The American Conservative

You know you talk about the Sunnis rising up. I mean the Sunnis have got to make a choice. Do they want to live in a society that’s free or do they want to live in violence and I suspect most mothers, no matter what they’re religion may be, will choose a free society so their children can grow up in a peaceful world.

Anyway, I’m optimistic about what’s taking place. ~George W. Bush

Have they so completely run out of ideas and even spin that they are reduced to “mothers love their children, mothers want their children to live in peace” rhetoric? That might well be true, but there are a great many mothers who still live in cultures that expect their sons to live and die with honour. If it appears to the average Sunni that he has been short-changed and his community ruined I imagine that his womenfolk would shame him into doing something about it. The saccharine, all-is-well optimism might play in Utah, but it will be greeted with hoots of derision in Iraq.

Besides, the Sunnis didn’t choose to “live in violence”–their country was invaded and their way of life destroyed! What would a normal man’s response be? He might just take offense and choose to fight for what was his, even if it were a pointless fight. This is not to idealise the insurgency (any normal people would resist the occupation of their land and the marginalisation of their community–there is nothing extraordinary about it), but to remind us that any Iraqi who rejects the “freedom” Bush offers is no different from, say, the sepoys whose religious convictions were outraged intolerably. There are things more meaningful than peace, even if peace is almost always the most rational course from the purely materialist perspective.

Surely Americans grant that there are things more important than peace or freedom, or else we would never consent or acquiesce in wars. On a less refined note, there is nothing so bitter as the resistance of a privileged minority that finds itself being displaced and excluded; no one, all things being equal, willingly yields power and status to others, especially if it means his community and offspring will be worse off for it.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam’s rivals, into extinction. ~Prof. Thomas F. Madden, Godspy.com

Hat tip to Paul J. Cella.

Prof. Madden’s review of the history of the Crusades is well worth reading. In general, his conclusions are unexceptionable and it is a credit to Crusades historians and medievalists that they have worked so hard to understand the Crusades in terms of the cultural imperatives of medieval Christianity and to recapture some sense of what these armed pilgrimages meant to those engaged in them. It has often been surprisingly difficult for Byzantinists to engage fully the mentality of Byzantine Christians (though most Byzantinists are ultimately successful in this regard), so this is no small accomplishment for any modern scholar. Whether religion is something to fight wars over (indeed, whether it is the only thing important enough to have wars over) is a question for another time.

His comments on the tragedy of the Fourth Crusade are quite right, though I would add that the real disaster of that attack was the basic crippling of the Byzantine empire and a diversion of Byzantine resources to recapturing Constantinople for the next fifty-seven years. This made the empire exceedingly vulnerable to future attacks from the east at the same time that renewed threats appeared in the west in the person of Charles of Anjou. If Innocent III found the sack of Constantinople appalling, his successors saw the Latin empire as a providential blessing and did their utmost for nearly a century to establish another one after it fell to Michael VIII.

The internal wars of Byzantium in the fourteenth century did much to hasten the end of the state, but there is little doubt that the persistent pressure and threat from western powers short-sightedly undermined and then destroyed Europe’s best defense against Islamic invasions. Thus the tragedy was not only the deepening of the alienation between Orthodox and Catholic (which was already well under way in the twelfth century), but helping to open the door to Europe to Ottoman invasion when it finally did come.

As Srdja Trifkovic has noted, the Crusades should be criticised only to the extent that they harmed the Christian East, but the damage done to Byzantium and the Orthodox of the eastern Patriarchates was considerable. In any positive reevaluation of the Crusades, which is by no means unwelcome, that fact must continually be borne in mind. Modern senseless hostility to the Orthodox world among Western elites, revealed in the aggression against Serbia and the efforts to undermine or destabilise other historically Orthodox polities, is a reminder that the mistakes that worked to destroy Byzantium and imperil Europe for two centuries are being made again.

