John McCain and the "Transcendent" War

John McCain, during the recent Republican debate, says:

I also firmly believe that the challenge of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism. It is a transcendent issue. It is hydra-headed. It will be with us for the rest of the century.

Josh Marshall, who is skilled at doing this sort of thing, lucidly analyzes the absurdity of the remark:

Now, think about that. That's ninety-three years. My old graduate school advisor Gordon Wood used to say that humans have a very hard time seeing more than fifty years into the future. Of course, even a year into the future is difficult. But more than a few decades and we haven't the slightest idea what the world is going to look like ...

But John McCain states it as a matter of fact that the war against militant Islam will still be the defining national security threat for this country in 2099 and for years after.

I know we customarily give a rather wide berth to rhetorical excess in the theater of politics. But what on earth is McCain talking about? Not long ago it was enough to sate the historical vanity of the War on Terror mongers to dub it a 'long war' or 'generational struggle', which it may well be. But apparently even that is now insufficient. Only an entire century will do. It is almost as if as the concept in the real-world present looks more and more ill-judged and foolhardy its credentials must be buffed up by giving it more and more ridiculous lifespans ranging off into the unknowable future.

The Carpetbagger Report expands on this:

We’re engaged in an undefined, open-ended war against an undetermined enemy that spans several continents and is unaffiliated with any specific nation-state. I’m rather surprised McCain was willing to limit his vision to just the 21st century.

Indeed, as long as we’re looking at this in a big-picture kind of way, a McCain-like vision of a “war on terror” can’t end until we’ve “won.” I’m curious how those who share McCain’s ideology would define “victory” in this context.

When the Middle East is dominated by democracies? That won’t do it; people can vote for terrorists. When al Qaeda is destroyed? There are other networks that can and would take its place. When religious extremists are no longer motivated by their faith to commit acts of violence? That might, um, take a while.

The two writers note other aspects of the "transcendence" of this struggle: for one thing, as Marshall points out, it puts McCain, Bush, and their ideological fellow-travellers beyond the realm of mere evidence -- and ultimately beyond judgment and consequences altogether: "the future is the only territory where empirical evidence or -- more plainly put -- reality can't be brought up to contradict you." I've suggested before that "victory" in Iraq, as it is postponed ad infinitum into the future by its neoconservative devotees -- always just around a corner or two -- is a similarly unassailable concept. Lest we forget, our travails in Iraq are, in the minds of the neocons, bound up conceptually into the general "long war" McCain was describing during the debate; indeed, there's no particular reason to believe that, given the unity and "transcendence" of the war as described by McCain, we should expect "victory" in Iraq to arrive at any point during the front end of that 93-year struggle. If Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, and the war on terror is expected to last a century, well...

Of course, the front line may shift. To where? It hardly matters. That's the fun of transcendent war -- it has little to do with actual circumstances or actual decisions or actual people with actual lives to be lived and lost.

From what has this war transcended? And to where? It has transcended, I think, from being a collection of actual issues, often only tangentally related to one another, and subject to management by competent people using empirically-tested methods, to being a holy cause, given rhetorical unity and subject first and foremost to the demands of faith (and political advantage). The claims to competence of the actual experts are degraded, and the experts themselves frequently become convenient and amusing subjects of abuse at the hands of the initiate. And for the nonbelievers, there's a lake of political fire.

Why does it seem so important for American conservatives to have a transcendent war to wage?

Perhaps because American conservatism -- that peculiar strain of hyper-aggressive, bowdlerized right-liberalism punctuated by bouts of Burke-inspired self-loathing -- has accomplished some things, but as a whole and on its own, it lacks a convincing internal logic (even though it believes strongly in the importance of such a logic) and is uninspired by the duties and challenges of actually governing. It seems to me that Democrats -- right back to the days of Andrew Jackson -- have generally been the party of the incoherent, non-ideological, pragmatic majority. Seekers of transcendence, on the other hand, have tended to be much more attracted to the Republican party. This has given us abolition, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and progressivism, but it has also given us Prohibition, "the Evil Empire," and the Moral Majority. It's difficult for the right to get by, politically speaking, without a transcendent cause to which it can attach. If the details of the cause -- the actual people, the actual circumstances, the fact that it can't really be described as a "cause" at all -- get in the way, said details should be rubbished and ignored. This is the mindset of the faithful.

What's the cash value of these ruminations? I don't know. But Prohibition and the Moral Majority went away sooner than many people thought they would. I imagine that neo-Reaganism will, as well. Transcendence feels great when you first inhale it, but the high never lasts as long as it should, and the real world comes rushing back hard.

