Sultan Knish makes the point that since the West can no longer offer normalization as a carrot to Israel, as if it ever could, there is no benefit to trying to make peace. The Islamists want no part of normalization and Israel wants no part of them. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Strang makes the point I made recently. The Republicans need need hassle themselves trying to select a perfect candidate to beat the Democrat's flawed 'messiah'. Most diseases are preferred to cancer. What Republicans must do is assemble in mass behind whomever their candidate is and keep hammering away at Obama's flaws - which provide fertile territory.
We have tried the 'messiah' route and it bombed. We did pretty well with ordinary down to earth Americans like Truman and Reagan.(See 2 below.)
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Obama remains in denial as he remains unwilling to name enemies. (See 3 below.)
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Finally, someone, Matt Welch, has ripped the mask off two pundits whom everyone believes are smart when in fact they have proven unworthy of being listened to for years. Why so? Because they have been consistently wrong despite the erudite titles of their books and articles.
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Dick
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1)The End of the Peace Process
By Sultan Knish
The “peace process” which created two terrorist states inside Israel may have begun in Oslo, but it ended in Cairo. Normalizing relations with the rest of the Middle East was one of the carrots that got the Jewish state hopping down the appeasement trial– and that carrot is now officially off the table.
The days when Thomas Friedman and his Saudi buddies could talk about normalization have passed. The Arab Spring saw to that and with Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and an unknown number of others sliding into the Islamist camp, and out of reach of negotiations, there’s a New Middle East that has even less in common with the old gentlemanly diplomacy model than the old one did. Some of the dimmer Israeli leaders may still believe that peace is possible with the Islamists of Turkey’s AKP, but not even they think that peace is possible with the Brotherhood.
If Western diplomats could offer regional acceptance twenty years ago, today that has all the credibility of a Rolex sold out of a briefcase just off Central Park. The end of the Camp David Accords has killed the grandaddy of the appeasement through territorial surrender template and with Assad looking shaky, the refusal to give up the Golan Heights to Syria seems downright prescient even to peaceniks.
The Brotherhood’s attitude toward Israel is indistinguishable from that of Iran, and with the Islamist way in ascendance, that attitude will be the dominant one throughout the region, turning back the clock on decades of diplomatic efforts. The Islamists will negotiate temporary truces and ceasefires, but not the peace and brotherhood accords so beloved by the US and the EU.
And even the remaining regimes that haven’t fallen look like poor prospects for paying out peace dividends after even the most stable country in the region, Egypt, melted down into mob violence and religious fanaticism. If Egypt can turn into battling mobs who don’t agree on anything except their hatred for religious and ethnic minorities, including a country full of them living next door, then no Muslim nation in the region is safe.
Without normalization on the table, all that’s left is outside pressure. But for the first time in a long time the Arab Spring has given Western diplomats something to do in the region besides denounce Jews living in Jerusalem. And the usual Arab League chorus that the region’s problems would be solved if only there were a Palestinian state sounds silly even to veteran diplomats who usually funnel this sort of nonsense right back to the White House.
Obama’s hostility toward Israel has paradoxically lessened the pressure by removing the leverage. Condoleezza Rice could get on the phone and warn that another house in XYZ would wreck the positive relationship with the White House. But there is as much of a prospect of a positive relationship with the White House, as there is with Iran, Hamas and the Brotherhood.
Israel still has a strategic relationship with the United States, but relations with the administration are cold, which also means there is less to be afraid of. Netanyahu’s exchange with Obama was startling for a careful diplomat from a country that usually avoids offending its big brother. The only way it could have happened is if Netanyahu had felt that there was nothing to lose. And he was right.
For the first time since Begin, an Israeli leader pushed back against White House pressure and it led to a slight improvement, not because Obama listened, but because the relationship was so toxic that using the confrontational tactics practiced by the Palestinian Authority actually worked. Only when the relationship hit rock bottom, was any attempt made by the White House to salvage it.
The situation is even uglier on the European side, which has not been friendly in a long time, but hasn’t been this hateful either. But all that ugliness also translates into a loss of influence over Israel. You can only slap your allies so many times, denounce them and threaten them before they begin paying a lot less attention to you.
Irrational demands that can’t be fulfilled have brought the situation to that point. It was one thing when the Clinton or Bush administrations were demanding that Israel go to the negotiating table and offer concessions. It was ugly and unfair, but at least it was specific. These days Abbas doesn’t want to go to the negotiating table, and the same demands keep coming out of Washington D.C. and Brussels. Israel is being ordered to make peace when the other side won’t even bother showing up to negotiate.
How can Israel make peace when the Palestinian Authority has been split into Hamas and Fatah run fiefdoms and neither side is even bothering to pretend to negotiate? It can’t and even diplomats know that, which makes every volley of demands look like messages for the Muslim world.
When Helen Clark wanted to sell more New Zealand sheep to the Saudis, her marketing gimmick was a hate campaign against Israel. Clark has gone off to a sinecure at the UN, but most of the West is acting the same way now. Europe isn’t trying to sell sheep, its leaders are acting like sheep in the face of the Islamic demographic destiny spilling across their lands. The Obama Administration lit the fuse of the Arab Spring and is getting nervous as the flames keep rising higher.
Western condemnations of Israel are increasingly no longer directed to Israel, but to the Muslim world, which makes it easier for Israel to ignore them. While the White House claimed that the Biden incident was about the timing of a construction approval announcement in Jerusalem, it was really about showing the Muslim world that this administration really had the knives out for Israel. If it hadn’t been a house in Jerusalem, it would have been a border shooting, a strike in Gaza or a clash at a checkpoint. Something would have been found.
But the more America and Europe have pandered to the Muslim world, the more obvious it has become to Israel that it has no role to play in this exchange, except its time honored position as the scapegoat.
The new normalization is no longer the offer to normalize ties with the Muslim world, but warnings that Israel’s ties to Europe will require the same kind of normalization if Israel’s Prime Minister doesn’t snap his fingers and make peace happen. It would be a more effective threat if the current crop of European leaders didn’t’ make de Gaulle seem pro-Israel.
Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama, three of the slimiest first world leaders, haven’t made their dislike of Israel such a secret that it took a microphone error for it to be discovered. Merkel has dispensed with the usual show of Gemutlichkeit toward the Jewish state and the situation in Brussels is as ugly as it could be. It all blends into one long angry tantrum about peace dispensed by insecure politicians with a wholly different agenda.
All that leaves Israel with fewer reasons to participate. The strategic and economic ties still matter, but they’re more mutual than anyone cares to admit. American and European leaders may kick Israel, but it’s also the only reliable ally in the region. And the Arab Springer is a reminder that there is one country that won’t implode and can be counted on as a point of stability.
Obama is capable of cutting off his nose to spite his face, but the Clinton era foreign policy hands still have enough control that it isn’t likely to happen before the next election– though all bets are off if he gets a second term. European leaders dislike Israel, but they also know that there are times when they need it. It’s a high tech incubator that’s a lot closer than Asia, it’s an arm of the West in the East and if the relationship is sliding under the table, that’s the kind of relationship Israel has with much of the world, from China to Saudi Arabia.
The isolation is a problem, but it’s also liberating. The weight of expectations has nearly broken Israel and the Obama Administration may be one of the best things that happened to it by forcing it to recognize that it was alone. Israeli dependence on the United States is not financial as most people think, it is mainly psychological. Alone in a region full of Muslim tyrannies, the need to believe in a close relationship with an admirable global power was powerful.
Friendship with America wasn’t like friendship with Russia or China. The United States is admired by people around the world for its accomplishments and its standing. For all the anti-war rallies, it is a nation that aspires to a higher standard. A virtuous Rome, an Athens without slaves, a standard bearer for the new age of mankind.
Only the United States could make a call for concessions to terrorists sound noble, when it would have sounded hopelessly venal from any European power. But in the age of Obama the nobility has run out and so has the peace. The illusions are dead and Israel is in survival mode, struggling to avoid any attention from Washington D.C. while keeping the country on track.
The Peace Process, that horrible masochistic program of terrorist empowerment, is a fading mirage that no one believes in anymore. The pretense that the handshake in the Rose Garden overseen by a beaming Clinton was something other than cynicism and bad policymaking mythologized into a transcendent expression of a new age of peace is over and done with. The cost has been high and all of it has been in vain.
As the West follows the Islam appeasement track domestically and internationally, its relationship with Israel will continue to degrade. The Peace Process was an expression of a dying belief in the orderly world of negotiated international peace envisioned by European policymakers for over a hundred years. Now that same world has brought Europe and Israel to the brink of ruin. It’s no wonder that Israel has left the peace process by the side door.
1a)Abbas, Mashaal hail new Palestinian 'partnership'
After meeting in Cairo, Palestinian president, Hamas leader say 'there are no more differences between us now'
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal on Thursday hailed a new Palestinian "partnership" after talks to implement a landmark reconciliation deal.
