Robert Mackey at New York Times’ The Lede has a Friday post entitled “Crisis in Syria Looks Very Different on Satellite Channels Owned by Russia and Iran.”

Well, no kidding.  It’s nice to see NYT catching up with the rest of the infosphere.  But it’s not just in Russian and Iranian media that the crisis in Syria looks different.  It’s basically everywhere outside the United States.  In the US, the news centers on what the Obama administration is doing about the crisis.  Outside the US, the news is about what the nations of Europe are doing, what the Russians are doing, what the Turks are doing, what the Arab League and the OIC are doing, what alarms the Russians about Western policies (see here for a more explicit, populist-level view), how the region is reacting to the crisis, and which nations – Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, the other Persian Gulf nations, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel – might be sucked into an armed confrontation between Russia and the West in Syria.

In American news coverage, Russia is seen as the spoiler in the UN, the bad-tempered world power that said no to an Arab-drafted peace plan backed by the US.  In other news coverage, Russia is seen as the principal military patron of Bashar al-Assad, with military advisors all over the country and a serious determination to prevent the West from regime-changing Syria out from under Russian influence.

The situation

According to Le Figaro on Tuesday, Russian military “advisors” are “omnipresent” in Syria. Besides reportedly sending S-300 anti-air missile systems to Damascus and agreeing to deliver a new batch of military aircraft, the Russians this week celebrated the reopening of a Cold War-era intelligence listening post on Mount Qassioun, the summit that dominates Damascus from the northwest.  The Russians appear increasingly dug in.

Russian advisors are also laboring to reorganize the Baath Party and arrange talks with members of the Syrian resistance.  They are making their own contacts with Arab and Islamic organizations, seeking to dilute the solidarity of the West with Arab leaders on the Syrian problem.  In a phone discussion with Nicolas Sarkozy this week, Dmitry Medvedev warned France not to use a coalition of the willing to take unilateral action in Syria.  France – not the United States – was the Perm-5 nation that inaugurated the “friends of the Syrian people” effort immediately after the Russian and Chinese vetoes in the UN on 4 February.  (Tunisia has reportedly agreed to host the first gathering of this coalition.)

On Thursday, Russia’s vice-minister of defense, Anatoly Antonov, was quoted as saying on Russian television that Russian military personnel are deployed in various sites around Syria.  (See here as well.)  This is the first high-level confirmation of such an extensive Russian presence, and it is obviously not a random comment.  The Russians are anxious to have it understood that if a Western-Arab coalition fires on Syria, it will hit Russians.  In Antonov’s words, Russia “cannot remain indifferent.”

Russian preparations

Is Russia preparing to actually do anything militarily?  She seems to be preparing to defend herself against the West and its allies, and indeed, to hold parts of the West (and perhaps Japan) at risk.  On Thursday, the Russians announced that a new Voronezh long-range missile-defense radar will go operational near St. Petersburg this month.   Along with the Voronezh radar operating near the Kaliningrad enclave on the Baltic (since November 2011), the radar in St. Petersburg will provide coverage of much of the western and polar-northern approaches to Russia.  This is one is a series of precautions, which also involve troop movements in the Southern Military District (facing the Black Sea and Caucasus), defensive exercises, and patrols.

One such patrol reportedly occurred in the Far East on Wednesday, when a flight of two Tu-95 Bear bombers, two Su-24 Fencer jets (outfitted for reconnaissance), and one A-50 Mainstay AWACS made a close approach to the airspace of northern Japan.  Russian media reported this foray in detail, along with Japan’s reaction, making sure to point out that the incident marked the first time a Russian AWACS had approached Japanese airspace.  The meaning of the AWACS participation would be twofold: first, that the Russians are ready to coordinate defensive responses to Japanese or US strike-fighters, and second, that they have the capability to coordinate air battles on offense.

Looking toward the near future, the Russians are improving the Severomorsk-1 air base near the Northern Fleet headquarters on the Barents Sea.  The project will allow the base to accommodate the Tu-160 Blackjack, Russia’s long-range supersonic jet bomber, and the Tu-95 turboprop bomber.  The move will put extended support facilities  for the bombers in Russia’s remote northwestern periphery, allowing the aircraft, now based in Engels in the interior, to get to a Western- or Northern- (polar) front fight faster, and with less vulnerability over potentially hostile territory (i.e., in Europe).  The new facilities are to be operational in May 2013; they would not be a factor in a near-term dust-up over Syria, but are another indicator of Moscow’s emerging posture toward the West.

The southern border

The Russians are attending to their vulnerable southern border as well, and here, their calculations are as much about ensuring freedom of action for their own initiatives as for securing their flank.  The geography is dictatorial: the Black Sea is the path to and from Syria (and the larger Mediterranean), and to hold the Black Sea, Russia must be able to secure the Caucasus.  That means preventing Georgia from being turned against Russian purposes by an outside power.  Russia is locally strong in the Caspian Sea, on the east side of the Caucasus; it is in the Black Sea and down the center-line, south through the Caucasus, where she needs strengthen her hand.

Reporting from December and January (see links at my earlier post above) indicated that Russia was moving troops into the Southern Military District.  In late January, the Russian defense minister announced the deployment of additional special forces (Spetsnaz) troops to Stavropol and Kislovodsk, which lie in the Caucasus close to the border with Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (see map).

The Caucasus

The additional troops in the Southern Military District are unlikely to be used in Syria.  Their new location is inconvenient for that; it would be easier to airlift them to Syria from better furnished logistics hubs.  But the location is ideal for intervening quickly to take over Georgia, and thereby prevent the US from using Georgian territory, as well as establishing an uninterrupted line of military communication from Russia to Armenia, where the Russians already have a military outpost.  Controlling the territory down to Armenia would put neighboring Azerbaijan – America’s other budding ally in the Caucasus – between Russian-held territory in the west and Russian forces in the Caspian Sea to the east.

This fight would involve “internal lines of communication” for Russia, and her preparations would not necessarily all be visible from outside the region.  Air support, in particular, can be provided without visible pre-staging.

Meanwhile, Russia wants to hold the high card in the Black Sea to the extent possible, and to that end, has just – at the end of January – begun conducting strategic bomber patrols over the Black Sea.

The weather is immobilizing ships in the Black Sea at the moment, so naval manifestations from Russia are not to be expected.  There has been a noteworthy change in the Med, however.  The Admiral Kuznetsov carrier task force exited the Med at the beginning of February, and the Amur-class floating repair ship PM-56, which had been in Tartus, Syria, returned to homeport in the Black Sea on 31 January.  But a Russian naval tanker, the Ivan Bubnov, remained in the Med when the carrier task force left.

Bubnov was north of Morocco heading east on 1 February; the tanker may well spend little time in Syria, because its presence gives the Russian navy a mobile refueling capability that is not dependent on Syria.  Keeping Bubnov in the Med means the Russians intend to bring warships back as necessary, and be able to operate without a geographic tether.  (For the time being, Bubnov can take on additional fuel in most Mediterranean ports.  If tensions increased, the options could include Morocco, Algeria, Montenegro, and possibly Malta or Cyprus.)

Scope of the worst case?

It is inaccurate to underestimate or dismiss Russia.  She is neither inert nor a non-factor in the Syria crisis – and she doesn’t need to be able to “defeat” the US or NATO in a confrontation, she just has to make the cost of a confrontation too high.  I believe Russia is sending every signal she can think of to discourage the West from mounting a military operation.  The Russians don’t want to have to fight.  In Syria, that will mean breaking the already-fragile conventions holding the regional status quo together.

But they are warning in multiple ways that they will fight if they have to.  If that actually happens, the calculation will be that the NATO nations will not choose to bring their superior force to bear, and break a military defense of Syria that is backed and shielded by Russia.  Before counting Russia out, consider these questions.

1.  Can Russia airlift a tailored, small- to medium-size force to Syria?  Yes.

2.  Can Russia overrun Georgia and force concessions on the use of Georgian territory?  Yes.

3.  Can Russia deliver large weapon systems to Syria by ship?  Yes.

4.  Can Russia hold all shipping at risk in the Black Sea?  Yes.

5.  Can Russia shut down NATO’s northern logistic pipeline into Afghanistan?  Yes.

Russia has all these capabilities.  The relevant questions of power and will would be these:

1.  Would NATO actively prevent Russian warships, or cargo ships escorted by warships, from getting to Syria?  NATO could, but the question is whether we would.

2.  Would NATO oppose Russia directly and with force, if she overran Georgia?  We could.  Would we?

3.  Would NATO threaten to shoot down Russian aircraft airlifting troops and equipment to Syria?  We could.  Would we?

4.  If NATO were faced with losing Russian cooperation on the northern logistics route to Afghanistan, would the NATO nations be prepared to accept that as a cost of enforcing a solution on Russia in Syria?

It is not certain how these questions would be answered, and that’s where Russia’s dilemma lies.  I do not by any means assess that Russia is ready to launch a campaign today.  But I do assess that the West has not taken seriously Russia’s fundamental objection to seeing Syria regime-changed by an Arab coalition whose principal outside patron is not Russia.  The problem for Russia is not so much that Assad has to be replaced as that the Western powers propose to do it in conjunction with the Arab League, an arrangement that diminishes Russia’s influence on the process while opening a door for state-Islamist radicals.  If Syria is to be given a new regime through an Arab partnership, Russia wants to be in the lead.

The strategic issue for Russia here is not merely the narrow concern about having a base in the Med.  It is the approach, ever closer to Russia, of a Western-backed “tectonic shift” – Medvedev’s expression for the Arab Spring – that keeps opening political doors to the Muslim Brotherhood.  If common cause is going to be made with the Muslim Brotherhood, Russia will do it, selectively, and for her own purposes.  She will resist having Muslim Brotherhood-led or -influenced regimes inflicted on her near abroad by the West.

Libya was a different story: always an outlier in numerous ways, and in any case having old and geographically obvious ties to the major economic powers of Europe.  It was not a direct blow to Russia for the West to handle Libya in the peculiar, indeterminate manner chosen by France, the UK, and the US.  But Syria is different.  What happens in Syria will affect everything for 2,000 miles around on three continents.  Russia can’t let Syria be handled as Libya has been.  Neither can Turkey, for that matter, which is why the Turks have been eager to take the Syrian resistance under their wing, and keep coming up with new proposals for talks and coalition building.

Failures of US policy

The bottom line, however, is that the US could handle the whole Syria issue differently.  What is missing in this saga is American leadership, on traditional American principles.  The outcome in Syria is not solely about a revolution against a terrible dictator.  It has repercussions for the power relationships and security arrangements of everyone in the region.  If there is no great power seeking to foster a good outcome for the Syrian people, while also balancing the concerns of other interested parties, then there will be no balance:  there will only be a back-and-forth scramble in which the chief victims are the Syrian people.

The back-and-forth scramble is what we are seeing.  It is not strategically sound to simply back one faction in a situation like this, on the narrow basis of ideology, but that is what the Obama administration has done.  Instead of taking leadership, it has backed a plan Russia has good reason to find inimical and dangerous.

The US should be concerned about the danger as well – but instead, the Obama administration is seeking reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, backing it in Syria (see here as well), and proposing to fund and treat with the terrorist group Hamas.  The Russians are justified in being worried that the US shows little discrimination in our choice of clients and protégés in the region.  Whether the reason is ideological sympathy or ideological naïveté, the US administration’s affinity for the most radical, repressive, Islamo-statist elements in the Islamic world cannot be a basis for strategically responsible uses of power.

The Obama administration showed clearly during the Libya operation that it was committed to not using US power to achieve decisive political outcomes.  Yet US power is the element most badly needed in the situation in Syria.  The feat needed in Syria is one to which only America, up to now, has been suited: acknowledging the regional implications of any Syrian outcome; bringing Russia into a group effort; and yet also bringing an end to the Assad regime on terms favorable for the Syrian people, and acceptable to the Arab world, the West, and Russia.

Perhaps, in the weeks ahead, another nation will find a way to fill that role.  France may shift her focus: from dismissing Russia and setting up a separate coalition, to trying to engage Russia.  Turkey may be able to broker a group effort in which Russia gets a role.

Russian intransigence is marginally more likely to win out; I don’t think France and the UK are really stupid enough to provoke an armed standoff with Russia, even if the US is.  But we are in uncharted territory, and that assessment may be wrong.

It’s not as great as Obama and his supporters have suggested, for the world to be free of US power, exercised with purpose and clarity.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

“Drain the Jacuzzi!”

“This government isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed.”

“We don’t want an economy built to last, we want an economy built to grow.”

“This is Obama’s Washington.”

I wonder, however, if one of the points she hammered throughout the speech really registered with her audience.  Her signature line in this speech was “The door is open.”  She meant that political conditions are becoming conducive to a renewed commitment to small government and liberty.  People’s mindsets are changing.  We are not governed by the “rules” of political seasons past; the door is open to choosing our candidates and charting our nation’s future on a different basis.  The door is open to not accepting a continuation of the false compromises of previous decades.

(As I go to press, I see that Tina Korbe picked up on this theme.)

I have referred to those false compromises – “compromises” in which the conservative, small-government side gave up virtually everything – as the “old consensus.”  I see it losing, bit by bit, in this primary season.  People are no longer obediently making their political choices within the parameters defined for them by the professional political class.

This doesn’t mean that the voters have ideal candidates with whom to make their statement against the old consensus.  Santorum and Gingrich both have their drawbacks, as Paul always has.  But a critical mass of voters has recognized that Romney is the old consensus, and they are rejecting it.  The CPAC vote was remarkable for Romney’s 38% — because it wasn’t bigger, because Santorum got 31%, and even Gingrich, in a conclave of the politically connected, got 15%.

Everyone outpolled Ron Paul at CPAC, even though he has regularly won the CPAC vote in the past.  This signals a change in the mindset of politically active conservatives – not merely a new perspective that it’s overwhelmingly important to defeat Obama, but a perspective that the core of the conservative movement is shifting, and we need a serious mainstream candidate because it is a life-or-death matter to be effective in the political process.

That obviously doesn’t mean the CPAC voters think we need a “moderate,” leadership- and media-approved candidate.  If it did, they would have gone for Romney, rather than voting 46% for the mainstream candidates who are not Romney – and who are perceived, in many if not all cases correctly, as less satisfied with and enthusiastically “managerial” about the matter of big government.

But the point to take away is that voter sentiment, as it relates to the meaning of different candidates and the basis of government, is changing.

And that, I think, is about half the reason why Sarah Palin didn’t throw her hat in the ring for this campaign cycle.  Her evaluation of political conditions is remarkably accurate and prescient:  she saw, long before most of the voters did, that the game of expectations itself needed to change, and that only we could do it.

What strategic value was there for Palin in participating in the Cynical Media Slime-fest and All-Out Kick-em-in-the-Nads, mud-slinging, business-as-usual, expectations-on-autopilot primary season?

Six or eight months ago, the sea change in the voters’ sentiments and propensities might have been foreseeable, but it hadn’t happened yet.  Those who think Palin could have won lots of primaries on the basis of pre-primary voter sentiments are wrong, I think.  After all, the business-as-usual approach – Karl Rove tells everyone how bad a candidate is, the media magnify his or her every quirk or mistake, the media and some (not all) of the other candidates pile on with allegations that range from hostile spin to outright falsehood – has so far felled our most conservative candidates.

But in the process, the voters have been changing.  That’s what Palin saw before others did.  Do I think she is counting the days to a brokered convention?  No.  There is no one who could reasonably adopt that as a “plan.”  She won’t run this year; that’s my rational assessment as well as my gut feeling.  (I could of course be wrong, although I think some big conditions will have to change more for that to be the case.)

But if she does run, it will not be because she has changed, but because we have.  There are political conditions in which she could run successfully, and conditions in which she couldn’t.  The latter have constituted our political environment up until the last couple of months.

If the conditions are changing now, I believe that is largely because voters are having to wise up to the flaws in our own thinking by going through this ugly spectacle.  We already knew that the media have no intention of giving our candidates a fair shake, and that many in the GOP leadership want to submarine the small-government conservatives.   What many voters didn’t understand is that if we want to select leaders of character, we have to graduate from high school, and overlook the vicissitudes of “presentation” that sometimes make good people look like buffoons to those who see without humility, mercy, or discrimination.  We have to see with better eyes.  We have to think independently of the jeers embedded in the media narrative.  We have to be wiser citizens, placing in political leadership only the hope that is appropriate to free men and women.

We can’t have a candidate who sounds like Mitt Romney, but will lead the way a small-government conservative would.  That’s not an option.  What we’re doing in this primary season is coming to grips with that reality.  I think Palin knew instinctively that we would have to, before it would make sense for her to jump back into the electoral fray.

But, as I said, I think that’s only about half the explanation.  The other half is that Palin is an evangelical Christian.  She believes God has a plan for her life, and that He gives her a certainty in her spirit about the big choices she has to make.  I suspect she has had a peaceful certainty that joining the campaign as a candidate for 2012 was not something she should do.  If she were to analyze it, she might say that God knows better than any of us how the voters’ concerns and expectations are going to change.

Meanwhile, the door is open.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Obama Retreats on Contraception

My first thought was, “Surely the Journal knows better than this.  Why would they headline this story as if Obama had, in fact, backed off on the mandate?  What are they, USA Today?”

The headline doesn’t reflect reality.

As Ed Morrissey pointed out yesterday, Obama has merely shifted the basis for the mandate.  The insurance companies – I use that term loosely – will be required to provide “free” contraception services to the insured who work for Catholic employers.  This means that the premiums paid by Catholic employers will fund contraception services.  And the overall mandate to purchase the insurance will continue.

I expected better of WSJ.  I expect the editors to recognize the significance of distinctions like this, and refrain from using headlines that bolster a counterfactual narrative.  Obama has not retreated.  He has moved laterally and reset the defenses for the same strategic position.

And in fact, he has done more than that.  I referred above to using the term “insurance companies” loosely, because Obama has just made crystal clear that “insurance” is not what we will be paying for under ObamaCare.  With actual “insurance,” the insured cannot expect to line up for “free” goodies mandated – arbitrarily, and at any time – by the government.  An insurance contract is finite and specific.  The insured pays a premium; the insurer makes defined pay-outs in the case of a contingency.  In most cases, for the average person, the contingency is a major personal setback of some kind:  an auto accident, the house burning down, being diagnosed with cancer.

If the federal government can step in and arbitrarily require a company to provide things for “free” that were previously elective, premium-based services, then it is no longer an insurance company.  We are not buying insurance from it; we are simply participating in a mandatory government program whose features can be changed at any time, regardless of what we or the “insurers” want.  There is no contract.  There are only the one-sided decisions of bureaucrats and future presidents.

This Obama move is the opposite of a retreat.  It’s a decision to reveal the future to us, and to insist on remaining on course for it.

Yet on their news pages (as opposed to the opinion pages), the mainstream media are stuck in the old mode of interpreting political events in a single dimension, as if all other things remain equal, and a rhetorical “retreat” from a president means the same thing it usually has in the past.  We see this in numerous aspects of their coverage.  They keep putting out stories in the same old narrative ruts, as if we have a business-as-usual political situation.  The president’s people say he has changed his mind on the contraception mandate; in the shallowest of political terms, that can be seen as a “retreat”; and no care is taken to frame the overriding reality that Catholic employers will be required to pay for “insurance” programs that distribute contraception to their employees.

That is not a change of heart, it’s a significant broadening of the state’s control, undertaken at the drop of a hat – and we have a huge mainstream media apparatus that simply does not frame what’s going on in realistic terms.  The clear implications of the Obama decision were widely discussed across the conservative blogosphere yesterday, and even on some MSM opinion pages.  But in their news reporting, the MSM characterized what had happened – falsely – as a retreat by the president.

Are they idiots?  Are they all “in the tank” for Obama?  It may feel good to excoriate them in these terms, but I see it differently in the case of at least some of the MSM.  There is no doubt that a significant segment of the MSM has the same peculiar worldview as Obama and his advisors, and takes care to frame everything in the terms of that worldview.  But that doesn’t necessarily explain the behavior of the entire MSM.

Please note:  I am speaking here of how “straight news” is framed in the news pages or broadcasts.  Various opinions may be expressed on the editorial pages, but it matters greatly how the MSM attempt to reflect reality, which is what we all tacitly accept they are doing in “straight news” reporting.  This reporting comes, over time, to write the narratives in our heads about what is going on in the world.  And I have never seen reality so reflexively misinterpreted in the retailing of “news.”

What I perceive is a sort of “capture”: the MSM being stuck in a retrograde narrative about American political conditions that no longer obtains.  We are not in the old political conditions today.  We have not had a federal budget for more than 1,000 days.  That’s extremely abnormal.  The 2010 election was a large-scale repudiation of the sitting president and his policies, but the new Congress is gridlocked, unable to exercise its proper role in the separation of powers.  President Obama, besides presiding over a network of executive agencies larger and more powerful than any previous president had at his disposal, is a deliberate political “divider,” constantly – constantly – making divisive appeals to one constituency and rhetorically “flaming” another.  No president has behaved in anything close to this manner since FDR in the mid-1930s.

This president is not Bill Clinton, or even Jimmy Carter; he is not Lyndon Johnson or JFK.  He and his administration have broken with America’s trademark political mindset of gradualism and respect – however grudging at times – for the people.  So why is the narrative by which his administration’s actions are explained the same one the MSM has used for decades?  Why is this administration being interpreted on the same terms as its predecessors, when its actions and perspectives, in both domestic and foreign policy, are so very different?

I’m not sure I have an answer for that.  But the outcome is consistent.  The longer we go in this presidency, the less relation MSM headlines have to reality.  If you asked a random sample of journalists at WSJ what the practical effect of Obama’s “retreat” on the contraception mandate would be, I’m betting more than 50% of them would get it right.  The Catholics are still stuck with paying for contraception services.  But the misleading headlines march on of their own accord, even at WSJ.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Who is to be congratulated for the elimination of Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and Huntsman?  The voters.  That’s right.  Sure, the candidates made some mistakes.  The media did everything possible to prejudice voters against them, and that was a crying shame.  But voters didn’t have to let the media or the contrived, somewhat artificial debate process make their decisions for them.

There is good news in all this.  First, the voters really are making the decision.  Second, the voters are starting to think for themselves.  It would have been nice for that to happen earlier, but there’s no time like the present.

Third, with the voters thinking for themselves, candidates who are focused on liberty issues are still on the ballot, and the party dialogue on those issues continues.  I know a lot of people don’t see it this way, but they’re wrong:  the most important thing the GOP can possibly do in 2012 is decide what it is and what it wants.  Self-identified “conservative” voters may be in a national majority according to the surveys, but it has been more than 20 years since we were all pulling together.

The bottom line is that the GOP is not agreed on what the problem is. We’re fighting that out right now – and it’s healthy, if annoying.  One faction says the problem is Obama; the other faction says it’s the way we now govern ourselves, which – no matter who is in charge – cannot avoid oppressing the people with regulation, debt, and crony-enrichment schemes at the people’s expense.  The latter faction is divided between those who see enough prospect for change with one of the candidates still in the race, and those who don’t.  Those who see even Gingrich and Santorum as too reflexively “big government” in their thinking are a growing voice.

The good news is that we are having the debate in a way that matters.  That is very good news.  Never underestimate the power of ideas.  They stick with people, even when it seems they haven’t, and they are the only thing that can motivate people to unite and make positive changes.

The mainstream media don’t depict it that way, of course.  They labor to depict the GOP primary season as a turkey shoot run by Keystone Kops.  But Americans have a choice as to whether they let the mainstream media distribute their opinions to them, like thematic gift baskets, and more and more Americans are choosing to just say no.

I wrote last year about Rick Perry as a candidate of the “old consensus” – my term for the modus vivendi adopted over the last 60 years by Democrats, who were increasingly taken over by progressive statists, and Republicans, who fought a rear-guard action to keep statism from getting too big and expensive.  Under the old consensus, Republicans were largely focused on the monetary and economic expense of statism, and the tacit agreement was that the right would accept as much statism as we could “afford.”  As long as we were growing economically – so this consensus went – we could afford a fairly heavy burden of statism.  Perry, I thought (and still do think), was on the Reagan end of the consensus rather than the Rockefeller end.

But what I see happening in the Republican primaries is an awakening of conservative voters to the disasters invited by the old consensus.  The loss of fiscal integrity and loss of liberty for America are products of the old consensus, and they have proceeded in lockstep: we are losing as much of the latter as we are of the former.  I believe 2012 is the year in which a critical mass of GOP voters has awoken to the reality that the old consensus is a destructive path and is in any case unsustainable.  Voting to continue down it on any basis is voting to remain on course for destruction.

I urge GOP voters not to be discouraged about this.  Ideas outlast everything else.  The idea of individual liberty and limited government cannot be killed.  America has not had a fundamental dispute over basic ideas for a very long time; we have become conditioned to the foggy stasis of bumper-sticker slogans and complacent, rarely-visited idea-sets.  It feels unsettled and strange to truly be debating the relationship of man and the state: to be breaking up those idea-sets and repudiating things supposedly bought into decades ago.  But a movement of ideas is a force of remarkable power, and one that no state power arrangement has ever ultimately withstood.  America’s burgeoning movement of ideas will not expire ignominiously.

The future of liberty on earth depends on what happens in America in the next decade.  If there is any nation on earth that can navigate peacefully back from the brink of statist implosion and loss of liberty, it is the United States. In 2012, GOP voters can rejoice in having alternatives, imperfect as they are, to a big-government statist candidate.  Voters can choose to affect the political process – and possibly the outcome in November – by casting their votes on principle.

Some words to live by as we go forward.  The president doesn’t make us, we make him.  The integrity and character of the people are paramount.  The only sure way to lose a battle is to stop fighting.  America has beaten the odds every time.  We will beat them again.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The US and EU backed an Arab League plan to transition Syria from the Assad regime to a new, popularly elected government.  The plan was proposed for UN endorsement, so that its execution would have the imprimatur of the UN and the implied weight of international approval.  The Obama administration made execution of this plan, through the UN, the focus of US policy on Syria, as did the EU and its major member states.

They brought the question to a vote in spite of the fact that the positions of Russia and China on intervening in Syria have been unchanged for months.  It was predictable that Russia and China would veto the resolution.  Indeed, it was a grave tactical error to force the confrontation.  Russia’s and China’s greatest concerns have not changed, and instead of addressing them, the Atlantic members of the Perm-5 forced a vote.

This was a confrontation that did not have to happen.  Russia’s and China’s concerns have sound elements.  Consider the issue in this light: do we really want to set a precedent in which the UN gives its stamp of approval to regime-change proposals from the Arab League?  Should the UN act as a fulcrum for regime change in this manner?  If we allow it to, what will that mean for the future?  For whom else will the UN endorse third-party plans for regime change?

The precedent in principle is one of the great problems here, and Russian and Chinese comments on the issue have consistently centered on it.  Remember that the UN did not give its stamp of approval to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which had as its objective regime-changing Saddam Hussein.  I never considered that a problem, and indeed was glad that a faulty precedent was not set then.

In 2011, the UN declined to endorse any regime-change proposal for Libya.  In approving the use of force against the Qadhafi regime, the UN’s narrow justification was protection of civilians.  That principle was strategically and operationally unsound, to be sure, but by invoking it, the US delegation and the UN avoided pushing for the bad precedent we have just demanded a vote on: having the UN endorse third-party proposals for regime change.

