Burma and International Relations

First Lady Laura Bush published a Wall Street Journal commentary Wednesday denouncing the Burmese junta's gross human rights violations against the country's pro-democracy forces:

The generals' reign of fear has subdued the protests - for now. But while the streets of Burma may be eerily quiet, the hearts of the Burmese people are not: 2007 is not 1988, when the regime's last major anti-democracy crackdown killed 3,000 and left the junta intact. Today, people everywhere know about the regime's atrocities. They are disgusted by the junta's abuses of human rights. This swelling outrage presents the generals with an urgent choice: Be part of Burma's peaceful transition to democracy, or get out of the way for a government of the Burmese people's choosing.

Whatever last shred of legitimacy the junta had among its own citizens has vanished. The regime's stranglehold on information is slipping; thanks to new technologies, people throughout Burma know about the junta's assaults. The public mood is said to be "a mixture of fear, depression, hopelessness, and seething anger." According to reports from Rangoon, "The regime's heavy-handed tactics against the revered clergy and peaceful demonstrators have turned many of the politically neutral in favor of the recent demonstrators."

Read the whole thing. The First Lady argues that the weight of moral legitimacy rests with the monks, the political opposition, and the people:

The regime's position grows weaker by the day. The generals' choice is clear: The time for a free Burma is now.

For more background on the crisis in Burma, and the global context shaping the international community's push to force democratic change on Burma's authoritarian regime, see "Asia's Forgotten Crisis," from the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. Here's a snippet:

After General Than Shwe became chair of the junta in 1992, repression grew more brazen. Thousands of democracy activists and ordinary citizens have been sent to prison, and Suu Kyi has been repeatedly confined to house arrest, where she remains today. Since 1996, when the Burmese army launched its "four cuts" strategy against armed rebels -- an effort to cut off their access to food, funds, intelligence, and recruits among the population - 2,500 villages have been destroyed and over one million people, mostly Karen and Shan minorities, have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands live in hiding or in open exile in Bangladesh, India, China, Thailand, and Malaysia. In 2004, the reformist prime minister Khin Nyunt was arrested. Two years ago, Than Shwe even moved the seat of government from Rangoon (which the junta calls Yangon), the traditional capital, to Pyinmana, a small logging town some 250 miles north -- reportedly on the advice of a soothsayer and for fear of possible U.S. air raids. And this past summer, the government cracked down brutally on scores of Burmese citizens who had taken to the streets to protest state-ordered hikes in fuel prices.

Burma's neighbors are struggling to respond to the spillover effects of worsening living conditions in the country. The narcotics trade, human trafficking, and HIV/AIDS are all spreading through Southeast Asia thanks in part to Burmese drug traffickers who regularly distribute heroin with HIV-tainted needles in China, India, and Thailand. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Burma accounts for 80 percent of all heroin produced in Southeast Asia, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has drawn a direct connection between the drug routes running from Burma and the marked increase in HIV/AIDS in the border regions of neighboring countries. Perversely, the SPDC has been playing on its neighbors' concerns over the drugs, disease, and instability that Burma generates to blackmail them into providing it with political, economic, and even military assistance.

Worse, the SPDC [State Peace and Development Council] appears to have been taking an even more threatening turn recently. Western intelligence officials have suspected for several years that the regime has had an interest in following the model of North Korea and achieving military autarky by developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Last spring, the junta normalized relations and initiated conventional weapons trade with North Korea in violation of UN sanctions against Pyongyang. And despite Burma's ample reserves of oil and gas, it signed an agreement with Russia to develop what it says will be peaceful nuclear capabilities. For these reasons, despite urgent problems elsewhere in the world, all responsible members of the international community should be concerned about the course Burma is taking.

The article suggests a change in approach to Burma, shifting to greater engagement with the regime at the highest levels, more forcefully pushing the junta toward political reform and human rights protection, while at the same time toughening the international sanctions regime impelling the junta toward democratic reforms.

But check out the guys at Maggie's Farm, who place the crisis in Burma in the context of Al Gore's Nobel Prize win.

Obama, Edwards Hammer Clinton on Iran Vote

The Los Angeles Times reports that two top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have hammered rival candidate Hillary Clinton for her recent vote to categorize Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization:

Five years after she voted to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is coming under attack from rivals in the presidential race for a recent vote that they say could bring the nation closer to war with Iran.

On Thursday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) added his voice to the criticism, comparing Clinton's vote on the measure to the "blank check" that he said she gave President Bush to wage war against Iraq.

Last month, Clinton joined a majority of senators in voting for a resolution that labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a government-sponsored military organization, a terrorist group. Obama said Bush could use the measure to justify a military strike against Iran.

Efforts by Obama and fellow Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to highlight Clinton's Iran vote come as the two are struggling to break her campaign momentum by reviving questions about her 2002 vote authorizing U.S. force in Iraq. Clinton has refused to call that vote a mistake.

"They've been trying, and they haven't found a way that works," said Donald F. Kettl, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "My sense is that she's done a pretty masterful and smooth job in making the transition she needed to make from the original vote to the position she has now, which is more strongly antiwar." Clinton says that as president, she would immediately start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, and that her goal would be to have them all out by the end of her first term.

Read the whole thing. Since it's not especially likely that the U.S. will be going to war with Iran any time soon, Clinton's vote was actually a safe bet. But by ripping into Clinton - far and away the frontrunner in the Democratic field - Obama and Edwards are hoping to chip away at her inevitability.

What I find interesting is Clinton's ability to have her cake and eat it too. With this vote she can claim firmness toward toward Iran, but should hard-left criticism kick up, she'd be safe enough to deny the terrorist-labeling legislation indicated increasing U.S. bellicosity.

Indeed, the vote illustrates Clinton's essential waffling on the issues, saying or doing whatever's best to fit the political circumstances of the moment. A week or two back, the Times ran a story on Hillary's squishiness, "Clinton's 2008 Lead is Clear, Though Her Policies Often Aren't." Over the course of this year, many voters have become frankly flummoxed over Hillary's flexibility, which the article calls "nuance." In other words, Clinton's so ambiguous, her White House bid's getting to be this year's "Where's the Beef" campaign:

After 10 months of campaigning, Clinton has built an image among Democratic voters as a skilled and experienced leader, propelling her to the top of the opinion polls. But her policy positions are sometimes unclear. In some cases, Clinton has made statements on the campaign trail or cast votes as a senator that put her on different sides of the same issue. At times she has avoided specifics, leaving her options open.
Clinton says that Social Security is in jeopardy. But pressed in a recent debate on how to shore up the system's shaky finances, Clinton refused to offer any remedy. "I don't think I should be negotiating about what I would do as president," she said. "You know, I want to see what other people come to the table with."

On free trade -- a top-tier issue for labor unions and core Democrats -- her position is murky. Clinton has voted for at least three tariff-lowering trade deals, but voted against one. Appearing before free-trade supporters, she has praised the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement, which is loathed by many unions. But speaking to a union audience as a presidential candidate, Clinton said NAFTA hurt workers.

