Jennifer Rubin Profiled at Politico

I don't read her that much, although I'm not hostile to Rubin as are some blog colleagues on the right. Dan Riehl and I occasionally go back and forth about Rubin on Twitter.

See "Rick Perry's worst nightmare: Jennifer Rubin."

Rubin describes herself as a mainstream conservative, if not a a movement loyalist.“I don’t take a check-the-box, down-the-line view of conservatism. I think on foreign policy and economics I’m very much a Reagan conservative,” she said.

But many conservative bloggers don’t view her as one of them.

“I don’t have time to waste bytes on someone not in the conservative movement,” RedState’s Erick Erickson, who broke with Rubin over her support for the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, told POLITICO when asked about her in an email.

Dan Riehl, another conservative blogger, described her as an “establishment Republican” and a “neocon” and said he suspected the Post uses her as a kind of foil, to define the rightward limit of the debate as relatively close to the center.

“She’s kind of like [center-right New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat in lipstick, assuming he doesn’t wear any,” Riehl said. “I guess she couldn’t get a job with Romney so she stayed with The Washington Post.”

(In fact, the Post has recently been courting other opinion writers on the right, in particular former Jesse Helms spokesman and Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, the leading defender of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the harsh interrogation he championed.)

But Rubin, who has never shied from a fight, says that her role is different from conservative bloggers: She’s commenting on the right, not defending it.

Lately I'm "commenting on the right" as well, since I haven't settled on a pick for the nomination, or at least not yet, since Michele Bachmann's numbers took a dive.

More later ...

Neoconservatives Still Dominate GOP

From Robert Merry and Robert Golan-Vilella, at National Interest, "The Neocon GOP: By Design or Default?" (via GSGF). And this doesn't sound fully accurate, considering Romney's statements in his foreign policy speech the other day:

The presumed frontrunner, Mitt Romney, seems particularly lacking in any coherent philosophical framework. He attacks Obama for the speed of his Afghanistan drawdown, for example, without offering a timetable of his own. (He says he would go with the recommendations of his generals.) He supported America’s role in the NATO intervention in Libya but criticized the way it was handled. His website calls for U.S. leadership in creating a “global military alliance of democracies dedicated to ensuring security and protecting freedom.” This scheme, expropriated from Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and the writings of polemicist Robert Kagan (also a Romney adviser), would be a recipe for an expanded American role in the world in the name of humanitarian principles—pure Wilsonism.

But Romney is relentless in his hostility toward China. He says that on his first day in office he would unilaterally slap trade sanctions against that Asian nation in retaliation for its currency policies (likely result: a devastating trade war), and he says Obama “caved” to Beijing by not selling the most sophisticated U.S. fighter jets to Taiwan. In his more general foreign-policy pronouncements, extolling “American greatness” and calling for a new “American Century,” Romney sounds rather like George W. Bush.

And frankly, I like Michele Bachmann's foreign policy:

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota is an interesting case. She advocated aggressive action against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, saying, “We must defeat them in their backyard.” And she wants no cuts in the defense budget. But she seems cautious on questions of where and when America should intervene in the world. She says she would confine such interventions to instances when the country’s vital interests were at stake. Hence, she opposed the Libyan intervention as having no relation to the country’s well-being. And she is wary of democracy promotion in general. Indeed, she criticized Obama not for abandoning Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak too soon but for abandoning him at all. “We saw President Mubarak fall while President Obama sat on his hands,” she said. She later suggested the Arab Spring (which she, interestingly, sees as a disaster rather than a trend to be applauded and encouraged) emerged in part because Obama had demonstrated weakness in not being sufficiently supportive of Israel in the ongoing maneuvering between that country and the Palestinians.

I should have update on developments with GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD. I'm waiting to hear back from Courtney.

The Courtney Messerschmidt Scam

I've held off posting this. Last weekend brought the news that Courtney Messerschmidt is merely the front-woman with a fake name for a collective of writers at GSGF.

Thomas Ricks, who invested a lot in Courtney, wasn't too bothered by the outing: "pHoNy GrEaT sAtAn'S gIrLfRiEnD." Neither was Crispin Burke at Wings Over Iraq.

I can't say the news didn't bother me, although I'd known for a long time that all was not right with Courtney Messerschmidt.

I got the news via Facebook, as did a number of people who Courtney'd been working with. I didn't quite understand it at first, because it wasn't a personalized note. Yeah, she confessed that she wasn't the primary author of GSGF, and that she hadn't attended the University of Georgia. But Courtney's been communicating with me since mid-2007. She'd write emails to wish me a good day at work, or to ask questions about neoconservatism. I considered her a friend and neocon protégé.

So I felt a real sense of betrayal. Indeed, Courtney and I exchanged hundreds of e-mails. She sent me this background in late 2007:

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 6:28 PM, Courtney Messerschmidt wrote:

Hi Donald,

Ok - whenever you start to zzzzz out, please remember that you asked.

