The Radical Foreign Policy of Matthew Yglesias

In my earlier post, "Blogging Foreign Policy: Bereft of Credentials, Left Strains to Shift Debate," I argued that the left blogosphere hosts a number of hardcore antiwar bloggers straining to influence the debate on American foreign policy. Their shared agenda is hatred of the Bush administration's anti-insurgency war in Iraq, as well as opposition to a firm U.S. stand in other assorted flashpoints, like the U.S.-Iran nuclear weapons showdown.

I include Spencer Ackerman, Glenn Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Cernig Newshog, and Matthew Yglesias in the bunch. I've got posts taking down the first four (here, here, here, and here), although I've yet to really trounce Yglesias.

It turns out that Yglesias, a perversely popular left-wing blogger, has a new book out, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.

I'm planning on reading it - not because of any burning desire, but simply from the need to "know your enemy."

I'm sure I'll have a post or two on the book at some point, but in the meanwhile check out Jamie Kirchick's killer review over at City Journal. Kirchick provides the basic background to Yglesias' thesis, particularly the book's attack on left-of-center "liberal war hawks, " who are reviled by the antiwar set as much as the Bush necons themselves.

But Kirchick's substantive review is devastating. Not only does the book misrepresent the record of liberal internationalism (a dominant strain in U.S. foreign policy since WWII), the positions Yglesias advocates - despite his protestations - come off as commensurate to the international program of the anti-American left:

Heads in the Sand is but the latest in a barrage of books condemning the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Where Yglesias tries to distinguish himself is by attacking a class to which he once belonged, however briefly: Democratic politicians and left-of-center commentators who supported the Iraq War. Many of these “liberal hawks” have since recanted in the face of the war’s bloody aftermath. Others have claimed that it was not the war itself that was mistaken but its execution, a qualification that Yglesias condemns as the “incompetence dodge.” For Yglesias, invading Iraq—along with the broader effort to promote democracy in the Middle East through the policy of regime change—was a fool’s errand from the start.

In Yglesias’s estimation, the terrorist attacks of September 11 have not changed the world scene appreciably; thus, the U.S. should return to the foreign policy approach it took during the Clinton years. He asserts that this brand of foreign policy—a “liberal internationalism” that places its hopes in multilateralism, international institutions, and a restrained role for the United States in international affairs —“was working well in the 1990s.” Never mind that NATO’s war against Serbia (which Yglesias says he supported) had to be undertaken without the blessing of the United Nations, or that most Democrats in Congress opposed the Persian Gulf War despite the large international coalition that waged it. Nor does Yglesias mention the Rwandan genocide, a 100-day slaughter of nearly a million people that the U.N. did nothing to prevent. Moreover, Yglesias does not grapple with the problems presented by an important “liberal internationalist” institution of the nineties: the post–Gulf War sanctions regime in Iraq, which took an enormous toll on the Iraqi people while simultaneously being undermined by Saddam Hussein. Avoiding arguments that weaken his case, Yglesias alleges that those who oppose his brand of liberal internationalism wish to transform the United States into an “imperial superpower that seeks to use its national strength to dominate the world and needlessly heighten conflicts.”

If only Yglesias were as tough on America’s mortal enemies as he is with his own intellectual adversaries. While acknowledging that “many liberal hawks took note of the near-total absence of international backing for [the Iraq] war,” he attacks them for not recognizing “the reason that Bush’s position had so little support,” without bothering to consider whether liberal hawks might have had a point in assuming that China, Russia, and France were not pure of motive in their opposition to the invasion. He echoes Osama bin Laden when he argues that Islamist anger against the West is a justified response to foreign powers that “occupy Muslim land.” This is a bold assertion, and yet Yglesias doesn’t care to explore why Iran and Syria—countries where foreign soldiers haven’t set foot for decades—continue to be the two most active state sponsors of international terrorism. In fact, he urges the United States to engage Iran and Syrian in diplomatic talks about the future of Iraq so that all three can “work together to secure their common interests in that country.” What “common interest” supporters of a democratic, federal, and secular Iraq might share with the ayatollahs and Assads is left unsaid.

While charitable toward religious fascists and tyrants, Yglesias is suspicious of Western attempts to combat them. To argue against the usefulness of military force in eliminating terrorist groups, Yglesias points to Israel’s experience with organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, “which, obviously, the Jewish state had been trying to eliminate for quite some time with what one could only call limited success.” But one reason why Israel has not eradicated the threat from terrorist groups is that people like Yglesias keep demanding that Israel negotiate with, and thus legitimize, them. He writes, for instance, that Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon in response to a series of PLO terrorist attacks represented a “policy of stubbornness.” Further, Yglesias admonishes any Democrat who refuses to rule out military action against Iranian nuclear sites. Indeed, he advocates a “grand bargain” with the mullahs in which we somehow convince them—without threatening force, of course—that constructing a nuclear bomb and making annihilationist threats against Jews are not in their interest. And while Israel was right to be worried about its security in the mid-twentieth century, when hostile neighbors surrounded it, it can now rest assured that “that threat no longer exists.” Why does Yglesias express such serenity when it comes to the malicious threats of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yet become apoplectic upon hearing the statements of Joe Lieberman? He writes as if his policy prescriptions were painfully obvious; those who believe otherwise are either bloodthirsty warmongers (conservatives) or soulless cynics (liberal hawks)....

Though Yglesias is at pains to distinguish his views from those of a hard leftist, he nonetheless ends up sounding like one. He sees no distinction between Saddam’s “aggressive warfare” against Kuwait in 1991 and America’s “aggressive warfare” against Saddam in 2003. Saddam’s campaign against the Kurds, by the way, was only “quasi-genocidal” (perhaps because Saddam did not kill every last Kurd?). He applauds the ridiculous Dennis Kucinich, who “was admirable in his ability to articulate a clear and coherent theory of foreign affairs” during the 2004 presidential election. He believes that rogue states and peaceful states should be treated the same, and lambastes the neoconservatives for adhering to a “two-tiered system of sovereignty” that deals with a country like Luxembourg differently than, say, Sudan. He also argues that no international action can be “legitimate” unless it has Russia’s and China’s support.

Kirchick has Yglesias down cold!

