Here’s an interesting paper from Marina S. Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy: “Fighting on Two Fronts: Secular Parties in the Arab World”:

Without strong secular parties, political competition in the Arab world could be reduced to a dangerous head-on confrontation between Islamist parties and the incumbent governments. Yet secular parties—a broad term referring to organizations that do not embrace a political platform inspired by religious ideals—are clearly facing a crisis in the Arab world as they struggle for influence, relevance, and in some cases, survival. . . .

Voters see little reason to support secular parties that offer neither the patronage of government parties, nor the vision and social services of Islamist movements. As a result, they have become second-tier actors who cannot compete successfully for voter support. Their leaders, in turn, feel victimized by authoritarian governments that allow little legal space for free political activity and believe they cannot compete with the grassroots mobilization by the Islamist movements. . . .

The crisis of secular parties is emerging as a major obstacle to democratic reform in the Arab world. “The weakness of secular parties is leading to a curious blurring of the lines between government and opposition, with many secular parties looking to the government for protection against the rise of Islamists, even as they try to curb the power of those governments.”

Trying to think in a bit of a comparative context, the question is what the social and ideological basis of an Arab secular democratic political party would be. The answer, typically, is “labor unions and socialism” or else in the case of the US Democratic Party “labor unions and a high level of religious pluralism.” Nationalism could also plausibly work. And, of course, the Arab world used to be shot through with secular socialist and nationalist parties — Nasserism and Baathism and the like — but the US didn’t like it very much at the time. And there’s the rub.

Neither Islamism nor Arab nationalism nor aggressive socialism are the sort of things the US government is likely to be enthusiastic about, but it’s very hard to imagine what the social basis of support for the sort of political parties Americans usually say they want to see in the Arab world would be.

Why does Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) hate America? Dhimmitude is just around the corner.

I suppose I’m just an optimist at hear, but reading about how the People’s Republic of China is going to execute to former head of the PRC food and drug regulatory agency tends to confirm my belief that China’s going to find it extremely difficult to continue on the path of prosperity and autocracy.

You reach for these kind of extremely harsh punishments when you recognize that you have a lot of people getting away with a brand of crime that you think it’s very important to curb. China, in short, has a large corruption problem, and very little success at catching corrupt officials. Thus, executions. But this sort of law enforcement strategy rarely works. It’s much better to catch a large proportion of violators and mete out a moderate punishment than to catch only a small proportion of violators and then clamp down super harshly. But the only even vaguely effective means of clamping down on public corruption is to allow for a free press and competitive politics; the things that create institutions with incentives to expose corruption.

Recently, we’ve been facing the collision of the following truths:

A. GOP members say they can’t keep supporting the war unless the surge shows signs of success by September.
B. Conditions in Iraq never improve.
C. Republicans will never stop supporting the war.

Well, Julian Barnes reports that “U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.” Success has, however, already been redefined plenty. If you’d predicted back in February 2003 that the US would be in the mess we’re in by May 2007 you would, rightly, have been viewed as someone who was predicting failure.

There’s a lot to be said about David Patten’s Middle East Quarterly article denying that Iraq is in a civil war, but let’s just quote this for now: “However, it does not follow that Iraq is in a civil war. While the government is weak, there is no political force presenting it with a serious challenge. Iraq is, indeed, an unstable nation, but there is little danger of regime change, the ultimate purpose of a civil war.”

While current conditions in Iraq don’t otherwise resemble the American Civil War, it should give Patten cause that he could have been standing in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July 1863 saying “there is little danger of regime change, the ultimate purpose of a civil war” and concluded that only unpatriotic and ill-informed elements in the news media would want to say the USA was in a civil war.

John McCain has such a complete and total record of hawkishness, that I think it’s safe to assume that this answer for The Jerusalem Post is more than just pandering:

Long considered a dear friend to America, today Israel is our natural ally in what is a titanic struggle against Islamic extremists – an enemy whose sinister nature I need not explain to the people of Israel. . . .

