Lucky you

After seven years, full resolution remains open on the question of how to deal with al Qa'eda terrorists: ordinary criminals, prisoners of war, or something else? The Bush administration's improvised approach, based on the unprecedented situation, was one of administrative detention, modified by court rulings and Congress' 2005 action on military tribunals.

Many of the Bush administration critics can't be taken seriously. They seem to think government's job is hairsplitting rather than protecting the public at large. Government is elected to do nothing else.

The situation actually is unprecedented, at least for the US. Terrorist groups are not state armies and thus not protected by the Geneva Convention. OTOH, they act as enemies of American society and not just criminals. They're private armies in all but name. No existing body of law comprehensively reflects this fact.

The central problem with the Bush policy is not that it is a "torture policy," but rather, no policy at all. Improvised from the start by wide-ranging executive discretion, the Bush non-policy was shaped by Cheney's obsession with executive privilege and secrecy and threatens to vanish when he leaves office. Only a new legal structure, qualified and honed by court precedent, can last.

This is one of the basic points of Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency. His title reflects the new reality that every president from now on will have to respond to. Goldsmith served as legal counsel to the Bush administration and found much of its improvisation in this department seriously flawed. His points of comparison are the reactions of FDR and Lincoln in roughly analogous situations. But he also convincingly shows the dereliction of Congress, which increasingly seems silly and irrelevant. Its lack of involvement is the big black hole of this issue. Today it spends most of its energy on attacking Bush when convenient and otherwise ducking its responsibilities.

Goldsmith's points are underscored and given deeper resonance by Benjamin Wittes' recent fine book, Law and the Long War. Even more than in Goldsmith's book, Congress is the main target of Wittes' contempt.

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The larger situation is worth a long look. Dealing with private armies is, for us, a new kind of war. Many of the misgivings that people feel about this conflict stems ultimately from the nature of the Middle Eastern and Muslim governments who make up some of our most crucial allies. All of them are dysfunctional and corrupt, frequently oppressive and mostly autocratic. Most of them routinely use torture and treat accused terrorists outside of any regular legal process.

Such facts make policies like "rendition" all but inevitable. It is certainly in no way a new policy. The first rendition occurred under the Reagan administration, and the Clinton years saw over a hundred. There's no way to cooperate with these regimes and get their cooperation for our purposes without it. To ask for something else would mean having to reconsider our whole alliance and cooperation with these regimes from scratch. Talk otherwise is fantasy.

We have democratic allies with experience in this area. We can start by studying them: Britain, France, Israel. The French system is all-civilian but tough (tougher than the American in many ways), but requires the highly centralized and unitary state of France. The British and Israeli experience is more relevant to our own, because of their mixed and divided systems of government. They feature military capture and interrogation on the "front end" and civilian review and closure on the "back end." That is what the American system is stumbling towards. But it needs real Congressional supervision, not hot air and grandstanding.

DISTURBING POSTSCRIPT: Have you noticed a repeated theme here and elsewhere? It's the irrelevance of Congress. Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki has a thoughtful and disturbing post on this topic. Are we turning into a bureaucratic dictatorship, where we get to vote on the dictator every four years?

Of course, the fact that the present Congress is the most non-productive in modern history is perhaps a blessing. No one's aching to see them turn their attention to anything serious, as they'll just further screw it up.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of torture, McCain's former captors in Vietnam admire him and want him as US president -- seriously! Of course, it's been a while since that nasty and strange war ended. In the meantime, the US has normalized relations with Vietnam (thanks, in part, to McCain and other Vietnam vets) and has spent over a decade expanding military cooperation, in an effort to offset China's rising power. Why, the US Navy is even back in Cam Ranh Bay :)

In politics, it really is better to be respected than loved.

Yet more revisionism and conspiracism about Iraq

Congressional Democrats, in spite of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report, are continuing their campaign to rewrite history and avoid responsibility for their decisions and statements in 2002 and 2003 regarding Iraq.

Via Instapundit, read James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, then view this on YouTube. Circle back to Fred Hiatt's piece in last week's Washington Post. It says something - something really revolting - about the current Democratic leadership in Congress and their enslavement to the "permanent campaign" - in this case, permanent fundraising mode with the wealthy and ultraliberal wing of the party.

