The Big Question, Ctd

Baghdadfrancopagettitime_3

Another reader weighs in:

The theory in Iraq was that we would not need to occupy the nation, not need to impose martial law, not need to do the things that we did in both Germany and Japan because it wouldn’t be necessary. Iraqis were going to do by themselves and for themselves what Germans and Japanese did guided by the firm hand of occupation forces which dominated every aspect of their post-war civil life. 

If you wish to cite Germany and Japan as the examples, you’ll have to explain why our leaders believed, and repeatedly affirmed, that the aftermath of Iraq would require so much less time, effort and manpower than our occupations of those Axis powers. America and its coalition partners never lacked the competence to occupy Iraq, we embraced a theory that said occupation would be unnecessary.

As for the Soviet Union are you seriously suggesting that toppling Saddam could possibly have the same effect on his neighbors, some of whom were sworn enemies, that the collapse of the Soviet Union had on its component and client states?  The similarities between the two are limited to the term ‘change of government.’  You’re better than this sophist argument.

The point still stands. The philosophy behind our effort Iraq doomed it, not an incompetent implementation of that philosophy.

It was conservative members of the US government who predicted that Iraq would take longer, cost more, and require hundreds of thousands more troops to turn out the way Germany and Japan turned out. Their opinions were dismissed out-of-hand as ‘old thinking.’ Neo-conservatives predicted that we’d be pretty much done militarily in Iraq within a few months, that our efforts would cost next-to-nothing, and that the entire region would then change for the better. 

You say that we were just being over-optimistic. Optimistic thinking would be that it would only take 3 years, 300,000 troops and $300 billion dollars to succeed. The pre-war predictions of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz weren‚Äôt ‘over-optimistic,’ they were magical thinking enshrined as policy.  Our nation acted upon those sunny predictions as if they bore any relationship with reality, and reality is now kicking our behinds.

Thanks. For my part (although I should go back and read my blog to make sure of this), I always believed that Iraq would be an enormously difficult endeavor, taking years of occupation and billions of dollars. But looking back, I think I didn’t fully realize the radical utopianism of some of the people I was backing. I also wrongly believed that the WMD threat was so real we had no choice; and I felt that the danger of radical Islam so profound that some space for democratic change in Iraq was essential to winning the long war. Part of me still believes that. On this book tour, I don’t have time right now to say more. But I hope to synthesize some of your points into a real piece soon that grapples with this deep question – and what it means for what we do now.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti.)

Prohibition II

George Will – who has easily been the wisest conservative commentator these past five years – makes the case against banning online gambling. Well, it makes itself, actually. Money quote:

[G]overnments and sundry busybodies seem affronted by the Internet, as they are by any unregulated sphere of life. The speech police are itching to bring bloggers under campaign-finance laws that control the quantity, content and timing of political discourse. And now, by banning a particular behavior—the entertainment some people choose, using their own money—government has advanced its mother-hen agenda of putting a saddle and bridle on the Internet.

Apart from the horrifyingly mixed metaphor, I couldn’t agree more. Cluck, cluck. Neiiighhh!

The Hijacking of Conservatism

A reader writes:

I listened to part of the interview on NPR with Tom Ashbrook.

I say thank you for pointing out that real conservatives have been pushed out of the Republican Party. We can’t be Democrats, but we can’t be Republicans anymore either. Sometimes we feel like we have been dumped onto another planet. 

What happened? We have been very politically active but the conservative movement was hijacked. True conservatives have ideals and goals more like our original colonists (influenced by Locke but also by Native Americans): the rights of the Individual, religious pluralism, and limited government only by consent.

Thank you for speaking out.

The fight has only just begin.

Brooks on Faith

I am grateful for David Brooks’ thoughtful review of my book. But I do want to take serious issue with a couple of arguments he makes. The first is the following:

When a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith.

