Jackson Diehl has an interesting column about how Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, “one of the foremost advocates of liberal democracy in Muslim countries,” has tended to embrace populist and somewhat demagogic rhetoric about Israel recently. If you’re anything like me and don’t follow Malaysian politics closely, it’s worth a read. But I thought his concluding interpretation was somewhat odd:

But Anwar’s story can also be read as a warning. His transition from pro-American democrat to anti-Israeli zealot is sobering — and it is on the verge of becoming a trend.

As best I can tell from Diehl’s column, Anwar hasn’t stopped being “pro-American” or a democrat, so it’s difficult to see what the nature of the “transition” is. Indeed, if I’m understanding Diehl correctly what he’s saying about Anwar (and also about Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan) is that he’s heated up his rhetoric on Israel precisely because as a democrat seeking political reform in Malaysia under difficult circumstances he needs to be responsive to public opinion.

In terms of “pro-American,” it’s always difficult to know what people mean by this term. Clearly, though, Malaysia is very far away from Israel and not the kind of country that’s engaged in global power projection. I would think that we would therefore judge the pro-Americanness or not of a Malaysian politician primarily in terms of his attitude toward regional issues in Southeast Asia. Perhaps a “pro-American” Malaysian leader is one who wishes the United States to play a robust security role in the region in order to counterbalance China. Presumably there are some specific issues in the area that we care about. But certainly it would be odd to make Israel the top agenda item during a discussion with Malaysian officials (one striking thing about being in China during the Gaza flotilla raid is that nobody there cared at all) or the main criterion by which we judge a politician.

I’ve got a sort of nagging concern that counterinsurgency advocates have sold the public—or at least a certain swathe of left-of-center elites—on a prettied-up version of what their brand of warfare means. Like it’s really development work and human rights, except the people will carry guns. As Michael Cohen points out, however, the favored success stories of the counterinsurgents don’t actually look like a kinder, gentler form of war.

Consider Malaysia:

The veneration of Templer and Thompson, however, ignores some inconvenient facts. By the time Templer had arrived on the scene, the tide of the war against the insurgency had already begun to turn. This had far less to do with protecting the population than it did separating the ethnic Chinese population from the insurgents, by force. Historian Paul Dixon has offered a compelling list of indignities visited upon this group: mass arrests, the death penalty for carrying weapons, food control systems, burning down of the homes of Communist sympathizers, curfews and fines against communities as forms of collective punishment for individual offenses, detention without trial.

And of course in Iraq the famous “surge” period was also marked by massive ethnic cleansing. Not perpetrated by US forces, but it happened nonetheless and created a more tractable situation. Meanwhile, we started killing more civilians:

According to one measure, U.S. airstrikes killed nearly four times as many Iraqis in 2007 than in 2006. According to Iraq Body Count, a database that records the number of violent civilian casualties in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, the numbers actually increased, post-surge. Deaths of non-combatants involving U.S.-led Coalition military forces rose from between 544 and 623 in 2006 to between 868 and 1,326 in 2007; civilian deaths directly attributable to U.S. forces alone (i.e., not involving any other combatants) increased steeply from be- tween 394 and 434 in 2006 to between 669 and 756 in 2007. Additionally, the surge was witness to a substantial increase in the number of Iraqis held in U.S. detention.

Which is just to say that people shouldn’t kid themselves about what’s involved in a war, even a counterinsurgency war. Undertaking these sort of enterprises when it’s not really necessary is abad idea.