On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

The Obama references are inserted at the end of each bio, in special blocks entitled “Did you know?”  Check out the bios since Coolidge.  Interestingly, there is an Obama blurb with the Nixon bio, but not with the Ford entry.  Here are the two Obama-related comments at the Reagan page:

•         President Reagan designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday; today the Obama Administration honors this tradition, with the First and Second Families participating in service projects on this day.
•          In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.

The White House confers honor on President George H.W. Bush as follows:

President Barack Obama awarded George H.W. Bush the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his commitment to service and ability to inspire volunteerism throughout the country, encouraging citizens to be “a thousand points of light.” The administration continues to promote service and civic engagement, honoring heroes of local communities as “Champions of Change” and fostering civic participation.

RNC depiction of a Moment of Eventhood

The Republican National Committee, perhaps a tad unfairly, has created a series of photoshops depicting Obama in events from history.  The one making the rounds is Obama landing on the moon, but I prefer the one with Elvis meeting Nixon, for its Gump-ish quality.

Of course, Obama’s staff is not inserting him into history.  Let’s just make that clear.  But in claiming that the Buffett Rule is like something Reagan would have promoted, it is certainly attempting to rewrite history.  I’m sure we can count on President Romney to end this strange practice, to let the presidential bios stand on their own, and to stick to hailing the sitting president’s policies over on the policy pages.

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.

As America remembers her honored dead this Memorial Day weekend – those who died in uniform defending our great cause of liberty – many hearts are troubled about what we have come to.  The idea of liberty on which our nation was founded seems to hang in tatters.  The genius of our forefathers in giving us a government that was to be limited, constitutional, and federal appears all but extinguished.  The indispensable ingredient of liberty, an independent people of good character, seems at times to be disappearing into a sorrowful sunset.

But I would like to suggest a few things about these discouraging fears.  First, I think the fear about the American people is overblown, because it is overhyped.  All we ever hear is bad news about the people.  Interestingly, however, in spite of our worsening economic situation and sense of political misdirection, America is still rumbling along:  her people still working and producing, still bearing children and raising them in families, still buying homes, still worshipping God as we see fit, and still paying taxes.  In spite of our mind-boggling, unparsable federal debt, there are thousands of safe, peaceful communities across America, in which the people live in diligence and hope.

The answer to why the nation continues to function lies with the people.  Government regulation does impose an increasingly onerous burden on us, of course.  Besides shutting down productivity entirely, in some cases, regulation makes everything cost more than it would otherwise, from our labor to real estate, and from automobiles to the price of milk, bread, and gasoline.  For several decades, debt was a relief valve for the rising cost of regulation, which eats away at the value of what we earn with productive work.  Now the regime of debt has largely shut down.

But Americans aren’t rioting in the streets over this.  We are tightening our belts, in order to get ourselves right with the future.  Don’t overlook the significance of this.  For every kid in the Occupy movement, there are hundreds his age finding whatever jobs are available and working hard, learning to be reliable employees and team players – and paying bills, saving money, and looking to what they can do about their own futures.  These young people, alongside their elders, are holding society together, with discipline and quiet, unheralded daily courage.

Don’t give up on Americans.  And don’t give up on liberty.  Regarding liberty, here is a lesson to commit to heart:  heavy-handed, dictatorial government never comes to take away the bad in people and their lives.  It comes to take away the good.

It is a fallacy of modern ignorance to think that no one had the idea, before about 1850, to make his fellows better by regulating and taxing them.  If that could be done, we would have been perfected long ago.  Governments have made that their rallying cry from the beginning of recorded history; overregulation and onerous taxation are always about “improving” the people and their conditions.  But what they actually do is sap the people’s initiative, productive instinct, and desire to live well, and do well by their fellow men, through knowing God.  No overweening government has ever ended up governing a hopeful, honest, productive people.

The good news is that America is the world’s example of what can be achieved by people who are not beholden to a god-like government.  America is not paralyzed today by the character of our people, the scarceness of our resources, or the terrors of our future.  America is paralyzed because our once-small government has grown on principles that are unworthy of us: invidious principles of despair, anger, resentment, and fear.  Because we are law-abiding and peaceable, our governments – too often vengeful and narrow-minded – hold us back.

Ronald Reagan said it repeatedly, and said it best:  Government is the problem.  I am not afraid of what the American people will do if we regain the liberties that are rightly ours.  I eagerly await the explosion of creativity and prosperity that will ensue.  We can produce, pay down, and manage our way out of the $100-trillion “entitlements bomb,” without penalizing the vulnerable.  And we do not have to be poor for generations in order to deal with it; in fact, we can’t be.  It won’t work.  We will deal with it only by regaining the prosperity and wealth that lie beyond the obstacles of the overregulatory state.  We can’t do this by staying on our current course, but if we change course, we will prove that history is not a death sentence for liberty.

Is Mitt Romney the person to lead us toward a different future?  I think he would give us a hiatus from the perils with which we are now on a collision course.  A president who would allow government to retain its current size and scope is not the reformer we will ultimately need; but the breathing space Romney could give us is indispensable.

I believe more and more Americans are seeing what those with wise foresight predicted as much as a century ago:  that when we give government greater power, someone will come along and use it in ways we did not intend.  Perhaps our slide into overweening statism has been necessary to teach a lesson to those who haven’t bothered to learn from history.  But there’s more good news in this regard:  we can learn the lesson and move forward.  Nothing compels us to spend time on backward-looking self-flagellation.  Lessons, yes.  Regret, no.

The beauty of restoring the unique American idea in our politics and common beliefs is that it inherently means moving forward.  In the last 80 years, America has been moving in fits and starts into the world’s past.  Over-governance and an institutionalized lack of confidence in the people are the past, as old as the pyramids but not nearly as interesting.  Any fool can proclaim – and often has – that the folks around him need more governing; history is largely an account of what happens next.  There is no impulse more common or banal than seeking to regulate and tax our fellows for “their own good.”

But the American idea is unique in setting explicit boundaries on that impulse.  Moving toward the American idea is always moving away from men’s overgoverned past and toward a better future.

A minority of American colonists was committed to the fight for independence – but they prevailed.  I don’t believe that the segment of today’s committed Americans is any smaller.  The only thing that can stop America from beating the odds now, as she has always done, is a loss of will by those who believe in her.

If history were a death sentence, America would never have been born.  If the past dictated the future, the light of liberty would have been shrouded in darkness some time ago; we who walk the land today would not even remember what it used to look like.

But we do.  Our nation did come into being; we not only ended slavery but we healed and thrived after our civil war; and as we survey the feckless wreckage of overgovernment strewn around us today, we can see that it is not the product of liberty, but of its opposite.  We can see the truth, and we have the great privilege of still being able to act on it.

Do not fear that Americans can’t do well with less government.  Something military officers learn early, if they are wise, is that you don’t control men: you believe in them.  And when you do, there is no limit to what they can accomplish.  The heroes who lie in our cemeteries, with the small flags waving bravely over them on Memorial Day, knew that.

I believe they did not die in vain.  Their spirit is with us now, carried in the hearts of those who knew and loved them, and the generations that have followed.  I believe we will honor them in the best way possible. We will beat the odds – again; we will give history something new to think about – again; and we will not sink in the mire but right ourselves, and trundle on toward firm ground and a bright future.

No nation has ever done this – but then, no other nation has been the United States of America.  When we do it, in peace, and for the world to see, it will indeed be our finest hour – and all the war dead whom we honor and thank today will be standing at our shoulders.

Let freedom ring.

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 they occur, as promised, in June – before the US election – the most likely outcome is more stalling and no progress.  But that is not because there has been no prior interest on the Western side in making big concessions in order to get an agreement.  What Iran is doing actually amounts to avoiding being presented with a favorable agreement.  The abruptness of the talks’ end indicates mostly that Iran doesn’t see it as advantageous to stick around and talk anymore, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the P5+1’s anxiety to negotiate a good deal for Iran.

As for Putin, his proximate reason for not attending the summit is obvious.  Missile defense was – as always, over the last decade – to be one of the two main topics in Chicago, the other being Afghanistan.  The collective NATO missile defense system for Europe was to be declared operational at the summit.  It was.  Russia’s main bone of contention with NATO is missile defense.  Although Russia has been invited to be a missile defense partner with NATO, and has participated in extensive talks on the matter, there remain fundamental disagreements between the parties over how to operate and orient a collective missile defense.

Putin had no intention of being present for photo ops under a “NATO missile defense” banner – in spite of President Obama’s assurance to Dmitry Medvedev that the US would be more “flexible” about the whole thing after our November election.  Putin’s reluctance is partly because Obama’s NATO allies have a different view.  They aren’t interested at all in more “flexibility”:  the Europeans, in their own special way, have actually been quite stringent on the need for missile defense, determined to go ahead with it for political purposes if not for the capabilities of the inaugural system.  The initial capability relies entirely on US Aegis warships being stationed in the Black Sea or Eastern Mediterranean, along with an early warning radar in Turkey whose data the Turks – against NATO policy – don’t want shared with Israel.  The vulnerabilities of this initial set-up are obvious, but for the Europeans, the point is the show of commitment.

Writing at NRO earlier this month, Daniel Vajdic assessed Putin as increasingly detached from reality.  I’m not so sure it’s Putin who’s in that condition.

If Greece leaves the Eurozone rather than staying in and swallowing some very nasty-tasting medicine, who will come to Greece’s aid?  The door will be open to Russia, in a way it wasn’t in 2010 when reports abounded that Russia offered Greece a 25-billion-Euro loan, but was rejected by the Greek leadership due to opposition from the EU and US.  Russia is already keeping Cyprus afloat, and has for centuries had a national interest in maintaining the principal geopolitical influence over Southeastern Europe.  Russia and Greece have begun a significant naval rapprochement – but that’s not the only rapprochement going on between the two Orthodox Christian nations.  Russian businessmen promised in September 2011 that Russian investment in Greece would be increasing dramatically, a credible promise given the level of investment Russia (and China) already had in Greek infrastructure.  As the Eurozone crisis rages – literally, at this exact moment – the second Greece-Russia Investment Conference is unfolding on the island of Evia.

The leaders of Europe have a problem.  If they effectively force Greece out – a move that would be understandable from a fiscal and monetary perspective – they will have to outbid Russia if they want to turn around and buy Greece back.  The implications for NATO are as uncertain as anything else.  A NATO missile defense, opposed by Russia and relying on the nations and waterways around Greece?  America has to be acting like the alpha dog to make that one work.

And we’re not.  There are a couple of potential factors in the decisions of Putin and the mullahs not to treat seriously with the US, for the time being, on the most important security matters.  One of them is that the US has little credibility as an enforcer.  What are we going to do if Iran cuts off nuclear talks?  Demand more talks?  Obama pre-neutralized US credibility on missile defense with his “flexibility” promise to the Russians; why come to the NATO summit when you can just wait for a collapse of American will after the US election?

Waiting could turn out to produce much bigger benefits than trying to fit into today’s American-sponsored multilateral efforts.  The second factor, which is both cause and effect of all the others, is that the world’s correlation of geopolitical power is changing.  It’s already happening.  The strong potential for Greece’s departure from the Eurozone is just the best publicized, most urgent of the current developments.

But there are others, like Japan’s growing concern over the predations of Russia and China on islands long claimed by Tokyo.  In early May, Japan made the unprecedented move of proposing that Russia return only two of the four northern islands – the Kuril Islands – claimed by Japan but occupied by Russia since World War II.  This is a major concession, and is undoubtedly related to the growing belligerence of China over the Senkaku Islands on the other end of Japan.

It may well have been encouraged in part by the Russian strategic bomber exercise in April that saw 40 bomber aircraft flying just outside Japanese airspace, along with the near-simultaneous naval exercise between Russia and China in the Yellow Sea (the first such exercise ever conducted).  Japan can ill afford to be in armed disputes on both ends of her archipelagic territory, but neither can she afford to suffer humiliating losses in those disputes.  Asia is not a good place to appear weak or friendless; Japan will want to be on better terms with one of the land powers at any given time, and it appears Russia is Tokyo’s first choice.

In theory, Japan should be able to rely on the support of her principal ally, the United States.  Our posture on the Senkaku Islands dispute is that it must be resolved through negotiation, not through force majeure.  On the Kurils, we have explicitly supported Japan’s claim since 1952 – but early in 2011, when Russian plans to upgrade the weaponry on the islands made headlines, our embassy in Moscow hid behind the claim of a media misstatement, when the Russian foreign ministry complained about our position on the matter.

If Obama is shifting our security focus to the Far East, one thing he will have to understand is that the resolution of our allies’ territorial problems is the hinge-point of our effectiveness.  We don’t weigh in on the negotiations; that’s for the parties to work out.  But we do back our allies up.  The problems may not seem big or important, but the security context we set for the resolution of these issues is what makes it useful – or not – to be an ally of the United States.

The questions are (a) whether Obama can understand and act on that reality, or (b) whether it even matters all that much at this point.  There will be no magic pill in the election of anyone to the Oval Office this fall; a switch of administrations will probably produce a brief hiatus, but will also represent an opportunity for status quo-busters.  Things have changed so much already that the political constructs within which the US and Europe operate too frequently come off now as complacent, head-in-the-sand pieties.  The holiday from history is over, although we may be the last ones to see it.  Neither Russia nor Iran – nor China, North Korea, or Syria, for that matter – is very interested in signing anything with the West right now.  Good deals based on the old assumptions aren’t as tempting when better ones seem to lie just over the horizon.

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 northern Ohio, the price was a surreal $357 per megawatt – because northern Ohio has been heavily reliant on coal plants that will all be shut down by 2015.

These increases can only be passed on to the consumer – or taxpayer.  Again, this is what bidders actually committed to pay for power generating capacity.  As Doug Ross reminds us, this isn’t information from a model; it’s a real-world, market-driven data point.  It’s going to cost that much to generate power without the coal plants.  If you want electric power, you’re going to have to pay the rate that makes it possible to generate power at that cost.

And, of course, almost no one can afford to do that.  Suppose the eight-fold increase in the auction price produced a commensurate eight-fold increase in the unit price of a kilowatt-hour for the consumer.  (It may not, but it will produce a significant increase, probably on the order of 500-700%.)

Imagine the average $120 or so monthly electric bill of Northeasterners exploding to $960 a month.  The 500-700% increase would produce average bills running from $600-720 a month.

Even just doubling the amount of people’s electric bills would entail a huge economic shock.  The eight-fold-increase numbers are hard to get our minds around, but supposing that the increase no more than doubled or tripled the amount of the average electric bill – with the residue being absorbed by taxpayer-debt-funded government programs – it would still have a very disruptive effect on social cohesion.  Only a small percentage of Americans would riot in the streets, but millions of Americans would begin fleeing the areas where they could no longer afford to live.

Those who already live in rural parts of northern Ohio would no doubt turn exclusively to diesel generators, propane heaters, and wood fires.  (Which we can expect would then be outlawed.)  They and their rural confreres in the neighboring states would be joined by more and more refugees from the cities.  Suburbanites would go off-grid to the extent they could, but would remain captive to urban regulation.  Many in the Northeast and Midwest would make the long delayed decision to move elsewhere – south and west – even if that meant losing the investment in their homes.  Still others would begin considering the move for the first time.

What Americans will not do is blithely revert to living in 19th-century conditions in the cities.  More than household electric bills will skyrocket:  the cost of everything in life that relies on electricity – in other words, everything – will skyrocket as well.  Retailers, no matter what they sell, will have to charge much, much more for their products, not only because making them costs the producers more, but because keeping the lights on or the machines operating in the retail facility will cost so much more.

This electricity increase will force thousands of businesses to shut down.  Even many big businesses can’t handle this cost increase.  It will kill more jobs than anything has to date, making the Great Depression look like a roaring recovery.  It will make things we take for granted, like fresh produce, impossible to obtain unless you live right next to a farm (and live outside of the Northeast, where commercial farming will die out entirely) – but it will also distort and suppress all kinds of sophisticated and packaged production, including those related to the most basic necessities.  The price of gasoline may remain comparatively stable, but if there are far fewer retailers to ship products to, many truckers will still go out of business.

Doug Ross cites the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) predicting that the massive shutdown of coal plants will compromise the reliability of the power grid in the Northeast.  But we must also consider the likelihood that power companies will lose so many customers, and lose so much revenue, that they will go under.  “Saving” them with big bailouts would only make the areas they serve more beholden to their “patrons” in the federal government.

These are mostly first-order effects.  As distortions mushroomed in the Northeast, we can assume that the federal government would not stand idle.  If its priority remained limiting the people’s access to electric power, it would do whatever was necessary to ensure that there would be no benefit from fleeing to the other parts of the country.

The bottom line on this prospective skyrocketing is that it cannot happen without tremendous social disruption.  That doesn’t mean the American people will turn violent or undisciplined – a small minority would, and they are already displaying their character as we speak – but it does mean that we cannot continue life as we know it, with almost everyone in the northeastern part of the country artificially priced out of the convenience of central-grid electric power.

Keep in mind, this is entirely artificial.  This is government policy, made independently of any sort of outside crisis.  Nothing imposes this on us except the Obama administration’s acceleration of hallucinatory ideological extremism.

Ross notes that after NERC published its estimates on the reliability problems of the future power grid, it was promptly investigated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

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.

Brooks’s thesis is that the selfish nature of man, in spite of “checks” placed on democratic government, has created the monstrous public debt in the West.  The wrongness starts with this opening volley:

The people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States had a low but pretty accurate view of human nature. They knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing. They knew that people generally prize short-term goodies over long-term prosperity. So, in centuries past, the democratic pioneers built a series of checks to make sure their nations wouldn’t be ruined by their own frailties.

Unfortunately, the very first words require correction.  We don’t have democracy in either Europe or the United States.  The reasons for that are different in each place, and they matter to the discussion that follows in the Brooks piece.

Democracy and the West

The ancient Greeks endowed us with the word “democracy,” which they pioneered more than 2400 years ago, before the main influences on the modern West had had their day: the Roman Republic and Empire, the rise of Christianity, the ascendancy of Old Testament Law as our common idea of law and the right; the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of the nation-state.

In the period between the Golden Age of Athens and the founding of the United States, the West’s ideas had been refined considerably.  “Democracy” was about participation in government.  Philosophers might debate the proper scope, purpose, methodology, and outcome of government (see Plato and Aristotle), but the ancient Greeks did not have a comprehensive ideology (like socialism) to define and insist on those elements.

Their practical contribution to the Western idea of man and the state was a concept of responsible participation in one’s government.  They were unusually willing (to their peril) to let government’s effects be whatever the participants came up with.  Regarding the nature of man and why he needs government, their legacy to us is theory and debate.  It has been the work of succeeding centuries to institutionalize “answers” on that head.

To call what the Western peoples have today “democracy” is to fatally elide 24 centuries of transformation in our ideas.  Granted, this is done all the time in public dialogue, where “democracy” is used as a shorthand for various other concepts.  But if we’re going to discuss how our perceptions of human nature relate to our arrangements for government, as Brooks does, it is essential to use the right terminology.

The American philosophy of government

Brooks gets it exactly wrong as regards the Framers of the US Constitution.  They didn’t see democracy as desirable, if requiring a check on people’s tendency to vote benefits for themselves.  Using the example of ancient Athens, they argued that democracy was itself the problem: it was a unique accelerator for this evil tendency, and was unsustainable precisely for that reason.

Their priority in any case was liberty; it was not endowing as many of the people as possible with the maximum possible influence over their government.  That’s why the Framers gave us – in the famous words of Benjamin Franklin – a republic: a government that was participatory, but representative and constitutional.

The power they intended to check was the power of government.  The American philosophy of government combines constitutional limitations with separation of powers; checks and balances among the elements of government, including the people as well as the three branches; and the division of government into levels of authority – federal, state, and local.

The kind of republican government the Framers gave us is properly described as limited, constitutional, and federal.  If you remember these three foundational words, you have memorized everything important about the American theory of government.

“Limited” government derives, first and foremost, from the Framers’ idea that our individual rights are endowed by the Creator, that government’s purpose is to respect and secure them, and that government’s scope must not be enlarged to interfere with them.  But the Framers also explicitly saw limited government as government that would not become, in today’s metaphor, a 24-hour ATM for those who like to vote themselves benefits.

The Framers’ precaution against benefits-voting was a limited federal government – government that had no charter to perform the highly corruptible function.  Remember that.  The Framers’ precaution against benefits-voting was limited government.  This concept is the opposite of Brooks’s thesis, so repeat as necessary.

That is why constitutional government is so important.  What the government is not chartered to do, it may not do.  It has to stick to the Constitution.  The Constitution can be amended by the people, but it is intended to be a bulwark against the dangerous enlargement of government’s scope by benefits-voters and other invidious interests.  Our Constitution was written to make it harder to achieve what the Framers called “transient majorities,” which ram things through – like entitlements, ObamaCare, and the EPA – that the nation will come to regret.  The separation of powers and checks and balances are intended to discourage incessant lawmaking, government-enlarging, and benefits-voting.

Federalism is the third and coequal characteristic of American government.  The Framers’ concept was that lawmaking intended to cultivate morality in the people and produce specified social outcomes belonged at the lowest possible level of government.  If the people are going to vote money out of their fellow citizens’ pockets, for things other than national defense and a few federal salaries, they should do face to face with both the beneficiaries and the taxed.  The Framers recognized that government typically ends up doing more than the US federal government is empowered to do by the Constitution; their concept was that state and local governments, with their inherently limited scope, would be the ones doing such things.

Ultimately, the American idea of both man and the state is directly antithetical to Brooks’s formulation.  The Framers’ philosophy was that men and women of character and education would do well with a limited government, which would minimize the temptations of big government for the evil aspects of our nature.  The Framers didn’t despair at all of men’s ability to be responsible and accountable in their lives – they attributed the capacity to having, in the words of John Adams, a “religious and moral” character.  They didn’t frame government to repress a tide of selfish irresponsibility in the people; they framed it to refrain from creating one.

The Framers knew it was a risk to make government as if men could prosper with very little of it – but they regarded it as a lesson of history that more government did not make men or their society better, but typically made them worse.  Contra Brooks, government was seen not as the warden of an incontinent species, but as the servant of a responsible, self-motivating, and self-restraining one.

The European difference

Over in Europe, meanwhile, the Western idea developed along a separate and distinct path.  The very English ideas of restraining government, respecting rights in the people, and dissociating government from apocalypticism were not the main shapers of the continent.  As the Enlightenment began to arm itself and burrow into the culture, divine-right monarchy collided with the rise of comprehensive secular ideologies, from the eerily modern Napoleonic Code to Marxism, communism, Soviet socialism, Fascism, National Socialism (or Nazism), and today’s “democratic socialism.”

Treading a centrist path meant putting new names on old practices.  Where once a king had provided for his people in the name of Jesus Christ, now the modern welfare state provided for the people in the name of enlightened national interest, “fairness,” or “economic justice.”  The governments operating on this premise have run the gamut from Bismarck’s Germany to the Scandinavian monarchies, the French Fifth Republic, and the disaster of present-day socialist Greece.  Europe has fielded parties named “Christian Socialist” as well as “Communist”; the modern continent has governed itself with a mishmash of legacy paternalism and bureaucratic radicalism, an approach that until the past three years was alien to the political consciousness of the United States.

The adjective “democratic” was added to signify that the people were to vote – a refinement adopted partly on the understanding that voting was a way to decide how much would come to a citizen from the state.  It is laughably wrong to suggest, as Brooks does, that modern European governments were set up to restrain the people from voting themselves benefits.  Voting benefits for the people has been the governmental zeitgeist of Europe for the last 150 years.

Classical liberals believing in smaller government and more liberty for the people were always a minority in continental European politics.  There is much to admire and be grateful for in the legacy of Europe, such as the idea of the independent yeoman – a free and responsible actor who has not existed in any other culture – and the idea of government that does not oppress the people, but has an obligation to prioritize their welfare.  The concepts of social mobility, and “capital” that anyone can amass and wield, arose there.  Europe gave the world the enduring model of “middle class man”: man who was neither a serf-lord nor a serf: man who could make of himself what he would, rather than being condemned for life to a single social stratum.

But Europe did not start its modern political run from the same place as the United States.  The essential difference between the continents boils down to the importance to each of dictated outcomes.  The modern, post-Napoleonic European approach to government was social-outcomes-oriented from the beginning and has become steadily more so.  The American mindset is skeptical of government’s efficacy for producing desired social outcomes.  In the distinctively American mindset, the danger of giving government more power to shape and trim the people far outweighs the potential benefit.

