People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn. Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state. ~David Brooks

Well, if by “people” Brooks means “people who didn’t buy into the crazy revolutionary rhetoric of the Second Inaugural,” this is true.  If by “people” he means “everybody, especially including me, David Brooks,” I will have to disagree, and not for the first time.  As we were reminded just the other day, those who were jaundiced about a promise of a new dawn in Iraq (or was that the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”?) were accused more or less openly of various horrible moral and political evils, including racism, treason and support for despotism.  How could we doubt that Iraqis could pick up in a matter of a few years political institutions and habits that took us centuries to develop?  We were accused of a lack of confidence in the universality of “freedom and democracy” and were mocked for doubting the equality of man–as if we should be embarrassed for lacking confidence in something that wasn’t real and doubting something that didn’t exist.  Why?  Well, we were under the funny impression that abiding cultural and religious identities would trump vague appeals to “freedom and democracy” every time and that a people’s particular history was far more relevant to its political constitution than vacuous bromides about how freedom is God’s gift to mankind.  Brooks and company took the other view.  Now they would like to rush back and claim the mantle of traditional conservative wisdom that they threw into the gutter and spat upon.  I, for one, am sick of this. 

Not too many neocons, New York Times columnists and other supporters of the “freedom agenda” were very actively contemplating what evolutionary theory might have to tell us about human biodiversity or political diversity back then.  They were not concerned to plumb the depths of man’s capacity for violently contesting for power, meaning and identity, nor were they going to sully their pure ideals with any acquaintance with anything so pedestrian as knowledge of history.  We were told to stop giving the Iraqis such short shrift–I mean, it’s not as if these people would prefer “tribe or religion or whatever” to glorious freedom!  That would be crazy!  What an insulting and low opinion to have of these people, they lectured us.  Of course, only effete coastal urbanites automatically regard other peoples with tribal and religious loyalties as somehow low and despicable, much as they regard their own allies in domestic politics with more than a little contempt.  They assume, like some of the old philosophes, that these loyalties are burdens imposed on people, who will be only too glad to cast them off and live “freely” when given half the chance, and that the progress of a nation is measured by the extent to which a people has abandoned these attachments.   

Well, okay, so the glorious freedom didn’t take exactly as planned–but who could have ever seen that one coming?  Oh, thesefolks.  You mean to say that they learned this from history and a traditional understanding of human nature?  Some of it was even informed by sociobiology?  Who would have guessed? 

Meanwhile, where was David Brooks in all of this?  By his own account, he was still traipsing over the rolling hills of globalised humanity.  What lessons did Brooks draw from his rude awakening to the “jagged” and rough nature of the world?  Oh, right, more democracy for everybody!  Or, as I put it back then:

But here Brooks has made a curious maneuver, wrapping up the effort to spread universalist propositions in supposed loyalty to his “group,” his tribe, which he has defined in the most non-specific and un-tribal way possible.  It is as if he has declared a blood debt against Iraq on behalf of the proposition nation: “Hello, my name is David Brooks.  You killed my proposition, prepare to die.”   

“People” who used to be, or were supposed to be, skeptical of social engineering–those pesky neocons and their fellow travellers–undertook one of the greatest social engineering projects in recent history and declared anyone who doubted this project to be a regressive, hidebound villain who was, to top it off, an anti-Semite or perhaps something worse (an isolationist!).  Those of us who said, “Iraq will fragment and self-destruct in the absence of strong central government!” or “You can’t build a modern democracy in a sectarian, tribal Islamic society!” were dismissed as (horror of horrors!) pessimists, and when some of us said that widespread insecurity and violence might not be all together the best cement of a new civil society we were told that “freedom is untidy.”  Yes, well sectarian massacres are also untidy.  They can be downright messy.  Those of us who questioned the wisdom of the grand project were told, “We did it in Japan and Germany, and we can do it again!”  Except that Iraq was nothing like those other places. 

Then there was the small problem that this keen grasp of the power of culture and an awareness of the enduring passions and instincts of human nature that Brooks has enjoyed showing off in the last year or so were entirely absent from the thinking of the proponents of the global democratic revolution, including Brooks himself, because had they paid any attention to these things they would have had to acknowledge that their entire project was doomed from the beginning.  

