Moira Whelan has a good rundown of the whole question of where the “100 years” talking point came from, and is it really unfair to attribute a desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq to John McCain just because he kept emphasizing his desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq before deciding it was politically inconvenient to be attacked for it.

One further point to ad is that McCain’s apparent belief that our military bases elsewhere in the Persian Gulf are entirely unproblematic seems to reflect a limited comprehension of the overall situation. After all, even our military presence in Saudi Arabia hasn’t been casualty-free and it’s extremely likely that we wouldn’t be able to keep all of the Gulf bases we currently have were the region more democratic. At the moment, the extraordinary weakness of the Iraqi state and the general lack of security have tended to obscure the basic reality of how unpopular are presence there is.

New ad continues to hit the 100 years theme:

They’re obviously making a rhetorical point at the end about being worse than Bush, but my guess is that on Iraq as such McCain is likely to be somewhat better as he has over the years seemed more engaged with the various tactical questions about how best to proceed. Where he’s most likely to be worse than Bush concerns our relationships with other major countries like Russia and China, where Bush has generally been cautious but McCain might take a substantially more confrontational approach. Still, for political purposes probably nobody’s going to care about Russia and China, so the fact that McCain, like Bush, will ensure that troops keep fighting and dying in Iraq for as long as he’s in a position to order them to do so does seem like the salient issue.

Matt Duss notes that Randy Scheunemann has a background as a lobbyist for the government of Georgia (the foreign country, not the state), the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, etc. To be fair to Scheunemann, though, this really seems to me a case where someone gets lobbying work because his sincere convictions (in favor of a more confrontational policy toward Iraq and Russia and basically everywhere) happen to line up with someone’s lobbying agenda.

It’d be like if Big Train started giving me money (which, frankly, they should) rather than like the highway lobby hiring me and then suddenly all my opinions change.

Jumping off some of Hannah Arendt’s observations about Vietnam, Dave Meyer has an excellent post about Iraq and war as a “signaling” strategy:

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning.  Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful “Suck. On. This.” Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that “every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our “strength.”

To add some further context and specificity, I point out in Heads in the Sand that the Bush administration wanted to simultaneously get more rigorous about cracking down on nuclear activities in unfriendly states and less scrupulous about U.S. compliance with the multilateral non-proliferation regime. Consequently, they wanted regime change in Iraq not just for its own sake, but also to “send a message” to would be proliferators in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.

As Dave points out, however, among many other problems with using war as a signaling device in this way, it has a very strong tendency to undermine democratic norms at home — “Effective marketing requires message discipline; in the context of a public relations war, there is a real sense in which dissent muddles the message.” This is especially true in the modern world where it’s essentially impossible to segment your message. In the past, it might have been viable for an administration to communicate one message, in foreign language, via the foreign press, to foreigners while allowing for a more muddled national dialogue in the domestic press and vernacular. But those days are gone, and today message discipline requires totally discipline.

I might also add that the problems here are a two-way street. Attempting this sort of messaging strategy gets you involved in illegal domestic propaganda but unless you actually succeed in snuffing out democracy (and perhaps not even then) you’re going to find it essentially impossible to communicate an unambiguous message abroad.

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet

Here’s Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s top foreign policy aide, talking about Georgia and U.S.-Russian relations and casually dropping tid-bits of his bizarre theoretical approach. For example, here’s his view of diplomacy:

Well, I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs. Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics.

That’s right, he thinks the entire process of bargaining for mutual advantage that lies at the core of diplomacy — and, indeed, of almost all constructive human interaction — is a relic of a bygone era of power politics. In the brave new future, either the Russians give way on all points, or else we raise up the national missile defense system and it’s bombs away.

For a more rational take on international relations, you might want to come by my Heads in the Sand event tomorrow at 6:30 PM at the Borders at 18th and L in DC.

UPDATE: That should be 6:00 PM at Borders, apologies.

