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On
Iraq, Right Reasons Give credit where it's due: Colin Powell had a point about going to the U.N. on the Iraq question. When President Bush did so, it helped change the dynamics of the debate, both domestically and internationally. But a few distinctions are in order. The U.S. should not make it its business to enforce U.N. resolutions willy-nilly. We are challenging the U.N. to live up to its resolutions only because they happen to align with important U.S. national-security interests. Bush's speech also packed a threat (one that, if the State Department had its way, would never be made): that the U.N. can go along or be left behind as the U.S. takes action in Iraq without it. The president's "unilateralism" — or leadership, to use a better term for it — is creating a practical multilateralism in accord with American interests. So it is that the tenor of French opposition to the intervention has changed, as Paris realizes it would be better not to be left out of the post-Saddam order, especially when it comes to its oil concessions in Iraq. Russia may play ball for similar reasons. We will leave it to the shrinks to determine why American liberals consider it a mark of morality in foreign policy when that policy coincides with Russian and French strategies that are themselves arrived at for the crassest of reasons. In general, making "international opinion" the benchmark for right and wrong is a mistake, since so much of it is driven by fear, self-interest, and greed. The power of fear, for instance, is evident in Saudi Arabia's renewed interest in offering the U.S. use of its bases, as the Saudis see the U.S. shifting its friendship to the relatively benign Gulf state of Qatar (an important lesson as we begin to deal with the effects of Saudi radical evangelism: The House of Saud does respond to pressure). Unfortunately, the attitude of many Democrats seems to be "international opinion" right or wrong. Al Gore implicitly blames the United States for the irresponsible attacks of Gerhard Schroeder on American policy. Gore is apparently not outraged by Schroeder's unilateralism — nakedly motivated by election politics — which says that Germany will oppose even U.N.-sanctioned action against Iraq. No: German obstructionism is America's fault. This line of argument risks returning a post-Vietnam, Blame America First taint to Democratic foreign policy, which Bill Clinton had largely effaced. A replay would be bad for the Democrats, and for the country. Bush has not, as Gore charges, squandered the international consensus that existed after September 11. That consensus arose spontaneously in the rush of sympathy after the attacks, and would inevitably fade. Making U.S. foreign policy dependent on such uniform support would be a prescription for paralysis, since only the status quo can typically command such unanimity. And the present status quo should be unacceptable. Terrorism emanates from the Middle East for a reason: The style of politics and religion promoted by the regimes there, and the work of their security services, all lend support to anti-U.S. terrorism. Breaking up the axis of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia is a goal central to the war on terrorism. To insist, as Gore does, that the U.S. not do anything else until we hunt down and kill bin Laden — a goal that, for all we know, may already be accomplished — is to reduce American policy to a manhunt, perhaps one of several years' duration. Gore suggests that Bush is going after Saddam because it's easier than eliminating al-Qaeda — as though the ability to achieve an objective were an argument against doing so. Besides which, an invasion of Iraq is the first step toward an extremely difficult long-term goal: transforming the geopolitical balance, and the nature of politics, in the Middle East. Is that hard enough for Mr. Gore's taste? Other Democrats ask what has changed in recent years with regard to Iraq. The answer is nothing. The situation is exactly the same as it was in 1998, when President Clinton and the Democratic leadership in Congress declared Saddam a threat that had to be met with military action if necessary, and Congress passed a law making regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States. All that has changed is that America now has a president — fired, to be sure, by 9/11 — determined to effect that policy. How can the Democrats be taken seriously on Iraq? One day they demand a debate on Iraq, the next day they accuse Bush of "wagging the dog" for having a debate on Iraq. One day the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says we should be confronting the terrorist regimes of Iran and Syria before going after Saddam. The next, Democrats (including Gore) criticize Bush's proposed Iraq resolution because it might leave open the possibility of confronting Iran and Syria. The fact is that pressure, and perhaps even military action, against those regimes may eventually be warranted. One purpose of the intervention in Iraq is to create a new international standard that such radical regimes cannot be trusted with weapons of mass destruction. As Paul Johnson points out in this issue, action against Saddam represents the civilized world's reasserting itself, and pushing back against the piratical regimes in the Middle East that have perversely been taken to be an acceptable part of the international order for 30 years. While the U.N. can be a useful tool, it is not the same thing as the civilized world, given the nature of many of the 190 governments it includes. Kofi Annan's eager embrace of Saddam's offer of new inspections showed the U.N.'s willingness to believe bluffs and nonsense so long as it advances "peace," no matter how phony. Saddam's "unconditional" offer was conditional, and based on a lie — that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. As Kate O'Beirne and Byron York report in this issue, inspections are meant to be a tool to confirm the compliance of a basically honest, cooperative state. They are unsuited to the current task. The United States should ask the U.N. for a resolution saying the obvious — that Iraq is in "material breach" of a decade's worth of resolutions — and leave it at that. No further U.N. action is necessary to authorize force. If France, Russia, or China wants to veto such a resolution, and expose even more starkly the U.N.'s bankruptcy, they are more than welcome to. But the U.S. should continue to make it clear that we will act to protect our interests, with only a handful of allies if necessary. Over the last decade, we have half-dismembered Iraq while respecting the one facet of Iraqi sovereignty that creates the problem — Saddam's tenure in power. We should remove the root of the problem, and begin the post-Saddam era. But conservatives should guard against naivety about the ease with which a liberal democracy can be installed in Iraq. Incremental improvements short of that are well worth making. Just as a non-terrorist government in Afghanistan that may eventually control the urban areas of the country is an improvement over the Taliban, a reformist authoritarianism in Iraq would be a relative boon. It would change the balance of the region, possibly reorienting it around a Turkey-Iraq-Jordan bloc and spelling the end of OPEC, the cartel that, through the Saudis, bankrolls Islamism. It wouldn't mean the end of the war on terrorism, but it would be an intermediate step toward a decent Middle East, and one that eventually is not a threat to America.
Scenes
from a War In the month of the
first anniversary of 9/11, Americans got to see three faces of vigilance. On September 13 a longer drama unfolded in Florida after three young Middle Eastern men sped through a toll booth on I-75 in the Everglades. Police stopped the car; they already had the license-plate number because, the day before, the men had been overheard in a Georgia restaurant talking ominously about 9/11: "If people thought September 11 was something, wait till September 13." They were uncooperative when questioned. But they too turned out to be innocent of criminal intent: They were med students from Chicago, driving to Florida to fulfill a practical-studies requirement in Miami. They denied talking about 9/11, though Eunice Stone, the woman who heard and reported them, stands by her story. Stone's son said the men may have been "playing" to the restaurant crowd, perversely enacting a stereotype. The families of the med students slipped their sense of grievance out of the entitlement holster, crying racism. Clearly all five men, in the car and on the airplane, were, in part, profiled. White or black Americans would have met a lower level of scrutiny. But then, no whites or blacks hijacked airplanes on September 11, 2001, nor do they figure heavily — pace John Walker Lindh — in the ranks of al-Qaeda. Northwest Airlines and Eunice Stone were right to take ethnicity into account. Circumstances (over which the five men had no control) and behavior (over which they did) completed the picture. These days, one should simply comply with the requests of stewardesses and cops. To the sick-humored med students: Time to learn some new jokes, dudes. Then, in Lackawanna, N.Y., the FBI moved in on what looked like the real thing: five men of Yemeni descent who had gone to a camp in Afghanistan for preliminary al-Qaeda training. (A sixth man was arrested in Bahrain.) The Justice Department is prosecuting them under the Antiterrorism Act of 1996, which makes it a crime to provide a designated terrorist group with "material support," which can include "personnel" — the men themselves, in their capacity as trainees. In 2000 a court ruled that "personnel" was an unconstitutionally vague item, since it "blur[red] the line between protected expression and unprotected conduct." One can say "Death to America," even if one cannot chant it during an early-morning boot-camp run. The Justice Department has appealed that decision. The government was helped by a tip from within the community — a hopeful sign of patriotism, and the impulse to self-protection. May there be more such. There must be many tips in a fight against an enemy who employs sleeper cells in hermetic ethnic communities. There will be many interrogations, not all of them on target. The peaceful and the patriotic must bear with it, and do their best to help.
