Saturday, April 30, 2005
Our Own Cool Hand Luke
By Charles Krauthammer Friday, April 29, 2005; Page A23
On Monday, April 25, the Public Interest passed away at the ripe old age -- for a quarterly journal of public policy -- of 40. It was a peaceful death, almost serene. Irving Kristol, co-founder and co-editor throughout its life, presided at the interment, a small dinner of past contributors and friends of the magazine.
He presided the same way that he presided over the magazine's life: with self-deprecation, sobriety and no fanfare. Magazines are not meant to live forever, said Kristol. New generations bring new ideas, and besides, the very idea of a quarterly magazine may no longer have a place in a time of such ferociously fast information flow. It had been a good run.
Kristol was being characteristically modest. For 40 years the Public Interest has been perhaps the finest scholarly magazine in America and, in relation to its small and exclusive circulation, surely the most influential. Heavy on empirical data, short on polemics and always lively, it challenged conventional wisdom on all the great domestic issues of our time: welfare, crime, dependency, automation, poverty, inequality, pornography and more.
It gathered around it a remarkable constellation of writers. The cover of the first issue, reprinted in the current and last issue, features articles by Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert Solow (a future Nobel Prize winner in economics), Jacques Barzun, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer. By the third issue they had added Milton Friedman, James Q. Wilson and Peter Drucker. For 40 years, an all-star team of social thinkers tilted at windmills and, unlike most brainy journals, knocked them down. The magazine's increasingly neoconservative bent over the years quietly shaped, and then came to dominate, political discourse in America.
This was due to many people but above all to its guiding editor. Kristol's influence and intellect and importance to the political history of our time are well known. The most remarkable and least known thing about him, however, is his temperament. He is a man of unique equanimity. His preternaturally even temperament betrays not a hint of angst, bitterness or anguish. He is not a happy warrior, just a calm and confident one; not Hubert Humphrey, but Cool Hand Luke.
This makes him unusual among conservatives, because conservatives tend to believe that the world is going to hell, and that tends to make them grumpy. But not Kristol. Both on the field of battle and off, he always retains a serenity and grace that express themselves in a courtliness and a quiet (yet devastating) humor.
His longtime friend and co-editor, Glazer, once wrote a piece about Kristol called "A Man Without Footnotes." I call him a man without rancor. I can think of only one other conservative with such an exceptional temperament: Ronald Reagan. Reagan was truly that political oxymoron, a conservative optimist. But most critics thought he was an optimist because he just did not know better -- James Baker had not briefed him on just how bad things were. Kristol knows how bad things can be, but he never -- never -- descends into despair or recrimination. When everyone else is headed for the bunkers, he keeps his head, his goodwill and his humor.
The main difference from Reagan is that Kristol is not an optimist. He does not believe in the onward and upward ascent of the human spirit. But he does believe that there is enough good spirit in ordinary human nature to get us to where we have to go anyway, as long as the illusions and delusions of the intellectuals are plainly exposed and avoided.
That is what he did not only in his enormously influential essays on everything from the Cold War to censorship, from supply-side economics to religion, but also as founder and editor of the Public Interest and, later, its foreign policy counterpart, the National Interest. His magazines cultivated not only new ideas but also an entire generation of editors, writers and scholars.
Which is why Kristol has earned, often from unfriendly sources, the title of godfather of neoconservatism. He has been compared to many people besides Don Corleone but, until Monday night, never to Ted Williams. My contribution to the gathering was to note that Williams hit a home run in his last time at bat, then quietly walked off the playing field. Very few leave the arena at the top of their game. That is what happened Monday night to the Public Interest -- with the equanimity and grace so characteristic of its longtime editor and founder.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
By Charles Krauthammer Friday, April 29, 2005; Page A23
On Monday, April 25, the Public Interest passed away at the ripe old age -- for a quarterly journal of public policy -- of 40. It was a peaceful death, almost serene. Irving Kristol, co-founder and co-editor throughout its life, presided at the interment, a small dinner of past contributors and friends of the magazine.
He presided the same way that he presided over the magazine's life: with self-deprecation, sobriety and no fanfare. Magazines are not meant to live forever, said Kristol. New generations bring new ideas, and besides, the very idea of a quarterly magazine may no longer have a place in a time of such ferociously fast information flow. It had been a good run.
Kristol was being characteristically modest. For 40 years the Public Interest has been perhaps the finest scholarly magazine in America and, in relation to its small and exclusive circulation, surely the most influential. Heavy on empirical data, short on polemics and always lively, it challenged conventional wisdom on all the great domestic issues of our time: welfare, crime, dependency, automation, poverty, inequality, pornography and more.
