The Russians filmed the arrest of Fogle and also obligingly provided the world media with a photo of what he was carrying when he was detained. The photo has inspired considerable merriment on the blogosphere because it apparently confirms everyone’s worst fears that the CIA no longer knows what it is doing (if it ever did, as some would add).

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is reporting that Fogle, a third secretary at the political section in the Moscow Embassy, twice phoned a Russian intelligence officer who specialized in Islamic terrorism in Russia’s Caucasus region. Fogle, who revealed in a Russian-language letter to his prospective agent that there had already been some quid pro quo, clearly believed that the Russian was already committed to assisting the United States. The letter that he carried provided instructions on setting up a secure Gmail account and pledging “up to $1 million a year with the promise of additional bonuses” for information. Fogle was also carrying a considerable sum in cash which might have been regarded as a recruitment bonus, de rigueur in such cases.

The Russians and the media have been making fun of Fogle over the letter, his wigs, his Moscow street atlas, and his compass, but all are components for running intelligence operations in what is referred to as a “denied area,” meaning an environment that is controlled by a hostile security service. Fogle’s disguises were meant to fool live surveillance following him on foot or in cars and to make it more difficult to track him on CCTV, which covers central Moscow. The Russians have revealed that the Fogle wigs matched a wig they seized while arresting CIA officer Mike Sellers in 1986—not completely surprising as the Agency has its own disguise factory.

Fogle’s route through Moscow would have been meticulously planned, indicating that the atlas and compass had an operational rather than a practical purpose. The street atlas would be used to set up secure communications in Moscow by use of dead drops, where material could be left by one party and later picked up by another. I would imagine dead-drop sites were somehow marked and indicated on the city street maps. The compass likely would be used, rather than a GPS that gives off a trackable signal, because Fogle may have been testing communicating to satellite from that part of Moscow. The system used, referred to by a codeword that I would best not reveal, fires a microsecond burst of encoded information but requires precise timing and compass orientation to work correctly when the satellite is in the right position. The cell phone shown in the FSB photo, large and clunky as it is, might have been modified to communicate with the satellite. (Rest assured that I am not revealing anything that the Russians do not already know.)

It is clear from the letter that Fogle was intending to meet his prospective agent, a man Fogle or others would have certainly met with before, likely outside of Russia. The potential agent would also have been “vetted,” possibly including a polygraph exam, to make sure that the CIA was not being “doubled.” Otherwise no one in Langley would have approved taking the considerable risk to set up the meeting in Moscow.

The approach itself might be construed as clumsy, but the letter carried by Fogle is not as bizarre as it is being portrayed, as it would both outline and confirm the commitment to compensate the fledgling agent with lots of money, the presumed motivation for cooperation. The KGB used to say that one could corrupt the French and Italians with a woman, the British with a man, and the Americans always with money. In truth, U.S. intelligence officers have always regarded money as the key to establishing relationships with spies and, when they themselves turned, as in the Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames cases, they have done so for the cash on the line, not for ideological reasons.

Well, in this case, everyone involved from the CIA side was effectively diddled. The new agent was clearly a double, undoubtedly a “dangle” produced by the FSB with the expectation that the CIA, desperate for sources on the Caucasus in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, would forget about normal security protocols and take the bait. They did just that, falling into a trap set by the Russians and being filmed while doing so. It is reminiscent of a scene in a Havana park in the 1980s in which a CIA officer, who will remain nameless, was filmed while strolling down a footpath and pausing to pick up a turd. He placed the turd in his pocket and went on his way. The turd was, of course, fake, fabricated at the CIA Office of Technical Services to conceal a message from another agent. As in Moscow, the agent in Cuba was a double, working for his own country while pretending to cooperate with the Americans.

There have been numerous detentions of American officials in Moscow—and of Russian officials in Washington—for espionage since the fall of the Soviet Union. Frequently, the official involved is declared persona non grata and leaves quietly, never to return, but every once in a while the host country decides to send a message. The U.S. did so in 2010 with the Chapman ring arrests. In this case, the Russians, who had already more-or-less quietly expelled U.S. official Benjamin Dillon in January, were sending the message that aggressive CIA spying must stop. The FSB had reportedly been surveilling Fogle for months, since he arrived in country, after noting that his outside-the-embassy behavior did not fit the pattern of other American diplomats. The FSB was also saying something on a more personal level, telling the Agency that it is more than capable of identifying and exposing CIA officers operating inside Russia. Even though espionage tit-for-tat is a game that Washington and Moscow have played since the end of the Second World War, the outing of the station chief by the Russians is serious business, as it demands commensurate retaliation. So the arrest and expulsion of Foyle will have real consequences, apart from providing an amusing interlude of what might appear to be bumbling. It is a deliberate raising of the espionage stakes on the part of the Russians that will negatively affect the already somewhat fractious bilateral relationship between Moscow and Washington.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

But while Dionne states that these two commitments do not simply “face off against each other”—that there is no party of “individualism” aligned against a party of “community,” but rather commitments to each ideal are to be found “in the consciousness and consciences of nearly all Americans”—in fact, throughout his book Dionne ends up making an argument distinct from his opening thesis. He insists that there is, in fact, one party of individualism today. That party— alternatively “conservatives,” “Republicans,” and the “Tea Party”; they are all named as purveyors of this view—has developed the notion that American prosperity and power derive almost exclusively from the efforts of individuals, and that government is everywhere and always a baleful influence. According to Dionne, Democrats/liberals/progressives, by contrast, maintain the traditionally salutary view that America is a combination of both individualism and community. He purports to offer his book as a corrective to the imbalance currently found in the political views of American conservatives,  even as he also triumphantly lauds the current balance between individualism and community to be found in the Democratic Party and embodied in the presidency and person of Barack Obama.

Dionne certainly has a point concerning a main current of American conservatism today, and he rightly notes that there is a strong intellectual tradition within conservatism that supplies correctives to the libertarian, Randian leanings found among some on the contemporary right. Among those correctives he identifies the work of such thinkers as Robert Nisbet, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, and the early George Will. However, Dionne is so exercised about the rise of the Tea Party in Republican politics that he somehow misses that “individualism” is hardly a pathology to be found exclusively among denizens of the American right; arguably, it pervades the very essence of the contemporary American left. He makes a fundamental category mistake by supposing that the left’s “balanced” position, and especially its support for “community,” can be discerned in the left’s support for the role of the national government.

A serious, rather than glancing, engagement with Nisbet would have been educational for Dionne, and would have helped him move beyond the partisan limits of his analysis. Dionne posits that “the American quest for community has taken national as well as local forms,” but throughout the book he equates the left’s identification with “community” to its willingness to support an activist federal government. With a seemingly uncontroversial reference to Robert Nisbet’s 1953 book The Quest for Community, Dionne inadvertently reveals a superficial familiarity with the conservative tradition he purports to recommend—and he unintentionally reinforces the continuing relevance of Nisbet’s analysis.

Nisbet spoke of the “quest for community” as an inherent longing of every human person. But modern society increasingly had been organized to thwart, undermine, or re-direct that longing away from local forms of membership. The modern project, as Nisbet described, could trace its origins back at least five centuries to such thinkers as Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau and consisted of the organized effort to align the supposed mutual interests of autonomous individuals (demanded by the rise of capitalism) and centralized government power, both working toward undermining a range of constitutive and “limiting” human associations such as church, guild, schools, and even families. As a result, the “quest for community” became pathologically redirected toward identification with the state. Government becomes, as Nisbet anticipated, the “only thing that we all belong to”—a line that was highlighted during the introductory video shown at last year’s Democratic National Convention. But this “quest for community” in fact results in the effective strengthening of centralized government power and individualism alike, at the expense of more local forms of constitutive community.

Dionne reveals a lack of familiarity with the basic contours of Nisbet’s argument, and in his insistence that the contemporary left embraces both community—in the form of an activist federal government—and individualism, what he misses is that actual forms of constitutive community are the losers in this arrangement. Our “political heart” is far from divided—it is rather in love with a unified and ongoing effort to use the power of the state to liberate the individual. The elites who lead the two parties are of one mind and one heart in this respect.

Dionne is so confused about this point that he misses it even when he endorses it. For instance, in commending the “balanced” view that he finds expressed in the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt, he italicizes the following line in which the ends of government activism are revealed: not to hamper individualism, but to protect it. Were Dionne attentive to the pincer movement described by Nisbet—in which the state supports the liberationist ambition of autonomous individualism, and autonomous individuals increasingly appeal to and rely upon the state as guarantor of their liberation—he might have noticed that this same basic devotion to individualism lies at the heart of the contemporary left, and particularly the president he claims as the very embodiment of “balance.”

There is no mention in Dionne’s 300-page book, for instance, of the campaign commercial that launched President Obama’s re-election campaign, “The Life of Julia.” Julia is portrayed over the course of her life as the beneficiary of a bevy of government programs; notably, with the exception of one slide, she is constantly pictured alone. She appears to be especially reliant upon the government because there is no evidence of any support of family, community, church, or friends in her life. In her middle age, she (on her own accord, apparently) “decides” to have a child, and in one scene is shown sending young “Zachary” off to school; he is never to be seen again for the rest of her life. It is the very picture of the Leviathan—in this world, there are only individuals and the state.

There is similarly no mention of an incident early in Obama’s first presidential campaign, when he argued (while campaigning during the Michigan and Ohio primaries) that there might be a need to revisit terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that were undermining and even destroying the economic base of communities throughout the upper Midwest and elsewhere. As was reported in hushed tones afterwards, Obama quietly dispatched his economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, to Canada to assure our northern neighbors that the president-to-be didn’t really mean it. Obama’s policies have consistently used the power of the federal government to “liberate” upwardly mobile individuals while leaving communities to fend for themselves in a globalizing and rapacious economic order. When has the word “NAFTA,” or any debate about “free trade,” been heard during the Obama administration? Would you rather be a trader on Wall Street under someone named Clinton or Obama or someone named Bush?

Dionne is enraptured, however, by any rhetorical flourish in which Presidents Clinton or Obama speak admiringly of community: he cites speeches by each as proof-positive of their care and concern for community, while he consistently dismisses conservative rhetoric—such as Ronald Reagan’s sentimental appeals to small-town America—as so much deception that shrouds policies that advantage Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.

Again, Dionne has a point: many Republican policies have proven harmful to communities, particularly those policies that have supported forms of crony-capitalism that have treated the small producers and blue-collar American workers as an afterthought. But have the Democrats lauded by Dionne done any better for communities in this regard? Have those “moderate traditionalists” who came to mistrust Democrats for their aversion to speaking positively about “family, faith and community” simply been in the throes of false consciousness since the 1980s? Did Obama win them back in 2012 by appealing to those rooted aspirations—or did he succeed in driving them away from supporting any candidate at all, as they finally realized that they were fundamentally unrepresented in the American political system today? Shouldn’t Dionne be concerned that several million fewer such voters even bothered to turn out in 2012? Where do we see this resurgent concern for “family, faith and community” in the policies of President Obama?

Dionne is correct on two main points: a major element of the Republican Party today is dominated by individualistic tendencies, and government can indeed do good things to assist people, especially against the depredations of global capitalism. But this book is keenly disappointing as anything more than a campaign handbook. Dionne willfully refuses to extend his analysis to consider more comprehensively the pathologies of American political life, particularly the complicity of his partisan friends.

Perhaps most lamentably, Dionne not only overlooks the systematic ways in which the left today advances the power of government to support the liberation of autonomy-loving individuals, but he also misses the opportunity to encourage the growing number of articulate conservatives who have taken up the banner of the likes of Robert Nisbet—one of whom, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, recently provided the introduction for a new edition of Nisbet’s Quest for Community. Where, on the other hand, does one see evidence of intellectual creativity on the Left today that consistently shows concern for the condition of “faith, family and community?” You will search in vain for the health of our actual communities in the pages of this book—written by one of America’s most celebrated communitarian thinkers—unless you unreflectively accept that “government” and “community” are the same thing. But that view is finally nothing more than the “quest for community” gone awry, something Dionne, more than anyone, should realize.

Patrick J. Deneen is David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

The farther removed from Reagan’s time in office that conservatives are, the more intent vying factions on the right have become to identify their preferred foreign policy with him. Reagan is the one national Republican figure of the last 40 years whose reputation with most conservatives has improved over time. That is partly the result of Reagan’s departure from the political scene after leaving office, and it is also partly because of the tendency of later conservatives to reimagine his administration as what they wished it had been. As the last politically successful, self-identified conservative president, Reagan is one of the few modern leaders most on the right will agree to imitate. Anyone wanting to make his policy arguments appealing to conservatives feels the need to identify them with the Reagan record.

Self-described realists often emphasize Reagan’s willingness to engage the USSR in arms-reduction negotiations. Noninterventionists tend to focus on his aversion to sending U.S. forces abroad and his relatively rare and limited uses of force. Hawks in general remember Reagan for his increased military spending and support for anticommunist insurgencies—the Reagan Doctrine—while neoconservatives in particular celebrate the combative rhetoric Reagan directed against Communism and his eventual support for democratic movements in the Philippines and South Korea. The Reagan administration’s foreign policy included all of these things, but they weren’t all desirable or successful.

How these factions interpret the same events during the Reagan years represents another way that the 40th president’s legacy is co-opted and reinvented in contemporary debates. The decision to send U.S. forces into Lebanon in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion and then the decision to remove them after the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut remain some of the most contested episodes from the Reagan years. The way that different factions on the right perceive Reagan’s Lebanon policy exposes the fault lines that divide them sharply from each other.

Noninterventionists and other conservative supporters of foreign-policy retrenchment view the withdrawal from Lebanon as an example of how Republicans can and should be willing to acknowledge a major policy error and correct it by avoiding additional American losses in unnecessary missions abroad. In 2011, Grover Norquist used the example of withdrawal from Lebanon as a model for how conservatives could agree to cut U.S. losses in Afghanistan and end that war sooner. During the 2008 and 2012 primaries, Rep. Ron Paul cited Reagan’s decision to pull troops out of Lebanon as proof that calls for terminating foolish interventions quickly had a good conservative and Republican pedigree.

The original decision to intervene in Lebanon stands as a warning for conservative noninterventionists that there is nothing to be gained for the U.S. by becoming involved in conflicts in countries whose history and internal divisions Americans don’t even begin to understand. Indeed, withdrawing U.S. forces from Lebanon had no significant harmful consequences for U.S. security. It was only much later, following the 9/11 attacks, that hawks put a new, implausible spin on the decision to leave Lebanon as an invitation to future strikes against us.

