The American Conservative

Jonah Goldberg writes:

This reminds me of all the people who blamed “neocons” for all that went wrong in the Bush years, but not the neocons’ bosses — Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales none of whom were famously neoconservative.

Do these people actually exist? I’ve probably read hundreds of articles, blog posts, etc. about the Bush years and I can’t recall one that specifically exempts Bush, Rumsfeld or Cheney from blame. I guess I’ll have to keep looking.

It seems like only yesterday when we were debating whether to do a “regime change” in Burma. Actually it was only last month when a powerful coalition of humanitarian interventionists and and a complex of international aid groups in Washington and Europe were calling on the “international community” to use military power (U.S., NATO) to force the military regime in Rangoon to allow foreign aid workers to enter the country and help save the survivors of a powerful cyclon from certain death.

Today we read in The New York Times that

More than six weeks have passed since Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Myanmar, leaving a trail of flattened villages and broken lives and arousing international sympathy that turned to anguish as the military government obstructed foreign aid.

Now doctors and aid workers returning from remote areas of the delta are offering a less pessimistic picture of the human cost of the delay in reaching survivors.

They say they have seen no signs of starvation or widespread outbreaks of disease. While it is estimated that the cyclone may have killed 130,000 people, the number of lives lost specifically because of the junta’s slow response to the disaster appears to have been smaller than expected.

Relief workers here continue to criticize the government’s secretive posture and obsession with security, its restrictions on foreign aid experts and the weeks of dawdling that left bloated bodies befouling waterways and survivors marooned with little food. But the specific character of the cyclone, the hardiness of villagers and aid from private citizens helped prevent further death and sickness, aid workers say.

Most of the people killed by the cyclone, which struck on May 2-3, drowned. But those who survived were not likely to need urgent medical attention, doctors say.

And

The United States has accused the military government of “criminal neglect” in its handling of the disaster caused by the cyclone. Privately, many aid workers have, too. The junta, widely disliked among Myanmar’s citizens, did not have the means to lead a sustained relief campaign, they say.

But relief workers say the debate over access for foreigners and the refusal of the government to allow in military helicopters and ships from the United States, France and Britain overshadowed a substantial relief operation carried out mainly by Burmese citizens and monks.

As I suggested in earlier posts it would be great if the Burmese people were given more access to the global economy (by removing the U.S. economic embargo against that country, for example) and if the bunch of paranoid murderers in Rangoon were replaced with the kind of military regime that is in charge in, say, Egypt, our great ally. But as David Rieff, recalling other humanitarian interventions and the “regime change” we did in Baghdad contends:

The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics. And somewhere, despite all the outcry, leaders know that the same people calling for intervention may repudiate it the moment it goes wrong.

I was sickened today in reading the Washington Post front page article “CIA Played Larger Role in Advising Pentagon.”  The article states that a CIA “counterterrorism lawyer” named Jonathan Fredman had counseled the military authorities running Guantanamo that torture is basically “subject to perception” noting that CIA had “well trained individuals” to “perform this technique,” and warning only that “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”  Fredman expanded on the theme, noting that if someone dies “the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental.”  A CIA spokesman commenting on Fredman’s remarks added the “far more important point that…the CIA’s terrorist interrogation program has operated on the basis of measured, detailed legal guidance…”  The spokesman, appropriately named George Little, concluded with the usual nonsense about how torture has “disprupted terrorist plots and saved innocent lives.”

I am not sure if I am particularly revolted by all of the above because I once worked for the CIA and believed that it was at that time an honorable institution staffed by officers with a moral compass, which makes me ask where the intelligence community leadership has found the low life reprobates who both torture and defend the practice.  Where do they find a “counterterrorism lawyer” like Fredman?  How many pills does he have to take to sleep at night? What kind of university  trained him in law?  Or I might just be reacting to the fact that the arguments being made could just as easily come from some hack defending the enlightened policies of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Third Reich.  I can believe that there are lawyers working for the Bush administration who are willing to justify any atrocity against anyone based on bogus claims of national security and “counterterrorism.”  Sick, sick, sick.

