tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1 2008-07-31T17:06:51Z Movable Type 3.35 tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.17 2008-07-31T17:03:51Z 2008-07-31T17:06:51Z

(Listen to the podcast here.)...

http://scoblic.com here.)]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.15 2008-07-24T16:09:54Z 2008-07-24T16:12:59Z

One of the most insidious things about the India nuclear deal (which The New Republic has opposed for these reasons) is that its value derives from us breaking the principles of the nonproliferation regime. That's because so much of the...

http://scoblic.com India nuclear deal (which The New Republic has opposed for these reasons) is that its value derives from us breaking the principles of the nonproliferation regime. That's because so much of the deal's value is psychological. Its architects have sold it as a paradigm-shifting gateway to a new strategic relationship, in which India will finally join the family of Westernized, Democratic great powers and ally with the United States. But how, one might ask, is a simple technology-sharing deal supposed to accomplish all this? Unless there's a fundamental change in their own interests, India's strategic goals will remain largely the same: They will not start containing China simply because they're using GE reactor parts; nor will they suddenly halt cooperation with Iran. And the development benefits of nuclear power are small, hype notwithstanding--they can't possibly reorient India on their own. No, the only paradigm-shifting aspect of the deal is related to India's belief that the Nonproliferation Treaty is a form of "nuclear apartheid," which has kept India a second-class citizen in a world of nuclear great powers. In that view, the United States is breaking the chains of bondage that have held India down for decades. As a Council on Foreign Relations primer puts it, the deal would "gut" the NPT--dismantling a system that India finds fundamentally unfair and granting it recognition it has always felt it deserves. Any U.S.-India "alliance" would be built on this interaction--and, as such, undoing America's commitment to the nonproliferation regime is the essence of the India deal, rather than an incidental result of it. Update: See more bad things about the India deal here. --Barron YoungSmith ]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.14 2008-07-23T18:08:01Z 2008-07-23T18:17:14Z

The Democrats & National Security By Samantha Power Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security by J. Peter Scoblic Viking, 350 pp., $25.95 Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy...

