Maliki is the New Diem

Some people are talking coup d'etat in Iraq.

David Ignatius writes that "President Obama sensibly appears to be leaning toward an alternative policy that would replace Maliki with a less sectarian and polarizing prime minister."

The impulse to replace Maliki is understandable. Most observers of Iraq argue that he has played a large role in the growing sectarian divide between the majority Shi'ites and the minority Sunnis, and thus bears responsibility for the growth of ISIS in the north.

The unstated assumption, of course, is that another popularly elected, plausible leader could have governed differently and guided Iraq into a functioning democracy, and that now, the fact that elections produced Maliki should not stop the United States from maneuvering behind the scenes to get a more able (read "pliable") leader in his place. Then the United States can go about fixing Iraq.

President George W. Bush shakes hands with Iraqi Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki, July 25, 2006. Photo by
Kimberlee Hewitt, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps. More likely is that the internal conditions in Iraq produced the kind of leader Maliki became. If that's the case, then a coup to oust Maliki will do no good at all. Instead, it is likely to make things worse.

There is certainly precedent for that. In the mid-1950s in South Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration sought a non-communist popular leader who would not be tarnished by associations with the departing French colonizers. It settled on Ngo Dinh Diem.

For about six years, Diem seemed the answer to American prayers. He created a separate South Vietnamese government as a counter to Ho Chi Minh's communist North. He led a fairly stable regime that served American interests in the region.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower shakes hands with South
Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, May 8 , 1957
U.S. National Archives and Records Administation

But then in 1960, the National Liberation Front began its offensive against Diem's government. As pressure grew, Diem grew more oppressive, in particularly cracking down on the majority Buddhists. By the fall of 1963, the American embassy and elements of the Kennedy administration decided that Diem was the problem and needed to go. American officials sent signals to South Vietnamese generals who then ousted and murdered Diem and his brother.

Ignatius effectively proposes that the United States do the same thing in Iraq today:

The people who will pull the plug on Maliki are Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and other Iraqi kingmakers. The United States should push them to signal unmistakably that Maliki is finished…. Saudi Arabia wants Obama to announce that he opposes Maliki. It would be better just to move him out, rather than hold a news conference.

One can only hope that Obama resists such pressure. Things with Diem didn't work out well.

In a February 1, 1966 conversation with Sen. Eugene McCarthy, LBJ put it bluntly. Kennedy was told, he said, that Diem

was corrupt and he ought to be killed. So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we've really had no political stability since then.

The political instability that followed the Diem coup was a major contributing factor in LBJ's disastrous decision to Americanize the war in Vietnam.

The desire to replace Maliki is another example of the imperial attitude toward Iraq: America gets to decide when it is time for the leader to go. I have little doubt that if the United States determined to do so, it could mount a coup against Maliki.  But as always, the question is: what then?

As with the initial invasion, it is relatively easy to destroy. It is much harder to build. The United States can probably destroy Maliki if it so chooses. But can it build anything to replace him?

Leadership and Interventionism Are Not the Same Thing

Robert Kagan has written a piece in the New Republic entitled "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire." In it, he bemoans what he perceives as America's retreat from its responsibility to preserve a liberal world order. Kagan argues: "Many Americans and their political leaders in both parties, including President Obama, have either forgotten or rejected the assumptions that undergirded American foreign policy for the past seven decades."

Kagan is correct that public attitudes towards America's role in the world have shifted recently, but he dramatically overstates the case when he posits a break with a 70-year tradition. He seems to equate "leadership" with military interventionism. Americans have rejected the latter, not the former.

What Kagan does not recognize is that the public's current aversion to military interventionism abroad is not only consistent with America's pre-World War II foreign policy, but with the golden age of leadership he praises.

Kagan's fundamental mistake is to think that the American people embraced military interventionism during and after World War II. They did not.

Americans have always been averse to military actions leading to large numbers of American casualties and extended occupations of hostile territory. In the two years before Pearl Harbor, Americans (even the so-called "interventionists") desperately clung to the idea that they could protect American interests merely by supplying the British (and later the Soviets) with the weapons to do the fighting.

While conventional wisdom suggests that Pearl Harbor changed all that, the reality is different. Even after the United States entered the war, it was reluctant to launch military operations that posed the threat of huge casualties. As David M. Kennedy has stated, this American predilection to avoid combat with Germany's forces in France led Stalin to conclude: "it looks like the Americans have decided to fight this war with American money and American machines and Russian men."