George Will — lauded as “the right’s most enduring elder statesman” by Jacob Heilbrunn in the New York Times last weekend — had a very good column yesterday about the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision. Will drips scorn on John McCain’s proclamation that this ruling, which should shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” After asking just how we’re supposed to take that assertion, Will gets to the meat of the matter:

McCain, co-author of the McCain-Feingold law that abridges the right of free political speech, has referred disparagingly to, as he puts it, “quote ‘First Amendment rights.’ ” Now he dismissively speaks of “so-called, quote ‘habeas corpus suits.’ ” He who wants to reassure constitutionalist conservatives that he understands the importance of limited government should be reminded why the habeas right has long been known as “the great writ of liberty.”

No state power is more fearsome than the power to imprison. Hence the habeas right has been at the heart of the centuries-long struggle to constrain governments, a struggle in which the greatest event was the writing of America’s Constitution, which limits Congress’s power to revoke habeas corpus to periods of rebellion or invasion. Is it, as McCain suggests, indefensible to conclude that Congress exceeded its authority when, with the Military Commissions Act (2006), it withdrew any federal court jurisdiction over the detainees’ habeas claims?

Predictably, National Review is outraged by Will’s heresy, with Ed Whalen, Andrew McCarthy, and Mark Levin piling on. What’s notable about their reaction, aside from its vehemence, is how much question-begging the NROniks indulge in: Levin writes of, “alien, unlawful, enemy combatants” seeking habeas corpus; McCarthy refers to “alien enemy combatants whose only connection to the United States is to levy war on her.” Apparently, even military tribunals, let alone proper trials, aren’t necessary to determine the guilt of these detainees — they’re guilty, they’re enemy combatants, simply because they’ve been picked up. They were “arrested,” weren’t they? Will, on the other hand, is realistic:

The purpose of a writ of habeas corpus is to cause a government to release a prisoner or show through due process why the prisoner should be held. Of Guantanamo’s approximately 270 detainees, many certainly are dangerous “enemy combatants.” Some probably are not.

For a long time, conservatives have been told that they have to vote for budget-busting, nation-building Republican presidential nominees for the sake of getting good judges. But it turns out that, while opportunities to overturn Roe never materialize, and one can never be absolutely sure how a conservative Republican Supreme Court justice will vote if a chance does arise, occasions for expanding or entrenching the arbitrary power of the president are plentiful, and the “conservative” justices can be relied upon to fall in line. The one thing that all of Bush’s actual or wished-for Supreme Court appointees have in common — Alito, Roberts, Miers, Gonzales — is that you can bank on their truckling to ill-defined and expansive presidential “war powers.” If you don’t believe that the U.S. president has the right to kidnap anyone in the world at any time for any reason and hold the detainee indefinitely and without charges, voting for Republicans for the judges is the last thing you should do.

Good for George Will, whatever his flaws, for refusing to toe the Republican mark on this.

Ross Douthat criticizes Michael Brendan Dougherty’s critique of Matthew Yglesias (this post is turning into quite a blogroll), but Douthat concedes an important point to Michael in his second paragraph. He writes, “unless you’re a very stringent non-interventionist (or a pacifist), no matter what theory of foreign policy you choose, you’ll always be able to find justification within the confines of that theory whenever a particular intervention seems like a good idea.”

Yes, exactly — which is why some of us at TAC (by no means all) counsel “very stringent” non-interventionism. Douthat is correct that whatever the theoretical differences between neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, and a variety of other interventionist perspectives may be, they all give policymakers — specifically, the executive branch — wide discretion for waging war. Stringent noninterventionism and pacifism provide a check against that. Douthat criticizes Michael by saying, “the paleocon lens tends to obscure some very real distinctions between neocons and liberal internationalists,” but Douthat himself acknowledges that, performatively, those “real distinctions” aren’t so real after all. I think Douthat would have to agree with Michael that Yglesias is wrong when he says, “America traditionally hasn’t engaged in Iraq-scale blunders.” Over 50 years, liberal internationalism, Cold War conservatism, and neoconservatism have engaged in many such wars, some rather bigger (Vietnam, Korea) and others somewhat smaller (Gulf War I, Kosovo) than our present neocon adventure.

But hope springs eternal for Douthat. Five decades of blundering interventions doesn’t convince him that interventionism in general is a bad idea. Like Doug Feith and everybody else, he just wants smarter interventions, prudent interventions — better management:

I don’t come away from the events of the last five years convinced that we should never intervene abroad on purely humanitarian grounds, or that we should never go to war without an international body’s authorization, or that the whole of American Middle East policy since 1991 (or 1945) has been discredited, or even that we should never launch wars of pre-emption. I come away from them convinced of a point that’s simultaneously narrower in scope, but more universal in its application: That whatever theory we take as our guide to international affairs, we need to proceed with greater caution than America displayed in the aftermath of 9/11 about the efficacy of military force, and the costs and consequences of using it.

