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Wednesday, February 25, 2004

STUMPED
Do Over
by David Kusnet

Only at TNR Online

Post date: 02.24.04
[ TNR Online is pleased to introduce David Kusnet, former chief speechwriter to President Clinton, as a regular contributor. Kusnet will write a periodic column called "Stumped," which will examine the rhetoric of the 2004 campaign. ]

Back in the fall of 1993, Bill Clinton began to present his health care plan before a joint session of Congress, looked at the teleprompter, and saw that it was scrolling the text of the speech about his economic plan that he'd delivered that February. Unfazed, he started riffing his health care speech anyway.

Last night, George W. Bush addressed a $1,000-per-person fundraiser for the Republican Governors Association to premiere what his handlers had touted as his new stump speech for the 2004 campaign. But his teleprompter displayed what should have been this year's State of the Union speech--a graceful, upbeat presentation of his record, agenda, and governing philosophy that slashed his rivals with a switchblade disguised as a scalpel.

When it comes to making his case for another term, last night's speech was Dubya's do-over--and this time he got it right. Where his State of the Union speech had been partisan and pedestrian, devoid of what his father called "the vision thing," his new stump speech is both presidential and political; it makes the case for the Bush presidency--and against John Kerry and John Edwards--in forward-thinking, rather than defensive, terms.

It's as if the first MBA president has belatedly reversed a colossal management error. His State of the Union speech read as if the writing assignment had been outsourced to a hack from the Republican National Committee. By contrast, last night's speech read as if it had been assigned to the president's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, a lyrical writer and evangelical Christian with a gift for addressing audiences across the ideological and theological spectrum. Most news coverage reported the speech as a frontal attack on Kerry for the differences between his rhetoric and his voting record. But more than simply attacking his likely opponent, Bush last night rolled out a repertoire of rhetorical techniques that he will almost certainly repeat between now and November:

Let's Not Look at the Record: Unlike Roosevelt in 1936, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1996, Bush can't claim that the country's condition has improved on his watch. And, unlike in his State of the Union Speech, he won't use the classic incumbent's appeal: "Do you want to go forward or back?" The America that Bush inherited from Clinton in retrospect appears to have been more Nirvana than nightmare, with nearly full employment, rising wages, and a federal surplus as far as the eye could see. So Bush is casting the choice in 2004 as a matter of philosophy not performance--a choice, as he said last night, "between keeping the tax relief that is moving the economy forward, or putting the burden of higher taxes back on the American people" and "between an America that leads the world with strength and confidence, or an America that is uncertain in the face of danger."

Underpinning this philosophical choice, at least on the domestic front, is the big idea that was missing from the State of the Union--"the ownership society." While caricaturing the Democrats as favoring costly and coercive government, Bush presented his policies as having the goal of encouraging people and families to save, invest, and accumulate wealth.

Bush's Unique Selling Proposition: Rather than describing Kerry as a left-leaning, commie-loving, Jane Fonda-following, Ted Kennedy clone--he'll let his surrogates do that--Bush is defining the difference between himself and his likely rival as one of decisiveness. Using a skillful light touch, Bush began by observing that the Democratic primaries feature candidates "with diverse opinions: For tax cuts, and against them. For NAFTA, and against NAFTA. For the Patriot Act, and against the Patriot Act. In favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it." And then he added: "And that's just one senator from Massachusetts." By way of contrast, Bush ticked off a litany of international crises that he had addressed, starting with the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that he brings a steady hand in times of danger. Decisiveness will be Bush's unique selling proposition, from his determination to oust the Taliban and Saddam to his consistent emphasis on tax cuts and privatization.

Changing What "Changing the Tone" Means: Bush subtly changed the meaning of one of his most remembered and now most embarrassing promises from his 2000 campaign--that he would "change the tone" in Washington. Back then, the phrase meant less partisan backbiting. Last night, he redefined it to mean tackling big issues with big ideas. Bush's approach has always been to magnify problems and offer super-sized solution--proposing huge tax cuts every year, responding to terrorism by promoting regime change in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, and promoting the partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare. Whatever the merits of the policies themselves, the strategic advantage of this approach has always been clear: Tackling (or appearing to tackle) big problems and proposing big ideas dispels doubts about Bush's stature, especially in comparison to Clinton, whose command of the issues was never in doubt but who concluded his presidency by offering micro-initiatives on the domestic scene. Pointedly absent last night was any mention of Bush's micro-initiatives, such as discouraging the use of steroids by athletes--although perhaps that was because the former body-builder and current California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in the room.

Pre-Empting Populism: While the event had its share of K Street influence-peddlers and corporate high-rollers, the president signaled that he will try to preempt populist attacks on his policies. He claimed to have "passed the strongest corporate reforms since Franklin Roosevelt." And, anticipating the prospect that Edwards will be Kerry's running-mate, he made a preemptive attack against trial lawyers and "frivolous lawsuits."

This was the best speech Bush has given since Kerry emerged as the Democratic front-runner. His arguments can be answered, but Kerry or Edwards will need to do more than counter with policy ideas; they will need to explain the philosophical antecedents of their proposals in order to give their candidacies an overarching message. That was exactly what George W. Bush--once again talking like a happy warrior--did last night.



