The Whole Thing

Power Line: Grounds for Optimism

Hindrocket at the indispensable Power Line notes recent analysis and polling data that have led him to re-consider recent posts in which he downgraded Bush's re-election chances. His and Republican pollster Ed Goeas' comments on successful strategies of incumbent presidents should also help the rest of us to put the Clelands and Chaits, and Deans and Clarks, in perspective.

It often seems that one "Bush lied" lie after another is passing virtually uncontradicted into public consciousness, and that the causes and justifications for the war in Iraq have been systematically reduced and re-cast in their narrowest forms, rendered as straw man arguments where they are recalled at all. The occupation and incipient re-construction of Iraq have been reported in such a way that one bilious fool after another feels secure in declaring the situation "chaos" or "a mess" or "a disaster," even as a recovering U.S. economy is still being described in almost equivalent terms. We've seen this movie before, though few seem to remember the first-term "Reagan Recession," which coincided as well with a vigorous and sustained worldwide mass protest against Reagan's defense and foreign policies. Back then, the opposition didn't just disagree with or even merely hate Reagan. We (for I was one of them, as a very young man) believed that he and his policies posed an imminent threat to "The Fate of the Earth" - the title of a then-popular peace movement book by Jonathan Schell, who, as it happens, is haunting the same approximate locale twenty years later.

Needless to say, Reaganomics did not pave the way for an economic depression that was foreshortened only by nuclear apocalypse, but we don't need to go back a generation to draw comfort from history. It was not very long ago at all that a number of well-placed observers declared Afghanistan a quagmire - shortly before Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, and Kandahar fell in a precipitous cascade. And it was only a few months ago that exactly the same group of people were predicting that the war "on" Iraq would lead to a humanitarian, environmental, and military catastrophe. Not much later, once this war "on" Iraq had actually commenced, they were again shouting quagmire scarcely a week into the operation, inspired by a sandstorm and some pot-shots from Fedayeen in pick-ups. The famous "plan" was a "fiasco," and war opponents could hardly conceal the pleasure with which they anticipated the public beheadings of Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld.

Now, the very same group - from Michael Wolff to Howard Dean to every hopeless crackpot who ever leaked on a web site - are offering virtually identical judgments, and the only significant difference may be that they now are operating over a re-extended time scale. Combat, especially in its contemporary forms, accelerates and heightens everything. In the aftermath, both soldiers and civilian observers have to "come down," and re-adjust their minds and very physiologies to processes that play out over months and years rather than minutes and days. By this mathematics, as applied to the Bush's re-election strategy, the Summer and Fall of 2003 may correspond approximately to Week 2 of Operation Iraqi Freedom, with the battle of DC/Baghdad still a year-week away. In this light, the main dangers for the sober and uncracked among us remain twofold - overengagement and overconfidence. For our troops speeding to Baghdad, it made no sense either to slow down and confront every zealot determined to die for much-less-than-zero, or, on the other hand, to forget that there was a war on, that logistics needed to be handled properly and that real obstacles needed to be overcome. For President Bush and his team, it likewise makes no sense to lose their way in skirmishes with Ted Kennedy or Aaron Brown, but it also would be a serious mistake to enter the necessary battles over the Iraq supplemental appropriation or international support for reconstruction without careful preparation for victory.

In other words, as far as war, politics, the economy, and just about anything else that matters far too much to far too many for anyone to lose a night's sleep over, there is as ever much work to do, but things are still going inexpressibly better than any of us might reasonably have feared or expected last February, or all the more during the Fall of 2001. So long as current trends hold, the news is more likely to get better - capture or killing of Hussein and/or Bin Laden, free elections in Iraq, employment beginning to catch up with economic growth, international allies creeping back into the sheepfold. As for electoral politics, the strategy Bush appears to be pursuing versus his potential opponents is clearly the right one - as Hindrocket quotes Goeas:

[The] challengers have the luxury of being in a time period where they can criticize what they do not like while taking no accountability for their own proposals--that time will end when they have a nominee. It is also a phase of the campaign when the incumbent is organizing and collecting resources, but little response is given to the onslaught of attacks from those who want to be president. This is smart politics for two reasons: 1) there is no need to answer each and every attack from the opposition (better to focus on the nominee when there can be a certain amount of accountability for what he said/proposed early in the campaign season), and 2) the lack of a response usually causes a feeding frenzy among the opposition's presidential candidates, they get more bold, and they often say stupid things! Patience is the key for the incumbent.

