My colleague Patrick Basham argues that the "upcoming Iraqi election foretells stillborn democracy." Basham claims that

the interim government has proven unpopular and illegitimate in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis. Members of the interim government are viewed, as were their predecessors in the failed Governing Council, as puppets of the Bush administration.

I'm not sure where Basham gets his information, but a poll by the International Republican Institute earlier this month found differently:

Recent public opinion surveys conducted by IRI show Iraqis to be surprisingly optimistic about their future and much stronger supporters of democracy than many new reports would lead you to believe.

Over 51% of Iraqis polled felt that their country is headed in "the right direction," up slightly from IRI's May/June poll. More telling, the number who feel that things are heading in "the wrong direction" has dropped from 39% to 31% over the same time period.

Some of this confidence may be a result of wide public support for the Iraqi Interim Government. Prime Minister Allawi holds an enviable approval rating, with 66% rating him as either "very effective" or "somewhat effective." Likewise, President al-Yawer enjoys the support of 60.6% of Iraqis polled who say that they "completely trust" or "somewhat trust" him.

In a stunning display of support for democracy and a strong rebuttal to critics of efforts to bring democratic reform to Iraq, 87% of Iraqis indicated that they plan to vote in January elections. Expanding on the theme, 77% said that "regular, fair elections" were the most important political right for the Iraqi people and 58% felt that Iraqi-style democracy was likely to succeed.

Looking forward to the drafting of the new constitution, a cumulative 67% place a strong importance on the preservation of a unified state, with 56% citing this as issue of primary importance. On the role of religion in determining the new constitution, while support for Shiri'a law is strong at nearly 70%, there is divided opinion on whether the government should create a secular state that respects the rights of all religious, tribal and ethnic groups with 49% agreeing and 40% disagreeing.

Support for political parties remains largely undefined with 80% not identifying with any political party. In determining who they would support, a large plurality of Iraqis, nearly 45%, say that a militia attached to a political party would make them less inclined to vote for that party. Only 7% indicated that the presence of a militia would make them more inclined to support a party. Among those polled, religious leaders enjoyed the support of 30% as possible election candidates, with university professors (24%) and party leaders (15.5%) rounding out the top three preferences. Iraqis further indicated a strong preference for "modern" (64%) versus "traditional" (18%) candidates, while also preferring "religious" (69%) candidates to "secular" (24%) ones.

Basham points out that elections across the whole country are not feasible because of the security situation, whereas partial elections will disenfranchise a portion of the electorate and cause further division. Moreover,

according to Allawi, Fallujah's residents could take part in elections "after we liberate them from terrorists." But the liberation of Fallujah from those guilty of terrorist acts and terrorist sympathies will require the removal of most Fallujans. A genuinely democratic vote would result in an overwhelming endorsement of those cloaked in Baathist-friendly colors.

Ah, but there's nothing wrong with the Sunnis voting for Baathists, if they want to. That's what's so brilliant about democracy: it coopts the opposition. Baathist-friendly the candidates may be, but their power would depend on people voting for them, and they would have to join coalitions to get what they want, and obey the law, like the former Communists in eastern Europe who are now ordinary democratic politicians. David Brooks says it better than I can in an excellent column about the resilience of democracy.

Arthur Chrenkoff moves away from the violence that journalists are addicted to covering and captures the deeper story: "post-totalitarian stress disorder," the slow and fitful but wondrous process by which people discover what it is to be free. Chrenkoff has tons of links. Meanwhile, Mark Steyn reminds us of the alternative "a half-century of American "realpolitik" in the Middle East — the absurd inflation of the Saudi "royal" family, the lavish subsidies to the Mubaraks — brought us 9/11. The foreign-policy realists turned out to be totally unreal."

Basham may turn out to be right. To some extent, the flurry of journalism on Iraq is pointless: we can discern the good guys and bad guys in the current situation (hint: the bad guys murder large numbers of civilians) but only future historians with five, ten, twenty years' hindsight will be able to offer a complete story. Particularly because what's happening in Iraq is something new under the sun. Post-WWII Germany and Japan are the closest analogies but they still fall short. This soldier's letter, quoted on Iraq the Model, was eye-opening, and mind-boggling:

Dear Dad:

1. Not much to report on here in Najaf. Its been quite but we have heard about things being hot in other parts of Iraq so we are still being vigilant. Just recently the Mosques here in Najaf have re-opened and people are returning to them for prayer for the first time in almost a year. When the militia came into the city they took over the Mosques and used them as hideouts, even though it's against their own religious beliefs to use a holy site in such a way, but they did so because they knew that we wouldn't bomb there. The people kept asking us to just go in and get them, but we didn't want to destroy their Mosque, and some of my friends died as a result of sniper fire from inside, but we know it was the right thing to do.
As we were driving through the city on a security patrol the other day we drove by the newly re-opened Mosque. As we drove by many people came out and waved at us and some parents even held up their children and said "thank you America." I remember thinking that how lucky I was to be able to be from a country where I don't have to worry about someone using my church as a battle position, or that someone might shoot me and my family for trying to go to church. Some times I forget how lucky I am and I can't ever believe that I thought of going to church as being a "chore" We should feel blessed to be able to go in and pray as we choose. And I thank God every day that you and my family are safe and sound in the U.S. I love you guys so much that I would gladly lay down my life so that you never loose a single freedom that you enjoy today. And if anything should happen to me, don't worry there are a lot of guys like me out there who will never let that happen.

Lately we have been doing public affairs stuff, going around to different schools and seeing what kinds of stuff they need to be fixed. Things like desks and chalkboards and stuff. The hard part is dealing with all the little kids that come out to see us and they all think that we are going to be giving away food and candy. And it's not like it's just a couple of kids, we get mobbed by like a hundred kids. Instead of more candy or chocolate or stuff me , if you could send some basic school supply stuff to me we can get it right to the school kids. Things like pens, pencils, protractors, rulers, etc and we will get it out. I will also get some pictures of the kids for you that I will send. Oh, and don't forget those little hand held pencil sharpeners. Apparently they need some of those too......

Love,
David Jr

"Imperialist" soldiers, global symbols of violence... yet they're going around to schools, delivering supplies, like I did once on a World Bank mission to Malawi. The phrase "beating swords into plowshares" rings in my head. What does it mean? for the war effort? for the world? for the human soul? I don't know, but I'm excited to find out.

In any case, I trust that we're all with Allawi, we're all hoping for the same thing.

EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENTS

Ukraine's election on Oct. 31 is a critical moment in post-Soviet history, argues Anders Aslund.

The good news is that incumbent President Leonid Kuchma is not even attempting to run for reelection. After suspicions of his involvement in the murder of a journalist in 2000, his popularity rating plummeted and has now stabilized at 7 percent. The bad news is that the big businessmen he has helped to enrich appear determined to hold on to power by any means.

A defeat for Yanukovich, Kuchma's preferred successor, could be an answer to Putin's re-election earlier this year and his recent power grab in the wake of Beslan.

Bernard Lewis has created a hubbub by saying that Europe will become Islamic before the end of the century. And this is mobilizing opinion against Turkish membership in the EU, which the US supports.

The French, or at any rate Foreign Minister Barnier, think that the insurgency should be represented in any conference on the future of Iraq, and also that a withdrawal of coalition forces should be on the table. This is pretty soulless. The insurgents are applying terror, and killing far more Iraqi civilians than US soldiers. They have articulated no positive goals. And yet... somehow, I kind of like it. France is finally thinking outside the box. To suggest making deals with mass-murdering thugs like al-Zarqawi is pretty unscrupulous. But we were unscrupulous when we backed the mujaheddin against the USSR in Afghanistan, and it worked. Lesson: If you're up against an evil superpower, you can't be choosy about your friends. (Of course, France isn't really up against an evil superpower, they only think they are, but let's not quibble.)

WILL THE DEMOCRATS LEARN THEIR LESSON?

It looks like the Democrats are headed for their biggest defeat in thirty years. Think about it. In 1980, 1984 and 1988, they lost the White House but held Congress. They lost Congress in 1994 but held the White House for another six years. In 2000, they lost the White House and Congress but won the popular vote in the presidential election. And they soon regained the Senate with Jim Jeffords' defection. In 2002, they lost the Senate by one seat, and since then the Republicans have controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress, but narrowly. And Bush still has his dubious 2000 mandate.

On November 2nd, George W. Bush will probably win the White House by a substantial margin, and the Republicans will gain seats in the Senate and hold the House. An era of Republican dominance will have begun, which might last a generation for all we know. After the Democrats gave this campaign everything they had, the voice of the people will have rejected them. How will they take it?

Josh Marshall is already finding excuses for Kerry losing the debates:

But the point is that we have a pretty good idea what the president is going to say. And what he'll almost certainly say will open up a number of solid lines of attack. But if the Democrats don't hit the ground running with a plan in mind they'll be overwhelmed by the GOP spin machine.

Blogger Daily Kos describes the spin machine, or noise machine, in more detail at The Guardian.

