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Sailing into a Storm?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

The last couple of months have been springtime in paradise for Republicans: the loveliest of all possible seasons. They have been watching two Democratic presidential candidates in an endless battle to destroy each other—a process that does not appear to enhance the chance that the eventual nominee will win in November.

A recent Gallup poll shows John McCain leading both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head matchup. All this before Republicans even begin publicizing the worst that can be said about either of two candidates whose alleged defects provide a supremely target-rich environment.

But it's easy to let the individuals involved obscure larger factors that may prove more important. In a hurricane, even handsome, well-built boats can end up underwater. And right now, the GOP looks as though it may be sailing into a perfect storm.

Currently, 69 percent of Americans disapprove of the way President Bush is doing his job. That is the highest disapproval rating since Gallup began polling 70 years ago—higher than Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon during Watergate, or Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.

Today, notes polling expert Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute, more Americans think the country is on the wrong track than at any time since the late 1970s—which set the stage for the Republican resurgence of 1980, led by Ronald Reagan. The sentiment is even more negative now than it was in 1992, when the GOP lost the White House. Some 63 percent see the Iraq war as a mistake.

Bush's troubles have sent voters fleeing from his party. In 2004, 47 percent of Americans leaned toward the Democratic Party, with 44 percent leaning Republican—a 3-point difference. Today, it's 51 to 38 in favor of the Democrats—a gap of 13 percentage points.

To win, McCain will have to pry away a lot of voters who currently find the GOP unappealing. Obama (or Clinton), by contrast, will have only to avoid alienating those who are already favorably inclined to a change.

Issue after issue also promises to hurt Republicans. Among the topics creating the most anxiety are the economy, domestic matters like health care and immigration, and Iraq. Of those, immigration is the only one that might not favor the Democrats.

Richard Norton Smith, a historian who has run the presidential libraries of Republicans Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, is pessimistic about the party's prospects. He thinks the correct analogy is not 1988 but 1920 or 1952—when an unpopular war and an equally unpopular president spelled doom for the party in the White House. He thinks 2008 is shaping up not only as a narrow defeat for the GOP but a decisive "repudiation."

Many Republicans see Barack Obama as the natural heir of George McGovern—an antiwar liberal with an avid but narrow base who is perfectly positioned to lose. They are also reminded of Michael Dukakis and his difficulty connecting with white males and working-class voters.

But Smith sees a big difference: In 1988, when Dukakis lost, the outgoing Republican president was popular, with an approval rating above 50 percent. Not so today.

Against trends like this, he strongly doubts that voters will put much weight on factors like Obama's associations with radical preachers or his flag-free lapel. Thanks to the Democratic contest, those matters have been fully aired, without fatal effect, and they are likely to sound stale and irrelevant by November.

In his view, the portents are all ominous for the Republican Party and its nominee. "Why do you think the race started so early? Why do you think turnout has been so high?" he asks. "A desire to put this chapter behind us."

The fallout is already apparent. In recent months, Republicans have lost two special elections to fill seats that had been GOP strongholds. Those shocks prompted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to warn that come November, his party faces the prospect of "a real disaster."

The bad news for Republicans is that objective factors are conspiring to produce a Democratic victory. The good news? If the Democrats can't win this year, they may never.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

How to Lose a War

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:00:00 EDT

When it comes to the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues, Republicans like to harken back to the stalwart presidents of the Cold War. John McCain has invoked Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as kindred spirits, and so has George W. Bush. Which raises the question: Why do they embrace those leaders while rejecting their policy?

The centerpiece of the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union was captured in a famous 1947 essay by American diplomat George Kennan, who rejected either war or retreat in favor of "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

Some conservatives, regarding this as appeasement, advocated "rollback" to liberate captive nations from oppression. But even resolute anti-communists like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon saw the risks and costs were too high. They kept troops to guard Western Europe, built a robust nuclear deterrent and employed prudent measures to block Soviet expansion. That was containment.

But in the months before the Iraq war, it became a dirty word. "Containment is not possible," President Bush insisted, "when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." The only remedy for such regimes lay in pre-emptive war. McCain agreed, saying the only option in Iraq was "disarmament by regime change."

Amid all the war hysteria, it was easy to forget containment worked against Stalin and Mao -- both unbalanced dictators with nuclear weapons. They were far more formidable tyrants with dreams of world domination. Yet we managed to preserve our security without pre-emptive war.

For that matter, containment had worked against Saddam Hussein. In the 12 years after the first Gulf War, we kept him in a box, where he was no threat to us or his neighbors. In 2002, he even had to accept the return of United Nations weapons inspectors -- who found no weapons of mass destruction because, thanks to our efforts, he had none.

But as Yale foreign policy scholar Ian Shapiro noted in his 2007 book "Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror" (just published in paperback), the Bush administration was dissatisfied. One reason was its unfounded certitude that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also complained that containing Iraq had cost a staggering $30 billion over those 12 years.

Today, that sounds like a bargain. The long-term cost of the Iraq war, according to an estimate by Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, will exceed $3 trillion -- or 100 times the cost lamented by Wolfowitz.
Ronald Reagan took a different approach. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he continued President Carter's covert aid to the rebels, but didn't send American troops. Likewise when a pro-Soviet regime gained power in Nicaragua. The key to containment was finding affordable means to constrain and weaken the enemy, without bleeding ourselves down in wars we didn't have to fight.

Our policy in Iraq has been just the opposite. And Iran could be the next mistake. McCain says Tehran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons -- which implies he would go to war to prevent it, no matter what the price in blood or treasure.

The claim is that the Iranians are too crazy to be deterred from using nukes against Israel or giving them to terrorist groups to use against us. One common trait of governments and their leaders is an overriding desire to survive. If Iranian nukes are ever used for aggression, the regime can be sure Iran will be, as Hillary Clinton so vividly put it, "obliterated."

Shapiro told me he sees no evidence that Clinton or Barack Obama would return to containment. But the challenges we face are likely to push them toward it. Those dilemmas, after all, have prompted a reconsideration by none other than President Bush.

One member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea, has acquired a nuclear arsenal. Instead of launching a pre-emptive strike, the Bush administration has chosen to 1) live with it if we have to, 2) negotiate with Pyongyang to give it up, and 3) maintain strong defenses in South Korea.

That route is plainly the least bad option toward North Korea. But don't dare call it containment. And don't get the idea it could ever work anywhere else.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

"Drop Dead Gorgeous—and Military Trained!"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Via the overheated commentary of Extreme Mortman comes this bizarre slow-news-day CNN Situation Room bit on how Israel (that 60-year-old!) is overhauling its image by having former military gals pose for Maxim magazine. "Israel is hip, sexy, and fun," says CNN:

Not sure if Fox News will counterblast with the girls of the PLO.

Gentle reader, does this news change your views on foreign aid?

Or does it merely convince you further that we're living in the Rapture and we don't even know it?

Putting Our Entitlements in Order

info@reason.com (Paul Wilner) — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Over the course of his career, George Shultz served as Secretary of Labor and Secretary of Treasury to Richard Nixon and Secretary of State to Ronald Reagan. Shultz's reputation for independence survived the Reagan era, in which he famously opposed the Iran-Contra adventure while maintaining credibility as a committed Cold Warrior. And as a strong critic of the war on drugs conducted by his former bosses (and every other recent American president): In a widely discussed 1989 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Shultz wrote, "We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalization of drugs."

More recently, he retained influence as the senior member of the "Vulcans,'' a group of policy advisors, including his protégée Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who helped identify George W. Bush as a rising political star who could lead the Republicans back to electoral victory in the post-Clinton era. He is still respected within the Bush 43 administration, even if one senses that, as a veteran internationalist, he might have preferred a less Lone Ranger-style of foreign policy.

An ex-Marine, Shultz is discreet about differences he may have with the Bush administration and was incensed at the group of generals and ex-generals who broke ranks not long ago to openly criticize former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (One wonders what his reaction will be to the book Rumsfeld is reportedly writing about his experiences in the administration.)

These days, the 87-year-old Shultz hangs his hat at Stanford University's Hoover Institution as the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow. As befits an elder stateman, he is turning his attention to some of the unsolved problems of our society, especially the looming wreck of federal entitlement spending. In a new book, Putting Our House In Order: A Guide to Social Security & Health Care Reform (W.W. Norton), co-written with fellow Stanford economics professor John B. Shoven, Shultz, outlines potential solutions to the Social Security and health-care messes.

Specific reforms Shultz and Shoven propose include changes in the indexing system of Social Security benefits, so that "the rate of increase over and above inflation is either eliminated or moderated," raising the age at which benefits would start, and creating individual accounts "with the possibility of an additional deduction on a mandatory or voluntary basis.'' They argue that a "Personal Saving Account plan would transfer a significant part of Social Security payments to a Personal Security Account system in which the amount of benefits would directly reflect the amount of contributions. This plan would likely increase national saving, which in turn would increase national income in the future.''

"Reform of these programs will not come easily,'' Shultz and Shoven write in their introduction. "To touch them, many politicians worry, is to touch a third rail. But well-documented projections of the costs of current programs show that inaction is simply not an option. Progress will be promoted by widespread realization of the depth of the problem and of the fact that workable options exist. In fact, the rigidity and stability of the programs are major parts of the problem. Everything about the U.S. economy is dynamic except its major entitlement programs. To serve their fundamental purposes, these programs must be modernized so that they are suitable for the twenty-first century.''

