Democrats Must Cope With Victory in Iraq

James Ceaser, at the Weekly Standard, argues that the Democrats face a monumental dilemma in the politics of foreign policy: How will they cope with U.S. victory in the Iraq war:

WILL ANY OF the Democratic candidates be able to summon the courage to concede an American victory in Iraq?

No one, of course, can know the ultimate outcome of this long war. But the vaunted "facts on the ground" now at least admit a trend leading to what might reasonably be called victory: a suppression of the insurgency; a steep reduction in the level of domestic, sectarian violence; the existence of a constitutional government not unfriendly to America; a gradual reduction of American force presence with diminishing American casualties; and the assurance for a period of a continued base of operations from which to handle other possible contingencies in the region.

But if this outcome "on the ground" can be called victory--and why should it not be?--there is a huge potential problem looming in our ability to acknowledge it. Generic opinion polls for the presidential election all indicate a much better than even chance that a Democrat will be elected president next year. All of the Democrats now have been running on a platform that, if it does not recognize defeat, certainly does not envisage victory. And moving beyond the candidates, a large part of the Democratic base is heavily invested in defeat, which is seen as condign punishment for a despised president.

Imagine then the dilemma facing a Democratic president with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. It might be too much to think that steps would be taken to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, although a lack of firm policies and rigor in the endgame could have that effect. More plausibly, if victory is near, could the new president proclaim it and cement its benefits for America's future strategic role? Could the new president suspend his or her disbelief and accord the full measure of praise to a general who had saved the day? Could that president give full honor to the American troops, not just for their service--that's always easy--but for their achievement in winning. Could that president show up on an Army bases and declare, in full-throated pride, well-done and mission accomplished?

Historians can cite many instances of nations that have been pulled apart by the difficulty of dealing with defeat in war. Will America be the rare case of a nation that is unable to cope with a victory?

Note first that Ceaser's piece is another sign that more and more commentators are speaking of an impending American victory in Iraq (see my earlier post, "Victory in Iraq? The War Has Been Won").

Now what should the Democrats do? That's easy: They need to reject the white flag politics of their nihilist, antiwar base and embrace the phenomenal success of America's fighting men and women in Iraq.

Ceaser makes a good point, though: Republicans need to give the Democrats political space to integrate victory into the party's talking points. It will not be necessary for Democrats to fully disown their last four years of criticisms and recriminations; and the party can be in fact heartened by its politcal victory in winning control of Congress (and its likely win of the presidency in 2008). But a strong Democratic leader must step forward to denounce the party's defeatist base, repudiating the politics of partisan destruction in foreign affairs.

I would add that this very leader needs to be unequivocal in announcing America's lasting support to the Iraqis in the consolidation of their democratic regime.

Democrats Revive Antiwar Push in Congress

House Democrats have renewed their antiwar efforts in Congress. The Los Angeles Times has the story:

Nearly two months after Democrats suspended their legislative push to force a withdrawal from Iraq, House Democratic leaders restarted their campaign Wednesday with a measure to compel President Bush to bring troops home.

But with Republican resistance to congressional intervention in the war stronger than ever, there appears little chance that this gambit will advance any further than previous failed efforts.

On Wednesday, a $50-billion war funding bill that would order the president to start withdrawing troops within 30 days and set a goal of completing the pullout by the end of next year passed, 218 to 203.

It attracted just four Republican votes, dozens short of a two-thirds majority needed to overcome a presidential veto.

And in the closely divided Senate, many Democrats concede that they probably won't get close to the 60 votes necessary to end a promised filibuster, which would effectively kill the bill.

"They seem determined to keep bringing up resolutions that they know the president won't agree to," said Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a moderate Republican who has urged Bush to adopt a new strategy in Iraq but has rejected all timelines. "We look pretty silly when we lecture Baghdad on being in political stalemate and insist on staying in one ourselves."

Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino accused congressional Democrats of planning "to send the president a bill that they know he will veto."

"This is for political posturing and to appease radical groups," she said.

Democratic leaders countered that they had the broader public on their side. "Democrats are committed to bringing the American people what they deserve and demand," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). "An end to President Bush's 10-year, trillion-dollar war."

Pelosi's obviously got no new ideas or initiatives, and the Democratic Party keeps rolling out the tired old meme that "the public's demanding withdrawal."

See also the commentary over at Michelle Malkin and Memeorandum.

Capabilities or Intentions? Defense Priorities and Realistic Threat Assessment

Richard Betts has a thought-provoking piece on military spending in the current Foreign Affairs, "A Disciplined Defense." Here's the introduction:

If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in the Pentagon's budgeting office 20 years ago and awoke today, his first reaction would be that nothing had changed. President George W. Bush has asked for $505 billion for the peacetime U.S. military establishment in 2008 -- almost exactly the amount, in real dollars, that President Ronald Reagan sought in 1988. Rip would start scratching his head, however, when he discovered that the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself had imploded more than 15 years ago and that Washington now spends almost as much on its military power as the rest of the world combined and five times more than all its potential enemies together. Told that Pentagon planners were nonetheless worried about overstretch and presidential candidates were vying to pledge even higher budgets and even larger forces, Rip's head might just explode.

The current strains on resources and forces are due, of course, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the costs of those wars are not included in the half-trillion-dollar "baseline" figure noted above. A supplemental request for an extra $142 billion covers them, bringing the total 2008 military budget request to a whopping $647 billion -- a budget more than 25 percent larger, in real terms, than the one for 1968, at the height of combat in Vietnam, a bigger and bloodier conflict than any the United States has seen since. And even that total figure does not include the $46 billion budget of the Department of Homeland Security, whose functions would be handled by the Defense Ministry in many other countries.

How would one answer Rip's inevitable questions about what is going on? One might note that everything costs more these days. And one might argue that even so, military spending takes up less of GDP today than it did during the Cold War -- 4.2 percent today compared with 5.8 percent in 1988 and 9.4 percent in 1968. But when pressed, one would have to concede that Washington spends so much and yet feels so insecure because U.S. policymakers have lost the ability to think clearly about defense policy.

In recent years, U.S. national security policy has responded to a visceral sense of threat spawned by the frightening intentions of the country's enemies rather than to a sober estimate of those enemies' capabilities and what it would take to counter them effectively. The United States faces very real dangers today and potentially bigger ones in the future, but these are not threats that can be tamed by current spending on the most expensive components of military power.

U.S. political leaders, meanwhile, have forgotten the craft of balancing commitments and resources responsibly. Nobody younger than 80 can remember a peacetime United States without vast standing armed forces, even though that was the norm for the first 150 years of the republic. So the post-Cold War situation does not seem as odd as it should. Contractors who live off the defense budget have also become more adept at engineering political support by spreading subcontracts around the maximum number of congressional districts. And the traditional constituencies for restrained spending in both major political parties have evaporated, leaving the field free for advocates of excess.

The last two U.S. presidents, finally, have embraced ambitious goals of reshaping the world according to American values but without considering the full costs and consequences of their grandiose visions. The result has been a defense budget caught between two stools: higher than needed for basic national security but far lower than required to eliminate all villainous governments and groups everywhere. The time has come to face the problem squarely. The sole coherent rationale for increasing military spending -- to try and run a benign American empire -- is dangerously misguided. But a more modest and sensible national security strategy can and should be purchased at a lower price.

Read the whole thing.

Betts' game is to deflate current threat assessments in support of cutting defense spending. He argues that contemporary proponents of a forward military role suffer from historical amnesia, that the country faces dangers today nowhere near the magnitude of America's Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. What Betts doesn't note, though, is that there were officials at the time who argued we weren't doing enough back then to adequately fund defense priorities.

The United States certainly needs more clear thinking on defense priorities. Of particular concern is our need to rebuild and strengthen the Army and Marines who've borne the brunt of current war-fighting. Betts' article, however, bolsters the case for liberal retrenchment hawks and opponents of the administration's war in Iraq.

