So why did Al Gore make that speech last Thursday, which most commentators, conservative and liberal, seem to agree put the Dems between a rock and a hard place? Well, I think it's because he thinks -- correctly -- that his only hope of getting the nomination again is to run to the left.
Moderate Democrats aren't going to nominate him again; they're interested in getting power for the Democrats so that they can enact a platform only modestly different from what would be enacted under the Republicans. They aren't going to take a risk on a man who lost the Clinton legacy to Shrub; they're going to nominate someone fresh, like John Edwards. In this case, better the devil you don't know than the loser you know all too well.
It's the party faithful, who would have felt nearly as hurt by the events in Florida if Dilbert had been the party nominee, to whom Al Gore must look. They're considerably to the left of the moderates who formed his base last time. His other hope is capturing the primary votes of the dyed-in-the-wool liberals, the ones who believe that the Republicans not only lied, cheated, and stole to win the election, but also no doubt sacrificed innocent Democratic babies to their fiery god. They're angry about Florida, angry at the party leadership because we don't have national health care yet, and welfare reform is still here, and the state hasn't withered away in time for true Communism to arrive before Friends is on. And they're madder than a wet hen about the war. They're also in favor of candidates that have the same kind of broad, national appeal as Walter Mondale, but no matter; for Al Gore, it's them or nothing.
So he's going on the attack. Consistency? It doesn't matter whether he's consistent. His potential supporters don't care whether he believes what he's saying; what they care is that he goes on the record saying it. Al Gore is trying to build a Reagan-style revolution, getting grassroots support to wrest control of the party from the moderates who are setting policy now.
I can kind of see where he's coming from. The moderate Republicans of Reagan's era were substantively indistinguishable from the Democrats; it was to Nixon we looked for price controls, massive expansion of federal entitlements, and foolhardy industrial policies. I can see how he tells himself that with the moderate Democratic leadership it's exactly the same thing now.
Except. Except that Reagan was selling his platform on low taxes, something almost everyone's in favor of; and regardless of what you think of his platform, he actually had one. Al Gore's speech is full of vague platitudes rather than specific proposals. And he's staking his candidacy on criticizing a highly popular president on the subject of a highly popular war. It may get him the nomination, though I doubt it, but it will certainly cost him the election. Not to mention drive another nail into the coffin of the left wing of the Democratic party. Although to be fair, I can see how another run could unify the party like never before -- in their dislike of the man who lost them the presidency twice.
Every so often I come across a historical issue which I'd thoroughly forgotten about, and rediscover, with surprise, some averted disaster. Thus did I read about FDR's attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and realize what a truly frightening thing this was. How did the Democrats make a hero of a man who basically attempted to gut the constitution in order to expand his power far beyond what the framers intended, or what he was elected for? And what would have happened if he had succeeded? Is my horror unjustified?
I remember how excited I was when I read in Time magazine or some such about the carbon-emissions-free future we could all enjoy just by switching our energy source to hydrogen fuel cells. And I remember how bone-crushingly stupid I felt when an engineer I know who enjoys travel, long walks on the beach, and making non-engineers feel bone-crushingly stupid, pointed out two things that I should have known:
1) Hydrogen is not lying around on the ground here on the planet Earth. It has to be produced. Producing this requires energy from another source. In our country, with our fear of nuclear, and our hydro supply that's far exceeded by our demand, that source is -- coal or oil.
2) Hydrogen fuel cells are widely touted as clean because all they emit is "harmless water vapor". The single largest greenhouse gas is. . . you guessed it, harmless water vapor.
Hydrogen fuel cells might help improve our efficiency a little bit, because the big turbines they use to generate the electricity to make the hydrogen are much more efficient than the internal combustion engine that powers your car. But not that much, because most of the energy from burning oil is lost as heat. . . and then more is lost in transmission to the factory. . . and more is lost in turning water or methane into hydrogen. . . and more is lost in turning the hydrogen back into water and energy. So the net effect isn't very large, the Second Law of Thermodynamics being what it is.
So here's my question: I mentioned fuel cells to one engineer, who instantly set me straight. How come none of the reporters writing breathless articles about hydrogen power can do the same?
Question of the Day: What is the evolutionary purpose of crying? Not tears, which obviously clear out the eyes, but why do we cry when we're sad? As far as I know, no other species does this.
