"The death of 1989"

It's the not the return of the Cold War, not by a long shot. But the wave of democratization, market opening, and globalization that began at the end of 1970s is definitely over. It reached its peak in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet bloc, but continued until the end of the 1990s, with the fall of Milosevic in 2000. But the last eight years have seen a strong reversal of the trend, which goes to show: positive trends can draw on powerful forces, but positive outcomes are far from inevitable. They require sound policies, leadership, and persistence. They're not part of some automatic unfolding of history.*

There's no ideology or coherent political system that ties these resurgent anti-liberal countries together. They're simply autocracies that learned to adapt and avoid the fate of, say, the Soviet Union, Serbia, or Iraq. (What's happening now in Georgia is best thought of as a cousin of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s -- except the analogue of Serbia, Russia, is winning.) The most sophisticated of these autocracies have learned to smooth-talk their way with skillful twisting of Western concepts and language. Having nuclear weapons helps. But the main common factor among all of them is state monopoly control of increasingly valuable oil and natural gas resources. Already familiar from the corrupt petro-dictatorships of the Middle East, Venezuela, and west Africa, such countries feature the "strong state, weak society" model. The government frees itself from dependency on tax revenue by seizing control of valuable natural resources sold mainly to foreigners. Most other valuable economic activity is controlled by the state as well, not motivated by socialist ideologies, but by simple cronyism and gangsterism. The rest of society and economy go into sharp decline. Russia, in many respects, is the most advanced case of these trends.

We won't be hearing talk of "World War V," I hope. But the common denominator of energy monopoly in a world of sharply rising demand for energy will, I expect, stimulate energy-consuming countries to develop a common strategy to moderate demand and look for alternatives to fossil fuels exported from the petro-dictatorships. Such a strategy is certainly overdue. We also need to step back from our casually reckless adherence to the globalization paradigm and concentrate on repair and defense of existing democracies.

And one more point: the progress and retreat of political democratization, social and economic liberalization, and globalization go hand in hand, contrary to a certain piece of fashionable claptrap now making the rounds on the left.

POSTSCRIPT: Some fine reporting, as always, from Michael Totten. Also, thoughts from Paul Berman, who has rightly declared the "death of 1989."
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* The developments of the last decade have discredited not only the naive arguments of economic determinists (prosperity leads automatically to political liberalization), but the European post-historical fantasy of "soft power." The "end of history" has, well, ended. It didn't die all at once, but in stages: the rise of al Qa'eda and the 9/11 attacks, the return of Russia and China as great powers, the sharp rise in commodity prices, and so on.

Iraq, five years later

What people, including historians, in the future will think about the Iraq war is anyone's guess. The answer will depend in part on events that have not yet happened and things we cannot now know. But it has been more than five years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the operation seems to be coming to a conclusion. US troop levels will start dropping even before the election and drop faster afterwards.

The most important thing about the Iraq war is not how it started, but how it is ending, with the so-called "surge" that started late last summer - essentially, concentrating a large number of the best combat troops in and around Baghdad. It reflects classical counterinsurgency doctrine, with its origins in previous wars (El Salvador, Vietnam, Algeria, Philippines, etc.) only dimly remembered by most today, but carefully studied by the military. However, the "surge" only became a reality after the Republican defeat in the 2006 elections and Bush's relinquishing of operational control of the war. Instead, a civilian, Defense Secretary Gates, and a military officer, General Petraeus, were put in charge, with the civilian as the senior partner, the optimal approach. At the urging of the military and members of Congress (including McCain), Bush was forced to accept the policy, having nowhere else to go. His dogmatism and incompetence had left him in a deadend.

The surge has led to two large positive results: a sharp decline in violence and the decisive defeat of al Qa'eda in Iraq, reflective of its apparent larger disintegration. (See the articles by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic.) Al Qa'eda's mistake was the most obvious one that can be made by any guerrilla movement or insurgency, choosing or being forced to fight an organized professional army in the open. Contrary to widespread myth, no guerrilla movement alone has ever won a war, and such movements cannot survive a direct fight with an army.

But the US has also had a large bit of luck here. To be defeated, an insurgency has to lose its cover among the civilian population, while the civilian population has to feel that casting its lot with the counterinsurgency is the lesser risk. In 2004, 2005, and 2006, al Qa'eda seemed on the way to winning in Iraq, because they had cover among Iraq's suddenly powerless and angry Sunnis. But al Qa'eda made the fatal mistake of imposing its harsh version of Islam on those Sunnis, who then turned on them in 2007 and 2008. Al Qa'eda had nowhere to run. It's a scenario that has played out before in the Arab and Muslim worlds: a population attracted to a radical Islamic movement, only to be totally alienated by it. Al Qa'eda took the lives of about 50,000 of their fellow Muslims to prove this, again.*

All of which demonstrates a perennial truth about war: it often ends in a place far from where it started.

The price of the surge. Like any such sudden turnaround, the success of the surge has come at price. There's the large amount of cash (bribes, essentially) doled out to Sunni tribal chiefs to cement their shaky loyalty to the Baghdad government. The US is now following a policy of no interference in purely internal Iraqi conflicts, which means that such conflicts and the mix of corruption and violence surrounding them evolve in their own way, without American attempts to shape them, so long as they do not become connected with jihadis.

Those changes reflect a larger change in American policy, the de facto abandonment of the democratization strategy. This policy lies in tatters elsewhere in any case, by the very forces that the Bush policy never came to grips with: jihadis from Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; the persistence of powerful tribal-sectarian divisions in the Middle East; and the sharp rise in the price of oil, which provides these forces with more material resources.** Restoration of democratic sovereignty has failed in Lebanon, thanks to Syria and Iran. Where elections do occur, they fragment populations into religious and tribal shards and open the way for jihadist groups. These forces threaten the democratically elected governments currently in charge in both Baghdad and Kabul, which could not survive in their present form without the presence of Western (mainly American) troops.

Military transformation collides with nation building. By making do with the troops available, rather than vainly wishing for the much larger number needed for a traditional occupation and "nation-building" effort, the "surge" has reasserted a more conservative and realist conception of military force and succeeded in making lemonade from lemons.

But why the lemons to begin with? The immediate cause was the push for "military transformation" which began after the Cold War and entered a heightened phase under former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001. The essence of "military transformation" was to continue to shrink US troop levels, while improving their ability to fight hi-tech conventional wars against other states. The idea is to be ready to fight another army - as in Korea or World War II - but with the newest technology, moving the US forces even further in the direction of an agile, light force capable of defeating conventional enemies quickly, but even less able to act as an occupation and nation-building force. The quick defeat of the Iraqi army in the spring of 2003 demonstrated "military transformation" perfectly. It was a faster, cheaper, and less deadly version of the 1991 Gulf war.

