Guilt by association: General Petraeus and the company he keeps

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it didn’t take long, did it? General Petraeus, who wrote the book on counter-insurgency fighting, whose Princeton PhD. dissertation analyzed the bloody consequences of the withdrawal from Vietnam, who was unanimously confirmed by Congress when appointed as Iraqi commander, is now officially a liar and a right-wing stooge.

Why? It appears to be a combination of two factors: the surge is having some positive results and Petraeus is reporting that fact, and he gave an in-depth interview to the likes of Hugh Hewitt (labeled a lunatic by Matthew Iglesias at the Atlantic Online, who also says—without really explaining why—that no one should go on Hewitt’s show).

If you actually read the interview transcript, it appears that Hewitt has somehow managed to keep from foaming at the mouth as he queries Pertraeus, whose answers to Hewitt’s questions seem judicious and measured. The General offers some good news, it’s true, but also some bad news about the surge—the latter including the spotty reliability of Iraqi forces, for example.

No one who reads the article with an open mind could find much actual evidence on which to question either Petraeus’s competence or his efforts at candor and balance. Ah, but that doesn’t stop those partisans on the Left who have a powerful interest in the surge not working, and in discrediting anyone—even a man with the impeccable credentials of Petraeus—who might have the gall to say otherwise.

And so they are killing the messenger by concentrating on criticism of the receiver of the message: Hewitt, who is indeed a partisan. As, of course, are they.

Here’s Hewitt’s response. In it he quotes Andrew Sullivan as saying:

….such a decision to cater to one party’s propaganda outlet [the Hewitt interview] renders Petraeus’ military independence moot,” Sullivan declared. “I’ll wait for the transcript,” he continued, before not waiting for the transcript. “But Petraeus is either willing to be used by the Republican propaganda machine or he is part of the Republican propaganda machine. I’m beginning to suspect the latter. The only thing worse than a deeply politicized and partisan war is a deeply politicized and partisan commander. But we now know whose side Petraeus seems to be on: Cheney’s. Expect spin, not truth, in September.”(emphasis added.)

So, let’s summarize. Despite his previous reputation as a knowledgeable man and a straight shooter (and all of that “supporting the troops” stuff on the part of the Left/liberals), if a commander gives an interview to someone on the Right, his veracity is immediately and deeply suspect. Petraeus is only allowed to give interviews to the NY Times and the Boston Globe and the New Yorker and the Nation—outlets that may not even be asking to interview him, for all we know—or his entire reputation is trashed.

It’s guilt by association, and there’s no need to point out the parts of the interview that are suspect; it’s the thing itself. The only good—and nonpartisan—interview would apparently be one with Seymour Hersh.

It’s not as though Petraeus has only been interviewed by Hewitt or the Right, either. Here’s a bunch of his recent interviews with venues that seem fairly varied: CBS and CNN to balance out Fox, for example.

The grouping includes a quote from Harry Reid in late April saying that he won’t believe Petraeus if he says there’s progress in Iraq, because whatever the General may say to the contrary, it isn’t happening there. Now, there’s another truly open and nonpartisan mind, like Sullivan’s and Iglesias’s.

And they call Petraeus biased.

Greetings from San Francisco

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m in San Francisco for a few days for a family get-together. It’s the usual beautiful summer here, with clear skies and only an intermittent bit of the fog for which the city is famous, just enough to give a slightly mysterious atmospheric mist now and then.

I arrived very late Thursday night and didn’t get to the house where I’m staying until the wee hours of the morning. Between the rigors of travel and the late hour, by the time I finally got to sleep I was fairly well-zonked.

Which explains why the earthquake failed to even wake me up.

The next morning people were talking about it. As earthquakes go, it was relatively mild, but there was enough of a kick in it that even the natives woke up, sat up, and took notice. Not me.

This, however, continues a long tradition of mine, which is this: far more often than chance would dictate, a noticeable earthquake occurs within twelve hours of my appearance in any city in the state of California. So, perhaps I should issue an alert when I’m about to arrive.

Terrorism and American geographic exceptionalism

The New Neo Posted on by

One aspect of the traditional idea of American Exceptionalism included the notion that its geography kept the US safe from foreign invasion. This was historically true for the most part.