Where are the Care Bears (tm) when we need them? Certainly the awesome power of the "Care Bear Stare" would melt even nasty Saddam's heart and turn those Al-Queda frowns upside down! I say we send a message to Care-a-lot Land and summon our fuzzy friends!
Daring? Unique? Thinking-outside-the-box? You betcha! Sure, those Mr. Macho U.S. Marines might sneer, as might the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, my family, and most of my co-workers. Who cares? What do they know?
Just look at all the advantages of a Care Bear-based solution:
1) Bears clad from head to toe in soft fur -- will not offend traditional Middle East sensibilities.
2) Collecting Care Bear products a rewarding hobby to fill the void caused by loss of terrorist activities.
3) Care Bears compatible with all NATO aircraft weapons mounts.
4) No one will want to be a suicide bomber when there is a visit from Birthday Bear (tm) coming up!
5) Share Bear (tm) might get those Arabs to lower the oil prices a bit.
6) Care Bears are environmentally friendly.
7) "Evil Bert" indicates that Middle Eastern Cultures open to influence by soft, fuzzy dolls.
8) Bear meat probably not Halal, preventing unfortunate misunderstandings on purpose of Care Bear deployment. (N.B.: probably best if Gentle Heart Lamb (tm) stays home)
I am disappointed with the administration for not even considering the possibility of deploying a Care Bear-based solution to the crisis. Such irresponsibility is obviously due to nasty conservatives led by Professor Cold-Heart's twin with a Texas accent.
I am even more unhappy (not mad, just very, very, very hurt) with the liberal anti-war left for ignoring the Care Bears -- the Care Bear worldview seems of a piece with the liberal worldview. An added plus -- the Care Bear Stare would soften up that Mean Republican Administration (tm)!
I look forward to you incisive commentary and keen analysis of this woefully neglected issue.
See guys, that's the kind of novel, thoughtful solution we need more of in this world. Remember -- sharing means caring.
Jesse Walker doesn't like the West Wing. Neither do I.
Not because it's left wing. So is pretty much every show on television, and I do watch the idiot box occasionally, and enjoy it. It's a pleasant addition to my needlepointing.
Walker hates the writing, specifically the dialogue. I hate the plot. Or perhaps a better word is the style: Sermon With A Cast.
The West Wing is Touched By An Angel for the political class. Sorkin takes the most burning issues of our day and reduces them to the kind of saccharin morals we spoon-feed fourth graders in their social studies texts. "Killing is bad." "Racism is bad." "People need help sometimes, especially if they vote Democratic." What grates on me is that Sorkin just can't bear to ever, ever give his ideological opponents a good argument, lest The Proles be misled into thinking their are actually two sides to an issue, and thus risk making a bad decision at the polls next year. Okay, I already read the Democratic position papers. The words don't suddenly vibrate with new meaning because they issue from the mouth of Rob Lowe.
The first episode I ever saw is emblematic: Bartlett takes on a woman who is clearly a doppelganger for Dr. Laura. In this scene, he just blows her away by citing all sorts of laws from Deuteronomy about various ritual sacrifices and such, which reduces her to incoherence as she attempts to explain why the laws on homosexuality apply, but the laws on sacrificing two white doves at the temple do not.
Nowhere does Sorkin reveal his native prejudices more clearly. I have heard such hilarious questioning from any number of liberals in my time, always posed to other people who are equally ignorant about any theology more complicated than the kind that comes in little books that come pre-packaged with crystals and incense sticks. The Jews have been debating these sorts of things for 5,000. The Catholics have been at it for 2,000. The fundamentalists have been giving it a good go for at least several hundred. Yet Sorkin & friends, to whom it would never actually occur to, y'know, ask someone, think that they have discovered a whole new set of questions that those ignorant rubes with the bibles were too filled with hate to even think of. Memo to Aaron: If a president had ever, ever directed that sort of inquisition to an Orthodox Jew in front of the press, what we would have seen was not His Triumphant Victory over the Narrowminded Religious Zealots, but the Presidential Ass Getting Handed to The President On a Plate, as she whipped out the eight zillion pages of talmudic debate concerning the very issues he'd brought up. But, of course, we don't actually want the opposition to be people; only cartoon villains can play opposite Superman.
