Month: December 2004

Many people discount the power of the so-called “cultural issues” – and especially of the abortion issue. I see it just the other way around. These issues are central to the national resurgence of the Republicans, central to the national implosion of the Democrats… the Democrats’ national decline – or better, their national disintegration – will continue relentlessly and inexorably until they come to grips with these values issues, primarily abortion.

That’s from Bob Casey’s 1996 autobiography. Francis X. Maier remembers a time when “being a Catholic meant being a Democrat,” which was before Governor Casey was denied a speaking slot at the 1992 Democratic convention. Maier calls the recent election “The Revenge of Bob Casey.” William McGurn, who prefers to call it “Bob Casey’s Revenge,” writes:

In the aftermath of Senator Kerry’s defeat the Democrats are wondering how it is that the first Catholic nominee for President since 1960, a man who spoke glowingly of rosary beads and his days as an altar boy, lost the Catholic vote, lost the Mass-going Catholic vote by an even larger margin, and lost it by larger margins still in key swing states such as Florida and Ohio.

McGurn asks, “As Democrats emerge from the electoral rubble, must not a few be noticing that Bob Casey has proved to be prophetic?” Evidently, several have. Former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, who the LA Times calls “an abortion foe who argues that the party cannot rebound from its losses in the November election unless it shows more tolerance on one of society’s most emotional conflicts,” is running for DNC chairman with the support of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Party leaders “are looking at ways to soften the hard line.” The LA Times makes this out as a point of contention in the fight to be DNC chairman, with Roemer and Howard Dean on opposite sides. But Dean too has been urging the party “to embrace Democrats who oppose abortion,” the NY Times reports.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum is bewildered. But Jim Wallis, writing before the election, gets it:

There are literally millions of votes at stake in this liberal miscalculation. Virtually everywhere I go, I encounter moderate and progressive Christians who find it painfully difficult to vote Democratic given the party’s rigid, ideological stance on this critical moral issue, a stance they regard as “pro-abortion.” Except for this major and, in some cases, insurmountable obstacle, these voters would be casting Democratic ballots.

Ironically, the Republicans, who actively and successfully court the votes of Christians on abortion, are much more ecumenical in their own toleration of a variety of views within their own party.

Wallis connects Christian concern about abortion with other “life issues” such as capital punishment and poverty. Which is more evidence that religious voters are at home in the Republican Party largely because Republicans are the ones who welcome them. John Kerry, apparently, has recognized the symbolic importance of the abortion issue in reaching out to these voters. (A Democrats for Life blog launched November 5.) But his party is caught between its activists and a growing segment of the public.
— Steven

Half the Kurdish population of northern Iraq asks for independence. On Christmas Eve, two U.S. Army captains reflect on their time in Kurdistan:

Although we are happy with our efforts, we do wonder why more attention was not paid to Halabja. And, not just to Halabja, but to all the Iraqi Kurds. What other citizens of Iraq fought alongside (and, in many instances, in front of) U.S. forces? What other citizens of Iraq offered security and housing to U.S. forces? We do hope that the days of the international community neglecting the Kurds are coming to a close, and we will be sure to pay close attention and provide assistance in any way we can. It’s the least we can do for those who did so much for us, and who desire to do so much more for themselves.

— Steven

Matt Continetti reports on the strange politics of Georgia’s once and future congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, and the conspiracy theories that animate them. He leaves out her recent fundraising for Narco News, however. As the New York Sun has noted, when McKinney first lost her seat two years ago, several Democrats welcomed her defeat. Not so this year.

When Trent Lott made his outrageous comments about the segregationist presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond, Republican leaders publicly rebuked him and pushed him out of his position as Senate majority leader. Why didn’t Democrats show similar leadership with regard to McKinney in the recent election? As Continetti suggests, McKinney’s views are going mainstream: “Maybe when McKinney shared her disturbing theories about President Bush in 2002, she was not so much falling off the edge of progressive politics as anticipating it.” Maybe MoveOn does own it.
— Steven

That’s the English version, anyway. And yes, Christmas. I’m not a fan of the holiday, and share Jon Meacham’s (absurdly maligned) view of its origins. But I see no offense in wishing those who do not share my faith (as well as those who do) a message of peace and joy and new beginnings. The incarnation is a bewildering notion. To think that the force behind the entire universe would actually become a single human being in a particular place and time is an astonishingly bold item of faith. The love and intimacy of the divine is nowhere better illustrated. The child Jesus was a speck in a sea of humanity all those years ago – wherever and however he was born. But he altered the trajectory of our souls. That is my belief. It transcends all the fights over sexuality or marriage or stem cell research or faith-based programs or creches in public spaces. Which is why, for me, Christmas is a time to reflect on mystery beyond politics and culture, on what we cannot understand even as we believe, on the potential for unimaginable events in the future, and the holy spirit that guides us in the face of them. Does that sound pretentious? I hope not. Writing candidly about Christian faith is not easy. But since I have spent much time this year criticizing those whose faith demands partisan political agendas, or the disparagement of minorities, or the fusion of politics with religion, it behooves me to restate my own belief. That belief is inconstant and human and faltering. But it somehow endures. Another gift, like the first one two millennia ago. And as I grow older, and the gift looks more tattered, I somehow feel gladder for it. From one human speck to another: the possibility of contact with the divine. Peace. Joy. Love. Happy Christmas.