David Kusnet was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994. He is a visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties.



The Great Iranian Election Fiasco
What actually happened; what we must do.


Even for a regime that excels in deception, the announcement by the Iranian government that nearly half the eligible voters cast their ballots in Friday's election is an extraordinary bit of effrontery. And even those Western "news" outlets that decided to pronounce the turnout "low" (the BBC, of course, echoed the party line by talking about a large turnout), did so by comparing the official numbers with those of the last parliamentary election, when more than 60 percent voted for the toothless "reformers."

The real numbers are a tiny fragment of the official ones. The overall turnout came in at about twelve percent, with Tehran a bit lower, and places like Isfahan and Qom (of all places, the headquarters of the Shiite religious elite) closer to five percent. The only major city with a substantially higher turnout was Kerman, due to a local factor: A widely hated hardliner was running, and many people judged it more important to demonstrate their contempt for him personally by voting for others than to show their rejection of the regime en bloc by abstaining.

It shouldn't have been hard to get this story right, at least in its broad outlines. A leading member of the old parliament, Mehdi Karoubi, was asked why he did badly, and he replied, publicly: "because the people boycotted the election."

Keep in mind that the reporters knew full well that all but a handful of polling sites in Tehran — the only place they were able to observe, thanks to the usual clampdown on information — were virtually dead. They knew, or should have known, that the regime had trotted out more than 10,000 "mobile voting booths," that is to say, trucks driving around inviting people to vote. They surely heard the stories — widely repeated on Iranian web sites — of thousands of phony ballots, and of citizens being forced to turn over their identity cards, thus making it possible for others to pose as legitimate voters. They must also have heard that high-school students were warned that if they did not vote they would never get into the universities.

But they did not report any of this. The Washington Post's Karl Vick wrote an upbeat report, as if the hardliners had won a normal election, and CNN's legendary Ms. Amanpour stressed that Iran was changing for the better since the dress code for women had loosened a bit in the past few years. Neither seemed to know that there were violent protests throughout the country, that several people had been killed and scores wounded by the regime's thugs, and that highways were blocked because the regime was afraid the protests would spread. There was enough electoral fraud to fill any Western news report, had the correspondents wished to do so. As the website www.iranvajahan.net reported, "In Firoozabad, Fars, people clashed with the Law Enforcement Forces when a cleric by the name of Yunesi-Sarcheshmeyi was declared the winner. In Miando-ab, West Azerbijan, some of the cheaters have publicly confessed how they were taught by a cleric to remove the voting stamp from their ID cards and vote again. In Malekan in East Azerbijan, people were told that 45,000 are eligible to vote, yet the number of declared votes for candidates totaled 50,000! Everyone including children and old people have poured into the streets of Malekan and there is non-stop running battles with the Law Enforcement Forces." The Student Movement Coordinating Committee for Democracy in Iran recorded violent clashes in Izeh, a southern city where a local politician was murdered by security forces when he protested his exclusion from the electoral list. Other protests were reported from Khorram-Abad, Firoozabad, and Dehdasht in the south, in Isfahan, and near the Afghan border in Mashad, Sabze-war, Nelshaboor, and Tchenaran.

Instead of this important information, we get the usual election-day analysis, as if a real election had been conducted, and one could understand something important about Iranian public opinion from the official numbers.

Oddly, the wild distortion of the real results does show something that the mullahs do not want us to know. They fear the Iranian people, knowing how deeply the people hate them, and they believe they must continue to tell a big lie about popular support for the regime. But the people know better. Thus, the demonstrations.

The regime clearly intends to clamp down even harder in the immediate future. Hints of this were seen in the run-up to the election, when Internet sites and foreign broadcasts were jammed, the few remaining opposition newspapers shut down, and thousands of security forces poured into the major cities. One wonders whether any Western government is prepared to speak the truth about Iran, or whether they are so determined to arrive at make-believe deals — for terrorists that are never delivered, for promises to stop the nuclear program, that are broken within minutes of their announcement, or for help fighting terrorism while the regime does everything in its power to support the terrorists — that they will play along and pretend, as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has put it, that "Iran is a democracy."

For those interested in exposing hypocrisy, it is hard to find a better example than all those noble souls who denounced Operation Iraqi Freedom as a callous operation to gain control over Iraqi oil, but who remain silent as country after country, from Europe to Japan, appeases the Iranian tyrants precisely in order to win oil concessions.

Meanwhile, the only Western leader who consistently speaks the truth about Iran is President George W. Bush, and the phony intellectuals of the West continue to call him a fool and a fascist. Meanwhile, his most likely Democrat opponent, Senator John Kerry, sends an e-mail to Tehran Times, Iran's official English-language newspaper, promising that relations between the United States and Iran would improve enormously if Kerry were to be elected next November.

Finally, perhaps our enterprising journalists could ask the administration how it can be, three years after inauguration, that we still have no Iran policy. Yes, Virginia, there is still no National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) on Iran, even though Iran is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, and we claim to be in a war against the terror masters.

Faster, please.