Consider, by way of comparison, the still basically unrepentant David Brooks from a little over two and half years ago:

This time, unlike 1920, say, Iraqis can see a panoply of new and thriving democracies. They have witnessed Iran’s horrible experience with theocracy. Once the political process moves ahead, nationalism will work in our favor, as Iraqis seek to become the leading reformers in the Arab world.

We hawks were wrong about many things. But in opening up the possibility for a slow trudge toward democracy, we were still right about the big thing.

Again in May 2004:

Bush is putting this tenet of our national creed to a fearsome test in the worst possible circumstances. For the past year Americans have committed horrible blunders. And if this gamble fails, it won’t be only the competence of our officials that will be called into question — it will be the American creed itself. Since before the nation’s founding, Americans have thought of themselves as the great democratic champions of the globe.

If this gamble fails to come off, then that mission will seem, to many, false. Perhaps democracy and freedom are not really universal values, some will say. Perhaps they are just the outgrowths of a specific culture. People on the left and right will race to withdraw from the world. It will become difficult to take on the tyrants who will menace the world.

On the other hand, if we muddle through in Iraq and some semidemocratic nation slowly emerges, it won’t be because of American skill. It will be because the democratic creed is so strong it can withstand the highest incompetence. Then there really will be hope for a democratic Middle East. The war on terror will really look winnable.

Of course, the mission of democratising the world has not been the national mission, much less has it been at the heart of the “American creed,” but this column from 2004 helps remind us just how blinkered Brooks continued to be even at that late stage in the game as the earliest phases of the sectarian war we now see before us were taking shape.  It is nearly impossible to take a single word Brooks says now seriously because he still thought in May 2004 that there was a reasonable prospect of success at vindicating the “democratic creed” in Iraq.  He was not alone–a  lot of “serious” people thought this and are still for some reason regarded as informed observers.

Some of these commentators, particularly the economic conservatives, have valid complaints, though like the rest of us they must face the fact that things would have been even worse under a Democratic administration. ~Joseph Bottum

Actually, Bush’s critics don’t have to face any such thing, because it probably isn’t true.  Perversely, because of the desire to oppose the other party, Republicans are much more reliably conservative when they are confronted with a Democratic President.  Besides, every Republican administration of the last forty years has been in many respects a catastrophe for controlling the growth of government in particular–Mr. Bush has the unfortunate distinction of being the worst offender, and he doesn’t even have the convenient excuse that the other party was in control of Congress.  

The myth of Republican fiscal competence has been one of the more powerful ones confusing and misleading conservatives over the years.  Aside from a few years in the late ’90s, Republicans have been pathetically bad at avoiding deficits and even worse at stopping new government initiatives during their time in power.  With one of their own in the White House, restraint disappeared completely.  It is not only unlikely that a Gore or Kerry administration would have been substantially worse, since Congressional Republicans would probably have made things very difficult for their agenda, but I would even go so far as to say that either of them might well have been substantially better–which doesn’t mean that either would have been particularly good.  If we must engage in the old “lesser of two evils” game, it is no longer obvious that having the GOP control the White House is automatically the lesser evil.  It certainly isn’t obvious in the case of Mr. Bush.   

Consider the last four elected Republican Presidents.  Nixon institutionalised Great Society programs that were set to sunset, then signed off on OSHA, the EPA and also imposed wage and price controls.  What the exact difference is between what he did and what Humphrey would have done eludes me.  “Watch what we do, not what we say” might as well be the GOP slogan for all time.  Reagan ramped up military spending and tolerated high domestic spending as the payoff.  He may have had strong arguments for doing so, but the bottom line is that the federal government grew considerably bigger during his tenure.  The less said about Bush the Elder with his tax hikes and signing off on the ADA, the better.  Meanwhile, for at least half of the twelve years that there have been Democratic Presidents in the last generation, the expansion of government was not reversed but its expansion was not quite as explosive–this was because Republicans recovered some sense of a reason to oppose big government when there was a Democratic President to target as the supporter of big government. 

Of course, GOP commitment to small government has always been notoriously poor.  Even during those revolutionary days of the mid-’90s, there was only marginal improvement.  Government spending increased more rapidly after the 1994 “revolution” than the rate of increase during unified government from 1993-95.  After the shutdown battle, Republicans learned to stop worrying and love the pork. 

