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Ann Coulter says (April 21) Arlen Specter is not really a Republican. One proof is that he was the first Republican to speak out against Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. According to Coulter, the failure of the Bork nomination made Republicans fearful of nominating true conservatives; inoffensive types including Anthony Kennedy made it to the Court; and extremely liberal decisions on social issues resulted.
"In a democratic process, liberals could never persuade Americans to vote for their insane ideas--abortion on demand, gay marriage and adoption, handgun confiscation, cross-district busing, abolishing the death penalty and affirmative action quotas."
On the other hand, William Saletan says in Slate that the 1989 pro-choice message, "Who Decides: You or Them?" was brilliant, and helped elect a Democrat in (what is usually safely Republican) Virginia:
"The conservative message succeeded brilliantly at keeping abortion legal. The Virginia election scared the dickens out of the GOP. President George H.W. Bush and other Republican politicians retreated from their threats to ban abortion. In 1992, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, noting (without acknowledging its obvious influence) that pressure to overturn Roe had been countered by increasingly intense 'pressure to retain it.' Even today, George W. Bush cautions, 'I don't think the culture has changed to the extent that the American people or the Congress would totally ban abortions.'"
So did a handful of politicians and judges really change everything themselves, or were they forced to acknowledge an electorate that is basically pro-choice?
Update: my provisional response is that there's a combination of libertarianism and puritanism. In his dissent on the Lawrence case (which struck down sodomy laws, and prepared the way for same-sex marriage), Scalia lists activities that might legitimately be covered by "laws based on moral choices": bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity. Somehow he is sympathetic to crack-downs on all these things--or at least he thinks there are no constitutional rights that stand in the way of criminal laws concerning them. (Masturbation? This one made my students laugh. How exactly would the policy enforce it?) Yet there is no mention of divorce, which arguably devastates the lives of families and children. Let's face it--some of Scalia's best friends are divorced.
Two more interesting pieces on the Woodward book in Slate.
One by Fred Kaplan suggests that Woodward doesn't know how to interpret his own anecdotes, or explain his own narrative; he "always misses the point." There is no real explanation of the role of Chalabi, Cheney, Wolfowitz, the Office of Special Plans, Doug Feith, or Rumsfeld's theories about a modernized and downsized military.
The other article by Timothy Noah suggests that Woodward knows more than he lets on. The fact that Bush isn't really in charge does emerge, but Woodward doesn't draw too much attention to it. Woodward keeps his sources happy, while letting at least a fair bit of the truth as he knows it emerge for the careful reader.
I still haven't read the Woodward book, but here are some suggestions. Everyone seems to agree that Colin Powell got the book he wanted from Woodward, as he has done before. Powell is the voice of caution, the voice of reason (as opposed to Cheney's "fever") the one who usually wants more time, more evidence, greater forces to be deployed. Yet he is also one who doesn't resign when precipitate and thoughtless action is taken, apparently contrary to his advice. Powell can't lose. If things don't work out, he can say "I told you so." If they do, he was just doing his best to ensure success.
What about the bigger story? Noah has suggested that Bush also got (more or less) the book he wanted. The near-silence about Cheney, Feith and others all helps reinforce the (probably misleading) impression that Bush is in charge. This might not help Cheney's ego in the short term, but in another way it also gives him what he wants. There is no real description of strategy meetings that must have taken place at which the axe-grinding of Ahmed Chalabi, and the now-discredited theories of the neo-cons and Laurie Mylroie, were front and centre.
If Cheney and others were more in the picture, a parade of rather strange special pleaders and hangers-on would also appear, and they might have raised questions about the president's judgement.
Bush defenders may not be happy at the picture of the Bush administration as "not the sharpest crayons in the box," but the book is apparently also almost totally free of the "wingnut" factor. This is not a bad compromise: less Don Quixote, or even Monty Python, but more Gomer Pyle.
The administration emerges as a group with decent small-town values who hated Saddam, and unfortunately invaded Iraq without knowing much about the country. Who can blame them for any of that?
Good if slightly dull patriots is not a bad thing for an administration to be in an election year. The public may continue to rally around them, even if the war goes badly. No one ever denied that the British, French and German generals in World War I were decent, patriotic chaps who meant well. Same with Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister at the outbreak of that war. It has been argued that if he had told the Germans the Brits would fight, and the Russians they wouldn't, everyone would have backed down. Instead he did the reverse. Not that swift, but he was no doubt a decent person, trying to do the right thing.