Tcscover_3 If by that, Brooks means that the scope and scale of American Christianity encompasses far more than these three things, then of course he’s right. That’s why an entire chapter of my book – a chapter he simply ignores – is devoted to conservative, Catholic arguments about life, death and sex. And many evangelicals, as I also take pains to point out in the book, are subtler than their leaders, especially the more politicized ones. Here’s a direct quote from Chapter Two:

It is too broad a brush to describe all fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants this way, let alone most non-fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants. Many have adopted much more open ways of discussing their human failings, and the most successful have put practical counseling to deal with human problems at the core of their ministry. The success of books like Rick Warren’s "The Purpose-Driven Life" is based on his candid and humane acknowledgment that many Christians experience drift, bewilderment and self-doubt. James Dobson’s folksy homilies on how to rear children fall into the same category. Similarly, many contemporary Catholic priests offer compassionate, pastoral care for their flawed flocks; and have learned to subject themselves to careful moral scrutiny.

Does that sound like I’m describing even all fundamentalists as Christianists, as Brooks implies? I’m even giving Dobson credit when he sticks to faith, not politics. But the notion that Falwell’s past, Dobson’s current political clout and the "Left Behind" series’ success do not capture something important about "the religious and political currents in modern America" today is preposterous. For David to deny this says much more about his blindspots than about America.

Falwell may indeed no longer be a central figure in American Christianism. But he was a critical early force in building the movement that now runs the GOP, along with Pat Robertson. You cannot narrate the emergence of the new Republicanism (in which Brooks played a part), as I do in the book, without mentioning Goldwater’s nemesis. As for Dobson, his influence is indisputably enormous. Last year, Dobson’s group spent $150 million on spreading its message. Dobson’s estimated listening radio audience is in the tens of millions Left_behind a day (some claim 200 million), and his multi-media complex in Colorado Springs is so vast it has its own zip-code. The president vets Supreme Court nominees through him. This is irrelevant to what has happened to conservatism in the last decade? Please.

As for the "Left Behind" series of books, the data also speak for themselves. Money quote from USA Today:

Since an initial printing of 35,000 copies, nearly 8 million of the original Left Behind have sold, as well as 62 million copies of related titles. The last six books in the series made their debut at No. 1 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list, a David and Goliath-like feat for a series that didn’t make a significant dent in mainstream stores until 1998 … In 2002, Jenkins and LaHaye joined Tom Clancy, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling as the only authors who have first printings of 2 million copies or more.

The books don’t do nearly as well abroad, because they speak to the particular dynamics of American evangelicalism, especially the popular notion of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture that has rapidly spread in the last five years – especially after 9/11. For good measure, author Tim LaHaye’s wife founded Concerned Women for America, a powerful Christianist lobby group with half a million members. Is Brooks saying that my citing this mass phenomenon means I knows nothing about American religion and politics today or that I am arguing in bad faith? If he is, his dismissal is a function of his own denial, not analysis.

Brooks on Doubt

David also makes a good and strong case for the limits of doubt in both politics in general and America in particular. My Oakeshottian strain of conservatism does indeed have a weak lineage in American culture and history, as I concede in the introduction. But it is far more integral to America in ways that David doesn’t fully grasp. Let me take his first point:

Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in [an Oakeshottian] view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one’s balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths. Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.

The interesting character to think about in this respect, of course, is not Oakeshott, whose twentieth-century conservatism is in part a product of – and therefore had no contribution to – the Declaration of Independence and the American constitution. But Edmund Burke, the first conservative of doubt, was alive at the time of America’s founding – and in Britain, the mother country, for good measure. What did he think of this event?

Burke saw two revolutions in his time – the French and the American. He was appalled by the prospect of the former – and his reflections upon it are the canonical text of Anglo-American conservatism. But he actually Burke_5 supported the second, even though it was a rebellion against his own country. How could a conservative of doubt support such a treasonous revolution? Because, as I try to explain in detail in the book, the American founding was a brilliant paradox (as Burke himself was). It was a conservative revolution. It occurred fundamentally not because of some great new idea about mankind, but because the colonies felt that a living practical tradition of English liberty had been denied them. They revolted with reluctance at first, but their growing anger was about the betrayal of their inheritance as free people.

