Dignity Promotion? The Obama Foreign Policy Doctrine

What would Barack Obama do in foreign policy? Bring the troops home? Champion the United Nations?

Sure, and a lot more that than, according to Spencer Ackerman at American Prospect. Obama's international policy is apparently the "most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades":

When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls scrambling for the small policy yardage between them. And then Obama said something about the Iraq War that wasn't incremental at all. "I don't want to just end the war," he said, "but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."

Until this point in the primaries, Clinton and Obama had sounded very similar on this issue. Despite their differences in the past (Obama opposed the war, while Clinton voted for it), both were calling for major troop withdrawals, with some residual force left behind to hedge against catastrophe. But Obama's concise declaration of intent at the debate upended this assumption. Clinton stumbled to find a counterargument, eventually saying her vote in October 2002 "was not authority for a pre-emptive war." Then she questioned Obama's ability to lead, saying that the Democratic nominee must have "the necessary credentials and gravitas for commander in chief."

If Clinton's response on Iraq sounds familiar, that's because it's structurally identical to the defensive crouch John Kerry assumed in 2004: Voting against the war wasn't a mistake; the mistakes were all George W. Bush's, and bringing the war to a responsible conclusion requires a wise man or woman with military credibility. In that debate, Obama offered an alternative path. Ending the war is only the first step. After we're out of Iraq, a corrosive mind-set will still be infecting the foreign-policy establishment and the body politic. That rot must be eliminated.

Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.)

But to understand what Obama is proposing, it's important to ask: What, exactly, is the mind-set that led to the war? What will it mean to end it? And what will take its place?

To answer these questions, I spoke at length with Obama's foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

Read the whole thing.

There's much more under this than "dignity promotion."

Obama's positions are in essence the dream foreign policy of the antiwar left. When we hear the notion of ending "the mind-set that got us into war in the first place" and eliminating "the rot" in "the foreign-policy establishment and the body politic," we're looking at something a little more substantial than traditional isolationist (or realist) restraint in world politics.

In the quotes here, and in this discussion of "dignity promotion," we're seeing the advancement of a radical left-wing foreign policy agenda hopped-up in people-pleasing phraseology.

Ackerman, the author of this American Prospect piece, as well as folks like Matthew Yglesias, Glen Greenwald, and the terrorist-backers at Newshoggers, are as far from Democratic foreign policy centrism as one can imagine. True, they start with some elements of Clintonian liberal interationalism, but they modify it radically to import the full-blown antiwar foreign policy agenda that's been struggling to break out in the American left since Vietnam.

Note first what Charles Krauthammer indicates about liberal internationalism, which Ackerman cites with glee at the end of the essay:

They [the liberal internationalists] like to dream, and to the extent they are aware of our unipolar power, they don’t like it. They see its use for anything other than humanitarianism or reflexive self-defense as an expression of national selfishness. And they don’t just want us to ignore our unique power, they want us to yield it piece by piece, by subsuming ourselves in a new global architecture in which America becomes not the arbiter of international events, but a good and tame international citizen.

The key point here: Liberal internationalists abhor the use of power for raw realpolitik policy interests, like the protection of oil, or regime change to consolidate America primacy through Middle East democracy promotion.

But the very essence of this new "Obama Doctrine" is its antiwar essentialism. Obama's become the genuine antiwar candidate of the anti-Bush, anti-military forces of the left. With opposition to the Bush/Cheney regime becoming the key litmus test among Democratic Party activists, Obama's got the requisite bona fides for the nihilist hordes (even though, actually, Obama's war positions have been fairly malleable).

For this faction, opposition to the Bush administration and Iraq is rooted in the maturation of antiwar ideology emerging from the Vietnam era. It's composed of the complete moral and political condemnation of the use of American military force. This position has become an unquestionable aspect of left-wing politics. It's preached like gospel, and any advocate for the robust use of military power is pilloried as nothing less than a stormtrooper in a new fascist project of imperial domination. This ideology goes behind mere policy differences, to utter demonization, to the most extraordinarily venomous displays of hatred to any and all things supportive of martial traditionalism in American domestic politics.

Take Ackerman, for example. While he's by day an apparently respectable correspondent at the American Prospect, he's also a prominent attack blogger for the new left-wing blogging commentariat. His blog postings are extremely vile and derogatory, marking some whacked alterego style of antiwar writings. Perhaps the use of four-letter expletives gives more incendiary power to his condemations of the war.

Either way, his oeuvre's representative of much of the commentary among current antiwar radicals who're positioning their work as some righteous new model of foreign policy expertise in the age of online political mobilization.

This is why Obama's purported "transformative" agenda of "dignity promotion" is pumped up by Ackerman with an almost fanatical religious breathlessness. An Obama adminstration provides the best chance for the radical left to implement a drastically new direction in American international affairs - a "most sweeping liberal foreign-policy" for the 21st century.

See more analysis at Memeorandum.

The Gore Theory of Campaign '08

Joe Klein of Time 's got a theory that if things continue to deteriorate for the Democrats, with, for example, Barack Obama failing to decisively wrap up the campaign with some big final-lap wins, Al Gore could be the answer for the Democrats.

Klein notes that the month of April provides a key decision timeframe:

It's the moment when pundits demand action—"Drop out, Hillary!"—and propound foolish theories. And so I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I'm slouching toward, well, a theory: if this race continues to slide downhill, the answer to the Democratic Party's dilemma may turn out to be Al Gore.

This April promises to be crueler than most. The two campaigns have started attacking each other with chainsaws, while the Republican John McCain is moving ahead in some national polls. At this point, Clinton can only win the nomination ugly: by superdelegates abandoning Obama and turning to her, in droves—not impossible, but not very likely either. Even if Clinton did overtake Obama, it would be very difficult for her to win the presidency: African Americans would never forgive her for "stealing" the nomination. They would simply stay home in November, as would the Obamista youth. (Although the former President is probably thinking: Yeah, but John McCain is a flagrantly flawed candidate too—I'd accept even a corrupted nomination and take my chances.)

Which is not to say that Clinton's candidacy is entirely without purpose now that she is pursuing a Republican-style race gambit, questioning Obama's 20-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright. Democrats will soon learn how damaging that relationship might be in a general election. They'll also see if Obama has the gumption to bounce back, work hard—not just arena rallies for college kids but roundtables for the grizzled and unemployed in American Legion halls—and change the minds that have turned against him. The main reason superdelegates have not yet rallied round Obama is that the party is collectively holding its breath, waiting to see how he performs in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana.

He will probably do well enough to secure the nomination. But what if he tanks? What if he can't buy a white working-class vote? What if he loses all three states badly and continues to lose after that? I'd guess that the Democratic Party would still give him the nomination rather than turn to Clinton. But no one would be very happy—and a year that should have been an easy Democratic victory, given the state of the economy and the unpopularity of the incumbent, might slip away.

Which brings us back to Al Gore. Pish-tosh, you say, and you're probably right. But let's play a little. Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let's also assume—and this may be a real stretch—that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party—and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? Of course, Obama would have to be a party to the deal and bring his 1,900 or so delegates along.

I played out that scenario with about a dozen prominent Democrats recently, from various sectors of the party, including both Obama and Clinton partisans. Most said it was extremely unlikely ... and a pretty interesting idea. A prominent fund raiser told me, "Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place." A congressional Democrat told me, "This could be our way out of a mess." Others suggested Gore was painfully aware of his limitations as a candidate. "I don't know that he'd be interested, even if you handed it to him," said a Gore friend. Chances are, no one will hand it to him. The Democratic Party would have to be monumentally desperate come June. And yet ... is this scenario any more preposterous than the one that gave John McCain the Republican nomination? Yes, it's silly season. But this has been an exceptionally "silly" year.

It's Klein who's silly, along with all those Democratic Party insiders who say this is a good idea.

