Conventional Wisdom on 2008 Could Be Wrong

In his new column, "Hold Your Conventional Wisdom," William Kristol gives three reasons why it's wrong to predict 2008 as the year of the Democrats:

1) The Democrats' takeover of both houses of Congress last November turns out to have been a mixed blessing for them. The approval numbers for the Democratic Congress have been trending downward. It hasn't been easy for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to keep the party's liberal base and its new supporters happy at the same time. And the Bush White House has made some adjustments. The election defeat coincided with a crisis about how to move forward in Iraq. Bush decided against Donald Rumsfeld but also against the Iraq Study Group, and for General David Petraeus and the surge. Democrats forecast an even deeper quagmire. Instead, we've seen progress -which could well continue and broaden. Meanwhile, Michael Mukasey - not Alberto Gonzales - will be making the case for the Administration on the tools it needs to conduct the war on terrorism. A respected and independent former judge, Mukasey will have credibility that Gonzales could only dream of.

2) Polls still show a hangover from November 2006, with Democrats having an advantage. But history suggests that may not hold up. Winning control of Congress doesn't necessarily signify much about the next presidential contest. The last time Congress flipped was 1994 - and that GOP sweep was followed by a Bill Clinton victory in 1996. Democrats took back the Senate (and thus control of both bodies of Congress) in 1986, and George H.W. Bush won easily in 1988. Voters like checks and balances.

It's true that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama now run ahead of the GOP candidates in matchups. But as often as not in recent presidential elections, the candidate who eventually won had trailed at some point by margins as large as those now facing the likely Republican nominees. This was true of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bush in 1988 and Clinton in 1992. And in the two most recent elections, Republicans haven't done badly. The GOP candidate made a far closer race of it than expected in a special election in the strongly Democratic 5th Congressional District in Massachusetts, losing by only 6 points despite being outspent about 4 to 1. And 36-year-old Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal won the governorship of Louisiana with a majority in the first round of balloting.

3) Watching the Republican candidates in the debate in Orlando, Fla., I wasn't filled with dread about the general election. The Democrats are going to nominate either a one-term Senator (Clinton) or a half-term Senator (Obama), neither with much in the way of legislative achievements. Against that, the GOP will offer one of the following: a remarkably successful two-term mayor (Rudy Giuliani), a business leader as well as Governor (Mitt Romney), a four-term Senator and war hero (McCain), an effective two-term Governor (Mike Huckabee) or a Senator with as much experience as Clinton and who was a star prosecutor and has an appealing personal story (Fred Thompson).

The strength of Kristol's argument lies in his points on Iraq (where security has improved and the public has recognized the gains) and the success of Republicans in recent elections (like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana).

But I'd be careful myself in throwing too much water on the Democrats' parade. While polls show deep dissatisfaction with Congress, voters are twice as likely to view the Democratic majority favorably compared to Congress in general.

Also, there's deep unease in the country on health care and other issues. The Repubicans need to decide quickly on their nominee in the primaries - no matter which candidate ends up getting the nod. The race for the general election will be tight, but Republicans can't afford a long, drawn-out nomination battle (better to unify early around a standard-bearer), and they need to run the best presidential campaign in party history.

The Stark Truth About the Left

With Representative Pete Stark's recent anti-Bush statements as the prompt, Michael Knox Beran at the National Review offers an excellent reminder of the contemporary left's anti-American fundamentalism:

Congressman Pete Stark has apologized for saying that President Bush finds “amusement” in the spectacle of American troops getting “their heads blown off” in Iraq. Yet his comments have been embraced by many of the president’s detractors, among them bloggers at The Huffington Post and Daily Kos.

It is not hard to see why. Congressman Stark’s words are faithful to a particular way of looking at America and its place in history — are faithful to what might be called the “liberal interpretation of history.”

The liberal interpretation of history holds that the United States is not merely a flawed country — all countries are flawed — but a deeply flawed one. It was founded by statesmen who subscribed to a deeply flawed philosophy; statesmen who believed that all men are created equal, and that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry.

The founders of the United States, it is true, did not always live up to their philosophy. But by placing its principles in the Declaration of Independence, they preserved it, as Abraham Lincoln said, for all time, so that “to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

In the view of those who subscribe to the liberal interpretation of history, the philosophy of the Declaration is antiquated. According to the liberal interpretation, all men are created equal, except for blacks, Native Americans, Alaskan natives, Hispanics, and Asian and Pacific Islanders, who are racially challenged and must be classed apart from everyone else. (Native Hawaiians will be added to the list if the Akaka Bill becomes law.) All are entitled to life, except for those whose hearts beat in the womb; to liberty, except for those who require the supervision of the nanny state; to the fruits of their industry, except for those who have made a certain amount of money and are obligated to hand a disproportionate chunk of it over to the government each year.

Central to the liberal interpretation of history is the belief that a country founded on so flawed a philosophy cannot, as a rule, be a force for good in the world. Accordingly, when the United States acts in the world it most often acts not for good, but for evil.

Viewed in the light of such an interpretation of history, Congressman Stark’s comments become comprehensible, even predictable. President Bush adheres to the Freevangelical faith of President Lincoln, who argued that the United States has a decisive role to play in advancing the cause of freedom in the world. President Bush adheres, as well, to the belief that all human beings are entitled to liberty and the fruits of their industry: he therefore opposes the enlargement of nanny-state measures like S-CHIP when alternative measures (such as tax cuts) would promote the general welfare in a better and less intrusive way.

From the point of view of those who subscribe to the liberal interpretation of history, such heterodoxy cannot be explained rationally; the President must be not merely intellectually primitive, but morally depraved, as Congressman Stark suggested when he condemned the president for defending freedom abroad while resisting S-CHIP expansion at home.

Read the whole thing.

For more argument along these lines, see Lee Harris, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing" and Cinnamon Stillwell, "The Making Of A 9/11 Republican."

Francis Fukuyama and America's Self-Defeating Power

Francis Fukuyama's got a piece up at RealClearPolitics arguing that the Bush administration's foreign policy has exacerbated global anti-Americanism:

When I wrote about the End of History almost 20 years ago, one thing that I did not anticipate was the degree to which American behaviour and misjudgments would make anti-Americanism one of the chief fault lines of global politics. And yet, particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, that is precisely what has happened, owing to four key mistakes made by the Bush administration.

First, the doctrine of "preemption", which was devised in response to the 2001 attacks, was inappropriately broadened to include Iraq and other so-called "rogue states" that threatened to develop weapons of mass destruction. To be sure, preemption is fully justified vis-a-vis stateless terrorists wielding such weapons. But it cannot be the core of a general non-proliferation policy, whereby the United States intervenes militarily everywhere to prevent the development of nuclear weapons.

The cost of executing such a policy simply would be too high (several hundred billion dollars and tens of thousands of casualties in Iraq and still counting). This is why the Bush administration has shied away from military confrontations with North Korea and Iran, despite its veneration of Israel's air strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, which set back Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme by several years. After all, the very success of that attack meant that such limited intervention could never be repeated, because would-be proliferators learned to bury, hide, or duplicate their nascent weapons programmes.