Rumsfeld v Powell: beyond good and evil
John C. Hulsman



Donald Rumsfeld is the neo-conservative architect of war, Colin Powell the cuddly multilateralist. Right? Wrong. Behind the caricature is a titanic Washington struggle far more complicated and interesting.


During my many travels to Europe over the past year, a familiar motif has played itself out. No sooner do I hit the tarmac than my hosts’ cheerful welcoming banter is followed by the first serious question: “who’s up and who’s down?” in the putative fight to the death being waged between the United States’s secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and its secretary of state, Colin Powell.

The question is not posed with equanimity. For all that Americans are charged with too often viewing the world as a simple clash between good and evil, this European concern has its own distinct moral subtext. In a cartoonish way, foreign observers often contrast the decent, honourable, mild-mannered, multilateralist Powell with an overbearing, rude, blunt, abrasive, arrogant, unilateralist Rumsfeld. This simplicism is a metaphor for how little the rest of the world really knows about the sole remaining superpower. It is also a fine place to start explaining the realities of post-9/11 America to the rest of the world.

It’s the ideas, stupid

The truth of the competition for the foreign policy soul of the Bush administration lies not in cliché but in history. Colin Powell is the champion of the realist school of thought, which has been prevalent in America since Alexander Hamilton convinced Congress to support the Jay Treaty with England in 1794. Realism, an ideology based above all else on furthering American national interests (it must be said by either unilateral or multilateral means), is as far from the cuddly Wilsonian idealism that many Europeans ascribe to Powell as it is possible to be.

Realists, moreover, do not share the fantasy (propagated by followers of the French president, Jacques Chirac) that we live in a “multipolar” world of three-to-five relatively equal powers. Realists currently see the power structure of the world as one where the United States is the chairman of the board, the first among equals. But if global problems are to be successfully addressed, other board members need to be engaged on an issue-by-issue, case-by-case basis. This hard-headed pragmatism – aeons away from foreign perceptions of Colin Powell as a closet European who somehow took a wrong turn and ended up in the Bush administration – is the true reason for Powell’s concern to carry allies along.


Europe’s judgment of Donald Rumsfeld as the repository of all that the rest of the world despises about America is equally flawed. A former ambassador to Nato, a Congressman, chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and now both the youngest and the oldest man ever to hold the position of defence secretary, Rumsfeld has been grappling with foreign relations issues for thirty years.

Indeed, as a staunch believer in the transatlantic alliance, Rumsfeld is far more a Washington operator than he is an ideologue, unlike neo-conservatives such as his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the thrusting hawks clustered around vice-president Dick Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. In fact, although “neo-conservative” is the current watchword for all that is malign in European eyes about the Bush administration’s foreign policy, it is an open question as to whether Rumsfeld is one at all.

Strict neo-conservatives see America as the new Rome, the only global power of significance in an otherwise dangerous and chaotic world. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous dictum, “the mission determines the coalition – the coalition does not determine the mission”, may not be music to the ears of European believers in the multipolar ideal; but it is far from the neo-conservative belief that pursuing coalitions is pointless.

Real drama, not soap opera

However, if foreign views of differences between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell are exaggerated, they are correct about one fundamental truth: the Bush administration’s foreign policy is not monolithic. In fact, a titanic struggle between realists and neo-conservatives for control of the Bush administration and the Republican party is underway; and it is mirrored by the ideological battle within the Democratic party between traditionalist and harder-edged Wilsonians. America has not been in this much ideological ferment regarding foreign affairs since the Truman era after the second world war.

For more analysis and argument about United States foreign policy, see openDemocracy’s debates on American power & the world and The Bush doctrine: right or wrong


As was the case in 1945 with the doctrine of “containment” elaborated during the cold war to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union, it is likely that the emerging, dominant paradigm of American foreign policy will be a hybrid that fuses elements of all three schools of thought: realism, Wilsonianism, and neo-conservatism.

America is a nation in flux. The neocon ascendancy that sent United States troops into Iraq is less secure than it seemed a year ago. A historic clash between different foreign policy doctrines is taking place; “who’s up and who’s down?” is mere European soap opera in comparison. As Valentine, the lead character in Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play, Arcadia, says: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when everything you thought you knew is wrong.”



Tuesday, February 24, 2004




February 24, 2004

The Americano Dream
By DAVID BROOKS


Samuel Huntington is one of the most eminent political scientists in the world. His essay "The Clash of Civilizations" set off an international debate, and now Huntington sees another clash of civilizations, this time within the United States.

"In this new era," he writes in his forthcoming book, "Who Are We," "the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico."

These new immigrants, he argues, are not like earlier immigrants. Many have little interest in assimilating. "As their numbers increase, Mexican-Americans feel increasingly comfortable with their own culture and often contemptuous of American culture," Huntington argues.

Instead of climbing the ladder of success, he says, Mexican and other Latino immigrants are slow to learn English. They remain in overwhelmingly Hispanic neighborhoods and regions and tend not to disperse, as other groups have. Their education levels, even into the fourth generation, are far below that of other groups. They are less likely to start companies or work their way up into managerial and professional jobs.