Pearl Harbor was the singular exception, as far as I know, and it constituted an attack rather than an invasion. Although shocking to the American public, it occurred very far away, in a territory rather than a state, involved military targets, and was perpetrated by a nation at war (not with us—not yet—but at war nevertheless).

Even in World War II the logistics were such that it was not practical to invade or even to attack the US mainland, although there were some attempts at small-scale sabotage.

The post-WWII spread of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union ushered in something quite new: a Cold War between ideological enemies armed with weapons that could destroy either nation. My generation therefore was the first one brought up with the idea that American geographic exceptionalism had effectively ended.

However, mutual assured destruction—or perhaps the relative sanity of the two nation-players—meant that despite the long duration of the Cold War and the bitterness with which it was fought in non-nuclear proxy wars such as Vietnam, the US remained uninvaded and unattacked, which may have allowed us to consider ourselves relatively invulnerable. And the fall of the Soviet Union only compounded this feeling.

That was true until 9/11, an event that had various unique characteristics. Not only was it the only attack on the mainland, it involved civilian targets, and was perpetrated by an extra-national group that had declared war on the US but had previously been seen as ineffectual, and by actors who had been living among us.

On 9/11 that group was spectacularly successful. But because of its shadowy and terrorist nature it was poorly understood by most people in this country, who had to try to play catch-up to learn what al Qaeda stood for and why it had seen fit to attack us in such a manner. This hasn’t been easy, since al Qaeda’s reasoning is both murky and seems quite different from traditional Western, state-motivated, casus belli.

That difficulty allows the various groups in the West to fill in the blanks in accord with our various positions, agendas, and philosophies. Are the terrorists rational actors, or rageful zealots? Can they be stopped by reason and/or concessions, or can they only be killed? Is this true, as well, of the states they are allied with, such as Iran? If killed, will that fact motivate more people to join this particular cult in love with death, or will it discourage the recruitment of jihadis?

There’s also a divide between those who see that in this technological age such groups do threaten us in a major way, and must be stopped, and those who consider them to be largely incompetent and easily contained.

The former group realizes that, to terrorists, American geographic exceptionalism is no more. The modern global economy and its enhanced communications and flow of material, the extraordinary number of foreigners already residing in this country with more entering all the time (both legally and illegally), and the relative ease of obtaining weapons with a destructive power that heretofore was limited to states, have ended that. 9/11 had the extra added feature of allowing us to see that extraordinary strategic creativity (for want of a better word) could allow terrorists to use ordinary devices such as airplanes as weapons of great destructive power.

As far as “invasion” goes—traditional invasion is no longer necessary to attack the US. Another way of looking at it is that an invasion has already occurred—albeit of mostly peace-loving immigrants and visitors who are intent on minding their own business. But among those millions terrorists can hide, as they did prior to 9/11, and can hatch plans to wreak various forms of destruction.

This was known as a possibility before 9/11, but was not really credited. Now instead of a hypothetical, it is a fact. One of the other myths that was exploded—along with 3,000 people—on 9/11 was that foreigners who actually have lived in this country for any length of time would come to appreciate it, or at least to like Americans well enough to lose the intense hatred that would make them capable of committing the mass murder of innocent civilians. We Americans consider ourselves to be a genial society. The persistence of the rage of the 9/11 perpetrators in the face of somewhat lengthy stays here for many of them was a shock of major proportions.

It’s been almost six years since 9/11, and those years have featured no significant organized terrorist attacks on our shores, despite our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, actions which certainly could be considered provocative. People of different political persuasions interpret this fact in ways that stem from their own pre-existing notion of things, because the truth is that we don’t know exactly why this has been true.

Many on the Right consider the lack of post-9/11 terrorist attacks here to be a combination of two things: anti-terrorist efforts by this administration nipping such plans in the bud, as well as the knowledge of the terrorists themselves that it would be in their interests not to provoke the American public into more forcible retaliation and awareness. If the American public is somewhat of a sleeping giant right now, then let sleeping giants lie.

Many on the Left consider the lack of successful post-9/11 attacks here as evidence that the terrorists are weak and incompetent (inherently so; not from anything the Bush administration has done, of course!) and that 9/11 was a rare exception, never again to be repeated. For this reason, all announcements of the thwarting of new plots must be trivialized and/or considered to be propagandist inventions of the nefarious Bushies. But in addition, I wonder whether the attitude of the Left is somehow a remnant of the long-held idea of geographic exceptionalism; certainly the Left considers America exceptional, although ordinarily in a negative way.

