Rudy Giuliani and Homeland Security

Rudy Giuliani's got a new article over at City Journal laying out his plan for homeland security:

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the United States has confronted both the deadliest attack and one of the most destructive natural disasters in the nation’s history. The term “homeland security” wasn’t part of the national debate during the 2000 election. Now, after September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, every American understands that homeland security is at the heart of a president’s responsibility.

There have been no fewer than 14 attempted domestic terrorist attacks and nine international plots against American citizens and interests since 9/11, according to reports in the public record. There have been plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and airplanes crossing the Atlantic. Terrorists have conspired to murder American soldiers at Fort Dix and planned to ignite the fuel lines beneath John F. Kennedy International Airport. Not a single post-9/11 plot on U.S. soil has succeeded to date. That is no accident; it is a measure of our increased vigilance as a nation.

The fight against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups will be America’s central challenge for years to come. We will achieve victory in what I call the Terrorists’ War on Us only by staying on offense: defeating terrorist organizations and hunting down their leaders, wherever they are; helping Afghanistan and Iraq establish stable and representative governments; aiding the spread of good governance throughout the Muslim world; and defeating militant Islam in the war of ideas.

Such international efforts are essential to winning this war, but not sufficient. We must also protect our people and economy, secure our borders, and prevent terrorist attacks here at home. These responsibilities are the domestic dimension of the larger struggle, and they require a focus on more than terrorism. As Stephen Flynn points out in his book The Edge of Disaster, “Nearly 90 percent of Americans are currently living in locations that place them at moderate to high risks of earthquakes, volcanoes, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, or high-wind damage.” Preparing for terrorist attacks and for natural disasters are complementary goals: when cities and states prepare for natural disaster, they also strengthen our response to potential terrorism.

Read the whole thing.

Giuliani points to three components of a continuing domestic anti-terror program: prevention, preparedness, and resilience.

I like what he says about domestic surveillance:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enacted in 1978 to exclude eavesdropping on foreign communications from judicial oversight, must be modernized and expanded to encompass not just phones, as the current law does, but also newer technologies, such as the fax machine and the Internet. Antiquated laws—enacted when such technologies weren’t part of everyday life—cannot be allowed to hamstring our federal law enforcement and foreign intelligence services. Some members of Congress want to throw as many legal obstacles as possible in front of FBI agents and intelligence officers as they try to intercept communications between known al-Qaida leaders and U.S.-based operatives who will carry out attacks. This is the last thing we should do.

That's not going to be popular with the left's civil liberties wing.

Giulani's campaign has lost some of his luster, and he's not my pick for the nomination, but I'm confident the country would be in good hands under a Giuliani administration.

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UPDATE: Red State offers a powerful endorsement of Giuliani for president:

Oh, I know it’s not fashionable to support the Mayor these days. He took a beating in December over allegations (since proven unfounded) that he abused City funds to pursue his extra-curricular love life. His failure to do a Romney-style flip-flop on social issues has earned him the undying enmity of many on the right. His strategy (and it is a strategy, by the way) of trying to reduce the utterly inequitable influence of Iowa and New Hampshire over the primary process and focus instead on states with more than seven electoral votes has been declared dead-before-arrival by those who are quite sure they know better. Conventional wisdom wags its sagacious head and tells us he’s done.

But then again, Rudy’s never been a conventional wisdom type. And neither have I.

So here’s why I've chosen Giuliani. He functions under inconceivable pressure. When the proverbial refuse hits the fan, he is able to think beyond himself, make decisions and exert that elusive quality of “leadership” that can pull a country through tragedy and loss. You don’t need me to tell you this. We know it for a grim fact. We all remember where we were on 9/11. I think it’s pretty safe to say we all remember Giuliani. I cannot tell you how Mitt Romney, John McCain, Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee would behave under comparable circumstances. I can guess, and I expect some would do better than others. Certainly Senator McCain’s biography demonstrates that the Mayor does not have a monopoly on personal heroism. But do I think any of them would surpass Giuliani in a major national security crisis?

I doubt Giuliani's got anything on McCain in terms of resolve in facing domestic and international crises.

McCain remains my first pick, as readers know.

I don't have a second pick, but unlike some conservatives, I will not panic over a Huckabee nomination, crossing over to vote for the Democratic nominee.

A Surge in Iraq Security

War opponents are intent on highlighting 2007 as the deadliest year in Iraq since the invasion (see here, here, here, and, here, for example). While this is true in total, the bulk of deaths came early in the year, with the last three months showing a dramatic drop in casualties.

The Los Angeles Times has more:

December emerged as possibly the safest month for U.S. forces in Iraq since the 2003 invasion and the least deadly for Iraqi civilians in the last 12 months, but overall 2007 was the bloodiest year of the war, according to figures released Monday.

The Iraqi Ministry of Health said 481 civilians died nationwide last month in war-related violence such as bombings, mortar attacks and sectarian slayings. It said 16,232 civilians died last year. The 2006 death toll was 12,320.

"I remember 2007 was the explosions year," said Abd Hadi Hussein, a Shiite Muslim resident of Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. He recalled carrying a woman who had been injured in a bombing to a hospital in August. "She was completely burned, and people could not recognize whether she was a man or a woman. She kept asking about her little girl. But then the woman died. This memory I can't remove from my mind.

"But this year, 2008, I am very optimistic," he said, citing the recent celebrations for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha and the crowded Christmas Masses held in Baghdad.

On the military front, 21 U.S. personnel died in Iraq during December, according to Department of Defense figures released by the independent website icasualties.org, making the average daily death tally last month the lowest since the start of the war. It was possible the military could report additional deaths for the month in coming days, but the casualty number was striking when compared with the December 2006 total of 112.

The key factor in declining casualies has been the U.S. military buildup throughout 2007.

After May, both civilian and military deaths declined, with the last three months seeing the lowest level of military deaths compared to any other 3 month stretch since March 2003 (by mid-2007, non-combat troop deaths were the lowest in three years).

The question going forward, as discussed in the Times piece, and other sources, is how long can the improvements be sustained?

Here's Michael O'Hanlon's assessment:

Iraq’s security environment is considerably improved, with security at its best levels since early 2004. This is largely thanks to the surge-based strategy of Gen. David Petraeus and the heroic efforts — and sacrifice — of so many American and Iraqi troops and police officers (more Americans have died in Iraq in 2007 than in any previous year, though death rates have dropped greatly in the last few months). But Iraq’s political environment and its economy are only marginally better than a year ago. High oil prices have helped the latter, but violence and rampant corruption remain huge problems.

The number of trained Iraqi security forces steadily rises. It had better, since American troop levels are scheduled to drop to pre-surge levels by summer, although the new strategy, with its emphasis on protecting the civilian population, is to continue. Given Iraq’s fragile sectarian relations and weak institutions, the likelihood is that further American troop reductions will have to be slow and careful if the progress is to continue.

General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, takes a cautiously optimistic view, arguing that a continuing U.S presence in the country over the long-term is the best guarantee of security.

