The webzine Foreign Policy is a little too globalist and USA Today-ee for my taste, but Stephen Walt is a real bright spot.  A few days ago he made a numerical argument about how silly it is for the US to be worrying about the military capabilities of Iran.  And for all the talk about the Iranian regime being made up of insane irrational actors, Walt reminds us

Iran hasn't invaded anyone since the Islamic revolution, although it has supported a number of terrorist organizations and engaged in various forms of covert action.  The United States has also backed terrorist groups and conducted covert ops during this same period, and attacked a number of other countries, including Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan.

By any objective measure, therefore, Iran isn't even on the same page with the United States in terms of latent power, deployed capabilities, or the willingness to use them.

One place I differ with Walt is when he says “the idea of preventive war against Iran [isn’t] going to go away just because Barack Obama [is] president.”  Fighting a preemptive war isn’t something a president can sort of be nudged into, like raising or cutting the top tax rate by a few percent or giving a chest thumping speech to the Nobel committee.  A president really has to have his heart into it the way Bush’s was.

More importantly is the psycho-sociological reason Obama won’t bomb Iran.  Anybody who talked to a liberal during the Bush years knows that their biggest complaint was that the president had ruined America’s reputation abroad.  And the main reason for anti-Americanism abroad was the Iraq war.  Obama is part of the SWPL culture which lives and dies by the opinions of Europe. Since he has to deal with political realities he obviously can’t go completely isolationist, but he’s not going to attack another country unprovoked either.  Not if it means losing the rock star reception in Berlin.

All in all, I’d be shocked if America actually struck Iran during an Obama administration regardless of what the Israel lobby wanted.

With the coming of the spring thaw, it's another season of riots and intrigue in Eurasia. And amidst local power plays and rumors of Great Game covert action, Washington's color revolution program is disintegrating.

Kyrgyzstan's President Kurmanbek Bakiev, leader of the U.S.-backed "Tulip Revolution" of 2005, was forced to flee Bishkek last Wednesday as political dissatisfaction accelerated into armed clashes with police and widespread looting. Seventy-eight people were killed. In the aftermath of the uprising, the Kyrgyz opposition has seized power, and with the cooperation of the Interior Ministry seems to be bringing order back to the city center. Meanwhile Bakiev is in the southern city of Osh, announcing to anyone who will listen that he's still the president. Bakiev has called for negotiations with the opposition, though it seems a little late for that, since he's been chased out of the capital.

The Kyrgyz who took to the streets were exasperated with the regime's mismanagement, nepotism, increasing brutality and endemic corruption. Yet these phenomena are all enduring features of the political landscape in Central Asia. Whatever slogans various factions display to energize the mobs, political struggles here revolve around regionally-based clans and their patronage networks. In the case of Kyrgyzstan, add in remote and mountainous topography, an impoverished population, almost no energy resources (besides hydropower coveted by the Uzbeks) and Soviet-drawn borders designed for dysfunction. With these factors in mind, it's clear that the country is vulnerable to instability in a neighborhood contested by the great powers.

Why is the Muslim world in the condition it is? Why do Muslims do such odd and inhuman things? Why does Spain translate more books in a year than the Arabs in a thousand years, Pakistan edit physics textbooks to get rid of references to causality, and the Arab world remain at the bottom of every measure of development for countries outside sub-Saharan Africa?

Robert R. Reilly, in his forthcoming book of that title, says it's all because of The Closing of the Muslim Mind. According to its subtitle, his book, to be published by ISI, tries to explain "how intellectual suicide created the modern Islamist." As such it's a clear and informative account that emphasizes basic issues and quotes lots of primary sources. (Like all accounts, it's imperfect, but more on that later.)

According to Reilly, the closing is longstanding. It began in earnest with the overthrow of the Mutazilites by the Asharites in the Abbasid caliphate around 848 A.D., and was pretty much completed by the 12th century. The Mutazilites were theologians who read the Greeks and liked what they saw, so they made reason primary in understanding everything, including God. The Asharites, in contrast, believed in God as absolute will, so that His uniqueness and unity meant that His arbitrary decision determines everything. If you said that reason determines God's actions you were denying His supreme freedom and omnipotence, and if you said that something that wasn't God (like human decision or the essential nature of things) had any effect on anything you were a polytheist.  