I'd add though, that Yglesias not only sounds like a radical leftist, he acts like one:

This photo shows Yglesias dressed in "terrorist chic."

As Mere Rhetoric indicates:

Terrorist chic is merely the latest retarded hipster trend to confirm the brutally obvious: spoiled liberal Ivy kids are not ready to talk to adults yet. The Left is not serious. They just don't get things. Like "terrorism is not ironic or cool". They just don't get it. They're in it for the smirks - and for their parochial back-patting sessions regarding their imagined cosmopolitan superiority.

That's way better than I could put it!

I would just add that Yglesias and his blogging ilk are taken as serious analysts among the left-wing surrender faction (by foks, for example, at the New York Times), not to mention the antiwar mandarins in the congressional Democratic majority.

Which is why I keep blogging about these hacks, making the case for the essential radicalism of "progressives" on the political left.

See also, "Diminishing International Relations: Left Bloggers and Foreign Policy."

Will the Real MLK Please Stand Up?

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, what would he be like? How would we treat his message and accomplishments?

Would we admire him as America's most important civil rights leader? Would his message of America's unrealized goodness be honored, or would his later days of personal turmoil be evidence for the radical set which sees America - despite 40 years of progress after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and decades of affirmative action - as an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity, the greatest stain on human progress in world history?

Unfortunately, the revisionists are pressing the latter case. As I noted yesterday, to hear it now, Jeremiah Wright was speaking truth to power, just restating the case on America's evil that was established unimpeachably by Martin Luther King on the eve of his death.

Apparently that's the message of Dr. King's assassination, that the civil rights leader had to be silenced, because the reactionary white establishment risked losing authoritarian control amid the window dressing of change the rights revolution of the 1960s now apparently represents. For example, see the embrace of King's later uncertainties by Kai Wright over at American Prospect, "Dr. King, Forgotten Radical":

Generations after the man's murder, our efforts to look back on his life too often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about his much-discussed dream. And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that remains urgently important to Americans' lives. Today, I don't mourn King's death so much as I do his abandoned ideas.

We've all got reason to avoid the uncomfortable truths King shoved in the nation's face. It's a lot easier for African Americans to pine for his leadership than it is to accept our own responsibility for creating the radicalized community he urged upon us. And it's more comfortable for white America to reduce King's goals to an idyllic meeting of little black boys and little white girls than it is to consider his analysis of how white supremacy keeps that from becoming reality.

What I see when I read essays like this is the left's project to reduce the successes of the civil rights movement to a footnote, to a few pieces of legislation that put a happy face on America's essential banality of hegemonic state oppression and violence.

The changes of the 1960s were, of course, revolutionary. This is not objectively in doubt. What's now happening in activism and scholarship is to argue for an "incomplete revolution," which puts the onus back on the system of an alleged structural white supremacy to expand even further the legislative and policy regime of racial reparations that's been in place since Dr. King's early successes in forcing the nation to live up to the moral promise of the creed.

It's never enough, though. As long as there are dividends to be paid, racial victimization will be the modus operandi of the hardline forces of the radical left.

Rick Pearstein, for example, has exerpted portions for his writings which he claims provide proof of some enormously irretrievable evil in the country, where white supremacist, no doubt, continue to hold forth throughout the country's halls of power.

Pearstein even congratulates himself:

I'm so, so proud to be a historian today, and to be able to do my own little part to wrench Martin Luther King's awesome radicalism out of the the blood-crusted arms of grubby clowns like David Brooks who dare try to embrace him.

Is Pearlstein an academic historian, or a journalist? Can we trust his "wrenching" of King's radicalism from the arms of the white power structure.

The historian versus journalist distinction's important, as David Noon argues, in attacking the credibility of Juan Williams' thesis on racial victimology:

Williams' hackery deserves considerably more attention than it tends to receive. Though his work on Eyes on the Prize seems to have given him a permanent and inflated custodial sense of The True Meaning of the Civil Rights Movement, actual historians generally regard him as a joke.

Noon provides no evidence that "actual historians" do any such thing, although as an "actual" political scientist, I can tell you that actual academic research (here and here, for example) backs up many of Williams points, and conservative bloggers know a deligitmation campaign when they see one:

Long before the left-leaning journalist wrote “Enough,” a book with a decidedly conservative slant, Williams was considered a turncoat, his support for policies like affirmative action notwithstanding. One would assume that a man who penned “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965,” the companion volume to the award-winning PBS series of the same name, would be immune from such charges. But his conservative-like views on taboo issues leave him wide open for insults.

In any case, back to MLK.

Dr. King faced debilitating personal crises in his late 1960s activism, and his legacy of racial progress can't be accurately evaluated without recognizing the totality of his circumstances. As David Brooks pointed out yesterday:

The key tension in King’s life was over how to push relentlessly for change but within an existing moral structure. But by the late-60s many felt the social structure needed to be torn down. The assassin’s bullet set off a conflagration.

At King’s funeral, the marshals told the throngs that nobody should chew gum because it would look undignified. But niceties like that were obsolete.

Building the social fabric after the disruption of that period has been the work of the subsequent generations — weaving the invisible web of family, neighborhood and national obligations so that people stay in school, attend to their kids and have an opportunity to rise if they play by the rules.

Progress has been slow. Nearly a third of American high school students don’t graduate (half in the cities). Seventy percent of African-American kids are born out of wedlock. Poverty rates in Memphis have scarcely dropped.

Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public. If Barack Obama’s presidential campaign represents anything, it is the triumph of King’s early-60s style of activism over the angry and reckless late-60s style. King was in crisis when he was gunned down. But his inspiration is outlasting his critics.

For more on the left's embellishment of King's "radicalism," see Memeorandum.

See also, "King Prophecies Foreshadowed Obama and Wright, Says Dyson."

Support Petraeus' Iraq Testimony

Freedom's Watch has a new video urging support for General David Petraeus, who's scheduled to update Congress on Iraq's progress next week, via YouTube:

See also my earlier post, "War Opponents Ready Attacks on Petraeus Testimony."