American Interests in the Persian Gulf

Walter Russell Mead's got a great piece on U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf over at OpinionJournal. Check it out:

Few subjects matter as much as oil, the Persian Gulf and American foreign policy. But few subjects are less well understood. Even relatively sophisticated observers will attribute American interest in the Persian Gulf to Uncle Sam's insatiable thirst for crude, combined with an effort to gain lucrative contracts for American oil firms. The U.S. on this view is something like a global Count Dracula, roaming the earth in search of fresh bodies, hoping to suck them dry.

True, the security of America's oil supply has been an element in national strategic thinking at least since Franklin Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz in the waning days of World War II. And true, the U.S. government has never been indifferent to the concerns of the major oil concerns. But the security of our domestic energy supplies plays a relatively small role in America's Persian Gulf policy, and the purely commercial interests of American companies do not drive American grand strategy.

Mead provides statistics on the declining share of Persian Gulf oil supplies to overall U.S. petroleum imports and production. But check out Mead's broader discussion of U.S strategic interests in the region:

For the past few centuries, a global economic and political system has been slowly taking shape under first British and then American leadership. As a vital element of that system, the leading global power--with help from allies and other parties--maintains the security of world trade over the seas and air while also ensuring that international economic transactions take place in an orderly way....

For this system to work, the Americans must prevent any power from dominating the Persian Gulf while retaining the ability to protect the safe passage of ships through its waters. The Soviets had to be kept out during the Cold War, and the security and independence of the oil sheikdoms had to be protected from ambitious Arab leaders like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. During the Cold War Americans forged alliances with Turkey, Israel and (until 1979) Iran, three non-Arab states that had their own reasons for opposing both the Soviets and any pan-Arab state.

When the fall of the shah of Iran turned a key regional ally into an implacable foe, the U.S. responded by tightening its relations with both Israel and Turkey--while developing a deeper relationship with Egypt, which had given up on Nasser's goal of unifying all the Arabs under its flag.

Today the U.S. is building a coalition against Iran's drive for power in the Gulf. Israel, a country which has its own reasons for opposing Iran, remains an important component in the American strategy, but the U.S. must also manage the political costs of this relationship as it works with the Sunni Arab states. American opposition to Iran's nuclear program not only reflects concerns about Israeli security and the possibility that Iran might supply terrorist groups with nuclear materials. It also reflects the U.S. interest in protecting its ability to project conventional forces into the Gulf.

As Mead concludes, American interests extend beyond the immediate Iranian problem, to the security of vital sea lines of communication from the Arabian Gulf and the coast of East Africa, to the Indian Ocean and Southeast, and beyond.

The vital importance of sea power and American national security goes back at least to Alfred Thayer Mahan in the late -19th century - a point protesters shouting "no blood for oil" often overlook (see here and here, for bit on that controversy).

Laptops Taking Over Computer Market

I just bought my wife a laptop computer for Christmas. We promptly hooked it up to a router for wireless connectivity, and we've been enjoying it non-stop, including the kids!

I figured I was behind the times on this, but perhaps I'm just part of the growing trend toward computer mobility, as today's Los Angeles Times suggests:

After decades as the computer of choice for homes and businesses, the desktop PC is being pushed to the scrap heap by its smaller, nimbler sibling: the laptop.

They've been around since the early 1980s, but portable computers are finally taking over. Last year, for the first time, American consumers bought more of them than desktops. Sixteen of the 20 bestselling PCs on Amazon.com this holiday season were laptops.

U.S. corporations are expected to make laptops the majority of their computer purchases in 2008. BNSF Railway Co. already has. Of the 4,000 Dell Inc. computers it bought last year, 60% were laptops, so rail inspectors could file reports from their trucks and other employees could work from home.

"They were in a totally tethered world, and now they have no tethering at all," said Jeff Campbell, the Fort Worth company's chief information officer.

Faster, cheaper technology is behind the most sweeping change the computer industry has seen in a generation. Buying a computer that can be spirited away in a briefcase or backpack no longer requires a big sacrifice in performance, storage or money.

Through common devices called docking stations, users can connect their laptops to external monitors, keyboards and mice while seated at a desk, then eject them and work from a coffeehouse, library, airplane or living room.

The surge in laptop sales is also fueled by the pervasiveness of wireless networks in homes and public hangouts. Having Internet connections everywhere makes laptops much more useful.

Parents and kids consult laptops for quick facts at the dinner table as they once did with encyclopedias. Cocktail-party hosts fire them up to amuse with the latest YouTube video or television show. Workers plop them down on the road and connect to the office without missing a beat.

And sales are expected to accelerate as devices such as the iPhone and tablet PCs pack more power and utility into ever-smaller packages.

"It's not really a computer anymore," said Dag Spicer, senior curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "It's a companion, it's your memory, it's your teacher and your entertainer."

I mostly work on a desktop, at work and in my home office. I do like the mobility of the laptop around the home. This last couple of days I've been blogging at the dining room table, where I can sit with my boys and watch movies at the same time - family entertainment multitasking!

I like this section from the Times' piece, on the coffee shop etiquette for notebook computers:

With their newfound popularity, laptops are doing for computing what cellphones did for talking - bringing the activities into public places. With that, new social norms and rules of etiquette are emerging.

At Ritual Coffee Roasters cafe, a mecca for laptop users in San Francisco, owner Eileen Hassi hired an electrician last spring to disable the electrical outlets. Regulars at the coffeehouse were spending so much time riding the free wireless network -- as many as eight hours at a stretch - that patrons who wanted simply to sip their lattes couldn't find seats.

You're welcome to work on your laptop here, Hassi explained, "until your battery dies."

That's pretty good!

Photo Credit: Jakub Mosur, Los Angeles Times

Divining Supreme Power in Iran

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's "Supreme Leader" (pictured above), does not always call the shots in the Iranian regime, according to this Los Angeles Times article:

For years, Western analysts have struggled to understand the inner workings of Iran's leadership. To many, it is a government tightly controlled by the Shiite Muslim clergy. But the power of the clerics has steadily eroded. Increasingly, power is distributed among combative elites within a delicate system of checks and balances defined by religious as well as civil law, personal relations and the rhythm of bureaucracy.

Iran analysts struggle to discern which officials have authority and how much. And when Iranian officials make public pronouncements, it often is unclear whether they are expressing established policy or fighting among themselves -- speaking for their own faction or just themselves.

Concentric circles of influence and power that emanate from the supreme leader include the clergy, government and military officials -- and at their farthest fringes, militiamen and well-connected bazaar merchants -- altogether perhaps 15% of Iran's 70 million people.

Even the man regarded in Iran as the highest-ranking cleric in Shiite Islam finds himself constrained and challenged.

Those inside Iran's circle of power, says Ali Afshari, an analyst and former student activist now living in Washington, operate according to unique rules.

"It is not a democracy or an absolute totalitarian regime," he said. "Nor is it a communist system or monarchy or dictatorship. It is a mixture."

