In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Awful.

I'm sorry, I can't pull my punches: the selection for the design for what will be built in place of the old WTC is just awful.

Let's start with the minor points. The design is incomprehensible. I defy anyone to make sense of the mess of jagged sight-lines, oddly-shaped buildings and crumpled abstractions that are supposed to be a unified concept for a commercial nexus a la Rockerfeller Center. The 1776-foot-high tower is tall, which is good, but architecturally unrelated to the city, which is bad; it won't blend nicely into the skyline but will stick out from it. Plus it's basically ornamental and so of minimal symbolic value. It's better than a giant radio tower, and less obtrusive than most of the other tower designs, that's the most that I'll concede. His other buildings are clunky and ugly and without style. The slanting lines of their glass cladding will make everyone dizzy. Nothing in the design is human-scale or makes reference to the human form. The whole design is fully as inhuman and Corbusian as the old WTC and without any of the old towers' simplicity, and occasional elegance. The sunken plaza will be cut off from the street, and hence will break up traffic and make the whole area less functional. The buildings in the plaza are mammoth sculptural hunks of twisted glass and metal, not buildings - and calling them sculptural is quite generous of me, because unlike sculpture they have no elegance of form. This is a monument to vanity and incompetence: no one visiting lower Manhattan will be able to escape the presence of the architect, and no one will be able to make themselves like it.

So: it's an utter failure as architecture and urban planning. Those are, as I said, the minor points.

Now for the major point: the symbolism. It is crushingly defeatist. The open sore of Ground Zero will never be repaired. A pit will be sunk forever in the heart of downtown, the retaining walls exposed forever to remind visitors that once, a great building was destroyed here. We will not be invited to contemplate the audacity and vision of the builders of the original WTC, the heroism of rescuers during the attack, and the determination of New Yorkers to rebuild their city, better than before. We will be ask to contemplate an unbridgeable chasm, a loss that can never be made whole. The message will be heard loud and clear around the world: terrorism works. We are a hemophiliac nation; cut us and we never stop bleeding. Blow up a city and we will never rebuild on the hallowed ground of your crime.

Daniel Libeskind is primarily known for his work in the Berlin Jewish Museum. I haven't been to that museum, but from pictures I know I don't like it. It's ugly and obvious, screaming the "point" it's out to make with its jagged lines and absences. The Jews contributed enormously to the very existence of German culture. The crime of the Nazis was not only that they murdered millions of Jews (that was, of course, their worst crime) but that they murdered Germany, the only Germany that actually existed, a Germany whose whole modern history was bound up with the history of the Jews. Libeskind's design says, loud and clear: this is not so. Jewish history in Germany is defined by our victimhood, by the fact that we were murdered. Now, I think it's a reasonable proposition to say that, after the Nazis, German history was essentially reduced to a crime, to the fact that the nation embraced mass-murder as the very definition of their culture. But why should the Jews make the same assessment of their own history?

But what I would resist in Berlin I am positively appalled by in New York. This is the greatest city in the world. The last thing we want to say to the world about 9-11 is that we'll never get over it. Yet that is precisely what Libeskind would communicate. "Life victorious" is Libeskind's own synopsis of his message, but the empty pit in the heart of downtown says quite the opposite. It says: the dead are never buried; their graves lie open ever, and we, the living, cannot stop staring at the open mouth of earth that yearns to swallow us as well.

This plan must be stopped. Not because, as the tabs would have it, the LMDC has secret plans to alter the design to suit the needs of developers, but because the idea at its heart is a betrayal of the city. Ugly buildings have been built before and will be built again, until we change our architecture schools; here, they would represent a missed opportunity. A bad urban plan would be a bigger mistake, disfiguring the area and doing lasting economic damage. But this design is organized entirely around its conception of a memorial, and that conception is an insult that every New Yorker should repudiate at full voice.

I would far rather we erected a tasteful plinth inscribed with the names of the murdered and the fallen heroes of the FDNY and NYPD, and be done with it.
posted by Noah at 4:03 PM

 
Andrew Sullivan thinks Bush "can't lose" at the UN, and only France can. Bush is going forward with war regardless, and is giving the UN a chance to remain relevant. Assuming we win the war fairly quickly, if we managed to bring a second resolution then we'll have strengthened our ally Blair at home and strengthened the UN as a vehicle for the Pax Americana. And if we didn't get a second resolution, then we'll have established the Pax Americana anyhow and removed the UN as a future obstacle.

Richard Holbrooke sees things rather differently. By going for a second resolution, Bush and Blair have actually undermined their case. They had sufficient warrant to attack Saddam without another resolution. Now, having gone for one, if they don't get one it will appear that the US and UK have flouted the will of the "international community." This will be much worse than Kossovo, where the UN didn't opine at all. It will effectively destroy the system of international security that the US built after WWII. We would have been far better going alone than setting ourselves up for rejection by the UN.

Of course, it's always possible that Saddam is so stupid that he effectively provokes the French into coming around. But assuming he isn't, I think Holbrooke - the only Democrat around with foreign policy credibility, and the token Democrat Bush should have hired (or tried to hire), rather than Underperformin' Norman Minetta - has the better argument. But I still think he's wrong, because he's missing the main point. The difference between Kossovo and Iraq isn't that in the first case we ignored the UN and in the second we sought its approval. It's that in the first case we had NATO firmly with us and in the second we don't.

What would have happened, after all, had America pushed ahead with war without trying to get the UN's blessing? How would it have helped our international position to have the French and Germans denouncing us, Tony Blair in serious domestic trouble (and possibly unable to support us as strongly), and so forth because of American unilateralism? What, precisely, is Richard Holbrooke's counterfactual that he would prefer to the Bush Administration's actual conduct of diplomacy since the passage of 1441 (which Holbrooke calls "masterful")?

Here's the only plausible scenario I can paint. Posit that France and Germany are not actually averse to war but are averse to declaring their support for war. Posit that they want to be immune from terrorist reprisals, bolster their commercial relationships with anti-American regimes, and avoid domestic unrest, but that they are not actively trying to "contain" America. Posit, in other words, that they are behaving like pussilanimous parasites on American power rather than actual adversaries. I think that's a plausible interpretation of their behavior.

By going to the UN, then, we put France (and Germany) in a bind. They want to allow the US to do what it wants while being able to publicly say that they are appalled. But we are making them declare their real feelings. We are making them pay a price: either explicitly side with the US, and take the consequences in terms of terrorist retaliation and popular anger, or explicitly oppose the US, and take the consequences in terms of American diplomatic retaliation, enervation of a UN Security Council that currently magnifies their influence beyond its natural dimensions, and weakening of their alliances with America. By saying, in effect, "you're either with us or with the terrorists" we have forced them to make a choice that they badly didn't want to make.

What's the cost for us? Well, if Holbrooke is right and having the UN is better than not having one, and operating in apparent defiance of it is worse for us diplomatically than operating outside of it, then there's a real cost for us if Franco-Germany don't ultimately back down. We'll beat Iraq, but at the cost of the Western alliance. Perhaps it would have been better to ignore the UN, let France and Germany be appalled at us for doing so, but let any breach with the US remain rhetorical.

But this presumes that keeping the Atlantic Alliance operational on paper is worth having it become worthless in practice. In Kossovo, NATO acted in concert against a dangerous dictator without UN approval because they knew the Russians would veto any action. We had no reason to expect cooperation from the Russians, and we didn't really change our relations by ignoring them. Similarly, we didn't test the UN, and arguably preserved the tissue of UN authority by ignoring that authority in practice. (This is presuming that preserving that tissue is a good thing, which is far from clear.) But we're supposedly allies with France and Germany. We have every reason to expect that they will work with us in good faith. If their objective was not to do so, then what is the point of the Atlantic Alliance? What is the advantage to the US government of letting France have their cake and eat it, too? Aren't we better served by making them choose, even if the result is that they choose unwisely?

I hope that's the considered view of the Administration, because if it isn't then they have indeed gotten us into a pickle. Because for France, the die is pretty much cast. This is not a bluff. Or, if it was a bluff, they are going to have to play the bluff out until they lose their shirts. Unless Saddam is so enormously stupid that he gives them a face-saving way to back America at the last minute, the French lose everything if they don't veto the resolution. They look like idiots, no one will believe anything they say ever again - everyone will join John Derbyshire in quoting Joan la Pucelle from Henry VI: Done like a Frenchman — turn and turn again. They can't do it. If this is a game of chicken, neither of us will swerve and our Hummer is going to flatten their Peugeot like a souffle in a rhino stampede (or something).

They say you should never back the other guy against the wall; always leave him a way out. Well, we haven't left the French any way out. Is that good for the US? I don't know. But if not, we shouldn't have put them where they are.
posted by Noah at 6:09 PM

 
It's now all but certain that the next Israeli government will have at its core a coalition of Likud, Shinui and the National Religious Party. Having predicted, in a fit of annoyance, that Shinui didn't want to join any government that would have anyone else as a member, I've been chewing on crow for a few weeks now. (But it was just a fit of annoyance, not a serious prediction - really! Whatever.) But I haven't resolved my quite conflicted feelings about Shinui - and even more so about the NRP.

Part of the conflict is my concern about Tommy Lapid's character. I think he's a grandstander, and I don't like grandstanders. But this bias has led me astray before. It took me a while to warm to Rudy Giuliani because of his obvious outsized ego and his career as a grandstanding prosecutor, but it's clear that Rudy was one of the greatest - possibly the greatest - mayor in New York history. So hopefully I'm similarly wrong about Lapid and I'll warm to him with time. Who knows; anything is possible.

But part of it cuts to the core of what Shinui is. Shinui could be a dramatic force for re-centering Israeli politics, putting the stake through the heart of its dying Socialist past and establishing a new centrist position on the relationship between Jewish law and the Jewish state that keeps Israel free, Jewish and well-integrated. But if it was these things, it would not devote such energy to denigrating entire segments of the population. It would have tried harder to get Meimad - a moderate and modern Orthodox splinter faction that left the NRP to join Labor - to join forces with them as a natural ally. Shinui and Meimad basically agree on religious matters, so it shouldn't have been so difficult, and the addition of a few skullcaps would have made it clear that Shinui was not out to secularize the State but to establish a new, moderate and more unifying religious consensus.

The negative view of Shinui is that it is fundamentally an ethnic and class protest party, the party of the middle- and upper-middle class Ashkenazim who work hard and party hard and don't want spongers taking their tax dollars or religious rules telling them what day of the week they can party. It's seen Shas rip the country apart playing an ethnic and sectarian card, and it wants to play the same card back at them at the same game. It's a game that will only continue to rip Israel apart.

A Likud-Shinui-NRP coalition is the best possible coalition for Israel at this time. But it can only be this if there is a real re-centering of the religious status quo. The haredim have got to serve the state like everyone else and they have got to enter the workforce. This is a fight, fundamentally, with UTJ, not with Sephardim, since overwhelmingly the haredi population in Israel is Ashkenazi. That's why it was so distressing to me to hear that Shinui was saying some weeks ago that they might be willing to sit with UTJ. In any event, the NRP should have no objection to these things, and they have no reason to go to bat for the haredim. The NRP is not supposed to be a sectarian party; it's not supposed to be the party of Orthodox Jews but the party of Judaism. The former is a narrow constituency; the latter pertains to the whole people.

Shas is an enormous problem. If a stable government can be formed without them, that would be a huge benefit for Israel. Shas has corrupted Israel's institutions and has created a fundamental instability in its politics and economy. But Shas' constituents mostly work, mostly serve in the army, mostly pay taxes - they are overwhelmingly not sponging haredim or welfare cases. They are traditionally-minded Sephardi Jews who think they've been treated lousily by the Ashkenazi establishment and want someone to speak for them and their values. That party used to be Likud. For the past 15 years, it's increasingly been Shas. Whoever is going to put a stake through Shas has to woo those voters.

That party should be the NRP. But I can't see how it will be under Effie Eitam's leadership. The NRP once stood for much more than the Land of Israel. It stood for the People of Israel and the State of Israel - for everything about Israel that could be understood Jewishly. They understood themselves to be the guardians of the Jewish character of the State and its people. They were, for that reason, a natural partner in any coalition government. The NRP's obsessive focus on settling the Land over the past thirty years has meant that they missed the enormous opportunity to influence the Jewish character of a whole generation of new Israelis, the children of the Sephardi immigration. Instead, these children - and their children - have been raised by the Lithuanian yeshivot. The end result is that a group of people who support the state, and serve it, and who have mostly moderate religious views have increasingly supported a party dedicated to fundamentalism, the negation of the state and the exemption of Ashkenazi yeshivah students from service.

