The American Conservative

Thou desired the Kingdom of God, pleasing Him in thy earthly life, especially in increasing Thy God–Given talent for good deeds, for which Thou dedicated all Thy life: Therefore, Christ God rewarded thee with the painful prize of martyrdom, to Whom we pray for salvation, singing the name of Lazar. ~Troparion for Tsar-Martyr Lazar of Serbia

Overlooked in my earlier remarks on Hanson and Kurdistan was this slightly puzzling claim:

Israel lost some of its precious capital of deterrence in the last war, but ultimately the real loser was a bankrupt Iran who lost far more materially than did a far wealthier Israel.

I call this puzzling for two reasons.  One reason is that the “real loser” of the war in Lebanon last year was, um, Lebanon, which had its infrastructure severely damaged, 1,000 of its people killed, hundreds of thousands made into refugees and its political life thrown into ever greater convulsions.  The next biggest loser in material terms was Hizbullah, which lost many of its men and expended much of the armament the Iranians had provided them in the latter’s expectation that Hizbullah would use those weapons for Iranian ends.  Materially, the third biggest loser was Israel, which did, after all, suffer a smaller but not inconsiderable number of civilian and military casualties, in addition to having the northern reaches of their country more or less paralysed by random bombardment.  Iran takes fourth place, so to say, in a war in which there were basically four parties (plus, I suppose, Syria and, a little more indirectly, the U.S.). 

The other reason it is puzzling is that if Iran is “bankrupt,” this would also remind us of Iran’s economic difficulties and its energy crunch.  Namely, Iran has to import refined oil because it cannot process it on its own on account of the feeble and run-down state of its industry, and it is no longer able to translate vast reserves of natural resources into resources to offset the economic disorder that has been plaguing the country for decades.  If we remember all this, the Iranian claim to be pursuing a nuclear program for the purposes of generating power seems plausible.  That doesn’t rule out additional Iranian nuclear weapons programs, but it makes their stated reason that much more plausible.

This is undeniably kinder, gentler, and less political. ~Timothy Noah on Goldberg’s re-subtitled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods

Timothy Noah has a knack for making me make mild, quasi-defenses of Jonah Goldberg.  Does he have any idea how wrong he has to be for this to happen?  When Goldberg says that his book has been delayed because it had yet to be finished, one does not need to work overtime to concoct an elaborate marketing damage-control theory to make sense of it.  Sometimes the simplest explanation is the one that is also true.

While Mr. Noah envisions Goldberg hastily deleting all references to Hillary in his desire not to appear too “Coulterish,” he fails to persuade even Goldberg’s most inveterate critics (i.e., people like me).  Now that the subtitle (the subtitle, for crying out loud!) has been changed, Noah declares victory, apparently not realising that the new subtitle makes the book sound even more ridiculous and bizarre than the old one.  If they were aiming to move away from Coulter, they need a new rhetorical compass. 

Whether you agree with the thesis about some actual historical and philosophical points of contact between liberalism and fascism or you don’t, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Clinton made a certain amount of sense for reasons I have outlined before.  Next, the original proposed subtitle had some recognisable relationship to the title.  For marketing purposes, this connection needs to be clear.  In my amateur opinion, to change a subtitle in such a way as to introduce new layers of confusion and ambiguity is not the way to sell a book.  The subtitle has to make the subject of the book more clear than the necessarily shorter, genuinely more marketing-driven decision on the title.  These range from the simple (Jefferson Davis: A Biography) to the baroque (see the original subtitle of Crunchy Cons).  Informing us that a book will investigate the relationship between liberalism and fascism by referring in the subtitle to Hegel and Whole Foods as the bookends for the discussion makes nothing clear and rightly invites chortles of laughter. 

Removing from the subtitle the man who was essentially the first historic Fascist and the one who actually gave us the modern word fascisti (something for which I hope Mussolini is paying dearly right now) and replacing him with Hegel may make Popperians everywhere shout for joy, but it actually makes the book appear even less serious.  This purports to impute to Hegel, who was a moderately liberal constitutional monarchist, the seeds of totalitarian thought.  This is still a popular opinion and is most widely held by those who have not read much Hegel.  This view of Hegel is rather like the view that holds Strauss ultimately responsible for various neoconservative preoccupations.  It bears a faint resemblance to the kinds of arguments that claim to show deep affinities between Counter-Enlightenment reactionaries and radical minority identitarians or deconstructionists, which is to say bad, misinformed arguments like this one.  Because you can trace an intellectual lineage of Hegelians down through the Marxists and into the modern communists, there is the idea–popularised by Popper–that Hegel is at the root of totalitarian politics and utopian historicism.  To be brief, Popper was wrong. 

As otherworldly as including it surely is, I can imagine how Whole Foods comes into this.  Goldberg is the would-be scourge of anything that purports to have found meaning and purpose in ordinary life.  He wants a “partial philosophy of life” and would find the claims of people who shop at Whole Foods, if they actually made any explicit claims, redolent of a totalising politics.  The very name threatens Goldberg’s partial philosophy with the possibility of organicity and wholeness and the idea that there is more to political life broadly understood than quibbling over pensions.  Themes that are as basic to European and British conservatism as these should not threaten any American conservative, but when you have no particular vision of order anyone who claims to have such a vision has to be shouted down as a lunatic…or a fascist in waiting.

