Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Madison Bumgarner, 24.

Want some good stuff?

1. More on the Iraq War, from Erik Voeten. My position, again: the instability and costs of the status quo were real...but good presidenting would have revealed that the costs, including downside risks, of invasion and occupation were far, far, higher.

2. Good crankiness about the current scandals (and stupid things being said about them) from Irin Carmon.

3. And speaking of cranky: Greg opens up on lazy punditry.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Danger Mouse, 36.

Recovering from a brutal Giants weekend; at least there's still good stuff:

Elizabeth Saunders on Al Gore and Iraq -- plus links to plenty more. I've only read the post, and not the full article, but I suspect I agree entirely (mostly because it sounds pretty similar to what I've said about Gore/Iraq).

While Philip Klein is a skeptic on a GOP shift to a less McCain-like foreign policy.

Perhaps a cheap shot, but fun: Paul Krugman goes all Lincoln on the Republicans.

And Dan Hopkins on messaging and health care reform.

Memorial Day

I'll mostly be over at Greg's place today, but wanted to pop in at least once to wish everyone a nice Memorial Day.

I'll contribute one item, really a follow-up to the weekend questions. There was one new coalition death in Afghanistan recorded yesterday. It was the first one in ten days -- ending a streak which had dramatically improved the pace of May casualties after a very disappointing first half of the month. The death yesterday put this month's coalition total up to 25. That's the highest this year (and in fact the highest since September), but that's to be expected given the seasonal nature of the war in Afghanistan. More promising is that May will wind up down from the 45 coalition deaths last year. There have been 67 coalition fatalities to date in 2013; last year, there were 183 through the end of May. There's still a plausible chance that coalition deaths will wind up under 200 for 2013.

There are (at least) two obvious interpretations of Barack Obama's policy with respect to all of this. The negative one is to question whether any of these deaths are in the service of anything more than a graceful exit; given that Obama continues to define the mission down, John Kerry's famous question would seem to apply here just as much as it applied to Iraq.

The positive interpretation would be that Obama has shown a solid pattern of actually following up on his stated plans to withdraw, even if it opens him up to criticism for "retreating" or for losing a war which (supposedly) was about to be decisively won. That interpretation would also give Obama credit for how difficult it is to turn the boat around, and stress that at least for now it appears that the Obama Administration will have successfully ended two wars and started no new ones. Remember, a lot of people in 2008-2009 believed that the US would find a way to keep a major troop presence in Iraq; that didn't happen.

(Yes, Libya, and yes, drone wars...but even there Obama displays an impressive ability to avoid escalations and to move to end things).

Is one of these interpretations correct? I don't know; perhaps they both are.

Bush, Principles, and Presidenting

The discussion of George W. Bush's intelligence, or lack thereof, continues. My position on this, as I've said many times, is that I've heard him speak on baseball and he sounded sharp enough; I attributed the evidence of his presidency not as a lack of innate intelligence, but as a consequence of his lack of interest in the world of public affairs and policy.

Two new contributions worth looking at. Kevin Drum looks at Keith Hennessey's anecdotes intended to show Bush's smarts and sees, instead, impatience and lack of interest in details. And Ed Kilgore wants to blame GOP orthodoxy, and not Bush at all, for the policies Bush adopted and urged.

I think it's probably correct to say that Bush arrived at the policies he supported because they conformed to conservative ideology, or at least GOP orthodoxy, of the time. However, that's not good enough. All presidents are driven by what their party wants, and part of being a good president is finding ways to keep party actors happy. Even if it means supporting unpopular policies, in some cases.

But presidents also need to know when to resist the party when the party wants something that won't work -- for the sake of the party, among other reasons, even though many party actors won't accept that.

And even more critically, presidents have to resist the temptation to accept party ideas as invariably correct -- and then the temptation to try to do the right thing. Generally, presidents are asking for trouble when they try to do whatever they believe is, in the abstract, the "right thing." That's true if it's "right" for ideological reasons, as with (perhaps) Bush; it's true if it's "right" based on the president's moral intuition, as was the case with Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson.

Presidents do not have any special claim to superior moral intuition, no matter what Carter or George W. Bush seem to believe. Nor do they have any special ability to channel the beliefs of "the people," as Wilson believed. When they attempt to do so -- when they attempt to base policy choices on their principles -- they are apt to get it all wrong, because there's no institutional reason that they should get it right. We might as well select our presidents by lot.

