After reading this (via Ross), I was reminded at once of the following scene from Brazil:

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?

HELPMANN: Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we’re fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I’d say they’re nearly out of the game.

INTERVIEWER: But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.

HELPMANN: Beginner’s luck.

I have no doubt that future administrations might try to perpetuate the war in Iraq, and I have equally little doubt that the media would, for the most part, roll over and accept this tyrannical imposition on our country just as they did when the Iraq war started.  We must be “responsible,” after all.  Mustn’t withdraw “precipitously,” you see.  Mustn’t do anything that would indicate that we are still, at some minimal theoretical level, self-governing citizens of a republic.

In fact, I think Mr. Robb is entirely right on the military matters he discusses, but does not judge correctly what the political implications of an indefinite continuation of the Iraq war will be.  It is because the war cannot be resolved in any traditional way that will make it politically impossible for it to garner meaningful public support for much more than another two or three years.  Our debates about progress and benchmarks in 2007 will seem quaint and ridiculous if in two years things are much as they are today, and I see little reason to think that the situation will be any better.  If it does not end in 2009, the incumbents will suffer badly in ’10.  If the next President does not end the war, he (or, perhaps, she) will not be re-elected, the successor will end it and will have likely also campaigned on such a platform.   

Pro-military and hegemonist pols will not continue to permit the wreck of the Army that a continued presence in Iraq would entail.  That will crack the base of the war’s support.  A couple more years of this, and you will finally have the open defection of many reliably internationalist politicians who will come out strongly against the war.  The public will grow weary of the futility of the entire exercise, even though most of them don’t know anyone who is fighting overseas.  Some event will dramatically symbolise just how pointless the Iraq war has become and will drown out the chatter from “serious” people. 

If there were some prospect of a satisfactory, victorious conclusion to the war, Mr. Robb might well be right that all of the factors he outlines would encourage prolongation of the conflict, but there is not and the public is on the verge of realising this.  The major candidates all favour continuing the war, but many of these are the same people who judged the original question of the invasion so poorly.  Their judgements are not sure signs of anything, except their own brazen complicity.

At his blog, George Ajjan has a good article on what the U.S. should with respect to Syria that originally appeared in Quarterly Review.  In it he has many important points, but this one stood out for me:

 Expending whatever remains of America’s regional credibility on behalf of the unproven Saudi stooges currently governing Lebanon must come to a halt, because it is simply not in the interests of the United States.

George also argues that negotiating a peace between Israel and Syria would help to detach Syria from Iran, which seems to me the most practicable way of limiting Iranian power short of full rapprochement with Tehran (which would, in any case, much more difficult). 

The accompanying piece that replies to George’s article, written by one Jillian Becker, does not seem terribly persuasive.  So much of it is the usual, bankrupt, unimaginative stuff you’ve seen a thousand times before.  Ms. Becker makes no attempt to distinguish between the retaliation for 9/11 of the Afghan War and the unprovoked invasion of Iraq that certainly did come about in no small part because of neoconservatives and Mr. Bush’s “hopes and wishes,” to use her phrase.  This makes everything else she has to say suspect.  She makes no attempt to distinguish, because I assume she does think there is any real separation between the one and the other. 

Her claims about Israeli public opinion seem surreal in light of this old story, which reports that 10% of Israelis favour full withdrawal from Golan and 40% favour partial withdrawal, with 44% opposed to any kind of withdrawal.  The same report confirms that most Israelis do not trust Assad, but it simply isn’t true that there is not much “public enthusiasm for conceding land.”  There is evidently some support for conceding some land.  The word “enthusiasm” does a lot of work here, as it is meant to discredit claims that there is some significant public support for some kind of “land for peace” arrangement with Syria. 

