July 16, 2007
Hiss and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:00 PM EST A line on the homepage of this website links to a Slate piece by Ron Rosenbaum on Alger Hiss. Rosenbaum writes about the fact that an American historian, Kai Bird, and a Russian historian, Svetlana Chervonnaya, have collaborated on a piece in the current The American Scholar titled “The Mystery of Ales.” As Rosenbaum tells the story, the two attempt (and signally fail) to clear Hiss’s name, or at least muddy the waters, by the nasty expedient of smearing another 1940s liberal who worked in the State Department, a man named Wilder Foote. Ales was the code name of a Russian spy; some modern scholarship on the Hiss case has tended to assume that Hiss was Ales, and the article Rosenbaum is writing about disputes that identification, suggesting that Foote better fits the bill, which Rosenbaum thinks unpersuasive to the point of being contemptible. I think Rosenbaum makes a good case, but I am depressed that he has been provoked to make it. At this point in my life, I do not much care about the Hiss case, and for that matter I never did; I am of the wrong generation and came from the wrong sort of political background (my father was a Truman Democrat) to have cared passionately about Hiss. I have, however, known and been close to people who knew Hiss in the 1930s and after, and who cared very much about the case. They were on both sides of the question, although by the 1970s most of the people I knew who had known Hiss, and who had at one time been convinced of his innocence, had moved to the position of assuming that he had been rightfully convicted of perjury and had almost certainly committed espionage. What Hiss meant to part of that group, the ones who were liberal patricians, was that contrary to their own first instincts, one of their own sort could indeed be a traitor. They did not thereby assume that all Communists were potential traitors, although they did think that in the wake of Hiss you had to think about the possibility, and they certainly didn’t think that non-Communist liberals were any likelier to be traitors than were, for example, Irish-American senators from Wisconsin. But Hiss had first seemed like a pure victim of gutter politics and Red-baiting in what they explained was the original sense of the phrase (falsely accusing a liberal of being a Communist), and they had reluctantly come to the sad conclusion that he was something very different. These people had remained liberals, but they were more aggressively anti-Communist liberals than they had been before. The Hiss case was a milestone for them, the way the Moscow purge trials had been one more than a decade before. I also knew at least one unashamed former Communist union organizer who had known Hiss, although not before his release from prison, and who resolutely insisted on Hiss’s innocence. This was something of a paradox. Why should people who had been loyal Communists insist that someone they had liked and admired could never have been one? Why should people who had not been Communists, but thought Communists the most honorable of people, also insist that Hiss had to be innocent? After a while, I decided that they thought Hiss had to be innocent for the same reason that they were sure the Rosenbergs were innocent, and that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been a sad necessity for the beleaguered Soviet Union, and on, and on, and on: because that was the party line, and it was the nature of a certain sort of loyalist to cling to the line. This was a bad habit of mind, one that occurred all over the political spectrum; on the right; these were the sort of people who (for example) didn’t care that McCarthy had lied about the number of combat missions he’d flown, almost tripling the number, or that one of his first political acts had been to curry favor with German-American voters by intervening on behalf of SS war criminals who had murdered American POWs in the Ardennes. The people who hewed to lines came in all political hues, but every one of them had the same kind of intellectual smell. What did change, after a while, or at least seemed to, was that people stopped arguing about Hiss, or even talking about him. The people I liked and admired mostly decided that Hiss could be guilty but that McCarthy was not on that account less of a villain, or liberalism any less compelling a politics. Finally, Hiss disappeared, and eventually the Soviet Union did too. But now Ron Rosenbaum comes along and shows that Hiss’s ghost is back and is haunting at least some magazines and websites. I am trying to cheer up about this. I believe Kai Bird is almost exactly my age, which makes him just old enough to have come by Hissocentrism honestly, or at least not insanely. I once asked a sophisticated sociologist of science why, given his views on the derisory effects of new evidence and good arguments on individuals’ adherence to paradigms, he thought bad scientific ideas ever disappeared. He thought about this for a second, and then opined that he thought bad ideas disappeared when the people holding them died. Here’s hoping.
July 14, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for his substantive and succinct reply to my post. The articles he links to provide good evidence that there has been some measured military progress in Iraq. I have agreed with this assertion before, although I’m not still not sure how much these articles do to demonstrate that our forces are making progress toward some satisfactory, conclusive outcome. It’s also a bit troubling that General Petraeus himself has acknowledged that a counterinsurgency of the kind we’re pursuing has tended to take closer to a decade than a year, which would place large-scale American forces in Iraq much longer than originally projected. Whether that’s acceptable or not is a subject for another debate. For the moment, since exchanges like these generally have natural lifespans that it is best not to exceed, I’ll simply add that I appreciate Mr. Gordon’s willingness to address his original question, and to participate in another of the somewhat contentious but entirely civil and instructive exchanges that he and I have had in recent months. I’m slightly disappointed with Mr. Zeitz’s prickly response to my post. My aim was not to “coach [him] on the proper way to discuss Iraq.” It was to steer the discussion back toward a subject that’s not only interesting to me, but that’s actually connected to the nominal discussion topic: “How Goes the War?” and that’s also been addressed less frequently on this blog than Mr. Zeitz’s objections to Mr. Gordon’s rhetoric. I’ll reiterate that I sympathize with Mr. Zeitz’s objections, but I will point out that readers interested in those objections can find them here, here, here, here, and many other places as well. I’ve always found that good evidence is the best response to a debating partner one finds occasionally disrespectful, and it’s worth observing that when I presented some and requested that Mr. Gordon do the same, he did so without complaint. Fred Smoler’s post this afternoon is a deft and serious treatment of the situation in Iraq, and, frankly, I’d be surprised if anyone can do better. Thus, I’ll join Joshua Zeitz in asking: “How about that political realignment question?”
July 14, 2007
Realignment Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:50 PM EST Five years ago, I wrote a piece about future political realignment
for The Wall Street Journal, called “The Next Great
Divide.” (The interested reader can find it at the Wall Street
Journal website, but he will have to fork over $2.95 to see it,
even subscribers. In fact even the author, I am not happy to
report.)
I noted that countries that trace their political traditions to
England usually have two-party, big-tent political systems,
divided by a single overriding issue. In this country, that issue
was first the size and power of the federal government. Then
there was a muddled period (the 1824 election went into the
House) before a new divide opened up, sectional in nature, with
the tariff and then slavery as the crucial issue. After the Civil War
there was another muddled period (the 1876 election was only
settled at the very last minute, and many other elections in this
period were very close). The next great divide was between
capital and labor. The Republicans had the better of the
argument between 1896 and 1929, but the Great Depression put
the Democrats in charge and they were able to push through a
broad array of programs on behalf of the have-nots in this
country.
The liberal programs proved so successful that the have-nots
began to disappear from the body politic, which became
dramatically more skilled, more educated, and more affluent. A
country of haves and have-nots became a country of haves and
have-mores. The third great divide began to close up, and we
are now back in a muddled period, characterized by close and
divided elections and personal vituperation, just as we had in
the 1820s and in the post–Civil War era.