Frankly, Russia and China have good grounds for rejecting that proposal.  It is not safe, for any nation, for the UN to be a source of such endorsements.  The character of the UN is well known; it cannot be trusted with such a portfolio.  Neither the United States nor any nation in Europe is naturally immune to attack by this method – but the Obama administration and the EU continue to behave as if we are.

Besides the flawed principle, Russia is of course concerned about her client, Bashar al-Assad, being removed by outside agency.  But her greater concern is who the remover would be.  Russia cannot tolerate giving a Western-backed Arab League the lead in picking a new leadership for Syria – any more than Russia thought it was a good idea for Turkey’s Erdogan to pick Syria’s new leadership.  The reason is a combination of factors:  Moscow fears political-power wins for the Islamic world in the context of a fading, incoherent American power – and the peril is doubled by the fact that it’s the West actively bolstering the Arab-Muslim bloc as a regional power broker.

From the Russian perspective, this Western move is either diabolical – a means of raiding Russia’s client base without confronting Moscow directly – or colossally stupid.  China, under perceived pressure from American activism in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, also sees the move as opening doors that should be held closed: doors that will usher in new stability problems on China’s western flank.

We should be clear that Russia and China are both happy to have their own special relationships with the Arab League, and with Arab or other Muslim Middle Eastern nations individually.  They understand this as pragmatism, and have no illusions about what it means in terms of amity, goodwill, or commonality of philosophical interests.  The problem, from their perspective, is the West giving a boost on principle to a bloc that is hostile, unreliable, and potentially very exploitable by newly-empowered radical Islamists, as the “Arab Spring” spins off its thunderstorms and tornadoes.  Either the Westerners are ideological dupes, or they are playing a very deep power game.  With their passive-aggressive approach, the US and EU have chosen the path most likely to shift power relationships in negative, uncontrollable directions for everyone in Asia and much of Europe and Africa.

By operating on a set of unrealistic ideological precepts, the Obama administration has made it impossible for Russia and China to tacitly accept US leadership and extract from it the benefits they can.  The vetoes they exercised in Saturday’s vote have launched a new period in which they will make fewer and fewer bones about repudiating US leadership and pushing for alternative arrangements.

 As for Syria, France has already announced that she is pushing, in the absence of a UN resolution, for a coalition approach (emphasis added):

President Nicolas Sarkozy said France would work with its European and Arab partners to create what he called a “group of friends of the Syrian people” to apply international backing to the Arab League’s call for President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, the withdrawal of troops and a transition to democracy.

Apparently, Sarkozy is willing to dispense with American “leadership from behind,” and find a solution for Syria without the United States.  France’s approach is commonsensical and realistic, and that could be a net positive for Syria and the region.  But Russia and China have their own diplomatic channels and proposals in Syria; it is not a given that France’s initiative is the one that will carry the day.  In any case, the outcome could very well be worked out without any real input from US power.

Don’t be too quick to say, “Good riddance; France or Russia should be handling it anyway.”  If our power is so valueless that it can be dispensed with in the Eastern hemisphere, there is nothing that will prevent that region’s security problems from rapidly becoming ours.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

In early February 2011, the first such task force made a stop in Jeddah on the way to an equally unprecedented visit to the Mediterranean.  While in the Med – as anti-regime fervor caught fire in the Arab nations – the Iranian warships visited Latakia, Syria.  According to disclosures from a Syrian who recently fled his post with the defense ministry, the Iranian warships in 2011 delivered arms to the Assad regime.

There is no public information on whether the current task force will go north through the Suez Canal.  In 2011, Iran announced the Suez passage of the first task force before the ships arrived in Port Suez on the Red Sea.

One of the noteworthy aspects of last year’s visit was that it occurred in the same time period as the visit in Jeddah of the French aircraft carrier, FS Charles de Gaulle.

This year’s deployment occurs in conjunction with a fresh Iranian naval exercise in the Strait of Hormuz.  It also occurs in the immediate wake of a speech in which Ayatollah Khamenei announced that Iran would “support and help any nations, any groups fighting against the Zionist regime across the world.” Characterizing Israel as “a true cancer tumor,” Khamenei declared:

The Zionist regime … should be cut off.  And it definitely will be cut off.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, doing his bit earlier this week to support America’s and Israel’s strategic interests, announced his suspicion that

… there was a ”strong likelihood” of Israel launching a unilateral strike against Iranian nuclear facilities in ”April, May or June.”

The helpful nature of this disclosure can hardly be overstated.  It keeps Iran on perpetual alert and tips Israel’s hand even if the Israelis are not planning a strike for the particular timeframe indicated.  I’m not sure what the Obama administration thinks it’s accomplishing with these incessant hand-wringing references to what Israel might be about to do – there are a couple of possibilities, which I have discussed before.  But the most probable consequence is Iran wanting badly to inflict another “intifada” on Israel, and keep her preoccupied with self-defense.

Outcomes and new power relationships are still in flux in the region, a year on from the Hezbollah takeover of the Lebanese government and the eruption in Tunisia that launched the “Arab Spring.”  Putting another naval task force in the northern Red Sea is an Iranian move intended to impress the region, and establish a presence and freedom of action.  It may also be intended pragmatically, like last year’s deployment, to deliver arms somewhere.  Iranian commercial ships may get stopped, but warships probably won’t.

Meanwhile, the exercise in the Strait of Hormuz does more than merely send political signals.  It provides training for the Iranian sailors – something they always need – and it begins to establish a pattern of more frequent exercises.  In the future, assuming that that pattern continues, it will be harder for the US and other navies to distinguish an exercise from a set-up for a real operation.

It is interesting to note that the Iranian warships have arrived in Jeddah just as the Russian carrier task force has departed the Med.  The RFS Admiral Kuznetsov and escorts entered the Atlantic, reportedly for the return transit to their homeports, on 3 February.  Kuznetsov visited Syria several times in December and January.  If the Iranian warships are headed for Syria – and that is not established yet – it is a good question whether any other navy in the Med would attempt to intercept them.  The navies of France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Israel have the capability to; the question is whether they would. A Russian arms carrier was allowed to deliver weapons to Syria last month.

The region is shifting away from the condition of relative stability it inhabited as little as two years ago.  Some things mean more now than they once would have, and some mean less.  It went over most Americans’ heads, for example, that the homicidal soccer melee in Egypt on Wednesday occurred in Port Said, the entry point to the Suez Canal on the Mediterranean side.  Additional follow-on violence has been seen in Port Suez, the southern access point on the Red Sea side of the canal.  A crowd of at least 3,000 besieged the governorate security-force headquarters there on Friday, and had to be fought back by security personnel, with two protesters being killed.

The Egyptian revolution in early 2011 saw long-running protests in Suez, organized by the labor unions that work the port facilities.  National authorities have assured the world that the canal will be kept safe, but the latest rounds of violence have hit the canal’s northern and southern access points within the space of 48 hours.  The interim regime’s ability to secure the canal without a fight, or without disruption of service, is not guaranteed.

In the fluctuating conditions of the Middle East, it is not clear what reaction Iran’s naval ventures will get.  Last year there was a US aircraft carrier in the immediate vicinity when the Iranian warships went through the Red Sea and Eastern Med.  This year there is not.  The US naval presence is relatively distant from the Eastern Med: two carriers in the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea area; a BMD cruiser (USS Vella Gulf, CG-72) currently in the Black Sea; a couple of destroyers on antipiracy patrol off Somalia.  We do not now maintain a deterrent, sea-control naval presence in the Med.

Would the nations of the region shrug off the Iranian naval deployment if it went further than Jeddah?  Do those nations – Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel – see a need to decide on a “post-American” posture on this matter now?  We don’t know yet.  The warships may turn around in the Red Sea this time.  But that day is coming.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

This primary season is a fight for the character of the GOP.  The fight is not the perennial standoff between “social cons” and “fiscal cons”; it is a long-postponed dispute over the size and charter of government, and how the GOP will approach it.  It is the most basic possible dispute over ideas about man and the state and their consequences.  It’s also a dispute only the Republican Party could have.  The Democratic Party does not have such a diversity of viewpoint, at least not in any politically consequential way.  The decision about whether America will continue on a fiscally unsustainable path of ever-growing statism comes down to the GOP’s fight with itself.

The Romney wing represents the attitude that America is really OK with the size of government we have now: it just needs better management and some tweaking on the margins.  The Romney wing does not by any means have a class-hostile, socialist vision for the future.  It has no intention of interfering with the citizens’ intellectual liberties, and its view of managerial government is not predicated on the idea that the people need to be coerced (or “nudged”) into collectivist life choices.  It simply sees the existing size of government as compatible with a free-enough life, in the sense that we don’t need to push for significant changes.

The other wing – the one that has been getting behind a different candidate every few weeks – believes precisely that America is not OK with the size of government we have now.  Its main point is that our fiscal and economic problems, and many of our social ones, result directly from the size and interventionist activities of government.  The size of government is the problem – already, today – and if it isn’t fixed, America literally cannot survive as a republic with the intellectual and lifestyle liberties we have enjoyed up to now.

Many in the GOP’s “Not OK” wing have perceived government to be out of control for some time.  But the shock administered by the Obama administration gave the most direct impetus to the Tea Party movement, because it brought home to many Americans how vulnerable we had already become to executive overreach.

For this wing of the GOP, it isn’t enough to put a Republican in charge of the sprawling, momentum-driven executive.  The mere existence of such a gigantic apparat is an already-proven threat to liberty.  A Democrat could be reelected to head it at any time, and even with a Republican in charge, the civil-service army would continue in obscurity to pursue regulatory and money-spending charters issued years or decades ago.  The failure of Congress to pass a budget for over 1,000 days has suspended the legislature’s principal hammer over the executive’s freedom to do what it wants.  As long as government limps along from month to month, on continuing resolutions that are mainly about constituency-tending fights in the House and Senate, Congress cannot gather its will to bargain seriously with the executive over spending priorities.

For the “Not OK” wing of the GOP, what is essential in 2012 is repudiating government on this model.  Nothing is more important to America’s future than that.  The different wings of the GOP have differing views of what constitutes “realism”:  the “America is OK” wing views it as unrealistic to focus on something other than putting up the candidate whom they feel will appeal to the most voters.  The “Not OK” wing sees that as an unrealistic perspective on the current situation.  If government is not reined in – put through an effective bankruptcy proceeding, with its assets sold off and its charter reorganized – then nothing else will matter.

Who is right?  While I am with the “Not OK” wing philosophically, I don’t think it would be the end of America as we know it if Mitt Romney were elected.  But I do believe it would be a grave strategic error for the Republican Party to endorse him early, and silence intra-party dissent as if he represents what America really needs.  A Romney presidency would be no more than a hiatus in deliberately using the state as a steamroller for ideological purposes.  That would be better than 4 more years of Obama, but from the perspective of getting America on a different path, it’s not good enough.

The GOP needs this fight over philosophy of government.  What has to be established in the 2012 primary season is that the small-government vote matters.  If that is not established, the GOP itself will matter little.  Its difference from the Democratic Party will not be sufficient to attract (or keep) membership.

I believe Palin has a strategic view of America’s future that looks beyond the 2012 election itself.  The most important thing now is that the small-government perspective continue to have a chance to express itself on its terms.  If it is silenced in electoral politics, there will be no hope of changing America’s path.  And the only way for it to have a voice is for this primary season to continue on a competitive basis.  That is the mechanism through which the voice of either wing of the party matters to the industry of politics.  That’s where the noise has to be made.

Palin is right.  This is an incredibly “political” year, more so than any year I can remember other than maybe 1979.  Americans are more engaged in political ideas than I have ever seen them.  Obama’s poll numbers aren’t good, but perhaps more importantly, those numbers and others on GOP candidates keep shifting.  People’s choices haven’t been set in stone.  They’re not sure what’s going on, they’re still trying to find a candidate who says what they’re waiting to hear, and they haven’t made up their minds.  The media will do what they’re going to do, but the people are having a separate dialogue with themselves, and it isn’t over.

I believe the GOP would be out of step with the remarkable nature of this year to crown a big-government-as-usual candidate early, on the theory that we need to damp down philosophical debate and concentrate on “campaigning” as early as possible before November.  The campaigning is what is annoying the living bejeebers out of the voters; it’s the philosophical debate that matters this year.  Shutting it down would be a tactical as well as a strategic error.  The only way to force Romney to the right is to keep the primary season competitive.  It’s also the way to keep quality attention on the most important debate America has had on the nature of government since 1860.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The reason Romney hasn’t had that much real political success is that he doesn’t have much in the way of a political philosophy.  When political conditions are set for him by outside agency, he’s an effective manager.  His admirable record at Bain, and his achievement in organizing a faltering Olympics for success, attest to that.  But his record as governor of Massachusetts indicates that in a political role, he accepts existing conditions as given, and seeks merely to optimize certain narrow priorities within them.

He is not committed to political principles, but to management.  The two things are different, and one of the worst mistakes Republicans make is to imagine that management trumps political principle.  In fact, the management focus knuckles under repeatedly to political pressure (see Romney in Massachusetts, Schwarzenegger in California, and generations of big businesses facing political activists).  Only philosophical commitment, based on irreducible and non-negotiable ideas, can stand – or prevail – against the assault of demagogic-statist political themes.

It is clear from his passage on “the very poor, the very rich,” etc, that Romney is operating on the vague, complacent mindset conventionalized by left-trending American politics over the last 80 years: that government must “help” certain demographics, while rebuking others; and that no amount of evidence will induce us to change our definition of “help,” or our assessment of the need for it.

What that means in practice is a “cycle of poverty” welfare regime for the very poor; a symbiotic relationship for government with the very rich; a selective dismissal of the impact of government regulation and taxes on our economic conditions; and an incessant, increasingly expensive use of the middle class as a political football.

Those are the factors that have created our current, untenable situation.  Its greatest impact is – as always – on the poorest among us.  The poor have less opportunity today than they did as little as 40 years ago to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” through enterprise and investment as opposed to narrowly-defined “education” and “jobs.”  And the principal reason is that regulation has them surrounded.  It has suppressed job opportunities, made it harder to set up in small business or as an independent contractor, and jeopardized saving by increasing the prices of the goods and services needed for survival.

Impoverishing the middle class with taxation and job-killing regulation hits the poor even harder than it does the middle class.  The middle class is what ultimately employs the poor, by exercising market demand; if it has less purchasing power, the poor lose jobs and business opportunities.  Forcing the price of goods and services up with regulation also hits the poor harder than it hits anyone else.  Policies that seek to suppress the industries and commercial activities disliked by activists hit the poor harder than anyone else.

Government favoritism, toward unions and big business alike, hits the poor harder than anyone else, because it is based on favoring the already connected, and preventing independent “upstarts” – frequently the poor – from competing with them.  Besides distorting markets and costing everyone more in price terms, favoritism also creates a public debt burden, which hits the poor again by adding to the economic discouragement of the middle class.

A separate but intertwined aspect of this issue is the one Newt Gingrich has spoken passionately about:  the debilitating and demoralizing effect on the poor of the very programs that, in Romney’s formulation, keep them “taken care of.”

I truly don’t think Romney means to be cavalier about the poor.  But his wording indicates that his first political instinct is managerial rather than liberty-promoting.  The two postures pull in different directions.  Governments are perennially inclined to try to manage their people.  They don’t naturally respect their people’s liberties and dignity; they have to be ordered to, and kept under constant surveillance and rebuke.  Romney is not the man to do that.  He appears to see the poor, like a lot of other things, as a managerial problem for government.

In the present case, respect for the people would entail acknowledging and revising policies that are socially destructive, and seeing whoever is poor at a given time principally as a “middle-class in waiting,” in need of liberty and opportunity.  It is still possible to offer public assistance without maximizing the disincentives thrown up by government to enterprise and independence for the poor.  The key is to avoid the deadly idea that assistance programs render the poor “taken care of,” as if the poor are a bill coming due.  The poor are people – the source of all creativity and wealth – who will largely respond to and make the most of the same incentives as the middle class and the rich.  America is, if nothing else, a demonstration of the truth of that maxim.

Romney consistently comes off as having an old-school interventionist approach to government.  He also seems to have missed the right’s whole welfare-vs.-enterprise discussion of the 1980s and ‘90s.  He is clearly not someone who would say that for the good of the people and in the interest of our most precious, most empowering commodity – liberty – government needs to stop doing whole categories of things.  Romney doesn’t reflexively or naturally formulate any comment on policy in small-government terms.

It is not, in fact, conservative to think of the poor as “taken care of” by the destructive, self-perpetuating welfare regime in the United States.  Far better for the poor to have the kind of opportunity, and the buying power of their earnings and savings, that they do not have now, but would have if the load of regulatory overreach, predatory taxation, and constituency-tending-by-overspending were lifted on Americans as a whole.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Will Weatherford, Florida state representative and spokesman for the Romney campaign in Florida, confirmed this weekend that the Republican-controlled Florida legislature is about to approve a redistricting proposal that will make it much harder for Allen West to be reelected.  Legal Insurrection points out the obvious:

Weatherford tried to hide behind a need to comply with [state and] federal law, but that’s obviously a dodge since there could have been many ways to comply yet not sacrifice West.

To point out some more “obvious,” this is a Republican-controlled legislature.  Did the Republicans allow other GOP-held Congressional seats to be severely jeopardized by the new district lines?  Apparently, only one.  An analysis done for the Washington Post last week indicates that Allen West’s and Tom Rooney’s seats are the ones in the most danger.  Getting positive help from the redistricting are Republicans Dan Webster, Sandy Adams, Mario Diaz-Balart, and John Mica.

Redistricting isn’t as easy as it looks, of course.  But it is not believable that it is either a fully non-partisan process – when anyone is doing it – or that the Florida GOP leadership was neutral as to which seats were jeopardized by their plan.

One possibility is that Republican leaders thought West and Rooney were the most likely to achieve reelection in newly hostile districts.  They haven’t said that, so that’s pure speculation based on trying to put this in a positive light.

Meanwhile, who are Florida’s arguably most outspoken, conservative Republican Congressmen?  West and Rooney.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

…the premise [that “we want everything to be fair”] relies heavily on how we choose to define the word “fair” and what sort of taxes we’re talking about here. (And to be clear, I’m still sorting through some of this because it’s hardly a simple, cut and dried issue.)

I agree that it’s not a cut and dried issue, largely because it cuts across multiple unarticulated premises about human life in general, and the relation between man and the state.  I also got interesting responses from readers at both the Green Room and my home blog.  Reader KGB provided a quote from P.J. O’Rourke’s book Eat the Rich:

So if wealth is not a worldwide round-robin of purse-snatching, and if the thing that makes you rich doesn’t make me poor, why should we care about fairness at all? We shouldn’t.

Fairness is a good thing in marriage and at the day-care center.  It’s a nice little domestic virtue. But a liking for fairness is not that noble a sentiment.  Fairness doesn’t rank with charity, love, duty, or self-sacrifice.  And there’s always a tinge of self-seeking in making sure that things are fair.  Don’t you go trying to get one up on me.

At The Optimistic Conservative, reader Cousin Vinnie asks the following:

At the risk of sounding like a liberal, if you are going to have taxes of any kind, you cannot completely avoid the fairness debate. Is it fairer to tax citizens’ current income (which most folks use to get by day-to-day), their current purchases or other economic activity (which increases the cost of barely getting by as well as living high on the hog), or to tax inheritance (which people probably are not relying on for subsistence)?

The variety of responses and thoughts out there is enlightening.  It is worth thinking long and hard about, that although the Obama administration proposes to “make things fair,” we don’t have a consensus on what fairness is – in the generic – or what anyone should be doing about it.

One of the most interesting aspects of this debate is that relatively few commentators tie the Obama “fairness” argument to the political tactics of collectivist ideologues.  Those tactics were once very well known: take a word or expression that people think we all know the meaning of – justice, democracy, peace, fairness – and appropriate it for militant statist schemes that actually portend something very different.  With this kind of political bait-and-switch fraud, you can gain control over the people that they had no idea they were ceding.  This has been the method of socialists for decades.

In the current case, for example, the Obama administration wants us to focus on “taxes” as we discuss disparities between rich and poor, and to predicate the whole debate on “fairness.”  We think we know what is meant by these terms.

But given the background and the trend of sentiments expressed by Obama and those in his administration, it is entirely reasonable to assess that what is important to them is not “taxes,” specifically, but “disparities between rich and poor,” and the association of “fairness” with giving the central government a charter to intervene in those disparities.  Taxes are a specific case on which to establish a general principle: that cultivating “fairness” requires government intervention.

We are justified in opposing this approach on principle.  But we should also take care to think comprehensively about “fairness” and what that means to communal life.  The public debate today is predicated – and I mean this in a clinical, analytical way – on a kindergarten-level understanding of the concept.  We speak about fairness as if the context is that we all showed up in a kindergarten classroom, and during play time, the bigger or more aggressive kids got hold of all the good play items, and the teacher had to enforce a “redistribution” because that wasn’t “fair.”

Even when conservatives viscerally reject this idea of “fairness” as a model for adult relations, we can’t always articulate alternative ideas about fairness.  The kindergarten model comes to us naturally, early in life, and in my experience, it takes years of upbringing – moral teaching, the cultivation of attitudes and beliefs – to supplant it.  Without that upbringing, we don’t formulate a compelling alternative idea about fairness.  We just keep seeing the world as a kindergarten classroom, in which an authority figure either is or is not enforcing “fairness.”

It isn’t possible to cover the topic comprehensively in a single post, but I propose we start with considering the following questions relating to fairness, as a means of evaluating its place in life and politics.

1.  Is fairness properly cultivated as a condition or an attitude?  The adult world once had a ready answer to that question.  Children were taught that we should take care to be fair with others (the attitude), but that life – in terms of events, outcomes, and other people – wouldn’t necessarily be fair (the condition).

Is it really possible to impose a condition of fairness on the world around us?  It is unquestionably possible for each of us as an individual to behave fairly, to the extent we can manage to – fairly, that is, according to our individual consciences and what we have been taught about how to treat our fellow men.  But no matter how fair we seek to be, there will continue to be unfair outcomes, and many of them will be out of our control.

The P.J. O’Rourke quote gets at a principle of both Christianity and Judaism, which is that God’s primary interest is in the attitude with which each one of us does things.  God can cause any external condition He wants to; His highest concern is our spiritual and moral development as individuals.  The Proverbs are full of instructions to individuals to be fair-minded in various situations, but there is no attainable condition of corporate “fairness.”

The West has had a dichotomous approach, however, to the condition-versus-attitude question.  A very accessible discussion of the twin trends in Western thinking is in Balint Vazsonyi’s 1998 book America’s 30 Years War, which distinguishes outcomes-based ideas of law and human relations from those based on eternal principles for decision-making.

Vazsonyi traces the outcomes-based ideas through early law systems from Hammurabi’s to the Egyptian pharoahs’ and those of Imperial Rome, up to the Napoleonic Code and the modern variants of socialism.  Then, from the Law of Moses through the democratic ideas of ancient Greece, the republican concepts of pre-imperial Rome, the moots of the medieval Germanic tribes, and the pragmatic common-law provisions of the Anglo-Saxon heritage, Vazsonyi outlines persistent threads in the type of law that does not pretend to control outcomes, but rather chooses decision-making methods that will, as far as possible, suppress bias in favor of fair-mindedness.  Hence, for example, legislatures that face reelection often; separation of government powers; 12-person juries and courts of appeal.

(For another synoptic view of Western thinking on this and related topics, see David Gress’s substantially longer From Plato to NATO, also published in 1998.)

The “attitude” focus recognizes human relations and government as interactions in which the moral worth and choices of individuals are paramount; the “condition” focus sees society and government as systems that produce outcomes, and the systems’ mechanisms and outcomes as paramount.

 2.  Are “fairness” and “equality” synonymous?  This question has been widely discussed in America in recent years.  I think most readers have a good idea of the points of argument on this topic; e.g., is it really “fair” for one person to be paid the same as another person who isn’t doing as good a job?  If numerical equality defines fairness, then what about the fact that some people have IQs of 86 and others have IQs of 172?  Do we redress this unfairness by some means unrelated to IQ?  Etc, etc.  This may be a less intellectually challenging question than some others – we all understand that people are different by nature – but it is remarkable how often we allow it to go unasked.

We also prize equality before the law.  But is that mainly because equality is “fair,” or is it because we understand the dangers inherent in the power of the state, and that evil can be amplified through it if the law is allowed to treat individual citizens differently for biased and invidious reasons?  We do think of equality before the law as fair, but the historically demonstrated danger of not having it – the danger to life, property, and social harmony – is the decisive consideration.

3.  In human life or government, does failing to make “fairness” the goal of a proposal inherently mean that the proposal is unfair, or will produce unfair outcomes?  An analogous question would be:  If you’re not on a weight-reduction diet, does that inherently mean that you’re fat?

Consider that men in the United States have to register with the Selective Service Board.  The purpose of this program is to ensure that the US can draft soldiers in a time of need.  It is no part of the purpose of the registration program to ensure “fairness” of any particular kind, but neither is its intention to operate “unfairly.”  Its purpose is narrow and pragmatic: register potential soldiers with the federal government.

Does that make it unfair?  Can it only be fair if those designing the program thought specifically about “fairness” and made specific provisions for it?  If they did so, what kinds of “fairness” must they have taken into consideration, in order for their program or its outcomes to be deemed “fair”?

How about traffic fines?  They are intended to discourage reckless driving.  But they may fall unfairly on the drivers of red sports cars or old clunkers, who attract more attention from the police than drivers of mid-size, late-model sedans.  Should our traffic laws take into account the unfairness of being targeted for driving a Z-Roadster?  Should lawmakers have capped the percentage of traffic fines that can be assessed on speeders driving enormous, belching 1971 Buicks?

4.  Is “unfair” being used to mean “doesn’t favor or disfavor the things I would”?  Very often, we call things “unfair” that are the result of policies we don’t agree with.  Taxation perennially falls under this heading.  It isn’t possible to tax the people without levying a burden.  That’s what government is:  overhead that you have to pay for.  We just have different ideas about the right way to do it.

As an example, I regard a percentage-based income tax that requires the government to know every last cent of a taxpayer’s income as a bad policy – because it encourages government to grow and the people to be complacent about that.  I don’t call it “unfair,” however, nor do I imagine government can function without revenue.  I dislike the policy for reasons other than conventional ideas of “fairness.”

Likewise, others may disagree with a policy of taxing retail sales, seeing that as a discouraging burden on commerce.  Others prefer not to tax real property, viewing that as government holding a hammer over our property rights.  There are many reasons to object to types of taxes, but none of them is nearly as likely to hinge on “fairness” as on policy preferences.

There is no rate or type of taxation that’s absolutely “fair” as opposed to “unfair.”  Different types and rates of taxation, and different kinds of deductions, produce different results.  Some may be good and some bad, but not necessarily fair or unfair.  The percentage-based income tax, for example, has produced an unequal tax code, along with societal acceptance of an interventionist role for government between us and what we earn.  In the private sector, taxing income is a way of taxing production, which translates into suppressing production on the margin.  Are these things “unfair” – or are they dangerous and dysfunctional, from a particular policy standpoint?