War Opponents Ready Attacks on Petraeus Testimony

General David Petraeus is scheduled for congressional testimony next week. The timing couldn't be better for antiwar surrender hawks. For over a year we've seen steady progress in Iraq, with an improving security picture, but the outbreak of sectarian violence in Basra cancels all that, to hear some tell it:

As stories hit the papers ... about the new Iraq intelligence assessment, I wanted to reiterate a point I made earlier in the week. While the Administration and others will cite the report as another sign that we are making progress in Iraq, with reporting of the classified document citing "significant security improvements and progress toward healing," and a more "upbeat analysis of conditions in Iraq than the last major assessment," there are some very important things to keep in mind.

The updated Iraq NIE analyzes only the subsequent six months after the previous update to the Iraq NIE, which was completed and released in August 2007. While it is deplorable that there is going to be no formal public document describing the findings—as has been the tradition in the past—due to DNI McConnel’s absurd declaration that “All future NIEs will not have unclassified key judgments”, it almost doesn’t matter. The New York Times article, for instance, states:

Among the factors seen as contributing to the ebb in violence in Iraq have been the cease-fire observed by the Mahdi Army, the militia founded by the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

But since the report only examines the months ending in January 2008, this aspect is already outdated. The findings of this assessment highlight the reduction in violence from August 2007—when Sadr acquiesced to a ceasefire— to January 2008. The updated NIE would not include any examination of the ground changing events from last month.

March turned out to be the deadliest month in Iraq since August's NIE, with attacks against Americans reaching their highest level since the surge reached its peak last June. The upheaval that occurred in Basra and Baghdad, a success for Sadr’s forces and an embarrassment, from both an operational and perception perspective, for Maliki and tangentially America, makes the findings in the updated NIE effectively antiquated. The Washington Post nails this aspect:

Violence declined substantially late last year, although it leveled off during the initial months of 2008 and increased dramatically during last week's fighting between Iraqi and U.S. forces and Shiite militias in Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere in southern Iraq. Those conflicts are not substantively addressed in the new report, sources said.

This last line hints to way the Administration might also be reticent to turn the assessment into a declassified, public summary. If the document is so upbeat, wouldn't, politically, the Administration want to release a glossy version, bound and full of graphs, triumphantly trumpeted the improved security situation, especially as Petraeus and Crocker come to Capitol Hill next week? But after March, the NIE went from being a compendium of confidence to an embarrassing catalog of just how quickly "good" can turn to disaster, and so-called progress regresses into setback.

This analysis is like saying the Kansas City Royals should play in the World Series because of a hot streak in the last ten days of the season.

But recall what Daniel Henninger reminded us last week regarding Basra:

The Democrats appear so invested in a failure that a half-week of violence erases a year of progress.

But check out Tigerhawk, who's got a good post on Nancy Pelosi's plans to attack the general:

If you are among those who wonder why the Democrats have a reputation for being anti-military and soft on national defense, look no further:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Thursday not to "put a shine on recent events” in Iraq when they testify before Congress next week.

“I hope we don’t hear any glorification of what happened in Basra,” said Pelosi, referring to a recent military offensive against Shiite militants in the city led by the Iraqi government and supported by U.S. forces.

Yes, the Speaker of the House is "warning" the American theater commander in the middle of a war not to "put a shine on" in his report. Because, God forbid, he might suggest there was cause for optimism. We cannot, after all, have the general leading our soldiers actually saying there is a chance for victory. You know, in public, in front of television cameras where actual Americans might see him.

Ten thousand jihadis could surrender tomorrow and beg to be waterboarded and Nancy Pelosi would refuse to view it as victory.

Pelosi did say one thing that is certainly true but wholly inconsistent with her policy prescription: That Moqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire in Basra was on orders from Tehran.

Although powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr agreed to a ceasefire after six days of fighting, Pelosi wondered why the U.S. was caught off guard by the offensive and questioned how the ceasefire was achieved, saying the terms were "probably dictated from Iran.”

So, the senior Democrat in our national government acknowledges that Iran is waging a proxy war against the United States and the government of Iraq, and yet believes (i) it is in our national interest to cede Iraq to the Islamic Republic and (ii) the United States has no casus belli against Iran. And that the one American general who has shown some capacity for counterinsurgency needs to be warned against any suggestion of victory, tactical or otherwise.

Check.

I'll have more antiwar spin machinations in upcoming posts. Notice how MoveOn's not reprised it "General Betray Us" ad in anticipation of the Petraeus testimony - so far.

Photo Credit: ABC News

Daily Kos Smears McCain as Anti-King Racist

John McCain spent the day in Memphis commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., and apologizing for his early opposition to the MLK national holiday:

John McCain honored the sacrifice and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and said today that he was wrong to oppose a federal holiday for King.

"I was wrong. I was wrong," he said in front of the Lorraine Motel after an impromptu tour of where King was assassinated 40 years ago. "We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans."

Some in the crowd heckled him, but others shouted, "We forgive you. We forgive you."

The presumptive Republican nominee also told the crowd, gathered in the rain, about when he learned of King's assassination, from the guards at the "Hanoi Hilton," where he was being held as a prisoner of war after being shot down over North Vietnam.

"I remember first learning what had happened here on the fourth of April 1968, feeling just as everyone else did back home, only perhaps even more uncertain and alarmed for my country in the darkness that was then enclosed around me and my fellow captives," he said. "In our circumstances at the time, good news from America was hard to come by. But the bad news was a different matter, and each new report of violence, rioting, and other tribulations in America was delivered without delay. The enemy had correctly calculated that the news from Memphis would deeply wound morale, and leave us worried and afraid for our country. Doubtless it boosted our captors' morale, confirming their belief that America was a lost cause, and that the future belonged to them.

"Yet how differently it all turned out," McCain said in remarks that he also plans to make later today to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group that King led. "And if they had been the more reflective kind, our enemies would have understood that the cause of Dr. King was bigger than any one man, and could not be stopped by force of violence. Struggle is rewarded, in God's own time. Wrongs are set right and evil is overcome. We know this to be true because it is the story of the man we honor today, and because it is the story of our country."

The Democratic National Committee attacked McCain's statements as insincere, but Markos Moulitsas sinks to a new low in yellow-bellied smears:

McCain claims he voted against an MLK holiday because of ignorance about "the issue", as if he needed position papers and highly paid lobbyists to explain to him what Dr. Martin Luther King meant to our nation.

