Gideon's Blog |
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In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.
For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com
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Thursday, December 28, 2006
Let's see how I did on last year's predictions before going on to this year. 1. Senator John McCain will stage a significant Mountain-Muhammad confab with a major leader of the religious Right (e.g., Dobson, Colson - not Robertson, obviously) who will bless him in his quest for the GOP nomination. His GOP numbers will immediately improve and his general election numbers and image with the media will immediately drop as all concerned discover that he is a Republican. Giuliani will not run for President. The remaining GOP candidates will compete all year to position themselves as the anti-McCains. Tom Tancredo will declare that if McCain is the nominee, he will run for President as an independent. Whether or not to seize immigration as the issue on which to run against McCain becomes a major point of debate in the conservative blogosphere, but not in the actual campaign. WRONG. Early, anyway. None of this has happened yet. At least some of it will happen in 2007. Specifically, I predict that Senator Sam Brownback will endorse John McCain for President, causing K-Lo's head to explode. As for Guiliani: he'll run if he thinks he has a shot, not if he thinks McCain has it all sewn up. He's going to announce, one way or the other, relatively late - mid-2007. The immigration-related political predictions I stand by for 2007 - if McCain is the nominee, Tancredo's head will explode, and you will see a 3rd-party challenge (Lou Dobbs?). Whether the bid gets any traction - i.e., more than 2% of the final vote total - is another story; I'd guess not. But it'll get a lot of press on the way there. 2. Kadima (Sharon's new party) will win a resounding victory in the Israeli parliamentary elections, but Sharon will still have difficulty cobbling together a coalition because (a) the parties to his right do better than expected, but they are committed to refuse to join a coalition unless further unilateral withdrawals are ruled out; (b) Labor and Meretz refuse, at least initially, to form a government with Sharon; and (c) Shinui (whose representation drops in half, but is still a factor) refuses to sit in a government with the ultra-Orthodox parties. Sharon uses his difficulties as the springboard to propose major changes to Israel's constitution making the Prime Minister more independent of the parliament. Outside of Israel, the least-noticed story about the Israeli elections is that the percentage of Labor votes coming from Arab voters hits an all-time high. Meanwhile, terrorist attacks planned in Gaza will prompt Israel to send the IDF back into the territory in a small-scale repeat of Operation Defensive Shield. Sharon will not die. WRONG on virtually all counts. 3. Canada will finally elect a Conservative government - barely. Italy, on the other hand, will elect Romano Prodi. RIGHT and RIGHT AGAIN. 4. Hosni Mubarak will be hospitalized for a period of days, during which speculation about the stability of Egypt will spiral out of control. Then he'll come out of the hospital to rule for several more years. WRONG, although for all I know this happened and I just missed it. 5. Lopez Obrador will win the Mexican Presidency by a decisive margin. This will not be the end of the world, and in particular will not mean major changes in Mexican fiscal or monetary policy. But it will be the end of the period of remarkably friendly relations between Mexico and the U.S. that obtained under the last two presidencies, and a return to something resembling the historic norm - not adversarial relations, but not exactly friendly. Lopez Obrador will ostentatiously embrace Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales and will court the EU, China and Brazil as a way of "restraining" American imperialism, but this will mostly amount to rhetoric. Mexico, Bolivia and Venezuela will, however, declare that they are opposed to American attempts to combat the drug trade by military means, and cooperation in this area will be significantly affected. WRONG, though I sometimes wonder whether an AMLO victory wouldn't have been better than the split decision that actually transpired (though, of course, I think a clear PAN victory would have been better than either). 6. Brokeback Mountain will win Best Picture. Other nominees: Walk the Line, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, and I'm not sure what else. Ang Lee will win Best Director. Philip Seymour Hoffmann will win Best Actor for Capote. Other nominees: Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain, David Strathairn for Good Night and Good Luck, Joaquin Phoenix for Walk the Line, and Jeff Daniels for The Squid and the Whale. Reese Witherspoon will win Best Actress for Walk the Line. Laura Linney will also be nominated, for The Squid and the Whale, as will Judi Dench for Mrs. Henderson Presents, but I'm not sure who else. The Capote Oscar will be the second data point that will allow journalists to extrapolate a "trend" from Brokeback Mountain and 2005 will be known as the year of the "gay film breakout" in Hollywood. Someone somewhere will also notice that everyone nominated for everything this year is white. Maybe Morgan Freeman will be nominated for Best Voice for March of the Penguins so everyone can breathe easier. I should note that, of the films mentioned above, Penguins is the only one I've seen, though I really wanted to see Capote (and I suppose I will rent it). WHO CARES? THIS IS ANCIENT HISTORY 7. Neither North Korea nor Iran will test a nuclear weapon. And neither country will be attacked by either the U.S. or any other country. Nor will either country experience regime change. WRONG, RIGHT, RIGHT and RIGHT - [NOTE: I originally gave myself full credit on this one, since the Nork test was probably a dud, but that's cheating: they sure tested something, presumably a nuke, so only 75% credit on this one.] 8. A major terrorist incident will occur in Russia, bigger than even the spectacular events that have already occurred. The last vestiges of democratic governance and the rule of law will be eliminated in response. Nonetheless, the West will conclude, collectively, that we had better continue betting on Putin because the alternatives - chess-playing dissenters notwithstanding - are worse. I'M GOING TO GIVE MYSELF ALMOST FULL CREDIT FOR THIS ONE; trend lines in Russia are all pointing the way I said, and, for that matter, so is the Western response, but there was no spectacular trigger. 9. Stocks will have a surprisingly strong year, led by business equipment, technology and telecom. The housing market will continue to soften and the dollar will weaken. Gains to stocks will be driven by: an upswing in business investment; an increase in corporate leverage, increasing returns to shareholders at the expense of bondholders; and utter legislative paralysis in Washington. There will be no Bernanke-panic-induced market tumble, but not because inflation is tame; inflation will be higher than anticipated by year-end. BASICALLY RIGHT. Stocks up, but not led by tech. Housing market weaker. Dollar down against Euro but flat against Yen. Inflation signals ambiguous at year-end. There was no Bernanke panic because Bernanke was tough on inflation! 10. Tom Delay will lose his House seat. Rick Santorum will lose his Senate seat. Harold Ford will win the open Senate seat in Tennessee. Nonetheless, the GOP will hold both houses of Congress, albeit by reduced margins. This will fool Republicans into thinking they are more popular than they are. RIGHT, RIGHT, WRONG, WRONG and WRONG. Not too bad in the scheme of political predictions. 11. Donald Rumsfeld will resign. He will not be replaced by John McCain or James Webb. So will John Snow. He will not be replaced by Larry Kudlow or James Cramer. RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT and RIGHT! 12. America will not substantially withdraw from Iraq; any troop drawdowns will be largely PR stunts. The news will continue to be a wearying mix of good and bad, with no signs of an end but no sufficiently dramatic negative news to change the political dynamic in America. Iraq will remain a unitary state, but not indefinitely; Kurdistan will eventually break off, but not this year. RIGHT, although I think it's fairer to say that the news from Iraq has gone from "mixed to bad" to "definitely bad" and the political dynamic has indeed changed. But I'm still giving myself full credit for now. 13. General Motors will fire its CEO. The new CEO will be widely expected to take the company into Chapter 11 in 2007. A Chinese company will publicly speculate about purchasing some or all of GM's brands. Pat Buchanan will cite this as evidence of the imminent end of the Republic. He will be wrong. WRONG, but my heart was in the right place. 14. John Derbyshire will actually read the first novel in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, and discover that he likes it very much. He will speculate aloud in The Corner about whether he is unconsciously trying to get himself fired. Fortunately for his wife and children, he'll decide he doesn't like the third book in the series, and is kept on. WRONG, but my heart was *definitely* in the right place. 15. Al Gore will form an exploratory committee pursuant to a Presidential campaign. So will John Kerry. The Gore announcement will be news. No one will notice what John Kerry does. (Yes, I am stealing this prediction outright from Mickey Kaus. Sue me.) WRONG, but just early: I'll predict this happens in 2007. 16. I will try my first bottle of wine from the Gobi Desert. WRONG. 17. One "crisis" country in the news will be The Philippines. Some combination of terrorism, corruption, domestic instability, economic crisis - the country will be in the news, because bad things will be happening. However America responds, China will emerge the more influential in that country. WRONG. 18. A referendum will be held to break up at least one of the following countries: Belgium, Canada, Italy, Bosnia, Iraq, Spain. WRONG, though I will give myself part credit for the hoax broadcast *claiming* Belgium had broken up! 6% of the Belgian public still believes the hoax, even after the same station that aired it owned up! 19. The German Party of Democratic Socialism will take a sharp nationalist turn. An utterly politically incorrect statement by a party leader - about deporting foreigners, or retaking Konigsberg, or something similary inflammatory - will give the party a noticeable boost to third place in the polls (very far behind the CDU/CSU and Social Democrats, but meaningfully ahead of the Free Democrats and Greens). As with Le Pen in France, the rise of the Unacceptable Right in Germany will prompt general hand-wringing and urgent calls to redouble efforts towards political union in Europe. WRONG, so far as I know. I think I don't know enough about the complexion of German political parties to make sensible predictions. 20. Japan's economic recovery will accelerate. It's nascent pro-natal policy initiatives will also begin to bear fruit, surprisingly quickly, albeit modestly. Japanese nationalism will also be on the rise, with increasing questions whether the country should change its constitution to permit a more robust forward defense, what naval and missile capabilities are necessary to deter a rising China, and whether Japan should even become a declared nuclear power in its own right. The rising sun will be a year-long news story in 2006. RIGHT, more or less. The recovery is accelerating, and nationalism is very plainly on the rise, complete with discussion about amending the constitution and possible nuclearization. It's too soon to know whether the pro-natal policies are having any effect at all, though, and Japan wasn't in the paper nearly as much as I thought it should have been. 21. Sam Alito will be confirmed with at least 65 and fewer than 75 votes. No other Supreme Court Justices will retire or die in 2006. Roe v. Wade will not be overturned. RIGHT on the outcome, WRONG on the vote total. 22. Eliot Spitzer will be elected Governor of New York, as punishment for Pataki's sins. Steve Westly will be elected Governor of California, after upsetting Phil Angelides in the primary. Ted Strickland will be elected Governor of Ohio. By the end of 2006, Democrats will have elected a substantial number of Senators and Governors with White House potential - the GOP "bench strength" advantage will have evaporated. This won't matter for 2008 much, but it will in 2012, 2016 and 2020. RIGHT except for the California prediction - though note that I was savvy enough to know that Angelides didn't have a prayer in the general, and hence based my Dem pickup prediction on the prediction that he would lose the primary. 23. Carbs will be good for you again; the new health bugaboo will be caffeine. WRONG, I bet, though I haven't followed the health news at all. 24. Bruce Ratner will get whatever he wants development-wise. Larry Silverstein will not. RIGHT. Atlantic Yards has been approved. And Ground Zero is still at least somewhat up for grabs. 25. I will finally write a book. SADLY, WRONG.Tuesday, December 19, 2006
