The Dish

Book-clubbers weigh in on the first part of Robert Kaplan’s new book, “Warrior Politics.” Is the nation-state really over? How stable is capitalism? How helpful is it to understand deeply the motives of your enemies? The debate warms up. Check it out.

Thanks to Matt Welch for spotting this monstrosity in an interview in the Chicago Tribune with Ralph Nader:

Q. Would you have made an effective wartime president?
A. This war would never have happened had I been president, because for 30 years we have had an aviation safety group, and we have been urging the airlines to toughen cockpit doors and improve the strength of the locks, and they have been resisting for 30 years.

I would add that Nader seems to have become completely unhinged. But that would imply that he has ever been hinged.

The Czech Republic’s prime minister, Milos Zeman, walked into a firestorm today after an interview with Ha’aretz in which he compared negotiating with Yasir Arafat to negotiating with Hitler. Here’s the BBC’s account. Notice the outrage among Arab countries, whose virulent anti-Semitism is certainly on a par with Hitler’s. Notice also the E.U.’s visceral hostility to any truth-speaking about the uncompromising hatred of Israel and Jews so prevalent in the Arab Middle East. The French government described any such comparison as “totally irresponsible.” But notice more the Palestinian Authority’s “culture” spokesman, who blithely comments, “The severity of the Israeli occupation matches only that of Nazi Germany, one of the victims of which was Czechoslovakia itself.” No word from the French on whether that comment is “totally irresponsible” as well.

“As for President Bush, my limited encounter with him indicates that from the beginning of his presidency he was intensely curious and concerned with the problems of the most seemingly-obscure countries. People may forget that months before September 11th he stood before thousands in Warsaw proclaiming the need to embrace into the West all the countries of Eastern Europe from, as he put it, the Baltics to the Black Sea.” This comment is from his first response to my first posting on his book, “Warrior Politics,” now being discussed on the Book Club page. More postings – from me and you – will follow this afternoon.

Why American imperialism is a liberal idea; the “inbetween” of love and friendship; another take on Bowers v. Hardwick, etc.

An interesting piece in Newsweek on the dearth of black activists under the age of 50. People are tired of the Jackson-Sharpton-West-Gates establishment, but who else is there? The author, David Evans, a Harvard official, makes some legitimate points, but he misses a more obvious one. Haven’t Sharpton and Jackson understandably turned younger blacks and whites off their kind of activism, with its corporate shakedowns and media pyrotechnics? Maybe younger African-Americans look at these leaders and wisely give such methods a pass. Or maybe younger blacks and whites believe that the era of political activism of this kind is behind them. The best way to advance black equality is by moving up the social hierarchy, succeeding in the law and medicine and the media and politics and business in a post-racial paradigm. Notice how Evans doesn’t acknowledge Colin Powell or Condi Rice or Oprah Winfrey. The problem here is a boomer generation that still associates minority advancement with special pleading and ’60s style protest. There are other ways, and the younger generation is exploring them.

An accurate piece in the New York Times today about how Tony Blair’s government has become synonymous in many Brits’ eyes with sleaze. And Hoge is right to point out that it’s the way in which the Blairites spin everything that really ticks people off. Boning up on Blair when I was in London (I’m writing from D.C. this morning), I found the following passage in Andrew Rawnsley’s book on New Labour, “Servants of the People.” It concerns Charlie Whelan, one of the government’s spin-meisters and, for translation purposes, the word “bollocks” refers to a part of the male anatomy:

Over a drink in his hostelry of choice, the Red Lion pub opposite the Treasury, Whelan decoded his denials for one political correspondent: “Telling a journalist a story was ‘bollocks’ meant it was true. ‘Total bollocks’ meant something similar. ‘Speculation’ meant get on and write it.”

Eventually, of course, the bollocks can come back to haunt you.

I’m afraid I’ve become skeptical of Nick Kristof’s warnings about almost every single initiative the Bush administration takes in the war on terror, but nevertheless, his column today is disturbing. Is it true that our effort in the Philippines is directed toward a small and unimportant terrorist group? Is it true that it’s mainly cosmetic? These are not questions to be dismissed as anti-war caviling, if they’re accurate. They’re important questions to ask if the war on terror is to be executed effectively. Kristof is also right to emphasize the desperate need for more peace-keeping troops in Afghanistan. Today the Times’ John Burns reports that the U.S. military is now engaged, perhaps for the first time, in controlling warlord opposition to Karzai’s government. We need far, far more ground-troops in Afghanistan if the regime isn’t going to unravel, and the entire momentum of the war on terror lost. The current number of Brits simply isn’t enough.

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.