Bush's Knesset Address: Revisiting the Lessons of Appeasement

With President George W. Bush's address to the Israeli Knesset yesterday, the world community received a pointed reminder of the dangers of caving diplomatically to revisionist powers whose demands are insatiable.

Bush decried appeasement, and along the campaign trail Democratic partisans attacked the president's implication that Barack Obama lacked the determination and vigor to resist America's implacable enemies. The controversy's now a full-blown partisan war over the direction of American foreign policy.

It's always a touchy thing wielding the appeasement cudgel. Throughout the postwar period, denouncing the weakness of political opponents as encouraging another "Munich" has been one of the most serious charges that can be leveled in debates on American foreign affairs.

Unfortunately, the Munich analogy's often overused (although I don't think so in this case, for reasons mentioned below), and the utility of appeasement as a useful tool of shrewd foreign policy statemanship has fallen forever out of favor.

I studied appeasement in some detail in graduate school. One article helpful to this debate is Robert Beck's, "Munich's Lessons Reconsidered," although unfortunately the full text isn't available online.

I did find a nice piece by defense scholar Jeffrey Record, "Appeasment Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s" (pdf). Here's the introduction to the paper:

No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Presidents have repeatedly cited the great lesson of the 1930s—namely, that force should be used early and decisively against rising security threats—to justify decisions for war and military intervention; some residents have compared enemy leaders to Hitler. The underlying assumption of the so-called Munich analogy is that the democracies could and should have stopped Hitler (thereby avoiding World War II and the Holocaust) by moving against him militarily before 1939. This assumption, however, is easy to make only in hindsight and ignores the political, military, economic, and psychological contexts of Anglo-French security choices during the 1930s. Among the myriad factors constraining those choices were memories of the horrors of World War I, failure to grasp the nature of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s strategic ambitions, France’s military inflexibility, Britain’s strategic overstretch, France’s strategic dependence on Britain, guilt over the Versailles Treaty of 1919, dread of strategic bombing and misjudgment of the Nazi air threat, American isolationism, and distrust of the Soviet Union and fear of Communism.

Appeasement failed because Hitler was unappeasable. He sought not to adjust the European balance of power in Germany’s favor, but rather to overthrow it. He wanted a German-ruled Europe that would have eliminated France and Britain as European powers. But Hitler was also undeterrable; he embraced war because he knew he could not get what he wanted without it. There was thus little that the democracies could do to deter Hitler from war, though Hitler expected war later than 1939. There was going to be war as long as Hitler remained in power.

A reassessment of the history of appeasement in the 1930s yields the following conclusions: first, Hitler remains unequaled as a state threat. No post-1945 threat to the United States bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. Second, Anglo-French security choices in the 1930s were neither simple nor obvious; they were shaped and constrained by factors ignored or misunderstood by those who retrospectively have boiled them down to a simple choice between good and evil. Third, hindsight is not 20/20 vision; it distorts. We view past events through the prism of what followed. Had Hitler dropped dead before 1939, there would have been no World War II or Holocaust, and therefore no transformation of the very term “appeasement” into a pejorative. Finally, invocations of the Munich analogy to justify the use of force are almost invariably misleading because security threats to the United States genuinely Hitlerian in scope and nature have not been replicated since 1945.

Record's introduction pretty much reflects the scholarly consensus on the use of the Munich analogy in international relations (some interesting research in this area is found in Yuen Foong khong's, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, And The Vietnam Decisions Of 1965).

It's certainly true that Hitler's Germany was a unique case in the history of 20th century international security. Thus the frequent references to war with Nazi Germany are sometimes overdone.

In the first Gulf War, for example, G.H.W. Bush's comparison of Hitler and Saddam Hussein struck me as strained, not so much in the sense of Saddam's revisionist intentions, but in the fact of the far lower degree of Iraqi economic and military capabilities relative to the United States. This is not to say the Iraqi threat was non-existent. Far from it. It's that if American policy-makers have to resort to elevating all national security issues to Nazi-level proportions, the importance of that historical precedent becomes diminished, watered-down in its power to generate public support for repelling significant threats to international order.

Having said that, there's always the need to take new challenges seriously, and as World War II was the "good war," it's natural to place contemporary challenges in the context of earlier times, especially when unified public backing for war is so crucial to the successful application of military power (which is why the Democratic Party's opposition to Iraq, starting only months after the Congress passed bipartisan legislation authorizing the deployment, is unprecedented in its degree of backstabbing, seeking to undermine a war launched with initial widespread support).

As for President Bush's comparison of today's Iranian threat to the 1930s, the regime in Tehran is by no means as powerful as Hitler's Germany of the interwar period, and Iran is not about to overthrow the world distribution of capabilities any time soon. Yet the Iranians, indeed, seriously threaten Israel and the regional security order in the Middle East, and the course of diplomacy over the last few years has not stopped the regime's efforts at procuring nuclear weapons capability. Iran's proxy armies arrayed around Israel's periphery today pose an existential threat to the Jewish state.

And this is why Barack Obama's pledge to open talks with Iran "without preconditions" should rightly be denounced as folly. President George W. Bush is right to invoke the lessons of Munich in this case, as we are dealing here in the realm of intentions. The security of Israel is of the greatest importance today. Ahmadinejad is not Adolph, but Tehran's designs to consolidate Iranian hegemony from the Persian Gulf to Russia's southern area of influence no doubt have the potential to do lasting damage to regional order. Appeasing Iran's leadership is not in the interest of the United States, Israel, or the international community.

For more on this see, Captain Ed, "Rookie Mistakes Again: Obama Owns Appeasement."

See also the text of the president's speech, "President Bush Addresses Members of the Knesset."

Myanmar Invasion: What Responsibility to Protect?

Since I've noted a couple of times how I've seen little advocacy on the left for regime change Myanmar, it's only fair that I note some attention to the issue.

Andrew Sullivan's got a post on George Packers's article at the New Yorker, "Should Burma Be Saved From Itself?"

Sullivan adds this:

A brief, decisive international effort to reach the starving and sick seems important to me. If it helps demystify this vile regime, great. But in its demonstration of humanity, it is also a great way for the US to enhance its soft power in the developing world. People remember who saved them. And sometimes, a bottle of water can mean a lifetime of gratitude. Bonus Burma blog here.

Sullivan's a shifty ideologue. He's something of a post-conservative Obama-backer, and here he sounds like a neocon!

But a look around the web sees little more of Sullivan's boosterism, at least among "liberal internationalists."

