Both newspapers downplayed the Korea and Japan analogies which Mr. Bush also delivered at the convention. This is more than a little convenient. The president spent much more speech time on Korea and Japan than on Vietnam. Both Korea and Japan stand as rebukes to people who once argued for the purported incompatibility democracy and freedom among peoples who lacked a history thereof. Today we hear it about Middle Eastern peoples instead of Asian ones. Mr. Bush’s point is that each was proven wrong in time and that he expects the same to be true in Iraq. ~The Washington Times

Everyone has been preoccupied with the (admittedly flawed) Vietnam sections of the speech, while dismissing or overlooking the others.  The others are, in their way, far more dishonest and inaccurate.  This is why I focused most of my attention on showing why Bush had no understanding of modern Japanese history, since Japan was his principal example of America creating democracy where none had existed.  The trouble was that some form of it had existed prior to the war, just as it had in Germany for decades prior to Nazism.  

Helping to rebuild a constitutional representative government (which is what we’re actually talking about) in a place that has already had one is immensely easier than laying a foundation on the sand of a political culture unsuited to such government.  The social, political and economic structures of modern Japan made it vastly different from Iraq, c. 2003, and made it much more able to resume its constitutional parliamentary government.  Japan’s cultural and ethnic homogeneity, its long history as a unified state, and the unifying symbol of the emperor all combined to make postwar Japan as unlike Iraq as could be imagined.  So many of the conditions that explain Japan’s success after the war do not exist in Iraq.  It is simple realism to acknowledge that two radically different societies are, in fact, radically different, and the development of democratic institutions in one may be impossible while it is possible in the other.  The simplistic Bush/Times notion is that the critics always underestimate the democratic potential of foreigners, so the right response is to consistently overestimate that potential while striking a pose of moral superiority.  There may have been occasions in the past when doubters were wrong (it is likely that doubters of Japanese democracy were as poorly informed as Mr. Bush about pre-war Japanese politics), but for the same to be true about Iraq the examples being cited would have to bear some remote resemblance to present-day Iraq.

But he is also the man who has declared his eternal friendship with Libya’s Col. Gaddafi, Belorussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Iranian leader Ahmadinejad, Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, Sandinista commandante Daniel Ortega, imprisoned terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Saddam Hussein and, of course, Fidel Castro. Amongst the gringo masses, this side of Chávez is rather less well-known. ~Michael Moynihan

I understand that there has to be an angle for articles to make them seem more interesting, and the author wants to present his material as if he were revealing something new and previously unknown to you, the audience, but are the “gringo masses” actually unfamiliar with Chavez’s list of friends, assuming they know anything about him at all?  If the gringos know anything about him, they will remember that Chavez called the President a “devil,” routinely visits Cuba and they may know that he has close ties to Morales in Bolivia.  The better-informed gringos will know of his support for Ortega and left-populist candidates around Latin America, and they will also know that there are alarmists in this country who want to make Hugo Chavez out to be one of the great threats of our time.  In fact, the odds are good that most Americans who have heard of Hugo Chavez regard him simply as another member of the ever-shifting list of officially approved enemies.  He probably has his liberal sympathisers (e.g., Danny Glover), but I would assume that Chavez, anti-American friend of Castro and Ahmadinejad and Master of Clock Changes, is much better known than Chavez, the “mildly buffoonish, if delightfully brave, left-wing populist.”

Jason Zengerle at The New Republic has an interesting article on evangelical converts to Orthodoxy (via Rod).  I had not seen it before Rod mentioned it.  It is worth reading (and not because it quotes me), and I think it presents a fair picture of Orthodoxy in America.  Evangelicals may be less pleased with the portrayal they receive, but nothing glaring leaps out at me as an unfair description.  

There is understandably considerable geographical overlap among the people interviewed for the article, but this story is very focused on one very specific region in the west suburbs.  My Scenecolleague Alan Jacobs teaches at Wheaton College, which is literally down the road from my parish, and the Antiochian parish Holy Transfiguration is fairly close nearby.  In fact, several families from Holy Transfiguration have been visiting our parish lately, and I realised with a sudden shock that the priest they have been telling me about is none other than the subject of Mr. Zengerle’s article.

Update: I hadn’t noticed the title of the article: “The Iconoclasts.”  As an eye-catching title, it works, but I wonder if Mr. Zengerle appreciates just how much Orthodox Christians dislike the historic Iconoclasts?  We anathematise them every year.  My guess is that most Orthodox converts would find the title annoying at best.

I had a response to this all worked out, but I will hold my fire this time.  Instead, I will point you all to my colleagues Paul and Zippy at WWWTW, who offer their much more even-tempered responses to recent critics.  They make the right points, and I agree with their remarks entirely.