McCain won the nomination fair and square: He hung in and hustled, carrying his own bags at airports terminals in the run-up to New Hampshire. He campaigned harder than any of the other candidates in the race. He stuck to his principles on the issues, like Iraq, and the GOP voters - with the exception of many base conservatives angered at McCain's apostasies - saw him as the rightful heir to the GOP nomination crown.

But what about Al Gore? What's he done?

Well, he's a rock star on the left, of course, something of a messiah himself, at least on global warming.

But he's damaged goods, as any political analyst worth his salt will tell you. If this year's already looking like a reprise of 1968, wait until the Dems nominate Gore. He's the Hubert Humphrey of the 21st century. His nomination will divide the party's base between the left's global warming ayatollahs and the "movement" activists who see Obama as the savior of antiwar, genuine "progressive" politics.

Ultimately, a Gore nomination will show to the entire country that the Democratic primary process failed, that it resulted in a disenfranchised electorate - not only in Florida and Michigan - but around the nation, where primary and caucus goers poured the hearts out to choose the candidate of their choice.

Perhaps there'd be some pleasure in Gore securing a second chance, the opportunity to mount another run for the White House after his disastrous campaign in 2000, when he chose to run as a populist, abandoning perhaps the biggest advantage he had: The Clinton-Gore's record of considerable peace and prosperity.

No, Klein's not serious - he's silly, sure, but not serious.

The Democrats need to finish out the primary, and the superdelegates need to do the right thing, which, even with only a couple of more wins for Obama, will be to throw their weight behind the Illinois Senator. He's the "one" this year, for good or ill, Jeremiah Wright or Samantha Power, be what may.

Anything else will make the '68 Chicago riots look like a hayride.

See more analysis at Memeorandum.

The Crisis of Governability in the Industrial Democracies

From Charles Kupchan, at Foreign Affairs, "The Democratic Malaise: Globalization and the Threat to the West":

Globalization has expanded aggregate wealth and enabled developing countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity. The proliferation of investment, trade, and communication networks has deepened interdependence and its potentially pacifying effects and has helped pry open nondemocratic states and foster popular uprisings. But at the same time, globalization and the digital economy on which it depends are the main source of the West’s current crisis of governability. Deindustrialization and outsourcing, global trade and fiscal imbalances, excess capital and credit and asset bubbles -- these consequences of globalization are imposing hardships and insecurity not experienced for generations. The distress stemming from the economic crisis that began in 2008 is particularly acute, but the underlying problems began much earlier. For the better part of two decades, middle-class wages in the world’s leading democracies have been stagnant, and economic inequality has been rising sharply as globalization has handsomely rewarded its winners but left its many losers behind.

These trends are not temporary byproducts of the business cycle, nor are they due primarily to insufficient regulation of the financial sector, tax cuts amid expensive wars, or other errant policies. Stagnant wages and rising inequality are, as the economic analysts Daniel Alpert, Robert Hockett, and Nouriel Roubini recently argued in their study “The Way Forward,” a consequence of the integration of billions of low-wage workers into the global economy and increases in productivity stemming from the application of information technology to the manufacturing sector. These developments have pushed global capacity far higher than demand, exacting a heavy toll on workers in the high-wage economies of the industrialized West. The resulting dislocation and disaffection among Western electorates have been magnified by globalization’s intensification of transnational threats, such as international crime, terrorism, unwanted immigration, and environmental degradation. Adding to this nasty mix is the information revolution; the Internet and the profusion of mass media appear to be fueling ideological polarization more than they are cultivating deliberative debate.

Voters confronted with economic duress, social dislocation, and political division look to their elected representatives for help. But just as globalization is stimulating this pressing demand for responsive governance, it is also ensuring that its provision is in desperately short supply. For three main reasons, governments in the industrialized West have entered a period of pronounced ineffectiveness.

First, globalization has made many of the traditional policy tools used by liberal democracies much blunter instruments. Washington has regularly turned to fiscal and monetary policy to modulate economic performance. But in the midst of global competition and unprecedented debt, the U.S. economy seems all but immune to injections of stimulus spending or the Federal Reserve’s latest moves on interest rates. The scope and speed of commercial and financial flows mean that decisions and developments elsewhere -- Beijing’s intransigence on the value of the yuan, Europe’s sluggish response to its financial crisis, the actions of investors and ratings agencies, an increase in the quality of Hyundai’s latest models -- outweigh decisions taken in Washington. Europe’s democracies long relied on monetary policy to adjust to fluctuations in national economic performance. But they gave up that option when they joined the eurozone. Japan over the last two decades has tried one stimulus strategy after another, but to no avail. In a globalized world, democracies simply have less control over outcomes than they used to.

I like Kupchan, but he errs badly here:

In the United States, partisan confron­t­ation is paralyzing the political system. The underlying cause is the poor state of the U.S. economy. Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses, jobs, and retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels of back-to-back decades of stagnation in middle-class wages. Over the past ten years, the average household income in the United States has fallen by over ten percent. In the meantime, income inequality has been steadily rising, making the United States the most unequal country in the industrialized world. The primary source of the declining fortunes of the American worker is global competition; jobs have been heading overseas. In addition, many of the most competitive companies in the digital economy do not have long coattails. Facebook’s estimated value is around $70 billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare this with General Motors, which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000 employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide. The wealth of the United States’ cutting-edge companies is not trickling down to the middle class.

These harsh economic realities are helping revive ideological and partisan cleavages long muted by the nation’s rising economic fortunes. During the decades after World War II, a broadly shared prosperity pulled Democrats and Republicans toward the political center. But today, Capitol Hill is largely devoid of both centrists and bipartisanship; Democrats campaign for more stimulus, relief for the unemployed, and taxes on the rich, whereas Republicans clamor for radical cuts in the size and cost of government. Expediting the hollowing out of the center are partisan redistricting, a media environment that provokes more than it informs, and a broken campaign finance system that has been captured by special interests.

The resulting polarization is tying the country in knots. President Barack Obama realized as much, which is why he entered office promising to be a “postpartisan” president. But the failure of Obama’s best efforts to revive the economy and restore bipartisan cooperation has exposed the systemic nature of the nation’s economic and political dysfunction. His $787 billion stimulus package, passed without the support of a single House Republican, was unable to resuscitate an economy plagued by debt, a deficit of middle-class jobs, and the global slowdown. Since the Republicans gained control of the House in 2010, partisan confrontation has stood in the way of progress on nearly every issue. Bills to promote economic growth either fail to pass or are so watered down that they have little impact. Immigration reform and legislation to curb global warming are not even on the table.

Ineffective governance, combined with daily doses of partisan bile, has pushed public approval of Congress to historic lows. Spreading frustration has spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement -- the first sustained bout of public protests since the Vietnam War. The electorate’s discontent only deepens the challenges of governance, as vulnerable politicians cater to the narrow interests of the party base and the nation’s political system loses what little wind it has in its sails.

Kupchan relies less on his globalization variable in the American case than he does on rising inequality and partisanship. And you'd have to code "protests" by leftward or rightward orientation for Occupy Wall Street to be "the first sustained bout of public protests since the Vietnam War." Actually, by that logic it was the tea parties that were the first sustained protests since Vietnam, but if you code "public protests" only as left-wing, one can forget about the tea parties --- a protest movement that dominated all of 2009 and is widely considered to have formed the grassroots constituency driving the GOP to the House majority in the 2010 elections.

Beyond that, I agree there's a crisis of governability in the industrial democracies. I just don't think Kupchan's focusing on the most important causes. The unsustainability of the European social welfare state model is probably a more important factor in the political turmoil in Europe in 2011. Globalization is important as well, no doubt, but the EU nations can only blame themselves for digging the kinds of debt holes in which they found themselves unable to climb out. Kupchan just barely touches on this, and he blames the economic crisis more so than the ultimately flawed social welfare commitments. Governments like Greece and Italy fell not just from economic and social crisis but because leaders lacked independence from EU institutions, which have enforced continued commitments to a continental bargain whose fundamental failures are finally being revealed.

