@ forecastle casady:
I'm not sure of the distinction you're making here, but I see a mixture of reason and reflex ("we're not Bush!") in the Obamites foregin policy.

@ forecastle casady:

Aside from your paeans to their realism and thoughtfulness, I'm not sure we're saying anything very different here.

@ CK MacLeod:
You have a point here--I read Zero's "liberal" as "leftist," as I often do, trying to adjust conflicting terminologies. When many conservatives say "liberal" they mean what I call "leftist" (as I can tell by what and who they refer to in that way). It usually works fine because there are today very few consequential liberals of the kind that essentially governed us for much of the Cold War--Peretz qualifies, Alan Dershowitz, Joe Lieberman. Many transformed before our eyes from liberals to leftists, like Al Gore. Their distinguishing feature, in fact, is seeing Israel as a friend. How many more are there? The president isn't one, nor are the people he surrounds himself with. Do you think the administration and the leaders in Congress (or major media outlets) sound like Gelb, Peretz or Pollack?

@ forecastle casady:
I have a half-formed hypothesis about Obama's actions against Islamic terror, and it may or may not be fair, I really don't know: I think he is trying to construct a way of fighting those who carry out or plan very precisely defined deeds in a way that corresponds completely to what the "international community" (or at least the one Obama imagines) can see as legitimate; but at the same time to fight seriously and even ruthlessly within those confining terms. All his other actions are predicated upon the assumption that the motivation to become one who carries out or plans such deeds is a response to our actions, which we can control (and can control the interpretation of). So, once you cross that line into wanton attacks on civilians you are fair game; until you cross that line we will appease you with all the means at our disposal. For me, this "experiment" is the only interesting part of this administration, because I can at least see a rationale here--a genuine transnational progressive might fight terrorism in this way, and thereby form a notion of the legitimate use of force, so we might as well see what comes of it.

@ forecastle casady:
There may also be many explanations for why one is anti-semitic, but that's not the point--anti-semitism is visible in actions, not in intentions, and singling out Israel as a source of evil, or violence, or instability is anti-semitic.

@ forecastle casady:
Maybe you're being disingeuous here. There are certainly anti-Zionist Hasidim, some of them pathologically so, to the point of allying themselves openly and fiercely with Palestinian terrorists--they amy not be anti-semitic, they may require a special category or diagnosis of their own, but the vast majority of non-Zionist hasidim wish no harm to come to their fellow Jews and do not provide propaganda much less material aid to Israel's enemies. But the desire to destroy Israel, and the determination to see Israel as uniquely evil, or the source of more of the world's evil than other peoples or countries, are definitely anti-semitic.

Anyway, according to VDH, it's now 1979.

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/our-1979/

@ CK MacLeod:
You don't serious believe that GS thinks he is time traveling, do you--saying "it's definitely the 30s" is equivalent to a coach or broadcaster saying "it's definitely crunch time"--it doesn't mean he thinks he's in a garbage truck.

Of course the Left has enemies and hates them passionately. It's enemies are those who delay the dream of a world without enemies--those who believe you can divide the world into good and evil rather than privileged and oppressed; or those who think pride, envy, overconfidence, conflicting interests and a host of other ineradically human motivations will always set humans at odds with each other in potentially violent ways. You can't tell me, can you, that you've never heard a Leftist say that the cause of war is that we set up dichotomies like "friend/enemy" in the first place?

If it really comes down to it, I could force myself to read The Nation again; but, as a show of good faith, before I subject myself to such torture, why don't you give me an example of a lefty who refers, in an unqualified manner, to Chavez or A-jad as enemies?By "unqualified," I mean without something like "but of course they are responding to our provocations."

You seem to be objecting to common reference points, or commonplaces, and the use of shorthand in making an argument--as if we can ever do without those rhetorical devices. We will always frame current events in terms of past ones, and trying to figure out whether it's "1939" or only "1935" might seem bizarre from the outside, but it is used to measure to trajectory of tyranical advance and Western self-abasement. If it inevitably misses something, other events can be introduced to frame other features of the situation, or to counter this framing. But claiming that those who use these frames take them literally constructs a straw man.

As for "Western liberal foreign policy," I don't know about all the leftists you've known, but I read leftist publications like The Nation, Mother Jones, and others for many years, along with more scholarly versions of the same viewpoint, and I have no doubt that we can open one of them pretty much at random and find a discussion of war or militarism assuming that conflicts between nations are the result of material inequities and/or attempts by ruling classes (or "elites") to "deflect" attention from their own depradations upon the people. And such an assumption easily leads to the conclusion that if we did away with material inequities and "elites" we would also do away with war. So Dr. Zero's claim is a simplification, but a sufficiently accurate one.