Postmodern Conservative.

The Dread Convergence

It's one thing to see Obama and McCain grow closer and closer together on Iraq. It's another to see them do the same on global human solidarity. This exchange is too good to quote in anything but full:

>>>

Matthew Yglesias writes: 

Am I a Georgian? 

Common sense indicates that, no, I am not a Georgian. But John McCain says “today we are all Georgians.” But does he mean it? Suppose Russia was bombing Atlanta and threatening to advance to Savannah. In solidarity with Georgia (the state) Americans from all fifty states would band together and fight the Russians off. Now I don’t think we should go to war with Russia. And I hope John McCain doesn’t think we should go to war with Russia. But insofar as he doesn’t mean that we should go to war with Russia on Georgia’s behalf, what’s the meaning of the claim that “we are all Georgians”?

Does he really not understand this? The point is that we can't physically defend Georgia from Russian agression, but we can make a symbolic stand of unity with a democratic, pro-Western state that has been attacked by an autocratic aggressor. Is Yglesias trying to argue that, since we don't have the capacity to intervene militarily, we can't make basic moral judgments?

--Jonathan Chait

>>

No, Mr. Chait, he is trying to argue that we do not need to pronounce ridiculously empty and dangerously grandiose symbolic lies in order to make basic moral judgments. I can strongly oppose military aggression against innocent civilians, strongly condemn Saakashvili's utter recklessness and disregard for those civilians, and criticize Russia for its disproportionately calibrated invasion of Georgia proper all without reference to being a citizen of the world or a Cosmic Georgian or anything else nonsensical and wrong. 

These rhetorical zeppelins explode into bits at first contact with reality, and they do affirmative harm to anyone trying to make a good case for regular ordinary prudence and a decent respect for the civilized distances between individuals and groups that make living our own lives, singly and together, possible. If you want to hear this without an ounce of snark (yet are equally disposed to criticize snarkless commentary as unbearably pious and self-congratulatory), then Yglesias is not your guy, but it's bald-faced obvious what he's saying as far as I'm concerned, and in my judgment that's because he's right. 

If we can't cast our moral judgment on the side of innocent Georgian civilians without phonily transubstantiating ourselves in our fake imaginations into pretend innocent Georgian civilians, we have really lost our minds, and McCain's jingo reflexes are the least of our problems. 

McCain as Teddy Roosevelt; Or, the Unstable Jingo Card

by Demophilus

A few years ago I was doing some work on the Progressive Era and needed to read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt. I bought Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex and Kathleen Dalton's Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, and for some reason never got around to the latter, even though I've subsequently learned that Dalton's book is considered the best one-volume biography of Roosevelt and the one taken most seriously by academic historians.

So last night I decided to pull Dalton's biography off the shelf on which it had sat collecting dust and start reading it, chiefly because of John McCain's professed idolization of TR. Now, my line of thought went, would be a good time to brush up on what I know about Roosevelt as various references may be made to him as the campaign proceeds. And it might provide me with blog fodder.

The first thing I noticed (in Dalton's introduction) was how many of Roosevelt's critics were sure he was a crazed warmonger. Mark Twain said of TR that he was "clearly insane...and insanest upon war and its supreme glories." William Jennings Bryan said TR was "a man who loves war." Historian Thomas Bailey believed Roosevelt was possessed of an "almost pathological bellicosity." Of course, we know TR, whatever his enthusiasms and personal escapades, behaved rather honorably as president and won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a peace between Russia and Japan. His critics seriously misjudged him. Indeed, from what I can tell so far, Dalton's biography admirably corrects both the caricatures of TR purveyed by his detractors as, in her felicitous phrase summarizing the slurs, an "unstable jingo" and the Roosevelt hero worship of his admirers.

