Cowboy Nation VII

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Sunday January 04, 2009 · 9:47 AM PST

2009/01/04 · 09:47

On a recent trip to Iraq, in July 2008, Kim Kagan, wife of Fred Kagan and herself one of the architects of the surge, did something that she had not done on any of her previous trips. She visited “the headquarters of a small Iraqi political party to learn about its campaign for the upcoming provincial and national elections.” Her host, the leader of this “secular and nonsectarian” party and a member of the Iraqi parliament, greets her “wearing a fine suit,” as if she were visiting “a foreign embassy just off 16th Street in Washington.” With this magical sleight-of-hand, momentarily transforming a street in Baghdad into one inside the Beltway, Kagan begins the rhetorical strategy by means of which she hopes to demonstrate that the people of Iraq are assimilating themselves to the political way of life of the great democratic nation that liberated them from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

Bastoche

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Tuesday July 29, 2008 · 12:41 PM PDT

2008/07/29 · 12:41

“The world has become normal again.” So Robert Kagan begins his latest effort, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he says, the world had in the 90s a “tantalizing glimpse of a new international order” in which an expanding global system of commerce and communication would break down national barriers and dissolve ideological conflict. But that glimpse of a new international order has proven to be “a mirage.” The nation-state, Kagan says, “remains as strong as ever, and so, too, the nationalist ambitions, the passions, and the competition among nations that have shaped history” (3). The end of the Cold War seemed to put an end to that competition and thus to history. But that “end of history” was nothing more than a brief pause in which new poles and configurations of power were fortifying and organizing themselves in order to recommence the struggle. And the struggle has now recommenced. Competition among nations for power and prestige has returned and with it history. The world has indeed become normal again.

Bastoche

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Sunday June 15, 2008 · 9:55 AM PDT

2008/06/15 · 09:55

Dean Barnett has read George Packer’s essay heralding “the fall of conservatism “and judges it “not particularly insightful.” Barnett specifically takes Packer to task for failing to acknowledge a “simple fact”: it is not conservatism that is heading for a fall but the Republican Party. Conservatism is one thing, Barnett argues, the Republican Party quite another, and one cannot conflate the enduring principles of conservatism with the party that is serving as their vehicle in the political arena. Those principles, according to Barnett, include “a belief in free markets, free people, and in the greatness of the American people and the American nation.” These are not talking points that will pass with the political season. They make up a “set of core principles” that are now and will always remain “timeless…pure and, in the eyes of conservatives, true.”

Bastoche

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Monday May 12, 2008 · 1:19 PM PDT

2008/05/12 · 13:19

In his recent Washington Post article, Michael Leahy lays out the evidence in support of a contention that few would dispute: John McCain has a temper. Few would dispute it because, as Leahy reports, many have witnessed McCain erupt in volcanic and memorable displays of anger. What is more interesting, however, is that these witnesses interpret McCain’s outbursts from two contrasting viewpoints. Some portray McCain as “an erratic hothead” whose anger is provoked by “either disloyalty to him or irrational opposition to his ideas.” Bob Smith, for example, opines ominously that McCain’s sometimes uncontrollable temper “would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger.”

Bastoche

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Monday April 14, 2008 · 1:24 PM PDT

2008/04/14 · 13:24

In a major foreign policy address on March 26, John McCain declared himself an idealist. He is an idealist because he believes that the core American “principles of free people and free markets” can still “make the world we live in another, better, more peaceful place.” He has, however, sufficient awareness of the current geopolitical situation, including, of course, the situation in the Middle East, to know that he cannot let his self-identification as an idealist stand stark and unadorned. And so he quickly applies to it an important qualifier: he is a realistic idealist.

Bastoche

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Sunday March 23, 2008 · 12:27 PM PDT

2008/03/23 · 12:27

Victor Davis Hanson has assessed the situation and come to the inescapable conclusion: Europe is in decline. He delivers this judgment, with his customary elegance and dash, in a recent interview, “The Future With Europe.” After the collapse of Communism, Europe, according to Hanson, was intent on transcending its centuries-old order of nationalistic competition and conflict. It therefore “diverged onto a secularized, affluent, leisured, socialist, and pacifist path” at the end of which lay a “heaven on earth.” In this paradise, the Europeans surmised, they would establish and maintain, on the basis of pure reason alone, a New Order of multinational peace and prosperity.

