Come Up To The Table, And We’ll Argue Whether To Stay Or Go

Ross Douthat at NYT:

Here is the grim paradox of America’s involvement in Afghanistan: The darker things get and the more setbacks we suffer, the better the odds that we’ll be staying there indefinitely.

Not the way we’re there today, with 90,000 American troops in-theater and an assortment of NATO allies fighting alongside. But if the current counterinsurgency campaign collapses, it almost guarantees that some kind of American military presence will be propping up some sort of Afghan state in 2020 and beyond. Failure promises to trap us; success is our only ticket out.

Why? Because of three considerations. First, the memory of 9/11, which ensures that any American president will be loath to preside over the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul. Second, the continued presence of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan’s northwest frontier, which makes it difficult for any American president to contemplate giving up the base for counterterrorism operations that Afghanistan affords. Third, the larger region’s volatility: it’s the part of the world where the nightmare of nuclear-armed terrorists is most likely to become a reality, so no American president can afford to upset the balance of power by pulling out and leaving a security vacuum behind.

This explains why the Obama administration, throughout all its internal debates and strategic reviews, hasn’t been choosing between remaining in Afghanistan and withdrawing from the fight. It’s been choosing between two ways of staying.

The first is what we’re doing now: the counterinsurgency campaign that Gen. David Petraeus championed (and now has been charged with seeing through), which seeks to lay the foundations for an Afghan state that’s stable enough to survive without our support.

The second way is the “counterterrorism-plus” strategy that Vice President Joe Biden, among other officials, proposed last fall as a lower-cost alternative.

Advocates of a swift withdrawal tend to see Biden as their ally, and in a sense they’re right. His plan would reduce America’s footprint in Afghanistan, and probably reduce American casualties as well.

But in terms of the duration of American involvement, and the amount of violence we deal out, this kind of strategy might actually produce the bloodier and more enduring stalemate.

It wouldn’t actually eliminate the American presence, for one thing. Instead, such a plan would concentrate our forces around the Afghan capital, protecting the existing government while seeking deals with some elements of the insurgency. History suggests that such bargains would last only as long as American troops remained in the country, which means that our soldiers would be effectively trapped — stuck defending a Potemkin state whose leader (whether Hamid Karzai or a slightly less corrupt successor) would pose as Afghanistan’s president while barely deserving the title of mayor of Kabul.

Noah Millman at The American Scene on Douthat:

Ross gives three reasons why we won’t leave: first, because we can’t “lose” to the people who attacked us on 9-11; second, because we need Afghanistan as a base to fight in Pakistan; third, because we can’t allow a “vacuum” in Afghanistan that might destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan.

All the work related to actual American interests is being done by that last sentence. America has an enormous interest in preventing nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of al Qaeda or other groups who might actually use them as weapons of terror; to the extent that our presence in Afghanistan helps prevent that eventuality, you’ve got your justification right there for spending a great deal of blood and treasure. But that “to the extent” is where the real argument is: whether our presence is making things better or worse in terms of stability in Pakistan. Reverse the sign on that equation, and your whole argument blows up.

And, while I don’t want to belabor comparisons between Nixon and Obama that I’ve made before by bringing up the Cambodian incursion, the sign probably should be reversed. The Pakistani military and intelligence services bankrolled the Taliban for years. But their goal is to secure their rear, to make sure that Afghanistan does not become an ally of any potentially hostile power (the old Soviet Union once, now Iran or India) and thereby become a potential base for operations against them. Given that our war in Afghanistan is very unpopular in Pakistan, and is directly contrary to the interests of the Pakistani military, it’s not at all clear why we should assume as a given that the war serves the interest of securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons against capture by terrorists.

I mean, think about it. The purported goal of our counterinsurgency campaign is to prop up an Afghan state capable of surviving “on its own.” But “on its own” certainly doesn’t mean “able to avoid being undermined by Pakistan,” a vastly larger and more powerful country next door with a profound interest in Afghan affairs. So what exactly does it mean?

Let’s be honest. The United States attacked Afghanistan not because we could not tolerate a failed state that played host to terrorists – Afghanistan isn’t the only one of those in the world, and it’s far from clear that the war and occupation was either necessary or sufficient to achieve that aim – nor because we were worried about Pakistan being destabilized by the Taliban next door – if anything, we were worried from the beginning that our attack would destabilize Pakistan, indeed that al Qaeda attacked us precisely because they knew we would respond, and that our response might destabilize Pakistan, finally delivering its nukes into their hands – but because al Qaeda attacked us on 9-11 and we needed to respond by destroying those who attacked us, lest we invite further attack. If we had carried the bodies of Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Ayman al-Zawahiri out of Tora Bora, we would not now be debating how to achieve “victory” in Afghanistan; rather, we’d be talking about what policies would be most likely to prevent a recurrence of a 9-11-type attack. And, in that hypothetical scenario, even if the Taliban were still active on both sides of the Af-Pak border, I’m not at all sure that Ross would be taking the view that we should occupy Afghanistan indefinitely for the sake of stability in the region.

Millman then references this Matt Yglesias piece in the Daily Beast:

Afghanistan and Iraq are different in many ways, but the “good war” could also benefit from some reframing. In particular, we’re currently suffering from a bad case of unrealistic expectations. The United States went into Afghanistan with a pretty clear goal of getting the bad guys responsible for 9/11. We succeeded to some extent, but failed to nab the key leaders, at which point Bush decided he wanted to invade Iraq. He didn’t, however, either declare victory in Afghanistan or admit failure. Instead, he shorted resources for the mission even while allowing it to be reframed in terms of grandiose aspirations to create a functioning, democratic Afghan central government.

Perhaps at some point this would have been achievable, but years of drift have made the goal ever more distant. What’s more, the government of Afghanistan centered around Hamid Karzai simply hasn’t proven itself to be especially capable or well-intentioned. Consequently, the surge of forces McChrystal’s been overseeing appeared to be going nowhere fast—killing Taliban operatives and flushing money around the country even while the legitimacy and credibility of the Afghan government continued to erode. Utterly committed to the goal of winning the war, McChrystal has been coming into conflict with other members of the Obama administration over his willingness to pour an essentially limitless quantity of money and manpower down the drain in an effort to crush the Taliban.

Strategically, this just doesn’t make sense. Despite the military’s best efforts to repackage old information about lithium reserves as a newfound trove of wealth, Afghanistan is a poor, distant, landlocked country containing essentially nothing of value. It would be much more reasonable to restrain our goals, shy away from efforts to conquer hostile territory, and simply try to provide some help to friendly Afghans while scaling our commitment of resources down to a more sustainable level. The politics, however, are bound to be treacherous, especially for a Democrat with reason to fear opportunistic attacks from the warmongering right.

Douthat responds:

Noah Millman’s critique of my column today makes reasonable points about the potential advantages of accepting failure in Afghanistan and simply picking up and leaving. I wish, though, that he’d reckoned a bit more with what I intended to be the thrust of the piece — namely, the fact that what many critics of counterinsurgency keep presenting as an exit strategy (drawing down troop levels and focusing on counterterrorism) might well turn out to be anything but.