But that was merely three or four weeks, of toppling Saddam, out of more than five years, of "now what?" The Rumsfeld doctrine of military transformation has been harshly criticized by both neocons and liberals as sacrificing "boots-on-the-ground" in favor of a shiny, hi-tech military future. Rumsfeld, like Colin Powell, was shaped by the Vietnam era and the rejection by American society in general, and the officer class in particular, of "nation building." Following this powerful prejudice of senior American military officers, its forces are prepared and equipped for wars only, in the narrow sense, like the 1991 war. The failure of preparation for a post-Saddam Iraq led to a spectacular collision of the military transformation doctrine with the reality of occupation and has put unprecedented strain on the American army.† Given that Rumsfeld was completely out of tune with what would be needed in Iraq, it's surprising he stayed as long as he did. He was originally opposed to the war and tried to resign at the end of 2003 and again in the spring of 2004. But Bush leaned hard to keep him from leaving. Here we get to another difficult puzzle, the strange effect of Bush's obsession with loyalty on the people around him.

The failure to foresee what post-Saddam Iraq would look like is at the heart of the depressing story told by the best books on the 2003-07 period. They include George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory, Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, Bing West's No True Glory, and Ali Allawi's The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Where a realistic guess of a post-Saddam Iraq should have been was a void, eventually filled by Bush and White House staff with wishful thinking of the neoconservative type.

The neoconservative failure. Fallacious neocon theories about democratization and the Middle East are the core of the failed Bush policy. Similar intelligence was available to both Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002 about Saddam's weapons programs and stockpiles. One difference in 2002 was, obviously, that the 9/11 attacks greatly raised the stakes. Bush determined to prevent future attacks, not just respond to them. But the injection of neocon theorizing also made a decisive difference, because it transformed a narrow debate about terrorism and unconventional weapons into a fuzzier and open-ended fantasy of regional and political transformation. This thinking could have been taken seriously by someone who thought that the Middle East as a whole and Iraq in particular were like eastern Europe or Latin America in the 1980s, or Germany and Japan in 1945. Only conservative and libertarian critics and skeptics strongly objected to this once-liberal, now-neocon "well-intentioned" and "fuzzy-minded" thinking. (See here, here, and here for George Will's corrosive skepticism and steely-eyed, classic foreign policy realism.) But such criticism had little influence: the Republican party, led by Bush, had rearranged itself to exclude precisely such objections. Centrists and liberals took the ideas for granted with no coherent answer to the neocon theories. The far left became consumed with its own kooky counterreality of "American empire" and "Bushitler."

In this verbal snapshot, Bing West described the state of Basra at the start of the invasion:

In March 2003, I accompanied the Marine battalion and British engineers who seized the pumping station just north of Basra that facilitated a multibillion-dollar flow of oil. The engineers were appalled to find open cesspools, rusted valves, sputtering turbines, and other vital equipment deteriorating into junk. Heaps of garbage lay outside the walls of nearby houses. Yet inside the courtyards, tiny patches of grass were as well tended as putting greens. That defined Iraq: a generation of tyrannical greed had taught Iraqis to look out for their own, to enrich their families, and to avoid any communal activity that attracted attention.

It's not the sort of thing that can be changed with the snap of the fingers. This is a larger failure of "intelligence" than just misjudging the scope of Saddam's WMD programs (which were real, if small) and the size of his stockpiles (which were non-existent).

The intelligence failure. The continued obsession with WMD distracts most people from seeing this truth. The fact is, if Saddam had had such weapons or a large weapons program, the long-term results of the Iraq occupation would not have differed except in details. Al Qa'eda would still have itched to turn Iraq into a showdown. The gross inadequacy of the number and type of troops deployed; the almost complete lack of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq; the radicalization of the Iraqi Sunnis, enraged by their loss of exclusive minority rule over Iraq - none of these would have been any different. The comprehensive failure of the Bush strategy for thinking beyond the first few weeks after the invasion and the apparent fantasy of the administration neocons - that Iraq would just snap into place as a functioning civil society - remain the grand mistakes of the Iraq war. After all, there were good reasons to think that, after ejecting weapons inspectors in August 1998, Saddam had restarted his weapons programs and produced some for use. He had used chemical weapons in the past.††

That's not to say that the intelligence failure isn't important. But its importance is not what Democratic politicians, having supported the war and now running for political cover, want you to believe. If the "Bush lied, people died" trope is a little too familiar as a cliché, consider the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report on the pre-war Iraq intelligence situation. It mostly confirms what everyone already knows, or should know: not just the CIA, but virtually all foreign intelligence services believed that Iraq had restarted of its advanced weapons programs. There is a very serious problem here, but it's not with "Bush lied" - there's no evidence that he did. In fact, Bush and the people around him fervently believed in what they were saying, and there lies the real failure: they believed too much and too well.

Midnight at the oasis. A long-running deficiency has plagued American intelligence in the Middle East since the late 1970s. We used to be able to collect our own Middle East intelligence, largely thanks to the relatively free country of Lebanon, the Arab world's previous and failed democratic experiment. When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975 and Western diplomats and spies there started being kidnapped in the early 1980s, that venue vanished, and the US began to rely on proxies for intelligence: first the Shah, who fell in 1979; then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.‡ This is not to let the Bushies off the hook - a failure of such long standing, including the failures that let to 9/11 - should have been dragged out front and center in 2002 for thorough scrutiny. The problem is that changing this dependency would require a complete overhaul of US alliances and, even harder, the policies and interests controlling our relationships with Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

If there is a specific thread that keeps popping up again and again in this history, it is the long-term degeneration and failure of the CIA. This failure is evident from the recent Senate report, the Kay report on Iraq's weapons programs, the 9/11 Commission report, and the CIA's repeated public misjudgments of the Middle East. The "work" (if it can be called that) of former CIA people gone public (Michael Scheuer, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson) makes it clear that the CIA's mindset is so far off base from what's needed that the agency is probably beyond saving. It should just be shut down: if "empty suit syndrome" means anything, the CIA is it.

This large and costly lesson about intelligence should never be forgotten: decisions of war and peace should be made only on public and obvious things. Intelligence has been used, both successfully and unsuccessfully, during wars. But decisions to step from peace to war, and from war to peace, should only be made on something more reliable than guesswork. It doesn't preclude military action in the future; it does preclude the doctrine of pre-emption, unless the threat is sitting on someone's lawn, so to speak. It means the end of the distinctive mix of mistaken neoconservative ideas that went into the Iraq war: connecting secular dictators with jihadi terrorists, "regime change" with poor prospects for functioning replacement governments, pre-emption based on intelligence trusted as more certain than it can ever be, the belief that Middle Eastern democratization improves American security in any but marginal and costly ways.

A moment of silence. It is far from the first time soldiers have died for the strategic mistakes of their leaders, far from the worst instance, and probably won't be the last. I know that's small consolation to those who lost relatives and friends in Iraq. The intervention does have positive achievements: the overthrow of a cruel dictator, and the crushing defeat and apparent dissolution of al Qa'eda outside its home territory.

