I was pretty disappointed with Robert Novak’s latest column on the Obamacon phenomenon, mainly because he focuses in on Colin Powell and Chuck Hagel—two utterly vapid “centrists” who expressed their mild critiques of the execution of the war only after it was clear to everyone that the campaign was a disaster and when nothing at all was at stake for them career-wise—Feh!

Powell, Hagel and lesser-known Obamacons harbor no animosity toward McCain. Nor do they show much affection for the rigidly liberal Obama. The Obamacon syndrome is based on hostility to Bush and his administration and on revulsion over today’s Republican Party. The danger for McCain is that desire for a therapeutic electoral bloodbath could get out of control.

OK, this is generally true, but there needs to more differentiation here. As I wrote not too long ago:

[T]here are actually multiple rebellions against Bush that have little to do with each other. Andrew Bacevich—who recognizes, in Bartlett’s words, that “[t]he prospects for a conservative revival … depend on withdrawing from Iraq”—has little in common with Francis Fukuyama, also afflicted with Obamania—who claims that Obama is the “best means for preserving American power, since Obama ‘symbolizes the ability of the United States to renew itself in a very unexpected way’”—or Andrew Sullivan, whom Bartlett identifies as a “libertarian” (?)—who thinks that Obama would be great because he’d make America attractive to brown people all over the world.
What’s remarkable is Obama’s ability to transcend—in the literal sense of “bridge across”—these various camps within the American Right. This probably has something to do with his quasi-evangelical (almost Joel Osteen-y) rhetoric and his status as a walking, talking Rorschach test and great hope of overcoming our “tragic history” blah blah blah. But ultimately the war’s the thing that leads conservatives to abandon all hope in the GOP. The rise of the Obamacons thus reveals more about what George W. Bush has done to the Right than any “new kind of politics” of the Great Transcender.

Moreover, understanding the power of this combination of the promise to end the war + Obama’s Rorschach Transcendence gets us closer to grasping why millions of erstwhile Republican voters might pull the lever for Obama in November. 

Novak should be applauded, however, for digging up this little nugget from Larry Hunter’s blog: 

Explaining his support for the uncompromising liberal Obama, Hunter blogged on June 6: “The Republican Party is a dead rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of “Weekend With Bernie,” handcuffed to a corpse.”

Also, in case you missed it, here is John Derbyshire’s hilarious column on how Obama’s blackness—or really blacknesses—are a net positive for him politically. 

Not only did the Supreme Court give us a wonderful decision this morning—overturning the District of Columbia’s unconstitutional, not to mention completely ineffectual, restriction on gun rights—but to top it off, it gave us an opinion written by the incomparable Antonin Scalia.

Scalia is a master of the art of close reading, and there are few better, in any discipline, at exploding opposing arguments through reductio ad absurdum—the Scalia way is to restate the logic of one’s adversary cleansed of all sentiment and ambiguity and then sit back and enjoy it as he frantically backtracks—“Well, I didn’t mean that, I’m just trying to uphold law and order…”

And Scalia does it with wit and élan. 

The 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” has often been interpreted to mean that Americans have the right to bear arms within the context of military service, “the well regulated Militia” of amendment’s opening clause. And Justice Stevens takes up this old ruse in his dissent. But as Scalia points out, such a restriction of meaning is inaccurate not only historically but grammatically: 

[Accepting Stevens’s argument,] the phrase “keep and bear Arms” would be incoherent.  The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom [to “bear arms”].  It would be rather like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.

Jonah is still posting about his own book. Several times a day, it looks like.

We don’t even post that much about, say, Paul’s books. And they’re, you know, good.

We’ve not always been kind to Andrew Sullivan at Takimag; however, it was nice to see him post the following with regards to Max Boot: 

[Boot’s demands for a 100-year presence] obviously isn’t about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It’s about an ever-greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel. And Joe Klein is in no way engaging in anti-Semitism - please - by pointing out the increasingly obvious fact that the Iraq war was in part launched to assist Israel (even though many Israelis were against it)

I guess it’s good that this kind of stuff is now appearing at the Atlantic. Though nothing here is news to us. 

I was more interested in Boot’s argumentation, to get a glimpse at least of what we’ll be hearing, in a talking-points reduction, from GOP talking heads over the next few months. First, he justifies McCain’s now-infamous 100-year plan on the basis of Petraeus’s success. 

In order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq-for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said.

We can’t leave now, just when getting good! 