What is the Rightwing Noise Machine? Conservatives in the United States have spent the last 30 years building a vast infrastructure designed to create ideas, distribute them, and sell them to the American public. It spans multiple think tanks and a well-oiled message machine that has a stranglehold on American discourse. From the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, Wall Street Journal, Drudge Report and Murdoch's Fox News, to (more recently) the mindless drones in the rightwing blogosphere, the right enjoys the ability to control entire news cycles, holding them hostage for entire elections.

Mindless drones of the right-wing blogosphere, eh? Would that be the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds? And me? Daily Kos adds that:

We had witnessed the goring of Gore, yet sat by, helplessly unable to fight back. We saw the Democratic party get outmanoeuvred in Florida, legally and rhetorically. We looked around for a "liberal media", yet found nothing of the sort.

The "liberal media" is the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and the rest. Otherwise known as the establishment media. But the establishment has been losing ground. People are voting with their remote controls, their mouses, and the knobs on their dashboards for an alternative media of blogs, cable news channels, and radio talk shows. The bloggers at redstate.org report, for example, that the Fox News Channel now gets more viewers than all its rivals combined.

The "spin machine" story assumes that people are stupid sheep, passively swayed by whatever comes along. A condescending view of people, that. A leftist view, one might say. I suppose the solution is that the government steps in and regulates the content of news channels, so that they lean in a more liberal-- or, "objective," or whatever word seems most suitable-- direction?

But people are not stupid sheep. Not the American people, especially. They work hard, they generally have a high level of education, and they think for themselves.

Gore did not lose because of some unfair advantage on the part of a right-wing spin machine. Why he lost, he demonstrated pretty well this morning in the NYT, in his advice to Kerry on how to debate Bush. Gore claims that:

But more important than his record as a debater is Mr. Bush's record as a president. And therein lies the true opportunity for John Kerry - because notwithstanding the president's political skills, his performance in office amounts to a catastrophic failure. And the debates represent a time to hold him to account. For the voters, these debates represent an opportunity to explore four relevant questions: Is America on the right course today, or are we off track? If we are headed in the wrong direction, what happened and who is responsible? How do we get back on the right path to a safer, more secure, more prosperous America? And, finally, who is best able to lead us to that path?

A clear majority of Americans believe that we are heading in the wrong direction. The reasons are obvious. The situation in Iraq is getting worse. Osama bin Laden is alive and plotting against us. About 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Forty-five million Americans are living without health insurance. Medicare premiums are the highest they've ever been. Environmental protections have been eviscerated.

Sorry, Gore, Americans just can't be fooled into thinking that the Bush years were a catastrophic failure. A loss of manufacturing jobs is part of a shifting global division of labor. The economy has been growing strongly. Unemployment is higher than in the unsustainably booming year 2000, but is still quite low by historical or international standards. To report people living without health insurance as a policy failure is to take for granted that everyone should have it, i.e. socialized medicine, but many Americans don't think so. Medicare premiums are high because health care costs are rising. And where's the evidence that our country is being turned into a wasteland? I live in one of America's biggest metropolises and I breathe just fine. I don't know how the national parks are faring, because I can't get to them. If I had more money, I might go find out. What I need, if I value the beauty of nature, is not environmental protections, but economic growth. Gore blew the huge Clinton legacy he inherited with stupid thinking like this. If Gore had said "while the Bush administration has certainly had some impressive successes, a new administration might be in a better position to consolidate what Bush has accomplished, while avoiding some of Bush's major failings, of which the largest is the deficit," I would listen, and maybe be convinced. When Gore calls Bush a "catastrophic failure," he has lost me, and insulted my intelligence to boot.

It's very important, it's critical for the future of our country, that the Democrats understand they will not lose this election because of dirty tricks, or media bias, or even the candidates' relative personal appeal. They will lose it because they deserve to lose. They will lose because Americans don't like their muddled, gloomy, weak message. To be competitive again, they must change. They must convert. This change must be very deep. They must scoff at guys like Gore and McAuliffe. They should denounce Michael Moore and stop reading Paul Krugman. They should look at the Republicans, drop their disdain, and give them some respect.

We have one good political party in this country. We need two. Please, please, PLEASE, Democrats, learn the lesson!

And who knows, I might just be a swing voter in 2006!

THE ILLIBERAL CANDIDATE

In arguing against the war in Iraq, one may say 1) that it shouldn't have been fought at all, 2) that it was fought "incompetently."

Kerry wants to do both. In this speech, he declares:

Instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan… the President rushed to a new war in Iraq. That was the wrong choice.

Instead of listening to the uniformed military, his own State Department, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress, and outside experts about how to win the peace in Iraq… the President hitched his wagon to the ideologues who told him our troops would be welcomed as liberators. That was the wrong choice.

This position is logically tenable. The administration might (1) have been mistaken in going to war, and then (2) handled the post-war situation very badly.

But (2) does undermine (1), because if the bloody mess that Iraq is today was not an inevitable result for the war, this weakens the case against the war.

Is twenty million freed worth twenty thousand dead? Well, a lot of Iraqis think so. I would think so if it were my country, even if I would end up as one of the dead. But "no" is a plausible answer.

But when Kerry suggests that Iraq is in a bad way only because of the administration's stubbornness and incompetence, the flip side of this is that the transition could have gone smoothly-- if, say, President Kerry were in charge. If so, that pushes us towards the conclusion that the war itself was the right solution, even if wrong choices were made afterwards.

When Kerry says that we shouldn't have fought the war even though he thinks the post-war transition could have been managed better and chaos and bloodshed, this suggests that it matters very little to John Kerry whether the Iraqis are free, or under Saddam's tyranny.

Given that John Kerry seems to have thought it morally indifferent whether the South Vietnamese had a free constitution or were subject to Communist tyranny, maybe this shouldn't surprise us. John Kerry is an illiberal man. And he always was.

THE ART OF NEGOTIATION

Nato writes:

I never suggested we "hit" North Korea. That this apparently springs immediately to Nathanael's mind as the first choice consequence of focusing on the problem would signal a seriously limited imagination, if he really meant it that way.

With most nations in the world, our relations are rich and varied, consisting of trade, aid, tourism, scientific exchanges, athletic contests, migration, lending and investment, translation of one another's literature, study abroad programs, and so on. It would take great "imagination" to enumerate them all (so to speak). Military conflict with them, fortunately, is almost inconceivable. If North Korea were susceptible to such varied and humane influences, we wouldn't be talking about it.

Europeans, and Democrats with European worldviews, pride themselves in preferring negotiation to military force, in contrast to mindless, violent Americans/Republicans.

What's wrong with this view may be illuminated by the immortal words of Richard Holbrooke to Slobodan Milosevic (which were roughly): "I've got U-2s in one hand and B-52s in the other. Which will it be?"

This is negotiation at its best. Front and center was the credible threat of force, which made it in Milosevic's interests to compromise. Holbrooke had learned the lessons of failed UN intervention in Yugoslavia's and Rwanda's genocides, which good intentions and high ideals did nothing to stop.

It's not in North Korea's interests to compromise. It's in North Korea's interests to get nuclear weapons and blackmail us. Yes, there are more ways to deal with a country than to "hit" it. But if we can't hit it, we're in a bad position to negotiate. All those other nice things I listed, trade, aid, scientific exchanges, and so on, are either impossible in North Korea's case, or else they would be a form of blackmail under present circumstances. Much "imagination" might indeed be called for in deciding what form of payment to offer the blackmailer. But should we pay blackmail?

I'm willing to consider that submitting to blackmail might be our best option here. But 1) the blackmailer may increase the bill, 2) it encourages others to get nukes and blackmail us.

If "imagination" can get us out of this fix, I hope Nato will explain how.

SULLIVAN ON BUSH’S SECOND TERM

This is Andrew Sullivan’s preview of four more years under Bush:

BUSH'S SECOND TERM: I don't have much of an idea about what it would look like, what it would do or even who'd be in it. In my informal chats in DC since I got back, no one else does either. I assume Powell and Rumsfeld are gone; but I can't say I have a clue who would replace them. Rice? Hadley? Armitage? Bush never fires people and we have very little evidence of him replacing anyone. So it's tricky. I'd say Ashcroft stays; along with Rove and Card. But that's total guesswork. As for policy ... I'd love it if he made a real push for a flat tax, or social security privatization (or whatever euphemism they're going to come up with for it), but I don't believe he'll do anything that ambitious (or conservative). Second terms are not good opportunities to do that, especially since his first two years will be consumed with trying to find a way out of the morass in Iraq he has created these past eighteen months or so. Iran? I have zero confidence the administration will do anything that different from a hypothetical Kerry administration. NoKo? Ditto. Tax cuts? Bush can hold the line, since the true fiscal calamity won't happen till after he's left, and then he can blame his successors. Socially? With the war working everyone's nerves, he'll shift even more to his base. More anti-gay stuff, I presume; more government funds for fundies; a right-turn on immigration maybe. Excited yet? Me too.