Meanwhile, historian Victor Davis Hanson is beating off another outburst of ignorant bullying from Pat Buchanan and his paleocon allies at the American Conservative. Hanson and I don't agree about the Iraq war, but that's neither here nor there: Buchanan is loaded for bear, recycling mythology stretching back to the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist right. He's been doing that since the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if we had a White House more communicative and forthright than the current one. Lots of people out here, both allies and critics of the Bush administration, are doing what the White House itself should have spent the last five years doing. But I guess you go to war with the White House you have.

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.

A horrifying milestone

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: It's another Middle East sick-humor moment - but it's real: Pakis flee to the relative safety of Afghanistan (via Instapundit). It's also a measure of how rapidly the situation is evolving.
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There's not much to add to what's been said about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. She wanted to return to Pakistan and, with Musharraf weakening in the last couple years, agreed with Rice and the State Department to a strange "arranged marriage" with the Pakistani government. While there's a lot of tongue-clucking about Bush's policy being dead, the reality is the opposite: it was the old policy of giving Musharraf a blank check that is now not only dead, but dead and buried. Bhutto's assassination was carried out by al Qa'eda-Taliban operatives, extremist groups that owe their existence to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) service and Saudi money and ideology. These groups do not and have never had widespread support from Pakistanis, and the government's main repressive actions have been directed against liberal and secular movements, not against the extremists.

What Rice and others in the administration realized a couple years ago was that giving Musharraf a blank check after 9/11, when Pakistan decided to at least officially side with the US, was good short-term strategy, but bad in the long run. As with many of these apparently clever "realist" strategies, we're now living in the long run. The era of "he's our bastard" realpolitik is over.

The future of fighting these extremist movements lies with allying ourselves to and strengthening Muslim governments that have greater legitimacy. They don't necessarily have to be electoral democracies. They can also be conservative monarchies, if they are open to reform. Relying on rulers with narrow bases of support is a deadend.

For Pakistan itself, the problem isn't just radical Islam, because in the Islamic world, religion isn't just a belief system as we think of it. Radical Islam comes with a political program (the caliphate fantasy versus nation-states) and social forces (the world of village clans and tribes versus the urban, the middle class, and the liberal). The resurgence of purist Islam is a result of the failure of "modernization," itself a relic of European colonialism. All of these older forms of Westernization had a narrow basis and limited appeal. Without a broader popular demand for better government, the rebarbarization of former European colonies is a real possibility. And because we live in a smaller and smaller world, we will not be able to run away from the consequences.

Mark Steyn put it well:

Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today's events a horrible inevitability ....

Since her last spell in power [in the 1990s], Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation .... Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir's, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that "the whole of the western world" was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee ....

When you invent an artificial country, you better be sure that your artificial identity will stick. Pakistan today is not what the British and Jinnah had in mind, nor Ayub Khan, nor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, nor General Zia, nor Nawaz Sharif. Instead, across 60 years, their failures incubated an identity that would have seemed utterly deranged to even the more excitable Punjabi Muslims of the early 1940s. As ... noted earlier, according to one recent poll, 46% of Pakistanis support Osama bin Laden.

What should be easy to agree [upon] is that Pakistan is getting worse. Even those who thought at the time that its creation was one of the most unnecessary mistakes in British imperial policy wouldn't have predicted that a mere half-century later it would be a coup-prone nuclear basket-case exporting both its tribal marriage customs and irredentist jihadism to the heart of the western world. Fifty years ago, Pakistanis emigrating to England and Canada brought with them an essentially Britannic education and a moderate Sufi Islam that was not a barrier to integration. Today they bring a narrow madrassah education and [Wahhabi- or Salafi-inspired] Deobandi Islam, which is deeply hostile to assimilation. In other words, what a "Pakistani" is[,] is profoundly different. I liked Benazir Bhutto very much, but she represented Pakistan's past, and her murder is a horrible confirmation of that fact.

I'm sure Steyn would love to be wrong about Pakistan, but there's a good chance he isn't.

A guide for the perplexed II

In the last posting, I pointed to Britain as the new odd man out in the Euro-Trio. Again, what gives?

One sign is the surge of antisemitism that began in the late 1990s. Although far-left antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not new in western Europe - they first reappeared in the 1970s - they derive new power from their synergy with the Islamic radicalism now common in Britain's cities, among its second- and third-generation Muslims of south Indian extraction. The first signs appeared in popular culture (for example, Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth and Udayan Prasad's film, My Son the Fanatic). Next was the explosive growth of Afghanistan- and Pakistan-bound and trained terrorists living in or coming from Britain. Law enforcement officials in continental Europe and the US began to bitterly refer to "Londonistan" - indeed the name of Melanie Phillips' excellent book on the subject.