If Shinui and the NRP ultimately agree that this is all about keeping Shas out and about controlling the budget, I worry that they will fail to drive a stake through Shas, but will invigorate it in opposition. My worries about Effie Eitam's character eclipse any concerns I have about Tommy Lapid's. Eitam is taking the NRP in exactly the wrong direction, trying to turn it into a far-right triumphalist party that wants Jewish law enforced as the law of the land and the entirety of the Land of Israel defended under all circumstances. Eitam's party has historically been far more moderate than he is, and if the NRP is ever to manifest its true strength - based on the number of non-haredi Orthodox Jews in Israel, and the number of traditionally observant Sephardim, it's an easy call that the NRP should be more than twice its current size if it were doing its job right - the NRP has got to move towards the center of where their constituency is. The NRP, not Shas, is Likud's natural partner, but it can only become that if it becomes again the guardian of the Jewish character of the State as a whole, and the people as a whole, and not the guardian of the interests of one group of fervent believers.

My worry is that the NRP will extract concessions that preserve the letter of the law on Jewish matters, thus satisfying the ultra-Orthodox who don't vote for the NRP anyway, but vitiate its spirit, and institutionalize secular contempt for religious norms. And I worry that Shinui will content itself with a long-term tug-of-war with Shas over funds rather than do something about the appalling state of education for Sephardi kids that has driven the growth of Shas schools - just to pick an example. I think that ultimately a fight over nothing but money is a losing battle, for Shinui, Israel and Judaism. It does no one any good to institutionalize a break between the secular and religious populations; what's needed is to integrate them. If Lapid and Eitam push things in that direction, I will applaud their leadership. I'm worried, in spite of many positive signs, that this is not what's coming.

Having written the above, I just read the following piece in the Jerusalem Post that makes many of the same points more clearly and succinctly.
posted by Noah at 1:41 PM

 
I hate to say this, but I'm falling off the wagon with respect to Ahmad Chalabi. I guess I'm showing the extent of my realist as opposed to neo-con colors.

Chalabi has been a hero of the neo-con Mideast cause for a decade now, having led the Iraqi National Congress for years in the wilderness. His cause is supposed to be part of the moral case for war, and the liberation of the Iraqi people is supposed to culminate in his installation as a freely elected President of a new Iraqi Republic (or a strong Prime Minister of a restored Iraqi monarchy, or something).

But, having finally paid attention to his public statements, Chalabi sounds . . . well . . . just as naive as his State Department critics have made him out to be.

He babbles on about the wonderful ethnic and religious diversity of the Iraqi people. He claims that democracy is natural to them, that this diversity in fact makes them an ideal laboratory for Arab democracy (which is, in fact, the opposite of the truth - take a look at Lebanon if you want proof). He is the only significant factor in the opposition with essentially no armed forces under his control, yet he confidently claims to lead all the factions and to have brought them to some kind of consensus. He sounds like a saloniste liberal, not like a symbol of his people. The contrast to the heir to the Shah's throne, and how he comes off, is particularly instructive in this regard. Phalavi speaks from a position of natural authority, even though he has no power, and he can speak as the symbol of a nation. When he talks about democracy and a vision for Iran, his words have some weight. One can imagine him as a Juan Carlos of a future democratic Iran. Chalabi is, so far as I can tell, speaking for Chalabi. And I have a hard time believing that his people will treat him as their natural leader. Among other thigns, he has not, like Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa, suffered along with his people under oppression.

Amir Taheri thinks it would be a serious betrayal to install a military government for 2 years in Iraq. He identified several reasons not to do this: it would mean the temporary "eclipse" of the Iraqi state and exacerbate border disputes with its neighbors; it would mean either disenfranchising the Kurds or institutionalizing their independence from central authority; it would mean American arbitration among Iraq's factions over how to share oil wealth and rebuild the country; and it would be a betrayal of the Iraqi opponents of the regime.

None of these arguments are persuasive. Iraq's border disputes will be no more exacerbated by an American military government than by an Iraqi Congress government. Would the Turks or Iranians be more likely to make a move against an American general or Ahmad Chalabi? To ask the question is to answer it. As for the Kurds: does Taheri really think Afghanistan is a good model for Iraq? Does he think Chalabi will do a better job of keeping the Kurds in Iraq and subject to central authority? Everyone's talking about a federal structure for a post-war Iraq, with a Catalan-scale autonomy for the Kurds in the North. Why is that more achievable without an American military government? Taheri doesn't say. The same applies to the economic questions; does Taheri really think that an American military governor will do a worse job keeping factions from fighting each other over this stuff than Chalabi will? Because that's what it comes down to.

And here's the worst part that Taheri and Chalabi try not to acknowledge: Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein is overwhelmingly concentrated among ethnic and religious minorities that are themselves geographically concentrated. The Arab Sunni opposition is overwhelmingly in exile. Taheri points out that there's a lot more opposition to Saddam than there was to Hitler or Tojo. But there's a good reason for this: Germany and Japan were nations. Their citizens were patriots, mostly, who did not want to see their country defeated. Iraq is not a nation. The opposition is not, by and large, a patriotic opposition like Poland's Solidarity or the French Resistance. Taheri says that there is a notion of Iraqi statehood and even nationhood. Maybe there is among the exiles. Is there one in the Kurdish north? In the Shiite south? Is there even an agreement between the exiles and those who have suffered under Saddam about what Iraq is?

Moreover, in Japan, Germany and Italy - as well as in post-Communist Eastern Europe - a significant percentage of the bureaucracy never really passed from the hands who once served the totalitarians. By contrast, Taheri and Chalabi both assume that de-Baathification means removing everyone associated with Saddam's regime from the levers of power. Installing Chalabi means not just decapitating the existing Baath party state but driving a huge number of people out of power and installing a bunch of exiles who will be immediately resented by the whole population. Meanwhile, the ethnic and religious factions will be overwhelmingly concerned with getting more for their own tribes, not with forging an Iraqi nation. It's a recipe for disaster.

The only way I can imagine keeping the country together is to have a strong central authority that everyone recognizes it is unwise to challenge. That's either another Saddam - that would really be a betrayal - or an American military governor. Then, over a couple of years, you structure an autonomy arrangement for the Kurds, work out a Constitution, maybe bring back a Hashemite figurehead, and hand the majority of power to Iraqi civilian authorities.

I think that's an optimistic case. The notion that we could simply "liberate" Iraq and leave them largely to their own devices as soon as Baghdad is taken - apart from lots of aid, of course - strikes me as simply bizarre. And the notion of Chalabi demanding that the Americans - upon whom he is entirely dependent for any hope of rescue for his people - do this or that or not do this or that strikes me as more arrogant than DeGaul, and with far less justification. Baghdad will not be liberated by the Iraqis. That's the key fact. The exiles are in no position to demand anything. If they are truly patriots, they will serve an American military government and prepare the country for transition to civilian rule, not make demands for power before an American bullet has been fired in their people's defense.
posted by Noah at 5:12 PM

 
Mickey Kaus thoroughly trashes Lawrence Kaplan for trying to silence critics who attack Bush's Iraq policy by pointing out the strong pro-Israel sympathies of those who most vigorously support the war.

I think they both have a point. I don't think pointing out prominent right-wing Jewish support for the Iraq war is an argument, any more than pointing out, say, Polish support for the Cold War was an argument. Unless you already distrust Jews (or Poles), all you've done is point out a fact, not make an argument. An argument would be: war is against America's interests. Bush is nonetheless leading us to war because of personal or political factors that act against the national interest: either his personal relationships with certain right-wing Jews or his need for the political support of right-wing Jews. (Or he's just an idiot being manipulated by wily right-wing Jews.) Phrased that way, the argument is clearly dubious. Unless you really believe Bush is an idiot and easily manipulated, you have to buy the proposition that it's politically necessary for him to be pushing war to placate the Jews. And that's just a ludicrous proposition on its face; if Bush gets a significant number of Jewish supporters in the next election, he'll win in a landslide, and he raised plenty of cash last time with minimal Jewish support. Jewish support is a bonus for him, not a necessity. The strongest supporters of Israel among voters Republicans do need to win are evangelical Christians, not Jews. As for the "personal" angle, Bush's family is very well-connected in the Arab world, from both the oil business and the world of diplomacy. Most Jews, particularly right-wing ones, have been frankly surprised - and pleasantly so - at how friendly this Administration has been to Israel and Israel's interests, given the low level of Jewish support for the Administration and the Administration's oil connections, friendship with the Saudis, etc. The notion that Jewish influence is driving Administration policy is just laughable when you look at facts like these.

Moreover, the argument that American policy is distorted by ethnic interest-group pandering is more dubious in the case of Israel than in the case of many other foreign policy areas. America's hard-line policy towards Cuba, and its soft-line policy on IRA terrorism, are at least partly driven by ethnic interest-group pandering, but these areas are tangential to core American national interests. Not irrelevant, of course. Cuba is an anti-American force in our backyard, while our anti-Cuban stance angers Latin American neighbors and our European and Canadian allies; meanwhile, the IRA cooperates with terrorist groups that target Americans - quite apart from the fact that the IRA targets a close American ally, Britain. There's at least a case to be made that both policies are at variance with American national interests. But neither comes close to the importance of the Middle East to American security. So even in the case of Democratic Administrations - who are far more influenced by Jews than Republicans, because Jews vote 75% or more for Democrats and Jewish fundraising is disproportionately for Democrats (and Democrats are proportionately more dependent on Jewish fundraising because they have a narrower fundraising base) - even in the case of Democratic Administrations it's not 100% plausible that sectarian Jewish concerns could override the national interest in any serious way. (Congress is a different story, because Congress can bloviate with impunity about foreign policy virtually without consequence.)

In any event, if you don't make an argument like the above, dubious as that argument is in the present case, what you're left with is not a reasoned position but a gut feeling. Mary McGrory now supports (sort of) war with Iraq not because she's convinced on the merits but because Powell favors it and she trusts Powell, not Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. Similarly, when, say, Robert Novak says this war is being fought against American interests but for Israel's interests, what he really means is that he doesn't trust Jewish neo-cons, for whatever reason, and not much else. So he doesn't have to think through the issues of national interest, just see where people he doesn't really trust end up and lean the other way. And if people he otherwise trusts line up with people he doesn't trust, he has a problem, and is tempted to turn to conspiracy theories.

So far I agree with Kaplan. But where I disagree, and think Kaus has a real point, is that it is far from obvious that the neo-cons - including of course the Jewish neo-cons - properly understand American interest and the way America should approach war, peace, and the international order. And because it isn't obvious, it has to be debated. And if their errors stem have something to do with their Jewishness, that's a legitimate argument. To repeat: this would be an argument for why, say, Paul Wolfowitz misunderstands American interest. It's not a sufficient argument to explain why Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and George Bush have come to agree with Paul Wolfowitz. There's no basis for them to be confused about America's interests, after all. Here's an analogy: for various reasons, well-outlined by Robert Kaplan in his book, The Arabists, the American State Department has long harbored a frankly fantastic view of the Middle East and has been afflicted with a particularly severe form of clientism. Bluntly, they are biased towards the official Arab side of things. So you can make a reasoned argument why the State Department habitually leans in a particular direction on Middle East matters, relative to the government as a whole. But this argument is insufficient explanation of why some Adminsitrations some of the time are more favorable towards this view and why others are more skeptical.

I've blogged before about neo-conservatism, what it is, how it differs from other strands of conservatism (and liberalism), and where specifically neo-cons - whom I generally agree with - go overboard. I do think some Jewish neo-cons take for granted an identity of interest between Israel and America that is implausible on its face. Our interests may be aligned some or even most of the time, and, specifically, we may have a compelling interest in the survival of Israel (as we do in the survival of, say, Taiwan; or as, during the Cold War, we had a compelling interest in preserving the integrity of free Berlin.) But this basic alignment does not mean that everything that serves Israel's interest serves American interests. Specifically, it doesn't mean that Israel's territorial ambitions - and I should point out that, as a matter of abstract justice, Israel has a pretty good case for its territorial claims in the West Bank and even in Gaza - are something America should support. Israelis all understand this. And I'm quite certain the Bush Administration understands this and that Paul Wolfowitz specifically understands this. (I sometimes wonder about Bill Kristol.) In the same way that American interests should drive our approach to the disputes in Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Taiwan, etc., they should drive our approach to the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.