I wrote this post before leaving for vacation, but somehow didn't manage to post it. Now I'm back, and it's a bit stale, but I'm going to post it anyway. The Telegraph has inaugurated an splendid new game: the Game of Never. Charles Moore explains the rules and plays a round, with some eyebrow-raising results. John Derbyshire enters the lists as well. This is, self-evidently, the best game of this sort of the year. My own entry follows. I am embarrassed to admit that, looking at the list, I appear barely to have lived at all. I have never - owned a car - owned a television set - owned a house (I do own my apartment or, more accurately, shares in a coop) - owned a gun - owned a dog (and yet, in spite of all the above, I am a registered Republican - go figure) - studied economics, business, finance or statistics (and yet, I make my living on Wall Street - happy face here) - fired an employee - quit a proper full-time job - placed an advertisement (not even for a roommate) - sued or been sued by anyone (my mother once sued the city on my behalf for an injury sustained on school grounds, when I was a child, but that doesn't count) - crashed a car (I said *crashed*, not *barely bumped fenders*) - filed for a patent (well, I'm not too surprised about this one, but I am embarrassed) - had a negative net-worth (no, not even in college, and no, I'm not independently wealthy) - installed an operating system (I actually have one in a box at home, which I am afraid to open) - grown a vegetable (not sure I've successfully grown anything, but certainly not a vegetable) - joined a proper club (i.e., the kind you have to be *accepted* into to join - again, unless you count my coop, or college, which I don't) - been elected to anything (no, not even in high school) - volunteered for hazardous duty of any kind - completed the writing of a novel or non-fiction book - memorized a soliloquy from Shakespeare - studied Talmud (I've read bits of Talmud here and there, but never properly *studied*) - competed in an eating contest (quite a surprise, given how long I've worked on Wall Street) - eaten fugu (I love Japanese food, and had a colleague who frequented a joint that served the deadly fish; don't know how I missed accompanying him) - asked out on a proper date any girl with whom I had not already established some degree of romantic or sexual entanglement (this may simply be a generational divide, but it's acutely embarrassing to me and, as a married man, it's too late to change this one) - been responsible for the conception of a child On the other hand, I have also never - struck a woman - refused to forgive someone who had wronged me and sincerely apologized So not all "nevers" warrant only regret or perverse pride. Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Thursday, November 16, 2006
While my readership is small, I flatter myself that it is exceptionally well-read. Hence this request: suggestions for what I should read - or, more specifically, what I should read *regularly*, what I should subscribe to. I ask because while I think I'm doing a pretty good job with books (currently reading Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, by Eugene Genovese, a book I am enjoying very much) - two exceptions being contemporary fiction, of which I seem to read almost none, something I feel bad about, and poetry, of which I am woefully ignorant, and ashamed of that fact, and yet unable to remedy - I'm doing a much less good job with periodicals and newspapers. I subscribe to a whole bunch, and I read them less and less - and get less and less pleasure from what I do read. So: suggestions for newspapers or magazines that I should subscribe to and read regularly. Don't bother mentioning the obvious if you're going to recommend it; I already subscribe to The Atlantic, for instance. Thanks. Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Well, I upgraded to Blogger Beta and my archives no longer appear on my blog. I checked the page on Blogger that explains what to do if this happens, and it gives instructions that are not applicable to Beta. Anyone out there have any advice? Other than emailing Blogger, which I've done? Thursday, November 09, 2006
Okay, I'm back from Asia. Itinerary somewhat altered: Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Seoul, no stop in Kyoto. Impressions? Well, I do a decent Jackie Mason . . . - Hong Kong feels like a giant shopping mall. Of course, both the hotel we stayed in and our offices in the city are in the IFC complex, the lower floors of which *are* a shopping mall, so maybe that's not a proper impression of the city as a whole. But even so, downtown felt swank but kind of sterile, while Kowloon, which I explored for a half-day, felt much more Chinese but not really in a good way - the press of humanity was too palpable. The view from Victoria Peak was impressive, though not as impressive as it would have been on a less hazy day. Any way, the hotel was excellent, as was the hotel's Cantonese restaurant - this was by far the best eating we did in Hong Kong, which surprised me, as I had heard the food in Hong Kong was generally exceptional, and my impression of the other places we ate was: it was all good, but not notably better than places in New York. Overall, Hong Kong was a bit of a disappointment. - Taipei I enjoyed more than expected, but my expectations were low. Felt like a real city, less artificial. Also felt the Japanese influence everywhere - in the layout of the city, architecture, even the signage and preferred color combinations, and all that's a positive in my view. But I don't want to exaggerate - Taipei is not what I would call a city with a lot of charm. I just was expecting something really ugly, and it wasn't ugly - just boring looking. Mountains form a lovely backdrop to the city, but didn't get to actually see them - too busy with business and, besides, weather was rainy. The National Palace Museum I did get to see, and it was very impressive indeed; I spent about 2 hours in the collection and, I think, saw most of the highlights, including the intricately carved tiny boat made out of an olive pit and the cabbage carved from a piece of jade (weirder was the lovingly mounted hunk of mineral that looked like a slab of pork belly). My favorite items were some of the smaller Chou-era bronzes, the elegantly simple Sung pottery, and some of the masterpieces from the Ch'ing era like that olive pit boat; least-favorite stuff was classic Ming era Chinoiserie, which looks like kitch to me no matter how accomplished it is. - I had a lively political conversation with colleague from our HK office who is herself Taiwanese and, politically, deep-blue. The green-blue divide is substantially an ethnic divide, and getting deeper for that reason - by her report, taxi drivers who are "Taiwanese" will curse at fares (like her) who speak Mandarin and are of "Chinese" ancestry. She also asserted that most Taiwanese immigrants to the U.S. are, in fact, Chinese, a claim I could not validate indepedently as yet. The politics of Taiwan and Korea have evolved in the post-cold-war world in both parallel and opposite directions. In both countries, the advent of political democracy brought about a two-party system where one party is reformist, liberal, feisty, nationalist, and traces its lineage back to the opposition to the old right-wing dictatorships, while the other is conservative and traces its lineage back to the old right-wing dictatorships. But in Taiwan, the liberal, nationalist party is pro-independence from China, hence "right-wing" in American eyes, while in Korea the liberal, nationalist party favors rapprochement with the North and a distancing from America, hence "left-wing" in Amercan eyes. - Shanghai is not an easy city to see in a day and a half, nor is it an ideal city to see alone. It felt like it would be a lot more fun if I had visited it with a group of friends. Also if I were 10 years younger. I spent a couple of hours one night at Barbarossa Lounge and, while I was genuinely impressed with the music (which is, in itself, impressive, since this I frankly don't listen to a whole lot of trip-hop electro-funk or whatever they call it), it was pretty lonely to be hanging out there by myself. More generally, Shanghai is gaudy, in love with surface, a city where "hip" and "now" are the biggest compliments, where the past is just an asset to be leveraged to make a cooler present. It's got a bit of Vegas in its soul. There's a lot of that around nowadays - remember "Cool Brittania"? - but it always rubs me the wrong way, and Shanghai really seems to mean it. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to feel the sheer scale of the city, and the speed with which it is rising. And no one would accuse the new skyline of lacking personality - every one of the new skyscrapers seems to want to make a statement. The Shanghai Urban Planning Museum is as good a place as any to see all these statements laid out on a single page. Unsurprisingly, while the new skyscrapers have boistrous personalities, they have nothing like the charm of the old colonial architecture of the Bund and the French Concession. The dilapidated condition of the splendid mansions in the latter testifies to Shanghai's decisive preference for the new over the old - in Brooklyn, these places would be fetching top dollar prices. My top restaurant recommendation: the Whampoa Club. - Precisely because I was worried I wouldn't like spending the whole time in the city, I arranged to take a tour to the "water village" of Zhou Zhuang outside the city. I didn't realize quite how long the tour would take - we left at 12:30pm and returned at 7:30pm, with most of that time devoted to travelling to and from the village - and I regretted losing so much possible touring time. The village itself was interesting, and a nice change from the city, but more than a little marred as an experience by its apparently total transformation into a tourist trap. Literally everyone in the village appeared to be employed either selling kitch or piloting the gondolas. Nonetheless, one could still squint and imagine what the village looked like when it was a prosperous provincial town at the height of the Ming dynasty. - Ended up in Seoul, which was another pleasant but boring city. It was fall foliage season and the mountains and hills around the city were too lovely for the urban landscape they cradled. The people of Seoul are terribly proud of what they themselves admit is pretty much their first urban beautification project, the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon River. This used to be the main river of Seoul, then was covered by a massive highway, and over the past few years was restored as a kind of linear urban park. I spent a very enjoyable hour following a school group down the banks of the river, snapping pictures of the schoolgirls waving at me and giggling at the prospect of having their pictures taken. The food we had in Seoul - a mix of Korean and Japanese, home-style and high-style - was the most consistently excellent of the trip, as was the air quality (which, I should note, was lousy in Hong Kong and terrible in Shanghai). I had another interesting, though brief, political conversation with a Korean colleague, who expressed his view that no one in Korea is at all worried about the North, nor terribly worried about China except as an economic competitor (*everyone* in Asia is worried about China as a competitor - Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand; it's not just an American obsession by any means). I find it rather unlikely that there will be a US-Korean alliance in any meaningful sense in 20 years' time. All in all, an interesting trip, and very worthwhile from a business perspective. But I've very happy to be home. Saturday, October 28, 2006
Seems like readers of this blog ought to check in about once every two weeks: that's about how often I can say anything these days. I haven't reviewed a book in months, and I still haven't written reviews of this summer's season at Stratford. And it ain't gonna get better any time soon. I'm blogging this from the airport, about to embark on a business trip that will take me to Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul and Shanghai, with a side-trip to Kyoto in the middle just for fun. Hopefully I'll have time to blog about the trip when I get back. Thursday, October 19, 2006
Well, it's official: hedge funds have finally bought the country, if not the earth. John Snow, former Treasury Secretary for President Bush, has just been named chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, while Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary for President Clinton, has just been named "part-time managing director" of the firm I used to work for, D. E. Shaw & Co (which is, I believe, now considered the largest hedge fund in the world). Personally, all I can say is: hiring standards at Shaw aren't what they used to be. Why, I'll bet nobody even asked Summers to provide his SAT scores with his resume. Well, it's official: hedge funds have finally bought the country, if not the earth. John Snow, former Treasury Secretary for President Bush, has just been named chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, while Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary for President Clinton, has just been named "part-time managing director" of the firm I used to work for, D. E. Shaw & Co (which is, I believe, now considered the largest hedge fund in the world). Personally, all I can say is: hiring standards at Shaw aren't what they used to be. Why, I'll bet nobody even asked Summers to provide his SAT scores with his resume. Thursday, October 12, 2006