The article discusses Ali Khamenei's power as situated within the khodi system, the Persian term for "one of us":

"In our society there is a red line between khodi and non-khodi," said one political activist. "If you've never been on the right side of that divide, you're considered guilty until proven otherwise. If you're not khodi, you don't have the right to criticize."

Khamenei and his closest advisors are at the center of that power structure, overseeing grave matters of state, including the country's nuclear program and domestic policy, from a huge tree-shrouded compound in downtown Tehran. Each day, the Supreme National Security Council, Khamenei's main think tank, faxes his orders to newspapers, television stations and government officials. Clergy spread the word at homes and Friday prayer sessions.

Surrounding the supreme leader are several powerful committees consisting of dozens of clerics, each established to cement the central role of religion in Iranian politics. The Council of Experts chooses the supreme leader. The Guardian Council vets laws and candidates for public office. The Expediency Council mediates legal disputes.

Next are the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard and armed forces, who are appointed by Khamenei; the elected president; the Cabinet; parliament; senior military commanders selected by the supreme leader; and the senior clerics in the holy city Qom.

Beyond that are governors and other provincial officials, all approved by the president. At the outer rim of khodi are well-connected merchants, militia members and millions of volunteers who make up the government's shock troops.

Included in the system are people with different ideologies and agendas, including the offspring of Western universities and onetime operatives in the shah's intelligence service whom Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini needed to help bring down the shah in the 1970s, defend his revolution and withstand attack from Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.

From the beginning, Iran's leaders fought over how wide to expand the circles of power, and how much room there would be to challenge the leadership.

Even those on the outer fringes of power can buck authority, especially if they retain a rank within the religious hierarchy. Despite a moratorium on stoning those convicted of morality crimes, a judge this year in the western village of Takistan ordered the stoning of a man for adultery.

Instead of firing the official, judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi decided the judge had a point: Stoning was, after all, part of Islamic law.

Though ordinary people have limited freedom to criticize the power structure, analysts and officials in Tehran say that the heads of government agencies eagerly devour results of polls about their leaders' performance and Iranians' attitudes toward everything from women's dress to making peace with the U.S. Many of Iran's leaders fear a popular uprising like the one that toppled the shah or the communist governments of Eastern Europe.

One after another over the past decades, Iranian leaders have tried to control this convoluted system -- and failed.

This article reminds me of studying political science in the 1980s, when "Sovietologists" worked hard to divine crucial leadership dynamics in the Kremlin, assessing every purge or power shake-up in terms of U.S.-Soviet relations, and international security more broadly.

Perhaps the Times is trying to tell us something with their analysis.

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Note: Political scientists code Iran's political system as a non-democratic regime, composed of theocratic and quasi-democratic principles. Power is concentrated at the pinnacle of the political system in the Supreme Spiritual Leader, according to Iran's Islamic Constitution of 1979.

The Supreme Leader is the pivot of government, mediating politics and policy-directives between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. He selects the presidential candidates (who in turn are elected in a national election), and he can dismiss an elected president under the authority of "the interests of Islam." Iran's executive branch bureaucracy is dominated by the clergy, who direct policy in the semi-public institutions of the state. The most important bureaucratic sectors are the culture and security services (the ministries of culture and intelligence), and the military under the leadership of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

Party politics and political participation are highly regulated by the state. Western principles of dissent, free speech, and a liberal press are alien to the current Iranian political culture. A current dilemma for the regime is how to manage demands from Iran's rising middle class for greater interest group participation in politics, democratic representation in government and elections, and respect for basic human and political rights.

See Mark Kesselman, ed., Introduction to Comparative Politics, 7th edition (Houghton-Mifflin, 2007).

Photo: Los Angeles Times

Conservatives in 2008 and Beyond

It's pretty well the consensus opinion that conservatives are in disarray, and that election 2008 is the Democrats to lose.

The point is stressed in Michael Tomasky's new essay on the conservative movement at the New York Review of Books. Here's the introduction:

As the voting begins in earnest, what are we to make of the Republican candidates? That the "conservative base" is dissatisfied with the GOP field is probably the single most common observation of this presidential campaign season. The second most common observation is probably that the Republican candidate, whoever it turns out to be, is doomed to defeat. National Review ran a recent cover story positing not only that the GOP is likely to lose the presidency in 2008, but that the loss may mark the beginning of a long period of wandering in the wilderness as the party gropes to redefine itself after George W. Bush's calamitous tenure.

You can see where this is headed, Tomasky being hopelessly liberal. He's often wrong as well, for example, when he made a rookie error in an essay awhile back stating that California had 57 Electoral College votes (it's actually 55).

In the current essay Tomasky - arguing from a pre-surge mindset - calls Iraq a "failure." This is not surprising considering the media elite's tremendous resistance to reporting increasing progress in the war (Iraqis are celebrating New Year's Eve this year, for example).

Tomasky does provide an interesting breakdown of the GOP's partisan coalition, noting that the GOP is:

...in the hands of three main interests: neoconservatives; theo-conservatives, i.e., the groups of the religious right; and radical anti-taxers, clustered around such organizations as the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. Each of these groups dominates party policy in its area of interest—the neocons in foreign policy, the theocons in social policy, and the anti-taxers on fiscal and regulatory issues. Each has led the Bush administration to undertake a high-profile failure: the theocons orchestrated the disastrous Terri Schiavo crusade, which put off many moder-ate Americans; the radical anti-taxers pushed for the failed Social Security privatization initiative; and the neocons, of course, wanted to invade Iraq....

Today's Republican Party...is essentially a faction: the conservative movement, which consists of the various branches described above, each with its different priorities. (We may lately add a fourth offshoot, the nativist anti-immigrant tendency, which embarrassed Bush last spring when it blocked the reasonable and comprehensive immigration bill the President supported.) Those branches, which of course overlap, are not sharply at odds with one another over fundamental questions, as the Democrats' factions are on, say, trade, and where they disagree, they tend not to air those disagreements publicly, especially at election time. There are a handful of vestigial Republican moderates; but they have no national power at all. The man who might have been able to change the party, the governor of the nation's largest state, cannot by accident of birth run for president, so he has gone as far as he can. In Congress, Republicans who are the least bit out of step with the goals of the conservative movement, people who in a different party might have made attractive national candidates (most notably Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel), are simply jumping ship and retiring, unable any longer to fight the obvious truth that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are one and the same.

Tomasky suggests that should the GOP win next November (a good possibility, he notes), there's little likelihood the party will move to the moderate center. The neocons will be too powerful for that:

On foreign policy, despite the Iraq war, the neoconservatives still hold tremendous sway in GOP circles. Jacob Heilbrunn, a former New Republic writer who has written incisively about the movement over the years, explains why in They Knew They Were Right, his excellent new history of neoconservatism. Heilbrunn adroitly surveys the movement's history, from the Trotskyist alcoves of the City College cafeteria up to the present day. With respect to the future, he argues that the neocons' main potential competitors, the foreign policy realists, have not prepared for long-term battle the way the neocons have:

So it will take an insurgency inside the GOP itself to dislodge the neoconservatives. But whether the old guard in the GOP has the mettle for that battle is dubious. There has been no real attempt to create new generations of realists to replace the Scowcrofts and Bakers and Schlesingers. The contrast between the Nixon Center event honoring Brent Scowcroft in 2006 and the [American Enterprise Institute] dinner for Bernard Lewis was striking. At the former, elderly veterans of the Nixon, Ford, and Bush administrations reminisced about their glory days.... Meanwhile, at the AEI dinner, none of the neoconservatives displayed much doubt about their own influence. Slate's Jacob Weisberg, for example, was dumbfounded by neoconservative serenity....