In sum: the notion that American policy is "warped" by Jewish influence is highly dubious on its face. I suspect it is frequently either (a) based on animus towards Jews or (b) a more general argument against interest-groups of any kind, which I think amounts to an argument against democracy. (Think ethnically homogeneous societies don't have interest groups? Take a look at the paralysis of the Japanese political system, and think again.) Or it's jus not well thought-out. But the notion that specific officials or commentators are biased one way or another on Israel is not implausible on its face. That doesn't invalidate their views; it's just something you need to know when evaluating those views. The views themselves should stand or fall on the evidence; knowing their biases just tells you when you might want to be careful about looking for conflicting evidence they might be downplaying. I think the case that our effective alliance with Israel is strongly in American interests - and more so now than during the Cold War - is highly compelling. It doesn't help in making that case to pretend that questioning the value of that alliance is somehow "out of bounds." Specifically, it does no one any good to pretend that Israel's interests are by definition America's interests. They aren't. Israel is far more threatened than other important American allies, and that's reason enough to be solicitous of them and their interests. But that doesn't mean that we are in some way obliged to ensure that Israel gets some kind of "justice." There ain't no justice, not in foreign policy anyhow, and this is something the neo-cons should know, but occasionally forget.
posted by Noah at 7:25 PM

 
Well, this sounds like good news: NRP and Shinui are making kissy-noises. Unfortunately, it sounds like they are going to fail to inaugurate a form of civil marriage, and instead inaugurate a form of official shacking up. So the secular-religious divide is "bridged" by institutionalizing a radical difference in secular and religious mores: religious marry, secularists just register for mortgage benefits. But I guess I'll wait to hear more details before carping seriously. Meanwhile, it is indeed, no sarcasm, good news if these two parties can join together in Sharon's government. Likud-Shinui-NRP is a majority; Sharon doesn't need anyone else. Which means whatever guidelines emerge from these three may actually mean something.
posted by Noah at 7:48 PM

 
On the other hand, Schroeder might just be a weasel.
posted by Noah at 7:42 PM

 
I was arguing well before the current fracas with France that America should be opposing the growth of Europe because every nation that joins the EU will become a French satellite. We should have no objection if France and Germany want to unite into one country, any more than we did when Czechoslovakia decided to become two countries. But we should very strongly oppose a dynamic whereby all sorts of friendlies - like Poland - are made to understand that they *must* become French satellites if they are to be economically viable. An independent Poland is more valuable to us than a Poland advocating for us inside the EU. Ditto Britain. To that end, pace Mark Steyn's very insightful column, our interests and France's are not so much opposed. France wants Britain outside of the EU. So do we. Also Spain, Italy, Poland, Czechia - any country willing to be free of the EU is probably still a valuable ally, and one we want outside of the EU.

I don't think Steyn is right that Chirac is politically vulnerable. I think he's a classic Frenchman, and that the foreign policy he's following is classically French. Regardless of the outcome of the war in Iraq, France - not Chirac - is moving in the direction of not being an ally. They might be helpful on one issue but not on another. They are unlikely in the extreme to actually go to war with America. They are probably best compared to Russia: not really an ally, and certainly a rival, but a country useful to have a positive relationship with. Better than China. Nothing comparable to Britain, or Australia, or Poland, or even India or Turkey.

If there's a country at the crossroads, it's Germany. Before the recent election and the Iraq war, the Germans were moving in the direction of favoring a more democratic, federal EU modelled on Germany itself. This was at odds with a French vision of an EU as a confederation of states with a strong Presidency. In the former vision, populous Germany would be like California in America: the most powerful region, capable of politically swaying the Continent by sheer bulk. The EU would provide Germany with a way to escape the horror of German history without renouncing all claims to power and influence. In the latter, French vision, diplomatically dominant France would be the dominant power, as the strong French state projected itself into the EU Presidency and so held sway over the entire continent of Europe. This was the logical conclusion of DeGaul's original vision of the EU as an instrument of French national aggrandizement.

At the time these visions were first articulated, I argued that the German vision was not particularly threatening to America. If the EU became a democratic nation, it's not obvious to me that its interests would strongly diverge from America's; and if a settled political structure developed with popular authorization, then new states would know what they were joining (and would not join it if they cherished their independence). Well, since the elections and the Iraq war, Schroeder has thrown himself fully behind the French vision and effectively repudiated the historic post-war alliance with America. It's not 100% clear to me if this has made Schroeder less or more popular. His poll numbers stink - but they did so before he turned into an anti-American radical. I'm not sure the German people know what they want. For that matter, I don't think the Italians or the Spaniards know what they want. Italy and Spain have right-wing governments with an interest in supporting the U.S.; Germany has a left-wing government with an interest in opposing the U.S. If Spain had a Socialist government and Germany had a CDU government, their positions might be reversed.

I think it's important for America to get the message out to Germany that it is indeed at a crossroads. That the historic path laid out by Konrad Adenauer is in jeopardy, and the road back may be difficult. German identity as part of a united West is at risk. Those Germans who flinch from the horror of German history should fear the path they are heading down. How humiliating would it be, after all, to trade being an American ally for being a French poodle?
posted by Noah at 7:42 PM

 
Two good posts from Rich Lowry in The Corner today, the first about the perfidity of the French, and how it is more related to their ambition than to their weakness, and the second about multilateralism, why it is still a good thing, but how it should be based on the NATO model rather than the UN model. I think both posts are right-on. Unfortunately, they refute one another.

Remember the purpose of NATO: keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. Well, the Russians are down and the Germans are up, sort of, and the heartland of Euroland - France, Germany and the BeNeLux - wants America out. Whither NATO?

A defensive alliance, which is what NATO is, requires a common enemy, or at least a common objective. I've been arguing for some time that a successful strategy for collective security in Asia has got to involve the creation of a NATO-like structure for the Pacific, encompassing Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, hopefully Taiwan, maybe Thailand, one day Vietnam. Without such a structure, the dynamics of our bi-lateral alliances will become increasingly unstable, and that works to the benefit of China, whose central foreign policy goal is to drive America out of the Western Pacific. The crisis over North Korea is demonstrating in real-time just how bad our current architecture for collective security is. A NATO-like structure could deal much more persuasively with North Korea, could contain China, could deal with the potential future implosion of Indonesia, etc. far more so that our current system of bi-lateral alliances.

But what is happening instead is that NATO is collapsing, leaving our European relationships looking more like our Asian ones. Cast Britain as Australia, Turkey as Japan, and the European periphery as a collection of smaller Asian states and you'll see what I mean. (You can cast Germany as South Korea, I suppose. I'm not sure who that makes France. So sue me.) We've got strong relationships, based on interest and/or affinity, with a number of states. But we don't really have collective security, not anymore. So how can NATO be a model for a muscular multi-lateralism when NATO itself is falling apart?

The Administration's recent foreign policy bible - the one that caused such a stir about preemptive war and all that - was, in fact, over-the-top utopian in its multilateralism. The core assumption of the document was that the Great Powers have their fundamental interests in common, and hence can cooperate to manage problems from rogue states and non-state actors like terrorist groups. This assumption is wildly wrong. Not only do historically hostile Great Powers like China actively seek to weaken American power, but even putatively friendly and democratic powers like Franco-Germany see their interests as fundamentally conflicting with America's. This is a big problem - much bigger than the institutional fecklessness of the UN.
posted by Noah at 7:24 PM

 
Last week, we had a visitor to the office from the home office in Brussels, a lovely man whom we have worked with for years and whom we like very much. So of course at some point we took a break from business conversation to discuss the impending war. (To keep from violating the rule of decorum not to discuss religion or politics, we were nominally discussing the expected impact of war on the markets, and on our positions specifically.) Well, it turns out according to our visitor's unscientific survey of Americans he met on the plane over and so forth that nobody in this country supports the war. That's right: everyone he talked to told him things like "I sure hope Bush has more cards in his hand than he's shown, 'cause the case he's made so far is laughable" and so forth. He even heard heartfelt tributes to France, stalwart ally trying to keep us from doing something stupid.

As you'd expect, the results of his unscientific survey do not exactly accord with the results of my own unscientific survey. Which just goes to illustrate the degree to which they are unscientific. But what about the scientific surveys, the ones showing overwhelming opposition to the war around the world?

Well, here's a nice reality check from the Chicago Boyz blog (thanks to Instapundit for linking to it), reading deeper into recent British polling data. Some highlights of his findings:

* Supposedly, most Brits think that this war is about oil. (Which, in part, it is. One thing we're trying to avoid is a situation in the future where a nuclear-armed Saddam invades or Finlandizes his neighbors and winds up controlling much of the world's oil.) But in fact, it's not a majority, it's a plurality - of 28%. The other 72% of Brits think it's a war to depose Saddam (24%), to eliminate Saddam's WMD (23%) and to prevent another September 11th (20%). Sounds like most Brits aren't so cynical about American motivations as are BBC reporters.

* About half of those polled agree with the premise that, post-September 11th, we have to act preemptively against "terrorist groups or dangerous states" and a bit shy of half think that sending more weapons inspectors would be a "diversion and not a solution." I'll bet that's a lot more support for this war on Iraq than the one in 1991.

* More than half believe that Saddam has links to al-Qaeda, 72% think Saddam has WMD (in violation of his obligations and of the binding resolutions of the Security Council that call for "serious consequences" upon violation), 69% think Saddam is trying to build nukes (another violation, and a major premise in the case for preemptive war), nad a plurality (44%) think there's enough evidence to warrant the UN taking military action (31% don't know). A clear majority (73%) support war with UN approval (though 55% support war *only* with UN approval).

What's the right way to parse this? It sounds like the British public wants France to get in line and support the war so things can proceed under a UN mandate. An overwhelming majority thinks that Saddam is in violation of 1441. Significant pluralities think that war is justified. The public is clearly nervous about war, and wants to limit the scope of collateral damage from war. There's a good reason why President Bush went to the UN: *if* the UN supports war, then the diplomatic fallout from war will be minimized. If it comes down to a situation where war means the practical end of the UN, but sticking with the UN process means leaving Saddam alone, it sounds to me like the British public is conflicted.

That's very far from solid opposition to war. But it does mean that if war proceeds without UN approval, and the war goes poorly or terrorist reprisals hit London, and/or Blair gets little or nothing from Washington in exchange for his stalwart support, THEN Blair has a problem.
posted by Noah at 10:51 AM

 
John Derbyshire has written another one of his "list" columns again. Those are always fun. This time, he's got 10 things that "everyone knows" should happen, but that are impossible.

I could quibble with the list ("disenfranchise nonmilitary government employees," John? Who do you think you are, Robert Heinlein?), or praise it (John Derbyshire on the right and Jeffrey Rosen on the left seem to be the only folks grappling with the high and increasing cost - in money and freedom - of anti-discrimination law), but hey, wouldn't it be more fun to add my own ten items to his list? (Well, for me, anyhow.) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, John.

11. End bi-lingual education. Bi-lingual education is the only form of compulsory segregation extant. It is indefensible on pedagogic grounds. It is an astonishing waste of money. It is wildly unpopular, including among Hispanics. There is recent, dramatic and basically uncontested evidence that you can eliminate the program and achieve substantial improvement in education outcomes in a very short span of time. But every state and locality that tries to end the practice winds up in a drag-out, nasty fight, neither political party will take up the issue, and even after referenda pass to end the practice, it clings tenaciously to life through bureaucratic obstruction and outright flouting of the law. Why on earth is this so? Beats me. Check out English for the Children, Ron Unz's organization dedicated to ending bi-lingual ed, if you want the full lowdown on his heroic fight.

12. Prohibit the export of nuclear power plants. Why is Russia building Iran a nuclear power plant? Why was America building one for North Korea? For that matter, why is there a nuclear plant in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire? What are we all, crazy? Nukes and nuts don't mix. It should be possible for those nations capable of exporting such technology to band together and agree: this is insane, and we won't do it anymore. Yeah, I know, some countries need hard currency and will do almost anything to get it. How much hard currency does it take to rebuild Tokyo, or London, or Paris, or Frankfurt, or Moscow, or Manhattan? I mean, selling nuclear plants to loonies is . . . loonie. Let 'em burn coal.

13. End subsidies for higher education. We're all supposed to repeat ten times a day that education is the ticket to the middle class. I'll tell you the ticket to the middle class: training as a plumber, or a carpenter, or some other skilled trade. Do you know how much these people make? Do you know how few of the ground-level folks who work for contractors and the like are citizens? When we renovated our apartment, the folks working in it were from the Caribbean, from Ireland, from Central America. None had the accents of a native-born American. For a large number of people, college is a great big con, a detour away from figuring out how to make a life, or remedial primary education. The huge subsidies we dole out for higher education have created structural inflation, which in turn has turned an entire generation of Americans into debt slaves. Don't we all really know, deep down, it's time to stop the insanity?

14. Eliminate the District of Columbia. No, don't make it a state; just parcel it out to Maryland and/or Virginia. The original purposes for the creation of D.C. as a corpus separatum are no longer valid: we no longer need to compromise between Northern and Southern sections on the placement of the capital, and as the D.C. suburbs are economically dependent on government it's no longer valid to say that disenfranchising the capital's voters has kept the government from becoming an interest group in its own right. It would be ludicrous to make D.C. a state. So just chop it up. We can leave the Capitol, the White House, the monuments and such as a Federal entity. Give the rest to a governor with time and incentive to manage the city out of the mess it's become.