Ms. Becker notes that the Kadima government of Ehud Olmert is horribly unpopular, neglecting to mention that it was Olmert’s disastrous entry into and handling of the war in Lebanon that destroyed his government’s credibility.  It was hardly his government’s most recent drive to negotiate with the Syrians that has undermined him; Olmert has not exactly erred on the side of being too irenic.  Speaking of public opinion, we should remember that Kadima had earlier been elected on a peace platform.  The very existence of Kadima as a viable party, before the war ruined its reputation for competence, stemmed from public support for some settlement with the Palestinians.  If, as George correctly argues, the Golan Heights have less religious and symbolic significance, it is hardly so strange to think that the public that voted Kadima in would be willing to consider peace with Syria at the price of the Golan.

On something pertaining to church life for a change, I had the great pleasure of seeing the visiting Moscow delegation of bishops and the Sretensky Monastery Choir at our cathedral this past Sunday.  This was a remarkable event, and not only because the crowd at the cathedral was huge by our standards.  So far as I know, this marked the first concelebration of Moscow and ROCOR bishops at our cathedral.  The delegation’s world tour will take them to many of the major centers of Russian Orthodoxy abroad in celebration of the reconciliation among all Russian Orthodox.  Also present was the “Reigning” (Derzhavnaya) icon of the Most Holy Theotokos, whose appearance after the last Tsar’s abdication signified that Russia thereafter was under the sovereignty of the Theotokos.  The Tribunehas a series of photographs from the event, and the story is here.

The Choir performed exceptionally during the liturgy.  Their rendition of Mnogaya Lyeta filled the church with such a rich, resonating sound that I felt a sense of awe.  I then had the added enjoyment of hearing the Choir perform at the CSO Sunday night, where they offered both sacred and secular songs.  If any of you live in D.C., they will be performing in the vicinity tomorrow.  If you can still get tickets, I strongly recommend that you go.

Via this Economist Free Exchange blogger (via McArdle), whose arguments seem strangely familiar, comes a review of The Bottom Billion.  My guess is that Paul Collier, the author, and I would agree on many of the evils of “developmentalism” and would find some of the same problems with the organisations and institutions that allegedly promote development in poor countries.  The Free Exchange blogger refers to “Easterly’s jaded pessimism,” which is fair if he means Easterly’s attitude towards the institutions and ideology of development.  It might be misleading to those who are not aware that Easterly is, in fact, a tremendously optimistic booster of free trade (one might almost call his views on trade naive, but I do not) who believes that the surest way for “the developing world” to enjoy economic growth is for development agencies and foreign governments to stop engaging in their absurd obsession with “helping” them.  Much more help of that kind, and these countries are done for.  

At one point, the reviewer writes:

The Nobel laureate Robert Solow once wrote that economists are intellectual sanitation workers: their key contribution is to consign bad ideas to the trash.

So that’s what economists are good for!  I had been wondering.  The Free Exchange blogger goes on to promote mass immigration (or rather mass emigration from the poor nation-states) to free people from their “national prisons.”  Iraqi refugees have been thus “liberated,” and I assume that they would have preferred to stay in the “prison,” which makes this talk of prisons seem rather odd.  Some might think that people who live in these “prison” countries regard the place where they live as their home and might even say that they are not simply labour units to be reassigned to allow for greater efficiencies.  Mass uprooting and relocation of poor populations with migrants moving from the countryside to the city and from the home country to communities abroad, which has happened in virtually every impoverished, modernising nation-state from the independence of Greece on, is all very good for those who can get out, but dooms those who remain (and many will remain) to an even more miserable existence.  Dr. Wilson once remarked on this, asking a rhetorical question that went something like this: “What sort of country robs poor countries of their best and brightest people?”  This blogger’s kind of country, it would seem. 

This talk of “national prisons” is the sort of language applied to states that one wishes did not exist and would like to see dismantled.  Again, the example of Iraq (or that of the recent Ivorian civil war) stands out to show us what will follow the breakdown of the “national prisons” in Africa and elsewhere.  However, like the bold Wilsonians dispensing self-determination to the “imprisoned” nations of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, those who would destroy the prisonhouses may be quite unhappy with what results.