What presidents do have -- and all elected officials have it, but presidents have more of it than anyone else in the system -- is access to the very best clues about what policies will be "viable" (in Neustadt's term). They have access to more, and more varied, information sources than anyone else. What's more, because their constituency is so large, they have access to the reactions of more, and more varied, organized groups than anyone else.Those reactions are often even better sources of information than the raw policy data that experts might give them (although to be sure the reactions of experts are an excellent source of information.

Good presidenting, perhaps more than anything else, is the art of extracting information from political action and actors. What does it mean when this general says that an occupation will take more troops than his bosses at the Defense Department say it will take? What does it mean when this DoD official (representing what faction? How?) disagrees? What does it mean when this ally objects to the course the United States is taking; what does it man when that ally goes along? How much weight to give private statements, and how much to give public? When is the support or opposition being given for a policy pro forma, and when is it sincere and intense? And what is that intense support or opposition really saying about the policy?

There are no magic formulas to answer those questions. It takes excellent governing skills: the ability to assess people and situations, deep knowledge of the political system and groups within it, a full sense of representational relationships. Some detailed policy knowledge can't hurt, although no president will have enough to substitute for those more general skills, and policy knowledge can even get in the way -- a determination to always do what's "right" can be just (almost?) as much of a problem if it's based on the president's personal policy expertise as it is if it's based on ideological principles or gut feelings.

So, yes, I do think it's true of all presidents that they are heavily influence by their party's positions, and that's as it should be. But presidents also must know when to push back against their party's positions (or ignore them, or give lip service support to them).

The difference, really, between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is that Reagan -- who surely was as much of an ideologue in some ways as Bush -- was at his best pretty good at seeing danger and avoiding it. George W. Bush? Spectacularly bad about seeing danger coming and avoiding it. That's not because Reagan (or other, even better presidents) had better "principles" or ideology or guts -- it's because they were excellent politicians. George W. Bush, alas, was a terrible politician, and a terrible president.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Robert Downey, Jr., 48. Surprised how many of his movies I've seen; I count at least nine movies he's been in that I've seen, despite that I never have watched Weird Science.

And some good stuff:

1. Alex Pareene on "the Mark Penn test."

2. Iraq dead-enders, from Dan Larison.

3. The future of marriage; Reihan Salam's view.

4. Yeah, I agree with Matt Yglesias about immigration, except I think I might be more pro-immigration than he is.

5. Ezra Klein on GOP health care policy.

6. And Abby Rapoport looks at NoDak populism.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Lucy Lawless, 45. OK: I wasn't really much of a Xena fan, at least not as far as actually watching the show. But I very much liked her D'anna.

The good stuff:

1. James Fallows on the costs -- to the US budget -- of Iraq and Afghanistan.

2. Micah Cohen looks at turnover in the Senate.

3. Ann Friedman interviews Chris Hayes, and talks quotas.

4. And a dissenting view to my post on public opinion, from Steve M. He argues that you can create "artificial" intensity that leads to action, which I said couldn't be done by presidents, by working at it in a sustained way for years. It's fair to say that there are some people who are partisan activists who were sparked by leading politicians, as opposed to those who became involved because some issue get them out of their houses. But in practice that's a very small group. Most of the people he's talking about, the Rush Limbaugh audience, don't become activists (more, although still a relatively small group, become avid consumers, but that's not the same thing). They learn, basically, the "right" answers to give on policy questions...but even then, it's not unusual to find that those answers are just a thin layer; that's why, for example, pollsters get surprisingly high rates of Republicans supporting some Democratic positions (minimum wage, background checks). Of course, the same happens on the other side, too.

Sunday Question for Liberals

I'll stick with Iraq, but try to find something a bit different...we've heard plenty from Democrats who supported the Iraq War in 2002/2003 and are now apologizing for it; we've also heard a fair amount from Democrats who opposed the war then and are pointing out now that they were correct to do so. So putting all that aside: for liberals those who opposed the war then, were there any lessons that they should have learned from what happened, either in the run-up to the war or after it began?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

I suppose I'm a few days late for this, but: what lessons, if any, do you think the Republican Party has learned from the Iraq War? What lessons should the party have learned?