As President, I will pursue every option at my disposal to neutralize that threat. We cannot and must not allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. I will make sure the American people understand that if we are to defeat the extremists that threaten our way of life, Israel’s security cannot be compromised.

Some followup is owed here from reporters. We need to get a better understanding of McCain’s understanding of who, exactly, the “Islamist extremists” are that we’re in a “titanic struggle” against. One assumes that Osama bin Laden doesn’t harbor warm feelings toward Israel. Still, in practice, when one thinks of Israel’s foes, ones thoughts turn to Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iran, etc., rather than al-Qaeda. McCain wants to say, it seems, that all of these groups are part of the enemy. People ought to ask McCain what other sort of groups around the world he would also lump together in this manner. They should also ask him why he thinks the lumping is warranted. Does he see centralized coordination between all these entities? I think I could guess at the answers based on having read years worth of hawkish punditry, but the candidate himself should spell out his thinking on these points and be challenged on it.

Brian Beutler describes efforts to hold US-Iranian talks strictly limited to the Iraq issue to be a “charade” since “as long as America and Iran are so bitterly at odds, the countries’ strategic objectives in Iraq will run counter to each other.” Exactly right. US-Iranian enmity isn’t rooted in disagreements about Iraq. Rather, we find it difficult to cooperate with the Iranians with regard to Iraq precisely because the overall state of US-Iranian relations is so poor.

Insofar as our goals in the Middle East include overthrowing the regime in Teheran and, short of regime change, doing everything possible to destroy the Iranian economy then, naturally enough, the Iranians are going to seek to thwart our goals. After all, they hardly have any choice of the matter.

It turns out that training soldiers isn’t very helpful unless you’re sure the trained soldiers aren’t going to turn around and shoot at you once the training’s done:

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

Of course the media refuses to report the good news — many of the people we’re training don’t attack us!

Oh man. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone make a serious effort to argue that ongoing school construction endeavors in Iraq outweigh the fact that we aren’t achieving any of our mission objectives, but apparently Chris Muir didn’t get the memo that these talking points are inoperative:

I’m pretty sure that these reconstruction projects have, in fact, largely been halted. And, of course, a lot of the refurbishing of public buildings is necessary precisely because the war has been so destructive. But all that aside, the level of bad faith here is really mind-boggling. If I proposed that the United States appropriate $87 billion to build 306 schools and refurbish 364 additional schools in Ecuador, would conservatives be applauding that? But that’s what congress appropriated in its 2003 supplemental for Iraq. The bill the president just signed appropriates $95 billion for just the next six months. Does Chris Muir intend to get behind a $95 billion disease eradication program? It only costs $1 to give someone a measles vaccine and “approximately 410,000 children under the age of five die globally of measles each year.”

But, of course not; take the value as a talking point away and conservatives don’t care about education in the developing world or global public health at all.

Did Dick Cheney really say this?

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.

This, of course, is exactly the sort of thing one would point to as an example of the moral superiority enjoyed by a liberal democracy when fighting a group of murderous fanatics — we treat people in accordance with domestic and international law in a manner consistent with the basic principles of human rights and human dignity; they do not. But in Dick Cheney’s America our delicate sensibilities fall away too.

It certainly strikes me as likely, though not inevitable, that after we leave Iraq there will be an increase in the level of violence. So should we stay? No. On Memoir Day Weekend 2006 it was true that if we left Iraq there would likely be an increase in the level of violence. Memorial Day Weekend 2005? Same deal. 2004? Same. 2003? Same.

Trend lines matter. We’ve been in Iraq a long time now, and our presence keeps not improving the situation. The fact that the actual leaving may well be difficult is no reason to simply prolong the need to leave.

Good thing the Bush administration didn’t listen to those clown in the Intelligence Community:

Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would likely spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and “probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups” in the Muslim world.