Maybe Ross is right, though I suspect Ms. McArdle is making more sense in this case, but can someone please smack the AFP writer who penned this drivel:

Aristotle may have been more on the mark than he realised when he said that man is by nature a political animal.

(Crankish intellectual mode on.)  For the love of all that’s holy, if AFP writers must refer to Aristotle, could they at least consult their Cliff’s Notes (or appropriate French substitute) first?  This is not a clever play on words or an amusing joke, but a kind of bowdlerised Aristotle for morons.  This is obviously not what zoon politikon means, and never could have done, since ta politika for Aristotle meant something that encompassed a wide range of social, ethical and religious life.  When he said that man is a political animal, he meant that man was naturally inclined to live in political community with others. (Crankish intellectual mode off.)

It has never been clear to me that liberals are all that much more interested in “ambiguity and complexity” than the average conservative (those on our side did not come up with the phrase “knee-jerk liberal” out of nowhere), and it is not at all clear that many of the people who call themselves conservatives today are actually politically conservative, which complicates things a bit.  The kind of bizarre dogmatism and blindness to reality exhibited by many soi-disant conservatives these days seem to be traits of an ideological cast of mind, but it doesn’t seem to me that this is conservative or that it is associated with a recognisably conservative politics.  The modern king of stubbornness and inflexibility, Mr. Bush, is probably temperamentally less conservative than Woodrow Wilson, and his politics are lamentably similar.   

Ross offers his explanation:

It isn’t just that the left, far more than the right, tends to tell brainiacs what they want to hear – that they were born to rule, that the world is just waiting to be reshaped for the better by their combination of smarts and expertise. (Though of course right-wingers sometimes give in to this temptation as well.) It’s that we live in a society that makes an aggressive attempt to select for intelligence in the formation of its elite, and then educates that elite in a university system that is liberal to the core – not left-wing, necessarily, or not anymore, but certainly not conservative either, unless you think (as some fools do) that Thomas Friedman qualifies as a man of the right. The modern meritocracy has evolved to bring up most of its pupils to be Friedmanites, a minority to be Chomskyites, and a vastly smaller minority to be actual conservatives. Small wonder, then, that if you’re brainy in America, you probably call yourself a liberal – you were raised that way, after all. Whereas conservatives are the stupid party – the party of the Boston phone directory, not the Harvard Faculty Club, with some crankish intellectuals thrown in for ballast.

This sounds plausible at first.  God help me, I was raised that way in many respects, but fortunately I managed to survive with my mind intact and free of sympathies with the “great” Friedman and the like.  Certainly, preparatory schools try their best to indoctrinate “future leaders” with the very latest hogwash, but it is this kind of constant reinforcement that creates the elite Ross is talking about. 

After thinking about Ross’ claims about “brainiacs” and being “born to rule” for a moment, I realised that we might observe that the left has so often argued for nothing of the sort.  It has traditionally told everyone that no one was born to rule, not even the intellectuals, and the more far left the revolution the more leveling, anti-intellectualism and cutting down of the tall flowers you would have.  There is a reason why the left-liberal Karl Popper identified the root of evil in Plato and Hegel, not exactly champions of rote repetition or plebeian yahooism, and it is because there is actually a presumption against the importance of intelligence and rejection of superiority of any kind in most leftist thinking. 

Social engineering does require smart technocrats, I suppose, and so those inclined to this sort of thing will be drawn towards liberal politics, but I would guarantee you that if the incentives of power, influence and status favoured a different politics many of the smart fellows, being smart fellows, would suddenly discover the virtues of right-wing ideas (or whatever was in fashion).  Rather by definition, left-wing ideas tend to be seemingly newish ideas, which makes them fashionable and thus attractive to the up-and-coming, so there may be a tendency for people who spend a great deal of time pondering ideas to fall for the latest nonsense simply because it has arrived recently on the scene.  Even so, academia was once the redoubt of relatively politically conservative people until not all that long ago, and its members were not therefore necessarily rigid or unimaginative.  