To counter criticism that she is beholden to special interests, Clinton has cited her work on a bill signed in 2005 overhauling bankruptcy laws. But others say that work is an example of something else: straddling an issue. She opposed the bill as first lady, voted for a later version as senator, then switched again to oppose it before a family crisis kept her from voting on the final bill.

Some people watching Clinton believe she owes the voters more answers....

Clinton's approach to the war is one issue where she has sent a nuanced signal.

"Are you ready to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home?" she called to the audience outside the New Hampshire statehouse over Labor Day weekend. A sure-fire applause line at Democratic rallies, Clinton works it into many of her speeches.

The New Hampshire crowd roared.

Later in her remarks, Clinton added that "we should end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home safely and responsibly and as soon as possible." But she did not lay out how much time it might take to withdraw "safely and responsibly." Nor did she mention something she had said in a debate one month earlier: that she thinks the U.S. would need to retain military forces to keep terrorists "on the run" in Iraq.

Bob Williams, 65, of Chichester, N.H., came out to the statehouse for Clinton's address. Asked whether he came away with an idea of when a full troop withdrawal might happen if she were president, Williams said: "I'm not sure." He later said he had heard little from Clinton in the way of "specific plans or commitments" for extracting the U.S. from Iraq.

There you have it!

Hardly anyone can figure out what Hillary's all about, at least in terms of policies. Politically, it's no surprise that she's all about power - that is, about winning-without-principle. After 2000, she made a reputation for herself as an accommodating centrist in the Senate. Her Iraq vote in 2002 was the right thing to do. Now, though, worried about the hard-left's grip on the party, and mindful of the electorate's pull to the center in the general election, Hillary satisfies herself with vapid evasions on the truly important question facing the voters in this campaign.

What Next for Conservatives?

How can conservatives move forward, in this age of apparent liberal ascendancy? That issue was addressed today by Yuval Levin and Peter Wehner in an essay over at the New York Sun:

Conservatives today are in a funk. The strains of governing, the challenges of war, and the frustration of an unsuccessful mid-term election have contributed to unease and unhappiness. But deeper than these issues is an intellectual fatigue and uncertainty about where the attention of the conservative movement now should be directed.

What domestic issues can unite and motivate conservatives to great political exertions, and can win the allegiance of the public?

In this respect, the right is partially a victim of its own successes. If 25 years ago you had asked an American conservative to name the preeminent domestic policy challenges of the day, you probably would have gotten back, along with a general worry about cultural decline, some combination of welfare, taxes, and crime.

Few conservatives today would name any of these three as the foremost problems, and even on the cultural front they could point to some advances. This is due, in large part, to a series of conservative successes that have transformed American politics and made conservative theories of economics, law enforcement, and welfare the accepted wisdom. Success has not been complete in any of these areas, of course, but the struggle over first principles, over which way to go in general, has been won.

Today the left — which for decades fought vigorously on all three fronts — offers scant opposition on any of them. No leading Democrats are arguing that we undo conservative achievements on welfare and crime. And even on taxes, which liberals want to increase, no Democrats are arguing that we return to the days when the top rate of taxation was 70%.

But what now? On what issues can conservative principles point to popular reforms today? The most prominent domestic policy concerns of the day would seem, at first glance, to favor the left. Health care, income inequality, and the environment, among other issues, have long been identified with American liberals, and conservatives have been uncomfortable taking them up.

But the notion that the left owns these issues is not a fact inherent in the problems themselves; rather, it is a failure of conservative imagination. In fact, it is precisely these kinds of issues that should now be front and center on the conservative agenda, not only because the public cares about them, but also because the left is far more vulnerable on them than it seems. Conservatives should fight precisely on what is perceived to be liberal turf, as they have done successfully before.

The authors argue that the success of the 1996 welfare reform initiative demonstrates how conservative ideas provide powerful alternatives to statist policies of top-down, bureaucratic management. With health care emerging as one of the great new items on the agenda, conservative ideas on invigorating markets and increasing access should be driving the debate.

This is also the case with economic inequality. Levin and Wehner - citing Arthur Brooks' research on the superior compassion inherent in conservative values - suggest that the debate on equality needs to shift toward a focus on upward mobility:

The problem with the gap between the rich and the poor, after all, is not that the rich are rich, but that the poor are poor. The solution, then, is not best understood through the prism of economic equality — a meaningless notion, good only for fanning envy and disillusion — but through the prism of economic mobility.

The key steps toward mobility have long been clear: school, work, and marriage. Conservatives know how to make that case and translate it into policy. They must do so, and again make clear the basic difference between their notion and the left's notion of freedom and the role of government.

I would add to this that such programs should also reach out to minority communities, specifically African-Americans and Hispanic Americans (economic programs with universal appeal, those seeking to lift all groups, will generate greater public support, and they'll benefit conservatives politically). The conservative emphasis on the importance of family on the life chances of the young is more vital than ever, especially when the headlines repeatedly report the crime, violence, poverty, and social disorganization of inner-city communities.

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Former Vice President Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to build and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made global warming. The award will be shared equally with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Washington Post has the story (see also Memeorandum):

Former Vice President Al Gore Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today, along with a United Nations panel that monitors climate change, for their work educating the world about global warming and advocating for political action to control it.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee characterized Gore as "the single individual who has done most" to convince world governments and leaders that climate change is real, is caused by human activity, and poses a grave threat.

Gore has focused on the issue through books, promotional events and his Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a joint project between the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization, has been monitoring evidence of climate change and possible solutions since 1988.

The science showcased by the panel and Gore's advocacy have helped to "build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change," the committee said.

"Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced clear scientific support."

As with last year's award to Bangladeshi banker Mohammad Yunus, whose pioneering use of small loans to the very poor contributes to the stability of developing nations, this year's prize focused on an issue not directly related to war and peace, but seen as critical to maintaining social stability.

The panel said that global warming "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Highlighting those risks, and the role people play in both creating and potentially mitigating them, has defined public life for Gore since he lost the closely fought 2000 presidential election to President Bush.

From that difficult race, in which he won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in a case ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, he emerged as a controversial figure -- ridiculed by opponents as an environmental extremist, and hailed by supporters as "the Gore-acle" for his foresight on issues like the Internet and climate change.

In a statement, Gore, 59, said he was honored to receive the prize. He said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit he chairs that works to educate the public about climate change and mobilize global support for action.

The article also notes that Gore's Nobel win is generating intense speculation that he'll enter the 2008 presidential race. Gore dismissed the notion, as well he should. It's very late in the season, and as Gore has not been involved in the normal pre-primary activites - especially fundraising - a late entry into the race would be unlikely to knock Hillary Clinton from her frontrunner status (see also The Politic and Dan Balz).

This presidential speculation's fascinating. It's normally the case that a former president (and not a presidential loser) wins the Nobel, like Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002 for his administration's diplomatic legacy, and his work for Habitat for Humanity. (Carter's humanitarianism is arguably more deserving of the prize, not being bogged down in the same kind to pseudo-scientific controversy as Gore's "Inconvenient Truth".)

I'm sure there'll be loads of commentary on this over the weekend, so I'll just note that the political motivations of the Nobel Committee have long been suspect.

