The Free Thinker

"Mister Tough Guy" (Mark Steyn):

Benjamin Disraeli’s most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: “Never complain and never explain.” For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Churchill, Lincoln, and Henry V at Agincourt look like first-round rejects on Orating with the Stars, Barack Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side. He tried it with health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end and the more he explained the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it’s time to sign on or else. 

Meanwhile, to take the other half of the Disraeli equation, Obama and his officials and their beleaguered band of surrogates never stop complaining. If you express concerns about government health care, they complain about all these “racists” and “domestic terrorists” obstructing his agenda. If you wonder why the president can’t seem to find time in his hectic schedule of international-awards acceptance speeches to make a decision about Afghanistan, they complain that it’s not his fault he “inherited” all these problems. And, if you wonder why his “green jobs” czar is a Communist 9/11 truther and his National Endowment for the Arts guy is leaning on grant recipients to produce Soviet-style propaganda extolling Obama policies, they complain about Fox News...

The most recent whine — the anti-Fox campaign — is, apart from anything else, unbecoming to the office. President Obama is the chief of state of one of the oldest free societies in the world, but his official White House website runs teasers such as: "For even more Fox lies, check out the latest ‘Truth-O-Meter.’” It gives off the air of somebody only marginally less paranoid than this week’s president-for-life in some basket-case banana republic ranting on the palace balcony because his interior security chief isn’t doing a fast enough job of disappearing his enemies.

At a superficial level, this looks tough. A famously fair-minded centrist told me the other day that he’d been taken aback by some of the near parodic examples of leftie radicalism discovered in the White House in recent weeks. I don’t know why he’d be surprised. When a man has spent his entire adult life in the “community organized” precincts of Chicago, it should hardly be news that much of his Rolodex is made up of either loons or thugs. The trick is identifying who falls into which category. Anita Dunn, the communications director commending Mao Zedong as a role model to graduating high school students, would seem an obvious loon. But the point about Mao, as Charles Krauthammer noted, is that he was the most ruthless imposer of mass conformity in modern history: In Mao’s China, everyone wore the same clothes. So when Communications Commissar Mao Ze Dunn starts berating Fox News for not getting into the same Maosketeer costumes as the rest of the press corps, you begin to see why the Chairman might appeal to her as a favorite “political philosopher.”

So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel, and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from The Untouchables — “the Chicago way,” don’t bring a knife to a gun fight — and, given the “pay czar”’s instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it’s easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer.

The trouble is it isn’t tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real “Untouchables” here? In Moscow, it’s Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary Clinton) they’re still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it’s Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle. We were told that Obama would use “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama’s soft power is so soft it doesn’t even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders’ very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama’s “smart diplomacy” is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever-cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander-in-chief look like a weenie — like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.

But, if you’re doing the overnight show on WZZZ-AM, Mister Tough Guy’s got your number.

Apologies to National Review for quoting almost the whole article, but Steyn is so funny it's a shame to leave anything out, and I wanted to add my punchline. The difference between Bush and Obama is that since Bush possessed a faculty for moral reasoning, he could be tough on really bad guys abroad even if they didn't harm him much personally, whereas perhaps no leader in the history of the world has tolerated such ferocious criticism as George W. Bush while abstaining completely from the use of power to suppress it. Obama, whose ideology seems to be narcissism, can evaluate various actors only by the degree to which they threaten his own popularity. By that standard, Fox News is objectively more dangerous than Putin or Ahmadinejad.

The Putinization of American Politics

"Fox Wars: The Obama Administration Wants to Delegitimize Any Significant Dissent" (Charles Krauthammer, 10/23/2009):

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’s bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox...

