Month: July 2008

Paglia On Iran

As Tehran flexes some military muscles, Camille channels my own mixed thoughts with uncanny accuracy:

A century from now, when the competitive flux among world cultures will doubtless be as intense as today, your stern view of Iran may well have been proved correct. The failure of the West to act decisively and to intervene in Iran’s nuclear armament may look timid and foolish. If nuclear weapons manufactured in Iran end up in the hands of jihadists and are successfully deployed in our capital cities, the West will look as if it committed suicide and deserved to fall.

But politics is not science.

It is impossible to predict with perfect accuracy the real-life results of any course of action. A thousand unanticipated factors may cause idealistic plans to go horribly awry. In the case of Iran, short of a massive land invasion or the outright assassination of its leaders (currently forbidden by civilized nations), it would be virtually impossible to surgically remove Iran’s regime without visiting death and destruction on untold numbers of innocent Iranian civilians. Do their lives mean nothing to you? By what ethical reasoning have you determined that the American way of life, which I too love, is or should be paramount on Earth, at the expense of all others?

The WSJ On Iraq

It’s an interesting editorial. One meme on the neocon right is that an Obama presidency will immediately mean "surrender" in Iraq. But this argument runs logically against another neocon meme: we’re winning! So the WSJ moves the two arguments closer today, by declaring that Maliki’s public noises about a withdrawal timetable are merely further evidence that our job is done, that Bush is a world-historical visionary, etc etc. But we still have to stay for the rest of our lifetimes:

Inside Iraq, a significant long-term U.S. presence would also increase the confidence of Iraq’s various factions to make political compromises. And outside, it would improve regional stability by giving the U.S. a presence in the heart of the Middle East that would deter foreign adventurism. This is the kind of strategic benefit that the next Administration should try to consolidate in Iraq after the hard-earned progress of the last year.

Translation: We’re winnng, so we can stay for ever. The US presence should be "significant" and "long-term". This, I think, is McCain’s position. But the WSJ’s rationale for keeping foreign troops in a sovereign country thousands of miles away for ever is the most priceless sentence. The whole point is to "deter foreign adventurism." Just not by the United States.

Is The Culture War Dead?

Michael Scherer evaluates McCain’s new ad:

In some ways, this is a predictable theme. Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the 1960s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation’s hinterlands against the cultural elites, the liberals of New York and Los Angeles. But the effectiveness of the strategy is arguably aging. Does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?

DIsh readers don’t think so. I find Obama’s post-culture war appeal to be central to his candidacy. But as an empirical matter, I’m not sure the post-Vietnam gambit is totally played out yet. Here’s hoping.

Holding The Center

Yuval Levin worries:

All these are moves in the right direction, and we ought to hope that if elected, Obama would stick to these new positions. But when he makes such moves so easily and shamelessly and then denies that he has changed at all, can we be blamed if we conclude he’s just playing us for suckers and will revert to his very liberal origins (as demonstrated by his very liberal voting record) if he becomes president?

But his list of Obama’s apparent reversals is very thin gruel.

“That Black Man’s A Commie”

"I have said publicly, and I will again, that unless he proves me wrong, he is a Marxist," – Tom DeLay, 2008.

"And did the Obama rally begin with the Soviet National Anthem?" – Hugh Hewitt, 2008.

"My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser," – Bill Kristol, 2008.

"King’s view of American society was thus not fundamentally different from that of the CPUSA or of other Marxists. While he is generally remembered today as the pioneer for civil rights for blacks and as the architect of non-violent techniques of dissent and political agitation, his hostility to and hatred for America should be made clear. While there is no evidence that King was a member of the Communist Party, his associations with persons close to the Party, his cooperation with and assistance for groups controlled or influenced by the Party, his efforts to disguise these relationships from public view and from his political allies in the Kennedy Administration, and his views of American society and foreign policy all suggest that King may have had an explicit but clandestine relationship with the Communist Party or its agents to promote through his own stature, not the civil rights of blacks or social justice and progress, but the totalitarian goals and ideology of Communism. While there is no evidence to demonstrate this speculation, it is not improbable that such a relationship existed," –Jesse Helms, 1983.

Nothing really changes, does it?