"We want to assure our people and the Arab and Islamic world that we have turned a major new and real page in partnership on everything do to with the Palestinian nation," Mashaal said.
"There are no more differences between us now," added Abbas, who heads the Fatah movement. "We have agreed to work as partners with joint responsibility."
The leaders spoke after two hours of face-to-face talks in Cairo, the first since they inked the reconciliation deal in May.
The deal was hailed as the beginning of the end of years of bitter rivalry between the Palestinian movements, which boiled over in 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza a year after winning a surprise electoral victory.
But implementation of the agreement, which called for a transitional government of independents to pave the way for elections within a year, has proved tricky.
The composition of the temporary government, and who would head it, has proven particularly contentious, with Abbas seeking to keep on his current prime minister Salam Fayyad, over objections from Hamas.
Successive rounds of talks between lower-level officials failed to move the process forward, but earlier this month Fatah negotiator Azzam al-Ahmed confirmed he had held secret discussions with his Hamas counterpart Mussa Abu Marzuq.
Ahmed said the talks had produced broad agreement on the principles for choosing a consensus government, though reports have suggested there is continuing disagreement about its composition.
No announcement has so far been made on candidates for the prime minister's post, and Ahmed said the names were likely to be discussed at a later stage, possibly when the factions meet in December.
Other issues being discussed at the talks included a restructuring of factions' rival security forces, as well as changes to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which does not currently include Hamas.
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2)We're Not Electing a Messiah
By R. Clayton Strang
No one is perfect. No one. Not a single one of us has led a completely blameless life. We've all said something that we wish we hadn't. We've all lied, cheated, or stolen. We've all done or said hurtful things. Imperfection is a reality of the human condition. We know and accept that we are flawed. We realize that our parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors are flawed. If we accept this as true, why do we expect more from our potential elected leaders?
Every day, you can turn on the cable news, or go to your favorite news or blog sites, and hear all about the Republican presidential candidates and how imperfect they are. We all know about the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain. Most agree that these charges have probably been completely fabricated. That being the case, we are then subjected to constant criticism of his campaign's handling of these allegations. Now we get to hear all about his flubbing of a question on Libya. The mainstream media has force-fed us clips of Rick Perry having a bit of a brain freeze during a debate. We know all about Newt Gingrich's past marital problems. He appeared in an ad with Nancy Pelosi, and he's criticized Congressman Paul Ryan. We hear these attacks daily from both sides of the aisle. These stories are designed to convince us of something that we should already know: no one is perfect!
The media is setting us up. They're lying to us. The lie is this: we must have a perfect candidate to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. Conservatives more and more seem to buy into the lie. They buy into it and get discouraged. They don't see any of our candidates as perfect, and they see Barack Obama's re-election as inevitable. If the progressives can get enough of us to believe that the defeat of conservatism in 2012 is a foregone conclusion, they can keep us home on November 6. What many American conservatives need is a good, cold splash of reality.
America has a president who was presented to us as perfect. We were told that with his election, the world would respect and love American again. We were told that we would remember even his nomination as the day when "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." We haven't heard from any of his past girlfriends, classmates, teachers, or co-workers who might tell us about his many flaws. If they have come forward, we've never heard about it. Why? Because we're supposed to believe that Barack Obama is perfect. He is everything that we should want to be. He and he alone can save us. Of course, now we know that none of that is true. Some of us have been saying it for years as Americans raced to follow this "perfect" man. Millions of our fellow citizens swallowed that narrative hook, line, and sinker, and look at the state of our Republic now.
Perfection for mankind in this life is unattainable, and thus is of no value to us. Of course, we cannot have as our nominee someone who is or has been an adulterer, an abuser, a liar, or a racist. Such a person, should any proof of such things be demonstrable, would have such a huge lack of character that he or she would be thoroughly undeserving of the office of president of the United States.
We don't need a new messiah. We don't need perfection. We need vision. We need substance. We need character. These traits are the building blocks of our Great Republic, and anyone wishing to be the Republican nominee for president must possess them in great quantities. We don't need another savior; we simply want a president.
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3)Calling things by their names
By Caroline B. Glick
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
Next month, the US's long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country. Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of US President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw on the US's hard won gains in that country. After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.
The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard's publication of an article entitled, "Defeat in Iraq: President Obama's decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters." The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan. The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the successful US-counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as "the surge," that former president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.
In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month's withdrawal. First they note that with the US withdrawal, the sectarian violence that the surge effectively ended will in all likelihood return in force. Iraq's Iranian-allied Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is purging the Iraqi military and security services and the Iraqi civil service of pro-Western, anti-Iranian commanders and senior officials. With American acquiescence, Maliki and his Shiite allies already managed to effectively overturn the March 2010 election results. Those elections gave the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi the right to form the next government.
Due to Maliki's actions, Iraq's Sunnis are becoming convinced they have little to gain from peacefully accepting the government.
The strategic implications of Maliki's purges are clear. As the US departs the country next month it will be handing its hard won victory in Iraq to its greatest regional foe - Iran. Repeating their behavior in the aftermath of Israel's precipitous withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are presenting the US withdrawal from Iraq as a massive strategic victory. They are also inventing the rationale for continued war against the retreating Americans. Iran's Hezbollah trained proxy, Muqtada al-Sadr has declared that US Embassy personnel are an "occupation force" that the Iraqis should rightly attack with the aim of defeating.
The US public's ignorance of the implications of a post-withdrawal, Iranian-dominated Iraq is not surprising. The Obama administration has ignored them and the media have largely followed the administration's lead in underplaying them.
For its part, the Bush administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.
US military officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded by Iran and Syria. But policymakers never took any action against either country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime's support for the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their actions.
As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki's pro-Iranian purge of the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama administration has effectively sided with America's foes, enabling Iranian-allied forces to take over the US-built, trained and armed security apparatuses in Iraq.
All of these actions are in line with the US's current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in ousting the US's most dependable ally in the Arab world, former president Hosni Mubarak. Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, (SCAF). Because SCAF is comprised of the men who served as Mubarak's underlings throughout his 30-year rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed to chaos and Islamic radicalism.
However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the military junta is much less able to keep Egypt's populist forces at bay.
Throughout Mubarak's long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak's ouster necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt. If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on Mubarak.
Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to the army's institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone presidential elections. Their moves provoked massive opposition from Egypt's now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they launched what they are dubbing "the second Egyptian revolution." And the US doesn't know what to do.
In late 2010, foreign policy professionals on both sides of the aisle in Washington got together and formed a group called the Working Group for Egypt. This group, with members as seemingly diverse as Elliott Abrams from the Bush administration and the Council on Foreign Relations and Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress chose to ignore completely the fact that the populist forces in Egypt are overwhelmingly jihadist. They lobbied for Mubarak's overthrow in the name of "democracy" in January and February. Today they demand that Obama side with the rioters in Tahrir Square against the military. And just as he did in January and February, Obama is likely to follow their "bipartisan" advice.
From Iraq to Egypt to Libya to Syria, as previous mistakes by both the Bush and Obama administrations constrain and diminish US options for advancing its national interests, America is compelled to make more and more difficult choices. In Libya, after facilitating Muammar Gaddafi's overthrow, the US is faced with the prospect of dealing with an even more radical regime that is jihadist, empowered, and already transferring arms to terror groups and proliferating nonconventional weapons. If the Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment acknowledge the hostile nature of the new regime and refrain from supporting it, they will be forced to admit they sided with America's enemies in taking down Gaddafi. While Gaddafi was certainly no Mubarak, at worst he was an impotent adversary.
In Syria, not only did the US refuse to take any action against President Bashar Assad despite his active sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, it failed to cultivate any ties with Syrian regime opponents. The US has continued to ignore Syrian regime opponents to the present day. And now, with Assad's fall a matter of time, the US is presented with a fairly set opposition leadership, backed by Islamist Turkey and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal, pro-American forces in Syria, including the Kurds, have been shut out of the post-Assad power structure.
And in Egypt, after embracing "democracy" over its ally Mubarak, the US is faced with another unenviable choice. It can either side with the weak, but not necessarily hostile military junta which is dependent on US financial aid, or it can side with Islamic extremists who seek its destruction and that of Israel and have the support of the Egyptian people.
How has this situation arisen? How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled "The Lost Decade."
Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after Sept. 11, 2001 to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.
The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn't want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world's hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.
For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left.
And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic - terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn't an enemy. It's just a tactic. And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.
The lion's share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn't want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after Sept. 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.
Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left's ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America's worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey's Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.
And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro-American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington's irresponsibility.