At its best, Reagan’s foreign policy was a response to contemporary realities and problems, and most of these no longer exist. Conservatives who fail to take these changes into account are substituting nostalgia for sound analysis. Instead of worrying about what Reagan would do today, conservatives should devise a foreign policy that advances U.S. security and interests in the world as it is. Rather than trying to relive the Reagan years, conservatives would do well to scrutinize which of Reagan’s decisions still make sense with the advantage of more than two decades of hindsight.

His most hawkish decisions as president make sense only in the context of the Cold War and have little or no application to contemporary issues. The U.S. has no superpower rival to contain any longer, and it faces no coherent ideological challenge on par with that of Soviet Communism. A military build-up comparable to Reagan’s today would serve no purpose except to bloat the Pentagon’s budget—and defense contractors’ wallets—to the detriment of America’s fiscal health. To the extent that Reagan-era increases in military spending contributed to Soviet collapse, they had some value, but it makes no sense to maintain military spending that exceeds even that of the Reagan era when no comparable foreign threat exists.

There is no longer anything to be gained by supporting insurgents against weak dictatorships, and no reason for the U.S. to embroil itself in the internal conflicts of other nations. Whatever value the Reagan Doctrine may have had in the 1980s, it now stands mostly as a cautionary tale about the damage that arming foreign insurgencies can do to the countries affected and the abuses that may come from waging such proxy wars. When there is nothing for the U.S. to “roll back,” there is no need for anything like a policy of rollback.

The most common abuse of Reagan’s legacy is the rote recitation of the slogan “peace through strength.” Originally, the phrase implied support for creating a strong defense as a deterrent to aggression. As the threat of aggression by other states has receded, it has come to mean something very different. Many Republican hawks rely on this phrase to describe their foreign-policy views, but they long ago dismissed the importance of deterrence when dealing with states much weaker than the Soviet Union. It is common now for advocates of regime-change and preventive war to profess their commitment to “peace through strength,” but the substance of the policies they prefer shows that they reject the concept as Reagan understood it both in principle and in practice. Instead of deterring aggression to protect international peace, the new “peace through strength” often serves as rhetorical cover for the violation of that peace through acts of aggression.

There is likewise little in common between Reagan’s actual foreign policy and the so-called “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy promoted by neoconservatives over the last 20 years. This is the approach Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan introduced in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article, which presented the case for U.S. “benevolent global hegemony.” The creators of “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy were determined to combat what they saw as insufficient conservative and Republican support for larger military budgets and an activist American role in the world. “Neo-Reaganites” wanted to “remoralize” American foreign policy, to make “moral clarity” its focus, and to “restore a sense of the heroic” to its conduct. In practice, this meant pushing for regime-change in some countries and meddling in the internal affairs of the rest. The Cold War had ended, but as far as “neo-Reaganites” were concerned, the only difference this made was that it freed the U.S. to be even more assertive in exercising global leadership.

The neoconservative use of “neo-Reaganite” as the brand name of their foreign policy was intended to signal to conservatives disaffected with George H.W. Bush’s domestic policy record that they should also reject the elder Bush’s more realist approach to world affairs in favor of a more militarized and moralistic one. If Bush had proved to be a poor heir to Reagan at home, the “neo-Reaganites” were saying, he must have “discarded” Reagan’s foreign-policy views as well by not being missionary enough. This deliberately obscured the extent to which Reagan had moved in the direction of the realists during his presidency, and it ignored how in response to this “neo-Reaganites” and their forerunners had constantly faulted Reagan for being too accommodating with the Soviets and too ready to negotiate and agree to arms reduction.

Sen. Rand Paul’s speech at the Heritage Foundation in February was an attempt to claim Reagan for the Republican realist tradition, but with the added twist of connecting Reagan’s record to George Kennan’s understanding of containment. Paul identified the link in the claim by Jack Matlock, a former Reagan national security official, that Reagan’s Soviet policy was closer to Kennan’s thinking than any president’s approach that had come before it. Matlock’s 2007 account of the views that Kennan and Reagan shared covered many different issues, but perhaps the most important point of convergence was on containment itself. Matlock wrote:

Both men rejected what Kennan called ‘liberationist slogans,’ those that had been used, particularly in 1952, to attack his containment policy. Reagan also refused to play the ‘nationality card,’ attempts to stir up the non-Russian population of the Soviet Union. While he thought that the independence of the Baltic countries should be restored, he did not set out to bring down the Soviet Union. He tried to change Soviet behavior, not to destroy the Soviet Union.

If there were important points of agreement between Reagan’s policy and Kennan’s thinking, Kennan himself was appalled by Republican triumphalism that sought to credit the Reagan administration and the GOP with winning the Cold War. In an October 1992 op-ed for the New York Times, Kennan dismissed the claim that the Reagan administration “won” the Cold War as “intrinsically silly.” He rejected the idea that an event as momentous as the dissolution of the USSR could be attributed to the actions of any American administration. Kennan wrote:

The suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish. No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments of any other one.

The idea that Reagan “won” the Cold War is one of the more pernicious and enduring distortions of Reagan’s real success, which involved both opposing and engaging with the Soviet Union as its system collapsed from within largely on its own. The claim of winning the Cold War greatly exaggerated the ability of the U.S. to shape events in other countries. That in turn has inspired later generations of conservatives and Republicans to imagine that they can successfully promote dramatic political change overseas in order to topple foreign regimes. As Kennan said in the same op-ed: “Nobody—no country, no party, no person—‘won’ the cold war. It was a long and costly political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions and strength of the other party.”

Congratulating Reagan for winning the Cold War is one more form of widespread abuse of Reagan’s legacy that has adversely affected how conservatives think about foreign policy and the proper U.S. role in the world. This has warped how the right understands American power and U.S. relations with authoritarian and pariah states for the last two decades. It also blinds many conservatives to the fact that other nations resent and reject American interference in their political affairs. In spite of the failures of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan and the collapse of the so-called Freedom Agenda, this myth continues to make many on the right overly confident in our government’s ability to influence overseas political developments to suit American wishes.

The conservatism of the Cold War era was in large part defined by anticommunism, as this provided the common cause that united disparate groups on the right and informed their prevailing foreign-policy views. Ever since the end of the Cold War, conservatives have sought in vain to find something that might replace anticommunism, and they have tried to conjure up a new ideological foe that could fill the same role that Communism did for four decades. Many conservatives have sought to use the existence of jihadism as a justification for a new global ideological struggle, and even Senator Paul suggested something along these lines in his speech at Heritage with his comparison of “radical Islam” and the Soviet Union. Yet what is necessary for conservatives now is to stop conceiving of the U.S. as the leader of one side in a global ideological struggle, and that isn’t likely to happen so long as conservatives keep falling back on arguments about what Reagan did and what he would do today.

Conservatives certainly can and should still learn from Reagan’s successes and mistakes—as they should from those of Nixon, Eisenhower, and other past leaders. However, if there is to be a conservative foreign policy that is well-suited to advancing present-day U.S. security interests, conservatives cannot continue relying on the crutch of imitating and invoking Reagan. If conservatives are supposed to understand and cope with the world as it is, rather than how it once was or how we would like it to be, nothing would be worse than to mimic a foreign policy that was created for another era.

Daniel Larison is a TAC senior editor. His blog is www.theamericanconservative.com/larison.

That was the leading Senate hawk favoring U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war. But by ruling out U.S. ground troops, John McCain was sending, perhaps unintentionally, another message: There is no vital U.S. interest in Syria’s civil war worth shedding the blood of American soldiers and Marines.

Thus does America’s premier hawk support the case made by think-tank scholars Owen Harries and Tom Switzer in their American Interest essay, “Leading from Behind: Third Time a Charm?”

There is in the U.S.A. today, they write, “a reluctance to commit American blood.”

A legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan “is an unwillingness of the American public to take casualties on behalf of less than truly vital challenges. … While such concerns may be admirable … they are incompatible with a superpower posture and pretensions to global leadership.”

You cannot be the “indispensable nation” if you reflexively recoil at putting “boots on the ground.”

“If a nation is not prepared to take casualties, it should not engage in the kind of policies likely to cause them. If it is not prepared to take casualties, it should resign itself to not having the kind of respect from others that a more resolute nation could expect.”

About the authors’ premise, that Americans are reluctant to take casualties, is there any doubt?

To demonstrate this, we need only address a few questions.

Would we be willing to send another army of 170,000 to stop a Sunni-Shia war that might tear Iraq apart? Would the American people support sending 100,000 troops, again, to fight to keep Afghanistan from the clutches of the Taliban?

To ask these questions is to answer them.

Should Kim Jong Un attack across the DMZ with his million-man army and seize Seoul, would Barack Obama’s America, like Harry Truman’s America, send a third of a million U.S. soldiers and Marines to drive the North out? Or would we confine our support to the South, under our security treaty, to air, sea and missile strikes—from above and afar?

Under NATO, the United States is required to assist militarily any member nation that is a victim of aggression.

If Moscow occupied Estonia or Latvia in a dispute over mistreatment of its Russian minorities, would we declare war or send U.S. troops to fight Russians in the Baltic?

Would we fight the Chinese to defend the Senkakus?

“America no longer has the will, wallet or influence to impose an active and ambitious global leadership across the world,” Harries and Switzer contend. They cite Walter Lippmann, who wrote that a credible foreign policy “consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, a nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.

“Without the compelling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, it purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.”

Though U.S. commitments are as great or greater than in 1991, the authors write, America is not so domineering as she was at the end of the Cold War, or when Bush 43 set out to “end tyranny in our world.”

“The dollar is weak. The debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions. Budget and trade deficits are alarming. Infrastructure is aging. The AAA bond credit rating is lost. Economic growth is exceptionally sluggish for a nation that is four years out of a recession. And where 20 years ago U.S. military power was universally considered awesome in its scope, today, after more than a decade of its active deployment, the world is much more aware of its limitations and costs. It is decidedly less impressed.”

Consider Syria, where the neocons and liberal interventionists are clamoring for U.S. military action, but “no boots on the ground.”

Is there really any vital U.S. interest at risk in whether the 40-year-old Assad dictatorship stands or falls?

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been calling for Assad’s ouster for two years and transships weapons to the rebels, has now seen his country stung by a terrorist attack.

But though he has a 400,000-man NATO-equipped army, three times Syria’s population, and a 550-mile border to attack across, Erdogan wants us, the “international community,” to bring Assad down.

But why is Assad our problem—and not Erdogan’s problem?

Harries and Switzer urge Obama to enunciate a new foreign policy that defines our true vital interests and brings U.S. war guarantees into balance with U.S. power—a policy where the first question U.S. leaders ask about a conflict or crisis abroad is not “how” but “why”?

Why, exactly, is this America’s problem?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Copyright 2013 Creators.com.

Antle’s new book, Devouring Freedom, seeks to provide a roadmap for how politicians and activists can curb federal spending and power grabs. Antle is bluntly realistic:

Cutting government is extremely difficult and rarely accomplished. In a perversion of Say’s Law (‘supply creates its own demand’), the supply of government creates its own demand. The breakneck growth of a deficit-financed welfare state makes it inevitable that more voters will develop similar attachments to proliferating government programs, though the broad-based tax increases that they entail will dampen the enthusiasm of some.

He reveals some of the ways the game is rigged: “Even the conventional economic statistics are stacked against the opponents of big government: they measure a dollar spent by Washington without taking into account whence that dollar came.”

Unlike your typical political scientist or Washington Post columnist, Antle recognizes the charade of cosmetic reforms: “Government programs are like weeds. If they are merely trimmed, they will grow back. They must be uprooted when possible.” Unfortunately, there is a distinct shortage of weed pullers inside the Beltway.

Unlike many right-leaning pundits, Antle does not fudge on the disastrous record of George W. Bush: “Enrollment in 25 major federal programs increased three times as fast as the population between 2000 and 2006.” Bush did much to propel the explosion of food-stamp enrollment even before the 2007 recession.

The No Child Left Behind Act deserves the brickbats it receives in Devouring Freedom.

That law was falsely sold as giving freedom to local school officials. In reality, it empowered the feds to judge and punish local schools for not fulfilling arbitrary guidelines. Many states “dumbed down” academic standards, using bureaucratic racketeering to avoid harsh federal sanctions. Though the No Child Left Behind Act promised to permit children to escape “persistently dangerous” schools, most states defined that term so as to claim that all their schools were safe.

Regnery may have targeted Devouring Freedom at readers who have not closely followed political battles in recent decades. The book declares, “The nexus of big-government and big business remains a well-kept secret.” This is a secret only to people who get all their information from their “Obama phone.” David Stockman, former director of Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, flogged business subsidies 30 years ago, and even the mainstream liberal media sometimes jibes corporate handouts.

The book is kind to a fault to Newt Gingrich’s glory years. It declares that the 1996 “Freedom to Farm act set agricultural subsidies on a glide path to elimination.” In reality, that farm bill tripled cash handouts to farmers and sufficed with an unenforceable pledge to phase down subsidies in the next century. The budget deficits of the mid-1990s vanished primarily because federal revenue rose almost three times as fast as the inflation rate between 1994 and 1998. In a series of budget deals with Bill Clinton, Gingrich did more than any other Republican to unleash the federal spending he later deplored while seeking the Republican presidential nomination. (The fact that so many Republicans still consider Gingrich a “deep thinker” does not inspire hope for the movement.)

Antle justly lauds the Republican-controlled Congress of 1947–48, which struck down some of the New Deal’s worst excesses. “Led by Sen. Robert Taft … the Eightieth Congress rolled back the militarization of the U.S. economy and prevented the creation of a full-blown European-style welfare state.” Federal spending fell from a wartime high of 43.6 percent of GDP to 11.3 percent in 1948. “Wartime price controls on food and other consumer products were repealed. Taxes were cut. The peacetime draft was, at least temporarily, suspended.” And changes to federal labor law curtailed the power of the nation’s largest unions. President Truman pilloried Republicans as a “do-nothing Congress.” But after a long period of mushrooming government, repealing bad laws and slashing spending is the height of public service.

Devouring Freedom reminds one of a passionate football coach chalking out savvy defensive plays in front of a roomful of listless players who have no desire to tackle their opponents. Many Americans, remembering the rhetoric of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, have counted on conservative organizations to resolutely block the expansion of government power. But the sellouts keep on coming. The New York Times reported on April 9 that the American Conservative Union has solicited contributions from business lobbyists to help thwart the push for budget cuts. A draft proposal circulating in Washington even offered to use the Conservative Political Action Conference to blunt attacks on federal infrastructure and military spending. Campaign for Liberty president John Tate observed that the proposed lobbying effort “smacks to a lot of people as taking big money to do the bidding of big business.”