West Coast writer Paul Wilner, whose work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, barnesandnoblereview.com, and many other publications, talked to Shultz at the Hoover Institution in April. Comments can be sent to letters@reason.com.

reason: Some people go to Washington and get addicted to life there. But you've chosen to divide your time between San Francisco and Stanford. I guess staying back East was not for you?

George Shultz: When I'm in Washington, I like to be in the action. If I'm not in the action, I'd rather be somewhere else.

reason: You're still very much in the action, even from this remove. It was down here at Stanford, wasn't it, that you and others identified the political potential of the current occupant of the White House?

Shultz: He came here, and we had a nice day.

reason: It was more than a nice day, You helped identify him as a candidate who could successfully carry the Republican torch forward in the 2000 election...

Shultz: (Pause). He won.

reason: Twice. With the help of your protégée, Condoleezza Rice.

Shultz: My other protégé was Ronald Reagan. And Condi's a very good friend.

reason: What's your view of recent history, especially in Iraq? Do you think the current arrangement, with Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, is more workable, even just from a purely managerial standpoint, than what came before?

Shultz: They had good arrangements before....

reason: What do you think of the prospect of a McCain-Rice ticket?

Shultz: Well, she's kind of ruled it out.

reason: But if she were to call you for advice on the subject, what would you say?

Shultz: She's very capable and can do just about anything. But she's expressed some interest in returning to Stanford, and that's our expectation.

reason: You were identified in The New York Times recently as part of the foreign policy debate for the heart and soul of McCain.

Shultz: I didn't know I was going to be in that story, but I'm a supporter of his.

reason: Have you had a chance to discuss any of the ideas set forth in this book on health care and entitlement programs with him?

Shultz: I think he thinks of me as a foreign policy person. I saw him recently and gave him a copy of the book, so he may look at it.

reason: The subjects you discuss in it couldn't be more timely. But how do we get these programs under control. How would you rate the positions of the candidates?

Shultz: Clinton's plan, apparently, is to force people to pay for health insurance. Obama says that he thinks the reason many people don't have health insurance isn't that they don't want it, but that they can't afford it. So I tend to agree more with that. Anybody, Republican or Democrat, can adopt some of the solutions we propose. We believe that the Social Security issue can be resolved more readily and that health care will require intermediate steps.

reason: One of the specific suggestions you make is to remove health-care tax exemptions for businesses.

Shultz: We didn't suggest that—President Bush suggested that. We mentioned various suggestions, including that idea, Milton Friedman's plan, and (Democratic Congressman) Rahm Emanuel's plan. Many of the proposals are interesting, but they're quite radical, and we didn't think a radical plan would likely succeed. Social Security is a problem that can be solved. There are various ways to do it. But it ought to get done. Nevertheless, the health of the system depends on other factors. The bigger the economic pie, the easier it is to cut a slice from it.

reason: The argument being made by Elizabeth Edwards and other critics of Obama and McCain's plan is that if everyone isn't covered, the costs will just be passed on to consumers.

Shultz: We have a lot of history that if you order people to do something, it doesn't work out very well. Remember Prohibition?

reason: Yes, but there's also the history of the creation of Social Security and of Medicare, where people can't opt out of paying into the system.

Shultz: When Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security, in his wisdom, he said that the one thing it should not be is a welfare program and that we couldn't afford such an approach. We keep borrowing from the Social Security trust fund—the politicians can't seem to keep their hands off it.

We favor subsidizing existing spending, providing benefits for people 65 years old and older regardless of sex or prior medical conditions. But that's different from saying to you, if you're a healthy 25-year-old, that you have to buy insurance for everything. They want insurance against a catastrophic event—they don't want to cover acupuncture, or wigs, or all kinds of things that make it more expensive. So how do you bring that about? Provide an insurance policy for the 25-year-old that makes sense. I'm 87 years old. I don't want the same policy as a young man; I'm in a different position.

reason: So as a free-market advocate, you think competition would get costs down?

Shultz: If you're mandating things to people, you won't get lower costs.

reason: You and Shoven are at some pains to say you want to preserve the safety net by taking incremental steps.

Shultz: It's incremental, but it's bold—we have a lot of suggestions.

reason: You mentioned President Bush's efforts in this regard, but his attempts at reform came up against a stone wall of resistance.

Shultz: As did President Clinton's. There's a bipartisan recognition that this is a problem that needs to be solved, and a bipartisan recognition of the resistance to solving it.

reason: If the federal government won't do it, what about local communities? What do you think of Gov. Schwarzenegger's and Mayor Newsom's health-care proposals?

Shultz: We know and like them both. The governor's proposal hasn't gone anywhere, so there's no need for me to talk about that. What's interesting about Newsom's proposal is the idea of clinics where ordinary health care needs can be addressed inexpensively.

reason: As you watch the deficit increase—along with the costs of funding the war—is your feeling one of, "A plague on both their houses?"

Shultz: I haven't seen any lack of appetite for more domestic spending programs. The last time anything substantive got accomplished [on Medicare reform] was when two Irishmen [Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill], who didn't agree on much else but knew this was a big problem, could get together over drinks and work to help fix it and get the changes through Congress.

reason: You mentioned Prohibition—I know you've taken a somewhat controversial stand for the legalization of recreational drugs.

Shultz: I don't think of them as "recreational.'' They do enormous harm, and we should do everything we can to prevent people from taking them. But the current system isn't working.

reason: You write in Putting Our House in Order about the successes of our economic system. As you point out: "Over the last 150 years, the U.S. economy has become increasingly stable. The economy was in recession nearly 45 percent of the time during the last half of the nineteenth century, 33 percent in the first half of the twentieth century and 16 percent in the last half of the twentieth century. In the post-World War II period, the occurrence of down quarters has diminished sixteen in the years between 1946 to 1965 to fifteen from 1966 to 1985 to just five since then. Meanwhile, even as the economy has grown to Herculean size, its rate of growth has continued to be robust.''

Despite the threats of terrorism, entitlement costs and the current downturn in the economy, are we better off today than we were 20 years ago?

Shultz: The economy has been very successful, but there are other problems, so we have to work on them.

reason: Are entitlements a bigger problem than terrorism?

Shultz: I don't see how you get very far by comparing them. Terrorism is a gigantic problem.

reason: Which is a greater threat to our way of life, though?

Shultz: Well....Entitlement spending is something we have to face up to.

Flight of the Neocons

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn, New York: Doubleday, 336 pages, $26

In 1996 Norman Podhoretz, ex-friend of the left and high priest of neoconservatism, wrote an elegiac essay in Commentary about the movement he had helped to found. Neoconservatism was dead, he argued, but not of intellectual exhaustion or mass ideological defection. It was a victim of its own success. What had previously been a movement of political outsiders—former socialists ambling through “the middle of their journey,” in Lionel Trilling’s phrasing—was now well represented in the corridors of power: on Capitol Hill, in influential think tanks, on the Sunday chat show circuit. It was at last time to shed the neo, to announce the movement’s assimilation into the conservative mainstream. What once were ideological heresies had now become widely accepted banalities.

In They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the conservative journal The National Interest, retraces the history of Podhoretz’s movement through its wilderness years to its open embrace of the Republican Party and, post-Iraq, its ignominious decline. Heilbrunn has roots in the movement himself—indeed, The National Interest was founded as a foreign policy–focused companion to the neocon journal The Public Interest. Heilbrunn’s breezy, crisply written history eschews the rancor of many recent discussions of neoconservatism in favor of a largely dispassionate account, tracing the movement’s development from its beginnings in the far-left milieu of 1930s and ’40s New York to its death, or grievous wounding, in the White House of George W. Bush.

Those introduced to the vagaries of neoconservative theory after 9/11—that is, most ordinary Americans and nearly every European editorial writer—often overlook the fact that Bush hadn’t paid much heed to the neocons prior to September 11, 2001, and that the movement’s prospects early in the new century had been quite grim. Indeed, it appeared to be in its death throes. As the 1980s drew to a close and the Soviet Union’s desiccated empire finally dissolved, neoconservatism lost its unifying enemy. But then the terror attacks on New York and Washington, as the cliché goes, changed everything.

Heilbrunn’s adumbration of neoconservatism’s left-wing provenance makes for compelling reading—and acts as a useful field guide to the current schisms on the right. It is an exaggeration to suggest, as many pundits have, that the neocon is merely a modified Trotskyist, but many of its intellectual architects did begin their careers on the radical left. Elliott Abrams, the Iran-contra veteran who served as special assistant to the president during George W. Bush’s first term, attended the radical Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City as a child and graduated to membership in the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). The American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik was YPSL’s chairman from 1968 to 1973 and later advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign on foreign policy issues. Onetime leftists such as Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and countless other “New York intellectuals,” disgusted by the cognoscenti’s ambivalence toward communism, migrated, at varying speeds and to varying degrees, rightward. But not every neocon emerged from the radical left, and not all of them landed in the GOP. Neoconservatism also enchanted disaffected liberals such as longtime New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who never abandoned the Democratic Party (although he did ultimately break with neoconservatism).