Robert McFarlane was National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan and is officially down as a supporter of John McCain, but Jacob Heilbrunn reports that McFarlane thinks know-nothing neocons will run the show in a McCain administration, “According to McFarlane, ‘the youngsters’ would run foreign policy the first year and then likely be ‘fired’ by the second after they mess up.” So that’s the grown up defense of McCain. He’s the kind of guy who’s likely to appoint a bunch of people who screw up, and then fire them. More:

My ears perked up when I heard this assessment because it confirms what I’ve been hearing elsewhere: while Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and other realist elders are consulted by McCain, his heart is with the younger neocons, the “beavers,” in the words of one McCain supporter, who draft the speeches and get the grunt work done.

I would suggest that this isn’t just a question of personnel and the neocons having groomed a younger generation that the realists haven’t. McCain’s choice of personnel reflects his own ideas about national security, honor, national greatness, etc. The realists McCain knows are all older guys who are sort of out of the game because McCain was a realist a long time ago in the 1980s when I was in grade school and these old dudes were practitioners. But his conversion happened a while back, and he’s been quite consistent in his adherence to neoconnish ideas (and, indeed, he’s shaped the direction of the movement and not just signed on to it) presumably because he thinks they correctly depict the post-Soviet security environment.

He’s wrong but it’s not like he hasn’t thought about this stuff or is some small-time governor being manipulated by his devilish speechwriters. These are his ideas and they’re bad ideas and lifelong Republicans who don’t like these ideas and don’t want to see them implemented should support his opponent.

Lee Beck gives five stars to Heads in the Sand:

The jump from blog to book worked well for Yglesias. I get the sense that he was pushed toward a less snarky, slightly stilted style, but you essentially get the same tightly reasoned and witty passages you’d expect from his longer posts or magazine stuff. What’s surprising (for a blogger) is that these passages actually thread together into one continuous and earnest argument, a case for traditional liberal internationalism.

Not, I hope, too earnest — there is stuff in there about Darth Vader’s theory of hegemonic stability (similar to Bush’s, led to the breakdown of the polity he thought he was strengthening) and, of course, the right-wing’s Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. At any rate, buy the book. We can count both blog readership and book sales, you know, and when the numbers don’t match up my feelings are hurt :-(

Stanley Fish says it’s confession time:

“I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard. Of course, I’m not running for anything, but I do write for The New York Times and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned.

This well-captures the absurdity of the idea that Barack Obama is some kind of terrorist for having had a passing association with Bill Ayers. It seems that everyone who’s anyone in Illinois political and intellectual circles has had some passing association with Ayers. This, however, doesn’t do much to explain why Ayers has managed to acquire this kind of banal-yet-prominent position on the scene. One can easily imagine an alternate universe in which this not-really-repentant ex-terrorist is basically shunned — bombmaking being a kind of shun-worthy activity.

But then again lots of folks with much more blood on their hands from that same period — Henry Kissinger and his subordinates — are even more respectable figures, key members of the national establishment. Donald Rumsfeld has an appointment at Stanford! Lord knows how many aspiring lawyers will learn their trade from John Yoo at Berkeley. If I had my druthers, we’d shun ‘em all, but I think that’s not in the cards.

Looks like South Africa may have had about enough of Robert Mugabe and has put the situation in Zimbabwe on the docket for a Security Council session they’ll be chairing.

It seems that back in 2005 John McCain understood how dumb John McCain’s current position on Iraq is:

Host Chris Matthews pressed McCain on the issue. “You’ve heard the ideological argument to keep U.S. forces in the Middle East. I’ve heard it from the hawks. They say, keep United States military presence in the Middle East, like we have with the 7th Fleet in Asia. We have the German…the South Korean component. Do you think we could get along without it?”

McCain held fast, rejecting the very policy he urges today. “I not only think we could get along without it, but I think one of our big problems has been the fact that many Iraqis resent American military presence,” he responded. “And I don’t pretend to know exactly Iraqi public opinion. But as soon as we can reduce our visibility as much as possible, the better I think it is going to be.”

Kudos to Sam Stein for writing this up. Checking the record by using Nexis doesn’t count as “reporting” under the fairly arbitrary rules governing “real journalism” but it sure can be valuable.

