Month: July 2008

Poor Conditions

By Daniel Larison

The American Prospect has assembled a number of assessments of the reasons why violence in Iraq has declined relatively over the past year and a half.  Lost in the frequent back-and-forth over whether John McCain understands what the "surge" was or whether he knows when the Anbar Awakening happened (answers: apparently not and no) is the more basic point, made here by Matthew Duss, that the Anbar model has succeeded for the time being by pursuing the opposite of a sound counterinsurgency:

The "Anbar strategy" which is the center-piece of the surge violates a central tenet of counterinsurgency doctrine in that it does not redirect political authority toward the central government [bold mine-DL]. The deals that have been made are between Sunni tribal militias and U.S. forces, not the Iraqi government. There are still an estimated 90,000 Sunni militia members expecting government jobs, and little sign that the Shia-controlled Iraqi government intends to provide them. It’s true that security is a prerequisite for state-building, but if that security only comes at the expense of the legitimacy of the state we’re supposedly trying to build, then we have an entirely new problem on our hands.

This is one reason why the fabled "bottom-up" reconciliation–which was never a reconciliation at all, but a temporary alliance of convenience that avoided reconciling disaffected Sunnis to the Baghdad government–has never been a promising way to establish an enduring political settlement.  This is significant for a couple of reasons.  First, the "bottom-up" reconciliation became a standard line of war supporters when it became clear that reconciliation at the level of the national government was not forthcoming and was unlikely to be for a long time.  Focusing on this was, first and foremost, an attempt to change the subject and ignore that the political goals of the "surge" had always been unrealistic, which was what had informed the views of so many of the plan’s opponents and which is the key reason why the "surge" on the administration’s own terms has not succeeded.

Meanwhile, the horrific attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk offer a reminder why so-called "conditions-based" withdrawals are forever subject to revision and why timetables that can be revised by such contingencies are meaningless.  Tying withdrawal to conditions in Iraq places U.S. policy at the mercy of the worst elements in Iraq, which gives these elements every incentive to persist in trying to sow discord and engage in spectacular acts of violence.  Besides being seized on by war supporters as evidence that Iraq is not yet stable enough to permit a U.S. withdrawal (after having cited these same sorts of attacks last year as proof that the "surge" was working and terrorist groups were becoming desperate), they expose the position of contingent withdrawal to one of the strongest criticisms against it, which is that it allows American policy to be dictated by whichever group wishes to foment chaos and disorder.  If the Iraq policy debate is "converging" towards a "conditions-based" withdrawal consensus, in the wake of these latest bombings this is the equivalent of saying that there is a consensus for remaining in Iraq more or less indefinitely.  Both candidates have committed the U.S. to ensure an elusive Iraqi stability that we have so far been able to advance only by undermining its long-term chances, which is to say that they have committed our forces to remain there for the foreseeable future. 

Cross-posted at Eunomia      

When Corruption Was Entertainment

by Chris Bodenner
The Stranger‘s Annie Wagner examines the evolving context of the X-Files:

The X-Files was, after all, unusually grounded in the psychological climate of its time. It’s fascinating to go back through the seasons now, in the wake of 9/11 and especially Hurricane Katrina, to see how the series—which went on the air in 1993, near the beginning of the Clinton administration—envisioned an American government so monolithic, so complacent in its power that one had to suspect things were more complicated than they seemed. In the 1990s, we were sufficiently bored with prosperity and globalization … that it was entertaining to imagine that an international cabal might be pulling the strings behind the scenes. The chasm between that way of thinking and the current political atmosphere became obvious to me only after I rewatched the last movie. Released in 1998, it went so far as to suggest that FEMA was a second shadow government, just waiting to take the reins after alien colonization. Thanks to Mike (“heckuva job”) Brown and the Bush administration, FEMA is an embarrassment now, not a fearsome symbol of government’s reach into the most obscure corners of our lives.

Moving Or Standing Still

By Patrick Appel
Josh Patashnik thinks Obama hasn’t moved:

Insofar as there’s a growing similarity between the Obama–Maliki position and Bush’s, it’s that Bush is talking less like this and more about a timetable or a "general time horizon" or whatever. Yet Mead doesn’t mention that at all, insinuating that it’s Obama who’s moved toward Bush, rather than the other way around. And anyway, is it really a consensus if the current Republican nominee for president doesn’t subscribe to it? It’s obvious that there are some areas of agreement, but let’s not get carried away here. There’s still a starker, more substantive contrast between the two parties on foreign policy than there’s been in any presidential election in decades.