UPDATE: Damian Thompson at London's Daily Telegraph asks, "What has Al Gore done for world peace?":

Climate change is a threat to the environment, not to "peace" and international order. The prize has gone to some sleazy recipients in the past, but at least you can make a case that their actions staved off bloodshed.

Rollback: An Update on School Desegregation Efforts

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an update on the politics of school desegration efforts across the country. It turns out that in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in June striking down voluntary desegration orders in Seattle and Louisville, a number of localities around the country have continued the use of school assignments plans in an effort to foster greater integration and more equal educational outcomes:

Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I "just don't feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school," he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Mr. Keating says his effort wouldn't have "much of a standing."

Five decades ago, federal courts began forcing reluctant districts to use race-based assignments to integrate schools. But in June, a bitterly divided Supreme Court reversed course, concluding that two race-based enrollment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle were unconstitutional. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Chief Justice John Roberts declared.

Now, in an era when schools nationwide are becoming increasingly segregated, the ruling is affecting local school districts in ways large and small. Some districts are sidestepping the ruling by replacing measurements of race with household income. But many others, such as Milton, are adjusting their programs in the face of opposition that's been emboldened by the Supreme Court decision.

Read the whole thing.

I'll be writing more on the politics of race here at American Power. In particular, at some point I'll lay out in some detail the neoconservative position on the black freedom struggle and racial progess.

I will say for now though that, in one sense, utlimately, racial integration is the key to black upward mobility. Here my position reflects that of the NAACP's judicial protest strategy of the 20th century that sought to break down the old Jim Crow system of American racial apartheid.

Traditionally, civil rights activists held that historically separate facilities for the races were inherenty unequal, and in addition, many argued that integrating blacks into mainstream Anglo-White institutions would facilitate preparation for success in the dominant socio-economic system with its white-majority norms of attainment. Yet, in the post-civil rights era, we no longer have legally-imposed segregation of the races. To the extent we could describe today's racial separation as "segregation," we should think in terms of de facto circumstances leading to the concentration of minorities in particular residential areas (but see Abigail Thernstrom on the racial grievance industry's interest in pepetuating claims of "racial segregation" as a means to extract more public funding for schools in the post-forced busing era).

So, while I still think the goal of integrating the races is laudible - at least in the abstract sense of equalizing expectations across groups - there's really little justification for school assignment plans other than to promote "diversity" through racial balancing policies. Indeed, today's mandatory racial balancing plans in fact represent the exact opposite of the goal of the historic civil rights movement (the elimination of state-sponsored racial discrimination). The Supreme Court advanced this notion in its June ruling:

Although the push to integrate public schools is often associated with the civil-rights movement, these days many school administrators want to integrate schools for a more practical reason: to raise test scores. Studies show black and other minority students tend to perform better academically when they learn alongside white classmates. Districts face the threat of losing government funds if school test scores fail to meet a certain threshold.

But the Supreme Court's June ruling handed opponents powerful ammunition, and some experts say the ruling could further accelerate the resegregation of America's schools. While the famous 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education concluded that racially segregated schools are "inherently unequal," a string of federal court decisions in the 1990s curbed desegregation plans. In 2004, 73% of black students nationwide attended schools where minorities were the majority, compared with 66% in 1991, according to the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In 2000, a group of parents sued the Seattle school district because their white children were denied admission into certain popular schools. Officials at those schools had imposed a racial quota to reflect the district's racial composition. Three years later, a group of white parents sued the Louisville school district for basing admissions on a plan that aimed to maintain black enrollment at any school between 15 percent and 50 percent.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that in both cases -- Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Crystal D. Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education -- the student-assignment systems were in violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, which says that "No state shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The statistics on racial imbalance are very interesting, as such numbers will likely reflect the dynamics of racial diversity in America's schools in the future. Rather than focusing on continuing the disruptive practices of school racial balancing programs, blacks need to look within, to the level of the black family, and begin to reverse the cultural aversion to educational success that's holding back members of the race.

Newfound Optimism in Iraq

Victor Davis Hanson just returned from a week in Iraq. He toured suburban areas outside of cities such as Baqubah, Ramadi, and Taji, and reports a newfound optimism among the citizens there. Especially noteworthy has been the tremendous increase in the willingness of everday Iraqis to assist American forces in hunting down and eliminating the terrorists in their midst:

Why the change?

Officers offered a number of theories. The surge of American troops, and Gen. David Petraeus’s risky tactics of going after the terrorists within their enclaves, have put al Qaeda on the run. Likewise, in the past four years, the U.S. military has killed thousands of these terrorists and depleted their ranks.

Sunnis — angry over their loss of power to the historically discriminated-against Shiites — discovered their al Qaeda allies to be worse than their Shiite rivals. We forget that jihadists drew in not merely religious fanatics but also repulsive common criminals and psychopaths who extort, butcher, and mutilate innocents.

Iraqis of all tribes and sects are also growing tired of the nihilistic violence that is squandering the opportunity for something better than Saddam’s rule. The astronomical spike in oil prices has resulted in windfall profits of billions of dollars for the Iraqi government — and with it the realization that Iraq could someday become a wealthy advanced state.

Iraqis told me that their widely held fear that Americans are going to leave soon has galvanized Sunnis to finally step up to secure their country or face even worse chaos in our absence.

The result is that ordinary Iraqis are increasingly willing to participate in local government and civil defense. Such popular engagement from the bottom up offers more hope than the old 2003 idea that a democratically elected government could simply mandate reform top down from their enclaves in the Green Zone.

So we are at yet another turning point in the constantly changing saga of Iraq. On this recent trip to Iraq, I rode on highways that just a few months ago were nearly impossible to navigate without being blown up by improvised explosive devices. Soldiers now train Iraqi security forces as often as they fight terrorists.

But there is also a new sense of urgency on the part of the military that Iraqis must seize this new opportunity before it fades. Unless the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government steps up to reconcile with the Sunni provinces and begins funding social services, the insurgency will only rekindle.

The Iraqi army must be freed up to police its porous borders with Iran and Syria. That’s impossible without a national police force inside Iraq’s cities that is both competent and law-abiding. So far the police are not quite either.

The Shiite community must appreciate that it has won the political struggle and finally achieved political power commensurate with its numbers. This majority must now take on Shiite death squads and their sympathizers inside the Iraqi government. Otherwise, an intolerant Shiite-run Iraq will either become a pawn of Iran or fight a perpetual war with the country’s Sunni provinces.

Meanwhile, the American military, after four years of hard fighting in Iraq, is strained, its equipment wearing out. America’s finest citizens, fighting for an idealistic cause that has still not been well explained to the American people, continue to be killed by horrific murderers.

If the unexpectedly good news about the surge has given Gen. Petraeus another six months to improve further the situation, the political debate at home has changed only from “Get out now!” to “Victory still isn’t worth the cost in blood and treasure.”

Lost in all this confusion over Iraq is the fact that about 160,000 gifted American soldiers are trying to help rebuild an entire civilization socially, politically and economically — and defeat killers in their midst who will murder far beyond Iraq if not stopped.

It is indeed amazing how much things have changed since the end of last year. I suggested last November that if we didn't see improvement on the ground within a year, I would come out forcefully in favor of the drawdown option. Yet throughout this period I've never wavered in my support for the deployment, and for good reason.

