The Dish

The Washington Post argues that the president’s desire to mend relations with Europe conflicts with his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While the Bush administration has insisted on reform within the Palestinian Authority, the Europeans want to put more pressure on Israel. The Post paints this as a wide gulf, but the piece fails to mention Tony Blair’s trip to Israel last week, where he too argued that reforms were necessary for “the Palestinian side to become a proper partner for peace with Israel”:

Viability cannot just be about territory. The viability has to be that of a state that is democratic, that is not giving any succor or help to terrorism and that uses the help that it is given from the outside in a proper and transparent way.

Saul Singer, in the Jerusalem Post, writes that this “means that taking democracy seriously is no longer just the quaint province of George W. Bush and Natan Sharansky, but has spread…to Europe. It also means that the conference that Blair is proposing for next month in London might, for a change, advance peace.” The London conference aims to help Palestinians build democratic institutions. At the same time, some 600 Palestinian politicians and intellectuals, in a public statement called “What We Want from the Elected President,” are calling for a “firm commitment to democratic deals” and “the implementation of good governance, mainly the rule of law, transparency and accountability.”

The Post repeats the idea that Bush “keeps giving Israel a pass” and “has devoted little attention to the issue.” But Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn argues, “Under Bush, Sharon has adopted a policy that is the reverse of what he believes in, and has accepted severe limitations on his own freedom of action.”:

Bush and his people have gone beyond declarations and have tried to have an impact on the reality of the Middle East. They have forced the Likud government to support a Palestinian state. They have forced Sharon both to promise to freeze settlements and evacuate outposts, and to agree to close American inspection of construction in the territories. They have forced him to return to the Palestinian Authority tax money that Israel owed the Palestinians, and they have made it clear to the Palestinians that, if they want a state, the price tag is internal reform and a change of regime.

All of which might be described as a synthesis of American and European approaches to the peace process.
— Steven

The earthquake, some first-hand accounts, who’s helping, and how you can help.
— Steven

There used to be a general understanding that in wars with dictatorships, democracies were at a disadvantage — because they were slow to mobilize, vulnerable to dissent from the home front, wary of casualties, and so forth. Lately, though, a new conventional wisdom has emerged, epitomized by a recent Gregg Easterbrook column, in which he writes:

When I ponder the twentieth century, one of the things that strikes me is that democracies turned out to be much better at fielding armies than dictatorships. In World War II, freedom beat dictatorship by a decisive margin in combat, even though dictatorship began the conflict with a significant advantage. Think about the situation in the summer of 1940, when England was the sole nation left actively resisting tyranny in all of Europe, while the United States was barely better than demilitarized; at that point, dictatorship outgunned democracy by a big margin, and was dangerously close to winning. But from the summer of 1942 on — El Alamein for the British and Midway for the United States — every battle between freedom and tyranny ended in victory for freedom.

My thoughts on Easterbrook’s argument are here (suffice it so say, he glosses over the not-insignificant, and probably even dispositive, contributions made by the Soviet tyranny to the war effort). But Easterbrook is hardly alone — Victor Davis Hanson, among others, has spent much of his career making a similar argument, and the whole “Greatest-Generation” hoopla, from Spielberg and Hanks to the DC memorial, was thick with the notion of democracy wiping the floor with totalitarianism on the field of battle.

NOW, A CORRECTIVE: It’s instructive, therefore, to consider just how tough it was for the Western Allies to defeat Nazi Germany, even in 1944 when everything seemed to be going the Allies’ way. Max Hasting’s new book out the 1944-45 slog, called Armageddon, is reviewed in this Sunday’s Times, and this passage struck me as worth highlighting:

. . . the generals’ failure to knock Germany out of the war in late 1944 reflected the kind of armies they led as much as their own deficiencies as leaders. The British and American armies were composed of citizen soldiers, who were usually prepared to do their duty but were also eager to survive. ”These were,” Hastings writes, ”citizens of democracies, imbued since birth with all the inhibitions and decencies of their societies.” Such peacetime virtues are not easily transformed into military effectiveness. James Gavin, whose airborne division was among the finest units in any army, filled his diary with harsh comments about the average soldier’s military quality. ”If our infantry would fight,” he wrote in January 1945, ”this war would be over by now. . . . Everybody wants to live to a ripe old age.” When Winston Churchill complained to Montgomery about the British Army’s lack of initiative, Montgomery replied by recalling the carnage on the Western Front during World War I: ”It was you, Prime Minister, who told me that we must not suffer casualties on the scale of the Somme.”