Funny, then, that just today Andrew Sullivan writes, "McCain's trigger-happy temperament, shallow understanding of the complexities and passion for military force as the answer to everything is the bigger risk. He is a recipe for more, wider and far more destructive warfare." Well, it seems like McCain has more in common with TR than we might have suspected, including reckless accusations of warmongering being hurled at him. McCain certainly is a fallible candidate, and I do not mind robust criticisms of his actual policy proposals. But I'd like to see Sullivan defend the point that McCain has a "passion for military force as the answer to everything..." Everything? Really?

Sadr For Keeps

For many moons I have claimed that Mookie is smarter than the average bear. In my more heated moments I claimed he was an Iraqi patriot, to boot, and once or twice I wildly predicted that he'd wind up something of a Mesopotamian Ataturk. Well, now that Maliki himself is angling for that role, Sadr is...not that surprisingly...recalibrating: presenting the Mahdi Non-Army.

Get Your War On

The fat is, at long last, in the fire. Russia and Georgia are doing the Big Dance.

TBILISI, Georgia -- Russian television reports that Russian troops are moving into South Ossetia. The development comes hours after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned Georgia that its attack on South Ossetia will draw retaliation. Channel 1 television showed a convoy of Russian tanks that it said entered South Ossetia. The convoy was expected to reach the provincial capital, Tskhinvali, in a few hours.

The 'frozen conflicts' in Ossetia and Abkhazia have served for years as big blocks of ice keeping a Russo-Georgian war from thawing to life. No longer. It seems each side sees an advantage to acting NOW: the West is busy, China is busy. But perhaps more importantly, Saakashvili's position has been more or less untenable for some time, and Russia has its own high-profile Olympics coming around the bend. To lance the boil now is, just maybe, to heal in time later. Neither America nor Europe will step in, here. Nor should they. 

On the other hand it is not altogether clear that Georgia will come out of this episode a free and independent country. Putin would be a fool to be toying with annexation. But the nearest analogy at hand might be the Mexican-American war: completely overrun the losing power and hand them back, literally, their own ass -- a rump state enjoyed at victor's sufferance. 

The big winner here: Abkhazia, a much more delightful and appealing land than Ossetia (sorry, guys), with the potential...long borne out in Black Sea history...to be the hottest spot north of Dubai, south of Moscow, east of Myconos and west of Goa. 

Bottom line: There is no safe bet. Don't leave your TV set.

 

UPDATE: Moscow Times reports Saak wants an "immediate cease-fire" -- ? Should have thought about that a few hours ago, eh? And a promise of 'full autonomy'...has he been spooked? Is it too late?

UPDATE 2: No cease fire. Heavy fire instead. Here come the tanks. 

UPDATE 3: Russia takes the opportunity to beef up its Abkhaz presence. Those US and European cries for an end to violence need a grain of salt:

Russia called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to respond to the crisis, but members failed to agree on a Russian statement calling on both sides to renounce the use of force. 

UPDATE 4: ITAR-TASS is reporting that Georgia had planned to "storm" the South Ossetian capital "overnight" (no dice), and, perhaps more interestingly, that it's "hard to contact" the commanders of Russia's in-field peacekeepers.

UPDATE 5: At CNN, Saak compares this to the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Not about Georgia but "the basic values" the US shares. "We are under attack because we never wanted to accept the old corrupt rules of the game; we wanted to be close to the west." "An ideal time to attack a small country...a very well-planned provocation." Denies flat out that Georgia initiated any attack on South Ossetia. Compares Georgia to Finland 1939, Afghanistan 1979. "It took the courage of Ronald Reagan to reverse the Soviet adventures"...wraps himself in human rights and freedom. Throws down rhetorical gauntlet to Bush: put your _____ where your mouth is. But won't demand an intervention. It's simply "a moment of truth" for Bush, US, Western world, "all of us." Georgia as an acid test for "democracy and freedom" and human rights: "a crucial moment in history." Clearly, Saak is concerned about what might happen without outside intervention. 

Another US ceasefire demand; McCain wants a Russian withdrawal. But in light of Russian attempts to get the Security Council to agree on a bilateral ceasefire, this snip of the McCain statement is extra fascinating:

The U.S. should immediately convene an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to call on Russia to reverse course.

