Author: Andrew Sullivan

Read this article in yesterday’s Washington Post and see if, like me, you feel nauseated by the end of it. The Post has unearthed a tiny little paper trail about the way sleazeball lobbyists in Washington do business. It’s basically about the shameless use of contacts to buy legislation. Ralph Reed is one of the least inhibited of the bunch. “We are a loyal member of your team and are prepared to do whatever fits your strategic plan,” Reed writes in an Oct. 23, 2000, memo, that reads like a manifesto for political prostitution. “In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard — and by whom.” Thanks, Ralph, for that little lesson in civics. But what else did we expect from Reed and his ilk? Perhaps they agree with the positions they’re lobbying for. Perhaps they don’t. At $380,000 for a consulting fee, the rights and wrongs of something are not exactly pertinent, are they? Almost as worrying is that Karl Rove clearly helped Reed get this lucrative position. He must surely have known that Reed would be paid substantially; and that, unlike others, he’d be expected to deliver. So indirectly, the Bush campaign was oiling the wheels for a massively corrupt corporation for strategic political reasons. It’s depressing; and it’s routine. I just hope Reed spares us in future any religious uplift about his role in politics and the importance of virtue in public life. This kind of activity would make anyone feel disgusted by what our political system has become. And it tells you everything you want to know about Reed’s integrity that he didn’t even feel the need to respond to the Post with a defense of his own actions.

IN TRANSIT: I’ll be flying back from London today (Monday) so forgive the light dish. But don’t miss the book club discussion which starts (with my first post) this morning.

THE BOOK-CLUB BEGINS: My first post on Robert Kaplan’s “Warrior Politics” is now up. We lucked out on the timing. In the Washington Post yesterday, Steve Mufson, reveals that Kaplan was brought into the White House as long ago as March 2001 to chew the fat about the state of the world. So much for the notion that this president is incurious or uninterested in foreign affairs or history or the intricacies of his job. Here’s Mufson’s account of the meeting:

Bush had plenty of other things on his agenda the day of Kaplan’s visit. The president was to meet the Japanese prime minister to smooth over the accidental sinking of a Japanese fishing boat by a U.S. submarine. Later that week, touting a policy of “realism,” the administration would reproach a Chinese vice premier over religious freedom and expel dozens of Russian diplomats in a tit-for-tat over espionage allegations. But first, Bush wanted to discuss “Eastward to Tartary,” a sequel to Kaplan’s influential “Balkan Ghosts,” a sobering political history that Clinton’s aides said he read before deciding not to intervene in Bosnia. Bush, soon to embark on his first presidential visit to Europe, wanted to hear what Kaplan had to say about the stability of Romania and Bulgaria. “Tell us what you think, that’s why you’re here,” Bush said. For 45 minutes, he and Kaplan talked, while Rice, NSC director of European affairs Daniel Fried and White House chief of staff Andrew Card mostly listened.

I had no idea about this when I picked “Warrior Politics” as our first book, and it’s typical of Bush and Kaplan to keep it quiet for so long. But it seems all the more relevant now. We’ll be reading and then talking with someone who has obviously influenced the current president. Maybe we will get an insight into how Bush is thinking at this critical moment in world history.

WILL HUTTON ON AMERICA: A little learning is a dangerous thing. In yesterday’s Observer, key New Labour “thinker” Will Hutton loses it over America’s international leadership. However, as even Hutton must now be aware, the problem with opposing American belligerency toward Iraq is the same as with the opposition to taking on the Taliban. Virtually no one in their right mind can describe the Iraqi regime as anything but dangerous, unstable and potentially capable of the use of weapons of mass destruction against the West. Since this is the central issue, it is odd that Hutton would simply ignore it. But he does. Instead he writes that Tony Blair

is reported to have said privately that ‘if we can get rid of Baghdad, we should’, a devastatingly naive remark which so far stands uncorrected. This is the traditional British view that insists we stick close to the US.

Actually, it’s the traditional British view that it’s probably sensible to protect yourself from a dirty nuclear bomb. Hutton then goes on to wax hysterical about a tiny intellectual cabal that allegedly runs the United States, and is based around the views of one Leo Strauss. It’s clear Hutton hasn’t read any Strauss, or he wouldn’t come up with the following near-unhinged account of his alleged politics. Straussianism, according to Hutton,

unites patriotism, unilateralism, the celebration of inequality and the right of a moral élite to rule into a single unifying ideology.

Huh? This is the kind of thing that would get a C on a freshman college paper. And Hutton’s evidence that the entire American establishment is acquainted with a largely unknown, if highly intelligent, political philosopher? Here it is:

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of state for defence pushing for an early invasion of Iraq, is a Straussian. So is John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, who has legislated for military tribunals both to try and execute suspected terrorists beyond the rule of law. Straussians build up the military capacity of the nation while invoking the Bible and the flag. This is not prejudice; this is a coherent ideological position.

Sorry, Will. I’ve read a lot of Strauss and this half-baked attempt to lump everything a British socialist dislikes about America into something called Straussianism isn’t a coherent ideological position. It’s a prejudice.