But there's more disturbing aspect to this sudden return of antisemitism. The phenomenon is historically most prominent and dangerous when a country or a whole civilization experiences an existential crisis of the first order. Antisemitism is a powerful outlet for an otherwise fractured society to direct its hatreds and problems outward to a ready scapegoat. Jews have unwillingly been thrust into this role before, and Europe seems unable to shake the habit. Today, the aftereffects of European imperialism (the sudden and unplanned jerking of the Islamic world into modernity; post-imperial immigration to the metropoles) and the inability of European countries to successfully integrate their Muslim populations have fractured these societies and destroyed their confidence - they're unable to live politically and culturally with Muslim immigrants, yet cannot live economically without them. Jews, both in Europe and in Israel, are again a convenient escape from reality: it's really all their fault. With Europeans unable to master their current difficulties in a workable and humane fashion, wacky conspiracy theories and irrational hatreds grow instead.

Britain also faces internal fracturing, as the central government in London negotiates with the regional Scottish and Welsh parliaments over federalism - a new and disorienting idea in Britain, one of Europe's oldest unified states. The peculiar evolution of the Western left in the face of its discrediting is also at play here. By the 1970s, classical Marxism of the old-fashioned kind was dead. The hard left mutated into new forms in the 1960s and 70s - cultural leftism, political correctness, the sorts of the things you see here in academia, Hollywood, and the news media. Outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair's "New Labour" had the opportunity to defeat these forces for good in the 1990s and was supposed to have reoriented the party to toward the center and greater viability. He was the center-left's answer to Thatcher, much the same way Clinton was the Democrats' answer to Reagan. Blair carried it off, but the hard left didn't disappear in the UK. Instead, he and his allies were led into a compromise that has come back to haunt him and everyone else. The far left today doesn't care about the working classes - what it wants is control of the culture, so it can brainwash the next generation with its authoritarian mumbo-jumbo of political correctness and multiculturalism. Blair, not grasping their importance, gave control of cultural and educational matters to the hard left, while he took the apparently more important bits, politics and economic policy. The far left gave up class warfare and socialist economics. But while Blair was busy reforming the post-Thatcher welfare state, the far left got, in exchange, unchallenged control of Britain's official cultural life, its schools and universities, trade unions, and government-owned news media.

This is the origin of the recent attempts by Britain's unions (always farther to the left than America's) to boycott Israeli universities. These attempts were defeated, but only after a two-year effort. Of course, these are the equivalent of what we call public-employee unions - they're not your grandfather's unions and feature no sweaty proletarians. Drifting away from the Old Left, they have fully swallowed the "cultural" or "new" left identity politics and search for scapegoats for all imperial sins, real and imagined. Jews and Israel have now become, not for the first or last time, whipping boys for European extremist movements.

But Britain has a longer tradition of elite antisemitism that should not be neglected. The "new" antisemitism traces from the late 90s back to the 1973-74 oil embargo, the rise of "Palestinianism" (it won't do to call it nationalism), and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and counterassault on the PLO. Until the late 90s, our view of this issue was shaped and perhaps warped by the Cold War. Further perspective is possible by looking farther back into the earlier twentieth century, the 1920, 30s, and 40s. Here we encounter the anti-Jewish prejudices of Britain's interwar upper classes (a phenomenon far more marginal before 1914, by the way). A figure like George Galloway, for example, cannot be understood apart from this modern tradition of elite antisemitism and strong affinity for foreign dictators and populist demagogues on the part of the educated classes and self-styled "radicals" - the same tradition that gave us Unity and Diana Mitford and Lord Haw-Haw.* Of course, people now have less shame and more incentive, given our media-driven exhibitionist culture, to let it all hang out, so to speak. In the 1930s, only those who had really gone around the bend put on such public displays. And we mustn't forget resentment over the accelerating loss of empire and displacement by the US (definitely found on the left as well, usually without the guts to admit it). The intellectual classes were hardly immune - exemplified by the once-important historian Arnold Toynbee and his antisemitism, opposition to Zionism, and extraordinary rationalizing for the Armenian genocide.