15. Ban Indian "gaming." Does anyone think putting casinos on Indian territory was a good idea? Did anyone vote for it? If not, why have these awful places proliferated around the country, to the point where my state (New York) is handing over a chunk of downtown Buffalo to an Indian tribe in order to allow for the building of a casino? Gambling is a parasitic industry that would not be profitable if there were not addicts, mild and serious, who cripple or ruin their lives to feed their habit. And Indian casinos are the worst; at least Las Vegas now has other "entertainments" around that produce some higher-quality jobs and economic development. Indian casinos are just takers. Why did we allow this to happen? Why are we, apparently, helpless to stop it?

16. End state lotteries, too. What on earth is the moral grounds for having the state bilk money out of idiots in this manner? State lotteries are probably the worst-odds gambling product on the market. They only exist because the state has banned competition. The advertising that supports the product is wildly misleading. We're corrupting our citizenry - and for what? So we can indulge in a little more government spending? Don't you feel a little bit dirty every time you see one of those Lotto ads? Doesn't everybody?

17. Legalize pot. Regardless of where you stand on the drug war as a whole, the war on pot is loopy, the absurdum to which the drug war can and has been reduced. I don't like pot and I think stoner "culture" is ridiculous at best. I am never going to buy hemp clothing, hemp oil, or heat my house with hemp. But having a law so widely flouted can't be good for the law's reputation. We all know this, don't we?

18. Reduce the size of the cabinet. Why does every President think it necessary to add new cabinet - or "cabinet-level" positions? Why do we still have departments of Commerce, Energy and Education? We should be able to make do with six cabinet positions: Justice, State, War (now would seem to be a good time to rename "Defense"), Interior, Treasury and Welfare (also an instructive name-change). No one treats "Veterans Affairs" as a serious cabinet position; why do we have to waste the time and money pretending to? The result of endless cabinet expansion is to force the government to create a second, less-visible layer of "real" controllers, whether it's the National Security Council to "really" run foreign policy or a Karl Rove type to "really" run a whole array of domestic policies. This can't be, ultimately, good for democracy, quite apart from the ludicrous duplication and expense. Who wants this mess we've got? Why, after successive Republican calls to eliminate this or that department, do they keep proliferating?

19. Treat Saudi Arabia like an enemy. Is this one even controversial anymore? No one thinks the Saudis are our friends. Why is there even a pretense? What possible benefit do we gain from continuing our relationship with the corrupt and murderous kingdom? We supposedly need them for their oil. Really? Don't they really need us far, far more than we need them? Quite apart from the fact that they need our military to defend them and our financial system to handle their money, who precisely would collapse first if, say, they were no longer permitted to export their oil? Say oil prices tripled overnight. That would be painful for us. But they have no other source of income. Why are we treating these people gently? Why are they not begging us not to dispossess them of all that they own?

20. Militarize space. We are told this would be a bad thing. Why? We depend on space for our economy to function and, increasingly, for our military to operate effectively. Does anyone seriously object to the "militarization" of the high seas by the U.S. Navy, or the British Navy before it? That militarization was an unalloyed good. Having a robust ability to project force to defend our satellites in orbit would be an unalloyed good. Having weapons in space that could shoot down missiles would be even better, as would having weapons in space that could be used against a terrestrial enemy. An space arms-race would either bankrupt our remaining enemies or provide the final impetus for humans to get beyond this planet and establish a permanent extra-terrestrial presence. Two more goods. Who's against this?

Anyone want to try another ten?
posted by Noah at 5:57 PM

 
Jonah Goldberg gets flack from Continentals for calling the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." I can't wait to see what term of art he (or Matt Groening) comes up with for the Belgians:

Chief Cpl. Rudy Christians, an impeccably coiffed military hairdresser, has been cutting soldiers' hair for 24 years, and he loves his work.

It's a full-time job, guaranteed until retirement, and until then, the 47-year-old has enough free time to pursue an amateur singing career featuring Elvis and Tom Jones numbers. When the military does send him on an occasional field exercise, he is amazed by the fellow soldiers lumbering around him. "All the people are so old," he says. . . .

Belgium . . . employs hundreds of military barbers, musicians and other personnel who aren't likely to be called into battle. Yet Belgium doesn't have the money to replace aging helicopters or conduct regular combat-training exercises. . . .

One reason Europe has so many soldiers is its strong military labor unions. Unheard of in the U.S. and Britain, these unions trace their history to the end of the 19th century, when disgruntled Dutch soldiers, unhappy about living conditions, banded together into a group called Ons Belang (Our Interests). Similar groups soon sprang up around Western Europe. In the 1970s, European military unions gained sweeping collective-bargaining rights, though they stay out of war-planning and deployment issues.

In Belgium, military unions are as powerful as anywhere on the Continent. On King Albert's birthday last June, a holiday for the Belgian military, unions deployed thousands of soldiers to Brussels to demand a raise in vacation pay. Soldiers chanted, drank beer and banged their aluminum mess bowls. "Show me the money," one officer shouted to a passing police van. The protest grew so rowdy that police cooled demonstrators off with a water cannon. But it was a success: An emergency session of the Belgian cabinet agreed to give soldiers -- already eligible for six weeks' annual vacation -- a raise in holiday benefits valued at about $500 each.

The quotes are from a Wall Street Journal article today (link will only work for subscribers, unfortunately).

The very *idea* of a country that depends for its defense on unionized hairdressers refusing to *plan* for the defense of its ally, Turkey (not that the hairdressers would actually be expected to *contribute* to that defense, mind you) is almost as humorous as the idea of a country that raped and pillaged the Congo in one of the most brutal chapters of European colonialism, and a country that collaborated fawningly with the Nazi occupier during World War II (a greater percentage of Belgian Jews were murdered by the Nazis than that of any other western European country except for the Netherlands - twice the percentage of French Jews) preparing to indict the Prime Minister of the democratic Jewish state for war crimes (alleged crimes that were fully investigated by Israeli authorities twenty years ago). And it's really funny when they turn out to be the same country.
posted by Noah at 2:02 PM

 
Yow! Michael Kelly isn't pulling any punches in his latest column, on German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.

The original Paul Berman essay from The New Republic, which forms the basis of Kelly's history of Fischer, is something I've been recommending to lefty friends since it came out, if only to make them think again about their reflex Popular Frontism. Berman is a lefty, but also a liberal - that is to say, he can be saved. He wrote a not-terribly-convincing book about the Generation of 1968 that tried to tie the heroes and martyrs of Prague Spring together with the Parisian, American and German radicals of the sort that Fischer ran with, an attempt to square his own personal circle. He wants to believe that there was something true and beautiful about the '68-ers and what they were trying to do, but doesn't deny their crimes. He wants to domesticate the '68 radicals not by lying about what they were but by showing that they've changed. He thinks that if he does this, he'll be able to redeem what was good about their motives, and redeem them personally. The impetus for the original piece on Fischer was to explain how this "former" radical had become a supporter of NATO and, specifically, the NATO war in Kossovo.

Fischer is different from most radicals who have gone legit in that he was a real radical - he was, by any reasonable definition of the term, part of a terrorist network. He wasn't just playing. Can such a man ever be redeemed? I don't know. In some societies, there is no choice. The Cultural Revolution in China touched just about everyone; if a counter-revolution had occurred there, and everyone who participated in the violence of that period were banned from positions of responsibility, the result would have been disaster. Does the Generation of 1968 pose a similar problem? On some level, Berman clearly thinks so. Even more: because he approves of their motives, he thinks it is morally necessary to redeem that generation's radicals. And the price of redemption, for him, is reconciliation with the moral value of "the system." He felt that Fischer had, to a great extent, proved his reconciliation by supporting the Kossovo war. Fischer had not become a neo-conservative like so many former radicals, but he had become, arguably, something like a Wilsonian: an advocate of international rules, supported by raw power (albeit collective power, not "unilateral" power), for the protection of the innocent and defenseless.

Is that enough to put a man's evil past behind him? I don't know. I know that I trust Fischer a whole lot more than Schroeder because Schroeder strikes me as an unreconstructed German, if you know what I mean. It's not just that Schroeder is so obviously self-serving; it's that he seems to have little consciousness of the weight of German history and its significance. There was a good piece in the Weekly Standard, I think, arguing that this is a typical problem on the German Left; they don't blame themselves for the Nazi period, so they are able to pursue what amounts to a nationalist agenda for Germany without worrying about echoes of the German past. Fischer, like the '68ers generally, seems to have been incorrectly reconstructed. He felt the weight of German history, but instead of turning to a Westernizing conservative orientation a la Adenauer turned to extreme radicalism and violence, becoming much of what he had set out to fight. Can such a man ever be trusted? Can he even be trusted if he came all the way over and became a neo-con? The paleos don't trust neo-cons partly because they think they are still Trotskyites under the skin, eager to spread their new revolution (democracy, not socialism) by force.

No one escapes their past. That's why our choices matter. The danger of accepting folks like Fischer into the corridors of power is that they begin to think that their "service" in the revolution is a credential rather than a blot. It's a danger worth running for the right person, but it is a reason to be vigilant. I, myself, think Fischer can be redeemed. I think he's one of the few leaders of the Greens who is not irredeemable, and the Greens are as good a proxy as any for what has emerged as the New-New Left. I vastly prefer him to Schroeder. But, to paraphrase the Misfit, it may be that he'll only be a good boy if it it'd be somebody there to shoot him every minute of his life.

Thanks to Instapundit and The Corner for the link to the Kelly column.
posted by Noah at 11:44 AM

 
Good editorial from the Jerusalem Post calling for Sharon to form a quick 61-seat coalition with Shinui and the National Religious Party. I agree pretty much wholeheartedly.

Look, I don't like Tommy Lapid, and I think Shinui is a house of cards that is going to collapse in the next election. Shas won 17 seats in the 1999 Knesset elections by pandering to its constituents' fears and exploiting a temporary political opening (the weakness of Likud under the atrocious leadership of Netanyahu). Shinui has won 15 seats due to similar temporary conditions: the utterly inept Labor leadership, the corruption scandals in Likud, and fury over the strength of Shas. It will not last. Israel does not have a 15-seat Thatcherite vote, and the specific issue of haredi draft-dodging cannot be resolved with the stroke of a pen.

But Shinui represents an important constituency, and much of their platform does need to be enacted. Israel does need to liberalize the economy. Israel does need to reform the religious status-quo. Israel does need to re-integrate the haredim into society, and end the current system where they are encouraged to be parasites on the state.

Sharon should announce his coalition guidelines. On the economy: liberalization. If Amir Peretz's Histadrut can't take it, Sharon will live without Am Echad. On religion: haredim will be drafted into "alternative service" on the home-front while plans are made to transition them into hesder-style student-soldier tracks designed in cooperation with their religious leaders. State support will be rapidly phased out for schools that do not meet an audit by the Education Ministry for, among other things, civics content. If UTJ and Shas can't take it, Sharon will live without them. On the matzav: no compromise on Israeli security, no tolerance for "freelance" establishment of settlement outposts, and no foreclosure of a Palestinian state as an option in the future; but no unilateral withdrawal and no negotiations with a terrorist regime. If National Union can't take it, Sharon will live without National Union.

Shinui should embrace this entire list of priorities. The price should be a stated willingness to sit with any party that accepts these guidelines - even Shas. I don't disagree at all with the Post that Shas has been a disaster for Israel - and for its own voters. (The fault, by the way, lies more with NRP than with Likud; the only Likud leader to actively encourage the growth of Shas was Netanyahu, while the NRP missed a historic opportunity decades ago in not putting effort into extending their message to the Sephardim, focusing instead with increasing exclusivity on the settlement enterprise.) But for hundreds of thousands of Israelis, Shas is their identity. These are people who serve in the army, who work, who are, ironically, Zionists, but nonetheless vote for a non-Zionist party of religious extremism. Just the other day, I was discussing the political situation with a woman I know who is a Yemenite Jew from Israel, who used to be a Likud activist, and she commented that her brother - a captain in the army - votes Shas. That's why it's so insane that Lapid is willing to sit with UTJ but not Shas. Shas's leadership and platform have been a disaster for Israel, but Shas's voters are people who can be wooed back to the mainstream, while UTJ voters are the people Lapid is really mad at: people who don't work and refuse to serve in the army. Does anyone think that the right way to woo back Shasniks is to tell them their party is the *only Jewish party* that is not acceptable?

Sharon should not include Shas in the coalition. But he has to arrange things so that Shas is the one who refuses to join. Shas will collapse after one season in the opposition; they cannot survive without government funding. The only thing that could keep them alive in opposition is the conviction that the Ashkenazi parties have ganged up to finally exclude the Sephardim once and for all. Shas was expected, at the start of this campaign, to take fewer than 10 seats. Their former leader and a miracle-working rabbi had teamed up to form a rival party. They turned to right-wing rhetoric on the Land of Israel to try to shore up their credibility in an election dominated by national security (historically the haredi parties would sit with Labor or Likud with equal comfort). The reason Shas had a late-campaign surge was: Shinui. Shas's campaign his its stride defending "their" people from the anti-religious and anti-Sephardi "racism" of Shinui. They will gain seats in the next election if a credible case can be made to Sephardim that Shas is their only protection against "white" Tel-Aviv-ites who want to keep them in the kitchens and out of power.