It seems hard to believe that any Democratic administration could have gotten away with expanding government at a faster rate or in more idiotic ways than Mr. Bush did.  Whenever there is a Democrat in the White House, obviously because of their campaign rhetoric and the history of Democratic welfare state-building, everyone is prepared to oppose any new expansions of government the Democrat may propose.  For some reason, though, when a Republican takes office everyone relaxes and actually believes the candidate’s promises to limit the size of government–why do they do this?  Further, why do they all then roll over when he begins increasing the size and role of government?  Can it really be as straightforward as pathetic partisan loyalty?  Probably. 

With a Democrat in the White House after the elections of 2000 or 2004, the GOP would have rediscovered the virtues of balanced budgets, because it would have been to their advantage to resist administration budget proposals.  They would have killed something like a Medicare Part D had it come from a Democratic administration.  They would have fought tooth and nail to stop something like Bush’s appalling education bill, had it come from someone in the other party.  That is depressing enough, but what is far more depressing is that there are plenty of people, including Joseph Bottum, who think that we somehow avoided a worse fate by enduring Bush.   

On foreign policy, escalation of existing conflicts and military adventurism have been the general trademarks of Republican administrations since 1968.  Based on this dubious record of accomplishment, they were for a while considered the serious party when it came to foreign policy–which sometimes had the depressing reality of being only too true.  (When you have to choose between the Kissingers and the Brzezinskis of the world, you really want to believe that someone is playing a trick on you and that they will soon present you with the real choice.) 

For those of us on the right who regard fairly militaristic and reckless foreign policy of this kind to be profoundly mistaken and contrary to the best interests of America, it is difficult to look back with any great joy at the Republican administrations of the last forty years.  Indeed, the Democratic administrations hardly inspire much admiration, either, but some the major flaws of these administrations have been by and large the very things (i.e., silly talk of promoting democracy and supporting dissidents against our own authoritarian allies; careless use of the military) that many admirers of Mr. Bush regard as virtues of this administration.  The “freedom agenda” is not terribly different in substance from the rhetoric of Jimmy Carter–Bush has differed from Carter in that he actually tries to implement the bad ideas Carter mostly just talked about. 

What Republicans once recognised as loopy nation-building and utopianism in the ’90s, they suddenly embraced as fundamental to national security.  Since so many “conservatives” today like to throw the withdrawal from Somalia in the Democrats’ face as the signal of weakness that Bin Laden cited as his evidence that America was not up for a real right, it is worth asking these people: which party got us into Somalia (the GOP), which Chairman of the Joint Chiefs denied the mission in Mogadishu the necessary armour (Powell), and which part of the electorate demanded that we pull out after the fighting in Mogadishu killed eighteen of our soldiers (primarily Republican voters)?  Of course, Clinton was right to leave Somalia, just as he was profoundly wrong to attempt the nation-building farce and just as Bush the Elder was a fool for ever getting involved in that country in the first place.  Yet many of the people who ridiculed and despised Clinton not for leaving Somalia but for staying as long as we did are now some of the very same people who cheer on Mr. Bush as he engages in nation-building and refuses to leave Iraq.  The lesson is that GOP voters, for the most part, will tolerate precisely the same disastrous, horrible, ill-conceived policies they would normally denounce as treacherous globalist villainy provided that the man committing the country to this course of action has the right party affiliation. 

Where Republicans normally questioned the credibility of a Democratic President when he would launch irrational military campaigns that seemed irrelevant or even damaging to the national interest, they happily went along with any Bush proposal, no matter how far-fetched or obviously nonsensical.  This is not because they all suddenly suffered psychotic breaks and possessed entirely new personalities–it was because one of “their” guys told them it was necessary and patriotic, and so they (with a very few exceptions) followed him in perfect docility.  It seems entirely likely that had a President Gore attempted to launch an invasion of Iraq (or any other country), the Republican majority would have been leading the charge to question his competence and damn his plans as either foolhardy or part of a giant deception against the American people.  They might well have been right, but for some twisted reason (based, I guess, in the fact that Carter dithered during the hostage crisis but Reagan presided over the unforgiveable deployment to Lebanon, which proved that Carter was the foreign policy naif) the obvious deceit of a Republican President on a matter of national security seems inconceivable to the same people who were quite glad to question the “convenient” timing of the 1998 attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan or the timing of Desert Fox during the impeachment process.  Of course, the Republicans were right to question Clinton’s honesty and judgement then–why, then, do they assume that someone else from their own party entrusted with the same immense executive power would not abuse that power?  Why reflexively assume, against most of the experience of the last thirty years, that Republicans are better stewards of the executive branch?

