Matt Yglesias

Neocons Bemoan USA Soccer Victory

Gary Schmitt, formerly of the Project for a New American Century, has a bizarre post up at an AEI blog in which he laments the fact that the United States upset Spain in the Confederation Cup, then further laments the fact that soccer exhibits a high degree of competitive balance, then explains that Americans don’t like soccer because its high degree of competitive balance cuts against American-style capitalism, then explains that soccer is popular in the US and Europe because it’s so socialistic. Fortunately, Alex Massie has already written the needed rebuttal so I’ll just recommend that to you.

It is worth saying that as best one can tell the degree of competitive balance involved in different sports seems related to the relative scarcity of high-level performers. Soccer and baseball are both sports in which relatively normal sized people can excel if they practice a lot and develop the skills. In other words, there are a lot of people who could be excellent soccer or baseball players. And since these are both popular sports, lots of kids learn them and attempt to excel at them. So pro clubs have a relatively high supply of good players from which to choose and the gaps in team quality get relatively small.

Basketball, the sport with the least competitive balance, is very different. There are instances of guys who are six feet tall (or even shorter) succeeding in the NBA, but they’re very rare. At the majority of the positions you need to be much taller than average, and you need multiple people who are outrageously tall. Ask yourself how many people taller than 6′9″ you’ve met in your life and then ask yourself how many people taller than 6′9″ are employed by a typical NBA team. The result is that you get a huge disparity in the quality of big men available to different teams and consequently huge disparities in team quality. Meanwhile, aside from the USA the other region of the world where basketball really caught on relatively early was Communist-dominated Eastern Europe.

Useful Clever People

Baron YoungSmith remarks on the fact that the very same neoconservatives who argued themselves hoarse that the election of Barack Obama would lead to imminent dhimmitude at the hands of a Sino-Islamo-Fascisto-Cuban alliance are now seeming remarkably supportive of an Obama policy agenda whose content—take troops out of Iraq and put a smaller number of troops into Afghanistan while not acting like a jerk on the world stage—is exactly the same as the one they hated during the campaign.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t a softening of neocon madness, it’s exactly what they did in the 1990s. After spending the George H.W. Bush administration in their customary role as the “totally insane” faction of conservative movement foreign policy thinking (key episodes being the insistence that Bush should have marched on Baghdad and commenced an occupation of Iraq, and the 1992 defense planning guidance draft) they spent the 1990s being the less partisan faction of the movement with regard to Clinton’s foreign policy. Basically any president sometimes orders military action somewhere, and whenever Clinton did so neocons would applaud and call politely for even more forceful action while criticizing those Republicans who asked questions. By making themselves useful to Clinton and his supporters, while maintaining an appropriate level of critical distance, the neocons were able to elevate their status within the conservative coalition and emerge as a more influential faction in the W. Bush administration than they’d been in the H.W. Bush or Reagan administration.

Going back to these tactics is integral to neocon plans to regain power. And I think it’s working. When PNAC 2.0 was launched, John Nagl head of CNAS spoke at the debut event, and Fred Kagan is speaking at CAP today. Neocons are out of power, but they’re not being banished to the fringes of the discussion, key progressives groups have made them the preferred interlocutors on high-profile issues. In the domestic political context, in other words, neocons very clearly appreciate the tactical and strategic utility of sometimes being nice, of accommodating the interests of others, and of strategic restraint. If only they could figure out a way to apply these lessons to foreign policy.

Neo-Neocons are Still Incredibly Dishonest

I wrote skeptically about the new Foreign Policy Initiative, basically the Project for a New American Century part two, populated by the same failed thinkers peddling the same failed ideas that have caused so much needless death and destruction in recent years. For my trouble I was compared to Hutu génocidaires. George Packer was also skeptical of this idea and in response he got a more customary response from the neocon gang—a bunch of BS:

Schmitt also implies that PNAC did not play a role in creating the congressional pressure that ultimately led President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act when he was badly weakened by the Lewinsky scandal. Read the PNAC letters and the rest of the relevant history and decide for yourself. Finally, Schmitt contends that PNAC was a leading post-invasion critic of the handling of the Iraq War. He should post some of the evidence on the group’s web site, where you can find a lengthy 2005 report called “Iraq: Setting the Record Straight,” an ex-post-facto defense of the WMD justification for the war, as well as links to numerous op-eds by PNAC members fighting rearguard battles against the war’s domestic critics—but no trace of the kind of thoroughgoing criticism that might have come to the attention of PNAC’s signatories, who had become leading Bush Administration officials, and made a difference when it mattered.

Just remember that Iranians will love us if only we bomb their country.

It’s All One War

Josh Marshall wonders what happened to yesterday’s defining generation struggle:

And it’s hard not to recognize that sad figure in the Max Boots and John McCains and Bill Bennetts and all the rest with their sustaining roots planted firmly at AEI HQ. After all, what happened to the long twilight struggle against radical Islam? So yesterday, I guess. Or can we do both simultaneously, even though the Russians are themselves up against hostile Islamic groups on their southern periphery?

Enter Melik Kaylan in The Wall Street Journal to put the pieces together:

The natural resources of Central Asia, from Turkmenistan’s natural gas to Kazakhstan’s abundant oil, cannot reach the West free of Russia and Iran except through that narrow conduit in the Caucasus. Moscow’s former colonies in Central Asia are Afghanistan’s most desirable trading partners. They are watching the strife in Georgia closely. It will tell them whether or not they will enter the world’s free markets without a Russian chokehold on their future — or, whether they, and their economies, are doomed for the foreseeable future to remain colonies in all but name. And it won’t be long before Moscow dictates to them exactly how to isolate Kabul. Moscow is perfectly aware, even if we are not, that choking off the bottleneck in the Caucasus gives Iran and Russia much say over our efforts in Afghanistan.

In Iraq too, the Kremlin’s projection of power down through Georgia will soon be felt. Take another look at the map. If Russia is allowed to extend its reach southwards, as in Soviet times, down the Caucasus to Iran’s borders, Moscow can support Iran in any showdown with the West. Iran, thus emboldened, will likely attempt to reassert itself in Iraq, Syria and, via Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

This is crazy and paranoid, but also ignorant. The former Soviet Republics of Central Asia already have friendly relations with Moscow — Georgia, the Baltics, and the current regime in Ukraine are trying to get out of the Russian orbit, but the ’stans largely aren’t. But beyond the specific details it’s the constant paranoia and hysteria of the right-wing that really comes through here — the entire American position in the world turns out to hang on the narrow thread of Georgia exercising effective sovereignty over South Ossetia and/or Mikhail Saakashvili’s ability to hold onto power in Tblisis. Nevermind that before he took office, nobody thought him taking power was especially vital to American interests (as opposed to, perhaps, the citizens of Georgia’s interest in democratic elections) or that it’s not clear why the fact that Georgia touches Iran would magically alter the nature of the US-Iran-Russia relationships.