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31 May 2008

Has the President Has Kept Us Safe?

Thane Rosenbaum doesn’t give the American public any credit for learning a lesson from the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001. In his OpEd in the May 30, 2008, Wall Street Journal, he congratulates President Bush for keeping us all safe for the past near seven years. What he doesn’t recognize is that the changes in our behavior while “waiting for terrorism’s second shoe to drop” may have been the real deterrent to a repeat of the horrific suicide airplane hijackings.

Our airport and airplane security tightened up. Our border security became more mission-oriented. Even passengers on our subways, buses and railways took to heart slogans like that on the New York MTA, “If you see something, say something.” The same behavior changes have, no doubt, occurred in other countries that have suffered terrorist attacks since 9/11, obviating repeat attacks in England and Spain, for example.

What is sure is that a liberal administration in Washington, respectful of civil liberties, would also have been congratulated by Mr. Rosenbaum for the safety from terrorism that is mainly attributable to a more vigilant public. The public is a lot more intelligent and adaptable than he gives them credit for. And, they may have achieved the same results without jeopardizing the lifeblood of our soldiers and of Iraqis, or the financial health and civil rights of our country.

28 May 2008

The Problem With Talking to Iran

Amir Taheri’s insightful analysis in the May 28, 2008, Wall Street Journal of a government’s two operating modes—as a nation-state or an ideological cause—ignores the fact that it was precisely by confusing those roles that the Bush Administration has sought to obfuscate the reasons for its invasion of Iraq. It is not in the interest of the American people that the U.S. adopt the mission of spreading democracy around the world.

Talking to Iran will require that the U.S. act as a nation-state, too. It takes two to tango. Likewise, Ahmadinejad and his boss, the Supreme Leader, are not appropriate counterparties for substantive talks about the real issues between Iran and the U.S. The Iranian nation has traditionally preferred authoritarian rule, but without ideological intolerance. They now realize that ideologically prejudiced authoritarian rule brings much worse dangers than potentially unwieldy democracy. However, they await assumption of power by a secular indigenous ruler.

When that happens, American desire for stability in the energy-rich region and conformance with customary international behavior will probably also be served. Therefore, it is up to us, through non-ideological and perhaps non-governmental means, to find true representatives of the Iranian nation-state to talk to and to support the establishment of rule that pursues that nation’s real interests.

25 May 2008

In McCain’s Court

It is odd for Jeffrey Toobin, in the May 26, 2008, New Yorker, to select as established law three controversial cases when defending the stare decisis conservatism of the Supreme Court. One of them was a majority opinion written by one of the avatars of using the judicial process to adapt the Constitution to changes in the zeitgeist—Douglas. The other two selected cases were decided when swing voters on the Court—O’Connor and Kennedy—sided with customary “legislators from the bench.”

No evidence is given, however, that the Constitution was ever meant to be interpreted by the Supreme Court in ways not intended by its original drafters and ratified by the confederating states. It is assumed to be settled law because in those three cases, as well as in others to be sure, a majority of Justices accepted it as one of their anointed powers.

The Constitution established a difficult procedure for amending its provisions. Its drafters intended to obviate frequent or easy modifications, and yet to allow for the correction of errors or “discovered faults”. This is highlighted in The Federalist Number 43. Changes in the social customs of the times, which led to the establishment of a right to privacy, a prohibition on juvenile death penalties, and a right to an abortion, must be counted as faults that could not have been anticipated, and are properly left to the amendment procedure provided in the Constitution.

If McCain’s Court would insist on reverting to the intention of the drafters of the Constitution, it would necessitate reformers of our system of government making the daunting effort to amend its articles of formation. Perhaps Senator Obama believes he can succeed in such an undertaking. (It might very well include an amendment to the Constitution that clearly authorized the third branch of government to adapt its articles to changing social circumstances, through decisions on controversial cases. Or it might outline a technologically modern method for amending the Constitution.)

