Greek Pro-Bailout Parties Seek Governing Coalition

At the Wall Street Journal, "Parties in Greece Near Coalition":

ATHENS — Greece's two leading pro-bailout parties appeared late Monday to be headed into an alliance that would give them the majority needed to keep promised overhauls on course, but they were working to find support from others in Parliament for a broad cross-party coalition government.

After formally receiving an exploratory mandate from Greek President Karolos Papoulias earlier in the day, conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras met with the heads of four other parties. Following those meetings, Mr. Samaras signaled a deal between him and his Socialist Pasok party counterpart, Evangelos Venizelos, would be reached within three days.

"Mr. Venizelos and I are in agreement that, no matter what, a government of national salvation must be formed within the deadline for the mandate given to me by the president," Mr. Samaras said after the third of the four scheduled meetings.

Although New Democracy won the most votes in Sunday's elections, it doesn't control enough seats to govern on its own and must seek a coalition partner to form a majority in Greece's 300-member Parliament.

Its former coalition partner, Pasok—which also supports the country's European-led bailout—came in third in the vote. Combined, the two parties would control 162 seats, giving them a comfortable margin of support.

The new government will face high hurdles, with a central administration threatened by a cash crunch within weeks, an economy in free fall and an angry public exhausted by two years of austerity measures.

Its first task will be to come up with €11.5 billion ($14.6 billion) or more of new austerity measures demanded by the country's creditors, which could further inflame the public.

Facing strident opposition in Parliament from Greece's antiausterity Syriza party—which came in a strong second in Sunday's vote—Messrs. Samaras and Venizelos have been trying to bring in other party leaders to gain broad backing for tough decisions ahead.

One possible candidate could be the small, Democratic Left party, which accepts the loan deal but wants an easing of the terms of the austerity measures.

But even without that support, the two are ready to reach a deal and have held advanced talks on forming a government, officials from both parties said.

Continue reading.

BONUS: From Walter Russell Mead, "The Greek Election Solves… Nothing."

Greek Radical Left Party Says If Threatened, Athens Will Repudiate Its Debts

Well, nothing like instilling confidence in the markets with a few threats to proudly default on your obligations. And the Greek moneyed classes can see the writing on the wall, as the video below indicates.

See the Wall Street Journal, "Greek Leftist Leader Throws Down Gauntlet on Debt" (via Memeorandum):

ATHENS — The head of Greece's radical left party—throwing down a gauntlet that could increase tensions between Greece and its frustrated European creditors—said he sees little chance Europe will cut off funding to the country but that if it does, Athens will stop paying its debts.

A financial collapse in Greece would drag down the rest of the euro zone, said Alexis Tsipras, the 37-year-old head of the Coalition of the Radical Left, known as Syriza, and potentially the country's next prime minister. Instead, he said, Europe must consider a more growth-oriented policy to arrest Greece's spiraling recession and address what he called a growing "humanitarian crisis" facing the country.

"Our first choice is to convince our European partners that, in their own interest, financing must not be stopped," Mr. Tsipras said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He said Greece doesn't intend to take any unilateral action, "but if they proceed with unilateral action on their side, in other words they cut off our funding, then we will be forced to stop paying our creditors, to go to a suspension in payments to our creditors."

According to recent opinion polls, Mr. Tsipras's party is poised to win the most votes in elections next month, bettering its surprise second-place finish in an inconclusive May 6 vote that left no party or coalition with enough seats in Parliament to form a government. With Mr. Tsipras likely to win pole position in the coming vote, it raises the risk that Greece will soon face a showdown with European creditors over the contentious austerity program that Athens must adhere to in order to receive fresh aid.

Mr. Tsipras's remarks come as Greece's failure to form a coalition government has fueled euro-zone tensions and spurred talk of a potential Greek exit from the common currency. This week, Greek citizens, anxious over the possibility their euros could be redenominated into a weaker new drachma, withdrew hundreds of millions of euros from local banks. On Thursday, Fitch Ratings downgraded its ratings on Greece two notches further into junk territory, pointing to the increased risk that Greece may leave the euro zone.

In Spain, another vulnerable euro-zone economy, the government Thursday sought to quell fears sparked by an unconfirmed report of massive withdrawals from Bankia SA, an ailing lender that Spain rescued last week. "It's not true that there's a deposit flight," Deputy Finance Minister Fernando Jiménez Latorre said.

Worries that the turmoil surrounding Greece could lead to contagion sent the euro to its lowest level against the dollar since mid-January, extending its decline over the past three weeks to 4%. Demand for the perceived safety of U.S. Treasurys pushed the yield on the benchmark 10-year bond to 1.702%, the lowest closing level in its history.

In Greece, a caretaker government was sworn in Thursday at the presidential palace, putting in place a technocratic cabinet led by senior judge Panagiotis Pikrammenos as prime minister that will take the country to fresh elections.

And check for the article free pass at Google.

More at Memorandum.