But these have come at too high a cost and taken much too long. While falling apart elsewhere, al Qa'eda is regenerating on its home turf, the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Supposed allies like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia continue to play a thoroughly ambiguous game with radical Islamic groups in no way in keeping with Bush's famous "you're with us or you're against us." In the wake of the debacle of neoconservatism, the big strategic issues are again up for grabs. In our present hyperpartisan hysteria, there's little hope they will be addressed, at least while we live under the evil sway of the "permanent campaign."

POSTSCRIPT: Listen here for a podcast interview with Douglas Feith, about his book War and Decision, the Iraq war, and more. What Feith says and documents in his book, and also what he does not address, are as important as the books mentioned above.
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* The civil war in Algeria, which led to the same result, ran for a decade after 1992 and took the lives of over 150,000. The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990, although it's never really ended) killed between 50,000 and 100,000. Iraq's 2003-08 civil war falls into the same class.

** Of course, it also provides them with more to fight over as well.

† An army of half a million would have been necessary to implement a traditional occupation, rather than the 150,000 deployed. To sustain that over time, with normal troop rotations, would have required a larger base of 2.5 million. Even the larger Cold War military of the 1980s, about 1.6 million and double the size of the post-Cold War military, could not have done it. The American military has not had an army that size since the earlier stages of the Vietnam war, when there was a draft. While most combat troops in Vietnam were volunteers, contrary to myth, draftees did free up volunteers to serve in combat roles.

†† Actually, the evidence is that Saddam thought he restarted his programs and had stockpiles - the people running these programs were evidently doing something else, like stashing money in European bank accounts - and his chemical weapons program ended up in Syria. It's not clear how much Saddam knew about his own regime. That's what dictatorships are like in their final stages. Think of the drug-addled Hitler in his bunker in the spring of 1945.

‡ Not accidentally, every president since Carter has had a misintelligence/misadvice-enabled Middle East folly. Carter had the fall of the Shah, the assassination of Sadat after the Camp David treaty, and the first US security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms. Reagan had the Marines in Lebanon and the Iran part of the Iran-Contra affair. Bush Sr. had American troops in Saudi Arabia for the long term. Clinton had the Oslo process and not taking al Qae'da seriously (except briefly). Bush Jr. had not taking al Qae'da seriously (at first) and the Iraq war. The list of failures over thirty years is long and striking.

From the frat house to the White House

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: For a different take on these books, harder on McClellan and more attentive to Feith, see this by Christopher Hitchens.

He is right about one thing: on substantive policy, Feith's book is much more important than McClellan's. The Feith memoir is massively well documented, including embarrassing tidbits from people once in favor of the Iraq war and now opposed to it - and a document-rich web site too.

But I can't help feeling that Hitch has missed something important, about how everyone outside the White House (including the neocons themselves) has been manipulated and jerked around by the "permanent campaign." Even now, some of them are still not awake.
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As the Bush presidency mercifully enters its final months, it's time to take stock and make some preliminary evaluation of a wrenching period in American politics. No one can know now what future historians will think of Bush. If they're not all not liberal Democrats and warped by the hysterical hyperpartisanship of our era (itself worth a long look from future historians), Bush Jr. will probably be seen as "Nixon lite" - not as consequentially bad as Nixon, but still bad enough. His foreign policy adds up to a very mixed bag; his domestic policy, to simply and gratuitously awful.

The fire has been stoked by the publication this week of Scott McClellan's new, would-be tell-all memoir of his role as White House press secretary, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. The Bush people are of course harsh in their criticism of McClellan and his tale of manipulation and disillusionment. But pillars of establishment liberal journalism, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Republic, are also piling on McClellan for simply being opportunistic and weakly rehashing themes heard many times before. They have weighty arguments on their side. There's not a lot in McClellan's memoir that's truly new, and he raises issues (like the Wilson-Plame affair) that are now definitively settled.*

But, as Peggy Noonan says, McClellan still needs to be listened to. His book does fill in a lot more about the mentality of the Bush administration. Even this isn't completely new: Paul O'Neill's 2004 memoir, The Price of Loyalty, written by Ron Suskind, presented the themes back when they were new and still had the power to shock. They include Bush and his aides' obsession with personal and partisan loyalty, Cheney's 35-year fixation with secrecy and executive privilege (stemming from the Nixon era), the mutual passivity of Bush and the Congressional Republicans, and the noxious results of the Republicans and Bush's style of "permanent campaigning."

If elected, I promise to ... get re-elected. Traditionally, politicians campaign and get elected in order to govern and set policy. Voters still expect that, bless their hearts. But American politics, since the early 90s, has been moving in a different direction: governing for the sake of campaigning and getting re-elected, not vice versa. This style was part of the reason for the lack of substantive results from the so-called Republican revolution of 1994. Although they did get Clinton to accept welfare reform (a stunning success, by the way) and even managed, incredibly, to phase out agricultural subsidies for a couple years, their fear of being voted out eventually overcame their original goals. By the late 90s, spending discipline broke down. Then with a Republican president unwilling to act as a check on a Republican Congress, things really started to get out of control. Even shockers like the McCain-Feingold bill, Leave No Child's Behind, Sarbox, and Medicare Part D got through - and got Bush's signature.

Such is Bush's obsession with loyalty. The outsized role of Karl Rove, Bush's campaign strategist, in shaping policy was a prime indicator of where American political culture is today. Even the Iraq war was, in part, packaged as re-election extravaganza. McClellan should have subtitled his book, "Washington's culture of permanent campaigning."

With perfect faith. But the Bush fraternity house culture isn't the whole story. Running through the Bush presidency is a bright streak of the "true believer" mentality, no more strikingly and tragically obvious than with Bush's fixation on Iraq. After languishing at the margins of the administration for its first nine months, administration neoconservatives found an opportunity to inject their misguided theorizing about the Middle East into the administration's response to the 9/11 attacks. Bush did not run or win on such issues in 2000. Before the 9/11 attacks, the neocons and the increasingly populist conservative media outlets were agitated, if anything, by China.** But in looking for a larger and more ambitious response to those and earlier al Qa'eda attacks, the administration, instead of focusing on the theocratic and jihadist element of Middle East politics rooted in Saudi Arabia and Iran, zeroed in on the unfinished business of Iraq. Defeated in the 1991 Gulf War and subject to containment and sanctions afterwards, Iraq posed no obvious threat to anyone.† But Saddam did expel UN weapons inspectors in 1998 and acted in a way that strongly suggested he had restarted his advanced weapons program.

