The American Conservative

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an unfortunate propaganda piece from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (sorry, no link), which predictably paints the South Ossetians as a band of criminals and the villains of the piece. In this frankly dishonest portrayal of events, Mr. Saakashvili understandably cast all of the blame for the recent outbreak in violence on the South Ossetians. In fact, the facts about the fighting that erupted earlier this month are not at all clear. Naturally, both sides claim that the other was the one to break the ceasefire. What is certain is that the main, immediate cause of this renewed fighting is the insistence on the part of the Georgian government to reincorporate its separatist territories, even though Mr. Saakashvili must have known full well what response this would bring.

It can hardly have helped matters that this summer’s local elections in the newly-reincorporated breakaway region of Ajaria were probably tainted by significant fraud to the advantage of Saakashvili’s political allies. It may be that a majority of people in Ajaria now support Saakashvili, and it may be that Ajarians, who are ethnic Georgians, really do want to reunite with Georgia, but this is plainly not the case with the other two separatist regions.

Because the South Ossetians do not have the ear of powerful cliques in the Western media, as Mr. Saakashvili apparently does, their view will inevitably be ignored and sidelined. Already the nonsensical rhetoric has begun, with Mr. Saakashvili as the defender of a multiethnic and democratic order and the South Ossetians as brigands and criminals. Of course, the criminality and corruption of the Georgian regime itself is hardly a secret to anyone who follows the news in the region.
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Some men have suggested that sovereignty resides in the people. This is a general or abstract proposition, [and] when one wants to apply it to history, or in history, one finds that the people have never been and never can be sovereign: for where would the subjects be if the people were sovereign? If one wants sovereignty to reside in the people, in the sense that it possesses the right to make laws, one finds that no part of the people has made laws, that it is likewise impossible that a people would make laws, and that it never has done, and that it is not able to do anything other than adopt the laws made by a man called for this reason, legislator: and yet, to adopt laws made by a man is to obey; and to obey is not to be sovereign, but a subject, and perhaps a slave.~ Louis de Bonald, Theorie du Pouvoir

Louis de Bonald’s political theory is a valuable challenge to the stock opinions that American conservatives have held about the role of “the people” (or even the existence of “the people” as a political reality) in government, and I believe that his very simple attention to the meaning of the word sovereignty unravels a number of apparently knotty theoretical problems about the source of legitimacy in government and the ‘location’ of sovereignty.

The translation is my own, taken from a citation in Jacques Alibert’s Les triangles d’or d’une societe catholique. I apologise for any errors that may have crept into the translation; I have endeavoured to be both accurate and to make it as intelligible as possible.

Now a government is secure insofar as it has God for its foundation and His Will for its guide; but this, surely, is not a description of Liberal government. It is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God; God Himself is a “constitutional monarch” Whose authority has been totally delegated to the people, and Whose function is entirely ceremonial….The government erected upon such a faith is very little different, in principle, from a government erected upon total disbelief; and whatever its present residue of stability, it is clearly pointed in the direction of Anarchy.

A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied it, cannot be stopped halfway; it is a force that, once awakened, will not rest until it ends in a totalitarian Kingdom of this world. The history of the last two centuries has proved nothing if not this. To appease the Revolution and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done, thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose it, is perhaps to postpone, but not to prevent, the attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical Revolution with a Revolution of one’s own, whether it be “conservative,” “non-violent,” or “spiritual” is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first principle of that Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a new truth must take its place.~ Eugene (later Fr. Seraphim) Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

More than half of Americans, 54 percent, continue to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a program to develop them before the United States invaded last year, according to a poll released Friday.
Evidence of such weapons has not been found.

Half believe Iraq was either closely linked with al-Qaida before the war (35 percent) or was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on this country (15 percent).~ The Associated Press

Americans are raised to have confidence in the wisdom of the people. It has become a stock phrase and commonplace opinion among many conservatives that ordinary people are generally sensible and are not only more in tune with the real world than the elites who run government, media and academia but are also more capable of judging the encroachments of government and the propriety of policies. Concerning his own interests, the average person is the best judge, and over the long term I am convinced that inherited folk wisdom is better than learned suppositions, because this wisdom has been proved through the test of experience and found worthy. But an equally important and unavoidable conclusion that all discerning people must draw is that the general public is quite unsuited to understanding and deciding many major questions of policy, most of which turn on fairly sophisticated knowledge of a number of subjects.

The faith that the people would catch out abusive governments and punish them at the polls, which is the only ultimately safeguard against abusive government in our presently consolidated system, is premised on two completely unreliable assumptions: that “the people” value good government, and that they will not slavishly fall in with what their government tells them to be the truth. If either was true once (and even this is questionable), it is no longer true, at least not for a broad section of the population of this country. Our educational system long ago abandoned any pretense to producing genuinely liberal and critical minds, and without this sort of training the average citizen is easy prey to the disarmingly solemn liars who pretend to have the best interests of the country at heart. In a nation of people generally ignorant about much of the world, and a people given to trusting their government to an inordinate degree, is it any wonder that outright falsehoods will continue to circulate as truth for years after they have been disproved?
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President Mikhail Saakashvili said his forces seized strategic heights after fighting in the rebel South Ossetia region Thursday and promised more such victories to fulfill a pledge to reunite his country.

