American Leadership and International Human Rights

Samantha Power, a leading expert on international human rights, and the author of A Problem From Hell, argues that the Bush administration has provided strong leadership in responding to recent world humanitarian crises, but other leading global actors have yet to to step up to share in the "responsibility to protect":

Rebel troops stampeded an african Union base in Darfur, Sudan, last month, murdering 10 African peacekeepers. That same week in Burma, the military regime killed a Japanese photographer and turned its machine guns on unarmed, barefoot monks. The violence in Darfur and Burma met with widespread international condemnation but scant concrete action. The perpetrators will almost certainly get away with murder.

What is going on? Even in an era of connectedness, when such outrages are beamed into living rooms around the globe, the world's major powers can't seem to agree on what should be done or who should do it. While many foreign critics of the U.S. express relief at the erosion of American influence, events in Burma and Darfur show the downside of the U.S.'s diminished standing: a void in global human-rights leadership.

The U.S. has raised its voice on Darfur and Burma louder than any other country. George W. Bush has regularly denounced the Sudanese campaign of destruction as "genocide," Washington has spent $2.5 billion on humanitarian aid to keep Darfur's refugees alive, and the Administration has spearheaded creation of a 26,000-person, U.N.-led peacekeeping force. When the Burmese regime cracked down on protesters, it was Bush who used his appearance before the U.N. General Assembly to announce that the U.S. would freeze the assets of Burma's repressive leaders and deny them visas. Yet when he urged "every civilized nation" to use its diplomatic and economic leverage to "stand up" to the regime, his appeal was largely ignored. Many countries acted as if they agreed with Burma's self-serving claim that the crackdown was simply an "internal matter." Notwithstanding the U.S.'s $500 billion military budget and $13 trillion GDP, its summoning power has dwindled.

The inaction is partly backlash against the discredited American messenger. Torture, "black sites," extraordinary rendition and the bungled, bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq have all made U.S. human-rights appeals ring hollow. But many countries that point to America's abuses are doing so to cover their self-interested, economic reasons for overlooking atrocities in Darfur and Burma.

U.S. leverage over Sudan and Burma is particularly limited. In 1997 Congress protested Khartoum's brutal tactics in southern Sudan by barring select Sudanese companies from involvement in the U.S. financial system. The same year, Congress punished the Burmese junta's "severe repression" by prohibiting U.S. investments in Burma. These measures have left the U.S. with few remaining business or diplomatic ties to terminate.

Others will need to step in. But China, the international actor with the greatest leverage over both countries, seems disinclined to use it. Two-thirds of Sudan's oil goes to fuel China's booming economy, and China's foreign direct investment in Sudan exceeds $350 million annually. China is Burma's leading arms supplier and trading partner and has just won the right to build a major oil pipeline there. Beijing's support for abusive governments would be troubling under any circumstances, but its influence is magnified because it is using its veto on the U.N. Security Council to block international sanctions.

Some observers hope U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his envoys can persuade repressive regimes to relent. U.N. officials must certainly use their pulpits to condemn abuses and mobilize international (not simply bilateral) punitive measures. But history has shown that envoys rarely succeed unless the Security Council is united behind them. Until Sudan and Burma begin to hear Chinese footsteps, they will have little incentive to engage in good-faith negotiations.

Given China's human-rights deficiencies and its reluctance to be seen to cave in to outside pressure, it will not budge easily. But China's wealthy trading partners must show Beijing that the long-term costs of uncritically backing murderous regimes exceed the benefits of doing so. We must elevate human safety alongside consumer safety, expressing the same outrage over massacred civilians that we do about faulty toys. And governments sending athletes to China's Olympic "coming out" must shine the torch on its support for brutal regimes.

It may take China decades to see that governments that kill at home make unreliable neighbors and threaten global stability. In the meantime a coalition of the concerned must insist that what is manifestly true of the economy is also true of human rights: in this age, there is no such thing as a purely "internal matter."

Power's political affiliations are on the left, and in 2005-06 she worked in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow. Which is what makes her argument here so interesting.

Some of the recent foreign policy manifestos of the leading Democratic candidates - like Hillary Clinton's - have invested a lot of rhetoric in renewing America's commitment to multilateralism and liberal internationalism. But Power underlines a key assumption of international politics: Coordinated multilateral action in international politics usually requires the leadership of a hegemonic power to help pay the burdens of international cooperation. Unfortunately, the Democrats have announced an aversion to the robust assertion of American power to achieve international objectives (we need to cultivate our "soft power" profile). But should they come to power in 2009, the Democrats might have second thoughts on multilateralism. Coordinated global action will most likely emerge amid American leadership and power, a necessary resource in the provision of international public goods.

The Lessons of a Precipitous U.S. Withdrawal

Dr. Earl Tilford, a military historian and former director of research at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute, has an interesting piece over at FrontPageMagazine today. Tilford discusses the final years of American military operations in Vietnam, focusing on the disastrous consequences of America's exit for those remaining in-country after the final evacuation:

Enormous numbers of South Vietnamese who fought for the Saigon government and who supported U.S. policy were left behind to face the harsh “justice” of the victorious communists. In Cambodia and Laos major blood baths took place. The Cambodian Khmer Rough systematically annihilated anyone associated with the Phnom Penh government along with an entire class of educated people. Millions were murdered. In Laos, the Pathet Lao, under the control of the North Vietnamese, imprisoned and murdered the Lao royal family along with hundreds of officials of the Vientiane government. The North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao conducted a genocidal campaign against the Hmong, a tribal people who, with U.S. support, fought valiantly for their homes in the mountains surrounding the Plain of Jars.

In early 1975, as the communists initiated their final offensives in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the American left remained riveted on the supposed ravages of war wreaked on Indochina by U.S. military forces. A continuous cacophony bellowed about “secret bombings” and lamented an “eco-disaster” issuing from a supposed “bathing of South Vietnam” in Agent Orange. In the aftermath, the left’s silence over the murderous aftermath undertaken by the communist Vietnamese and their cohorts in Cambodia and Laos was pervasive.

The lessons for today are clear. First, any precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be costly even if it were possible, which it isn’t. Second, the sectarian violence that follows, being religiously and ethnically-driven, will be far bloodier than what happened in South Vietnam, more resembling the ethnic and class-cleansing carried out by the Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao. Third, in Indochina there was no regional power ready or able to fill the void left by America—China tried in 1979 and the Vietnamese army trounced its invasion forces. Iran, by contrast, is anxious to dominate Iraq, seize its oil, and then exercise hegemony over the Persian Gulf region.

Iran ultimately plans to establish a global Islamist caliphate. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Shi’ite mullahs in Teheran know the United States and Israel present major obstacles to realizing that vision. Make no mistake: Iran is at war with the Judeo-Christian West. If we lose this war, we lose Western civilization.

Today's left is again silent on the threats we now face - or the radicals simply dismiss such warnings as more "neocon" lies. Thank goodness we have scholars like Tilford focusing attention on the clear dangers in world politics today.