So what’s next? Good question. Three factors might be noted,
however.
First, the left half of American politics hasn’t had a new idea in 50
years. It is still committed to economic policies geared to a
country with widespread poverty. On foreign policy it is
increasingly isolationist. Its main sources of support are all
backward looking: labor unions, civil rights organizations,
bureaucrats, and tort lawyers. Meanwhile the right half,
intellectually moribund in the ‘
’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, has been a ferment of ideas, by no means
all of them good (in fact some of them terrible). But at least they
are ideas that would have been unfamiliar to Franklin Roosevelt
and Arthur Vandenberg.
Second, we live in the most technologically revolutionary times
at least since the steam engine, only now change is happening
much more quickly than it did 200 years ago. To demonstrate
this, here’s a quick thought experiment. Some latter day Rip Van
Winkle has just woken up from a half-century sleep. He says,
“What’s new?” In answer you hand him an iPhone, which kids
are acquiring by the millions. See what I mean? And, to coin a
phrase, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The world of 2057 will be far
more different from today’s world than today’s is different from
the world of 1957.
Third, the new technology is rapidly reducing the control of old
political power centers (the mainstream media, political parties,
governments, labor unions, central banks) and raising that of
new centers, most prominently perhaps the blogosphere (just
ask Dan Rather). How it will all play out is anyone’s guess, but it
is not good news for the conservative party in American politics.
And that party today is the Democratic Party, deeply wedded to
old ideas and fighting hard to maintain the old ways of doing
things and sustaining the political power of fading forces, like
organized labor. That’s the very essence of conservatism.
My guess—or perhaps more accurately, my wish—is that
American politics will divide, at least in the near future, over how
fast and how far to allow market forces to dictate change, just as
in the middle third of the twentieth century it was over how far
and how fast to introduce the liberal programs. That change is
coming as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, and
market forces will drive it—all those kids mobilizing coalitions
over their iPhones. The argument will be over the hows and
whys and wheres and whens and whethers. Globalization and
the ever increasingly out-of-date monopoly nature of
government are two major areas where these battles will surely
be fought. I expect the Democratic party to be on the
conservative side of most of these battles and to lose most of
them as well, unless an American Tony Blair arises. I certainly
see no sign of him in the current bunch of Democratic
contenders.
It’s going to be very exciting, and I’d love to stick around and
watch it unfold over the next half a century. Unfortunately, I
expect I’ll find that I have an appointment in Samarra before
then.
July 14, 2007
How Goes the War? VI Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:15 PM EST John Steele Gordon asked for my opinion of J.D. Johannes’s assessment of the Iraq war posted at Tech Central Station. The article asserts that “June 2007 saw a dramatic turnaround in our military fortunes, with the insurgents in headlong retreat in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diayala. But Al Qaeda continued to dominate its chosen battlefield: America’s living rooms.” I think there has indeed been good news in Anbar, as well as a fall in Iraqi casualties in Baghdad, and there is some evidence that the pattern in Anbar has repeated itself in a smaller way in some other places. Reducing Iraqi fatalities through more aggressive American action against insurgents in Baghdad does mean that American casualties have risen, although it would be strange to cite increasing American casualties as in themselves proof that the American effort is failing, when they are just as likely to be proof of the opposite. There is, unfortunately, some reason to doubt that the good news in Anbar will soon be repeated over most of Iraq. In Anbar province Sunni Arab militias now calling themselves the Anbar Salvation Council, which had once been the backbone of the insurgency, have recently turned on AIQ (Al Qaeda in Iraq) elements, and are now (to a degree) cooperating with American forces, although not with the elected Iraqi government, which is at best uneasy about the new American strategy in Anbar. There are similar trends in other regions—for example, Ninevah and Salahaddin—but all of these areas are dominated by Sunni Arabs, where there is less potential for protracted sectarian conflict than in more mixed regions, hence fewer Shiite reprisals for AIQ atrocities, and hence a smaller temptation for Sunni Arabas to look to AIQ atrocities as legitimate and necessary deterrents to Shiite actions. A sustained decrease in Iraqi casualties in Baghdad requires either a sustained increase in the numbers of American troops fighting there or significant numbers of reliable and competent Iraqi national forces augmenting those American troops, and neither of those outcomes is anything like certain; given U.S. manpower constraints, a sustained increase in U.S. troop numbers actively engaged Baghdad seems particularly unlikely, and there are no greatly encouraging results in our efforts to produce larger numbers of reliable Iraqi national forces. But good news is not bad news, and there has been some good military news from Iraq. Mr. Johannes also argues that most Americans do not know the extent of the good news, that media coverage of the war is the source of their ignorance, and that creating an impression of an inevitable insurgent victory is a crucial part of insurgent strategy. The first two assertions may be true, and the third is certainly true. As a general rule, I think it is hard to evaluate reports of progress or failure coming out of Iraq, because it is hard to tell how representative or even accurate any piece of news may be, and most observers appear to have a tendency to use news to confirm preexisting views. Impassioned partisans rarely give evidence a cool and disinterested examination, and this may be particularly true for wars. Are opponents of this war wishing for an American defeat, as Mr. Gordon suggests? In a very few cases, certainly: if you read (for example) the Guardian and The Nation, you can find a few such people, and if you read more widely, you can find more. But most American opponents of the war are not, in my opinion, consciously hoping for an American defeat; rather, they cannot (and in most cases could never) imagine any good outcome to the use of American force in Iraq. They urge actions that will make defeat certain in the belief that they are cutting short the duration of what they take to be at best an American tragedy, easily persuading themselves that they are doing the Iraqis no great harm, since the American military presence is simply assumed to be making things worse. I think there is very little clear and indisputable evidence for that latter proposition, so the question is what men and women are thinking when they choose to consider uncontestable a likely absurdity. I shall not try to answer that question here. In the case of American journalists who have been embedded with military units in Iraq, or Americans who are in Iraq for other purposes—I know some, and have read others—in my experience their reports are sometimes encouraging, sometimes discouraging, but almost always reports on a small and possibly unrepresentative piece of the war, or the country, and reporters and other observers are subject to their own momentary hopes and despairs. It is notoriously hard to judge the progress of a counterinsurgency campaign in the middle of things. Successful counterinsurgency campaigns tend to take a long time—consider the British victory over the Provisional IRA (1969–1997), or the campaign in Dhofar (1962–1976), or the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), or the Second Malayan Emergency (1967–1989), etc. There may be no indisputable progress for long periods of time, but the fact remains that most insurgencies fail. In Iraq, the chances for an AIQ victory are derisory, and the chances for a neo-Baathist or other Sunni Arab recapture of a unified Iraqi state also look derisory. We may lose in Iraq, but our most militant and brutal adversaries are also likely to lose, along with many (maybe all) other Iraqis. In any case, the modest good military news from Iraq coincides with some bad political news from both Iraq and the United States. In Iraq, the factions within the government seem deadlocked on the measures many American observers have decided are to be the benchmarks of progress in Iraq. If these benchmarks are not met, further pressure will build for a withdrawal of American forces, and they may carry the day. The leaders of all Iraqi factions (other than AIQ) seem to agree that a withdrawal anytime soon would be a disaster, but that does not seem to have spurred too much willingness to compromise, or made too much of an impression on the American Congress, or on the editorial writers of most of the papers I read. With respect to the question of whether people who have lost children in a war have any special claim on our deference to their views of that war: I do not think they do. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., lost a son in a war he detested; both my grandfathers had sons survive that same war, which they supported. I do not think I need defer to JFK’s father over my own grandfathers when judging the merits of the Second World War. Similarly, I have the impression that support for the war in Iraq tends to be higher among people with children bearing arms there than among those with no children at risk, and if this is no longer true it has certainly been the case until quite recently. This pattern does not mean that opponents of the war would have been obliged to suspend their own judgment because they did not have sons and daughters at immediate risk. Mr. Gordon also writes that “for better or worse, we started a war in Iraq and now must deal with the consequences of that action . . . what we should have done or not done in 2003 is one question and what we should do in 2007 is entirely another. In July 2007 the only alternative to war is not peace. It is catastrophic defeat.” On this particular issue, I think Mr. Gordon has a very good case.
