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Lynch vs. Posner

In this video from NBC nightly news, my colleague Tim Lynch takes on Richard Posner, who seems determined to hand off any libertarian street cred he once had.  (Can you say "security panic"?)

Money quote from Lynch?

If the president and his lawyers keep up with these arguments that the entire United States is like a battlefield, that raises profound questions about our legal institutions, because on the battlefield, people do not have constitutional rights.

Hackneyed zinger from Posner?

Democracy is not a synonym for weakness.

The "Iraqi Army"

Tom Lasseter of Knight-Ridder continues to do heroic work digging into the reality on the ground in Iraq.  He paints a stark picture of Kurdish fealty to Iraq's central government when it comes to the hot-button issue of Kirkuk.  The whole piece is worth a read, but it's full of forceful quotes from Kurdish leaders making quite clear their intentions:

The [Kurdish] soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga - the Kurdish militia - and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.

"It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs in our own battalion," said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in the Iraqi army who was escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours."

[...]

Col. Talib Naji, a Kurd serving in the Iraqi army on the edge of Kirkuk, said he would resist any attempts to dilute the Kurdish presence in his brigade.

"The Ministry of Defense recently sent me 150 Arab soldiers from the south," Naji said. "After two weeks of service, we sent them away. We did not accept them. We will not let them carry through with their plans to bring more Arab soldiers here."

[...]

"Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the Arabs," Hamid Afandi, the minister of Peshmerga for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two major Kurdish groups, said in an interview at his office in the Kurdish city of Irbil. "If we can resolve this by talking, fine, but if not, then we will resolve it by fighting."

Then, this:

Jafar Mustafir, a close adviser to Iraq's Kurdish interim president, Jalal Talabani, and the deputy head of Peshmerga for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a longtime rival of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, echoed that.

"We will do our best diplomatically, and if that fails we will use force" to secure borders for an independent Kurdistan, Mustafir said. "The government in Baghdad will be too weak to use force against the will of the Kurdish people."

Admitting that elections are better than dictatorship only gets you so far, it seems.  This is a politics, yes, but it is a nasty, volatile, divisive politics.  Probably be better if we find a way to extricate ourselves from it before we're forced to take sides.

Nope, Try Again

Christopher Hitchens has been one of the most fervent believers that Saddam Hussein's regime, despite the historical record, would surely have been inclined to collaborate with al Qaeda.  One is hesitant to argue that he can prove a negative, but suffice to say Hitchens has had to plumb awfully deep into the well for any evidence to support his claim.  But here, discussing Iran, he's just gone plain off a cliff:

Elements of Iran's senior leadership are wanted on serious charges in many countries, from Germany to Argentina, for their complicity in death-squad activity. They are also known to be the patrons of Bashar Assad's moribund Baathism in Syria (yet another case, by the way, when Baathist "secularism" seems happy to collaborate with Islamic extremism) and are partners in his attempt to intimidate the Lebanese.(my emphasis)

Now, in this analogy, Hitchens is likening the Shiite regime in Teheran to al Qaeda, and the Baathist regimes to each other.  The latter seems fair enough, but surely somebody as well-traveled as Hitchens isn't going to deny the chasm of difference between the Iranian theocracy and bin Laden's group.

Right?

Well, Which Is It?

One of the more puzzling aspects of the discussion of neoconservatism and foreign policy is that neocons have alternatively claimed that (a) the Bush doctrine fits neatly with American diplomatic tradition, and that (b) Bush is a radical visionary who dared to make a profound departure from that tradition.

For example, Chris Preble and I pinged Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk here for claiming that

neoconservatism is the rightful heir to the "great liberal tradition of American strategic culture - a history that links the Founders to the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush."

But then, in this AEI invite to an event on Arab liberalism, we learn that

In November 2003, President George W. Bush jettisoned half a century of American foreign policy, declaring that “stability can not be purchased at the expense of liberty.” America, he announced, would adopt a “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.”

If you want to be a revolutionary, fine, but it doesn't seem right to call it "conservatism."  The neocons have tried to be all things to all people: bellicose nationalists to Jacksonian conservatives, bleeding heart internationalists to social democrats, promoters of Christian missionaries to evangelicals, and on and on.  Their coalition, such as it is, is remarkably broad, but at the same time pretty fractious.  I always thought that the Jacksonians should have been the first to get off the bandwagon, but they seem to be hanging on the tightest.

Either way, the neocons ought to decide whether they want to be radicals or conservatives.  You can't very well be both.

Levy vs. Rivkin

Bob Levy, one of the smartest guys at Cato, takes on David Rivkin on the president's alleged power to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans over at the Federalist Society here (.pdf)

Bob is a true-blue libertarian, and really one of the guys who makes me proud to work at Cato.  He gives it to Rivkin good and rough.  Give it a read.

Lang on Congress and Hamas

Col. Pat Lang has a good post up about Congress's recent overture to President Bush on the prospect of Hamas picking up serious ground in the Palestinian elections.  (Congress wants Hamas to disarm before the election, threatening to pull the plug on funding to the Palestinians if Hamas refuses to disarm and gains political ground.)  The post is good all the way through, but here's a taste:

We have a long history of self-defeating policy in the Middle East and one could view this folly as part of the American tradition of diplomatic foolishness in the region.  Sadly, the Israelis, who live there and ought to know better, encourage this kind of silliness instead of having their friends in AIPAC put a brake on it.  If the Israelis can not find a political solution with the Palestinians, they can always build their walls higher, but to further confuse the thinking of the US Congress is a big mistake.

This will further increase the prospect of Hamas political victory.  Abbas should postpone the election again and hope that people shut up over here.

Lang posts a good bit, and a lot of it's excellent.  You should be reading him.

A for Effort

Once again, stormin' Norman Podhoretz has charged to the ramparts at the (once again) increasingly irrelevant Commentary magazine to condemn "the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists, and the armchair generals" for ruining the war in Iraq.  And he does so without a hint of irony, no less.

You've got to give the man credit: he has truly scribbled heroically in his attempts to keep 150,000 other people's kids bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire.

Ouch.

For those of you who are into that sort of thing, Georgetown law prof David Cole is positively humiliating pro-Bush pundit Ronald Kessler on the administration's interpretation of executive power on the Diane Rehm show right now.  I think it'll be archived here at some point.

A bloodbath, really.  Good times.

Quote of the Day, Maybe the Year

From a commenter over at Henley's discussing libertarianism post-9/11:

I don’t really like being on the same side as Bob Barr, but I’ll take what I can get. But there are so many guys who were talking libertarian talk for literally decades, who caved in the first time it made any real difference.

Who Won In Iraq?

Praktike's got a nice run-down of the ominous early results from Iraq's election.  Here's the short version:

It's time to get out of the realm of fantasy.

So let's be very clear about what just happened in the Iraqi elections because perhaps people like Michael Rubin and the WSJ are confused as to how their rosy scenarios didn't pan out. Also worth noting is that wishful thinking is not the same thing as analysis.

Unfortunately, the results set the table for my book forum on January 12th.  Mansfield and Snyder warn that in fractious polities, the electoral triumph of extremist, sectarian parties can spell trouble for peace and stability in the medium term.  (Unfortunately, Christopher Layne has had to withdraw from commenting at the forum, but in Chris's place there will appear an equally impressive commenter to be announced as soon as he's confirmed.)