Labels: Iraq, John McCain, Neoconservatives, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:05 PM 1 comments

  Look Who's a Fifth Column Now!

Andrew Sullivan, of course, was a cheerleader for the Iraq war and an enthusiastic participant in the demagoguery that suffocated American political debate during the run-up to the invasion. But his role as perhaps the most prominent intellectual of a certain peculiar school of American conservatism (one might call it the "Interesting!" school, in the Michael Kinsley sense) makes him somebody worth reading nonetheless. If I find occasion to praise him, don't think I've forgotten or forgiven his sins.

This is one of those occasions. Sullivan, who has now turned his defender-of-national-security schtick against the real domestic threat to American interests -- the Republican party -- writes the very script Democrats should be using when they talk about the war. Responding to one of Hugh Hewitt's inane party-line iterations of the mantra that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror (and that, therefore, those who oppose the war advocate submission to Islamic terror), Sully smacks the whole conservative framework to pieces:

Is it not possible to make, you know, empirical distinctions between various threats? To see that Islamism does indeed fuel Sunni and Shia violence, but that these forces are also fundamentally at war with one another? To see a distinction between Ahmadinejad's Shiite apocalyptics and Bin Laden's Wahhabist caliphate - a distinction any halfway competent war strategy would exploit, not deny?

When you see how evidence-resistant a propagandist like Hewitt can be, you begin to realize how important it is to keep these people away from power. They are much less interested in defeating al Qaeda than they are in using al Qaeda to defeat Democrats. This is what Hewitt really cares about: the GOP. Look what damage his ilk have done to the West's security since 9/11 because of their pathological partisanship. Look at how their refusal or inability to see any nuance, complexity or variety in the many threats we face makes our defeat more likely. We just cannot afford to tolerate these Republican propagandists any longer. There is a war on. And they simply aren't serious about fighting it.

Emphasis mine. I pledge my vote to the first Democratic presidential candidate to repeat the bolded parts of Sullivan's post verbatim. And to repeat it often.

Labels: Andrew Sullivan, Iraq, national defense, Republicans, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:32 PM 2 comments

  Falwell Dead; Conservatism Ailing

One could cut and paste today's New York Times headlines into a pretty instructive narrative about the state of American conservatism today. Something like this:

First, The death of conservative evangelicalism. Okay, not the death -- that's far too optimistic. But the passing of Jerry Falwell is symbolic of a shift in the politics of evangelical Christianity in the United States. Falwell, by founding the Moral Majority in 1979, founded the modern Christian right. Too often these days we forget that evangelical Christians have by no means always been a conservative force in American politics. In other eras they've been progressive forces -- even radically progressive; in still others they have simply been politically disengaged. The equation "evangelical=fundamentalist=right-winger" is very much a creation of Jerry Falwell and his allies. As the Times obit puts it, the Moral Majority's "very name drew a vivid line in the sand of American politics."

But now the line is blurring, as moderate evangelical leaders guide their flocks away from conservative dogma, and as the conservative movement's elites and intellectuals are emboldened to advocate for abandoning core Christian right priorities. It's more than cosmic coincidence that Falwell died only days after the frontrunning candidate for the GOP presidential nomination openly embraced a pro-choice, not-anti-gay line. So have you checked out the National Review lately? It's full of conservative pundits spinning away on Rudy's behalf. Falwell is dead; his movement may be going to the grave with him. What that means for the Republican Party is yet to be seen.

Second, Republican candidates cling desperately to war and terror. The conservative elites' eagerness to embrace Giuliani has much to do with the perception that his electability is based in the very issues that, in recent history's most operatic irony, have been both the GOP's greatest strength and its great downfall. War and terror are Republican specialities; if they do not own war and terror, they own very little in a country whose electorate moves inexorably into the progressive column on issues of government, economics, and teh gays. Having brought the public far more war and terror than anyone ever really wanted, along with their incompetence, their mendacity, and their cronyism, the Republicans can only hope to reinvigorate the brand. The various candidates' enthusiasm, during last night's debate, for more torture!, more war!, more Gitmo!, might be understood as rather confused efforts to do just this. But it was Giuliani who best defined himself, precisely as his supporters have hoped he would, as the Candidate of War and Terror -- But Better This Time!, when he seized an opportunity to blow-torch a straw man dressed up to look like the inimitable Ron Paul. We'll let the National Review's Byron York tell the tale:

It all started when Paul was asked how September 11 changed American foreign policy. “Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us?” Paul answered. “They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years…”

Questioner Wendell Goler, of Fox News, asked, “Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?”