July 14, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST With due respect to Mr. Burns, that I was not engaging the question that particularly interests him does not mean that I am participating in a “contest for civic virtue between liberals and conservatives.” Iraq poses a complicated and tragic problem for American policymakers. There is no easy way out. But I wasn’t debating Mr. Gordon on the question of whether the troop surge is working, or whether our forces are closer to victory than they were four months ago. I was taking issue with his tendency to dismiss people as anti-American when he simply does not agree with them, and to suggest that such people wish defeat on America. These kinds of ad hominem attacks only coarsen the political dialogue. Since I was addressing the need for a more civil discussion of the Iraq war, and not the Iraq war itself, Mr. Burns’s well-intentioned effort to coach me on the proper way to discuss Iraq was somewhat gratuitous. In his latest post, Mr. Gordon writes, “If the military is underfunded, as Mr. Zeitz alleges, then that is easily remedied. The Democrats control Congress, which controls the purse strings, so Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi can easily add the necessary funds to the defense appropriation bill. I am confident that the President will not veto the bill because of those additions. I am, shall we say, less confident that Reid and Pelosi will do any such thing. Of course, in the strange political calculus of the left, the underfunding will then be President Bush’s fault.” I’m pretty sure that I demonstrated, rather than alleged, that our military is being spread too thin by the Iraq war. Mr. Gordon should remember that Democrats assumed narrow control of the Congress in January. For six years preceding that, it was a Republican Congress and a Republican President who planned and funded the war. On almost straight party-line votes, the last (GOP) Congress voted down $1,500 bonuses for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; $3.6 billion in quality of life enhancements for deployed servicemen, including water treatment facilities and prepaid phone cards; extending the child tax credit to 200,000 low-income military families; and extending bankruptcy protection to deployed servicemen. The same Congress also voted on a party-line vote to under-fund veterans’ healthcare by $13.5 billion less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected would be necessary to keep pace with inflation. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were victorious last November in large part because a Republican President and Republican Congress have handled the war in a most irresponsible fashion, sending servicemen into combat without properly equipping them or caring for their families. The Democratic Congress will have to do much better. On that, Mr. Gordon and I are probably agreed. How about that political realignment question?
July 14, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:05 AM EST Mr. Burns writes that I cited only one article in support of the idea that matters might be improving in Iraq at long last. I cited three, one from the New York Times front page, in fact. Here are six more, including one from a journalist embedded in Iraq and one from an Iraqi blogger whose blog www.iraqthemodel.com should be read frequently. http://michaelyon-online.com/wp/al-qaeda-on-the-run-feasting-
on-the-moveable-beast.htm http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=071107A http://britainandamerica.typepad.com/britain_and_america/2007/
07/bbc-reports-tha.html http://article.nationalreview.com/?
q=MDVlZDA4NjFlNmUzZGU1OTk3MDEyNWFiNWRjN2E2Mjg= http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118420029887664045-search.html?
KEYWORDS=iraq+the+model&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118429030611165505-search.html?
KEYWORDS=iraqthemodel.com&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month As for Mr. Zeitz’s three points in his latest post, let me say the following: 1) If the military is underfunded, as Mr. Zeitz alleges, then that is easily remedied. The Democrats control Congress, which controls the purse strings, so Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi can easily add the necessary funds to the defense appropriation bill. I am confident that the President will not veto the bill because of those additions. I am, shall we say, less confident that Reid and Pelosi will do any such thing. Of course, in the strange political calculus of the left, the underfunding will then be President Bush’s fault. 2) I have now read the articles by Mary-Jo Cooney and Michael Ledeen. I haven’t changed my mind. I just don’t buy the idea that people who choose to publish articles in major newspapers are immune to criticism because they have a child in the military. I, like Mr. Ledeen, found the article remarkably egocentric. 3) With regard to Cindy Sheehan and whether she is anti-American or merely criticizing a country she loves, let her speak for herself. “I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people . . . since we first stepped on this continent; we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bulls**t to my son, and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms this country is not worth dying for.” That is not criticism, that is a rant by a pathological (I use the word advisedly) anti-American. The undoubted fact that there are anti-American nut cases elsewhere in the body politic is neither here nor there.