The biggest problem with the scenario spun by the Post is that it puts too much power in the hands of the NRP. Effie Eitam, the party leader, is as extreme as Avigdor Liberman, if not more so. There's a war going on right now for the soul of the NRP: will it stand for a vision for Israel as a self-governing Jewish commonwealth, the party that reconciles Jewish religious values with Zionism and democracy; or will it stand for an eschatological ideology opposed to democracy and committed to a kind of blood-and-soil nationalism. Eitam favors a united front with National Union to force Sharon into an exclusively right-wing coalition. If Sharon partners up with Shinui publicly, then reaches out to the NRP to complete his narrow coalition, whom does that empower within the NRP? I think it empowers Eitam, not the moderates.

On the other hand, the far-right does not really want to bring Sharon down. If Sharon and Shinui form a partnership, with clear, reasonable guidelines, parties that refuse either to join or to support the coalition from the outside will have something of a credibility problem if the government somehow lost a no-confidence vote.

Bottom line: yes, Sharon needs a coalition with Shinui. But he needs to bring Shas voters home, not alienate them further. And he needs the NRP to turn away from a flirtation with extreme, even fascist ideology and return to an emphasis on Jewish self-government. If he achieves these things, he'll have been a truly historic Prime Minister.
posted by Noah at 6:02 PM

 
It's Jacob Levy day. He muses here about Britain's bicameralism problem.

I'm not 100% clear on what's so terrible about having the upper house composed of life-appointees selected by the executive and confirmed by the legislature. One of the few real powers that the Lords has is that it's the highest court in Britain. And the U.S. Supreme Court is composed of life-appointees selected by the executive and confirmed by the legislature. Again: what's so terrible?

I do think bicameralism is a good thing, and that the upper house should represent a social compact among social groups among whom rough consensus is needed for the social organism to remain healthy. At America's founding, those groups were preeminently the states, who considered themselves independently sovereign. In Britain, historically, the Lords represented the landed interest and the hereditary principle. I've argued in the past for a corporatist bicameralism for Israel, an appointed upper house (appointees to serve long, but not life terms) representing various sectors of society (and possibly even the disapora community), with very limited powers similar to Britain's Lords. (This would provide an alternative forum for hammering out social consensus versus the current mechanism of having narrow interest-group parties extort concessions in the coalition-building process in a proportional-rep parliament).

As for Britain, the weakness of their democracy is lack of direct accountability. Their executive is elected from the legislature, and their head of state is hereditary. They already have district-based elections to the legislature on a first-past-the-post basis. So if they wanted to experiment with creating a body that directly affects the "will of the people," how about the following compromise:

Lords would serve for lengthy fixed single terms - say, 10 years. 20% of the Lords would retire every two years, at which point the government and opposition would each select a "slate" of proposed replacements replacements. The slates would be presented to the British populace for preference voting, and the first x to clear the necessary vote hurdle through the preference system would be elected. The selection of slates would preserve the Commons' current role in selecting new Lords, reaffirming the supremacy of the Commons. The provision of a slate for the opposition would ensure that the government wouldn't simply "pack" its slate with undistinguished yes-men, and would give the people an opportunity to express disapproval of a government without really tipping the balance of power every two years. The preference system would incline the system towards producing outcomes that reflect social consensus - candidates would have to either be very popular with significant but narrow constituencies or broadly popular among the whole nation in order to get in. The result should be a natural check on the Commons, which, particularly in a system without a written Constitution, magnifies narrow electoral pluralities into decisive legislative majorities and scure governments with near-dictatorial powers.

Whadaya think?
posted by Noah at 2:00 PM

 
I continue to be impressed with the behavior of the Turks, who continue to be loyal in the face of considerable provocation. We've got to do something nice for them post-bellum. Anyone know what they really want? Do they have a wish list on Amazon or something?
posted by Noah at 12:59 PM

 
I've got to read Jacob Levy over at The Volokh Conspiracy more often. But then, when would I get any work done?

I have no opinion on whether conservative views are under-represented in philosophy departments, 'cause I ain't a philosophy professor. (As an aside: are we only talking about political philosophy here? Is there a conservative/liberal divide on epistemology? I know there are some religious conservatives who like fairly radically deconstructive epistemological theories because they appear to allow them to continue to believe in creationism and the like even though these beliefs are non- or anti-scientific. Just asking.) But I do think, at least out here in the non-professoriat, that liberal/conservative is a pretty oversimplified way of slicing political philosophy. And I'll take myself as a case study.

If I had to put a political label on myself, I would call myself a National Liberal. As you would expect, that means I dig Hegel, not necessarily on all of the specifics but in the sense that I think the challenge in political philosophy is to harmonize the liberty of the ancients with the liberty of the moderns and that history has, in a sense, the structure of a political argument. But I'm not a Romantic. I'm not under any delusion that oft-reified concepts like "the nation" are real in the same sense as a chair is real. By the same token, I'm not a liberal fundamentalist either, because I don't think that concepts like "rights" are any more real. Most days I'm an epistemological Pragmatist; I think that knowing something is more about being able to sort that thing from other things than about being able to define that thing precisely. And I'm a Pragmatist about my Liberalism. I think Liberalism is a "good idea;" it's Pragmatically, not Platonically, true.

I prefer the company of Aristotle, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Burke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Hegel, George Eliot, Lincoln, Arnold, Ruskin, Disraeli, William James, Hayek and Arendt to the company of Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Jefferson, Marx, Bentham, Bakunin, Dewey, T.S. Eliot, Strauss, and Heidegger. I'm an optimist. I don't like declinism. But I put a positive value on tradition and a negative value on revolution. I don't like systems, but I do like principles. I think history is an argument, and that solutions that "work" evolve in real time. But I don't think history has a "destination" except in an eschatological sense that does not belong in any discussion of mundane reality and decisionmaking. (I agree with Kafka that the Messiah will come not on the last day, but on the very last, but I agree with the Chofetz Chayyim that it's wise to keep your bag packed, just in case he comes tomorrow, if that makes any sense.) I prefer both Jabotinsky and Ahad Ha'am to Herzl and mainstream Zionism. I call myself a Pragmatist, but I am deeply suspicious of Richard Posner's work. I think Peter Berkowitz's criticism of Rawls is more telling than Robert Nozick's; I also think Nozick's critique of Rawls is a decline from Hayek's critique of Socialism and Social Democracy precisely because Nozick's argument is so much more philosophical. I am most deeply mistrustful of Platonic thinkers - thinkers who have found the truth "out there" whether that truth is a scientific explanation of history or a set of religious dogmas. But I'm also very mistrustful of positivists who don't know what they don't know and somehow, thereby, wind up knowing a great deal about how our politics should be re-ordered.

So what does that make me? I think my own political thinking is both liberal and conservative, depending on what you mean by those words. I think political thinkers that I admire can be similarly characterized; it's an anachronism to use the terms for pre-moderns, but Burke, Madison, Hegel: these folks are all plausibly described as both liberal and conservative. Perhaps we need to slice things a little differently.
posted by Noah at 12:32 PM

 
Speaking of revolutionary democratization in Iran: I am getting sick and tired of reading articles like this one, about how America is doing too little to promote it.

Iran is headed either to 1991 or 1989.

In 1991, there was an uprising in Lithuania that Premier Gorbachev half-heartedly tried to put down. His feeble response led directly to the attempted coup later that year, which in turn led directly to President Yeltsin's declaration dissolving the Soviet Union and establishing a new Russian Republic. And thus ended the Soviet Union, not with a bang but with a whimper.

By contrast, in 1989 a student-led uprising in Beijing was brutally crushed by the People's Liberation Army at the orders of Premier Deng Xiaoping. It was not obvious from day one that the army would obey its orders; there were rumors, in fact, that different armies were firing at each other in the first hours of the crackdown. But over the course of the next year or so, the Chinese Communist Party decisively crushed all opposition and consolidated its rule.

What was the difference? Well, there were differences in the sources of opposition. Yeltsin was already President, and the Soviet Union had already acquiesced in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The opposition to the Soviet Union was led not by students but by, in the first place, Polish shipyard workers, and later by many different segments of society, including within the Party. Gorbachev was also a singularly inept leader, who actually seemed to *believe* in Communism, and specifically had lost ther respect of the KGB (it's a subject of continued speculation whether Andropov, had he lived, could have kept the Soviet Union together). The Chinese, by contrast, were ruled by a strong leader with no illusions about the system he headed and what it took to stay on top of it.

Where is Iran today? Well, the revolt is far more widespread than in China in 1989. It's not just students; it's workers, business-owners, even significant segments of the clergy. The regular army reputedly despises the regime as much as the populace does. But the regular army is (a) stationed at the frontier; (b) starved of fuel and equipment; (c) not likely to be used in suppressing an open revolt. That task would fall to the internal security services, which are well-armed, stationed in the cities and strongly aligned with the regime.

So my read is: this could go either way. The people are more and more openly disdainful of the regime; the regime has lost its legitimacy and rules exclusively by force. But the leaders of the regime are more like Deng than like Gorby: absolutely ruthless and fully aware of what kind of violence it will take to reestablish control by brute force alone.

This is why it is so important for the Americans to make it clear that the regime will not be permitted to commit that violence, and make it clear publicly. We don't need to take any direct action against Iran. We just need to make it clear that the 1989 option *would* provoke such action, and thereby take that action off the table.

I've argued before in this space that Iran is, besides being the best candidate for the second Muslim-majority democracy in the Middle East (Turkey being the first), Iran is the strategic lynchpin to American interests in the region. All our other efforts - the deposing of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the coming war with Iraq, any subsequent attempt to deal with the Saudis - will necessarily enhance the power of Iran. We are taking out their enemies one by one. If they remain *our* enemy at the end of this process, we will have created a very big problem for ourselves.

And I've argued before as well - and continue to believe - that the one action that would do more than anything to simultaneously prosecute the war on terror and foment revolution in Iran would be to attack Hizballah in Lebanon. Hizballah is second only to al-Qaeda in murders of Americans, is collaborating actively with al-Qaeda, and has a relationship with Syria somewhat comparable to al-Qaeda's relationship with the Taliban (i.e. it is sometimes hard to tell who is controlling whom). Wiping out Hizballah would be a gift to the world. But in addition, it would put Iran's leadership in a bind. A major asset will have been destroyed. Not to respond would be to look weak, which would encourage the spread of popular revolt. To respond would mean potentially inviting an American attack on Iran, and a consequent massive popular uprising. The Iranian regime might possibly rally the people to the defense of the country if it were attacked out of the blue by America. But if the regime took the people to war for the sake of an Arab terrorist group (remember: the Persians *hate* Arabs), the people would tear them to pieces with their own hands.

Anyhow, that's my scenario. If we're not going to do that, the least we should do is make it clear that the violent suppression of popular revolt will provoke an American military intervention. Then pray that revolt comes soon, before this key member of the Axis of Evil buys their first nuke from the Dear Leader.
posted by Noah at 1:31 PM

 
Stanley Kurtz is looking forward to Fareed Zakaria's book about illiberal democracy, and the danger of democratizing too quickly. Sounds like a good, evil vital topic - but a little off-topic from the argument that Kurtz is having with Daniel Drezner about said book.

Best example of illiberal democracy in the world today: Venezuela, Exhibit A for what a mess you get if you don't have liberal political traditions, used to have lots of oil wealth to spread around to the masses, and continue to have regular elections. You get a populist demagogue who eagerly dismantles democracy in democracy's name. Russia is a more optimistic version of the same thing: a country run by a strong man former secret policeman who nonetheless seems to want to force his country to be free.

Is this what we're worried about with Iraq, for instance? Or Saudi Arabia? Or Pakistan? No. We're worried about Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and Afghanistan: utterly dysfunctional societies turning into genocidal bloodbaths and havens for terrorists. And we're worried about Iran: an illiberal non-democracy organized around ideological war with the West.

If Zacharia is going to argue that elections without an infrastructure of liberal institutions to support them are a bad idea, is Drezner really going to argue with him? From his post, I'd say no; his point seems to be that changing the *culture* will be easier than Zacharia - or Kurtz - think.

That's a debatable point. Kurtz thinks that Japan is a poor model for democratization in Iraq. He does an excellent job of explaining why: Japan had westernized once already, adopting a Parliament among other things; Japan had an aristocratic elite with an ethic of public service; Japan had a private economy and a legal structure that respected property; etc. I finished his article and said: yup, Japan's a lousy model for Iraq.

