Yes, Minister jokes aside for the moment, I was struck by Ross’ comment on the Peter Baker story I posted on yesterday.  Ross writes:

On the one hand, it’s a damning portrait of a weak President who entertained delusions of world-historical grandeur but couldn’t even keep his own Vice President on board with the mission, let alone his Cabinet agencies; on the other it’s a story of how the federal bureaucracy works to frustrate and undermine the elected officials whose policies it supposedly exists to implement [bold mine-DL].

I have a few observations.  Cheney seems to me to be wholly on board with the “freedom agenda” as far as the Near East and the former Soviet Union are concerned (and these are the only places where the administration actually cares about the “freedom agenda,” because they think it meshes well with their other strategic goals, such as they are).  Embracing Nazarbayev is useful in pushing an anti-Russian line, while pushing for “democratic” revolution in places with more pro-Russian despots also advances that line.  One of the goals of democratism is to put a “democratic” (i.e., relatively pro-American) elite in power in various countries around the world, but their democracy is very much the managed managerial democracy that will come up with the “right” policy results rather than function as a government that reflects and represents the popular interest.  Eastern Europe is lousy with such “democratic” governments these days.  When democratists talk about democracy, it is this managerial system to which they are referring.  Actual popular, representative government gives such people hives, as we can see whenever American populists make any headway in domestic politics. 

There is a certain irony that some of the bureaucratic managers inside our managerial state are opposed to the proponents of the “global democratic revolution,” but I think it is a mistake to focus entirely on the federal departments as obstacles to some imagined representative government enacting the will of the people.  The policies being set by elected officials have no more connection with representative government than do the policymaking processes inside the bureaucracy; these policies routinely favour very narrow and particular interests that may have nothing to do with the interests of most of the voting constituents.  The departments and agencies work to undermine the politicians who actively work to undermine and discredit them–that’s how bureaucratic infighting works, and it is unavoidable once you have vested so much power in permanent departments and agencies.  If we find it obnoxious, as we all do to some degree, we might start by getting rid of large parts of the bureaucracy and removing permanent entrenched power interests from the heart of our government.  It seems to me that the trouble arises when we want to have the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus of a managerial state and also want to have none of the drawbacks of ceding actual governing to unelected functionaries.  We are likely to feel very agitated when confronted with the arrogance of the managers who think, not without good reason, that they are effectively in charge (or at least have a major say in what happens).   

What about the friendly relations with the Thai military men?  On the one hand, the administration can ignore the Thai coup and embrace Gen. Sonthi et al. because the coup does not represent a shift in Thailand’s relations with Washington (which is what really matters for those pushing the “freedom agenda”), and it can also justify support for the coup on the grounds that Thaksin was corrupt, unpopular and making a hash of the counterinsurgency in the south.  There will always be “war on terror” exceptions to the “freedom agenda” (see Pakistan) and the U.S. acquiescence in the coup in Thailand was a good example of that at work.

But the notion that the U.S. should not attack another country unless that country has attacked or directly threatens our national security is not really extraordinary. Quite the contrary, that is how virtually every country in the world conducts itself, and it is a founding principle of our country. Starting wars against countries that have not attacked you, and especially against those who cannot attack you, is abnormal. ~Glenn Greenwald

Yglesias cites this as an example of how Greenwald is politically on his “left” and rather too far to the left for his taste.  This is certainly one of those places where the right/left schema makes no sense at all to me, since I am light years to the right of Yglesias on everything else and yet I believe I am entirely in agreement with Greenwald’s statement here.  This is not because I am discovering my inner left-winger, but because Greenwald’s statement is entirely consistent with any sane Christian and conservative attitude towards war.  There is nothing particularly “far left” about repudiating and deploring wars of aggression, which seem to me to be the kind of war that Greenwald is rejecting.  He might go beyond this and say that American forces should never be involved in wars of collective security or sent on peacekeeping missions (that would generally be my view), but that is not clearly implied here.  Greenwald is saying that wanton aggression is not the norm, and wars of self-defense and national security are.  He does not say whether collective security or peacekeeping is desirable (my wild guess is that he probably thinks that they are), though he does imply that it is fairly unusual.  He says simply that the default condition for the use of force for most states is self-defense, which seems pretty clearly true.

Moved by claims that it will help the metabolism and productivity of his fellow citizens, President Hugo Chavez said clocks would be moved forward by half an hour at the start of 2008. He announced the change on his Sunday television program, accompanied by his highest-ranking science adviser, Héctor Navarro, the minister of science and technology. “This is about the metabolic effect, where the human brain is conditioned by sunlight,” Mr. Navarro said in comments reported by Venezuela’s official news agency. Mr. Chávez said he was “certain” that the time change, which would be accompanied by a move to a six-hour workday, would be accepted. ~The New York Times

Via Zengerle

Clearly, the plan to conquer Argentina proceeds apace.  Fortunately for all of us, the Venezuelan war machine will only be working six hours a day, which means that we might still have a chance to save Buenos Aires from the dastardly time change before it’s too late.