I consider myself to be friendly with both Damon Linker and Ross Douthat; I've been impressed with Ross's blogging for some time, and I've been eager to read Damon's book (actually, I'm kind of embarrassed not to have read it yet); so I was obviously pleased to hear that they would be debating each other over at TNR. Unfortunately, I don't think TNR gave them enough rounds to really get going. The opening statements are promising, but there's no time to develop arguments; they have to move directly to closing flourishes. Or, perhaps, it's not TNR's fault. Perhaps neither Douthat nor Linker really wants to concede what kind of argument they are having, and so wind up dancing around each other more than truly engaging. As I say, I haven't read Linker's book. But the more I read about it, the more convinced I am that it is, at bottom, an anti-Catholic argument. That's not intended as an insult or a conversation-closer. It sounds like an intelligent, thought-out anti-Catholic argument. It doesn't strike me as a bigoted argument, and anyhow, right-wing PC of the sort that rules criticism of particular religious traditions out of bounds cuts no ice with me. I just think that, honestly, that's the kind of argument he's making. The closest he comes to approaching the question of whether that's the kind of argument he's making is to answer Douthat's question - is there a place for me? - with his own question - am I making an anti-Catholic argument? - when what we really want to know is whether *he* thinks he's making an anti-Catholic argument. And this also lets Douthat get away with something of a retreat into identity politics: he doesn't *argue* that orthodox Catholic Christianity is perfectly compatible with the American Republic, he just warns that if you say it isn't, then Catholics may not choose the allegiance that Linker would prefer them to make primary. But then, it's not surprising that identity politics reared its ugly head in this debate, because this is what the culture war at bottom is about, or at least I am increasingly convinced that it is. As one of his arguments against Linker, Douthat trots out the history of American religious-inspired political activism: abolition, social gospel, temperance, Bryan's crusade against evolution, etc. Linker responds by saying that some of these movements he also is troubled by, but that generally he's less troubled by them than by the theocons because their objectives could be defended in secular terms, and because they didn't advance a religious *ideology* in the way that the theocons do. I question whether temperance or opposition to teaching evolution could be so grounded; frankly, I question whether abolition and the social gospel can be *entirely* divorced from the profound religious motivations that lie behind even the secular formulations of these causes. But what both he and Douthat neglect to focus on is the fact that all of these movements were *Protestant* movements. (Temperance wasn't just a Protestant crusade - it was an *anti-Catholic* crusade.) Which is, of course, only logical: America was, from its founding until roughly 1950, a Protestant country, both in fact and in self-conception. Stating that fact doesn't change or undermine the equally true fact that freedom of religion, anti-establishment and equality for citizens of all faiths were fundamental American principles from the beginning. American Jews still rightly prize Washington's letter. But the notion that the Jewish *religion* was in some sense part of the American *identity* is a 195os-era innovation, a product of the era when the Jews and the Catholic ethnics of America "became white" and America, still a "nation with the soul of a church" tried to think of itself no longer as Protestant but as a country founded on the "Judeo-Christian tradition." Except that there is no such tradition, not in any meaningful sense. There's a Christian tradition, but Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Christians approach that tradition very differently. And Judaism is outside that tradition; Jews and Christians can, one hopes, have fruitful religious dialogue (I once said that because we cannot choose to be strangers, we must endeavor to be friends lest we revert to being enemies), but that dialogue takes place across a substantial chasm. And America was not founded upon a chasm. The 1950s, and not the 1970s: this is the period from which Linker's "liberal bargain" dates, the bargain that let JFK assume the Presidency in exchange for his commitment not to take his Catholicism too seriously (i.e., seriously enough to impact his policymaking). The rise of a distinctive secular (as oppose to merely irreligious) subculture in the 1970s was merely the follow-on to the deconstruction of America's traditional Protestant identity that took place twenty years earlier. This context explains why Linker is right that the theocons are different from previous religious/political movements in American history. First, and most simply, because the theocons are transparently Catholic in inspiration, where all previous notable movements were Protestant. But second, relatedly but more importantly, because all previous movements took place against the backdrop of an assumed Protestant religious identity of the nation as a whole, and spoke to the nation in terms of that identity. The abolitionists, the temperance crusaders, the preachers of the social gospel: they were not trying to restore America's religious identity; they were trying to restore America's virtue, to get her to live up to that identity. The theocons, by contrast, are trying to *determine* America's religious identity; they are engaged in identity politics. Which is why, even though their policy goals are decidedly modest, they appear so threatening to so many. Identity politics is *always* threatening, because it is hard to compromise one's identity without feeling one has compromised one's integrity. (As an aside, there have certainly been Catholic social movements in the United States, but these tended to be identity-politics movements of the parochial kind - movements that did not so much speak to the *American* identity as attempt to defend a special *Catholic* identity against the larger culture, or to change the larger culture to make *room* for that identity. That's somewhat analogous to the mode of Muslim organizations today, in America and in Europe, and is very different from the kind of identity politics that the theocons are up to.) Linker rightly bemoans that state of affairs, but I don't see how he's doing anything more than engaging in combat on the same field. I can tentatively agree with Linker that there's an asymmetry between his ideology and that of the theocons: that theirs is a kind of total vision while Linker's, good liberal that he is, appears to be more modest. But it's still an ideology. And it's still an ideology in the service of identity: a dispute about what *being an American* means. Which brings me to what I think is the largest unspoken problem with Linker's position. Whether or not the theocon position *is* covertly illiberal (I'm going to reserve judgement on my feelings about that until I've read Linker's book, but I'm going in inclined to disagree), it's certainly *perceived* as such by liberals, and I think the reason is that they *correctly* read it as a species of identity politics, and that it advances an American identity with which they don't . . . identify. But the "liberal bargain" that Linker advocates fails, I think, in either one of two ways. On the one hand, Linker's liberalism may be a "thick" liberalism, a real substantive liberal identity that Linker believes in - in which case the theocon critique of liberalism as a "secular religion" has teeth. Or, on the other hand, it may be a "thin" liberalism that tries not to articulate much in the way of a substantive identity for the citizenry to unite around - in which case it is unlikely to be terribly satisfying, and will encourage the formation of strong identities that are sub- or supra-national as the primary identities of the citizenry. This is what Douthat is talking about, effectively, when he warns that Damon may not like the choices people make if you force them to choose between *identifying* with Christ or with the Republic. It may well be that such an outcome is, on balance, good for religion - or, anyhow, good for religious organizations. I'm not convinced it's good for America, though - not because we'll become decadent and immoral, but because we'll become increasingly divided as a nation. The rubber meets the road on things like public education. Are we to have it? If we live in a libertarian utopia where we don't, then the rubber doesn't meet the road much, and we have a "thin" liberalism that shouldn't cause conservative Christians much pain. But we substantially rely on public education not only to teach reading, writing and 'rithmetic (assuming they still teach these things) but also to bind us together as a nation (something I know we don't teach much anymore). Our modus operandi for decades has been that a liberal society needs to teach the next generation to be good liberals, for its own continuity's sake. *This* is what lies behind the conviction of the actual citizens who support the theocon position that Linker's liberal bargain is not nearly as neutral, nor his liberalism as "thin", as he might claim. Sam Huntington in his book, Who Are We?, closes with a half-hedged prediction that as America has become more racially and ethnically diverse, we will turn increasingly to Christianity as the source of our common national identity, revitalizing what is in fact the oldest strain in our identity (going back to Plymouth). I suspect he is right; indeed, I'd be inclined to hedge less than he does. What remains to be seen is whether America will make Catholicism into (pragmatically) a Protestant denomination, or whether the Catholic church will transform American Protestantism and make America, pragmatically, a Catholic country. Neuhaus's critics on the right think he's an agent of the former type of change; Linker is, effectively, charging him with trying to effect the latter type of change. I don't know who's right about that, or if either of them are, and it seems to me that, as a Jew, I probably don't have a dog in that particular fight. But that question, it seems to me, is what's really at issue in considering the ideology of the theocons, and what they mean for America. Friday, September 29, 2006
Next: I am opposed to war with Iran. I surprise myself in this, for four reasons. First, I find nuclear proliferation to be an extremely dangerous threat in general. I have, in the past, said that preemptive action to take out the North Korean nuclear program was justified. And Iran is a more determined enemy of the United States than North Korea is (albeit also a weaker enemy in any conventional military sense), so proliferation there should be more worrying. Moreover, an Iranian bomb would assuredly lead Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt down the path of nuclearization, if only to deter Iran. Second, because I supported (at the time) the war in Iraq in part because of the WMD claims, and those claims with respect to Iran are vastly more credible than they ever were with respect to Iraq. Third, because I am very much a friend of Israel, and I recognize that the Iranian bomb significantly alters the balance of power in the Middle East to Israel's detriment. Indeed, one cannot completely dismiss the notion that Iran would be willing to use nuclear weapons aggressively, though I myself do not think they would do this. And fourth, because I think nuclear terrorism is the ultimate contemporary nightmare, and that al Qaeda would certainly use nuclear weapons if it had them, and that the example of Afghanistan proves that terrorist groups like al Qaeda, if they gain control of a state, may be willing to strike countries capable of massive retaliation even though that logically means that they will lose control of the state they have, which undermines any argument for deterrence against such regimes. I should point out as well that, unlike my previous post, the topic of this one is not actually pressing, because we are nowhere near going to war with Iran. We have done nearly nothing to make such a war possible, either in terms of positioning equipment or getting the support of the American people or preparing the diplomatic ground. The tentative initial diplomatic gestures we have made have been rebuffed. The only reason *anyone* is talking about the possibility of war is that the President has said in various people's presence that he will not leave office without dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem. I don't see any signs yet that this vague promise - made basically to himself - is being translated into precipitate action. So: why am I opposed to war with Iran? Several reasons, which I articulate here. 1. Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iran, is an Islamic dictatorship. But there are important differences. Pakistan is, arguably, less democratic. Its people are, almost certainly, more anti-American. Pakistan has ties to al Qaeda, a terrorist group actively at war with America, while Iran is the patron of Hezbollah, a terrorist group actively at war with Israel but not with America, and which has only struck Americans as such when America was intervening in Lebanon (whereas they have incidentally struck American Jews in Israel and elsewhere in the world as part of attacks on Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish targets). And, of course, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. America's "alliance" with Pakistan is already on its last legs. But the nuclear terrorist nightmare becomes vastly more likely if Pakistan collapses or is captured by al-Qaeda sympathetic forces. Indeed, the likelihood of nuclear terrorism originating in Pakistan must be rated more highly than the likelihood of nuclear terrorism originating in Iran. I'm convinced that an attack on Iran would mean the end of any prospect of controlling Pakistan and keeping it from going wholeheartedly over to the dark side. 2. China. The United States has a massive interest in integrating China into an international system, in enabling China to emerge as a great power without feeling the need to become a "revisionist" power. We failed in this regard with Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, with consequences that are well-known. If we fail with China, the consequences could be considerably worse. The Chinese leadership has for some time been consciously stoking Han nationalism as a way of building support for a regime that no longer espouses socialism in any meaningful sense of the word, and that has been tainted by massive corruption. We have to maneuver carefully between the Scylla of making the regime feel threatened from without and the Charybdis of making the regime feel like there's a power vacuum for it to occupy. Right now, I fear our foreign policy is achieving the worst of both worlds: making China worried about our intentions and unimpressed with our abilities. War with Iran would substantially increase Chinese perceptions of America as a threat. If the war achieved success levels similar to our Iraqi adventure, it would also deepen their contempt for our abilities. Moreover, precipitate American action in Iran would lead to a reassessment in a variety of minor Asian capitals as to the relative dangers of American or Chinese patronage. Who would want to be the Turkey of East Asia when America decides to target North Korea, or Burma, or some other state? That's going to be a question asked in Bangkok and Seoul and Jakarta and Manila, and China is poised to reap the benefit any time the answer is, "not us!" 3. We have no justification for war. Iran is not threatening to attack us. Yes, they have called for our destruction, but not in terms that constitute acts of war, and we have not implicated them in any actual attacks on our interests much less our country. Yes, they are pretty clearly cheating on their obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but there is no provision in that treaty giving the nuclear powers the right to enforce its terms by the use of arms. I'm unaware of any actual casus belli that we have against the Iranian regime, unless it is the seizure of our Embassy lo these 27 years ago. And while there is no actual statute of limitations operative in such matters, it would be outright farcical to attempt to justify an attack on Iran on *that* basis. War on Iran, then, would set a new precedent: that the United States feels it has the right to attack any country that seeks to acquire nuclear weapons. Now, one might be inclined to say: what's wrong with such a precedent? Wouldn't the world be a better place if would-be proliferators feared the wrath of the United States? Perhaps it would - if the United States were immune from any consequences of its behavior. But try to imagine what such a conclusion would feel like in Ankara, or Jakarta, or Moscow - or even in London or Ottawa or Canberra. Even if we want to be the world's policeman, the world has not elected us to the post as yet. 4. The war would be unconstitutional. A war of aggression conducted without international sanction would be a very bad endeavor indeed. (We need no international sanction to make war in self-defense, but as noted, Iran's threats to America have been almost entirely rhetorical, and mere possession of dangerous weapons cannot plausibly be construed to rise to the level of threat justifying launching a war in ostensible self-defene.) But it is also remotely unlikely that the President would undertake such a war under authorization of a proper declaration of war by Congress. And that should trouble us very much. In the last 60 years, the President has conducted numerous wars without declarations. But these have by and large fallen into recognizable categories. Korea and the first Iraq War were police actions conducted under U.N. auspices. They were arguably not "wars" between the United States and another country but situations where that other country was declared an outlaw, and America led a collective effort to bring the outlaw down under treaties which obliged us to do so. In such cases, perhaps an "authorization to use force" is more appropriate than a declaration of war, as the latter makes "personal" between America and the outlaw country a matter that we have reason to want to seem impersonal. Vietnam, meanwhile, was an effort to assist that poor country from being subverted by a revolutionary group financed by its neighbor. We escalated to full-scale war by small degrees, such that it is perhaps understandable Congress never roused itself to recognition of the crossing of that Rubicon. Finally, we engaged in a number of small wars - Grenada, Panama - that were without our traditional "sphere of influence" and were hardly large enough to dignify with the name of "war." Virtually all our military adventures undertaken since WWII - none of which have been declared wars - can be excused constitutionally under one or more of these three categorizations. The main exceptions are the last three wars our nation has fought: Kossovo, which was pretty plainly illegal as NATO had not been attacked by Serbia; Afghanistan, which was plainly legal under international law and, as well, about as justified a war as could be imagined, but which obviously should have been a declared war; and the second Iraq war, which could be justified legally as both a domestic and international matter by saying that America and the President specifically had residual authorization under the U.N. resolutions that preceded and followed the first Iraq war to resume its "police action" when those resolutions were flagrantly violated. An attack on Iran that was not conducted under an actual declaration of war would meet none of these conditions. It would quite plainly set a dangerous constitutional precedent in letting the President undertake aggressive war without the consent of the people and their representatives. 5. We would not win the war. We have not yet won in Iraq, and I see precious little chance of us doing so. Pinprick air strikes are not going to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program; at best they would set it back a few years. There is a reason that the Administration has - in a not-very-serious way - been asking questions about the utility of low-yield nuclear weapons as part of an Iran strike. The irony of conducting a nuclear first-strike as a way of preventing nuclear proliferation is apparently lost on those asking the questions. In any event, it seems clear to me that if we struck Iran from the air, we would not be sure of success, and we would quickly become embroiled in a wider war - either within Iran, because we invaded, or around the Gulf, because Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, or attacked the Saudi oil regions, or began firing conventional missiles at our bases in Iraq, or a combination of all of these. And even though we could quickly destroy the Iranian airforce, and would win a pitched tank battle quite easily, we do not have the resources to *subdue* Iran, which has nearly three times the population and four times the land area of Iraq. We invaded Iraq on the assumption that if we had sufficient force to win a battle with the enemy in the open, we would win the war. The enemy declined to meet us, and we have been losing steadily ever since we took Baghdad. Iran will be very different, as the state is much less fragile and more capable, and the country has much more national consciousness. This might lead the Iranians to make the mistake of fighting us head-to-head, but it also might mean that the government of Iran would successfully coordinate a guerilla campaign against a U.S. invasion. Lest we think that overwhelming conventional superiority guarantees victory, we should recall the German experience in the Balkans in World War II as well as our current war in Iraq. The Atlantic conducted a wargame of a U.S.-Iranian conflict a couple of years ago, and the result was very unfavorable to the United States. If victory is defined as anything more than damaging Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons for a decade or so, then I think victory will be elusive. If victory is defined as nothing more than this, then it seems to me that victory would be quite Pyrrhic in character - for the United States, anyway. For Israel, with much less to lose, such a victory would probably be sufficient. But we have a lot more to lose in terms of the collateral costs of conducting such a war. 6. War is not a general solution. Nuclear technology is now generally available. A host of European and Asian countries have the technical capacity to nuclearize already; several other countries could get there quickly if they felt the need. And then there is the long list of countries nominally further away from nuclearization who would love to get there quickly. The odds are that an Iranian bomb would accelerate the process of proliferation in the Middle East specifically. But the process is going to continue regardless. Between Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan, the world has enough providers of nuclear know-how who will not kowtow to American wishes. And it is very hard to see how making war on Iran is any kind of precedent for a workable strategy of nonproliferation. We have not gone to war with Pakistan, and it is a nuclear power; we are not likely to go to war with Turkey if it decides to go nuclear. War with Iran would be a very expensive delaying action, and I'm not even clear how much delay would be achieved if what we're trying to delay is a world in which terrorists potentially have access to nuclear weapons. This is a depressing conclusion. But it does not follow from the fact that it is depressing that the conclusion is false, or that simply voting for war makes you less culpable for a bad outcome because at least you did *something* - any more than voting *against* war makes you less culpable because at least you voted for "peace." More broadly, I feel like the case for war rests in part on a kind of nostalgia for the good old days when the West could deal with threats from the South summarily. But the reason the West could do this was not just a matter of a lack of "politically correct" scruples back in said good-old-days. Nor was it merely a matter of technological superiority; we still have that in spades. It's also a matter of demographics. In 1900, Iraq had a population of about 2 million, Britain a population of about 35 million - a ratio of 17 to 1. And Britain found occupying Iraq after World War I to be an enormous pain. Today, Iraq has a population of 27 million, the U.K. a population of 60 million, a ratio of a bit over 2 to 1. And that understates the change in the ratio, as the U.K.'s population is much older than Iraq's; a ratio of males of military age would show an even more dramatic change, and a much less favorable ratio. In the heyday of Western imperialism, the West had an overwhelming demographic advantage over a South that was pre-modern, traditional, quietistic, and most of all sparsely populated. Today's South is still under-developed, but it is increasingly modern, politically mobilized and densely populated - and there are just a lot more of them. Strategies that might have worked 100 years ago are simply inapplicable today. I wish more war advocates understood this. 7. There is no rush, or it's too late. Iran is already past the point of having the capabilities to develop a weapon. They have all the technologies they need. It's too late to stop them by halting technology transfer. But they are still a few years away from a workable weapon. That means we have time to figure out an effective strategy to handle them, even if that strategy may involve a military component. This was a key point of Edward Luttwak's article in Commentary, and I take it to heart. 8. Nuclear weapons are useless as offensive weapons. Iran could not conceivably win a war by using nuclear weapons. The only rational use of nuclear weapons would be in self-defense against a conventional threat (this was America's war plan during the Cold War in the event of a Soviet invasion of Germany, and it is likely Pakistan's war plan today against a hypothetical Indian invasion), or as a second-strike capability against a decapitating nuclear first-strike. It is overwhelmingly likely that the reason Iran wants nuclear weapons is to deter other countries - preeminently us - from attacking them, and to give it greater freedom for aggressive behavior in its near abroad. America is perfectly capable of countering the latter; if Iran tries to "Finlandize" Azerbaijan or Qatar or what-have-you, that will only push many countries in the region *closer* to the United States. Until Iran has the kind of soft power that China has developed (which, on a much smaller scale, they could eventually develop - Iran has an educated population, after all, and is a better bet than any other Middle Eastern state to actually become a developed country), it is unlikely to win allies of genuine interest. If Iran tries to bully its way into regional hegemony, the strategy will backfire, even if they have nuclear weapons in their pocket. So the great risk is that Iran will do something profoundly irrational, like conducting nuclear terrorism against the United States or, more likely, Israel. This risk cannot be entirely discounted. But neither can it be a kind of conversation-ending catch-all justification for aggressive war. Those minds so dedicated to coming up with justifications for war should spend a bit more of their time figuring out how to deter Iran from doing what we are most afraid of them doing: handing nukes to terrorists. On the one hand, Iran has said some inflammatory things, and the current President is a complete nut-job. On the other hand, Iran's *actions* have been carefully calibrated, and Iran has not initiated hostilities against any country in a very long time. I certainly think we can make a strong case for a variety of coercive diplomatic measures to quarantine Iran as punishment for