Spencer has more. It’s remarkable to recall that for a couple of years following 9/11 actual knowledge of Middle Eastern countries was considered a disqualification for offering opinions about Iraq. “Arabist” was purely a term of abuse.

National Journal had a cover story last week that seems to have gone offline that saw America in decline. Ross Douthat had some doubts. Wending to a pragmatic third way, I think the salient point is that America’s been in relative decline for a long time. As Robert Keohane points out in After Hegemony, the real “unipolar moment” came in 1945-46 when the United States accounted for something like half of world economic output, had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and much of Europe and Asia was rubble.

Writing in the late 1980s, Paul Kennedy observed that both the USA and the USSR were experiencing relative decline and that the world order was shifting from a bipolar one to a multipolar one in which Japan, China, and a consolidating Europe would all play more prominent roles. What Kennedy missed, of course, is that the USSR was about to enter an extremely acute period of decline. Thus, from 1989-1993 or so, the #2 power declined so rapidly relative to the #1 power that America’s continued slow-but-steady relative decline was masked.

This led to the Clinton years, where the United States played the role of hegemon, but did so relatively cautiously. Neoconservatives spent eight years fulminating that Clinton was being too cautious and missing the opportunity of a world-historical lifetime. In March 2001, Charles Krauthammer explained:

In the liberal internationalist view of the world, the U.S. is merely one among many–a stronger country, yes, but one that has to adapt itself to the will and the needs of “the international community.” That is why the Clinton Administration was almost manic in pursuit of multilateral treaties–on chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear testing, proliferation. No matter that they could not be enforced. Our very signing would show us to be a good international citizen.

This is folly. America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.

There was certainly folly lurking somewhere in that column, but it wasn’t in Bill Clinton’s caution. Green Lantern foreign policy has merely proven that Clinton had this right. We’re stronger than anyone else, but not nearly so strong that it doesn’t benefit us to play nicely with others.

Sharon Burke says you should stop tarring her and her colleagues with the generic “centrist” brush:

The United States needs to get out of the war in Iraq. We should have never, never been in it in the first place. This war was a stupid idea, not just a badly executed idea.

That is my position. It is – and always has been – the position of Third Way. Well, actually Third Way did not exist when we got into this war. But I certainly know it was my position, and that of all four founders of this group. One of them, Matt Bennett, moved to Little Rock, Arkansas to work for Wes Clark’s campaign because he thought Clark was the best anti-war candidate. So let there be no doubt that Third Way’s team has opposed this war from the very beginning.

She also notes that “I hope that the people of the Middle East will have an opportunity to benefit from open economies and representative governments . . . [b]ut I do not believe that invading other nations to force them into democracies can possibly work, and I really don’t believe it can work in the Middle East.” I think it’s fair to say that I have major disagreements with a lot of the domestic policy stuff that’s come out under the Third Way umbrella, but netroots folks would do well to keep in mind that unlike, say, the DLC, Third Way has a pretty good foreign policy track record. Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, authors of this new Third Way report on national security, for example, were also Iraq War opponents from the beginning.

It’s not just union-busting, it’s foreign policy, too!

According to Justice Department filings, Colombia agreed this month to pay $300,000 to public relations firm Burson-Marsteller – whose president, Mark Penn, is a senior advisor to Sen. Clinton – to help “educate members of the U.S. Congress and other audiences” about the trade deal and secure continued U.S. funding for the $5 billion anti-narcotics program Plan Colombia.

The filings also show that last month Uribe’s government put The Glover Park Group, a Washington D.C.-based lobbying firm that includes former Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart, on a $40,000 a month retainer.

Of course, hiring Clintonites to do the Plan Colombia lobbying is natural since it was a Clinton Administration initiative in the first plan. It’s also been a disastrous failure. It would be nice for a new Democratic administration to revisit things, but it looks clear that Hillary Clinton won’t be the person to do that.