Most important, Huntington concludes, they tend not to buy into the basic American creed, which is the bedrock of our national identity and our political culture. "There is no Americano dream," Huntington writes, "There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English."

Obviously, Huntington is not pulling his punches. You can read an excerpt from the book in the new issue of Foreign Policy magazine at www.foreignpolicy.com. You'll find that Huntington marshals a body of evidence to support his claims. But the most persuasive evidence is against him. Mexican-American assimilation is a complicated topic because Mexican-Americans are such a diverse group. The educated assimilate readily; those who come from peasant villages take longer. But they are assimilating.

It's easy to find evidence that suggests this is so. In their book, "Remaking the American Mainstream," Richard Alba of SUNY-Albany and Victor Nee of Cornell point out that though there are some border neighborhoods where immigrants are slow to learn English, Mexicans nationwide know they must learn it to get ahead. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican-American children speak only English at home.

Nor is it true that Mexican immigrants are scuttling along the bottom of the economic ladder. An analysis of 2000 census data by the USC urban planner Dowell Myers suggests that Latinos are quite adept at climbing out of poverty. Sixty-eight percent of those who have been in this country 30 years own their own homes.

Mexican immigrants are in fact dispersing around the nation. When they have children, they tend to lose touch with their Mexican villages and sink roots here. If you look at consumer data, you find that while they may spend more money on children's clothes and less on electronics than native-born Americans, there are no significant differences between Mexican-American lifestyles and other American lifestyles. They serve in the military — and die for this nation — at comparable rates.

Frankly, something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term "Anglo-Protestant" to describe American culture. There is no question that we have all been shaped by the legacies of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. But the mentality that binds us is not well described by the words "Anglo" or "Protestant."

We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see.

Huntington is right that Mexican-Americans lag at school. But that's in part because we've failed them. Our integration machinery is broken. But if we close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss goodbye the new energy, new tastes and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.

That's the real threat to the American creed.





Monday, February 23, 2004

Stalinist Mullahs
The Iranian regime is in open battle with its own people.


Iran is now racing, literally hell-bent toward two dramatic confrontations: one within the country, between forces of tyranny and forces of democracy and/or reform. The other rages outside the country, a desperate war against the United States, its Coalition allies, and the Iraqis who support us. Both derive from the fundamental weakness of the fundamentalist regime, which has lost the support of the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people, and is increasingly defining itself a pariah state because of its support for terror and its brazen pursuit of atomic weapons.



Unreported in the American press and apparently unnoted by the leaders of the Bush administration, the regime is in open battle with its own people. In late January the regime's thugs murdered four workers, injured more than 40 others, and arrested nearly 100 more in Shahr-e Babak and the small village of Khatoonabad, prompting an official protest from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. (Would that the American trade-union movement had leaders worthy of the name, capable of expressing such outrage). Demonstrations five days ago in the western city of Marivan were so potent that the regime sent helicopter gunships to shoot down protestors, and there are reports that members of the regular armed forces joined the demonstrators. And in Hamadan, demonstrators clashed with security forces after the closure of the unfortunately named "Islamic Equity Ban." The demonstrators accused the bank managers of stealing the bank's money and smuggling it out of the country to their personal benefit, and that of the regime's top figures. The charge is credible because, as Western governments know well, large quantities of cash — just as in the case of Saddam Hussein — have been moved out of Iran in recent months by friends and relatives of the leading officials.

Much more attention has been given to the "hard-liners vs. reformers" kabuki dance leading up to Friday's parliamentary elections. The ritual dance itself-the hard-liners first removed thousands of reformers from the electoral lists, then, following protests, restored a few hundred — is not as important as most reporters and columnists would have us believe, since the makeup of the parliament has nothing to do with the real exercise of power in Iran. But the lessons from the dance are enormously important. Above all, the dance has shown both the political impotence and the moral fecklessness of President Khatami, because he first failed to get his people on the ballot, and then, once the Supreme Leader and the various theocratic institutions had slapped him down, he supinely obeyed and then had the cheek to call upon the people to turn out and vote, in support of "Iranian democracy." Maybe he'd been listening too much to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the other great philosopher of "Iranian democracy."

The other great lesson is that many Iranians, when pushed to the wall by the tyrants, do indeed have the courage to fight back. In an unprecedented step, more than 100 reformers issued a letter to Supreme Leader Khamenei, in which they used language more traditionally reserved for greater and lesser satans in Washington and Jerusalem. They surely know that punishment will be severe, but they did it anyway. One fine day such shows of courage will inspire the Iranian people to defend them en masse, fill the public spaces of the major cities with demonstrators, and demand an end to the regime. And one fine day such actions will compel the Bush administration to support the Iranian people. And on that day the regime will fall, and with it the keystone to the international terror network with which we are at war.

Meanwhile, the regime is placing terrorists in parliament. Loyal members of the security forces are now candidates in the upcoming elections from Teheran and other metropolitan center. For example, 30 candidates running under the banner of Abadegarane Irane Eslami (The Builders of an Islamic Iran) are members of the security forces and are being managed by the father-in-law of Khamenei's daughter Mr. Hadad Adel. For example:

1. Parviz Sorouri, a top Basij organizer in western Teheran. He is the editor-in-chief of Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) publications in Lebanon and Syria. A terrorist activist.