It gathered around it a remarkable constellation of writers. The cover of the first issue, reprinted in the current and last issue, features articles by Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert Solow (a future Nobel Prize winner in economics), Jacques Barzun, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer. By the third issue they had added Milton Friedman, James Q. Wilson and Peter Drucker. For 40 years, an all-star team of social thinkers tilted at windmills and, unlike most brainy journals, knocked them down. The magazine's increasingly neoconservative bent over the years quietly shaped, and then came to dominate, political discourse in America.
This was due to many people but above all to its guiding editor. Kristol's influence and intellect and importance to the political history of our time are well known. The most remarkable and least known thing about him, however, is his temperament. He is a man of unique equanimity. His preternaturally even temperament betrays not a hint of angst, bitterness or anguish. He is not a happy warrior, just a calm and confident one; not Hubert Humphrey, but Cool Hand Luke.
This makes him unusual among conservatives, because conservatives tend to believe that the world is going to hell, and that tends to make them grumpy. But not Kristol. Both on the field of battle and off, he always retains a serenity and grace that express themselves in a courtliness and a quiet (yet devastating) humor.
His longtime friend and co-editor, Glazer, once wrote a piece about Kristol called "A Man Without Footnotes." I call him a man without rancor. I can think of only one other conservative with such an exceptional temperament: Ronald Reagan. Reagan was truly that political oxymoron, a conservative optimist. But most critics thought he was an optimist because he just did not know better -- James Baker had not briefed him on just how bad things were. Kristol knows how bad things can be, but he never -- never -- descends into despair or recrimination. When everyone else is headed for the bunkers, he keeps his head, his goodwill and his humor.
The main difference from Reagan is that Kristol is not an optimist. He does not believe in the onward and upward ascent of the human spirit. But he does believe that there is enough good spirit in ordinary human nature to get us to where we have to go anyway, as long as the illusions and delusions of the intellectuals are plainly exposed and avoided.
That is what he did not only in his enormously influential essays on everything from the Cold War to censorship, from supply-side economics to religion, but also as founder and editor of the Public Interest and, later, its foreign policy counterpart, the National Interest. His magazines cultivated not only new ideas but also an entire generation of editors, writers and scholars.
Which is why Kristol has earned, often from unfriendly sources, the title of godfather of neoconservatism. He has been compared to many people besides Don Corleone but, until Monday night, never to Ted Williams. My contribution to the gathering was to note that Williams hit a home run in his last time at bat, then quietly walked off the playing field. Very few leave the arena at the top of their game. That is what happened Monday night to the Public Interest -- with the equanimity and grace so characteristic of its longtime editor and founder.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Mourning Mother Russia
By DAVID BROOKS
Vladimir Putin gave a bizarre speech this week in which he described the fall of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" and said that an "epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself."
The sad thing is he is half right.
Most of us are grateful for the fall of communism, but the phrase "epidemic of collapse" is not a bad description of what Russian society is suffering through right now. You can measure that collapse most broadly in the country's phenomenal population decline. According to U.N. projections, Russia's population will plummet from about 146 million in 2000 to about 104 million in 2050. Russia will go from being the 6th-most-populous country in the world to being the 17th.
That population decline has a number of causes. The first is the crisis in the Russian family and the decline in fertility rates. Between 1981 and 2001, marriage rates in Russia dropped by a third, and divorce rates rose by a third, according to Russian government estimates. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out recently in one of the last issues of The Public Interest, Russia now has three divorces for every four marriages, an astounding rate of family breakups.
As the Soviet regime disintegrated, Russian fertility rates fell through the floor, from 2.19 births per woman in 1986-87 to 1.17 in 1999. Birth rates have now recovered somewhat, but they are not even close to replacement levels. According to Eberstadt, Russia currently has about 160 deaths for every 100 births.
The more shocking reason Russia's population is declining is that people are dying younger. Russians are now much less healthy than their grandparents were in 1960. In the past three decades, Russian mortality rates have risen by 40 percent. Russian life expectancies now approximate those in Bangladesh and are below India's.
The health care system is in shambles. The risk of suffering a violent death is nine times as high for Russian men, compared with men in Israel. There's an explosion of heart attacks and strokes, thanks to smoking, increased vodka consumption and other ruinous lifestyle choices. The H.I.V./AIDS epidemic hasn't even been fully factored into the official statistics. According to Russian statistics, a 20-year-old man in 2000 had only a 46 percent chance of reaching age 65. (American 20-year-olds had about an 80 percent chance.)