Hmm. And what does Obama want?

UPDATE 6: Early reports suggest Obama is calling for restraint on both sides. An August surprise? A shock foreign policy wedge issue? Breaking...

MORE...the crisis not a big moneymaker, so far, for Russia...

AND...this seems worth quoting:

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meanwhile said Moscow had received reports that villages in South Ossetia were being ethnically cleansed, according to Reuters.com. 

"We are receiving reports that a police of ethnic cleansing was being conducted in villages in South Ossetia, the number of refugees is climbing, the panic is growing, people are trying to save their lives," he was reported saying. 

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax, said Russians had died because of Georgia's operations. Russia "will not allow the deaths of our compatriots to go unpunished" and "those guilty will receive due punishment," he said. "My duty as Russian president is to safeguard the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, wherever they are. This is what is behind the logic of the steps we are undertaking now."

UPDATE 7: Obama statement:

I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict. Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war. Georgia’s territorial integrity must be respected. All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis.

That puts him closer to the Bush administration line -- that is, the line of restraint and evenhandedness -- than McCain!

UPDATE 8: Hits from Bloomberg:

* Georgia will pull half its 2,000-strong Iraq force in as few as the next 72 hours;

* Georgia's NATO hopes should probably be considered dead; and maybe most importantly,

* Putin has dropped the w-bomb, stating that "war has started."

UPDATE 9: Reuters has a levelheaded first round of insta-analysis from a range of regional experts. Bottom line, in tune with mine: Saak took a probably unnecessary gamble and forced the hand of a West that won't ride to the rescue, for reasons that should've seemed obvious...or obvious enough.

The Guardian concurs, throwing Saak's allegations of Russian 'perfect timing' back in his face. It already looks like Saak has pulled his country into a PR debacle. Observe:

The timing suggests Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili may have been counting on surprise to fulfill his longtime pledge to wrest back control of South Ossetia – a key to his hold on power. Saakashvili agreed the timing was not coincidental, but accused Russia of being the aggressor. "Most decision makers have gone for the holidays," he said in an interview with CNN. "Brilliant moment to attack a small country."

When even the AP has seen fit to skin your cat, where do you have to turn? Jonah Goldberg?

UPDATE 10: Defining expectations down:

Vasil Sikharulidze, Georgia's ambassador to Washington, said in an interview, "We are asking our friends, and the United States among them, to somehow to try to mediate and try to persuade Russia to stop this military aggression and invasion of Georgia." "What we heard is that the State Department and the entire administration is deeply concerned and that they are heavily engaged with Russia trying to de-escalate the situation," he said.

Dan Nexon (with lots of updates and links):

I just want to emphasize that a lot of people with knowledge of Georgia have been raising alarms about the risks involved with a close US-Georgian relationship, particularly to the degree that Saakashvili believes it gives him more "strategic cover" than he actually has. 

Saakashvili has sunk an enormous amount of his political capital into resolving--in Georgia's favor--the frozen conflicts. This never made sense, as Saakashvili has a decent record to point to when it comes making the Georgian state more functional and less patrimonial. But, for whatever reason, he decided to stake his reputation on goals that the Russians will not accept. 

I can't say for certain, but I do get the sense that the Bush Administration missed major warning signs. To paraphrase something a very smart friend of mine once told me: the problem is that Georgia is one of the few "success stories" the Bush Administration can point to for its democratization agenda.

UPDATE 11: Here it is: pitched battle between Russian peacekeepers and Georgian regulars. Interestingly mild spin from Russia's NATO rep (who cut his vacation short):

[NATO] has taken a detached and neutral position. It is receiving and analyzing information. Our NATO partners have had enough time to take a close look at Saakashvili and to understand his game.

Indeed. Still no sign -- no sign at all -- that anyone in Europe or America wants to bail out the Saak. Even McCain, who seems to be alone in demanding everything of Russia and almost nothing of Georgia, has shown no interest in sending in the cavalry, airlifting Georgia's Iraq contingent back home, or lifting a little finger to get Saak out of trouble. 