His argument that India is a better model, though, I think is dubious. First of all, India was ruled by the British for something like 200 years. We are going to be ruling Iraq for, I would guess, under a decade. Second, Iraq already has a technocratic elite, which India did not when the British came. But Iraq's elite is concentrated in an ethnic minority. What happens in a Shiite-majority post-war Iraq? Do we displace the Sunnis and train a new elite? That's what the French and Belgians tried in Rwanda with the Hutus. Do we try to get the majority to accept the existing elite, now under new management? Also a tough sell. Third, India did not go through the brutalizing experience of totalitarianism as Iraq has; India, when the British came, was a traditional society, and remains so to a great extent today. That was both a blessing and a curse; traditional ties slowed the growth of radical and illiberal populist movements, but also slowed the development of modern nationalism, capitalism and a democratic-minded elite. Iraq's atomized populace will be much more prone to extremism. Finally, the British failed in a fundamental way in India: the country was partitioned between Muslim and Hindu states, and the largest successor state of the former - what was originally West Pakistan - is a running sore on the body of world politics. (And even Indian nationalism is more than somewhat unstable.)

Here are two other models to keep in mind as we start picking up countries to fix: South Korea and the Philippines.

South Korea, unlike Japan, was an impoverished, very traditional society when the Americans came. It had been developed, but also brutalized under the Japanese. It had no modern, technocratic elite. It was ruled by what amounted to military dictatorship for a generation after the Korean War. During that generation, Korea experienced profound economic development, and also, underground, political development that burst forth to topple the existing regime (with American support). South Korea is now a major economic power and a thriving, stable democracy. The transformation was far more dramatic than Japan, arguably even more thorough, and happened in a much shorter time than India.

What's different about Iraq and Korea? First, Iraq is more developed and its elite better educated now than Korea was when the Americans arrived. Second, we will conquer Iraq; we came to defend Korea. Both of these are, I think, advantages Iraq has.

On the other hand, Iraq has some marks against it. First, Korea's democratization went hand-in-hand with its Christianization, a process led by American missionaries. It's hard to say how important this was for the development of democracy. But it's clear that something similar will not be happening in Iraq.

Second, Korea was ethnically homogeneous with a strong pre-modern sense of itself as a people, if not a "nation." That is not true of Iraq at all. Iraq's Sunni Arab elite, its Kurdish minority and its Shiite Arab majority hate each other and do not particularly wish to live together in a single state. Its Assyrian, Turkoman and other minorities have been severely repressed under Saddam and will have to be re-integrated into the social frabric after liberation. This ethnic fragmentation has, correctly, I believe, led many observers to argue that some kind of federal structure would be best for Iraq. Probably true - but to prevent such a structure from simply disintegrating into unstable mini-states (which would likely be controlled by a foreign power - read: Iran) there would have to be some centralizing point of loyalty.

And this brings the third point of difference: Iraq does not need another military dictatorship. Because Koreans thought of themselves as Koreans, what was primary was to have a central source of order, not a central source of identity. By contrast, part of the job in post-war Iraq will be to create institutions that Iraqis will look to for the definition of what it means to be an Iraqi. That's a much taller order - more akin to what was achieved in India, but needing doing on a much shorter time schedule and under tougher conditions.

The Philippines are an interesting model, because this was a country liberated by the Americans, and occupied for many years; a country that started thoroughly undeveloped, with no indigenous political culture, and no sense of itself as a nation; and which is now, while still a country with a lot of problems, much closer to having a functioning democracy than any Arab state.

Iraq, again, has certain advantages: a better educated elite, a more developed infrastructure, oil wealth (though this may be more a curse than a blessing). The disadvantages again revolve around the unique factors of the Middle East. The Philippines, even more than South Korea, is a largely Christian country, and even if Christianity is not important for democratization per se, it created a commonality between the ideas and culture of occupier and occupied that will not exist in Iraq. Moreover, the United States had a relatively free hand in the Philippines, with little fear of foreign interference; that will not be the case in Iraq vis-a-vis Iran. And finally, we had a lot more time to work with in the Philippines than we will in Iraq.

My point is: there are lots of models of how democratization can be achieved in various cultures, and the model should suit the particular situation. What is going to create unique problems in Iraq is the lack of a sense of nationhood. Could this be solved by some role for the Hashemites? I doubt it, but I don't think having them involved can hurt, and it might just help. But I don't have too much optimism short-term about a vibrant, democratic, stable Iraq. I think it's clear that Iran, as a historic nation with a strong pre-modern identity, the experience of revolution behind it and the knowledge that the "democracy" promised by it was a lie, and with a strongly pro-Western popular current - for all these reasons, I think it's clear that Iran makes the best candidate for revolutionary democratization in the Middle East today. After Iran would probably come Egypt (strong pre-modern identity, but strong anti-Western popular currents), Jordan (strong traditional identity and pro-Western, liberalizing leadership, but ethnically divided and geopolitically insecure), and, if you want to count them, Morocco and Tunisia (similar to Jordan but even more backward and traditional). Except for Iran, I wouldn't advocate *pushing* any of these countries towards democracy, for fear of precisely the illiberal outcomes that Zacharia fears. But we do have to figure out how best to nudge them in that direction - and, more importantly, encourage the growth of liberal institutions and interests that would provide the basis for a more stable transition to democracy down the road.
posted by Noah at 12:34 PM

 
Ha'aretz, meanwhile, has a piece by Ze'ev Schiff about Sharon's upcoming visit with Mubarak. As you would expect, they are worried that Sharon will not be sufficiently forthcoming, not pleased that Mubarak has apparently changed his tune about Sharon.

I've blogged before about Egypt's foreign policy and its basic objectives. They are: (1) keep close to the Americans; (2) contain Israel and try to separate Israel from the Americans; (3) avoid war with Israel; (4) enhance Egyptian stature and leadership within the Arab world. So Egypt will make trouble for Israel whenever it can do so without making too much trouble for itself, and will try to calm things down when things seem to be getting out of control. Egypt lobbied Arafat hard against signing an agreement with Barak, because peace was considered to be a strategic victory for Israel, almost regardless of the terms. Now, Egypt is trying to broker a partial cease-fire with Hamas because that will push Israel to go back to the negotiating table to make more concessions. Bottom line: Egypt is an enemy of Israel, but is constrained by its desire to stay close to America and to avoid war, and therefore its interests and Israel's sometimes dovetail.

So the significance of Mubarak's invitation is: the isolate-Israel strategy has failed. Sharon has consolidated power and captured the Israeli center. The Palestinians, meanwhile, continue to never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. With a number of potential coalitions to keep him in power, Sharon is likely to serve out his term. Mubarak knows he will have to deal with him. That's reason enough for Mubarak to want to have a meeting.

What will Mubarak be trying to get out of the meeting? Well, Schiff is right that one aim will be to establish that he, Mubarak, is the reasonable one, and score propaganda points over Sharon with the Americans. But achieving this is a stretch. The Administration is not going to do anything on this front until after the Iraq campaign. And the Iraq war will have significant repercussions throughout the region and in the internal configuration of Israel's electorate. So I don't see the Bush Administration expecting a plan from Sharon until after the war, and I don't see Sharon offering anything but vagueness to anyone except Bush.

After the war, things do change. Bush is highly likely to want to make very real "progress" on this front once the war with Iraq is done. But the wild card in that regard is what happens with the Hashemites. If, for example, the Hashemites wind up taking some kind of role in post-war Iraq - something Abdullah clearly wants, as it would dramatically increase his family's power and prestige - it would not be unreasonable for the Bush Administration to pressure Amman to step up to the plate with respect to the Palestinians as payment; that's something Abdullah does *not* want. And if *that* happens, then what is a reasonable or unreasonable "solution" to the Palestinian problem changes dramatically.

The problem has not changed since the days of Lord Balfour. There's no way to create defensible borders for Israel and a "viable" independent Palestinian state. None. If Israel is to be defensible, then any Palestinian state will be a practical or legal dependency of either Israel or Jordan or both. The Palestinians won't accept being a dependency of Israel, and Jordan hasn't wanted the headache of dealing with another 2-3 million Palestinians. Iraq provides the only possible carrot to bring Jordan back to the table. If the Palestinian "cantons" that so offend Ze'ev Schiff are formally affiliated with Jordan, and if the Israeli presence in the territories is formally limited by treaty, then it seems to me that Israeli security and Palestinian self-determination can be reconciled. If not, then not, and whatever Sharon tells Mubarak won't matter: concessions will provoke more terrorism, while military victory remains elusive.

I don't think Bush is going to demand a quick resolution of the host of issues surrounding the Palestinians. His proposal for an "interim state" involves unsettled borders. He has not talked about dismantling settlements; he's talked about ending the construction of new settlements. And he has clearly predicated any establishment of a state on the removal of Arafat and the reform of Palestinian institutions, which in itself, if it happened, would change the dynamic of negotiations. Sharon does not need to make concessions to Mubarak to keep his relations with the Bush Administration strong, and if that's the case then Mubarak himself is not going to expect too much of the meeting. After the war, when solutions will be demanded, if Israel needs to separate physically from the Palestinians, then they have some very difficult problems to solve: Hevron, Netzarim and Ariel are the easy ones; Jerusalem is the hard one. If, on the other hand, what is really called for is political separation, these problems become much simpler. But that requires an outside partner with credibility. The only possibility is Jordan.
posted by Noah at 11:00 AM

 
The Jerusalem Post has a nice editorial on Sharansky's next career. They are optimistic about his future. From their mouths to God's ear!
posted by Noah at 10:15 AM

 
News flash: Yisrael B'Aliyah has merged with Likud.

I'm not 100% sure what this means, whether YBA will cease to exist permanently or whether it will, like Meimad or Gesher, continue to exist as a separate party currently within a Likud "alignment." In any event, I will be sorry to see the party go, but glad to see Sharansky in a position to rise within Likud, potentially. As I've said many times: I think he's PM material, eventually, and I think Likud badly needs his reforming, democratic spirit. I had thought that YBA would become Likud's "natural partner" in the way that the Free Democrats are the natural partner to the CDU/CSU in Germany. But this'll work, too, if it means Sharansky and his ideas now get a bigger megaphone, and not just that he is swallowed up and becomes irrelevant.
posted by Noah at 12:51 PM

 
John Derbyshire appears to have had a bad night. I know the feeling.
posted by Noah at 12:43 PM

 
Good piece in The New Republic on German Nationalism and the German Left. Warning: while he says nasty things about Gerhard Schroeder, it says nice things about Jurgen Habermas.
posted by Noah at 12:41 PM

 
I love it. Turkey, our only real Muslim ally, a staunch pro-American member of NATO even now, with an Islamist-oriented government, decides to buck the opinion polls and support an American war in Iraq. In response, our Franco-Germano-Belgian allies are trying to stop us from defending Turkey from an Iraqi attack.

The French demand that Turkish troops, as part of NATO, be made available to the EU and placed under EU command as part of the European Defense Force. But they won't admit Turkey into the EU; indeed, a French elder statesman says openly that admitting Turkey would mean "the end of Europe." Now France won't even agree to let NATO assets be used to defend Turkey!

And France is supposedly bucking America on the war because it is more "sensitive" to Muslims.

A friend of mine, of quirky, hard-to-pigeonhole political views, recently said: the American people are genuinely conflicted about the idea of war with Iraq. But they are of one mind about the idea of war with France.
posted by Noah at 12:40 PM

 
Well, this is encouraging. North Korea threatens first strike on U.S. in response to American military buildup. Encouraging that there is some kind of military buildup on our part, I mean.
posted by Noah at 12:32 PM

 
That Blair fellow really is quite a chap: Britain Formally Agrees to U.S. Missile Defense.
posted by Noah at 2:37 PM

 
Okay, what with war coming I haven't expressed opinions until now about The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's Choice of Finalists for the rebuilding of the WTC site.

And I don't know how much there is to say. The Libeskind plan is completely incomprehensible; the only thing I can say for certain about it is that, by leaving an enormous hole in the ground, it is an expression of utter defeatism. So, by default, I favor the THINK plan, which is just silly and pathetic, not evil. It will certainly be a distinctive skyline element. It will have nothing to do with New York, true. It will look like a tinker-toy construction, also true. It has none of the elegance of the Eiffel Tower, its self-declared point of comparison. Can you imagine people buying little metal replicas of these big empty cannisters? Of course not. But at least it doesn't say to the terrorists, "you killed 3,000 of us and we'll never get over it," which is pretty much the message behind Libeskind's hole in the ground. And at least the funny tinker-toy shapes go up; they don't wobble all over the sky in a way that gives you nausea. Kids'll love it.