My 'rents are very old. In fact I have nieces and nephews older than me. My mom taught college and my dad retired frm the AF and works at a world famous aeronautical firm near Atlanta. He says he'll know when he gets to retire from that depending on what school I go to. One of my brother in laws is a Capt in 'Old Ironsides' - America's Armor division. He was an LT in Najaf I think in Aug 2003 when Mookie Al Sadr's Mahdih Army v1.0 was granted access to the perfumed halls of Allah.

When all my friends plowed through Paris' heiress book - I was plowing through Dennis Ross' "Missing Peace", Bodansky's "High Cost of Peace" and "Beyond Paradise and Power" by Ischinger, Fukyama, Applebaum and others, Michael Oren's "6 days of war". Alexander Bevin's "How America got it right' and Larry Schwiekert's "America's Victories" are essntial reading.

I have widely traveled throughout Europe including Ireland, Great Britain, France, Benelux, Deutschland, Czech repub, Italy, Greece and Belgium. In The ME I've been to Israel, Egypt and Turkey. In March 2002 me and some friends almost singlehandedly crashed HAMAS's condolences site for suicide bombers and their family after the Seder massacre. Hasn't been up since..

Being blessed with an unusual last name helped drive me towards history. Having to drive through multiple civil war battlefields to get any where tended to fuel my curiousity.

911 was a big influenece as I remember sitting on the floor at home eating my Captain Crunch Berries when that couple held hands and jumped from the 70th floor of the WTC. Just then the avuncular Peter Jennings cut to their man in Gaza. THere they were. Having a great old time - passing out laffy taffy with that demonic cry Alluha Ackbah. "I only wish that Bush was in those towers with his precious baby Sharon" is what one woman alledgedly said.

I was trapped at home one summer with my dads immense library. New books like James Spahns 'Rise of the Vulcans' and old ones Gary Dorrein's "Imperial Designs" or Robert Kagan's "Paradise and Power' had an effect - The more I studied American History the more convinced I became that America "...ain't what's wrong with the world..." I saw Victor Davis Hanson on Britt Hume's show back around Xmas 2001. I've been hooked every since.

Ivo Daalder's book "America Unbound" is crucial - though not the reasons Daalder would hope for. He kinda wails that 'Merica can do whatever she dang well pleases - unbound by the UN, the EU, NATO, OPEC, OAS, G7's and G8's. I love that!

Curently, my life is so controlled - do this, don't do that so I started my own blog. Mainly because I was sick of people saying the American military was broken, Iraq is a quagmire etc. A random reading of American history shows that is so incorrect - it's either stupid or weirdly unAmerican. Places I went to began to block me from challenging their inappropiate, weak, boring and incorrect handwringing. Empowerment I reckon. Also like Gollum says to Smeagul in "2 Towers" - "Now we be the master!"

I want to work on grand strategy like Dr Posen's but since I have no PHD's or Pulitzer prizes behind my name it may take a while.

I'vr been meaninig to raise this subject with you and now I shall.

Redefinition. The term Neo Con is so misunderstood, so falsely painted that it may be time for a new term to describe that especial perspective. Since Posen himself espoused neo conish views as a fait accompli in FP circles that can be used to our advantage. As far as a new name - I'm leaning towards New Millenialism myself.
Redefinition will be critical in the near future.

Example - Islamo Fascism is out (regardless of what Hitchens says). Mohammedism should be the new term.Tough for critics to cry about that term - after all Mohammed was a fighting, conquering, ruthless, merciless intolerant dictator.

Wow - didn't mean to ramble but remember you did ask. Now how about a bit of reciprication?

I appreciate you sharing your time and ideas with me - spiritually we are very close.

As Fisher said to Churchill,

"yours til charcoal sprouts",

Courtney

Last weekend I asked Courtney to confirm four questions:

You are a genuine neocon, right? I believe you are and that our communications on that were genuine.

And the picture of you is genuine, right?

What about your 'rents? Is the stuff you told me about your parents and family true? The military background of your brothers? And so forth. That's all true, right?

And did you write the majority of posts at GSGF, and I mean at least more than half? Or about what percentage?

The only thing she would confirm on record was that she is indeed a hardcore neoconservative. The remaining questions she fudged or ignored. She wouldn't give me a straight answer on the percentage of her self-authored posts at GSGF and she ignored my questions about her personal background. I finally wrote back to say that we were no longer friends.

Courtney's maintained her Facebook page, although she's removed all the pictures of herself. She'd sent me some by e-mail, like the one above. And since she says that Courtney is her real first name, it's likely that the personal pictures are genuine and she's scrubbed them to protect her identity from the inevitable harm to her reputation, should she move on from anonymous blogging to the real world of college and employment.

John Hawkins, unlike some of the others, severed ties with her: "The Courtney Messerschmidt Controversy."

Courtney still publishes at Theo Spark's, where I am a co-blogger, so I may have some peripheral interactions with her in that role. But that's it. Folks get the real me online, through blogging and social networking, email, etc. I expect the same in return, as just the decent thing to do.

