What We Got Right in the War on Terror

I was hoping to do some big analysis of Abe Greenwald's masterful essay, at Commentary, but never got around to it. This is simply the best piece I've read on the war on terror:

Over the course of the 10 years, American authorities foiled more than two dozen al-Qaeda plots. Those averted tragedies were not foremost on the minds of revelers who gathered to celebrate Bin Laden’s demise on May 1 at Ground Zero, Times Square, and in front of the White House. But if a mere few of the plots had materialized, those spaces might not even have been open to public assembly.

Not only have U.S. authorities managed to keep America safe from al-Qaeda for a decade; by the time he was killed, Osama bin Laden was barely a leader. Among the items recovered at his compound in Abbottabad were some recent writings, in which the former icon lamented al-Qaeda’s dramatically sinking stock and pondered organizational rebranding as a possible antidote.

His growing insignificance as a global player was not the product of chance. The marginalization of the world’s principal jihadist was the result of audacious American policy—indeed, the most controversial and hotly debated policy undertaken in the wake of 9/11. In the words of Reuel Marc Gerecht writing in the Wall Street Journal, “the war in Iraq was Bin Laden’s great moral undoing.” In his desperate attempt to drive American fighting forces out of Mesopotamia, Bin Laden sanctioned a bloody civil war in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. The carnage failed to repel the United States, but in the end, the countrywide slaughter of Muslims proved too much to bear for al-Qaeda’s own one-time and would-be supporters. The “Sunni awakening” that helped transform Iraq was an awakening out of al-Qaeda jihadism, and the blow it delivered to Bin Laden’s ambitions was stunning.

After the turnaround in Iraq, the landscape of the Muslim world suffered even greater changes—with ordinary Muslims rising to revolt against Persian and Arab tyranny, not against American hegemony. As Fouad Ajami has written: “The Arab Spring has simply overwhelmed the world of the jihadists. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria, younger people—hurled into politics by the economic and political failures all around them—are attempting to create a new political framework, to see if a way could be found out of the wreckage that the authoritarian states have bequeathed them.”

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

Thus, there are three intertwined achievements that have proved to be the dispositive features of American success in the war on terror: formulating the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East, reversing the course of the war in Iraq, and establishing a national-security apparatus to foil multiple terrorist attacks. It is no coincidence that they are also the most controversial foreign policies America has implemented since the Vietnam War.

September 11 was a hinge moment in American history. The attacks plunged the nation into a full-scale war against non-state entities. Any adequate American response had to break with previous approaches in previous conflicts. War could not be waged on parties inside states in the same way it had been waged on states themselves. Prisoners captured on a battlefield in a country not their own and with no interest in following the rules of conventional war could not be handled as they had been. Getting the edge on Islamist terror would mean fundamentally rethinking our approach to both the blunting of deadly threats and the shuttering of the political hothouses of the Middle East in which such threats thrive.

The adoption of these unprecedented and uncompromising means of war inspired animated debate in the United States. In fighting the war on terror, we have been told, America has become—depending on the accuser—either too dismissive or too enamored of democracy. Some on the left think our national-security apparatus undermines our defining ideals. On the right, outraged voices condemn our naive enthusiasm for helping to secure liberty for Muslims abroad, calling it a form of multicultural self-sabotage. After civil war seized post-invasion Iraq, critics from across the ideological spectrum denounced our misguided effort. The fits and starts and frustrations of the war decade have this one thing in common: we have done battle in an age when spectacular setbacks appear to provide irrefutable evidence of our own baseness and incompetence—a few years before drab good news arrives to refute both expert opinion and common knowledge.

The arguments that we have prosecuted the war on terror immorally and ineffectually are important, and deserve the respectful hearing they have received, even if many of those arguing these points have resorted to launching the most abject slanders and accusations toward those who believe the war on terror is just and has been fought honorably. To be sure, not everything the United States has done in the war on terror has been correct. Far from it. As Winston Churchill said, “War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.” In the fight against Islamist terrorism, American blunders have come in all shapes and sizes, and in truth there are few small wartime miscalculations. This is especially so in an age of instant global headlines.

We continue to suffer for our biggest mistakes. Concerning the failure to catch Bin Laden and make serious efforts to nation-build early in the Afghanistan war, inaccurate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons, and the Pentagon’s ill-preparedness for the Iraqi insurgency, there can be no absolution. These errors have cost the country tragic sums in money, credibility, and life. They also set our efforts back precious years.

But these blunders, great as they are, have not undone America’s outstanding accomplishments. Ten years ago, the most delusional optimist among us would not have predicted the irrelevancy of Osama bin Laden or a decade without another al-Qaeda attack, let alone a democratic Iraq and a transformative explosion of antiauthoritarianism in the Middle East.

Nor do American achievements in this war mean we are in a position to quit the fight. The notion that America achieved closure with Bin Laden’s killing suggests to some, perhaps even the occupant of the White House, that the war on terror has had its decade and the United States can now move on. “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home,” said Barack Obama this summer as he announced a sizable drawdown of troops in Afghanistan for the fall of 2012. The suggestion that our work is done has traction only because resolute American action at home and abroad have provided a sense of security so pervasive it now goes unquestioned.

The United States has fallen prey to false comfort in the past. So before we submit to the siren song of closure, we would do well to recall that that is exactly where this war began—and our retaining some genuine measure of security has been the result of thinking and acting more boldly than we have in generations.

Now go read the whole thing.

Anders Behring Breivik's Manifesto

Here's the pdf file: "2083 – A European Declaration of Independence."

I'd say my previous analysis, which I posted prior to reading Breivik's full manifesto, holds up well. See: "Anders Behring Breivik — No Clear Ideological Program." But I can speak with more authority now. Note first that Richard Starr has read parts of the manifesto and has a response, at Weekly Standard, "The Manifesto Behind the Horror in Norway." I'm going to disagree a bit, though, for example:

The author is listed as "Andrew Berwick," which seems to be an anglicized pen name for Anders Breivik. but Mein Kampf may be a better analogy that the Unabomber manifesto. The man is a mass-murdering sociopath, responsible for a horrific bloodbath yesterday. He is an extremist, but he is not incoherent.

Actually, Breivik states a passionate loathing of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi program of the Third Reich, much of which was outlined in Hitler's early writings. (See the specific quotations appended below.) Also, while Breivik is obviously sociopathic, I disagree about his coherence. The guy's a criminal mastermind whose "program," as written, wouldn't fit a single major established party. He's explicitly "ethno-nationalist" but rejects the racial supremacy theories of Europe's historical hard-right parties. And Breivik hopelessly romanticizes an earlier time that is simply not coming back. He's crazy in that sense. A loner, rejecting intimacy and relationships that might jeopardize his "cause." He is conservative, but again the idea that he's "far right" is ridiculous in the European context. Nazis hated Jews. He loves them as preserving the crusading anti-Islamic history of the Medieval West. Most of all, the manifesto lays out a program of terrorism using all manners of paramilitary resistance, including deployment of weapons of mass destruction (and yes, nuclear and radiological weapons). We'll have to see upon further investigation, but if he's not acting alone then folks should be worried about what's ahead. But so far no larger movement has claimed alliance with or responsibility for the horrendous and evil carnage befallen Norway. We can both learn and remain vigilant, and of course pray for the families of those killed.

And it must be said, but obviously Breivik's crimes deserve complete condemnation, and no modern conservative should be sympathetic to what has happened. It's pure evil and Breivik's violence has no place in modern democratic societies. I won't hold my breath waiting for progressives to produce one mainstream conservative who backs it, although they're surely attempting so.

