Ross Douthat is not a fan of the White House’s decision to require Catholic-aligned organizations to provide its employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives. He argues that it’s not just a matter of religious freedom, but that this government politicization of morals is a dangerous precedent:

The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly, and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.

The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends.

Right, I would never want an adminstration to just impose its moral sensibilities whenever it has control of the health care bureaucracy.

Which is why I did not like it when Douthat wrote in favor of the Bush adminstration’s intervention in the Terry Schiavo case against the wishes of her husband. Ross’s insistence in that case that the federal government encroach on a voluntary community (marital couple), just because that community didn’t "share the moral sensitilities" of the party in power seemed wrong to me.

Ross is also a long-standing advocate for the Bush administration’s ban on the use of public funds for embryonic stem cell research. Here too he seems to have had no problem with the party in power imposing its moral sensibilities on society. I might have warned Ross at the time, to no avail, that "the logic behind [the stem cell ban] could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values."

Here is my real gripe with the Douthat line. He calls the White House regulation an "attack on conscience," and I have seen several opponents similarly decry the rule as forcing Catholics to "betray their conscience."

Whenever religion demands some special privilege or special exemption from public policy, or special state protection or innoculation against modern norms (or in its more sinister manifestation, protection from "offense"), the issue of "conscience" is inevitably invoked. The implication is always that the beliefs and morals of organized religion should be given special consideration above those of secularists. I find this a very tiresome disparity. Because, we on this side have consciences too. We believe that the wide availability and destigmification of contraception and the attendant liberation of women from the animal reproductive cycle represents one of the greatest moral and economic triumphs of humankind. Wheresoever these rights are not respected, we find political and cultural backwardness, economic stagnation, and sexual pathology. In fact, we on this side believe that teaching a doctrine that resigns women to be slaves to their reproductive cycle is not "conscience," but unconscionable.

Now, forcing female employees of Catholic-aligned institutions to go pay full retail price for birth control is not quite the same thing as consigning them to an animal reproductive cycle. But it does show how attenuated the church’s argument has become, and how much "conscience" ground it has already conceded. "Contraception is such a moral evil that my conscience requires some of you to go pay full retail price for it!" It doesn’t really have an Old Testament gravitas ring to it.

And where exactly is this contraception culture war that Ross invokes? It seems to be occurring largely in his and Timothy Dolan’s mind. Elsewhere in the 21st century, there’s not much debate as to whether birth control is ok or not. Catholics are more than welcome to adhere to or preach retrograde contraception norms among their co-religionists. But evidence suggests that no one is listening, including Catholics themselves. 98% of Catholic women say they’ve used contraceptive methods banned by the church. It’s a dead letter.

To me this is likely to be one more in a long line of issues in which the church has been forced to assimilate or abandon its doctrinal inanities when they have come into conflict with scientific or historical fact, or modern moral norms. The church has retreated so thorougly on creation, on evolution, on geology and cosmology, on gender norms and antisemitism. May its psychosis regarding sex and women’s bodies pass along as well, despite the ostensibly inviolable consciences of its flock. Remember, we too have inviolable consciences and principles, and the rejection and stigmatization of this piffle in the public square cannnot occur fast enough.

You must admit some relish in watching conservative elites teeter around like defective bumper cars trying to figure out how it possibly came to be that their party is seriously considering elevating Newton Leroy Gingrich to a national presidential candidacy. It’s worth taking a little tour of the disbelief and panic setting in:

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard provides the main case:

The problem with Gingrich, of course, is that he comes with a cargo ship full of baggage – ideological, financial, and personal. Gingrich has made a career since leaving the House as a well-connected insider; he has bona fide ethical scandals on his resume. His personal life is a total mess, and he has turned off the broad middle of the country for the last 15 years.

The “of course” is priceless.

David Frum, though not really in the good graces of the conservative elite these days, certainly shares their disdain for Newt:

Gingrich remains one of the very most disliked figures in national politics…. Over a political career of nearly 40 years, Gingrich has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power. […]

He is a candidate of talk-show hosts and local activists—and of course of Rick Perry and Sarah Palin—but not of those who know him best and have worked with him most closely. Gingrich may raise more money after his South Carolina win. But prediction: Romney will raise even more, among the great national network of Republicans who recognize that to nominate Gingrich is to commit party suicide.

Ross Douthat strikes against the core of the Gingrich pseudo-appeal: his supposed mastery of all those “big ideas”:

I have, for my sins, watched Gingrich make his pitch across what feels like seventeen thousand Republican primary debates, and I am at a loss to identify the “big ideas” and “big solutions” that he is supposedly campaigning on. […] Instead, so far as I can tell, his “idea-oriented” campaign consists almost entirely of promising to hold Lincoln-Douglas-style debates with President Obama, grandstanding about media bias and moderator stupidity, defending his history of ideological flexibility much more smoothly than Mitt Romney, and then occasionally throwing out a wonky-sounding notion (like, say, outsourcing E-Verify to American Express) that’s more glib than genuinely significant.