Protection Racket: 'Responsibility to Protect' Becomes a Doctrine

From Joshua Muravchik, at World Affairs:

The world has mostly enjoyed peace since 1945, but that owes nothing to the UN and everything to American power, exercised mostly in the form of guarantees to Japan, NATO, and other allies, rather than in shooting wars. In this era when violence within states is far more common than between them, cases of extreme abuse will sometimes cry out for outside intervention. But the traditional doctrine of humanitarian intervention, invoked by the United States and other democracies at their own discretion, is likely to offer a more usable basis for such action than the shiny new version called R2P, which places all authority in the paralytic hands of the United Nations Security Council.

It's a good piece. RTWT.



And recall David Rieff, at National Interest, "Saints Go Marching In."

The Future Still Belongs to America

Great piece from Walter Russell Mead, at Wall Street Journal:

It is, the pundits keep telling us, a time of American decline, of a post-American world. The 21st century will belong to someone else. Crippled by debt at home, hammered by the aftermath of a financial crisis, bloodied by long wars in the Middle East, the American Atlas can no longer hold up the sky. Like Britain before us, America is headed into an assisted-living facility for retired global powers.

This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong. Sure, America has big problems. Trillions of dollars in national debt and uncounted trillions more in off-the-books liabilities will give anyone pause. Rising powers are also challenging the international order even as our key Cold War allies sink deeper into decline.

But what is unique about the United States is not our problems. Every major country in the world today faces extraordinary challenges—and the 21st century will throw more at us. Yet looking toward the tumultuous century ahead, no country is better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities or manage the dangers than the United States.

RTWT.

There's not a lot to quibble with, although Mead might underestimate the challenge of transnational terrorism --- which is promoted by powerful regional states --- to the stability of the international system. If the issue is geopolitics and the rise and fall of great powers, then, yes, America's well positioned for continued primacy for generations. Other than that, I think folks will appreciate systemic arguments like this when the economy's expanding and unemployment's declining.

Courtney Messerschmidt at Best Defense!

That's Thomas Ricks' blog, at Foreign Policy. Courtney's got a guest post: "Courtney Me 109 on the meaning of bin Laden's death for her peer group."

For those of us who were 10 or 11 years old on 9/11, the news of bin Laden's death is worthy of celebration. It is a tremendous moral victory for our nation and it validates what so many of us have learned in the past decade -- that America really is a magical nation -- the only one of her kind (more on this in a bit).

It's the triumph of good over evil. Sound passé'? Au contraire -- most of us reject moral relativism.

It's because for half of our entire lives we have lived with scary and creepy stuff like Taliban, al Qaeda, jihad, and the threat of terrorism on a mass attack scale from the indescribable horrors we saw live on TV that day -- with almost daily threats from various branches of aQ that they would gladly kill more Americans anyway and anytime they could.

Unlike the Soviet threat in ancient times -- al Qaeda had no embassies or diplomats at U.N. to double talk and speak of peaceful coexistence. aQ was always intolerant, and totally hot for murderous activities that targeted innocents by design.

9/11 was the pivotal day in our very young lives and OBL's timely demise seems to have closed a chapter that lasted forever.

This is significant.

More at the link.

Hat Tip: Charli Carpenter (of all people).

More Neoconservative Backlash

I don't know if Dan Riehl was as big a Bush-backer on Iraq as was David Horowitz, but Dan's written another interesting repudiation of neoconservatism. See, "Why Neo-Conservativism May Represent a Serious Concern For Israel":

Old line Reagan conservatives have always been something of a firewall for neo-conservatives, siding with them over more isolationist factions within the GOP. The thanks we most often got for that was either to have been ignored, or taken for granted - and now, it seems, even marginalized, as Jennifer Rubin is doing.

I'm not suggesting traditional conservatives will abandon Israel, or one of the three legs of Reagan Conservatism - national defense, most particularly. However, it is going to have to re-assess its positioning as regards neo-conservatism and the more isolationist elements of the GOP cited above. Unfortunately, they are not always a best friend to Israel.

As a result, what the aforementioned third leg of conservatism might look like given some new alignment, or dynamic, within the conservative movement is hard to predict. But with mounting debt and three wars going on, it's most likely to not be a very adventurous one, however hawk-ish it might remain in theory.

That, in the end, could prove to be a serious concern for Israel, one coming at the same time the Middle-east is unraveling thanks to Obama - a time when it can least aford any new concern. Yet, ultimately, neither they, nor anyone else, would have anyone to blame but neo-conservatism. Thanks to their policies, combined with a lack of respect and regard for traditional Reagan conservatives over a decade, or more, neo-conservatives may be bringing about the very thing they most oppose: a more isolationist grassroots conservative movement rising to take control of the Republican Party.

They may even have to revert to being Democrats before long. And one can only imagine the reception they'd get there. Given budget constraints and Obama's own current international adventurism, it's quite possible that neo-conservatism as a driving ideology won't even have a place in any next Republican administration. And that may happen, even if they are successful in helping to elect the next establishment Republican they are bound to find themselves endorsing in 2012 and, or 2016.

