The Bush-Blair "Freedom Agenda"

Charles Krauthammer bloviates,

Today, everyone and his cousin supports the "freedom agenda." Of course, yesterday it was just George W. Bush, Tony Blair and a band of neocons with unusual hypnotic powers who dared challenge the received wisdom of Arab exceptionalism - the notion that Arabs, as opposed to East Asians, Latin Americans, Europeans and Africans, were uniquely allergic to democracy.

To the extent that Krauthammer is arguing that Tony Blair personifies the G.W. Bush "freedom agenda", and how it relates to Egypt, I agree completely.

Tony Blair has described Hosni Mubarak, the beleaguered Egyptian leader, as "immensely courageous and a force for good" and warned against a rush to elections that could bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power.

The former prime minister, now an envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, praised Mubarak over his role in the negotiations and said the west was right to back him despite his authoritarian regime because he had maintained peace with Israel.

Yes, when G.W., Tony Blair and their merry "band of neocons" stood for freedom they stood squarely behind people like Mubarak. And they stood in the way of Arab democracy not because they didn't believe it would be embraced, but because those pesky Arabs might have elected the wrong people.

And that pretty much sums up the rest of Krauthammer's column - the Arab world needs democracy, so for now we should prop up dictators and hope that they start creating the necessary institutions and opportunities such that elections can take place once the Arab world is no longer Islamic.

Some Decent Advice from Thomas Friedman

To President Obama:

Today, I believe President Obama should put his own peace plan on the table, bridging the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and demand that the two sides negotiate on it without any preconditions. It is vital for Israel’s future — at a time when there is already a global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state — that it disentangle itself from the Arabs’ story as much as possible. There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way.

Or perhaps better,¹ he should instruct Netanyahu to make a public proposal including a map and final borders by a specified date, or the U.S. will release its proposal. Perhaps indicating the reported Taba or Olmert maps as a possible starting point for his own plan. With the neocons embracing self-determination, a concept that most of them have never seemed to believe applies to Palestinians, let's put them to the test. And let's score one for the U.S. in the "Honest broker, concerned about freedoms around the world" column.

Update: Subtract Netanyahu's intransigence and the two sides may be a lot closer to a resolution than some would have us believe.
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1. One issue with the Obama Administration's creating a map would be that they would be staking out the maximum borders for a Palestinian state. The Palestinians lack any real bargaining power and, having been told by the "honest broker" that "this is fair," any shift they could negotiate would likely be de minimis and, more likely, they would end up having to cede ground.

Afghanistan: In or Out?

George Will is so convinced that the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, that he comes close to complimenting President Obama:¹

On July 24, 2008, in Berlin, Obama stressed the need to "defeat the Taliban." Then, however, he spoke as a "citizen of the world," not as president. Now he is being presidential by reconsidering some implications of the politically calculated rhetoric that helped make him president. He is rightly ignoring those who cannot distinguish thinking from dithering....

Whatever strategy Obama adopts, its success cannot depend on America teaching Afghans to [elect good men]. If he is looking for a strategy that depends on legitimacy in Kabul, he is looking for a unicorn.

Here, Will is correct - Karzai's removed any doubt about how he is going to run Afghanistan, or at least those portions under which he (backed by the U.S. military) actually exercises control, and his priorities are quite different from ours. We cannot afford to hope that Karzai and Afghanistan's government somehow magically reform themselves, and a strategy that depends upon that hope is doomed to fail. (One wonders why it took some people seven years to figure that out, but there you go.)

Remember, back in the day, when the neocons were describing themselves as wanting to move away from realpolitik? How they wanted to build real nations, with real, functional, honest governments, and not simply replace one tyrant with another who was more willing to bend to the will of the U.S.? Is anybody still trying to advance that argument? If so, where can I find an example of their putting that into practice? Isn't it the paleocons who have more consistently advocated against military adventurism, the notion that governments can be magically replaced with U.S.-friendly regimes that are also competent, ethical and democratic? Sneering that the paleocons would install somebody like, you know, Karzai doesn't work so well when it's the neocons who most want U.S. soldiers to shed blood to keep him in power. And when it comes to backing traditional U.S. values, such as the ethical treatment of prisoners captured by the military, once again don't the paleocons have the moral high ground?

Turn the page and see exactly what I mean. Yet another unsigned editorial from Fred Hiatt's editorial board, insisting that we back Karzai:

As President Obama pointedly noted in recognizing Mr. Karzai's reelection a day earlier, "the proof is not going to be in words. It's going to be in deeds." True enough -- but it's also the case that the direction of Mr. Karzai's deeds is going to depend to a large degree on whether he believes he can depend on the United States, its forces and especially its president to back him up.

That's true, but not in the sense the editorial intends. Backed in the manner the Post demands, Karzai will continue to be corrupt and self-dealing, unconcerned with establishing a competent, stable government, and unconcerned with the consequences of electoral corruption that demolish our effort to nudge his nation toward democracy. Isn't that the lesson of the past seven years?

Senior envoys such as Vice President Biden have quarreled with him in private, even as Mr. Obama has held Karzai at arm's length in public. This might have made some sense if there were an alternative to Mr. Karzai. But there is none.

Well, um, yeah, there are alternatives. Sure, Bush and Cheney squandered most of the good ones, and even toyed around with a bad one, but no question there are alternatives.

A fair question, what does Karzai actually bring to the table? He undermines our effort to democratize Afghanistan. He undermines our effort to establish good governance. He happily enriches himself at the expense of his people, aligns himself with warlords and Taliban leaders... Is it enough that he looks good on camera? That he presumably pledged his pliance to the Bush Administration? Karzai depends upon useful idiots like Hiatt, always willing to give him "another chance" because "there aren't any alternatives", rather than insisting that he demonstrate that he's worthy of another chance.

