And yet these vestigial right-wingers represent a huge current of working class social conservatism, broadly patriotic, broadly religious, broadly monarchist, against drunkenness, gambling and sexual licence, highly uneasy about mass immigration, hostile to the EU, angry about crime and disorder.

But the Labour Party itself long ceased to represent such people. ~Peter Hitchens

Not that Mr. Hitchens is proposing the Cameroons as an alternative for these voters.  Far from it.  If there is anyone around who dislikes the Tories as much as I dislike the GOP, it would have to be Peter Hitchens.

But, as poor Polly Toynbee ceaselessly points out in column after column and book after book, it simply isn’t true. In classic terms, of increased state power, higher taxes and a bigger welfare state, with legions of people employed by the public sector, Labour is our most left-wing government since 1945-51. In terms of constitutional revolution, it is the most radical since Cromwell. Culturally and socially, it has hugely outdone Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins in turning the ‘permissive society’ into the politically correct society. In foreign policy, it has made us more subservient to continental powers than any ruler since Charles II sold the country to Louis XIV at the secret Treaty of Dover. There is also a strong case, which I won’t elaborate just here, for making out that the Iraq war is not ‘right wing’, but originated in radical leftist ideas about reforming the world, combined with a leftist contempt for national sovereignty. ~Peter Hitchens

With the exception of the bit about Europe, much of the same might be said about the Bush era.

The more sophisticated will declare that the Iraqis were culturally destined to fail. ~Robert Kagan

What exactly are we talking about here?  Is it the Iraqi failure to cultivate a working, nonsectarian, representative democracy under the rule of law?  Well, then, yes, they were “culturally destined” to fail at this, since the overwhelming majority of them had absolutely no experience of this kind of politics and their political tradition has never had such a thing.  Then again, it is totally unreasonable and actually quite mad to expect that any people on the face of the earth could pull together a functioning government based on principles and habits that they had never had before while simultaneously suffering from the effects of war and rampant insecurity.  Had Americans not had decades of experience and centuries of legal and constitutional tradition and received wisdom in political theory, we would have made quite a hash of things as well (as virtually every liberal revolutionary movement elsewhere in the world did).  There is all the difference in the world between guarding a constitutional inheritance that has been thoroughly elaborated and developed and making one up from scratch based on largely alien models.  Some conservatives still understood that in 2002-03, but not nearly enough.

In another sense, the Iraqis “failed” to create or re-establish their nation-state after Hussein.  This is because their nation-state is a cobbled-together, artificial contraption that lost whatever meaning it once held for a large number of “Iraqis” some time ago.  Yet again, they “failed” to do the impossible.  So, yes, the Iraqis “failed,” but they could not have succeeded at the tasks they had before them.  I doubt very much that any people in the world could have done any better, given the resources at their disposal.

They have failed to create a functioning army and security force, but then it was our occupation authorities that got rid of the old army and security force in the name of ideological cleansing.  That one mistake probably accounts for 50% of the mess today.  Fools with WWII analogies dancing in their brains did more damage to this war effort than any number of insurgents. 

Of course, the impossibility of the Iraqis’ tasks underscores the futility of the American mission.  If American success rests on Iraqi political reconciliation, it is not going to happen.  Iraqi failure is mitigated by the recognition that “success” as determined by the goals set out by the administration was never realistic, which also means that American success was never realistic.  Those who didn’t want to create an opportunity for Al Qaeda should have not started an unnecessary war.  Once it was started, and the unreachable goals were set down, Al Qaeda and others were going to exploit the situation.  This was foreseeable.  Some foresaw it, and they were largely written off as appeasers or worse.  Complaining that the outcome that will follow U.S. withdrawal is not “tolerable” is useless: of course it isn’t “tolerable,” in the sense that it is a dreadful outcome, but neither is it all that avoidable.  In politics and foreign policy, serious people tolerate what they cannot eliminate, fix or avoid.  Other people follow the advice of Robert Kagan.

Iraq said Turkish forces shelled a mountain stronghold of Turkish Kurd rebels in the north of the country on Sunday, a day after it urged Turkey to use diplomacy to resolve rising tensions in the region.