Millman praises the realism of this Matt Yglesias piece, for instance, but note where Yglesias ends up: He concludes that American policy toward Afghanistan should “restrain our goals, shy away from efforts to conquer hostile territory, and simply try to provide some help to friendly Afghans while scaling our commitment of resources down to a more sustainable level.” Aiming for “a more sustainable” American presence doesn’t sound like a policy oriented toward an actual withdrawal; rather, it sounds like a recipe for what Rory Stewart, in an essay admirable for its honesty about the scope of the commitment he has in mind, suggested would be 20 years or more of muddling through in Afghanistan.

This possible future seems at once unacceptable and all-too-plausible. And it’s precisely because I don’t think we can afford to spend upwards of two decades heavily invested in the Hindu Kush that I’m unwilling to give up on the hope of a more decisive outcome — not a final victory, which I agree is a chimera, but a shift in the balance of power in Afghanistan that makes it easier for leading U.S. policymakers to embrace a real withdrawal. I’m not optimistic that this is attainable, but I’m very pessimistic about what seems to be the other option on the table at the moment — and the main purpose of today’s column was to explain the reasons for my pessimism, not to attempt to permanently settle the “should we stay or should we go?” debate.

The Rory Stewart essay Douthat mentions, in the New York Review of Books:

A more realistic, affordable, and therefore sustainable presence would not make Afghanistan stable or predictable. It would be merely a small if necessary part of an Afghan political strategy. The US and its allies would only moderate, influence, and fund a strategy shaped and led by Afghans themselves. The aim would be to knit together different Afghan interests and allegiances sensitively enough to avoid alienating independent local groups, consistently enough to regain their trust, and robustly enough to restore the security and justice that Afghans demand and deserve from a national government.

What would this look like in practice? Probably a mess. It might involve a tricky coalition of people we refer to, respectively, as Islamists, progressive civil society, terrorists, warlords, learned technocrats, and village chiefs. Under a notionally democratic constitutional structure, it could be a rickety experiment with systems that might, like Afghanistan’s neighbors, include strong elements of religious or military rule. There is no way to predict what the Taliban might become or what authority a national government in Kabul could regain. Civil war would remain a possibility. But an intelligent, long-term, and tolerant partnership with the United States could reduce the likelihood of civil war and increase the likelihood of a political settlement. This is hardly the stuff of sound bites and political slogans. But it would be better for everyone than boom and bust, surge and flight. With the right patient leadership, a political strategy could leave Afghanistan in twenty years’ time more prosperous, stable, and humane than it is today. That would be excellent for Afghans and good for the world.

Meanwhile, Obama’s broader strategic argument must not be lost. He has grasped that the foreign policy of the president should not consist in a series of extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles, driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine. Instead the foreign policy of a great power should be the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty. Obama, we may hope, will develop this elusive insight. And then it might become possible to find the right places in which to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States. We might hope in South Asia, for example, for a lighter involvement in Afghanistan but a much greater focus on Kashmir.¹

I began by saying that “calling” in poker was childish and that grownups raise or fold. But there is another category of people who raise or fold: those who are anxious to leave the table. They go all in to exit, hoping to get lucky but if not then at least to finish. They do not do this on the basis of their cards or the pot. They do it because they lack the patience, the interest, the focus, or the confidence to pace themselves carefully through the long and exhausting hours. They no longer care enough about the game. Obama is a famously keen poker player. He should never be in a hurry to leave the table.

Millman responds to Douthat:

I want to thank Ross Douthat, first of all, for responding to my critique of his latest column, and I think I understand better what he’s getting at. Now let me see if I can clarify what I am getting at.The choices Ross presented in his column, and that are usually presented, are between trying to win and just muddling through. The third, usually excluded choice, is: planning for the exit. Ross explicitly excluded that choice by simply saying that the Obama Administration is not considering it and that “the memory of 9/11, which ensures that any American president will be loath to preside over the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul.” But neither of these are arguments for staying – they are arguments for not considering whether we should stay because we simply will. He chose to frame the question that way, and that framing shaped my response.

To grapple with the heart of Ross’s argument, then. Apart from the overarching point that our resources, our responsibilities, and our interests are all limited, the key point that Rory Stewart makes in his article that Ross cites as “admirably honest” is that “[t]here are, in reality, no inescapable connections between Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” If this is true, then if our goal is overwhelmingly to keep al Qaeda from again regaining its prior position in Afghanistan, to say nothing of Pakistan, then we should not assume that defeating the Taliban and/or keeping them out of power should be a primary war aim. Right now, nearly all the discussion about Afghanistan is predicated on the assumption that the American goal is to keep the Taliban out of power. If, instead, the assumption were that the Taliban, in some form, was inevitably going to return to power – not necessarily to exclusive power, of course – then we’d be having a very different conversation.

The key questions are: what does Pakistan (or the Pakistani army) really want; is it well-aligned with what we want; can they deliver; and can we live with giving them whatever it is they want that doesn’t dovetail with what we want.

My sense is that Pakistan wants a docile Afghanistan dominated by the Pashtun majority that is beholden to Islamabad and, in particular, doesn’t have any meaningful relations with India. Al Qaeda is more a threat to their regime than to us, so I should think if our preeminent war aim is to separate al Qaeda from the Taliban, that our aims are well-aligned in that regard. Whether we can live with Afghanistan being turned into a Pakistani puppet is another question – but it’s a question worth asking.

Whether Pakistan can deliver is another story entirely, but it strikes me as very peculiar indeed to believe simultaneously that the Pakistani army can’t be relied on but that after a decisive effort we could hand the reins over to the Afghan army.

Andrew Sullivan:

The question remains: does occupying Afghanistan recruit more than 50 terrorist for al Qaeda? At 51 new Jihadists, we are creating more terror than we are defeating in Afghanistan. And since the only way to tackle al Qaeda in Pakistan is by exactly the kind of tactics that Biden – and not Petraeus – has suggested for Afghanistan, one has to ask if pursuing counter-insurgency in one place and counter-terrorism in another is … well, spectacularly incoherent. You get all the human and fiscal cost of counter-insurgency occupation and all the blowback and Jihadist-recruitment of counter-terrorism.

Then there’s the factor that Ross doesn’t even mention: what if the core object of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is, in the best of all possible worlds, simply impossible? What if that failed state, after a generation of religious and ethnic warfare, cannot be turned into a functional state at any price in any foreseeable time-frame? Washington doesn’t like to believe there are some things it simply cannot do. Even now. Even after Iraq, they still believe in their power to do anything.

This is how great powers destroy themselves. By the pride of elites and the fears of the masses.

