In a wildly confused front-page Washington Post story today (19 July), Michael Abramowitz asserts that President Bush is “facing a new and swiftly building backlash on the right over his handling of foreign affairs.”
Abramowitz claims “conservative intellectuals and commentators” are infuriated by perceived “timidity and confusion about long-standing problems” ranging from Iran to North Korea to Lebanon. Kenneth Adelman tops the cake by accusing President Bush of middle-of-the-road “Kerryism.” By “conservatives,” Abramowitz is mostly referring to “neoconservatives” – no doubt the many who went apoplectic when the Bush Administration recently appeared to shift gears on Iran and even to de-emphasize the “regime change” mantra.
Yet burried within Abramowitz essay is a vague reference to yesterday’s startling WaPo essay by traditional “conservative” columnist George Will. Will argues first that the Administration’s core hope that the democratic “infection” emanating from the democracy imposed on Iraq has, at best, produced democratic movements prone to extremism. He then rejects Secretary Rice’s rejoinder that democatic turmoil and “violence” is unavoidable.
“that argument creates a blind eye: It makes instability, no matter how pandemic or lethal, necessarily a sign of progress. Violence as vindication….”
Yet Will saves his most choice words for attacks on the Administration coming from what he deems to be a radically un-conservative and different direction, one
so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious dynamics of the Middle East are opaque to most people, but to the Weekly Standard — voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, “neoconservatism” — everything is crystal clear: Iran is the key to everything . (emphasis added)
“No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of Iran, no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support for Syria . . .” You get the drift. So, the Weekly Standard says:
“We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions — and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.”
Will is referring to the essay by The Weekly Standard’s editor, William Kristol, in the July 24th issue. Will takes up Kristol’s flip question, “Why wait?”
Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if Bashar Assad’s regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard’s hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?
As for the “healthy” repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication’s powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation’s behalf before all of the surprises — all of them unpleasant — that Iraq has inflicted.
Here, I agree with Will – and I say that as the father of a young American officer in the US Reserves. (He signed up for ROTC in the weeks after 9/11 – his idea, not mine – for another time.) I have long been suspicious of how neoconservative “chicken-hawks” seem all too “cavalier” about the utility of US power — and to risking the lives of other people’s sons and daughters.
About the only bright spot I’ve seen in Bush Administration statements on the Lebanon crisis thus far has been an apparent hesitation about holding Iran directly responsible for catalyzing the crisis. Perhaps this relates to the Administration’s unspoken recognition that the US militarily is already stretched too thin, even before factoring in the radicalizing effects of the Israeli raids into Lebanon on both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kristol’s zest for using the Lebanon crisis as a pretext for bombing and/or invading Iran also happens to square the circle for a nagging question I’ve seen expressed in other private forums by “conservative” friends of mine – namely, just what was behind the “furious” Israeli response to Hizbullah’s provocative capture of the Israeli soldiers?
Consider the angst, as noted above, from neoconservatives aimed at the signs that the US and Iran might have been working on a “grand bargain” (without calling it as such) to address multiple grievances by both sides, while also building on common interests and goals. As such, wasn’t it rather convenient for those wishing to put the kabash on that prospect to see a major conflict break out between Israel and the “pro-Iranian” (whatever that means) Hizbullah?
Perhaps a snarky remark, but one part of “containment” is demonstrating to the citizens of “the other side” that life is better here. That requires all that boring good government stuff that liberals love to worry about, but conservatives (especially the current crop) do not. War is easier because it’s not that hard to make life in the US better than in an actual war zone.
I recall, once upon a time, the mantra “run government like a business”, and one thing that businesses do now is measure performance, and work to improve those metrics (good businesses are also careful to sanity-check what they choose to measure). Our national metrics are crap, and the crowd in charge is also working hard to get us to focus on the wrong metrics (average income, vs. median, or percent in poverty).
(I almost wrote “ruin government like a business” — perhaps the Republicans have a typo in their mission statement, perhaps they don’t and I was hearing it wrong all along.)
The Abramowitz WP article obscures the war skepticism of Buckley, Will, Buchanan,
and assorted paleocons who doubt any positive outcome in Iraq or Afghanistan. It simply espouses the frustration of the ruling AEI, Kristol, and evangelical right factions who want to escalate counter-insurgency in Iraq and expand the war to Iran and Syria. Rice cannot really believe that more war would be good, and Rumsfeld knows US are stretched thin, but W’s ear and heart are still open to “heroic” pleads for expanded war, especially because the present situation offers no pleasing exits. Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah seem prepared to test the odds that the US cannot act, which only makes the outlook more dangerous.
Chances are, however, that the ugly dilemmas will simply drag into 2008 and that neigher US party will dare to propose any fundamentally different.