Why would Bush fail to follow through on the ambitious agenda he laid out at the RNC? It wouldn’t help his legacy. It would make him unpopular with his friends in the Republican party. He won’t have to worry about re-election. Bush followed through on his campaign promises pretty well last time, even those, like steel tariffs and prescription drugs, that were probably election-year pandering he didn’t believe in. This time he has more political capital and can lay down what he really wants. If Bush doesn’t take the lead on North Korea or Iran, that’s fine by me: others are more threatened by them than we are. What conceivable indication is there of a right turn on immigration? Bush has risked alienating his base with pro-immigration noises. The RNC was full of positive talk about immigration. Bush has said what he believes. He’s pretty good about following through on his beliefs. If Sullivan predicted more budget-bloating, OK. But I can’t think of any plausible account of Bush’s character that would predict him turning lazy in his second term.

IRAQ’S ABE LINCOLN

Allawi is not shaken by violence in Iraq. A confident NYT interview here; here he thanks American and describes his plan. A moving passage:

For the skeptics who do not understand the Iraqi people, they do not realize how decades of torture and repression feed our desire for freedom. At every step of the political process to date the courage and resilience of the Iraqi people has proved the doubters wrong.

(APPLAUSE)

They said we would miss January deadline to pass the interim constitution.
We proved them wrong.

They warned that there could be no successful handover of sovereignty by the end of June. We proved them wrong. A sovereign Iraqi government took over control two days early.

They doubted whether a national conference could be staged this August. We proved them wrong.

Despite intimidation and violence, over 1,400 citizens, a quarter of them women, from all regions and from every ethnic, religious and political grouping in Iraq, elected a national council.

And I pledge to you today, we'll prove them wrong again over the elections.

Among those doubters is John Kerry. Bummer. Couldn't he say a few words of encouragement, at least?

NO DRAFT

If the war necessitated a draft (as Kerry is now hinting) that would be another reason for me to reverse my position on it. “Streiff” of redstate.org does the math on why this is unlikely. But one thing he doesn’t address: will the war make it harder to recruit? Or will it draw more people to join, for adventure and liberty?

BLOOD FOR OIL

I like to say that the blood-for-oil argument refutes itself—that is, any attempt to articulate the theory makes it falsity transparent. But my old prof Jeffrey Sachs’ version seems logically tenable:

September 11 was a dramatic confirmation that the stability of Saudi oil was in jeopardy. The regime was unstable and perhaps even a lethal threat to the US. The only quantitatively significant alternative to Saudi oil was Iraqi oil, but that option was barred as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power. The long-standing contingency plans to seize Middle Eastern oil were probably rolled out within days of September 11.

Second, a substitute had to be found for the US military bases in Saudi Arabia. Like Saudi oil, the bases too were now under threat, especially because the US presence in the Saudi kingdom was known to be the principal irritant for al-Qaeda. Iraq would become a new base of US military operations. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, has already explained during an interview with Vanity Fair that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were but a bureaucratic pretext that hid other core motives for war, including the reduction of the US military presence in Saudi Arabia. Mr Wolfowitz's remarkable statement seemed bizarre at the time it became public but was allowed to pass in the US without scrutiny. But it makes full sense in the context of a White House debate about the US's response to a teetering Saudi regime.

Third, the Bush White House needed to issue a powerful threat to the Saudi leadership: one more false step and you're finished. Attacking the next-door neighbour was no doubt judged to be quite persuasive.

Sachs concludes that

if the Iraq war was an opportunistic response to September 11, it is crucially important that we know it. Thousands of lives and perhaps $100bn have gone into this war, with little to show for it except an enraged Iraqi public and enormous costs of occupation extending into the future.

Wait a minute, Sachs, haven’t you just described yet another “something to show for” the war—namely, that in future we won’t need to prop up one of the world’s most reactionary regimes to secure our oil supply?

There’s more that’s wrong with this argument. Bush is a millionaire who doesn’t care what he pays at the pump. If he wants to keep oil prices low, he’s doing it for Joe Sixpack’s vote. But in that case, shouldn’t he tell Joe Sixpack that’s why he did it, so Joe knows to vote for him in return? Anyway, cheaper oil hasn’t materialized so far. Did Bush think it would, and miscalculate? Or is it the long-term oil supply that Bush is trying to boost? But how will that help him in the election? Unbeknownst to Sachs, his argument implies that Bush is a selfless altruist, taking great risks for his country’s and the world’s (everybody needs oil, not just us) good, seeking no political credit.

What’s absurd is that Sachs doesn’t even consider the most obvious reason for the war, which Bush is saying loud and clear: liberty for Iraqis, and a beacon of democracy in the Middle East! This explains the facts far better than any version of blood-for-oil. Even if you think Bush is bad and selfish, he could just be betting that Americans will like a democracy-spreading project. The Bush-hating paradigm is turning some smart people really stupid. Sad.

BUSH QUIXOTE

Bush’s speeches always inspire me. At the UN yesterday, he declared

we gather at a time of tremendous opportunity for the U.N. and for all peaceful nations. For decades, the circle of liberty and security and development has been expanding in our world. This progress has brought unity to Europe, self-government to Latin America and Asia, and new hope to Africa. Now we have the historic chance to widen the circle even further, to fight radicalism and terror with justice and dignity, to achieve a true peace, founded on human freedom.

The United Nations and my country share the deepest commitments. Both the American Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaim the equal value and dignity of every human life. That dignity is honored by the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, protection of private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance. That dignity is dishonored by oppression, corruption, tyranny, bigotry, terrorism and all violence against the innocent. And both of our founding documents affirm that this bright line between justice and injustice -- between right and wrong -- is the same in every age, and every culture, and every nation…

The democratic hopes we see growing in the Middle East are growing everywhere. In the words of the Burmese democracy advocate, Aung San Suu Kyi: "We do not accept the notion that democracy is a Western value. To the contrary; democracy simply means good government rooted in responsibility, transparency, and accountability." Here at the United Nations, you know this to be true. In recent years, this organization has helped create a new democracy in East Timor, and the U.N. has aided other nations in making the transition to self-rule.

And Bush answers Kofi Annan’s statement that the Iraq war was "not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, [and so] from the charter point of view, it was illegal,” by reminding the world of what that charter says:

History will honor the high ideals of this organization. The charter states them with clarity: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights," "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom."

By emphasizing only the avoidance of the scourge of war, Kofi Annan and those who agree with him render the other points of the charter meaningless. We cannot “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights” or “promote social progress” as long as we have to recognize regimes like Saddam’s.

Yet did Bush really think he would convince the UN, a chamber half-filled with the representatives of dictators? Most of humanity does not and will not believe in ideals as lofty as Bush's.

Unlike the New York Times editorial page, I admire Bush’s idealism. I’ll vote for it. But while Bush proposes to “fight radicalism,” he himself is the radical. Some will remember him as a great president, in the mold of Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR. But those touched most intimately by his words may see him, in the end, as a tragic figure, whose ideals were too lofty for this world.

RIVERBEND, STILL BLOGGING
I was pleased to discover, via a link from Healing Iraq, that Iraqi blogger Riverbend is still writing. I had gotten mixed up about her url and thought she’d quit. Riverbend is probably the best writer among all the Iraqi bloggers I’ve read. She’s also the only woman, and the only one opposed to the war and the occupation, to balance out pro-American bloggers Iraq the Model, The Mesopotamian, and Healing Iraq. Mostly she’s just horrified by the bloodshed and chaos. Here’s a typical sample from a few days ago:

I tried futilely to cling to the last fragments of a fading dream and go back to sleep when several more explosions followed. Upon getting downstairs, I found E. flipping through the news channels, trying to find out what was going on. “They aren’t nearly fast enough,” he shook his head with disgust. “We’re not going to know what’s happening until noon.”

But the news began coming in much sooner. There were clashes between armed Iraqis and the Americans on Haifa Street- a burned out hummer, some celebrating crowds, missiles from helicopters, a journalist dead, dozens of Iraqis wounded, and several others dead. The road leading to the airport has seen some action these last few days- more attacks on troops and also some attacks on Iraqi guard. The people in the areas surrounding the airport claim that no one got any sleep the whole night.

The areas outside of Baghdad aren’t much better off. The south is still seeing clashes between the Sadir militia and troops. Areas to the north of Baghdad are being bombed and attacked daily. Ramadi was very recently under attack and they say that they aren’t allowing the wounded out of the city. Tel Affar in the north of the country is under siege and Falloojeh is still being bombed.

Everyone is simply tired in Baghdad. We’ve become one of those places you read about in the news and shake your head thinking, “What’s this world coming to?” Kidnappings. Bombings. Armed militias. Extremists. Drugs. Gangs. Robberies. You name it, and we can probably tell you several interesting stories.

Is it worse than Saddam? And what can you do about it? Riverbend has no answers. But that’s not the point. Riverbend is not a problem-solver. But she maintains her humanity in grim circumstances. I’m glad she’s still writing.

WHAT ABOUT NORTH KOREA?
Nato thinks the real threat is North Korea, not Iraq:

Considering that the threats from North Korea that were intensifying then and remain today still unresolved, this does appear to be a collossal misallocation of resources.

North Korea’s bad. But we can’t hit them because they would nuke Seoul, or Tokyo, and kill millions. Right?