By contrast, Armaggedon points out, the Soviets were prodigal with the lives of their soldiers — and ended up in a much-better postwar position because of it. (Paul Fussell’s recent The Boy’s Crusade offers a similarly demythologized view of the European front in the 1944-45 period, with the added advantage that Fussell was one of the American boys in question.)

Note that I’m not questioning America’s military superiority today, or the role that democracy plays in facilitating the kind of capitalism that breeds a superior military-industrial-technological complex. But I’m deeply skeptical of the notion that there’s something in the democratic “citizen-soldier” that makes him ideally conditioned to take on the mindless lemmings of a dictator-commanded army. Just as a for instance — if democratic India fought fascist China today, who do you think would win? (Or did we already run that experiment?)

— Ross

It’s been interesting, to say the least, watching David Brooks attempt to singlehandedly bring idea-driven discourse to the (ahem) not-terribly-idea-driven opinion pages of the New York Times. I’m not always sure that the 700-word column is the best venue for this project, and his “Hookie” nominees (named for Sidney Hook, of course) for best political essay exemplify the difficulties the format presents, since it will require at least another column for him to summarize the top candidates and their arguments. Still, it’s a valiant effort, and a reminder, after a year in which he’s taken his share of slings and arrows, of how much better the Times‘ page is with Brooks than it was without him. (Hands up, everyone who misses Gail Collins’ column. Anyone? Hello?)

My only quibble with his pick of essays so far would be the choice of William Stuntz’s brief for why academics and evangelical Christians would make good political bedfellows. Reihan liked it, but it seemed to me at best a nice but deeply misguided piece that reflected the author’s own wishful thinking (he’s an evangelical and a Harvard Law professor) more than any actual political reality. Here’s a typical passage:

Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness. Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those church buildings that dot the countryside is education — people reading hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.

The fact that universities were founded as schools of theology is telling, yes — telling of how far universities have risen or fallen (depending on your point of view) from the days when they did have a lot in common with religious communities. Claiming that elite colleges’ Christian past somehow links them to today’s evangelicals is at best appealing sophistry, and it’s typical of Stuntz’s argument, which relies on superficial similarities — people reading texts and caring about ideas — that could apply equally well to any pair of mismatched intellectual groups, from Pakistani madrassas to Communist cells to suburban book clubs. The important question is not whether people read books and contemplate ideas — it’s what conclusions they come to, and what ideas they promote. And looked at in this light, the gulf between Christian conservatives and liberal academics is as wide as any in our culture, and widening apace.

For a more serious engagement with some of the issues Stuntz raises, check out this exchange, between Stanley Fish and Richard John Neuhaus. It’s nearly a decade old but (perhaps unsurprisingly) still timely.

— Ross

“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe: the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” More talk of God and freedom from presidents who aren’t George W. Bush, this time in the Boston Globe.
–Steven

CBS News worries that “blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks.” Unlike journalists, the argument goes, bloggers are apt to engage in campaign politicking (this, remember, from CBS). Jonathan Last, in a different context, suggests that some kinds of opinion journalism already present the same quandries about journalism as political advocacy. James Lileks thinks blogs will replace opinion journalism altogether:

The Internet is going to make gigs like this obsolete, once enough people realize that some guy in his basement is capable of turning out commentary as insightful as a tenured eminence who was handed a column 30 years ago and has spent the last 10 coasting on a scoop from the Reagan years.

Lynne Cheney reads them.
— Steven

Many people discount the power of the so-called “cultural issues” – and especially of the abortion issue. I see it just the other way around. These issues are central to the national resurgence of the Republicans, central to the national implosion of the Democrats… the Democrats’ national decline – or better, their national disintegration – will continue relentlessly and inexorably until they come to grips with these values issues, primarily abortion.

That’s from Bob Casey’s 1996 autobiography. Francis X. Maier remembers a time when “being a Catholic meant being a Democrat,” which was before Governor Casey was denied a speaking slot at the 1992 Democratic convention. Maier calls the recent election “The Revenge of Bob Casey.” William McGurn, who prefers to call it “Bob Casey’s Revenge,” writes:

In the aftermath of Senator Kerry’s defeat the Democrats are wondering how it is that the first Catholic nominee for President since 1960, a man who spoke glowingly of rosary beads and his days as an altar boy, lost the Catholic vote, lost the Mass-going Catholic vote by an even larger margin, and lost it by larger margins still in key swing states such as Florida and Ohio.