Indeed, most early neocons had little interest in changing allegiances from the Democratic Party. “There was, and remains,” Heilbrunn writes, “a kind of aesthetic revulsion to the Republican Party amongst liberal hawks.” The neoconservative hatred of Richard Nixon—his policy of détente was, they argued, suicidal—provided ammunition for their (long since abandoned) contention that America’s best hope for a vigorous foreign policy was the Democrats. They did back Nixon against George McGovern in 1972, but afterward Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walt Rostow, Daniel Bell, and other liberal hawks took out an ad in The New York Times urging the Democratic Party to return to “the [foreign policy] tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.”

Heilbrunn quotes the late William F. Buckley, founder of National Review and doyen of the traditional conservatives, on the neocons’ fetishization of the Democratic senator and liberal hawk Henry “Scoop” Jackson. “The neos wanted a Democrat to enshrine,” Buckley said. “They found someone who was pretty much a welfarist but was anti-Soviet.” The latter position was pre-eminent, the former tolerable. Understanding the widely held misperception of the neocon as a sort of ultra-conservative Republican, Heilbrunn asks the reader to “remember that the neoconservatives did not oppose the idea of welfare itself.”

The neoconservative house organ of the 1970s, The Public Interest, was founded in part, Buckley later wrote, because Irving Kristol “had deemed National Review…too right-wing.” In 1976 Kristol denounced the antipoverty programs birthed by LBJ’s Great Society, but he suggested that the money not be taken out of government hands and instead be used to achieve “some form of national health insurance.” As late as 1993, Kristol would advocate a “conservative welfare state” that, for instance, would “leave Social Security alone—except for being a bit more generous, perhaps.” In the 1980s, like most other neocons, Kristol did embrace supply-side economics, then fashionable among Reaganites, although it is unclear how much of the Arthur Laffer gospel he actually believed.

(In the ’90s, he would express regret over his support for the theory that slashing taxes leads to greater revenues.)

All this leftover leftism made for an occasionally awkward integration into the right. The neocons had been focused primarily on the evils of the Soviet empire, having little time for the free market. As Podhoretz noted in his obituary for neoconservatism, “The neoconservatives did not love commerce, or anything else, more than they loathed Communism.” In other words, it was an ideology short on classical liberalism and limited government—both at least theoretically conservative principles—and long on “rollback” and exporting democracy.

A year after Podhoretz’s self-congratulatory trauermarsch, Bill Kristol, son of neocon founding father Irving Kristol and editor of The Weekly Standard, and David Brooks, also of The Weekly Standard, took to the pages of The Washington Post to inaugurate “National Greatness conservatism.” Critics grumbled that it was simply neoconservatism rebranded. Kristol and Brooks called for a muscular foreign policy and argued that the GOP message of limited government fell far short of a coherent governing philosophy; the Republicans, they wrote, must reconcile themselves to a certain amount of government intervention. The liberal columnist E.J. Dionne was ebullient, proclaiming that with the advent of National Greatness conservatism, “The era of bashing government is ending.” (Proving Podhoretz’s point about the mainstreaming of neoconservatism, both Kristol and Brooks have since matriculated to the New York Times opinion page.)

Libertarians and small-government conservatives were appropriately aghast. Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel wrote a scathing response with Washington Post economics columnist James Glassman, dismissing National Greatness as “wistful nationalism in search of a big project.” The duo opined that “the Cold War is over. So what’s a national-greatness government to do? It could go looking for the next war, hope for another Great Depression, or sponsor a trip to Neptune.” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg hissed in May 2001 that the younger Kristol’s project, by then four years old, was “an allegedly ‘conservative’ cause.” Goldberg was still irritated at the tenor of Kristol’s support of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2000 presidential primaries. “During the campaign,” he wrote, “Kristol suggested more than once that to be a Bush supporter was tantamount to being a hostage to evil corporations that put profit above patriotism.” (It was a point McCain would revisit during this campaign when he told Mitt Romney that he served in the Navy “out of patriotism, not for profit.”)

To Heilbrunn, the other important characteristic of neoconservatism is its Jewish roots. In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece debunking myths of neoconservatism, Heil-brunn pooh-poohed the commonly held idea that “neocons are Israeli lackeys” as pure “bunk,” noting that, if anything, they are often further to the right than the Likud Party. But in They Knew They Were Right, Heilbrunn says neoconservatism “is as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentments and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas.” This is a debatable point, but one that doesn’t necessarily contradict his dismissal of the oft-cited Likud-Commentary axis.

Many of neoconservatism’s heaviest hitters are, as is often pointed out, gentiles, and many Jewish intellectuals were, and are, repelled by neoconservatism. Nevertheless, Heilbrunn argues plausibly that the movement was really born “with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the 1967 war, and the rise of black anti-Semitism in the United States.” The Six Day War, he writes, “gave the first real impetus to the birth of the modern neoconservative movement.” The idea that the world would sit idle as Jews were again attacked—recall that Washington’s unswerving support for Israel began only after that war—galvanized the neocons. Neither did it go unnoticed that the Soviet Union, one of the first countries to recognize Israel at the United Nations in 1949, was now actively assisting both Arab dictatorships and Palestinian terror groups.

The invocation of the Holocaust would be a frequent refrain—and a point of frequent criticism. Neoconservatives constantly cited the Shoah as a reductio ad Hitlerum debating tactic. In 1976 a neocon lobby, the Committee on the Present Danger, stated that the Soviet arms buildup was “reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s.” Evoking the mass murder of European Jewry, Norman Podhoretz warned in The New York Times against renewed complacency, “For if for the second time in this century, the world were to stand by while a major Jewish community was being destroyed, it would be hard to evade the suspicion that an irresistible will was at work to wipe every last Jew off the face of the earth, to make this planet entirely Judenrein.” Three decades later, in 2004, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter hyperbolically announced in The Weekly Standard that “the world’s indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to Hitler.” Heilbrunn could have also included a more recent reference: Podhoretz’s now-notorious essay arguing the “case for bombing Iran,” published last year in Commentary, which compared Israel’s current situation vis-à-vis Iran to Czechoslovakia’s forced immersion in Hitler’s Reich. In a brief debate with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on PBS after the piece was published, Podhoretz invoked Hitler four times.

Heilbrunn demonstrates that for the first generation of neoconservatives, the motive for embracing a hawkish foreign policy was this fear of resurgent Nazism. For the second generation, it was an Israel encircled by hostile neighbors, and a visceral dislike of the New Left, parts of which saw the Jewish state through the prism not of victimology but of colonialism. For the newest generation of neocons it was the mass murder of 9/11 and its attendant effects on the so-called Arab street.

In this latest iteration, Heilbrunn convincingly argues, neoconservatism would destroy itself. The Bush administration, which campaigned in 2000 on a policy of nonintervention abroad, had no intention of embracing the neoconservative outlook until the terror attacks of 2001. Condoleezza Rice, Heilbrunn writes, “hewed to her stated course of leaving nation building to the Democrats.” Some neocons shared this distaste for aggressively exporting democracy. In her famous 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which blasted President Carter’s “human rights”–centered foreign policy and argued for toleration of certain America-friendly, anti-communist authoritarian regimes, the neocon heroine Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that “the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances…is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government.”

Kirkpatrick strongly supported the “rollback” policy Reagan adopted toward the Soviet Union, but she surely would have balked if, instead of merely stunting Soviet imperial advances, the United States attempted to build mini-Americas in every liberated land. “There is no inherent or historical ‘imperative,’ ” Kirkpatrick would write during the Iraq War, “for the U.S. government to seek to achieve any other goal—however great—except as mandated by the Constitution or adopted by the people through elected governments.” There is, after all, a significant difference between assisting in the abrogation of the Soviet empire and a quixotic policy of democratization.

It also worth noting, as Heilbrunn does, that the Reagan nostalgia of many neoconservatives requires a selectively deployed memory and a distorted reading of history. Reaganism held much promise for the neocon movement, though most neocons soon felt betrayed by the president’s nuanced handling of nuclear disarmament. Midge Decter declared herself “disgusted” with the administration’s willingness to sit down with the Soviet Union. Norman Podhortez called Reagan’s refusal to send ground troops into Nicaragua “appeasement” and was enraged by the administration’s “half-hearted” support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the president’s apparent volte-face on arms control.

Heilbrunn recognizes that, from Nixon to Bush, the neocons actually have angered the right far more than the left. For many libertarians, paleoconservatives, and Reagan Republicans, this is certainly true. The American Conservative, a magazine that Heilbrunn misidentifies as beginning operations in the late 1990s (it was founded in 2002), is a case in point, launched in large part as a reaction against the neocon rebirth. It would have been helpful and interesting had Heilbrunn explored these internecine battles in greater detail.

To Heilbrunn, the legacy of neoconservatism is one of long-term disaster for the Republican Party, an ideological digression that “quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades.” This sounds right. The surge has undeniably mitigated the violence in Iraq, but it seems likely that—barring a continued military presence in Iraq for “100 years,” as John McCain posited—the neocons’ nation-building project will be a millstone around the movement’s neck. The Iraq fiasco will also obscure the fact that many of their Cold War–era arguments with the left were prescient. They were right about the ineffectiveness of Great Society welfare programs and about the colossal evil of the communist bloc.