To this uncertain if understandable motive (understandable after 9/11) was added something much loopier, the strategic fantasy of neoconservative theorists, making the Middle East democratic. Since the Iraq war started in March 2003, many have criticized the Bush administration for supposedly hiding this, its larger strategic motive. But the critics are wrong: Bush did mention it, in a number of major speeches, before the actual invasion of Iraq. In the media hysteria surrounding the weapons inspections, the issue was never properly framed and probed. Instead, its legitimacy and feasibility were mostly taken for granted, if anyone really thought about it at all. The neocon failure to understand the Middle East is most glaring here. If some fraction of the weapons hysteria had been focused instead on this point and the related issue of what to do with Iraq after invading it, the war either might not have happened or happened very differently.

That is why, for all the bruhaha surrounding McClellan's book, the other recent book about the Iraq war, that of Douglas Feith, one of its main architects, deserves more attention and response. Unfortunately, the establishment liberal media won't get off its high horse and actually review it: it's been embargoed apparently. It's critically important, because one of the most extraordinary things about the Bush presidency is the crossing of wires between two very distinct political forces, the obsessed-with-loyalty, frat-boy culture of Bush and Rove and the strategic theorizing of the neocons. Bush's weakness for "road to Damascus" conversion experiences seems to be a starting point. But we really need to understand it. Frat house, revival tent, and the neoconservative academy all collided in Bush's first term. The Iraq war was the result.

Once more into the breach. McClellan is not looking at the Bush frat house culture from the outside, of course. He's a disillusioned frat brother himself. For an outsider's look at the Bush White House, one should consider the best book on the Bush presidency to appear so far, Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy. Weisberg uses an analogy (not original with him) of Bush Jr. and Prince Harry as portrayed in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2. After the riotous and misspent youth depicted in the earlier play, Harry undergoes a dramatic change. The later Henry V portrays a serious, transformed, and deeply religious Harry as king, determined to reclaim the French throne, reviving the Hundred Years War between England and France that his father had put on hold.

Weisberg's analogy is strained in places, but it's still a striking parallel, especially the Oedipal angle. In Bush's case, it helps to understand why the rest of Bush's foreign policy has been more conventional: when it comes to foreign trade, Yugoslavia, North Korea, or any other foreign issue you care to name, it's hard to find such distorted and delusional thinking in the Bush policies. In the genesis and first few years of the Iraq war, we're getting to the heart of something unusual in democratic politics, an intense bout of blind belief. For Bush, the neoconservative theories became objects, not of thought, but faith.

The American weakness for moralistic crusades. Such episodes are not new in American politics: its soul is still that of a Protestant church. In the Civil War, we had a president who had mastered these forces to the point where he was not dominated by them, even as they animated millions of Americans in the crusade to crush the South. The disillusioned generation that fought World War One is better case for us today to look to. In the last extended presidential episode of blind belief, Woodrow Wilson the crusader rallied Americans to launch "making the world safe for democracy." With cooler heads and more detached eyes, he and his aides might have steered the peace in the direction of successful new alliances to rebuild Europe and contain Germany. Instead, Wilson overpersonalized the issues, thought of himself as a messianic figure, and failed to give Americans a stake in the long-term success of his policy. As a result, Americans became jaded in the 1920s and, later in the 1930s, turned xenophobic. It took another, much larger, war to resolve what remained unresolved.

Worst president ever? Wars of choice are especially dangerous for any political leader. Wars of necessity, even though they also provoke dissent, tend to focus the mind and keep people from drifting off into strange ideas. In American history, these include the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War II, and the Korean and Afghan Wars. Wars of choice include the Mexican war, the Spanish-American war, World War I, and the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The latter form a very mixed bag: brilliantly successful (Mexican war), success-almost-disaster-success (Spanish-American war, including its Philippine sequel), ambiguous success with ultimately very bad consequences (World War I), and just plain bad (Vietnam and Iraq).

Given this list, it's hard to justify to condemning Bush as the worst president in American history. Nonetheless, my guess is that Bush will end up on the short list of the worst ten, and not just because of the Iraq war. There is also the mistaken domestic policy change, into new, large, and gratuitous spending commitments and regulations that have undone the healthier evolution American politics had been following in the 80s and 90s.††

Pace the neocons, Bush is not Truman. The 9/11 attacks were handed to Bush, as the Korean war was handed to Truman. But the Iraq war was a war of choice, dubious in conception and profoundly botched in execution. Personal character is the real difference: while reasonably intelligent, Bush is lazy and dogmatic, hyperactive yet strangely passive, insecure and uncertain about taking responsibility for anything. Thankfully, his character flaws are not in Nixon territory; he lacks Nixon's paranoia and cynicism.

But Bush, in spite of his attempt to fashion a populist self-image, is not a hayseed, ordinary folks, or even a cowboy. He's the dried-out, eldest son of wealthy parents, a rich kid - not a self-taught and self-made, essentially 19th century, figure like Truman. Even if his bank accounts have done well, Bush is a spiritual slacker, a downwardly mobile figure of the Baby Boom, who reinvented himself as a populist chieftan, sounding on good days like a cartoon superhero in his own comic book. Looking to the future, we must, if nothing else, avoid electing as presidents half-formed politicians who wrestle with serious personal and political deficiencies while they occupy the world's most powerful office.
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* Unfortunately, there are still people in the media still trying to flog this dead horse, holding out for some substantive role by "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney, or Karl Rove in the outing of Plame. We've known for a year that it was Richard Armitage of the State Department who did that, probably inadvertently. As for Joe Wilson, he outed himself. There's really nothing left to this story. But its continued life shows how much of our "news" now consists of manufactured pseudo-events and pseudo-scandals, salacious pseudo-crimes parlayed into lucrative book contracts. Counterfactual "reporting" - even contradicting what the news media itself reported last year - is now the norm on this, like so many other, non-stories.

Such is the biased and incorrigible stupidity of America's media culture.

** A few prescient exceptions apart, like Steve Emerson, Michael Ledeen, and Daniel Pipes. And then there was Gary Condit - remember him from those hot, dry summer days just before 9/11?

† So much so that, after 1991, Israel's main security focus became Iran, quite rightly. Apparently, no one told Wolfowitz or Feith.

Another important question about the Bush presidency is, why did people with previously reasonable public careers (Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, even Cheney) behave as strangely as they did under Bush? The 9/11 attacks clearly had something to do with it, but they're not the whole story.

†† Someday, once the partisan hysteria dies down, people will view the 80s and 90s correctly, from Carter's last year through the last year of Clinton's second term, as a single political era. Between 1998 and 2001, something changed.

Afghanistan, bin Laden, and all that

A mindworm has returned, one familiar from 2001 and 2002. Inspired by the book and recent movie, Charlie Wilson's War, and Pakistan's troubles, the worm says something like this: in the 80s, "the US supported bin Laden," or "bin Laden supported the US," or the 1980s anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan is somehow responsible for al Qa'eda. None of this is true. Those events and forces do have significance today, most of it not foreseen back then. But the Afghan anti-Soviet war (1978-1989) helped to delay the rise of al Qa'eda and Sunni radicalism directed at the US, rather than accelerate it. And Sunni radicalism needed certain prerequisites - the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988), the end of the Cold War (1990), American troops stationed in the heart of the Muslim world (Arabia, 1990-2003), the rise of Arabic satellite television (after 1994) - that didn't start falling into place until the end of the 80s.