5.  Is it possible to “reason” our way into putting “fairness” in the proper perspective, without adopting an attitude about it on principle?  I would submit that it is not.  In neither our personal lives nor in politics can we behave as if our reasoning and bargaining powers will lead us to perfect situational perspectives on fairness.

If we let fairness in the door as a controlling quantity, human history suggests that we will never meet its rigorous standard.  Nothing can ever be “fair” enough, because there will always be someone who isn’t happy with the current conditions, and can point out an undeniable situational disparity of one kind or another.

The sensation of unfairness comes from deep within the human consciousness.  But it cannot be assuaged by any perfect reordering of material conditions.  Indeed, when material conditions are promptly reordered in response to our childhood complaints about unfairness, that only encourages us to base our happiness on specific material conditions – and complain more and more readily at the drop of a hat.  On the other hand, when we learn to deal with unfairness under the tutelage of good-hearted, fair-minded adults, what we come away appreciating is the trust and sense of safety their fair-mindedness engenders in us, even though things aren’t always fair.

Fairness cannot be enforced, nor unfairness requited, by the actions of the state.  Politics doesn’t lead us, through its inherent clash of competing biases, to a universal standard of fairness.  It merely enforces one set of policy ideas over another.  The tendency of all of us to treat each other unequally in one way or another (many of them utterly benign) is not itself a reason for government to intervene between us, but rather for government – which is just other people to whom we have given authority – to be limited in what it can do to us, period.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The proper purpose of taxes is not to establish a condition of “fairness.”  It’s to pay for government:  a legislature, executive, military, police, firefighting, courts, schools.  But for 100 years now, the percentage-based income tax has been shifting public dialogue on taxes steadily away from their proper purpose, and toward increasingly juvenile arguments over “fairness,” as if the tax code is like Mom, telling Makayla to share the toys and be patient because Brendan is little.

If we let taxation be about “fairness,” rather than paying for the cost of government, the two big problems we have are defining “fairness,” and defining the role of government in promoting it.  Those questions will never be settled to the satisfaction of all.

It might seem that the first question – “what is fair?” – is the more contentious one.  We discuss it incessantly, after all.  But the more fundamental question is actually what government should be doing about fairness.  The freighted nature of our discussions about fairness is largely relieved if we assign a limited, utilitarian role to government.  It doesn’t much matter what other people think is “fair,” in a lengthy list of situations, if they can’t harness the power of the armed state to enforce it on their fellow men.

Thus, I reject the whole idea that government needs to keep an eye on the citizens’ incomes, and worry about “fairness” as if the numbers are a meaningful indicator of it.  For much of American history, no government at any level actually knew how much income individual citizens had.  That was not a problem.  It didn’t need correction.  We could do away with virtually our entire tax code, if we did away with the modern idea that government needs to know what our incomes are.

We would also do away with the various ugly arguments that pit citizen against citizen in a do-loop of unrequitable resentments.  No, childless people shouldn’t have to pay proportionally more in taxes than people with children do.  No, married people with two incomes should not have to pay a “marriage penalty” in their tax bill.  Neither demographic is battening on the other with its life choices.  But however we feel about that issue, we could avoid the argument altogether, if the tax code didn’t creep around after us inquiring into our incomes and household arrangements.

Obviously, we should all obey the law as it exists today; the point here is that we once handled these issues in a way less susceptible to demagoguery, government interventionism, and social conflict – and we could do so again.  The way to discuss the tax code is not in terms of “fairness,” as if the government should be charged with using taxation to establish conditions according to a “fairness” index, but in terms of what needs paying for and how we’re going to collect revenue for that purpose.

In our pre-16th Amendment days, the federal government collected taxes on imports, liquor, and cigarettes.  It also collected, and continues to collect, fees for various kinds of concessions, such as mining, drilling for oil and gas, cutting timber, fishing, and so forth.  State and local governments collected taxes primarily on real property.  With the automation of market transactions, sales taxes have become a widespread method of collecting revenue for state and local governments.

These methods of tax collection can be pursued without knowing what anyone’s income is or what his household arrangements are.  The first question about government knowing these things is why it needs to at all.  Taxes can be collected in different ways; it is not as though government can only tax us effectively if it knows all our financial, family, and household business.  Many things that are crimes today are crimes only because government now insists on having this information about us.

I consider it a very low-payoff proposition for conservatives to continue to debate tax “fairness” as if we are in a closed-loop system with our tax code, and no alternative is imaginable.  The mechanism of automated payroll withholding has made percentage-based income taxation convenient, but not more so than automated sales taxes, or property taxes escrowed with mortgage payments.  There are alternatives.

The real question is whether our citizenry has the maturity and largeness of mind to accept the idea of government that is not chartered to be our Mom, knowing all our business and ordering us to share the toys.  Such a government would have, for starters, a lot less to do.  It would cost us less, and be less exploitable by demagogues and special interests.  That would be OK with me – I can go the rest of my life without knowing what Bill Gates’ income is, or Warren Buffett’s, or Warren Buffett’s secretary’s.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

If you get your news from the mainstream media, you probably think that China – in spite of repeatedly opposing the Western sanctions on Iran – has effectively joined the sanctions effort by cutting oil orders with the Iranians.

In the context of Beijing’s deep involvement in the Iranian oil and gas industry, however, this media narrative is not just invalid, it’s wildly, grotesquely invalid.  China is investing heavily not just in oil and gas, but in other industries in Iran, including arms manufacturing and railway development.  The investment in the oil and gas industry is robust by itself, however.  It is also geographically interesting, and financially interesting.

All aboard for evading the sanctions

The point to begin with is that China is continuing at this moment to buy large quantities of oil from Iran and have it shipped to China.  An equally salient point is that the explanation for the cut in orders in the first month of 2012 was provided by the Wall Street Journal on 6 January:   China and Iran have been negotiating a pricing dispute.  In dealing with the state oil and gas companies of China and Russia, clients and partners run into this problem all the time.  Russia has become particularly famous for stalling on purchases and deliveries during negotiations, but China does it too.  If you want to understand how prices and deliveries will be negotiated in a world ruled by the oligarchs of the Asian powers, watch how they deal today with their global partners in the oil and gas industry.

But it’s not just that China is not on board with the sanctions against Iran.  Russia, China, and India are all continuing to trade with Iran in various lines of commerce, including oil and gas, and are settling their accounts in currencies other than the US dollar (see here as well).  They are simply avoiding the mechanisms – e.g., correspondent banks – through which the US and the EU are levying sanctions.  Japan and South Korea, other major crude oil customers, have been noncommittal on sanctions; industry analysts predict they will make symbolic cuts in their orders from Iran, on the order of 10-15%, but will not cease buying entirely.

This is much bigger than the usual evasion shenanigans that come with economic sanctions.   Frankly, Western political leaders are deceiving themselves if they believe Iran’s oil industry can be set on its heels with sanctions so porous.  It is entirely possible that Iran will not have to sell any less crude than she has to offer.  Instead of going to the EU, the oil would simply go to Asian nations.

The disadvantage for Iran in this arrangement is that negotiating non-dollar purchases with Russia and China will be a freighted political activity, as opposed to a simple marketplace transaction.  This is an important, game-changing disadvantage.  The “customer” will hold the upper hand in Iran’s economic-survival transactions.  However Iran deals with that, it will change Asia for the foreseeable future, and begin to affect conditions at Asia’s juncture with Europe and Africa sooner than we imagine.  The political consequences of that shift in power relationships will be uniformly disadvantageous to the US and our allies.

Meanwhile, however, Iranian natural gas continues to flow.  Turkey, like China, is taking advantage of Iran’s precarious position to negotiate a price reduction on Iranian gas.  But Pakistan is moving ahead with Iran on a gas pipeline project that is intended to eventually transport gas to India as well.  And although the EU has sworn off Iranian crude, BP reportedly believes that natural gas from a Caspian Sea field in which Iran has a 10% interest will be exempt from the sanctions.  Iran’s gas exports will continue to be a source of hard currency – whatever hard currency now means.

The pivot-point of change

The quiescent global regime of hard currency and the effective national independence it bolsters – for anyone who can generate robust, honest trade – are already in the process of breaking down.  Trying to isolate Iran from that regime is undermining the regime itself, because Russia, China, and India are all willing to operate outside of it in dealing with Iran.  This is a reflection not only of their resistance to the US policy on Iran, but of their assessment of the West’s prospects for stability.  The perception of safety in the US dollar and the US security regime is no longer the governing “cost” factor.  The Asian giants are willing to accept the cost of what is essentially a system of politics-based barter, because their higher priority is doing things their way from a geopolitical standpoint.

At some point, other nations will probably face a choice between making tacit agreements with the Asian giants, or sticking by the heroic gestures of Washington and Brussels – whose own monetary soundness is daily less unassailable.  A quick resolution of the Iran problem would avert that choice, but such a resolution is all but impossible, even if miracles can never be assumed away entirely.  The sanctions on Iran will either be lifted without achieving their goal, or – one way or another – they will fundamentally transform the geopolitical environment of Asia.  The latter is more likely at this point.

China’s move to occupy a central position

Russia has a significant advantage in doing business with Iran:  their shared sea-link through the Caspian Sea.  But China has been laboring to arrange for advantages of her own, and, through the oil industry, has managed to establish herself – in something of a Napoleonic move – in a central position on one of the most important borders in the region:  the southern border between Iran and Iraq.

On 22 January, Michael Ledeen highlighted a little-noticed report on an agreement recently concluded between Beijing and Tehran, which will allow China to develop oilfields in western Iran.  Besides outlining the areas where the Chinese will set up infrastructure, the report claims that the agreement provides for China to give military protection to the oilfields.  This may or may not mean that the Chinese presence will include such weapon systems as anti-air missiles, but it undoubtedly covers oilfield security detachments that could be manned by the Chinese army.

China has taken little trouble to disguise her deployment of troops into the province of Gilgit-Baltistan, in northern Pakistan – it is not by any means unthinkable for her to put troops in Iran, if she can arrange to.  The location of the areas where China will operate is equally interesting.  In addition to the Persian Gulf coast – reportedly out to 8 km (5 statute miles/4 nautical miles) seaward – the Chinese will be in an area running from Ilam province up to Marivan along the border with Iraq (see map). There is an additional concession in northwestern Iran on the Caspian Sea coast.

China on Iran-Iraq border. Map of oil deposits from www.gregcroft.com. Author annotations

China is already developing oil and gas resources on the Iraqi side of the border, across from Ilam province (see map).  In late December, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) shipped the first oil to market from the Al-Ahdab field in Iraq’s Wasit province.  CNPC is also developing the Halfaya oilfield, southwest of Al-Ahdab in Maysan province (and is a participant in oilfield development in Rumaila, in Iraq’s southern tip).

Iran’s oil and gas deposits are located almost entirely on her western border.  But Iraq’s are more geographically diverse, and China’s choice in Iraq was to pursue oilfields near the southern border with Iran.  The oilfields where China operates – if Rumaila is included – lie on either side of the Iraqi approach through Basra province to the Shatt-al-Arab, where the Tigris-Euphrates empties into the Persian Gulf.  With positions commanding the Iran-Iraq border and the long-disputed Shatt-al-Arab, China could hardly have selected a more geopolitically significant area in which to establish a presence – and have a plausible reason to transship lots of huge things in big containers.  Meanwhile, of course, she gets oil out of it as well.

It would be wrong to think of this move as a precursor to conducting offensive war.  That is not Beijing’s objective.  What the Chinese have in mind is establishing an influence with both Iraq and Iran that would ensure China’s participation in resolving disputes, making new accords, and agreeing on principles for regional order.  China doesn’t want to fight the United States in the Persian Gulf, but she hopes to deter the US and NATO by claiming a Chinese stake in the targets we might have to attack, and the arrangements we might seek to undo.

What, after all, will we do about oil shipments from Iran to China?  If they are contracted by China and handled by, say, a Liberian-flagged tanker owned by an Asian or Middle Eastern nation, will we go beyond issuing warnings to actually attacking oil tankers, or punishing nations with which we have good relations?  We could ask similar questions about offshore oil rigs in Iranian waters being defended by detachments of Chinese soldiers.

The naval component

China isn’t leaving the balance of naval power in the Persian Gulf region to chance: in December 2011, the Chinese were “considering” a basing offer from the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean east of Africa, which would allow Beijing’s navy to improve infrastructure there and keep a larger naval force deployed continuously.  The Chinese have developed basing facilities at Djibouti, on the Red Sea, as well as having built the Pakistani port of Gwadar, immediately outside the Persian Gulf (and having conducted an intensifying series of live military exercises with Pakistan over the past 12 months).  The Chinese navy has conducted a number of port visits in Oman as well, since starting its antipiracy/shipping escort patrols in the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea in 2008.  The naval basing options to which China can have access have multiplied significantly in the last 3 years.

Russia too is negotiating a naval services agreement with the Seychelles, and has more naval force forward deployed right now than she has at any time since 1991.  Besides the Admiral Kuznetsov carrier task force in the Mediterranean, the Russian navy is keeping its antipiracy/escort task force in the Gulf of Aden – except when the Pacific fleet task force en route the antipiracy mission is conducting a maritime exercise with India.

It remains to be seen if either Russia or China will be able to deploy forces like reconnaissance or land-based bomber aircraft, which require the use of regional airfields.  They may or may not have the cooperation of South Asian nations in that regard.  But they will both have the Seychelles, for at least some purposes.

Again, neither nation wants to get into a fight with the US or NATO.  What they want to do is discourage the West from acting summarily on its own initiative, by putting a deterrent presence of their own in the region.  The Western nations would not have a free hand in that case, and all calculations would be different.

A watershed test of Western will

An example of what Russia and China want to be able to enforce was observed earlier this month in the Mediterranean.  Sanctions, including a prohibition on arms imports, are being enforced on Syria while the bloody Assad regime continues to slaughter its people.  With the Russian carrier task force on station – the largest aggregation of deployed naval power in the Med at the moment – Moscow conducted a significant test of the will of the US and EU.  The result was that a cargo ship carrying Russian arms was allowed to proceed to Syria, in violation of the sanctions, after giving Cypriot authorities a false assurance that its destination would not be Syria.  NATO made no attempt to intercept the arms delivery to Assad.

Russia is justified in supposing that this passivity from NATO was a result of the presence of Russian naval power.  Perhaps the decisive factor was actually the indifference of Western governments, but with this little episode, the Russians have established at the very least that naval power reinforces indifference.  That, at any rate, is the lesson they will take from it.  A similar principle can be applied in the Persian Gulf.

Western media took little notice of the Russian arms shipment to Syria, which was followed immediately by the announcement of a Russian military aircraft sale to Syria.  The Atlantic West failed this test of will, and Russia is likely to grow bolder in propping up the Assad regime.  (Note:  although Russia’s behavior is in one sense clearly immoral, it is understandable from the standpoint of Russia’s security.  The Russians cannot accept an outcome in which Turkey gets to effectively choose the new leadership of a post-Assad Syria.  Yet that is precisely the result the Obama administration is fostering.  If it is true that Erdogan is dying of cancer, Moscow will hope to keep a clamp on the status quo at least until the situation in Turkey changes.)

What about that pipeline?

Meanwhile, one other interesting development – or rather, lack of development – rounds out the evolving conditions of the post-American world.  There has long been hope for the oil pipeline being built across Oman to link the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea while bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.  The pipeline was begun in early 2009; January 2012 would seem to be just the time to inaugurate it, to the acclaim of a relieved world.  The UAE – from whose Persian Gulf coast the pipeline originates – has been promising for nearly a year that oil would start flowing through the pipeline soon.

In early January, however, unnamed sources disclosed that inauguration of the pipeline would be delayed until at least mid-2012 (see here as well).  All shareholders in the pipeline corporation reportedly declined to comment to the media – including the construction contractor for the pipeline, a subsidiary of China’s CNPC.

Why would China want to delay making the pipeline operational?  Perhaps because relief from the pressure of the Strait of Hormuz crisis would be an advantage for the US-led status quo – whereas keeping the pressure on, in the current conditions, creates incentives for the Gulf nations to seek new patronage.  Certainly China can negotiate better deals with an Iran under the gun.  Meanwhile, China’s central position as the pipeline’s contractor means that if the Hormuz crisis does come to a head, China can bargain hard with the nations under economic stress demanding to have its flow turned on.  It is not clear what’s behind the pipeline delay, but it is clear who derives advantage from it.

Americans and Europeans might recoil from an analysis like this – but readers from Vietnam or Japan probably won’t, nor will many others from the Asian-Pacific region.  This is the model of geopolitical pressure, maneuver, and intimidation on which China does business.  Russia does too, for that matter, but China has a greater advantage in stealth vis-à-vis Western knowledge and expectations.

The drama playing out across the Middle East gives us an excellent glimpse of what the world will be like without a governing hand from American power.  And if the Western nations can no longer justify using power to preserve and foster our trademark conditions of quiescent safety for national borders, commerce, travel, and intellectual exchange – instead deprecating and apologizing for any condition that has to be enforced – the world will have little use for Western leadership.  If the fate of other peoples is to be condemned to negotiate bad deals with Chinese oligarchs, from various positions of weakness, there is no advantage in being lectured by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or a parade of irritable Europeans as the iron gates swing shut.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

If the voters weren’t silly, they would understand that it has to be Mitt Romney, because, well, primary voters were silly and picked Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell over Mike Castle in Delaware, not to mention running with that goofy Sharron Angle in Nevada, and look how that turned out.  You can’t get California and you probably can’t get New York, if you’re the GOP nominee.  But you have a good shot at Pennsylvania and Ohio, Michigan and maybe even Illinois, if you’re Mitt Romney.  Newt Gingrich?  Forget it.  Gingrich can’t even win Georgia.

And the truth is, this analysis isn’t necessarily wrong.  If I had to make a bet, I’d bet that a Newt Gingrich nominated to run for the GOP in November would implode on the campaign trail.  He’d still make a better president than Obama, but his “sticking it to the media” shtick in the debates would lose its luster when he faced Obama.  He comes across as easily annoyed; the feistiness that resonates with voter sentiment in the primaries would weather time and tides poorly.  As between an irritable Gingrich and a cool, scripted Obama, I would predict without hesitation that the latter’s jokes during a debate would come off better.  All things being equal, that is.

As with the O’Donnell-Castle primary outcome in 2010, however, it’s not the voters who are silly.  They know that all things aren’t equal in 2012.  The voters who put Gingrich over the top yesterday believe that we can’t keep going down the same political path in the United States – and that that holds for Republicans at least as much as for Democrats, if not more.  Their perception is that the GOP leadership is invested in the current path of government: that it doesn’t want change; it is not committed to restoring liberty and limited government, but instead is comfortable with the growth of regulatory intrusiveness, and seeks merely to broker pragmatic accommodations to leftist activism as a sort of rear-guard action.

Considering that the GOP has been doing this for most of the last 80 years, the voters aren’t wrong.  They aren’t wrong about Mitt Romney: his record of enthusiastic accommodations to the left is a set of rusty, clanking weights tethered to the back of the Mitt-mobile.  Gingrich and Santorum both have some ‘splainin’ to do as well, but Gingrich has specifically repudiated some of his earlier faux pas (such as the snuggle-up with Nancy Pelosi on combating “global warming”).  He also speaks trenchantly on the issues that exercise the most voters:  federal debt, health care regulation, regulation in general, government intervention in the economy, illegal immigration.

It does matter to primary voters, moreover, that Gingrich “takes it to” the media by rhetorically denouncing the questions posed in the GOP debates.  Voters on the right perceive the one-sided political attitude of the media to be a significant problem for American politics.  And while I don’t get as excited as others do about Gingrich’s little rhetorical broadsides in the debates –responding with broadsides isn’t, per se, a component of leadership – this is another thing the voters aren’t wrong about.  Media bias is a problem, not only in politics but for our public life in general.  People believe a lot of things that aren’t so today because of the particular narratives favored by the major media.  The perception of public assent generated by the media’s formulations produces an environment for government taking actions that jeopardize our liberties.

Many voters are determined not to be ruled by federal executive agencies whose agendas are approved by MSNBC and the New York Times.  These voters are voting for the candidate they deem most likely to reverse America’s slide into precisely that method of government.  That they see such a candidate in Newt Gingrich speaks more loudly about the general state of the GOP than about anything else.  Voters are seeking to break the inertia and conventionalism of the Republican Party; this is, in fact, a power struggle, and one in which I would not bet against the voters.

The famous salvo from South Carolina in April 1861 precipitated a shooting war under old conditions that no longer prevail.  The Union had all the material advantage in that war, as it had the moral advantage in being determined to preserve the national union while ending slavery.

But today’s South is no longer under such a disadvantage.  A political salvo from the South is a different portent now.  Likewise, the Republican Party doesn’t hold a Union-like advantage over its members, nor is there any valid reason for our federal government to hold such an advantage over a law-abiding people.  Today’s “rebel” GOP voters in South Carolina aren’t the slave-regime old guard, they’re the abolitionists.  We need not be deceived that wanting to reverse the encroachments of the federal government, and defeat the plantation mentality in Washington, is evidence of irresponsibility or lawlessness.  The truth is closer to the opposite.

The people have one tool – the vote – by which to express the sentiment that things have to change.  In 2008, Mitt Romney didn’t look all that different from George W. Bush.  The Obama tenure has been a wake-up call that has put Romney in a new perspective: in 2012, he doesn’t look as different from Barack Obama as conservative voters would prefer.  Obama is less an outlier than the end-gamer of the same big-government principles embraced by both major parties over the past 80 years.  We have now seen with our own eyes where those principles lead, and the voters don’t want to go there.  It’s not the voters who need to wise up; it’s the Republican Party.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Romney is not a small-government, limited-government conservative.  He will not go on offense against the dangerous principles on which government is being conducted today in the United States.  This is thought by many to be behind his “electability,” but it makes him the most defensive of potential Republican candidates.

RomneyCare is only one example of Romney’s comfort with big government, but it’s an important one.  Romney has continued to defend the principle of an absolute purchase mandate, levied on anyone with an income and a pulse.  The health “insurance” purchase mandate is not like the mandate for driver’s insurance, because citizens can opt out of being drivers.  But avoiding the health-insurance purchase mandate of RomneyCare requires opting out of life (or leaving Massachusetts).

Purchase mandates are not so much a states’ prerogatives issue as an issue of the principles controlling the purpose and scope of government.  RomneyCare is wrong for Massachusetts because it’s bad government.  Of course people in Massachusetts can choose to levy such a mandate if they want, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.  It puts government in an intrusive role that not only invites but demands a spiraling level of intrusion, one that pits citizen against citizen, rent-seekers against taxpayers, and government against liberty.

The US federal government is engaged today in far too many things that promote all three of these conflicts.  Advocacy groups leverage the EPA to prevent business activities that would generate thousands of jobs.  Both unions and big businesses lobby incessantly for regulations and special laws that will ensure they don’t have to face the consequences of unprofitability.  Yet very often, the conditions that make them unprofitable are themselves produced by regulation, rather than market factors.  These sources of cost to the public purse go increasingly uncriticized; the fiscal disaster, we are told, can only be averted by taking more from the taxpayers and further modifying the taxpayers’ behavior.

Health care is, as always, a prime example of this kind of interplay.  Once the premise of public funding for health care is established, everything anyone does becomes a cost issue for the public treasury.  There are some protected categories of behavior, like those that lead to STDs and AIDS, but constituencies arise for controlling people’s eating habits and fertility, and for proclaiming everything under the sun – including the sun itself – to be a public health hazard.  The urgent necessity of controlling what people do is amplified by the centralized, spiraling cost of health-care disbursements.  Few forms of government-brokered activism are as inimical to individual liberty.

Government – not social or economic dynamics – is now the primary means of pitting citizen against citizen.  This needs to change: the scope and independence of federal agencies and the regulatory impulse need to be dramatically reined in.  We can’t afford for the federal government to continue on the premise of the last 80 years.  The basic premise must change.

This doesn’t mean that the changes need to be abrupt, but they do need to be scheduled and prosecuted with determination.  Only someone who believes that, however, will be willing to make the case, and face down the multifarious opposition to reducing the footprint of government on principle.  Reduction on principle means that government can’t come back in 10 years and start regulating again things that it was ordered not to regulate in 2013 (or tighten regulations that were loosened).  It means that the apparatus for reclaiming an over-regulatory posture won’t even be there in 10 years.

Romney is not the man who will do this.  He has coexisted comfortably with the regulatory premise throughout his public life – even during his years at Bain Capital.  He sees a need to change some regulations on the margin, but he is not an advocate of fundamentally changing the premise on which we now regulate ourselves.

Although it’s not the point of this post, I will suggest, for comparison, what a truly deregulatory posture might look like.  Besides eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, the size and charter of the EPA and other federal agencies, a key shift in principle would be requiring that Congress positively approve every new regulation.  We already have the condition in which Congress sets parameters for the regulatory charters of the various agencies – and that is what has gotten us to the current environment of wild, often incoherent overregulation.  It is a good principle to start with, that whatever forms of regulation Congress doesn’t have time to attend to directly, we don’t need anyway.

Much reduction in the footprint of regulation would flow from that.  I also like Rick Perry’s proposal to reduce the amount of time Congress spends in session.  It is shifts in principle like this that will change the basis of government.  Changing that basis is our only hope for arresting the fiscal freight train headed for the mother of all wrecks.  But Romney is not the candidate who will push for the changes we need.

That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better than Obama.  He would.  But electing Romney will mean at least four more years of playing on defense:  trying to mitigate the score being racked up by the other side, rather than playing on offense to score touchdowns for liberty and smaller government.  That’s why so many of the voters can’t get excited about Romney.  They know we need someone to lead us in a direction of fundamental change – a shift in the principle of government, back toward the limited-government idea of the Founders, plus a very big reduction in its footprint – and they know Romney won’t do that.

I would put the other candidates (with Ron Paul as an outlier) in this order, as to how much they would push for fundamental change: Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.  All three would go further than Romney would in this regard.  If any of these candidates got a Republican-controlled Congress, we could expect some amount of actual reduction in the persistent basis for regulation.

Romney’s approach would be to tinker with it on the margins.  I will vote for Romney if he’s the choice, just as I will vote for any of the other three.  But what we need is a small-government president who will go on offense.  Defense will only stave off the eventual loss.  And as we see with the Republican apathy over Romney, in politics – unlike football – defense isn’t exciting or motivational.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The administration appears to be doing what it thinks will avert one.  Military force is playing a quiet and relatively minor role.  There has been more “messaging” about force in the last few weeks than actual force activity.  The administration is also trying to discourage Israel from mounting an independent strike on Iran, by frequently advertising US concerns about that possibility.  Presumably the White House knows that this particular messaging campaign serves to keep Iran alerted.  Ultimately, there is more talk than anything else.  Military preparations, such as they are, are defensive in nature.  That includes the acceleration of missile-defense sales to the Persian Gulf nations.

Consider last week’s disclosures about the number of US troops in Kuwait and the announcement that a “second” carrier strike group had arrived in the Central Command (CENTCOM) theater.  News outlets across the nation reported these bits of information as evidence that the US is “boosting” our military presence in the Persian Gulf.  The direct implication is that we are doing this not only because of the Iranian threat but because of a concern in the White House that Israel will conduct a strike on her own (which would produce a backlash from Iran).

