I Don't Remember President Rumsfeld

In a column that reminds me of David Brooks' efforts to put a nominally independent spin on right-wing talking points, Ross Douthat criticizes President Obama's second term foreign policy record. All sixteen months of it. Douthat isn't going to cut Obama any slack:

His foreign policy looked modestly successful when he was running for re-election. Now it stinks of failure....

But the absence of an Iraq-scale fiasco is not identical to success, and history shouldn’t grade this president on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld.

Why should this President be graded "on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld", as opposed to on a curve set by George W. Bush? The buck stops at the White House, unless you're a Republican in which case it stops with the Secretary of Defense?

Douthat's principal conceit is that, "balked by domestic opposition, turn to the world stage to secure their legacy". By "usually", he apparently means "recently", as his examples are Jimmy Carter ("the Camp David accords"), George W. Bush ("his AIDS-in-Africa initiative"), Bill Clinton ("chasing Middle Eastern peace") and Richard Nixon (opening doors to China) and... one-term President George H.W. Bush with something that's not really a foreign policy initiative as it is a matter of watching events unfold ("closing out the cold war"), although I suspect Douthat means to attribute that to Reagan. To the extent that you want to credit Reagan's foreign policy with helping to end the cold war, it's difficult to see how his second term policy was materially different from his first term policy. I can't help but notice, also, that Douthat makes no mention of the Clinton Administration's success facilitating the peace process in Northern Ireland, instead implying that Clinton is among those presidents who has no clear victory. He also makes no mention of Ronald Reagan's decision to intervene in Lebanon, or his rapid withdrawal after the barracks bombing, or of George W. Bush's inabilty to prevent Russia's invasion of Georgia, and its subsequent actions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

One big problem with Douthat's conceit is that he looks only at what he sees as the "big accomplishment", even if it relative terms it's a small one or a failure, while ignoring the lists of horribles that can be found in the choices of pretty much every president on his implied list. There's no reason to believe that, a decade or so from now, a pundit as generous as Douthat is toward Republican presidents won't be able to find a second term accomplishment by President Obama that's at least as impressive as Bush's AIDS initiative. Further, why is it a good thing that presidents, frustrated by their inability to achieve their domestic agenda, shift their focus to the international scene? If it's possible to attend to both the domestic and the international, go for it. But if it's not, or if focus on domestic issues is "too hard", a President should nonetheless buckle down and do his primary job before trying to build a legacy on foreign policy issues.

In listing what he describes as Obama's foreign policy failures, it's no surprise that Douthat wants to limit our consideration of G.W.'s fingerprints. Even granting that Douthat recites, "His predecessor’s invasion of Iraq still looms as the largest American blunder of the post-Vietnam era", and concedes that "many current problems can be traced back to errors made in 2003", to put it mildly that's a remarkable understatement.

• Libya - Douthat implies that the so-called Benghazi scandal is a Republican confabulation, but complains, "The consuming Republican focus on Benghazi has tended to obscure the fact that post-Qaddafi Libya is generally a disaster area". That's not an unfair assessment, but the question becomes, "What should we do about it". The chaos is not considered a sufficient threat to U.S. or European foreign policy interests that any western nation is interested in intervening. Is Douthat arguing that Obama should have left Qaddafi in power, better to keep the humanitarian disaster we know than to risk one we don't know? He does not seem to be arguing that the U.S. should send enough troops to occupy and pacify the region, for however many years that would take. What's left? Also, how does Obama's Libya record and its fallout compare to that of Ronald Reagan, who unsuccessfully tried to kill Qaddafi, or George W. Bush, who along with Tony Blair spent years promoting Qaddafi as a poster child for the success of the "War on Terror"?

• Syria - Douthat complains, again not without justification, that the Obama Administration has not kept its implied promise to use military force to remove Assad from power, upon it being established with reasonable certainty that he used chemical weapons. Except Douthat is not endorsing the prevarication that the world does not take the U.S. seriously any more because we didn't invade Syria, and goes on to state, "I’m glad we don’t have 50,000 troops occupying Syria" -- as if we could occupy Syria with only 50,000 troops. The military estimated a short-term need for 75,000 troops just to secure Libya's weapon stockpiles.

• The Holy Land - Douthat complains that John Kerry's Israel/Palestine peace initiative has failed. I'm not sure that many people other than John Kerry expected the initiative to be a success. Douthat himself deems the failure "predictable" and... it was. George W. Bush had a number of peace initiatives directed at the Middle East that were far more ambitious than anything President Obama has endorsed. His father attempted a more coercive approach to advancing a peace accord. Clinton spent years hosting superficial peace talks before his last-minute effort to achieve agreement on the big issues helped contribute to a complete collapse of the peace process. But the fundamental problem is with the leaders of that region, and the last leader who seemed courageous enough to press for a bona fide peace deal was assassinated in 1995.

• Iraq - Douthat complains that "the caldron is boiling and Iranian influence is growing", as if this is a new thing. Who would have thought, after all, that replacing a largely secular Sunni regime with a much more religious Shiite regime would lead Iraq to become friendlier with Iran... except for anybody who knows anything about the Middle East? The failure Douthat attributes to Obama? a suggestion that the "White House’s indecision undercut negotiations that might have left a small but stabilizing U.S. force in place." That's not actually what the article linked by Douthat states. The author indicates that U.S. officials did not receive guidance from the Obama Administration about how many troops they wanted to leave behind, but that's attributed to ambivalence, not indecision. The article also suggests that the Obama Administration was not in fact ambivalent, but that "The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible". Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, on the other hand, who was negotiating over troop levels, is explicitly described as indecisive. Douthat admits, "I sympathized with the decision to slip free of Iraq entirely", and he attempts no argument that the Middle East would be better off had the U.S. maintained a troop presence in Iraq.

• Afghanistan - Douthat complains that "", never mind that he's speaking of a first term decision by the President, or that if he's followed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at all he should know that there are enormous differences between the two nations and the nature and purpose of the respective "surges". Douthat seems to have little understanding of Afghanistan, complaining, "even with an American presence the Taliban are barely being held at bay". Let's imagine that the U.S. took a few holds barred approach to occupation and modernization of Afghanistan, as the Russians did during their years of occupation. Did that make the Taliban go away? And if we're bringing first term decisions into the discussion, here's a doozy. For that matter, was Ronald Reagan's effort to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan a foreign policy success, in that the USSR withdrew, or should we look at what subsequently happened in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and contemplate whether it was one of the biggest foreign policy blunders of all time?

• Russia - Douthat complains that "the 'reset' with Russia — has ended in the shambles of the Ukraine crisis, as if there was something that the U.S. could reasonably have done to prevent Russia from invading Crimea. This is the same Putin who, as previously mentioned, invaded Georgia under G.W.'s watch. Expressing a willingness to start afresh with Putin is not something that can be achieved unilaterally.

