The American Conservative

Bush used his weekly radio address to hit back at critics who cited the newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate as evidence the Iraq war has worsened the terrorism threat. He said early leaks about it created “a lot of misimpressions about the document’s conclusions.”

 

“Some in Washington have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists in Iraq, we are making our people less secure here at home,” he said. “This argument buys into the enemy’s propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we are provoking them.” ~Reuters

At least no one is misunderimpressionating Mr. Bush any longer!  I am curious which is worse: quoting selectively from the 2006 NIE to oppose the ongoing illegal war or cooking up a poorly-sourced, inaccurate 2002 NIE that was used to justify an unnecessary war?

On the question of buying propaganda, whose propaganda should we be buying (if we are indeed buying any)?  Perhaps the kind that says they attack us because of our freedom?  Well, not to worry, folks–in the past five years Mr. Bush and friends have been well on their way to getting rid of those pesky terrorist-causing freedoms, and very soon we won’t have to worry about freedom-hating terrorists coming here to strike at us.  Another question: if Bin Laden said that the sun rose in the east, would we need to deny this to avoid being guilty of buying “enemy propaganda”? 

Of course, no one serious is saying that if we left Iraq Islamic terrorism would go away or that there would no longer be a real threat at all, but simply that it is very likely that this overall threat would decrease if there were an end to the occupation of a Muslim country, when this occupation does generate more and more supporters for jihad for as long as we remain there.  Jihadis did not disappear after the Soviets left Afghanistan, but they also lost their “cause celebre” and there was less jihadi violence after that.  They turned to other conflicts in the world to advance their cause–they went to Yugoslavia after Bosnia broke away, they went to Sudan, they went to Kashmir and some did stay in Afghanistan, etc.  But if the goal is to reduce the incidence of Islamic terrorism, ending occupations that lend the jihadis‘ cause perceived legitimacy in the Islamic world is not a mistake and in fact works against what the jihadis themselves desire.  They want us sitting in one place in a static occupation where they can bleed our armed forces, force us into overreactions that alienate the population and turn more and more people against us.  For someone who believes this is the “ideological struggle of the 21st century,” Mr. Bush doesn’t have a clue what that kind of struggle entails–rule number one ought to be that you do not let the enemy create conditions more favourable to its message than yours.  While we who are opposed to the war are not buying “enemy propaganda,” the government seems intent on playing by the enemy’s rules and acting in ways that make the enemy’s strategy more effective than it otherwise should be. 

Withdrawal is not a long-term or permanent solution (indeed I am skeptical that a long-term “solution” is possible to something that is intrinsic to a religion of one billion people), but withdrawing from Iraq remains the least awful option and the one most in the national interest.  Mr. Bush attacks people with charges of following “enemy propaganda” because he has no credible answer to this option that does not make all the same mistakes the administration has been making on Iraq for four years.

For the GOP, when it rains it pours.  Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney, meet Mark Foley.  Resigning in disgrace and/or being indicted or convicted is becoming quite the habit with these folks.  The funny thing is that Bob Ney still hasn’t resigned in spite of his guilty plea in a corruption case; Foley is resigning over some (decidedly inappropriate and disgusting) electronic chat and email.  The Republicans still have a decent chance of retaining Ney’s seat, while they have relatively little hope of holding Foley’s.  As the Russian Tocqueville of our time says, what a country! 

With the GOP majority-led Congress already fighting high disapproval ratings in a very difficult election year, each and every safe seat counts, so it is with some interest (and not a little Schadenfreude, I’m sorry to say) that I read of the resignation of Mark Foley over his, er, ethical lapses in chatting up underage Congressional pages online.  Besides the twisted irony that a man such as this was part of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus in the House, which has been remarked on elsewhere, the political consequences of Foley’s resignation right now are noteworthy: under Florida law, once the primary election votes have been certified, the nominee’s name cannot be removed from the ballot.  That will assuredly reduce the chances of the relative unknown who will take Foley’s place of pulling out some kind of miraculous upset.  It is impossible to build up meaningful name recognition when your name will not be on the ballot in any case.  The district has been Republican-leaning, though before the resignation it was as safe an incumbent seat as any, which makes any chance of a Democratic pick-up here a disaster for the GOP.     

