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Rich Lowry's Predictive Powers

Man, I used to think he wished he had this one back:

but after all the George Allen stuff, you have to wonder--how does this guy keep his job?

Opher two, Rich.  What topic next?

We're All Neville Chamberlain Now?

Heck, with Michael Novak telling me it's 1938 all over again (again), and that

the congressional election of 2006 is about one, and only one, issue: It is a vote for victory, or for defeat. There is no middle ground.

and then with David Frum telling me that his former boss may just have replaced the bust of Churchill with a bust of Neville Chamberlain, I'm in a quandry: What's all this fearmongering supposed to get me to do?  Maybe I should pray that Newt Gingrich and Thomas McInerney can orchestrate a military coup and invade North Korea or something?

Save the Date

It's still several weeks away, but on October 10th, I'll be moderating a discussion of Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman's forthcoming Ethical Realism, with Joe Cirincione and Lawrence Kaplan commenting.  I'm just getting started reading the book, but I can tell you already that the event should be an all-too-rare-in-Washington open discussion that brings together smart folks who vigorously disagree about US foreign policy.  Register, attend, let us buy you a sandwich.

Greenwald on Lowry on Iraq

Via Brad DeLong, boy does Glenn Greenwald hit this one out of the park:

in just five short months in Rich Lowry World, we went from "The debate over troop levels" is "somewhat beside the point" and "to think that higher troop levels would have been a magic bullet is to indulge a very American faith in the power of mass to overcome anything" to "There is no mystery as to what can make the crucial difference in the battle of Baghdad: American troops" and "The bottom line is this: More U.S. troops in Iraq would improve our chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment." It's not just profoundly wrong; it's worse than that. It's ludicrous.

All along, over the past several years, Lowry has been insisting that troop levels don't matter, that we have a sufficient force to get the job done in Iraq, and that we are winning, winning, winning. This is the same Foreign Policy Expert Rich Lowry who, following the example of the Commander-in-Chief's aircraft career victory dance, boldly announced in the May 9, 2005 issue of National Review: "It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq" -- an article which prompted this embarrassing NR cover (a cover which, as TBogg notes, competes with "Dewey Wins" for humiliating headlines of historic proportions).

I tee off on the NR editorialists at length in my recent American Conservative piece, and take a run at Lowry's coauthor, Bill Kristol, too.  Here's the Kristol bit:

On—appropriately enough—April Fool’s Day 2003, on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol informed host Terry Gross that “there’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America…that the Shi’a can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shi’a in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime.  There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”  Three years later, with a Shi’a-Sunni civil war simmering in Iraq and an Islamist Shi’a government in place, Kristol still sits at the top of the heap when it comes to foreign affairs punditry.

In fact, Kristol’s predictive powers are so bad that one wonders how the man gets booked onto television anymore.  Kristol declared in March 2005 that “it seems increasingly likely that [the January elections] will turn out to have been a genuine turning point.”  By December 2005, it was the December elections that led Kristol and Robert Kagan to declare “Happy Days!  The Iraqi elections really could be a turning point.”  (Kagan and Kristol were forced to reemerge in April 2006 to observe that “Iraq is at a critical turning point.”)

The first sentence of the Kristol/Lowry piece this morning?

We are at a crucial moment in Iraq.

Moments in Unintentional Foreign Policy Hilarity

Here's Thomas P M Barnett blaming Ian Bremmer for being "a bit too dependent on one concept to explain the world."

Yes, that Thomas P M Barnett.  If you have access to online resources, I did a lengthy review essay of his books here, which he responded to here.

"Neo" Is Short for "Not"

Go read Radley Balko's takedown of the Neolibertarian endorsement of (and employment for) the odious George Allen's campaign.  I've never given a dime to a politician in my life (by choice), but if I lived in Virginia, I'd seriously consider throwing a few quarters in Jim Webb's bucket.