Following on Zippy’s remarks, I would just include this one section from my unpublished post:

There is, of course, a legitimate hierarchy of loyalties that a professing Christian can and should respect.  One no less than Aquinas has laid out how natural loyalties to kindred, friends, neighbours and fellow citizens appropriately take precedence over loyalties to other, more remotely related people.  Loyalty and obligation to fellow citizens would take precedence over duties owed to foreign citizens, but the duty to treat all men justly in wartime is something owed to God.  As my colleague Zippy is a very serious Catholic (and it is this, I think, that is really what bothers his critics), he would probably have no difficulty acknowledging and affirming such an idea.

Is Max Boot channeling Ross, or was Ross anticipating Boot?  Here’s Mr. Pith Helmet himself:

That assessment actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. In the late 1970s, America’s enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan. It is impossible to prove the connection with the Vietnam War, but there is little doubt that the enfeeblement of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from.

Not only is it impossible to prove this case, but it is also possible to prove that Boot’s argument is wrong.  Actually, Iran was lost because Carter dropped most meaningful support for the Shah and all but urged the Iranians to depose him.  That was one of the early “victories” of a foreign policy of “values” and democracy promotion.  The Shah was gone by February 1979.  Afghanistan, which the Soviets invaded in December of that year, came at least partly as a result of the failure to respond effectively to the hostage crisis, but the Soviets had already been looking to counter what Moscow saw as American gains in the 1979 peace deal between Israel and Egypt and the beginnings of a pro-Western turn in Baghdad under you-know-who.     

Mozambique’s communists came to power in the wake of independence from Portugal, and their internal policies provoked civil war.  Their support for ZANU and the ANC provoked some of Mozambique’s neighbours to intervene against the government’s side.  Naturally, the Soviets supported or at least sympathised with communist and pro-communist African movements, including the ANC, but the existence of these movements would not have been prevented by continued U.S. backing for South Vietnam.  Obviously.  The rise of communism in Mozambique (and Angola) had more than a little to do with resistance to Portugese colonialism and Portugal’s fairly intense efforts to prevent the independence of its African colonies.  These were national or independence movements in which communists took a leading role; outside support did not create these movements.  

The very same kind of limited thinking about the nature of Vietnamese communism that plagued policymakers in the ’60s and ’70s then seems to be plaguing latter-day Vietnam “hawks” when it comes to talking about African communist movements.  The confusion is such that Mozambique can be cited as some sort of “proof” for the validity of the domino theory, when Mozambique was  going to turn communist at that stage regardless of what happened in southeast Asia.  Communists in wars of decolonisation were not all directed by the Supreme Soviet to advance Moscow’s foreign policy.  Moscow might try to use these rebels as proxies after they had already started fighting, but communist control in Mozambique was primarily a result of their war for independence and not outside support.  There is no meaningful connection to the aftermath of the Vietnam War.  

Nicaragua’s story was rather like that of Iran.  Carter was pulling the rug out from under Somoza (Carter’s foreign policy of “human rights” strikes again) and stopped all military support in 1978, which certainly did nothing to reduce Sandinista enthusiasm for overthrowing the government.  The methods of Somoza’s dictatorship generated the resistance against the government, and the Sandinistas came eventually to dominate that resistance.  You might make a very roundabout argument that Carter did to Somoza’s regime what had been done to South Vietnam’s, but the connection with Vietnam ends there.  There is a certain irony that the policies that helped bring about these blows to U.S. power are the very ones–democracy promotion and championing of human rights–backed by the interventionists who are busily cheering on Mr. Bush’s blinkered revisionism.  Naturally, if I were a partisan of the New Carter currently in the White House I would do all I could to deflect attention to the actual causes of U.S. setbacks during the late 1970s, since a discerning eye would be able to recognise an earlier version of Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” doing its pernicious work in undermining American interests.  Indeed, each and every one of the examples cited has nothing to do with Vietnam and everything to do with a misguided idealistic foreign policy that the current administration seems intent on duplicating today.

Update: Separately, it seems relevant to the Drezner-Greenwald debate over the foreign policy establishment consensus to point out that Max Boot, a “paid-up” CFR man himself, has never had any difficulty endorsing the idea that the United States has been acting as an imperialist power.

No wonder Americans are so weak in learning foreign languages.  Take this case.  I had not heard of this academy, but I was not surprised to find that one of its critics was Daniel Pipes, who wrote earlier this year what may be one of the most ignorant things I have seen:

I say this because Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.

This is absurd.  I just went through the equivalent of one year of Arabic language instruction here at Chicago, and if it was laden with “pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage” it would be news to all of us who were in the class.  It would be one thing to argue that, in a specific case, the instruction was loaded with such messages, but to say that learning Arabic inevitably involves “pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage” is to reveal yourself as a fool. 

One of the most common textbooks used for Arabic instruction in this country, Al-Kitaab, the text we used this summer, is essentially free of anything that might be construed as political or controversial.  (The one thing that I noticed that was bluntly political and obnoxious was the depiction of Kosovo as an independent country on one of its maps.)  It is true that studying al-fusha involves not learning specific dialects, but that hardly makes it “pan-Arabist” in any meaningful way.  This would be like saying the study of German is inevitably laden with Pan-German ideology because it privileges Hochdeutsch over Bavarian, Austrian and Swiss dialects. 