What's stunning about these developments, is how opinions and tendencies once (correctly) viewed as far-right and reactionary poison, have now become an everyday staple among the postmodern left. For more about the tangled origins of the "new" antisemitism, see here.

What's happening in Britain now is not at all like Germany in the 1930s or even Russia and Romania in the early 20th century. It's more like Austria and France in the late 19th century. Both countries had just been humiliated by Germany. While their economies boomed throughout that period, the growth was uneven in both time and in its effect on different social classes. Both countries experienced political and social turmoil. Today, the rise of the EU and the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have combined with the vicious political correctness of the far left and the radical muzzein's call to leave Britons' confidence in, not only their present institutions, but basic political principles, badly shaken. To follow the argument of English doctor Theodore Dalrymple, the "rebarbarization" of Britain is a real possibility. While the world wars and the end of empire left mid-century Britain materially damaged, middle-class decency and intellectual leadership were still solid. These apparently can no longer be counted on, although many in Britain are deeply unhappy about this.**

A few years ago, Richard Wistrich vividly spelled out the profound and accelerating shift in Britain:

None of this is to say that British culture is inherently or overwhelmingly hostile to Jews. Great Britain, which was the birthplace of liberalism in its modern political and economic senses, continues to be a liberal society today, with a healthy democracy, a free press, and an independent judiciary dedicated to protecting individual liberties. Indeed, in the last several centuries, and through World War II, Great Britain was, relative to the rest of Europe at least, a model of tolerance. Nor does it follow that the Jews of the United Kingdom are about to enter a dark era of persecution or the curtailment of basic individual rights.

What it does suggest, however, is that the widely held image of Britain as a realm uniquely hospitable to its Jewish citizens - similar in this regard to the United States, Canada, and other English-speaking countries - no longer seems accurate. In dry numbers, Great Britain has become home to a wave of anti-Semitic violence second only to France in all of Europe. Considered more substantively, anti-Semitic sentiments, motifs, symbols, and methods have gained a legitimacy in British public discourse that enjoys little parallel in the Western world.

Today the United Kingdom stands at a crossroads. Great ideological battles - over European unification, the effort to reassert elements of sovereignty in Scotland and Wales, and the future of long-standing traditions such as hunting and the monarchy - have brought about a profound erosion of the very idea of Britain. But when nations are so deeply unsure of the stability of their values and the security of their future, anti-Semitic sentiment often bubbles to the surface, as people deflect blame for a nation’s problems instead of addressing them head-on. For this reason, it is often said that the way a nation treats its Jews is a litmus test for its true character. As Britain’s subjects ponder their future among the community of nations, they would do well to keep these lessons of the past in mind.

These developments also give the lie - again! - to the absurd idea widely-held by American liberals that Europe is more sophisticated than the US or worthy of American imitation. The truth is very different. For an update on the situation, see here.

But - Europe's resurgent post-Cold War demons: that's another posting - or two, or three.

POSTSCRIPT: Some observers are struck by the fact that a significant number of the propagandists and leaders of the boycott movement are Jewish - but this should be no surprise. Pair them up with Islamic radicals, and inward-looking self-hatred meets outward-directed aggression. It's like one of those "high affinity" reactions you learned about in high school chemistry: acid-base, alkaline-halide: a violent encounter between sadism and masochism - and a strongly bound molecule emerges.

A people's vices are often related to their virtues. The rise of the self- and Jew-hating post-imperial left in Britain has been facilitated by the ingrained English sense of fair play and tolerance for eccentricity. (Something similar was at work in the 1930s appeasement era.) It is precisely because of Britain's long tradition of tolerance that far-left and radical-Islamic antisemitism have run so rampant there. But the rise of political correctness in Britain has not gone unresisted.† On the Tory side, the criticism of the Blair-era rampage of academic and media elites has been trenchant. These elites have more influence in Britain than do their opposite numbers here. But that does not mean their critics have disappeared.

Counterboycotts have been proposed, but they need to be painted with a finer brush and properly directed. General boycotts of Britain are not warranted.†† These are not, after all, government policies. In fact, instead of drawing the boundaries around countries, we can understand and fight these ideas and these people better if we draw boundaries around "the media," "academia," and "far-left activist organizations." Then all those people in Britain who are irritated by political correctness end up on the right side of that boundary. And the boundaries are international - we can see all of these same PC tendencies at work here as well - they just lack the concentrated clout they have in Britain.
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* Familiar to any student of British politics and foreign policy in the 1930s and echoed, for example, in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Remains of the Day and the movie based on it.