But where is this caution going to come from? Who counsels it? There was at least a minority of liberal internationalists who opposed the Iraq War, and I tend to agree with Douthat that if Gore had been president we would not have invaded Mesopotamia. But I think it’s quite probable that Gore would have taken us into Darfur or Somalia (which, unlike Iraq, actually was and is an al-Qaeda base), and I doubt such an intervention would have proven much more prudent or successful than Bush’s Iraq farrago. Liberal internationalists have at least as bad a record as the neocons, both in how much they intervene (which admittedly, is not a problem for people who are not noninterventionists) and in how badly their interventions fare.

If you want a prudent foreign policy that keeps America out of unwinnable wars in places like Iraq and Somalia, you should support noninterventionism. Neither neoconservatism nor liberal interventionism nor old-fashioned Cold War conservatism will ever be cautious enough to avoid such entanglements. To hope that any of these ideologies of intervention will “proceed with greater caution” than they have in the past half-century is as vain as to hope that visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles will one day, under the right management, be an efficient and pleasant experience.

I should qualify my remarks just a little. The range of coherent foreign-policy positions may not be quite as narrow as most of what I say above would suggest. For example, I do think it’s possible that with a strict enough definition of the national interest, foreign-policy realists can avoid most troublesome interventions. And in general the more that anti-interventionist sentiment and logic seeps into any foreign-policy ideology, the less likely that ideology is to get involved in future Vietnams, Somalias, and Iraqs. There is a scale: but even the scale depends upon strong noninterventionist thought and advocacy.

p.s. I pine for the Ludlow Amendment.

In selecting their nominee, Republicans were willing to forgive countless deviations from conservative orthodoxy because of John McCain’s reliable belligerence on foreign policy. But it’s an uneasy embrace: a new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that just 17 percent of McCain’s supporters feel “very enthusiastic” about him. Last month’s endorsement of cap-and-trade legislation didn’t help.

So McCain is tracking back, calling for an end to the federal ban on offshore oil drilling. “Energy independence” sells well on both sides of the political divide, and support for domestic drilling resonates with conservatives who don’t like coming second to caribou.

Problem is, they don’t have a clue how global energy markets operate. “We must embark on a national mission to eliminate our dependency on foreign oil,” McCain said. That’s pretty talk. And pretty much impossible.

University of Virginia’s S. Fred Singer analogizes the situation well. Think of the global market as a giant bathtub into which all producers dump their product. Consumers pump from the pool without much regard for origin—the U.S. imports crude from 41 countries. The level in the tub sets the price, which should drop as supply increases. But the contribution from America’s coasts—McCain still opposes drilling in ANWR—would be nominal: the estimated deposit off California is 10 billion barrels, enough to supply America’s needs for about 17 months. But everybody draws from the same tub and is looking to pay the lowest price possible—and we can’t hope to undercut the production costs of larger-scale, more mature suppliers. The notion that the U.S. will have some secret stash that allows us to detach entirely from the global energy market is nonsense, as Senator McCain surely knows. Developing alternative energy sources would mean less need to draw from the global oil supply, which would be a good thing. But he’s looking for answers in drilling–and there’s no way that dumping a bit more into the big bathtub will “eliminate our dependency.”

Of course, McCain may be giving this fiction space because it squares with his vision of global security. Robert Bryce—TAC contributor and author of the excellent Gusher of Lies—quotes Thomas Friedman’s theory about energy independence and Mideast reform: “Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.” Bryce retorts:

If only it were that easy. Between about 1986 and 2000, oil prices generally stayed below $20 per barrel; by the end of 1998, they were as low as $11 per barrel. As Alan Reynolds pointed out in May 2005 in … National Review Online, this prolonged period of ‘cheap oil did nothing to promote economic or political liberty in Algeria, Iran, or anywhere else. This theory has been tested—and it failed completely.’

That’s not to say we shouldn’t drill domestically—though this Hawaii girl has greater concern for coral reefs than the average rightwing blowhard. But conservatives should play a little harder to get. Much as they may enjoying the novelty of hearing their buzzwords in this nominee’s mouth, hating Hugo Chavez shouldn’t be sufficient make him their hero.