• Iran - Although Douthat suggests that the Obama Administration could still achieve a "paradigm-altering achievement" with Iran, he simultaneously complains that those efforts could "unsettle[] America’s existing alliances in the region to very little gain". So it's the same situation G.W. Bush failed to resolve, but with the added caveat that any promising effort, and perhaps even a breakthrough agreement, could simultaneously be a failure. Perhaps that's not such a bad perspective on significant foreign policy issues, as blowback from even well-intentioned efforts can be harsh, but it seems like an absurd standard to impose on the President, particularly in light of Douthat's failure to acknowledge that the presidents whose second term accomplishments he finds to be most impressive all made foreign policy decisions that resulted in severe, negative consequences for the country.

Douthat goes on to qualify the Obama Administration's successful operation that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden by asserting that the success of the mission "has to be qualified by Islamist terrorism’s resurgence". It's the sort of footnoting he's not willing to do for any other President, some of who can be credited with foreign policy failures that had much more profound and direct negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy interests. More than that, does Douthat believe that it's the killing of bin Laden that resulted in the "Islamist terrorism's resurgence"? That the Obama Administration shouldn't have pursued that mission? And, wait a minute, the blog post linked to support Douthat's allegation of the claimed "resurgence" doesn't even support his position, instead pointing out how difficult it is to hunt for terrorists and has resulted in U.S. security difficulties for government personnel in Yemen, that the U.S. issues regional security alerts when there is an "uptick in the fight against Al Qaeda in Yemen", and questioning the value of drone attacks.

From my reading, all Douthat's equivocation does is reaffirm that his goal is not to analyze Obama's foreign policy records, but to put a slightly centrist spin right-wing talking points. To be a "reasonable voice" by alluding to G.W. Bush's disastrous Iraq policy and distancing himself from the most ludicrous right-wing allegations directed at the President, and then to explain why none of that distance matters while hoping that his readers don't recognize his overt partisanship. If any lesson can be drawn from Douthat's analysis, it's that six years from now, no matter what larger consensus is drawn from the Obama Administration's foreign policy record, we can anticipate that some number of partisan pundits will offer tear-downs of the foreign policy records of the incumbent President and, if the President is a Republican, that they're apt to try to pick even the smallest of cherries from President Obama's record to try to paper over his acknowledged failures. Meanwhile, I would rather a second term President keep his eye on the domestic situation as even a small but significant foreign policy success does not overcome the rank incompetence of an administration that ignores or inflates an economic bubble that, upon bursting, almost takes down the world's economy.

Rich People Need Not Apply

Joan Walsh writes,

Anyone who purports to care about income inequality who encouraged New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s flirtation with a 2012 third party presidential run – as Nader did in 2011 – is a hypocrite. Trusting enlightened multi-billionaires to lead us out of political paralysis and toward economic equality is anti-progressive.

That's right. After all, what sort of rich person would want to run for the White House to advance progressive causes or would enact policies that result in significant movement toward economic equality and an expanding middle class?

If you really want to advance progressive values, you need a candidate who knows what it's like to be poor, who gives up Harvard in favor of a local college because he's needed at home, who went to law school not on a trust fund, but on scholarship. I don't see how you could go wrong, trusting somebody like that to lead us out of political paralysis.

(If you don't understand where I'm going with this post, please follow the links before you comment.)

Romney's Leadership is About Calculation, Not Experimentation

On the whole, I think Ross Douthat's column on Romney offers a decent summary of the dilemma of electing the man:

If there was a persistent and persuasive theme in his convention address, and in Ann Romney’s as well, it didn’t have anything to do with deficits or taxes or Medicare reform or foreign policy. It was the promise of hard work — work on behalf of “you and your family,” work in pursuit of “jobs, lots of jobs,” work that would “solve the problems that others say can’t be solved” and “fix what others say is beyond repair.”

One can hear in this rhetoric a kind of right-of-center rhyme to Roosevelt’s campaign promise of “bold, persistent experimentation,” his exhortation to “above all, try something,” without necessarily specifying what that something might be.

This parallel is not necessarily an advertisement for Romney. Liberal nostalgia notwithstanding, Roosevelt flailed as often as he flourished, and boldness and experimentation untempered by principle and modesty have been responsible for many more recent presidential failures as well.

But if you’re looking for a best-case scenario for a Romney presidency, you have to hope that his Mr. Fix-It impulses will work out for the best — and that rather than being a model of moderation or a paragon of purity, he’ll be a president who tries, and tries, and ultimately gets things right.

There's no "not necessarily" about it. Although Douthat attempts to emphasize Romney's "CEO" credentials, his criticism of Hoover's failures neglects to mention that Hoover, also, had been a phenomenally successful businessman before becoming President. An orphan at age 9, by 1914 Hoover's fortune is estimated at $4 million - roughly the equivalent of a $90 million fortune today.

Further, in the wake of Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam, the nation has not been very trusting that secret plans exist, let alone that they will work. Asking us to assume first that Romney has a "secret plan" to fix the economy, completely at odds with what he's actually stating that he will do if elected, is bad enough. Asking us to believe we should vote for a candidate upon another layer of assumption (our having first assumed that the plan exists) that the "secret plan" will work? Our nation tends to have a poor memory of history, but I hope not that poor.

Another point of contrast is that, although Douthat apparently sees it as a point for attack ("Roosevelt flailed as often as he flourished"), that was in essence what FDR promised ("bold, persistent experimentation"). If you want to see that in the business world, look at the late Steve Jobs, a man whose flaws have now been extensively picked over, but who also demonstrated a fantastic ability to foster innovation. His mistakes prior to his ouster from Apple were big enough to make his ouster understandable. He took over Pixar with the intention of making computers to movie-makers and, when he realized that his plan would not work, he ended up making movies. He took huge risks when he returned to a floundering Apple, throwing out it's old OS in favor of the UNIX-based OS he had developed at NeXT. He made many mistakes, and ushered in many failed products and ventures. I wouldn't have wanted him to be President but I respect his ability to bounce back from failure, to learn from his mistakes, and to change his business plans when his assumptions proved incorrect.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, was all about due diligence. That can be a great thing in a money man - analyze the deal, crunch the numbers, and figure out what deals will be profitable before proceeding. If you do it poorly, you end up with a fiasco like the AOL-Time Warner merger or Daimler-Chrysler. If you do it well, you make a ton of money. By all appearances, Mitt Romney was an excellent money man. But that type of work is about avoiding risk - finding the "sure thing". It's about as far from "bold, persistent experimentation" as you can get. There's also some humility in arguing that experimentation is necessary, as it implies that you know you don't have all the answers. Romney takes the opposite approach, implying that he does have all the answers but doesn't care to tell us what they are.

I'm also reminded of President Obama's candidacy, four years ago, when people were arguing that they weren't sure what he stood for. A few commentators, such as Daniel Larison, shouted from the sidelines, "Look at his records. Look at his words. It's no secret what he stands for or how he'll govern." With Romney we're asked not to look at his records or his words, to assume that anything in his past history that is inconsistent with our own beliefs was a sham and that he'll somehow be everything to everyone when elected.