Fortunately, some of the GOP candidates, not persuaded by left-leaning retrenchment arguments, are proposing hikes in defense spending and boosts in military manpower.

The Political Psychology of Bush Hatred

Peter Berkowitz has a great piece up day over at the Wall Street Journal on Bush hatred in American politics:

Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. The people, or various factions among them, have indulged in Clinton hatred, Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred, FDR hatred, Lincoln hatred, and John Adams hatred, to mention only the more extravagant hatreds that we Americans have conceived for our presidents.

But Bush hatred is different. It's not that this time members of the intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition. Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene.

This distinguishing feature of Bush hatred was brought home to me on a recent visit to Princeton University. I had been invited to appear on a panel to debate the ideas in Princeton professor and American Prospect editor Paul Starr's excellent new book, "Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism." To put in context Prof. Starr's grounding of contemporary progressivism in the larger liberal tradition, I recounted to the Princeton audience an exchange at a dinner I hosted in Washington in June 2004 for several distinguished progressive scholars, journalists, and policy analysts.

To get the conversation rolling at that D.C. dinner--and perhaps mischievously--I wondered aloud whether Bush hatred had not made rational discussion of politics in Washington all but impossible. One guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, "What's irrational about hating George W. Bush?" His vehemence caused his fellow progressives to gather around and lean in, like kids on a playground who see a fight brewing.

Reluctant to see the dinner fall apart before drinks had been served, I sought to ease the tension. I said, gently, that I rarely found hatred a rational force in politics, but, who knows, perhaps this was a special case. And then I tried to change the subject.

But my dinner companion wouldn't allow it. "No," he said, angrily. "You started it. You make the case that it's not rational to hate Bush." I looked around the table for help. Instead, I found faces keen for my response. So, for several minutes, I held forth, suggesting that however wrongheaded or harmful to the national interest the president's policies may have seemed to my progressive colleagues, hatred tended to cloud judgment, and therefore was a passion that a citizen should not be proud of being in the grips of and should avoid bringing to public debate. Propositions, one might have thought, that would not be controversial among intellectuals devoted to thinking and writing about politics.

But controversial they were. Finally, another guest, a man I had long admired, an incisive thinker and a political moderate, cleared his throat, and asked if he could interject. I welcomed his intervention, confident that he would ease the tension by lending his authority in support of the sole claim that I was defending, namely, that Bush hatred subverted sound thinking. He cleared his throat for a second time. Then, with all eyes on him, and measuring every word, he proclaimed, "I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks."

And so, I told my Princeton audience, in the context of a Bush hatred and a corollary contempt for conservatism so virulent that it had addled the minds of many of our leading progressive intellectuals, Prof. Starr deserved special recognition for keeping his head in his analysis of liberalism and progressivism. Then I got on with my prepared remarks.

But as at that D.C. dinner in late spring of 2004, so again in early autumn 2007 at dinner following the Princeton panel, several of my progressive colleagues seized upon my remarks against giving oneself over to hatred. And they vigorously rejected the notion. Both a professor of political theory and a nationally syndicated columnist insisted that I was wrong to condemn hatred as a passion that impaired political judgment. On the contrary, they argued, Bush hatred was fully warranted considering his theft of the 2000 election in Florida with the aid of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore; his politicization of national security by making the invasion of Iraq an issue in the 2002 midterm elections; and his shredding of the Constitution to authorize the torture of enemy combatants.

Of course, these very examples illustrate nothing so much as the damage hatred inflicts on the intellect. Many of my colleagues at Princeton that evening seemed not to have considered that in 2000 it was Al Gore who shifted the election controversy to the courts by filing a lawsuit challenging decisions made by local Florida county election supervisors. Nor did many of my Princeton dinner companions take into account that between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, 10 of 16 higher court judges--five of whom were Democratic appointees--found equal protection flaws with the recount scheme ordered by the intermediate Florida court. And they did not appear to have pondered Judge Richard Posner's sensible observation, much less themselves sensibly observe, that while indeed it was strange to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide a presidential election, it would have been even stranger for the election to have been decided by the Florida Supreme Court.

This is all very frustrating.

Berkowitz's discussion reminds me of my own recent experience as a panelist at a town hall meeting on the Iraq war. The left-wing participants on the panel fit perfectly into the mold of the irrational Bush-hating intellectual Berkowitz describes.

Majority of Blacks Cite Individual Factors in Plight of Lower-Income African-Americans

Today's Los Angeles Times discusses the results of an important Pew Research Center poll that finds black Americans citing individual-level factors in the economic difficulties of lower-income African-Americans:

A majority of black Americans blame individual failings -- not racial prejudice -- for the lack of economic progress by lower-income African Americans, according to a survey released Tuesday -- a significant change in attitudes from the early 1990s.

At the same time, black college graduates say the values of middle-class African Americans are more closely aligned with those of middle-class whites than those of lower-income blacks, the poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found.

And 40% of those surveyed said African Americans could no longer be viewed as a single community.

The report said that in 1994, 60% of African Americans believed racial prejudice was the main thing keeping blacks from succeeding economically. Only 33% blamed the individual. Though views on the issue have shifted over time, this was the first year that a majority of blacks, 53%, said individuals were responsible for their own condition.

The original Pew Research Center poll is here.

I'm pleased with the black majority finding on individual responsibility, although overall I'm not that impressed with the survey. Too many blacks - 60 percent - continue to see racism as a dominating presence in the contemporary life chances of African-Americans. (This is a nationally representative sample as well, so it's likely that academic multiculturalism - the ideology of the racially oppressed - had little influence on lingering perceptions of institional racism.)

Ron Paul's Storm Troopers

Ron Paul's in the news again this week, following his big fundraising haul on November 5. The Chicago Tribune discusses the Paul campaign liftoff:

No more Department of Education. No more Federal Reserve Bank. No more Medicare or Medicaid. No more membership in the United Nations or NATO. No more federal drug laws. And, no more U.S. troops in Iraq -- or anywhere else on foreign soil.

The Internal Revenue Service would be history in the first week that Ron Paul sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. And the dismantling of the above-mentioned entities and relationships -- plus a long list of others -- soon would commence.

Think that sounds eccentric, strange, even crazy? Many of the libertarian-minded, 10-term congressman's rivals for the GOP presidential nomination think so and have said so.

But, to a growing, Internet-based pool of supporters, the silver-haired obstetrician turned politician is the sanest man at the Republican debates and perhaps in all of Congress. Paul attracts an unusual political potpourri of people of all ages and viewpoints, including a sprinkling of conspiracy theorists and other extremists whose views Paul's campaign disavows. While most supporters ardently oppose the Iraq war, what they all share is a deep disenchantment and distrust of the federal government in its present form and a fervent belief in Paul's plans to change it.

On Nov. 5, they demonstrated their passion for Paul in spectacular fashion, raising $4.2 million, mostly online, in 24 hours, rocketing him close to his $12 million goal for the fourth quarter. In terms of 2008 GOP presidential candidates, Paul's take broke the previous one-day record of $3.1million set by Mitt Romney Jan. 8.

Hammering home a singular message of freedom, free markets, smaller federal government and greater personal responsibility, Paul, at 72, is nothing if not consistent. Personally, he seems very much the same in a one-on-one conversation as he does on the stump: earnest, serious and slightly stunned. Although pleasant, he, unlike most politicians, makes no effort to charm. He leaves an impression that he is out to sell ideas, not himself.

Andrew Walden over at the American Thinker penetrates deep into the Paul internet contributor base to unearth the group remants of the shady side of American politics:

When some in a crowd of anti-war activists meeting at Democrat National Committee HQ in June, 2005 suggested Israel was behind the 9-11 attacks, DNC Chair Howard Dean was quick to get behind the microphones and denounce them saying: "such statements are nothing but vile, anti-Semitic rhetoric."