Contrast this with Law and Order, which breaks liberal, but always, always makes sure that both sides have good arguments to make. Ultimately, conflicts don't always get resolved; sometimes, you have to make a judgement call between two competing values, and get an answer that truly satisfies no one. There's good reason it's the longest-running show on television.
But Gawd, it wouldn't be any less tiresome if it were libertarian. Less realistic, and there would be, no doubt, funny Pot Smoking in the Lincoln Bedroom scenes to leaven the dullness. But if it were libertarian, and still took the same smugly ignorant approach to opposing arguments, you'd find me in my living room hurling my needlepoint scissors at the television and screaming "Not all opponents of drug legalization are evil hypocrites, you evil hypocrites!"
But I digress.
It wouldn't be that hard to do a really good, still left-leaning show; get some Republicans, intelligent ones, and have them write the dialogue for the opposition. Let the opposition win once in a while. Any senior Creative Writing major ought to be able to tell you that any book where the hero never loses quickly gets tiresome.
But you know how those fundamentalists are. Can't risk letting anyone think for themselves; after all, they might get the wrong answer.
That reminds me, a propos of absolutely nothing, that when the Republicans took the House in '94, apparently that gave the residents of the previous speaker's district quite a shock. Someone was telling me at dinner that a poll revealed that a majority of the people in his district thought that whoever they elected automatically because Speaker of the House. I don't know if it's true -- but I find it frightening that I don't have any difficulty at all believing that it could be true.
I don't think he thought this through. First of all, he made it into a Democrat/Republican issue more explicitly than it already was. Bush said "some in the Senate care more about politics than national security", with nary a word about Democrats; Tom Daschle told the nation that it was the Democrats who were obstructing Bush, and gave a platform to remarks that otherwise, almost no one would have heard.
Now, I think that the President's remarks went too far. And I understand why Daschle was hopping mad. But the speech he made on the Senate floor was hasty and not one of his finer rhetorical moments, and he's certainly not helping himself by saying "Well, now I don't know if we can vote on this until Bush has done a full grovel," that being what he's been telling the network shows. I don't think that "sulky girlfriend" is the image that the Democratic national leadership wants to portray heading into the election.
The Democrats, it seems to me, are doing exactly what the Republicans did under Clinton. They simply cannot learn to cut their losses, abandon issues they can't win, and get on with it. I understand that Daschle is in a tough place -- Wellstone may very well lose his seat if the war comes up for a vote. I admire Wellstone's honor, and I understand what a tough spot that puts the leadership of the Democratic Party in. But hurling yourself again and again against the rampart of a president's popularity ratings, when each sortie decimates your ranks and has no visible effect on the fortress you're attacking, isn't brave. It's foolish.
More and more, I'm beginning to believe that the administration is adopting a policy of letting opponents raise arguments against an action, letting them wear the argument out in the press, and then calmly releasing information that demolishes it. Each new argument thus ultimately raises the credibility of the Administration, and lowers that of its opponents. If I'm right, it's an absolutely masterly control of information, and the discipline is impressive. They don't have the Clinton administration's all-out crisis response, but they have their own strengths.
But if this is the case, why haven't said opponents taken notice?
Update God, how fast do y'all type? I no sooner post than some speed reader flies to his email account to correct me. Or try to. When will y'all learn that I am always, always right?
Correspondant Brian emails to say that he doesn't think the ties in the article are that strong. But that's not the point. The anti-war press, and some bloggers I could name, have been stating that (I'm paraphrasing): "The administration is trying to gin up support for the war with outrageous lies, like it's flimsy attempt to connect Al Qaeda to Saddaam when there is no evidence that there is any connection."
The Clinton spin machine would have been all over this like white on rice. Probably they would have demolished it, but it wouldn't have gotten a lot of press, and so righties (their presumed opposition) would be repeating the trope long after it had been discredited, while party faithful wearily dragged out the evidence with each new wing-nut.
The Bush administration, on the other hand, let it grow until it had wide currency. And now when the myth is popped, it makes a big noise that everyone notices, and not incidentally, tarnishes the reputation of everyone who said it.
Each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. But I confess to being amazed at how politically shrewd Bush has turned out to be. I didn't expect it.
(Incidentally, anyone who defended Clinton, who then complains about Bush's media management, is off my Christmas card list. I mean it. There's ridiculous, and then there's moronic.)