Still, even his claimed ignorance on the topic strains credibility. Perhaps because it just isn't true. Check out what he said about his POW captors in a 1987 interview with USA Today:

"They never gave us any meaningful news," McCain said. "They told us the day that Martin Luther King was shot, they told us the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot, but they never bothered to tell us about the moon shot. So it was certainly selected news."

McCain claims ignorance about MLK because his state didn't have black people, but he knew. His captors told him about it. The issue isn't one of "I didn't know about the issue", but one of "MLK ain't shit". What else could it be?

It's clear as day, especially considering that as late as 1987, McCain didn't consider the assassination of Martin Luther King "meaningful".

A sentiment, I'm sure, shared with his good friends Trent Lott and George Allen.

I watched newsclips from the Lorraine Hotel thoughout the day. McCain's statements appeared heartfelt, and his interaction with members of the audience appeared enthusiastic and genuine.

(Think Progress can't get enough of the McCain heckling).)

Today is not a national holiday itself, days when we normally get a break from intense political polarization - but today's recriminations over King's legacy are a sure sign of how nasty this year's campaign's going to be.

Check Memeorandum for more commentary.

What's a Radical?

I use the terms "radical" and "radical left" quite regularly when discussing the antwar left and multicultural racial victimologists.

But what really is a radical?

I offered a couple of definitions in my earlier post, "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama." For example, according to Leon Baradat's Political Ideologies:

...a radical may defined as a person who is extremely dissastified with the society as it is and therefore is impatient with less than extreme proposals for changing it. Hence, all radicals favor an immediate and fundamental change in the society. In other words, all radicals favor revolutionary change.

One of the points I've made in the "No Enemies" series is that radicals don't necessarily have to advocate political violence as a means for revolutionary transformation.

Further, I contend that today's "progressive" activists constitute a contemporary radical movement seeking to use the electoral process to achieve a dramatic and fundamental transformation of American political and social institutions. Recall though that the notion of "progressive" has been appropriated by far-left activists in order to make their radical agenda more acceptable):

The term 'progressive' has evolved a great deal over the past 35 years. By the ’70s, many ’60s veterans had concluded that working 'within the system' had become a viable option. As a result, many leftists stopped using rhetoric and slogans that had marginalized them from the political mainstream. Labels like 'radical', 'leftist', and 'revolutionary' sounded stale and gratuitously provocative. And so, gradually, activists began to use the much less threatening 'progressive.' Today, 'progressive' is the term of choice for practically everyone who has a politics that used to be called 'radical.'

Progressives of late prefer electoral mobilization over direct action to bring about radical transformation. For example, the Nation, in writing about the antiwar movement's robust backing of Democratic congressional candidates, indicated an electoral strategy is the most viable option - "barring a draft or a radical turn in public opinion that would once again bring people en masse into the streets" - to bring about a political realignment committed to implementing the left's total surrender agenda in Iraq.

Electoral mobilization to bring about radical left-wing change is also seen in this definition from the folks at Daily Kos themselves:

The term radical, as applied to political theory and ideology, denotes someone who believes in an ideology or theory that doesn't accept the status quo of society as natural, apolitical, or the way things should be simply by virtue of being the way things are. Virtually all radical ideologies and theories seek to challenge the status quo, to question how things came to be as they are, why they came to be this way, and whose interest things being this way serves.

Most, though not all, radical ideologies and theories also argue that the status quo cannot be fixed by piecemeal reforms and that a more fundamental restructuring of society is necessary to achieve their goals. This may include advocating the armed overthrow of the existing social structure, as in Marxist-Leninism, but often also takes other forms such as many modern socialists who advocate for a democratic means of revolution.

So, according to Daily Kos activists and writers, reforms that might bring about a fundamental restructuring of society - a democratic revolution - can be achieved through "other means."

Now, hardcore opposition to Iraq has been the sine quo non among left blogosphere's main spokespeople, like Daily Kos, Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald, and The Impolitic. But radicalism goes beyond opposition to the war to include far left-wing positions on the entire range of major political and social issues facing the country.

Let's lay out the bases of this radicalism. With apologies to Joe Klein, left wing extremism:

* believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.
* believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.
* believes the Iraq war was a consequence of America's fundamental imperialistic nature.
* believes capitalism is largely a force for social oppression.
* believes American society is fundamentally racist and unfair.
* believes intractable problems like crime and poverty are primarily the fault of society.
* believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.
* believes religious faith is a source of intolerance, for example, against gays.

This is simply a typology of positions, and logically not all self-professed "progressives" would slide neatly into the rubric.

Many would, however. Indeed, some of the "aggressive progressives" of the Democratic Party have aligned themselves with the most implacable foes of the Iraq war currently on the scene.

Recall, of course, that some of these antiwar progressives have formally endorsed Barack Obama's campaign.

See also my introduction to the series, "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama."

King Prophecies Foreshadowed Obama and Wright, Says Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson, at the Los Angeles Times, seeks to rehabilitate the hate sermons of Jeremiah Wright by conflating the Chicago reverend's black liberation America-bashing with Martin Luther King's late-1960s-era sermons, where the civil rights leader assuaged his frustration at the glacial pace of integration by increasing the intensity of his promised-land theological preaching.

Here's Dyson's

Before 1965, King was upbeat and bright, his belief in white America's ability to change by moral suasion resilient and durable. That is the leader we have come to know during annual King commemorations. After 1965, King was darker and angrier; he grew more skeptical about the willingness of America to change without great social coercion.

King's skepticism and anger were often muted when he spoke to white America, but they routinely resonated in black sanctuaries and meeting halls across the land. Nothing highlights that split - or white America's ignorance of it and the prophetic black church King inspired - more than recalling King's post-1965 odyssey, as he grappled bravely with poverty, war and entrenched racism. That is the King who emerges as we recall the meaning of his death. After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettos or to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 "were at best surface changes" that were "limited mainly to the Negro middle class." In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks "are now making demands that will cost the nation something. ... You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then."

King's conclusion? "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." He didn't say this in the mainstream but to his black colleagues.