RESOLUTION
I had a writing seminar today at which I (1) found out I’m allowed to have a blog here (at the risk of getting fired if it leads to bad publicity for the Cato Institute), and (2) became ashamed of the low standard of writing I’ve let myself to post on this blog. So: going forward, no more essays, all posts under 200 words (minus blockquotes), everything short and pithy. (For longer stuff, I’ll build a website one of these days.)

MORE IRAQ

Two great pieces from Mark Steyn. He skewers Kerry here as an "anti-war anti-hero." I like this:

In his testimony to Congress in 1971, Kerry asserted a scale of routine war crimes unparalleled in American history -- his ''band of brothers'' (as he now calls them) ''personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.'' Almost all these claims were unsupported. Indeed, the only specific example of a U.S. war criminal that Kerry gave was himself. As he said on ''Meet The Press'' in April 1971, ''Yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I used 50-caliber machineguns, which we were granted and ordered to use.''

Really? And when was that? On your top-secret Christmas Eve mission in Cambodia? If they'd taken him at his word, when the senator said ''I'm John Kerry reporting for duty,'' the delegates at the Democratic Convention should have dived for cover.

And Steyn argues that pessimism about Iraq is overblown because violence is regionally concentrated-- like Northern Ireland in Britain. Is he right? Who knows. I've read enough returning soldiers' stories to be convinced that the press over-emphasizes the negative, though I'm in doubt about how extreme the bias is.

Tom offers a comprehensive response to my last post on the case for war. He concludes:

For Nathanael: I get the feeling that you would have supported an invasion of Iraq regardless of the circumstance, and that you would have considered it a success in nearly any event. What would it have taken for you not to support it? What would have been un-successful? Your optimism is truly boundless.

Good questions. When the war began, the predictions I had heard were those of the UN: 250,000 dead and millions of refugees. Without the information to form an independent judgment, I mostly took the experts' word for it, though perhaps taking this as a "ceiling" on what was likely to happen. And I narrowly supported the war. I supported it, first, because Saddam's rule was so murderous, and his and his sons' tenure in power so indefinite, that I thought human lives, in net, would be saved-- though I was extremely unsure about this. If we assume more lives would be lost than saved, one must begin to weigh life against liberty, which is more difficult.

I was delighted when the UN prediction turned out to be completely wrong. Since then things have gotten worse, but we're nowhere near that. If the death toll hit 250,000 and there were millions of refugees, I would start to rethink my support for the war. Alternatively, I could be convinced that Saddam's regime was not as bad as people said. I've read that Saddam's regime killed 50 people per day-- i.e., the death toll from the bloody past week in Iraq (over 300 in a week) was par for the course under Saddam. But among all the anti-war chorus, no one seems to berathe a word of what would be the most potent defense of their position, namely, that Saddam was not so bad.

The other thing that would have changed my position on the war is if the Iraqis supported Saddam. Before the war, there were pro-Saddam demonstrations in Baghdad. I thought these were fake, orchestrated by a regime that held the populace in fear. But we didn't really know. If the Baathist Party were campaigning on the slogan "Restore Saddam" and looked to win a landslide in the elections in January, I would reverse my position on the war.

What doesn't change my mind is the claim, as published in this Cato paper, that

The U.S. forces that in April 2003 may have been liberators are, today, in September 2004, widely seen as occupiers. These sentiments have been building for months. When asked in April 2004 whether they viewed the U.S.-led coalition as "liberators" or "occupiers," 71 percent of all respondents said "occupiers." According to another poll taken in July, two-thirds of Iraqis were either "strongly" or "somewhat" opposed to the foreign military presence in their country.

Unfortunately, it's facile to take public opinion at face value. If, in the US, you conducted one poll asking questions about whether taxes are too high or too low; a second poll asking questions about particular kinds of government spending that people benefit from; and a third poll about the deficit; you would no doubt find that most voters want to keep taxes level or lower them, to keep most spending programs, expand some, and introduce some new ones, while shrinking the deficit. Just because they want this, though, doesn't mean it's possible. Likewise, small majorities of Iraqis dislike the foreign military presence, and they also want more security, and they strongly want democracy. But it is a possibility that the first makes possible the second two, in which case Iraqis' opinions are inconsistent.

Tom agrees with my case for war for the most part, but in the midst of his post he makes an abrupt transition from good sense to this:

But how did we go from everything in our favor, to nothing in our favor? Are terrorist ideals really so attractive, and in certain cases more attractive than democratic/capitalistic ones? How could anyone have supported Saddam over us? Was it really because other countries had secret deals with Saddam? Even then, isn't it preferrable to deal with us than with Saddam? How did we lose all the trust? How did we lose all the faith and goodwill? It's easy to say that the world was spineless and sniveling in regards to Iraq, but it certainly wasn't spineless and sniveling in the matter of Afghanistan or even the first Gulf War. How can this discrepancy be explained? Should we blame the Secretary of State for his faulty WMD case before the UN, even though he was against the timing of the proposed invasion from the start? Should we blame France, Russia, and Germany for not blindly following our lead, regardless of where we took them? We were in the right, there was a compelling case to be made, we should have had support, we should have had a plan, we should have had an understanding of the feelings of the Iraqi people, and we should have broadcast to the world our intentions for a solid year, so that there would be no doubt whatsoever what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and why we were doing it. There should have been a solid year of rest for war-weary troops coming back from Afghanistan. There should have been a solid year of training and preperation for another war in Iraq. There should have been a solid year for the exceedingly slow and hampered weapons inspections. There just should have been another year. Iraq may eventually be happy and prosperous, but maybe it would have happened in half the time if things had been done correctly.

Hmm. Let's see if I can refute this point by point to Tom's satisfaction.

But how did we go from everything in our favor, to nothing in our favor?

We didn't. There was global opposition to the war in Iraq from the moment it was mentioned, and it was gaining strength before March 2003. Now the position of the former peaceniks is trickier since they risk seeming ill-wishers of Iraqi democracy. We've moved up.

Are terrorist ideals really so attractive, and in certain cases more attractive than democratic/capitalistic ones?

No. Not to the Iraqis. We know that now in a way that we didn't in March 2003: almost all the Iraqi factions support democracy, even declared Islamists and communists. But there is a certain aesthetic appeal to the jihadist vision, of the world being mystically transformed into a caliphate as the corrupt apostate governments fall, of a restoration of Islam's long-lost glory. As long as our complicity with Arab tyrannies locked hundreds of millions out of the world we were building, many in the Third World looked to bin Laden's dream instead. The caliphate, or world apartheid?

How could anyone have supported Saddam over us?

Hardly any peacenik would agree to this formulation of their position, and that's the whole point. The peaceniks were all about not taking responsibility for the implications of their positions. They thought it rude and unfair to confront them with the logical implications of their position. Tom's ideas seem to contain the thought, if only we had had a little more time to reason with them, they'd have come round... I suspect he was not paying close enough attention to the debate back then.

Was it really because other countries had secret deals with Saddam?

No. It was because they believed in a construction of international law by which whatever regime inhabited the space between the world's "sacred" borders was "legitimate," no matter how it came to power or how iniquitous it was-- with the possible exception of genocide, though even there a genocide in progress could be halted by intervention, but a genocide carried out did not destroy the government's legitimacy. They thought this maintained peace, and they were right. But the price was too high.

How did we lose all the trust? How did we lose all the faith and goodwill?

Because we wanted to make a change, and people are afraid of change. But sometimes change is necessary. (A lot of answers are possible here. Another is: we never had it. The left was fiercely anti-American in the 1990s too.)

It's easy to say that the world was spineless and sniveling in regards to Iraq, but it certainly wasn't spineless and sniveling in the matter of Afghanistan or even the first Gulf War. How can this discrepancy be explained?

The biggest reason is international law. People like the idea that peace can be assured by everyone respecting everyone else's borders. They don't realize that this means writing a blank check to tyrants, caging ethnic minorities in states that may exclude, oppress or even kill them. The first Gulf War was a response to an invasion, a defense of international law; and in Afghanistan, it helped that the Taliban regime had never been recognized. Also, that was a clear act of self-defense. In Rwanda, in the Balkans, and now in Sudan, the world proves spineless, with devastating consequences.

Should we blame the Secretary of State for his faulty WMD case before the UN, even though he was against the timing of the proposed invasion from the start?

Maybe.

Should we blame France, Russia, and Germany for not blindly following our lead, regardless of where we took them?

No. Independent thinking is welcome. We should blame them, not for thinking for themselves, but for reaching the wrong conclusions. (Tony Blair is a contrast, a fine example of independent thinking.)

We were in the right, there was a compelling case to be made, we should have had support, we should have had a plan, we should have had an understanding of the feelings of the Iraqi people, and we should have broadcast to the world our intentions for a solid year, so that there would be no doubt whatsoever what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and why we were doing it.