I made a video with the gang from ThinkProgress talking about my book, the Bush doctrine, etc.

Via Spencer Ackerman, Fred Kagan’s mad as hell that folks like me don’t know what “victory” in Iraq is supposed to mean:

Virtually everyone who wants to win this war agrees: Success will have been achieved when Iraq is a stable, representative state that controls its own territory, is oriented toward the West, and is an ally in the struggle against militant Islamism, whether Sunni or Shia. This has been said over and over. Why won’t war critics hear it? Is it because they reject the notion that such success is achievable and therefore see the definition as dishonest or delusional? Is it because George Bush has used versions of it and thus discredited it in the eyes of those who hate him? Or is it because it does not offer easily verifiable benchmarks to tell us whether or not we are succeeding? There could be other reasons–perhaps critics fear that even thinking about success or failure in Iraq will weaken their demand for an immediate “end to the war.”

For an article that’s full of dishonest propaganda, Kagan actually does a pretty good job of exploring the issue here. The fact that his definition of success doesn’t admit of any sort of benchmarks really is a serious problem with it. And, indeed, the fact that it’s a dishonest and delusional vision also counts against it in my view. At the heart of the problem is that Kagan’s vision is contradictory and absurd. Given the contradictions involved in mixing various kinds of procedural and substantive criteria, any development whatsoever can be portrayed as bringing us closer to success.

Given that there is no viable political movement in Iraq that embodies this vision of a unitary, U.S.-aligned, democratic Iraq any advance by any turn of events embodies it just as well as anything else. The hawks haven’t failed to produce some words they claim define success, they’ve failed to produce a realistic notion of success. There only interest is in whining about defeatism on the idea side and ginning up fairy tales about how wonderful everything will be if only the mean ol’ war critics will stop pointing out that the mission has long ago become pointless.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt Tim Ortez

My cover story in the latest issue of The American Prospect is now online. It’s a look at John McCain’s views on national security policy and how frightening they are:

Things were looking bleak for Republicans in February, and it was clear that only a candidate with crossover appeal to war opponents stood any chance of going toe-to-toe with a Democrat. Thus, though it may have angered the conservative base, the Republicans got lucky as McCain emerged as the front-runner over Mitt Romney, the preferred choice of Bush-lovers. But there is a problem. Despite neoconservatism’s close association in the public imagination with the Bush administration, and despite McCain’s image as a moderate, a look at the record makes clear that McCain, not Bush, is the real neocon in the Republican Party. McCain was the neocons’ candidate in 2000, McCain adhered to a truer version of the faith during the early years of hubris that followed September 11, and as president McCain would likely pursue policies that will make what we’ve seen from Bush look like a pale imitation of the real thing. McCain, after all, is the candidate of perpetual war in Iraq. The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he “hates war,” not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He’s the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling imaginable. It is, in short, not Bush but McCain, who among practical politicians holds truest to the vision of a foreign policy dominated by militaristic unilateralism.

To tie this in to some of the themes of Heads in the Sand McCain offers Bush-like ideas — indeed, Bush’s ideas in a rawer, purer form — but without Bush or necessarily too much of Bush’s personnel. To make the case against McCain you need to be able to make the case against their ideas and not just against the alleged incompetence of Bush and his key subordinates. But of course to do that, McCain’s opponent is going to need to have adequate separation from those ideas.

At any rate, the article is part of a larger package on McCain on the TAP website so also check out Harold Meyerson and Mark Schmitt. Meanwhile, the June issue of The Atlantic should be out one of these days and features my take on Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who’s noticed that John McCain wants to start a new Cold War. Fareed Zakaria’s also on the case:

We have spent months debating Barack Obama’s suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain’s proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

Right. I mean, regardless of what you think of the merits of McCain’s thinking on this front, surely the country deserves some debate and analysis of what’s going on here. Instead, insofar as any attention has been paid at all to McCain’s foreign policy vision it’s centered on his empty promise to try to act nicer to Western Europeans. But his views toward Russia and China would represent a much more dramatic and consequential departure from current practice — just not in a friendly and moderate way.