Maybe Woodward really is a conservative Republican (Alterman).
I'm still impressed that Sharon seems determined to remove settlements from the Gaza Strip. If it happens, this will be the most that has been given up by either side in the Israel/Palestinian conflict, probably ever.
It seems true that the only way he can do this and maintain his political support is to prove his toughness. Thus the wall, and the targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders. The Palestinians might reasonably conclude--anyone might--that if it is not Sharon in charge, it is likely to be someone even less open to negotiations.
So I sympathize with Kevin Drum--both his concern that he may simply not get what is going on in Israel, and his openness to the idea that if Sharon goes, Likud will shift even further to the right.
It follows that Bush might be right to support Sharon's plan--even though the timing seems crazy, Bush is already hated by the entire Arab world (even Jordan), etc. It has been clear since at least 1992 that Palestinians will not have a right of return, and Israel will not give up much of the West Bank; yet Bush may have caused a lot of anger over matters of style if not substance.
Do Iraqis really care about Palestinians? Does anyone? If Iraqis do care, then it seems to follow that Bush has made things tougher for himself in a place where he is already in a shooting war.
Of course, an argument like this one for Sharon has long been made for Arafat: if we don't deal with him, we'll have to deal with someone worse. Somehow, what the Palestinians say doesn't seem to matter much these days.
Couldn't Sharon proceed more by law and trials than by outright assassination? Wouldn't that show that he is truly above the terrorists? I guess the show of toughness as well as precision is very important to him now.
Jonah Goldberg says Woodward's book answers two charges against Bush: that he lied about WMDs, and that he is not really in charge--Cheney is.
The problem is, Goldberg has already explained that the two contrary thoughts--that George Tenet of the CIA assured Bush there were WMDs in Iraq, and that Bush personally wanted to invade Iraq without the benefit of any briefing by anyone--were probably planted in Woodward's book by Bush.
I tend to think Woodward is a disgrace, and always has been. His narratives rely almost completely on unnamed sources. Woodward offers a deal to these sources: give me your side of the story, with some lurid details that can't be easily disproved by anyone (and will make Page 1) or else I'll publish a story from your enemies that will make you look bad.
How much of the result is a lie that can never be tested by responsible people?
So Kathryn Lopez, Goldberg's colleage at the Corner, asks: "Why does the president sit down with Bob Woodward in the first place? We have, evidently, in the Woodward book, based on 60 Minutes and Post excerpts, a portrait of a simple-minded Christian who thinks he was sent by God to give the whole world freedom, and who doesn't consider himself accountable to Congress, the Constitution, or anyone else. Which would [be] just a typical Beltway book--one current account of history, from the angle of its main sources or writer--if it weren't for the legitimacy stamp it gets from having the president as one of its only on-the-record sources."
Goldberg replies: "It sounds like Bush has put a lot of the 'blame' on Tenet (WMDs are a 'slam dunk' indeed) and clarified that Cheney and Rumsfeld were not calling the shots. There's no way Woodward would have written that if Bush hadn't cooperated."
In other words, Bush can't dictate Woodward's whole book, or prevent any negative stuff from appearing. But, by cooperating, and helping Woodward with sales and publicity, Bush can plant a couple of crucial claims.
Does this make these claims more likely to be true, or less? I still think the political staff did a lot of torquing of the evidence about WMDs, both before and after the "slam dunk" remark. I'm willing to believe the President said, from his early days as President, and as he hired various hawks, who had their own reasons for invading Iraq, "let's do it"--regardless of any briefings from Chalabi, the neo-cons, or anyone else.
On the other hand, Timothy Noah suggests that a careful reading of Woodward indicates that it was Cheney who actually pulled the trigger on Saddam's regime.
Update: Noah has a newer piece recommending that Bush dump Cheney. Among other virtues in this piece, Noah links to some of the evidence that Cheney torqued any and all WMD material at least as hard as anyone.