It certainly can’t be the inherent plausibility of liberalism that draws smart people to it, since it has little or none.  Today it has value as a marker of social status and in-group membership, and most who hold to its presuppositions do so out of rote and habit and unthinking allegiance, because it is expected and much more risky to reject outright.  Unless the reasonably smart person is either unusually cranky or oblivious to the social and professional costs of espousing a strong traditional conservatism, he will find a way to accommodate himself to the prevailing views of his peers.  This is how the social and political elite maintains its status–it co-opts those who might threaten it if it can and marginalises the rest.  At present, this means liberals are in, but this has to do with the changes in the kinds of people who acquired and held power in the past much more than the “cognitive style” of members of the different groups.

Another fairly major problem with the “soft partition” idea: it’s not terribly popular among Iraqis (see question 13) with only 28% (of Iraqi Arabs) in favour.  Naturally, the solution that is being touted by such “realistic” pols as Joe Biden is the one that is the most unlikely to be accepted by the people who actually inhabit the country.

Via Ross and Franke-Ruta, here is a CBN profile of Mike Huckabee.  According to the report, he does support the teaching of creationism (not ID) “alongside evolution,” which came as something of a surprise to me.  Intelligent Design is custom-made as the pseudo-scientific alternative that a pol can invoke without bringing down quite the same measure of criticism on himself.  Even McCain (whose campaign is apparently now going to have “faith” as its theme!) has hied himself to the Discovery Institute to pay homage to the latest fad.  ID is, of course, quite different from “creationism” and “creation science,” in that ID assumes that much of evolutionary theory and cosmology is correct, but holds that modern theory fails to account for the presence of orderliness and intelligence in the universe.  (ID does not so much account for these things as it asserts them and waves its hands melodramatically as it asks, “Why, oh, why will the oppressive scientific community not heed our arguments?”) 

“Creationism,” on the other hand, holds that more or less literal accounts of Biblical creation are entirely, “factually” true and creation science is founded on the notion that the claims are empirically verifiable.  The thinking here seems to be that if archaeology can verify many historical references in the Old Testament, “creation science” should be able to do the same for prehistoric times.  If there is geological evidence of the event that the Bible (and the Epic of Gilgamesh, stories about Manu, etc.) records as the Flood (at the end of the last ice age), that is apparently not supposed to be taken as evidence that modern geology and paleontology are reasonably reliable and accurate fields of science, but rather as proof that 95% of what geologists and paleontologists say about the age of the earth and the history of life on earth is wrong or badly distorted.  Hence you have such travesties as the Creation Museum.   

As you may remember, the governor was one of three candidates who raised his hand in response to the question about who didn’t believe in evolution.  In the following debate, given a chance to elaborate on this, Huckabee gave his somewhat famous “I’m not running to write eighth grade science textbooks” line.  In the past, however, he has made this sort of statement:

But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution. And I think that what I’d be concerned with is that it should be taught as one of the views that’s held by people. But it’s not the only view that’s held. And any time you teach one thing as that it’s the only thing, then I think that has a real problem to it.  

Indeed!  The kids have been deprived without having a proper education in the four humours and epicycles in addition to modern biology and heliocentrism.  After all, who can really say how, or even whether, the planets orbit the sun?  How unfair to privilege one view over another!  That is effectively what the governor was saying.  This is ridiculous. 

You have to enjoy Huckabee’s standard refrain of “it’s a theory, not a fact!”  As I have said before regarding ID:

That theories are constantly revised does not make theoretical knowledge less certain or less reliable than the “factual”–there is, or should be, the awareness that no theory ever has the final word, but that it is the best word available to us to date. Indeed, without theoretical frameworks to structure it, factual “knowledge” is often just a jumble of unrelated information. What ID proposes to do is to say, “The theory of evolution has not, as of yet, accounted for all of the complexities of biological phenomena, and therefore we declare it simply insufficient and propose to fill in the ‘gaps’ with a non-empirical, non-scientific explanation.”   