Bill
Simon: En Route to Sacramento Bill Simon looks a little like Christopher Reeve when he was doing Superman, wearing those horn-rimmed glasses which were supposed to make him appear pedestrian. Of course if you want to pass by unnoticed, which Superman wanted to do when he wasn't on a tear, you don't run for governor of California, a state that specializes in high dramatic dress, and California is not going to find that in William E. Simon Jr., a candidate without a lot of plumage. On the other hand, it hasn't found anything striking in Gray Davis, other than his high spending. But Californians at large don't seem to have noticed that, or anything else inordinate in government. Simon is of course trying to do something about that. On a recent Saturday, at an evening with friends and backers in the Sacramento area, the candidate was reminded that in the last ten years, California has graduated from 39th to 44th on the list of states engaged in what amounts to philanthropy to other states. Only six states contribute a higher percentage of taxes to the federal government, measured against returns. For every dollar Californians remit to Washington, Californians get back 82 cents. That would be okay if California were all Bill Gates, but of course he lives elsewhere and California is in very bad economic shape. Gov. Davis has increased spending by 39 percent more than would simply keep pace with inflation and population. A lot of Californians are unaware of this — and apparently unaware that the next governor is going to have to find a way to raise $27 billion, or to reduce spending by that much. Here are some nice figures to store in your statistics bank. The State of California spends per year just about $100 billion. Its GDP is $1.3 trillion. Pre-Gray, California's income was the fifth largest of any political unit in the world (after the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Britain). France has edged up, and California down. This may have something to do with the quality of public education in California, which is the 46th worst in the nation. California has the most Nobel Prize winners and the most illiteracy, but Gray Davis doesn't talk about that; he is comfortable with the routine lament over the ratio of poor to non-poor. I have a special friend who has a special son, whose balmy disposition makes Perry Como sound like a tiger. Tim Draper did everything a 40-year-old could do to liberate the public-education system in California from the teachers unions, which underwrite the poor school standards. The bad news is that the plebiscite, which would have returned power to parents, lost in 2000 by two to one, in part because the unions control even the parent-teacher associations. Tim Draper certainly did what he could — he paid out $27 million to back the proposition. It must be true hell to lose that much money on a lost political cause, but Tim Draper put it this way to his father: "If I had cashed all those securities in today, Dad, I'd have netted only two million dollars." That's Pangloss you just heard, and Bill Simon appears capable of that kind of cheerful stoicism. He has contributed $5 million of his own to his campaign and is self-scheduled to contribute $4 million more. That isn't a great deal of money, up against what is being spent by Gov. Davis: He has $27 million standing by and has been spending about $3 million per week elaborating on the disqualifications of Bill Simon. These require a lot of ingenuity. What would be expected of a candidate for governor of California? Simon, a graduate of Williams College, was a vigorous prosecutor who served under Rudy Giuliani in New York. In business, he has been successful in several enterprises, as you certainly have to be to come up with $9 million to forward your political ideals. For a while, Gov. Davis tried to concentrate public attention on an adverse civil judgment against Simon, a jury having found for the plaintiff, who happened to be out of jail when he launched his complaint against Simon, a business partner. The finding was as ludicrous as that which found O. J. Simpson blameless, and a couple of weeks ago a calm and scholarly judge threw the verdict out of court. There was never in the history of grief anyone more disappointed than Gray Davis when he learned that the Republican running for governor had been exonerated. Davis's stamina in broadcasting the word that Simon was nothing more than a representative of crooked corporate America had picked up so much steam, he had a hard time rescheduling booked TV spots, and has now had to find other reasons to warn Californians against voting for someone who believes the same kind of thing Ronald Reagan believed in. Davis hasn't had much luck, in that his popularity rating remains remarkably low: Even $30 million later, it is still only 51 percent. On the other hand, Simon hasn't done very much better. But he suffered six whole weeks from the O.J. jury verdict, during which California backers went solidly to sleep. The challenge is to rouse them now, because Bill Simon has only pennies in the political bank, and campaigns cost a lot of money, in the state that nudges up with France in spending. Last weekend there was much brightness in the Simon camp. The lead by Democrat Davis is usually reported at 7 percent. There are Simon sources who say it is reduced to 4 percent. And Bill will remind you, driving back from the fundraiser, that at the equivalent point in Reagan's campaign for governor, His Greatness was behind even further, and ended by winning with 1 million votes. It is late, after a full day, but he talks with enthusiasm, and his finance chairman, Frank Baxter, in the back seat, echoes it, but acknowledges that a great deal depends on cranking up the fundraising. Is there anything I can do? his guest asks. I can pass the word along, herewith. Arriving at the hotel after ten, the Candidate said he was going to stop by and get some ice cream. "I missed dessert." He deserves a square meal, and California is being given the opportunity to spread that one around.
Leviathan
to the Rescue The approaching war with Iraq is essentially a 21st-century problem. Strictly speaking, it has no precedent in history, and in terms of presidential power and national sovereignty, Mr. Bush is walking into unknown territory. By comparison, the Gulf War of the 1990s was a straightforward, conventional case of unprovoked aggression, like Germany's invasion of Belgium in 1914 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet I do not think Mr. Bush need hesitate to change the Iraq regime by force. Nor will he. He is quite clear on what he has to do. He can occupy Iraq by force under Security Council Resolution 678 of November 1990 and Number 687 of April 1991. To get further and explicit authorization from the U.N. is courteous but superfluous, and justified only by the need to line up as many allies as possible. Moreover, Mr. Bush, and the United States, are lawfully empowered to take action against Iraq by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which states plainly that nothing in the charter "shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense . . . until the Security Council has taken [the] measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." It is the last two words which are crucial. A year ago, the U.S. was subjected to an unprovoked attack of an unprecedented kind, which not only killed 3,000 people and destroyed much of the country's main financial district but was designed also to destroy America's legislative body and/or its executive, and its main defense headquarters. The scale of the attack, and the presumption that it would be followed by others, gave the U.S. the right, under Article 51, to punish the aggressors and to take all necessary steps to ensure its future security by destroying the source of their power, present and future. Hence the occupation and regime-change in Afghanistan was merely the first move. The ferocity of the 11 September assault, designed to kill the maximum number of people and demolish the heart of America's government and financial strength, made it obvious that its perpetrators would use any and all weapons of mass destruction the moment they acquired them. Hence, to ensure its security, the U.S. is plainly entitled, under Article 51, to prevent this from happening. There are two countries where sympathy for Moslem fundamentalist terrorists makes the possibility of supplying mass-destruction weapons likely. Pakistan already has a small arsenal of nuclear bombs. Mr. Bush has now satisfied himself that the present regime there will not supply them to terrorists and will prevent their theft. He would have an absolute right to prevent any change of regime, or indeed government, in Pakistan, if the consequences were likely to increase the risk of nuclear weapons' falling into terrorist hands. Granted Pakistan's instability and fragility, drastic steps such as the destruction of its nuclear stockpiles may still be necessary. Indeed the only long-term solution, desirable in itself, is the reunification of the Indian subcontinent, which ought to be an object of Western policy. Iraq's consistent sympathy and active support for terrorist movements, and the regime's record of unprovoked aggression, make us presume that its consistent efforts to make a wide range of mass-killer weapons will end in their use, against either the U.S. or Israel or both. Whether the regime plans to use them itself or supply them to terrorists is a detail. It is clear that the only safety for the U.S. is to ensure that the program is scrapped once and for all, and the experience of the past eleven years shows that this can be achieved only by changing the regime. Thus a U.S.