Paul Pillar

We constantly find new material to illustrate Winston Churchill’s observation that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Traditional democratic theory offers several reasons why democracy is better than the other forms, including the positive effects that broad political participation may have on popular attitudes and outlooks. I have always thought the most important aspect of the superiority of democracy is instead simpler and more direct: that the power to vote rulers out of office is the best safeguard against rulers acting continually and blatantly against the interests of the ruled—as happens in countless autocracies around the world.

In practice, holding rulers accountable to the ruled doesn't always work smoothly even in a democracy. Some of the issues involved are related to what Robert Merry addresses in his insightful commentary on an earlier piece of mine that expressed concern about what kind of foreign policy a finger-in-the-political-wind Mitt Romney would follow. Merry notes that with regard to that most important of presidential decisions—going to war—the dominant pattern in American history has been one of popular deference to presidential leadership, with the electorate withdrawing that deference only after a war goes sour. Given current signs of lowered American patience for more war, Merry concludes that if Romney leads the nation into some misguided military adventure, it would be because of his own impulses more than any popular sentiment.

Several questions can be raised about this, one of which concerns the effects of popular sentiment on decisions other than going to war. Sometimes playing to the electorate implies inaction when action would be more in the nation's interests. This might be true, for example, of whether to undertake a concerted effort (to the annoyance of the Israeli government) to promote a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, or to undertake a comprehensive U.S. rapprochement with Iran. Moreover, if a president doesn't have any particular impulses of his own in foreign policy, even a slight puff of the political wind may be enough to set him off in whatever direction has a plurality of popularity at the moment. Notwithstanding the currently growing American aversion to another war and especially a prolonged war, popular sentiment might tend to favor something described as a one-time strike, even if it in fact carried the danger of leading to a longer war. Finally, even if a president factors into his thinking the possibility of the public eventually turning against him if one of his initiatives goes awry, that negative turn may come too late to be very important to him—just as most of the battering that George W. Bush's popularity took as a result of the Iraq War going sour did not come until after he had been elected to a second term.

Let us focus for a moment on democratic accountability, in the form of the aforementioned issue of voters punishing an incumbent for policies gone bad. The American pattern that Merry correctly describes, of the public turning against wars only after they have become long and costly, points to one of the deficiencies in accountability in the United States. Accountability is not achieved until after much damage as already been done, and maybe even after a president who was responsible for the damage has been reelected.

Another deficiency, which appears at least as much in domestic as in foreign policy, concerns the electorate's frequent inability to determine which incumbent or former incumbent is most responsible for something. We see this today in how the state of the economy is playing in the current election campaign. President Obama inherited from his Republican predecessor—in addition to a couple of already-long wars—the deepest recession since the Great Depression. But regardless of how much the White House or Democrats offer charts showing how many jobs were lost under the Republican president and how many have been regained since their man came into office, voters tend to make their current feelings about current economic problems a referendum on whoever is the current president. An irony—an undemocratic one—is that Republicans are profiting politically from the severity of a Republican president's recession. If the recession had not been as severe, and the lingering effects on employment not as long-lasting as the ones we are seeing today, the Democratic president the Republicans are trying to unseat would be losing fewer votes over the economy and the Republicans would be less likely to regain the presidency.

Even worse is when incumbent politicians (other than the president) have a positive political interest in their constituents being bad off economically. The higher that unemployment remains, the lower is Barack Obama's chance for reelection. That means that Republican members of Congress have a political interest in defeating or delaying legislation that would create jobs. They may have an ideological impulse to do so anyway, but their political interest in doing so—bearing in mind that their leaders have declared the defeat of Obama to be their number-one priority—certainly subverts democratic accountability.

This last factor may point to a respect in which the American type of presidential government, in which different parties may control the executive and legislative branches, is inferior to British-style cabinet government, in which policy is set by what amounts to a temporary party dictatorship and it is very clear which party is responsible for the policies and their consequences. But the same perverse incentives about making the electorate worse off may apply even if the party opposed to the president does not control a house of Congress. Even if Republicans did not have a majority in the House of Representatives, they could still push up the price of gasoline by talking about a possible war in the Persian Gulf region. Voters tend to blame the president for higher gas prices, and thus higher prices hurt Obama's reelection chances, even though the president's policies are not actually causes of the price rise.

There is no way around these deficiencies short of somehow making the American public more knowledgeable about actual responsibility for policies, or somehow reducing partisanship that is so intense that defeating the other party's president takes precedence over the good of the nation as a whole.