So how did this come to pass?

I say, Republican Establishment, quit your whining. You might not have pulled the final switch to bring the Gingrich monster to life, but you outfitted the laboratory and set all the wiring. Jon Chait explains perfectly:

The Republican Establishment, having spent three years stoking its voters into a fit of wild rage against President Obama, now finds itself in a panic over the possibility that those voters might be wild and enraged enough to go ahead and select Newt Gingrich as their nominee. There really is a lot of humor in the situation. The proposition Gingrich is offering GOP voters is just the natural extension of what they have come to believe. Obama is an ultra-radical, as well as a lightweight, who can’t speak without a TelePrompTer, so simply forcing him into a series of lengthy debates will expose his incompetence and extremism.

Exactly right. Republican party, you birthed Newtenstein 2012. Anyone who ever said the word “death panels”; anyone who ever tried to convince themselves that Sarah Palin was a worthy national political figure; anyone who ever wondered or gave cover to those who wondered where the President was born, or if he hates white people, or if he was a socialist, a Marxist, a radical anti-American, a danger, an illegitimate usurper. All the thought leaders who praised “the passion and intensity” of the base, and pandered to the low denominators of human decency in order to drum up votes. Well done, the Republican electorate believed everything you said.

Here is Newt, your frontrunner, feeding off and reflecting back your fears and resentments like Freddy Kruger:

What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.

Foreign, alien, illegitimate, duplicitous, at once incompetent and mastermind of a grand national con. It’s all in there. Newt is the full-spectrum Republican.

Those establishment elites, the politicians and op-ed and magazine writers, are now waking up to the nightmare they’ve helped create. They are now engaged in a rather pathetic display of pining for what might have been, including a surprising amount of anger and contempt directed at those potential candidates who decided not to run this year.

Brett Stephens, in a very funny column in the WSJ:

Finally, there are the men not in the field: Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn’t because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant. Nothing commends them for it. If this election is as important as they all say it is, they had a duty to step up.

Douthat:

[T]he decisions by various capable Republicans to forgo a presidential run this year have been a collective disgrace; …Republican primary voters deserve a better choice than the one being presented to them.

And as of this week, Bill Kristol is still trying to get Mitch Daniels to run.

Why did these bright credible Republican leaders all take a pass? Are they really disgraceful cowards who abdicated their duty to lead?

I don’t think so. I think the reason is related to the first point. It’s because none of these reasonable people wanted to expose themselves to this Republican primary electorate. You cannot spend three years stoking popular demand for a Newtenstein, then wonder how someone like Mitch Daniels comes to think that maybe this isn’t his year.

It’s a calculation made not out of fear but pragmatism. We’ve known for three years that this is not the age of Republican Reasonableness. If you were one of these talented politicians contemplating a run, would you want to compete to out-bombast and out-demogogue Newt Gingrich? Would you want to try and win South Carolina by stoking racial stereotypes about food stamps and calling the media dispicable? Would you want to debate tax policy with Herman Cain? Pander to Ron Paul’s insane idea about reviving the gold standard? Insinuate that the president is illegitimate and wants to undermine American values?

No, you probably wouldn’t. That’s why, if you ran, you’d likely have no clearer path to the nomination than Romney does, or Jon Huntsman for that matter. And why at some point in your principled rock star campaign you’d probably be labeled a heretic and a moderate for this or that mistaken bout of sanity.

You would try to play the Obama-hater, as Romney does, but your forced attempts at vitriol will be deeply unconvincing, as Romney’s is. You’ll never match Newt’s natural ease with bilious sneering contempt, or his brilliance at combining maximum condescension with maximum populist emotionalism. You’d have placed in Iowa. You’d have lost South Carolina by 12 points too. If you made it this far, you’d now be tied in Florida, wondering how it came to be that Newt Gingrich was on the verge of destroying your party. Party leaders would be contemplating new saviors.

I believe Mitt Romney will still be the nominee. But this spell of trouble has exposed how very weak he is as a general election candidate. It is not a good sign of party enthusiasm if after only three primary contests, the main feeling is one of misplaced regret and nostalgia for the candidates who didn’t run. It’s also exposed the dark depths of Republican dysfunction. I fear a Romney defeat in November will convince the party base not that it needs more moderation, more erudition, more rationality, but that it needs a stronger, better, faster, Newtenstein to set things pure and right. Sadly, we might be a few more cycles away from a credible conservative opposition.

Unlike David Frum, I was very disappointed in Mitt Romney’s victory speech in New Hampshire last night (transcript here). If Romney was awakened from a cryogenic freeze, and was asked to give a speech without being told anything about the national circumstances or about the president other than that he was a Democrat, this is the sort of speech he’d deliver.

Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. This election is a choice between two very different destinies.

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America. [..]

I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become.

That America is still out there. We still believe in that America.