It is essential to understand these things.  In America, we still have not bought into the premise of the European welfare-state concept – and the political force of our trademark libertarianism remains powerful.  In his thesis, Brooks posits an ahistorical amalgam of diverse and even opposing political ideas, implying that the US and Europe have been sort of intending and doing the same thing all along – when in fact, that has not been the case.  The reasons matter, and they influence how we vote today.  There is a significant portion of the US voting population that rejects the idea of man and the state on which the welfare state is predicated, and in doing so, traces its roots to America’s unique founding idea.

The American idea and today

Man can govern himself.  He has to do it it carefully and sparingly.  It is outside of the ministrations of government that he develops character and self-discipline.  The less he is governed from without, the better he does in terms of work, saving, providing for himself and his family, using ingenuity, showing compassion to those in distress, and uniting with his fellows in the community to make it better.

Will everyone do exactly this, and in exactly the way each and every one of us would like, if the burden of government is light?  Of course not.  But the great majority of people will perform admirably, and will be free to help those who don’t.  The Framers believed that, and so do I.  And if America’s history demonstrates anything, it is that we are right.

The Framers’ pessimism about human nature was different from that posited by David Brooks.  It affirmed that containing the scope of men’s selfishness is best accomplished with less government, not more.  It did not fear to limit the charter of government on that principle.

The Framers’ solution is the correct one:  have less government.  Walk back from it step by step, if necessary.  Protect the vulnerable who would be hurt if it were done carelessly (e.g., seniors relying on the entitlement programs).  But get it done.  This, right here, is the argument we need to be having.  The answer is right before the noses of the American people.  But we do need “conservatives” who know how to frame the question.

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.

“It would have been better to solve it (the Iranian nuclear crisis) in a diplomatic way, by using pressure and without applying military force,” the ambassador clarified at the closed meeting, “But that does not mean that this [attack] option is not possible. Not only is it possible, it is ready. The necessary planning is in place to make sure it’s ready.”

Well, OK.  The question is not whether we are ready or should be ready for this option – um, of course we are; would we tell anyone if we weren’t? – the question is why our ambassador in Israel would say this.  (Read the full comments for the unnecessarily explicit flavor.)

First of all, an ambassador – or at least his top advisors – knows that bellicose comments of this kind do not accord with the conventions of diplomacy.  You don’t go around assuring other nations that you’ve been practicing to attack a third party.  Besides being operationally stupid, it’s potentially both destabilizing and destructive to your credibility.

Instead, you state what your national interests are, you clarify the outcome you’re looking for, and you assure the relevant audience that you will do what it takes to protect your interests and secure your outcomes.  The point is not whether the audience knows that you have actually tested a military OPLAN (who cares? We test them regularly), the point is for them to understand exactly what you want and the seriousness of your determination.

A warning (or, in this case, an assurance) that the US is ready to attack Iran was almost certainly given on orders from the White House, since it’s not something a diplomat would naturally be moved to say, or say without permission.  It’s a combination of operational TMI and inflammatory rhetoric: a sort of anti-diplomacy.

Second, this is a threat that can’t be convincingly conveyed in a fey, indirect manner.  If we mean this threat and we want it to affect Iran’s decisions, then say it to Iran.  (I would advise putting it in different terms.)  Putting the threat out there in the guise of an assurance to Israel just looks manipulative.

It also looks spurious and irresponsible, if we’re going to sit down with the Iranians in Baghdad later this month and “negotiate.”  What, exactly, are the Iranians supposed to assume about this threat?  What action of theirs could trigger it?  Does it clarify the US position, or obfuscate it?  With the threat of war, it is not actually a good idea to be overly clever and create doubt about triggers and your intentions. If you’re going to deploy the war card, certainty is the mindset you want your intended audience to have.

In any case, if the US and the Western powers make the offer of a sweet deal for Iran, in the hope of getting some kind of agreement – a prospect endorsed by the analysis of long-time observer Gerald Seib in this video – that signal will be at odds with the over-explicit threat of attack.  It would be hard to be convincing about a coherent position in that case.

Regarding the point on military preparations, I know many readers try to stay abreast of where the aircraft carriers are, and that’s not necessarily a fool’s errand.  It’s important not to go all “Pat Buchanan” about it – there are two carriers in the Persian Gulf region at least twice a year because they are turning over their patrol duties; it’s not a sign of the Apocalypse – but it can be a useful indicator.  That said, I advise you not to try this at home if you aren’t familiar with US Navy operations.  The presence of two or more carriers in the Central Command “AOR” (area of responsibility) is almost always an indicator of strike group turnover – or simply a coincidence due to a rare circumstance like USS Abraham Lincoln’s (CVN-72) recent change of homeport from Everett, Washington to Norfolk, Virginia, which involved an extra transit through (and deployment in) the Middle East.

The US administration announced earlier this year that it would be keeping two carriers on station in the Gulf region for the time being.  That gives the president a ready option in case he wants to ramp up pressure on Iran.  I would not obsess over the carriers, however.  They will undoubtedly participate if there is a strike on Iran – they will be indispensable for keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, and their F/A-18 strike-fighters will no doubt be used for the precision targeting of hardened sites, among other tasks for the airwings – but they may well not be the centerpiece of the operation.

If President Obama were to scope a strike on Iran as I believe he would – narrowly, striking only a limited set of nuclear-related targets – the strike may well be conducted as a “prompt global strike,” according to the doctrine and capability of the same name, which has been in development since the last year of the Bush administration.  It could involve mostly cruise missiles and “global airpower”:  B-2 and B-52 bombers launching their missions at a distance from Iran, including launches from US territory; i.e., Whiteman and Barksdale.  (I doubt that it would involve long-range ballistic missiles, which are not accurate enough for most applications in this kind of strike.)  The strike would certainly be conventional, not nuclear.

All that said, if an agreement is reached with Iran in the next couple of months, it will be because the agreement is advantageous to Iran, delaying the EU sanctions which are to kick in this summer, and requiring nothing of Iran that the mullahs were not willing to concede.  Any agreement that does not entail full, unannounced inspection of all Iran’s suspect facilities and nuclear-related programs, as well as Iran’s adherence to the “Additional Protocol” of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, is an agreement that will not stop the nuclear weapons program.  That kind of agreement, however, is what we are virtually guaranteed to get.

For the United States, issuing attack threats in the manner of Hugo Chavez is not a convincing posture.  I don’t know if the Israelis will find it reassuring; I suspect the Europeans and Iranians will find it annoying, and decide to ignore 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.

Blogger Richard Millett was one of those using a video camera – for the first few minutes.  About 8 seconds into the presentation, Millett was prodded in the shoulder and ordered to stop recording.  When he refused, a man got in his face, demanding he stop recording, and said “You’re a typical Israeli, you know.”  (Millett is not an Israeli, and it’s not even clear he’s Jewish.  I have no personal acquaintance with him.)  As that confrontation unfolded, a very large man seated in front of Millett got up, towered over Millett, ordered him to leave, and snatched Millett’s backpack, walking out of the auditorium with it.  The audience began rhythmic clapping, shouting at Millett to leave.  Millett tried to make the case for his presence at a meeting open to the public, being held at the taxpayer funded University of London facility, but the audience continued to shout at him:  noise for noise’s sake; noise to drown him out and preempt any rational discourse.

Eventually, Millett did leave, in part to ensure the recovery of his personal belongings.  The audience clapped ecstatically for his departure.

If you go through Richard Millett’s website, what you will see is documentation of a number of such events (at most of which he was able to stay and record throughout).  Millett is critical, no doubt about that, but all he does is document exactly what the anti-Israel – and often anti-Semitic – activists and lecturers themselves do.  He quotes them accurately and gets them on video when he can.  There is nothing unfair about his coverage; it is scrupulously honest.

The University of London should certainly look into this, and ensure that public events can be attended peacefully by anyone, and that videorecording is allowed to all or denied to all equally.  Such enforcement may have little effect, however, on a group mindset that resents not just criticism but the simple truth.  If a civic or political group, meeting publicly, is not willing to have its activities and statements recorded truthfully by critics, its purpose is suspect.  Forcible suppression of truth only works one way:  those who practice it have wrong intentions.  There can be no good purpose for preventing third parties – i.e., the whole of society, whether friendly or critical – from seeing what is said and done at a public event sponsored by the Palestine Society.

The flip side of preventing the coverage of pro-Palestinian events is silencing supporters of Israel and those who make a pro-Israel – or even just a balanced – case in the matter of Israeli-Palestinian relations.  College campuses in the United States are the scene of a growing number of such attempts.

Quite a few of the most noteworthy have taken place in California (although by no means all.  On a slightly different head, see here for a Rutgers event to which putative Israel supporters were denied entry, based on blatant profiling by the sponsors.  And here for the attacks on Israel supporters who mounted political displays at UCLA and Penn State).  Back in 2010, writers for the American Thinker summarized a series of events at California universities at which critical or pro-Israel speech was shouted down – including an event made infamous for this exclamation by Dr. Jess Ghannam, a psychiatry professor at UC-San Francisco (emphasis added): “Now, every single Israeli military official and politician will be afraid to speak publicly. It’s huge!”

In a similar vein, Israeli soldiers giving a presentation at UC-Davis in March 2012 were relentlessly heckled by Palestinian-activist students.  One accused the Israelis of having turned “Palestine into a land of prostitutes, rapists, and child molesters.”  He hollered at the soldiers (emphasis added):

“How many women have you raped?  How many children have you raped?  You are a child molester!”  And he admitted freely: “I can embarrass myself all I want.  I will stand here and I will heckle!  My only purpose today is that this event is shut down!”

The joker in all this, however, is that the passionate heckler turned out to be a student who admitted to having been paid $50 to do the heckling, and who was given a script to follow for his performance.  The authorities made no effort to quiet the hecklers during the event, or advise them that the invited guests had a right to be heard.  Read the full CAMERA story; it’s a doozy.

It’s a good question how many universities realize the hit their academic reputations take from these events.  It’s one thing for the citizens to have to effectively subsidize the propagation of views they disagree with at the state-funded institutions.  But it’s another altogether for those state-funded institutions to silence speech on the taxpayer’s dime.

Not all the universities in question are taxpayer funded, of course.  But if you assembled the actual taxpayers for these events, they would behave much better than the student activists, faculty, and officials at almost any university.  (Fans at a minor-league hockey game would behave better.)  The best in the legacy of the English-speaking peoples – letting everyone have his say, tolerating dissent, prizing courtesy toward political opponents – is decreasingly in evidence in our most celebrated institutions of higher learning.  When the ordinary people are way better than the leaders of academia in this regard, it becomes a serious question why the taxpayers should keep funding the institutions’ sophomoric privileges.

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 temptation is strong to just let this one go.  But it’s actually a perfect example of where Romney is, um, challenged, and why my enthusiasm for him remains tepid.  The short version of my point is that the president has no business restructuring auto companies and trying to guide them through “recovery.”  He is not empowered by any part of the US Constitution to do this, and it’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea in any case.

If I want the services of someone who’s good at reorganizing auto companies, I’ll invest money in a private business.  That’s not what we elect a president for.  The president of the United States, our highest elected public official, needs to keep his paws off the management of private companies.  When he doesn’t, the window is flung open to cronyism, graft, bad business decisions, and distorted, uneconomic incentives.

The US auto industry keeps snuffling up to the public trough – has been doing so for 30 years now – because it is required by the government to operate under unprofitable conditions.  It is tended by the federal government as an interest of politically connected constituencies.  It has been artificially constrained and incentivized for so many years now that to say it has “recovered” is a wholly political statement, bearing no useful relation to the Big Three’s actual profit-loss or earnings picture, stock price, or any other measure of business health.

In fact, Chrysler’s much-touted “payback” of its taxpayer bailout turned out to involve a shell game in which the US Department of Energy is lending Fiat $3.5 billion so that Fiat can pay off its US Treasury loan and pump Chrysler with cash by exercising an option to buy Chrysler stock.  The Washington Times describes the transaction as follows:

So, to recap, the Obama Energy Department is loaning a foreign car company $3.5 billion so that it can pay the Treasury Department $7.6 billion even though American taxpayers spent $13 billion to save an American car company that is currently only worth $5 billion.

That’s government management in a nutshell.  Romney can’t manage the auto industry better – not from the Oval Office.  No one can.  If he wants to run auto companies, he needs to see if Ford, GM, or Chrysler is hiring.  If he wants to guide them through bankruptcy, he can become a federal regulator or get himself appointed as a bankruptcy judge – and in either case, follow the law on the matter as written by Congress, rather than getting creative and exercising powers the Constitution doesn’t give him.

When Romney speaks of the US auto industry recovering, he is speaking in the language of big, dirigiste government, accepting at face value the short-term effect of a bailout process that has served mainly to perpetuate unprofitable but politically entrenched conditions.  It guarantees that more subsidies will be needed down the road.  The taxpayer had to be billed for getting the Chevy Volt built and maintaining the political sway of the UAW, because those are special-interest mandates that no one would pay for voluntarily.  The bailout under Obama has simply been a pretext for expanding the unprofitable conditions that make the US auto industry unable to truly “recover,” in the sense of not continuing to need bailouts.

A president who doesn’t see this is hard to get excited about.  There is no point in claiming that Romney does see it, when he never speaks as if he does.  About the auto industry bailout, what he ought to say is that it was improperly handled by Obama through executive actions that must not serve as precedents; that it hasn’t turned out to be a good deal for the taxpayer; and that due-process bankruptcy without presidential intervention would have been the right way to proceed and should have been defaulted to.

Romney’s utterances on this topic indicate that he is a big-government politician.  Not only is he not offended by the bailout, he’s not offended by the Obama administration’s dirigiste approach to restructuring GM and Chrysler.  He’s taking credit for it.

In the sense that he would not engage in Chicago-style cronyism, I think Romney would be better than Obama.  (There are a number of other ways in which Romney comes out on the long end of the personal- and professional-integrity comparison.)  But in terms of improper autonomy in the executive, and structural opportunities for cronyism, he would probably either set or confirm some very undesirable precedents while in office.  He needs an active, curmudgeonly Congress to thwart him, early and often.

The president is not the nation’s CEO-in-chief.  Regarding domestic policy, he should talk principle, not business-reorganization specifics.  I’d like to hear more from him on foreign and security policy; on domestic policy, it is far more important to be courageous about the principles of limited government than to be knowledgeable about reorganizing businesses.

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.

Little b-words are probably sexist, sizeist, and ageist too.

According to the study, babies of 9 months (whose lives, we should note, are centered on eating, doodying their diapers, and putting unsanitary things in their mouths) have difficulty interpreting the facial expressions of people of other races.  Medical Xpress, reporting on the U. Mass Amherst study, summarizes the findings as follows:

The researchers found that by 9 months, infants show a decline in their ability to tell apart two faces within another race and to accurately match emotional sounds with emotional expressions of different-race individuals. This is the first investigation of this effect in infancy and supports other studies suggesting that emotion recognition is less accurate for other-race faces than own-race faces.

So there is a decline in infants’ ability to distinguish between other-race faces (the decline was observed between 5 and 9 months in the study).  Of course, there are a lot of changes in babies between 5 and 9 months, such as getting way bigger, gaining teeth, sitting up and crawling, sleeping through the night, and so forth.  If we went by the labeling standard with which the “racist babies” study is being touted, we’d describe a baby’s growth as obesity and his sleeping proficiency as narcolepsy.

Baby, wired to register racism (U Mass-Amherst photo)

If “racism” is defined as any form of noticing that there are physical differences between the races – anytime, anywhere, by anyone – then the concept has no political or moral meaning whatsoever.  It is as neutral and uninteresting as eyelashes and fingernails.  The “differently abled” or handicapped, according to this definition of racism, would be those who did not develop it.  If it’s typical of babies in a study, regardless of race, then it’s – by definition – normal.

But the thoughtless use of the word “racism” in connection with this study highlights a snowballing trend – something in the nature of an avalanche – in modern communication.  There are a number of freighted words, like “racism,” “intolerance,” and “[x]-phobia,” which have specific meanings and were coined at one time to identify patterns in which people either made conscious choices to believe certain things and behave in certain ways, or were driven to by pathologies attributable to rearing or their social environment.  The point of this post is not to refight the battles of their creation, but to observe that these words are used in invalid ways to prejudice public dialogue.

The idea of racism – see Dinesh D’Souza’s comprehensive volume on it – gained momentum in the 19th century with theories of race from well-known historians and philosophers, followed by a moral and political backlash against the idea of permanent racial disparities.  Racism was initially considered to be an intellectual choice, based on “empirical” observation and analysis.   Its opponents, for their part, regarded their position as a moral one, adopted out of moral concern for the treatment of – discrimination against – their fellow men.

As D’Souza notes, the modern take has evolved further: the “prevailing view … is that racism … is a product of irrational antipathy … a kind of pathology or dementia.” (1995 hardback edition of The End of Racism; p. 28.)

These two distinct concepts are themselves something of a mishmash, requiring much refinement and explanation.  The first implies a choice that is ultimately moral:  a choice of how to perceive and treat other humans.  The second implies a socio-psychological problem that may require therapy, although it’s not clear how to administer such a program for vast numbers of people.  But in either case, the central idea is that there is a problem, an anomaly that affects the community and needs to be dealt with by policy of some kind.

These concepts are on another planet from the untutored responses of 9-month-olds.  If our earliest natural response to other races constitutes “racism,” then the manifestation cannot be either a moral problem – which must be based on individual choice – or “a pathology,” something that is damaging to a system because it is anomalous.

We have developed imperfect (and easily abused) means to try to deal with the kinds of problem racism has been defined as in the past.  But what do we do if it’s not one of those problems?  Babies aren’t making moral choices to “discriminate” or assume derogatory things about others.  And if they carry a universal “pathology,” what meaning can that possibly have?  How are we to see ourselves as a species, if we are all carriers of this pathology?  How do we justify placing a moral value on ourselves?  Or are we to subjugate our moral value to the need to eliminate “pathologies”?  Do we declare open season on ourselves because of our innate characteristics?

The lunacy of labeling the natural responses of infants “racism” consists partly in that doing so robs racism of any useful meaning.  But it also creates an open-ended pretext for haranguing the people, and making policy that seeks to limit their options and punish them preemptively.  It suggests, if it doesn’t explicitly say, that liberty and freedom of choice are problems for mankind – because who knows what all these racist babies would do with them.

The issue here is partly that a concept as poorly defined as racism is constantly waved at the public like a talisman.  But an equally great problem – perhaps a greater one – is that so many in the media have obediently discussed the U. Mass Amherst study’s results as evidence of racism.  It’s as if the entire nation has adopted the word “racism” as a banner with felt appliqués, something big and colorful and recognizable, without much of an explicit definition, but conveying a set of self-congratulatory emotions.

Yet the implication – that there’s a terrible, destructive pathology born into us that needs to be eradicated – is incompatible with the idea of humans as moral actors, in charge of our behavior and accountable for what we do.  It’s incompatible with the very useful respect we have for our moral consciences.  We get angry with ourselves when we don’t follow our consciences – and we know when that has happened – but we don’t drown in metaphysical doubt about the efficacy of conscience or the fundamental propriety of its guideposts.

In the end, we can’t help noticing that the implied concept of “original racism” is basically like the Christian concept of “original sin,” but without the all-important redemption feature.  Christians do believe that the “sin nature” requires renovation through the ministrations of Jesus Christ.  But Christianity is about redemption of the whole person – turning what was corrupted to the good purposes it was meant for – not removal of innate human traits.   Moreover, America was established as the world’s beacon of religious liberty precisely because concepts like original sin and Christian redemption are inherently a matter of conscience, to be handled by the individual and his fellows in faith without coercion from the state.

We should actively resist turning public education and the legal code into a doctrine of salvation – from racism or anything else – administered by the government.  It isn’t enough to make jokes about the racist babies, and thereby convey that we’re not taking this too seriously.  The careless, inconsequent use of the word “racism” needs to be called out, and all its implications refuted.  Talking about “racism” should entail talking about something that has been defined for a declared purpose – a purpose to which the means at human disposal are suited.  We don’t have the power to remake mankind, not even with the resources of the government, nor would we use it wisely if we did.

If you believe that it’s an example of racism when David Duke associates laziness and other contemptible qualities with black people, or when Louis Farrakhan associates the world’s great evils with white people, then I’m with you, and we can unite in decrying racism.   If you believe we humans harbor original racism, an evil existing outside the competence of our moral consciences, but one that needs to be expiated, and exorcised by appointed practitioners, then just register as a religion already.

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.

Chen, who is blind, was transported to the US embassy on 22 April by well-wishers in China, barely escaping pursuit by authorities.  To secure his departure from the embassy compound, the US agreed to a deal with China by which Chen and his family, who have been tortured and subjected to a brutal form of house arrest for seven years, would be allowed to live, undetained, near a university where Chen could pursue academic studies.  No information has been released as to how the features of that deal would be verified.

Chen reportedly made the decision to leave the embassy when he was told by American personnel that his wife would be beaten by authorities if he did not give himself up.  Chen is in a Chinese hospital, in an extremely vulnerable position, and has been making appeals through the foreign media for help for him and his family.  He has now officially requested asylum of the United States.

Embassies do not make a practice of publicly spiriting asylum-seekers out of host nations, although the embassies of a number of nations, including the US, have quietly assisted over the years in getting asylum-seekers to safety.  During the Cold War, there were official procedures for handling the issue in US embassies and consulates.  Nevertheless, in a publicized case inside the country the dissident seeks to leave, the embassy will not, during normal peacetime relations, take him out of the country by force majeure.

What the embassy can do, however, is offer refuge to the dissident.  The grounds of the US embassy, anywhere in the world, are sovereign US territory.  And what the United States can do is put pressure not on the dissident, but on the dictatorial communist government, to allow Chen and his family to be reunited, and to travel abroad if that’s what they want to do.  Such pressure is more effective when the US has the dissident in safety, and is clearly going to withstand any pressure to give him back to a government that has been torturing and imprisoning him for his beliefs.

The US can put a spotlight on the dissident’s plight, and ensure that the world is watching anything the communist authorities do to his family.  More than that, the president can make it a personal priority to see the dissident released into a safe situation – abroad, if necessary or desired – and a promising future.

How do we know a president and his embassies can do this?  Because it’s what was done by two presidents – Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan – for two Russian Pentecostal Christian families in the former Soviet Union. 

On 27 July, 1978, two Pentecostal families from Chernogorsk, in Siberia, burst into the US embassy in Moscow, seeking American help to leave the country.  They had been attempting to emigrate from the USSR for as much as 20 years (in the case of one of their number), which had resulted only in more assiduous oppression by the Soviet authorities.

Of President Carter, we may say that he did at least the minimum by allowing the Pentecostals to remain in the embassy (where they eventually lived for five years).  There is an interesting echo of the accounts of embassy pressure on Chen in this exchange in October 1978 between Carter and the press (view it here in the papers of the Carter administration):

Q.  Mr. President, a family of Russian Pentecostals, the Vaschenkos, are seeking asylum and are lodged in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.  They said in letters that have been smuggled out that the embassy is bringing subtle, emotional pressure to expel them into the hands of the Russians, probably at great risk.  Did you direct the embassy to seek their ouster, or are you willing to give them asylum and visas?

The President.  They are Russian citizens, as you know, and have been in the embassy in the Soviet Union, in Moscow, the American Embassy, for months.  We have provided them a place to stay.  We provided them a room to live in, even though this is not a residence with normal quarters for them.  I would presume that they have no reason to smuggle out correspondence to this country since they have the embassy officials’ ability to transmit messages.  I have not directed the embassy to discharge them from the embassy, no.

Reagan had a more proactive approach, one remembered and affirmed by others in later years.  His concern for those suffering persecution in the communist world was genuine and passionate.  Kiron Skinner wrote about Reagan’s intervention with Soviet authorities – including direct appeals to Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov – in his 2007 book Turning Points in Ending the Cold War.  (See excerpts from pp. 103-4 here.)  According to Skinner:

By the summer of 1983, at the height of the Cold War chill, Reagan and Andropov had privately worked out the details of the Pentecostals’ release from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and the families were allowed to leave the country.  As Secretary [of State George] Schultz writes in his memoir, “This was the first successful negotiation with the Soviets in the Reagan administration.”  Schultz further notes, “Reagan’s own role in it had been crucial.”

Skinner recounts further the release of well-known dissident Natan Sharansky in 1986 (then known, before his emigration to Israel, as Anatoly Scharansky), as well as Reagan’s advocacy for the Pentecostals and the army of intellectual dissidents in the Soviet Union on his radio program in the 1970s.