2. Said AbuTaleb, a member of the security apparatus and intelligence of Pasdaran. He was active in Iraq, posing as a television worker. He was arrested in Iraq and later released.

3. Hosseyn Fadai, one of the organizers of the army's branch known as the Badr forces. The Badr forces have undertaken terrorist activities in Iraq. A known terrorist, he is also a member of the group that oversees supplies for the armed forces.

4. Mehis Kouchakzad, responsible for organizing the safehouses for the terrorists in Karbala, a known terrorist.

5. Elias Naderan, the manager of legal matters regarding the Pasdaran in parliament.

6. Alireza Zaakni, responsible for the Basij at Teheran University and its presence in the student body, he oversees all Basij/student activities nationwide.

7. Emad Afrough, a member of the Governing Council of the Army and in charge of security and intelligence matters in the Guardian Council.

8. Seyyed Fezollah Moussavi, director of the Committee for the Defense of the Palestinian Nation and the head of the council overlooking the benefits of the Martyrs of the Intifada, a known terrorist group.

The chief of staff of the armed forces has cancelled all leaves for all military personnel starting Tuesday for one week. All soldiers have been commanded to cast their ballots in the elections on Friday, as have all members of the revolutionary guards and all air force personnel.

In other words, the regime is now removing the "reformist" mask from all Iranian institutions. Henceforth we will see Stalinist Shiites alone.

And we may see them with atomic bombs. Oddly, just as the foreign minister was announcing Iran's intention to sell enriched uranium to interested parties — thereby spitting in the eye of the French, German, and English diplomats who sang love songs to themselves just a few short months ago, proclaiming they had negotiated an end to the Iranian nuclear program — two smugglers were arrested in Iraq, near Mosul, with what an Iraqi general described as a barrel of uranium. Here is what General Hikmat Mahmoud Mohammed had to say about the event: "This material is in the category of weapons of mass destruction, which is why the investigation is secret. The two suspects were transferred to American forces, who are in charge of the inquiry."

Compulsive readers of these little essays may remember that, late last summer, I told CIA that I had been informed of a supply of enriched uranium in Iraq, some of which had been carried to Iran a few years ago. I had offered to put CIA in touch with the original couriers, who said they would take American inspectors to the site, but CIA could not be bothered to go look.

I am told that the uranium in the barrel near Mosul came from the same secret laboratory. Perhaps now the CIA will think better of my sources, and work harder to find these materials.

Faster, please.

THE LIBERAL HAWKS
by James Verini


There is an adage popularized by Georges Clemenceau,the acerbic French premiere who’s come back into vogue in Europe lately, that goes: “The man who is not a socialist in his youth has no heart, but the man who is not a conservative by 30 has no head.” This thought has taken on the status of an embedded platitude in America – just wait until you start paying taxes, your newly Republican-voting father tells you – for the good enough reason that it is, usually, true. Rare is the political thinker, or the mortgage holder, who grows more liberal with age. (The few well-known counter-examples are out of common mortal reach: Bertrand Russell, the genius; George Soros, the billionaire; Noam Chomsky, the titanic crank.) Liberalism means change and reform, or claims to anyway, and change and reform are exhausting.

But the war in Iraq has breathed new life into the question of whether old political dogs can be taught new tricks. The war has produced a cabal of contrarian liberal intellectuals not seen with this kind of fecundity since the days of Dean Acheson: the “Liberal Hawks,” as they’ve been called. They are nominally left-leaning thinkers who have, for whatever reason, supported the Iraq war – and paid heed to Clemenceau’s other famous remark, which he probably pilfered too, that “war is too important a matter to be left to the generals.” (You may remember the psychopathic Gen. Ripper quoting that one in Dr. Strangelove.)

Liberal hawks have proliferated in the place you’d perhaps expect it least: among the media elite, whose opinions are their stock in trade. Liberals who supported the Iraq war include Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times; Christopher Hitchens, the columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate; Paul Berman, New Republic contributing editor and author of Terror and Liberalism; Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria; New York Times Magazine and New Yorker writer George Packer; New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Gore Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan. Even some prominent Europeans are in the club: Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, supported forcible regime change, though in a multilateral form, as did the beloved (maybe not so much anymore) Paris intellectual Andre Glucksman and English journalist and first-team Kissinger-basher William Shawcross. Add to the group former president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel, a progressive who faced down not Trent Lott and Tom DeLay but Kruschev and Brezhnev and a hero of the left for going on four decades.

Of course, as we all suspect when sitting alone with the paper, the American liberal/conservative divide is too facile by half, and the idea that liberals (much less Democrats) should have the market cornered on pacifism, or that conservatives (much less Republicans) should be associated with bellicosity, is faulty, when not simple-minded. Even if you count the Democrats’ near unanimous vote to grant President George Bush war powers as craven, just look at the longtime support for taking out Saddam Hussein offered by likely presidential nominee John Kerry, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War ? (after he got back from it) and by all accounts a liberal (and not a moderate) Democrat, or at the slew of antiwar op-ed pieces published by acolytes of George H.W. Bush before fighting commenced.