http://scoblic.com The Democrats & National Security By Samantha Power Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security by J. Peter Scoblic Viking, 350 pp., $25.95 Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats by Matthew Yglesias Wiley, 251 pp., $25.95 1. Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership." Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower initiated US involvement in Vietnam, and President Nixon escalated the war in 1969 and kept US troops on the ground in a manifestly unwinnable mission until 1975. But John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were tagged as the primary culprits. President Carter was widely seen as having bungled the Iran hostage rescue mission and having responded ineffectually to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he substantially increased US military spending, he was never forgiven for his claim that Americans had "an inordinate fear of communism."]]> The last eight years of Republican-run foreign policy, however, have undermined US security and global stability in highly visible ways. Since a Republican president took over in 2001, the United States has invaded two countries. In Afghanistan, after swift success ousting the Taliban, the administration made the inexplicable initial decision to reject NATO's help, insisting that the international military presence not extend beyond Kabul. It spent a pittance on reconstruction—$737 million in 2003 as compared with $10 billion in 2007. Further, with al-Qaeda on the run, the administration spent 2002 mobilizing support for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which required it to divert precious units from eastern Afghanistan. According to many observers, this allowed the Taliban and the al-Qaeda leadership to snatch survival from the jaws of defeat. Violence has spread to once-peaceful pockets of territory, and the number of suicide attacks has increased from two in 2003 to 137 in 2007. In June 2008, forty-six American and allied forces died in Afghanistan, more than during any other month since the war began nearly seven years ago, and more than the thirty-one Americans who died in Iraq that month. As for Iraq, the war has taken the lives of more than four thousand American soldiers, created another front for US forces in combating al-Qaeda, and eroded US army readiness to such an extent that US commanders concede that the army is at its "breaking point." Since 2001, Congress has appropriated about $640 billion for the "Global War on Terror," most of this for operations in Iraq. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in June found that the United States still lacked a strategy for meeting its goals in Iraq. The GAO found that violence had diminished somewhat; but according to the Pentagon, the number of Iraqi units capable of carrying out operations without US assistance continued to hover around 10 percent. While the Iraqi authorities passed legislation readmitting some lower- level Baathists to the parliament, legislation was stalled on oil-sharing and the holding of provincial elections. Between 2005 and 2007, the GAO report found, the Iraq government spent less than a quarter of the $27 billion it budgeted for its own reconstruction efforts. And when it came to essential services, water supplies had improved, but electricity shortages persisted, meeting only about half of Iraqi demand by early May 2008.[2] Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank found in 2007 that the Iraq war had brought about a 600 percent increase in the average number of annual jihadist terrorist attacks throughout the world. Even if one didn't count attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, the incidence of terrorism increased 35 percent worldwide.[3] By now, it is clear that "enhanced interrogation techniques"—in fact, torture—were authorized from the top of the Bush administration and were widely used from Afghanistan to Guantánamo to Iraq to "black sites" such as covert prison facilities or off-shore aircraft carriers. Al-Qaeda has made use of these excesses as recruitment propaganda. Donald Rumsfeld may be remembered for his policy failures, but he should also be remembered for the question he posed in a leaked memo in 2003: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" Many press reports and National Intelligence Estimates offer a resounding "no" to that question. According to polls, many voters are persuaded by the administration that torture can be justified. They probably have not heard from terror specialists who say that useful intelligence comes less from detainees than from informants, communities, and familiar sources. US agents have found that these sources began drying up as American mistreatment of prisoners became known. "Based on my experience in talking to al-Qaeda members," John Cloonan, an FBI counterterrorism specialist testified to Congress recently, I am persuaded that revenge, in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland, is coming, that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.[4] The effect of the Bush administration's policies is that, notwithstanding the towering US military budget, which drastically exceeds that of its rivals, America's global influence has plummeted. This is evident in the administration's failure to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. According to the IAEA, Iran now has 3,300 centrifuges to enrich uranium, as compared to the 160 the IAEA confirmed during a visit to Iran in 2003. Iran's political influence, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, or Gaza, has been dramatically expanded as a result of the US quagmire in Iraq and the crude strategies the US used to eliminate Iran's two greatest enemies—the Baathist and Taliban regimes. Since the greatest potential risk to American lives comes from nuclear terrorism, and since the Bush administration leaders infamously invoked "mushroom clouds" as grounds for invading Iraq, one would have expected them to work zealously to retrieve or secure loose nuclear material. Instead, President Bush attempted to cut funding for the Nunn-Lugar program to secure such material in the former Soviet Union. In declaring an openness to using nuclear weapons for tactical purposes and in discarding the longstanding nuclear doctrine of "no first use," the administration weakened the nonproliferation regime and created additional incentives for nonnuclear countries to acquire nuclear weapons. The President also maintained uncritical support for the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf despite the fact that Musharraf sheltered Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who was caught selling nuclear secrets to North Korea and Iran. Bush's stated goals were to strengthen the US military, bring stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, combat terrorism, prevent rogue states and militants from acquiring nuclear weapons, and promote democracy around the world. In each case, two terms of Republican rule have been disastrous for US national security. The question is: Have American voters noticed? 2. Joe Biden has. In an interview with MSNBC, Senator Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked whether Democrats could be trusted on national security. He erupted: I refuse to sit back like we did in 2000 and 2004. This administration is the worst administration in American foreign policy in modern history—maybe ever. The idea that they are competent to continue to conduct our foreign policy, to make us more secure and make Israel secure, is preposterous.... Every single thing they've touched has been a near disaster.[5] Poll data show that voters are in fact beginning to share Biden's view and at last question Republicans' reliability on national security. On Election Day in 2004 exit polls showed that a majority of voters (49–44 percent) believed that the war in Iraq had made the country less safe. Yet those same exit polls gave Bush an 18-percent edge in handling national security.[6] Between 2003 and 2006 the Republicans had as high as a thirty-point advantage over Democrats on the question of which party could best deal with Iraq. But in the summer of 2006 in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the Democrats were given their first lead in handling Iraq —a three-point edge. This has since been expanded to double digits—an advantage that helps explain the Democrats' strong showing in the 2006 midterm elections. On handling international terrorism, too, the substantial Republican lead had dwindled by 2006; last year, for the first time, a majority of Americans (47–42 percent) said that the Democratic Party would do a better job protecting the country from security threats. President Bush did Republicans a disservice by wrongly conflating the invasion of Iraq and the "war on terror." The setbacks in Iraq have undermined public perceptions of Republicans' performance in combating terrorism more generally. But the poll data raise three important questions. First, which voters have changed their minds? Interestingly, Democrats have improved their showing on security principally by convincing Democratic voters that their own party is more trustworthy than their opponents'. Independent voters still have slightly more faith that Republicans would better protect the country from terrorist attack. A June 2008 Rasmussen survey found unaffiliated voters still favored Republicans on national security by six points. Second, will voters identify Senator McCain closely with the Republican Party, whose policies he has championed, or will he succeed in decoupling himself from a party whose national security credentials have been tarnished? Thus far, probably because of his record of personal heroism and his occasional criticisms of the Bush administration, many polls have judged him more suited to keeping the country safe than the faceless "Republican Party." Third, and most important for the future of US security and the Democratic Party, can Democrats do more than exploit Bush's foreign policy blunders to gain a tactical electoral edge? Can they take advantage of the increased public confidence in their judgment to advance a distinct twenty-first-century foreign policy that voters will prefer and trust them to execute? The first step toward undoing Republican dominance on foreign policy entails debunking the myth that conservative ideology enhances US national security. Here Peter Scoblic, the executive editor at The New Republic and former editor of Arms Control Today, does a great service in Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security. He considers five decades of arms control efforts in order to illuminate the common themes underlying hard-line conservative ideology on national security. He shows, most usefully, the continuity in conservative intellectual leadership across the years. John Foster Dulles wrote the Republicans' foreign policy platform in 1952, denouncing the Democrats' "futile and immoral policy of 'containment,' which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism." Barry Goldwater denounced the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which William Buckley's National Review termed a "nuclear Yalta." And during his first term, Ronald Reagan and the Reaganauts appeared to argue that doing away with an evil regime was more important than preventing nuclear war. Scoblic shows that these men had in common several core premises. One cannot coexist with evil-doers, who are irreparably "fallen," and thus rollback is required. Negotiation is not merely pointless, it is costly "appeasement." And the United States should participate in only those international institutions that are servants of American power; those that constrain Ameri-can power are enemies of the national interest. Scoblic's book offers a terrifying glimpse of the persistent tendency of one militant strand of conservatism to pursue conflict over peace, arms races over arms control, and ideology over pragmatism. His analytic history is particularly strong in revealing how, in a world of uncontrolled forces, conservatives sought to impose complete control, whether by pursuing technological fixes (like the nuclear missile shield) or treating US security as if it were something that could simply be willed. Because many conservatives presume exceptional American virtue —and believe that this virtue is self-evident to others—they have also consistently failed to see how aggressive US actions can appear abroad, and how the fear they generate can give rise to threatening behavior by others, who believe they are acting in self-defense. Scoblic, who sympathetically describes Reagan's shift from denunciation to negotiation with Gorbachev over nuclear arms reduction, writes that it had not previously "even occurred" to Reagan that adopting a war-fighting strategy, beginning a widespread civil defense program, researching a missile shield, while increasing the military budget by 35 percent, starting a new bomber program, deploying a new ICBM, and deploying missiles in Europe could be construed as threatening. Scoblic's account becomes most chilling at the end, when the same conservative voices that had long preferred confrontation to cooperation— such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—actually become dominant players in George W. Bush's executive branch. On January 21, 2000, a year before he would move into the White House, Bush said: When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world. And we knew exactly who the "they" were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who "them" was. Today we're not sure who the "they" are but we know they're there. Having suffered through what one diplomat called the "enemy deprivation syndrome of the 1990s," September 11 gave hard-line conservatives an opportunity to apply their pre-hatched theories; and from the start they sought to unshackle the United States from international agreements and to reduce reliance on diplomatic engagement. When the Bush administration scored a rare recent diplomatic success, convincing North Korea to open up some of its nuclear records, Vice President Cheney was so disgusted by his own administration's pragmatic decision to take Pyongyang off the US terrorist blacklist that he snapped at reporters, "I'm not going to be the one to announce this decision. You need to address your interest in this to the State Department." He then abruptly ended the press encounter, and left the room. What is striking about Scoblic's account of the hard-line conservatives' disdain for diplomacy and pragmatism is the resilience of the central tenets of their ideology. As they ridicule Senator Barack Obama's willingness to engage in negotiations with America's enemies, they seem unchastened by recent history. In 2003, for instance, when the reporter Jeffrey Goldberg told Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, that US troops in Iraq had not been greeted with flowers, Feith said that the Iraqis had been too spooked by the presence of Saddam supporters to show their true emotions. "But," he said, "they had flowers in their minds." Unfortunately, the Democrats have too often failed to contest such dangerous conservative fantasies. This is is the subject of Matthew Yglesias's briskly written, provocative book entitled Heads in the Sand. Yglesias draws on the last decade of US foreign policy to build his case that the Democratic Party's position on national security "has mostly been to play Charlie Brown perennially falling down as Lucy yanks away the football, swearing not to be fooled again...." In 2000 and 2004 Democrats did their best to move away from national security issues to other problems, such as Medicare, where they felt more at home, but they never put forward a strong foreign policy alternative. "Democrats," he writes, have tended to approach security debates from a reflexive posture of fear, preemptively assuming a defensive crouch from which it is impossible to practice politics effectively. Charlie Brown, he writes, "needs a football of his own." Yglesias is persuasive in showing how mainstream Democrats, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, caricatured the antiwar left as a way of flaunting their national security bona fides. The intraparty squabble inhibited the creation of a pluralistic coalition united against the administration's unilateralism and militarism. Yglesias also gives an important account of the different positions that led to Democratic acquiescence in the war in Iraq—an acquiescence that neutered or delayed many Democrats' criticisms of the President. For some Democrats the Iraq war was the natural culmination of the thinking that earlier gave rise to President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. It is true that Clinton bypassed the UN Security Council in the war of 1999, but to charge, as Yglesias does, that there was "no difference" between the two wars procedurally or substantively is to ignore the coordination of the Kosovo war with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The basic attitude of the Bush administration was described by one of its officials quoted in Strobe Talbott's recent book, The Great Experiment: Your type agonizes, ours seizes opportunities. You see our interests in Iraq and in the UN as in tension with each other; we see an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. We don't know how events in 2003 would have progressed without the Kosovo war, but it is hard to imagine that President Bush—a man who repudiated five treaties in his first year in office[7] and has consistently ridiculed the UN—would have been deterred in any way by the absence of past precedent. Moreover, while some prominent "liberal hawks" favored the Iraq war, plenty of those who had supported NATO action in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons opposed the war in Iraq on those or other grounds. Yglesias wrongly implies that support for one war inevitably entailed support for the other; he also unfortunately lends credence to the surprisingly prevalent fiction that Bush invaded Iraq for humanitarian purposes. Still, NATO action in Kosovo did make UN Security Council authorization seem more optional than it had in the past. Also, the Kosovo war helped build support for the invasion of Iraq by contributing to the false impression that the US military was invincible. The mistaken recollection that the US victory over the Serbs was nearly effortless, combined with the Bush administration's quick initial overthrow of the Taliban, caused many Democrats to agree with the Republican claim that the war in Iraq would in fact be the "cakewalk" that Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz promised. Yglesias is most convincing when he discusses the other two factors behind the rush to war—an international security hawkishness among Democrats, who accepted Kenneth Pollack's argument that Iraq was indeed a "gathering storm"; and domestic political opportunism rooted in the belief that Washington careers would be ruined by the failure to support a war that proved successful (the so-called "Sam Nunn effect," after the Georgia senator whose presidential hopes were widely seen to have been dashed by his opposition to the first Gulf War). Yglesias shows how, for the last five years, Democrats have allowed themselves to be hemmed in by the conservative mind-set about Iraq—arguing over tactics such as whether international support could be acquired, whether enough troops had been sent, or whether the surge has caused a drop in violence. They have neglected, meanwhile, to confront the Bush administration directly for its pursuit of global hegemony and seeming contempt for a rule-based liberal order. It wasn't only Bush's particular policies that happened to be foolish, Yglesias notes: Conservative Republicans have not merely made some mistakes on Iraq, and some other mistakes on Iran, and some other mistakes on North Korea, plus some mistakes on Syria, while mishandling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, by coincidence, damaging our relationships with formerly close allies. Rather, they are making one big mistake in seeking to transform the United States' role in the world... to that of an imperial superpower that seeks to use its national strength to dominate the world and needlessly heighten conflicts. A believer in international institutions and international law, Yglesias rightly dismisses the proposal to replace the UN with a group of like-minded countries, such as the League of Democracies favored by McCain. "An action opposed by Russia and China will not suddenly gain new legitimacy in Russian or Chinese eyes simply because a group from which they are excluded says so," he writes. Having criticized the Democrats for failing to put forward an alternative strategy, Yglesias devotes fewer than ten pages at the end of his book to sketching one of his own. His brevity is partly justified by his basic argument —that the alternative is not "new" (he is irked by liberals' tendency to "fetishize novelty"). Democrats, he writes, should turn back to the same "reciprocity, rules, institutions and cooperation" that in his view prevented major conflict in the second half of the twentieth century. 