Matt Yglesias

Kristol: Generals Eikenberry and Jones are “Political Hacks”

Failure to publicly respect military service would get a liberal raked over the coals, but Bill Kristol is a know-nothing who loves war so this will be fine:

In areas where policies are still being debated — in foreign policy in particular — conservatives need to keep urging Obama to do the right thing. We are disgusted with Obama’s irresoluteness on Afghanistan. But we continue to urge that he side with the experienced military leaders he’s been fortunate to inherit against the second-guessing of political hacks (and of failed retired generals turned political hacks).

That’d be retired Generals Karl Eikenberry and James Jones, I assume.

Kristol and Hume Call for Targeted Air Strikes on North Korea

As you probably know, a certain number of people are down-the-line pacifists. They believe that war is wrong, no matter what the cause. And as you’ve probably realized, none of them are major newspaper columnists or television pundits focusing on national security issues. Nobody takes the views of someone who’s a pacifist in general seriously on a specific question of war and peace. But if you’re Bill Kristol, and every time an issue comes up your idea is that we should launch a war, then you get to a Washington Post columnist and a constant TV presence. Here he is with Brit Hume calling for “targeted air strikes” against North Korean missiles:

Kristol doesn’t even attempt to say what he thinks this will accomplish. He just kind of tosses it out there for no reason because arguing that the United States should start wars is what he does. And ask yourself how Kristol would react if one of Iran’s leading political pundits went on television and said that maybe “targeting suicide bombings” against American targets would be a good idea.

The Inevitable Triumph of the Neocons

Robert Farley expresses skepticism that Bill Kristol’s new Foreign Policy Initiative is going to succeed:

For one, not many people seem to be buying into the efforts of neocons to distance themselves from the Iraq War. Second, the Iraq War hasn’t become notably more popular; it still seems to be widely regarded as a misstep, with the only serious discussion being on how disastrous the mistake was. Finally, the information infrastructure is different; because of the efforts of “Mad” Matt Duss, Stephen Walt, and others, the launch of FPI has been greeted as much by mockery and derision as fear and respect. Bill Kristol is a 20th century guy lost in a 21st century world…

I think that’s way too optimistic. The commanding heights of the information economy remain incredibly friendly to neocon perspectives. Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Charles Krauthammer are still all there op-edding away at The Washington Post. The Council on Foreign Relations is staffing up with neocons, adding Elliot Abrams to its arsenal. The Very Serious People at the Brookings Institution remain more likely to collaborate with neocons than with, say, Stephen Walt. And the FPI’s unveiling was validated by the attendance of Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and John Nagl, head of CNAS the left-of-center national security think tank of the moment. Basically, neoconservatism continues to be the mainstream voice of right-of-center national security—the perspective that establishment-oriented institutions feel compelled to shower with respect. The odds of a Republican president getting elected within the next 12 years are extremely high, and the odds of such an administration being heavily influenced by Foreign Policy Initiative ideas strike me as good.

In terms of Iraq, think about it this way. If things continue to be fairly calm for a few years, that will “prove” that the surge “worked” so we should be glad that the doves didn’t manage to ruin things back in 2007 and 2008. And if things don’t remain calm, that will also “prove” that the surge “worked” until the doves came along to ruin things in 2009 and 2010. If the military-industrial complex were to suddenly vanish over the next couple of years, or cease to be interested in subsidizing the generation of ideas that serve to justify maximalist levels of defense spending, then neocons might go away. But why would that happen?

The World Desperately Needs More Bill Kristol

When I was a kid, I remember hearing that cockroaches would not only survive the sure-to-happen US-Soviet nuclear holocaust, but actually emerge stronger than ever as they devour our irradiated corpses. Similarly, there’s a new think tank in town, headed by Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesguy Dan Senor. Senor’s inclusion is especially interesting, since neocons of the Kristol/Kagan ilk ostensibly now believe that the early years of the war were catastrophically mismanaged. And yet here they are with the public face of the mismanagement as their partner in warmongering.

Matt Duss:

On March 31, FPI holds its first public event, Afghanistan: Planning For Success, though, given the heavy representation of Iraq war advocates, I think a far better title would be Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage. The broad consensus among national security analysts and aid officials is that the diversion of troops and resources toward Iraq beginning in 2002 was one of the main reasons the Taliban and Al Qaeda were able to to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, facilitating the collapse of the country back into insurgent warfare. Having failed to complete the mission in Afghanistan, Bush and the Iraq hawks handed the Obama administration a war that promises to be as difficult and costly as Iraq has been -– if not more. It’s deeply absurd that some of the people most responsible for the crisis in Afghanistan would now presume to tell us how to deal with it.

Incidentally, this is my most current thinking on the Afghanistan issue.

Pollitt On Douthat

For a column that’s critical of me, I don’t really disagree with much of what Katha Pollitt has to say about Ross Douthat. He’s a conservative. I am not a conservative. If I thought that conservative views were correct, I would be a conservative. But I think they’re wrong. Therefore, I think that conservatives such as Ross Douthat are regularly wrong about a wide variety of important topics. Thus, instances of them being wrong can be easily produced. I also am not a fan of the idea that institutions are under an obligation to be ideologically balanced. Conservative editorial pages normally contain zero progressive contributors, and there’s no particular reason that The New York Times op-ed page needs to have two conservatives.