Speculation: if the Russians had given any hint or indication of a planned incursion into Georgia proper, the 'detached and neutral' position of this afternoon would never even have seen the light of day. But the more this is Georgia's fault, the more that kind of operation looks excusable.

UPDATE 12: Barring anything (extra) strange & savage, this will close out coverage for the day:

* The UNSC reconvenes, close to agreement on wording this time. 

* I'd missed this chestnut from Saak the first time around:

If the whole world does not stop Russia today, then Russian tanks will be able to reach any other European capital.

His frustration is understandable given what a botch this has become, but Helsinki is safe, and they will sleep soundly tonight in Warsaw and Berlin.

Concert of Democracies Redux

Ikenberry and Slaughter try to wrest their baby back from McCain. To the annoyance of some of my paleo friends, I have a soft spot for international law, especially minimal yet robust international law. So reading Ike and Slaughter's piece was sort of like eating mushroom and zucchini flavored ice cream. It's ice cream, but, um:

In proposing a Concert of Democracies, we are urging the world’s democracies once again to work together – this time to renew and expand world governance capacities.

Shudder. How you can accomplish this by including Nigeria and Egypt in a new-and-improved G8 is beyond me. Ike and Slaughter have a hard time wrapping their arms around an admittedly hard problem: managing the tension between market democracies and the nondemocracies they rely on to keep the market humming.

a Concert of Democracies that included southern as well as northern democracies would insist on including China in any expansion of the G8. That fact highlights the contrast between our Concert and Senator McCain’s proposal of a League of Democracies, together with the expulsion of Russia from the G8. Democracies understand the need to have effective global institutions that include all important powers.

"Important," eh? An interesting metric for measuring representative legitimacy:

By making clear that liberal democracy is not confined to “the west”, a Concert would redraw the geopolitical map and open spaces to reform global institutions to reflect the world they purportedly represent.

True. But many global institutions were never supposed to represent anything. They were supposed to convey the interests and intelligence of the elites running member states. Not very appealing, I know, but there's a difference between international law and international institutions that oftentimes gets lost in the mix when liberal institutionalists get off and running. One of the great virtues of the international legal regime that we've developed is that it's self-regulating and self-enforcing. One of the drawbacks is that sometimes it doesn't work, and that powerful violators can go unpunished, and I know it's disappointing and inadequate to many to think that Iraq has to suffer to prevent any further Iraqs, but I've suspected for a while that this was more or less the way things were going to go down, and so far I've been right. If I wind up wrong, I'll admit defeat, but the point so far is that the world may be powerless to stop one superpower from running amok once, but woe to the superpower that wants to make a habit of it, at least in this day and age. That's the revenge of minimal but robust international law. 

Anyway, I like international law because its default mode is the slow, aggregate, marginal development of new laws that aren't voluntary treaties. International treaty law is nice because it's almost always only binding on parties who represent their very own selves. International institutionalism, to the extent that it wants to become more representative of the world, pushes in a direction we should all do without. The imperfection of such representation is profound. This leads advocates to insist that some representativeness is better than none, and this is true, as far as it goes. But advocates really see representativeness as a means to an end -- a way of balling up a glob of legitimacy with which to grease the wheels of "expand[ed] world governance capabilities." This style of leveraging a sense of democracy to attain a heap of instrumental power is pretty repugnant, even as it does promise to accomplish some ends that nobody could complain about. But the means! One of the biggest problems with the West's obsession with alleviating suffering around the world is that it drums into our brains that only a cruel and vicious slob would raise an objection to alleviating suffering by Any Means Necessary. And of course there's no more instrumentally powerful means that The State -- except an international institutional Task Force of States, that is. Who cares by what procedure power is pooled for the Betterment of Man? 