After going on for some time about how the real problem in all this is how being “closeted” harms gay men, Andrew Sullivan, as only he could, concludes his response to the Foley resignation with this remarkable line: “Better to find integrity and lose a Congressional seat than never live with integrity at all.”  So where exactly in all this has Mr. Foley found “integrity”?  Is it the part where he was found out to be a liar, or where he was discovered chatting up underage boys?  Note that in the entire thing Sullivan never said a word about the attempt to sexually pursue a minor–that might raise rather unfortunate questions about the relationship between homosexuality and pederasty that Sullivan has been keen to avoid.

I like these Mexicans. They go to Catholic Church; They work hard; They’re learning English and they will eventually create a new blue-collar middle class.

Yes, I do worship at the high church of GDP. But I also worship at the high church of Catholic Mass. And therefore I’m able to combine supply-side economics with the teachings of Catholic humanitarianism. ~Larry Kudlow

Kudlow is quite the humanitarian. He has not seen a war he didn’t think was good for America and, more importantly, good for the stock market. Kudlow is so very humanitarian that he welcomes the creation of an exploited underclass. I don’t know for sure where Larry the Humanitarian stands on the abuse of prisoners and torture, but I suspect he is especially humanitarian when it comes to inflicting pain on prisoners–at least as humanitarian as he has been in cheering on the devastation of whole nations. He is so painfully humanitarian (his heart, look how it bleeds!) that he sees nothing amiss in comparing a border security fence with the Berlin Wall–the one designed to keep unwanted people out, the other to keep enslaved people in–because he literally cannot understand the difference between the two. To limit the “free movement of labour” is the same as commie oppression. That is what your stereotypical pro-immigration “conservative” believes. One wonders, incidentally, if he thinks Israel’s security barrier is a new Berlin Wall–I’m going to guess that he doesn’t agree with that comparison.

Here’s the main problem I have with the rhetoric of the people who keep pointing to the Catholicism of Mexican immigrants as if that were some kind of free pass for them (besides being based on the strange and entirely unproven assumption that Mexican Catholicism is as amenable to American political and cultural values as European Catholicism could come to be over time): the people who use the Catholicism of Mexicans and other Latin Americans as the rhetorical club with which to beat restrictionists also invariably happen to be the same people who think the freedom of movement across borders, a flood of cheap labour and maximising of GDP are the things that are most important in determining immigration policy. In other words, most of the people, including the Catholics, who are thrilled to see more Catholics crossing the border illegally are typically also the people who would be thrilled to see them cross the border if they were atheists, Muslims or Shintoists, because they are making these determinations primarily on economic grounds and have clearly made economic values their priority. I bet millions of Muslim labourers wouldn’t trouble Larry one bit. After all, we know where Larry stands on hateful “Islamophobia”–he’s against it, especially when it might bar the way to glorious international trade arrangements.

It is useful to them that the labourers in question are often Catholic, whether nominal or not, but it would not matter a whit to these people what religion they practiced so long as they lent their aid to building the Temple of GDP. It is also a sentimental ploy to tap into Catholic memories about past anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant prejudice in the 19^th century as a way of mobilising Catholic America against the enforcement of immigration law and the control of the borders. It is manifestly cynical for the most part, but few are bold enough to hold up their cynicism for the world to see as Kudlow is.

But at least Kudlow holds up the glaring contradiction of his two loyalties for all to see. He doesn’t even hesitate to embrace the language of “worship” to express his economic desires. I have long held Kudlow up as a kind of walking caricature of the money-obsessed conservative, but that is because he plays to the stereotype so perfectly that it is impossible not to think of him when trying to imagine what such a person would be like.

“Yes, I worship at the altar of Mammon. But I also worship at the altar of God,” the man says to us, “And therefore I’m able to combine Mammon with the teachings of Christ.” What was it that Someone Important said about two masters? It’s a bit fuzzy, but it was something about not being able to have two. So Kudlow has fortunately declared very openly which one he serves. Give him credit for being at least somewhat more forthright than all of the conservatives who say, “But I’m not a materialist! Look, I go to church!” Instead Larry preaches a new gospel: “I’m a materialist because I go to church!”

My Enchiridion Militis colleague Joshua Trevino now also blogs at The Claremont Institute’s The Remedy.  In spite of my own disagreements with Claremont’s other bloggers, I congratulate Josh on the position and I can say with certainty that he will bring excellent insights and writing to Claremont’s site.