Either way we can apply Obama's borrowed phrase, "The audacity of hope", to the voters who project their own ideals onto the candidate. But while you actually could figure out roughly where Obama stood from his record and statements, you can make no safe assumption about Romney. Even Douthat, trying to build his case, speaks in terms of the odds - what's "likely" - and states his hope for how Romney will govern, but while making what seem to be reasonable comments about Romney's character ("play-it-safe strategy"; "studied vagueness and generic Republican rhetoric; if elected his primary motivator will "be in making his first term a success" - which, translated from politician-speak means his number one priority will be getting reelected) he's really falling back on hope.

Note that the language Douthat asks us to fall back upon to reassure us about Romney,

[T]he promise of hard work — work on behalf of “you and your family,” work in pursuit of “jobs, lots of jobs,” work that would “solve the problems that others say can’t be solved” and “fix what others say is beyond repair.”

is nothing but a series of platitudes. When did we last have a presidential candidate who did not promise all of that?¹ Douthat argues, "One can hear in this rhetoric a kind of right-of-center rhyme" and implied promise to offer FDR-style "bold, persistent experimentation", but only if one wants to. If one looks at the actual words, they're hollow, tired and meaningless. And when you look at the few specifics, such as the promise to "create" over the next four years pretty much the exact number of jobs the economy is already projected to create², it's actually discouraging.

Douthat's projection onto Romney of characteristics inconsistent with anything in his record, the personality of a Mr. Fix-it who tries until he gets things right, as opposed to a careful, deliberate man who got where he is (up to the point that shifts within his party made so many of his past achievements and political positions a liability) through careful planning and the studied avoidance of mistakes.

Douthat's comments remind me of Shimon Peres's assessment of Obama:

Obama is an honest man. He's made some stupid mistakes in the Middle East, but he's learned, and he's a serious man. Before Obama, the American military establishment had no plans, no preparations for Iran; now they do.

That is to say, if Douthat wants a person who studies problems, plans for contingencies, takes chances when necessary, and adapts his approach and policies based upon the outcomes produced, the guy in the White House appears to be his man. The numbers guy he's instead backing has a very different style of management, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but suggests that he will be anything but the type of leader for whom Douthat pines. A Romney presidency is likely to be a studied exercise in mistake avoidance. Not a President "who tries, and tries, and ultimately gets things right", but one who studies and number crunches in order to try to avoid mistakes, and who appears to follow the unfortunate tendency of many business and political leaders to take credit for anything good that happens under his watch while attributing any mistake or failure to other people or to factors outside of his control.

Douthat falls back on a rhetorical tool with which I've become a bit bored, essentially "liberals think this, conservatives think that, they're both wrong." Douthat argues that "On the left, it’s an article of faith that the Republican nominee is effectively a hostage to the [extreme right]". He's confusing the political strategy of Obama's reelection team with what people actually believe. Pretty much everybody I've spoken with on the left agrees with Douthat's sentiment that Romney does little but tell people "roughly what they want to hear", and that you can't draw any inferences from his demagoguery. Their tendency is to assume that his past centrism and ability to work with the Massachusetts Democratic Party better reflects his beliefs than his present rhetoric - the same type of projection Douthat displays, but from a different angle.

Douthat tells us that the political right "may be misreading the import of the Ryan pick" and that the pick also benefits Romney by "transforming a spokesman for conservatism into a salesman for the Romney White House’s agenda". Douthat drinks a bit of the Kool-Aid, arguing that the selection of Ryan is "no doubt a sign that Romney intends to pursue at least some of Ryan’s entitlement reform proposals once in office" - there are reasons to believe that Romney will propose "entitlement reform", but the selection of Ryan isn't one of them. I'm also not seeing the conservatives Douthat describes, any significant population that has become convinced that Romney will tackle entitlements in a serious way. On the contrary, the pick seems to be waking a lot of people up to the fact that Ryan's reform proposals aren't either serious or economically sound. If you want a balanced budget, Ryan's not your man.³

I had a discussion with a conservative friend a few months back in which I expressed discontent with Romney's mendacity and his game of "hide-the-ball" on his beliefs and policy positions, and that if Romney were honest about his beliefs he might reveal a man who was qualified for the Presidency. It was my friend who responded skeptically. I don't have much patience for phonies, but he has next to none. We both agreed on this: If Romney were honest about his beliefs, no matter what they were, it would diminish his chance to become President. Politically speaking, he's better of being a screen upon which we can project our hopes. President Obama was happy enough to allow people to project their hopes onto him, but at least with Obama you could figure out where he stood if you chose to pay attention. With Romney, except with regard to how he managed Bain, you simply cannot know.
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1. I did a quick search and came up with a gem from Dick Cheney in 2004,

Because of the Bush tax cuts, nearly 5 million Americans no longer pay any federal income taxes at all. Families bear a lighter burden, because we doubled the child credit and [decreased] the marriage penalty.

Then a point of pride; now a basis to accuse those very same people of being moochers. Cheney also argued, "To create more jobs, we will work hard to make America an even better place to do business."

2. I've previously poked fun at Romney's secret jobs plan.

3. I remain convinced that the Ryan pick was much more about sending a message to big donors, "We're not going to touch your taxes, even if it means big deficits."

In Other Words, Obama's Advisors Weren't Roger Cohen?

Roger Cohen usually writes better stuff than this. After acknowledging that President Obama has accomplished quite a lot, despite Republican obstruction, Cohen rattles off a list of issues in which he had hoped the Obama Administration would have taken different action, or in which he disapproves of its initial approach, and complains:

There is only one star in the galaxy at this White House and his name is Barack Obama. Everyone in the Sun King’s court has drunk the Kool-Aid.

The failure of hope, the absence of profound change, has much to do with the Republican obstructionism that has helped keep unemployment above 8 percent. But it is also related to Obama’s refusal to entertain a real team of rivals, to place around him big characters with big ideas who would challenge his instinct for cautious politics and foreign policy. And so a transformative election failed to produce a transformative president.

Cohen complains that he cannot think of an individual on Obama's team that compares to Nixon/Kissinger, Carter/Brzezinski, Reagan/Schultz, or George H. W. Bush/Baker. I think that Cohen only mentions Secretaries of State, along with Cohen's list of complaints, betrays the real issue - Cohen wishes that the Obama administration had taken a different or more forceful tack on certain foreign policy issues. Worse, Cohen argues that Obama did pick somebody who could have replicated that dynamic, but that although "a superb secretary of state" she chose to acquiesce to the White House "for various reasons (her future is very much ahead of her)" - the "various reasons" apparently being Cohen's belief that acquiescence better serves Clinton's future plans.

In short, Cohen's big complaint is that Obama picked a "superb" candidate who, for all he knows, confronts and challenges the President behind-the-scenes, but that he did not fire her for having a lower public profile than, say, Kissinger or Baker, or for taking their disagreements public? More than that, what does Cohen believe would have been accomplished by more public debate, discord or disagreement between Obama and Clinton?

Further, although Cohen gives no credit to Bush, most of the foreign policy issues of which he complains have existed during each of the administrations he mentions. When he complains in relation to Iran of "tired old carrots and sticks", he should stop to consider how the approach got "tired" - we have been at odds with Iran, after all, for decades. If Cohen recalls his history, our relationship with Iran was considerably more rocky under Carter/Brzezinski, when the Shah was toppled and the occupants of the U.S. embassy were taken hostage. Is Cohen joining the advocates for war on Iran, because if not rather than complaining he should be telling us what the Obama Administration could have done that would have fixed a problem that none of the aforementioned dynamic President/Secretary of State duos were able to resolve. Is he advocating a return to the "Nixon/Kissinger" approach of imposing and propping up leaders like the Shah?