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a Saturday Night Live skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high-school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Nationalization of major companies, attempts to muscle out critics in the press, efforts to rewrite history in favor of mass-murdering Communist tyrants... Wow. Note that Obama and Putin go after TV rather than print media; the National Review is safe. It's OK to have small freethinking cliques, but you can't give the other guy access to public opinion. By the way, I made a break with CNN last fall. The last straw was a story last October about people losing money in non-FDIC-insured banks, which was all fine up to the sting: they mentioned that McCain's nephew worked in one of these banks, or something. It was such a low blow. A mere pundit would have been ashamed to make such an ad hominem attack on a candidate's family. I would have been ashamed to see freerepublic.com sink to that level. That was the end. I will simply never watch CNN. I don't think it should be shown in public places, but it doesn't hurt me, because I can look the other way, and I always have an iPod to drown out the sounds. I never watched Fox News either but now I feel guilty about that. If I want to keep my First Amendment freedoms, shouldn't I support the network that is standing up for them, even if I don't like it?

From The Moscow Times:

In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly last week, U.S. President Barack Obama said we are entering a new historical era. He declared that the United States would cease taking unilateral actions and called on all people of all nations to join together in combating the challenges facing the world. Obama said we need the “cooperative effort of the whole world.” His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values. He made similar appeals during visits to Prague, Cairo and Moscow...

A recent survey by the Levada Center revealed that only 2.1 percent of all Russians consider the United States a friend, but 50.2 percent see Belarus as one, 17.6 see China that way and 17.4 percent consider Germany a friend. By contrast, 61.8 percent of respondents considered Georgia as Russia’s enemy, with the United States in second place at 45.4 percent.

The survey also found that 50.4 percent of Russians had either a “basically bad” or “very bad” attitude toward the United States, with only 1.4 percent holding a “very good” attitude and 34 percent feeling “basically good” toward Washington. What is most surprising to me is that Russians’ attitudes toward the United States have actually worsened during Obama’s first year in office compared with what they were during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, Russia’s heretofore-favorite whipping boy.

"His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values."  Wow.  It's the most damning summary I've read yet, precisely because it's so decorous and superficially favorable.  How provincial, how uncurious, how narcissistic, how trapped in an echo chamber of admirers do you have to be not to realize that much of the world doesn't share the values that America has traditionally stood for.  If we want to live by and promote values like freedom, democracy, and peace, that will sometimes bring us into conflict with others.  It would certainly bring us into conflict (though well short of war) with Putin's Russia.

Russians are right to continue mistrusting us.  Obama may wish to conduct an amoral foreign policy for the next four years, but he can't commit America permanently to ignoring democratic freedoms and appeasing aggressors.  The first order of business for the next Republican president will be to apologize for Obama's apologies and for shabby treatment of our allies in eastern Europe and elsewhere.  Then get back to leading the Free World.

The Limits of American Power

"McChrystal: More forces or 'mission failure'" (Washington Post):

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

McChrystal concludes the document's five-page Commander's Summary on a note of muted optimism: "While the situation is serious, success is still achievable."

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians.

He provides extensive new details about the Taliban insurgency, which he calls a muscular and sophisticated enemy that uses modern propaganda and systematically reaches into Afghanistan's prisons to recruit members and even plan operations.

McChrystal's assessment is one of several options the White House is considering. His plan could intensify a national debate in which leading Democratic lawmakers have expressed reluctance about committing more troops to an increasingly unpopular war. Obama said last week that he will not decide whether to send more troops until he has "absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be."

'Absolute clarity' sums up in one neat phrase what Obama has shown he can't do...  But it gets even more depressing when you look at the details of McChrystal's critique:

The assessment offers an unsparing critique of the failings of the Afghan government, contending that official corruption is as much of a threat as the insurgency to the mission of the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, as the U.S.-led NATO coalition is widely known.

"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government," McChrystal says.

The result has been a "crisis of confidence among Afghans," he writes. "Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents."

McChrystal is equally critical of the command he has led since June 15. The key weakness of ISAF, he says, is that it is not aggressively defending the Afghan population. "Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us -- physically and psychologically -- from the people we seek to protect. . . . The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves."

McChrystal continues: "Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. ISAF does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."