At the very least, in the face of passionate hostility at home and abroad, George Bush has proved himself a brave and determined man who has staked his presidency on getting democratic momentum underway in the Middle East. Even if in the short run he fails-which many of us are not yet ready to concede-some Muslims in the future will be able to remember that in a difficult time an American president, at heavy cost, cared about their sufferings, their natural rights, and the better angels beckoning in their dreams. He held before them a democratic standard by which they will forever measure other political movements and other leaders. ~Michael Novak

I’m sure that’s what “some Muslims” in the future will remember, rather than the mass death and destruction that he brought.  If my country were destroyed because of the decisions of a foreign leader, I know I would look back fondly on his high-minded rhetoric and remember how much he cared about me and my rights.  Unfortunately, such has been the democracy “experiment” in Iraq that these Muslims in the future will use the “democratic standard” to measure all other movements and come to the conclusion that the other movements are at least not associated with the complete ruin of their countries.  Mr. Bush’s accomplishment in Iraq is to bind together the idea of democracy with the reality of majoritarian tyranny and hell on earth.  More than anyone, I suspect that he has convinced tens of millions of Muslims that this “democracy” business is not worth the slaughter and mayhem, and has probably confirmed in the minds of more than a few that the only way forward to a just order is through Islam.  He will have managed to convince one of the most repressed and unfree regions on earth that “freedom and democracy” are disastrous political solutions for their woes.  That is a not inconsiderable achievement.

Can southern Sudan hold without at least the distant intimidation of American military intervention? Can Nigeria? Can Indonesia? ~Joseph Bottum

Well, since the rather nasty SPLA in southern Sudan has held out for going on two decades or so mostly without much help, I suspect that they will somehow muddle through without us.  They have the support of Ethiopia and Uganda, and these two enjoy fishing in Sudan’s troubled waters, partly to keep Khartoum busy and partly as payback for its meddling in their affairs.  Only to the extent that Ethiopian and Ugandan support is conditional on the continued supply of American weapons to Addis Ababa and Kampala will any U.S. pullback from interventionist foreign policy even be noticed in this miserable part of the world.  Nigeria may well “hold out,” and probably will, but if it doesn’t it won’t be for a sudden U.S. pullback from propping up Lagos’ government against the increased growth of Islamic fundamentalism in the north.  The idea that Indonesia is even under threat is amusing.  Indonesia’s larger concern is disintegration along ethnic lines, not the violence of a tiny fraction of its Muslim population.  Mr. Bottum may as well ask whether China will be able to hang on against the overwhelming power of the East Turkestan Liberation Movement.  I think they’ll manage somehow.  To pose these questions is to reveal oneself as an alarmist and not much of a foreign policy analyst.  Mr. Bottum is Santorumesque in worrying about miniscule threats to larger, more powerful nations.  He might as well ask, “How will Argentina be able to cope with a combined Venezuelan-Bolivian front?”  Yawn.  Call us when you have something that looks like a plausible threat.

In all that he has tried to do-reform education, fix social security, restore religion to the public square, assert American greatness, appoint good judges-Bush has proved himself a conservative. ~Joseph Bottum

It is hard to express how mistaken this is.  “Reforming” education by engaging in massive centralisation is not related to any conservatism concerned either with federalism and the American political tradition of cultivating variety and local responsibility.  Mr. Bush might get some credit for at least attempting to “fix” Social Security, if “fixing” a program that conservatives have historically wanted to eliminate had something to do with conservatism.  Obviously, I don’t accept that it does, so there’s really not much more to say there.  Naturally, every claim Mr. Bottum makes is a contested one because most of Bush’s conservative critics would not accept what Bottum or Bush mean by conservative.     