We worked very hard to get support, but it was not forthcoming, and by the time of the invasion it was clear it would only diminish. The brave leaders who supported us were already under unbearable pressure. I disagree with the "plan" idea: we could never have known what the post-war environment would be like, and the more we planned, the less room we would have to improvise in response to "the feeling of the Iraqi people." Unless Tom means we should have understood the feelings of the Iraqi people before the war, in which case I would say that it would have been difficult for the CIA to conduct public opinion polls in a totalitarian state. Tom himself has recognized that Bush "couldn't make public certain other reasons for going to war;" you can't go to the UN and expect the Chinese not to veto a war for democracy promotion. (The Chinese are vetoing genocide relief in Sudan, no doubt wary of a precedent which could eventually be used against them in Taiwan and Tibet.) How could we ever convince a cynical world, all too poisoned by left-wing and Islamist ideologies, that we were liberating Iraq for the sake of freedom-- that "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was a genuine and not a propagandistic label? Answer: only by doing it.

There should have been a solid year of rest for war-weary troops coming back from Afghanistan. There should have been a solid year of training and preperation for another war in Iraq.

Should diplomacy be suppported to the needs of the military? Maybe. Indeed, surely, to some extent. But Tom should realize the implications of this. One reason the war frightens people so much is that they fear their regimes now exist only at the convenience of the US military. If we let Saddam stay in power a year to give the military a rest, this would be more openly and obviously the case. If Tom means we shouldn't have started the drive for war in January 2002 (yes, January 2002-- Bush did try to give the military a year to rest!), no one could have foreseen the course of the diplomatic maneuvering then.

There should have been a solid year for the exceedingly slow and hampered weapons inspections.

That illusion, in any case, should have been put to rest by now. Even when we control the country it took us months to satisfy ourselves there were no weapons. We're really still not sure. Bill Kristol and other hawks argued that weapons inspections were a false middle ground, that to have a few guys certify a country clear of weapons in the face of a probably sabotaging regime was impossible. In this at any rate, events have vindicated them.

There just should have been another year. Iraq may eventually be happy and prosperous, but maybe it would have happened in half the time if things had been done correctly.

Another year might have improved the military situation (I couldn't say) but it would have made the diplomatic situation worse. Mostly, though, it wouldn't have made much difference. The war would always have involved a risk of bloodshed, chaos, and so on. I'm grateful that it wasn't worse than it was.

REVISITING IRAQ

I used to be so exasperated by the Iraq war critics' bad or non-existent reasoning that I stopped giving them the time of day. When I come across them I groan and click somewhere else. But maybe that's too complacent. After the bloodshed of late, a lot of them probably think war supporters are just avoiding the subject because it's too embarassing. Here's Josh Marshall from the Talking Points Memo blog.

Back more than a year ago, when it first began to dawn on many that stabilizing, let alone democratizing, Iraq would be a great struggle, the challenge was often framed around the unacceptability of allowing Iraq to 'become another Lebanon' or descend into civil war.

Let's be honest with ourselves. That's already happened. That's the clearest reason why yesterday's violence garnered so little attention. It's not surprising any more. A year ago, when a bomber blew up the Jordanian Embassy, it sent a shock through the United States. The same was more or less the case in the bombings that followed through the rest of 2003 and into early 2004.

Iraq has quite simply become a disaster for the United States. And while people disagree over why this has happened, no thinking person can now fail to see that it has happened.

Hmm. A "disaster?" I can't help but think that if a real disaster were to strike-- say, an Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange, or a suitcase nuke blowing up Chicago-- this kind of language would seem a bit absurd. If 9/11 is the yardstick for disaster, Iraq doesn't measure up. And 9/11 is nothing compared to, say, the AIDS epidemic. A sense of proportion is called for here. Before the war, I'm under the impression that the UN predicted the war would produce 250,000 dead and millions of refugees. Maybe it was just 250,000 refugees. Either way, events have made nonsense out of such predictions. I don't recall hearing any apologies. I myself would have guessed that a few thousand US soldiers would probably die, and tens of thousands of Iraqis. A terrible price, but again, a sense of proportion is called for. Saddam killed millions. Nor does the term "civil war" seem appropriate. There are not large armies of Sunnis fighting against large armies of Shias or Kurds. A "conventional wisdom" has coalesced, it seems, that the neocons and Bush were naive, the war critics prescient. Neither side of that conventional wisdom seems to me to hold any water.

But certainly a lot of blood and treasure, and perhaps diplomatic capital, has been spent, so-- was it worth it? It's worth revisiting the case for war, to try to measure it up. The reason I stand by my support for the war goes back to the original case, which consists of a three-point positive case for war, and a one-point negative case.

THREE-POINT POSITIVE CASE
(1) According to the best information we had at the time, Saddam possessed, or was seeking, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, in violation of commitments he had made at the end of the last Gulf War. He had played a cat-and-mouse game with the UN inspectors, before throwing them out in 1998, and then, when forced to let them in by the imminent threat of force in 2003, he returned to his cat-and-mouse game.

(2) Saddam had ties to terrorists, including al-Qaeda. He had sponsored terrorist attacks in Palestine and, for all we knew, might well sponsor them in the United States.

(3) Saddam's regime was a murderous tyranny, and we wanted to give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom and democracy, after 35 years of the foulest oppression. We hoped that Iraq would become not only a democracy, and the first Arab democracy ever at that, but a beacon of democracy to the whole Middle East. Liberty is God's gift to humanity. Surveys show that Muslims want democracy. Free and democratic peoples are not inclined to engage in terrorism, which is a product of oppression and the narrow-minded fanaticism that festers in the absence of freedom. Totalitarianism is evil. It is a great and noble mission, and our duty as those fortunate enough to be born to the blessings of freedom, to fight it, to show a spirit of brotherhood with the less fortunate.

Point (1) comprised the legal case for war; taken together, points (1) and (2) made the war in the US national interests (since a direct attack from Iraq on the US was hardly a plausible threat); point (3) was the emotional and idealistic core of the case for war, but where would it lead us, if we tried to follow it consistently? This ideal has come to define Bush's foreign policy vision since. As John O'Sullivan at The National Review observes:

[Bush] outlined [at the RNC] a bold foreign policy based on spreading the blessings of liberty, principally to the Middle East but in principle to wherever men labor under tyranny. Even if one disagreed with this argument or was skeptical of its practicality, one could not withhold admiration for the eloquence with which it was expressed or the sincerity that plainly inspired it.

I like The Washington Monthly as a source of critiques of Bush and the neocons, because however bitingly critical, there's always an undertone of acknowledgement of the radicalism, if in their view misguided, of the vision.

The last few years have constituted a grand experiment, a test of what would happen if Washington threw out the standard foreign-policy playbook and just winged it. The results are now in, and they ratify most of the conventional wisdom that the Bush administration initially rejected. And although Bush and his lieutenants will never say as much publicly, and may not even admit it to themselves in private, their recent behavior shows that at some level they understand the point and don't want to be burned again...

Bush's campaign line, "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein," sums up the three-point positive case for the war in a punchy, persuasive way.

But if there were only the positive case, I might not have as strong a stomach for the rising death toll. The three points can be turned around: (1) regime change in Iraq increased the incentive for countries like Iraq and North Korea to get nuclear weapons, (2) the invasion of Iraq created a wave of anger in the Muslim world and fueled terrorism, (3) what follows Saddam's demise might be (so it is said) civil war or theocracy, something worse than Saddam. I don't buy (3). Saddam's regime was so bad that there was hardly any risk that the war would make them worse off. But (1) and (2) are good points.

What is decisive for me is the negative case.

ONE-POINT NEGATIVE CASE
(4) The status quo before the war was morally intolerable. Economic sanctions had impoverished Iraq while doing no harm to Saddam, if anything helping him shore up his power. We had helped bring Saddam to power. We had supported him in the war against Iran. We had encouraged the Shiites to revolt and then let them be slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands of children died because of the sanctions, lacking medical supplies. The Iraqis were living in a prison state, and we were complicit in it.

This part of the case for war is invisible. No one mentions it. Which makes me wonder: am I dreaming? Did I read a couple of spurious sources and conclude with no good reason that my country was guilty of a terrible crime? Sure, America has done a lot of nasty things abroad that most Americans don't know about. But with Iraq being the center of a huge national debate for three years now, you would think this argument would have been mentioned. If nothing else, war supporters would put it in their arsenal. So maybe I'm missing something. And yet as far as I know it's as true now as it was three or five or ten years ago that the sanctions were murderous. They worked, from the point of view of national security. Even if we didn't know we were keeping Saddam from getting WMDs, it was pretty clear he wasn't much of a threat. We got our own security: but at a morally intolerable price.

Here a distinction between sins of omission and commission might be in order. Allowing the genocide in Rwanda was a sin of omission. Hundreds of thousands died, and it's shameful that we didn't do more to stop it, but it was still someone's crime, and whatever we are guilty of, it's not murder. But in Iraq it's different. Our sanctions caused those deaths. This sin shades over from omission to commission.

When you think of hundreds of thousands of children dead, it's hard to get exercised about 9/11. I think we deserved 9/11. I mean, not that those particular people deserved it. Not that it was right. What justice there is in human events tends to be messy. Osama was punishing us for (1) stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, (2) supporting Israel against the Palestinians, (3) the sanctions on Iraq. He was right about all three. I know there's supposed to be a distinction between honorable war and terrorism, which I guess I endorse though at the deepest level I'm not sure I understand why. So in those terms, Osama did wrong. But I can see his point of view.

