I just found this, and it’s great. “The Guns of 17th Street”, a review of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy edited by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan published in the spring 2001 issue of The National Interest. The author is Jonathan Clarke, a former British diplomat and conservative foreign policy analyst who, as you’ll see, was hating on neoconservatives before it was cool.

UPDATE: FYI, both The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute are located on 17th Street here in sunny Washington, DC. Clarke’s book, co-written with Stefan Harper, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order is very good but a bit dated at this point.

One of the weird ticks of our current political culture has been a tendency to embrace characterizations of Muslims or Arabs that, at the end of the day, are just truisms about human culture but then turn around and attribute these characteristics to Islam or Arab nationalism specifically. In his book, for example, Andrew Sullivan quotes Bernard Lewis:

What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society and the flouting or even abrogation of God’s law.

Strip this of the portentious rhetoric and Islam-specificity and what you have here is the banal objection that people prefer to be members of political communities where their own faith is dominant. Here in the USA, Christians chafe at public policies they see as imbued with the spirit of secular humanism. More secularly oriented people, meanwhile, are happy to let Christians go about their merry way but greatly fear and loath public policies inspired by the spirit of evangelism or orthodox catholicism. Israelis want to live in a state of their own — a Jewish state — and not be a minority in some Muslim-dominated Middle Eastern polity. Just a bit north, Lebanon’s Christians long fought — and quite violently — to maintain Christian domination of Lebanese politics.

In short, this is not some quirk of Islam, it’s how the world works — people don’t like to be ruled over by Others, but tend not to mind the idea of ruling over Others. People are, in other words, self-interested and a little hypocrtical. Muslims, too! The fascinating question is why folks influenced by this view of the Islamic world thought it would be a good idea to conquer a patch of Muslim land and try to rule it. The common thread, I suppose, is an extreme level of condescension.

In a strange convergence, William Greider in The Nation endorses (without calling it that) the Jonah Goldberg referendum plan for Iraq, doing us the kindness of specifying what question he wants to see. Namely, Iraqis should choose between these three options:

1. I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within six months of the date of this referendum.

2. I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within one year of the date of this referendum.

3. I ask that the government of Iraq determine some time in the future when all coalition forces should be withdrawn.

Like any referendum-based plan for Iraq, this seems to me to founder on the details. Ask three questions and there’ll probably be no majority. And suppose option three winds in a plurality grounded in overwhelming Kurdish support but clear majorities of Iraqi Arabs want us to leave in a six or twelve month timeframe. Then withdrawing loses legitimacy (we held a referendum!) but staying also loses the relevant sort of legitimacy in the Arab-populated areas where we’re actually operating (we voted for y’all to leave and you’re still here). Ultimately, this whole notion strikes me as a rather desperate casting-about, a desire to somehow evade the rather ugly policy choices facing the nation.

Call it the populist counterpoint to David Ignatius’ call for “less partisan bickering” as the solution to Iraq.

Greg Easterbrook:

I suspect one reason the Iraq death toll elicits so little concern is that exaggerated estimates exist. Americans can say of the exaggerated estimates, “Oh, that’s way too high” and skip over thinking about the more probable numbers. The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to “unknown causes.” The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have dismissed the Lancet study, and they should. It’s gibberish.

Well, no. That is not it at all. The authors used a statistical method that, as they perfectly well knew, doesn’t generate especially precise results. That’s why when they calculated the confidence interval for their estimate it turned out to be rather wide. The 654,965 number is the middle point of the confidence interval. The true number could very easily be thousands higher or lower than that, but the true number is extremely likely to fall somewhere within the band they laid out. This isn’t hard stuff and it certainly isn’t gibberish.

We’ve screwed up so much, so badly in Iraq that we can ill-afford to stop screwing up.

This strikes me as a curious way to end a column about how Russia’s ability to threaten cutting western Europe off from its gas supplies is making it extremely powerful:

German officials don’t really think Russia is about to turn off the gas if it doesn’t get its way on some issue. After all, it never did that during the old cold war, and Russia today is much more dependent on Western markets. But still, centuries of uneasy relations between Europe and Russia make German officials queasy about how dependent they’ve grown on the Kremlin to heat their homes and offices. Queasy or not, one thing they know for sure: Russia is back. The gas man cometh.

That Russia never did this during the Cold War seems like a good reason to think they won’t do it in the future. And if Germans don’t “really” think Russia will turn off the gas, then what’s the significance of the gas man comething? Russia seems to be “back” primarily in the sense of not being as economically devastated as it was when I visited in the late Yeltsin years. And that I’d have to judge as a good thing; the human suffering involved in Russia’s botched post-Communist transition was enormous.

John Judis continues his efforts to convince me that John McCain may not be the psychotic neoconservative on national security issues that he appears to be, by noting that he has a long time proclivity for suggesting that someone like James Baker or Brent Scowcroft might make a good envoy to try to re-start negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Later, McCain qualifies that to say he “would appoint someone to go to the region who was well regarded: Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, George Mitchell, Tony Zinni, Bill Kristol, Randy Scheunemann.” Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, Mitchell, and Zinni would all be good choices. Scheunemann would be silly, and Kristol would be absurd. Judis remarks:

McCain clearly did acknowledge recommending Scowcroft and Baker as his negotiators. In grouping them subsequently with Bill Kristol (the editor of The Weekly Standard) and former campaign aide Randy Scheunemann–neither of whom have had significant diplomatic experience or enjoy high regard in Arab capitals–McCain appeared to be grasping desperately for a way to undermine the significance of his own statement. What really happened in Brussels will probably always be shrouded in doubt, but there is some reason to believe that McCain, faced with a foreign reporter, did temporarily let down his guard and reveal that, on U.S. policy toward Israel, he is closer to George H.W. Bush than to George W. Bush. And that’s not a bad thing at all.