The second important miscalculation concerned the likely global reaction to America's exercise of its hegemonic power. Many people within the Bush administration believed that even without approval by the UN security council or Nato, American power would be legitimised by its successful use. This had been the pattern for many US initiatives during the cold war, and in the Balkans during the 1990s; back then, it was known as "leadership" rather than "unilateralism".

But, by the time of the Iraq war, conditions had changed: the US had grown so powerful relative to the rest of the world that the lack of reciprocity became an intense source of irritation even to America's closest allies. The structural anti-Americanism arising from the global distribution of power was evident well before the Iraq war, in the opposition to American-led globalisation during the Clinton years. But it was exacerbated by the Bush administration's "in-your-face" disregard for a variety of international institutions as soon it came into office - a pattern that continued through the onset of the Iraq war.

America's third mistake was to overestimate how effective conventional military power would be in dealing with the weak states and networked transnational organisations that characterise international politics, at least in the broader Middle East. It is worth pondering why a country with more military power than any other in human history, and that spends as much on its military as virtually the rest of the world combined, cannot bring security to a small country of 24 million people after more than three years of occupation. At least part of the problem is that it is dealing with complex social forces that are not organised into centralised hierarchies that can enforce rules, and thus be deterred, coerced, or otherwise manipulated through conventional power.

Israel made a similar mistake in thinking that it could use its enormous margin of conventional military power to destroy Hizbullah in last summer's Lebanon war. Both Israel and the US are nostalgic for a 20th century world of nation-states, which is understandable, since that is the world to which the kind of conventional power they possess is best suited.

But nostalgia has led both states to misinterpret the challenges they now face, whether by linking al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or Hizbullah to Iran and Syria. This linkage does exist in the case of Hizbullah, but the networked actors have their own social roots and are not simply pawns used by regional powers. This is why the exercise of conventional power has become frustrating.

Finally, the Bush administration's use of power has lacked not only a compelling strategy or doctrine, but also simple competence. In Iraq alone, the administration misestimated the threat of WMD, failed to plan adequately for the occupation, and then proved unable to adjust quickly when things went wrong. To this day, it has dropped the ball on very straightforward operational issues in Iraq, such as funding democracy promotion efforts.

Incompetence in implementation has strategic consequences. Many of the voices that called for, and then bungled, military intervention in Iraq are now calling for war with Iran. Why should the rest of the world think that conflict with a larger and more resolute enemy would be handled any more capably?

But the fundamental problem remains the lopsided distribution of power in the international system. Any country in the same position as the US, even a democracy, would be tempted to exercise its hegemonic power with less and less restraint. America's founding fathers were motivated by a similar belief that unchecked power, even when democratically legitimated, could be dangerous, which is why they created a constitutional system of internally separated powers to limit the executive.

Such a system does not exist on a global scale today, which may explain how America got into such trouble. A smoother international distribution of power, even in a global system that is less than fully democratic, would pose fewer temptations to abandon the prudent exercise of power.

My reading of Fukuyama is that he's stuck in a pre-surge mentality.

The justification for the U.S. invasion of has been debated ad nauseum (so that's a stale rehash). Fukuyama also fails to note the recovery of international views toward the United States (public opinion in our Western democratic allies has recovered since the early days of the Iraq war).

Further, we don't need to wonder why a hegemonic U.S. "cannot bring security to a small country of 24 million people after more than three years of occupation." It is well known among security experts that the effective deployment of American military power will be most difficult in the "contested zones" of international security, in countries like Somalia in the 1990s and Iraq in this decade. In these theaters irregular forces have used unconventional tactics to neutralize the preponderant advantages of American military technology. But America has adapted, and the Petraeus counterinsurgency strategy is now bearing fruit in Iraq, with most parts of the country seeing dramatic improvements in security.

Fukuyama's right that a dramatically lopsided distribution of global power will lead to international antagonism toward the system's leading state, which is currently the United States. But we will always face opposition to the forward exercise of American power, no matter who's in office. The Bush adminstration simply shook international opinion out of its Clinton-era stupor - national populations around the world had to reckon with an American hegemon intent on deploying power in its national interest.

The result has been costly, but progress is being made. It will be interesting to see how long Fukuyama will continue to make arguments such as this. Fukuyama's a top scholar in international relations, but he's flipped-flopped in his loyalties to neoconservative theory. Perhaps he's jockeying for a prominent foreign policy post in a Democratic administration. I wish him luck, but I'll be on him when he starts backpeddling from his criticism of America's mission in Iraq, particularly amid additional signs of progress in consolidating that nation's democratic regime.

The Emerging Giuliani Doctrine

Today's New York Times discusses the development of Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy, which is getting significant input from neoconservative thinkers:

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for the United Nations.

But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.

Their positions have been criticized by Democrats as irresponsible and applauded by some conservatives as appropriately tough, while raising questions about how closely aligned Mr. Giuliani’s thinking is with theirs.

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

The campaign says that the foreign policy team, which also includes scholars and experts with different policy approaches, is meant to give Mr. Giuliani a variety of perspectives.

Based on his public statements, Mr. Giuliani does not share all of their views and parts company with traditional neoconservative thinking in some respects. But their presence has reassured some conservatives who have expressed doubts about Mr. Giuliani’s positions on issues like abortion and gun control, and underscored his efforts to cast himself as a tough-minded potential commander in chief.

And while Mr. Giuliani, like other New York mayors, liked to be seen as conducting his own brand of foreign policy from City Hall, he had little direct exposure to many of the specific issues the next president will confront and is still meeting for the first time with some of his advisers to develop detailed positions on particular subjects.

Mr. Giuliani has taken an aggressive position on Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear program, saying last month it was a “promise” that as president he would take military action to keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon.

The article quotes William Kristol on Giuliani's neoconservative persuasions:

Neoconservatives said they were generally supportive of Mr. Giuliani’s positions and saw them as being in line with those taken by the other leading Republican presidential candidates.

“I would say, as a card-carrying member of the neoconservative conspiracy,” said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, “that I think Giuliani, McCain and Thompson are all getting really good advice — and Romney.” Mr. Kristol said that none of the leading Republican candidates “buy any of these fundamental criticisms that Bush took us on a radically wrong path, and we have to go to a pre-9/11 foreign policy.”

Then the piece lays out the elements of an emerging "Giuliani Doctrine":

The emerging Giuliani doctrine, which is being created through conference calls, policy papers, and seminarlike meetings, contains a number of main elements.

Mr. Giuliani calls for continuing the war in Iraq and building up the military by adding at least 10 combat brigades to the Army. He takes a dim view of the United Nations, which he sees as good for little other than humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, but wants to expand NATO and invite Israel to join it.

He would continue the Bush administration’s efforts to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa, but would tailor policy toward Africa to emphasize trade over aid.