Similarly, although King spoke famously against the Vietnam War before a largely white audience at Riverside Church in New York in 1967, exactly a year before he died, he reserved some of his strongest antiwar language for his sermons before black congregations. In his own pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, two months before his death, King raged against America's "bitter, colossal contest for supremacy." He argued that God "didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world today," preaching that "we are criminals in that war" and that we "have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world." King insisted that God "has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, 'Don't play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power.' "

Dyson goes on to extrapolate from King's frustration to the current controversy over Barack Obama's Wright affair:

Obama has seized on the early King to remind Americans about what we can achieve when we allow our imaginations to soar high as we dream big. Wright has taken after the later King, who uttered prophetic truths that are easily caricatured when snatched from their religious and racial context. What united King in his early and later periods is the incurable love that fueled his hopefulness and rage. As King's example proves, as we dream, we must remember the poor and vulnerable who live a nightmare. And as we strike out in prophetic anger against injustice, love must cushion even our hardest blows.

Unfortunately, the real caricature here is Dyson's.

His analysis of Dr. King's later political and theological adjustments have been ripped from the tumult of the era in which King lived. By 1965 the inner cities had begun to violently chafe at continued economic disenfranchisement and the Black Power movement had begun to marginalize traditional civil rights leaders as out of touch with demands for change. Further, the war in Vietnam had become an increasing focus to many in the movement. Dr. King was personally torn over the appropriate response to the slow pace of progress change, not to mention the stressful demands of various constituencies pulling him to and fro - all of this when the Johnson administration's civil rights and policy programs were still in the development and implemenation phase.

As David J. Garrow has shown, in Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King and the civil rights movement faced increasing political difficulties, and the wear and tear had upending Dr. King's stability:

More and more, in public and private, King spoke of the inner turmoil that plagued him. "We often develop inferiority complexes and we stumble through life with a feeling of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, and a sense of impending failure," he told the Ebenezer congregation one Sunday [in September 1967]. "A fear of what life may bring," he went on, "encourages some persons to wander aimlessly along the frittering road of excessive drink and sexual promiscuity," a more personal revelation than his listeners realized. Even in the darkest moments, faith in God gave him the inner equilibrium to face life's problems and "conquer fear." "I know this. I know it from my own personal experience."

According to Garrow's biography, the rush of fame and power weighed heavily on Dr. King, and he questioned the efficacy of his long-standing commitment to peaceful change through civil disobedience.

This context is lacking in Dyson's account. Indeed, Dyson's comparison of Dr. King's preaching discounts the significance of his most important speechs, like the "I Have a Dream" speech, considered one of the most important public statement on civil rights and political philosophy in American history.

Jeremiah Wright can't hold a candle to the King legacy, and allusions to Dr. King prophecies being reborn in "God Damn America" sermons do a grave injustice to the King family on this day 40 years after Dr. King's death.

Thankfully, Juan Williams, at the Wall Street Journal, has placed Dr. King's legacy in the proper relation to Obama's Wright controversy, suggesting the original uplifting message of the Obama campaign has given way to identity politics and racial grievance (via Memeorandum):

Mr. Obama has carried a message of pride and self-sufficiency to black voters nationwide, who have rewarded him with support reaching 80% and higher. His candidacy has become, as the headline on Ebony magazine put it, a matter of having a black man as president "In Our Lifetime."

Among his white supporters, race is coincidental, not central, to his political identity. Mr. Obama is to them the candidate who personifies the promise of equal opportunity for all. But as black support has become central to his victories, this idealistic view has been increasingly at war with the portrayal, crafted by the senator to win black support, of him as the black candidate. The terrible tension between these racially distinct views now surrounds and threatens his campaign.

So far, Mr. Obama has been content to let black people have their vision of him while white people hold to a separate, segregated reality. He is a politician and, unlike King, his goal is winning votes, not changing hearts. Still, it is a key break from the King tradition to sell different messages to different audiences based on race, and to fail to challenge racial divisions in the nation.

Mr. Obama's major speech on race last month was forced from him only after a political crisis erupted: It became widely known that he'd sat for 20 years in the pews of a church where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lashed out at white people. The minister cursed America as worthy of damnation, made lewd suggestions about the nature of President Clinton's relationship with black voters, and embraced the paranoid idea that the white government was spreading AIDS among black people.

Here is where the racial tension at the heart of Mr. Obama's campaign flared into view. He either shared these beliefs or, lacking good judgment, decided it politically expedient for an ambitious young black politician trying to prove his solidarity with all things black, to be associated with these rants. His judgment and leadership on the critical issue of race is in question.

While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.

When King spoke about the racist past, he gloried in black people beating the odds to win equal rights by arming "ourselves with dignity and self-respect." He expressed regret that some black leaders reveled in grievance, malice and self-indulgent anger in place of a focus on strong families, education and love of God. Even in the days before Congress passed civil rights laws, King spoke to black Americans about the pride that comes from "assuming primary responsibility" for achieving "first class citizenship."

Read the whole thing.

As Williams makes clear, Obama's pandering to black grievance and vicitimization is opposed to the centrality of the King legacy: As the barriers to justice and opportunities fall, black individualism and self-sufficiency have to rise to meet the coming challenges.

Michael Eric Dyson takes Dr. King's personal turmoil out of context, pushing a revisionist interpretation of the slain civil rights hero's words and legacy to legitimize a black liberation anti-Americanism that has been roundly repudiated in the court of public opinion.

Sometimes You Have to Draw Lines: John Yoo Responds

Just yesterday Glenn Greenwald accused John Yoo of war crimes.

Greenwald, of course, is leading the left's blogospheric attack on Yoo, who was Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel, and the reviled author of the "torture memos" outlining the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation techniques.

It turns out that Yoo's got an interview forthcoming in Esquire, which is excerpted today. I particulary liked Yoo's response to the jab that he's not the kind of guy who'd employ purportedly inhumane definitions of torture, like this:

...intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result.