** As suggested by the striking success of Conn and Hal Iggulden's anti-PC The Dangerous Book for Boys, written to counter the simultaneous dumbification and couch-potato-ization of at least half of the West's adolescents. Listen here to an interview.

† A British book published recently, Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge, is a comprehensive and irrefutable critique of Edward Said and his noxious influence on Orientalism (study of the Middle East). It's the most important book on the subject in decades.

Strikingly, while Irwin is sympathetic to the Palestinians, he goes out of his way to point out the large contributions to modern Oriental studies by Jewish scholars (German, British, American, Israeli, and Ottoman/Middle Eastern). Irwin firmly rejects the attempt to annex the intellectual life of our or any society to "political correctness." However you come down on some burning current issue, the forming of meaningful opinions and of successful policies for the Middle East by outsiders is impossible without real knowledge. What "Middle East studies" needs is more - not a Edwardian ban on - free inquiry and discussion. While knowledge alone can't make our decisions for us, what's dumber than a willfully uninformed opinion?

Since Said was educated at elite Christian boarding schools and came from an Anglophile family, he was himself a personal link between the snobbish Christian and bourgeois antisemitism of the pre-war decades and the new-style anti-Zionism of the radical left - once he doctored his autobiography and reinvented himself as an oppressed noble savage.

†† Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg recently canceled appearances at a number of British schools because of the attempted boycotts. He hasn't engaged in or called for a general boycott of Britain, however.

A guide for the perplexed I

There is a great deal of ruin in any country.

- Adam Smith

The new French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, recently visited the US and gave an exceptionally fine speech to a joint session of Congress. You can find it here, translated. (Although Sarkozy can understand English, his speaking and writing are shaky. So he spoke in French.) It's certainly one of the best speeches a foreign leader has given in the US in many years. Many liberals were nonplussed by it, since it contradicts their fantasies about Europe. Conservatives were pleased, but confused - after all, he's French.

What gives? It's explained here, but I'll add something else: the critical problem with France, from the mid-1960s on, was the dominant Gaullist dispensation that did not view France as part of the West. Instead, it was supposed to constitute its own realm, with a foreign policy often divergent from Western interests vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Although the Socialists brought French foreign policy back in a more sensible direction in the 1980s, the Gaullist approach dominated through the end of Chirac's presidency this year. This, in spite of the fact that since the early 1990s, France has been becoming a "normal" country, sharing more and more culturally and socially with the rest of Western Europe and - quel horreur! - the US. Its foreign and economic policies were the late in reflecting this evolution and often seemed stuck in another era. "Official" France did not view itself as being in the same boat as other Western countries, even though, in fact, it has been continuously since the industrial revolution and the rise of Germany and Russia in the late 19th century.

All of that has changed in the last few years. One reason is economic-demographic: France, like the rest of western Europe, can no longer afford its welfare state. Over a third of the country, in effect, doesn't work, while the rest support them. And it does not have enough younger workers to pay for generous retirements (starting at age 53 or so) or for students to remain in school until their mid-30s. Its labor market rigidity, however, also prevents younger French Arabs from entering, or from entering at a high enough level to contribute their full economic potential to the French economy and tax coffers. No doubt, French politicians of the last two generations thought they were being clever by buying off these "youths" (as they're often called when they riot) with welfare, instead of doing the harder but better thing of integrating them into the work force. Much of social integration is economic: when you work in a country's economy, you've taken some big steps towards integrating into that society. Of course, there's more to it than work and money, which don't capture the political and social dimensions of integration. But still, it counts for a lot. When it's missing, disaster results.

Which brings up a second reason: the French are now fully awake to the problem of unassimilated Muslim enclaves growing in their cities. This development poses the most serious threat to France's social cohesion and political sovereignty since the decline and collapse of the Third Republic before and during World War Two. What's more, it's not a matter of defeating a foreign army and pushing them out. The younger Muslims are French citizens, but they are frequently far less assimilated than their parents and grandparents, who originally immigrated to France. Western Europe's post-1945 cultural-religious-political vacuum leads these restless "youths" to look elsewhere for moral and intellectual guidance - with radical Islam being the most popular choice. The French of European culture and descent are frightened of what's grown up in their midst, and their governments until recently were reluctant to talk about the problem in public. Although France has a tough system of antiterrorist laws, courts, and police that has been successful in stopping Islamic terror attacks in the last 15 years, the reality of this problem - like so many of Europe's problems - has been carefully hidden from the public by political elites and the media. A variety of substitute hate objects - Israel and the US prominent among them - fill the void. Only in the last few years, with the problems now so serious that elites can no longer hide them, has the French public begun to wake from its welfare-state narcosis. The formerly high-handed and somewhat secretive French elite was forced to turn to the public at large and run a competitive politics for the first time in decades. The last elections featured four major parties; Sarkozy and his followers in the center-right party (the old Gaullist coalition) swept the field, in part by acknowledging realities that everyone sees but often refused to admit.