Jimmy Carter may have sounded grudging about his government’s support to the Pentecostals, but he was president in a time when Americans did not doubt that communist governments were brutally oppressive, and that helping their embattled citizens, however diplomatically discordant it might be, was simply the right thing to do.  We were prepared at different levels of government to deal with the possibility, because we knew what state collectivism was, and we knew that people would seek help to get away from it.

The preparedness was not universal, of course.  A Soviet sailor who leaped from his freighter – twice – as it sat pierside in a Louisiana port in 1985, hoped to obtain asylum in the US, but was turned back over to his Soviet superiors by two US Border Patrol agents.  (The freighter was loading grain, which the US was selling the USSR to relieve the suffering of the Soviet people, incident to their 67th annual crop failure since the 1917 revolution.)  The State Department became involved only after the sailor had been handed back over to the ship’s master, and although the interpreter who conveyed his wishes to the Border Patrol agents had been clear that Miroslav Medvid was seeking asylum, Time described what followed in this manner:

When the State Department belatedly learned of the incident 13 hours afterward, it persuaded Soviet officials to let Medvid be interviewed. He was examined and questioned by State Department representatives as well as by the Navy doctor and Air Force psychiatrist, both of whom concluded that he was not under the influence of drugs and was competent to decide what he wanted to do. While his ship’s skipper, its doctor and two Soviet diplomats watched, Medvid insisted that he had merely fallen overboard and had no intention of deserting.

The psychiatrist, however, said the evidence showed that Medvid had jumped “purposefully from his ship” and that when he was returned to it, he “probably felt very afraid of the consequences and very much trapped in a corner.” The Soviets apparently threatened to retaliate against the sailor’s family at home, and he became “rather guilty at having jeopardized their safety,” the psychiatrist theorized. The State Department ruled that he could not be held against his expressed wishes and let him return to the Konev.

There are parallels with the Chen situation in just about every previous instance of refuge-seeking by the oppressed from communist nations.  Of all the arms of the US government that ought still to be attuned to the likelihood of these cases, the US embassy in Beijing would seem to be at the top of the list.  The key difference today appears to be the basic posture of the US government.  As regards China specifically, we should not pin that exclusively on the Obama administration.  There has very much been an attitude for the last 20 years that, with the Cold War over, it is outdated to see China through the human-rights lens of the Cold War.

When China proves clearly just how apposite that Cold War lens still is, it may be that a US administration is caught flat-footed.  The “tactical” particulars of the situation – Chen’s unexpected arrival at the embassy, the publicity, and his family’s peril in the hands of the Chinese authorities – meant that the embassy could not easily pursue a quiet plan to help his whole family leave the country.

But that is the sort of tactically inconvenient situation that is likely to arise with people in great trouble.  If we don’t see China, from a strategic perspective, as a source of such situations, we won’t be operationally prepared for them.

Once they do happen, a US administration has discretion over how it responds, and on that head, the Obama administration deserves criticism.  The whole world knows the peril Chen and his family are in.  The right approach here is not to seek a “solution” that gets the governments of China and the US off the hook; it’s to stand by Chen and demand that he be treated with the respect for his rights understood in the Helsinki Accords.  While China is not a signatory to the Accords, their standard for freedom, travel and emigration, and reunification of families is the touchstone to be invoked in this instance.

If we do not believe that, enough to stand up for it when it is inconvenient to our other diplomatic plans, then there was little point in winning the Cold War.  Indeed, if our fear of angering China is greater than our commitment to the freedoms Chen Guangcheng is relying on us to defend, then we didn’t win the Cold War after all.

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.

span style=”font-size: small;”

[The Commander-in-Chief] presents his thanks in the most serious and affectionate manner to the General Officers, as well for their Counsel on many interesting occasions, as for their ardor in promoting the success of the plans he had adopted–To the Commandants of Regiments and Corps, and to the other Officers for their great Zeal and attention in carrying his orders promptly into execution–To the Staff for their alacrity and exactness in performing the duties of their several Departments–And to the Non-commissioned officers and private Soldiers, for their extraordinary patience in suffering, as well as their invincible fortitude in Action–To the various branches of the Army, the General takes this last and solemn oppertunity of professing his inviolable attachment & friendship–He wishes more than bare professions were in his power, that he was really able to be useful to them all in future life; He flatters himself however, they will do him the justice to believe, that whatever could with propriety be attempted by him, has been done. And being now to conclude these his last public Orders, to take his ultimate leave, in a short time, of the Military Character, and to bid a final adieu to the Armies he has so long had the honor to Command–he can only again offer in their behalf his recommendations to their grateful Country, and his prayers to the God of Armies. May ample justice be done them here, and may the choicest of Heaven’s favors both here and hereafter attend those, who under the divine auspices have secured innumerable blessings for others: With these Wishes, and this benediction, the Commander in Chief is about to retire from service–The Curtain of seperation will soon be drawn–and the Military Scene to him will be closed for ever.

George Washington’s farewell address to the Continental Army, 2 November 1783

http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/revolution/farewell/index.html

Our citizen soldiers are unlike those drawn from the population of any other country. They are composed indiscriminately of all professions and pursuits–of farmers, lawyers, physicians, merchants, manufacturers, mechanics, and laborers–and this not only among the officers, but the private soldiers in the ranks. Our citizen soldiers are unlike those of any other country in other respects. They are armed, and have been accustomed from their youth up to handle and use firearms, and a large proportion of them, especially in the Western and more newly settled States, are expert marksmen. They are men who have a reputation to maintain at home by their good conduct in the field. They are intelligent, and there is an individuality of character which is found in the ranks of no other army. …

When all these facts are considered, it may cease to be a matter of so much amazement abroad how it happened that our noble Army in Mexico, regulars and volunteers, were victorious upon every battlefield, however fearful the odds against them. …

But our military strength does not consist alone in our capacity for extended and successful operations on land. The Navy is an important arm of the national defense. For the able and gallant services of the officers and men of the Navy, acting independently as well as in cooperation with our troops, in the conquest of the Californias, the capture of Vera Cruz, and the seizure and occupation of other important positions on the Gulf and Pacific coasts, the highest praise is due.

James K. Polk, message to Congress after the Mexican-American War, 5 December 1848

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29489&st=valor&st1=#ixzz1teRtvws6

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863

But it is not the physical scale and executive efficiency of preparation, supply, equipment and despatch that I would dwell upon, but the mettle and quality of the officers and men we sent over and of the sailors who kept the seas, and the spirit of the nation that stood behind them. No soldiers or sailors ever proved themselves more quickly ready for the test of battle or acquitted themselves with more splendid courage and achievement when put to the test. Those of us who played some part in directing the great processes by which the war was pushed irresistibly forward to the final triumph may now forget all that and delight our thoughts with the story of what our men did. Their officers understood the grim and exacting task they had undertaken and performed it with an audacity, efficiency, and unhesitating courage that touch the story of convoy and battle with imperishable distinction at every turn, whether the enterprise were great or small, from their great chiefs, Pershing and Sims, down to the youngest lieutenant; and their men were worthy of them,-such men as hardly need to be commanded, and go to their terrible adventure blithely and with the quick intelligence of those who know just what it is they would accomplish. I am proud to be the fellow-countryman of men of such stuff and valor. Those of us who stayed at home did our duty; the war could not have been won or the gallant men who fought it given their opportunity to win it otherwise; but for many a long day we shall think ourselves “accurs’d we were not there, and hold our manhoods cheap while any speaks that fought” with these at St. Mihiel or Thierry. The memory of those days of triumphant battle will go with these fortunate men to their graves; and each will have his favorite memory. “Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, but hell remember with advantages what feats he did that day!”

What we all thank God for with deepest gratitude is that our men went in force into the line of battle just at the critical moment when the whole fate of the world seemed to hang in the balance and threw their fresh strength into the ranks of freedom in time to turn the whole tide and sweep of the fateful struggle,-turn it once for all, so that thenceforth it was back, back, back for their enemies, always back, never again forward!

Woodrow Wilson, address to Congress after the end of World War I, 2 December 1918

http://www.infoplease.com/t/hist/state-of-the-union/130.html#ixzz1te1bNDCa

On this Army Day, freedom-loving men all over the world rise with us to salute our fighting men and devoted women of the Army. Our American soldier is respected everywhere for his courage, admired for his fighting skill, and loved for his charm and simplicity. Like his gallant brother in arms in the United States Navy, he is the symbol of our traditions and our hopes.

Our Army has written many glorious chapters in the Nation’s history, but none so brilliant as the last. Its story in this war has been written in every corner of the globe–on the continent of Europe; in the wastes of the Arctic; over the vast expanse of the Pacific; in jungle and desert; on mountains and over the beaches. It is a glorious history of men against the forces of nature as well as against the forces of evil.

Harry Truman, national address on Army Day, 6 April 1946

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12625#ixzz1te4pKjVQ

I can’t say enough in praise of our military – Army rangers and paratroopers, Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel – those who planned a brilliant campaign and those who carried it out. Almost instantly, our military seized the two airports, secured the campus where most of our students were, and are now in the mopping-up phase. …

May I share something with you I think you’d like to know? It’s something that happened to the Commandant of our Marine Corps, General Paul Kelley, while he was visiting our critically injured Marines in an Air Force hospital. It says more than any of us could ever hope to say about the gallantry and heroism of these young men, young men who serve so willingly so that others might have a chance at peace and freedom in their own lives and in the life of their country.

I’ll let General Kelley’s words describe the incident. He spoke of a “young Marine with more tubes going in and out of his body than I have ever seen in one body.”

“He couldn’t see very well. He reached up and grabbed my four stars, just to make sure I was who I said I was. He held my hand with a firm grip. He was making signals, and we realized he wanted to tell me something. We put a pad of paper in his hand – and he wrote ‘Semper Fi.’ ”

Well, if you’ve been a Marine or if, like myself, you’re an admirer of the Marines, you know those words are a battle cry, a greeting, and a legend in the Marine Corps. They’re Marine shorthand for the motto of the Corps – “Semper Fidelis” – “always faithful.”

General Kelley has a reputation for being a very sophisticated general and a very tough Marine. But he cried when he saw those words, and who can blame him? That Marine and all those others like him living and dead, have been faithful to their ideals. They’ve given willingly of themselves so that a nearly defenseless people in a region of great strategic importance to the free world will have a chance someday to live lives free of murder and mayhem and terrorism. I think that young Marine and all of his comrades have given every one of us something to live up to.

They were not afraid to stand up for their country or, no matter how difficult and slow the journey might be, to give to others that last, best hope of a better future. We cannot and will not dishonor them now and the sacrifices they’ve made by failing to remain as faithful to the cause of freedom and the pursuit of peace as they have been.

Ronald Reagan, after the Grenada invasion, 27 October 1983

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/102783b.htm

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are men who in your “lives fought for life . . . and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”

I think I know what you may be thinking right now — thinking “we were just part of a bigger effort; everyone was brave that day.” Well, everyone was. …

All of these men were part of a rollcall of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland’s 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England’s armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard’s “Matchbox Fleet” and you, the American Rangers.

Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They fought — or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell

Ronald Reagan, address commemorating the 40th anniversary of D-Day, 6 June 1984

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/60684a.htm

We hear so often about our young people in turmoil—how our children fall short, how our schools fail us, how American products and American workers are second-class. Well, don’t you believe it. The America we saw in Desert Storm was first-class talent. And they did it using America’s state-of-the-art technology. We saw the excellence embodied in the Patriot missile and the patriots who made it work. And we saw soldiers who know about honor and bravery and duty and country and the world-shaking power of these simple words. There is something noble and majestic about the pride, about the patriotism that we feel tonight.

So, to everyone here and everyone watching at home, think about the men and women of Desert Storm. Let us honor them with our gratitude. Let us comfort the families of the fallen and remember each precious life lost.

Soon, very soon, our troops will begin the march we’ve all been waiting for—their march home. … Let their return remind us that all those who have gone before are linked with us in the long line of freedom’s march.

Americans have always tried to serve, to sacrifice nobly for what we believe to be right. Tonight, I ask every community in this country to make this coming Fourth of July a day of special celebration for our returning troops. They may have missed Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I can tell you this: For them and for their families, we can make this a holiday they’ll never forget.

In a very real sense, this victory belongs to them—to the privates and the pilots, to the sergeants and the supply officers, to the men and women in the machines and the men and women who made them work. It belongs to the regulars, to the reserves, to the National Guard. This victory belongs to the finest fighting force this nation has ever known in its history. We’re coming home now—proud, confident, heads high. There is much that we must do, at home and abroad. And we will do it. We are Americans.

George H.W. Bush, address to Congress after Desert Storm, 6 March 1991

http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3430

The success of yesterday’s mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq. The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator’s footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate ‘em. …

We’ve come to this moment through patience and resolve and focused action. And that is our strategy moving forward. The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty. And the United States of America will not relent until this war is won.

George W. Bush, address to the nation after the capture of Saddam Hussein, 14 December 2003

http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/famous-speeches/george-w-bush-speech-capture-of-saddam-hussein.htm

I said that I would go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they’d do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.

Barack Obama, on politicizing the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by the US Navy SEALs, 30 April 2012

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/Obama-Denies-Politicizing-Bin-Laden-Raid-149677975.html

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.

But what does all this look like in terms of numbers?  What’s the how much and where and whom of the Golden State collapse?  Perhaps the most interesting and telling thing is that it really is as bad as it looks.  And the reasons are pretty much what you’d expect.  Here’s the California story, in numbers.

According to a March 2012 report, 855,000 is how many private-sector jobs California has lost since the recession started four years ago. (H/t: California Political News & Views.)  The state today enjoys an unemployment rate of 11%, compared with the official national average of 8.3%

Texas, by contrast, has added 139,800 jobs, posting the biggest absolute gain among the 50 states.  (California’s is the biggest absolute loss.)  Texas’ unemployment rate is 7.1%.  Number 3 on the job-growth list? The District of Columbia, with 21,000 added private-sector jobs.  Government is big business.

But we were talking about California.  How does California rank in terms of the average state and local tax burden? According to the Tax Foundation, in 2009, California had the 6th heaviest tax burden in the nation, at 10.6%.   (New Jersey was #1, followed by New York at #2.)  That’s the in-state tax burden, of course.  Federal taxes are on top of that.

Of course, business climate comprises more than the average individual tax burden.  The Tax Foundation looks at five forms of taxation – corporate tax, individual income tax, sales tax, property tax, and unemployment insurance tax – to index the business climates of the 50 states.  By this combined measure, the Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in business climate.  (New York is 49th, and New Jersey 50th.)

State regulatory environment? George Mason University’s Mercatus Center ranks the Golden State 48th in the nation.  New Jersey and New York are numbers 49 and 50, respectively.

How about other business costs?  California had the 5th highest state premium ranking for worker compensation insurance costs in 2010 (although the state’s position improved slightly in 2011 due to other states raising their state premiums).

California ranks 7th highest in electric utility costs, with Hawaii being the highest, followed by Connecticut and Alaska.

According to the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, California has the third-highest per-gallon gasoline tax (Connecticut and New York are #1 and #2) and by far the highest tax on diesel, at 52.5 cents per gallon. (Some numbers below also come from the SB&EC report.)

California perennially has the second-highest gasoline prices at the pump (Hawaii is #1), although the state has regularly been ranked 3rd or 4th in oil production in recent years.  (In the past week the statewide average was $4.15 for a gallon of regular, down from $4.36 a month ago.)  In spite of having the third largest oil and gas reserves of any state in the nation, California is ranked dead last among all US jurisdictions for global oil investment.  The fact that California hasn’t issued a new offshore drilling permit for over 30 years is undoubtedly a factor, as is the fact that the Monterey Shale Oil Field, which holds 64% of all the recoverable shale oil in the United States, is hamstrung by lawsuits, a typical condition in the state for both drilling and refining operations.

In spite of the state’s natural bounty, California produces only 37% of its statewide oil consumption.  The rest comes from other states and countries, at added expense.

In terms of the employer burden of health-insurance mandates, California is 9th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.  (Rhode Island, Maryland, and Minnesota have the highest burdens.)

Meanwhile, California ranks 4th highest in state and local government spending per capita.  The District of Columbia is the highest, followed by Alaska, Wyoming, and New York.

Ah, yes, state spending.  California has by far the largest debt of any US state, at around $612 billion with state and local debt and pension liabilities included.  In terms of raw numbers, New York posts a pathetic second place with only $305 billion.  The size of California’s population allows the Golden State to slip to only 7th place in terms of per capita state and local debt.  The District of Columbia walks off with another prize in this category, having on the books 85% more debt per capita than the 50-state average.

The California debt spiral is due in part to the steep decline in state tax revenues.  The 22% year-on-year decline observed in February 2012 doesn’t tell the whole story either; California had already posted dramatic revenue losses in business and property taxes between 2007 and 2010.  Business-tax revenues dropped 18% in that period, and property-tax revenues fell 30% due to the real estate market crash.

Let’s talk population trends.  Many readers are familiar with the arresting Golden State statistics cited by a Wall Street Journal article in March:

From the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

The net gain in tax filers includes the author:  I was added as a tax-paying filer to the California income tax rolls in 2004.  Apparently there are another 149,999 of us, and I’m thinking we need a T-shirt.  (And yes, alert readers, I understand that this was a net gain, reflecting both additions to and subtractions from the tax rolls over time.  Just having some fun with these sad little numbers.)

California also has the distinction of having 12% of the US population and 33% of the nation’s welfare recipients.  Governor Jerry’s Brown’s 2012-13 budget proposal includes $100 billion for health and human services, which, on an annualized basis, is more than all the state and local spending in 27 of the 50 states.

In California, meanwhile, the tax code is steeply progressive.  Prior to the recession, the state got 45% of its income tax revenues from the top 1% of filers.  As the Wall Street Journal pointed out last year, the incomes of filers in that top 1% — which in California starts at $490,000 – are more volatile than the incomes of other filers.  California, New York, Connecticut, and Illinois are some of the states most dependent for revenue on the top 1%, and they have opened up the biggest state deficits during the recession.

How many businesses are leaving California?  In 2011, 254 businesses left California, or an average of 5 per week.  202 left in 2010, 51 in 2009.  Even “green” businesses are leaving California.  The business environment is that overregulated, and costs are that high.  A business saves, on average, between 20% and 40% on costs by moving out of California.  (Even the lower figure is astounding for a move within the same nation.)

But according to a 2011 report, 2500 employers ceased operations in California between 2007 and 2011.  The great majority of them simply went out of business.  (I can certainly vouch for the observability of that trend in my area of Southern California.  Besides small businesses closing – I can’t seem to keep a dry cleaner for longer than 6 months – we’ve had a number of big chain businesses pull out, leaving gigantic empty stores and parking lots.  The last time I stocked up on household supplies at the local Wal-Mart, there were no greeters at the doors.  An ominous portent.)  How did California’s real GDP growth rank in 2011?  34th in the United States.

As of January 2012, which state had the highest average mortgage debt per household?  California, with $313,000.   California has had the second highest foreclosure rate of any state throughout the recession (Nevada has the highest).  In terms of the state’s percentage of underwater mortgages, California ranks only 6th (Nevada, again, is #1).  But that’s a little deceiving, since the value of the underwater mortgages in California is over $544 billion. That sum represents nearly 30% of total mortgage debt in California, which is $1.94 trillion – or 22% of all mortgage debt in the United States.

Well, but which state had the highest tuition hike for its state university system in 2011?  That would be California, with a tuition jump of 21%.  (This hike mitigated somewhat the advantage of in-state tuition for those here illegally, which California offers along with 11 other states.)

Oh, and California has far and away the most endangered animal species, with 111.  No other state comes close.  Hawaii has California beat on endangered plant species, however, with 273 to the Golden State’s 178.

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.

Defining “atrocity” will be a stiff challenge.  If something seems awful but the US administration doesn’t really want to intervene in it, will it be defined as an “atrocity”?  If it’s defined as an atrocity but we don’t do anything other than blather about it, what exactly will be the point of the Atrocities Prevention policy?

Presumably, a due-out from the Atrocities Prevention Board (APB) will be a periodically updated list of which foreign activities and ongoing events the United States considers to be atrocities.  The absence of any such communication will render the APB so pointless as to be a daily unfolding satire.  Silence from an Atrocities Prevention Board is inherently untenable.

Yet assembling that list will be a heavily politicized process.  Will we call “atrocities” things we have no power to intervene in?  If the American people are reluctant to take on an “atrocity” intervention, is there any political value for the president in having the atrocity officially identified?  A divided Congress may have been inert in the last 18 months, but when overly provoked, as with the endless, punch-pulling Vietnam intervention, Congress becomes a snorting, stamping elephant.   How would a president acting on the proposals of an Atrocities Prevention Board deal with Congress?

If atrocities are defined and declared on a regular basis, yet remain undeterred, the atrocity list will lose its impact in the same way the Homeland Security terror-alert system has.  “Yeah, we’ve got some atrocities going on out there,” the average citizen might say.  “I don’t know what they are, but there’s some kind of board for that.”

Institutionalizing indifference to mass murder – to use The Weekly Standard’s formulation – is one of the obvious hazards of boardifying the US posture on “atrocity.”  There are a couple of others worth mentioning.  One is contingent:  the APB’s leadership under Obama.  The president has appointed Samantha Power– the brain behind the “responsibility to protect” non-hostile kinetic military action in Libya – to head the APB, and she is on record as calling Israel a “major human rights abuser.”  Here is her 2002 proposal for intervening in the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict:

What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially (sic) mean sacrificing—or investing, I think, more than sacrificing—billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

Getting a US military intervention force in Israel past Congress would be interesting.  The American politics of this are a head-scratcher, but so is the definition in this case.  If Power were to be specific about what she considers “human rights abuses,” one can only presume she would be speaking of checkpoints, the security fence between Israel and Gaza (the security wall with the West Bank had not been constructed in 2002), and Israel’s military attacks on terrorist strongholds in Gaza.

One question this raises is what the APB would call the terrorist attacks by Hamas.  Presumably a single terrorist incident is not a “mass atrocity” – if the Holocaust is taken as the standard – but how about systematic terrorism of the same kind, and against the same people, over decades?  Terrorist organizations do commit mass atrocities, as they have in Colombia and Russia, among other places.  Are terrorists to be intervened with like national governments?  How about syndicate crime, like the cartel thugs who have slaughtered more than 50,000 Mexicans in the last five years?

Meanwhile, are India and Pakistan abusing each other’s populations with their border barriers in Kashmir?  Perhaps even more informative, is the UN committing a human rights abuse by sponsoring (and managing) the security barrier between the Republic of Cyprus and the unrecognized Turkish-occupied portion of the island?

Is the existence of border-security measures a justification for armed intervention?  And if it is, how does it fit into the “mass atrocity” construct?  If it doesn’t justify armed intervention, on the other hand, but something else – what is that something?

UN security wall in Cyprus: Human rights abuse? (WIkimedia Commons photo)

Beyond these problematic points is a more fundamental one, which is the question of what international boundaries mean and how we will decide to use the elements of US power, including force, across them.  Before we jump to any conclusions on this, we need to remember something very basic.  The Holocaust was ended only when we regime-changed Hitler with armed force.  Nothing short of invading Germany and eliminating Hitler – pursuing what was for years afterward called “absolute victory” – had the power to stop any facet of Hitler’s program.  The same was true of imperialist Japan, which committed what we may well call mass atrocities in Manchuria and Southeast Asia during the occupation period there.

The only mass atrocities that have ever been stopped by outside agency – eventually – were stopped by regime-changing the perpetrators.  Suasion, shaming, contumely from the world community, and even sanctions of various kinds have been tried against the perpetrators of other mass atrocities, and nothing but the credible threat or actual use of force has ever produced even a hiatus.  There is no basis on which to hope that it may be possible to “prevent atrocities” by specific, tailored means, as if the atrocities can be separated from the objects of other elements of US policy.

We may perhaps, for example, foster economic and social conditions that have the effect of deterring atrocities.  But except in the case of the longest-running regional or ethnic feuds, we may not even be aware in advance that that’s what we’re doing.  We may simply be pursuing policies that we think are of assistance to other peoples, and will thereby promote US security and interests.  Specifically planning to “prevent atrocities” by these means raises a host of questions about both our prophetic abilities and – frankly – our good sense.

We may also decide that a demonstrable perpetrator of atrocities, like Saddam Hussein, has to be regime-changed, for reasons relating to US security policy.  That will effectively halt his career of atrocities – unlike, for example, our posture on North Korea, where the Kim regime has been starving and torturing its people for decades, as part of a 59-year-old armistice over which our forces stand guard.  The US spent the entire period of the Soviet Union’s existence declining to intervene directly in most of the numerous mass atrocities perpetrated by Soviet Communists and their proxies abroad, while ritually decrying them, imposing very limited sanctions because of them, and performing other ineffective actions.  Estimates of the lives lost to Communist civil wars and takeovers – entirely apart from World War II – range from 100 to 150 million.