Image: DonkeyHotey

This time the Romney campaign's gaffe of the week did not come from the candidate. Instead, it was the explanation from a senior aide of how once Romney secures the Republican nomination he can revise his positions for the general-election campaign as easily as erasing an image on an Etch A Sketch. This explanation does not tell us anything new about the candidate, whose record as a political chameleon was already well established. The incident brings to mind Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.”

Some in the hard-core Republican base to whom the candidates in the primary campaign have been appealing are apt to be disturbed by the aide's comment. And Romney's Republican opponents are striving to exploit the remark to the fullest, to the extent of distributing Etch A Sketches to reporters. Conversely, some voters open to backing Romney in the general election may be reassured by the idea that he doesn't really believe in all that right-wing stuff he has been emitting in the campaign so far—although that leaves open the question of whether it makes sense to vote for someone out of a belief that he does not mean what he says in his campaign. As for figuring out what Romney really believes and how a President Romney would act, most speculation about that will center on domestic matters, such as whether a being a self-described severe conservative squares with enacting Romneycare. But let us speculate for a moment about foreign policy.

The starting point for any such speculation is the realization that, as Jacob Heilbrunn puts it, “Romney's overwhelming desire has been to please whatever audience he is before” and that “his only sincere belief appears to be in his own personal advancement.” His positions will be determined above all by whatever it takes to win the next election he faces. Thus the policies of a first-term President Romney, assuming he is not content to be a one-term president, would be determined above all by whatever will help him to win a second term. Predicting the policies of such a first term is less a matter of determining what Romney “really” believes (on many foreign-policy matters he probably does not know what he really believes) than of forecasting how the politics of major issues will play over the next four years.

Romney's November opponent, President Obama, already has a track record in office that provides a basis for extrapolating his behavior in a second term. That record is not a Romney-like one of being shaped overwhelmingly by what plays well politically. Some aspects of that record on important issues, such as an initial (albeit later abandoned) resistance to continued Israeli expansion of settlements on occupied territory, have not been vote-winners. One cannot just extrapolate in a straight line from a first to a second term, however. Although a second-term President Obama would continue to feel some legacy effects of old political baggage (especially on the war in Afghanistan), a big difference from the first term would be that he would never be running for office again. That fact and the political freedom it implies would be one of the most important determinants of the policies of a second Obama term. And it would mark a big difference from what would determine the policies of a first Romney term, which would be whatever it takes to win a second Romney term.

So the choice will be between a foreign policy that is shaped overwhelmingly by whatever is seen to be politically advantageous and a foreign policy that is shaped by a less politically minded sense of what is in U.S. interests. A populist response would be to go with the first alternative, out of a belief in democratic principles and in the idea that, in foreign as well as domestic policy, the people ought to determine what is in their own interests. One problem with this view is that what a leader sees as politically advantageous is not to be equated with whatever a majority of the populace, not coached and not manipulated by the leadership, happens to believe. This is illustrated by what the George W. Bush administration did in launching an offensive war in Iraq, which most Americans would not have supported without the administration's ardent pro-war sales campaign lasting over a year. Bush came into the presidency, as Romney would, as a novice and cypher as far as foreign policy was concerned. During his first few months in office, he fumbled around for a defining and inspiring theme for his presidency. After 9/11, he figured he found that theme in being a “war president.” He bought into the neoconservatives' Iraq scheme as a way of developing that theme and reaping a political advantage from it—which he did long enough to win a second term. The disastrous consequences of that choice, and the resulting negative impact on his popularity, did not fully set in until his second term, when it no longer mattered as far as reelection was concerned.

Even without a reprise of anything like that episode, a more basic problem with the populist view of foreign policy is that often most of the people do not know what is in their best interests (even if they later come to realize that some things they earlier favored were not in their interests). That observation sounds elitist, of course, and it would be poison for any politician to utter it openly. But the truth of it has been demonstrated by something like the Vietnam War, which was not caused by anything like the neocon manipulations that led the United States into Iraq. Even without coaching or manipulation by leaders, most Americans believed in the early 1960s that it was necessary to draw a line in Vietnam to stop a worldwide communist advance.