And cue the weak-on-defense music:

Internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy. He believes America’s role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. I believe a strong America must – and will – lead the future.

He doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it.

He chastises friends like Israel; I’ll stand with our friends.

He apologizes for America; I will never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the Earth.

Doesn’t this just seem so tedious and anachronistic? Europe, appeasement, defense, Europe, thank you goodnight. They’re just rote themes that could be trotted out against any Democrat at any time in history. Much like Republican economic prescriptions remain exactly the same for all time, regardless of the circumstance. Boom time? Regressive tax cuts! Historic recession? Regressive tax cuts!

I found Romney’s unusually large focus on Euro-bashing—following a primary victory which makes him the presumptive nominee—to be in bad taste, and poor politics. The only explanation is that he was aiming his message at South Carolina primary voters, after which he’ll switch to general election mode for good. But that speech sure seemed general election-like, with its broad themes, vacuous platitudes about American awesomeness, and attempts at stark contrasts with the president, without even hinting that any of his primary opponents exist. We have to wonder, is this Romney’s general election message? Can this be all he’s got?  

His foreign policy critique is a rehash of fabricated talk radio tropes—Obama apologizes for America, appeases our enemies—that just doesn’t square with the president’s record, or the high marks he gets from the public in this area. He’s of course banking on his economic critique of the president, which may or may not be compelling depending on how things go over the next ten months. But if the recovery continues apace, and more importantly, it is perceived as improving come November, Romney will be left with nothing but a very contrived and unconvincing cultural critique. Maybe we’ll hear about arugula again.

The president’s favorability rating has been hovering over 50% for most of his term. (George W. Bush left office in the low 30s.) In the worst economy of our lives, and amid the most rancorous partisan political environment anyone can remember, people still like this president. (It’s Congress they absolutely loathe.) They also know him. Trying to redefine him as an effete Europhile who wants to transform the country into a socialist dystopia will not work. Plus, Mitt Romney is not exactly the ideal messenger for this sort of cultural attack. He and the president come from the same educational milieu and probably share the same broadly cosmopolitan cultural values (which I believe they both obscure in interesting ways). George W. Bush could bury his patrician past with his drawl and his down-home mannerisms. But Mitt doesn’t seem to realize that he will be the John Kerry in this race.

Romney needs to claw away 97 electoral votes from Obama’s 2008 total. If he tries to get there using the tepid, tired playbook of Euro-bashing and American jingoism, well he better hope the employment market improves by 2013, and that Bain is hiring. 

I really enjoyed this ESPN Magazine piece (via The Browser) on India’s 15 year old, 7-foot tall basketball phenom Satnam Bhamara. His father, a farmer, is also a seven-footer, and his grandmother is 6’9”. The piece tracks his journey from his small farm village in Punjab to the elite IMG sports and education facility in Bradenton, Fla. The kid is doing well and looks to have a genuine shot at being the first Indian ever to play in the NBA.

The article is titled "One in a billion," and the theme running through it is that Satnam has the opportunity to do for basketball in India what Yao Ming did for it in China. He’s very aware of the cultural and national prestige that would accrue to his homeland if he were to succeed. And of course, if he does make it to the NBA, it won’t just be India’s collective ego that benefits, but basketball fans everywhere who will be exposed to his talent.

Reading it, I was thinking about the similar gains to be had from the ongoing rise in living standards in the developing world, and the replication many times over of Satnam’s general journey off of the farm. The analogy is not great, since Satnam’s road to success involved mostly having had the good fortune of a 6’9” grandmother.

But the hope is with increased economic development and the deliverance of hundreds of milllions of people from lives of subsistence labor and grinding poverty, that other one-in-a-billions will emerge. Rather than being athletic phenoms, maybe they will be science researchers, genius  inventors, or innovators in health care or energy or education. That the "rise" of underdeveloped parts of the world represents not just the greatest poverty-alleviation scheme in human history, but a massive potential boon to human welfare the world over.

There’s also a high-skilled immigration story here. Satnam was plucked from obscurity because the NBA happens currently to be making a huge marketing push into India. But Satnam didn’t have dreams of playing in Europe or in South America: he’s in Florida, and he’ll likely play basketball at an American university, and if things go very well he’ll become an American millionaire and make his home here. Would that we made it just as easy for other high-skilled foreigners—not only the one-in-a-billions—to come develop their talents and do their work here, pay their taxes here, raise a family here.

Liberalizing immigration laws is the closest thing we have to an economic free lunch. In my view our continuing unwillingness to do this represents our single most short-sighted national policy. That’s quite a distinction, in a strong field.

The authoritarian impulse is alive and well in your modern GOP. The party which in other contexts implores us to hew to the mythical “original” meaning of the constitution, has shown itself during the primary campaign to be utterly contemptuous of that document when it comes to nuisances like the rule of law or separation of powers. To wit:

Newt Gingrich is continuing his outrageous campaign to subvert one of the most sacred and revolutionary democratic principles, that of the independent judiciary:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is doubling down from Thursday’s Fox News debate on his vow to abolish federal courts if he disagreed with their decision.