And so, divided we stand. Or sleep. Whether an awakening will occur, and whether it will be a rude one, is everybody’s guess.

Apologists for terror: liberty vs. social equality

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been reading a collection of essays in the book The Survival of Culture by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. In a piece entitled “Burke and Political Liberty,” by Martin Greenberg, the author is discussing the French Revolution and its excesses, and how it was that so many political figures of the time made excuses for the path the Jacobins took.

For example, the relatively moderate Roland defended them by saying that their “vengeance mingled a sort of justice,” and praised them for showing restraint in not murdering everyone they could.

It turns out that Roland’s own wife ended up being the victim of the revolutionaries’ “sort of justice,” at which point he killed himself. But that was later.

Greenberg’s summary of the position of apologists for the Reign of Terror is well worth reading, and is relevant today when thinking of the many Leftists in the West who have become apologists for a different form of terror—the Islamist totalitarian variety:

How did intelligent, cultivated people, then and later, come to excuse these abominations which ordinary simplicity sees for what they are? One answer, of course partial, seems to be the deep shift, anticipated by Rousseau, of moral feeling away from concern for liberty to concern for social justice.

For “social justice” please substitute any of the following: social equality, racial equality (or “justice”), ethnic equality (or “justice”), cultural equality (or “justice”), and economic equality (or “justice”) and you have the motivation behind much of Leftist thought and action. The fact that such equality is a fake “justice,” the fact that it cannot actually be attained by human society, and the fact that all efforts towards achieving it end up profoundly compromising liberty are ignored by its champions, who have as much difficulty now giving up their Utopian dream as they did then.

Perhaps more.

Democrats on Iraq: what, us worry?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know whether it shocks you, but it still has the capacity to shock me that the Democrats don’t seem to care about the consequences of their current stance on Iraq.

Perhaps that’s the best indication that they are not actually interested in implementing those policies, and that their real goal is to position themselves as antiwar in order to win the 2008 elections.

As the very liberal LA Times points out (registration necessary to read the article), advocates of precipitous withdrawal have failed to devise a strategy for the bloodbath that even they acknowledge will almost surely follow.

There are many among you who say that I shouldn’t be surprised, and that my reaction is the mere tattered and naive remnant of my lifelong liberal Democrat allegiance. And naivete is hardly in short supply right now among the Democrats when looking at how to deal with the consequences were we to withdraw before calming the situation down in Iraq (this naivete, by the way, was matched by some on the other side who failed to plan for the scope and viciousness of the postwar battle there).

According to the article:

Many congressional Democrats also say that a U.S. withdrawal would encourage Iraq’s neighbors, such as Iran and Syria, to play a more constructive role in resolving the conflict.

“I believe, if we leave, the region will pull together,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), a founding member of the influential House Out of Iraq caucus. “It’s important to them that Iraq stabilize.”…

But aside from broad calls for a diplomatic effort to work with Iraq’s neighbors and more involvement by international organizations, such as the United Nations, most Democrats have no “Plan B,” should a withdrawal yield chaos.

My favorite Democratic “leader,” Harry Reid, has another solution:

Some proponents of a withdrawal declined to discuss what the United States should do if the violence increases.

“That’s a hypothetical. I’m not going to get into it,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said.

Okay, Harry. Next question?

More congressional theater on Iraq: the Senate’s all-nighter

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprise, surprise! The Senate pulled an all-nighter, but the Democratic leadership failed to garner enough votes to change anything in Iraq.

That “surprise, surprise” comment of mine was, of course, sarcastic, because it could not possibly have come as a surprise to Reid and company that they lacked the sixty votes necessary to force the proposed movement on the issue of troop withdrawal.

But actually succeeding was probably not the point for the Democrats; if they did, they might start looking a lot worse than they do now—although that’s bad enough—when the withdrawal becomes real (and dirty) rather than imaginary (and clean).

The Democrats have gone forward and put antiwar bill after antiwar bill to the vote, hoping perhaps for the magic formula to reach that all-important number: sixty. But so far the math just won’t parse.

That hasn’t stopped the flow of bills, however, because the secondary agenda (or come to think of it, maybe it’s the primary one, after all) is to force members of Congress to go on record as pro or con, and also to pressure Bush (or to get the Republicans to pressure him) into making concessions.