What a glorious time for anti-EUers everywhere. The technocrats in Brussels are busy licking their wounds after Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty. How pleasing it is that–in a world apparently dominated by spin and bureaucracy–the public can still tell the political class to stuff it. The European Union is in crisis, we are told. The treaty in ruins. Hurrah.

Hang on. Amid the joy, the anti-corporatist right should remember that the EU doesn’t take no for an answer. When Holland and France rejected the treaty in 2005, EU officials essentially ignored the vote, and set about changing the wording of the document to make it more palatable to the public. Now that the Irish have refused that revised document, they already face, according to the Daily Telegraph, the possibility of another referendum next year. (Irish voters, remember, rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001, only to accept a different version a year later.)

Moreover, for all the talk about the EU being a disaster, the Euro continues to outperform the Dollar and the Pound. Of course, this could change, and fast. But what if this trend continues? How long will it be possible to use the rhetoric of sovereignty and independence against the economic strength of the union? Perhaps the “democracy strikes back” triumphalism is premature.

Richard Just inadvertently makes it, and in the process convinces Lew Rockwell that Webb would indeed be a good VP for Obama. Writes Just, his pulse no doubt racing:

In his book Born Fighting, you can practically feel the resentment coming off the page when he writes, “The slurs stick to me … Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.” To disaggregate these resentments: There is Webb’s resentment of elites, whom, as Eve notes, he derides as “people of books and pep clubs and prom committees.” (People of books–what an ugly phrase, especially given that Webb himself is a writer. Haven’t we had enough of the anti-intellectualism of George W. Bush and others who insist that there is virtue in ignorance?) There are also his resentments that focus on gender and ethnicity.

The horror! Of course, accusing Webb — author of eight well-regarded books — of anti-intellectualism is a bit rich. But there’s no doubt that Webb is not Just’s kind of people, which is precisely why conservatives, libertarians, and regular Americans like him. (And by way of full disclosure, as well as an advertisement, the forthcoming issue of TAC carries Webb’s byline. Look for it in a couple of weeks.)

Nearly twenty years ago, Edward Luttwak addressed the issue of American decline, surprisingly enough in Commentary. (Their website is read for pay, so isn’t worth the trouble of linking to). It stirred a medium sized debate, where most conservatives considered Luttwak’s worries (infrastructure falling apart, collapse of the manufacturing economy) overwrought. Luttwak opened his piece with a description of what the traveler experiences at JFK, compared to airports at other advanced industrialized countries.

I picked up a daughter coming home from college there yesterday. In addition to the unavoidable flight delays, there was a madhouse as three flights at the Delta terminal were served on one conveyor belt, which frequently broke down. So, two plus additional hours to get luggage. Then a walk to the parking garage, where the elevators weren’t functioning. Some lugging very heavy bags up a winding staircase.

Luttwak compared JFK with airports in Tokyo and, I think, Singapore. The said daughter is traveling to Mexico this summer, and India in the fall. I wonder how JFK these days will compare Mexico City and  New Delhi. I’m not too optimistic.

But, yes, America, world’s only superpower, does have many  aircraft carriers and thousands  of nuclear weapons.

Jamie Kirchick had a very timely editorial in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times on one of the major news items of nearly two weeks ago: the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unveiling of the final two sections of its Phase II report on prewar intelligence. Despite having given himself an ample period to peruse the report four or five times, Kirchick primarily only offers a poor regurgitation of Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post piece from last Monday. Having already commented at length on Hiatt’s misleading op-ed, I’ll let that previous post speak for itself. But Kirchick does have a few characteristic zingers.

The only point in the piece that Kirchick attempts to address in the findings of the Rockefeller report is in the alleged connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda:

Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

It is impossible to understand how Kirchick has come to this conclusion. The findings of the report explicitly state that “Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.” The quoted phrase “substantiated by the intelligence” does indeed appear in the report near the words “Iraq” and “al-Qaeda”, but no significant connection is substantiated by the report’s findings.

Kirchick later adds: “The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.” This is also a blatantly false statement. The Bush administration’s biggest crime in its claims about WMD was not their claims about Saddam’s stockpiles, but its claims regarding Saddam’s intent to restart production and distribute them to terrorist organizations. The committee’s findings on these weapons issues were very clear:

Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

Kirchick needs to check his facts.

The report can be found here and here. The official government press release on the report can be found here.