The WSJ story on Giuliani’s London visit included this: 

“This is no time for defeatism and appeasement,” Mr. Giuliani said of Islamist terrorism, using Churchillian language of 1930s Europe. Shifting forward five decades, he added: “As Margaret Thatcher would have put it, this isn’t a time to go wobbly!”

He can really string those cliches together, can’t he?  (Of course, the word appeasement became a dirty word because it was used by Chamberlain and had less than optimal results as a policy.)  I wonder if Giuliani will ever be able to say anything about foreign policy without falling back on tired slogans, bluster and invoking the names of Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher.  Hang on, that sounds like someone else we know…

This bit from the story was remarkable:

“I don’t think of Sept. 11 as being my defining experience,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters before the speech. 

No, he just wants everyone else to think of it as his defining experience, and he just happens to mention it at every possible opportunity. 

Mr. Giuliani argues his foreign-policy experience is extensive, though perhaps easily overlooked because it is less traditional. 

“Less traditional” here means “non-existent.”  Romney has similarly grand foreign policy “experience”–he refused to give Khatami state police protection at Harvard–but even Romney has visited Iraq.  It’s amusing that Giuliani somehow thinks that going to London and making a speech constitute an example of gaining foreign policy experience.  He and Thompson really are more alike than either would like to admit. 

Giuliani also made sure to remind us that he is a crazy person:

Mr. Giuliani used his speech to call for expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, mentioning for the first time that he’d like to bring Israel into the alliance, which now includes European countries, Canada and the U.S. He also mentioned Japan, India, Singapore and Australia as potential candidates.

Bringing in Israel doesn’t strike me as a feasible option, but then I don’t think NATO should still exist.  But Singapore?  India?  Japan?  Does that mean if Pakistan and India get into a shooting war, NATO attacks Pakistan?  Giuliani does know where the Atlantic Ocean is, doesn’t he?  He was giving the Atlantic Bridge lecture, after all.  Why this doesn’t make him a laughingstock, I’ll never understand.

It is interesting to note in passing how much more Republicans love Margaret Thatcher than do many members of her own party.  The Tories are in the perpetual electoral bind that they’re in for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that they are about as competitive in the North as Michael Dukakis was in Utah.  The way Thatcher privatised industry in those areas is a large part of the reason why those regions are lost to Conservatives.

Update: James makes the right points about this NATO expansion nonsense.

Via Dan McCarthy, the Taft Club discusses the relationship between the right and the GOP.  The above quote refers, of course, to the Bush administration.  The moderator of the panel refers to the war as being obviously a “quagmire with no compelling rationale.”

Rudy Giuliani scored a coup in his White House campaign yesterday by meeting Gordon Brown at No 10, conferring with Tony Blair, receiving an award from Baroness Thatcher and wrapping himself in the legacy of Winston Churchill. ~The Daily Telegraph

It’s enough to make one violently ill.  We may forgive Baroness Thatcher, since she is advanced in years and has politely received other hopeless Republican candidates.  Otherwise, we have the spectacle of Giuliani meeting with two of the more loathsome politicians on the other side of the Atlantic.  For that matter, it is only in the warped world of the modern GOP that a photo-op with Tony Blair would be considered a boon. 

Update: The WSJ headline today is “Giuliani Visit to London Aims To Bolster Credentials”–how have we come to such a pass where Republican presidential hopefuls seem to feel obliged to make a pilgrimage to Britain?  How does visiting with British politicians bolster credentials?  As someone who follows British politics pretty closely, it seems to me that association with most of the people in politics could only drag a candidate down.  I have to confess that I don’t fully understand the Churchillophilia that grips so many on the right today, but admiration for Churchill has begun to change from being an annoying rhetorical tic and become almost a kind of requirement for office.  This kind of pilgrimage can only work by going Britain, since no aspiring candidate would dare visit any other country and seek the blessing of past or current political leaders.  We won’t be seeing anyone falling over himself to win Jose Maria Aznar’s approval.

“Safe and superficial.”