Few people in the Western world in the 1960s and 70s foresaw the rise of radical Islam. Superficially, at least, the Middle East was dominated by ideologies familiar in a Western context: nationalism, and various types of socialism. Not understanding that the Middle East is really a distinct civilization with a history very different from the West or Asia, most pundits and experts projected the future as more of the same. Most people unthinkingly believed in an automatic secularization, modernization, and so on. The Middle East was mentally lumped into an artificial construct, the "Third World," made up of non-white peoples either patronized as "noble savages" or feared as simply "savages."

The Islamic revival of the late 1970s came as a shock to the West, the communist bloc, and Westernized elites in the Middle East. Several events marked turning points and milestones in the return of political Islam. The failure of modernization and the Arab defeats in 1967 and 1973 helped to discredit secular regimes. At the same time, Saudi Arabia's successful orchestrating of the 1973-74 oil embargo - taking the industrialized world's economy hostage, in effect - marked a power shift away from secular governments like Egypt's and Syria's, once the centers of the Arab world. The Saudis already enjoyed a unique prestige from their position as keepers of the Muslim holy cities (Mecca and Medina) and as the strictest Muslims. There and elsewhere in the Middle East, Muslim radicals began to argue that Islamic purism was an authentic identity Muslims should return to and reject alien imports like nationalism, secularism, and socialism. The 1977 and 1979 hostage crises, one in Washington DC, the other in Mecca, were both carried out by Sunni radicals enraged by the gap between the Saudi regime's purist rhetoric and its modernizing, semi-cosmopolitan, and often corrupt reality. These marked the first of what would, later in the 1990s, become a familiar stream of events. At the same time, a double opposition to the Shah's regime of autocratic modernization in Shi'ite Iran put the region's secular autocrats on notice. Most Western observers expected the liberal, secular opposition to win and were stunned when the 1979 Iranian revolution turned Islamic.

In those days, everyone in the West viewed the Cold War as far more important and failed to take Islamic radicalism seriously. The war between North and South Vietnam had just ended (in 1975) with a communist victory. Only in the Iranian case was Islamic revolutionary politics viewed as genuine and threatening: by the US, because of the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-81),* and by the conservative Gulf monarchies, who rule over significant Shi'ite populations and live next door to Iran. In fact, the Gulf governments were thrown into a panic, one that led them in 1980 to prod Iraq into launching the Iran-Iraq war.** Few could see how Muslims from the ultra-conservative Gulf states would experience a growing and intolerable tension between the supposed purity of Islam in Arabia (its home) and the reality of the Gulf kingdoms, then being showered in oil wealth.

The 1978 communist coup in and December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought this budding Sunni radicalism to a stop, or rather temporarily transformed and redirected it. Suddenly the region was under a genuine threat, not from the US, but from the Soviets. After the 1978 coup, the US began to support Afghan groups directly. The most important was the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik and not a member of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. The US continued to support Massoud, but later in the 80s, found itself shut out of the more important channels for helping the Afghans, controlled by Pakistan and its military intelligence service (the ISI). (This is the part where Charlie Wilson came in.) The US, which has always had a rocky relationship with Pakistan, upgraded its ties and kept them there until 1990, when they were downgraded again, because of Pakistan's nuclear program.

Here truly a devil's bargain was made, but it has nothing to do with the Afghans. (No Afghan has been involved in terrorist attacks on the US.) The problem is Pakistan and the later involvement of Saudi religious institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which began after the anti-Soviet war was over, in the 1990s. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89, the US made a terrible (if familiar) mistake of just walking away from Afghanistan. It entered into a vicious, three-way civil war pitting against each other the remains of the pro-Soviet regime, Massoud's forces and allies, and radical Islamic groups sponsored by Pakistan. From the Saudi seeds and Pakistan's continued attempts to take over Afghanistan sprang the Taliban, whose core were madrassa (religious school) students determined to turn Afghanistan into an Islamic utopia.† After coalescing in 1994 and obtaining widespread popular support for bringing the civil war to an end, the Taliban (with massive Pakistani aid) took over most of the country by 1996. Popular support evaporated, once Afghans got to see the Islamic utopia close up (as in The Kite Runner), but by that point, popular Afghan sentiment meant little. Poor and isolated, Afghanistan had been unwillingly and unwittingly turned into a "jihad theme park," with Islamic radicals implementing the vision they could not in their home countries.

As for the rest of the myth, it's almost all fabricated, largely in retrospect by al Qa'eda, its supporters, and credulous Western journalists. The "Afghan Arabs" who supposedly fought against the Soviets actually did no fighting, confining their support of the Afghans to monetary donations. The religious motives for Sunni radicalism are rooted in Arabia, the home of Islam, and fundamentally result from the large contradiction between its dominant Wahhabi (Salafi) type of Islam and the materially modern life made possible by all that oil wealth. Pakistan, an artificial country lacking a national identity, finds promoting Islamic radicalism an almost irresistible temptation. It's a practical good as well, since it helps the ISI run an insurgency next door in the Indian province of Kashmir (claimed by Pakistan) and promote Pakistani control of Afghanistan, its geographic "rear," through the dominant Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghani border. To come full circle, when the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, its local allies were made up of - you guessed it - the same Northern Alliance we started supporting in 1978, but then abandoned in 1989. Massoud had visited the US in the summer of 2001 to warn Americans about the Taliban and its al Qa'eda allies. After his return to Afghanistan, he was assassinated, two days before the 9/11 attacks, by an al Qa'eda suicide bomber posing as a journalist. The Taliban and al Qa'eda guessed correctly that their upcoming attacks on the US would lead to a US invasion. Killing Massoud, in advance, deprived the US of an important local ally, one we had supported in the past.

The radical Islamic project remains today, among Sunnis, a violent cult inspired and funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and largely hosted by Pakistan. That these are supposedly American "allies" just adds what history will view as a cruel twist. From this perspective, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are, not diversions, but sideshows, chasing around and killing or capturing terrorists whose beliefs and activities are the result of the policies and religious proclivities of countries we dare not touch. A year-and-a-half after invading Afghanistan to overthrow a government made possible and supported by Pakistan, we failed to logically take the struggle home to the countries that hatched the crisis and instead invaded Iraq.

There are some important lessons here, but they have little do with lachrymose theories of "blowback" and other "radical" claptrap.†† The most important is the damaging American habit of walking away from a foreign involvement after a period of intense engagement, abandoning hard-won friends in the process. The US has always had, and probably will always have, a strong isolationist streak, reinforced by our attention-challenged media and short election cycles. But foreign policy is not about one-night stands and can't be built on dubious "allies" and so-called "friends." And the other lessons are familiar to readers of this blog: the sinister roles played by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the rise of radical Sunni Islam and our strange relationship with Saudi Arabia. Even an enormity like the 9/11 attacks was not enough to shake that relationship, in the end. Our descendants will stare at this fact in wonder.