The extent to which the major Republican candidates, with the partial exception of Mike Huckabee, have backed the neocon worldview is striking. Exhibit A is of course Rudy Giuliani. The former mayor has organized his campaign around the fight against terrorism and to that end has assembled a hard-line foreign policy team led by Yale professor Charles Hill, a noted neoconservative and member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the group that pressed Bush to invade Iraq after September 11. (Nine days after the attacks, Hill signed a PNAC letter arguing that refusal to invade Iraq "will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.") Norman Podhoretz, who has a prominent spot on the Giuliani team, is still agitating for war with Iran, even after the early December release of the National Intelligence Estimate that demolished any rationale for such a strike. Podhoretz writes of his "dark suspicions" that the intelligence community was both seeking to undermine Bush and rushing to judgment on the basis of scant evidence.

I wrote on Michael Desch's demonization of Giuliani's neoconservative brain trust yesterday.

Tomasky doesn't go so far, but he's working in the same neighborhood - although he does sink to a conspiritorial tone when labeling Giuliani's stated foreign policy principles as part of the "the basic neocon outlook."

After a cursory discussion of the foreign policies of the remaining GOP candidates, Tomasky mentions how the "theo-conservatives" will influence the party, and then shifts over to the GOP's tax-cutting base:

The third leg of the conservative movement is in many ways the most important and comprehensive: all conservatives agree on less government, lower taxes, and less regulation. And all the candidates have pledged to support these goals.

[David] Frum reminds us that in the real world, the salience of tax-cutting as an issue has been steadily eroding in recent years:

When Republicans speak of "tax cuts," they mean "income tax cuts." Yet after almost three decades of income-tax cutting, most Americans no longer pay very much income tax. In fact, four out of five taxpayers now pay more in payroll taxes than federal income taxes. Some 29 million income-earning American households pay no income tax at all. By contrast, the notorious top 1 percent of taxpayers pay well over one-third of all U.S. income taxes. The top 1 percent may make a disproportionate amount of money. But they still cast only 1 percent of the votes.

One can quibble that Frum's math is probably slightly off since higher-income citizens are more likely to vote than poor people. But he is correct that for most Americans there simply isn't much more income tax to cut, and that poll respondents repeatedly prefer either deficit reduction or particular types of public investment, such as health care.

But the major Republican candidates give no sign that it may be time to shift to a different set of priorities. They all emphasize tax-cutting and deregulation as the centerpieces of their economic policies, including now McCain, who had opposed the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Indeed, one gets little indication from their speeches and platforms that serious domestic needs even exist. In August, for example, Giuliani released a health care plan whose main feature is tax exclusions of up to $7,500 per person and $15,000 per family that buys a health care plan. In order to help a family buy insurance, he proposed $15,000 of its income would not be taxed. But in reality, most uninsured families would derive little or no benefit from this plan because their incomes are already below the taxable level regardless of whether they are taking the exclusion. Even for wealthier households whose tax burdens would be reduced, the savings would certainly not come close to the $10,000 to $12,000 per year that most households would have to pay for family coverage.

So what is the purpose of Giuliani's plan? The journalist Ezra Klein characterized it with asperity, and accuracy:

Rudy Giuliani doesn't have a health care plan. What he has is a pretext with which to attack the Democrats. Indeed, just about all you need to know about Giuliani's thoughtfulness on the issue can be summed up by the following: In the speech introducing and detailing his new health care proposal, Giuliani refers to the "Democrats" six times. "Single-payer" is said eight times. "Socialized medicine," or some variant thereof, makes nine appearances. "Uninsured" is never uttered—not once.

The reason Giuliani cannot release a health care plan that makes a genuine attempt at insuring the uninsured is not resistance from "politicians" and "conservative voters," as Ponnuru and Lowry claim. He cannot do so because the important interest groups—such as the Club for Growth—that influence Republican fiscal policy would write him off, and in fact oppose him vehemently, if he tried to.

Tomasky's basic point of criticism mimics the hard-left's: That health care provision ought to be a public entitlement rather than a personal responsibility.

In his conclusion, Tomasky seems to have prepared a bit for the possibility of a GOP comeback in 2008, but he's relieved that a new Republican administration won't likely replicate the take-no-prisoners style of the George W. Bush years:

It is tempting to think that the Bush years have represented an apotheosis of conservatism, and that a future Republican administration would surely bring a kind of Thermidorean adjustment. It is also the case, obviously, that none of these men [of the current GOP field] is George W. Bush and that each of them, as president, might at least be less stubborn, more interested in the details of policy, and less hostile to empirical evidence that does not support his preconceived notions.

Tomasky finds the George W. Bush administration to have been a monumental disaster.

I don't. Tomasky's view will be proven wrong by the record of history, although California will have 57 Electoral College votes some day.

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UPDATE: Ross Douthat, over at The Atlantic, criticizes Tomasky's essay in terms of the conservative tripartite coalition's propensity for internecine warfare (via Memeorandum):

He [Tomasky] treats the alliance between the three interest groups listed above as a near-immutable fact of conservative politics, and argues that any realignment of the GOP must, perforce, be driven by Republicans who are "outside" the conservative movement. (He offers the names Chuck Hagel and Arnold Schwarzenegger as examples of the sort of politicians he has in mind.) Tomasky acknowledges the unlikelihood of this "revolt of the moderates" scenario; what he doesn't acknowledge, I think, is the growing likelihood of fissures within the conservative movement reshaping the ground of GOP politics.

It's true that the current conservative intelligentsia, forged in the crucible of Ronald Reagan's successes, is heavily invested in keeping the triple alliance intact - hence the Thompson bubble, the anti-Huckabee crusade, and the "rally round Romney" effect. And it's true, as well, that if the Republican Party recovers its majority in the next election the alliance will be considerably strengthened. But such a recovery is unlikely, and already, in the wake of just a single midterm-election debacle, it's obvious that the Norquistians and neocons and social conservatives aren't inevitable allies - that many tax-cutters and foreign-policy hawks, for instance, would happily screw over their Christian-Right allies to nominate Rudy Giuliani; or that many social conservatives don't give a tinker's dam what the Club for Growth thinks about Mike Huckabee's record. (So too with the neocon yearning for a McCain-Lieberman ticket, which would arguably represent a far more radical remaking of the GOP coalition than anything Chuck Hagel has to offer.)

That's a slick take on things. I love the idea of a McCain-Lieberman ticket myself, but as I noted in the previous post, my concern is for the GOP to decide on a standard-bearer quickly, enabling Republicans to unify strongly around the nominee and fight aggressively to win in the general.