The negative case changes the whole argument. If the status quo was morally intolerable, we had two choices: (a) lift the sanctions unilaterally, (b) regime change. If the alternate is (a), then points (1) and (2) of the positive case become much stronger. Sanction-free, Saddam would probably have had the means, and he certainly had the will, to get WMDs and give them to terrorists. And maybe point (3) becomes stronger too: we owed the Iraqis liberation, after the iniquitous way we had treated them. (Maybe...)

It depends ultiamtely on values. For me, anti-totalitarianism and the critical importance of freedom of conscience are extremely valuable. More valuable than my own life, for example. "Give me liberty or give me death," is a decision more suitable to make for oneself than for others, admittedly. Still, it's this principle that leaves me with scarcely a doubt that the war was right.

As for the rest of it...

Despite the widespread claim of "incompetence," I'm not convinced. We shouldn't have dissolved the army, some say. Maybe, but a lot of Iraqis thought we should then, some still think so now, and it's natural to want to level the remnants of a regime as evil as Saddam's-- if it was a mistake, it was an understandable one. We should have sent more troops, it is often said. But I don't get it. Even now, I often read that the Marines could take out Sadr's Mahdi army, or overrun Fallujah, but that it's politically dangerous because it would inflame anti-American feeling. If so, how would it help to have more troops there? Maybe more troops at the beginning of the war would have pacified the country and denied the insurgency time to grow. Or maybe they would just have blown more things up and killed more people and made more people mad. I don't think we'll ever know. I don't see any reason that I should believe someone else could have done it better.

I'm not as determined that America must not "cut and run" as some people are. As I see it, the biggest thing we could do was remove Saddam Hussein. And we were justified in doing that because Saddam was not a government but a murder-master with no legitimacy, a pirate, bearing the mark of Cain, whom anyone might destroy at will because by his crimes he had forfeited his rights as ruler and as man. It's nice of us to stick around and help with the reconstruction, too, but we don't have to. Having overthrown Saddam does not create that obligation.

Also, I wish we downplayed democracy as a goal, and instead saw our role as guarantors of liberty. For a number of reasons. Iraqis desire democracy more than they understand liberty. Democracy needs liberty but not vice versa. An imperial power can impose liberty (by preventing violations of people's rights) but not democracy. We would have to foster democracy too, because it's the only form of government Americans know of, and the only one that enjoys legitimacy in the contemporary world, and because Iraqis want it.

Beyond Iraq, what does this mean for the world, and in the long run? Hegel speaks of progress in terms of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. The 1990s world order, post-Cold War, liberal and marketizing, with the sanctity of borders firmly established and America firmly on top, was the "thesis." For Americans at any rate, it was great: peace, prosperity, freedom, hegemony, as far as the eye could see. But the Third World was still poor, and in some cases racked by new problems, such as AIDS; the sanctity of borders left tyrants unmolested and ethnic minorities trapped and angry; some Americans and many in the Muslim world were alienated by the somewhat hedonistic character of the emerging world culture; and the atrophy of a narcissistic West's will-to-power left many parts of the world to succumb to anarchy and state failure, or to weak, corrupt and unresponsive government. Robert Kaplan does a good job documenting the dark side of the 1990s. From 9/11/2003 to 4/9/2004 was the "antithesis": peace was suddenly interrupted by a hate-driven group that rejected all of the values of the "thesis;" then, in its reaction, Bush's America repudiated the narcissism of the 1990s, plunging into distant wars, weakening the principle of the sanctity of borders and the supremacy of international law; guided instead, at times by a Hobbesian vision of a world radically endangered by terrorism, but also, and increasingly, by a soaring neo-Wilsonian vision. It is this vision, a global liberal and democratic transformation, which is the "synthesis," with Bush as its towering articulator. If he wins in November, his vision will come to dominate this decade and perhaps this generation.

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

I was depressed but not much moved when the Financial Times (among others) reported that Bush is unpopular around the world:

In 30 nations, many staunch allies of the US, the public favoured Mr Kerry over President George W. Bush by a two-to-one margin, according to the poll conducted by GlobeScan, a public opinion group, and the University of Maryland. Only Poland, Nigeria and the Philippines backed Mr Bush, while India and Thailand were a statistical tie.

Should we be listening to them? James Glassman at Tech Central is unfazed by the poll, asking

How many French voters would be swayed by American attitudes toward Jacques Chirac? Do Germans really care what people in Iowa think of Gerhard Schroeder?

Not quite convincing. French and Germans both know more about and are more affected by American elections than vice versa. Indeed, since the US president is the leader of the free world, it almost seems that the rest of the world should have a say in who is elected.

However, there is one good reason not to count at naught Americans' own opinions about it: Americans are more educated than foreigners. In three senses. First, Americans tend to have more years of education than foreigners, certainly if those foreigners are from Africa or South Asia or the Middle East, but even, I suspect, if those foreigners are from France and Germany. We also host the world's top universities. Second, Americans are much more educated about our own affairs than foreigners are about our affairs, be they French and Germans, Pakistanis or Indonesians or Russians, etc., even if they know more about our affairs than we know about theirs. This argument applies to the domestic side, but not so much to foreign affairs, where foreigners tend to know a lot more than we do about local facts. Yet even there, it matters that Americans are more educated about what freedom and democratic capitalism are, about why they work, and about the nature of our own national and popular commitment to them-- all of which are mysterious to and little understood by foreigners. We know about tolerance, about how deliberative democracy secures internal peace, about how a recognition of individual rights make both freedom and capitalist prosperity possible. We know these things because we live them. And this self-knowledge gives us insights into the occupation of Iraq, its nature, purposes and character, that the rest of the world lacks. (Heartland Americans know perfectly well that our boys are not imperialist-colonialist-oil-thieving-occupiers, for example.)

I knew Bush was unpopular; what surprised me was that some countries do prefer Bush to Kerry! Given the prevailing slant against Bush and the knee-jerk negative reaction to the word "war" with which Bush is associated, why is that? Why do so many people in Poland, Nigeria, India, the Philippines and Thailand like Bush?

To me, the clash-of-civilizations story seems to explain it. India is threatened by militant Islam. Bush is perceived as the Enemy #1 of militant Islam. A lot of Indians like having the superpower on their side. Likewise in the Philippines, where civil peace is threatened by Muslim rebels in the South. Thailand, too, has a problem with restive Muslims. I wonder if public opinion in Russia will tip towards Bush as it plunges into its own war on terror. Putin sees the US reaction as a model for the Russian response to horrors in Beslan. The places in the world where Bush is most popular are probably southern Sudan and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where Bush has wielded American power to dispel the threat of genocide.

Nigeria also has a problem with Muslim-Christian communal violence, and no doubt their favoring Bush owes something to anti-Muslim feeling among the Christian community. The Bush administration has shown positive interest in Africa, boosting money to fight AIDS, for example. More fundamentally, west Africa is a place where an excruciating power vacuum is destroying lives and leaving the country with a hopeless future. What stands out in the Iraq situation from a west African perspective is not that heavily armed soldiers roam the streets. They're used to that. What stands out is that those soldiers are Americans, that they're civilized, that they are giving rather than taking, building rather than ransacking, that they can be trusted not to rob or rape or kill indiscriminately. To put it colorfully, to be occupied by American troops would be a "beautiful dream" for west Africa (to use an Iraqi's description of the fall of Saddam.) I suspect that any intelligent west African knows that.

What about Poland? No obvious Islamic militant threat there. Two reasons, I think. 1) Bush is picking up the Catholic vote. Poles know he stands against gay marriage and abortion, and that he is a believer. 2) Poland was a close ally in Iraq, and enjoyed playing a big role and eclipsing France and Germany. Maybe 3) they're offended that Kerry called the coalition "fraudulent." And 4) they know the political capital they built up during the Iraq war will be wasted if Kerry wins and starts kissing up to France and Germany.

The clash-of-civilizations story explains a lot of the opposition to Bush too. The Chinese, for example, see the US as a rival or even an enemy, and certainly the principle obstacle to their recovering Taiwan. They perceive Bush as a strong leader, Kerry as a weak leader, and they want America to be weak. (Not that I'm anti-Chinese. I greatly enjoyed my travels in China; respect its civilization; anticipate that China will succeed as world-hegemon within my lifetime; and rightly so, since we are guilty of creating a global caste system through our immigration restrictions and have thus, as a Chinese dynastic historian would put it, "forfeited the mandate of heaven." I hope, though that the remnants of totalitarianism melt away before that happens, and in the meantime, I think America has a lot of good things left it can do, at least if Bush is president.)

But the strongest opposition to President Bush is in Europe. Europe has become a strange civilization. Untethered from the realism of Judeo-Christian ethics, unwilling or unable to confront the darkness in its own history, retreating instead into an escapist post-historical worldview and a dream of perpetual peace, caged within its own prodigious Eurocentrism, socialist, pacifist and (mostly) atheist, stultified by political correctness, European political thought has been hijacked and smothered by the vast quasi-utopian project of the European Union. They see the rest of the world through this peculiar lens, and want the world to treat borders as sacred, delegate sovereignty to transnational agencies, and abjure violence in favor of endless negotiation. Europeans are true believers, devotees of international law, a substitute for the religion they have lost. They are the only ones. When non-EU countries appeal to international law, they do so because they assume they are too weak to change or overturn it, or because (as for China with respect to Taiwan) it is a useful cloak for the national interest. Meanwhile, myriads of separatists, oppressed ethnic minorities, and victims of tyranny find themselves at the losing end of international law. They fight. It is among these minorities that Bush finds his global constituency.