-led invasion having this object is lawful under Article 51 and a country's inherent right of self-defense. What applies on the international plane applies a priori on the domestic one. It will be surprising if any substantial segment of opinion, inside or outside Congress, opposes the Bush resolve to end the threat from Iraq. The three basic tasks of government are to ensure external defense, to maintain internal order, and to operate an honest currency. Mr. Bush would be failing in the first two, and would make the third increasingly difficult, if he neglected to take all measures in his power to protect the people from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Instead, not only must he change the regime in Iraq; the question is: What further precautions must he take to make the U.S. reasonably safe? In the second half of the 20th century, the American government was obliged to answer this question by doing two very expensive and risky things. First, it had to build up a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and continually update its delivery systems to maintain a balance of terror and/or first- and second-strike capabilities. Second, it had to construct a worldwide spread of alliances and bases to ensure its conventional superiority. These measures are still necessary but they have receded into the background. The foreground is occupied by the need to eliminate regimes which, in one way or another, make international terrorism on a large scale possible and threaten to produce mass-destructive terrorism. Such states include not only all "the usual suspects" — Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba, and North Korea (as well as Iraq) — but Saudi Arabia too, whose authoritarian monarchy pays protection money to terrorists and spreads the religious fundamentalism which lies at the root of the problem. All these regimes need to be changed. By whose right, and with what authority, can the U.S. undertake such a wide-ranging program? It is this which takes us to the heart of the new, 21st-century form of geopolitics. The risk of great-power conflict is now small. The risk of nation-to-nation wars is diminishing. But the risk of colossal attacks on centers of civilization has increased, is increasing, and must be diminished. Imagine a world in which the United States was stricken by a successful series of nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. Putting aside the appalling loss of American lives this would involve, the global consequences would be horrifying. The world would be plunged into the deepest depression in its history. There would be no power-of-last-resort to uphold international order. Wolf and jackal states would quickly emerge to prey on their neighbors. It would be a world as described by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651), in which, deprived of a giant authority figure "to keep them all in awe," civilization would break down, and life, for most of mankind, would be "nasty, brutish and short." Hence, we do well to look at the crisis not as solely or even primarily an American problem, but as a global one. We need a Leviathan figure now much more than in the 17th century, when the range of a cannon was a maximum of two miles and its throw-weight was measured in pounds. America is the only constitutional Leviathan we have, which is precisely why the terrorists are striving to do him mortal injury, and the opponents of order throughout the world — in the media, on the campus, and among the flat-earthers — are so noisily opposed to Leviathan's protecting himself. But Leviathan will not be deterred. He is in arms, and knows what he has to do. Moreover, he is not a solitary autocrat as in Hobbes's day, but a constitutional ruler with an educated people of nearly 300 million behind him. To vary the metaphor, the clock is ticking towards high noon but the sheriff is buckling in his belt and the citizens are aroused. Mr. Bush has been given a mission by the brutal logic of events and he must carry it out promptly and in full. Is America, then, a world policeman? The answer must be: Yes, and thank God for it. Progress has contracted all distances and made destructive forces almost limitless. So the world is now too small, and the weapons of the malefactors too devastating, for us to do without a constabulary enjoying full powers and global reach. As Mr. Gladstone once said, "the resources of civilization are not yet exhausted," and Mr. Bush has no moral alternative but to put himself at the head of them, and point the 21st century in the direction of world order and peace.
Going
with a Winner In the left corner, the United Nations; in the right corner, the United States. It looks like something of a championship match. Except that it isn't really, so long as the Bush administration keeps its resolve. It is a question of doing the right and obvious thing: It is unthinkable that a proven killer like Saddam Hussein should be able to deploy weapons of mass destruction. The sole means to that end is regime change. If the U.N. has its way, Saddam will give up some disposable part of his deadly weaponry, keep the rest, use it as opportunity arises, and outlast this President Bush and probably subsequent American presidents too. The prospect of such a man forcibly uniting the Arab world concentrates the mind. The pitiful record of the U.N. in the Middle East speaks for itself. Far from preventing war, it precipitated it in 1967; stood by impotently in 1973; could do nothing about the Syrian invasion of Lebanon and would have accepted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait unless the United States had acted; prolonged the Palestinian refugee problem; washed its hands of Israeli security; in short, has been pointless at best, harmful at worst. But we live in a multilateral world, a strange euphemism which actually translates, "Let me see you furthering my interests better than I can do for myself." Its converse, unilateralism, means "The Americans are behaving in their own interest." Multilateralists devise plausible reasons for a wrong position. The Russians want money out of Iraq. President Putin expects 8 billion dollars, and ex-president Boris Yeltsin, now a ventriloquist's dummy, therefore bellows on his behalf, "We should not allow a U.S. military strike under any circumstances." France wants money too, but also la gloire, and so President Chirac calls for U.N. resolutions the way a prima donna goes for the high note. Out of anxiety to be reelected, Chancellor Schroeder speaks of the American "adventure" and promises to have nothing to do with it, may deny air space to U.S. forces, and wouldn't even support a U.N. campaign, if there were to be one. So the new German pacifism has an anti-American symmetry with the old German militarism. Herta Däubler-Gmelin, the German minister of justice, feels free to compare Bush to Hitler: "Bush wants to divert attention from domestic difficulties. That is a popular method. Hitler has done that before." Hers is a contribution to be remembered for a long time. At least Tony Blair is convinced of the danger posed by Saddam, and is preparing to publish a dossier from intelligence sources to inform the public. But about 160 members of Parliament have registered dissent, and may vote against him when policy on Iraq comes to be debated in Westminster. Facing a major row with his own party, Blair is pinning his hopes on weapons inspection rather than regime change. You have to give it to Saddam. Floating the idea of the unconditional return of the inspectors has been enough to launch a dazzling shoal of red herrings. Brought out of deserved retirement, Dr. Hans Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, is head of the present inspectorate, known by the acronym of UNMOVIC. Hardly had Saddam made his offer before Dr. Blix was coming up with an immense list of "practicalities." For example, several months may be required, according to Blix, before UNMOVIC personnel and equipment are in place. It may be a year before any report on Iraqi weaponry is ready. Then it turns out that inspectors will have access only to military sites. Unconditional means conditional. Iraqi defectors have informed everybody that Saddam has hidden the manufacturing plants and storage depots of his weapons of mass destruction in civilian sites all over the country, invisible from the air and probably on the ground as well. Seven hundred such sites (some authorities say twice as many) are thought to have been identified, but who knows what the reality is? Previous inspectors found mostly what was left for them to find. Tricks are sure to be played again until Saddam has only to declare that the inspectors still find nothing significant because there is nothing significant to find. That way he can hope to survive inspections and to keep his weapons until he is free to use them. There's also a suggestion that a limited number of U.S. troops should accompany the inspectors. A cut-price invasion of the sort would place all concerned at risk of a provocation or ambush at a time of Saddam's choosing. An Arab proverb has it that a man who takes sides with a loser is not fit to be a statesman. In the past twelve months there have been 17 anti-American demonstrations in the Muslim world, all of them small-scale, and most of them in Peshawar and Quetta, the two most Islamist cities of Pakistan. The recent arrest after a gunfight in Karachi of Ramzi Binalshibh and other top al-Qaeda operatives did not cause attacks on Americans or their representative institutions like embassies and cultural centers. Arabs are in a bind. Like everybody else, they know that Saddam is indefensible, and puts the whole Arab world to shame. But to say so out loud seems to be another equally painful way of shaming the whole Arab world. They'd like to be rid of Saddam without anyone noticing. So the press is full of anonymous "senior Arab diplomats" maintaining, "There's no support for regime change," while colleagues are furtively preparing for that very eventuality. Double standards are the order of the day. Jordanian parliamentary deputies, for example, have called on "all Arab countries to move collectively and seriously, and to adopt a united stand to confront any aggression against Iraq and to find ways to bring it out of the ordeal." At the same time, Jordan has allowed American military preparations at the base at Mafraq, and is arranging for cheap American-supplied oil to replace subsidized Iraqi oil. Saudi Arabia is directly threatened by Saddam. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi crown prince Abdullah's foreign-policy adviser, and seemingly a fixture in the CNN studio, complains, "How can anybody justify going to war if Saddam is letting the inspectors back in and the responsibility of the inspectors is to dismantle the weapons of mass destruction?" Meanwhile Saudi Arabia has changed its mind and is prepared to allow the U.S. the use of its bases there, and sends high-level delegations to Iran, an ancient enemy of theirs and of Iraq's, in order to make sure that both countries sit out the coming campaign. They may hate America, but they fear Saddam more. Turkey is no friend of the Arabs in general and Saddam in particular, but needs reassuring that the break-up of Iraq will not lead to a Kurdish state to tempt its own Kurds into separatism. For better or worse, there is no question of such a state. For form's sake, the Turkish president and chief of staff speak against American "unilateralism" but American aircraft are operating out of the invaluable Incirlik base. Syria shares Iraq's Baathist national-socialist ideology, but this makes them rivals rather than allies. Damascus would rejoice in Saddam's downfall, but its foreign minister, Farouk Shara, says that striking Iraq represents "blind bias" and "distorted vision." As a token of goodwill, however, Syria has allowed the CIA access to Muhammad Haydar Zammar, who is believed to have recruited some of the September 11 terrorists. A Syrian, Zammar was arrested abroad and extradited home. In return, Congress is postponing the impositions of sanctions on Syria. Arab ambivalence about Saddam and his aggressivity is captured in an article in Cairo's leading newspaper, Al-Ahram, by the poet Farouk Goweida. "In our hearts we are with the Iraqi people, and Egypt condemns the tough sanctions imposed on Iraq. At the same time, and with the same passion, we are with the Kuwaiti people, who want to live securely in their homeland without threats from their brothers and neighbors." Salah Eissa, editor of a weekly magazine in Cairo, writes, "We have to get past this Cold War mentality that anyone who is America's enemy is our friend." Raghda, a well-known Syrian-Egyptian actress, hit upon the perfect hypocrite's formula: "Saddam Hussein is not a catastrophe — but the situation in Iraq is!" The Palestinians once more seem to be almost alone in failing to get the message. At a recent enthusiastic demonstration in Gaza, Saddam's representative handed out $25,000 checks to the families of suicide bombers, and among those present and approving was Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, head of the Islamist terror group Hamas. These habitual unfortunates apart, people evidently have little difficulty identifying losers so long as the winner makes his intention clear. Once it's all over, of course, the United States will have to congratulate the U.N. on winning with a knock-out.
September 11 may not have changed everything, but it has had one shocking effect on American political life: People are rethinking their positions on foreign policy. Moreover, the rethinking is genuine and not merely a matter of political opportunism. Not everyone has gone so far as Henry Kissinger, who now believes that the international system of sovereign states that began with the Peace of Westphalia — the system within which he has worked and thought all his life — needs to be substantially revised in an era of proliferating weapons of mass destruction. But conservatives of all stripes have been moved to reconsider their Clinton-era opposition to "nation-building." For some left-wingers, merely rooting for the United States in a military engagement has required a radical change in sensibilities. The libertarians, too, are thinking about foreign policy anew. Libertarians have generally been hostile to intervention abroad; the dominant position has been that military action is permissible only when the United States itself is physically attacked. All sensible people would like to avoid war when possible, of course, but libertarians had additional reasons to oppose it. War is both a vast and horrible government enterprise and a catalyst for expansions of government that, in many cases, outlast the war that occasioned them. Many libertarians therefore defined themselves in opposition to what they styled the "welfare-warfare state." This time, however, American libertarians have been surprisingly hawkish. Most of them supported the campaign in Afghanistan. David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, the leading libertarian think tank, notes that in the past, when he said that libertarians could support a war under some conditions, people would say that his conditions were so strict that he would never, in practice, find a war he could support. "Well, we finally found one." The Libertarian party came out for the Afghan war, too, albeit with qualifications. The homeland had, after all, been attacked, and the perpetrators needed to be tracked down. The party did not, however, endorse the overthrow of the Taliban, and urged that America's response to the 9/11 attacks be "appropriate and measured." Its spokesmen have also continually argued that America's interventionist foreign policy provoked its enemies and that non-intervention "will reduce the chance that terrorists will want to strike [again] at America." Not all libertarians were willing to endorse the exercise of American power. Harry Browne was the party's presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. His comment on the day of the attacks: "When will we learn that we can't allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?" Since then, Browne has said that in Afghanistan the U.S. "has attacked an innocent nation" and "slaughtered a lot of innocent people." He characterized America as "a threat to the world." Browne's rhetoric was restrained compared with that of some like-minded libertarians. Over at Lewrockwell.com, readers can learn that Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and even Madeleine Albright are "war criminals." The site's writers accept the Iraqi regime's propaganda at face value. The discredited claim that sanctions have killed 1.5 million Iraqis, for example, led one author to ponder the similarities between contemporary America and Nazi Germany. A few other websites indulge in similar pleasantries. Some of the hard-core opponents of a military response to September 11 are simply anarchists or, as they would put it, "zero-state libertarians." The most they would have us do about Osama bin Laden is put a bounty on his head. In some cases, as the above examples suggest, their anti-statism has led them to a suspicion of the U.S. government — which is, after all, the most powerful state in history, in the arena of world affairs — that is indistinguishable from anti-Americanism. The Independent Institute, a Bay Area libertarian think tank, hosted a seminar on the war this spring. The institute reports that one of the participants explained that America was a "terrorist state." Gore Vidal was on hand to notify the world that America was fighting in Afghanistan because war is good for corporate America and because we want Central Asian oil. Also participating was Robert Higgs, the libertarian scholar who wrote the well-respected book Crisis and Leviathan and who is an institute fellow. Higgs has not added to his reputation for sagacity with his post-9/11 comments. In the December 2001 issue of Reason, the major libertarian magazine, Higgs predicted that as a result of anti-terrorist measures "the socio-political system will gravitate ineluctably toward totalitarianism." More recently, he has been characterizing a prospective American attack on Iraq as "naked aggression" and speculating that the Bush administration wants to defeat Saddam "apparently for reasons of political expediency." The anti-war absolutists tend to depict less doctrinaire libertarians as sellouts. But this time, the anti-war crowd is facing a new and aggressive challenge: the rise of the blogosphere. There are bloggers — i.e., individuals who offer regularly updated commentary via their websites ("weblogs") — of all political descriptions, even Luddites. But libertarians, and articulate hawks, seem to be disproportionately represented among them. Glenn Reynolds, one of the most important bloggers, is a fellow traveler of libertarianism and a proponent of regime change in Iraq. A small army of like-minded web pundits have made the case for what might be called a muscular libertarianism. Indeed, someone whose knowledge of libertarianism came from the web might be forgiven for assuming that it is a fighting faith. One gets the sense, reading the anti-war sites, that these bloggers are the final straw: Now they really feel beleaguered. Reynolds sums up the differences this way: "I think there's a split among libertarians between those who view government as the enemy and those who view individual self-defense as the most important right. There's a lot of overlap in political positions between people who take those views. To a lot of libertarians, the war looks like self-defense writ large. Whereas to another class of libertarians, anything that strengthens the state is wrong, even in self-defense." On his site, Brink Lindsey has taken on the anti-warriors' premises. He argues that they are wrong to regard foreign military intervention as analogous to governmental intervention in domestic markets. The case against the latter rests on the existence of equilibrating mechanisms that intervention would disrupt. By contrast, "there is no invisible hand in foreign affairs." Other libertarian bloggers have declared themselves agnostic on the question of Iraq. Jacob T. Levy probably speaks for many libertarians when he writes that "the last year has made me more interventionist than I had ever thought conceivable, by convincing me that even the internal affairs of other states can pose a mortal threat." In arguing for pre-emptive action against Iraq, the bloggers have not only broken with the anti-war libertarians. They have also implicitly gone beyond organized libertarianism (to the extent that such a thing exists or can exist). The Cato Institute, the Libertarian party, and Reason are all against a pre-emptive strike. Small as their numbers are, then, the libertarians have divided into three camps of roughly equal strength: the anti-war absolutists, the hawks, and a libertarian mainstream that endorsed action in Afghanistan but opposes war with Iraq. Boaz, the executive vice president of Cato, presents the disagreement over Iraq as a difference among friends. Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive defense, he allows, "is not inherently anti-libertarian." But for the libertarian rethinking to go further, the bloggers will eventually have to take on not only the anarchist fringe but the organized movement, too. Cato's foreign-policy analysis leans heavily on the doctrine that (to quote its chairman, William Niskanen) "the best defense may be to give no unnecessary offense." In this regard, Cato is aligned with Browne, whose strategic advice to the U.S. on 9/11 was to emulate Switzerland. This might even make sense, if America were somehow able to stop being the most powerful country on earth. In 1998, Ivan Eland, the director of defense-policy studies at Cato, wrote that "as a practical matter, the United States must resign itself to Iraq's possession of biological and chemical weapons." After all, America can't stop every bad actor in the world from getting such weapons. Eland concluded, "As schoolboys grow to be adults, they learn to ignore minor quarrels instead of fighting over every perceived affront. They also learn not to meddle gratuitously in disputes that don't concern them." This is not serious thought. To an outsider, it may not seem to matter much what libertarians think. They are a small and fractious group of people. At most, the libertarian opponents of war with Iraq have influenced two congressmen, Republicans Dick Armey and Ron Paul; and Armey is backing away from his previously expressed opposition. (Paul, meanwhile, is a gadfly, and a gullible one: He believes both in "Gulf War Syndrome" and in all the latter-day claims of Scott Ritter.) But libertarians themselves should care a great deal about how this debate plays out. Protecting citizens from foreign threats is a fundamental task of government. A political philosophy that regularly yields absurd conclusions when it turns to that task cannot plausibly be held up as a guide to good government. The absurdity, indeed, threatens to discredit libertarianism's valid conclusions, such as that most of the domestic functions of the federal government should be eliminated. Which is why conservatives have a stake in this debate, too.
At a committee hearing on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, Republican congressman Edward Schrock of Virginia paid an unusual tribute when he expressed his gratitude for the witnesses' chilling accounts of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons: On behalf of the members of the House Armed Services Committee, he thanked the former U.N. weapons inspectors for "scaring us to death." Nor was Schrock, a House freshman, reacting as a nervous newcomer to military realities: He is a retired Navy captain with 24 years' service, including two tours in Vietnam. During a closed-door briefing on the scariest scenarios, and in a scary-enough open session, the veteran experts agreed that if the Iraqi dictator isn't removed from power, he will almost certainly use his weapons of mass destruction to launch a devastating first attack against the U.S. and its friends. The witnesses were Dr. David A. Kay, who was chief nuclear-weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) immediately following the Gulf War, and Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, who headed up the biological-weapons inspection team until UNSCOM was booted from Iraq in 1998. Their informed case for the ouster of Saddam Hussein rests on their experiences with the severe limitations of the U.N.'s inspection regime, the fecklessness of the inspectors' overseers on the U.N. Security Council, "the gigantic scope and indigenous nature of Saddam's weapons program," and the coercive power wielded by his brutal dictatorship. "We ought to give that inspection thing one more shot," former president Bill Clinton recently declared on Larry King Live. Others calling for another round of cat-and-mouse with Saddam share Clinton's ignorance of the fundamental nature of the U.N.'s "inspection thing," and ignore the Security Council's record of playing self-serving politics with the commission's mission and methods. The U.N.'s weapons inspectors were charged with confirming that Saddam was fulfilling his post-Gulf War commitments to disarmament. Having been designed to verify the actions of a cooperating state, the inspection regime wasn't up to the task of catching a duplicitous dictator bent on hiding evidence of prohibited weapons in every nook and cranny of Iraq. Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, explains, "It is a different proposition altogether to wander about a country looking for what has been deliberately concealed. That is a task with no end." Having spent years in Iraq at precisely such an endless task, Dr. Kay says that it would take "tremendous resources, actually . . . resources beyond anything I can imagine," to prevent Saddam from thwarting inspections. The totalitarian Iraqi regime did a far better job of keeping track of the inspectors than the inspectors were able to do of keeping track of weapons. A recent analysis of the 280 inspections of facilities and sites that UNSCOM conducted from 1991 to 1998 found that fewer than a half dozen were surprise visits, catching the Iraqi minders off guard. Kay points out that Saddam has spent 20 years and an estimated $40 billion on a weapons-of-mass-destruction program that involves 40,000 Iraqis. To counter these enormous resources, any effective inspection force would be, in Kay's words, "very much like an occupation." Furthermore, in their attempts to discover Iraq's deadliest weapons the inspectors actually had to fight a two-front war. The inspection teams were undercut by members of the Security Council eager to make business deals with Iraq, and cited an irresponsible buck-passing attitude of "if it were a serious problem, the U.S. would take care of it." By the time the U.N. capitulated in allowing Saddam to refuse inspectors access to "sensitive sites," Kay claims, UNSCOM had become so emasculated it "had almost become a shielding force for Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction development program." Dr. Spertzel agrees, flatly declaring that in the face of a determined regime like Saddam's, "the inspectors don't have a chance." He points out that it took a full year to set up the biological-inspection system, including an extensive effort to survey every site in Iraq — including hospitals, labs, and breweries — that had potential for biological-weapons work. Once 80 sites were identified, monitoring was largely confined to reviewing the semi-annual or monthly reports the sites were required to provide. Given Saddam's long history of deception, the U.N.'s reliance on self-reporting was self-defeating. And the deception has become ever more creative. Spertzel points out that Iraq's use of mobile vans as production facilities would make their detection by monitors "virtually impossible." Saddam's biological-warfare program began in the early 1970s — probably, Spertzel notes, within a few months of Iraq's signing the Biological Weapons Convention. Spertzel explains that the biological-weapons program was organized under the intelligence service, and from the beginning had a "terrorist application" (what the Iraqis refer to as "secreted delivery"), along with its regular-military component. He believes that this program is undoubtedly much stronger today than at the time of the Gulf War. The agents in Saddam's biological arsenal that most concern Spertzel are anthrax, tularemia bacteria, and the smallpox virus that Iraq "almost certainly" has. In addition, Spertzel points out, Iraq has been working on weaponizing aflatoxin, a carcinogen whose ten-year trigger rules it out for military use, and cites "pretty doggone good evidence" that it has been used against the Kurds in northern Iraq. He agrees with Dr. Christine Gosden, the British scientist who has documented 250 uses of chemical and biological weapons by Saddam Hussein. While the experts debate whether Saddam has the requisite fissile material to produce nuclear weapons, Spertzel's experience with Iraq's well-documented capabilities lead him to conclude that the U.S. faces a grave non-nuclear risk: "It is my opinion that Iraq's greatest threat to the U.S., and certainly the U.S. homeland, is in the production of agents, bacterial agents, to be used by terrorists." During his testimony, Spertzel reminded committee members that it is extremely difficult to trace the origin of a biological agent, and then quickly sketched one possible use of weapons-grade material. The biological agent would be delivered in a covert way, to maximize casualties, maybe in a multi-city assault, similar to last September's attacks. "Delivery boys" with little specialized knowledge need only release about 20 grams of material in the ventilation system of an office building. In a 14-to-16-story building, there would be 100 percent casualties. There was another scenario Spertzel didn't detail in the public hearing — one "that potentially could involve upwards to a million people with [a] relatively small quantity of material." How might Saddam use the smallpox virus that Spertzel believes him to possess? In powdered form, this virus is relatively stable and so quite easy to get into the U.S. If it were released in a building's ventilation system, about 30 percent of those exposed would die, and during the five-day-to-two-week incubation period, about ten additional people would be exposed for each person initially infected. Thus, 400 infected individuals would pretty quickly result in 4,000 cases of smallpox, each in turn infecting at least 10 others. Even if Saddam ordered an airplane flying inside Iraq's borders to release a biological agent, there could be a "devastating effect as far south as Yemen and Oman," which would include thousands of Americans stationed in Saudi Arabia. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently detailed the threat posed by the nexus of a terrorist state, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorist networks operating around the world — and he recalled how a previous, similarly crucial period in our past was recorded by historians. The story, he said, has been told in books with evocative titles: At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor; December 7, 1941: The Day the Admirals Slept Late; and While England Slept. But this time, mid-September 2002, the House Armed Services Committee received an undeniable, unambiguous wake-up call.