And for the wider systemic challenge facing the Western democracies, Kupchan suggests more statism and accommodation to globalization --- the same variable he posits as the number one factor causing the decline of industrial competitiveness and economic dynamism. In other words, Kupchan's recycling failed theories of a sort of globalist Keynesian bargain: "state-led investment" in the domestic economies and "progressive populism" in the political systems of these states. It sounds fancy. But that's the kind of thing that got these nations into trouble in the first place.

Progressives Are Communists (If You Didn't Know)

A really interesting piece at Gallup, "Americans Unsure About 'Progressive' Political Label."

It turns out that a majority of 54 percent aren't quite sure what a "political progressive" really is. And a very small percentage, 12 percent, actually self-identifies as "progressive" (with 45 percent of those identifying as "liberal" or "very liberal"). The numbers make sense to me. Traditionally, ideological discussion of the left/right continuum focuses on liberals and conservatives. But liberalism literally has become a dirty word in American politics, and for decades Democratic-leftists have been working feverishly (yet unsuccessfully) to get out from under it. Well now it turns out that self-identified socialist Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has called herself a "progressive," hence Gallup's inclusion of the measurement of progressive in its June 11-13 USA Today/Gallup poll.

What's frankly awesome about this is that Gallup recognizes that leftists use "progressive" to avoid being "pigeonholed" as outside of the mainstream. And even funnier is how Thomas Rhiel at Talking Points Memo also acknowledges the truth about leftist identification as "progressive":

For years, pundits and politicians on the left have been calling themselves "progressives" to avoid the apparent stigma of the word "liberal." But a USA Today/Gallup poll released today indicates that a majority of Americans still aren't sure what "progressive" really means.

Long-time readers of American Power will recall that I never use the word "liberal" to refer to Democratic-leftists. I've always thought "liberal" was an unacceptable bastardization of the more traditional "classical liberal," from which we draw our political heritage (in the Declaration of Independence, for example). And since around the time of the Iraq War in March 2003 --- as one who had voted Democratic my entire life --- it finally dawned on me that today's Democratic-leftists are not only not "liberal" but they're literally allied with all the anti-democratic ideologies and movements in world politics today. Of course, as I've noted here recently in my commentaries on The World Turned Upside Down, leftists adopt a righteous infallibility that disdains anti-statist ideologies as backwoods. Of course, the most irrationalist and totalitarian programs are entirely associated with the left (which of course includes its alliance with global jihad). What's unfortunate is that if the respondents at Gallup really knew what was going on they'd be distancing themselves from the "progressive" label faster than you can say "RAAAAACIST"!!

In any case, progressives today are not social and economic reformers, or those who're directed toward modernization and social improvement. They're totalitarian ideologues working for the idealized utopia that always historically ends in the terror and the gulag.

Here's a bit from David Horowitz on the bankruptcy of communism (what progressivism is really all about):

In what sense can a bankrupt idea be called “progressive”? For two centuries the socialist idea -- the future promise that justifies the present sacrifice -- has functioned as a blank check for the violence and injustice associated with efforts to achieve it. The “experiments” may have failed – so go the apologies for the Left -- but the intentions that launched them were idealistic and noble. But it is no longer really possible to hold up the socialist fantasy to justify the destructive assaults on existing societies which, whatever their faults, were less oppressive than the revolutionary “solutions” that followed their demise. The failed “experiments” of the Left and its divisive crusades must be seen now for what they are: bloody exercises in civil nihilism; violent pursuits of empty hopes; revolutionary actes gratuites that were doomed to fail from the start.

Historical perspective imposes on us a new standard of judgment. Because they were doomed from their origin and destructive by design, these revolutionary gestures now stand condemned by morality and justice in their conception and not merely in their result. If there was a “party of humanity” in the civil wars that the Left’s ambitions provoked in the past, it was on the other side of the political barricades. In these battles, the enlightened parties were those who defended democratic process and civil order against the greater barbarism that, as we now know for certain, the radical future entailed.

UPDATE: Linked at Doug Ross, Linkiest, and The Rhetorican.

Americans Dissatisfied with U.S. Global Position

I'm having a little debate with Gayle from Dragon Lady's Den on the hypothesized representativeness of Barack Obama's lack of patriotism.

Recall my earlier post, where we find more evidence of anti-Americanism in Obama's rhetoric, "Obama: No Pride in Saying "I Am an American" (the debate in the comment thread is here).

Well it turns out, that a huge majority of Americans, in a new Gallup poll, indicates that they are dissatisfied with America's position in the world.

Now, this is obviously not evidence of anti-Americanism, per se: For someone to say they're "dissatisfied" with America's global position is not the same as claiming that young people traveling abroad can't say they're proud to be an American (which is what Obama asserted).

So, to be clear, I'm not claiming this substantiates any larger claim about the generalizability of Obama's lack of pride in country.

Still, personally, such expressions of shame are shocking to me, as it can be argued that such sentiment goes beyond disapproval of a particular administration or set of public polcies to a loathing of the United States itself. If true, that's not a healthy trend for the democracy.

In any case, here's a summary of the Gallup findings:

Americans' view of the United States' position in the world has undergone a complete reversal over the course of the Bush administration. Since February 2001, Americans' dissatisfaction with the country's position in the world has more than doubled.

Public dissatisfaction with the United States' global position was 27% in February 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It rose to 50% during the pre-Iraq war period in 2003 when the United States was actively lobbying its allies and other countries at the United Nations to support military action against Iraq. It then quickly dipped to 29% at the very beginning of the war in Iraq in March 2003, but has risen steadily since.

Today's 68% dissatisfaction rating is the highest Gallup has recorded on this question, including during the Vietnam War era. At three different points in the 1960s, the public was consistently divided in its responses, with about 44% satisfied and 46% dissatisfied. (See table at the end of this report for exact survey dates and results.)

Note something further here, and this is where we can make a tentative tie between popular dissatisfaction with America to Obama's statement of shame in nation:

Gallup's findings are highly partisan, with almost 9 out of 10 Democrats indicating dissatisfaction with America:

Current attitudes about the United States' global position are highly partisan, with a majority of Republicans (60%) saying they are satisfied with the country's position in the world, and the vast majority of Democrats (85%) saying they are dissatisfied. The ratings of political independents tend to be closer to Democrats' ratings than to those of Republicans.

Although the question is implicitly an evaluation of the nation's leadership, Gallup did not find a similarly strong partisan breach at the end of President Bill Clinton's second term. In May 2000, 78% of Democrats were satisfied with the United States' position in the world, along with 57% of Republicans.

The majority of Democrats were satisfied with the U.S. global position in the first two measures of Bush's presidency -- 69% in February 2001 and 61% in February 2002. However, their satisfaction plunged to 30% by February 2003, rebounded to 50% during the start of the Iraq war, and, beginning in 2004, has not registered more than 26%.

The percentage of Democrats currently satisfied on this measure (13%) is similar to what it was two years ago (18%). At the same time, satisfaction among Republicans has dropped by 15 percentage points, from 75% to 60%.

To be really able to link these two sentiments - dissatisfaction with America and unpatriotic attitudes - we'd need survey data with question items measuring these two notions independently (note that polls do find majorities of Americans as patriotic, Democrats less so than Republicans).

It's just fascinating that much of Obama's shame in nation is driven by expressed disagreements with our current foreign policies and our alleged lack of standing in the world.

These are precisely the same views that Gallup taps into in a second set of questions (on the "diminished perceptions of U.S. global image," which declined after 2003 and the Iraq war).

