of course, it’s all about keeping the country safe with them.

Michael Cohen seems to me to be quite right to be skeptical that cultural exchanges of the sort typified by the New York Philharmonic’s recent visit to Pyongyang could play a constructive role in “opening things up” in North Korea. The DPRK is just too despotic and locked-down for whatever you might want to communicate to the North Korean people to get through. But that said, I also don’t understand the worry that a visit of this sort will “provide international credibility to a terrible regime (probably the worst in the world).” I mean, how so?

Someone says to you “North Korea, that’s gotta the worst regime in the world.” Then you reply, “no, no, the New York Philharmonic played there, it can’t be so bad.” And then what — he’s supposed to say back “man, you’re right, I suddenly find Kim Jong-Il very credible!” I mean, it is what it is; the DPRK is an incredibly horrible regime and I never hear anyone say otherwise. I oftentimes detect a disturbing level of subjectivism in foreign policy circles, as if people are seriously at risk of forgetting that the US is a mighty superpower and North Korea is ruled by awful despots and thus a top priority to be to find symbolic ways of endlessly reiterating those facts.

Since I last checked on developments in Iraq, it seems that Turkey’s invaded and folks aren’t so happy about it:

In Baghdad, the Iraqi government demanded that Turkish forces withdraw from northern Iraq, where they have been fighting Kurdish guerrillas who use the area as a base to mount attacks in Turkey. Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq’s cabinet condemned the incursion and called it a “violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.”

“The cabinet calls on Turkey to withdraw its troops immediately and stop the military interventions, and stresses that the military action by one side is unacceptable and threatens the good relations between the two neighboring countries,” Dabbagh said.

But of course these protests are going to be ineffectual. Given the Iraqi government’s dependence on the U.S. military, a Turkish invasion of Iraq that the United States approves of isn’t something the Iraqi government can or will do anything about. Thus this incident becomes one more case where U.S.-supported Iraqi leaders see their credibility as national leaders leeched away. If you think of the goal in Iraq as helping to prop up a government that’ll be able to stand up on its own, this sort of thing is a disaster. If, by contrast, the idea is to ensure that the authorities governing Iraq are permanently dependent on external American support to maintain their grip on power, it’s actually pretty good. But once again, it all comes down to a question of what do you think the right strategic priority are for the United States, not to any question as simplistic as whether or not green-lighting a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq is “working.”

Kevin Drum snarks that “the surge is working so well that we have to keep it up forever.”

What this highlights is the gap in strategic vision between proponents and opponents of the war. To opponents, the deep U.S. military involvement in Iraq has become a problem. The problem needs to be solved. That doesn’t mean we need to start sprinting for the exists in a mad dash tomorrow, but it does mean that we need to be taking troops out as rapidly as can be done in a safe and responsible way. On another view, though, an indefinite military presence in Iraq isn’t a problem, it’s the goal of the policy. Under the circumstances, a policy is “working” not if it contributes to solving the problem, but just if it makes the continued presence of U.S. troops somewhat less costly.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Timothy Kingston

Tony Cordesman is a brilliant analyst, so I don’t take issue with him lightly, but I think he ought to have re-read this sentence a few times before framing his op-ed the way he did:

Meaningful victory can come only if tactical military victories end in ideological and political victories and in successful governance and development.

That’s, like, hard to do, man. And more to the point, if you start out with a grain of sand, then add another, then another, then another, etc. eventually you have yourself a heap of sand. The relationship between “tactical military victories” and “ideological and political victories [and] successful governance and development” isn’t like that. We’re not a dozen tactical military victories away from bringing successful governance to Iraq. I’d say we have no idea how to bring successful governance to Iraq. This isn’t what our troops are trained and equipped to do, and it seems cruel to toss them into the theater for an indefinite period of time based on the vague hope that a formula for achieving this other stuff will emerge.

Via Spencer Ackerman, this is considerably more forward-leaning than I’d heard previously from Obama:

“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud ap-proach to Israel, then you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.

“If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress,” he said.

He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than “just crushing the opposition” is being “soft or anti-Israel.”

This is music to my ears and, frankly, very much the attitude that’s Israel’s long-term future requires. Still, in some quarters the man may as well have just festooned himself with swastikas.

I think Hillary Clinton’s major foreign policy address from yesterday is pretty good. The key implicit critique of Obama:

The symbol of our presidency – the American Eagle – holds arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other. Both are symbolic tools of what we need to keep our democracy strong and our nation safe— tools that a President must know how to use in the daily course of events, but also when that 3 a.m. phone call comes to the White House because an unforeseen crisis has erupted without warning. In that split second the president has to respond and make a decision that could affect the safety and lives of millions of people here in our country and around the world. Whoever sits at that desk in the Oval Office on January 20th, 2009 needs all the tools available, all the resources at our disposal, and the wisdom to know how to use them.

This sometimes gets lost in the heat of a campaign, but I really do think Barack Obama’s lack of administrative or executive experience is problematic. I don’t find Hillary Clinton’s claims on her own behalf in this regard nearly as convincing as she does, but it is a real problem with his candidacy. Still, as we get down to a choice of two people I do think this line of argument runs smack into the brick wall of the 2002 Iraq vote. Do I worry that Obama might screw up? Yes. Does voting for the woman who got the single most important call of her legislative career wrong seem like a reasonable alternative course of action? Not really.