 

While residents say Turkey shells the area almost daily, the latest attack came days after Turkey moved tanks to its border and speculation mounted that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government is planning a military incursion. ~Reuters

The Iraqi prime minister on Saturday urged Turkey not to stage a military incursion into the northern Kurdish territories, saying his government will not allow the relatively peaceful area to be turned into a battleground. ~The International Herald-Tribune

Maliki is a funny fellow.  His government “will not allow” it?  If anyone is going to try to stop the Turks’ incursion, it will be peshmerga militiamen, who do not really answer to Maliki.  Of course, any direct clash between Turkish forces and our allegedly allied Iraqi Army would be a fairly disastrous outcome.  (The only good news might be that the Iraqi Army will probably be so ineffective that it will break and run as soon as it engages the Turks.)  Any direct clash between Americans and Turks would be something of a nightmare scenario.  If for no other reason, avoiding any such conflict is an excellent reason to get American forces out of Iraq.  We cannot be allied with two or three mutually hostile forces all at the same time without either shooting at our allies or betraying one or more of these allies.  There is no way for America to come out of this looking terribly good.  Getting out before we have the irretrievable situation of Americans killed by Turks or Turks by Americans seems imperative.     

By the standards applied to Israel and Lebanon last year, the Turkish air force should be allowed to bomb Baghdad at will and target whatever infrastructure that remains in Iraq.  This double standard might irritate the Turks, but they should appreciate how double standards have worked for them in the past.  After all, when they were brutally suppressing a Kurdish insurgency and tens of thousands were killed, Washington was not terribly concerned.  Later, once Iraq was out of favour in Washington, its suppression of Kurdish revolts was taken as evidence of the supreme malevolence of the Hussein regime and one of the reasons why he should be deposed.  Some more excitable people spoke of “genocide” and the plight of the Iraqi Kurds was suddenly a cause celebre.  Turkish Kurds, of course, didn’t matter quite as much to most of these same pro-Kurdish enthusiasts, since Turkey was a “democratic” country and an ally.  It’s amazing how easily “genocide” can become a reasonable respone to internal security problems…provided that your government is on the right side internationally.

White House officials said it had led them to engage the blogosphere in a concerted way for the first time [bold mine-DL], posting defenses on liberal and conservative sites. ~The New York Times

If the Bush administration has coincided with the rise of political blogging, and it has only just gotten around to engaging bloggers seriously at this point in the middle of a big political fight, it can count this late entry into the blogging fray as yet another missed opportunity and another failure to communicate its message.  Forget for a moment, if you can, about the horrible policy being pushed–how out of it must administration communications staff be that they have not actively engaged political bloggers years ago?

The inclination of most Western leaders most of the time has been to coddle or appease Mr Putin, rather than confront him—because they have been deluded about his real goals and motives, or distracted by other crises, or divided by the Kremlin’s gas deals. ~The Economist

The European response to Putin is more complicated (they are over a barrel because of oil and gas supply dependency, but they are ideologically hostile to Putin as much as anyone in Washington), but when it comes to Washington’s approach this is an amazing description.  On the surface at an official level, there has not been much confrontational and inflammatory rhetoric coming from administration officials, but to understand actual Russia policy you have to follow the old “watch what they do, not what they say” rule.  First, there was the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which the Russians viewed harshly, and there was also NATO expansion into eastern Europe, which Russia took very poorly.  Then there has been repeated meddling by Washington, the EU, the OSCE and Western NGOs in Russia’s near-abroad: Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan being the most oustanding examples.  Criticism about Chechnya also rankles, especially when it comes from those states that invade other countries.  The government was not quite as bad about excuse-making for the Beslan murderers as some pundits and journalists in establishment circles, but the general response to the Beslan massacre in the West was a mix of indifference and a sense that the Russians brought this on themselves, and the perception of a double standard about terrorism here is very hard to shake. 