Last February, Hans Blix, the United Nations arms-inspection chief who will, if the Security Council has its way, search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, addressed a group of inspectors-in-training at a U.N. facility in Geneva. He gave a brief history of UNMOVIC — the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission — which he now heads and which will do the searches. After the history lesson, Blix got to a key issue: How should the inspectors conduct themselves inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq? "If I were to give some adjectives of what I believe would be desirable conduct, I would say driving and dynamic — but not angry and aggressive," Blix said. Inspectors, he continued, should be "friendly, but not cozy" and "show respect for those you deal with, and demand respect for yourself." Finally, Blix advised, "A light tone or a joke may sometimes break a nervous atmosphere." A decade earlier, on August 6, 1991, the Washington Post ran a story headlined "Baghdad Surreptitiously Extracted Plutonium; International Monitoring Apparently Failed." The story, and several subsequent reports, revealed that Saddam had put together a massive and sophisticated nuclear-weapons program virtually under the nose of one Hans Blix, who was then head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the group charged with monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In the years leading up to 1991, Blix gave Saddam high marks for abiding by the treaty; the nuclear program was discovered in 1991 only after an Iraqi defector told authorities about it. Blix was stunned. "The system was not designed to pick this up," he told the Post. Now Blix, a 74-year-old former Swedish diplomat, is preparing to take on perhaps the most important arms inspections ever. His critics point to the Iraqi nuclear fiasco and ask why a man who missed one of the most extensive illegal arms programs in recent years has been selected to conduct inspections in Iraq today. "He has a history of not being terribly aggressive," says Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "The Iraqis were given stars for good behavior, when in fact they were making bombs in the rooms next door to the ones the inspectors were going into." Two other nuclear-arms experts, Paul Leventhal and Steven Dolley of the Nuclear Control Institute, have written that while the best arms inspectors are "confrontational, refusing to accept Iraqi obfuscations and demanding evidence of destroyed weapons . . . IAEA was more accommodating, giving Iraqi nuclear officials the benefit of the doubt when they failed to provide evidence that all nuclear weapons components had been destroyed and all prohibited activities terminated." Blix's critics also point to the way he got his current job as evidence that he is not the best choice for the weapons-inspection assignment. After heading the IAEA from 1981 until 1997, he was asked by the U.N. at the beginning of 2000 to head UNMOVIC, the new agency that replaced the older United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). But Blix was not the first choice for the job. The United States wanted another veteran inspector, Rolf Ekeus, who was viewed as more assertive than Blix (although less so than former UNSCOM head Richard Butler). But Iraqi allies France and Russia would not accept Ekeus. "The French and the Russians didn't want Ekeus because he was too aggressive," says Milhollin. "They wanted Blix instead." Faced with those objections, the Clinton administration backed down and accepted Blix as an alternative choice. So Blix is, in the view of a number of people of differing philosophical viewpoints, insufficiently aggressive, responsible for a momentous arms-inspection failure, and, on top of it all, Saddam Hussein's choice for the job of inspecting Saddam Hussein's weapons installations. Is there anything that can be said in his favor? Blix's defenders say the Iraqi nuclear-weapons mess does not prove anything about the kind of job he would do in weapons-inspections today. The problem in 1991, they say, was not Blix, but rather the inspection regime that existed at the time. "I don't think you can lay it at his feet," says Ewen Buchanan of UNMOVIC. "You have to lay it at the feet of the system that was in place." Buchanan says that at the time Blix missed the Iraqi nuclear program, "the rules of the IAEA, which are drawn up by its membership, only allowed for inspection of declared facilities. So if Iraq only declared A and B, that's where the inspectors went." It's also possible that Blix has learned from his mistakes. He was, in the words of one acquaintance, "burned very badly" by the Iraqi nuclear weapons. Maybe he'll do better now. But discussing whether Blix will do an acceptable job leaves aside the question of whether the job should be done at all. Suggesting that Blix is the wrong man for the job implies that there is a right man for the job — when the reality may be that the job is simply not worth doing at all. A senior Bush-administration official points out that the real problem here is not Blix — it's the idea that inspections can work with Saddam Hussein still in power. "It is not possible structurally for Blix or anybody else to do this job," says the official. "You can see this from the difficulties that UNSCOM had after we crushed Iraq in 1991. The fact is that when Iraq was on its knees, UNSCOM couldn't find out everything. The idea that UNMOVIC will find what it needs to find is just implausible." There's nothing in Blix's record — even if he has improved since his see-no-evil days in the early 1990s — to inspire confidence that he will make the weapons-inspection system work this time. But there's also nothing to inspire confidence that any weapons inspections will work with Saddam. Blix, it seems, is simply the wrong man for the wrong job.