When Georgia governor Lester Maddox was criticized in the late 1960s for the abysmal conditions in his state’s prisons, he blamed the problem on the poor caliber of the convicts. Similarly, government has been growing by leaps in bounds thanks in large part to the mental turpitude and character defects of the typical member of Congress. Antle observes late in the book: “Opponents of big government … overestimated the degree to which the average American understands the details of the federal budget and what’s at stake.” But most members of Congress also have little or no understanding of the vast majority of federal programs. For every Tom Coburn—the Oklahoma Republican senator who plunges avidly into the details and issues reports on backburner boondoggles—there are a score of congressmen who vote like a know-nothing herd following leadership’s command.

“Freedom” is a word that Republicans enjoy evoking when Democrats are in charge of the White House and executive branch. But one of the best gauges of character is the number of Republican congressmen who openly resisted the abuses and power grabs of George W. Bush. To say that the list is short is the understatement of the year.

It is pathetic that the biggest civil-liberties issue thus far this year is whether the president should be permitted to assassinate Americans residing within the nation’s boundaries. Even more appalling is that few congressional Republicans stepped up to support Rand Paul’s Senate filibuster on this issue. And despite a token gesture to Paul from Attorney General Eric Holder, Americans still know almost nothing about the extent of, and legal rationale for, Obama’s prerogative to order killings based solely on his own decrees.

Few Republican congressmen today have the gumption to oppose almost boundless executive power, even when the executive branch is controlled by their arch-enemy. Can you imagine Everett Dirksen taking the floor of the Senate to boisterously champion President Lyndon Johnson’s prerogative to read the private mail of Dirksen and every other Republican member of Congress? With their own party in the White House, however, GOP members of Congress gave Bush a standing ovation when he bragged about his illegal “Terrorist Surveillance Program” warrantless wiretapping in his 2006 State of the Union address. Perhaps many of today’s Republican members of Congress are so clueless that they do not recognize the peril of permitting Obama to perpetuate the secret surveillance that Bush commenced.

Devouring Freedom warns, “Republicans who are committed to the fight against big government may have to fight their leaders first.” Unfortunately, it is difficult to see any sign of a learning curve from GOP leadership. Antle notes, “Shortly after the November 2012 elections, Congressional Republicans purged four strong fiscal conservatives—Justin Amash of Michigan, Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, David Schweikert of Arizona, and Walter Jones of North Carolina—from their preferred committee assignments.” Kicking Amash and Huelskamp off the Budget Committee signaled that the Republican leadership would not tolerate any principles when it came to negotiating tax-and-spending deals with Obama. Expelling Walter Jones from the House Financial Services Committee was especially tawdry since Jones was out of the few courageous and sagacious Republicans opposed to the Iraq War (an unforgivable sin).

Antle does not lull readers with assurances of no-sweat victories:

It would be foolish to claim that stopping big government is easy. Many people clearly benefit from government. Others perceive benefits where they may not exist. Most of all, asking politicians to think of something more important than fundraising or reelection cuts against human nature. But big government has been challenged before, with some success. With some courage—and more than a little luck—it can happen again. Learning from the recent past is a great place to start.

But how many Republican congressmen are more interested in freedom than in power? Far fewer than most readers would wish. And what are the chances that an effective core of pro-freedom congressmen will arise who are as eloquent as Reagan, as tough as Phil Gramm, and as well-informed as David Stockman?

Antle points Republicans and conservatives in the right direction, but it is unclear how many will heed his message.

James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and a new e-book memoir, Public Policy Hooligan.

It’s been an eventful twelve years. In addition to the “debacles” of Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve had the (ongoing) menacing of Iran on account of an unproven nuclear-weapons program and Israeli military assaults on Lebanon in 2006 and on Gaza in 2008 and again in 2012. Add in the global financial crash of 2008, and there’s been plenty to keep the two Davids occupied.

David Cromwell’s new book, Why Are We The Good Guys?, discusses these events and the work that he and Edwards have done to counter the “elite-friendly value assumptions and judgements” that characterize their coverage in Britain. Although he is clearly a man of the left—his working-class childhood was an “interesting mix of Catholic and Communist” influences—Cromwell’s not one to be deceived by labels, an important skill to possess in an age when wars are sold as “humanitarian interventions” to gain support from liberals.

Media Lens has been outspoken, when the need arises, in its critique of so-called liberal-left media. Many on the British center-left give the BBC a free pass because they have swallowed the line that the organization is somehow “left-wing.” Yet Cromwell and Edwards have shown that when it comes to propagandizing for illegal wars and peddling establishment views, the BBC has at least as bad a record as commercial news networks.

When I caught up with David to talk to him about his new book, the BBC was in the middle of what has been described by some as the biggest crisis in its 90-year history: the resignation of its Director-General and other bigwigs after the fallout from a “Newsnight” program on child abuse. But while heads rolled over the state-owned broadcaster getting allegations wrong on just one program, Cromwell points out that the BBC was never held accountable for the role it played in the lead up to the Iraq War.

“There was no such pressure for senior BBC staff to go over the broadcaster’s systemic failure to challenge US-UK propaganda over Iraq’s non-existent WMD. This media failure paved the way towards war in Iraq and the subsequent brutal and bloody occupation. Instead of responsible public-service journalism, BBC News provides a reliable conduit for government propaganda, most notably the state’s supposedly benign intentions in foreign wars and international relations. That is the daily news diet we are all spoon-fed.”

No such presumption of good faith applies when journalists discuss the actions of countries that don’t toe the Washington line. “It is, of course, fine for journalists in the West to point to the crimes of official enemies and to mock them for their transparent propaganda efforts. Thus, the BBC’s Emily Maitlis was able to introduce the flagship television program ‘Newsnight’ with a touch of sardonic wit: ‘Hello, good evening. The Russians are calling it a “peace enforcement operation.” It’s the kind of Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud.’

“Maitlis was referring to the invasion of Russian forces into the Georgian province of South Ossetia in August 2008. By contrast, imagine a BBC presenter referring skeptically to the government’s claim of a ‘peace enforcement operation’ for the West’s invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya and describing such language as ‘the kind of newspeak that would make George Orwell proud.’ It just would not happen.”

I ask Cromwell how he would respond to those who say that Media Lens should devote all its energies on attacking neocon über-hawks rather than criticizing the liberal media, which might agree with the group’s standpoints, say, 70 percent of the time. “Media Lens has indeed spent more time analyzing the liberal media than right-wing outlets. Why? Because the liberal media is often regarded as the outlets where the most progressive and the most challenging views can be seen and heard. If you like, it’s one end of the acceptable spectrum of news and views. But if even here there are severe limits on permissible challenges to state-corporate power, what does that say about society generally? It’s like a litmus test for dissent.”

Cromwell believes that the role of the media in promoting the doctrine of “liberal interventionism” has been absolutely crucial. “If the public was better informed, and not so often misled by those in power, there would likely be a stronger rein on the governing elite. But it’s not happening. A major reason for this is that the corporate media acts as an echo chamber and amplifier of government propaganda. Even when challenged, senior journalists say that their role is to report what those in power say and do—even what they ‘think.’

“For example, when the BBC’s Nick Robinson was the ITN political editor, he wrote of the war in Iraq:

In the run-up to the conflict, I and many of my colleagues, were bombarded with complaints that we were acting as mouthpieces for Mr Blair. Why, the complainants demanded to know, did we report without question his warning that Saddam was a threat? Hadn’t we read what Scott Ritter had said or Hans Blix? I always replied in the same way. It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… . That is all someone in my sort of job can do.

“Robinson performs the same compliant role today as political editor for the BBC,” Cromwell says.

In the ’90s we saw an informal alliance formed between neoconservatives and progressives united behind their support for “liberal intervention.” I ask Cromwell if he thinks that a similar alliance can be formed between the antiwar left and the antiwar right. “I’d be wary of an overt alliance with anyone, right-wing or otherwise, who espouses other views that I might find distasteful. But certainly traditional conservatives should be—and often are—vehemently opposed to what goes by the benign-sounding term ‘neo-liberalism,’ which I unpack in the book.”

One of the most riveting chapters in Cromwell’s book is called “Beyond Indifference,” in which he talks about his philosophical influences. He concludes—rather like Aldous Huxley—that if we do want to “free ourselves” and live better lives, it all starts with undertaking “small acts of kindness for others.” And in contrast, he writes,

Violence feeds on violence, as wise people have known for thousands of years. For example, if brutal state repression is met by violence from some elements of society, it provides an excuse for state forces to ramp up fire-power and crush dissent with even more brutal and widespread violence. The current state of Permanent War can only be ended by people coming together peacefully to overcome state power.

Cromwell certainly thinks that in challenging elite state propaganda we’re in a better position now than we were when Media Lens began in 2001. “One positive thing I’ve noticed is that more people are challenging the media, at least judging by the messages posted on our board and Facebook page, the emails we get and the tweets we receive. Often, even before we’ve worked up a media alert, we’ve been beaten to it by our readers—although, to be fair to ourselves, we do typically wait a few days or longer to see how an event is being played out in the media. Ideally, I would hope that in five years’ time there would be less need for Media Lens to be on the internet ‘haranguing’ and ‘vilifying’ journalists, as skeptics and opponents sometimes say! And surely by ten years from now I can be happily retired and pottering about in a garden shed. Preferably my own and not some random neighbor’s.”

Neil Clark is a UK-based journalist, blogger, and writer.

Democrats had seriously hoped to win a heavily Republican congressional district in South Carolina and invested significant resources in their attempt to do so. The GOP candidate, Mark Sanford, took an unexplained vacation from the state while governor in 2009. Turns out he was visiting his mistresses in Argentina.

Thus ended Sanford’s marriage and, so it seemed, his political career. He was essentially disavowed by his party’s congressional campaign committee this time around. But while the election results didn’t bear out the Democrats’ hopes, the early poll numbers were encouraging. Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch led Sanford by 9 percentage points at one point and was tied with him just days before the election.

Republicans entertain similar hopes in Massachusetts, where the Democratic nominee is Congressman Ed Markey. Markey was first elected to the House in 1976, but he has taken a powder from the state to live in Chevy Chase, Md. Though the congressman has for the last 13 years maintained his childhood home as his Massachusetts voting address, a similar residency issue helped unseat Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar—also first elected in 1976—last year.

Bay State Republicans have visions of another Scott Brown dancing in their heads because of their candidate: Gabriel Gomez. Gomez is Latino, a former Navy SEAL, a successful businessman, and—in sharp contrast with Markey—not a career politician. He has staked out a mix of conservative and moderate-to-liberal positions that has served past Massachusetts GOP candidates well.

The polling has mostly shown a surprisingly close race, with Markey clinging to a single-digit lead. Only one of four recent statewide surveys shows the Democrat winning more than 50 percent of the vote. Public Policy Polling found Markey leading Gomez by just 44 percent to 40 percent.

Independents are now 53 percent of the Massachusetts electorate, and they have been trending Republican in the recent elections where the state party has actually been able to come up with a plausible candidate. But only Scott Brown in the 2010 special election carried them by a wide enough margin to overcome the Democratic base vote. Other Republicans—Sean Bielat against Barney Frank, Jeff Perry in a Cape Cod congressional race, Charlie Baker for governor in 2010, and Brown in last year’s reelection bid—were competitive but came up short.

The one poll that has Markey up by double digits contains warnings of why Gomez may join them. Suffolk/7News has a decent track record in the commonwealth and their polling finds state voters taking strong liberal positions on a whole host of issues. Barack Obama remains popular.

Gomez has tried to combat this by acclimating himself to Massachusetts’s unusual political climate. He has yet to come out foursquare for Obamacare repeal—an issue that helped Sanford return to Congress—though it’s clear his own plan would be different. By contrast, Colbert Busch is widely viewed as not doing enough to distance herself from her national party’s brand in South Carolina. (For good measure, Gomez says Sanford “seems pathetic,” as strong a shot as Colbert Busch ever took.)

Winning Massachusetts Republicans—Brown, William Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Mitt Romney make up the majority of the list—tend to run to the right on the issues they intend to focus on while running to the left on issues peripheral to their campaign. Pro-tax cuts, pro-choice. But that is a harder bet in a federal election than a gubernatorial race.

Brown had three things going for him that Gomez lacks—a Tea Party tidal wave that could be felt even in Massachusetts, a proven track record of turning out independents in tough races, and most importantly an element of surprise over a complacent state Democratic Party. We’ll see if Markey proves to be as bad a candidate as Martha Coakley.

But the main thing to look at beyond Boston or Charleston is this: neither party has an overwhelming advantage over the other, even if partisans on both sides are extremely confident. If these conditions hold into 2014—with the burgeoning IRS scandal, Benghazi, and the looming debt-ceiling fight just a few of the things that could possibly change them—the midterms may be decided by which party does a better job taking advantage of limited opportunities.

Democrats representing states or districts carried by Romney and Republicans representing places won by Obama are high on the list of targets. Senate retirements have created additional opportunities for Republicans, but in some cases top-tier candidates aren’t stepping forward.

That’s where the two parties’ limited forays into enemy territory will prove interesting. The lesson of South Carolina may well be that if Democrats can’t beat Sanford, they can’t win any reddish districts in this issue environment. But it could also be the case that if Colbert Busch had been willing to run as far to the right as, say, Heath Shuler, she’d be heading to Washington.

If Gomez beats Markey, he will become an example of how Republicans could potentially expand their map. If he doesn’t repeat Brown’s special election magic, the national GOP will probably avoid further blue-state incursions while the Massachusetts party turns its attention to the governor’s race—a contest Gomez could make even more interesting if he comes close next month.

W. James Antle III is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation and author of the newly released Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?

In terms of providing its army with bountiful resources, no nation comes even close to the United States. In terms of willingness to commit that army into action, no nation (except perhaps Israel and the United Kingdom) compares. Yet the roster of victories achieved by the United States Army since 1945 is an abbreviated one: the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989). Twenty years ago, observers might have added the Persian Gulf War (1991) to that list. Unfortunately, the brief and seemingly glorious encounter that was Operation Desert Storm turned out to be a mere preliminary bout.

Forays ending in something other than victory—i.e., conclusive operational success yielding desired political outcomes—have been both more numerous and of greater moment. The Cold War provided the occasion for one costly draw (Korea) and one humiliating defeat (Vietnam). The post-Cold War era has included one outright failure, the embarrassing if quickly mythologized Somalia intervention, along with two wars of middling size, long duration, and ambiguous outcome. Whatever verdict historians ultimately render regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, they are unlikely to classify them as roaring successes. Indeed, mounting evidence suggests that these two badly managed wars may have rung down the curtain on the so-called American Century, with the self-described “world’s only superpower” now facing irreversible decline.