Strategic Interests and American Maritime Power

Seth Cropsey, over at the Weekly Standard, argues that the United States cannot ignore its strategic interests as the world's leading maritime power:

CHINA HAS BEEN expanding the size of its naval fleet for the same length of time--about 25 years--that the U.S. has been decreasing its Navy. A Congressional Quarterly article warned ominously that China will possess nearly twice as many submarines as the U.S. in 2010, and is likely to surpass the total size of the U.S. fleet five years later--if we do nothing.

In the two years since that article appeared China has continued its decades long annual double-digit defense budget increases: we have done nothing. Notwithstanding several efforts over the past decade to stabilize the diminishing size of the U.S. Navy, the current fleet of 274 combat ships is the same size as it was on the eve of World War I. Even if shipbuilding can be sustained at 7 vessels per year, we will eventually possess a fleet whose numbers equal those achieved just after the Russo-Japanese War. The presidential debates that began half a year ago have considered expensive haircuts and federal support for the renovation of Soldier Field in Chicago. But the fact that the U.S. Navy today is less than half the size it was during the Reagan administration continues to escape serious, sustained attention at the national level.

There are lonely exceptions. The redoubtable House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, from Missouri, a state with no oceanic coast, has called current fleet numbers "shocking." Retired Army general, Barry McCaffrey, told Congress this past spring that "the monthly burn rate of $9 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan has caused us to inadequately fund the modernization of the U.S. Air Force and Navy If this continues," he said, "we will be in terrible trouble in the coming decades when the Peoples Republic of China emerges as a global military power--which we will then face in the Pacific with inadequate deterrence."

Unfortunately, no one is listening. The long descent that our naval forces find themselves in today continues despite China's naval growth, its emphasis on modernization and training, its effort to develop a system that can wield ballistic missiles against ships at sea, and Beijing's overall objective of building a force that can deny the U.S. Navy access to the Western Pacific. More important, our national policy is blind to the element of the strategic equation that does not change, the fact that the United States is surrounded by oceans, that the future of the world's growing commerce depends on safe transit through the seas, and that one of the most fundamental measures of national power remains the strength of a nation's navy.

Cropsey's especially good at linking the balance of naval power to the fight against rogue nations and transnational terrorism:

At some point the U.S. will face the choice of maintaining naval supremacy or yielding it to others. Because decades are needed to build, train, and deploy powerful naval forces, climbing back after falling off strategically is a long process. In fact it is an historically unprecedented feat--one that would require the passive benignity of another power that had surpassed ours.

There is no inevitability to our enmity with China, but we strongly prejudice the case against a secure and balanced East Asia by encouraging a serious power vacuum in the form of our departure as the region's first naval power. Russian saber-rattling can be dismissed today. But the Russians remain an ambitious people with a yearning for the international recognition they once enjoyed. India strives to build a naval force to control the ocean bearing its name, the one through which much of the world's oil is transported. It is only a question of time until jihadists attempt to use the seas as a more effective alternative to the air routes whose assault has now been complicated by threatened nations' measures. The flexibility of powerful, wide-ranging naval forces offers protection for the civilized world against weapons of mass destruction in the hands of fanatics armed with long-range missiles. In each case, a strong Navy protects U.S. maritime interests which are now virtually inseparable from the broadest national security interests. The sum of these interests today, and all the more so in the future, amounts to this nation's future as the world's great power.

This is an important warning, although Cropsey's discussion of China focuses too much a raw measues of comparative naval tonnage, rather than the balance of technological sophistication. For some perspective, check out Barry Posen's pathbreaking article on America's enduring strategic primacy in the air, land, sea, and space: "The Command of the Commons." Posen argues that "Unipolarity and U.S. hegemony will be around for some time."

Also, on the unfavorable trends in China's balance of demographic power relative to the United States, see Mark Haas, "A Geriatric Peace? The Future of U.S. Power in a World of Aging Populations."

Fred Thompson and the GOP Debate

I had lecture from 4:00 to 7:00pm last night, so I missed the GOP debate from Dearborn, Michigan. The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney sparred over their tax-and-spending records as Republican presidential candidates met for their latest debate -- joined for the first time by former Sen. Fred Thompson.

Meeting in a troubled manufacturing state to focus largely on economic issues, the nine candidates agreed on much -- including that their party has been guilty of overspending in recent years. The debate was sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and MSNBC.

But several reflected skepticism about free trade that is gaining hold in both political parties. The others, while professedly free-traders, acknowledged widespread job losses as a consequence of globalism and a public sense that trading partners, particularly China, are taking advantage of the U.S.

Mr. Thompson seemed halting at first but overall provided more-concise answers than he has on the campaign trail. He called for reining in Social Security benefits over time, and, while supporting free trade, several times chastised China for devaluing its currency to increase its exports.

Thompson aides sought to lower expectations beforehand, but the former actor had already done so. Though many demoralized conservatives had hoped he would fill a perceived void in the Republican field, Mr. Thompson's low-energy style and gaffes since his entry into the race last month disappointed some would-be supporters.

At one point, Mr. Romney took a dig at Mr. Thompson, who leads him in national polls. "Is this our sixth debate?" Mr. Romney dryly asked the others. Referring to the television show that featured Mr. Thompson, Mr. Romney continued, "This is a lot like 'Law & Order,' senator. It has a huge cast, the series seems to go on forever, and Fred Thompson shows up at the end."

I caught Romney deliver that quip on CNN this morning, while having my cereal. Thompson was shaking his head up and down, snickering a bit, saying "that was pretty good, pretty good."

Thompson was also extremely bullish on the economy:

Ms. Bartiromo:

OK...Senator Thompson, this is your first debate in the election. We welcome you. Mr.

Thompson: Thank you.

Ms. Bartiromo: And we kick off with you.

Mr. Thompson: Thank you.

Ms. Bartiromo: The economy is America's greatest strength. In a recent poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, two-thirds of the American people said that we are either in a recession or headed toward one. Do you agree with that? And, as president, what will you do to ensure economy vibrancy in this country?

Mr. Thompson: I think there is no reason to believe that we're headed for a recession. We're enjoying 22 quarters of successive economic growth that started 2001 and then further in 2003 with the tax cuts that we put in place.

Mr. Thompson: We're enjoying low inflation. We're enjoying low unemployment. The stock market seems to be doing pretty well. I see no reason to believe we're headed for an economic downturn. As far as the economic prosperity of the future is concerned, I think it's a different story. I think if you look at the short term, it's rosy. I think if you look at a 10-year projection, it's rosy.

Ann Althouse live-blogged the debate, and after Thomspon delivered his we have "no reason to believe that we're headed for a recession" remark (gaffe?), she writes: "Oh, Fred, do not do that again."

The full debate transcript is here.

Clarence Thomas and the Power of Black Intellectual Emancipation

John Yoo's got a great piece up today at the Wall Street Journal on the power of Clarence Thomas' constitutional adjudication. Hard-left grievance-mongers attacked Thomas this week upon the release of his new book, My Granfather's Son. Notes Yoo:

Liberals now are girding to insinuate that Justice Thomas is so angry about the personal attacks on him during his confirmation hearings that he must be unfit to sit on the bench.