Democrats Are Fired Up!

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting front-page piece on the comparative motivation of the Democrats and the Republicans. Are the Dems more fired up?

As presidential hopefuls from both parties rally support across Iowa ahead of Thursday's caucuses, Democratic voters are showing greater fervor for the race than their Republican counterparts, a difference that could have repercussions throughout the 2008 campaign.

At its simplest, there is a political energy gap. Democrats appear to be more fired up about their party nominating contest than are Republicans. Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire have been turning out at rallies in greater numbers than Republicans and giving more money to candidates. In Iowa, polls indicate Democrats will be attending the Thursday night caucuses in record numbers.

"There seems to be a little more juice on the Democratic side," says Republican pollster Bill McInturff.

"Republicans have a lot of work to do to get to the intensity level Democrats are at today," agrees Terry Nelson, a Republican strategist who previously headed the campaign of Arizona Sen. John McCain.

That's critical because, although the presidential nominating contest is just getting under way, Republicans are worried the Democrats' greater enthusiasm could allow them to sustain their wide national lead in overall fund raising. And money will play a big role in the outcome of November's general election.

Some Republicans also worry that they could end up having trouble rallying around their party's eventual nominee, a problem faced in recent years by the often-fractious Democrats. This time, by contrast, Democratic voters nationally are telling pollsters they like their field of candidates better than Republicans say they like theirs.

Read the whole thing.

The article's mostly anecdotal, although the numbers on campaign finance are favoring the Democrats considerably.

It's also important that the Republicans settle on a party nominee as soon as possible, rather than drag out the primaries to the convention.

I've been noticing a tremendous divide in the Republican party all 2006, especially since the immigration debate last summer. Such divisions are not good, as the mudslinging can be unusually nasty - on the campaign trail and in television advertising (see here and here). These divisions don't patch up well, leaving a question mark in the electorate as to how unified and strong the party stands behind its nominee.

It doesn't look like a single candidate's going to take both Iowa and New Hampshire, so the February 5 primaries could be decisive in sorting out the race.

I hope so, for the sake of the party's prospects in November.

See Memeorandum for more campaign analysis.

New York Times Rings in the New Year

Just after the breath of fresh air in the Kristol hiring, the editors at the New York Times are back to their old ways.

To wit: This morning's editorial, "Looking at America." I imagine with all of the lefties up in arms over Kristol's new gig - threatening to cancel their subscriptions - the Times had to get back in good graces with the radical base!

The editors provide a rehash of the "restoring moral credibility" attack against the Bush administration's war on terror, at home and abroad:

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Fear of terrorism? These folks are watching too many of those neo-totalitarian movies!

Check Memeorandum for some commentary.

I like Jules Crittenden's take on NYT's lofty "ideals":

Ideals are great. Imagine the possibilities if the editorial board with a preference for genocide had some. NYT has had a little trouble remembering where it put its ideals, however, perhaps distracted by its eagerness for the United States to lose the war NYT had lost interest in covering.

At least we'll have some old-fashioned left-wing editorial continuity in the new year!

**********

UPDATE: I took a little spin around some of the lefty blogs posting on this, and FireDogLake's entry is worthy of the end-of-the-year over-the-top blogging award (if there's such a thing)! Check it out:

As we look into the mirror to see what our country has become, one cannot help but feel contempt for the passivity -- or is it complicity -- with which the "opposition party" and an indolent media acquiesced in one outrage after another. Do the leaders of the Democratic Party truly condemn the Administration's actions? Do they feel the revulsion and disgust in the pits of their stomachs? And if so, why are they not demanding full disclosure, accountability, censure and removal from office for the most criminal regime in our history?

Glenn Greenwald reminds us the Democrats have been complicit in the Administration's illegal spying, in waging illegal wars, in creating a CIA monster, in sanctioning torture, in destroying the 4th Amendment, in illegal kidnappings and detentions and the assault on habeas corpus, and in creating kangaroo courts. As much as the Administration's arrogant defiance and contempt for the rule of law, the Democrat's meek protests and their refusals time and again to stand up to these outrages dismayed their supporters and created a sense of helplessness, a feeling there is nothing our political institutions can or will do to do cure this sickness.

The most obvious remedy, the one expressly designed for this purpose, sits unused for reasons no one can credibly explain or defend. I suspect historians will look back on Nancy Pelosi's decision to take impeachment off the table and describe it as one of the most cowardly, unprincipled and damaging statements ever uttered by a national leader. It has left America defenseless against an onslaught of lawlessness.

The Administration is destroying who America is, what it stands for, why it's important. And with only a few exceptions like Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others, the Democrats are not vowing to save it. They're not even acknowledging the travesty that every American can read in every day's headlines.

Now a new set of leaders is seeking our votes. What have they done to earn our trust? They have some interesting proposals to deal with other problems, but the front runners are not speaking to the destruction of our Constitutional system, they're not demanding accountability for the damage that has been done and a return to the rule of law. They're playing it safe.

But this is not a time for people who lack political courage. Who among them will step up and say what must be done?

What is to be done? FDL's post here looks like a call to revolution. It's frankly a repudiation of the two-party system and the very constitutional structure about which Scarecrow purportedly frets.

Like NYT, FDL's game is demonization of this administration for adopting a unitary executive theory of presidential power, for acting on neoconservative foreign policy principles to uphold international law, and for making no apologies in fighting the terrorists here and abroad.

Scarecrow's right about one thing: The Democrats have indeed been a disaster! It's a good thing the separation of powers is working as the Founders intended. Pelosi and company don't have the votes to ram through their extremely partisan agenda, a program made more unpalatable, frankly, by the party's kowtowing to netroot hordes of the likes of FireDogLake!

Interestingly, no matter how far the Democrats tilt to the left, there are always demands for more: Unless we have impeachment proceedings to rein in the "most criminal regime" in history, the revolutionary masses will continue their campaign to extract untold tons of flesh.

Elections aren't enough: Even after winning the congressional majority, and even as the Democrats are looking at the best electoral environment in decades, hard-left forces continue their call for Bush's head with just over a year to go for the administration.

Why?

Well, you see, we've become a fascist dictatorship according to the unruly mobs of the left-wing. It's punishment they want: Punishment for Afghanistan (can you believe it?), for Iraq, for Guantanamo, for John Ashcroft, for John Bolton, for John Roberts - any poor old John they can get their hands on!

Look out John Doe on mainstreet - you're next! To the guillotines!

FDL and their hordes (don't forget the Kos crowd) would make Robespierre look like an amateur.

You say you want a revolution? Voting Democratic's not going to be enough this year, if the hardline netroots have their way!

Enough for now. It's going to be a busy 2008 for us neoconservatives!

***********

UPDATE II: My commenter Libby mentioned she checked the comments to NYT's editorial. I checked them out myself, reading about a dozen or so. This one caught my attention:

All of these horrific acts are done for the primary purpose of testing what the American public will go along with. Every Republican and conservative since Richard Nixon has had an agenda to push the policies of this country further and further towards a totalitarian state. The benefit of 9/11 was that it gave the American public an amorphous enemy to fear. Therefore to defend against what the public fears it is necessary to have a strong government to defend them.