But the failures of the neoconservative approach to both foreign and domestic policy are recognized even by consummate neocon David Frum, partial author of the infamous “axis of evil” State of the Union speech. In his recently released book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, Frum concedes Heilbrunn’s point that a conservative regeneration is needed after the Bush administration’s big spending and disastrous foreign policy. While Frum is upbeat about conservatism’s prospects, Heilbrunn ends They Knew They Were Right on an ominous note: “These reckless minds…aren’t going away. Quite the contrary.”

Perhaps. But unless Iraq becomes an Arab version of Switzerland in the next decade, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.

Al Qaeda No. 2 Slags U.S., Iran, Sunnis, Starbucks Coffee

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:35:00 EDT

From the AP, via the Cincy Enquirer:

Al-Qaida's No. 2 said in an audiotape released Friday that the United States will lose whether it stays in Iraq or withdraws, and he sneered that President Bush just wants to pass the problem on to his successor....
"The truth is that if Bush keeps all his forces in Iraq until doomsday and until they enter hell, they will only see crisis and defeat by the will of God," said al-Zawahri, the deputy of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.
"If the American forces leave, they will lose everything. And if they stay, they will bleed to death," he said....
He said Tehran "has clear goals, which are the annexation of southern Iraq and the east of the Arabian Peninsula" as well as strengthening ties to its followers in southern Lebanon.
He said that if Iran achieves its goals, "this will add oil to the fire which is already ablaze. This will explode the situation in an already exploding region."

The tape, which is titled "Five Years of the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by Tyrants," couldn't be verified but the AP noted it "the logo of al-Qaida's media wing," for what that's worth. Al-Zawahiri also trashed Iraqi Sunnis who created "Awakening Councils" and joined up with American forces.

More here.

What say you, Hit & Runners? Is A-Z right that U.S. options are all bad? That God is on al Qaeda's side? That Iran is on the march regionally? That the title of this audiotape sounds like a track from Love's Forever Changes? And shouldn't he be asking whether al Qaeda is bleeding to death in Iraq and elsewhere?

Same As It Ever Was

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On March 28, the United Nations Human Rights Council elected, by unanimous vote, a special rapporteur on the "situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." The nominee, Richard Falk, a veteran political activist and emeritus professor of law at Princeton University, was opposed by Israel for, among other statements, equating the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Nazi Holocaust. According to a spokesman for Israeli's foreign ministry, Falk will not be allowed through passport control in Tel Aviv.

"This is a very outrageous statement to us and a personal insult to every Israeli," said spokesman Arye Mekel. "How could he then come up with an objective conclusion about what Israel does or doesn't do in Gaza?"

To the Israelis, Falk's appointment is but another indication that the Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which replaced the corrupt United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 2006, amounts to little more than a new acronym obscuring old anti-Israel bias. When the UNCHR was disbanded, The New York Times called the organization a "disgrace," conceding that, on this one point, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton was undeniably "right." In assembling the replacement body, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the new council would provide the "United Nations the chance—a much-needed chance—to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world." The UN-HRC, he claimed, "will breathe new life into all our work for human rights."

So has the UN-HRC purged itself of its political biases? Has it, at long last, expelled human rights violators from its ranks? Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Human Rights Watch's Peggy Hicks surveyed the recent record of the revamped council with dismay: "In its first year, the council shied away from taking action on most human rights crises, dropped its scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan, and managed to condemn Israel's human rights record without addressing violations by Hezbollah and Palestinian armed groups."

The nomination of Richard Falk is further evidence of UN backsliding in its commitment to fairly scrutinizing human rights. Not only has Falk served in a similar role in the past—he was on a 2001 special panel investigating Israeli human rights violations, suggesting that UN-HRC is recruiting from the old UNCHR pool—but his record is considerably worse than the recent news reports would suggest.

For instance, in 1979, not long after the inauguration of Iran's totalitarian and theocratic "revolution," Falk, then chairman of something called U.S. Citizens Concerned about Freedom in Iran, was granted space on The New York Times opinion page to shill for the incoming government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A month prior, Falk had flown to Paris with his comrade Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and inveterate friend of dictators, to discuss "social justice" (Clark's phrase) with the then-exiled religious leader. Upon returning, Clark told The Washington Post that he was "deeply impressed by the nature and depth and purpose of the movement in Iran that has established the opportunity for a new freedom."

By the time Falk published his impressions of the Paris pilgrimage, the Ayatollah's gang of fundamentalist squadristi—officially known as "secret revolutionary tribunals"—was already meting out executions with little concern for due process. Nevertheless, in his Times opinion piece, Falk upbraided President Jimmy Carter for "associating [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism," and declared that "the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude religious prejudices seems certainly and happily false." Indeed, "his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."

This was too much for the Times' preeminent liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, who ripped Falk's column as "outstandingly silly." It was clear to those not blinded by ideology, Lewis wrote, that the "Ayatollah has set out, without equivocation or disguise, to turn the clock back and give Iran a theocratic regime." With hindsight, it is perhaps tempting to see Lewis's column as prescient, and Falk as merely a naïve, anti-Shah activist duped by the regime's unsophisticated propaganda apparatus. But as contemporaneous news accounts make clear, the theocratic and dictatorial character of the Khomeini clique was widely acknowledged by Middle East observers well before the hostage crisis.

Falk's conception of human rights—remember, this is what he is tasked to monitor for the UN—is also colored by his warm feelings toward Tehran. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, noted in 2000 that "The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that ‘Islam' is entitled to have its own 'civilizational approach' to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West."

But this is small beer compared to Falk's latest intellectual pursuit. In 2004, Falk wrote the introduction to The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a book arguing that the American government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the vast trove of 9/11 "truth" material available in print and online, it was Griffin, Falk wrote in his foreword, who "has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account." For Griffin's latest book, Debunking the 9/11 Debunkers, Falk provided a dust jacket endorsement: "David Ray Griffin has established himself—alongside Seymour Hersh—as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths."

As media coverage of Falk's nomination has metastasized, it has unfortunately obscured news of UN-HRC's nomination of the Swiss socialist Jean Ziegler to the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. A brief recapitulation of Ziegler's qualifications: In 1996, he defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy not only on free speech grounds—an admirable position, after all—but further celebrated his supposed scholarship. "All your work as a writer and philosopher," Ziegler wrote, "attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time." He lauded the Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, a leader who "has history and morality with him." He offered his "total support for the Cuban revolution." He recently told a Lebanese newspaper the he "refuse[d] to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national movement of resistance."

Then there's Ziegler's friendship with Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi. In 1989, according to a report in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (one that confirms research done by UN Watch), Ziegler helped establish the Kaddafi Prize for Human Rights. In 2002, Ziegler himself received the prize, which he shared with, among others, Roger Garaudy. Previous recipients include Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and Hugo Chavez.

Outside Turtle Bay, it is obvious that those who believe the 9/11 attacks were a government sponsored "false flag" operation and who believe in the moral probity of Kaddafi bequeathing cash prizes to serial human rights abusers have no business adjudicating human rights violations at the United Nations. In 2006, the current administration was widely criticized for opposing the establishment of the UN-HRC; the United States was the only industrialized country, besides Israel, to oppose its creation. In light of the appointment of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler, it is similarly obvious that this was the correct decision.

While it is gratifying that the commission that long provided political cover for vile and undemocratic regimes such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Libya was publicly disgraced and dismantled, it is a disheartening, though utterly predictable, that its replacement is following in its footsteps.

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

War Is the Health of the Economy

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:28:00 EDT

Hyper-influential foreign policy intellectual establishmenteer Frederick Kagan has a long new piece in the National Review attacking, um, "hyper-sophisticates of the American foreign-policy and intellectual establishment." Or at least, the ones who aren't named Kagan.

One of his rebuttals to critics of the Kagans' War is sure to win over you FDR fanboys out there:

Modern economics has long understood that the notion of a one-for-one guns-versus-butter trade-off is simply wrong. A high proportion of money spent on defense goes back into the U.S. economy in the form of salaries paid to the more than 5 million Americans employed directly or indirectly by the Defense Department, and payments to the defense industry and the long and complex supply chains from which they draw their raw materials. Military spending has traditionally been a form of economic stimulus, and wars more commonly end recessions or depressions than start them.

Whole Kagger here; thanks to commenter Don for the link. And for something completely different, a reminder to check out Veronique de Rugy's cover story from reason's May issue. Excerpt:

How much money is $1 trillion? Enough to pay for the entire 1976 federal budget, adjusted for inflation. Enough to write a check for $37,500 to every Iraqi man, woman, and child. Enough to buy 169,492 Black Hawk helicopters, or 455 stealth bombers. Enough, in nominal terms, to pay for the entire federal government from 1789 to 1957. And it's 10 times more than what specialists predict it would take to eradicate malaria once and for all.

To distract people from the real price tag of a two-front war, the president and Congress have used an unprecedented and fiscally irresponsible budgetary trick: a series of "emergency" supplemental spending bills totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. This scheme has allowed them not only to hide the costs of the conflicts but also to avoid painful budget choices while funneling billions of dollars in unvetted goodies to favored interest groups.