Here's Yoo's reply to this "not-the-kind-of-guy" angle:

This is unpleasant. Don’t interpret what I’m saying as oh I was happy to do this or eager, or I felt some satisfaction. Mainly because I had read what the British and the Israelis had gone through -- they had their own struggle with this issue and they had their own judicial decisions -- and I had read all kinds of articles and books about this issue. I mean, it’s a difficult issue. You have to draw the line. What the government is doing is unpleasant. It’s the use of violence. I don’t disagree with that. But I also think that part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more -- we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague.

Read the whole thing.

Yoo's apparently a very mild-mannered fellow who's routinely booed at colloquia and speaking engagements by student antiwar ayatollahs.

In any case, as noted, much is being written this week about extreme interrogations amid the release of Yoo's 2003 legal memorandum, which is widely regarded at supplying the "green light" for coercive methods outside of stateside constitutional channels (for the "green light" meme, see Vanity Fair and Harpers).

Yoo's legal theories, of course, will never be forgiven by the paranoid left. It's not the terrorists seeking our destruction who're dangerous, it's the Bush administration itself.

Never mind the fact that for deeply principled, philosophical reasons we might need to consider the selective use of torture against our enemies. As Jerome Slater has argued in advocating aggressive interrogations:

Put differently, so long as the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks against innocents is taken seriously, as it must be, it is neither practicable nor morally persuasive to absolutely prohibit the physical coercion or even outright torture of captured terrorist plotters—undoubtedly evils, but lesser evils than preventable mass murder. In any case, although the torture issue is still debatable today, assuredly the next major attack on the United States—or perhaps Europe—will make it moot. At that point, the only room for practical choice will be between controlled and uncontrolled torture—if we are lucky. Far better, then, to avoid easy rhetoric and think through the issue while we still have the luxury of doing so.

Slater was writing a few years ago, but now, more than ever, even the slightest mention of torture elicits the most violent knee-jerk reaction among the vanguard of the surrendering antiwar contingents.

But Yoo's right: Sometimes we need to think about this stuff. Sometimes we have to draw those lines between the thinkable and the unthinkable, to think about what indeed needs to be done to protect American national security, unflinchingly, without succumbing to the natural human impulse to recoil from the commitment of requisite acts.

More Far-Left Hackery!

It was just the other day that Think Progress had to issue an apology and retraction for erroneously accusing John McCain of plagiarism.

Now less than a week later we have another round of far-left hackery against another reviled neocon warmonger: Firedoglake and Democracy Arsenal have both attacked Senator Joseph Lieberman for his statements on Iran's role in Iraq.

Jane "Hammering" Hamsher calls Lieberman an "attack chihuahua" for questioning Barack Obama's credibilty in his attacks on John McCain's Iraq statements on FOX News (via YouTube):

More egregiously, Ilan Goldenberg at Democracy Arsenal attempts to smear Leiberman's knowledge of Iran and Islam, claiming that McCain's surrogates are taking "Barack blasting" to a new level with attacks allegedly ignorant of Islamic sectarianism.

Not to worry. James Kirchick clears things up with a succinct slap-down:

Ilan Goldenberg of the National Security Network claims that, in an interview yesterday, Joe Lieberman said:

If we did what Sen. Obama wanted us to do last year, Al-Qaeda in Iran would be in control of Iraq today.

Goldenberg is apparently a believer in the meme that Sunnis and Shia's can never work together, exclaiming "There's no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iran!" Never mind the fact that the 9/11 Commission actually did find extensive ties between Al Qaeda and Iran (in that several of the hijackers passed through Iran in the months leading up to the attack, that "Iran made a concerted effort to strengthen relations with Al Qaeda after the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole," that Iran harbored Al Qaeda members after the fall of the Taliban, etc. etc.), what Lieberman actually said was "Al-Qaeda and Iran." Watch the interview here.

Goldenberg cites Jane Hamsher, of the liberal blog firedoglake, as his source for this amazing find. She's a reliable figure on matters involving Lieberman, having once doctored a photo of the Connecticut Senator in blackface. So I'm sure she would never distort something as pedantic as this. Apparently the credulosphere isn't just illiterate when it comes to terrorism, but the English language as well.

Update: The transcript of the interview is here. Perhaps Goldenberg and Hamsher will correct their mistakes.

Don't bet on it. America-bashing radicals rarely concede their ignorance.

See also, Michael Goldfarb, "The New Art of Inventing Gaffes," who includes beer-addled Flophouse blogger Matthew Yglesias to the hideous hacking cohort (via Memeorandum).

Basra Breakout: The Second Iran-Iraq War

Well, thank goodness for the Kagans. This neocon couple consistently provides some of the most important analyses on Iraq, including last week's fighting, despite the best efforts of antiwar detractors to paint Basra as this year's Tet.

Kimberly Kagan, for example, argues that Iran's assistance to renegade militias in Iraq indicates the next phase of strategic competition in the Middle East: "The Second Iran-Iraq War":

Iran now causes the majority of the violence and instability in Iraq, a trend that began in July 2007, according to U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, when U.S. and Iraqi military offensives swept al Qaeda from its safe havens around Baghdad.

Senior officials of the Iranian government, the U.S. military has noted in press briefings, support and in some cases control, illegal armed groups that are fighting American forces and undermining the Iraqi government. In particular, the recent fighting in Basra and Baghdad is not at root a civil war between Iraqi Shia political factions, but an ongoing struggle between the Iraqi government and illegal militias organized, trained, equipped and funded by Iran.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Iraqi Security Forces are now fighting these militias, a long-standing demand of the U.S. that was articulated in congressional benchmarks in 2006. The question for Americans is simple: Will we support Iraq in this fight, or abandon its government and people?

Iran has sponsored illegal militias since the formation of the Maliki government in 2006. The Qods Force, Iran's premier terrorist training team and exporter of its revolution, provided between $750,000 and $3 million-worth of equipment and funding to Iraq's militias monthly in the first half of 2007, according to U.S. Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner. In addition, the U.S. military and the press note that Lebanese Hezbollah under Qods Force auspices directly trained Iraqi fighters, sending military advisers to help Moqtada al-Sadr create the Mahdi Army in August 2003, to train Iraqi militias inside Iran in 2005, and to advise the militias inside Iraq since 2006.