Americans should not be ashamed of their country. Indeed, we have more reasons to be proud of our nation than in any time in history. We are more prosperous and more welcoming than ever. Women and minorities enjoy more opportunities in American society today than any other time in history (meanwhile, people are so absorbed by the long drawn out Democratic primary that they forget to reflect on how awesome is the fact that we are choosing between a woman or black man to be the next Democratic standard-bearer).

Sure, we are facing some challenging times, especially in the economy and the war (which actually is getting much better), but I don't think this is cause for a decline of love of country.

Barack Obama's getting a reputation as unpatriotic, an inclination which I hope does not rub off on his supporters.

"Lawfare" and Bush Administration War Crimes Trials

In my essay, "Enhanced Interrogation's in the Charts Again," I suggested that the radical left will "ratchet-up its push for war crimes prosecutions in the weeks ahead."

The funny thing about it, though, is that even the most die-hard foes of the administration's war on terror admit that criminal prosecutions of Bush administation officials are a pipe dream. The most recent essay conceding the point is David Cole's new piece at the New York Review, "What to Do About the Torturers?" Cole reviews Philippe Sands', Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, praisng the book as "the most unusual and deeply revealing take on the subject."

What makes Sands special? It turns out that Sands, a British attorney, professor of law, and long-time anti-American antagonist, is apparently one of the best able to make the case for the primacy of international human rights over state power and sovereignty. For all that, and despite the "deeply revealing take" on the Bush administration's alleged criminalilty, Cole at most is left with recommendations for "an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate" to "assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies."

I have a sneaking suspicion that that's not going to be enough for the left's America-bashers who want President Bush executed at the Hague.

Well, there's more on all of this in the news today, with the Wall Street Journal's report, "Gonzales Defends Role in Antiterror Policies." Of course, all the lefty bloggers at Memeorandum are up in arms about it, for example, Think Progress, TPMMuckraker, Spencer Ackerman, Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, Law Blog, Paul Krugman, Steve Benen, and Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Alberto Gonzales is the left's prime candidate for "torture trials," right up there with the president, Vice-President Dick Cheny, and former Justice Department attorney John Yoo, to name just a few. But trials aren't going to happen. Leftists are simply foaming at the mouth, and they'll be in another uproar when the Barack Obama administration turns the page on the whole affair sometime next year. Robert Stacy McCain summed things up on this recently:

Frankly, I don't even give a damn. If I turned on the TV sometime next year to see Paul Wolfowitz in the dock at the Hague, I'd shrug in mute acceptance, and if I blogged about it, would do so in an insouciant way.

Still, even if the political pressure in the U.S. for war crimes prosecutions trails off, the global human rights (and anti-American) constituency won't let such things go. Since the 1990s, when the increased globalization of legal rules resulted in the establishment of the International Criminal Court, Augusto Pinochet's arrest, trial, and attempted extradition in 1998, calls for war crimes prosecutions against Henry Kissinger, and other efforts to bring "tyrants to justice," global left activism has pushed relentlessly for universal jurisdiction, and the push for torture trials against the "evil BushCo regime" will linger interminably at the fringes of global left activism.

So let me leave readers with a nice response to all of this from Michael Chertoff, the administration's Secretary of Homeland Security, in his essay at Foreign Affairs, "The Responsibility to Contain: Protecting Sovereignty Under International Law."

Chertoff makes a powerful case for the expansion of international law and justice grounded in a legal doctrine of "a consent-based model of national sovereignty." That is, justice in international law will become increasing irrelevant in a world of great-power sovereign states unless international legal regimes become embedded in robust norms of national consent. Chertoff suggests that the global left's "lawfare" against the United States is in fact the biggest impediment to the longstanding global legal order arising out of the ashes of the World War II. In the face of constant attacks on American policy and sovereignty, the U.S. has been increasingly encouraged to reject wholesale the entire appartus of international law. Such an outcome, of course, would deprive the world of the first-mover hegemon that's been at the center of mulitlateral institution-building and the cooperative regimes underwriting world order.

Chertoff's discussion of the left's push for universal jurisdiction is particularly good, and worth quoting at length:

The typical strategy of international legal activists today is to challenge the idea of national sovereignty. This is a revolutionary tactic, particularly because sovereignty has played an important role in the development of the international system for over three centuries. Under the Westphalian model of sovereignty - which dates back to 1648 - an independent state is not subject to external control over its internal affairs without its consent ....

Imposing international legal mandates on a nation without its consent undermines this traditional concept of sovereignty and conflicts with the democratic will. For this reason, international law has often been based on the consent of nations by way of treaties, in which nations voluntarily agree to abide by certain rules, or through customary international law, which infers tacit consent through widespread state practice. To be sure, not all sources of international law are explicitly based on sovereign consent. So-called peremptory norms, or jus cogens norms, are rules -- such as those forbidding slavery or genocide - considered to be so deeply embedded in international law that they bind all nations, even absent national consent.

An international legal framework founded on a consent-based model of sovereignty is advantageous for several reasons. By requiring the explicit or implicit consent of nations before a particular international standard binds them, this approach gains the legitimacy that democratic legal traditions and processes provide. Consent-based international law also allows states to protect their own critical interests by bargaining for or withholding consent from certain provisions of a treaty. Finally, grounding international law in consent acknowledges national differences in culture and legal philosophy by ensuring that international rules fit within an international consensus - one shared by real governments, not merely endorsed by intellectual elites.

Academics, lawyers, and judges who challenge the continued relevance of consent in international law often treat "sovereignty" as a pejorative term or an antiquated concept. Many of these critics depart from the traditional view of international law as consisting primarily of reciprocal obligations among nations. For example, some have argued in particular cases that international agreements automatically confer legal rights on individuals that may be enforced directly without state support or even against the laws of the individuals' own countries. And some further argue that international law is not limited to what is agreed on by nations in treaties or accepted through widespread practice; they claim it also encompasses a set of standards based on highly general and "evolving" universal principles.

For example, the international legal scholar Philippe Sands argues that "to claim that states are as sovereign today as they were fifty years ago is to ignore reality." Sands describes international law as a set of obligations that "take on a logic and a life of their own" and that "do not stay within the neat boundaries that states thought they were creating when they were negotiated." The late Harvard Law School professor Louis Sohn went even further in unmooring international law from consent, positing, "States really never make international law on the subject of human rights. It is made by the people that care; the professors, the writers of textbooks and casebooks, and the authors of articles in leading international law journals." Even the conservative commentator Robert Kagan has called on U.S. policymakers to "welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty," arguing that the United States "has little to fear and much to gain in a world of expanding laws and norms based on liberal ideals and designed to protect them."

Of course, not all who seek to diminish the role of sovereignty in the development of international law are so explicit. International legal jurists and scholars often purport to recognize sovereign consent as the foundation of international obligations but then proceed to "identify" and apply norms or principles of customary international law that are not evidenced by actual state practice. For example, a court may proclaim that there is a rule that prohibits particular government actions without considering whether most nations indeed adhere to that rule. Alarmingly, some jurists rely for support on academics and commentators who do not merely catalog international law but rather seek to influence its development according to their own policy preferences. It makes no practical difference that these jurists may pay lip service to the importance of sovereignty; the effect of their efforts is to undermine nations' prerogative to choose their own laws.

Whether invoked explicitly or implicitly, the most common justifications for rejecting sovereign consent as the foundation of international law are flawed. One argument is that the growing global activity among nations creates the need for more comprehensive systems of international law to govern global conduct. This need, however, does not justify eliminating sovereign consent as the basis for imposing international obligations. Indeed, requiring the consent of nations has not prevented the international community from addressing a host of substantive issues, ranging from trade to arms control to endangered species protection. Moreover, individuals still principally identify themselves as part of a particular national community and resist decisions imposed on them by foreign actors and institutions without their consent. A visible case in point was the rejection of the European Constitution by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and the more recent rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by voters in Ireland in 2008.