According to The Hill, in a conference call with reporters, Gingrich indicated that it was in the president’s power as commander-in-chief to deem any Supreme Court ruling irrelevant if he or she in the White House disagreed. […]

Gingrich also backed his position to subpoena judges or abolish courts entirely if he thought their final rulings were wrong.

At the last Republican debate he repeated this bold plan to transform the U.S. into a banana republic by making the rule of law subservient to executive caprice.

Ron Paul, god bless him, was the only candidate to challenge him on it. The recent polling suggests that Gingrich will likely be slithering back into his private life as an influence peddler soon enough. But I find it outrageous that the recent front-runner for the Republican nomination could express such overt constitutional contempt without opprobrium of any kind.

The next item is a more general critique but I think recognizable to us all. In the recent debates the most popular refrain from the candidates when asked about military or security policy has been that they would “listen to the commanders on the ground.” This sort of language serves as a very easy way for politicians to signal to military fetishists that they are tough and like tough things such as men with epaulets. And to be fair, one hears this tiresome deference to the “commanders on the ground” from both parties. But I think it can be fairly said that it’s the liberty-loving GOP most enthralled with the idea of civilians “listening to the generals”—rather than the other way round—in the conduct of war policy.

Just yesterday there was a very important corrective to this inversion from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey. General Dempsey was asked if his advice on extended troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014 will be heeded in Washington. His surprising and brilliant response:

I’ll probably make news with this but I find some of those articles about divergence or control of the generals to be kind of offensive to me. And here’s why. One of the things that makes us as a military profession in a democracy is civilian rule. Our civilian leaders are under no obligation to accept our advice; and that’s what it is. Its advice. It’s military judgments, it’s alternatives, it’s options. And at the end of the day, our system is built on the fact that it will be our civilian leaders who make that decision and I don’t find that in any way to challenge my manhood, nor my position. In fact, if it were the opposite, I think we should all be concerned.”

Here is one case in which listening to the generals would be wise indeed.

This might all be dismissed as campaign nonsense. However, in a week in which we’ve lost the great Czech champion of human freedom and democracy, as well as his ghoulish diametric opposite in North Korea; and as we watch Egypt descend into violent martial law, with the heroes of Tahrir Square beaten and shot and gassed by generals who do not recognize the legitimacy of civilian rule; and as the rule of law remains nothing more than the morality of the strong in so many parts of the world; we should shame from public life such demagogues as Mr. Gingrich, who seek applause lines from credulous voters by selling them a subversion of the very principles they claim to venerate.

Sarah Kliff cites a study that shows people spend far more time researching an appliance or car purchase than they do researching their choice of doctor.

Kliff notes that this is superficially surprising considering health care makes up such a large share of our annual household spending ($10,944 on premiums for a family of four). And aside from price, you’d think the stakes for doctor selection are much higher than the stakes for dishwasher selection. If you mess up your dishwasher choice, you either live with a mediocre dishwasher or you return it and get another one. But if you blow your doctor choice you can theoretically end up with Dr. Nick.

The survey finds that people don’t research their doctors because they don’t think shopping around would reduce their ultimate costs or lead them to a better doctor. They basically perceive no competition in price or quality. Which is a difficult clay from which to mold a free market. As Kliff notes, "Shopping for a doctor is a lot harder than shopping for a dishwasher. There’s no price tag for what you’ll pay, or a Consumer Report to reference on quality."

So is this all about price transparency and clear quality standards? Is there a savvy health care consumer buried in all of us, just waiting for the wonders of free market competition to be unleashed in order to drive down costs systemwide? I am skeptical.

The thing that is unique about a lot of health care consumption is it is done under conditions of emotional and physical distress. Finding a doctor for your yearly physical is probably relatively stress free, as is the physical itself; but in terms of system costs, this isn’t where the money is. Treatment for chronic disease and hospital bills is where most of the cost damage is done in this country. And these are precisely the times when people are most vulnerable and afraid and least able to make informed dispassionate choices. Patients are not consumers. If your dishwasher breaks you can wash by hand until you get around to looking for a new one. If you have a heart attack and need an emergency bypass you’re not going online to read surgeon reviews. Or just before they lay the defibrillator on you, you are unlikely to ask where everybody in the room did their residency. And you don’t really have the option of threatening to walk out if the anaesthesiologist won’t come down in price.

Various elective surgeries, and non-emergency but serious diagnoses like cancer admit of some opportunity to shop around. But only very affluent people can fly around to Boston or Houston to receive top cancer care. And cancer treatment is very expensive no matter where you go. But even if there were huge price disparities that you could theoretically take advantage of, it’s unclear that "cheapo cancer treatment" would be a big selling point to anyone.