This one's interesting as well:

I believe that all you have said about the Bush administration is true. It's what you didn't say - about the role of the Democrat controlled Congress in righting all of these wrongs - that I find surprising. Yes, the next president will have a lot to do cleaning up this mess, but that person could be given a useful head start is Congress were to shine the light on the Bush administration in the way the Constitution says it should: by holding impeachment hearings on the matters of the actions of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney. My question for the editorial board of the Times is: Why didn't you call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney? You seem to have outlined the case for doing so, but you haven't said the magic word, "Impeach". I am as mystified by this omission.

I'm sure many of these folks find themselves right at home over at FDL or Daily Kos.

RWS, from my comment thread, was mystified by the analysis here, so let me just remind readers to brush up on their French history a bit:

The goal of the constitutional government is to conserve the Republic; the aim of the revolutionary government is to found it... The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.. These notions would be enough to explain the origin and the nature of laws that we call revolutionary ... If the revolutionary government must be more active in its march and more free in his movements than an ordinary government, is it for that less fair and legitimate? No; it is supported by the most holy of all laws: Martin Guerre! (Martin Guerre:"safety/welfare/or salvation of the people").

Robespierre presaging Scarecrow, or Glenn Greenwald?

China, International Institutions, and Power Transitions

Can the West handle the growth of Chinese power? Certainly, as long as China's rise is contained within the global system's multilateral institutionalist framework, led by the United States. This is G. John Ikenberry's basic point in his new essay on the growth of Chinese power at Foreign Affairs, "The Rise of China and the Future of the West." Ikenberry's one of the very top international relations scholars working from a neoliberal institutionalist perspective. I particulary liked his edited volume, America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power. I find myself agreeing with much of Ikenberry's argument in his current Foreign Affairs essay. Here's the introduction:

The rise of China will undoubtedly be one of the great dramas of the twenty-first century. China's extraordinary economic growth and active diplomacy are already transforming East Asia, and future decades will see even greater increases in Chinese power and influence. But exactly how this drama will play out is an open question. Will China overthrow the existing order or become a part of it? And what, if anything, can the United States do to maintain its position as China rises? Some observers believe that the American era is coming to an end, as the Western-oriented world order is replaced by one increasingly dominated by the East. The historian Niall Ferguson has written that the bloody twentieth century witnessed "the descent of the West" and "a reorientation of the world" toward the East. Realists go on to note that as China gets more powerful and the United States' position erodes, two things are likely to happen: China will try to use its growing influence to reshape the rules and institutions of the international system to better serve its interests, and other states in the system - especially the declining hegemon - will start to see China as a growing security threat. The result of these developments, they predict, will be tension, distrust, and conflict, the typical features of a power transition. In this view, the drama of China's rise will feature an increasingly powerful China and a declining United States locked in an epic battle over the rules and leadership of the international system. And as the world's largest country emerges not from within but outside the established post-World War II international order, it is a drama that will end with the grand ascendance of China and the onset of an Asian-centered world order. That course, however, is not inevitable. The rise of China does not have to trigger a wrenching hegemonic transition. The U.S.-Chinese power transition can be very different from those of the past because China faces an international order that is fundamentally different from those that past rising states confronted. China does not just face the United States; it faces a Western-centered system that is open, integrated, and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations. The nuclear revolution, meanwhile, has made war among great powers unlikely - eliminating the major tool that rising powers have used to overturn international systems defended by declining hegemonic states. Today's Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join. This unusually durable and expansive order is itself the product of farsighted U.S. leadership. After World War II, the United States did not simply establish itself as the leading world power. It led in the creation of universal institutions that not only invited global membership but also brought democracies and market societies closer together. It built an order that facilitated the participation and integration of both established great powers and newly independent states. (It is often forgotten that this postwar order was designed in large part to reintegrate the defeated Axis states and the beleaguered Allied states into a unified international system.) Today, China can gain full access to and thrive within this system. And if it does, China will rise, but the Western order - if managed properly - will live on. As it faces an ascendant China, the United States should remember that its leadership of the Western order allows it to shape the environment in which China will make critical strategic choices. If it wants to preserve this leadership, Washington must work to strengthen the rules and institutions that underpin that order - making it even easier to join and harder to overturn. U.S. grand strategy should be built around the motto "The road to the East runs through the West." It must sink the roots of this order as deeply as possible, giving China greater incentives for integration than for opposition and increasing the chances that the system will survive even after U.S. relative power has declined. The United States' "unipolar moment" will inevitably end. If the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is between China and the United States, China will have the advantage. If the defining struggle is between China and a revived Western system, the West will triumph.

Ikenberry's correct to note the importance of China's rise, although I think he needs to specify more carefully just when America's "unipolar moment" will end. Indeed, my main quibble with his piece is that his major premise of American decline (and China's rise) is an assumption. Some of the best recent work on the contemporary balance of power predicts a shift to multipolarity in about 20 or 30 years (and even Christopher Layne's important argument to that effect was more theoretically-driven than empirically substantiated). Fareed Zakaria, in a recent Newsweek essay, actually made a nifty little data-based case for the likelihood of continuing American global leadership:

Over the past 20 years, America's growth rate has averaged just over 3 percent, a full percentage point higher than that of Germany and France. (Japan averaged 2.3 percent over the same period.) Productivity growth, the elixir of modern economics, has been over 2.5 percent for a decade now, again a full percentage point higher than the European average. In 1980, the United States made up 22 percent of world output; today that has risen to 29 percent. The U.S. is currently ranked the second most competitive economy in the world (by the World Economic Forum), and is first in technology and innovation, first in technological readiness, first in company spending for research and technology and first in the quality of its research institutions. China does not come within 30 countries of the U.S. on any of these points, and India breaks the top 10 on only one count: the availability of scientists and engineers. In virtually every sector that advanced industrial countries participate in, U.S. firms lead the world in productivity and profits.

But with specific reference to China, Walter Russell Mead argues in today's Los Angeles Times that the Chinese challenge is not as pressing as many assume:

The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world. The story's unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China's economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought. About 40% smaller. China, it turns out, isn't a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

Mead goes on:

The political consequences will be felt far and wide. To begin with, the U.S. will remain the world's largest economy well into the future. Given that fact, fears that China will challenge the U.S. for global political leadership seem overblown. Under the old figures, China was predicted to pass the United States as the world's largest economy in 2012. That isn't going to happen. Also, the difference in U.S. and Chinese living standards is much larger than previously thought. Average income per Chinese is less than one-tenth the U.S. level. With its people this poor, China will have a hard time raising enough revenue for the vast military buildup needed to challenge the United States. The balance of power in Asia looks more secure. Japan's economy was not affected by the World Bank revisions. China's economy has shrunk by 40% compared with Japan too. And although India's economy was downgraded by 40%, the United States, Japan and India will be more than capable of balancing China's military power in Asia for a very long time to come.