Iowa GOP Sets Caucuses for January 3

The Iowa Republican Party has rescheduled the party's nominating caucuses. The Los Angeles Times has the story:

Iowa Republicans on Tuesday moved the date of their caucuses to Jan. 3, ensuring the earliest-ever start to the presidential primary season.

The caucuses - a statewide gathering of party members who cast their votes in a series of precinct-level meetings - were originally scheduled for Jan. 14. But the 2008 political calendar has been in flux for months, ever since Florida and other states began pushing their dates forward to have a greater say in the nominating process.

"We were going to have to move to stay first, so we just did it," Chuck Laudner, executive director of the Iowa Republican Party, said after state GOP leaders approved the switch. "Moving into December was not an option, so we moved as close as we could without going over."

Iowa Democrats have yet to schedule their vote. But the party is weighing two options: voting on the same day as the state GOP, or holding a separate vote on Jan. 5, which would split the caucuses for the first time since 1972.

"We will decide our caucus date based ultimately on what is best for the people of Iowa and the Democratic Party," officials said in a statement issued shortly after Republicans announced their move.

Earlier Tuesday, Democrats in South Carolina announced they would seek the national party's permission to advance their presidential primary to Jan. 26, three days ahead of the current schedule.

South Carolina Republicans are set to vote Jan. 19. Leaders of both parties are fighting to preserve South Carolina's status as the nation's first Southern primary.

The biggest remaining question is when New Hampshire will vote. The state will host the first primary and is expected to go no later than Jan. 8, though Secretary of State William M. Gardner - who has sole discretion to set the date - has said he may schedule the vote as early as December to protect New Hampshire's primacy and spread the voting out.

Michigan has scheduled its primary for Jan. 15, in violation of national party rules. As a result, Democratic candidates have pledged to avoid campaigning in the state.

Whatever the final schedule, the result is the most front-loaded primary calendar since the current nominating system gained hold in 1972.

On Feb. 5 alone, more than a dozen states - including California and New York - will vote in what will amount to a coast-to-coast national primary.

I've lectured this week on presidential nominations, and I mentioned the January 14 date for Iowa's caucuses. I told my students the primary schedule's still in flux, however. I'm glad I did! I'll pull this article up on the overhead in tomorrow's classes and update my earlier lecture.

Frontloading's interesting to me, as one who's been teaching this stuff for ten years. A few students usually fall asleep during the discussions of delegate selection, although a few are getting fired up about voting.

For a top scholarly analysis of frontloading, see William G. Mayer and Andrew E. Busch, The Front-Loading Problem in Presidential Nominations (2003). For an interview with Mayer, click here.

Hillary Clinton and American Foreign Policy

The "Campaign 2008" foreign policy series continues over at Foreign Affairs with a new essay from Hillary Clinton, "Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-first Century." Clinton's article arrives amid great anticipation, at least on my part (and I imagine on the part of a number of others who follow the foreign policy-making literature). Unfortunately, Clinton's piece is a let down: The article recycles much of tired criticisms of the Bush administration's foreign policy, while at the same time offering a half-baked validation of much liberal internationalist gobbledygook common among leftist foreign policy specialists.

Here's Clinton's boilerplate attack on the Bush administration's foreign policy record:

The tragedy of the last six years is that the Bush administration has squandered the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States enjoyed a unique position. Our world leadership was widely accepted and respected, as we strengthened old alliances and built new ones, worked for peace across the globe, advanced nonproliferation, and modernized our military. After 9/11, the world rallied behind the United States as never before, supporting our efforts to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan and go after the al Qaeda leadership. We had a historic opportunity to build a broad global coalition to combat terror, increase the impact of our diplomacy, and create a world with more partners and fewer adversaries.

But we lost that opportunity by refusing to let the UN inspectors finish their work in Iraq and rushing to war instead. Moreover, we diverted vital military and financial resources from the struggle against al Qaeda and the daunting task of building a Muslim democracy in Afghanistan. At the same time, we embarked on an unprecedented course of unilateralism: refusing to pursue ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, abandoning our commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and turning our backs on the search for peace in the Middle East. Our withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and refusal to participate in any international effort to deal with the tremendous challenges of climate change further damaged our international standing.

Our nation has paid a heavy price for rejecting a long-standing bipartisan tradition of global leadership rooted in a preference for cooperating over acting unilaterally, for exhausting diplomacy before making war, and for converting old adversaries into allies rather than making new enemies. At a moment in history when the world's most pressing problems require unprecedented cooperation, this administration has unilaterally pursued policies that are widely disliked and distrusted.

Yet it does not have to be this way. Indeed, our allies do not want it to be this way. The world still looks to the United States for leadership. American leadership is wanting, but it is still wanted. Our friends around the world do not want the United States to retreat. They want once again to be allied with the nation whose values, leadership, and strength have inspired the world for the last century.

Clinton then goes on to say that she'll restore America's global standing in the world. Actually, she won't have that hard a time of it, since things aren't as bad as she makes out. The last couple of years have seen great improvement in global sentiment regarding the United States. According to a Pew Global Attitudes Report from 2006, strong majorities in all of America's major current treaty allies - Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan - held a favorable opinion of the U.S. Even in Britain - where opinion is often characterized as deeply opposed to the Bush adminstration - 56 percent of those polled held favorable views of America.

America as international bogeyman gains some support among Third Word nations in the Pew survey, but in truth the nature of global anti-Americanism is much more complicated. As Anne Applebaum pointed out in a 2005 Foreign Policy essay, even during the initial outrage following the American invasion of Iraq, people around the world continued to see the America as the world's beacon of liberty, and in a number of countries - like India, the Philippines, and South Africa - majorities evinced "mainly positive" views of the U.S.

Applebaum also notes large generational differences in public support. In countries like Poland, for example, anti-American opinion after Iraq was isolated to younger cohorts who have little recollection of American support for Poland during its historic resistance to Communist oppression during the Cold War. Applebaum highlights the tremendous latent good will toward the U.S. in international attitudes. Such positions make understanding international opinion more involved than we might get from Clinton's the-U.S.-as-bogeyman meme. (Don't forget as well the tremendous outburst of lasting respect for the United States in Indonesia, which followed America's strong leadership in tsunami humanitarian relief efforts.)

Also questionable are Clinton's obligatory statements on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. One can place little trust in such statements, because Clinton has shown very little consistency on Iraq policy in 2007, endlessly shifting her positions to satisfy the most important constituency demands of the moment. Because of the sheer logistical and strategic impediments to a rapid withdrawal, Americans ought not to expect a rapid drawdown of American forces in Iraq. To do otherwise would invite a collapse of order, and indeed the potential release of violent elements intent to restore a reign of murder in the wake of America's precipitous exit:

Here's Clinton:

We must withdraw from Iraq in a way that brings our troops home safely, begins to restore stability to the region, and replaces military force with a new diplomatic initiative to engage countries around the world in securing Iraq's future. To that end, as president, I will convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council and direct them to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home, starting within the first 60 days of my administration.