Andrew Sullivan just called me a paleo-con. That’s hitting below the belt. As I’ve explained before, I am a Russell Kirk-style Tory crossed with Michael Novak/Richard Neuhaus-style Catholic neo-conservative, with a mild dash of libertarian for seasoning. But I’m definitely neither a paleoconservative like Mel Bradford or Pat Buchanan nor a paleolibertarian like Lew Rockwell or Murray Rothbard. I like Abraham Lincoln, democratic capitalism, David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, American hegemony, Alan Greenspan, the GOP, and open borders, all of which seem to be anathema to one or both strains of real paleos. ~Prof. Stephen Bainbridge

For what it’s worth, Sullivan allowed that Prof. Bainbridge might not be a real paleo after all. The speed with which Prof. Bainbridge was targeted for such a ‘smear’, and the fact that paleo has become a term with which to smear someone, is indicative of how desperate defenders of the war have become. Watching the squabbles breaking out among members of the War Party, even at its margins, I am reminded of the comment of the Tsarist officer in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon: “The wolves devour each other!” It might be a little early to hope for that much, but that just about captures my mood.

I do hate to break it to the good professor, but one cannot really be a Kirk-style Tory and be a Novak/Neuhaus-style Catholic neocon. Such a combination would self-destruct from its own internal contradictions. Bainbridge admitted as much himself in part of his post on conservative definitions:

“Why no option for Tory with streaks of Catholic libertarian neo-conservative? With Russell Kirk and Michael Novak as “main representatives”? (One answer may be that the two strains co-exist only uneasily. Kirk had some very nasty things to say about neo-cons like Novak.)”

“Tory with streaks of Catholic libertarian neo-conservative”? Why even pretend to have any coherent view? At the risk of sounding doctrinaire, Tory and neoconservative are virtual opposites (the modern Conservative Party is doing its best to realign with the neocons, but they can only do so much), and libertarian and neoconservative have virtually nothing in common. As for being Catholic and libertarian or Catholic and neoconservative, I am frankly at a loss as to how someone manages that combination (the folks at First Things try mightily for the second one), since everything I understand about Catholic social doctrine implicitly or explicitly condemns some major elements of both ideologies.

Perhaps Kirk had some “very nasty things” to say about Novak because he and his ilk have had even nastier things to say about Mel Bradford, et al. Then again, I find it hard to believe that Kirk had “nasty things” to say about someone. He did not engage in invective or personal attack, being well-mannered and a gentleman by all accounts I have ever heard, but he probably just reduced the intellectual shambles that neoconservatism is to rubble with some withering observations.

Bainbridge certainly can’t be a “Kirk-style Tory” if he “likes” Lincoln, hegemony and open borders. By definition, anyone who believes in “American hegemony” as such and endorses it is not Kirk’s sort of conservative or Kirk’s sort of American, at least not according to everything I know of the man’s views on such things. Prof. Bainbridge does not strike me as someone who has a better grasp on Kirk’s thought. Perhaps Prof. Bainbridge will tell me why Kirk was apparently kidding when he rejected, in The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky, the prospect of installing American-style regimes in foreign lands, especially Muslim countries.

Kirk had no intense animus against Lincoln in his writings to the same degree that some of us have, so far as I know, and one can even find Richard Weaver saying nice things about Lincoln in one of his stranger essays. But the sort of society they treasured was a world that Lincoln and the forces he represented helped to weaken or destroy (that is, a traditional, agrarian, constitutional republican American society). Logically, they could never have endorsed his ‘understanding’ of the Constitution, since that ‘understanding’ was a gross perversion at odds with all their principles. Neither could they have viewed favourably the unitary and democratic character he imputed to the establishment of the Republic, since it was historically false and ideological, nor would they have approved of the leveling effects of the war and the messianic tone of the Unionist effort transforming liberty from a prescriptive right to the slogan of an “armed doctrine.”
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On the evidence, the administration of George W. Bush has failed to discharge this first duty in the area of immigration law and border security. The evidence, also, points to a willful negligence — in short, it points not to incompetence but to treachery. When the highest officer of a republic, in the service of ideology, interest, or avarice, employs the power vested in him to subvert the very laws of the republic he serves, he justly opens himself to the sort of charges that our rhetoric usually reserves for the most extravagant of outbursts. But the extravagance here lies with the perfidy of the Administration. ~Paul J. Cella

It’s time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my nearly 5 decades, but what have we really accomplished? Is government smaller? Have we hacked away at the nanny state? Are the unborn any more protected? Have we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority? ~Prof. Stephen Bainbridge

Hat tip to Casey Khan on the LRC blog.