July 13, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:00 PM EST An offhand comment in one of my posts, asserting that the Iraq war “continues to fail,” has sparked a larger discussion about the state of the war. Or, at least, it’s a discussion that’s nominally about the state of the war. John Steele Gordon initiated the discussion with this question, challenging my characterization of the war: “Is that the case as of today, July 11, 2007, or have things begun to change for the better in Iraq at long last?” Since Mr. Gordon asked that question, there have been a few attempts to answer it, including one by me. Unfortunately, most of the words composed in response to this prompt have not come close to offering a substantive reply, and, on the whole, constitute a great lesson in how not to debate Iraq. Mr. Gordon and Mr. Zeitz have done what a lot of pundits do these days, which is turn an objective, fact-based question about the Iraq war into a contest for civic virtue between liberals and conservatives. Mr. Gordon, the author of the initial question, has answered it by criticizing Harry Reid, The New York Times, the “mainstream media,” liberals, Cindy Sheehan and Mary-Jo Cooney, and Maureen
Dowd (for offenses, I suppose, distinct from those of The New York Times in general). He has made some spirited moral arguments: that withdrawal is equal to defeat, that defeat empowers the “enemies of civilization,” that empowering those evildoers will lead to another Darfur, that our losses in Iraq are a fairly small price to pay for averting such genocide, and that ending American involvement in Iraq is like applying euthanasia prematurely. The evidence he has presented in answer to his own query, however, is limited to a single op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Gordon’s arguments would be germane to a conversation about whether it would be desirable to succeed in Iraq, or about whether a hypothetical victory there would be worth the sacrifices Americans have made. But while I sympathize with some of what Mr. Gordon has to say, almost none of it is useful in determining whether the war effort is actually moving toward eventual success. For his part, Joshua Zeitz has responded to John Steele Gordon’s post in a manner to which I am also sympathetic, but which seems a little misguided. Mr. Zeitz chides Mr. Gordon for “impugn[ing] the motives of those with whom he disagrees,” and he is right to do so. But Mr. Zeitz does a disservice to his own antiwar views by engaging this element of Mr. Gordon’s post. The question that should determine the future of America’s Iraq policy is the one Mr. Gordon first asked, and that’s where any serious conversation should focus. To restate the question neutrally: Are our forces in Iraq closer to a victory now than they were four months ago? It’s good of Joshua Zeitz to stick up for Cindy Sheehan, Jim Webb, and the editorial board of The New York Times, but the reputations of those parties have very little to do with answering that question. It’s a mistake to treat the debate over Iraq as some kind of proxy for a larger struggle between left and right. The only people who benefit from that kind of discussion are those trying to dodge the question of our progress on the ground. So, with a few days having elapsed since my post and Mr. Gordon’s question, and with the first round of assessments on the President’s “surge” having been reported, let me re-ask the question: How much progress are we making in Iraq? According to the benchmarks set by Congress and the President, not very much. President Bush has said that our troops and allies in Iraq have made “satisfactory” progress toward 8 of the 18 benchmarks. This less than 50 percent success rate would result in a failing grade for the “surge” even if the President weren’t practicing grade inflation. Distressingly, the results of the “surge” policy have actually been even less impressive than that, as analysts note here, here, and here. While our soldiers have achieved some successes fighting insurgents, they haven’t been able to reduce sectarian violence in a lasting way, and their victories have not been matched by any political or organizational breakthroughs by the Iraqi government. These disappointing facts do not resolve the matter of what the United States should do next in Iraq, and Americans of all political inclinations should consider that question with open minds. But looking at the facts as of July 13, 2007, there is really no way around the sad truth that the war “continues to fail.”
July 13, 2007
How Goes the War? V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:20 PM EST A few replies to Mr. Gordon: 1) Mr. Gordon writes, “To say that such a war ‘is breaking the back’ of the United States military does not say much for one’s opinion of the United States military. The fact that reenlistment rates in Iraq are very high argues powerfully that it is anything but ‘broken.’” Yet a recent Kaiser Foundation study found that over 20 percent of military families have had to turn to WIC and Food Stamps to feed their children. Myriad reports also show that the low ratio of dwell time to deployment time is having a brutal effect on these same military families, and in order to sustain their numbers the service branches have had to relax their recruitment standards. The Army entered Afghanistan short $56 billion worth of equipment and has seen its kit deplete rapidly, without any commensurate buildup. Consequently, items like night goggles, Humvees, and body armor are in dangerously short supply in some areas, and the National Guard reports that it has only 50 percent of the equipment it needs. The Army’s own calculations conclude that for every brigade in the field there should be two at home; by these standards, of the Army’s and Marines’ (equivalent unit) 50 brigades, 17 can be safely committed to the field at any given time. At present, 25 brigades (or Marine equivalents) are in the field. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the present surge lasts into next spring, the military will have 11 brigades at best—and 3 brigades at worst—ready to address other foreign crisis. Military planners agree that an invasion of South Korea, were it necessary, would require 20 brigades. 2) Mr. Gordon writes: “I was not able to find the articles to which Mr. Zeitz refers, but judging from his description of what Ms. Cooney and Mr. Ledeen wrote, I agree with Mr. Ledeen. Her adult son chose to join the Marines. She should be proud of that fact, not whining about it. Like Cindy Sheehan, Ms. Cooney seems to me to be exploiting her son’s service for her own political agenda. Again, she has of her own free will entered the political arena by writing an op-ed article. She is therefore fair game for criticism.” I’d suggest that before commenting on it, Mr. Gordon read Cooney’s op-ed, which is easily accessible online here. It is entirely apolitical and simply conveys the feelings of a mother whose son is about to deploy. She also invokes Abraham Lincoln in hoping that out country will “care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan” better than it has over the past five years. I suspect that when Mr. Gordon reads this very moving, introspective opinion piece, he will feel a little foolish for accusing Ms. Cooney of grinding a political axe, or of “whining.” Bringing this back to history (sort of), Mr. Gordon claims that Cindy Sheehan is “anti-American to the core.” As a historian, he must know that those who bandy about terms like anti-American (or un-American) seldom look good in the annals of history. Those who criticize American values and institutions—from Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Wallace to Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King, Jr.—tend to be passionately interested in bettering, rather than destroying, the country they live in. Mr. Gordon’s argument is a slippery one, for just as Cindy Sheehan could be accused of “anti-American” bias, so could one level the same charge against mainstream and radical conservatives who hate so much about contemporary America, from its secular influences and liberal sexual mores, to its focus on material acquisition and its sometimes coarse public culture. Criticism and damnation are very different things.
July 12, 2007