This is where comparisons between health care and normal consumer markets really fail. If I needed a new dishwasher I’d very likely choose one in a middle price point in the good-but-nothing-special category. If I heard about amazing luxury dishwashers being produced and sold only in Boston and Houston, I wouldn’t have any inclination to travel to Boston or Houston to buy one. I’d say most consumers share my dishwasher preferences, which is why there is robust price competition and a plethora of choice in the good-but-nothing-special category. And you can find a good-but-nothing- special class of goods in pretty much every normal consumer market. This category doesn’t really exist in health care, and even if it did it’s not clear that people are very interested in it. 

But the main point is that even after you’ve somehow managed to do diligent research and find your dream doctor while actively bleeding from your eyes and ears, it turns out you are in no condition to calmly adjudicate between different complex treatment options. You just want to stop the bleeding! You defer! In no way whatsoever does this scene resemble you kicking the tires on a showroom floor.

And if we throw in the fact that a large majority of expensive health care is performed on old people near the end of their lives, the shopping around/free market theory really falls apart. I’m not sure who the Republicans have in mind when they suggest that 80-year olds should get vouchers so they can shop around on price and quality. I don’t know these 80-year olds. We’ve all had infirmed elderly relatives go to an important specialist appointment only to come out unable to recall most of what the specialist said. It’s a nightmare. You want them burdened with negotiating prices also? And thoughtfully weighing various treatment value propositions? Please.

The asymmetry of information and authority will always be profound between doctors and patients. Even clear-headed, smart, stoic sick people prefer to just defer to a doctor’s expertise. A disoriented, suffering, afraid sick person will always defer. That’s ok, it’s why society venerates doctors and pays them extremely well. But it makes any analogy to "consumers" or "free markets" disingenuous and extremely unhelpful.

There are plenty of reasons of morality and justice for Americans to hope for the swift demise of the Syrian regime, and for its smug, chinless leader to be escorted to the dock, followed by a lifelong retirement in prison.

But virtues and values notwithstanding, it’s national interests that all the realist kids want to hear about these days. So let’s talk interests.

The main U.S. strategic interest in the ongoing Syrian uprising is Syria’s star role in the regional “Resistance Bloc” consisting also of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. What are they “resisting?” Well they would say they’re resisting the big bad U.S-Israeli axis of imperialism; colloquially known as the Great Satan and the Little Satan. Of all their resistance activities, none is undertaken with as much ardor as their often violent, mostly rhetorical opposition to the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

That the regimes in Iran and Syria maintain their power only through coercive repression always left it an open question as to exactly in whose name they were “resisting”. They have a very old game of deflecting blame for all domestic ills on hidden foreign plots and conspiracies, and they claim legitimacy by arguing that they alone can win justice for Palestinians and dignity for Muslims.

With the Arab Spring in late bloom, it has been interesting to see if and how the resistance bloc coalition might fray, as its members are forced to choose between support for regimes or for the people demanding the end of the regimes. Any result that weakens this coalition would be a tremendous boon to U.S. interests in the region.

This choice is particularly acute for Hamas and Hezbollah. Both are grassroots movements with mass popular support and experience in coalition government. They are far more attuned to their respective local constituencies, and are credible because they are seen as taking seriously the importance of democratic legitimacy and accountability. But with their main arms and cash conduit in Damascus under threat of being toppled, who will they stand with?

Hamas, whose senior leadership is based in Damascus, is nothing if not politically astute, and has calculated (correctly) that it better not be caught clinging to its erstwhile sponsor at the expense of the very people on whose behalf it claims to be “resisting.”

Haaretz has learned that Hamas has made a decision to abandon Damascus without letting the Syrian authorities know. The decision was made by the organization’s senior leadership in the wake of the harsh criticism voiced against top Hamas officials in Gaza and abroad because of their ties with the Syrian regime. […]

The Arab League’s decision to suspend Syria from membership of the organization and impose economic sanctions on Damascus tipped the scales, with Hamas finally deciding to covertly evacuate all its activists from Syria and leave behind only the organization’s highest-ranking officials so as to preserve a low profile of activity there.

Iran, which hasn’t wavered in its support for Assad, is not happy with Hamas’ abandonment of Damascus:

Iran had applied intense pressure to Hamas in an effort to persuade it not to leave Damascus, threatening even to cut off funds to the organization if it did so, Palestinian sources have told Haaretz.

The Iranian pressure also included an unprecedented ultimatum – namely, an explicit threat to stop supplying Hamas with arms and suspend the training of its military activists.

And how about Hezbollah? For now Hezbollah seems to have chosen to stick with old team. Regarding Assad, Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah told a large crowd in Beirut that he would “stand by a regime that has stood by the resistance for a long time.”

His invocation of Syria’s support for “the resistance” sounds a little discordant when the “resistance” most people think of today is that which is bravely battling and dying out on the streets against the Assad regime.