Mark Levin thinks McCain hasn’t moved:

In my opinioon, McCain has not come closer to Obama’s position.  McCain’s position, like Bush’s, has always been a conditional one, based on circumstances/conditions not ideology.  If leaving Iraq, in whole or part, in 16 months can be done without harming our national security (broadly defined), then neither McCain nor Bush would hold out for more time.  Why would they?

Running Against Congress

Congress2
By Patrick Appel
A tidbit from Kristol’s column today:

McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year. A President McCain, on the other hand, could check Congressional appetites — as well as work across the aisle with a Democratic Congress in a bipartisan spirit where appropriate.

McCain "running against congress" gets suggested regularly. I’m skeptical it would work. Namely, I’m not sure about the reasons Americans dislike congress. It may have more to do with negative feelings about the direction of American government in general. Approval of congress is at record lows, but congressional approval is usually correlated with presidential approval ratings. Gallup:

Americans’ ratings of Congress are almost always lower than their ratings of the sitting president. With Bush in a period of extremely low approval, and both houses of Congress controlled by the Democratic Party, one might expect that gap to be closer today. And, in fact, it was for a short period after the Democrats first returned to power in Congress at the start of 2007. However, that honeymoon quickly ended (about last August) and since then, Congress has lagged behind the president in approval.

A Tennessee Tragedy

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

I am surprised that there is no mention on your blog of the Unitarian Universalist church shooting in Tennessee, especially since it has now been established that the gunman choose this church in part because of their welcoming policy towards GLBT persons (they recently put a sign up outside their church specifically marking themselves as a welcoming congregation for the GLBT community).  The church also sponsors a cafe night/safe space for GLBT teenagers and their straight allies that is open to all.  As a Unitarian Universalist in Tennessee myself, I am sickened over this shocking violence towards such a peace-loving group of people whose only crime was opening their doors to those who are shunned at other churches.

The Base Of Faith

By Daniel Larison

As Ross said last week, the Pew numbers on white evangelical support for the major presidential candidates do show that McCain appears to be running poorly among these voters when compared to the support Bush received at this time four years ago.  Then again, according to a Post survey earlier in the year McCain was running ahead of Bush’s mid-2004 support among white evangelicals and was on track to replicate the latter’s overwhelming majority with this core constituency.  If the Pew numbers are right, the drop in evangelical support for McCain seems to be part of the generic "enthusiasm gap" between the two candidates, but in any case this has never translated into greater white evangelical support for Obama.  Instead, we are seeing white evangelical voters become part of the sizeable undecided vote, which may mean that McCain is failing to win them over, but it is certainly not the case that they are in danger of being "mesmerized" by Obama.  Indeed, Mr. Bass is simply wrong when he says that Obama fares better with these voters than Kerry did.   

One reason why the fear (or hope, depending on who you are) of Obama making inroads among white evangelicals is overblown is made clear by Obama’s embrace of a form of the faith-based initiative.  There is an assumption that this move will appeal to some religious voters who are normally wary of Democratic candidates, but even if this is so it will not meaningfully increase Obama’s share of the white evangelical vote.  To the extent that this initiative was welcomed by evangelicals when Bush proposed it, Bush’s own religious identification with evangelical voters reassured them that government support would not necessarily mean any change in how these people ran their charities and organizations.  Among more conservative evangelicals, the response to the initiative was much more hostile, however, because there was the reasonable fear that government rules would follow the acceptance of federal money, and among the most conservative critics of then-Gov. Bush the initative was viewed as a way for government to co-opt and undermine private and religious charities.  Those fears and criticisms are sure to increase if an Obama administration works to implement his faith-based proposal, and my guess is that they will tend to drive those undecided white evangelicals to McCain and motivate them to oppose Obama’s election with much more energy and enthusiasm than they would have ever been able to muster for McCain.

Cross-posted at Eunomia

Correction Of The Day

By Patrick Appel
"CHICAGO – Presidential candidate John moccasin on Sunday endorsed a proposal to ban affirmative action programs in his home state, a policy that Democratic rival Barrack Abeam called a disappointing embrace of divisive tactics. In the past, moccasin has criticized such ballot initiatives."- AP, July 27, 2008.