3. In a June interview with Fortune magazine, Charles Black, one of John McCain's top campaign advisers, credited the assassination of Benazir Bhutto with improving McCain's appeal in New Hampshire just ahead of the primary (a claim Jon Stewart termed the "Bhutto Bump"). "His knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be commander-in-chief," Black said. "And it helped us." He then went on to predict the effect of another terrorist attack on US soil on McCain's presidential bid: "Certainly it would be a big advantage for him," Black said. McCain had to dissociate himself from this remark but it seemed to lay bare Republican thinking. McCain has tried to turn the 2008 election into a vote on national security. He believes that he has an edge in presenting himself as a natural commander in chief and in describing Obama as a rookie who is simply too naive to know how to deal with a deadly world. At a town hall meeting in June the Arizona senator read aloud a recent statement by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which the Iranian leader again suggested Israel should "disappear." "It's a very clear choice, and whether it be on Iran, or whether it be on Iraq, or whether it be on other national security issues," McCain said, "Senator Obama does not have the experience and the knowledge and clearly the judgment, my friends." McCain has pledged to continue many of Bush's national security policies. He backed Bush's invasion of Iraq, he raised the possibility of military action against Iran, and he deplored granting the right of habeas corpus to detainees. He has three main tactics for seizing public trust in the area of national security. The first is to invoke, however implicitly, his own military service. When Obama criticized McCain for his refusal to support Senator Jim Webb's proposal to increase college tuition benefits for recent veterans, McCain lashed out: "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did." McCain's second tactic is to evoke what he claims will be the costs of "embracing defeat" in Iraq—an al-Qaeda base, a genocide that will make Srebrenica "look like a Sunday-school picnic," and a regional war that will undermine US interests in the Middle East. Since voters have seen the debacles of the Republican-led status quo, McCain has to paint an even grimmer imagined picture of the costs of Democratic national security leadership. His third tactic is to try to impose on Obama the conservative caricature of "liberals"—as weak, naive, elitist, and unfit to lead in a time of existential threats. Here McCain follows the example of Karl Rove at a conservative Republican gathering in New York in 2004: "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." How can Obama and his Democratic colleagues expose once and for all the fallacies in the conservative approach to national security, while putting forward a convincing alternative? They must start by not shying from the security debate or relying, with quiet relief, on polls showing that (unlike in 2004) only 4 percent of Americans today view terrorism as their top concern. Democrats must instead seize the advantage the polls show they could have on security issues. This means talking early and often about national security and going on the offensive by strongly presenting the foreign policy plans already devised, whether by members of Congress or by the Obama campaign.[8] It also means explaining how each plan —whether for retrieving loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union or for assisting Iraqi refugees in Syria— advances the central goal of keeping Americans safe. Democrats can break with their reputation for squeamishness about national security issues by showing their ease and confidence in dealing with these topics. Instead of changing the subject when national security issues arise, they should look forward to taking part in detailed foreign policy discussions that allow them to show their new strength. They must also answer McCain's apocalyptic claims about the effects of a US withdrawal from Iraq. Too often on Capitol Hill or in the primary battle, Democrats have confidently suggested that since the US-led invasion brought savage sectarian killing to Iraq, a US departure will rid the country of much of its violence. Critics of President Bush have seemed to imply that no serious harm will flow from a US withdrawal. But American voters realize that the effects of a US drawdown are in fact unknowable. The failure to acknowledge any possible humanitarian or strategic risks of leaving makes Democrats sound less sophisticated than they are, and deprives them of the chance to describe their plans to draw down troops in a careful and strategically sound way. McCain's alarmist forecast thus goes unchallenged. Prominent Democrats must drive home the continuing costs of remaining in Iraq—costs to Iraq, the region, Afghanistan,[9] US military readiness, and national security as a whole— while describing the specific ways an Obama administration would limit the harmful consequences of withdrawal. (In fact, Obama outlined such plans in a speech last year but it got little attention and needs reinforcement from the Democratic echo chamber.) Obama has long stated his intention to retain a Quick-Reaction Force in the region to carry out counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and other such networks. He has made clear his concern for Iraqi civilians in mixed neighborhoods who might be more vulnerable following a withdrawal of US combat brigades. He would offer these civilians fair notice of US plans and would be open to relocating those who would feel more secure if they moved. He has promised $2 billion to assist the two million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries. He would establish a war crimes commission to gather the testimony of survivors and put militia leaders on notice that they may eventually be prosecuted. Obama's plan to meet with the region's heads of state is the first of many steps that will be required to prevent regional conflict. Since Vietnam there has never been a more auspicious time for the Democratic Party to establish close relations with the US military. Building on Obama's October 2002 speech explaining his opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats can continue to argue that Obama and his party will never do what the Republicans have done: send US service members to fight unnecessary wars. He will not stretch the US military and military families to their breaking points by extending tours of duty beyond what is tolerable. He will not order young cadets and reservists to carry out cruel and inhuman acts against foreign detainees and then abandon them when it becomes politically inconvenient, allowing them to be court-martialed while those who authorized the practices take up high-paying jobs at corporate law firms or prestigious teaching posts at top-flight law schools. Democrats should make it clear that they will listen to the military's pleas to make major improvements in the civilian components of the government that work with the military on policing, governance, and reconstruction. Republicans have had eight years to respond to the appeals of US generals like David Petraeus who have begged for more and better-equipped civilian partners to join US soldiers; yet more US personnel still serve in US military marching bands than in the foreign service. With their grossly inadequate veterans' care, moreover, the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress badly failed many of those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Democrats in Congress such as Jim Webb and Obama who have put forth the health care and college tuition plans that treat American veterans with the respect and dignity they deserve during their difficult transitions to civilian life. The Republicans' failure to support first-class care for returning service members is not only immoral; it is contributing to the difficulty the armed forces are now having in recruiting and retaining volunteers. Democrats must also help voters see—and reject once and for all—the false choice that George W. Bush and now McCain offer between militarism and "appeasement." When John F. Kennedy was ridiculed by the right for his plans to negotiate with Communist countries, he rejected outright the idea that "we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead." Obama and the Democrats today can show that while the United States refused to talk to America's adversaries, Iran and North Korea both advanced much further in their nuclear development. And finally Democrats must play up the sharp differences that exist between the two parties on national security. Here the voters seem to be accepting in larger numbers the principles of the Democratic foreign policy platform, but Democrats have not yet locked in their advantages. Three framing themes seem particularly worth emphasizing: • The New versus the Old. Democrats should argue that their foreign policy is particularly well suited to meeting today's unconventional threats —those that cross borders. Meeting such threats will sometimes entail using military force, but it will almost always require mustering global cooperation. Here the Democrats must point to the security consequences of the loss of respect for the United States around the world: the US requires the assistance of others to aid it in combating terrorism, halting nuclear proliferation, and reversing global warming. In scorning international law and public opinion abroad, Republicans have alienated those the US needs to share the burden of neutralizing threats that Americans deem the most pressing. Democrats for instance, will be more effective in securing the cooperation of intelligence and law enforcement officials in the eighty countries in which al-Qaeda is now active. • Deeds versus Words. In his National Security Strategy for 2002, Bush used the words "liberty" eleven times, "freedom" forty-six times, and "dignity" nine times; yet people who live under oppression around the world have seen few benefits from President Bush's freedom doctrine. Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Bush, put it best when he said, "Since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear." The gulf between America's rights rhetoric and the abuses carried out against detainees in American custody has been fatal to American credibility. Obama needs to restore that credibility by ending those excesses, and by following through on his pledge to launch a foreign aid initiative rooted in Franklin Roosevelt's core democratic value: freedom from fear. The United States should invest in a long-term "rule of law" initiative that takes up the burden of helping other countries and international organizations to build workable legal systems in the developing world. • Law versus Lawlessness. In arguing for closing down Guantánamo, ending extraordinary rendition, and returning to the Geneva Conventions, Democrats must remind voters of the national security consequences of being perceived as a lawbreaker. More terrorists take up arms against the United States, while fewer countries take up arms along with the United States. In stressing the importance of law, Democrats should also repudiate the extraordinary and illegitimate presidential power seized by Bush (and generally supported by McCain). As a constitutional lawyer, Obama is in a unique position to argue that as commander in chief, he will never hold himself or his advisers above the law. For the first time in sixteen years, the Democrats in 2008 could end up in control of the House, Senate, and White House. This could enable them to scale back the ballooning budget deficit, put in place a universal health care plan, move the country along the path to energy independence, and commit the United States to combating climate change. Although few have focused on this, the Democratic Party today is also in a strong position to show that it will be more reliable in keeping Americans safe during the twenty-first century. If the party succeeds in doing this, it will not only wake up the United States and the world from a long eight-year nightmare; it will also lay to rest the enduring myth that strong and wrong is preferable to smart and right. —July 17, 2008 ]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.16 2008-06-27T18:35:40Z 2008-07-24T18:36:24Z