That's a block quote from the second half of the essay, so readers need to RTWT for the full argument. I'm not sure if it's just Jennifer Rubin that's the most painful thorn here, or something larger. If you check the links you'll see that Dan's fuming mad at Rubin's hoity-toity dismissal of grassroots conservative concerns on the budget deal. Rubin comes off as a beltway moderate completely out of touch with the ideological currents of limited-government conservatism. And I write this as a fan of Jennifer Rubin. But Dan's got a good point. The tricky thing here is not to throw all the "neocons" in one basket when hammering Rubin. I don't read her as much as I'd like, but she was at Commentary for a while, and she's about as aggressively Zionist imaginable. Perhaps Dan will want to flesh out his argument further in an additional essay. If by "Neo-Conservatives" he means William Kristol and perhaps Charles Krauthammer ... well, they're as beltway as you can get, and with Kristol, sometimes his fervent advocacy of the freedom agenda seems to overtake his better judgment. He's consistent, so give him that. But folks who might otherwise be attacked as "neocons" have been very cautious on change in the Middle East and the effects on Israel's interests. David Horowitz most obviously comes to mind, with his highly publicized renunciation of the democracy promotion agenda in Egypt and so forth. But Victor Davis Hanson personified neoconservative foreign policy on the Iraq war, and he had an inside line to the White House back in 2003, but he's now one of the biggest skeptics on the Obama administration's foreign policy, calling for a degree of realist restraint that's the antithesis of the the neoconservative paradigm.

And that's to say nothing of the domestic neoconservative agenda, especially on social policy going back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the folks at Public Interest under Irving Kristol. And the Reagan years are probably a little more of a complicated comparison in any case, considering President Reagan's appointment of Jeanne Kirkpatrick to the U.N. after her breakout article on dictatorships in foreign policy at (the neoconservative policy journal) Commentary.

Anyway, my money is on the neocons remaining a key force on conservative policy circles well into the future. On Israel and isolationism alone, the paleocons will be out to pasture. The real debates will be more on whether we'll see ideological purists within the conservative movement prevail over the moderate progressive-appeasers in the GOP. I'm thinking Newt Gingrich on latter, despite his otherwise grand vision for the Republican Party. No more Dede Scozzafavas, thank you.

Anyway, Dan might head over to Cato Institute to read the batch of essay at the series, "The Rise and Fall of Neoconservatism." And I'd also recommend going easy on Jennifer Rubin for a while. Check her out again after the budget battle dies down a bit. She's a good lady. A lot of us, like myself, were previously on the left, hence "neoconservative," but we're among the most passionate defenders of the Reaganite vision in conservative circles today.

Lieberman and McCain: Regime Change Should Be Goal in Libya

From my favorite senators, at WSJ, "In Libya, Regime Change Should Be the Goal." After laying out praise for President Obama's stirring words of support for Libya, and also identifying the military and communications requirements needed beyond airstrikes and humanitarian assistance, the senators indicate:

Some critics still argue that we should be cautious about helping the Libyan opposition, warning that we do not know enough about them or that their victory could pave the way for an al Qaeda takeover. Both arguments are hollow. By all accounts, the Transitional National Council is led by moderates who have declared their vision for (as their website puts it) Libya becoming "a constitutional democratic civil state based on the rule of law, respect for human rights and the guarantee of equal rights and opportunities for all its citizens."

If there is any hope for a decent government to emerge from the ashes of the Gadhafi dictatorship, this is it. Throwing our weight behind the transitional government is our best chance to prevent Libya's unraveling into postwar anarchy—precisely the circumstance under which Islamist extremists are most likely to gain a foothold.

We cannot guarantee the success of the Libyan revolution, but we have prevented what was, barely a week ago, its imminent destruction. That is why the president was right to intervene. He now deserves our support as we and our coalition partners do all that is necessary to help the Libyan people secure a future of freedom.

I love the robust moral vision, but after nearly two months of studying change in the Middle East, I'm much more skeptical of the prospects for Western-style democratization. Of course, the U.S. is fully deployed at this point, and despite announcements of a handoff to NATO, the U.S. will continue to play first among equals in this war, and despite Secretary Defense Robert Gates' assertions to the contrary, it's increasingly plausible the U.S. ground contingents could be sent in. Shoot, the CIA could be preparing covert operations as this post goes live. Lots of scenarios are unknown except to those in the highest ranks of power. And I'm not convinced that Lieberman and McCain represent the bulk of thinking on the conservative right. Ann Coulter penned an excellent critique of the administration earlier, and Victor Davis Hanson warns against the deployment at Pajamas Media, "Libya: The Genesis of a Bad Idea." (Hanson does indicate that by now we'd better get Gaddafi or look out for some major blowback.) And at Flopping Aces, "Arming Libyan rebels? The Deaf, Dumb and Blind errors of western leaders."

And to round it out, see Ron Radosh, who's not quite so skeptical, "Our Libyan War: What Position Should Skeptical Conservatives Take?"

