Here’s an excellent and revealing debate at the Council on Foreign Relations between Richard Perle, roving Bushie, and Leon Fuerth, foreign policy adviser to Al Gore. It proves to me at least that Fuerth is an expert at finding reasons not to do anything – a continuation of the policies of the Clinton-Gore administration that helped make us vulnerable last September 11. But check out the debate for yourself. Here’s a critical Perle outburst:
Leon would have you believe that Iran is at least a great a threat as Iraq, but I didn’t hear him recommending that we take action against Iran. Indeed, I don’t think he’s prepared to take action against any state, which is why he’s put the emphasis on the non-state network. Let me suggest to you that the non-state network he’s talking about had its roots in Afghanistan where thousands of people were trained, where the most proficient and effective prospects were identified and selected. It is no accident that the people who carried out those acts passed through those training camps in Afghanistan.
If we are going to win the war against terror, which Leon’s suggest[s should be] the emphasis of American policy, we must take that war to the states that harbor and support terrorists. If terrorists are fugitives, if they have to sleep in a different location every night, if they are hunted wherever they attempt to put down roots, we will have a decent chance of defeating terrorism. But if we shy away from taking on the states that support them, states like Iraq, they will continue to enjoy the benefits of sanctuary and the problem for an open society will be unmanageable.
That’s the rub. I’m just glad we don’t have to deal with this threat with president Al “It’s-All-So-Complicated” Gore.
GREEN BUSH: Well, he promised us something. The greenhouse gas proposal, as outlined in today’s papers, strikes me as a perfectly defensible compromise in the debate over global warming. Its most important theoretical contribution is to ally environmental progress with economic growth, and to rely on voluntary and market-driven incentives to restrain the production of allegedly harmful greenhouse gases. It’s a more full-throttled embrace of market-environmentalism than some statists would like, but, given the fact that growth and environmental health have been shown to be complementary in the past, and given that the drastic Kyoto alternative would have all but destroyed the U.S. economy (and thereby the global economy), this strikes me, at first blush, as a sound proposal. There’s a sensible use of the “right to pollute” provisions which allow dirty companies to buy polluting credits from cleaner ones, while they try to clean up their act:
Under the “cap and trade” approach, the government would set mandatory limits on emissions of those three pollutants while establishing a new market in which major polluters can purchase “credits” from non-polluting companies toward meeting their pollution targets.
All in all, a decent first stab at arguing that conservatism and environmentalism are not in any way contradictory, and in many ways, natural allies. After all, the essence of conservatism is a desire to conserve – and that means conserving our society and economy and our natural world. Bush has begun to figure out a way to do all three. The “green” left still hasn’t.
MORE CHURCHILL: After Schama, enjoy Himmelfarb.
THE ANTI-WAR LEFT RALLIES: It has started in earnest in Britain, but it will surely gain traction in parts of the United States. The argument now is that the war against terror is over; that there is no serious continuing threat, and that increases in defense spending is just a ruse for Bush to maintain political dominance at home and spread the imperium abroad. Here’s Seamus Milne in the Guardian today:
Those who have argued that America’s war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had “better get their house in order” or face what he called the “justice of this nation”, it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all. Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the “full spectrum dominance” the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war.
There is no account of the growing threat of weapons of mass destruction, complete amnesia of September 11, an assertion that the “axis of evil” is an “absurd” concept, and a tired reversion to the arguments of the 1960s and 1980s. They don’t seem to read newspaper reports such as the one in today’s New York Times, suggesting al Qaeda operatives are poised to strike again. In other words, they still don’t get it. In the Guardian, of course, they never did. But it’s a warning sign of what might lie ahead as some elements of the left ramp up their efforts to appease the forces of terror and destruction. Amnesia and complacency are their strongest weapons. The rest of us must do what we can not to forget.
THE IDEOLOGY OF BRITISH FOOD: A Canadian reader writes to say that Orwell’s inspiration for his defense of English cooking was the novelist George Gissing (also the source for Orwell’s own nom de plume). He also forwards this priceless piece of Brit propaganda as the basis for the quality of English cooking. It’s from “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft” published in 1903:
The aim of English cooking is so to deal with the raw material of man’s nourishment as to bring out, for the healthy palate, all its natural juices and savours. And in this, when the cook has any measure of natural or acquired skill, we most notably succeed. Our beef is veritably beef; at its best, such beef as can be eaten in no other country under the sun; our mutton is mutton in its purest essence — think of a shoulder of Southdown at the moment when the first jet of gravy starts under the carving knife!
Each of our vegetables yields its separate and characteristic sweetness. It never occurs to us to disguise the genuine flavour of food; if such a process be necessary, then something is wrong with the food itself. Some wiseacre scoffed at us as the people with only one sauce. The fact is, we have as many sauces as we have kinds of meat; each, in the process of cookery, yields its native sap, and this is the best of all sauces conceivable. Only English folk know what is meant by gravy; consequently, the English alone are competent to speak on the question of sauce… Give your average cook a bit of cod, and tell her to dress it in her own way. The good creature will carefully boil it, and there an end of the matter; and by no exercise of art could she have so treated the fish as to make more manifest and enjoyable that special savour which heaven has bestowed upon cod.
I think the subtext here is pretty obvious. He’s saying: “Our food may be tasteless – but at least it isn’t French.”
The Dish 