Clearly, Prof. Bainbridge didn’t read Joseph Bottum’s explanation that the old conservatism doesn’t matter anymore under the dispensation of the New Fusionism, not to mention his assurances that foes of abortion and neocon interventionists are all on the same team advancing the cause of human dignity. If he had, he would probably have come to this epiphany a week ago after he stopped laughing uncontrollably. Cheer up, Professor, Mr. Bottum would say–you don’t want to become too angry and paleoconservative, now, do you?

On occasions like this, when die-hard loyalists to the GOP who claim to be conservative turn against Mr. Bush, I suppose it is better to say, “Better late than never.” But that would be insufficient. Most of the responses to Prof. Bainbridge’s post have been the predictable contemptuous accusations of betrayal and leftism (!) from “stalwarts” more stalwart in their Bush-mania than Bainbridge or the usual conservatives-in-denial who assure us that it isn’t really that bad. Missing from all of this is the basic question: what convinced Prof. Bainbridge that any seriously conservative policies, whether on abortion or rolling back the state, were ever on the GOP’s agenda under Mr. Bush? Compassionate conservatism, so called, is by definition Republican welfarism with a saccharine, pseudo-Christian coating, and everything else on Mr. Bush’s agenda, when he is not busy selling out our country to Mexico, has been either to streamline and preserve relics of the welfare state or expand the size of government.

There has hardly ever been a better case of someone becoming disillusioned after believing the conventional press clippings about the victory of conservatism and the “deeply conservative” Mr. Bush than Prof. Bainbridge’s pained posting. Mr. Khan makes a concise statement of the futility and folly of placing such hope in political parties, but it is still puzzling why Prof. Bainbridge managed to discover only now that the political potential of conservatives and their chances for reform and renewal had all been frittered away by Mr. Bush.

Real conservatives knew Mr. Bush wasn’t really “one of us” since 1999 when he began his first campaign with moronic class-warfare rhetoric and support for the bombing of Serbia, but before early 2002 there might have at least been reason to think he was an acceptably moderate Republican who would not do anything particularly foolish or radical. By 2004, those who still supported Mr. Bush knew what they were getting and deserved exactly what they have received. And what is Prof. Bainbridge’s conclusion? Here it is:

“What really annoys me, however, are the domestic implications of all this. The conservative agenda has advanced hardly at all since the Iraq War began. Worse yet, the growing unpopularity of the war threatens to undo all the electoral gains we conservatives have achieved in this decade. Stalwarts like me are not going to vote for Birkenstock wearers no matter how bad things get in Iraq, but what about the proverbial soccer moms? Gerrymandering probably will save the House for us at least through the 2010 redistricting, but what about the Senate and the White House?”

Notice that there is no sense that the war is actually wrong or unconstitutional, but simply politically inconvenient and a threat to the imaginary domestic agenda that Prof. Bainbridge apparently believes Mr. Bush would have implemented had it not been for the colossal blunder of Iraq. Notice also the blind, nay, stupid loyalty to party that still trumps all else “no matter how bad things get in Iraq.” He is probably correct about the political reality created by the war, but consider the rather shocking cynicism implied in this view. It is, to put it rather harshly, a sort of Bolshevik criticism of the war, in the sense that Lenin never had any objection to war in general (witness the disastrous war with Poland, c. 1919-21) but simply saw domestic political advantage in supporting peace in 1917. This is the ultimate cynic’s critique of the war.

Besides, who is this “us” for whom control of the House may be secure? Surely by now Prof. Bainbridge understands that this mythical entity of conservative Republicanism to which he is so devoted is scarcely more real than Iraq’s WMDs? The GOP has controlled Congress with larger or smaller margins for over 10 years, GOP appointed justices have made up a majority on the Court for even longer and Republicans have been President for 16 of the last 24 years. In what fantasy world was Republican domination of government going to lead to the fulfillment of any conservative goals, if literally nothing significant had been accomplished thus far in terms of reducing the size and scope of government or counteracting state-sponsored cultural rot? Prof. Bainbridge would be well-advised to remember the observation Chilton Williamson made in The Conservative Bookshelf that one cannot seriously consider the GOP a conservative party unless one identifies conservatism with imperialism and capitalism. This would save him a lot of angst and dissatisfaction later.