More later ...

Sarah Palin Slams Obama's 'Profoundly Disappointing' Speech on Libya

This is great.

At Politico, "Sarah Palin 'profoundly disappointed' by Obama's Libya speech," and Gateway Pundit, "Sarah Palin on President’s Libya Speech: “It Proved That the Obama Doctrine is Still Full of Chaos and Questions”."

What's interesting is not so much that she hammer's Obama, but that her comments raise implications for the debate on the "Neocons vs. the Anti-Jihad Movement." Palin sounds like a neoconservative regime-changer, but that's a dangerous bet at this point. See David Horowitz, who continues his campaign against Obama's intervention: "Bill Kristol Drinks the Kool Aid."

Neocons vs. the Anti-Jihad Movement

Editor David Swindle has a nifty post at NewsReal Blog, "David Horowitz on Nation-Building: “I agree with Haley Barbour”." It's a summary of David Horowitz's recent comments on U.S. foreign military intervention. I laid out my position this morning at "Libya's Rebels?" I think things are a little more complicated than Horowitz has laid out, although David Swindle's contrast of the paradigms is excellent --- a conservative divide over regime change and humanitarian intervention:

The divide can be summarized in both movements’ reactions to one fact: 84% of Egyptians believe apostates from Islam need to be executed. The traditional neo-conservative establishment ignored that fact in their embrace of the revolts in Egypt. (Apparently traditional neoconservatives are so eager to remove one tyrant that they don’t care if a worse one steps in to fill the void.) The Anti-Jihad movement was more clear-eyed in realizing that “democracy” in such a country would be many things but “freedom” is not one of them.

Libya and the Anti-Intervention Left

From Jamie Kirchick, at World Affairs Journal:

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argues that the campaign against Muammar Qaddafi represents the height of hypocrisy. Because the United States is abstaining from taking military action against other regimes in the region that are also using force to quell domestic uprisings—namely, Bahrain and Yemen—“all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms” are bunk. The war in Libya “isn’t about justice,” Robinson says, “it’s about power.” Far from arising out of some neoconservative impulse to spread democracy, he argues, the military action against the Libyan regime is rather an example of “realism” ...

The guiding principle of American foreign policy should be to support freedom overseas, when we can, where we can, and however we can. There are no firm rules by which this principle can be implemented. Libya, however, presented a rather obvious case: a murderous dictator who had the blood of many thousands of innocent people—including American citizens—on his hands, who had fomented instability in his region, and who had for many years been a leading sponsor of international terrorism, was suddenly confronted by a mass domestic insurgency. He reacted violently, in a way that rendered moot whatever economic benefit he was providing to the West. He all but announced his intention to commit genocide against his own people, stating that he would “cleanse Libya house by house,” practically rendering international intervention a legal imperative due to the stipulations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which the United States is a signatory. Furthermore, from a basic practical standpoint, and unlike in Yemen and Bahrain, Libya is located on the periphery of Europe, meaning that continued strife would have resulted in a mass refugee exodus onto the shores of NATO states. By assisting an indigenous revolt, and not partaking in the dread warfare of the sort that liberals like Robinson so fervently opposed in Iraq, the United States and its allies were given a prime opportunity, the sort of opportunity that arrives once in a blue moon, to overthrow a despicable regime and implement something better in its stead.

More at the link.

Kirchik is a great writer.

Botched Neocon Wars? Hardly

Ideological simplification is one of the biggest problems we're seeing with all the intense debate over Libya and the wider "Arab Spring." One example is Andrew Sullivan's little piece that stops just short of slamming neocons as fascist. Sully draws on C. Bradley Thompson's recent book on neoconservatism, but amplifies the implications without the theoretical context. For background, see Thompson's recent piece, "Neoconservatism Unmasked." It's pretty abstract, but if Thompson's right, there's a lot in my personal philosophy that's at odds with the neoconservative program hypothesized there. That said, much of the current debate over intervention in Libya hinges on the argument that the Iraq war was a colossal blunder of world historical proportions. It's the progressive meme that the Bush administration blew the mission after the initial post-conflict phase of operations. The photo-op on the USS Abraham Lincoln came to symbolize the hubris of an administration many argued was hell-bent on war and profanely dismissive of international norms. There's no convincing ideological partisans otherwise, of course, so it's probably not worth it to make the effort. Yet real-world events have repeatedly shown that the Bush administration's foreign policy was frequently masterful and often quite successful. There's been a long slide in Afghanistan's political efficacy, which is why we're still there today, after ten years of war. But in Iraq, the lodestar for progressive attacks on the "Bush-Cheney cabal," the revolutionary changes in the Middle East have elevated Baghdad to regional diplomatic prominence. See New York Times, "Ready or Not, Iraq Ascends to Take Helm of Arab Bloc":

BAGHDAD — After Libya was suspended from the Arab League last month, de facto leadership ended up coincidentally in the hands of Iraq, the Arab nation with the most experience — much of it painful — with a foreign-led military campaign against an unpopular dictator.