Even the major architect of the postwar order, Franklin Roosevelt, did not envision an America that would permanently station large numbers of U.S. soldiers abroad, much less deploy them on a regular basis. Yes, he did see the United States as the leading power in the new United Nations. But the point of having the so-called "Four Policemen" was to insure that the other three would be the ones to send soldiers to keep order in their respective spheres of interest. He imagined that the American role would be primarily in the form of naval and air power. "The United States will have to lead," FDR said of the UN, but its role would be to use "its good offices always to conciliate to help solve the differences which will arise between the others."

FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Teheran
By Horton (Capt), War Office official photographer
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As the historian Warren Kimball has written, at the 1943 Teheran conference, when Stalin pressed him on how the United States would comport itself as one of the policemen, "FDR resorted to his prewar notion of sending only planes and ships from the United States to keep the peace in Europe." In FDR's mind, the United States would be primarily responsible for order in the western hemisphere, a role it had played for decades.

Even the so-called American declaration of cold war, the Truman Doctrine speech of March 1947, avoided the implication that American military forces would be deployed to uphold the doctrine. The speech simultaneously signaled to the world that the United States was both assuming some of Britain's responsibilities and had given up on the idea of cooperation with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Truman explicitly stated that the aid he was requesting would not be military: "I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes." Truman presented aid to Greece and Turkey as mere money to make good on the far larger investment of lives and treasure during World War II: "The assistance that I am recommending for Greece and Turkey amounts to little more than 1 tenth of 1 per cent of this investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain."

The Korean War changed that by requiring quick American military intervention to prevent the collapse of South Korea in the summer of 1950, but when it bogged down into a stalemate after the Chinese intervention in November, the public quickly soured on the war. In January 1951, "49% thought the decision was a mistake, while 38% said it was not, and 13% had no opinion," according to Gallup. While those numbers fluctuated over the next two years, and more Americans thought the war was not a mistake whenever an end to the war was in sight, the American public in general did not support military actions that led to substantial American casualties and prolonged combat. The public's disillusionment with the war was one of the reasons that an increasingly unpopular President Truman decided not to run for reelection in 1952.

The next president, Dwight Eisenhower, moved quickly to end that war, and, more importantly, instituted a foreign policy that had at its core the principle of avoidance of any Korea-style wars in the future. Rather than engage in limited wars in every world hot spot, Eisenhower determined that such a course would bankrupt the country. He preferred "massive retaliation": the idea that a threat to essential American interests would be met with a nuclear threat, not a conventional response in kind. Even when the French faced defeat in Vietnam, Eisenhower refused to intervene, and never seriously considered deploying American troops to Vietnam.

While John Kennedy came into office criticizing that approach, pledging to "pay any price, bear any burden," the sobering experience of the Cuban missile crisis made him rethink that mindset. The cold war, he said in June 1963, imposed "burdens and dangers to so many countries," and specifically noted that the US and Soviet Union "bear the heaviest burdens." He spoke of the American aversion to war: "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough -- more than enough -- of war and hate and oppression."

While one may argue that Kennedy's policies led to the next American war in Vietnam under his successor Lyndon Johnson, it is also the case that Johnson sought to avoid a land war. Significantly, he looked first to use air power. Operation Rolling Thunder, the American air campaign against North Vietnam, was meant to forestall the need for American ground troops in large numbers. It was only after the clear failure of bombing to achieve American aims that Johnson escalated the war with more ground troops.

When that effort too proved futile, Richard Nixon again returned to air power as America's main instrument to maintain order abroad. His Vietnamizaion policy tried to balance the withdrawal of American troops with the deployment of increased air power. The "Nixon Doctrine," announced that henceforth "we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense." In other words, America's friends should not expect American troops to do their fighting for them.

I'd argue that from Nixon up until George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, that was American policy. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all avoided open-ended military commitments of American troops (Clinton's air-only campaign against Serbia in 1999 is the best example).