“I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” Paul said. “They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”

Enter Giuliani. “May I comment on that?” the mayor said, interrupting the orderly flow of things for the first time in the debate. “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”

The audience loved it. As the applause built, Giuliani added, “And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

Paul didn’t back down, but by cutting in, Giuliani had scored some of the best, and perhaps easiest, points of the night.... Giuliani’s aides seemed genuinely happy with his performance Tuesday night, in contrast to the way they seemed to be faking their happiness in California. “He was better,” said Jim Dyke, a top Giuliani adviser. “9/11 is very personal to the mayor. You can’t coach something like that.”

Giuliani, of course, "lived through" the attacks of 9/11 much as I "lived through" them -- by being in the city at the time. The idea that he was some sort of hero that day, or in the days thereafter, is a myth. But it's not the myth that matters here -- it's the conservatives' need to believe in it. It appears to be all they have. And for its sake, they'll abandon the coalition that made them what they are today (or at least, what they were before last November's elections).

Finally, the crony capitalism machine churns on. I mentioned this in a previous post, and I should continue to emphasize it. As giddy as we can be over all the various acts of immolation and cannibalism on the conservative side, let's not forget that, in perhaps its most essential function, their movement has continued to hum along quite efficiently. My own thesis, advanced many times, is that since conservative principles for government don't work, conservatives wind up governing without principles. And so you get things like this:

A senior lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers nominated by President Bush to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission will receive a $150,000 departing payment from the association when he takes his new government job, which involves enforcing consumer laws against members of the association.

[...]

As chairman of the commission, Mr. Baroody’s salary would be $154,600. With the severance payment and an additional lump sum of $44,571 for unused leave time, Mr. Baroody would receive $349,171 this year. That amount, which excludes Mr. Baroody’s pension and retirement payments, nearly matches the $344,607 salary that Mr. Baroody earned as the second-highest-paid executive at the association last year.

The nomination of Mr. Baroody, executive vice president at the association, has provoked heavy criticism from Democrats and consumer groups. He is the latest in a line of industry officials and lobbyists to be given senior jobs by Mr. Bush at federal safety agencies that oversee matters like workplace and mine safety and transportation as the administration has sought to roll back hundreds of regulations that businesses viewed as excessive.

Of course, you could argue that there is a principle at work here, and you wouldn't be wrong. There are more than one, I'd say. "Reward your friends, punish your enemies" is a principle that seems to crop up a lot in this administration. It's not much, as principles go, but it's a good general rule of thumb for, say, a street gang. On a larger level, there's "keep those meddling bureaucrats from messing with American business." That's a principle that could almost, if you argue it right (and conservatives are very good at arguing things right), derive from a legitimate philosophy, which is that "capitalism works better than government, so don't pollute capitalism with government." That's a numbingly foolish, short-sighted, and simple-minded philosophy, but it is a philosophy nonetheless.

So we can't say the Bush administration operates entirely without principles (and I won't delve here into a discussion of whether the president's devotion to his war counts as a principle or merely as evidence of insanity), though the few remaining principles in evidence seem to have almost nothing to do with an argument about the good society, and a lot to do with looting the Treasury and gutting the regulatory apparatus before the electoral hordes can finally break down the White House doors.

Modern Republican party conservatism isn't a pretty picture. Denuded of principle, fleshed by mutual purge attempts, insensately clinging to its once-fearsome reputation as the party best able to use violence and the threat of violence to further its own aims, it seems to hurtling toward some kind of reckoning. We can only guess how much of the public interest it will drag along toward that doom.

Labels: Bush administration, conservatives, Jerry Falwell, Rudy Giuliani, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:01 AM 1 comments

  In Which It Gets Awkward for Rudy

NRO's Jim Geraghty reports on Rudy Giuliani's appearance at the Latino Coalition, a conservative policy organization whose chairman, former Bush administration official Hector Barreto, apparently set the stage with a rousing introduction. The enthusiasm might have had something to do with the fact that America's Mayor (TM) was the only presidential candidate, "Republican, Democrat, Green, red or blue" to accept TLC's invitation. Yet Garaghty reports that Rudy somehow managed to fall flat anyway.