Douthat responds to Millman:

The point has been made, correctly, that much of David Petraeus’s accomplishment in Iraq involved managing expectations, shifting goalposts, cutting deals, and redefining “victory” to mean a halfway decent outcome rather than a triumph for democracy. But these essentially political successes were inseparable from the surge’s military gains, which strengthened America’s hand and improved the position of Maliki’s government even as they weakened the irreconcilable elements of the insurgency and incentivized more compromise-inclined elements to peel off and negotiate. And likewise, the weaker the Taliban’s position in Marja or Kandahar or any other contested territory, the better the chances of a grand bargain that actually stabilizes the country, and that has some hope of holding up without a permanent American presence.The point of a counterinsurgency campaign, in this sense, isn’t to crush the Taliban once and for all. It’s to create an environment in which they feel like they could be crushed, and to turn those security gains to political ends. Whereas so long as the Taliban’s leaders and fellow travelers are convinced that they’ve all but won the war, any “orderly entry” into government that they negotiate is likely to end in disaster — for our interests, and for Afghanistan.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat and Noah Millman at Bloggingheads

Peter Beinart Writes An Article

Peter Beinart in New York Review of Books:

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives

[…]

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

Marc Tracy at Tablet:

What prompted the essay? Why now, when you previously have not written much about Israel?
Having kids definitely played a role. I think it made me think about not just my Zionist identity, but what kind of Zionism was available to them. And the more I thought about that, the more I began to worry. I also think that we all operate at intellectual levels and emotional levels, and for me I just decided … There was this story in the New York Times about the Gaza War, about the house in Gaza where they found the children whose parents were dead. What you may find, if you do have kids one day, you are affected at an emotional level more strongly by certain things, in a way you may not be entirely prepared for. I think that’s a good thing, it’s primordial. I know people develop all kinds of shrewd and sophisticated and clever ways of explaining anything that happens, but when I read the story I just thought I was not in the mood to try in some clever way to explain it away. And the fact that I felt I was supposed to just sickened me a little bit.

That’s not to say there are never gonna be civilian casualties in war. But knowing the people who are running Israel now. … The amazing thing about Netanyahu’s book, which is a pretty long book, is there is not a single word of human empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians or Arabs. It was for me such a chilling book in its willingness to essentially. … there was something so inhuman about it, I felt. I just felt like that wasn’t something that I wanted to apologize for.

Why did you publish the essay in the New York Review of Books, which has a reputation of being distinctly left-wing, particularly on the question of Israel?
In all honesty, it was originally supposed to be New York Times Magazine. I don’t have any ill will, but there was a stylistic disagreement, not an ideological one.

There are not very many places anymore where one can write long, serious essays. Secondly, although my piece is a piece about liberal Zionism—I don’t believe in a binational state—Jeff Goldberg is my friend, but I disagree with him when he says NYRB is an anti-Israel. It publishes some of the most important people on the Israeli left. … We should draw inspiration from those people who share our values in Israel. If you’re going to tell me the New York Review of Books is an anti-Israel publication, that just makes no sense. I don’t think I’m anti-Israel. I think people throw around these terms way too promiscuously.

But doesn’t this make it easier for those who disagree with you to simply dismiss the piece given where it appeared?
I did think about that. You’re right: People will say that. And I think it’s a little bit silly. I wrote 5000 words. If you disagree with what I said—and there are reasonable disagreements—if you just say, ‘Oh well, it’s in the New York Review,’ that’s a sign that you’re looking for an opportunity not to engage with it. Tell me where I’m wrong! I can think of counterarguments.

Ben Smith at Politico:

Peter Beinart’s new essay indicts American Jewish organizations — AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents first of all — for, as he sees it, apologizing for an extremist and racist Israeli right. It will cost him friends, and start a conversation, particularly in the shrinking space occupied by liberal, Zionist* voices like his, Jeffrey Goldberg’s, and Jonathan Chait’s.

Jonathan Chait at TNR:

In its intellectual style, Peter’s piece reminded me of another attention-grabbing essay he wrote – “A Fighting Faith,” his 2004 manifesto in TNR urging Democrats to purge their anti-interventionist wing. Both essays exude an almost masochistic “tough love” toward groups which Peter (and I) feel affinity, urging them to adopt positions that Peter (and I) share or else face political annihilation. Both also suffer from analytical shortcomings – Peter’s latest less so than his last one – that leave me a bit intellectually queasy.

First, both reflect Peter’s highly idealistic conception of the world, in which political setbacks are the consequence of a failure to confront difficult truths, and intellectuals themselves hold a decisive place in the course of events. Peter’s 2004 essay argued that liberals had lost the presidency, and would continue to lose the presidency, because they had failed to confront the anti-war tendency within their base:

[L]iberals don’t have a sympathetic White House to enact liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in the name of unity, they never will.Likewise, his current piece places the blame for the lack of Zionist passion among secular Jews upon the failure of the Jewish leadership to confront Israel’s right-wing lurch:

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s.You can see the polemical imperative of such warnings. But a bit of reflection makes clear that they bear little relationship to reality. Democrats managed to sweep the two elections that came after “A Fighting Faith” without undergoing anything like the rigorous ideological cleansing Peter prescribed. I suspect that young Jews’ indifference toward Israel is overwhelmingly a function of their weakening ties to Judaism itself. Peter argues for such reforms as bringing pro-peace Israeli students to campus. I suspect that such things, or even a dramatically more liberal turn by the American Jewish establishment, would have little effect on the opinion of young Jews. Sometimes virtue must be its own reward.

Second, Peter can over-react to the most recent political setback, all the better to lend urgency to his call to arms. 2004 was not just another electoral setback, but a harbinger of existential crisis for the Democratic Party:

Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.In the same vein, Peter now paints Israel as falling almost inexorably into the grip of the far right. “The Netanyahu coalition,” he writes, “is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society.” There is certainly some truth to this – Russian immigration and the higher Orthodox birthrate have altered the face of the Israeli electorate. On the other hand, it was not that long ago that left-of-center parties governed Israel. Demography does not work that rapidly. Though he concedes that Israeli government can move in and out of power quickly, the tone of his essay has the same two-minutes-to-midnight urgency. I hope that, just as he rethought the stridency of “A Fighting Faith,” he’ll eventually look back on this piece as somewhat overwrought.

Finally, and most seriously, the stridency and clarity of Peter’s argument comes at the cost of shaving off the rough edges of reality that would otherwise intrude. Just as he once all-too-quickly dismissed the flaws of George W. Bush’s foreign policy for the good of urging Democrats to move rightward, he seems to have again temporarily blinded himself to counter-argument. Peter, for instance, twice writes that Palestinians “wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders.” It’s an odd contrast with his description of the Israeli polity, every problem with which he portrays as reflective of a deep cancer on the Israeli soul. Moreover, if you examine the respective public opinion, it’s not actually true – most Palestinians want to undo the Jewish state altogether, while most Israelis accept the need for a two-state solution.