Had Mr. Bush had done anything tangible or, indeed, had he done anything concrete to “restore religion to the public square,” we could all agree that this was a very good thing and even a conservative thing.  However, in all fairness, what has he done along these lines?  Aside from talking up the “religion of peace” and marking Eid in the White House, which is not what I think most Christians have in mind when they say “restore religion to the public square,” I cannot think of anything Mr. Bush has had to do with religion in public life that has been in any noteworthy.  In fact, Mr. Bush has helped to drive religion out of the public square on at least one occasion.  It was this administration that worked with Alabama Republicans to pull the rug out from under Roy Moore during the Ten Commandments controversy.  When it comes to prominent episodes when Mr. Bush might have defended the place of religion in the public square, he is nowhere to be found.

Of course, from a “new fusionist” perspective, I suppose someone would think that it is conservative to “assert American greatness.”  But what exactly does this “assertion” entail?  It involves hubris, disregard for international law, executive overreach, unconstitutional acts and aggression against other nations and an ahistorical fantasy that radically different cultures can be made over in our image through the application of force.  If a weird sort of Wilsonianism-cum-chauvinism combined with rank illegality, immorality and injustice are conservative, count me out.  Happily, I believe these things demonstrate the complete or near-complete lack of a conservative mind and conservative spirit in Mr. Bush and his cheerleaders.  If I believed otherwise, I don’t really see how I could take conservatism seriously.  Mr. Bottum’s defense is the classic retreat of the ideologist who has to explain the divergence between the promises of the ideology he defends and the stark realities of failure: he has to argue that there was nothing wrong with the principles that were employed, but that it was simply flawed execution by bumbling politicians.  The solution is not to abandon the hideous ideas that have failed so miserably, but to regroup and declare renewed zeal to implementing those ideas “the right way.”  But even successes would not make these ideas conservative ones.  Even had Mr. Bush more competently “asserted American greatness,” this would simply make him a successful nationalist-imperialist, because in the very act of asserting said “greatness” Mr. Bush has had to do violence to our general tradition (not only always observed, but usually) of nonaggression and has hitched that “greatness” to liberal revolutionary goals for which I think most conservatives, when they think on the matter seriously, have no sympathy. 

So it comes down to the judges.  Frankly, as relatively acceptable as his selections to the Court were, they cannot begin to make up for the staggering damage that his policies have done, both to this country and to conservatism itself.  Yes, there has been incompetence, but a “successful” Iraq war would have been in some ways even more injurious to American interests, since it would have made aggressive interventionist warmaking the signature policy of a conservative foreign policy for the future and would have opened the door to multiple interventions in the near future, any one of which could have become even more ruinous debacles than the current war.  The only thing more horrifying than a bumbling idealistic foreign policy is a well-executed, highly effective interventionist approach that makes our government into an engine of political upheaval and the destruction of settled, traditional societies.  Imagine Jacobins who performed with stereotypical German efficiency and expertise, and you might have an idea of what sort of destruction and evils such a combination could cause.

The Mormons, critics say, are secretive and strange, and they are controlling more and more of your world. ~Stephen Stromberg

As the blogosphere’s foremost critic of Romney (or something close to it) and as someone who has thought about the “Mormon issue” more than is probably necessary or reasonable, I can confidently say that this is complete nonsense.  Not once in any of the criticisms of Romney’s Mormonism have I ever read anywhere that people are wary of Romney’s Mormonism because of LDS expansion and property holdings.  Weisberg thinks Mormons are unusually gullible, and no one really cares what he thinks; Linker uses elaborate webs of logic to conclude that Mormon theocracy is just around the corner, but no one acquainted with any actual Mormons believes this.  For that matter, probably very few people are agreeing with anything I have to say about the subject.  But the most vocal critics are not saying what Mr. Stromberg claims we are saying.  

For people to know that the LDS church is expanding or acquiring more properties, they would have to know something about Mormonism.  For people to know that there is no clergy in the LDS church would require people to know certain details about that church, which I bet most people don’t know.  I wager most people know next to nothing about Mormonism, except for the condensed version of Mormon history as revealed to them by South Park and other such edifying vehicles of public education (“Joseph Smith was a prophet, dum-dum-dum-dum!”)–therein lies Mormonism’s biggest problem with the American public.  It is not an obstacle that can be overcome in a presidential campaign, as I feel compelled to repeat yet again, especially when the candidate is making no effort to address the issue at all. 