Still, whether because of the media, or political pandering, or our need to associate all things nice with people we like and all things nasty with people we don’t, those are the lines along which many of us, liberal and conservative alike, have grown accustomed to think. “Liberal Hawk” shouldn’t ipso facto strike us as a contradictory term, but of course it does. So Friedman, Hitchens, et al have been accused of fulfilling Clemenceau’s truism and turning to the right. They’ve taken on Darth Vader-like status among antiwar liberals, and the treacherous names of “neocons” such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the original liberal turncoats, have come up again and again. Hitchens has taken the most heat. And it’s not just talk. Friendships have deteriorated or broken off altogether. Gore Vidal, who once anointed Hitchens his heir in spirit (his “Dauphin or Delphino” as Vidal, not surprisingly, put it), has since repudiated him over Iraq, and Hitchens in turn has expurgated Vidal’s gushy quotes from the new printings of his books.

Most of the liberal hawks supported invading Iraq for one simple, non-political reason: weapons of mass destruction. But in the past two weeks, the WMD argument has all but evaporated, and with it the reasoning of most liberal hawks. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell last week essentially said in an interview with the Washington Post, that he would have seriously questioned the war if he’d known in March of 2003 what he knows now. That was before he was, presumably, reprimanded by Bush and returned to on-message status.

The disappearing WMDs have not finished off the liberal hawks, however. In the cases of Friedman, Hitchens, and Berman, especially, it has almost served to strengthen their arguments, for now they don’t come off as discredited alarmists. These are the guys who supported war in Iraq for reasons larger and more nebulous, if less pressing, than WMD: because it was someone’s humanitarian duty to topple Saddam, and if not ours, whose?; because totalitarianism is alive and well and must be combated everywhere; because history, and not just the events of September 11, have led us to this inevitably. Or, as Friedman blurted out in a moment of unbuttoned passion in a Slate roundtable discussion of the liberal hawks in January, because we needed to “Go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something.”

Smash Something

For size of readership and sheer number of words, Friedman is probably the most exposed, if not the most committed, of the media’s liberal hawks. He writes three columns a week for The New York Times, a paper that claims close to a million daily readers, and his book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, was a fixture on the best-seller lists in 2003. Friedman’s development as a liberal hawk was the most public and candid, too. From embryo to fullwingedness, his conversion took several months, and bore at times the tone of a public confessional. We might call him the Thomas More of the liberal hawks as he agonizes and runs again and again through the arguments for war from a tower atop the Times’ Washington bureau.

Beginning in late 2002, Friedman began to convince himself of the need for, or at least advisability of, a war in Iraq in the pages of the Times. (Friedman declined to be interviewed for this article.) His general argument was of the “There’s something rotten in the land of Allah” school popularized by Arabist Bernard Lewis. He urged his readers to see the “super-story” of 9/11. Never under the impression that Saddam bore a technical link to al Qaeda, he nonetheless wrote: “I think the chances of Saddam being willing, or able, to use a weapon of mass destruction against us are being exaggerated. What terrifies me is the prospect of another 9/11 … triggered by angry young Muslims, motivated by some pseudo- religious radicalism cooked up in a mosque in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Pakistan. So I am for invading Iraq only if we think doing so can bring about regime change and democratization.”

By March of 2003, Friedman had convinced himself not only that war was necessary, but that a regime change in Iraq would be an instant watershed moment in history – “pay-per-view history,” as he called it. At times this thought appeared to make him almost giddy. “Watching this Iraq story unfold,” he wrote on March 2, just days before fighting commenced, “all I can say is this: If this were not about my own country, my own kids, and my own planet, I’d pop some popcorn, pull up a chair, and pay good money just to see how this drama unfolds. Because what you are about to see is the greatest shake of the dice any president has voluntarily engaged in since Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Japan.” Walter Winchell couldn’t have put it better.

Friedman’s tone in the months leading up to the war was far less certain than that, however. He conducted a Hillary Clinton-esque listening tour of the U.S. and claimed to find that, contrary to what some polls and the Fox News Channel indicated, the American public was deeply ambivalent about the prospect of war. He seemed to want to embody this ambivalence in his column, sounding one day like John Wayne and the next like your hand-wringing aunt Maude, changing his mind about Bush by the week. In one of his more arresting laments, in November of 2002, he decried the Bush administration’s squandering of international good will and its adoption of what he called Europe’s “tragic” view of history. “JFK and FDR and Ronald Reagan faced enemies more evil than Saddam and Osama without losing touch with American optimism and communicating that to the world. The Bush team has lost it – and it’s a loss for them and for America.”

But by the following February, he was able to applaud Bush’s “audacity”: “I must say, (it) has an appeal for me.” Then he thumbed his nose at the supporters of Jacques Chirac and France, a group that one must guess makes up a good portion of his readership, and seriously suggested, in a column called “Vote France off the Island,” that India replace France as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. He risked offending the materialist-minded wing of the polity when he admitted that oil probably figured in the Bush administration’s motives, but then said, “There is nothing illegitimate or immoral about the U.S. being concerned that an evil, megalomaniacal dictator might acquire excessive influence over the natural resource that powers the world’s industrial base.”