Israel is one country that cannot possibly believe in the dream of international law. Peace-loving appeasers paved the way for millions of Jews to die in the 1930s; and if they heeded UN resolutions, their state would long since have been annihilated once again. If they had been surveyed, I suspect it woudl be another point for Bush.

And one more: what would the Iranians' preference be in a Kerry-Bush contest, if it were possible to conduct a legitimate, free survey there? Bush, all the way.

A BRIEF APOLOGIA (FOR THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION)

Tom likes what I wrote about freedom ("I agree!" his blog exclaims) but has more questions:

There's actually only one rule, and it's such a simple rule, yet it makes so little sense that many people have a hard time following it: believe that Jesus is the son of God. What does belief in Christ's divinity give you except a pass into Heaven? If there are earthly reasons for believing such a thing, they sure aren't apparent.

Well, point taken. My intellectual journey to the Christian creed (by which I mean, not how I arrived at it as a biographical matter, but how I would go about rebuilding it if challenged to make a Descartes-style doubt-everything move and then re-justify my beliefs) has a few steps: 1) the existence (and nature) of God, 2) the moral order of the world, 3) the fallen-ness of the world (from that moral order), 4) the hope of redemption... and only then 5) that in Jesus Christ God was made incarnate and suffered for our sins to bring about the atonement and redemption of the world. The first four I take to be prove-able, at any rate in a loose sense and to my own satisfaction; the fifth, though always retains the character of an intellectual gambit, a mystery, in which faith, which begins as the mundane (though strange and wonderful if you think about it) belief in patterns to render (practically indispensable) inductive reasoning legitimate, turns into an acrobat, climbing an ascending tightrope into the Light; and while I sometimes dare to follow for a little ways, I always lose my balance and sooner or later (usually sooner) fall off in one direction or another; but I've become used to the bruises from falling, and after a moment I pick myself up and begin ascending again, as opportunity permits. As one ascends higher, one sees farther looking down, one learns and understands more and more...

1) God. Cogito, ergo sum: I start, like Descartes, recognizing my own mind, its thoughts, its free will, by introspection. Next I discern object permanence, gravity, and the basic array of natural laws by induction from sensory experience; and for this, the first application of faith is required (for just because the sun has risen every day does not prove it will rise tomorrow, except inasmuch as the universe, by assumption, is law-abiding and orderly). Certain entities I encounter in the course of my sensory experience are special in that I discern behind them the working of ideas, and conclude that they are not merely physical objects but beings with minds/souls, like me; for this the second application of faith is required (for no mere deduction can distinguish with certainty true cognition in another being from the pseudo-cognition of sophisticated computers). I then discern that reason in these beings, as well as in myself (so other beings tell me) wakes and sleeps, lives and dies, is in short impermanent, and subject to, vulnerable to, the physical matter to which it is self-evidently superior and which it is able to manipulate and colonize; I discern, furthermore, that rational beings contain with him them a certain moral/aesthetic compass, which seems to point towards something, or towards Something, which stubbornly tugs in a certain direction despite changing circumstances... by a third application of faith, I conclude that the Something that rational beings are drawn towards actually exists, a certain Absolute of truth, of beauty, of right, of love, and this I call God. Tom remarks that

Even if God is omnipotent, She [a stylistic point: Tom enjoys the irony of referring to God as "She," suggesting that, despite his atheism, he is firmly convinced that God is female; for my part, I'll defer to custom and use the masculine pronoun] is still subservient to logic, or, if you don't like that phrasing, She is pure logic and cannot go against Her own nature.

No, God is not (in my view) "pure logic," that is the Stoic view; God is love.

Moral order. We humans are indelibly moral creatures, who quarrel with each other, and in the act of quarreling, by justifying ourselves, no matter how materialist our core philosophy, display an instinct that we ought to act according to certain rules. It is not all that hard to realize that the world would be a much better place if we all listened to our consciences more, and much of the suffering results from people betraying their consciences, being dishonest, or selfish, or cruel. Every civilization has legislated and enforced certain moral codes, of a limited nature: you must pay a poor man the wages you have agreed to, but no more; you must not kill, but you may hate. General obedience to these rules makes civilization possible. Christianity introduces a higher morality, pertaining not only to external actions but to moods of the heart, not limited in its demands but total. Obedience to these rules, though never individually, let alone generally, achieved to completeness, would make life a paradise, like the dreamy imaginary socialism which certain idealists once exhorted, only combined with perfect freedom.

Fallenness. Yet we cannot achieve this, and our failure is a bit more radical than simply that we don't get things right all the time: we have a perpetual urge to alienate ourselves through pride, to hate those who threaten that pride, to exploit and dominate and destroy one another even though it yields no happiness: all of this justifies the doctrine of "original sin," which is something a bit stronger than that we have the capacity to sin. An angel with a flaming swords guards the way back to Paradise. Clothes, which are highlighted in this connection in the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, are a good illustration of the radical character of original sin. Why do we wear clothes? It's not the weather. If it were, we would expect people to wear them in cold climates in winter, but, on balmy days, to cheerfully strip to the skin. No, we are ashamed for some reason to show our private parts; this shame has a stubborn, universal, irrational character. Our refusal to expose the private parts of our bodies (though we get great pleasure when we do so) has its counterpart in our refusal to expose the private parts of our minds (though at any moment a frank and confessional conversation may create a deep and lasting friendship and assuage deep loneliness and grief!)

The hope of redemption. A universal urge, weak, confused and intermittent among the broad masses of people perhaps, but articulated by the great poets again and again; individually and collectively. "We live in hope of deliverance / Hope of deliverance / Hope of deliverance from the darkness that surrounds us," sings Paul McCartney. The most relevant expression of this universal Desire for Christians, and one with extraordinary literary merit (so I'm told; I've read them only cursorily myself) is found in the Hebrew prophets. But they are not the only ones.

But why should that hope be incarnated in Jesus? One argument against it is that Jesus anticipated (so it seems) a swift world-transformation, "the Kingdom of God." Well, we're still waiting. Nonetheless, I find a sublimity and perfection in his words, in the context of the Jewish tradition expressed in the Bible, a tradition that had a lot of things right though it needed to be transcended in some respects, such as its narrow nationalism and its rule-obsessed morality. One of many deeply problematic aspects of the Incarnation is that it occurred at a particular time in history, creating problems like those Tom mentioned of the salvation of uninstructed infants. I don't claim to have answers to all of those questions. But as a practical matter it does seem to me that revelation is somehow necessary. Moral and philosophical debate without Jesus is interminable, and with Jesus, it is still interminable; but without Jesus, it leads to various forms of madness, whereas with Jesus, with his miraculous words as a focal point (which testify to age after age of their truth, needing in the end no authority to justify them other than our own experience of life) moral and philosophical debate converges to what Christians call a "mystery," as in the Creeds, which hedge the truth and protect against errors but ultimately retain their indefinite character, which do not bind, but rather loose the mind...

Does that make any sense?

ON FREEDOM

Nato remarks on his blog:

It would seem the Christian "deal" runs something like: "You have the free choice between believing in Jesus and going to heaven or not believing, and spending eternity in torment. Choose any old way you want, and no pressure."

Now, I understand that it's not docrinaire to put it that way, but it certainly seems to amount to that often. I would feel the choice was more "free" if there was no mention of reward or punishment in the Bible, and the soul presumably found out about their happy reward (or terrible punishment) at death. It's suspicious, no?

Tom quotes this and adds:

Sure sounds like coersion to me, even if it is smothered in apologetics, and topped off with a bright, red appeal to faith. As an old poet probably once said, "Coersion by any other name would still seem as pavlovian."

But freedom can't possibly mean freedom from the consequences of one's actions. You're free to jump off a cliff, but you'll still splatter on the ground at the bottom. Am I coercing you if I inform you that jumping off a cliff will cause your death? I'm just telling you the facts, and so is the Christian who warns you that sin will lead to damnation. Of course, he may be wrong about the facts, but it doesn't make sense to equate it with coercion.

I'm somewhat agnostic about the afterlife. I believe in the soul and its immortality, but I don't claim to know what things will be like after we die. To the extent that I believe in eternal punishment and reward, it's an extension of my belief (which life has often tested, and which I cannot prove) that good behavior (not that I completely understand what that means in every situation, to be sure) leads to joy on earth, while bad behavior (and pride in particular) leads to misery and alienation. Heaven and Hell are not a punishment which God voluntarily applies. A good and loving God would save everyone if He could; if he doesn't save someone, it must mean that He can't. But how can there be anything that an omnipotent God can't do? A tricky question, but one which can be answered. Can God make anything that is both white and black? Can he make a mountain exist and not exist at the same time? God is bound by the laws of logic. We are in nature, in essence, free beings. Salvation is our free embrace of God, an act which engenders the joy of Heaven. If we choose to reject Him, He cannot override our will and save us, because it violates logic: "we" are free beings, and would cease to exist if our will were overridden.