The
Hispanic Republic of Texas If Texas voters elect Ron Kirk to the Senate on November 5, his win will become the story of Election Night. The TV commentators will dwell on his amazing victory, and his smiling face will be on the front pages of the Wednesday morning papers. This summer, it looked like Kirk might pull it off. The polls had him leading his Republican opponent, attorney general John Cornyn. There was even talk that the Democrats' gubernatorial candidate, a self-funded millionaire named Tony Sanchez, would unseat Gov. Rick Perry. A big year for Democrats in Texas? This sort of thing isn't supposed to happen. And it probably won't — at least not this time. By September, Cornyn had inched ahead of Kirk, and Perry appeared to have a comfortable lead over Sanchez. Yet their summertime bubble was not imaginary. A political transformation is coming to Texas, driven by the hard facts of Hispanic demography. When it does arrive, it will almost certainly not be to the liking of conservatives. The most important political story of the last few decades in Texas has been the remarkable rise of the GOP — how a one-party state dominated by Democrats became a one-party state dominated by Republicans. The high-water mark arrived six years ago, when the GOP won every statewide race. Two years later, of course, Texas sent its chief executive to the White House. That's a tough act to follow anywhere, but it will soon become impossible for Texas Republicans to approach anything like it again. The most important political story of the next decade or two in Texas will be the ascendancy of the Democrats. It all comes down to Hispanic population growth. Along with New Mexico, Texas is home to some of the oldest and most established Mexican-American communities in the country. But there are plenty of newcomers as well. Of the 6.7 million Hispanics in Texas — about one-third of the total state population — almost 2.4 million arrived in the 1990s. State demographer Steve Murdock calculates that Anglos (i.e., non-Hispanic whites) will make up less than half the population within three or four years. "Sometime between 2026 and 2035," he adds, "Texas will become majority Hispanic, assuming current trends hold." The Anglo population won't decline in absolute numbers, as it has in California and several other large states, but Murdock anticipates that its growth will brake to a near stop. No Democrat running for a major statewide office in Texas has won a majority of Anglo votes in 20 years — the last was Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, in 1982. "Back then, everybody was talking about 'Republican realignment,'" says David Hill, Cornyn's pollster. "We did a study looking at the birthrates and migration patterns of different groups. Our conclusion was that the realignment would be undone by the first decade of the 21st century, and now we're here." Hill says that two things have slowed the pace of change: Hispanics don't vote as frequently as Anglos and blacks, and George W. Bush busted the idea that Republicans can't attract more than a third of their votes. Exit polls have never agreed on how much support Bush really draws from Texas Hispanics, but 40 percent is probably a reasonable estimate. On the national level in 2000, he is believed to have captured 31 percent of all Hispanic votes — a dismal performance in one sense, but also the best GOP showing since Ronald Reagan's in 1984. This is no way to a governing majority. The math is simple: More Hispanic voters equals fewer Republican victories. And one thing is certain about the future in Texas: There will be more Hispanic voters. Bush's success has given the GOP a short reprieve from the inevitable, and it may last a bit longer, surviving on the fumes of recent success. Then comes the tipping point — "maybe by the end of the decade," says one senior White House politico. Many Republicans have wrestled with this problem, but the party still has not had to reckon with the consequences of Hispanic demography on the federal level. One of the peculiarities of the Electoral College is that the national distribution of Hispanics actually aids the GOP: If every Hispanic voter had stayed home on Election Day in 2000, Bush would have won the popular vote but Al Gore would be president. Without Hispanics, California, Illinois, and New York still would have gone for Bill Clinton or Gore in each of the last three elections. Without Cuban Americans, however, Florida would have slipped away from the GOP. This goes to show that not all Hispanics are alike. Just as there's a big difference between Cuban Americans and other Hispanics, there's a big difference between immigrants in East Los Angeles and Mexican Americans from old families in Laredo. Texas Hispanics, in fact, are more conservative than most other Hispanics. According to a recent poll by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, they're much less concerned about race relations and discrimination than Hispanics in other states, and much more concerned about jobs and the economy. They are also less supportive of abortion rights and gun control. "Hispanics in Texas aren't liberals," says Tom Pauken, former GOP state chairman. Yet this may be small consolation: Two-thirds consider themselves Democrats — the party of abortion rights and gun control — and in this respect they aren't much different from the national Hispanic profile. When a sink's overflowing, the first thing to do is shut off the water, and one potential solution for Republicans is to try cutting legal immigration. Yet this strategy may have fatal drawbacks. "The restrictionists are asking us to take a huge gamble on the unlikely odds that immigration reform will succeed. The whole project would alienate Hispanics from Republicans even further, including those who haven't even arrived yet," says Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute. Hope may have to rest on assimilation. "Middle-class Hispanics are basically split, 50-50, between the two parties," says Richard Murray, who directs the Houston Chronicle's political polling. But that's the long term. The short-term good news for Texas Republicans is that they look ready to have a successful 2002 election. In March, the Democrats nominated the so-called "Dream Team" ticket — a black for the Senate (Kirk), a Hispanic for governor (Sanchez), and an Anglo for lieutenant governor (John Sharp). This sort of racial and ethnic balancing may represent the political future of Texas, but it hasn't electrified the state this time around. Demographic destiny probably won't come soon enough for Ron Kirk. As mayor of Dallas, he earned a solid reputation for working with the business community, and had the look of a center-seeking New Democrat — but it may be old-time liberalism that undoes his campaign. In August, The New Yorker quoted Kirk summarizing his election this way: "What it comes down to is whether white people are going to vote for a black man." For most voters, of course, it will come down to something else, such as Kirk's views on Iraq and his willingness to support the president. At a rally in San Antonio on September 13, Kirk made what may go down as the great belly-flop comment of his candidacy. "You go look at the people that are responsible for all the corporate wrongdoing in this country, you ain't gonna find a whole lot of people who look like us. You go to Wall Street and look at the people who have been defrauding our nation and brought our economy to its knees, you ain't gonna find a lot of people who look like us," he said to a heavily minority audience. This loose talk about The Man was obnoxious, but the worst — by far — was yet to come: "You go to the battlefield of Afghanistan, you look in the burial grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, you go to [the] Vietnam [Memorial], you find us anywhere. . . . I wonder how excited [my critics would] be if I get to the United States Senate and I put forth a resolution that says the next time we go to war the first 500,000 kids have to come from families who earn a million dollars or more." This moment of racial hysteria, by the way, comes courtesy of a man who said he opposed Bush judicial nominee Priscilla Owen — a native Texan — because he found her lacking the "even temperament" to be a federal judge. What remains clear is that Texas Democrats really might have threatened Republicans in this election — but only if they had nominated candidates like John Breaux and Zell Miller. Kirk is no race hustler like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton — he has tried to help Dallas corporations, not shake them down — but he still is to the left of where Texans want their politicians to be. The last Democrat to occupy the seat Sen. Phil Gramm is giving up was Lyndon Johnson, and the next one probably won't be Ron Kirk; at least not in 2002. But he or someone very much like him is in the cards for Texas — and much sooner than most Republicans realize.