“The usual suspects say that some state may eventually give terrorists an atomic bomb. That is, put the crown jewels of its national power into hands it doesn’t control, in much the same way that the Great Powers at the end of the 19th Century were always handing out battleships to anarchists…

“As a practical matter, anyone who is all that willing to die for his principles seems to manage to do so early in his career, well before he achieves high office. Most of the people running Iran today could have easily become martyrs under the Shah if they’d felt like it. Somehow, they avoided it.” ~Greg Cochran, The American Conservative (via Steve Sailer)

 

 What a refreshing experience to see someone else exploding this particular nonsensical argument.  This is one of those claims that’s so ”serious” that you have to provide an answer to a scenario that is about as likely as happening as the island nation of Mauritius landing a man on the man.  It is a potential threat as likely to come into being as the great existential threat that America will someday face from Burkina Faso.  It is one of the most implausible scenarios in the book, yet every time we have a proliferation “crisis” (i.e., a nation Washington dislikes seeks weapons that our allies developed without penalty of invasion) this absurd possibility is held up as if it were the silver bullet that kills all realist doctrines of deterrence. 

 

Over the years, I have occasionally dismissed the same claim (“they might give the bomb to terrorists”) whenever supporters of intervention would throw it up as an example of why containment and deterrence no longer work.  Their spiel goes something like this:

 

“You see, they’re crazy and suicidal, and if you don’t believe that just consider that they might hand it off to terrorists who are definitely suicidal.  And why would they give away their most powerful weapons to people who might turn around and use them for a completely different purpose?  Didn’t you hear me before?  They’re crazy and suicidal!”

 

As I said a year and a half ago in one of my early anti-Hanson posts:

 

Next is the canard of Iran arming terrorists with nukes. One does not need to be an expert in Near Eastern affairs (and Mr. Hanson certainly is not) to know that no state, whatever its ideology, will ever hand over nuclear weapons to some rogue third party, no matter how much it may theoretically agree with that group. Raison d’Etat and a basic logic of the government keeping control over such an immensely powerful weapon dictate that any state that invests its resources in such a weapon will not squander that weapon on a group over which it has no meaningful control, but to which it will inevitably be linked should that group decide to use the weapon. The political calculation of the risks involved would show any remotely sane person, however fanatical he might otherwise be, that there is nothing to be gained by such a course of action. Even if some ayatollah were moved to pursue such a mad plan, the military would probably sooner depose him than allow such a stupid decision to be carried out, or he would be ousted by other elements of the clerical regime itself. Nothing is more certain in politics than the desire of a state to preserve its existence and power, and every ideology will come crumbling down when it conflicts with that basic imperative of Realpolitik.

 

Earlier this year I hit a similar note in response to the Official Persophobe Hysteric, Stanley Kurtz:

 

People who obsess about an Iranian bomb frankly baffle me. What do they think the Iranians are going to do with nuclear weapons? What do all states do with nuclear weapons? They stockpile them and use them as a deterrent. They do not wantonly launch them, nor do they hand them off to terrorist or paramilitary groups. The chief reason to fear Iranian nukes is the threat of their use, and particularly the threat of their use against America or an ally of ours. The Iranian government is not so daft as to invite openly the complete annihilation of their country by doing anything so transparent as first-strike nuclear attacks against anyone.   

 

And then again more recently I answered Mario Loyola on this same charge:

 

This is to hide behind the propaganda that Iran will give away one of its yet-to-be-made nukes to some third party (presumably Hizbullah)–something that no nuclear weapon state has ever done and which no remotely self-interested government ever would do.   

 

 

One historian has recently suggested that the strain of isolationist thought in Bolingbroke’s writings was an important European source for Washington’s Farewell Address and its warning against foreign entanglements.  Particularly meaningful to Washington was the statement of English aloofness contained in the Patriot King.

Other Nations must watch over every motion of their neighbors; penetrate, if they can, every design; foresee every minute event; and take part by some engagement or other in almost every conjecture that arises.  But as we cannot be easily, nor suddenly attacked, and we ought not to aim at any acquisition of territory on the continent, it may be our interest to watch the secret workings of the several councils abroad; to advise and warn; to abet and oppose, but it never can be our true interest easily and officiously to enter into action, much less into engagements that imply action and expense.

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Bolingbroke may have been a nationalist preoccupied with patriotic service, but his nation was not expansionist or interventionist.  His Tory realism might encourage wars at sea to protect England’s interests, but it did not seek to spread any moral attitude or political ideology, as seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen had sought to do; it did not seek to intervene on the continent in the name of liberalism and freedom as nineteenth-century liberals sought to do. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Come home, America–and come back to Bolingbroke.