Freedom can mean a lot of different things.

I have a friend from Russia who thinks that America is not a free country. She talks about how, if you commit a crime here, you destroy your life. You'll never be able to get another decent job. She talks about credit card companies which can track you down, destroy your credit rating. Russians have two words for freedom: svoboda is civic freedom (e.g. that of non-serf subjects of the czar); volia has stronger, more emotional connotations, like our "liberty," but it has nothing to do with freedom of the press but instead conjures the wild freedom of a Cossack on the endless steppes.

Freedom may be understood as a psychological rather than a political condition. Americans have legal freedom but nothing is more common than for them to be trapped in routines, hemmed in by fears far more immediate than that of Hell: how will I pay the rent? will I get fired if I don't turn in this report on time? how can I keep my girlfriend happy so she won't leave me? what's the normal thing to do in this situation so I won't be thought weird? etc. But the Christian (and here I'm speaking more of the idea of a Christian, or of people like the apostles in the early Church, rather than your everyday American Christian) is free from such mundane cares, because for him wealth stands condemned, and fame is not sought after, he does not marry and has no family... Think of St. Francis, or St. Paul, wandering the ancient world... That is a freedom of a wonderful and radical kind, which most people cannot even conceive of.

Why can't they conceive of it? Here it's useful to compare children and adults. In the very short term, children are much freer than adults. An adult on the subway sits in his/her chair and reads, or listens to music: they are quite predictable, observing a wide range of restraints. A child, on the other hand, may run, or sing, jump, change seats, as the mood takes him. But in the medium-term the adult is much freer: he can travel far and wide, if he so chooses, and buy many different items, eat and dress as he likes, while the child is governed in all these things by the parent. Call it "discipline," or "delayed gratification," but this restraint makes freedom possible, because the adult is trusted by others, and can trust himself to carry out long-term plans and projects. So with the Christian: the restraints which he learns make a far more expansive freedom possible; thus Christians forever venture into and master new worlds, of the intellect, of geography, art, music, sculpture, and so on, while Buddhists and Muslims end up in cultural treadmills, and atheists destroy themselves...

Well, this is tapering off into mysteriousness, appropriately, since a mystery is precisely what it is. If this doesn't sound like your average Sunday-school-brand Christianity, it's not meant to: churches are hybrids, mingling the divine message incongruously with (in America) bourgeois culture. And yet the secret of the most glorious and radical freedom in the world is right there in the Bible.

BUSH AND UNEMPLOYMENT

I suggested in a post a while back that the Bush administration may, because of its close ties to business, tend to pursue policies that increase unemployment, without realizing that it's doing so; and this because a bit of unemployment is useful for business, since it makes it easier to hire workers, and makes the threat of firing more effective as a disciplinary device. I didn't have any specific policies in mind at the time, but this may be an example.

Daniel Gross (the author) cites a change in rules about how companies account for depreciation:

Depreciation is an accounting principle that recognizes the fact that if you buy something, its value declines over time. Thus, if a new printer is supposed to last for five years, a company can write off 20 percent of its value each year for five years against profits, thus lowering the tax bill.

This creates an incentive to invest in more capital, by reducing the tax bill on it, and thus, since capital and labor are substitutes, to hire fewer workers. This is not a conspiracy theory here. I think businessmen just say to themselves "What do we really want?", and they talk to their Republican politico friends, and who think, "if it's good for business, it's good for the economy," and pass it. That what's good for business is good for the economy is close to the truth, but not quite: sometimes good macroeconomic management means making things hard for business. We need a Wall Street-loving Clintonite Democrat party to offset the Main Street-loving pro-business Republican party. That would be a healthy political arena. There may even be faint signs that Kerry is moving in that direction. As Slate reports:

Kerry offered a taste of his new message Monday morning at one of his "front porch" campaign stops in Canonsburg, Penn., but he waited until the afternoon in Racine, W.V., to unveil his new stump speech in full. The new message: Go vote for Bush if you want four more years of falling wages, of Social Security surpluses being transferred to wealthy Americans in the form of tax cuts, of underfunded schools and lost jobs. But if you want a new direction, he said, vote for Kerry and Edwards.

It's a simple and obvious message, but Kerry hasn't used it before. There were other new, even more Clintonesque wrinkles, too. Kerry talked about the same issues—jobs, health care, Social Security, education—that he's talked about in the past, but he had a new context for them: how Bush's policies were taking money out of taxpayers' pockets. The deficit, the Medicare prescription drug plan that forbids bulk-price negotiation and the importation of drugs from Canada, and the "$200 billion and counting" Iraq war all "cost you money," Kerry said, by increasing the cost of government. Kerry even pushed his health-care plan as a selfish device to put more money in voters' wallets (rather than an altruistic plan to cover the uninsured), in the form of lower health-insurance premiums ($1,000, he says).

After Kerry's massive-spending convention speech, and his general flip-flopping incoherence, and in view of his charisma deficit, it's too late for Kerry to run and be elected as a New Democrat. But (assuming Bush wins) I'll be interested to see what the Democrats have to offer in 2006. Bush's big weakness is THE DEFICIT. Possible Democratic campaign line in 2006: "Bush didn't cut your taxes! A deficit is a tax on borrowing, on business investment, on share prices, on job creation. To really cut taxes is to reduce federal spending, and nothing else."

BRAVO!

Some of the Republican Convention rubbed me the wrong way. I got the nasty-nationalism vibe from it a bit too often. But I was anticipating a pleasant performance from Bush because of the following so-called gaffe, reported as follows by Sullivan.

Looking at the context of president Bush's remarks yesterday on the Today Show does not undo the weird gaffe. Here's the conversation:

LAUER: You said to me a second ago, one of the things you'll lay out in your vision for the next four years is how to go about winning the war on terror. That phrase strikes me a little bit. Do you really think we can win this war of ter--on terror? For example, in the next four years?

Pres. BUSH: I have never said we can win it in four years?

LAUER: No, I'm just saying, can we win it? Do you say that?

Pres. BUSH: I don't--I don't think we can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the--those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in part of the world, let's put it that way. I have a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand is to find them before they hurt us. And that's necessary. I'm telling you it's necessary.

The odd thing is that this really does sound like a parody of Kerry. And if Kerry had indeed said that, we would be hearing nothing else for weeks. And indeed, every time I hear the president talk extemporaneously about the war - his interview with Tim Russert last February was a classic - he does seem to have almost no conceptual grasp of what he's talking about. Back then, he seemed flummoxed by the very concept of a distinction between a war of choice and a war of necessity. Now he seems to be parroting a Council on Foreign Relations confab on the permanence of terrorism.

Bush was forced to back down from the comment later, but I thought the juxtaposition was brilliant: McCain and the rest of them at the RNC insisting "We will win" the war on terror, while Bush is moderating the concept of victory. Bush is right: to "win" a war on an abstract noun is misconceived. The "war on terror" notion was perhaps a justified bit of poetic license in 2001, but we shouldn't be prisoners of that concept. Of course the Bush campaign would attack Kerry for it, politics is politics; the voters could decide, and I think the clear statement might do better than his muddling.

But there's a deeper point: the words would have a different meaning coming from Kerry. "Creating the conditions so that those who use terror as a tool become less acceptable in part of the world" sounds so easy. It could be an excuse for cowardice. Most people who talk that language would never have the nerve to do what it takes to create those conditions, for example to knock out the world's worst tyrannies and light the torch of freedom in the world's most benighted regions, and undermine the old UN ancien regime in the process. Bush is in the rare, almost unique position, of being able to talk that kind of language with credibility, without it being a kind of hypocrisy. He understands that "creating the conditions..." is not easier than a smashing military assault on somebody; it is harder, but nobler.

His speech did not disappoint. Bush is the #1 champion of the liberal theory of history, as Michael Mandelbaum calls it, in the world today. What was a beautiful but delusional and deadly dream for Woodrow Wilson, is finally becoming reality under President Bush. Bush's long focus on domestic policy was welcome and was just what the convention needed: there had been too much talk of foreign policy, where we already know where Bush stands and where he can't really tell us where he's going to go because it depends on events outside his control. We heard his plans for the next four years. He's still guilty of "fuzzy math," but this time around less so than Kerry. It's not the platform I would have designed. Too liberal, too big-government. But this is the political spectrum paradox: both parties go to the center, and the center is defined by where the parties go. When the Democrats return to Clintonomics, Republicans will move in the libertarian direction: the imperative is to crush the moment of paleoliberal revival and force the Democrats to finish reinventing themselves.

To counter-balance the excessive nationalism and militarism of the Convention, I was pleased to hear immigration trumpeted in such a positive light. Bush spoke (bad) Spanish, Schwarzenegger emphasized his immigrant roots, as did other speakers... It's true, as the NYT points out, that Bush didn't make any mention of his immigration plan, but I think there was a signal that that's still on the agenda.