If there is a central tenet to his thinking, it may be that the United States must project strength to keep itself safe. “Weakness invites attack,” Mr. Giuliani warned to cheers in a speech he gave recently to the Republican Jewish Coalition.

On the question of diplomacy, Mr. Giuliani makes it clear that he would impose a number of conditions before opening talks with unfriendly countries. In the Foreign Affairs article, he wrote that it might be advisable at times to hold serious diplomatic talks with the nation’s adversaries, but not with “those bent on our destruction or those who cannot deliver on their agreements.”

In a recent speech to the Jewish Coalition, he went further, accusing the Democrats of putting too much stock in diplomacy. “This is the great fallacy in this now very strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate,” he said. “You’ve got to know with whom to negotiate and with whom you should not negotiate.”

The foreign policy education of Mr. Giuliani, from former big-city mayor to would-be statesman, has played out in a series of briefings and papers and calls.

I wrote earlier on "Neoconservatives and Rudy Giuliani" (for a full statement on Giuliani's foreign policy, see his essay in Foreign Affairs).

I would second Kristol's comment, that it's indeed great news that all of the top GOP contenders evince strong inclinations toward the neoconservartive foreign policy agenda.

**********

UPDATE: The Washington Post has but another article on Rudy Giuliani's growing list of top policy advisors, in this case Bill Simon, a former gubernatorial candidate in California, and the founder of "Simon University," a series of seminars featuring top conservatives and neoconservatives.

Code Pink Protester Accosts Secretary of State Rice

A radical activist from the antiwar group Code Pink thrust her red-painted hands in the face of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during congressional testimony yesterday. Here's the story:

An antiwar protester ambushed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a House hearing Wednesday, thrusting red-stained hands in her face and accusing her of having the "blood of millions of Iraqis on your hands" before being removed by police.

"War criminal! War criminal!" bellowed Desiree Ali-Fairooz, 51, a former teacher from Arlington, Texas, after a guard grabbed her wrists and another officer led her out of the Rayburn House Office Building.

The incident caused House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame) to order the removal of other CodePink members, an all-female antiwar group with a regular protest presence on Capitol Hill.

Capitol Police said Ali-Fairooz was charged with assault on a federal officer and three other counts. Police deflected questions about how she was able to get close enough to Rice to confront her but said that the incident did not constitute a security breach.

"Because it's an open hearing and the building is open to the public, anyone can come in," said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, a spokeswoman. "However, if anyone is breaking the law, the Capitol Police will take appropriate action."

The incident provided a startling moment at the start of a hearing featuring Rice testifying about the Middle East. Witnesses sit alone at a table at the room's front facing House members, with their backs to the audience. There are no barriers between spectators, witnesses and House members. Metal detectors at the building's entrance screen for weapons and hazardous chemicals.

Wednesday's confrontation seemed to happen in an instant. Rice entered the hearing room from a side door with Lantos, an aide and State Department security.

Ali-Fairooz strode up the aisle and met Rice at the table with arms outstretched, moving her hands toward Rice's face but apparently not touching her.

After she was taken outside the hearing room, Ali-Fairooz smeared her painted hands on the hallway wall. A crew painted over the marks.

The photograph of the confrontation is here.

Next to Ali-Fairooz is Congressman Tom Lantos, the far-left California Democrat who laid into General David Petraeus during his own September testimony. Ali-Fairooz and Lantos: Same hatred, different methods.

Note Rice's calmness as well. That's dignity.

Break in Winds Give Firefighters a Chance

My wife and I attended a parent-teacher conference yesterday with my youngest son's kindergarten teacher. She's a young woman. Her husband's a firefighter with the City of Buena Park, and he was on assignment fighting the Santiago Canyon fire. Our appointment was at 8:00am. The red sunrise over Saddleback Mountain glowed ominiously through smokey sky. I'll be glad when the fires are under control. Orange County has lost its magical happiness, and it's hard to breathe.

The Washington Post has a story on the weakening Santa Ana winds:

In a disaster driven more than anything by wind, the breezes dying across Southern California on Wednesday translated into rising hope.

About 20 brush fires continued to roar, part of a conflagration that has blackened an area 10 times the size of the District of Columbia, destroyed 1,600 structures, displaced hundreds of thousands and sullied air for millions more across the region.

But gradually decreasing winds allowed the 8,000 exhausted firefighters to stand and fight the flames rather than dash from one hot spot to another. Aircraft arriving from across the country found free rein to bombard the fires from above. Blazes in Malibu, where the first fires leapt down canyons toward the sea on Sunday, were declared under control, and the Pacific Coast Highway reopened. So did many stores as a hint of normalcy crept into view.

Farther south in San Diego County, the hardest hit of the seven affected counties, a trickle of residents ventured from evacuation centers to check on homes that, in most cases, still stood. But the way was far from clear: A fast-moving blaze in the vast Camp Pendleton Marine base threatened the last remaining power lines that provide the county with almost all of its electricity.

The other major link, which ran from Arizona, was severed by another fire earlier in the week, forcing the power company to import electricity from Mexico to keep up with demand. The Pendleton blaze also leaped Interstate 5, shutting down a stretch of the state's main north-south artery for several hours while firefighters bent to yet another task.

"I wish we could control the wind," President Bush said while announcing that uninsured victims of the fires would be eligible for grants. The president was scheduled to tour affected areas Thursday.

Officials said they suspected that some of the fires had been deliberately set. Police in San Bernardino County said they shot and killed a suspected arsonist Tuesday night and arrested another arson suspect a few hours later. County officials also beefed up patrols to prevent looting after several looters were arrested in nearby San Diego County.

So far, only one death can be directly linked to the flames. But Ron Lane, the director of San Diego County emergency services, provided the first estimate of damage: $1 billion "or more."

Here's the Los Angeles Times story on the arsonist:

Amid worries of new blazes adding to the firestorm already afflicting the region, a man in Hesperia has been arrested on suspicion of arson, and police reported shooting and killing another arson suspect after chasing him out of scrub behind Cal State San Bernardino.

Law enforcement officials said today that they didn't know whether either of the men had started any of the more than a dozen large fires that have devastated Southern California in recent days, including the nearby Lake Arrowhead blaze. The brush fire in Hesperia was quickly extinguished by residents.

Investigators have said that at least two of the huge wildfires, one in Orange County and the other in Temecula, were the work of arsonists.

The confrontation that ended in the shooting death started about 6 p.m. Tuesday when San Bernardino university police spotted a man in a rural area of flood channels and scrub near the campus. University police tried to detain the man, but he got into his car and fled, authorities said. When he began to ram officers' vehicle, they shot him.

I would like to thank everone who commented on my earlier post on the fires. It's been a busy work week, and I've haven't had time to respond. Please join me in praying for the safety of all of those affected.

Runaway Train: Hillary's White House Years

Readers will recall that I've likened the inevitability of Hillary Clinton's 2008 Democratic nomination to the potential disaster of a "runaway train." I've also suggested that - like her or not - she'll bring to the White House a degree of top-level experience rarely seen in the history of the presidency.