North Korea just blew up the cooling tower on its own Yongbyon reactor, as part of an ongoing dismantlement deal with the United States. This is a momentous step because it's largely irreversible: North Korea will never again be able...

http://scoblic.com ridiculous policy, George W. Bush may have perversely increased America's long-run incentive to prop up the North Korean regime--since now, a coup or political meltdown would run the risk of putting those nukes in the hands of terrorists. --Barron YoungSmith]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.13 2008-06-09T20:28:26Z 2008-06-09T20:34:48Z

“Moral Clarity,” Ideological Rigidity, Strategic Myopia by Paul Boyer (Link.) Before I retired as a university professor, I would mentally calculate as each term began what public events that year’s freshmen were likely to remember. For today’s freshmen, born around...

http://scoblic.com “Moral Clarity,” Ideological Rigidity, Strategic Myopia by Paul Boyer (Link.) Before I retired as a university professor, I would mentally calculate as each term began what public events that year’s freshmen were likely to remember. For today’s freshmen, born around 1990, the earliest such memory might well be Bill Clinton’s impeachment. As for national security issues, even the rare freshman attentive to such matters would be aware of little before the current Bush administration.]]> U.S. vs. Them. If the younger generation, in whose hands the nation’s future and our hopes of avoiding nuclear catastrophe will soon rest, is to possess the knowledge essential to intelligent action, broad public understanding of how we got where we are becomes essential. Scoblic’s book represents a major contribution to this public education effort. Executive editor of The New Republic (and a former editor of Arms Control Today), Scoblic has written a deeply researched, highly readable, and compellingly argued account of strategic debates and foreign policy decision-making from the 1950s to the present. Even arms control veterans will find fresh insights and provocative interpretations. U.S. vs. Them should be read not only by those unaware of our nuclear history, but by the new cadre of policymakers who will soon take the helm in Washington. An important overarching thesis frames Scoblic’s historical survey. Since the 1950s, he argues, two contending groups, conservatives and realist-pragmatists, holding radically different worldviews have vied to shape U.S. foreign policy and strategic decision-making. With William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers, and James Burnham among their patron saints and Buckley’s National Review as their house organ, the conservatives began as a dissident minority but gained strength steadily. Rallying around Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and reinforced by hard-line Cold War Democrats turned neoconservative Republicans, they reached their apogee of influence in the administration of George W. Bush, with disastrous consequences. Scoblic’s devastating analysis of the current administration’s foreign policy and strategic decisions, both pre- and post-September 11, is thus firmly grounded in his explication of a half century of ideological development. The catastrophic Iraq war; contempt for international bodies and diplomacy in general; downgrading of arms control and nonproliferation initiatives; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; affinity for nuclear war-fighting doctrines and weaponry; commitment to a costly, destabilizing, and technologically dubious missile defense program; offer of nuclear know-how to India despite that country’s flouting of nonproliferation norms; and muddled handling of the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs are all convincingly examined as the interconnected apotheosis of a worldview gestated, elaborated, and tirelessly promoted by an identifiable ideological clique. For Scoblic’s conservatives, all human reality, including international relations, aligns itself like magnetized metal filings along force fields of good and evil. Fetishizing “moral clarity,” they see a black-and-white world where the murky realms of moral ambiguity must be avoided at all costs. For them, America has a quasi-divine global mission to promote righteousness and combat evil or, in a partially desacralized formulation, to spread democracy and destroy tyranny. America best fulfills this cosmic mission when it acts alone. Working with international bodies such as the United Nations or even with fractious allies can dilute the moral clarity essential to a wise foreign policy. Those who counsel compromise or coexistence with adversary states jeopardize this rigidly bimodal worldview. Military power and readiness to use it comprise America’s key assets in performing its moral role. As Vice President Dick Cheney memorably put it in 2003 in rejecting a Chinese proposal for multiparty talks with North Korea about its nuclear weapons program, “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” Any attempt to reduce or constrain America’s war-making capacity, either directly or through arms control agreements or treaties based on the principle of deterrence, must be resisted. (On these grounds, Scoblic argues that the 1972 ABM Treaty became a particular target of conservative venom.) The goal is not mere balance-of-power sufficiency or deterrent capability, but U.S. dominance in all military realms, including nuclear weaponry. Scorning arms control and nonproliferation as goals worth pursuing in themselves, conservatives denounce the nuclear ambitions of “evil” nations but insouciantly tolerate and even facilitate the spread of nuclear weapons to nations that meet their moral and political litmus tests. Their vehement opposition to a consistent application of the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, writes Scoblic, represents “one of the conservatives’ more bizarre and foolish stands.” Scoblic finds conservatives’ current tactics foreshadowed in their earlier ideological maneuverings. The manipulation of intelligence data to justify the Iraq war, for example, recalls the tactics of “Team B,” a group of dedicated Cold Warriors led by Harvard historian Richard Pipes. In 1976, working through the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Team B dismissed the CIA’s intelligence estimates and offered their own apocalyptic assessment of Soviet military capability and intentions to support their ideologically driven preconceptions. Similarly, the ridicule heaped on UN weapons inspectors by National Review editor Rich Lowry in the run-up to the Iraq war echoed decades of sneering attacks on arms control efforts by Lowry’s patron, Buckley. Documenting the channels by which conservative ideology has passed from earlier years to the present, Scoblic traces the Byzantine bureaucratic histories of influential Bush policymakers and their journalistic and other enablers, such as Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Charles Krauthammer. We encounter John McCain, the current GOP standard-bearer, describing the world situation at the 2004 Republican convention in depressingly familiar terms: “It’s a fight between right and wrong, good and evil.” Although the realist-pragmatists share many of the conservatives’ moral and political values and foreign policy goals, Scoblic argues, they differ radically over how to achieve them. They seek to advance U.S. interests not by moralistic rhetoric, military bluster, and impetuous unilateral action, but through international cooperation, patient diplomacy, a regard for world opinion, and, when unavoidable, measured military action, preferably in an international or multilateral context. If it serves U.S. interests, they are prepared to negotiate with unsavory or undemocratic regimes rather than ostracize them, plot to overthrow or destabilize them, or insist that they accept U.S. demands before talks can begin—the other camp’s typical strategies. Although willing to use force, the realists see danger in the obsessive preoccupation with U.S. military might and jingoistic saber-rattling and see considerable benefit in collaborative efforts to reduce the world’s military arsenals, including nuclear weapons. Scoblic insists the realists have best served the national interest. The conservatives, for all their nationalistic rhetoric and prating of moral clarity, have time and again embraced positions that undermined national security and U.S. global standing and made the world a more dangerous place. From the near hysterical anti-communism and gleeful anticipation of an apocalyptic showdown between the world’s good and evil forces that characterized the movement’s rambunctious infancy through the knee-jerk opposition to successive arms control and nonproliferation efforts in the later twentieth century down to the policies of the current administration, Scoblic makes his case. He also challenges the historical distortions of today’s conservative ideologues. For example, he convincingly argues that their veneration of Reagan draws precisely the wrong lesson from the Reagan years. Waxing nostalgic over the “evil empire” rhetoric, massive military buildup, and chilling talk of nuclear war that characterized Reagan’s first term, they ignore the conciliatory tone and openness to negotiation that marked his second term, a shift they and their ideological forebears