How Goes the War? IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:20 AM EST A few responses to the points Joshua Zeitz made in his latest post. 1) He writes that “Webb and his colleagues—most of whom also support withdrawal in one fashion or another—simply believe that the Iraq War is breaking the back of the U.S. military and that we need to do better by our servicemen by bringing them home and helping them mend their families, their souls, and their bodies.” First, “withdrawal” is defeat. When an army moves in to a foreign country in order to achieve an objective, fails to achieve it, and withdraws from that country, it has been defeated. Therefore those who advocate immediate withdrawal are advocating immediate defeat. Defeat can be euphemized a thousand ways, but it is still defeat. And when an army has been defeated, someone has been victorious. In this case, the victors would be Al Qaeda, Iran, and the other enemies of civilization. Second, the Iraq war has required the deployment of roughly one percent of the soldiers and sailors deployed in World War II, 20 percent of those employed in Vietnam. It is absorbing something like 25 percent of the military budget, which, in turn, is a much smaller percentage of federal spending than in the 1960s, let alone the 1940s. It is, therefore, a very small war, however vicious and frustrating. To say that such a war “is breaking the back” of the United States military does not say much for one’s opinion of the United States military. The fact that reenlistment rates in Iraq are very high argues powerfully that it is anything but “broken.” Third, anyone who believes that Senator Webb, et al., “simply believe” that the soldiers need more R&R stateside, must also believe in the tooth fairy. The net effect of Senator Webb’s amendment would be to force an American defeat (oh, sorry, “withdrawal”) in Iraq by making it impossible to deploy sufficient troops there, not something of which Senator Webb could possibly be unaware. The reason that Congress’s approval ratings are even lower than the President’s, I think, is exactly the habitual use of such smoke-and-mirrors dishonesty. 2) He writes, “The vast majority of war opponents . . . think . . . that Iraq has sapped precious military, diplomatic, and financial resources that are needed in the real fight against Al Qaeda. Mr. Gordon is free to disagree with these ideas, as honest people can and should do, but it’s wrong to impugn the motives of those with whom he disagrees.” I am not impugning the motives of those who think the war on terror should have been fought differently than it has been or who think the war in Iraq should have been fought differently or not fought at all. In many ways I agree with them. Obviously our strategy in Iraq in the last few years has not worked. But we have a new strategy now, and it shows preliminary signs of working. I cheerfully admit that, as Mr. Zeitz points out, that has a certain light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel quality about it. But consider a small thought experiment. A patient has been suffering from a medical problem and the treatment regimen has not been working. He’s as sick as he was before. So the doctors decide to try another approach. They develop another treatment regimen, and start that regimen. An hour and a half later, Dr. Harry Reid declares the new approach a failure and says the only acceptable action is euthanasia. I think we should give the new regimen time to work before we kill the patient. I am, however, impugning the motives of those who ignore that fact that, for better or worse, we started a war in Iraq and now must deal with the consequences of that action. Many of these people can’t seem to fathom that what we should have done or not done in 2003 is one question and what we should do in 2007 is entirely another. In July 2007 the only alternative to war is not peace. It is catastrophic defeat. These people advocate, whether they know it or not—and those of them who sit in Congress or write for serious periodicals surely do—a catastrophic defeat for the United States in particular and civilization in general. Some of them even admit that one of the consequences of that defeat (oh, sorry, “withdrawal”) will be a genocide in Iraq and quite possibly a far worse conflict in the Middle East into which the world’s strongest power (and largest importer of oil) will inevitably be drawn. They just don’t seem to care. As far as I can see, the passion to be able to say “I told you so” trumps everything else with these people. To admit that genocide—another Darfur—will be the consequence of an action one advocates and be indifferent to that fact is as morally shameful as anything I can imagine, short of taking an AK-47 and personally shooting as many strangers as possible. 3) Regarding Cindy Sheehan, Mary-Jo Cooney, and Michael Ledeen, I regard Cindy Sheehan as a profoundly disturbed woman who has shamelessly exploited her son’s death for political purposes while she has been shamelessly exploited in turn by the liberal media to advance their political purposes. I do not trivialize the death of a child. It’s hard to imagine anything more painful. But the idea that someone like Cindy Sheehan has “absolute moral authority,” to use Maureen Dowd’s hyperbolic phrase, is frankly ridiculous. Does Ms. Sheehan get to say whatever she wants and everyone else must simply stand in awe of her sacrifice? Ms. Sheehan has chosen to enter the political arena and must take her lumps like everyone else. Her son’s death, if anything, has clouded her judgment, not clarified it. The death of a son would certainly cloud mine. Do I think her a traitor? No, for as far as I know she has not levied war against the United States or given aid or comfort (except spiritually) to the enemies of this country. But she is anti-American to the core. Her antiwar rants get wide coverage, her anti-American ones do not. I was not able to find the articles to which Mr. Zeitz refers, but judging from his description of what Ms. Cooney and Mr. Ledeen wrote, I agree with Mr. Ledeen. Her adult son chose to join the Marines. She should be proud of that fact, not whining about it. Like Cindy Sheehan, Ms. Cooney seems to me to be exploiting her son’s service for her own political agenda. Again, she has of her own free will entered the political arena by writing an op-ed article. She is therefore fair game for criticism.
July 12, 2007
How Goes the War? III Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:35 AM EST I look forward to John Steele Gordon's response to my post on party realignment. In the meantime, I will offer a few thoughts in response to his post on the war in Iraq. First, I have to take slight issue with his use of Kimberly Kagan’s Wall Street Journal editorial as evidence that the President’s “surge” policy is working. Ms. Kagan is the wife of Fred Kagan, one of the principal authors of that policy. If concerns about media bias are going to enter into a discussion of the Iraq war, one might begin by asking why The Wall Street Journal doesn’t identify her as such. This isn’t, incidentally, the first time that a conservative media outlet has obscured the family ties of certain surge proponents, as Andrew Sullivan notes here. As far as the substance of Kagan’s piece is concerned, the author claims that U.S. forces are fighting insurgents more aggressively, and with greater success, than before the surge. She also says that this is “creating an opportunity for Iraq’s leaders to negotiate a political settlement. These negotiations are underway. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is attempting to form a political coalition with Amar al-Hakim and Kurdish political leaders, but excluding Moqtada al-Sadr, and has invited Sunnis to participate. He has confronted Moqtada al-Sadr for promoting illegal militia activity, and has actively prompted this so-called Iraqi nationalist to leave for Iran for the second time since January.” If Kagan is correct, and the surge is poised to crush the Iraqi insurgency and make way for a political settlement, I will be tremendously relieved. Though, by my assessment, the Iraq war has been, and continues to be, a dismal failure, I would like nothing more than absolute victory. The moral issues Thomas Friedman raised in his article yesterday are also very troubling, and the prospect of a genocide following an American withdrawal is awful to contemplate. One of the reasons I supported Sen. Joe Lieberman’s reelection was that I felt his opponents didn’t fully appreciate just what withdrawal from Iraq might mean. The approach to Iraq, though, that collects scraps of good news and begs, “Give it another six months,” has its limits. As does Colin Powell’s folksy axiom: “You break it, you bought it.” At some point, you have to look at the criteria you’ve set for success and judge the mission by those criteria, outside evidence notwithstanding. By the expectations the Bush administration initially put forth for the Iraq war—an easy invasion, followed by an easy, swift, cheap reconstruction financed by oil revenues—the war has been an undeniable failure. Even looking past that, though, and accepting the surge as a reality, the war continues to fail. There is scant mention in Kimberly Kagan’s sunny editorial of the benchmarks by which President Bush actually agreed to judge the surge (see here), and the White House is barely bothering to deny reports that the July 15 assessment of these benchmarks promises little good news. It’s great that fighting has subsided in Ramadi, and the tidbits of good news that Kagan cites sound encouraging. But while we in the United States are scavenging for good news, a working political system still eludes Iraq’s leaders, and most of the country’s major political questions, related to oil, elections, representation, and regional autonomy, remain unresolved. We can quibble over whether “failure” is the right word to use for this situation. There’s little evidence, however, that “success” is a term that might apply. Blaming the media for the public’s plummeting support for the war is a very weak method of misdirection, especially since it was the media’s enchantment with stunts like the President’s USS Lincoln landing that allowed the war to go forward unchallenged for so long. Similarly, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Gordon is still clinging to the canard that the American media lost Vietnam. Whether our adventure in Vietnam was a complete failure by 1973, I suppose people can debate. There’s nothing to indicate that victory was anywhere in sight. And with that year seeing even a reelected, thoroughly hawkish President Nixon pushing for honorable defeat by way of the Paris Peace Accords, it’s hard to believe that the Sulzbergers were to blame for American withdrawal. That kind of thinking is usually confined to this hysterical set.