The United States Army is like one of those chronically underperforming professional sports franchises: the team looks good on paper but somehow doesn’t quite get the job done. Despite a huge payroll, a roster loaded with talent, and an enthusiastic fan base, performance on the pitch falls short of what’s needed to win championships.

What explains this gap between apparent potential and actual achievement? When Americans send their army to fight, why doesn’t it return home in triumph? In The Generals, Thomas R. Ricks ventures an answer to that question, with his book’s title fingering the chief culprits.

Writing in 1932, the soldier-historian J.F.C. Fuller identified the essential attributes of successful generalship as “courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.” A prize-winning journalist best known for his cogent analysis of the Iraq War, Ricks does not question whether senior American military officers can do the requisite number of push-ups and sit-ups to demonstrate their physical vigor. Yet since World War II, he argues, the quality of creative intelligence found in the upper echelons of the United States Army has declined precipitously. So too has the quality of civil-military interaction—the dialogue between senior officers and senior civilian officials that is essential to effective war management. Here the problem stems at least in part from pronounced lapses in moral courage. Together, these failings at the top explain why an army that seemingly ought to win doesn’t.

Ricks also offers an explanation for why this decline occurred: the Army officer corps no longer polices itself, at least not its upper echelons. Back in World War II, generals fired generals who performed poorly. Today that is no longer the case—indeed, it hasn’t been for several decades. The demise of this ethic of professional accountability has created an environment in which people getting to the top are patently unqualified for the responsibilities that await them. Worse, even when they screw up they get a pass—and sometimes even get promoted.

To become a general officer is to join an exclusive club. As with many clubs, ranking members decide whom to admit, restricting entry to those who satisfy the criteria for being the right sort. In American military vernacular, Ricks writes, the key is to be deemed a “good guy.” The good guy projects the right attitude, strikes the right pose, and recites all the right clichés. Good guys are team players. They don’t rock the boat. They get ahead by going along. In practical terms, demonstrated adherence to orthodoxy becomes the premier qualification for admission. Heretics need not apply.

And according to Ricks, once you’re in, you’re golden: with membership come privileges and protection. So when events expose the limitations of a William Westmoreland in Vietnam or a Tommy Franks in Iraq, other senior officers cognizant of those shortcomings keep mum. Sergeants or captains falling short in the performance of duty might feel the axe; not so with the generals said to be responsible for what the sergeants and captains do or don’t do. General officer responsibility turns out to be more nominal than real. Reflecting on the Iraq War, one disenchanted American officer put it this way: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” Needless to say, that officer’s invitation to join the club never arrived.

It didn’t use to be that way. At the outset of World War II, Ricks writes, George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, established strict standards of general officer accountability. In the field, commanders like Dwight D. Eisenhower enforced those standards, ruthlessly sacking division and corps commanders found wanting. Meanwhile, those generals who demonstrated a capacity for combat leadership—among them J. Lawton Collins, James Gavin, and Matthew Ridgway—reaped rewards: swift promotion and assignment to positions of greater responsibility. For Marshall, war was the ultimate Darwinian environment, separating fit from unfit (or perhaps lucky from unlucky). The clash of arms rendered judgments; Marshall’s system accepted those judgments as authoritative.

Did this Marshall system actually exist? The case that Ricks advances for answering that question in the affirmative falls short of being conclusive. His approach is nakedly didactic: The Generals consists of a series of chapter-length profiles, each focusing on a particular senior officer whose personal qualities, performance of duty, or ultimate fate reveals something about the evolution of American generalship. The individuals to whom the author directs attention form a motley, even whimsical, group. Some are colorful, others bland. Some—George S. Patton for example—meet anyone’s standards for historical importance. Others—raise your hand if you’ve heard of Terry de la Mesa Allen—qualify as marginal. But the key point is this: tinker with the cast of characters and you’re likely to reach different conclusions.

Even some of the figures Ricks uses to build his argument cast doubts about the Marshall system’s efficacy. Mark Clark offers a case in point. Ricks correctly identifies Clark, the erstwhile liberator of Rome, as a petty, if exceedingly ambitious, officer of negligible ability, “disliked and distrusted by subordinates and superiors alike.” In a crisis, Clark’s practice was “to blame everyone but himself.” If the Marshall system worked as Ricks claims, he ought to have been sacked. Yet as a personal friend of Eisenhower, Clark flourished, achieving four-star rank and remaining a blight on the Army for years to come.

More problematic still is the case of Douglas MacArthur, who presided over the Southwest Pacific theatre of operations with an imperial disdain for whatever George Marshall (not to mention Franklin Roosevelt) might want. In a 2010 blog post, Ricks fingered MacArthur as “the worst general in American history.” Here he concedes that MacArthur “stood outside of” the Marshall system. Yet a system of accountability that allows the worst (not to mention most narcissistic) general in U.S. history to run roughshod over his superiors while cultivating an undeserved reputation as a Great American Hero may not actually qualify as a system at all. Some exceptions confirm the rule; others expose the rule as fiction.

Still, even without enshrining World War II as some sort of golden age of American generalship, Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and the rest of them (even including he likes of Clark and MacArthur) did get the job done. The war ended with the United States on the winning side. We may wonder how much credit for that outcome is due to superior U.S. military leadership as opposed to German strategic folly, Japanese economic weakness, and the extraordinary resilience of the Red Army. But that is not the question that Ricks wishes to entertain here.

Instead, according to the story he chooses to tell, the leadership system that had produced victory almost immediately began to decay. By the onset of the Korean War, it had all but ceased to exist. In choosing subordinates, MacArthur, the dominant figure during the war’s early stages, preferred cronies and courtiers. The only creative intelligence he valued was his own. Rather than competence or independent judgment, therefore, sucking up to the boss determined who flourished under his command. After President Harry Truman had finally had his fill of MacArthur’s insubordination and dismissed him, Ridgway sought to reinstate Marshall’s standards, but with a twist: rather than being fired outright, failed commanders were quietly transferred. Shielding generals, and the Army, from embarrassment was becoming a priority.

Worse was to come. In the wake of Korea, a new “corporate model of generalship” emerged, embodied by Maxwell Taylor and by Taylor’s protégé William Westmoreland, officers who were smooth, bureaucratically savvy, intellectually shallow, and less than honest. Taylor “made a habit of saying not what he knew to be true but instead what he thought should be said.” Westmoreland displayed a similar tendency to shade the truth, especially on matters affecting his own image and reputation. Among senior officers, plain speaking was becoming a lost art. The Army, writes Ricks, “was fast becoming a collection of ‘organization men’ … who were far less inclined to judge the performance of their peers.” Generals “were acting less like stewards of their profession, answerable to the public, and more like keepers of a closed guild.”

Here for Ricks lies the key explanation for why Vietnam became such a debacle: Army generals screwed it up. They misconstrued that war’s actual nature. They employed methods (“search and destroy”) that were wrong-headed, unnecessarily brutal, and massively counterproductive. Attempting to deceive and manipulate their civilian masters, they helped create a poisonous civil-military relationship. And with Marshall’s standards of accountability now fully abandoned, they prospered. Senior officers who ran the army into the ground as they led it to defeat reaped rewards, winning medals and promotions. Westmoreland’s fate was emblematic: Ricks suggests that Marshall would have canned him; yet after four years of mismanaging the Vietnam War, Westy ascended to Marshall’s old job as Army chief of staff.

From their experience battling insurgents in Southeast Asia, army generals took one lesson: never again. That apart, they learned next to nothing. Indeed they wasted no time in concluding that the war had nothing to teach.

In recounting how the Army recovered from Vietnam, Ricks rightly emphasizes the contributions of Gen. William DePuy. Today a forgotten figure, DePuy may well rank as the most consequential U.S. military officer in the last quarter of the 20th century, both as chief architect of the Army’s post-Vietnam reforms and as the senior officer most insistent on declaring the entire Vietnam experience irrelevant.

DePuy’s interest in burying that war was understandable: as Westmoreland’s operations chief he had devised the concept of “search and destroy,” confident that superior U.S. firepower would bludgeon the Communist insurgents into submission. In effect, DePuy in the 1960s applied to a Vietnamese civil war methods that Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman had employed during the American Civil War in the 1860s: grind the enemy down until he gives up. Yet the two wars were utterly dissimilar. DePuy’s approach badly underestimated the capacity of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army to absorb punishment and still carry on. And in a contest where the prospects of success turned on winning the support of a contested population, it employed means that victimized and alienated that population.

Yet the abject failure of that concept in Vietnam—a failure above all of creative intelligence—prompted little soul-searching on DePuy’s part. Nothing that had occurred there altered his pre-existing conception of warfare. Stripped to its essentials, that conception reduced combat to a series of discrete, measurable tasks. In DePuy’s eyes, to master tasks was to master war itself. Paying lip service to war’s human dimension, disdaining its political aspect altogether, DePuy’s approach—which became the Army’s approach—pretended to a sort of pseudo-empiricism, as if war were akin to a large-scale industrial enterprise.

Demanding compliance with prescribed formulas, checklists, and decision matrices, DePuy’s Army had little use for critical thinking or independent judgment. This was the Army that in 1991 fought Saddam Hussein and then in 2003 came back for a second go—an Army led by “good guys” who had mastered minor tactics but were intellectually complacent, strategically illiterate, and wore their antipathy for politics like a badge of honor.

Against Saddam’s undistinguished legions, this proved good enough to win battles but nowhere near good enough to win wars. Against the more resolute opponent that American soldiers confronted in occupying Iraq (and Afghanistan), it wasn’t good enough to win anything. Iraq after 2003 became the war that DePuy’s Army had been so intent on avoiding: it was Vietnam redux. Yet generals imbued with DePuy’s mechanistic approach to warfare proved no more adept at grasping the problem actually at hand than had the prior generation of senior leaders who all but destroyed the army they professed to love in their vain pursuit of an ever bigger body count.

Generals who had come of age in DePuy’s army took for granted the superiority of American military technique. They did not question its relevance to the battlefield that they confronted in Iraq. For this generation of senior leaders, creative intelligence amounted to bearing down harder in the face of resistance, an impulse that found its ultimate expression in the madcap effort to lock up every military age Iraqi male in places like Abu Ghraib prison. To remove from circulation every potential “terrorist” was to assure ultimate victory: here was the modified version of body count.

In painful detail, Ricks recounts the failings of successive U.S. commanders in Baghdad and of the equally lackluster four-stars back in Washington who had little to offer to civilian leaders badly in need of competent military advice—even if they were slow to acknowledge that need. The roll call of generals that Ricks singles out for spanking—the “dull and arrogant” Tommy Franks, the clueless Ricardo Sanchez, and the slow-on-the-uptake George Casey (“up to his ears in quicksand and he doesn’t even know it”)—certainly sustains his overall thesis. Not since Irvin MacDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and Joe Hooker subjected the Army of the Potomac to serial abuse had American soldiers suffered under such mediocre leadership.

Extending that comparison would find David Petraeus serving as the Iraq War’s equivalent of Ulysses S. Grant, the general who turns looming failure into victory. Yet Ricks won’t go that far. Rather than winning the Iraq War, he writes, Petraeus succeeded in merely “putting a new face on it.” He applied the tourniquet that slowed the loss of blood. The tourniquet held just long enough for Washington to declare the patient stable and hastily leave the scene of mayhem that the United States itself had unleashed.

Furthermore, the Petraeus Moment by no means inaugurated a full-fledged renaissance of American generalship. According to Ricks, Petraeus’s ill-concealed ambition and operating style, more than slightly reminiscent of Taylor or Westmoreland, had always marked him as an “outlier.” Petraeus assiduously courted journalists. Devoting considerable energy to winning favor among politicians, he achieved rock-star status on Capitol Hill. In recruiting staff, he surrounded himself with fellow Ph.D.’s, seemingly valuing academic credentials over experience gained while leading troops in the field. None of these qualify as standard “good guy” attributes.

As a consequence, Ricks depicts Petraeus as a one-off. When he departed from active duty to become CIA director, the Petraeus Moment ended. Were there doubts on that score, the sex scandal that booted “King David” out of Langley quashed them. The result was an Army left in the hands of senior officers no more interested in critically examining their service’s (or their own) performance in Iraq and Afghanistan than DePuy had been interested in critically examining his service’s (and his own) performance in Vietnam. To judge by the evidence that Ricks assembles, the present generation of senior officers may lack a capacity for introspection, but its members suffer no shortage of self-esteem. “I think we’ve got great general officers,” remarks one Army four-star quoted by Ricks, insisting that anything that had gone amiss in Iraq was clearly the fault of civilian politicians.

For this very reason, the eminently sensible suggestions for improving the quality of senior military leadership that Ricks offers in concluding his account—in essence restoring the professional ethic that produced George C. Marshall and that he himself subsequently sought (however imperfectly) to uphold—have little chance of implementation. The successors to the generals once so keen to forget Vietnam are now hell-bent on forgetting Iraq and can’t wait to do the same for Afghanistan. They are “good guys,” able to do their push-ups and sit-ups. Just don’t look to them for much by way of moral courage or creative intelligence.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

But Dr. Steven S. Coughlin’s charges that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials hid, manipulated, and even lied about research pertaining to Gulf War Illness (GWI) and health problems plaguing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are still causing fallout a month after his stunning testimony before a key House subcommittee.

“The implications of his testimony are profound,” declared Anthony Hardie, 45, a Gulf War veteran who serves on the congressionally appointed Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses (RAC).

Veterans and their advocates, as well as many in the scientific community, have long believed that the VA avoids responsibility for veterans’ care by downplaying or outright ignoring evidence linking wartime experiences—such as exposure to Agent Orange, chemical weapons, or toxic pollution—to veterans’ chronic medical issues back home.

Coughlin, a senior epidemiologist with the VA’s Office of Public Health (OPH), gave the VA’s critics what they say is a smoking gun: after conducting major surveys of 1991 Gulf War veterans and “New Generation” veterans from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan, Coughlin told the committee he quit his post in December. He claims the VA is hiding important survey results about the health of veterans and that his colleagues watered-down analysis that might have shed light on whether recent vets got sick from open-air trash-burning pits on overseas bases.

He told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on March 13 that millions of dollars are invested in veterans’ heath studies each year, yet “if the studies produce results that do not support [OPH’s] unwritten policy, they do not release them.” And “on the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible.”

He tried to confront his supervisors about what he saw but was “openly threatened and retaliated against” when he did. “I took a beating, but I had to follow my conscience,” Coughlin told The American Conservative.