To Putin, who was the first to offer aid to the United States after the 9/11 attacks and who put up no barriers to American deployments all over Central Asia in the campaign that followed, Washington’s actions have been obnoxious, pointed incursions on Russia’s sphere of influence and demonstrations of impressive ingratitude.  The targeting of regimes that have long-standing ties to Moscow on grounds of halting weapons proliferation must strike the Russians as oddly convenient, since it was our ally in Pakistan that has been responsible for most of the nuclear and missile technology proliferation of the last ten years.  The deployment of “missile defense” systems in central Europe, contrary to past commitments made to Moscow, has been something of a final straw, precipitating a series of more and more confrontational moves from the Russian side to make up for what I suspect the Kremlin regards as its excessive indulgence of Western encroachment.  The idea that the current situation has come about because the West has been soft and indulgent towards Russia is simply bizarre and I don’t know how anyone could make successful policy recommendations based on such a skewed view of the situation.

Referring to its behavior while still enslaved by the Soviet state, she writes that “[t]oday’s Moscow Patriarchate is the as-yet-unrepentant inheritor of this legacy.” I would suggest Prof. Kizenko read the “Basic Social Concept,” adopted by the MP’s Council of Bishops of 2000, in which subservience by the church to a state hostile to Christianity is unequivocally rejected, and in great detail. As for repentance, that is a private Christian podvig, or spiritual deed, made before one’s spiritual father (as the daughter of a venerable ROCOR priest, Prof. Kizenko is certainly aware of this). Still, 16 years ago, Patriarch Aleksy performed an open act of repentance in an interview published many times since then: “It is not only before God, but also before all of those people to whom the compromises, silence, forced passivity or expressions of loyalty that the church leadership allowed themselves to make in those years brought pain that I ask forgiveness, understanding and prayers.” ~Nicholas A. Ohotin

Read the entire response.  It is good to see that the Church has challenged and corrected the misrepresentations of the earlier article.

As Bush’s inner circle shrank through his second term, Bartlett’s stature — initially questioned by some outside advisers who viewed him as too inexperienced to work at a high level — increased. Colleagues said he frequently was a balance to the more combative and aggressive instincts of other advisers such as Karl Rove. ~The Houston Chronicle

If that is true, one shudders to think how Mr. Bush would have governed without this “restraining” influence.  I suppose we will find out what Mr. Bush is like sans Bartlett over the next 20 months.

But nothing changed, the other side continued to get stronger, the ARVN side weaker. One reason the principals were always surprised by this, and irritated by the failure of their programs, was that the truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a revolutionary war, and that the other side held title to the revolution because of the colonial war which had just ended. This most simple fact … entered into the estimates of the American intelligence community and made them quite accurate. But it never entered into the calculations of the principals, for a variety of reasons; among other things to see the other side in terms of nationalism or as revolutionaries might mean a re-evaluation of whether the United States was even fighting on the right side. In contrast, the question of Communism and anti-Communism as opposed to revolution and antirevolution was far more convenient for American policy makers [bold mine-DL]. ~David Halberstam (quoted by Wilson Burman)

But Halberstam saw firsthand how hope turned into expectant paralysis and confidence into dangerous myopia. In that dynamic come easy bromides about “terrorists” and rejection of complex terms like “civil war.” ~Wilson Burman

The problem is that the vocabulary of optimism itself distorts our understanding of the world and leaves us lost in illusions. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag

There are at least three terrible things that optimism does to people: 1) it makes people expect success, rather than teach them to prepare for it; 2) it encourages unrealistic expectations that can never be met, thus prompting profound disenchantment and bitterness; 3) it is constantly appealing to the future to make present failure seem more acceptable, which is simply another way of trying to excuse and justify error by saying that today’s errors are the seeds of tomorrow’s victory.  Virtually all foreign interventions possess these three optimistic evils, and it is because of the ruinous effects of optimism that these interventions will fail to achieve their stated missions.