Another objection to sovereign consent holds that all humans possess certain fundamental rights that cannot be denied, even by the consent of the majority. But the recognition of fundamental human rights raises the harder and more particular question of how those rights should be defined and applied, and by whom. Bodies such as the United Nations include member states that often do not share a common position and whose values often clash with those of the United States and other democratic states. For example, the UN Human Rights Council has passed resolutions urging states to adopt laws combating the "defamation of religions," which would prohibit the type of open discussion about religious and political matters that is protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The UN has also held a conference to examine gun-control provisions, ones that would be at odds with the Second Amendment. And the UN recently passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on capital punishment with "a view to abolishing the death penalty," even though the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld it. Ironically, many of the states supporting such initiatives have a poor record when it comes to respecting the rights of their own citizens.

In short, absent an express treaty or convention, giving international bodies the power to decide what are new and expanded fundamental rights would allow countries to advance nationalist or bloc political agendas under the guise of human rights. It would also empower an often self-perpetuating international legal establishment - courts, advocates, academics, and activists - to "discover" international human rights by relying selectively on transnational agreements that may express only regional consensus or by drawing on philosophical or academic texts that reflect particular intellectual fashions. Such amorphous sources provide questionable grounds for mandatory international obligations.

The remainder of the article sets forth a model of consent-based international law. Chertoff focuses on three core principles of a regime of "reciprocal responsiblity" in international law and protection against emergent threats: nonsubordination of actor's sovereign rights, collaborative security in generally non-controversial international regimes (e.g., global trade and finance), and reciprocal sovereignty.

It's a great piece of policy writing, grounded in realism and respect for the sovereign rights of peoples in democratically-legitimated contitutional regimes, much unlike that wild unhinged rants of the "lawfare" advocates of the global left.

The Nation Endorses 'Democratic Socialist' Bernie Sanders for President

It's Katrina vanden Heuvel's publication --- it's her baby, and the editors are going all in for Bernie Sanders.

It's a lengthy editorial, so as they say, RTWT.

See, "‘The Nation’ Endorses Bernie Sanders and His Movement":

We have an announcement! https://t.co/pteRV2hrEb pic.twitter.com/vSjlGcPKhN

— The Nation (@thenation) March 2, 2020

If Bernie Sanders had simply demonstrated that it is possible to wage a competitive campaign for the presidency without relying on wealthy donors, corporate funders, or secretive PAC money, he would have earned his place in history.

If all Sanders had to show for his two campaigns for the presidency was the greatest leftward shift in the political discourse since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term—putting not just Medicare for All but also the Green New Deal, free public higher education, fair taxation, cancellation of student debt, housing as a human right, universal free child care, and an unwavering critique of the billionaire class firmly onto the political agenda—we would owe him our gratitude.

If his contribution to the debate on foreign policy never went beyond refusing to endorse trade deals that harm workers, denouncing America’s endless wars, and reasserting Congress’s control over presidential adventurism—and had not also included defying AIPAC and the Israel lobby, reminding Americans that many of those crossing our borders are fleeing dictators sustained by Washington, and maintaining his long-standing rejection of authoritarianism at home or abroad—we would still recognize Sanders as a prophetic figure.

But he has accomplished much, much more. As of this morning, Bernie Sanders—a Jewish grandfather with an indelible Brooklyn accent—is the leading contender for the Democratic nomination. He got there by forging a movement campaign that expands our understanding of what can be achieved in the electoral arena and that invites us to imagine that government of, by, and for the people might actually be possible.

The movement Sanders has helped to build—a multiracial, multiethnic movement of working-class women and men, people of all ages, all faiths, gay, straight, and trans, veterans and pacifists, teachers, farmers, bus drivers, nurses, and postal workers coming together to demand justice and redeem the endlessly deferred promise of America—deserves our enthusiastic support. Most crucially at this point in the 2020 campaign, this movement and this candidate deserve our votes.

Bernie Sanders and the movements he supports (and that support him) have created a populist moment, a vibrant and growing alternative to the tired shibboleths of austerity and market fundamentalism. They are exposing and upending the white nationalist con that promises a blue-collar boom while cutting taxes for the rich and gutting health care, environmental protection and education for the rest of us.

Four years ago, when Sanders began his battle, we supported him, arguing that in his candidacy

movements for greater equality and justice have found an ally and a champion. In contrast to the right-wing demagogues who exploit [our national crisis] to foment division, the Vermont senator has reached into a proud democratic-socialist tradition to revive the simple but potent notion of solidarity. We must turn to each other, not on each other, Sanders says, and unite to change the corrupted politics that robs us all.

A great deal has changed since then. We now have a right-wing demagogue in the Oval Office, a man credibly accused of sexual assault on the Supreme Court, an administration staffed with sycophants and corporate lackeys. Meanwhile, we’ve watched with mounting dismay as congressional Democratic leaders have pursued a narrow—and futile—quest for impeachment while failing to prevent immigrant children from being torn from the arms of their parents and put in cages. We have witnessed the daily spectacle of an administration that fudges the facts and scorns science while the planet burns.

Yet when we look beyond the corridors of power, we cannot despair. Not while we’re also in the middle of a long season of revolt, from the millions of women (and allies) in their pink pussy hats protesting Donald Trump’s inauguration to successful teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Los Angeles, and Chicago, to demonstrations culminating in the removal of Puerto Rico’s corrupt, sexist governor—and that’s just in the United States. From Beirut to Baghdad and from Haiti to Hong Kong, people are rising up together to demand an end to corruption and the politics of divide and rule.

Sanders has made this global outcry a part of his 2020 campaign. He has gathered his forces and moved against America’s oligarchy, and this time he’s had company—and competition. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy appealed to progressives who, though they shared many of the Sanders campaign’s goals, worried that his age, his fiery manner, or his avowal of democratic socialism would be handicaps in the battle to defeat Trump. She appealed, as well, to the millions of Americans who believe that it is long past the time when this country should elect a progressive woman as its president. Along with Sanders, Warren has widened the left lane of American politics. While Sanders has popularized the idea of a political revolution, Warren’s detailed plans have given depth and meaning to proposals for Medicare for All and a wealth tax. The pair have differed on details, but Warren and Sanders have been such a potent team—especially in last summer’s debates—that some here argued they ought to form a ticket.

That still seems like an idea worth considering...

As noted, don't miss the rest of this essay --- I have a feeling the editors are on to something: Don't blow off Bernie's chances. This "democratic socialist" could very well destroy the American republic.

Hat Tip: Memorandum.

Activist Groups Prepare for Left-Wing Democratic Takeover

Far left-wing activists in the Democratic Party plan to shift a Barack Obama administration far to the left of the spectrum on everything from civil rights to energy to taxes, and beyond.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, in "Liberals, Sensing Victory, Try to Pull Obama to Left," nothing is off the table:

A phalanx of liberal think tanks and interest groups - anticipating a Democratic victory on Tuesday - are mobilizing to push Sen. Barack Obama to the left of his campaign positions....

A number of the economic and social prescriptions being pushed on Obama advisers would require greater spending that almost certainly depend on raising taxes -- threatening Sen. Obama's campaign promise to cut taxes.

The Campaign for America's Future, a progressive Washington group founded by a former adviser to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's presidential bids, is organizing a conference for this month on creating a government-funded investment fund for public works projects. The Center for American Progress recently released a two-year, $100 billion plan for producing renewable energy, and its president, former Clinton administration Chief of Staff John Podesta, has been tapped to lead the Obama transition team.

Last month in Washington, an organization recently formed by Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil-rights leader, attracted more than 100 leading activists on poverty and other social issues to a daylong conference. Mr. King demanded that the next president appoint a cabinet member dedicated to eradicating poverty. In a keynote address, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs called for substantially higher tax collections to fund government investments in energy production, public works and eradicating poverty and other ills.

Sen. Obama's energy and economic policies include many of the same goals, but the senator says he will pay for his proposals with savings from cutting bureaucratic waste and ending the Iraq war.