The effective powers of government have their limits.  Force is a blunt tool which cannot be used effectively in the calibrated manner suggested by Power’s proposal for Israel and the Palestinians.  To be effective, force must have a concrete, achievable objective that is suited to what force can do: destroy means and vanquish will.  This works for regime-change, an objective with at least a potentially self-sustaining end-state.  It does not work for “atrocity prevention,” which cannot be self-sustaining because it does not posit vanquishing the will of the perpetrator.

Ending atrocities is possible, meanwhile, precisely because there are multiple armed nation-states, and some are constituted to act with both compunction and purpose.  A prophylactic, globalist approach to mass atrocities is another matter.  If we sold out the concept of national sovereignty – including the integrity of borders – for the postulated benefit of preventing atrocities, we would find that against a supranational body chartered with “prevention,” there would be no recourse.  Whatever atrocities it permitted would be unredressable.

Territorial nationalism is what allows us to guarantee liberty and civil rights for ourselves, and to intervene abroad on the terms we consider appropriate.  Global-political universalism is the enemy of liberty and national political discretion, as demonstrated most recently by the globalist Communist empire, but in earlier centuries by the Roman Empire.

Ultimately, even in a narrow sense, “atrocity prevention” as a core mission of the US national security apparatus is a recipe for endless, end-state-less – and regional-pattern-distorting – involvement abroad.  It fits no traditional construct for the US decision to use national power.  It inherently posits a kind of “force decision-making” different from what exists today with the structure of the US government and our arrangements with our allies.

Yet all of that may be moot, if the APB is little more than window-dressing.  And if that is the case, US credibility will take another major hit.

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 left-wing media want you to – and it appears some of the reporters and opinion-writers for the mainstream media do too.  An example that seems to have crossed a new line was Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes, in which veteran reporter Bob Simon framed the plight of Arab Christians in the West Bank as a problem caused by Israel.  The laughably one-sided report shoehorned a number of freighted implications into its 14-odd impressionistic minutes, including this bumper-sticker point made by one of the interview subjects:

Mitri Raheb:  Christianity started here. The only thing that Palestine was able to export so successfully was Christianity…  Christianity has actually on the back a stamp saying, “Made in Palestine.”

The correct bumper-sticker – if we’re using Greco-Romanized names (like “Palestine”) –  would read “Made in Judea” (Latin: Iudaea), which is what the Roman rulers called the region during the first century of Christianity’s spread.  A series of lengthy points could be made on this head, but the bottom line is that no entity called “Palestine” existed at the time of Christ.  There is no basis for crediting such a non-existent entity with the spread of Christianity. 

I doubt many would begrudge Palestinian Christians their natural pride in being native to the Holy Land.  Today’s Palestinian Arabs are descended mostly from peoples who were not indigenous to the Holy Land at the time of Christ or the early spread of Christianity.  But the Palestinian Arabs of today are nevertheless thoroughly Levantine in culture and heritage, and can rightly point to the importance of the Middle East in the early spread of Christianity, and the fact that the faith went East and South as well as North and West.

That said, however, there is no entitlement from sympathy or sentiment to rewrite history.  In the mishmash of implications from the Simon piece, meanwhile, another is the “false equivalence” idea that Jews and Muslims, between them, are imperiling Christians.  Simon interviews an Israeli journalist who offers this perspective:

Ari Shavit, one of Israel’s most respected columnists, believes Christians have become collateral damage.

Ari Shavit: I think this is a land that has seen in the last century a terrible struggle between political Judaism and political Islam in different variations.

Bob Simon: And the Christians are being squeezed in the middle between the Jews and the Muslims?

Ari Shavit: Absolutely.

Unfortunately, this narrow, simplistic formulation comes off as a cynical attempt to pander to a sort of superficial Christian sympathy.  We are not invited to examine either proposition – “political Judaism” or “political Islam” – and in fact, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab dynamic, both characterizations fall apart on examination.  It takes little reflection, in any case, to recognize that there is no settled definition to which these expressions apply.  They are nothing more than vaguely parallel-sounding proto-ideas, packaged to imply a joint, morally equivalent menace to Christians.

As to whether there is actually such a parallel, the Simon piece tells us nothing. It leaves out entirely such elements as numbers, demographic facts, and policy information.  It makes no reference to the fact that in the entire Middle East, there is a single nation whose population of Christians has been increasing, rather than dwindling, and that is Israel.  Indeed, Israel’s Christian population grew faster between 1995 and 2008 than the Jewish population, and is up more than 300% from its level in 1948.

Simon also left out the fact that by far the biggest exodus of Christians from Jerusalem and the West Bank occurred during the Jordanian occupation period from 1948 to 1967.  In the West Bank, the Christian population declined from 59,160 in 1945 to 42,494 in 1967.  In Jerusalem only, the Christian population was nearly 13,000 in 1910.  By 1946 it had increased to over 31,000, but by 1967 it was down to under 13,000 again (largely due to Jordanian restrictions on Christian daily life). 

Since 1967, the total Christian population in the West Bank as a whole – Judea and Samaria – has increased again to over 51,000 in 2007.  (In Gaza the number is between 2,000 and 3,000, and was never high.)  This does not mean that Christians haven’t left the Palestinian territories in recent years; some have – mainly in the educated middle class – and Christians undoubtedly endure unequal treatment under the Palestinian Authority, and are sometimes subjected to violent attacks.  But the overall trend is upward from the nadir of 1967.  As the JCPA study indicates, the drop in the percentage of the Palestinian population represented by Christians is due to the increase in the much larger Muslim population, which has more than doubled from about 1.15 million in 1967 to 3.77 million in 2007.

Are Christians emigrating from the West Bank because of the security wall built by Israel to stop terrorists, and the checkpoints administered for the same reason?  The Simon piece doesn’t make that explicit claim – very possibly (given his specious exchange with Israeli ambassador Michael Oren) so that Simon could then say that he never made such a claim.  But the parade of images on the topic of Christians in the Holy Land is heavy on checkpoints and the security wall.  Clearly, the synoptic video scan of the wall from every window of a Bethlehem apartment is not a rhetorically meaningless artistic choice.  The 60 Minutes segment wants us to see the wall and the checkpoints as “the problem” for Palestinian Christians.  We are led to draw the seemingly obvious conclusion.

Fact-deficient segments from 60 Minutes are hardly a novelty, but to my eyes, the Bob Simon piece hits an unusual level of tendentious impressionism.  One thing Simon did make sure to do, however, was include a reference in his segment to the Kairos** Palestine “Moment of Truth” Document, a manifesto issued in 2009 by Palestinian Christian activists (and signed by supporters from various nations) on their situation in the Palestinian territories.

This choice, in light of the rich and varied history of Christians in the Middle East over the last two millennia, and Simon’s thin and perfunctory depiction of them, is informative.  The Kairos document is somewhat Christian in tone, emphasizing forgiveness and restoration, but it contains some problematic passages.  The first two (there are a number of them) occur in the letter introducing the manifesto, which is signed by supporters from various nations.  In the second paragraph of the letter we find this declaration (emphasis added):

In this historic document, we Palestinian Christians declare that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity, and that any theology that legitimizes the occupation is far from Christian teachings because true Christian theology is a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed, a call to justice and equality among peoples.

The third paragraph contains a sentence that can only be off-putting to most American Christians (again, emphasis added):

[The document] seeks to be prophetic in addressing things as they are without equivocation and with boldness, in addition it puts forward ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and all forms of discrimination as the solution that will lead to a just and lasting peace with the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

Appealing to American Christians on this basis is a losing proposition.  Regardless of how they feel about the current political situation, most American Christians recognize Jerusalem as the capital of ancient Israel, a Jewish city that was the seat of King David and the site of the First and Second Temples.   Jerusalem is the subject of a number of Old Testament prophecies, some of which have yet to be fulfilled, and is therefore an enduring link between the Hebrew people and God.

Whether one agrees with it or not, this belief is a widespread reality.  For millions of American Christians, it is anti-Biblical revisionism to give Jerusalem a different name (Jerusalem means “foundation of peace”; “Al-Quds” means “the holy”) and propose to separate it from Israel.  But it is also anti-historical revisionism to pretend that Israel and the Jews did not have their signature – transformative – relationship with the city.  All generations for the last 3,000 years have known the city as Jerusalem, and considered it important and unique, because of the ancient Hebrews who made their capital there.  The Roman emperor Hadrian’s attempt to rename the city “Aelia Capitolina,” following the Bar-Kokhba revolt in the AD 130s, didn’t take – few today are even aware that he made it.

Bob Simon makes no effort to investigate these matters, and certainly makes no explicit case either way.  He merely presents individual Palestinian Christians who speak as if the Israelis are interlopers, and whose sentiments, if one digs down, are different from those of American Christians.  His segment suggests, without explicitly saying, that a religiously justified animosity toward Israel is to be regarded a “Christian” point of view.

Leftward-trending evangelicals?

A method used increasingly to foster the impression that support for Israel is without a Christian foundation is to slip into the discussion the idea that Jesus was something other than a Jew.  Some Christians are at the forefront of this effort.  One of the closest associates of the Kairos Palestine group is Sabeel, a Jerusalem-based Christian foundation promoting the Palestinian Arab cause as defined by the political left.  Sabeel and its leaders get a lot of left-wing media coverage in the United States (e.g., here, here, and here).  Sabeel describes itself as an “ecumenical liberation theology center,” and offers a frequent forum for theologians to make points like “Jesus was a Palestinian” and a “Jesus was community organizer.” This gambit is given a pass by Sabeel’s Christians supporters in America.

Since it is integral to Christian doctrine that Jesus was a Jew – a descendent of David, subject to the Law of Moses, and heir to the Old Testament’s prophetic promises to the Jews – and that he is, in fact, the Messiah promised to all mankind through the Jews, there is really no room for the alternative notion of Jesus as something else.  If Jesus wasn’t a Jew, then he cannot be the Messiah or the foundation stone of the Church, the Body of Christ.  Christian belief cannot accommodate this revision and continue in force.

But for many American Christians, “liberation theology” itself sets off alarm bells and points automatically to radical left-wing politics.  Most evangelical Christians (as well as conservative Catholics and denominational Protestants) view claims like Sabeel’s not as a form of new and possibly interesting “information,” but as anti-Biblical – and anti-historical – revisionism.  There is no doubt that some Christians embrace liberation theology and radical left-wing political ideas, but there is also little support for the idea that this wing of American Christianity is supplanting more traditional evangelicals, or is becoming more influential with Christians as a whole.

This wing is presented by the media, however – in approving tones — as an important social force and voice for Christianity.  The New York Times, for example, published an editorial in November 2011 entitled “The New Evangelicals,” which argued that a “sizable portion of evangelicals” had left the political right and embraced a “new kind of Christian social conscience,” identified as the political themes of the left.  (See here, here, here, here, and here as well.  This Columbia Journalism Review post from 2007, on the other hand, shows some interesting critical research and journalistic self-awareness.)

The NYT editorial relied on soundbites from the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, along with a rather kindergartenish subtraction exercise, using percentages put together by a Pew Forum study.  Regarding the latter, the editorial does a little bait-and-switch, concluding that 24% of the US population – in other words, a set that includes all Christians, such as mainline Protestants and left-wing Catholics, but also includes Jews, Muslims, other beliefs, and atheists – “don’t think of themselves as part of the religious right.”

That could well be an accurate assessment, if a derivative and unproven one, but it’s not information about evangelicals per se.  Nor does it strike me as anything new.  Mainline Protestants and leftist Catholics – particularly their ecclesiastical leadership; not as much their congregations – have been on the left side of many social and international issues for decades.

The New Evangelical Partnership, meanwhile – whose leader, Richard Cizik, is a fellow of George Soros’ Open Society Institute – has taken the name “evangelical” from the multiple, differing traditions of Christian evangelicalism (useful discussion here), and is not representative of the evangelical congregations and social ideas most Americans associate with the term.  Ministries like those of John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family, the Trinity Broadcast Network, and hundreds of non-denominational evangelical churches across America, are what we think of when we imagine evangelical Christians.

That definition does not encompass the evangelical traditions in some of the formal denominations, such as Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican, and Catholic – and the important thing to take away is the real, if inconvenient fact that not all who describe themselves as “evangelical” are representative of each other.  The Evangelical Lutheran denomination, for example, is a formal church of longstanding and differs in a number of ways – both doctrinal and explicitly political – from the mass of self-confessed born-again American evangelicals.

Such is the case with the New Evangelical Partnership, which is Protestant and embraces some of the traditions of evangelicalism, but by no means those of the majority of American evangelicals, who tend (see the Pew study above) to be Baptist, members of small, non-Mainline denominations, or simply non-denominational.  For simplicity, I will call this latter group “traditionalist evangelicals,” using the term essentially as defined in another 2005 Pew study cited below.

The New Evangelical Partnership (NEP) is a sympathetic group for the MSM, however – along with groups like Evangelicals for Social Action – precisely because of its political views.  The NEP made waves in September 2011 with an “Open Letter to America’s Christian Zionists,” in which it took traditionalist evangelicals to task for their support of Israel (emphasis added):

Not to put too fine a point on it, we wish to claim here that the prevailing version of American Christian Zionism—that is, your belief system—underwrites theft of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinian people, helps create the conditions for an explosion of violence, and pushes US policy in a destructive direction that violates our nation’s commitment to universal human rights. In all of these, American Christian Zionism as it currently stands is sinful and produces sin.

As numerous Jewish and non-religious sites pointed out, the “open letter” appears also to suggest that Israel, along with American Christian Zionists, is calling down God’s wrath on her head, perhaps in the form of a nuclear attack by Iran.  It is worth presenting the entire passage to convey the flavor of this warning, with its evocation of old, hackneyed themes in the West about the Jewish people uniquely bringing destruction on themselves (emphasis added; some spelling corrected):

We are not Old Testament prophets, nor do we pretend to see the future. But we have seen enough to claim that the occupation practices of the modern state of Israel are a direct violation of the most basic biblical moral principles. It is immoral to steal anything, including people’s land, homes, and vineyards. It is immoral to dehumanize people, as occurs daily at Israeli checkpoints. It is immoral to choke people’s freedom and deprive them of their dignity. And it is foolish, a violation of every lesson of history, to think that through sheer intimidation and superior military power a people can be subjugated indefinitely without rising up in resistance or attracting more powerful allies who will do so on their behalf. God gave humanity a recognition of justice and a nearly endless capacity to resist injustice. It is wired into our nature, and the Palestinian people and the neighboring countries have it just like everyone else does.

We genuinely fear that someday someone or some nation inflamed with resentment at the seemingly eternal Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people will “make your land desolate so no one can live in it” (Jeremiah 6:8). That sounds like a nuclear bomb. Have you heard of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? While in the Middle East we heard from Palestinian leaders a current commitment to pursue their cause nonviolently. We applaud that commitment. We see it as an extraordinary one under the circumstances. We fear that it cannot last forever, for no people will allow itself to be ground into the dust indefinitely. What are you doing to end their suffering and bring justice to them?

We will leave it to God to sort out with the Jewish people of the modern state of Israel the very complex terms of his covenant with them. But we cannot remain silent about the vast array of American Christians who support the most repressive and unjust Israeli policies in the name of Holy Land and a Holy God. We charge that you bear grave responsibility for aiding and abetting obvious sin, and if Israel once again sees war, we suggest that you will bear part of the responsibility. Christians are called to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), but by offering uncritical support of current Israeli policies you are actively inflaming the Middle East toward war—in the name of God. This is appalling; it is intolerable; it must stop!

As Elder of Ziyon notes, the letter goes to great lengths to dilute the connection of the Jewish people with Israel, and undermine the idea of Israel as an inheritance from God, while leaving out a great deal of relevant material from the Old Testament.  This is a valuable investigation, since we are talking here about Christian exhortation.

The promises associated with Israel are integral to the Christian understanding of God, and if they are dismissed or rejected, there can be no remaining, distinctively Christian message.  If one does not believe that God made specific, accountable promises to the Jews – including promises about Israel and Jerusalem – and does not believe that Jesus, in his death and resurrection, was the fulfillment of the greatest of those immutable promises, then the original and age-old meaning of “Christianity” evaporates.  There is no particular point in Jesus in that case; he is just another famous religious leader, better known and more widely followed than most.

This is definitely a different view of Christianity from that held by a majority of American Christians, and different as well from the doctrinal statements of all the world’s major denominations.  Rasmussen does an annual poll at Easter in which it asks respondents to state things like whether they believe Jesus is the son of God and whether they believe he rose from the dead, and in the last three years, 77-78% of Americans polled believed these things (see here, here, and here).  This could not be the case without the context of the Old Testament account of God’s dealings with, and prophetic legacy to, the Jews, which prophesied and foreshadowed the supernatural characteristics of the Messiah’s existence and purpose.

That traditionalist evangelicals are, in general, unpersuaded by NEP’s and other similar views – as indeed are many in other Christian groupings – is evident in the trends of polling and study data.  In December 2011, blogger Rachel Alexander did a useful comparison of the beliefs registered by evangelical leaders and those of America’s general evangelical Christian population, and came up with a series of disparities.  Leaders tended to evince a greater percentage of revisionist or left-wing views, while their congregations differed significantly, embracing those views to a dramatically lower extent.  (Note: the percentage of respondents holding left-wing views was higher among the leaders, but as Alexander’s links show, there was still a healthy percentage of leaders with the views more traditionally associated with American evangelicals.)

The MSM likes to present the views of left-leaning leaders as a growing trend, and to quote such leaders suggesting that the ideas they prefer are the “real” Christianity.  But ultimately, this hoped-for shift is not one the MSM has the power to broker or bridge.

The depth and breadth of Christian support for Israel in America

If traditionalist evangelicals went by common media themes, they might think their numbers were being outstripped in the rate of growth by left-wing evangelicals.  But as regards support for Israel, as well as conservative views on social issues (and general affinity with the right), the evidence of this is more overhyped than real.  In terms of general political affinities, for example, exit polling during the 2010 election showed 77% of white evangelical poll respondents voting Republican – an overwhelming majority, and one that had risen since 2004.

Regarding Israel, traditionalist evangelicals remain the Christian group most overwhelmingly supportive of the existence and security of the Jewish state.  In this, they are more like their fellow Americans in general than like members of the evangelical (or general Christian) left.  In 2005, a Pew study found that 52% of all evangelicals supported Israel when asked to contrast their support for Israel versus the Palestinians, and of that number, 64% of “traditionalist evangelicals” – the largest evangelical subgroup – supported Israel.

A poll taken in late 2011 showed general US population support for Israel to be where it has been in for decades, in the 60-percent range.  Looking back at the 2005 Pew study, meanwhile, 63% of white evangelicals (and 51% of black evangelicals) believe the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.   The study also indicated that 55% of white evangelicals considered their views on the Middle East influenced by religious beliefs.

A 2008 poll found that 82% of all American Christians – both Protestant and Catholic – believe they have a moral obligation to support the Jews and Israel.  In a survey of Americans done in early 2011, Wenzel Strategies found that 80% of born-again Christians disagree that Israel is an “aggressor nation”; 71% believe the US should be “very concerned” about Israel’s national security; and 66% say the US will be judged by God according to how we treat Israel.

The news remains good for Israel supporters when the growing evangelical-Latino demographic is considered.  A Pew study in 2007 found that 62% of Latino evangelicals in the US support Israel, a percentage almost identical to that of traditionalist evangelicals overall.  Younger Christians in general are also pro-Israel.  In March, Forbes contributor Stephen Richter pointed out that among all young (under-35) Americans, the majority support for Israel is driven by the overwhelming support of younger Christians.

These sentiments are not a record of the past but the beliefs of today among traditionalist evangelicals, as well as among many American Christians of other denominations.  John Hagee’s organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006 with less than 10,000 members, now reports having 950,000, of whom the majority are evangelical Christians.  (Jennifer Rubin reported yesterday that in the first 24 hours after the 60 Minutes segment aired, CUFI members sent more than 29,000 complaining emails to CBS.)  But CUFI is merely the largest of dozens of American Christian organizations dedicated to supporting and engaging with Israel, from the evangelical Friends of Israel and Christian Friends of Israel USA to Catholics for Israel, Anglican Friends of Israel, Methodist Friends of Israel, and tattooed Texas Pentecostal bikers roaring up to the Western Wall on their Harleys to show their solidarity with the Jews.

The MSM and left-wing media sites may seek to magnify the importance of the evangelical left and its sentiments about Israel, but for most American Christians, the posture of the evangelical left is not a representative reality.  Recent studies confirm that the traditional commitment of American evangelicals to Israel is thriving, and that in most denominations there is a robust element not only supporting Israel, but rejecting the anti-Israel policies pursued by some of the church leadership (e.g., in the Methodist and Presbyterian churches).

Media Matters: Born to oppose “Christian bias” in the media

There is another dimension where the media intersect with Christians and Israel, and although I don’t assess that it has direct relevance to the Bob Simon segment, it is clearly a related phenomenon, and one requiring examination in the overall context.

Earlier this month, author M.J. Rosenberg, a fellow at the leftist watchdog organization Media Matters, was forced to resign his position after – among other things – repeatedly accusing American Jews who support Israel of being “Israel-firsters,” a dual-loyalties allegation popular with the Nazi leadership of Hitler’s Germany.

Rosenberg isn’t the only Media Matters fellow with an anti-Semitism problem.  Eric Boehlert is another.  Media Matters and the Center for American Progress (CAP) came in last year for criticism from the Simon Wiesenthal Center for their bloggers’ often vitriolic lapses into the language of anti-Semitism.  (As RedState and American Thinker, respectively, note, Media Matters and CAP share fund-raising operations and receive funding from George Soros.)  Around the same time, former AIPAC spokesman and Clinton-administration official – not a conservative Republican –  Josh Block took Media Matters and CAP to task for their bloggers’ anti-Semitic expressions, and was promptly “expelled” from the Truman National Security Project for trying to suppress “open debate” through intimidation and “character attacks.”

As Michelle Malkin highlighted in February, meanwhile, Media Matters and CAP have for some time had a standing weekly appointment in the White House.  (Michelle’s centerpiece is the original Daily Caller article on the topic, but her additional links are worth reviewing as well.)

This context of rabid anti-Semitism and regular White House access sets the stage for a revelation from CBN reporter Erick Stakelbeck this past weekend that Media Matters’ charter document indicates an anti-Christian bias.  In its Form 1023 application for non-profit status, Media Matters made this statement in the section on organizational description (the passage is edited by CBN):

Media Matters for America (MMA) believes that news reporting and analysis by the American Media…has become biased. … It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote…a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology.

Notably, Daily Caller reporter Vince Coglianese tells Stakelbeck that the public mission statement at the Media Matters website omits this motivational reference – perhaps for fear of alienating a notoriously Christian public, much of which would consider the charge that the American media have a Christian bias to be the most ridiculous thing they have ever heard.

Traditionalist evangelicals will not be surprised that an organization dedicated to opposing “Christian bias” in the media has also been called out repeatedly for anti-Semitism.  That there is a unified “theory of themage” working itself out through at least some left-leaning media organizations is increasingly evident.

It is important not to tar all left-wing media with the same brush; some do a commendable job of seeking balance, fairness, and decorum in their coverage of Christians, Jews, and Israel.  Honest disagreement, expressed vigorously and explicitly, is clearly legitimate.

But the emerging pattern of media outlets in the US simply repeating ideas formed from revisionist “liberation theology” and revisionist “history” is a dangerous one.  The rote repetition of Palestinian activists’ themes is a case in point.  Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor (quoted at the Jennifer Rubin link) characterized the Bob Simon piece in just such terms:

The 60 Minutes segment uncritically adopted the standard Palestinian narrative of suffering and victimhood promoted by church-based NGOs that work closely with the Palestinian political leadership. … Bob Simon’s segment simply repeated … immoral positions without any independent analysis.

The American public is already wary and suspicious of the MSM, and that includes many Christians and supporters of Israel.  With the Bob Simon segment on Sunday, 60 Minutes has placed itself in the category of media outlets retailing impressionistic themage that misrepresents both Christianity and Israel.  The Simon piece, justly called by critics a “hatchet job” on Israel, could have been put together by Sabeel itself, and might as well have been.

This is perilous territory for CBS.  If the network cannot distinguish its themes from those of Palestinian activists, its distinction from a fringe “attack” organization like Media Matters – and from other avowedly partisan media outlets – will grow fatally fuzzy.  The evidence of a particular kind of unified themage – one that misrepresents Christianity and seeks to undermine Israel – is out there, hovering over the infosphere.  The ones who need to check six are the mainstream media.