For all of that still unsettled pain, the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari — in his new capacity as head of the Arab League — rushed off to Paris last Friday evening to join Western and Arab allies, where he argued passionately in favor of action against Libya, citing the American no-fly zone in northern Iraq that protected the Kurdish population from Saddam Hussein in the years before the American invasion here, according to a senior official who took part in the Paris deliberations.



And soon, Iraqi leaders, who are facing their own protest movement, plan to use their own troublesome democracy, still bloody and inchoate, as a showcase for Middle East countries. Iraq is taking on a larger diplomatic role in regional affairs as host of the group’s annual summit meeting — while assuming the rotating presidency of the league — in May.



“If there’s a political message, it’s that Iraq is back to play a major and positive role in the Arab region,” said Labid Abawi, the deputy foreign minister who has led a committee to prepare Baghdad for the summit meeting.



“We take pride in that Iraq has already exceeded all these other Arab countries in establishing a democratic regime,” he said. “Now, we can say yes, we are on the right track, and other Arab countries can follow suit in establishing a democratic regime.”

There's more at the link, but I want to reiterate the point above: No amount of evidence, not even Iraqi testimony on the country's democratic consolidation, will wrest from idiot progressives the claim that toppling Saddam Hussein was a debacle. It's all they have, along with endless allegations of racism and the demonization of Israel. And to respond to simpleton Mike Tuggle, who asked if I'd lost my "'neo-conservative illusions' as a result of the botched Neocon Wars?," the answer is no --- because I don't have any illusions to lose.

Conservatives and the Libyan War

One thing I believe in firmly is the universal desire for human freedom. It's an American thing, you could say, univeralistic in the Jeffersonian sense of "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." Believing in universal principles doesn't mean we throw off our more studied inclinations toward realism. And by this I don't mean the perverted realism of Stephen Walt and the neo-isolationist Israel-bashers. No, it's the realism for holding up interests to the light of pragmatism over idealism. With the Egyptian revolution, for example, the hopes for liberation engendered powerful emotions of solidarity with people breaking the chains of their poverty and oppression. The problem, of course, is that the nature of the Mubarak regime was to elevate the most extreme forces in society as the bogeyman to justify authoritarian rule. At the same time the tempering forces of civil society were suppressed to prevent pluralistic impulses that might threaten the regime. And when the spontaneous outpouring of revolt hit the streets the Obama administration's incompetence and indifference worked to let slip the opportunity for shaping a pro-democratic wave that might have limited the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. Attention has moved away from Cairo as new developments elsewhere have captured the news. But Egypt's election on constitutional reform a few days ago was said to favor Islamist forces in the country. And because those same forces will be less committed to peace with Israel, and perhaps to an extreme fundamentalism domestically, it's clear that democratic change in Egypt hasn't seen the coming of a freedom-producing utopia.

I'm reflecting here in light of David Horowitz's essay, "Why I Am Not a Neo-Conservative." Folks should read it all. There's little I disagree with, especially on the dangers of democratic elections in totalitarian cultures. It's hard to be bullish on democratic change when the key principles of constitutional order include the extermination of the Jews, as it is with the Hamas Charter. But there's more to neoconservatism than foreign policy and war, which is a point that I keep stressing, since it's getting lost in the fog of Obama's foreign policy. Horowitz even calls for folks to abandon the "neo" and return to being just conservatives. To do that, of course, is to abandon the long tradition of moral-based conservatism that been shaping cultural debates in the U.S. since at least the 1960s. A larger understanding is required. It's appropriate to recall that neoconservatives aren't currently unified on change in the Middle East. Refer to Matt Lewis' recent article as well, "Abusing and Misusing The ‘Neo-Con’ Label," where he notes how the term's been bastardized by critics.

In any case, Victor Davis Hanson ---whose work was extremely influential in the top circles of the Bush administration during the runup to the Iraq war and beyond --- puts things in perspective at National Review, "Let Us Count the Ways ...":

Why are many conservatives against the Libyan war? Is it, as alleged, political opportunism — given their prior support for the 2001 and 2003 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

No. Most of us support wholeheartedly our troops now that we are in, but opposed the intervention for reasons that were clear before we attacked, and are even clearer now. Among them ...

Be sure to read it all.

Regime Change the Only Viable Solution in Libya

From Bret Stephens, at WSJ, "We're (Almost) All Neocons Now." After a primer on the surging popularity of neoconservatism --- from French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Princeton Political Scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter --- Stephens reminds us:

It's easy to forget that Iraq was a war many liberals—Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton among them—once supported, when they could bring themselves to hate Saddam more than they did the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. The latter passion overwhelmed the former for a few years, but eventually the initial logic of their position was bound to reassert itself in some similar scenario.



So it has been with Libya. The moment the Libyans revolted, the U.S. could not have remained silent without doing violence to bedrock American values. And so President Obama said Gadhafi must go. The moment Mr. Obama said that, the administration could not be indifferent to the outcome without risking the wrath of a vengeful Gadhafi, as well as a wider Arab audience that would have felt profoundly betrayed by empty U.S. promises. And so Mr. Obama crossed his fingers that the rebels would win, and win fast.