Our knowledge of the world, like the knowledge of the past or any other subject of study, is always limited and provisional, but clearly some answers and some theories are more valid than others.  Huckabee’s view on teaching both creationism and evolution is effectively a rejection of the idea that it is possible for reasoning people to discern between theories that are more consistent with empirical evidence and those that are less so or entirely inconsistent.  Instead, Huckabee thinks we should be “fair” to all of the views “held by the people.”  This is taking the right’s flirting with an anti-diversity love of “intellectual diversity” a bit far, wouldn’t you say?* 

I take Huckabee’s point that such cultural fights over education policy really are not relevant to being President, or at least they shouldn’t be since education ought to remain a strictly local and state matter, but the argument that Huckabee is making in the statement above is actually a very strange one for a conservative to make.  What he is saying is that there are many equally valid truths, truth is not one, and to privilege the best or most coherent explanations of phenomena is to stifle or shut out a free and fair exchange of ideas.  Presumably Huckabee does not believe this when it comes to moral and spiritual truths about the obligations men owe each other or about the nature of man or the existence of God.  Cultural conservatives do not think we should actually be “fair” to all views “held by the people” on matters of abortion and marriage when it comes to setting public policy and passing laws, but rather insist quite strongly (and, to my mind, rightly) that there are right answers that rule out the alternatives as unacceptable and false. 

I suppose the complaint Huckabee is making here is that science, or any kind of scholarly research, is not democratic.  By democratic here, I mean not only that anyone can have his own ideas about science, which is less worrisome, but that everyone’s views are entitled to equal respect and public affirmation.  Obviously, everyone’s views are not so entitled, and certainly not when it comes to specialised fields of study. 

Having said all that, I think the Genesis account of creation ought to be taught in those schools where the parents want it taught, along with an education in the cultural inheritance of the Christian civilisation to whose last remnants they belong, but not in science class.  The establishment clause has nothing to do with this, and this is not a First Amendment issue.  It is a matter of good education and common sense.  The fundamental objection that so many Christians have to the teaching of evolution is the significance that is attached to the theory in the name of evolutionism, which secularists push to deny the existence of God and reject the authority of the Bible.  If there were not the notion that their religion and everything they are teaching their children to believe were being openly derided and denied through the teaching of evolution, there would be a great deal less resistance.  Encouraging that resistance to the teaching of evolution, rather than mobilising the same people against the courts’ hostility to religion in the public square and public schools, is self-defeating.       

The secular West has already done away with any hierarchy of religious truth some time ago.  More’s the pity.  Indeed, religious truth as something real and binding is not taken very seriously in our culture, though there are many individuals who accept that it is.  Christians have to plead for some minimal acknowledgement of their own beliefs in schools that they fund with their taxes, and even here they are usually unsuccessful.  In effect, religious claims have been reduced to the level of “private” opinion, and every effort to drag them out of this prison is met with powerful hostility. 

We allow for pluralism regarding ideas and things that our culture already acknowledges to be irrelevant to the organisation and running of social and political life.  You can always tell what a culture values most highly by how much control those in authority attempt to exercise over its particular sphere.  People generally permit the widest scope of “freedom” in those things that do not concern them and do not really matter to them.        

Now Huckabee would ironically have us abandon standards of truth in at least one area of secular study in the name of religion, or rather in the name of “representing” the views of religious citizens in the classroom.  “Let’s be fair!” the man says.  As I thought conservatives used to argue whenever the latest multiculti fad was sweeping through the schools, schools do not exist for the purpose of “representing” the diversity of society (and attempts to make them do this are generally a waste of time, when they are not efforts at ideological indoctrination).  Schools exist for educating children in those fundamental subjects and abilities of analysis and reasoning that will make them more humane and more capable to take up their duties as citizens.  (Yes, I know how old-fashioned that sounds given the state of things, but there it is.)  It seems blindingly obvious to me that instructing children in the religious heritage of their own country and civilisation is an essential part of a proper education, if only to make them culturally literate human beings who are not cut off from the riches of Western art and literature.  Both are incomprehensible without a grounding in the history and teachings of Christianity, and it is no coincidence that I learned virtually nothing of those things in my formative education, receiving cant about diversity instead.  A proper education in Western culture and religion, however, has nothing to do with talking about Genesis in biology class.  Without the former, creationist school boards might triumph everywhere and achieve nothing of lasting significance. 