Mead notes that in terms of absolute gains, the overestimation of China's comparative power has real negative implications for the quality of life for the Chinese people. When China's growth is calculated more accurately, the downward revisions mean in effect that fewer Chinese have escaped the burdens of poverty. But back to Ikenberry's argument: Beyond Chinese relative power, Ikenberry provides a couple of questionable examples to support his case on embedding great power change within an institutional framework. For example, check out this passage on the Soviet Union's power transition in the 1980s:

As the Soviet Union declined, the Western order offered a set of rules and institutions that provided Soviet leaders with both reassurances and points of access - effectively encouraging them to become a part of the system. Moreover, the shared leadership of the order ensured accommodation of the Soviet Union. As the Reagan administration pursued a hard-line policy toward Moscow, the Europeans pursued détente and engagement. For every hard-line "push," there was a moderating "pull," allowing Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue high-risk reforms. On the eve of German unification, the fact that a united Germany would be embedded in European and Atlantic institutions - rather than becoming an independent great power - helped reassure Gorbachev that neither German nor Western intentions were hostile.

This is a particularly benign take on the Soviet view of the world correlation of forces during the Reagan years. While the Europeans may have been more accomodating of an institutionalist bargain facilitating Soviet accession to German independence, material factors - the Soviet Union's dramatic relative decline in the international system - just as likely contributed to Gorbachev's decisionmaking on international reform (or, there could be multi-level interaction effects; see Seweryn Bialer, "Domestic and International Factors in the Formationof Gorbachev's Reforms"). Ikenberry also makes an odd point on NATO and the need to "renew" Western institutions to channel China's multilateral integration:

Renewing Western rules and institutions will require, among other things, updating the old bargains that underpinned key postwar security pacts. The strategic understanding behind both NATO and Washington's East Asian alliances is that the United States will work with its allies to provide security and bring them in on decisions over the use of force, and U.S. allies, in return, will operate within the U.S.-led Western order. Security cooperation in the West remains extensive today, but with the main security threats less obvious than they were during the Cold War, the purposes and responsibilities of these alliances are under dispute. Accordingly, the United States needs to reaffirm the political value of these alliances - recognizing that they are part of a wider Western institutional architecture that allows states to do business with one another.

Reading this passage one might get the idea that NATO's leadership in the multilateral coalition in Afghanistan is a fluke (see here, here, here, here, and here). Other than this, interestingly, Ikenberry's institutional case for integrating China into the Western order rests on fundamentally self-interested notions of maintaining U.S. international primacy. The article's an especially interesting contribution in that sense.

Kenya Vote Sparks Riots and Tribal Violence

Kenya's contested election has unleashed massive unrest. The Los Angeles Times has the story:

President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner Sunday of Kenya's presidential election and hastily sworn in, defying widespread concern over vote irregularities and sparking riots and tribal violence.

As smoke rose over parts of Nairobi, Kenya's emerging democracy also appeared to be smoldering. Before the chaotic election count, which saw returning officers disappear and European Union observers turned away without access to tallies, analysts and diplomats had viewed Kenya as one of the most promising democracies in Africa.

But the politics of the Big Man still holds sway in many parts of Africa, with only a few cases of incumbent presidents losing power through the ballot box.

After the 76-year-old president was sworn in for another five-year term, his challenger, opposition leader Raila Odinga, said a ruling clique was trying to rob Kenya of its democracy, wiping away tears as he spoke.

Odinga, 62, said he would be sworn in as "people's president" in his own ceremony Monday and outlined plans for a parallel government. As he spoke, live television transmissions were abruptly cut.

There were reports of violence across the country. In Kibera, a Nairobi slum area and opposition stronghold, thousands of protesters armed with rocks, knives and machetes chanted, "No peace!"

Rampaging mobs burned shacks and kiosks and beat people up. Panic-stricken people fled the area, shouting that gangs of youths were stoning cars, attacking people and robbing them. Police fired tear gas and live bullets to try to disperse the protesters.
But in Kibaki's strongholds, his supporters danced and sang.

The violence ran along tribal lines, as opposition supporters from the Luo tribe attacked those from Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe. Local media reported at least 13 people died, including several protesters shot by police. At least 70 had died in earlier election-related violence.

According to the official result, Kibaki won 4,584,721 votes and Odinga had 4,352,993. Odinga was well ahead in counting Friday, but Saturday saw the voting tally steadily tilt in Kibaki's favor, triggering riots in cities across Kenya.

"Kenyans will not accept the results of a rigged election," Odinga, the leader of the Orange Democratic Movement, had declared earlier Sunday. "No force will stop Kenyans attaining what they want." He said his party's figures indicated the vote had been rigged by 300,000 votes.

As previously mentioned, I watched "The Constant Gardener" yesterday, which features a political-geographic backstory in Kenya.

See Vicky Randall for an excellent book on Third World development, with cases on African politics, Political Change and Underdevelopment: A Critical Introduction to Third World Politics.

The CIA's World Factbook entry for Kenya, is here.

Photo Credit: A woman carrying a Kitten in Nairobi, Los Angeles Times

Preventive Strike? Declaring War on Neoconservative Foreign Policy

Obviously, considering all the controversy surrounding Bill Kristol and the New York Times, the political demonization of neoconservatism isn't fading away.

Indeed, with success in Iraq - and the media's reduced sensationalism in (anti)war reporting - many might see (or fear) a vindication of neoconservative ideas. Further, as the Democratic party continues to founder in its congressional power, voters may well continue to give the GOP superior marks on foreign policy - not great news for the Democrats in November 2008.

Perhaps such logic explains the genesis of Michael Desch's new preventive strike against Rudy Giuliani's neocons over at the paleoconservative flagship, the American Conservative.

Desch is a respected scholar of international relations, now at Texas A&M University; and in his introduction to the article, where he recounts confronting Giuliani at a lecture at the university, Desch portrays himself as above partisanship:

Like most Americans, I knew little about Rudolph Giuliani, save that he had been the very successful mayor of New York City catapulted to iconic status for his cool-headed demeanor after the Sept. 11 attacks. I was curious about where he stood as a presidential candidate, so in April 2007, I joined nearly 3,000 other Texas A&M faculty and students to hear him speak.

After saying some nice things about his host, President George H.W. Bush, Rudy launched into a stemwinder about the “war on Islamic fundamentalist terrorism” that basically repudiated everything the former president stood for in his foreign policy. Moreover, in the space of 40 minutes, Giuliani never once mentioned Osama bin Laden, the man who masterminded the attack on his city.

I was so appalled by the mayor’s simplistic message that terrorists were attacking us because they “oppose our freedom and ... want to impose their ideology on us” that I ignored protocol and challenged him during the Q&A. To the accompaniment of hisses from the rabidly pro-Rudy students, I reminded the mayor that Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere in the Middle East have taken our side against al-Qaeda at various times. Like the students, Hizzonor was not amused, and I got five minutes of unvarnished Rudy chiding me for just not getting it.