The Center for American Progress likewise backs higher taxes based on a "pro-growth" structure steering funds to schools, health care, job training and technology innovations. Mr. Podesta's organization is one of several interest groups working with Mr. King's Realizing the Dream Inc. to push the federal government to cut the poverty rate in half over the next 10 years. The Census Bureau estimates that 12.5% of the population, or 37.3 million people, earned poverty-level incomes last year.

In addition to Messrs. King's and Podesta's organizations, other partners in the umbrella group, called Halfinten.org, include the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, which has endorsed Sen. Obama and conducted a voter-registration drive that has drawn criticism from the McCain campaign, as well as federal and local investigations, for fraudulent names submitted in some states....

Some groups already have emerged as Obama advisers, such as the Potomac Coalition, a collection of African-American former Clinton appointees and Senate aides, that advises the campaign on the economy. The members, many of whom now work on Wall Street, urged Sen. Obama to back the addition of homeowner assistance and a contracting provision for minorities and women in the $700 billion rescue of the financial sector.

This report confirms something I've said all along: That an Obama administration will be captured by radical groups seeking to hijack the state in furtherance of an extremist agenda:

...an Obama administration will push an extreme-liberal policy agenda of tax hikes, spending windfalls, economic stimulus, spread-the-wealth redistributionism, universal health care, infrastructure investment, fairness doctrine, global warming legislation, restrictions on gun rights, abortion on demand, embryonic stem cells, foreign importation of prescription drugs, union card-check voting, trade protectionism, precipitous Iraq withdrawal, ban on domestic wiretapping, opposition to mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, sex-education for kindergartners, race-based affirmative action, expanded welfare entitlements, radical education pedagogy, and enemy appeasement diplomacy with no preconditions (and more).

As we can see, this agenda is by no means far-fetched.

In an essay last week, progressive agitator David Sirota pledged to battle centrist elements in the Democratic Party and to "sweep out" Clintonites and moderates from the party establishment and get a "whole new crew in there."

That crew will be filled with the very radicals conservatives have warned about all year. Democratic activists are simply confirming what has been the main ideological battle lines of election 2008.

The Sinister Symmetry of CRT and GRT

From Andrew Sullivan today, on Substack, "The extremes of right and left on immigration are fueling each other":

The MSM rushed last weekend to explain the previously obscure conspiracy theory that motivated a mass-murderer on a shooting spree in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. We didn’t get to read the warped “manifesto” of the mass shooter, but we were told about its account of “Great Replacement Theory.” It posits that a shadowy, global elite (in this case — surprise! — Jewish) is deliberately fostering mass non-white immigration to dilute the voting power of white Americans. The goal is a minority-majority country in which the Republican Party is doomed by inexorable racial demographics, and a whole new multiracial society can be built on the smoldering ruins of “white supremacy.”

“Wait a minute!” as Homer Simpson might say. Haven’t I heard some of that kind of talk before? It’s coming back to me now. Here’s one devotee: “Folks like me who are Caucasian of European descent — for the first time in 2017 we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolutely minority … That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” Here’s another: “There’s nothing really [the Republicans] can do against this incredible demographic revolution.” And another: “The Republican majority has always been based upon whites and, in particular, white males … The bulwark of Republican electoral strength is disappearing.”

These quotes are from then-VP Joe Biden, Univision founder Jorge Ramos, and sassy Dem Party hack James Carville celebrating the implosion of white America. This was also the theory that drove the 2016 Clinton campaign to ignore white swing voters and focus instead on the non-white: “What I found fascinating about the primary was how we got into our different demographic lanes, and demographics were to some extent destiny,” was how the genius Robby Mook put it, before he helped elect Trump.

No, these people do not represent a secret conspiracy — let alone a Jewish one — to dilute the “whiteness” of America. There is nothing secret about it at all. The majority-minority enthusiasts represent instead a transparent movement to see Americans primarily in racial/generational terms, to view a multi-racial society as a zero-sum endeavor in which a gain for whites always means a loss for non-whites, and who therefore cheer the declining percentage of Americans who are deemed “white.”

Whole libraries could be constructed by the books outlining this thesis. It really got started with John Judis’ and Ruy Teixeira’s “The Emerging Democratic Majority” (2002), Sid Blumenthal’s “The Strange Death of Republican America” (2008), Carville’s “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation” (2009), Ron Brownstein’s Next America project (2012), Paul Taylor’s “The Next America” (2014), and William Frey’s “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America” (2014), to cite a few. All of them argue that mass immigration is a critical factor in making America majority non-white and therefore Democratic. And all of them are pretty much psyched.

When I say “psyched,” there is a spectrum. Here’s Michelle Goldberg not so long ago: “Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority” — and she “felt good” about that non-white future. Here’s Jen Rubin, reacting to the news last year that the Census found numbers of white people falling: “This is fabulous news. Now we need to prevent minority White rule.” And who can forget Michael Moore’s reaction to the same news “Best day ever in U.S. history.”

None of them seemed concerned that the thesis could boomerang on them. By “boomerang,” I mean racializing politics so aggressively that you actually help create and legitimize a racially white party — because of negative partisanship. In the words of Michael Barone: “When you keep telling white Americans that they will soon become a minority — a message that sometimes sounds like ‘hurry up and die’ — then many non-college graduate ‘deplorables’ may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority, and vote more cohesively.” Exactly.

And when this demographic prediction is combined with constant denigration of “white people,” and when a simple white majority is suddenly redefined as “white supremacy” — indistinguishable from the era of Jim Crow — then feelings might get, shall we say, “triggered.” If you demonize an entire race, you may at some point get the compliment returned. The more you raise racial consciousness among non-whites, the more you risk the same among whites. As Thomas Chatterton Williams warned: “so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes.”

As for the GRT notion that demographic transformation was somehow imposed on America by cunning elites, there’s no real evidence for that. The key moment — the Immigration Act of 1965, which made non-white immigration a priority — was not deemed demographically revolutionary at the time. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified: “This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America.” Senator Edward Kennedy pledged:

The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

His brother, Bobby, told the House subcommittee his prediction of Asian immigration under the bill: “I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle, it would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear … we do not expect that there would be any great influx after that.” Emanuel Celler, House sponsor of the bill, insisted: “Quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European.”

And yet by 1998, Patrick Reddy, a Democratic consultant, boasted that the act had “resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.” And by 2018, 78 percent of immigrants were non-European, and Europeans made up a mere 9.8 percent of new green-card holders in 2020. As for Bobby Kennedy’s prediction of 5,000 immigrants from Asia, the number now is 14 million. Not a plot. Just a massive predictive error.

Mass illegal immigration has also lent legitimacy to gripes about rapid demographic change against the majority will. You could argue that the 1965 Act was a democratic process; but you can’t really say that about subsequent illegal immigration. The GOP liked the cheap labor; the Democrats believed that it would eventually help them win elections. That wasn’t a conspiracy, but it was a kind of anti-democratic mutual understanding — and you can’t blame someone for thinking it felt like one. Voters repeatedly voted for border control, but even Trump failed...

If we are to get past the kind of ugly violence and race essentialism in Great Replacement Theory, then we also need an antidote to the toxins of Critical Race Theory. The two illiberalisms are profoundly connected. They need each other. And, in their racialized heart, they are morally exactly the same.

 

Progressives and Disorder

At the Wall Street Journal, "The next two years may be the most dangerous since the Cold War ended":

As the calendar turns toward the final two years of the Obama Presidency, this is a moment to consider the world it has produced. There is no formal Obama Doctrine that serves as the 44th President’s blueprint for America’s engagement with the world. But it is fair to say that Barack Obama brought into office a set of ideas associated with the progressive, or left-leaning, wing of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment.