* Yes, a neologism I created for this piece.

** In Christian theology, the Greek term “kairos” refers to a time of crisis or precipitation: “the appointed time in the purpose of God” when something of eschatological significance happens, requiring a response from man (such as the birth of Jesus Christ).   Christian groups from all backgrounds and creeds invoke the concept of kairos and use it in their organization names. 

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.

TT includes the following passage from news coverage of the event (which, you may be relieved to know, shocked at least some Swedes, who are now calling for Adelsohn Liljeroth’s ouster):

As part of the installation, which was reportedly meant to highlight the issue of female circumcision, the culture minister began cutting a large cake shaped like a black woman, symbolically starting at the clitoris.

Makode Aj Linde, the artist who created the installation and whose head is part of the cake cut by the minister, wrote about the “genital mutilation cake” on his Facebook page.

“Before cutting me up she whispered, ‘Your life will be better after this’ in my ear,” he wrote in a caption next to the partially eaten cake.

So the artist meant well.  Swedes of African origin were unimpressed, however, calling the whole thing a “racist spectacle.”

Frankly, it does come off as one.  But in my view, that’s not even the most important point.  Watch the video (it’s only 47 seconds) to see the art patrons laughing their heads off at the clever howling cake-woman.  For them, it’s a big, hilarious joke.  I don’t think these folks are representative of the Swedish people, but they are certainly Sweden’s self-appointed guiding lights.  And they don’t have any compunction – any “ick” reaction, any vague uneasiness – about an “artistic” depiction like this.

It’s quite possible that they think the shock factor is an effective way to alert, well, someone – clearly not themselves – to the evils of female genital mutilation.  But in that context, their full-throated laughter is simply grotesque.  There are some jokes it is our purpose as a civilization not to take, and this is one of them.  In terms of the horrors we should all be aware of, what the Stockholm arts crowd has alerted us to with this piece of “art” is itself.

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.

A.  Stupid.

We have become the caricature curmudgeons and common-sense libertarians warned about decades ago.  The day of mindless stupidity and standardized irresponsibility is upon us.  Our news media post headlines like this:

“Calif. kids can have Happy Meals, judge rules”

… and we don’t bat an eye.  Instead of finding grotesque the very idea of judges ruling on what can be sold to accompany meals, we shrug and move on.

Some of us probably think, “Well, the judge made a sensible ruling, and things could be worse.”

Others have a confused idea that there exists a sort of moral brokerage inhabited by judges, politicians, and celebrities, which occasionally puts up some white smoke and signifies that it has reached a new decision about how we are to live our lives.  This idea lurks in the human subconscious, manifesting itself from generation to generation in fealty to the imagined moral brokerage of the day: the emperor and his officials, the priestly class, the state church, the monarch, the parliament, the Party, the media, the cradle-to-grave welfare state.

The human spirit has a very powerful sense that there must be a set of “oughts” and “shoulds” to guide us.  Used in our own lives, as individuals and in voluntary congregations, this sense does great good.  But when we insist on using the apparatus of civil government to herd our fellow men around like pasture animals, according to the oughts and shoulds favored by a few, we turn into a Stupid Society.

Societies that put government in the roles of father, mother, priest, and tutor invariably descend into stupidity.  No generation of humans has ever been wise enough to use the power of the state against the lives of the citizens, on an endlessly interpolated basis, without getting stupid.  No generation ever will.  If you let the state advertise a food pyramid to you, and if you let the state decide what kind of medical care everyone should get, and who should pay for it, the constituency will always be there to take the next step, and the next, until you have activists petitioning the courts to slap Happy Meals out of other people’s hands, and judges agreeing to rule on such petitions rather than throwing them out because they’re an egregious abuse of law.

We have had heavy-handed, intrusive, intricately detailed government for decades now.  Nothing that has happened in the last 40 years has happened in unregulated conditions (and little in the last 80).  Other than criminal enterprises, there is no such thing as the left-wing fantasy of businesses running rampant in the absence of regulation.  Regulation touches literally everything businesses do and is one of the biggest business costs, in some states second only to employee costs.

The beauty of regulation and regulatory bureaucracies is that they can grow by stealth.  The people can tootle along thinking they’re free, and they just want breathable air and food safe from e. coli and salmonella, and the next thing they know, cities are outlawing Happy Meals, and judges are entertaining lawsuits brought by activists for whom city ordinances just aren’t far-reaching enough.

Fifty years ago, such a premise for a lawsuit would have been laughed out of court.  Today, everything in our society has been softened up, bruised, corrupted – like rotting fruit – by decades of victory for the twin impulses of statism and regulatory sanctimony.

Neither impulse can be domesticated, and both are incompatible with liberty.  If a government you pay taxes to will even consider the idea of outlawing Happy Meals, what else will it consider that could affect your livelihood, your life choices, or your liberty of conscience?  (How about a plastic bag ban?)  It is useless to insist that our governments won’t go too far; they already have, and specifically, much farther than their apologists claimed they would back in the 1910s, the 1930s, the 1960s, the 1990s, and even the decade just past.  Assurances that government would never go that far have always been proven false.  They will be again.

The day is here.  We have officially become a Stupid Society, at least in terms of the way our government is suffered to behave, from the courts and city councils to the school systems, the vast army of regulators, and the Regulator-in-Chief in the Oval Office.  I know for certain that there are many, many Americans who are not fit for a Stupid Society: who see the nanny state for what it is, and reject the regulatory premise refined and glorified in the last century.  But there will have to be more, if the nanny state is to be given its notice via the electoral system.

So it’s necessary to point out from time to time where the Stupid Society is manifesting itself.  The California judge’s ruling on the Happy Meals is the opposite of meaningless or merely funny; there is a monstrous regiment of false and dangerous statist assumptions behind it.  The whole episode should never have even happened.  If we want to restore our Stupid Society to a condition of intelligence and liberty, we will have to agree on that – and change our course.

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.

A furor of deductions and rumors has arisen around the president’s utterances on the judiciary.  But what caught my attention was how quickly and with what language Obama clarified his Monday gaffe.  This was the money quote:

And the point I was making is that the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it…

That actually bears no relation to what he said the day before, but it is telling in two ways.  First, it is the language of social activists who insist that the Supreme Court has had the last word on issues like abortion and school prayer.  And second, it is the rote principle Americans have been taught in the public schools for at least the last 50 years.

But it’s not how the Framers envisioned the role of the court system, and frankly, a constitutional scholar ought to know that, even if the average citizen no longer does.  If you haven’t read Mark Levin’s excellent book Men in Black, do yourself a favor and get that checked off the to-do list.  It’s well worth your time, especially if you learned American history and civics any time since about 1960.  You probably have concepts like “judicial review” and “final say on our Constitution” melded together in your mind, because that’s what you were taught.  But the Framers didn’t see it that way.

Their concept of interpreting law was that it is a responsibility shared by the three branches, with each acting as a check on the others.  Legislators obviously construe the intent of the laws they write, and the executive places a construction on law in executing it.  The court system’s role was never intended by the Framers to function as the sole venue in which law was interpreted.  The latitude of the courts depends to a significant extent on what Congress and the executive will tolerate – something we now see in living color every time a new federal judge is nominated.

Americans have little awareness today that Congress is explicitly empowered by the Constitution to limit what the federal courts have jurisdiction over.  The relevant passage is in Article III Section 2 of the Constitution.  Congress actually uses that power on a routine basis, although it has never seen fit to limit the courts’ jurisdiction on the most freighted social issues.

Meanwhile, the president’s signature is required to enact new laws unless they are passed with a veto-proof majority, so the president also has a say in defining the courts’ jurisdiction.  The president appoints judges as well, with the advice and consent of the Senate.  The Constitution is designed to give the other two branches explicit powers over, and implicit influence upon, the judiciary.  Clearly, the Framers did not intend for the courts to have “the final say” on the nature or scope of law.  All three branches have a say in those matters.  The courts were to function as a check on the other branches, on narrowly defined issues – not as a supreme arbiter of what the law is or may be.

That’s why the courts are given no power of execution or enforcement.  Those powers reside with the executive.  The quote itself may be apocryphal, but the famous challenge attributed to Andrew Jackson – “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” – captures accurately the division of powers in the US federal government.  The executive can choose to ignore the judiciary – and if the executive has the agreement of the legislature, there is nothing the judiciary can do about it.

The same is true of other combinations among the three branches.  If the legislature and the courts are in agreement, they can stymie the executive.  If the executive and the courts concur, they can decline to implement something the legislature wants.  The purposes of the separation of powers are to prevent a dictatorship by any one branch, and to force compromise, increase the likelihood of moderation, and – at least as important as anything else – bring the processes of government to an impasse when one branch has swung to an extreme.

The people, of course, are the ultimate arbiters of the Constitution.  We can change it.  The true sense in which it is a living document is that the people can amend it.

As regards the role of the judiciary, however, the original Constitution is set up pretty well.  Our society has migrated – due to indoctrination, but also out of ignorance – to an understanding of it different from what the Framers had in mind.  On balance, that “supreme arbiter” view of the federal courts has worked in favor of the leftist agenda on social issues.  In correcting his previous, erroneous comment on the Supreme Court, Obama reverted reflexively to the “final say on our Constitution” mantra.  Of all the things he could have said, that was what he considered important.

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  The Bosphorus Naval News blog, an excellent source for ground-truth naval information in the Bosporus and Black Sea, has photos of the Russian Kashin-class destroyer Smetlivy transiting the Turkish Straits on 2 April, on her way to Syria.  “As you can see,” says blogger Cem Devrim Yaylalı demurely, “she was smoking heavily.”

According to Russian officials quoted in an AFP report on the deployment, the visit to Syria is a “purely technical port call.”  I actually like that characterization, a lot, and I think we should use it ourselves.  If Israel attacks the Iranian nuclear facilities, we can point out that the event is a purely technical combined-force operation, so everyone should just cool his jets.

Kashin DDG-810 Smetlivy in the Bosporus on 2 April; turkishnavy.net image

The counterpoint with the current deployment of USS Enterprise (CVN-65) could hardly be starker.  As the Bosphorus Naval News piece observes, Smetlivy was commissioned in 1969.  Enterprise was commissioned in 1961.  This is her last deployment (a sad occasion indeed for Cold War sailors).  She is on the way from Norfolk to the Persian Gulf, but stopped in Greece last week for a port visit before heading for the Suez Canal.  A news photo of Enterprise at anchor off the Greek coast captures her size and capabilities.

All Hands on Deck! has excellent footage of the Enterprise Strike Group forming up for a photo op during its transit from the East coast in March.  The strike group includes an Aegis cruiser, USS Vicksburg (CG-69) and three Aegis destroyers, USS Nitze (DDG-94), USS Porter (DDG-78), and USS James E. Williams (DDG-95).  Enterprise spends a lot of time anchoring naval formations, as seen in this video from the Mediterranean in late March with warships from NATO allies Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Spain.

It’s only fair to note that Russia has an intelligence collection ship operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, and has been keeping one on station.  The Black Sea Fleet ship Kildin took up the patrol in March, relieving the intelligence collection ship Ekvator (which, yes, means “equator”).  So that makes at least two Russian navy ships in the Med at the moment.

It is equally fair to note that while the Enterprise Strike Group is just passing through, USS Vella Gulf (CG-72) and USS The Sullivans (DDG-68) are deployed to the Med separately, for ballistic missile defense patrols.  They are currently participating in joint exercise Noble Dina with the navies of Israel and Greece.  (See Elder of Ziyon’s takedown of the carefully edited Hezbollah – Al Manar – reporting on Noble Dina.)

Capability versus will

Why is it so important to go over these naval details?  To emphasize that merely showing up and tooling around in force doesn’t get the job done politically.  The US Navy has so much more force than Russia has in the Med right now that the comparison could be considered surreal.  But that force isn’t making a difference to developments in the Syria problem, because it is not being used in the service of any focused policy to settle the Syrian conflict favorably.  NATO has an overwhelming preponderance of force in the Med, but it is Russia that wields the effective veto over what the international community is going to do about Syria.

Situation to shift in Syria

The result is that the bloody crisis in Syria drags on.  The events of the last 48 hours suggest that the situation in Syria is going to change, but probably for the worse.  The second “Friends of Syria” meeting was just held in Istanbul, and the Friends (including the US) decided to support the Syrian opposition with, at a minimum, humanitarian aid and communications equipment.  (Arms will be forthcoming from some sources, as discussed below.)  The plan is basically to bureaucratize the Syrian civil war; as the BBC notes, the rebel fighters are to be paid salaries from the monetary aid provided by the Gulf nations in the Friends of Syria conclave.

But if Russian media are to be believed, that isn’t stopping the rebels from visiting Russia, perhaps to see if they can get a better deal.  That is by no means unlikely: Russia could be satisfied to resolve the Syria situation by installing a new client regime.

The rebels are also reported to have expelled 50,000 Syrian Orthodox Christians from the embattled city of Homs, forcing many to flee and slaughtering an untold number of others.  US congressmen have expressed grave concern over supporting the rebels given these and other reports (e.g., that Al Qaeda I represented in the rebel ranks).  But however Orthodox Russia may be, Putin is a pragmatist.

The question will be what he does as a long, drawn-out civil war unfolds.  Press reports have indicated that the Syrian rebels are pulling out of the cities, having determined that trying to hold them is a flawed and vulnerable strategy (which it is).  The UK Telegraph cites their intentions as a shift to guerrilla war.  If they can retain outside support, they can keep the fight going for a long time.

Bear that in mind as you see reports that the Assad regime has agreed to pull troops and heavy weapons out of the cities.  The cost of doing that is not nearly what it would be if the rebels weren’t pulling out and changing their strategy.  Assad will, of course, do what he can to prevent aid from getting to the rebels – and that’s where the strongest likelihood lies that his forces will come into conflict with foreign militaries.  He has already mined areas of the border with Lebanon and Turkey.  Reports that arms are flowing to the rebels via Iraq are probably prompting the regime to fortify that border to some extent as well (although Assad’s forces are overstretched around the country).

Iraq’s political leadership warns that arming the rebels is a bad idea and could provoke a wider regional war.  So does Egypt.  Much of the Arab League has preferred to look for a negotiated solution, rather than arming the rebels as Qatar and Saudi Arabia are eager to do.  Of course, Iraq and Egypt aren’t wearing white hats any more than anyone else is; they have their own, understandable – if not necessarily noble – interests in influencing the outcome in Syria.  Saudi leadership in arming the rebels works to their disadvantage.

Sadly, US media coverage of Syria tends to be disjointed on the one hand, and credulous on the other.  The Friends of Syria decision to inundate the rebels with cash – and arms, from some of the Friends – is mainly a portent of continued killing, and very possibly one of regional destabilization.  It’s not good news.  Russia will oppose it by funneling arms to Assad and seeking her own accord with the rebels, probably by trying to divide and bribe them.  Everyone else – Turkey and Saudi Arabia, regional jihadists – will continue to pursue a leadership role in remaking Syria.  Assad and the rebels will make no concessions that matter.  And China and Iran will continue to collude to evade sanctions on both Syria and Iran.

What Russia has that NATO doesn’t

The prospects for the conflict are framed – bounded – for all the actors in the drama by the Russian veto.  That current condition is to be contrasted with the situation only last year, in which developments in the Libya conflict were bounded by what the US was willing to do.  Geography does make a difference; the situations are not identical, but it is fair to say that the shift from 2011 to 2012 is a major one.  For the first time since 1945, the US has not been the principal limit-setter for the unfolding of a significant regional crisis.

Quite obviously, this is not because we lack power.  But unlike anything the West has done, Russia’s policy has been effective: for averting what she doesn’t want, if not for getting what she does.  The reason is not that she has greater military power – or more allies, or more friendship or credibility in the region.  She does have something important, however.  The remarkable contrast between her naval forces in the Eastern Med and ours is a study in an indisputable truth: the greatest military force on earth has no political force without a focused will behind it.

(Note for naval aficionados:  to see extra material with a lot of cool video links to naval operations and weapon systems, see this post in expanded form at The Optimistic Conservative.)

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.

Sandwiched between last month’s International Conference on Jerusalem in Qatar – at which a cast of Islamists, Western sympathizers, and UN officials sought to “combat the Judaization” of Israel’s capital – and the upcoming Global March on Jerusalem, the US State Department has stumbled this week through another episode of “Jerusalem denial.”  The Washington Free Beacon caught the first round on Tuesday, when a State Department media release on a senior official’s travel distinguished between visiting Israel and visiting Jerusalem.  (Adam Kredo at the Free Beacon caught State’s excuse and correction.)

In the Wednesday State Department press briefing, AP journalist Matthew Lee questioned spokeswoman Victoria Nuland intensively as to what the US posture is on Jerusalem as part of Israel (apparently as a follow-up to the criticism on the media release).  The Weekly Standard has a transcript of the segment with Lee questioning Nuland on Jerusalem; the complete transcript for 28 March is here. (See Elder of Ziyon’s summary as well, with commentary on the US policy on Jerusalem.)

It is fair to characterize Nuland’s responses as Daniel Halper has at The Weekly Standard: “There was an amazing exchange today at the State Department press briefing when the press secretary refused to say that Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel.”  Nuland went on to confirm (repeatedly) that the disposition of the entire city of Jerusalem is a final-status issue, to be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs – which is not in itself a change in US policy.  The problem is not that statement.  The problem is everything else.

Earlier Jerusalem denial

This isn’t the first time the Obama administration has been at pains to convey that Jerusalem is most definitely and absolutely not acknowledged as part of Israel by the United States.  Last year, Daniel Halper highlighted an earlier instance in which a White House photo was originally labeled “Jerusalem, Israel,” but the caption was then changed to remove the name “Israel” from it.  A series of media volleys ensued, in which Obama defenders insisted that the Bush administration hadn’t referred to Jerusalem as “Jerusalem, Israel” either.

Commentary blogger Omri Ceren discovered, however, that the Bush administration had, in fact, sometimes referred to “Jerusalem, Israel,” although it didn’t always.  As with any other major, well-known city, the Bush White House sometimes used only the city name (e.g., Paris, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Jerusalem) in a caption or other reference, and sometimes added the country name.

But Ceren found something else – something (to use Daniel Halper’s word) quite remarkable.  The Obama administration literally went through old State Department documents from the Bush administration and revised every reference to “Jerusalem, Israel” so that it would read only “Jerusalem.”  There were files online that the Obama administration had no editorial access to, and those could not be changed.  But the administration did go through and change what it could.

This pattern can only come across as an obsessive determination to emphasize the not-acknowledgment of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or even as part of Israel.  Ben Smith at Politico, meanwhile, turned up documents from previous administrations in which references were made to “Jerusalem, Israel,” and concluded that there has not historically been a US prohibition on making such references.  The Obama approach is unique.

US policy, actual

The US policy on Jerusalem since the 1970s has, indeed, been that the city’s comprehensive disposition is a matter to be worked out between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.  US policy has changed over time, due principally to the 1967 War, in which Israel, under concerted Arab attack, ejected the Jordanian occupation force from Jerusalem and assumed control of the city.  Victoria Nuland was referring to the baseline US policy stance since the aftermath of the 1973 War and the Israel-Egypt peace accord – and the reference, giving her wording, is accurate.  She was clearly not referring to the very early US position on Jerusalem as an international city under UN auspices.  (This summary of historical US policy on Jerusalem points out that US officials reinforced our modern baseline position – that Jerusalem was to be negotiated between the parties, and was not a UN issue – after the Oslo accords in 1993.)

Washington’s position for at least the last 35 years was well expressed in a statement by Ronald Reagan in 1982:  “We remain convinced that Jerusalem must remain undivided, but its final status should be decided through negotiations.”  The point here is not that negotiated concessions on the boundaries of Jerusalem and Israel’s civil control over it have been unthinkable.  The point is that the Obama administration’s posture in conveying the US position is qualitatively different from its predecessors’.

(We must note, of course, that the US Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, ordering that Jerusalem be recognized as the capital of Israel and the US embassy be moved there from Tel Aviv.  The official US policy on Jerusalem, which has wandered through different stages since 1948, is a separate issue from the majority sentiments of the American people, which have routinely affirmed support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  The presidents since 1995 have declined to adhere to the Jerusalem Embassy Act’s provisions, deeming the Act an encroachment on the constitutional privileges of the executive.)

It is deceptive to suggest that US policy has ever had the character of disavowing reality on the ground in Jerusalem, or appearing to invalidate history since 1967 – which is what the obsessive dissociation of Jerusalem from Israel amounts to.  The US has instead been pragmatic (if not always enthusiastic or good-humored) about it, tacitly acknowledging Israel’s de facto control, and not taking extraordinary measures to affirm US “non-recognition” of the current situation.

US presidents, even those not especially friendly to Israel, have understood that to do so would not only anger American voters but would also be destabilizing.  Insisting on US dissatisfaction with a situation can be read by interested parties as an invitation to actively assail the status quo.  We have preferred to resolve the situation peacefully, by starting from where everyone actually is.  The US position of impartiality – that is, of acknowledging that there is still negotiating to be done and that both sides must be satisfied – has not until the Obama administration taken the form of specifically scrubbing allusions to Israel’s obvious, historical, and very real connection to Jerusalem.

Altering the character of our “impartial” position matters, particularly in the context of the administration’s much criticized and often unjustifiable handling of Israel and Middle East security issues.  As is common with the Obama administration, a shift in posture is conveyed through wording decisions so picayune as to seem ridiculous – yet they signal a real change in approach.  It is one thing for the US to be tacitly satisfied with Israel’s control of Jerusalem while being prepared to endorse a different arrangement that the parties may agree to, in negotiations that we encourage.  A concern for orderliness and the satisfaction of both sides dictates a posture like this.

It is another, very different thing for the US to insist obsessively that no official US communications can appear to endorse Jerusalem as even an Israeli city, much less as the capital.  The evidence indicates that this Obama posture is a deviation from his predecessors’ stances, not a continuation.  It is also, in the unyielding context of reality, a clear attempt to affirm a desired or at least theoretical condition, rather than the actual one.

The Global March to Jerusalem

The timing, again, is bad.  The Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ) is scheduled for Saturday, 30 March (and West Bank demonstrations tend to start on Fridays, so the wild rumpus may well begin earlier).  CiF Watch has a website dedicated to exposing the organizers and intentions of the Global March to Jerusalem, and their excellent factsheet names the members of the terrorist group Hamas who are organizing it.  (Advisory board members include the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the multitalented George Galloway – ex-Labour MP from Glasgow – and Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, former prime minister of Malaysia and perennial supporter of anti-Israel flotillas.)  You can follow the CiF Watch “gmj2” site on Twitter.

The North American chapter of the Global March has its own website.  (You can check out the luminaries involved there, including – besides Jeremiah Wright – Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Medea Benjamin of Code Pink.)  As CiF Watch points out, the North American website’s FAQ section explains why there is a separate organization (my emphasis):

Q: Why is there a separate GMJ-NA organization?

A: Because of the laws governing citizens of the U.S. and Canada, legal advisers in these countries have determined that it is better for them to operate separately and not to participate in the decision-making of the international movement, but rather as an autonomous coalition. This is because some of the groups in the international coalition are subject to legal reprisals in these countries, and there is some risk that any joint decision-making might place citizens of those countries in legal jeopardy. The risk may be small, but this is an extra measure of safety for those concerned.

In other words, the organizers of GMJ are terrorists, and knowingly colluding with them is a criminal act.

CiF Watch also quotes from an email exchange between the organizers, clarifying the intentions of the GMJ (errors in original):

[I]magine a situation where we have more than a million people streaming in from four borders & israel fails to stop the human tide. Once we have broken this mental barrier, then its all over. next time we will have 5 million who will be marching in & it will ony grow from there. This is exactly the nightmare situation for Israel. How do you handle a million ordinary non-violent people who want to go back Home? – how do you handle a million non-violent people who just wish to pray in their Masjid in Jerusalem, which is under our Occupation? Thius will undermine the Israeli state, like no other strategy & then it will all begin to unravel & the Zionist edifice which is unraveeling as we speak, will soon fall. It’s a matter of time now, as we well know.

It is not possible to honestly claim that this effort has any goal short of terminating the nation of Israel.  The principal action on Saturday is to be the attempted swarm across Israel’s borders, along with solidarity marches in Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).  Notably, it was announced earlier this week that members of the infamous 2010 flotilla were joining the GMJ and heading for Lebanon from Turkey.  Thus, it is likely that, in addition to Hamas, armed thugs from the Turkish terror organization IHH are participating in the Saturday event.