It turns out that a plurality of the public holds a similar view on Clinton's political credentials. The background story to the new Los Angeles Times poll has the details:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has neutralized the political fallout from some of the most difficult moments of her eight years as first lady, with Democratic voters looking favorably on her failed effort to revamp healthcare and either supporting or having no opinion of her decision to remain loyal to an unfaithful husband, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows.

The positive impression of Clinton's White House years -- which is shared, though more faintly, among the broader public -- is helping propel her to a formidable lead over her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton leads the No. 2 contender, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, 48% to 17%.

Her support has risen 15 percentage points since the last nationwide Times/Bloomberg poll in June, while Obama's support has fallen 5 percentage points.

As a leading actor in her husband's presidency, Clinton entered the race for the White House linked tightly to his legacy of personal scandal and political polarization. But today, the Times/Bloomberg poll found, nearly two-thirds of Democrats and nearly half of all voters say Hillary Clinton's famously unsuccessful effort in the 1990s to provide health coverage for all Americans makes her better able now to deal with healthcare as president.

More than 7 in 10 Democrats, and about half of all voters, said they would welcome a White House advisory role for Bill Clinton, who jokes that he would be called "first laddy" if his wife became president.

And 42% of Democrats agreed it was the "right thing" for Hillary Clinton to stick with her husband after his affair with a White House intern, compared with 5% who said it was the wrong choice.

At the same time, the former first lady remains a polarizing figure -- viewed unfavorably by 44% of respondents. But a favorable rating of 48% is relatively high for Clinton.

Read the whole thing.

Note that Clinton has considerably high negatives, which create some problems for her general electability. Still, voters view Hillary and Bill Clinton as a team, and her husband's popularity makes up for some of the distrust toward Hillary in the polling numbers.

The Times poll also holds some interesting findings on the Republicans. While Rudy Giuliani leads the pack with national support at 32 percent (more than twice that for Fred Thompson, the next most favored candidate in the GOP field), local polls in Iowa and New Hampshire have Mitt Romney on top. In South Carolina, Thomspon's got the lead among Republican primary voters.

Also interesting is that John McCain's the leading Republican candidate in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups against Clinton. Based on such comparisons, National Review's Kate O'Beirne argued recently that McCain deserves a second look. I'm pulling for him, in any case.

As for Hillary, I hate her flip-flopping. But for an even more critical look at Hillary's candidacy, check out Gayle's blog, where she's putting up some powerful commentaries against a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Thomas Friedman: Double-Reverse Chickendove

Jules Crittenden's got a killer take-down of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a post today at Forward Movement.

Friedman's bummed out over U.S. progress in Iraq. He's sad that congressional Democrats have finally acquiesced to the reality of victory on the ground (or at least publically, while they squeeze-in on the side their underhanded Armenian genocide votes to sabotage Turkish support for the mission).

Here's what Friedman says:

Boy, am I glad we finally got out of Iraq. It was so painful waking up every morning and reading the news from there. It’s just such a relief to have it out of mind and behind us.

Huh? Say what? You say we’re still there? But how could that be — nobody in Washington is talking about it anymore?

I don’t know whether it was the sheer agony of the debate over Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony, or the fact that the surge really has dampened casualties, or the failure by Democrats to force an Iraq withdrawal through Congress, or the fact that all the leading Democratic presidential contenders have signaled that they will not precipitously withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, but the air has gone out of the Iraq debate.

That is too bad. Neglect is not benign when it comes to Iraq — because Iraq is not healthy. Iraq is like a cancer patient who was also running a high fever from an infection (Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia). The military surge has brought down the fever, but the patient still has cancer (civil war). And we still don’t know how to treat it. Surgery? Chemotherapy? Natural healers? Euthanasia?

To the extent that the surge has worked militarily, it is largely because of what Iraqis have done by themselves for themselves — Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders rising up against pro-Qaeda Sunni elements, taking back control of their villages and towns, and aligning themselves with U.S. forces to do so. Some Shiites are now doing the same.

There has been no equivalent surprise, though, in Iraqi politics, yet. If you see that — if you see Iraqi politicians surprising you by doing things they’ve never done before, like forging a self-sustaining political compromise and building the fabric of a unified country, then you can allow yourself some optimism.

So far, though, too many of Iraq’s leaders continue to act their part — looking out for themselves, their clans, their hometowns, their militias and their sects, and using the Iraqi treasury and ministries as looting grounds for personal or sectarian gains.

As a result, what you have today is more of a spotty truce, with U.S. soldiers still caught in the middle. That is a quiet strategy, not an exit strategy.

Now, here's Crittenden on Friedman's claim of an "unhealthy," "cancerous," "feverish" Iraq:

Actually, Iraq is more like a tortured, politically traumatized nation of 25 million people desperate for a chance in life, after decades of being cynically abused by everyone from Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda to the Iranian mullahs, a plague of viruses that have infected the entire region. The cure? Determined, patient counter-insurgency in Iraq. Airstrikes targeting Iran’s capability to project trouble. A long war. Diplomacy with honest partners, when they emerge.

And here's Crittenden on Friedman's outburst, "to the extent that the surge has worked militarily," the Iraqis have done it themselves:

Now that’s supporting the troops. Apparently Friedman missed the part about the Iraqis recognizing the Americans aren’t leaving, that Americans can fight and won’t quit, that the Americans, as they have bled, are actually trying to help them, while al-Qaeda was just bleeding them. That the American “strong horse” represents their interests. That the Americans represent order and prosperity, and will leave when Iraq is on that path. That al-Qaeda represents chaos, death and violently enforced Sharia. Clearly the Americans had nothing to do with this uprising.

This is interesting. It dovetails with the line some in Washington and the news media have been pushing: Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a homegrown organization, all Iraqi anti-invader resistance, no links to bin Laden. The same people will tell you that al-Qaeda in Iraq, now that it’s on the ropes, never really was that big a deal. Not the enemy. That’s just Bush trying to hoodwink America with a new version of the old Saddam hearts al-Qaeda thing four years later.

Friedman bemoans the fact that Iraqi politicians have not yet followed their people. In fact, some have made moves in that direction, but they’ve turned out by and large to be every bit as self-interested, gutless, ineffective and divisive as … American politicans. Friedman bemoans that fact that Washington isn’t bickering about Iraq anymore. He observes that after a summer of squawking about it, a year spent doing everything they can to undermine it, the Democrats are spent. They failed, in the face of logic, hope, achievement. They and their candidates have had to recognize that America prefers to win and sees a chance to do that. He neglects to observe that it hasn’t stopped the House speaker from running a cynical campaign to derail supply lines into Iraq with an Armenian genocide resolution … a bid to unsupport the troops and usher in a new Iraqi genocide. And if Friedman is patient, he’ll get all the Iraq bickering he wants soon enough. Bush needs more money for his war.

The politics aside, there is something particularly loathsome about Friedman’s snide screed this morning.