It's the same old thing: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, upon learning of Thomas' possible elevation to chief justice, called him "an embarrassment":

For years, critics whispered that Justice Thomas was a mere clone of Justice Antonin Scalia, and that he could not think for himself. When speculation ran high that Justice Thomas might rise to chief justice, Sen. Harry Reid called him "an embarrassment" whose "opinions are poorly written." Mr. Reid apparently had not read a Thomas opinion, and his own Senate Web site ended up providing a nice contrast on grammar and writing style with Justice Thomas's fine work....

Critics ignore the unique, powerful intellect that Justice Thomas brings to the court. He is the justice most committed to the principle that the Constitution today means what the Framers thought it meant.

At times, this can cause him to lean liberal. He agrees, for example, that the use of thermal imaging technology by police in the street to scan for marijuana in homes violates the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches. He opposes the court's effort to place caps on punitive damages. He has voted to strike down literally thousands of harsher criminal sentences because they were based on facts found by judges rather than juries, as required by the Bill of Rights. He supports the right of anonymous political speech, and wants advertising and other commercial speech to receive the same rights as political speech.

So was it Justice Thomas's anger, or lack of intellect, that made him rule in favor of the rights of criminals, the press and the plaintiffs bar--one of the Democratic Party's largest financial supporters?

No one, of course, would deny that Justice Thomas has strong conservative views on constitutional law. He would reject much of affirmative action, end constitutional protection for abortion, recognize broad executive powers in wartime and allow religious groups more participation in public life. What he brings to the court as no other justice does is a characteristically American skepticism of social engineering plans promoted by elites--whether in the media, academia or well-heeled lobbies in Washington--and a respect for individual self-reliance and individual choice. He writes not to be praised by professors or pundits, but for the American people.

As his memoir shows, Justice Thomas's views were forged in the crucible of a truly authentic American story. This is a black man with a much greater range of personal experience than most of the upper-class liberals who take potshots at him. A man like this on the court is the very definition of the healthy diversity his detractors pretend to support.

In his dissent from the court's approval of the use of race in law-school admissions, he quoted Frederick Douglass: "If the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!" Justice Thomas observed: "Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators."

In a 1995 race case, Justice Thomas explained without cavil why he thought the government's use of race was wrong. Racial quotas and preferences run directly against the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Affirmative action is "racial paternalism" whose "unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination."

Justice Thomas speaks from personal knowledge when he says: "So-called 'benign' discrimination teaches many that because of chronic and apparently immutable handicaps, minorities cannot compete with them without their patronizing indulgence." He argued that "these programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are 'entitled' to preferences."

By forswearing the role of coalition builder or swing voter--a position happily occupied by Justice Anthony Kennedy--Justice Thomas has used his opinions to highlight how the latest social theories sometimes hurt those they are said to help. Because he both respects grass-roots democracy and knows more about poverty than most people do, he dissented vigorously from the court's 1999 decision to strike down a local law prohibiting loitering in an effort to reduce inner-city gang activity. "Gangs fill the daily lives of many of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens with a terror that the court does not give sufficient consideration, often relegating them to the status of prisoners in their own homes."

Justice Thomas is an admirer of the work of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, both classical liberals. His firsthand experience of poverty, bad schools and crime has led him to favor bottom-up, decentralized solutions for such problems.

He rejects, for example, the massive, judicially run desegregation decrees that have produced school busing and judicially imposed tax hikes. A student of a segregated school himself, Justice Thomas declares that "it never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior."

Yoo concludes by noting that Thomas' memoir - with its awareness of society's injustices and government's limited ability to remedy them - is not one of an angry justice, or political justice, but that of a human justice. I see in Yoo's essay Thomas' powerful sense of black ability and the uplift of black intellectual achievement. The left should be saluting such an agenda.

An Imminent Attack on Iran?

Thomas Joscelyn has an interesting essay up at the Weekly Standard calling out Seymour Hersh for his alarmist reporting the Bush administration's Iran policy. Hersh's most recent article in the New Yorker is one in a line of pieces warning of an imminent U.S. attack on Iran. Joscelyn notes that Hersh's warnings have been wrong (the urgency dates back to early-2006), and thus the tone of this most recent piece ("Shifting Targets") has backed off a bit from the earlier dire tocsins:

IN THE LATEST EDITION of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh returns to one of his favorite themes: The Bush administration is preparing for war with Iran. Well, that is, may be preparing for war with Iran.

Anyone familiar with Hersh's writing these last couple of years knows that he has been fixated on claims from anonymous spooks and foreign policy luminaries concerning the Bush administration's supposed dastardly designs on Iran. His latest piece does not disappoint. Former and anonymous CIA officials opine on the Bush administration's gameplan for attacking Iran. The suddenly once-again-in-demand foreign policy guru Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has never shown any particular proclivity for diagnosing Iran or the Middle East correctly, tells Hersh's readers what he has heard about "limited bombing plans for Iran." And, in a new twist, David Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the UN, tells Hersh that he thought General Petraeus exaggerated the extent of Iran's nefarious activities inside Iraq.

All in all, one is left with the same impression as after having read any of Hersh's previous contributions to the "neoconservatives vs. Iran" genre. Hersh and his sources believe that the Bush administration is hyping the threat from Iran in preparations for a war (of some sort), which will be disastrous for the U.S. and the Middle East.

Perhaps feeling a bit like the boy who cried wolf once too often, however, Hersh takes a half-step back in his latest piece. He still believes "there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning," which he does not really explain. But, Hersh tells us, he "was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the 'execute order' that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued."

Hersh has good reasons for this newfound hesitancy. In April of 2006, he wrote that the Bush administration "has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack." In November 2006, in the wake of the midterm elections, Hersh pondered: "Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?" He found ample reasons to think that Vice President Cheney and his attending neoconservatives would remain undeterred. And then in March of this year, Hersh told his readers that the Bush administration's new strategy for the Middle East "has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran."

So, in Seymour Hersh's world, the war with Iran has been imminent for at least 18 months now.

Joscelyn notes that while Hersh's claims may indeed prove correct, there's a deeper maliciousness infecting Hersh's project:

He is so myopically focused on exposing malfeasance--both real and imagined--on the part of the executive branch that he ignores legitimate concerns about Iran's ongoing role in the terrorists' worldwide war.

This last point is a basic problem among left-wing critics of the administration's foreign relations with Iran: Many lefties evince very little willingness to consider the real stakes involved in preventing Iranian acquisition of nuclear capability. While Iran's nuclear development program is years from maturity, the severity of the growing challenge in not dismissed by analysts. As Colin Dueck and Ray Takeyh noted in their recent article, " Iran’s Nuclear Challenge":

Once Iran completes the necessary infrastructure, from mining to enriching uranium at the suitable weapons-grade level, and masters the engineering skill required to assemble a bomb, it could cross the threshold in a short period of time. All this would depend on the scope and scale of the program and the level of national resources committed to this task. Iran today does have an accelerated program, but not a crash program similar to Pakistan’s in the early 1970s, when the entirety of national energies was mobilized behind the task of constructing a nuclear device. In this context, Iran’s persistent determination to complete the fuel cycle — which it has a right to do under the NPT — is ominous, because doing so would bring the country close to a weapons capability.

