Month: August 2006

A reader writes:

There’s one aspect of your Cheney & Rumsfeld theory that really is paranoid. I very much doubt that they actually WANTED democratization to fail in Iraq — I just think that they had little belief that it would succeed, and believed that in any case it wasn’t worth the huge amount of military and economic effort we would have to pour into it to be reasonably sure of making it work. The trouble is that their alternative Shock & Awe strategy hasn’t worked, either – Iran and the various terrorist groups are singularly Unshocked & Unawed by us now.

Morever, if Woodward’s quotes are correct, Bush agreed with them on this from the start – if a modest, short effort succeeded in reforming Iraq, fine, but if not he didn’t believe in wasting any more time or military effort on it.  What tripped all of them up was the fact – the one real shock of the war which caught absolutely everybody off guard — that Saddam had gotten rid of all his WMDs.  So, to avoid making it look to the entire world as though the war had been totally unjustified (after all, we hadn’t even given the UN inspectors time to finish looking for WMDs before we went in), they grabbed for "democratization" as an alternative justification – while still being unwilling to provide the huge supply of resources (probably including a draft) that would have been necessary to give it a good chance of success. They just kept trickling support in and hoping that a miracle would happen and the place could be reformed anyway.

That miracle hasn’t happened. And in the process the US has managed to look spectacularly impotent and incompetent militarily speaking to Iran and the Islamic Fascists, which of course is not what C. and R. had in mind at all.  They seriously overestimated the degree to which our jumping up and down and yelling "Boogabooga!" would scare the Iranians and the theocratic Moslems in general.

I think that’s about the best inference right now. Some in the administration and among Bush-supporters, like me, believed in democratization as well as WMD-removal as twin pillars of the war. But the war-plan proves that this was not what Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush really had in mind. The most plausible interpretation is that they expected the discovered WMDs to provide complete justification for the war – and then wanted to get out as fast as possible, with a friendly exile like Chalabi installed. They wanted merely to send an intimidating signal. And they have achieved exactly the opposite. And so they have made us less safe, with more enemies, who are more dangerously armed and less intimidated.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 8.55 am.

There’s been an interesting exchange over at NRO. Just scroll for the last couple of days. The Buckley view, apparently, is that it is perfectly possible for a conservative to be an atheist, but that respect for religion and a lack of disrespect for the faithful is also part of conservatism. I tend to agree. The only thing I’d add is that "religion" is a very broad and inchoate term for the purposes of this discussion. It matters a great deal what kind of religious faith we’re talking about. Faith is not, to my mind, an on-off switch, in which you either believe completely or not at all. This model is shared by fundamentalists and atheists, but not by many, many Christians.

The most natural religious complement to conservatism is a faith in God, tempered by a deep humility about our ability to know surely much about what God is, an emphasis on mystery, on charity, individual responsibility, and sacramental worship. But when religion becomes absolutist and abstract and political, when it become fundamentalist, it is much less compatible with conservatism, and, in the end, actively hostile to it. What we are seeing resurgent in the world today is the rise of a religious sensibility – in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity – which has far more in common with the statist absolutist totalitarianisms of the last century than with, say, Anglicanism or post-Vatican II Catholicism. In fact, as I argue in my book, I think the collapse of the last centuries’ totalitarianisms has opened a cultural and psychological vacuum for this kind of religion to occupy, as it once did before the Enlightenment. A passage from my upcoming book makes the point:

In this non-fundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important then theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. This is the Christianity that the conservative clings to; and it is a form of Christianity the fundamentalist rejects. That is his right. But it is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

Alas, many conservatives have conflated these rival forms of faith. And, often with good intentions, they have thereby helped erase conservatism’s critical, definitional distinction between transcendent truth and practical wisdom. From that confusion, so much damage has been done. So much – in so short a time.

Lewis Black on quail-"hunting". I worship him.