denounced at the time. Caveats Is “conservative” the best label for these relentless ideologues? As Scoblic himself notes, this elastic term encompasses many ideological positions—traditionalists, anti-government libertarians, cautious moderates suspicious of all sudden change, even environmentalists protective of wildlife and wilderness. One could argue that Scoblic’s particular subset of conservatives are really radical utopians, in their rigid moralism, hypernationalism, and contempt for all who engage the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. In making his case, Scoblic himself partially adopts the polarized mind-set he criticizes. Highlighting the more doctrinaire ideologists and their pronouncements, he pays less attention to those figures—John Foster Dulles and Condoleezza Rice come to mind—who do not clearly fall in either camp, who shifted positions over time, or whose actions and rhetoric did not always match. Scoblic goes easy on realists such as Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, and John Kennedy, who employed stark apocalyptic language to promote specific policy objectives or in the heat of an electoral campaign, arguing that this was merely a tactical ploy, not reflective of their actual worldview. The structure of his argument also leads him to play down the role of liberals or pragmatists who intensified nuclear dangers: Harry Truman, whose 1950 approval of the hydrogen bomb project accelerated the nuclear arms race; Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal; Jimmy Carter, who after initially pledging to work for total nuclear disarmament, responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and deployment of medium-range missiles in Eastern Europe and to intense conservative political pressure at home by abandoning the SALT II Treaty, deploying intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe, and signing Presidential Directive 59 justifying a U.S. nuclear war-fighting strategy; Clinton’s 1999 endorsement of the pared-down successor to Reagan’s misbegotten Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI); and Hillary Clinton’s campaign-inspired resurrection of John Foster Dulles’ “massive retaliation” threat, warning that should Iran “foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” Scoblic’s conservatives have much to answer for, but not every deplorable development and hyperbolic pronouncement since 1950 can fairly be laid at their doorstep. Although he effectively documents how ideological rigidity has undermined conservatives’ approach to security issues, Scoblic seems less attuned to how ideology has also subtly influenced the realist-pragmatists he admires. His focus on conservatives’ historical distortions and blind spots plays down how realists too have sometimes uncritically relied on treaties, governmental assurances, and even sketchy inspection procedures, missing violations and clandestine programs. Reagan’s mantra of “trust but verify” embodied an important truth. (The skepticism it expresses must, of course, be applied to the United States no less than to other countries.) Further, Scoblic’s close attention to the conservative and realist approaches to security issues tends to marginalize the liberal internationalists who emphasize the role of the UN and other international agencies. This Wilsonian vision reached its peak of influence in the early post-World War II campaign for the international control of atomic energy, which the Truman administration briefly endorsed and Scoblic himself supports in his conclusion. Although never dominant, liberal internationalism has remained influential, espoused by respected organizations, policy institutes, journals of opinion, and writers such as Jonathan Schell, author of such powerful works as The Fate of the Earth (1982), The Abolition (1984), and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (2007). It influenced policy in the early Carter administration, and even the current Bush administration grudgingly acknowledges the importance of the UN and its security agencies. Generally excellent on policy debates, U.S. vs. Them pays less attention to the larger political/cultural milieu within which these debates unfolded. We learn little, for example, of the nuclear test ban movement of the later 1950s and early ‘60s. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, religious leaders, physicians, science fiction writers, satirist Tom Lehrer, and filmmakers such as Stanley Kramer (On the Beach) and Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove) all helped generate the powerful cultural headwinds that made it easier for Kennedy to negotiate the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, opening the door to subsequent arms control agreements. The nuclear weapons freeze campaign of the early 1980s, the crucial background for Reagan’s 1983 SDI speech, receives two paragraphs. Although stressing the essentially religious nature of the conservative worldview and noting Buckley’s devout Catholicism, Scoblic provides few specifics on the role of religion in this deeply religious nation, both in resisting and supporting the conservative cause. Many religious leaders over the years vigorously challenged the conservatives’ position, impeding their growing influence. The U.S. Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace,” for example, bluntly rejected hard-line conservative views on nuclear weapons policy and urged redoubled disarmament efforts. On the other hand, the upsurge of evangelicalism that gripped Protestant America in these years buttressed the conservative cause. Anticipating Team B, Billy Graham’s apocalyptic sermons in the 1950s warned of an imminent Soviet attack. In the 1970s and beyond, Bible-prophecy popularizers such as paperback writer Hal Lindsey and televangelist Jerry Falwell foresaw a nuclear holocaust as God’s way of finally imposing moral clarity on wicked humanity. Newly politicized evangelicals helped assure Reagan’s victory in 1980, rallied to Bush in 2000 and 2004, and provided consistent grassroots support (with some defections recently) for the militarized, hypermoralistic foreign policy ideology that Scoblic examines. Scoblic’s concluding reflections on “Why We Cling to Good and Evil” address a key question: If conservative ideologists have so disastrously undermined U.S. security, how have they accumulated such power and influence? His rather generic psychological explanation—leaders who promise security in fearful times can win support even if their promises prove hollow—certainly makes sense. Yet, a closer look at specific cultural and religious trends in contemporary America would have deepened his analysis. Scoblic’s own policy advice focuses on how the benefits of nuclear power may be extended to developing countries without encouraging nuclear weapons proliferation. (He favors the international control of fissionable material, first proposed in the Acheson-Lilienthal plan of 1946.) This is an important issue, but only one of many that demand attention if we are to extricate ourselves from the slow-motion train wreck that has resulted from the conservative hijacking of U.S. strategy and foreign policy. Recommendations If Scoblic’s own prescriptions remain sketchy, he leaves no doubt about the ideological reorientation he believes is essential if we are to put our diplomatic and strategic thinking back on track: Conservatives are right: There is evil in the world—and there always will be. All we can do is to identify the threat it poses to the United States and to minimize it. Rejecting the goal of victory in a war between good and evil—indeed rejecting the very concept of such a war—is not immoral or even amoral.… After all, there is nothing moral about leaving the American people vulnerable to nuclear threats…. When the national interest is cast in ideological rather than empirical terms, it is usually miscast.… Defining America’s enemy as “evil” renders the threats we face abstract and therefore unsolvable; moral clarity becomes obfuscating. In short, nonproliferation, nuclear arms reduction, and the ultimate goal of a nuclear-free world must be primary and continuing objectives of U.S. diplomacy, important in their own right, and not merely demands applied selectively depending on whether a given country is currently considered a friend or foe or whether a regime meets American standards of democracy and freedom. Governments change; alignments among nations evolve; the nuclear threat remains. When arms control is subordinated to ideologically driven objectives, particularly those rooted in a Manichean good-versus-evil worldview, true security suffers, however lofty the rhetoric. U.S. vs. Them lucidly traces a half century of strategic thinking and arms control debates while probing the gaping flaws in the conservative worldview. All concerned citizens, policymakers included, could benefit from a thoughtful reading of this impressive book, one that brings genuine clarity, not the illusion of clarity, to the vital issues it addresses. Paul Boyer, professor of history emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is author of By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985) and Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter With Nuclear Weapons (1998).]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.11 2008-06-03T14:10:38Z 2008-06-03T14:13:30Z