Jeffrey Goldberg:

Ben Smith has helped me figure out the source of the claustrophobic feeling I’ve been experiencing lately. It turns out that it occurs when you’ve been locked in a small room (decorated, ambivalently, in blue and white) with Peter Beinart and Jon Chait and…. well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Who else is still out there arguing that you can be liberal and Zionist at the same time, meaning, pro-Israel and anti-occupation? There’s Leon Wieseltier, of course, but who else? Tom Friedman is in the same camp (and has been there for a long time) but he pays only intermittent attention to the problem.

I’ve only read through Beinart’s essay quickly (though not so quickly that I haven’t already exchanged a couple of e-mails with him about it) and I think it is in many ways analytically valid, if unsympathetic to some of the existential challenges faced by Israelis. But the essay’s placement, in the New York Review of Books, the one-stop shopping source for bien-pensant anti-Israelism, is semi-tragic. If Beinart’s goal is to talk to the great mass of American Jews who support the institutions of American Jewry but who are troubled by certain trends in Israeli politics, this is not the way to do it. Who is he trying to convince? Timothy Garton Ash? Peter should have published this essay on Tablet, or some other sort of publication not associated with Tony Judt’s disproportionate hatred of Jewish nationalism.

Spencer Ackerman:

To get the inevitable out of the way: back when I worked with Peter, the magazine we worked for, for all its professed love of Israel, would never be as frank and as brave and as honest and as morally urgent to publish a piece like this. It would be a hurtful shame if it continues its current pattern and instead either attacks Peter for writing it or dismisses the points he raises. Whatever some of you think about Peter, it takes a brave and reflective man to write this. Don’t hate, congratulate.

Now that that’s out of the way, Peter falls prey to a certain myopia when assessing the political options for the mainstream American Jewish organizations. Their problem is stark: younger generations of American Jews are liberals who greet the growing illiberalism of Israel with discomfort that tribal loyalty doesn’t assuage. (“In their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel” is Peter’s felicitous and, I presume, caustic and personal turn of phrase.)  So if those organizations want to maintain their influence without challenging that growing Israeli illiberalism, what to do? Peter:

To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore, America’s Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.

Well, no, because there’s a different and vastly more sustainable political option for those organizations, and it’s one that’s been underway for decades. It’s to build more durable ties with conservative evangelical Christian communities, which have attachments to Israel based on millennial, eschatological commitments that are entirely untroubled by liberalism — or, for that matter, Jews and Arabs. All that matters to them is that Jews conquer the biblical land of Israel. So if you’re an organization devoted less to liberalism than to letting Israel do whatever it wants whenever it wants to do it — well, then, Jews are nice, and your Jewish grandkids are nicer. But they’re nothing compared to tens of millions of motivated voters.

Matthew Yglesias insightfully calls this a post-Jewish brand of Zionism, and he’s exactly right. Peter is right that it’s the moral task of Zionist liberals like, well, himself and myself and the J Street generation to save Zionist liberalism. But if you’re Malcolm Hoenlein or Abe Foxman, why should you care what pischers like us think? You’ve got aspirant Republican officeholders tripping over each other to profess their deep faith in Israel.

That should underscore the urgency of the J Street generation. Liberal Zionism is as much an archaic and dying trend in American politics as it is in Israeli politics. What Peter might have more forcefully added in his piece is the hidebound hostility that the mainstream organizations express toward it. Well, what did these self-hating Jews say about Gaza? What did they say about Goldstone? How dare they connect the occupation to anti-American sentiment? Don’t they know Iran is an existential threat and the end of Jewish democracy isn’t! We left-wingers in the Shtetl live amidst a sentiment among our parents and grandparents that tells us that we can take the position that a Jewish democracy and two-state solution is a fine thing. But if we advocate for it too strongly — if we put it in the language of justice; if we see Zionism’s early universalism as demanding Palestinian statehood; if we plead for Israel to abandon its current anti-Jewish course — then we’re merely useful idiots giving aid and comfort to the enemy. To listen to our parents and grandparents in 2010 is to be told that you ought to have a mere superficial attachment to Jewish democracy and Jewish justice after all. And that’s why we don’t listen anymore.

But it’s also true that they don’t have to listen to us. And that’s the more vexing problem.

Joe Klein at Swampland at Time:

This is an excellent, well-argued piece by Peter Beinart about the moral failure of  Jewish-American leaders with regard to Israel’s hard-right turn. I would hope that the leaders of AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League etc etc would read it and think about it carefully, and that it forces those who have refused to debate these issues–how unJewish!–to start a real dialogue.

But I’m sure that it’s only a matter of hours before someone calls Beinart anti-Israel or a self-hating Jew. How sad.

Jeffrey Goldberg again on Klein:

Come on, Joe! There is real debate all the time in the Jewish community, even within the ADL! I’ve been to national meetings of the ADL when actual debate broke out! I belong to the biggest and most established Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C., and one of beloved rabbis is a leader of the hard-left group Rabbis for Human Rights, and you know what? No one cares. Liberal critics of Israel and the organized Jewish community are going to have to let go of this particular meme. (Please see my post on a related subject, the taboo that won’t shut up.) We live in an age when cartoonists — cartoonists! — are threatened with death for drawing pictures of the Muslim prophet, and yet an unseemly amount of space on the Interwebs is given over to condemning Abe Foxman for writing hostile press releases. It is not an act of bravery — physical bravery, spiritual bravery, intellectual bravery — to criticize Israel, not ever, and certainly not today.

By the way, I just asked Peter Beinart if he’s been called an Israel-hater or a self-hater today. His response: “Actually no one has. It’s been the biggest shock — and happiest one — of the piece. I don’t think my grandmother has read it yet, though.”

Philip Klein at AmSpec:

The problem, however, isn’t with leading Jewish organizations that defend Israel, but with liberalism. As sickening as it sounds, Jewish liberals see their fellow Jews as noble when they are victims being led helplessly into the gas chambers, but recoil at the thought of Jews who refuse to be victims, and actually take actions to defend themselves. It isn’t too different from American liberal attitudes toward criminal justice or terrorism, where morality is turned upside down and the lines between criminals and victims become blurred, and in certain cases, even reversed.

In the case of Israel, what changed over time was that Israel went from a state that exemplified Jewish victimhood (a role that Jewish liberals are comfortable with) to one in which Jews were actually in a position of power, which liberals are not comfortable with. Meanwhile, Palestinians, aided by the media, effectively exploited Jewish liberals by portraying themselves as the real victims, and Israel as the oppressors. I experienced this first hand once when I went on a Birthright Israel trip (which is a paid trip for American Jews to travel to Israel). At one point, we went to the cemetery at Mount Herzl, which is sort of Israel’s equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, and is located by Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust Museum. While stopping at the cemetery, we were asked to offer our feelings standing in a cemetery honoring fallen Israeli soldiers, and the first American Jew who commented was this liberal girl who reflected, “All I can think about is how many Palestinian graves there are.”

