There’s been a lot of talk in the more fever-swampish corners of the hawkish right of Iranian expansion into leftist Latin America countries. And some of it has been supported by the fact that Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez — two populist dictators who secured greater power in military coups — are somewhat buddy-buddy. But when it comes to hard evidence of Iranian influence in Latin America, specifically in the form of a rumored “super-embassy” in Nicaragua that Secretary Clinton had warned of back in May, evidence appears to be lacking:

But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.

Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing. Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: “It doesn’t exist.” Government officials say the U.S. Embassy complex is the only “mega-embassy” in Managua. A U.S. diplomat in Managua conceded: “There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell.”

The mysterious, unseen giant embassy underscores how Iran’s expansion into Latin America may be less substantive than some in Washington fear.

Even if Iran is doing some investment and infrastructure building in Latin America, it’s still absolutely ludicrous to compare, as Connie Mack does, what’s going on between Iran and Venezuela and Nicaragua to what the Soviet Union was doing in Cuba or elsewhere during the Cold War. And putting aside whatever specific details over whether or not there’s a super-embassy in Managua, the point should be continually stressed that Iran is, compared to the United States, a small poor country that only threatens our interests because we’ve taken it upon ourselves to essentially govern the Middle East and be responsible for the world’s flow of oil.

When it comes to Latin America, where we have unmatched economic and political weight, any real concern that Iran could affect our interests in a meaningful way is just threat-mongering.

And, getting back to the super-embassy, the Post article is just wonderful in how it gets so many quotes from people confidently asserting the existence of a building or complex that doesn’t appear to exist. Michael Rubin, not to mention the State Department, doesn’t come out looking to good.

Radical utopians like myself see nuclear weapons as entirely pointless, and think that a main priority should be doing everything possible to totally eliminate all of them. But reasonable people can disagree on this point. What I don’t think reasonable can disagree on is that the amount of nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia have is way too many. Moreover, the number of strategic warheads we have — somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 — whose only purpose is to be able to kill so many people so as to deter other countries from using their strategic warheads, is nothing short of insane. Even if the reduction that Obama and Medvedev agreed to was only slightly less than already scheduled cuts and still allows for a distended nuclear arsenal, they’re still signifigant in two very simple ways.

One, in general, you shouldn’t spend lots of money maintaining things that you have literally no plan of ever using. And even if there’s deterrent value, one surely doesn’t need so many nukes.

Second, nuclear accidents. Every strategic nuke, or any nuke, is a weapon that can be lost, stolen, accidentally detonated or any number of bad things. Considering that the Air Force doesn’t seem to take nuclear safety very seriously more, on the margins, it will be good to give them fewer chances to totally screw things over.

I think these two points are basically incontestable. And moreover, we could get down to many fewer nukes before it even becomes debatable whether or not the cuts are a good idea.

For more speculative, bigger foreign grand geostrategic implications, check out Yglesias.

Dan Senor and Christine Whiton, two former Bush Administration officials, argue in Time that all previous democratic transitions happened with Western support, and so we should more explicilty support Moussavi and the protestors in Iran. This seems like a fair point, but when you look at the actual examples they give, they are clearly irrelevant to the current situation.

First they mention the Eastern Bloc. And yes, it’s true, the United States supported opposition movements in those countries, and the Eastern Bloc was  mostly sucessful in transitioning to democracy. But the difference between, say, Poland and Iran is that Poland only had a totalitarian system because it was imposed on them by the Soviet Union. So, not only were they essentially occupied by a despised foreign nation, but once that regime became impotent, overthrowing a political and military strcuture that was dependent on Soviet support became much easier. Iran’s authoritarian leadership is not a satellite of another unpopular foreign power. This strikes me as a fairly important distinction.

Their second example is just absurd — South Korea. Senor and Whitman write that “energetic bipartisan U.S. pressure peaked in 1987 when U.S. ambassador Jim Lilley hand delivered a letter from President Reagan urging against a crackdown on protesters. The advice was heeded. Two weeks later the protesters’ demands were met, and Korean democracy was born.” But can you think of any differences between Iran and South Korea? Oh yeah, South Korea was not only a strong US ally, but there have been tens of thousands of US troops stationed there since the end of the Korean War. It seems obvious why the authoritarian leadership would be more susceptible to US pressure.

What’s worse about this piece is that when they’re done dealing with the arguments against more active US involvement against the regime, they never say exactly what Obama should do differently. This seems like a fairly important question that nearly every conservative Obama critic has been oddly silent on.

