Can Dems Find Their Mojo?

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There were a couple of articles in Tuesday’s newspapers that underscored, for me, how far the Dems have fallen. One was a Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne:

While Republicans believe in their party and in the cause of building its organization from bottom to top, Democratic sympathizers tend to focus on favorite causes and favorite candidates, notably in presidential years. …

… a political party needs to see itself — and be seen by those who support it — as a long-term operation, not simply as a label of convenience at election time.

The other article was a New York Times story by Robin Toner, “Fathers Defeated, Democratic Sons Strike Back.”

In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party.

Now, that election has a sequel.

Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.

All of them had their political sensibilities shaped, to some extent, by the election that defeated their fathers and began a generation of conservative dominance.

OK so far. But the article goes on to describe the sons as “careful” centrists who run away from the dreaded “L” word — Liberal. For example:

While Birch Bayh was known as a classic “Great Society liberal,” as Evan Bayh has put it, and as a champion of causes like the equal rights amendment, the son has long been a careful centrist, a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and a founder of the Third Way, a centrist research group.

Visiting 22 states over the past year, he has argued that the way for Democrats to win is to reach out to the middle class, demonstrate credibility on national security and show respect for faith and values issues.

Conclusion: Evan Bayh is a eunuch.

The past couple of posts focused on how the Democratic Party lost itself. This post discusses how the Right, through a long campaign of “hysterical charges and bald-faced lies,” undermined the Democrats’ credibility on foreign policy. The last post looks at how white middle- and working-class voters bolted to the Right when Democrats took a stand in favor of racial equality. Further, the old New Deal coalition was fatally undermined by the New Left. But the New Left did not create a new coalition to take the place of the old one. Instead, for almost forty years American liberals and progressives have been caught up in discrete issues — civil rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment, etc. — that compete with each other for money and attention.

Meanwhile, the Right built an infrastructure of think tanks and media that by the 1980s dominated the nation’s political discourse and agenda.

This is a complex history, and I’ve only touched on a few main points. I’ve left out Ken Starr and the Clinton impeachment, for example, and the pernicious influence of the Christian Right. And then there is the problem of fundraising. With no broad-based coalition to support them, the Dems came to depend on a small pool of wealthy donors for campaign money. Now, E.J. Dionne notes, Dems argue whether they should wage a 50-state campaign or strategically focus on 20 or so “blue” states, conceding the remainder to the Right.

The result: In recent years Republicans have ruled national politics like lords, while the Dems cringed about like court eunuchs being careful not to offend. While the Republicans pushed for broad and radical change in domestic and foreign policy, Democrats attempted little more than minor, incremental tweaks. And when George W. Bush became president, and as we leftie bloggers and other liberals screamed our virtual heads off at the Dem Party to get a spine and stand up to the Right, at first Washington Dems either ignored us or ran away from us.

Dems in Washington are so insular they barely know what to make of demands from the grassroots. At first they seemed to think that if they ignored us, we would go away. Now some of them are catching on that we’re not going away, and they’re becoming more responsive. But conventional wisdom tells the Dems to stick with the Clinton triangulation approach, because we liberal activists have burned the party before, in the 1960s and 1970s.

There’s a lot of distrust and estrangement here. We liberals of the base don’t trust the party to work for our issues, but the party doesn’t trust us, either.

Some progressives argue in favor of a third party. The Dems, they say, are hopeless. Why work to elect them when they’re going to let us down, as they have in the past? This argument suffers from two fatal flaws. First, since the emergence of the first “third” party in the early nineteenth century, in national campaigns third parties at best have been spoilers. This has to do with the way we run elections in the U.S. and is not going to change no matter how sincere and earnest we are.

But the other flaw is even more fatal: Until we heal our toxic political culture, and until we liberals and progressives pull together to create a unified coalition with infrastructure to rival the Right’s — any third party we create will end up being just like the Dems.

The national Democratic Party came to be the way it is in response to the nation’s political environment, which has been so fouled by the Right that real political debate and discourse are damn near impossible. And it came to be the way it is because no coalition of citizens and interest groups support it and defend it, the way the New Deal coalition supported the Democrats from the 1930s until the 1960s. Instead, our myriad single-issue advocacy groups hang back until an election is looming, then issue endorsements. Like anyone cares. And the rest of us tend to focus on favorite issues and candidates, as Dionne says.

I cannot emphasize enough that the Democrats in Washington won’t change until we change. That’s the whole point of the netroots uprising, and I believe we’re having an effect.

Those who advocate abandoning the Dems for a third party are thinking too small. They are looking for the Magic Candidate who will get elected and go to Washington and make it all better. But this ignores how Congress works and how agendas are set in Washington; in fact, individual politicians are only as strong as their parties. Going the third-party route, IMO, would make progressives even more marginalized than we already are.

This is a feeble analogy, but let’s say you have a big aquarium, but your fish are sick and dying because there is something wrong with the aquarium environment. There’s not much point in replacing dead fish with new ones if you don’t fix what’s wrong with the aquarium.

Healing the political environment is not going to be easy. Media reform, which I’ve ranted about in the past, is critical. But I’ve got a couple of other ideas.

First, we absolutely must re-build a strong and broad coalition that will work together to support the Democratic Party and liberal/progressive politicians and issues all the time; not just when elections are looming. This coalition will not necessarily look like the New Deal coalition. It would include unions and minorities, but it should strive to include small business owners, who have been pretty much shafted by the Bush Administration, and workers, and not just workers who belong to unions. Everyone who lives on a paycheck and hopes to retire with a pension or 401K is being hurt by Republican policies these days. Retirees, also, should be our natural partners.

The single-issue advocates should think hard about whether it’s in the best interests of their causes to put all their effort into maintaining big nonprofit organizations that can’t actually do much but make noise, or instead work together through the Democratic Party. I say that if the advocates — for the environment, reproductive rights, civil rights, health care, etc. — could pull together and focus their efforts on strengthening and influencing a single political party, eventually they could have the power to effect real policy changes instead of settling for tweaks. Or, as in recent years, just trying to blunt the damage being done by Republicans.

As commenter JHB pointed out, 1970s-era changes in campaign finance law, which were supposed to make campaigns more democratic, had the effect of empowering pro-big corporation PACs and gave rise to single-issue groups pretending to be bipartisan, but who demagogue on one or two inflammatory issues to help Republicans get elected. It seems every time campaign finance gets “reformed,” new sets of problems arise. And, oddly enough, those problems tend to help the Republicans and hurt the Dems. I am more and more convinced that public finance of campaigns is the way to go. But if we can’t get public financing, we must fight any “reform” that would hinder our efforts at coalition building.

In short, liberals and progressives must completely re-think our way of doing political business. All the time. Not just the way we run election campaigns.

My advice for the Washington Democrats is to figure out who they are in their own right, and stop allowing themselves to be defined by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Dems are so cowed they’ve come to believe rightie revisionist history — that the Democratic Party destroyed itself by their mushiness on foreign policy and association with 1960s hippies and radicals. And that the only way they can prove themselves to be worthy is to be like Republicans. Bleep that. I spent the last two posts explaining why the GOP version of Democratic Party history is bogus. Further, I sincerely believe a majority of voters are sick to death of the Republicans’ act and would respond well to something else.

In the last post I said Dems should “reconnect to the best of the core principles that made the party strong in the past and reaffirm those principles in the present.” Take, for example, this passage from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

    Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
    Jobs for those who can work.
    Security for those who need it.
    The ending of special privilege for the few.
    The preservation of civil liberties for all.
    The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Whenever the Republicans go off on tangents about saving endangered stem cells or starting more wars in lieu of an actual foreign policy, Dems should be saying, look, here are the basic things government should be doing, along with national defense and homeland security, and government controlled by Republicans isn’t doing any of them. Instead, we’ve been distracted by fringe issues, most of which amount to government interfering with matters that people could better decide for themselves. Republicans believe in fairy tales — such as starting wars in the Middle East will spread democracy, or cutting taxes increases government revenue, or unregulated business and markets will improve everyone’s standard of living. None of these fairy tales have come true in the past, and they aren’t coming true now, yet Republicans still believe in them. If you’re tired of fairy tales and want government that works, government that does the job government is supposed to do, vote for Democrats.

Is that so hard?

How the Democrats Lost, Period

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This is a follow up to the last post, which reviews how the Right took the foreign policy issue away from the Left after World War II, as well as the “Don’t Blame McGovern,” “Hey, Hey, LBJ,” and “Countercultural” posts from last week. I’m afraid this post is long even by my standards, but there are a lot of pieces to be pulled together. Even this post is barely just an outline.

I’m walking through this old stuff because I think it’s important to clarify how the Democratic Party was eclipsed by the Republican Party, to the point that it went from being the dominant party to being the triangulation party. Today the Democrats have a big, fat opportunity to regain political momentum if they can present a clear alternative to the floundering Republicans. But the Democratic Party has been stumbling along for years with no clear self-identity. Emptied of cohesion and purpose, at times the party has seemed little more than a catch-all receptacle for politicians who are not Republicans, exactly.