Check out this audio book talk about U.S. vs. Them, featuring Peter Scoblic, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, and a cameo by John B. Judis....

http://scoblic.com audio book talk about U.S. vs. Them, featuring Peter Scoblic, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, and a cameo by John B. Judis.]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.12 2008-06-03T13:16:04Z 2008-06-09T20:33:47Z

Via Ben, Great news for Obama in the form of this Gallup poll: Large majorities of Democrats and independents, and even half of Republicans, believe the president of the United States should meet with the leaders of countries that are...

http://scoblic.com Ben, Great news for Obama in the form of this Gallup poll: Large majorities of Democrats and independents, and even half of Republicans, believe the president of the United States should meet with the leaders of countries that are considered enemies of the United States. Overall, 67% of Americans say this kind of diplomacy is a good idea....]]> Michael Crowley]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.10 2008-05-26T15:43:35Z 2008-05-26T15:47:02Z

Never Mind the ‘Neo’ May 25, 2008 by Nicholas Confessore (link) As the occupation of Iraq grinds through its sixth year, many who view American involvement there as a disaster are content to blame the neoconservatives, those operatives and intellectuals...

http://scoblic.com Never Mind the ‘Neo’ May 25, 2008 by Nicholas Confessore (link) As the occupation of Iraq grinds through its sixth year, many who view American involvement there as a disaster are content to blame the neoconservatives, those operatives and intellectuals inside and outside the Bush administration who once believed they could democratize the Middle East at the point of a gun. Even some right-leaning critics have declared that the neoconservative project in Iraq was both utopian and imprudent, and therefore at odds with basic conservative principles. Not so fast, says J. Peter Scoblic. In “U.S. vs. Them,” Scoblic, the executive editor of The New Republic, argues persuasively that neoconservatism isn’t the problem — plain old conservatism is. For Scoblic, the Bush administration’s habits of foreign affairs — its distrust of international institutions, its conviction that “good” and “evil” nations cannot coexist in the world — are part of an inglorious tradition of bad ideas that dates to the years of the cold war, when Barry Goldwater lobbied against building a Moscow-Washington hot line. ]]> Nicholas Confessore is a reporter in the Albany bureau of The Times. ]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.9 2008-05-20T01:19:50Z 2008-05-20T01:22:08Z

And it's not just that he doesn't wear a moustache....

http://scoblic.com doesn't wear a moustache.]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.6 2008-05-19T14:15:04Z 2008-05-19T14:16:57Z

Bush, McCain and other conservatives are on the wrong side of history when they dismiss Obama's foreign policy. By J. Peter Scoblic Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2008 In a speech to the Israeli parliament Thursday, President Bush took a...

http://scoblic.com Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2008 In a speech to the Israeli parliament Thursday, President Bush took a swipe at Barack Obama for his willingness to negotiate with evil regimes. "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said. "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history." But if there is anything that has been discredited by history, it is the argument that every enemy is Hitler, that negotiations constitute appeasement, and that talking will automatically lead to a slaughter of Holocaust-like proportions. It is an argument that conservatives made throughout the Cold War, and, if the charge seemed overblown at the time, it seems positively ludicrous with the clarity of hindsight. ]]> The modern conservative movement was founded in no small part on the idea that presidents Truman and Eisenhower were "appeasing" the Soviets. The logic went something like this: Because communism was evil, the United States should seek to destroy it, not coexist with it; the bipartisan policy of containment, which sought to prevent the further spread of communism, was a moral and strategic folly because it implied long-term coexistence with Moscow. Conservative foreign policy guru James Burnham wrote entire books claiming that containment -- which, after the Cold War, would be credited with defeating the Soviet Union -- constituted "appeasement." Instead, conservatives agitated for the rollback of communism, and they opposed all negotiations with the Soviets. When Eisenhower welcomed Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to the United States in 1959, William F. Buckley Jr., the right's leader, complained that the act of "diplomatic sentimentality" signaled the "death rattle of the West." Conservatives even applied this critique to one of the most dangerous moments in human history: the Cuban missile crisis, during which the United States and the Soviet Union nearly came to nuclear blows over Moscow's deployment of missiles 90 miles off the American coast. When President Kennedy successfully negotiated a peaceful conclusion to the crisis, conservative icon Barry Goldwater protested that he had appeased the Soviets by promising not to invade Cuba if they backed down. The Soviets withdrew their missiles in what was widely seen as a humiliation to Khrushchev, but Goldwater believed that Kennedy's diplomacy gave "the communists one of their greatest victories in their race for world power that they have enjoyed to date." To Goldwater, it was far preferable to risk nuclear war with the Soviets than to give up our right to roll back Fidel Castro. Indeed, conservatives considered virtually any attempt to bring the arms race under control as a surrender to communism. When the SALT I agreement capping nuclear arsenals came to Capitol Hill, conservative Rep. John Ashbrook (whose presidential candidacy Buckley supported in 1972) said that "the total history of man indicates we can place very little reliance on treaties or written documents. This is especially true when the agreements are with nations or powers which have aggressive plans. Hitler had plans. Chamberlain's Munich served only to deaden the free world to reality. The communists have plans. SALT will merely cause us to lower our guard, possibly fatally." A few years later, Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the elected face of the burgeoning neoconservative movement, charged President Carter with "appeasement in its purest form" for negotiating SALT II, which set equal limits on the number of U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles and bombers. Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 was seen as the culmination of the conservative movement, dubbed SALT II "appeasement" as well, but the trope would come back to bite him. Although Reagan pleased the right enormously during his first three years in office with his military expansion, his call for rollback and his advocacy of missile defenses, conservatives reacted with horror once he began serious negotiations with the Soviets. When he and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which for the first time eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, Buckley's National Review dubbed it "suicide." The Conservative Caucus took out a full-page newspaper ad saying "Appeasement is as unwise in 1988 as in 1938." It paired photos of Reagan and Gorbachev with photos of Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. Containment, negotiation, nuclear stability -- each of these things helped protect the United States and end the Cold War. And yet, at the time, conservatives thought each was synonymous with appeasement. The Bush administration has been little different, refusing for years to talk to North Korea or Iran about their nuclear programs because it wanted to defeat evil, not talk to it. The result was that Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon and Iran's uranium program continued unfettered. (By contrast, when the administration negotiated with Libya -- an act that its chief arms controller, John Bolton, had previously derided as, yes, "appeasement" -- it succeeded in eliminating Tripoli's nuclear program.) Alas, John McCain accused President Clinton of "appeasement" for engaging North Korea, instead calling for "rogue state rollback," and now he dismisses the idea of negotiations with Iran. Given conservatism's historical record, Obama's inclination to negotiate seems only sensible. When will conservatives learn that it is 2008, not 1938? tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.7 2008-05-16T19:18:43Z 2008-05-19T15:01:03Z