I know that Friedman travels a lot, talks to a lot people. He’s visited war. Thirty years ago he spent some time in Beirut, and he’s been to Baghdad, met with the big players. But I’m not sure he’s travelled enough to make the arguments he’s making and crack wise about it. Correct me if I’m wrong. Has this guy spent any time in combat with American troops? If not, then he hasn’t met enough big players. Hasn’t sweated enough. Hasn’t counted his last hours and minutes enough. Hasn’t come under enough fire. Hasn’t seen enough bits of people lying around afterward.

People who talk up war without going get slapped with chickenhawk slurs. Clearly Friedman’s no chickenhawk, at least not anymore. Chickenhawk slurs are slapped on people who support war and haven’t gone. ”Chickenhawk” gets tossed around by people who don’t feel the need to lift a finger in support of the peace they profess to love. Not a human shield among them.

Friedman presents us with something different. The double-reverse chickendove. War supporter turned surrender enthusiast makes ironic funny about how painful this war has been for him. The terrible barrage of headlines, slogging through all those long, bitter thumbsuckers. News is hell. But apparently, he hasn’t been reading it.

Now that is a takedown!

The End of the Antiwar Movement?

Eli Lake, a reporter and columnist for the New York Sun, argues that the antiwar movement has run its course:

The People. United. Can in fact be defeated. Well not exactly, but this must be what America's anti-war movement is thinking as Congress and the president iron out the funding for the war with no danger of the Democrats attaching a withdrawal date to the bill. The Dems don't have the votes.

It's enough to deflate the spirits of our nation's most hardened pacifists. Take Medea Benjamin, the leader of Code Pink, an association of mainly senior citizen women who dress up and shout slogans at Congressional war hearings. In an interview in the current issue of Mother Jones, Ms. Benjamin said that she doubted that the troops would be withdrawn even within a year's time. "Well, I think it's kind of silly to talk about it because it's just not going to happen," she said. Code Pink now is hoping to end the war by the end of 2008.

It's an extraordinary statement for the leader of an organization that produced a YouTube ad last month featuring women in pink jockey outfits riding Democratic leaders of Congress like they were horses. The narrator tells the viewer: "With your help we can dominate Congress with peacemakers and finally end this illegal, immoral and unconstitutional occupation." Apparently the plan for peacemaker domination has run into some snags.

As the Hill newspaper reported on October 19, the legislative representative of American Against Escalation in Iraq, John Bruhns, a former Army Sergeant who participated in the 2003 invasion, has left the organization. "I feel I've done all I can," he told the newspaper. "I can't continue to attack members of Congress to pass legislation that isn't going to get passed."

Mr. Bruhns had worked on something the anti-war movement called "Iraq Summer," an initiative aimed at getting 50 Republicans to break with the president on the war. That goal seemed plausible in July when the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, was threatening to vote with Democrats on withdrawal dates. But in September Mr. Warner said that arguing for some troops to come home by Christmas barely changed the ayes and nays in the senate.

The anti-war movement has not even managed to get any of the big three Democrats running for president to embrace their goal of an immediate withdrawal. Gone are John Edwards' rhetorical excesses of the spring, promising not to leave even Marines to guard the new American embassy in Baghdad.

Today Mr. Edwards, like Senators Obama and Clinton, concede that in their administration there will still be some troops in Iraq in 2009, probably between 50,000 and 70,000. Also, the Democratic party's professional agitators must know that Mrs. Clinton will sprout wings and talons and screech for the blood of every Iranian terrorist as soon as she receives her party's nomination, faster than you can say, "Sistah Souljah."

Read the whole thing.

I agree Hillary will morph into a foreign policy hawk when she wraps up the nomination. But if Lake's argument is accurate, she has no business flip-flopping on the war in the first place.

I'm also not convinced the antiwar forces will go away any time soon. Iraq's what unites them, but the broader War on Terror will always have its activists shouting for "a million Mogadishus."

I do agree that they're impotent to stop the war with Bush in the White House, but I wouldn't discount the potential for the MoveOn types to cause a lot of problems for American foreign policy down the road, especially under a Democratic administration. Which is all the more reason to marginalize them even further now.

Baby Boosters! Big Money Bundlers Seeking Underage Contributors

The Washington Post reports on the new fundraising tactic of bundling campaign contributions from children:

Although campaign finance laws set a limit of $2,300 per donor per campaign, they do not explicitly bar donors based on age. And young donors abound in the fundraising reports filed by presidential contenders this year.

A supporter of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R), Susan Henken of Dover, Mass., wrote her own $2,300 check, and her 13-year-old son, Samuel, and 15-year-old daughter, Julia, each wrote $2,300 checks, for example. Samuel used money from his bar mitzvah and money he earned "dog sitting," and Julia used babysitting money to make the contributions, their mother said. "My children like to donate to a lot of causes. That's just how it is in my house," Henken said.

Just how much campaign cash is coming from children is uncertain -- the FEC does not require donors to provide their age. But the amount written by those identifying themselves as students on contribution forms has risen dramatically this year, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. During the first six months of the 2000 presidential campaign, students gave $338,464. In 2004, that rose to $538,936.

This year, the amount has nearly quadrupled, to $1,967,111.

"What's driving it is a desire by maxed-out donors to max out on their maxing out," said Fred Wertheimer, president of campaign finance reform organization Democracy 21, who sought, unsuccessfully, to outlaw child donations five years ago. "More often than not, you're dealing with people who are simply trying to circumvent the limits of what they can give."

Congress tried to outlaw political contributions from those under age 18 as part of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002, but the Supreme Court struck down that provision as an infringement on the constitutional rights of minors. With that ruling in mind, the Federal Election Commission wrote new regulations two years ago that tried to balance what it considered a legitimate desire among some children to make political contributions against the possibility that parents would seek to pad their donations by funneling money through children.

The regulations established a three-step test to determine whether a contribution is acceptable: It must be made with the child's money, the parent cannot reimburse the child for making the donation and the contribution has to be knowing and voluntary.

That last part of the test is the one that would seem to rule out a 2-year-old, said Michael E. Toner, a former FEC chairman who helped draft the rules. "If they are 16 or 17, they're clearly old enough to know what they're doing, as compared to someone who is, say, 10 years old. . . . I don't know any 2-year-old who is capable of making that kind of decision."

Well, certainly babies are not going to be toting up the maximum contribution for their presidential election prospects!

But the bigger picture here is that limitations on personal campaign contributions are too restrictive, and they infringe on the right to freedom of expression under the First Amendment. Families would not be making contributions in their children's names if they weren't limited in how much they could contribute to their favored candidates.

This point should be a boon for those thinking about new legal challenges to the financing regime. It's clear that there's a desire to provide greater financial support to the candidates among partisans on both sides of the political spectrum. Fred Wertheimer 's case for restricting campaign giving is looking weaker all the time.

See also my argument in defense of big money bundling, which cites the recent Wall Street Journal story on current trends in campaign financing.