Perhaps that latter goal has now been abandoned as impossible; I’ve written here about how little likelihood there is of its ever happening. Whether you love Bush or hate him, or are somewhere in between, you have to admit the guy stubbornly sticks to his guns.

But, according to Harry Reid, this latest Senatorial pajama party (including cots and pizza–sounds like fun!—as well as toothpaste, toothbrushes, and deodorant) had another goal. In addition to showing the Democrat antiwar base the Party has their interests at heart, “[I]t will focus attention on the obstructionism of the Republicans.”

Of course, it also focuses attention on the willingness of the Democrats to push for what Republican Orrin Hatch called the “political abandonment . . . of the biggest threat we face of the 21st century.”

So, which Republicans abandoned their “obstructionist” ways last night and joined up with the Democrats? Here’s the list: Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Chuck Hagel (Neb.), Gordon Smith (Ore.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine).

Not exactly news. Hagel and Smith have a long history of joining with the antiwar crowd, and Mainers Snowe and Collins (Collins is billed as the “surprise” vote) are hardly an astonishing duo to join the Dems. Understand that Maine—a state I know quite a bit about—is hardly Republican any more, despite its two Republican Senators. Both Snowe and Collins are RINOS—as well they might be, because otherwise they could never be re-elected, much less elected in the first place.

The rock-ribbed Republicanism of Maine is long gone. In recent years it has joined virtually all of New England in the solidly Democratic ranks on both the state and the national level (see this and this). Snowe and Collins may indeed be sincere in their alliance with antiwar Democrats, but it is also in their own political interests (Collins is up for re-election in 2008) to officially go on record as doing so.

These four are hardly typical of Republican lawmakers. Nor do they represent the persuasive powers of Democratic rhetoric. Bush isn’t the only stubborn one, apparently; both parties are hanging tough in their respective positions.

[ADDENDUM: See this for another example of Bush’s stubbornness–or his steadfastness.]

Seat belts in Iraq: an oxymoron?

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back I had lunch with Michael Totten during one of his rare moments in this country. He’d just returned from a recent visit to Iraq and Kurdistan, and was telling me what it was like to travel there.

One of the things he mentioned was that the cars he rode in invariably lacked seat belts. No, it wasn’t because the automobiles were old. According to Totten, it’s because the Iraqis had purposely ripped out the seat belts. Why?

Apparently it’s a point of honor (as in honor/shame culture; see this and this) in many Arab countries to do away with the protection afforded by seat belts. In their eyes, this shows bravery.

According to Totten, some taxis still sport seat belts. But they are somewhat like vestigial organs; the drivers take it as a personal insult if you put them on or even indicate a desire to wear them. “What’s the matter,” they say, “don’t you trust my driving?”

Although my personal experience of Israelis is that they can be mighty macho, too; according to Michael, Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where seat belts are widely used. Somehow, that’s not a surprise.

[ADDENDUM: Yes, yes, I know that not everyone in this country wears a seat belt, either. Some of my best friends (you know who you are!) refuse to wear one; something about having once been in an accident and having survived by being thrown clear of the wreckage. In this country, seat belt usage in lowest in young males (a telling fact; they tend to be higher risk-takers than other segments of the population), but most people of all ages wear them; the costs and annoyances seem small compared to the possible benefits.]

Amending the Constitution: protection from the tyranny of democracy and republicanism

The New Neo Posted on by

In the many posts I’ve written attempting to explain the basic neocon attitude towards the spread of democracy-(see this and this) I’ve tried to be careful to use the term “liberal democracy” to describe what is advocated. Why? Because democracy alone is not enough.

Democracy can devolve into tyranny almost as easily as a powerful central government can. The genius of our system is that it makes it exceptionally difficult for tyranny to occur by making it extremely hard to change our Constitution or to give up the basic rights guaranteed there (absurdly hyperbolic discussions of the Patriot Act notwithstanding).

This is not to say that some encroachments can’t, and don’t, occur. But they have been relatively minor compared to what is possible; so far, our system has worked to insure that we are among the freest people on earth.

Not only are we a republic rather than a pure democracy, but our republican form of government is designed with an exquisite system of checks and balances in place among the three different branches. But that’s not all. Our Bill of Rights establishes that certain basic liberties will be protected, and the mechanism for amending the Constitution and changing that system (including that Bill of Rights) is made almost fiendishly difficult to implement.