Similarly, Cohen complains "half-steps on Israel and Palestine", as if the issue can be resolved in a vacuum. Were things better under "Nixon/Kissinger" when the occupation was permitted to continue indefinitely and the annexation of Palestinian lands began in earnest, or with Egypt's 1973 invasion of the Sinai? Even if that invasion led to the Camp David Accords and a cold peace between Egypt and Israel, did any of the policies of Carter/Brzezinski slow settlements or result in the creation of two states? How about Reagan/Schultz? Did the more aggressive polices of Bush/Baker result in the cessation of Israeli settlement of Palestinian lands? What about the efforts of President Clinton, who is not credited with a "dynamic duo" relationship? Good, bad or indifferent? And if you look at the real world and see Prime Minister Netanyahu in control of the Knesset, a man who has absolutely no interest in negotiating for peace, what is it that Cohen imagines that Obama could do - even if we ignore the fact that Cohen's "dynamic duo" presidencies often accomplished little to nothing, or moved the cause backward, under more favorable circumstances?

Cohen complains, that on "Egypt, [Obama] toyed with preserving Mubarak ad interim before the tide became irreversible." Mubarek became President of Egypt following the assassination of Anwar Sadat back in 1981. Thirty years in power, mostly under Cohen's "dyanmic duo" Presidents. Which of them "toyed" with the idea of removing Mubarek from power?

Cohen's lament continues, "On Syria, he has in essence dithered." As opposed to what? Invading? Seriously, for the complaint to be credible Cohen needs to identify both what a better approach should have been and why it should be better. It's easy to say that Obama has "dithered", but there are very good policy reasons for not increasing the U.S. role in the Syrian conflict. Using a loaded word like "dither" sheds no light on whether or not the Obama Administration is pursuing sound or unsound policy.

Finally, "On Afghanistan, domestic politics dictated the agenda, at a cost in American lives." That's a loaded, conclusory statement, not an argument. When you go to war, whatever your policy, there will be "a cost in American lives". The closest thing Cohen offers to a substantive point is the quote of a former State Department official who complains that the war in Afghanistan should be a "marathon" and not a "sprint" - which implies that Cohen would continue that war indefinitely. Does Cohen believe that an indefinite "marathon" of a war in Afghanistan would carry no "cost in American lives"? Frankly, the line is nothing but a cheap shot.

The most substantive argument Cohen offers is that "Marines will gather at Camp Lejeune, N.C., to receive the [Presidential Unit Citation (PUC)] award ... he should indeed present the award himself". A third of his column is in support of that argument, yet he can find no space to substantiate any of his foreign policy complaints.

There's apparently a possibility that hasn't occurred to Cohen - that the reason Obama and Hillary Clinton don't butt heads on the issues he lists is because, having carefully considered the facts and options, they agree that the present approach is best. No need for secret wars in Cambodia, no benefit in threatening Netanyahu with a loss of loan guarantees, no gain in invading Iran to deal with our disagreement with that nation's government, no need to fantasize that the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan comes at no cost in lives or treasure or will suddenly bring about an enlightened transformation of that nation....

That is, you don't need "Sun Kings" or "Kool-Aid" to recognize that Cohen doesn't necessarily have the better argument on these issues, nor should you overlook the fact that when given the opportunity to write a substantive criticism of the Obama Administration's policies he chose to forgo that approach in favor of a personal attack.

Looking for Proof of Intelligent Life in the Political World....

Sometimes political events bring to mind the classic Ronald Reagan SNL sketch, in which whenever cameras were rolling or members of the public were around he would play the part of an affable grandfather, but the moment they were gone he turned into an energetic, detail-driven dynamo. There was probably some truth to it, that we never got to see the "real" Ronald Reagan who was concealed by a carefully contrived cowboy persona. Whatever his actual behind-the-scenes persona, Reagan was comfortable with his public image.

A few decades later, G.W. Bush offered the public a similarly contrived public persona, that of a Texas rancher who liked to drive around in a pickup truck and clear brush in his spare time. No pictures of G.W. on horseback - to put it mildly, he was not that much of a rancher. And never mind that the ranch was purchased as a campaign prop and sold pretty much the minute G.W. retired from the White House. But the public image worked... to a degree.

Bush apparently chafed at the public's perception that he was not very bright. So, during his presidency he arranged for some meetings with authors and other prominent individuals in which he would attempt to wow them with his deep understanding of their work, before ushering them out to share the news of how brilliant he was. The principal tool appears to have been flattery - convince the participant in the meeting that the President had read their work, thought about it, compared it to other ideas, and found it compelling. Flattery will get you... a lot of places.

I suspect that the campaign didn't succeed - at least, not to the degree the White House had hoped. That is, although I do recall hearing a number of people, some of whom were unquestionably intelligent, claim that the President was very impressive in their meetings, the formula was pretty obvious. But more to the point, it raised the question of why a man who is so impressive in a controlled meeting behind closed doors demonstrated none of the same brilliance and insight in any other context.

All presidents have aspects of their personality that they would prefer to hide from the public, and often they are quite successful in managing their public images. No matter how it is created, once a public persona is firmly established it can be difficult to overcome. John McCain seemed like something of a maverick until he fully embraced G.W., and some who scrutinize his record question the extent to which the label ever truly fit, but the image was strong enough to carry him through his presidential campaign. At the time, the public would have been shocked by some of the behavior attributed to Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and while we now view Watergate as consistent with Nixon's personality, the Nixon you hear on tape is not the Nixon people thought they elected.

Negative images can stick, as well, which is no small part of the reason why political campaigns work so hard to tar opponents before they're known to the public. "Dukakis in a tank". Gerald Ford was probably less clumsy than the average president, but a few prominent incidents led to him being regarded as somewhat accident prone. Al Gore was not the dissembler that his detractors claim, but any number of myths persist about supposed false claims or exaggerations that made for good headlines but turned out to be misrepresentations of what Gore had actually said.

In G.W.'s case, it's difficult to believe that we were simply talking about stage management. That is, once his team made the decision to play up his intellect, it should have been possible to modify his public persona to better display his intellect. Once the decision was made to push his intellect, it should have been possible to demonstrate publicly what was reportedly being demonstrated in private. The fact that G.W.'s P.R. team failed in that effort suggests that the public persona was more genuine than what was going on in controlled, private meetings.

Here's the thing: Yes, the President and his team have enormous power to craft a public image and push that image forward. If it resonates with the public, it can be difficult to overcome, even with facts. By virtue of his intellectual incuriosity and desired "blue collar, man of the people", Bush was able to convince people that he was less intelligent than he actually was. But when he became uncomfortable with that persona, the public simply knew too much about him for him to take it to the other extreme. Had he settled for the middle, where by all appearances the truth most likely would have been found, he might have achieved at least that much.