Needless to say, there are wild cards out there: Democrats may, for instance, be thinking (I won't accuse them of "hoping") that a major EVENT may all at once provide them with a winning hand, but is it reasonable at all to presume that, for instance, a new 9/11 would cause the public to urge a less aggressive response to threats - that it would increase a public desire to think first about the feelings of our supposed allies, to await the results of UN deliberations, or to consult the world's assorted hedgers, opportunists, anti-American idelogues, and always-certain/never-right experts before committing ourselves to action? There are other examples that anyone could come up with - from assassinations and earthquakes to transformational scientific discoveries, events of the type that we futures traders refer to as "exogenous" (relative to internal market forces) - but by their very nature they are unpredictable, and grounds neither for optimism nor pessimism, and even less a reason to take too much to heart the next set of "bold... stupid things" the Bush-haters and fellow travelers come up with.

Max Cleland's Rage

Vietnam Veteran and former Democratic Senator Max Cleland lost his seat in 2002 partly because he was successfully depicted as too soft for the war on terror. He has lent confirmation to that charge, and to the late judgment of Georgia voters, through a widely syndicated op-ed in which he airs out one of the more obviously banal claims of contemporary political discussion: that Iraq is another Vietnam.

Leaving aside all questions as to whether, in the long view of history, the Vietnam War may be something other than the unambigous defeat for the the United States that conventional wisdom holds it to be, to believe that there is at this time anything remotely approaching a just comparison between Vietnam and Iraq requires acceptance of a series of absurdities. Partial list: More than a decade of warfare = a few weeks of major combat. Vietnamese casualties in the millions = a few thousand Iraqis. As for U.S. casualties, it would appear that in Cleland's mind over 50,000 = some 300. In terms of logistics, support and re-supply from Red China and the USSR = remnant Baathist arms caches.

None of this is to suggest that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq have been or will be easy, or that there are not some valid parallels to the circumstances of Vietnam, among many other American military involvements, but what Cleland actually offers in support of his dubious equivalence thesis amounts to a few empty generalizations, several obvious distortions and exaggerations, and a lot of bile. On the level of historical parallels, for instance, he tries to turn the misreported, vastly overblown "Niger-uranium" story into the equivalent of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Ignoring everything we know or have learned about the former (e.g., that what Bush said about Saddam and Niger in his 2003 State of the Union appears to have been both technically accurate and well-supported factually, or, to the larger point, that the item was one small factoid in a larger case that had already been definitively made and accepted months earlier), Cleland refers to it as both an "outright lie" and a "key piece" of intelligence meant to justify the war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was turned into a pretext for President Johnson's major escalation. Niger-uranium figured little in President Bush's Iraq war policy on any practical level: It has served at most as a kind of reverse Gulf of Tonkin - a phony pretext for the left's Summer propaganda offensive.

Throughout the op-ed, Cleland relies on numbingly manipulative rhetoric to describe what he calls a "disaster in the desert." Discussing the difficulties of occupation, he claims that "casualties continue to increase," while making no reference either to casualty rates over time or even to absolute numbers. (As David Warren has pointed out, until the dead commence to rise up and regain life, casualties can do nothing else but increase.) While indulging in apparent desperation to attack the president personally, Cleland then asserts that declarations of an end to "major combat" and the famous "Bring 'em on" taunt have led "as a result" to the loss of "more people in [the son's] war than his father [lost] in his...and there is no end in sight." The former Senator does not pause to explain how the utterances could have caused casualties to occur prior to the dates on which they were spoken, nor does he reveal when the enemies of the U.S. and the occupation assumed their Pavlovian dependency on rhetorical triggers. It's notable also that Cleland shifts ground in this statement: Instead of comparing the removal of Saddam's regime and the aftermath to Vietnam, we are now to compare it to the first Gulf War, a far simpler and much more tightly circumscribed operation, of which, according to a reasonable view of the laws of war and of recent history, the more recent fighting has been a continuation rather than a re-play.

To call the conclusions that flow from such hyberbole and nonsense "ill-founded" would itself be hyperbolic understatement. The argumentation offers better support for a different set of conclusions entirely, such as those reached by Georgia voters on Cleland's willingness to fight the war on terror. Thus, when Cleland stridently demands "bulletproof" intelligence prior to action, he confirms that he would prefer for a president to ignore threats from malefactors such as Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden, until it was too late to deal with them except at the greatest cost. At another point, Cleland recalls Tom Friedman's term for the kind of people who perpetrated 9/11, "non-deterrables," and, referring to Iraq, suggests that "[i]f those non-deterrables are already in their country, they will be able to wait you out until you go home." Cleland neglects the option of killing them until they are dead, and he also neglects to mention that Friedman defined this group as he did in order to argue in favor of combating them aggressively (precisely because they cannot be deterred), pointedly including the then-projected war in Iraq - the idea being that, 1) since they cannot be deterred, they must be attacked directly, and 2) the social and political conditions that create and support non-deterrability must be radically altered, among other things by confronting the autocratic regimes that hold so much of Islam in thrall.