History teaches that the Bill of Rights was adopted with an eye to limiting the power of both the executive and the legislative branches, as well as to make clear that all powers not specifically listed in the Constitution as belonging to the federal government were retained by the states and the people. But what would prevent the people from voting away any of those rights? History also teaches us that crowds are strange and fickle things, subject to persuasive demagoguery as well as coercive threats, and that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor wasn’t lying when he said that humankind is often willing to lay down the burden of freedom for easy answers and the promise of protection from its responsibilities.

As Lincoln wrote, our government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” But the overwhelming power the people would wield in a pure democracy is limited by the powers and balances among the three branches, the fact that we have a representative republican form of government rather than a pure democracy, and by the aforementioned difficulty of amending the constitution.

Without these guarantees, democracy can mean “one person, one vote, one time.” The Ayatollah Khomeini was given dictatorial powers in a process that began, after the fall of the Shah and the Ayatollah’s triumphant return, with a nationwide referendum that was passed with an extraordinary 92.8% percent of the vote. This established the theocratic dictatorship that exists to this day, with the constitution of Iran being totally rewritten shortly afterwards.

Hitler came to power without ever winning a majority vote for his party, but the German government had another weakness—under its constitution, it was relatively easy to suspend civil liberties and establish a dictatorship. This did not even require the vote of its people, merely a two-thirds majority of its legislature. Therefore it was done by republican means; the Reichstag obligingly voted to abolish itself, although not without the “persuasion” of Hitler’s storm troopers surrounding the building with cries of ““Full powers—or else! We want the bill—or fire and murder!”

And recent less dramatic, but similar and still worrisome, events by which Venezuelan dictator Chavez has seized power with the full cooperation of the Venezuelan legislature—which, as in Germany of old, can amend the constitution by a mere 2/3 vote—demonstrate once again that there are not only “democratic” ways to seize power, but “republican” ones as well (and please note the small “d” and the small “r”).

One has only to look at the makeup of our own Congress, with its power-hungry politics-playing on both sides, to understand that we would by no means be immune from such a vulnerability if our own Constitution were similarly written. But, just as our checks and balances work to protect us from one branch of the government easily gaining ascendance over the others, and our Bill of Rights works to protect our liberties from encroachment by any branch, the entire edifice rests on the difficulty of changing any of this. The framers purposely built such roadblocks into the Constitution itself when they implemented the amendment process.

I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but my guess is that our constitution just might be the most difficult on earth to change. Yes, the first step is a vote by two-thirds of the legislature (with a never-used alternative form of proposal, two-thirds of the state legislatures calling for a special convention for the purpose of making an amendment), just as in Germany and Venezuela. But that, fortunately, is only the first step. The next one is approval by three-quarters of the states, either their legislatures or special conventions.

These hurdles placed in the way of easy amendment do not, of course, assure that our liberty will be protected. But they certainly make it more likely than it is in most countries. In the end, of course, even the constitution only rests on the general social contract and the consent of the governed (and, by the way, this is where the guarantee of the right of the people to bear arms comes in handy; at least it gives them a fighting chance against a possible runaway military).

How does this apply to the attempts to spread democracy to a country such as Iraq? It makes it clear that democracy itself is a highly flawed “solution” without the guarantees inherent in a liberal democracy, and that none of it is of much use if the constitution of a country is too easily amended or suspended.

Blog week in review

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that the Sanity Squad is on summer vacation, those of you who may have been aching for the sound of my voice can listen to this week’s “Blog Week in Review,” in which I discuss the recent Live Earth concert and the phenomenon of rockstars advocating political causes, as well as the advent of the iPhone and its cultural ramifications, with host Austin Bay and fellow guest Jeff Goldstein.

Jewstalgia: after they’re gone, you may even start to miss them

The New Neo Posted on by

This NY Times article was both touching and disturbing, almost in equal measures.

It describes a phenomenon in present-day Poland that might be described as philo-Semitism, the opposite of anti-Semitism. Now that there are virtually no Jews in that country—a land in which one in ten citizens had been Jewish, pre-WWII—there’s a movement to revive and revere the Jewish culture that was lost. It’s an illustration of the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

In the Poland of today, especially among the trendy young:

“Jewish style” restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing plaintive Oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, are Jews.