For example, Coughlin said he had been working on the ten-year National Health Study of a New Generation of U.S. Veterans, which cost taxpayers $10 million and targets 60,000 Iraq and Afghan war vets, of whom many are Gulf War I vets, too. Among other data, the questionnaire given to the vets produced information about their exposure to pesticides, oil-well fires, and pyridostigmine bromide tablets, which were prescribed to Gulf War soldiers to protect against nerve agents.

The breadth of research today indicates that these and other battlefield exposures played a role in making an estimated 200,000 (out of 697,000) Gulf War soldiers sick, yet Coughlin and others charge the VA is still bent on treating GWI as a psychosomatic condition brought on by battle stress—which would be a less expensive prospect for future benefits and health costs.

The new information could have been a treasure trove for researchers outside the VA. But the Office of Public Health has never released the study data, “or even that this important information on Gulf War veterans exists,” Coughlin testified. “Anything that supports the position that Gulf War Illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published.”

His charges were bolstered by pioneering Gulf War Illness researcher Dr. Lea Steele in her own testimony that day. “I regret to say … there seems to have been backward movement with actions that seem intended to ignore the science and minimize the fact that there is a serious medical condition resulting from military service in the 1991 Gulf War.”

Coughlin was co-authoring a paper for publication that he said would reveal connections between Iraq and Afghan war veterans who had been exposed to toxic burn pits on U.S. bases overseas and post-deployment diagnoses of asthma and bronchitis. He said the survey found that “a sizable percent” of vets had been exposed to the burn pits.

“My supervisor, Dr. Aaron Schneiderman, told me not to look at data regarding hospitalization and doctors’ visits,” Coughlin said. By ignoring that data, the “tabulated findings obscured rather than highlighted important associations.” The VA has initiated a new study but currently maintains that there are no long-term health risks associated with the burn pits, citing a limited Institute of Medicine study in 2011 that, based on old air samples, found no conclusive evidence that burning trash in the open was responsible for veterans returning home with scars on their lungs.

The original New Gen study could have provided fresh data, but it was deliberately ignored, said Coughlin, who testified that when he told Schneiderman he “did not want to continue as co-investigator under these circumstances,” he “threatened me.”

Since the hearing, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki has directed the Office of Research Oversight to review Coughlin’s allegations. “Any retaliation against VA employees is against the law and is not tolerated by the Department,” the VA said in a statement. But even after repeated attempts by this writer, the VA declined to address Coughlin’s other claims, which include:

His supervisors lied 

Coughlin was the principal investigator for the ongoing Follow-up Study of a National Cohort of Gulf War and Gulf War Veterans, a survey of some 30,000 vets that began in 2010 and whose results have never been published.

From the beginning, the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, which is appointed by congress and is made up of outside researchers and veterans, had serious reservations about the way the questionnaire was structured, said Steele. She complained that while it “contained scores of questions” about “psychological stress, substance abuse and alternative medicine,” it did “not include the basic symptom data” nor define GWI, “by any case definition.”

RAC demanded changes to the questionnaire, and Coughlin tried to push them through. “The VA Chief of Staff [John Gingrich] directed my supervisor” to send it out for objective peer review, he recalled to the House subcommittee. But it was instead sent out to a friend of OPH’s Dr. Michael Peterson, who found a reviewer, “who had no background in Gulf War research,” and was told by “my direct supervisor, Dr. Schneiderman” that “the RAC’s comments were politically motivated.”

“Not surprisingly the reviewer’s comments were very favorable” toward the original questionnaire, he added. Additionally, Coughlin’s supervisors told Gingrich that making changes to the questionnaire would cost the government $1 million and delay the study for a year or more. “None of this was true,” testified Coughlin, “but as a result [Gingrich] ordered the survey to proceed without any changes.”

Data permanently lost

Coughlin pointed to the results of the Gulf War family registry as another set of  “important data that has never been released.” Mandated by Congress, the registry began offering physical examinations to veteran’s families in 1996 in an attempt to screen for possible congenital disorders that may have been caused by wartime environmental exposures. Over 1,100 children and spouses of Gulf War vets were tested through 2001.

“I have been advised that these results have been permanently lost” from the registry database, Coughlin said.

Suicidal vets ignored

Coughlin said that in both the Gulf War and New Gen studies, thousands of veterans reported they had suicidal thoughts in the previous two weeks and “would be better off dead.” Coughlin said there was no protocol in place to offer these vets clinical assistance, and as a result only a “small percentage” got follow-up calls from mental-health specialists.

Coughlin fought for that, and “only after my supervisors threatened to remove me from the study and attempted disciplinary action against me” was he able to secure help for 1,331 vets in the Gulf War study. But he was not been so successful with the New Gen vets, some 2,000 of whom expressed suicidal thoughts. Only a small percentage of those veterans ever got assistance, he said, insisting, “some of those veterans are now homeless or deceased.”

He claimed the Inspector General’s Office would not take on the case. He quit and brought his concerns to the Office of Research Oversight and to Congress. Both are investigating his charges today.

He said it was his ethical duty to push, even if it cost him his job. (He’s now an adjunct professor at Emory University, and still looking for a full-time position.) “The only reason I testified was to help out the veterans,” he told The American Conservative.  “As principal investigator for the study I heard from hundreds of veterans, I talked to them daily for months. I was happy to help out.”

Coughlin says this is an issue that affects all Americans: after $120 million in taxpayer dollars spent on research over that last 10 years, the VA is no closer to targeted treatment for GWI than it was in the 1990s.

Capt. Mark Lyles, a Navy scientist who’s been working on research based on a theory that a highly toxic “stew” of heavy metals found in the Iraqi dust is making veterans sick, says he is “not surprised” to hear of inside data manipulation and research bias.

“I’ve had meetings with the VA and their epidemiology people and basically was shocked at their lack of concern for the data I was presenting,” he says. “You have to realize the cost associated with a real pathology. A psychosomatic [illness] can be treated, thus cured. At the very least we can put you on some pills and ‘fix’ your problem. If there is an environmental toxin or exposure that is the cause of this, and they produce permanent neurological damage, than that is forever.”

Paul Sullivan, director of veteran outreach at the law firm of Bergmann & Moore, notes that research is the first step towards getting new regulations, which are required for expanding eligibility for service-connected healthcare and disability claims. Coughlin’s “substantiated charges,” says Sullivan, show the VA is undermining the process to avoid the burden of lifetime costs on the system.

“The only way to block claims is to block the research,” charges Sullivan. “That is the shameful tragedy of the VA’s actions, as described by Dr. Coughlin.”

For its part, the VA says it’s working vigorously on veterans’ behalf. While not responding to Coughlin’s accusations directly, Victoria Davey at OPH testified that “VA facilities throughout the nation are working on bold, innovative programs that combine primary care and specialty care services” for veterans with GWI, now referred to by the VA as Chronic Multi-symptom Illness (CMI). When pressed by members of the House subcommittee whether the VA believes GWI is physical or mental, she said, “We do not believe it is psychological.”

However, Hardie, who also testified before the subcommittee on March 13, tells The American Conservative that Coughlin’s testimony is just “the tip of the iceberg” of how far the “public health staff will go to lie and manipulate the outcomes they want.” As a veteran who’s been suffering from chronic illnesses since he returned home from Iraq 22 years ago, Hardie calls the officials’ behavior “criminal.”

Right now no one is going to jail, but since the hearing several top Veterans Affairs officials have quietly resigned, including Chief of Staff John Gingrich, Deputy Secretary Scott Gould, and Joel Kupersmith, the VA’s chief research and development officer. (The first two resignations could be connected just as much to the VA’s more widely publicized backlog scandal and revelations that officials were still getting millions of dollars in bonuses while the backlog grew.)

Coughlin’s claims affect at least two generations of veterans as they struggle with life-altering, chronic illnesses that so far, can’t be officially traced to their wartime service.  But while his testimony validated many suspicions about how the VA research arm operates, it left many questions unanswered, the least of which is, what were the results of those studies Coughlin insists are being hidden away?

Veterans hope these answers will come upon further investigation, but note that money is bleeding through the system in the meantime. The culture of the VA needs to be transformed, they say, before real progress can be made.

“There is an element of hope here,” Hardie said, however, “if we keep following this ‘don’t ask, don’t find’ strategy, then we’ll end up having an overburdened healthcare system and an overburdened disability claims system, and you’ll have more people like me who would do anything to get their health back and live a normal life.”

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance reporter and TAC contributing editor.

Follow @kelleybvlahos

First, the government retroactively classified a previously unclassified text message to justify firing MacLean. Then it invoked arcane civil service procedures, including an “interlocutory appeal” to thwart him and, in the process, enjoyed the approval of various courts and bureaucratic boards apparently willing to stamp as “legal” anything the government could make up in its own interest.

And yet here’s the miracle at the heart of this tale: MacLean refused to quit, when ordinary mortals would have thrown in the towel. Now, with a recent semi-victory, he may not only have given himself a shot at getting his old job back, but also create a precedent for future federal whistleblowers. In the post-9/11 world, people like Robert MacLean show us how deep the Washington rabbit hole really goes.

The Whistle Is Blown

MacLean joined the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) in 2001 after stints with the Air Force and the Border Patrol. In July 2003, all marshals received a briefing about a possible hijacking plot. Soon after, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), which oversees FAMS, sent an unencrypted, open-air text message to the cell phones of the marshals cancelling several months of missions for cost-cutting reasons. MacLean became concerned that cancelling missions during a hijacking alert might create a dangerous situation for the flying public. He complained to his supervisor and to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, but each responded that nothing could be done.

It was then that he decided to blow the whistle, hoping that public pressure might force the TSA to reinstate the marshals’ flights. So MacLean talked to a reporter, who broadcast a story criticizing the TSA’s decision and, after 11 members of Congress joined in the criticism, it reversed itself. At this point, MacLean had not been identified as the source of the leak and so carried on with his job.

A year later, he appeared on TV in disguise, criticizing the TSA dress code and its special boarding policies, which he believed allowed marshals to be easily identified by other passengers. This time, the TSA recognized his voice and began an investigation that revealed he had also released the 2003 text message. He was fired in April 2006. Although the agency had not labeled that message as “sensitive security information” (SSI) when it was sent in 2003, in August 2006, months after MacLean’s firing, it issued a retroactive order stating that the text’s content was indeed SSI.

A Whistleblower’s Catch-22

That disclosing the contents of an unclassified message could get someone fired for disclosing classified information is the sort of topsy-turvy situation which could only exist in the post-9/11 world of the American national security state.

Under the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA), a disclosure prohibited by law negates whistleblower protections. That, of course, makes it in the government’s interest to define disclosure as broadly as possible and to classify as much of its internal communications for as long as it possibly can. No wonder that in recent years the classification of government documents has soared, reaching a record total of 92,064,862 in 2011.

Officially, the U.S. government recognizes only three basic levels of classification: confidential, secret, and top secret. Since 9/11, however, various government agencies have created multiple freestyle categories of secrecy like “SSI,” “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” “Sensitive But Unclassified,” and the more colorful “Eyes Only.” All of these are outside the normal codification system; all are hybrids that casually seek to incorporate the full weight of the formal law. There are currently 107 designations just for “sensitive” information. In addition to those labels, there exist more than 130 sets of extra “handling requirements” that only deepen the world of government secrecy.

At issue for MacLean was not only the retroactive classification of a text message already in the public domain, but what classified could possibly mean in an era when everything related to the national security state was slipping into the shadows. Such questions are hardly semantic or academic. MacLean’s case hinges on how they are answered.

The case against Army Private Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks is, for example, intimately tied up in them. The military hides behind classification to block access to Manning’s “public” trial. With WikiLeaks, despite more than 100,000 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables being available to anyone anywhere on the web, the government continues to insist that they remain “classified” and cannot even be rereleased in response to requests. Potential federal employees were warned to stay away from the cables online, and the State Department even blocked TomDispatch from its staff to shield them from alleged WikiLeaks content (some of which was linked to and discussed, but none of which was actually posted at the site).

With author Tony Shaffer, the government retroactively classified its own account of why he was given the Bronze Star and his standard deployment orders to Afghanistan after he published an uncomplimentary book about American actions there. The messy case of alleged “hacktivist” Barrett Brown includes prosecution for “disclosing” classified material simply by linking to it at places where it had already been posted online; and, while still at the State Department, I was once accused of the same thing by the government.

In MacLean’s case, over a period of seven years, the legality of the TSA firing him for using an only-later-classified text was upheld. Legal actions included hearings before administrative judges, the Merit Systems Protections Board twice, that interlocutory appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The sum of these decisions amid a labyrinth of judicial bureaucracies demands the use of the term Kafkaesque.  MacLean, so the general judgment went, should have known that the text message he planned to leak was a classified document, even when it wasn’t (yet). As a result, he should also have understood that his act would not be that of a whistleblower alerting the public to possible danger, but of a criminal risking public safety by exposing government secrets. If that isn’t the definition of a whistleblower’s catch-22, what is?

What such a twisted interpretation by the various courts, boards, and bodies meant was chillingly laid out in an amicus brief on behalf of MacLean filed by the United States Office of Special Counsel (a small, lonely U.S. government entity charged with protecting whistleblowers):

“Whistleblowers should not have to guess whether information that they reasonably believe evidences waste, fraud, abuse, illegalities or public dangers might be later designated as SSI [unclassified sensitive security information] and therefore should not be disclosed. Rather than making the wrong guess, a would-be whistleblower will likely choose to remain silent to avoid risking the individual’s employment.”

Seven Years Later…

In 2011, five years after he had been fired as an air marshal, MacLean’s case finally reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Two full years after that, in April 2013, the court handed down a decision that may yet provide justice for Robert MacLean — and for future whistleblowers. While awkwardly upholding previous decisions that the government can indeed retroactively classify information, even documents in categories like SSI that exist outside the government’s official framework for classification and secrecy, the court tackled a more basic question: Was Robert MacLean a whistleblower anyway, entitled to protection for his act of conscience?

Here lies the conflict at the heart of just about every whistleblower case — between the public’s right (and need) to know and the (at times legitimate) need for secrecy. The government typically argues that individuals should not be allowed to decide for themselves what remains secret and what doesn’t, or chaos would result. At the same time, in a post-9/11 world of increasing secrecy, the loss of the right to know, and the massive over-classification of documents, the “conflict” has become ever more one-sided. If everything can be considered a classified secret document too precious for Americans to know about, and nothing classified can be disclosed, then the summary effect is that nothing inside the government can ever be shown to the public.