Only the first war against Iraq in 1991 challenged that trend, and even that war involved a longer preliminary air campaign than a ground one: five weeks of bombing preceded the ground campaign, which lasted only 100 hours. According to Colin Powell, Bush had the Vietnam War in mind when he resisted the calls of "on to Baghdad." Bush "had promised the American people that Desert Storm would not become a Persian Gulf Vietnam," Powell writes in his memoir, "and he kept his promise." Within two weeks of the ceasefire, the 540,000 U.S. troops began their withdrawal from the Persian Gulf.

Even the American war in Afghanistan in 2001 was planned to keep the American "footprint" light, relying on American air power and the Afghan Northern Alliance to do much of the fighting. It was the invasion and prolonged occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003 that predictably soured Americans once again on the prospect of extended military engagements.

In sum, what Americans are experiencing now is not exceptional, but rather normal. In the aftermath of extended, costly military interventions leading to the loss of American lives, the American people revert to their historical aversion to solving problems by fighting in and occupying foreign states. That does not mean the United States ceases to be relevant, or ceases to lead. It simply means that Americans have been reminded once again that not every problem can be solved by an invasion, and that leadership is more than a reflexive application of American military might.

Churchill, Romney, and Modern American Conservatism

In Wednesday's post, I concluded with a series of questions:

How is it that a perceived slight to the memory of a British leader has come to suggest a lack of American patriotism?
How did Churchill become more "American" than the American president?
The bust of Churchill is obviously symbolic--but symbolic of what exactly?

My short answer is this: I think many of today's American conservatives who embrace Churchill do so because they embrace Churchill's vision of a world benignly managed by the "English-speaking peoples." Romney's pandering on the Churchill bust is a desperate attempt to both appeal to those conservatives and wrap himself in the image of a well-known decisive leader.

Seeing the waning power of the British Empire after World War II, Churchill sought to bolster it by forging not just an alliance with the United States, but something close to a union with it. That union, he argued, could effectively manage world affairs far into the future, as a new, updated, and revived version of the British Empire.

In a sense, Churchill became American because he sought to erase the differences between the British and the Americans. Churchill himself embodied that union--he was literally half-American. His mother was born in Brooklyn. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy even made him an honorary citizen of the United States (perhaps to immunize himself against charges that his anti-colonial Irish heritage made him hostile to Britain?), calling Churchill "a son of America though a subject of Britain."

Most importantly, Churchill almost single-handledly created the "special relationship." The phrase was in fact coined by Churchill himself in 1944, but he had held the idea for many years.  Fraser Harbutt, author of The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Cold War, writes that as early as 1931, Churchill believed that the "two great opposing forces of the future ... would be the English-speaking peoples and Communism." 

Today, most Americans tend to think of the "special relationship" in general terms to mean simply that the United States and Great Britain have been close allies since World War II. But for Churchill, it meant much more than that. The vision he sketched in Fulton, Missouri in 1946 was for a virtual Anglo-American union which would keep the postwar peace.

Churchill delivering the "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, MO, March 1946, with President Truman seated on his right.

Churchill used the phrase "special relationship" twice in his Fulton speech, and he said "English-speaking" people (or world) on five different occasions.

Churchill consciously cultivated not just a connection, but a complete identification between the two nations. The Fulton speech was a pivotal part of that. His conscious goal was to wed the two in common cause. He called the United States a "kindred nation" and said it was "necessary that the constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall rule and guide the conduct of the English-speaking peoples in peace as they did in war."

For Churchill, the combination of Britain and America was essential. He said that to fail to achieve this virtual unity of Britain and the United States threatened the world with the return of "the dark ages." Peace depended on "what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America."

Few people today realize that the "special relationship" Churchill envisioned was far more ambitious than what actually developed. He called for the virtual merging of the American and British militaries: "It should carry with it the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in the possession of either country all over the world. This would perhaps double the mobility of the American Navy and Air Force."

Churchill called for "such co-operation ... in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force" to insure that "there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary there will be an overwhelming assurance of security."

Churchill even looked forward to the day when not only he, but every Briton and every American, would be citizens of both countries: "Eventually there may come -- I feel eventually there will come -- the principle of common citizenship, but that we may be content to leave to destiny, whose outstretched arm many of us can already clearly see."

Churchill's vision was no short-term expedient, meant simply to meet the immediate postwar challenges: "if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for our time, but for a century to come."

What Churchill was proposing was nothing less than an Anglo-American condominium to keep the world peace; not the American Century, but the Anglo-American Century.