Poland is not alone in its Jewstalgia. Russia seems to be experiencing something of the sort as well, and a year or two ago I read an article describing a similar (and even more ironic, if such a thing be possible) longing in Germany, in connection with an article about the opening of the new Jewish Museum there.

The museum is apparently the most well-attended museum in the country. And I also recall a story—perhaps apocryphal, since I can’t find any links for it—that there was a conference a few decades ago in Germany on its population’s lack of a sense of humor, and the conclusion was that the country destroyed all its comedians when it murdered its Jews—an example of the law of unintended consequences, no doubt.

It all puts me in mind of some of the lyrics to the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi:”

They took all the trees
Put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till its gone…

But Poland itself has a mixed history regarding the Jews (as does Germany, by the way). Why were so many there in the first place? Because Poland was originally one of the most welcoming and tolerant nations in Europe for the Jews. The history of Poland’s long and relatively intimate relationship with its Jewish population includes a golden age in which the Jewish community there flourished.

Poland is a country with a past that includes multiple and lengthy occupations by foreign powers. Russian, German, and Austrian-Hungarian influences dominated the nineteenth century there, and anti-Semitism and violence against Jews increased during their reigns. Then the Nazi occupation, of course, resulted in the effective destruction of Polish Jewry, and the Communist takeover that followed drove the remainder away, leaving Poland essentially Judenfrei.

But “Judenfrei” is a German word; the Poles themselves had a much more complex relationship than that with their Jewish citizens. And in fact, although many Poles participated in the Holocaust with an attitude of enthusiastic cooperation, Poland was also home to a large number of what Israel calls “Righteous Gentiles,” those who risked their lives to save Jews.

Their varied motivations are delineated in a remarkable book entitled When Light Pierced the Darkness, by Nechama Tec. Some did it for money, some out of political or religious conviction, and some for personal reasons related to the good relations they had previously enjoyed with their Jewish neighbors and friends.

When I write that these people risked their lives, I don’t think the phrase conveys exactly what that meant. But I’ll add an anecdote that might illustrate the situation more graphically (unfortunately, I can’t find a link to it, nor can I recall the source). When the Nazis entered a Polish village and caught someone who had sheltered or aided Jews, they called a meeting of the town. It was compulsory to attend, and villagers were treated to a spectacle guaranteed to discourage further such assistance: a public execution of the offender and his or her family and relatives, including the children.

Effective, no? I would challenge all of you to ask yourselves how brave and noble you would have been in the face of such a threat; I’m by no means absolutely certain of my own answer.

And yet, even under such circumstances, quite a few Poles considered it their duty to help the Jews who had been part of the fabric of their lives. This is not to whitewash the Polish history during the Holocaust. As I said, there were many enthusiastic participants, and it wasn’t just Nazi coercion that caused this behavior. One of the saddest and most horrific chapters of Polish-Jewish history were the killings that occurred after the war, when some Jewish-Polish Holocaust survivors who had somehow managed to return home were murdered by their former neighbors in a pogrom sparked by that standby of anti-Semitism, the blood libel.

In the Poland of today, the Judeophiles are mostly the young, people who are finally becoming free of both the country’s Nazi past and the Communist yoke that followed it. As such, they may represent the original Polish spirit of tolerance that flourished in most of the early years of the Jewish presence there.

It is deeply ironic, of course, that this is only happening in the absence of the Jews of Poland, like a sort of museum diorama in tribute to the vanished passenger pigeon. But nevertheless, it is to be welcomed.

Neocons and Sowell’s vision of the anointed

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I’ve been reading an extremely thought-provoking book by Thomas Sowell entitled The Vision of the Anointed. In it, Sowell attempts to describe the differences between the liberal/Leftist (“the anointed”) worldview and that of the Right.

The book is far too rich in thought to be summarized easily, and I’ve only just begun reading it. But I’ve read enough to know I recommend it.

Here’s Sowell’s main thesis:

The vision of the anointed may stand out in sharper relief when contrasted with the opposing vision, a vision whose reasoning begins with the tragedy of the human condition…The two visions differ in their respective conceptions of the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the nature of causation, knowledge, power, and justice….All these particular differences between the two visions turn ultimately on differences about human limitations and their corollaries….Clearly, those who assume a larger set of options are unlikely to be satisfied with results deriving from a smaller set of options.

