The American Conservative

Victor Davis Hanson complains about so-called “neo-isolationism” under Obama:

Conservatives have jumped on the president’s trivial gestures — the “apology tour,” the bows to foreign authoritarians and monarchs. In isolation, these would be irrelevant, but they reflect an underlying policy of multipolarity and multilateralism.

Obama’s apparent neutrality in the matter of the “Malvinas,” his initial pressure on Israel about the settlements, his courting of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman Turkey, his seeking of the permission of the Arab League and the United Nations (but not the U.S. Congress) to intervene in Libya — all send signals that there is no privilege to be derived from being a supporter of America or its values.

If there’s one thing I’ll never quite figure out, it’s how an “underlying policy of multipolarity and multilateralism” can ever be “neo-isolationist,” but Hanson wants us to believe that the U.S. under Obama is “neo-isolationist.” It helps that Hanson is using all these terms as insults, but it should occur to Hanson at some point while writing this article that these are opposing positions. If Obama were a “neo-isolationist,” he wouldn’t seek the approval of regional and international institutions for much of anything, much less make it a requirement before going to war. If he were a “neo-isolationist,” it is doubtful that he would be trying to rebuild the relationship with Turkey that his predecessor wrecked and he has handled poorly in the past. Of course, Hanson’s use of “neo-isolationist” is just intended as mockery. That is the thing Republican hawks are trained to call the people they attack, and so that is what Hanson calls Obama.

What stands out in Hanson’s catalogue of errors is the sheer irrelevance of most of what he’s talking about. The “apology tour” never happened. It’s pure fiction. U.S. neutrality over the Falklands dates back decades. Obama’s position is essentially no different from the one taken by his predecessors dating back to Reagan. It is only now that Hanson and other hawks pretend to care about this neutrality, because they think they can shoehorn it into a bogus narrative about allies betrayed. Obama has been “courting” Erdogan (a.k.a., trying to repair the horribly damaged U.S.-Turkish relationship). What is Hanson’s point? Once we set aside the silly “neo-Ottoman” distortion, which is every bit as silly as the “neo-isolationist” one, why does this bother Hanson? He doesn’t explain here, but it’s presumably because the relationship with Turkey that the previous administration trashed so stupidly is slowly being repaired, which reflects poorly on the administration that wrecked it in the first place.

I talked about Bush’s role in creating the bankruptcy of Republican foreign policy thinking earlier today. This Hanson article is a good exhibit of that bankruptcy on full display.

While he rejects pro-Bush revisionism, Dan Drezner nonetheless tries to give George W. Bush a little bit of credit:

Second, ironically, Bush’s legacy will be a bit more buoyant because the quality of post-Bush GOP thinking on foreign policy has been so piss-poor that Bush really does look good by comparison. It is worth remembering that, for all of the criticisms of Bush’s foreign policy rhetoric, he kept anti-Muslim hysteria somewhat in check. He boosted foreign aid through PEPFAR, which might be his most significant foreign policy legacy. And the Bush foreign policy of 2008 looked dramatically different from the Bush foreign policy of 2003, which suggests some degree of adaptation and learning.

Bush’s record in Africa and his work to improve relations with India are among the very few redeeming features of his tenure, which is why I suspect the current very negative assessment of his foreign policy record will withstand the scrutiny of later generations. Even when we take genuine Bush successes into account, the record of failure on Bush’s own terms speaks for itself. Is Bush “the most disastrous foreign policy president of the post-1945 era,” as Drezner describes him? Possibly not, but he has a very strong claim to that title, and the arguments against describing him that way are exceptionally weak. These arguments usually focus on the fact that his successor didn’t reverse Bush’s entire approach to national security and foreign policy, and Bush loyalists conclude that this must mean that Bush was right on the issues where there was continuity. That’s not necessarily true, but the bigger problem for pro-Bush revisionists is that the Bush years were marred by foreign policy incompetence that went far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The “freedom agenda” was ill-conceived and ended in failure in virtually every place it was tried. Relations with Russia sank to a post-Cold War low in no small part because of administration bungling and needless provocation in the form of continued NATO expansion and proposed missile defense installations. The awful handling of relations with major European states and with Turkey during most of Bush’s tenure serves as a cautionary tale of how a great power should not treat its allies.