For years Conventional Wisdom has said that the Democratic Party crashed in the 1960s and 1970s because Democrats were opposed to the war in Vietnam. And ever since, says the CW, voters just haven’t trusted Dems to handle foreign policy. Now the Lamont Insurgency and other signs of uppitiness among the Dems has the punditocracy wagging its fingers and warning of the dire consequences of “McGovernism.”

I’ve already argued in the previously cited posts that the “McGovernism” charge is bogus. But I think that before the Dem Party can find itself again it needs to clearly understand what did strip the party of its soul. Then, perhaps, the Dems can reconnect to the best of the core principles that made the party strong in the past and reaffirm those principles in the present.

Essentially, what happened in the 1960s and 1970s was that the New Deal coalition came apart, and no new coalition stepped in to take its place. What was the New Deal coalition? From Wikipedia:

The 1932 election brought about a major realignment in political party affiliation, and is widely considered to be a realigning election, though some scholars point to the off-year election of 1934. Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up his New Deal and was able to forge a coalition of Big City machines, labor unions, liberals, ethnic and racial minorities (especially Catholics, Jews and African Americans), and Southern whites. These disparate voting blocs together formed a large minority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections, as well as control of both houses of Congress during much of this time.

A great many factors eroded the coalition, and Vietnam was one of those factors. Other factors included the decline of the city machines and the decreasing influence of labor unions. But I think if there was one factor that stood out from the rest, it was not Vietnam. It was race.

From the end of Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the mid-twentieth century, southern whites were Democrats. Although Franklin Roosevelt pushed the Democratic Party overall in a more liberal direction, he compromised with southern white supremacists to get his programs passed in Congress.

1948 saw a prequel of party divisions to come: In January President Harry Truman integrated the military by executive order, and that summer at the Dems’ national convention Hubert Humphrey urged the Dems to add an anti-segregation plank to the party platform. Humphrey’s speech so inflamed some southern delegates that they walked out. After Truman’s endorsement of and the party’s adoption of the anti-segregation plan, some of the southern Dems split off and formed the Dixiecrat Party, which nominated Strom Thurmond for president. On election day the Dixiecrats won in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.

On the other hand, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision got a tepid response from both parties. Racial issues played little part in the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns of Adlai Stephenson and Dwight Eisenhower. The Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic fold, for a time. National politicians tried to ignore the Civil Rights movement, although in 1957 circumstances (i.e., Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus) forced Republican President Eisenhower to send the 101st Airborne Division to protect African American students attempting to attend a newly integrated high school in Little Rock. In the late 1950s Congress went through the motions of addressing racial issues by passing some toothless civil rights laws. The essential point, however, is that neither national party was closely associated with desegregation in most peoples’ minds in the 1950s.

But in 1960, when Martin Luther King was sentenced to a four-month prison term in Georgia, presidential candidate John Kennedy called Coretta Scott King to express sympathy. That may not seem extraordinary now, but in 1960 it was a major breakthrough. As president, Kennedy expressed support for the Freedom Marchers and introduced the bill that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Again, Kennedy’s contributions to racial equality were small, but they encouraged Democrats outside the South to more openly support civil rights.

President Lyndon Johnson kicked Democratic Party support for racial equality to new levels. Overall, Johnson’s record as a champion of civil rights is, um, mixed. But IMO Johnson’s Great Society program was at least as big a watershed moment for the Democratic Party as Vietnam, if not bigger. The Great Society was wildly unpopular among white Americans. In their minds, it amounted to taking tax money from whites and giving it to blacks. (Remember, as I explained here, entitlement programs were fine with the white folks in earlier times, when it was understood whites were the principal beneficiaries.)

It was the Great Society that popularized the myth of the tax-and-spend liberals, IMO. The Right may have said the same thing about FDR and the New Deal, but the New Deal was popular. The Great Society wasn’t. In fact, Johnson was reluctant to raise taxes. But in 1967 Johnson’s economic advisers persuaded him that taxes had to be raised to pay for Vietnam, and he struggled for most of the rest of his administration to shove a short-term tax surcharge through Congress. Republican politicians successfully coupled the tax surcharge with welfare programs in white voters’ minds, forming the basis of the “tax-and-spend” charge embedded in the public mind for the past forty years.

I bump into people today who think the definition of liberal is “someone who wants to raise your taxes and increase government spending.” See also this Heritage Foundation commentary claiming our current Congress’s reckless spending means it is turning “left,” never mind that the money is being drizzled away on war and pork, not expanded social programs. Today spending alone is what defines “left,” not the purpose of the spending. The fact is that Republican Administrations over the past 25 years have run bigger deficits and spent more as a percentage of GDP than the Democratic Administration. Yet you still hear “pundits” claim that Democrats spend more.

Back to civil rights — in the 1960s, as the national Democratic Party became associated with civil rights and racial equality, the old Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic Party and became Republican. Thus it was that “solid south” went from being solid Democrat to solid Republican. There is more background on the significance of the Dixiecrat Revolt here. See also this Wikipedia article about Richard Nixon and the Southern Strategy.

But also in the 1960s the issue of race became subliminal. It was no longer socially acceptable (accept on a local level) for white politicians to openly advocate white supremacy. Even Strom Thurmond toned down his rhetoric. George Wallace may have been the last prominent politician to wage an openly racist campaign to run for national office. For this reason the impact of race on politics in the 1960s and 1970s might not be obvious today to someone studying the speeches and editorials of those years. For example, as I explained in the “McGovern” post, most of the first half of Richard Nixon’s 1972 nomination acceptance speech amounted to an appeal to white racist voters, even though Nixon didn’t use the words race (except in the context of arms race), racial, equality, integration, or other words directly associated with racial issues. Believe me, everyone listening at the time knew exactly what he meant.

What about the New Left? As explained in this essay (scroll down to the American History subhead; emphasis added):

Liberalism in the Truman era seemed to be simple self-interest to most families who benefited from the G.I. bill and veterans’ mortgages. Campaigning in 1948 on the slogan “All I ask you to do is vote for yourself, vote for your family,” Harry S. Truman not only defeated challenges from his left and right, but triumphed despite drawing only limited support from the top tiers as measured by wealth, education, or occupation.

New Deal liberalism’s final political victory came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson once again defeated Hoover’s ghost in the form of the outspoken economic libertarian Barry Goldwater. Johnson went on, in effect, to complete much of the New Deal’s agenda by expanding its social and health benefits for the poor, the elderly, and African-Americans who had earlier been ignored. …

… By the middle of the decade, New Deal liberalism was in retreat, routed initially not so much by its conservative opponents as by new forms of liberalism, which had emerged in response to the cataclysms of those years. In the next quarter century, its reputation declined until in the 1988 presidential race “liberal” became the “L word,” an epithet.

New issues, such as racial justice and the misuse of a now powerful presidency to fight a morally untenable war in Vietnam, destroyed the New Deal political coalition. At the same time a renewed fear of government as a threat to individual moral autonomy, defined in terms not of property but of lifestyle, undermined the social and cultural assumptions of the New Deal’s mild collectivism and authoritative institutions. Both civil rights and lifestyle liberalism were moral critiques of meat-and-potatoes majoritarianism and both pursued their goals through the courts, the “undemocratic” branch of government the New Deal had, in large measure, defined itself against.

The legacy of the New Left was that liberalism in America splintered. “Identity politics” and single-issue advocacy groups have been the main focus of American liberalism since the 1970s. This may have been therapeutic, but it’s way ineffective. And as the Left came apart, the Right got its act together. During the 1970s a number of wealthy conservatives began to build the media and political infrastructures that dominate U.S. politics today. Kevin Baker’s “Stabbed in the Back!” article discussed in the last post explains how Nixon expanded his campaign against the antiwar movement and counterculture into permanent cultural war.

This takes us to Ronald Reagan, who was still pandering to racism with his “welfare queen” remarks in 1980. Reagan was brilliant at playing the role of a strong, big-hearted representative of the common man while appealing to the meanest instincts and prejudices of voters. As explained in this Wikipedia article, by Reagan’s time white working-class voters no longer saw the Democrats as champions of middle-class issues and aspirations, as they had during the heyday of the New Deal coalition. (Note: I disagree with Wikipedia that these same voters saw “gains” during the Reagan Administration; I remember just the opposite. But that’s another post, maybe.) Working class whites came to believe Dems were working only to benefit other people, who happened (ah-HEM) to be black. See also this article by William Schneider in the July, 1992 Atlantic Monthly. Writing about the 1992 election campaigns, Schneider wrote,

Democrats have been talking about “the forgotten middle class,” and for good reason. For the past twenty-five years the Democrats have forgotten the middle class. And they have paid dearly.

One could debate whether the Dems actually forgot the middle class, or whether they were only perceived to have forgotten the middle class. But the damage was done. The Republican Party had become the party of both Big Money and the working class it exploits. The Democrats had become the party of … who, exactly?

OK, this post is already too long. If you’ve read this far … bless you. I’ll finish in another post.

How the Democrats Lost Their Spines

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E.J. Dionne writes in today’s Washington Post that “The Democratic Party has a self-image problem.”

Talk to Democrats at every level about the strong position the party is in for this fall’s elections and the conversation inevitably ends with a variation of: “Yeah, if we don’t blow it.” Karl Rove’s greatest victory is how much he has spooked Democrats about themselves.