Understandably, the opposition forces in Syria are not happy with the prospect of anyone taking the side of the regime, and they have warned the old resistance bloc superfriends that they are watching closely:

Burhan Ghalioun, the chairman of the Syrian National Council, told CNN in an interview airing Tuesday that Iran is “participating in suppressing the Syrian people” by backing al-Assad. […]

“I hope that Iranians realize the importance of not compromising the Syrian-Iranian relationship by defending a regime whose own people clearly reject it and has become a regime of torture to its own people,” Ghalioun said. Tehran must understand “that this is the last chance to avoid an unwanted fate to the Syrian-Iranian relationship,” he said.

As for Hezbollah…Ghalioun said, “The Syrian people stood completely by Hezbollah once. But today, they are surprised that Hezbollah did not return the favor and support the Syrian’s people struggle for freedom.”

You notice the chairman is not exactly burning bridges here. This is for the unsettling but banal reason that most Syrians, including opposition members, strongly dislike Israel, are deeply distrustful of the U.S., and agree broadly with the military and political goals of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. It’s likely that a more representative government in Damascus would not be any more amenable to coexistence with Israel than Assad is.

The Syrian National Council is basically offering to keep the old resistance bloc intact, if only they all agree to disavow Assad. Hamas is on board. I don’t know why Iran and Hezbollah don’t take the deal, unless they are so sure that Assad will survive this.

But from a U.S. perspective, this in-fighting is great. It will be a fine day if and when Assad finally tumbles, but it will be extra special if a new government is seated that feels scorned by the old alliances and distrustful of the motives of Iran. Disrupting this four-headed supply chain of reactionary hate and violence would be a major strategic victory for the United States and reform-minded allies in the region.

UPDATE: Forget my assessment on what the Syrian opposition thinks of Iran and Hezbollah. Instead, read this interview with the head of the Syrian opposition, Burhan Ghalioun (quoted above), transcript here. It seems I misrepresented his position.

On Iran:

The current relationship between Syria and Iran is abnormal. It is unprecedented in Syria’s foreign policy history. [...]

Our relations with Iran will be revisited as any of the countries in the region, based on the exchange of economic and diplomatic interests, in the context of improving stability in the region and not that of a special relationship. There will be no special relationship with Iran.

This is the core issue—the military alliance. Breaking the exceptional relationship means breaking the strategic military alliance. We do not mind economic relations.

On Hezbollah:

As our relations with Iran change, so too will our relationship with Hezbollah. Hezbollah after the fall of the Syrian regime will not be the same. Lebanon should not be used as it was used in the Assad era as an arena to settle political scores.

How much of these positions actually make their way into a new post-Assad representative government remains to be seen. But wow, these are truly transformative policies; let’s hope he speaks for many, many of his countrymen.

One undeniable political trend over the past fifteen years or so is the way in which every policy issue eventually seems to get vaccumed up by the culture war. And once an issue enters the realm of the culture war, it really never escapes, and will likely never be considered on the merits ever again. The environment, immigration, welfare, the deficit, health care, energy, transportation, monetary policy: it’s all been sucked up and ruined by identity politics. People now know the answers to these complex policy questions not by appealing to data or to a conception of the social good, but merely by making a reflexive in-group, out-group assessment. And once a person fuses their conception of their identity with any particular policy outcome, it’s near impossible to dislodge it. I cannot think of an issue that, once recruited into the culture war, was later set free and reverted back to a “normal” issue.  (If you can, please leave it in the comments)

The culture war is as old as the Republic; or rather, even the founding itself has been absorbed into the culture war, and the poor Founders are regularly exhumed and drafted in support of belligerents on both sides. The Civil War provided the cultural-geographic template which in many ways we’re still saddled with today; and with the consolidation of the two-party system, it’s been a steady process of electorate-sorting based on various group affiliations.

In Ken Burns’ recent documentary on Prohibition, I was interested to learn about the identity coalitions that formed on either side of the issue. A dominant dynamic was City (wets) vs. Country (drys). The city was mostly poor Catholic European immigrants and Jews. The country was buttoned-up white Protestant. Liquor became a proxy for a rural WASP population to stick it to the unwashed urban immigrants who were in the process of changing the face and culture of American life forever. (In answer to my question above, I guess alcohol is one culture issue that has been defused almost completely over time. But it’s also been defused as a policy issue altogether.)

One area that’s always been resistant to culture war enlistment is foreign policy. Yet, as Noah Millman writes at the American Scene, that may be over with. Millman thinks the GOP has finally succeeded in culture war-izing foreign policy.

Sure, the “anything tough is Republican” theme has been crystallizing for a long while; I’d say its iconic modern moment was maybe, “Tear down this wall.” But the process has really accelerated since 9/11, and Millman writes that this GOP primary campaign has put it over the top:

It’s in the last two elections that the trend of foreign policy being treated as part of the culture war – at least by the GOP – has become dominant. Mitt Romney is the exemplar in this regard; his entire foreign policy argument consists of saying that he knows America is exceptional and President Obama does not, and that Obama has been making too many concessions to America’s enemies (without any clear explanation of what those concessions might be).

You can watch Romney spin his main theme here.