Clash of civilizations? This fellow makes a good argument.
The article was written in 1999, but this passage is utterly chilling:
The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic states focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering them, and the guidance, intelligence and other electronic capabilities for achieving that goal. The West promotes nonproliferation as a universal norm and nonproliferation treaties and inspections as means of realizing that norm. It also threatens a variety of sanctions against those who promote the spread of sophisticated weapons and proposes some benefits for those who do not. The attention of the West focuses, naturally, on nations that are actually or potentially hostile to the West.
The non-Western nations, on the other hand, assert their right to acquire and to deploy whatever weapons they think necessary for their security. They also have absorbed, to the full, the truth of the response of the Indian defense minister when asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf War: "Don't fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles are viewed, probably erroneously, as the potential equalizer of superior Western conventional power. China, of course, already has nuclear weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy them. North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be attempting to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared that all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in 1988 the president of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for development of "offensive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological weapons."
Steven Den Beste has a post on military spending in Europe should the US pull out. He disagrees with me that German spending would rise (and since he spends a lot more time thinking about military things than I do, you should weight this accordingly). Most interesting, however, is the point he makes that much-vaunted European diplomatic efforts are becoming less effective as they lose the stick that went along with the carrot.
I've argued time and time again that both are necessary to negotiation; you may only pull one or the other out of the bag, but you need to have 'em both there. Den Beste makes a point I knew unconsciously, but not consciously: that we provided Europe's threat until the mid-nineties, and that as our interests diverged, their foreign policy has become less effective, because they couldn't back up their efforts with any sort of force projection. As he says, why is Europe pretty much irrelevant in the Middle East? Because we can put soldiers on the ground, and they can't.
(Before you send me the angry emails, think about it: why is the US involved in peacemaking in Israel and Northern Ireland, to name two places, when Europe is much closer to both countries? Recent successful European diplomacy efforts I can think of are almost solely centered around either events right in their back yard, which used American force to back up their efforts, or former colonies where they use cash to clean up the mess they left.)
In many ways it becomes more obvious that Europe needs military force of its own. Not that I think this will be enduring fun for America; it's not fun having more players with competing interests to deal with. But ultimately, I think, as Den Beste speculates, that it will make them better friends to us, and us to them.
Group Captain Mandrake has the German point of view on our current tiff from an ardent SDP supporter.
Which brings up some of the emails I've gotten.
People have accused me of hypocritical moralism about the German elections. Listen, if they think the war in Iraq is immoral, and they can't support it, well then, they shouldn't support it. They're a sovereign nation.
But that's not what my interlocutors, particularly the German ones, really want. What they really want is for there to be no costs for refusing to support it.
Allies support each other unconditionally. At the very least, they do what Canada has done and shut up. They do not announce to the public, without consulting or even notifying their allies, that they will block assets to allied military assets in their country. They particularly do not do this for the purposes of grandstanding, when no one has requested the use of those assets.
They do not allow their ministers to compare the heads of allied states to Hitler.
We now know that we cannot trust Germany the way you trust a real ally. They made their choice; they don't want to be part of an American (Anglosphere?) bloc. That's their perfect right. But then you don't get the goodies that come from being part of the American bloc. If Germany wants to be an independant military power, it has to actually do so. We are not going to continuing paying for them to dress up and pretend.
We can argue about who made the split necessary, but ultimately it's irrelevant. The split is now there. Den Beste casts it in terms of honor, but I think of it in terms of trust. We don't trust Germany any more. Her leaders violated our trust. We can't go back to feeling the way we did before, even if we wanted to. The Germans have sent emails saying they feel the same way -- well, I'm sorry about that. But if that's really the case, you shouldn't want to be allied with us.
The funniest letters came from a slightly nutty French guy screaming that I couldn't want Germany to re-arm. The same thing applies. You felt big and powerful when you kicked the US out of the bases in your country. You wanted to stand on your own two feet, without the burden of supporting the US. Well, when push comes to shove, is the US going to protect you from a re-armed Germany? Maybe. Maybe not. Independance has costs as well as benefits.
(Not that I think Germany re-armed is Hitler III. But judging from my email, a lot of French people do.)