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
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4)The Simpletons
David Brooks, Thomas L. Friedman, and the banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry
By Matt Welch
That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, Current Affairs, 380 pages, $28
Consider for a moment the paradoxical pain of being a best-selling political pundit so successful that American presidents don’t just seek but heed your advice. You have lobbied in your columns for the commander in chief to deploy your signature catch phrases, and he has. You have, in times of both crisis and sloth, advocated robust federal action in the name of national “greatness,” and the people in power have mostly followed suit. You have been flattered by invitations to the White House and pecked at by lesser partisans, yet you’ve maintained your critical distance in the patriotic spirit of post-ideological problem solving. All this influence and success, and somehow the country still sucks.
“Are we going to roll up our sleeves or limp on?” an exasperated Thomas L. Friedman asked the nation in a September 20 New York Times column. Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, influential Iraq war supporter, champion of “green jobs” industrial policy, and backer of President Barack Obama’s public education initiatives, is threatening to secede from a status quo he helped create.
“Given those stark choices,” he wrote, “one would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that any serious plan must have: spending cuts, increases in revenues and investments in the sources of our strength. But that, alas, is not what we’re getting, which is why there remains an opening for an independent Third Party candidate in the 2012 campaign.”
These are glum times not just for the 23 million working-age Americans without steady jobs but for hyper-employed commentators who have built comparative fortunes whispering into and occasionally bending the world’s most powerful ears. “I’m a sap,” a morose-sounding New York Times columnist David Brooks confessed the day before Friedman’s outburst. “I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.” But now that the president had unveiled a dead-on-arrival, soak-the-rich jobs package in a televised address designed more to please his progressive base than to actually solve problems, even David Brooks—who in March 2010 deemed Obama “the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington”—was forced to admit the unbearable: “This wasn’t a speech to get something done.” But noble dreams die hard. “I still believe,” Brooks insisted, “that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems.”
Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail. On September 30, 2008, in a classic of the do-something genre, Brooks argued that the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be rammed through Congress over public objections because the federal government needed “to give people a sense that somebody was in charge, that something was going to be done.” Did that “something” involve buying up toxic assets? Introducing or relaxing certain banking regulations? Taking over or winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Not important. “What we need in this situation,” Brooks declared, “is authority.”
American discourse is saddled with a large and influential do-something school of political punditry, a cadre of pragmatists from Meet the Press to your local editorial board who are forever seeking to solve the country’s problems by transcending ideology, demanding collective citizen sacrifice, and—always—empowering authority. In their new book That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Friedman and Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum lament that people “in positions of authority everywhere have less influence than in the past,” due to a “corrosive cynicism” preventing “the collective action that is required.” America, David Brooks wrote in March 2010, “is suffering a devastating crisis of authority,” resulting in a “corrosive cynicism about public action.” The similarities are not accidental.
Brooks and Friedman may be the most prominent practitioners, but the do-something school is evident just about anywhere the political class is talking shop. Here is former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum at CNN.com on September 26, lamenting that the “old rules” of bipartisan cooperation “have broken down,” unlike those bygone days when “the imperatives of the Cold War inspired a spirit of deference to the president.” There is centrist Matt Miller at Washingtonpost.com the day before, writing an imaginary speech (a favored tactic of the do-something set) for an imaginary independent presidential candidate (ditto) who rejects “the Democrats’ timid half-measures and the Republicans’ mindless anti-government creed” in favor of “a bold agenda equal to the scale of our challenges.” That agenda is virtually indistinguishable from the Brooks/Friedman playbook: higher energy taxes, more money for infrastructure and schools, and national service for the young, all while somehow cutting government spending over the long term.
There are some obvious rejoinders to this fictitious excrescence of the “radical center” (Friedman’s preferred term). As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out in response to Miller, “many of those calling for a third party are refusing to reckon with an inconvenient fact: One of the two parties already occupies the approximate ideological space that these commentators themselves are describing as the dream middle ground that allegedly can only be staked out by a third party. That party is known as the ‘Democratic Party.’ ” By dreaming up a third way to deliver ideas and rhetoric already associated with Barack Obama, the centrists are making the implicit admission that the president is ineffectual in the face of GOP intransigence.
But there is an even less charitable explanation. Because do-something punditry inevitably appeals to whoever holds power—what president doesn’t want to rise above partisanship to get things done, particularly if the solution amounts to a blank check to government?—pragmatic centrism has been implemented to a much greater extent than any of the “rigid” ideologies it abhors, whether they be trade unionism, social conservatism, or across-the-board libertarianism. Put another way, we live in a David Brooks/Thomas L. Friedman world, but now that the results have come in they are trying to wash their hands of the whole experiment.
The Limits of Simplicity
Simply making fun of Thomas L. Friedman’s writing style is not enough to expose the pervasive temptation of pragmatic punditry. But it is important. “The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in a justly celebrated 2005 New York Press slam of Friedman’s bestseller The World Is Flat, “is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.” In a Wall Street Journal review of That Used to Be Us, Andrew Ferguson describes “being pelted with clumps of words that Thomas L. Friedman, alone among native English speakers, could have devised.”
What do such clumps look like? Try to make sense of this paragraph from a December 2010 column: “More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T. on a full scholarship and will be leaving them in a few months. What to do?” What indeed?
But Friedman didn’t earn his success by tapping into a mass market for mixed metaphors. Like David Brooks and the best from the do-something school, Friedman is an extremely gifted simplifier, boiling down complex phenomena into one-liners that you can’t quite get out of your head. Surely you’ve heard that “no two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other,” a clever 1996 insight that isn’t exactly true but close enough for government work. Friedman’s 1989 book of Middle East reporting, From Beirut to Jerusalem, remains the classic text for making shorthand sense out of geopolitics’ most hopelessly complicated problem. When Andrew Ferguson writes that “Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer,” it’s not just an insult.
Simplicity is great for depicting basic problems. That Used To Be Us, one of a spate of America-in-decline tomes to come out in 2011, correctly identifies many of the country’s most glaring ills: the lousy economy, runaway deficits, widespread political irresponsibility, gratuitous regulatory burdens, a labyrinthine immigration system, grossly underfunded retirement and medical promises, a public education system treading water, and so on. Matt Miller’s imaginary presidential candidate is right to point out that “neither of our two major parties has a strategy for solving our biggest problems,” especially the baby boomer entitlement time bomb. David Brooks’ pop sociology is especially effective at breaking down complex political trends into binary choices.
But clarity going down is not the same as coherence getting back up. Many intractable problems get that way because they’re hard to solve, because there are powerful interests with a vested stake against reform, or because the policies in question are cemented in place by the perennial political impulse to do something. That Used To Be Us starts off with a contrast between a gleaming new convention center in Tianjin, China, that was built in 32 weeks and a lousy D.C. Metro subway stop in Bethesda, Maryland, where “the two short escalators had been under repair for nearly six months.” Modern China—which has taken the role that Japan played for American declinists two decades ago—is all about bullet trains; modern America is all about potholes. That may sound like an invitation to critique transit spending efficacy and public-sector work rules in the United States, but it’s not; the authors insist that the difference in results is chiefly a question of will.
“The American political and economic systems, when functioning properly, can harness the nation’s talents and energy to meet the challenges the country faces,” Friedman and Mandelbaum write. But “America’s future cannot simply be a function of our capacity to do great things or our history of having done great things. It also has to be a function of our will actually to do those things again.…What the country needs most is collective action on a large scale.”
We never do hear precisely how it was that the annual expenditure for D.C.’s infrastructure—let alone the nation’s—proved insufficient for meeting demand or preventing disrepair. In fact, we don’t hear anything about that annual expenditure at all. Nor do we hear much about how President Obama has already been throwing scores of billions of dollars at infrastructure, particularly of the transportation variety, his inauguration. Instead of anything approaching specifics, Friedman and Mandelbaum simply declare that “to assure the nation’s economic future we will have to spend, more, not less, on some things: certainly infrastructure and research and development, and probably education as well.” Probably!
When details don’t matter, it’s easy to be dazzled by the politicians you’re trying to influence. Friedman and Brooks always have a nice word to say about the school-reform cred of both Education Secretary Arne Duncan (liberally quoted throughout That Used To Be Us) and his boss when it comes to making those tough post-ideological choices to improve our schools. “Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party,” Brooks wrote in March 2010. “In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools.”
It’s always nice when presidents give good speeches, which may be one reason why the do-something school is always volunteering to write them. But at the time Brooks was publishing those words the president already had a relevant track record of governance, one that included dumping an unprecedented $100 billion into the education status quo via the stimulus package alone, thus ensuring the exact opposite of the line Brooks swallowed: keeping failed teachers in failing schools. Obama had signed into law the euthanasia of Washington, D.C.’s school voucher program, violating a centrist-pleasing campaign pledge to make decisions based on science (the science in this case showed that the program was working). The president’s ballyhooed Race to the Top initiative, which incentivizes states to embrace charter schools and more closely link teacher evaluation to student performance, amounted to less than 5 percent of the education stimulus money.