What we are seeing, in short, is a country with nuclear weapons that is enduring a slow-motion version of the medieval Black Death. Perhaps we should be thankful that the political and economic situation there isn't worse than it is.
For, indeed, the paradox of Russia is that as life has become miserable in many ways, the economy has grown at an impressive clip. We can look back on this and begin to see a pattern that might be called Post-Totalitarian Stress Syndrome.
When totalitarian regimes take control of a country, they destroy the bonds of civic trust and the normal patterns of social cohesion. They rule by fear, and public life becomes brutish. They pervert private and public morality.
When those totalitarian regimes fall, different parts of society recover at different rates. Some enterprising people take advantage of economic recovery, and the result of their efforts is economic growth.
But private morality, the habits of self-control and the social fabric take a lot longer to recover. So you wind up with nations in which high growth rates and lingering military power mask profound social chaos.
This is what we're seeing in Russia. It's probably what we would be seeing in Iraq even if the insurgency were under control. And most frighteningly, it could be what we will be seeing in China for decades to come.
On the surface, China looks much more impressive than Russia. But this is a country that will be living with the consequences of totalitarianism for some time. Thanks to the one-child policy, there will be hundreds of millions of elderly people without families to support them. Thanks to that same policy, and the cultural predilection for boys, there will be tens of millions of surplus single men floating around with no marital prospects, no civilizing influences, nothing to prevent them from assembling into violent criminal bands.
At some point the power-hungry find a way to exploit social misery. At some point internal social chaos has international consequences. Fasten your seat belts. We could be in for a bumpy ride.
By DAVID BROOKS
Vladimir Putin gave a bizarre speech this week in which he described the fall of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" and said that an "epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself."
The sad thing is he is half right.
Most of us are grateful for the fall of communism, but the phrase "epidemic of collapse" is not a bad description of what Russian society is suffering through right now. You can measure that collapse most broadly in the country's phenomenal population decline. According to U.N. projections, Russia's population will plummet from about 146 million in 2000 to about 104 million in 2050. Russia will go from being the 6th-most-populous country in the world to being the 17th.
That population decline has a number of causes. The first is the crisis in the Russian family and the decline in fertility rates. Between 1981 and 2001, marriage rates in Russia dropped by a third, and divorce rates rose by a third, according to Russian government estimates. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out recently in one of the last issues of The Public Interest, Russia now has three divorces for every four marriages, an astounding rate of family breakups.
As the Soviet regime disintegrated, Russian fertility rates fell through the floor, from 2.19 births per woman in 1986-87 to 1.17 in 1999. Birth rates have now recovered somewhat, but they are not even close to replacement levels. According to Eberstadt, Russia currently has about 160 deaths for every 100 births.
The more shocking reason Russia's population is declining is that people are dying younger. Russians are now much less healthy than their grandparents were in 1960. In the past three decades, Russian mortality rates have risen by 40 percent. Russian life expectancies now approximate those in Bangladesh and are below India's.
The health care system is in shambles. The risk of suffering a violent death is nine times as high for Russian men, compared with men in Israel. There's an explosion of heart attacks and strokes, thanks to smoking, increased vodka consumption and other ruinous lifestyle choices. The H.I.V./AIDS epidemic hasn't even been fully factored into the official statistics. According to Russian statistics, a 20-year-old man in 2000 had only a 46 percent chance of reaching age 65. (American 20-year-olds had about an 80 percent chance.)
What we are seeing, in short, is a country with nuclear weapons that is enduring a slow-motion version of the medieval Black Death. Perhaps we should be thankful that the political and economic situation there isn't worse than it is.
For, indeed, the paradox of Russia is that as life has become miserable in many ways, the economy has grown at an impressive clip. We can look back on this and begin to see a pattern that might be called Post-Totalitarian Stress Syndrome.
When totalitarian regimes take control of a country, they destroy the bonds of civic trust and the normal patterns of social cohesion. They rule by fear, and public life becomes brutish. They pervert private and public morality.
When those totalitarian regimes fall, different parts of society recover at different rates. Some enterprising people take advantage of economic recovery, and the result of their efforts is economic growth.
But private morality, the habits of self-control and the social fabric take a lot longer to recover. So you wind up with nations in which high growth rates and lingering military power mask profound social chaos.
This is what we're seeing in Russia. It's probably what we would be seeing in Iraq even if the insurgency were under control. And most frighteningly, it could be what we will be seeing in China for decades to come.