And the MSM's sticking to their ideological witch hunt, for example, at New York Times, "Norway Attacks Put Spotlight on Rise of Right-Wing Sentiment in Europe."

Anyway, here's some a few passages in chronological order:

Consolidating our forces in phase 1, 2 and 3

We must work hard in the coming decades to create and develop Anti-Jihad or other forms of Cultural conservative movements. Our objectives will be to recruit the youths of our society (15-30) whom will be the bulk of the physical defence of our cultural conservative ideology.

The cultural conservatives vs. the racial conservatives

Whoever manages to attract the youths of a society will have the best possibility to secure power and implement the changes of the given political ideology.

If racist organisations succeed where we have failed, then we know what will happen. Unfortunately for us, the intelligence agencies of Europe are currently doing everything they can to prevent the creation of any type of militia, that being CC’s or RC’s. The media on the other hand will go to great lengths to put us, the cultural conservatives (anti-Jihad movements etc.) in the same category as the racial conservatives. To them it’s black and white; According to them, everyone who is not considered “politically correct” must by default be racists or Nazis…

*****

Organisational work in Phase 1 (2009-2030)

We must spend the next 20 years wisely and continue our work on creating a pan European conservative consolidation, a new conservative political ideology (a political ideal) which has the potential to appeal to a MINIMUM of 20-35% of Western Europeans, including the bulk of our youth. The creation of cultural conservative student organisations in Universities all over Europe must be a priority.

In order to do this we have to agree on a consensus for creating a modern, “un-tainted”, cultural conservative, patriotic youth movement which will prevent our youths from joining NS or WN movements. This movement should be somewhat like the equivalent of Russias Nashi movement (Putins youth movement - 120,000 members aged between 17 and 25). They are anti fascist/anti Nazi, but still patriotic conservatives.

*****

The word "race", “white”, “ethnic” or "nationalist" for that matter should never be used in modern debates with adversaries or individuals who may have been subject to severe indoctrination. These words are so stained by history and post-war media coverage that you are basically just undermining yourself and the message you seek to communicate by actively using them. It’s wise to limit the use of all words that has stigma attached as well as or the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist mainstream media will attempt to label you as a bigot. If you use the word "race" you are basically contributing to committing character assassination of yourself or will contribute to self-defeat of the organisational goals you are representing. You need to understand the following; the modern European man/women has been indoctrinated or conditioned in a way that he is likely to run for the hill or active subliminous mental defensive blocks if you use rhetoric containing these words in your attempt to reach out to him or her. Ill try to explain this more throuroughly [sic] as this applies to me as well. In a world where the absolute arch sin is to be a Nazi, words who are associated with Nazis must be avoided at all costs, regardless of the justification for associating them with given ideology.

*****

3.4 Why armed resistance against the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regimes of Western Europe is the only rational approach

It is counterproductive, even lethal to waste another five decades on meaningless dialogue while we are continuously losing our demographical advantage. We have never and will never be allowed to ever exercise any influence. The cultural marxist/multiculturalist elites nationally and in Brussels have for the last five decades created a resilient system whose objective is to ridicule, persecute, harass and silence us. They will continue to systematically marginalise us until the day when we are no longer a threat to them. The following arguments will further underline why any democratical or peaceful cultural conservative victory of significance is impossible ...

It is expected that native Europeans shall humbly watch and applaud their own annihilation and extinction. The fact that we are persecuted and harassed in our own countries does not violate our human rights because we are white Christians and therefore evil by default.

It is a pretty terrifying prospect that the prevailing ideology that dominates Western Europe long term will result in the extermination of people like me and you.

Nevertheless, it is the only plausible theoretical explanation of the current development. As such, multiculturalism is an inversed form of Nazism where white European Christians ends up at the bottom of the food chain instead of on top. Exactly how the Jews according to National Socialist doctrines automatically were blamed for everything that went wrong in society. Multiculturalisms doctrine teaches that “white racism” is the cause of all problems in our societies. The indigenous peoples of Europe are increasingly exposed to more violence, ridicule and persecution in cities all over Western Europe. This does not result in any sympathy whatsoever. The multiculturalists become increasingly hateful in their rhetorical attacks against us the more we are humiliated by Muslims, groups they mass import to our countries. This tells us everything we need to know about their real intentions.

*****

There have already been thousands of preemptive strikes from brave Europeans all over Europe. However, the majority of attacks have been impotent “poop in mailbox” operations with zero to little ideological effect. In order to successfully penetrate the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist media censorship we are forced to employ significantly more brutal and breath taking operations which will result in casualties. In order for the attack to gain an influential effect, assassinations and the use of weapons of mass destruction must be embraced. When employing such methods the Justiciar Knight becomes a force multiplier, he becomes a one-man army. The continuation of these “humiliating strikes” on the Multiculturalist system will contribute to destroy the cultural Marxist hegemony in Europe.

*****

The true definition of racism vs. the Marxist definition

Don’t let the multiculturalists define what racism is or isn’t. Keeping an African againsthis will in your basement as a slave is racism. Loving your extended family/your ethnic group and fighting for ethnic and/or indigenous rights does not make you a racist, quite the opposite in fact. It makes you a civil rights activist. Creating a pro-indigenous and/orpro-ethnic movement does not make it a “white supremacy” movement but rather an Indigenous rights movement or even a civil rights movement. Anyone who calls you a racist due to these reasons proves very clearly that HE is the real racist, as he obviously ONLY attacks European rights movements. He is therefore an anti-European racist supporting the anti-European hate ideology known as multiculturalism. The cultural Marxists/multiculturalists have gone to great lengths to change the very definition of the word; racist. Europeans having African slaves on a plantation WAS racist, the apartheid system WAS racist (deportation and a two state solution would have been the right way to go). However, loving your ethnic group and fighting for the interests of your tribe is NOT and will never be racist. Nevertheless, the cultural Marxist systems would have everyone think otherwise.

*****

Race-mixing and interracial relations; necessary to create the global utopia lead by the Marxist-Islamic UN or the ultimate crime?

The PCCTS, Knights Templar, obviously, does not have any pre-defined specific policies or principles concerning race-mixing. The following are my own views concerning the theme. I have for a long time dreaded the thought of writing an essay about this subject. Primarily because it is considered politically incorrect by even many of the most dedicated conservatives and it is considered an efficient way to commit character suicide for individuals who have ambitions to appeal to the bulk of the masses in this early stage of the European civil war. On the other hand, if you’re Arab, Pashtun, Kurd, Pakistani, Japanese, South Korean or belong to any other non-European tribe then it’s a completely different matter. Then it’s all about showing cultural tolerance and respecting their customs. But if you’re a European and say the same thing, God forbid, then you’re a monster. This double standard effectively shows us the anti-European nature of multiculturalism. A large amount of the current multiculturalist elites in the EU/US, the category A and B traitors specifically, are focused on the destruction of European culture, Christendom, European identity and there is not a more efficient way of destroying the core of everything European than facilitating the gradual deconstruction of the European ethnic groups. The norm and practice for adopting non-European babies has more or less been institutionalised, bio-laws have been restricted, mass non-European immigration has been encouraged along with allowing and even subsidising the non-European explosive birth rates. The sum of these deliberate genocidal practices when mixed with Marxist procreation policies (feminism) is equal to the demographical annihilation of European ethnic groups if they are allowed to continue.

