A Must Read

[Dubya]

Charles Krauthammer is a national treasure. Whether you agree with his politics or not, you have to agree that the man speaks with impeccable clarity and from an extensive background in foreign relations. Once in a while he gives a seminal speech, and the February 10 Speech to the American Enterprise Institute defines the term. I have never heard anyone lay out so clearly, in terms anyone can understand, what the real differences are between foreign policy thinkers in the USA today.

If you plan to vote in the 2004 elections, this piece is a must read. I do not say that because Krauthammer is a conservative and because I hope he will persuade you to his point of view. I say it because he clarifies the issues as no one else has done. He argues for a point of view, but he also understands and addresses the other sides of the issue. I say "sides" advisedly, because foreign policy is a multifaceted discipline.

Enjoy the speech. It is QUITE looooong. Try to finish it...it is worth it. I look forward to the comments.

W

 

[Dubya]

The speech

An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World
By Charles Krauthammer
Posted: Thursday, February 12, 2004

SPEECHES
2004 Irving Kristol Lecture
AEI Annual Dinner (Washington)
Publication Date: February 10, 2004

A Unipolar World

Americans have healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a sense of thrift: Who needs it? We’re protected by two great oceans. We have this continent practically to ourselves. And we share it with just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent upon moving in with us.

It took three giants of the twentieth century to drag us into its great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War. And then it ended with one of the great anticlimaxes in history. Without a shot fired, without a revolution, without so much as a press release, the Soviet Union simply gave up and disappeared.

It was the end of everything--the end of communism, of socialism, of the Cold War, of the European wars. But the end of everything was also a beginning. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly new--a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe.

This is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. It is so new, so strange, that we have no idea how to deal with it. Our first reaction--the 1990s--was utter confusion. The next reaction was awe. When Paul Kennedy, who had once popularized the idea of American decline, saw what America did in the Afghan war--a display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar power at a distance of 8,000 miles--he not only recanted, he stood in wonder: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power;” he wrote, “nothing. . . . No other nation comes close. . . . Charlemagne’s empire was merely western European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”

Even Rome is no model for what America is today. First, because we do not have the imperial culture of Rome. We are an Athenian republic, even more republican and infinitely more democratic than Athens. And this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world--acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness greater even than Britain’s. And it was not just absent-mindedness; it was sheer inadvertence. We got here because of Europe’s suicide in the world wars of the twentieth century, and then the death of its Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective organism, it simply expired in its sleep. Leaving us with global dominion.

Second, we are unlike Rome, unlike Britain and France and Spain and the other classical empires of modern times, in that we do not hunger for territory. The use of the word “empire” in the American context is ridiculous. It is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone’s soil is to demand an exit strategy. I can assure you that when the Romans went into Gaul and the British into India, they were not looking for exit strategies. They were looking for entry strategies.

In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence: “I think you are another of these desert-loving English. . . . The English have a great hunger for desolate places.” Indeed, for five centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans and new continents.

Americans do not. We like it here. We like our McDonald's. We like our football. We like our rock-and-roll. We’ve got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We’ve got Silicon Valley and South Beach. We’ve got everything. And if that’s not enough, we’ve got Vegas--which is a facsimile of everything. What could we possibly need anywhere else? We don’t like exotic climates. We don’t like exotic languages--lots of declensions and moods. We don’t even know what a mood is. We like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs, and if we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court. We don’t send the Marines for takeout.

That’s because we are not an imperial power. We are a commercial republic. We don’t take food; we trade for it. Which makes us something unique in history, an anomaly, a hybrid: a commercial republic with overwhelming global power. A commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the international system. The eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia; Arab and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.

That is who we are. That is where we are.

Now the question is: What do we do? What is a unipolar power to do?

Isolationism

The oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and retreat. This is known as isolationism. Of all the foreign policy schools in America, it has the oldest pedigree, not surprising in the only great power in history to be isolated by two vast oceans.

Isolationism originally sprang from a view of America as spiritually superior to the Old World. We were too good to be corrupted by its low intrigues, entangled by its cynical alliances.

Today, however, isolationism is an ideology of fear. Fear of trade. Fear of immigrants. Fear of the Other. Isolationists want to cut off trade and immigration, and withdraw from our military and strategic commitments around the world. Even isolationists, of course, did not oppose the war in Afghanistan, because it was so obviously an act of self-defense--only a fool or a knave or a Susan Sontag could oppose that. But anything beyond that, isolationists oppose. They are for a radical retrenchment of American power--for pulling up the drawbridge to Fortress America.

Isolationism is an important school of thought historically, but not today. Not just because of its brutal intellectual reductionism, but because it is so obviously inappropriate to the world of today--a world of export-driven economies, of massive population flows, and of 9/11, the definitive demonstration that the combination of modern technology and transnational primitivism has erased the barrier between “over there” and over here.

Classical isolationism is not just intellectually obsolete; it is politically bankrupt as well. Four years ago, its most public advocate, Pat Buchanan, ran for president of the United States, and carried Palm Beach. By accident.

Classic isolationism is moribund and marginalized. Who then rules America?

Continued..........................

 

[Dubya]

Continued..........................

Liberal Internationalism

In the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite. It has a peculiar history. It traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson’s utopianism, Harry Truman’s anticommunism, and John Kennedy’s militant universalism. But after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.

Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman’s and Kennedy’s roles in containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used “cold warrior” as an epithet. In the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. Today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan’s “illegal war in Central America”--and oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.

That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No. The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly--two to one in the House, more than four to one in the Senate.

And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just two years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist. It involved us four times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.

How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.

And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.

The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. The Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bioweapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, antiballistic missiles, etc.

Why? No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would “provide us with a valuable tool”--the “moral suasion of the entire international community.”

Moral suasion? Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? Or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? It was the suasion of the bayonet. It was the ignominious fall of Saddam--and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. The whole point of this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons. Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.

Moral suasion is a farce. Why then this obsession with conventions, protocols, legalisms? Their obvious net effect is to temper American power. Who, after all, was really going to be most constrained by these treaties? The ABM amendments were aimed squarely at American advances and strategic defenses, not at Russia, which lags hopelessly behind. The Kyoto Protocol exempted India and China. The nuclear test ban would have seriously degraded the American nuclear arsenal. And the land mine treaty (which the Clinton administration spent months negotiating but, in the end, met so much Pentagon resistance that even Clinton could not initial it) would have had a devastating impact on U.S. conventional forces, particularly at the DMZ in Korea.

But that, you see, is the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will--and interests--of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the planet--ours.

Today, multilateralism remains the overriding theme of liberal internationalism. When in power in the 1990s, multilateralism expressed itself as a mania for treaties. When out of power in this decade, multilateralism manifests itself in the slavish pursuit of “international legitimacy”--and opposition to any American action undertaken without universal foreign blessing.

Which is why the Democratic critique of the war in Iraq is so peculiarly one of process and not of policy. The problem was that we did not have the permission of the UN; we did not have a large enough coalition; we did not have a second Security Council resolution. Kofi Annan was unhappy and the French were cross.

The Democratic presidential candidates all say that we should have internationalized the conflict, brought in the UN, enlisted the allies. Why? Two reasons: assistance and legitimacy. First, they say, we could have used these other countries to help us in the reconstruction.