POSTSCRIPT: There's another angle to Afghanistan, besides the fact that its security problems are all baked next door in Pakistan. We've heard over and over in the last few years how much the US needs to be multilateral and follow the NATO model of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and not the Iraq model of largely unilateral action. But there's trouble on the horizon for NATO. It's an organization that was founded to cope with the Cold War, which it did, with great success. But in the 1990s, it was pressed into service in new ways not part of its original mandate and which are now proving more difficult, costly, and unpopular than originally anticipated. Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, supposedly models of multilateralism, may instead prove its graveyard. US military action in the future will probably look a lot more like Iraq than people think.

Another important development that our wonderfully unbiased and objective news media are all over - right?
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* Notice how often the word "hostage" comes up in this posting.

** Here's a place to lay to rest another myth, that the US supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. While the US did quietly grant security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms, it was officially neutral in the conflict ("it's too bad both sides can't lose," was Kissinger's famous quip). It was the Gulf kingdoms themselves that directly supported Iraq with money. Using that and his own oil money, Saddam bought weapons mainly from the Soviets and, to a smaller extent, from France. (The French had their own reasons to back Iraq against the Iranian revolutionary mullahs.) Iraq didn't fight Iran with American weapons, but with Soviet ones: AK-47s, not M-16s; T-55s and T-62s, not M1s; MiGs, not F-16s. But the price of oil collapsed in the later 1980s, and Saddam's income dried up. Unable to pay off his loans from the Gulf states, he invaded one of them and threatened to invade the others.

† In Farsi (Persian) and related languages, taliban just means "students."

†† As for "blowback," the ultimate in tragic backfiring is the death of Benazir Bhutto. It was during her terms as Pakistani prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96) that the ISI turned into a dedicated machine for promoting radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself. And of course, it is just those groups who were responsible for her assassination.

Again, these developments started after the end of the anti-Soviet war. Only once Pakistan was no longer an object of superpower interest did it unabashedly and recklessly go full-time into the Islamo-radicalism business, picking up the thread dropped in 1980.

The end of Europe? II

And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people: ".... The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated, and no tall tree will be able to grow in it .... I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves .... Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, [the one] no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the Last Man.

" 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the Last Man, and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small .... 'We have invented happiness,' say the Last Men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth .... Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them .... A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison, now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death .... One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion ....

"No shepherd and one herd! Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same: whoever feels differently goes voluntarily to the madhouse. 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink."

- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue (1882)

If Berlinski's is the most perceptive and charming of the recent books on Europe, Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It is surely the most blunt and original, and of all of them, the most unapologetically conservative. In spite of its title, the book is really about the apparently unstoppable decline of Europe, as reflected by its mix of overburdened economies, inability to defend itself, dicey demographics, unsustainable welfare states, and rapidly growing Muslim populations.

It is also a devastating and almost-irrefutable book, cutting through layers and layers of accumulated conventional wisdom and poisoned junk-food residue left behind by the media. It challenges everyone: realists - Steyn dismisses them as obsolete in a shrinking world; liberals - they're largely unwilling to defend their own liberalism; even neocons - can the Islamic world be reformed - really? In Steyn's view, the real problem is not the Muslims of the Middle East, but Eurabia, the alienated and anti-assimilating Muslims of Europe. America Alone is mainly a book about Europe, and only secondarily about America. The United States simply emerges as an historically normal nation-state, Europe as a doomed post-historical project. Steyn's point on this score: the US doesn't need to join the "rest of the world"; it's Europe that needs to rejoin history. It has a generation left, at most. Otherwise, save your dollars and get over there now to have a look-see: Europe is entering its museum closing time.

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The book's style does sometimes veer into Steyn's newspaper column banter. But it has several intertwined broad themes that control its arguments, and Steyn has obviously given them considerable thought. They encompass the post-1945 evolution of Western governments away from "primary" responsibilities (maintaining internal peace and order, self-defense) toward ever-more expansive "secondary" ambitions (refashioning society, labeling everyone a victim and making them objects of solicitude). From this trend arise the relentless expansion and simultaneous unsustainability of the social democratic welfare state - economically, demographically, and politically. At its heart, modern government's "secondary" impulses rest on an incorrigible tendency by elites to treat everyone else as helpless children.

In Europe, another development is being scribbled over top of the first: the basic conflict between Islam as a political project, on the one hand, and the nation-state system and liberal democracy, on the other. ("Terrorism" and the "war on terror" are merely the violent symptoms of this contradiction.) That makes the emerging conflict different in nature there from here: we view it as a foreign war - in Europe, it's headed towards expression as a civil war - not so different from the streets of Gaza or Baghdad. Finally, we have the confusion and fatuity of many liberal and leftist politicians and thinkers when confronted with these unpleasant facts. Steyn is put into the peculiar position many conservatives find themselves in these days, of defending a liberal political system that liberals themselves helped to build, yet are often unwilling to defend. So conservatives do the job that liberals won't, and conservatives end up in a strange position when they do so. That fact alone explains more about the rise of "neoconservatism" (which is really no more than a kind of "right-wing liberalism") than any number of conspiracy theories.

Steyn deftly grasps the self-destructive dynamic here and wonders if Europe can escape the end result: the dynamic of self-hatred, a manifestation of the self divided against itself. For Euro-Muslims, the divided self is a result of a double alienation, both from traditional Muslim society and from post-modern, post-religious Europe. Islamic culture (especially its Arabic core) is markedly underdeveloped in its capacity for self-examination and self-criticism. The resulting self-hatred is projected outward on to the supposed causes, the West and the allied corrupt Muslim governments. For Western post-Christian leftists (and their self-hating post-Jewish allies), self-examination and self-criticism are hypertrophied; the result is self-hatred projected inward, with typical symptoms: a paralysis of self-interested action and rational thought, the invention and invocation of fantasies ("noble savage," "social justice," etc.), and an inability to defend oneself. In Europe (not as much here), the fully-developed symbiosis draws white Europeans and alienated Euro-Muslims into an intertwining of hatred and self-hatred. The suicidal meet the homicidal.