*****

The great Satan, his cult and the Jews

Whenever someone asks if I am a national socialist I am deeply offended. If there is one historical figure and past Germanic leader I hate it is Adolf Hitler. If I could travel in a time-machine to Berlin in 1933, I would be the first person to go – with the purpose of killing him. Why? No person has ever committed a more horrible crime against his tribe than Hitler. Because of him, the Germanic tribes are dying and MAY be completely wiped out unless we manage to win within 20-70 years. Thanks to his insane campaign and the subsequent genocide of the 6 million Jews, multiculturalism, the anti-European hate ideology was created. Multiculturalism would have never been implemented in Europe if ithadn’t been for NSDAPs reckless and unforgivable actions. Eastern Europe would have remained free, the US and Russia would never have risen up as super-powers. The balance of power would have remained in Europe. And it would be a beautiful Europe with beautiful cultural conservative policies – very similar to the ones you now find in Japan and South Korea. Hitler almost destroyed everything with his reckless and unforgivable actions and he will forever be known as a traitor to the Nordic-Germanic tribes.

*****

3.153 Interview with a Justiciar Knight Commander of the PCCTS, Knights
Templar

The following interview was conducted over three sessions. It might be considered irrelevant to many people. However, I decided to add it as I personally would enjoy reading a similar interview with another resistance fighter. The interview covers politics, society and the struggle: the Western European civil war, the PCCTS, Knights Templar and other armed pan-European and National Resistance movements. It also covers personal reflectations and information. ...

Q: If you were to coin a word for the ideology or movement you represent, what
would it be?

A: Cultural conservatism or a nationalist/conservative direction known as the Vienna school of thought. As for the political movement; I would describe it as a National Resistance Movement, an Indigenous Rights Movement or perhaps a Conservative Revolutionary Movement. Justiciar Knights are not an ideologically homogenous group. Many Justiciar Knight Commanders would probably reject some of my personal views as I would with theirs. Some are deeply Christian while some are Christian agnostics or even atheists. Some are individualists while others not so much so, some puritans. The primary factors that unites us is that we are all nationalists, anti-Marxist, anti-Islam(isation), we support indigenous rights and we are revolutionary, willing to martyr ourselves.

Cynthia McKinney Statement on Libya: 'NATO – A Feast of Blood'

Longtime readers will recall that McKinney spoke at LBCC a few years back. I've been on her list-serve ever since. Normally I delete these, but she's been getting sensational coverage of late, so her latest communique is worth sharing (below).

See also Michelle, "Cynthia McKinney: Islamofascist Tool," and Gary Fouse, "Cynthia McKinney Speaks Out for Ghaddafi":

NATO – A Feast of Blood

While serving on the House International Relations Committee from 1993 to 2003, it became clear to me that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was an anachronism. Founded in 1945 at the end of World War II, NATO was founded by the United States in response to the Soviet Union's survival as a Communist state. NATO was the U.S. insurance policy that capitalist ownership and domination of European, Asian, and African economies would continue. This also would ensure the survival of the then-extant global apartheid.

NATO is a collective security pact wherein member states pledge that an attack upon one is an attack against all. Therefore, should the Soviet Union have attacked any European Member State, the United States military shield would be activated. The Soviet Response was the Warsaw Pact that maintained a "cordon sanitaire" around the Russian Heartland should NATO ever attack. Thus, the world was broken into blocs which gave rise to the "Cold War."

Avowed "Cold Warriors" of today still view the world in these terms and, unfortunately, cannot move past Communist China and an amputated Soviet Empire as enemy states of the U.S. whose moves any where on the planet are to be contested. The collapse of the Soviet Union provided an accelerated opportunity to exert U.S. hegemony in an area of previous Russian influence. Africa and the Eurasian landmass containing former Soviet satellite states and Afghanistan and Pakistan along with the many other "stans" of the region, have always factored prominently in the theories of "containment" or "rollback" guiding U.S. policy up to today.

With that as background, last night's NATO rocket attack on Tripoli is inexplicable. A civilian metropolitan area of around 2 million people, Tripoli sustained 22 to 25 bombings last night, rattling and breaking windows and glass and shaking the foundation of my hotel.

I left my room at the Rexis Al Nasr Hotel and walked outside the hotel and I could smell the exploded bombs. There were local people everywhere milling with foreign journalists from around the world. As we stood there more bombs struck around the city. The sky flashed red with explosions and more rockets from NATO jets cut through low cloud before exploding.

I could taste the thick dust stirred up by the exploded bombs. I immediately thought about the depleted uranium munitions reportedly being used here--along with white phosphorus. If depleted uranium weapons were being used what affect on the local civilians?

Women carrying young children ran out of the hotel. Others ran to wash the dust from their eyes. With sirens blaring, emergency vehicles made their way to the scene of the attack. Car alarms, set off by the repeated blasts, could be heard underneath the defiant chants of the people.

Sporadic gunfire broke out and it seemed everywhere around me. Euronews showed video of nurses and doctors chanting even at the hospitals as they treated those injured from NATO's latest installation of shock and awe. Suddenly, the streets around my hotel became full of chanting people, car horns blowing, I could not tell how many were walking, how many were driving. Inside the hotel, one Libyan woman carrying a baby came to me and asked me why are they doing this to us?

Whatever the military objectives of the attack (and I and many others question the military value of these attacks) the fact remains the air attack was launched a major city packed with hundreds of thousands of civilians.

I did wonder too if the any of the politicians who had authorized this air attack had themselves ever been on the receiving end of laser guided depleted uranium munitions. Had they ever seen the awful damage that these weapons do a city and its population? Perhaps if they actually been in the city of air attack and felt the concussion from these bombs and saw the mayhem caused they just might not be so inclined to authorize an attack on a civilian population.

I am confident that NATO would not have been so reckless with human life if they had called on to attack a major western city. Indeed, I am confident that would not be called upon ever to attack a western city. NATO only attacks (as does the US and its allies) the poor and underprivileged of the 3rd world.

Only the day before, at a women's event in Tripoli, one woman came up to me with tears in her eyes: her mother is in Benghazi and she can't get back to see if her mother is OK or not. People from the east and west of the country lived with each other, loved each other, intermarried, and now, because of NATO's "humanitarian intervention," artificial divisions are becoming hardened. NATO's recruitment of allies in eastern Libya smacks of the same strain of cold warriorism that sought to assassinate Fidel Castro and overthrow the Cuban Revolution with "homegrown" Cubans willing to commit acts of terror against their former home country. More recently, Democratic Republic of Congo has been amputated de facto after Laurent Kabila refused a request from the Clinton Administration to formally shave off the eastern part of his country. Laurent Kabila personally recounted the meeting at which this request and refusal were delivered. This plan to balkanize and amputate an African country (as has been done in Sudan) did not work because Kabila said "no" while Congolese around the world organized to protect the "territorial integrity" of their country.

I was horrified to learn that NATO allies (the Rebels) in Libya have reportedly lynched, butchered and then their darker-skinned compatriots after U.S. press reports labeled Black Libyans as "Black mercenaries." Now, tell me this, pray tell. How are you going to take Blacks out of Africa? Press reports have suggested that Americans were "surprised" to see dark-skinned people in Africa. Now, what does that tell us about them?

The sad fact, however, is that it is the Libyans themselves, who have been insulted, terrorized, lynched, and murdered as a result of the press reports that hyper-sensationalized this base ignorance. Who will be held accountable for the lives lost in the bloodletting frenzy unleashed as a result of these lies?

Which brings me back to the lady's question: why is this happening? Honestly, I could not give her the educated reasoned response that she was looking for. In my view the international public is struggling to answer "Why?".