I suppose it’s true that that “the Bush foreign policy of 2008 looked dramatically different from the Bush foreign policy of 2003″ in that the grand ambitions and ideological delusions of 2003 had all been exposed as the nonsense they always were, but most of the differences between 2003 and 2008 were changes forced on the administration by events and by the manifest failures of its earlier decisions. It’s obviously true that Bush wasn’t launching any new preventive wars in 2008, but the “adaptation and learning” that did take place came grudgingly. What few changes occurred during Bush’s second term came about in large part because the preventive war Bush launched in 2003 had turned into such a debacle for Iraq and America that “staying the course” was no longer feasible.

Republican foreign policy thinking since Bush left office has indeed been very poor, but Drezner is mistaken to say that this makes Bush look better by comparison. The experience of the Bush presidency inflicted enormous damage on the GOP’s reputation for competence in conducting foreign policy, but the greater damage to Republican foreign policy thinking happened earlier. The lockstep support for the administration’s preferred policies that was expected on the right contributed mightily to the intellectual bankruptcy that has been on display in the last four years. Bush’s second term was in some ways worse than the first in this regard, because at that point support for Bush and the Iraq war had been reduced mostly to those inside the Republican coalition and the need to try to justify and vindicate Bush’s Iraq decision became proof of Republican and conservative bona fides. The “surge” debate served as the venue for expressing support for Bush and the Iraq war, and the same enforcement of mindless litmus tests on politicians and pundits that we saw in the early part of the decade happened all over again.

If you want to know how Republican foreign policy thinking reached its present sorry state, just review the record of pro-war and pro-Bush conformism on the right from 2002 on. Instead of rigorous and critical thinking on policy, conservatives became accustomed to inventing defenses for administration positions and serving as enforcers against critics from the center and left and against dissenters in their own ranks. Having becoming used to shaping their foreign policy views around what “their” president did and said, many on the right were left adrift when Bush left office. Bush was extremely unpopular, so conservatives didn’t want to identify openly with him for political reasons, but on policy many of them were so used to endorsing whatever he had done that they couldn’t design a distinctive and relevant agenda of their own. Most Republicans defaulted to opposing almost anything Obama did, partly because they believed that this is how the other party had treated Bush and partly for lack of any other ideas. To some extent, Republicans and conservatives did that to themselves, but Bush was the one they were following and he is partly responsible for the results.

In the wake of the Boston bombings, there have been a few articles discussing the effects that the Tsarnaevs’ Chechen background might have on U.S.-Russian relations and diplomacy related to the conflict in Syria. I doubt that there will be much of a discernible effect on either of these, but they’re worth pondering. A recent Post article began this way:

The possible link between the Boston Marathon bombings and Chechnya’s struggle for independence from Russia is likely to harden Russian opposition to any outside intervention in Syria and complicate the question of whether to arm the Syrian rebels.

It’s probably true that the Boston bombings will reinforce anti-interventionists’ existing views, but other than that I don’t see the attack having much of an effect. Considering how strongly opposed Russia already was to Western intervention and to any Western support for the Syrian opposition, I don’t know that their opposition can be “hardened” much more than it is. American public opinion was already heavily against greater U.S. involvement in Syria before the bombings, and the Syria policy debate among politicians and pundits will likely remain more or less unchanged. Arming the Syrian opposition has always been a poor idea, and one reason for that is the inherent difficulty in keeping weapons supplied to one group from falling into the hands of others. Nothing that happened in Boston over the last week makes this any more or less complicated than it already is. The case for intervention in Syria certainly doesn’t look any better than it did before, but that is because it was never persuasive in the first place. As for U.S.-Russian relations, any Russian attempts to exploit the bombings in order to advance other policy arguments will most likely backfire and sour relations with Washington further, but otherwise I don’t see significant improvement or deterioration in the relationship happening in the near future.

Charles King elaborated on the possibility that this could influence the Syria debate in an article for Foreign Affairs:

Now, Russians have already begun to portray the Tsarnaevs as an unlikely link between Boston and Damascus. There are somewhere “between 600 and 6,000” Chechens from the North Caucasus fighting in Syria, said [Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Vladimir] Kotliar in a recent interview with Russian media, “and from what happened in Boston, perhaps Americans will finally draw the lesson that there are no good terrorists and bad terrorists, no ‘ours’ and ‘yours.’” Keep arming the Syrian rebels, the argument goes, and sooner or later you will have to face the consequences of a Syria overtaken by Islamist radicals.

That might not be a bad line of reasoning, especially given what we know about the complicated mix of ideologies and motivations inside the Syrian opposition movement. And after Boston, Moscow now has an additional argument, however tenuous, against greater international involvement in Syria.