Moreover, the constitution they came up with was, in some respects, the ur-text of doubt-based conservatism. You’ll have to read the book to see why because the argument is too long to summarize here. But the concept of separating government into different branches, devolving power to the states, and keeping the federal government out of religion was a deliberate way to disrupt the effectiveness of any faith-based politics or certainty-fueled enthusiasm in government. The entire mechanism of American government was designed to ensure that as little as possible is ever done by government, that doubt is welded into the core system, that certainty is always checked by other powers, and that the great Certainty of Divine Truth is always, always, always kept at bay. That’s one reason Oakeshott loved America – and why increasing numbers of American thinkers are coming to admire his thought, especially in these absolutist, fundamentalist times.

Now to David’s second point:

Oakeshottian conservatism can never prevail in America because the United States was not founded on the basis of custom, but by the assertion of a universal truth — that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain rights. The United States is a creedal nation, and almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed.

But where did that creed come from? It came from custom, from a political tradition, in a particular place, called Britain, which itself made a creed possible because of its own slow cultural and political evolution toward a free society. Where else could it come from? From heaven? No real Oakeshottian conservative would make such a claim. Yet that is the preposterous argument of the Christianists with whom Brooks has made common cause. And that is why their integration into conservatism is not an enlargement of the tradition, but an attack upon its core meaning.

And what were most of the "creedal" dreamers in subsequent American history basing their arguments on? That the Constitution protected them too. They were not claiming a new dawn for humanity, although their rhetoric inevitably deployed the religious rhetoric of a religious people. They were arguing that the old system that defines America – the Constitution – had somehow forgotten them, or, in the case of African-Americans, obliterated and enslaved them. They were arguing that social change had revealed that its guarantees of freedom had not yet been fully realized for all its people – women, most of all. The African-American civil rights movement was not so much an attempt to revolutionize America, but to Oakeshottcaius_1 include all Americans in the very system that had been set up at the start. This makes America not a creedal nation, but a Constitutional one. The president takes his oath of office to protect the Constitution, not an ideology or creed. I find it amazing I have to remind alleged conservatives of this basic fact.

Occasionally, other moral enthusiasms emerged that were not of this Constitutional kind, enthusiasms that seriously wanted to enforce new social policies across the entire society or reintroduce God into a political system that had kept theology at bay. Prohibition comes to mind, or the attempt to prevent freedom of speech in flag-burning, or the bigoted attempt to squelch the freedom of gay citizens, as we have slowly come to understand them. But it is no accident that in order to achieve these things, these spuriously religious movements had to amend the Constitution itself to succeed. Which is why the founders made it very hard to do so. Because they were conservatives of doubt. And they knew who the enemy was.

David is absolutely right that America itself – in its sociology and culture – is not a conservative place. It’s full of dreamers and achievers, activists and builders, religious zealots and cultural experimenters. My book ends with a ringing celebration of them – in all their passion and zeal and innovation (another core feature of the book Brooks ignores). But I argue that this is made possible solely because the constitutional system is so conservative in an Oakeshottian sense. Stable government is so constitutionally secure that it unleashes the potential for American vitality, passion, faith and certainty in the private and social and cultural spheres, without the danger of any single strain overwhelming the whole or hijacking the system itself. Without the conservatism of doubt in the Constitution, the enthusiasm and certainty and vitality and passion in the culture could turn into political tyranny and oppression and terrible error. This is echoed in the paradox that a conservative Constitution that took God out of politics precipitated the greatest flourishing of religious faith that the modern West has ever known.

Brooks, in other words, is right that the conservatism of doubt can never prevail in America – for the simple reason that it already has. In the beginning. As the defining moment, and in the enduring and almost miraculous Constitutional structure that is still, mercifully, in place.