What we do know, and what is quite clear, is this: what I experienced last night is no "humanitarian intervention."

Many suspect it is about all the oil under Libya. Call me skeptical but I have to wonder why the combined armed sea, land and air forces of NATO and the US costing billions of dollars are being arraigned against a relatively small North African country and we're expected to believe its in the defense of democracy.

What I have seen in long lines to get fuel is not "humanitarian intervention." Refusal to allow purchases of medicine for the hospitals is not "humanitarian intervention." What is most sad is that I cannot give a cogent explanation of why to people now terrified by NATO's bombs, but it is transparently clear now that NATO has exceeded its mandate, lied about its intentions, is guilty of extra-judicial killings--all in the name of "humanitarian intervention." Where is the Congress as the President exceeds his war-making authority? Where is the "Conscience of the Congress?"

For those of who disagree with Dick Cheney's warning to us to prepare for war for the next generation, please support any one who will stop this madness. Please organize and then vote for peace. People around the world need us to stand up and speak out for ourselves and them because Iran and Venezuela are also in the cross-hairs. Libyans don't need NATO helicopter gunships, smart bombs, cruise missiles, and depleted uranium to settle their differences. NATO's "humanitarian intervention" needs to be exposed for what it is with the bright, shining light of the truth.

As dusk descends on Tripoli, let me prepare myself with the local civilian population for some more NATO humanitarianism.

Stop bombing Africa and the poor of the world!

RELATED: At New York Times, "NATO Bombs Tripoli in Heaviest Strikes Yet." And at National Journal, "Heavy NATO Action in Libya, While Rebels Invited to Open D.C. Office."

Runoff Expected in Special Election for California's 36th Congressional Seat

And it looks like Marcy Winograd, the hardline progressive who took 41 percent of the vote against Jane Harmon in the Democratic primary last year, won't make the cut. See Politico, "Class divide in war for Jane Harman's seat":

Washington has largely ignored the special election here Tuesday, focusing instead on a competitive House race across the country in New York. But the winner of California’s 36th District contest could reveal who’s leading the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party heading into the 2012 cycle.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn is an urban Democrat with strong labor backing. She will square off against Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a progressive candidate supported by environmentalists.

Under new California election rules, the top two vote-getters will advance to a July 12 runoff. With 16 names on the ballot, that means a divided Democratic vote won’t tip the seat to a Republican.

Hahn, the front-runner, is a “beer-track” Democrat from a political dynasty. She has support from such politically muscular unions as the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, an AFL-CIO affiliate representing 800,000-plus workers in the region, and the California Service Employees International Union.

Bowen, who previously represented most of the district in the state Legislature, is a “wine-track” Democrat who made a name for herself as an environmental crusader, co-authoring one of the country’s most ambitious laws to curb global warming. That’s earned her strong support from the national Sierra Club and the California League of Conservation Voters.

“Whoever’s voters show up on Election Day, that’s what’s going to win this,” Hahn told POLITICO. “The labor piece in this election is key, and particularly, again, because it’s a special election. L.A. County Federation of Labor knows how to win these.”

Actually, there's really not that much of a "class-divide" here. The South Bay labor constituency boasts major backing from the left's communist organizations. Winograd marched with ANSWER and antiwar veterans groups, but the Los Angeles teachers unions and SEIU recently "dropped the mask" on their communist orientation, so clearly the local Democrat Party has been captured by the hard left. Hahn? Bowen? It doesn't really matter. The 35th District is pulling far left and whoever wins the runoff will be doing bidding for America's ideological enemies in Congress.

More on this at WaPo, "Fighting to be the real progressive in California special election."

Socialist Public Employees Call for Revolution in Wisconsin

These folks are from International Socialist Organization, revolutionary Trotskyites committed to global anti-capitalist struggle. What's fascinating is how the lady speaks about how "all of our members" are up every morning organizing for the dictatorship of the proletariat. That's amazing, since I thought we only had imaginary communists in America:

So with that, here's a roundup of reports that you won't be seeing in the Democrat-Media-Industrial-Complex.

First, check Ed Morrissey, "WSJ: Unions about power, not democracy." There's good commentary and a link to "Athens in Mad Town, at the Wall Street Journal:

For Americans who don't think the welfare state riots of France or Greece can happen here, we recommend a look at the union and Democratic Party spectacle now unfolding in Wisconsin ...

The battle of Mad Town is a seminal showdown over whether government union power can be tamed, and overall government reined in. The alternative is higher taxes until the middle class is picked clean and the U.S. economy is no longer competitive. Voters said in November that they want reform, and Mr. Walker is trying to deliver. We hope Republicans hold firm, and that the people of Wisconsin understand that this battle is ultimately about their right to self-government.

There's also a wonderful background report from Stephen Hayes, at Weekly Standard, "Scott Walker vs. Public Sector Unions." The proposed reforms are moderate and Wisconsin public employee benefit contributions would be smaller than the national average. But get this:

... beyond the thousands of protesters in Madison, several hundred protesters even showed up at Walker’s personal home in Wauwatosa to register their displeasure with his leadership (and, perhaps, intimidate his family).

It's thuggery. Michelle has more, "Apocalypse Now: Wisconsin vs. Big Labor; Plus: More out-of-state union recruiting & another teacher speaks up for Walker; police order for AWOL Dems." The entire essay's a gem, and that's not even mentioning the fabulous updates. More on those later. Plus, John Hawkins reports that Speaker John Boehner's house is also being targeted by progressive terrorists: "Call The Civility Police: Liberal Threats and Violence Surge."

Now let's go to Ann Althouse, "I went down to the demonstration this morning... just now..." She'll be uploading, so check back over there. And check the succinctly awesome William Jacobson's essay, "Gadsden Flag Bad, Egypt Flag Good." And I couldn't agree more, "Obama Acted Stupidly In Picking Sides Against The Taxpayers."

I'll have updates this afternoon. Michele Bachmann is speaking with Megyn Kelly as this post goes live. She says: "This is outrageous... now we are at the tipping point."

RELATED: From Doug Ross, "Top 15 Photos From the Wisconsin Hate Rallies You'll Never See in Legacy Media."

The Way Forward in Egypt? Defeat the Left's Red-Green Alliance and Build the Secular-Representative Alternative to Mubarak

Over the last few days, William Kristol has been among the most vocal supporters of dramatic democratic change in Egypt. And in today's essay he pushes back against Glenn Beck and others on the right who fear a Red-Green Alliance of communists and Islamists. Kristol also disagrees with Charles Krauthammer, but that seems secondary to him slamming those positing "one-world conspiracies theories" of a communist-backed caliphate across the Muslim world. The problem is that while Glenn Beck's show sometimes comes off as half-baked, the neo-communist left has indeed aligned with global jihad in a campaign against the West. In fact, today was the progressive-left's "international day of mobilization and solidarity with the Egyptian people." The neo-Stalinist ANSWER homepage has the announcement, "Emergency demonstrations: Stop all U.S. aid to Mubarak dictatorship!":

Emergency demonstrations in solidarity with the uprising of the Egyptian people are taking place across the country to demand that the U.S. government stop all aid to the Mubarak dictatorship.