The moment Gadhafi turned the tide and threatened to massacre his opponents, the administration was bound to try to stop him for purely humanitarian reasons. And so Mr. Obama pressed for international action, even as he hoped the U.S. would not have to be directly involved. The moment it became clear that there would be no such intervention without U.S. involvement, the U.S. became involved.



Now the administration is again at a crossroads as it ponders what to do next. Sooner or later it will figure out that any road that doesn't lead to Gadhafi's death, imprisonment or exile is a cul-de-sac that can only mean the de facto partition of Libya, or Gadhafi's survival, or a long civil war from which the West cannot easily disentangle itself.



Put simply, regime change is the only viable option for resolving the crisis in Libya, a point most sentient observers are beginning to grasp. And regime change is only going to come about if the U.S. presses the matter. So why is the administration so reluctant to acknowledge the obvious?

Compare to Stephen Walt's, "What intervention in Libya tells us about the neocon-liberal alliance." Walt sounds more and more like a Paulbot. And he's long given realism a bad name. Not only that, his analysis is riddled with clichés. The United States hardly wields its military like hammer, obviously, since untold nails of humanitarian crises remain un-pounded. Indeed, the lost souls of Rwanda haunt the conscience of the West today. Americans can't intervene everywhere, but that's not a likelihood anyway. Walt --- and the anti-military paleocons before him --- simply raves against robust U.S. engagement in the world. It's isolationist and morally bankrupt.

Coalition Airstrikes Hit Libya Again: Tripoli and Surroundings Targeted in Fourth Barrage in Last Several Days

The main story's at LAT, "Coalition Airstrikes Target Tripoli." Reports of civilian causalities at both videos, with the U.S. denying the allegations:

RELATED: There's all kinds of commentary at Memeorandum, but too little hours in the day. Still, I'll try to post on Stephen Walt's essay later.

Obama Has Thrown American Interests to the Wayside

The best as ever, Caroline Glick, at Jerusalem Post, "America’s descent into strategic dementia" (via Memeorandum). She pulls no punches, and puts "realists" like Stephen Walt to shame. This is one of those essays best read in full. The second passage on Obama's anti-American foreign policy is classic, but this section below reaffirms the point I made here earlier on the need to be wary of the Libyan opposition:

One of the most astounding aspects of the US debate on Libya in recent weeks has been the scant attention paid to the nature of the rebels.

The rebels are reportedly represented by the so-called National Transitional Council led by several of Gaddafi’s former ministers.

But while these men – who are themselves competing for the leadership mantle – are the face of the NTC, it is unclear who stands behind them. Only nine of the NTC’s 31 members have been identified.

Unfortunately, available data suggest that the rebels championed as freedom fighters by the neoconservatives, the opportunists, the Europeans and the Western media alike are not exactly liberal democrats. Indeed, the data indicate that Gaddafi’s opponents are more aligned with al-Qaida than with the US.

Also, from David Horowitz, "The War Against Israel Has Begun."

The Neocon Cudgel

I wanted to comment earlier on this Politico piece attacking the emerging GOP field as a bunch of "neo-cons" on foreign policy. I thought it simplistic, for one thing, and as usual, the essay wrongly generalizes neoconservatism as exclusively an expansionist foreign policy ideology. It's not. But because questions of war and peace (and support for Israel) have become among the most contentious political issues of recent years, the neocon label has become the all-purpose slur to demonize and marginalize political opponents. That said, it's interesting to see Matt Lewis jumping in here to disaggregate the simplicities. See, "Abusing and Misusing The ‘Neo-Con’ Label":

Perhaps seeking to contrast himself with the rest of the 2012 Republican crowd, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour recently said the U.S. should consider reducing forces in Afghanistan.

Noting that Barbour is the lone voice among likely GOP candidates making this argument, Politico’s Ben Smith and Byron Tau argue that neo-cons are “winning the fight for the direction of the [Republican] party.” (As far as I know, Barbour did not use the term neo-con).

The term “neo-con” originally was used to describe former Democrats (often Jewish intellectuals — but not always) who were, as Irving Kristol put it, “mugged by reality”.

Over time, the meaning has evolved — so much so that apparently the modern definition includes anyone who isn’t an isolationist. Today, neo-con is essentially shorthand for “quixotic warmonger.” (That Pawlenty, Romney, Gingrich — and the rest of the GOP field — are all essentially being labeled neo-cons speaks to the bastardization of the term.)

Putting aside whether or not Governor Barbour’s position on Afghanistan is correct or not, I can’t help thinking the label is now just a cudgel, casually employed by people who don’t know the original definition of the word — or are merely looking for a cheap way to discredit their adversaries. (And for journalists, the term is simply a good shorthand — which makes its overuse all the more common).