Here's Democracy Arsenal suggesting Burma can't be a case of the world community's "responsibility to protect":

Afraid I can't go along with Mark Goldberg on the Burma situation as a test of the Responsibility to Protect. I worry that a showdown over the principle of national sovereignty could undercut, rather than promote, the process by which R2P takes hold as an international norm. Which raises the question of how that process will work and where it stands. [I owe thanks to Stanley Foundation colleagues Keith Porter and (occasional DA guest) Michael Schiffer for forcing me to think about this.]

Actually, I look at this not as an opportunity to assert R2P, but rather as an indication of how far we still have to go. Ask yourself this: how do you rate the chances of getting into Burma via a Security Council showdown over intervening militarily without the junta's consent (Chapter VII) versus forms of pressure short of the assertion of an international responsibility to intervene? There has been a lot of important progress in chipping away at the sovereignty shield, but R2P doesn't enjoy nearly enough international support for us to simply insist that it be followed.

How far we still have to go? So much for liberal humanitarianism?

Notice the strained legalistic language in Democracy Arsenal's post, which can be translated into something like this:

Nope, no regime change Burma, not while President Bush is in power, as we're implacably opposed to this administration's regime change doctrine. Better to wait until the Democratic Party takes over the White House next year, then we can have Samantha Power - who rejoined Barack Obama's campaign in the fall - address the United Nations making the case for humanitarian intervention on the latest outbreak of ethnic cleansing in the Congo or Sudan, or on the next natural disaster in South Asia or the Pacific.

In other words, tens of thousands could die daily, around the world, while the "liberal internationalist" community twiddles its thumbs.

Yep, we can see the same tendency in Matthew Yglesias's recent post rebuking outside intervention in Burma:

At the end of the day, great power conflict ... will do immense humanitarian damage to the world and avoiding it should be a very high priority. Does that mean we should do nothing? No, it doesn't, it means American officials (and, indeed, civil society figures) should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world. But it has to be done in a reasonable consensual way that tries to stitch together America and its traditional allies with new emerging powers in various regions ...

Well, actually, it does mean doing nothing.

The leftist "internationalists" will sit around, waiting for some "global norm" to develop - apparently emerging magically out of some kind of ethereal "international legitimacy" - before the nations of the world mount some decisive effort to help the diseased and starving.

For more on this, see my post, "Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar."

Fighting Shifts to Western Baghdad as Sadr City Violence Falls

Via Thunder Run, here's Bill Roggio's report on recent military developments in Iraq:

With the cease-fire agreement between the Sadrist movement and the Iraqi government now in full effect after the four-day grace period that began on May 11, the fighting in Sadr City has decreased, but has not halted. The Mahdi Army continues to attack US and Iraqi troops as they work to complete the barrier along Qods Street in Sadr City, but the attack tempo has slowed, according to Multinational Forces Iraq. The US military believes the fighting has shifted to western Baghdad to deflect attention from Sadr City.

From March 25 until last weekend, US and Iraqi security forces were engaged in major battles in Sadr City. Mahdi Army fighters were killed at a rate of nearly 20 per day, during which it was not uncommon for 20 to 30 Mahdi Army fighters to be killed in a single engagement.

The major clashes have slowed, but the attacks continue as the US and Iraqi military nears completion of the wall. “The enemy still creeps up on the wall or fires at the wall, our Soldiers and the IA [Iraqi Army] soldiers," said Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover, the chief Public Affairs Officer for Multinational Division Baghdad, in an e-mail to The Long War Journal. “The wall is nearly complete. There are fewer attacks, but there is still a threat - however, there are no major engagements." Indirect fire attacks - rockets and mortars - are down significantly, Stover said, with only one mortar attack on May 15.

Attacks by US air weapons team, which have fired hundreds of Hellfire missiles at Mahdi Army sniper positions and roadside bomb teams, have tapered off. "We're still conducting AWT/UAV [air weapons teams/unmanned aerial vehicle] Hellfire strikes - when we see a SG [Special Group fighter] in the process of committing a violent act or about to," Stover said. "The last AWT Hellfire strike was last night, and it was outside of Sadr City, just north" of the Mahdi Army stronghold.

The Mahdi Army is still planting explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, the deadly armor-piercing roadside bombs manufactured in Iran. These weapons are placed along the wall in an effort to hit US and Iraqi engineers and route clearance patrols. "Shiite militias have been trying to blast gaps in the wall, firing at the American troops who are completing it and maneuvering to pick off the Iraqi soldiers who have been charged with keeping an eye on the partition," The New York Times reported.

An EFP attack occurred near Sadr City on May 15. Soldiers from the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division killed a Mahdi Army fighter and wounded another after an EFP and small arms attack in "eastern Baghdad." The attack probably occurred in New Baghdad, which is adjacent to Sadr City, as the 4-10 Mountain operates in this region.

But the Mahdi Army may be removing EFPs and other roadside bombs in Sadr City, according to eyewitness reports in Sadr City. "Gunmen removed bombs they had planted to prevent Iraqi and U.S. forces from plunging into the city," Voices of Iraq reported.

The US and Iraqi military has insisted the Special Groups - the Iranian-armed and trained factions of the Mahdi Army - and not the Mahdi Army itself, are behind the attacks in Sadr City. But the lifting of the weapons and the reduction in attacks in Sadr City suggests otherwise. The Special Groups appear to be abiding by Sadr's order for a cease-fire to some degree.

The Fighting Shifts Westward

The US military believes the Special Groups are shifting their attacks outside of Sadr City into areas of Western Baghdad in order to deflect attention from the Mahdi Army stronghold. "We're actually seeing more hostile action in western Baghdad, likely because the SG [Special Group] criminals are trying to pull the focus off of Sadr City and those penned up there," Stover said. "And also, because they lack their freedom of maneuver" in Sadr City.

Read the rest of the report here.

See also, "Iraq Without Ideological Blinders: Michael Yon's 'Moment of Truth'."

Iraq Without Ideological Blinders: Michael Yon's "Moment of Truth"

I've been picking up my book reading of late.

I've finished Matthew Yglesias' Heads in the Sand, which is practically a primer for Democratic Party soft-and-squishy foreign policy this year.

Readers know I have problems with Yglesias' project, which can be seen, for example, in my post from last night, "Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar." I'll have more on Yglesias later, but see his hot-off-the-press article on Barack Obama's foreign policy at the Atlantic, "The Accidental Foreign Policy."

I'm also a couple of chapters into David Horowitz's, Party of Defeat, which is a must-read treatise on Democratic Party foreign policy appeasement since the Carter administration.

I've also picked up Andrew McCarthey's, Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad. McCarthy's been doing some great writing recently at National Review, so I'm looking to get into that one.