He then makes this strange admission: 

I can’t speak for anyone else, but if the surge had failed, as Rich, Klein, and so many others expected, I very much doubt that I or anyone else would be calling for continuing a major troop presence in Iraq. The surge was always seen as a last-ditch attempt to salvage a decent outcome. If it failed, then it would have been appropriate to head for the exits. But, as Rich and Klein now acknowledge, it didn’t fail.

I find this difficult to believe. Setbacks are opportunities for demanding we redouble our efforts; successes are justifications for a long-term presence. All outcomes lead to the same policy. 

Gangster rap is the cesspool where black music has been festering for about twenty-five years now. What might one say about that, as an observer of politics and culture?

Very little, if you eat your meals in the neocon mess hall. Such observation could easily get too real, and airing too much reality gets the high officials in the antiracist priesthood all antsy in their pantsies. But you have to say something—you have to at least seem like you’re living in the real world, where a virtuoso named Lil Wayne is at the top of the Billboard charts and my WASP college pals are suffering through cultural identity crises that end up looking like this. Otherwise people will start to notice how out of touch you are.

So L. Brent Bozell III bravely airs his opinion that rap is stupid.

And Jonah Goldberg has the courage to suggest that rap isn’t very good music.

Thrilling stuff. Really, guys, you’re giving me goosebumps. But what if I don’t want to nance around with a self-satisfied smirk, and actually want to be a journalist? Is neocon limp-wristing really my only option?

Thank heavens one guy doesn’t think so, or else I’d feel guilty for being so mean.

In the mid-1980s, a potent new formulation of cocaine called crack became popular in the slums of Los Angeles County. In 1988, the first gangsta rap album, NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, began to spread the South Central crack dealer’s code nationwide. Soon, all across America, gangsta rap fans formed crack-dealing gangs called either Bloods or Crips in emulation of LA County’s most notorious black gangs. They began blasting away at each other, causing the national homicide rate to peak from 1990-1994.

LA’s legendary black gangs, like its black community in general, are in decline, inundated by Latin American immigrants and their progeny. Man for man, the black gangstas are still plenty scary, but the Hispanic “gang-affiliated members” now badly outnumber them. Blacks are leaving Los Angeles, with the South a particularly popular destination.

Oh. So, like, sociology and race are kind of important when discussing gangster rap. Who would have thunk it? Tell me more.

Hip hop first hit the Top 40 way back in 1979 with the amusing “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. At the time I thought, “What a cute novelty record—I bet that style will be around for a year, maybe even two!” Little did I anticipate that decades of stylistic innovation by African-Americans were coming to an end, and that rap would turn out to be the black hole that entrapped black talent for, apparently, all eternity.

Hip-hop kept its goofy aura through the mid-80s (when the biggest selling rap record was “The Super Bowl Shuffle” by the Chicago Bears NFL team).

Then, gangsta rap emerged from Los Angeles and New York. By promoting the drug dealer’s code of what a boy had to do to be a man, it helped spread the crack wars across the country. By 1993-94, the murder rate had quadrupled among black 14-17 year-old-youths born in the late 70s (which was after Roe v. Wade, as economist Steven D. Levitt conveniently forgot to mention while pushing his abortion-cut-crime theory in the bestseller Freakonomics).

Wow. So realistic journalism about rap is possible. Thanks, Steve. On the other hand, if I go easy on hip hop like the ladies in Manhattan and D.C., maybe I’ll get invited to some fun parties at Snoop’s crib—or at least some cocktail receptions at AEI. I’ll have to think about this one.

With regard to Tom’s hope that “As Bush falls, so should the neocons,” it’s worth looking at the list of the “100 Top Public Intellectuals” recently compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, without question an accurate estimate of Who’s Who in the set of “unacknowledged legislators” and global hob-nobbers. 

Of the 100, 22 are well known for commenting publicly about American foreign policy and matters of war and peace. Of these 22, 7 can be considered “neocons” (of various orientations) or their very close allies: 

Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now a fellow at AIE), Christopher Hitchens, Robert Kagan, Bernard Lewis, Olivier Roy, Francis Fukuyama (who, one should add, turned against the war in 2004)

There are also the neocons’ friends on the Center Left who initially were Gung Ho about Iraq and now are offering up mild criticisms of the campaign (or else trying hard to distance themselves from their views of 2003):     
Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, and Michael Ignatieff.

And then there are the Center Left thinkers who might have declined to back the Iraq War but nevertheless are well known for supporting “humanitarian interventions” around the globe and are basically right on board with the whole spreading peace, democracy, and multiculturalism mission:   

Jürgen Habermas, Tony Judt, Paul Krugman, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Ian Buruma, Anne Applebaum, Michael Walzer, Samantha Power.