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When we look at Europe's three most important countries - Britain, France, and Germany - a curious spectacle presents itself. France, a frequent irritant to the US in the last 40 years, has swung around to a position of broad agreement with the US, in spite of conflicting views about Iraq. Germany also now has a leader of the center-right, Angela Merkel, an "Atlanticist" of the Kohl-Adenauer type, broadly similar to Sarkozy. But Germany is in a strange position. Unlike France and for obvious reasons, it has not been allowed or allowed itself to exercise an aggressive policy of national interests. While the French have done this vigorously since the 1960s, they often pursued misguided policies - but at least they pursued something. The commitment of Germany's political elites to Western democratic values is real, and they are consistent in opposition to Muslim antisemitism in ways often not true of their French or British counterparts. But such an orientation is essentially reactive and defensive, and it's unclear if that is enough to halt the spread of Islamic radicalism among Germany's growing Muslim population. A weak national government and power decentralized to the German laender (states) and cities, imposed by the Allies in 1945, is the price of a defanged Germany no longer threatening to its neighbors.

The odd man in this trio is now, strangest of all, Great Britain, once America's most dependable ally in western Europe and creator of the original Jewish National Home in Palestine. The long shadow of post-1945 American dominance of the English-speaking world, the end of the Cold War, and Britain's loss of its empire have left it politically hollowed out. While Tony Blair and his government were strongly pro-American and firm on the need to oppose Islamic radicalism, the political elites of Britain have been headed in a different direction since the early 1990s. Britain's official culture of politics and education have been overrun with particularly noxious form of political correctness. It would be reversing cause and effect to say that PC has weakened Britain's national identity. But the rapid and unchecked growth of Islamic radicalism in London and other British cities has created as serious a crisis there as in France; the difference is that Britain, unlike France and the US, lacks clearly articulated and universal liberal and democratic values. Its political culture and national identity have depended historically far more on the unwritten and even unspoken. It seems odd that this should be so; after all, Britain is the cradle of modern liberty, constitutionalism, and democratic practice. The triumph of liberal, democratic, and market-economic values in the modern world is due largely to Britain and its former colonies.

Nonetheless, the weakness of Britain's domestic culture and politics, its inability to face down Islamic radicals, and the spread of intellectual and moral corruption in the face of such challenges are unmistakable. The next posting will explore why.

Update on the Iraq war

So how goes it?

Better, but still not great. The "surge" has worked as advertised, in a limited sense. But it remains a temporary solution and cannot be sustained beyond next spring. Chatter about the "surge" deflects attention from the fact that the US needs a longer-term strategy, and it's fairly clear what that is.

That strategy is reducing the troop level to something much lower (30,000 say) and reshaped for pure counterinsurgency, without the typically long and massive American logistical trail - the one that winds through the fast food joints in Kuwait and ends in a military warehouse back here in the States. The keys to successful counterinsurgency are:

• Using the minimal force necessary, not the maximum force possible
• Keeping the politics to the fore and the military aspect to the rear

The political constraints should be the following. It's not in American interests to intervene military in purely internal Iraqi conflicts. That's not to say the US can't do conflict resolution here; it just shouldn't involve military intervention. The reason is simple: get involved militarily in the Middle East and, no matter how hard you try, you'll end up being viewed as "taking sides" and "dishonoring" or "shaming" someone (viz. Lebanon in 1982-83).* OTOH, if something in Iraq involves al-Qa'eda, its affiliates, or their Iranian-Shi'ite counterparts, then indeed the US has a real stake in the regional and global implications and military involvement is absolutely justified - like in Afghanistan, in the same way and for the same reasons.