When KKK leader David Duke switched parties to run for Louisiana governor as a Republican in 1991, then-President George H W Bush responded sharply, saying, "When someone asserts the Holocaust never took place, then I don't believe that person ever deserves one iota of public trust. When someone has so recently endorsed Nazism, it is inconceivable that someone can reasonably aspire to a leadership role in a free society."

Ron Paul is different.

Rep Ron Paul (R-TX) is the only Republican candidate to demand immediate withdrawal from Iraq and blame US policy for creating Islamic terrorism. He has risen from obscurity and is beginning to raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions. Paul has no traction in the polls -- 7% of the vote in New Hampshire -- but he at one point had more cash on hand than John McCain. And now he is planning a $1.1 million New Hampshire media blitz just in time for the primary.

Ron Paul set an internet campaigning record raising more than $4 million in small on-line donations in one day, on November 5, 2007. But there are many questions about Paul's apparent unwillingness to reject extremist groups' public participation in his campaign and financial support of his November 5 "patriot money-bomb plot."

On October 26 nationally syndicated radio talk show host Michael Medved posted an "Open Letter to Rep. Ron Paul" on TownHall.com. It reads:

Dear Congressman Paul:

Your Presidential campaign has drawn the enthusiastic support of an imposing collection of Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Holocaust Deniers, 9/11 "Truthers" and other paranoid and discredited conspiracists.

Do you welcome- or repudiate - the support of such factions?

More specifically, your columns have been featured for several years in the American Free Press -a publication of the nation's leading Holocaust Denier and anti-Semitic agitator, Willis Carto. His book club even recommends works that glorify the Nazi SS, and glowingly describe the "comforts and amenities" provided for inmates of Auschwitz.

Have your columns appeared in the American Free Press with your knowledge and approval?

As a Presidential candidate, will you now disassociate yourself, clearly and publicly, from the poisonous propaganda promoted in such publications?

As a guest on my syndicated radio show, you answered my questions directly and fearlessly.

Will you now answer these pressing questions, and eliminate all associations between your campaign and some of the most loathsome fringe groups in American society?

Along with my listeners (and many of your own supporters), I eagerly await your response.

Respectfully, Michael Medved

Medved has received no official response from the Paul campaign.

There is more. The Texas-based Lone Star Times October 25 publicly requested a response to questions about whether the Paul campaign would repudiate and reject a $500 donation from white supremacist Stormfront.org founder Don Black and end the Stormfront website fundraising for Paul. The Times article lit up the conservative blogosphere for the next week. Paul supporters packed internet comment boards alternately denouncing or excusing the charges. Most politicians are quick to distance themselves from such disreputable donations when they are discovered. Not Paul.

Daniel Siederaski of the Jewish Telegraph Agency tried to get an interview with Paul, calling him repeatedly but not receiving any return calls. Wrote Siederaski November 9: "Ron Paul will take money from Nazis. But he won’t take telephone calls from Jews." [Update] Finally on November 13 the Paul campaign responded. In a short interview JTA quotes Jim Perry, head of Jews for Paul describing his work on the Paul campaign along side a self-described white supremacist which Perry says he has reformed.

Racist ties exposed in the Times article go far beyond a single donation. Just below links to information about the "BOK KKK Ohio State Meeting", and the "BOK KKK Pennsylvania State Meeting", Stormfront.org website announced: "Ron Paul for President" and "Countdown to the 5th of November". The links take readers directly to a Ron Paul fundraising site from which they can click into the official Ron Paul 2008 donation page on the official campaign site. Like many white supremacists, Stormfront has ties to white prison gangs.

Paul's fringe element support's not only among far right strom troopers:

Other Paul donations and activists come from leftists and Muslims. Singer and Democrat contributor Barry Manilow is also a Ron Paul contributor and possibly a fundraiser. There are close ties (but no endorsements) between Ron Paul's San Francisco Bay Area campaign and Cindy Sheehan's long-shot Congressional campaign.

An Austin, TX MeetUp site shows Paul supporters also involved in leftist groups such as Howard Dean's "Democracy for America." MeetUp lists other sites popular with members of the Ron Paul national MeetUp group. The number one choice is "9/11 questions" another leading choice is "conspiracy"....

The ugly mishmash of hate groups backing Paul has a Sheehan connection as well. David Duke is a big Cindy Sheehan supporter eagerly proclaiming "Cindy Sheehan is right" after Sheehan said, "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." Stormfront.org members joined Sheehan at her protest campout in Crawford, TX and posed with her for photos. Sheehan is also intimately associated with the Lew Rockwell libertarian website which has posted over 200 articles by Ron Paul as well as some "scholarly" 9-11 conspiracy theories.

The white supremacist American Nationalist Union also backed Sheehan's Crawford protests and endorsed David Duke for president of the United States in 1988. Now they are backing Ron Paul-linking to numerous Pro-Paul articles posted on LewRockwell.com.

Medved's questions surprise many, but they shouldn't. Paul's links the anti-Semites and white supremacists continue a trend which has been developing since the 9-11 attacks. Barely six weeks after 9-11, Paul was already busy blaming America. On October 27, 2001 Paul wrote on LewRockwell.com, "Some sincere Americans have suggested that our modern interventionist policy set the stage for the attacks of 9-11". Paul complained: "often the ones who suggest how our policies may have played a role in evoking the attacks are demonized as unpatriotic."

See my earlier posts on the Paul campaign, here, here, here, and here.

Paul is endlessly fascinating, from a political science perspective in particular. His campaign is like a real-world laboratory on extremist ideology. We sometimes forget all the nasty strangeness lurking in the subterranean fringe of the American electorate. Paul's candidacy brings out the loons, demonstrating the weird power of internet advocacy in a time of political dealignment and policy discontent.

**********

UPDATE: Be sure to check this Buzztracker link, which has an aggregation of some top blog posts on American Thinker's, "The Ron Paul Campaign and its Neo-Nazi Supporters."

The 1960s Are Hard to Escape

I was born in the early-1960s, but with the exception of some of my earliest rock-and-roll recollections, I feel more a child of the 1970s and 1980s. Or, at least that's what I figured after reading this week's cover story at Newsweek:

Barack Obama was born in the 1960s but is not of them. Such is the constant promise of his presidential campaign. Announcing his candidacy last January, he vowed to lead a "new generation" unencumbered by the divisive struggles of the past. By last week, when a Fox News reporter asked him to define the difference between him and the Democratic front runner, Hillary Clinton, he had grown more pointed. "Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s," Obama replied. "It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

Obama's promise—I am not the'60s—is heartfelt, but ultimately hard to believe. Just look at the gray-haired '60s idealists inside the senator's own brain trust who see him as the fulfillment of 40 years' worth of hard work. Or look at the throbbing crowds that mob the young senator, reminiscent in so many ways of the crowds that mobbed Bobby Kennedy 40 years ago. Or look at the Secret Service detail that trails Obama, a reminder of the old '60s lesson that assassination is a real threat. Obama is the '60s, whether he likes it or not.

John McCain is also the '60s. A former naval aviator who spent the latter part of the decade in a North Vietnamese POW camp, McCain uttered the best line of the 2008 presidential campaign last month in a Republican primary debate. "A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock Concert Museum," McCain announced. "Now, my friends, I wasn't there … I was tied up at the time." The Republican room erupted, not in laughter, but in applause. His campaign quickly took the debate clip and cut a television ad.

McCain knows what Obama should have learned by now: the '60s are impossible to escape. They will define the 2008 presidential election, just as they have defined American politics, and American culture, for the past 40 years. It is fashionable to see the boomers' '60s obsession as a reflection of their own narcissism, their inability to get over themselves. But this does not do justice to a truly traumatic decade. In the midst of adolescence, an entire generation was presented with repeated reminders of its own mortality: the Cuban missile crisis; the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; the violence in the cities; the 58,193 Vietnam War dead. So much death and killing, too much to simply put aside.