There’s been a lot of confusion in the critiques of Obama’s stance on Iran. Some critics want Obama to be more forceful rhetorically, but don’t then substantiate how such a move would actually help the protestors, or even what the ultimate end-goal should or could be. Other suggestions, like blatant material support for opposition groups, are clearly wrongheaded.

George Packer, however, offers the most plausible case for more forceful rhetoric from Obama:

Every day you have to summon the courage to go out into the streets (where the death toll is now reportedly at thirty-two), and your awareness of international opinion is steadily diminishing as Internet and phone access is choked off, A part of your mind is alert to the danger of being labeled an American agent, always a factor in the regime’s propaganda; but given the enormous risks you’re already running, a much larger part of your mind is afraid that the world is going to lose interest or write you off, that the regime is going to stop feeling any international pressure to behave with restraint, and that when the guns start mowing protesters down in earnest, no one will be watching. When the stakes are this high, being the object of too much foreign concern is not likely to be your number one fear.

This is an argument for more pointed and judgmental rhetoric from Obama, who has the biggest megaphone in the world. But I’m not sure it’s really necessary.

Iran is not Burma, Iran is not Kyrgzstan. Even if the activities of journalists are being restricted, there are still plenty of reporters in Tehran. Also, Iran, unlike Burma, isn’t cut off from the rest of the world, and while it may seem a tad glib to say that twitter and youtube can make up for the power of the president to capture the world’s attention, if anything, those first few days of protests where Obama took, in Packer’s words, a stance that “made the U.S. look out of touch with the reality in the streets of Tehran, inexplicably afraid of offending Ahmadinejad” showed that Obama needn’t say anything for the world to know about the protesters’ cause.

Also, if the concern of the protestors is that  ”the world is going to lose interest or write you off,” then there are plenty of people and groups besides the President who can assauge those concerns. Michael Walzer has argued convincingly that instead of looking for the government to support the protestors, people should:

Confronting mass protests in Iran, where at least some of the protesters, perhaps many of them, are our political friends, let’s help them through our parties, and unions, and religious groups, and magazines. Let’s write about them, publish their stories, raise money for their activities, condemn their arrests, hold meetings, sign petitions, picket Iranian embassies in every country where we can mobilize the picketers. Let’s explore every possible means of agitation and advocacy on behalf of our principles and our friends.This is an ideological struggle, and that kind of struggle isn’t first of all the business of governments. It is the business of politically committed men and women.

If the problem is literally one of attention, of enough people knowing about and seeing the protests so that the regime is to embarassed to openly slaughter the protestors, than the work of those “politically committed men and women” — like those setting up proxy servers so Iranians can bypass censors — can make sure that the world’s eye stays focused on the protests, without Obama exacting the real diplomatic and political costs of speaking more forcefully.

But Packer and Obama are actually on the same page now, and if anything, the fact that Obama adjusted his position to make it more in line with what Packer says in necessary to sustain the protests and shame the regime shows how Obama is a relatively small player in this large, complex and very Iranian drama.

Victor Davis Hanson makes the somewhat plausible argument that liberals would not be saying that we shouldn’t get openly or vociferously involved in the events in Iran had Obama followed the policy conservatives recommend , and had Obama followed that policy, liberals would support him. Correspondingly, had the election happened while Bush was in office and Bush took Obama’s stance, Hanson argues that we would be criticizing Bush for being overly cynical.

Now, even if you accept this as true — notwithstanding the fact that Obama being president could have been an important variable in the amount of support Mousavi got — it doesn’t reflect well on conservatives. If Obama were openly taking sides, wouldn’t they just be saying it was more of the same empty, hope-filled rhetoric? Would they ever unambiguously support an Obama foreign policy position?

But the real point is that this type of counterfactual is totally silly. The reason Democrats and liberals support Obama is not because he’s Obama, it’s because they substantively agree with where Obama stands. Now, one some issues that people don’t care about or are uninformed on, they’ll follow someone they trust, but big foreign policy questions are totally different. Not only did Obama draw sharp contrasts with Bush during the campaign and while in office, he also did so with Clinton during the primary. From the beginning, Obama has defined himself by his approach to foreign policy, and has been rewarded with support. So, imagining Obama taking the exact opposite track than the one he’s taking and then speculating about how Democrats would react to it is pretty pointless.

Robert Kagan, responding to Jonathan Chait’s criticism of his Washington Post column in which he called Obama a “objectively pro-Ahmad,” criticizes Obama for accepting the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad regime:

Bush, on the other hand, occupied a policy no-man’s land:  not being willing to endorse the legitimacy of the regime AND not helping the opposition.  my point is that Obama had moved to a policy of accepting the legitimacy of the regime, in keeping with the grand bargain approach, and that the continuation of that approach would eventually be to promise the regime that the US would undertake no actions that would in any way be destabilizing to it.