“Leading from behind” was the phrase coined in 2011 by an Obama foreign-policy adviser to describe the President’s approach to the insurrection in Libya against Moammar Gaddafi. That phrase may have since entered the lexicon of derision, but it was intended as a succinct description of the progressive approach to U.S. foreign policy.

***
The Democratic left believes that for decades the U.S. national-security presence in the world—simply, the American military—has been too large. Instead, when trouble emerges in the world, the U.S. should act only after it has engaged its enemies in attempts at detente, and only if it first wins the support and participation of allies and global institutions, such as NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and so on.

In an interview this week with National Public Radio, Mr. Obama offered an apt description of the progressive foreign-policy vision. “When it comes to ISIL, us devoting another trillion dollars after having been involved in big occupations of countries that didn’t turn out all that well” is something he is hesitant to do.

Instead, he said, “We need to spend a trillion dollars rebuilding our schools, our roads, our basic science and research here in the United States; that is going to be a recipe for our long-term security and success.”

That $1 trillion figure is one of the President’s famous straw-man arguments. But what is the recipe if an ISIL or other global rogue doesn’t get his memo?

ISIL, or Islamic State, rose to dominate much of Iraq after its armed forces captured the northern city of Mosul in June, followed by a sweep toward Baghdad. With it came the videotaped beheadings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aide worker Peter Kassig.

Islamic State’s rise was made possible not merely because the U.S. wound down its military presence in Iraq but because Mr. Obama chose to eliminate that presence. Under intense pressure from the Pentagon and our regional allies, the White House later in the year committed useful if limited air support to the Iraqi army battling Islamic State. Without question the U.S. was behind the curve, and with dire consequences.

Islamic State’s success has emboldened or triggered other jihadist movements, despite Mr. Obama’s assurance that the war on terror was fading.

Radical Islamists are grabbing territory from U.S. allies in Yemen. They have overrun Libya’s capital and threaten its oil fields. Boko Haram in Nigeria, the kidnappers of some 275 schoolgirls in April, adopted the ISIL terror model. U.S. allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are struggling to cope with the violence spreading out of Syria and Iraq. Mr. Obama can only hope that the Afghan Taliban do not move now to retake Kandahar after he announced this week with premature bravado “the end of the combat mission.”

The crucial flaw in the Democratic left’s model of global governance is that it has little or no answer to containing or deterring the serious threats that emerge in any region of the world when the U.S. retreats from leadership...

A chilling editorial.

The left's "model" is making each and every American less safe. Keep reading. The next two years will be the most dangerous for America since the end of the Cold War.

Democrats Sabotage War They Voted to Authorize

David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have posted the introduction to their new book, Party of Defeat, at FrontPageMagazine.

Here's the editors' background blurb from the post:

The following is the introduction from the new book Party of Defeat by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. The introduction lays out the book's thesis: that the opposition to the war in Iraq has crossed a troubling boundary. For the first time, a large number of national leaders have not merely opposed a war; that would be their inalienable right under the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they have actively sabotaged an ongoing war they voted to authorize and which our troops are currently winning. Party of Defeat is available from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore for $15, less than Amazon.com. -- The Editors.

Here's a key passage from the introduction:

The object of war is to break an enemy’s will and destroy his capacity to fight. Therefore, a nation divided in wartime is a nation that invites its own defeat. Yet that is precisely how Americans are facing the global war that radical Islamists have declared on them.

The enemies who confront us are religious barbarians, armed with the technologies of modern warfare but guided by morals that are medieval and grotesque. Their stated goal is the obliteration of America and the conquest of the West. They have assembled a coalition that includes sovereign states such as Iran and Syria, Muslim armies such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and terrorist cells that are globally dispersed and beyond counting....

Striking America’s homeland on September 11, 2001, jihadists murdered thousands of unsuspecting civilians, and came within a terrorist attack or two of destabilizing the American economy and unleashing chaos.

As the victim of these unprovoked and savage attacks, and as the defender of democratic values in three world wars, America would seem a worthy cause. Instead, America is on the defensive, harshly criticized by its traditional allies and under political attack by significant elements of its own population.

In this epic conflict Americans appear more divided among themselves than they have been at any time in the century–and–a half since the Civil War. Never in those years was an American commander-in-chief the target of such extreme attacks by his own countrymen with his troops in harm’s way. Never in its history has America faced an external enemy with its own leaders so at odds with each other.

Even as American soldiers have fought a fanatical enemy on the battlefields of Iraq, their president has been condemned as a deceiver who led them to war through “lies”; as a destroyer of American liberties; as a desecrator of the Constitution; as a usurper who stole his high office; as the architect of an “unnecessary war”; as a “fraud”; as a leader who “betrayed us”; and as a president who cynically sent the flower of American youth to die in foreign lands in order to enrich himself and his friends.

These reckless, corrosive charges are made not by fringe elements of the political spectrum, but by national leaders of the Democratic Party, including a former president, a former vice president and presidential candidate, and three members of the United States Senate (among them a one-time presidential candidate). These attacks occurred not after years of fighting in Iraq, when some might regard the result as a “quagmire,” but during the first months of the conflict, when the fighting had barely begun. They were made not over a war that was forced on Americans, or surreptitiously launched without their consent, but a war authorized by both political parties. They were directed not merely at its conduct, but at the rationale of the war itself—in other words, at the very justice of the American cause.

Although they voted for the bill to authorize the war, leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Senator Hillary Clinton, turned around after it was in progress and claimed that it was “George Bush’s war,” not theirs. They argued that Bush alone had decided to remove Saddam, when in fact it was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who made regime change the policy of the United States. They argued that the war was “unnecessary” because Iraq was “no threat.” But who would have regarded Afghanistan as a threat before 9/11? They maintained that because the war in Iraq was a war of “choice,” it was therefore immoral. But every war fought by America in the twentieth century, with the exception of World War II, was also a war of choice.

Cartoon Credit, Nice Deb, "Once Again, Encouraging Words From Dingy Harry On Iraq."

(Harry Reid voted for the 2002 Iraq war authorization in the Senate, and has justified his shift to Democratic defeatism saying, the "evidence at the time was persuasive.")

Browner Proves It: The Second Clinton Administration!

Carol Browner, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency for both terms of the Clinton administration (1993-2001), is expected to be tapped as "energy and environmental czar" for the incoming Barack Obama administration.

Well, that does it. I'm putting my foot down, finally. I've held off on criticizing Obama for his oppressively stale administrative appointments. But, I mean let's be honest, this is a de facto Second Clinton Administration, with a token black chief executive who'll be sitting in the Oval Office. This is not just a disaster for the Democratic Party, but for Barack Obama's personal claim to embody hope and change, not to mention post-partisan transformation.

Recall what we've seen so far: Obama picked the profane Illinois political operative Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff. Emmanuel, prior to being elected to Illinois' 5th conressional district in 2002, was Bill Clinton's campaign finance director in 1992, and later served in the Clinton White House as a personal advisor to the president.

Then, of course, we have Senator Hillary Clinton who has accepted her nomination to be secretary of state in the new administration. The Clinton pick raises more questions than anything we've seen so far. Tapping Clinton, above all, is a sign of Obama's dire weaknesses. Did Obama need to shore up his credibility with the PUMAs? Probably not, as he won a decisive 52.5 percent majority on November 4th (apparently showing that the pre-convention fears of party disunity were overblown). No, Obama selected Clinton to neutralize his own woeful inexperience, and not just in foreign policy, which Hillary had targeted so effectively during the primaries (don't forget the "3 am phone call"). After running perhaps the most successful presidential campaign in history, Obama put on the retroburners. Frozen by the fact that he's going to have to actually govern, he tossed his utopian calls for transformation and hewed to the tried and true of old-news party hacks. We'll have not just have Hillary, but Bill Clinton too, as an in-house deputy secretary of state, with tremendous influence on his wife (and not to mention his estimable connections, which at any other time in history would raise vigorous questions of conflict of interest).