Joscelyn's piece goes even further in elucidating the Iranian danger. It turns out that Robert Baer's 2002 book, See No Evil, made a powerful case tying Iranian-backed proxy group Hezbollah to the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Hersh himself endorsed Baer's reporting by writing the introduction to the book, and a Hezbollah/al Qaeda link was corroborated in the investigations of the U.S. government's 9/11 Commission.

What's also interesting is that contrary to Hersh's recent reporting, the Washington consensus indicates that the administration is in fact highly averse to a military solution to the Iranian crisis (in other words, despite all the doomsday scenarios, the incessant warnings of an attack dramatically overestimate the likelihood of such).

Note also the strategic and logistical obstacles to an Iranian military strike. According to Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, and son of the late liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in the New York Review, the U.S. is limited in its ability to rein in Iran's nuclear program:

The United States has two options for dealing with Iran's nuclear facilities: military strikes to destroy them or negotiations to neutralize them. The first is risky and the second may not produce results. So far, the Bush administration has not pursued either option, preferring UN sanctions (which, so far, have been more symbolic than punitive) and relying on Europeans to take the lead in negotiations. But neither sanctions nor the European initiative is likely to work. As long as Iran's primary concern is the United States, it is unlikely to settle for a deal that involves only Europe.

Sustained air strikes probably could halt Iran's nuclear program. While some Iranian facilities may be hidden and others protected deep underground, the locations of major facilities are known. Even if it is not possible to destroy all the facilities, Iran's scientists, engineers, and construction crews are unlikely to show up for work at places that are subject to ongoing bombing.

But the risks from air strikes are great. Many of the potential targets are in populated places, endangering civilians both from errant bombs and the possible dispersal of radioactive material. The rest of the world would condemn the attacks and there would likely be a virulent anti-US reaction in the Islamic world. In retaliation, Iran could wreak havoc on the world economy (and its own) by withholding oil from the global market and by military action to close the Persian Gulf shipping lanes.

The main risk to the US comes in Iraq. Faced with choosing between the US and Iran, Iraq's government may not choose its liberator. And even if the Iraqi government did not openly cooperate with the Iranians, pro-Iranian elements in the US-armed military and police almost certainly would facilitate attacks on US troops by pro-Iranian Iraqi militia or by Iranian forces infiltrated across Iraq's porous border. A few days after Bush's August 28 speech, Iranian General Rahim Yahya Safavi underscored Iran's ability to retaliate, saying of US troops in the region: "We have accurately identified all their camps." Unless he chooses to act with reckless disregard for the safety of US troops in Iraq, President Bush has effectively denied himself a military option for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program.

Galbraith's obviously a member in good standing of the left-wing diplomatic establishment (and thus largely predisposed against a military option), yet the basic notion of an overstretched military is supported by some members of the Army general staff.

Despite the dire warnings of Hersh (and the endless legions of hard-left bloggers denouncing the administration's "rush to war"), the current strategic and logistical situation makes a preventive strike unlikely at this time.

Yet even Hersh himself has recognized the gravity of Iran's threat to international security. So, make no mistake: Given Iran's dismissal of the Security Council's antiproliferation sanctions, its continued support for terrorist proxies around the world, and its avowed rejection of Israel's right to exist, ending the threat from Iran may eventually warrant exercizing the military option.

Che Guevara: Superstar Revolutionary

Bolivian leftists are holding a 40th anniversary event this week commemorating the death of Che Guevara, the murderous Latin American revolutionary who died an inglorious death in the jungles of La Higuera, Bolivia, on October 9, 1967. The Los Angeles Times has the story:

Today, the ideological legacy of this peripatetic militant may loom larger than ever in Latin America, abetted by the election of a "Pink Tide" of leftist governments from Nicaragua to Argentina. Socialism is in, the Cubans are on the march, and Che is the defiant embodiment of it all.

To his critics, Guevara was a trigger-happy megalomaniac whose bloody example led thousands to their deaths in futile uprisings that only hardened military repression from Guatemala to Chile.

But to the legions of devotees who subscribe to his personality cult, Guevara is forever the doomed idealist, the poetry- loving guerrillero and "most complete human being of our age," in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre....

A legendary guerrilla leader in the Cuban Revolution that ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Guevara stumbled in his 1960s struggles. Virtually exiled from Cuba after differing with Castro and Cuba's Soviet patrons, he suffered an ignominious defeat alongside anti-U.S. rebels in Congo before meeting his demise in a secluded Bolivian canyon at the end of a quixotic 11-month campaign.

But, 40 years later, Guevara has scored big in the contested battleground of memory, emerging as a kind of secular saint, freeze-framed at age 39 between the Summer of Love and the abyss of 1968. Hollywood sees box-office cachet in Che: Director Steven Soderbergh is filming a new biopic starring Che look-alike Benicio Del Toro.

"Today Che is associated in the collective conscience with values -- his ethics, his principles, his willingness to lose his life for an ideal," biographer Pacho O'Donnell wrote recently in the Argentine weekly Veintitres.

Guevara, a physician with no formal military training, was also something else, critics say: prolific executioner, dogmatic totalitarian and co-designer of the Cuban police state and indoctrination apparatus.

His detractors contend that his short life may appear to his admirers more James Dean than Chairman Mao, but his politics were more Comrade Stalin than Mahatma Gandhi.

"What's left is a kind of idealistic, romantic aura," said Jorge Lanata, an Argentine journalist who has written about Guevara. "It's more culture than political."

I often shake my head at the celebrity cult that has emerged around this revolutionary villain. Young "progressive" mall-rats who wear t-shirts adorned with Che's iconic image - indelibly represented by Alberto Korda's world-famous snapshot - are either indifferent to Guevara's history as Fidel Castro's most willing executioner or downright ignorant of it.

I read up a bit on Che after I saw the 2004 film, "The Motorcyle Diaries," a Che biopic that develops the revolutionary killer's cinema cult. I remember reading Anthony Daniel's critical review of the film at The New Criterion, which concludes with this interesting nugget:

In presenting Guevara as a romantic figure, generous and compassionate rather than ruthlessly priggish and self-centered, and by suggesting that he has anything to teach us other than negatively, the director is guilty of mendacity of a very high order. The film is an exercise in moral frivolity and exhibitionism, self-congratulation, of course, opportunism. It should sell as well as Guevara T-shirts.

The global activists making the trip to Bolivia's Che commemoration this week obviously won't be keeping such points in mind.

Neoconservatives and Rudy Giuliani

Neoconservatives are having a big influence on Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign, as this week's Newsweek reports:

Neocons can't help but slink around Washington, D.C. The Iraq War has given the neoconservatives—who favor the assertive use of American power abroad to spread American values—something of a bad name, and several of the Republican candidates seem less than eager to hire them as advisers. But Rudy Giuliani apparently never got that memo. One of the top foreign-policy consultants to the leading GOP candidate is Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neocon movement.