How soon remains to be seen, because I've committed myself to reading the second volume in Saul Friedlander's majesterial history of the Holocaust, The Years of Extermination Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. I read Friedlander's original volume in grad school (Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939).

Sometimes, amid all the politics and political polarization, it's essential to take a step back and read some deep history, which in Friedlander's case is unsurpassed in quality and scholarship.

Note too that I picked up a copy of Michael Yon's, Moment of Truth in Iraq, which is reviewed at City Journal by Micael Totten, who says:

Yon is a former Special Forces soldier, and his affection for the grunts in the field is palpable. He takes their honor, courage, duty, and sacrifice seriously in a way that most journalists don’t—and perhaps can’t. At heart, he is as much a soldier as a reporter, but he is neither a propagandist for the U.S. military nor a mouthpiece for its public affairs officers. He nearly got himself thrown out of Iraq for an article in The Weekly Standard challenging some top-level brass for trying to censor media coverage. And he calls out both officers in the field and pundits back home who refuse to admit that all has not always gone according to plan. “Combat soldiers have little patience for less than unvarnished truth,” he writes. “That’s why I spend so much time with infantry.” Nothing makes a mockery of party lines and spin from air-conditioned offices quite like facing snipers, ambushes, and improvised explosive devices in 135-degree heat. Reality is more real in Iraq than almost anywhere else.

And the reality is that the war's been a difficult, terrible conflict in many ways, but not a lost cause, nor an ignoble one.

Yon's message is not likely to sit well with the denialist, post-modern antiwar left, as Totten notes:

Yon convincingly argues that the U.S. is winning in Iraq, at least for the moment. “The enemy learned that our people and the Iraqi forces would close in and kill them if they dared stand their ground. This is important: an enemy forced to choose between dying or hiding inevitably loses legitimacy. Legitimacy is essential. Men who must always either run or die are no longer an army and are not going to found a caliphate.” The outcome, though, is still in doubt. If Petraeus’s surge strategy fails or is prematurely short-circuited by Congress, the American and Iraqi forces will almost certainly lose. “Maybe creating a powerful democracy in the Middle East was a foolish reason to go to war,” Yon concludes. “Maybe it was never the reason we went to war. But it is within our grasp now and nearly all the hardest work has been done.” Which makes the present moment the moment of truth in Iraq.

Well, I better get to reading, because I've got some great stuff on my plate!

"Any Time, Any Place": Obama's Foreign Policy Debate Challenge

Barack Obama's talking tough on foreign policy. At a South Dakota campaign rally he called out President Bush and presumptive GOP nominee John McCain for hypocrisy in international affairs.

CNN's got the story:

“I want to be perfectly clear with George Bush and John McCain, and with the people of South Dakota,” he said at a Watertown campaign stop. “If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I'm happy to have any time, any place and that is debate I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.”

In his comments before the Israeli Knesset Thursday, Bush seemed to equate the Illinois senator’s foreign policy views with those of Nazi appeasers in the years before World War II, though he did not mention any names. Obama strongly criticized the president for the remarks Friday, calling them “the kind of appalling attack that's divided our country and that alienates us from the world.”

On Friday, Obama also fired back at McCain for saying Thursday that the Democratic senator was not qualified to protect the nation. “[John McCain] talked about elevating the tone of debate in our country. He talked about reaching out in a bipartisan fashion to the other side. Then not an hour later he turned around and embraced George Bush's attack on Democrats,” said Obama, who called the Arizona senator’s Iran policy “naïve and irresponsible.”

“He jumped on a call with a bunch of bloggers and said that I wasn't fit to protect this nation that I love because I wanted to sit down and negotiate with tough diplomacy with countries like Iran. Accused me of not being fit…[or] being able to protect this nation,” he added.

He said both Bush and McCain “have a lot to answer for” over the war in Iraq and the failure to find Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s continuing strength, among other continuing foreign policy problems. “They are going to have to explain why it is that Iran is able to fund Hezbollah and poses the greatest threat to America and Israel and the Middle East in a generation. That's the Bush-McCain record on protecting this country.

See also, Ben Smith, "Obama on McCain: Hypocrisy and Fear-Mongering."

I doubt Obama's in a position to point out hypocrisy.

He's got terrorist organizations like Hamas lining up behind him, advisors are stepping down for contacts with the group, and some Palestinians in the West Bank phone-banking for the shady Chicago socialist surrender-hawk!

The Presidential Politics of Same-Sex Marriage

The big news in the morning papers is the California Supreme Court decision striking down the state's ban on gay marriage.

How will the ruling play out on the presidential election trail?

The Los Angeles Times suggests the decision introduces some hot-button volatility to the race:

The California Supreme Court's decision allowing same-sex marriage probably throws the politically volatile issue into November, when a proposed state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage could spill into the presidential campaign and contests for Congress and the state Legislature.

The court's Thursday ruling was not necessarily good news for the presidential candidates, on whom it could exert problematic pressure.

Republican John McCain's success depends on melding a fractious coalition of GOP conservatives -- who are among those pressing for a ban on same-sex marriage -- with independents and conservative Democrats who tend to recoil from candidates campaigning on social issues. Although a November ballot measure could encourage higher turnout by conservatives who are not naturally aligned with McCain, it also could alienate moderates and young voters, who polls show are far more accepting of same-sex marriage.

Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had sketched out a more centrist path than the court's. The decision could encourage Democratic interest groups to press candidates to extend their support for civil unions to same-sex marriage itself.

All three offered finessed responses Thursday, saying that defining marriage is best left to individual states.

In an apparent effort to assuage supporters, McCain reiterated his belief that states have a right to ban same-sex marriage. Obama and Clinton emphasized support for civil unions and equal rights for same-sex couples.

Not surprisingly, the most definitive political statement Thursday came from someone not on the November ballot: California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I respect the court's decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling," Schwarzenegger said. "Also, as I have said in the past, I will not support an amendment to the Constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling."

A coalition of religious and conservative activists has submitted 1.1 million signatures to qualify a November constitutional amendment to say that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

A random sampling of those signatures is underway, and in late June the secretary of state is expected to announce whether, as expected, the groups collected the 763,790 valid signatures necessary to qualify the measure for the November ballot. If approved by voters, the initiative would overturn the Supreme Court decision, according to Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for groups backing the measure. He predicted it would be "a dominant issue" in November.

The politics of the ballot process is interesting here.

The Court's ruling overturns California's Proposition 22, which passed with 61 percent of the vote in 2000. If McCain's sincere about resisting activist judges in judicial appointments, here's a great chance to hammer far left-wing activists.