The radical Islamic project has little traction here - it's Europe where the terror cells are being hatched and the political future is in serious doubt. The attempt to buy off the Euro-Muslims with welfare has only produced a generation of lazy, undisciplined resident aliens with no future in European society, but plenty of free time to watch al-Jazeera and think about how much they hate the infidel West. The other pole of this negative dialectic is represented by the European leaders who lack the confidence to defend themselves and their societies. America has far few Muslims to begin with, and they're better educated and integrated into American society. But there's a flip side to this, as Steyn points out: it's because Americans are comfortable with their "liberal" system (including religious freedom) and willing to defend it, that they also have no difficulty expecting immigrants to adapt themselves to it. For the most part, Europeans lack this confidence, and the result is something very different from here: a large, growing population of alienated Muslims who are neither here nor there, doubly alienated, perfect candidates for radicalization. The origins of the European lack of self-confidence are many. But note the fact that traditional national identities in Europe are being euthanized by the Euro-elites. The intended replacement is a weak EU-identity that many Europeans have difficulty taking seriously and which most Euro-Muslims don't identify with at all. The real difference between the US and Europe is not the religion the media and talking heads keep chattering about; it's that the US has a strong secular, national identity and Europe does not. Europe has not only put its religious identity to sleep; it's even putting to sleep the national identities that, a century or two ago, were supposed to replace religion.

In the long run, it might turn out that the 9/11 attacks will prove to be a turning point in European, not American, history. The attacks were planned by Euro-Muslims, not American Muslims. And their successor attacks have mostly happened in Europe. It is the epicenter of the emergent conflict.

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Although America Alone -is- a book, not a collection of newspaper columns, it's still studded with the witticisms and zingers we have come to expect from Steyn and that never fail to hit their targets:

• "In the social democratic welfare state, you don't have kids - you are the kid."
• "There are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam."
• "Europe is ahead of America, mainly in the sense that its canoe is already halfway over the falls."
• "The EU is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem ... a quarter-century past its sell-by date."
• "Europe's Muslim immigrants are the children Europe couldn't be bothered to have."
• "[Daniel] Pearl's beheading was the story ... for the jihadis, Pearl [as a reporter] wasn't needed to tell some other story."
• "The non-imperial hyperpower [the US] does not garrison remote ramshackle outposts, but its most wealthy allies, freeing them from having to defend themselves .... Defense welfare is like any other form of welfare."
• "Fighting a war is not a lawsuit, its victims are not plaintiffs ...."
• "As they said of the British at Singapore [in 1942], at least four of those five guns [military, economic, diplomatic, informational] are pointing in the wrong direction."
• "[Multiculturalism] is a kind of societal Stockholm syndrome .... It doesn't involve actually knowing anything about other cultures ... It just involves making everyone feel warm and fluffy inside, making bliss out of ignorance."
• "There are three outcomes to the present struggle: surrender, destroy Islam, reform Islam. We can lose."

Bush is conspicuous by his relative absence, probably because Steyn wants to communicate the fundamental conflict and trends, and they have nothing to do with Bush. Like most conservatives, he's also probably gone through multiple stages of Bush disillusionment, and Steyn aims some bitter barbs in his direction: too wimpy, too indolent, too PC, too tolerant of the Saudis and their system of radical schools, too ready to promote big guvmint and overlook its failures.

Steyn's list of possible conflict outcomes is not exhaustive, as many conservative critics point out. But given that the world is getting smaller and smaller, and given the fact that virtually no Muslim country fits liberal-internationalist criteria as "normal," our options, both liberal-internationalist and conservative-realist, are running out.

The larger melancholy of Steyn's book, clear only in the last couple chapters, is the profoundly unhealthy relationship that has developed between the US and the rest of the developed world since 1945, and especially since the end of the Cold War. This is a world deeply dependent on the US for its military protection; its foreign policy; our demand on world markets for their exports; our ability to absorb the world's savings as investment capital into an economy that is stable, non-corrupt, and growing healthily (a combination that occurs almost nowhere else); our role as an escape for the ambitious and talented stymied in their home countries by oppressive dictatorships and stifling welfare states; a place that develops their medicines, because we still have a semi-free medical system - and so on. America far outspends the rest of the developed world in things military, but that is only because the rest of the developed world has abandoned the ability to defend itself or contribute to a common defense. Given American responsibilities, we arguably don't spend enough; what is definitely true is that they don't spend enough. They have become dependencies, not allies. This is what Steyn means by "America alone": the rest of modern civilization is in not-so-good shape. One of the reasons is a potent source of anti-Americanism: the existence of America - the idea of America - is profoundly disturbing to most of the world's elites who are always doing their best to control, if not outright shake down, the countries they rule. These countries still suffer from the very thing that led to the world wars and the near-destruction of civilization in Europe and Asia: modern economic systems functioning in the heart of (at best) semi-modern social and political systems that can't handle modernistic dynamism.

Steyn's scary vision of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa sliding into a new Dark Ages may be too negative. It's certainly only one possible future. But it is a real possibility, and it needs to be taken seriously.

POSTSCRIPT: Steyn has a Web site and a solid presence in the newspaper world, being one of the best and best-known conservative commentators. (Read his famous interview with Monica's dress.) Listen to podcasts with Steyn here, here, and here; and read a recent talk he gave at Hillsdale College.

More on resurgent conspiracism

PRE-POSTSCIPT: Follow the saga of the Saudi-sponsored school in northern Virginia by starting here. The Washington Post, normally sensible on such questions, has inexplicably gotten lost on this one. They ask, what about parochial schools? Indeed: what if Catholic schools didn't just teach Catholic doctrine, but advocated religious war against Protestants or forcible conversion of Jews? Or if Protestant schools taught that Catholics should lose all of their civil and political rights?
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First, a follow-up to the earlier posting on Walt and Mearsheimer's book, which reviewers have mostly panned. What's amazing is that the book fails to even mention the Saudi lobby or the effect of oil money in buying influence in Washington. Having now looked at the book myself, I also cannot believe how much it uses recycled mythology about Israel and its supporters pushing for the Iraq war. Walt and Mearsheimer themselves register these facts in their book, but it strangely leaves their argument unchanged, showing how disconnected from reality they are (and from Israel's real concern, Iran). Clearly, they're in the obsessive "Jews-on-the-brain" zone, à la Pat Buchanan. Whether you want to call that "antisemitism" is a fine semantic point up to you.

Remember: the 9/11 and other al Qaeda attacks - from 1990's assassination of Rabbi Kahane in New York City through the two attacks on the WTC, and on down the list, including the present mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq - could and would not have happened without Saudi money, Saudi pressure for accelerated normalization of travel and visa requirements, and Saudi wacko ideology. Saudi Arabia is the cause of those attacks in two senses, for you Aristotelians out there: "first" cause (the basic driving ideology) and "efficient" cause (enabling the means).

For a book to seriously discuss these effects without mentioning their cause is a farce.

A book-length counter to the myth-spinning of Walt and Mearsheimer is Abe Foxman's new book, The Deadliest Lies. (Foxman is the head of the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith.) The ADL is a problematic organization and routinely misses the mark in their strategy by not understanding the real purposes of antisemitism, wrongly thinking that it's fundamentally about the Jews. (The ADL's serious flaws are a topic for another day.) Nonetheless, the book is on target with its analysis of the archetypical antisemitic fantasy: secret cabals, the secret cause of wars and financial panics, etc. The patterns of Walt and Mearsheimer's book and its cruder cousins are striking and, to any student of classical antisemitic theorizing, very familiar. Yale University's Charles Hill blurbs Foxman's book this way: "Conspiracy theories are a measure of a society’s mental health; when on the rise, trouble lies ahead. In The Deadliest Lies, Abraham Foxman diagnoses the ‘Israel Lobby’ conspiracy theory and reveals how sick it is." Even in the 1930s, people had a vague sense of conspiracism as a mental disorder, but we're more sharply aware of this now and have fewer excuses for tolerating it.

