Thoughts on the third anniversary

turn towards how our responsibility today is to ensure a future of liberty and prosperity for our children—and how the unwelcome battle we wage today is painful but necessary, as were the battles against monarchy, fascism, and communism that consumed those that come before us. I don’t know that I entirely agree with Mark Helprin’s evaluation of how feckless we have been in the face of this threat, but I do agree we have erred in not speaking candidly about the what the threat actually is. It is not terrorism, which is the enemy’s weapon, not the enemy itself, but an illiberal, radical Islam which is perhaps best describe by what it is against, not for: liberty, modernity, liberalism, equality, the pursuit of happiness and of course the standard bearer of all of these things, America. Here are some excerpts of Helprin’s blistering condemnation of the flaccidity of both sides “Three Years On”:

Out of fear and confusion we have hesitated to name the enemy. We proceed as if we are fighting disparate criminals united by coincidence, rather than the vanguard of militant Islam, united by ideology, sentiment, doctrine, and practice, its partisans drawn from Morocco to the Philippines, Chechnya to the Sudan, a vast swath of the earth that, in regard to the elemental beliefs that fuel jihad, is as homogeneous as Denmark.

Too timid to admit to a clash of civilizations even as it occurs, we failed to declare the war, thus forfeiting clarity of intent and the unambiguous consent of the American people. This was a sure way, as in the Vietnam era, to divide the country and prolong the battle. …

At this point the American people, who most of the time are wiser than the experts or politicians who briefly take the helm, may already have decided to reinstall the president despite his shortcomings. If this is so, it is because Sen. Kerry's main motive power has come from those who are foolish enough to exult in the crude and baseless propaganda of a freakish Leni Riefenstahl wannabe (too heavy), and because, in what may have been his campaign's defining moment, Sen. Kerry stated that he learned a long time ago that when under attack you turn your boat toward the enemy. And yet it is clear from his record, his character, and his present policy that this is precisely what he would not do. Nor, though it is exactly what the country should do, is it at all what his most enthusiastic partisans or the base of the Democratic Party would want him to do.

He and they have adopted simultaneously two opposing propositions and embraced two opposing tendencies, which they then present to the electorate as if there is no contradiction. They do not feel acutely, as others do, the dissonance of their positions, because they truly believe in only the less martial of the two.

Although they cannot state why the American, British, Spanish, and Australian invasion of Iraq was any more or less unilateral or multilateral than France, Germany, and Belgium working to derail that invasion, or deny that they admire Britain for standing alone, unilaterally, in 1940, or that the multilateral Axis invasion of Greece was wrong, or that they themselves urge unilateral American action to stop genocide in Africa, they use these words fervently and without logic. They may believe that this is their subtlety, but it is nothing more than confusion and a stylish capitulation to the French, who unfortunately are perfectly willing to capitulate to Islamic terrorism as long as France has purchased its own safety, as of old.

Given the lack of movement in the war and poverty of choice in leadership, Americans looked to a commission. Like the senescent Ottomans we waited and waited as the seasons passed, and were presented neither with swelling armies, well defended borders, nor a string of victories. Although the bravest commissioners of said commission fought to tell us that we are indeed in a clash of civilizations, even they, appointed by their respective parties, did not state the simple unvarnished truth that for 20 years administrations both Republican and Democratic have ignored or misread the evidence concerning terrorism and must be judged negligent and culpable. ...

Neither the commission, the president, nor the Democratic nominee has a clear vision of how to fight and defend in this war. Partly this is because so many Americans do not yet feel, as some day they may, the gravity of what we are facing.

Three years on, that is where we stand: our strategy shiftless, reactive, irrelevantly grandiose; our war aims undefined; our preparations insufficient; our civil defense neglected; our polity divided into support for either a hapless and incompetent administration that in a parliamentary system would have been turned out long ago, or an opposition so used to appeasement of America's rivals, critics, and enemies that they cannot even do a credible job of pretending to be resolute.

It should depress us that the debate over how, and even whether, to fight this battle is virtually absent from the presidential race. Republicans are long on swagger, but I think Helprin is largely right that “Too timid to admit to a clash of civilizations even as it occurs, we failed to declare the war, thus forfeiting clarity of intent and the unambiguous consent of the American people.” Terror is an easy enemy, but what if we had only condemned the methods of Hitler and Stalin but left fascism and communism uncontested as ideologies?

For any anti-war thinking one must look beyond the incoherence of the Kerry camp--in a desperate struggle for political power and incapable of any sort of moral clarity, hail marying strings of hindsight critiques of tactics, but with no clue on strategy—to the isolationist likes of Pat Buchanan and Ralf Nadar. But this stasist alliance, as Virginia Postrel might describe it, has little to back their risky assessment that withdrawal will make us safer.