Gerard Baker has been one of the British journalists most open to supporting the Bush administration, most prepared to give neoconservatism the respect it deserves, most willing to give president Bush the benefit of the doubt. Here’s what he’s writing now:

[T]he US could take the risk of alienating the world and discarding international law only if its leadership was going to be effective. Instead its leadership has been desultory and uncertain and tragically ineffective.

It tried unilateral pre-emption in Iraq, but never really had the will to see it through. So with Iran, it went all mushy and multilateralist. In Lebanon, it thought it would cover all the bases — start by aggressively supporting Israel, then go all peacenik, holding hands with the UN in a touching chorus of Kumbaya.

Now we have the worst of all worlds. Not only is the US despised around the globe, it can’t even make its supposed hegemony work.

It’s one thing to be seen as the bully in the schoolyard; it’s quite another when people realise the bully is actually incapable of getting anybody else to do what he wants. It’s unpleasant when people stop respecting you, but it’s positively terrifying when they stop fearing you.

He regards Bush’s foreign policy as in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

"I’m watching an AP video of this freak, and he seems more like a homosexual pedophile to me. According to this story, Karr was married with children," – LaShawn Barber, commenting on the suspect in the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. (Hat tip: Malcontent.)

A woman gets her throat slit in Italy for dating a non-Muslim.

This piece about the British converts to Islamism prompted some thoughts. Money quote:

Myfanwy Franks, a researcher who has studied converts to Islam and is the author of "Women and Revivalism in the West: Choosing Fundamentalism in a Liberal Democracy," said, "Being troubled does not necessarily lead people to conversion ‚Äî people who aren’t troubled convert ‚Äî but it could lead to extreme radicalization."
Mentioning reports in the news media that Mr. Waheed was a heavy drinker and drug user before turning to Islam, Ms. Franks added: "I think there’s a tendency for some people, when they stop using some kind of addictive substance, to be left with a big hole in their lives. To do something extreme is the easiest way to go, because it fills that big hole."

The path that some addicts take – not to go into lengthy, difficult recovery but to adopt, cold-turkey, the most absolutist religious position as the panacea for their addiction – is a fascinating one. I think it helps explain the strange management style and worldview of the current president.

Jack Balkin agrees with the result, doesn’t much like the reasoning. Money quote:

It is quite clear that the government will appeal this opinion, and because the court’s opinion, quite frankly, has so many holes in it, it is also clear to me that the plaintiffs will have to relitigate the entire matter before the circuit court, and possibly the Supreme Court. The reasons that the court below has given are just not good enough. This is just the opening shot in what promises to be a long battle.

A reader adds to the debate on the real motives for the Iraq war for Cheney and Rumsfeld:

The funny thing about your speculative theory is that it doesn’t really make the duped neo-cons look any better. After all Rumsfeld was quite upfront about the troop strength that would be used. The administration did nothing to free up money for the building of democracy or for maintaining troop strength during lengthy nation building. The neo-cons cannot claim they were lied to. They have to claim that they were told the truth which was unfair because it was unreasonable to expect them to have believed it.

My own guess is that Cheney and Rumsfeld did not care much about whether democracy arose, and certainly had no interest in the nation building required to bring it about. They thought the invasion would make a statement to the world and that is what justified it. That statement included the ability of the US to depose Hussein without great expense or great troop numbers. This was a misguided idea, but in some sense at least coherent. Contrast it with the people who wanted to do things that required great resources and great numbers of troops but supported the war anyway when it was clear that that wasn’t what we were doing. Such people existed both to the right and left. Friedman might be the clearest example of someone who was defending a completely different invasion than the one that was clearly going to be waged.

I plead guilty too. I bought the democratization line and the WMD threat and was passionately pro-war. My only defense is that within days of the invasion, I started to worry about the troop levels, and the dissonance between what I had been told and what was actually being done opened up. Then Abu Ghraib; then the refusal to add more troops; well, you get the picture. The bad news is: in a long, dangerous war of ideas, the Bush administration has somehow managed to muddy the moral high-ground against the evil of Islamism. It will take decades and countless innocent lives for us to recover.