Even if it be granted that Bolingbroke was a “patriotic” nationalist when not in exile, it should be noted that he was not an expansionist, like the seventeenth-century Commonwealth nationalists.  As often with nationalists, a heavy streak of isolationism runs through his writings on England’s dealings with the outside world.  This isolationism is an outgrowth of Bolingbroke’s emphasis on the supremacy of national interest in determining foreign policy.  In his discussion of national interest Bolingbroke emerges an early proponent of what has come to be called the realist theory of international politics, which in England is most closely identified with Tory writers and statesmen….Tory realism holds that the determining factor in a state’s attitude to other states is its national interest, not sentiment, morality, or ideology. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

That Bolingbroke and his Opposition appeared to later radicals with a radical face is neither surprising nor difficult to reconcile with his basic conservatism.  Part of the ideological dynamic of his politics was “populist,” even though an early and most aristocratic populist manifestation, and inherent in populism is a force at once intensely radical and reactionary.  It is always “the people,” be they yeoman farmers, urban small traders, or failing gentry who are being victimized by the small conspiratorial financial interests.  In Bolingbroke’s view, these conspirators had captured the government; the King, ministers, and legislature spoke at their bidding.  Bolingbroke’s Opposition inevitably took on a popular tone in its perpetual plaint that the government and its ministers and legislature were alienated from the people, the true source of power.  There was, of course, much more to Bolingbroke’s Opposition than this.  What concerned him particularly was that the conspiracy of government and vested interest had removed “the people’s” natural leadership from power.  In defending the one, however, he often had to defend the other; for “the people” and the aristocratic leadership faced the same enemy. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Bolingbroke’s conservatism stands not only as the fons et origo of Country-Jeffersonian-Republican agrarian resistance to the new Court of the Federalists and Whigs, but perhaps even as the core of the entire Anglo-American populist tradition.  I will go so far as to say that, as good as Burke can be, it is the Viscount Bolingbroke and not the Irish Whig who represents the real source of Anglo-American conservatism.  It is especially to him that we should look as “the reactionary imperative” becomes ever more imperative. 

Conservatism as such did indeed become an articulated position only in response to the French Revolution, but Bolingbroke’s Opposition laid the groundwork for the arguments of the American tradition far more and defined an anti-liberalism that was also anti-Lockean but which appropriated the Whig mythology of 1688 as a moment of constitutional renewal–in spite of the historical falsehood of this claim–so that the “modern Whigs” might be defeated.  As Jefferson did with the Constitution, and as American conservatives have attempted to do with the entire liberal project, Bolingbroke sought to recast the usurpation of 1688 as a return to political moderation, the restoration of the mixed constitution that Walpole was then perverting and destroying.  He sought to make the best of the political settlement at hand and guard English liberties against the corruption that was now ruining them.  To better fight Walpole, he did not attach himself to embittered Jacobitism, and instead embraced the commonwealth vision of Harrington and passed it on to the English Tories and American patriots who embraced it equally. 

The unification of the interests of aristocrats and the people against consolidation and moneyed interest finds strong parallels in early Jeffersonianism, the alliance of Southern aristocrats and “plain republicans” of the North and the alliance of planters and yeomen in the Southern Democracy.  Bolingbroke, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Stonewall Jackson, Bryan all fought some different form of the moneyed interest and “bank rule”; all fought in their different ways the corruption and consolidation of government.  The same themes of defense of the small town, small firm and small farm against the encroachments of concentrated wealth and power and the confluence of the two in government circles recur again in the history of American Populism in the 19th century and even find echoes in the career of the Insurgent Progressive, Bob La Follette.   

Bolingbroke’s reactionary radical combination of defending the people and their liberties against the usurpations of the government and the moneyed interest, the Opposition’s rejection of the standing army, and its aversion to war and foreign entanglements all anticipate many of the themes developed by American agrarians in their arguments and taken up again by their latter-day populist inheritors.  Look homewards, America–and look to Bolingbroke.

To preserve liberty by new laws and new schemes of government, whilst the corruption of a people continues and grows, is absolutely impossible: but to restore and preserve it under old laws, and an old constitution, by reinfusing into the minds of men the spirit of this constitution, is not only possible, but is, in a particular manner, easy to a King. ~Bolingbroke, The Patriot King

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via Leon Hadar