In contrast with G.W. or Reagan, some candidates want to be seen as intelligent, even brilliant, and work to advance that perception. Sometimes they don't have to work very hard at it - our nation loves dynasties, business and political, and it also associates wealth with intelligence. So if you're rich and have a strong family name, you are 90% of the way to selling yourself as brilliant.

Even if you turn out to be Donald Trump, crass, boorish, prone to making absurd claims and statements, you are likely to maintain your reputation as a business genius simply by virtue of your claimed wealth, no matter how many failed ventures, bankruptcies and dubious licensing schemes you leave in your wake. Frankly, you can see why somebody like Trump would seethe at the "you didn't build that" misquote, because at this point there's little left to the myth behind his fortune - he looks like a narcissist of middling intelligence who learned the building trade (and got some very important connections) through his father, then got very lucky gambling with his inherited fortune.

But the fact is, when somebody is brilliant you can usually find evidence of that. Not in nebulous, Chauncey Gardener-type statements that require you to either defer to the speaker's brilliance or invite you to read into the statement the "brilliant" insight you are hoping to hear (yes, I'm talking about Alan Greenspan). But in documented, public actions, statements and writings that demonstrate the claimed level of intellect. When somebody tells you, in essence, "Trust me, when he's alone in private he says smart things," tell them, "I'll believe you when I hear the tape."

Republican Price Controls

It's easy to forget that the last President to impose wage and price controls on the country was the very Republican Richard Nixon. But for all their talk about the power of markets, there are contexts in which they remain happy to impose price controls:

The University of Florida, the state’s flagship school, has been hit particularly hard [by cuts in state funding]. In an opinion article in The Gainesville Sun, a former university administrator said this year would bring “$38 million in budget cuts, creating an accumulated reduction in state funding to U.F. of 30 percent, or $240 million, since 2006.”

The university has responded to these cuts with tuition increases, although the Legislature has set ceilings on tuition that keep schools from fully offsetting the cutback in state support. This is true in many other states, too.

Similarly, for all their talk about "free markets" in healthcare, you won't find any serious effort by Republican politicians at any level of government to do away with the mechanisms used by Medicare and Medicaid to limit their expenditures through various forms of price control. The pharmaceutical lobby was strong enough to prevent the government from negotiating over the cost of prescription medications, but doctors have a "take it or leave it" choice with Medicare and Medicaid, and the rest of the insurance market often follows Medicare's lead.

To the extent that you want to argue that state-paid or subsidized colleges and insurance are different from their market equivalents, you need to explain why the free market has not displaced them from the market. Or why it's not a good idea to end the subsidies and let the public programs and colleges compete with their private competitors. Public rhetoric aside, Medicare and Medicaid were introduced due to a failure of the markets, and public universities were founded and funded in order to provide higher education to a population that was underserved or excluded by private universities, at a reasonable cost. The principal competition between private colleges and their public counterparts occurs at the bottom of the market, with for-profit diploma mills attempting to peel away students who lack the necessary ability, desire, need and/or resources to attend an elite private university.

We Should Shed Tears for Corrupt Dictators?

Pat Buchanan appears to believe so:

But what must Mubarak think of us?

He stood by us through the final Reagan decade of the Cold War. At George H.W. Bush’s request, he sent his soldiers to fight alongside ours against fellow Arabs in Desert Storm. He stayed faithful to a peace with Israel his people detested. He cooperated with George Bush II in some of the nastier business of the War on Terror.

A dictator, yes, but also our man in the Arab world. Yet a few hundred thousand demonstrators in Cairo’s streets caused us to abandon him.

In the last half-century, how many others who cast their lot with us have we abandoned as “corrupt and dictatorial” when they started to lose their grip? Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. Thieu and Marshal Ky, Lon Nol, Chiang Kai-shek, Marcos, the Shah, Somoza, Pinochet — the list goes on.

When we needed them, they were hailed as America’s great friends. When they needed us, we abandoned them in the name of our rediscovered democratic values.

Buchanan was in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations, so he's in a position to tell us whether any of the dictators for whom he weeps ever came to the President with a question such as, "I want to create a legacy of bringing my people into enlightenment, creating an educated, free democratic society - can I count on your help?" My guess is that the answer is none. On the other hand, were we to count the times they might have approached a President with a question like, "I need help training my secret police to squelch dissent - can I count on your help?"...

As for Mubarak's cooperation with the U.S. and its principal goals in the region, yes, he did cooperate. But would Buchanan have us believe that no quid pro quo was involved? That even if Egypt were not receiving close to $2 billion per year in aid and participating in U.S. military training exercises, Mubarak would have been as cooperative - or would have cooperated with us at all?

Buchanan sees Mubarak as wanting a better legacy than fleeing his country in the face of popular protest. No doubt. But if that happens it won't be because of anything the United States did. As with the other dictators and tyrants on Buchanan's list, it will be because of the way he ran his country. What are Mubarak's accomplishments as leader of Egypt? If he's looking for a place in the history books, being deposed may in fact be the best way to keep himself from being a footnote between the Presidency of Anwar Sadat and that of his successor.

Mubarak could redeem himself and maintain power until a transition date of his own choosing, if he embraced the democratic process and started speaking about creating a safe context for elections in the fall. He could transform the tail end of his presidency into an interim government, bridging Egypt's undemocratic, dictatorial past with its (possible) more democratic and open future.

Also, if he has to turn tail and flee in the next few days it won't be because the U.S. hasn't tried to support him and to facilitate an orderly transition of government. It will be because, in lieu of making any substantive promise of or timetable for reform, he decided to try to put down the protests with violence. How is that anybody's fault but his own.

No, I don't want to say that U.S. policies don't play a role in this. As part of his quid pro quo with the United States, Mubarak helped sustain policies that were very unpopular with some, most, and perhaps at times all of his population. The U.S. government appreciated that type of loyalty to U.S. interests - but at the same time the government, most notably the administrations of Buchanan's past employers, were quick to withdraw support or attempt to oust allies of this stripe who weren't willing or able to demonstrate the required degree of loyalty. Mubarak might have had difficulty in a more open, democratic society, maintaining his nation's blockade of the Gaza Strip. But nobody said democracy was easy.

As for the rhetorical question, "what must Mubarak think of us," I guess it depends upon whether he knows his history. But in the greater scheme of things it doesn't matter. That's the part that's gotta hurt, right? That (albeit in large part due to his own choice and action) we see him as largely dispensable. That one of his biggest U.S. defenders categorizes him alongside Lon Nol and, implicitly, Manuel Noriega. (Should Saddam Hussein be on Buchanan's list?)

A Simple Quiz For Richard Cohen

Who said the following, when, and in what context?

• Settling Israelis in administered territory, as is known, contravenes international conventions, but there is nothing essentially new about that.

• Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don't grab will go to them.

The first quote is Moshe Dayan, in a 1968 memo proposing massive settlement in the occupied territories. The Second is Ariel Sharon in 1998, displaying concern that a peace deal with the Palestinians might result in the loss of Gaza, before he woke up to the demographic consequences of Israel's territorial claim to that region. For people like Sharon, from the start the purpose of the settlements was to frustrate the peace process and to create "facts on the ground" that would prevent the return of most or all of the occupied territories to a Palestinian state. Richard Cohen appears to understand this, flatly asserting,

[Israel's settlements] are all, under international law, illegal.