But what about the rest of us? Nearly 162 million Americans were born after Dec. 31, 1969. More than half the country, then, knows the decade only through mythology (peace, love and liberation) or through marketing (tie-dyed T shirts at tourist shops, the Rolling Stones on oldies radio, Dennis Hopper in Ameriprise Financial ads). They rightly question what makes the '60s so special: What, after all, did the baby boomers really achieve 40 years ago? Why does NEWSWEEK commemorate 1968 instead of 1918 or 1941?

The answer: because all of us, young and old, are stuck in the '60s, hostages to a decade we define ourselves as for or against. As the pages that follow demonstrate, the '60s were not necessarily, as some baby boomers would have it, America's defining moment. But they were an era when a generation held sustained argument over the things that have always mattered most: How should America show its power in the world? What rights were owed to African-Americans, to women, to gays? What is America and what does it want to be?

Read the whole thing.

I understand why the 1960s get so much attention. Yet I dont' think it's necessary to hold the 1960s as a decade of revolutionary morality with which to hold hostage the nation's conscience. We needed the change, in civil rights, desegration, the advancement of women, and so forth - but a lot of the tumult we could have done without.

Ultimately, I think the 1960s will remain the decade of influence as long as our top political leaders hail from that era. In the years ahead, kids who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s will come to power, and we'll remember bands like the B-52s and Devo, phenomena like MTV and skateparks, and political movements like the Reagan Revolution.

Each political era has its triumphs and tragedies. In remembering earlier times we take seriously the formative periods of our history.

Student Press Bias at Long Beach City College

I don't normally comment on campus politics, but my college's student newspaper's published a wildly innacurate article on an Iraq war panel discussion in which I participated.

The article, "Panelists discuss Iraq in town hall meeting," badly misrepresents my statements at the college forum. Indeed, the piece is a poorly veiled, miserable attempt to impugn my debate performance and my reputation as an informed commentator on the war.

Here's the piece, in full:

About 15 students gathered and listened as a panel of four men sat behind a folding table in LAC's dimly lit Nordic Lounge and discussed the widely debated issue of Democracy in Iraq Monday, Nov. 7.

The panel, chosen by the Political Science Club, included two liberals, LBCC history professor Dr. Julian DelGaudio and political analyst Peter Mathews, and two conservatives, LBCC political science professor Dr. Donald Douglas and republican activist Ed Williams.

Panel members spent an hour answering 9 questions, conceived by political science students, that focused on the United States' decision to invade Iraq, issues present in Iraq, and the future of Iraq.

"The invasion of Iraq is illegitimate," said Dr. DelGaudio. The history professor was quick to respond to Dr. Douglas' support of the U.S. invasion. Douglas said that the invasion was justified because Saddam Hussein was violating a United Nations truce from the Gulf War. DelGaudio continued calmly, "This was actually done in opposition to the U.N. which never voted for an actual invasion of Iraq. In fact, I recall the Secretary General of the U.N. at the time saying that this was an illegal war."

The panelists then discussed Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, or the lack thereof, and the effect that this issue had on inspiring pro-invasion sentiment amongst Americans.

"We in this country talk about our soldiers that we've lost in this war, but they don't amount to one week of the death squads of Saddam Hussein," Williams said as he hunched over the table to get closer to the microphone, his volume and tone indicating angry excitement.

"No weapons of mass destruction? You ask a Kurd and they'll tell you yes, there were weapons of mass destruction used against us," Williams continued, pounding his index finger on the table. "Why aren't we talking about that, do the Kurds not matter because they are desert people?"

As the debate moved on, three of the four men openly agreed that President Bush is, in the words of DelGaudio, "a pathological liar". Douglas was the only one who didn't comment on the statement, though he said nothing to argue it.

Congressional hopeful Mathews criticized President Bush's policy on Iraq by saying, "You cannot go into Iraq with guns blazing and impose or build democracy from the outside."

Mathews, a progressive Democrat, will make his eighth bid for congressional representative of the 37th district in June, 2008. The first seven have been unsuccessful. He concluded, "Mr. Bush had this idea in his mind that he could help build democracy in his own way, but a lot of the approaches he has used have been vacant."

Dr. Douglas, who, according to his website enjoys reading works of international intrigue, had a differing perspective, "Democracy in Iraq is beginning to take hold, they've got elections, they're making political progress, they're establishing their oil resources and rebuilding industries, peace is returning to the cities," he said. "In fact they're trying to open restaurants and bars, which will be terrific."

However, when the audience asked him about the Iraqi constitution being contradictory to the premise of establishing democracy he said, "It's not going to take months or years, it's going to take decades to really establish democracy."

He also said that he is not yet familiar enough with the Iraqi constitution to give a hard and fast answer on the subject.

Article 2A in the Iraqi constitution states, "No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established."

The panel did unanimously conclude that even if congress votes to withdraw America from Iraq, our soldiers will be there for years to come.

"The United States is going to be staying in Iraq for some time," said Douglas. "Freedom is not free."

Sadly, this is essentially a commentary piece purportedly offered as "objective" student journalism. One wouldn't know this from the story, but with all due respect, Professor Del Gaudio, a colleague in my department, is a hardline Marxist historian who's an advisor to my college's "campus progressive" club, a front-group for the local International ANSWER chapter. I vehemently disagree with his antiwar positions, and I robustly defended the Bush administration and the war at the forum.

During the panel, Professor Del Gaudio denounced the war in Iraq as a disaster, conducted in violation of international law, and launched on the basis of lies put forward by the administration. I rebutted his arguments - succinctly and point-by-point - noting that the war was in fact waged to force Saddam Hussein's compliance with the 1991 U.N.-imposed Gulf War truce and subsequent resolutions for complete Iraqi disarment. Indeed, the U.S. and British invasion was launched to uphold the very resolutions the U.N. Security Council itself refused to enforce.

I noted, further, that the U.S. was now winning in Iraq, but that no measure of success on the ground would satisfy antiwar forces who've worked diligently to weaken public support for the deployment.

The audience member's question about the "Iraqi constitution being contradictory to the premise of establishing democracy" came after about 40 minutes of debate in which I laid down a barrage in indicators countering decisively every point of the left wing panelists. Naturally I don't claim to be an expert on the Iraqi constitution, though I noted that Iraq's governing regime contains parliamentary safeguards for proportional representation and poltical equality. The student reporter's game here is to whitewash the disastrous performance by Professor Del Gaudio and Peter Mathews. My statements were taken completely out of context, and the whole article demonstrates a clear leftwing, antiwar bias.

Especially pathetic is the author's completely irrelevent reference to my campus webpage, where I mention my personal interests, such as taking "walks on the beach" and "reading works of historical fiction and international intrigue." No other background information of this sort was provided for the other panelists, so perhaps the reporter thought my interest in spy novels might discredit my command of counterinsurgency in Iraq.

In any case, I've had my run-ins with the student paper before. Indeed, my participation on an Iraq panel on March 19, 2003, at the start of the war, began my process of being "radicalized by the radicals." Back then as well, my school's newspaper botched its coverage of my participation at the earlier campus forum, and in subsequent years the LBCC Viking's demonstrated its brand of far-left student journalism, lackadaisical reporting, and absence of journalistic integrity.

I understand these are students learning a craft, but my repeated critical responses to the editors and the faculty advisor have been treated with hostility, and indeed with violations of campus free speech policies.

The current reporting is just another chapter in this sorry history, and what's sad about it, ultimately, is that it's the student journalists who are being poorly served by a lack of professional direction in the standards of responsible press reporting.

Media is AWOL on Victory in Iraq

Ralph Peters has an excellent commentary today on the media's convenient avoidance of American military success in Iraq:

LAST weekend's news coverage of our veterans was welcome, but deceptive. The "mainstream media" honored aging heroes and noted the debt we owe to today's wounded warriors - but deftly avoided in-depth coverage from Iraq. Why? Because things are going annoyingly well.

All those reporters, editors and producers who predicted - longed for - an American defeat have moved on to more pressing strategic issues, such as O.J.'s latest shenanigans.