From there Dionne discusses Democrats and fundraising, but I want to dwell longer on the “self-image problem.” The fact is that the self-image problem didn’t start with Karl; the Dems have had a self-image problem for many years. Karl is brilliant at exploiting it, but he didn’t create it.

Conventional wisdom says that the Dems lost their edge as a party because they went all mushy on foreign policy. Peter Beinart certainly has bought this view:

When John Kerry lost in 2004, I started in my despair reading about the late 1940s, the first years of the Cold War. That was the last time America entered a new era in national security. It started very fast in 1945 and 1946. And it was the last period where the country trusted liberals and Democrats to defend it.

As Will Marshall has pointed out, if you look at all presidential elections since the Vietnam War, the disturbing reality is the Democratic Party has only won in those moments when the country turned inward. Carter won in 1976, when the country turned inward after Vietnam. It was the first election since 1948 when national security was not the issue that people told pollsters they were most concerned about. Then Clinton won in 1992, in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The truth is this: Unless the Democratic Party can change its image on national security, its only realistic hope of winning the White House is the hope that the war on terrorism is a passing phenomenon that will be over in a few years.

There’s some truth to what Beinart says, but it’s not the whole picture. Last week I took apart the conventional wisdom that says George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon by a landslide in 1972 because McGovern was anti-war. As I explained, opposition to the war was possibly one of the least important factors in McGovern’s defeat. The same conventional wisdom says that it is the Dems’ delicate sensibilities about war and the military, and their Neville Chamberlain-like tendencies to appease enemies rather than confront them, that gave Republicans the edge in foreign policy issues ever since. And this, “pundits” like Beinart propose, is why voters flock to Republicans whenever national security is a prominent issue. And it’s why, other “pundits” declare, the Dems must avoid association with antiwar types if they expect to win elections.

As Beinart says, the Narrative that Dems are soft on security goes back to the late 1940s and the beginning of the Cold War. But isn’t it odd that, so soon after World War II, Democrats were under fire for being soft? After all, two Democratic Presidents had just led the nation through World War II. And before WWII, it was right-wing isolationists who wanted to ignore or appease Hitler, while Franklin Roosevelt argued that Hitler was a threat who must be confronted. (There are echoes of this old argument in today’s paleoconservative revisionist history that the war in Europe was unnecessary and that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and didn’t stop it.)

The notion that Republicans are, somehow, traditionally the party of war and Democrats the party of wusses seems particularly odd when you consider that Poppy Bush (41) was the first Republican president to take the nation into a war worthy of the name since William McKinley . Except for the Gulf War, the big wars of the 20th century — World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam — were joined under the leadership of Democratic presidents — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson.

In fact, when I was a child the old folks often said that Democrats liked to start wars because wars are good for the economy. I haven’t heard that one in a while.

To understand how Dems went from being warriors to wusses, you must understand how Republicans went from isolationism to imperialism. For background, I urge you to read “Stabbed in the Back!” by Kevin Baker in the June issue of Harper’s. A snip:

In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations—supported by many liberal Republicans—had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.

Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly—even suicidally—maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” and the right’s enduring presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, America First, and opposed the nation’s first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chiang Kai-shek’s worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. “The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up,” Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951.

Of course, by 1951 Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s “red scare” campaign was in full swing, and McCarthy ranted about the Soviets often enough. But Baker argues persuasively that in the postwar years Republicans saved themselves from irrelevancy by propagating the myth of Yalta. The Yalta agreements forged by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in 1945 met with widespread approval at first. But then along came Alger Hiss, who had been a junior member of the U.S. delegation at Yalta. Accusations that he was a Soviet spy first emerged about eight months later —

[T]he exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent followed, in relatively rapid succession, by the fall of Czechoslovakia’s coalition government to a Soviet-backed coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb, and the victory of Mao’s Communists over Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang regime in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt. Never mind that the right’s own feckless or muddled proposals for fighting the Cold War would not have ameliorated any of these situations. The right swept them into the memory hole and offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how suddenly their nation’s global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta.

A growing chorus of right-wing voices now began to excoriate our wartime diplomacy. Their most powerful charge, one that would firmly establish the Yalta myth in the American political psyche, was the accusation that our delegation had given over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. According to “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” an essay written for Life magazine shortly before the 1948 election by William Bullitt—a former diplomat who had been dismissed by Roosevelt for outing a gay rival in the State Department—FDR and his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, were guilty of “wishful appeasement” of Stalin at Yalta, handing the peoples of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states over to the Soviet dictator.

The Right became obsessed with the notion that Hiss had somehow manipulated the conference so that the agreements would favor Stalin. Exactly how a young junior delegate accomplished this feat was never clear, and although righties persist in calling Hiss a spy he was never, in fact, convicted of espionage, but of perjury. And Baker argues that a close look at the Yalta negotiations reveals the myths about Hiss to be absurd. No matter; Yalta became a symbol for perfidy and weak-kneed appeasement on the part of Democrats. From there the Republican Party launched a full-court-press campaign — a “compilation of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies,” Baker writes — against the “weakness” of Democratic foreign policy. Events such as Truman’s dismissal of General MacArthur became new chapters in the Narrative of the Spineless Democrats — charges that fall apart under even moderately casual scrutiny, but which took hold in the American public conscious nonetheless.

The charge from the Right that traitors in the State Department “lost” China to Mao — as if it had been theirs to lose, and the people of China had nothing to do with it — led to a purge of Asia experts. This purge had serious consequences; Henry C K Liu wrote for Asia Times:

Robert McNamara, defense secretary under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, attributed the Vietnam debacle to the thorough purge of China experts by McCarthyism. He wrote, “The irony of this gap – Asian experts – was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department – John Patton Davies Jr, John Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent – had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we – certainly I – badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony.”

And by the 1960s the old charge about “losing” China had taken a toll — “Democrats in particular, like Kennedy and Johnson, feared a right-wing backlash should they give up the fight; they remembered vividly the accusatory tone of the Republicans’ 1950 question, ‘Who lost China?'” Andrew J. Rotter wrote.

So Johnson made the catastrophically bad decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. The war was such a disaster that Johnson chose not to run for a second term in 1968 (as had Truman, because of MacArthur and Korea, in 1952). In the Humphrey-Nixon campaign it seems to me that Nixon was the “peace” candidate, since he was the candidate who promised to end the war. Yet somehow Democratic defeats in 1968 and 1972 are attributed to Democrats taking an antiwar position.

Baker discusses the way the Right “processed” Vietnam at some length. It was, he says, a war the Right had been clamoring for. When it went sour, the Right did not admit that the war in Vietnam had been, fundamentally, a bad idea. Instead, the Nixon Administration and the Republican establishment successfully turned the antiwar movement and “liberal elites” into scapegoats. The antiwar protesters were traitors who were aiding the enemy. That Nixon made this charge stick at the same time he was stumbling around looking for a way out of Vietnam is a testament to his political genius.

Baker also argues that Nixon escalated the Right’s foreign policy campaign into permanent cultural war. Which takes us to our current problem —

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater’s characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing’s belief system that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation’s history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq—and the “war on terrorism”—seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their country should be.

Again, I urge you to read the entire Baker article, because it is excellent, and because it puts our current political mess in an entirely different light.

I’m planning another post to tie together Baker’s article with some ideas in my “Don’t Blame McGovern” post from last week to say more about the Democrats’ self-identity problem. I hope to have that post published by tomorrow. Maybe this evening.

Non Sequiturs

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Non sequitur is Latin for “it does not follow.” In English, non sequitur can refer to a response that has no relevance to what preceded it, or to a conclusion that does not follow from the premises.

Wikipedia has a fun example of the first type of non sequitur:

A good example of this device can be seen in Season 2 of the Micallef Programme in which Shaun Micallef hosts a game show called Non-Sequitur Family Feud. He asks the question “Name ten things you plug in”, to which Francis Greenslade answers with a list of ten random words, including mules, Lewis Carroll, 1832 and ‘I like butterscotch‘.

An example of a conclusion that does not follow the premise — If I am in Tokyo I am in Japan. I am not in Tokyo, therefore I am not in Japan. Since there’s lots to Japan beside Tokyo, the statement is illogical.

I’ve come to believe that righties think entirely in non sequiturs.

I mentioned this in a post last week — check out this bit from Friday’s Hardball:

REP. CHARLIE RANGEL (D) NEW YORK: I like to quote Rumsfeld, who said that he didn‘t know whether we were creating more terrorists than we‘re killing. And I think that the terrible way in which we have gotten involved in Iraq, have no clue about how to get out, inability to have any diplomatic policy, that we got young people who are Islam but of course have now found that people are being killed, and they are being recruited to do this terrorist work.

So we‘ve created an atmosphere, not of diplomatic resolution of this problem, but thinking that we can bring peace and freedom at the end of a rifle. And it‘s not working,

MATTHEWS: Your answer, Mr. Lungren?

REP. DAN LUNGREN ® CALIFORNIA: Well, we weren‘t in Iraq when we lost 241 marines in Lebanon,

Five-alarm non sequitur, that.