According to Geraghty's account, Giuliani's tough love anti-welfare schtick went over well enough with the business-oriented crowd. Stressing the importance of individual "dignity," he moved from welfare to immigration -- this seems like a pretty good rhetorical theme -- and recounted how, as mayor, he supposedly complained to federal immigration authorities who were more interested in deporting restaurant workers than drug dealers.

And, perhaps inevitably, the R-word makes an appearance:

Rudy was the Rudy we’ve all seen before, invoking Reagan at every opportunity and not only using "optimistic" frequently, but actually demonstrating optimism, as when he said the illegal immigration debate was an illustration of an unrecognized greatness of America.

It's morning in America. Yet again.

All well and good, but when he came to the theme that's supposed to be at the heart of his campaign, Rudy apparently failed to convince:

Yet the meat of Giuliani’s stump speech, the section on 9/11 and the war on terrorism, was greeted with, if not quite silence, a distinct quiet after what one might think were intended to be applause lines. Iraq was not mentioned at all, and there was a palpable lack of enthusiasm after Giuliani’s statement "We have to be on offense against them — we have to say we’re never going to go back to the way we were before September 11. We’re never going to be in denial, never going to be in a situation again. The only real good defense is a good offense." Perhaps the audience looked back on the façade of peace on September 10 with a bit of nostalgia.

Or perhaps they were worn out by years of brutal Republican incompetence on national security issues. An ominious sign for the guy who wants to be President of 9/11?

In other Rudy-related news, it seems the mayor dissed influential right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham this morning, ignoring requests to appear on her show. Not smart, says K-Lo.

Labels: 2008, Laura Ingraham, National review, Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:44 AM 0 comments

  It's Really Not About Us, Except When it Is

Dinesh D'Souza has really caused hell for American conservatives. With his silly little book, he has inadvertently pinned cultural conservatives into a trap of their own making; he is openly asking for an alliance that everyone knew made sense but nobody outside the left had been willing to point out: between U.S. social conservatives and Islamic conservatives. He has illustrated, in grand fashion - and quite explicitly - the not-so-secret yearning of so many on the right for an American version of sharia law. And despite his best efforts to square the circle and insist that, still, it's actually the left who are in cahoots with the terrorists (even while rejecting everything they stand for), D'Souza has left conservatives desperately looking for a way to squirm out of the frame he has so artfully built for them.

The latest conservative intellectual to make an attempt at escape is Stanley Kurtz, the inveterate culture warrior, who has just reviewed D'Souza's book at the National Review. Kurtz declares that his "moment of culture-war overload has finally arrived." Better late than never, I suppose.

Of course, this is not going to be the violent denunciation D'Souza's foolish screed deserves. Kurtz is far too polite. Or rather, he's not too terribly opposed to D'Souza's thesis. Sure, it's "seriously misconceived." But it's also "thoughtful, provocative... serious and interesting;" it's a "fruitful error," one which can serve to provoke useful debate. Kurtz is hardly bothered by the slander against liberals - indeed, he seems to agree with it ("D’Souza is undoubtedly correct to finger the global spread of our “liberated” post-Sixties culture as a factor in the terror war.") But as long as the frame is "liberal values vs. Islamicist values," conservatives are trapped in the uncomfortable position of admitting (if only implicitly) that conservative values can look discomfitingly close to the latter. He needs other "factors" to discuss.

So Kurtz turns the focus to Islam itself. The problem, he argues, is not (liberal) Western culture, it's the pathologies within Islam that lead Muslims to be so easily offended by the West:

Yet, while Islamists may seize upon Hollywood films and international productions of the Vagina Monologues as symbols of their underlying objections to modernity, the more important sources of conflict are the distinctively Muslim social practices that generate such complaints to begin with.

In other words, if immigrant British Muslims weren’t secluding their daughters in hopes of preserving family honor and protecting an already promised marriage to a cousin back in Pakistan, they’d be far less upset with Western movies in the first place. What’s driving the distress is less the movies that a daughter sees at college than the fact that British daughters go off to college at all, freely meet men there, and freely choose their husbands from among those men. Other British immigrant communities, with less restrictive family practices, may occasionally grouse about cultural depravity. Yet the complaints are less frequent, less deeply felt, and far less deadly. It’s the marriage practice, not the movie, that counts.

Here the culture warrior is on familiar ground. All he needs to do is find a set of criteria that allows him to transfer his critique of liberal pathologies to a critique of Islamic pathologies. Hell, he even gets to keep "marriage" as the central point of analysis.