While working to stabilize Iraq as our forces withdraw, I will focus U.S. aid on helping Iraqis, not propping up the Iraqi government. Financial resources will go only where they will be used properly, rather than to government ministries or ministers that hoard, steal, or waste them.

As we leave Iraq militarily, I will replace our military force with an intensive diplomatic initiative in the region. The Bush administration has belatedly begun to engage Iran and Syria in talks about the future of Iraq. This is a step in the right direction, but much more must be done. As president, I will convene a regional stabilization group composed of key allies, other global powers, and all the states bordering Iraq. Working with the newly appointed UN special representative for Iraq, the group will be charged with developing and implementing a strategy for achieving a stable Iraq that provides incentives for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey to stay out of the civil war....

As we redeploy our troops from Iraq, we must not let down our guard against terrorism. I will order specialized units to engage in targeted operations against al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorist organizations in the region. These units will also provide security for U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq and train and equip Iraqi security services to keep order and promote stability in the country, but only to the extent that such training is actually working.

Nothing new here. Recent reports indicate dramatic U.S. successes in beating back al Qaeda's operations, and the U.S. military is engaged in a wide-variety of security initiatives with local forces to accelerate the operational independence of the Iraq security apparatus.

But check out as well Clinton's platitudes on global multilateralism:

Contrary to what many in the current administration appear to believe, international institutions are tools rather than traps. The United States must be prepared to act on its own to defend its vital interests, but effective international institutions make it much less likely that we will have to do so. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have understood this for decades. When such institutions work well, they enhance our influence. When they do not work, their procedures serve as pretexts for endless delays, as in the case of Darfur, or descend into farce, as in the case of Sudan's election to the UN Commission on Human Rights. But instead of disparaging these institutions for their failures, we should bring them in line with the power realities of the twenty-first century and the basic values embodied in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Here Clinton systematically ignores the role of interests in international politics. The U.S. will resist multilateral initiatives that work to subordinate American international priorities. The Bush adminstration in fact began efforts to reform global bodies like the IMF and U.N., only to meet vicious opposition from some of the most corrupt bureaucrats on the planet. Hillary Clinton needs to propose an increase in such efforts, not the abandonment.

Finally, Clinton's international agenda evinces hallmarks of 1990s-era foreign policy as social work:

To build the world we want, we must begin by speaking honestly about the problems we face...We will also have to take concrete steps to enhance security and spread opportunity throughout the world.

Education is the foundation of economic opportunity and should lie at the heart of America's foreign assistance efforts...As president, I will press for quick passage of the Education for All Act, which would provide $10 billion over a five-year period to train teachers and build schools in the developing world. This program would channel funds to those countries that provide the best plans for how to use them and rigorously measure performance to ensure that our dollars deliver results for children.

The fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other dreaded diseases is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity. These diseases have created a generation of orphans and set back economic and political progress by decades in many countries.

These problems often seem overwhelming, but we can solve them with the combined resources of governments, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and charities such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We can set specific targets in areas such as expanding access to primary education, providing clean water, reducing child and maternal mortality, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases. We can strengthen the International Labor Organization in order to enforce labor standards, just as we strengthened the World Trade Organization to enforce trade agreements. Such policies demonstrate that by doing good we can do well. This sort of investment and diplomacy will yield results for the United States, building goodwill even in places where our standing has suffered.

Read the rest. Clinton goes on to propose American pocketbook leaderhip on global warming, international energy investment, human rights, gender equality:

U.S. leadership, including a commitment to incorporate the promotion of women's rights in our bilateral relationships and international aid programs, is essential not just to improving the lives of women but to strengthening the families, communities, and societies in which they live.

These are essentially human development issues. But what's missing is a discussion of the fundamental importance of markets and trade in promoting economic growth in Third World countries. The U.S. can continue to build the international infrastructure of global prosperity through policies of trade expansion and international openness. Greater economic development will precede greater human development. According to Clinton's manifesto here, though, rather than a reliance on traditional trade practices, we see an aggressive call to lift up all nations through a Herculean American social policy effort.

There's much that's admirable about such goals, and we shouldn't reject innovative approaches in helping to solve the globe's most intractable problems. But Clinton's paper is almost like a wish list for the future of America's global role. Her discussion of vital interests and Ameican policy is cursory, and she avoids any tough talk beyond quick talking points on "firmness" and "resolve" (she derides the Bush administration as advocating the use of force as the preferred policy to most international problems).

Hillary Clinton's deeper problem is her notion that American foreign policy is a moral failure, and that we must "regain our authority" in international affairs. The U.S. hasn't lost its authority. The country remains the world's indispensible nation, and when global crises demand benign leadership for the provision of international goods, the U.S. will continue to get the call. We've faced difficulties in Iraq, which has made sustaining momentum and support more difficult. But we're gaining the upper hand, and to now feed the terrorist a victory through withdrawal would be folly. In the realm of opinion, much of international anti-Americanism is based on a resistance to America acting on the basis of its self interests. This is not new, and opinion trends are already turning back towards increasing acceptance and support (and recent elections in France and Germany have demonstrated how powerful the impulse to bandwagon on American power remains).

The U.S. needs to make adjustments, indeed, but not in the direction proposed by Hillary Clinton. America should leverage its improvements in Iraq to foster increased international efforts to combat the forces of terror, both transnational and state-sponsored. Diplomacy is key here, of course, but we have no desire to negotiate away our vital interests in regional and global security. We can, as well, increase spending on defense and expand the armed forces. We must increase efforts at vigorous public diplomacy to clarify America's interests in democracy promotion, economic development, and nuclear nonproliferation. We must not denigrate the great power that we enjoy. We can exercise robust leadership amid our substantial capabilities in ways no less "warm-hearted" than in earlier eras. In short, we need to continue to get things right, to follow-up our current victories against the forces of nihilism with more success. The "American idea" continues to glow, yet its illumination burns brighter amid a backdrop of competence and progress.

Democratic Stupidity

Here's how James Caesar sums-up the Democrats in his new article over at the Weekly Standard: "The Stupid Party." According to Ceasar, after a half-century of scientific progressivism, the Democrats moved toward nihilism by the end of the 1960s:

This split between the liberals and the radicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s cost the Democratic party its confidence, and the party has never been quite the same since. The New Left did not take over permanently, a task for which it was morally, intellectually, and above all politically unfit. Once it became clear--as it did in the 1972 election--that the majority of the American people had no sympathy for the New Left's cause, especially "revolution," the old liberal mainstream was in effect asked to step back in and serve as the public face of the party, and it did so in the persons of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

But the New Left didn't disappear. Renamed the cultural (or multicultural) left, it decamped from center stage and repaired to safer quarters in the universities, where it managed to carry out much of its program. Inside the Democratic party, it ceded actual leadership, but maintained an impressive power base and exercised enormous influence on the policy agenda. Usually, the old liberals found the cultural left too dangerous to embrace, but too powerful to resist.