Well, powerful countries have to care. In the world of important countries, some are less important than others, and they tend to get annoyed when this fact is made plain by enterprising westerners who insist on pursuing a level of human flourishing for local citizens and subjects which both those people and their leaders may be ambivalent about...or even antagonistic to. And now that western parochialism is entirely out of fashion -- enjoying our standard of flourishing while we let others enjoy theirs -- we have two competing mission statements to contend with: alleviating suffering (the 'imbalances of globalization') because it destabilizes the world geopolitical order versus alleviating suffering because it's a moral duty. Ike and Slaughter and ilk would like these to dovetail, or to dovetail them, but it's harder than it looks: our patience with, and our fealty to, the procedural prudence that has characterized the development of international law before the rise of the postwar institutions is put under tremendous strain when we are practicing politics under orders issued from some super-political realm.

Politics at its best is an exercise in restraint -- the restraint involved in allowing yourself not to get your way, not to extend your reach, not to perfect your power, not to gratify your hopes, and all because your fellow citizens have different priorities. It's inconceivable to me how that restraint is just without the political equality of shared citizenship. I see how it can be tolerable -- say, under an international quasi-regime of incomplete and semi-arbitrary 'representationalism' -- but a lot of unjust things are tolerable. In their zeal to consolidate world governmentality -- as a means to moral ends -- liberal internationalists are quite willing to trash the one basis on which political activity, at least in this day and age, grounds its authority and legitimacy: the participatory consent of equal citizens. There is still a lot of room for the ad hoccery of international friendship -- I come to you as a friend of the world's various citizens. Friendship may be a perfectly unequal relationship, mutually unequal -- and as such provides us a model of interacting with one another and among groups without having to crystallize those interactions into institutionalized rules and laws, with all the allocations of official powers that process entails. 

At the international level, I'm your average anarcho-libertarian, all for a bare set of key rules and everyone work on making friends. Friends keep friendly distances: do not be swayed by these degenerate and weird conditions of pseudo-friendship that have developed in Our Insane Times (frenemies, friends with benefits). Friends do not try to be saviors or parents or nurses or lovers or priests. Strangely, friendship has lessons to teach us about politics: for citizenship is different than friendship, but citizens also keep civil distances. A topic for a dissertation.

Pink Police State Watch

Pole dancing, for fitness' sake: that's the face of New China. The bottom line:

I feel in control when I do this. If I learn this well, I feel I can be a superstar. I want to be a superstar.

Keep twirlin', babe.

Omar al-Bashir: An O.J. for Our Time

Sudan's president says he would not [...] allow [his indictment on genocide charges] to distract him from the search for peace in troubled Darfur. -- CNN

More EU Muscle-Flexing

Bulgaria: punished for corruption. It seems piddly by American standards of sovereignty, but it's another in a series of steps toward the consolidation of eastern central Europe within a zone of law that's variegated, yes (as it should be), but has an important bottom line. And I'll say again, a little more forcefully, that corruption is the biggest worldwide story of the year. Not that the EU's some great alternative on that count. But, often, it's better. Welcome to the Era of Low Bars.

In Which I Praise the NYT Editorial Staff

China, no matter how cool we think it is, or how cool we think it is to think it's cool, is no place to be a citizen. Pepsi's "Go Red for China!" campaign [see below] is but the most absurd of a whole series of wretched capitalist ploys to make a buck or ten off of every Chinaman. I mean to be crass here -- the fawning attention paid to a country deep into the world's biggest Pink Police State trip is profane, stupid, ridiculous, and transparently lame. The dross of world-heartedness and good feeling that's been branded with such frightening choreography across every platform and product that straddles the globe leaves me with The Fear, and the only redemption I can see in it is that at least all this cheapskate marketing is reallocating piles of wealth in 'our', American, direction. Bah!

That said, this seems to hit the right notes to me. And now:

Serbia: One Step Closer to Destiny

Any way you slice it, the capture and surrender of Radovan Karadzic makes Serbia's integration into the EU that much more of a foregone conclusion. Of course, anything can happen. But will it? As I've been suggesting about post-Yugoslavia, that's not likely.