There is a case to be made, I suppose, that the isolationists and the likes of Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, and Michael Moore are right that American empire and American leadership is the problem—and that this is really about tactics. Stop pissing them off, swinging at hornets, and they will leave us well alone. How comforting it would be to believe that a global retreat, abandoning Israel, apologizing for Pinochet, signing the Kyoto treaty, trading our SUVs in for bicycles, and leaving the rest of the world alone to fester under tyranny is what it will take to provide freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and security for the generations that follow us.

But what alternative are we leaving the world with this strategy? Churchill noted that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried” and this simple analysis should be applied to America’s “empire”—it should be compared to the alternative. Let’s just use one metric: lives lost. Let’s grant Noam Chile, Central America, Iran in the 1950s, native Americans, whatever else he wants, and yet its hard to get the cost of American empire in terms of lives lost above 1 million. Now look at the other side of the balance sheet: Hitler’s and Imperial Japan’s WWII: 40 million dead. Stalin’s USSR: 40 million dead. Mao’s China: 40 million dead. Who wants to do the math on Hussein’s Iraq, Nasser’s Egypt, the Assad’s Syria, the Ayatollah’s Iran, the Great and the Dear Leader’s North Korea, Fidel’s Cuba, the Sandinista’s Nicaragua, and on and on? Maybe you are pissed off by globalization, global warming, and US foreign policy, but in terms of slaughter the US (even to those who think the worst of us) is kinder and gentler by two orders of magnitude at least—100 to 1.

Fareed Zakaria points out that America is hated because we are strong. I think that FAR MORE than whatever the policies of the Bush administration have done, the MAIN reason the world went from loving us to hating us in the least three years is because we went from being weak, helpless victims of reactionary radicals, to strong, liberators (for the moment at least) of 50 million people. We all fear at some level those that can crush us, not matter how gentle they may be, and that fear can turn into hate.

But Zakaria also points out that the alternative to American strength may be something worse. What if Nazi Germany or the Soviet Empire had been left unopposed? What if the fruits of Western capitalism and prosperity hadn’t invaded China, leaving it poor and hopeless?

Here’s some excerpts from Zakaria’s Foreign Policy essay: Hating America:

The wave of anti-Americanism is, of course, partly a product of the current Bush administration’s policies and, as important, its style. Support for the United States has dropped dramatically since Bush rode into town. In 2000, for example, 75 percent of Indonesians identified themselves as pro-American. Today, more than 80 percent are hostile to Uncle Sam. When asked why they dislike the United States, people in other countries consistently cite Bush and his policies. But the very depth and breadth of this phenomenon suggest that it is bigger than Bush. The term “hyperpower,” after all, was coined by the French foreign minister to describe Bill Clinton’s America, not George W. Bush’s.

Anti-Americanism’s ascendance also owes something to the geometry of power. The United States is more powerful than any country in history, and concentrated power usually means trouble. Other countries have a habit of ganging up to balance the reigning superpower. Throughout history, countries have united to defeat hegemonic powers—from the Hapsburgs to Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. ...

But an equally important force propelling anti-Americanism around the world is an ideological vacuum. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was right when he noted that the collapse of the Soviet Union also meant the collapse of the great ideological debate on how to organize economic and political life. The clash between socialism and capitalism created political debates and shaped political parties and their agendas across the world for more than a century. Capitalism’s victory left the world without an ideology of discontent, a systematic set of ideas that are critical of the world as it exists.

There is always a market for an ideology of discontent—it allows those outside the mainstream to relate to the world. These beliefs usually form in reaction to the world’s dominant reality. So the rise of capitalism and democracy over the last 200 years produced ideologies of opposition from the left (communism, socialism) and from the right (hypernationalism, fascism). Today, the dominant reality in the world is the power of the United States, currently being wielded in a particularly aggressive manner. Anti-Americanism is becoming the way people think about the world and position themselves within it. ...

Much has been written about what the United States can do to help arrest and reverse these trends. But it is worth putting the shoe on the other foot for a moment. Imagine a world without the United States as the global leader. Even short of the imaginative and intelligent scenario of chaos that British historian Niall Ferguson outlined in this magazine (see “A World Without Power,” July/August 2004), it would certainly look grim. There are many issues on which the United States is the crucial organizer of collective goods. Someone has to be concerned about terrorism and nuclear and biological proliferation. Other countries might bristle at certain U.S. policies, but would someone else really be willing to bully, threaten, cajole, and bribe countries such as Libya to renounce terror and dismantle their WMD programs? On terror, trade, AIDs, nuclear proliferation, U.N. reform, and foreign aid, U.S. leadership is indispensable.