As I've reported many times, the ANSWER contingents have been at the center of every left-wing mobilization over the past decade, from the Iraq war to Proposition 8 to the anti-SB 1070 campaign last year. The left's all-purpose protest machine, ANSWER is bolstered by Democrats and progressives, many of whom have ties to the Obama administration. Code Pink's Jodie Evans, for example, served as a top campaign fundraiser for Barack Obama, and now her organization is leading a fundraising operation for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: "Code Pink: Obama, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood Ally Raising (Tax Exempt) Money to Overthrow Egypt Gov’t:

As we reported previously, Code Pink has been on the ground in Cairo since the beginning of the uprising. The group has made nine trips to Egypt in the past two years as part of a campaign to undermine the Egyptian government and the blockade against Hamas-controlled Gaza.

For over a week now we've had international solidarity protesters calling for an anti-American, anti-Zionist revolution in Egypt, so, folks might want to step back and go easy on the freedom euphoria just a bit (in favor of a prudent democratic realism).

In any case, Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey, a.k.a. Mahmoud Salem, offers a way forward for Egypt's democracy:

So here are my two cents: next time when you head to Tahrir, alongside blankets and food and medicine, please get some foldable tables, chairs, papers, pens, a laptop and a USB connection. Set up a bunch of tables and start registering the protesters. Get their names, ages, addresses & districts. Based on location, start organizing them into committees, and then have those committees elect leaders or representatives. Do the same in Alex, In Mansoura, in Suez, in every major Egyptian city in which the Protesters braved police suppression and came out in the thousands. Protect the Data with your life. Get encryption programs to ensure the security of the data. Use web-based tools like Google documents to input the data in, thus ensuring that even if your laptops get confiscated by State Security Goons, they won’t find anything on your harddrives. Have people outside of Egypt back-up your data daily on secure servers. Then, start building the structure.

You see, with such Proper citizen organization and segmentation, we’ll have the contact information and location of all the protesters that showed up, and that could be transformed into voting blocks in parliamentary districts: i.e. a foundation for an Egyptian Unity party. That Egyptian Unity Party will be an Umbrella party that promotes equality, democracy & accountability, without any ideological slants. It should be centrist, because we don’t want any boring Left vs. Right squabbling at that stage. Once you institute the structure, start educating the members on their rights and their obligations as citizens. Convince them to bring their friends and relatives into meeting. Establish voters’ critical mass , all under that party.

The Egyptian Unity Party, however, will not be a permanent structure, but rather a transitional entity with a clear and direct purpose: create the grassroots organization to take back the parliament and presidency in the next elections. Once sufficient votes and seats have been obtained, the party will amend the constitution to promote civil liberties, plurality, and truly democratic elections. Once that constitution is in place, the party can disband, and its elected members can start forming their own parties and collations, based on their personal beliefs and ideologies, or they can join any of the existing parties, and breathe some life into their decaying carcasses. We will end up with an actual political process and representative political parties that will actually discuss policy and have to represent those who voted for them so that they can get re-elected. Democracy in action. An old but brilliant concept. A way to ensure that no matter what, we will have a huge influence on who becomes the next Egyptian President come election day in September.

That sounds awesome. The only problem is that during revolutionary crises the most highly organized factions often seize power through divide, conquer and assassination politics. We know now that Egypt's Arab street will not be silenced. But the shape of developments is still extremely fluid, and given the left's heavy investment and mobilization in the Muslim Brotherhood, a certain caution is well warranted.

Move Quickly on Egypt Democracy

I've been reading around the conserva-sphere, and there's a lot of backtracking on Egypt. The euphoria's gone, replaced with a deep fear of an Islamist regime in Cairo. It's certainly understandable. This New York Times story on Israel paints near trembling at the prospects of collapse of secularist Egypt: "Israel Shaken as Turbulence Rocks an Ally." And Melanie Phillips, one of my favorite writers, made a surprisingly pointed effort to distance herself from the neoconservative agenda of democracy promotion: "The Arab world on the brink...but of what?"

But folks need to get a grip. Nostalgia for Mubarak is exceedingly misplaced. Yeah, he's our guy and all that. But he's been a disaster for Egypt's development, and in an age of increasingly rapid global communications, the regime's failures are exponentially multiplied by the day. Victor Davis Hanson points out that the roots of radicalism in Egypt have more to do with Mubarak's rule than anything found in Israel or the United States, "What’s the Matter with Egypt?"

What’s next? “Finger-in-the-wind” diplomacy may work for a while, but it requires deftness that follows conditions on the street in a nanosecond to avoid appearing purely cynical (a skill beyond Hillary, Biden, and Obama). I think in this bad/worse choice scenario we might as well support supposedly democratic reformers, with the expectation that they could either fail in removing Mubarak or be nudged out by those far worse than Mubarak. Contrary to popular opinion, I think Bush was right to support elections in Gaza “one time” (only of course). The Gazans got what they wanted, we are done with them, and they have to live with the results, happy in their thuggish misery, with a prosperous Israel and better-off West Bank to remind them of their stupidity. All bad, but an honest bad and preferable to the lie that there were thousands of Jeffersonians in Gaza thwarted by the U.S.

So step back and watch it play out with encouragement for those who oppose both Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood— hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

And as I indicated earlier, the dawdling Obama administration is only empowering the Green-Red alliance working to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Even mainstream progressives are pooh-poohing the Brotherhood's ties to Hamas and global jihad. So we need to move quickly in transitioning to an interim government committed to free-and-fair elections in the near-term. William Kristol offers the appropriate response, "Beyond Mubarak: ‘Twere Well It Were Done Quickly":

In a crisis like this, moving quickly is often more important than moving in an “orderly” way. After all, an “orderly” transition is far less important than a desirable and orderly outcome. Trying to ensure now that everything is “well thought-out” to the satisfaction of diplomats can easily become an excuse for a drawn-out transition. And that means trouble. The more drawn-out this transition is, the more likely it is to end badly. The best case—the least radicalizing one for the population, the least advantageous for the Muslim Brotherhood—would be a quick transition now to an interim government, with the prospect of elections not too far off, so people can rally to the prospect of a new liberal regime. Uncertainty and dithering is what helps the Lenins and Khomeinis in revolutionary situations. Acting boldly to prevent more disarray and more chaos offers the best chance for an orderly outcome.

I'd recommend folks visit Jennifer Rubin for updates throughout the day as well. She hammered the administration's dalliances earlier, "On Egypt, Obama offers 'too little, too late'." And in another entry she points to the pragmatic manifesto of Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee:

"For far too long the democratic hopes of the Egyptian people have been suppressed. Their cries for freedom can no longer be silenced.

"I am deeply concerned about the Egyptian government's heavy-handed response seeking to silence the Egyptian people. It is imperative that all parties involved avoid violence.

"I am further concerned that certain extremist elements inside Egypt will manipulate the current situation for nefarious ends.

"The U.S. and other responsible nations must work together to support the pursuit of freedom, democracy, and human rights in Egypt and throughout the world."

That's the right balance and the right approach. It's time to move forward. The neo-communists will seize the initiative and attempt to install the Islamists in power. Their useful idiots on the progressive left --- in the media and Democrat Party apparatus --- will help propel that outcome. For the true friends of freedom, the best bet is to quit whining about how bad the Muslim Brotherhood is and start working to help the Egyptians on the street take back their country. Those folks are at the top video above. They help us capture a vision of what an emerging secularist democracy could look like.

Facing the Unknown in Egypt

From Ross Douthat, at New York Times, "The Devil We Know":

As the world ponders the fate of Egypt after Hosni Mubarak, Americans should ponder this: It’s quite possible that if Mubarak had not ruled Egypt as a dictator for the last 30 years, the World Trade Center would still be standing.