The result by the 1980s was a much weakened liberalism that was no match for a renewed conservative movement. Sapped of energy, liberalism had become, in Paul Starr's words, mostly "defensive" and "oppositional." Liberals tried to stick to the catechism of the older values, but were often pushed off course by the conflicting priorities championed by the cultural left. Liberals lacked any clear conception of first principles or anchoring ideas to guide them. Except for the fact that the Democratic party remained the home of almost all of the intelligentsia, it had now become the "stupid party" of American politics, an honor previously reserved for Republicans. Not even the two Clintons, with their high IQ's and a new generation of policy wonks to serve them, could change this. The "New Democrat" thrust was wholly strategic and practical: to move the Democratic party to the center and to "reinvent" government. Whatever other contributions may be ascribed to the Clinton Democrats, deep reflection about the party's theoretical foundations was not among them.

Caesar says things have gotten worse during the Bush years. Especially noteworthy is the vacuity of the foaming netroot hordes of the radical left:

Today, the Democratic party mainstream has its values, its instincts, and, as usual, more than its share of 10-point programs. It even has its "isms," represented by its leading troika: the pragmatism of Hillary Clinton, the idealism of Barack Obama, and the populism of John Edwards. Yet its intellectual reservoir has shown itself to be lacking in depth and confidence. Today's Democratic mainstream is no more willing or able to stand up to the party's present leftist insurgency than the older mainstream was to stand up to the New Left. The tenor of the current left is best captured by something Lionel Trilling said in 1949 about conservatives: They do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

Even this description may be overly generous. The journalist Matt Bai, in his recent book The Argument, undertook an anthropological field trip to investigate the natives who inhabit the progressive coalition of billionaires and bloggers. The big money men and women--what the left used to call, back when it framed matters more astutely, the "obscenely wealthy"--are mostly people who have made their fortunes recently. (George Soros, the godfather of the movement, is an exception.) The last thing these newly rich would wish to be called, however, is nouveau riche; they are bobo billionaires who profess to regard their own fortunes with nonchalance. Steven Gluckstern, for example, who helped bankroll the Democracy Alliance--a new organization to fund the rebuilding of the progressive infrastructure (dues $200,000 a year for five years)--told Bai, "I don't really care about money. I mean, I like it. You can do fun things with it. You can give it away." All in this progressive money set, which includes some of Hollywood's more modest donors, follow the new progressive formula of buying political influence while decrying the influence of money in politics.

The allies of the wealthy, the bloggers, are the coalition's hit men. Almost all are males in their thirties. The two most prominent, "Markos and Jerome" (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD), gained their fame and won their political clout by latching onto Howard Dean's candidacy in 2003 and using the Internet to help create the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party." Their websites not only constantly abuse thought, but show contempt for intellectuals, even while gaining influence among them. The language is often violent and vulgar. The moving spirit of the Daily Kos is one of anger and resentment, which, when not directed at Democrats who dare to stray from the wing line, is directed at the president, the vice president, and the Iraq war.

The bloggers in turn are teamed up with the new, Internet-reliant grassroots associations like MoveOn and ACORN. What emerges from Bai's study of the coalition is that the tone of MoveOn's recent New York Times ad assailing General Petraeus as "General Betray Us," far from being exceptional, is perfectly typical of the discourse preached and practiced by this so-called progressive coalition. The ad stood out because it exposed to the world at large the ugly style the new radicals have developed for use among themselves--and because it forced the main Democratic presidential candidates, who declined to disavow it, to show publicly their fealty to the movement.

The Democratic party, its prowess renewed by a taste of success in 2006, is riding the crest of a political wave. It is the stupid party triumphant. What serious Democrats must now consider is whether to accept this state of affairs--or begin to think deeply enough to find a principled ground for rejecting a faction in their midst that is not only stupid but dangerous as well.

What's interesting about Ceasar's piece is how nicely he captures the chest-thumping narcissism of the hard left blogosphere. Markos Moulitsas is the worst - his megalomania I've called "The Daily Kos Syndrome" - but the same massive narcissism is found among most of the top radical lefty blogs.

These trends wouldn't be much more than a nuisance, except that many in the not-too-smart Democratic congressional majority lack the nerve to stand up to these idiots. Even Hillary Clinton, alas, can't stick to the firm centrism she sought to establish during her first Senate term. Certainly she's got the brains - if not the backbone - to rescue the Democrats from their stupidity, although I'm not holding my breath.

Majority Says SCHIP is Low-Income Program

A new poll on health care policy from USA Today finds a majority of Americans disagreeing with the extention of the Children's State Health Insurance Program to middle class families:

• 52% agree with Bush that most benefits should go to children in families earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level — about $41,000 for a family of four. Only 40% say benefits should go to families earning up to $62,000, as the bill written by Democrats and some Republicans would allow.

• 55% are very or somewhat concerned that the program would create an incentive for families to drop private insurance. Bush and Republican opponents have called that a step toward government-run health care.

Taken together, the results show that while Bush may be losing the political battle with Democrats, he may be doing better on policy.

The public's actually more trusting of the Democrats to handle overall children's health reform, which is a bit contradictory given public opinion's firm opposition to the morphing of SCHIP into a middle class program. Americans are obviously concerned about health access, but they're not so bad off as to endorse a sneaky, underhanded Democratic social policy power grab.

Paul Krugman's a Respected Economist in His Other Life

One would hardly know it from his New York Times commentaries, but Paul Krugman's actually one of the country's great contemporary economists, his current post being at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

Yet, he's not mainstream. A casual perusal of his essays reveals Krugman's considerable left wing bent, and I'm being nice here (Krugman's a superstar among radical lefty bloggers). In today's column Krugman spouts off about some "Gore Derangment Syndrome." Here's a nugget:

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

It's bad enough dredging up all the old nonsense about the "stolen" 2000 election. Gore lost that race fair and square, and the popular vote nationally means nothing if the candidate fails to win a majority in the Electoral College (precisely Gore's problem).

But Krugman's got no time for such details. He's on a roll, riding Al Gore's Nobel bandwagon to rustle up some readers along the far left fringe. It must be nice for op-ed columnists to dish out such left wing trash, as the current climate certainly is weary of all things Republican, and the media has elevated Gore to some kind of heroic savior.

But the facts aren't supporting Krugman - an interesting thing, given his pedigree as a eminently trained academic. Global warming remains a controversy in environmental science, and progress on the ground in Iraq is proving that G.W. Bush is in fact the man-of-the-moment in tamping down the nihilist forces of terror worldwide (see my post today on the increasing defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq).

For more on Krugmania, see my good bloggin' buddy, The Oxford Medievalist.

China's 17th National Party Congress Opens in Beijing

The Chinese Communist Party is holding its 17th National Party Congress this week in Beijing. Here's the background:

Delivering the opening address at the ruling Communist Party’s 17th National Congress today, President Hu Jintao promised to address social fissures, a degraded environment and rampant corruption during his second term as China’s top leader, but he all but ruled out more than cosmetic political reform.

Mr. Hu spoke extensively about his “scientific view of development,” a set of lofty, vague principles supporting harmonious economic, social and political development.

