Month: September 2011

The Real Pro-Israel Lobby

Edward Luttwak notes an essential point: Greater Israel is sustained more by Christianist Americans than anxious American Jews:

The cleanest analytical way of understanding the American-Israeli relationship is to say that the post-1945 career of the United States as a world-meddling, imperialist power has forced Americans to be very foreign-oriented. Many American families have had their sons killed overseas, and many other Americans have become foreign-oriented for many reasons. Among them there is a group of Christians who read the Bible, who believe in the Bible to some degree as a document that registers God's will. For them, Israel is the proof of the truth of the Bible. Hence, the notion that the United States should be supporting rather than opposing Israel has now become expected, which was absolutely not true in 1948 when the United States did every possible thing to prevent the existence of Israel by systematically intercepting arms flows to the Jews.

Therefore, if we in the Z.O.G. didn't really run everything, and there was no Zionist influence, then this solid mass of foreign-aware Americans, who also happen to be Bible-believers–we're talking 50 million people–to them, the only foreign policy that counts is America's support for Israel. Period.

Spot-on, although the cheerleading or quiet encouragement of Greater Israel from the American Jewish Establishment doesn't help. All of which explains the hilarious/tragic spectacle of the US government furiously attempting to prevent the UN from recognizing the two-state solution that the United States has supported for as long as one can recall. You don't know whether to laugh or cry; but we all know where all this ends – capitulation to the most extreme elements of the American and Israeli right.

One of Mitt Romney's dumber lines (and there are plenty to choose from) is that Obama has no foreign policy. This is only true, it seems to me, on Israel. There the president has no real leeway or leverage to achieve any ends at all, and therefore no foreign policy. The foreign policy is set by US public opinion, and sustained by elite media granstanding for the Christianist imperial and apocalyptic project in the Middle East.

Romney’s Plan

Romney_Plan

Romney released a 150-page economic plan yesterday. The plan is about what you would expect in a GOP primary – it costs $7.8 trillion according to Think Progress – but Romney's newly unveiled economic brain-trust is more heterodox:

Harvard's Greg Mankiw founded the Pigou Club to advocate for a tax on carbon. "A $1 per gallon hike in gas tax would bring in $100 billion a year in government revenue and make a dent in the looming fiscal gap," he said. Columbia Business School's Glenn Hubbard has argued that though marginal tax rates do significant damage to the economy, there's a good case to be made for raising revenues through closing loopholes and shaving tax expenditures. And ex-Minnesota Congressman Vin Weber was an enthusiastic backer of Simpson-Bowles, which raised taxes by about $2 trillion over 10 years. Only Jim Talent, the former senator from Missouri, hasn't confessed to an interest in stabilizing the debt through a deal that includes revenues.

I guess we can hope that all of this won't be thrown to the winds to appease the Tea Party. Frum loves the plan's focus on long-term growth but, er, what about, you know, jobs:

A President Romney would take office in January 2013, at a time when even on a best-case scenario more than 10 million Americans will still be unemployed or under-employed, more than half of them for a very long time. What to do for them? On this urgent topic, the plan falls dismayingly quiet. Even if Romney’s policies do raise the long-term growth rate of the United States beginning sometime about 2014, unemployment won’t return to normal levels until a Romney second term. That portends almost a decade of very high unemployment.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Thank you for your excellent 9/11 article in Newsweek. But please allow me to raise one important question for further explanation on your blog: why exactly did you support the war in Iraq?

I know you have reconsidered your position, and in your article you "tip your hat" to those who got it right. Since then you have led the fight publicly against neocon thinking and paid a professional price (I guess) by being ostracized by the Republican party for challenging Bush-era terrorism policies. And, I suspect, you may be tired of "apologizing" for this episode. But as a devoted reader, who didn't read your blog back then (it was 10 years ago!), I never really understood why you supported the Iraq war and, over the last few years of my readership, I haven't heard a satisfying explanation on your blog as to why you did originally.

I also suspect that many of your current readers also would be curious as to why you were in favor of the Iraq war. But, your explanation in the Newsweek article was both very short and (frankly) unsatisfying. By your words, the explanation is straightforward: you were "fooled" because of understandable post-9/11 anxiety. You write of your "psychic terror," "swamping of reason in [my] frontal cortex," "panic," "fear . . . spiraling upward," "minds . . . flooded with dread," "panic," "overwhelmed . . . judgment," and "fear dominated my being," and thus you trusted in "what our government told us, in tones that certainly sounded sincere."