Making
the World Safe — Period Will the forthcoming invasion of Iraq prove to be a war to establish the first democratic Iraqi state? Indeed, will it be the first stage in establishing a Middle East of Muslim Arab states rooted securely in modern democracy? Hey — why stop there? Is it destined to be merely the first skirmish in a war led by the United States to make the entire world safe for democracy? These questions imply a boldly interventionist vision of American foreign policy. Yet they are not far removed from the considerations now openly discussed in Washington by serious people. Certain kinds of political outlook — liberal internationalism on the left, crusading neoconservatism on the right — desire a moral justification for military intervention beyond the practical advancement of U.S. interests. We are assured that the foreign policy of an idealistic people should aim also at spreading their values — democracy, free markets, and human rights — around the world. The overwhelming military and economic dominance of the U.S. gives it the ability at least to embark on such an ambitious program. And a combination of 9/11 and a genuine Iraqi threat provides the necessary pretext for such a campaign. All but a handful of people on the right support military action to invade and occupy Iraq; an automatic corollary of that commitment is that after a victory the U.S. would be faced with the unavoidable duty of establishing some kind of new regime there. Given who we are, that regime would obviously have to be some kind of democratic one. Beyond that, however, the notion of basing American policy on spreading democracy is fraught with difficulties and hidden dangers. Indeed, even the unavoidable duty of establishing a democratic Iraq after defeat would be hard to accomplish. The Iraqis doubtless want democracy after years of oppressive dictatorship; but there are many examples of nations' obtaining democracy amid wild celebrations only to lose or abandon it amid cynicism a few years later. Nor is it an especially mysterious paradox: People almost certainly have — as Francis Fukuyama has argued — some kind of natural bent for democratic government, because it is the mature political expression of a desire to have one's dignity respected. That desire ranks rather low, however, not in a philosophical hierarchy of desires but in point of historical time and urgency. Someone is likely to be concerned about his dignity only when he already enjoys a measure of prosperity, comfort, and social awareness. A peasant tilling the fields who encounters government only rarely and at third hand is unlikely to feel a fierce anger because he exercises no influence on the emperor's decisions. But his grandson in the city, a wealthy lawyer who heads an international partnership of 50 lawyers, will feel humiliated at his exclusion from political authority. He will therefore agitate for democracy and seek to exercise it. To make democracy work, however, requires more than enthusiasm. Among the important cultural underpinnings of democracy are: a tradition of debate; a culture of self-restraint in the exercise of power (the concept of a loyal opposition is central to effective democracy, yet unimaginable in an autocratic culture); a strong middle class used to exercising power responsibly in economic and social life; and, above all, a broad social consensus on religious and cultural concerns — for if people differ profoundly on the highest questions of life and salvation, they will refuse to accept political defeat at the hands of opponents they consider infidels. When states lack some or all of these preconditions, democracy is either distorted or doomed. Religiously divided societies like Lebanon or Northern Ireland develop "confessional" constitutions that base political representation not on majority voting but on religious or community affiliation. Societies without a tradition of ordered liberty and loyal opposition, such as most of Latin America, alternate between democracy and authoritarianism. And the most common distortion in a world in which democracy is the only respectable form of government is what Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek calls "illiberal democracy" — that state of affairs in which governments are subject to free and fair elections but themselves impose severe restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly. Zakaria points out, for instance, that though the Iranian parliament is elected more freely than most in the Middle East, it imposes harsh restrictions on speech, assembly, and even dress. Left to itself, an Iraqi democracy might well evolve in a similar direction. Both countries have the advantage of a large and well-educated middle class whose members certainly want to see their dignity reflected in democratic institutions. But they lack most of the other preconditions for democracy — as their histories amply demonstrate. And though both countries are ethnically diverse, Iran — with Shia Muslims making up 89 percent of its population — is much less culturally divided than Iraq. Common sense suggests that an Iraqi democracy would therefore need to undergo a longish period of Western tutelage as its various ethnic groups, religions, and social elites learned to cooperate with one another in running a constitutional-democratic government. But the emphasis would be on the "constitutional" rather than the "democratic." In this, it would resemble the Western protectorates in Kosovo and Bosnia, where NATO or the U.N. simply removes from office those elected politicians who affront their liberal sensibilities by running nationalist radio stations or refusing to cooperate in multi-ethnic institutions. These quasi-democratic arrangements are somewhat similar to what Zakaria has in mind when he proposes that the best path to reform for autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia's would be to introduce liberal economic, political, and social institutions gradually, leaving democratic elections for last. By the time elections arrived, both politicians and the public would be thoroughly apprenticed to democracy as a result of living in constitutional freedom. Without such a preparation, the result might well be "one man, one vote, one time" — or the installation of a fierce fundamentalist regime, unambiguously hostile to the U.S. and unrestrained by pragmatic calculations in expressing that hostility. THE
ROAD AFTER IRAQ When we move from Iraq to other nations, the task becomes even more difficult. In some countries, notably China, very large sectors of the population have not yet reached the stage of economic security at which they feel that their dignity is affronted by autocratic rule. At present they are at the stage identified by the anti-liberal High Tory philosopher John Gray as one in which the government enjoys legitimacy because it provides people with security, the prospect of material betterment, and a form of rule that accords with (or at least does not outrage) their moral beliefs. In China, the regime seems to have successfully made the transition from an unpopular Communism to a highly popular mixture of capitalism and ethnic nationalism as its justifying ideology. Singapore is a more advanced (and less autocratic) version of the same phenomenon. These regimes will be gradually pulled in a democratic direction as the Chinese rural masses move into modern urban society and as the Singaporeans grow accustomed to being rich. Both are then likely to develop democratic discontent — as the Taiwanese and South Koreans have already done. So it makes no sense for the U.S. to wage war, even merely ideological war, on such undemocratic societies when they are (a) not yet receptive to importing democracy, and (b) almost certain to demand it successfully from potential domestic suppliers over time. America's role here should be to provide backward governments with the political and economic incentives to move toward democracy in line with the developing appetite of their citizens for it — and, admittedly, to be ready with corresponding penalties when these governments egregiously offend international norms, as when Beijing fired on the students at Tiananmen Square. It has a theoretically harder problem to solve when existing democracies look likely to fail — as may be about to happen in several Latin American countries, notably Brazil and Argentina — because they lack the habits of voluntary cooperation and self-restraint that underpin Anglo-American democracy. These are not problems that can be solved by the U.S. military or even by the State Department. In effect the U.S. has to rely on the transforming influence of cultural change in the age of the Internet. It has to hope that the citizens of statist or traditional societies will gradually develop good democratic habits in response to the free competition of ideas and traditions across frontiers. But what is likely to be the nature of the democracy that the U.S. exports today? In recent years, even as neoconservatives were celebrating the triumph of democratic capitalism worldwide, the content of this democracy was being radically redefined by liberals and progressives. And in redefining it, they have rendered it largely or wholly undemocratic. As Hudson Institute fellow John Fonte has argued in his recent critique of "trans-national progressivism," the new democracy takes virtually every democratic concept and inverts it. For majority rule in a sovereign democratic state, it substitutes permanent negotiations between ethnic groups. In place of a common national culture, it proposes ethno-cultural separatism. And in place of sovereign governments, it proposes a vast international Leviathan of overlapping jurisdictions. It is a system in which political power is located everywhere and nowhere and is therefore beyond the control of democratic parliaments. As Fukuyama said in his recent John Bonython Lecture in Australia, such a system positively "invites abuse on the part of elites who are then free to interpret the will of the international community to suit their own preferences." Yet it is this system that the U.S. increasingly implements at home, via such devices as racial preferences and multiculturalism. And U.S. ambassadors abroad have reproached governments for not living up to such progressive injunctions as parliamentary set-asides for women politicians. My advice to any innocent abroad who is thinking of buying the whole American democratic package is to read the list of ingredients with care.
European
Communities Greece is said to be the most anti-American country in Europe, and Albania the most pro-American. As it happened, my itinerary included both countries. I was to speak on 9/11 and the ongoing war, and to mix it up a little with local journalists and intellectuals. Anything learned? Many things, among them that there is really no such thing as a European: The continent is not a monolith, no matter what the grandees in Brussels might wish. Also, that anti-Americanism is something of a house of cards, ready to collapse with a breath of reason and explication. Of course, you can do nothing about the die-hards. But what can you do about die-hards anywhere, including on an American campus? The first thing an American is told in Greece is, "Don't say anything about terrorism" — meaning, domestic terrorism, with which Greece has had a problem. The Greeks are very sensitive to criticism on this score, particularly coming from Americans. Recently, government authorities rounded up the terrorists of the November 17 group, which has wreaked havoc for the last 25 years. In the course of their work, they murdered five Americans, and the Greek political establishment did not seem especially sorrowful or alarmed. In light of the current American-led war, and the coming of the Olympic Games to Athens in 2004, the Greeks were feeling extra pressure to do something about terrorists in their midst. Good for them. I was certainly not going to mention it, even to laud it. But a young journalist in Thessaloniki (or Salonika, as we once called it) was quick to spring it on me: Why are you Americans so sensitive about this terror group, since merely five of your people died at its hands? This attitude — rather bristling and callous, actually — reminded me of something that had just been reported in The (London) Spectator. The magazine's editor, Boris Johnson, interviewed the Saudi ambassador to London, one Ghazi Algosaibi, notorious for penning poetic homages to Palestinian suicide-bombers. The ambassador, in an obvious effort to flatter his interviewer, said, "The American p | |||||||||||
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