This is rich. Everyone would like to have more help in reconstruction. It would be lovely to have the Germans and the French helping reconstruct Baghdad. But the question is moot, and the argument is cynical: France and Germany made absolutely clear that they would never support the overthrow of Saddam. So, accommodating them was not a way to get them into the reconstruction, it was a way to ensure that there would never be any reconstruction, because Saddam would still be in power.

Of course it would be nice if we had more allies rather than fewer. It would also be nice to be able to fly. But when some nations are not with you on your enterprise, including them in your coalition is not a way to broaden it; it’s a way to abolish it.

At which point, liberal internationalists switch gears and appeal to legitimacy--on the grounds that multilateral action has a higher moral standing. I have always found this line of argument incomprehensible. By what possible moral calculus does an American intervention to liberate 25 million people forfeit moral legitimacy because it lacks the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen Square or the cynics of the Quai d’Orsay?

Which is why it is hard to take these arguments at face value. Look: We know why liberal internationalists demanded UN sanction for the war in Iraq. It was a way to stop the war. It was the Gulliver effect. Call a committee meeting of countries with hostile or contrary interests--i.e., the Security Council--and you have guaranteed yourself another twelve years of inaction.

Historically, multilateralism is a way for weak countries to multiply their power by attaching themselves to stronger ones. But multilateralism imposed on Great Powers, and particularly on a unipolar power, is intended to restrain that power. Which is precisely why France is an ardent multilateralist. But why should America be?

Why, in the end, does liberal internationalism want to tie down Gulliver, to blunt the pursuit of American national interests by making them subordinate to a myriad of other interests?

In the immediate post-Vietnam era, this aversion to national interest might have been attributed to self-doubt and self-loathing. I don’t know. What I do know is that today it is a mistake to see liberal foreign policy as deriving from anti-Americanism or lack of patriotism or a late efflorescence of 1960s radicalism.

On the contrary. The liberal aversion to national interest stems from an idealism, a larger vision of country, a vision of some ambition and nobility--the ideal of a true international community. And that is: To transform the international system from the Hobbesian universe into a Lockean universe. To turn the state of nature into a norm-driven community. To turn the law of the jungle into the rule of law--of treaties and contracts and UN resolutions. In short, to remake the international system in the image of domestic civil society.

They dream of a new world, a world described in 1943 by Cordell Hull, FDR’s secretary of state--a world in which “there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements by which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their interests.”

Continued...................................

 

[Dubya]

Continued.........

And to create such a true international community, you have to temper, transcend, and, in the end, abolish the very idea of state power and national interest. Hence the antipathy to American hegemony and American power. If you are going to break the international arena to the mold of domestic society, you have to domesticate its single most powerful actor. You have to abolish American dominance, not only as an affront to fairness, but also as the greatest obstacle on the whole planet to a democratized international system where all live under self-governing international institutions and self-enforcing international norms.

Realism

This vision is all very nice. All very noble. And all very crazy. Which brings us to the third great foreign policy school: realism.

The realist looks at this great liberal project and sees a hopeless illusion. Because turning the Hobbesian world that has existed since long before the Peloponnesian Wars into a Lockean world, turning a jungle into a suburban subdivision, requires a revolution in human nature. Not just an erector set of new institutions, but a revolution in human nature. And realists do not believe in revolutions in human nature, much less stake their future, and the future of their nation, on them.

Realism recognizes the fundamental fallacy in the whole idea of the international system being modeled on domestic society.

First, what holds domestic society together is a supreme central authority wielding a monopoly of power and enforcing norms. In the international arena there is no such thing. Domestic society may look like a place of self-regulating norms, but if somebody breaks into your house, you call 911, and the police arrive with guns drawn. That’s not exactly self-enforcement. That’s law enforcement.

Second, domestic society rests on the shared goodwill, civility and common values of its individual members. What values are shared by, say, Britain, Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe--all nominal members of this fiction we call the “international community”?

Of course, you can have smaller communities of shared interests--NAFTA, ANZUS, or the European Union. But the European conceit that relations with all nations--regardless of ideology, regardless of culture, regardless even of open hostility--should be transacted on the EU model of suasion and norms and negotiations and solemn contractual agreements is an illusion. A fisheries treaty with Canada is something real. An Agreed Framework on plutonium processing with the likes of North Korea is not worth the paper it is written on.

The realist believes the definition of peace Ambrose Bierce offered in The Devil’s Dictionary: “Peace: noun, in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”

Hence the realist axiom: The “international community” is a fiction. It is not a community, it is a cacophony--of straining ambitions, disparate values and contending power.

What does hold the international system together? What keeps it from degenerating into total anarchy? Not the phony security of treaties, not the best of goodwill among the nicer nations. In the unipolar world we inhabit, what stability we do enjoy today is owed to the overwhelming power and deterrent threat of the United States.

If someone invades your house, you call the cops. Who do you call if someone invades your country? You dial Washington. In the unipolar world, the closest thing to a centralized authority, to an enforcer of norms, is America--American power. And ironically, American power is precisely what liberal internationalism wants to constrain and tie down and subsume in pursuit of some brave new Lockean world.

Realists do not live just in America. I found one in Finland. During the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty, one of the rare holdouts, interestingly enough, was Finland. The Finnish prime minister stoutly opposed the land mine ban. And for that he was scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors. To which he responded tartly that this was a “very convenient” pose for the “other Nordic countries”--after all, Finland is their land mine.

Finland is the land mine between Russia and Scandinavia. America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.

Where would South Korea be without America and its land mines along the DMZ? Where would Europe--with its cozy arrogant community--had America not saved it from the Soviet colossus? Where would the Middle East be had American power not stopped Saddam in 1991?

The land mine that protects civilization from barbarism is not parchment but power, and in a unipolar world, American power--wielded, if necessary, unilaterally. If necessary, preemptively,

Now, those uneasy with American power have made these two means of wielding it--preemption and unilateralism--the focus of unrelenting criticism. The doctrine of preemption, in particular, has been widely attacked for violating international norms.

What international norm? The one under which Israel was universally condemned--even the Reagan administration joined the condemnation at the Security Council--for preemptively destroying Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981? Does anyone today doubt that it was the right thing to do, both strategically and morally?

In a world of terrorists, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction, the option of preemption is especially necessary. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, with a stable nonsuicidal adversary, deterrence could work. Deterrence does not work against people who ache for heaven. It does not work against undeterrables. And it does not work against undetectables: nonsuicidal enemy regimes that might attack through clandestine means--a suitcase nuke or anonymously delivered anthrax. Against both undeterrables and undetectables, preemption is the only possible strategy.

Moreover, the doctrine of preemption against openly hostile states pursuing weapons of mass destruction is an improvement on classical deterrence. Traditionally, we deterred the use of WMDs by the threat of retaliation after we’d been attacked--and that’s too late; the point of preemption is to deter the very acquisition of WMDs in the first place.

Whether or not Iraq had large stockpiles of WMDs, the very fact that the United States overthrew a hostile regime that repeatedly refused to come clean on its weapons has had precisely this deterrent effect. We are safer today not just because Saddam is gone, but because Libya and any others contemplating trafficking with WMDs, have--for the first time--seen that it carries a cost, a very high cost.