The court found that while the Transportation Safety Administration could legally apply any classification it wanted to information any time it wanted, even retroactively, simply slapping on such a label did not necessarily prohibit disclosure. Absent an actual law in MacLean’s case mentioning SSI, a term created bureaucratically, not congressionally, there could be no Whistleblower Protection Act-excepting prohibition. In other words, MacLean could still be a whistleblower.

One of MacLean’s lawyers, Tom Devine, told me the decision “restored enforceability for the Whistleblower Protection Act’s public free speech rights. It ruled that only Congress has the authority to remove whistleblower rights. Agency-imposed restraints are not relevant for WPA rights.”

“With this precedential decision,” MacLean explained to me, “agencies can no longer cancel out Whistleblower Protection Act rights with their semi-secret markings like SSI, Law Enforcement Sensitive, etcetera.”

In a concurring opinion, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Judge Evan Wallach was even clearer: “Mr. MacLean presented substantial evidence that he was not motivated by personal gain but by the desire to protect the public… I concur to emphasize that the facts alleged, if proven, allege conduct at the core of the Whistleblower Protection Act.”

MacLean’s case now returns to the Merit Systems Protection Board. The board is a complex piece of bureaucracy inside the already complicated federal government personnel system. In simple terms, it is supposed to be a place to appeal personnel actions, such as alleged unfair hirings and firings. It thus serves as a kind of watchdog over the sprawling federal human resources empire. The Board now has the court-ordered specific charge to “determine whether Mr. MacLean’s disclosure qualifies for WPA protection.”

Note as well that this case could continue without end for years more, traveling on “appeal” back through the federal judicial bureaucracy and the courts. And remember that this, too, is an advantage to a government that wants ever less known about itself. If, as a federal employee, you are watching a case like MacLean’s (or Thomas Drake’s, or Franz Gayle’s, or Morris Davis’s, or John Kiriakou’s, or even my own small version of this), then you can’t help noticing that the act of whistleblowing could leave you: a) out on your ear; b) prosecuted for a criminal act and/or c) with your life embroiled for years in the intricacies of your own never-ending case. None of this is exactly an encouragement to federal employees to blow that whistle.

Whistleblowers and Secrecy

Threats to whistleblowers abound, so any positive step, however minimalist or reversible, is important. Entering the White House pledging to head the most transparent administration in history, Barack Obama has, in fact, gone after more national security whistleblowers, often using the draconian Espionage Act, than all previous administrations combined.

His Justice Department has repeatedly tried to prosecute whistleblowers, crudely lumping them in with actual spies and claiming they endanger Americans (and sometimes “the troops”) by their actions. In addition, through the ongoing case of Berry v. Conyers, Obama has sought to expand the definition of “national security worker” to potentially include thousands of additional federal employees. Many employees who occupy truly sensitive jobs in the intelligence community (for example, real-world spies at the CIA) are exempt from being granted whistleblower status. They also cannot appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board if fired. By seeking to expand that exemption to a significantly larger group of people who may work at some federal agency, but in non-sensitive positions, Obama is also functionally moving to shrink the pool of potential whistleblowers. In Berry v. Conyers, for example, the persons Obama seeks to exempt as occupying sensitive jobs are merely an accounting technician and a commissary worker at an Air Force base. Neither of them even hold security clearances.

What happens with MacLean’s case potentially affects every future whistleblower. If the mere presence of a pseudo-classification on an item, even applied retroactively, negates whistleblower protections, it means dark days ahead for the right of the citizenry to know what the government is doing (or how it’s misbehaving) in its name. If so, no act of whistleblowing could be considered protected, since all the government would have to do to unprotect it is classify whatever was disclosed retroactively and wash its hands of the miscreant. Federal employees, not a risk-taking bunch to begin with, will react accordingly.

This is what gives MacLean’s case special meaning. While the initial decision on his fate will occur in the bowels of the somewhat obscure Merit Systems Protections Board, it will set a precedent that will surely find its way into higher courts on more significant cases. Amid a lot of technical legal issues, it all boils down to something very simple: Should whistleblower protections favor the conscience of a concerned federal employee willing to risk his job and the freedom to inform the public, or should they dissolve in the face of an unseen bureaucrat’s (retroactive) pseudo-classification decision?

Procedurally, there are many options ahead for MacLean’s case, and the government will undoubtedly contest each tiny step. Whatever happens will happen slowly. This is exactly how the government has continually done its dirty work post-9/11, throwing monkey wrenches in the gears of the legal system, twisting words, and manipulating organizations designed to deliver justice in order to deny it.

MacLean smiles at this. “I did seven years so far. I can do seven more if they want. There’s too much at stake to just give up.”

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Following the publication of his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People in 2011, the Department of State began termination proceedings, reassigning him to a make-work position and stripping him of his security clearance and diplomatic credentials. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren will instead retire from the State Department with his full benefits of service in September. Copyright 2012 Peter Van Buren

In March 2003, on the eve of war in Iraq, Pope John Paul II dispatched Cardinal Pio Laghi, a senior Vatican diplomat, to Washington to make a final plea to Bush not to invade. Laghi, chosen for his close ties to the Bush family, outlined “clearly and forcefully” the Vatican’s fears of what would follow an invasion: protracted war, significant casualties, violence between ethnic and religious groups, regional destabilization, “and a new gulf between Christianity and Islam.” The warning was not heeded.

Two weeks after the Bush-Laghi meeting, on March 19, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced. Shortly after combat operations concluded on May 1, the real conflict began. Amid the chaos and sectarian violence that followed, Iraq’s Christians suffered severe persecution. Neither the military nor the State Department took action to protect them. In October 2003, human rights expert Nina Shea noted that religious freedom and a pluralistic Iraq were not high priorities for the administration, concluding that its “diffidence on religious freedom suggests Washington’s relative indifference to this basic human right.” Shea added, “Washington’s refusal to insist on guarantees of religious freedom threatens to undermine its already difficult task of securing a fully democratic government in Iraq”—more prescience that would be likewise disregarded.

Iraq’s diaspora Christian community in America had also foreseen the danger, and quickly took action, helping thousands of refugees with humanitarian assistance. The Chaldean Federation’s Joseph Kassab, himself a refugee from Baathist Iraq decades before, advocated zealously for their protection. Kassab’s brother, Jabrail, a Chaldean archbishop, helped organize relief in Iraq during the sanctions from 1991-2003, doing “all that he could to help the Iraqi people—Christians and Muslims together.” His brother remained at his post until October 2006, when a Syrian Orthodox priest, Fr. Paulos Eskander, was abducted and beheaded, after which Pope Benedict ordered him to leave Iraq. Fr. Eskander’s murder was part of a campaign that targeted the most conspicuous of Christians—the clergy.

In February 2008, Archbishop Paulos Rahho’s vehicle was attacked after he finished praying the Stations of the Cross in Mosul. His driver and bodyguards were killed. Rahho, wounded but alive, was put into the trunk of the assassins’ car and taken from the scene. He managed to pull out his cell phone and call his church to tell them not to pay his ransom, saying he “believed that this money would not be paid for good works and would be used for killing and more evil actions.” His body was found in a shallow grave two weeks later.

During this campaign of systematic violence, the U.S. military provided no protection to the already vulnerable Christian community. In some instances, the clergy went to local American military units to beg to for protection. None was given. As Shea noted two weeks later, the administration and the State Department—whose record on Christian minorities and religious freedom leaves much to be desired—still refused to “acknowledge that the Christians and other defenseless minorities are persecuted for reasons of religion.”

A month after the murder of Archbishop Rahho, President Bush addressed the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.  Joseph Kassab had been invited to pray the Hail Mary and Our Father in Aramaic following Bush’s remarks, an act of solidarity with the Christians of the Arab world. “I had two or three minutes with the president behind the curtains,” Kassab said in a recent interview. “He said he thought you had to fix the whole picture before coming to the other elements. It was disappointing. He knew it was a failure and his administration refused to acknowledge that.”

Rosie Malek-Yonan, an Assyrian Christian who testified before Congress, would call the Bush administration a “silent accomplice” to “incipient genocide.” Anglican Canon Andrew White of Baghdad’s Ecumenical Congregation captured the reality with blunt precision: “All of my leadership were taken and killed—all dead.”

Those Iraqi Christians who fled to America would fare little better in seeking asylum. Many Chaldeans and Assyrians were detained, until their cases were heard, in what an attorney familiar with Chaldean-asylum cases describes as “prisons,” adding that she “never worked on a case where a Chaldean was granted asylum, but I heard that it happened.” Throughout these deportation proceedings, the administration and the State Department steadfastly refused to recognize the conditions—which the U.S. had helped to bring about—as “persecution.” In consequence, most were deported.

Ironically, hundreds of thousands Iraqi Christians would find refuge in the quasi-autonomous republic of Kurdistan in the north. “They arrived,” Kassab would note, “with nothing on their backs and the Kurds came to the rescue.” Traveling to the region to assist with resettlement efforts, Kassab observed a Kurdish government willing despite inadequate resources to help the fleeing Christians. The Kurds went to the U.S. government, which they believed was partly responsible for the refugee crisis, to ask for help. “This fell on deaf ears,” Kassab recalls.

Today Iraqi Kurdistan is assimilating refugees from another neighboring country torn apart by sectarian violence: Syria. Among the refugees are more Iraqi Christians, who originally fled to the relative freedom and tolerance of Syria, only to find themselves again fleeing persecution, often hunted by Syria’s rebels. Many of these rebels are members or affiliates of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The Obama administration, bewilderingly, has chosen to support Syria’s rebel groups without any apparent thought of the consequences. The extent of covert support remains unclear, though reports suggest it is significant. As in Iraq, the insurgent campaign in Syria targets priests, the most visible symbols of the Christian faith.

The protection and perseverance of minority religious communities—indeed, of religious freedom—continues to be a low priority for the Obama administration and the State Department.  The U.S. fails to recognize that the Islamist-Wahabbist commitment to eradicating Christian minorities today will result in the extinction of diverse modes of Islam tomorrow, a fact that is not lost on moderate Muslims.

The objective of the Iraq War—to democratize the Middle East—may yet be realized. But democracy in the Middle East is proving less tolerant than the regimes it has succeeded. Unless swift action is taken, these democracies will evolve into bastions of intolerance and violence beyond our comprehension. These democracies will not march ineluctably toward liberty and pluralism, as some naïve optimists continue to forecast despite the evidence, but will end in the ordered barbarism of Saudi Arabia, where punishments include beheading and crucifixion, according to Amnesty International.

When he came to office, President Bush famously scribbled in a report on the Clinton administration’s inaction during the Rwandan genocide, “Not on my watch.” Clinton today admits that inaction in Rwanda is his greatest regret. One day, Bush may look back on the neglect of the Middle East’s Christians with similar regret. Cardinal Laghi would recall that Bush “seemed to truly believe in a war of good against evil,” that his work was providential. “You might start, and you don’t know how to end it,” the prelate warned. In this sense, the Iraq War continues, and with it the deliberate extinction of Middle Eastern Christians.

Andrew Doran served on the Executive Secretariat of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO at the U.S. Department of State, where he has since worked as a consultant. His views are his own.

Jordan was the first woman elected to Congress from Texas and the first Southern black female ever elected to the House. She compiled a similar record of firsts in Texas state politics and was active in the civil rights movement. But Jordan capped her career chairing the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.

The commission’s vision of immigration reform was very different than the “comprehensive” variety pushed by a bipartisan gaggle of senators. To understand how different, consider Jordan’s contention in early 1995 congressional testimony that “deportation is crucial.”

“Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave,” Jordan said. “The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”

Today’s comprehensive immigration reformers think it is an abomination to deport anyone but criminal aliens. The Obama administration has celebrated such deportations while announcing that most of the remaining illegal immigrant population isn’t an enforcement priority.

In all, the Jordan Commission favored reducing legal immigration by one-third, moving towards more skill-based immigration and away from chain migration, and enhanced enforcement. One need not support all its recommendations—I oppose national ID cards, for instance—to see that serious alternatives to the Gang of Eight approach were once seriously contemplated by such mainstream Democrats as former President Bill Clinton.

Not long after Jordan’s untimely death in January 1996, the effects of her absence were felt. Liberals could not say no to immigration, whatever its impact on the working poor. Economic conservatives decided her commission’s worksite enforcement mechanisms were insufficiently pro-business; Beltway social conservatives regarded its changes to family reunification as insufficiently pro-family.

Since then, the country has been plagued by the notion that racism is the only possible motivation for reducing immigration or enforcing immigration laws. There were once courageous liberals like Jordan and to a lesser extent Theodore Hesburgh to whom it was impossible to ascribe such motives who were willing to argue otherwise.

Jordan observed that “it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest,” which includes the interests of citizens of every race, and naturalized citizens as well as natives and the “nativists” supposedly advocating on their behalf. The shift from Jordan to Joe Arpaio as the public face of immigration enforcement made a more nuanced restrictionist case even more difficult to make.

Perhaps Jordan’s liberalism would have merely served those making the bizarre argument that conservative immigration restrictionists aren’t really conservative, that the pro-choice views of the obscure John Tanton somehow negate Tom Tancredo’s 100 percent pro-life ratings from the National Right to Life Committee.

Somehow, the liberalism of Chuck Schumer, Bob Mendendez, the National Council of La Raza, and the Ford Foundation never negates the conservatism of Republicans who work with these lawmakers and organizations to promote comprehensive immigration reform.

But it’s at least as likely that we would actually have an immigration debate rather than what has largely been a monologue, with the possibility of some federal legislators being able to quietly block a comprehensive bill lingering in the background as the only source of suspense.

Critics of uninterrupted mass immigration are currently relying upon lawmakers like Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions and Texas GOP Rep. Lamar Smith. Despite their considerable talents, both men are near-perfect foils for immigration increasers and amnesty advocates.

It’s possible that someone like Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican whose Cuban ancestry is similar to Marco Rubio’s while his take on the Gang of Eight machinations is markedly different, could shake up the prevailing narrative.

But nothing could challenge the conventional wisdom more than the reminding Americans that one could march against Jim Crow and advocate more moderate levels of immigration. A figure who could compellingly make that case is sadly missing from our national politics.

W. James Antle III is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation and author of the newly released Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?

But looking at the situation from Karzai’s perspective it is necessary to reckon with the fact that he will be an ex-president after elections in April 2014 since he cannot run again. What power he currently enjoys will go to whoever replaces him, possibly a hand-picked successor but equally possibly someone who does not like him very much. If Karzai wants to maintain his viability in Afghanistan and protect his interests he has to have his own powerbase and he is doing that in the time honored Afghan fashion by working with tribal and local power brokers. So no one should be surprised that Karzai regards the CIA cash, which he refers to as “ghost money,” as a gift from Washington that he can use to buy the personal loyalty of regional heavyweights and ensure both his future relevance and his safety.