That’s one interpretation. Another, of course, would be that McCain is seriously confused, doesn’t understand this issue at all, and is just thrashing around saying things that don’t make sense.

If you enjoyed Kristof’s column today, make sure to read yours truly making the exact same argument at much greater length back in July. God bless Joe Stiglitz.

Having abandonned “stay the course” rhetoric, the question arises, exactly, of how the administration’s new plan for Iraq differs from the old one. If it doesn’t differ, of course, then we’re just staying the course. Well, the new plan has substantive components and a procedural one. Substantively, it calls for the disarmament of Shiite militias and talks aimed at incorporating Sunni Arab groups into the political process. I have no idea how many times I’ve seen these exact same initiatives proposed before and touted as progress. Half a dozen? Twenty? Who knows?

Procedurally, there is a new wrinkle — the dread timeline, or at least a “timetable for a series of milestones to be pursued in the coming year.” Nevertheless, General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad “did not say what American officials planned to do if the timetable is not met.” So there’s no actual timetable for the implementation of the new policy, and there’s no actual new policy.

Meanwhile, administration figures have correctly discerned that it would be easy to manage the situation in Iraq — to at least keep some kind of lid on the bloodshed — if Syria and Iran were cooperating with us. Unlike weak-kneed appeasers who want to try and achieve this through talks including the governments of the United States, Iraq, and Iraq’s various neighbors, the administration has hit upon the awesome “new” “policy” of talking shit about Syria and Iran in hopes that empty rhetoric and a hostile attitude will lead to the rise of a new spirit of benevolence in Damascus and Teheran. The president is like a five year-old sitting in the sandbox hoping that if he cries and screams long enough his mom will drop by and sort out his disagreements with the other kids in the park.

An astoundingly blinkered New York Times article on why Republican candidates aren’t getting more of a boost from “glowing economic statistics” takes an astounding thirty paragraphs (admittedly, many of them short) to consider the possibility that “Rather than celebrate the stock market’s gains and the overall growth of the economy, many voters are worried about the wages of ordinary workers, which have just started to improve after several years of falling short or barely keeping up with inflation.”

Yes, yes, shocking but true — typical people’s perceptions of the economy are driven more by the well-being of typical people than on aggregate macroeconomic indicators. Who’d a thunk it?

Sara Mead notes UNICEF’s curiously tone-deaf press release touting such successes in Iraq as “universal salt iodization (to prevent iodine deficiency disorders), reduction of iron-deficiency anaemia and fortification of locally produced wheat flour with iron and folic acid.” Preschooling facilities, however, remain inadequate. That and the country is devolving into brutal ethnosectarian slaughter.

I guess I’m a little bit agnostic on the Drum versus Black dispute about the utility of canvassing one’s support or lack thereof for past wars as a guide to foreign policy wisdom. It seems to me that this has some value, but I agree with Atrios that its value tends to be overstated. My biggest problem with this way of looking at the world, however, is that it winds up discounting people’s views on wars that didn’t happen. Since 2001, for example, various Weekly Standard articles I’ve read have advocated that the US send more troops to Afghanistan, that we send more troops to Iraq, that we go to war with Sudan over Darfur, that we go to war with Syria, that we go to war with Iran, and that we go to war with North Korea.

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I’m fairly certain I don’t grasp the full complexity of the situation, but it continually strikes me that enthusiasts for military intervention in Darfur, insofar as they’re not just poseurs eager to use the corpses of thousands as fodder for cheap UN-bashing (see also), are oddly in denial about the fact that there’s an actual war happening with multiple sides. A feasible intervention against the government, it seems to me, would have to be an intervention on behalf of the rebels and their political agenda.

This is a course of action that nobody actually wants to explicitly endorse. Perhaps that’s wrong. Perhaps Darfuri independence is a cause we should get behind. I’m skeptical that re-drawing all the lines on the map is the solution to Africa’s problems — seems more like a Pandora’s Box to me — but maybe someone can make that case. This other idea that an intervention could somehow proceed without us taking sides seems a bit daft.

I just wrote a draft of a forthcoming column on this subject and I thought it might be too out of left field, but fortunately along comes Sebastian Mallaby with the weird assertion of the day: “In North Korea and Iran, the United States has tried every diplomatic trick to prevent nuclear proliferation, making common cause with Western Europe, Russia, China and Japan, and wielding both sticks and carrots. The result is failure: North Korea has tested a nuke and Iran still presses on with its enrichment program.”

Every trick? Really?

This sentiment is part of a bizarre American arrogance that seems to think “diplomacy” means “talking to people” and “every diplomatic trick” means “talking to them at great length.” He’s a trick we haven’t tried vis-a-vis North Korea and Iran — seriously offering to do things Pyongyand and/or Teheran would like us to do in exchange for them doing what we want them to do in terms of not building nuclear weapons. Similarly with regard to Russia and China. As I’ve been pointing out, we’ve been doing “everything” to get Russia and China on board with our North Korea policy except, well, setting priorities, making compromises, cutting deals and, um, conducting diplomacy. We want Moscow and Beijing to do such-and-such. Well, what do they want from Washington? Diplomacy means finding out what they want and then, if the price is worth paying, paying it.

That’s negotiation, that’s diplomacy. The Bush administration simply doesn’t do it. It issues demands. And when it finds its demands can’t be achieved through threats of force it . . . issues demands again. Sometimes it curtails its demands somewhat. What it doesn’t do is diplomacy, the search for horses to trade, for positive-sum exchanges, for the reconciliation of competing interests.

Tyler Cowen suggests a simple model, I’ll explain and elaborate a bit below the fold.

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