Khobar Towers, U.S. Cole. I don‘t think we need to do anything to radicalize these elements of Islamo-fascism, who are bent on killing Americans. I don‘t think we need to do anything to radicalize these elements of Islamo-fascism, who are bent on killing Americans. You can argue—

MATTHEWS: In each case, Mr. Lungren—in each case, sir, we were in the country where we were killed. You say it wasn‘t because we were in an Arab country, we were in Lebanon, we were killed by the Lebanese, we were in Saudi Arabia when we were attacked. And Saudi Arabia, some believe, was the trigger to bin Laden, who was in Saudi Arabia when we had 10,000 troops there.

LUNGREN: If you‘re going to argue that we‘re the ones that are radicalizing the Muslim world, I happen to disagree with you.

MATTHEWS: What is radicalizing them?

LUNGREN: This has been a commitment on the part of these radical elements for some decades. They don‘t need any excuse. The Fatwa that was published in 1993, specifically called on them to kill Americans anywhere in the world.

If the genius is referring to Osama bin Laden’s fatwa — he’s issued several, actually, although I don’t believe he has the authority to issue official fatwas — the ones I found on the Internets refer specifically to American occupation of “holy places.” As I wrote in the earlier post linked above, bin Laden’s beef with Americans dates from 1990, when American troops were moved into Saudi Arabia in anticipation of the Gulf War.

Lungren’s logical fallacy, of course, is — Osama bin Laden is Muslim; Osama bin Laden hates Americans; therefore, Muslims hate Americans. There are a couple of other Muslims in the world beside bin Laden, I believe.

Of course, there are many factors that cause Muslims to turn against the West. The Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia indoctrinates its followers, especially boys, into a radical, militant, and anti-western Islam. Muslims who grew up listening to this stuff certainly are pre-disposed to hate Americans. But Wahhabism is just one sect of Islam. To assume that Wahabism exemplifies Islam is like assuming that Seventh-Day Adventism exemplifies Christianity.

Further, to acknowledge that the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia incited bin Laden to issue fatwas against America is not to say that America “deserved” to be attacked on September 11. That would be another non sequitur. Bin Laden is a twisted bastard; just because he wants to kill us for something we did doesn’t mean that what we did was wrong. Certainly the Muslims of Kuwait appreciated us at the time, as I recall.

But it’s also nuts to deny that the 1983 deaths of 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. service members killed in a single truck bomb attack in Beirut had nothing whatsoever to do with what the Marines were doing in Beirut. As explained in this article by Max Bergmann,

In August 1982, Reagan sent troops to Lebanon to resolve an internal civil war and a wider regional conflict. About 1,800 Marines along with French and Italian troops formed a multinational force (MNF) to support the fledgling Lebanese government by acting as a peacekeeping force. After some initial success, however, the MNF became increasingly entangled in Lebanon’s sectarian conflict and soon was only exacerbating the problems it was supposed to resolve.

There’s a lot more to it, of course, and I’m not saying the Marines who were killed did anything wrong. The MNF suffered from muddled thinking on the part of the politicians about what the mission in Lebanon actually was. The troops dealt with the situation around them as best they could, I’m sure. But at the same time it’s illogical to offer Beirut 1983 to argue that what we’re doing in Iraq doesn’t matter; Muslims would hate us anyway.

Another brilliant Republican non sequitur is the one that goes If you don’t support the war in Iraq you don’t support fighting terrorism. Bob Herbert writes,

There was something pathetic about the delight with which Republicans seized upon the terror plot last week and began trying to wield it like a whip against their Democratic foes. The G.O.P. message seemed to be that the plot foiled in Britain was somehow proof that the U.S. needed to continue full speed ahead with the Bush administration’s disastrous war in Iraq, and that any Democrat who demurred was somehow soft on terrorism.

The truth, of course, is that the demolition derby policies of the Bush administration are creating enemies of the United States, not defeating them. It cannot be said often enough, for example, that the catastrophic war in Iraq, which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands, was a strategic mistake of the highest magnitude. It diverted our focus, energy and resources from the real enemy, Al Qaeda and its offshoots, and turned Iraq, a country critically important to the Muslim imagination, into a spawning ground for terrorists.

Almost three years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Jessica Stern, who lectures on terrorism at Harvard, wrote in The New York Times that the U.S. had created in Iraq “precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary needs.”

Ms. Stern went on to say, “As bad as the situation inside Iraq may be, the effect that the war has had on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be even more worrisome.”

The situation has grown only worse since then. While Republicans are savoring the political possibilities of a foiled terror plot, the spiraling chaos in Iraq and other Bush administration policies are contributing mightily to the anger and radicalism in the Muslim world.

It’s true there were radical Muslims preaching hatred of America before we went into Iraq. But our presence in Iraq is making their sales pitch a lot more enticing. It’s like they’re air conditioner salesmen and we’re the heat wave.

Max Hastings:

In September 2001, most of the world clearly perceived that a monstrous crime had been committed against the United States, and that the defeat of al-Qaida was essential to global security. While many ordinary Muslims were by no means sorry to see American hubris punished, grassroots support for Osama bin Laden was still small, and remained so through the invasion of Afghanistan.

Today, of course, everything has changed. In the eyes of many Muslims, the actions of Bush and Blair have promoted and legitimised al-Qaida in a fashion even its founder could hardly have anticipated a decade ago.

Of course, it’s hard to make logical decisions without facts. But if you make illogical decisions, facts are just so much clutter.

Bush has chosen to lump together all violent Muslim opposition to what he perceives as western interests everywhere in the world, as part of a single conspiracy. He is indifferent to the huge variance of interests that drives the Taliban in Afghanistan, insurgents in Iraq, Hamas and Hizbullah fighting the Israelis. He simply identifies them as common enemies of the United States.

The Bush Administration: Fuzzy math, fuzzy facts, fuzzy logic. One would think the recent busted plot coming out of Britain would have highlighted the fallacy of “We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” The neocons talk about creative chaos, which is a pretty good term for rightie thinking skills. Last Friday’s Hardball gave us a frightening example:

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. Does this foiled terrorism plot out of London help Republicans by refocusing the country on national security issues? Or will Democrats hammer home that the Bush administration‘s policy over in Iraq is encouraging hatred and terrorism? Our HARDBALLers tonight are here to answer those questions. Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now on the radio and it‘s on Pacifica, and on television, also the author of “Static Government: Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back” and Heidi Harris is a radio talk show host with no book out right now. Heidi you start, who wins this discussion as to the object lesson of catching those bad guys over in Britain?

HEIDI HARRIS, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: I think the Republicans do, and frankly I think it‘s a good thing some people have not forgotten about our national security, thanks to MI5, working in conjunction with America, we were able to catch these people before thousands of innocent people were killed.

MATTHEWS: Who has forgotten about our national security?

HARRIS: There are a lot of people who have, like those who want to see us pull out of Iraq instantly. They have forgotten about the fact that we‘ve still got the terrorists on the run and that‘s the objective. You‘re not going to make people like us, but ultimately we can keep them on the run and keep them off-balance and try to protect ourselves.

MATTHEWS: So Iraq is making us safer?

HARRIS: Well I think it is because we‘ve got them on the run. We‘ve caught people like Zarqawi. They hated us before we went there so the argument they only dislike Americans because of George Bush and because of we‘re over if Iraq, that‘s a lie. They attacked us. We weren‘t in Iraq.

MATTHEWS: OK, we were in Saudi Arabia however when bin Laden actually from Saudi Arabia decided he hated us, we were in Lebanon when we got blown up last time. There is a connection between our location and the anger that it causes, isn‘t there?

HARRIS: Well there‘s a connection between our location and where they can below us up. You don‘t see them blowing us up here since 9-11, because they would to come over here, but we have to be vigilant. So they blow us up in Lebanon because it‘s easier than trying to come over here, that‘s why we have to be vigilant and stay on top of them. They‘re not going to like us no matter what we do.

If this woman ever in her life were to put a logical conclusion after a premise, her head would explode. A plot originating in London is hardly vindication of the “flypaper” theory in Iraq.

Eric Leaver:

The British plot underscores the weakness in Bush’s counterterrorism strategy of “Taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don’t have to face them here at home.” Reports note that all of those arrested in connection to the plot were British citizens. Even though many of the suspects appear to be of Pakistani descent, this operation was launched from within the country, just like 9/11.

The rising number of attacks, failure to capture bin Laden in five years, and the persistent and unabated threat of terror underscores the fact that our nation is not safer than it was before September 11, 2001. Bush has relied too heavily on military action and panic planning in the aftermath of attacks rather than addressing the root causes of terrorism, supporting effective prevention strategies and investing in the domestic infrastructure needed in case of an attack.

Every … single … time a Republican falls back on a non sequitur the Dems have got to smack it down. They’ve got to say, clearly, that is illogical. It doesn’t follow. And we’ve got to do as much as we can do to make Republican non sequiturs look ridiculous, because they are ridiculous.

Update: See also Altercation.

Freeped

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Those nasty liberal bloggers are at it again … oh, wait …

Last December a freelance writer named Jenny Price wrote an op ed for the Washington Post arguing for a ban on handguns and criticizing the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence for not pursuing a handgun ban.