The current demonization of Russia in some American quarters is thus incomprehensible, unless one keeps in mind the particular conceit of democracies at war that Kennan, following Tocqueville, pointed out long ago: “There is nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision of everything else. . . . People who have got themselves into this frame of mind have little understanding for the issues of any contest other than the one in which they are involved.” ~Tony Corn

It is an interesting, albeit rather long, article, and I can’t agree with everything in it (who can actually be surprised by neocon tunnel vision?), but most of the sections on Russia and Central Asia seem fairly sound.

There was no manger, Christ is not the Messiah [bold mine-DL], and the crucifixion never happened.  A forthcoming ITV documentary will portray Jesus as Muslims see him. ~The Guardian

I don’t know whether this is a mistake by The Guardian or by ITV’s documentary, but a mistake it surely is.  Set aside for the moment that the phrase “Christ is not the Messiah” sounds really stupid (since Christos means “anointed one” and thus Messiah), and consider the claim behind it.  The claim is that Muslims do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, which is incorrect.  The relevant point, obviously, is that they deny His Divinity and do not recognise His Divine Sonship in His role as Messiah.  This is one of the two major points of disagreement between the religions, and it is rather central to how Muslims see Jesus.  One would have thought that a report on a documentary designed to foster some minimal understanding of the Islamic view would have managed to get this much right.

The Qur’an (Sura 3:48) says (Pickthall translation):

(And remember) when the angels said: O Mary! Lo!  Allah giveth thee glad tidings of a word from Him, whose name is the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary…

Idh qaalat al-malaika ya Maryam inna Allah yubathiruki bi-kalimat-in minhu ismuhu al-masih-u ‘Isa ibn-u Maryam…

Presenting Mormon tritheism:

Just to clarify, Mormons in fact do believe that Christ is God. It’s really quite simple. There is one God, which is the Godhead, consisting of three separate beings [bold mine-DL] in the way that the Bush Administration is one administration consisting of many people. God the Father, Jesus Christ who is also God, and the Holy Ghost, who is also God. They are one in purpose. It’s not more complicated than that. Mormons do not believe in the Nicean [sic] Creed, but Christ’s role is not undermined.

In other words, Mormons do not share the fundamental doctrine of God that all Christians share and quite explicitly accept something that undermines monotheism.

But after the inevitable failure of Islamic movements to provide an adequate response to the challenge of modernity, what will Muslims embrace? The only thing left, at that point, will be the ever elusive “moderate Islam,” a new, modernity-compatible faith that retains the name of Islam but jettisons all the substance (kind of like mainline Protestantism).

But Muslims have to come to that conclusion on their own, by living under regimes that will exemplify that failure (like Iran). Our hearts-and-minds efforts, like the north poles of two magnets, can only repel Muslims from drawing the necessary, inescapable conclusion that Islam, as it has existed for 14 centuries, is a failure as an ideology and way of life in the modern world. ~Mark Krikorian

No offense to Mr. Krikorian, but does he really think that Muslims are going to conceive of their religion as an “ideology” and “way of life” that have failed?  If they believe, as I assume they do, that their religion is the final revelation of God to humanity, it will take a lot more than its “inadequacy” to adapt to modernity to persuade them to abandon it.  The substitute will also have to be a lot more powerful than the Islamic equivalent of the via media. 

The lesson of mainline Protestantism, to follow his comparison, is that religion without substance and conviction is dead and uninspiring and doomed to stagnation and irrelevance.  People flee it as they would from the plague.  Those inclined to belong to religious communities are going to seek out communities where there is a sense that the religion they practice is true and edifying.  Looked at this way, Islamic revivalism and fundamentalism stand a much better chance of spreading and thriving, much as Pentecostalism has been doing for many decades, which means that the failues to adjust to modernity will simply persuade even more people to follow a revivalist and fundamentalist path.  For every person who thinks that a religion needs to be updated to match the modern world there will always be at least one other who thinks that it is the modern world that must be adjusted to the dictates of the old time religion, and probably more than one.  It seems to me that one of the handicaps of a lot of Westerners in understanding the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism is the idea that such fundamentalism is not modern.  It is anti-modernist, but it is itself a modern phenomenon that addresses the needs (or seems to address them) of people today.  To say that it does not result in good results by the standards of our modernity is to miss the point entirely–the people who embrace such fundamentalism do not want such results, or if they do they want them less than they want the certainty and deliverance offered them by revelation.