McChrystal's frankness and demand for a rethink is encouraging.  But 'weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, [and] widespread corruption' is not the sort of thing the US-led coalition can do much about.  Nor can we create 'appreciation [of] the dynamics in local communities' out of thin air.  And I presume there's a trade-off between force protection and protecting the population, at least in the short run, in which case McChrystal's strategy implicitly calls for accepting more casualties.

McChrystal is saying to double down or get out.  What Americans seem to want, and what our broader geopolitical needs demand, is some kind of middle way, to try to achieve some kind of peace and avoid outright abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan, without committing a lot more resources to a project that even then is likely to fail, and which is really very marginal to our national security or to the values that we want to promote globally (since democracy in Afghanistan seems extremely unlikely). 

What we need ten times more urgently than success in Afghanistan is to get the Russians out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Every day that the Russia's conquests in the South Caucasus stand, international law is eroded.  We need to get back to basics: make the world safe for democracy, Georgian democracy in particular.

"Adding Fuel to the Russian Fire" (The Corner):

President Obama’s decision not to deploy an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic is intended to improve U.S.–Russian relations. In fact, it will make them worse.

The missiles were never a threat to Russia. This has been acknowledged by Russia’s own experts. Russia’s ICBM force is designed to attack the U.S. over the North Pole and the missiles intended for deployment in Poland are too slow to catch them and designed for a totally different purpose. The constant anti-western propaganda around this issue was referred to in the Soviet Union as “information for fools.” It served to consolidate the support of the population around a corrupt leadership by directing its frustrations against an external foe.

Russia opposed the missile deployment for a completely different reason. Had they been deployed on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact they would have demonstrated that this region was once and for all part of the defense architecture of the West. By using propaganda to induce Obama to back down, Russia has divided the NATO alliance into those countries where Russia has a veto over deployments and those where it does not with serious negative implications for the cohesion of the West.

The Obama administration undoubtedly hopes that the next step will be Russian cooperation over Iran. But having achieved a major strategic victory at no cost, the Russians are not likely to take steps that would alienate the Iranians and strengthen the West. Support for Iran gives Russia weight in international politics because, in the absence of any willingness on the part of the West to penalize Russia, it compels worried Western countries constantly to court the Kremlin. At the same time, a corrupt and criminalized regime whose stability depends on the price of oil may actually welcome tension in the Middle East capable of raising oil prices to stratospheric levels.

Officials in Washington have insisted that the decision to cancel the missile deployment was dictated by a new understanding of the threat posed by Iran. This is not the way it is being seen in Russia where officials are delighted by the demonstration of Russian strength which they think it represents. Russian news agencies recently reported that Russia will detain Georgian ships off Abkhazia in legally recognized Georgian territorial waters. As Russian “strength” becomes more self confident we can expect more such reactions to Russian success in the months ahead.

Exactly right. It's hard to tell whether this step is more stupid or more disgraceful. Why should anyone be our ally if we're such unprincipled appeasers as this? For shame!

Does Obama not understand that all Russia's demands in eastern Europe are utterly illegitimate? He can't be stupid enough not to see that, can he?

Insulting Our Allies

"America and eastern Europe: end of an affair?" (The Economist):

AFTER two decades of sometimes fervent Atlanticism in the ex-communist world, disillusionment (some would call it realism) is growing. At its height the bond between eastern Europe and America was based, like the best marriages, on a mixture of emotion and mutual support. The romance dates from the cold war: when western Europe was sometimes squishy in dealing with the Soviet empire, America was robust. When the Iron Curtain fell, ex-dissidents and retired cold warriors found they had plenty in common. America pushed for the expansion of NATO, guaranteeing the east Europeans’ security. In return, ex-communist countries loyally supported America, particularly in providing troops for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That relationship is now looking more wobbly. A new poll (see chart) by the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank, shows that western Europe is now much more pro-American and pro-NATO than the ex-communist east. Until last year, the eastern countries swallowed their misgivings about George Bush, while the west of the continent writhed in distaste at what many saw as his administration’s incompetence and heavy-handedness.