In contrast to Friedman, Cleland seems to be suggesting that, when confronted by non-deterrables, our only choice is to run away, or to wait for them to attack us. He underlines the point in a variation on the same theme: "If the enemy adopts a 'hit-and-run' strategy designed to inflict maximum casualties on you, you may win every battle, but... you can't win the war." If there is any truth to this statement, then the future belongs to the world's most implacably murderous zealots, we have already lost this war and all the wars that will follow until we are reduced to the same conditions and tactics. Of course, if there ever was any truth to this statement, then few of the wars that have ever been fought would ever have been won by either side - since some version of these tactics is always available, and since they are very frequently tried.

Reading through such material, it's hard to avoid the perception that Cleland's judgment has been overwhelmed by bitterness, and that, in this article as in associated TV appearances and other activities, he is now seeking a pound of flesh from the White House, whose operatives have been blamed (or, as some may prefer, credited) for a Saxby Chambliss campaign that included a TV ad juxtaposing photos of Cleland and Osama Bin Laden. Whether or not the White House actually had anything directly to do with the ad or even with Chambliss's victory is probably beside the point. Even under normal circumstances, the loss of a Senate seat would likely have been injury enough to earn Cleland's undying enmity, but the added insult, which Cleland must perceive as a kind of electoral terrorism directed at himself, may have turned that enmity into the kind of hatred that obliterates fine distinctions. Whether or not George W. Bush personally signed off on associating a triple-amputee war veteran and sitting senator with probably the most reviled individual in the history of this country, the failure to denounce the ad is probably enough for Cleland to make Bush and the rest of his regime guilty of harboring the terrorist Chambliss.

For those of us who support the president and oftimes bewail the harsh and unfair invective directed against him, it may be worth recalling that both sides have often played political "hardball" in the last few years, but the fact that those on our side have also been guilty of excesses does not require us to fall silent and cede the field. The stakes are much higher than any individual's hurt feelings, even when that individual's personal biography is as impressive and exemplary as Cleland's. Few among us can claim to have sacrificed even a fraction of what Cleland has sacrificed, and far fewer still can state with confidence that, having suffered the injuries he suffered, we would have risen to life's challenges as he must have, but by the same token we may wonder whether the anger that many of us might have felt in his place, alleviated and repressed during his long rehabilitation and the political career he gained, is now emerging under the pressure of his own personal setbacks. It may very well be that Cleland has experienced recent events as the second most traumatic of his life, leading to the release of powerful withheld emotions. One might even ask whether the hostility he is expressing for the current president has not in some part been displaced from its true, though long-dead objects.

Such analysis might be dismissed as amateur psychology, but it may explain at least in part why Cleland cannot resist saying things that he must know are false, ridiculous, and even vile. The concluding sentences of his op-ed, which manage to be odious and pathetic at the same time, remain very much those of a man who has been thrown back to a time of tragedy and horror in his life, and who not only wishes to hold someone responsible, but also sustains fantasies of vengeance: "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President," he writes, then adds, disjunctively, "Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance." Making much sense of this self-entangled outburst is difficult, as the two statements contradict each other in tense and content. What binds them together is pure rage. In drawing attention to Cleland's own experience, they seem to wish not just his historical knowledge but even his wounds on George W. Bush.

Neither Bush, nor America, nor US troops have arrived in Cleland's Vietnam - a place of anguish, debilitation, and endless lies, to which Cleland, however, seems to have returned, and where he seems now to wait, alone and unrequited. If it is not already too late, those who are encouraging and facilitating him in such exercises would do well to re-consider before his personal victory over inestimable obstacles has fully reverted to the tragic outlines he once so heroically re-drew.

Why Do You Hate George, Johnny?

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.

These first two sentences of Jonathan Chait's current New Republic cover story would seem more appropriate to a confession than a polemic, and, in the rest of this introductory paragraph, which moves from a brief mention of policies to a series of petty and parochial, rather literally adolescent reactions to the person of President Bush, one can see why Chait might feel embarrassed:

[Bush] reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

Chait seems to sense that there's something wrong with these remarks - that they may reveal at least as much about him as they do about George W. Bush - but, rather than facing the implications of his own words, he seeks refuge in numbers:

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling." Columnist Robert Novak described it as a "hatred ... that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching." [...and so on.]