Yes, of course, imperfect intelligence makes preemption problematic. But that is not an objection on principle, it is an objection in practice. Indeed, the objection concedes the principle. We need good intelligence. But we remain defenseless if we abjure the option of preemption.

The other great objection to the way American unipolar power has been wielded is its unilateralism. I would dispute how unilateralist we have in fact been. Constructing ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” hardly qualifies as unilateralism just because they do not have a secretariat in Brussels or on the East River.

Moreover, unilateralism is often the very road to multilateralism. As we learned from the Gulf War, it is the leadership of the United States--indeed, its willingness to act unilaterally if necessary--that galvanized the Gulf War coalition into existence. Without the president of the United States declaring “This will not stand” about the invasion of Kuwait--and making it clear that America would go it alone if it had to--there never would have been the great wall-to-wall coalition that is now so retroactively applauded and held up as a model of multilateralism.

Of course one acts in concert with others if possible. It is nice when others join us in the breach. No one seeks to be unilateral. Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be held hostage to the will of others.

Of course you build coalitions when possible. In 2003, we garnered a coalition of the willing for Iraq that included substantial allies like Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy and much of Eastern Europe. France and Germany made clear from the beginning that they would never join in the overthrow of Saddam. Therefore the choice was not a wide coalition versus a narrow one, but a narrow coalition versus none. There were serious arguments against war in Iraq--but the fact France did not approve was not one of them.

Irving Kristol once explained that he preferred the Organization of American States to the United Nations because in the OAS we can be voted down in only three languages, thereby saving translators’ fees. Realists choose not to be Gulliver. In an international system with no sovereign, no police, no protection--where power is the ultimate arbiter and history has bequeathed us unprecedented power--we should be vigilant in preserving that power. And our freedom of action to use it.

But here we come up against the limits of realism: You cannot live by power alone. Realism is a valuable antidote to the woolly internationalism of the 1990s. But realism can only take you so far.

Its basic problem lies in its definition of national interest as classically offered by its great theorist, Hans Morgenthau: interest defined as power. Morgenthau postulated that what drives nations, what motivates their foreign policy, is the will to power--to keep it and expand it.


Continued............................

 

[Dubya]

I warned you.....................

For most Americans, will to power might be a correct description of the world--of what motivates other countries--but it cannot be a prescription for America. It cannot be our purpose. America cannot and will not live by realpolitik alone. Our foreign policy must be driven by something beyond power. Unless conservatives present ideals to challenge the liberal ideal of a domesticated international community, they will lose the debate.

Which is why among American conservatives, another, more idealistic, school has arisen that sees America’s national interest as an _expression of values.

Democratic Globalism

It is this fourth school that has guided U.S. foreign policy in this decade. This conservative alternative to realism is often lazily and invidiously called neoconservatism, but that is a very odd name for a school whose major proponents in the world today are George W. Bush and Tony Blair--if they are neoconservatives, then Margaret Thatcher was a liberal. There’s nothing neo about Bush, and there’s nothing con about Blair.

Yet they are the principal proponents today of what might be called democratic globalism, a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values, and that identifies one supreme value, what John Kennedy called “the success of liberty.” As President Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November: “The United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings.”

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition--to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries. This American exceptionalism explains why non-Americans find this foreign policy so difficult to credit; why Blair has had more difficulty garnering support for it in his country; and why Europe, in particular, finds this kind of value-driven foreign policy hopelessly and irritatingly moralistic.

Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil.

Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan--and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment: for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay.

That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil.

Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true.

Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine--many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is . . . our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson.

Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later--with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights--there is no way not to know.

Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism.

Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy.

But where? The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy. Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.
Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts.

Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.

Where does it count? Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted. Why? Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom in midcentury--fascism--and then were turned, by nation building, into bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism.

Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.

Establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq and ultimately their key neighbors would, like the flipping of Germany and Japan in the 1940s, change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.

Yes, it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may yet be right. But how do they know in advance? Half a century ago, we heard the same confident warnings about the imperviousness to democracy of Confucian culture. That proved stunningly wrong. Where is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?

Yes, as in Germany and Japan, the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism. It’s not one man; it is a condition. It will be nice to find that man and hang him, but that’s the cops-and-robbers law-enforcement model of fighting terrorism that we tried for twenty years and that gave us 9/11. This is war, and in war arresting murderers is nice. But you win by taking territory—and leaving something behind.


One more time.....................

 

[Dubya]

Conclusion

September 11

We are the unipolar power and what do we do?

In August 1900, David Hilbert gave a speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians naming twenty-three still-unsolved mathematical problems bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Had he presented the great unsolved geopolitical problems bequeathed to the twentieth century, one would have stood out above all--the rise of Germany and its accommodation within the European state system.

Similarly today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we can see clearly the two great geopolitical challenges on the horizon: the inexorable rise of China and the coming demographic collapse of Europe, both of which will irrevocably disequilibrate the international system.

But those problems come later. They are for midcentury. They are for the next generation. And that generation will not even get to these problems unless we first deal with our problem.

And our problem is 9/11 and the roots of Arab-Islamic nihilism. September 11 felt like a new problem, but for all its shock and surprise, it is an old problem with a new face. September 11 felt like the initiation of a new history, but it was a return to history, the twentieth-century history of radical ideologies and existential enemies.

The anomaly is not the world of today. The anomaly was the 1990s, our holiday from history. It felt like peace, but it was an interval of dreaming between two periods of reality.

From which 9/11 awoke us. It startled us into thinking everything was new. It’s not. What is new is what happened not on 9/11 but ten years earlier on December 26, 1991: the emergence of the United States as the world’s unipolar power. What is unique is our advantage in this struggle, an advantage we did not have during the struggles of the twentieth century. The question for our time is how to press this advantage, how to exploit our unipolar power, how to deploy it to win the old/new war that exploded upon us on 9/11.

What is the unipolar power to do?

Four schools, four answers.

The isolationists want simply to ignore unipolarity, pull up the drawbridge, and defend Fortress America. Alas, the Fortress has no moat--not after the airplane, the submarine, the ballistic missile--and as for the drawbridge, it was blown up on 9/11.

Then there are the liberal internationalists. They like to dream, and to the extent they are aware of our unipolar power, they don’t like it. They see its use for anything other than humanitarianism or reflexive self-defense as an _expression of national selfishness. And they don’t just want us to ignore our unique power, they want us to yield it piece by piece, by subsuming ourselves in a new global architecture in which America becomes not the arbiter of international events, but a good and tame international citizen.

Then there is realism, which has the clearest understanding of the new unipolarity and its uses--unilateral and preemptive if necessary. But in the end, it fails because it offers no vision. It is all means and no ends. It cannot adequately define our mission.

Hence, the fourth school: democratic globalism. It has, in this decade, rallied the American people to a struggle over values. It seeks to vindicate the American idea by making the spread of democracy, the success of liberty, the ends and means of American foreign policy.

I support that. I applaud that. But I believe it must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic globalism to a democratic realism. It must be targeted, focused and limited. We are friends to all, but we come ashore only where it really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.

In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we came to the edge of the abyss. Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we both deliberately drew back. On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back. This time the enemy knows no reason.

Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless. But there is a second difference between now and then: the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever. That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions but only by the limits of our mission--which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism--we can prevail.

 

[Dubya]

Hope it was worthwhile.

So there it is....a truly great speech. Hope everyone can finish it.

Maximum character length for one post is 10000. This one was over 39000 characters....sheesh...wish I had a link for it...that would have been easier.

Enjoy your weekend reading assignment.

W

 

[jarhead]

Dubya

Thank you for the post. I've read it once, and will do so again to try to absorb it all, as CK makes many points. I agreed with a lot of them, and I think I had a disagreement with a few.

Long read, but worth the effort.

 

[enigma]

I just spent fifteen minutes writing a comment and lost it. Oh well, I guess that it wasn't worth reading.

Maybe later, for now let me ask this. It seems that both liberal and conservative see the necessity for America to be active in the world. Both sides advocate worldwide military force projection. So where will our military be when our manufacturing capacity is unable to supply our military needs? Will we be able to buy missle components from the Germans?, what about the French?

Both sides would seem to laugh at the isolationists, yet we need the isolationists to defend our own production capacity. As much as I hate to admit this, we didn't win WWII because the greatest generation was smarter, better, stronger, faster, better aiming, than the axis, we won because we outproduced the bad guys.
Where will we be when Boeing is bankrupt because our government fought so hard for free trade and gave the business to Airbus? What about ships? Do we posess the necessary ship yards to build a great fleet?

Some would argue that free trade is necessary, I believe that our national sovereignty is absolutely essential, and I don't know that we can sustain it once we become completely immersed in the global economy. I would rather accept one less tv in my family room and one less set of Nikes, than I would allow our production capacity to wither and die. That's what is happening now. Even more troubling is the brain drain. Our leaders need to find some way to stop the outsourcing of engineering, etc. jobs to places like India. What will we do when we don't have enough engineers to design a new bomber?

All of the utopian talk from the neocons and the libs is nice, but without sustainable force, it's all for naught.

later,
enigma

 

[jarhead]

Enigma

I guess there becomes an overlap in domestic policy and foreign policy. Perhaps they can't be as easliy separated as they once seemed to be.

 

[TransMach]

Thanks ...

Outstanding read, mate. Thank you.

Just meets my needs ... just meets my thoughts. Thank you for helping put them into words.

TransMach

 

[46Driver]

Very good read. I always thought Krauthammer was very well spoken. I still have his article from the Aug 4, 1997 issue of TIME magazine called "America Rules: Thank God." My favorite quote from that was, "We stood down the Soviet Empire and destroyed the very idea of communism. Dominance? Arrogance? We go there the old fashioned way...by winning three world wars I, II, and Cold.... we earned it."

I just posted that same speech on www.pprune.org and am waiting for that entire website to explode.

 

[Timebuilder]

I was fortunate enough to catch the speech. Charles is a treasure, to be sure.

Thanks for posting it here.

 

[low-n-slow]

Some would argue that free trade is necessary, I believe that our national sovereignty is absolutely essential, and I don't know that we can sustain it once we become completely immersed in the global economy.

I completely agree enigma.

*

Thanks for taking the time to post this Dubya, very good reading.

 

[N2264J]

Charles Krauthammer is a national treasure.

Garrison Keillor is a national treasure. Charles Krauthammer is a pundit.

Jarhead alluded to the confluence of our foreign and domestic policy. I agree. This country and it's economy runs on oil. Our national security is necessarily vulnerable to that.

We need clean and renewable sources of energy. We need cars that get 60 miles to the gallon. We need to work on eliminating our and our allies dependance on foreign oil.

What Krauthammer could have said but didn't is that since Sept of 2001, our Energy policy and National Security policy are not mutually exclusive. But you're not going to hear that from the corporate apologist on the right when Haliburton and Exxon have a such a big influence on what our foreign policy actually is.

Example: The poor majority of the middle eastern nations rich with oil, see the US prop up savage dictator's (remember when Hussein was our ally and Iran was the bad guy?) and watch oil resources literally taken out from under their feet and sent to nations enjoying a very good standard of living and quality of life while they continue to have nothing. That kind of circumstance breeds hopelessness and ill will.

Consider this: Corporate juggernauts including JP Morgan and the Dupont family tried to seize the White House in a military coup in the 30s but failed due to the character of one Marine:

Smedley Butler

The plot to seize the White House

 

[surplus1]

Dubya

Thanks for posting the speech. It is a good one and explores many if not all of the theories behind variations in United States foreign policy. Let us not forget however, that this is the "big picture" of the world according to Charles Krauthammer. I am not quite ready to assume that he shares presumed infallability with the Pope.

He undoubtedly has a broad grasp of several scenarios and may indeed be a pundit, but he's no Socrates or Plato and his theory is unproven.

Should our government continue to pursue the foreign policy that he describes as "democratic realism" it will take at least a quarter of a century before we can determine its validity. During that time frame we could cease to live in what he calls a "unipolar" world and be forced to return to a scenario in which we are no longer the "only power". Even if his theories are correct today, what happens then?

There is much with which I could debate, but I just picked a couple of passages near the end, mostly for convenience. He said:

I support that. I applaud that. But I believe it must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic globalism to a democratic realism. It must be targeted, focused and limited. We are friends to all, but we come ashore only where it really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.

It must be targeted, focused and limited ... to the Islamic crescent .... from North Africa to Afghanistan. First, he has targeted Islam as the culprit. Not "radical Islamics", but Islam itself. An extremely dangerous premise in my opinion. It almost sounds, though he does not quite say it, that we should be (or are) engaged in a war against Islam.

Next we focus on "the crescent", which excludes the three most populous Islamic nations, Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Assuming that we can selectively strike, invade and occupy "the crescent", when the terror moves to those countries what do we do, punt?

On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back. This time the enemy knows no reason.

An enemy that does not draw back and knows no reason. Accurate observations those. Same question ... what is our next move when that enemy, defeated in the crescent, moves to the "big three of Islam", in one of which it is already entrenched?

Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless. But there is a second difference between now and then: the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever. That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions but only by the limits of our mission--which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism--we can prevail.

Our situation would be hopeless but for the uniqueness of our power. Well, there is no doubt that our military power is unrivaled but does that truly "even the odds". The foundation of our military power is our economic power. The loss of life in the WTC was a grave tragedy, but the real blow to our country was the impact on our economy. Similar attacks in the future will further undermine that economy. Disruption of the worlds major petroleum resources (which will happen if we attack the crescent nations) will reak economic havoc not just in the US but also in Europe and Japan. How will we sustain this vast military power without the economic base that pays for it?

Did we really outsmart the communists or did their empire collapse because their economy could not sustain the arms race with the USA? Should we put our own economy in the same jeopardy maintaining a huge military machine with which to make unchallenged preemptive strikes?

Perhaps we can control how we use our military power. If we do so, it leaves us vulnerable to the very attacks that we are supposedly using it to prevent. He appears to believe that all we must do is modify the Bush administration's policy from one of permptive war, to one of selective preemptive war. Ultimately, we will run out of small vunerable nations that we can easily overrun, unless of course we play the nuclear card. The arguement is weak.