This, I argue, is why Churchill is even more attractive to some American neoconservatives today, 20 years after the end of the cold war, than he was during the cold war. We tend to remember the Fulton speech as a cold war warning only, but the fear of communism had a larger purpose for Churchill. Like Churchill, American neoconservatives believe that the "English-speaking peoples," by virtue of their "moral and material forces," are fit to manage the world.

Mitt Romney's trip to London not only prompted my questions; I think the complete story of that trip illustrates the above answer.

Romney made the statement about the Churchill bust at a fundraiser. He was not pandering to the British--by law Romney could only raise money from American citizens in Britain, not from British citizens. He was appealing to American conservatives who idolize Churchill.

But more importantly, the Churchill bust was not the only Romney story to come from the London trip. The controversial comments of unnamed "Romney advisors" are even more illuminating and make the connection between the bust and this larger foreign policy vision.

In a story in The Telegraph, those anonymous sources were quoted criticizing President Obama and explaining why a President Romney would be better for Britain. It is important to look at everything they said, to get the full effect:

"We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: "The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have."
"Obama is a Left-winger," said another. "He doesn’t value the Nato alliance as much, he’s very comfortable with American decline and the traditional alliances don’t mean as much to him. He wouldn’t like singing 'Land of Hope and Glory'." [This is roughly equivalent to criticizing a British leader for not being comfortable singing "God Bless America."]
The two advisers said Mr Romney would seek to reinstate the Churchill bust displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush but returned to British diplomats by Mr Obama when he took office in 2009. One said Mr Romney viewed the move as 'symbolically important' while the other said it was 'just for starters,' adding: 'He is naturally more Atlanticist.'

After criticism of those comments (particularly the racial implications of the phrase "Anglo-Saxon heritage"), Romney "distanced himself" from them. "I don't agree with whoever that adviser is," Romney said.

Nonetheless, I think it is important to view Romney's Churchill bust remark in the context of these other comments. The Romney aides themselves made the connection--it was all of one piece. They said that Romney appreciates the "Anglo-Saxon heritage" (not all that different from "English-speaking peoples"), was "more naturally" comfortable with British culture and the "special relationship" and correctly predicted that Romney would say that he plans to make the "symbolically important" step of returning the Churchill bust to the Oval Office to signify all of those things.

In doing so, Romney is singing the Churchill-adoring, neoconservative tune.

The neoconservative choirmaster is Charles Krauthammer. It was Krauthammer who, in his column last week, revived this nonsense over the Churchill bust. The point of his piece, however, was that Romney's choices of destinations on his trip were meaningful. He would be the anti-Obama, affirming support for Britain and Israel and, via the trip to Poland, animosity toward Russia (they have trouble completely letting go of the cold war).

Krauthammer is an unabashed advocate of American unilateralism in foreign policy. Churchill's Fulton speech, despite the occasional nod to the new United Nations, is an argument against the kind of multilateralism that neoconservatives such as Krauthammer hold in utter disdain. Krauthammer believes--like Churchill--in the idea of a "benignly" managed empire.

As the cold war was ending in 1990--a time of transition not unlike 1946 in some ways--Krauthammer published "The Unipolar Moment."  He wrote: "The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is an unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies." He argued that the West needed to develop "antiballistic missile and air defense systems to defend against those weapons that do escape Western control or preemption." [emphasis added]

In Krauthammer's world view, the sin of multilateralism is that it seeks to "restrain the American Gulliver and remake him into a tame international citizen." For Krauthammer, the United States should always be the tamer, never the tamed.

A dozen years later, he argued that one "effect of September 11 was to accelerate the realignment of the current great powers, such as they are, behind the United States." It was, in a sense, Churchill's Fulton vision finally come to pass.

Writing on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, Krauthammer concluded confidently: "The new unilateralism argues explicitly and unashamedly for maintaining unipolarity, for sustaining America’s unrivaled dominance for the foreseeable future." That dominance would be "managed benignly" by the United States, he said. Americans had the duty to manage the world: "To impiously paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: History has given you an empire, if you will keep it."

This, effectively, was also what Churchill was saying to the United States in 1946. Churchill sought, of course, to be America's equal partner, while Krauthammer sees Britain as merely one of its attending allies. The vision is fundamentally the same: by virtue of its "moral and material forces," Americans must dominate the international system.