Education is the most important of the “five pillars of prosperity” that constitute what Friedman and Mandelbaum call “the American formula” (which in turn is beset with “four major challenges,” which stem from failing to ask “the two questions that are crucial for determining public policy,” which doubtlessly trigger arbitrary number sets of their own). Education is the reason they most frequently cite for the recent economic growth of China, Singapore, and South Korea, which would certainly be news to the high school dropouts powering the entrepreneurial revolution in places like Wenzhou (See “China’s Black Market City,” page 24). Why, education is so important that the co-authors volunteered to write an imaginary letter from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama saying: “Today…more than ever before, our national security depends on the quality of our education system. That is why I don’t want to be secretary of state, Mr. President. Instead, I want to be at the heart of national security policy. I want to be secretary of education.”
With all that emphasis on education, particularly from two authors who made their careers talking about foreign policy (Mandelbaum is a Johns Hopkins University Sovietologist), you’d think there’d be some concrete, hardheaded proposals for overhauling a K–12 education system in which real spending per pupil has increased threefold in four decades. Instead, we get do something. “We do not know the exact mix of policies that is needed for ‘more’ education, a subject on which there are many views,” they write. “We leave to the education experts the definition of what is sufficient in all these areas to produce more education for all. We do, though, think we know what is necessary to produce what the country needs. We believe that six things are necessary.…” Thereafter tumbles a list that includes such content-free gems as “students who come to school prepared to learn, not to text.”
From Banality to Authoritarianism
Do-something punditry means almost never considering the possible benefits of getting the government out of the way of a given issue, since that would be “ideological” and require walking away from the world’s largest problem-solving tool. Pragmatism also means never having to say you’re sorry about the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation, the capture by industrialists of the regulators who were supposed to constrain them, or even the basic failure of government action to produce the promised results. By the time such flaws make front-page news, there is always a new crisis requiring urgent intervention. And if all else fails, you can blame it on the competence of the government that followed your advice.
Pragmatic problem solvers (including the vast majority of the nation’s newspaper editorial boards) were foursquare behind the invasion of Iraq. And if detail-free simplicity is inadequate to the current task of economic recovery, it was downright frightening in the service of banging the drums for a major war.
Friedman was among the most influential “liberal hawks” who gave non-Republican respectability to the idea that toppling Saddam Hussein was crucial to defeat Islamic terrorism in the wake of 9/11. On what would become a notorious Charlie Rose Show appearance in May 2003, he argued for the use of deadly force as a demonstration project to Islamists everywhere: “What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think…we care about our open society?…Well, Suck. On. This.’ That, Charlie, was what this war was all about.”
This kind of playground chest thumping was par for the course. David Frum, lately seen putting his shoulder on the wheel of a third-way political organization called No Labels, was at the time the war began attempting to purge the last intervention skeptics from the Republican Party. “They began by hating the neoconservatives,” Frum wrote in a National Review cover story titled “Unpatriotic Conservatives” in April 2003. “They came to hate their party and the president. They have finished by hating their country. War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen —and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.”
David Brooks at the time was withering in his contempt for those who lacked his interventionist conviction, writing in The Weekly Standard in March 2003 that “any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion—that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed—but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis. But those who actually have to lead and protect, and actually have to build one step on another, have to bring some questions to a close.”
In 2011 such do-something authoritarianism reappears in the national conversation whenever the subject moves to China. Friedman, for example, has expressed preference for China’s political system over America’s for years now. “There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today,” he wrote in September 2009. “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.…Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing.”
This was no one-off. On Meet the Press in May 2010, moments after complaining how the Internet can enable “a digital lynch mob” of people who disagree with you, Friedman fantasized about playing dictator: “What if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions.” That Used To Be Us, perhaps due to Mandelbaum’s more sober presence, takes pains to insist that “our problem is not China, and our solution is not China,” but the book’s very title comes from (fittingly enough) a Barack Obama quote fretting about China’s superior rail systems and supercomputers.
Not only does China offer a tempting (if illusory) vision of enlightened scientists routing around that messy democracy stuff; it also provides what Al Qaeda can no longer quite muster: a palpably dangerous competitor with which to scare complacent Americans into collective action. That’s not an exaggeration. “When the West won the Cold War, America lost the rival that had kept us sharp, outwardly focused, and serious about nation-building at home,” Friedman and Mandelbaum lament. “As the Cold War ended,” David Frum writes at CNN.com, “the party struggle intensified.” No wonder Matt Miller’s imaginary presidential candidate is on the case: “We can no longer allow China’s brazen currency manipulation—nor its routine theft of American intellectual property—to tilt the playing field unfairly against American jobs.”
Although younger than the authors under discussion, I am old enough to remember domestic politics during the Cold War, and I’m here to tell you that there was no political consensus. Americans were deeply, bitterly divided, particularly over how and even whether to prosecute the Cold War. Richard Nixon was made vice president due to his Cold War hawkery; John F. Kennedy then tried to out–Cold War him in 1960. There were hugely divisive and deadly wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Cold War affected nearly every presidential election from 1952 to 1988. Nostalgia for pre-1989 political comity is nostalgia for a country that never existed. And we saw under George W. Bush the many pitfalls of whipping up political consensus by demonizing a common enemy.
Perhaps strangest of all, Barack Obama is already on board this particular anti-China bandwagon and has been since long before taking the oath of office. He has even taken to using Friedman’s signature (and characteristically incoherent) line of “nation-building at home” in his stump speeches, although it did take Friedman 35 references across 15 columns to persuade White House speechwriters. What does a guy have to do to win the affection of pundits whose advice he has taken?
My Way, or the Third Way
This fall Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum, and Matt Miller were all talking about Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party “Bull Moose” run for president in 1912. (In fact, they were all paraphrasing the same Richard Hofstadter quote about how the role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.) This must have sounded like old hat to David Brooks, who during the 2000 presidential primary season was holding up T.R. and his relentless, independent-minded government activism as the model for John McCain (a suggestion that McCain, one of the most prominent do-something politicians in America, readily embraced). After losing to the more “humble” George W. Bush, Brooks and McCain were both licking their wounds in 2001, openly pondering Bull Moose–style defections from the GOP, when the planes struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon, giving America an urgent new task.
Five months later in The Weekly Standard, Brooks envisioned a “huge opportunity” to “create a governing Republican majority” under Bush, echoing “precisely the aggressive foreign policy and patriotic national service themes that John McCain struck in the 2000 primary season,” including “rogue-state rollback,” “nation-building,” and “a summons to national service.” President Bush, Brooks gushed, had finally “broken the libertarian grip on the GOP.” On the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention, Brooks performed an end-zone dance celebrating “the death of small-government conservatism,” arguing that Republicans now “must embrace” a Teddy Roosevelt–style “progressive conservatism” if they want “to become the majority party for the next few decades.” With two major Brooks-supported wars under its belt, along with a new prescription drug benefit, an important new federal education initiative, and an overall increase in government spending of more than 60 percent, you’d think that the co-author of “National Greatness Conservatism” would have expressed satisfaction with his handiwork.
Think again. “There are two major parties on the ballot,” Brooks wrote in August 2006, “but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.” Like Friedman’s “radical centrists,” Frum’s “No Labels” movement, Miller’s presidential independent, and other 2011 works of political fiction, Brooks’ McCain-Lieberman Party advocated both raising taxes and cutting benefits, maintaining America’s energetic foreign policy leadership in the world (especially in the Middle East), “invest[ing] in human capital so people can compete,” and above all returning to a kind of political “civility” and seriousness worthy of a great country. It’s the dream that will not die.
“Write it down: Americans Elect,” Friedman enthused in July, talking about another premature third-party movement. “What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life—remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.”
Back in reality, the only plausible independent presidential scenario in the 2012 race looks roughly like this: The Republicans nominate someone their own base distrusts and dislikes (call him “Mitt Romney”). The Tea Party and grassroots right grumbles about not having a choice. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) finishes a respectable third or even second place during the primary season, but along the way the GOP establishment trashes him and the sprawling, independent-bent political movement that has sprung up around him. Having no re-election to run for anymore, Paul decides to go rogue and run as an independent.
If the establishment centrists were at all serious about third party or independent runs, they would greet such a development with enthusiasm. But Paul is an ideologue, you see. He wants to apply his rigid libertarian philosophy to significantly scale back the federal government, instead of using flexible post-ideological pragmatism to give government more power.
On September 26, David Brooks pinned the blame for what he is now calling America’s “Lost Decade” on “the ideologues who dominate the political conversation” in the United States. “Orthodoxies,” he warned in his column, “take a constricted, mechanistic view of the situation. If we’re stuck with these two mentalities, we will be forever presented with proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand.”