I do not believe that we can impose democracy on any people that do not want it and certainly not via the military occupation of their countries. That may be a nice idea from a neoconservative perspective, but it isn't going to work. Democracy presupposes freedom of choice, including the choice to reject our system of governance and values. Additionally democracy, as we know it, cannot function unless the state is secular. If anyone thinks that we can eliminate Islam by imposed democracy, perhaps he should do some more thinking.

From my perspective the entire theory falls apart the instant you come to believe that we can 'bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism". I find the choice of the term "nihilism" especially interesting. As most words in the English language this one has several meanings, the very last of which is terrorism. Is that what the speech maker means? I don't know, but given the remainder of the speech, I have to wonder.

Here's the first meaning" "1 a : a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless b : a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths "

It seems fairly obvious that Islamics do not believe that their own traditional values and belief's are unfounded or that their own existence is senseless and useless. They may believe those things about us, but not about themselves. Now let's look again at 1.b., above, and see how that fits the rest of the speech. Is CK saying that Islam is "a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths"? If that is what he means by that choice of terms, it is little wonder that they call us "infidels".

Now look at the second definition: "2 a (1) : a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility." Once more, given the identification of Islam and the "crescent" as the place where our "democratic realism" should be imposed by military force, it would appear that CK believes that "conditions in the crescent of Islam are so bad as to make its collective "destruction for its own sake" something that we should decide is necessary and then use of our "unipolar" military power to destroy it, the destruction therefore being justified on a preemptive basis.

This line of reasoning appears to be somewhat reactionary or radical. with all the elements of what CK himself calls "realism" and admits is flawed. Since I have no doubt whatever that he knows the meaning of the term nihilism I have no doubt that he chose it deliberately. Had he meant "terrorism" and nothing more he would have used that term.

When intellectuals like CK advance these theories they are not taken lightly. This one is an attempt to justify the use of unbridled military power in preemptive strikes against not just the terrorists, but one of the world's greatest religions and all of the people that practice it. Perhaps that is what needs to be done if you harbor an "it's us or them" mentality. A philosophy that seeks military solutions for all that we see as different and therefore wrong. I submit that is a rather shallow perspective. It is also predicated on especially dangerous perspectives. We fought World War II against a man who also believed that he was the leader of the Super Race and it was unfortunate that the rest of the world weren't Germans. Is "democratic realism" a modified term that defines our own brand of facism ("a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control")? "Would we had the gift He gives us to see ourselves as others see us."

On the other hand there is the possibility that we could successfully identify the true cause of anti-Americanism and work to remove it, before we resort to preemptive war making whether "focused" or otherwise.

At this point I cannot suscribe to the preemptive doctrine. Military action is sometimes necessary, as it was in Afghanistan, but the adoption of this concept as the foundation of our national foreign policy leaves much to be desired.

Thanks again for posting the speech. I found it quite interesting, but less than convincing.

 

[Timebuilder]

Garrison Keillor is a national treasure.

I suppose if you live to listen to NPR, buy your stuff at Land's End or Eddie Bauer, and think that all things are really being considered, then you might think that Garrison is a national treasure. A gifted writer, yes. A treasure? I don't think so.

We are many years distant from the quaint place called Lake Wobegone, and are in need of the Charles Krauthammers and their observations to maintain our way of life, and to make wise choices to help ensure our survival.



Hopefully, we will not lose our sovereignty anytime soon.

 

[Timebuilder]

Example: The poor majority of the middle eastern nations rich with oil, see the US prop up savage dictator's (remember when Hussein was our ally and Iran was the bad guy?) and watch oil resources literally taken out from under their feet and sent to a nation with a very good standard of living and quality of life while they continue to have nothing. That kind of circumstance breeds hopelessness and ill will.

I have an additional observation. The importance of energy to the US economy has been a fundamental idea for many years. It is also important to our security. I am always willing to point this out to anyone. The fact that this obvious truth whent unstated means nothing more than the fact that it was obvious.

Why are we involved in mideast oil today? Perhaps the biggest reason is the US environmental lobby, which works fervently in a not-in-my-backyard mentality when it comes to drilling the oil we have right here. We have relied on others for our energy because we are so restrictive when it comes to developing our own resources. It matters not to the chronic leftist that we just deposed a "savage dictator". No matter what, these critics will always hate America first. If we once supported a bad leader, they think we are therefore guilty sinners. Oh, and that's in the most progressive, secular-humanist sense, of course.

When we do have a new source of clean, renewable, and affordable energy, it will likely be an energy company that will have developed it. That's another reason why I am glad that people who love the United States are in charge, rather than those who hate it. They understand economics, they understand security, and they understand energy.

That is a very good thing, indeed.

 

[Dubya]

Lets not forget.....

.......it is our technology that allowed those oil wealthy nations to access their oil in the first place.


Garrison Kellior cannot hold a candle to CK.

W

 

[mar]

"Americans, If You Only Knew"

"Americans, If You Only Knew" by Regis Debray
Published in the Sept. 5 Le Figaro.
Translated from the French by Benjamin Storey
and Donovan Hohn.
Printed in Harper's Magazine Jan 2004

Judging by results, as they say in the military, it appears that Paris had a clearer view of things in Baghdad than Washington did. In the New York Times of Feb. 23, 2003, I allowed myself to predict--merely by reading the newspapers in the light of history books--that the American war was going to "provoke chaos instead of order, and hatred instead of gratitude," while giving a "formidable second chance to the partisans of Bin Laden." That was before the "victory," and at the time many a distressed reader dismissed these somber prognostications as "ideological." An out-of-touch arch-Gaullist such as myself, however, is not bound by the euphemisms of transatlantic modesty. "When one tells it like it is," De Gaulle once remarked, "it's a scandal. If one says that England is an island, no one blinks. If one says that NATO has an American commander, everyone is shocked." To state the raw facts bluntly is a task, always thankless but never useless, reserved for those not in charge.

The Americans seem to have gotten themselves into an intractable mess in Iraq. They must now choose between a historical debacle if they hang on and a temporary setback if they let go. "We cannot leave Iraq before it is stabilized," declared a former CIA officer. But to maintain a prolonged foreign occupation of Iraq is to destabilize it only further. Once the invader departs, there will no doubt be a civil war, which will accelerate the dismemberment of the nation, giving rise to a fundamentalist regime, which will make at least some people miss the era of Saddam.

On the other hand, if the occupation persists, one can foresee a multifaceted terrorist escalation eating away at U.S. forces and aggravating ethnic and religious divisions. The Americans will bring in reinforcements, including Fijians and Norwegians. They'll talk of the final fifteen minutes and of last gasps. A coup d'etat or uprising will be inspired in Teheran (terrain more favorable to the West than Iraq is) but with irritating repercussions in Najaf, which will be transformed into a base of retreat for vengeful ayatollahs. The Americans will cling to Iraq as "useful" and ensconce themselves inside supposedly unbreachable bastions. Then, as the death toll mounts by the hundreds, the "bring the boys home" movement will spread like an oil slick across the United States, and a new, Democratic administration will make the prudent decision to stop the hemorrahaging when the vital interests of the United States are not at stake. But how many lives will be ruined in the meantime?