To the extent that Mitt Romney has had a foreign policy vision, this is it. As I noted in an analysis of Romney's speech at the Citadel back in October, the Romney foreign policy amounts to little more than mindless muscle-flexing. He said then, in a passage he repeated a couple of weeks ago in a speech to the VFW: "This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President. You have that President today." In ominous tones reminiscent of the Fulton speech, he warned of a "global alliance of authoritarian states." His simple-minded answer was a "strategy of American strength" leading to a new "American century."

Romney's foreign policy advisors are working hard to cast him in a Churchillian mold, to present him as strong where President Obama is allegedly weak and "eager to address the world with an apology on his lips."

This superficial attempt to claim the mantle of Churchill should make all Americans suspicious. Recall who started all of this by requesting that bust of Churchill in the first place: George W. Bush.

Why did Bush want the bust? It seems Churchill reminded him of, well, himself:

People said why would you be interested in having a bust of an Englishman in your Oval Office and the answer is that he was one of the great leaders in the 20th century. He stood on principle. He was a man of great courage. He knew what he believed, and he really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me, wasn't afraid of public opinion polls, he wasn't afraid of, he didn't need focus groups to tell him what was right, he charged ahead and the world is better for it.

Bush wanted to associate himself with those leadership traits that he identified in Churchill, and we know how that turned out. Bush was, to say the least, no Churchill.

Now Mitt Romney is doing the same thing. As Bush once tried to say, "Fool me once ..."

[In the course of working on this post, I concluded that I have two separate explanations that I'd like to explore--one more respectable (above), another more disturbing. I'll examine the latter in a subsequent post.]

A Quick Note on the Bust Kerfuffle

Another reason the Churchill bust has been in the news is that the columnist Charles Krauthammer cited it last week in explaining Romney's trip to Britain. His comments prompted a rebuff from Dan Pfeiffer at the White House, claiming the bust had never left the White House. Pfeiffer then had to apologize and admit that it had. Turns out there are two busts of Churchill, one of which remains in the residence--the one in the picture of Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama.

So, the White House looks incompetent at best, and Krauthammer comes out smelling like a rose.

Not quite.

This is what Charles Krauthammer said on Bill O'Reilly's program: "All I know is that the British reaction to the return of the bust was extremely negative, and it felt like it was an insult, that this was a gift after 9/11 to show solidarity. The British had soldiers serving with us at the time in Iraq and Afghanistan, really standing shoulder to shoulder and this was a slight. That's how they saw it."

There is nothing true about that passage by Krauthammer. The bust was a loan, not a gift. It was given before, not after 9/11; it therefore had nothing to do with the fact that American and British soldiers later served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a personal gesture to the new president, George W. Bush, not a symbol of the "special relationship."

The Churchill bust was presented to Bush on July 16, 2001, a week before Bush was to visit Great Britain. As Bush explained in his remarks after the presentation, the British gesture was prompted by a remark by Bush:

"I think I casually mentioned to the ambassador right after my swearing in, I lamented the fact that there was not a proper bust of Winston Churchill for me to put in the Oval Office. He's a man of great action. Here sits a bust on loan from Her Majesty's Government which I accept gratefully."

Two things are significant here: 1) the Churchill bust ended up in the Oval Office due to a remark made by Bush, and 2) Bush himself acknowledged in accepting it that it was not a permanent gift but was on loan to him. So the idea that it was done at the initiative of the British and that to return it was some kind of insult is patently false. It was loaned to Bush personally at his request and returned when he left office.

These are easily verified facts. It took me a matter of seconds to find out when Bush received the bust. Krauthammer evidently never bothered to find out, because the facts did not fit his pre-determined narrative that the Obama administration deliberately insulted the British, a line he has been pushing for years.

The White House apologized for its error. It will be interesting to see if Krauthammer acknowledges his.

Paul & Huntsman: "Bring 'em Home" Republicans

Back in November, before the GOP debate here at Wofford, I noted that one of the interesting things to look for in the debate, whose ostensible topic was foreign policy, was how large a role the historical internationalist v. isolationist split in the GOP would play: "I’ll be looking for signs that this old debate within the Republican party may be re-emerging in the 21st century."