Israel, right now, is surrounded by terorrist groups dedicated to the nation’s destruction. Palestinian society teaches its children to aspire to slaughter Jews much in the same fashion as the Nazis indoctrinated their young. Suicide bombers who die in the act of killing Jewish civilians are celebrated as heroes. It’s a culture that glorifies death and uses women and children as human shields to gain sympathy from the international community — and especially liberal Jews. And the terrorists are receiving aid from Iran, a radical nation that vows to wipe Israel off the map within the context of seeking a nuclear weapon.

Yet against this backdrop, all liberal Jews want to do is to pin the blame on Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and engage in the magical thinking that more Jewish concessions will create peace and security. By doing so, they are helping the enemies of the Jews who are intent on finishing the job that Hitler started. While Israel has no shortage of critics, when Jewish liberals attack Israel, it’s that much more damaging, because Israel’s enemies can say, “See, even Jews admit that Israel is the oppressor.”

While I would never suggest that Jews who happen to be politically liberal would want a second Holocaust to happen, I do think that by participating in a campaign to defang Israel and prevent it from taking the actions necessary to defend itself, that Jewish liberals are making things significantly easier for those who do want to carry out a second Holocaust.

Luckily, though, there are a lot of Jews in Israel who are determined not to let that happen.

Daniel Larison:

Whether Klein finds it sickening or not, the more important point here is that this doesn’t seem to be true. I can’t speak for liberal Jews, but my guess is that what causes them to recoil is the thought of fellow Jews imposing inhumane, unjust policies on people under their power. If it were simply a matter of self-defense, rather than one of sustained occupation and the attendant humiliations and degradations visited on a subject people, there would be far less criticism because the government’s policies would be much easier to justify. Nationalists here in the U.S. insist on uncritical support for our policies abroad because they see this as an expression of loyalty to their country “right or wrong,” and “pro-Israel” hawks insist on offering the same kind of uncritical support for Israeli policies regardless of their merits or their consequences.

Of course, nationalists typically have a defective understanding of loyalty and a distorted understanding of patriotism, and hawks have a similarly defective understanding of what constitutes real, effective support for an ally. Encouraging a government in its worst habits and instincts, remaining silent in the face of its abuses and focusing all of their energies on attacking dissidents and critics are not the acts of friends or supporters. They are instead the acts of the blindly loyal who ultimately contibute to the ruin of the state they claim to defend.

P.S. As Beinart’s essay makes clear, it is the hard-line Israeli politicians who constantly invoke the history of Jewish victimhood to justify what they want to do. On the whole, it is “pro-Israel” hawks in the U.S. who grossly exaggerate the vulnerability and weakness of Israel’s position in the region to justify aggressive policies vis-a-vis Israel’s neighbors and other Near Eastern states. The trouble isn’t that Jewish liberals are uncomfortable with the power of Israel, but that “pro-Israel” hawks refuse to acknowledge the disparity between the power of the Israeli government and its enemies and the disparity in power between Israelis and Palestinians. On the whole, Jewish liberals seem to be willing to accept responsibility that wielding such power requires. In the meantime, “pro-Israel” hawks prefer an Israel that wields power under the constant protection of invoking victim status whenever someone criticizes the Israeli government’s abuses of power.

Ezra Klein:

This disagreement often falls across generational lines. As Beinart says, young Jews do not remember Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Algeria massing forces in the run-up to the Six-Day War. They do not remember a coalition of Arab forces streaming across the Sinai on Yom Kippur in order to catch the Jewish state by surprise. Their understanding of Israel was not forged watching the weak and threatened state improbably repel the attacks of potent adversaries.

The absence of such definitional memories has contributed to a new analysis of the Israeli situation. Today, Israel is far, far, far more militarily powerful than any of its assailants. None of the region’s armies would dare face the Jewish state on the battlefield, and in the event that they tried, they would be slaughtered. Further stacking the deck is America’s steadfast support of Israel. Any serious threat would trigger an immediate defense by the most powerful army the world has ever known. In effect, Israel’s not only the strongest power in the region, but it has the Justice League on speed dial.

That is not to say that the Jewish state is not under threat. Conventional attacks pose no danger, but one terrorist group with one nuclear weapon and one good plan could do horrible damage to the small, dense country. That threat, however, is fundamentally a danger born of the Arab world’s hatred of Israel. It follows, then, that hastening the peace that will begin to ease that hatred makes Israel safer. Exacerbating the tensions that feed it, conversely, only makes the threat more severe.

And to many of us, it looks like Israel is making the threat more severe. Its decision to pummel the city of Gaza from the air in a misguided attempt to punish Hamas. The ascension of Avigdor Lieberman and the return of Benjamin Netanyahu. Neither an overwhelming assault certain to kill many Arab civilians or a political movement that seeks to disenfranchise Israeli Arabs — whose respected position in Israeli politics has long been a point of pride for Jews — seems likely to begin the long process required to get back to the place where peace is conceivable.

Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Peter Beinart here and here

David Goldman at First Things:

Liberalism assumes that clever and and enlightened people can engineer happy outcomes for everyone. The notion that some peoples fail of their own deficiencies is anathema to liberalism, whose premise is that enlightened intervention can solve all the problems of any society. That is what Jewish college students are taught.

It certainly is getting harder and harder to be both a liberal and a Zionist. To support a Jewish state on purely secular grounds is the conceit of generations that long ago faded away. There is no more illiberal notion than the Election of Israel. To a generation whose heart bleeds for every endangered species, the prospect that peoples may perish of their own cultural failings is an unthinkable, horrendous, nightmarish proposition.

Nonetheless Israel’s position is stronger than ever in the hearts of Americans. The Orthodox may be fewer in number, but more young Americans are spending time in Israel, studying in Israel, and moving to Israel than ever before. The rapid growth of the young Orthodox Jewish population is making an impact on Israeli demographics (which are in excellent condition due to a fertility rate of nearly 3), and will make an increasing impact over time. Skullcaps are multiplying on American college campuses, and many of them sit on heads that spent a year before college at an Israeli yeshiva.

In absolute numbers, the support of young American Jews for Israel is stronger than it ever has been. Zionism is in no danger. The entity that is in trouble is Jewish liberalism.

Ross Douthat:

I will leave the debate over the justice of Beinart’s portrait of both Israel and its American supporters to his fellow anguished liberal Zionists, Jeffrey Goldberg and Jonathan Chait. What I wonder is whether the trend that Beinart describes — the diminishing bond between secular American Jews and the state of Israel — was more or less inevitable, no matter what policies were pursued in Israel and what kind of attitudes American Zionist organizations struck. Benjamin Netanyahu and Abe Foxman may have accelerated the process, but it’s hard to imagine that the more secular, more assimilated sections of the Jewish-American population wouldn’t have eventually drifted away from an intense connection with Israel anyway, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Italian-Americans are less attached to both Italy and Catholicism than they were in 1940 or so, or that Irish-American are far less interested in the politics of Eire and Northern Ireland than they used to be.