violating their NPT obligations. But I just can't see how we justify aggressive war on the basis that we "worry" Iran will do something crazy like nuking Los Angeles in the hopes we won't figure out who did it and turn their civilization into a shiny glass plain. In the end, the question of Iran's rationality rests on the question of whether the leadership of the regime is more like the Soviets - a bunch of dangerous radicals but aware of reality and eager to grow in power, not to commit suicide - or more like al Qaeda - maniacs whose sole principle is destruction for the sake of destruction. On the evidence of Iran's behavior for the past 25 years, I'm very much inclined toward the former rather than the latter understanding. That's it in a nutshell. I could probably say more. I know there are answers I have not anticipated here to all of the points above. But I've been over this ground in my head a number of times over a long period. I guess my conclusion here means that I've finally left the "fold" in a definitive way. Where I've wound up, I don't know yet. I'll keep you posted, though. I'm very behind on things I want to post here. And if I have any time to post, I want to post about the productions I saw this summer at Stratford. But I feel like I need to put down a marker on a handful of contemporary matters, so here we go: the next few posts give you my opinions on a variety of matters, with hopefully at least a little bit of supporting rationale, just so you know where I stand. First, I'm against the torture bill, strongly. The specific techniques that Andrew Sullivan never tires of talking about - waterboarding, stress positions, hypothermia - are plainly tortures. They are "civilized" tortures in that they do not cause permanent physical harm; indeed, I've read that CIA operatives trained to apply waterboarding practice the technique on each other, which they would certainly not do if they were being trained to rip out fingernails. But they are plainly tortures, in that they are designed to cause pain and suffering, and break the prisoner by making him desperate to end that suffering. That's torture. I'm not convinced that we need to go down this road. I'm very persuaded, in particular, by the argument that by formally legalizing such procedures, you will inevitably make them routine. That's certainly what happened in Israel when "moderate physical pressure" became part of the Shin Bet's arsenal. And while I'm both skeptical of making human rights the centerpiece of our diplomacy and generally indifferent to bien pensant opinion in Europe, formally endorsing torture by the CIA is going to alienate lots of people who are our natural allies, not only people who are already disposed to be our enemies. I recognize the moral force of the argument for torture in a "ticking time-bomb" scenario. But if we really think there's a nuke in Los Angeles, and CIA officers torture a suspect to find out where it's hidden, and those officers are sued after the fact because they got the wrong guy, the President can always pardon them and take the political heat himself. I am totally unconvinced that we need to make torture legal and, potentially, routine in order to protect CIA officers from lawsuits. I'm far more convinced that what today is restricted to a "ticking time-bomb" scenario will tomorrow be applied for purely political purposes - as, indeed, there is some evidence was already done in the first months after 9-11. Moreover, I do not think the Administration has earned Congress's or the people's trust in terms of what this bill actually says or how it will be applied. Even if, let's say, Arlen Specter were assured by the President verbally that, for example, this bill could not be construed as a suspension of the writ of habeus corpus for American citizens deemed by an unaccountable military court to be unlawful enemy combatants, I'm not sure why he should trust that assurance. At this late date, I think Reagan's old maxim - "trust, but verify" - must be applied to any legislation proposed by this Administration. And this particular legislation especially merits such scrutiny. Finally, I am appalled that we are even considering legalizing torture while standing resolute in our refusal to apply appropriately targeted screening techniques at points of entry into the United States. This President has been willing to go the people demanding the right to declare anyone an enemy combatant and torture that person, but he is not willing to go the people and say that ethnicity, religion, age and sex should determine who is subject to more aggressive searches before he boards an airline. I can find no good excuse, and no good moral justification, for his preference in this regard. I wish the opposition party could oppose this bill in those terms, but unfortunately they will not. So I am left hoping they will successfully oppose it in whatever terms, because this bill should be opposed, and defeated. Tuesday, September 26, 2006
So Japan has a new Prime Minister. Elvis has left the building. And the question on everyone's lips is (naturally enough): what pop icon will Shinzo Abe model himself on? If I might be so bold as to make a suggestion? Okay, before you laugh, look: they've even got a 5th Beatle! Monday, September 25, 2006
This year's Rosh Hashanah menu was (drum-roll please . . .)
Friday, September 15, 2006
Things I owe my readers: - Reviews of more than a dozen books that I've read since I last posted book reviews. - Reviews of a dozen plays that I saw at the Stratford Festival (well, one at Shaw) in Canada this summer. I would rather be writing these things. Actually, I would rather be writing the book I never finished, or any of the books or screenplays I never started. But that's all one: I have no time. So: some quick thoughts on things that are easy to have quick thoughts about. 1. The Pope had some things to say about de-Hellenization, and the media has picked up particularly on his comments about Islam, and the relationship between faith and reason in Christianity versus Islam. To whit (if I may simplify): in Christianity, because of its Greek heritage, reason is allied to faith. One cannot substitute reason for faith, but one can reason to faith and within faith. (I think I have that right.) In Islam, he implies (though the Pope never explicitly endorses this view), faith is beyond reason. There is, of course, technical reason within Islam (legal reasoning, for example) and compatible with Islam (scientific reasoning). But reason as the Greeks (or Plato) understood it, Benedict implies, is not an ally of the Muslim faith. I have no idea if this is right about either Islam or Christianity. It seems to me that much theology is more technical and instrumental in its reasoning than its practitioners admit, and that as a matter of history Christianity has had its partisans of unreason as well as reason. But I did want to address a common assumption, that Judaism works in some way similarly to Christianity in this regard. It does not - anyway, traditional Judaism does not. To some extent, Judaism is quite analogous to Islam, in that the kind of reasoning it engages in is instrumental - predominantly, legal reasoning. Legal reasoning, like mathematical reasoning, has an irreducible aesthetic component, but I don't think I'm wrong in describing it as instrumental. The interesting question is whether the rabbis of the Mishnaic and Talmudic eras thought of themselves as reasoning within a hermetic system or with reference to a larger philosophical framework. I'm inclined to believe that the rabbis of the generation of the Mishnah were indeed reasoning with reference to a larger philosophical framework, one recognizably influenced by the Greek philosophical tradition. But I'm less sure about the generation responsible for the Gemarra, which is a much stranger text. In other ways, Judaism is more similar to Christianity. The notion of human beings as partners with the divine is much more Judeo-Christian than Islamic. The Jewish conception of God is not quite so "near" as the Christian, but is much closer than (this is my impression) orthodox Islam's conception. As well, neither Christianity nor Judaism is possessed of Islam's horror of history; Judaism is highly conscious of its transformation through history (albeit, obviously, a strict traditionalist would interpret these historical developments differently than a religious liberal like myself) and Christianity cannot without profoundly bad conscience avoid an awareness that in its own terms it is only justified by its own pre-history (in Judaism). Both of these have some bearing on Benedict's point, though they are not identical to it. But in other ways, Judaism is quite distinct from either Christianity of Islam. The most obvious way is very much on-point to the distinction Benedict draws. Judaism is the only one of the three major monotheistic faiths in which religious obligation is passed down the bloodline. In Islam, all people on earth are born Muslims, and need to return to their birthright faith if they hvae been corrupted by their upbringing. In Christianity, all people on earth are born in sin, and need to accept God's self-sacrifice to be redeemed and born again as Christians. In Judaism, people are born as they are - and those who are born as Jews are born with specific (and un-natural) religious obligations. And we signify this special birthright with an act of violence: circumcision. (Muslims also practice circumcision, of course - for that matter, so do most American Christians - but it signifies differently.) My point being: howsoever Judaism may (with Christianity) exalt reason as the pinnacle of human faculties, the one that brings us closest to God, and the handmaiden rather than the enemy of faith, there are some aspects of our relationship to the divine that are indeed beyond reason. 2. Steve Sailer has written a good piece on a book I have not read, John Keegan's A History of Warfare. As I say, I haven't read the book, but from Sailer's description it sounds like Vic Hanson through a glass darkly. That is to say: Keegan and Hanson agree on what makes the West different from the rest in terms of the practice of warfare; it's just that Keegan thinks this is a bad thing, and Hanson that it is a good thing. Which raises the question: couldn't they both be right? Couldn't the Western way of warfare be intimately related to the Western tradition of free self-government (as Hanson thinks) *and* horribly and ultimately irrationally destructive, as Keegan thinks? I don't see why they couldn't, and I can easily think of reasons why they could be. Sailer is re-reading Keegan in the context of his opposition to a confrontation with Iran. I have a lot to say on that point, and no time now to say it all. (I've said some of it already elsewhere, but I haven't put all my thoughts together in one place.) But I will say this much apropos of Sailer's fears of nuclear genocide. He should recall that, in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a similar clamor in some quarters for a nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union. And while this sentiment never became a majority view by any means, it was far from being confined to the lunatic fringes. People forget this, but no less a luminary than Betrand Russell advocated a nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union by the United States in the early post-war years. He understood just how evil the Soviet system was, and he understood that conflict between free peoples and Soviet Communism was inevitable. He wanted that conflict to happen on the most favorable terms to the free world, which he believed obtained when the United States had a nuclear monopoly. Once two hostile powers had the A-bomb, the future of the human species itself was at stake. It seems to me that commentators like Krauthammer are making much the same argument with regard to Iran. In their view, it's not so much that Iran is anything like as powerful as the Soviets, or that they ever will be. It's that they don't believe deterrence will work against them. If you accept that proposition, all else follows. The question, then, is why anyone would believe that Iran cannot be deterred. Once they have the bomb - and they will get it; I fully expect that - we will have to think the truly unthinkable: how to learn to stop worrying and live with it. Which means it makes sense to start thinking about that possibility now. The refusal to consider seriously a nuclear-armed Iran, the jump to the conclusion that such a world is synonymous with the apocalypse, is the hawkish parallel to the dove's refusal to consider scenarios in which we might use nuclear weapons. Both are evasions of the real world, intellectual surrenders. Both are more likely to lead to wars - bad wars - than a realistic appraisal of risks and costs on either side of various propositions. Friday, September 01, 2006
I admit to being fascinated by the current debate over the name of the enemy. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and probably a bunch of other places - personally, I've been following it in The Corner, as if you couldn't tell. As far as fascism goes, my guide is Stanley Payne, who authored a well regarded history of fascism. If I recall correctly, the key components to fascism are:
I've probably left one or two items off of that list, but it's a good start, I think. Different movements classified as "fascist" had their own special traits. Something akin to Christian fascism did develop in Romania and, I would argue, in Spain, but that would not be a fair way to describe Italian fascism, to say nothing of Nazism which was aggressively pagan and anti-Christian. Japanese militarism was accompanied by a unique racial ideology, as was German Nazism, that was not common to the southern European fascist movements. But we call these different groups fascist because they have a common denominator, whatever the distinctions between them. So: are our current enemies properly described as "fascist" or "Islamo-fascist"? Well, the economic ideology of bin Laden is obscure to say the least, as is his political vision. I see no evidence that any of the entities that get called "Islamo-fascist" have embraced the fuhrerprinzip, nor that they have proposed any mechanism or have any plans for the total mobilization of their various societies. Iran, for example, has a political structure far more similar to that of the Soviet Union than to that of fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, and it is far from completely mobilized - they spend about 3% of GDP on the military. The Baathism of Saddam Hussein was indeed derived from European fascist models, but the Baath was historically the enemy of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The ugly dictatorships in Syria, Iraq (under Saddam) and, for that matter, Pakistan and Egypt have at various times made alliances of convenience with Islamist groups and have in numerous cases actively sponsored their activities, as, for example, Syria does today with Hezbollah and Pakistan did with the Taliban and the Kashmiri terrorist groups. But a distinction must be made between patron and client. On the other hand, Islamist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas do articulate an "organic" vision of society, albeit one that makes no meaningful reference to economic reality; they have developed a cult of martyrdom and embrace a hyper-masculinist ideology; they are driven by romantic ideas and their actions are sometimes rooted more in fantasy than in strategy; they are fundamentally youthful movements; and, interestingly given that they are religious in nature, they are basically anti-traditional as fundamentalist religion usually is. So: are they fascist? I think that designation probably obscures more than it clarifies. What is probably more true is that their appeal is akin to the appeal of fascism; that they are popular for some of the same reasons that fascism was popular where and when it was. But what I think is interesting in the debate is that the Corner-niks seem to be looking for some word, some concept, that will correspond to the Axis of Evil that President Bush famously identified in 2002 - something that will make it clear how the Iranian regime and bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are all parts of the same whole that is out to get us. But, in truth, the only thing that unites these disparate groups is . . . Islam. You could say, if you choose, that what unites them is "bad Islam" as opposed to "good Islam" and dress that good/bad distinction up any way you like. But *if* they are parts of a whole, *that* is the whole they are part of. There is no way I can see to square that circle, to name our enemy without making it either smaller or bigger than the folks in The Corner and, for that matter, the Administration would like. The notion that World War II was a grand ideological conflict is belated anyway, I should mention. We were not fighting "fascism" in the abstract - we were fighting Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan, and we were only fighting Italy because the Duce chose the wrong side. And all of our alliances were at least in part of convenience; Roosevelt hated the British Empire, and dreaded the thought that the war against Hitler would be used by Churchill to extend its life and scope even as World War I had done, and Churchill, needless to say, hated Soviet Communism nearly as much as he hated Hitler. And our primary ally in Asia - the Kuomintang of China - had fascist tendencies. Even when we talked about the enemy in ideological terms, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism were the words we used for our respective opponents. The Communists were the ones who made a fetish of the word, "fascist" as the ultimate epithet - and they were as likely to hurl it against Trotskyites and other "social-fascists" as they called them as against the Nazis. It does nothing to detract from the idealism of that conflict to point out that our enemies were regimes that were trying to conquer the world - and had a decent chance of succeeding. So who are we fighting? Certainly al-Qaeda. Certainly regimes or movements that support al-Qaeda. As well, we are newly aware of the potential danger from nuclear terrorism, and we are newly serious, or at least I hope we are, about preventing the continued spread of nuclear technology to hands that might be undeterrable - but that effort might involve as much hugging unpleasant characters and regimes, like that of Pakistan, as it does fighting them. Beyond that? We could say, with the paleo-right, that beyond that . . . nothing; we're not fighting anyone beyond that, and have no aims beyond wiping out al-Qaeda and getting better control over nuclear technology. Or, alternatively, we could say we are fighting "Islamic fascism" or "Jihadism" or "political Islam" or "Islamic extremism" or "Islamic militancy" or "Islamic terrorism" or what-have-you, and it doesn't much matter. Whichever phrase we use is close enough for government work, and whichever phrase we use there are only two bits of semantic content. One bit tells you that were fighting against some kind of violent political tendency; the other bit tells you that this tendency is to be found among Muslims. In other words, naming the enemy as such tells you we are engaged in a war for the soul of a civilization - but not our own. Whether one can wage that kind of a war is a real question in my mind five years into the War of September 11th. I will content myself for now with pointing out that this was *not at all* the way we thought of World War II or the Cold War, the two conflicts which so many conservative pundits continually compare this one to. In World War II, the enemy was *out there* and we were out to *destroy* him. In the Cold War, the enemy was also *out there* but his tentacles reached here, and so we had two missions: to kill those tentacles and to stand guard at the walls, in each case to keep the enemy *out*. Keeping Iran *out* in the sense of keeping them from attacking us directly should be pretty easy. We could squish them pretty thoroughly if they tried. How much a small nuclear arsenal changes this equation is a good question, and one I think no one should be too confident in answering, which makes it hard to say how much blood and treasure we should spend to avoid having to answer it. But of course, since 9-11 most of the terrorist attacks have come not from without but from within; the terrorists in London and Madrid were home-grown. It is in confronting the enemy *within* that this whole business of *naming* the enemy actually becomes important. What kind of language *separates* the terrorist recruiter from his community, as opposed to binding him to them? *That* is a good and interesting question, and one that I don't know the answer to. I suspect that "Islamic fascist" is probably the wrong answer, but that's just a hunch; I just don't think "fascist" sounds like anything more than "bad" to most people's ears, and Muslims probably hear the phrase and think it means "Muslims are bad" and nothing more. But the difficulty is that any language that would be both *precise* and *meaningful* to this audience probably has to be a native idiom, and there's no way that the authorities in London or Paris or Washington will be very persuasive using that idiom. In the Cold War, the enemy within was still *us* and we knew how to talk to and about them. In this war, that is not entirely the case, and we don't entirely know. But the exercise of trying to come up with the right language in this context seems to me to be a whole lot more productive than trying to come up with language to please ourselves. Friday, August 18, 2006
Oh, one more aside. The two dominant strains of commentary I've read on Israel's performance have been: Israel lost and this is a catastrophe; and, on the other hand, Israel didn't lose because Hezbollah was badly weakened, and if you say Hezbollah won you are buying into Hezbollah spin and letting them win the PR war. I think I've answered the "catastrophe" position as well as I can. This was a clear and bad loss, but Hezbollah is not about to overrun Israel. As for the second, contrary argument: Hezbollah's assets are men and missiles. They don't appear to have lost any of their key leadership, and they will easily recruit more men with the propaganda victory they have achieved. And missiles are cheap; Iran has plenty, and Hezbollah still had some themselves at the end of the war, as they were launching right up to the date the cease-fire went into effect. I think the right way to score this is in terms of who achieved their objectives, and on that score it's pretty clear that Israel failed to achieve its objectives while Hezbollah achieved its objectives quite well. The other side isn't the only team to use spin, you know. Olmert and his team have every reason to want us to believe that they did a good job. The Israeli people aren't buying it. We shouldn't either. Links to pieces I thought were good about the war: Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'aretz Yuval Steinitz in Ha'aretz Yossi Klein Halevy in The New Republic Andy McCarthy in NRO Thursday, August 17, 2006
Sorry to be posting so sporadically, but I've barely been around, away much of last week and going away again today. Lots to talk about, but I'm going to stick for now to the situation in Israel. Three things that, to me, seem pretty clear about the Israel-Lebanon war just ended: One: Israel lost, unequivocally. Two: It's just a battle, not the war, that was lost. Israel's security situation is marginally, not profoundly, worsened by their failure in Lebanon. Three: The biggest setback is not to Israel's security situation but to Israel's democratic culture, and we'll see soon how big that setback was. To the extent that Israel had anything resembling a concrete war aim in attacking Lebanon (which I don't believe they did - as I argued just before Israel launched their ground offensive, Olmert launched this war largely for domestic political reasons, and seems not to have bothered trying to figure out what the military objective was or how it might be achieved), that war aim was to cripple Hezbollah operationally, and incidentally to retrieve the two kidnapped soldiers. These aims were not remotely achieved. Hezbollah survives as an organization and will quickly rebuild both its ranks and its supply of missiles. Hezbollah's position internally within Lebanon and its clout with its Syrian patrons have both been significantly enhanced by its performance in the war. The new UN force will not forcibly disarm Hezbollah, nor will the Lebanese army. And not only have the kidnapped soldiers not been returned, their return is not a condition of the cease-fire. Hezbollah's objective was to provoke Israel into attacking, survive the attack sufficiently well to easily rebuild, and end hostilities on terms that would allow it to flourish. It achieved its aims, Israel failed to achieve its aims - so Israel lost, unequivocally. The cost to Israel in terms of lives lost is not terribly significant. The economic cost is more so, and we'll see how badly the investment climate in Israel is damaged by the continued threat of attack. But Israel can survive both of these things. The neighboring Arab states have seen the IDF fail decisively for the first time, but they are not so foolish as to think either that they now can win a traditional ground war with Israel (to recover the Golan, say) or that they themselves can attack Israel with impunity (the leaders of the various states have a lot more to lose than Nasrallah does). What they will do is show Hezbollah more respect formally and informally, and will not again trust Israel to "solve" a terrorist problem for them. The big cost to Israel is in terms of its relationship with the United States - or, at any rate, I hope that is the case. The U.S. gave Israel an extremely free hand in this conflict, and Israel quite clearly failed to deliver. Interestingly, I have heard from more than one Israeli the not-terribly-plausible theory going around Israel that Bush put Olmert up to this war - that we encouraged him to attack Lebanon as a sort of proxy-war against Iran. As I say, I find the story implausible. Domestic pressures are quite sufficient to explain Olmert's decision to take the war aggressively into Lebanon, and it's not at all clear how Israel bombing Hezbollah would either weaken Iran or strengthen America's position in its burgeoning confrontation with that country - and the ways in which the Lebanon war would complicate our position in Iraq were immediately obvious. This Israeli theory strikes me as another instance of a people wishing away their own failures by blaming the United States, a common enough strategy world-wide. But if it were true (and it isn't impossible, just unlikely) it seems to me that this would make the damage to Israel's relationship with the United States worse. But, as I say, this is just a battle. Israel's geopolitical situation is not greatly changed. Hezbollah's primary strength comes from its financial backers, and these were as motivated before as they are now. Hezbollah is a Shiite power originally created by and still backed by Iran, the would-be Shiite regional hegemon. Syria, controlled by an obscure minority religious group and allied with Iran, has equal reason to be supportive. But Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan: these are all states that are dominated by Sunnis, fearful of their own restive Shiite minorities (especially in Saudi Arabia), and