Last night, I could not help but note that the primary in New Hampshire produced a 40% vote for two candidates who explicitly call for the US to get out of Afghanistan: Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Granted, Mitt Romney, who called for "overwhelming military superiority," won the primary with 38%, and if one adds in the 20% that went to the combination of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, that means that about 60% of voters went for candidates whose foreign policy is much more aggressive and interventionist.

It is also worth noting that voters don't generally vote on foreign policy, and this year that is probably more true than it usually is. So one can't take that 40% as a necessarily isolationist vote.

Nonetheless, it does seem fair to say this: for that 40% of New Hampshire Republican primary voters, the foreign policy views of Paul and Huntsman were not disqualifying. That is significant. 

It is practically impossible to imagine that just four years ago. Then, there was only one candidate calling for such a foreign policy: Ron Paul.  And he got only 7.7% of the vote in 2008. He tripled that last night.  Something interesting is happening among Republican voters.

Several observers have noted the absence in this campaign of references to the last Republican president, George W. Bush. For some, that's due to the perception that he was a "big government" conservative who let spending get out of hand. But it may also be that some Republicans are recoiling from the aggressive, regime-change, nation-building foreign policy that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld pursued.

Listening to the jingoism of Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum (especially on the topic of Iran), it is clear that the animating spirit of the Bush foreign policy is far from dead. It is also not going unchallenged.

Those two things combined add up to a meaningful split in the foreign policy consensus in the Republican Party. That makes it all the more interesting that Romney's victory speech in New Hampshire focused as much as it did on foreign policy.

He accused Obama of an "appeasement strategy" and said the president  "doesn't see the need for overwhelming military superiority." If Obama is an "appeaser," then what do we call Paul and Huntsman and their supporters? Clearly, Romney is not interested in appealing to the Paul and Huntsman voters on foreign policy.

Certainly, no virulently anti-Obama voter is going to vote against Romney in the general election on foreign policy grounds. But those who find appealing the "bring 'em home" sentiment expressed by Paul and Huntsman will have no place call their own in a Republican Party led by Romney. In the long run, that could spell trouble for party unity.

Credit, Where It Isn't Due

It has almost been amusing, watching the contortions of Republicans trying to reconcile their reflexive disdain for Barack Obama with the unquestionable merit of his accomplishment in the bin Laden operation. Ever since he emerged as the Democratic nominee in 2008, they have tried to paint him as unprepared, naïve, and indecisive. His measured but steely command in this instance has given the lie to those charges.

In response, Republicans have launched a campaign to argue that any success Obama may have had is due to his continuing the policies of the Bush administration. The more shameless variety has even tried to assert that the lead that eventually led to bin Laden originated from Bush-era torture. Others, like Ross Douthat of the New York Times, have made a more subtle--but no more convincing--case.

Douthat's column on Monday claims that "the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office." Not satisfied with that somewhat dubious claim, he even refers to the "Bush-Obama era."

Douthat is not completely wrong: there is a trite truth in his observation, one that seems shocking to people who pay more attention to campaign rhetoric than to policy, but is glaringly obvious to those who know our history. Students of American diplomacy know that continuity in foreign policy is more common than dramatic change, even when the presidency changes parties.

Perhaps the best example of how overheated political rhetoric can create the illusion of major policy differences comes from the 1952 campaign. Dwight Eisenhower, seeking to placate the McCarthyite right-wing of the Republican Party, suggested that he would pursue rollback of communism rather than mere containment. In reality, he did no such thing. Most famously, when the people of Hungary bravely rose up in 1956, Eisenhower did nothing. Like Harry Truman before him, he knew that acting to liberate the states of eastern Europe would mean World War III. He practiced containment too.

That does not mean, however, that there was no difference between Truman and Eisenhower. The latter feared that limited wars, like the one in Korea, would sap America's military and economic strength, and he determined to avoid them. When the French pleaded for American intervention in Vietnam in 1954, he said no. He relied far more on covert action (such as the CIA-assisted coup that brought the Shah to power in Iran) and nuclear brinksmanship to accomplish his goals.

There were continuities, to be sure. There always are: the nation's core interests do not change overnight. But there were important differences, too.

And that brings us back to Douthat's column. He asserts, seemingly in all seriousness, that "the most visible proof of this continuity" between Bush and Obama is the killing of bin Laden. The raid that killed Osama, he says, "operationalized Bush's famous 'dead or alive' dictum.'"