The world changed on September 11th for us. Germans who are saying that they're only reacting as they must should remember that we are too. I'm deeply saddened to see our relationship hurt, and I'm worried by what's happening to the world. But I can't turn back the clock, and I won't feel guilty about it. Nor do I want Germans to feel guilty about it. But I don't have much sympathy when they complain that it's really all our fault either.
Question of the day: How do you know that deterrence is working on Iraq?
I mean, it might be working in the sense that, after you jump out a 50 story window, flapping your arms works -- until you hit the ground. If he's two years away from getting a bomb, and we don't substantially change what we're doing, is that working? Will it still be "working" in two years, when he gets the bomb? And if you are sure that he does not already have nukes, why are you so sure that after he gets them, the military status quo will prevail? It's not like it did when the Soviets or the Chinese or the Israelis acquired them.
Yesterday's question has been answered, somewhat. Some people have pointed out that we will be redeploying special forces from Afghanistan, specificially, the 10th mountain, airborne assets, and special forces. Will all of these go, or some of them? Is that a foregone conclusion, or a guess?
Least satisfying were those who responded with vague quotations about needing to build up after the effort expended in Iraq. Yes, that's true, but that doesn't answer my question. The things we expended in Afghanistan that we have to rebuild, like missiles and cluster bombs, are not necessarily things that we will be using in Afghanistan going forward.
Also, Afghanistan is not synonymous with Al Qaeda. There are multiple problems in Iraq, of which Al-Qaeda/the Taliban are only one. And more and more of our victories against Al Qaeda are coming from degrading their presence in other countries, notably Pakistan, but also Western Europe and here.
I guess what I was trying to figure out was whether it is actually not possible to simultaneously sustain both operations at high efficiency levels, or if it simply more difficult/expensive. That question still hasn't been answered, although I presume the people who sent me detailed information on what units might be redeployed could answer it, if they chose.
So far the Blogosphere nominees include Lawrence Simon and Our Fearless Leader. Maybe we should have a blogosphere debate in which the Blog party chooses it's candidate based on photogeneity and ability to deliver a speech without staring fixedly at the teleprompter.
You knew I wouldn't be able to resist weighing in on tehe Burqa, didn't you?
Aziz Poonwalla, originally picking up on my post about our ability to culturally colonize Islam, is arguing that the Burka and the Bikini are both emblems of male control over women. I can see where he's coming from, though I don't agree with it entirely.
For one thing, the amount of clothing that a culture chooses to believe is necessary for modesty is fairly arbitrary. Mohammed may have been shocked by the display of bare breasts in some of the tribes he encountered, but it's a sure thing that if it really was common, the men didn't think of it as particularly sexy. Ho, hum, breasts. No, really, I'm serious. The only reason y'all are titillated by cleavage now is that it's usually covered. I'm not saying that men wouldn't be interested in them, but if they weren't covered, they wouldn't find uncovered breasts any sexier than you find uncovered ankles.
Uncovered ankles? I'm equating breasts to ankles? Well, your Victorian ancestors were obessed with them. They had a lot better chance of getting a look at a lady's cleavage than they did at her bare ankles. Paens were written to the glimpse of ankle. Yet I bet you don't even know what your girlfriends ankles look like, unless she's sprained one recently. Fat? Thin? Bony? Your Great-Grandfather would have known.
Bikinis are sexual because they uncover what is normally covered. ANd in this climate, a good thing, too.
What Aziz is arguing for is, in my opinion, a well meaning but futile attempt to take sex out of male-female relations. I had an interesting conversation with Norah Vincent a little while ago on a similar topic: the way that NOW and other feminist groups have made enemies of the womb. Reproduction is inherently unfair, and there's nothing that can be done to make it fair . . . except giving women the same right to walk away that men have. Doing this requires them to pretend that these are equivalent activities; to argue that failing to take care of a child is morally the same as preventing it from living. In fact, NARAL and NOW, in the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, have elevated the latter choice over the former, approving abortion but disapproving guys who excercise their "right to choose" not to be a father. They've staked out some extremely precarious moral and political ground.
Aziz is, probably without knowing it, endorsing another brand of feminism, the "difference feminists". Those are the folks who set up the speech codes and sexual harassment laws in a futile attempt to excise every trace of sex from all but the narrowest spheres of human life. Can't be done. All the Burqa, or a speech code does, is bottle in a potent force that then explodes in dangerous and unforeseen ways wherever it finds a weak spot. The more you cover up, the more time men are going to devote to trying to figure out what's underneath all that fabric.