Fortunately for Brooks—and unfortunately for us—there is a distinct third way. Though vague on details, it involves increased taxes (especially on energy), short-term spending boosts, long-term entitlement cuts, and roughly the same foreign policy commitments as today. It calls for renewed citizen engagement, a return to political civility, and a rejection of coarse cynicism. Better teachers, trained workers, and cleaner air. Although advocated by pundits from all over the traditional political spectrum, the program is remarkably uniform when it comes to giving the government more power. Just don’t call it ideological.
Editor in Chief Matt Welch is co-author (along with Nick Gillespie) of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America (Public Affairs).
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Dick
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1)The End of the Peace Process
By Sultan Knish
The “peace process” which created two terrorist states inside Israel may have begun in Oslo, but it ended in Cairo. Normalizing relations with the rest of the Middle East was one of the carrots that got the Jewish state hopping down the appeasement trial– and that carrot is now officially off the table.
The days when Thomas Friedman and his Saudi buddies could talk about normalization have passed. The Arab Spring saw to that and with Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and an unknown number of others sliding into the Islamist camp, and out of reach of negotiations, there’s a New Middle East that has even less in common with the old gentlemanly diplomacy model than the old one did. Some of the dimmer Israeli leaders may still believe that peace is possible with the Islamists of Turkey’s AKP, but not even they think that peace is possible with the Brotherhood.
If Western diplomats could offer regional acceptance twenty years ago, today that has all the credibility of a Rolex sold out of a briefcase just off Central Park. The end of the Camp David Accords has killed the grandaddy of the appeasement through territorial surrender template and with Assad looking shaky, the refusal to give up the Golan Heights to Syria seems downright prescient even to peaceniks.
The Brotherhood’s attitude toward Israel is indistinguishable from that of Iran, and with the Islamist way in ascendance, that attitude will be the dominant one throughout the region, turning back the clock on decades of diplomatic efforts. The Islamists will negotiate temporary truces and ceasefires, but not the peace and brotherhood accords so beloved by the US and the EU.
And even the remaining regimes that haven’t fallen look like poor prospects for paying out peace dividends after even the most stable country in the region, Egypt, melted down into mob violence and religious fanaticism. If Egypt can turn into battling mobs who don’t agree on anything except their hatred for religious and ethnic minorities, including a country full of them living next door, then no Muslim nation in the region is safe.
Without normalization on the table, all that’s left is outside pressure. But for the first time in a long time the Arab Spring has given Western diplomats something to do in the region besides denounce Jews living in Jerusalem. And the usual Arab League chorus that the region’s problems would be solved if only there were a Palestinian state sounds silly even to veteran diplomats who usually funnel this sort of nonsense right back to the White House.
Obama’s hostility toward Israel has paradoxically lessened the pressure by removing the leverage. Condoleezza Rice could get on the phone and warn that another house in XYZ would wreck the positive relationship with the White House. But there is as much of a prospect of a positive relationship with the White House, as there is with Iran, Hamas and the Brotherhood.
Israel still has a strategic relationship with the United States, but relations with the administration are cold, which also means there is less to be afraid of. Netanyahu’s exchange with Obama was startling for a careful diplomat from a country that usually avoids offending its big brother. The only way it could have happened is if Netanyahu had felt that there was nothing to lose. And he was right.
For the first time since Begin, an Israeli leader pushed back against White House pressure and it led to a slight improvement, not because Obama listened, but because the relationship was so toxic that using the confrontational tactics practiced by the Palestinian Authority actually worked. Only when the relationship hit rock bottom, was any attempt made by the White House to salvage it.
The situation is even uglier on the European side, which has not been friendly in a long time, but hasn’t been this hateful either. But all that ugliness also translates into a loss of influence over Israel. You can only slap your allies so many times, denounce them and threaten them before they begin paying a lot less attention to you.
Irrational demands that can’t be fulfilled have brought the situation to that point. It was one thing when the Clinton or Bush administrations were demanding that Israel go to the negotiating table and offer concessions. It was ugly and unfair, but at least it was specific. These days Abbas doesn’t want to go to the negotiating table, and the same demands keep coming out of Washington D.C. and Brussels. Israel is being ordered to make peace when the other side won’t even bother showing up to negotiate.
How can Israel make peace when the Palestinian Authority has been split into Hamas and Fatah run fiefdoms and neither side is even bothering to pretend to negotiate? It can’t and even diplomats know that, which makes every volley of demands look like messages for the Muslim world.
When Helen Clark wanted to sell more New Zealand sheep to the Saudis, her marketing gimmick was a hate campaign against Israel. Clark has gone off to a sinecure at the UN, but most of the West is acting the same way now. Europe isn’t trying to sell sheep, its leaders are acting like sheep in the face of the Islamic demographic destiny spilling across their lands. The Obama Administration lit the fuse of the Arab Spring and is getting nervous as the flames keep rising higher.
Western condemnations of Israel are increasingly no longer directed to Israel, but to the Muslim world, which makes it easier for Israel to ignore them. While the White House claimed that the Biden incident was about the timing of a construction approval announcement in Jerusalem, it was really about showing the Muslim world that this administration really had the knives out for Israel. If it hadn’t been a house in Jerusalem, it would have been a border shooting, a strike in Gaza or a clash at a checkpoint. Something would have been found.
But the more America and Europe have pandered to the Muslim world, the more obvious it has become to Israel that it has no role to play in this exchange, except its time honored position as the scapegoat.
The new normalization is no longer the offer to normalize ties with the Muslim world, but warnings that Israel’s ties to Europe will require the same kind of normalization if Israel’s Prime Minister doesn’t snap his fingers and make peace happen. It would be a more effective threat if the current crop of European leaders didn’t’ make de Gaulle seem pro-Israel.
Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama, three of the slimiest first world leaders, haven’t made their dislike of Israel such a secret that it took a microphone error for it to be discovered. Merkel has dispensed with the usual show of Gemutlichkeit toward the Jewish state and the situation in Brussels is as ugly as it could be. It all blends into one long angry tantrum about peace dispensed by insecure politicians with a wholly different agenda.
All that leaves Israel with fewer reasons to participate. The strategic and economic ties still matter, but they’re more mutual than anyone cares to admit. American and European leaders may kick Israel, but it’s also the only reliable ally in the region. And the Arab Springer is a reminder that there is one country that won’t implode and can be counted on as a point of stability.
Obama is capable of cutting off his nose to spite his face, but the Clinton era foreign policy hands still have enough control that it isn’t likely to happen before the next election– though all bets are off if he gets a second term. European leaders dislike Israel, but they also know that there are times when they need it. It’s a high tech incubator that’s a lot closer than Asia, it’s an arm of the West in the East and if the relationship is sliding under the table, that’s the kind of relationship Israel has with much of the world, from China to Saudi Arabia.
The isolation is a problem, but it’s also liberating. The weight of expectations has nearly broken Israel and the Obama Administration may be one of the best things that happened to it by forcing it to recognize that it was alone. Israeli dependence on the United States is not financial as most people think, it is mainly psychological. Alone in a region full of Muslim tyrannies, the need to believe in a close relationship with an admirable global power was powerful.
Friendship with America wasn’t like friendship with Russia or China. The United States is admired by people around the world for its accomplishments and its standing. For all the anti-war rallies, it is a nation that aspires to a higher standard. A virtuous Rome, an Athens without slaves, a standard bearer for the new age of mankind.
Only the United States could make a call for concessions to terrorists sound noble, when it would have sounded hopelessly venal from any European power. But in the age of Obama the nobility has run out and so has the peace. The illusions are dead and Israel is in survival mode, struggling to avoid any attention from Washington D.C. while keeping the country on track.
The Peace Process, that horrible masochistic program of terrorist empowerment, is a fading mirage that no one believes in anymore. The pretense that the handshake in the Rose Garden overseen by a beaming Clinton was something other than cynicism and bad policymaking mythologized into a transcendent expression of a new age of peace is over and done with. The cost has been high and all of it has been in vain.
As the West follows the Islam appeasement track domestically and internationally, its relationship with Israel will continue to degrade. The Peace Process was an expression of a dying belief in the orderly world of negotiated international peace envisioned by European policymakers for over a hundred years. Now that same world has brought Europe and Israel to the brink of ruin. It’s no wonder that Israel has left the peace process by the side door.
1a)Abbas, Mashaal hail new Palestinian 'partnership'
After meeting in Cairo, Palestinian president, Hamas leader say 'there are no more differences between us now'
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal on Thursday hailed a new Palestinian "partnership" after talks to implement a landmark reconciliation deal.
"We want to assure our people and the Arab and Islamic world that we have turned a major new and real page in partnership on everything do to with the Palestinian nation," Mashaal said.
"There are no more differences between us now," added Abbas, who heads the Fatah movement. "We have agreed to work as partners with joint responsibility."
The leaders spoke after two hours of face-to-face talks in Cairo, the first since they inked the reconciliation deal in May.