Borking the Constitution

Today's the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Senate's rejection of Robert Bork as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The failure to confirm Bork held enormous implications for the future of constitutional intrepretation, according to Gary McDowell in today's Wall Street Journal:

To many at the time (and still today) it was inconceivable that a man of Mr. Bork's professional accomplishments and personal character could be found unacceptable for a seat on the Court. Warren Burger summed it up for many when he described Mr. Bork as simply the best qualified nominee in the former chief justice's own professional lifetime--a span of years that included the appointments of such judicial luminaries as Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. Such praise was no empty exaggeration.

A former Yale law professor and U.S. Solicitor General, Mr. Bork was, at the time of his nomination, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. When he was a circuit court judge, Mr. Bork's opinions not only were never overruled on appeal, but on several occasions his dissents were adopted by the Supreme Court as its majority view.
In an earlier day such an appointment would have been celebrated as adding breadth, depth and luster to the highest bench. Instead, the nominee faced a mauling by those who set out not only to destroy him personally but to discredit all that he stood for as a jurist.

It was immediately clear that the unprecedented vote of 58-42 against his confirmation reflected something far more historic and fundamental than an ordinary partisan standoff. The confrontation in fact had been one of the most cataclysmic and divisive events in American domestic politics during the second half of the 20th century. The reason was that Mr. Bork's opponents succeeded in making the fight over his nomination into a contest over the future of the Constitution.

Read the whole thing.

McDowell illustrates Bork's commitment to originalist restraint with his discussion of Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut (the landmark cases at the forefront of an emerging "transcendental" jurisprudence of the left, which, McDowell suggests, has grown increasingly disconnected from historical interpretations of the constitutional groundings of liberty).

Islamofascism

Christopher Hitchens defended the terminology of "Islamofascism" in an article yesterday over at Slate.

The notion of Islamofascism is denounced by left-wing activists, whose grumblings are building in response to "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week," a series of gatherings at college campuses around the nation to promote greater awareness of radical indoctrination and propaganda in America's classrooms. (See Little Green Footballs on the online "pro-Islamofascism petition" being circulated by members of the leftist-Islamist axis at UC Irvine.)

Hitchens asks if the Islamist ideology of Osama bin Laden can be appropriately compared with fascism:

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)

There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.

Hitchens does a good job in defending Islamofascist terminology as a description of our current ideological nemesis.

Yet, I would also point readers to Ladan and Roya Boroumand's, "Terror, Islam, and Democracy," from the Journal of Democracy (April 2002):

The man who did more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna (1906-49). Banna was not a theologian by training. Deeply influenced by Egyptian nationalism, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the express goal of counteracting Western influences.

By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had established contacts with revolutionary junior officers in the Egyptian army, including many who were close to the Muslim Brothers. Before long the Brothers, who had begun by pursuing charitable, associational, and cultural activities, also had a youth wing, a creed of unconditional loyalty to the leader, and a paramilitary organization whose slogan "action, obedience, silence" echoed the "believe, obey, fight" motto of the Italian Fascists. Banna's ideas were at odds with those of the traditional ulema (theologians), and he warned his followers as early as 1943 to expect "the severest opposition" from the traditional religious establishment.

From the Fascists-and behind them, from the European tradition of putatively "transformative" or "purifying" revolutionary violence that began with the Jacobins-Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death as a political art form. Although few in the West may remember it today, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which the aestheticization of death, the glorification of armed force, the worship of martyrdom, and faith in "the propaganda of the deed" shaped the antiliberal ethos of both the far right and elements of the far left earlier in the twentieth century. Following Banna, today's Islamist militants embrace a terrorist cult of martyrdom that has more to do with Georges Sorel's Réflexions sur la violence than with anything in either Sunni or Shi'ite Islam.

The Boroumands' piece is an excellent reference on the ideological origins of the current Islamofascist threat.

For some discussion of the etymological and linguistic justifications for Islamofascist terminology, see the articles from William Safire and Stephen Schwartz.

California Burning

I think to myself every year: The rest of the county's got floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, but in California we get fires.

It happens every October, when the dry weather system and the Santa Ana winds develop across the region. Fires breakout in the crackily dry tinder of the foothills and mountains across the state; many are set by arsonists.

This morning's Los Angeles Times reports on yesterday's developments across the state:

Wind-whipped firestorms destroyed more than 700 homes and businesses in Southern California on Monday, the second day of its onslaught, and more than half a million people in San Diego County were told to evacuate their homes.

The gale-force winds turned hillside canyons into giant blowtorches from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Although the worst damage was around San Diego and Lake Arrowhead, dangerous fires also threatened Malibu, parts of Orange and Ventura counties, and the Agua Dulce area near Santa Clarita.

Late Monday night, new blazes were menacing homes near Stevenson Ranch and in Soledad Canyon in northern Los Angeles County. The Soledad Canyon fire burned multiple mobile homes and evacuations were underway, fire officials said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, calling it "a tragic time for California," declared a state of emergency in seven counties and redeployed California National Guard members from the border to support firefighters. Schwarzenegger stressed how much California officials have learned since the devastating wildfires of October 2003, which raged over much of the same terrain.

But as the day wore on, it became clear that any hard-earned knowledge was no match for natural forces overrunning the ability of firefighters to control them.

"The issue this time is not preparedness," said San Diego City Council President Scott Peters. "It's that the event is so overwhelming."

For the Times' complete story gallery on the fires, click here.

One of the local blazes, in Irvine, was not far from my home. My wife came downstairs Sunday night and said "I smell smoke." The smell from the smoke was so strong that she thought something in our house was on fire. I had seen some early news reports of the fires breaking out, and I told my wife, who looked out the door to see thick black billows in the sky.

I had no idea how close some of the blazes were to my neighborhood. Huge clouds of black smoke rose up down the road yesterday when I dropped my oldest son off at school. I told him to take it easy, stay inside, and go to the nurse if he couldn't breathe.

I want to thank Goat from Goat's Barnyard for sending an e-mail yesterday to check on me. We're doing fine. Thank God there have been no fatalities in the fire disasters.

Progress in Iraq: The Complexity and the Reality

Michael's Yon's latest dispatch from Iraq is available. The piece is a clear-headed report on Iraq's national transformation (towards, well, nationhood). Yon's particularly forceful in arguing the tragedy of American public opinion's disconnect from reality on the ground, which results largely from the media's inattention and poor coverage of progress in battle:

All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car.

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.

Read the whole thing. Yon provides a nice overview, with bibliographic links, to the media's institutional weaknesses in reporting the war.

Yon has become the most important freelance combat journalist of this generation. His reporting is a gift to the American people.

But If You Want Money For People With Minds That Hate...

I often listen to The Beatles' "Revolution" during my weekday's drivetime. I love the hammering guitar introduction, but I'm always intrigued by the song's lyrics: Is "Revolution" John Lennon's anti-"Imagine" anthem?

Here's the YouTube:

:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

How about this for a counter-bumper sticker slogan, from "Revolution" (lyrics here):

You say you got a real solution
Well you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well you know
We're all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait
Don't you know it's gonna be alright
Alright Alright Alright

John Lennon's dead...long live John Lennon!