George Ajjan draws to our attention the bizarre case of Patrick Syring, former State Department officer and apparently inveterate Arab-hater (how’s that for dispelling myths about State Department employees’ reflexive Arabism?).  During the war in Lebanon, he sent vulgar, nasty and threatening messages to members of the Arab-American Institute.  He has been indicted on 2 counts of “Threatening Communication in Interstate Commerce.”  Whether he has violated the statute in question is not really my main concern, and I am skeptical that the laws he may have broken are actually constitutional, but a few things do occur to me. 

The first is that if the situation were reversed and there were a government official sending such hateful messages to Jewish-Americans and their colleagues, it would be a major story and would be hyped from here to eternity by the usual suspects.  We would see daily coverage in The New York Times and hear constant commentary every day.  There would be bloviating pundits asking “how many” other Foreign Service officers held similar views, and what Secretary Rice was doing about it.  Certain newspapers and magazines would have a field day and would draw broad, sweeping claims about State’s toleration of these attitudes.  As it is, so far as I know, this has not been a major news story and is not likely to become one.  Further, it occurs to me that the reason why it is not a bigger story than it has been is that Syring’s opinion that “the only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese” is one with which I fear all too many pundits and citizens of this country might be inclined to agree, at least to some degree, as shown by the appalling indifference of the American public to the civilian casualties of the bombing of Lebanon and the propagandistic mantras that “they” deserved what they were getting.  In short, it is not more of a story than it is because the public would not be interested in reading or hearing about it.  Additionally, I note that Syring’s repeated declarations in which he allegedly wishes “death” to various Arab-Americans is a strange imitation of standard street protests in the Near East by the very people whom Syring regards as “dogs” (which would apparently make him an imitator of dogs?).  Yet another thing that occurs to me is that it is sickening that foreign conflicts can so inflame Americans against each other that they would wish harm upon their fellow citizens for the sake of a state on the other side of the world.  This is why we were advised to avoid passionate attachments to any other nation, and why we should have no permanent alliances abroad.  Such alliances breed attachments that are not healthy for the political life of our country and they set Americans against each other over wars with which we properly have nothing to do.     

Update: ThePost, CBS andUSA Today’s blog have some items on this case, but it is generally not a widely reported story.  Suffice it to say, this would be inconceivable if the targets of the threats were not Arab-Americans and the context in which the threats were made was not the war in Lebanon. 

Syring (evidently a Notre Dame alum) was apparently a big fan of threatening people with hellfire, as he had done previously in condemning a critic of administration foreign policy.

Less than two months later, Vice President Cheney went to Lithuania to deliver the toughest U.S. indictment of Putin’s leadership. But the next day, Cheney flew to oil-rich Kazakhstan and embraced its autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, with not a word of criticism. The juxtaposition made the talk of democracy look phony and provided ammunition to the Kremlin. ~The Washington Post

Of course, it is unusually dense to denounce the decline of democracy in one country and then slap the back of another dictator in the same week, and I would agree that this betrays a certain cynicism at the heart of the democratist agenda.  However, as I tried to argue before, I would insist that the proper criticism is not that democratists are “phony” democrats, but that they are consistent hegemonists.  Washington is officially worried about the decline of Russian democracy because it coincides with the relative increase in Russian power in Asia and Europe and the strengthening of the Russian state.  Complaining about this declining democracy helps to undermine that growing power by attributing to it a certain political illegitimacy.  “Democracy” as such is neither here nor there.  In neocon theory, expanding democracy and expanding American power go hand in hand, but this does not often work out in practice.  More realistic democratists (and I think they do exist) understand that democratism exists as a vehicle for expanding American power at the expense of rival powers.  If it can be used as a club with which to bludgeon hostile or rival states, so much the better; if it can be used to undermine or overthrow their governments, that’s great in the democratist view.  Should there be a perfectly pro-American dictator somewhere, such as in Kazakhstan, let’s say, there is no reason to talk about democracy or anything of the kind, because the more important goal of expanding American influence and power is already being served.  Similarly, when perfectly democratic, elected governments come to power in Latin America espousing political views that Washington finds objectionable and threatening, the supposed love of democracy goes out the window because these populist governments are opposed to Washington’s policies in their part of the world. 

Viewed from the perspective of consistent, principled support for democratic politics, this approach appears inconsistent and two-faced, but that’s a result of judging these policies by some standard of principle.  Once we recognise that the ideology exists to facilitate power and will be adjusted as and when necessary for the sake of power, the “phoniness” and inconsistency of democratist support for democracy makes perfect sense.