The congress will enshrine the phrase “scientific view of development” into the party’s constitution alongside the political slogans of Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and Jian Zemin, elevating Mr. Hu into the pantheon of leaders as he begins the second and final term as party general secretary, head of state and military chief.

This speech kicked off the week-long event held once every five years to extol past leaders and welcome a roster of younger officials newly elevated to leadership roles.

Party members have described the succession contest, conducted in secret, as fractious. But the congress proceedings, which are purely ceremonial, present a facade of seamless unity and continuity.

In the main auditorium of the Great Hall of the People, under a giant hammer and sickle, Mr. Hu appeared on a rostrum with all the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee and the Central Committee arranged in precise hierarchical order. They were joined by party elders including Mr. Jiang, Mr. Hu’s direct predecessor, and at least two stalwarts of an earlier era, Wan Li and Song Ping, both more than 90 years old.

In keeping with tradition, Mr. Hu’s address, which lasted two and half hours, stressed the correctness of the rhetoric and guiding philosophies of the past. Though the text of the address ran to 64 pages, Mr. Hu discussed few specific government programs and provided only broad hints about what he intends to do between now and 2012, when under party retirement rules he will make way for a new top leader.

“China is going through a wide-ranging and deep-going transformation,” Mr. Hu told the 2,200 party delegates and a national television audience. “This brings us unprecedented opportunities as well as unprecedented challenges. On the whole, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.”

Mr. Hu tweaked one well established goal, which was to quadruple the economic output of the year 2000 by 2020, saying that the party would now aim to increase “per capital GDP” four-fold in the same period.

The switch to a per capita target reflects Mr. Hu’s emphasis on enhancing the benefits that the Chinese people derive from economic growth. But given that China’s population will likely increase by about two hundred million during the 20-year period, the new goal suggests that Mr. Hu now expects the economy, which has sustained double-digit growth for more than five years, to expand at an even faster pace than he and his predecessors forecast at the last party congress in 2002.

He called the international situation favorable to China, saying a “trend toward a multipolar world is irreversible.” He offered to hold peace talks with Taiwan, the self-governing island China claims as its territory, as long as the island’s leadership sets aside independence goals. The offer broke no new ground, but his tone was slightly softer than in the past.

Read the whole thing.

Considering the dramatic impact China's having on the world capitalist economy, it's good to remember that the Chinese political system remains a throwback to the era of Cold War rivalry between Communism and Western liberal democracy.

I see a little nostalgia for the old balance of power system in Hu's comments about the coming of a multipolar world. If Beijing gets its way, that balance of power system will ultimately shift to favor China, validating that country's long period of national mobilization designed to strengten the nation's power position on the world stage.

China's rigid, one-party authoritarianism combined with the country's dynamic, increasingly high-technology economy will continue to pose challenges to the contemporary global system. With all our attention on the Middle East, let us not forget that the time-honored tradition of balance of power jockeying continues in the background.

No Warrant Required in Illegal Immigrant Detentions

The New York Times has this interesting report on the warrantless search and detentions of illegal aliens:

LONG ISLAND officials protested when federal agents searching for immigrant gang members raided local homes two weeks ago. The agents had rousted American citizens and legal immigrants from their beds in the night, complained Lawrence W. Mulvey, the Nassau County police commissioner, and arrested suspected illegal immigrants without so much as a warrant.

“We don’t need warrants to make the arrests,” responded Peter J. Smith, the special agent in charge in New York for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency that conducted the raids.

His concise answer helps explain the friction that the Bush administration’s recent campaign of immigraion enforcement has caused. Last week, immigration officials announced that they had made more than 1,300 arrests across the country over the summer when they went looking for gang members. Since the raids were carried out under immigration law, many protections in place under the American criminal codes did not apply. Foreign residents of the United States, whether here legally or not, answer to a different set of rules.

Immigration agents are not required to obtain warrants to detain suspects. The agents also have broad authority to question people about their immigration status and to search them and their homes. There are no Miranda rights that agents must read when making arrests. Detained immigrants have the right to a lawyer, but only one they can pay for.

While criminal suspects are generally sent to jails near the courts that hear their cases, immigration agents have discretion in deciding where to hold immigrants detained for deportation. Many suspected illegal immigrants who were detained in Nassau County, for example, were quickly moved to York, Pa., distant from family and legal advice.

This parallel course for noncitizens is not new. But it has come into fuller view as the enforcement drive has swept up record numbers of illegal immigrants, also reaching legal immigrants and citizens. In answer, a barrage of lawsuits is challenging both the laws and their enforcers.

“Buried within the proud history of our nation of immigrants, shrouded but always present, there exists a distinct system,” wrote Daniel Kanstroom, a law professor at Boston College, in his book “Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History,” which traces the history of the immigration code. To begin with, he writes, the Constitution does not specifically address the government’s power to control immigration. This is “not a small problem for a nation of immigrants,” he notes.

Immigration law remains founded on the notion that immigrants are not full members of American society until they become citizens, writes Professor Kanstroom, who is also a practicing immigration lawyer. The reduced protections in modern-day law were shaped by some of the darker episodes of the 20th century, he writes, including the prosecution of immigrant dissidents, like the Australian union leader Harry Bridges, in the 1930s; and the mass roundups of Mexican workers in the 1950s.

Arising from that landscape, the courts that handle immigration cases are part of the Justice Department, not the judiciary. Even immigrants who have lived here legally for many years, lawyers said, can run afoul of the immigration laws with minor infractions or misdemeanors. A late filing of visa renewal papers or a shoplifting citation can quickly spiral into an order for the ultimate penalty: deportation. Immigrants who fight the orders have more limited bail rights than American criminals and can spend years behind bars while their cases inch through the overburdened court system.

The immigration laws have gained new influence in everyday life because of the record number of immigrants — 37.1 million, according to census figures — now living in the United States. Of those, more than 22 million are not naturalized citizens and remain subject to the immigration system, including about 10 million legal residents and 12 million illegal immigrants, by estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington. Increasingly, immigrants live in mixed-status families that include illegal and legal residents as well as citizens.

Over the last two years, ICE has grown more aggressive, entering factories and communities, hunting down foreign fugitives ranging from convicted criminals to workers whose visas have expired. Last year, the agency deported 195,000 people, another record. After President Bush’s immigration overhaul failed in Congress in June, the administration has vigorously pursued the enforcement-first policy that Republicans demanded.

Being a New York Times story, you have to know they'll cite as their main expert a leftist open-borders type willing to trash any systematic effort to control illegal access to the United States.

Yet, as the conclusion to the article notes, while this year's immigration reform initiative failed, we're now seeing more and more reports of stepped-up enforcement of existing laws, so there's a silver lining in all of this.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is Crippled

Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung report on the U.S. military's success in decimating al Qaeda in Iraq, the main terrorist group in the country:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq....