That said, The New York Times clearly made the decision that it does want two writers from the right on its pages. Given that, I think Ross Douthat is one of the best possible candidates and certainly will be a marked improvement over Bill Kristol. I don’t think it makes sense to reason “all conservatives are wrong about important things, therefore all conservatives are equally pernicious.” Tyler Cowen on economics has a lot more to offer than Larry Kudlow on economics, even though I agree with neither of them. I think that’s common sense, and I don’t think it makes one a traitor to progressive politics to point this kind of thing out or to think it’s a good thing when conservatives-who-offer-more replace conservatives-who-offer-less.

Ross Douthat Replaces Bill Kristol as New York Times Columnist

I’d say congratulations are in order to Ross Douthat, the new hire at The New York Times. Dumping Bill Kristol in favor of Ross is a very smart move—probably the smartest one (Virginia Postrel?) the Times could have made—and will generate a conservative column that progressives will have reason to read and take seriously.

On a personal note, I’m pretty sure that when I was talking to Ross about leaving The Atlantic I specifically told him that the Times wasn’t going to have an op-ed page by the time they got around to giving guys our age columns, so there was no sense in him clutching to his idle legacy media dreams.

Diversity, Hiatt-Style

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, shining star of your liberal media, says:

Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt called Kristol “very smart and very plugged in,” saying Kristol would be an influential voice in the coming debate over redefining the Republican Party. “It seems to me there were a lot of Times readers who felt the Times shouldn’t hire someone who supported the Iraq war,” said Hiatt, adding that he wants “a diverse range of opinions” on his page.

Even absent Kristol, the Times will have among its op-ed columnists Iraq War supporter David Brooks. And it will also have Iraq War supporter Thomas Friedman as its dedicated foreign affairs columnist. So it’s hardly as if Iraq War supporters have been purged from the NYT. Meanwhile, what kind of diversity has Hiatt really brought to the Post’s opinion section? His masthead editorials backed the war, as did all of his conservative columnists and most of the “liberal” columnists. A believer in diversity would be trying to get some company for poor E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson among the liberals.

The fascinating thing about this, though, is that Hiatt combines contempt for newspaper readers with contempt for the craft of journalism. He clearly thinks it was bad of the Times to cater to the desires of its readers. And he doesn’t say Kristol’s column is good! Doesn’t call it insightful, doesn’t call it informative, doesn’t call it well-written. He just says that Kristol is “plugged-in” and influential. Which no doubt he is. But as a consumer of media, I prefer to take in well-written informative commentary that’s entertaining or enlightening. Being deliberately misled by influence-peddlers or wannabe influence-peddlers doesn’t rank high on my priority list. But to Hiatt it’s the very model of a modern major political pundit.

Against Craziness

Kevin Drum writes about the question of Bill Kristol’s replacement: “It shouldn’t be a ‘liberal’s conservative,’ it should be a genuine, dedicated, smart, reality-grounded, conservative’s conservative — someone who will drive liberals crazy. Who best fits that bill?”

Honestly, one thing that drives me crazy is the idea that “x drives liberals crazy” is a form of praise for a conservative writer. If that’s what you’re looking for, you really can’t do better than Mickey Kaus. He’s not a genuine conservative, and he’s not that dedicated or reality-grounded but he is smart and precisely because he’s neither genuinely conservative nor dedicated he has both the skills and inclination to spend a lot of time pressing liberals’ buttons. But the goal in finding a conservative writer should be to find a writer who’s not a liberal but who liberals enjoy reading. That doesn’t need to be columns that make liberals feel good about themselves (e.g., conservatives writing about how brain-dead the GOP is, etc.) but it needs to be columns that liberals find not maddening but challenging. When I read Tyler Cowen’s skeptical notes on the stimulus, for example, I don’t become infuriated, I become better-informed about the issue. At his best, this is what David Brooks contributes on that page—he’s raised issues about public choice and so forth that liberals tend to neglect but that are genuinely important.

That’s the standard you should be reaching for, though, people who can take on strong liberal arguments and raise strong doubts about them. Not someone who “drives liberals crazy.” But that’s not just a matter of finding “someone” who can do it, but of trying to frame the job in such-and-such a way — I bet there are a lot of people on the right who could do a good job if a good job is what they were being asked by editors to do. The Times seems to have decided when it hired Kristol that what the page needed was a direct channel to Conservative Movement Central Command or something, but it would be easy enough to save money and just republish Bill O’Reilly transcripts occasionally if that’s what you want to do.

Ruffini: Kristol, Brooks, and Will Not Conservative Enough

Right-wing rising star Patrick Ruffini Twitters:

How representative are Will, Kristol, and Brooks of conservative media?

This strikes me as somewhat reminiscent of Erick Erickson’s planned “Operation Leper” targeted at right-wingers insufficiently wingnutty to recognize Sarah Palin’s eminent qualifications for high office.

Bloggers Loving It

Barack Obama went to a dinner party last night with conservative pundits such as George Will, David Brooks, and Bill Kristol, prompting the pool reporter to snark “This is for real, folks. The bloggers are going to love this one.”

Honestly this blogger is ready to wholeheartedly endorse a strategy of acting in a personally cordial manner to conservatives. I’m not enthusiastic about doing things like larding down a stimulus package with ineffective business tax cuts in a misguided effort to attract massive Republican support for the bill. But sitting down and being nice? Hard to see what’s wrong with that. Obama appears to be very effective at convincing people he speaks to in small group settings that he’s a good guy (I got to witness this firsthand in the summer of 2007 and you can see it indirectly as well) so it seems worth trying. Kristol’s probably a lost cause, but neither Will nor Brooks is a dogmatically on-message partisan.