Catch of the Day

How about one for Conor Friedersdorf, who today looks back at the demonization of opponents of the Iraq War during the run-up and early stages of that conflict.

It's a good item. I do want to think about this stray point:

You know the conservative account of how the media covered Tea Party rallies, heaping disproportionate attention on offensive signs and crackpot attendees, as if the least defensible elements of the protest movement represented and defined the whole? That's basically how the pro-war faction covered the protest movement that opposed the war.

I think that's basically fair -- but also unfair. With the anti-war protests, it was pretty clear what the main point was: they didn't want the United States (and allies) to invade Iraq. Reasonable coverage of those protests could have started and ended with that; making hay over crackposts in the crowd was clearly superfluous.

I'd argue that the same was not true about Tea Party rallies. Within the Tea Party movement (or whatever you want to call it), there were certainly some people with coherent policy demands or ideologies. But as a whole, it was extremely difficult to figure out what the Tea Party was about. And not just from a few people carrying crazy signs; there was plenty of stuff from the podium that was, well, pretty goofy. It was in fact perfectly plausible to hypothesize that, say, bigotry against Barack Obama was a significant part of Tea Partyism. And that therefore the more explicit evidence was a plausible clue to what was going on.

That's not to say that the bigotry theory was necessarily correct, and it's certainly not to say that the coverage never took isolated or out-of-context evidence and generalized inappropriately. It's just...look, it's usually a good idea in politics (if not in political analysis) to ignore motives. Arguments stand and fall on their merits, regardless of why they're made. That's why I usually defend hypocrisy; in politics, hypocrisy is at most a very minor sin, if that. But the Tea Partiers, at least in my view, practically begged us to consider their motives, because much of what they were saying on the surface just didn't make any sense (as in the iconic "keep government away from my Medicare").

I'll stop there...I'm not sure I have a final point. Just that the situation is complicated.

Oh, and that has almost nothing to do with what Friedersdorf is up to on the post overall, for which I only need to say: Nice catch!

A "Lesson of Iraq" Which I Thought Everyone Learned But I Guess Not

Reading over all of the Iraq stuff this week, I'm sort of stunned that almost everyone -- supporters, opponents then, supporters then who believe they were wrong -- are still using the phrase "weapons of mass destruction."

Cut it out, everyone.

"Weapons of mass destruction" was a stupid category then, and it's a stupid category now.

Unless it's for a critique of the poor thinking that went on then, no one should use it. Ever.

Underrated Villains of Iraq

Okay, let's talk blame for the Iraq War.

Matt Yglasias, in a smart post, says:

The main not-totally-obvious thing I have to say about this is that the underrated villains in this drama are the leading Democratic Party politicians of the 2002-2003 era. “Because trusted leaders of my political party say so” is of course not a good reason to back any political position. But the evidence is overwhelming that elite signaling and top-down leadership matter for public opinion formation. I remember quite clearly that in arguments around the dining hall people who were (rightly) opposing the invasion would (wrongly) emphasize the Bush Bush Bush factor in their arguments and I would rebut by pointing to Hillary and Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, John Kerry and John Edwards. Madeleine Albright. The whole crew

I think that's correct if "this drama" refers to mistaken policy preferences of college-student Yglesias and others who basically mistakenly lined up on the "wrong" side - wrong not in that it was poor public policy (although I certainly agree that was the case) but wrong in the sense that they were following sensible cues which nonetheless betrayed them.

But I don't think it's correct in the sense that the liberals who wound up voting for the war (many with some sort of reservations, but even putting that aside) really weren't in a position to have very much influence over whether the war would happen or not. Had mainstream liberal Democrats been solidly opposed, the resolution still passes the Senate, for example. It would have been less popular, yes, but I don't think there's much that Democrats, or at least mainstream liberal Democrats could have done in 2002-2003 to stop it. So, sure, those who voted for it should be held responsible, but I don't think they're the underrated villains.

No, to find those, I suspect we need to turn to what Yglesias says later:

On the actual policy, what holds up reasonably well from the old pre-war case is that the Clinton era “containment” policy on Iraq was crumbling. The endless sanctioning of Iraq was not a viable long-term strategy for the region. That left you with two kinds of options. One—the wrong option—was to get more aggressive. The other—the correct option—was to realize that the goal of military domination of the Persian Gulf is just fundamentally misguided. The project is motivated by fuzzy thinking about oil, and it’s been extremely costly over the decades. Protecting Kuwait from a direct and flagrantly illegal cross-border military attack is a defensible (though arguably not necessary) use of military force, but the whole rest of the undertaking dating back to long before Bush was a mistake.