Greek Voters Oust Ruling Parties in Backlash Against Austerity

The Wall Street Journal offers a dire headline, "Greeks Court Chaos in Mass Protest Vote: New Parties Vow to Redo Bailout Terms; Prospects for Coalition Rule Look Dim" (at Google):

ATHENS — Greek voters on Sunday delivered a stinging rejection of the country's two incumbent parties—the Socialist, or Pasok, party and the conservative New Democracy—and the austerity program they support, raising the specter of political instability that could ultimately challenge the country's future in the euro zone.

More than 60% of the popular vote went to smaller left- and right-wing parties that have campaigned against the austerity program Greece must implement in exchange for continued financing from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund.

With the political landscape dramatically recast, difficult talks for a multiparty coalition were set to follow the election of Greece's most fragmented Parliament since the restoration of democracy and the fall of the military junta in 1974. But the prospect of a viable government emerging from these talks looked dim, raising the possibility of fresh elections before long—possibly by the middle of next month.

Greek voters' resounding rejection of austerity came the same day that the French elected François Hollande as president, giving that country a Socialist leader who has pledged to shift the burden of hardship onto the rich and resolve the protracted euro sovereign-debt crisis by softening the current prescription of fiscal stringency.

With more than 95% of the vote counted, Greece's two mainstream parties looked set to secure just 150 seats in the 300-seat Parliament, which would prevent them from forming a governing coalition on their own. The projection includes a 50-seat bonus awarded to the conservative New Democracy party which holds a slim lead with 19.1% of the vote and 109 seats.

The two parties garnered just under 33% of the vote between them, a sharp drop from the combined 77% they won in the previous election less than three years ago.

At least seven parties, most of which reject austerity policies, were poised to clear the 3% threshold needed to enter Parliament—meaning the next Greek government will have difficulty implementing the reform program demanded by the country's European and international creditors in exchange for funding a continued bailout for Greece.

In a surprise result, the Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, which seeks to annul the austerity program, saw its share of the vote more than triple from the 2009 elections, to 16.4% of the vote and 51 seats—making it the second-largest party in Parliament—Interior Ministry projections showed.

Pasok took the brunt of voter anger, slipping to third place, with 13.5% of the vote and 41 seats, its worst showing in more than 30 years.

The far-right, anti-immigrant Golden Dawn party, with an estimated 6.9% of the vote, or 21 seats, will enter Parliament for the first time.

If final results confirm initial projections, a bipartisan coalition of New Democracy and Pasok is unlikely to deliver a viable government, capable of passing fresh reforms demanded by international creditors.

And here's this, from the editors at WSJ, "The New Greek Extremism":

As for the rise of the extremist fringes, this should serve as a warning of what happens in countries where mainstream parties fail. It's too soon to start making comparisons to the interwar years of the last century, when Fascism, Communism and Nazism all found their political footholds. But that's the scenario Europe may someday risk again if its centrist parties continue to fail.

RTWT.

Also, at Telegraph UK, "Angry Greeks send a message by punishing parties of austerity." And from The Guardian, "Greek voters vent anger towards austerity at ballot box: Parties that passed unpopular belt-tightening measures punished by electorate..."

Socialist Party Delivered Humiliating Defeat in Spain's General Election

Voters booted the Socialist Party of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister who caved to terrorism in 2004, pulling Spanish forces out of Iraq.

At New York Times, "Spain Vote Deals Decisive Blow to Socialist Government":

MADRID — Spaniards struggling with high unemployment and a credit squeeze delivered a punishing verdict on almost eight years of Socialist government at the ballot box on Sunday, turning to the conservative Popular Party in the hopes of alleviating the pain of Europe’s debt crisis.

With 99.8 percent of the vote counted Sunday night, the Popular Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, had won 186 seats and a governing majority in the 350-seat lower house of Parliament, while the governing Socialists plummeted to 110 seats from 169. It was the Popular Party’s best showing, and the Socialists’ worst, since Spain’s return to democracy in the 1970s.

Spain is the third southern European country in two weeks to see its government felled by the debt crisis in the euro zone. In Italy and Greece, prime ministers were forced by mounting financial and economic woes to resign and give way to interim “unity” governments of technical experts, who are meant to take urgent but unpopular austerity measures to cope with the crisis and then call new elections.

The new Spanish prime minister will have an advantage they lack — the solid backing of a freshly elected single-party majority in Parliament — but he must still cope with the same dire combination of economic stagnation, gaping budget deficits and crushing debts that brought down his predecessor, and that swept governing parties out of office in Greece and Italy this month, Portugal in June and Ireland in February.

Also at Telegraph UK, "Spain: Conservatives win landslide victory."

RELATED: From 2010, "Aznar Calls for New Elections to Solve Spain’s Problems."

European Tea Leaves for Conservatives

From Ken Davenport, "From Europe, hope for conservatives":

The left in this country has made much of the big electoral victories that the Democrats won in 2006 and 2008 -- and for good reason. Not since 1977, when Jimmy Carter swept to victory along with huge Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, has there been such lopsided partisan rule in this country. With Al Franken seemingly a lock to win the Minnesota Senate seat, the Democrats are on the verge of a 60 vote "supra majority" that is virtually filibuster proof. The immediate future seems to all be swinging the left's way, and all the things that come with it are now a foregone conclusion: major health care reform, tax increases, deficit spending and a spate of intensive, restrictive environmental regulation.