The Iranian-trained militias operated in 2006-2008 as units known as Special Groups or Secret Cells, ostensibly claiming to serve within Mr. Sadr's militia. In reality, the U.S. military says their titular leader – the ex-Sadrist Qais Khazali – reported to a Lebanese Hezbollah commander, who in turn reported to the highest Qods Force leaders.

The foreign advisers organized these Iraqi opposition groups into a Hezbollah-style structure. The Special Groups kidnapped Iraqi government officials, ran death squads against Iraqi civilians, and regularly rocketed and mortared the Green Zone with Iranian-imported weapons. They smuggled in and placed highly-lethal, explosively-formed projectiles (EFPs) to kill U.S. soldiers. In short, Iranian-backed Special Groups prevented Iraq's government from effectively controlling the country in 2006, even removing some of the Mahdi Army from Mr. Sadr's control. In the recent clashes, the Special Groups coordinated the unrest and attacks of the regular Mahdi Army in the capital and provinces. In Baghdad, the Mahdi Army, in turn, facilitated Special Groups' movements....

The recent fighting in Iraq has also revealed much about our enemies. The intensity of Special Groups activities rose from January to March; U.S. and Iraqi forces found the large caches of EFPs and new Iranian rockets that often precede a Special Groups offensive. The Basra operations seem to have prompted the Special Groups and the Mahdi Army to launch this offensive prematurely, not according to plan. It did not succeed....

These events provide an enormous opportunity for either the U.S. or for Iran – and whichever state responds most intelligently and quickly to the circumstances on the ground will gain the benefit. The U.S. should encourage the Iraqi government to defeat Iran's proxies and agents, and should provide the requisite assistance. It should encourage and support the Iraqi government's laudable determination to establish the rule of law throughout Iraq, not just where U.S. forces are present....

Above all, the U.S. must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq. Iranian agents and military forces are actively attacking U.S. forces and the government of Iraq. Every rocket that lands in the Green Zone should remind us that Iran's aims are evidently not benign – they are at best destabilizing and at worst hegemonic. The U.S. must defeat al Qaeda in Iraq, and protect Iraq from the direct military intervention of Iran. Failure to do so will invite Iranian domination of an Arab state that now seeks to be our ally.

Note too that in contrast to the bitter denunciations of Iraq's military contingents - last week, for example, at Memeorandum - the battles between government troops and outlaw militias reveal considerable military capabilities among Iraq's indegenious security forces.

For the last few years war critics have ridiculed the Iraqi army, hammering over and over, "When are they going to stand up?"

Well, this is Iraq's military breakout, with the nation's soldiers standing tall. Americans should be standing up behind them.

Barack Obama's Antiwar Coalition

I've been researching a post on "paleoconservatism," so I'm intrigued to see Philip Giraldi's new essay over at the Huffington Post, "Obama the Conservative Choice."

Giraldi's highlighting Andrew Bacevich and his endorsement of Barack Obama at the American Conservative.

This is a very interesting development, holding considerable significance for the fall election if Obama's the nominee.

Here's a bit from Giraldi:

Many traditional conservatives (not the neocon subspecies) are embarrassed by George Bush and are looking for a way out of the foreign and domestic policy nightmare that he has engineered. They also understand that John McCain would be more of the same or even worse. There is a lively discussion of Barack Obama that is taking place both in the blogosphere and in the media directed at a conservative audience, and much of the discourse is surprisingly receptive to the idea that Obama, though a liberal, could bring about genuine change that will benefit the country. A recent article by Boston University professor and former army officer Andrew Bacevich appeared in The American Conservative magazine and is available on the internet at www.amconmag.com. It is entitled "The Case for Obama" and makes the point that Obama is a candidate that is certainly no conservative, but he is the only real hope to get out of Iraq and also avoid wars of choice in the future. Bacevich rightly sees the Iraq war and its consequences as a truly existential issue for the United States, one that should be front and center for voters in November. Any more adventures of the Iraq type will surely bankrupt the country and destroy what remains of the constitution. Bacevich also notes that the election of John McCain, candidate of the neoconservatives and the war party, would guarantee an unending series of preemptive wars as US security doctrine and would validate the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq and wage an interminable global war on "terrorists." Electing Obama instead would be as close as one could come to making a definitive judgment on the folly of Iraq and everything that it represents, a judgment that is long overdue. Many conservatives would agree that the Obama commitment to leave Iraq is the right way to go and long to return to the days when America only went to war when a vital interest was threatened.

Note Giraldi's conclusion:

Obama for president is beginning to look pretty good to many conservatives and that means that a Barack Obama Administration might actually bridge the gap between right and left, finally bringing together American citizens who are intent on righting the foundering ship of state rather than preserving the status quo. Clinton and McCain represent little more than two nightmarish visions of an out-of-touch political reality that has manifestly failed and should be rejected.

The point's left unsaid by Giraldi, but it's Clinton and McCain's Iraq authorization votes that tie them together in this "nightmarish vision" that should be rejected.

But what's key here is how Bacevich himself describes the agenda of "conservatives for Obama." Notice, for example, how Bacevich demonizes McCain in classic antiwar style:

Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves....

Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.

Noam Chomsky couldn't have issued a stronger antiwar denunciation!

But Bacevich continues by laying out the "conservative" case for Obama:

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.

To appreciate that possibility requires seeing the Iraq War in perspective. As an episode in modern military history, Iraq qualifies at best as a very small war....

As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can “keep us safe.” Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government.

Now Bacevich is channeling Glenn Greenwald!

You see, the arguments of "conservatives for Obama" aren't so different from "progressives for Obama," which is why Giraldi can argue that "a Barack Obama Administration might actually bridge the gap between right and left.

Actually, there's not much to bridge. Paleoconservatives have become so reactionary in their opposition to Iraq - and the American national security state - that they've simply tied the loop of the ideological continuum, joining the radical left with the reactionary right in common hatred of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, and GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain.

In fact, the only thing plausibly new about Bacevich's position is that he's openly rooting for the other side of the traditional liberal/conservative split.

David Frum explains the extreme antiwar positions of the paleoconservatives in his article, "Unpatriotic Conservatives":

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves "conservatives."

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies....

The antiwar conservatives aren't satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?