I'm not sure about "crumbling", but I would definitely agree that the GHWB-Clinton policy after the first Gulf War was extremely costly and long-run unstable.

What that points to is that the first Gulf War was a mistake -- a mistake that wasn't recognized, and still isn't recognized, because of the almost picture-perfect execution of the policy.

George H.W. Bush and his national security/foreign policy team deserve tons of credit for managing the end of the Cold War; I think their handling of that is severely underappreciated (thanks to Democratic reluctance to praise Republicans and Republican insistence on glorifying Ronald Reagan). Given the decision to use force to kick Iraq out of Kuwait, they handled it about as well as possible. But for all that, the US wound up with a situation considerably worse than another Korea and in a worse part of the world in which to have that situation.

It wasn't a good enough reason to go to war in 2003, but that only goes to show that when there are no good decisions one can still make a relatively worse decision.

Which means that long-term US policy in general, and the George H.W. Bush Gulf War, are really the underrated villains of the Iraq War.

At least that's one theory. The other theory is just that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld etc. are underrated as villains because there's a tendency to look for more complicated explanations.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Brent Scowcroft, 87.

Good stuff:

1. Sarah Binder is tracking the CR. Which is easier said than done.

2.  Interesting David Karpf item about technology and politics.

3. And the amazing history of GOP minority outreach: it didn't start in 2013.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to J.R. Richard, 63.

Oh, the good stuff:

1. Conor Friedersdorf asks: who were the radicals in 2002?

2. Partisanship, ideology, and Rand Paul. From Hans Noel.

3. Ezra Klein on what the Obama charm offensive tells us about Obama. 

4. And a terrific Sarah Binder post about the Rand Paul filibuster.

What Mattered This Week?

Better late than never, I hope:

Syria is the headline again, no? Also, I'd say that the announced decision to cut US personnel in Iraq matters. Why? It's another indication that this administration is willing to cut its losses; it doesn't allow itself to be held hostage to Friedman Units. One of the real strengths, in my view, of the Obama presidency.

The Santorum shocker on Tuesday? Hard to know whether it will wind up meaning more than what I thought on Wednesday, when I really didn't think it would matter much.

What about the birth control/Catholic Church thing? My guess is that it's a lot less important than it looks now. Surely that's true for the second half of the Komen flap. We also had two victories for marriage equality this week, with the courts coming down against California's Prop 8 and the Washington state legislature passing a law enabling same-sex marriage there.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

What Matters This Week

Hey, what matters to me is that I got to the Bat Mitzvah on time -- she did great -- despite a rather more adventurous than usual trip there. Which you all don't care about at all, but explains why I'm running a little late this week and why I don't really have any memory at all of what happened that mattered. Let's see...well, the war ended (formally) for the US in Iraq. That's something. Developments in Syria, still. Congress didn't manage to shut down the government, but also didn't get a lot of their work done (confirmations!). But really, I've had barely any sleep and I'm going to have to rely on you all for this one. So tell me: what do you think mattered this week?

Catch of the Day (Plus: Elections, Democracy, and the Surge)

How about one for Matt Duss, who has been having fun beating up on Fred Kagan and associates over the Iraq withdrawal. I was going to give one to Duss the other day on the same subject, but this one is even better; after quoting Fred and Kim Kagan on why the withdrawal ruins everything, Duss notes: "What the Kagans seem to be describing here is a scenario in which the surge didn’t really achieve its goals."

Exactly right. The Kagans say that the withdrawal is a defeat of the US by Iran, but the truth about this is that George W. Bush negotiated the US surrender when he signed the agreement to leave; Obama has been doing little more than managing that surrender. Although it's worth saying that managing a surrender is a tough assignment, since there are always going to be people around who will suggest that sticking around just a little bit longer (despite the agreement) could make all the difference; expect those same people to blame Obama for surrendering too soon whenever anything goes wrong in Iraq or the general region once the US troops are gone.