Oh, if you turned to the inner pages of the "leading" newspapers, you found grudging mention of the fact that roadside-bomb attacks are down by half and indirect-fire attacks by three-quarters while the number of suicide bombings has plummeted.

Far fewer Iraqi civilians are dying at the hands of extremists. U.S. and Coalition casualty rates have fallen dramatically. The situation has changed so unmistakably and so swiftly that we should be reading proud headlines daily.

Where are they? Is it really so painful for all those war-porno journos to accept that our military - and the Iraqis - may have turned the situation around? Shouldn't we read and see and hear a bit of praise for today's soldiers and the progress they're making?

The media's new trick is to concentrate coverage on our wounded, mouthing platitudes while using military amputees as props to suggest that, no matter what happens in Iraq, everything's still a disaster.

God knows, I sympathize with - and respect - those who've sacrificed life or limb in our country's service. I just hate to see them used as political tools.

How many of you really believe that those perfectly coiffed reporters care about our soldiers and their families? Does anyone think those news anchors will invite any Marines in wheelchairs home for Thanksgiving?

Still, for the 100-proof nastiness of the intelligentsia, you have to move to the "entertainment" world. Hollywood declines to make a single movie about any of our Medal of Honor winners in Iraq - but has deluged us with left-wing diatribes, as activist actors and directors parade by with their limp bayonets fixed.

"Stars" who enjoy incredible privileges that our troops will never experience treat us to vicious propaganda - such flicks as "In The Valley Of Elah," "Rendition" and the released-on-Veterans'-Day-weekend (gee, thanks) "Lions For Lambs."

And then there's the forthcoming "Redacted," which wants us to grasp that our psychopathic military's basic skills are the rape and murder of innocent civilians.

Immeasurably self-important, Hollywood tells itself these movies are acts of courage.

In some of the films, the victims - of their own leaders - are our troops. In others, the victims are innocent Muslims falsely linked to terrorism. But the unifying thread is that the only heroes are stay-at-homes who bravely fight for the truth.

A number of critics have noted that the American people refuse to pay an hour's wages to see these films. Last weekend's release, "Lions For Lambs," earned less than $7 million, despite starring Tom Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl "America's in Peril" Streep. And that was the big-bucks earner so far.

Scriptwriters, directors and vanity-project actors (how many have been to Iraq?) scratch their heads and deplore our apathy. They fail to grasp what's truly happening: We, the citizens and moviegoers, simply reject these films' underlying message.

Because the real message of all of these in-the-toilet flicks isn't just that the war in Iraq or the struggle against Islamist terrorists is bad - it's that America is evil. At best, we're the moral equivalent of our enemies.

Read the whole thing.

Peters' point reminds me of a post by Angevin13 over at The Oxford Medievalist on Brian De Palma's moviemaking (and anti-Americanism).

But back to the war: AJStrata over at The Strata-Sphere reports on the new media argument that it's too late to report the good news out of Iraq:

In the continuing joke of denial by the liberal left that things are turning around in Iraq we now have a new spin: it is too late for success to be recognized, even if it is happening. This comes from one of those liberals who cannot emotionally face the fact that (a) Iraq was tough fight (like Bush and others said it would be) and (2) we are succeeding.

I'm sure we'll be seeing more left-wing press denials of military success. Or we'll see additional partisan attacks on the war's management (the New York Times) or calls for a precipitous withdrawal after conceding progress (the Los Angeles Times).

Check out Jules Crittenden for more media insanity.

Time for Withdrawal From Iraq?

Is the current success in Iraq reason to quit the deployment? Should we declare victory and withdraw the troops? The editors at the Los Angeles Times think so:

The latest statistics are in and, by every reasonable measure, the U.S. military is making commendable progress in lessening the violence in Iraq.

Iraqi civilian and military deaths have plummeted in recent months, as has the number of American soldiers killed or wounded. Bombings are down, attacks on U.S. troops have plunged and the ghastly daily count of corpses bearing the signs of sectarian torture is markedly lower. While the U.S. military's data are rosier than some other tallies, all the indicators of violence are now, mercifully, pointing down. As a result, some of the 2 million Iraqi refugees who have fled their homes have begun to come back - 46,030 of them reentered the country in October, according to the Iraqi government.

Analysts will continue to debate how much of the progress is because of the "surge" of 30,000 U.S. troops last spring, how much is the result of Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province and elsewhere making common cause with the United States against Al Qaeda terrorists, and how much is because ethnic cleansing of some neighborhoods is complete and the "enemies" within have fled or been killed. All of these factors undoubtedly played a role. And the daily carnage, though lessened, remains horrific. The high casualty rate earlier this year made 2007 the deadliest for U.S. troops in this tragic misadventure.

Still, now is the moment to praise the U.S. military for doing what it said it would do when it embarked on the surge: reducing the violence so as to allow Iraqis breathing space to work out the modus vivendi that has so far eluded them. We salute them and hope that their blood and tears are not squandered by whatever comes next.

The question, however, is what should come next. The surge has succeeded militarily; it has so far been an utter failure politically because there has been no progress toward reconciliation. Anbar is more peaceful, but Basra is more racked than ever by fighting among Shiite warlords. There is no oil law, no plan for reversing de-Baathification, no progress toward an integrated police force, no plan for federalism that would accommodate Iraq's ethnic and regional aspirations while keeping the country from fracturing.

Without actually saying so, the Bush administration is now trying to move the goal posts, yet again, by arguing that stopping the violence in and of itself constitutes success. The president and the secretary of Defense have both mentioned South Korea as a model of where the United States might be heading in Iraq: leaving perhaps 35,000 U.S. troops there, perhaps for a decade or more, to keep a modicum of peace, prevent the country from splitting up and keep the neighbors out. But U.S. troops in South Korea were helping to keep an external enemy, North Korea, from crossing an armistice line. U.S. troops in Iraq are trying to suppress a sectarian civil war, not to protect a fragile peace. Neither the American nor the Iraqi publics will tolerate a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq. The surge has created an opportunity to leave - and leave we must.

This is a classic left-wing analysis of the war on our future in Iraq. The editors want to have it both ways: Praise the troops on the one hand, and denounce their mission on the other. From the outset, however, the surge was designed as an interim step to regain the momentum in securing the country, in pulling Iraq back from the precipice of internecine slaughter and political decay. This is happening now. But it's not time to bring the forces home.

Note the faulty comparison to South Korea, which is an attempt to discredit a long-term presence in Iraq: Why should a civil war in a U.S.-backed democracy be less of a reason to maintain troops than would be a cross-border enemy of a client? The goal of our foes would be the same: To destroy the U.S.-backed state and bring to power a regime hostile to American interests. Besides, Iraqis face an implacable interstate threat in neighboring Iran. One of the biggest arguments of the left in recent times is how Iran's emerged as the big strategic victor amid U.S. difficulties in Mesopotamia? Yet if so, why pull out now? Iran's a sworn enemy of American interests in the region, and the mullahs would like nothing more than their own Shiite puppet state in Baghdad.

No, the Times editors have let ideology of surrender get the better part of reason. The U.S. needs to maintain a robust troop commitment in Iraq. A reasonable estimate suggests remaining troops levels in the 80,000-100,000 range for a number of years. That in itself would be a significant drawdown, but not enough for the cut-and-run types inclined to support the editorial position of the Los Angeles Times.

Favorite Movies and Movie Stars

A couple of years ago, while out shopping, my oldest boy asked me, "Dad, what's your favorite movie?" Without hesitation, I replied, "Saving Private Ryan."

I got to thinking about this last night, after I caught the last hour of "Saving Private Ryan" on TNT. Not only is the Spielberg WWII epic my favorite movie, Tom Hanks is my favorite actor as well. Hanks' "Captain John Miller" genuinely captures the essence of the middle-American fighting man, the guy who has a job to do, and who completes it without a bunch of complaint. Miller's even too moral for his own good, for the German POW he releases ultimately fires the fateful shot at the movie's conclusion (right before the P51 Tankbusters zoom in to destroy the German armored assualt).