This is strange stuff. Are all non-democratic leaders of states illegitimate and thus should be ignored by the United States? Is Hu Jintao illegitimate, is Fidel Castro illegitmate? Now, even if we assume that Ahmadinejad lost the election (which probably isn’t true) and now is ruling based on votes he didn’t actually win, was he an illegitimate leader from 2005 to last week? This strikes me as an odd position to take. For better or for worse (OK, for worse), lots of countries, and even some big important countries, are ruled by leaders who weren’t democratically elected or have non democratic governments.

One could certainly argue that in some ideal or theoretical sense, Mubarak or Jintao or even Medvedev aren’t legitimate, but inasmuch as this leads you to a policy of pretending that the governments of Egypt, China and Russia shouldn’t be recognized, this discussion becomes basically moot. And when we’ve tried to just ignore countries because we didn’t like them — Cuba since the Revolution, the P.R.C. through 1972 — it didn’t actually help us accomplish any meaningful objectives. Also, at a certian point, the group of people who perform the tasks of a government are the government, regardless of any larger moral claims. Kagan’s complaints are also rendered hollow by the fact that we have all sorts of relationships with regimes that are orders of mangnitutde less democratic, liberal and “legitimate” than Iran. Saudi Arabia doesn’t bother having elections, Egypt has totally phony ones and yet we manage to deal with their leaders as if they were legitimate.

I understand why people argue that Obama shouldn’t negotiate with Ahmadinejad while all this turmoil is still going on, but ultimately Iran’s nuclear program is something we have to deal with, and if the best way of doing that is through direct talks, than all this stuff about legitimacy is very much moot.

For more, check out this.

There are obviously plenty of problems with Krauthammer’s latest column excoriating Obama for not “meddling” in Iran. But here’s one part that was especially curious:

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

I mean, maybe, but is it really so inconceivable that the protests end with Moussavi as president and Rafsanjani as Supreme Leader? Or some other arrangement that leaves much of the institutional structure of the Islamic Republic intact? Sure, these types of attempted rebellions tend to end in violent repression, but the scenarios I’ve outlined seemed just as likely as a complete overthrow of the existing political system.

But I understand why Krauthammer wants it make it seem like a stark choice between the continued survival of a hard-line, belligerent theocracy and a new regime that would “mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism” that would “leave it forever spent and discredited” and would go on to inspire further revolts all over the Middle East. This way Krauthammer can make Obama seem opposed to all sorts of developments that all reasonable people would see as good. It would be nice if a democratic regime sprung up in Iran, made all sorts of liberal reforms, stopped funding terrorism and didn’t develop nuclear weapons. But there’s hardly enough evidence — if any — that suggests the protesters want to see that type of system or that their substantive foreign policy views, as opposed to their tone, regarding enrichment and terrorism are really all that different from what we have now. Who knows, maybe they are, but it’s hardly obvious how a total regime change shake out.

But then again, it wouldn’t be Krauthammer if he let ambiguity and uncertain get in the way of making Manichean pronouncements about American foreign policy.

When this story originally broke in Haaertz, it alluded to how Dennis Ross being Jewish may have played a role in his rumored ouster from his position as special envoy to Iran. Of course, that’s not actually true — the mere fact that Ross, say, recites the schema every Saturday (or every day!) doesn’t disqualify him as an Iran/Persian Gulf envoy, it’s his close connections, both ideologically and personally to Israel that makes him less than credible to anyone in the Middle East besides Israel.

That and he just published a book which has a bit contemplating military action against Iran, and so you could see why he would get moved to a different spot in the government. There’s also the problem that of the three special envoys in the larger region – Mitchell, Holbrooke and Ross — Holbrooke has been sucking up the most oxygen and that Mitchell seems to have some expectations hoisted on him about jumpstarting the peace process. Ross, on the other hand, is something of an odd man out, both ideologically and logistically, so it’s not surprising that he could be going somewhere else in the government.

Of course, Haaertz seems to be the only one reporting on this, so take it all with a grain of salt.

UPDATE: Time is saying that Ross is moving to the National Security Council, which may very well be an upgrade, seeing as that puts him closer to Obama.