But we are not “boosting” our troop presence in the Gulf.  We decided last year to keep some of the troops coming out of Iraq in Kuwait, as a ready force to deal with contingencies.  As far as I can tell, the US administration has not explicitly implied in the last few days that the troops were “dispatched” to Kuwait, as if they had just recently deployed from North America.  But numerous news outlets are reporting the developments in exactly those terms.

The force of about 15,000 includes two Army brigade combat teams (BCTs) and a combat air (helicopter) brigade, all of which deployed in 2011 prior to the withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq.  We haven’t “boosted” our ground-force presence in the Persian Gulf; we have drawn it down a little less than originally advertised.  The forces in Kuwait are insufficient to mount an attack with; they might be used instead to help defend Gulf nations if Iran retaliated against sanctions or other Western actions with regional attacks.  (The original premise was being able to go back into Iraq for security operations.)

The carrier strike group situation, meanwhile, will prove out in the coming days; we may have decided to keep two strike groups on station instead of one.  One of two carriers that are currently outside the Persian Gulf – USS John C Stennis (CVN-74), which has been on station and is due to go home to the West coast, and USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70), which has just arrived from San Diego – will probably leave shortly.  A third carrier strike group, that of USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), is reportedly headed for the theater from its last port visit in Thailand, which may mean that two carriers will be within a 1-3 day transit of the Persian Gulf, even if both are not operating there continuously.

It has been far from unusual to have two carriers in CENTCOM over the past decade.  Even Pat Buchanan seems to have given up thinking it’s a harbinger of an ill-advised attack on Iran.  Two carriers are, in fact, insufficient to launch a deliberate attack on Iran – like the ground forces being retained in Kuwait.  The presence of two carriers in the theater for an extended period is evidence of a marginally heightened defensive profile.   (It also gives the president the flexibility to send one on a dash to the Eastern Mediterranean if necessary, while keeping one on station in Southwest Asia.)  The two carriers are not a signal that we are going on offense.

Notably, if we did need to apply significant force in the Eastern Med, we’d have to send assets there.  The Russians have the only aircraft carrier task force deployed in EASTMED. The US has not maintained a robust carrier presence in the Med for some years now.  (Interestingly, Britain and France are planning to jointly deploy a large naval force – including aircraft carriers – to the Med later this year.)

Meanwhile, another media narrative, about the US sending a signal of support to Israel (and pressure against Iran) at a crucial time, has just fallen apart.

The US and Israel were set to hold exercise Austere Challenge 2012 in May, followed by Exercise Juniper Cobra 2012, a missile/air-defense exercise that would place the Theater High-Altitude Defense (THAAD) system in a “defense against Iranian missiles” scenario.

The Juniper Cobra series started in 2001, and in 2009 brought the THAAD system into Israel also.  Austere Challenge is a US European Command (EUCOM) exercise series in which the command headquarters practices operating as a joint task force HQ, commanding participants among the US forces stationed or deployed in the EUCOM theater.  US reserve forces regularly deploy to Europe for the exercise, and in 2011, the US Sixth Fleet flagship, USS Mount Whitney, participated as a HQ afloat, concluding the exercise with a port visit in Haifa.

The US and Israel were planning a large-scale combination of these exercises in April-May 2012.  But reporting in the last 24 hours indicates that the exercises will not take place then.  Turkish press, quoting Israeli reporting, says that the exercises have been postponed until later in the year.  But the most recent Israeli reporting suggests the exercises have been cancelled (with budget concerns cited as the reason).

Postponement – probably to an as-yet unspecified date – is more likely.  The US gets as much out of these exercises as Israel, and has been focusing on Juniper Cobra 2012 for validating missile-defense systems and operational concepts that cannot be effectively exercised elsewhere.   (UPDATE:  the latest from the Jerusalem Post confirms that the exercises will be held later in 2012.)

But the political signal is the opposite of the one originally talked up in the infosphere.  Rather than intending to send a signal about US support for Israel, one that would put pressure on Iran, the administration is, at the very least, not concerned that canceling or delaying the exercises will inevitably send a very different signal.

I’m sure the Obama administration would characterize its political posture as one of concern that holding these exercises on schedule would be seen as provocative in an already unsettled situation.  The unspoken premise is, of course, that demonstrating US-Israeli collaboration in missile defense and military operations is provocative.

And from the perspective of Tehran, and no doubt Damascus, it presumably is.  Well-intentioned people can argue honestly over whether it is a good idea to let policy decisions be governed by what our opponents consider provocative.  “Provocative” is always the flip side of “deterrent”; the question is whether, in a given situation, one thinks like a global leader determined to deter, or like a nation that hopes to avoid the need for exertion.

Regardless, it cannot be argued that the Obama posture is anything other than defensive.  Equally defensive is the administration’s emphasis on supplying Gulf nations with air- and missile-defense systems.  These systems are of obvious interest to Iran’s neighbors, but they cannot prevent Iran from launching attacks – of any kind.  They are purely passive, entailing no preemption or active deterrence.

It has been a mistake at every turn to look for evidence of the conventional use of US power in the actions of the Obama administration.  The operations in Libya demonstrated clearly that Team Obama is determined not to use US military power to secure transformative outcomes rapidly.  Obama is prepared to let conflicts continue as long as they must in order that the outcomes be achieved by other means.  His solicitude for missile defenses in the Gulf and in Israel is a signal that he expects to approach Iran on defense.  Our overall military posture in the Gulf simply reinforces that approach.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Vivian: So you don’t actually have a billion dollars, huh?

Edward:  No, I get some of it from banks, investors…

Vivian: And you don’t make anything and you don’t build anything.

Edward: No. No.

Vivian: So what do you do with the companies once you buy them?

Edward: I sell them.

Vivian: … You sell them.

Edward: Well, l… don’t sell the whole company; I break it up into pieces… and then I sell that off; it’s worth more than the whole.

Vivian: So it’s sort of like, um, stealing cars and selling ‘em for the parts, right?

Edward: [ Exhales ] Yeah, sort of. But legal.

Edward Lewis could have added:  “… and I love being able to FIRE PEOPLE!!”  Or so the soundbite-driven understanding of all this would have it.

You’d think Romney’s opponents would know that much of the base they’re trying to appeal to hates demagoguery against business.  When a business isn’t profitable, there are good reasons why it’s better to repackage and repurpose its assets for more profitable use.  Unprofitable businesses aren’t made profitable by political bailouts; they are made dependent and unsustainable.  Businesses like Bain Capital ensure that resources are being put to the most profitable, job-creating uses, given the environment of regulation and taxes that businesses have to operate in.  There’s nothing wrong with the existence of such companies; indeed, they are a positive factor in a dynamic business climate.

But then, Romney is tin-eared himself on some significant things.  He did, in fact, say that he likes to be able to fire people if they’re not performing.  That is a stupid, politically insensitive way to word a valid requirement of a healthy economy.  People sometimes have to be fired, but it’s suspicious for someone to “like” being able to do it.  There is nothing more gratifying than an employee who does well, and in particular one who improves over time, while there is nothing that makes the average boss feel as terrible as having to fire one who simply can’t seem to measure up.

Why couldn’t Romney have said instead that businesses need to be able to fire non-performing employees, even though it’s never any fun to do that?  Apparently because that’s not the way he sees it.  His phrase about liking to be able to fire people is the one that came naturally to him.  It doesn’t mean he’s a cold-hearted jerk who loves to give people bad news, but it is a personality problem for him in political leadership.  ‘80s-era pop psychologists would have said that he is very “objective-oriented”: he resonates to the idea of the goal and the achievement, and gives short shrift to the people.

Republicans do want a better climate for business, but the more abstract, data-focused perspective of a Bain Capital graduate is not necessarily what they are looking for.  I don’t actually want a president who imagines he can boost the bottom line of US companies.  I want one who understands that government policies affect people, largely through the constraints they put on business.  And I want him to respect the rights and dignity of individual people, neither trying to bribe them with goodies nor trying to herd them into programs that he sees as financially smart.  I’m not looking for a president with an opinion on whether a whole bunch of things he isn’t in charge of can be profitable.

Bringing up Bain as an issue has also turned up the fact that Bain profited from a deal in the early 1990s involving a steel company that received a $44 million federal bailout for its pension plan.  While it is demagoguery to equate this with Bain itself receiving a federal bailout, it is still a problem for Romney.  Companies like Bain have been operating in the environment of government incentives, regulations, and bailouts for quite a while now, and Romney’s record is one of being comfortable with that.  (He endorsed the TARP bailout in 2008.)

More and more of the people are not comfortable with it.  It is well and good that Romney wants the government to get off business’s back, but it’s not OK to remove only some constraints while leaving others, and continuing to bail the whole mess out.

Sadly, Romney’s opponents have wasted a superb opportunity to talk about what they think is the proper relationship between business and government.  They have simply jumped on the demagoguery bandwagon, which frankly is cheap and annoying.  If I were crafting talking points, I would address the “liking to fire people” comment graciously – something along the lines of “I’m sure this is what Governor Romney meant to say” – and focus more on Romney’s comfort with the extent to which government regulates business, profits from regulating business, and bails business out so it can keep regulating and profiting.

One last thought.  In contrast to the bloviation-fest precipitated by the Bain Eruption, consider the cool dispatch and intelligence with which the candidates knocked down the idiotic social-issue questions posed by Stephanopoulos and Sawyer in the debate on Saturday night.  The candidates were ready to talk about those issues – irrelevant as they were – with principled specifics.

On the matter of business and government, however, it’s been all big-government complacency on one side, and all mindless demagoguery on the other.  Not a hint of a principled argument about the free market and the appropriate role of government, from the perspective of either a man-and-the-state theory, or a regulation-vs.-the-market theory.

Nothing has made clear like the last 40 months that there is no longer an American consensus on these matters.  The Obama camp knows exactly where it stands.  But the GOP candidates aren’t internally motivated and prepared to make specific cases about it, as they are about social issues.  Yet that’s what the voters are waiting to hear.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The strategic drivers

Once Iran is destabilized, the picture gets murkier from the standpoint of a great Asian power.  Either the US has a specific plan to re-stabilize Iran – which would probably reestablish a US presence there – or the Obama administration really doesn’t understand how alarming the prospect of a destabilized Iran is, and has no plan.  In either case, the potential outcome is worrisome or undesirable.  Asian leaders can’t just sit there and watch something develop without preparing for what might happen.

The question is not whether they will prepare, but what they will do.  India is an important factor, because whoever she aligns more closely with – Russia, presumably – will derive advantage from that.  But in terms of actively trying to shape the outcome in Iran, the actors with capability and history are Russia and China.  Both of them want to wield the major Asian influence over Iranian policy, and – perhaps more importantly – neither is willing to see the other gain the upper hand.

The basic conditions, which always have to be explained to Westerners, are geographic.  Iran naturally commands the Persian Gulf and anchors Southwest Asia.  She is the major power across the Caspian Sea from Russia.  Her population is vigorous and educated; she has a unifying national idea from out of the depths of history that no other nation in her immediate vicinity can claim.

Iran is a tremendous prize; neither Russia nor China is so foolish as to imagine ruling her directly, but obtaining her as a client is viewed by both as a major power-and-security move.  It would give them a foothold closer to the “Great Crossroads” of the Middle East-Africa-Europe juncture than either has yet obtained.

What Russia and China will not tolerate, if they can help it, is an Iran that falls either to the other or to the influence of the United States.  The Russians and Chinese have both made it clear, in numerous ways, that they are not willing participants in any global vision the US may choose to operate on.  They are no more interested in waiting for Barack Obama to reorder the world for them, through his trademark passive-aggressive approach, than they were for Bush II, Clinton, or Bush I to do it by their methods.

Potential courses of action

What can Russia and China do to respond to the toughened sanctions being imposed on Iran?  They can breach the sanctions; they can prepare for what they perceive to be US intentions; and they can seek to influence the political outcome in Iran, where the leadership is increasingly in disarray and may indeed lose its footing as the bite of sanctions intensifies.

It would not be difficult at all for Russia to continue to trade with Iran.  Russia has what no other G-8 power has:  an inland sea shared with Iran, where conventional US or NATO forces would find operations inconvenient in the extreme, both logistically, militarily, and politically.  China does not enjoy that advantage, but there are other ways into Iran, such as through Afghanistan and Iraq.  The US and NATO don’t control all the roads through Afghanistan, and the US no longer patrols the border between Iraq and Iran.

Certainly, the most convenient method of trading in oil and gas products with Iran is through the network of maritime terminals set up in the south.  But with the help of an outside partner, Iran could adapt relatively quickly to a different logistic footprint.

Meanwhile, we should not discount the options Iran may have from her southern coast.  The sanctions-evasion industry that grew up around Iraq between 1991 and 2003 involved actors in Iran, the UAE, and Oman (non-government actors in the latter two, to be sure, but the governments did little to interdict their activities.  See here for an analysis from 2009 of Iran’s evasion options).  Someone in the Persian Gulf is always up for profiting from sanctions evasion, and if the contraband network involved Russia, China, India, or other interested nations as clients, its appeal would only be increased.

The banking sanctions can certainly hurt Iran a great deal in the short term, but they also create conditions in which it would be an indispensable relief for a nation like Russia or China to come in with cash under the table.  Neither Moscow nor Beijing would do that out of compassion; the purpose would be to influence the course of political events in Tehran.  Against the assumption that the mullahs would have nothing to do with them must be set the reality that economic conditions are deteriorating rapidly.  The regime has a survival problem.

Since the end of World War II, both Russia and China have sought repeatedly to secure influence abroad by bolstering miscreant regimes against the policies of the West. They have had varying degrees of success, but the point to be disproven today is not why they would attempt it with Iran, but why they wouldn’t.  We can assume without demur that both Moscow and Beijing have an active interest in “picking” the leadership that will establish itself out of a destabilized Iran.

My own view is that if the US took a more active interest in cultivating a new leadership from among the liberalizing elements in Iran, we would have a good opportunity to succeed.  Iranians have no illusions about the intentions of Russia or China.  The idea that those nations’ purposes would be more consonant with the sentiments of Iranians, whether the political leaders or the average people, is laughable.

But successful support of this kind cannot be accomplished without an overtly articulated moral and political case for it.  The best way Obama could help Iranian reformers is by stating that the US is behind them.  Reagan’s success with this approach stands out against decades of failure with the more Obama-like ambivalent rhetoric from both Democrats and Republicans.  You cannot induce at-risk nations into liberalizing by applying secret-squirrel methods inside a cone of political silence.  This is a case in which the only effective approach is to state your intentions and lead from the front.

The military aspect

Besides breaching the sanctions and seeking to foster a client regime in Iran, Russia, in particular, can be – and is – preparing to counter US/NATO military action.  That doesn’t mean China has made no “military” noises; in fact, a Chinese general has been quoted as saying that a US attack on Iran would launch World War III.  China has conducted major military exercises with Pakistan – Iran’s neighbor to the east – this past year; has a military build-up underway in Pakistan’s northern territories (namely, Gilgit-Baltistan); and has a growing and respectable capability to project power in the Indian Ocean.  (At the end of December, the Russian navy also had talks with the Seychelles about using Port Victoria for Russian naval operations.)

But Russia’s territory abuts Iran’s to the north, and the Caucasus and Central Asian ‘Stans are the southern flank of Moscow’s “near abroad.”  The Russians are worried – to the extent of moving troops to the south, near the border with Turkey, evacuating families from military posts in the Caucasus, and conducting a large military exercise in the Caspian Sea, simulating the defense of oil and gas interests against an attack by Western forces.  The oil and gas infrastructure in the Caspian Sea belongs to multiple nations; one implication of the Russian exercise is that Russia wants to be able to pursue joint commercial interests with Iran in spite of sanctions, and that the Caspian Sea is the nexus of that intention.  Supposing that Russia merely intends to “help Iran” by defending Iranian assets is too narrow an interpretation.

Russia is also building both a case and a capability to eliminate Georgia as a potential base for US operations – and to secure Georgian territory for logistic support to Russian forces in Armenia.  Multiple sources quote Russian military leaders as complaining that their logistic freedom is constrained by Georgia’s denial of a key transport route.  And in mid-December, the chairman of the Russian Security Council – not an anonymous functionary, but the chairman himself – announced that Moscow was worried about a force of terrorists supposedly being readied in Georgia for attacks on Russia, specifically attributing this to Georgian government policy.

While manufacturing a case against Georgia, Russia has also consolidated the command structure of her Black Sea naval forces and put them at the highest readiness level (see RT link above).  These are the ships that will blockade Georgia in the case of a Russian takeover.

Many readers are also aware that Russia has dispatched a naval task force to the Mediterranean, built around the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov.  The naval love-fest continues between Russia and Greece:  Kuznetsov conducted flight operations in Greek waters on 5-6 January, and her escorts pulled into Tartus, Syria on the 7th.  From the Kremlin, Kuznetsov’s presence looks as much like the spearhead of a potential deterrent against US action in the Black Sea as it does anything else.  Of course, Russia intends to stake her claim on Syria and support the Assad regime, but since 2007, when Putin proclaimed a return of Russian force to the global stage, it has been wrong to interpret the strategic purposes of Russian deployments narrowly.

It’s also worth noting that Russia’s core security alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), conducted a major military exercise in September in which it simulated preventing the construction of a gas pipeline between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.  Such a pipeline could only get going with outside support from a presumably Western (perhaps Chinese) partner.  Russia is starting to put serious ideas of military force behind her strategic concern that her rivals are all up in her Kool-Aid, and the actions of the Obama administration are having the opposite of a reassuring effect.

Russia’s preparations for something that many Americans reflexively assume will not happen are both extensive and expensive.  In the wake of his inconsistent responses to the Arab Spring revolts, it is logical for Russia and other nations to read Obama as unpredictable, and to see him as dismissive of the repercussions of his policies for the rest of the world.

Obama’s lack of strategic understanding will only carry US policy so far.  Iran has more options than simply collapsing and hollering “Uncle!” under the Western sanctions.  Any of those options entails a major shift of power liaisons in the Eastern hemisphere.  Team Obama seems to be proceeding as if none of that matters.  But it does.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The performances are superb – Gary Oldman as George Smiley immediately makes you forget even Alec Guinness – and the script and staging range from not overly annoying to inspired.

But in the theater where I saw it, the quiet, understated delivery of the actors caused an older gentleman in the audience to shout, “Turn up the damn volume!” (He was shushed by his embarrassed wife.)  The cast does affect a certain amount of mumbling and whispering, which apparently forms an important part of Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s concept for remaining true to le Carré’s trademark atmospherics.  (It could also be that his artistic hero is Ingmar Bergman; I haven’t seen any of Alfredson’s Swedish films.)

This little audience-reaction vignette sums up beautifully the movie’s basic disconnect.  Tinker works very hard to be true to le Carré, whose classic Cold War spy novels were contemplative and brooding, generous and patient.  Le Carré is a writer of unequalled talent in his sphere, giving his name to an enduring, identifiable mood about the fictional business of international espionage.   But for that mood to grip an audience’s short hairs when the story is told on screen, something more is needed than a faithful rendition of le Carré’s style.  What is needed is a Cold War audience.  What is needed is the Cold War.

Le Carré didn’t do cinema-ready chase scenes in his Cold War spy novels.  He isn’t a mystery writer or a spinner of fantastic tales about resurgent Nazi cabals or Nazi breeding programs in Latin America.  His fascination has been with character, moral decisions, and the tension between professionalism and human weakness.

Frederick Forsythe, by contrast, another great action-fiction writer from the same era, gave his readers a sort of documentary insight into spycraft, constructing stories around criminal plots, suspense, and danger.  Robert Ludlum, for his part, built his name on fast-paced action, stock characters, shocks and surprise twists.  Ludlum’s Bourne series has been translated effortlessly into a modern franchise, and the film adaptation of Forsythe’s Day of the Jackal, released in 1971, holds up for 21st century audiences who have barely heard of Charles De Gaulle, because the story is about the respective crafts of assassination-for-hire and police sleuthing.  When the tale was reset in the United States for the 1997 Bruce Willis vehicle The Jackal, it worked as a film of its own because the story is a generic classic: rumpled, wily law enforcement official pursues preternaturally brilliant international criminal.

But le Carré was the Greek-tragedy hymner of Spies in the Cold War.  His genius was to sketch stories against the background of the common angst, fears, and assumptions of that strange, twilight conflict.  He didn’t have to explain why a fanatical Soviet spymaster who had never heard of compunction was a figure both frightening and fascinating – because everyone knew why.  The tanks that rolled into capital cities in Eastern Europe, the nuclear weapons that were pointed at everyone in the northern hemisphere 24/7, the grainy videos of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, eyes shadowed under their Russian-style swaddlings, the mental water-torture of endless coups and insurrections and wars – Soviet spymasters were connected with these lurking threats, these things that could actually hurt us.  These things that could end life as we knew it.

The necessary but somewhat ironic outcome of winning the Cold War has been that we no longer viscerally understand le Carré’s world without having it explained to us.  What Soviet communism was in the Cold War world is something that does not even exist today.  We have no common perception now of a threat figure like the storied Soviet spymaster, because there is no threat like the predatory Soviet Union.

The specific threat environment within which the humans do their shabby maneuvering is a surprisingly important component in a le Carré tale.  A diabolical plot, car-chase, or shoot-out can be reset almost anywhere, but the towering existential threat and moral exhaustion of the Cold War are sui generis.  Without a prior sense of them in the hearts of the audience, the conflict at the core of Tinker’s narrative comes off as flat and uncompelling.  Ho-hum, we think.  Another bunch of cynical spies, unable to trust each other.  And why is this lumbering story of teletype messages and old paper files moving along in such a jerky fashion?

The 1979 TV adaptation of Tinker, featuring Alec Guinness as Smiley, did less homage to le Carré’s style, but it fit squarely within the cultural expectations of Cold War fiction, and in that way was less self-conscious than the 2011 movie.  It was suited to its time, with Guinness as a memorable Smiley.

But Oldman is a wonderful George Smiley in his own right.  If there are more adaptations of Smiley novels, I predict that all future performances will be compared to his.  Oldman hits off le Carré’s ordinary, understatedly noble functionary perfectly.  He carries the movie, which I think would otherwise be rather tedious and inexplicably dour for under-40 audiences with no tribal memory of the Cold War.  Virtually all the performances are excellent, although some of the actors, like the wonderfully effulgent Ciaran Hinds, have too little to do.  Hinds plays Roy Bland, one of the top British spy leaders suspected of being a mole, and manages with just a few close-ups to keep those who don’t already know the story interested in the possibilities of his guilt.

Tom Hardy (Inception, The Take), as lower-class thug Ricky Tarr, almost steals the movie out from under the tremendous older cast.  He manages to convey a feral audacity without being coy or grating.  Other stand-outs are Benedict Cumberbatch (BBC’s 2010 Sherlock Holmes) as Smiley’s sidekick Peter Guillam, and Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes, The Young Victoria) as Jim Prideaux.  The Prideaux character is shortchanged somewhat in the film, but Strong grabs attention for it anyway.

One of the most poignant moments of the story occurs when Prideaux – after being sneaked back into Britain from his supposed assassination in Hungary – finds himself in a rural classroom with a group of young students.  An owl emerges like a wild dervish from the schoolroom’s chimney, precipitating an explosion of feathers and char over the assembled children.  Prideaux, who was tortured by the KGB before he was returned to the Brits, kills the bird quickly and professionally with a stick, administering one deadly, jolting whack that leaves the owl emitting terrible cries in its death throes on the classroom floor.

We are meant to see in this jarring vignette the seared conscience of a beaten-down, used-up spy – and back when spies seemed terribly necessary, in a world rent by a grotesque ideology married to weapons of global destruction, the irony and sorrow of such a moment had a power to pierce the heart.

But more heart-rending today is the fact that they no longer do.  We may appreciate the owl’s scene as a narrative device, but it doesn’t make us secretly long to hug a spy for all the moral sacrifices he makes to keep us safe.  We simply don’t live in a world anymore in which his services seem indispensable, or like the center ring of a global struggle for civilization.

It is this passing of an era that does in Colin Firth’s turn as Bill Haydon, another of the potential moles among the senior leadership of the British spy service.  Firth’s performance is terrific – in his last scene with Oldman you can hardly bear to look at him – but the elephant in the room is the stark recognition that it just doesn’t matter anymore.  Without the Cold War context – of politics, of ideology, of threats to the future of mankind and to our very existence – the hubris and manipulation and cynicism and betrayal look small and pathetic, like something way too inconsequential to build a story around.

I suspect that today’s generations will have an existential-conflict narrative of their own soon enough.  We who remember every assumption and slogan of the Cold War don’t by any means wish it back.  But we are in a peculiar hiatus now from the civilizational compulsions that attend a life-and-death struggle, and nothing – no fiction, no poetry, no art – that requires a context of that kind to grip our minds and hearts has a hope of tasting the way it once did.  For such a savor, we will have to await the next brush with existential brinkmanship.

Addendum:  For more poignant Cold War reminiscing, be sure to check out Rick Richman’s superb review of The Iron Lady, the late-2011 indie film in which Meryl Streep portrays Margaret Thatcher.  Rick makes the case that, whatever the narrative intentions of the film’s producers, the movie’s result is to spotlight the remarkable strength, grace, and admirable quality of Thatcher’s character and legacy.  If I were to sum up Rick’s thesis, I would put it this way: No matter what you try to say about Margaret Thatcher, she’s going to have the last word.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

First, the admin. I appear to be experiencing the “System Check” malware on my primary (fast) computer, and can therefore not, at the moment, publish the better, in-depth post I was planning to prepare over the last couple of days. A system diagnostic is running to verify that the problems being reported by the “System Check” dialogue box are not actually there. The rocedure to remove the malware looks like it will take some time (link provided in case anyone else needs it, or perhaps has insightful comments on the problem). So, unfleshed-out comments only, for now.

Iran

The Iranian regime is posturing for the region. The Iranians do intend to affect thinking in the US as well, but it is a mistake to suppose that we are dealing with a dyad here: Iran and the US locked on each other in a vacuum in which all other assumptions are static or “given.”

If that were the case, the Iranian threats to the Strait of Hormuz (SOH) might be considered foolish or pathetic. US power is fully sufficient to put down an Iranian attempt on the SOH – if it is used decisively.

It may not be. The US is not, in fact, rushing aircraft carriers to the SOH; the recent passage of the USS John C Stennis (CVN-74) through the SOH, commemorated with

footage from an Iranian surveillance plane (apparently a Fokker F-27), was an exit from the Persian Gulf; and US officials weren’t kidding when they said it was a routine transit, and that Stennis was headed for already scheduled operations.

The US Navy has enough carriers in a ready status to pry the SOH open if Iran tries to close it with force, but those carriers are not in the theater. Stennis is the only one on station. The potential exists for three already-deployed carriers to be in the CENTCOM theater within a couple of weeks: Stennis could still be there (unless she has started a return transit to the US West coast); USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is heading that way, on a deployment that will end with her shifting home ports from Washington to Virginia; and USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) is in the Southeast Asia region, also scheduled to operate in the CENTCOM area (and, from a continuous-presence scheduling standpoint, the “relief” for Stennis).