But I like Hanks in a lot of other roles too. Forrest Gump is corny, but Hank's portrayal of Gump's idiot savant again captures some essential human dignity and goodness, and the film pulls it all together with some powerful Baby Boom nostalgia.

While some of the reviews were poor, I also really liked Hanks in "Cast Away." The film was criticized for its long segments without dialog (when Hanks' character, "Chuck Noland," is stranded on the tropical island). But I like Noland's survival instincts, his escape from the island, and his heartbreaking return to his previous life and fiancee, Helen Hunt's "Kelly Frears". For me, Noland's near-death on the plane crash, his survival and return, presented metaphorical recollections of my own early difficult life experiences (my one time physical and romantic isolation and recovery).

In any case, I could go on about Hanks. He's certainly not my only movie hero. The truth is, I need to get out to the movie theaters more often. I'm getting behind the times, at least as far as my familiarity with younger stars, like Vince Vaughn (the favorite actor of Angevin13, over at The Oxford Medievalist).

I would note that Jodie Foster's one of my favorite actresses. She's both attractive and tough, and (obviously) she's starred in some of America's greatest films (Taxi Driver, Silence of the Lambs). I missed Foster in "The Brave One" when it was in theaters, although I don't mind, as the film will be a nice addition to my modest DVD collection.

What's your favorite movie, and who's your favorite actor?

**********

UPDATE: I found this cool "Saving Private Ryan Online Encyclopedia" while responding to comments and surfing around for information about the film. Beware of plot spoilers, however, if you haven't seen the movie.

Many Women Executives Lukewarm on Hillary Clinton

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on Hillary Clinton's support among women professionals:

When Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley human-resources consultant, heard Hillary Clinton assert that she could "take the heat" after getting pummeled by opponents in a recent debate, she recalled the times in her own career when a roomful of men disrespected her.

Once, at a national sales meeting for a large construction-products company, a male colleague passed around photographs of her in a bikini that he'd secretly taken on a prior business trip. "Instead of quitting, I focused on being better, on outselling the guys three-to-one," says Ms. Frederickson, who later founded her own firm, Valerie Frederickson & Co.

Ms. Frederickson has donated money to John Edwards's campaign, because she thinks he has a better chance of winning, but she'll vote for Mrs. Clinton if she's the Democratic candidate. She identifies with Mrs. Clinton's determination "to pick herself up when she's shot down and figure out how to be effective." And, she notes, "As professional women we've been through so much -- I feel like she's my big sister."

A year away from the election, Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has a lead with women voters over male candidates of both parties. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that when matched against Republican Rudolph Giuliani, she wins by 53% to 38% among female voters (and loses among men by 52% to 38%.) Against Democrat Sen. Barack Obama, she wins among women by 53% to 21%, while winning among men by just 37% to 31%.

Not all women are certain that Mrs. Clinton is going to be the one to shatter what's been called "the last glass ceiling." Executive and professional women with incomes over $75,000 -- who might be perceived as having most in common with her -- support Mrs. Clinton in much lower numbers than do lower-income women, and they are slightly more likely to vote for Mr. Giuliani than for her: 46% to 45%.

But regardless of their political views and preferences, Mrs. Clinton's campaign is stirring strong feelings among female executives about what it means to be a woman -- often the only woman -- seeking a position of power. Whether she is battling male opponents in debates, having her hair and clothing scrutinized or trying to convince voters she is strong enough to do tough tasks, the senator is publicly facing challenges that most female executives have grappled with privately throughout their careers. Her determination to win the White House is also prompting many women in business to reflect on their career goals and what price they're willing to pay to achieve them.

Read the whole thing. The article notes that many women agree that when Clinton plays the gender card it reflects poorly on the status of women as equals in the economy and politics.

I'm particularly intrigued by the finding, as indicated by the polling data above, that as women executives get closer to bumping into the glass ceiling, they're less likely to support Clinton than are women at lower levels of workplace advancement. Perhaps Clinton's nanny state agenda is less attractive to women who've proven themselves entreprenurial, independent, and upwardly mobile (and less likely to be receptive to Clinton's redistributive policies).

A Veteran's Courage

The Los Angeles Times has a compelling story on Sgt. Maj. Jesse Acosta, an Iraq war veteran who lost both eyes to shrapnel in a mortar attack at Camp Anaconda in 2006:

He was a soldier in Iraq and he's a soldier now, shoulders squared and head held high on a street corner in Santa Fe Springs at 6:30 a.m., waiting for a bus with his guide dog, Charley.

Sgt. Maj. Jesse Acosta's hat says "Army." His green jacket says "Military Order Purple Heart. Combat Wounded." Dark shades conceal his prosthetic eyes.

Better to fight the enemy on distant shores, the argument goes, than fight the enemy here. But that doesn't mean the war doesn't eventually come home. For Acosta, a 50-year-old gas company employee with a wife, four children and three grandchildren, what happened in Iraq will permanently complicate his life.

"OK, we're going to take the 62 to the 108," says Felicia Echeverria, an orientation and mobility trainer with Junior Blind of America who is teaching Acosta how to travel by bus.

Echeverria has been working with Acosta since February, helping him adapt to 24-hour darkness.

"He's amazing," she says, telling me she hasn't had many students with his courage and determination. He has already graduated from white cane to German shepherd, and now he's making his first attempt to ride a bus with his new dog and report for computer and GPS training at Junior Blind headquarters in the Southwest Los Angeles area.

"Forward," Acosta commands when the bus door opens.

Charley sets a paw on the first step of the bus. Acosta, with a firm grip on the dog's harness, dangles a foot off the curb and searches the empty space between sidewalk and bus.

The move is daunting. It's a short step, but it's also a leap of faith, with invisible geometry to negotiate. Acosta is balanced on one foot, dog tugging, passengers waiting and watching.

With Charley's help, Acosta finds his way. He's up the stairs and telling the bus driver to please announce his transfer stop when they get to it. He asks her if there's an open seat on the left or the right, and looking in her rear-view mirror, she gets it wrong. Acosta is about to sit in someone's lap when the passenger tells him the open seat is on his right, not his left.

He sits down, relieved, pulls Charley back out of the aisle and takes a breath. Everyone on the bus is watching. When you're blind, Echeverria says, you lose your privacy.

The driver forgets to tell Acosta his stop is next, so Echeverria fills the gap.

"I guess I better get used to this," he says without a trace of self-pity. This is a man who lifts weights every morning in the backyard and still has a military bearing and sense of purpose.

The transfer is clean. Acosta doesn't trip or bump into any poles, as he's done more than once. He has to get this down cold, he says, because early next year he'll go back to work with the Southern California Gas Co., traveling by bus to Downey. His days of house calls as a customer service rep are done, but the company has told him it will find something else for him.

Bumping along on Slauson, I ask Acosta why he did it. Why, in 2002, did he re-enlist in the Army Reserve, as he had done previously after seven years of active duty following high school? Was it Sept. 11?

"No, not really. I'm a warrior, and I still had a lot left in me."

The call to duty came in the spring of 2005, with deployment to Iraq in late October. His wife, Connie, had trouble with it, proud of her husband but tired of sharing him with the Army. He told her it was a safe assignment -- a logistics and supply operation at Camp Anaconda along the Euphrates River near Balad, Iraq.

"Little did I know they called Anaconda 'Mortaritaville,' " Acosta says.

The mortars flew into the base every day. Then a first sergeant, he commanded 43 soldiers and routinely ordered them to dive for cover. He was doing just that Jan. 16, 2006, when he was hit. A shard of shrapnel ripped through his left eye, destroyed the nerve that controls taste and smell, nicked his brain, then took out his right eye.

"They say I was crawling around on the ground, shouting orders," says Acosta, who remembers nothing. Only later did he learn that surgeons spent more than seven hours trying to save him. Then he was flown to Germany for more treatment.