A while back, I made a point of reading Commentary’s blog — Contentions — frequently and commenting/responding/criticizing their work. For a variety of reasons, from boredom to just blogging less, I don’t do this anymore. But this head-scratcher from Martin Kramer just begged for a response:

Some of the influences on Obama bubble to the surface. There is the Third Worldism: Muslims are victims of our colonialism (Obama has read Fanon) and the Cold War (has he been reading Khalidi again?) The primacy of the West is over: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” There is the implicit comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans during segregation, a familiar trope (Carter and Condi went for it too). Israel comes across as an anomaly. There is no appreciation of Israel as a strategic asset – its ties to the United States are “cultural and historical,” and thus not entirely rational. (That validates Obama’s other former Chicago colleague, Mearsheimer.) All of this has the ring of conviction – and of a Third Worldist sensibility.

As far as I can tell, the only evidence Kramer needs to show that Obama’s claims that “muslims are victims of our colonialism..and the cold war” are wrong headed is that he can cite two left wing critics of colonial and imperial foreign policy who make these arguments. I guess in Commentary world, the mere fact that Rashid Khalidi or Frantz Fanon said something makes it necessarily not true.

But that’s not the only bizarre part of argument. There’s also the sheer amount of paranoia on display, Kramer just had to paint Obama in this absurd light as a adherent of Fanon and a “Third Worldist.” Now, why a Third Worlder would, say, expand our presence in Afghanistan or even want to become the commander-in-chief of the American military is beyond me, but whatever.

The more important thing is that what Obama said about the Muslim world’s interaction with the West and with the United States specifically is totally true, no matter if it happens to overlap with critical thinkers like Khalidi or Fanon. Would Kramer like to dispute that America played a major part in meddling with the affairs of Muslim and Middle Eastern nations before the Cold War? I mean, is there even an argument? And during the Cold War, would Richman deny that America sponsored all sorts of nasty leaders in Muslim countries, some of whom slaughtered their own people. Or that the U.S. gleefully played both sides in and helped prolong a  near-decade long war that killed or maimed nearly one million Iranians and 375,000 Iraqis? Oh yeah, and there’s the entire over throwing Mossadegh and reinstating the dictatorial Shah thing.

Neoconservatives, at their most appealing and idealistic, actually said they regretted the oil and geopolitics fueled support for these awful regimes and saw it as one of the root causes of terrorism. But I guess when a Democrat acknowledges the US’s role in all this nasty stuff (not to mention calling on Israel to comply with international law and an agreement they signed), he’s a Fanon disciple Arab-lover who’s going to sell out the Jews.  Interesting how that works.

A lot of lefties don’t like Peter Beinart. And they have good reason. As editor of TNR, he was not only one of the most prominent supporters of the Iraq war, but he notoriously compared war opponents to soft on Stalin leftists like Henry Wallace. His book, The Good Fight, was the clearest evocation of why liberals should buy into the war on terror framework, even if it had an apology for his support for the Iraq war.

Since then, he’s done a very good job of taking account of why he went wrong in supporting the Iraq war and has correspondingly decisively broken with the neoconservatives moved his foreign policy coordinates well to the left. Interestingly enough, for such a smart, intellectually honest person, he’s apparently good friends with Jonah Goldberg. And, occasionally, he does diavlogs with him. And while I usually like bloggingheads where they have two smart, informed people who disagree with each other, the Beinart/Goldberg diavlogs are amazing for just how much more informed with the actual content of history, current affairs and ideas. For instance, look at Beinart take apart Goldberg’s complaints about the Obama speech or his making the very basic point that “black people are much more aware of America’s racial history” and that white people experience a lot of “ignorance and denial” — much to Goldberg’s shock. It’s all very good stuff, and it makes me feel good that Beinart is on my side.

Dovish liberals like myself were a little surprised when Obama took a hardline on settlement expansion, rejecting the loopholes that Bush Administration privately inserted into declrataions against settlment activity, and when pro-Israel members of Congress appeared to be on board with a real freeze on expansion.

Well, the honeymoon is (sorta) over. Ben Smith has a good piece getting a lot of Congressional Democrats complaining about Obama pressuring Israel too publicly and not doing enough criticizing of Palestinian rejectionists and terrorists.

“There’s a line between articulating U.S. policy and seeming to be pressuring a democracy on what are their domestic policies, and the president is tiptoeing right up to that line,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who said he’d heard complaints from constituents during the congressional recess. “I would have liked to hear the president talk more about the Palestinian obligation to cut down on terrorism.”

“I don’t think anybody wants to dictate to an ally what they have to do in their own national security interests,” said Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), who said he thinks there’s “room for compromise.”