But Mormonism isn’t Scientology–critics and observers don’t think that the religion is a gigantic racket for making money and controlling other people’s wealth or some enormous con aimed at dominating more and more of society.  That is what Scientology is, but that’s a subject for another day.  The critics of Mormonism view it with skepticism on religious grounds or for one of the many other reasons outlined here, but “critics” don’t say that Mormons are “controlling more and more” of our world, because most of the critics are not terribly concerned about this kind of “control.”  High levels of involvement in church are least likely to strike highly active conservative Christians as “cultish” or weird, since they, too, are extremely active in their churches.  It is significant here to note that the strongest opposition to a Mormon President of any one group comes from people who attend church services more than once per week.  

Opposition to Mormonism is not nearly so great among Protestants and Catholics of the “Chreaster” variety.  These folks are more inclined to shrug off the “Mormon issue” because they aren’t that fired up about their own religious observance (however, even among the fairly lacadaisacal and the lapsed, anti-Mormonism never goes below 30% of any cross-section of the population).  It isn’t intensive church involvement that strikes Mormonism’s strongest critics as kooky and worrisome–it is (how can I put this diplomatically?) Mormonism that is the problem.

I know you’ve all been dying to read my Intercollegiate Review book review of Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul.  Now you can (PDF).

Left out of her—and virtually every other—account is any hint that the “Bosnijaks” were ruthless agents of Ottoman oppression or that that they committed unspeakable war crimes during WWII or that their renewed violence and aggression helped to bring on the Bosnian War. Best of all, Ms Walsh seems to know nothing about the active role played by the Clinton administration in continuing the war. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” is the inevitable refrain of American journalists whose knowledge of history comes from Ken Burns’ mockumentaries.

Perhaps young Talovic was deeply affected by the violence he witnessed in childhood—though from experience I have learned to take these refugee stories with handfuls of salt: It is their tale of suffering that has made it possible for them to live in the American paradise. We shall probably never find out what made him tick so loud he ultimately exploded, but that is because we do not want to know. Truth, in America today, is whatever story can be trimmed to fit an historical template created by pop historians, high school civics teachers, news producers, State Department spokesmen—and other propagandists.

It probably does not need saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Political liberty cannot survive in a country in which public “debate” consists of statements made by dishonest law enforcement agencies, a lying and ignorant press corps, and the self-abusing white trash who infest the blogosphere. ~Thomas Fleming

Did you know that there was a book about Queen Shirin, the Armenian queen of Khusrau II?  Neither did I.  She is remembered in the Shahnameh of Firdausi, but her story is better remembered because of the poet Nezami‘s treatment of her story.  Some of you may be more familiar with that widespread tradition of Shirin’s legendary idealised, tragic love affair with Fahrad, who lost Shirin to Khusrau when he was condemned by the king to carve stairs out of the cliffs of Behistun (the famous rockface into which Achaemenid and later Sasanian kings carved their monuments).  

Their story became part of the literary traditions of the Near East, central Asia and India.  (You can even pick up an echo of their story in the film Kama Sutra, which incidentally happens to star one of the great Bollywood heroine-actresses Rekha and was directed by the accomplished Mira Nair.)  Speaking of Bollywood, Shirin Fahrad(1956) is an Indian adaptation of the tale starring the great screen legend Madhubala, who also played the female lead in the masterpiece Mughal-E-Azam. 

The story of Fahrad and Shirin is one of those timeless stories of pure, unfulfilled love, and so serves as a natural reference for both the yearning of ghazals and the laments of the khagher of Sayat Nova, including one of his most memorable, Fahrad mirats Shirinn asats, which includes this nod to another famous pair of lovers:

Medjloomi nman man im gali, earen ervats im.

Like Medjloom I am wandering, I am grieved by my beloved.

Sayat Nova, like Shirin, laments because of the love that he cannot have:

Sayat Noven im, endoor goolam dardires arbab.

I am Sayat Nova, that’s why I cry, my griefs are unbearable.

Fahrad and Shirin appear again in another Sayat Nova poem, whose first line is Khabar gnats blbooli mot (The news went to the nightingale).  The poem is a dialogue between the nightingale and the rose, a common symbolic representation of the lover and beloved in this genre, and at one point the rose says:

The pick killed Fahrad, the dagger remains for you, Shirin.

The Iraq connection? As President Bush ever so delicately touched on the subject in a press conference with then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin: “”There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may or may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that stronglly…I believe that people whose skins are a different color than white can self-govern.”