I have seen the “Chechens in Syria” claim before, and it is possible that there are some fighting on the side of anti-Assad forces, but it is a claim that never seems to be corroborated. Even if there are Chechens fighting Assad in Syria, some interventionists will come up with some way to blame Russia for that as well. There are jihadist groups among the anti-Assad forces, but if this hasn’t discouraged advocates for intervention or arming the opposition before now I’m not sure why the Tsarnaevs’ attack would change that.

Robert Merry comments on John McCain’s recent CNAS speech:

We may be in a new era, but it isn’t a new John McCain.

The senator summed up his underlying national-security philosophy by saying that “our interests are our values, and our values are our interests.” This lays bare the essence of McCain’s foreign policy. What does it mean to conflate values with interests? Where does it lead?

It leads to a messianic foreign policy.

If one defines “our values” to be as broad and universal as possible, and then identifies them with “our interests,” there is no limit to where “our interests” are at stake because “our values” have been defined in such a way that they are potentially at risk almost everywhere in the world. No less important, this creates a foreign policy that doesn’t acknowledge the need for trade-offs and priorities. If McCain thinks “our interests are our values, and our values are our interests,” he can always say that American interests are at stake in a foreign conflict or crisis without ever specifying what they are. He won’t be able to recognize that “our values” and “our interests” can be in tension or opposed to one another. Conflating values and interests has the effect of luring in those that want U.S. foreign policy to be focused primarily on advancing and securing national interests, and then revealing that they are being taken for a ride as part of a purely ideological project.

The Wall Street Journal reports on last night’s violence in Watertown, Massachusetts related to the Boston bombings:

U.S. authorities on Friday locked down the Boston area in the hunt for one of two brothers of Chechen background suspected in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.

Authorities identified one suspect as 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnayev, who was killed in a confrontation with police in Watertown, Mass., according to a U.S. law-enforcement official.

A manhunt was on for the second suspect, identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnayev, 19 years old. Both brothers were believed to be involved in the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer during a chaotic series of events Thursday night.

CBS reports that there is no evidence of connections between the two men and any terrorist groups in the North Caucasus:

There has been no indication that the Tsarnaev brothers are linked to Chechen terror groups operating in the region now. The former head of the school who spoke to the Reuters news agency in Dagestan said the whole family left for the U.S. in 2002.

So what to make of this? Based on initial reports, it appears that this was an attack launched by two brothers whose religious and political views were radicalized in part by their experience of fleeing their home because of the Chechen wars and partly through their sympathy with and interest in jihadist propaganda online. According to Haaretz, the younger Tsarnaev’s website expressed his identification with Islam and Chechen independence. Why they would choose the marathon of all things as their target isn’t entirely clear, but presumably it offered them an opportunity to harm as many people at once as possible in a high-profile way. What they hoped to achieve beyond notoriety and mayhem isn’t known, but perhaps that was enough for them.

I think Jacob Heilbrunn gets this wrong:

So the two suspected bombers—if suspect will even be the operative word later this day—are Chechens. Nothing illustrates the hollowness, the grandstanding of American foreign policy better than the fact that America has antagonized the one country that might have been able to help avert the blasts in Boston [bold mine-DL].

When our own law enforcement and intelligence agencies were completely unaware of a plot unfolding here in the U.S., it seems doubtful that Russia would have been able to alert us to these specific attackers when these men have been outside Russia for over a decade. Cooperation with Russia in counter-terrorism is valuable, and as a general rule I think antagonizing Russia is a pointless and destructive way to handle the relationship. However, I don’t see how Russian cooperation would have made any difference in this case. Russian help might be useful in determining whether or not there are any links between the Tsarnaevs and some group in the North Caucasus, but for now there wouldn’t appear to be any obvious implications for Russia policy here.

As for the “vindication of Putin,” I don’t think that holds up very well, either. Russian policy in the North Caucasus has been and remains brutal and repressive, and the Kremlin’s brutality contributed to transforming what was originally a separatist struggle into a jihadist cause. Insofar as the second Chechen war contributed to the Tsarnaevs’ willingness to engage in terrorism, the Boston bombings are a delayed form of blowback from Putin’s war. Obviously, none of that excuses the atrocities that Chechen terrorists have carried out over the years, but it is important to remember this in order to understand why Chechnya became a magnet for jihadists and why Chechens driven out of the region would be drawn to jihadism. In the case of the Tsarnaevs, it appears that the Chechen wars may be part of the explanation for their radicalization, but they are not the whole story.

Update: Here is some additional useful background on the Tsarnaevs.