In general, liberals assume that human capability to understand, correct, and therefore eradicate basic problems in society is vast, and that the only real impediment to their solution is will. Conservatives assume that many such problems are inherent in the human condition, and that at any rate our state of knowledge can never be complete enough to “solve” them without conjuring up unforeseen results that often cause more difficulties than the initial problems they set out to solve.

That’s why, for example, liberals focus on equality of outcome, which they believe to be both achievable and desirable, and conservatives focus on equality of process and opportunity, which they believe is the best way to justice. That’s why liberals believe in attempting to tackle vast social problem through governmental actions, and conservatives believe in smaller government and smaller changes.

In foreign policy, however, the lines between the two are far murkier. You would think, if both sides were consistent, that liberals would believe in widescale interventions—including military ones—to change other countries and/or our relationships with them, and that conservatives would be more isolationist. And this has sometimes been the case; liberals such as FDR and Truman, and even JFK, were not averse to such action, whereas the opposition to our participation in several wars of the past came in large measure from isolationist conservatives.

This state of affairs flipped to its reverse after Vietnam, when liberals became far more negative towards military operations that were designed to preserve freedom and oppose Communism, or that furthered American interests. This left the bulk of liberal support for only those actions that were seen as strictly humanitarian.

But this anti-interventionist state of affairs had a long tradition, as well, among those of the liberal persuasion, many of whom believed (and still believe) that humans are rational beings amenable to talks, neutrality, understanding, and reason, and that negotiations and diplomacy, if performed correctly, could eliminate war. In contrast, their tragic view of human nature leads many conservatives to concede that evil exists, that tyranny and power will always rise up in human life, that the irrational will continue to be with us despite our best efforts at the opposite, and that military force is sometimes the best way to fight these dangerous realities. Conservatives also believe that any such military victory and the resultant peace is only temporary, whereas liberals believe it possible to achieve the eradication of war as a permanent solution—that’s where the idea that “war is not the answer” originates.

In their foreign policy recommendations, neocons are a strange mixture of these positions. As such, they don’t sit well with many in either group, liberals or conservatives. I’ve written at great length about neocons and their agenda previously (see why neocons are so disliked by so many people, and the neocon stance towards promoting the spread of democracy). I therefore see no need to repeat that discussion here.

But in light of Sowell’s dichotomy, it occurs to me that neocons are also upsetting to people because—in some cases, at least—they appear to have adopted the liberal idea that it is possible to transform societies in ways that are extremely difficult to accomplish, and that some see as likely to cause more problems than they solve.

That’s one of the most valid criticisms of the war in Iraq and its aftermath. As I’ve written in the posts linked above, societies have been transformed for the better in the past by a war and its aftermath—World War II and the subsequent occupation of Germany and Japan. But the details of that conflict were considerably different, and at any rate those wars were not originally fought with that purpose in mind, nor with the idea of the imposition (or, in the case of Germany, the re-imposition) of democracy through a lengthy postwar occupation, although that’s in fact what did occur.

It is my contention that the war in Iraq was not fought only with that purpose in mind, either; it was multiply-determined. Saddam’s defiance of the UN and the terms of the Gulf War armistice, his flagrant human rights violations, and his history of aggression against neighbors were part of it as well. But another part was most certainly the desire to establish an ally in the region, and to have that country become an example of the fact that democracy and human rights are not incompatible with either Islam or the Arab world.

But nation-building of this sort is exceedingly difficult, just as paleoconservatives would always have told you. And it is also my contention that the present administration insufficiently estimated the extreme difficulty of the endeavor they were undertaking, and as a result they failed to plan adequately for it. In this, I’m joined by many on both sides, of course.

In this post I’m not going to revisit the question of whether the task of nation-building in Iraq can in fact succeed, or whether the impediments it faces are inherently insurmountable (it’s been done ad nauseum before; see this for my most lengthy effort to date). But in light of Sowell’s dichotomy, it occurs to me that those neocons who did in fact underestimate the difficulty of the task were falling prey to their susceptibility to the vision of the anointed about the ease of solution of complex societal problems. And it occurs to me that liberals, in criticizing the naivete of some neocons on this matter, are taking the classic position of the Right.