For the record, I suspect the Brady Campaign is taking a realistic approach. The chance of a ban on all handguns in our lifetime probably is slightly less than the chance lightning bolts will simultaneously strike and write “Bush Sucks” on the White House lawn. I also believe — and I’ve spent some time with arguments pro and con on this point — that such a ban would require a constitutional amendment. But I don’t intend to go into all that today.

I bring up the Jenny Price op ed because today Ms. Price has an op ed in the Los Angeles Times in which she describes reactions to her Washington Post piece. She knew she was going to catch hell; she was not surprised, she says, by the insults and threats she received.

But Ms. Price began her Washington Post op ed by describing how her brother was murdered by his fiance’s mother, with a handgun. And Some People objected.

First, many chat-room members declared that the killing had to have been justified and was most likely an act of self-defense.

One participant, “armymarinedad,” wrote: “I would submit it was a liberal mind-set.” Liberals, many others agreed, are mean to their parents — mean enough to warrant homicide. “One can’t help wondering,” went one response to armymarinedad, “what the mother had done in a previous life to deserve … a Liberal for a daughter.”

The second challenge was that I had made up the story of my brother’s murder. “Law-abiding gun owners simply do not commit crimes,” “Gunslinger” posted — logic hard to refute. But like David’s killer, thousands of law-abiding citizens annually become criminals when they pick up a firearm and shoot other people.

“Chances are very good,” wrote “Plutarch” on freerepublic.com, “that her brother, if she has one, is alive and well.”

Plutarch and his freerepublic fellows Googled my story about David — and were encouraged when they came up empty because they were certain that “this remarkable murder” would have received massive media attention.

“I love to catch them [liberals] lying!” declared “mad_as_he$$.”

Lamentably, a double homicide by a friend or relative of the victims is an unremarkable news event in Los Angeles County, where 17 people, on average, are shot to death every week. The Times’ and Daily News’ stories were brief and buried on inside pages. Because the police took all day to notify our family, David’s name did not appear in them.

No matter. The freerepublic.com gang Googled some more, LexisNexised, scoured The Times’ archives for headlines, dug up Social Security records. They wondered whether David and I had different last names: A “rabid feminist” like me, of course, would never use her husband’s name. But “Ghengis (Alexander was a wuss!)” surmised that David and I had different fathers because that was so “common in California in the ’60s.”

In the midst of my detective work, I received an e-mail from a medical doctor who praised my “terrific opinion piece” and asked for “a link to any newspaper accounts.” But I quickly determined that Plutarch had sent the e-mail using his real name (I can Google too).

Plutarch found a photograph of me on the Internet and posted it on the freerepublic site. He worked so hard on the case that I was rooting for him to be the guy who finally figured it out. But just after he promised his colleagues that he’d call the L.A. County coroner’s office, “DakotaRed” posted a recent newspaper piece about my family that mentioned the murder. The freerepublic discussion stopped abruptly, and the chat rooms on the other pro-gun sites soon moved on as well.

Technorati says the December op ed received remarkably little notice from bloggers — only ten links. I guess when this is posted there will be eleven. The attention paid to Price’s op ed came from gun advocacy chat rooms and Free Republic, not from bloggers, which might Mean Something. Or not. Anyway, here’s a link to one Free Republic thread, although I couldn’t find the comments Price quotes. (Deleted, perhaps?) If you are interested, you can see what the Freep are saying about today’s Los Angeles Times article here. I notice one commenter (#22) doubts the story of Price’s brother’s murder is true. They don’t give up, do they?

A guest blogger at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, is posting a series on the authoritarian personality. (Thanks to moonbat for the tip.) Robinson believes authoritarians can be cured — good luck with that. But I mostly want to call attention to the traits of the authoritarian personality, which she lists in Part I. Authoritarian leaders tend to be (not the full list) —

Intimidating and bullying
Faintly hedonistic
Vengeful
Pitiless
Exploitative
Manipulative
Dishonest
Cheat to win
Highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)
Mean-spirited
Militant
Nationalistic

And authoritarian followers are usually (not the full list, either)–

Prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals, women, and followers of religions other than their own)
Mean-spirited
Narrow-minded
Intolerant
Bullying
Zealous
Dogmatic
Uncritical toward chosen authority
Hypocritical
Prone to panic easily
Highly self-righteous
Moralistic
Severely punitive
Little self-awareness

Clearly, Ms. Price stumbled into a nest of authoritarians. Ouch. But in her Los Angeles Times op ed she makes a valid point about the Freep that IMO also could apply to blogs —

The discussions left me profoundly sad. “You know,” a friend tried to reassure me, “these are just guys who sit in front of their computers at 3 a.m. in their underwear.”

But when these gun-obsessed guys in their underwear talk to like-minded guys, they build a community that reinforces a level of intolerance that is off the charts. After all, the Internet doesn’t create community. People create community — and how the Internet is used depends on the people who use it.

I’ve sometimes wondered if some Internet forums amount to positive feedback loops for personality disorders. In this case, Free Republic is a medium by which authoritarian personalities get together and feed each other’s authoritarian traits. You can say the same thing for Little Green Footballs and other blog communities. And never forget — anything you feed will grow. Eventually (I postulate), a Freep who was mildly authoritarian when he began freeping will become a flaming, snarling, foaming-at-the-mouth authoritarian; the sort of person compelled to destroy anyone with whom he disagrees, like Jenny Price.

Price also asks, “[D]o you really want these people on these websites … to have guns? … the paranoia and bone-chilling hatred that spew from such sites as packing.org and freerepublic.com make for an equally — and unusually — effective argument for a ban on handguns.” (Have you ever noticed that the people who are most single-mindedly zealous about their right to own firearms usually are the last people on the planet you’d want to own firearms?) But, as Michael Moore argued in the film “Bowling for Columbine,” Americans aren’t just violent with handguns. We are violent, period. We murder each other with all manner of objects — knives, clubs, whatever — at much higher rates than other first-world nations. Might this homicidal tendency be a by-product of authoritarian culture? A stretch, maybe, but think about it.

Henry Porter writes on the Guardian web site that right-wingers on the web are successfully silencing speech they don’t like. Porter cites a Chicago university that banned students asking questions about Israel and Palestine in class. The subject was verboten, Porter says. When a professor named Douglas Giles permitted a student to ask a question about Palestinian rights in his World Religions class, he was fired. (I found the same story at Chicago IndyMedia. Is it true? Is there something that Giles is not telling us? I don’t know. If anyone learns more about this, please post.) According to Porter (emphasis added) —

Giles’s sacking … is part of the movement to suppress criticism of Israel on the grounds that it is anti-semitic. A mild man, Giles seems astonished to find the battle for free speech in his own lecture theatre.

‘It may be sexy to get on a bus and go to DC and march against war,’ he said to me last week. ‘It is much less sexy to fight in your own university for the right of free speech. But that is where it begins. That is because they are taking away what you can talk about.’ He feels there is a pattern of intolerance in his sacking that has been encouraged by websites such as FrontPageMag.com and Campus Watch.

Joel Beinin of Stanford University is regularly attacked by both. Beinin is a Jew who speaks both Hebrew and Arabic. He worked in Israel and on an assembly line in the US, where he helped Arab workers understand their rights. Now, he holds seminars at Stanford in which all views are expressed. For this reason, no doubt, his photograph recently appeared on the front of a booklet entitled ‘Campus Support for Terrorism’.

It was published by David Horovitz, the founder of FrontPageMag.com who has both composed a bill of rights for universities, designed to take politics (for which read liberal influence and plurality) out of the curriculum and a list of the 100 most dangerous academics in America, which includes Noam Chomsky and many other distinguished thinkers and teachers.

The demented, bullying tone of the websites is another symptom of the descent of public discourse in America and, frankly, one can easily see the attractions of self-censorship on the question of Middle East and Israel. Read David Horovitz for longer than five minutes and you begin to hear Senator Joseph McCarthy accusing someone of un-American activities.

More evidence that authoritarians rule America — we are about the last industrialized democracy with the death penalty; in 2004, 97 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, Viet Nam (authoritarian regimes, notice) and the USA. And is not the Neocon world view — love us, or we’ll invade you — essentially authoritarianism writ large?

The compulsion to eliminate whatever one doesn’t like takes milder forms. A few days ago a rightie blogger realized, correctly, that a Reuters photograph showing bomb damage in Lebanon had been Photoshopped. Ever since then a number of rightie blogs, including some of the big ones like LGF and Hot Air, have been eagerly searching for more evidence of media malfeasance. And it may be they’ll find such evidence, since many such images are coming from stringers who earn a living by selling their work to news and stock photo agencies. But now every image that amounts to bad PR for Israel is being scrutinized with single-minded obsessiveness. And if the scrutinizers don’t see signs of Photoshopping, they’ll find clues the image was staged. As Glenn Greenwald wrote last week, reaction from the VRWC to the Reuters photos has been a little, um, over the top.

I’m sayin’ there’s something going on here that ought to be listed in the DSM-IV-TR somewhere.