Unfortunately, anyone who disagrees with a given instance of military intervention can dismiss their intellectual adversaries by simply labeling them with the term. This, of course, dispatches with the messy work of actually debating the merits of intervention on an ad hoc basis (I would argue that sometimes intervention is good and sometimes it is bad).

I'd just simply remind folks of the deeply moral dimension of neoconservative thought, which is the key reason it's despised by the America-hating left. And in case you missed it, Irving Kristol's posthumous collection of essay is out, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009.

RELATED: At GSGF, "Regional Strategery."

Intervention in Libya?

Following-up on my earlier piece, "Regime Change Libya?"

I'm actually not all that gung-ho on U.S. military intervention, although the case is not just a matter of democracy promotion at this point. Gaddafi's now waging an all-out war on his own people. William Kristol echoes Niall Ferguson's point on Egypt a few weeks back, noting the utter bankruptcy of the Obama administration's foreign policy.

Progressives are up in arms about the possible use of force, which is a classic left-wing knee-jerk reaction to deployment of military power, no matter how limited. It's pretty shameful, especially as these tools claim Barack Hussein's doing a fabulous job with his comments on the crisis so far. Problem is, that's not going to be nearly enough, as William Kristol points out:

Perhaps progressives might wrap their tiny minds around the call from Princeton's Anne-Marie Slaughter:

The United States should immediately ask the Security Council to authorize a no-flight zone and make clear to Russia and China that if they block the resolution, the blood of the Libyan opposition will be on their hands. We should push them at least to abstain, and bring the issue to a vote as soon as possible. If we get a resolution, we should work with the Arab League to assemble an international coalition to impose the no-flight zone. If the Security Council fails to act, then we should recognize the opposition Libyan National Council as the legitimate government, as France has done, and work with the Arab League to give the council any assistance it requests.

Slaughter's a genuine "liberal interventionist," while Kristol is perhaps today's most prominent neoconservative hawk on regime change in the Middle East. That their arguments are dovetailing like this, in such a compelling way, makes for an interesting smackdown against the lame antiwar peanut-brains.

RELATED: At Los Angeles Times, "Libyan rebels flee Port Brega as Kadafi's forces advance" (via Memeorandum).

Regime Change Libya?

GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD gets the neocon-crazy photo-credit, at "Libyavention."

But see Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Wavers on 'Regime Change'"

WASHINGTON — After weeks of internal debate on how to respond to uprisings in the Arab world, the Obama administration is settling on a Middle East strategy: help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait.

Instead of pushing for immediate regime change—as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya—the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling "regime alteration."

The approach has emerged amid furious lobbying of the administration by Arab governments, who were alarmed that President Barack Obama had abandoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and worried that, if the U.S. did the same to the beleaguered king of Bahrain, a chain of revolts could sweep them from power, too, and further upend the region's stability.

The strategy also comes in the face of domestic U.S. criticism that the administration sent mixed messages at first in Egypt, tentatively backing Mr. Mubarak before deciding to throw its full support behind the protesters demanding his ouster. Likewise in Bahrain, the U.S. decision to throw a lifeline to the ruling family came after sharp criticism of its handling of protests there. On Friday, the kingdom's opposition mounted one of its largest rallies, underlining the challenge the administration faces selling a strategy of more gradual change to the population.

Administration officials say they have been consistent throughout, urging rulers to avoid violence and make democratic reforms that address the demands of their populations. Still, a senior administration official acknowledged the past month has been a learning process for policy makers. "What we have said throughout this is that there is a need for political, economic and social reform, but the particular approach will be country by country," the official said.

Right.

A learning process. Frankly, White House foreign policy is FUBAR, as Niall Ferguson noted a couple of weeks ago at Newsweek. A U.S. carrier group off the Egyptian coast might have sent a signal for Mubarak to step down a lot sooner than he did, and a Marine landing at Suez might have bolstered the opposition, and perhaps crushed forces loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, anything along those lines could have led to a long-term U.S. occupation and an intense outcry around the Arab world. What's interesting is that despite all of these dangers, folks keep raising the prospects of U.S. military action in the region. See Micah Zenko, at Foreign Policy, "No-Go: A No-Fly Zone Over Libya Will Not Be Easy or Painless." And the roundup at New York Times, "Should the U.S. Move Against Qaddafi?"

True Conservatives

I'm trippin' on this graphic, from Melissa Clouthier, "Should Libertarians Be Banned From CPAC?" (via Memeorandum). It's not developed from Melissa's discussion, but can we say the tea party represents "true conservatism" if large numbers of tea partiers are closer to the libertarian position on defense? I'm neocon, and firmly is the defense and social conservatives circles, but I'm also a tea partier and would like to see more fiscal restraint in government, although that circle's less defining of my ideological identity. Anyway, folks'll have to read Melissa's post to see if she'd boot libertarians from CPAC. (And folks should check Midnight Blue's CPAC updates, while I'm thinking about it.)

P.S. I doubt Dan Riehl would be a "true conservative" as measured by the graph. He's not a big defense kinda guy, but nevertheless touts himself as an ideological gatekeeper.