From the CIA point of view, the money being given to the president’s office is a pittance relative to the cost of the war. Assuming that Karzai is not being completely frank with his State Department interlocutors, a likely assumption, having another channel to him might be regarded as not only desirable but essential. It would give Washington an extra seat at the table in the Afghan presidential office. The income stream is also an inducement for the Karzai administration to be cooperative on issues that are considered to be vital. And the moves by Karzai to create his own political powerbase independent of his office would also be regarded as a plus by Langley as it could suggest that he might continue to be a viable source or even an agent of influence for years to come.

On the downside, the monumental corruption of the Karzai regime must have been a concern, as was the demonstrated connection of the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai (now deceased) with drug trafficking. Even for a senior level bureaucrat in Washington it would have been presumptuous to believe that more under the table money would buy influence without fueling still more corruption. Indeed, the Times quotes one U.S. official as saying off the record that “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.” Nor would money received directly in any way diminish the enormous profits coming from drugs, which is all part and parcel of the political and personal patronage network that makes the Afghan government operate like a criminal cartel. And as for buying access and influencing policy, Karzai has been resistant to some initiatives being advanced by Washington, including the plan for the CIA to continue to run counter-insurgency operations using its own militias post 2014.  Karzai is insisting that the Afghan government will take charge of the effort. The Times even suggests that Karzai’s unwillingness to be accommodating is a demonstration that he cannot be bought. Or at least that he cannot be bought for a paltry few million dollars.

There is a long history of CIA buying foreign heads of state. In the Middle East, the late King Hussein of Jordan received $7 million yearly from the Agency and a succession of Christian presidents of Lebanon and their parties benefited similarly. Nearly all the Generals who headed military style governments in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s were on the CIA payroll. In Europe, the process was more subtle, with the money generally going to a political party or even a faction within a party rather than to a politician.

As one who has personally carried and delivered bags of CIA cash to buy foreign politicians, I must confess to having generally negative feelings regarding the process. Prior to 9/11, the money very often went to politicians and leaders who were either anti-communist or accommodating of U.S. commercial interests. Today, the money generally winds up in the hands of a leader who will cooperate with U.S. global security policies regarding counter-terrorism and in opposition to the so-called rogue states Iran and North Korea.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s allegations that a left leaning political party might be supported by Moscow frequently led to the funding of other organizations willing to publicize and oppose that connection. This pattern was repeated throughout Western Europe, most notably in countries like France and Italy where local Communist parties, associated unions, and front organizations were believed to be capable of winning elections.

The CIA’s efforts were sometimes successful, but many of the schemes concocted on the fly to counter the red menace and economic nationalism turned out to be counterproductive in achieving the stated goal of US foreign policy, the development of stable multi-party democracies. In Italy, for example, the CIA interfered in elections through the 1970s in its attempt to keep the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) out of power even though it was hardly a pawn of Moscow, and the US government’s support of the various unstable coalitions propped up around the Christian Democrats institutionalized corruption that continues to this day. It also inhibited the development of a genuine democratic opposition party.

CIA-fueled conservative political dominance inevitably produced what is now referred to as “blowback.” It empowered the Communists in places like Portugal, Italy, France, and Spain, making them appear to be genuine nationalists—which some were—resisting American hegemony. The CIA continued to fund various political groups and labor unions into the 1990s, long after the presumed Communist threat to disrupt Western European political solidarity with the United States had subsided.

Elsewhere, the CIA’s funding of local politicians representing military governments often had long-term consequences that eventually harmed US interests. The overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 led to a series of despotic regimes and a civil war that killed at least a quarter of a million people. The pattern was repeated in a number of other nations in Central and South America, to include El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Colombia, and Bolivia, countries that are only now recovering from the years of military or authoritarian rule.

In all the examples cited above, the CIA was able to influence political development in the countries involved, for better or for worse. So does Agency cash delivered to the Karzai president’s office accomplish anything along similar lines if one assumes that the United States will have vital interests in Afghanistan after 2014? Probably not. Karzai will be gone and will likely be enjoying his hundreds of millions of corruption-generated dollars in a place like Dubai, leaving behind a new set of thieves in the presidential palace. Afghanistan will continue its slow slide into chaos as the few remaining donor nations that actually come up with the cash become nervous about long term prospects due to the corruption. The Agency will continue to tout the belief that it has some special access to senior level Afghan officials, who it will continue to pay off with some regularity, but the “Great Game” in Central Asia has already moved far beyond the point where it can be fixed by buying a president.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

Yet even though Congressional Republicans won an obvious victory on the sequester, we might note that on the overall issue of optimizing air travel, the sequester reversal doesn’t make things better; it only keeps them from getting worse. So the long-term decay of America’s competitive position in the world–air travel being a key component of competitiveness—will lamentably continue.

As we all remember, in the wake of last months’s FAA furloughs of air traffic controllers, constant news reports of travelers suffering long lines at airports proved alarming—and galvanizing—to Congress. So gridlock was transcended, and quick action taken, to “carve out” the FAA’s air traffic controllers from the effects of sequestration. And yes, the fact that reporters and lawmakers fly so frequently had a lot to do with this sudden supernova of media attention and legislative action.

The political spin was clear enough immediately; even progressive partisans had to agree that their side had lost: “The Democrats have lost on sequestration” was the headline atop Ezra Klein’s April 26 blog item in The Washington Post. “Sequestration: GOP Wins” ran the header for Michael Tomasky’s same-day piece for The Daily Beast. Democratic leaders were naturally upset: “We’re going to have to reclaim some lost ground here,” declared Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a rising star in the House. Moreover, added Van Hollen, “We cannot have a situation where people just cherry-pick the sequester.”

Yet that cherry-picking, of course, is exactly what happened. The air traveling class picked itself out of the one-size-cuts-all impact of the sequester. Is such cherry-picking a victory for aerial overclass elitism? Or is it a victory for the common-sensical need to make judgments as to what are the most important federal functions?

Everyone can help answer that question, and yet in the meantime, Beltway politicos know that the Republicans won big, even as the next generation of would-be sequester-exempters are lining up for their own special treatment. Most likely, the sequester will continue to be honeycombed with carve-outs, as powerful groups reclaim “their” federal money.

However, returning to the FAA matter, we can see a lost opportunity in the way that this chapter in the sequester saga was resolved.

First off, we might note that the pre-sequester system was hardly ideal, and so a mere return to the status quo ante is hardly the best possible outcome. Why? Because the airways are overcrowded beyond their current capacity; we need better air traffic control, and we need better, bigger, and more airports. Otherwise, we will continue to snarl our travelers, and our commerce, in costly delays.

In 2011, according to the Airlines for America trade association, the direct cost to the airlines of system delays was $7.7 billion—and that was a 15 percent increase from the year before. That $7.7 billion cost, we might note, does not include the personal cost to passengers from all those delays. For busy business travelers, time is money, and if it takes too much time to get from place to place in the US, well, they can make other long-term business arrangements, elsewhere in the world.

Second, the $253 million that Congress reallocated to air traffic control was, in fact, taken from elsewhere in the FAA budget—specifically, from the fund that finances airport improvements. To be sure, airport infrastructure might not be as immediately critical as air traffic control, but it is, of course, vitally important.

Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers calculated that a $2 billion shortfall exists in projected airport construction spending through 2020. The ASCE further argued that inadequate airport infrastructure could cost the economy as much as $47 billion during that same time span.

On April 30, President Obama himself took note of the air infrastructure issue, expressing the problem in terms that the flying class could readily understand:

“There was a recent survey of the top airports in the world. And there was not a single U.S. airport that came in the top 25.  Not one. Not one U.S. airport was considered by the experts and consumers who use these airports to be in the top 25 in the world. Cincinnati airport came in around 30th. What does that say about our long term competitiveness and future?”

In fact, Cincinnati comes in at exactly #30 in international rankings. Surely even Republicans can see something wrong with that picture—and that picture will be made worse if the $253 million for airport improvements is now gone.

So what to do? How can conservatives, in particular, think about improving aviation—without simply surrendering to the Obama administration on budget issues? Isn’t there a better way to fund national assets such as our aviation system?

We might begin by stepping back and thinking about the paradox of how something as rich as passenger aviation could be impoverished by arbitrary budget-sequesters. After all, there’s plenty of money in aviation. So why is anybody talking about cuts?

The answer, of course, is that the original sequester, as it was designed, was the problem.  Controlling overall federal spending is a meritorious goal, but a robust aviation system is not only a necessity for the US, but also a money-maker—and for that reason, it shouldn’t ever suffer cuts as part of any larger government retrenchment program. It makes no sense to impose austerity on a profit center.

If Uncle Sam doesn’t account for aviation as a profit center—as a capital asset—then Uncle Sam needs a new accounting system. And the FAA would be a good place to start, because it has an affluent support base that wants the air system to get better, not worse.   The trick is to simply to apply aviation resources directly to aviation problems.

Such a direct-funding system shouldn’t be difficult. Indeed, airline passengers, fully aware that they are paying a number of special taxes on their tickets, might think that such a direct-funding mechanism already exists. After all, Airlines for America identifies 17 different taxes on airline tickets and air travel. Yet as we have seen, all those taxes did not insulate passenger aviation from the sequester.

So is it possible to do that now? To guarantee that a certain stream of tax revenue goes toward a specific public purpose? The answer is not only “yes,” but “yes, it happens all the time.”

These directed revenues happen most often at the state and local level, in the form of hypothecated taxes. “Hypothecated” is a two-dollar word for “dedicated,” or “earmarked.” That is, all the revenues from a certain tax go toward a certain purpose.

Such taxes are common at the state and local level, where such taxes—even tax increases—prove to be reliably popular. Voters often feel good about paying a special sales tax, for example, to help build a park or a school or a new sewer system. The closer the citizen is to a problem, the more likely he or she will be sympathetic to arguments that more taxes could solve the problem.

Indeed, the closer one looks at hypothecated taxes, the less ideological they appear. Everything has a political dimension, but a question about, say, a new road in an area is more of a problem to be solved, and less of an ideological point to be fought over. That’s why it’s often legitimate to think of hypothecated taxes as “user fees,” and there’s rarely much controversy over those.

By contrast, the federal government does not typically operate on the hypothecated-tax principle. As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, the many federal taxes go into the same general fund from which all agencies draw. Thus the popular FAA and unpopular foreign-aid agencies share the same siphon into the tax well.

We can quickly see that the national government would naturally prefer this general-fund approach, because it commingles the popular and the unpopular.

Indeed, over time, the federal government has tended to eliminate even the semblance of hypothecated taxes. The Social Security system, for example, began in the 1930s amidst lots of stern talk about a sacrosanct “trust fund,” into which the payroll taxes of future recipients were deposited. Yet over the decades, that trust fund has become nothing more than an accounting fiction; nothing stops DC lawmakers from using the trust fund to pay for anything else.

Similarly, the walls around the Highway Trust Fund, financed by a federal gas tax, have been knocked down; today, less than two-thirds of the Highway Trust Fund’s revenues go for highways.

This federal sleight-of-hand may serve the convenience of Powertown, and it may be the only way to sustain unpopular programs, and yet fiscal slipperiness comes at a political cost: People don’t much like the federal government. According to an April 2013 survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, just 28 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of the federal government; by contrast, 57 of Americans approve of their state government, and 63 percent approve of their local government.

So maybe Uncle Sam should give hypothecation a try. A dedicated tax for defense? For Afghanistan? For education? For NASA? We would quickly learn some lessons as to what the voters like-and don’t like. Okay, maybe that’s too radical, at least in the short run; after all, how much hard truth can the Beltway withstand?

So as a modest step in the right direction, perhaps the national government could hypothecate all the taxes it needs to upgrade the passenger aviation system. DC could put forth a plan that would fully fund all the needs of the air system—and then separate it out from the overall federal maw, once and forever.

Would it work? Sure it would: As we have seen, state and local governments do it all the time.

Indeed, the hypothecation idea is fully in keeping with the government-as-a-platform vision that’s now percolating out of Silicon Valley. That is, we can think of each government function as an “app,” to be regarded on its own merits—and to to be upgraded, or even removed, as needed.

So over time, the hypothecation idea could be applied to other areas of the federal government, segmenting the whole of the national leviathan into more effective—and more popular—operating units. To think: Uncle Sam could become popular again.

James P. Pinkerton is a contributor to the Fox News Channel and a TAC contributing editor. Follow him on Twitter.

The importance of the Hispanic vote to the outcome of the 2012 election is easily overestimated since many Hispanics live in states like California and Texas where a GOP loss or win was a foregone conclusion. Allison Kopicki, polling editor at the New York Times, explained in the Nov. 20 edition how Obama could have won re-election even if Romney had taken a majority of the Hispanic vote in key swing states. Moreover, the reasons for President Obama’s popularity among Hispanic voters are complex. Hispanics are on average less educated and wealthy than non-Hispanic whites and are drawn to generic Democratic policies such as raising the minimum wage. Even on the so-called “social issues,” Kopicki points out that Hispanics were far more likely than white voters to support Democratic priorities such as same-sex marriage (59 percent versus 47 percent) and abortion on demand (“two thirds” compared to “slightly more than half”).

No doubt some Hispanic voters were also moved by the President’s promise of a “path to citizenship” for the millions of illegal aliens residing in the country. Hispanic citizens are more likely than the rest of us to be related to, or personally acquainted with, an illegal immigrant who might benefit from the president’s amnesty. In addition, they could hardly have missed the relentless message of the liberal and Spanish-language media that all opposition to the president’s immigration policies grew from fear and hatred of Hispanics. Even so, opinion polls consistently showed that immigration policy was a low priority for most Hispanic voters. Indeed, in a May 2012 Gallup poll, immigration policy ranked fifth—behind healthcare, unemployment, economic growth, and the gap between rich and poor.

Even if some Hispanic voters are turned off by Republican restrictionism, Republicans face a dilemma. Their opposition to unions, minimum wages, and taxes on the rich gives them to little to show white working men and women why conservative Republicans, and not liberal Democrats, are on their side; limiting wage competition by restricting immigration is one of the GOP’s few truly blue-collar policies. In a study reported in the December 2012 issue of Social Science Quarterly, University of Houston political scientist George Hawley concluded that supporting amnesty would lose more white votes for the GOP than it would gain them in Hispanic votes.