No miracles in Cana

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A determined refrain heard among those thinking about or dealing with the Middle East is that the Gordian knot of the region is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cut it and conflict will recede everywhere, because the frustrations engendered by Arab-Israeli animosity will evaporate.

Maybe. The Bush administration partly adopted that logic several months ago when it sponsored a regional peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. President George W. Bush promised that a final agreement would be signed between Israelis and Palestinians before he leaves office in January. Some don't buy into that deadline; many accuse Washington of being insincere in its efforts. But the real question is whether the United States can actually do anything when it comes to altering the outcomes.

The Palestinians complain that the Bush administration leans too heavily in Israel's favor, and is therefore not a credible mediator. Most egregiously, the U.S. is allowing Israel to create facts on the ground in Jerusalem and the West Bank, complicating prospects for peace. As the Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri has written: "There is now only one real test of progress, or criterion of political seriousness, in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the short term: Can the United States make Israel stop expanding its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories? If not, talk of peace is a cruel hoax that will only raise and then dash expectations, leading to unknown consequences when the backlash occurs."

The Israeli argument is that the Palestinians, divided between Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, pose a persistent security threat to Israel. Unless there is a Palestinian interlocutor who can guarantee a positive outcome in negotiations, there is little need to offer vital concessions at present. The Palestinians respond that such an attitude only strengthens Hamas by discrediting the Palestinian Authority—which supports a peace deal with Israel—making a resolution even less probable. The Israelis come back that if the Palestinian Authority is so frail, then Israel has even less of an incentive to negotiate. And on and on the exchange goes, descending into proliferating circles of disputation—all of it very logical, all of it tightening further the Gordian knot.

But what can the United States do? The reality is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so replete with minefields that even a concerted American push would almost certainly fail in the end.

Yet no one can deny that there is a need to break out of the sterile cycle of rhetoric afflicting Palestinians and Israelis alike. Israel's obtuseness in dealing with the Palestinians, its uninterrupted expansion of settlements, and its reluctance to dismantle even those settler outposts successive governments have declared illegal, has strengthened its most dedicated enemies. Yet no Israeli government today is likely to survive the kind of concessions needed to revive the Palestinian Authority. At the first sign of dramatic change, the right-wing parties, perhaps even cabinet ministers, would oppose major concessions. This would likely lead to early elections that could bring about the victory of Likud, which is even less enthusiastic about giving up land. We would soon be back where we started. But then even the ruling Kadima and Labor parties don't believe in the Palestinian Authority enough to conduct serious business with it.

On the Palestinian side, the situation is even more dysfunctional. The Palestinian leadership is divided between two rival governments, one dominated by Fatah, the other by Hamas, each claiming legitimacy. The president, Mahmoud Abbas, refuses to speak to Hamas unless the Islamist movement first reverses its takeover of Gaza last summer. Yet Abbas' control over armed Palestinian groups, even those opposed to Hamas, is tenuous. The international community, particularly the United States, supports the Palestinian Authority, but all that does is discredit Abbas in the eyes of his own people, because such support has not even allowed him to end Israel's physical and economic strangulation of Gaza. Everyone regards Abbas as weak, so that now even Western pundits, former officials, and think-tank mavens are calling increasingly on Israel and the international community to talk to Hamas—a step that would all but destroy what remains of the Palestinian Authority

The thing is, Abbas happens to be the one Palestinian partner willing to give up land to achieve a mutually acceptable peace pact with Israel. Hamas has no such intention and has never committed publicly to the idea. However, this hasn't prevented Israel from taking measures that, intentionally or not, have facilitated the emergence of an Islamist mini-state in Gaza, headed by a movement that considers armed struggle against Israel a quasi-religious duty. In fact, Hamas' charter tells us "that the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf [religious endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day."

The Islamists believe history is on their side, and see a region shaping up in their favor. In Egypt, the government faces a potent and rising challenge from the Muslim Brotherhood, as does the monarchy in Jordan. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is deployed along Israel's northern border with tens of thousands of rockets in its arsenal. Hamas, observing the heightening of contradictions all around, but also sensing that it may be close to overwhelming its rivals within Palestinian society, feels it can wait Israel out and one day push for victory in collaboration with its allies elsewhere. The movement's charter also outlines steps toward this end by asking "Arab countries surrounding Israel...to open their borders to the fighters from among the Arab and Islamic nations so that they could consolidate their efforts with those of their Muslim brethren in Palestine."

Faced with this mess, the Bush administration has few ways to succeed. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is today a perfect storm of unfeasible diplomacy. No one wants to give up the fight, because a vacuum may be far worse than keeping up some kind of dialogue, whatever the results; but no one has much of a clue about how to reach the endgame either.

When in a stalemate, the theory goes, try something new—anything. Take the idea of talking to Hamas, now all the rage. No one has defined what Israel or the international community should talk to Hamas about, let alone what Hamas would agree to discuss, given that the movement refuses to even recognize Israel's right to exist. So, the prevailing outlook is that Israel and Hamas should avoid the matter of recognition now and agree to a long-term truce, allowing a revived peace process to kick in. But giving precedence to the gesture of talking over the substance of recognizing the other party means that Hamas has everything to gain from continuing to deny recognition. The signs are that it hopes to do just that while imposing a ceasefire during which it could rout its Palestinian foes and rearm for a final showdown with Israel in future decades.

How can the U.S. address all this? Trying to stifle Hamas isn't working. Talking to the movement will go nowhere, but will kill Abbas politically. Forcing Israel to make serious land concessions would bring down the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—to be replaced by one bound to be even more intransigent. And expecting the Palestinian Authority to impose its will on all Palestinian factions is laughable. So the short answer is that the U.S. has little to offer any of the parties. Blame Bush for many things; blame him for acting too late on the Israeli-Palestinian front. But don't seriously expect him to produce a miracle.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon

McCain's Cheap Dates

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

John McCain has two fundamental and conflicting challenges in the national election: 1) Rally disaffected Republicans to his side, particularly libertarians, social cons, war-skeptics, immigration restrictionists, and those who he has personally pissed off over the years; and 2) maintain his attractiveness to independents, moderate Democrats, and loyalists to whichever of the two Dem candidates gets croaked in the primaries.

Problem #1 will largely take care of itself. Merely by pointing out the Democrats' leftward drift on economics, McCain will win back many disgruntled fiscal conservatives. I'm sure he'll nominate as veep someone sufficiently young and conservative in a way McCain is not. And most importantly, the dwindling ranks of true-blue Republicans don't require that loud of a dog whistle (Supreme Court! George McGovern!) to get back on the bus. To watch that process unfold in real time, keep reading former lead McCain-basher Hugh Hewitt now that his Mormon isn't headed for the White House.

That leaves Door #2 as the main focus of McCain's attention. Here, he has two huge vulnerabilities: 1) Much of his likeability stems from that enduring image as straight-talker, which gives indie-leaning voters seven long months of flip-floppery and absolutist statements to learn that this image is a lie and 2) he wrapped up the Republican nomination largely through by winning with 2-1 ratios among voters who hate the war and hate George W. Bush. Eventually, the majority of Americans who are weary of the Global Cop act are going to realize that McCain is a more enthusiastic interventionist and committed benevolent-imperialist than his predecessor, whose miserable unpopularity is due in no small part to his activist foreign policy. Thus it becomes crucial for McCain to distance himself from Bush on foreign affairs, preferably in a way that changes the subject from his own interventionism.

That was the political backdrop to McCain's Major Address on Foreign Policy last week in Los Angeles, which campaign staff busily telegraphed to a willing press corps as an important distancing-from-Bush moment. Judging by Davids Brooks and Broder, not to mention this remarkably biased news story in the Washington Post...mission accomplished! So how did McCain, in the words of establishmentarian-in-chief Broder, signal "a vastly different approach from President Bush's [...] that might heal the wounds left here at home and abroad by the past seven years"? It's a thin reed, but here ya go:

1) He mouthed the magical three-syllable phrase: "I hate war." Uttered, needless to say, "as only a man who has experienced its horrors can do," according to Broder.

It was due to such pious and pithy protestations—as opposed to, say, McCain's long, specific and never-withdrawn doctrine of "rogue-state rollback"—that the Des Moines Register concluded McCain would be "reluctant to start" war. Unless you are the cheapest of cheap dates, or just so predisposed toward the guy that you can't see straight, it should take more than three words to disprove a totally consistent decade-plus record of hawkish interventionism and dependable boots-on-the-groundism.

2) He said "the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone," and that "when we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic, or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them." Cries a relieved Broder, "an implicit rebuke to the mind-set of the current White House"!

Another cheap date. If you really believe that President McCain will be talked out of a decision to go to war by a democratic ally, I invite you to read his comments about the Japanese in the run-up to the Gulf War, or what he said about the French and Kosovo in 1999, or this Sept. 24, 2002 interview with Larry King:

KING: Senator, when Vice President Gore said, after September 11, we had enormous sympathy, goodwill and support. We squandered it, and in one year we've replaced that with fear, anxiety and uncertainty, not at what the terrorists are going to do, but at what we're going to do. In other words, he's saying, in essence, countries now don't like us, that were supporting us a year ago. You create a lot of ill will by doing this. You're going to need the support of everybody to go in. What's wrong with that?