Sara Robinson points out that authoritarians are hostile to the “cultural and political openness” that a functional democracy requires. “Everything in their souls drives them to dismantle the democratic impulse,” she says, “and bring people under the heel of hierarchical authority — which is why history has also shown us that the nation’s worst moments, past and future, are created by people with a strong right-wing authoritarian orientation.”

I’m not sure how history shows us what our worst moments are going to be in the future, but never mind — authoritarians are in control of our government more so than ever before — even more so than during the McCarthy era, IMO. And the Internet may be a factor, because (I postulate) it is exacerbating authoritarian tendencies in right-wingers who participate in online discussion.

This bears, um, watching.

No Surrender

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“We are at war with an ideology, and pounding it frontally just disperses it. It’s like trying to smash mercury with a hammer.” — Eugene Robinson, “The War Bush Isn’t Fighting”

I came across this post yesterday, which IMO exemplifies why righties are living in a pre-9/11 world. The blogger is trying to justify the deaths of children in wars against “enemies” — I notice the blogger doesn’t call ’em “terrorists.” In a nutshell, the blogger argues that because killing the enemy is of paramount importance, and because the enemy chooses to surround himself with children and other civilians, then “we” must harden our hearts to the killing of children. And this is, he says, for the children’s own good. My favorite part (the post is written as a conversation between the wise and virtuous blogger and a bleeding-heart, presumably liberal, woman):

“It must be,” I tell her sadly, “Here: That we pursue war without thought of the children. That we do not turn aside from the death of the innocent, but push on to the conclusion, through all fearful fire. If we do that, the children will lose their value as hostages, and as targets: if we love them, we must harden our hearts against their loss. Ours and theirs.”

Now, I believe that some military actions are necessary, and where there is military action people are going to get killed. There is no weapon that can discriminate between the flesh of enemies and that of innocents. But the blogger is making a huge mistake if he thinks the wholesale killing of “enemies” must trump all other considerations. And it’s this muddled and outmoded thinking that is costing us dearly in the Middle East now.

A few days ago I wrote about fourth generation warfare, a.k.a. 4GW, and why it differs from the “total war” waged in earlier conflicts. Very simply, in “total war” political considerations are put aside in favor of military considerations. The object is to hurt “the enemy” in any way you can so that the enemy — the nation you are at war with — surrenders. And then when the enemy surrenders there’s a cease fire and formal ceremonies and agreements signed, etc., and the nations that had been at war enter into a new and entirely different relationship. In “total war,” if the bombing of civilians hastens surrender, then bombing civilians is militarily acceptable.

However, in our more recent “asymmetric” wars — usually, these days, pitting the conventional military power of a nation against a stateless ideological faction — there will be no surrender. Because ain’t nobody gonna surrender. Surrender isn’t the point. The enemy faction will not surrender even if all their strongholds are overrun and their leaders killed. Instead the survivors will disperse and find new strongholds (possibly virtual ones) or break into scattered cells. If the Cause still has supporters, new leaders will emerge; new followers will be recruited. Eventually a new enemy will arise from the ashes of the old one. And the war will continue.

At the same time, the enemy’s objective is not to get us to surrender to them. They don’t want our surrender, except in a metaphorical sense. They don’t want to occupy our territory or run our government.

So if they’re not going to surrender to us, and it’s out of the question that we would surrender to them, what is the nature of this war? What would “victory ” look like? Why is the enemy fighting us? Why are we fighting them? And how does this relate to killing children? The answers to these questions must be clearly understood if we are going to adopt effective strategies and tactics. Unfortunately in Iraq and Lebanon they are not well understood at all; most especially, they are not well understood by the very people most interested in promoting military solutions to our foreign policy problems. Instead of clarity, from the hawks we get empty slogans and rationalizations.

Righties are so terrified of the ghost of Neville Chamberlain they seem to think that even trying to understand what the enemy wants amounts to “appeasement.” Thus the vacuous nonsense about “they hate us for our freedoms.” But understanding what the enemy wants isn’t just about negotiation or appeasement, but understanding who the enemy is. This is vital when the enemy is a stateless faction, because what they want is what defines them. It’s what sets them apart from other people who might live in same region and share the same ethnic and religious heritage, but who are not necessarily our enemies. If we don’t understand clearly who, precisely, we are fighting, how can we develop effective tactics and strategies? How can we efficiently direct our resources to strike the people we most need to strike?

Last night on Hardball I saw some rightie — I didn’t catch his name — claim it is absurd to argue that our presence in Iraq is making more enemies. We weren’t in Iraq when terrorists killed 283 U.S. Marines in Lebanon, he said. No, but we were in Lebanon, said Chris Matthews, perplexed. You know someone’s gone off the stupid scale when even Tweety notices. Later in the program a right-wing radio host — I didn’t catch her name, either — sounded the same note. It doesn’t matter whether we’re in Iraq or not. They all hate us, anyway, she said. Who’s “they”? Tweety asked. It was clear she meant all Middle Eastern Muslims, and the other guest, Amy Goodman, took her to task for it. But the rightie, in so many words, denied she had said that all Middle Eastern Muslims are terrorists, just that they all hate us and wish us dead. Brilliant.

As I wrote in the last post, Osama bin Laden’s beef with the U.S. began in 1990, when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the Gulf War. At that time Bin Laden was living in Saudi Arabia and working in his family’s construction business. Bin Laden was outraged by an infidel army within the nation that is the birthplace of the Prophet, and he also turned against the Saudi government for allowing this sacrilege. In 1991 the Saudis expelled him from Saudi Arabia. He moved to the Sudan, where he made connections with other exiled Muslim radicals. The following year he claimed responsibility for attempting to bomb U.S. soldiers in Yemen. This was followed by successful strikes on the U.S. military in Somalia.

I bring this up to emphasize that al Qaeda started out as a radical fringe group, and by 2001 it was still a radical fringe group, albeit a well-financed one, with only a few thousand followers. It’s true that other Muslims disliked Americans; the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, which influenced bin Laden, comes to mind. But it is simply not true that the entire Muslim population of the Middle East was seething with rage against America and thought exactly as bin Laden thought. Yet somehow, in the name of striking out against the perpetrators of September 11, we’ve got the whole Middle East in an uproar. And a whole lot of people who weren’t all that worked up about us before would like to do us harm now.

Some righties still talk about fighting “terrorists” in Iraq, as if everyone in the conflict is either “coalition” (us) or “terrorist” (them). But it isn’t that simple. I understand that fewer than 10 percent of the fighters in Iraq are with al Qaeda or an affiliate. The rest are with a number of other warring factions that are fighting each other; some of these factions are also fighting us, and some are not. Yet. We invaded to liberate the oppressed Shi’ia majority from the regime of a ruthless Sunni Baathist dictator. Today the Shi’ite militias, armed by Iran and sometimes operating out of the “unity” government President Bush is so proud of, are slaughtering Sunnis wholesale. U.S. troops are sometimes put in the position of rescuing former Baathists — and former Saddam supporters — from the Shiias that we liberated. Note that neither the Baathists nor the Iraqi Shi’ias had a bleeping thing to do with al Qaeda or were in a position to harm America before we invaded Iraq.

Yet we are fighting “them” there so we don’t have to fight “them” here. Who are “they,” exactly?

And what about other terrorist organizations in the Middle East, like Hezbollah? I urge you to read this article by Lisa Beyer that appeared in the August 7 issue of Time. Highlights:

Bush two weeks ago likened Hizballah militants to the terrorists who last summer bombed London subways. That implies that Hizballah has the same mind-set and agenda as the global jihadis of al-Qaeda and its imitator groups, but they are not the same. Hizballah’s military mission is principally to defend Lebanon from Israeli intrusion and secondarily to destroy the Jewish state. As an Islamist group under Iran’s sway, Hizballah would like to see Islamic rule in Lebanon. The global jihadis think much bigger. They are Salafists, radicals who seek to revive the original and, to their minds, pure practice of Islam and establish a caliphate from Spain to Iraq, in all the lands where Islam has ever ruled. The Salafists are Sunni, and Hizballah is Shi’ite, which means their hatred for each other is apt to rival their hatred for the U.S. Al-Qaeda’s late leader in Iraq, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, used to say Shi’ites were worse than Americans and launched a brutal war on them in Iraq.

Of course, Sunnis and Shi’ites do sometimes cooperate. Ali Mohammed, a former Green Beret who pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaeda agent, testified in 2000 that he had provided security for a meeting in Sudan between Hizballah security chief Imad Mughniyah and Osama bin Laden and that Hizballah had provided al-Qaeda with explosives training. If there was cooperation, it seems to have been short-lived; the two groups certainly aren’t allies. Lebanese police in April arrested nine men that Hizballah officials claim were al-Qaeda agents plotting to assassinate their leader. In a recently published interview with the Washington Post’s Robin Wright, Nasrallah slammed al-Qaeda. “What do the people who worked in those two [World Trade Center] towers … have to do with war that is taking place in the Middle East?” he asked. Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri last week released a videotape about the fighting in Lebanon, but at least in the excerpts released by al-Jazeera, he conspicuously failed to encourage Hizballah in its fight against Israel or to so much as mention the group. Instead, al-Zawahiri spoke of the jihad–that is, al-Qaeda’s jihad–being the one that would liberate Palestine.