…

The pro-Israel lobby AIPAC last week got the signatures of 329 members of Congress, including key figures in both parties, on a letter calling on the administration to work “closely and privately” with Israel — in contrast to the current public pressure.

This was to be expected. AIPAC and the Israel Lobby’s greatest influence is in Congress, and AIPAC is especially proud of the number of liberal Democrats they have on board with their program.

But as far as Congressional opposition to a relatively dovish executive branch Israel policy goes, this is pretty weak stuff. The article also says that “few [Congressional Democrats] will defend illegal Jewish outposts on land they hope will be part of a Palestinian state.” Without that, one could think that these Democrats were just giving lip service to supporting Obama’s settlement freeze but actually didn’t want to see any real pressure on Israel to do anything. Instead, it seems like they actually want to do the right thing, but have to cover their right flank and maintain their pro-Israel bona fides. In the case of Ackerman, Wexler and Weiner, three Jewish Congressmen who represent districts with sizable Jewish populations, it was almost inevitable that they would have to put up some token opposition to the tenor of Obama’s settlement policy.

Dylan Matthews sees the brutal way in which the Sri Lankan government ended their long civil war with the Tamil Tigers as an almost necessary outcome of any sucessful counter insurgency:

But it’s weird that such concern has evaporated into universal euphoria once the government’s tactics succeeded. I can’t help but wonder if this is the natural ideological consequence of a US government fetish for counterinsurgency. Sure, it has the potential to be implemented somewhat humanely – though as Michael Cohen and Tara McKelvey argue, we should avoid it like the plague even then – but these things experience slippage. It’s hard for the US military to publicly endorse a policy with the vigor with which it’s embraced COIN without a degree of inadvertent evangelism. Just as Abu Ghraib and Guanatamo gave foreign government a way to cloak themselves in the American flag as a means of defending their own torture regimes, the US adoption of counterinsurgency provides a justification for mass atrocities like the ones the Sri Lankan government has been committing. After all, the easiest way to beat an insurgency is to make it unbearably painful to join one,

Dylan is making two arguments here. One is that the US military and diplomatic establishment’s enthusiastic adoption of counter insurgency tactics has essentially given a carte blanche for other countries to employ the roughest COIN tactics with the least concern for human rights or civilian deaths. The second argument is more general, that counterinsurgency will inevitably turn into an almost total war against a loosely defined group of people, so that people are discouraged from becoming insurgents.

Let’s deal with the first, more limited question about the US and Sri Lanka. I doubt that there’s any scenario under which the Sri Lankan government wouldn’t have taken their oppurtunity to end their war with the most expedient means possible. The fact that they’re seemingly impervious to the complaints of the US and the UN shows that their priority was ending the conflict by being in control of all of Sri Lanka. After all, civil wars always tend to be especially bloody, as the fighting is necessarily on civilian or non-military turf. Also, since governments will always desire to control their own territory, a situation like the one in Sri Lanka will always lend itself to disregard for humanitarian concerns. In a war where you have to opportunity to regain territorial and political integrity, winning will always come first. If you don’t believe me, I have a scenic path from Atlanta to Savannah to sell you.

Now, I’m sure this was all made easier by adoption not just of COIN rhetoric, but more generally, by portraying the Tamil Tigers as terrorists (which they are) and thus putting the Sri Lankan government on the good side in the War on Terror.

Dylan’s second point about counterinsurgency more generally is a bit more tricky. Yes, there seems to always be the Mau-Mau route to putting down insurgents — torture, concentration camps and more generally, terrifying the population into no longer supporting the insurgency. But I think the relative American success in Iraq shows that the Mau-Mau route is hardly inevitable. If the insurgents are essentially parasites on the local population, then counterinsurgency will mean population protection, along, of course, with deploying high-tech commandos to kill terrorists.

I guess, on the margins, the US occupying countries and inevitably putting down insurgencies, will encourage other countries to do the same. I just don’t think Sri Lanka is an especially good example of this trend. Also, before the US even started engaging in COIN, countries were using the War on Terror more gnerally to justify their repressive military actions (see Russia in Chechnya or China in Xinjiang)

I actually wrote my previous post, “America and Torture,” last night. It just so happened that Andrew Sullivan, today, wrote a post glorifying Winston Churchill’s — and the Allies in general — refusal to use torture despite the truly horrifying consequences of insufficient intelligence about Nazi Germany’s actions. And while I think Churchill is a good example of how liberal societies have a very deeply entrenched cultural norm against torture, I can’t help but be a bit troubled by Sullivan’s view that the Bush administration’s actions are a huge break from the past.