On the surface, China looks much more impressive than Russia. But this is a country that will be living with the consequences of totalitarianism for some time. Thanks to the one-child policy, there will be hundreds of millions of elderly people without families to support them. Thanks to that same policy, and the cultural predilection for boys, there will be tens of millions of surplus single men floating around with no marital prospects, no civilizing influences, nothing to prevent them from assembling into violent criminal bands.
At some point the power-hungry find a way to exploit social misery. At some point internal social chaos has international consequences. Fasten your seat belts. We could be in for a bumpy ride.
Iraq's Assembly Overwhelmingly Approves New Government
By ROBERT F. WORTH and TERENCE NEILAN
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 28 - Against a background of applause and praise, Iraq's National Assembly overwhelmingly approved a list of cabinet officials today, bringing a multiethnic government into power.
Twenty-seven ministers and five acting officials gained approval from 180 members of the 185 who were present in the 275-member Parliament, ending a three-month political stalemate that has appeared to be fueling violence.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari presented the cabinet, which includes members of the main Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions. Most of the positions went to Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population. Six women will share the administration of seven ministries.
Dr. Jaafari, a Shiite, will be acting defense minister, a position that was intended to go to a Sunni Arab. Disputes remain over two deputy prime minister positions and the defense, oil, electricity, industry and human rights ministries.
The acting oil minister will be Ahmad Chalabi, a Shiite once close to the Pentagon. He will also be one of four deputy prime ministers. The Interior Ministry, a key security position, went to a Shiite, Bayan Jabbor.
A Kurdish official and former vice president, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, will be another deputy prime minister and acting electricity minister.
Parliament's approval is a historic moment for Iraq's Shiites, who were brutally suppressed by Saddam Hussein's government.
It also signifies a personal triumph for Dr. Jaafari, who was named prime minister on April 7 but has since faced an effort by some members of the National Assembly to force him out. Some Kurdish members were deliberately prolonging negotiations, Shiite officials have said, in an effort to run out the clock on Dr. Jaafari, who would have automatically lost his position if a new government were not formed by May 7.
Shiite leaders rejected Dr. Jaafari's initial choices for a Sunni deputy prime minister and defense minister because of suspicions they had ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which repressed Iraqi's Shiites and Kurds.
The approval came after millions of Iraqis risked their lives to vote in national elections on Jan. 20. Since then, much of the public confidence built up by the elections has been lost, with Iraq's leaders mired in bitter struggles over policy and power-sharing that are likely to persist, in some form, even after the establishment of a new government.
The confirmation also followed closely on the heels of personal appeals to Shiite and Kurdish leaders by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who warned that the continuing political deadlock could be hampering Iraq's ability to respond to a recent increase in insurgent attacks.
An announcement that agreement on the cabinet had been reached - although no names were made available - was made on Wednesday by Dr. Jaafari from the marble steps outside his official residence, in a phalanx of fellow Shiite leaders and security guards in dark suits and sunglasses. President Jalal Talabani was not present, nor were his deputies.
"I recognize that the wait has been long, and that tragedies have taken place, both through violence and through sabotage," Dr. Jaafari said during a 10-minute speech. "We recognize that the level of services is poor, and that we are in a race against time to form a government and establish security."
Speaking in a soft, somber voice, he described the main challenges as security, corruption and rebuilding Iraq's shattered infrastructure.
He also noted that the government must help guide the writing of a new constitution. That document is to be completed in draft form by Aug. 15 - a deadline that some assembly members say may be impossible in light of the delay in forming a cabinet.
Dr. Jaafari's speech, widely broadcast on Arabic satellite television, drew an ambivalent response from some Iraqis, who seemed pleased at the apparent formation of a government after so many delays but baffled by his refusal to provide more details.
Others said they were surprised and concerned about the apparent absence of Mr. Allawi, the departing prime minister, whose party had been expected to take part in the government until just days ago. His party insisted on four cabinet positions and a deputy prime ministerial post, and when members of the Shiite alliance refused to grant that much, Dr. Allawi chose to stay out of government, members of his party have said.
In the past week another problem emerged, as Shiite and Kurdish leaders struggled over which Sunni Arabs to appoint to the cabinet. The Sunnis largely boycotted the January elections, and Shiite and Kurdish leaders agreed early to include six Sunnis in an effort to create a national unity government that might lure some disaffected Sunnis back into politics.
But the lack of Sunni political unity has complicated that effort, said Laith Kubba, an aide to Dr. Jaafari. "Whenever you pick one person, someone else says, 'They don't represent us,' " Dr. Kubba said.
