Month: November 2006

Another proponent:

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

That’s Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers. (Hat tip: Publius.)

I haven’t written about the latest Judith Regan obscenity because writing about the controversy only helps the bottom-feeders at places like Harper Collins and Fox television. (Full disclosure: Harper Collins published my book; and the Sunday Times is a News Corporation company.) But now that this nightmare is over, it’s worth remembering what it represented. In much of the media, there really is less and less interest in the actual content of books or television programs these days. What matters is merely the sell, which increasingly means the hype. The actual product comes last in priority. With free markets comes great freedom but also some responsibility: to publish books worth publishing, to air TV shows actually worth airing, to care about content as well as ratings and sales. Those criteria are distinguishable from what the market will reward. That distinction has been lost in many places. It is not a criticism of the market; it is merely a reminder that markets also require integrity among those who work in them. That point deserves recovering.

Everything else was said better by Paddy Chayefsky. If you haven’t rented or Netflixed "Network" recently, do yourself a favor.

You’ve seen the clip already. It’s distressing. It’s distressing because it really does show what lies beneath the surface of so many minds and hearts. No one is immune. And the only thing that really changes the deeper hatreds is, in my view, constant exposure to others, self-criticism, self-doubt and spiritual work. I hope Michael Richards can tackle all of the above.

Garry Wills has a new book out on St Paul. The surprise is: he’s an unabashed fan. Here’s an interesting review of the book, from Slate. Money quote:

Like the Niebuhrians before him, Wills will be mistaken for a conservative Christian, since he admires Paul so much and since he remains devoted to the orthodox teachings of the faith—the Messiah as sacrificial lamb and risen Lord, not just Jesus as ethical exemplar. But Wills remains a liberal because he highlights the gospel of love, asserts the equality of women, distrusts institutions and hierarchies, and endorses the findings of modern biblical scholarship. He depends on that scholarship to make his case for placing Paul back in a pre-church period, a time when Jews like him—followers of Jesus the Messiah—were proclaiming their faith in heated competition with Jewish traditionalists. Both groups of Jews vied for the conversions of gentiles drawn to the zealous monotheism of the Jewish faith, an increasingly attractive alternative in a Mediterranean world whose standard polytheistic beliefs struck many as anachronistic.

Today, I’m starting a week of book club emails about "The Conservative Soul," featuring the smartest reader critiques, as promised. Here’s one reader:

My only criticism of your line of argument is your view of Reagan. Undoubtedly, he was a prime example of the sort of limited-government, pragmatic, grown-up conservatism you advocate; but I think it’s scarcely deniable that the Christian right first became active politically under him. Indeed, their efforts contributed to Reagan’s election success, and their support did find in-roads into his policy (his neglect of the AIDS epidemic, for example). In many ways Reagan is very far from Burkean and Oakeshottian conservatism – far away from Goldwater, even – not the least in his appeasement and empowerment of Christian fundamentalists, making them into a political force for the first time in American history, etc.

And something tells me that Burke wouldn’t have endorsed Reagan’s particular brand of Cold War conservatism; I mean, I’d like to think that Edmund Burke would have lambasted Iran-Contra, not cheered it on. As Conor Cruise O’Brien states in his great "thematic biography" of Burke – conservatism as a synthesis of evangelical Christianity, military patriotism, and unchecked free-market values is something Burke would hardly have endorsed.

Reagan did indeed presage some of the worst aspects of today’s degenerate Republicanism. His deficit spending, his subversion of constitutionalism in Iran-Contra, his coded appeal to Southern bigotry when beginning his campaign, and his dithering on the HIV epidemic are all fore-runners of later abuse. But they were mild in comparison to Bush.

Reagan would never have signed the biggest increase in entitlement spending since LBJ; Reagan’s domestic spending record was far better than Bush’s; Reagan raised taxes when he felt it necessary; he reformed the tax system in his second term; he vetoed pork; his Supreme Court nominees were diverse; he would never have gone to war in the reckless, unplanned way the Bush administration did in Iraq; and his foreign policy was a blend of deep conviction but also pragmatism, as he reached out to an imploding Soviet Union in his final years. Even on Iran-Contra, he eventually fessed up, and apologized. You can see the seeds of future conservative self-destruction and hubris, but Reagan’s record, to my mind, is on balance, a conservative one in the best sense. His undoing of excessive government control of the economy and his defeat of the Soviet Union dwarf everything else.