One actually can not think of a better example than Churchill, or more generally, the Allies’ behavior in World War II. Sure, they eschewed torture because that’s what civilized nations do. But for some reason or another, there wasn’t a great cultural taboo against the mass slaughter of civilians, be it by air raid or by nuclear assault. Churchill, of course, was a great supporter of civilian bombing of Germany, especially of Dresden. Bush, for all his faults, never ordered area bombings of major Iraq or Afghani cities that had no military significance. So, for his tremendous faults when it comes to torture, Bush can be seen as something of an improvement over Churchill, Roosevelt et al.

I guess I’ll see it as a truely landmark moment when the killing of innocent civilians in war is seen as alien to the liberal tradition as the torture of hardened terrorists. Until then, I just hope that we remember that immorality in times of war didn’t start with the Bush administration.

Wow. Just Wow. From the New York Times.

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Over at the Corner, the former ambassador to Venezuela makes the case that all interaction with Hugo Chavez should be coup-based, as opposed to handshake based. Well, he doesn’t mention the oligarchical coup that he was so quick to support in 2002, but you really have to read in between the lines.

But more seriously, beyond the near-Talismanic power he attributes to Obama’s handshake with Chavez, this last paragraph is a pretty ridiculous bit of fear-mongering:

Too many of the participants at the Summit are “freely elected” yet engaged in undermining the very institutions of a democracy and in perpetuating themselves in power indefinitely. In varying degrees, Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Honduras’s Manuel Zelaya, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa are abusing their presidential powers to change the rules of the game. They are all allies of Chávez in what he calls “21st-century socialism” which is what. So far, this socialism recalls nothing less that the beginning stages of the socialism which was established in the first half of the 20th century in Russia, Italy, and Germany. I doubt a U.S. president would have given a warm handshake to any of those leaders.

That “in varying degrees” bit does a lot of work for Reich. The short of it is that much of Latin America does not have the most robust democratic institutions, and so it’s easy for a popular, charismatic leader to slightly alter the rules of the game so as to accumulate more power for him and his supporters. It’s just that for most of Latin America’s history, it’s been right-wing, American supported, anti-communist leaders that have been doing this. But now as America has become at least tolerant of left wing regimes in Latin America (as opposed to just knocking them over), we have populist, left wing leaders doing the same thing. But I don’t really see how this is much of a problem vis a vis the United States.

On a macro level, Latin America has never been more liberal or democratic, and now that we don’t have the Cold War going and the even-slight prospect of a hostile superpower stocking up weapons in pliant regimes south of the Border, trying to pick winners or have a foreign policy that is significantly affected by whether or not, say, Ecuador has a right-wing or left-wing democratically elected leader is pretty silly.

It’s weird that one even has to make an argument that a world without nuclear weapons would solve a major problem, namely, the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon, or even worse, an all out nuclear war. But here’s Anne Applebaum:

More to the point, nuclear weapons, while terrifying in the abstract, are not an immediate strategic threat to Europe or the United States—even from Iran. Biological weapons are potentially more lethal. Chemical weapons are far cheaper to produce. Within the United States, ordinary bombs and rogue airplanes have already caused plenty of damage.

Conventional weapons, meanwhile, have not gone out of fashion. The most recent use of military force in Europe—the Russian-Georgian conflict of last August—involved tanks and infantry, not nukes. Even if Russia sold its remaining nuclear weapons for scrap metal, Russia’s military would still pose a potential threat to its neighbors, just as a China without nukes could still invade Taiwan.

Ridding the world of nuclear weapons would be very nice, in other words, but on its own, it won’t alter the international balance of power, stop al-Qaida, or prevent large authoritarian states from invading their smaller neighbors. However unsuccessful it has been so far, the promotion of democracy around the world is, ultimately, the only way to achieve these goals. Besides, however much the French loved Michelle’s flowery dress, I’m not sure they have much interest in giving up their force de frappe. Ditto the British. And since they don’t pose a threat, to us or anyone else, it’s not clear to me why we should waste diplomatic capital trying to make them do so.

There’s a lot to deal with here.  First the general point, that nuclear weapons are only “terrifying in the abstract.” Yes, they indeed are, and it’s worth exploring just why they’re so terrifying. Nuclear weapons, which unlike chemical and biological weapons, have been masterfully designed and tested to maximize their potential to kill millions of weapons, are basically the only way that humans can cause planetary extinction, or short of that, the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

It’s important to emphasize how many orders of mangitude worse a nuclear war could be than just about anything else. To compare the real, demonstrated risk of the destructive power of nukes to the totally hypothetical risk of widespread use of biological weapons is just irresponsible. The small risk of nuclear war should be intolerable — or at least Reagan (correctly) thought so.