So let's move to part two of the quiz. What U.S. Administrations were responsible for each of the following statements, and when were the statements made:

1. The [Government of Israel] is aware of our continuing concern that nothing be done in the occupied areas which might prejudice the search for a peace settlement. By setting up civilian or quasi-civilian outposts in the occupied areas the GOI adds serious complications to the eventual task of drawing up a peace settlement. Further, the transfer of civilians to occupied areas, whether or not in settlements which are under military control, is contrary to Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which states "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

2. The expropriation or confiscation of land, the construction of housing on such land, the demolition or confiscation of buildings, including those having historic or religious significance, and the application of Israeli law to occupied portions of the city are detrimental to our common interests in [Jerusalem]. The United States considers that the part of Jerusalem that came under the control of Israel in the June war, like other areas occupied by Israel, is governing the rights and obligations of an occupying Power. Among the provisions of international law which bind Israel, as they would bind any occupier, are the provisions that the occupier has no right to make changes in laws or in administration other than those which are temporarily necessitated by his security interests, and that an occupier may not confiscate or destroy private property. The pattern of behavior authorized under the Geneva Convention and international law is clear: the occupier must maintain the occupied area as intact and unaltered as possible, without interfering with the customary life of the area, and any changes must be necessitated by the immediate needs of the occupation.

3. Substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under the convention and cannot be considered to have prejudged the outcome of future negotiations between the parties on the locations of the borders of states by the Middle East. Indeed, the presence of these settlements is seen by my government as an obstacle to the success of the negotiations for a just and final peace between Israel and its neighbors.

4. U.S. Policy toward the establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is unequivocal and has long been a matter of public record. We consider it to be contrary to international law and an impediment to the successful conclusion of the Middle East peace process.

5. The Reagan Plan states that ‘the United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements during the transition period (5 years after Palestinian election for a self-governing authority). Indeed, the immediate adoption of a settlements freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks. Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be fee and fairly negotiated.

6. The United States believes that no party should take unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be reached through negotiations. In this regard the United States has opposed, and will continue to oppose, settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 which remain an obstacle to peace.

7. [T]he settlement enterprise and building bypass roads in the heart of what they already know will one day be part of a Palestinian state is inconsistent with the Oslo commitment that both sides negotiate a compromise.

8. Our position on settlements, I think, has been very consistent, very clear. The secretary expressed it not too long ago. He said settlement activity has severely undermined Palestinian trust and hope, preempts and prejudges the outcome of negotiations, and in doing so, cripples chances for real peace and prosperity. The U.S. has long opposed settlement activity and, consistent with the report of the Mitchell Committee, settlement activity must stop.

The answers? 1. The Johnson Administration, 1968; 2. The Nixon Administration, 1969; 3. The Ford Administration, 1976; 4. The Carter Administration, 1980; 5. The Reagan Administration, 1982; 6. The George H.W. Bush Administration, 1991; 7. The Clinton Administration, 2001; 8. The George W. Bush Administration, 2002. Again, while he appears ignorant of the details, Cohen appears to grasp the gist of things, admitting,Cohen argues that, from a Palestinian perspective,

As for the average Palestinian, settlements are a poke in the eye. The construction of each one means yet another piece of his land has gone over to the enemy and cannot be a part of a Palestinian state. It is an in-your-face reminder of impotency, of the inability to control life or fate -- and of a baleful history that has seen nothing but defeat.

Although I doubt he has a sufficient grasp of the history of the conflict to have passed either quiz, Richard Cohen has expressly admitted that Israel's settlements are illegal and an impediment to peace, a position superficially consistent with the position taken by every U.S. Administration throughout the entire history of the occupation. The settlements have resulted in vast areas of the occupied West Bank being declared off-limits to Palestinians (the blue and red areas are exclusive to Israelis; the Green area represents an occupied portion of Hebron, with about 20,000 Palestinians under martial law for the benefit of about 400 radical settlers), with their lands criss-crossed with "settler only" roads, roadblocks and checkpoints:

But it's Richard Cohen, so you can't expect that anything logical will flow from his pen. Although he admits the settlements are illegal, an impediment to peace and a deliberate thumb in the eye of the Palestinians, Cohen argues that the religious and ideological importance of the settlements justifies dictating to the Palestinians, up front, that "some, regardless of legality, are going to stay". He makes no call for any sort of reciprocal land swap. For Netanyahu, whose government he has already described as perpetuating an illegal enterprise, Cohen complains that the settlements have "enormous symbolic value" and that for a minority of Israelis "settlements have enormous religious and ideological importance". It was thus "a major concession" for Netanyahu to (sort of, but not really) freeze the expansion of the settlements for ten months as a prerequisite for peace talks.

So you have a clear legal picture: Cohen sees the settlements as illegal. You have a clear consequence of continued settlement activity, with Cohen recognizing that each brick laid makes the possibility of achieving peace more remote. You have the consistent position of every U.S. Administration that the settlements are an impediment to peace and cannot be allowed to interfere with the peaceful resolution of the crisis. And you have an Israeli Prime Minister who says, "Screw you, even if the peace talks crash and burn we're going to go right back to expanding the settlements."

So, in Richard Cohen's mind, who is to blame? The party he describes as committing an offense against peace? Of course not. The party that is losing its prospect of statehood as a result of that intransigence? Not unless it results in the end of peace talks. What about the mediator who is trying to bring the two sides together to reach a peace deal? Yes, obviously the mediator is at fault, even though his position is 100% consistent with that of his predecessors and even though he has done nothing to create the problem:

Obama, too, has to husband his credibility. He foolishly demanded something Israel could not yet give. It was bad diplomacy, recalling neither Metternich nor Kissinger but the ol' professor and his question about the inept Mets ["Can't anybody here play this game?"].

Cohen apparently doesn't understand the difference between "can't" and "won't", and doesn't actually care about the consequences to peace of taking "no" for an answer. It is tragic that imbeciles like Cohen are given prominent positions where they can advance counter-factual arguments that undermine the peace process and perpetuate the crisis. But, as they say, welcome to America.

The Price of the Iraq War

I don't know whether to praise Anne Applebaum for acknowledging the huge price that the U.S. has paid (and continues to pay) for the Iraq War, or chide her for continuing to insist that it could turn out to be sunshine and lollipops. I do think it's fair to observe that nowhere among the prices she has listed will you actually find a dollar figure. The war has drained trillions from the treasury, and the bills keep coming. To quickly hit Applebaum's points, she believes that among the casualties of the war are,

1. America's reputation for effectiveness;
2. America's ability to organize a coalition;
3. America's ability to influence the Middle East;
4. America's ability to think like a global power; and
5. America's ability to care for its wounded veterans.

As with the dollar cost of the war, the impact of the war on Iraqis goes unmentioned.