FACE TO FACE WITH JIHAD: One man lived to tell the tale.

— Andrew

A striking fact about the November election is that both major party candidates embraced what John Lukacs referred to as “the militarization of the image of the presidency.” Kerry’s use of martial imagery and his “sentimentalization of the military” paralleled that of Bush, though he used it to a different, dovish end. For Kerry and his allies, Bush’s recklessness and his failure to defer to the greater wisdom of the uniformed military represented a repudiation of the authentic military virtues. Bush, in contrast, identified support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with support for the troops. Strength as “commander-in-chief” is once again seen as the signal virtue in a chief executive.

As Lukacs points out, this represents a break.

In the past, even presidents who had once been generals employed civilian manners. They chose not to emphasize their military achievements during their presidential tenure – in accord with the American tradition of the primacy of civilian over military rule.

Lukacs ends his brief polemic with a warning:

When the Roman republic gave way to empire, the new supreme ruler, Augustus chose to name himself not “rex,” king, but “imperator,” from which our words emperor and empire derive, even though its original meaning was more like commander in chief. Thereafter Roman emperors came to depend increasingly on their military. Will our future presidents? Let us doubt it. And yet . . .

It’s easy to dismiss this as alarmist nonsense, and I certainly don’t maintain that the US is heading for a military dictatorship. Far from it. But I am concerned by the fact that the Cassandras, a kind of early warning system for democracy, are few and far between.

Peter Beinart forcefully and persuasively argues that the left ought to embrace a militarized approach to the Terror War, matching conservatives in the never-ending quest for guts and glory. While I’m very sympathetic-I remain emphatically hawkish, and if anything I think we need a larger military-my sense is that we need a credible voice for restraint. American global leadership is the sine qua non of a liberal peace, but the standing army it demands has corrosive effects. Far left critics, in the vein of Chomsky and Zinn, are discredited by their distrust of US intentions, and the same is true of critics on the far right, like Buchanan. We no longer have a Sen. Bob Taft, a man who opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and US military interventions abroad while retaining a belief in the essential decency of he American people. The defenders of internment today represent an obscene caricature of how we’ve gone wrong.

THE TWIN THREATS: These dark thoughts-Merry Christmas, incidentally!- occur to me in light of Andrew’s link to Publius on “The Conservative Case for Outrage.” I wholeheartedly agree that outrage is the only appropriate response to the torture of prisoners, but not because it inflames the Arab street. Outrage is appropriate because any sustained military campaign-particularly a shadowy war against shadowy villains-poses a threat to constitutional democracy. The threat can be contained, and the US has been more successful than most countries, Britain and France included. And yet it’s never easy. Because I’m sympathetic to Heather MacDonald’s call for the aggressive use of data-mining and other surveillance technologies, it’s all the more vital that abuses be rooted out and prosecuted mercilessly. Abu Ghraib, and allegations of torture elsewhere in the secret archipelago of prison camps, pose a threat to this country less immediate but no less real than that posed by the Islamist killers.

THE UN-IMMACULATE AMERICANS: On the pressing question of whether Abu Ghraib represents a devastating setback in the Terror War, and whether being seen as an immaculate force for good in the Arab world is key to American victory, I’m tentatively with the dissenters. Reuel Gerecht made the case in the Weekly Standard back in May. Arab cynicism about American intentions runs very deep. Our self-perception bears no relation to how we’re seen in that part of the world, or almost anywhere else. The true test is whether we can hold elections. Elections will, with any luck, create a dynamic of their own that will end in majoritarian democracy, and, as Gerecht argues, deeply illiberal and anti-American democracy at that. It will, however, kill off Bin Ladenism, and that’s worth firing on all cylinders, ramping up counterinsurgency efforts, and betting the farm.
— Reihan

TOM MENASHI, ROSS EDWARDS, AND HILLARY RODHAM SALAM?: “C’mon, admit it. The three guys filling in for Andrew are Tom Daschle, John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton!” More feedback on the Letters Page.

If there’s one thing “everyone” knows about Christmas, it’s that we celebrate it on December 25th because the early Christians decided to have their holiday piggyback on various pre-existing pagan solstice-related festivals. (The same, of course, is held to be true of Easter, which is supposedly stolen from pagan fertility celebrations.)

