But don't talk about revolution, That's going a little bit too far

Just for clarity, that's not a Beatles' line, rather it's this guy, from this song.

So, the news from Iraq is that the generals rolled over and we're sending more troops, exactly as I said in part one of my tribute to Country Joe and the Fish. There is a rather strident discussion in some left-leaning circles as to the exact mechanics of the process within the Pentagon. Consensus seems to be that Abizaid stepped down early to stay out of it, that the guys currently in charge in Iraq either had to agree or step down (you can't follow orders while questioning them publicly; that's called mutiny), and that while Casey just pulled a flip-flop, the guy who'll be in charge of our escalation is a raving looney-tune. If you're not feeling depressed enough, it is important to realize that while the new troops have to fight somebody, we haven't yet decided who that'll be. The problem here is that the administration apparently believes its own bullcrap, and has trouble with the following chart:

Militia	Sect	Leader	Power Base	Iraq/Iran	Wants to Kill
Badr Brigades	Shi'ite	Abdul Aziz al-Hakim/The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq	Southern Iraq	Linked closely to Iran	Everyone else on this list, plus Kurds when possible
Mahdi Army	Shi'ite	Muqtada al-Sadr	Baghdad/Basra	Iraqi nationalist	Everyone else on this list, plus Kurds when possible
iraqi Sunnis/al Qaeda(?)	Sunnis	God only knows	al Anbar province in Western Iraq	Hate both, but have Saudi support	Everyone else on this list, plus Kurds when possible

We are currently supporting SCIRI, even though they have the closest ties to Iran, and seem itching to fight Sadr, even though the latter's Iranian ties are much weaker, he controls much of the capital plus Basra, the key oil city in the south, and would likely win in a fight between the two. Note that US press releases rarely mention the last column, and the fact that every time someone decides to cleanse a Baghdad neighborhood, the Iraqi army either participates actively or sits the fight out to avoid having to fight the police, and they always inform the Americans that our help is not necessary.

Anyway, this post is really supposed to be a response to dkon's remarks on moderation, in which we seek out a way to become the bleeding-heart liberals we want to be without turning everyone off (BTW, it's Kossack, even with all the unsavory connotations, not Kossian). Let's start with why I'm still a good little capitalist at heart:

It would be nice if all large corporations were inherently evil capitalistic enterprises, and we just had to smash them to achieve peace and justice.

I would argue it is just as silly to argue that large corporations are evil as it is to argue that they are good; you are trying to assign morality to an entity that is fundamentally amoral, not immoral, and the distinction is critical. What is the purpose of a corporation? At least in America, to maximize profits for shareholders (my impression is that in Europe stakeholders are given more weight, e.g., employees and customers). Welcome, my friends, to the Chicago school and the aforementioned tragic ascendancy of economic theory into daily life, in this case like so many thanks to the Chicago School. In modern practice, it seems that while corporations are non-moral creatures, their executives are often the scum of the Earth, twisting the system for their own personal enrichment. If one wishes to impose a moral system on capitalist America, it has to be externally implied. Let me suggest that Republicans dropped the ball because it was worth billions for them to do so; one can only hope that some Democrats, especially the resurgent economic populists, might do a tad bit better. If nothing else, the revival of unions in America certainly couldn't hurt, at least to provide a counterbalance.

Development and even intervention by the derided West can lead to very positive results (is Bosnia better off now or in 1994? How about India with all the evil globalization?).

I think this argument may reflect living in a part of the country, like Madison or among my family in Rochester, where Greens and Democrats battle for the mantle of the left. I, along with many Democrats, supported the Bosnian intervention before the government finally went in, as well as intervention in Afghanistan. If the latter has exposed one flaw in US policy, it is that we lose interest before finishing the job, and this does undercut the justification of war, which ends not when hostilities cease but when some measure of civil society is established. Unlike Iraq, which was predicted by many unheeded voices to be a disaster in the making before the war, Afghanistan was fundamentally a manageable conflict in which we had the support of virtually every major world power. Doing good through multilateral exercise of power is in no way an illiberal approach, and remains a valid theory of international relations. Obviously, I could never support another military action under Bush (or McCain) given that he has proven his inability to commit to the long-term steps necessary after a war, but that does not mean that at some point in the future, under competent leadership, that we don't have a role to play in conflicts like Darfur. The same goes for economic development as well: the problem is not globalization itself, but rather how it is managed.We are happy to sign all sorts of agreements, but unwilling to give up the domestic agricultural subsidies that are killing people in the third world, or to negotiate the conditions that will allow wealth to be spread more widely in the developing world. If people complain about the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, it is not necessarily because they are inherently evil, but rather that on a good day they do a half-assed job with many aspects of their policies. Admittedly, in this case there is a strong argument to be made that the perfect can be the enemy of the good, but one should remember that the entrenched interests that benefit from globalization aren't going to be the ones to point out the flaws they themselves built into the system.

As a final note, the left vs. right comparisons are telling. Noam Chomsky is by any standard in the far left-wing of American politics, whereas Condi Rice is considered a centrist Republican. Mother Jones is pretty far to the left (further away from the center than The Nation, The American Prospect, and the New Republic, which is so contrarian by nature that it serves as its own opposite in the political spectrum. The National Review, which is equally as crazy as MoJo, if not vastly more, is not so far to the right (that's the Weekly Standard's role). We are in a situation where we can now debate if the center-right is more deluded than the fringe left. Similarly, look at the craziness and outright racist and bigoted garbage one gets from perfectly acceptable right-wing pundits: Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan. Honestly, who amongst leading Democratic voices is anywhere near that crazy? We need not go off the deep end of the left, but it is important to remember that on a host of issues (Stop Teh Gayz; Down with Evilution; Cutting taxes while increasing spending is teh s#!t), we really are right and they really are wrong. There's just no polite way to say it.