Reportedly, the governments of Lebanon and Jordan are “sponsoring” marches on their territory – which, in the case of Jordan, at least, may be a good sign.  Although the Jordanian organizers have announced a rally site supposedly coinciding with the site of Jesus’ baptism nearly 2000 years ago – a false and repellent association of the GMJ cause with Christianity – the Jordanian government will almost certainly keep demonstrators in check and prevent them from attempting to cross the border.

Egypt is unlikely to allow demonstrators to mass at the border either, in large part because doing so would mean allowing them to congregate in the Sinai Peninsula, where security has become a big headache.  Lebanon may be a different story, however; in 2011, Hezbollah, which is in firm control of southern Lebanon, allowed people to rush the Israeli border during demonstrations in May (the Lebanese Armed Forces did ultimately move in to control the situation).  I doubt Lebanon will permit an actual border breach; even Hezbollah will prefer not to draw an Israeli response.  But with Israel being pressed elsewhere, Lebanon may push to see how far she can go.

Then there is Syria.  Reporting from the last several days has suggested that activists have been flown into Damascus to participate in the GMJ.  A Xinhua report puts the flow of marchers in the thousands, with Jordanian media appearing to confirm the arrival of activist-carrying flights in Syria.   The Jordanian report is one of many that tie the activists staging in Syria to Iran.  Jonathan Spyer, writing for PJ Media, considers the Iranian connection significant, but he is less concerned about the prospect for major security problems at Israel’s border with Syria.

I tend to agree with him that Syria is unlikely to allow a major cross-border influx, or to mount an attack herself.  Obviously, the Assad regime is pretty preoccupied, and has no interest in drawing Israeli intervention.  I don’t discount the possibility that Assad will attempt an attention-getting action of some kind, however.  Reporting from last year’s Nakba demonstrations in May indicated that the Syrian regime itself bused demonstrators to the border.

It is always important to remember about these events that the respective governments are the entities exerting control.  I don’t believe any of Israel’s neighbors feels the time is right to allow destabilizing attacks on Israel to begin – even if the attacks are undertaken by swarms of protesters on foot, who carry no military weapons.  (Many of them may well be armed in other ways.)  And the organizers themselves will consider their event a success if they can manufacture damning allegations against Israel, and negative photo ops, out of its various manifestations.

But the fact that the campaign against Israel is one of impressions, emotions, and “moral” suasion – honest or otherwise – is one of the chief reasons why the attitude of the United States matters.  We can maintain the position that there are still points to be negotiated on the status of Jerusalem, but that need not entail going well out of our way to avoid associating Jerusalem with Israel.  Doing so is pointed and tendentious, rather than honest or even-handed. (It’s also a pointed repudiation of an ally’s position – the Knesset declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel in January 1950 – which alone should give any administration pause.)  Excising the public record, moreover, has about it the whiff of totalitarian state revisionism.

The February conference on Jerusalem in Qatar punctuated a series of signals over the past decade that Islamist groups are coalescing around a concerted effort to obtain control of Jerusalem and prevent what they call its “Judaization.”  (Jerusalem is, of course, already Jewish, was established as a Jewish capital, has always had a Jewish population, and has had a majority Jewish population in the modern era since at least the 1850s.)  As I have written before, I don’t project that these groups will unite any time soon.  Leadership in gaining control of Jerusalem is, rather, a key focus of the competition between them.  But what they will all do is seek to maximize pressure on Israel, campaigning to discourage, undermine, and delegitimize the Jewish state – and capture it on camera defending itself.

The danger and destabilizing potential of this campaign will only escalate.  Under these circumstances, the Obama administration’s emphasis – which conveys less the importance of negotiation than the hint that Jerusalem is up for grabs – is not a damper; it’s a catalyst.

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 some aspects of it aren’t bad at all.  Judd runs into an acquaintance from her espionage days in each episode, and so far it’s been foreign guys with charming accents.  French Canadian Lothaire Bluteau (Black Robe, The Tudors) in the most recent episode was a superb choice.  (The Judd character – Rebecca Winstone – is widowed, by the way.  Her husband, Sean Bean, was also in The Business, and was assassinated in an airport years ago.  Too bad.)  The outstanding Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida (Clear and Present Danger, Desperado) is the director of French intelligence.  And then there’s the scenery.  There’s a lot to enjoy.

But I’m not sure how long I can stick with it.  Ashley Judd getting beat up and shot all the time is one thing.  I did see Salt (Angelina Jolie), on an Encore movie channel not too long ago; I can be hip.  But what’s with this 18-year-old son who’s, like, twice Mom’s size and completely helpless?

Michael Winstone is the son’s name.  He’s a prospective architecture student who went to Rome in the first episode to pursue his studies.  I can certainly buy that he has never been a spy or received any training; that he was abducted; and even that he’s being moved around Europe to tantalize his desperate mother, the former CIA agent with a Past.  (Hey, we’ve got to have a story, after all.)

But at the end of the second episode, Mom rushes to the French airport where Michael is being bundled onto a private jet, and, catching sight of him as she pulls up in a car, leaps out and starts running onto the tarmac.  She runs in that purposeful, symmetrical, hard-striding manner that moviegoers now expect from the stars of spy thrillers.  Her son is being herded resistless toward the plane by a phalanx of armed thugs, and as she shouts at him, he howls back, “Mom!  Help me!  Mom!  Help me!!!!”

The plane begins to taxi, Mom loses ground against it, and finally she has to collapse in agony on the tarmac.  As a loving mother, she has been unable to reach the armed abductors of her shrieking, strapping, grown-up son, to wreak mayhem on them and rescue her baby.

I don’t know, maybe you have to have spent a military career working with 18-year-old men to realize that, however lacking in wisdom and experience they may be, they are smart and brave as well as strong and fast.  (They have, for another 10 years or so, the greatest potential of any human demographic to be the latter.)  In a perilous situation with lots of gunmen in it, they are going to feel instinctively protective of their mothers.  They’re not going to shriek wildly at them for help.  A young man in this particular situation is more likely to yell, “Get out of here, Mom!”

Eighteen is the age of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines entering America’s armed forces.  Eighteen-year-olds go into combat.  Eighteen-year-olds with the proper training take on the responsibilities of adults.  And throughout the ages of mankind, 18-year-olds have watched over their mothers, up to and including taking up arms and defending their mothers at peril to their lives.

Story narratives do often ask us to suspend disbelief about one thing or another.  But it seems to me to be sloppy story-writing, to ask us to buy into an 18-year-old behaving like a helpless 6-year-old in a dangerous situation involving his mother.  That’s just icky, and audiences won’t stay with it for very long.  If Junior is a wimp, then for the story’s sake, he needs to grow out of it.

This hole in the plot could have been salvaged pretty simply, by amending the “Mom!  Help me!” scene at the airport to let Junior show some spunk (even though he clearly couldn’t have made an escape).  It would be a better show, and we’d care more.  Mom can be a very capable and talented former CIA agent without her son being infantilized to advance the story.  You could make a very good story out of reuniting mother and son if you let the Michael Winstone character be an actual young man.  The plot takes care of whether his abductors would kill him for showing spunk; they won’t.  As a series denouement, Mom and Michael fighting their way together out of the captors’ clutches could be a great episode.

But Missing is the wrong genre for Mommy Bathos.  And if Michael remains an inert, somewhat pathetic cardboard cut-out of a character, I suspect that that potentially great episode is one viewers won’t stick around for.

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.

It’s hard to say: Iman by herself couldn’t transport very many troops into Syria (a detachment of infantry, maybe, if they were really miserable, sleeping on deck and in passageways, during the few days’ transit), but Iman is an unlikely platform for transporting Russian troops anyway.  If Russia puts a substantial number of troops in Syria, it’s likely to be done via airlift.

And that said, I don’t necessarily expect Russia to put big troop formations in Syria.  Russia doesn’t want to fight the Syrian civil war directly.  Arming Assad and letting his troops do the work is preferable.  In the past week, Assad’s army has ejected the rebel forces from Idlib in the north, and the eastern city of Deir el-Zour; Moscow probably is not alarmed that the Syrian army can’t handle the job.

Protecting Russian installations in Tartus, the Russian-operated port, is a priority – and so is reinforcing the impression that Russia is ready to defend Syria against a Western coalition.  Seen in that light, the most likely purposes of newly-arriving Russian military detachments, other than protecting Tartus, are intelligence and air defense.  And except for man-portable systems, much of their equipment would have to be transported separately anyway.

More troop movements in the Caucasus

But there is another report that the Russians have moved a huge number of troops in the last week.  According to media in the Caucasus, they moved between 20,000 and 25,000 troops from Chechnya to Dagestan (both autonomous republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States), reportedly for “anti-terrorism” operations.  (This movement comes in the wake of special forces deployments to the central Caucasus reported in January.)

That’s one heck of a lot of troops for anti-terrorism operations.  There is no question that Dagestan has seen a spate of assassinations and bombings in the last few months, but 20-25,000 troops represent nearly half of the total Russian forces stationed in Chechnya.  (Recent comments on the troop footprint in Chechnya put it at about 60,000; see the Jamestown Foundation article from this past week on the Dagestan deployment.)  The 20-25,000 is a very large number, particularly for anti-terrorism as opposed to conventional operations.

Even if the actual number is not that big, eyewitness reports suggest a very large movement of troops and equipment.  The “Rosbalt” website – used often by analysts at the Jamestown Foundation – cites statements from eyewitnesses in Dagestan that the military formation on the move was over 10 kilometers long and comprised 150-200 “units,” presumably troop transport vehicles.  (Commercial satellite imagery of the Russian base at Khankala suggests that this number of vehicles represents most of those present on the parking aprons.)    According to the Dagestani reporting, Russian forces rolled into campgrounds in the Karabudahkent District south of the capital of Makachkala, which sits on the Caspian coast.  Statements from locals also suggest that the Russian troops will be quartered in school buildings.  Reports like this confirm that this is not a small-footprint deployment.

A look at geography yields some interesting revelations about the deployment.  There are two significant perspectives.  One is general:  Dagestan lies on the west coast of the Caspian Sea; on Georgia’s eastern border; and on Azerbaijan’s northern border.

Geographic factors in Dagestan

The other is specific:  most of the terrorist incidents in Dagestan over the past several months have occurred between Makhachkala and Chechnya, or across the central “waist” of Dagestan.  As seen on the district map, however, the Russian troops have not deployed to that area, but past it, to a southeast position in the coastal district of Karabudahkent, and in the district immediately south of it, Sergokala.

The forests of Karabudahkent have been a perennial hiding place for Islamist terrorists, and some Dagestani hunters were found assassinated there in March.  A homicide bomber also attacked a post office in Karabudahkent on 6 March.  But these are the most recent in a long list of incidents, most of which have occurred to the northwest of the deployment area.  The size of the Russian deployment, and its geographic objective, appear to be tailored for more than this one, most recent security problem. 

Russia is concerned, for example, about all three of the general geographic factors.  Moving the troops from Chechnya to the coast puts them in a different position in relation to Georgia, and it’s not clear that the new position is less favorable than being in garrison in Khankala.  (In fact, it gives the Russians a second vector into Georgia with a large formation – an option they had maintained for a long time until late in 2011; see below.)  Russian troops are closer to Georgia in Chechnya, but some passages may be easier from Dagestan.  Vladimir Putin, in particular, has been assiduous about improving the road approaches to Georgia in Dagestan.

In 2008, at the end of his last term, Putin inaugurated road construction from Botlikh, Dagestan (see map), where Russia maintained a mountain infantry brigade, to the Georgian border (this in spite of the fact that Putin had ordered the border crossings between Dagestan and Georgia closed in 2006).  The Russians removed the infantry brigade from Botlikh in 2011. Besides the new troop deployment to Dagestan, however, 2012 has also seen a new allocation of funds for road construction.  There are already roads in Dagestan to the Georgian border; Putin-ordered maintenance on the Dagestani side, coupled with a massive troop deployment, cannot give Georgia a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Russian analysts suggest that concerns about Azerbaijan may be prompting the deployment as well.  Both Georgia and Azerbaijan represent roadblocks to Russian freedom of action on the southern flank – the paths to Syria and Iran – and both lie between Russia and Armenia, where Moscow maintains a military base with 5,000 troops, a tank unit, and a squadron of MiG-29s.  The military path through Azerbaijan is well laid and ready, with a major highway, Route 29, running from Dagestan into Azerbaijan near the coast.

The Russians also have a military radar facility in Azerbaijan, and the lease is about to expire.  Russian media claim that Baku is demanding $300 million annually to renew the lease, far in excess of the current amount (which is variously reflected as $7 million and $22 million).   Azerbaijani media seem to have offered no specific counter-claims, and may simply not know what negotiating figure is correct.

At any rate, the US has a military cooperation agreement with Azerbaijan, as does Israel.  The last two scheduled joint exercises involving the US and Azerbaijan have been cancelled by Baku, largely due to unease about Russia’s reaction, but the US has provided minor military hardware to Azerbaijan, and a few days ago Azerbaijan and NATO concluded an agreement to demine a large, Soviet-era military training facility, an activity that will bring NATO personnel into the country.

I don’t think any of Azerbaijan, Georgia, or the Caspian Sea – the most obvious geographic feature toward which the troops have been moved – is by itself the chief concern in Moscow.  Rather, the potential convergence of events in Central Asia has prompted the Russians to reevaluate their preparedness and the position of a major troop formation.

Shifting factors, shifting posture in Central Asia

Iran is the not the only factor in this thinking, but she may be at the top of the list.   A Monday editorial in The Moscow Times summarizes nicely the Russian perspective that Israel and the US are colluding to establish positions in the Caucasus and Central Asia from which to attack Iran.  The editorialist says this:

Stratfor wrote in a recent report: “It is difficult to believe that the United States and Israel are not coordinating their activities in the Caucasus. … It can be assumed that the United States has approved the initiatives.” …

Directly or indirectly, Russia and the United States have been bumping up against each other in the Caucasus region where Russia is resurgent.

The most recent “bump” would undoubtedly be exercise Agile Spirit, conducted in March by a detachment of 350 US Marines and the Georgian armed forces.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the exercise “provocative.”  Russia and Iran are also annoyed that the NATO missile defense radar in Turkey has become operational (Iran has been especially assiduous in recording objections to the radar site; e.g., here and here).

Moreover, an interesting emphasis in US military aid to the nations surrounding the Caspian Sea has caught Russian attention.  In the 875-page State Department document heralding the proposal, few American readers were likely to run across the naval assistance to Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan.  But regional analysts were paying attention, and highlighting the “concerted [US] effort to build naval capacity in the Caspian.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear American reactions along the lines of, “What are we doing that for?”  I suspect one of the reasons is simply that naval assistance is one of the main things the Caspian nations are requesting.  Another is the interest of our European NATO allies in bringing to fruition a trans-Caspian pipeline opposed by Russia and Iran.  With no declaration of strategic interest or specific US policy to frame these actions, however, they can look like sneaking US hardware into Russia’s back yard.  Why would we take this particular approach to Caspian Sea security?

There is an aspect to this of US interests being effectively declared for us by the priorities of our regional partners.  We care very much about the stability of Asia, the security of our Asian and European allies, the resistance of Asia to Islamist terrorism, and about the openness there to political liberalization, trade, and communication – but none of these interests requires building up navies in the Caspian Sea.

In any case, Russia is definitely concerned: the Russian armed forces have deployed their newest coastal missile system to the Caspian Sea, among other upgrades (see here, here, here, and here).  I wrote in January about a military exercise conducted by the Russian Federation’s Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in the Caspian Sea in 2011, in which the “threat” was a Western consortium.

The 2012 CSTO exercise will be conducted for the first time in Armenia (in September).  The all-purpose “anti-terrorism” pretext is cited for holding the exercise there, but it is more likely that Russia’s concern is simply to have the troops there.  Visible demonstration of the troops’ activities will be another purpose, but declaring the exercise will justify deployments that could start whenever Moscow deems it necessary – and that, I think, is the principal consideration.

What will Russia do?

It’s a good question.  In both Syria and the Caucasus/Central Asia, I assess that Moscow’s immediate purpose is to consolidate territory and deter Western initiative (“Western” including Israel v. Iran).  I don’t think the Russians want to fight, and it’s not clear whether or how they would fight if it came to that.  I believe the position they envision falling back to, if Western nations launch attacks on either Syria or Iran, entails remaining able to supply their clients so that Syrians or Iranians could keep the fight going.  Moscow must also be concerned about stabilizing the Caucasus in the event of an attack on Iran, which is likely to serve as a goad to Islamist terrorism in the region.

(In the case of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, Russian air forces deployed to the Caucasus could conceivably attempt to warn off Israeli strike aircraft operating in northern Iran.)

Meanwhile, affecting Western calculations with the threat of military power increases Putin’s stature for leading a “peacekeeping” coalition – that is, an effort to avert or transition from outright conflict to negotiations of some kind, with an international protection force effectively under Russia’s aegis.  Seizing the reins of the foreign intervention in Libya was beyond Russia’s power last year, but with respect to the Syria problem, Russia has not only put together a joint posture with the Arab League but has backed Kofi Annan’s “UN” solution, and continues to block and shape Western multinational proposals.

Under these conditions, NATO reliance on Russia for logistic support to Afghanistan is an increasing vulnerability.  Russia naturally wants to retain her bargaining chip in this regard, but we need only look a few months back to find the last Russian threat to close down the “Northern Distribution Network,” as the logistic pipeline through Russia is called.  And with Russian troops redeployed pointedly around the Caucasus, independent NATO partners like Azerbaijan and Georgia will be less inclined to anger Moscow by offering us an alternative.

None of these problems is insurmountable, but they can only be addressed to our advantage from the perspective of a clear focus on US interests and a vigorously prosecuted strategy.  “Leading from behind” – merely lending our support to the plans of others, as in Libya – will serve to increase our troubles.

Note on maps:  To view both maps, see this article at The Optimistic Conservative.  Both maps are from the presentation “Land, Votes, and Violence: Political Effects on the Insecurity of Property Rights over Land in Dagestan,” by Yegor Lazarov.

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.

Ed did an excellent job breaking down the few actual differences between Obama’s new defense-resources EO and the previous version from 1994.  Here are the two main differences:

1.  The Obama EO elaborates vague-sounding functions for federal agencies in maintaining defense-resources preparedness (Section 103).  Ed summarizes them as follows:

Note what this EO specifically orders: identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation.

2.  The Obama EO delegates authorities under Section 308 to agency heads.  The Section 308 authorities include putting additional equipment in public and private defense industrial facilities, and modifying or expanding private facilities, including modifying or “improving” industrial processes.

Any time I see the Obama administration and “modifying private industry” in the same zip code, I get curious about who’s cooking up ways to spend taxpayer money on uneconomic ventures.  We’ve had that whole thing with the green-tech companies making out like bandits from Obama administration crony projects – while failing, destroying unused parts, and charging the military four times the cost of regular fuel – so it’s not like there’s no precedent for the concept.

And it turns out that Obama’s new EO did not emerge from out of nowhere in this regard.  The Department of Energy has become notorious for its funding awards to Obama cronies, but there has been much less of that unpleasant publicity about the Department of Defense.  Where Obama has proposed increasing defense expenditures, however, is in public-private partnerships to develop “advanced manufacturing” technologies for the defense industry.  A whole infrastructure of initiatives and organizations has been set up to bring the idea to fruition.  And a key due-out in each case will be DOD money going to businesses.

As Ed and others pointed out this weekend, there is nothing new about federal provisions to manage and ensure “defense resources.”  The Obama administration has set up some new organizations, but it has relied on the authority from previous legislation (principally the Defense Production Act of 1950, or DPA) to scope its overarching concept.  Readers should also keep in mind that the idea of government stepping in and modifying defense businesses has been enshrined in US law for decades.  (The previous understanding has been that these measures would be reserved almost entirely for war or national emergency.)   The Obama administration is merely putting its unique stamp on the concept.

There’s a big cast of characters.  Besides reorganizing the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an entity that has existed under different names for most of the last 80 years, the Obama administration launched its Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) in June 2011.  The AMP will hand out money, but will also identify projects for the federal departments to hand out money to.

In 2011, the administration created a new Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy (MIBP).  ASD/MIBP is not a Senate-confirmed official,   but he manages the DPA Fund; i.e., money.  (A GAO report in 2008 summarized the somewhat chaotic approach to funding DPA projects under Title III; the Obama administration’s approach has emphasized wrestling some of that chaos down, to put a more Obamist face on the priorities.)

Obama also established an interagency Defense Production Act Committee, which, although derived from the authorities conferred by the DPA of 1950, had not been constituted prior to 2009.  DPAC’s charter:

[DPAC] serves as a multi-departmental forum to identify risks and shortfalls in the industrial base and make recommendation on actions to rectify them, including the use of DPA Title III authorities.

(Title III authorities are summarized here as a “set of unique economic authorities to incentivize the creation, expansion or preservation of domestic manufacturing capabilities for technologies, components and materials needed to meet national defense requirements.” Read, in large part: money.) 

The Obama administration also published very quickly – in March 2009 – a new strategic plan for the DOD Manufacturing Technology Program, another federal program dating to the 1950s, and one that – you guessed it – disburses money.  But note: the specific requirement for the strategic plan came from the Defense Authorization Act in the final year of the Bush administration.  As is often the case, the Obama administration doesn’t have to think up new programs, requirements, or authorities; it simply leverages the existing, cumulative infrastructure.

That appears to be what is going on with a concatenation of programmatic efforts that we may call the “defense advanced manufacturing nexus,” or DAMN.  The central document in the nexus is the National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing, published – pay attention here – in February 2012.  This is another in that ever-lengthening list of things you probably didn’t know we had.  This strategic plan was developed by the Interagency Working Group on Advanced Manufacturing (IAM, and how’s that for an acronym), in response to Section 102 of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010.

The strategic plan is about federal investment (“greater public co-investment”) – that is, in plain speak, “giving money” to folks.  The priority for expenditures is explained as follows:

[P]rivate investment in advanced manufacturing capabilities may not occur domestically unless the public sector makes strategic investments to address market failures in stages of the innovation process downstream from basic research.

So the strategic plan is to invest taxpayer money in market failures.  And it all comes together on pages 30-31 of this document, where we see the Defense Production Act Committee and the DOD Manufacturing Technology Program called out specifically as vehicles for implementing the strategic plan.  DARPA is explicitly invoked as well.

Acronym overload is an issue here, so let’s just state the proposition one more time.  The Obama strategic plan for advanced manufacturing is to invest public money in technologies that are vulnerable to (or are already) market failures, with a focus on defense manufacturing.  The vague-sounding functions assigned to federal agencies in Obama’s new defense-resources EO – identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation – mirror quite exactly the National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing and the DOD Manufacturing Technology Strategic Plan.

In light of this comprehensive, money-intensive plan, the delegation of authority to agency heads – for adding to, modifying, and improving the industrial base – takes on an interesting hue.  The first thing that occurs to me is the Obama administration’s well-known reliance on “stealth” implementation of controversial or unpopular measures, through the unheralded actions of federal agencies.  Charles Krauthammer outlined several such actions in December 2010; readers can no doubt think of numerous others.

How would this matter to the defense industrial infrastructure?  One obvious way is the potential for agencies to quietly circumvent the intentions of Congress, which are a longstanding source of friction for presidential defense priorities.  The Senate, in particular, is the center of excellence for political horse-trading over national priorities for the defense industry.  If it’s manufactured for defense, or if it’s a defense service, there’s a senator for that:  the Senate’s slugfests over which states get the biggest or next or “fair share” piece of the defense-industry pie are as unseemly and ridiculous and necessary as anything in consensual republican government.

But there is a subtler issue as well.  The defense industry and its advocates have been complaining in the last couple of years about irreparable losses in the defense industrial infrastructure due to spending cuts.  (See here and here as well.)   There need be no “conspiracy theories” for us to recognize that as spending is cut further and further, some elements of the base will die on the vine, and what the federal government does spend defense money on is what will determine the shape of the future defense industrial base.

I am profoundly uneasy about the priorities of the Obama Defense Department in general – and I am made more so by the achievements in innovation touted by defense-funded enterprises like the $16-a-gallon marine biofuel, the contract to apply grid efficiency technology to DOD energy use, and DARPA’s partnership with start-up Local Motors to develop the first Experimental Crowd-Derived Combat-Support Vehicle (XC2V).  The last sounds like one heck of a lot of fun, but forcing money into this kind of idea while declining to fund basic weapon systems will transform the defense industrial base in a way no one would buy into up front.