Now, if the true pathology is with Islam itself, then this suggests that Muslims will be offended by the West anyway, whether the libs are running wild or not. Kurtz describes this as a "clash between modernity and Islamic social life" (hung up as it is on practices like preferential patrilateral parallel cousin marriage), and he argues that "Islam has a long history of producing violent and radical sects ... in times of crisis." What this analysis allows Kurtz to do is to set up an opposition between American conservatives and Islamists, for it is the conservatives who represent Kurtz's ideal version of Western "modernity," which is defined by its Judeo-Christian commitment to individualist values and free choice in marriage.

Now, we have plenty of reason to be skeptical of the social conservatives' claims to represent such values anyway. But see if you can spot the massive gray thing in the room here.

The pachyderm-like shape becomes clearer when you read the series of responses Kurtz's review triggered at the Corner. Mark Steyn says "it's not about us":

Dinesh’s argument that America’s worthless porno-sodomite-lapdance culture is the root cause of jihad has one very big hole in it: He speaks in praise of "traditional Islam" and notes that most of the world’s people also live in "traditional societies" who are as revolted by our pop culture as your average imam. But how then do you account for the very problematic relationship "traditional Islam" has with other "traditional societies"? In Nigeria, in Sudan, in southern Thailand, etc.

Andrew Stuttaford says "it's not even just the Muslims":

The fact of the matter is that there is something in human nature that is drawn to violent religious fanaticism of the worst kind (usually bundled up in a grotesque puritanism). It's not just the Wahhabis. No religion (or quasi-religion such as communism) is immune from it. Think, for example, of the Maccabees, or the completely-to-be-expected Spanish Inquisition, or, for that matter, the zealots of the early Bolshevik era, or even, dare I say it, the foam-flecked atheism of Richard Dawkins. The more interesting question is whether some religions are more prone to it than others...

Jonah Goldberg says it's not the Muslims' responsibility to tell us that the queers are out of control:

It shouldn't matter. If gay marriage is wrong, it's wrong. If feminism goes too far, it goes too far. Jim Crow was wrong because it was wrong, not because it gave the Soviet Union talking points at the UN. So even if Dinesh were right that our "pagan depravity" prompts Jihadis to behead Jews and Christians, kill homosexuals, enslave women, hijack planes, and blow up buildings full of civilians, the fault still lies entirely with the Jihadis.

Gee... all that talk about the furniture and still nobody's mentioned the elephant.

The elephant, of course, is foreign policy. It's the fact that bin Laden himself has made it very clear why Al-Qaeda attacked the US, and it had nothing to do with Hollywood or with whose cousins were marrying who. It's the fact that every competent observer has pointed out that bin Laden has certain specific regional strategic goals, that his primary targets are secular Mideastern regimes (including the one we helpfully destroyed for him), and that Al-Qaeda has attacked the US because and to the extent of our status as an obstacle to and/or useful foil in accomplishing those goals.

Kurtz himself has dismissed this observation, for instance in this piece written shortly after the 9/11 attacks. To Kurtz and his ilk (and he's got a lot of ilk), any consideration of actual foreign policy choices - even one that might not lead the conclusion that our choices have been wrong per se - is nothing more than a howlingly outrageous attempt to "blame America first." It looks that way, quite probably, because the Kurtzes and Steyns and Goldbergs are generally quite ignorant when it comes to geopolitics. They are movement types. Their bread and butter is commenting on the social pathologies of everyone who does not live they way they think people should live; when foreign policy realities fail to bend to their wishes, they fall back on the same schtick: the problem must be with the way Muslims live. Or, if you're D'Souza, it's American liberal pathologies to blame after all. Once again, foreign policy is subjected to the ideological preoccupations of the social right; once again, they are hammers, so the problems of the world must all be nails.

None of which resolves their essential dilemma: culturally speaking, conservatives do indeed have more in common with Islamicists than do liberals.

But it sure gives them a lot to talk about.

Labels: Dinesh D'Souza, Foreign Policy, Islam, social conservatives, Stanley Kurtz, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 5:46 PM 0 comments

  You're Either With Us, or With the Mooninites

h/t: Once again, my sister.

Labels: War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:48 PM 0 comments

  Have You No Decency

This is sick.

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

Unbelievable. Should we also destroy the careers of the military doctors who treat Gitmo detainees?

It's more grist for the wingnutmill, but more importantly it's further proof that this administration really has abandoned all pretense of respect for the Constitution, or even basic human decency.

Stimson should resign, and if he won't resign, he should be fired.

And we all know how likely that is.

Labels: Charles Stimson, Guantanamo Bay, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:44 AM 6 comments