July 11, 2007
How Goes the War? II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:15 PM EST Just a few thoughts about John Steele Gordon’s latest post. Mr. Gordon is certainly entitled to believe that we are (to invoke some Vietnam War–era phraseology) turning the corner in Iraq, or that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I disagree, as do a great many people with honest intentions and good information. But it’s highly problematic to argue that there “are a large number of people on the left who sincerely hope” that “American defeat [is] inevitable.” Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, as antiwar a politician as they come, introduced an amendment today that would have required that servicemen and servicewomen enjoy equal “dwell” time (time spent at their home bases, resting, working, retraining, and reuniting with their families) and deployment time. Currently, many Army brigades are facing dwell time of roughly one year and deployments that last 15 months. This ratio, 0.8-to-1 dwell time to deployment time, falls well short of Webb’s proposed 1-to-1 ratio, and dangerously short of the Army’s preferred ratio of 2-to-1 dwell to deployment time. A former Marine, Jim Webb certainly does not wish defeat on America; his son served in the war, and I find it hard to imagine that Sen. Webb hopes for his son’s death or dismemberment. Neither do the 56 members of the U.S. Senate, including seven Republicans, who supported this measure today. (Despite enjoying majority support, the amendment failed, as it takes 60 votes to end a filibuster and move to a final vote.) Webb and his colleagues—most of whom also support withdrawal in one fashion or another—simply believe that the Iraq War is breaking the back of the U.S. military and that we need to do better by our servicemen by bringing them home and helping them mend their families, their souls, and their bodies. Ditto, The New York Times, whose Sunday editorial, which Mr. Gordon found “morally and politically shameful,” argued this: “Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.” The vast majority of war opponents care deeply about our servicemen and think they deserve to be treated better, resent the administration’s reliance on twisted logic and bad intelligence in initiating the war, are appalled by the administration’s mismanagement of the conflict, and believe that Iraq has sapped precious military, diplomatic, and financial resources that are needed in the real fight against Al Qaeda. Mr. Gordon is free to disagree with these ideas, as honest people can and should do, but it’s wrong to impugn the motives of those with whom he disagrees. A second case in point is Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist who has threatened to run in next year’s Democratic primary against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sheehan is as radical an antiwar figure as they come. But one needn’t agree with her to understand her motivation. Her son died in Iraq. She is grief-stricken. In World War II, Ms. Sheehan would have been called a Gold Star Mother. In George Bush’s America, conservatives have made her into a traitor. Are we to believe that Ms. Sheehan wants the terrorists to win? Or is it more plausible that, right or wrong on public policy, she doesn’t want other mothers to lose their sons? Conservative hardheadedness reached an incredible level this week when a columnist for National Review Online (NRO) lashed out against Mary-Jo Cooney, the mother of a deployed Marine who had the temerity to write an op-ed for the Washington Post in which she described the sorrow and anxiety of family members whose kids, parents, and spouses are serving in the war zone. In a scathing item entitled, “It’s All About Me,” Michael Ledeen, whose sole contribution to the war effort, as far as I know, was enjoying some Bush-era tax cuts, wrote: “In short, both she and her Marine are victims. Not. He chose freely, he was not compelled to join the Corps. Why did he make that choice? Surely not because his mom told him to. And surely not, as so many would have it, because he’s from the underclass and has no other way to earn a living. But he, the Marine, doesn’t get a word. We get her memories of his early childhood, but nothing about the current man. Narcissus running wild as he so often does in our world.” The ideas expressed in Ledeen’s vile column go a long way in explaining why George Bush’s approval rating is on a par with Richard Nixon’s, and why in generic match-ups voters now prefer Democratic congressional candidates by wide margins. Mr. Gordon writes, “The Vietnam War was lost not on the ground but in the American media. The Tet Offensive was a military debacle for the Viet Cong on the ground but a huge success for it on CBS and the pages of The New York Times. The American military and government, it seems, has yet to learn the real lesson of Vietnam, which is that it is not enough to win the battle on the ground; it must be won in the media as well, or the war will be lost regardless.” Would that this were so. Richard Nixon, no dove, committed enormous airpower to the task of breaking the NLF’s supply lines in Cambodia. Code named MENU, his secret (and potentially illegal) bombing campaign dropped 108,000 tons of explosives on the small Southeast Asian country and accomplished almost nothing. North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces required only 34 tons of supplies each day—an amount that one military historian likened to “a trickle too small for airpower to stop.” MENU did little to disrupt the flow of war materiel to enemy forces inside South Vietnam. That wasn’t the fault of the New York Times editorial board. It was the fault of an enemy force that found a frighteningly effective, but unconventional, way of prosecuting its war effort. Fast forward to 1975, when South Vietnam had one of the largest air forces and best-equipped armies in the world. None of that enabled ARVN to stave off the North Vietnamese offensive. Walter Cronkite didn’t lose the Vietnam War. South Vietnam did. By 1975 the United States polity decided that it could no longer sacrifice its young men to prop up a regime that could not or would not sustain itself. Whether Vietnam is the right analogy, I don’t know. But as I’ve argued elsewhere on this site, the antiwar left today has stood with American servicemen and asked tough questions about the relationship between Iraq and the war on terror. To say that antiwar activists want America to lose the war is to dodge their tough questions with a hollow chorus.
July 11, 2007
How Goes the War? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:10 PM EST Alexander Burns, in his post on political realignment (to which I hope to respond soon), writes, “As the war in Iraq continues to fail . . .” Is that the case as of today, July 11, 2007, or have things begun to change for the better in Iraq at long last? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid certainly thinks it’s the case, and so does the New York Times editorial board, which last Sunday published one of the most morally and politically shameful editorials I have ever read. It called for immediate and total American withdrawal regardless of the political consequences for this country or the flesh-and-blood consequences for the Iraqi people. “There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide,” the Times admits without a trace of concern for the people who will die in that genocide. The Times columnist Tom Friedman agrees, writing today (behind a subscription wall) that “it will be one of the most morally ugly scenes you can imagine—no less than Darfur.” But is the war effort still failing, and is American defeat inevitable? There are a large number of people on the left who sincerely hope so, some of them running major newspapers and other media. But even The New York Times—perhaps through an editing error—has reported improvement in the situation on the ground, now that the “surge” has reached full strength and the new tactics devised by General David Petraeus are just now being fully implemented. Since I have zero respect for the New York Times editorial page, I actually wonder if the Times is trying to force defeat before the possibility of victory can be clearly demonstrated. Consider this: on Sunday, the Times editorial wrote, “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit. . . . Milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. . . . Whatever [President’s Bush’s] cause was, it is lost. . . . Keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.” On the very same day, on the front page, the Times reported, “Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda. . . . The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page today reports considerable progress now that the surge is up to full strength. I am hardly in a position to evaluate it, of course, but I recommend reading it, if only as an antidote to the mainstream media’s relentless see-no-American-successes-speak-no-American-successes drumbeat. That drumbeat, it seems to me, is Al Qaeda’s greatest success in this war. It has failed in all its on-the-ground objectives, but it has had great success manipulating the American media in ways designed to produce American defeat. A very interesting article on this exact subject can be found here. It is worth your time, and I would hope Fredric Smoler, far more of an expert on such matters than I, would comment on it. The Vietnam War was lost not on the ground but in the American media. The Tet Offensive was a military debacle for the Viet Cong on the ground but a huge success for it on CBS and the pages of The New York Times. The American military and government, it seems, has yet to learn the real lesson of Vietnam, which is that it is not enough to win the battle on the ground; it must be won in the media as well, or the war will be lost regardless. Our enemies, perhaps because they are so much weaker in conventional measures of military power, understand that. When will we?