Left unsaid by Bush is the very, very long record of the Democratic Party in believing precisely that “people whose skins are a different color than white” cannot govern. ~Jeffrey Lord

There are a lot of problems with this article–more than can be done justice in any one blog post, so let’s focus on the exceedingly silly attempt to tie in Mr. Bush’s obnoxious pro-war rhetoric. 

Presumably Mr. Lord cites the example of Iraqi self-government with a heavy dose of irony.  I know I certainly feel silly for saying that Iraqis would not succeed in representative government.  Ahem.  There are quite a few arguments that could be made about why some nations and peoples are ill-suited to self-government (especially the very particular kind of self-government that we understand by that term) that need not touch on race at all.  One might point to social structure and see a fragmented, tribal society as uniquely unsuited to such government.  One might look at the religious culture of a people and see in it principles and habits entirely inimical to free government.  One might note that ethnically and religiously heterogenous societies are among the worst possible places to try to create stable representative democracy.  In any case, “racially,” even if we were speaking at such a crude level as skin colour, Arabs are not very different from Europeans and white Americans, so it has never been at all clear what Mr. Bush was talking about here–unless we are meant to tendentiously read into Mr. Bush’s remarks some racial ‘othering’ of Arabs.  That would, of course, be fairly silly, as is this entire article by Mr. Lord. 

Indeed, Mr. Bush’s statement never made any sense, since he was knocking down the flimsiest of straw men: the antiwar argument from Arab racial inferiority.  There never was any such argument, and you can’t cite a single article of any consequence that advances this argument.  He was doing what he often does: he repudiates a weak, untenable position that no one holds to give the false impression that his position is that much more noble and admirable.  “Unlike you people, I am not some stinking racist,” he says, as he is cheered on by legions of admirers who will repeat, mantra-like, “The only thing those people understand is force.”  There is an unusual degree of cheekiness in those war supporters (whose colleagues cite The Arab Mind as if it were religious scripture) to repeat charges of racism against opponents of the war and critics of the program of democratisation of Iraq. 

Perhaps Mr. Bush left unsaid any remark about the views of mid-19th century Democrats about black capacity for self-rule because that would have forced us all to remember that Republicans of the day, including Father Abraham himself, held the exact same low opinions of black competence and, with the exception of the very most radical egalitarians, possessed the same hostility to full black equality.  It is doubly odd for conservatives to want to remind people that they have allied themselves with the party that was originally the party of egalitarianism, social revolution and progressive liberalism, especially when they would like to make the implausible attempt of damning the Democrats for both their old racial attitudes and their new radical attitudes that embody hostility to any hint of those old attitudes (especially when the targets of this hostility today tend to be conservatives).  

Perhaps Mr. Bush left it unsaid because he probably knows, as we all know, that his party’s electoral strength in many parts of the country originated in the dissatisfaction of old Democratic white voters with the combination of civil rights activism, spectacles of lawlessness and the urban and predominantly Northern liberal response to all of these things.  Perhaps the last thing these voters want to hear is some lousy Northeastern transplant running down the reputation of their fathers and ancestors.  He might also have left it unsaid because it was completely irrelevant to the question of Iraq.  He might have left it unsaid because virtually no one in this country, much less “a lot of people in the world,” believes anything like this.  Had he added partisanship and South-bashing to his already-tendentious pitch for democratising Iraq as a fight against American racism, he would not have only made a fool of himself, but he would have caused the overwhelming majority of his voters to groan in disbelief.  

When you grow up reading a lot of conservative commentary as I did during the ’90s, you find that the ever-so-cute and amusing attempts to show that Democrats and liberals are the “real” racists got old about ten years ago.  It served the purpose of trying to hoist the race-hustlers and exploiters by their own petard, but it was, had to be, purely tactical and a way to puncture liberal claims to moral authority on these things.  As of five years ago, they became really tiresome, because you began to sense that some of these people were deadly serious.  “No, really, we’re the true anti-racists!  I’m so not racist, you can hardly believe it!”  Now I consider them an embarrassment of sorts, a kind of irrepressible tick that conservative writers feel the need to express every once in a while to get it out of their system.  Indeed, the whole of Mr. Lord’s exercise in condemning the entirety of the history of the Democracy is something that was probably better left unsaid.