The Bushies and Neocons are doing a great job of establishing the United States as the common foe of all Muslims, unfortunately. Where once only the most extreme, radical fringe of Islam wanted to take jihad to American soil, someday mainstream Muslims may decide they’ve had quite enough of us and unite against us. As I wrote yesterday, one of Osama bin Laden’s long-term goals was to draw a western power into attacking and occupying a Muslim nation. This would incite Muslims from many sects and nations to unify in jihad against the common foe (guess who?). It is unlikely such a jihad would unite under bin Laden’s leadership, but in every other way the Bush Administration has exceeded bin Laden’s fondest hopes.

Bush Administration has a one-size-fits-all policy for combating all Muslim militants and terrorists, as if they all came out of the same box. This is stupid. Smart would be to take differences and distinctions into account when crafting policy; policies for a group with purely local or regional interests should be different from policies that deal with al Qaeda or other global terrorist organizations. Most important, our policies should drive wedges between groups, not inspire diverse groups — some of which have been antagonists for centuries — to unite against us. The reverse of Julius Caesar’s famous military axiom — divide, and conquer — is unify, and lose.

By remaining ignorant of the historical, social, cultural, and political realities of the Middle East; by our ham-handed and disastrous “occupation” of Iraq; by knee-jerk support of Israel, right or wrong; we are fanning the flames of jihad, not putting them out. Today we might be sowing the seeds of many wars yet to come.

Christopher Dickey:

Most of the terrorist attacks since 9/11 were carried out by people who were or would be suicide bombers, and their numbers seem to be growing in number every day. Is this merely some contagious madness? When Al Qaeda planners Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Youssef plotted attacks on 11 American planes flying from Asia in 1995, their idea was to leave bombs on board hidden in life jackets after stopovers. The scanty information released thus far about the British plot suggests that teams of people, fully aware that they would die, were going to take components for the bombs on board separately, then assemble them to kill themselves and everybody traveling with them.

There is no excuse for those who would carry out such atrocities, but there are reasons that keep pushing recruits to take up the suicidal cause of attacking the United States. To blame “Islamic fascism” that “wants to destroy those of us who love freedom” dodges responsibility for making those reasons more abundant, and making them worse, over the last five years. What’s at work in the heads of those who would kill themselves to slaughter Americans is less Al Qaeda’s ideology, such as it is, than a pervasive sense that Muslims are under attack: their lands occupied; their men, women and children victimized around the world. The Iraqi slaughterhouse, besieged Gaza, wasted Lebanon are all examples in the minds of those who convince themselves that suicidal terror is the only way to fight back. While partly blaming Israel, their frantic logic finds easier targets among the people who elected the invaders of Iraq, the backers of Israel, George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The American failure to limit these scenes of carnage in the Muslim world, or even to understand them, has combined with shortsighted military policies to create a kind of breeder reactor for explosive terrorism. Today we are looking at a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, even as Osama bin Laden and his ideologue Ayman Zawahiri remain at large. Iraq is in the midst of an intensifying civil war that will only grow worse after today’s ghastly bombing in Najaf, which killed at least 34 people. Lebanon has become a cause that can cement ties among radical Sunnis and Shias against the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Iran is cooking up nukes and the inflammatory issue of Palestine is farther than ever from resolution.

To those who say Bush’s policies must be working, because Muslim radicals haven’t achieved a terrorist attack in America in the past five years — remember, eight years separated the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and September 11, 2001. By rightie logic, Bill Clinton must’ve really been tough on terrorism.

Back to the dead children. As I said above, if you are trying to force the surrender of an enemy government, then the bombing of civilians, including childen, might be an acceptable tactic. But if your enemy is a cause, and not a country, the last thing you want to is gain them the world’s sympathy. In a very real and tangible sense, we are fighting for the moral high ground in the world’s eyes. Ignoring that reality not only strengthens our enemies and weakens us; it also could have long-term repercussions in our relations with the other nations on the planet for years to come.

Over the past several days the righties have complained that Hezbollah and Israel are expected to play by different rules, and it ain’t fair. But William Lind argues that’s how 4GW is; get used to it.

The fact is, both sides don’t get to operate by the same rules in 4GW. While the very strength of the intervening power means it must be careful how it applies its strength, that is much less true of the weaker forces opposing it. This is an aspect of what Martin van Creveld calls the power of weakness. Viewed from the moral level, a weak force can get away with tactics that damn its vastly stronger enemy. Its weakness itself tends to justify whatever it does.

Suicide bombing is itself a tactic of the weak (which does not mean it is ineffective.). The United States bombs from aircraft, where the pilot operates in complete safety against 4GW opponents, with rare exceptions. At the moral level, that safety works against us, not for us. In contrast, the fact that 4GW fighters often have to give their lives to place their bombs works for them. Their combination of physical weakness and apparent heroism leads civilians from their own culture to excuse them much, including “collateral damage” they would never excuse if the bomb came from an American F-18.

Does this mean that al Qaeda and its many clones can ignore the deaths and injuries they cause among fellow Islamics? No. They have to be careful not to go too far, as al Qaeda clearly did in Jordan. But they can still get away with a great deal we could not get away with. The same rules do not apply to all, and much stricter, more disadvantageous rules apply to us than to them. Is that fair? Of course not. But who ever said there was anything fair about war?

It’s one thing to hunt down and and imprison terrorists who threaten to harm the U.S. But “When the United States drops bombs from aircraft or otherwise dumps firepower on Iraqi cities, towns and farms, it alienates the population further,” Lind says, and causes more Iraqis to join the insurgency — the insurgency that didn’t exist before we invaded Iraq and which was no threat to the United States. And when photos of dead Lebanese children are all over the world’s newspaper, but Israeli children remain unharmed, Israel becomes the Bad Guy in the eyes of the world. Whether this is fair or not is beside the point; it is what it is.

Here’s something I wish the hawks would think about: What does “victory” look like when your enemy is not a government with the authority to surrender? What tactics do you adopt when your military offensive against the enemy wins it sympathy and recruits? You’ll never kill all of the enemy, and even if you did, public outrage would likely cause another group to organize and take its place. Can there even be a “victory” in any meaningful sense of the word against such an enemy? Or is a cessation of hostilies the best we can hope for (in which case, escalating war would seem to be counterproductive)? Righties? Anybody?

See also: “Know Your Enemy: Who Are We Fighting In Iraq?”

Also also: What Wes Clark says.

Fighting Smart, Fighting Stupid

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[T]he deeper and more discouraging prospect—that the United States is doomed to spend decades cowering defensively—need not come true. How can the United States regain the initiative against terrorists, as opposed to living in a permanent crouch? By recognizing the point that I heard from so many military strategists: that terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage but not destroy us. Their real destructive power, again, lies in what they can provoke us to do. While the United States can never completely control what violent groups intend and sometimes achieve, it can determine its own response. That we have this power should come as good and important news, because it switches the strategic advantage to our side. — James Fallows, “Declaring Victory,” The Atlantic, September 2006

Chief among the reactions Osama bin Laden hoped to provoke was the invasion and occupation of a Muslim country. Fallows continues,

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Richard Clarke wrote in his book Against All Enemies that something like the Iraq War was bin Laden’s plan all along. At least a decade before 9/11, according to Clarke, Osama was hanging out in the Sudan dreaming up an Iraq scenario–

The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the success of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radical Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire. [p. 136]

Time and time again, the Bush Administration’s fear and hubris and ignorance become puppet strings in jihadists’ hands. We might as well invite al Qaeda into the Pentagon and let them plan our security policies.

Rightie blogger Allahpundit wrote yesterday,

There are bits from Reid and Kerry too, but as usual it’s Teddy who provides the pull-quote for the day’s events:

    “Five years after 9-11, it is clear that our misguided policies are making America more hated in the world and making the war on terrorism harder to win,” Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said.

We’ve reached the point where either you see instantly what’s wrong with that statement or you don’t, and if you don’t, nothing I’m going to say will change your mind. So I won’t try; maybe Ace or Goldstein will muster the energy later.

Of course Allahpundit can’t explain “what’s wrong” with Senator Kennedy’s statement, because coherently explaining something in words requires logic and dispassion. If one’s motivations are, in fact, a sludge of unprocessed fear and bigotry slopping around one’s psyche like raw sewage, then rendering those motivations into clear, dispassionate, and logical rhetoric is, um, futile. So righties do not explain; they package. We are at war with enemies who hate our freedoms. We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Victory. Resolve. We can’t cut and run.

Then Allahpundit embraces one of the Right’s favorite conceits, which is that we lefties are opposed to Bush’s policies because we don’t understand the threat posed by terrorism. The fact that we oppose Bush policies because most of them amount to fighting a fire by pouring kerosene on it flies right over their terrorized little heads. But in a “nutroots terror-reaction round-up” he finds no prominent leftie bloggers to feed his fantasies; instead, he sites a commenter at Democratic Underground, a diarist at Daily Kos, and “some moron looking for attention at Goldstein’s site.” We’ve seen this before, too. They’re desperately trying to reassure themselves that we’re the crazy ones, and they’ll take any proof they can get.