From a practical perspective, the THINK plan really isn't bad at all. Because it's mostly empty space, it could go up quickly. It's mostly cultural space, which is appropriate since there's no real demand for office space now, and downtown isn't necessarily the best location for it anyhow (that would be Mahattan's Far West Side). It's really tall, which will make us feel good about ourselves. But compare the THINK design with Gaudi's 1908 design for a grand hotel on the same spot. If we're going to build a cultural monument rather than an office tower, couldn't it at least be beautiful?

The whole thing makes me sad. We really are, it seems, incapable of building beautiful buildings anymore. We don't lack the ability to execute the designs. Anyone who's seen the restored Grand Central Station knows: the craftsmen exist, somewhere. (Maybe we import them from Poland.) But we can't design them anymore. I don't miss the old WTC. It was ugly and inhuman. I don't want it back. I want something better. This is something worse. Now I just hope they retain the Peterson/Littenberg team to do what can be done to humanize this monster, and embed it in a context that works for the city. It's damage control from here on out.
posted by Noah at 2:33 PM

 
While Powell is slam-dunking Iraq at the Security Council, the folks in The Corner are starting to worry again about North Korea.

We are not checkmated. If anything, the North Koreans are potentially on the brink of mate; having resorted to nuclear blackmail, they have entered a very high-stakes game of chicken, and their government, not ours, is on the line.

We have no evidence yet that North Korea has transferred plutonium out of the country. We don't even have evidence yet that they have built a nuclear device. We know that they have some enriched uranium, and they are now very publicly moving in the direction of having large amounts of plutonium. We have a short window of time to put the pieces in place to stop the North Koreans. That will require a sufficiently credible threat of force to convince them to back down. Or it will require the use of that force. We have therefore got to get moving on taking serious, military action to disarm the regime, if only because without such a threat no progress will be made.

Could North Korea kill a million South Koreans if we started a war? Yes. But Iraq could do proportionately as much damage to Israel, or to Kuwait, or to our own soldiers. We are not being deterred there. If we are serious, we can take 'em.

We cannot allow ourselves to think, or appear to the world as if we are checkmated once an enemy acquires nuclear weapons. Rather, we have got to demonstrate that acquiring nuclear weapons, and maintaining a hostile posture towards the United States, is a ticket to regime change. Otherwise, the incentives all line up in favor of nuclear proliferation across the globe, and we will never be secure again. To deter acquisition, we cannot only punish attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. We must punish rogue states that actually do acquire them, credibly and forcefully enough that states think long and hard before raising their profile by trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

By the way, North Korea is NOT the toughest problem we have in the nuclear arena. Neither is Iraq. The toughest problem is Pakistan. Pakistan is an Islamic country with a large al-Qaeda-sympathetic contingent in its military and intelligence services, with a number of working nuclear devices and with missiles to deliver them. North Korea is not nearly as big a threat as Pakistan. We can still solve the North Korea problem by blockading them; that'll make it tough for them to move nuclear material out of the country. (And there is very strong evidence that North Korea acquired *its* nuclear material from Pakistan, in exchange for missile technology.)

I think it behooves us to work the Iraq model of building an international consensus, if only because that is the only way we'll get South Korea and China onboard, and we *need* them onboard to win the peace, if not to win the war. But simultaneously, we have got to put the military pieces in place - quickly. The world will not wait for us to finish one war before giving us another.
posted by Noah at 11:49 AM

 
Everyone is harping on how France is no longer an ally because of their obstructionism on Iraq. Anyone comment lately on the dog that hasn't barked - China?

The Russians have a lot economically at stake in Iraq, but they have more at stake in their relationship with the U.S. Putin has staked his Presidency on an alliance with George W. Bush, and he made that choice when it was already clear that we'd be going after Iraq. It would make no sense to back out now; rather, Russia is just trying to get as much as it can out of the negotiating process. Britain, meanwhile, has behaved as a staunch American ally, going well beyond what I would have expected. The Arab states, Turkey and Iran are all playing more or less according to type. But China is being a little surprising.

The Chinese would normally be pretty touchy about violations of national sovereignty, suggestions that a U.S.-led coalition could break up or reorder a country, and so forth. They were not happy about the Kossovo war. But we've heard very little from them on Iraq. And the consensus seems to be they will abstain, regardless of what France does.

What's their game? Are they genuinely afraid of antagonizing an aroused U.S.? Is there an emerging quid-pro-quo whereby China is not obstructive in the war on terror and in exchange we give them more of a sphere of influence in Asia? Does the North Korean situation have anything to do with their acquiescence on Iraq?

I'm genuinely curious. Email from China experts welcome.
posted by Noah at 10:47 AM

 
You want my opinion? I think Tommy Lapid's Shinui is making an ass of itself.

I said before: Shinui should never have campaigned against a political party (Shas) but only against particular policies (high taxation, draft exemptions for yeshivah students, religious monopoly on marriage, etc.). They should then set their conditions for joining a coalition and, if they are met, join.

So now, Shinui has essentially dropped all its conditions. It will sit, perhaps, with UTJ, the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party, a party that will never agree to reforming draft exemptions. And it will join a right-wing government without Labor. But it will not sit with Shas.

Shas is accusing them of "racism" for refusing to sit with Sephardim. How wrong is that charge? Shinui now says that the difference between Shas and UTJ is that Shas demands ministry portfolios. Why is that decisive? And why is giving UTJ the chair of the Knesset Finance Committee any different?

The hollowness of Shinui's program is being exposed before the world. What will they show their voters by way of accomplishment, whether they join a government without Shas or stay out because Shas is in, now that they have made it clear that their principles are for sale?

Shinui stands for an important demographic, and it has certain positions that are important for Israel. Israel needs reform of the religious status-quo. It needs to liberalize its economy. I wish I felt more confident that Tommy Lapid was aiming to achieve these things, and not just grandstand. I previously thought he was grandstanding and didn't want power. Now I think he's grandstanding and *does* want power. My core feelings about his character haven't changed, however.

It seems to me, though, that Sharon now has a tough decision to make. It looks less and less likely that he's going to get Labor onboard. And it looks less likely that short-term there's going to be a split in Labor ranks. His best hope is just to peel off Peres. With his new electoral strength, he doesn't need National Union. So his main question is whether to or not to snub Shas. Doing so would be very risky for him. But he badly wants a centrist party at the heart of his coalition, and if he isn't going to get Labor then he needs Shinui.

Probably his best move is to put reform of the religious establishment into his coalition guidelines and publicly reach out to both Shas and Shinui to accept those guidelines. That would put pressure on Shas to decide which it wants more: to feed at the government trough or to stay true to *its* principles. And it would put pressure on Shinui to decide if it is out to accomplish reform or out to make permanent war with Shas.

Of course, this is all ultimately academic. The most likely scenario is that we get a wall-to-wall unity government as soon as the fighting starts in Iraq, and the whole game begins again after the fighting stops. And by that time, the whole world may have changed.
posted by Noah at 9:58 AM

 
Andrew Sullivan ruminates today in a quite thoughtful manner on sex, risk, HIV-envy and other topics I thought I wouldn't return to so quickly. But I thought it only fair to give him credit when he's thinking through things I think are very important.

Sullivan starts off by praising Richard Posner's book, Sex and Reason, and since I am deeply skeptical of Posner's whole project this is as good as any grounds to outline where Sullivan and I fundamentally disagree.

Sullivan takes the sexual revolution for granted as both permanent and good. I don't. I do take for granted a certain loss of reticence; that's a permanent change in culture, for better or worse. And I take for granted the end, outside of certain subcultures, of old courtship rituals. That's another permanent change, again for better or worse. And I also take for granted - and applaud - the emergence of gay men and lesbians from the closet. The closet is a dark and lonely place, and I don't wish anyone to go back in.

But I don't accept a fundamental change in the nature of marriage, or the status of marriage in society. And I think Sullivan does. Maybe he doesn't think so, but I think his arguments betray him. For him, I believe, marriage is a choice. It may be a good thing for some people, a bad thing for others, but it's ultimately a choice individuals make to marry or not, whom to marry, and what kind of marriage to have. So long as society has minimal protections in place for children, people should be able to find their own happiness in whatever arrangements they feel make sense.

I don't agree. I believe that marriage, if it is anything, is not one choice among equals but a social norm. It is, by its nature, an institution that asserts itself as the proper destination for people in general. It expresses a societal view about the proper shape of a human life, and as such it is an exception to the general Liberal proposition that our social order does not have a common conception of the good, only a system for helping us find our own individual goods. On this one matter, and perhaps a very few others, our generally Liberal civilization does believe there is a Good with a capital "G."

None of this is to say that society is intolerant of singletons, divorcees, widows, or even people who have "alternative" family arrangements. But tolerance is very different from equality. And if marriage is to mean anything, what it means is: this social arrangement is not equal to other arrangements; it is superior.

Sullivan has complained in the past about right-wingers who think gay men need to be "tamed" and asserted that his advocacy of gay marriage has nothing to do with this motivation. But domestication of the human species is a primary reason for marriage. We ALL need to be tamed, straights and gays alike - and men and women alike. It seems to me that if you don't accept that, then you must be a Rousseau type convinced that we are born virtuous. The reality is that we are born not just with the capacity but with the innate urge to sin, and we must be trained to resist this impulse. And marriage is a key discipline in that training, turning one of the strongest motives to sin - sexual desire - in a Godly direction.

I cannot endorse the promiscuity that seems to be an important feature of gay culture. I think promiscuity, gay or straight, is a sign of serious spiritual and moral failure. Sullivan has waffled on this question, sometimes decrying promiscuity and sometimes celebrating it. Where he comes down usually is on the side of letting individuals sort it out without having the state or society express much of an opinion. I think that's totally inadequate, and does a disservice to the next generation whom he rightly worries about, who deserve moral guidance and not just a speech about personal responsibility.

Since I cannot endorse promiscuity, the whole question of the integration of gay people into the social order - which, it seems to me, is what the gay marriage debate is about - revolves around two questions. First, can gay culture and sexuality change, and become "virtually normal," or is it essentially and fundamentally different from straight culture and sexuality? Second, if the answer to the first question is "no," then can the aspects of gay sexuality and culture that, if replicated in the straight world, would (and do) wreak havoc be contained, and how?

I am optimistic that the answer to the first question is "yes." I know gay male couples that are long-term, loving partnerships that look like marrieds. I don't know whether most gay men could come to think of these people as the models to be emulated rather than as admirable freaks. Right now, I think it's closer to the latter, and gay men look at gay "marrieds" something like the way that, 50 years ago, lay Catholics looked at priests: their sexual choice (monogamy on the one hand, celibacy on the other) is admired, but not seriously considered for emulation. But I don't see why, a priori, this couldn't change. Sullivan thinks it will take a generation for gay marriage or something similar to change the gay world. I think it depends a lot on what else is going on in the culture; it could go more quickly, and it could actually go the other way, and gay marriage could do more harm than good. Sullivan is right that the only way to find out is to do the experiment. So we come to the second question: how to run the experiment in such as way as to get the most benefit with the least potential harm if it goes awry.

I think the latter requires that the law, if it is to recognize gay unions that are functionally equivalent to marriage, nonetheless distinguish in nomenclature between such unions and marriage. I also think it is essential that any move towards gay unions be preceded or accompanied by a serious effort to reform marriage itself. I have expressed the opinion several times in this space, in disputation with Stanley Kurtz, that the most important fight to have over the nature of marriage is not over gay unions but over no-fault divorce. So long as no-fault is the law of divorce in America, marriage is officially understood as a mere contract between two parties, and as such there is no plausible rationale for discriminating against gay couples - or, for that matter, against polyamorous groups. Only when no-fault divorce is ended will it be possible to reconstruct the idea of marriage as a covenant, entered into before and, in a sense, with the community (and, for the religious, God), something public and not merely private. And once no-fault divorce is ended, I think integrating gay unions will be much easier and less threatening.

But the law is going to be a blunt instrument in this matter. The real heavy lifting is going to be done in the private sphere, by both gays and straights, and in the liberal and even the more conservative religious denominations. That's one reason I get annoyed at Sullivan for harping on this whole question as a civil rights issue. That's the easiest part of the argument, and framing the question that way is really a way of making all sorts of tougher questions appear out of bounds. But they are not out of bounds, and these questions, questions of culture, are somebody's problem. If they are not Sullivan's, the leading gay "conservative" out there, then whose are they?

I want to know what Sullivan thinks marriage is, really. I want to know why he thinks it should exist as an institution. If he rejects the covenantal model of marriage, then why should the state care about marriage at all? And if he does embrace the covenantal model, then I want to know what it should look like for gay couples. What, for example, should the text of a gay commitment ceremony, enacted with due solemnity and not with Hallmark treacle, be about? What should the words be? How should older gay men communicate to younger ones that their right destiny is not an endless round of relationships but the creation of a new and larger self in partnership with another man?