This is almost too silly to rebut. Bush's "dictum," as he calls it, was not a policy. It was an all-too-typical example of Bush's knee-jerk bravado, one that he did not follow up with a consistent and focused policy. When bin Laden was seemingly trapped at Tora Bora in December 2001, the necessary troops were not sent to prevent his escape, likely because the administration had already shifted its attention and resources to the coming war in Iraq.

Six months after the attacks on 9/11, Bush glibly said: "I don't know where he is, nor, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you." He said that people who were fixated on bin Laden lacked understanding: "The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me that people don't understand the scope of the mission." By March 2002, Bush had decided "the mission" was moving on to invading Iraq.

Contrast that to Obama. He opposed the war in Iraq from the start. From the beginning of his campaign for the presidency in 2007, Obama has been saying that it was a mistake to take the nation's focus off Afghanistan, and that as president, he would finish the job against Al Qaeda there. Obama also said back in 2007 that capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would be a priority, even if he were in Pakistan (and he was roundly criticized by conservatives for that position). By that time, the Bush administration had long stopped talking about bin Laden.

It is simply not true to say, as Douthat does, that Obama was merely completing what Bush started. On the two major pieces of unfinished foreign policy business that Bush bequeathed to Obama--the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--Obama has reversed the Bush's priorities, with positive results. He has done much to salvage something positive from the shambles he inherited.

This pathetic attempt by conservative critics to credit Bush for Obama's accomplishment does have some small merit, come to think of it. If Bush had done his job well, Obama never would have had the opportunity to clean up his predecessor's mess.

Two Bad Calls

Let me say up front that I know that these are not really comparable situations. Apples, oranges, kiwi fruit. I know.

But in the past couple of days, stories about two really bad decisions have crossed my radar screen, and the contrast between the how the two men who made them handled questions about them could not be more stark.

The first one will be familiar to any baseball fan, and to not a few others: the blown call by umpire Jim Joyce that cost Armando Galarraga what would have been the third perfect game in the first third of this major league baseball season. If you missed it, the Detroit Tigers pitcher was one out from perfection. He had set down the first 26 batters to face him--no hits, no walks, no errors. No one had reached base. One more and he'd have a perfect game. The 27th batter hit a ground ball between first and second. The first basemen fielded it, turned and threw to the pitcher covering at first for what the announcers prematurely called the final out. But the umpire called the runner safe, though the replay clearly showed the throw beat the runner. And just like that, what should have been a perfect game became just another one-hitter.

If that were all there was to the story, it would be extraordinary enough. But two things add to the poignancy of the story. First, the camera shot clearly shows Galarraga's reaction to the call. Volcanic rage? Stunned disbelief? No. He smiled. He looked almost bemused. And he did not argue the call (though others did for him). It was an amazing example of personal grace.

What most impressed me most, however, was the umpire. After the game, he watched the replay and took questions from reporters. When asked about it, he said simply and clearly: "I did not get the call correct. I kicked the shit out of it." Joyce did not simply admit his mistake, however. When a reporter tried to give him an out and asked if maybe he didn't have a good angle, he refused to take it: "I had great positioning on it," Joyce said. "I just missed the damn call." Joyce also refused to minimize what he had done: "This isn't *a* call. This is a history call.... I took a perfect game away from that kid over there who worked his ass off all night. It's probably the most important call of my career and I missed it." When asked about what the Detroit manager and players said to him about it, Joyce took that with grace as well: "I don't blame any one of those guys over there for saying whatever they said to me." Joyce later met with Galarraga and personally apologized.

Joyce was a model of accountability and responsibility. He did not hide, he did not shift blame, he did not deny. He admitted his mistake, took responsibility, and apologized.

In contrast, there was this story, in which former President George W. Bush, when asked about water-boarding said "Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.... I'd do it again." I won't rehash the history of this torture technique here, except to note that prior to its adoption by the Bush administration, it was basically universally accepted as torture. I'd be willing to accept that in the heat of the moment, Bush may have made a bad call, may have thought it was right at the time. But now, years later, not only does he not admit error, he still cannot even entertain the notion that it might have been a mistake.