But maybe, just maybe, everyone is wrong. (via GetReligion)

As a Christian, I should add that the notion of “stealing” the dates of the pagan holidays (and their holly boughs, mistletoe, and all the rest of the trimmings) never particularly bothered me. A VIP (very intelligent priest) in my New Haven parish once put it this way: “The Church’s way is to include — and to sift.”

Merry Christmas to all . . .

— Ross

Everyone — including Andrew, below — is debating the meaning of poll numbers that show a post-election slip in public support for the Iraq War (or, more specifically, for fighting the war in the first place, since most people still want to finish the job . . . whatever that may mean). Kevin Drum sees it as part of a general post-Mission Accomplished decline in pro-invasion sentiment, which is fair enough — but as David Adesnik rightly notes, the numbers had either flatlined or were declining very slowly during the run-up to election day, and they’ve gone south much faster since Bush won re-election. So there’s clearly something more going on here.

Josh Marshall’s argument (Andrew has the money quote) that Bush supporters had to indulge in a little cognitive dissonance about the war in order to stand by their man does sound like a smarter take . . . but I’d like to meet some of these hypothetical self-deluding Bush voters before I endorse it.

IT’S THE COVERAGE, STUPID: What’s more likely, I think, is that the media coverage has shifted since the end of the election, and that people’s attention patterns are shifting accordingly. A lot of conservatives howled that the press was playing up bad news from Iraq in order to take down Bush, and there were probably some cases where this was true (the Al Qaaqaa kerfluffle, at the very least, seemed like an attemped media “October Surprise”). But in the larger scheme of things, what really happened during the election sprint was that the political coverage drove the Iraq coverage off the front pages — which meant, in turn, that most people stopped paying attention to the news from the Middle East.

This would explain why attitudes toward the war were largely frozen in place from primary season, really, until election day (check out Drum’s chart) . . . people simply weren’t thinking about Iraq, except maybe as a campaign issue. Now, however, there aren’t any more stories about Bush pressing the flesh in Ohio, or the Swift Vets coming out with another ad, or Kerry flubbing the names of Red Sox players — and so Iraq is once again the country’s biggest news story. And the more people pay attention to what’s happening there, I suspect, the less the war seems like a good idea.

STICKING WITH IT: Of course, believing the war was a mistake (as I do) doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be in it to win it. The question is how . . . and fortunately, Michael Ledeen has the answer. The way to bring democracy to Iraq, you see, is to bring democracy to Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Piece of cake! Sign me up!

I’m being unfair, I know . . . but the trouble with Ledeen is that he always seems to have one idea (“democratic revolution”) about what to do, and very few ideas about how to do it. He writes:

No, we can only win in Iraq if we fully engage in the terror war, which means using our most lethal weapon – freedom – against the terror masters, all of them. The peoples of Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are restive, they look to us for political support. Why have we not endorsed the call for political referenda in Syria and Iran? Why are we so (rightly and honorably) supportive of free elections in the Ukraine, while remaining silent about – or, in the disgraceful case of outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell, openly hostile to – free elections in Iran and Syria? Why are we not advancing both our values and our interests in the war against the terror masters?

This is a masterpiece of vagueness. Freedom is a potent weapon, I’ll grant you (and also a “messy” one, as Donald Rumsfeld can attest), but how, exactly, is it to be unleashed in the Greater Middle East? Does Ledeen really think that if the U.S. starts publicly calling for a democratic revolt in the streets of Tehran and Damascus (not to mention Saudi Arabia, where the results would probably not be to our liking), our diplomatic power is going to make the mullahs and Ba’athists magically melt away? Or does he really mean that we should first call for free elections, and then put boots on the ground to make it happen?

Either way, I wish he would be more explicit in his intentions and more detailed in his plans. It’s not as if we have excess diplomatic capital to play with these days — let alone excess armored divisions.

Slower, please.

–Ross

Publius asks the hard questions about conservatives and torture. I couldn’t agree more.
— Andrew

Here’s his explanation of declining war-support in polls:

I think that many Bush supporters simply couldn’t take stock of the full measure of the screw-up in Iraq during the election because doing so would have conflicted their support for President Bush. Iraq and the war on terror so defined this election that support for the war and the president who led us into it simply couldn’t be pried apart.
Perhaps it wasn’t so internalized. During the slugfest of the campaign supporting Bush just meant supporting the war and this is what people told pollsters when they were asked, because one question was almost a proxy for the other.
You can even do a thought experiment by imagining how many conservatives during election season would have been so staunch in their support for the war if it were being fought under a President Gore or a President Clinton. The question all but answers itself.

Well, some of us who backed Bush in 2000 and also backed the war in 2001 and 2002 did try and pry the two issues apart. And the reason I narrowly backed Kerry is that I wanted us to win the war; and had a hard time maintaining minimal confidence in the current leadership. I wonder if that judgment has now sunk in more generally, as pre-election partisanship subsides. We’ll see, won’t we?