That a number of Republican politicians have nonetheless leapt for the media’s bait should not be surprising. There have always been factions within the GOP that favored loose enforcement of immigration law, mostly those in thrall to businesses in search of cheaper labor but also libertarians who in principle detest market regulation of any kind. (Shortly after the election, the editors of the Wall Street Journal intoned: “The GOP needs to leave its anti-immigration absolutists behind.”) Yet along with these establishment conservatives, who have never hidden their affection for more liberal immigration policies, a significant number of formerly reliable conservatives in the media and Congress, such as Sean Hannity of Fox News and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, have decided to go with the flow and pronounced that Republicans must do “something” to prove that they are not anti-Hispanic—or at least to get immigration out of the spotlight.

The apparent crumbling of Republican opposition to a general amnesty for the 11 million illegal aliens estimated to be residing in the United States has triggered a euphoric reaction and sense of empowerment among a host of liberal and business interest groups. They demand not only an amnesty for the huddled masses “living in the shadows” but also expanded “guestworker” programs to satisfy the demand for unskilled labor that fostered illegal immigration in the first place, tens of thousands of additional visas for skilled STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers, and millions of additional visas for the foreign relatives of naturalized immigrants now stalled in decades-long waiting lists. This accumulating “immigration wish list” is grudgingly accompanied by promises to increase security at the border and to make mandatory the now-voluntary “E-Verify” system, by which employers may instantaneously confirm the validity of newly hired employees’ social security numbers. The resulting package of amnesty, guestworker programs, more legal immigration, and improved enforcement bears the label “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” (CIR), so christened when a somewhat less grand version was proposed by President George Bush in 2004.

Where this will end is hard to predict. Hearings have taken place in both the House and the Senate. A group of four Democratic and four Republican Senators—the “Gang of Eight”—has introduced legislation that would legalize the undocumented population immediately but defer citizenship until certain enforcement targets had been met. The president is putting together a similar plan, to be proposed only if the Gang of Eight’s plan does not move promptly in the Senate. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, and the chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, are expected to follow the example of outgoing committee chairman Lamar Smith, who opposed amnesty and favored upgrading the skills requirements for legal immigrants without increasing their numbers.

While it is early in the game, it is hard to imagine that the House Judiciary Committee will report out a bill that would meet the most basic demands of CIR advocates, let alone their more exotic proposals, such as unlimited numbers of visas for the foreign partners of gay citizens and immigrants. Even those Republicans who jumped on the amnesty bandwagon are having second thoughts about creating millions of new Democratic voters and are imaging versions of legalization that do not lead to citizenship—a non-starter with most Democrats. The wild card is Speaker John Boehner, who is widely believed to be among the small but potent class of Republicans who would let the Chamber of Commerce write the rules for legal immigration and give Democrats the amnesty for which they lust in the vain hope that the media would then stop casting Republicans as nativists.

No outcome to this byzantine process is predictable, but every aspect of immigration policy will be up for grabs, which means that the pending legislative process may yield the most fundamental revision of U.S. immigration law since the 1960s, shaping the country’s economic and cultural future for the remainder of the 21st century.

Given the multifaceted nature of immigration, is there a version of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” that ought to appeal to true conservatives, who are not beholden to the bottom line of a global business or to the ideological dictates of Ayn Rand? I think there is. Indeed, the outlines of Immigration Reform that would be both comprehensive and conservative are not even that hard to discern, if the effort is made to understand what immigration is all about.

Since before the American Revolution, there has been a division of interest between American business, looking to minimize labor costs, and American workers, for whom minimal labor costs mean minimal incomes. In this respect, the current debate over illegal immigration is simply the present incarnation of the 18th century debate over indentured servitude, the 19th century debate over slavery, and the 20th century debate over unionism.

Myself, I don’t like unions. They create artificial monopolies in the supply of labor so that privileged castes of workers may extract high wages for mediocre service. Still, I know of no conservative who does not believe that a healthy society must be based on functioning families. With illegitimacy rates of over 70 percent among blacks, over 50 percent among Hispanics, and nearly 30 percent among whites, conservatives should be rallying to policies, including even a higher minimum wage, that make it more certain that young men and women may expect to raise families on their wages alone. After all, the original “American Dream,” as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, was of a nation of yeomen, not beholden by penury either to privileged interests or to the state. But since the days of the New Deal, we have not had the option of having parents compete in a free labor market for their family’s daily bread and then make do with the outcome. If competition with immigrant workers prevents native workers from earning enough to support a family, they will not form families at all, or they will elect Democrat politicians who will balance market outcomes with food stamps, Obamacare, and a host of other public subsidies that conservatives rightly regard as insidious when they become normal.

In other words, the affluent must expect, in the president’s words, to pay “a little bit more” in taxes if they are unwilling to pay a little bit more for lettuce, landscaping, and cleaning their pools. Maybe those libertarians who want to demolish the welfare state will someday have their way. But in the meantime, is it not better to ensure that a family-supporting wage is available from full-time employment so as to minimize the attraction of direct dependency on government? And is it not better to sustain a living wage by controlling immigration than by mandating wage rates or by empowering labor unions?

As a conservative who worries about a nation where many and eventually most men will depend on the government to care for their families, I hold to a very high standard of proof the claims of the business community that foreign workers are needed to perform unskilled work that “Americans won’t do.” If American public schools excel at anything, it is the production of unskilled workers, young men and women who in decades past would have counted on working as bricklayers, janitors, waiters, or even farmworkers to make a living. When slavery was abolished in the 1860s, cotton farmers wailed that the cotton would “rot in the fields.” When the Bracero Program for Mexican farmworkers was ended in the 1950s, tomato farmers made the same “rotten” argument. In both cases, technology quickly came to the rescue, and farmers learned to plant and harvest in a manner compatible with living wages for their workers.

The need for immigrant workers was comprehensively addressed by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which was authorized by the Immigration Act of 1990. The head of the commission for most of its seven-year existence was Barbara Jordan, a former Democratic congresswoman and African-American civil rights leader appointed to her post by President Clinton. The recommendations of the Jordan Commission, given their provenance, should be beyond reproach to liberals. Based on extensive studies conducted by the National Academy of Sciences, the commission concluded that the United States, with nearly 300,000,000 people and the world’s premier university system, suffered no overall shortage of workers and that amnesties and guestworker programs would do more harm than good.

The Jordan Commission also challenged the centerpiece of American immigration policy, the right of every citizen to sponsor the admission of members of both the family he created (his spouse and children) and the family that created him (his parents and siblings). Granting this priority to relatives of prior immigrants was a legacy of the 1965 immigration reforms, which replaced national quotas that favored European immigration with equal per-country quotas that opened the door to Asian immigration. By granting preference to relatives of prior immigrants, the sponsors of the reforms thought they would preserve an overwhelmingly European migration flow.

But in post-1960s Europe, most families had only one or two children, and most did well enough economically to stay put, whereas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America families of three or more children remained commonplace, and economic conditions made immigration to the United States immensely attractive. Within a few decades, family-sponsored immigrants were overwhelmingly originating from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. Moreover, allowing sponsorship of the family that created the sponsor, as well as the family the sponsor created, led to chain-migration, whereby a naturalized immigrant sponsored his siblings and a spouse, the spouse sponsored her own siblings, the siblings sponsored their own spouses, ad infinitum. The result was exponential growth in the demand for immigrant visas and decades-long waiting lists in numerically limited categories, only temporarily relieved by a huge increase in visas for relatives in 1988.

The Jordan Commission recommended limiting sponsorship rights to an immigrant’s immediate family—spouse, minor children, and parents—with a ceiling of 400,000 per annum, allotting an additional 150,000 visas to refugees and exceptionally talented aliens. While one might not agree with all the findings and recommendations of the Jordan Commission, they were the outcome of a bipartisan process involving years of work under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences. They ought to be the starting point for any reasoned national discussion about immigration policy.

The Jordan Commission also recommended that the E-Verify system, already mandatory for federal contractors, be made mandatory for all employers. The business community has one reason for opposing E-Verify with which I sympathize. Employers are already obligated to submit a Form W-4 to the IRS that gives the name and social security number of every new employee. The IRS shares that information with the Social Security Administration (SSA), which knows which numbers are invalid—or are suspicious because there are being used in multiple locations or belong to children or the very elderly—and generally does nothing about it. The SSA refuses to share evidence of fraudulent use of Social Security numbers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). When Bush administration officials approached the chairmen of the Social Security committees in Congress about a fix, they were rebuffed.

In other words, but for a handful of senators and congressmen jealous of their bureaucratic prerogatives, the federal government would not need to mandate E-Verify. If employers knew that ICE would be notified of false or suspicious Social Security numbers—“G-Verify”—unscrupulous employers would be deterred from hiring workers they knew to be illegal, and most honest employers would voluntarily enroll in E-Verify to avoid the hassle.

There is no good policy reason for giving amnesty to the 11 million illegal aliens believed to be living in the United States, or to any significant portion of them. The only reason amnesty is considered at all is that the Democratic Party stands rock-solid against enactment of the Jordan Commission recommendations—or any other reform of the immigration laws—unless accompanied by a blanket amnesty for whomever happens to be here illegally when the reform is enacted. Arguments in favor of amnesty break down into two categories: “sympathy” and “inevitability.” Most Americans, myself included, can sympathize with aliens who have taken risks to leave their country in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Nevertheless, there are millions of aliens who have legally entered the United States for the same reasons. Some of them will live and work here for six years or more before their visas expire. How does one explain to one of those legal alien workers why he must now return home while the fellow working beside him, who sneaked across the border two years ago, is invited to stay for the rest of his life?

If making illegal aliens accept the same conditions on their stay as we routinely impose on legal aliens does not break our hearts, then what about their families? Some of their children may be U.S. citizens; even those who are not may have been raised in this country. I invite those whose hearts are broken to speak with some of the hundreds of thousands of legal aliens living or studying here on temporary visas, many of whom also have children born or raised in the United States but who will nevertheless repatriate with their families when their visas expire. When finished speaking with them, I suggest a call to a few of the millions of American men and women who serve in our armed forces and are expected every three years, with a few months notice, to move their households across the country, if not across the globe.

Illegal-alien advocacy groups take for granted that aliens with U.S.-born children represent a special case, since the U.S. government treats those children as U.S. citizens. But there is nothing special about their case, since many alien women who come temporarily to the United States, whether to work at an embassy or to visit Disney World, give birth during their stay and do not think of asserting that they have thereby acquired rights to live here forever. Instead, they feel blessed that their children now have the option of someday living here, as well as in the parents’ native land.

Treating the American-born children of illegal aliens as U.S. citizens is in any event bad policy. While illegal-alien advocates focus on the privileges of which the child would be deprived if the United States did not grant citizenship, they ignore the responsibilities with which such children are burdened, including the obligation to fight in our wars if the military draft is re-instituted and the obligation to pay U.S. income tax on their worldwide income for the rest of their lives. The so-called “birthright citizenship” that supposedly is bestowed on children of illegal aliens (if one focuses on the privileges) or imposed upon them (if one focuses on the responsibilities) is based upon the Fourteenth Amendment’s prescription that all persons “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are U.S. citizens.

This prescription was intended to remove any doubt that Americans born as slaves would be U.S. citizens. Yale Law Professor Peter Schuck, in his 1986 treatise Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, laid out a convincing case that the term “jurisdiction” here refers to the mutual duties owed between an individual and the state. The courts have reasoned that Fourteenth Amendment “jurisdiction” does not apply to the children of Indian tribes and foreign diplomats, and this same reasoning would exclude from birthright citizenship the children of tourists, illegal immigrants, and other aliens whose presence here cannot reasonably be construed as an implicit pact with the child that whatever tribal or foreign citizenship he or she would otherwise inherit from the parents has been superseded by a greater bond of loyalty to the United States.

Three years ago, the Washington Post reported on the phenomenon of “birth tourism,” exposing doctors from China and other countries who had made a lucrative practice of arranging accommodations in the U.S. for well-to-do pregnant women from overseas who were entering the country for the sole purpose of attaining U.S. citizenship for their children, usually so that they would later be eligible for free or reduced tuition at U.S. schools and universities. Impoverished Mexican mothers have been crossing the border for this purpose for decades, giving birth to what are called “anchor babies” because they provide the child’s parents an “anchor” in the United States that may protect them from deportation and entitle them to certain government benefits. Although illegal-alien advocates have treated the term “anchor baby” (and even “illegal alien”) as derogatory, perhaps the Post’s revelations of how the well-off abuse an overbroad interpretation of birthright citizenship will permit the subject to be discussed in polite company.

The “sympathy” argument at least has the merit of starting with a fact—that many illegal aliens merit our sympathy, albeit not the grand prize of permanent residence and citizenship. The “inevitability” argument, that “we cannot deport 11 million people,” is wholly meretricious. No one in the immigration debate has proposed that. True immigration reformers have proposed only that aliens who find themselves in our country under any auspices should obey all of our laws. Aliens who have been admitted to study here are not allowed to work, and aliens who were not invited at all should not be allowed to work either.

Every day, between 400,000 and 500,000 aliens enter the United States by air, land, or sea. Depending on their visas, they may visit for a day or stay for years. We do not rely on deportation to ensure the return of the 11 million aliens who will enter the United States in the next three weeks, and we will not rely on deportation to ensure the return of the 11 million who happen to be living here illegally at present. Most alien visitors choose to obey our laws, including our labor laws. When they run out of money, they do not “self-deport,” they “go home.” If Congress enacts G-Verify, then even those alien visitors who are willing to break our laws will find that almost all jobs are closed to them and, like countless other visitors, they will go home when they run out of money.

Illegal aliens change jobs frequently. If the government were to institute G-Verify or mandate E-Verify, the great majority would soon be out of work. Presumably there are some innocent employers who would be inconvenienced and many innocent family members whose lives would be disrupted. Even a proponent of strict law enforcement might countenance a transitional program that granted temporary work permits to those illegal aliens who came forward, so that their employers might find replacements, their children might finish the school year, etc. Twelve months would be more than sufficient—and would give more notice than we give our sailors, soldiers, and Marines before shipping them and their families to Timbuktu.

In short, packaging together the recommendations of the Jordan Commission, enabling G-Verify, clarifying birthright citizenship, and issuing transitional visas to illegal aliens should qualify as immigration reform that is conservative as well as comprehensive. Sadly, comprehensive conservative immigration reform has little chance in the real world. The Democrats’ leadership will sign on to nothing that does not include an amnesty, and the Republican leadership will approve nothing that does not provide for guestworkers to pick our crops and build our homes. We may perhaps hope that serious conservatives serving in Congress will at least see that America gets as much as possible of the good, with as little as possible of the bad.

William W. Chip is an international lawyer in Washington, D.C.