It's also striking that Governor Schwarzenegger's so out front in his position on supporting gay rights. He's ineligble for the White House, but in an era of electoral upheaval the Austrian Oak might be a model of moderation for those advocating Big Tent Republicanism.

Note, though, that conservatives activists are already mobilizing to overturn the ruling.

Not only that, Gallup data show that gay marriage is oppposed by a large majority nationwide:

Even as a majority of Americans believe homosexuality ought to be an "acceptable alternative lifestyle," only 40% currently say marriage between same-sex couples should be legal; 56% disagree.

The issue has been brought to the fore by Thursday's California Supreme Court decision to overturn a state ban on gay marriage, making California only the second state in the nation to legally recognize such marriages. Massachusetts blazed this trail with passage of a gay marriage act in 2004.

Public support for legalizing gay marriage is somewhat higher today than what Gallup found at the outset of polling on the subject 12 years ago. In 1996, about one in four Americans thought marriages between homosexuals should be recognized by the law as valid. That increased to 35% in 1999 and to 42% in 2004. However, for the past four years, public support has failed to grow in a linear fashion; rather, it has fluctuated between 37% and 46%.

That's interesting!

Over the past four years (during the Bush administration) there's been little demand for change on this issue. So, while everyone's touting '08 as a "change election," here we have a conservative majority saying, hey, slowdown a bit here!

This should work to the GOP's favor, as Ann Althouse notes:

I think the fear of rapid change will affect voters in the presidential election, especially since we expect the Democrats will control both houses of Congress. Do we really want a Democratic President too? Do we want, in addition to free-flowing legislative change, a President whose judicial appointments will be rubber-stamped in the Senate?

Now, Obama's message has been change. He's committed to that message, and it can be turned against him — a feat that becomes easier in the aftermath of the California decision.

Now there's a big "culture war" issue that will help drive political dynamics this fall.

And just think, Republicans have been in a panic of late, but now we'll have Gavin Newsome to kick around a bit!

See more at Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

McCain and Obama Coming Together on Iraq?

Are candidates John McCain and Barack Obama seeing eye-to-eye on Iraq?

McCain's been criticized for allegedly pledging a 100-year commitment, while Obama's been one of Democratic Party's most vocifererous Iraq critics and surrender hawks.

Can these two be reconciled on the war?

Well, with John McCain's major address yesterday on his presidential vision and goals by 2013, there's speculation that the Republican and Democratic Party Iraq positions are merging toward a happy medium.

The Los Angeles Times make the case:

After launching their candidacies with opposite positions on the Iraq war, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama seem to be edging toward a middle ground between them.

McCain has long denounced timetables for withdrawal, but said for the first time Thursday that he would like to see most U.S. troops out of Iraq by a specific date: 2013.

Obama has emphasized his plan to withdraw all combat brigades within 16 months of taking office, but also has carefully hedged, leaving the option of taking more time -- and leaving more troops -- if events require.

The positioning is noteworthy because McCain and Obama have made Iraq war policy a core element of their campaigns. But McCain has bowed to the political reality that American impatience with the war is growing, and Obama to the fact that a poorly executed exit would risk damage to other vital U.S. interests.

"It's one thing to stake out a relatively uncompromising position early in the presidential process," said Stuart Rothenberg of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. "But when the idea that you might move into the Oval Office hits you squarely between the eyes, it reminds you that there's a time to be pragmatic about these things."

The maneuvering also reflects the increasingly difficult politics of the Iraq war as the country heads into a general presidential campaign in which the candidates must broaden their appeal for votes. In a debate, the clearest differences between McCain and Obama on Iraq would be their prewar positions: McCain was in favor, Obama opposed. Somewhat less clear, however, would be their approach to the Iraq end game.

The general thrust here is to paint McCain as making a huge concession to the realities of public opinion on Iraq, which has long questioned the decision on invading, but has not demanded an immediate withdrawal.

By contrast, the Times makes it seem if Obama's one of the Democratic Party's "wise men," suggesting that he's practically the party's leading foreign policy moderate:

Obama also has modified his positions as a presidential candidate, toughening his stand on normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, by insisting on democratic reforms.

On Iraq, the senator from Illinois has made it a point in public comments to guard his prerogatives as president. At campaign stops and in interviews, he has regularly emphasized his promise to start bringing home troops as soon as he is elected, and to bring home one or two combat brigades each month, so that the approximately 19 combat brigades are out within 16 months.

Less noticed is his promise that he will listen to military commanders and react to events on the ground -- caveats that give him wide latitude.

Obama says he wants to keep a "follow-on force" in Iraq that would fight terrorists, protect U.S. forces and facilities, and train Iraqi forces. Obama has not provided an estimate of how large that force might be.

If there's anyone who's bowing to reality it's Obama.

As Peter Wehner has argued, the Illinois Senator has advocated more troops when the war was going badly (an opportunistic attack on the administration), and he's called for an immediate withdrawal when things have turned around under General Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy. In other words, Obama's been consistently wrong.

So the issue should not be about public opinion jockeying to get closer to public preferences on the war. The question is which candidate possesses the requisite foreign policy judgment in a time of great international challenges?

Just last year Obama proved himself to be one of the most strident Iraq opponents in Washington, for example, when he called the war "a complete failure" on the campaign trail.

Obama's foreign policy calls for diplomacy with Iran "without preconditions," which is tantamount to giving Iran anything it wants and demanding nothing in exchange: "Oh, sure, Mahmoud, you can keep your nuclear program if you'll just cut back a little on IED deliveries to Iraq ... thanks buddy!"

Obama has proposed a "global antipoverty act" that would commit the U.S. to spending a 13-year total of $845 billion above and beyond America's current level of foreign aid. This would amount to a massive new tax on Americans and redirect the United States to a foreign policy of social work.

There are considerable foreign policy differences between John McCain and Barack Obama.

McCain will not blame America first, and then try to make up for it through appeasment and profligate foreign aid largesse.

McCain will stand up to our enemies. He'll tell them America will not tolerate your nihilist mayhem and the slaughering of innocents. We will never surrender.

Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar

In my earlier entry, "Regime Change Myanmar?," I noted:

The humanitarian crisis in Myanmar is the most recent example of state failure among the developing world's authoritarian regimes.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times noted, for example, that the Myanmar government's initial refusal to accept international relief reflected the junta's indecision and fear.

Whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable for the world community to stand by idly while hundreds of thousands perish, and the nation descends into a nightmare of disease and hunger.

I suggested too that I was seeing little support for outside intervention on either side of the political spectrum, although liberal internationalists have long argued for regime change in precisely situations like these.