"I got a call from the doctor in Germany," Connie says. "He said, 'You know, I tried to get him to where he would ever see light again.' He cried with me -- the doctor. He said, 'I'm sorry, but he'll never be able to see again.' "

Several surgeries followed, with more to come. Acosta's palate and several teeth were blown out of his head, and doctors have taken bone from his hip to rebuild the palate. When he eats a hamburger, he puts familiar textures together with memories of what cheese and mustard tasted like. "I try to savor it," he says.

"I hope it was worth it, Mr. Bush," says Echeverria, who has a tear in her eye.

But Acosta doesn't engage. He says he believed in the cause when he re-enlisted, and even now, traveling across the city in eternal darkness - and weighted, perhaps, with a touch of guilt for the sacrifice his wife and family must make - he doesn't question his service.

Acosta represents the best of the American fighting man. I salute him and his service to country on this Veterans Day.

Power or Partnership? The Collapse of Liberal Internationalism

Over at the new International Security, Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz have a really interesting article on the decline of liberal internationalism in American politics (pdf).

The liberal international paradigm characterized much of American postwar foreign policy. Successive U.S. administrations sought to marry American economic and military preponderance to policies of international cooperation and institutionalization. According to Kupchan and Trubowitz, the collapse of the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy in the American political system has decimated the liberal international project. These trends have received a push with the power-oriented foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration. Here's a key segment:

The conditions that sustained liberal internationalism have of late been rapidly disappearing, dramatically weakening its grip on the nation’s politics. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, U.S. primacy has reduced the incentives for Republicans and Democrats alike to adhere to the liberal internationalist compact. Unipolarity has heightened the geopolitical appeal of unilateralism, a trend that even the threat of transnational terrorism has not reversed. Unipolarity has also loosened the political discipline engendered by the Cold War threat, leaving U.S. foreign policy more vulnerable to growing partisanship at home. “Red” and “Blue” America disagree about the nature of U.S. engagement in the world; growing disparities in wealth have reawakened class tensions; and political pragmatism has been losing ground to ideological extremism.

The polarization of the United States has dealt a severe blow to the bipartisan compact between power and cooperation. Instead of adhering to the vital center, the country’s elected officials, along with the public, are backing away from the liberal internationalist compact, supporting either U.S. power or international cooperation, but rarely both. President Bush and many Republicans have abandoned one side of the liberal internationalist compact: multilateralism has received little but contempt on their watch. Meanwhile, the Democrats have neglected the other side: many party stalwarts are uneasy with the assertive use of U.S. power. As the partisan gyre in Washington widens, the political center is dying out, and support for liberal internationalism is dying with it. According to Jim Leach, one of the Republican moderates to lose his House seat in the 2006 midterm elections, “[The United States’] middle has virtually collapsed. And how to reconstruct a principled center, a center of gravity in American politics, may be the hardest single thing at this particular time.”

Prominent voices from across the political spectrum have called for the restoration of a robust bipartisan center that can put U.S. grand strategy back on track. According to Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, “For more than a half a century, we know that we prospered because of a bipartisan consensus on defense and foreign policy. We must do more than return to that sensible, cooperative approach.” Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney echoes this sentiment: “It seems that concern aboutWashington’s divisiveness and capability to meet today’s challenges is the one thing that unites us all. We need new thinking on foreign policy and an overarching strategy that can unite the United States and its allies.”

These exhortations are in vain. The halcyon era of liberal internationalism is over; the bipartisan compact between power and partnership has been effectively dismantled. If left unattended, the political foundations of U.S. statecraft will continue to disintegrate, exposing the country to the dangers of an erratic and incoherent foreign policy. To avoid this fate, U.S. leaders will have to fashion a new brand of internationalism—one that will necessarily entail less power and less partnership if it is to have a chance of securing broad domestic support. To find a new equilibrium between the nation’s commitments abroad and its polarized politics at home, the United States will need a grand strategy that is as selective and judicious as it is purposeful.

I enjoyed reading this piece. Especially valuable is Kupchan and Trubowitz's discussion of the collapse of American bipartisanship in domestic politics.

The problem with the discussion, it seems to me, is how the authors find so much fault with the tightening of left-right political positions between the parties and their constituencies. The assumption is that bipartisanship is always good for the direction of foreign policy, that politics must stop at the water's edge for good foreign relations. That's a value judgement, I would argue, that's not empirically validated by the analysis. Politics - domestic and foreign - requires the mobilization of political bias, a clarity in elucidating the stakes of political alternatives. Laments over the collapse of bipartisan cooperation often reflect a naivity on the realities of political hard ball.

What is more, I would suggest that the foundations of the postwar bipartisan consensus - which are found in the shared memories and sacrifices of the World War II experience - are not something that can be easily replicated. The Soviet threat of the early Cold War generated political clarity among political actors, and the bipartisan consensus held before the United States sustained a burst of democratization with the rights revolution of the 1960s. While the authors broach these issues, the article reflects some utopianism on the prospects of the political system returning to the status quo ante pre-1960s.

What's noteworthy as well is how Kupchan and Trubowitz - as academic as they are - essentially indict the Bush administration for providing the final nail in liberal internationalism's coffin. This is a partisan analysis parading as scholarly objectivity.

Intriguing too is the authors' urgency: We are at the precipice in our international relations, it is announced, necessitating a return to a political centrism supportive of international institutionalism. Note, though, that while Kupchan and Trubowitz call for a "new equilibrium" abroad which will require "a grand strategy that is as selective and judicious as it is purposeful," their policy proposals amount to little more than stale Democratic talking points on the need to renew global alliances, cooperation, and strategic restraint. Such a movement in U.S. foreign policy would do little to restore the domestic bipartisan consensus on America's international role. Indeed, such a shift would likely restore America to a foreign policy of impotence, insecurity, and incivility, a foreign policy reminiscent of the international relations of the Carter and Clinton years.

From Abu Ghraib to Georgetown: A Veteran's Reflections

William Quinn, an Iraq war veteran, describes the experience of returning to civilian life in today's Washington Post:

The only feeling I've ever had that was more surreal than arriving in a war zone was returning from one.

I came home on R&R in 2005 after eight months in Iraq. Heading for the baggage claim in Detroit, I watched travelers walking and talking on their cellphones, chatting with friends and acting just the way people had before I'd left for Baghdad. The war didn't just seem to be taking place in another country; it seemed to be taking place in another universe. There I was, in desert camouflage, wondering how all the intensity, the violence, the tears and the killing of Iraq could really be happening at the same time that all these people were hurrying to catch their flights to Las Vegas or Los Angeles or wherever.

Riding home that day with my parents, I felt nervous, too exposed in their Ford Taurus. There was no armor on the car, and it felt light. We stopped at every red light and stop sign, and I saw potential dangers everywhere, even though I-94 heading into the city was nothing like Baghdad's Airport Road. There were no torched trucks or craters left by bomb blasts. I think it was the neatness of it all that made me uncomfortable. It seemed that staying alive shouldn't be so easy.

I've been out of Iraq for more than two years now. I have a different life, as a college student. But some of those feelings are still with me. After dedicating a year to a conflict of such enormous complexity, I find that college feels a bit mundane, and it's inexplicable to me that people here seem to be entirely untouched by the war....

People on campus don't think about the war very much. It rarely comes up in conversation, either inside or outside the classroom. Some professors have encouraged me to share my experiences, and some students have expressed interest in my past. Last semester, one wrote an article about another Iraq veteran and me for the campus newspaper. And this semester I dedicated about 250 words of a 900-word paper to the problem of sectarian violence in Iraq for a class on international relations. But that was the first time in my three semesters here that I was asked to formally consider the war for a class.

Beyond that, my theology professor gave a lecture last year that challenged students to find God in Iraq. My philosophy professor used Baghdad to describe what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes may have meant when he said that life in the state of nature would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." But that's about it. One student actually told me to stop thinking about Iraq. "You need to get rid of all that baggage and let yourself live," she said. "We need to be shallow sometimes."

