John Derbyshire has looked into Nuri al-Maliki’s soul: 

Nothing in any of Maliki’s “inartful” statements is the least bit surprising to a ‘To Hell With Them’ Hawk. This absurd and insane desire to be loved and admired by foreigners will be the death of this republic.

Now that our American blood and money has seen off most of the enemies of Maliki and his Iranian pals, it is perfectly natural for them to believe they can finish the job themselves, without further assistance from us. Maliki can now afford to start putting distance between himself and the U.S.A. — essential for political viability in a region where the U.S.A. is pretty generally hated.

We should tell Maliki, loudly and in public, that he owes his job to us, and that further prosecution of our military operations in his country will be conducted with regard only to U.S. interests, as determined in consensus by our established domestic political processes. And if he doesn’t like that, he can go to hell.

Let’s play a little game called “Name That Presidential Candidate.” Of the two major-party nominees, who said the following? 

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence… A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five ‘surge’ brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

Was it that appeasing cut-‘n-run coward Barack Obama? 

No, it’s the “let’s stay a 100 years” nutjob John McCain, who wrote the above paragraph in his now famous op-ed that the Times editorial board found unfit to print.

I bring this up to point out that amidst all the hullabaloo over the Times’s rejection of the piece and “liberal media bias,” no one seems to be noticing that a bipartisan consensus on Iraq is emerging. Both parties essentially want to get out of Iraq and redeploy troops to Afghanistan—that is, withdraw without sounding retreat and without actually decreasing troop levels in the region. Democrats have their timetables, Republicans have their “time horizons,” the differences are rather minor. 
My earlier blogs on this phenomenon can be found here and here. 

Both parties, as well as the Obamanic media, find it convenient to distinguish the candidates by rehearsing the old “should we have gone in?” “did you support the surge?” debates of the past years. Both the rabid hawks, who actually do want to stay 100 years, and the antiwar doves, who want out now, will be disappointed by what’s actually being planned. 

There’s little controversy that the American conservative movement is in decline and disarray and that whether John McCain wins in the fall or not, there will be tectonic shifts in the near future, perhaps a little bloodletting. “May you live in interesting times.” Breakdown and defeat mean an opportunity for a new intellectual movement, new institutions, and, generally speaking, I’m optimistic.   

But then so is the New York Times, which gives me second thoughts about my great hopes. Yesterday, the Lady announced, “Conservatives Thinkers Think Again,” and gave sympathetic coverage to some mainstays and under-30 bloggers who are willing to break with movement orthodoxy. 

Two notable examples from the story stand out: 

• David Frum is now saying critical things about George W. Bush (an easy way to score points with the Times) and, better yet, he’s departing from limited government principles and advising conservatives to stop focusing on lowering taxes—indeed, perhaps they should add on some new ones that “would look exactly like the carbon tax advocated by global-warming crusaders.”
• Ross Douthat thinks “social conservatives have gotten stuck and need to move beyond their focus on gay marriage and abortion — a focus, he said, that does nothing to help a single African-American mother trying to raise a family.”

Put simply, conservatives have discovered liberalism—a new, Green liberalism in the case of Frum and with Douthat a rather retrograde “save the family” liberalism of the New Deal and Great Society. While I suspect some triangulation on the part of Frum, Douthat’s motives seem more genuine. He really does think that with just a little more imaginative welfare policy, the illegitimacy rate will plummet and social atomization will be transcended.

As I wrote in my review of his new book, “Retread liberal policies are presented as ‘outlandish’ new rightwing ideas, which Douthat and [co-author] Salam are positive will work just fine this time because they’ll be implemented by Republicans and have conservative-sounding objectives.” At the very least, Douthat’s ideas are sure pleases the Times.

What I find most striking about the Lady’s embrace of Frum and Douthat is how the Left, much like the neocons, finds it so convenient to use support for the Iraq war as the distinguishing characteristic of the real right winger. Throughout the hullabaloo over Bill Kristol getting hired to submit one editorial a week to the Times, only a few noted that, outside the war and the surge, Kristol is on the same page with most Times subscribers on issues ranging from abortion to immigration to spending.

Douthat is also considered conservative because he backs the war (however tepidly). If he starts sounding a lot like the Times editorial board on domestic issues, that just means he’s learned to think again.   

The NYObserver is reporting that Ron Paul has been contracted to write his memoirs. He’ll call it The Revolution, reviving the title of his recent bestseller..   