Well it turns out that the hippest liberal internationalist du jour has done a little writing on this, and Ross Douthat offers his response:

Matt has an interesting post on the questions that Burma raises for liberal internationalism of the sort he advances in Heads in the Sand:

Realistically, you're not going to see a forceful U.N. intervention in Burma because no country capable of mounting such an operation (basically the U.S. and maybe Britain and France) would want to mount one, while Russia and China (and probably even post-colonial democracies like India) would be opposed to anyone mounting one, and democratic countries would be secretly glad that Russia and China would block a move like this because they could blame inaction on Russia and China ... for a domestic audience even though they wouldn't want to step in themselves.

That said, if you could sort of bracket the logistics/will/capabilities issues, with any proposed humanitarian military intervention I've come to think that we need to think seriously about two issues - legitimacy and sustainability. We really might be greeted by the Burmese as liberators ... The trouble is what happens the day after you're greeted as a liberator. An occupying foreign power is naturally going to come to be viewed with suspicion by the occupied. This is in many ways an intrinsic problem, but it can be ameliorated a lot by legitimacy -- especially the kind of legitimacy you get from the U.N. where precisely because the UNSC decision-making process is cumbersome you can be ensured that a UNSC authorization reflects a broad international consensus ...

The other thing is sustainability. The international system needs to have some kind of recognized rules of the road. "The United States topples foreign regimes when we decide their government is bad" isn't a reasonable proposal for us to ask people in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Teheran, Brasilia, or anywhere else to live by. By "any large country topples any foreign regime when it decides their government is bad" is a terrible rule that would lead to a lot of destructive conflict of various sorts. At the end of the day, great power conflict -- even if it "only" takes the form of cold war-style standoffs -- will do immense humanitarian damage to the world and avoiding it should be a very high priority. Does that mean we should do nothing? No, it doesn't, it means American officials (and, indeed, civil society figures) should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world. But it has to be done in a reasonable consensual way that tries to stitch together America and its traditional allies with new emerging powers in various regions ...

I think this argument captures what I take to be the central difficulty with Matt's thesis: Namely, the extent to which it's offering a long-term agenda as a response to a question - how, when where and why the U.S. and our allies should intervene abroad - that tends to manifest itself as a series of discrete and very immediate challenges. It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."

Now, that may be the right answer, but it's an answer that's more likely to appeal to realists and non-interventionists of the left and right than to the liberal internationalists to whom Matt's addressing himself. Basically, it amounts to telling people who are ideologically invested in the idea of interventions to halt wars, genocides, famines and so forth that they need to accept today's famine, and tomorrow's genocide, and the day after that's bloody civil war ... and someday, if the U.S. plays its cards right and invests heavily enough in a multilateral framework for international relations, the other great powers will come around to "rules of the road" under which it's plausible to imagine the UN conducting humanitarian interventions inside the borders of its more misgoverned member states. And while the Iraq invasion has made this Yglesian, "choose the UN, and patience" approach to world affairs much more appealing to the liberal-internationalist set than it was in, say, 1999 or 2002, as time goes by and more Burmese-style crises pass without an international response, I expect that most liberal hawks will default back toward the more aggressive and UN-skeptical approach to the world's troubles that at present is defended primarily by neoconservatives.

This is a long way of saying what I was trying to get at, clumsily, in my conversation with Matt about his book - namely, that he's trying carve out a "liberal internationalist" middle ground between the sort of liberal hawkery that helped give us the Iraq War and the non-interventionist (or pacifist) left, but that in practice (at least when the U.S. isn't just coming off a disastrous overseas intervention) this middle ground tends to get very narrow very fast: From JFK down to Bill Clinton and the liberals who agitated for the invasion of Iraq, it's hard to find all that many prominent liberal internationalists (at least within the Democratic Party) who resisted the temptation, when it presented itself, to choose interventionist ends even when the multilateral means that liberal internationalism is theoretically committed to weren't available.

I indulged the full quote so readers can digest it themselves - but also because I simply can't stand Yglesias' radical foreign policy project, and I want to give full play to Douthat's takedown.

Douthat mentions his "conversation" with Yglesias (available here), where he frankly puts Yglesias in a bind by suggesting that the international system doesn't just float by itself after one establishes some "legitimate" set on multilateral institutions and rules. The maintenance of international order is a collective action problem, and to overcome the system's inherent free-riding behavior (that will likely kill the regime), a "privileged group" or hegemon is required to bear the greatest burden in supporting the institutional order.

That hegemon is the United States, and since Yglesias detests not only U.S. power and prepondrance, but the use of any and all military force as well, there's no way he's going support a U.S.-led invasion of Myanmar to topple the military junta and open up that country to the world's humanitarianism that's practically pleading to help Burma's afflicted.

I've read Yglesias' Head in the Sand, and I'm planning to post a review on it sometime soon.

The book is inconsistent and utopian, and fails because it refuses to see any useful role for the deployment of American hard power.

Douthat is indulgent toward his colleague, who I imagine he has to see at the office quite frequently, and thus prefers some semblance of collegiality.

But let's be honest: Heads in the Sand is a long treatise in the foreign policy of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Yglesias comes out and says at least once explicitly, and by implication on a number of other occasions, that there's nothing - not one thing - redeeming about the Bush administration's foreign policy: Not breaking free from the outdated Cold War arms control framework, not resisting Kyoto-style hypocrisy on international climate change, not on Afghanistan (a war that had bipartisan support, but is pilloried by Yglesias as simply a "superficially important" warmup for toppling Saddam), and not the war in Iraq (where the surge is now looking to be the most important U.S. military turnaround in history).

And that's a serious problem, for even Yglesias' liberal international mentors see elements of utility in American leadership in security affairs, even in cases like Iraq, where (dubious) questions of international legitimacy constrained the American exercise of power.

I'll have more on these themes later.

But regarding regime change Myanmar, see Anne Applebaum, "A Drastic Remedy: The Case for Intervention in Burma."

Photo Credit: "Video footage has emerged showing the bodies of children who died in the cyclone, laid out in a row in a makeshift riverside morgue," BBC News

Hillary Clinton's Lessons for McCain

I just love the picture! A bipartisan smooch!

It reminds me of Mike's America's unhinged attacks on John McCain during the primaries, when he was slurring McCain as RINO.

But check out Jennifer Rubin's article, "Hillary’s Lessons for John McCain":

Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination. Magnanimous Democrats might applaud Hillary Clinton for energizing the party and helping to register millions of new voters, but her contribution was not merely to her own side.

Clinton’s failures and successes provide some invaluable lessons for John McCain as well—if he’s alert enough to heed them.