Another point from the new Hitchens piece in Slate:
"Now we hear on all sides, including Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, that de-Baathification was also a mistake. Can you imagine what the antiwar critics, and many Iraqis, would now be saying if the Baathists had been kept on? This point extends to Paul Bremer's decision to dissolve the Baathist armed forces. That could perhaps have been carried out with more tact, and in easier stages. But it was surely right to say that a) Iraq was the victim of a huge and parasitic military, which invaded externally and repressed internally; and b) that young Iraqi men need no longer waste years of their lives on nasty and stultifying conscription. Moreover, by making it impossible for any big-mouth brigadier or general to declare himself the savior of Iraq in a military coup, the United States also signaled that it would not wish to rule through military proxies (incidentally, this is yet another gross failure of any analogy to Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, and all the rest of it)."
So: anyone at all who served Saddam's regime, even in the lowest position in the armed forces, couldn't be trusted? Could any Iraqis be trusted other than the hand-picked members of the IGC, who would meet inside the Green Zone or whatever the former palace is called?
So you're liberating people you don't trust? From the beginning you're operating from within an armed camp, sending out orders to construction teams, paid security forces, and pitifully few regular troops, and hoping for the best?
Kevin Drum among others has suggested that disbanding the armed forces--opposed by Jay Garner, carried out by Paul Bremer (at the behest of Bush personally?)--may have been the single worst mistake of the U.S. occupation.
Douglas Saunders in the Globe and Mail adds another dimension: young Iraqi males in general were not trusted in the early days of the occupation. Paid employment was given to almost anyone, from almost any country, in preference to young Iraqi males.
From Saunders: "We don't want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to protect ourselves," explained Colonel Damon Walsh, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority's procurement office. "From a force-protection standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a bad-guy influence."
Hitchens seems to be babbling at this point, but he might actually have captured Bremer's thinking a year ago--best and safest to send them all home, with nothing to do but fume.
The problem seems pretty obvious. If there are many Iraqis who have, so to speak, ordinary ambitions--not just for the return of a black market, but for honour, and positions of responsibility, among their fellow-citizens--then one either trusts a great many of them, willy-nilly, or not. If, on the other hand, you are convinced that mullocracy, combined with lingering loyalty to Saddam, and who knows what crazy resentments, are all bursting out all over, then you can't tell friend from foe, you can't really trust anyone, and military occupation is ... not a good idea.
An unfair but hard-to-resist analogy: when the French helped the American revolutionaries in the 1770s, they didn't say: we can't trust you guys to fight; there might be a Benedict Arnold among you.
Christopher Hitchens will admit only one mistake in his advocacy of the Iraq war:
"The thing that I most underestimated is the thing that least undermines the case. And it's not something that I overlooked, either. But the extent of lumpen Islamization in Iraq, on both the Khomeinist and Wahhabi ends (call them Shiite and Sunni if you want a euphemism that insults the majority), was worse than I had guessed."
The words sort of pile on top of each other here, but part of the meaning seems to be this: there is much more evidence of radical Islam--the kind that threatens the West--in Iraq than Hitchens thought. But knowing that now, he doesn't think the case for Bush's war is weakened. In fact, the "rule of the proxies of the Iranian mullahs and the Saudi princes, ... these sadistic and corrupt riffraff ... would have made it even more important not to leave Iraq to the post-Saddam plans of such factions."
The more true it was that the dangerous mullahs were in charge, the more of a case there was for U.S. invasion? I would have thought the opposite--it was the hope or promise that Iraq was largely secularized or even Westernized that made it so inviting as a potential showcase for Western-style democracy.
In fairness, Hitchens also emphasizes that the U.S. had half-occupied Iraq for years through sanctions and no-fly zones. The only real options were to call all this off, and leave Saddam in his glory, or carry out regime change. Hitchens cites Pollack's book for its much-quoted advocacy of invasion, even though Pollack largely based his case on ... er ... weapons of mass destruction.
This will no doubt prove to be a learning experience for many of us. If Iraq turns out to be another mullocracy, with a formal veneer of secular, even elected government, and a somewhat hidden arbitrary rule by mullahs, like Iran, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, then we can learn more about the success and growth of such regimes.
They do seem to be the basis or source of a great deal of hatred of the West, and thus, recruiting grounds for terrorists.
So far, U.S. efforts in Iraq have not exactly relegated the regime in Iran to the dustbin of history. On the contrary, it seems much more of a player--and perhaps more deeply entrenched--than it was in March 2003. (See more background here).
Iran's recent dipomatic effort in Iraq ended with little in the way of results, but it seemed to confirm that certain leaders in Iran have enormous influence in Iraq. Whether anyone in authority in Iran is actively supporting Sadr is another matter.