The popular impulses of the American people, at different times in U.S. history, have been a force either for extraordinary accomplishment or for bad misdirections. Those impulses provided the energy to win World War II and to sustain the efforts needed to prevail in the Cold War. Over the coming four years, nothing like those campaigns will be what is needed to protect and advance U.S. interests. During the next presidential term, a foreign policy that responds largely to popular impulses is more likely to result in misdirection than in accomplishment. The popular American need to see a foreign enemy as a negative national reference point is apt to result in needless conflict and to miss opportunities for fruitful cooperation. The impulse to slay foreign dragons also carries the danger of overextension at a time when the limits of national resources need more attention than ever. The president for the next four years needs to draw up a foreign policy (not necessarily on an Etch A Sketch) that is shaped by something other than just what will sell at the next election.

Romney Image: Jessica Rinaldi

The tendentious and careless use of historical comparisons and analogies has long contributed to some of the biggest foreign-policy follies, such as the Vietnam War. Seeing a reincarnated Hitler in a two-bit dictator or a reenacted Munich in a decision to avoid a war has perhaps been the most frequent such misuse of history. Now three U.S. senators, as described in a sympathetic puff piece by Jackson Diehl, are reaching into more recent history to argue that getting the United States involved in more wars is a good thing and that they themselves have been both courageous and insightful in taking the lead to see that this happens. The senators—Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and John McCain—whom their staffers affectionately refer to as the “three amigos,” are most immediately interested in getting the United States involved in the civil war in Syria. Not far behind that, they also are itching to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, with Graham and Lieberman being lead sponsors of a Senate resolution aimed at boxing the U.S. president into doing exactly that.

The amigos describe themselves as repeatedly having been on the right side of recent history by pushing for more military action in situations such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya and the “surge” in Iraq. As portrayed by Diehl, the trio's inspired, bellicose leadership keeps running up against others small-mindedly “playing their usual roles,” including the Pentagon cautioning about how tough some of the proposed combat missions are likely to be and “self-styled 'realists' ” pointing out how intervention in a civil conflict may only make it worse. The amigos' confidence remains undimmed. “We have a record of being right,” says McCain. The lesson of the recent history is quite simple, says Lieberman. “What it shows is that civil wars we get involved in can be settled more successfully than civil wars where we don't get involved.”

Would that it be that simple. There are at least three major problems with this use of history.

One is that the situations being discussed are not at all similar. Getting Serbs to stop doing what they were doing in Bosnia or Kosovo is not at all comparable to winning a civil war against a Syrian regime that is fighting for its life and still enjoys substantial backing from domestic elements who fear the alternative. It is a comparison not just between apples and oranges but between apples and pumpkins. Even the more recent Libyan revolt, another part of the Arab Spring, was far different from the circumstances in Syria, mostly because of the sectarian dimension in the latter country.

Second, Diehl and the amigos are too quick to declare what is the right or the wrong side of history in the recent cases they cite. Diehl states that “the consensus in Washington” is that the surge in Iraq “rescued the United States from catastrophe in Iraq and made possible the withdrawal that Obama completed as president last year.” What consensus? Probably the only conclusion clear enough to warrant that word is that the surge contributed—along with other factors, most notably the Sunni Awakening—to a reduction in the violence in Iraq that peaked in 2006 and 2007. But the surge failed miserably to accomplish its principal declared objective, which was to facilitate political reconciliation among the contending Iraqi factions. Many of the defense intelligentsia in Washington who have been most keenly interested in the Iraq War argued against completion of the withdrawal because of the continued bitter internal conflict in Iraq that the surge failed to resolve. As for Libya, it is far too early to declare that intervention wise or successful given the continued instability, atrocities and division to the point of secession in that country, not to mention the terrible example set by reneging on the deal with Qaddafi under which he gave up terrorism and development of weapons of mass destruction.

Third, the history being invoked is highly selective. Nowhere in Diehl's piece is there mention of what was by far the biggest act of military intervention that the three amigos supported. They all voted in 2002 in favor of a Congressional resolution authorizing it. That's right: the original launching of the Iraq War—the intervention with the trillion-dollar price tag, thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded and even more Iraqis dead, along with more extensive damage to U.S. interests still being incurred. Of course, we can't say in that instance that the United States intervened in a civil war; in Iraq the United States precipitated a civil war. But for the amigos to say smugly that “we have a record of being right” about the application of military force while ignoring a blunder so big and so costly that it outweighs dozens of Kosovos would be—were it not for the tragic nature of the consequences of this blunder—laughable.