President Obama has yet to rush an aircraft carrier to the scene of unrest or threats (Debka is uniformly wrong on this), and it does not appear that he is doing so here. It is important to note that in this case, that restraint amounts to more than a laconic political signal. It is also a strategic decision not to guarantee freedom of action for the US in responding to Iranian provocations, at least not on a rapid timeline. We still have land-based air forces in the Persian Gulf, which would ideally be available for any campaign to open and secure the SOH. But with the drawdown in Iraq, the numbers have dwindled (our principal concentration of air assets is at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar).

More important, however, is the question of whether the local nations would allow us to use their territory as a base for the operations we might deem necessary. I wrote a year ago about the

declining willingness of the Gulf nations to host US military operations that could involve attacks on Iran – and forcing open the SOH inevitably would. The Gulf nations would undoubtedly be in favor of ensuring the SOH was open and safe, but it is not clear today that they would be prepared to accept a US plan that involved attacks on Iran. We would need cooperation from Oman and UAE at the very least, because their territory, and air and seaspace, are so close to Iran and so greatly affected by Iran.

The day may not be far off when

the pipeline across Oman to bypass the SOH will allow oil, at least, to flow out of the Gulf even if the SOH is under threat. Unless the US shows a determination to restore the status quo ante – a safe, open SOH, guaranteed by US power – the Gulf nations are more and more likely to simply accept the need to revise their security thinking and make new arrangements. Much oil could reach the world market by going across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea as well. The local nations would adjust if they saw a need to.

But the strategic position of the United States would be changed for the worse, and in a way that could not be reversed without much greater military inconvenience.

Iran doesn’t actually want to close the SOH; Iran wants to influence the calculations of the region by threatening to close the SOH. It’s a method of peeling partners off from the United States – little by little, and codicil by codicil in terms of our agreements with the nations of the region.

Qaradawi

Why would regional nations think the US might not be prepared to restore the status quo ante? The most important reason by far is the growing perception that Obama does not operate on the basis of traditional US security assumptions (and, for that matter, moral philosophy). A report from the Indian newspaper The Hindu last week indicated that

the Obama administration had solicited the offices of Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi to broker an agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Andrew McCarthy has a good summary of Qaradawi’s numerous philosophical enormities; there are all kinds of reasons why the US should not deal with him at all, starting with the fact that he was placed on the terror watch list in 1999.

But the narrow American perception of his association with Islamist extremism is only one aspect of the problem. Equally important is the signal it sends about the US posture in Asia if our administration is seeking the negotiation support of someone like Qaradawi. Russia thinks it’s idiotic, for example, and – given that Afghanistan is in Russia’s back yard – has

good reason to find it alarming. The problem of Islamist insurgency that torments Russia’s southern border would only be worsened by an Islamist triumph in Afghanistan, which, to all appearances, would have the imprimatur of the United States.India and Iran are also worried about the US romance with the Taliban. Irresponsible policy from the US – and throwing in with Qaradawi is toweringly irresponsible – drives the nations of Asia to make common cause with each other. Each for her own reason, none of Iran, India, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, or even Pakistan wants Yusuf al-Qaradawi to be making speeches from Kabul arm-in-arm with the Taliban. From the Asians’ perception, what is setting their security assumptions in flux around them is as much the off-the-wall policies of the US administration as it is anything else.

And that means that we are not a reassuring constant in the environment of their security problems – we are an unpredictable variable that may increase them.

Qatar

One nation that is apparently not worried about the trend of our policies Is Qatar. Qaradawi, born in Egypt, lives and operates out of Qatar (he has a large Islamic center there), and the US has quietly encouraged Qatar’s growing involvement in regional issues, from the air action over Libya in 2011 to the security problems of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and the issue of the Palestinian Arabs. Al Jazeera, of course, also operates out of Qatar. In contemplating

the release of Taliban leaders held at Guantanamo, as part of a negotiated deal with the Taliban, the Obama administration reportedly proposed releasing at least one to Qatar. (The Taliban rejected that idea categorically. They want Taliban leaders released to Afghanistan.)

It is not a random choice for Qatar to host negotiations with the Taliban. The Obama administration has invested diplomatically in Qatar, turning what started under Bush II as a deepened security partnership into a kind of client (US)-agent (Qatar) relationship. Such a relationship can flourish under some conditions, but if The Hindu’s report about our use of Qaradawi is correct, accepting Qatar’s services and advice as an agent has gone dangerously off the rails. There is no aspect of US security that can possibly be strengthened by resorting to a liaison with Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Indeed, the converse is the case: the boost he can get from becoming, effectively, a front for the operation of US power, erodes the conditions of US security.

As it does everyone else’s. The world’s nations are under no illusion that the Obama administration is behaving with circumspection or sound judgment. Having celebrated our exit from a still-iffy Iraq, Team Obama is pooh-poohing the provocations from Iran – as if the American people and the world were looking for an intelligence assessment, as opposed to reassurance about US policy – and is apparently looking in the most unwise, unsavory places for a quick way to get out of Afghanistan.

If that is not what Team Obama is doing, a policy speech could certainly help to clear that up. The administration goes way overboard in “not overreacting” to events abroad. It hardly constitutes overreacting to publicly, officially clarify US interests and US policy, rather than leaving these quantities to be divined from media revelations about unannounced diplomatic activities. The most important element of diplomacy and security maintenance is not one’s plans, conferences, or military movements; the most important element is one’s overt posture, as expressed through public statements, and as validated by the other aspects of diplomacy.

Obama has simply not established an overt posture. The Middle East is starting to look very different, largely because the US has not confirmed our interest in the agreements, borders, and conventions that have underpinned its security since World War II. We have instead put our power in the service of a mishmash of ideological concepts, crony-commercial interests, and the individual visions of favored foreign associates, like Erdogan in Turkey – and now, apparently, Qaradawi and the maneuvering leadership of Qatar. We have, in fact, started behaving like Russia or China, with all the cynicism but none of the predictable consistency.

It will not be very much longer before the situation in the region has gone so much up for grabs that the nations with a security interest there will simply begin making their own arrangements. Those arrangements may spark conflict, intervention by other actors, and an increase in threats to our allies on either end of the Eastern hemisphere’s great land mass. One of the purposes in all this will be to squeeze the US out of the region; another will be to dupe and exploit us wherever possible.

If we are not resolving those threats on terms favorable to the US, their impact on our alliances and our economic security will be felt much sooner than many might think.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, and The Weekly Standard online. Her blog is The Optimistic Conservative.

Jazz argues that it’s inconsistent to make the economic impact of a tax hike the overriding concern when it comes to income tax rates, but dismiss the economic impact of an increased tax load when the subject is ending the payroll tax holiday.  He points out that the Bush tax rates were passed with an expiration date, and therefore were temporary in a sense similar to the scheduled expiration of the payroll tax holiday.

There is an extent to which this argument is valid, but it’s a very limited one.  The reason is quite simple:  the two tax issues are different.  They are different on both the paying and the receiving end — and in their impact on the economy.

Income taxes are paid on “taxable income” from earnings (wages, salaries, dividends) and annuities (e.g., retirement plans).  The rate of taxation goes up as taxable income increases.  That’s on the paying end; on the receiving end, income taxes provide the largest single source of general revenues for the federal treasury.

Payroll taxes – Social Security and Medicare – are paid on base salary.  The rate is the same for all income levels (currently 7.65% for an employee, matched by his employer; 15.3% for self-employed), up to the maximum taxable earnings figure, which this year is $106,800.  (It is going up next year to $110,000.)  The payroll tax holiday has reduced the withholding for the self-employed and for employees – not for employers, who still pay their 7.65% per employee – by 2 percentage points.  On the receiving end, the payroll tax revenues go to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

Basically, those who are fine with ending the payroll tax holiday are simply asking workers to go back to making their full contribution to the Social Security and Medicare programs.  Jazz is correct in saying that this will mean more current money out of the pockets of taxpayers who earn up to $110,000 a year.  For that $110,000-a-year earner, the payroll tax bill will increase by $2200, or about $180 a month.  It will increase by less at each lower level of income.

An increase in the income tax rate – and in particular, the expiration of the Bush tax code – would have a more significant economic impact, in that it would hit everyone from lower-middle to the highest income levels with an increased tax load.  Besides reinstituting the “marriage penalty” and reducing child tax credits, an expiration of the Bush tax code would tighten tax brackets – subjecting people in the lower-middle and middle range to a higher rate – and increase the rate on higher incomes and capital gains.

These latter effects are the ones that suppress economic expansion the most. Short of violating the laws that protect everyone, you can’t make the rich poor by taking their money from them – but you can force them to restructure their finances so that it’s less taxable.  The rich can choose to take less income, hold assets in the least-taxable forms, put their money overseas, and so forth.  And every time they do, they invest and spend less in the US.

The payroll tax doesn’t affect these dynamics of the economy.  Of course, for those with the FDR-era Keynesian view that consumption drives the economy, the idea that wage-earners will see an average total of $1000 less in their paychecks next year (about $83 a month) means taking that $1000 per earner out of circulation for consumption purposes.

Those who see it differently would point out that the payroll tax holiday has already cost Social Security $105 billion in revenues – and it has done that in the first year in which Social Security paid out less than it took in.

Social Security is a separate program; unlike the all-but-unintelligible situation of general revenues and expenditures, with Social Security, we can tell what effect we’re having on the program by paying less into it.  But if having to contribute to Social Security is too much of a burden on us, then let’s restructure it already, and schedule transitions to a different basis for the program in the future, while keeping our commitments to today’s seniors and those close to retirement.

What smart earners have been doing with their payroll tax holiday savings is, well, saving.  Or, very possibly, investing.  We’ve had the holiday for a year now, and it hasn’t had any noticeable accelerating effect on consumption, or on the economy as a whole.  If it’s that important to have a payroll tax holiday, then let’s go big.  Let’s have a payroll tax holiday of 5 percentage points for 10 years, suspending federal taxes on investment returns from the amount previously withheld; and let’s reform Social Security and Medicare at the same time.  In 10 years, we can have a viable plan for the future of both programs, putting them back on a “needs” basis and leaving more current money in the pockets of earners, because the programs can be paid for out of general revenues, and perhaps – if necessary – a 1-2% payroll tax.

And we’ll have a whole lot of people with bigger, better investments for their own futures – and a whole lot of investment capital built up for the economy.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Back in July, at a conference of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul, Clinton pledged that the US would take action against “religious intolerance” in America.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on that.  Clinton said, in her remarks, “No country, including my own, has a monopoly on truth or a secret formula for ethnic and religious harmony.”  But if any country comes close to having such a monopoly, it is, in fact, the United States.  One of the core principles of our founding was religious freedom; the purpose of guaranteeing it was, explicitly, to discourage religious strife; and to fulfill that purpose, the drafters of the Constitution prohibited Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

The US has not avoided religious enmity entirely, but we have kept the law and the government on the side of enforcing a peaceful, quiescent environment for the practice of religion, to a greater extent than any other nation that has ever existed.  This environment has existed side by side with robust and sometimes disgusting criticisms of other people’s religions, which we have always allowed as free speech.

And it is worth taking another moment to remember why we determined to allow such free speech.  We didn’t do it because it is “good,” in any positive sense, for people to say vile things about each other’s beliefs.  It may be perfectly good, or at least not repulsive, for people to say reasonably critical things about religious beliefs.  But whether it’s ridiculous allegations about Jews, absurd accusations against Catholics, or today’s fresh-milled 20-something atheists calling Christians “Christofascists,” the point of free speech was never to encourage idiocies of this kind on the theory that we need more of them.

The point of free speech is to keep the government out of the business of deciding whether they’re “bad” or “good.”  Government is incompetent to decide such questions, and they should therefore not be within its scope of authority.  Precisely because government has civic authority, its involvement in classifying critical speech should be somewhere between severely limited and non-existent.  The step from government having an opinion to government repressing intellectual freedom is perilously short.  Government can’t wave a magic wand to kindly and gently fix people’s thoughts; it has only the hammer of force and punishment, and that means making every unapproved thought into a “nail.”  The American Founders understood this about government, and insisted therefore on keeping its powers limited, constitutionally explicit, and federally divided.

 So when Hillary Clinton promises the following, she is on wholly un-American, anti-liberal ground (emphasis added):

In the United States … we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.

OK, so the US government is going to use peer pressure and shaming on us.  (The tools, by the way, of “worker soviets” in the sanguinary workers’ paradises of the last century.)

What exactly is it that we abhor?  Elizabeth Kendal has an excellent summary at her Religious Liberty Monitoring website of the history behind the UN push to “combat religious intolerance,” and it is worth talking the time to understand how a number of terms – Islamophobia, “defamation” of religion, and “incitement” against religion – have been conflated over the last decade.  Getting forms of intellectual discretion wrapped up in “what we abhor” is an ongoing project in the misnamed effort to “combat religious intolerance.”

But another entry point is the definition of “Islamophobia” cited by the typical Islamophobia watchdog.  The definition was produced by a British think tank, The Runnymede Trust, in the 1990s, and was consciously constructed as an analogue to definitions of Judeophobia or anti-Semitism.  These are its basic elements:

1)  Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
2)  Islam is seen as separate and “other.” It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
3)  Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
4)  Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a “clash of civilizations.”
5)  Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.
6)  Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.
7)  Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Most of these elements are susceptible of extremely ambiguous interpretation.  Credentialed academics like Samuel Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson would be indicted by some of them.  And in almost any case you can think of, deciding that these criteria correctly classify the actions of non-Muslims is a matter not of objective judgment but of partisan opinion.

Regarding #6, for example, both non-Muslims and Muslims are likely to reject some criticisms from each other out of hand – because our beliefs about some things are fundamentally different.  There are Muslim leaders, after all, who constantly reject Western criticisms of sharia out of hand.  And there are Muslim leaders who don’t.  There is no valid reason why any Westerner should be charged with “Islamophobia” for ignoring or rejecting criticisms of Western practices by Muslims.

Consider the practice of veiling women.  When an imam criticizes Western society for failing to veil women, I have no heartburn whatsoever in rejecting that criticism as invalid and inapplicable to my life and my society.  How absurd to suggest that I am being “Islamophobic” by doing this.

I recognize, of course, that many Muslim women don’t wear a veil, and many clerics are fine with that.  Muslims don’t do the same things in every part of the world.  And I prefer civic approaches in the West that seek to live with the practice of veiling where it is important to some citizens.  I disagree with the veil being imposed on women, but 99% of the time, the issue isn’t one that affects me directly or requires me to register an official political opinion.

But the fundamental issue here is the status of women.  Declaring it to be a “phobia” when people adhere to their original opinions about that is something no government should be in the business of doing.

At what point would a government decide that it was not Islamophobia when a person “rejected out of hand” criticisms of the West made by “Islam”?  Where would the line be drawn?  Can I reject, for example, Islam’s criticism that the West doesn’t accept Mohammed as a prophet of God?  Or does this criterion indicate that I am allowed to reject it, but only after giving some positive display of having considered it without “prejudice”?  And if so, how will that work, exactly?  Will I carry a card with me, certifying that I was observed by a competent authority to give due consideration to the criticisms of my society made by Islamic leaders?

This is not a laughing matter; the 20th century was a vast, vicious playground for exactly such measures of control over the intellectual lives of peoples and societies.  The criticism we should be leveling here is not against “Islam” or “Muslims,” it is against our own government, and the factions of our own, Western/American political spectrum that conceive of government as a method of administering anti-phobia measures.

The idea of government, for too many in America, has gone wildly off-track.  Hillary Clinton’s acknowledgment that the Obama administration can’t make black-letter laws against free expression about Islam, but that it will use peer pressure and shaming to try to shape and discourage the people’s expression, is a perfect example of the corruption of the governmental idea in our once-constitutional nation.  Our basic problem in this regard is not Islam; our problem is the growing failure of our governments at all levels to adhere to America’s own standard of individual liberty and limited government.  We chose that standard not because criticism of others is necessarily or absolutely “good,” but because intellectual liberty itself is.

Judaism and Christianity are, along with Western philosophy, the progenitors of that idea of liberty.  The positive, absolute good of liberty is what we must proclaim and defend.  And in our nation, on our terms, Islam has the opportunity to thrive as Judaism and Christianity have, by being consistent with it.  It cannot be the other way around.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

In one case, a Predator supported the sheriff’s department in making an arrest at the property of suspected cattle thieves (who are also reportedly members of the Sovereign Citizen movement).

The cattle thieves – the cattle in question were indeed found on their property – had warned the sheriff’s deputies away with firearms prior to the Predator-assisted arrest.  They certainly seem to have coming whatever the due process of law ends up throwing at them.

But does the fact that they were on the wrong side of the law justify the use of US Air Force surveillance assets, working for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in apprehending them?  If the assets had been National Guard helicopters working for CBP, would it have been proper for them to provide surveillance for a local law-enforcement matter that had no connection to border security, illegal immigration, or illegal trafficking?

LAT quotes a retired USAF general as saying that drones under federal control are now being used routinely to support local law enforcement and emergency responders.

Former Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA), for one, says it’s a mistake to do this.  She chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 2007 to 2011 (and although I have political disagreements with her, she has been good overall on intelligence issues).  Harman helped block attempts by DHS in 2008 and 2010 to use military intelligence satellites in domestic (federal) law enforcement.  LAT quotes her as follows:

Using Predators for routine law enforcement without public debate or clear legal authority is a mistake, Harman said.

“There is no question that this could become something that people will regret,” said Harman.

My own sense on this is that while the use of drones will be inevitable in the future, the real issue here is the casual incorporation of the federal military apparatus in local – police- and sheriff-level – law enforcement activities.  Big-city police departments will no doubt have their own fleets of drones in the coming years, as will the wealthier, more populous states.  Civil-rights law can accommodate that.  But civil-rights law must come first – and that means that any process for authorizing surveillance of citizens needs to go through the channels appropriate to the crime and the cognizant authority.  The use of US military assets to assist in local law enforcement, even when they are under federal agency control, is problematic, in terms of both constitutional limits and of the use of the military.

I believe a stop should be put to this at once.  Before anything like this is done again, there needs to be a debate in Congress.  The people need to mull it over.  Technology is going to keep racing forward, and it’s foolish to proclaim that the Constitution is a blanket prohibition on using it.  But the Constitution is the basis for asserting that due process of law must precede any government use of technology that crosses the rights and liberties of citizens.  This issue ticks all the boxes, from domestic use of the military to blurring the federal-state-local law-enforcement distinction, and it needs to be put in the spotlight and subjected to strenuous criticism and debate.

*UPDATE*

Alert readers have pointed out that the Predators are owned by CBP rather than the Air Force, which, having researched, I believe to be correct.  Posse comitatus was never my issue or argument, but the point is valid.

It doesn’t change the character of the problem, though, which is that lines that protect our civil rights are being blurred.

Two points need to be made.  One is that there’s no basis for relaxing about collaboration between federal agencies and the Air Force, when it comes to performing aerial surveillance of ground activities on US territory – which could, at any time, involve the activities of US citizens.  This isn’t speculative; it’s based on other pieces of information not included in the LAT report.

The 174th Fighter Wing of the New York Air National Guard (ANG), based near Syracuse, has completed a transition from manned fighters to the MQ-9 Reaper UAV, making it the first unit east of the Mississippi to operate UAVs.  In February, local media reported concern from citizens about the civil rights implications of the proposed mission for the Reapers in New York State.

In August, homeland-security industry press reported that the 174th would operate the Reaper in a border security mission as well as for platform training.  (The article was also published in National Guard Today.)  In November, a spokesman for the 174th stated during a public display at Fort Drum that the Reaper would not be used for border security.  But the extremely detailed nature of the information about base-sharing and operational collaboration in the HS Today summary indicates that the concept of operations for incorporating military-operated UAVs in border security is well advanced.

That in itself is not surprising, of course, since military assets have been used for border security for a long time.  The high level of integration envisioned between federal civilian and military assets is important, however.  Such integration is discussed with enthusiasm in testimony like the summaries here and here.  And there are good reasons for boosting integration – for border security.

But the potential for law enforcement agencies to get sloppy and start using military assets in unsanctioned ways will only grow with all this integration, common basing, and use of similar or identical systems.

The second point is that we should be concerned about even civilian federal assets being detailed on missions for local authorities acting under state law.  The bottom line is that the mission conducted on behalf of the sheriff was outside the scope of the CBP’s authority for operating UAVs.  That’s not something we can tolerate the authorities at any level getting sloppy about.

It is a thoughtless citizenry that complacently assumes no government will ever try to abuse its authority.  The protection of civil rights and constitutional limitations can’t be left to chance or assumption.  It should be the central concern of the people and our lawmakers as new technology shows up in the skies above our cities, counties, and states.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy.  Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.

The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of course.  The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package.

Solazyme’s partner in the biofuel sale is Dynamic Fuels, a Louisiana company owned jointly by Tyson Foods and Tulsa-based Syntroleum.  Tyson and Syntroleum are distinguished by having profitable lines of business that do not rely on government grants to unprofitable “green” projects.  This does not make their biofuel product price-competitive with fossil fuels, however.  (They were induced to develop biofuel manufacturing processes by a combination of subsidies and tax breaks.)

The Dynamic Fuels plant was opened for business in Geismar, LA in 2010, becoming by far the largest biofuels plant in North America – and reportedly, in combination with a plant in Finland, a producer of 94% of the world’s biofuels.  This is great boosterism stuff, but the biofuels produced by Dynamic Fuels are still considerably more expensive than the fossil-fuel alternative.  Dynamic Fuels has begun supplying aviation biofuel to KLM, the Dutch flag carrier, but of course, the use of more-expensive biofuels by commercial carriers has to be subsidized by governments.

If governments stopped subsidizing biofuels, their artificial “profitability” would disappear overnight.  Price-wise, they can’t compete with fossil fuels.  The day may come when they can, but subsidizing them while they don’t is not a method with any record of success for encouraging price efficiency.  What it does instead is create languishing public dependencies and tremendous opportunities for cronyism, as demonstrated in the Solyndra scandal.

As the Institute for Energy Research article (top link) indicates, the US has enormous reserves of both conventional and unconventional oil and natural gas resources.  Opening them up for exploitation would, among other things, ensure that the US armed forces could buy cheaper fuel – cheaper than today’s prices – produced in the USA.  At a time when federal debt is spiraling and the Defense Department is facing budget cuts that are guaranteed to gut the fighting forces and render them ineffective, it seems to border on insane to eschew a ready, significantly cheaper alternative and require the armed services to quadruple what they pay for fuel as a proof of concept – apparently with the idea that the forces should buy more of the 4-times-as-expensive fuel.  This is, after all, our national security we’re talking about.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has a report out today, however, with new commercial imagery showing no destruction whatsoever at the UCF.  The imagery date is 3 December, five days after the blast.

As readers can see, the UCF is densely packed with buildings of ordinary, non-hardened construction.  An explosion originating at that facility – one that could be heard and could break windows in Esfahan – could not possibly avoid damaging at least some of the compound’s structures.  The zirconium production plant adjacent to the UCF is undisturbed as well.

ISIS does note that a nearby site of unknown purpose had been razed, however, sometime between 27 August and 5 December 2011.  ISIS analysts identified the site in imagery from as early as 1996, and indicate that it was a salt mine at one time.  The mine entrance has long been visible, and remains so in the 5 December image.  But the above-ground structures are now gone, and there is evidence of bulldozing.

It is conceivable that Iran rushed in to raze a site affected by the 28 November explosion, but it is extremely unlikely that all traces of a major blast could be removed.  There is no evidence of debris, discoloration, or cratering at the razed site.  It does not appear to have suffered a large explosion, either at the surface or underground.  An underground explosion, indeed, would have had to be colossal to break windows in Esfahan.  It would not be possible to restore the mine entrance to an undamaged condition within 5-7 days after an explosion of that magnitude.  The Iranians might well, for reasons of their own, detonate explosives inside the mine to collapse its underground chambers, but the blast wouldn’t break windows in Esfahan.  The sound could travel, but the kinetic overpressure would be virtually all contained by the earth.

In summary, the synoptic image of the complex offers no evidence of a major explosion anywhere at the constructed facilities.

There were original reports that the explosion occurred elsewhere, but because of their confused and conflicting nature, they were largely dismissed.  The earliest report, somewhat garbled, suggested that the explosion occurred in the city of Esfahan, near the military academy there.  A widely-viewed InfoLive.tv video contains footage of an explosion viewed from a distance – apparently from outside Esfahan – but there is no indication that the video footage was actually obtained on 28 November.

The explosion thus remains a mystery for now.  I would observe again that an attempted assassination involving a large explosion in a major city would be both ridiculous overkill and ridiculously inaccurate.  The previous apparent assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran were performed in a more typical, targeted manner, precisely taking out individuals at vulnerable times.  Assuming this explosion was caused by a bomb, it remains unlikely that it was placed by any agency of a foreign government.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

According to Fox, a US official confirms the drone in the video to be the one reported missing by US operators.  A number of web commentators have suggested that the thing in the video is not an RQ-170, but a US official says, at least, that it’s the drone that is missing.

I would agree with some of the doubters that the drone in the Iranian video isn’t 100% identical to the images of the RQ-170 available on the web.  But it’s not uncommon for secretive, special-purpose platforms to exist as a small, motley collection of one-, two-, or three-offs.  The overall design is the same.  One thing I would definitely say is that the drone in the video doesn’t have the 65-foot wingspan long considered the standard estimate in aviation-tech circles.  It looks closer to the low-end estimate of 46 feet.

All that said, I’m not clear on why US officials are in a rush to publicly confirm, with colorful details, that the Iranians got our drone.  It’s not immediately obvious what the upside of doing that is.  It could be something as simple as wanting to get the bad news over with, but why go into all the detail about who was operating the drone, and where, and which plans were rejected for retrieving and destroying it? – and why make a point of how we’re concerned that Russia and China may get hold of it?

That latter consideration has to qualify as one of the biggest “DUHs” of 2011.  But aside from injecting “duhs” into the news cycle, the US government seems to be spilling its guts to a much greater degree than is warranted.

Meanwhile, alert analysts are asking whether the drone downing was related in any way to the virus found on ground-control computers at Creech Air Force Base in September.  The Sentinel is operated out of Creech, like other drone types including the Predator.  But the Air Force’s eventual disclosures about the virus suggest that that’s unlikely.  The Air Force follow-up didn’t get much play in the national media, but it was picked up by local outlets in Nevada:

“The malware in question is a credential stealer, not a keylogger, found routinely on computer networks and is considered more of a nuisance than an operational threat,” according to the Air Force statement. “It is not designed to transmit data or video, nor is it designed to corrupt data, files or programs on the infected computer.”

Air Force Space Command officials said the virus infected computers that were part of the ground-control system that supports remotely piloted aircraft operations.

“The ground system is separate from the flight control system Air Force pilots use to fly the aircraft remotely; the ability of the … pilots to safely fly these aircraft remained secure throughout the incident,” the Air Force statement said.

Since the ground-control system was not – according to the Air Force – connected to a network outside of Creech, the only way to download stolen credentials would have been for a human to use portable storage media inside the center where the ground system is operated.  And even then, the credentials would have been useless with the flight-control system – the one in use when the drone went down in Iran.

Assuming Iran did get hold of an RQ-170, it’s not a good thing.  It wouldn’t be the first time unfriendly nations got samples of US technology, of course.  It should force us to move forward with next-generation improvements; even minor ones can prolong the useful life of a state-of-the-art drone.  I’m not worried that the ingenuity of US engineers isn’t up to the challenge – as long as we prioritize keeping our edge.