Peter Beinart in The Daily Beast

UPDATE: Jamie Kirchick at Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy’s discussion of the article

Peter Beinart in The Daily Beast

Noah Millman at The American Scene

UPDATE #2: Peter Beinart and Eli Lake at Bloggingheads

Noah Pollak at Commentary

UPDATE #3: Beinart in Forward

David Frum at FrumForum

UPDATE #4: Eric Alterman in The Nation

Chait responds to Alterman

UPDATE #5: Jack Shafer at Slate

Tony Judt, Kafka, And Night

Ross Douthat:

When I took note, earlier this month, of a lecture that Tony Judt delivered at NYU in October, I had no idea that he’d delivered it while paralyzed from the neck down by Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Now Judt has published what promises to be the first in a series of reflections on his illness.

Tony Judt at The New York Review Of Books:

I suffer from a motor neuron disorder, in my case a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Lou Gehrig’s disease. Motor neuron disorders are far from rare: Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and a variety of lesser diseases all come under that heading. What is distinctive about ALS—the least common of this family of neuro-muscular illnesses—is firstly that there is no loss of sensation (a mixed blessing) and secondly that there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.

[…]

This cockroach-like existence is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable. “Cockroach” is of course an allusion to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into an insect. The point of the story is as much the responses and incomprehension of his family as it is the account of his own sensations, and it is hard to resist the thought that even the best-meaning and most generously thoughtful friend or relative cannot hope to understand the sense of isolation and imprisonment that this disease imposes upon its victims. Helplessness is humiliating even in a passing crisis—imagine or recall some occasion when you have fallen down or otherwise required physical assistance from strangers. Imagine the mind’s response to the knowledge that the peculiarly humiliating helplessness of ALS is a life sentence (we speak blithely of death sentences in this connection, but actually the latter would be a relief).

Morning brings some respite, though it says something about the lonely journey through the night that the prospect of being transferred to a wheelchair for the rest of the day should raise one’s spirits! Having something to do, in my case something purely cerebral and verbal, is a salutary diversion—if only in the almost literal sense of providing an occasion to communicate with the outside world and express in words, often angry words, the bottled-up irritations and frustrations of physical inanition.

The best way to survive the night would be to treat it like the day. If I could find people who had nothing better to do than talk to me all night about something sufficiently diverting to keep us both awake, I would search them out. But one is also and always aware in this disease of the necessary normalcy of other people’s lives: their need for exercise, entertainment, and sleep. And so my nights superficially resemble those of other people. I prepare for bed; I go to bed; I get up (or, rather, am got up). But the bit between is, like the disease itself, incommunicable.

I suppose I should be at least mildly satisfied to know that I have found within myself the sort of survival mechanism that most normal people only read about in accounts of natural disasters or isolation cells. And it is true that this disease has its enabling dimension: thanks to my inability to take notes or prepare them, my memory—already quite good—has improved considerably, with the help of techniques adapted from the “memory palace” so intriguingly depicted by Jonathan Spence. But the satisfactions of compensation are notoriously fleeting. There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.

Tyler Cowen

Ezra Klein:

A few years ago, Tony Judt received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease. At this point, he’s paralyzed from the neck down. His essay on the experience — dictated, of course — particularly the torments of the night, is deeply affecting, not least because Judt stubbornly refuses to pretend that silver linings compensate for unending storms

James Wolcott:

If you’re ever inclined to feel unduly sorry for yourself, to steep in self-pity and complain that fate has dealt you a cruel hand, read this, by Tony Judt, held captive in his own body through a chain of mute, dark, unyielding hours.

Ampersand:

I’ve long admired Tony Judt’s political writings. I didn’t know that he is disabled, with a progressive condition that has almost entirely paralyzed him below his neck. His short piece “Night,” about getting through the nights when he is immobile, is excellent. (I did wonder why he doesn’t have a voice-operated computer positioned so he can use it from his bed, but my guess is that he wants to encourage sleep, not put off going to sleep).

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman

UPDATE #2: Judt died on August 6. His obit in NYT by William Grimes

The Thing Is, It Also Gave Us That God-Awful Jesus Jones Song

Matt Welch at Reason:

On August 23, 1989, officials from the newly reformed and soon-to-be-renamed Communist Party of Hungary ceased policing the country’s militarized border with Austria. Some 13,000 East Germans, many of whom had been vacationing at nearby Lake Balaton, fled across the frontier to the free world. It was the largest breach of the Iron Curtain in a generation, and it kicked off a remarkable chain of events that ended 11 weeks later with the righteous citizen dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

Twenty years later, the anniversary of that historic border crossing was noted in exactly four American newspapers, according to the Nexis database, and all four mentions were in reprints of a single syndicated column. August anniversaries receiving more media play in the U.S. included the 400th anniversary of Galileo building his telescope, the 150th anniversary of the first oil well, and the 25th anniversary of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A Google News search of “anniversary” and “freedom” on August 23, 2009, turned up scores of Woodstock references before the first mention of Hungary.

Get used to it, if you haven’t already. November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes in this issue as the “Jurassic Park statism” of the 1930s (see “ ‘The Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs,’ ” page 42). There have been more Hollywood hagiographies of the revolutionary communist Che Guevara in the last five years than there have been studio pictures in the last two decades about the revolutionary anti-communists who dramatically toppled totalitarians from Tallin to Prague (see Tim Cavanaugh’s “Hollywood Comrades,” page 62). And what little general-nonfiction interest there is in the superpower struggle, as Michael C. Moynihan details on page 48 (“The Cold War Never Ended”), remains stuck in the same Reagan vs. Gorby frame that made the 1980s so intellectually shallow the first time around.

Timothy Garton Ash at New York Review of Books:

In truth, the essence of 1989 lies in the multiple interactions not merely of a single society and party-state, but of many societies and states, in a series of interconnected three-dimensional chess games. While the French Revolution of 1789 always had foreign dimensions and repercussions, and became an international event with the revolutionary wars, it originated as a domestic development in one large country. The European revolution of 1989 was, from the outset, an international event—and by international I mean not just the diplomatic relations between states but also the interactions of both states and societies across borders. So the lines of causation include the influence of individual states on their own societies, societies on their own states, states on other states, societies on other societies, states on other societies (for example, Gorbachev’s direct impact on East-Central Europeans), and societies on other states (for example, the knock-on effect on the Soviet Union of popular protest in East-Central Europe). These portmanteau notions of state and society have themselves to be disaggregated into groups, factions, and individuals, including unique actors such as Pope John Paul II.

The end of communism in Europe brought the most paradoxical realization of a communist dream. Poland in 1980–1981 saw a workers’ revolution—but it was against a so-called workers’ state. Communists dreamed of proletarian internationalism spreading revolution from country to country; in 1989–1991, revolution did finally spread from country to country, with the effect of dismantling communism. Yet the story is as much one of unintended consequences as it is of deliberate actions—let alone of historical necessity.