"Why do you hate George, Johnny?"

"Cuz everyone does!"

Answering a challenge from Hugh Hewitt, who believes that Chait's principal though unstated motivation comes down to envy, other bloggers have analyzed the body of Chait's article in some detail (Hugh promises to provide links as the pieces are published). Their work is welcome, but it seems to me that Chait (even his name contains the word "hate," and would be indistinquishable from it for certain non-native speakers of English) has already fisked himself: He has made it clear that his feelings are irrational, crucially non-political, and altogether uncontrollable - that, in short, his judgments on any subject relating to Bush simply cannot be trusted, and are therefore unlikely even to be worth the time it takes to sort them out. Still, even if Chait disqualifies himself as an observer, the phenomenon that he both examines and represents remains deserving of attention - not least because a more probing analysis can lead to insights of the sort offered by Hindrocket over at Power Line. After working through the predictably tendentious, convoluted, and dishonest argumentation that Chait deploys in an inevitably hopeless attempt to justify Bush-hatred as "a logical response to the events of the last few years" - a "logical" hatred? - Hindrocket finds a more persuasive explanation of the phenomenon, even while taking Hewitt's theme a step further:

The ascendancy of President Bush and his popularity with the American people threatens to put the final nail in the coffin of liberalism. Millions of people whose self-images have been shaped by their conviction that they are better, more moral, and above all smarter than their fellow Americans are faced with the prospect that they have been, after all, on history's losing side. And that thought is, for many of them, too much to bear. Hence, I think, the hate. Bush is a criminal, a fraud and a liar. He has to be.

In other words, Chait could hardly be more wrong. Hatred is not, as it cannot be, a logical response to Bush either as a human being or as a politician, or even to whatever events Chait associates with him: It is not the logical but rather the only response left to those who in the very act reveal themselves to be incapable of responding logically - that is, with coherent analysis, effective proposals, the basis of a positive political vision. Instead, they choose a refusal of logic, the defiance of logic - a flight from a set of logical implications, and the hostile assertion of fantasy in their place. Logic applies only to the process, not to the content. It's a logic of desperation, one that compels the representatives of an empty, senescent, almost purely reactionary political movement, as they sense that all reason has turned against them, to commit themselves wholly to the irrational.

Islamic Fascism Not The Main Danger

Nelson Ascher at Europundits seems almost on the verge of despair over the ability of America to prosecute this war successfully, especially in light of the apparent incomprehension, re-assumed complacency, and even opposition of so many in the West. As he points out, quite rightly:

There are many who, probably sincerely, don’t believe in the very reality of the war. There are others who are on the other side. Even on this side of the conflict, there’s much disagreement about how serious is the war, who is the enemy, what would constitute victory and how it should be attained.

Part of the difficulty people have in understanding the stakes in this war - what some have called "World War IV" - may be that the main existential threat to the West, or what we still call over here "the American way of life," does not come chiefly from Islamic fascism. The struggle may be better understood as having several dimensions, including the Free World vs. Islamo-fascism, but also including democratic capitalism vs. collectivism as well as North vs. South and Order vs. Chaos.

The U.S. remains the leader of the Free World, the main Northern power, the center of democratic capitalism, and the chief guarantor of world order. Currently, the most vigorous challenge to U.S. ascendancy is coming from the Islamists, while the collectivists (virtually everyone in the "peace" camp) and the forces of chaos (rising regional powers) seem to be investigating the potential to exploit America's distraction. In the longer term, the greatest threat to citizens of the Free World is posed less by disparate terrorist assailants or Islamist ideological beachheads, than by collectivism and chaos, and in this regard Islamic fascism may not deserve its own separate category, but rather may stand as one peculiar collectivism making its own bid for regional (or possibly multi-regional) power. The danger is less that the Muslim armies will come marching through Berlin, London, and Washington than that a forced withdrawal of the US from security responsibilities would inspire other regional powers all around the globe to make similar bids.

In this scenario, the likelihood both of increasingly bloody wars, involving ever more advanced weaponry, and of vast economic disruption would increase to the point that almost anything except for a century remarkably more peaceful than the last one became possible.

If The Unthinkable Is Thinkable, Then It's Also Political

Jeff at Caerdroia and Wretchard at The Belmont Club offer some provocative speculation on the logic of escalation applied to a nuclearized war on terror. What, they ask, would or should be the response if, at some point in the not too distant future, Islamist terrorists succeed in obliterating an American city?