Finally, the new issue of Foreign Affairs contains an important review by Walter Russell Mead. He points to one of the realities that Walt and Mearsheimer keep colliding with but never understand: the ways in which foreign policy elites intersect with broad democratic norms and the assumption, natural to American political culture, that broad democratic norms should influence foreign policy - an concept alien in most other countries, even other democracies. And Mead perceptively identifies the way in which Walt and Mearsheimer use classical antisemitic tactics, including the attempt to put American Jews in a bind over criticizing their book - so they can appear outraged that American Jews should be provoked by what is so clearly intended as a provocation. As Mead says, Jimmy Carter is the past master of this tactic, but Walt and Mearsheimer give Carter stiff competition.

But Mead also lets his fellow academics off the hook too easily, in my view. It's hard to believe they're unaware that most American Jews voted against Bush both times and that most American Jews (and most American Jewish organizations) were neutral on or opposed to the Iraq war. The recycling of discredited mythology is only superficially about pseudo-facts; such myth-spinning always serves some other and normally unstated purpose. And while they might be naive about American politics, they are not naive about the Middle East. Like many so-called experts, they hide much of what they really know, even from themselves, and peddle oil-realism as a higher morality. Walt and Mearsheimer cannot not know the truth about the Middle East, its oil regimes, Islam, etc. They also cannot not know the truth about the Arabs of Palestine, an important topic to consider next.

POSTSCRIPT: Regional cooperation in the Middle East is possible, once you get outside the context of the UN and spectacles like the ridiculous Ahmadinejad. Israel and Oman just marked 10 years of cooperation on regional water conservation.

Year-end round-up and a merry ...

Random thoughts on the year's best books and movies ....

* Lawrence Wright's The Looming Towers: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is the best narrative history of the 9/11 attacks so far. It's tightly focused on the primary actors and shows you through personal vignettes how the attackers succeeded and how the defenders failed. For more background, see this posting. C-SPAN's BookTV interviewed Wright recently.

* The year's best political book is Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. We're living through an era of rapid geopolitical change, and unfortunately, our political elites mostly spent the post-Cold War period asleep, misunderstanding, or lost in absurd partisan follies. Steyn's book will get you thinking, get you infuriated, get you to agree or disagree - but most of all, it will get you to wake up, open your eyes, and pay attention. As a bonus, it features Steyn's trademark zany humor and wordplay. He's shamelessly promoting it over on his Web site (greedy bastards, these conservatives :).

In connection with the theme, consider Niall Ferguson's much larger tome, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West and this related posting.

* Another Big Book is Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation, released in paper this year, and the best one-volume history in a long time. It focuses mainly on the religious and social aspects of the Reformation, but also lays into the relief the unintended consequences: the simultaneous growth of religious freedom and oppression, the separation of religious authority and civil government, the divergent histories of western and central-eastern Europe, the rise of skepticism and the Enlightenment, and the rise of the nation-state. Useful for understanding the modern Western political system and to compare with the many-centuries decline of the Muslim world. (Don't let all that oil $$ fool you!) A tale both interesting in its own right and highly relevant to our current mess.

* For popular science, I've beaten the subject of string theory and its failure to death, but remember Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics.

On a more positive note, don't forget Nina Planck's Real Food, reviewed here. Related is The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I haven't read, but have heard good things about.

* It has nothing to do with 2006, but I rediscovered it this year, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, a quintessentially American book about a quintessentially American thing, the road trip - in this case, around the US in 1978 in a van called Ghost Dancing. A good companion is another, rather different classic also based on a road trip, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the first book I read in college and never forgot.

Both books are sometimes compared to Kerouac, but either one is far better.

* The year's funniest movie is Little Miss Sunshine, a sweet, sharp barely-functional family comedy of mini-epic proportions, with an unforgettable ending.

* The year's sexiest movie: The Devil Wears Prada. It's really a chick flick, but no healthy male should pass up two hours with Anne Hathaway. Plus it has KT Tunstall's catchy theme song.

* NOT the year's funniest movie, but still worth watching for its bizarre scatology and unique "plot," is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Sacha Baron Cohen brings Ali G. and his questionable antics to America, to impress and awe the unwashed natives. The BBC was less impressed: see please here for BBC reviewing of Borat cinema.

* And don't forget United 93, a small gem of a movie that never got the attention it deserved. Democracy in action: airliner passengers don't wait for Homeland Security; they figure it out for themselves and act.
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On Donner, on Blitzen ... on Donder, for purists ... oy ... and to all the nice goyim out there, merry Christmas and happy new year ... and to all, a gut yuntif :)

A useful antidote

Conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks have been festering almost since the awful day itself, helped along by college professors, Internet crackpots, and the likes of Michael Moore and Cynthia McKinney. Radio talkshow hosts are starting to give this fantasy-spinning even more exposure. The events of 9/11 threaten to become our generation's Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor -- conspiracy theories about those continue to be heard, in the latter case, more than 60 years later and the release and exhaustive study of all relevant, surviving documents by historians.

The 9/11 theories, like the others, thrive on ignorance and willful denial of facts and common sense. The 9/11 conspiracists -- like Kennedy assassination obsessives, McCarthyites, Pearl Harbor theorists, and so on -- manifest all the classic signs: the pseudo-skeptical pseudo-questioning style that actually consists of accusation-by-innuendo, lifting and garbling factoids out of their original context, and a complete failure to question their own rickety ideas in the light of evidence. It's timeless and fact-free blind credulity masquerading as skepticism.

Just in time comes a concise introduction to the debunking of 9/11 myths by the editors of Popular Mechanics. Since 2004, that reputable publication has enhanced its stature by studying the technical nature of the attacks. The editors decided to put together a selection of the most important theories and debunkings, with pointers to further information and a fine analysis of "conspiracism." Not that it will silence many of the loonies, but at least it will help everyone else stop listening to them. People open to reason should be able to figure this out for themselves, once they have real knowledge in hand. It's just been released in bookstores -- run out and get your copy.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds and Instawife Helen Smith recently interviewed the authors for a podcast. See their MP3 archive.

POSTSCRIPT: Divine lawblogger Ann Althouse continues to follow the Barrett story at the U. of Wisconsin in her home town of Madison -- a repulsive intersection of 9/11 conspiracism and the accelerating rot of American undergraduate education. There's a topic for a few more postings and some hard questions about what students and parents are getting at such great expense.