Bush was fairly infamous as president for not admitting any error. Most notably, when asked in a press conference in April 2004 to name his biggest mistake, he could not think of any, and tried to laugh it off by saying "Maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one." But when asked again a year and half later, in December 2005, Bush again gave no answer--instead, he questioned the motives of the questioner: "The last time those questions were asked, I really felt like it was an attempt for me to say it was a mistake to go into Iraq. And it wasn't a mistake to go into Iraq."

Now, I realize that Bush does not believe that it was a mistake for his administration to cross that awful line into adopting torture as an official American policy, and that he does not believe invading Iraq was a mistake. I also recognize that Bush can't, unlike Joyce, simply look at a replay and see objective evidence of whether or not he made the right call.

What bothers me most is the unreflective character of Bush's response. He seems unwilling to even consider that he might have been wrong. Perhaps it is inevitable that presidents will tend to refuse to publicly consider that they may have erred. Harry Truman, for example, always insisted that he never doubted that he made the right decision about dropping the atomic bombs. Nearly 20 years afterward, in 1963, Truman wrote: "I have no regrets, and under the same circumstances, I would do it again." He always insisted, "I did what I thought was right," and claimed he never lost any sleep over it.

I generally like Truman, and it long bothered me that he seemed so unthinkingly certain about so momentous a decision. But when doing some research for my book, The Truman Years, 1945-1953, I found out that Truman was not as certain in private as he was in public. After the second bomb was dropped, Truman reclaimed control of the bomb from the military, and said to some advisors: "The thought of wiping out another hundred thousand people was too horrible. I hate the idea of killing all those kids." And years later, when some people called for him to use the bomb again to break the stalemate of the Korean War, he refused.

Truman may well have always believed he did the right thing. But I think it says something good about the man that at least in private he did not shy away from acknowledging the terrible consequences of what he had decided, and clearly felt the grave responsibility that it placed on him. I hope that one day historians uncover similar sentiments expressed by Bush in his private moments.

But I'd feel better about both Bush and Truman had they had the confidence to express such thoughts in public, or better yet, say simply and clearly, about something substantial, "I did not get the call correct."

The "Stimulus Did Nothing" Canard

If there is one thing Republicans agree on these days, it is that the stimulus bill "did nothing." The newest Republican phenom, Scott Brown, asked to have his swearing in hastened so that he could oppose any further economic stimulus. “The last stimulus bill did not create one new job,” Brown confidently said.

This claim is absurd on the face of it.

Oh, it is easy for people like Sean Hannity to hammer away at the fact that the Obama administration claimed that the stimulus would keep the unemployment rate from reaching 8%, and last month it was 10%. Therefore, they claim, it did nothing--unemployment is higher, so no jobs were created.

On the surface, you can see the appeal of the claim. But it won't withstand even a moment's thought. Jobs being saved, or created, is not inconsistent with the unemployment rate going up. It's the equivalent of saying that the rescue efforts in Haiti have saved no lives because the death count keeps going up.

Yes, they were wrong about what the unemployment rate would be. But if that is the standard Republicans want to use, then they have some explaining to do.

Let's take the Reagan tax cuts enacted in August 1981. At that time, the unemployment rate was 7.4%. Despite the tax cut, the unemployment rate continued to rise, reaching a height of 10.8% in December 1982. It did not decline to below the August 1981 level until the fall of 1984, over three years after the passage of the bill. Would today's GOP say that this means the Reagan tax cuts did nothing, that they "did not create one new job”?

Or look at George W. Bush. In January 2001, Dick Armey predicted that passing "a pro-growth tax cut ... could help avert a recession." Despite getting the tax cut passed in June 2001, which Bush predicted would stimulate the economy, the unemployment rate rose from 4.2% in January 2001 and peaked at 6.3% in June 2003. Yet we were told repeatedly that the tax cuts worked, even though the unemployment rate continued to rise for two years after the cuts were enacted. When even ONE Republican says that this fact means the Bush tax cuts did "nothing," I'll start taking this line of attack on Obama seriously.

The unemployment rate would be higher without the stimulus. To pretend that it did "nothing" is absurd substantively because it is demonstrably false, but if the objective is to deny Obama any credit for partisan purposes, well then there is a certain twisted logic to the claim--one perfectly consistent with the scorched earth political strategy of the GOP.

One last blatant contradiction. If the stimulus package did nothing, then it would seem tax cuts are totally ineffective and produce nothing, since about $200 billion of it was tax cuts. I won't hold my breath waiting for Republicans to admit that.