A spokesperson for the Iranians delivered some rather cheeky remarks to the effect that the U.S. is an obstacle to peace.
Two articles in Slate bring out related issues.
Lee Smith says the terror problem is bigger than Al Qaeda, and different from anything implied by one centralized organization. One point he makes is that Richard Clarke keeps demonstrating he is wrong about this--still focusing on Al Qaeda. Perhaps Clarke has done a lot to give the 9/11 Commission the same wrong or misleading focus?
One implication Smith draws is that law enforcement and the judiciary should not go on a "war footing" when it comes to terror--since this implies something fairly short term. Terrorism should be understood as a long-term problem that may not be significantly resolved for generations. Using "normal" law enforcement against it is not a sign of weakness, but a demonstration of the strength of our institutions. Trials will also allow a range of experts, as well as the public, to learn more about actual terrorist operations--and areas where law enforcement agencies need improvement.
Dahlia Lithwick's argument is similar. The U.S. is only allowing "small fry," accused of taking very small actions in support of terrorism, to go to trial. Everyone who is accused of anything serious faces a military tribunal, or simply a long detention with no trial. Some of the nobodies pleaded guilty and got substantial jail time because they were told that if they did not, they would get the military "combatant" treatment.
Her conclusion:
"But the Bush administration needs to do two things differently, starting now: First, it must stop heralding each of these trials as a determinative battle in the war on terror. It puts too much pressure on prosecutors to behave appallingly, as they apparently did in Michigan. And it bullies possibly innocent defendants into accepting guilty pleas by threatening to designate them as 'enemy combatants.' Second, the administration must try a real terrorist for real acts of terror. Either the Moussaoui trial should go forward, based on real terror charges, with Moussaoui given a meaningful opportunity to defend himself, or Padilla, Hamdi, or Binalshibh should be tried in open court. Reserving the courts for the small-fry sends the message that the Western legal system can only punish the pretty-bad. And treating each pretty-bad guy like he committed the crime of the century sends the message that justice was never really the point in the first place."
Attorney General John Ashcroft seems very much in charge here (although of course it was the President who insisted on the evening of 9/11 that "we are at war"). In light of some of the testimony at the 9/11 hearing, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Ashcroft, like the President, has gone from one extreme to another: from believing that the emphasis on counter-terrorism was simply empire-building by bureaucrats, to believing it is the number one priority--and indeed requires a martial law approach. (As Smith says, following "the model of authoritarian states like Egypt and Algeria").
Is it because he was taken so much by surprise by 9/11--even because he felt, so to speak, foolish, that Ashcroft wants to use extreme measures that (one hopes) are relatively short-term?
As predicted earlier, the National Rifle Association has announced that they will purchase a media organization in order to be exempt from the campaign finance regulations that have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. (Via Hit and Run).
In a presidential election year, it is hardly enough to say there are problems with what the president is doing and has done; one must face the question whether his opponent would be an improvement.
It's hard to be enthusiastic about John Kerry. Mickey Kaus, a Democrat, has made it clear he wishes the Democrats had another nominee. Today (or late yesterday) he says Kerry was wrong to say he'd settle for a stable regime in Iraq--not necessarily a democracy--even though this may be the simple truth for Bush as well as for Kerry.
There may still (despite everything?) be an opportunity to turn Iraq into a successful anti-terrorist initiative. Some kind of mullocracy may be OK (some mullocracies are better than others) but a full-fledged democracy would be much better. It is far too soon for Kerry to give up on this possibility, and thus imply he would give in to a coup or some other undemocratic outcome.
(Linking to an op-ed by Robert Wright in the NY Times (which doesn't quite make this claim) Kaus says: "democracy is also our only shot at salvaging a positive long-term anti-terrorist dynamic from an invasion that otherwise will have nasty blowback effects." I certainly hope it's not the only shot.)
Now Kaus has added that if Bush is in fact prepared to hand over significant control to the UN, he may be following Kerry's suggestion, and it may be working. This won't leave Kerry much of a position from which to criticize.
Even David Remnick in the New Yorker, while clearly rooting for Kerry, suggests he needs to say more. While using the word "nuances" with a straight face--something I assumed was impossible by now--Remnick says: "It falls to Kerry to disprove the conservative zealots' favorite canard: that subtlety of vision is inconsistent with strength and cogency of action."
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