But will it last? As we know, Jimmy Carter's 1977 victory gave way in just four years to the Reagan Revolution -- and though Barack Obama is much more politically sophisticated than was Carter, a former Georgia peanut farmer who was poorly schooled in the ways of Washington, there are many similarities thus far between the two presidencies. Carter took over after a period of eight years of Republican rule and in the wake of an unpopular war and scandal; his campaign was based on a promise to "change" Washington -- to clean up government and restore the nation's image in the world. The economy he inherited was suffering from high unemployment and high inflation -- and Carter's typical "tax and spend" policies made both worse. He oversaw the expansion of government with the creation of the Departments of Energy and Education, instituted price controls and rationing on energy, oversaw the bailout of a Detroit automaker (Chrysler) and pursued Middle East Peace by promoting the cause of the Arab states over those of Israel.

Sound familiar?

But it is not a lost cause, for as Carter gave way to Reagan, Obama’s left-wing policies and programs may lead to a new conservative revolution. In fact, there are signs now from Europe that the purported "death of conservatism" has been greatly exaggerated. As the BBC reports tonight, in European Parliament elections this weekend it appears that Center-right parties have made major gains ...

More at the link.

Weekend Interview with Natan Sharansky

Natan Sharansky, the Israeli Zionist and former Soviet dissident, comes about as close as possible to living a life of neoconservativism.

Sharansky's the subject of this weekend's Wall Street Journal interview. A main theme of the interview is that democracy promotion, especially as that practiced by the Bush administration, is on the ropes. Sharansky, as the author of The Case for Democracy, has been a major influence on the adminstration's agenda.

Here's a key excerpt from the article:

But democracy is a dirty word these days. So Mr. Sharansky is lonely too, bounced out of Israeli politics and out of favor. He, Vaclav Havel and other former Eastern European dissident faces of the freedom agenda are dismissed as Cold War naïfs, pernicious Utopians, or worse--men whose moral Manichaeism has no business in the "complex Middle East."

America is back to its realist ways in the region, propping up Egyptian and Saudi gerontocrats. The day I visit Mr. Sharansky, Condi Rice is here to prod all sides to another Middle East peace conference, with no mention of political opening as part of the bargain.

Across town at the Shalem Center, his new professional home in Jerusalem's German Colony, Mr. Sharansky puts a brave face on this latest turn in his life. Nine years in a Siberian prison camp without seeing his young wife, he says, puts everything that follows in healthy perspective. His smiling eyes are framed by a recognizable bald pate and graying sideburns (he's almost 60). An anecdote or joke is never absent for long in conversation. As almost any East European will tell you, humor makes unpleasant reality go down easier.

Mr. Sharansky says of his adversaries among the Western intellectual elite: "Those people who are always wrong--they were wrong about the Soviet Union, they were wrong about Oslo [the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace deal], they were wrong about appeasing Yasser Arafat--they are the intellectual leaders of these battles. So what can I tell you?"

But his side is today on a back foot. The war in Iraq and the rise of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, aided by the ballot box, are Exhibits A and B in the case against the Bush Doctrine and its contention that democracy can put down roots in Arab soil.
Mr. Sharansky considers these cases immaterial. "What's happening today in Iraq has nothing to do with the question whether promoting democracy is a good idea, or whether people in Iraq want to live in freedom." The Iraqis' refusal to defend Saddam Hussein and courage in voting for a new constitution and parliament settled that argument for Mr. Sharansky. Iraq's Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites are, he says, engaged in a different, no less ferocious struggle over "identity"--his current obsession, and the subject of his next book.

The victory of Hamas in last year's Palestinian elections is widely considered a defeat for the Bush Doctrine. Mr. Sharansky recalls seeing friends at the White House the day of the vote. "They said, 'Oh, it's the first time, it's a good experiment.' And I said, 'I fully disagree. It's a terrible experiment!' Now of course they come back and say, 'You see, you want to promote democracy and you get Hamas.'"

As he argued in his bestselling book, the West confuses the ballot box with democracy. "The election has to be at the end of the process of building free society," he says. "If there is no free and democratic society, elections can never be free and democratic."

Having not even attempted a "bottom up" overhaul of its politics and economy, the Palestinians weren't ready for a poll, he says, nor were other post-Cold War Western protectorates. He faults successive U.S. administrations for pushing votes before their time in Bosnia right after its war ended in 1995, Iraq and in the Palestinian territories. "Nobody thought in 1946 to have elections in Germany and Japan."

I think the neoconservative vision for Iraq will be vindicated ultimately (sooner rather than later, the way things are looking). History shows that the spread of freedom is generally welcomed. The controversy starts when that vision is backed by military power.

I noticed that Sharansky was spared a thrashing by the left blogosphere, as indicated by the dearth of blog posts at Sharansky's Memeorandum link. Perhaps he's old news, or perhaps the lefties don't have a clue on Sharansky's neoconservative significance. Considering his impact on President Bush (here and here), that would be a surprise.

Neo-Neocon 's on top of it, in any case.

Welcome to American Power

Welcome to my new blog, American Power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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