The other thing worth noting, again, is the imperfect but real relationship between elections and policy. Imagine if Republicans had done well in the 2006 elections, retaining control of both branches of Congress (which requires also imagining a much more popular George W. Bush in 2006). What happens in Iraq then? My guess is...more of the same. No surge, but no withdrawal, either. What the 2006 elections "caused" (quotes because direct causation is too strong) was for Bush to start actively managing the war with an eye towards being able to at least have it winding down in some way by fall 2008. That this wound up producing the surge and an increase in US casualties is, I suppose, ironic, and certainly not what the most energetic folks in the 2006 election cycle wanted, but even putting aside any claims that the surge "worked" it's still the case that active management of the war was almost certainly better than the autopilot that seemed to be the case in 2004, 2005, and 2006 up to election day.

A lot of people, of course, were very upset that Democratic electoral victories sparked in large part by disgust with the war apparently produced the surge and increased casualties. And again, I'm not claiming here that everything worked out perfectly the way that antiwar folks should have wanted it to if only they understood things better (remember, I started this by linking to a piece that pointed out that the surge didn't work).

But while I think the policy stunk, I'd still defend the democratic process that produced it. After all, the people who were seriously antiwar in 2006 were a kind of minority, too (a larger minority than pro-war types if I remember the polling correctly, but still a plurality, not a majority). A whole lot of people in 2006 didn't feel strongly either way, and they voted on other issues: the economy, something about their local candidates, guns or abortion or Afghanistan or Katrina or GOP corruption in Congress, or just plain normal partisanship.

What the 2006 elections did is what elections can do: they pushed politicians who previously had been acting as if no one cared about Iraq one way or another to start acting as if they could be punished if Iraq went bad. They aligned politicians' incentives correctly. And the result (down the road, and after another bloodbath, and still not quite done yet) was, I think, one of the potential results of getting those incentives aligned correctly. (Of course, remember that in 2007-2008 George W. Bush was just as legitimately an elected president as the Congress was legitimate; the Constitution forces overlapping temporal majorities to get along, too). Well, elections do more than that; they also produced some representatives whose representative relationship with their constituents was closely tied to opposing the war. That group wasn't a majority in 2007-2008, but having them around makes a difference, too.

Elections aren't plebiscites; they don't actually tell us "what the voters think" or "what the voters demand." If we expect that of them, we'll wind up thinking that democracy doesn't work well. But that's wrong; it just asks more of elections than they can give. Which doesn't mean that self-government doesn't work; it just means that if you really want self-government, it can't be only about voting. If that's all you got, you don't have much of a democracy.

I seem to have wandered a bit. Back to Duss: really good post, and nice catch!

Catch of the Day

Over at Think Progress, Ben Armbruster catches Newt Gingrich coming out for the withdrawal from Iraq on Friday...but by the end of the weekend, Newt had also taken the opposite position. Okay, it's slightly more subtle than that; click through and read it. Armbruster reviews the Libya flip-flop that got Newt in trouble a few months ago, too. Nice catch!

Want more Newt-bashing? I have a new piece over at Salon saying that if Newt didn't exist, Republicans would want to invent him. Yes, if you're wondering, I did use the words "fraud" and "snake-oil." What did you expect?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Double question. First, how about a letter grade for Barack Obama on Iraq. Provisional, of course.

Second, does the way Obama handled Iraq and Libya make you more or less likely to trust him on other foreign  policy actions, whether it's Afghanistan or any future actions?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Leaving policy behind, and just thinking for now about electoral politics,which is the better rhetoric on Iraq: bashing Barack Obama for pulling out too soon, or just ignoring the whole thing? Or is there some better choice available -- again, simply in terms of rhetoric, not policy.

What Mattered This Week?

I suppose it has to begin with the events in Libya, and then the president's announcement about Iraq. 

What else? Little bits of potentially good news about the US economy, but nothing as significant as the questions about Europe. 

Some judges were confirmed, and some ambassadors, and even an open cabinet spot...well, it was Commerce, so it's hard to say it really matters, but still...

The GOP contest continued. Herman Cain had the kind of gaffe that could destroy a real candidate, and may wind up bursting his polling bubble, although it was bound to happen one way or another. Rick Perry showed signs of life, sort of. 

That's all I have, except I'll also recommend a nice essay by Matt Glassman about how things matter, since it's relevant here. What do you think mattered this week?