The 140-square-mile patch of misery known as the Gaza Strip suffers from two degrees of inattention. First, any hope of being lifted permanently out of the misery rests on Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy that is now moribund. Benjamin Netanyahu’s war-mongering on Iran has succeeded in pushing the unresolved plight of Palestinians almost entirely off the Israeli-American agenda. This was demonstrated earlier this month when a visit to Washington by Netanyahu and a major AIPAC conference were remarkable for how little either one explicitly addressed the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Second, to the extent that conflict gets any attention, the attention focuses more on the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), where continued Israeli colonization of conquered land is pushing a two-state solution ever closer to infeasibility. There once were a few thousand Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip (in contrast to the half million in the West Bank), but as these numbers indicate, Israelis never coveted this piece of sand as much as they do lands to the east. Seven years ago, Ariel Sharon pulled Israelis out of the strip, successfully dealing with the few diehard settlers who resisted.

Since then, Israeli governments seem to have wished that the Gaza Strip could somehow just go away. That not being possible, they instead have dealt with it as if it were a den of unruly, infectious creatures that could be cordoned off, with an occasional overt use of force to swat the creatures down. The well-being of the people who really live in the strip, and the ways in which Israel's assault on that well-being redound to Israel’s own disadvantage, do not seem to have figured into Israeli government thinking.

Whether or not anyone gives due ethical regard to the welfare of Gazans, the short-sighted cordon-and-swat Israeli approach will continually make the Gaza Strip a locus of trouble and instability. The most recent reminder of that has occurred within the past week. The trouble began with the latest Israeli swat: the killing last Friday with an air-to-ground missile of Zuhair al-Qissi, the leader of a militant group called the Popular Resistance Committees. Palestine Islamic Jihad took the lead in retaliating by firing rockets back into Israel, which in turn led to more Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip. By Tuesday, the Egyptians had brokered a truce, which was still shaky as of mid-week.

The latest round of fighting demonstrates anew how Israel’s iron-fisted approach of blockades, airstrikes and invasions never has and never will bring peace to Israel’s southwestern border. It is little more than three years since Operation Cast Lead, a full-scale Israeli invasion that killed around 1400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and inflicted such extensive physical damage to the Gaza Strip that, combined with the effects of the previous blockade, it caused a humanitarian crisis that in some ways continues today.

Neither Israeli nor Palestinian leaders seem anxious for a new war right now in Gaza. Some Israeli politicians have warned that such a war would risk undoing the success the war-mongering talk about Iran has had in diverting attention from the Palestinians’ plight and focusing it instead on the Iranian nuclear program. The successful operation of Israel's Iron Dome anti-rocket defensive system has relieved what might otherwise have been greater popular pressure on Israeli leaders to strike back faster and even more forcefully.

There nonetheless is talk in Israel about launching at some point another war against Gazans. Israel's finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, said “sooner or later, and I don't want to quote dates, we will have to do a 'root canal.'” The talk reflects another Israeli idée fixe, one that is just as short-sighted as the reliance on cordon-and-swat: an absolute refusal to have anything to do with Hamas except to try to crush it (and occasionally to exchange prisoners with it). This obsession continues no matter what Hamas does and no matter how substantial a portion of Palestinian opinion it may represent. Hamas has not been involved in the most recent round of rocket firing, and it was Hamas that sought Egyptian help to negotiate a cease-fire. Hamas's staying on the sidelines of this latest round follows months in which it has spoken more of moving away from violent resistance and has tried anew to reconcile with the Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas. Steinitz's comments nonetheless indicate that making things as difficult as possible for Hamas is at least as important to the Israeli government as stopping any rockets. Israel “cannot accept in the long run,” he said, a Hamas regime in Gaza.

The counterproductive (if one were interested in peace, that is) Israeli attitudes at play are vividly displayed in a paper published this week by Efraim Inbar and Max Singer of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a version of which appeared as an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. Their piece is titled “The Opportunity in Gaza”—it's interesting how a violent, destructive clash is viewed as a “opportunity.” They argue for a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip now—one even bigger and more damaging than Cast Lead, with the objective of destroying as much of Hamas as possible. They blatantly recommend exploiting the U.S. electoral calendar, arguing that “until November, the U.S. is likely to restrain rather than promote international action against Israel in response to an action in Gaza.” They say “deterrence created by Cast Lead” is “wearing thin,” and “military action now could restore deterrence.” Someone should point out to Inbar and Singer than when you repeatedly have to go to war that means deterrence is not working. But they don't seem to care, fully accepting the prospect that in the future “Israel will probably have to 'mow the grass' again.” There is not a single word in their paper about the lives and livelihoods of the residents of the Gaza Strip, or the effect what they are recommending would have on those lives.

May both Palestinians and Israelis be spared from such perverse thinking.

Image: Al Jazeera/Wikimedia Commons