At the Scene, I have some new posts on Kurdistan, the continuing diversity debate, and finally one in which I attempt (apparently to no good effect) a joke about trite political rhetoric.

Feeding America’s natural isolationism — no country relishes sending its sons and daughters to fight in a far-off desert — can create a momentum of irresponsibility that moves beyond control. ~Michael Gerson

So says that deeply realistic man who wrote the speeches for Mr. Bush in which the President declared that America would “end tyranny” on earth.  He understands foreign policy and what the real world requires. 

Of course, Gerson is right in that he recognises that no people wants to send off their sons and especially their daughters to fight overseas, but it never occurred to me that this was “‘natural isolationism.”  It just seems like natural humanity to me.  I don’t know of many other peoples in the world who truly relish sacrificing their young men to war.  Peoples around the world may glorify soldiers and celebrate their deeds in war, but most people, normal people, would rather that there be no war if at all possible.  One might just as misleadingly call this desire to live in peace a “natural pacifism,” since the desire to live in peace (or the desire to have your children live that way) can be of the most powerful motivations to fight in a war.  I have seen more than a few reports in which soldiers in Iraq have explained their belief in the cause in terms of making sure that their children do not have to return in another generation.  This, too, is a natural desire, even if it makes for bizarre policy choices.  In the end, Gerson’s remark is just one in a long line of confused uses of the word isolationism by people who wouldn’t understand the instinct for what they call “isolationism” if they spent a lifetime trying.

From George Ajjan and another commenter at the Scene, I have learned that the Arabic for blog is mudawwinah.  You never know when a piece of information like that may be useful.

The missing Republican realists have been worrying Ross for a while now, so he may be gratified by the recent speech of Sen. Lugar on Iraq, which reads like an “internationally-minded” realist’s how-to guide for Near East policy.  The speech has begun having an effect on the Senate GOP, mainly among those members, such as John Warner, who have been most skeptical of the “surge,” but the speech may have emboldened them to do something more than stand there and look gravely unhappy.  As we might expect, Lugar’s view seems to be, summed up briefly, “We really ought to follow through on those ISG recommendations, while investing heavily in ethanol!”  He makes the statement in the most authoritative establishmentarian way as he can–he blames sloganeering and opportunism and (egads!) ”partisan political calculations” for the present state of affairs–and gives a lecture on the irrelevance of benchmarks.  His view seems to be that Iraq is in such bad shape that trying to get some measurement of progress is ridiculous–better to just drop all talk of these measurements, while shaking a cragged, aged finger at those proposing to use such measurements as a way of determining whether or not the new tactical plan was having its intended and desired effect.  In a sense, he has a point.  As he admits, the plan is not working, so why bother with anything so tiresome as a debate over benchmarks? 

Of course, he gives that lecture on benchmarks in the context of remarks declaring that political progress in Iraq is essentially a fantastic, incredible dream, and he notes, “Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis.”  If “sectarian factionalism” is not going to abate and it “probably cannot be controlled from the top,” what exactly is the flaw with the position arguing for relatively more rapid American withdrawal?  Suppose that I grant that “we” have “vital interests” in other parts of the Near East–Lugar nowhere persuades any skeptic that withdrawal from Iraq, be it “phased” or “precipitous” or whatever, actually does more to damage our ability to protect those “vital interests” (i.e., ready access to the oil supply) than remaining where we are.  It is as if withdrawal from Iraq must also mean a pell-mell abandonment of every other commitment in the region.  Gradual disentanglement from these commitments would be desirable, but this isn’t on the agenda for a while yet, as there are more immediate concerns.  Even though “sectarian factionalism” will not abate, and there seems to be no military means that Lugar sees that can overcome the lack of security, departing from Iraq–even if it is done as part of an effort to contain and limit the further spread of instability outside Iraq–is simply not allowed in Lugar’s arrangement.  His main argument against withdrawal, after citing the potential for greater instability (a greater future instability that is not necessarily being prevented by continued presence in Iraq), is that it would take some time to do it right, as if this were not in itself a strong argument for beginning the preparations now.

In short, he declares every assumption central to the new plan being implemented since January to be wrong, announces the impossibility of the “surge” to accomplish its goals and essentially states that the political situation in Iraq is so miserable that no one should pretend it will be getting better anytime soon, but from this he nonetheless concludes that it can’t possibly be the best of all bad options to leave Iraq.  He wants a re-deployment to Kuwait and non-urban and Kurdish areas of Iraq, which is effectively an admission that the military presence in Iraq will not be used to improve the security of non-Kurdish Iraqis–so why keep them in Iraq itself?  There are no real answers to this, except fear of a greater instability for which the realist will not be able to prevent in any event.  That is what establishment Republican realism amounts to in the end: a recognition of the exact same problems that opponents of the war have been describing for months and years and a refusal to do anything except more or less soldier on for lack of imagination.

From the film Nagin (1954), the instrumental theme composed by the great Hemant Kumar and Man Dole Mera Tan Dole.

Take a look at my Scene posts on Johann Hari’s new TNR article, Western (mis)perceptions of Iraqi and Yugoslav identity and the charge of Dolchstoss in the Iraq/foreign policy debate.

The new American Scene is up and it is looking good (or tayyib, to use a word I have heard about 100 times in the last week).  My first posts there should be up before too long.