Leon Wieseltier reminds us that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about:

In this spirit of obnoxious relentlessness, I want to say: Syria Syria Syria. But this is more than the peroration that Carthage must be destroyed. There is now a variation on the theme: call it the vanishing red line. It appears that in March a chemical weapon was used in Khan al-Asal in the province of Aleppo. It is not clear what kind of chemical it was. There was a stench of chlorine at the atrocity, where 25 people were killed, and those who survived it suffered respiratory problems of varying severity. Nobody believes that the poisoned rocket was fired by the rebels [bold mine-DL].

In fact, there is some reason to think that anti-Assad forces may have been responsible for this particular attack. The Daily Telegraph reported this last month:

The military’s version of events is that the home-made rocket was fired at a military checkpoint situated at the entrance to the town. The immediate effects were to induce vomiting, fainting , suffocation and seizures among those in the immediate area.

A second source – a medic at the local civilian hospital – said that he personally witnessed Syrian army helping those wounded and dealing with fatalities at the scene. That Syrian soldiers were among the reported 26 deaths has not been disputed by either side [bold mine-DL].

The military source who spoke to Channel 4 News confirmed that artillery reports from the Syrian Army suggest a small rocket was fired from the vicinity of Al-Bab, a district close to Aleppo that is controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra – a jihadist group said to be linked with al-Qaeda and deemed a “terrorist organisation” by the US.

It is not hard to imagine that a jihadist group could build a crude device using harmful chemicals and then use it in an attack, and in this case that may be what happened. That is a disturbing development, but it is not one that obviously shows that the U.S. should plunge into the Syrian conflict, which is what Wieseltier so desperately wants it to mean. An equally important point is that the attack in question would not have represented a crossing of the administration’s “red line” even if regime forces were responsible for it. From the Telegraph report:

The American and independent weapons analysts do not believe that the regime or rebels used advanced chemical weapons last week, after studying initial intelligence reports and video coverage of survivors on state-run television.

However, they suspect that the victims were deliberately exposed to a “caustic” agent such as chlorine. This does not count as a chemical weapon, under terms laid down by international treaties, but as an improvised chemical device would represent a major escalation in the conflict [bold mine-DL].

Aryn Baker at Time reported additional details earlier this month:

The opposition, though it also says it would never use chemical weapons, does have access to at least one item that could be used in a chemical attack: Sabbagh’s chlorine gas.

In August rebel forces took Sabbagh’s factory by force, as part of a sweep that also netted them an electricity station and a military airport about 30 km from Aleppo. Sabbagh, who has since fled Aleppo for Beirut, says his factory is now occupied by Jabhat al-Nusra, a militant group with strong ties to al-Qaeda that has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. He knows this because his site manager has struck a deal with the rebels — they supply 200 L of fuel a day to keep the generator running so that the valves of his $25 million factory don’t freeze up. The factory isn’t operational anymore, but this way at least, says Sabbagh, it might be one day in the future. In the meantime, he has no idea what has happened, if anything, to the 400 or so steel barrels of chlorine gas he had stored in the compound [bold mine-DL]. The yellow tanks, which hold one ton of gas each, are used for purifying municipal water supplies. “No one can know for certain, but if it turns out chlorine gas was used in the attack, then the first possibility is that it was mine. There is no other factory in Syria that can make this gas, and now it is under opposition control,” he says.

Obviously, none of this is certain, but based on the evidence that we have at the moment we shouldn’t be rushing to assume that the “red line” against the use of chemical weapons is “vanishing.” We definitely shouldn’t conclude that a single attack that may have been launched by anti-regime forces is a reason to drag the U.S. into yet another war.

Dennis Ross rehashes the unpersuasive case for intervention in Syria:

It is rare that idealists and realists find common ground. But ironically, the unfolding conflict in Syria is one where idealists and realists should come together. There is a moral imperative to try to stop the onslaught against the Syrian population. But there is also a strong U.S. national security imperative to at least contain the conflict in Syria, ensure that the regime’s chemical weapons do not fall into al Qaeda’s hands, and prevent the neighborhood from being destabilized.

It is not true that the U.S. has a “great stake” in the conflict. Once we dispense with this illusion, we can stop fixating on trying to influence the outcome of a conflict in which the U.S. has nothing at stake. Insofar as the U.S. has something at stake in the surrounding region, it is in limiting the damage from the conflict to Syria’s neighbors. That won’t be achieved by sending more weapons into Syria, and sending more weapons will intensify the conflict and displace even more people into neighboring countries. In practical terms, the chances of chemical weapons falling into the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra or similar groups are greater if the U.S. helps to overthrow the regime, whose arsenals could then be looted by whichever anti-regime forces happen to come across them first. Containing the conflict in Syria is desirable, which is precisely why the U.S. shouldn’t do anything to further internationalize the conflict. U.S. cooperation with Turkey and the Gulf states has already done enough damage. There’s no sense in compounding the error.