I find many of Applebaum's points to be unpersuasive. In terms of America's reputation for military effectiveness, the initial war was a success. The mistake was embracing the notion that it would be quick and easy (not to mention free) to occupy Iraq and reinvent it as a right-wing utopia and corporate grab-bag. Tyrants may not be trembling that the U.S. will attempt such a project in their nations after they are deposed, but they know that we can depose them.

In terms of the impact on coalition-building, the war can't be said to have had any appreciable effect. The war was unpopular with most of our allies, and coalition-building was difficult even before the war began. To the extent that the war "", that's his own fault, he managed to serve as Prime Minister for another four years (considerably beyond the term he negotiated with Gordon Brown when he became party leader), and if he's crying on the way to the bank his tears are so small as to be invisible to the naked eye.

In terms of Georgia, if the lesson to a nominal coalition member (and by that I mean no offense to Georgia, a nation that lacked the capacity to contribute more substantially to the war effort) is that their participation won't inspire the U.S. to militarily back them if they provoke a war with Russia, I would have to call that a good thing. Truly, if building a coalition is nothing more than promising a return greater than the investment - in Applebaum's words, "economic or diplomatic benefits" and "special American favors" in exchange for a small commitment of troops - we are going about it the wrong way. When Applebaum complains, "'Iraq' is part of the reason there is so little enthusiasm for Afghanistan", she displays amnesia - the Afghanistan war started first. To the extent that the effort to maintain a coalition in Afghanistan has suffered due to Iraq, it is much more because of the Bush Administration's change of priorities and diversion of resources from the Afghan war.

As for "why it is so difficult to put organized pressure on Iran", sure, having launched a war in Iraq on the basis of its possession of WMD's and coming up empty, it's harder to convince other nations to follow us into a potential war with Iran over WMD's we concede that it does not possess. At best that has to do with having demonstrated the limits of our nation's intelligence on the state of other countries' weapons programs, and at worst it's because the exaggeration of the threat of Iraq has damaged our credibility - but either way, the outcome was avoidable. If Applebaum is speaking not just of an initial war but of a prolonged occupation, even as the effort to democratize Iraq continues to wobble, few are eager at repeating the experiment in a nation with about twice the population and four times the land mass.

In terms of influencing the Middle East, the Bush Administration made no serious effort to end the Israel-Palestine conflict. It instead tightened the U.S. embrace of Israel. I'm not sure if Applebaum believes that to be good or bad, but it was foreseeable. She claims that the war increased the price of oil, and snipes at war opponents, "this was supposed to be a 'war for oil,' remember", but she misses the boat there as well. Even if we assume that she has never heard of the Carter Doctrine, and even if we view the war proponents who believed that the war would significantly reduce the price of oil and undermine the finances of the Arab oil states, she surely can't have missed that the war in Iraq did remove a potential threat to the world's oil supply. (Memories of the first Iraq war.) It would be naive to have imagined that launching a war in Iraq would flood the world with cheap oil, but it's no less naive to pretend that oil played no role in the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Applebaum refuses to reconsider her support of the war and, although she concedes a high price with no basis to yet declare victory, she offers a defense of her stance by way of anecdote,

Before speaking on Tuesday, Obama might ponder the words of former Chinese leader Zhou Enlai - who, when asked to assess the long-term impact of the French Revolution, allegedly told Richard Nixon that "it's too soon to tell."

If we were to assume that the anecdote occurred, our interpretation of the comment perhaps tells us more about us than about the speaker. Had, for example, G.W. made that comment during a debate, it would have been framed as a gaffe, a mistake, a reflection of ignorance. Had Al Gore done the same, it would have been equivocation, pointy-headedness, waffling. But when framed through the idea of a Chinese leader who is presumed to take an exceptionally long view of history, the statement is viewed as deep and meaningful.

Odds are if it actually occurred it was because of a translation error, Zhou Enlai's misunderstanding the question, or his providing a murky answer because he didn't know enough French history to know that the revolution had occurred almost two centuries before. But under any interpretation, it won't take two centuries for us to learn the impact of the Iraq war or, as Applebaum's own column reflects, its impact on the United States.

Masculinity and Temper Tantrums

There's a concept known as sang-froid, the maintenance of composure, level-headedness, and coolness under stressful or difficult circumstances, that is often depicted in movies as the height of masculinity. Think Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now - sure, he may be under live fire in a war zone, but that's not going to stop him from surfing. Think of pretty much any action movie - the hero faces adversity and gets mad, but keeps his cool - there's no point in a tantrum. It doesn't look good on camera and does nothing to even the score. This is anything but a novel or rare interpretation of masculinity.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too; ...

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

When most people are responding emotionally to a situation, a commonly invoked idiom is, "Let cooler heads prevail."

President Obama has sang-froid. In spades. His coolness has resulted in any number of right-wing attacks on him for "not showing enough emotion". As if he would seem more Presidential if he were displaying barely-controlled rage. Me? I got enough of play-acting under G.W. Bush, and I'm perfectly content to have a President who both acts like a grown-up and treats the electorate as if it's comprised of adults.

Parker apparently sees herself less as an analyst, taking facts, creating novel arguments and presenting them to the public in her bi-weekly column, and more as part of an echo chamber:

Many people seemed to have a hankering for one particular emotion: Not the Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" kind but the "Take-BP-Behind-the-Woodshed-and-Make-Them-Pay" kind. They wanted an action figure in the hyper-masculine mode, not George W. Bush but the Terminator.

In fits and starts, Obama had given it to them. He wanted to know "whose ass to kick," he told us. He wanted them to "plug the damn hole." Press secretary Robert Gibbs assured us that in discussions with Obama he, indeed, had "seen rage from him."

Then the president gave his Oval Office speech. And the collective reaction was, "That's it?! Where's the outrage?!?!"

Arnold Schwarzenegger was well-cast as The Terminator because he was big, intimidating, and had not yet learned to convey on-screen emotional range. Earth to Kathleen Sullivan - The Terminator is an android. The Terminator has no emotions. In Terminator II, the android was frozen by liquid nitrogen - you don't get much colder than that - and yet he managed to (dare I say) keep his emotional cool (because he didn't have emotions). You could hardly ask for a better illustration of sang-froid as evidence of masculinity, yet Parker's not sufficiently self-aware to recognize the contradiction. Meanwhile, back in the real world where the real Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually in politics, how often does he engage in public blow-ups or tantrums when things aren't going his way?

With due respect to Kathleen Sullivan's yearning for the "boil" of George W. Bush, it seems that President Obama's ability to keep his cool is more consistent with Presidential tradition. Sure, we have stories of past Presidents who would explode into anger at their aides - behind the scenes - but that wasn't the face they put forth to the public. Which presidents in recent history didn't present a calm public face in response to crisis? Bill Clinton? George H.W. Bush? Ronald Reagan? Gerald Ford? Jimmy Carter? I'm not sure that Parker's either presenting the vindication of G.W. or the condemnation of Obama that she imagines when she, in effect, holds G.W. and Richard Nixon out as paragons of the appropriate display of anger.

If we're honest about perceptions of public displays of anger, as a society we tend to recognize a male form - the inner beast escapes and wants to "break something" - and a female form - "hysteria", "histrionics", the "hissy fit" - etymology, L. hystericus "of the womb". It's sexist, and truth be told the biggest difference often appears to be that men are for the most part more capable of outwardly directed violence. But in the context of Presidential behavior it's all spin.