The new Obama EO on defense resources comes out of an accelerating, months-long effort to harness the defense budget for favored kinds of spending.  This will no doubt be depicted as, precisely, “national defense resources preparedness.”  And it’s already underway.  In addition to the various direct-purchase or sponsorship projects with defense funding, the Army and Navy are just (literally, just) opening new research laboratories, which the US is apparently able to fund in spite of needing to cut funds for the high-performing RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV, the F-35 multi-service strike-fighter, US bases in Europe, and 80,000 Army soldiers.

For perspective, it is important to recognize that all presidential administrations seek to put their stamp on defense policies.  There is nothing nefarious about doing that.  What’s worth noting about the Obama administration is that its clearest public posture on defense is that defense spending has to be cut, no matter how painful the losses in military capability.  In the esoteric realm of “national investment in infrastructure,” however – where money goes, as with the “Stimulus” package, to cronies – the administration has lifted out a segment of defense-related spending for special funding.  It defines this segment in the terms of its “investment” plan for “advanced manufacturing,” in a manner similar to its enthusiasm for defense “investment” in “green technologies.”

And now it has modified the EO on National Defense Resources Preparedness along lines that are clearly relevant to implementing the plan for advanced manufacturing.  A whole slew of websites went to high warble over the revised EO on the theory that it was intended to facilitate martial law, and I agree with Ed that that looks like a silly overreaction.  But the important point is that it’s misdirected.  I don’t think the EO or its timing is meaningless, or merely routine.

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.

An interesting aspect of the ISIS analysis is the fact that the building in question is located well outside the main area of the Parchin facility.  Basically, it is in an area the ISIS analysts had apparently not reviewed before, at least not prior to the November 2011 IAEA report in which the Parchin building was featured as a suspect site.  The building is between 4 and 5 kilometers northeast of the Parchin main installation, at the edge of a seasonal riverbed across from a small village.

ISIS imagery: Parchin in 2004. Berm building site at upper right.

The ISIS report suggests the analysts’ approach was to look for a site with the features provided in the November 2011 IAEA report: a building with its own perimeter fence and a berm between it and the adjacent building.  That’s how they came up with the site in the report.  They may be right that this is the building IAEA wants to inspect.  An additional feature of this particular building is that it lies at the north end of a two-lane, paved north-south road.  Vehicle traffic can only approach it from one direction, a common feature of high-security sites the world over.

On the other hand, it is a serious question why this building hasn’t been visited before.  Was it actually not identified by authorities until recently?  We could throw confetti at the new ISIS report, but we should gain a little perspective first.  Some of the important facts are included in the ISIS report:  IAEA’s information (in the November 2011 report) is that the explosive testing done in this building occurred in the early 2000s, and that the building houses a test chamber (described as being the size of a double-decker bus) that was put in place in 2000.  The information, in other words, is not about a new development.

And we have to go elsewhere for other pieces of the puzzle.  When we put everything together, the central question we end up with is this one:  when IAEA last visited the Parchin installation in 2005, why did its team not inspect this building?

It wasn’t because there was no input from national intelligence agencies.  In fact, a key reason IAEA visited Parchin in 2005 was that the United States had forwarded evidence in 2004 of high-explosive testing for a nuclear weapon at Parchin.  In a September 2004 analysis done because of the aggregate reporting at that time, ISIS cited AFP stating that IAEA already regarded Parchin as a suspect site. The ISIS summary indicated that the agency had independent sources of information on the site.

IAEA identified four areas of interest at the installation, according to its own documents.  There is no public information on where those four areas were.  But IAEA was allowed to visit no more than two areas, in two separate visits in 2005 (the reports from 2005 are here and here).  According to IAEA, the January inspection team was given its choice of one of the four areas.  The January 2005 visit was described as including five buildings, which means that it was not a visit to the site of the building identified yesterday by ISIS.  The earlier ISIS reporting suggests that the area visited in January 2005 was in the main part of the Parchin installation.  The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) reported that the November 2005 visit was to a site for testing air-defense systems, unrelated to the nuclear program.

The bottom line is that US intelligence had information in 2004 that explosive tests had been conducted at Parchin in the early 2000s, and IAEA also regarded the site as suspect for its own reasons.  The evidence suggests, however, that in two visits to Parchin in 2005, IAEA did not visit the site northeast of the main installation where ISIS now thinks the test building is located.  If ISIS is right – and it’s still possible they’re not; there are a lot of nondescript buildings in the Greater Parchin area – this is the building that has been there since 2000 (a fact IAEA has established) and is also the building where explosive tests were conducted in the early 2000s (an intelligence report put forward by the US in 2004).

The most positive construction on the failure to visit the building in 2005 is that no one knew it was the site to visit.  Perhaps that was the case.  The US deduced that beryllium might have been used in the nuclear-detonator testing, but that kind of information does not depend on knowing exactly where tests have been conducted.

It appears that descriptive information about the building (i.e., the berm at one end, the dedicated perimeter security), while already available from unnamed national intelligence agencies, did not become significant to IAEA until the agency debriefed Vyacheslav Danilenko, the Russian scientist who is said to have assisted Iran in testing a nuclear detonator.  Reporting on that aspect of the problem did not emerge until November 2011.  (IAEA doesn’t name Danilenko in its report, but news outlets like Washington Post cite diplomats as identifying Danilenko.  Danilenko denied he had had any connection with Iran’s nuclear program, stating that he understood his stint in Iran, which lasted from the mid-1990s to 2002, to be related to the explosive generation of nanodiamonds.)

Perhaps it shouldn’t strain credulity that IAEA had regarded Parchin as a suspect site prior to 2004, that the US knew of nuclear-related explosive testing there by 2004, and that IAEA visited two areas of Parchin in 2005, but it wasn’t until 2011 that anyone had enough information on the whole matter to identify the building with the berm.

It does, however.  Meanwhile, one other matter requires clarification.  News reporting last week seemed to suggest that IAEA had observed attempts to “clean up” an area of Parchin a very short time ago – at least, as the news customer would imagine, sometime in 2012.  But the original reports about this activity were made in November 2011, shortly after that month’s IAEA report was issued.  On 21 November, AP reported that national officials from several nations had discussed unusual activity at Parchin on 4-5 November, using exactly the same references to freight trucks and haulage vehicles found in the statements from last week.

Perhaps the more recent comments are about an ongoing effort to truck things out of Parchin, one stretching back to early November 2011 – an effort of truly prodigious proportions.  It is more likely, however, that the reports from last week were about the observations from early November.  That’s how the Iran problem generally rolls.  Whatever “new” thing you hear, it’s probably something we knew about months or even years ago.

Hat tips/see also:  Challah Hu Akbar, Elder of Ziyon, Israel Matzav

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.

Clearly divided global leaders

The confrontations in the UN have been emblematic of the Asian-Atlantic divide over Syria, but perhaps not as much as a less-publicized sequence of events.  In the hours after Russia and China vetoed the Western-sponsored UN resolution in February, Nicolas Sarkozy proposed the “Friends of Syria” vehicle for coordinating international action.  The US and Turkey quickly joined forces on the Friends of Syria effort, and a first meeting was scheduled for 24 February in Tunisia.

Russia and China both declined to participate.  And their non-participation has taken the form of competing efforts to put a plan together to resolve the Syrian crisis.  On 10 March, at a meeting in Cairo – shortly before this week’s UN confrontation with the US – Russia and the Arab League announced a set of agreed principles for ending the conflict.  One of those principles is that both sides – the Assad regime and the insurgents – must lay down their arms.  Russia will not buy into any proposal that has Assad’s forces observing a unilateral ceasefire.

The Arab League’s agreement on Russia’s “five principles” is a milestone in the effort to get some kind of coalescence around a way ahead.  Arab League agreement is not universal; it won’t surprise Middle East-watchers that Qatar – home of Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi and recent host of the anti-Israel “Jerusalem conference” – called last week for a military solution in Syria, with Arab troops in the lead.  But the Arab League agreement with Russia tends to highlight Qatar as an outlier in that regard.

It appears that Qatar is hoping to urge the West to intervene in Syria, in combination with military forces from Arab partners; i.e., replicate the action in Libya last year.  From a Muslim Brotherhood standpoint, wresting Libya from Qadhafi opened the country up to shariazation.  But the Arab League as a whole is publicly agreeing with Russia rather than backing Qatar’s play.  (And this in spite of Arab League participation in the Friends of Syria meeting in Tunisia.)

China chimed in a few hours ago with supportive comments about the Russia-Arab League agreement.  (Beijing has also gone Russia one better with a six-point plan.)  The Chinese had an envoy in Syria last week talking to both the Assad government and the insurgents in an effort to broker a ceasefire, and they are dispatching diplomats around the region to “explain China’s position” and affirm the need for a political solution.

Meanwhile, Turkey plans to host the second Friends of Syria meeting on 2 April.  (The dilatory schedule mimics the US/EU approach to Libya in 2011.)  Nothing much came out of the first one, and the second meeting is already haunted by the report – denied by Turkish authorities – that Sarkozy had not been invited to it because of the recent French resolution condemning the World War I-era slaughter of Armenians as a genocide.

The lack of momentum for Western-brokered proposals is a serious problem.  While it would be too much to say that the Russia-Arab League agreement has momentum at this point, it would also be too much to say that anything put forward by the West is a credible challenge to it.  The Arab League doesn’t have the unity to deal with Syria by itself, and has been looking for a strong horse to run with.  There is no guarantee at this point that the strong horse will be the US and EU.

Turkish press opined this weekend that the reelection of Vladimir Putin would induce a notable warming trend in Russian-Turkish relations.  Putin is a personal friend of President Gul and Prime Minister Erdogan; this prediction is solid, although of course it will not eliminate all of the natural sources of friction between the two nations.  What it may well do, however, is change the dynamic in which Turkey has found it convenient to throw in with the US on the Syria problem.

If the US is not going to back decisive action in Syria, Turkey may quietly migrate to an accord with Russia on ending the conflict.  (If Ankara can present this as Russia migrating toward Turkey, so much the better for Erdogan.  But Moscow has the agreement in hand with the Arab League.)  What we may count on with both Turkey and Russia is a desire to wield the primary influence over the process of establishing a new government in Syria.  With the current US administration, the utility of the United States as a patron for this Turkish purpose may not be as great as that of Russia.

Syrian situation on the ground

Is the strategic situation changing inside Syria?  There are developments that suggest it is.  The Assad regime is mounting an assault today on the northern enclave in rebel hands.  Unconfirmed reports suggest that regime forces have recaptured Idlib, a key city held by the Free Syrian Army.

Significantly, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has also reported that the Syrian government is laying mines on the borders with Turkey and Lebanon, a measure designed to keep foreign forces out and curtail the rebels’ cross-border cooperation.  There is no reporting about the border with Iraq, but Iraq is the land route between Syria and Iran, which Assad will probably not want to imperil.  The borders with Turkey and Lebanon are the likely infiltration routes for foreign special forces and support to the Syrian rebels.

Yesterday, moreover, Russia dispatched two planeloads of humanitarian assistance to Syria.  Raise your hand if you think the two IL-76 cargo aircraft contained only “humanitarian” goods.  (OK, you with the hands up, go demine the Syrian border.)

The hour is late.  The fact that the US and EU have no momentum doesn’t mean no one has; with each passing day, it is more likely to mean the opposite.  If Assad is able to regain control of his territory, there will be no acceptable – no unifying – pretext for intervention.  The battle for this objective appears to have already started.  As between the dithering of the West and the cynical pragmatism of Russia and China, the latter seems to be looking pretty good to the Arab League.

The road not taken

What should the US have done by now?  Adopted a determined objective of our own – in my view, it could only have been removing Assad, preventing a takeover by Islamists, and brokering the establishment of a consensual, multi-party government – and pursued the objective pragmatically but in a principled manner.  It is very possible the objective could have been achieved without military action.

Regarding the pragmatism: Russia has a stake in Syria.  It doesn’t matter whether we think she should or not; she does.  Get over it; stop haranguing Russia pointlessly in public forums, and concentrate on herding Russia toward our objective.  If Syria is not taken over by Islamists, Russia wins.  So do we.  That should unite us in riding herd on the plans of the Erdogan government, as well as Iran’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s.

In any case, Russia has always been the key to removing Assad without the need for military intervention, and in late January and February, Russia was even obliquely communicating a willingness to trade Assad for a new model.  The character of Syrian territory as a strategic factor for Russia – whether it is hostile or friendly – is of more importance to Moscow than Bashar al-Assad is.

A solution in which the Syrian people were empowered to operate more freely in a true multiparty government, under the aegis of multinational protection against both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, would be the most desirable, achievable outcome.  It is not possible to broker this outcome while ignoring Russia, but it would be possible to broker it by including Russia.  There are enough competing interests, between the US, the Arab world, the EU, Russia, and Turkey, to leverage everyone into a favorable compromise.  The overriding principle should be that the Syrian people be relieved of Assad but not fall prey to Islamists – and that is a principle that the governments of most of the Arab League, as well as Europe and Russia, could unite around.

A key principle of the Reagan administration, that negotiating with the old Soviet Union on human rights was integral to global security, should underlie the US approach to Syria.  We need not hand Moscow a third-party revolution in Syria; we would do better to warn Russia that that’s what she’ll get if she doesn’t work with us – and then focus on the political conditions in Syria.  If we are watching over their liberalization, Russia may even retain a special relationship with Syria, but the guarantee of a more liberal political atmosphere will do what it always does: empower the liberalizers and foster transparency and truth.  Russia’s relationship with Syria should depend on adapting to that.

But only the US has the power to ensure that condition.  None of this would be easy.  I can think of few things less fun than dealing with Russia and Turkey on Syria.  But a program like this is feasible, or at least it has been, because there are so many competing interests to leverage.  US leadership is what is missing in all this – and it will not look like leadership to anyone else unless it contains an element of enforcement.  (The reason why Russia’s position is starting to look more like leadership to those in the region is precisely that it does.)  Everyone should be worried that if he doesn’t compromise and accept the basic features of the US position, he won’t be in on the solution.

That’s not the situation our leaders in Washington have created, however.  There is and has always been an alternative to either intervening militarily, against the strenuous objections of Russia and China, or leaving Assad to do whatever he’s going to do.  But crafting that alternative would require positive leadership from the United States.  (It would, for example, require changing our intelligence focus from generic – plaintive – questions about whether Assad will survive to what would happen if the US took specific actions.)

We would have to take a position, one beyond simply getting rid of Assad.  We would have to start knocking heads together to line up a coalition for it.  It seems absurd to have to explain that – but then, we did elect Obama in 2008.

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.

Lest you think the UC system thought this up all by itself, be assured that the idea of a public requirement for this data was approved by the state assembly.  In October 2011, Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 620, which seeks to have the higher-education systems in California

… collect aggregate demographic information regarding sexual orientation and gender identity of staff and students within other aggregate demographic data collected, and … require annual transmittal of any report to the Legislature, as specified, and posting of the information on the Internet Web site of each respective institution.

The idea has been around for a while, of course, and the leaders of higher education in the Golden State have been discussing it.  The California Post-Secondary Education Commission (CPEC) in June 2009 adopted an official posture urging institutions to “collect and report LGBT data to CPEC in the same manner as gender, race, ethnicity, and disability data.”  According to CPEC, “Sexual orientation and gender identity should be considered its own demographic.”  Page 3 of the CPEC document makes a fleeting reference to pushing for student health insurance to cover gender-reassignment surgery, and we’ll come back to that.

(We should also note, for completeness, that California has mandated a survey inquiring into state judges’ sexual orientation.  According to Democratic State Senator Ellen Corbett of San Leandro, who authored the 2011 legislation, “It’s essential that a state as diverse as California has judges that reflect that diversity.” H/t: Ed Whelan at NRO.)

In the spring of 2011, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC), citing the CPEC document, resolved to support collecting sexual-orientation and gender-identity data on students.  In February 2012, the chairman of the UC Academic Senate communicated via letter the approval of the Senate’s Academic Council for collecting LGBT data on college students. The groups recommending this were the University Committee on Affirmative Action and Diversity (UCAAD) and the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS).  The original UCAAD and BOARS letters urging approval are included in the PDF file with the chairman’s letter; all three cite AB 620.  BOARS forwards the following statement:

BOARS is sympathetic to the view that students should have the right to identify themselves as LGBT…

I suppose it would be tiresome and pedantic to point out that students have that right today, and in fact have never lacked it.  At any rate, these proposals never spring unmidwifed from the brow of Zeus; there is always something else at work, and in this case, one of the things appears to be national and state health policy.

You may or may not be aware that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has an initiative called Healthy People 2020, which has its own website and all kinds of opinions, programs, and plans relating to your health.   (Here are the Vision, Mission, and Goals of Healthy People 2020.)  You might not have known that the Affordable Care Act of 2010, better known as ObamaCare, provides funding to collect data for the study of health care disparities (Section 4302).  (You may not have been aware that the United States has an Office of Minority Health, when it comes to that.)  As part of the effort to flesh out disparities, HHS has a plan to improve federal data collection on the LGBT community, by asking people via national health surveys to self-identify as to sexual orientation and gender identity. 

Citing “health disparities in insurance coverage” – a phrase whose meaning is not clear, even though it appears in a federal policy document – HHS outlines its LGBT data collection program here.  While “health disparities in insurance coverage” may not have an intelligible meaning, the words forming the expression appear together in other places, like this Center for American Progress (CAP) article and an LGBT activist document entitled “Healthy People 2020 Transgender Fact Sheet.”  (See also the same activist group’s comments on sexual orientation and gender identity as “health disparity” factors in 2009.)  In these documents, as in the CPEC document above, one of the key issues cited is that health insurance doesn’t routinely cover gender-reassignment surgery or the other health needs of the transgendered.

California comes by the LGBT data-collection approach honestly, of course.  Besides the 2011 law requiring a sexual-orientation inquiry into the state’s judges, California has pioneered LGBT data collection with its California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), which is another thing you may not have known existed.  As the CAP article points out, CHIS is the only operation in the United States that has collected this kind of information in its health surveys.  In 2011, the congressionally chartered Institute of Medicine published a study, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People, based on data from the CHIS survey of 2009.

So, to recap: the pedigree of LGBT data collection is extensive in California, but as the HHS initiative indicates, the US federal government is also on the hunt for ways to collect data on sexual orientation and gender identity.  Its pretext for doing so is that the LGBT demographic is associated with minority health disparities – and HHS isn’t the only agency that has thought of that.

Back at Elmhurst College, the dean of admissions points out the following incentives for having students identify themselves as members of the LGBT community:

Those who answer “yes” may be eligible for a scholarship worth up to one-third of tuition, not unusual because about 60 percent of incoming students receive some type of scholarship aid, Rold said. More importantly, he said, knowing students’ sexual orientation will help officials direct incoming students toward services or groups that might help them make an easier transition to college life.

Q***r Alliance Board member Luis Roman puts it a little differently, referring to the UC system proposal:

Roman … believes it will bring badly needed services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students.

Some members of that community believe it would show that there are many more LGBT students than university officials realize.

“I think the numbers are way bigger than we really imagine or know,” Roman said.

The “badly needed services” do not, of course, refer to dry-cleaning or bicycle maintenance.  The CPEC document specifies, along with an itemized list of necessities (page 4), the following:

Meet needs of LGBT students in student housing, health insurance coverage for gender reassignment surgery, and recordkeeping when students or staff change gender.

The theme of health insurance coverage for LGBT issues recurs often.  The Healthy People 2020 Transgender Health Fact Sheet points out these discrepancies:

Health insurance coverage for … transgender-specific health services continues to be commonly excluded by most U.S. health care insurers. These blanket exclusions in health insurance policies present barriers to access to all types of health care. While many transgender people cannot afford the expensive out-of-pocket costs of the transgender-specific services, coverage denials can extend to even basic health care services unrelated to sex reassignment. For example, transgender men who have a lifelong need for ongoing gynecological care find their insurance policies will not cover it after they transition to male.

It would be one thing if these various comments and appeals about insurance coverage were sentiments expressed in a private – that is to say, non-governmental – context.  All things being equal, we can rejoice that other people’s gender-reassignment surgery is none of our business.  But all things are not equal, and the boundary on our rejoicing is drawn right where public policy may require that the surgery be made available to 18-year-olds at third-party expense (e.g., through insurance).  Clearly, the policy on insurance coverage at a state university is public policy.

With ObamaCare, meanwhile, it is increasingly possible – in the absence of an originalist Supreme Court ruling at some future date – that even in the realm of private institutions’ policies, the era of privately-contracted, elective insurance coverage is entirely behind us.  Never again will it be possible to say that people can pick and choose insurance based on a company’s coverage policies, and that no one is forced to cover anyone else’s gender-reassignment surgery or gynecological services for transgendered males.  As the HHS contraception mandate has made clear, that is no longer our choice.  With ObamaCare’s mandates, we have passed from the basis of tolerance, as regards what other people choose to do with their bodies, to a basis of enforced subsidy.

So when a state university system proposes to collect data on the LGBT student population, while proposals for special health “services” for those students are published, and HHS wants, coincidentally, to collect the same data on the population at large to redress “health disparities” – it matters.  Questions about why this is being done are worth asking.  There is no credit remaining in the big-government Left’s “benefit of the doubt” reserve; if it looks like another end-run on health insurance, mandates, and conscience, it’s a good bet that that’s what it is.

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 answer is, We can’t.  Not in the context of current government.  We bought into this mode of political discourse decades ago, when we decided it was a good idea to set up federal regulatory agencies and unleash them on every aspect of our lives.   When the federal government is empowered by its regulatory charter to take sides on the issue of contraception, then contraception is something we have to talk about.

Anything the people don’t agree on becomes a government issue, if government is chartered to take actions of any sort that imply an opinion on it.  This creates enough problems when the government in question is local.  But when the government in question is the federal government, the implied outcome, no matter what the issue, is a “national policy” on the matter.  As certain rights are enshrined in the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, so advocates wish to enshrine others in federal mandates.

This process is bound to come in conflict with the original concept of American rights, as it has lately done with contraception (a technology-accelerated social factor in today’s America) and religious liberty (a First Amendment right).  And as we might expect, virtually all pundits on the right are reiterating that the issue with contraception and the universal mandate is religious liberty.

But that is only half the picture, and it is fatal – I mean that word seriously, in terms of the survival of our national idea – to speak only of religious liberty, as if it is a disembodied right that can coexist with any size of government.  Catholic objections to funding contraception with mandated insurance premiums are the canary in the coal mine; the real, underlying problem is government so big that it goes around forcing us to do one thing and not another on an expanding host of matters.

The problem is big government.  That cannot be said often enough.  The problem is that we have chartered the US federal government to, in effect, have an opinion on your contraception, Sandra Fluke’s, and that used or not used by Catholics.  When government is forcing us to do things with our money, property, and speech that we otherwise would not do, of course we have to talk about that.  But again, it’s not just an issue of religious liberty.  It’s an issue of the size of government.

That covers liberties of all kinds.  Some conservative writers have been leery of presenting the contraception mandate as a general “liberty of conscience” issue, apparently on the theory that religious liberty is a stronger argument and easier ground to hold.  But that posture itself accepts the premise of government so big that it interferes with the individual conscience on more and more issues.  If organized religious organizations are exempt because of conscience, why shouldn’t individuals be?  How you answer that question is exact information as to how big and intrusive you are satisfied with government being.

The more outcomes you insist on trying to control, the bigger government gets.  America was set up for this day 70 years ago when the federal government used wage controls and tax incentives to induce employers to provide medical insurance.  Other factors from decades back include the creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Eisenhower (it became Health and Human Services in 1979); Johnson’s “War on Poverty” legislation, which provided contraception to low-income women and mandated that at least 6% of federal funding for maternal and child care go to “family planning”; and Nixon’s health industry reforms in the early 1970s, which enlarged federal oversight of private insurance plans and advantaged then-nascent HMOs over true “insurance.”

It is not possible and it will never be possible to grow government every decade, hand more and more things over to it for supervision, and expect to keep our liberties intact.  If government is big enough to declare that objections to contraception are meaningless and that government ought to force private individuals to fund it, there will be a constituency for that.  If it is big enough to preach opinions on sex to other people’s minor children, there will be a constituency for that.  If it is big enough to make the use of salt illegal in restaurant cooking, there will be a constituency for that.  And if government is big enough to suppress dissent by restricting access to the airwaves and internet servers – or increasing the cost of it until individuals and small organizations can no longer afford to use it as an effective vehicle for dissenting opinion – there will be a constituency for that.  There will be a constituency for everything we let government be big enough to do.

We have put together a government this big by incremental steps, and for reasons that were often emotional at the time.  But the future was always foreseeable.  Politicians and pundits predicted as much as 100 years ago that we could not let government take over more and more things, regulate them, and prescribe levels of contribution from us on an invidious basis, without seeing compromised our liberties of thought, speech, and discretion over our livelihoods.  They were right, and those who made fun of them were wrong.  That remains the case today.