The deal was hailed as the beginning of the end of years of bitter rivalry between the Palestinian movements, which boiled over in 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza a year after winning a surprise electoral victory.
But implementation of the agreement, which called for a transitional government of independents to pave the way for elections within a year, has proved tricky.
The composition of the temporary government, and who would head it, has proven particularly contentious, with Abbas seeking to keep on his current prime minister Salam Fayyad, over objections from Hamas.
Successive rounds of talks between lower-level officials failed to move the process forward, but earlier this month Fatah negotiator Azzam al-Ahmed confirmed he had held secret discussions with his Hamas counterpart Mussa Abu Marzuq.
Ahmed said the talks had produced broad agreement on the principles for choosing a consensus government, though reports have suggested there is continuing disagreement about its composition.
No announcement has so far been made on candidates for the prime minister's post, and Ahmed said the names were likely to be discussed at a later stage, possibly when the factions meet in December.
Other issues being discussed at the talks included a restructuring of factions' rival security forces, as well as changes to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which does not currently include Hamas.
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2)We're Not Electing a Messiah
By R. Clayton Strang
No one is perfect. No one. Not a single one of us has led a completely blameless life. We've all said something that we wish we hadn't. We've all lied, cheated, or stolen. We've all done or said hurtful things. Imperfection is a reality of the human condition. We know and accept that we are flawed. We realize that our parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors are flawed. If we accept this as true, why do we expect more from our potential elected leaders?
Every day, you can turn on the cable news, or go to your favorite news or blog sites, and hear all about the Republican presidential candidates and how imperfect they are. We all know about the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain. Most agree that these charges have probably been completely fabricated. That being the case, we are then subjected to constant criticism of his campaign's handling of these allegations. Now we get to hear all about his flubbing of a question on Libya. The mainstream media has force-fed us clips of Rick Perry having a bit of a brain freeze during a debate. We know all about Newt Gingrich's past marital problems. He appeared in an ad with Nancy Pelosi, and he's criticized Congressman Paul Ryan. We hear these attacks daily from both sides of the aisle. These stories are designed to convince us of something that we should already know: no one is perfect!
The media is setting us up. They're lying to us. The lie is this: we must have a perfect candidate to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. Conservatives more and more seem to buy into the lie. They buy into it and get discouraged. They don't see any of our candidates as perfect, and they see Barack Obama's re-election as inevitable. If the progressives can get enough of us to believe that the defeat of conservatism in 2012 is a foregone conclusion, they can keep us home on November 6. What many American conservatives need is a good, cold splash of reality.
America has a president who was presented to us as perfect. We were told that with his election, the world would respect and love American again. We were told that we would remember even his nomination as the day when "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." We haven't heard from any of his past girlfriends, classmates, teachers, or co-workers who might tell us about his many flaws. If they have come forward, we've never heard about it. Why? Because we're supposed to believe that Barack Obama is perfect. He is everything that we should want to be. He and he alone can save us. Of course, now we know that none of that is true. Some of us have been saying it for years as Americans raced to follow this "perfect" man. Millions of our fellow citizens swallowed that narrative hook, line, and sinker, and look at the state of our Republic now.
Perfection for mankind in this life is unattainable, and thus is of no value to us. Of course, we cannot have as our nominee someone who is or has been an adulterer, an abuser, a liar, or a racist. Such a person, should any proof of such things be demonstrable, would have such a huge lack of character that he or she would be thoroughly undeserving of the office of president of the United States.
We don't need a new messiah. We don't need perfection. We need vision. We need substance. We need character. These traits are the building blocks of our Great Republic, and anyone wishing to be the Republican nominee for president must possess them in great quantities. We don't need another savior; we simply want a president.
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3)Calling things by their names
By Caroline B. Glick
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
Next month, the US's long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country. Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of US President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw on the US's hard won gains in that country. After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.
The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard's publication of an article entitled, "Defeat in Iraq: President Obama's decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters." The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan. The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the successful US-counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as "the surge," that former president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.
In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month's withdrawal. First they note that with the US withdrawal, the sectarian violence that the surge effectively ended will in all likelihood return in force. Iraq's Iranian-allied Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is purging the Iraqi military and security services and the Iraqi civil service of pro-Western, anti-Iranian commanders and senior officials. With American acquiescence, Maliki and his Shiite allies already managed to effectively overturn the March 2010 election results. Those elections gave the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi the right to form the next government.
Due to Maliki's actions, Iraq's Sunnis are becoming convinced they have little to gain from peacefully accepting the government.
The strategic implications of Maliki's purges are clear. As the US departs the country next month it will be handing its hard won victory in Iraq to its greatest regional foe - Iran. Repeating their behavior in the aftermath of Israel's precipitous withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are presenting the US withdrawal from Iraq as a massive strategic victory. They are also inventing the rationale for continued war against the retreating Americans. Iran's Hezbollah trained proxy, Muqtada al-Sadr has declared that US Embassy personnel are an "occupation force" that the Iraqis should rightly attack with the aim of defeating.
The US public's ignorance of the implications of a post-withdrawal, Iranian-dominated Iraq is not surprising. The Obama administration has ignored them and the media have largely followed the administration's lead in underplaying them.
For its part, the Bush administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.
US military officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded by Iran and Syria. But policymakers never took any action against either country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime's support for the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their actions.
As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki's pro-Iranian purge of the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama administration has effectively sided with America's foes, enabling Iranian-allied forces to take over the US-built, trained and armed security apparatuses in Iraq.
All of these actions are in line with the US's current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in ousting the US's most dependable ally in the Arab world, former president Hosni Mubarak. Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, (SCAF). Because SCAF is comprised of the men who served as Mubarak's underlings throughout his 30-year rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed to chaos and Islamic radicalism.
However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the military junta is much less able to keep Egypt's populist forces at bay.
Throughout Mubarak's long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak's ouster necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt. If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on Mubarak.
Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to the army's institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone presidential elections. Their moves provoked massive opposition from Egypt's now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they launched what they are dubbing "the second Egyptian revolution." And the US doesn't know what to do.
In late 2010, foreign policy professionals on both sides of the aisle in Washington got together and formed a group called the Working Group for Egypt. This group, with members as seemingly diverse as Elliott Abrams from the Bush administration and the Council on Foreign Relations and Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress chose to ignore completely the fact that the populist forces in Egypt are overwhelmingly jihadist. They lobbied for Mubarak's overthrow in the name of "democracy" in January and February. Today they demand that Obama side with the rioters in Tahrir Square against the military. And just as he did in January and February, Obama is likely to follow their "bipartisan" advice.
From Iraq to Egypt to Libya to Syria, as previous mistakes by both the Bush and Obama administrations constrain and diminish US options for advancing its national interests, America is compelled to make more and more difficult choices. In Libya, after facilitating Muammar Gaddafi's overthrow, the US is faced with the prospect of dealing with an even more radical regime that is jihadist, empowered, and already transferring arms to terror groups and proliferating nonconventional weapons. If the Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment acknowledge the hostile nature of the new regime and refrain from supporting it, they will be forced to admit they sided with America's enemies in taking down Gaddafi. While Gaddafi was certainly no Mubarak, at worst he was an impotent adversary.
In Syria, not only did the US refuse to take any action against President Bashar Assad despite his active sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, it failed to cultivate any ties with Syrian regime opponents. The US has continued to ignore Syrian regime opponents to the present day. And now, with Assad's fall a matter of time, the US is presented with a fairly set opposition leadership, backed by Islamist Turkey and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal, pro-American forces in Syria, including the Kurds, have been shut out of the post-Assad power structure.
And in Egypt, after embracing "democracy" over its ally Mubarak, the US is faced with another unenviable choice. It can either side with the weak, but not necessarily hostile military junta which is dependent on US financial aid, or it can side with Islamic extremists who seek its destruction and that of Israel and have the support of the Egyptian people.
How has this situation arisen? How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled "The Lost Decade."
Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after Sept. 11, 2001 to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.
The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn't want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world's hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.
For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left.
And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic - terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn't an enemy. It's just a tactic. And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.
The lion's share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn't want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after Sept. 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.
Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left's ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America's worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey's Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.
And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro-American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington's irresponsibility.
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
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4)The Simpletons
David Brooks, Thomas L. Friedman, and the banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry
By Matt Welch
That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, Current Affairs, 380 pages, $28
Consider for a moment the paradoxical pain of being a best-selling political pundit so successful that American presidents don’t just seek but heed your advice. You have lobbied in your columns for the commander in chief to deploy your signature catch phrases, and he has. You have, in times of both crisis and sloth, advocated robust federal action in the name of national “greatness,” and the people in power have mostly followed suit. You have been flattered by invitations to the White House and pecked at by lesser partisans, yet you’ve maintained your critical distance in the patriotic spirit of post-ideological problem solving. All this influence and success, and somehow the country still sucks.