But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

Frum does not cite Bacevich in the article, as he was writing shortly after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

But Bacevich's positions criticizing "the new American militarism" are well known, for example, in his books and articles appearing at prominent antiwar websites and publications.

Even far-left bloggers can't get enough of Bacevich's anti-militarist thesis!

Note that Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, is a graduate of West Point who served in Vietam. His son, also named Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed in Iraq in 2007. (Bacevich wrote about his son's death in a Washington Post essay.)

Credentials like these give a certain authority or gravitas to Bacevich's views, and his service to country and the loss of his son are to be respected.

Nevertheless, the paleoconservative case for Barack Obama's presidential bid further illustrates how undifferentiated is today's antiwar movement.

The history of antiwar opposition to Iraq includes a diverse array of groups. From radical socialists and anarchists to anti-Semitics and paleocons, contemporary opposition to the Iraq war has united left-right fringe elements like never before.

As Victor Davis Hanson indicates:

It is becoming nearly impossible to sort the extreme rhetoric of the antiwar Left from that of the fringe paleo-Right. Both see the Iraqi war through the same lenses: the American effort is bound to fail and is a deep reflection of American pathology.

An anguished Cindy Sheehan calls Bush "the world's biggest terrorist." And she goes on to blame Israel for the death of her son ("Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel").

Her antiwar venom could easily come right out of the mouth of a more calculating David Duke. Perhaps that's why he lauded her anti-Semitism: "Courageously she has gone to Texas near the ranch of President Bush and braved the elements and a hostile Jewish supremacist media."

This odd symbiosis began right after 9/11. Then the lunatic Left mused about the "pure chaos" of the falling "two huge buck teeth" twin towers, lamented that they were more full of Democrats than Republicans, and saw the strike as righteous payback from third-world victims.

The mirror-imaging fundamentalists and censors in turn saw the attack as an angry God's retribution either for an array of our mortal sins or America's tilting toward Israel.

In Iraq, the Left thinks we are unfairly destroying others; the ultra-Right that we are being destroyed ourselves. The former alleges that we are bullying in our global influence, the latter that we are collapsing from our decadence.

But both, in their exasperation at George Bush's insistence on seeing Iraq emerge from the Hussein nightmare years with some sort of constitutional government, have embraced the paranoid style of personal invective.

In other words, when one breaks down all of the various antiwar strains, we see a common denominator of unpatriotic anti-Americanism.

These groups have been explicitly welcomed into the massive multipronged coalition Obama seeks to build, which he sees as nothing less than a full-blown social movement. As Elizabeth Drew notes:

Obama has a big idea: he believes that in order to change Washington ... and to reduce the power of the lobbies and "special interests," he must first build a large coalition—Democrats, independents, Republicans, whoever—to support him in his effort to change things. He has figured out that he cannot make the kinds of changes he's talking about if he has to fight for 51–49 majorities in Congress. Therefore, he's trying to build a broader coalition, and enlist the people who have come out to see him and are getting involved in politics for the first time because of him. If he can hold that force together, members of Congress, including the "old bulls," according to a campaign aide, "will look back home and see that there is a mandate for change." Thus, Obama talks about working "from the bottom up" to bring about change. When he says he will take on the special interests and the lobbies, to him it's not as far-fetched as most jaded Washingtonians think: he intends to do that with the army he's building.

To stress Drew's point once more: Obama seeks mobilize the support of whoever he can get, drawing all factions into his mass political coalition for change.

This coalition, as we can see from this analysis, includes progressives and paleoconservatives, and while different individuals may float in and out of the various factional groupings, the fundamental radical basis of Barack Obama's support is undeniable.

See also, "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama."

Hat tip: Memeorandum

Joe Klein Channels Glenn Greenwald!

The Kagans are the most reviled bunch of neocons on the current scene, perhaps next to Bill Kristol.

The latest evidence of this is Joe Klein's post dismissing the Kagans as foolish:

On the day that John Yoo's remarkable torture memo is released, this foolishness is a reminder that none of these people--none of the vicious, mendacious, naive, simplistic, unapologetic, neo-colonialist ideologues who promulgated this disaster--should have even the vaguest claim on the time or tolerance of fair-minded people. Fred Kagan's certainty is an obscenity, his claim to expertise a farce.

Klein essentially "channels" Glenn Greenwald:

Fred Kagan, along with his writing partner Bill Kristol, specializes in planning and advocating more wars, always from afar. His family has a tradition of doing the same. His dad, whose career he has copied, is Donald Kagan, whom The Washington Post described as "a beloved father figure of the ascendant neoconservative movement." Several years ago, Fred co-wrote a book with his dad arguing that America is too afraid to fight wars and "that it will be in the world's ultimate interest for the United States to remain militarily strong and unafraid of a fight." Neither has ever fought anything.

Donald's other son -- Fred's brother -- is Robert, who founded Project for a New American Century with Bill Kristol and is a fanatical, resolute supporter of the Iraq War (from the pages of The Washington Post). Fred's wife, Kimberly Kagan, regularly types about how great the Iraq War is in The Weekly Standard and other places. None has any military service. They have no need for the troop relief provided by the Webb bill (which Fred opposes) because they are already all sitting at home....

The Fred Kagans and his dad and his brother and his wife and his best friend Bill Kristol sit back casually demanding more wars, demanding that our troops be denied any relief, demanding that the President call for other families to volunteer to fight in their wars...

If the Kagans all changed their names, started publishing under pseudonyms, and subsequently were successful in influencing national security policy under the next Republican administration, you'd see the same attacks on "fake-expertise" and the "faux-warrior" arguments that you see here.

(Mark my words on that if McCain's elected - new faces, same smears.)

The same last name just makes things easier for the surrender hawks to keep track of things.

(Maybe Kein's trying to get back in the good graces of Greenwald, who's become a rock star of the radical left. Greenwald's apparently attacked Klein for factual errors in his FISA reporting, and hey, nobody - and I mean nobody - better mess with Greenwald's creeping totalitarianism domestic surveillance meme!)

Note that Bill Roggio suggests things are going well for al Maliki, whose military strategy seeks to emulate of successul practices of the U.S. cointerinsurgency doctrines of the surge: "Iraqi Military Continues Operations in Basrah."

See more attacks at Memeorandum.