Wretchard argues that, once the threshold has been passed, the logic of escalation would almost inevitably lead to the complete destruction of the Islamic world. In his view the key question would be at what point we, the West, accepted the inevitable, and concluded the conflict on terms most favorable to ourselves. Jeff envisions us first applying massive retaliation against the most radical Islamist powers, then waiting to see how the second, third, and fourth tier Islamic nations reacted.

Though many readers might consider such speculations to be, in a word, insane, or, in a different word, MAD, they may be useful at least to the extent that they open a space for us to think about the supposedly unthinkable.

While Wretchard envisions the logic of escalation as unitary and inexorable, Jeff is more open to assessing this prospect of nuclear war, even nuclear war with terrorists, in more Clausewitzian terms - that is, as a continuation of politics by other means, and therefore susceptible to a political analysis. In a way the question comes down to whether or not the nuclear annihilation of an American city would mean the end of politics.

I believe the war on terror remains political, and would remain so even under the extreme circumstances envisioned by these other writers. I also see no reason to accept Wretchard's assumptions, however interesting they may be, when they lead him to imagine Islamic terrorists launching repeated nuclear attacks in an attempt to "carry out the execution" of condemned America, even while America is busily obliterating the Islamic world on the inexorable way to a final solution.

The aims of the Islamists may seem fantastical and absurd to us, but they remain political and strategic: Their primary objectives focus on the Islamic world itself and their position within it against whatever forces of relative moderation. For the longer term vis-a-vis the West, they believe themselves directed to seek the conversion or enslavement of non-Muslims, not genocide for its own sake.

Whatever a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda chose for their first "demonstration," it would be for the sake of delivering or reinforcing political demands and advancing a power-political agenda, not merely for the sake of murdering infidels - just as the 9/11 attacks had political purposes that went far beyond decreasing the infidel population by several thousand. If in the future Al Qaeda overreaches even further, then the US might respond with massive retaliation of some kind, but, even then, our aims would very likely remain political up to and including the point where we believed the survival of the nation was in jeopardy.

Left At A Loss

Norman Geras, one of the most articulate pro-war leftists in the blogosphere (among other spheres) wrote recently of exchanges with anti-war leftists whose responses to him frequently have been crass and insulting, but have rarely engaged his views directly. The whole thing (TWT, hereinafter) seems to have left him somewhat at a loss, for clearly, from any rationally identifiable "left" point of view, removing the Baathist regime has to be a good thing in itself, and could well have been seized by internationalists as their own cause.

Actually, the motivations and underlying position of his comrades may be quite simple, if rarely stated explicitly.

It appears to me that the implicit, usually unstated difference between Geras and his comrades is that they hold their "anti-imperialist" project, which they conceive to be crucially an anti-American project, to be of greater importance than the fate of the Iraqi people. Geras would appear, on the other hand, either not to share their commitments or definitions regarding said project, or not to consider opposing US war policy to be of high relevance to it.

If the issues are not often described in this way, it may be because most anti-war leftists remain unwilling to admit - at least in public discourse, perhaps even to themselves - that they hold the fates of almost any number of Iraqi or other victims to be secondary in importance, at best. Many seem to have convinced themselves that their intellectual or emotional opposition to Saddam, or the occasional wishful fantasies of some alternative to war for having removed his regime, somehow means they have not acted as his objective allies, and the emotionalism of their reactions to the charge tends to support the idea that mechanisms of denial and displacement are at work. Some seem to be acting mainly out of parochial hostility to the parties in power in Washington and London. Some lack the maturity or ability to consider larger contexts, strategic concerns, or matters of any complexity at all. Many of the rest, representing the committed and politically self-conscious left, avoid stating their positions clearly, mainly because doing so would put their political alliances and public profiles at risk.

Though I am no longer a Marxist socialist, haven't been in years, and don't even consider myself on the left anymore, I very much appreciate the views of pro-war leftists such as Geras and Hitchens. I remain curious, however: If they could be persuaded that weakening the US was critical to bringing about socialism or some other great advance for their cause (revolution, if they are revolutionaries), and that, specifically, frustrating US policy in Iraq might hasten the adoption of socialism worldwide by a generation at least, would they then find themselves able to set aside the plight of the Iraqis and whatever immediate harms and uncertainties a US failure would imply?

My guess is that many of Geras' opponents within the left have accepted some calculus along these lines, and clearly have answered affirmatively. In short, Iraq is and was simply a pretext and a side-issue for them. It appears that, in their view, defeating America/ capitalism/ globalization/ militarism/ whatever was and remains more important than deposing some individual despot could be under almost any circumstances. Among other things, this approach is at least as "strategic" as any advanced by American neoconservatives, and, understood as such, would at least be rationally debatable.