Hours later, Saakashvili said his troops would hand over the heights above South Ossetia’s regional capital of Tskhinvali to peacekeepers and pull back in what he described as a last chance to avoid all-out war there.

“There will be many more such gifts in the future,” Saakashvili said after announcing at a ceremony that Georgian forces had “wiped out” South Ossetian separatists responsible for killing Georgian soldiers in overnight fighting.

The battles were some of the worst fighting in the breakaway region since a war more than a decade ago. Georgian officials said three Georgian soldiers were killed overnight, while South Ossetia’s military chief said three civilians had died in Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali, the regional capital. South Ossetian officials denied Georgian forces had captured the hills, saying fighting in the area was continuing.~ International Herald-Tribune, August 20, 2004

President Saakashvili’s commitment to the path of war would be outrageous to the Western political classes if he were not an American puppet. Let us recall that NATO attacked Yugoslavia without provocation or justification for doing even less than what Saakashvili is now doing, which is nothing except the deliberate provocation of a new war in a region where there has been an uneasy truce, but a truce nonetheless, and the effective autonomous government of South Ossetia by Ossetians for 12 years, approximately the same amount of time the pseudo-state of Kurdistan in northern Iraq existed on its own. Keeping South Ossetia in Georgia by force is to make the old, accidental Soviet territorial divisions somehow sacrosanct and worth defending with violence. It serves neither the Georgians nor Ossetians to perpetuate this fight. It serves only the petty and despotic goals of Mr. Saakashvili.

It would be completely wrong for outsiders to intervene in this conflict by force, but the United States should cut all funding to the government of Georgia if it persists in its belligerent and aggressive course. Since Washington is the architect of its own war of aggression, though, I doubt this is likely to happen. However, if Washington fails to declare that Georgian attacks are unacceptable, it will share in the responsibility for precipitating yet another useless conflict that will only make the stabilisation of Georgia and the Caucasus that much more difficult. It is an unfortunate reality that Russia is the patron of South Ossetia, and Moscow is unlikely to ignore its client’s plight. While Russia would do well to seek a peaceful resolution, Mr. Saakashvili seems intent on forcing the issue. In so doing, he seriously jeopardises Georgia’s future and its relations with Russia for virtually no gain.

Shi’ite fighters appeared still to be in control of a holy shrine in Najaf on Friday after Iraq’s interim government said it had overcome a bloody uprising by seizing the Imam Ali mosque without a shot being fired.

Witnesses in the southern city said Mehdi Army militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr controlled the narrow alleyways leading to the mosque. Police were nowhere to be seen.

Iraqi police in Najaf told CNN they did not control the site, the country’s holiest Shi’ite shrine, the broadcaster reported.

Amid the extraordinary confusion over a two-week rebellion that has killed hundreds and driven world oil prices to record highs, the U.S. military also said it could not confirm the government had taken control of the shrine peacefully.~ Reuters

Saudi Arabia had no women in its Olympic delegation, but it just might at the Beijing Olympics if the political process struggling to take root in Iraq spreads there–or to Syria, Yemen or Jordan. And if the notion of an Arab constitutional democracy makes your eyes roll, as it does for William Odom and Francis Fukuyama in the current National Interest, perhaps we can let Iraqi soccer coach Abdul Kareem Hajim speak for at least laying the cornerstone: “Now we have freedom. Our chains are broken. We just need a stable government to make sure everyone has work and a salary.”

My apologies for ruffling the global fellow-feeling that lies officially beneath the summer Games. But for many of us it has become more than a little tiresome of late hearing how much the Europeans “hate us” and how the U.S. has “alienated” our “friends.” And how all this global ill will is because George W. Bush “invaded” Iraq to wage an “unjustifiable” or unnecessary war.

Here’s President Bush speaking this week: “A free and peaceful Iraq and a free and peaceful Afghanistan will be powerful examples in a part of the world that is desperate for freedom. Free countries do not export terror. Free countries do not stifle the dreams of their citizens.”