This is true even though Mubarak’s regime has been a steadfast U.S. ally, a partner in our counterterrorism efforts and a foe of Islamic radicalism. Or, more aptly, it’s true because his regime has been all of these things.

In “The Looming Tower,” his history of Al Qaeda, Lawrence Wright raises the possibility that “America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt.” By visiting imprisonment, torture and exile upon Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Mubarak foreclosed any possibility of an Islamic revolution in his own country. But he also helped radicalize and internationalize his country’s Islamists, pushing men like Ayman Al-Zawahiri — Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, and arguably the real brains behind Al Qaeda — out of Egyptian politics and into the global jihad.

At the same time, Mubarak’s relationship with Washington has offered constant vindication for the jihadi worldview. Under his rule, Egypt received more American dollars than any country besides Israel. For many young Egyptians, restless amid political and economic stagnation, it’s been a short leap from hating their dictator to hating his patrons in the United States. One of the men who made this leap was an architecture student named Mohamed Atta, who was at the cockpit when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center.

These sound like good reasons to welcome Mubarak’s potential overthrow, and the end to America’s decades-long entanglement with his drab, repressive regime. Unfortunately, Middle Eastern politics is never quite that easy. The United States supported Mubarak for so long because of two interrelated fears: the fear of another Khomeini and the fear of another Nasser. Both anxieties remain entirely legitimate today.

RTWT.

Douthat is right to say that, in the end, the Egyptians have the last word on what government is right for them. But looking at the clip above, with the "we have to destroy Israel" sentiment, it's gonna be a rocky road ahead.

And here's an exit question. Do you think the signatories of this "Open Letter to President Barack Obama" are saying the same thing?

In order for the United States to stand with the Egyptian people it must approach Egypt through a framework of shared values and hopes, not the prism of geostrategy. On Friday you rightly said that “suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.” For that reason we urge your administration to seize this chance, turn away from the policies that brought us here, and embark on a new course toward peace, democracy and prosperity for the people of the Middle East. And we call on you to undertake a comprehensive review of US foreign policy on the major grievances voiced by the democratic opposition in Egypt and all other societies of the region.

A number of prominent communists are signatories. And for the left, this is an anti-colonial revolution with explicitly anti-Zionist goals attached to it. (I'll scour around for more, but you'll get a chill reading some posts at Mondweiss. For example, "This revolution ‘undoubtedly means the end of Israel as a Jewish state’.")

That's frightening. Still, there's obviously no turning back on revolutionary change. The trick is to manage it. The goal is a reasonably secular interim government committed to democracy.

Expect updates ....

If Mubarak is Toppled?

Matt Lewis addressed this yesterday, "Toppling Egyptian President Mubarak: Careful What You Wish For":

Should he be toppled? ...

Even toppling regimes that were clearly anti-American -- from the Soviet Union to Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- resulted in power vacuums and instability, giving rise to new problems that had been obscured by the heavy-handedness of the ousted regimes. The benefits of toppling an anti-American government may outweigh the costs, and so one naturally wonders about the cost of toppling an ostensibly pro-American one. Were Mubarak's regime an obvious American enemy, such as Iran's, rooting for a revolution would be a no-brainer. But in Egypt, things are a bit more complicated.

I think the question to ask is whether Egypt's Mubarak is genuinely pro-American? Caroline Glick offers the definitive analysis of Egypt's foreign policy interests in the Middle East: "The Pragmatic Fantasy." The fantasy is that Israel's pragmatists believed their vision would best be achieved by allying with Israel's idealists. The reality is that nothing could was gained from the alliance (the Camp David Accords set back Israel's security, for example):

Unlike the starry-eyed idealists, the so-called pragmatists have no delusions that the Arabs are motivated by anything other than hatred for Israel, or that their hatred is likely to end in the foreseeable future. But still, they argue, Israel needs to surrender.

And she adds further, "Egypt has been the undisputed leader of the political war against Israel raging at international arenas throughout the world."

If Israel remains our main democratic friend in the region, American backing for Mubarak has been a disaster. We bought stability in an entrenched "secular" dictatorship on the leading edge of establishment jihad. So will regime change be an improvement? That depends. If the Islamists come to power it could unleash a rage of militant fanaticism around highly mobilized actors in the Muslim Brotherhood et al. (Glenn Reynolds worries about this.) But frankly, it's not clear that violent militants could take power if Mubarak flees. The Weekly Standard suggests that top members of the officer class stand in line to power. The government is a "Free Officers regime" that is "unlikely to fold in the face of 50,000 protesters throwing rocks." That's not much change, and no improvement in the prospects for democracy. And that makes sense, considering Washington's disgusting approach so far. As I noted last night, the Obama administration has held its ground on the wrong side of history and democracy since taking office. And while no one really knows who's driving some of the most newsworthy reports out of Eygpt (attacks on Mubarak's party headquarters, government gun battles with RPG-armed "protesters" in Northern Sinai, etc.), it's without doubt that years of dictatorship have engendered powerful demands for freedom. The New York Times reports on that, "Egyptians’ Fury Has Smoldered Beneath the Surface for Decades." And I think ultimately the freedom agenda that drove U.S. foreign policy before the Obama interregnum is being reaffirmed, and freedom's a big step from dictatorship. Peter Wehner puts things in context, "Vindication for Bush’s Freedom Agenda":

During the course of the Bush presidency, his “freedom agenda” was criticized from several different quarters, including foreign-policy “realists” who believed that the bargain Bush spoke about — tolerating oppression for the sake of “stability” — was worth it.

It wasn’t. The core argument Bush made, which is that America must stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity — the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance — was right. No people on earth long to live in oppression and servitude, as slaves instead of free people, to be kept in chains or experience the lash of the whip.

How this conviction should play itself out in the real world is not self-evident; the success of such a policy depends on the wisdom and prudence of statesmen. Implementing a policy is a good deal harder than proclaiming one. Still, it seems to be that events are vindicating the freedom agenda as a strategy and a moral insight, as even the Obama administration is coming to learn.

So, topple Mubarak. We'll be sorting through the implications of global jihad either way, and without much help from Hussein Obama.

In any case, my earlier essay is linked at New York Times, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Mubarak?"

And from this morning, "Army on Streets of Egypt — UPDATED!!"

Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change

I mentioned previously that one of the extreme gender feminists suggested on Twitter that the #MooreandMe protest was something akin to a new civil rights movement. No doubt there's quite a bit of self-congratulations there. And while the gender feminists did gain a lot of attention, the power of Twitter and other media is to mobilize social change through strengthening civil society. The new media gets people out in the streets, to the ballot box, raising money and distributing information. This is not to minimize the leveling effect we saw with this most recent feminist campaign, but large-scale political effects of social technology will vary across regime development, or at least that's one of the things I'm getting from Clay Shirky's article at Foreign Affairs, "The Political Power of Social Media." While Shirky discusses the new social media as a global phenomenon, the essay focuses on the potential for revolutionary change in authoritarian regimes. The established democracies aren't prone to regime change of this sort, although some of those in the U.S. and Europe are backing the WikiLeaks project with such hope in mind. That said, it's an informative discussion at the article. The key point is the contrast between "instrumental" and "environmental" approaches to Internet freedom. The former relates to U.S. efforts to pressure repressive regimes to open access to online information sources. The latter focuses on the more traditional theme of opening civil society in general, taking the long view to social and political change:

In January 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined how the United States would promote Internet freedom abroad. She emphasized several kinds of freedom, including the freedom to access information (such as the ability to use Wikipedia and Google inside Iran), the freedom of ordinary citizens to produce their own public media (such as the rights of Burmese activists to blog), and the freedom of citizens to converse with one another (such as the Chinese public's capacity to use instant messaging without interference).