The ascent of Barack Obama has boosted America’s image in most countries, but only modestly in places like Poland and Romania. Among policymakers in the east, the dismay is tangible. In July, 22 senior figures from the region, including Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, wrote a public letter bemoaning the decline in transatlantic ties.

One reason is that the Obama administration is rethinking a planned missile-defence system, which would have placed ten interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic, in order to guard against Iranian missile attacks on America and much of Europe. That infuriated Russia, which saw the bases as a blatant push into its front yard. Changing the scheme—probably using seaborne interceptors—risks looking like a climb-down to suit Russian interests.

Poland is also worried that a promised battery of Patriot air-defence missiles, originally to protect the interceptors, may now be only a temporary loan of dummy rockets for training purposes—“just a sales exercise”, says an official in Warsaw, crossly. America says it never intended to station real rockets there permanently.

The administration also botched its participation in Poland’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the start of the second world war on September 1st. Other countries, including Russia and Germany, sent top people. America, initially, offered only a retired Clinton-era official. William Perry, who was a notable sceptic about NATO expansion. After squawks of dismay, Jim Jones, the national security adviser, went too. But Poles sensed a snub.

Sorry, Eastern Europe!  How many allies does Obama think we can afford to throw away?  Russia is the #1 threat to international law and world peace right now.  A wise foreign policy would focus on strengthening trans-Atlantic ties and using all peaceful methods to make Russia withdraw from Georgia.  But Obama seems to think that helping the good guys and opposing the bad guys isn't nuanced enough for someone with his Ivy League credentials.

At Least, Obama is a Good Way to Trick Europeans

"Poll finds soaring European support for US foreign policy" (Yahoo! News):

WASHINGTON – European support for the U.S. president's handling of foreign policy has soared since President Barack Obama took over from former President George W. Bush, but Europeans continue to view major issues including Afghanistan, Iran and global warming differently than Americans view them, a poll released Wednesday found.

Among those polled in the European Union and Turkey, about three-fourths, on average, said they supported Obama's handling of foreign policy compared with about a fifth who said the same for Bush last year, according to the survey. It was conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a nonpartisan policy institution that promotes trans-Atlantic cooperation, and the Compagnia di San Paolo, a research center in Turin, Italy.

The results were especially pronounced in Germany, where support shot up 80 percentage points to 92 percent, and in France, where it rose 77 percentage points to 88 percent.

The German Marshall Fund said in a press release that in eight years of conducting the survey, which includes dozens of polls, no other data changed as dramatically as the European support for U.S. policies between 2008 and 2009.

Obama's presidency has produced a less dramatic rise in support for U.S. polices in Central and Eastern Europe on average, where Bush enjoyed greater popularity than in Western Europe. Obama scored approval from almost nine of 10 people surveyed in Western Europe compared with about two-thirds in the four Central and Eastern countries surveyed: Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

Last year, the poll found support for Bush at less than a fifth of those surveyed in the Western European countries and about a third in the other four countries...

Almost two-thirds of Europeans polled were pessimistic about stabilizing Afghanistan, while more than half of Americans were optimistic. The poll was conducted before Afghanistan's widely criticized Aug. 20 elections.

This is sort of amusing since Obama has basically been continuing with Bush policies in foreign affairs, continuing the drawdown of troops in Iraq, continuing the war in Afghanistan, recognizing Georgia's territorial integrity, etc. The biggest difference is that Obama seems less supportive of America's friends, e.g., Israel, Poland, India, and more inclined to appease enemies, e.g., Russia, Iran.  He's also been increasing the US presence in Afghanistan, which Europeans are skeptical about.  Anyway, these changes are small and certainly don't account for the jump in support for US foreign policy.