So what happened in 1989 can only be understood on the basis of a scrupulous, detailed chronological reconstruction of intended and unintended effects, in multiple directions on multiple stages, day by day, and sometimes—as on the evening of November 9 in Berlin—minute by minute. The reporting or misreporting of events, especially by television, is itself a vital part of the causal chain. When a trusted, avuncular presenter on the 10:30 PM West German television news declared that “the gates in the Wall are wide open” they were not yet wide open; but this report helped to make them so, since it increased the flood of East Berliners (who watched and were more inclined to believe West German television) hoping to get through the frontier crossings to the West, and the crowds of West Berliners coming to greet them on the other side.^[5] An erroneous report on Radio Free Europe that a student called Martin Šmid had been killed, in the suppression of the November 17, 1989, student demonstration in Prague, helped to swell the protesting crowds in the first days of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. (In what seems to me the best, and certainly the most amusing, of the retrospective chronicles, György Dalos tells how the student came home the next evening to be told by a somewhat agitated father that he was reportedly dead.)

A model of the kind of fine-grained, multinational analysis that we need is the work of the Harvard scholar Mark Kramer on Soviet–East European relations, so far published only in a series of scholarly articles, research papers, and book chapters.^[6] Basing his work on extensive digging in Soviet and East European archives, plus a wide range of published sources, Kramer demonstrates the full intricacy of the interaction between imperial center and periphery. He concludes that what he calls the “spillover” was mainly from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe between 1986 and 1988, in both directions in 1989, and then mainly back from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, as the Baltic states, Ukraine, and eventually Russia itself were emboldened to follow the East-Central European example of self-liberation. If leading academic publishers are not already pursuing Kramer to turn this work into a book, they should start doing so now.

Alex Massie:

Histories of the Cold war written in capital cities often fall into the Great Man trap (It was Reagan! No, it was Gorbachev!) or a false sense of historical inevitability (Communism was always doomed!) but the truth is rarely as simple as that. We see through a glass darkly, at best, and our – or anyone’s – ability to predict, let alone control, events is severely limited. Here too, boldness is not necessarily our friend and the case for limited government – that is, for modest government – seems pretty strong.

David Frum in the National Post:

Perhaps the point is obvious, and yet it still needs to be said. Nov. 9 is not only the anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. It is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the organized attack upon German Jews in 1938, and of Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch in 1923.

Some kind dispensation of fate has arranged for this grim anniversary now to be tinctured with the joy of 1989. Yet there is a reason that the new reunified German state has chosen to set its national day not on Nov. 9, but on Oct. 3: the anniversary of the formal merger of the two Germanies in 1990.

Nov. 9 is the more momentous date, but like so many German dates, it is perhaps too momentous to be remembered in full.

On this particular Nov. 9, the Germans will want to remember only what is joyous. Even the day’s anthem is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Let’s join with them. They have built a good society and a solid democracy. They have earned the right to a little forgetting.

Nina L. Khrushcheva at Foreign Policy:

It has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, yet Russia still cannot accept the loss of its imperial power. Today it is clear that unlike other communist states, Russia’s own 75 years of captivity to Soviet ideals and leadership cannot be blamed on the despotic nature of its former communist leaders. Neither closed borders, nor the Iron Curtain, nor the Berlin Wall, can imprison the Russian mind more than the idea of a Great Russia. As the saying goes, “Every nation deserves its government.” Russians fully deserve Putin’s illiberal leadership, and his popularity consistently rates at more than 70 percent. It is Mikhail Gorbachev and his liberal ideals that they have never embraced, or deserved.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias

Ross Douthat in the NYT

UPDATE #2: Noah Millman at The American Scene

James Joyner

Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic

Matt Y on Kaplan

Attackerman on Kaplan

Alex Massie on Kaplan

Daniel Larison on Kaplan

Do We Burn The Village To Save It? Massing Versus Glenzilla

Michael Massing in the New York Review Of Books:

The bloggers I have been reading reject such reflexive attempts at “balance,” and it’s their willingness to dispense with such conventions that makes the blogosphere a lively and bracing place. This is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Glenn Greenwald. A lawyer and former litigator, Greenwald is a relative newcomer to blogging, having begun only in December 2005, but as Eric Boehlert notes in his well-researched but somewhat breathless Bloggers on the Bus, within six months of his debut he “had ascended to an unofficial leadership position within the blogosphere.” In contrast to the short, punchy posts favored by most bloggers, Greenwald offers a single daily essay of two thousand to three thousand words. In each, he draws on extensive research, amasses a daunting array of facts, and, as Boehlert puts it, builds his case “much like an attorney does.”

Greenwald initially made his mark with fierce attacks on the Bush administration’s policy of warrantless surveillance, and he continues to comment on the subject with great fury. Other recent targets have included Goldman Sachs (for its influence in the Obama administration), Jeffrey Rosen (for his dismissive New Republic piece on Sonia Sotomayor), Jeffrey Goldberg (for his attacks on the Times ‘s Roger Cohen), the Washington Post Op-Ed page (for the many neoconservatives in residence), and the national press in general (for its insistence on using euphemisms for the word “torture”). In June he wrote:

The steadfast, ongoing refusal of our leading media institutions to refer to what the Bush administration did as “torture”—even in the face of more than 100 detainee deaths; the use of that term by a leading Bush official to describe what was done at Guantánamo; and the fact that media outlets frequently use the word “torture” to describe the exact same methods when used by other countries—reveals much about how the modern journalist thinks.For the press, Greenwald added, “there are two sides and only two sides to every ‘debate’—the Beltway Democratic establishment and the Beltway Republican establishment.”

In so vigilantly watching over the press, Greenwald has performed an invaluable service. But his posts have a downside. Absorbing the full force of his arguments and dutifully following his corroborating links, I felt myself drawn into an ideological wind tunnel, with the relentless gusts of opinion and analysis gradually wearing me down. After reading his harsh denunciations of Obama’s decision not to release the latest batch of torture photos, I began to lose sight of the persuasive arguments that other commentators have made in support of the President’s position. As well-argued and provocative as I found many of Greenwald’s postings, they often seem oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.

Greenwald responds:

Massing examines the work of several online journalists and commentators and is largely complimentary of the blogosphere [“a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.”].  He’s also largely complimentary of what I do here (“The bloggers I have been reading reject such reflexive attempts at ‘balance,’ and it’s their willingness to dispense with such conventions that makes the blogosphere a lively and bracing place. This is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Glenn Greenwald”; “Greenwald offers a single daily essay of two thousand to three thousand words. In each, he draws on extensive research, amasses a daunting array of facts”; “In so vigilantly watching over the press, Greenwald has performed an invaluable service”).

[…] But the mentality reflected by Massing’s view — there are no “principles”; everything must give way to “practical considerations” of Washington officials — is precisely what has become so rampant and is what accounts for most of the lawlessness and corruption in our political class.  Instead of “the President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” we have: “Presidents should try to obey the law except when they decree there are good reasons to violate it.”  Instead of “in America the law is king,” we have: “we can only apply the law when it won’t undermine bipartisanship.”  Instead of “treaties shall be the supreme Law of the Land,” we have:  “we can’t have torture prosecutions because they’ll distract from health care.”  To “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause” and “No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” we have added:  “unless there are Terrorists who want to harm us, in which case we spy without warrants and imprison people for life without charges.”