What of my own paradoxical passion, which David sees as a contradiction or refutation of my broader case for doubt? On the question of torture, I am passionate because torture so profoundly violates the core principle of the Constitution, which is to protect the individual body from unchecked power; and because it was authorized illegally and was subsequently perpetuated by legislative cowardice and fear. I oppose torture because it violates freedom at its core and because it is the greatest enemy of the conservatism of doubt. The court did its job in Hamdan. The legislature failed. But now the people get to re-elect a new legislature, and if they care about the Constitution, and if they care about freedom, they will vote for representatives who will check this executive’s criminal excesses. On gay equality, my passion is partly because I saw so many of my fellows die and I owe it to them to carry the task on of explaining why they matter as human beings and as citizens. And it is also simply because I believe the Constitution guarantees equality and freedom for all. I don’t think, as David suggests, that my record is one of unmitigated zeal either. I published an anthology half of which was devoted to arguments against mine. I wrote a careful book that respected the arguments of my opponents. I favor state decisions, rather than federal over-reach. And so on. In this new book, I make a conservative case for including gay people in the country they belong to and the families they love. Whatever else it is, it is not a radical manifesto for a new utopia.

To paraphrase Oakeshott, I am a conservative in politics so I – and anyone else – can be a radical in every other activity, if we so choose. And I know no place on earth that allows that more fully than America. Which is why I love it so; and why I am so passionate in defending the system some people seem not to understand or have forgotten. Yes: I am passionate about doubt. And I am passionate about the protections in this Constitution so casually junked by this reckless, arrogant president. And I am passionate about saving the idea of America from those who have not fully understood – and now therefore threaten – its paradoxical strength. That’s the passion that made me write this book – and to defend it as well.

(Photo of Michael Oakeshott courtesy of Simon Oakeshott.)

Losing Baghdad

Baghdadyurikozyrevfortime

Reading this excellent report in USA Today is truly sobering. The Maliki government obviously has little power to restrain Shiite militias, who are slowly taking over the entire capital city. The Maliki government may actually be complicit in some of this:

U.S.-led raids often must be approved in advance by Iraqi leaders. This month, a unit in Baghdad got a tip about a torture chamber for Shiite death squads, but a planned raid needed clearance from the Iraqi side, said Capt. Kevin Salge, a company commander whose unit received the tip.

Several days passed before approval came through. By the time U.S. troops conducted a nighttime raid on the two-story building, it was largely abandoned, he said.

They were tipped off by the people who are supposed to be helping us. The ethnic cleansing is accelerating:

The Mahdi Army is brutal in pursuit of its goals, [Sgt. 1st Class Jeff Nelson, an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army’s 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, based in Baghdad] said. Large red X’s are painted on the sides of houses the militia wants vacated, he said. Residents know they have a few days to leave before their houses are firebombed.

The Mahdi Army has used the tactic to clear entire clans from neighborhoods and to empty the neighborhoods of rivals, he said… "They’ve infiltrated every branch of public service and every political office they could get their hands on," Nelson said. "As soon as the U.S. leaves, they’ll be able to dominate the area with key citizens, key positions, key offices. They’ll pretty much have the lay of the land."

More troops won’t help. We already have 60,000 in the capital. Nelson explains: "To fight these extrajudicial killings effectively, we need to be embedded, almost one to one, with the Iraqi security forces." In other words, you have to saturate a city’s entire police and military, one on one, and fight vicious urban guerrilla warfare for years and years.

Before the war, many of us feared that a battle for Baghdad would entail enormous losses in dangerous terrain before victory. We thought in the early days we had somehow avoided it by the lightning invasion plan. It turns out, because of our inability to restore order immediately and capture the window of opportunity at the start, that the battle for Baghdad is only now truly beginning. And it could last years, with fast-eroding civilian support, and the likelihood of eventual defeat. This is the grim reality we now have to face. And it would be good if we faced it now – before the election – than after.

(Photo: Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)