The neocon cliches set the courageous, clear-eyed inhabitants of Mars/America against the lofty, retiring souls of Venus/Europe. The former follow the hard principles of reality; the latter preach morality on the cheap. This distribution of roles reveals a case of imperial self-deception. The American leadership has come to believe in its dreamworld so completely that like some Alice in Horrorland, unable to escape from the mirror, it mistakes its intellectual fantasies for practical measures.

It was lured down this rabbit hole by three magic words, fallacies disguised as self-evident truths. First, "terrorism." Of course every great nation needs a great enemy, but there's a problem: although there are terrorist modes of action, terrorism itself does not exist. "The use of extreme violence against disarmed populations outside any context of declared war" (a definition of terrorism) is a tactic of opportunity, a mode of operation, which includes everything and its opposite, from Corsican guerrillas to the French, Algerian, and Palestinian resistance. Just as the ideas of my enemy were once ideology, so the violence of my dissidents will now be terrorism.

This adverb mistaken for a noun promises a hundred years' war--interminable because neither armistice nor capitulation is possible--in which the Empire, lacing up its boxing gloves to battle a swarm of flies, will exhaust its strength in a perpetually recommencing fight against everybody and nobody.

"Democracy" is the second of these magic words. Ultra-sovereignistic, the American hyper-nation reserves for itself the exclusive right to patriotism but intends to export "democracy" wherever and whenever it suits its interest. "Democracy" is the contemporary equivalent of the old "civilization," which brought to the backward peoples of the world the European colonialism of the nineteenth century, the humanitarian character of which has been largely forgotten. Then, too, the colonialists were supposedly rescuing the oppressed from tyranny, slavery, and fanaticism. But since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, democracy at home has never gotten in the way of prisons for recalcitrant foreigners or napalm for foreign dissidents.

And indeed, "one man, one vote" in the Middle East is not in the interest of the United States. If tomorrow the Americans could wave a magic wand and democraticize Iraq, they would have to pack their bags the next day. For, as a former Israeli foreign minister has said, the choice in this region is not between democracy and dictatorship but between secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy.

The third source of hynosis is "weapons of mass destruction." On Sept 11 it was nineteen men with box cutters. The Pentagon was preparing for cyberterrorism and got pocket knives. Tomorrow, it will be a rifle shot, a mortar shell, or a hunk of TNT. It is with the archaic and the artisanal that the best-armed country in the world--5 percent of the population, nearly 50 percent of the total military expenditure--should be concerned. The United States, a nation of engineers, is in thrall to a technological illusion and thinks of arms rather than men, visible devices rather than interior dispositions (belief in the afterlife is undetectable via infrared). The alliance of the two is certainly volatile, but the detonator is belief.

<continued>

 

[mar]

Part Two.

Nor should one underestimate the geographic expansion of legitimate interventions zones. Because any desert and any jungle can harbor a factory for weapons of terror, a superpower must have eyes everywhere in order to be tranquil at home. Every attack it launches on the other side of the world becomes an act of self-defense, and it is therefore possible to be both neo-isolationist and omni-interventionist, as the defensive perimeters of Los Angeles and Chicago are now situated in sub-Saharan Africa, the Red Sea, and perhaps, tomorrow, Cape Horn. But an escalation to immediate and total war is not the best way to bring states that finance terrorism to the light of reason.

Our moralists compete in criticisizing the lies, distortions, and exaggerations of our master planners. But the majesty that certain spin doctors showed in giving the international community nonexistent morsels to chew on should command our admiration. Every country, like every man and every animal, makes as much as it can of its own power, so who can blame those who have the material capacity for transforming their military emergency into the number-one moral emergency of all humanity? Plato permitted lying in only two occupations: doctors and statesmen. The preemptive strike in self-defense is as old as the Peloponnesian War.

Is is reassuring to note that the same distortions that allowed Washington to give credibility to this war will hasten its defeat in the end. The software of representation replaces reality with the illusion of a world made to order, as in a film or a sitcom, but only for so long. Today's dominators control the present by training the projectors, microphones, and lenses on whatever place, problem, or person they wish, but reality is what happens after the cameras leave. The dominated takes his time, which works in his favor. The media transmitted the images of celebration in a liberated Kabul of Afghan women unveiled, of the posthumous victory of Massoud, of the rediscovery of tolerance. But when the facts later become disagreeable, the Empire brings its reporters back home. No one sees the Afghan women back in their burkas, the Taliban everywhere, nor the 3,000 tons of opium, cultivated by Massoud's heirs, now headed west.

The ability to brainwash the world into believing one's domestic delusions has been the ambition of empires for three millennia, but America has transformed this advantage into a weakness. By aspiring to rule the little people of the world without taking into acount thier language, their religion, their memories--in sum, all that makes them other than we might like--the United States guarantees its own failure. Muslim houses are searched with dogs, X-rated theaters are opened, and one of the principal administrator of the universities of the oldest country in the world is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. This deliberate blindness, which transforms the occupied into a video-game target, is the curse of all ominpotent sovereignties.

Disdain does not pay in the long run, but how does one get through to deaf men who can support their empty ideas with a formidable reserve of dollars, patents, arms, and an enviable patriotism? With power, there is no other argument than power, a costly counterweight with which the European Union no longer wishes to be weighed down. Rome therefore decides for the Greeks. Did she not liberate them from Macedonian oppression? Did she not force the ferocious Phillip V to let go of Rhodes, Athens, and Pergamum? Is not the Roman camp the camp of liberty? The Achaean League thus awaited the decisions of the Senate, begging it to send a few legions to Greece, to stop the troubles on its Balkan perimeters. Rome is a Hellenic power, said Polybius. "The United States has become a European power," says Richard Holbrooke. And the Roman Senate plots to train the new Greece against the old one, the unconditionally loyal cities against the more insolent ones, who forget what they owe their protector.

That was two centuries before Christ. The procedures of subjection have hardly changed. Nor has voluntary servitude. When France had the means to be the "indispensable nation," she was equally suicidal and deaf, equally cultivated and stubborn, just as doctrinaire and unimaginative as the present titleholder. The exercise of power is anonymous, and its laws are universal. The day before yesterday, it was Rome. Tomorrow it will be China. That is why the free man is not anti-American but anti-imperial. He refuses to march to the pace of the cosmic metronome. He knows that soldiers like Faulkner, Orson Welles, and Dylan must be saved. But he laughs when people villify "knee-jerk anti-Americanism" so as to assimilate themselves, with good conscience, into the so-called New World Order, which knows how to recompense its own with money, prestige, authority, and influence.

With its proconsuls and its aircraft carriers, the rapacious and generous America revisits the time of colonizers drunk on their superiority, convinced of their liberating mission, and counting on reimbursing themselves directly. We built roads; they build airports. We brought books and schools; they bring videotapes. We brought penniless Catholic missionaries; they bring wealthy evangelical sects. But when, a century from now, our American friends come back to their senses and turn against this "capture of Baghdad" (along with the oil wells), it will be, without a doubt, with the same perspective, incredulous and annoyed, from which we French now regard the capture of Tunis or of Hue' (along with the good soil and coal mines). Historia non facit saltus. A certain historical wisdom and patience should make us indulgent, not blind, and still less complicit.