Clinton’s most serious error, her delinquency in recognizing that this is the greatest “change” election in a generation, should serve as a warning to McCain, who is already saddled with the most damaging label in this election season: “Republican.” The winning message in this election is not likely to be “Experience” or “Ready on Day One.” And it certainly won’t be “How to Build on the George Bush Legacy.”

In every poll, voters overwhelmingly tell us that they think the country is on the wrong track and want someone who can take us in a new direction. McCain might be able to argue that Obama’s direction is faulty or even dangerous. But McCain is unlikely to convince voters that the best reason to vote for him is, as Obama ever so indelicately points out, his “fifty years of service to his country.” (Conversely, Obama’s own modest résumé never seemed to bother most voters.)

If the McCain camp had been paying attention, they might also have noticed that Clinton got nowhere with cynical attacks on Obama’s inspirational rhetoric. “Change you can Xerox” will go down as one of the lamest debate insults in modern times. Whining about his big rallies and fancy phrases sounded envious and small-minded and severely underestimated Americans' desire to be inspired by leaders. Republican heirs of Ronald Reagan should know better than anyone that politics is the art of inspiring people to join your cause. Grousing that Obama does it exceptionally well is not a recipe for success.

But Clinton did not just leave the campaign trail littered with mistakes and miscalculations. In her run of successes through Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, she also carved a path that a savvy McCain team might follow.

While some conservatives are loath to admit it, millions of working-class Americans don’t feel like they have benefited from macroeconomic growth, free trade and globalization. By identifying on a visceral level with these voters, pledging to fight for them and offering specific policy prescriptions aimed at their daily concerns, Clinton found her greatest electoral success.

If McCain commits to expanding and reinvigorating the American dream of upward mobility and to ensuring that the playing field is at least level for these voters, he stands a chance to inherit these voters who, Clinton has shown, admire a feisty, combative and world-wise champion.

Rubin makes some additional observations on Barack Obama's weaknesses, issues which I don't think are lost on the McCain campaign (although it doesn't hurt to emphasize those liabilities).

Photo Credit: New York Observer

Winning Late: Can West Virginia Change Democratic Race?

Check out the Economist's take on Hillary Clinton's big win in West Virginia this week:

IN LOGAN, the local high school's cheerleaders wrote a chant for Hillary Clinton's visit on May 12th: “H-I-L-L-A-R-Y, Hillary, our nominee!” In Fairmont, her supporters printed T-shirts reading, “We Need A Mama, Not Obama”. And on May 13th Mrs Clinton won West Virginia's Democratic primary by a whopping 41 points, almost the largest margin of her candidacy so far. For Mrs Clinton, the state is “almost heaven”, she said, quoting John Denver's “Country Roads” to a raucous crowd of supporters.

The state's profile is, indeed, perfect for Mrs Clinton: West Virginia's Democrats are relatively poor, undereducated, ageing and overwhelmingly white. With one of the highest number of veterans per head in the country, the state takes displays of patriotism—such as flag pins—very seriously. Barack Obama visited the state only once, and when he did he admitted he was likely to lose.

Although Mrs Clinton's head is in Appalachia's heavenly peaks, only a miracle can save her candidacy now. On May 14th John Edwards, who ran a respectable third in the Democratic stakes thanks to his appeal to white working-class voters, endorsed Mr Obama. Mr Obama has just taken the lead even in superdelegate endorsements, the last meaningful measure to favour Mrs Clinton. And despite her thumping victory in West Virginia and her likely win in Kentucky on May 20th, Mr Obama will finish the primary season with more delegates and more votes than Mrs Clinton. In Washington, regardless of both successes, the debate is still all about not whether she will concede but when, and how.

So, that's it, only a miracle can save her?

Not everyone thinks so:

"It's not over! It's not over!" The chant echoed through the Charleston Civic Center last night as defiant Hillary Clinton supporters urged their candidate to keep on fighting. The almost all-white crowd included a disproportionately large number of elderly women. The sparsely decorated main hall of the civic center—the barren walls made it all too obvious that Clinton's campaign is desperately low on funds—didn't matter, because the crowd kept things festive. Teenage girls wore homemade T-shirts saying "Hillary's Tag Team." A young man standing behind the podium where Clinton delivered her victory speech steadily punched an invisible opponent with red boxing gloves. A group of union members launched into a booming "Madame President" singsong.

More than a dozen Clinton supporters interviewed by NEWSWEEK said they believe Clinton can still win, and many faulted a biased media for prematurely writing her off.

See more news and analysis at Memeorandum.

Oh, the Misogyny!

Historians, sociologists, and feminist scholars, in the months and years ahead, will no doubt be busy sorting out all the gender implications of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

I spend a lot of time on women's equality issues on my sections on civil rights in my courses, so naturally I've paid attention to developments. Indeed, I've joked about some of the feminist outrage of campaign '08, for example, on the backlash following Charlotte Allen's tongue-in-cheek essay in March, "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?"

Remember what Noemie Emery wrote about the episode:

LAST SUNDAY, OUR friend Charlotte Allen wrote a gentle spoof for the Outlook section of the Washington Post on the general subject of feminine ditziness, suggesting that at times members of her and my gender could be ineffectual, overemotional, sometimes irrational, and, now and then, "dim." Readers swooned, feminists shrieked (Katha Pollitt in a riposte on the Post's website), and Post higher-ups raised the white flag of contrition, unaware, so it seems, that exactly two days later--on Tuesday, March 4--the paper itself had run two major stories that proved every point Allen made.

Well it turns out that even if the Post's own reporting bears out some of Allen's points, perhaps the feminists have a case on gender-baiting mysogyny this season.

Marie Cocco has an interesting piece providing evidence to that effect:

As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.

I won't miss episodes like the one in which liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a "big [expletive] whore" and said the same about former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. Rhodes was appearing at an event sponsored by a San Francisco radio station, before an audience of appreciative Obama supporters -- one of whom had promoted the evening on the presumptive Democratic nominee's official campaign Web site.

I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.

I won't miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie "Fatal Attraction." In the iconic 1987 film, Close played an independent New York woman who has an affair with a married man played by Michael Douglas. When the liaison ends, the jilted woman becomes a deranged, knife-wielding stalker who terrorizes the man's blissful suburban family. Message: Psychopathic home-wrecker, begone.

There's more at the link, but it's hard to miss Cocco's message.

I'm a McCain man, but I'd be supporting Hillary over Obama in the Democratic primaries (so no mysogyny here!). Not only can she pound 'em back like a parched West Virginia coal miner, she's tough on the Iranians too!

So, readers should't read too much into my fun-feminist posts. I've already lost one reader who didn't appreciate the political humor!