But it is really rather too late for such “conservatives” to cry in their beer (or is it wine?) and say that they’ve been done wrong, as if it had not been obvious for a very, very long time. We few, we happy few, have been telling them this for years, and have received nothing but ostracism and scorn from the “mainstream conservatives” for it.

According to the interim constitution, the permanant constitution should have been presented to parliament and passed by August 15. There should have been two readings of it, two days apart, before the vote. Otherwise, parliament should have been dissolved and new elections called. Parliament avoided this fate with a last-minute amendment of the interim constitution, allowed if by 3/4 vote, though the nicety of two readings of the amendment two days apart was dispensed with (arguably, unconstitutionally, though it is a relatively minor affair). The amendment stipulated that the new constitution would by passed by August 22, with other conditions unchanged.

The new constitution, with blank passages, was presented to parliament just before midnight on August 22. But parliament did not vote on it, and a “three-day delay” was announced.

Announced?

The rule of law is no longer operating in Iraq, and no pretence of constitutional procedure is being striven for. In essence, the prime minister and president have made a sort of coup, simply disregarding the interim constitution. Given the acquiescence of parliament and the absence of a supreme court (which should have been appointed by now but was not, also unconstitutionally), there is no check or balance that could question the writ of the executive. ~Juan Cole

When Prof. Cole says that the rule of law “is no longer operating in Iraq,” he was surely having some fun with his readers. When, after all, was the rule of law operating in any meaningful sense before this? There has certainly been the fiction since the election of the current parliament that the Iraqi government was constrained by law, but did anyone really believe this? Nonetheless, the observation is a good one and drives home the point that Iraq’s constitutional development has failed on its own terms, and not simply in the eyes of critics and reactionaries such as myself.

There is no need for discussion of the fundamental oppositions between representative self-government and Islam, considerable though they are, or observations on Iraq’s artificial nature, its lack of suitable precedents for such government and Iraqis’ lack of habits of self-government. All of that may be well be true, and all of it has been said many times, but we need not wait to see whether Iraqis will succeed or not. Iraqi politicians are failing with each new test of constitutional self-government, and it is no surprise that people with no experience, no history and no real commitment to such government cannot make it work (even our country has the experience and history, if no longer any real commitment, and an honest observer could not claim that it works here any longer, either). We can see before us the contravention of the existing fundamental law by the closest thing to constitutional government Iraq will probably ever have, providing us with a sense of how seriously future Iraqi governments will take the constitution the politicians are in the process of drafting.

If Iraqis are not attempting to maintain any pretense of constitutional procedure, perhaps it is because the idea of meaningful constitutional procedure and “the rule of law” in Iraq are pretenses put up by Washington to obscure what the administration has achieved. What the administration has achieved is only slightly better than the Shi’ite theocracy against which many opponents of the war, myself included, warned both before the invasion and ever since.

Prof. Cole’s translation of the draft copy he has tracked down is revealing, in that it tells us that no law will be allowed to contravene Islamic law (obviously a victory for freedom) and also that no law may contravene the “principles of democracy.” If that last part is an accurate rendering of the text, as I assume it is, I can only laugh. What in the world could something so vague as “principles of democracy” mean? The Supreme Court here would have a field day with a phrase as empty and malleable as that; it would make the commerce clause seem like a limited, inflexible provision.

Constitutional procedure has no value to the representatives of the majority, since they have no real need of it, and the Kurds always have the option of secession (and therefore have far less incentive in observing or defending any constitutional system). The main minority group with the greatest stake in developing constitutional procedure and protection are fundamentally hostile to both the existing and proposed fundamental laws of the country. Here the lack of any suitable political tradition in Iraqi history is fatal to any attempts to create a functioning representative and constitutional system out of whole cloth. Cote d’Ivoire, not Germany and Japan, is the likely model of political development Iraq will follow.

IN A dramatic midnight turnaround, Iraq’s ruling Shia pulled back from threats to force the new constitution through parliament, putting off a vote to buy more time to win over Sunni Arabs who had threatened civil war if it was passed.
Shia and Kurdish leaders had agreed to a draft constitution laying out plans for a federal system that would transform the Iraqi state into a loose federation of regions with a weak central government.

Sunni leaders reacted with fury at the proposition, claiming that it would inflame the insurgency and trigger civil war and vowed to defeat the charter at a national referendum later this year unless demands for federalism were dropped.