There is widespread agreement that AQI has suffered major blows over the past three months. Among the indicators cited is a sharp drop in suicide bombings, the group's signature attack, from more than 60 in January to around 30 a month since July. Captures and interrogations of AQI leaders over the summer had what a senior military intelligence official called a "cascade effect," leading to other killings and captures. The flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq has also diminished, although officials are unsure of the reason and are concerned that the broader al-Qaeda network may be diverting new recruits to Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The deployment of more U.S. and Iraqi forces into AQI strongholds in Anbar province and the Baghdad area, as well as the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters to combat AQI operatives in those locations, has helped to deprive the militants of a secure base of operations, U.S. military officials said. "They are less and less coordinated, more and more fragmented," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said recently. Describing frayed support structures and supply lines, Odierno estimated that the group's capabilities have been "degraded" by 60 to 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the Joint Special Operations Command's operations in Iraq, is the chief promoter of a victory declaration and believes that AQI has been all but eliminated, the military intelligence official said. But Adm. William J. Fallon, the chief of U.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is urging restraint, the official said. The military intelligence official, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity about Iraq assessments and strategy.

Senior U.S. commanders on the ground, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, have long complained that Central Command, along with the CIA, is too negative in its analyses. On this issue, however, Petraeus agrees with Fallon, the military intelligence official said.

For each assessment of progress against AQI, there is a cautionary note that comes from long and often painful experience. Despite the increased killings and captures of AQI members, Odierno said, "it only takes three people" to construct and detonate a suicide car bomb that can "kill thousands." The goal, he said, is to make each attack less effective and lengthen the periods between them.

Right now, said another U.S. official, who declined even to be identified by the agency he works for, the data are "insufficient and difficult to measure."

"AQI is definitely taking some hits," the official said. "There is definite progress, and that is undeniable good news. But what we don't know is how long it will last . . . and whether it's sustainable. . . . They have withstood withering pressure for a long period of time." Three months, he said, is not long enough to consider a trend sustainable.

That's key: American troops are definitely making progress.

See also yesterday's post on the Washington Post's editorial noting the undeniable success on the ground. Some on the left (here's one) are just squirming to find some bad news in all of these upbeat progress reports, but the denial game's got to be tough when the pattern of military progress is proving the defeatists badly wrong.

Check Memeorandum for more commentary.

Better Numbers in Iraq

The Washington Post published an important editorial today on the improved situation in Iraq:

NEWS COVERAGE and debate about Iraq during the past couple of weeks have centered on the alleged abuses of private security firms like Blackwater USA. Getting such firms into a legal regime is vital, as we've said. But meanwhile, some seemingly important facts about the main subject of discussion last month - whether there has been a decrease in violence in Iraq - have gotten relatively little attention. A congressional study and several news stories in September questioned reports by the U.S. military that casualties were down. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), challenging the testimony of Gen. David H. Petraeus, asserted that "civilian deaths have risen" during this year's surge of American forces.

A month later, there isn't much room for such debate, at least about the latest figures. In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43 - down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004.

During the first 12 days of October the death rates of Iraqis and Americans fell still further. So far during the Muslim month of Ramadan, which began Sept. 13 and ends this weekend, 36 U.S. soldiers have been reported as killed in hostile actions. That is remarkable given that the surge has deployed more American troops in more dangerous places and that in the past al-Qaeda has staged major offensives during Ramadan. Last year, at least 97 American troops died in combat during Ramadan. Al-Qaeda tried to step up attacks this year, U.S. commanders say -- so far, with stunningly little success.

The trend could change quickly and tragically, of course. Casualties have dropped in the past for a few weeks only to spike again. There are, however, plausible reasons for a decrease in violence. Sunni tribes in Anbar province that once fueled the insurgency have switched sides and declared war on al-Qaeda. The radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr ordered a cease-fire last month by his Mahdi Army. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top day-to-day commander in Iraq, says al-Qaeda's sanctuaries have been reduced 60 to 70 percent by the surge.

This doesn't necessarily mean the war is being won. U.S. military commanders have said that no reduction in violence will be sustainable unless Iraqis reach political solutions -- and there has been little progress on that front. Nevertheless, it's looking more and more as though those in and outside of Congress who last month were assailing Gen. Petraeus's credibility and insisting that there was no letup in Iraq's bloodshed were - to put it simply - wrong.

See also my previous post on the debate surrounding the Pentagon's $190 billion supplemental budget appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008.

Also blogging: Captain's Quarters, Bits Blog, Blue Crab Boulevard, Don Surber, Hot Air, Jawa Report, Macsmind, Middle Earth Journal, Outside the Beltway, Prairie Pundit, Red State, Right Voice, Sweetness and Light, Take Our Country Back, Weekly Standard, Wizbang.

Pay Any Price? Supplemental War Spending Set at $190 Billion for 2008

Today's opinion section over at the Los Angeles Times asks "The $190 Billion Question":

The Bush administration will request $190 billion for fiscal year 2008 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Opinion asked four national security experts whether this was a wise use of U.S. resources. If not, we asked, how would they propose spending $190 billion to reduce the strength and appeal of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda?

The experts are listed in alphabetical order: Anthony Cordesman, James Dobbins, Frederick Kagan, and Winslow Wheeler.

Their comments are brief, but revealing. Here's Kagan's response, "Spend Whatever it Takes on the War on Terror":

Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan is vital to U.S. national security, and we must spend whatever it takes to win in both places. The $190 billion requested for this year is still less than 1.5% of our gross domestic product, a small burden given the enormity of the stakes. We are in a desperate war against terrorists who have vowed to destroy us, yet our military remains about the same size as it was in the 1990s.

America's top priority for weakening Islamist terror groups should be to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is the increasingly important offshoot of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It cannot be allowed to grow stronger. Already, Al Qaeda has used the Soviet failure in Afghanistan and U.S. retreats from Somalia and Lebanon as proof of the strength of its ideology. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of Lebanese Hezbollah (whose agents are supporting Shiite extremists in Iraq), has said that the U.S. will withdraw in shame from Iraq as we did from Vietnam. We must not allow that prediction to come true.

Some people say we must get out of Iraq immediately because our presence there serves only to recruit more people to the ranks of theradical Islamists. But honestly, the presence of American forces in any numbers in a Muslim land can serve as a recruiting tool. It doesn't matter to the terrorists if there are 160,000 Americans in Iraq or 160 -- the propaganda about "U.S. occupation" will be just the same. It does matter if they can claim to have defeated us again.

Other critics would abandon Iraq and shift resources to Afghanistan. Current efforts to fight Al Qaeda inside Afghanistan must be stepped up. But how would we actually rout Al Qaeda from its bases in the tribal areas of Pakistan? Shall we invade Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state with 125 million people? Using American forces to defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan would be extremely difficult and dangerous, but we are already defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq. It makes no sense to abandon a critical effort in Iraq that is going well to start a riskier campaign from scratch in Pakistan.

Moreover, Iraq is a potentially wealthy country in the heart of the Middle East; Afghanistan is an isolated land with few resources and central to nothing. Al Qaeda would happily trade Afghanistan for Iraq -- indeed, it has done so, funneling its own resources into Iraq to fight us where we are strongest. Ceding either Iraq or Afghanistan to them would be a tragic mistake.