Al-Qa'eda's military and political fortunes in Iraq have plunged in the last year and a half. Whether this reversal will stick depends heavily on whether al-Qa'eda can regroup and regenerate itself, like in Afghanistan. That in turn depends on the presence of outside sponsors and sanctuaries - like the case of Pakistan vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

Supporters of the Iraq operation also need to face a by-now fairly obvious American political reality. Many of them have wrongly fused support for the Iraq war with support for Bush (or vice versa). In the last year, that fusion has become no longer tenable. It's not "Bush and Iraq," but "Bush or Iraq." The combination of Bush's "true believer" stubbornness and incompetence, his now-almost complete reliance on military people who understand things better than he does, and the remains of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) among liberals and Democrats makes separating Bush from his Mess-o-potamia essential, if we're ever to straighten the latter out.** Bush will no longer be president after January 2009. The Iraq mess, and even more, the Iranian threat hanging over it all like a dark cloud, will still be there.

POSTSCRIPT: A politically- and militarily-savvy synopsis, and a somewhat different point of view, from the San Antonio Express-News.
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* Thus, under no circumstances should the US intervene militarily in a Kurdish-Turkish conflict. There's a lot of other things we can do to help stop or contain such a conflict; military intervention isn't one of them.

** This has a powerful added bonus for the 2008 Republican candidates. As Bush and Iraq are peeled apart, the powerful anti-Bush obsession among Democrats dissipates. There's little else to the Dems these days except BDS. They're still as bankrupt now as they were in 2004.

When "realists" attack

Do not answer fools according to their folly, lest you be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, lest they be wise in their own eyes.

- Proverbs 26

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PRE-POSTSCRIPT: An interesting sidelight on this issue from Jeff Robbins (a former Clinton administration UN rep) at the Wall Street Journal. Pay particular attention to his encounters with the anti-Israel lobby, the extensive and lucrative business it does here, and its claims about the "pro-Israel media" - claims both laughable and disturbing.
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No better motto could be imagined to introduce the continuing scandal of Walt and Mearsheimer's attack on the "Israel lobby" and their new book on same. They, their book, their publishers, and their schools (Harvard and Chicago) are a disgrace. Answering them is a necessity, yet fraught with danger - it gives them the attention they crave, but don't deserve.

For a start, former Secretary of State George Schultz has responded with this short piece, which is in turn a selection from a longer preface to a new book on the ongoing saga of conspiracy theories about Jews and politics that always mutate but never seem to die. (Apparently, they're too useful.)

Schultz is one of the most important living American diplomats and one of the most important Secretaries of State ever. (And there's more to Schultz than you think.) He brings that weight and his direct experience on the side of reason in helping dispel a pernicious myth. Groups that advocate on behalf of Israel could only have the impact they have because of the strong pre-existing support for Israel in Congress and the general public. Otherwise, they would be like what Walt and Mearsheimer portray: a semi-secret cabal having a questionable influence on America's foreign policy counter to its best interests. But their influence on that policy would also be all the weaker.

Dissecting the argument and the book. The real beef that Walt and Mearsheimer and people like them have is with American voters and political culture in general. They're aggrieved that not all of American foreign policy is up for sale to oil-producing countries, and this striking fact is what stimulates the irrational obsession that otherwise lives in the darker corners of modern politics. The book itself has been examined and critiqued, following earlier criticism of the authors' original notorious "working paper" and article in the London Review of Books. See here, here, here, and here. And here's a handy summary suitable for talking points.

Careful examination of the book reveals a situation similar to that found with Jimmy Carter's recent book: selective misuse of documents, frequent inversions of reality, careful omission of crucial facts and developments that undercut their argument, and a general failure to talk with the very people they're writing about, who would have also undercut their argument. They make full use of discredited mythology concerning the Iraq war and the Palestinians. Moving from the obvious (Jewish and non-Jewish Americans advocate for Israel) to the libelously malicious in spinning a fantasy of an evil conspiracy, Walt and Mearsheimer emerge with arguments that bear disturbing similarities to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the rantings of Henry Ford.

The real danger. Typical of conspiracists like Walt and Mearsheimer is the phenomenon of psychological projection.

The fascinating thing is that this sinister characterization does fit someone: not the so-called "Israel lobby," which operates in the full light of publicity and mainly through Congress, but what might be called the "oil lobby" or the "Middle East petro-dictatorship lobby." Unlike Israel's supporters, it is semi-secret, interacts almost exclusively with the Executive branch, generally stays out of the spotlight, and usually avoids public or Congressional examination. Behind it lie six decades of "Arabism," "oil realism," and so on, including influential and moneyed investment groups.* This is the other half of the problem, one that Schultz is too polite to mention and is rarely discussed at all, and it's what should be the focus of scrutiny.