I have never seen an issue where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson is right about one thing (and one thing only): there is a stark opposition.  There is a short-term temptation for Republican candidates this year and next to pursue Hispanic votes in the general election through the shameless and misguided pandering of embracing Gerson’s preferred, horrible immigration policy, which, if enacted, would result in the guaranteed long-term destruction of the GOP as a competitive national party.  There is a temptation to treat Hispanic voters like idiots and pretend that liberalising immigration is their top priority (only slightly less condescending than the old Republican effort in the ’90s to try to build up support among Hispanics by supporting Puerto Rican statehood).  Of course, the reason why Hispanics do not tend to vote for Republicans and young Hispanics are even less likely to do so is that these voters do not support the various other, non-immigration policies championed by the GOP.  This is, in fact, why most immigrants tend to vote for the Democrats: Democrats propose policies on social services, education, welfare and the like that are more likely to benefit immigrants, or which are more likely to be in keeping with the political traditions they have brought with them from their old countries.  Additionally, Republicans cannot outdo Democrats in their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, since they have no enthusiasm for it.  They cannot be insistent on assimilation, which is what their constituents demand, while playing up to bilingualism or rhetoric about strength in diversity.  

Hispanic voters’ opinions on immigration policy are hardly monolithic.  The idea that capitulating to immigration liberalisation or amnesty will win over these voters assumes that actual Hispanic voters want such policies, when a sizeable number of them may prefer immigration restriction.  Gerson wants the GOP to do two incredibly stupid things at the same time: pander to Hispanics by adopting strongly pro-immigration views, thus alienating core constituencies of the party, and simultaneously insult the Hispanics with this pandering while ignoring any and all other policy issues that are the actual source of Hispanic alienation from the GOP.  It is a combination of substantively bad policy with an embarrassing attempt to employ the symbolic politics that both parties use to feign concern for this or that community.  It would be much more refreshing if pro-immigration Republicans could at least acknowledge that they support liberalisation and amnesty because it suits the interests of large businesses even though it means future doom for the GOP.

I know that you’ve waited patiently for another Bollywood-related post.  Believe it or not, it’s been over two months since I last wrote about anything of the kind.  So, here is a nice patriotic song from Veer-Zaara.  Razib Khan will be pleased that I have stopped fixating on Bengali actresses.

P.S. As a bonus, here is an old one from Gambler: Dil Aaj Shayar Hai.  Another classic, Aye Dil E Nadan, is here.  Along the patriotic lines of Aisa Des Hai Mera, here is Des Rangeela from Fanaa.

P.P.S.  While I’m at it, I can’t leave out a note about Armenian.  It will not be much of a surprise to find out that the two languages have virtually identical demonstratives meaning “this” (ays and aisa), but it is an interesting thing to note in passing.

A few pokes have made the structure wobble and sway, and if enough of us get together, we could push it all right over. ~Pharyngula

Via Sullivan

Yes, it’s not because atheist diatribes are feebly argued and pitiful that we ridicule and deride them, but because they are so powerful and threatening to the claims of faith.  That must be why atheism is taking the world by storm…oh, wait, it isn’t.  Of course these insults provoke religious people to indignant response, and especially because the arguments used are tendentious or inaccurate or intellectually sloppy (or all three together).  But this really is one of the weakest argument of them all.  It’s as if a man called your mother filthy names and then used your outraged response as proof that the accusations are true.

Then there is the old chestnut that any and all religion is a prop of tyrants and a license to abuse power.  I should have thought that this would have been revealed as absurd by the end of the twentieth century, but why would anything as trivial as empirically verifiable historical record disturb the comfortable and lazy habits of the atheist mind?  The Church at its best was historically the bane of arbitrary rulers and abuses of secular power, and even the most autocratic of Christian rulers would have never contemplated the mass slaughter of innocents that enlightened revolutionaries carried out.  Even in the worst persecutions of heretics (and I would note that one of the most ancient and most thoroughly Christianised polities, namely Byzantium, generally avoided any executions of heretics), it was typical that only recalcitrant heresiarchs would be punished.  Enlightened terror tries to wipe out entire communities, entire nations, for the “greater good” or “utopia” or some damned pseudo-scientific lie.  And, of course, plenty of enlightened atheists have accepted the political rationalisations of mass murder while they scoff at the punishment of heretics.  If the “New Atheists” want to play the game of “whose mentality is more likely to lead to tyranny and state-sanctioned killing?” they shall lose, and lose badly.