“Are we going to roll up our sleeves or limp on?” an exasperated Thomas L. Friedman asked the nation in a September 20 New York Times column. Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, influential Iraq war supporter, champion of “green jobs” industrial policy, and backer of President Barack Obama’s public education initiatives, is threatening to secede from a status quo he helped create.
“Given those stark choices,” he wrote, “one would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that any serious plan must have: spending cuts, increases in revenues and investments in the sources of our strength. But that, alas, is not what we’re getting, which is why there remains an opening for an independent Third Party candidate in the 2012 campaign.”
These are glum times not just for the 23 million working-age Americans without steady jobs but for hyper-employed commentators who have built comparative fortunes whispering into and occasionally bending the world’s most powerful ears. “I’m a sap,” a morose-sounding New York Times columnist David Brooks confessed the day before Friedman’s outburst. “I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.” But now that the president had unveiled a dead-on-arrival, soak-the-rich jobs package in a televised address designed more to please his progressive base than to actually solve problems, even David Brooks—who in March 2010 deemed Obama “the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington”—was forced to admit the unbearable: “This wasn’t a speech to get something done.” But noble dreams die hard. “I still believe,” Brooks insisted, “that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems.”
Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail. On September 30, 2008, in a classic of the do-something genre, Brooks argued that the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be rammed through Congress over public objections because the federal government needed “to give people a sense that somebody was in charge, that something was going to be done.” Did that “something” involve buying up toxic assets? Introducing or relaxing certain banking regulations? Taking over or winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Not important. “What we need in this situation,” Brooks declared, “is authority.”
American discourse is saddled with a large and influential do-something school of political punditry, a cadre of pragmatists from Meet the Press to your local editorial board who are forever seeking to solve the country’s problems by transcending ideology, demanding collective citizen sacrifice, and—always—empowering authority. In their new book That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Friedman and Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum lament that people “in positions of authority everywhere have less influence than in the past,” due to a “corrosive cynicism” preventing “the collective action that is required.” America, David Brooks wrote in March 2010, “is suffering a devastating crisis of authority,” resulting in a “corrosive cynicism about public action.” The similarities are not accidental.
Brooks and Friedman may be the most prominent practitioners, but the do-something school is evident just about anywhere the political class is talking shop. Here is former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum at CNN.com on September 26, lamenting that the “old rules” of bipartisan cooperation “have broken down,” unlike those bygone days when “the imperatives of the Cold War inspired a spirit of deference to the president.” There is centrist Matt Miller at Washingtonpost.com the day before, writing an imaginary speech (a favored tactic of the do-something set) for an imaginary independent presidential candidate (ditto) who rejects “the Democrats’ timid half-measures and the Republicans’ mindless anti-government creed” in favor of “a bold agenda equal to the scale of our challenges.” That agenda is virtually indistinguishable from the Brooks/Friedman playbook: higher energy taxes, more money for infrastructure and schools, and national service for the young, all while somehow cutting government spending over the long term.
There are some obvious rejoinders to this fictitious excrescence of the “radical center” (Friedman’s preferred term). As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out in response to Miller, “many of those calling for a third party are refusing to reckon with an inconvenient fact: One of the two parties already occupies the approximate ideological space that these commentators themselves are describing as the dream middle ground that allegedly can only be staked out by a third party. That party is known as the ‘Democratic Party.’ ” By dreaming up a third way to deliver ideas and rhetoric already associated with Barack Obama, the centrists are making the implicit admission that the president is ineffectual in the face of GOP intransigence.
But there is an even less charitable explanation. Because do-something punditry inevitably appeals to whoever holds power—what president doesn’t want to rise above partisanship to get things done, particularly if the solution amounts to a blank check to government?—pragmatic centrism has been implemented to a much greater extent than any of the “rigid” ideologies it abhors, whether they be trade unionism, social conservatism, or across-the-board libertarianism. Put another way, we live in a David Brooks/Thomas L. Friedman world, but now that the results have come in they are trying to wash their hands of the whole experiment.
The Limits of Simplicity
Simply making fun of Thomas L. Friedman’s writing style is not enough to expose the pervasive temptation of pragmatic punditry. But it is important. “The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in a justly celebrated 2005 New York Press slam of Friedman’s bestseller The World Is Flat, “is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.” In a Wall Street Journal review of That Used to Be Us, Andrew Ferguson describes “being pelted with clumps of words that Thomas L. Friedman, alone among native English speakers, could have devised.”
What do such clumps look like? Try to make sense of this paragraph from a December 2010 column: “More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T. on a full scholarship and will be leaving them in a few months. What to do?” What indeed?
But Friedman didn’t earn his success by tapping into a mass market for mixed metaphors. Like David Brooks and the best from the do-something school, Friedman is an extremely gifted simplifier, boiling down complex phenomena into one-liners that you can’t quite get out of your head. Surely you’ve heard that “no two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other,” a clever 1996 insight that isn’t exactly true but close enough for government work. Friedman’s 1989 book of Middle East reporting, From Beirut to Jerusalem, remains the classic text for making shorthand sense out of geopolitics’ most hopelessly complicated problem. When Andrew Ferguson writes that “Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer,” it’s not just an insult.
Simplicity is great for depicting basic problems. That Used To Be Us, one of a spate of America-in-decline tomes to come out in 2011, correctly identifies many of the country’s most glaring ills: the lousy economy, runaway deficits, widespread political irresponsibility, gratuitous regulatory burdens, a labyrinthine immigration system, grossly underfunded retirement and medical promises, a public education system treading water, and so on. Matt Miller’s imaginary presidential candidate is right to point out that “neither of our two major parties has a strategy for solving our biggest problems,” especially the baby boomer entitlement time bomb. David Brooks’ pop sociology is especially effective at breaking down complex political trends into binary choices.
But clarity going down is not the same as coherence getting back up. Many intractable problems get that way because they’re hard to solve, because there are powerful interests with a vested stake against reform, or because the policies in question are cemented in place by the perennial political impulse to do something. That Used To Be Us starts off with a contrast between a gleaming new convention center in Tianjin, China, that was built in 32 weeks and a lousy D.C. Metro subway stop in Bethesda, Maryland, where “the two short escalators had been under repair for nearly six months.” Modern China—which has taken the role that Japan played for American declinists two decades ago—is all about bullet trains; modern America is all about potholes. That may sound like an invitation to critique transit spending efficacy and public-sector work rules in the United States, but it’s not; the authors insist that the difference in results is chiefly a question of will.
“The American political and economic systems, when functioning properly, can harness the nation’s talents and energy to meet the challenges the country faces,” Friedman and Mandelbaum write. But “America’s future cannot simply be a function of our capacity to do great things or our history of having done great things. It also has to be a function of our will actually to do those things again.…What the country needs most is collective action on a large scale.”
We never do hear precisely how it was that the annual expenditure for D.C.’s infrastructure—let alone the nation’s—proved insufficient for meeting demand or preventing disrepair. In fact, we don’t hear anything about that annual expenditure at all. Nor do we hear much about how President Obama has already been throwing scores of billions of dollars at infrastructure, particularly of the transportation variety, his inauguration. Instead of anything approaching specifics, Friedman and Mandelbaum simply declare that “to assure the nation’s economic future we will have to spend, more, not less, on some things: certainly infrastructure and research and development, and probably education as well.” Probably!
When details don’t matter, it’s easy to be dazzled by the politicians you’re trying to influence. Friedman and Brooks always have a nice word to say about the school-reform cred of both Education Secretary Arne Duncan (liberally quoted throughout That Used To Be Us) and his boss when it comes to making those tough post-ideological choices to improve our schools. “Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party,” Brooks wrote in March 2010. “In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools.”
It’s always nice when presidents give good speeches, which may be one reason why the do-something school is always volunteering to write them. But at the time Brooks was publishing those words the president already had a relevant track record of governance, one that included dumping an unprecedented $100 billion into the education status quo via the stimulus package alone, thus ensuring the exact opposite of the line Brooks swallowed: keeping failed teachers in failing schools. Obama had signed into law the euthanasia of Washington, D.C.’s school voucher program, violating a centrist-pleasing campaign pledge to make decisions based on science (the science in this case showed that the program was working). The president’s ballyhooed Race to the Top initiative, which incentivizes states to embrace charter schools and more closely link teacher evaluation to student performance, amounted to less than 5 percent of the education stimulus money.
Education is the most important of the “five pillars of prosperity” that constitute what Friedman and Mandelbaum call “the American formula” (which in turn is beset with “four major challenges,” which stem from failing to ask “the two questions that are crucial for determining public policy,” which doubtlessly trigger arbitrary number sets of their own). Education is the reason they most frequently cite for the recent economic growth of China, Singapore, and South Korea, which would certainly be news to the high school dropouts powering the entrepreneurial revolution in places like Wenzhou (See “China’s Black Market City,” page 24). Why, education is so important that the co-authors volunteered to write an imaginary letter from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama saying: “Today…more than ever before, our national security depends on the quality of our education system. That is why I don’t want to be secretary of state, Mr. President. Instead, I want to be at the heart of national security policy. I want to be secretary of education.”