Sex is a powerfully disruptive force, and I don't think that any society can survive long without finding ways to control both sex, and its consequences. But I don't think that you can argue that there is some platonically ideal way to do so; that the set of standards you've stumbled upon is best. I certainly don't think that you can argue that you've managed to remove it entirely.
The only problem with Doug Turnbull is that he doesn't post often enough. Well, here's an excellent piece deconstructing another simplistic type of anti-war argument.
Incidentally, Jim Henley is ribbing me about the "simplistic terms of a morality play" line in this post. Well, I never gloried in being simplistic as some Republicans did, but I also think that we're referring to two different things. A situation may be complex, and it may require sophisticated analysis, but that doesn't imply that the answer is also complex. In this case, I think it is valuable to make complex analysis, but that doesn't mean we're going to get a sophisticated answer. Ultimately, we're going to do one of three fairly simple things:
We're going to invade, or institute an inspections regime so thorough that it will constitute a military invasion.
We're going to stay with variations on the status quo: ineffective inspections, limited by the most of the same qualifications that made them ineffective last round, and sanctions.
We're going to pull back to the kind of mild interference-running we use on Iran.
Opponents will say I'm sneaky to load working inspections in there with the invasion. Well, right now that's where the UN is putting them -- off the table, to be achieved only if we bully them into it. And I've written before that a regime that would really work would involve thousands and thousands of soldiers there to support massive simultaneous inspection, and prevent the shell games and the petty degrading of our capabilities that Saddaam used so successfully last time around. And that many troops in-country will render Saddaam unable to engage in the kind of brutal repression of his people that keeps him in power. Which means he's not going to go for it. So in my mind, it's in that group. But fine, take it out; make it four. None of these are complex solutions. They are, basically: use overwhelming force to get what we want; do nothing; or give up. The kind of elegant diplomatic solutions we all wish would solve this problem only work when there are complex baskets of things that the various parties want. We want, basically, one thing: Saddaam never, ever gets WMD. This is inconsistent with Saddaam's goals, which are: continue breathing, stay in power, increase that power. He sees WMD as crucial to at least 2 of those goals. There's no horse-trading, no brilliant orchestration of competing interests to reveal a previously unthought of solution, that is going to reconcile those sets of goals. I mean, I guess we could offer to invade Iran for him if he gives up his WMD, but isn't that Sending the Wrong Message to the Children?
Vedrine was complaining that the US was seeking simplistic answers. My problem with the anti-war crowd isn't that their answers are simple; it's that their arguments are.
Excellent article by William Saletan on the differing views of human nature that animate Bush's foreign policy vs. Gore's:
The party of good will, led by Gore, believes that the behavior of foreign peoples and governments toward the United States is driven by whether they like us. If we're nice to them, they'll be nice to us. If we're mean to them, they'll be mean to us. "It is impossible to succeed against terrorism unless we have secured the continuing, sustained cooperation of many nations," Gore asserted. By angering these nations, he argued, a unilateral American attack on Iraq would jeopardize that cooperation.
Believers in good will tend to talk about foreign peoples and leaders the way you talk about friends, colleagues, or neighbors. Other nations will be friendly to us if we treat them as "equals," said Gore, but Bush treats them with "disdain." Instead of being "calmed down," they're suffering "apprehensions" about us. As Gore sees it, after Sept. 11, 2001, "We had an enormous reservoir of good will and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety" about American adventurism. "Look at the entire German election campaign," said Gore. "It revealed a profound and troubling change in the attitude of the German electorate toward the United States."
The party of fear, led by Bush, takes a different view. It believes that the behavior of foreign peoples and governments toward the United States is driven, as President Reagan put it, not by whether they like us, but by whether they respect us. Terrorists don't think the way your friends or colleagues do. They're "a bunch of killers," Bush declared Monday. As for our allies and potential allies, they respond more to forcefulness than to pleading. Lead, and they'll follow. Punish an upstart, and they'll fall in line. "Either you're with us or you're with the enemy," said Bush. It's "necessary to send a message to friend and foe alike that we're plenty tough, if you rouse this country." The Germans don't like us? Screw 'em. A few good slaps, and they'll come around.