MCCAIN: Well, I think we have the goodwill of most countries in the world, with the notable exception of Germany, which—their candidate for chancellor chose to, in a really obscene fashion, in my view, chose to use Iraq as a way to get reelected.

What about the Uni-power thing? Here's an exchange I had with last July:

Q: Senator on the defense budget—We now spend about roughly the same amount on defense as the rest of the world combined. Is that a healthy ratio, and if it's not, what would be a healthy ratio?

A: Oh, it's healthy. We need a bigger Army, we need a bigger Marine Corps. You look around the world−Iran, North Korea, uh, Afghanistan−it's not going to be over for a long time.

Or let's just roll more tape from the speech itself, to see messianic American exceptionalism — and analogical illiteracy—at its finest:

President Harry Truman once said of America, "God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose." In his time, that purpose was to contain Communism and build the structures of peace and prosperity that could provide safe passage through the Cold War. Now it is our turn.

3) He hyped a 'League of Democracies.'

Now, there have been times that I have been intrigued by a League of Democracies, as has Jonathan Rauch, but regardless of whatever Rauch, Welch or McCain might think about a 21st century League of Nations, the main point is that there is no way in hell anything remotely like this is happening any time in the next decade. After eight years of a cranky, go-it-alone White House that won re-election in part by bashing limp-wristed Euro-weenies, the chances of another interventionist Republican winning enough good faith among grumbly allies to create a brand spanking new America-defined Club of Winners are something approaching zero.

4) He wants to close Guantanamo.

That is indeed terrific news, and promises to be one of the virtues of a McCain presidency (along with pro-trade policies, earmark reform and serial uses of the veto pen). But remember—McCain was against torture, too, and that led to ... the eradication of habeas corpus. His reforms tend to break down upon negotiation (when not plain lousy to begin with). But even if President McCain is successful in shutting down Gitmo—as I think he would be—we are talking about an issue that's close to purely symbolic. Meanwhile, in the non-symbolic world, McCain wants to increase troop levels by 150,000, maintain a much more aggressive posture toward Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and Burma (at minimum), and launch a brand-new O.S.S. to help destabilize foreign despots.

5) He wants a "successor to the Kyoto Treaty, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner."

Here the cheap dates will be those Europeans who believe that the demon-spawn George W. Bush invented Kyoto opposition in the U.S. (as well as the death penalty). Here, too, a perennial McCain question must be asked—will his "reform" actually, you know, work?

As reason science correspondent Ron Bailey has shown, existing cap-and-trade markets are "not working," because "governments have every incentive to cheat" due to the fact that "the process is inherently political." Aside from any other bad (or good) policy that might result from a Kyoto II, what McCain's cap-and-trade gesture amounts to a rhetorical signal that—if you believe Global Warming is a threat—his Heart Is in the Right Place.

Which might be enough. My former colleagues on the L.A. Times editorial board, for example, endorsed McCain during the primaries in part because "he supported cap-and-trade systems that could reduce greenhouse gases, and he has stayed that course despite criticism from fellow Republicans." Even though, a half-year previous, that same board concluded that cap-and-trade has too many "drawbacks" to be workable. I guess it's the thought that counts!

So in summation: McCain says he hates the wars he'll inevitably launch. He says the U.S. cannot act alone with all the unipolar power he'll continue to amass and flex. He advocates a League of Democracies that will never happen, and an environmental treaty that probably won't work.

As David Brooks noted, "Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention." He's right—McCain will close Gitmo, make a couple of cheap rhetorical promises to play nice with the world, then increase this administration's interventionism in a way befitting a candidate who ran as the neo-conservative favorite against the too-humble foreign policy approach of governor George W. Bush.

The only question is whether his deep reserves of credibility in the Bank of Media is enough to maintain the fiction that he's less an interventionist than his predecessor. Judging by the Washington Post's news pages, he's well on his way:

McCain is often portrayed in the news media as a global John Wayne who would tread on the world stage with a Navy veteran's swagger and talk tough toward unfriendly governments in Iran and North Korea.

But his record on foreign policy during two decades in the Senate is more nuanced.

Matt Welch is the editor in chief of reason and the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick

Putting the "Oh?" in O.S.S.

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:36:00 EDT

One of John McCain's many curious foreign policy initiatives is his desire to launch a new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in order get more civilian shoulders on the wheel of the shadowy War Against Islamic Nutjobbers. The OSS was FDR's wartime intel & covert-ops shop; after the war it was disbanded, then basically re-formed as the CIA.

Why do we need a CIA and an OSS? Beats me. More importantly, what does the this-is-why-I-love-the-Internet site OSS Reborn say about it? "[N]ot without merit; but there are significant obstacles."

Whole thing worth a read for you Wild Bill Donovan fans out there.

4,000 U.S. Dead in Iraq

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:24:00 EDT

The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year.
The American deaths occurred Sunday, the same day rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad and a wave of attacks left at least 61 Iraqis dead nationwide.
An Iraqi military spokesman said Monday that troops had found rocket launching pads in different areas in predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad that had been used by extremists to fire on the Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi government headquarters.
"We hope to deal with this issue professionally to avoid civilian casualties," said spokesman Qassim al-Moussawi.

More here.

Cuba: What Is and What Can Be

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:14:00 EDT

A Canadian perspective on Cuba's past and possible future, via Mark Milke of the Calgary Herald:

Cuba in 1958 had a per capita GDP of $3,170 according to the OECD. (Canada's was $8,947.). But Cuba outranked all other Latin American countries except four: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Tellingly, in 1958, the island nation's per person wealth was higher than any East Asian country or colony, save Japan, which barely beat Cuba at only $3,290. Hong Kong had a per capita GDP of $2,924, Singapore's was $2,294, the Philippines' was $1,447, Taiwan's per person GDP stood at $1,387 and South Korea's was $1,112.
Thus in 1958, Cuba was almost as rich as Japan, one and half times as wealthy as Singapore, richer than Hong Kong, and three times as prosperous as South Korea.
Fifty years later, Cuba is one of the poorest countries in Latin America.
Meanwhile, jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan (the latter two also had dictators and problems similar to Cuba in the 1950s) have long eclipsed Cuba. They've done so not only in per capita wealth, but in measurements Castro's defenders point to when they assert the Marxist revolution "worked," such as in health care and education.

Milke doesn't have any faith in Castro Junior doing what's right. His preferred solution is for the U.S. to lift its stupid and ineffective embargo and "wash the Communists out to sea on a tidal wave of U.S. dollars from investment, trade and tourism."

Whole thing here.

Hat Tip: Alan Vanneman.

reason.tv hosts Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) talking down the embargo here.

reason on Cuba over the years.

Iraq at Five Years

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:17:00 EDT

Editor's Note: With the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq upon us, reason staffers look at where they were when the shooting began in 2003—and where they are now. In 2006, reason published an "Iraq Progress Report," in which "advocates for liberty weigh in after three years" and the June 2006 cover story featured three views on "'Mission Accomplished,' Three Years Later." For an archive of reason's Iraq coverage, go here.

Radley Balko, Senior Editor:

In the lead-up to the war, I was suspicious of the Bush administration's assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, dubious that the federal government is capable of building a liberal society in Iraq from scratch, and in general opposed to the idea of attacking a country that had no discernible ties to the September 11 attacks. Like most people, my positions were based on the assumption that there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That we now know there weren't only makes the decision to go to war more regrettable. My position hasn't changed at all.
As for what we should do now, I really can't see any option other than a plan to withdraw troops as soon as possible. Yes, it will be disastrous. But it seems to me this is a pill we're either going to have to swallow now or later, the difference being that swallowing it later will only mean more U.S. casualties in the meantime. We can't pay the Sunnis not to attack us forever (or maybe we can, but we shouldn't). The New York Times mentioned a striking figure in an editorial the other day. For all the talk about pork barrel spending, the total amount of federal spending in all congressional earmarks combined would fund the war in Iraq for about two months. This has been a colossal waste of blood, treasure, and global goodwill.
It's worth noting that it was the crazy, wild-eyed libertarian foreign policy experts who predicted what would happen in Iraq almost to the letter. Yet for reasons that escape me, the neoconservatives who got everything so massively wrong are still taken seriously, and get huge platforms from which to denigrate opponents of the war as "unserious."