Bastoche

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Sunday March 02, 2008 · 12:24 PM PST

2008/03/02 · 12:24

The neocons are a resolute and resilient bunch. Their fantasy of implanting in the autocratic aridity of the Middle East a garden of seedling democracies has proven, in reality, to be a far more difficult act of cultivation than they had anticipated. Nonetheless they are certain that they have grasped the real historical forces at work in the region and that our intervention will soon produce vigorous and gladdening results. Charles Krauthammer, for example, confidently declares that the Keane/Kagan/Petraeus counterinsurgency plan known as the surge is succeeding. “After agonizing years of searching for the right strategy and the right general, we are winning,” he says, and we are winning because “unprecedented” acts of reconciliation between Sunni and Shia factions are “taking place at the local and provincial level.”

Bastoche

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Sunday February 17, 2008 · 11:36 AM PST

2008/02/17 · 11:36

He’s back and he’s gunning for bear.

Norman Podhoretz, in his June 2007 essay, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” argues that the US can no longer afford to put off attacking Iran, the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” According to Podhoretz, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, wants to “wipe Israel off the map,” extend “the power and influence of Islam” throughout the Middle East and Europe, and diminish America’s ability to impede his fanatic quest. Such ambitious goals are mere pipedreams—unless Ahmadinejad has a realistic means of accomplishing them. Podhoretz argues that Iran is close to obtaining such means—nuclear weapons—and when it does so it will use the threat of those weapons to force the nations of the Middle East and Europe—and even the Great Satan itself—to submit to its demands. As Podhoretz says, Iran would not have to use its nuclear weapons to achieve its goal of regional domination and world influence. “Intimidation and blackmail by themselves would do the trick.”

Bastoche

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Sunday January 20, 2008 · 12:54 PM PST

2008/01/20 · 12:54

Barack Obama, according to Michael O’Hanlon in his recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “has some work to do.” Obama advertises himself as the candidate who will harmonize all the voices, raucous and discordant and vehemently partisan, contending on the stage of American politics. But for O’Hanlon it is already clear that Obama has no intention of drawing together all the rowdy and dissonant factions into one all-inclusive chorus of comity and hope. Quite the contrary, Obama is being deliberately exclusionary and shunting off to the wings a significant portion of the American electorate. The loss, O'Hanlon warns, will be Obama’s, for by cutting himself off from that portion, he is also cutting himself off from the “non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom of the American people that he seeks to lead.”

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

Bastoche

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Sunday December 30, 2007 · 12:22 PM PST

2007/12/30 · 12:22

Victor Davis Hanson does not like echo chambers, and Washington, he claims, has become one. A number of notions, it seems, are flinging repetitively around the enclosed and reverberant spaces of the Beltway Bubbleworld and, as a result of the ceaseless reiteration, are being elevated to the status of “gospel.” One such notion is that “We need to talk to Iran.” Hanson will have none of that. Tyrannies such as Iran resort to diplomacy only when, as Hanson puts it, “their backs are against the wall or their appetites are for a time sated.” With Saddam eliminated and the Taliban, at least for now, posing no threat, Iran finds its back at a comfortable remove from any flat and vertical surface and its appetite whetted for mischief. It therefore feels no urgent need to discuss, among other items, its exasperating insistence on enriching uranium.

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

Bastoche

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Monday December 10, 2007 · 12:42 PM PST

2007/12/10 · 12:42

On Monday, 3 December, the combined intelligence agencies of the US released a summary of their National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. The same day at a press briefing, Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor to President Bush, commented on the “key judgments” in the Estimate. The Intelligence Community, Hadley said, “has high confidence—high confidence—that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons program that it has never acknowledged and continues to deny.” The intelligence community also reports, with “high confidence,” that this covert program was brought to a deliberate halt in 2003 and, with “moderate confidence,” that it has not been reactivated.

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

Bastoche

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Sunday November 25, 2007 · 2:17 PM PST

2007/11/25 · 14:17

The evidence, as a November 18 Washington Post editorial intones, is “overwhelming.” The evidence that the editorial adduces includes signs of diminishing violence throughout Iraq, the rout of al Qaeda from its strongholds, and a renewal of normal activity in the markets of Baghdad. On the basis of such evidence the indisputable verdict can now be delivered: “the ‘surge’ of U.S. military forces in Iraq this year has been, in purely military terms, a remarkable success.”

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

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