At other times, Friedman sounded like a starry-eyed Teddy Roosevelt circa age 15. In early September 2002, he concluded a heartfelt deliberation of the Iraq question with this lovely hypothetical: “In the best case, a ‘nice’ strongman will emerge from the Iraqi Army to preside over a gradual transition to democracy.” A “nice” strongman? “Now, truth be told, I think I get this war,” he wrote in February of 2003, apparently doing his best Jerry Mathers impersonation. And in September he reported breathlessly: “The big thing that has happened in Iraq, which you can really feel when you’re there, is a 100 percent correlation of interests between America’s aspirations for Iraq and the aspirations of Iraq’s silent majority.” Iraq and America, now 100 percent correlated!

“He seems to think too much with his feelings,” is what Hitchens said to me of Friedman, and, clearly, Friedman at times wants to convince himself – before a million well-educated readers, no less – that his fondest hopes for the world may come true. But to his credit, it is refreshing, amid Maureen Dowd’s shrill invective and the doomsday predictions of Paul Krugman, to see a New York Times columnist wearing his optimism on his sleeve. Even more to his credit, it’s oddly reassuring to hear his dependably off-message voice. When questioning the motives of a president who aligns his minions’ upbeat public statements and glosses over obvious changes in policy as slickly as Bush does, ambivalence can be a powerful rhetorical strategy in itself. One of the more insidious effects of September 11 is that it deflated the quality of certainty so natural to everyday American thinking, and Friedman represents the new, less-assured mode of thought. A pedant or pundit he is not.

“Deceitful”

The same uncertainty does not plague Paul Berman or Christopher Hitchens. Berman, who cut his teeth at the Village Voice in its heyday and was in the early 1980s a columnist for The Nation, is not as prolific as Friedman or Hitchens. But Terror and Liberalism, released in fall of 2003, has given grandiloquent expression to the “super-story” liberal hawk case. It has justified the liberal hawk position the way Reagan alum Robert Kagan’s screed, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, released about the same time last year, has justified the conservative argument for ignoring the U.N. and “Old Europe.”

Like Friedman, Berman is no great admirer of President Bush – he does not even admit to finding that Texas roll-the-dice audacity appealing – and, as a reporter who covered Nicaragua in the 1980s, he does not think too highly of the president’s father, either. But he believes that Bush set his sights on Iraq with something more substantial than realpolitik in mind. He suggests that Bush recognizes that Islamic totalitarianism is not an anomaly confined to al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but is ingrained in the Muslim world, peddled by sinister intellectual heroes and codified by febrile leadership. Bush, he says, has progressed despite his flaws past the Nixonian cynicism that produced his father (who, before playing G-man in Central America, was Nixon’s ambassador to China), even if the administration’s thinking is “a bit incoherent” or “even at times deceitful,” as he put it to me when I reached him at his home in New York City last week.

“I have not turned to the right,” Berman said. “The reasons I find most respectable to oppose the war are reasons of caution and prudence. But caution and prudence are conservative virtues. Therefore, from my point of view, the position against the war in Iraq is conservative – and I don’t say that pejoratively.”

“We’re dealing with a clash between liberal society and people who want to destroy liberal society,” he went on. “What we’re fighting against is not neglect and not apathy – we’re fighting against totalitarian political movements that are animated by very worked-out doctrines. Somebody who’s marching in the peace march, I’d say to them, ‘You should express yourself, and so I can’t question your motives.’ But what I don’t want to hear is that this is left-wing idealism. Left-wing idealism is the wish to help 45 million people to live freely in Iraq and to help the Kurds live with religious freedom and to help women achieve rights, etc.”

Berman’s thinking and his book – nothing less should be expected of a liberal hawk – have pleased and incensed both the right and the left. The conservatives at The Weekly Standard reviewed it poorly, but then so did The Nation (which Berman quit, not amicably, in 1986). The National Review praised it, as did Salon.

How does he account for this? “Any original work of political analysis that’s worth its salt is a mindfuck,” Berman said. “If people aren’t thrown into confusion and scattered to the winds by your thinking, it can only mean that you’ve merely reproduced the clichés of political thought.” But doesn’t this smack a bit of intellectual novelty-seeking? Is the liberal hawk position mental Viagra for bored old lefties? “No,” he said. “I would put it to you this way: if you keep on articulating the same truth in the same way you always have, the truth will by and by turn into a non-truth, a slogan. And if you have something genuinely new to say, people on the right and left will find that their proclivities don’t help them much in responding.”

Against Nihilism

In his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens writes: “the radical ? conservative is not a contradiction in terms.” Hitchens is arguably the most forceful of the liberal hawks, and he is the most reviled among antiwar liberals. He does not draw a thick line between the roles of activist and journalist, and, where Iraq is concerned, has a deep attachment to the Kurdish cause in particular. He has become something of a force of nature in American journalism and letters. He writes a political column for Slate, a regular cultural affairs column for Vanity Fair, and contributes frequently to The Atlantic. He has published 11 books. Until late 2002, he wrote the “Minority Report” column for The Nation, a post he quit, after a more than 20-year association, because the magazine had become, in his words, “The echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” (Apparently, The Nation is the dreaded nursery for liberal hawks.)