Millman notes that there just isn’t any objective substance with which to attack Obama on foreign policy:

[Obama has been] a competent and fairly successful steward of America’s position as he inherited it. America has suffered no meaningful foreign policy setbacks during his tenure, and has had some notable successes. The contrast to the economic situation could not be more stark. Why on earth would anyone on the other side spend their time demagoguing on foreign policy? […]

The reason has everything to do with the culture war.

Millman goes on to outline the psychological mechanism at work:

Identity politics on the GOP side of the aisle involves stoking an emotional identification between their core demographic groups, the Republican Party, and the national identity. The white working class is the backbone of the American military. Stoking an identification between the white working class and the military, and between the military and national purpose, provides the emotional fuel for political mobilization. It imbues identity with purpose and connects that purpose to politics.

There’s some truth to this, but I think it’s a bit needlessly complex. I think part of the Republicans’ insistence on attacking Obama on foreign policy is the simple Rovian innovation of going after your opponent where he’s strongest. Absent any arguments to make on the merits, the only way to get at it is through culture, which necessitates demagoguery.

The left is certainly not immune to identity politics or reflexive cultural affiliation. But I think the Republicans’ sense of grievance and resentment is today a far more fundamental mobilizing force for the right than whatever its analogue would be on the left. The 2012 America Is So Awesome Tour that we’re currently seeing on the Republican side is an outgrowth of that cultural anxiety and grievance. This sort of overt triumphalism always has such a sad “doth protest too much” quality to it. But as Millman says, this dynamic is probably not going anywhere for a while. Just add foreign policy to the ever-growing list of American team sports.

This article on President Obama’s failure at managing the U.S.-Pakistani relationship by Kapil Komireddi was recommended and endorsed by David Frum, so I gave it a close read, and I was surprised to find it consisting of mostly hysterical ad hominem bunk. The central conceit seems to be that the Obama administration is omnipotent, yet instead of using this omnipotence to help usher in a strong civilian democratic rule in Pakistan, Obama insists on using it to cosign Pakistan’s backslide into military authoritarianism. The failure of all former U.S. presidents to meaningfully change the balance of power between militarists and civilians in Pakistan is not mentioned in the piece.

Komireddi spends half of his piece blaming Obama for the recent forced resignation of Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani. It is true that Haqqani was a great champion of civilian democratic rule in Pakistan, and during his time in Washington he was often the only bright spot surrounding the fraught U.S.-Pakistani relationship. I’m sure the generals hated him. But unfortunately he was not the vanguard of some imminent Pakistani Spring in which the liberal secular pro-Western democrats would assert themselves and ride the army and the ISI and the Islamists out of town once and for all.

That’s because for all his personal and professional attributes, Haqqani as ambassador didn’t mean that Pakistan had civilian rule. As even Komireddi tellingly admits, "[Haqqani's] forced resignation puts an end to the pretence of civilian rule in Pakistan." (italics mine) It was pretense, and it’s always been pretense. The generals were always in charge. This is tragic and lamentable but it’s not Barack Obama’s fault.

Komireddi accuses the U.S. of marginalizing Haqqani due to his outspoken support for civilian rule and for curbing the influence of the military.

Why would the White House choose to belittle a man championing civilian rule in Pakistan? Isn’t that also the objective of the Obama administration? The answer increasingly appears to be no.

Nonsense. The U.S. loves Haqqani’s peaceful democratic vision for Pakistan, but because that vision does not accurately reflect all parts of the government he was supposed to represent, his effectiveness as ambassador was somewhat attenuated. It would be a lovely world in which Husain Haqqani was in charge of civilian and military policy in Pakistan. But it’s not our world, and it’s no help for the U.S. to pretend that he actually had the ear and the confidence of the true power-brokers in Pakistan.

Komireddi undermines his own thesis about Obama’s unique role in emboldening Pakistani perfidy when he diagnoses the real source of Pakistan’s problems, which, shockingly, predate Barack Obama’s presidency:

Since the 1950s, when Gen. Ayub Khan mounted the first military coup, Pakistan’s army has etiolated the country’s evolution in every imaginable sense. Rooted in a culture of grievance and malevolence that is the foundational basis of Pakistan, the army has waged wars against India, suffused young minds with a fervor for jihad, sponsored terrorism, spread xenophobia and racism, carried out genocide against millions of its own citizens, stolen and smuggled nuclear secrets, foisted the vile Taliban regime upon the defenseless people of Afghanistan, and assumed complete ownership of Pakistan.

Those sound like really tough problems! Yet, Komireddi thinks that these sixty years of entrenched military rule buttressed by Islamic extremism, nuclear promiscuity, and terrorism sponsorship; in fact a military rule so entrenched as to be said without exaggeration to have "assumed complete ownership of Pakistan," could have been undone by a U.S. president throwing his rhetorical support behind a particularly talented and sympathetic Pakistani ambassador! Boy we really missed an opportunity there! 