As for consistently antiwar intellectuals… well, there’s Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek. Interesting guys. But I don’t think we’re going to want to forge alliances with them any time soon. 

On the entire list, I see only Samuel Huntington as a thinker who, more or less, shares our views on foreign policy and culture. 

Put simply, Bush’s approval rating could drop down to nil and the GOP be destroyed in November, and little more than a dint would have been made in the interventionist consensus. 

I’ll be honest, when Putin was censoring the speech of Chechen Islamicists or those repulsive former Commies known as the Oligarch, I wasn’t exactly jumping to my feet to condemn the human rights violations in Moscow’s state-run media environment. However, after the recent actions of Putin’s hand-picked successor—how do you pronounce his name again? Medevarova or something?—to silence the Moscow-based and fantastically irreverent English-language paper know as The eXile, well, I’m just about ready to take back all those nice things we published about Putin in the past! 

I learned about this through my friend the Tory Anarchist; the first to report seems to be the venerable Der Spiegel—here’s the link for our Teutonic readers—and there I learned that the main issue seems to be that The eXile publishes the writing of the leader of the National Bolshevik Party, Eduard Limonov, a true fusionist, as it were.   

The Nation’s Katarina Vanden Heuvel, who interviewed The eXile’s founder, Mark Ames, is right to sense that this might be one of those rare times when the Western media applauds Putin’s authoritarian excess:

“I asked Ames, The eXile’s chief editor in recent years, why he thinks the US mainstream media did not respond quickly. “It doesn’t fit their simple propaganda,” Ames told me. “Putin is an oppressor—except when he oppresses something that the American mainstream media doesn’t approve of either. Americans have proven that it’s not oppression or censorship they oppose—it’s opposition to America that they oppose. We’ve angered most of the Western press corps for eleven straight years by constantly calling them on their hypocrisy and idiocy, so the last thing they want to do is give us an honorable send-off, despite all their pieties about ‘supporting free speech that you disagree with.’ It’s censorship by silence, the most lethal of all, and it really sickens all of us to see it.”

Here’s Ames himself reporting on his recent radio debate with the Duma deputy Robert Schlegel, an avid Young Putinist who exclaimed, “The Russian media is completely free … Our television stations express all the opinions of the people.”

I’ll let Ames take it from here: 

How do you respond to that? I told him that he lived in some strange parallel world separate from the world everyone else in Russia lives in; his world was some kind of formalistic fantasy land where all of Russia ran a law-abiding state; the world the rest of us saw was one in which people hid from Russia’s cruel and arbitrary powers, so when a media outlet like the Exile gets fingered, people understandably run. Schlegel didn’t take kindly to it.

When I started to talk about the shameful self-censorship that went on in the American media in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and the disastrous consequences that followed, Schlegel loudly cut me off: “The American media was right to support the invasion of Iraq, because the American people supported that war. Of course the American media should back the president!”

“But the only reason that the American people supported the war was because the media duped them! They didn’t do what they were supposed to do!” I stammered.
“No, Bush was right to invade Iraq!” Schlegel yelled. “I absolutely support his reasons for invading, and I believe the American media did the right thing in supporting the war, because the American people supported this war.”

Finally, here’s The eXile’s War Nerd (aka Gary Brecher)—a frequent Takimag contributor—calling mayday, mayday: 

I’m calling in an urgent request for reinforcements, before we’re overrun. The eXile, my HQ since I started this column, has been sucker-punched by a bunch of squeamish bureaucrats and anonymous complainers. You know the type, the kind of people who’ll poison your dog but don’t have the guts to come to your door. Looks like this Fifth Column is winning, and we’ll be forced to retreat from Moscow. And you know how messy retreats from Moscow can get. Ask the Little Corporal; he left the Kremlin with half a million men and came home with about enough for a high-school marching band.
Well, the Bible gives clear instructions on what to do if the locals spit on you for trying to help’em out. It’s right there in the Book, in fact the Book of Mark, Chapter 6 if I recall, makes for a nice Mark-Ames tie-in, huh? Here’s what the Bible says:

“And whosoever shall not hear you, when ye depart, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily, It shall be easier for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for them.”

Ya hear that, Moscow, ya ungrateful place? We’re shakin’ your dust from our ‘Nam boots and setting up a new site somewhere not so allergic to truth, boobs and gory jokes. Maybe we can get Eritrea to give us a home. I volunteer to be the eXile’s Eritrean rep right now.