Look, you are an admirable straight shooter, and it is plausible that you became overcome by 9/11 fear. But, candidly, that doesn't feel right. I mean, we got hit on September 11, 2001 and we didn't invade Iraq until March 20, 2003 – 18 months later. By the time we went to war in Iraq, it was widely reported that 70% of the American population mistakenly thought that Saddam Hussein had a connection to 9/11 (a percentage which I assume did not include you), there were high-level dissenters as to the supposed WMD intelligence, there was no evidence that Saddam posed a threat to the U.S. homeland, we knew that senior Bush people previously had issued public pre-9/11 statements in favor of invading Iraq, etc.

Honestly, this was not an environment where you could be fooled. It was an environment where you could make an informed choice. And it is hard to believe that 18 months after 9/11 that you were in a state of debilitating panic.

I have gone over this many times. But here's as succinct answer as I can muster today: no, the debilitating panic did not disappear. But it hardened into a political and rhetorical position, which I resisted changing in a highly emotional and volatile environment. I did believe that Saddam had WMDs; I also believed they could be handed to Jihadists; I did believe that democracy in Iraq could transform the Middle East, and that only such a transformation could get at the roots of Jihadism and adequately respond to the 9/11 crisis. I think I was broadly right about the latter but blind as to the competence and morality of the Bush administration, and woefully clueless about the distinction between democracy imposed from outside and a democracy that bubbles up from within. That last misjudgment is about as grave as a Burkean can admit.

In the daily mudfight of the blogosphere, I also dug in. And if I doubted, far left elements of the anti-war movement (think ANSWER) kept me too sure of myself (a classic epistemic failing). When I spoke with them, some instinctively blamed the US itself for an indefensible mass murder, and some seemed more consumed with hatred of George W Bush than Osama bin Laden. I got into a camp and doubled down. And if you want to know where the impulse for a blogazine that routinely presents dissent, that is open to self-doubt, that has become less a one-man pedestal than a collective thought process, then that experience may help explain the Dish's evolution.

None of this is an excuse. But I hope it is more of an explanation.

Men In Free Fall

Tina comments on the plenitude of political sexual scandal (notable exception: the president):

I have a theory that men are losing altitude at tremendous speed, and that they are so insecure that they are acting out with sexual antics all the time.

Amanda Marcotte uncovers it in the fall TV line-up:

When you list out the great shows that make up this television renaissance, certain commonalities emerge: high production values, a greater investment in acting talent, and complex plotting that assumes an audience that never misses an episode. But with the sole exception of True Blood—which has camp enough to put it into a genre of its own—all these shows share something else. Every other non-vampire show centers around a modern man struggling with the limitations of his outlook in a world full of complexity and changes that prevent survival through simple reliance on old gender norms. If you want to make a critically acclaimed drama, you need to build up a patriarch, preferably in a highly masculine environment, and then start to peel away his certainty about the way the world works and what it means to be a man in this world.

Or watch with morbid fascination the role of men in Mad Men or Pan Am.

Leaving, And Returning To, The Bubble

Rod Dreher has a shiny new blog over at The American Conservative. From his initial post:

Driving home from work one day, I listened to a news story on the radio, and it occurred to me that after a year of living in Philadelphia, I had had maybe two political conversations, period. I think it’s so easy for pundits and others who live in a bubble where conversation is driven by news and current events to forget that many, probably most, Americans don’t live their lives according to the daily news cycle. I know, I know, this is obvious, but it’s so obvious many of us commentators don’t notice it. Leaving the New York-Washington bubble for Dallas showed me how cut off the people who run our country and media are from the lives of most Americans. Leaving the newspaper bubble for a job that specifically ruled out writing about politics and current affairs compelled me to see the world in a different way — in a way that I think is more like the way most Americans see it, to be honest.

Media News

Chait's departure from TNR is surely a body blow to the place. He had become its spine, its central voice, without which a magazine is in trouble. Here's hoping Tim Noah can somehow match him, and the new writers the still-excellent magazine has hired can keep the standards up. And a big welcome to neocon reporter Eli Lake here at the Beast. He's an old friend, and sparring partner, and has more sources in the Israeli government than even Jeffrey Goldberg, who is now writing columns for Bloomberg.