McGurn asks, “As Democrats emerge from the electoral rubble, must not a few be noticing that Bob Casey has proved to be prophetic?” Evidently, several have. Former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, who the LA Times calls “an abortion foe who argues that the party cannot rebound from its losses in the November election unless it shows more tolerance on one of society’s most emotional conflicts,” is running for DNC chairman with the support of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Party leaders “are looking at ways to soften the hard line.” The LA Times makes this out as a point of contention in the fight to be DNC chairman, with Roemer and Howard Dean on opposite sides. But Dean too has been urging the party “to embrace Democrats who oppose abortion,” the NY Times reports.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum is bewildered. But Jim Wallis, writing before the election, gets it:

There are literally millions of votes at stake in this liberal miscalculation. Virtually everywhere I go, I encounter moderate and progressive Christians who find it painfully difficult to vote Democratic given the party’s rigid, ideological stance on this critical moral issue, a stance they regard as “pro-abortion.” Except for this major and, in some cases, insurmountable obstacle, these voters would be casting Democratic ballots.

Ironically, the Republicans, who actively and successfully court the votes of Christians on abortion, are much more ecumenical in their own toleration of a variety of views within their own party.

Wallis connects Christian concern about abortion with other “life issues” such as capital punishment and poverty. Which is more evidence that religious voters are at home in the Republican Party largely because Republicans are the ones who welcome them. John Kerry, apparently, has recognized the symbolic importance of the abortion issue in reaching out to these voters. (A Democrats for Life blog launched November 5.) But his party is caught between its activists and a growing segment of the public.
— Steven

Half the Kurdish population of northern Iraq asks for independence. On Christmas Eve, two U.S. Army captains reflect on their time in Kurdistan:

Although we are happy with our efforts, we do wonder why more attention was not paid to Halabja. And, not just to Halabja, but to all the Iraqi Kurds. What other citizens of Iraq fought alongside (and, in many instances, in front of) U.S. forces? What other citizens of Iraq offered security and housing to U.S. forces? We do hope that the days of the international community neglecting the Kurds are coming to a close, and we will be sure to pay close attention and provide assistance in any way we can. It’s the least we can do for those who did so much for us, and who desire to do so much more for themselves.

— Steven

Matt Continetti reports on the strange politics of Georgia’s once and future congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, and the conspiracy theories that animate them. He leaves out her recent fundraising for Narco News, however. As the New York Sun has noted, when McKinney first lost her seat two years ago, several Democrats welcomed her defeat. Not so this year.

When Trent Lott made his outrageous comments about the segregationist presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond, Republican leaders publicly rebuked him and pushed him out of his position as Senate majority leader. Why didn’t Democrats show similar leadership with regard to McKinney in the recent election? As Continetti suggests, McKinney’s views are going mainstream: “Maybe when McKinney shared her disturbing theories about President Bush in 2002, she was not so much falling off the edge of progressive politics as anticipating it.” Maybe MoveOn does own it.
— Steven

That’s the English version, anyway. And yes, Christmas. I’m not a fan of the holiday, and share Jon Meacham’s (absurdly maligned) view of its origins. But I see no offense in wishing those who do not share my faith (as well as those who do) a message of peace and joy and new beginnings. The incarnation is a bewildering notion. To think that the force behind the entire universe would actually become a single human being in a particular place and time is an astonishingly bold item of faith. The love and intimacy of the divine is nowhere better illustrated. The child Jesus was a speck in a sea of humanity all those years ago – wherever and however he was born. But he altered the trajectory of our souls. That is my belief. It transcends all the fights over sexuality or marriage or stem cell research or faith-based programs or creches in public spaces. Which is why, for me, Christmas is a time to reflect on mystery beyond politics and culture, on what we cannot understand even as we believe, on the potential for unimaginable events in the future, and the holy spirit that guides us in the face of them. Does that sound pretentious? I hope not. Writing candidly about Christian faith is not easy. But since I have spent much time this year criticizing those whose faith demands partisan political agendas, or the disparagement of minorities, or the fusion of politics with religion, it behooves me to restate my own belief. That belief is inconstant and human and faltering. But it somehow endures. Another gift, like the first one two millennia ago. And as I grow older, and the gift looks more tattered, I somehow feel gladder for it. From one human speck to another: the possibility of contact with the divine. Peace. Joy. Love. Happy Christmas.

FACE TO FACE WITH JIHAD: One man lived to tell the tale.

— Andrew