I find it frustrating that Facebook is a bigger part of most students' lives than the war. After my first semester, I decided to rejoin the Army by signing up with the ROTC. I felt a bit guilty for having done only one tour in Iraq while friends of mine have done two or three. And I didn't want to forget the war. I may be prejudiced, but many of my college peers seem self-absorbed. I didn't want to end up like that.

You could rightly say a lot of negative things about soldiers. Many are crude. Some visit prostitutes; some commit adultery. I've known some who are bigots. It would be a lie to say that every soldier behaves honorably at all times. When I was stationed in South Korea from 2003 to 2005, I was often embarrassed by soldiers who were loud, obnoxious and insulting to Koreans. Men in their early 20s act like men in their early 20s, whether they wear a uniform or not.

Nonetheless, the Army's values are important to soldiers. They may not always live up to them, but they do when it matters most. Soldiers are selfless; they are courageous; they are loyal. The most interesting intellectual conversations I've had have been with others in the military. They discuss things not to impress you but because they're trying to figure them out. They're faced with difficult situations, and they want to make sense of them. Though many privately question our government's policies, they do their duty, which lies beyond the political debate.

This culture of duty is at odds with the culture of individualism and self-promotion that seems paramount here in college. And yet, the divide between my soldier friends and my fellow students isn't the result of any fundamental differences between the people themselves. Many of my peers at school know much more about the world around them than my fellow soldiers do -- international relations is a popular subject at Georgetown. My Army friends used to laugh when they saw me reading the Economist; my friends here think everyone should read it. Students talk about refugees from Iraq, North Korea, Burma and Darfur with sincere compassion. One of my friends told me: "I want to dedicate my life to educating people about the sufferings of others."

That's a wonderful goal, but I often feel that the words ring hollow. Students' true priorities are demonstrated by their daily activities: They have friends to meet, parties to attend, internships to work at, extracurricular activities to participate in, papers to write and classes to attend. They're under a lot of pressure to build a strong resume for whatever company or graduate school they apply to after college. They're under no pressure to be concerned about those who are less fortunate -- or those who fight wars on their behalf.

I'm proud to be a student at Georgetown. Though I find some aspects of campus culture discouraging, I have a lot of respect for my professors and peers. But there are still days when I think about what it must be like back in Baghdad -- and wonder whether that's where I should be.

Read the whole thing. Quinn's matter-of-fact demeanor is impressive. Sometimes I wish I'd had as much existential clarity when I was younger.

An American Coup d'Etat?

Frank Rich goes off the deep end in his column today, arguing that the United States has suffered a "quiet coup" during the Bush years. Rich precedes his declaration of an American coup d'etat with some incoherent rambling on the disaster of Pakistan:

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

But here's the kicker, a "quiet coup" in America:

But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

Sometimes I have to just shake my head at what's disguised as serious analysis on the commentary pages of the New York Times.

Rich can't be serious, can he? This essay's satire, right? It has to be. Where's the barbed wire ringing the homes of the administration's opposition? If Nancy Pelosi's feeling the heat, it's not from an authoritarian state, but from the antiwar contigents circling her home, calling for a quicker surrender in Iraq.

Lawyers in the street? Haven't seen 'em. Maybe they're still waiting for Bush/Cheney's announcement of a state of emergency?

The Bush administration's "subverted the law"? Wow, tell that to the federal courts, which have routinely reined-in the more aggressive administration anti-terror efforts.

But don't miss this ominous warning from Rich:

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

What corruption? John Murtha as king of the congressional pork? Yup, both parties are implicated. Mukasey's confirmation proves it:

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

Actually, Feinstein and Schumer may be a couple of the last remaining Democrats who haven't completely flipped their lids.

I can't say that for Frank Rich.

Check Memeorandum for additional commentary.

Realists Discover the Bush Doctrine

This weekend's "Hot Topic" commentary over at the Wall Street Journal argues that realists have caught the neoconservative spirit on Pakistani democracy:

Whatever Pervez Musharraf's failings in Islamabad, his impact in Washington has been nothing short of miraculous. With his declaration of emergency rule, the Pakistan President has single-handedly revived the Bush Doctrine. The same people who only days ago were deriding President Bush for naively promoting democracy are now denouncing him for not promoting it enough in Pakistan.

"We have to move from a Musharraf to a Pakistan policy," declared Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden on Thursday. "Pakistan has strong democratic traditions and a large, moderate majority. But that moderate majority must have a voice in the system and an outlet with elections. If not, moderates may find that they have no choice but to make common cause with extremists, just as the Shah's opponents did in Iran three decades ago."

Joe Biden, neocon.

The Senator's epiphany underscores that Pakistan has long been the playground not of democracy promoters but of the foreign-policy "realists." General Musharraf may have taken power in a coup, but when Colin Powell famously gave him the for-us-or-against-us choice after 9/11, the general chose "for." He is a U.S. ally in a rough neighborhood, his government captured such al Qaeda bigs as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and as an authoritarian he was of the moderate kind. The Bush Administration did push Mr. Musharraf to restore democratic legitimacy, but quietly and without great urgency. Brent Scowcroft would have approved.

Read the whole thing. See also my earlier posts on neoconservatism and Pakistan (here and here).

Barack Obama and the Dream of a Color-Blind America

Be sure to read today's lead story at the Wall Street Journal on Barack Obama and the politics of race in America. Obama's captured the hopes of many whites, who see in the Illinois senator's campaign the emancipation from racial guilt:

As he campaigns across the country, Sen. Obama, the son of a black father and a white mother, is both revealing and tapping into a changed racial landscape, especially among younger whites. After decades of often bitter polarization and racial tension on issues ranging from the spread of civil rights to affirmative action, many whites say they are drawn to Sen. Obama precisely because they think his mixed-race background reflects America's increasingly diverse population and projects a more optimistic vision of the country's racial future.

Sen. Obama's candidacy, whether it succeeds or not, appears to mark a turning point in race and politics in America: It is prompting significant numbers of white Americans to consider voting for him not despite his racial background, but because of it.

"Obama is running an emancipating campaign," says Bob Tuke, who is white and is the former chairman of the Tennessee Democratic party. "He is emancipating white voters to vote for a black candidate."

The aticle goes on:

Two decades ago, Jesse Jackson broke new ground by challenging whites to consider a black mounting a serious run for the presidency. Now Sen. Obama and a new generation of black candidates are running campaigns that make whites feel good about themselves. These younger black politicians, including Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr., are, like Sen. Obama, seen by many whites as proof of the country's racial progress - and their own....

Race remains a wild card in American politics. Candidates such as Mr. Ford, who narrowly lost the Senate race in Tennessee last year, have often come close to election only to find race flaring at the last minute to blunt their momentum.

"Obama knows that just because people are saying one thing doesn't mean they will vote that way," says Tim King, the African-American head of a charter school in Chicago who has known Sen. Obama for a decade. "No one ever really knows what people do once they close the curtain in the voting booth."

Sen. Obama's popularity among whites also stirs uneasiness among many blacks. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, Sen. Obama trails Sen. Clinton among black voters 46% to 37%.

"There is a lot of debate [among blacks] over how appealing Obama is to white folks," says Mr. King. "People are saying, 'Is he too likeable to white people?"'

This last passage says a lot about the Obama campaign. Whites like Obama because he's non-threatening, with cross-over appeal. Blacks, on the other hand, don't see Obama as down with the 'hood.

I have to admit that I like Obama's multi-racial appeal. I'd like him even more if he'd switch parties and return to the language of personal responsibility and family values that he outlined in his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston:

Obama's early message of hard work and individual effort has the potential to become the rallying theme of a new black movement toward greater upward mobility.

Unfortunately, his campaign's domestic policy platform has not lived up to that early vision of tradition and responsibility. His foreign policy, moreover, is much too idealisitic for America's current priorities in international affairs.