But even if we assume that the risk of an all out nuclear war that kills most or all of the world’s population is basically zero, or so low that it isn’t worth factoring into our policy planning, there are still other risks from having such distended nuclear arsenals. For one, every nuclear weapon out there is a weapon that could be stolen by a terrorist group and detonated in a major Western city. If this happens, not only would the death scale be horrific, but America would probably cease to exist as a liberal democratic state and we would, in all likelihood, kill far more civilians in retaliation than were killed in the initial attack. And our weapons aren’t very secure, or, at least, considering their deadly potential, not secure enough. The US Air Force, to say nothing of the Russian or Pakistani armed forces, can’t keep perfect track of them.

Applebaum also argues that the push to get the West, or at least America, to unilaterally reduce the size of their arsenals is pointless, because Iran, North Korea et al won’t go along with it. But let’s look at why regimes who are developing nuclear arsenals are doing so. Pakistan has one to deter an invasion from India and to compete with them more generally. North Korea wants one to to deter a US invasion, and because of residual memory of Americans discussing the use of atomic weapons against North Korea and China during the Korean War, and Iran wants one because it sees what happens to Middle Eastern countries that America doesn’t like that do not have nukes (not to mention deterring Israel, which has a large, illegal nuclear arsenal). 

It’s actually easy to see how, one day, we could get Pakistan and India to put down their arms. Their main threat is from each other and so if neither of them had weapons, they could both be happy. As for North Korea, it would be much easier to put pressure on them if we demonstrated a real commitment to reducing our nuclear arsenal. Even though there are local factors that play into any countries choice to develop nuclear weapons, all these choices exist in a framework where the US, through the NPT, (along with the other 4 major nuclear powers), has said that no other countries should have nuclear weapons, and that the nuclear powers should make real steps towards getting rid of theirs. But we haven’t made real steps towards abolition recently, and proliferation has only quickened. These are not unrelated phenomena.

I guess all I’m trying to say is, yes, nuclear weapons are indeed dangerous and Obama should be commended for taking such a clear, bold stance on their eventual abolition. But hell, don’t ask me, just ask Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn.

When there’s an act of violence in a place that’s on the brink of conflict, or has a long history of conflict, people worry about the response. Even if that violence is purely meant to elicit an irrational, violent response that ratchets up the intensity of conflict and leads to more needless deaths, people will ruefully shake their heads and just assume that this one act of violence means that there are more to come.

I’m being too obscure here. My point is that in Northern Ireland, where IRA fighters killed three British officers in two days, there seems to have been no ratcheting up of tension or any real violence in response — from John Burns’ Times piece:

ut as formerly sworn enemies filed into a provincial church on Friday to mourn as one, the funeral of the slain policeman provided the latest and most powerful demonstration of the ways in which the province’s people and its leaders have united against a return to the violence that racked Northern Ireland for 30 years. Rallies that drew thousands to silent vigils this week in Belfast and other major towns across the north, and dozens of interviews across the province, suggested that the old antagonists — Roman Catholics and Protestants, nationalists seeking a united Ireland and Unionists committed to keeping Ulster a part of Britain — remain determined to settle their future in peace.

The thing is, in theory, there’s no reason why this basically shouldn’t always happen. In most cases, sectarian warfare — or just organized violence between groups in general — is a negative-sum activity. And most importantly, it’s a choice to respond to violent provocations violently. People and political groups aren’t billiard balls; they have agency. And in Northern Ireland, all the relevant groups have realized that they have more to win from not descending into more internecine violence.

Of course, there are reasons why it’s easier to avoid this chain on bloodshed in Northern Ireland than in, say, Iraq. There are groups who visibly have a lot to gain from peace,  and the attacks occurred against a background of peace and quiet. But still, just because it’s easier in this case to resist these provocations, doesn’t mean that the underlying calculus is much different than it was in post Golden Mosque bombing Iraq or, to get really radical for a bit, post 9/11 America or post Sderot-rocket attacks Israel.

OK, I think that everyone who saw the entire Freeman situation entirely through this lens.

1.Chas Freeman says heterodox stuff about Israel 2. Steve Rosen, Josh Block, Martin Kramer and Michael Goldfarb blow everything out of proportion and spread various about him 3. Charles Schumer and other Israel hawks sink the nomination

Should probably reevalutate that stance in light of Michael Isikoff’s reporting that, ultimately, it was Nancy Pelosi who squashed the nomination in light of Freeman’s rather blood curdling thoughts on Tiananmen Square.