What the poll really shows is how shallow and superficial European opposition to the US in the Bush years really was.  It was essentially self-indulgent, the pleasure of claiming the moral high ground and shaking one's fist at the powerful, without any real danger of punishment for it.  Europeans found it clever to say that the US was the greatest threat to world peace, but they knew that, in reality, the US is a civilized power like no other in history and that they were perfectly safe under the US security umbrella.  It's notable that Europeans didn't actually change their geostrategic orientation in the Bush years.  They didn't, for example, try to form a large, global anti-U.S. alliance: indeed, the two European leaders who came closest to doing so, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder in their flirtations with Vladimir Putin, became highly unpopular at home and lost at the polls, Chirac seeing a rival, Sarkozy, win the president, Schroeder being defeated by Angela Merkel (before accepting a job at Gazprom!). 

This is not to deny that Europeans really did despise Bush, who offended their sense of superiority by believing that Iraq was capable of achieving the same transformation to democracy under US occupation that Germany, and in a sense Western Europe generally, achieved under US occupation.  They liked the older world order where the West bought peace for itself by tolerating totalitarianism abroad.  Their moral relativism was made uncomfortable by Bush's calling al Qaeda's terrorism and Saddam's murderocracy "evil."  Europeans prefer a non-threatening morality, by which rich nations donate pocket change to human rights groups to point out, but only verbally of course, that oppressive regimes have room for improvement in their treatment of their people.  Actually doing something about evil in the world is a scandal.

Now the substitution of a new figurehead, even without a change in policies, has changed the fashion in Europe.  While that's certainly the most useful thing Obama has done so far, let's not get too used to it.  The last time we were popular in Europe, al Qaeda was running terrorist training camps and preparing for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Keeping Europe's good will is not necessarily consistent with dealing with rising threats to US security, or with working for the welfare of mankind.

It Worked

The Economist supported the Iraq War, and the surge, and in the past has often defended Bush against some of his critics.  Yet recently, they have succumbed to Bush Derangement Syndrome.  Thus, in their recent survey of the Arab world, they write:

Four years on from Ms Rice’s speech, the Bush administration’s dream that democracy could be imposed on the Arabs by an outside force lies in tatters.

The idea that the Bush administration dreamed of "imposing democracy on the Arabs by force" is the crudest of fallacies.  It is true, at most, in Iraq; elsewhere, of course, the Bush administration made no attempt to overthrow regimes by force and install democracy.  In Iraq, the imposition of democracy by force succeeded.

Whatever becomes of Iraq in the longer term, the bright hope that the Americans’ removal of Saddam might transform that country into a democratic example for other Arabs to follow has flickered out. The invasion, and the civil war that followed it, killed far too many Iraqis for anyone else in the region to wish such a chaotic, bloody and destructive experiment on themselves.

Right.  Neither would the Bush administration.  That's why the Bush administration imposed democracy on Iraq, not other Arab countries like, say, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, where the regimes are nasty but not psychopathically totalitarian.  The operation was going to be bloody, chaotic, and destructive.  Only when the alternative was a totalitarian murderocracy responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths was the sacrifice worth it.

The installation of democracy was never the main part of America’s motivation for unseating Saddam. The need to rid America of an unpredictable enemy, suspected plausibly of pursuing weapons of mass destruction, loomed much larger in Mr Bush’s pre-war speeches and deliberations.

Now, that's gratuitous.  Also stupid.  Naturally when the Bush administration was trying to get the United Nations, half of whose members are dictatorship, to support the war, it didn't talk about spreading democracy.

His “freedom agenda” came to the fore later, after it was discovered that the much-hyped weapons did not exist.

Wrong again.  Bush started emphasizing freedom as soon as it was clear that UN approval would not be forthcoming.  WMDs were emphasized prior to the war because everyone believed Saddam had them (why risk his regime if not?!), so it seemed like a good way to make the case for war ex post.  Legally, whether Saddam actually had WMDs was irrelevant, since he was violating his treaty obligations by keeping out the inspectors even if he had nothing to hide.  It was a little embarrassing, in retrospect, that we emphasized WMDs when they weren't there, but it was good that he didn't have WMDs, since he would likely have used them, making the war much bloodier.  He still wanted to acquire them and presumably would have done so had the sanctions regime unraveled, which it was beginning to do anyway.