traditionally enemies of Iran. An Israeli victory would have met with quiet toasts in Cairo and Riyadh. But while the Israeli loss will make these powers more respectful towards Hezbollah, it will not make them into supporters. Nor is Israel's security situation much changed. Before the war, Hezbollah threatened Israel with rockets; they will soon be able to do so again. Before the war, Lebanon could not, practically, control its territory; there is no sign that they will be able to do so now. The presence of an international force complicates Israel's ability to respond to future provocation, and that is a loss, but it doesn't actually prevent an Israeli response, just complicate it. If Hezbollah fires rockets at Israel, Israel will respond, blue helmets or no. (This is one major reason that, so far, the blue helmets have not materialized.) Hezbollah, meanwhile, has not demonstrated that they can defeat the Israeli army, much less seize and hold Israeli territory. Terrorist groups in Ireland and Algeria achieved many of their political objectives by means of terror, but they are a poor analogy to Israel because they were fighting to expel what were, effectively, colonial powers (though both Algeria and Ireland were integral parts of France and Great Britain respectively); Israel, by contrast, is fighting for its home. (The pied noirs and Protestant Irish were, of course, home, but they were not in a position to retain control of their countries without the assistance of the metropole.) So long as Israeli Jews are unwilling to be ruled (or, in the worst case scenario, be massacred or expelled by) Arabs, Israel will endure, and short of a nuclear attack that would completely change the complexion of the Israeli response (Israel reportedly has upwards of 200 atomic warheads, and was prepared to use them in 1973 when national survival was at stake) Hezbollah cannot plausibly "eliminate" Israel - its stated goal. Nor, finally, is it obvious that Israel starts the next war in a worse position than it did this most recent one. On paper, the diplomatic end-game is surprisingly favorable to Israel. This reflects the fact that nobody but Iran actually wants Hezbollah to be victorious, and that a broad array of states recognize that Israel was, indeed provoked. (Israel has been condemned in many quarters for the conduct of the war, but in most of these she has not been condemned for "aggression" - and those who have condemned Israel for "aggression" are from the quarters that reject Israel's right to exist per se, so what can you expect.) The significance of this basically positive diplomatic context is that Israel has a clear path to resume hostilities in response to any new provocation. All of this explains why I say that Israel lost unequivocally, but that the loss was not as significant as many commentators have suggested. So what do I think the most significant consequences of this war will be? I see four, all ominous for Israeli democracy. In increasing order of importance: First, Israel is currently governed by a center-left coalition. It is not clear that there is another coalition capable of governing Israel, but it is imperative that Israeli voters hold Kadima (and Labor) accountable for the failure of this war. It is difficult to see how the electorate in Israel will square the circle they are presented with, and punish the current leadership without opting for an even less-plauible leadership. If they fail to do so, Israeli democracy will suffer in one fashion or another - either because the leadership is not held accountable or because Israel will come to be governed by an unstable or even bizarre coalition of special interest groups that hollows out the always fragile center in Israeli society. Second, Israel is currently governed by a man who has fewer in the way of military credentials than possibly any prior Israeli leader. And he has proved incompetent in handling his first war. The lesson I expect Israelis to take home - and probably should take home - is that Israelis cannot trust their security to a Prime Minister who is not also a general. (The most optimistic scenario for the next government is that Kadima knocks off Olmert and replaces him with former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.) It is very hard to paint such a conclusion as a good thing for democratic culture. Third, the class divisions in Israeli society have been brought home with a vengeance. Ehud Olmert is known as Israel's first "yuppie" Prime Minister, a proud member of Israel's overclass. His chief of staff, the man responsible for the notion that Israel could beat Hezbollah using air power alone, is similarly typecast. As happened before in the 1970s, Israelis are realizing that their leadership class is in a meaningful sense divorced from the people. The country did not have a good plan for protecting civilians, and they used the IDF not the way it has traditionally been used but more akin to the way Clinton used America's military - Olmert appeared to be more afraid of Israeli military casualties than of whether he would win or lose the war, and this will be interpreted as an expression of the elite's self-interested rather than collective-minded mentality. The same is true of the chief of staff's air-power-centric plan for dealing with Hezbollah in the first place. The same is true in spades of his decision to sell his stock portfolio before launching an attack. All of this will give a strong boost to Israeli populism, and populism is the favorite food of demagogues, not generally good for orderly democratic governance. Fourth, and most significantly, it is worth noting that a large fraction - I suspect a majority - of Israel's Arab population supported Hezbollah in the war. Several Arab members of the Knesset vocally supported Hezbollah, and even relatives of civilians *killed* by Hezbollah's rockets were quoted supporting Hezbollah. Israeli Jews are not going to forget this. Among the Jewish population of Israel there was wall-to-wall support for the war in Lebanon - in contrast to the situation in the territories, where there are a variety of opinions and usually a clear majority in favor of withdrawing from most of Judea and Samaria. Hezbollah has no legitimate grievances against Israel; their grievance is Israel's existence. For Israeli Arabs to support Hezbollah is as much as to declare themselves not only alienated from the state and eager to change its character but an active fifth column, assisting those who would destroy Israel by violence. I have been growing steadily more pessimistic about the prospects for Israel's survival as a Jewish state with a substantial Arab Muslim minority as that minority has grown steadily more hostile to the state of which they are citizens. It is now hard to convince me that there is any plausible future but re-division of the country. The big winner, long-term, is going to be Avigdor Liberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, who has advocated "trading" the triangle region of the Galilee - the most concentrated Arab region in Israel, and also the home of the most radical Islamist groups - to the Palestinian entity in exchange for retention of key settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria (Ariel, Ma'ale Adumim, etc.). Unless this were accomplished by referendum, however, such a "trade" would be a clear violation of international law, as well as a profound violation of democratic principles, as it would entail summarily stripping hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs of their citizenship and forcing them to be citizens of a different polity. Nonetheless, that is where I think Israel is heading. This is the most profound reason why I think this war's most significant casualty is Israeli democracy. Israel, for its own reasons, wants to get out of the bulk of the territories, because it does not want to suffer the fate of South Africa. Precisely because an Israeli withdrawal would also be a victory for Israel's enemies, those enemies will do everything they can to create conditions that reinforce the - plausible - interpretation that Israel has been driven out by Arab heroes and martyrs. Their attempts to create such conditions will be the spark for the next war, which will come sooner or later, probably sooner. One hopes that Israel will learn enough from their mistakes in the current conflict to be better prepared when the next conflict comes. Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Apologies to my long-suffering readers (if I still have any) for being incommunicado for so long. July was much busier than I expected, with business trips to London and Southern California and a surprisingly hectic schedule when in the office in New York. So, again, my apologies. There are a lot of things I've wanted to say. Unfortunately, the topic you probably most want to hear about - the war in Lebanon and Gaza (remember Gaza? thought not) - is one that, frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about. So perhaps I should air my thoughts in a relatively haphazard way, and see where they land. - Israel's response, in the north especially, was, at the inception, extremely popular. Even now, there is virtually wall-to-wall support for a war with Hezbollah, albeit an increasingly loud chorus of outrage at the conduct of the war (its ineptness, not its violence). - This should not be surprising, as the war was, to a considerable extent, launched for political reasons. The proper comparison of this war is not the 1982 Lebanon War, much less World War II (ridiculous comparisons to which continue to proliferate), but Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, Shimon Peres' strike on Lebanon that was intended to shore up his position in the run-up to that year's elections (it didn't work). By making that comparison, I don't mean to suggest that either the current operations or, for that matter, Operation Grapes of Wrath were unjustified. Hezbollah's naked aggression is manifestly unacceptable; Israel could with perfect justification respond with far greater force, including operations against Syria or even Iran. Justification is not the point. The point is: what is the objective of the war? It seems to me manifest that the primary objective of the war was political, and that the primary audience was Israel's own people. Prime Minister Olmert understood correctly that a failure to respond forcefully to brazen and unprovoked attacks from Gaza would discredit the idea of unilateral withdrawal, an idea he still fully intends to extend to much of Judea and Samaria. So he struck back to prove that Israel was still willing to defend itself - indeed, would defend itself more forcefully now that there were no Israeli civilians in the way (which was one of the primary rationales for the withdrawal from Gaza). And when Hezbollah responded, Olmert had to open a northern front as well. - As I say, there's nothing unjustified about Israel's actions. But there's a problem with wars fought for domestic political purposes: they don't have a clear military objective. And once begun, the only acceptable way to end a war is to win it. And if you don't have a military objective that bears some relation to your offensive operations, then pretty much by definition you cannot achieve victory. And that's where Israel is today, on both fronts but more dramatically in Lebanon. - Some have described this as a war to reestablish deterrence. But it is not obvious that Hezbollah is deterrable. On the contrary: so long as the political dynamic whereby Israeli responses strengthen Hezbollah's hand, there is no way to deter Hezbollah. If Israel ignores Hezbollah, they strengthen; if they respond, they strengthen. So why would Hezbollah not attack whenever war is useful to it or to its sponsors in Damascus and Tehran? Note that I am *not* saying that religious warfare is more "irrational" than other kinds of warfare, and that this is the reason they cannot be deterred. I think they cannot be deterred because it is not clear how Israel can respond in a way that clearly weakens them, and they know this. Lots of non-religious populations - Stalin's Soviet Union? Ho's North Vietnam? - have suffered immensely in war without breaking. If you that war not only will not break you, but will strengthen your position, why avoid war? - For this reason, I am skeptical that Nasrallah or Assad or Ahmadinejad had some kind of "grand plan" in provoking this war that has either gone awry (assuming Hezbollah is suffering badly under the current campaign) or spectacularly well (assuming it isn't). No grand plan need be posited. These characters are more likely to benefit than not from disruption of the existing order. All they had to calculate is that the time was opportune to create a measure of chaos. That's not much of a plan, but it's sufficient to explain their behavior. - Well before Israel withdrew from Gaza, I predicted that the IDF would return within a year. I nonetheless favored withdrawal and the dismantling of the settlements, because the settlements implied an Israeli *claim* to Gazan territory, and I thought that for both reasons of justice and prudence it made sense for Israel to renounce those claims. I never expected unilateral withdrawal would mean peace; I thought it would mean the continuation of war under altered conditions. - A lot of commentators argued that withdrawal would make deterrence work better, because once they had Gaza the Palestinians would have something to lose, and would not lose that something readily. But I never bought this because the Palestinians have consistently chosen no loaf rather than settle for half. And precisely because there is no way to "eliminate" the terrorist infrastructure in a permanent way, I assumed that Israel would have to resume the occupation in order to protect