Obama Tax Proposals Stir Backlash on Left

Barack Obama's tax proposals are generating backlash among centrist Democrats.

How far left can the shady Chicago socialist go? It turns out there might be a limit even in the Democratic Party:

The centrist Democratic group instrumental to former President Clinton's rise to the White House in 1992 has some advice for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.: get to the center, starting with taxes.

"In the fall, our nominee will have to do what John Kerry had to do in the 2004 debates, which is turn to the camera and say, 'No, I will not raise taxes on people making less than $200,000,'" said Bruce Reed, the president of the Democratic Leadership Council, in an interview with ABC News.

During ABC News' April 16 debate in Philadelphia, asked whether he would take an absolute "read my lips" pledge not to increase taxes of any kind for anyone earning less than $200,000 a year, Obama seemed to agree.

"Well, I not only have pledged not to raise their taxes, I've been the first candidate in this race to specifically say I would cut their taxes," Obama said.

Reed, however, does not think Obama's answer in Philadelphia qualified as a pledge to protect those earning less than $200,000 because the Democratic front-runner has left open the possibility of raising Social Security taxes for those making as little as $97,000 per year.

Asked about the DLC's advice, Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in an e-mail message, "We've said countless times we'd consider a donut," referring to the idea of exempting income between $97,000 and $200,000 from facing the 12.4 percent Social Security tax.

Reed, however, does not think Obama's promise to consider a donut goes far enough. A chief domestic policy adviser under the Clinton administration, Reed thinks that in order to get through the general election, Obama should make it absolutely clear that higher Social Security taxes will not start below $200,000 per year.

"It's exceedingly unrealistic to expect that you could raise taxes on people under $200,000 anyway, so why not be honest about the circumstances and fight for responsible restoration of tax rates on the wealthy," said Reed. "That will be an extremely difficult battle, but we might win if we have a supportive enough Congress."

Beyond ruling out higher taxes on those making less than $200,000, Reed wants Obama to get specific on his proposed spending cuts.

"We need to show as much enthusiasm for controlling spending as we do for proposing it," said Reed.

This is an interesting debate, particularly in that public opinion supports increasing taxes, "Dems Favor Economic Redistribution by 2 to 1 Over Republicans."

Keep an eye on this debate, because, as Leon Wieseltier has noted, Obama has demonstrated Marxist tendencies, and the Illinois Senator has yet to make a national address defining his measurement for determining the income qualifications for capitalists and proletarians.

The Case for a League of Democracies

I love John McCain's proposal for a international league of democratic states.

The idea's bipartisan, (relatively) new, and exciting.

The notion of a concert of great democratic powers augmenting the moribund international institutions of the post-World War II-era couldn't come at a better time, as the United Nations descends into further irrelevance amid Third World radicalism that enables the worst excesses of rogue state manuevering in the new global system of transnational terror.

Current American preponderance will be more effective with a new array of structures conducive to cooperation among liberal democratic polities.

Robert Kagan makes the case for a league of democracies at the Financial Times:

With tensions between Russia and Georgia rising, Chinese nationalism growing in response to condemnation of Beijing’s crackdown on Tibet, the dictators of cyclone-ravaged Burma resisting international aid , the crisis in Darfur still raging, the Iranian nuclear programme still burgeoning and Robert Mugabe still clinging violently to rule in Zimbabwe – what do you suppose keeps some foreign policy columnists up at night? It is the idea of a new international organisation, a league or concert of democratic nations.

“Dangerous,” warns a columnist on this page, fretting about a new cold war. Nor is he alone. On both sides of the Atlantic the idea – set forth most prominently by Senator John McCain a year ago – has been treated as impractical and incendiary. Perhaps a few observations can still this rising chorus of alarm.

The idea of a concert of democracies originated not with Republicans but with US Democrats and liberal inter­nationalists. Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state, tried to launch such an organisation in the 1990s. More recently it is the brainchild of Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy expert and senior adviser to Barack Obama. It has also been promoted by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton university, and professor John Ikenberry, the renowned liberal internationalist theorist. It has backers in Europe, too, such as Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, who recently proposed his own vision of an “alliance of democracies”. The fact that Mr McCain has championed the idea might tell us something about his broad-mindedness. But Europeans should not reach for their revolvers just because the Republican candidate said it first.

American liberal internationalists like the idea because its purpose is to promote liberal internationalism. Mr Ikenberry believes a concert of democracies can help re-anchor the US in an internationalist framework. Mr Daalder believes it will enhance the influence that America’s democratic allies wield in Washington. So does Mr McCain, who in a recent speech talked about the need for the US not only to listen to its allies but to be willing to be persuaded by them.

A league of democracies would also promote liberal ideals in international relations. The democratic community supports the evolving legal principle known as “the responsibility to protect”, which holds leaders to account for the treatment of their people. Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, has suggested it could be applied to Burma if the generals persist in refusing international aid to their dying people. That idea was summarily rejected at the United Nations, where other humanitarian interventions – in Darfur today or in Kosovo a few years ago – have also met resistance.

So would a concert of democracies supplant the UN? Of course not, any more than the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations or any number of other international organisations supplant it. But the world’s democracies could make common cause to act in humanitarian crises when the UN Security Council cannot reach unanimity. If people find that prospect unsettling, then they should seek the disbandment of Nato and the European Union and other regional organisations which not only can but, in the case of Kosovo, have taken collective action in crises when the Security Council was deadlocked. The difference is that the league of democracies would not be limited to Europeans and Americans but would include the world’s other great democracies, such as India, Brazil, Japan and Australia, and would have even greater legitimacy.

Note Kagan's key point: The new body would act when "the UN Security Council cannot reach unanimity," which is most of the time!

During the Cold War, precisely two major multilateral actions were taken under traditional theories of collective security: In Korea in 1950, when the Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council vote on North Korean aggression, and in 1990, at the end of the Cold War, when both President G.H.W. Bush and Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev joined together in a New World Order to authorize the repellence of Iraq's invasion Kuwait.

Despite the democratic league's origins in Democratic Party foreign policy circles, the proposal will be resisted vigorously by leftists now that McCain's endorsed it.

McCain's recently backed off the proposal, but he shouldn't.

The idea offers a genuinely important alternative to the postwar system of international institutions. As Kagan notes, the traditional order of multilateral institutions will not be replaced, but facing a little competition, they might improve their speed and efficiency in responding to the world's contemporary crises.