Question for “dr2chase”: exactly what policies raise median income or lower the % in poverty? Expenditures on public education seem to have little correlation or reinforce existing social distributions: those at the bottom tend to stay there. In a free market of goods and labor, aren’t the contraints and ceilings set by factor prices in Mexico, China, or India? Would you pay 200% more for clothing and appliances so that US born laborers earn, say, a 25% wage increase?
exactly what policies raise median income or lower the % in poverty?
If the answers were certain, you’d like to think we’d be doing them already. A more progressive tax code would be good for a start. National health would probably be a good idea — 20+ countries spend far less than we do, live long, have lower infant mortality, and more healthy years. Not having to pay for health care takes some of the sting out of poverty.
We’ve got to get away from faith-based birth control. Too many kids get derailed by ignorant mistakes because they either don’t know any better, or else they don’t know what obligation they take on or risk by not being more careful.
Our penal code is screwed. We’re spending money throwing people in prison who don’t belong there, and we don’t much care to be sure that they are better people when they emerge. Again, kids make stupid mistakes, we need to make sure that they get a chance to recover from their stupidity. So make the prisons more humane, vastly expand drug treatment, perhaps decriminalize/legalize marijuana and the opiates. Also spend a ton of money on PSAs telling people how stupid it is to get addicted to a drug. Maybe the government should be in the business of selling the addictive drugs, at cost, so as to ensure that it is very unstylish and very unsexy.
We need to get it through our heads that education is expensive, wiill remain expensive, and will get more expensive. Good teachers are trained professionals, who could just as easily have chosen some other high-education profession earlier in life. If their salaries do not grow approximately as quickly as their alternatives, people will stop choosing to teach, or we will need to lower standards. It Does Not Matter that teachers are not actually “more productive” in the sense of educating a larger number of children; if we choose not to pay them enough, they are free to change jobs, and ultimately they will. (And yes, big city schools are a mess, and I do not know why or how. I live next door to Cambridge, they spend about 3x per student what we do, and have a lot less to show for it. So I have all the answers, except for that one 🙂
I am very very reluctant to push for trade barriers, but the economic models that say that free trade is good use broad definitions of “general welfare”. It’s mathematically much easier to use norms (metrics) that overweight the rich getting richer (this requires its own digression). I am quite happy to have a more efficient global economy, with higher taxes (which we should be more able to pay, because of the more efficient global economy) to help out those people who fall through the cracks.
And, further coupled with free trade, should be some assurance that the workers on the other end are free to organize, etc. It’s no surprise that prison labor undercuts a free person’s wage.
Because of the nature of the current conflict, we should work hard to make it clear that life here is better in every possible way. We’ve got way too much violence against women, we’ve got way too much violent crime [a result of our decadent lifestyles, right? We need to show that when women (or men!) “dress like harlots”, nothing bad happens]. Our literacy rate is too low, our infant mortality is a complete scandal. We’ve got too much jingoistic anti-religious crap floating around, for all religions that aren’t Christianity (a former Iranian manager recalls notes left on her car in college, calling her a “sand nigger”). All this “our-lawyers-say-it’s-not-torture” and extraordinary rendition has got to stop. It’s immoral, it’s war crimes, it’s a black mark on all of us, and it doesn’t even work that well (a recent issue of the New Yorker includes an article about an Arabic-speaking FBI agent, who managed to get quite a lot of information from an Al Qaeda member with plain old talk and civil treatment).
The mathematical digression: the easiest “norms” (ways of reducing a bag of numbers to a single number) are typically L1 (the sum) and L2 (square root of sum of squares — Euclidean distance). Because of how incomes are distributed, both of these overweight the incomes of the rich and underweight the poor. A better measure is a percentile, such that you can say “at least 50% of the people are doing better than this”. We can argue about which percentile is best, but the median is customary. The reason our current policies are doing a poor job at improving median income or reducing the percentage in poverty is that this is not what they are designed to do. Those are not the numbers that get most widely reported — when someone says “the economy is growing”, they are almost certainly talking about GDP, meaning the sum total, and paying no attention to who gets what. So, for starters, we should never, ever, report the GDP, without also discussing median income, employment rates, and poverty rates. Simply including the other metrics in every economic discussion would be a huge change.
I could go on — just for example, I think our policy w.r.t. South and Central America are a disaster, and it makes me crazy that we are more willing to outsource work 12 time zones away when we have an entire underutilized continent in the same hemisphere. Imagine, if during the Reagan years, we had worked to be nicer than the commies, instead of selling missiles to Iran to fund a war in Nicaragua. Even my grandfather, with politics to the right of Al Haig, thought it was a scandal that kids in this country were not taught Spanish by default.
(How’s that for a rant?)
dr2chase: that’s one of the nicest succinct statements of what we could be doing with the resources of the country that I’ve ever read. Thanks!