In the meantime, perhaps the athletes from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Ceausescu’s Romania will find their way to the Iraqi pavilion to hear familiar stories about living in a land of exterminations–of Shiite peoples murdered in southern Iraq and Kurds in the north. That has ended, thanks, as in many other places around the world, to American intervention, however unnecessary or poorly planned.~ Daniel Henninger, OpinionJournal.com

Recently, neoconservatives and the Bush re-election campaign have discovered that the bad, old habit of excessively politicising the Olympics might just be useful in their never-ending quest to both lie about their actions and try to impose guilt on their opponents. Citing “free” (and happy!) Olympian athletes from “liberated” countries, Mr. Henninger hopes to distract us from the grinding misery and considerable violence of large swathes of at least two of the latest “liberated” lands. This is a perfect operation in a kind of Clintonian or Blairite spin: don’t mind the tens of thousands dead and the hundreds more innocents dying every month from the anarchy we have unleashed, but look at the happy athletes!
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But the general approach of the paleos is burdened by one major negative trait and several bad habits. The first is their fear of and antipathy to clear political principles, to the very concept of politically relevant, universal objective truth. What is – or, rather, should conservatism be all about? About conserving the truth – true notions of justice, morality, civility and freedom. But for any notion to be true, it must necessarily be universal, absolute, and binding on all people at all places in all times. The Decalogue – the Ten Commandments – is true, and therefore relevant for all people in all nations in all eras. “Thou shall not kill!” – it does not mean “thou shall not kill, except Negroes”, it does not mean “thou shall not kill in the 19th Century, but you may in the 20th,”it does not mean “thou shall not kill in Alabama, but you may in Oklahoma.” It simply means you shall not deliberately kill any innocent human being, period. Paleocons seem not to understand that – they consider universal norms of justice to be a product of Enlightenment Liberalism – as if Moses, and the God, at Mt. Sinai, were Enlightenment Liberals. Paleocons would profit very much by re-reading their favorite, but neglected, Richard Weaver, and his defense of philosophic realism against relativist, historicist and particularist nominalism.

Mr. Francis is outraged that Mr. Devine criticized him (absolutely correctly, in my reading of Francis’ earlier column) for denouncing “fusionist conservatism for its preoccupation with its ‘pet abstractions’ of liberty, national security and the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Well, that is the point we have already raised: the paleoconservative allergy to any abstract, universal concepts or ideas.~ Roman Joch, March 10, 2004

At the risk of dredging up a tired, old argument between “fusionists” and paleoconservatives, I was inspired to return to this rather disingenuous reply of Mr. Joch after reading one of the reviews mentioned by name in the article, Richard Weaver’s “Anatomy of Freedom,” where he reviewed Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom for the old, more respectable National Review. The heart of the trouble with Mr. Meyer’s ideas will have to wait for another post, but my observations on this article deserve separate consideration.
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The second point is, quite naturally, that identity formation grows within a CONTEXT. If you do not understand the social, economic, cultural and political underpinnings of a society, you cannot understand either its corporate or individual identities, affiliations or loyalties. Anyone who tries to pinpoint an Iraqi in terms of a static rubric (Sunni/ Shi’i/ Kurd/ Assyrian/ Sabean/ Turcoman) will be forever lost in the wilderness. And he/she will probably deserve to be so.~ Hala Fattah, Askari Street

Hala Fattah is an Iraqi historian currently living in Jordan and my favourite blogger bar none. Her blog is by far the most informative and worthwhile at HNN or at most any other news or weblog site when it comes to matters pertaining to Iraq. Her blog is pretty much exclusively dedicated to the history and current affairs of Iraq, but this focus allows her to explain things so very well.

Her posts are rich and detailed, and it is clear that she puts far more thought into each of them than most bloggers (myself included) would ever bother to do. For anyone interested in understanding the situation in Iraq more thoroughly with some historical perspective, or is simply interested in solid, short historical articles online, Hala’s blog is the one to read.

Note that the Pakistani government had never before revealed Khan’s name. It had never been mentioned in any Pakistani newspaper or any Pakistani news conference. Since Khan had been turned, he was perhaps the most valuable asset inside al-Qaeda Pakistani intelligence ever had.

Why would this Pakistani official now tell Rohde the name, if that is what happened? We cannot know, of course. It is possible that he believed that Ridge had given the show away anyway. That is, al-Qaeda members on hearing the details Ridge revealed to the American public would know that a real insider had been busted, and would inevitably become so cautious that the Khan sting operation might well have been fatally compromised. We know that after the Ridge announcement, the level of “chatter” among radical Islamists fell off dramatically.

The Bush administration at the very least bears indirect responsibility for the outing of Khan. Without the Ridge announcement, reporters would have had no incentive to seek out the name of the source of the information.~ Juan Cole

Apparently, the initial reports that Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan’s name had been given to the press on background by the White House were not necessarily accurate. Nonetheless, as Prof. Cole explains in the article, the chain of events leading to the leak of the name–which has had such terribly negative effects on antiterrorist efforts, when Khan’s defection from al-Qaeda became public knowledge–began with the administration’s insistence on providing highly specific details of the (old) plot uncovered after the arrest of Khan in Pakistan.

I still maintain that the administration’s shoddy credibility has forced it to use sensitive information to bolster its sagging image as a counter-terrorist administration, and that this ultimately resulted in the demonstrable weakening of the antiterrorist campaign. It would be outrageous for such an administration to claim to be a capable or worthy opponent of al-Qaeda after this huge mistake. No sensible Republican with an interest in national security can pretend that this failure is anything but an administration fumble of the highest order. Their relative silence about this is indicative of how craven and subservient to the President most Republicans and all of their elected officials have become.