 

[Timebuilder]

A wonderful opinion piece.

Unfortunately for the author, that is all it is.

 

[surplus1]

I'm curious Timebuilder, is the Krauthammer speech opinion or is it fact?

 

[mar]

Exactly!

Timebuilder--you didn't even read it. Admit it. Otherwise (as per your style) you would've snipped every piece you had issues with and supplied some retort.

But surplus1 has it right. Everyone has their opinion (unlike scripture, right?).

By the way surplus1, I appreciated your response (the long one) above. My fingers were just too tired last night to say so.

 

[Timebuilder]

Otherwise (as per your style) you would've snipped every piece you had issues with and supplied some retort.

Actually, it was just too late at night after a long week out of town, and we have already covered most of the topic. Sorry.



Surplus, the answer is that they are both opinons.

One is only an opinion, with no more validity than the other typical "America is all wrong" stuff.

The other is an opinion that sees America as a place of value, with laudable motives, and ideals worth not only preserving, but also spreading.

One is a piece intended to find fault, to criticize, and demean the work that America does on a regular basis for the good of all people; the spread of freedom, the overthrow of tyrants. Not all tyrants right now, but in sequence as we are able, and find appropriate. One says "you guys are making the same mistakes that we made" when in reality, that is only a limited perspective.

The other piece recognizes the work we do for freedom, the necessity of meeting terrorism with cunning and courage rather than appeasement and fear. I'll take cunning and courage any day.

While both are opinons, one is greater and more valuable to the United States, and one is smaller and of little value in the face of today's problems.

 

[surplus1]

While both are opinons, one is greater and more valuable to the United States, and one is smaller and of little value in the face of today's problems.

Which is of course nothing more than yet another opinion .... yours.

What bugs me about you neoconservatives is not so much what you do as it is your belief that your opinions and ideas are better than everyone else's and that you have a near Biblical "right" to impose them on others. Your mantra seems to be the equivalent of "resistance is futile ... you will be assimilated" ... very Borg-like. You seem to have ordained yourselves as the annointed one's who inherently know what is "best" for everone else. Anyone offering a different opinion, no matter how slight, is not considered but branded as a proponent of "hate-America first".

You remind me of the Greeks, inventors of democracy, who forced Socrates to drink hemlock for questioning their obvious flaws. You are proponents of democracy only when it permits the imposition of autocracy .... your own.

This method does not stifle the opposition, it only serves to increase it. As someone said, "Him that I love I want to be free .... even from me."

 

[Dubya]

Read closely

If you read closely you notice that CK is careful to dissect several different points. His speech is not filled with hatred, jealousy, or name calling and finger pointing. He is careful to give each view thorough consideration and even point out what works and what doesn't work with each view.

Is is one man's view...yes...but if you go back and read the intro I posted before the speech....the reason this is such a great speech is because of his consideration of others' views. He doesn't simply rant and rave as the pundits for both sides usually do.

The french and the rest of Europe just can't stand the fact that America is the most powerful nation on earth...ever...and uses that power for the good of mankind...not to conquer and divide.

We are here because Europe screwed up. Period. We saved Europe from disaster not once, not twice, but THREE times....and the Europeans can't stand it. They want what we have...but they haven't the moral doctrine to wield such power. We do. We are inherently good. I believe a Canadian said something to the effect of how when there is a disaster in the world....the world calls Washington...and we always are there to help. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, famine, drug lords, terrorism...the US is there to help. Does anyone remember how many nations sent support after the California quakes? How bout after hundreds of towns are leveled by tornados each spring? And anyone want to take a guess as to how much debt the US as written off...owed to us by the same French, German, and Russian governments who refuse to stand behind us when the world is threatened by unknown terrorists and weapons.

Great post mar....a glaring example of the hatred and jealousy that exists towards the greatest nation the world has ever known. A perfect follow to the CK speech.....it simply reinforces the greatness of CK's words.

Great comments by all.

W

 

[Dubya]

Are we really not welcome?

The media will never show what is truly going on in Iraq. They will always exploit the damaging, and the most sensational. I, as many of you may, have had direct contact with personnel in and around Iraq. What you don't hear in the media is...we are most welcome by the vast majority of civilized, concerned Iraqi citizens that have been tortured and held down for decades. Are there radical factions that will never accept our gift of freedom and democracy? Sure. That exists right here in the good ole USA too. It will never be rosey and calm...but it is right and it is good.

Quote: (from the french speech posted by mar)
"The Americans seem to have gotten themselves into an intractable mess in Iraq. They must now choose between a historical debacle if they hang on and a temporary setback if they let go. "We cannot leave Iraq before it is stabilized," declared a former CIA officer. But to maintain a prolonged foreign occupation of Iraq is to destabilize it only further. Once the invader departs, there will no doubt be a civil war, which will accelerate the dismemberment of the nation, giving rise to a fundamentalist regime, which will make at least some people miss the era of Saddam.

On the other hand, if the occupation persists, one can foresee a multifaceted terrorist escalation eating away at U.S. forces and aggravating ethnic and religious divisions."

Poor france...no more tyrants to sell nuclear secrets, arms and intelligence to.

W

 

[Timebuilder]

Which is of course nothing more than yet another opinion .... yours.

What bugs me about you neoconservatives is not so much what you do as it is your belief that your opinions and ideas are better than everyone else's and that you have a near Biblical "right" to impose them on others. Your mantra seems to be the equivalent of "resistance is futile ... you will be assimilated" ... very Borg-like. You seem to have ordained yourselves as the annointed one's who inherently know what is "best" for everone else. Anyone offering a different opinion, no matter how slight, is not considered but branded as a proponent of "hate-America first".

You remind me of the Greeks, inventors of democracy, who forced Socrates to drink hemlock for questioning their obvious flaws. You are proponents of democracy only when it permits the imposition of autocracy .... your own.

This method does not stifle the opposition, it only serves to increase it. As someone said, "Him that I love I want to be free .... even from me."

Hmm. When did I become a "neoconservative?" I never thought of myself as a "neo" anything. Ah, well.

Let me share something with you. I'm not saying that my ideas are better that anyone else's, but I am certain that they are better than many others' ideas, specifically, those ideas I found to be faulty and left behind when I was one of their practioners. That "Borg-like" quality to which you refer is the mantra of the Democrat Party and the major television networks. Not only do the democrats believe they "have a near Biblical "right" to impose (their ideas) on others" because "only they are sufficiently intelligent and progressive to lead," but they scoff at the values of America as being backward and bigoted. Their deepest wish, having been there and done that, is to make America a socialist country who is beholden to the UN in matters of social and economic policy and law. That's a fact. The writings of this French national speak volumes to that attitude.

Now I can say with conviction that no one has ordained me for anything, but I can tell you that I know intimately what the opposition party has in mind, and it isn't a respect and value of American ideals. Let's review one more part of your rant.

Anyone offering a different opinion, no matter how slight, is not considered but branded as a proponent of "hate-America first".

Differences of opinion are good, but it does depend on the quality and nature of the opinion. For example, some psychologists opine that pedophiles should not be punished, but instead as Michael Jackson has said, allowed to love the children they crave. It is an opinion, but one that any one of us probably feels has no value whatsoever.