The thing is, it takes money and we have none, zero, aren’t even getting paid any more. We need help. That’s what this mayday is about. You want us in the foxhole with you, fighting against all that’s good and decent in the name of all that’s funny and honest? Then cough it up, soldier!
—Gary Brecher, The War Nerd

There is something rarefied and useless with the endless post-mortems brought to bear on the alleged injustice of the Iraq War. We must act today based on the circumstances of today. We should concern ourselves with these post-mortems chiefly because they should guide future conduct. It would have been preferable, for instance, if the US never allowed chattel slavery, but having done so, there were other more just choices than destroying states’ rights and half-a-million Americans to be rid of it. This is to say that even in addressing injustice and other mistakes, we must be both just and prudent. A question of transitioning is distinct from a question of ends.

How to preserve US interests today having gotten embroiled in Iraq is the question of the hour, not whether it was wise to do so at first. Clearly it wasn’t. This is the consensus view of the vast majority of Americans. That said, policymakers always run the risk of “fighting the last war,” over-correcting earlier mistakes while discounting unknown or under-appreciated risks that are distinct from the most salient and recent error. Arguably fear of a repetition of the failed Somalia mission prevented military men from pushing more aggressively for a military response to bin Laden and al Qaeda after the Cole and embassy bombings of the late 90s.  This same fear of commitment, the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, led to the pusillanimous response to Soviet aggression in Latin America during the 80s.  Now, having over-reacted to an imaginary WMD threat in Iraq, an over-correction is likely . . . and it would be a major mistake.

This to say that there are foreign policy errors of both action and inaction. It’s always easy to look wise in hindsight. One-note-johnnies always get their day in the sun. It would have been wise to wipe out al Qaeda before 9/11 and, before that, not to be so closely involved with Israel and the Middle East after the Cold War ended. A strong case can be made that the preferred policy of the most vociferous Iraq War critics, that is a poilcy which is critical of most U.S. applications of force in foreign policy, has fueled certain harms too.  This is most apparent on the Korean peninsula, where a nuclear power governed by nut-cases has materialized due to a short-sighted U.S. policy of appeasement.

We are where we are, and we cannot right every wrong that has come down the pike, nor easily correct every mistake made by our predecessors. We must always chart a way forward. In this instance, any withdrawal from Iraq will impact the price of oil, the power and prestige of al Qaeda, the likelihood of others states harboring terrorists or developing WMDs, the power of US deterrence, the perception the US is a paper tiger, the instability in the region, U.S. military morale, along with other, unknown effects. This is to say, withdrawing from Iraq will not be costless for the United States in some very practical ways. Nonetheless, I believe this is a price worth paying, as the costs of staying are higher.  Just as we should not over-correct from a mistake, we should also not allow pride or habit or some mistaken sentimentality keep us going down the wrong-path until inescapable disaster occurs.

A conservative should acknowledge the costs of any foreign policy action along with the costs of any omission and be humble in the face of the various unknowns. Conservative statemen should seek, above all, to conduct decision-making in a prudent and empirical fashion informed by a wide range of historical examples, not just recent events or the events of 1939.

American conservatives have typically been realists in foreign policy, noting that the international order is anarchic, full of hostile forces.  Conservatives should remind us that this terrain is easily misunderstood, particularly by Kantian-style moral reasoning indifferent to the chief objects of a foreign policy: national independence secured through a balance of military power and diplomacy that communicate appropriate deterrence to any threats, along with the cultivation of the capabilty and willingness to deliver an appropriate military response in the case of necessity.  In this formulation, independence means at its core protection from invasion.  But it also requires free sea lanes, the prevention of foreign colonization of the western hemisphere, cooperation against pirates and international criminal organizations, and American access to essential raw materials and markets. This is practical stuff.  The idea that we can deductively reason our way from the Golden Rule to a sound foreign policy is, quite simply, well-wishing rooted in gnostic ideological thinking that fails to account for the role of force and disorder.

* This entry is adapted from a comment I left in this earlier thread begun by Paul Gottfried.

Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg has ventured into the Corner to promote his column.  Now that NRO has set up an entire blog for Goldberg to engage in self-promotion, he no longer promotes every column in the Corner, so it is fair to guess this is a column of which he is especially proud.  Goldberg’s target, unsurprisingly, is the neocons’ bete noire, Pat Buchanan.  The gist of Goldberg’s column is that Buchanan is inconsistent because he wrote columns expressing sympathy for the Croatians and the Lithuanians when they were under attack by their neighbors nearly twenty years ago, but later turned a deaf ear to the Kuwaitis and Bosnians, and rather than have a foreign policy based on “objective national interest,” as Buchanan now advocates, “America should be a good country and do what’s right.” 