To the cheers of the partisan crowd, Giuliani argued that my “failure to see the connection between Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups [was] a recipe for disaster.” In his view, the campaign of radical Islamic terrorism began back in the 1960s and 1970s and included things like the Black September attack upon Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. He ridiculed my call to disaggregate the terrorist threat, saying it ignored the fact that Yasir Arafat, whom, he lamented, we helped win the Nobel Prize, was responsible for “slaughtering 29 Americans” over the years. I learned later that Giuliani was so annoyed by my hectoring that he complained about it at the reception after the talk. He was reportedly shocked to learn that I was not some lefty professor but a member of the faculty at the Bush School.

After this disheartening experience, I decided to look more closely at what Giuliani was saying about foreign policy and who was advising him. What I found alarmed me: Rudy’s performance here was no aberration. Those who thought George W. Bush was too timid in the conduct of his foreign policy will find a champion in Rudy.

So begins Desch's examination of the "Giuliani cabal" of neocon foreign policy advisors.

The article's almost like an intelligence dossier on the enemy operatives of some rival nation, with one recurring theme: Rudy Giuliani and his neocons would be even more bellicose and bloodthirsty than the current administration.

Take Desch's discussion of Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative godfather and recent high-profile proponent of preventive strikes on Iran's nuclear program:

Podhoretz is the person whose presence has done the most to set in concrete the notion that Team Rudy is all neocon all the time. Famous for arguing that we are in the midst of “World War IV,” Podhoretz is scathing in his criticism of those he suspects of not waging the war with enough vigor. He even charges that many senior military officers show insufficient stomach for the fight, singling out former CENTCOM commander John Abizaid and his successor, Adm. William Fallon. Podhoretz is also an assiduous peddler of the new neocon myth that the antiwar camp stabbed President Bush in the back.

And he doesn’t stop at Iraq: Podhoretz constantly beats the drum for bombing Iran to halt its nascent nuclear program. Air Marshal Podhoretz assured The Telegraph that the air campaign “would take five minutes.” His optimism that attacking Iran would be another cakewalk combines with pessimism about the prospects of multilateral sanctions preventing Iran from getting the bomb. “Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of the Jews back then,” Podhoretz sneers, “the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.”

There are areas where Podhoretz is out of sync with the rest of the Giuliani team. One is his steadfast commitment to the Bush administration’s efforts to spread democracy in the Middle East, which he applies equally to American enemies like Iran and Syria and friends like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Other Giuliani advisors are more restrained about democracy promotion. Another point of departure is Podhoretz’s long-standing critique of the Clinton administration for treating terrorism as simply a “crime problem,” a charge somewhat discordant with the mayor’s claim that his successful campaign against crime in New York City justifies electing him global sheriff.

It's odd for Desch to suggest that Podhoretz is "out of sync" with the rest of Giuliani's advisors, since the article goes out of its way to make a person-by-person case that this foreign policy team is hell-bent on bulking-up America's neocon wars of neo-imperial aggression.

Desch, for example, hammers Daniel Pipes (which is nothing new), who he calls "the crazy uncle" of Giuliani's campaign and one who "stands out as an extremist." What Desch doesn't like is Pipes' unabashed support for Israel, which includes hardline (and unpopular) positions on Iranian strategic designs and the legitimacy of Palestinian statehood.

For Desch, even Giuliani's advisors of questionable neoconservative credentials - like Yale lecturer Charles Hill - come under fire for their alleged alarmist bellicosity. In his slam against Hill, Desch compares the former diplomat to Vice President Dick Cheney:

Hill describes himself as an “Edmund Burke conservative,” but as one former Yale International Security Studies Fellow explained to me, “There’s not much if any daylight between Charlie and the neocons, except on the degree to which is Charlie is more of a multilateralist than them. ... I suppose the only difference is that Charlie is more like Cheney, who dovetails with the neocons on most issues of the last 6.5 years, rather than strictly being a neocon. And like Cheney, I think 9/11 had a massive effect on Charlie. You can’t underestimate just how much it galvanized him.”

In the next paragraph Desch castigates Hill for moving "steadily closer to the neocon camp," as if he's jumping into a rattlesnake pit.

This criticism wouldn't be surprising, except recall that Desch describe's himself in the introduction as "not some lefty professor but a member of the faculty at the Bush School." Unfortunately, though, Desch's demonization of the neocons fits right into the left-wing antiwar, anti-American movement and its paleoconservative allies. Look at this concluding statement on Giuliani's support for neoconservative ideas:

Unfortunately, he is of one mind with some of the most unrepentant, unreconstructed neoconservatives around. Podhoretz told the New York Observer that “as far as I can tell, there is very little difference in how he sees the war and how I see it.” If anyone thinks that neoconservativism is on the outs after the debacle in Iraq, they need look no further than the Republican frontrunner’s brain-trust.

Note Desch's language, the call to "repent" and the slur of "unreconstructed" neocons. That tone's not too far off from some of this weekend's leftist denunciations of the New York Times!

It's certainly not very conservative, as noted by David Frum over at the National Interest:

Have we really reached the point where a magazine [the American Conservative] that masquerades under the label of "conservative" thinks that the very worst possible allegation to throw against a president is that he has advisers who admire Israel and support democracy, that he knows his own mind, and that he is ready to defend the country against his enemies? If this is the American Conservative's idea of criticism, God save the Republican party from ever deserving its praise.

But let me close with some perspective from this side of neoconservatism.

In a recent review of Podhoretz's World War IV, Bruce Thornton argues that Podhoretz not so much overstates his case endorsing the Bush Doctrine, but rather fails to focus clearly enough on the long-term existential nature of the Islamic challenge facing American national security:

Podhoretz is right that we have a “fighting chance” to create the conditions for the reconciliation of Islam with modernity. But we need to accept that the job is one of decades, and that it will require continued force and a strong presence in Afghanistan and Iraq for many years. It also requires that we realize that the assault on Israel is a theater in the jihadist war, not a quarrel over Palestinian “national aspirations.” And it will necessitate speaking the truth about Islam and compelling Muslims to acknowledge that truth and to stop hiding behind distortions and propaganda about the “religion of peace.” We must compel more Muslims to step up and start telling us –– and other Muslims –– how that reconciliation can take place, and back their words with deeds. Yet whenever Muslims do this –– Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq come to mind –– they have to go into hiding from the devotees of the “religion of peace.”

But the ultimate question is whether we Americans have the stomach for this fight, whether we can drop our sentimental “we are the world” multiculturalist fantasies and speak plainly about Islam and its dysfunctions, whether we can cast off the hair shirt of colonial and imperial guilt so eagerly donned by self-loathing Western elites. Podhoretz ends his important, indispensable book by affirming his belief that enough Americans do have that resolve and that we will ultimately win. But as he also says, “the jury is still out, and it will not return a final verdict for some time to come.”

The notion of having "stomach for this fight" is alien to antiwar types - whether these are protesters in the street or academics ensconsed at realist foreign policy schools who publish wildly anti-neocon tracts in paleoconservative journals.