The standard Beltway mindset doesn’t recognize principles or the validity of Constitutional guarantees.  People who believe in those things — who takes them seriously and think they should be applied independent of “practicalities” — are naive extremists and ideologues.  But just read what those Constitutional provisions say:  it’s not possible to believe in them without being what Joe Klein derisively called a “civil liberties extremist.”  Constitutional guarantees and principles are, by their nature, extremist and absolute.

Relatedly, the Beltway mindset also don’t recognize political controversies where only one side — not two — is right or is speaking factually.  There are many political disputes where there are two or more reasonable sides and where solutions can legitimately be shaped by political compromise and “practical considerations” — by putting Arlen Specter and Susan Collins in a room with Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe and arbitrarily dividing everything in the middle in order to attract bipartisan and “centrist” support.  But not all political questions are supposed to be resolved by that sort of randomly compromising horse-trading.  Yet the Washington mindset doesn’t recognize any other type of political question; they think that all political matters, including ones grounded in Constitutional guarantees and the rule of law, must be subjected to that process of dilution.

Brad DeLong:

The total content of Massing’s critique of Greenwald is that Greenwald is (a) shrill and (b) effective, and that that makes Massing uncomfortable.

This is an excellent and reflexive example of exactly what Massing earlier in the article had called “reflexive attempts at ‘balance'” the absence of which “makes the blogosphere a lively and bracing place”–and the presence of which sucks the lifeblood out of the mainstream print media and will soon consign it to a sodden death.

Does Massing understand that by not making a real critique of Greenwald–by not saying what the “persuasive arguments… in support of the president’s position” are, that he is performing the kind of journamalism that he has condemned for most of the article? Is it just a little albeit sophisticated joke on his part?

The consensus of observers is no, that it is not a joke. Massing has, at this stage in his article, decided that he needs to cover his flank: to:

establish his I’m-not-shrill bonafides here…

as one of Massing’s peers put it in email, and that Massing does so:

in a shameful way…

If Massing thinks that the arguments against Greenwald are persuasive, then they are worth laying out in the article. If they are not worth laying out in the article, then they are not persuasive–and Massing should not claim that they are.

James Joyner:

The advancement of technology have blurred some lines and simultaneously increased the potential costs to society of strict obedience to the Bill of Rights, and made it much easier for government to abuse its power.  I frequently disagree with Glenn as to precisely where the line ought be drawn on various matters but fundamentally agree with his insistence in the rule of law.  As Barry Goldwater famously put it, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”  Less famously, in the same speech, he observed,

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Many seem to think this notion only applies when their party is out of power.  Greenwald, at least, recognizes that it’s just as true when his own guy is in office.

Matthew Yglesias, not on Massing or Greenwald, but blogging about a WaPo chat:

But what the audience wants isn’t an explanation but a justification of the media’s conduct. Typically, though, press figures when faced with a specific complaint will wave the complaint off by noting that the output in question was generated according to the prevailing conventions. The question, however, is whether the conventions are producing decent results.

I frequently here journalists complain that Media Matters or Glenn Greenwald “doesn’t understand how the press works.” Which is probably true. But the point is not to understand the details of how it works but to ask whether or not it’s working well.

Clive Davis

Chekhov’s Mistress

If “Back To The Future” Was Made Today, Marty McFly Goes Back To 1979

Brink Lindsey has a piece in Reason called Nostalgianomics about liberal pinning for the 50s. Specifically, he’s speaking of Paul Krugman, income inequality and social progress. The last two graphs:

Paul Krugman may long for the return of selfdenying corporate workers who declined to seek better opportunities out of organizational loyalty, and thus kept wages artificially suppressed, but these are creatures of a bygone ethos—an ethos that also included uncritical acceptance of racist and sexist traditions and often brutish intolerance of deviations from mainstream lifestyles and sensibilities.

The rise in income inequality does raise issues of legitimate public concern. And reasonable people disagree hotly about what ought to be done to ensure that our prosperity is widely shared. But the caricature of postwar history put forward by Krugman and other purveyors of nostalgianomics won’t lead us anywhere. Reactionary fantasies never do.

Veronique de Rugy at The Corner

Jim Manzi:

Brink goes on to argue that the political and social changes that have allowed growing inequality – and have in turn been reinforced by it – are good things, not bad things. These include greater freedom for women, acceptance of diversity and non-conformism and so on. I broadly agree with this diagnosis, though I think that Krugman paints too rosy a picture of the 1950s and Brink pays too rosy a picture of the current era. The trade-offs involved in policies that allow or encourage growing inequality are not nearly as one-sided as either Brink or Krugman asserts. They are uncomfortable.

But the United States didn’t just wake up in 1980 and decide to make a set of uncomfortable trade-offs through a process of abstract reasoning, or even entirely through organic social developments, we were pushed. What I think is missing from the debate as presented in Brink’s piece is international competition.

Manzi links to Jonah Goldberg, who writes about nostalgia for an even earlier time:

It seems to me that all of the new New Deal talk fails to grasp that the extent to which nostalgia drives our assumptions of “what works.” Even if you give the most charitable reading of the New Deal and the postwar period, the simple fact remains that those times aren’t like these times.

Goldberg is discussing the Niall Ferguson Financial Times article about Keynes and Krugman. Krugman had this blog post on Ferguson in early May. Here’s Paul Krugman‘s column on inflation, published a day before Ferguson. The New York Review of Books symposium with Krugman, Ferguson, Roubini, etc… Andrew Stuttaford excerpts part of the Ferguson piece at The Corner:

Of course, Mr Krugman knew what I meant. “The only thing that might drive up interest rates,” he acknowledged during our debate, “is that people may grow dubious about the financial solvency of governments.” Might? May? The fact is that people – not least the Chinese government – are already distinctly dubious. They understand that US fiscal policy implies big purchases of government bonds by the Fed this year, since neither foreign nor private domestic purchases will suffice to fund the deficit. This policy is known as printing money and it is what many governments tried in the 1970s, with inflationary consequences you do not need to be a historian to recall.

This fight between Ferguson and Krugman has gotten a lot of blog press.

Henry Blodget at Clusterstock

Noam Scheiber at TNR

Sheldon Filger at HuffPo

Gideon Rachman in FT

Cees Bruggemans in iAfrica sums it up:

But as history has shown, this may actually be very rational, demanding upfront that policymakers show it can work and thereby earning the compliance of bondholders rather than merely naively assume such compliance to be blindly forthcoming. Mr Ferguson goes wrong in claiming with the expectations crowd that governments are always wrong. In the present global crisis the Keynesian medication is needed and will work and to decry it merely suggests an inability to distinguish good from bad policy.

[…]So was this clash of titans useful? It most certainly helped in seeing where both gentlemen are going right, but also where they err. This aside of personal pettiness which suggests real big egos can’t have a normal conversation without completely missing the point of each other.

UPDATE: Daniel Gross in Slate