July 11, 2007
Executive Privilege (Again) Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST There’s a little irony in White House Counsel Fred Fielding’s letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, invoking the principle of executive privilege to deny their request to see certain presidential documents, and to hear testimony from two presidential aides, in the ongoing investigation of the firing of several U.S. attorneys. Readers might recall that Fielding served as deputy White House counsel in the Nixon administration. When the Senate Watergate committee learned in the summer of 1973 of the existence of secret Oval Office audiotapes that would presumably shed light on the President’s involvement in the execution and cover-up of the Watergate burglary, a struggle ensued between Nixon, who claimed executive privilege and refused to hand over the tapes, and the Senate, a federal grand jury, and the Office of the Special Prosecutor. On October 20, 1973 (henceforth known as the Saturday Night Massacre), with the noose tightening around his neck, Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, both of whom had refused to carry out the firing. It fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, a hard-line conservative and onetime law professor at Harvard, to close down Cox’s operation. It is little wonder that Nixon was willing to risk a constitutional crisis over custody of the Oval Office tapes. The recordings were proof positive that he had been involved in the cover-up since its first days. When Dean reported that it might take as much as $1 million to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars, the President replied, “We could get that . . . if you need the money, I mean, you could get the money . . . [Y]ou could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten . . . I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done.” He also told his staff that he didn’t “give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save the plan. That’s the whole point.” Of course, the tapes were eventually released, and the rest, as we say, is history. In fairness to the current White House counsel, Fred Fielding left his Nixon administration post in 1972, before the President invoked executive privilege. Moreover, Nixon’s was hardly the first administration to tangle with Congress over access to executive branch documents. As I explained in my review of Michael Beschloss’s new book, George Washington, a Federalist, more or less pioneered the concept in a fight with the Republican-led House of Representatives. It’s a concept that always seems good to the party in control of the White House, and pernicious to those in the loyal opposition. All of which brings me to an amusing contradiction out of Washington, D.C. Earlier this month, Vice President Dick Cheney invoked executive privilege to avoid turning over documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet several weeks ago he claimed that his office was not part of the executive branch in order to avoid turning over entirely different documents to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives. Dick Cheney: of but not in the executive branch. Not even Richard Nixon could have pulled off that trick.
July 11, 2007
Irving and Grass Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 AM EST In 2006 the novelist Günter Grass published a memoir, Peeling the Onion, revealing that as an adolescent he had served in SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. The memoir has now been translated into English, with one section appearing in the June 4th issue of The New Yorker. This revelation about Grass’s military experience has produced something of a controversy, and in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, the novelist John Irving has written a very long and in some ways peculiar defense of Grass, one raising some questions about the legitimate uses of hindsight, for Irving loudly scorns those who have criticized Grass “from the cowardly standpoint of hindsight.” What did Grass do that was so terribly wrong? During the Second World War, I think, nothing. On the evidence he has now made available, Grass was conscripted into the Waffen SS as a seventeen-year-old, during which service he never fired a shot in anger, but failed to take a morally sophisticated view of the Third Reich, a defect that ought to be set against his having been raised in a totalitarian society. It is hard to condemn such actions and inactions, and relatively few have done so. The critics have instead condemned Grass for his tardiness in revealing these details, in the context of his pronounced self-righteousness and sometimes execrable political judgment thereafter. After all, Grass served as Germany’s national scold for half a century, while concealing his very ordinary life between 1943 and 1945. Much of what Grass said in that self-assumed role was ridiculous, or worse. Amazingly, Irving quotes some of it while intending to praise: “In 1979, Grass wrote: ‘There’s no shortage of great Führer figures; a bigoted preacher in Washington and an ailing philistine in Moscow.’” Jimmy Carter was (and remains) a sometimes exasperating prig, and one who has said some foolish things, but any comparison between Carter and Adolf Hitler is surely an example of moral idiocy, and a comparison of Hitler to Brezhnev isn’t all that much better, especially if what Grass found most offensive in Brezhnev was philistinism, rather than, say, invading Czechoslovakia. The generally reliable Ian Buruma recently reported that a few years later Grass made a similarly ludicrous comparison: he likened the stationing of U.S. Pershing missiles on German soil to the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. This was poisonous nonsense; it sounded bad at the time, and it may sound a little worse when you discover that the speaker was a former SS man. Germans themselves understandably tended to find irritating Grass’s insistence that East Germany had no right to voluntarily join a democratic West Germany, and when voluntary unification did occur, Grass compared it to the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria). When Der Spiegel five years later ran a cover depicting a Grass novel being torn apart, Irving writes that “The magazine might as well have conducted a book burning.” Well, a Nazi book burning, which the remark necessarily recalls, generally involved the banning by law of the books being burnt, and eventually, in a number of cases, the incineration of their authors, whereas the reunified German state in which Der Spiegel published that cover was not much for burning either books or people. Hindsight has not been kind to the Reagan:Hitler comparison, and Irving’s remark on book burning suggests that he has as feeble an understanding of the historical peculiarities of the Third Reich as does his hero, and also a curious notion of courage, and of its opposite, cowardice. With respect to courage and cowardice, Irving several times praises Grass’s courage, while impugning the cowardice of his critics: “Grass’s most egregious critic—Christopher Hitchens, in Slate—calls him ‘something of a bigmouth and a fraud, and also something of a hypocrite.’ It is Grass’s craven critics—the fatuous Hitchens among them—who should feel ashamed.” Why courageous? Wherefore craven? It took initially significant literary gifts but no vast courage to be Günter Grass in West Germany, where Grass made a very good career out of being the self-appointed national scold. Christopher Hitchens, whose self-described contrarianism seems genuinely fearless, is an odd man to call a craven critic, and while many find Hitchens maddening, few have ever called him fatuous—reckless and vitriolic, maybe, but not fatuous. As alliteration, both “Grass’s most egregious” and “craven critics” recall Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism”: comically bad writing under the curious misapprehension that it is good writing. Irving’s piece is on more than one occasion unintentionally amusing: For example, while it begins with praise of Grass’s literary gifts, Irving implies that these literary gifts are not least so great an achievement, for which much should be forgiven if anything at all need be forgiven, because they served to inspire Irving to become a novelist. Irving’s second sentence, in a piece approaching 4500 words, notes that “. . . Dickens made me want to be a writer—but it was reading “The Tin Drum” at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language . . .” Justifying more than sixty years of bullying and evasiveness on the grounds that Grass is indirectly responsible for producing The Cider House Rules is not a risk-free rhetorical strategy. Similarly, Irving praises Grass’s “moral certainty,” a quality less consistently alluring than Irving seems to think it is, in Grass or in anyone else. So it turns out that hindsight, which is proverbially said to be always 20/20, can on occasion fall sadly short of that high rating. In this case, hindsight has failed not Grass’s enemies, but his friends.