But Shia leaders, determined not to miss the deadline, presented the draft to parliament minutes before midnight. To loud applause, the speaker announced that the deadline had been met. Then to stunned confusion, he dismissed parliament without a vote, calling for three more days of talks between political leaders. But as the events of the evening sank in, it remained unclear what could be done to win over the recalcitrant Sunnis. ~Timesonline.co.uk

“There is no doubt that all the people here will say no to the constitution because nobody here trusts the Government and nobody wants the country to be divided the way the other groups want it,” Mr Samaraai said. Jamal al-Shimari, a neighbour, agreed. “It’s not going to be a constitution. It’s a conspiracy to divide the country,” he said, referring to the federal demands of the Shias and the Kurds.

The boycott of January’s elections is now widely seen as a mistake that left the Sunni minority, from whom the insurgency is drawn, without political representation. When Iraq’s leaders came to form a committee to write the constitution, they were forced to draft in unelected Sunni representatives for fear that excluding them would further exacerbate tensions. But as the constitutional drafting process has dragged on, ordinary Sunnis have grown disillusioned and begun laying plans to wreck the charter, whatever it contains.

To do so, Sunnis would have to persuade two thirds of voters in at least three of Iraq’s 18 provinces to vote “no”. Although they represent only 20 per cent of Iraq’s population, they could muster such a majority in four provinces, giving them the power to make or break the charter. ~Timesonline.co.uk

Whether or not Sunni political leaders are able to scupper the constitution by mobilising majorities in western and central provinces in which they have much greater influence, the bitterness and mutual recriminations that will follow the attempt will likely prepare the way for a poisoned politics and a collapse of political consensus. Should the Sunnis succeed in defeating the constitution, no amount of whistling past the graveyard by the administration will be able to obscure the complete failure of its project (brought down, no less, by democratic self-determination), and should they fail they will be as permanently alienated from any future regime as nationalists were from Weimar.

Reportedly backed by Kurdish negotiators, Iraq’s ruling Shiite Islamists prepared on Monday to force a draft constitution through the interim parliament they dominate, brushing off fierce objections from Sunnis as they raced to beat a midnight deadline.

A draft prepared without the participation of minority Sunni Arab delegates appeared nonetheless to give ground to some Sunni concerns about Shiites and Kurds carving out powerful federal regions in the oil-rich north and south.

A text seen by Reuters defined Iraq as a “federal” republic but gave no details and one member of parliament’s drafting committee, from the small Christian minority, said details of the extent and mechanisms of autonomy would be worked out later. ~MSNBC

This was the more or less inevitable outcome. Why it could not have been agreed upon a week ago is a mystery, since nothing significant has changed. If Sunni disaffection with the constitution is indeed very great, the constitutional settlement will be political ‘progress’ that facilitates the expansion and intensification of the insurgency and sectarian violence generally. Perhaps the onset of genuine civil war would convince our latter-day mugwumps that remaining in Iraq is perhaps even greater folly than invading in the first place, and maybe only then will the imperative of withdrawal become obvious to all.

The United States yesterday finally abandoned the fading dream of turning Iraq into a beacon of secular democracy in the Middle East, as it backed demands for the new constitution to enshrine Islamic religious law.

This raises the prospect of new laws being assessed against verses from the Koran, and risks alienating the country’s non-Muslim minorities as well as more secular Muslim groups, particularly the Kurds.

The move came 24 hours before the expiry of a deadline for the constitution to be approved, and will appease the Shias who dominated in January’s election.

Though still not going as far as fundamentalist Islamic groups had demanded – they wanted Islam to be the “sole” source for legislation -the wording marks a fundamental concession by the US as it ends the possibility of a separation of religion and state. It paves the way for far more conservative social legislation, for example diminishing the divorce rights of women, as it could allow Islamic clerics to serve on the high court, which will be responsible for interpreting the constitution. ~The Daily Telegraph

This will be ruinous for those Christians who have stayed in Iraq since the invasion and makes a final mockery of the proposition that the war has advanced anything like real liberty (not that wars ever do). It is perfectly understandable and predictable that in a democratic dispensation in an Islamic country that this would happen, which should tell us everything we need to know about the hostility and threat to liberty that democracy and Islam represent in their own ways.