*Having been subjected to idiotic propagandising in middle and high school about the glories of Diversity and multiculturalism, I recognised the shallowness and vapidity of both a long, long time ago.  I also noticed early on that a diversity of ideas and particularly political ideas was not welcomed.  I am very familiar with and in favour of this kind of criticism of the diversity cult.  However, an enthusiasm for intellectual diversity (which, I would add, many on the right do not have when it comes to certain intramural policy debates) is not a license for dressing up willful ignorance or anti-intellectualism as a legitimate alternative to a prevailing view.

If you were one of the ten people who actually read all of Paul Berman’s long essay on Tariq Ramadan, you will be very excited to hear that Ian Buruma has attached his counterblast to a review of Podhoretz’s latest “book.”  For everyone else, it will seem like a very odd diversion away from what had been up till then a fairly interesting review article in which he quite properly mocks the notion of “Islamofascim” and related idiocies.  In related neoconiana, James has a response to Beinart’s review of the latest from Ledeen and Podhoretz.

Reacting to theseposts, a commenter at Ross’ blog wrote:

No wonder politicians give up and rely on scripts; this kind of henpecking the details and failing to engage on the larger point that Fred Thompson counts himself an unapologetic patriot who generally sees the US foreign policy as good. I’d think his judgement could be addressed on that point without dithering about body count.

Yes, why “dither” about facts?  Why be concerned with historical accuracy?  It’s not as if a deficient understanding of the past could have any consequences for the quality of policymaking. 

Speaking of “larger points,” one might engage the larger point that Thompson lends credibility to the stereotype of the “unapologetic patriot” as unthinking, ignorant and boastful patriot, which in turn does so much to give proper American patriotism a bad name in the world.  One might engage the larger point that Thompson’s answer reflects not so much patriotism as it does chauvinism, since the patriot, as Chesteron said in Napoleon of Notting Hill, boasts not of the largeness of his country but of its smallness.  One might engage the point that Thompson largely ducked the question about America’s unpopularity today by jumping into a refrain about how much more Americans have sacrificed than all other nations for the “liberty and freedom of other peoples.”  Or a Thompson defender might engage the larger point that ignoring the contributions of our British, French, Commonwealth and other free European allies is an amazing thing for a presidential candidate to do in the announcement of his candidacy.  This is someone who allegedly wants to be President.  He claims to be prepared to run our foreign policy during what he regards as a crucially important time in a major worldwide struggle, and this struggle requires cultivating and tending alliances that have been badly strained over the past few years.  He chooses to launch that effort with an insult to some of our oldest and best allies. 

Suppose for a moment that Thompson genuinely doesn’t know that his statement was, in fact, false–is that supposed to encourage us to regard him well?  Haven’t we had quite enough of presidential candidates who relish their own lack of knowledge about the rest of the world and the history of other nations?  The gaffe, if we can call it that, is indicative of the sort of detail-free campaign he seems intent on running, and yet another example of a Republican who thinks that foreign policy is two parts nationalist rhetoric and one part bombast.  

Here’s another point.  If a Canadian or, God help us, a French politician were to make some similarly overblown statement, the reaction in certain circles in this country would be one of hysterical outrage at the expression of “anti-Americanism.”  Our pols are free to say whatever foolish, ignorant thing they please and can ignore U.S. allies whenever it suits them, but just watch those pols issue denunciations of those same allies the moment their leaders utter the ‘wrong’ thing or fail to show their gratitude to America for all that we have done for them.