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction," – Pascal, Pensees.

(Photo of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by Georges Gobet/Getty.)

The only politician with greater powers of denial than the president appears to be his 2004 opponent, the worst politician in Washington, John Kerry.

It doesn’t get more comprehensive than this:

Your suspicion of Charles Krauthammer’s pre-war arguments is not justified. Some reasons:

1) Mr. Krauthammer has discussed the dangers of WMD and terrorism for a very long time and has done so when many pundits and foreign policy experts focused on other issues (the economy, China etc.) In his famous essay on America’s "Unipolar Moment", he foresaw the importance of these two issues at a time when the Cold War had only just ended. He has brought up the WMD issue again and again, and Iraq was – naturally – one of the countries he was always most concerned about. Why, after being honestly concerned for years, should he suddenly have stopped to believe in the danger – while still proposing a war that he no longer deemed necessary for security reasons? That would make no sense whatsoever.

2) Mr. Krauthammer is an outspoken man, and he is a convinced unilateralist. Should he consider war against a certain country as necessary in view of important American interests, I am sure he will say so, and without much ado. I really don’t have the impression that he is a man who needs false justifications to argue for what he believes to be in the best interest of America.

3) Mr. Krauthammer is a proponent of what he calls "democratic realism". While that technically makes him a neoconservative, the "realist" element has dominated most of his positions for the most time. He has never been an extreme "idealist" or "moral crusader". The war in Iraq made sense for a "democratic realist" only if there was a strategic reason for it. Iraq’s importance for the regional balance of power may have been part of that logic, but I don’t believe for a second that it would have been enough to make Mr. Krauthammer a proponent of this war, if not for the danger of WMDs. As for ousting Saddam and democratizing Iraq – Krauthammer is way too much of a "realist" to support a war of such importance for "idealistic" reasons alone.

4) Why (and how) should Mr. Krauthammer of all people have known what countless foreign governments, international agencies, former members of the Clinton administration, independent analysts and even Saddam himself did not know or even deem possible at the time? And what good reason is there to believe, keeping in mind this administration’s problems with security leaks, that Mr. Krauthammer would be perhaps the only person to know about the government’s deceptions to this very day?

5) There also remains the question of why the administration should have used the WMD argument if they knew it to be a lie. There was no way this would not have been found out afterwards, and it should have been clear that this could only hurt American credibility. The only way to prevent this would have been to carefully plant some WMDs in Iraq, which obviously didn’t happen either. And IF the administration had decided to use a pretense for war, it would have been a much smarter idea to trumpet some more alleged evidence of Saddam’s links to the attacks of 9/11. They would have been easier to fake and much harder to disprove than the claims of Iraqi WMDs, they would have created an even greater sense of urgency and they would not have allowed for a negotiated solution or inspections of any kind, making war much more probable.

6) Simple common sense: Regarding the overall accomplishments of the Bush administration’s foreign policy: Is it more plausible that the WMD rationale was a careful, politically smart and successful attempt at deceiving the whole world – or that is was one more example of sheer incompetence?

Those are just some reasons that come to my mind why I don’t believe that the Bush administration, much less Charles Krauthammer, intentionally lied about the existence of WMD. Is it impossible that they did? No. But I’d much rather go with Occam’s razor.

Incompetence is indeed perhaps the most plausible answer. I’m going to re-read parts of "Fiasco" and "State of Denial" to sum up my worries with more detail. The Krauthammer omission (which could have been an oversight) is trivial compared with the underlying issue. An invasion plan without a serious contingency plan for finding and securing WMD sites cannot be described as an "oversight." Given the risk posed to U.S. troops, it’s not just incompetence either. It’s criminal incompetence or outright deception. Stay tuned …

I’ll be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today at 2 pm Eastern, discussing the battle for the conservative soul.