Apart from funding the politically-correct academic pseudo-discipline of "Middle East studies," the most sinister part of this lobby is its Saudi component and its spin-off front groups like CAIR. The consequence has been a gradual takeover of world and American Islam by Saudi-funded and Saudi-inspired religious extremists. When a catastrophe like the 9/11 attacks happen, media attention temporarily turns to these groups. But it doesn't take long for this lurid light to get turned away on to something else, like another one of those Britney crises, or maybe a Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.

The Arabists: The rise and fall of a bad idea. The origins of these groups and their influence (in the US) go back the 1940s. Ever since the Lebanese civil war and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, they and their ideas have suffered one blow after another: first the the Iran-Iraq war, then the almost-fatal blow of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, followed by the relentless post-1990 rise of radical Islamist groups in precisely the Sunni countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) that are supposedly our "allies" and "friends."

The oil-driven "Arabist" idea and the policies based on it now lie in ruins. This is the real background to "when 'realists' attack." The perversion of classical foreign policy realism by the need for oil (on our part) and the need for oil revenue (on the part of oil-producing countries) has led American policy into a dead end. It's probably been the biggest foreign policy scam of the last century. Walt and Mearsheimer and people like them can't take this truth. So they idle away their hours in Cambridge and elsewhere with poisonous fantasies.

The curse of Midas. There's a final irony to this worth mentioning. Oil revenue was supposed to make the backwards petro-nations rich, able to leap into modernization at a single bound with enormous pools of capital that countries not blessed with abundant oil did not have. Except that it failed to work out as planned: as economists have learned, when a country becomes dependent on nothing more than a natural resource monopoly for its revenue, and all that revenue is controlled by the government, it has a strong tendency to become a corrupt, stagnant backwater. Far from becoming modern, a petro-government turns into a dictatorship and tries to buy off its population with oil wealth. This is the well-documented predicament of the Arab oil countries and the Arab-Iranian world in general. While the larger Muslim world does not suffer as much from this condition, the ability of governments like Saudi Arabia to promote radical Islamic doctrine is enabled by that flow of oil dollars.

OTOH, a country like Israel, with limited natural resources, has had, like Hong Kong and Singapore, to make the most of its human resources. For a society to be modern doesn't require wealth to showered on it, unearned, from an oil well. It requires a modern society and modern social and political practices. A modern society's wealth is its people, not what's in the ground.** Having just returned from Israel, I can testify from first-hand experiences that the same miracle that happened in those Far Eastern city-states has happened in Israel. Not having oil or other significant natural resources has been a blessing for all those places.†

Dependency on oil revenue, from the Persian Gulf to Venezuela, has produced little more than wasted decades, squandered wealth, political stagnation and oppression, and radical religious and political reaction. These countries now have little to show for it.

Allies, friends, and ... ? As for who's an ally of America, and who's not, consider the result of this recent Harris poll. Americans were asked to rank countries in terms of closeness as allies, and they responded with this revealing list, in rank order: Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, followed by Japan, Italy, South Korea, and Germany. These are all democracies with whom we share values, history, and extensive commercial, cultural, and human ties. For a great democratic power like the United States, that says it all: allies like this arise from what you are, not just something you buy or sell.

So-called "experts" like Walt and Mearsheimer don't understand this, but ordinary voters do.
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* These actually have far more political influence than the oil companies, which have more limited impact in Washington than many people think. The goal of these consulting and investment groups, which operate in all wealthy, oil-consuming countries, is to recapture the oil money flowing into the oil-producing countries by selling those countries large public works projects, military systems, etc. They also sell political influence in a fairly crass, if discreet, way.

** An interesting implication is that the main division in the globalizing world is not between those have and those who don't have, but between those who know and those who don't know.

† There's a lot of business now between Israel and Asia, especially China. Tel Aviv has a significant flow of Chinese and Indians doing just that. Even stranger, some of them speak Hebrew.

People often think that such benefits should be immediate, instant-gratification things, like finding oil in your backyard. Real blessings are not easy-come, easy-go: they're are difficult things that take longer to come to fruition, but are unassailable.