But I think there is a sort of presumption in the idea that God is particularly interested in liberating people from Communism, let alone from the rule of Jimmy Carter or of the British Labor Party. His kingdom is not of this world, as Christ unambiguously said. Go to Poland now, and you will find that the church and the Christian faith are, if anything, weaker than they were under the heel of the Communists. I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is. As for the U.S. and Britain, I will get round to that. I really wouldn’t like to speculate on what God might have wanted to happen, but if He was hoping for the current arrangements, I should be very much surprised. ~Peter Hitchens

There is some presumption in this, and it is the same kind of presumption that once guided confessional Protestant and then Anglo-American secular whiggish historiography, inspired whiggish “rights” theories and which even now creeps in with every claim that “freedom is God’s gift of humanity.”  God offers a different and a better liberation than the one offered by free-market gurus and democracy promoters.  He has loosed the bonds of death and sin–other forms of bondage here below, while they may be vicious, are not and never have been the priority for divine redemption.  The theological assumptions of the Social Gospel do not make any more sense when they are uttered by anticommunists. 

Hitchens has another great line later about Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI:

By contrast, the pope and his less-beloved but more dogged successor did hold fast against the satanic optimism of the free market and opposed both vainglorious Gulf Wars despite the unpopularity it caused them.

Of course, I tend to think that all optimism, rightly understood, is satanic after a fashion, but the one he mentions here is a particularly good example of it.

What Mr. Hitchens gets at here is an important lesson about the dangers of mythologising leaders of any kind, but especially political leaders.  The Reagan-Thatcher worship in particular is the right’s answer to the virtual deification of FDR.  Like the left, the Anglophone right wants to have its epochal, world-changing leaders, too, except that the mythology woven around FDR (“he got us out of the Depression,” “he won WWII,” etc.) is also to a very large degree bunk.  Liberals knock Republicans and conservatives today for their hero-worshipping ways, which is fair, because there is far too much of it and far too little thought, but they have always been great ones for idolatry of political figures, whether it was the posthumous honours bestowed on FDR by generations of liberal historians or the beatifications of the martyrs, JFK, RFK and MLK.  This tendency to revere and venerate political figures is a bad habit.  There may be something in human nature that calls us to do this.  As Dostoevsky said, man needs something to worship.  Yet if we are devoting our attention to enthusing over secular figures, it seems likely that we will lose sight of those actual saints and the Lord Himself Who sanctifies. 

The Psalmist says trust ye not in princes, and there is good reason for this.  The victory over Soviet communism was primarily the victory of the subject peoples of the evil empire over that empire’s rulers.  It was a moral and, in a way, a spiritual victory, and it was undoubtedly very good in itself.  We tell the story about how “we” won the Cold War, but exulting in triumphing over the Soviet system is a bit like congratulating oneself for having outrun and outlasted a paraplegic who was suffering from cancer.  

No stranger to Soviet affairs, George Kennan poured water on the myth of “Reagan won the Cold War” fifteen years ago:

The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous political upheaval, in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. (quoted in Lukacs’ George Kennan: A Study of Character, p.181)

Communism failed, would always fail, because it was moral and political abomination contrary to human nature and the law of God.  There were wise and foolish policies that could have been pursued against the USSR, and by and large Reagan and Thatcher can be credited for pursuing wise ones.  However, the final lesson to be learned here is that we should be honest and humble about what it is that we believe our government has been able to accomplish in the past so that we do not foolishly presume that we can work miracles in the future.  Whether they are sincere or not, some Iraq war advocates claim that they took the end of communism in eastern Europe as an example of how they expected liberation in Iraq to proceed: through an outpouring of popular support and mostly peaceful political change.  It is hard not see how the kind of mythologising of the end of the Cold War contributed directly to profound misconceptions about what would happen in post-invasion Iraq.  For sizeable parts of the two generations either raised on or actively participating in this myth-making about the end of the USSR, the expectations of some miraculous democratic transformation were unreasonably high.  These people had come to genuinely believe that all that was necessary for liberal democracy to flourish was for the oppressive regime to go away.  Of course, this ignored vast differences of culture, history, religion, political traditions and all the rest of it that explained why events unfolded as they did in Europe and would not be the same in Iraq, but these errors of historical ignorance were compounded by more of the mad optimism that runs through the myths about 1989 that many on the right today hold dear.  It is not simply too soon for such “confident eulogies”–these eulogies and the mentality that creates them can be positively dangerous.