The drone downing comes at an informative time, however, hard on the heels of the mistaken NATO attack on the Pakistani base in November.  These events are a reminder of the perilous geostrategic situation in Afghanistan, where it is essential to monitor Iran’s threat activities on one border, and Pakistan’s activities can’t always be distinguished from those of the Taliban on the other.

The New York Times reports foreign sources and US experts saying that the RQ-170 was probably on a mission to conduct surveillance of Iranian nuclear sites.  The drone can operate at an altitude of up to 50,000 feet, and provides long-dwell coverage allowing multiple looks at target clusters, over periods in which other surveillance assets would only provide one or zero looks.  Its high-resolution radar may have the most significant sensor technology, for experts from Russia or China.

The drone in the video certainly does not appear to have been shot down.  Iran’s radar coverage is poor for the nation’s eastern areas in any case:  besides not shooting the drone down, the Iranians may not even have detected it in flight, given its low-radar-cross-section design.  If it had flown in from the south or the northwest, where Iran’s radar coverage is better, the likelihood of detection would have been higher.

But it is also unlikely that Iran caused the drone to malfunction through an electronic attack.  Any kind of physical-effects electronic attack would have required affecting the drone at its operating altitude, probably between 35,000 and 50,000 feet.  The ability to do that from the ground is very limited in even the most advanced militaries.  A literal digital attack would have required intruding on the drone’s control signal, with the sophistication to get around the security measures built into its operating systems.

These things are not impossible – Dyer’s First Law of Intelligence is that if you can imagine it, someone is trying to do it – but prior evidence of some kind of capability in this regard would make the probability stronger.  For now, it looks too soon to say exactly why the drone went down.  Fortunately, the RQ-170 was unmanned, and we won’t have to deal with another U-2/Gary Powers incident.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

I was pretty mad at Obama … I had changed my registration from Democrat to Independent, and I had blacked out the top of the “h” on my Obama bumper sticker, so that it read, “Got nope” instead of “got hope.” I felt like he had let down the struggling middle class. My son and I had campaigned for him, but since he took office, we felt he had let us down.

But then she learned about the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) created by ObamaCare, which is tailor-made for her needs as an uninsured Californian with breast cancer.

I have tremendous sympathy for this woman, who was facing breast cancer at a time when her husband’s COBRA had long since run out, and the family had been unable to afford insurance for several years.  Health insurance is very expensive in California, as a result of the state’s penchant for overregulation, public subsidies, and rent-seeking.  All insured health-care transactions in the Golden State contribute in one way or another to the gigantic state health-care apparatus, which endlessly drives up the cost of everything in the “private” sector.  (This squeeze has produced a mushrooming medical-services industry across the border in Mexico, as well as causing a growing number of practitioners in the state to operate on a cash-only basis – no insurance accepted.)

But PCIP is a superb example of how ObamaCare was frontloaded with goodies to attract constituencies.  Because if the Valley Gal were to read the fine print on PCIP, she’d discover that the program ends on 31 December 2013.

California administers the PCIP using ObamaCare funds.  Here is the information from the California PCIP website (emphasis added):

As a result of the federal Affordable Care Act of 2010, California has a contract with the federal Department of Health and Human Services to establish a federally-funded high risk pool program to provide health coverage for eligible individuals. The program will last until December 31, 2013 when the national health reform is set to begin. After that date, there will no longer be a need for high risk pools because federal rules will not allow insurers to reject persons with pre-existing conditions or charge them higher rates than those without such conditions.

The federally-funded program is called the California Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP). The PCIP offers health coverage to medically-uninsurable individuals who live in California. The program is available for individuals who have not had health coverage in the last 6 months. The California PCIP is run by the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board (MRMIB).

California actually already had a high-risk insurance program, before ObamaCare was passed.  The Major Risk Medical Insurance Program (MRMIP) became operational in 1991, and at one time served over 27,000 Californians.  Spiraling costs (partly due to legislative increases in plan benefits) meant the plan had to increase premiums and cap the number of participants at around 14,000.  In 2002, a 36-month limit was imposed on participation in MRMIP, with the proviso that MRMIP insurance providers would guarantee the offer of insurance to termed-out “MRMIP graduates” at 110% of the cost of their MRMIP premiums.

Loosely tethered to some semblance of fiscal accounting, MRMIP is definitely more expensive than PCIP in terms of monthly premiums.  Through 31 December 2011, for example, the woman in the San Fernando Valley can get PCIP coverage for herself for $306 a month, compared to the $480 she would have to pay Kaiser Permanente under MRMIP, or the $797 for a PPO plan with Anthem or Blue Cross under MRMIP.  And in January 2012, the MRMIP premiums are scheduled to increase.  The PPO plan premiums will go up to $865, and the Kaiser Permanente premiums to $516.

But that’s just something states and private companies have to do, because they face bad consequences if they don’t exert some control, however slight, over the gap between their revenues and their expenditures.  ObamaCare is subject to no such pressures.  Hence, it was able to lower PCIP premiums for Californians by an average of 18% in August 2011, because, as explained by the California administrators, “We want to make sure that everyone who qualifies for this program has access to its benefits and is not deterred by price.”

Presumably, ObamaCare, like Obama Money, comes from Obama’s Stash. It has certainly bought an apology from a Democrat who was previously angry enough at the president to switch to Independent; it may well buy her vote next year.  But the joke on her will not be a funny one.  PCIP ends on 31 December 2013, and what will happen after that is that premiums will go up – for everyone.  But services will also be restricted, for everyone who contracts for medical care using “insurance.”  And those are just the direct, first-order consequences.

The Valley Gal will find herself increasingly subject to state bureaucrats who get to decide how much she has to pay for her health “insurance” – which will actually be a state-run health plan over which she has no discretion – based on her income and assets.  Up to now, even in the wildly overregulated health care environment we have today, middle-class householders have been able to make choices of their own by maintaining private insurance at their discretion.  But it is “insurance” itself that is being subverted:  under ObamaCare, “insurance” is not a ticket to independence but a means for the government to exert control over the middle class.

The process of subverting medical insurance began decades ago, as alert readers will no doubt point out.  But ObamaCare takes it across the finish line with the insurance mandate.  Under no circumstances is the premium-cutting, welcome-all-comers PCIP model sustainable – and without a mandate, its unsustainability will blow up all over the Obama Stash program very, very quickly.  There’s nothing behind the politically deceptive PCIP premium-cutting except the future earnings of millions of people who have other plans for their money – if they’ve even been born yet.

Will Obama get his mandate?  The Supreme Court will make one decision on that before the 2012 election.  Americans may or may not accept it, if it goes the wrong way.  But one thing is for sure: as provided by the “Affordable Care Act” itself, PCIP will cease providing access to medical care in exchange for unrealistically low premiums in a little over 24 months.  I’d strongly suggest no one build his or her life around it.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

You may not have heard of Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad (MTJ), but it has heard of you.  Its sharia council issue fatwas right and left, and you and your laws are the subject of a number of them.  It’s hard to pick among the forum’s many interesting features, but perhaps this will serve as a taste.  In June 2011, London-based radical cleric Sheikh Hani al-Sibai was admitted to the MTJ sharia council.  Al-Sibai made a name for himself in 2005 by justifying the gruesome murder of two Israeli truck drivers in Ramallah, based on Mohammed’s eye-gouging, limb-lopping punishment of sheep stealers.

One of the recent fatwas issued through MTJ came from Jordanian Sheikh Abu Humam Bakr bin Abd’ al-Aziz al-Athari.  Al-Athari had already popped up a few months ago with a fatwa permitting Libyan rebel fighters to kill members of the former Qadhafi regime. He is also the author of the seminal work The Exalted Declaration of the Justness of Our Sheikh al-Maqdisi.

On 28 October, al-Athari issued a fatwa permitting mujahedin to “kidnap, imprison, and have sexual intercourse with infidel women.” (H/t:  Belladonna Rogers at PJM Tatler)  Robert Spencer has taken it apart here.

From there the story moves to Norway, where a police report uncovered by the media in June 2011 indicated that all of the rapes reported in Oslo in the previous year had been committed by “non-Western” males.  According to a victim interviewed for the news story, her Pakistani immigrant rapist told her that he “had the right to do exactly as he wanted to a woman … because that’s how it was in his religion.  Women didn’t have rights or opinions, he was in charge.”

A new article from a Norwegian source (link below) indicates that 45 of the 48 rapes reported in Oslo in 2011 (a new set of crimes, distinct from the earlier ones considered in the June 2011 story) were committed by “non-Western” males.

But here our tale moves in a remarkable, if not entirely unpredictable, direction.  Confronted with these statistics, Norway’s political leaders had a ready answer (emphasis added):

After [the police report was publicized in June 2011] a stormy public debate erupted … “the government ministers, most of them avowed anti-Semites, claimed that the report and its publication serve Israel and its policy of occupation.”

Norway’s justice minister defended the police report but also said that “Israel must be glad to hear about it.”

Of course.

Remember, these aren’t bloggers in their mamas’ basements.  They’re members of the Norwegian cabinet.

But then, Leon Panetta is a member of the Obama administration’s cabinet, and he made headlines this weekend with his heated exhortation to Israel to “get to the damn table” with the Palestinian Arabs.  Hillary Clinton, also a member of Obama’s cabinet, decided to weigh in on the internal condition of Israeli democracy, which she regards as perilous due to some pending legislation on NGOs.  Hillary is worried about democracy in a few other places, although not at all in the Arab Spring nations.  When it comes to those nations, harboring skepticism about Islamists and democracy is “insulting, dangerous, and wrong.”

And then there was Obama’s ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, who blamed Israel in a 30 November speech for the growth of anti-Semitism.  (See Ron Radosh link above; see Omri Ceren here.)  In Gutman’s words, the problem is:

[A] tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem.

(The UK Telegraph, among others, points out that Gutman was referring in this speech to the 18 November attack in which a Belgian Jewish girl was severely beaten by Muslim classmates.)

Gutman congratulates himself that when he communicates this “Israel is the problem” message to Muslim audiences in Europe, he gets applause:

But the longest and loudest ovation I have ever received in Belgium came from the high school with one of the largest percentages of students of Arab heritage. It was in Molenbeek. It consisted of an audience dominated by girls with head scarves and boys named Mohammed, standing and cheering boisterously for a Jewish American, who belongs to two schuls and whose father was a Holocaust survivor.

The Emergency Committee for Israel isn’t buying it.  And it is a sign of interesting times, when government officials are retailing, in lockstep, a meme of such falsity.

The road to the “Israel made us do it” meme is littered with false syllogisms and defensive triangulations.  It has no use for the crystalline courage of positive assertions; it is all angry eruptions, innuendo, euphemism, red herrings, inverted implications, and a retreat behind the twin barricades of riot and applause.  The meme is wielded like a mantra and assumed as background like the “consensus” about global warming.  As the recent words of American and Norwegian political leaders indicate, this isn’t something peculiar to Islamism.  It resonates with political factions in the West as well.

They are factions Americans can choose not to vote for.  Legitimizing Jew-hatred and reflexive animosity toward Israel won’t be the last line they try to cross, as they rely on the indifferent silence of the public.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

According to Iranian press, quoted at Iran Daily Brief, General Moqaddam’s will contained the request that his headstone be inscribed as follows: “Here lies the man who wanted to destroy Israel.”

An associate verified with a Farsi speaker that this is actually being reported in Iran.

For reasons I have written about here and here, I don’t think the recent series of explosions in Iran is the work of a foreign government.  If the explosions continue, the pattern of targeting may change that assessment – but based on what we know now, there is no pattern.

An assessment that Mossad or the CIA did not kill Moqaddam merely increases the irony of his proposed epitaph, however.  He probably intended his choice of inscription to crown a long, successful career.  Instead, it will serve as a warning.

(Tombstone image generated here.)

Update:   See Israel Matzav’s take on this story as well.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The first affirmative quote offered in the article is in this sentence:

Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was “no doubt” that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was “no accident.”

Later, an Israeli intelligence source is quoted as follows:

“This caused damage to the facilities in Isfahan, particularly to the elements we believe were involved in storage of raw materials,” said one military intelligence source.

The Times author speaks of satellite imagery showing billowing smoke and damage to the UCF compound.  This is believable, but a few comments are in order.

First, I don’t know of anyone who has suggested the explosion was an accident, other than an Iranian official or two.  If it was not a fuel-based explosion, however, it had to be a very large bomb – something approximating the 3200kg explosive capacity of the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995, or even greater – to generate the window-breaking blast experienced miles away in Esfahan.

Again, a reminder:  the materials being stored or processed at the site could not have caused such an explosion.  If I saw what the Israeli intelligence sources reportedly saw, I would conclude that someone probably detonated a bomb at the UCF.

I would not, however, conclude that it was done by a Western government agency.  There are two reasons for this, both of which I mentioned on Monday. First, the UCF at Esfahan is simply not a priority target in the nuclear network.  It is important, yes, but not worth hitting before anything else – and not worth sending Iranian internal security to high warble over.  Hitting this target , by itself, just doesn’t justify the blowback.  Western governments make their targeting decisions based on criteria that would put the Esfahan UCF several notches down the list of things that need to be struck in November 2011.  It’s a workhorse facility in the fissile-material production network, and it’s already done what needs to be done to assemble an arsenal of multiple weapons.  Uranium conversion is also “mastered technology”; Iran can reconstitute it relatively quickly.

(Notably, the series of explosion at IRGC/government facilities to date has not systematically targeted the critical nodes of the nuclear network.  From a step back, it doesn’t look like an organized campaign to take the network down.)

If hitting the UCF is basically closing the barn door after the cows have gotten out, it also creates a serious risk of releasing contaminants into the atmosphere.  It’s not clear what the Israeli intelligence source meant in saying that the damage caused was “particularly to the elements we believe were involved in storage of raw materials,” but that does raise the spectre of atmospheric reaction with a release of UF6 (or UF4, which may also be stored in some quantity).  See my earlier piece for a link on the contamination threat from a release of UF6.

These factors mean that any decision by a Western government to strike the UCF at Esfahan would be made only in a very different context.  Esfahan would be on the short list of targets to be struck in a campaign to destroy the important nodes in Iran’s nuclear network, but an accountable government would only attack this facility as part of a larger campaign, and in a situation of grave urgency: one that justified imperilling the population of Esfahan, Iran’s third-largest city.

Striking one-off targets on an as-available basis would drive a government-orchestrated campaign to a different top priority.  What needs interdicting, right now, today, is Iran’s weaponization program.  That program is not being pursued at the baseline Esfahan UCF compound (and certainly not in the raw-materials storage area there.  If elements of the weaponization program are housed at Esfahan, it’s probably in the tunnels that were started in 2004-5).

The size of the blast – in the absence of a large fuel depot in the vicinity – indicates the explosion was created deliberately, and if the damage was mainly at a particular area of the UCF, then it would have been generated by a large bomb, set by direct, on-the-ground placement.  It is extremely unlikely that a Western government did it.  Eventually there will be commercial satellite imagery available to confirm where the damage was done and what kind it is.

2005 facility overview annotated by ISIS

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Nuclear complex east of Esfahan

Local officials are offering different explanations for the blast that rocked Esfahan (also spelled Isfahan) a few hours ago.  It will be some time before there is enough information to make a good assessment, but a few things can be said now.

First, although the probable location of the explosion hasn’t been clarified, comments from the provincial governor suggest that it was on the east side of the city.  The governor claimed that the blast resulted from a military training exercise at the air base co-located with the Esfahan International Airport, which is situated on the east side of the city.  Presumably his comments, whether true or not, were intended to offer an explanation consistent with the local inhabitants’ experience of the blast.

The Esfahan nuclear compound is located east of the metro area, but there are good reasons to doubt that the uranium conversion facility – the main operational component of the Iranian nuclear network in Esfahan – was being targeted.  The UCF converts yellowcake to usable forms of uranium, including uranium hexafluoride, or UF6, the compound that is then enriched up the road at Natanz.  Causing a big explosion at the UCF would risk releasing the UF6 into the atmosphere, and creating some amount of hydrofluoric acid, a toxic compound that forms when UF6 comes in contact with humidity in the ambient air.  It takes a lot of UF6 to generate widespread contamination, but that’s what the UCF at Esfahan has:  a lot of UF6.

We can discount the possibility that a foreign agency would deliberately cause an explosion that could rupture UF6 containment at Esfahan, short of an in-extremis situation.

Of equal importance is the fact that this facility is not a high priority for a set of limited attacks.  Iran already has enough enriched uranium for several nuclear warheads; attacking the Esfahan UCF doesn’t buy time against weaponization.  I very much doubt the UCF was attacked, and it is very unlikely that it suffered an accidental explosion.  (The UF6 stored there could not have caused a blast like the one reported.)

We will know more when there is new, post-blast satellite imagery of the area (like that of the missile base west of Tehran where there was another explosion earlier this month).  At that point, it will probably be clear whether there was an explosion at a military facility.  If there was a blast east of the city, it could have occurred at one of several sites, most of which are bases for conventional forces (armor, artillery, and air forces).  (For more on the sites, Arkenstone has a nice presentation.)

One thing these sites have in common is that they store lots of fuel.  A blast of the size reported, which was heard in several places throughout Esfahan and broke windows in some (unspecified) areas of it, was probably caused by a fuel depot explosion. Michael Ledeen reported, after the earlier blast at Bigdaneh, that the major explosion there was induced in the fuel repository by a smaller, prior explosion.  That accords with the effects reported from the blast by inhabitants of Tehran and its western suburbs.

Ledeen characterizes the series of recent explosions in Iran as a “war against the mullahs,” and at this point, that explanation has more going for it than the supposition that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is being attacked.  The attacks – if that’s what they are – appear poorly designed, if the targets are components of the nuclear program.

At this point in Iran’s progress, the highest-value point of the process to be targeted is the weaponization effort:  making a nuclear device work, and mating it with a delivery platform.  The explosions so far appear almost random, rather than orchestrated to effectively interdict the nuclear weapons program.  Michael Ledeen’s explanation, that internal insurgents have been attacking the Revolutionary Guards, accords better with the known facts.  He also points to earlier attacks on refineries and pipelines, which, in terms of the explosive agent leveraged, suggests a concerted effort to produce a lot of disruptive explosions around the country, using the handiest materials out there.

We’ll probably have to wait to view the after-effects in the Esfahan area to be sure what happened there today.  A blast of the reported size can’t be made, within a few days, to look as if it never even happened – not even by Service Pro.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The weird thing is that there seems, in fact, to be a proposal for a Syrian NFZ – one in which the US would reportedly provide logistic support – and it took a GOP candidate to tell us about it.

Perry took a lot of heat for “bringing up” the idea of an NFZ for Syria.  But foreign news agencies have been furiously reporting for nearly a week that negotiations are underway for such a measure.  The plan, as sketched out to date, would involve Arab and Turkish air forces enforcing the NFZ, with the US providing logistic support.

Calm down, the aircraft carrier is not off Syria

With little having been disclosed to the public at this point, and no assurance as to what is actually being planned or proposed, speculation is rampant.  DEBKA and the Russian agency RT are hyperventilating today over a report that USS George H W Bush (CVN-77) has anchored off the Syrian coast.  But Bush actually pulled into Marseilles on the 25th for a long-scheduled port visit (and posted photos from a reception in Marseilles on Saturday at her Facebook page).  French local press confirms the carrier’s presence.

The Russians may or may not have dispatched three warships to Tartus to signal that they don’t want a Western intervention in Syria, and that they want to protect their alliance with the Assad regime.  The report originated with Syria, and Russia is being coy about the ships.  It would be very easy to disprove the Syrian news story, if the ships aren’t there.  And they may well be, calling in Tartus from the anti-piracy station off Somalia, as a Russian anti-piracy task force did in September.

Meanwhile, reports that the Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is in the Med are premature.  As of 24 November, the carrier and her escorts were still in the Northern Fleet operations area in the Barents Sea, awaiting a pre-deployment inspection.  The transit to the Strait of Gibraltar will take at least 8 days once it starts; the Russian media report that Kuznetsov will be in the Med in December.  Her deployment has been scheduled for some time; of course her activities are indicators of Russian national interests, but they aren’t necessarily an indication of reaction to yesterday’s news.

Bush deployed from Norfolk on 11 May, and is on the way home at the end of her deployment (which will be 7 rather than 6 months if she arrives in Norfolk around the 11th of December).  It’s possible for Bush to be held in the Med for some reason in the next couple of weeks, but she is not the best platform for providing logistic support to an NFZ – and, indeed, is superfluous for that mission in the Med.  The Air Force, with our existing infrastructure of resources in Europe, can do the whole job, and do it better.  If Bush’s air wing were to be used for anything, it would be initial strikes on the Syrian air-defense infrastructure.  But it’s not clear that US assets are even going to be involved in that phase of the operation.  Bush is due in Norfolk before Christmas, and my money is on her continuing home when the port visit ends in Marseilles (she is scheduled to depart on Tuesday 29 November).

(Note:  USS John C Stennis, CVN-74, is in the Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean, having deployed from the US West coast in August.  She is the only carrier on-station in the region, and will not be redeployed to the Med.)

The big questions

One nagging question is why we in the US keep hearing after the fact about force deployments, uses of force, and support for “kinetic” operations, as if we’re an afterthought in the arrangements of the Oval Office.  This is particularly disquieting when other nations begin deploying military forces in one place or another, while the US administration emits little besides rhetorical shrugs and formulaic bromides.

Everyone was at least talking about the problem in Libya, and what role the US should play in it, before the president decided to “lead from behind” there.  But in mounting his non-hostile kinetic military action, he could hardly be said either to have stated a coherent policy on Libya, or presented a set of national objectives to Congress for approval.  When Congress invoked the 90-day deadline from the War Powers Act, Obama simply ignored its demands.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s decision in October to send a special forces detachment to Uganda was disclosed during the news-black-hole window on a Friday afternoon, and was done with no prior public discussion and very little explanation after the fact.

This month, the decision to begin basing a Marine detachment in Australia was announced in the multinational forum most likely to anger and alarm China, but again without prior notice to the American people.  The basing move can be read one of two ways – as a token affirmation of US engagement and bona fides, or as a provocation – and in either case, the people are entitled to know what commitments are being made in their name, and why.

That goes triple for an adventure in Syria.  There are big questions about any potential intervention, and about an NFZ proposal, in particular; e.g., why the US would support a Turkish leadership role in it, and what consequences it would produce.  A conflagration in Lebanon, an armed response from Israel, the use of northern Iraq as a corridor for support coming from Iran – these are just some of the first-order possibilities.  Syria is not Libya; for that matter, Turkey and the Arab states are not France and Britain.  Syria’s geographic situation is pivotal in the Middle East, in a way Libya’s is not, and so is the Assad regime’s association with Iran and Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, at least half a dozen nations would argue that Turkey under Erdogan is a key problem in the Eastern Med, not a solution to anything – at least not if Turkey assumes a regional leadership role in which she is not only patrolling the Eastern Med with warships, conducting air strikes in northern Iraq, and permanently stationing troops there, but is patrolling the skies over Syria as well.  In the eyes of our own allies in the region (not to mention Russia’s eyes), NATO or the United States enabling Turkey to expand the scope of her military activities is a highly unfavorable development.

The idea’s not stupid, but the execution may be

A reasonable case can be made for intervening in Syria.  The chief value of an NFZ, per se, lies not in preventing Assad from using his air force against the Syrian people (he has shown little disposition to), but in preventing Iran (or Russia, or even China) from flying arms and provisions into the country – or perhaps providing air support of their own to Assad.  Of course, the fact that that is the chief value of an NFZ is also the chief obstacle to implementing one, unless the US is in charge.  And since logistic support to Assad can come by sea (and even, theoretically, by rail, if Iraq allows it), an NFZ alone would not shut down his options entirely.

Rick Perry is right, however:  if there is to be a no-fly zone, it ought to be enforced under the auspices of overt US policy, and ideally would be a combined NATO-Arab states operation.  As with the constraints on our options in Desert Storm, having more allies would mean having a narrower charter to transform Syria.  There would have to be a greater degree of compromise on the outcome than some in Europe and the US might prefer.

But the benefits for stability from executing a combined operation under US leadership would outweigh the costs.  The most important benefit for America would be directly and meaningfully influencing the outcome in Syria.  All the positive consequences for the US and our allies and partners in the region would flow from that.

There can be only negative consequences from encouraging others to take the lead.  Unlike the situation in Libya, no important actor has the luxury of being passive about the course of events in Syria.  Syria, they’ll fight over.  Even the relatively unimportant actors are already trying to put down markers, as we see with the effort of the new Libyan government to arm the Syrian insurgents, and with unconfirmed reports that Iraq’s Shia revolutionary leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, is sending loyalists to intervene on the side of the Syrian regime.

Syria is the theater where America’s luck will run out, if we foster the leadership of others for abstract ideological purposes.  The question for Americans is how to rein in a presidential administration that is running around making – or even just implying – under-the-radar military commitments, as if they amount to shaking a talisman at a set of problems we have allowed others to define.

Military force in any guise is a big deal, as is failing to use it when a situation calls for it.  There is no such thing as “routine” use of the military element of national power. The policy and the strategic considerations behind it should always be under the glare of a public spotlight, even if the operational particulars are not.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

So the news that the US will be stationing a detachment of 2500 Marines in northeastern Australia, for what will apparently be six-month rotations, prompts a reaction along the lines of “You lucky devil dogs!”

It also raises some questions.  The first is a general but nagging one:  what is the strategic context in which this is being done?  What is the announced US national interest that it will serve?  When the US was negotiating to base missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, and then in Bulgaria and Turkey, the basing agreements mapped back to an elucidated US policy for national and alliance security.  When we made basing agreements with Pakistan, Qatar, Oman, and Kyrgyzstan after 9/11, the use of airfields in these countries was obviously related to the campaign in Afghanistan (and later in Iraq).  Beefing up our presence in the tiny Red Sea nation of Djibouti has served the war on terror and antipiracy operations off Somalia.  Etc, etc.

In a period in US history when we have been at pains to draw down military forces overseas, new deployments get lots of scrutiny in Congress and the media – and that’s a good thing.  Since the end of World War II, Congress has been friendly, in general, to the deployments and basing agreements presidents wanted.  But Congress has required that the executive justify moving the military around by referring to announced policies and an explicit concept of national security.   (This is the reasoning behind the Goldwater-Nichols Act requirement for a president to author a “national security strategy,” and for the Defense Department to translate it into a separate “national military strategy.”)   The media, for their part, have maintained a small but robust thread of commentary on the topic, offering analysis that ranges from execrable to pretty darn good, and keeping the subject of basing agreements and the reasons behind them before the public.

There has been little to no discussion in US media of the new basing agreement with Australia.  This is curious:  there are serious implications from such an agreement – implications that China has already read into it, and that our other allies in the region are likely to have questions (or, more importantly, opinions) about.  When the possibility of the US developing basing options in Australia was first raised in public a year ago, it produced a flurry of headlines and opinion pieces in Asia, and was tied at the time to the confrontation between the US and Japan over a Marine air base in Okinawa.  Choosing to pursue new basing options is never a policy-neutral act, and it is certainly not one when you already have a large and longstanding force footprint in two nations in the region (Japan and South Korea, in this case).