The Bush Administration’s habit of dangling terrorism alerts to distract us and manipulate public opinion is too well established to ignore. This timeline, which unfortunately stops in January 2005, provides some good examples. But of course, just because some child cries “wolf” as a prank doesn’t mean there are no wolves. It may be only a matter of time before a plot like the one stopped in London actually succeeds. Lord knows plenty of jihadists would love to hurt us on our own soil, and more such jihadists are being created every day by George Bush’s misbegotten policies.

The next argument is, of course, that the U.S. wasn’t in Iraq on September 11. No, but we were in Saudi Arabia. It’s well known that bin Laden’s grudge against the U.S. dates from August 1990, when the Saudi government allowed U.S. troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. In this case I don’t blame America, because those troops were there at the behest of the Saudi government. Twisted people like Osama bin Laden can be set off by just about anything, and it’s probably not possible to devise a foreign policy that won’t offend some whackjob’s inflammable sensibilities.

On the other hand, when our policies utterly ignore the sensibilities of a majority of Muslims; when our policies are creating enemies faster than we can shoot them; when our policies help the war effort of our enemies but weaken us; there’s a problem. And I’ve yet to see evidence that anti-American terrorists give a hoohaw about our freedoms, one way or another.

I’ve written myriad blog posts explaining why the war in Iraq is hindering, not helping, our antiterrorism efforts. I’m not going to repeat all those arguments now; just click on “Iraq War” after “Filed under” at the top of this post, and start reading. The James Fallows article linked at the top of this page also explains why our war in Iraq is hurting us. If you can access the article (you may not be able to if you aren’t a subscriber), click here and scroll down to “What Has Gone Right for al-Qaeda,” and start reading. Because I believe there is a subscription firewall, I’ve added an excerpt to the end of this post.

It seems obvious to me that, after September 11, our focus should have been on destroying al Qaeda and increasing basic security at home. The “destroying al Qaeda” part certainly included military action (against al Qaeda and groups with a similar agenda, not action diffused over every terrorist cell on the planet whether it is likely to strike the U.S. or not), but it also should have included leading democratic nations in a cooperative global intelligence-and-police effort and addressing those “root causes,” which are still imperfectly understood, in order to deprive terrorists of popular support in the Muslim world.

The “basic security at home” part is a mess; the “security” policies exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security are described in Fallows’s article as “haphazard, wasteful, and sometimes self-defeating.” That other nations are aiding our intelligence and police efforts is mostly because it’s in their own self-interest to do so; they are are terrorism targets, too. We’ve pissed off enough people that I wonder how much they’d help us otherwise. But as for depriving terrorists of popular support, we’ve done just the opposite.

Righties will continue to lie to themselves and each other that we lefties oppose Bush’s policies because lefties don’t want to fight terrorism, and there’s not much point in trying to reason with them. Our efforts, IMO, must be to reach out to those Americans (and voters) whose brains are not pickled in extremist rightwing ideology and explain to them that the Bush White House is aiding terrorism, and foreign policy power must be taken away from the Bushies as quickly as possible.

Since Bush’s “approval” numbers are hovering at around 40 percent these days, that should leave us with plenty of people who are reachable. Of course, an important part of this effort is to keep watch on media and speak up when reporters and “pundits” repeat rightie talking points as gospel, which is most of the time. It’s an uphill fight. But we’ve got to fight as if our lives depend on it, because they probably do.

Here’s the James Fallows slice I promised:

In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

“You only have to look at the Iraq War to see how much damage you can do to yourself by your response,” Kilcullen told me. He is another of those who supported the war and consider it important to fight toward some kind of victory, but who recognize the ways in which this conflict has helped al-Qaeda. So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another. …

… Because the general point is familiar, I’ll let one more anecdote about the consequences of invading Iraq stand for many that I heard. When Americans think of satellite surveillance and the National Security Agency, they are likely to imagine something out of the TV show 24: a limitless set of eyes in the sky that can watch everything, all the time. In fact, even today’s amply funded NSA can watch only a limited number of sites. “Our overhead imagery is dedicated to force protection in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I was told by a former intelligence official who would not let me use his name. He meant that the satellites are tied up following U.S. troops on patrol and in firefights to let them know who might be waiting in ambush. “There are still ammo dumps in Iraq that are open to insurgents,” he said, “but we lack the imagery to cover them—let alone what people might be dreaming up in Thailand or Bangladesh.” Because so many spy satellites are trained on the countries we have invaded, they tell us less than they used to about the rest of the world.

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing America’s ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East. Bin Laden imagined this would happen largely through attacks on America’s oil supply. This is still a goal. For instance, a 2004 fatwa from the imprisoned head of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia declared that targeting oil pipelines and refineries was a legitimate form of economic jihad—and that economic jihad “is one of the most powerful ways in which we can take revenge on the infidels during this present stage.” The fatwa went on to offer an analysis many economists would be proud of, laying out all the steps that would lead from a less-secure oil supply to a less-productive American economy and ultimately to a run on the dollar. (It also emphasized that oil wells themselves should be attacked only as a last resort, because news coverage of the smoke and fires would hurt al-Qaeda’s image.)

Higher-priced oil has hurt America, but what has hurt more is the economic reaction bin Laden didn’t fully foresee. This is the systematic drag on public and private resources created by the undifferentiated need to be “secure.”

The effect is most obvious on the public level. “The economy as a whole took six months or so to recover from the effects of 9/11,” Richard Clarke told me. “The federal budget never recovered. The federal budget is in a permanent mess, to a large degree because of 9/11.” At the start of 2001, the federal budget was $125 billion in surplus. Now it is $300 billion in deficit.

A total of five people died from anthrax spores sent through the mail shortly after 9/11. In Devils and Duct Tape, his forthcoming book, John Mueller points out that the U.S. Postal Service will eventually spend about $5 billion on protective screening equipment and other measures in response to the anthrax threat, or about $1 billion per fatality. Each new security guard, each extra checkpoint or biometric measure, is both a direct cost and an indirect drag on economic flexibility.

If bin Laden hadn’t fully anticipated this effect, he certainly recognized it after it occurred. In his statement just before the 2004 election, he quoted the finding of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (!) to the effect that the total cost, direct and indirect, to America of the 9/11 attacks was at least $500 billion. Bin Laden gleefully pointed out that the attacks had cost al-Qaeda about $500,000, for a million-to-one payoff ratio. America’s deficit spending for Iraq and homeland security was, he said, “evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan, with Allah’s permission.”

And they say some guys in caves in Afghanistan couldn’t have pulled off 9/11. Hah. Bottom line, they’ve been fighting us smart, and we’ve been fighting them stupid.

Update: Finally a serious anti-terror policy.

Countercultural

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[Update: If you’re here ’cause Susie sent you, you probably want this link.]

A follow up on this morning’s history post —Eric Alterman writes,

The punditocracy argument about 1972, while dead wrong about McGovern himself, who was a brave, patriotic World War II hero form the South Dakota, has some validity, given whom he was perceived by voters to represent. The first serious historical research I ever did was when I was researching my honors thesis as an undergraduate. I wanted to study the origins of neoconservatism, the Six Day War, and Vietnam—this was back in 1981—and my adviser, Walter LaFeber—insisted that I learn a little context first by examining the attitudes of the entire country to the war and the antiwar movement. I poured over the polling data and found to my surprise, that in many ways, the antiwar movement was counterproductive. Many Americans didn’t like the war but they really hated the counterculture. If supporting Nixon was a way to get back at the hippies and protesters and rioters, they were willing to do it, even if it meant extending a war they thought to be already lost.

This is true, and I’ve said the same thing many times. And every time I say this somebody tells me I’m crazy. “The Vietnam War ended, didn’t it? That must mean the antiwar movement was effective.” Hardly. History always looks simpler when you view it from a distance, but at the time it’s generally complicated and messy.

Now look at today. In the first place, as I keep saying, remember this is Connecticut. It’s blue, antiwar state. It’s not the whole damn country. But second, look at the context for God’s sake. There’s no antiwar movement to speak of, no riots, no marches, no one is burning their draft cards, preaching free love, wiping themselves with the flag, bussing your kids to ghetto schools or vice-versa, taking away your jobs, raising your taxes to give the money to rioting race-baiting Black Panthers, etc.

Exactly. Instead you’ve got mostly middle-class citizens in khakis who give a damn about America and think the ship of state is being steered the wrong way — a view shared by a whopping majority of Americans.

The only Abbie Hoffman/Jerry Rubin types are on the right and when they’re not hosting Fox News programs, they are being called “brilliant” by Chris Matthews on MSNBC. So the upshot we are left with is that Connecticut Democrats picked a candidate whose positions are consistent with the majority and rejected one whose are not. And yet that, we are told is somehow the “elitist” position that will destroy the Democrats with a public that largely agrees with them. In other words, the analogy fails completely upon the slightest scrutiny.

Exactly.

Also, the Anonymous Liberal has a history post up at Unclaimed Territory. And thanks to commenter dday for recommending this article on McGovern in The American Conservative magazine, believe it or not. It’s worth a look.