I know those opinions that are shared by the "Hate America First" bunch. I used to hang out with them, so to speak. I used to promote those ideas myself as being "alternative views" and said they were "worthy of consideration." They were not worthy.

They are not rejected because of a lack of consideration, my friend. They are rejected because they HAVE been considered, and for many years, too, and found wanting. They are without merit, and serve only to anger and rally the depressed and misled among us. The poor and undereducated that the dems say they care so much about are only fodder for their cannons, guaranteeing them a voter block of slaves, yes SLAVES to their democrat party massas. This is unconscionable by anyone's definition.

So, having practiced, tested, promoted, intoned, challenged, examined, and rejected those ideas, I can tell you that resistance is not futile. We can still save America from the secular humanist and socialist agenda being promoted by many people in this nation, but we have to have the awareness necessary to discern the means to an end, and be wise enough to hold the line against it.

 

[surplus1]

Re: Read closely

The french and the rest of Europe just can't stand the fact that America is the most powerful nation on earth...ever...and uses that power for the good of mankind...not to conquer and divide.

You were doing great until the above. There is no basis for that assumption regarding the French. The French position is not based on America being the world's most powerful nation. It is based on the reality that, because of its power, the American nation often demands that other foreign nations must agree with its policies, all of them. Soverign nations will always have differences of opinion with each other, just as the peoples within any given nation, including the United States, have differences of opinion (the split in our own country is virtually 50/50 ... the nation is divided).

We do not hesitate to point out that we will not subgugate our own soverignty to the United Nations and I agree with that. Why then do we expect France (or for that matter any other country) to subordinate its own soverignty to the United States? Are they somehow required to do that merely because we have more money and more guns?

If we expect to export "democracy" then we must also accept that in a democratic world, there will be opinions different from our own. When that happens, we can't call ourselves proponents of democracy by ingnoring the views of others and imposing our view by force. The two just don't go together.

We are here because Europe screwed up. Period. We saved Europe from disaster not once, not twice, but THREE times....and the Europeans can't stand it. They want what we have...but they haven't the moral doctrine to wield such power. We do. We are inherently good.

I think what you're doing here is atypical. You are confusing he American government with he American people. The people of America are inherently good, but the government of America is little different from others, and this is by no means a new phenomenon. Like all other nations our government exercises its power to advance the interests of the United States. Principally its financial interests as opposed to the moral interests of its people or the philosophy of our national charter (Consitution and Bill of Rights).

Our intervention in the great wars of the 20th centruy in Europe did in fact save Europe from the domination of German tyrrany, but to say that we did that for altruistic reasons stretches the imagination of the educated. We did it in order to protect ourselves from Germany and the Soviet Union.

There is a long history of United States intervention in foreign countries, in a variety of circumstances, and I am not talking about humanitarian aid. I'm talking about intervention in the internal affairs of other countries for political or military reasons. If you are interested in that sought of thing, it doesn't take much research to verify.

Yes, we are called upon for humanitarian aid frequently and we often give generously, more often than not. We get the calls because we are not only the most powerful nation, but the richest nation. When we can give such aid it pleases me. However, when we give a dictatorial government (that we happen to support) tanks and helicopter gunships with which to operss its people, when what the "people" need is water, food and medicine, if our motives are questioned I don't find that unusual.

I have been lucky enough to travel and live extensively in many foreign countries. I feel I can honestly say that I never met anyone that "hated" the American people. In fact, much the opposite was true. However, I seldom ran across anyone that agreed with the actions of the American government. Basically, as a nation, our government does not practice what it preaches.

I agree completely that the interests of the United States should come first, but at least for me, that depends on what those interests are. I'm all for spreading democracy, I just don't think you do that by invading foreign countrys or clandestinley overthrowing their governments or assasinating political leaders that do not share our views.

As for how much debt we have "written off" it is true that it has been a great deal. When you include the French however, I think you err somewhat. Perhaps you would do better to focus on the unpaid debt of countries like the United Kingdom and India.

In the most recent scenario we have a "new friend" in Pakistan. How much money changed hands between the governments of Pakistan and the United States to "buy" that friendship? I'm not saying that we shouldn't have done that, but I am saying that "friends" that you have to buy are not friends.

In Afghanistan, where we should have gone, we are proclaiming loudly that we have routed the Taliban and installed a democratic government. The fact is that we have installed a democratic mayor of Kabul (that we call the President). The majority of the country is still in chaos, the Taliban are everywhere and resurging, the opium trade is booming. Yes, we routed a rag-tag army of terrorists, but we have done little else. Unless we plan a permanent military presence in that country the former situation will recur and when it does, the people that we have abandoned will no longer be on our side. The Bush administration has failed to follow up. This is good for the USA? I don't think so.

It is not that I think we can change that country overnight, I don't. However I also don't think that we are trying to change it at all. We don't really care what happens to Afghanistan, what we care about is the al Queda bases. Unless we do change the country, the minute we leave, they will come back.

A similar policy in Iraq will also result in a new civil war in that country and most probably the resurgence of an Islamic Republic that will not be friendly to the United States. It may make us feel good to listen to TV speeches and sound bites from Cheney and Rumsfeld telling the American people that we are the "liberators" of Iraq. That may be their view, but it is not the view of the people of Iraq. Removal of Saddam Hussein is a plus for most of them. Occupation of their country by the USA may well be seen as a greater evil, by them.

How we see ourselves is not the road to a successful foreign policy. The world already knows that Americans like Americans. The problems that we have stem from the reality that most of the world does not like the American government's policies.

If we choose to believe that doesn't matter, then we have given in to the isolationist faction. That may have been practical when North America was an island protected by vast oceans. In a world of modern technology the idea that we can hide in "fortress America" is folly in the extreme.

In my opinion, our survival as a great nation is not solely dependent on our vast military power. It is truly dependent on how this nation is seen by the rest of the world. Either we learn to live together with the rest of the planets population, without the need for military might alone, or our way of life will continue to be threatened. Survival is dependent on more than military power. The real danger is from those who believe that as long as we have this military superiority we can dictate to the rest of the world.

Great post mar....a glaring example of the hatred and jealousy that exists towards the greatest nation the world has ever known. A perfect follow to the CK speech.....it simply reinforces the greatness of CK's words.

That's an amazingly interesting perspective of the Debray piece. That you would form that opinion about a dissenting view and a different perspective pretty much confirms everything that I've said. Instead of attempting to understand and learn why other's have the view that they do, you dismiss it as "hatred and jealousy". That myopia, if embraced by our government, will not produce continued success. Unfortunately, the current administration does seem to share your views.

I believe that we must defend everything that we have and act where necessary to protect ourselves. I also believe that as long as we choose to ignore WHY we are being attacked, the attacks will continue.

The fact that we have not been attacked overtly again since 9/11 is not an indicator of Bush's successful policy. It is merely an indicator that the enemy has not chosen to make another attack serious attack as yet. The day will come when he does try again. I can only pray that we will be lucky enough to prevent it on the next go around. Meanwhile, I continue to wish that we did not have to depend so much on luck and so little on wisdom.

I enjoy the dialogue.

PS. Thank you mar, for posting the other perspective. I find it just as enlightening as the CK speech.

Edited to fix the quotes. Text unchanged.