The neocons are fond of citing Buchanan’s column on the shelling of Dubrovnik—David Frum also cites it in Dead Right —because it represents one of the few times since the end of the Cold War when Buchanan has advocated the use of American military force, and the only time I can recall when he advocated using military force against a country that hadn’t attakced Americans.  Buchanan has been a very consistent non-interventionist since that point, whereas the neocons have seldom found a country they haven’t wanted to invade.  And it should be pointed out that what Buchanan advocated in 1991 was a show of force by the Sixth Fleet to stop the shelling of Dubrovnik, not an invasion and occupation.  As for Lithuania, Goldberg uncovers the unsurprising fact that Buchanan was a Cold Warrior who felt that Soviet Communism posed a mortal threat to the United States and thus opposing Soviet aggression was in the objective national interest of the United States.  Other Americans shared that belief, preeminently among them the founding editors of National Review.   Nor was Buchanan alone in thinking that with the Cold War won, America could return to the traditional foreign policy set forth by George Washington in his Farewell Address and stop trying to run the world.  Jeane Kirkpatrick, too, expressed the hope that America could become a “normal country” again with the Cold War won.  By saying that she wanted America to become a “normal country” again, Kirkpatrick was implying that non-interventionism was in fact the normal foreign policy for America.  And she was right.

And what does Goldberg mean when he says we “should be a good country and do what’s right?”  In 2002, it meant invading Iraq because “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.”  Goldberg favored throwing small crappy countries against the wall in the nicest possible way, of course:  “The most compelling substantive reason [for invading Iraq], from my point of view, is that Iraq should be a democratic, republican country, with individual rights secured by a liberal constitution.”  You might suspect that if we need to invade every place that is not “a democratic, republican country with individual rights secured by a liberal constitution” we have a lot of invading ahead of us, and you would be right.  In 2000, Goldberg, true to his beliefs, advocated invading Africa for humanitarian reasons:  “I think it’s time we revisited the notion of a new kind of Colonialism—though we shouldn’t call it that….I mean going in—guns blazing if necessary—for truth and justice.  I am quite serious about this….We should spend billions and billions doing it.  We should put American troops in harm’s way….This would be America and its allies doing right as we see it.”  I do not doubt Goldberg’s sincerity in advocating violent humanitarianism as the basis of American foreign policy.  But seeing how it’s worked out in Iraq, and contemplating what it would actually mean to recolonize Africa by force of arms, should give Americans pause about embracing the type of foreign policy Goldberg advocates.

Tom Piatak’s comments about the neoconservatives’ dubious gifts to the Bush administration made me think about the non-accountability of the group Tom is criticizing. If truth be known, it makes no difference for the fortunes of the neocons what they do to any American government. These people who are lionized at the New York Times and Newsweek are not about to fall from media favor. Their future does not depend on their political success or on how much they and their friends mess up any administration. The reason for my belief is that I couldn’t imagine how the liberal establishment and foreign policy community could function, in the absence of a certain kind of “debate.” After all, isn’t that what democracy has come down to, whether we’re discussing the PC public administration that runs Western Europe or the dismally uninteresting mainstream media in this country? There must be some semblance of disagreement in order for our democracy to work.
At the same time, such managed democracy must avoid being seriously divisive, a situation that would disturb the powerbrokers. But such divisiveness is not the same as doing something more condonable, for example, releasing personal sleaze about one’s largely indistinguishable opponent in an expensive political race. Such name-calling never threatens “democracy” understood as a gradual movement, which sometimes gains staggered momentum, toward the social, PC Left.

Even less harmful and perhaps even beneficial to managed democracy are mock debates set up among the established powerbrokers. Some in the group are allowed and even encouraged to question a procedural point or a particular tax hike, while assuring everyone that things have never been better for the human race, at least for that part of it that has been “liberated “ for American democracy. The opposition is also free to come out for open borders and gay marriage and to point out that these policies embody “conservative values.” Thus we see the high value the neocons possess for the rest of the political-media establishment. They furnish a toothless opposition, except when it comes to going after those “further on the right.” Then the neocons and their hirelings jump up and down indignantly in a way that brings smiles to the faces of their supposedly more leftist talking partners. And old Stalinists at The Nation can lavish praise on one NR editor and FOX news-celebrity for having no truck with the “extremists” (us). Maintaining this docile, kept opposition is a big thing for the permanent political establishment. And it therefore is not likely to push the make-believe opposition out of view and, even less plausibly, to replace it with adversaries like us. In short, the neocons are not going down!