The goals that Ross describes are mutually contradictory: fueling the conflict and taking sides in it make it more difficult to contain the conflict and limit its destabilizing effects on neighboring countries. If the U.S. won’t be able to influence “the realities on the ground without providing lethal assistance,” then so be it. Influencing “the realities on the ground” isn’t something that the U.S. needs to do, and the U.S. is unlikely to have much influence on those realities even if it begins directly providing weapons. Ross talks up the idea of a “no-fly zone on the cheap,” which is what he’s calling the bad idea of using Patriot missiles to create a small no-fly zone at the Turkish-Syrian border. The “no-fly zone on the cheap” is the very definition of a half-baked idea. The “no-fly zone on the cheap” wouldn’t be as effective as its advocates want, and it would run into strong political opposition from most NATO members. NATO members were willing to provide the Patriot batteries for the purposes of defending Turkey against possible Syrian attack, but they aren’t going to agree to using them for a completely different purpose.

Ross tops off the bad case for Syrian intervention with this claim:

If we want diplomacy to work with Iran on the nuclear issue, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei must be convinced that the United States will actually use force if negotiations fail — and America’s hesitant posture toward Syria signals not readiness to use force, but reluctance.

First, reluctance to plunge into Syria’s civil war tells us nothing about whether the administration is willing to launch an attack on Iran. That’s not good news, since war with Iran would be folly, but it means that Ross’ concerns here are unfounded. Does Ross believe that diplomacy with Iran will be more likely to succeed if the U.S. takes an even more aggressive role in toppling an Iranian ally for the purpose of weakening Iran’s position in the region? On the contrary, an Iranian regime that sees the U.S. successfully toppling yet another government in the region will become even more fearful that they are next on the list, which will make acquiring a deterrent against attack that much more attractive and it will make a negotiated settlement that much less appealing.

Mark Murray interprets a new poll result showing Bush’s low favorability rating (via Doug Mataconis):

Yet buried inside Bush’s poll numbers is a striking finding: He fares well among the demographic groups that have favored Republicans, including defeated 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and he performs poorly among the demographic groups with whom Republicans have struggled.

I’m not sure this is all that striking. It sounds like what one would expect from strong partisan and ideological voters. If you voted Republican for president in 2012 or 2008, the odds are good that you belong to the hard core of the Republican coalition. This is something that not even the disasters of the Bush era could weaken, which is how the extremely poor McCain/Palin ticket still managed to get almost 46% of the vote during a recession and a financial crisis.

Bush’s continued popularity on the right is relevant to the debate over what Republicans have to do to get out from under the shadow of the Bush administration. Unfortunately for the GOP, the party is in something of a bind. Most Americans outside the party view Bush unfavorably because they regard him (correctly) as a failed president whose policies inflicted serious damage on the country. Most people inside the party see him in an entirely different light. If 65% of Republicans and 60% of self-identified conservatives view Bush favorably, it’s not surprising that there is so much resistance on the right to acknowledging Bush’s errors and learning from them. It’s also possible Bush’s overall unpopularity may be contributing to his popularity inside the Republican tent out of some sort of perverse need to defy the prevailing view that Bush’s presidency was a disaster. There is a strange rally effect in partisan politics that can cause people to remain loyal to their worst leaders simply for the sake of opposing critics from the other “side.” Even worse than this are the loyalists that genuinely can’t see failure for what it is.

This brings to mind the question Romney was asked in the second presidential debate last year. The woman asked Romney:

Governor Romney, I am an undecided voter, because I’m disappointed with the lack of progress I’ve seen in the last four years. However, I do attribute much of America’s economic and international problems to the failings and missteps of the Bush administration [sic]. Since both you and President Bush are Republicans, I fear a return to the policies of those years should you win this election. What is the biggest difference between you and George W. Bush, and how do you differentiate yourself from George W. Bush?