It is highly likely that the March 29^th terrorist strikes in Moscow were carried out by Chechen female suicide bombers, also known as "black widows." After six years, Chechen jihadist cells have pulled off another successful attack against innocent Russians only minutes from the Kremlin.

The official U.S. response to the bombings has been to condemn the violence and "stand with" Russia, though support in these matters rarely extends beyond statements for the press. Beyond public diplomacy, what policy line does Washington actually pursue in relation to the Caucasus?

Much as has been said of me, I know Larry Auster, he's very intelligent, and I respect him. I read his blog just about every day and find him an engaging presence in person. And I hope he takes the following criticism in the constructive spirit in which it is written.

I often get the sense that Larry has turned himself into a kind of Ayn Rand of the paleo Right. So often, do I see him expelling others from the circle of "conservatism" -- to the point that the only conservatives left are himself and a handful of intimates -- inflating a single issue or difference of opinion into an existential Either/Or, and proclaiming the absolute consistency of his philosophy (while in actuality it's full of the elisions and willed forgetting characteristic of an ideology.)¹

His recent comments on AltRight follow this trend...

The U.S. appears to be gearing up for it...

Richard Spencer is right when he says that he couldn't think of any significant issue that the Alternative Right and the established conservative movement would hold in common. What he might have added is that he couldn't think of any significant issue over which the conservative movement and the GOP would disagree; or any major issue on which the Alternative Right and the GOP would agree. There is equal truth in all of these statements.

The conservative movement and the GOP have virtually merged, a situation that is underscored by the likelihood that the designated successor to Edwin Feulner as head of the Heritage Foundation will be the wife of Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Beltway conservative foundations work for Republican administrations almost exclusively, and they do so when the GOP is in power or else when it is trying to take over the presidency and/or Congress.

Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel this week turned out to be a major diplomatic flop for the White House. The Obama administration was hoping to renew peace negotiations between the Jewish state and Mahmoud Abbas’ West Bank Palestinians, but ended up in a rather embarrassing position.

In the middle of Biden’s stay, the Israeli Interior Ministry gave the stamp of approval for new settlements in East Jerusalem, an act that torpedoed the White House reconciliation initiative. Over the course of two decades, the talks have never gone anywhere anyway, but that is not the point.

Biden’s trip was touted as a US-Israel love fest. He went out of his way to remind the press that alignment with Tel Aviv "has been and will continue to be the centerpiece of American policy." Appearing upon arrival with Israeli President Shimon Peres, Biden also remarked on how it was "good to be home." And we thought the man was from Scranton! Yet the Vice President didn’t get anything in return for all this obsequious behavior. Rather, the Israeli government undermined his agenda in a very public fashion by giving the green light to further settlements.

 

The American public (along with the world) doesn't seem to care about last weekend's elections in Iraq. One doesn't even hear much about this March of Freedom from Dubya's greatest admirers within the conservative movement. Michelle Malkin, for instance, hasn't written a column on the subject. Only the center-left is talking up the election -- and it all seems forced, if not sarcastic: "Victory At Last!"; "Iraq's newborn democracy is a juggernaught that will not be stopped." Really?     

A lot of this unconcern is due to the fact that everyone's focused on the economy, healthcare, and Obama. But I think the main reason for it is that the display last weekend was profoundly embarrassing. There were over 6000 candidates "from all of the country's major sects and many different parties," according to Newsweek. And the election represented, even more baldly than here in America, an "advance sale on stolen goods." Jobs, handouts, a more equitable distribution of the fabled Iraqi dish  al-qawza were promised (though, in truth, that latter one was satire.) Even the one-time neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi took part: after getting his use from Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, he's now teamed up with anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr! Does anyone out there really want to stand up and exclaim, "Boys, this is what we've been fighting and dying for!"