I don't know if I buy the idea that this is actually what's animating their foreign policy, though I think the fundamental distinction is sound. Bush obviously draws starker rhetorical lines than he does in practice. And while I think that the Clinton administration was, disastrously, more interested in building up goodwill with Europe than in deterring nations who took restraint and amity as a sign of weakness, they did after all send troops a number of places. But rhetorically, this is certainly where they've positioned themselves.
So why do I think that Bush's view is the nearer correct?
I don't, globally. I don't think that we need to invade China to gain advantage in the region; we'll do far better trading with them. I don't think we need to arm up in Europe to ensure that the Belgian Menace is contained. But I do think that in the case of Iraq, the stick is more appropriate than the carrot. Why?
The kind of regime we're dealing with. It isn't that it's a dictatorship; so is China, or near enough. It isn't even that he's crazy; so are half the leaders in teh world, so far as I can tell, and we all seem to get by. It's that on international terms, the carrot must be predicated on an exchange of value. We give countries aid because we hope it will make them rich and they'll invent or produce stuff we want, and we'll all get richer selling stuff to each other. We trade with countries because it makes us both better off. We enter into alliances because they make both nations more secure.
Iraq has nothing to offer. Oil, of course. But the oil doesn't really seem to improve things in the Middle East. And the money we give him to buy oil buys the arms with which he threatens his neighbors, and the bounties he pays the families of suicide bombers.
Aid might alleviate some poverty at the margins, but only at the expense of sending an immense amount of money into Saddaam's personal coffers. Giving aid to dictators like him is a net destruction of value.
He might, in exchange, give up his territorial and munitions ambitions. But he isn't interested in that sort of exchange. He's interested in the sort of exchange where we give him stuff, and he pretends to give up his nasties until we get tired of listening to France whine.
The Iraqi economy is not so constituted as to develop the kind of mutual ties with the rest of the world that foster the goodwill approach. When they trade with us, it doesn't make them a prosperous nation with a broad middle class; it makes them Zimbabwe with mineral deposits. It doesn't have to be this way; there's nothing intrinsic to the Arab soul that makes this so. But it is this way currently, and until we get rid of the corrupt system that suppresses economic development, there is no way to develop the economic interdependance that makes military threat less necessary.
Can someone please explain to me what this argument that the war in Iraq will distract us from Al Qaeda is supposed to mean? What resources are we using for the hunt for Al Qaeda that will be diverted to Iraq?
And how come 90% of the people I see making this argument were arguing a year ago that we shouldn't go after Al Qaeda, at least not in any way that would actually threaten the ongoing health of OBL et. al.?
I've been having an ongoing conversation for the past couple of weeks that started in the Philadelphia Art Museum. The initial exchange was between a friend of mine, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine, about American morality.
"Americans are too black and white about everything", she said. "If you grow up in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, you see shades of gray." She was talking about cheating the government, pulling small fast ones on corporations, that sort of thing. Americans are too rigid about their ethics, was the upshot; it makes them dangerously inflexible.
And she's right. We are hyper-rigid about our ethics. But I admire the hyper-rigidity. My answer to her was that, while I am not under the impression that I could have sustained an American style ethics system under, say, Soviet Russia, nonetheless, I think it is superior to the system in use in most of the world, which I would sum up as: one set of morals for "us" (family, friends) and another set of morals for "them".
Now, of course, America does not practice this ideal perfectly. But in other parts of the world, it's not even an ideal. There are large groups of people who do not consider it "wrong" in a moral sense to kill or cheat people outside the clan. It may have unpleasant repercussions, but it's not immoral. I, on the other hand, was marched five blocks back to the store I stole the tootsie roll from to hand it back to the merchant with a tearful apology. And I know I'm not the only one this happened to.
Americans, as a group, embrace the ideal that there is one contiguous set of morals for everyone. It's not okay to steal from your employer, not even to give it to your cousin who really needs it. It's not okay to attack, rape or kill people even if they're not related to you. These things do happen, but they're not widely accepted as the norm. That's huge. That's what makes America work.
Really, a remarkable number of people don't cheat on their taxes, steal when they can, fiddle their expense reports, divide themselves into ethnic interest groups, or violate, in a hundred different ways, the trust our society places in them, which in other countries is available only to family members. It's an idea that's unique, I think, to Western Europe, and I think that the Puritannical values, for which we're everywhere derided, are it's purest form. And I think that that is what makes America so successful. This is what Ralph Peters meant when he said that the clan or extended family as the basic social/political unit is the kiss of death to becoming an economic superstar. A clear set of values, and the notion that those values apply to everyone, is a key part of the "Operating System" on which capitalism has to be installed.