Given the growing regional alarm over China in the year since, and the encouragement from our allies to beef up our presence on China’s perimeter, we can take it that the allies now view the US expansion into Australia with favor.  But this evolution begs the question of where the fine line will be, between a posture that deters China – surely the constructive American interest – and a posture that may not be sufficient to do so, but will ensure the US gets bloodied in any confrontation.

The question is reasonable.  The Marines to be deployed in Darwin, Australia will comprise a special purpose Marine air-ground task force, or SP/MAGTF:  a group that has plenty of capabilities for tactical action, but is not a deterrent in the terms of the threat from China.  One could theorize that the SP/MAGTF might be deployed to guard, say, one or a few of the Spratly Islands from incursions by China.  But China’s advantage in the “correlation of forces” (fine old term from Soviet military doctrine) is so overwhelming in the South China Sea that this would be an insanely unsustainable level of confrontation – unless the US simultaneously bolstered the action with a massive deployment of air and naval force.

We could come up with other scenarios involving Singapore or the Philippines, but there is little purpose in pursuing further the potential of an SP/MAGTF versus China’s strategic aspirations in the South China Sea.  The two are simply a mismatch.  Deploying an insufficient amount of force to achieve anything useful is the opposite of clever: it gets uncomfortably close to writing bad regional-security checks.  On the other hand, the alternative possibility, that getting some boots on the ground will involve the US, de facto, in skirmishes over which we may have little to no political control, is not to be dismissed.

During her years of empire, Great Britain had some experience with deploying “downpayment” forces in Europe: forces that were insufficient to deter a predatory power (principally Germany), but ultimately guaranteed that Britain would not stand by while Continental nations were menaced.  The thinking is captured in the remark of Ferdinand Foch in the months before World War I.   When asked by a British counterpart what would be the smallest British military force of practical assistance to France, Foch replied: “A single British soldier — and we will see to it that he is killed.”  The evacuation at Dunkirk, early in World War II, was the unseemly fate of a later downpayment force deployed on the Continent.

The Obama administration says the Marine basing agreement will “allow the U.S. and Australia to more effectively respond to natural disasters and humanitarian crises in the region.”  That statement doesn’t parse, which is a data point of its own.  We can’t move an SP/MAGTF to a humanitarian crisis substantially faster from Australia than from Okinawa, or even from Camp Pendleton in Southern California, for that matter.  The logistics of moving the force will involve either transport aircraft or the use of ships, either of which will have to be staged from somewhere else anyway.  Unless the humanitarian crisis is literally in Australia, or perhaps Papua New Guinea or New Zealand, there is no advantage to basing the Marines in Australia for non-combat crisis response.

But perhaps the greatest concern Americans should have is that we aren’t asking questions about this agreement.  It constitutes a change of our strategic military posture in the Far East.  Effecting it as if it’s “business as usual” detaches the move from a specific policy justification and makes it general.  Having a general, a priori disposition to base troops abroad is a characteristic of empire – as is the absence of critical interest from the citizenry when new basing proposals are announced.  Australia is an old and superb ally, but even with old and superb allies, troop deployments and basing agreements should require specific justification from a policy on identified threats, and from a strategy for using force to counter them.

One other thing we know about the agreement with Australia: it will reportedly involve support for the operation of US bombers, strike-fighters, and transport aircraft from an Australian air base southeast of Darwin.  The US Navy will make more stops in Sterling, on Australia’s west coast, as well.

Sailors and airmen have always enjoyed port calls and deployments to Australia, but the transits burn lots and lots of fuel.  Facilities in Australia are a long way from anywhere; decisions to deploy forces to them have to consider fuel and transit time to a greater extent than with any destination other than one of the poles.  Depending on how robust this new presence is, it could have a real impact on the operational posture of US forces elsewhere in the region.  Cutting $60 billion a year from the defense budget for the next 10 years, while adding deployments to Australia, doesn’t compute unless other things are curtailed.

We ought to be asking what those things are – but then, we ought to be asking for a foreign policy statement outlining why we’re doing this in the first place.  To date, Obama has basically adjusted the policies of previous presidents and reacted to security crises driven by events elsewhere.  The basing agreement in Australia is his first foreign policy move that indicates an actual initiative for change.  I can come up with reasons for an enhanced US posture in Southeast Asia, although I wouldn’t handle it in the manner Obama has chosen; but we shouldn’t have to interpret signs and oracles to figure it out.  Shifting our force footprint in this way is a major move, and it ought to be explained with, essentially, an outline of an “Obama Doctrine.”

The nature of the China problem in Southeast Asia makes a US deterrent posture important.  But the key to that posture is not ambiguous subtleties and minor, carefully downplayed force deployments.  The key, rather, is precisely the element the Obama administration has not provided: a seminal statement of US interests and will.  An SP/MAGTF in Australia is not a clearly intelligible signal in that regard – nor is it a security compact with the American people, as the clearly articulated Truman and Reagan Doctrines were.

We should never get used to our forces being based overseas without such statements and compacts.  It may seem minor and harmless to make a basing agreement with one of our best allies, but what’s missing from this action could be very costly down the road.  China is likely to probe an ambiguous signal from the US; she is certain to complain about an unambiguous one.  All in all, I’d rather have China complaining.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

This means that unless the Super Committee comes to an agreement to avert it, you are almost guaranteed to have a larger federal income tax bill after next year.

Money-manager-types explain, each time we reach this precipice, that going back to the Clinton tax code means virtually everyone who pays now will pay more.  It also means some who don’t currently pay net federal income tax will have a balance owed in 2013 after exemptions.

It’s not just rate increases for the “rich.”  The 10% bracket goes away, with the lowest rate reverting to 15%; the child tax exemption goes from $1000 per child back to $500; the “marriage penalty” comes back in terms of personal exemptions – and those are just the changes that will be felt by the most people.  Taxes on dividend income will go up as well, and all exemptions will be phased out as income rises (which will hit the small-business proprietors and professionals whose activities with their own money make an outsize contribution to economic growth and prosperity – not to mention dealing a blow to charities).

Bob Jennings at Fox Business ran some numbers for a young couple with two kids and combined income of $100,000.  (H/t: Lonely Conservative.)  Their tax bill would go up by nearly $3600 between 2012 and 2013, or about $300 a month.  And that’s just federal income tax:  they’re also paying property taxes (they have a mortgage), probably state income tax as well, and sales taxes and special excise taxes (e.g., federal gas tax) – plus they’re sending 13% of each of their earned incomes to Social Security and Medicare.

The young couple will certainly feel the loss of $300 a month.  Estimates of tax bill increases suggest that they will be felt down to incomes in the upper $20,000s range, by typical single filers.  (With exemptions, multi-person households have lower tax bills at the same or higher incomes.)  Those most likely to be single filers with incomes in this range are either seniors on fixed incomes, or young people just starting out.  For either demographic, an increased tax bite of even $20-30 a month makes a difference.  That amount can easily equal the total monthly fees assessed on, say, utility bills and banking.  Few people in this income bracket can say they wouldn’t miss the amount.

For a household earning $150,000 a year, the tax bill increase will run to $6,000, $8,000 or more, depending on the household.  People with incomes in this range know that the loss of $500-700 a month will make a significant difference.  Assuming they’ve already cut way back on consumption, they’ll have to start cutting back on savings and investment.  That will do the opposite of create jobs and encourage economic growth.  (It will also minimize the additional revenues from increasing the tax rate on dividends.)

The higher you go in the income brackets, the more likely filers will be to simply take less individual income.  Why expose it to the tax man?  The discretion wealthier taxpayers have over their assets disappears, disproportionately with each increase in current income.  It’s not worth it on the margin to accept the greater tax exposure.

These filers will park a greater portion of their assets in low-tax-exposure instruments rather than taking as much current income or capital gains as they do today, and taking economically-productive risks with it.  This removes some amount of ready capital from circulation, leaving it latent:  too expensive to take out and use.  If there were not relatively tax-advantaged options for using it abroad, this might make less of a difference.  But there are.  For America, increasing tax rates on our capital sump will drive jobs and economic growth elsewhere (especially with the costs of regulation on a dramatic upswing in the US).

We can hope the tax increase won’t happen.  The threat was averted for 2011, after all.  But it ought to be especially galling for taxpayers, in the wake of the Solyndra revelations – and the now seemingly endless parade of crony beneficiaries of the Obama administration – to contemplate the very real pain it will inflict on their recession-shocked households if the Clinton tax code comes back.

Americans are not undertaxed.  Government at every level is, rather, overspent – and the people’s lives and commercial activities are stupendously overregulated, which discourages economic activity – as well as income mobility – by raising the cost of literally everything.

Before we collect one additional penny in taxes from anyone, we need to cut spending and regulation.  Start with the federal grants to Obama’s political cronies; the current prohibitions on drilling for oil and gas; and 100% of the discretionary activities of the Environmental Protection Agency, including the new air quality standards set to go into effect on 1 January.  Whether you want to add a new regulation or modify an old one, you should have to fight in Congress for every single change, using your own money, not the people’s – and lose your battles if  you can’t get the votes.

The basis of government has gone badly awry in America.  The bottom line is that the taxpayers should not have to accept pain so that we can fork over more to keep funding it on its current basis.  Michael Bloomberg is wrong about that.  Government is what has gone wrong, and it’s government that needs to change.

* Aw, heck.  I meant the tax code reverts to Clinton’s in 2013, as several alert readers have pointed out.  No excuse; brain flatulence.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Ninety-three years ago, in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the armistice was proclaimed that ended the terrible fighting in World War I.  A war that had erupted in large part because Europe’s political leaders, a century on from the Napoleonic conflicts, were accustomed to war remaining limited, produced some of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The six-month battle of the Somme in 1916 took the lives of an unimaginable 1.5 million French, German, and British soldiers – without either side achieving sustainable penetration of the line of confrontation, or any operational victory. WWI was the most tactically and politically frustrating of wars, admitting little maneuver, little jockeying for advantage, and no enduring significance to victory.

But it marked the debut of the United States on the stage long occupied by the great powers of Europe, as American soldiers boarded troop ships to head “Over There,” and with their numbers and supplies, along with improving mobile tactics in the battles of 1918, turned the tide in favor of the Western alliance. We remember WWI now – as we should – for its excruciating trench battles and horrific death toll.  But it also inaugurated, in cataclysm and blood, the defining trends of the 20th century.

American geopolitical significance was one; of all the major political players in WWI, Woodrow Wilson was the one to put his name on an enduring international idea. Another was the rapid mechanization of warfare, in three dimensions.  WWI saw the first use of the armored tank, the debut of the first aircraft carrier prototype, the use of aircraft for bombardment, the rise of the submarine to effectiveness and tactical primacy in naval combat, and the fulfillment for ground warfare of the promise of indirect artillery fire, which pinned down troops in trench lines hundreds of miles long for years until military planners could figure out how to maneuver against it. The trend toward breaking up empires in favor of nation-states and popular sovereignty lurched forward at the end of WWI, which started with six major empires governing parts of Europe – British, French, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman – and ended with only two intact.  Indeed, out of the break-up of empires in WWI came the eventual fractious, uneasy statehood of most of the Middle East, with whose consequences we live today.

But on that Armistice Day in 1918, few could have foreseen the cast of sleeping giants – and some would say gnomes and demons – that was awakened by the Great War.  Few, indeed, had had any inkling in August 1914 that the troops heading off to war, with bands playing and tripod-mounted cameras snapping, would be ground to a pulp within months; or that the joking complacency of the pre-war summer would yield ultimately to a melancholy civilizational silence, in which the proclamation of armistice was a nearly soundless ripple, and weary peoples turned to the business of their son-denuded homes and towns and villages, and sought reasons to go on.

We never do see it coming, at least not in the outlines visible in hindsight.  War was in the air in 1914, but no one foresaw what that war would actually turn into.  A quarter century later Europeans were as steeped in complacent certainties as ever, even after Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, occupied the Sudetenland, and invaded Austria.  As Clare Booth Luce recorded in her incandescent Europe in the Spring, the political class of France, England, and the Low Countries spent the “Phony War” period of late 1939 and early 1940 reassuring itself that Hitler wasn’t going to invade them.  Nor were Americans any more farsighted:  our Congress came within a vote of demobilizing the Army in 1940, so certain was it that whatever stew they managed to cook up over there in Europe, we in America could stay out of it, if FDR’s hands were properly tied.

We are always living with unfinished business, and everything that seems like an ending to us eventually turns out to have been a beginning.  So it is with the armistice that ended combat in WWI.  In 1954, there having intervened a second world war and the Korean War, President Eisenhower signed the proposal to commemorate the day as “Veterans Day,” and remember veterans of all wars on it.  With the passage of time and the natural demise of the soldiers who fought in WWI, our vivid memory of the war itself is fading. But it remains a cautionary event, a source of fable and moral exhortation, and often, today, freshly relevant – and that is due in part to the fact that it ended with an armistice, the quintessential emblem of unfinished business.

Unfinished business is all around us today, as nations jockey against a precarious international order and America herself focuses inward.  It has never been wise to bet on the commitment of men or nations to peace, and we have no reason to do so in 2009.  Veterans Day is a day significant in this geopolitical sense, because of its origins in America’s first participation in a campaign to restore a global order. Our president at the time called it fighting a “war to end all wars.” It wasn’t, of course; war has not ended.  We have had to keep going back again and again, and the features of WWI have dictated where and when, and why and how.

But Veterans Day is also well named and well focused, in that its subject is veterans:  those who fight when unfinished business creeps up on us, when foresight fails, and the best-laid plans make contact with those of our opponents, and limp back to us wounded and inert.  In today’s America, our veterans are volunteers.  We are, uniquely for a great power, a little-militarized society:  our armed forces are comparatively small given our size and power, and relatively few Americans today find their personal lives touched by participation in war and combat.  Yet we see our military not as a cadre of alien professionals, but as our sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers – as a mobilized yeoman people, representing ourselves and what we believe in.

Our participation in WWI, a watershed outing for us, might have changed that.  But it did not.  Conflicts like Korea and Vietnam, conducted in a heavy political twilight, could have changed our perception of the purpose and character of our veterans.  But in the end, they did not.  Our armed forces, for all the natural human faults of those who people them, enjoy today an exceptional level of confidence from the nation, and a support from many that is heartfelt and visceral.

Lindbergh flying over the American cemetery at Flanders Field, Belgium

We are 91 years on now from that November day in 1918 that marked an agreement of combatants to unfinished business, and launched the near-century in which we have tried to finish it.  The unforeseen that is always around the next corner makes these lines from John McCrae’s 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields” particularly poignant:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Do they sleep, the Dead in Flanders fields?  Have we who caught the torch kept faith with them?  We have spent 91 years trying to figure that out.  We are likely to spend at least 91 more.  On Veterans Day, we can take a moment to honor the veterans who have carried that torch, giving the reality of flesh, blood, and spirit to our often confused, disputatious, dilatory, and halting attempts to keep faith with those who lie in Flanders fields.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

And, really, we did.  The intelligence from what IAEA calls the “alleged studies,” which makes up the bulk of the discussion in the latest report, was known to IAEA in 2005, and to Western intelligence agencies, including US national intelligence, earlier than that.  To be clear:  US intelligence made the assessments in the infamous 2007 NIE in the full knowledge of the information in the “alleged studies.”  The information pertained to activities prior to early 2004.  And it still forms the basis of IAEA’s new assessment.  Every substantive point in the report has been known to the public for at least two years; most of it for even longer.  Some of the details are new.

(For those who don’t follow this closely, the “alleged studies” are intelligence reports on the Iranian nuclear program forwarded to IAEA by UN member states, including the US, in early 2005.  The convention in IAEA documents is to refer to them as the “alleged studies,” which avoids conveying an official opinion on their accuracy or veracity.)

IAEA refers, for example, to the possibility that the Parchin weapons development facility, on the southeast edge of Tehran, is being used for nuclear-related high-explosive testing, a likelihood which US intelligence suspected prior to September 2004.  IAEA was allowed to inspect a portion of the Parchin facility in 2005, but was not given access to all the areas requested (including the area implicated below), and has not performed an inspection since.

The 8 November report alludes to information suggesting Iranian work on a multipoint initiation system for detonating a nuclear warhead (see section C.6 of the Annex, “Initiation of high explosives and associated experiments”).  Yes; that intelligence (along with IAEA’s knowledge of it) was reported two years ago by the UK Guardian’s Julian Borger, who provides a helpful link to his original piece in an article published Monday.  As Borger notes, IAEA referred obliquely to the same intelligence as early as May 2008, which would be three and a half years ago now.  The Iranian experiment itself, according to the foreign intelligence referenced by IAEA, occurred in 2003 (see paragraph 43 on page 9 of the Annex).

The “new” data point getting the most media attention is the report’s discussion of imagery of the Parchin facility showing a “bus-sized steel container” assembled there, possibly for high-explosive testing.  As indicated at the WaPo piece linked above, analysts at ISIS (Institute for Science and International Security) could not immediately corroborate that finding to the Post.  But however recent its detection, the container cannot be said to be new. According to paragraph 49 on page 10 of the Annex, the container was constructed, and a building erected around it, in 2000.

By itself, this development doesn’t come close to proving that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.  If you were disposed to ignore (or explain away) the pile of other evidence outlined in the 8 November Annex, you would be justified in ignoring this too.  A bus-sized steel container could be a number of things.  It’s not a tie-breaker.

If, on the other hand, you have been taking the previous evidence seriously all along – the accumulated data points from 2003 to 2011, most of which have been known to the public for at least two years, and some for more than six – you would be justified in regarding the steel container as additional evidence.  It would bolster your case, but it is neither decisive nor a sudden pretext for urgency.

There is a bemused skepticism being evinced about the timing of this particular IAEA report – and the media hype surrounding it – at many blogs where military strikes on Iran are generally opposed.  I appreciate their skeptical perspective. What IAEA has done in this report is showcase, in a newly pessimistic analytical context, a lot of data points we have known about for years.  Why now?

It is an interesting study in, well, something, to compare some very recent headlines in the Washington Post coverage of the Iranian nuclear program.  As recently as 17 October, WaPo characterized the program in these terms:

Iran’s nuclear program suffering new setbacks, diplomats and experts say

The language of the story started out dolorous and went downhill from there (all emphases added):

Iran’s nuclear program, which stumbled badly after a reported cyberattack last year, appears beset by poorly performing equipment, shortages of parts and other woes as global sanctions exert a mounting toll, Western diplomats and nuclear experts say.

That was 23 days ago.  In the last few days, the headlines have changed.  See 5 November:

IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclear capability

Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles, according to Western diplomats and nuclear experts briefed on the findings.

And 7 November:

IAEA warns of improved Iran nuclear program capability; Israel strike speculation builds

The urgent-sounding word “threshold” shows up in a lot of the MSM reporting from the past 48 hours (e.g., National Public Radio, CBS, New York Times, Agence France Presse), although the IAEA report doesn’t actually say Iran is on the threshold of anything.  (The word “threshold” doesn’t appear in the document.)

And in another change of thematic stance, some MSM outlets (see above for examples) are even suggesting that, contrary to the theme flogged earlier by WaPo and the Obama administration, the UN sanctions have not been working very well.

The character of the Iran nuclear problem is not something that can change significantly in less than a month based on the identification of a bus-sized steel container constructed during the Clinton administration.  A parsable case cannot be built that suddenly, Iran’s program has been catapulted from a largely theoretical and/or dilapidated state to Full Speed Ahead: Next Stop Alamogordo.  The sober truth appears to lie somewhere in between: there’s extensive evidence – and there has been all along – that “Alamogordo” is the objective.  But Iran’s progress toward it, while steady in some areas, is halting or difficult to discern in others.

I have heard from several readers who express skepticism about the apparent drum-beating campaign of the last week, which has featured reports of Benjamin Netanyahu seeking strike approval from the Israeli cabinet; disclosures about IAF military exercises and a Jericho missile launch; multiple leaks about US officials apparently being traumatized by the fear of an unannounced Israeli strike on Iran; a leak from the British defense ministry that it thinks the US is accelerating preparations for a strike on Iran; and now the wildly hyped IAEA report – which could have been assembled, to an 85-90% level of fidelity, by making abstracts from all the previous IAEA reports, changing some emphases in the analysis, and adding some results from modeling.

The skepticism is appropriate, I think.  No concrete development justifies the implication being built up in the media of “threshold-arrival,” or of a new finality to the intelligence.

The possibility that Israel might be taking advantage of a newly critical IAEA posture toward Iran, even though none of the information is new or game-changing, has a level of interest to it.  I don’t regard that as likely, however, because in 2011, Israel can’t gain enough from a preemptive strike – a strike conducted while it’s still a discretionary option – to make the consequences of it worthwhile.

That hasn’t always been the case, but it is now.  Conditions in the problem set in Iran have changed, dating back to late 2008-early 2009: the target list has expanded, and the critical bottleneck in the program – the most important set of facilities and capabilities to interdict – has shifted from the uranium enrichment network to the weapons development network.  The latter is more geographically dispersed, less clearly identified, and generally more co-located with dense population areas (mainly in Tehran and its suburbs).

There’s another facet of the overall issue that has changed in a way the public’s expectations haven’t caught up with.  It’s reflected in the outdated theme being flogged in the media about US officials fearing that an Israeli strike will be executed without prior warning.

This isn’t 1981, and the Iranian nuclear program isn’t Saddam’s; it really isn’t even possible for Israel to repeat the 1981 operation, in the terms suggested by the media leaks from “US officials,” and with the implications evoked by them.  The US will know what’s happening within moments of any such strike attempt being launched.  Indeed, we’ll know something is afoot before it happens.  The scope of American presence, intelligence, and planning in the Middle East today is immensely greater than it was in 1981.  And we work too closely with Israel now, on a daily basis, to be unaware that something on the level of a strike against Iran is being prepared for – even if we’re not explicitly informed of it.  If Israel conducts such a strike, it will be with our prior recognition, whether we and Israel agree there was a formal notification or not.

There cannot be a pragmatic, on-the-ground concern that we “won’t know about” an Israeli strike in advance.  We have known for too many years that such a strike is possible to be wholly unprepared for it as a contingency.  Of course we don’t want to be faced with its regional consequences, but there is no good reason to emphasize that point in public forums.  The main purpose for flogging this theme to the media seems to be keeping the possibility of it alive in the minds of a less-informed public.

Pundits speculated last week that the media onslaught was designed to channel foreign governments toward tightened sanctions on Iran, as the only viable alternative to the implied threat of a military attack.  (The Russians promptly interpreted it that way.)  Pursuing the endless, speculative permutations of this possibility would bog us down forever.  But this interpretation does seem more likely than the possibility that any of Israel, the US, or a combination of the US and the UK is planning to attack Iran in the near future – while issuing no serious, pointed diplomatic warnings to Iran, but instead making a lot of tantalizing, ambiguous noise about it to the press.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

For a slightly different tale of demosclerosis, see the Wall Street Journal today on “Flies and their lawyers,” which are keeping the Paiute Cutthroat Trout from “going home.”  The drama unfolds in the Sierra Nevada wilderness of California, southeast of Tahoe near the Nevada border.  In brief, the Paiute cutthroat trout (not to be confused with other varieties of cutthroat trout, like the Lahontan, for which there are also restoration projects underway) has been absent for decades from the 9-mile-long lower-creek area from which it is believed to have sprung some 10,000 years ago.  State fish and game officials introduced different varieties of trout into the lower-creek area some time back, and those trout did away with the Paiute cutthroat.

Happily, however, in 1912 a guy toted some Paiute cutthroats to the upper-creek area, above the waterfall, and the Paiute cutthroat trout survives to this day.  California Fish and Game and the federal authorities want to reintroduce the Paiute cutthroat to the lower creek.  They’ve been working on it since 1990.  The process itself isn’t expected to take long – get rid of the “non-native” fish by killing them off, put the Paiute cutthroat back in – but the regulatory requirements and the lawsuits have kept the restoration waiting on the shelf for 21 years.

Lawsuits?  Who could object to restoration of the Paiute cutthroat trout in its ancestral home?  That would be the legal defenders of invertebrates, of course.  Defenders of “flies,” to put it in WSJ’s generic terms.  Well, and people who just don’t like the use of chemicals.  To eliminate the unwanted fish, the state authorities want to use rotenone, a chemical whose naturally occurring base, found in the roots of common plants, was once used by indigenous tribes to kill fish for easier harvesting.  Rotenone would be tough on the flies (although they would be back in force pretty quickly).

Now, it turns out that the EPA has already been pleased (literally, that’s their word) to note that the project managers plan to use forms of rotenone that do not contain the synergist piperonyl butoxide (PBO).  They would prefer that the project use a rotenone compound with less naphthalene wherever possible, of course, and they recommend that Tamarack Lake receive physical treatment only (that is, have the unwanted fish removed physically rather than by chemical extermination).  They note that the lake is already deemed to be fishless, but the project managers reserve the authority to treat it chemically if the need arises.  The EPA wants them to commit to physical removal as their method of prior choice.

EPA also shoehorns the following into the agency’s May 2010 comment on the Final Environmental Impact Statement regarding the restoration project:

Finally, we wish to comment on the statement in “Master Response I” regarding climate change (p. F-16, last paragraph). The response states that the evaluation of cumulative impacts of the project and climate change are not required under NEPA since NEPA only requires consideration of project impacts in combination with other past, present, and reasonably foreseeable projects, and that climate change is not a project under this definition. We strongly disagree with this interpretation. In fact, the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) cumulative effects handbook1 identifies global climate change as an example of cumulative effects (CEQ, p. 9) and identifies indirect effects, such as climate change, as important in improving the analysis of cumulative effects (CEQ, p. 7).

In case you were wondering.

We could focus on the sensation of swimming in tar that one gets from tracing one of these bureaucracy-lawsuit-regulation-fests.  But there are two other important perspectives on this, one of which is that this is what your tax dollars are doing for you.  Some questions to consider:

1.  Do you care if the Paiute cutthroat trout, which is already surviving elsewhere, is reintroduced to the 9 miles of lower creek where, over the millennia, it developed its unique markings?

2.  Do you care enough to pay for the restoration?

3.  Do you care enough to spend all the money spent by the US federal government and the states of California and Nevada to overcome years’ worth of regulatory bureaucracy and lawsuits?

4.  Do you think this is a high-priority topic for the US federal courts?

5.  Would you care even if the Paiute cutthroat trout had not survived?

6.  Since this whole issue has arisen because of fish management activities undertaken by government officials in the past, should we not think twice about continuing to bustle around relocating fish, for abstract, sometimes fanciful reasons that end up competing with each other down the road?

The other important perspective on this is that a burdensome, demosclerotic process of this kind can only be sustained by government.  Government doesn’t have to worry about a bottom line – at least not in the short run.  You’ve got government’s back.

You certainly can’t institute processes like this in the administration of your own life.  (Imagine telling your mortgage-holder that your payment is being held up by the environmental impact statement.)  Businesses can’t tolerate them.  These processes are extremely inefficient and dysfunctional: they actively prevent the objective from being reached, in favor of endless deliberations from which more and more people come to derive their livelihoods.

Virtually all of the money that has changed hands so far has gone to lawyers, advocacy “experts,” and government employees, none of whom gets anything done that generates food, shelter, commerce, production jobs, and revenue.  Every single speck of this whole tale is self-imposed overhead.  It’s as if the clerical and janitorial staff, Human Resources and the legal department and the electric power company, all combined forces to prevent the sales staff from selling anything, or the logistics staff from getting the product delivered, or the production line from rolling anything off of it, finished and ready for the customer.