While it was a bit choppy, I'd have to say Obama's speech today was an epochal stride towards dismantling the conservative advantage on foreign policy--attacking its rhetorical substructure in way Democrats have not done before....

http://scoblic.com bit choppy, I'd have to say Obama's speech today was an epochal stride towards dismantling the conservative advantage on foreign policy--attacking its rhetorical substructure in way Democrats have not done before.]]> Why Not Victory?, Victory is Possible, and Choosing Victory for more historical examples)--and replaced it with a more accurate description of reality. Second, by calling the conservative approach to Iran "naïve," he turned the rhetorical tables in an important way. Their policy is naïve. It basically posits that with enough "moral clarity" and willpower, which--absent military rollback--manifests itself in the real world as name-calling and posturing, America's enemies will simply capitulate. That is stupid on its face. But liberals often point this out in a studious, technocratic way that makes them sound like Piggy from Lord of The Flies--allowing Republicans to exploit the nagging, Spenglerian suspicion Democrats will lead America to defeat and civilizational collapse. By appropriating "naïve," Obama inoculates himself from this charge, makes conservatives look like children, and attacks their stewardship in a way that's satisfying on a gut level--as well as a rational one. --Barron YoungSmith]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.8 2008-05-16T17:11:05Z 2008-05-19T15:00:44Z

We're slamming Phyllis Schlafly for her role in the culture wars, but she was arguably more destructive during the 1950s, '60s and '70s--decades she spent facilitating Barry Goldwater's rise (authoring A Choice, Not An Echo), while agitating against arms control...

http://scoblic.com slamming Phyllis Schlafly for her role in the culture wars, but she was arguably more destructive during the 1950s, '60s and '70s--decades she spent facilitating Barry Goldwater's rise (authoring A Choice, Not An Echo), while agitating against arms control and "appeasement" of China and the Soviet Union. ]]> Strike From Space and Ambush at Vladivostok--warning that merely talking to the Soviets would weaken America's will to prevail in a nuclear war and sap our moral legitimacy. Sound familiar? Alan Wolfe wrote that Schlafly's "vituperative, apocalyptic, character-assassinating campaign against the ERA" set tone for America's culture wars, but that tone originated in her apocalyptic, vituperative approach to U.S. foreign policy. That, too, is still with us today. --Barron YoungSmith ]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.5 2008-05-14T16:07:54Z 2008-05-14T16:10:37Z

Check out this Eye on Books audio interview with Peter and find out how he really feels. --Staff...

http://scoblic.com audio interview with Peter and find out how he really feels. --Staff]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.3 2008-05-06T16:43:47Z 2008-05-06T17:17:03Z

Charles Krauthammer has been taking the Bush administration to task over Iran. His recent National Review piece began, "It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration's attempt to halt Iran's nuclear program has failed. Utterly." Simply put, he's...

http://scoblic.com piece began, "It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration's attempt to halt Iran's nuclear program has failed. Utterly." Simply put, he's angry Bush hasn't overturned the Iranian regime with strong enough sanctions, nor hit Iran with air strikes. Because we've failed so disastrously on these counts, Krauthammer says, the only thing to do is adopt a "Holocaust Declaration" promising massive retaliation against Iran in response to any nuclear attack on Israel. I admire his determination to secure the United States and Israel, but I can't help but think his position utterly absurd. Why? Because Krauthammer has backed the Bush administration's position from the start--the very same 'utterly failed' approach that has resulted in Iran continuing to enrich uranium, unimpeded. ]]> counterproliferation policy, rather than a nonproliferation policy: it assumes that proliferation is inevitable, and, in doing so, encourages it. (More on this here.) From a U.S. security standpoint, this has indeed been an utter failure. There's no guarantee negotiating with Iran would have worked. But, by deriding diplomacy as appeasement--rather than treating it as a proactive effort to eliminate a nuclear threat before it becomes extremely dire (necessitating deterrence and missile defense, the second of which assumes we'll wait until literally the last possible second before stopping Iran's nukes)--and declaring that "the era of nonproliferation is over" we've disclosed any hope that Iran's program could be nipped in the bud. That is a serious oversight, which commits us to one of two possible eventualities: preventive military strikes, or a world where Iran gets a nuclear bomb. Ruling out all other options, Krauthammer has, logically, been resigned to these quite some time. Now, since it's politically non-viable to undertake air strikes without first attempting substantive diplomacy (which he doesn't want to do), he's asking us to plan for the second of those worlds--the world where Iran has the Bomb. We may well find ourselves adopting a deterrent posture towards Iran one day. But, if we do make some sort of "Holocaust Declaration," it will be worth remembering how we got to that point--and who was responsible. --Barron YoungSmith ]]> tag:peterscoblic.com,2008:/blog//1.4 2008-05-06T16:00:00Z 2008-05-06T17:16:34Z

Hi! I'm Peter's research assistant, Barron YoungSmith. I was intimately involved with the book for quite some time, and now I work at The New Republic. I'll be guest-blogging here, often cross-posting book related items from The Plank. Nice to...

http://scoblic.com The New Republic. I'll be guest-blogging here, often cross-posting book related items from The Plank. Nice to meet you too. --Barron YoungSmith ]]>