Victor Davis Hanson’s defense of Donald Rumsfeld is, as usual, full of his usual insights and perspective. But he ducks the main complaints. The most important is that the war immediately after the fall of Baghdad was seriously under-manned, and that this was obvious from the beginning. Hanson’s defense is that the humber of troops is not as important as their successful deployment. But surely, the lack of troops did a couple of terribly damaging things: it prevented the occupying forces from getting a monopoly of violence across the country, emboldened the Baathist/Jihadist resistance, and alienated many Iraqis who could not understand why the greatest super-power’s main achievement in Iraq was the initiation of chaos and insecurity. Both these undermined our objectives, were pointed out in time, and could have been rectified. Rummy refused to do anything, and, indeed, minimized with criminal glibness the disaster brewing. Secondly, Hanson suggests that there’s no evidence that it was Rumsfeld’s dcision to disband the Iraqi army. But that’s irrelevant. Rumsfeld is ultimately responsible for the war. If Bremer called for the disbandment of the Baathist army and Rumsfeld objected, that army would still be intact. Bremer, remember, worked for Rumsfeld. If Rumsfeld had been over-ruled on such a critical matter, he should have quit. He didn’t. He remains responsible. The Bush people can look the word “responsible” up in the dictionary if they need to.

HANSON ON TROOPS: Then Hanson seems to withdraw the too-few-troops argument, and complains that we don’t have enough! Of course, the reason we don’t have enough is … Bill Clinton! Four years after this president took office in a campaign against a man, Al Gore, who urged troop increases, and three years after 9/11, Bush remains adamant that our military is big enough. But Hanson won’t brook any criticism of this administration in this respect:

In truth, the real troop problem transcends Iraq. Our shortages are caused by a military that was slashed after the Cold War and still hasn’t properly recouped to meet the global demands of the war against Islamic fascism – resulting in rotation nightmares, National Guard emergencies, and stop-order controversies… In reality, [Rumsfeld] has carefully allotted troops in Iraq because he has few to spare elsewhere – and all for reasons beyond his control. If Senator Lott or kindred pundits first show us exactly where the money is to come from to enlarge the military (tax hikes, cuts in new Medicare entitlements, or budgetary freezes?), and, second, that Mr. Rumsfeld opposes expanding our defense budget – “No, President Bush, I don’t need any more money, since the Clinton formula was about right for our present responsibilities” – then he should be held responsible. So far that has not happened.

Well, we do know that this president has ruled out any increase in troop levels globally. That was one reason I supported Kerry over Bush in the last election. If Rumsfeld wanted more, and believes more are essential, why is he still serving a president who rules that out? In Hanson’s universe, no one in the administration is responsible for this. Why? How on earth are we supposed to effect a generational democratic shift in Iraq with barely any troops? The more you read the defenders of the conduct of this war, the more you realize they have perfected the art of the Bush people: always shift the blame elsewhere, always attack your critics, never take responsibility.

OH, AND … : No mention of the fact that Rumsfeld has presided over a military that has been found guilty of umpteen violations of basic ethical procedures observed by the U.S. military for generations. He has presided over the de facto suspension of the Geneva Conventions, the torturing-to-death of at least five prisoners, and possibly close to 30. The scale and scope of the abuse – hundreds of incidents of the most appalling torture across all theaters and all services – is unprecedented. Isn’t this the Sec Def’s responsibility? Or do we have to endure another sickening right-wing attack on the International Red Cross as some kind of excuse?

NOVAK ON RUMSFELD: But Rummy’s own self-defense is just as revealing as Hanson’s. If you read Bob Novak’s column today, it’s hard not to see Rumsfeld’s flunkies or Rummy himself doing some energetic spinning. Here’s the key paragraph:

Rumsfeld is often bracketed with the neocons, but that is incorrect. In a long political career that dates back to his election to Congress in 1962, he has not even been associated with the traditional conservative movement. In the run-up to the attack on Iraq, he was not aggressively pressing intervention by force of arms, but instead was shaping a military response to fit President Bush’s command.

Translation from Rummy: “This is Bush’s war, not mine. I never really wanted it. I don’t believe in the democratic transformation of the Middle East. I don’t want to shift gears from my lean, mean fighting machine concept to one of a military that has to be big enough to impose a new order on societies where liberty has never had deep roots. I’m just taking orders.” You can either see this as true (my view) – in which case, Rumsfeld really is the wrong man for the president’s Wilsonian agenda. Or you can see this as disloyal spin: in which case, Rummy has lost confidence in the war he was obliged to run. In either case, he should resign. This war is too important to have the wrong man in the job or someone who disagrees with its basic rationale.

— Andrew