This sort of hangs like a cloud over a lot of the speech’s best moments:

On my first day in office, I will announce, as I have repeatedly in this campaign, that the era of cowboy diplomacy is over. That includes the doctrine of pre-emptive war. I have been against that for many years.

I like these words. I’m against the doctrine of pre-emptive war, too. But this is the woman who, when casting a vote to authorize a preemptive (really preventive) military invasion of Iraq said “my vote is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose.” Under the circumstances, it’s hard to know what her opposition is supposed to amount to. It — especially in combination with a refusal to deal with the issue directly and clearly — leaves me confused, not understanding who I’m supposed to be voting for.

But all that is, at it were, external to the text at hand. What’s on the page here is very good, including a very thoughtful take on the diplomacy with adversaries issue and a strong statement about the need to avoid the many false choices with which the Bush administration has sought to present people.

This sounds like an interesting initiative:

The multi-million-dollar Iraq/Recession Campaign, which launches Monday, seeks to remind voters, in the words of organizers, that, “As economic concerns weigh heavily on the minds of Americans, opposition to President Bush’s reckless war in Iraq continues to grow. The massive cost of the war in Iraq – hurtling toward one trillion dollars – has increased demand for a strategy to bring U.S. troops home. The Iraq/Recession Campaign will highlight the majority of Americans who want to see leadership on investing in critical priorities at home and establishing real security throughout the world.”

In addition to John and Elizabeth Edwards, those involved in launching the campaign included Service Employees International Union secretary-treasurer Anna Burger, MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser, VetsVote chairman Jon Soltz, USAction executive director Jeff Blum, Center for American Progress president John Podesta and Americans United for Change president Brad Woodhouse.

The trouble is that, as Paul Krugman has pointed out a few times, the short-term impact of the war is to serve as a form of economic stimulus. Perversely, it might be good for the economy for the war to take a turn for the worse — an uptick in the quantity of vehicles and other military equipment destroyed in Iraq could stimulate orders for replacements.

Which isn’t to say that war is good for the economy. If we could go back in time and invest the hundreds of billions spent in Iraq on something more productive, we’d be in better economic shape today. Alternatively, if we could take the vast sums we’re currently spending in Iraq and somehow frictionlessly transmute that into some kind of better-designed domestic stimulus, that would help the economy over the short run. But in terms of actually available policy options (the time machine would be handy, though) bringing the war to an end, though strategically vital and good for America’s long-term economic outlook, doesn’t seem to me to be something likely to help the country with our short-term economic challenges.

I’m not sure the point can be made forcefully enough that John McCain is, among practical politicians, perhaps the single most committed advocate of an imperial vision of American foreign policy out there. This case can (and will!) be made at great length, but one quick way of getting at the point is through Teddy Roosevelt. It’s well known that McCain is a huge Roosevelt admirer, and sees himself as a kind of TR for the 21st century. At the same time, TR is a complicated, multi-faceted figure. Among other things, however, he was an arch-imperialist at a time when imperialism was undertaken with much less of a velvet glove. Things like McCain’s March 25, 2002 speech at USC make it clear that he doesn’t see Roosevelt’s imperialism as somehow incidental to his hero’s vision:

Theodore Roosevelt is one of my greatest political heroes. The “strenuous life” was T.R.’s definition of Americanism, a celebration of America’s pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. “We cannot sit huddled within our borders,” he warned, “and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.”

His Americanism was not fidelity to a tribal identity. Nor was it limited to a sentimental attachment to our “amber waves of grain” or “purple mountains majesty.” Roosevelt’s Americanism exalted the political values of a nation where the people were sovereign, recognizing not only the inherent justice of self-determination, not only that freedom empowered individuals to decide their destiny for themselves, but that it empowered them to choose a common destiny. And for Roosevelt that common destiny surpassed material gain and self-interest. Our freedom and our industry must aspire to more than acquisition and luxury. We must live out the true meaning of freedom, and accept “that we have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither.”

Some critics, in his day and ours, saw in Roosevelt’s patriotism only flag-waving chauvinism, not all that dissimilar to Old World ancestral allegiances that incited one people to subjugate another and plunged whole continents into war. But they did not see the universality of the ideals that formed his creed.

There are a couple of things to note about this. The sentiment that American patriotism is a higher calling than some tawdry blood-and-soil nationalism is a fairly banal one in the US and serves as an umbrella under which different kinds of ideas can hide. But McCain brings it up and specifically ascribes this view to Roosevelt, apostle of empire. To McCain, a commitment to universalism requires American expansionism. Indeed, to McCain it is precisely commitment to this imperial vision that makes American patriotism superior to other brands of nationalism. Our own patriotism would become compromised by stinginess and selfishness were we to show more restraint in world affairs.

I find this new John McCain take on his remarks about staying in Iraq for 100 years pretty confusing. Formerly, we weren’t supposed to worry about his commitment to a war of indefinite duration because, you see, the 100 years was tacked on with the proviso that no Americans would be killed. How this kind of open-ended commitment was supposed to get us to that zero-casualty point was unclear. But now we learn that “the war for all intents and purposes, although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years, but it will be handled by the Iraqis, not by us, and then we decide what kind of security arrangement we want to have with the Iraqis.”

This, to me, is baffling. If the insurgency is still going on “for years and years and years” then either the insurgency is taking place but U.S. troops have left Iraq (which McCain opposes) or else the war is continuing. I guess the McCain alternative is that the insurgency keeps fighting, and our troops stay in Iraq, but the insurgents forget we’re there and generously decide not to attack us. Or something.