Then you've got New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, the most qualified failed presidential candidate in American history. Richardson was Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of energy. Having been snubbed for state, Richardson will preside over private-sector ribbon-cutting at one of the smallest cabinet departments in Washington. What a letdown, but it's a perfect signature for Obama's already-failing style of bureaucratic leadership.

Of special note is attorney general-nominee Eric Holder. As assitant attorney general in the second Clinton administration, Holder endorsed Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, which soon became a culminating symbol of the moral vacuum of the Clinton presidency.

With the appointment of Carol Browner as a top staffer on Obama's energy and environmental policy, we'll see another top Clinton administration official coming back to D.C. for a second turn on the Democratic-insider merry-go-round (revolving door?). An undistinguished bureaucrat, Browner apparently stepped on toes during her tenure as the administration's enforcer on bone-crushing anti-business environmental mandates. This time around she'll have the added capital of global warming hysteria to really dampen entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

More announcements are on the way (including the possible appointment of Anthony Lake, a former national security advisor to Bill Clinton, as CIA director - no "change" there, again!).

Note that Obama's selection of physicist Steven Chu as secretary of energy should have been the model. This man has no inside Washington experience, and he boasts impeccable credentials as a winner of the Nobel Prize. Chu is a big thinker on the cutting-edge of alternative fuels and is thus exactly the kind of pick that Obama should be making across-the-board.

The progressive left has been deeply disappointed with Obama's appointments so far (not enough "genuine" Democratic leftists). But it's the American public who should really be disappointed, now that they're disabused of the campaign's lofty - even ethereal - promises of national healing, unity, and restoration of American values abroad. The fact is American government will largely return to the status quo ante, circa 1999. The difference is the country's got pent-up and deep-seated problems, and the man in driver's seat (or the figurehead, depending on how incompetent Barack Hussein ends up being) will have not a "team of rivals" but a team of cronies from the previous Democratic era of Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and the last presidential impeachment.

I can't see how this constitutes the kind of "change" Americans hoped for when they pulled their levers last month. But this year's been a black-magic tour of corruption and radicalism on the Democratic side, from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers, and now to Rod Blogojevich.

I'll be relieved, though, if Obama breaks with Bill Clinton's record and loses in 2012, ending up as a failed one-term president with his first-term agenda of big-government liberalism repudiated at the polls next time around.

Peter Beinart Backs Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel

Beinart writes at yesterday's New York Times, "To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements":

In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

In response, many Palestinians and their supporters have initiated a global campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.), which calls not only for boycotting all Israeli products and ending the occupation of the West Bank but also demands the right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — an agenda that, if fulfilled, could dismantle Israel as a Jewish state.

The Israeli government and the B.D.S. movement are promoting radically different one-state visions, but together, they are sweeping the two-state solution into history’s dustbin.

It’s time for a counteroffensive — a campaign to fortify the boundary that keeps alive the hope of a Jewish democratic state alongside a Palestinian one. And that counteroffensive must begin with language.

Jewish hawks often refer to the territory beyond the green line by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, thereby suggesting that it was, and always will be, Jewish land. Almost everyone else, including this paper, calls it the West Bank.

But both names mislead. “Judea and Samaria” implies that the most important thing about the land is its biblical lineage; “West Bank” implies that the most important thing about the land is its relationship to the Kingdom of Jordan next door. After all, it was only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948 that it coined the term “West Bank” to distinguish it from the rest of the kingdom, which falls on the Jordan River’s east bank. Since Jordan no longer controls the land, “West Bank” is an anachronism. It says nothing meaningful about the territory today.

Instead, we should call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.” The phrase suggests that there are today two Israels: a flawed but genuine democracy within the green line and an ethnically-based nondemocracy beyond it. It counters efforts by Israel’s leaders to use the legitimacy of democratic Israel to legitimize the occupation and by Israel’s adversaries to use the illegitimacy of the occupation to delegitimize democratic Israel.

Having made that rhetorical distinction, American Jews should seek every opportunity to reinforce it. We should lobby to exclude settler-produced goods from America’s free-trade deal with Israel. We should push to end Internal Revenue Service policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities. Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line.

But a settlement boycott is not enough. It must be paired with an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel. We should spend money we’re not spending on settler goods on those produced within the green line. We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies in the settlements: call it Zionist B.D.S.

Supporters of the current B.D.S. movement will argue that the distinction between democratic and nondemocratic Israel is artificial. After all, many companies profit from the occupation without being based on occupied land. Why shouldn’t we boycott them, too? The answer is that boycotting anything inside the green line invites ambiguity about the boycott’s ultimate goal — whether it seeks to end Israel’s occupation or Israel’s existence.

For their part, American Jewish organizations might argue that it is unfair to punish Israeli settlements when there are worse human rights offenses in the world and when Palestinians still commit gruesome terrorist acts. But settlements need not constitute the world’s worst human rights abuse in order to be worth boycotting. After all, numerous American cities and organizations boycotted Arizona after it passed a draconian immigration law in 2010.

The relevant question is not “Are there worse offenders?” but rather, “Is there systematic oppression that a boycott might help relieve?” That Israel systematically oppresses West Bank Palestinians has been acknowledged even by the former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who have warned that Israel’s continued rule there could eventually lead to a South African-style apartheid system.

Boycotts could help to change that. Already, prominent Israeli writers like David Grossman, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua have refused to visit the settlement of Ariel. We should support their efforts because persuading companies and people to begin leaving nondemocratic Israel, instead of continuing to flock there, is crucial to keeping the possibility of a two-state solution alive.

I think the phrase "useful idiot" was invented for people like Beinart.

I remember a few years ago Beinart emerged on the scene with some writings on foreign policy (although I can't recall the titles of his books, which should tell you something). And now apparently he's a professor at the City University of New York. I wouldn't recommend him to my students. Beinart's giving aid and comfort to Israel's enemies. Recall that I'm reading Professor Michael Curtis' new book, Should Israel Exist?: A Sovereign Nation Under Attack by the International Community. Let me refer readers to Chapter 9, "The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis." The Mufti was Haj Amin al-Husseini, an Arab nationalist who worked with Adolf Hiter and top leaders of the Nazi regime to develop Germany's policy on the Middle East and the Jews. One key policy proposed was a Jewish boycott. In the 1930s, the Mufti was the lead organizer of Palestinian Arab campaigns of assassination and terrorism against British forces and the Jews in the area of Palestine. After World War II, Husseini was the head of the Arab High Committee in Palestine that imposed an economic boycott on Jewish companies, industry, and trade throughout Palestine. According to Curtis, "The Arab League in 1948 formerly organized a boycott, which had begun more informally three years earlier and had preceded the establishment of Israel, not only of Israeli companies and products, but also of those from other countries maintaining economic relations with or who were perceived to be supporting Israel." Curtis notes that elements of the "boycott is still in existence" today and it costs Israel "considerable amounts of finance in terms of lost markets and economic problems" (p. 149). (The boycott was the economic arm of the Arab state strategy that came to a head in the Arab's war of aggression against the new state of Israel in 1948 --- and it's thus in fact a central cause of the current conflict in the Middle East today.)

Folks should get a hold of Curtis's book --- it's a must-read history, vital for the intellectual and political defense of Israel. And you can see why: The idiot Beinart is attempting to make distinctions between this and that side of the Green Line where none exist. The West Bank territories do not belong to Arab states or the so-called Palestinians. These are not "occupied territories." The lands were delineated and internationally accepted by the 1948 partition plan: "there was never an international border on the Green Line..." Beinart is involved in helping to propagate a lie that works to further the delegitimation program of the global left's Israel extermination industry. He should be ashamed of himself.

In any case, Beinart has a new book out, The Crisis of Zionism. I haven't read it but Sol Stern has a review at Commentary, "Beinart the Unwise."

I'll have more later.

In the meantime, keep pushing back against the assholes. This is getting ridiculous.