Yesterday, Phil Gramm, formerly the waterboy of Wall Street in the Senate, and now the vice-chairman of a Swiss bank, resigned his role as an economic adviser to John McCain.  Gramm, of course, became notorious for describing the current economic downturn as a “mental recession” and for denouncing those worried about the state of the economy as “whiners.”  (Of course, it’s easy to view worries about the economy as “whining” from the commanding heights of a Swiss bank).  But his other comments in that interview were equally troublesome.  In addition to claiming that “we have benefited greatly” from globalization and advocating more immigration on the grounds that “The American story is a story of immigration,” Gramm said, with a straight face, “We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today.”

Apparently, Gramm regards stagnant incomes, massive trade and fiscal deficits, and an unprecedented dependence on foreigners as signs of strength.  Then again, the type of deregulation of the financial sector that Gramm advocated in the Senate helped lead to the Enron debacle and the current financial crisis.  America faces serious economic problems, and McCain has little chance of being elected unless he convinces voters that he appreciates that fact and knows what needs to be done.  A campaign that echoed Phil Gramm’s view of the world would have zero chance of winning.

Job Jab’s take on ‘08 is perhaps not as brilliant as the “This Land” spoof from ‘04, but it’s worth a watch. 

Via Steve Sailer, I’ve learned that the National Science Foundation is beginning to find new applications for Title IX, that pernicious law whose ill-effects, I thought, would be limited to college sports and whose main causalities would be male wrestlers.

In post-Larry Summers academia, unequal representation means “institutional racism” means federal intervention. Therefore, we need to do something about not having enough women in the sciences! “The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants.”

Susan Pinker relates what I’ve heard countless times from women in grad school: 

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

Instead, they complained of being pushed so hard to be scientists and engineers that they ended up in jobs they didn’t enjoy. “The irony was that talent in a male-typical pursuit limited their choices,” Ms. Pinker says. “Once they showed aptitude for math or physical science, there was an assumption that they’d pursue it as a career even if they had other interests or aspirations. And because these women went along with the program and were perceived by parents and teachers as torch bearers, it was so much more difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that the work made them unhappy.”

Significant as well is the increased self-segregation that’s been occurring in graduate study in the humanities since women entered the academy. 

Although I guess I could go do some actual statistical research on the subject, I’m pretty sure that what I relate below is accurate across the country. 

Departments like English and History have fairly balanced representation, 50/50, although the self-segregation begins to take effect within specialties—“history of gender and sexuality” and “military history” attracting whom you’d think they’d attract. (There are of course some exceptions, and even some attempts to bridge the divide (“construction of gender bianaries in war” etc.); however, the rule basically holds.)

Philosophy is all dudes. But then, and I say this quite seriously, I’d estimate that Art History departments are 95-100% either female or gay male. A rough count from the Duke Art History department’s webpage reveals that 29 of its 35 fully-funded grad students are women (and I didn’t included the ambiguous names.) 

I’m sure that there are plenty of men interested in the history of painting etc.; however, my guess is that once women entered the university, they flocked to Art History and across the country these departments began to take on a bit of a, well, girly quality—the guys were simply driven away.

Let’s not hold our breath waiting for the National Endowment for the Humanities to seek to redress this troubling inequality. 

Yesterday I blogged on Afghanistan as a kind of “good war” for Democrats— it’s not quite as good as Iraq is bad, but then antiwar liberals are basically content with Obama “ending the war in Iraq” by redeploying the troops to the land of the Afghans.

Taking a quick look at McCain’s foreign-policy statement from yesterday (video, transcript), I’m beginning to wonder whether the Arizona senator might have a similar exit strategy in mind:

It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan. It is by applying the tried and true principles of counter-insurgency used in the surge—which Senator Obama opposed—that we will win in Afghanistan. With the right strategy and the right forces, we can succeed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I know how to win wars. And if I’m elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory.

It’s easy to read this as McCain simply loving on war—the more troops better, total victory at whatever cost, a surge everywhere etc. etc. However, such a reading overlooks one of the contradictions at the heart of the surge strategy—it was always about building up to draw down.

As Andrew Bacevich stresses in his two major articles on the surge,

It is one of the oldest principles of generalship: when you find an opportunity, exploit it. Where you gain success, reinforce it. When you have your opponent at a disadvantage, pile on. In a letter to the soldiers serving under his command, released just prior to the congressional hearings [last September], Petraeus asserted that coalition forces had “achieved tactical momentum and wrestled the initiative from our enemies.” …[S]urely the imperative of the moment is to redouble the current level of effort so as to preserve that initiative and to deny the enemy the slightest chance to adjust, adapt, or reconstitute.
Yet Petraeus has chosen to do just the opposite.

The rhetoric of the surge was all about “doing what it takes,” but its planners understood that high troop levels were simply unsustainable (barring the politically impossible draft), and in the back of their minds they no doubt understood that the U.S. would have to get out of that hopeless situation sooner or later. 