Cordesman and Dobbins also see a continued U.S. presence in Iraq as crucial to American national security, but they're both critical of the wisdom of the war, and they seem resigned to a prolonged deployment rather than heartened by the improved situation on the ground (the credentials of both Dobbins and Cordesman are impeccable). I've never heard of Wheeler. His comment is no more than an antiwar rant. I'm surprised he was even included in the symposium.

Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and Women in Power

The October 15 edition of Newsweek is a "Women in Power" issue. The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffiington's on the cover (and the contents page, etc., etc.), and the volume includes a number of topical essays and first-person testimonies from prominent women in politics, industry, and sports.

I was particular interested in Liz Cheney's personal vignette, which is included in the symposium, and especially her comments on Hillary Clinton. Liz Cheney is Vice President Dick Cheney's eldest daughter. She's an attorney specializing in international law, and has served in prominent positions at the U.S. State Department, with specializations on Middle East policy. Most of the women Newsweek profiles are on the left (way left in the case of Huffington), but Cheney's got solid-gold GOP credentials, and I was especially impressed by her comments on Hillary Clinton. Cheney's been highly critical of Clinton, especially on Iraq, but she's fair in recognizing her historical significance:

I don't agree with Senator Clinton's views on the issues, but I think it's terrific that she is a credible presidential candidate. It's a measure of progress in this country that she will be judged not on the basis of her gender, but on whether she is right or wrong on the issues, whether she is up to the task of being president. That says a lot about us as a nation. It's about time we got to that point.

To an amazing degree, Cheney's sentiments capture my own feelings about Hillary Clinton. While I disagree with the senator's policies, I admire her political success, and especially her political perseverance and learning. As Clinton will almost certainly win the Democratic nomination, the debate and political polarization on her candidacy will undoubtedly get nasty. I frequently post on Clinton. I'm especially disturbed by her wishy-washy positions on the war. But I will not demonize her, and I will distance myself from conservative attacks on her integrity which fall outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

But let me be clear: While I'm intrigued by the historical significance of Hillary's presidential campaign - and especially the possibility of the United States electing a woman as president for the first time in history - I utterly reject any hard-left feminist political agenda that might naturally find a home in a Hillary Clinton administration. While Clinton has certainly moderated her overall political ideology - and she's emerged as the quintessential Washington insider - given her history of supporting the hardline feminist agenda, a Clinton presidential administration in 2009 is naturally prone to capture by hard-left forces, and particulary the male-bashing cohorts of militant feminism.

Clinton's entry over at the Discover the Networks has this on her radical feminist propensities:

Throughout her adult life, Mrs. Clinton has embraced the worldviews and ideals of radical feminism. Following the February 2006 death of Betty Friedan, the longtime communist who co-founded the National Organization for Women , Mrs. Clinton said that Friedan's activism and writing had "opened doors and minds, breaking down barriers for women and enlarging opportunities for women and men for generations to come. We are all the beneficiaries of her vision."

Some hardline feminists reject the idea that Hillary will implement a radical women's rights agenda. Barbara Erhenreich, a well-know progressive author and feminist, has rejected Hillary Clinton as a standard-bearer of the militant feminst political agenda. Note thought that Erhenreich's opposition is mostly based on Clinton's recent policy positions. In the larger sense, with Clinton's known feminist history - and especially her extremely malleable political positions - voices like Erhrenreich's are likely to get a prominent hearing in a Hillary presidency. This larger context is key.

So in summary let me say once again that I will not politically demonize Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Like Liz Cheney, I see Hillary Clinton as highly qualified for the office of president. However, I'm fully aware of the political implications of a Hillary presidency for the direction of American cultural politics. I believe that a reform feminism - which notes the inherent diffences between the sexes, but recognizes historic practices of gender subjugation - represents a reasonable approach to fostering women's progress. Conversly, a radical feminist agenda - rooted in revolutionary feminist demands, and often accompanied by the ideology of feminist separatism - would be a disaster for American politics. It will join with all of the other strands of antiwar leftism, multicultural ideology, moral relativism, and terrorist appeasement to continue a hegemonic project of the destruction of the traditional American way of life.

The Political Culture of the Anglosphere

Michael Barone covered the "Five Best" book section this week at WSJ's Weekend Journal. Each week "Five Best" offer capsule reviews of five books within a subject area, and Barone looks at the shared cultural heritage of the United States and Britain.

Here's what he says about James C. Bennett's, The Anglosphere Challenge (2004):

James C. Bennett coined the term "Anglosphere" to describe countries where English is the native language or (as in India) serves as a lingua franca for the well educated. But language is not all that America, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other places have in common. Bennett argues that the peculiar island history of England produced a set of institutions that other advanced nations in Europe and Asia lacked - the common law, respect for private property, continuous representative government, a culture that nurtures civil society and entrepreneurial enterprise. It is thus no accident that the Anglosphere has excelled in innovation and economic growth and, Bennett believes, will continue to do so.

I haven't read the Bennett volume, but my lectures in comparative politics develop the theme of the "cultural requisites for democracy," and the British political experience is held out as a model of gradual, pragmatic political development.

There seems to be a fundamental set of cultural attributes conducive to the consolidation of a democratic regime - attitudes toward authority, conceptual understandings on knowledge and progress (belief systems), feelings of attachment to nation (a sense of belonging), and basic values (religiosity, freedom, equality). When these attributes lean in a postive direction (feelings of national belonging and community rather than alienation), and when a nation resolves its crises of development (establishment of a constitutional order before the onset of mass mobilization) early in the country's history, a more lasting political order is the result. (See Lawrence Mayer, Comparative Politics: Nations and Theories in a Changing World, 3rd Edition, for the full theory.)

The Anglo-American history is the epitome of these processes, and as Barone notes in his remarks on Bennett, "Anglosphere" greatness is likely to continue far into the future.

Does the Nobel Prize Vindicate Al Gore?

From the New York Times: "With Prize, Gore Is Vindicated Without Having to Add President to Résumé." Here's an excerpt:

Al Gore's seven-year journey from loser to laureate began in bitterness, settled for a time into self-imposed exile and led him in the end to rediscover his voice on climate change.

The question now is what he will do with the prestige and attention that comes to him with the Nobel Peace Prize. The answer appears to be that he will neither embrace nor reject another quest for the presidency, but harness the speculation about his intentions to become a more formidable force on environmental policy and a power within the Democratic party.

Mr. Gore’s close friends and advisers said Friday that he had no desire to be drawn into the race for the presidency but that he saw the clear advantage of leveraging the acclaim. The clearest expression of his true feelings, they said, was his brief statement of thanks for the prize in an appearance in Palo Alto, Calif., where he talked about planetary politics and uttered not a word about the kind unfolding in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“This obviously turns everybody toward the presidency, but I think he’s saying what he means,” said Paul Begala, a political adviser in the Clinton White House who prepared Mr. Gore for his 2000 presidential debates against George W. Bush. “He knows there’s a Democratic field that Democrats are happy with, and that they don’t need a white knight riding in.”