Nick Gillespie, Editor, reason.tv and reason online:

After almost 4,000 U.S. deaths, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and trillions of dollars poured into the desert sands, Americans have gone from "shock and awe" to something approaching "Aw, shucks." According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank often credited with providing intellectual grounding for the Iraq War, 59 percent of Americans say the war was a mistake and 60 percent want a timetable for pulling troops out. Given a similar percentage favored invading Iraq in the spring of 2003, that just might be too little, too late.
I was never in favor of invading Iraq, which I thought was a bait and switch from the 9/11 attacks engineered by a Bush administration whose "War on Terror" had run out of steam given its inability to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice. When U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein (a man who makes me want to believe in hell, just so he can get what he deserves for all eternity), the Americans hubristically pulled a page from the playbook of Shelley's overreaching Ozymandias, and replaced one "colossal wreck" of a regime with another. It's incredibly dispiriting how arrogant and stupid the U.S. forces were when it came to losing the peace, but really, more of us should have seen it coming.
The question I worry about is what American foreign policy will look like five years hence. I'm not a pacifist, and I don't think that military intervention is always a bad thing (ideally, it should be used like Astroglide: sparingly and after a lot of foreplay). But I don't think we've learned very much as a country from the Iraq mess, other than not to rely too much on retreads from the Ford administration to call the shots. I certainly don't think John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, much less their advisors, have learned much from recent mistakes. Some of them are more ready to bow down to popular opinion but really, that's no way to conduct foreign policy. As a country, we're still a long way away from even starting a conversation that will yield a post-Cold War consensus on how the U.S. should act as a military power. That's not just a bad thing, it really dishonors those who have sacrificed life and limb over the past five years.

Kerry Howley, Senior Editor:

I don't remember where I was when the war started, or when the war turned one, or two, or three, or four. I was in college for the flashy beginning, in Burma for much of the following two years, where the war presented itself as a daily collage of gruesome black and white pictures in the junta's state press. The quality of the print was so bad that many of the pictures just looked smudged. You had to look for the black spaces, and imagine blood.
When I came back, the war was as it is now-hard to imagine and easy to ignore. Every liberty lost here is an abstraction. I have only the vaguest idea of what Nisour Square looks like; my image of Fallujah consists of charred bodies hanging from a single bridge. I can't fathom what it means for a collective to have lost 100,000 people prematurely, or for a state to waste $2 trillion it does not have. Few people I know have ventured out of the Green Zone, and no one I know has been hurt. What do I think about the Iraq War as it enters its sixth year? I think it seems tragic and brutal and criminal, and very far away.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Associate Editor:

In March 2003, I was just a few months out of college and I had already helped start a war.
My first journalism gig was as the pet libertarian at The Weekly Standard, the neocon home base generally credited with nudging the Bush administration into Iraq.
It's quite exciting to inaugurate a war, and we at the Standard were far from alone in feeling the thrill. Like much of the pro-war commentariat, I thought, "Whatever happens, it can't get worse." After all, what's worse than a genocidal dictator filling mass graves and stockpiling nukes in the volatile Middle East? (Belief in WMDs was robustly bipartisan at the time.) There even seemed to be a decent chance things would get a whole lot better-an oasis of freedom in a desert of tyranny and all that. My colleagues at the Standard and I supported the war with the best intentions, something that opponents of the war often lose sight of. We dreamed of a free, friendly Iraq. Better for us, better for Iraqis.
As a libertarian, I could have and should have known better than to think government actors would get things right, since my political philosophy is grounded in the idea that government is uniquely bad at getting anything done cheaply or efficiently. War is too often a classic example of government action creating waste and confusion on a spectacular scale, good intentions or not.
As it turns out, things could get worse—and they did.

Michael C. Moynihan, Associate Editor:

Anniversaries of catastrophic wars are typically moments of ritual self-flagellation. So what, then, was I wrong about, what have I changed my mind about, five years later? Where does one begin. In those years proceeding the 9/11 attacks, one was forced, often by the social obligation of dinner discussions, to wade into the swamp of Middle Eastern politics; to be pro-war or anti-war, regardless of your level of political engagement or knowledge.
Groping at the unfamiliar—which ones are the Sunnis? what is a Kurd, exactly?—the post-9/11 cult of the amateur (myself included) rebelled against the supposedly lazy and corrupt "MSM," and instead offered endless lunkheaded comparisons between 2003 Iraq and 1945 Japan. The insurgency that flowered, many bloggers blithely suggested, had its historical antecedents in the Werewolf Organization, a band of former Nazis that harassed Allied occupiers and quickly melted away. The Iraqis, brutalized by war and dictatorship, were ready to have a go at democracy. Of course, none of this would happen.
The best mirror of my bewilderment and disappointment is George Packer's brilliant book The Assassins Gate, a clear-eyed account of the stupidity and venality of those sent by the Bush administration to mismanage the occupation. As one CPA advisor told me in 2006, Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) was known inside the green zone as "Kick Back and Relax." And as Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran's noted with wonderment, James K. Haveman Jr., the official put in charge of Iraq's health care system, landed in Baghdad and launched an anti-smoking campaign. I suppose this is something I always knew, just something that I hoped wouldn't be true in this one case, but boy was I wrong in thinking that the U.S. government could ever achieve a level of honesty and competence needed to even try to promote democracy in an undemocratic region.

Jacob Sullum, Senior Editor:

I was against the war before I was even more against it. I never had any doubts that Saddam Hussein was a murderous thug, but I believed he was a deterrable murderous thug. So even when I assumed he had at least some "weapons of mass destruction," I did not think the threat was big and imminent enough to justify the invasion. Now that we know he had none, I'm embarrassed that I gave as much weight as I did to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations. I'm only slightly less embarrassed about my warning that Iraq surely would use its dreaded (but nonexistent) chemical weapons once the U.S. invaded. Here is the truth starting to dawn on me, right after the fall of Baghdad: "Could it be that Iraq never had a significant WMD capability?" I added that it might not matter, since "even before jubilant Iraqis started pouring into the streets, waving improvised flags and tearing down Saddam's statues, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom' had metamorphosed from a pre-emptive act of self-defense into a humanitarian mission to rescue people from a brutal dictator."
People who supported the war assure me the Bush administration made the argument about fighting terrorism by turning Iraq into a liberal democracy and thereby transforming the Middle East even before the WMDs went missing. My impression during the lead-up to the invasion was that it was all about neutralizing the WMD threat, since Saddam could decide any day to use those weapons against us, either directly or by passing them on to terrorists. If I had believed the aim was to make the world safe through democracy, which I now hear was the idea all along, I would have been even more skeptical, and I think most Americans would have been as well. I doubt that many who supported the war imagined the U.S. would still have such a large presence in Iraq five years later, let alone that it would have to stay indefinitely simply to prevent the chaos unleashed by the invasion from getting even worse.

Jesse Walker, Managing Editor:

In 2003 I thought there was no compelling reason to invade Iraq, even if the country held weapons of mass destruction; that the U.S. would easily topple Saddam Hussein's regime but would run into serious troubles when the occupation began; and that the war would do much more harm than good.
Five years later, I am less likely to concede the possibility that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

David Weigel, Associate Editor:

Do you remember the pro-war protestors? I was one of them. Five years ago a pack of conservatives at my college planned a "crash" of the final anti-war rally before the start of the war. When the forces of non-intervention set up on the library steps and started speaking, we walked right in front of them, blasting the Saddam Hussein love ballad from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut on a ROTC student's boom box.

I have excuses for all of this. I was 21. My expertise in American interventionism came from watching Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo reports on CNN. I had friends in the Army. I wanted to "free the Iraqi people." The takeaway is that, like millions of people, I was naive and uninformed about the doings in Mesopotamia and I did my little part to enable a catastrophe.

Matt Welch, Editor in Chief, reason magazine:

I was neither for nor against the war when it was launched, though most of the stuff I was worried about ended up coming true (especially "we will create a damned-if-we-do scenario unless we start looking for creative ways to devolve power and responsibility to the rest of the world").
But the mere fact of that ambivalence points to what's changed most about my thinking since then. Until five years ago, the prior three major U.S. interventions -- the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo—each went quite a bit better than the skeptics predicted. In the same way that almost all past U.S. presidents end up looking good in retrospect (to somebody, anyway), while history marches toward a better future, my hunch was that the pattern would hold true to our post-Vietnam wars as well. No more.
Because of the magnetic logic of perpetual interventionism (on both sides of the political aisle); the strategic problem of anti-Americanism, the temptation of inapt historical analogies and the way that power wants to be corrupt, I have gone from a guy who begged for U.S. leadership in a feckless world to stop the slaughter in Sarajevo, to someone whose primary voting motivation is to provide a check on America's expansion of responsibility for the world's affairs.

Michael Young, Contributing Editor, reason; Opinion Page Editor, Lebanon Daily Star:

The assumption that our thoughts should have changed on Iraq is presumptuous. Certainly, the Bush administration's abysmal postwar strategy until the surge last year invites a critical reassessment of what could have been done for the better. But what does not, and should not, is the bottom line of the war: the fact that the United States managed to remove one of the world's worst mass murderers from power, so that today 55 percent of Iraqis believe that their lives are good, according to a recent poll—including 62 percent of Shiites and 73 percent of Kurds.
The thing with conflicts is that they can be like that old joke about the man who swims halfway across the ocean, only to swim back to where he left from because he's tired. Is the U.S. halfway across the ocean of the Iraq war? Would swimming back to the departure point be a pointless waste of expended energy, so that persisting in Iraq would bring more dividends? It's difficult to say. The gross blunder of the administration was to leave such questions without answers. But it is difficult to justify retreat from Iraq a year into tangible signs of progress thanks to the surge.
Those who back an American withdrawal on the grounds that Iraq is already in a state of chaos don't know what they're talking about. The Moloch of uninhibited chaos and carnage would be infinitely worse, as I remember from my own experiences growing up during Lebanon's civil war. For numerous reasons—the fate of the Iraqis after a pullout, Iran's continuing rise as regional superpower, the future of the Kurds, the threat to regional stability—the U.S. has no choice but to stick it out in Iraq. And as the doubts creep in, Americans might want to think back to what Iraq was under Saddam Hussein, who in two decades was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of nearly 1 million people.
So, sorry, but invading Iraq was the right thing to do, even if it could have been done a million times better by a more competent group of people. When I think of Iraq, somehow I have no profound problem slamming George W. Bush's faults while welcoming what he did to the Baath regime—the barbaric, genocidal, thankfully bygone Baath regime.