The Strangeness of Libertarianism

Michael Kinsley praises libertarianism in his current essay at Time. The background is the contrast between the Democrats and Republicans and their competing conceptions of government, and their lukewarm support among large sectors of the electorate:

Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big Government or you don't. And if you don't, you call yourself a libertarian. Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe "foreign entanglements," and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America's help. They don't care--or at least they don't think the government should care--about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The relationship of these two ways of thinking to the two established parties is peculiar. Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it's the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

Libertarians and communitarians (to continue this unjustified generalizing) are different character types. Communitarians tend to be bossy, boring and self-important, if they're not being oversweetened and touchy-feely. Libertarians, by contrast, are not the selfish monsters you might expect. They are earnest and impractical--eager to corner you with their plan for using old refrigerators to reverse global warming or solving the traffic mess by privatizing stoplights. And if you disagree, they're fine with that. It's a free country.

The chance of the two political parties realigning so conveniently is slim. But the party that does well in the future will be the one that makes the better guess about where to place its bets. My money's on the libertarians. People were shocked a couple of weeks ago when Ron Paul--one of those mysterious Republicans who seem to be running for President because everyone needs a hobby--raised $5 million from July through September, mostly on the Internet. Paul is a libertarian. In fact, he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988. The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don't need society--nor should anyone else. They are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.

I respect Kinsley. But come on, a $5 million haul for Ron Paul in the FEC's 3rd quarter reporting is not a sign that libertarianism's becoming increasingly powerful.

In truth, Paul's appeal is strong among any and all of the whacked-out loons whose Bush-hatred knows no bounds. There's no consistency here: From paleoconservatives to Stalinists, the most hardened Bush-bashing anti-victory types have joined together in the most unprincipled outburst of blame-America-firstism we've seen in a generation. Paul's candidacy even gained the sympathy of antiwar Democrats Dennis Kucinich and John Murtha earlier this year.

It's strange, frankly, but that's politics (new readers should see American Power's initial post for a penetrating ideological antidote to the strange defeatism of libertarianism).

**********

UPDATE (via Memeorandum): Andrew Sullivan says the rise of libertarianism indicates we might be on "the verge of a real realignment" and such background forces are perhaps "the harbingers of a new politics."

Victory is Within Reach

Michael Ledeen, in the Wall Street Journal, argues victory's close at hand in Iraq:

Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.

Read the whole thing. Ledeen points out that military success is being joined by political reconciliation, which is what all the antiwar types have been demanding. Where are their cheers at our progress?

John McCain and American Foreign Policy

I've been eagerly awaiting John McCain's contribution to the Foreign Affairs Campaign 2008 series, and I'm not disappointed. I've long considered McCain the most qualified candidate among both parties, especially on national security. Here's McCain's statement on the contemporary international challenges facing the United States:

Defeating radical Islamist extremists is the national security challenge of our time. Iraq is this war's central front, according to our commander there, General David Petraeus, and according to our enemies, including al Qaeda's leadership.

The recent years of mismanagement and failure in Iraq demonstrate that America should go to war only with sufficient troop levels and with a realistic and comprehensive plan for success. We did not do so in Iraq, and our country and the people of Iraq have paid a dear price. Only after four years of conflict did the United States adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, backed by increased force levels, that gives us a realistic chance of success. We cannot get those years back, and now the only responsible action for any presidential candidate is to look forward and outline the strategic posture in Iraq that is most likely to protect U.S. national interests.

So long as we can succeed in Iraq -- and I believe that we can -- we must succeed. The consequences of failure would be horrific: a historic loss at the hands of Islamist extremists who, after having defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the United States in Iraq, will believe that the world is going their way and that anything is possible; a failed state in the heart of the Middle East providing sanctuary for terrorists; a civil war that could quickly develop into a regional conflict and even genocide; a decisive end to the prospect of a modern democracy in Iraq, for which large Iraqi majorities have repeatedly voted; and an invitation for Iran to dominate Iraq and the region even more.

Whether success grows closer or more distant over the coming months, it is clear that Iraq will be a central issue for the next U.S. president. Democratic candidates have promised to withdraw U.S. troops and "end the war" by fiat, regardless of the consequences. To make such decisions based on the political winds at home, rather than on the realities in the theater, is to court disaster. The war in Iraq cannot be wished away, and it is a miscalculation of historic magnitude to believe that the consequences of failure will be limited to one administration or one party. This is an American war, and its outcome will touch every one of our citizens for years to come.

McCain offers some interesting propasals. For example, he backs the formation of a new international organization of the world's leading democracies. He notes that such a body wouldn't replace the United Nations, but founded on a common set of interests, it would act with more dispatch toward global problems. McCain also speaks to strengthening America's existing great power alliances in Europe and East Asia. Here are his comments on America's alliance partnerships and East Asian security:

Power in the world today is moving east; the Asia-Pacific region is on the rise. If we grasp the opportunities present in the unfolding world, this century can become safe and both American and Asian, both prosperous and free....

North Korea's totalitarian regime and impoverished society buck these trends. It is unclear today whether North Korea is truly committed to verifiable denuclearization and a full accounting of all its nuclear materials and facilities, two steps that are necessary before any lasting diplomatic agreement can be reached. Future talks must take into account North Korea's ballistic missile programs, its abduction of Japanese citizens, and its support for terrorism and proliferation.

The key to meeting this and other challenges in a changing Asia is increasing cooperation with our allies. The linchpin to the region's promise is continued American engagement. I welcome Japan's international leadership and emergence as a global power, encourage its admirable "values-based diplomacy," and support its bid for permanent membership in the UN Security Council. As president, I will tend carefully to our ever-stronger alliance with Australia, whose troops are fighting shoulder to shoulder with ours in Afghanistan and Iraq. I will seek to rebuild our frayed partnership with South Korea by emphasizing economic and security cooperation and will cement our growing partnership with India.

Read the whole thing. McCain is concise and to the point. To his credit, he doesn't propose an unending array of policy propsals designed to involve the U.S. in every possible international problem of the day, unlike Hillary Clinton in her Foreign Affairs essay from the series.

Note something important here, though: I don't back McCain's suggestion that we need to repair our image around the world. This is an apparent buckling to negative public attitudes regarding the U.S. internationally, not to mention antiwar opinion in the U.S. Here you can see how McCain trumpets America's traditional moral leadership, while simultaneously calling for renewal:

We are a special nation, the closest thing to a "shining city on a hill" ever to have existed. But it is incumbent on us to restore our mantle as a global leader, reestablish our moral credibility, and rebuild those damaged relationships that once brought so much good to so many places.

McCain's absolutely correct to situate contemporary American foreign policy in our robust history of promoting human dignity, progress, and universal values. He's made the point eloquently many times. But we don't need to make apologies for acting in our interests on Iraq in 2003, or on issues issues such as global warming or missile defense. Our interests are legimate. Leave the apologies (and appeasement) to the Democrats.