Look, the undoing of Chas Freeman was an overdetermined event. Had the only thing wrong with him had been his statements on Israel, then the carping of his critics would have gained no traction. Sure, people who are already tooth-and-nail opposed to Obama’s foreign policy agenda would have brought up these concerns, and no one would have listened to them. But because Freeman made himself an easy target — for totally legitimate, non-Israel based reasons (fondness for Saudi Arabia) — anyone who had an issue with him could bring up all sorts of objections and he was subsequently done with.

Once again, I don’t think we’ve lost much by not having Freeman in the government. The cases where the Israel Lobby, or to make everything sound less ominous, the hawkish pro-Israel community, is able to exert influence in appointments and policy making specific to Israel (or to the Middle East more generally), we should be concerned.

Although the entire Chas Freeman to-do confirmed some rather depressing facts about who can most effectively bend both the foreign policy discussion and the actual make up of the foreign policy community to their will, it was not, in and of itself, a great loss. I haven’t really red anything that really convinced me, independent of the loathing he elicted in Michael Goldfarb and Steve Rosen, why Chas Freeman was such a great choice. Sure, the fact that Dennis Blair wanted him should have been enough, but I imagine that the intelligence community will get along OK with out Freeman. In short, the fact that the Israel Lobby was able to scalp Freeman doesn’t really have any specific implications for American foreign policy, or most importantly, our policy towards the Middle East. Freeman was supposed to be an intelligence analyst, not someone who was coming up with a strategy for ensuring peace in Israel and the Territories.

I think it’s instructive to look at what happened to Freeman and what happened to Rob Malley. Malley, unlike Freeman, not only had impeccable credentials as a foreign policy guy, but had incredibly experience specific to the Peace Process. A veteran of Clinton’s NSC, he became a special adviser for Arab-Israeli Affairs and was one of the key players in the Camp David negotiations. AFter they fell through, he wrote an infamous article in the New York Review of Books which challenged the prevailing wisdom that A. Arafat had been offered the best deal possible and B. that he was nearly entirely responsible for scuttling the negotiations. For this, he earned the enmity of the hawkish pro-Israel community.

Flash forward to 2008. He’s working for the International Crisis Group on Middle East issues and he’s one of Obama’s numerous unofficial foreign policy advisers. It comes out that, as part of his work with ICG, he has talked with Hamas leadership. This makes sense — the ICG is charged with resolving conflicts, and Hamas is a participant in a particularly knotty conflict, so of course Malley would talk to them — but Malley quickly ends his association with the campaign to spare Obama  any embarassment.

In the case of Malley, Obama truly lost someone who had specific expertise and background that is basically irreplacable. It’s not that there aren’t other experienced diplomats with knowledge of the peace process, but Malley, because of his subsequent work with the ICG and experience talking with Hamas, had something unique to bring to the table. But because there are very strict parameters over who can think and say what and still be involved at the highest levels of forumlating and implementing American foreign policy, Malley will be standing on the sidelines. That — not Chas Freeman — is probably the most unfortunate recent action of this group of vindicative hawks.

Ok, so, we can all agree that Michael Goldfarb entitling a post “Pedophile Lobby Gets Behind Freeman” is perfectly denotive of the total bad faith in which the Weekly Standard deals with questions of Israel and of foreign policy . But even if we accept that it’s all relevant that Scott Ritter, who endorsed Chas Freeman,”had arranged in an Internet chat room to meet with the girl at a Burger King in Colonie, a suburb of Albany, so she could witness him masturbating,” I want to make another, more minor point that really has nothing to do with Chas Freeman or foreign policy at all.

Pedophilia is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV for all you psychology folk out there) as:

• A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger);
• B. The person has acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty;
• C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.

What’s important here is that the clinical definition for pedophilia has nothing to do with our intuitions about the appropriateness of relationships between adults and teenagers (not children, this is very important) or with any statuatory rape laws. For example, a 40 year old man who has a sexual attraction to, say, a 16 year old girl is not a pedophile, even if he acts on that attraction. To say otherwise is to just ignore the real meaning of these words. It’s really not that difficult to understand that a 16 year old girl is a whole lot different than a 9 year old girl. It’s the difference between Elle Fanning and Miley Cyrus.

*Interesting how Godlfarb never mentions that, along with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern (who he considers “crackpots”), some 17 former ambassadors — including Thomas Pickering, who was ambassador to the UN for Bush I — had endorsed Freeman. Just more proof of the rampant bad faith on display here.