A business could never run this way.  It would be bankrupt by the third day of operation.  But there’s one more perspective worth taking a look at here, and that is the modernist perspective:  that we know enough, and government agencies are smart and well-appointed enough, to cruise the landscape with perfect foresight, resettling the fish for what are basically sentimental purposes.  It’s an odd marriage of irredentism and technological self-satisfaction, as if we can now use technology and the majestic powers of government to enforce mythical beliefs.

The most important question of all – whether this project is something worth having the taxpayer-funded government do – doesn’t get a serious debate.  The important question never gets posed to the people footing the bill.  Instead, with a government now run largely through its bureaucracies, and a court system attuned to arcane environmentalism, the process is extended for years, costing more and more money, over ancillary questions like how much naphthalene ought to be present in the rotenone compound, and whether fish are sexier than flies, environmental-advocacy-wise.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

2.  That Rick Perry had anything to do with the “leak” of “information” about sexual harassment complaints against Cain to Politico.

3.  That Mitt Romney was behind the “leaks” either.

4.  That the mythical ability to silence baseless innuendo, or spin it and come out smelling like a rose, or avoid it altogether, is a qualification for being president of the United States.

5.  That the left-wing mainstream media act in good faith when they retail these allegations.

6.  That media coverage of such allegations and innuendo is some form of vetted professional activity, rather than just a glorified form of slam book smears and middle-school cafeteria gossip.

7.  That it is incumbent on any of us to take the endless effluvia of the media smear machine seriously.

8.  That it is a sign of intelligence to thoughtfully consider these charges-without-evidence, rather than simply dismissing them.

9.  That the whole circus matters to our choice of president, in terms of illuminating for us the character or abilities of any of the candidates.

10.  That any of these cheap-allegation dramas is even about the candidates, rather than about us, and whether we have any judgment or discrimination when it comes to what we let the media fill our heads with.

If a competent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, today’s media can smear one – and then make it look like some innocent ham sandwich over there behind the counter did it.  But the media can only do this because we cooperate with them, by simply accepting every negative, damning, evil thought they suggest to us.

Keeping the barrage up is virtually cost-free for them.  They are not going to stop, no matter how conclusively it is proven that they are full of shinola.  Accepting their cues, and spending day after day discussing things on their terms, is the actual problem.  And that problem starts with us.

There is no corrective for this problem in the mechanics of politics or the media’s M.O.  Politics and the media aren’t going to change.  Period.  We have to decide what our characters and priorities will consist of.  Do we have the strength of mind to say this? – “Don’t bother me with your innuendo about Herman Cain.  I want to talk issues.  We need to cut spending, reduce regulation, and undo all of Obama’s dangerous executive orders.  We need to restore a constitutional balance of power in the federal government.  And that’s just for starters. Iran is closing in on a nuclear weapon.  China is menacing all of Asia.  European security is in jeopardy, and so is ours.  That’s what I want to talk about.  The future of the republic is at stake.”

Who cares if “they” think we’re stupid?  Are we seriously going to let this election degenerate into a suicidal snark free-for-all because someone might think we’re stupid, if we don’t bite on every worm the media dangle on the hook?

Any one of us could be in Cain’s or Perry’s position – or Bachmann’s, or Palin’s, or that of any conservative front-runner past or present.  Ronald Reagan himself wouldn’t have triumphed over this kind of media attack.  He would have looked every bit as caught off guard and flat-footed.  One thing the blogosphere does is amplify cheap, off-the-cuff opinions and send them echoing back to us in chorus, as if “everybody” now thinks Candidate X is toast and his character is in shreds.  Is that really true?  What obliges us to think so, other than the kind of fearful, triangulating approach to our personal opinions that we should have overcome by the time we got our high school diplomas?

Herman Cain hasn’t been convicted of sexual harassment, nor have charges been filed against him.  It would be public record if these things had happened.  It is not a sign of intelligence or moral discrimination for conservative voters to feast on vague allegations against our candidates, which we are told by third parties were made by persons whose names we don’t know, and which never resulted in prosecution or sanction.  As a rule for life, that’s no way to think about morality, law, society, or other people’s characters.

And Cain’s not even my preferred candidate.  But this applies to all of them.  If we wait for cheap “bad news” about other people to cease flowing, we’ll be stuck obsessing over it for all eternity.  It doesn’t have to be true or significant; it will just keep coming.  How much we are preoccupied with evil allegations is up to us.  We only think it’s the media doing this to us.  In reality, we’re doing it to ourselves.  We have the power to say no: we’re not playing any more.  Until we do that, the MSM will have us by the short hairs.

Oh, and one more thing I don’t believe:

11.  That Americans are too foolish and weak-minded to figure this out.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The Palestinian Arab campaign to unilaterally declare statehood has been pushing for over a month for full membership in UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.  Seeking membership in collateral organizations, where the US can’t exercise a Perm-5 veto, is a method of generating momentum for de facto recognition of statehood.  As pointed out by many, in numerous forums, the unilateral campaign being prosecuted by the Palestinian Authority (PA, led by Mahmoud Abbas) circumvents the negotiation process with Israel.  In doing that, it violate the Oslo Accords and invalidates everything both sides have agreed to in the years since.

In early October, Secretary Hillary Clinton lambasted the decision by UNESCO to allow a vote on the question – a vote that has just been held, in spite of strong US objections.  According to Fox News (emphasis added):

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said the vote signals weakness in U.S. diplomacy.

“So ineffective was Obama administration diplomacy, that France voted in favor of Palestinian membership, and Britain and Japan abstained. U.S. statutes, dating from 1990, now require a full cutoff of U.S. funding, which Congress should insist occur immediately. Should the administration seek changes in the applicable statutory provisions that would eliminate or weaken the funding cutoff, Congress should reject them,” Bolton said.

Fox quotes Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as determined to cut off funding in accordance with US law.

But the Obama administration may or may not take summary action.  The federal executive is not necessarily committing a prosecutable or impeachable offense by failing to observe the restrictions put on funds by Congress or by previous administrations.  Certainly, many Americans – probably a majority – would consider it wrong, and even disgusting, for the Obama administration to not make good on the funding threat, given the outright provocation and the irresponsible, confrontational stance of the PA.  But it is not clear what Congress can do to withhold the funds if the president decides to allocate them to UNESCO anyway.  The threat of budgetary retaliation is cleanly usable only when there is an expectation that there will be an official federal budget, voted on and signed.  There are ample reasons to suspect we will not have another one until after Obama leaves office.

We can hope Obama will act in accordance with longstanding US law.  That Mahmoud Abbas intends his statehood campaign to bypass the need for binding agreements with Israel has been made crystal clear, most recently in a 23 October interview translated by MEMRI.  Of recognizing the Jewish state of Israel, one of Israel’s requirements, he had this to say (emphasis added):

Mahmoud Abbas: “First of all, let me make something clear about the story of the ‘Jewish state.’

“They started talking to me about the ‘Jewish state’ only two years ago, discussing it with me at every opportunity, every forum I went to – Jewish or non-Jewish – asking: ‘What do you think about the “Jewish state”?’ I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will never recognize the Jewishness of the state, or a ‘Jewish state.’” [...]

Abbas also endorsed the kidnapping of Israel soldier Gilad Shalit as “a good thing”:

Interviewer: “Don’t you think that it was the resistance that managed to liberate a thousand prisoners?

“Negotiations must always be accompanied by a measure of force. There can be no negotiations without resistance. This has been shown by the experience of people – in Ireland and all countries.”

Mahmoud Abbas: “That’s true, but our circumstances are different. We are not able to wage military resistance.

“Hamas kidnapped – or rather, captured – a soldier, and managed to keep him for five years, and that is a good thing.

“We don’t deny it. On the contrary, it’s a good thing that on a small strip of land, 40 × 7 kilometers, they were able to keep him and hide him.” [...]

Fatah (Abbas’ party) and Hamas made much of their rapprochement and the unity of their parties as representatives of a “Palestinian State” earlier this year.  Rather than repudiating Hamas and its terrorist acts, Abbas continues – in Arabic language media – to embrace them.  (Although blogger Challah Hu Akbar no longer posts regularly, you can check his blog for daily updates to the number of rockets fired by Hamas at Israel.  There have been 53 so far in October.)

An organization of the UN has, over the strenuous objections of the United States, endorsed terrorism and the campaign plan of a PA leader who is determined to gain statehood without negotiating in good faith with Israel.  Time for the US to do what we said we’d do.

*UPDATE*  According to Voice of America and Fox, the State Department has announced that the next disbursement to UNESCO, $60 million due in November, will not be made.  The DOS spokeswoman said the administration would consult with Congress on how to move forward, pointing out that US membership in UNESCO could be challenged based on non-payment.  This will bear watching.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Now, in 2011, would be the worst of times for the US Senate to ratify the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS; or, “Law of the Sea Treaty”: LOST).

Ratification would presuppose an internationally agreed maritime order into which the US was buying.  The nature of that order is tacitly supposed to be one of agreements, definitions, and legalities; in essence, the form of international order to which the United Nations was intended to give impetus.

Realities of maritime order

But no such order exists, nor has it ever.  There is no overarching order for the US to buy into: nothing that exists independently of the use of force and the expression of credible intent by the most powerful nations.  That is why the early indicators of the demise of the Pax Americana are appearing in the maritime realm.  The great oceans are much like the old American frontier: regulated largely by custom and the firearm, sometimes unsafe for the vulnerable bits of civilization, and held in check by the vigilance of hanging judges and the threat of visits from the Army.

For the basis of order to change, the assumptions and activities of key players have to change.  Roving criminal bands have to perceive that their opportunities are increasingly closed off by a stronger order: that the cost of crime outweighs the benefits.  Strongmen have to accept the supervision of a civil order in which they may suffer losses or have to compromise on what they want.  The vulnerable have to be satisfied that they are safe if they relinquish a posture of armed vigilance.

Only the United States – a continent-size maritime power and the sheriff of the seas for the last 65 years – and America’s formal allies have been able to cultivate the open-minded, complacent attitude required of participants in a meaningful UNCLOS.  The basis of UNCLOS was American dominance of the seas; without it, UNCLOS is meaningless.  No independently-motivated power will voluntarily adhere to it where it requires compromise and the relinquishing of national purposes.  We are seeing that with unvarnished clarity in the Eastern Mediterranean and the South China Sea.

Turkey and China worry everyone in their neighborhoods.  Turkey is not a state participant in UNCLOS; China is.  But their attitudes toward the maritime rights of their neighbors are basically identical: neither regards international custom, UNCLOS, or the UN as an arbiter that can limit their claims or purposes.  So they behave as if international expectations don’t even exist.  Their neighbors take refuge in claims lodged with the UN, in alliances of convenience, in diplomatic protests.  Turkey and China respond with force and threats.

Cyprus, the next act

The drama off Cyprus, where US firm Noble Energy is drilling for natural gas, is now six weeks old and showing no sign of diplomatic resolution.  Turkey’s exploration ship K. Piri Reis was reportedly set to wrap up seismic profiling in the past week, but a second and third ship have been dispatched to “conduct exploration” for Turkey in Cyprus’ economic exclusion zone (EEZ).

The significance of that is overshadowed in most media reporting by the excitement of the related military activity.  But the important thing that’s happening is that Turkey is operating ships in Cyprus’ EEZ, for economic-exploitation purposes, and no one is doing anything effective about it.  The meaning of having an EEZ claim registered with the UN is thus being eroded before our eyes.

The additional ships contracted by Turkey are the Norwegian-flagged survey vessels Bergen Surveyor (now in the Black Sea following operations off Cyprus) and Oceanic Challenger, which are working for the Paris-headquartered corporation CGG Veritas.  That is interesting in itself, of course, since it’s easy to detect that the work is being done in Cyprus’ EEZ, but without the approval of Nicosia.

Cypriot sources reported Bergen Surveyor as active in the Republic’s EEZ, off the Western end of the island, as early as 6 October.  Cypriot bloggers suggested their government was appealing to France and Norway to keep their assets out of the dispute, and some concluded in mid-October that the appeal had been effective, since Bergen Surveyor was operating outside of – or no closer than the extreme northwestern tip of – the oil-and-gas deposit zone (see the blocks outlined on the map).

Outline of oil/gas blocks in the Cyprus EEZ, Levantine Basin

But the area of operations by the Turkish-contracted ships is inside the Cyprus EEZ, as that EEZ is designated under UNCLOS.  It is further noteworthy that the Cypriot exploration to which Turkey objects – taking place in Block 12 (“Aphrodite”) of the Levantine Basin deposits – is well outside of any Turkish maritime claim (or any potential claim by “Northern Cyprus,” for that matter.  See the map of Turkey’s idea of proper maritime-claim delineations).

Turkey’s move is thus not motivated by a claim to the seabed deposits in the area south of Cyprus; she has made none.  It’s not a matter of muscling Cyprus away from a gas deposit claimed by Turkey or Northern Cyprus.  It’s a general power move that places Turkey at odds with the international system of maritime claims by which Cyprus is operating.  Turkey is registering non-acceptance of maritime claims in EASTMED in general.

I don’t assess this to be a confused, abstract move on Turkey’s part; I believe the Erdogan government sees maritime claims as a key security and power issue, and views the claims of all parties in the Aegean and off the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel as of integral significance to Turkey.  This is a geostrategic view that appreciates the importance to Turkey’s security of the maritime approaches – and their importance to Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman aspirations.  By the lights of the Ottoman legacy, the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel are as much Turkey’s concern as the Bosporus, the Aegean islands, and the waters off Antalya.

For Turkey to operate from this visceral, historical sense of things is not nefarious in itself.  Geography and history are what they are.  But Erdogan is not “picking his battles” in a defensive security policy; he is starting new ones, for purposes beyond security and self-defense.  As a member of NATO, Turkey started out with presumptions in her favor, and might have approached her concerns with Cyprus and the maritime claims of EASTMED very differently.  But Erdogan has instead chosen confrontation and tacit rejection of international conventions.

Russia to the rescue, Israel over EASTMED

Because Erdogan’s NATO allies aren’t taking order to him, the other nations of the region are beginning to show force and advertise their alliances.  As previously announced, Russia sent an amphibious landing ship full of Russian marines (naval infantry) to join Greece in a naval commemoration at the end of October.  The RS Tsesar Kunikov docked in Alexandroupolis, near the Turkish Straits:  a pointed allusion to the city’s brief history.  It was built by the Ottoman Empire and called Dedeagac – a waypoint on the Ottomans’ 19th-century railroad extension into Europe – but captured by Russia in an invasion in 1877.  The Ottomans reclaimed it in 1878, but it went first to Bulgaria and then to Greece in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars (1911-13) and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22.  The Greeks renamed it Alexandroupolis in honor of their king at the time, Alexander I.

In last week’s commemorative ceremony, Russian naval infantry marched through Alexandroupolis with Greek marines, and the Greeks don’t appear to have been so excited about anything for a long time.  (Reportedly, anti-government protesters suspended their activities in favor of the ceremony.)  More than one website retails the story of how the enlightened Russian occupiers built a system of broad avenues through Alexandroupolis during their brief reign there in the 1870s, as opposed to the crabbed labyrinth of culs-de-sac favored by the secretive Ottomans.   If there isn’t an aphorism about how it takes the Turks to make you appreciate a Russian invasion, there ought to be.

In Cyprus, meanwhile, Israel last week dispatched a force of 16 fighter aircraft, tankers, and six IDF helicopters to conduct a military exercise with the Cypriot armed forces.  (The Turks responded but kept their distance.)  Israel has multiple security concerns for which having access to Cyprus would play a useful role; protecting her own offshore gas activities is certainly an important one.

Israel and Cyprus have in common their resistance to living under terms dictated by Turkey, whether the subject is the gas trade, their maritime claims, or their general security.  Besides her gas deposits, Israel is eying the threat from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria; even with respect to the asymmetric threat growing in the Sinai, Israel will benefit from an expansion of her geographic options.  So Shimon Peres is heading for Cyprus this week.

On the other side of Asia

Across Asia in the South China Sea, the confrontation between China and her neighbors continues at a low boil.  Unlike Turkey, China is a state participant in UNCLOS, and has registered a set of wildly excessive maritime claims with the UN.  China’s claims (see map) would leave her neighbors with little opportunity for offshore development, but accord Beijing the ability to hold almost the entire body of water at risk with coastal cruise missiles.

The Philippines has proposed, in the ASEAN forum, a concept for joint economic development in disputed areas of the South China Sea (SCS).  Vietnam endorsed the Philippine plan when President Truong Tan Sang visited Filipino President Benigno Aquino last week, signing agreements on naval and intelligence cooperation and committing to a hotline between the coast guards of Hanoi and Manila.  The Philippines has moved forward with a proposal for a special session of ASEAN defense ministers to discuss the joint-development concept – which, with momentum building for it in ASEAN, is the main idea on the table right now.

China is not a member of ASEAN, however, and a few days ago a state-owned media outlet, Global Times, issued yet another threat to China’s SCS neighbors.  An editorial in Global Times warned the “little countries” to “prepare for the sound of cannons [sic],” causing the Philippines’ foreign secretary to issue a stern rebuke.

Fishing disputes

But the SCS nations aren’t the only ones who think Global Times was referring to them.  Granted, the Philippines has been dealing for some time with Chinese fishing boats operating – with Beijing’s blessing – in her EEZ, and on 18 October, her coast guard had an accidental collision with a fishing mothership that was towing fishing boats near one of the disputed Spratly Islands.

South Korea, however, announced detaining three Chinese fishing ships, with 31 crewmembers, on 21 October, because the Chinese were encroaching on South Korean waters (a persistent problem for the Koreans as well as for the Philippines).  The ensuing brouhaha prompted editorialists at Chosun Ilbo to suspect that the “sound of cannons” comment was directed at Seoul.  And Japan had a minor incident of her own on the 25th, when the Japanese coast guard confronted two Chinese fisheries-patrol ships operating in the contiguous zone off the Senkaku Islands.

An absentee sheriff

As with the EASTMED dispute, the US is a negligible quantity at the diplomatic and strategic level.  Leon Panetta, making his first trip to Asia as secretary of defense last week, was recorded assuring ASEAN members that the US would maintain our military presence in the Pacific as a counterweight to China.  This is the kind of thing that is already less than credible if you actually have to say it.  It’s certainly not the centerpiece of a positive policy.  The momentum in the Pacific is with China and the jostling Asian powers – which ought to give us pause, in the US, since we do maintain a still-significant military presence there.

As with the NATO alliance and our defense alliance with Israel (indeed, our defense cooperation with Egypt and Jordan as well), our alliances in East Asia will begin to back us into confrontations we are not making the requisite strategic effort to ward off.  If we aren’t taking the lead in influencing events, using all the tools of state power, our alliances and military deployments can begin to look like absent-minded vulnerabilities – or ill-conceived provocations.

The US Marines, for example, conducted an annual landing exercise earlier in October with their Philippines counterparts on the west-central coast of Luzon, the northernmost of the major Philippine islands.  The coast fronts on a region of the SCS which Manila disputes with Beijing; Marine Corps spokesmen declined to address any idea of political overtones to the exercise.  As with US Naval exercises with Vietnam held in the summer, the joint events are always “annual” or “previously scheduled,” and are left otherwise without strategic context: left to communicate, in a changing geopolitical environment, whatever China and other regional nations want to divine from them.

This may sound clever to the sensibility of some people – it has Robert S. McNamara written all over it – but that doesn’t make it wise or sound policy.  The strategically significant message we want to send China isn’t actually “We will put our Marine Corps in your face and you can read what you like into that.”  That’s a negative, triangulating kind of message, one that gives hope to no one and shape to nothing.  If we are going to keep US military power in Asia, we should not be there to, in effect, provoke China, nor should we be there merely as an enforcer – a hired goon squad – for the initiatives and security emergencies of our Asian allies.

Ensuring that we and our allies are agreed on basic objectives is, of course, a process of give and take.  We are as interested in their goals and concerns as we are in ours.  But ultimately, we have a military presence in East Asia because we have our own objectives there.  We’re not there to intimidate China on behalf of Vietnam and the Philippines – or at least, if we are, we are behaving according to a separate set of rules from those of statesmanship and accountable policy.

China is watching developments in EASTMED.  Beijing will take lessons from whatever happens there, and the principal lesson will be the involvement of the US – or lack of it – and the extent to which we shape the outcome or have it handed to us.  If Turkey is able to change the security regime to her advantage, China will be emboldened to try the same.

It’s still not too late for the US to weigh in with Turkey, bringing NATO and our bilateral relations to bear.  One of the best favors we could do UNCLOS is get Turkey to honor it in her dealings with her EASTMED neighbors.  As long as major nations like Turkey and China see UNCLOS as either a negligible obstacle or as something to be exploited, the convention itself is meaningless without assertive enforcement.  Where there is no sheriff, the law is a matter of convenience for the strong – and no protection for the weak.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

(Note:  I didn’t realize until after writing this that Daniel Henninger had an opinion piece on a similar topic in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Great minds and all that.)

The other night, I watched a debate I’ve had on video for years: the PBS-hosted debate between early GOP candidates for the 1988 nomination.  (Many have forgotten now that H.W. Bush had quite a bit of competition.)  I wanted to see if my perception is correct that these debates have gotten much more stupid than they used to be.

And it is.  Boy, is it ever.  Bush was, of course, a “target” in that debate, as the sitting VP.  But the rest of the candidates weren’t out for blood.  There was no blood-in-the-water, feeding-like-sharks dynamic — nor did the moderator or questioners try to set the candidates up to go for each other’s throats, with cheap broadsides and one-liners that may draw laughs or applause, but fall apart on inspection.

The candidates talked – interestingly and intelligently – about a number of meaty topics.  They shoehorned way, way more substance into an hour and a half than the candidates for 2012 are able to get into 2 hours.  (There were 7 candidates in this 1988 debate; it wasn’t a narrow field.  It included blunt talkers like Al Haig, Jack Kemp, and Pat Robertson too.)

The differences between now and then?  Obviously, the behavior of the media is one.  The PBS organizers in 1988 weren’t trying to get a food fight going.

But the candidates’ behavior was equally important.  I’m not sure everyone has figured out that Romney could have refrained from being pugnacious and going into attack-dog mode in the first debate in which he and Perry faced each other.  The fact that he’s good at it doesn’t excuse doing it.  Perry, for his part, didn’t have to respond in kind.  He’s not good at it, and he shouldn’t have tried to match Romney cheap dart for cheap dart.  His strength is in talking policy and exuding a quietly tenacious benevolence.

These two were the field leaders, and they both whiffed at bat.  They didn’t have to take the bait and turn the debates into a mud-slinging contest.  I fault both of them – they’re both big boys – although the motive looks different for each one.  Romney comes off as cynical, willing to sling mud because it works for him, but then wipe himself off and pretend he didn’t start it.  Perry comes off as having had a bout of bad judgment:  thinking he was obliged to compete on the mud-slinging level, and getting mired up to his neck because that’s definitely not his area of strength.

But the most important difference between 1988 and today may be us.  If we didn’t let this contrived nonsense make our decisions for us, the first one who tried it – in the media or on the candidates’ stage – would get his comeuppance and have to scurry back into his hole.

We should know better than to think that debating abilities, in a content-deficient “gotcha” venue, are evidence of moral courage, constitutional vision, or strong leadership.   We should know better than to think that a president needs the ability to score points as Romney does (or as others did in the latest debate), in the artificial, closed-loop debating system designed to reward such point-scoring.

Leading the nation and dealing with global security threats don’t require that ability at all.

The president will never have to debate Hu Jintao or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a stage under the “gotcha” questioning of MSM anchor persons.  He will never have to debate the leaders of Congress in such a venue.  He won’t even have to debate the Democratic candidate in this manner: an attack-dog stance doesn’t work in that forum, as H.W. Bush demonstrated beautifully when he tried it in 1992, and Dukakis when he tried it in ‘88.  No matter what the “gotcha” question, in the post-convention match-ups, both candidates know whose side everyone is on – they’re not taking friendly fire anymore, and they focus most usefully on getting their own, positive message out.

Of course, the media and Democratic politicians will dog a GOP president’s every step seeking to trip him up and manufacture narratives that put him in a bad light.  But they’re going to do that to any Republican who wins in 2012, and none of the candidates has a magic pill that will immunize him or her against that process.

The president, however, doesn’t spend his time trying to score points against the news media or Democratic politicians.  He’s the president:  he states his case to the people.  Our media today are too numerous and varied for the old MSM to actually prevent the president’s message from getting out. He doesn’t have to shout them down, silence them, or make them look foolish or guilty or incoherent in order to reach the people.  He just has to speak.

His connection with foreign leaders is even simpler, because it’s one-on-one and doesn’t involve the media at all, except as incidental noise.  The media may be able to confuse at least some average Americans about the president’s character and intentions, but they can’t confuse Nicolas Sarkozy, Felipe Calderon, or Benjamin Netanyahu.  (Nor can Democratic politicians who make royal progresses to Damascus or Moscow, for that matter.)

President Obama is Exhibit A in the case that smooth rhetoric is not evidence of character or ability to lead.  Conversely, anyone – anyone – can be made to look stupid under the klieg lights.  You, me, Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, John Wayne, George Washington, Pope John Paul II, Mother Theresa, Margaret Thatcher.  (Well, maybe not Thatcher.)  It’s the easiest thing in the world to frame a moment so that someone looks like a guilty, inarticulate fool, unable to explain himself or get that awful knife-throwing machine turned off.  It’s also cheap and meaningless.

Our character as Americans ought to cause a revulsion in us against this kind of cheap theater in our political process.  As recently as 1988, it was better understood – by the media and the candidates – that it did.

I have my concerns about Rick Perry.  I think it was a serious misstep for him to go into attack mode in the debates; I’d prefer him to have seen the dilemma coming and chosen differently.  It was just the wrong thing to do, not so much because it’s not a good tactic for him – that’s an ephemeral concern – but as a matter of tone and leadership.  The debates have provided no reason, however, for concluding that anyone else who’s running would be a better president.  (I say this as someone who would be reasonably satisfied with anyone in the race except Ron Paul.)

My own view is that Perry has learned from his mistake and decided that his best option is to cut his losses and focus elsewhere.  That’s something I respect.  There will always be naysayers baying at such an enterprise, but we all have to recover from mistakes and losses at one time or another.  We can let the naysayers rule our attitude, or not.

Perry’s move is a gamble, certainly, but one thing it demonstrates is a willingness to strategize independently, rather than having his boundaries set by the organizational dictates of others.  He’s a politician; he understands the gravity of this move, and isn’t making it lightly.  But I, for one, am not invested in these debates.  I’d rather hear the candidates give their stump speeches, and peruse the information about their records that is available from numerous sources, friendly and otherwise.

Others may disagree.  But no reference to the “appearance” of the candidates, based on their debate performance, is a convincing argument about their character or suitability for the Oval Office.  The debates have been too silly for that.  They are little more than a high school popularity forum, showcasing facile performance abilities and leaving the viewer feeling cynical and unsatisfied.  I am convinced that 2012 will be decided by whether we show that we have the chops, as an electorate, to look beyond these debates.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.