But more to the point, how can Hiatt's and his crew, or any neocon, argue in support of the perpetual, unquestioning support of Karzai without admitting that their concerns about establishing good governance in troubled or lawless nations were a fiction? Because here's the rub: If you truly want an Afghanistan that is less tribal, less radical, less fundamentalist, at least tolerant of women's rights, you need to do a lot better than Karzai. Hoping that he'll change, or not even hoping but insisting that he's our Obi-Wan Kenobi,² is unlikely to turn out any better than Russia's experiment with Mohammad Najibullah.

I hate to harp on this, but if the best strategy we can come up with for Afghanistan is to prop up Karzai and significantly expand our military presence in order to just tread water, with no strategy for success or even a concept of what success will look like,³ we're not doing favors to anyone... Well, except Karzai. I would detest a future for Afghanistan that involved a resurgent Taliban, but it's unrealistic to expect that the U.S. will tread water indefinitely.
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1. Ever since Clinton's election, Will's had something of a pathological need to insult Democrats; even, or perhaps especially, when he criticizes Republicans, he traditionally makes sure to suggest that the Democrats are nonetheless worse.

2. "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're our only hope."

3. The "Groundhog Day" approach.

Inspired by the Founding Fathers....

David Brooks explains:

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

The "and others" maybe, although those "others" behind the "Southern Strategy" would seem to have relied upon Lincoln's pre-Civil War statements on race. But the neoconservatives? Which words does Brooks have in mind?

I can just picture the founding fathers arguing that we had a duty to invade foreign nations to liberate their people and spread democracy. I can just picture Lincoln insisting that the Civil War would be a cakewalk, could be won with 100,000 troops (maybe 30,000 or so more if things don't go well), and that the people of the south would greet us as liberators. Can't you?

Based upon the actual policies they have advanced, I think it would be more accurate to say that the neocons derived their brand of conservativism by watching the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

The Neo-Cons & Chechnya

Yesterday's Guardian brought us the claim that the Neo-Cons advocate against Russia in the Chechnya conflict, and turn a very blind eye toward Chechen terrorism:

This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

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The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there.

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Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere.

Some people will take any opportunity to bash the "neo-cons", or exaggerate their position, so I viewed the piece with a jaundiced eye.

But today, leading neo-con Daniel Pipes shared his views in the Times:

The terrorist attack in Beslan in Russia's North Caucasus was not only bloody but viciously sadistic: the children taken hostage by pro-Chechen terrorists were denied food and drink and even forbidden to go to the bathroom, then massacred when the siege was broken. It is proper for the civilized world to express outrage and feel solidarity with the Russian people. But to say this is not necessarily to agree with those - including President Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia - who would equate the massacre with the 9/11 attacks and Islamic terrorism in general.

Um... excuse me? (Note his use of the infamous "but" clause, used habitually by the defenders of terrorism - "This incident is indefensible, but....") Perhaps he'll explain that....

Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness. The terrorists who blew up the train station in Madrid just before the Spanish election this year had a specific goal in mind: to compel the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Chechen case is, in some respects, analogous. A small group of Muslim people, the Chechens have been battling their Russian conquerors for centuries.

An - so Chechen terrorism, involving massacre of children, is understandable and excusable because... in the mind of Pipes it's like Israel-Palestine? How do people like Pipes not choke on their own words when they advance such wildly hypocritical, internally inconsistent positions - and stand as apologists for one of history's worst terrorist attacks on a civilian target?

Criticizing the Neo-Cons

Today, David Brooks suggests that the public perception of the "neo-cons" is incorrect, and seems to suggest that criticism of neo-cons is tantamount to anti-Semitism:

In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for "conservative" and neo is short for "Jewish") travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings.

Fair enough - there probably is overstatement, perhaps premised on the fact that PNAC's report, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, was seemingly followed extremely closely by the Bush Administration, particularly with regard to Iraq and the Middle East. I think PNAC itself bears some responsibility for any inflated public perception of its influence - it seems to want people to believe that it is everything its fiercest critics claim, and links prominently to that report on its website. Additionally, I think many people apply a broader definition of neo-con than that embraced by Brooks, and to them the movement is not synonymous with its Jewish constituents.

And if you can give your foes a collective name — liberals, fundamentalists or neocons — you can rob them of their individual humanity. All inhibitions are removed. You can say anything about them. You get to feed off their villainy and luxuriate in your own contrasting virtue. You will find books, blowhards and candidates playing to your delusions, and you can emigrate to your own version of Planet Chomsky. You can live there unburdened by ambiguity.

That's a good point, too often forgotten in today's world of deepening partisanship. But stepping back to an earlier statement,

Still, there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything.

and the article's conclusion that anti-Semitism is resurgent, I hope the intended message is not that criticism of neo-cons (or of the overblown influence of the neo-cons) is rooted in anti-Semitism. Most people I have heard criticize the neo-cons have no apparent knowledge of which ones are or are not Jewish, and their criticism seems to be rooted in policy and concern about undue influence as opposed to their religion. (The most ridiculous rumor cited by Brooks is about Dick Cheney - "my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans". Cheney, of course, is not Jewish. Simiarly, Ann Coulter is probably the most hated of the self-professed neo-cons - and she favors converting as much of the developing world as possible to Christianity.) If I heard, or even sensed, that this was a reinvention of the notion of Jewish cabals which, in one way or another, control or manipulate the world, I would be one of many who would promptly jump down the throats of any advancing such nonsense.

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