Most notably, Clinton announced funding for the development of tools designed to reopen access to the Internet in countries that restrict it. This "instrumental" approach to Internet freedom concentrates on preventing states from censoring outside Web sites, such as Google, YouTube, or that of The New York Times. It focuses only secondarily on public speech by citizens and least of all on private or social uses of digital media. According to this vision, Washington can and should deliver rapid, directed responses to censorship by authoritarian regimes.

The instrumental view is politically appealing, action-oriented, and almost certainly wrong. It overestimates the value of broadcast media while underestimating the value of media that allow citizens to communicate privately among themselves. It overestimates the value of access to information, particularly information hosted in the West, while underestimating the value of tools for local coordination. And it overestimates the importance of computers while underestimating the importance of simpler tools, such as cell phones.

The instrumental approach can also be dangerous. Consider the debacle around the proposed censorship-circumvention software known as Haystack, which, according to its developer, was meant to be a "one-to-one match for how the [Iranian] regime implements censorship." The tool was widely praised in Washington; the U.S. government even granted it an export license. But the program was never carefully vetted, and when security experts examined it, it turned out that it not only failed at its goal of hiding messages from governments but also made it, in the words of one analyst, "possible for an adversary to specifically pinpoint individual users." In contrast, one of the most successful anti-censorship software programs, Freegate, has received little support from the United States, partly because of ordinary bureaucratic delays and partly because the U.S. government is wary of damaging U.S.-Chinese relations: the tool was originally created by Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that the Chinese government has called "an evil cult." The challenges of Freegate and Haystack demonstrate how difficult it is to weaponize social media to pursue country-specific and near-term policy goals.

New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before. One complaint about the idea of new media as a political force is that most people simply use these tools for commerce, social life, or self-distraction, but this is common to all forms of media. Far more people in the 1500s were reading erotic novels than Martin Luther's "Ninety-five Theses," and far more people before the American Revolution were reading Poor Richard's Almanack than the work of the Committees of Correspondence. But those political works still had an enormous political effect.

Just as Luther adopted the newly practical printing press to protest against the Catholic Church, and the American revolutionaries synchronized their beliefs using the postal service that Benjamin Franklin had designed, today's dissident movements will use any means possible to frame their views and coordinate their actions; it would be impossible to describe the Moldovan Communist Party's loss of Parliament after the 2009 elections without discussing the use of cell phones and online tools by its opponents to mobilize. Authoritarian governments stifle communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight.

Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic. It is difficult for outsiders to understand the local conditions of dissent. External support runs the risk of tainting even peaceful opposition as being directed by foreign elements. Dissidents can be exposed by the unintended effects of novel tools. A government's demands for Internet freedom abroad can vary from country to country, depending on the importance of the relationship, leading to cynicism about its motives.

The more promising way to think about social media is as long-term tools that can strengthen civil society and the public sphere. In contrast to the instrumental view of Internet freedom, this can be called the "environmental" view. According to this conception, positive changes in the life of a country, including pro-democratic regime change, follow, rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere. This is not to say that popular movements will not successfully use these tools to discipline or even oust their governments, but rather that U.S. attempts to direct such uses are likely to do more harm than good. Considered in this light, Internet freedom is a long game, to be conceived of and supported not as a separate agenda but merely as an important input to the more fundamental political freedoms.

In any case, Charli Carpenter has more thoughts: "Information Doesn't Want to be Free, People Do."

RELATED: Evgeny Morozov, "Why Washington's support for online democracy is the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet."

Americans No Longer Think U.S. Economy No. 1

From Ronald Brownstein, at National Journal, "Down From The Pedestal" (via Memeorandum):

In the global race for jobs and economic prosperity, the United States is No. 2. And it is likely to remain there for some time. That’s the glum conclusion of most Americans surveyed in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll. Henry Luce famously labeled the 20th century the “American Century.” This survey suggests that most Americans now doubt that this new century will bear that name.

In the poll, only one in five Americans said that the U.S. economy is the world’s strongest—nearly half picked China instead. Looking forward, Americans are somewhat more optimistic about regaining primacy, but still only about one in three expect the U.S. economy to be the world’s strongest in 20 years. Nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said that increasing competition from lower-paid workers around the world will keep living standards for average Americans from growing as fast as they did in the past. Ruben Owen, a retired Boeing engineer in Seattle who responded to the survey, spoke for many when he said, “We’re still in a reasonably good place … but it’s going to get harder because other places are growing stronger.”

Across a wide range of issues, the poll found the traditional American instinct toward optimism straining against fears that the nation’s economic struggles may extend far beyond the current slowdown. On many fronts, particularly the quality of higher education and scientific research, large majorities of Americans still believe that we lead the world. And most say that the U.S. can remain a manufacturing leader.

RTWT.

We discussed exactly this topic in the conclusion to my World Politics course on Wednesday. China still has quite a ways to catch the United States on a number of measures. China's GDP in 2009 was roughly $5 trillion. The U.S. economy was nearly three times as large, at rougly $14.2 trillion. And while breathtaking, I doubt China can maintain its growth trajectory indefinitely (see, "China Is Not Another Ascendant Superpower"), and the nation's quality of life is still mired by its Third World standard of living for much of the population (see, "Cost of Living Increasingly a Struggle for China's Poor").

Especially problematic is Chinese authortarianism. I noticed today this piece yesterday at NYT: "China Moves to Block Foreign News on Nobel Prize." And earlier at WaPo, "On eve of Nobel ceremony, China cracks down and lashes out." The research on democracy and economic productivity suggests that non-democracies perform as well as democratic states, but given the information-driven nature of coming first-mover industries, I doubt China will compete effectively against the United States as long as it remains a closed, repressive regime.

That said, there's always the potential for increased conflict in U.S.-Chinese relations. The Economist reported on that this week: "The dangers of a rising China," and "Friends, or else: A special report on China's place in the world."

More on all of this later.

RELATED: "The Road to Ruin? American Profligacy and American Power."

WikiLeaks Reveals China's Fear of the Web

I've been meaning to post this piece at Foreign Affairs, "The Digital Disruption," by Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. What's interesting is that the authors hit most of the key themes of the digital revolution in world politics, but with WikiLeaks topping the charts this last week, something was missing, and I held off on posting it. Now though we've got the clearest indication of how China views web technology in the New York Times' report, "Cables Discuss Vast Hacking by a China That Fears the Web." (At Memeorandum and Techmeme.) The Times indicates the members of China's Politiburo Standing Committee (almost as high as one goes in the Chinese party government) directed hacking operations against Google's servers in the United States. This seems almost unreal from the perspective of power politics and traditional concerns over geographic spheres of influence and market shares in key industrial sectors. But this is the information age and Chinese officials don't like what they're finding. Schmidt and Cohen put some of this in perspective in their Foreign Affairs article:

Realists describe international relations as anarchic and dominated by self-interested states. Although there is little doubt about the dominant role states will and should play in the world, there is a great deal of debate about exactly how dominant they will be going forward. In these pages in 2008, Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, described a "nonpolar world" that is "dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power." In the interconnected estate, a virtual space that is constrained by different national laws but not national boundaries, there can be no equivalent to the Treaty of Westphalia -- the 1648 agreement that ended the Thirty Years' War and established the modern system of nation-states. Instead, governments, individuals, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies will balance one another's interests.