its citizens from rocket attacks and other aggression. That's what's happening now, but it's not clear that Israel has set the stage for its ability to remain in place; indeed, Israel has made it pretty clear that it does not intend to remain in place. - Similarly, after the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, I presumed that Israel would have to return. Israel had no territorial claims on Lebanon; its presence was entirely security-driven. Yes, the long occupation produced Hezbollah. But there was no reason to think that withdrawal would result in Hezbollah withering away, as indeed it has not. So now Israel has had to launch a full-scale war merely to "degrade" Hezbollah's capabilities - capabilities that can be rapidly rebuilt, at a fraction of the cost for Israel to degrade them. Israel's stated objectives are to make it possible for the Lebanese army and some unspecified international force to come in and "control" the region in which Hezbollah operates. But Hezbollah is more popular than ever in Lebanon, and it is inconceivable that an international force will actually use, well, force. In terms of restraining Israeli action any such force will be worse than Israeli settlements, and in terms of restraining Hezbollah they will be inferior to the Syrians who, if they chose to, certainly could force some restraint. - Which brings us to Syria. Various hawkish voices have called for Israel to take the war to the source - that is to say: to Damascus, which never seems to suffer adequately for the wars it provokes (see, e.g., 1967, 1973). But there is no mystery about why Israel has declined to take any action against Syria directly: because the Assad regime is the best Israel could plausibly expect in that country. Were the Syrian regime to fall, it would be replaced not by a friendly Arab democracy but by one of three possibilities: a new military dictatorship (not obviously better than the current regime), a radical Sunni Islamist regime (obviously worse), or a state of anarchy such as obtains in Iraq (also obviously worse). If Israel were certain that the Syrian regime could survive a direct Israeli attack, then, perhaps, Israel might launch such an attack, which would make the Assad regime *fear* collapse and take the necessary actions to prevent it, even if these meant acceding to Israeli objectives such as reining in Hezbollah. The fact that Israel is being very careful with Syria is a testament not to Israeli weakness but to their perceptions of Syrian weakness, and their recognition that the fall of the Assad regime would be unlikely to benefit Israel. Israel will not turn decisively against Damascus until such time as it appears that Assad has been "captured" by Hezbollah, and has forgotten who is the patron and who is the client. That doesn't appear to have happened yet. - (Side note: some*might* think it in Israel's interests for there to be an *American* effort to topple the Syrian regime, on the assumption that America can simply *impose* a more friendly government on that country. I think that since the Iraq campaign, no one serious in America or Israel still believes that America has that ability.) - So this is how Israel got where they are. The Israeli government understood that it could not stand idly by while its citizens were murdered. But it did not want to reinstate the expensive occupation of either Gaza or south Lebanon. Nor did it want to seriously threaten the Syrian regime that it would ultimately have to count on to preserve some semblance of order. So it launched a war with no rational military objective, and it now has to figure out how to salvage the situation. - The short-term consequences for Israel are likely to be quite negative. Israel launched this war with, initially, a surprising amount of support from Europe and the major Arab states. No one especially *wants* Hezbollah to succeed. But the botch job they've made of the campaign so far - which, in my view, stems from the lack of clarity about militarily achieveable objectives at the start - has squandered this goodwill and turned it to hostility, and undermined Israel's position with the Bush Administration as well. On the other hand, the long-term consequences are not likely to be terribly significant. The diplomatic context will have changed many times by the time the next war rolls around. The most significant medium-term consequence - for Israel - of this war is likely to be a substantial setback for Ehud Olmert, and hence for withdrawal from Judea and Samaria - precisely the opposite of the intended outcome when the operation was launched. - The consequences for the United States could be more significant. In Iraq, Americans are fighting and dying for a Shiite-dominated government that supports Hezbollah verbally if not materially. Maintaining our position in Iraq's burgeoning sectarian conflict just got a whole lot harder; if we force Israel to stand down, we hand a victory to our enemies (not good for our position in Iraq); if we don't force Israel to stand down, we support their war against Lebanese Shiites (not good for our position in Iraq); and if we impose a "solution" in the form of an international force, then we "own" yet another crisis that can't actually *be* solved (which is incidentally also not good for our position in Iraq). - I do not think that the manifest sympathy of the Iraqi government for Hezbollah materially constrains *Israel's* freedom of action, but it certainly should be an eye-opener for Americans, both as to the character of that regime and the nature of politics in the region. The Middle East is still, and will remain for the forseeable future, a "who/whom" region, where politics boils down mostly to who gets to do what to whom. That isn't the way the whole world works all of the time, nor is it the way one would like the world to work, but it's the overwhelmingly dominant mode of the Middle East. (Th flip side of the Iraqi government's response - and I should point out that not only the Iran-friendly Iraqi government, but also Ali Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shiite cleric opposed to sectarian war in that country, came out on the side of Hezbollah in this war with Israel - is, of course, the response of the Saudis, who, at least initially, blamed Hezbollah for the war and argued that a "proportional" Israeli response would be legitimate. This, again, is not warmth towards Israel or America, nor antipathy to terrorism, but "who/whom" - Saudi Arabia's oil region is predominantly Shiite, and the Hezbollahfication of that region is probably the worst thing that could happen to that kingdom.) - As for the United States' democracy project: I continue to believe that elites are the motor of history, and republican governance depends on the existence of a patriotic elite willing to subordinate its private interests to the interests of the nation. The Middle East spectacularly lacks such elites, which makes successful republican governance very difficult if not impossible. How to nurture the growth of such an elite is a difficult problem as well, and I suspect an insoluble one; in any event, it seems clear at this point that adventures like the Iraq War are not the way to do it. In the absence of such elites, and of a realistic prospect for republican governance (which if it were realistic would, indeed, change the civilizational dynamics of the region), we're left with management of the conflict, which means working through the self-interested elites that exist, supporting those that seem more congenial against those that are transparently hostile. America is terrible at this sordid game, and always has been. But it's the only game in town. - There has been a lot of commentary about how tough the Hezbollah fighters have proved. Piffle. Hezbollah is proving hard to defeat not because they are great warriors but because guerillas who have the support of the populace are *always* hard to defeat. To defeat them, you have to be either willing to destroy the populace - Israel is not, nor should it be - or able to separate them from the populace - Israel is unable to. Ironically, an authority perceived as legitimate can get away with - and get positive results from - the kind of brutality that can cause an illegitimate authority to lose a war. Thus, France lost their war in Algeria against the FLN - but the far more inept and corrupt but more legitimate Algerian military regime, the FLN's heirs, basically won their war against the Algerian Islamists, employing more than comparable brutality against a fairly comparably popular insurgency (the Islamists did, after all, win a popular election; the FLN did not enjoy majority support in polls for most of the Algerian war of independence). Hafez al Assad, the current Syrian President's father, was able to destroy the Syrian arm of the Brotherhood in about a week, with 20,000 casualties, and his regime survived; Israel's much less sanguinary and longer-lasting effort against Hezbollah has so far made Hezbollah more popular. Israel's problem fighting Hezbollah - and Hamas - is not that Hezbollah and Hamas are so mighty or so clever but that they are legitimate and popular, and Israel cannot separate them from the populace the way another legitimate authority might. - Many pundits have pointed out that Hezbollah wants civilians casualties, and fights in such a away as to maximize such casualties on both sides. All true. They go on to argue that therefore it is perverse to reward this barbaric calculus on Hezbollah's part. True - and yet, on another level, entirely understandable. Because, after all, the reason why people are outraged by incidents like Qana is not only because they are biased against Israel, or against the West generally, or because they hold Western countries to a higher standard of civilization, or because people are just idiots. The outrage also follows from the outrage of the Lebanese people. They are not (today, anyhow) blaming Hezbollah; they are blaming Israel. This is a who/whom problem: the Lebanese don't ask whether Israel is justified, they just ask whether Israel is *other* and, if so, then its attacks are illegitimate. Lebanese outrage speaks to Israel's illegitimacy in their eyes, and the world understands that, if the war is not considered legitimate, then it is unlikely to succeed in any meaningful sense. I'm not saying people think this all through consciously. But there is simply more going on than stupidity and prejudice. There is a kind of cold wisdom operating as well. - What to do now? Israel has just announced that it will expand its ground operations. That's probably a good thing; there's at least some chance that they will at least find out how much damage they did to Hezbollah's weaponry, and so long as Israeli troops remain in place during any cease-fire that is pressed on them they will at least know that violations of that cease fire will mean war on Lebanese territory rather than their own. And accepting more Israeli military casualties in exchange for fewer Lebanese civilian casualities is probably a trade Israel simply must make if it is to salvage anything from the current war. But within a few weeks this war will end, and I am very pessimistic that any solution imposed on the parties will end the threat from Hezbollah either to Israel or to stability in Lebanon. I ultimately don't think the most important aspect of this war is the PR war to decide who "won" - what really matters is whether there *was* a victor, whether anyone's war aims have actually been achieved, and I doubt that Israel's will have been. For that reason, I expect war, on both fronts, to recur. - The biggest technical problem of any proposed cease-fire is how to make it difficult for Hezbollah to strike Israel. I'm not sure there's a straightforward solution to this technical problem. Shimon Peres has been fond of arguing for years that in the age of the ballistic missile, strategic depth no longer exists, and therefore there is no vital reason for Israel to retain the heights of the Golan or Samaria or the Jordan Valley. Well and good, but the corollary is that in the age of the ballistic missile, there are no borders, and Tel Aviv becomes the front line. Israel is in a novel position, but not a unique one; the rest of the world is trending their way, as it becomes easier and easier for "entrepreneurial" groups to foment violence on a large scale for low cost. Hezbollah's budget is tiny compared to any state military budget, but it can do more damage than most Arab armies have been able to inflict on the Jewish state. This is not a testimony to Hezbollah's greatness, but to the power of modern military technologies. - But the most difficult problem for Israel is how to get the major Arab states - Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia - to begin to play a constructive role. I can't think of a good reason for any of them to help Israel in any meaningful way, but they are the key to Israel's geopolitical situation, because there is no way to satisfy the radicals - including all significant factions among the Palestinian Arabs - without destroying Israel as an independent sovereign entity. Israel is not going to consent to self-destruction, and for all that Hezbollah would love to wipe Israel off the map, they can't. Israel is probably going to have to learn whether nuclear deterrence works against Iran; even if it does, an ever-bolder Iran will surely try to provoke additional wars between Israel and Hezbollah, and between Israel and Hamas, and these proxies will be ever better armed. Even so, this is the continuation of the long war of attrition that Israel has been fighting since the pre-state period, a war that looks like it will continue for another generation. That's a very sad reality, but I don't see what is to be done about it but to face it. |