But what about Asia, I was asked. Well, we eradicated those notions in Japan, and until recently, Britain controlled the operating environment in Hong Kong. And lo, Japan and Hong Kong are the only countries with high rates of Total Factor Productivity growth. I'll explain that concept another time; the important point is that while Japan has massively increased the productivity of its inputs (labor and capital), other Asian "miracles" have dismal growth in this key indicator. They haven't increased the productivity of their resources; they've just raised the inputs, through extremely high rates of forced savings. As their economies mature, the return on investment will decline, and the miracle will start to look mighty soggy.
That's why the relativist morality of the sixties radicals was so destructive to the inner cities. Martin Luther King was the standard bearer of middle class blacks who wanted to live with dignity. He was standing against a racialism that hurt the interests of everyone who practiced it. After Malcolm X, however, it was Us against Them, and as usual, it was Us who got hurt. You do not build a stable middle-class environment when the leaders are telling everyone that it's okay to assault, batter, rob, or kill, as long as you do it to "them" -- and isn't that what Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are saying when they take the side of the thugs in their community against "The Man? Not that they invented this practice; my ancestors were pretty good at it themselves, and you'll note how long it took them to get out of the ghetto.
That sounds awfully paternalistic, doesn't it? Of course, it's a two way street, just as it was with the Irish; they closed in on themselves because the WASPs closed them out. But the sad thing is, it doesn't matter. You can't build a middle class society -- stable, orderly, decent, with a modicum of happiness thrown in for the majority of folks -- without those values. The Nation of Islam understands this; that's why they enforce those values within the larger community, which allows them to build a pretty high-functioning little economic community. That's why no amount of tax breaks will revitalize a high crime area; nor any amount of foreign aid build a capitalist miracle out of a society still mired in tribal wars.
So the next time someone tells you that Americans are too black and white, just remember to thank your lucky stars that it's so.
Update I've been accused of saying that blacks are immoral. No, no, no. That's not what I meant at all. I was speaking on the community level, to a breakdown of reciprocal morality. And I was speaking of the inner cities. I used Malcolm X and Martin Luther King because they're widely known; parallel processes occurred in all sorts of inner cities, including white areas. Blacks in the middle class behave pretty much like everyone else in the middle class. Poor whites in high-crime communities behave pretty much like everyone else in a high-crime area where community norm enforcement has broken down -- "Screw you, I want mine." The point about Malcom X was not that he was angry; it was that his separatist tendencies paved the way for the Black Panthers, MOVE, and other groups who, first of all, saw the poor and criminals as their target audience, and second of all, combined their ideology with the radical poverty ideology of the era that said it wasn't wrong to steal, or engage in violence, as long as it was against those richer than you, or those outside your race.
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were born in that era. They make excuses for egregious black criminals -- but only those whose crimes are committed on whites. Sharpton not only comes within a hair's breadth of encouraging lynching, as he did with the stores in Harlem, or the motorist who accidentally killed a little black girl; he then refuses to condemn those who commit them. Both Jackson and Sharpton excused the Reginald Denny mob on the basis of race. Message: go ahead, attack people. Steal from merchants. Just not your own kind. Obviously, this message isn't played to the middle class, though it probably touches a sense of angry justice in some. It's aimed at the poor and disaffected, who form the political base of inner city leaders.
It's not just reprehensible; it's a major barrier to building a sustainable community. The inner cities have few mechanisms for capital formation; they need outside entrepreneurs to come in and provide jobs, services, and a critical mass of commerce into which local entrepreneurs can grow.
But this has nothing to do with the majority of blacks who are in the middle class, any more than a riot in South Boston has to do with me. Nor is it somehow characteristic of the black underclass. It happened in Russia. It happens in most countries in most parts of the world. After all, it was my ancestors, the Irish, who invented the race riot in America; it was they who perfected an interlocking system of family obligations that had its fullest flower in the corruption of Richard Daley. All oppressed minorities are tempted to it, understandably. In many places, the majority does it. I'm just saying that you can't build a middle class community until you abandon it.