Pipes isn’t finished:

Also, learning Arabic in of itself promotes an Islamic outlook, as James Coffman showed in 1995, looking at evidence from Algeria. 

Really?  Does that mean that Pipes’ own study of Arabic made him into an Islamist sympathiser?  This is preposterous.  Arabic predates Islam; there are still many Arab Christians (though fewer of them remain in the Near East thanks to foreign policy moves favoured by geniuses like Pipes), and there are Orthodox and Maronite liturgies in Arabic.  It is doubtful that these Arab Christians are being Islamicised when they learn the language of their parents or when they go to church.  (The phrase in the title of this post is the Arabic for the Orthodox Paschal greeting, “Christ is Risen,” and the response, “truly He is risen.”)  It is likely that Pipes would have no objection to the students learning about the history and culture of the Near East, provided that they were learning the sorts of things with which Pipes would agree.     

Of course, the results of the cited study (which appears in Pipes’ own journal, which has incidentally also played host to articles providing cover to Armenian genocide denial) might have something to do with the students being Algerian Muslims living in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.  These results have literally no bearing on instruction in this country.  It is very likely that there were other factors that determined the results Pipes cites.  For one, students in Algeria who are studying in Arabic rather than in French might already be predisposed to endorse these views.  There seems to be absolutely no control here for their social background, the political affiliations of their parents or the materials presented in the class.  Studying Arabic in and of itself cannot induce an Islamic outlook if there is no attempt to propagandise the students, and in most Arabic instruction in this country it is implausible that such propagandising is taking place.  Learning foreign languages does not compel you to embrace this or that ideological or religious frame of mind.  If Americans become convinced that learning Arabic is somehow buying into Islamic propaganda, they will be that less interested in learning it.  It is fairly despicable that a putative scholar of the region should actively spread such misinformation.  Put it down as one more reason to pay no attention to what Pipes has to say.  

Are we really supposed to believe that Maha and Khalid, two of the characters of Al-Kitaab, are the vehicles of jihadi subversion?  Give me a break.  Perhaps Pipes had this experience in Egypt, but Brooklyn is in a very different mintaqa.  Whatever else might be said about the principal of this academy or the curriculum of the school, it can hardly be a good thing that her ouster is a victory for buffoons of Pipes’ ilk.

Update: Just for your enjoyment, here is the voice of the wonderfully talented Maronite nun, Sister Marie Keyrouz, as she sings Inna Al Masih Qad Qam (approx., Christ Has Risen).  Here are additional liturgical songs courtesy of the same Melkite Catholic church site.

Now, the tribal leaders are rallying to the government and asserting themselves against al-Qa’eda. ~William Shawcross

The first part of this statement is, of course, completely untrue, as is quite a lot of Mr. Shawcross’ flimsy rah-rah article.  The “Awakening” in Anbar has no loyalty to the Maliki regime or an Iraq ruled by Shi’ites, and it is not rallying to either one.  This group, or rather the tribes that make up this group are rallying, if you like, against being assassinated and blown up by the “Islamic State of Iraq” types.  Once they have taken care of these people, they will in all likelihood turn their attention to destroying the government to which they have supposedly rallied.  I know that The Spectator has to run pro-war articles because its owner requires it, but couldn’t they be the least bit interesting and accurate while they’re at it?

Update: For good measure, Shawcross manages to invoke both the Partition and Vietnam withdrawals to try to intimidate people into supporting the war.  (He was an early one to start talking up the genocide in Cambodia as a way to bludgeon war opponents.)  This is also the same Shawcross who wrote last May that “we are winning” in an article describing the training work being done in Basra–the same Basra mission that he so thoroughly criticises and ridicules in this article.   

For those keeping track, another August 22 has passed without any sudden world-ending apocalypse, just as it passed without incident last year.  I’m sure that comes as a relief to all of us.

The rights of the siloviki, however, have nothing to do with the formal kind that are spelled out in laws or in the constitution. What they are claiming is a special mission to restore the power of the state, save Russia from disintegration and frustrate the enemies that might weaken it. Such idealistic sentiments, says Mr Kondaurov, coexist with an opportunistic and cynical eagerness to seize the situation for personal or institutional gain. ~The Economist

This is what accounts of a resurgent Russia often miss, as I have argued before.  Whether it is self-justification and rationalisation or genuine conviction, or some measure of both, Putin and the siloviki are both keenly interested in gaining and expanding their power and in achieving their goals of restoring what they see as Russia’s proper place in the world.  They are nationalists because they are power-hungry, but to some extent they are also interested in power for themselves because they believe, for good or ill, that they can restore national power.  Dismissing any of them as cynical and greedy misses the point: they are cynical and greedy because they are ideologues, and they probably think their “correct” beliefs entitle them to rewards.