He goes on:

We can admire the scattered bits of rational architecture that have arisen from the flawed bases of religion … but what if all of humanity were building on the bedrock of naturalism and reason, instead of that quaking vapor of god-belief? We could reach so much higher!

Yes, as high as the tower of Babel…but then that didn’t go very well, did it?

Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can–to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.” Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible [bold mine-DL]. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson–and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs. ~David Gelernter 

Simply ridiculous.  What can I say?  Do Jews respect the Septuagint?  Are they unified behind the New Testament?  Jefferson “respected” the Bible the way that a butcher “respects” the carcass of an animal–he chopped up the New Testament and kept the bits of the Gospels that he thought were suitably “rational,” which leads me to note that my WWTW colleague Paul Cella has a good post on Gelernter’s latest.  Paul’s Marcion reference is very good, since Gelernter is a modern gnostic of sorts, and the reference to Marcion makes the comparison with Jefferson only too obvious.  If Marcionites, too, might be counted in the broad church of “Bible-respecting” folk, we can see just how utterly meaningless such respect is.   

Gelernter’s article is something amazing to behold.  It combines almost every hateful aspect of nationalism and every piece of degraded thinking shared by war supporters today.  It blithely confuses opponents of particular wars with adherents of doctrinaire pacifism, a view that virtually no one in this country holds today.  Anyone who opposes the war in Iraq knows all too well how idiotic it is to try to describe the leadership of the modern Democratic Party as pacifistic.  If they were, they might at least have the stomach to try to end this war outright, and, of course, they do not.  Gelernter sets a new standard for unintentional irony by damning globalism in the pages of The Weekly Standard, a flagship of globaloney if ever there was one.  There is, of course, the required mockery of France and the obligatory nod to Joe Lieberman, and every other intellectually lazy rhetorical move that we have come to expect from neoconservatives.  It is really quite dreadful.   

Consider this bit of Gelernter’s “reasoning”:

You might argue that World War II has nothing to do with Iraq; after all, the Japanese started the fight by attacking our fleet at Pearl Harbor. But even the Japanese never succeeded in slaughtering civilians on the U.S. mainland. And those who think that our war in Iraq has nothing to do with the 9/11 murderers, or their friends whose ultimate target is America, are living in Fantasyland.  

Actually, one might argue that WWII has nothing to do with Iraq because WWII ended over sixty years ago and was fought in entirely different parts of the world against radically different enemies.  As for living in a fantasy, I expect that Gelernter would know all about that by now. 

This is really a shame.  Some years ago I heard good things about Gelernter’s Drawing Life (perhaps I heard incorrectly?), and I imagined that because of his personal experience he would have to have been keenly aware of the dangers of ideological fanaticism and the glorification of violence as a means of change.  Apparently he has come to different conclusions.  

Gelernter’s article is just a rehashed version of his new book’s thesis as applied to the latest political controversy, in this case the fight over Petraeus’ testimony.  It confirms my impression that Gelernter’s book does not simply try to describe the idea of “Americanism.”  A description and analysis of the idea might not indicate any approval of the thing being described.  He might have written a book about Americanism describing the “Americanist heresy” and could have been quite hostile to it, but, of course, this is David Gelernter we’re talking about.  Far from opposing the heresy, he seems interested in becoming its latest heresiarch.  He is interested in championing his brand of Americanism quite actively, even if that means grossly distorting or oversimplifying American history, among other things, in the process.  It also seems to mean extolling the virtues of every military conflict of the last century, going out of his way to defend the merits of the most astonishingly futile of wars.  He manages to find words of praise for British intervention in WWI (!), which even one so belligerent as Niall Ferguson was sane enough to recognise as an unparalleled national disaster for Britain.  Perhaps if more leaders in 1914 had belonged to the mythical church of appeasement that Gelernter has invented in this latest exercise in lame, shabby Europe-bashing, European civilisation would not have come crashing down in an orgy of bloodshed–not that I expect him to care about the fate of European civilisation, since he seems to loathe Europeans so intensely.

From the book description of Americanism:

If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.

Conflating one’s country with nationalist ideology is bad enough, but to imagine that your ideological nation is itself the font of a “religion,” and that Americanism is “derived from the Bible” at that, is so perverse that words fail me.