Last week, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki floated the idea of a timetable withdrawal of U.S. troops (it’s pretty unlikelythat he has the political power to make any demands, however.)

But then regardless of the opinion of the PM, a drawdown is happening anyway. Before January, as many as 3 of the 15 combat brigades will be gone; total troop levels might be reduced by as much as 30% (from 170,000 to 120,000). This trend seems likely to continue.

What’s important in all this is that neither Obama nor McCain want a withdrawal from Iraq to entail a shrinking of the overall U.S. military presence abroad—to the contrary. Thus it’s beginning to look like the McCain’s exit strategy leads to Afghanistan.

As McCain works hard to depict Obama as “retreating” in Iraq and Obama paints McCain as “entrenched,” we can be sure that what is actually happening will probably never get much discussion time in the fall.   

The great Jim Kalb has responded to Paul’s recent post on “Thinking about White Nationalism.” Kalb brings up the issue of whether things like white guilt or multiculturalism are the worldviews of the public at large or just the managerial elite. 

The materials that white nationalists bring into play seem inadequate for any serious war for civilization. The most they may land up producing is a fiercely defended critical perspective. And while that perspective can be directed against leftist and neoconservative assumptions, it is not likely to carry our society toward a new vision of order.

In addition to that point, which I agree with, and which suggests a welcome concern with visions of order, he makes another point that in the past he’s emphasized in a variety of ways:

The majority in a multicultural society is encouraging others to trash its heritage and to practice discrimination against the majority. What is wrong ... is not oppression by others but the glorification of self-destructive behavior.

I think here he’s taking too seriously the idea of the majority as an actor that deliberates and makes decisions that are attributable to the people in general. In fact, the active part of the “majority” that’s doing the encouraging is our ruling class of experts, managers, and functionaries, the heritage they want trashed is not their heritage of social rationalization but the competing incompatible heritage of classical antiquity, Jerusalem, the European middle ages, and normal life in general, and the “majority” targeted for discrimination is not experts, managers, and functionaries but normal white men, who are not as such our dominant class. (White male managers and experts are powerful because they are managers and experts, not because they are white males.)

The entire post is worth reading. 

We finally learned what Obama really meant when he was talking about “ending the war in Iraq” throughout the primaries —redeployment of the troops to Afghanistan. Obama book-ended his recent New York Times op-ed with “end the war” and “I’m really different than McCain” themes, but when he got down to specifics, his aim in leaving Iraq is to transfer brigades into Afghanistan, where they can presumably “finish the job” against al-Qaeda and the Taliban (both of whom seem to be always regrouping, resurging, or otherwise getting the band back together again.) Whether “ending the war” will actually mean bringing any troops home is far from certain. I’d say that all this is a big disappointment for any foreign-policy realist Obamacon.   

Tabling the question of whether a withdrawal would force the Iraqi parliament to reach a political solution, what’s perhaps most remarkable in all this is the degree to which Afghanistan has become “the good war” for liberals, including antiwar liberals. While the pro-war Right has jumped all over the op-ed, I don’t see Obama catching much flack from the antiwar Left for wanting to expand the campaign in Afghanistan. That war’s OK.

I find this has less to do with perceptions that the Afghan campaign is more strategically important or better justified, and more to do with the fact that Afghanistan is a war that’s easily flushed down the old memory hole.

The Land of the Afghans is thankfully free of inter-ethnic/religious violence—populations centers are homogenous and isolated—and its feudal drug economy has prevented urbanization, and thus the country has a much less volatile “Arab street.”

Post-Vietnam Americans prefer their wars to be splendid little Blitzkriegs—if they are done, then ‘twere well they were done quickly, and then forgotten while we and the UN station bases or peace- keeping forces there for decades.

Afghanistan fits the mold. So much so that yesterday, Joe Biden made a bid for becoming a kind of Afghan hawk—“If John [McCain] wants to know where the bad guys live, come back with me to Afghanistan. We know where they reside. And it’s not in Iraq.”

Biden was almost mimicking the post facto justification for Iraq we’ve been hearing from Republicans over the past few years—“we’re in Iraq because al-Qeda’s in Iraq because we’re in Iraq—only whereas the Republicans had a bit of a circularly reasoned point, Biden’s intel seems to be totally inaccurate. 

But then how long will the good feelings last. Rich Lowry is actually getting at something when he asks, “When Will the Left Turn Against the Afghan War?” That is, much of the antiwar’s Left’s criticisms of Iraq—long war, magnet for militants, no end in sight—hold true for Afghanistan as well. Thus When Will the Left Turn Against the Afghan War? If the campaign remains relatively calm, producing no really bloody televisuals, then probably never. Afghanistan might become the place where the bad war goes to die.