July 10, 2007
Party Like It’s 1999 Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:05 PM EST Joshua Zeitz’s post, “The Second Party System,” reviews some of the domestic political debates of the first half of the nineteenth century and provides a useful reminder, along with John Steele Gordon’s front-page piece, that slavery was not the only subject that interested America’s early generations of legislators. Mr. Zeitz invites his fellow blog contributors to respond to the following question: Will “the Iraq War, the big-spending conservatism of the Bush administration, the utopian ideology of the neoconservatives (utopianism being more often associated with the left), and the debates over abortion, gay rights, and immigration . . . bring about a realignment” in the American party system? This is an enormous question, so I’ll get right down to it, and I hope I won’t be the only blogger to do so. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the party system won’t realign under the next President, but that it will change substantially within familiar parameters. At the risk of sounding like Pat Buchanan, I think Bush-style “compassionate conservatism” will be out, and the 1990s Republicanism of men like South Carolina’s Jim DeMint and Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan will be back in style. If you block out the static of the presidential race for a minute and focus instead on Congress, it’s clear that the Republican Party’s young leaders are, for the most part, uninterested in big-government conservatism. Their agenda emphasizes spending reductions, border security, and judicial appointments. As the war in Iraq continues to fail, Senate Republicans are less determined than ever to maintain America’s force deployment abroad. George Will, on “This Week,” recently observed that the Senate GOP seems scheduled to bolt the President’s foreign policy in September. Though the Weekly Standard crowd might not like to admit it, there’d be very little appetite among Republicans in Congress for any additional nation-building. Democrats don’t seem poised for an ideological transformation either. Watching Democratic presidential debates and observing the day-to-day operations of their legislative majorities, their big issues seem to be energy, healthcare, and ending the war. Some of their interests–chiefly, energy–are relatively newfound, but they aren’t inconsistent with the party’s more established issue positions on subjects such as the environment. Hot-button social issues are slyly sidelined with moderate-sounding policy proposals: proposing civil unions to avoid debate on gay marriage, proposing legislation to reduce unwanted pregnancies to dodge confrontation on Roe. Some of the actors, like Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, are new, but the script is pretty familiar. The party is notably more unified than it was just a few years ago, and its political leaders are obviously more competent. Democrats also seem poised to make big inroads with Latino voters, which will strengthen their hand as they try to implement their agenda. But while some unpredictable legislators, like Virginia’s Jim Webb and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, may mix things up a bit, nobody’s about to alter the basic framework of that agenda. So are we headed for a reprise of the 1990s, full of gridlock on budgeting and social policy and opportunistic posturing in foreign affairs? Maybe, and if Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani is elected President, I’d wager that we are. 9/11 would add an additional political football, but, on the whole, I guess we’d see a lot of the same debates we’ve already seen on “Crossfire.” Alternatively, though, I think it’s possible that a comparatively untarnished, fair-minded, and prudent President, maybe Obama or Mitt Romney, might approach old political conflicts with the lessons of the ‘90s in mind, and produce different results. Maybe Republican leaders less cynical than Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole would acknowledge that healthcare and climate change present real problems, and enter into good-faith negotiations with Democratic legislators on a market-based compromise. Or maybe Democrats with more humility and self-control than Bill Clinton could reach out to ostracized big-government Republicans, like Michael Gerson, and partner with socially conscious evangelicals to revive and revise the welfare state. These kinds of reforms might really upset the political status quo. And slow generational change will incrementally alter the public debate on issues like gay marriage, which young people just don’t care about. I’ll wait eagerly for the day when big legislation or demographic change produces new partisan battle lines. Until then, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, you approach reforms with the parties you have.
July 10, 2007
The Second Party System Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST In today’s feature article, John Steele Gordon reviews the tumult that arose from Andrew Jackson’s war against the Second Bank of the United States. Mr. Gordon writes, “It’s hard to imagine today, but for much of the nineteenth century, matters like the gold standard, the money supply, and central banking were red-hot political issues. They not only took up space on editorial pages but were the casus belli in many a bar fight . . .” One of the more interesting books I often assign students who are working on the rise and fall of the second party system–the prevailing arrangement from the early 1830s through the early 1850s that pitted Whigs against Democrats–is Michael Holt’s The Political Crisis of the 1850s. Holt begins from precisely the same place as Mr. Gordon, observing that the truly salient issues in antebellum politics revolved around matters of political economy: Should the federal government finance infrastructure projects, then known as “internal improvements”? Should states and (or) the federal government charter banks and facilitate the proliferation of paper money, or should money transactions be limited to specie (gold and silver)? Was the ideal economy a “mixed” one in which manufacturing and agriculture prospered side-by-side, or should America remain a nation of small, self-sufficient farmers? In the 1950s consensus historians noted that Whigs and Democrats often agreed on more than they disagreed on. Good Democrats like Jackson were suspicious of the Second Bank of the United States but more sanguine about state-chartered banks (which tended to be less adequately capitalized and thus extremely unstable), just as many Whigs like Abraham Lincoln supported Henry Clay’s “American System” to promote economic development, even as they held up the yeoman farmer as the archetype of good citizenship. But the parties did disagree about a great many things. Some historians claim that Whigs favored expansion across time, meaning that they favored an economically developed and unified nation, while Democrats favored expansion across space – most notably, through annexation and conquest. Others believe that Democrats were less enthusiastic than Whigs about the emerging market economy and the values shift that accompanied it. At the most core level, there is no denying that the two parties had substantive differences. Holt argues that by the early 1850s these differences ceased to be salient. The 1849 Gold Rush and other such phenomena undercut the argument for paper currency and credit; the annexation of much of Mexico slaked most Democrats’ thirst for more land; and many of the battles over banks and corporate charters had settled themselves at the state level by the late 1840s, with Democrats usually winning the day. In other words, the issues that once stirred popular passions were becoming increasingly irrelevant through gradual resolution. A political vacuum thus left the two parties in a struggle to maintain the allegiance of their supporters, who were no longer sure why they identified either with the Democrats or with the Whigs. In this vacuum, a realignment occurred. It might have occurred around any numbers of issues, like temperance or nativism. In the latter case, it almost did. Instead, it occurred around slavery, and the second, bisectional party system gave way to a third, sectional system that pitted Northern Republicans against Southern Democrats. Most historians and political scientists believe we are still living in the “fifth party system,” which emerged in the 1930s. Then, voters realigned and reoriented the two existing parties (Republicans and Democrats). It’s remarkable to see a party system cling to life after 65 years. Despite claims of those on the radical left and those on the extreme right that the two parties are carbon copies of each other, the Bush years have shown otherwise. Say what you will about partisanship; America’s two-party system, for all its foibles, has kept the public debate sharp. The question I’d ask of my fellow contributors is whether the Iraq War, the big-spending conservatism of the Bush administration, the utopian ideology of the neoconservatives (utopianism being more often associated with the left), and the debates over abortion, gay rights, and immigration, might bring about a realignment?
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