We often hear about the Brits boffo counterinsurgency in Malaysia. But are the British still in Malaysia? Yes, it was a communist insurgency, which they defeated. But they also left, which presumably sapped the nationalist dimension from equation. ~Josh Marshall

As others have pointed out before, the Malayan case is much less encouraging for us, since the communist insurgents came primarily from the Chinese minority and so did not have nearly as much of a popular “sea” in which to swim.  It was more like a small pond.  The Muslim Malay majority was not sympathetic to their goals, and Malay nationalists supported the British effort in exchange for a promise of independence, which made the insurgents’ political marginalisation and defeat much, much easier.  Decolonisation and independence were already in the works, while communist revolution seemed both unnecessary and undesirable to the majority. 

Both Malaya and Vietnamese insurgencies grew out of the resistance to Japanese occupation, but the chief difference was that the Vietminh could appeal to national identity in ways that the communist insurgents in Malaya could not.  In other words, the Malayan insurgency lost in part because it could not count on a nationalist dimension in its fight, since the insurgents were not representing a nationalist cause, but rather an ideological one and one associated with a small minority group.  (Comparing the Malayan and Vietnamese cases seems to confirm Prof. Lukacs’ view that nationalism is the far more powerful and therefore potentially more dangerous modern ideology when compared to socialism and communism.)  Had the British opted to stay in Malaya indefinitely, as the French chose to try to do in Indochina, there might have been a broader-based anti-colonial rebellion, which would have probably been very different in its outcome. 

The Malayan case was also significantly different in the number of insurgents involved:

In the end the conflict involved up to a maximum of 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops against a peak of about 7–8,000 communist guerrillas.

Estimates of the insurgency’s size in Iraq vary, but I have seen figures this year as high as 60,000.  (As I understand this estimate, this refers only to Sunni insurgents.)  That’s seven to eight times the number of insurgents, while we have approximately four times as many soldiers fighting them.  If the optimal size of a counterinsurgency force is 10x larger than that of the insurgents, the British were much closer to the ideal and had the overwhelming support of the majority, and it still took them nine years before the crisis was formally ended.  The lesson from the Malayan experience is that you should fight very unpopular, isolated, highly ideological insurgencies and you should ally with the local nationalists if you want to win.  It is very difficult for a government, especially one backed by a foreign power, to compete with nationalist insurgents in the intensity and credibility of their nationalism.

Via James comes this claim:

Contemporary Japan and India, among other non-Christian countries, have also embraced the Great Separation.

This is pretty demonstrably untrue in the case of India, since Indian politics has been nothing if not suffused with religiosity of all kinds since independence.  It is technically true to the extent that the religious communities in question do not have institutional “churches” as such, but pretty clearly nonsense to the extent that religious activist associations wield enormous clout in Indian politics.  There is an idea that this has been bad for “Indian secularism,” but Indian secularism has not meant the separation of religion and politics but the incorporation of all communities into the political process.  Where Hindutva seems to some to threaten the system is in its majoritarianism and exclusivism.  But the Great Separation has nothing to do with it one way or the other.  Japan is more straightforward in that the divinity of the emperor was officially repudiated, but large numbers of people still respect the emperor intensely and the symbolic value of the emperor is incalculable.  The clearest example of actual separation is in Turkey, which is where the separation is being actively undermined by the democratic process, because the “separation of church and state” or the separation of religion from politics is fundamentally hostile to democratic principles in a religious country. 

Then there is this even more extraordinary claim:

Separating church and state works; mixing them tends toward disaster.

This is where the messy details and historical contingencies come in handy.  First of all, it depends on which church or religion and what kind of state, which this formula ignores.  I can also say, with just as much confidence, that mixing church and state works, while separating them tends towards disaster.  I can say this because I can think of cases that support both claims, just as Ms. Goldstein can think of cases that support hers.  To my mind, Rome (renowned as the most punctilious of religious societies) and Byzantium “worked” and the Soviet Union failed–consider their respective lifespans as political systems and “experiments” in having different answers on the church/state relationship question.  Byzantium wins, hands down.  Does that mean that we should all prostrate ourselves before an emperor?  Perhaps not.  What it does mean is that taking the particular experience of certain nations as a universal rule is probably unwise.  The details of church-state relations are extremely important in distinguishing between excessive subordination of church to state or subordination of the state to the church.  Separation works, except for all the times that it doesn’t and symphoneia works better.