But this later effort to talk, bribe and bully friendly Arab regimes into political reform was serious. And the reasons for its failure, even in the case of supposedly malleable American “clients” such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, reveal a great deal about the immobility of Arab politics.

What it reveals is that talk is cheap and ineffective.  Which is why this line is risible:

Whatever the reasons for its failure, Mr Bush’s freedom agenda is now dead. In June of this year it was the turn of Barack Obama to make a spellbinding speech at a university in Cairo. This speech will go down in the history books.

No doubt Obama's speech will get a sentence, but it doesn't matter; it is a blip, not an event.  The Economist is falling for Obama's conceit that he can change the world by mere talking.  They ought to know better.  In a way, maybe they do know better, since they soon follow up with a "but"...

But in some ways this speech was less ambitious than Ms Rice’s of 2005. Like Ms Rice, Mr Obama extolled the virtues of democracy. But this time he stressed the crucial rider. “Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people,” he said. “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.”

Obviously, the content of democracy depends on where it is being practiced.  Bush often said things to this effect, too.  One doesn't make history by repeating truisms.  One does so by acting; for example, by overthrowing the world's worst tyranny and installing a democratic regime in its place.  The rest of The Economist's survey of the Arab world describes a widespread ferment and some signs of a growing liberalism.  They also note that:

For the present, al-Qaeda’s vision of endless war against the West and a return to the simple verities of Islam’s first century appears to have lost the glamour it acquired after the felling of the twin towers. America’s reputation suffered a terrible beating in the sands of Iraq, but so in the end did Osama bin Laden’s as the Arab public, Sunni as well as Shia, recoiled from al-Qaeda’s atrocities, which killed more Muslims than infidels.

That is as much as to say that America won the War on Terror by invading Iraq.  Well, yes.  Good point.  The Iraq War put al-Qaeda in an unwinnable catch-22.  They would see their credibility ruined if they didn't fight.  They would have to kill Muslims and alienate their constituency if they did.  They chose the latter, unfortunately for the Iraqi people, but the looming menace that, on 9/11, stood a real chance of causing WWIII, has been reduced to insignificance.

For decades the Arab world has been moving towards growing tyranny, fermenting poisonous ideologies.  Now it is moving in the other direction, "waking from its sleep," as The Economist puts it.  Why?  Because of the Iraq War.  It worked.

Dreams of a Humanitarian World Order

"An idea whose time has come-- and gone? An idealistic effort to establish a new humanitarian principle is coming under attack at the United Nations" (The Economist):

GARETH EVANS, a former Australian foreign minister and roving global troubleshooter, makes a bold but passionate claim on behalf of a three-word expression which (in quite large part thanks to his efforts) now belongs to the language of diplomacy: the “responsibility to protect”. In a recent book, he says there are “not many ideas that have the potential to matter more for good, not only in theory but in practice.”

Like many people who labour to ensure that mass murder will never recur, he links his personal commitment to an early formative event: in his case, a visit to Cambodia on the eve of the massacres in which up to a quarter of the population died. For others, the spur was the genocide in Rwanda, pictured above; for others still, the killing of Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in Bosnia.

Whatever their motive, people of that cast of mind took heart from the moment in 2005 when the biggest-ever gathering of world leaders accepted the principle that they have a general “responsibility to protect” human beings from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In a delicate formula which Mr Evans worked hard to craft, it was agreed that this concept, now known as R2P, referred mainly to the responsibility of states for their own people. Only in certain extreme circumstances, when states could not or would not protect their own citizens, or were actively harming them, might others step in. The concept was carefully modified so as to avoid giving prickly sovereign states the idea that they were about to be invaded at will by moralising outsiders.

But to the dismay of Mr Evans and his friends, a coalition of governments and other sceptics now seems bent on unravelling all their delicate work. These naysayers have been busily sharpening their knives ahead of a debate at the General Assembly which was due to start on July 23rd.