Well to be fair, he has other ideas for how President Obama could have won the day if he wasn’t so willfully in cahoots with Pakistan’s military. He could have "corraled the army with fresh ultimatums" following the embarassing revelation that Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad. Komireddi does not mention that in the wake of the bin Laden operation the U.S. withheld almost $1 billion in military aid to Pakistan. Yet the relationship has only deteriorated further since then. I don’t know how Komireddi is so sure that more and stronger U.S. ultimatums would miraculously produce a more compliant Pakistani military, and one that suddenly stops caring about hating India or wanting control over Afghanistan. Komireddi’s ideas come straight from the toughness-seriousness-boldness school of intractable problem solving. 

Nonetheless, he is certainly right that the Pakistani military and ISI’s double-dealing with the Taliban and complicity in violence against Americans in Afghanistan is scandalous. As to the former, Pakistan has seen a strategic interest in supporting the Afghan Taliban for a long time. Not even ten years of war has changed this calculus. Ten more years won’t either. At least the killing of American troops will be mitigated by the upcoming drawdown. But that is bad news according to Komireddi:

Then, in a craven abdication of American responsibility to the citizens of Afghanistan, Obama talked about the need for nation-building at home. […]

As the fighters currently enjoying Pakistani hospitality in the country’s northwest make their way back into Afghanistan [following the U.S. withdrawal], the gains made over the last decade will wither away. Thus will the tremendous sacrifices, of both American troops and Afghan civilians, be honored.

Ah yes, the only way to honor sacrifice is with unending sacrifice. That’s a tidy aphorism but a really terrible basis for military strategy, and an immoral one. One may disagree with the administration’s decision to bring the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan to a close after ten years. But I’m curious: what would acquit Obama of the charge of craven irresponsibility? Another troop surge? Another trillion dollars? Escalating the current nebulous proxy war with Pakistan into a real war? If your principles of justice and sacrifice require you to advocate embroiling America in a hot war with an major Asian nuclear power, you need new principles.

Are there things the U.S. could do to help foster a less military-centric ruling order in Pakistan? I don’t know, I’m sure there’s something. But in the post-9/11 period, two successive administrations, with opposite foreign policy visions and opposite rhetorical styles, have been unable to do so. I find it very likely that a long string of future administrations will encounter the same difficulty. Then, as now, it will not be Barack Obama’s fault.

Say it with me Mr. Komireddi, slowly and tearfully, Good Will Hunting style: it’s not Barack Obama’s fault.

Barney Frank is retiring next year, and we’ve been seeing a lot of deserved commentaries about his famous pugnacity, his erudition, his wit. One thing I think his career shows is the importance of congressional longevity and seniority in acquiring policy expertise. Whenever the topic of congressional term limits comes up, Frank is my go-to example for arguing against the idea. However you feel about his politics (and no, he didn’t cause the housing crisis), over the last 31 years in office he made himself an expert in the U.S. financial and banking system, and in committee hearings this fluency allowed him to interact and spar with Fed chairmen, Treasury Secretaries, and industry executives as a peer, rather than as a supplicant or a grandstander or with his nose buried in a sheet of talking points written by his staff.

This isn’t a post about congressional term limits, but what term limits and short congressional careers in general do is make this accumulation of policy expertise next to impossible, and that transfers effective policy-making control to think tanks and lobbyists and outside advisors.

A freshman congressman comes to DC and first has to master the arcane norms and rules of legislative procedure. That takes time. In addition, they rarely have the policy knowledge necessary to make an immediate substantive impact. Whether their legislative portfolio is banking, foreign affairs, budgeting, energy, the military—the substance of their jobs is unimaginably complex. Most House members do not have a relevant educational or professional background to rely upon. Yet the moment they are sworn in they are faced with bills to vote on, hearings to attend, entreaties from interest groups and constituents and fellow lawmakers. You’ve got to have something to say about the topic at hand. Staff can keep you afloat, but staff can’t help when you’re alone or forced off-script.

Luckily, in Washington there is an entire industry of partisan aligned think tanks and lobbyist firms whose job it is to crank out plausible-sounding policy arguments for lazy or under-informed lawmakers. To the extent that a lawmaker lacks knowledge or command of their legislative purview, that gap is filled in by the information-industrial complex in DC. This complex will (very happily!) help you write your legislation and formulate your talking points for your afternoon hit on MSNBC, and it will help you think of things to say in your big address to the American Enterprise Institute luncheon crowd.

Of course longevity is no guarantee of policy expertise. You can make a long career out of cutting and pasting policy briefs from the Center for American Progress or the Heritage Foundation onto your congressional website. And you can amass a voting record by doing what industry lobbyists and interest groups and political consultants tell you to do. But we’d agree perhaps that this career template falls far short of the ideal, and Barney Frank was much closer to the ideal than most. Rarely does one find in public life such a combination of legislative passion and policy acumen. Regardless of your politics, we can lament that the U.S. Congress is losing a whole bunch of both.