Why Bush is wrong on the environment; why the gun lobby is like the abortion lobby; America’s imperial DNA; etc.

Every now and again, I have to protest to my American friends that England actually is a serious country. It’s not all faint echoes of Monty Python and ‘Are You Being Served.’ And then I read the Guardian this morning. Here’s a priceless correction about an overheard comment from Ms. Ann Widdecombe, a large, well-bosomed, big-haired Tory, known in the House of Commons as Attila the Hen:

Ann Widdecombe: an apology.
In an item yesterday, we referred disapprovingly to a remark made by Ms Widdecombe to my so-called rival on the Telegraph, concerning a male acquaintance going to “pussy heaven.” We now accept that Ms Widdecombe was in fact referring to her cat, Carruthers, who recently passed away. We are greatly distressed by this misunderstanding.

You really can’t make this stuff up, can you?

The invaluable and unimpeachable Jonathan Rauch puts a fork in the Times’ columnist Who Gets Money Calls.

Contrast Bill Clinton’s excruciating dialogue with MTV viewers not so long ago with Colin Powell’s masterful, engaged colloquy. No boxers or briefs questions. No attempt to pander shamelessly for votes. Just a principled and effective defense of America’s role in the world to a global generation that desperately needs to hear it. According to the New York Times today,

[w]hen Ida Norheim-Hagtun, 19, of Norway, asked about America’s being seen as Satan, Secretary Powell said that, “far from being the great Satan, I would say we are the great protector.” He said the United States had rebuilt Europe and Japan after World War II, defeated Communism and fascism and that “the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead.”

That’s a home run. I was also proud of him for not kowtowing to the crazy notion, still fostered by paleocons, that somehow using condoms won’t impede the spread of HIV. Of course they’re not perfect. I’m the last person to claim they are. But they’re an essential part of any attempt to restrain transmission in the developing world. Even more amazing was his calm and candid exploration of the explosive matter of “blackness:”

Natalie Cofield, 20, an information- systems major at Howard, also drew a sober response when she asked the secretary why he had suggested he was not “that black.”
“Because I am not that black as a physical matter,” he replied, adding: “I’m as black as anybody whose skin could be 20 shades darker. I consider myself an African-American, a black man, proud of it, proud to stand on the shoulders of those who went before me.”
Because of his military background and upbringing in an interracial neighborhood in the Bronx, Secretary Powell added, “I’m probably more acceptable to the white power structure that I was dealing with when I was coming up.” But, he noted, Jim Crow laws were not a historical footnote for him. “I’ve been thrown out of places because I was just black enough not to be served,” he said.

I’m usually not a Powell booster. I disagree with some of his judgments on international relations and foreign policy. But in this instance, all the hype is justified. What an amazing asset the United States has in its dealings with the wider world.

MACULATE CONCEPTION: A razor-sharp piece by Jeff Morley in Slate on liberal interest group reaction to a recent Bush HHS proposal. The Bush administration at the end of last month announced a dramatic extension of federally-supported health-care for poor pregnant women. To sweeten this liberal pill for its own constituency, the administration put in the small print that the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which currently covers children from birth to age 19, would now define children as any living being from conception onward. The left had a cow, declaring, as they do every fifteen minutes or so, that abortion was in imminent danger of being made illegal. Jeff is right to point out that one of the reasons groups like NARAL do this is not because it’s true (it obviously isn’t) but because without these scare tactics, their direct mail fundraising dries up. The result is that the Bushies have successfully occupied the center-ground on abortion, while cleverly marginalizing the interest group left. It’s the same mistake that PFAW have made by describing Charles Pickering as a latter day Goebbels. Good for Morley for presenting a saner liberal position.

THE EUROPEAN RIFT: Sane piece by David Ignatius today in the Post, reiterating many of the arguments made in this space, by Tom Friedman, and others. Ignatius is right that Europeans simply don’t get the depth of the change in the American psyche since September 11. They can be forgiven for that. Some Americans haven’t absorbed it either. He’s also right that Americans too easily forget that Europe itself has had much experience with terrorism. I grew up in a country where half the cabinet had to be dug out of rubble in a hotel explosion in Brighton. It doesn’t help America’s case now that some Americans actually financed this war on a fellow democracy for years. Even today, you can’t find a single trash-can on a London street – they’re too easy to plant bombs in. At the same time, the simple truth is that no terrorist event in the history of Europe’s recent past can be compared to 9/11. The difference is simply one of scale and ambition. If a similar event had occurred in London or Paris, they would be singing a different tune today – and desperate for America’s help. So I have limited patience with their quibbles. They actually have nothing comparable to talk about, and their success in appeasing terrorists is the best argument yet for Bush’s zero-tolerance policy. the Europeans should also be smart enough to realize that they could be next. This is not time to start whining about American global power. If it weren’t for American global power, al Qaeda would be busy destroying key European cities as we speak.