In either case, a grass-roots campaign will be necessary in order to suit our laws to our radically changed social mores. Although our Constitution has served us well over the past two centuries, it no longer fulfills our needs without a more flexible means of amendment or specific authorization of modification by a panel of wise men. The latter solution is not likely to be accepted by the majority in a national referendum, and the Information Technology revolution has now made it unnecessary.

20 May 2008

The Foreign Policy Debate

Terrorists do not crave legitimacy and international acceptability, as stated by John R. Bolton in his OpEd article, “Bring On the Foreign Policy Debate” in the May 19, 2008, Wall Street Journal—just the opposite. They are, in fact, nihilists and bringing them to the negotiation table would begin to co-opt them into the circle of world order that we seek to defend.

Mr. Bolton sets up a false dichotomy between those who favor negotiations for the resolution of international disputes 99% of the time and those who “polyannishly” favor them all the time. In fact, constant dedication to the utility of negotiations does not exclude or delay the use of other tactics.

What made Chamberlain’s agreement with Nazi Germany a failed policy of appeasement was conducting those negotiations without removing the blinders from his eyes. Talking to the enemy should always be done with no delusions. Worse yet, we should not be deluded into believing that stiffing the enemy will accomplish more than feed our own pride. On the contrary, we cannot ignore the possibility that something beneficial to both sides may result even from negotiations that are adamantly opposed by political rivals.

19 May 2008

McCain Doctrine

In his thorough review of the process behind John McCain’s position on the Iraq War in the New York Times Magazine (“The McCain Doctrines,” May 18, 2008), Matt Bai waits until the final paragraphs to capture the essence of the Republican candidate’s convictions. Like General David Petraeus and other military experts, McCain can’t escape evaluating this and other conflicts, including Vietnam, within the boundaries defined by civilian authorities. For the military, that’s as it should be. However, Mr. McCain has long been a member of the civilian apparatus that is supposed to run things in this country. Whereas officials like President Bush rely on military views of the conflict as a convenience, Senator McCain does it as an unreformed habit.

Mr. Bai pegs McCain for not defining victory in Iraq beyond minimizing U.S. casualties and installing orderly democracy. The objective of the U.S. military has traditionally been effectively to enforce the security interests of the country as determined by our political leadership. In general, you don’t fight a war in order to win it; you fight it in order to achieve a political goal. When that political goal is only to protect our country’s ability to act willfully in international affairs—upsetting a cultural desire for authoritarian rule, for example—the effectiveness of our military is not the appropriate measure of the success of the war policy.

Our warriors may be competent to achieve a political goal, but their success is certainly not the standard for measuring the correctness of the policy. If it were, invasion and occupation of other countries with a minimum loss of the aggressor’s lives would be the height of accomplishment for any society. That’s certainly not the ideal we wish to choose for ourselves this election year.

16 May 2008

False Promise of Appeasement

I fear that President Bush and his sympathizers on the Right, including the Israeli Knesset, believe that those in the world who disagree with U.S. policy would feel they had accomplished their goals by just coming to sit at a negotiation table with U.S. officials. How unsure he is of controlling such a situation. Does he really believe that spending time to talk to someone who threatens to upset his orderly system would convince observers that he has nothing better to do?

Yes, it is advisable to define the terms of such a negotiation beforehand--it is always wise to prepare well for any meeting. It is not naïve to believe that going unprepared into a meeting that you hope to achieve an objective, it is just plain stupid. It is almost as vapid an activity to meet for the sake of meeting alone as to step into the public relations trap of a rival who has no better goal to achieve than to win the allegiance of sympathizers who need nothing more than a good show to earn their support. The advantages of order far outweigh the risks of chaos.

10 May 2008

Our Enemies

Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin and Khaled Meshal are only our enemies if global politics is a zero-sum game. (In fact, in a zero-sum game, they are all enemies of each other, too.) Some of those players are more subtle than Gabriel Schoenfeld shows himself to be in his OpEd article, “Our Enemies and the Election,” that appeared in the May 10-11, 2008, Wall Street Journal.