Not all governments will manage the turbulence left in the wake of declining state authority in the same way. Much remains uncertain, of course, but it seems clear that free-market and democratic governments will be the best suited to manage and cope with this maelstrom. The greatest danger to the Internet among these countries -- perhaps best defined as the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- will be the overregulation of the technology sector, which has thus far thrived on entrepreneurial investment and open networks.

Perhaps no country has more carefully considered the implications of allowing its citizens access to connection technologies than China. The regime's goals are clear: to control access to content on the Internet and to use technology to build its political and economic power. Beijing has arrested online activists and used the country's thriving online bulletin boards to spread its propaganda. All of this is part of a strategy to ensure that the technology revolution extends, rather than destroys, the one-party state and its value system. Around the world, the Chinese model of Internet control has been copied by nations such as Vietnam and actively promoted in Asian and African countries where China is investing heavily in natural resources. And Beijing has moved to co-opt international institutions, such as the International Telecommunications Union, in order to gain global credibility and rally allies behind its efforts to control its citizens' communication.

But thanks to the work of activists and nongovernmental organizations operating inside and outside China, Beijing has learned that its attempts to establish total control of the Internet will not always work. The regime has recently been caught off-guard by the use of cell phones, blogs, and uploaded videos to encourage labor protests and report on industrial accidents, environmental problems, and incidents of corruption. The July 2009 demonstrations by ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang drew international media attention even after Beijing completely shut down all Internet connections in the region; Uighur activists used social networks and so-called microblogs to spread news among targeted audiences abroad, including the Uighur diaspora. These kinds of cat-and-mouse games will no doubt continue, but in the short run there is doubt that Beijing's attempts to control access to information will largely succeed.

Axis of Evil: One Down Two to Go

There are few presidential slogans more reviled that President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" from his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002. Endlessly ridiculed, leftist media outlets argued such rhetoric "heightened dangers" while some claimed the speech came back to "haunt the U.S." in 2006. But President Bush stayed the course, and Iraq now boasts a democratic government that is unique among Arab states of the Middle East. See, "Seven Years Later, Iraq War Bearing Fruit." Unfortunately the Obama administration's precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces leaves a tenuous security balance between the Iraqi government and its long-time nemesis Iran. At the height of the insurgency Shiite power spread like an arc across the Persian Gulf and today Iran presses its claws on political developments in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, and even the Pakistani hinterlands controlled by the Qaeda-Taliban-Lashkar enterprise. See, "Obama's Lose-Lose Iraq Policy." Now we have not only an emboldened Iran but an increasingly bellicose alliance between Tehran and Pyongyang. And while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the document release as an "attack on the international community," there's a demonstrable clarity to the nature of global threats today following the WikiLeaks disclosures. Even New York Times reporting occasionally concedes the dangers. See, "Iran Fortifies Its Arsenal With the Aid of North Korea."

I have called for regime change in North Korea. We'll hardly see a better time than right now. Japan has pressed the U.S. for a military response and Sen. John McCain argued for lobbying China on toppling Pyongyang. Continued soft-peddling will only bring more conflict on the Korean peninula, and more military and civilian deaths. It's time for American foreign policy to return to the animating vision of the early Bush years. President Bush's Axis of Evil speech identified the threatening storm of rogue regimes in the early post-9/11 period. Toppling Saddam in Iraq was costly, but the world benefits with one less leg of the rogue revisionist triad of terror. It's time to work on making the Axis of Evil two down and one to go.

Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers

If these are the world's top thinkers, the world's in a world of hurt.

At Foreign Policy: "The Wisdom of the Smart Crowd."

One-fifth say that the rise of China is "good for the global balance of power" (along with some even more favorable findings on China). And a whopping 81 percent say that regime change in Iraq "wasn't worth it."

Oooh, surprise!! The world's top thinkers favor the rise of a murderous authoritarian regime in Beijing to balance the international system's leading democratic power.

There's a roster of respondents at Foreign Policy. I'm shaking my head at these people.

Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010

Professor Chalmers Johnson has died.

Steve Clemons has reflections (via Memeorandum), and see also the links at Google so far. Leftists lionize Johnson --- not to mention paleocon America-bashers --- for his research on the purported American empire. Much more important is Johnson's work in comparatitve political science.

Below I've re-posted an essay on Johnson from January 31, 2007, "Chalmers Johnson and America's Imperial Decline."

*****

Chalmers Johnson's one of the nation's foremost experts on Japanese politics and international economic competitiveness. A professor emeritus at UC San Diego, Johnson's book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975, remains one of the most important selections on Japanese politics graduate syllabi. In recent years Johnson's been writing on trends in American foreign policy, particularly the consequences of America's clandestine intelligence operations and the "blowback" from U.S. strategic reach and ambition.

Johnson's got a new book out, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Empire, which looks at what Johnson sees are threats to the republic from the country's massive military industial complex, which emerged from our post-World War II foreign policy of containing threats to U.S. national security.

Nemesis received an outstanding review by Tim Rutten in today's Calendar at the Los Angeles Times:

The thesis proffered here is that, since the end of World War II, the United States has been undergoing a kind of creeping coup in which the growth of an imperial presidency, the development of the CIA as a secret presidential army, the bloating of an outsized military establishment, and a venal and derelict Congress have conspired to undermine the American republic — perhaps irremediably.

Much of what Johnson denounces is the Bush administration's advocacy of executive branch supremacy in the realm of national security, manifest, for example, in the adminstration's early policies on the detention and torture of enemy combatants. But Johnson goes too far in making his case, essentially equating the Bush administration's excesses with the totalitarianism of Hitler's Nazi regime. Here's what Rutten says about that analytical overstretch:

Many of the conclusions Johnson teases from his shrewdly assembled and analyzed material are not so convincing. For example, appropriating Hannah Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann — "desk murderer" — and applying it to Cheney, George W. Bush and Donald H. Rumsfeld isn't just histrionic, it's wrong on the merits, wrong in ways so fundamental that it renders moral judgment itself a uselessly blunt instrument. However horrific events in Iraq have been, they have nothing in common with Hitlerian Germany's "final solution," and it does violence to both reason and history to carelessly suggest otherwise for mere effect.

On the other hand, when Johnson argues that America "will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon," he presents a case that demands consideration.

That sounds pretty fair. Rutten goes on to give additional examples of the difficulties of Johnson's analysis. For example, even if the Bush administration succeeded in elevating White House power into an "imperial presidency," the election of a Democratic majority in the November midterms has already started the process of restoring the balance of power among the branches in the federal system. The democracy's not in jeopardy of succumbing to a military dictatorship any time soon, as Rutten ably points out.

(An interesting aside here is that Johnson's book shares its title, Nemesis, with the second edition of Ian Kershaw's authoritative biography of Adolph Hitler, Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis. I agree with Rutten, though, that comparing Bush to Hitler -- or U.S. foreign policy to Nazi foreign policy -- defies reason. The antiwar left, nonetheless, loves to denounce the Bush administration as fascist. Whether the shared title was deliberate or coincidental is an intriguing footnote to Johnson's scholarship.)

I've been reluctant to read Johnson's latest books. Upon skimming The Sorrows of Empire at Barnes and Noble, for example, I got the feeling the work was just a dressed-up, high-brow anitwar attack on the Bush administration war policies. Rutten's cool-handed review has convinced to give Johnson's writing a second look, however. There's a growing debate on America's continued leadership of the global system -- which I have discussed here and here, for example -- and Johnson's work certainly adds an important dimension to the discussion.