Barack Obama, the Crossover Vote, and the White Working Class

Republican John Weiler, the winner of MoveOn's "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest, endorses Barack Obama in the video:

I don't see how any Republican could endorse Obama, but it turns out there are quite a few, including some of high prominence:

Susan Eisenhower is more than just another disappointed Republican. She is also Ike's granddaughter and a dedicated member of the party who has urged her fellow Republicans in the past to stick with the GOP. But now Eisenhower, who runs an international consulting firm, is endorsing Barack Obama. She has no plans to officially leave the Republican Party. But in Eisenhower's view, Obama is the only candidate who can build a national consensus on the issues most important to her—energy, global warming, an aging population and America's standing in the world....

Eisenhower is one of a small but symbolically powerful group of what Obama recently called "Obamacans"—disaffected Republicans who have drifted away from their party just as Eisenhower Democrats did and, more recently, Reagan Democrats in the 1980s.

So apparently MoveOn, in selecting Weiler's story - from a selection over 1100 submissions - sees this message as a chance to capture a large crossover vote in the fall, not unlike the "Reagan Democrats" from the 1980s.

I'm skeptical of the strategy frankly, considering Obama's dramatic weakness with conservative white working class voters, many of whom may have registered or voted GOP in recent elections.

I'm particulary unimpressed with Weiler himself. Perhaps he's suffering from BDS, but Weiler ought to realize that Obama's turning out to be even more lightweight on foreign policy than was suspected.

As Captain Ed notes, with reference to Obama's gaffes yesterday on Afganistan and Iraq:

Obama’s rhetoric calls into question whether he has any real knowledge of the issues in either Iraq or Afghanistan in any depth beyond that of the latest MoveOn talking points.

Note something too: Gallup today reports that Obama essentially ties John McCain in attracting political independents, but he's having a harder time keeping Democratic partisans in his column:

Each candidate wins the vast majority of votes from his own party, with Obama currently holding a 76% to 15% edge over McCain among Democratic registered voters and McCain leading Obama by 84% to 12% among Republican registered voters.

The candidates' own party support has been very stable thus far this year, with Obama's share of the Democratic vote ranging from 73% to 76% since mid-March and McCain's share of the GOP vote between 84% and 87%.

Obama is able to hold his own against McCain despite receiving less support from his fellow partisans because significantly more Americans currently identify as Democrats than as Republicans.

Independents are usually one of the most closely watched swing voter groups each presidential election. However, contrary to expectations, they are not always decisive, in part because turnout among independents is usually lower than it is among those with a political party affiliation....

It would seem more critical that McCain prevail among independents in order for him to win the November election, given the deficit in Republican identification and voting enthusiasm to the Democrats.

Barack Obama appears vulnerable to me.

While MoveOn's angling to attract crossover Republicans with ads like the one above, the immediate challenge for Obama will be in winning over the vast bulk of Middle American conservatives from his own party, many of whom have been voting for Hillary Clinton in high and increasing numbers.

See also, the New York Times, "After Big Loss, Obama Woos Blue-Collar Voters."

Who's to Blame When Students Fail?

Remember my post from last week, "Blaming Teachers? Educational Accountability and Student Performance?"

I noted in that entry how I'm hesitant to base tenure decision on student perfermance indicators, such as testing results and percentages of students mastering course curriculum.

Well, check out this piece from Inside Higher Education, "Students Fail — and Professor Loses Job," which chronicles the story of Steven Aird at Norfolk State University:

Who is to blame when students fail? If many students fail — a majority even — does that demonstrate faculty incompetence, or could it point to a problem with standards?

These are the questions at the center of a dispute that cost Steven D. Aird his job teaching biology at Norfolk State University. Today is his last day of work, but on his way out, he has started to tell his story — one that he suggests points to large educational problems at the university and in society. The university isn’t talking publicly about his case, but because Aird has released numerous documents prepared by the university about his performance — including the key negative tenure decisions by administrators — it is clear that he was denied tenure for one reason: failing too many students. The university documents portray Aird as unwilling to compromise to pass more students.

A subtext of the discussion is that Norfolk State is a historically black university with a mission that includes educating many students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The university suggests that Aird — who is white — has failed to embrace the mission of educating those who aren’t well prepared. But Aird — who had backing from his department and has some very loyal students as well — maintains that the university is hurting the very students it says it wants to help. Aird believes most of his students could succeed, but have no incentive to work as hard as they need to when the administration makes clear they can pass regardless.

“Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone,” Aird said in an interview. Continuing the metaphor, he said that officials at Norfolk State have the attitude of “a track coach who tells the team ‘I really want to win this season but I really like you guys, so you can decide whether to come to practice and when.’ ” Such a team wouldn’t win, Aird said, and a university based on such a principle would not be helping its students.

Sharon R. Hoggard, a spokeswoman for Norfolk State, said that she could not comment at all on Aird’s case. But she did say this, generally, on the issues raised by Aird: “Something is wrong when you cannot impart your knowledge onto students. We are a university of opportunity, so we take students who are underprepared, but we have a history of whipping them into shape. That’s our niche.”

Now, think about that: Something's wrong WITH THE PROFESSOR, who's being portrayed as unable to impart knowledge. He has "failed to embrace the mission of educating those who aren’t well prepared. "

I guess that answers the question on "who's to blame when students fail?"

Aird was in a catch-22 situation, for even when students did well in classes, he wasn't credited as being a successful teacher:

Some of the students writing on his behalf received grades as low as C, although others received higher grades.

But although DeLoatch held Aird responsible for his failures, she wrote that he did not deserve any credit for his success stories and these students, by virtue of their strong academic performance, shouldn’t influence the tenure decision. “With the exception of one of these students, it appears that all have either excelled or are presently performing well at NSU. Given their records, it is likely that that would be the case no matter who their advisors or teachers were.”

Sounds a bit double-standard-ish, no?

Note Aird's explanation of the situation:

“I think most of the students have the intellectual capacity to succeed, but they have been so poorly trained, and given all the wrong messages by the university,” he said.

The problem at Norfolk State, he said, isn’t his low grades, but the way the university lowers expectations. He noted that in the dean’s negative review of his tenure bid, nowhere did she cite specific students who should have received higher grades, or subject matter that shouldn’t have been in his courses or on his tests. The emphasis is simply on passing students, he said.

“If everyone here would tell students that ‘you are either going to work or get out,’ they would work, and they would blossom,” he said. “We’ve got to present a united front — high academic standards in all classes across the institution. Some students will bail, and we can’t help those, but the ones who stay will realize that they aren’t going to be given a diploma for nothing, and that their diploma means something.”

I feel the same way sometimes, when I have students complaining about my policies on late work, or something, when they say, "well, professor so-and-so lets me turn my stuff in late..."

He sounds like a crusader, but he's going to have to battle like Syssiphus to change the system.

See also, Paul Trout, "Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University."