Podhoretz is in favor of bombing Iran because of the country's unwillingness to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. He also believes America is engaged in a "world war" with "Islamofascism" and that Giuliani is the only man who can win it. "I decided to join Giuliani's team because his view of the war—what I call World War IV—is very close to my own," Podhoretz tells NEWSWEEK. (World War III, in his view, was the cold war.) "And also because he has the qualities of a wartime leader, including a fighting spirit and a determination to win."

Giuliani clearly hopes this image, born of his heroic performance on 9/11, can carry him to the GOP nomination and to the White House. But is he really the candidate who will "keep Americans safer" if his primary tactic is to go "on offense" in the "long war," as he often puts it in his campaign stump speech? Critics will say that the neocons already tried that—in Iraq. Still, what's left of the neocon movement does seem to be converging around the Giuliani campaign, to some degree, because he embraces their common themes: a willingness to use military power, a tendency to group all radical Islamist groups together as a common enemy, strong support for Israel and an aggressive posture toward Iran. "He's positioning himself as the neo-neocon," jokes Richard Holbrooke, a top foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton.

Among the core consultants surrounding Giuliani: Martin Kramer, who has led an attack on U.S. Middle Eastern scholars since 9/11 for being soft on terrorism; Stephen Rosen, a hawkish professor at Harvard who advocates major new spending on defense and is close to prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol; former Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten, who often sided with the neocons during the Reagan era and was an untiring supporter of aid to Israel, and Daniel Pipes, who has advocated for the racial profiling of Muslim Americans. (He's argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was not the moral offense it's been portrayed as, though he doesn't say Muslims should suffer the same.)

Read the whole thing. While the piece offers an (undeserved) quick and easy dismissal of neoconservative foreign policy, the artice suggests the reason for Giuliani's current frontrunner status - considering his social policy centrism - is his firm moral clarity on the terrorist threat.

Plus, that's an impressive list of advisors. I blog on Podhoretz every now and then (his YouTube making the case for bombing Iran is here). Stephen Rosen is a top foreign policy expert whose articles appear regularly in journals like Foreign Affairs and International Security. William Kristol, of course, is the founder and publisher of the Weekly Standard, a top neoconservative magazine; and Daniel Pipes is an American historian and counterterrorism expert, and founder of Campus Watch.

Newsweek notes that Giulani's careful to solicit a wide range of advice and policy recommendations, and while he's yet to endorse some of the more breathtaking neoconservative suggestions - like a preventive strike on Iran - it's nevertheless heartening to see such an intense ideological focus driving his bid.

For more on Giulani's international policy, check out his excellent piece from the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.

Welcome to American Power

Welcome to my new blog, American Power.

I've been meaning to establish a new blogging homepage for some time, since the "Burkean" in Burkean Reflections (my original blog), no longer reflects my fundamental political orientation. The fact is, when I started blogging I had just finished teaching a new course, Introduction to Political Theory. More so than other political philosophies covered in the class, I was drawn to Burkean thought for its emphasis on custom and tradition. I especially liked Burke's emphasis on continuity in culture - on prescriptive authority found in a nation's historical associations and traditions, and how such bases of authority formed a bulwark against revolutionary movements, and the rise of authoritarian leadership. I thus thought Burkean conservatism would provide excellent foundations for a traditionalist's analyisis of poltics and world affairs.

Yet I've become increasingly distressed under a Burkean identity of classical conservatism. While Burke will remain a key pillar of my thinking on the best social order, my forward orientation on America power and U.S. foreign policy diverges substantially from orthodox conceptions of Burkean restraint in foreign affairs. What's more, I've been disgusted, frankly, by some of the uses of Burke among some old-guard conservatives, who've championed Burke in a program of outright American isolationism and reactionary race doctrines.

Moreover, a couple of recent articles further convinced me that it was time to firmly authenticate the neoconservative foundations of my blogging project. One of these is a New York Times essay by David Brooks, which argues that the current GOP crisis is explained by the party's shift away from Burkean foundationalism:

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.

Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.

Over the past few years, the vice president and the former attorney general have sought to expand executive power as much as possible in the name of protecting Americans from terror. But the temperamental conservative believes that power must always be clothed in constitutionalism. The dispositional conservative is often more interested in means than ends (the reverse of President Bush) and asks how power is divided before asking for what purpose it is used.

Brooks' essay provides a useful service, which is to push today's GOP to more clearly identify the true ideology conservative partisans ought to genuinely champion. Brooks is correct, of course: Tradition and habit should always be respected. Yet in some areas of public and international life, new demands may impel a tweaking of ideational foundations to fit the needs of the day. The current era is one calling forth such demands, and unlike Brooks, I hold the Bush administration as offering a powerful legacy for the direction of Republican Party conservativism in the decades ahead.

Sure, I know what many readers might be thinking: "Wow, this Professor Douglas has lost his mind! The Bush administration? Sheesh! What a disaster." But I disagree. This administration - like any other in American history - has made mistakes and has often overreached. But President Bush is no intellectual lightweight, despite what detractors may believe (see James Lindsey and Ivo Daalder's, America Unbound, for an early look at the rigorous intellectual foundations for the Bush revolution in international policy). Indeed, Bush's agenda of global democracy promotion is well within the established traditions of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy, from Wilson to Reagan. There's no ignominy in the push to harness U.S. hegemony for the expansion of world freedom.

This point brings me to the second recent article that has affirmed the importance of making more clear the ideological identity for my writing: Joshua Muravchik's October 2007 essay in Commentary Magazine, "The Past, Present, and Future of Neoconservatism." Muravchik makes an awesome case - absolutely no apologies - for the power of neoconservative thought thus far and in the years ahead. The essay offers a fairly comprehensive review of neoconservativism's development. Here are the key elements Muravchik identifies:

First, following Orwell, neoconservatives were moralists. Just as they despised Communism, they felt similarly toward Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and toward the acts of aggression committed by those dictators in, respectively, Kuwait and Bosnia. And just as they did not hesitate to enter negative moral judgments, neither did they hesitate to enter positive ones. In particular, they were strong admirers of the American experience—an admiration that arose not out of an unexamined patriotism (they had all started out as reformers or even as radical critics of American society) but out of the recognition that America had gone farther in the realization of liberal values than any other society in history. A corollary was the belief that America was a force for good in the world at large.

Second, in common with many liberals, neoconservatives were internationalists, and not only for moral reasons. Following Churchill, they believed that depredations tolerated in one place were likely to be repeated elsewhere—and, conversely, that beneficent political or economic policies exercised their own “domino effect” for the good. Since America’s security could be affected by events far from home, it was wiser to confront troubles early even if afar than to wait for them to ripen and grow nearer.

Third, neoconservatives, like (in this case) most conservatives, trusted in the efficacy of military force. They doubted that economic sanctions or UN intervention or diplomacy, per se, constituted meaningful alternatives for confronting evil or any determined adversary.