The apparent campaign to sabotage R2P is taking place in defiance of Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, who earlier this year drew up a report that presents the concept in the most cautious and reassuring of tones. As he argued, there were several benign and uncontroversial ways in which R2P could be made more real. For example, by helping decent states protect their people; or by having an effective early-warning system to trigger constructive action when things start to go wrong (or in plainer terms, when states start to collapse). He says action, military or otherwise, by external powers is a last resort.

Such assurances have failed to convince critics of R2P, who are adamant that the whole idea is just a cover to legitimise armed interference by rich Western powers in the affairs of poor countries. One person who takes that view is Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a Nicaraguan diplomat (and Sandinista priest-politician), who is now president of the General Assembly.

In a calculated snub to the idealists who tried to make the R2P idea nuanced and hence palatable, he says a more accurate name for the concept would be the “right to intervene” or R2I. Quite a number of countries might be persuaded to support a resolution diluting the commitment to R2P that was made by over 150 states at the UN summit in 2005. Possible backers include large and middle-sized powers of various ideological stripes—including India, Pakistan, Cuba, Sudan, Venezuela and Egypt. Some of these may try to induce smaller states in their neighbourhood to follow their sceptical line...

Mr d’Escoto scheduled an eve-of-debate discussion by a four-member panel in which Mr Evans was the only supporter of R2P—pitted against three sceptics, including Noam Chomsky, a linguist and veteran critic of American foreign policy.

In the 1990s, the horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo, etc. inspired a lot of well-intentioned but quixotic thinking about humanitarian intervention, in which idealists made mental and rhetorical gestures in the direction of a foreign policy for which they may not have had the real gumption, and inspired efforts which, though not as ineffectual as sometimes alleged, could only have effects at the margins.  Then George W. Bush came along and, in Iraq, showed the world what kind of efforts civilized states must undertake if their joint "responsibility to protect" the world's peoples from massacre and totalitarianism is not to be a travesty.  The next step, which may be a long time coming, is to convert the precedent of Iraq into a credible threat that regimes which violate their people's rights on a totalitarian scale will be overthrown and the culprits punished.  Were the credible threat established, it might not be necessary to act on it very often.

You can call responsibility to protect imperialist if you like; that term is a distraction.  What matters is not the nationality of the people who rule any given territory, but the degree to which their rule is consensual, accountable, and respectful of the rights of the governed.  Many past empires have behaved badly in those respects, and to that extent the term empire has negative connotations, but the empires of today and tomorrow might do better, as the American empire in Western Europe, Japan, and now Iraq has done.  Though probably it's better not to use the term at all, since an "empire" that occupies a country only with the consent of an elected government that represents that people's will, such as the US presence in Iraq, seems like a contradiction in terms.  In any case, while it will probably be some time before the Iraq precedent turns into a new humanitarian world order, it's hard to see how the project can be set back permanently.  People of good will now know that we can bring a better life to victims of totalitarianism or anarchy.  Their consciences cannot be silenced forever.

UPDATE: I wrote an article about the soulless Noam Chomsky a while back, below the fold:

C.S. Lewis on Religious Persecution

From God in the Dock:

Question 15: In the past the Church used various kinds of compulsion in attempts to force a particular brand of Christianity on the community. Given sufficient power, is there not a danger of this sort of thing happening again?

Lewis: Yes, I hear nasty rumors coming from Spain. Persecution is a temptation to which all men are exposed. I had a postcard signed 'M.D.' saying that anyone who expressed and published his belief in the Virgin Birth should be stripped and flogged. That shows you how easily persecution of Christians by the non-Christians might come back. Of course, they wouldn't call it Persecution: they'd call it 'Compulsory re-education of the ideologically unfit,' or something like that. But, of course, I have to admit that Christians themselves have been persecutors in the past. It was worse of them, because they ought to have known better: they weren't worse in any other way. I detest every kind of religious compulsion: only the other day I was writing an angry letter to The Spectator about Church Parades in the Home Guard!

The best part of this is Lewis's remark that Christians should have known better than to be persecutors. It is a bit hard to understand how a religion whose central narrative is the Crucifixion could so often have emulated Caiaphas.