What the Candidates Will Do in Iraq: Special 5th Anniversary Edition

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:49:00 EDT

From ABC News comes a summary of what Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) pledge to do in Iraq if elected president.

The short versions:

McCain: "emphasize his commitment to keeping U.S. troops in the country to secure it."
Obama: "go beyond his plan to pull troops out of Iraq and "outline a strategic vision for our country" to make the United States more secure."
Clinton: "renewed her pledge to begin withdrawing troops within 60 days of becoming president, using her platform to attack both McCain and Obama."

More here.

From surveys collected by the American Enterprise Insititute, a look at current U.S. opinion:

Strong majorities, 59 percent in Gallup's latest survey, say that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Virtually the same percentage of Americans, 60 percent from the same late February 2008 Gallup survey, also say that we should set a timetable for removing troops from Iraq. Policymakers should not jump the gun though. Only a small fraction of Americans—around 20 percent in most polls—support immediate withdrawal.

More here.

Coming later today: reason staffers reflect on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Rep. Jeff Flake on U.S.-Cuba Policy

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EDT

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From Ridiculous to Revolutionary

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:30:00 EST

"Nothing says ‘police state' like detaining kids for eating ice cream."

This is the best line in Internet guru Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody, and he knows it. He wisely recycles it for an appreciative crowd on Thursday, the day of the book's release, at a talk sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He's talking about flashmobs in Belarus, which we'll get back to later. But let's begin at the beginning.

Email is the granddaddy of seemingly frivolous Internet applications. "It was an afterthought on the original internet. It was not part of what they sold to ARPA," says Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an Internet consultant for Nokia, BBC, Lego, and the U.S. Navy. Email was just a simplified file-sharing program. But within 3 months, email was 70 percent of traffic on the fledgling Internet.

It wasn't because email was a fast way to send a message to someone, or even that it was a fast way to send a message to a lot of people—there were already ways to do both those things pretty efficiently. What really made email take off, says Shirky, was the Reply All button.

Of course, everyone professes to hate the Reply All button and periodically swears bloody vengeance on its abusers. But the Reply All button offers us the power to turn a communication into a conversation (and sometimes even a community) with virtually no effort at all. No coordinating meetings or teleconferences, no need for synchronicity (anyone can read their email at any time and still be a part of the group), and no duplication.

"For the first time in human history," says Shirky, "our communications tools support group conversation and group action." Governments, ancient and enormous institutions like the Catholic Church, and massive corporations used to thoroughly dominate the landscape because only they could afford the high costs of coordination of large numbers of people. But now, for the first time, coordination (like talk) is cheap.

Consider the case of Gnarlykitty. She's a college student in Bangkok who mostly blogs about her new cell phone or posts pictures of her friends at clubs. But when Thailand found itself mid-coup in 2006 with major media outlets heavily restricted, she posted a bunch of photos and some of her thoughts on what was happening.

She became a minor celeb, posting to Wikipedia—which was aggregating news about the coup—and blogging summaries of events intermingled with tidbits like this one:

Long lost friend asked on MSN: "Hey Kitty how are ya??"
Me: "Great! Country is breaking but great!"

When things calmed down, she wrote: "OK I'm giving it a rest. I live blogged because all the news channels were cut off and all the websites were blocked. Now all major newssites and channels are up and running, my job is done. Besides, school back to normal tomorrow so I need to get back to my work." And that was that. The next day she posted about shoes: a "new pair of Nine West wedges" to be exact.

"She wasn't a full-time journalist," writes Shirky, "she was a citizen with a camera and a weblog, but she had participated in a matter of global significance at exactly the time when the traditional media were being silenced." The government closed down old coordinating institutions like media and activist groups, but was powerless to stop non-institutional actors.

Let's now return to the Belarussian ice cream eaters (Gnarlykitty would want us to).

They were a flashmob, of course. Flashmobs started out as a critique of hipster culture. Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper's, started sending out messages (as "Bill from New York") to large groups, suggesting that they do things like make bird noises on a ledge in Central Park. He intended it as a kind of elaborate thumb in the eye of hipster conformism. Others caught on, perhaps omitting the irony, and did things like staging a silent rave in Victoria Station. The New York Times runs a smug story on how flashmobbers "have nothing better to do" with their time. And, as the cliché goes, once The New York Times has heard of a trend, it must be so over, right?

But then, suddenly, flashmobs found their true calling: On a blog in Belarus, someone proposes a flashmob. The plan is to get together in October Square—the preferred site for political action, and a place where concerted action is banned—and eat ice cream.

Black clad secret police appear and drag dairyphilic kids bodily out of the square. "The problem with a group eating ice cream wasn't the ice cream, it was the group," says Shirky. "Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, is the last great Eastern European dictator [but] the Lukshenko government can't penetrate the conspiracy, right? The whole thing is being done on the web. And they can't stop the group from entering October Square because they're not a group when they enter October Square."

Photos went up online almost immediately. The thinking was that it's tough to be really consistently oppressive and brutal when the world is watching. (Shirky: "The bug in the system is that the West cares quite a bit less about Eastern European dictatorship than it used to.")

Twitter is another example of the ridiculous quickly turning to the sublime. Morons who can't choose one bar and stay there on Friday nights want their friends to be able find them. Voila, a service that sends out badly spelled messages about your whereabouts to everyone you know. A few short months later, Egyptian democracy activists are using the same tool to organize and communicate below the radar and/or while in jail.

From frivolous to political is well-documented, but where does the market fit in? Shirky mentions another collaborative project, a tool to coordinate teams of people to subtitle Japanese animation called Aegisub. "It ended up signaling the high demand for stuff that American distributors thought was too arcane," says Shirky. As official releases of anime other than Sailor Moon became more common, the Aegisub community decided to delete their bootleg versions.

Why did they start a group only to run themselves out of business? "It's not because of a commercial motivation. It's also not because of an anti-commercial motivation. These aren't people who are motivated by sticking it to The Man....They changed the world to be more like what they wanted and once it changed, they could stop."

It's that impulse—do what you want in order to get what you want and then go back to whatever you were doing—that Shirky ably captures in Here Comes Everybody. Things that seem trivial become tools for building crucially important, often ad hoc, collaborations. Social media erodes the divide between freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, and intertwining them makes all of them easier to defend.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

Of Gold and Empire

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:46:00 EST

For those confused by the linkage between two of Ron Paul's major issues--antiwar and pro-gold--economist Steve Horwitz explains the connection in the January/February issue of The Freeman with a historical review of the links between federal intervention in the currency system and war.

Some excerpts that tell the tale:

Governments that can either create money directly or use regulation to force banks to provide the resources will be able to conduct war more often and with less political resistance than those that cannot.
.......
In 1863 the federal (Union) government for the first time offered charters for individual banks. With charters came regulations, one of which was the requirement that bank-issued currency be backed with U.S. government bonds. Whenever a federally chartered bank wanted to give its customers paper currency, it had to purchase such bonds, whose face value slightly exceeded the value of the currency and then present them to the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, who then printed the bank’s notes......Interestingly, when the federal government first offered the charters, almost no banks signed up; they kept their state charters because the federal charters offered no advantages and some minor disadvantages. Not content to lose that way of financing the war, Congress quickly passed a 10 percent tax on the banknotes of state-chartered banks..... Between the original bond-collateral requirements and punitive tax on the state-chartered banks, the federal government used its power over the monetary system to ensure a market for bonds to pay for the Civil War.
............
The Johnson administration made a conscious decision to finance the Vietnam War
through inflation rather than higher taxes....At the time Federal Reserve Notes held by foreign central banks were still redeemable in gold at the Fed. As a result of the inflation (depreciating dollar) of the late 1960s, the Fed saw a massive flow back of Federal Reserve Notes from foreign governments, which began to reduce U.S. gold holdings. This drain of gold reserves led President Nixon to close the “gold window” in 1971, breaking the last remaining link between the dollar and gold. With excess supplies of money no longer generating any direct negative economic consequences for the Fed, the even-greater inflation and macroeconomic disorder that characterized the rest of the 1970s and ’80s were no surprise.
Thus the need to finance the Vietnam War led to increased government control over money, which led to macroeconomic disorder (much as we saw in the late nineteenth-century banking panics), which in turn led to calls for more government intervention.

A reason roundtable on the Federal Reserve in the Bernanke era, featuring Milton Friedman and Ron Paul, among others.

Horwitz reviewed Theodore Burczak's Socialism After Hayek in reason's July 2007 issue.