To this list, I would add a fourth tenet: namely, the belief in democracy both at home and abroad. This conviction could not be said to have emerged from the issues of the 1990’s, although the neoconservative support for enlarging NATO owed something to the thought that enlargement would cement the democratic transformations taking place in the former Soviet satellites. But as early as 1982, Ronald Reagan, the neoconservative hero, had stamped democratization on America’s foreign-policy agenda with a forceful speech to the British Parliament. In contrast to the Carter administration, which held (in the words of Patricia Derian, Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights) that “human-rights violations do not really have very much to do with the form of government,” the Reagan administration saw the struggle for human rights as intimately bound up in the struggle to foster democratic governance. When Reagan’s Westminster speech led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, the man chosen to lead it was Carl Gershman, a onetime Social Democrat and a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY. Although not an avowed neoconservative, he was of a similar cast of mind.

This mix of opinions and attitudes still constitutes the neoconservative mindset. The military historian Max Boot has aptly labeled it “hard Wilsonianism.” It does not mesh neatly with the familiar dichotomy between “realists” and “idealists.” It is indeed idealistic in its internationalism and its faith in democracy and freedom, but it is hardheaded, not to say jaundiced, in its image of our adversaries and its assessment of international organizations. Nor is its idealism to be confused with the idealism of the “peace” camp. Over the course of the past century, various schemes for keeping the peace—the League of Nations, the UN, the treaty to outlaw war, arms-control regimes—have all proved fatuous. In the meantime, what has in fact kept the peace (whenever it has been kept) is something quite different: strength, alliances, and deterrence. Also in the meantime, “idealistic” schemes for promoting not peace but freedom—self-determination for European peoples after World War I, decolonization after World War II, the democratization of Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria, the global advocacy of human rights—have brought substantial and beneficial results.

Yet, the ultimate aim of the essay is to provide a robust defense of neoconservatism against its critics. Here's the essay's disussion of the Bush administration and America's national interests following 9/11:

Whether or not a distinct neoconservative position could be discerned in the relatively calm 1990’s, everything changed, with a vengeance, after September 11, 2001....

Bush’s declaration of war against terrorism...[bore] the earmarks of neoconservatism. One can count the ways. It was moralistic, accompanied by descriptions of the enemy as “evil” and strong assertions of America’s righteousness. As Norman Podhoretz puts it in his powerful new book. Bush offered “an entirely unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world affairs.” In contrast to the suggestion of many, especially many Europeans, that America had somehow provoked the attacks, Bush held that what the terrorists hated was our virtues, and in particular our freedom. His approach was internationalist: it treated the whole globe as the battlefield, and sought to confront the enemy far from our own doorstep. It entailed the prodigious use of force. And, for the non-military side of the strategy, Bush adopted the idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East in the hope that this would drain the fever swamps that bred terrorists.

It is possible that Bush and Cheney turned to neoconservative sources for guidance on these matters; it is also possible, and more likely, that they reached similar conclusions on their own. In either case, the war against terrorism put neoconservative ideas to the test—and, in the war’s early stages, they passed with flying colors. The Taliban regime was ousted from Afghanistan quickly and without a major commitment of American forces. More striking still, a democratic government was established in Afghanistan—one of the least likely places on earth for it. Muammar Qaddafi, the ruler of Libya and one of the world’s most erratic and violent dictators, abandoned his pursuit of nuclear weapons, and in effect sued to bring his country in from the cold reaches to which Bush had assigned terrorism-supporting states. Finally, Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in a brief campaign with minimum loss of life.

Even more remarkably, Bush’s advocacy of democracy brought an immediate and positive reaction around the region. The Lebanese drove out Syrian forces after a 30-year occupation. In an unprecedented development, elections at various levels of government were held in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a handful of other Arab states (and the Palestinian Authority), including most dramatically Iraq itself. The collective leadership of the Arab states, meeting at a summit, declared its commitment to “strengthening democracy, expanding political participation, consolidating the values of citizenship and the culture of democracy, the promotion of human rights, the opening of space for civil society, and enabling women to play a prominent role in every field of public life.”

Crowning all these events was one crucial non-event: the absence, despite the almost unanimous forecast of experts, of further terror attacks on the United States.

Muravchik also provides a penetrating response to the claims that American difficulties in Iraq discredit the neoconservative project:

According to one highly publicized article in Vanity Fair, several leading neoconservatives put the blame on poor execution of their ideas on the part of the administration. This is not a very satisfying analysis. Complaints about government incompetence dog every administration, almost always with justice, and there is no convincing evidence that the functioning of the present administration has been worse than that of its predecessors.

More specific and more convincing targets for blame are a few key decisions made by Paul Bremer, the chief of the allied occupation from May 2003 to June 2004, and by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Bremer’s decisions—to disband the Iraqi army and to undertake a purge of Baath party members so sweeping as to dismantle the Iraqi government—have been widely criticized. Whether it would otherwise have been easier to cope with the insurgency is hard to say, though the idea seems plausible. Rumsfeld’s insistence, backed by the President, on deploying to Iraq only a fraction of the troops requested by General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, seems more clearly to have courted trouble—a conclusion brought home all the more sharply by the apparent success of today’s “surge” in manpower.

In any event, the decisions about troop levels and about abolishing Iraq’s existing administrative structure had nothing to do with neoconservative ideas. The most that can fairly be said is that Rumsfeld was an ally of neoconservatives and that some among them, enamored of military technology or influenced by the Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi, endorsed his choices. Besides, whatever measure of responsibility may be placed on neoconservatives in this one matter, it pales in comparison to the errors of the realists in the George H.W. Bush administration who in 1991 chose to leave Saddam in power, and of the liberals in the Clinton administration who allowed Saddam’s defiance of his disarmament obligations to swell steadily over eight long years. Together, these failures left the problem of Saddam Hussein festering for George W. Bush to confront in the aftermath of 9/11, when it appeared in a more ominous light.

This article's a modern classic, and those who so easily and utterly dismiss neoconservatism would be irresponsible to disengage from the arguments it presents. Muravchik concludes the piece by rightly noting that neoconservatism isn't foolproof, that it doesn't hold all the answers. What it does do is offer a coherent and compelling approach to meeting today's international challenges, not the least of these being the war on terror:

By contrast, liberals and realists have no coherent approach to suggest—or at least they have not suggested one. That, after all, is why George W. Bush, searching urgently for a response to the events of September 11, stumbled into the arms of neoconservatism, unlikely though the match seemed. One can always wish that policies were executed better, but for a strategy in the war that has been imposed upon us, neoconservatism remains the only game in town.

Now, to conclude, let me assure readers that my basic blogging style and delivery will continue here at American Power. I remain as firmly committed as ever to providing incisive daily commentary and opinion on the big issues of the day. Indeed, the standards and goals anounced when I first took up blogging - especially my commitment to challenging anti-American nihilism - remain central to my ongoing enterprise. Popular features such as books reviews and my regular top-featured posts - like the Blog Watch series - will continue as unique attractions of this blog.

So, welcome again to all of those visiting my new blogging homepage. As regular readers know, I'm enthusiatic about blogging. Perhaps more importantly, I also greatly appreciate everyone who's been following my writing over this last 18 months or so. Thanks as well to all of those who've helped me get established on the web, a list of names which is much too long to enumerate in this post.