Democrats also said Mr. Gore’s entry into the messy world of politics would undermine the stature that comes with the prize and his role as a wise man and conscience among many liberals.

“Why would he run for president when he can be a demigod?” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, who was a top aide in the Clinton White House. “He now towers over all of us because he’s pure.”

Michael Feldman, a Gore strategist who was meeting with him on Friday near San Francisco Bay, also said that Mr. Gore was not entering the 2008 race. “He’s focused on trying to solve the climate crisis,” Mr. Feldman said.

The speculation that Mr. Gore would win a Nobel Peace Prize began soon after the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary on global warming he starred in that won an Oscar.

But Mr. Gore’s close aides said they did not believe it would come to him as soon as this year. When his phone failed to ring early Friday morning, Mr. Gore assumed he had been passed over. He and his wife, Tipper, then turned on CNN to see who had been awarded the prize, only to learn it was him.

Although he shares the award with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it was in many ways a personal victory for Mr. Gore, one achieved beyond the shadow of the disputed 2000 election and outside the orbit of the couple to which he has been linked for so long as a partner and a rival, Bill andHillary Rodham Clinton.

The presidency was within Gore's reach in 2000, but after his disastrous presidential campaign - where he stiff-armed Bill Clinton, who was leaving office with approval ratings in the 60 percent range - Democratic insiders snubbed their former standard-bearer. If there's any vindication here, it has more to do with the distant memory of Gore's incredibly poor political skills during his White House bid (rather than the controversy surrounding the Florida recount). To his credit, though, at least Gore didn't wind up like Michael Dukakis, who still wallows in that special ignominious obscurity reserved for presidential losers.

I blogged on Gore's Nobel win on Friday. With its history of controversy, I doubt the Nobel Prize committee will ever be vindicated (and I'm not alone).

Band of Brothers Vets Have New Book Forthcoming

William "Wild Bill" Guarnere and Edward "Babe" Heffron, two veterans of the U.S. Army's "Easy Company," have a new memoir forthcoming. The story of Easy Company was told in the HBO miniseries, "Band of Brothers (which was adapted from the Steven Ambrose book).

Here's the background on the Guarnere/Heffron book (via Blue Crab Boulevard):

After parachuting into Europe during World War II, battling along a strip of road called Hell's Highway in the Netherlands and surviving the freezing woods of Bastogne surrounded by German troops, William Guarnere and Edward Heffron do not consider themselves heroes.

Guarnere, 84, and Heffron, 84, are among the surviving members of the fabled Easy Company memorialized in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers." To them, the real heroes are the men whose bodies stayed buried in that foreign soil and the mothers who sent their sons off to war, praying for a safe return.

It is so their sacrifices are not forgotten that Guarnere and Heffron have written "Brothers in Battle: Best of Friends," recently published by the Berkley Publishing Group.

"Sitting there in the plane, you wonder why you're up there," says Heffron. "You could be home, but then when you land there, and you go through these villages and you look at those people's faces … now you know why we're here."

Heffron sits in Guarnere's Philadelphia house, surrounded by pictures of soldiers the two served with and mementos emblazoned with the Screaming Eagle of the 101st Airborne Division, of which they were part.

The book, with a foreword by actor Tom Hanks, one of the miniseries' producers, tells the story of how the two young men from South Philly became paratroopers, fought in some of World War II's major battles and survived to form a lifelong friendship……

……Guarnere's voice has a raw, unvarnished "tell it like it was," quality while Heffron's is an often-introspective look at the war and life. But neither is sanitized or rosy-eyed. Both speak plainly about killing German troops, the looting that sometimes occurred and the drinking and partying that went on after the war and when they were on leave.

But they said it was important to give as an accurate picture as they could about what they experienced, saying that they were simply trying to do their job the best they could and protect their friends.

"Once you start lying and trying to change things, it's no good," Guarnere says. "You tell the truth, and that's it."

I wish Guarnere and Heffron success with their new book - it sounds like a great read!

I have "Band of Brothers" on DVD, and I always try to take time out to watch the episodes when they run on the History Channel. A new 10-part miniseries from Steven Spielberg, focusing on the war in the Pacific, is tentatively scheduled for a 2009 release.

"Saving Private Ryan" is my favorite movie, and I think Spielberg's film productions have been phenomenally important in keeping World War II history alive for younger generations of Americans.

Ann Coulter's Anti-Semitism: Too Dangerous to Ignore

I've never been a big fan of Ann Coulter. I don't disagree with all of her points, but generally she's too abrasive, and frankly, often seems unhinged. Commenters to my posts dissecting the radical left often say that those on the far right are just as bad. In Coulter's case, they've got a point. She's basically a ideological hack, and one apparently whose books aren't worth the ink and paper used to publish them. I don't read Coulter, though that's what Tim Rutten argues in his article today on Coulter's recent outburst of anti-Semitism. It's a good read:

Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity.

Deutsch, to his everlasting credit, wasn't having any of it, and the full transcript of their extended and -- on Coulter's side -- vilely offensive exchange on the matter is widely available online. Reaction over the last couple of days has been swift.

The National Jewish Democratic Council weighed in with a petition asking other broadcast news organizations not to give Coulter a forum. "While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment," said council Executive Director Ira N. Forman. "Just as media outlets don't invite those who believe that Martians walk the Earth to frequently comment on science stories, it's time they stop inviting Ann Coulter to comment on politics." (Sadly, too many Americans now believe the only way to confront offensive or dangerous speech is to silence it.)

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that Coulter's "remarks that Jews needed to be perfected and America would be better off if everyone was Christian are deeply offensive and have been the classic language of anti-Semites throughout the millennia. She may have been a guest on CNBC's 'Big Idea,' but what she invoked is the oldest 'Bigoted Idea,' and she should apologize." (Good luck on that one, rabbi.)

Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."

That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.

It's a scandal that in this pluralist nation it falls to the voices of organized Jewry to make this case, because it is a case whose outcome is of the greatest consequence to us all. For too long we've pretended that the brutal political rhetoric that now characterizes our partisan politics can be quarantined, that it won't inevitably leach over into every other aspect of our lives. In fact, it's doing just that, and soon the coarse and vituperative language of the war between red and blue -- with it's instantaneous imputations of bad-faith and utter disrespect for minimal civility -- will begin to color aspects of our civil society where mutual respect is too crucial and hard won to tolerate this sort of risk.

It would be hard to find a better statment on how I feel about this. As a blogger, I'm a participant in this vituperative "war between red and blue," and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm not into conservative bigotry, however. I simply think that powerful argumentation is more effective than hare-brained ideological baiting.

While people can disagree on whether Coulter's anti-Semitic or stupid (Dennis Prager, a radio commentator and practicing Jew, defended her), Coulter didn't just misspeak: She crossed a line into sentiment that I can never condone.

UPDATE: Angevin over at The Oxford Medievalist also wrote about Coulter. I like this:

Besides being offensive, her problem, however, is two-fold. One, she's way too outrageous and abrasive, in a way that suggests that, whatever she says is solely meant to drum-up controversy and book sales.