Romney’s answer wasn’t very good, since his attempt to differentiate himself from Bush just confirmed that he didn’t disagree with Bush on anything important. Like many other Republicans over the last four years, Romney couldn’t identify many big differences with Bush because they didn’t exist. More important, he didn’t really understand why he needed to do this. He didn’t understand why because he didn’t accept the premise that “the failings and missteps of the Bush administration” were responsible for America’s “economic and international problems.” Instead, Romney spent most of the campaign pretending that Bush didn’t exist and that the Bush years never happened while proposing to do almost all of the same things that Bush had done. Bush loyalists also don’t know how to answer the question Romney was asked, and it is even more difficult for them because they are so busy being offended that someone has the temerity to hold Bush responsible for his failures.

Here is a quick reminder of why no one should listen to Michael Ledeen on anything related to Iran:

In 2009, when massive protests followed Iran’s disputed presidential vote, Mr. Obama sat by as the insurrection [bold mine-DL] was brutally put down by the Tehran regime.

This is a falsehood that Iran hawks have pushed on and off for four years. It has been repeatedly exposed as nonsense, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the people recycling it. When Ledeen calls the 2009 protests an “insurrection,” he’s partially letting the regime off the hook for killing peaceful protesters, since calling it an insurrection implies an attempt at violently overthrowing the government. It is a little odd that hard-line Iran hawks end up echoing official Iranian propaganda about the Green movement, but the lie that the Green movement was a seditious one is very useful to hard-liners in both countries.

The current Iranian leadership is happy to portray the Green movement as “seditionists,” because this de-legitimizes and undermines the protesters’ original demands for political reform and redress for violation of civil rights. If the Green movement can be portrayed as trying to overthrow the government, that makes it even more politically difficult for them inside Iran and creates the pretext for even harsher treatment. Hard-liners here want to pretend that the Green movement was an “insurrection” in order to complain about the administration’s response to the protests and to project their own fantasy of regime change onto the Iranian opposition, which doesn’t seek it. It’s fair to say that Iran hawks have been interested in U.S. support for the Green movement insofar as they believe it is a vehicle for regime change. Some of them are more than happy to adopt groups with a long record of political violence as the “real” Iranian opposition, which is one reason why there are so many eager MEK boosters in the U.S. these days.

Aaron David Miller discusses American optimism as a product of the country’s secure geographical location, and holds it responsible for recent foreign policy errors:

Just look at America’s recent foreign-policy misadventures. Americans’ mistaken belief that post-invasion Iraq would be a place where Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds would somehow look to the future to build a new nation reflected this tendency. It’s the same story with the Arab Spring: From the beginning, America seemed determined to impose its own upbeat Hollywood ending on a movie that was only just getting started and would become much darker than imagined. The notion that what was happening in Egypt was a transformative event that would turn the country over to the secular liberals powered by Facebook and Twitter was truly an American conceit.

I agree that misunderstandings born of extreme optimism are harmful, but I think Miller errs in attributing these specific optimistic views to most or all Americans. Some mistaken beliefs about post-invasion Iraq were probably not widely shared by most Americans. The idea that “Iraq would be a place where Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds would somehow look to the future to build a new nation” was a view espoused by pro-war propagandists, and I doubt that it was ever seriously held by more than 20% of the population. (Miller actually understates how absurdly optimistic some prominent war supporters about what post-invasion Iraq would be like.) Many Americans didn’t think about what would happen after the invasion, and for a lot of war supporters that was irrelevant anyway. The war received the support it did because of the panicked political atmosphere after 9/11, and because of the administration’s utterly false assertions that Iraq was supposedly an intolerable threat in league with Al Qaeda.

The Iraq war was a product of excessive fear and fear-mongering. Its architects may have had delusional, optimistic schemes for regional democratic transformation, but a lot of its supporters backed the invasion because their government had terrified them with the prospect of nuclear terrorist attacks that might follow if there were no war. Unreasonable expectations about what would follow Egypt’s original anti-Mubarak protests were widespread in American media, but I’m not sure that the “American conceit” that Miller refers to here was one that most Americans accepted. It could be that the secure location of the U.S. causes some people here to not fully understand the severity and horrors of armed conflict, which in turn makes them quicker to support military action in other countries, but I suspect that excessive optimism about the results of democratization in other countries is something normally confined to a very small fraction of the population.

Despite living in an unusually secure and powerful country, Americans are just as susceptible as any other nation to the demagoguery of politicians that exaggerate and invent foreign threats. It may be that our secure position in the world has spoiled us. When an attack does occur, there is a tendency to overreact because suffering foreign attacks has been so unusual in our history. Oddly enough, we are accustomed to being very secure, and yet our foreign policy debate ceaselessly obsesses over the most remote and manageable foreign threats.