I have my own thoughts on the subject. Gay unions, obviously, cannot be built on the complimentarity of the sexes. So a gay partnership must have another founding myth. Sullivan has written movingly on the subject of friendship. Well, maybe gay male unions are more like friendships, of a particular and unique order. As marriage is a binding of complementary individuals to produce a new thing and to keep both individuals from sin, a gay union could also be such a binding.

I've left out what the sins are that a gay union would guard against. That's deliberate. It's obviously implausible to imagine, in our current cultural context, celibate unions. That said, it's not inconceivable that, a century hence, in a different cultural moment, such unions could seem reasonable. It may be implausible to argue, in our current cultural context, for monogamous gay male unions. That's one reason I think there needs to be a legal and cultural distinction between gay and straight unions; the end of monogamy would mean the end of marriage, so if gay unions turn out to be overwhelmingly "open" in character it's important that everyone think of this as a peculiar feature of gay unions, and not a new norm. But even if monogamy as a gay norm is unrealistic today, it might not be unrealistic in a generation or so. An understanding of a gay union as a species of alliance against evil, while leaving vague the precise nature of the evil allied against, would allow for cultural development over time. It would not try to freeze our current cultural moment, at the potential expense of longstanding and enormously valuable institutions like marriage. (And, perhaps, it will turn out that non-monogamous gay unions are reasonably stable, and the current cultural moment is preserved. I'm not saying it's impossible, and the framework I'm outlining would certainly allow for it.)

But honestly, this is not my job. It's a gay man's job. Sullivan is a big Oakeshott fan. Well, Oakeshott would probably argue apropos of gay unions that it's a lot more defensible for the state to recognize an existing institution that emerged from the culture rather than try to change the culture by creating such an institution on its own. I'd be curious to know whether there are gay commitment ceremonies out there that express the ambition to serve as a partnership not only against suffering but against temptation. I'd be curious to know whether Sullivan thinks such a ceremony would be more profound than a mere expression of mutual affection and regard, or whether he would consider it self-hating.

To circle back to the original topic: Sullivan talks about his worries about the rise in HIV infections in young gay men as a species of rational choice problem. Gay men want sex, but they want to live. If living with HIV looks more plausible, they will have more and riskier sex. He rightly argues that a public health message based on implausible scare stories is going to do more harm than good. He worries that segregation of HIV+ from HIV negative men may help, but may also cause harm. He worries about HIV envy. He notes, correctly, that how to get people to behave sexually is difficult, and not only for gay men; contraception, as he notes, is now widely available, but the number of abortions and unwanted pregnancies has gone up, not down. He concludes by fretting that a certain level of disease may simply be inevitable because it's hard to ask people to be "extremely careful in a sphere of life where fantasy and passion rule."

But this conclusion is as good a summary of what's wrong with Sullivan's whole outlook as I can think of. Our desires are not - or should not be - our masters. That is what distinguishes us from animals. To Posner, NOTHING distinguishes us from animals. He's an economist to the core. For him, it's not just that in a Liberal order we generally let people figure out the Good for themselves. It's that there is no Good, only goods. So why not just pursue your desires? Why try to change your desires? Why try to sublimate them for the sake of something greater than mere sensual gratification? Posner cannot adequately explain why someone would have children or how someone can face aging and death. His philosophy, a blend of libertarianism and utilitarianism is a philosophy for healthy, unattached 30-somethings. You can't build a civilization, or even a single life, on such a foundation.

Look, I believe in pleasure. I'm not an ascetic, and the spiritual tradition I ascribe to rejects asceticism. I enjoy sex. For that matter, I enjoy good food and I enjoy having spending money. But the choice between asceticism and libertinism is a false one. The whole Jewish approach to sexual and other desires is to say that they should be trained to operate in the service of the divine. That implies that they CAN be trained, that we are not at the mercy of our desires. Passion and fantasy, in a healthy mind, do not "rule." They are trained to serve. But to train them requires men of stature to serve as an example to us of how to live, to show us how they can be trained, and, yes, tamed. Sullivan is, I think no one would dispute, a man of stature, and as such, he has his obligations.
posted by Noah at 6:12 PM

 
One of the more rewarding reads of the last year for me was Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. (For me, it was rewarding last year; for you, it might have been rewarding ten years ago, because it was published in 1992. So I'm behind. Sue me.) It's basically a study of nationalism in five countries: England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States. To summarize her argument:

* A nation originally meant something like an intellectual faction at Continental universities.
* From this, the word evolved to correspond to the elite of a political community.
* In England, in the 16th century, the populace began to develop a sense of itself as a community of self-governing individuals, and as-such as sovereign. This development was a consequence of high social mobility in early-modern England, and resulted in a new sense of the word nation as such a self-governing community.
* The break from Rome under Henry VIII and the spread of dissenting Protestantism allied the monarchy and religion to the proposition that England was an Empire of its own, independent of other authority, and as-such a nation.
* By the mid 17th century the transformation of England into a nation was complete. Around the same time, France began to change. In medieval days, France understood itself as a something akin to the apotheosis of Christian civilization, and had a political ideology that identified the king and Christ. Under Louis XIII and XIV, Royal absolutism articulated an ideology whereby this civilization was not only devoted to but entirely identified with the king.
* Royal absolutism concentrated power in Paris and in the royal court. It consequently radically reduced the real power of the nobility, producing acute status anxiety.
* The end result of this transformation in the nobility was for them to seek an alternative source of status. This was found by separating the state from the king, and transferring identification from king to state.
* In the French understanding, the nation became the embodiment of the unique French civilization, and the state became the embodiment of the nation. The nation was not a self-governing community but the state that ruled over a community, and devotion to that state became the source of status.
* This transformation of France into a new kind of nation was informed by admiration of and ressentiment towards England, a nation at once recognized as the most advanced and successful in Europe and derided as an inferior civilization to the French.
* Following French developments from a distance, Russia's Tsar Peter the Great began a program to drag Russian forcibly into the modern world. His nobility was already abject in its servility. The dynamic of the development of Russian nationalism was therefore dominated by the disconnect of an absolute ruler ordering his people to be free.
* Because of this, Russian anxiety was dominated less by the sense of a class newly humiliated by the rising state (as in France) than by a sense of Russians as a people humiliated by their failure to be modern.
* This sense of humiliation resulted in two intellectual streams, both violent and mutually opposed: the westernizers, who wanted to burn Russia down and rebuild it on a rational, western model; and the slavophiles, who reinterpreted Russia's failures as spiritual successes, and opposed everything western.
* Russian nationalism, unlike French, developed an ethnic emphasis that predated any political expression.
* Germans came late to the concept of nationalism, but developed it very quickly. Germany did not develop nationalism until the Napoleonic invasions, and the reason was that the German states - particularly Prussia, the most modern - did not dispossess its aristocratic class, as did the French, but turned to it to staff the emerging bureaucracy. The leading class, therefore, did not suffer the status anxiety that caused an intellectual revolution in France.
* Rather, Greenfeld identified the sources of German nationalism in Pietism, an important stream in German Protestantism. Greenfeld contrasts Lutheran Pietism with the Calvinism that was so important to the development of English nationalism. This is an area where she's kind of playing to my prejudices, and where I am insufficiently knowledgeable, so I may be more receptive than the evidence warrants. Nonetheless: her contention is that Pietism, as an inward-looking spiritual movement that rejected the world, did not prepare the ground in Germany for individualism and popular sovereignty in the way that outward-looking Calvinism did in England.
* The key class for German nationalism was not a dispossessed nobility, as in France, or a rising middle-class, as in England, but an intellectual class drawn from the Pietist-influenced country, educated at the new universities, but without an economic foothold in German states still dominated by the aristocracy. These suffering young Werthers were drawn to and developed the ideology of Romanticism which was a kind of secularized version of Pietism, and which stood for Spirit against Matter and Feeling against Intellect.
* This ideology became suddenly important after the Napoleonic invasion, which sparked an visceral reaction on the part of the aristocratic leaders of the German states, and especially Prussia. Looking around for an ideology to unite Germans against the French, they found one ready to hand in Romanticism.
* In the French formulation, the state was the nation, and the people, in serving the state, served the nation, and became patriots, a kind of noble. In Germany, the state was the reification of an Idea, and the people barely figured at all.
* Greenfeld concludes her discussion of Germany with an articulation about how the anti-Enlightenment ideology of Romanticism gave birth to the two distinctive German ideologies of the 19th century, Marxism and anti-Semitism, which she sees as intimately related to German nationalism.
* Her discussion of America is more cursory and less interesting. Basically, she sees American nationalism as a kind of hypertrophied English nationalism at heart, and, because of its individualist character, is always at risk of flying off into its constitutive parts. Only during and after the Civil War was a truly American nationalism established, in her formulation, and its character is its relentless egalitarian reformism. I think she captures important and distinctive things about American nationalism, but I don't think she's on as sure footing as she is in discussing France and Germany.

I called the book one of my more rewarding reads because I believe that nationalism, and failed nationalism, continues to be the motor that drives world events. Much of what Greenfeld describes is failed nationalism, states and peoples adopting ideologies of resentment and hatred because of their failures, and never understanding that what nationalism is about is self-government first and foremost. Her class analysis of these resentful nationalisms seems very good to me as well. How different are the underemployed untermentschen of Lahore from those of Wetlzar? The difference is between tragedy and farce; Germans could plausibly think that, their talents being so manifest, their present humiliations would be swiftly swept away by the tides of history. They could make reality conform to their fantasies, however dark. The followers of Qutb and the Deobandi schools cannot do the same (we hope).

If the failed nationalisms of the Islamic world bear the closest resemblance to the nationalisms of Germany and Russia, the new nationalism of Europe looks most like the nationalism of France. A state is rising both in imitation of and in competition to the United States, as France rose in competition with and in imitation of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The people of this new state have little or nothing to say about its rising, but its leaders, suffering from the status anxiety of being groomed for global leadership and achieving the destiny of setting the proper rules for the size of cheese wheels while Americans are busy reorganizing the world.

My assumption until recently was that, the EU project being inevitable, our goals should be limited to (a) keeping Britain out; (b) influencing the EU to be more democratic and accountable. If France and Germany want to form a superstate, good for them, and if others want to join, good for them, so long as it is a state with liberal values. But I now wonder whether France has overplayed its hand, and begun a reaction that will take the EU apart. At a minimum, it looks possible that Britain and the Eastern and Southern countries may be taking another hard look at whether they want to be ruled by France and Germany. At a maximum, Germany itself may take another hard look at whether it wants to antagonize America for the sake of the French gloire.

And my assumption continues to be that the Muslim world is largely hopeless where nationalism was concerned, and that this would make the region a perennial problem. My only hopes were placed on states like Iran and Egypt that have a pre-modern sense of themselves as nations (this is something Greenfeld gives too little credence to in the book; I think it definitely bears on English nationalism, and also on the French and the Russian varieties), and on Turkey, the only Muslim nation to have achieved a modern nationalism. Indonesia and Malaysia also have some potential to develop into nations. But I was very pessimistic about Iraq, Algeria, Pakistan, and of course Saudi Arabia to ever develop into something like nations. And I didn't see any alternative but chronic instability.

But it looks likely that, in a few weeks and over the next few years, my second assumption will get to be tested. We should all hope that pessimism on this score is unwarranted.
posted by Noah at 7:05 PM

 
Yossi Sarid, resigning as leader of Meretz, says: My mistake was not speaking strongly enough against Arafat. Ya think?

Seriously, though, I think this is both a revealing comment and to his credit. To his credit because Sarid, a very left-wing fellow, remains and has always been a patriot and a Zionist. He can bear no love towards the murderer in Ramallah, and his only motivation is the good of Israel and of the Jewish people. This is what divides the Zionist Left from the haters of Israel.

But it is revealing, and not in a positive way, that Sarid says he would pull his punches with regard to Arafat because of his feelings about Sharon. If he thought it unwise diplomatically to speak ill of Arafat, that would be one thing. But to let his political antipathy get in the way of serving his country . . . well, that's the Left all over these days, isn't it?

I'm glad he said it, though.
posted by Noah at 4:02 PM

 
A friend writes from Rochester that someone at shul this past Saturday morning told him that Ilan Ramon's actions were "the highest order of kiddush Hashem" (lit: sanctification of the divine Name, fig: martyrdom). I think that's a truly beautiful way of thinking about a tragic loss. I only hope it is true. If Ramon was only in space to wave an Israeli flag, or to perform mitzvot where they had never been performed before, well, that's not enough. If the brave crew of Columbia took their lives into their hands simply to continue to hold a marker in position saying, "yes, mankind is still here," that's not enough. We've been treading vacuum for a generation. We should be ashamed of ourselves, and ashamed to sacrifice six of our best men and women, and one dear friend, for so little. If we go on out of the determination not to be defeated, without making any progress toward "victory," that won't be enough. The shuttle is just a tool. We can build another or scrap it without ceremony. But the stars are our destiny.
posted by Noah at 3:58 PM