McCain understands the dangers facing the U.S. amid the present correlation of world forces. Sure, we might face some challenges of image-building, but I think the point's more a matter of good public relations rather than wholesale policy change. Indeed, international opinion in the advanced industrial democracies has rebounded from earlier lows following 2003. I believe continued success in Iraq will work to further consolidate these gains in the years ahead. Thus, we must not slacken our commitment to defeating the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. I propose that John McCain provides the best set of skills to further these objectives.

See the other essays in the Foreign Affairs series, in the order they first appeared: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, and Hillary Clinton.

See also my post yesterday making the case for a second look at McCain's candidacy.

Bobby Jindal Wins Governorship of Louisiana

Bobby Jindal, a GOP Member of the House of Representatives, won the governorship of Louisiana on Saturday, taking 53 percent of the vote in a crowded field, avoiding an election runoff. The Washington Post has the story:

Rep. Bobby Jindal (R) became the nation's first Indian American governor Saturday, outpolling 11 rivals in Louisiana and drawing enough votes to avoid a runoff election next month.

With about 90 percent of the state's nearly 4,000 precincts reporting, Jindal had 53 percent of the vote. His nearest competitor, state Sen. Walter J. Boasso (D), had 18 percent.

Louisiana holds an open gubernatorial election, with candidates of all parties competing. By drawing at least 50 percent of the vote, Jindal avoided a Nov. 17 runoff race with Boasso.

"Let's give our homeland, the great state of Louisiana, a fresh start," Jindal said to a cheering crowd at his victory party, according to the Associated Press.

Jindal, 36, was making his second attempt to become Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction. The last one was P.B.S. Pinchback, a black Republican who served briefly between 1872 and 1873, at a time when many white voters were disenfranchised.

I frankly haven't been following state-level politics all that much, but the GOP's success in the Louisiana election and elsewhere holds some important implications for 2008. Angevin13, over at The Oxford Medievalist, provides some analytical perspective:

First, powerhouse Niki Tsongas defeats her no-name Republican opponent in uber-liberal Massachusetts by only 6 percentage points, [and] now a Republican wins the Louisiana governorship, largely as a rebuke of the incompetence of the previous Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco.

So much for that 2008 anti-Bush, anti-GOP landslide we keep hearing about. And so much for an MSM that does little else than carry water for the Democrats. If the MSM were interested in news, the fact that the Oxford-educated, Roman Catholic-converted, Republican son of Hindu immigrants just won the Louisiana gubernatorial election as the first non-white candidate in Louisiana since Reconstruction would be major news.

The 2008 elections, Presidential, Congressional, and Gubernatorial, will all be about one thing: competence. Who's got it, who doesn't. The electorate is fed up with the B.S. The elections won't be about Bush, and it will be a mistake to portray them that way. Despite conventional wisdom, which says a Democratic cakewalk is on order, the Democrats are in trouble, since they have little else to offer besides some good anti-Bush soundbites. Not that the Republicans don't have anything to worry about, it's just that the situation is not as dire as the media would wish it and make it.

Hey, I'm feeling better about next year already!

Rejecting Rudy: Social Conservatives May Bolt From GOP

This morning's Los Angeles Times reports that social conservatives will break with the GOP if Rudy Giuliani wins the GOP presidential nomination:

With some leading social conservatives threatening to boycott the Republican Party if Rudolph W. Giuliani wins the presidential nomination, the former New York City mayor sought Saturday to assure activists in this crucial GOP voting bloc that they have "absolutely nothing to fear from me."

Giuliani told more than 2,000 evangelical activists that despite his support for abortion rights and other liberal views, Christians would have a voice in his administration, and that, though he has not always been comfortable discussing it in public, faith "is at the core of who I am."

"I come to you today as I would if I were your president, with an open mind and an open heart," Giuliani said. "And all I ask is that you do the same."

Although Giuliani was interrupted several times by applause and some stood to clap as he concluded his 40-minute address, it was clear that he remained a distrusted figure among those gathered here from across the country.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an evangelical organization and primary sponsor of the annual Values Voter Summit, called Giuliani's speech sincere but said he could not ignore the difference of opinion on abortion.

"It's not something that can be paved over easily," Perkins said, adding that he had not changed his mind about looking elsewhere for a candidate should Giuliani win the GOP nomination. "My position remains the same, as I think it does for a number of pro-life conservatives -- that we draw a line that we will not cross in supporting a pro-abortion-rights candidate."

Read the whole thing. The piece points out that Giuliani may have a tough time winning caucuses and primaries dominated by voters skeptical of the former New York mayor's views on bedrock conservative issues. At Saturday's Values Voters Convention, Giulani sought to clarify his record:

Giuliani offered a laundry list of issues that he said showed "shared goals" with religious conservatives, such as his support for school choice and his opposition to the procedure that critics call "partial-birth" abortion. He pledged to veto any effort to roll back limits on public funding for abortions, and to appoint judges like conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

He reminded the audience that he fought pornography and prostitution in New York and that he took on the Brooklyn Museum of Art when, in 1999, it scheduled an exhibition featuring a painting of the Virgin Mary that included splotches of elephant dung. "It was just another example of the double standard that exists for people of faith," he said.

Giuliani referred obliquely to his troubled family life.

"You and I know that I'm not a perfect person," he said. "I've made mistakes in my life, but I've always done the best that I could to try to learn from them. . . . I feel my faith deeply, although maybe more privately than some because of the way I was brought up or for other reasons."

Conference participants later said they appreciated Giuliani's attendance but were not necessarily moved to support him -- at least not in the primaries.

Giuliani would do well to further publicize his strong credentials on the bulk of issues important to the GOP's evangelical base. Regarding Giuliani's New York record, Jennifer Rubin, in an American Spectator article last February, noted:

Pundits of all political persuasions have been chattering about whether Rudy Giuliani, whose name is invariably modified by the description "social liberal," can overcome the objections of many religious conservatives to win the Republican nomination....

If the definition of "social conservative" is merely a checklist of several hot button issues, specifically abortion and gay rights, Giuliani is certainly to the left of his principal rivals. He might give assurances to appoint strict constructionist judges and might stipulate that his support of civil unions is not the same as support for gay marriage. However, on these issues he is unlikely to win the hearts of single-issue voters who care passionately about a candidate's beliefs and not just the likely outcomes of a candidate's policies.

But the commentators and consultants may have gotten the questions wrong. The better, at least the more interesting, question is whether Giuliani can establish a new description of what it means to be "socially conservative." Perhaps to be socially conservative means something more than just fidelity to pro-life and anti-gay marriage positions. Giuliani has a convincing argument that he is an ethical or cultural conservative who in the end will protect the values that most conservative Republicans hold dear. What does this mean? It means that he sees the world as a battle between good and evil, and politics as a struggle between decent hard working people and elites who have too little respect for their values -- public safety, respect for religion and public virtue.

Read Rubin's whole piece. Giuliani's the guy who removed porn shops from Times Square, vigorously defended New York's aggressive policing against cries of "racism," kicked Yassir Arafat out of the Lincoln Center, and argued that fatherhood's "the best social program for ending poverty."