Mr. Chalabi has led a broader effort to oust former Baathists from the government. That set him at odds with Dr. Allawi, who rehired a number of veteran military officers to guide Iraq's fledgling security forces last year.
Robert F. Worth reported from Baghdad for this article, and Terence Neilan contributed reporting from New York.
By ROBERT F. WORTH and TERENCE NEILAN
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 28 - Against a background of applause and praise, Iraq's National Assembly overwhelmingly approved a list of cabinet officials today, bringing a multiethnic government into power.
Twenty-seven ministers and five acting officials gained approval from 180 members of the 185 who were present in the 275-member Parliament, ending a three-month political stalemate that has appeared to be fueling violence.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari presented the cabinet, which includes members of the main Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions. Most of the positions went to Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population. Six women will share the administration of seven ministries.
Dr. Jaafari, a Shiite, will be acting defense minister, a position that was intended to go to a Sunni Arab. Disputes remain over two deputy prime minister positions and the defense, oil, electricity, industry and human rights ministries.
The acting oil minister will be Ahmad Chalabi, a Shiite once close to the Pentagon. He will also be one of four deputy prime ministers. The Interior Ministry, a key security position, went to a Shiite, Bayan Jabbor.
A Kurdish official and former vice president, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, will be another deputy prime minister and acting electricity minister.
Parliament's approval is a historic moment for Iraq's Shiites, who were brutally suppressed by Saddam Hussein's government.
It also signifies a personal triumph for Dr. Jaafari, who was named prime minister on April 7 but has since faced an effort by some members of the National Assembly to force him out. Some Kurdish members were deliberately prolonging negotiations, Shiite officials have said, in an effort to run out the clock on Dr. Jaafari, who would have automatically lost his position if a new government were not formed by May 7.
Shiite leaders rejected Dr. Jaafari's initial choices for a Sunni deputy prime minister and defense minister because of suspicions they had ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which repressed Iraqi's Shiites and Kurds.
The approval came after millions of Iraqis risked their lives to vote in national elections on Jan. 20. Since then, much of the public confidence built up by the elections has been lost, with Iraq's leaders mired in bitter struggles over policy and power-sharing that are likely to persist, in some form, even after the establishment of a new government.
The confirmation also followed closely on the heels of personal appeals to Shiite and Kurdish leaders by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who warned that the continuing political deadlock could be hampering Iraq's ability to respond to a recent increase in insurgent attacks.
An announcement that agreement on the cabinet had been reached - although no names were made available - was made on Wednesday by Dr. Jaafari from the marble steps outside his official residence, in a phalanx of fellow Shiite leaders and security guards in dark suits and sunglasses. President Jalal Talabani was not present, nor were his deputies.
"I recognize that the wait has been long, and that tragedies have taken place, both through violence and through sabotage," Dr. Jaafari said during a 10-minute speech. "We recognize that the level of services is poor, and that we are in a race against time to form a government and establish security."
Speaking in a soft, somber voice, he described the main challenges as security, corruption and rebuilding Iraq's shattered infrastructure.
He also noted that the government must help guide the writing of a new constitution. That document is to be completed in draft form by Aug. 15 - a deadline that some assembly members say may be impossible in light of the delay in forming a cabinet.
Dr. Jaafari's speech, widely broadcast on Arabic satellite television, drew an ambivalent response from some Iraqis, who seemed pleased at the apparent formation of a government after so many delays but baffled by his refusal to provide more details.
Others said they were surprised and concerned about the apparent absence of Mr. Allawi, the departing prime minister, whose party had been expected to take part in the government until just days ago. His party insisted on four cabinet positions and a deputy prime ministerial post, and when members of the Shiite alliance refused to grant that much, Dr. Allawi chose to stay out of government, members of his party have said.
In the past week another problem emerged, as Shiite and Kurdish leaders struggled over which Sunni Arabs to appoint to the cabinet. The Sunnis largely boycotted the January elections, and Shiite and Kurdish leaders agreed early to include six Sunnis in an effort to create a national unity government that might lure some disaffected Sunnis back into politics.
But the lack of Sunni political unity has complicated that effort, said Laith Kubba, an aide to Dr. Jaafari. "Whenever you pick one person, someone else says, 'They don't represent us,' " Dr. Kubba said.
Mr. Chalabi has led a broader effort to oust former Baathists from the government. That set him at odds with Dr. Allawi, who rehired a number of veteran military officers to guide Iraq's fledgling security forces last year.
Robert F. Worth reported from Baghdad for this article, and Terence Neilan contributed reporting from New York.