With all that emphasis on education, particularly from two authors who made their careers talking about foreign policy (Mandelbaum is a Johns Hopkins University Sovietologist), you’d think there’d be some concrete, hardheaded proposals for overhauling a K–12 education system in which real spending per pupil has increased threefold in four decades. Instead, we get do something. “We do not know the exact mix of policies that is needed for ‘more’ education, a subject on which there are many views,” they write. “We leave to the education experts the definition of what is sufficient in all these areas to produce more education for all. We do, though, think we know what is necessary to produce what the country needs. We believe that six things are necessary.…” Thereafter tumbles a list that includes such content-free gems as “students who come to school prepared to learn, not to text.”
From Banality to Authoritarianism
Do-something punditry means almost never considering the possible benefits of getting the government out of the way of a given issue, since that would be “ideological” and require walking away from the world’s largest problem-solving tool. Pragmatism also means never having to say you’re sorry about the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation, the capture by industrialists of the regulators who were supposed to constrain them, or even the basic failure of government action to produce the promised results. By the time such flaws make front-page news, there is always a new crisis requiring urgent intervention. And if all else fails, you can blame it on the competence of the government that followed your advice.
Pragmatic problem solvers (including the vast majority of the nation’s newspaper editorial boards) were foursquare behind the invasion of Iraq. And if detail-free simplicity is inadequate to the current task of economic recovery, it was downright frightening in the service of banging the drums for a major war.
Friedman was among the most influential “liberal hawks” who gave non-Republican respectability to the idea that toppling Saddam Hussein was crucial to defeat Islamic terrorism in the wake of 9/11. On what would become a notorious Charlie Rose Show appearance in May 2003, he argued for the use of deadly force as a demonstration project to Islamists everywhere: “What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think…we care about our open society?…Well, Suck. On. This.’ That, Charlie, was what this war was all about.”
This kind of playground chest thumping was par for the course. David Frum, lately seen putting his shoulder on the wheel of a third-way political organization called No Labels, was at the time the war began attempting to purge the last intervention skeptics from the Republican Party. “They began by hating the neoconservatives,” Frum wrote in a National Review cover story titled “Unpatriotic Conservatives” in April 2003. “They came to hate their party and the president. They have finished by hating their country. War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen —and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.”
David Brooks at the time was withering in his contempt for those who lacked his interventionist conviction, writing in The Weekly Standard in March 2003 that “any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion—that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed—but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis. But those who actually have to lead and protect, and actually have to build one step on another, have to bring some questions to a close.”
In 2011 such do-something authoritarianism reappears in the national conversation whenever the subject moves to China. Friedman, for example, has expressed preference for China’s political system over America’s for years now. “There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today,” he wrote in September 2009. “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.…Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing.”
This was no one-off. On Meet the Press in May 2010, moments after complaining how the Internet can enable “a digital lynch mob” of people who disagree with you, Friedman fantasized about playing dictator: “What if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions.” That Used To Be Us, perhaps due to Mandelbaum’s more sober presence, takes pains to insist that “our problem is not China, and our solution is not China,” but the book’s very title comes from (fittingly enough) a Barack Obama quote fretting about China’s superior rail systems and supercomputers.
Not only does China offer a tempting (if illusory) vision of enlightened scientists routing around that messy democracy stuff; it also provides what Al Qaeda can no longer quite muster: a palpably dangerous competitor with which to scare complacent Americans into collective action. That’s not an exaggeration. “When the West won the Cold War, America lost the rival that had kept us sharp, outwardly focused, and serious about nation-building at home,” Friedman and Mandelbaum lament. “As the Cold War ended,” David Frum writes at CNN.com, “the party struggle intensified.” No wonder Matt Miller’s imaginary presidential candidate is on the case: “We can no longer allow China’s brazen currency manipulation—nor its routine theft of American intellectual property—to tilt the playing field unfairly against American jobs.”
Although younger than the authors under discussion, I am old enough to remember domestic politics during the Cold War, and I’m here to tell you that there was no political consensus. Americans were deeply, bitterly divided, particularly over how and even whether to prosecute the Cold War. Richard Nixon was made vice president due to his Cold War hawkery; John F. Kennedy then tried to out–Cold War him in 1960. There were hugely divisive and deadly wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Cold War affected nearly every presidential election from 1952 to 1988. Nostalgia for pre-1989 political comity is nostalgia for a country that never existed. And we saw under George W. Bush the many pitfalls of whipping up political consensus by demonizing a common enemy.
Perhaps strangest of all, Barack Obama is already on board this particular anti-China bandwagon and has been since long before taking the oath of office. He has even taken to using Friedman’s signature (and characteristically incoherent) line of “nation-building at home” in his stump speeches, although it did take Friedman 35 references across 15 columns to persuade White House speechwriters. What does a guy have to do to win the affection of pundits whose advice he has taken?
My Way, or the Third Way
This fall Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum, and Matt Miller were all talking about Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party “Bull Moose” run for president in 1912. (In fact, they were all paraphrasing the same Richard Hofstadter quote about how the role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.) This must have sounded like old hat to David Brooks, who during the 2000 presidential primary season was holding up T.R. and his relentless, independent-minded government activism as the model for John McCain (a suggestion that McCain, one of the most prominent do-something politicians in America, readily embraced). After losing to the more “humble” George W. Bush, Brooks and McCain were both licking their wounds in 2001, openly pondering Bull Moose–style defections from the GOP, when the planes struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon, giving America an urgent new task.
Five months later in The Weekly Standard, Brooks envisioned a “huge opportunity” to “create a governing Republican majority” under Bush, echoing “precisely the aggressive foreign policy and patriotic national service themes that John McCain struck in the 2000 primary season,” including “rogue-state rollback,” “nation-building,” and “a summons to national service.” President Bush, Brooks gushed, had finally “broken the libertarian grip on the GOP.” On the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention, Brooks performed an end-zone dance celebrating “the death of small-government conservatism,” arguing that Republicans now “must embrace” a Teddy Roosevelt–style “progressive conservatism” if they want “to become the majority party for the next few decades.” With two major Brooks-supported wars under its belt, along with a new prescription drug benefit, an important new federal education initiative, and an overall increase in government spending of more than 60 percent, you’d think that the co-author of “National Greatness Conservatism” would have expressed satisfaction with his handiwork.
Think again. “There are two major parties on the ballot,” Brooks wrote in August 2006, “but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.” Like Friedman’s “radical centrists,” Frum’s “No Labels” movement, Miller’s presidential independent, and other 2011 works of political fiction, Brooks’ McCain-Lieberman Party advocated both raising taxes and cutting benefits, maintaining America’s energetic foreign policy leadership in the world (especially in the Middle East), “invest[ing] in human capital so people can compete,” and above all returning to a kind of political “civility” and seriousness worthy of a great country. It’s the dream that will not die.
“Write it down: Americans Elect,” Friedman enthused in July, talking about another premature third-party movement. “What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life—remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.”
Back in reality, the only plausible independent presidential scenario in the 2012 race looks roughly like this: The Republicans nominate someone their own base distrusts and dislikes (call him “Mitt Romney”). The Tea Party and grassroots right grumbles about not having a choice. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) finishes a respectable third or even second place during the primary season, but along the way the GOP establishment trashes him and the sprawling, independent-bent political movement that has sprung up around him. Having no re-election to run for anymore, Paul decides to go rogue and run as an independent.
If the establishment centrists were at all serious about third party or independent runs, they would greet such a development with enthusiasm. But Paul is an ideologue, you see. He wants to apply his rigid libertarian philosophy to significantly scale back the federal government, instead of using flexible post-ideological pragmatism to give government more power.
On September 26, David Brooks pinned the blame for what he is now calling America’s “Lost Decade” on “the ideologues who dominate the political conversation” in the United States. “Orthodoxies,” he warned in his column, “take a constricted, mechanistic view of the situation. If we’re stuck with these two mentalities, we will be forever presented with proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand.”
Fortunately for Brooks—and unfortunately for us—there is a distinct third way. Though vague on details, it involves increased taxes (especially on energy), short-term spending boosts, long-term entitlement cuts, and roughly the same foreign policy commitments as today. It calls for renewed citizen engagement, a return to political civility, and a rejection of coarse cynicism. Better teachers, trained workers, and cleaner air. Although advocated by pundits from all over the traditional political spectrum, the program is remarkably uniform when it comes to giving the government more power. Just don’t call it ideological.
Editor in Chief Matt Welch is co-author (along with Nick Gillespie) of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America (Public Affairs).
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