Hitchens’s perceived defection galls antiwar liberals the most, because he has for so long been a hero of the Left (beginning when he spoke out against the Vietnam war at Oxford, where he overlapped with Bill Clinton, whom he loathes, and extending to his opposition to the first Gulf War), because he is the hardest liberal hawk to pin down, but, perhaps most of all, because he is such a seductive writer. No debating team likes to see a star philomethian switch masks, though they should know it’s inevitable. Reading Hitchens after reading Friedman (or, to be fair, after most any writer) is like sipping a tumbler of Maker’s Mark after taking a shot of watered-down well whiskey. His thinking is less compromised and more nuanced; his command of history more deft; and his prose is, well, better. The English accent – undiluted after nearly a quarter-century of living in the U.S. – doesn’t hurt, either.

Hitchens himself insists that he hasn’t taken a new side. “What strikes me about partisanship these days is that it’s over less and less, which makes it doubly boring for me,” he told me, from Northern California, where he was visiting in-laws. “I have no ideological attachment anymore of any kind. On some days that feels like a missing limb, and some days it feels liberating.”

“‘Liberal hawk’ is wrong, in my mind,” he said. “It attempts to suggest that there’s some contradiction in being liberal and pro-war.” Still, Hitchens sometimes talks like he believes he has switched sides. “I’m not ashamed of the time I spent on the left,” he said. Unlike Friedman, Hitchens does not feel the need to preface his support for the Iraq war – “intervention,” he prefers to call it – with assurances that he distrusts Bush. He did, however, refer to himself as a “republican” during our conversation.

Indeed, his defense of the Bush administration has at times been strident. In a Slate column from December of 2002, he defended Bush’s repeated use of the word “evil,” a point of verbiage that has nettled the Left to no end. “Scoff if you must,” he wrote, “but you can’t avoid it.” In a February 2003 column called “Drumbeat,” the subtitle asserted: “Bush rushing to war? Nonsense.” He’s even defended Halliburton. And in October of last year, while every news magazine in the country was running cover stories with titles like “What Went Wrong?”, Hitchens published a rosy picture of postwar Baghdad in Vanity Fair, even as Graydon Carter, in his Letters From the Editor, marched on with what has become a monthly tirade against Bush.

“Bush is an extremely limited guy who’s saved by the fact that he’s aware of his limitations,” Hitchens said. He claims that he no longer minds being associated with certain neocons. His thinking began to change when he reported from Kurdish territory in northern Iraq in the early 1990s, where George H.W. Bush was revered as a hero. “I found myself with Kurds who said, ‘If it wasn’t for Bush, we’d probably all be dead.’ And I thought, I’d better think about what that means.”

His opinions continued to change when he reported from the mid-’90s war in the former Yugoslavia and found that just as many liberals opposed committing American troops to intervene and depose Slobodan Milosevic as did conservatives. But among those arguing most strongly for intervention were people such as Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Secretary of Defense, and former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. “If someone had suggested to me that I had any relationship with them, I would have taken it as an insult,” he said. “But then I thought, ‘Good for them.’ By the time that was over, I decided that what I admired in people was a willingness to break with their own fiction, to generally call things by their right name and to see a point of principle when it came up.”

Like Berman, he sees the Iraq war as part of a larger war against totalitarianism, or the “open society vs. nihilism” as he puts it, and agrees that an antiwar position is in fact not a truly liberal one. “The problem, to me, is leftists who claim they’re not in favor of disturbing the status quo,” he said. “In fact, their position is reactionary – and they make excuses for the most savagely reactionary movement on the planet – Islamic extremism. There are a lot of liberals and left-wingers who would see Iraq go to hell if it would give Bush a hard time.”

For Hitchens, a confirmed atheist, the real war, the ongoing war, is ages older. “I think everything is a clash between secularism and religion – my original allegiance to the left was on this point,” he said. “You hear (the left) saying ‘Well, we mustn’t offend Muslims.’ Do they think the Muslims will return the compliment? Do they think the Muslims will recognize gay marriages? Yes, actually they do. Then we get to the dirty secret that they refuse to admit – that religion is a lousy way to run a country. That you can’t run a country out of a holy book. This is not a new idea – this is what Thomas Jefferson said.”

Not surprisingly, his combativeness has served to alienate him from some of his former admirers. He does not feel the need to be polite in print to liberals, or even to liberal hawks, which, after all the half-hearted post-WMD self-flagellation and warm forgiveness being handed around lately, can be as refreshing as Friedman’s ambivalence. He has been involved in public disputes with, in addition to Gore Vidal, Fred Kaplan, Oliver Stone, and Studs Terkel, to name a few. But for Hitchens, combat, intellectual and real, is vital.

“There’s nothing like a good war to bring on social and political revolution,” he said. “Of course, you have to be careful which wars you get involved with. I’m not against war. War is a natural human condition. The question is who is going to be the intelligent winner.”

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