Had Obama been reacting to things more angrily, you can fully expect that the very same voices that have been demanding "more anger" would be denouncing him as excessively emotional, unbalanced, out-of-control. And you can expect that columnists like Kathleen Parker would pick up on those themes to argue that the conduct she presently contends evidences a "testosterone deficit" would in fact make him more masculine than his "inability to control his anger". Sang-froid would once again be a masculine attribute, while the "boil" of G.W. would be pushed into the background as somehow different or irrelevant to similar behavior by Obama - but I would not be surprised by comparisons to Nixon.

Our Corrupt Allies

Pat Buchanan is upset that the media is paying so much attention to the corruption and ineptitude of Hamad Karzai. He argues that when we're involved in military action in a state or region, and depict a leader as corrupt, it means we're about to abandon our support for him.

When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.

We did not lose China. He did.

Let's take a look at that allegation:

Mao Zedong’s communists eventually came to power in 1949. A year earlier, in June 1948, Chiang wrote in his diary that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within.

You see, sometimes when a foreign leader or his administration is depicted as corrupt and incompetent, the depiction is accurate.

Buchanan similarly complains that South Vietnam's President Diem was depicted as "a dictator... who had lost touch with his people", something he fails to demonstrate is in any way false. He similarly whines that Cambodia's Lon Nol "got the same treatment", again failing to demonstrate that the treatment was undeserved. For some reason, he neglects to mention such illustrious leaders once supported by the United States, including the Shah of Iran, Manuel Noriega... the laundry list of thugs and despots the U.S. has at times supported in South and Central America.... Should we include Saddam Hussein?

Yes, when it's convenient we have historically dropped support for such "allies", and it's no coincidence that the public narrative goes from their being "important allies to the U.S." to "corrupt and incompetent, an impediment to our goals in the region", but the convenient timing of the admission of corruption doesn't make it any less true. It instead highlights how we care more about advancing our interests in a given region than we do about whether that region enjoys honest, scrupulous governance. Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon - yet he claims to know nothing of realpolitik?

Buchanan's memory cannot be so short that he has forgotten his time in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps he remembers a guy named Pol Pot - an incompetent, genocidal leader responsible for the deaths of probably millions of Cambodians. What did Ronald Reagan do after Vietnam toppled Pot's regime?

Rollback was the American end of the proxy war fought between the two superpowers for power and influence in the developing world. The basis was childishly simple: my enemy's enemy is my friend.

To that end the Reagan administration insisted on recognising the deposed Khmer Rouge government in exile at the UN, mostly because it was the pro-Soviet Vietnamese that had done the deposing. This recognition helped maintain a civil war in which many Cambodians were killed and many thousands of landmines were laid.

What defense does Buchanan now offer for Rios Montt, whom Reagan described as "a man of great personal integrity"? Reagan's high praise for Jonas Savimbi? Is it problematic that those leaders are now judged based upon the facts, not upon Reagan's (I would hope knowingly) fabricated songs of praise?

No, fundamentally, Buchanan knows the charges are true. The problem is that the truth is becoming known:

That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.

That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America’s war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.

But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.

I'm sorry, but I don't feel any great sympathy for people who "cast their lot with us", enrich themselves, their families and their clans at the expense of their countries and countrymen, undermine U.S. political goals and military efforts, and ultimately lose our support due to true allegations of their greed, corruption and incompetence. I can't feel sorry for somebody who thought that "casting his lot" with the U.S. meant "winning the lottery", and who if deposed will most likely live out his life in a billionaire's exile, supported by the money he has stolen from his (and our) country.

Does Buchanan really believe it's too much to ask of somebody like Karzai to steal a little bit less, or to accept a small risk of losing an election he probably could have won honestly, in order to help us achieve our goals of improving and stabilizing the country he claims to lead? Well, yeah, I guess he does. Because they "trusted us", apparently, to not care if they demolished the foundation of our efforts.

The War on Drugs

Today George Will suggests that the war on drugs is one we can win - or, if not, that it is nonetheless worth fighting. To advance his point, he presents the following arguments:

• In the early days of the War on Drugs, during Nixon's presidency, key administration officials already perceived it as an unwinnable war;
• Profit margins for illegal drugs are enormous, and the sale price for cocaine can reach 100 times the cost of production;
• Illegal drugs are easily smuggled from impoverished nations into the United States;
• Inflation-adjusted prices for marijuana, cocaine and heroin have decreased significantly over time;
• There are 19 million active users of illegal drugs, 7 million of whom are addicted;
• Marijuana is stronger and more potent than ever (although I know some aging hippies who scoff at that claim);
• The increase in drug prosecutions since 1990 arises from increased prosecution of marijauana possession, not trafficking offenses; and
• The cost of the "war on drugs" is $35 billion per year.

I will acknowledge that Will notes periodic downward trends in marijuana use among teens, that occasional large seizures of portions of the 200 metric tons of cocaine that entered the U.S. last year caused "abrupt shortages in some metropolitan areas", and that alcohol use did not rise to pre-prohibition levels until the 1960's, but otherwise... which side was he arguing, again?

Cambodia

In a line of argument even Powerline seems to regard as nutty, Ben Stein, Peggy Noonan and Pat Buchanan are attacking "Deep Throat" for supposedly causing Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia (by participating in events which led to Nixon's resignation from office when, in Stein's words, "No one doubts RN would never have let this happen") I am left wondering... given Nixon's 1970 expression on Cambodia's civil war, what would he have done? He wasn't even particularly committed to standing against public opinion at that time ("A majority of the American people want to end this war rather than to have it drag on interminably. The action I have taken tonight will serve that purpose.") The Watergate break-in occurred more than two years after he gave that speech.

Further, it could be suggested quite plausibly that the roots of the Cambodian civil war lie with Nixon's secret war in Cambodia (with its estimated 600,000 casualties), and with U.S. support for the corrupt and incompetent government of Lon Nol.

Also, Pol Pot did not take power until 1975 - so is the suggestion that but for a scandal which started in June of 1972, Nixon would not have brokered a 1973 peace deal with North Vietnam, would have conqured the North, and would have kept a significant U.S. military presence to stabilize both the reunified Vietnam and Cambodia, and thereby would have prevented the rise of Pol Pot? It seems to me that events that led to the "victory with honor" withdrawal from Vietnam were well in progress prior to the Watergate scandal.

Am I wrong in suggesting that, but for the intervening years of Gerald Ford's Presidency, at least Noonan and Buchanan would be blaming Carter for the genocide as well? Can anybody find a single word from any of the critics, which in any way, shape or form is approving of Vietnam for invading Cambodia and bringing Pol Pot's brutal reign to an end? Did any of them criticize Ronald Reagan, following Vietnam's invasion, for insisting upon the continued recognition of the Khmer Rouge as the official government in exile of Cambodia?

-----
Updated to remove reference to the wrong Ben. Ben Stiller? What was I thinking....

Ben Stein seems like a bright guy, but....

Oh, spare me.

Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW's, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?

Ben, pick a better hero.