“Philomene was a dainty thing, built somewhat on the order of Lois De Fee, the lady bouncer. She had the rippling muscles of a panther, the stolidity of a water buffalo, and the lazy insolence of a shoe salesman.” – S.J. Perelman, “Crazy Like a Fox.”

COKE AND HIV: A fascinating study today that proves the bleeding obvious: if you’re HIV-positive and doing coke on a regular basis, your immune system is likely to collapse much more quickly than if you were sober. But the benefit of the study seems to be that it has successfully isolated the effects of cocaine – rather than the effects of poor eating, less sleep that go with coke-use. Of course, among some HIV-infected populations, such as the inner-city poor, it’s more likely to be crack that accelerates illness and death. And in the urban gay male world, the soaring use of crystal meth is also a far more dangerous threat. This isn’t even about transmission as such. It’s about the maintenance of health in HIV-infected individuals – the difference between a short decline into illness or decades of good living. I think it would be a smart move by groups dealing with HIV among gay men to move away from some of the doom and gloom messages about transmission (which have obviously failed to have much traction) and start appealing more aggressively to men with HIV about their more general health. Instead of portraying HIV as still a deadly and terrifying disease (which most gay men understandably question these days), health officials need to stress how well you can live with HIV if you avoid smoking, excessive drug-use, heavy drinking, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and so on. This is a positive message that also builds self-esteem, rather than a negative message that seems to condemn people for contracting HIV, stigmatize them for having it, and place the blame exclusively on them for transmission. Let’s use this study as a good place to start for a new discussion.

Lasagna and chips; the meaning of heroism; liberal heterosexual editors; etc.

A year ago around this time, I wrote this screed against romantic love. It’s been a theme of mine – and formed part of my last book, Love Undetectable. In contrast to the breathlessness of romance, and our absurd expectations of it, I tried to argue that friendship as a form of relationship was actually a superior form of love. I still believe that on the whole, if you count romance as the “falling in love” part of what the Greeks called eros. But at the time, many people told me that romantic love fully understood could be a nobler thing, that it could encompass both friendship and romance, fusing both. I noted the argument, but was a skeptic. It behooves me to say that, a year later, I understand it a little better. No book taught me, of course. Thanks, bro. Miss you.

Chatting with English friends over the past few days, one theme keeps coming up. America is now, for the first time ever, a real empire. And the Brits know an empire when they see one. Yes, the U.S. has been a dominant global power before now; and, yes, it had an enormous sphere of influence in the past century. But it was always challenged by a serious rival in the past; and it was also hobbled by a profound ambivalence toward foreign entanglement. Both qualifications have now disappeared. My friend Niall Ferguson kept haranguing me for years about the disparity between American power and American responsibility in the post-Cold War world. In return I kept telling him that Americans simply didn’t want to be the heirs of the British Empire of the nineteenth century. It wasn’t in their DNA.

But hasn’t September 11 changed that somewhat? What that event did was end isolationism. What it proved is that a reluctance to get involved in the world wasn’t merely a moral or strategic choice of whether to intervene in other countries – i.e. Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda. It was a matter of necessity to prevent an attack on America itself. What Osama bin Laden did was what neoconservatives never fully persuaded Americans of – that America’s destiny is necessarily an imperial one. This doesn’t mean occupying everywhere – or anywhere for that matter. Technology has made warfare and empire something that can be done at a great distance and with few casualties. Moreover, the sheer gulf between the level of American power in almost every field and the rest of the world is not shrinking. It’s growing. At the end of the Cold War, America’s share of the world economic pie was around 22 percent. With the collapse of Russia and Japan and the sclerosis affecting continental Europe, the U.S. share is now 30 percent. American productivity growth since the mid-1990s has merely exacerbated this differential. Here’s Paul Kennedy, former theorist of American decline, changing his mind in the Financial Times:

In 1985, the Pentagon’s budget equalled 6.5 per cent of gross domestic product and was seen by many as a cause of US budgetary and economic-growth problems. By 1998, defence spending’s share of GDP was down to 3.2 per cent, and today it is not much greater. Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world’s single superpower on the cheap is astonishing… [Today], a full 45 per cent of all internet traffic takes place in this one country. About 75 per cent of the Nobel laureates in the sciences, economics and medicine in recent decades do their research and reside in America. A group of 12 to 15 US research universities have, through vast financing, moved into a new superleague of world universities that is leaving everyone else – the Sorbonne, Toyko, Munich, Oxford, Cambridge – in the dust, especially in the experimental sciences. The top places among the rankings of the world’s biggest banks and largest companies are now back, to a large degree, in US hands. And if one could reliably create indicators of cultural power – the English language, films and television, advertisements, youth culture, international student flows – the same lopsided picture would emerge.

When you add to this the current projections for future Pentagon defense spending, the empire so feared by people like Gore Vidal is no longer a theory. It is a reality. This preponderance of real global power is literally unique in the history of the world. And the one thing holding it back – America’s ambivalence and isolationism – is lying in the rubble of the World Trade Center. The further you get from America, the clearer this is. And we have only begun to think through the full consequences.