As long as we have a no-negotiation-in-any-circumstances attitude, there will never be a “victorious” end to the Iraq War. The fiction of a centralized terrorist movement called Al Qaeda, tying together merely co-sympathetic antiestablishment groups in Spain, Indonesia, the Levant, Pakistan, the Caucasus and elsewhere, has energized the U.S. war effort in Iraq. None of these supposed component groups is made up of cave-dwelling operatives. They are all as careful and well-informed as the Iraqi insurgents, something that can’t be said of our own Pentagon planners.

It will indeed be a smart strategy for the insurgents in Iraq to step up the violence in October in order to bring America to our senses that we have placed ourselves hostage to their own fratricide.

06 May 2008

Bottom-up Approach in Iraq

If the U.S. had adopted the bottom-up approach to building political order in Iraq from the beginning, as advocated by a State Department official on the 6 May 2008 “To the Point” KCRW radio program, we would have energetically supported sedition against the Saddam regime instead of invading the country. The terrible human suffering that this policy would have entailed would probably not have been any worse than was claimed as the justification for making the top-down intervention that took place in 2003. Shifting to this tack as part of the American exit strategy will also prolong the internecine conflict and bloodshed, although not as long as some have projected for successful counterinsurgency operations.

03 May 2008

Rules vs. Principles

The new financial regulatory scheme proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as described by James Surowiecki in his column in the April 28, 2008 New Yorker, “Parsing Paulson,” is suited to European cultures that still consider the Government as the grantor of human rights, including the right to do business. In the U.S., since the founding of our republic, we have acted on the basis that it was the people who granted the Government any of the rights it has to rule and regulate. This reflects our fundamental distrust of public officials and has meant the need to closely limit their discretionary power with detailed written laws and regulations.

A rules-based approach to regulation invites gaming the system, as Enron did, and attracts the smartest players to the most highly rewarded vocations—to private enterprise rather than to public sector employment. America would never stand for placing government officials in charge of enforcing even the best principles in the world. A market-regulated economy does indeed need to have boundaries on the freedom of participants to transgress on the liberty and property of other members of society. However, imperfections in drawing those borders can only be corrected after the fact, by a qualified and trusted adjudication system. That is the price we have always been content to pay for our freedom.

01 May 2008

You Kill Me

It’s unbelievable that there still are apologists for antinationalist warfare in keeping with the domino theory. In his essay in the May 1, 2008, Wall Street Journal, “Democrats and the Killing Fields,” Arthur Herman appears to attribute every foreign policy event that has been inimical to American interests over the past thirty years to the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

The U.S. should have learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union that it was enough to maintain our own economic and technological strength to protect our security against the perceived threat from a fruitless ideology. Shedding our own blood and that of the population of invaded countries was unnecessary and even counterproductive. Alas, the Iraq invasion is illustration that we have not learned that lesson. Nor has Mr. Herman.

Autocracy vs. Democracy

In his review of several political commentaries, “After America,” in the April 21, 2008 New Yorker, Ian Buruma implied that liberal democracies and particularly the United States had something to learn from autocracies like China about letting well enough alone. It seems, in fact, that the U.S. sometimes acts like an intermittent autocracy. The compulsion to instill democratic values in other societies by force would not be U.S. foreign policy if it were put to a vote; but between elections, the American people tend to let our government undertake bellicose international initiatives because they are recovering from electoral politics fatigue.

Autocratic states have governments or dictators that rule without check by the will of the people as much owing to the consent of a permanently sullen population as to forced subjugation. It takes a combination of wealth, education, and diligence for liberal democracy to emerge as the solution to the challenge of governance in any country. The correct mixture varies for each culture and, indeed, autocratic rule produces better public welfare in some societies than disorderly or incompetent democracy. The goal that we should strive for in the world is to create optimal living conditions for most people. Achieving that goal, and not blindly imposing the trappings of democracy, will more surely protect us from terrorism and insecurity.

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