The problem isn’t social conservatives.  The problem isn’t social liberals.  The problem is big 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.

A key feature 1996 and 2012 have in common is that, as of today’s date (4 March), the primary elections have delivered one outright win (50% or more of the vote) to any candidate.  In 1996, Bob Dole won Puerto Rico with 98% of the vote before Super Tuesday.  In 2012, Mitt Romney has won Nevada with 50% of the vote.

Otherwise, the assumed frontrunners in both elections remained in the 30-40% region throughout the early primaries.  Bob Dole faced Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, and Lamar Alexander, whose combined “not-Dole” popular-vote total up through 4 March 1996 was 593,472 to Dole’s 443,381.

Assumed frontrunners are, of course, commonly beaten by the combined “not-frontrunner” vote total in the early primaries of a competitive year (i.e., when a party’s sitting president is not running).  That is the case this year, with Romney at a vote total of 1,812,418 so far, and the combined total of Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul at 2,049,303.

In 1980, Reagan’s early vote total through 4 March – there was no “Super Tuesday” then – was at least 1,240,068, while his competitors combined had racked up 1,528,937.  (The 1980 vote total for Alabama is unavailable at this writing, due to a server problem at the state government website.)  In 1988 – a slower-starting primary year – Bush Sr.’s 4 March vote total was 224,871 to his opponents’ combined 401,377.  In 2000, George W. Bush was sitting on 1,614,355 votes by 4 March, while John McCain had gotten 1,712,991.

But by 4 March, in each of those years, there had been more outright primary victories (by any candidate) than in 1996 or 2012.  The following table covers Republican primaries in competitive, non-incumbent years back to 1980:

Elec. Yr         No. Voting Primaries/             No. Primaries won by 50%

                        Binding Caucuses                   or more (any candidate)

1980                       5                                             2

1988                     12                                             5

1996                      11                                             1

2000                     11                                             8

2008*                  40                                          20

2012                     12                                             1

* Super Tuesday was 5 February in 2008; entire primary schedule was heavily front-loaded

(All primary/caucus totals include District of Columbia and trust territories; totals do not include non-binding primary/caucus votes)

Obviously, there are multiple dimensions for comparison between years, and on other scores we may distinguish 2012 from 1996.  The sitting president in each year is a Democrat who is popular with the media and gets good press, but in 1996 the US economy was in better shape and President Clinton was getting comparatively high marks for his handling of it.

In 2012, the economy is in unusually bad shape, with one key indicator – labor force participation – at its worst reading since the recession of 1982, and another – the price of gas at the pump – at its highest level ever.  Meanwhile, President Obama’s handling of national security gets lower marks from poll respondents as the months go by.  Bill Clinton famously tacked toward the center for the 1996 election; Barack Obama has tacked leftward, with socially divisive rhetoric and socialist talking points, and thus has major negatives that Clinton did not have.

So it is entirely possible that Obama will beat himself in November; we should not despair over the parallels between 2012 and previous years.  That said, the quality of the assumed GOP frontrunner and the relative lack of enthusiasm for any of the candidates may give us pause.  On reviewing this table of popular vote tallies for the presidential elections of the last 40 years, we must hope that the fear of Obama is greater than anything else, for GOP voters and GOP-leaning independents:

1972                29,173,222                  47,168,710

1976                40,831,881                  39,148,634

1980                35,480,115                  43,903,230                     5,719,850 (Anderson)

1984                37,577,352                   54,455,472

1988                41,809,074                  48,886,097

1992                44,909,806                  39,104,550                   19,743,821 (Perot)

1996                47,401,185                    39,197,469                     8,085,294 (Perot)

2000                50,999,897                  50,456,002

2004                59,028,444                  62,040,610

2008                69,456,897                  59,934,814

Naturally, one of the key factors in 2012 is likely to be whether there is a third-party candidate with significant vote-getting power.  At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be one on the horizon, which is good news for Mitt Romney and the fortunes of the GOP in the general election.

But the decline in enthusiasm for the GOP candidate from 2004 to 2008 was marked, if not as precipitous as the decline between 1988 and 1992, or 1972 and 1976.  There is reason for concern as to whether a candidate with Romney’s record of comfort with big government is the man to lead a GOP resurgence.  The drawbacks of his limited appeal suggest that a Republican victory in November is likely to be a narrow one, perhaps on the order of Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 or even Bush 43’s in 2000.

One additional factor has to be considered.  Pundits speak with absolute certainly today about the economy being the main – possibly even the sole – driver of the voters’ decision in November 2012.  And it may be, but there are 8 months to the general election, and a big world out there.  Whatever drives the election will almost certainly be related to the economy in some way – but it won’t necessarily be what we can see or imagine on 4 March.

Note:  Primary election/caucus information from Wikipedia, Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, and selected state government websites.  General election vote totals from Wikipedia and Dave Leip’s site.

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 left’s governmental approach to sex today involves, among other things, the following:

1.  Advertising it to children through the public schools and encouraging them to explore and participate in it.

2.  Basing policy on the assumption that no solution to any problem lies in individuals restraining or channeling their sexual urges, and therefore even the intractable facts of nature should not be left, with their powerful incentives, to encourage that posture.  It is important, instead, to create an environment conducive to sex unfettered by its natural consequences.

3.  Providing, at public expense, the means to have sex on one’s own terms, but avoid procreation and sexually transmitted diseases.

4.  Providing, at public expense, the means to support children who are born nevertheless.

5.  To adjust the balance between 3 and 4, encouraging and advocating the use of contraception and the resort to abortion.

The suite of policies advocated by the left is designed to encourage sex but limit procreation and STDs.  The social “good,” therefore, is deemed to be unfettered sex, while the social “ills” are the birth of children and the suffering (and infectiousness) incident to STDs.

Let’s compare this moral view and its program construct to the left’s policy attitude toward eating.  In this latter realm, the social “ills” are thought to be obesity and the medical problems that come with it.  But what is the social “good”?  Is there one?  It’s hard to say, because eating – which can be a most enjoyable activity, and far less avoidable than sex – is not, in the left’s moral view, considered a “good” to be promoted on whatever terms the individual prefers.

The left’s governmental treatment of eating is very different from its treatment of sex.  It runs on these lines:

1.  Advertising to children (as well as adults) the evils of certain kinds of food.

2.  Basing policy on the assumption that the people must be nudged or even coerced to eat according to whatever principle is suggested by the most recent studies.  It is important to create an environment in which eaters have to go well out of their way to avoid the choices made for them by government authorities.  The ideal, in fact, is an environment in which eaters can’t avoid the dictates of the government.

3.  Ensuring that the expenses of obesity are, increasingly, born by the public, while fanning political resentment of those expenses, and of the condition of the obese.

4.  Proclaiming that the solution in every case is controlling what people eat, rather than providing for the obese the same publicly-funded relief offered to the sexually promiscuous.

It is hard to make the case that eating a lot is worse than having a lot of sex outside of commitment and marriage.  At the very most, the two practices are a moral wash, one no worse than the other.  Both involve doing discretionary things with one’s body.  Both involve courting well-known consequences.  Both involve the strong potential for inconvenience to oneself and the larger community.  It is making an arbitrary moral judgment, to insist that what causes obesity should be dealt with through coercion and the limiting of options, while what causes unwanted pregnancies and STDs should be the object of solicitude, and public programs based not on denial but on mitigation.

We know that eating in moderation and limiting certain foods generally results in better health than eating, indiscriminately, lots and lots of things we enjoy for only a brief moment.

But we also know that not having sex prevents pregnancy and STDs with unparalleled effectiveness.  We know, moreover, that disciplining our sex drives, keeping sex within marriage, welcoming the children that come from it, and raising them with a father and mother are substantially more effective in preventing STDs, “unwanted” children, poverty, delinquency, addiction, and hopelessness than are government programs to distribute condoms and subsidize abortion providers.

If government treated obesity the way it treats sex, it would encourage schoolchildren to explore their enjoyment of Twinkies, Oreos, and moon pies; it would employ professionals to devise ways of suiting government policies to the principle that our bodies belong to us and we can put whatever we want in our stomachs; it would hold legislative hearings on the overriding importance of the freedom to eat what we want; it would resist the very idea of remedies that involve the individual eating less, or eating different things; it would pay for liposuction, cholesterol drugs, heart surgery, and diabetes-mitigation measures but not for programs of diet and exercise; it would encourage the development of drugs that could prevent fat formation regardless of what one eats; and it would make it a basic human right to be able to eat whatever one wants and have the consequences mitigated by the public.

There really is no case to be made that government should not do this.  If, that is, we accept that government’s current approach to sex and its consequences is appropriate and warranted.

Ultimately, no discussion of these issues would be complete without the observation that if government – and the federal government in particular – wasn’t involved in them in the first place, it wouldn’t matter nearly as much when the people’s opinions and our moral perspectives on them differed.

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.

Let me state up front that I don’t think the filmmakers meant anything by the “Christo” character.  I do think they stumbled haplessly on a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitic tropes – and thereby hangs a tale that matters.

Act of Valor is a moving, gripping film, all the more so for being enacted by real Navy SEALs.  (Full disclosure: this reviewer is a 20-year Navy veteran, and while definitely not a SEAL was privileged to work with some.)  The one major flaw I found with the production, per se, was the rather annoying sound track, which could have dispensed with the hackneyed crescendos at suspenseful moments.  What the SEALs do needs no audience-cues or embellishment.

And they do incredible things.  The movie conveys well the deceptive simplicity of their narrowly-scoped tactical operations.  Naval Special Warfare is the unique funnel through which attack submarines, amphibious assault ships, and special-purpose aircraft are brought to bear on strange, one-off combat problems for which they weren’t necessarily designed.  The whole Navy – indeed, all the special ops capabilities the United States has – makes up a big bag of tricks for the SEALs to reach into.

Yet when the SEALs are on-scene conducting their operations, doing what no one else can, it all depends on them.  Training and expertise are indispensable, naturally.  But the on-scene surprises, the multi-vector firefights, the heart-rending collateral damage, the fallen comrades – that’s where the valor comes in.

It doesn’t come in with a trumpet fanfare.  The SEALs are effective in the movie because they evince valor so realistically.  They are terse, focused, making every yell and profanity count – which is what highly-trained men sound like in combat.  Valor isn’t something you emote your way through or sit around thinking about.  It’s just what’s left when all the props have fallen away.  And it requires a context if it is to matter and be detectable: a life saved, a mission accomplished, a job not given up on, a shipmate not left behind.

That, it turns out, is the poignant weakness at the heart of Act of Valor’s premise.  The ambiguous real-world context of the war on terror is the greatest narrative disability of all.   The film’s story, with so much gripping tactical realism, seems to be built on a strategic hallucination: that it’s Chechen underworld gangsters who are likely to be masterminding a terrorist insertion into the United States.

Hezbollah is all over Latin America; Hamas is showing up there; Iran’s paramilitary Qods force is reported to be operating out of Venezuela; Hezbollah and Somali Islamists have already sneaked illegally across our border from Mexico; the great majority of drug criminals in Latin America are Latin American – yet the production team for Act of Valor decided to make the villains in the movie Chechens, and make the Chechen drug smuggler a Jew.  Why in the name of Jumping Jehoshaphat did they do that?

The Jewish character’s name is Mikhail Troykavitch, but his nom de narcotics in Latin America is “Christo.”  This seems a little studied, but perhaps is merely a coincidence.  (If you’re not getting it, all Western names containing the syllable “Christ” in any form map back to the name of Jesus Christ.  The “Christ” comes from the Greek christos, meaning “anointed.”)  I say let’s assume nothing about a Jewish criminal naming himself “Christ” and move on.

Other reviewers have pointed out Christo’s rather cartoonish hooked nose and eyeglasses, so we need not belabor that.  I was struck forcibly, however, by a disclosure early on about Christo’s Chechen associate, Shabal – the terrorist who blows up children while assassinating the US ambassador in the Philippines, and then plots to put suicide bombers with high-tech explosive vests in cities in the United States.  Shabal, we are told, was connected with the 2004 massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, in southern Russia.

The insertion of a Jewish character into this mix begins to rise to a remarkable level of haplessness with the Beslan tie-in.  Perhaps the filmmakers were unaware that there is a well-worn theme among some factions in Russian politics of Jewish complicity in the Beslan massacre.   (A relatively printable fulmination represented at a Pravda forum here; more colorful ones can be found in Russian.) The baseless allegation is periodically inflamed by reports that alternately suggest Israel is sympathetic to the plight of Chechnya, and in league with the hated, Russian-approved government there.

The flames are fanned further, however, by 9/11 Truthers who believe a Russian Jew, Boris Berezovsky, was connected with the 9/11 attacks.  The same Berezovsky, who had business interests in Chechnya in the 1990s, is also quoted all over the net by the conspiracy-minded as boasting that he “caused the war in Chechnya.”  Those of fevered imagination can’t decide whether the Jews are abetting Chechen terrorism or allying themselves with Moscow, but in any case, you can’t make a criminal a Chechen Jew and give him an underworld buddy who blows up kids and had a hand in the Beslan massacre, and not open up a big, sweaty bottle of single-malt anti-Semitism.

“But, good grief,” you might say.  “Can’t anybody ever make a Jew a bad guy?  What, screenwriters are supposed to look under every rock for exotic anti-Semitic tropes they might be inadvertently evoking?  Seriously, we have to be that careful?”

And the proper response, the pointed, relevant response is: Why shouldn’t we have to?  Look at Act of Valor itself.  About whom were the screenwriters at least that careful?  Consider the interview on Christo’s yacht, in which the SEAL senior chief is interrogating the drug smuggler.  Note what the senior chief says out loud, and what he doesn’t.  He barks at Christo, “But you’re a Jew!” – by which he is suggesting that it’s odd for Christo to be in league with a terrorist like Shabal, whose goals are presumably hostile to Jews.

Then the senior chief asks Christo, “You know what he is?”  Well, we all assume we know what Shabal is, having seen him in a video near the beginning of the movie, calling on Allah while waving an automatic weapon.  But the SEAL doesn’t say it.  He doesn’t say “Muslim radical,” he doesn’t say “Islamic terrorist,” he doesn’t say “Islamist” – he doesn’t fill in the blank at all.  The question hangs there, answered in every viewer’s mind but not on the screen.

In the real world, meanwhile, the transnational terrorists who keep popping up far abroad, especially in the Western hemisphere, are Arabs, Pakistanis, and Somalis.  But Act of Valor gives us Chechens and Filipinos.  (There is a brief interlude at an airfield in Somalia, but no Somalis in the terror gang we follow in the story.)

This political correctness wouldn’t be as noticeable if the filmmakers did not seem to have taken the long way around the barn to shoehorn a Jew into the story.  The contrast can’t help standing out, and it is right to point it out.  It would be wrong to accept it without cavil.

It is almost as if the filmmakers were consciously determined not to appear to give a Jewish character kid-glove treatment – as if to say: “Fears about negative depictions of Jews are outdated and overblown.  Jews are just like anyone else; we can make some of them villains.  The evils of the past don’t mean we have to whitewash the present.”

But, of course, the world hasn’t changed that much.  If it had, we could make Lebanese-Arab Hezbollah Muslims or Yemeni-Arab Islamist jihadists into our main screen villains for a movie, without self-consciousness.  The truth is that this world is pretty much as it has ever been, and a political recognition of that – an unspoken one would be fine – is what is missing from Act of Valor, because it is missing from America’s official, public dialogue on the war on terror.  The breathtaking nature of the SEALs and what they do makes the movie a thrilling ride.   But the story comes off as thin, not because the SEALs’ missions don’t matter, but because there is no strategic-level narrative, no “Why We Fight,” tying them together.

Our enemies in World War II were basically living caricatures, armed with tanks and aircraft carriers.  Writing a narrative in which they were the enemy wasn’t difficult.  It was harder to write our narrative in the Cold War, but even then it was easier than it is today to define what the problem was, and how to bring the nation-state to bear in solving it.

Today’s war is a war without a narrative: a war in which there is only an endless series of “battles,” which we cannot afford to lose but which don’t bring us any closer to winning.  We don’t have an actionable concept of what winning would look like, and we certainly have no strategy to get there.

In a sense, the SEALs are the perfect force to follow in a movie about a war like this one.  A number of reviewers have complained about the shallowness of the plot; some even consider it to be laughable, no more than a cheap device to get a particular SEAL team from one operation to the next.  But the joke is on them, because that is pretty much how a war looks from the perspective of a SEAL team.  One of the most realistic aspects of the movie is precisely the narrow immediacy of the pretexts for moving the SEALs around.

SEALs don’t run extended joint-force campaigns, they don’t take and hold territory, and they don’t hand the president enduring, decisive political victories.  For those activities – the kind that form a coherent narrative – you must, to paraphrase T.R. Fehrenbach, put your young men in the mud and give them enduring, decisive political objectives.  But that is not the war on terror as it has been waged for the last four years.  Act of Valor has a plot like a police-procedural TV show because that’s what the war on terror has become.

The war was losing strategic steam by the end of the Bush presidency, and has settled into a tactical police-action posture under Obama.  The throw-away “Chechen-Jewish-drug-smuggler” character has about it the whiff of a Law & Order episode; it comes off as a quasi-random composite, of the kind writers can just make up when the narrative is as open-ended as the face of human crime.

Wars against well-defined enemies preclude such literary license, which is quite clear if we imagine writing a story like this about World War II.  The Nazis were Germans; there was no getting around it.  Today, we have worked hard not to define an enemy; we have no enduring, decisive political objective; and we have no positive strategy.  So we end up with as much literary license as we can handle, and no end in sight to the conflict.

Seen in that light, it is perhaps even more remarkable that Act of Valor is so compelling.  I admit to not even registering the thespian inadequacies of the SEALs, because – as many readers can probably also say – they looked real to my eyes.  The actors in G.I. Jane looked like actors playing SEALs; the SEALs in Act of Valor are authentic.

I saw one review in which the writer supposed that the SEALs “don’t really talk that way,” but I’m not sure what he meant: the SEALs talked as military men talk.  SEALs tend to be very intelligent, well-read, and understated, with a somewhat mordant sense of humor and a natural, unforced patriotism and warrior’s honor.  That came through in the movie.  To ask for something else is to miss the point.

When one of the SEALs is killed after throwing himself on a grenade, the scene is depicted accurately, without gratuitous gore, and the other SEALs react, but continue their mission.  At his funeral, the team’s wounded SEALs make a powerful visual, gathered around the casket, but equally powerful is the quiet dignity and courage of the assembled family members.  The SEALs would have it no other way.

Critical reviewers have denigrated the voice-over by the SEAL chief (NCO, E-7) whose narration frames the movie.  They suggest that the narration and its content – which is focused on the heritage passed between generations of fighting men – are simplistic or hackneyed.  It didn’t strike me that way.  The SEAL’s voice, with its Midwestern accent and unpracticed cadence, sounded familiar and authentic to me.  It sounded like the voice of a sailor.

Tethering the story to the SEALs’ family lives cements the film’s message.  The silly, tortured ambiguities of politics and the war on terror are mostly offstage.  The reality that grounds these men is captured in the face of the SEAL lieutenant’s baby boy in the final seconds of the movie.   Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard:  in a war without a narrative, there is still valor.

We sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.   (Attributed by George Orwell to Winston Churchill)

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 might think the big news from the last 24 hours would be the report that Iran declined to load a Greek tanker with oil for Greek refineries, thus sparking concerns that the Iranians will cut off oil to hard-pressed Greece entirely.  Tehran has already officially stopped deliveries to France and the UK.  The Europeans are worried that a cut in Iranian oil could sink any hope of a recovery for the Greeks – and that Iran might threaten to extend the embargo to Italy, which also depends on Iranian oil.

In the wake of this report, the Iranian government hastened to announce that it hasn’t cut off shipments to Greece.  So it isn’t clear what’s going on, and strategic ambiguity can check another item off the to-do list.   Gasoline has surged to about $8.10 a gallon in the UK (not yet the $9.00 a gallon being trumpeted by Iranian media), so, check, check!

But that’s not really the big news.  The big news is that the Iranian parliament is working on legislation that would require foreign warships to obtain permission from Iran to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.  How could Iran enforce such a requirement?  Well, that’s exactly the fun of strategic ambiguity.   Maybe they’ll try, and maybe they won’t.  As the Iranians say, it will depend on us.

Apart from a last-ditch resort to something like mining the Strait of Hormuz (SOH), the most likely Iranian approach would be to take advantage of an incident in the SOH, or even create one, to justify cranking up Iranian oversight of “safety and security” by half a notch or so.  A diplomatic win on that exploratory probe could be leveraged to increase Iran’s effective control incrementally – unless each new measure was directly challenged.  If the US were unwilling to do the challenging, strategic ambiguity would be a lot more fun for Iran than for the rest of us.

You do need a quiescent partner on the other side of the Strait for an oblique approach of this kind.  And sure enough, besides conducting a naval exercise in the Strait of Hormuz (SOH) in mid-February, Iran concluded a new naval cooperation agreement with Oman on the 12th, and plans to conduct a joint naval exercise with Oman in March.  Earlier in February, moreover, the Iranian navy’s commander stated that the Iranian naval task force in the Red Sea would visit the port of Salalah, Oman in March.  That would be a first since the 1979 revolution, and would put the Iranian navy in the company of all the other global navies in the region (including the US Navy), which visit the major port of Salalah on a regular basis.  Iran is establishing a new naval posture as we speak.

The new Iranian naval posture is being strategically ambiguous all over Saudi Arabia.  During the Iranian task force’s triumphal sideswipe at Syria – where the ships reportedly entered port although the Pentagon “has no evidence of it” (see my comment at this link for a summary of data points on the question) – an Iranian parliamentarian announced that Iran was displaying her naval power in the region, as a warning and a portent.  The ships had stopped in Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Jeddah on the way to the Mediterranean, so this saber-rattling didn’t sit well with the Saudis.

Therefore, the Saudi ministry of defense has just issued a statement clarifying the basis on which it authorized the Iranian warships to visit Jeddah.  And the salient point is that Saudi Arabia wasn’t down for the “naval warning” business.  The Saudis understood they were agreeing to a port visit for ships on a training cruise.

In general, the Saudis are feeling squeezed by Iran; a Die Welt report from 15 February, summarized at the al-Akhbar website on the 21st, indicated that Riyadh sponsored a Gulf States  meeting in January to discuss Iran’s continued arms sales to Hezbollah.  The Saudis didn’t openly disclose anything we don’t already know about the Iranian smuggling routes, but apparently they excluded Qatar from the meeting, because they don’t consider the emirate “reliable on issues related to Iran.”

Meanwhile, down south of the Saudi border, Iran continues to supply the Houthi rebels in Yemen, a Shia group that operates as a scourge of Riyadh as well as Sana’a.  On 15 February, Yemeni authorities reported intercepting another ship from Iran carrying heavy weapons for the Houthis.  It is accepted fact on the Arabian Peninsula that Iran’s paramilitary operates from islands in the southern Red Sea, supporting activities in both Yemen and Eritrea.  In a recently translated al-Arabiya interview from June 2011, a Kuwaiti professor stated that Iran leases three islands from Eritrea and uses them for military training.

(This particular claim may be overly specific, but its generic point is justified by numerous reports from regional sources that the Qods force is operating in the islands of the southern Red Sea.  These islands form a sort of lily pad network between Yemen and the coast of Africa, through which Iran is credibly reported to facilitate the transit of extremists and arms.)

Strategic ambiguity: exacerbating distrust, ill-feeling, and armed conflict in the region.  Check.

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 isn’t hyperbole.  The conference is unusually well advertised in English, being referred to in the media regularly as a “conference on Jerusalem,” rather than sparsely as a “conference on al-Quds,” the Arabic (and larger Islamic) term for Jerusalem.  Yousef al-Qaradawi, “spiritual leader” of the Muslim Brotherhood, has held a number of conferences on Jerusalem in the last decade, hosting them around the Arab world and flying largely under the radar in terms of his media posture with the West.  Researchers on the earlier Qaradawi conferences were more likely to find them under “al-Quds” than under “Jerusalem.”  But the February 2012 conference is simply billed – even in a number of Arab-world English-language media – as the “conference on Jerusalem.”

Yet that doesn’t fully convey the conference’s confident tone.  The conference is being given a higher profile than usual in English-language outlets, but the English transcriptions (such as the ones at the official conference website) don’t all provide the event’s full name:  “International Conference for the Defense of Occupied Jerusalem.”  Implied in this posture is a sense of momentum behind, and mainstreaming of, anti-Zionist themes.

US participation

This unabashed posture is certainly bolstered by the attendance of representatives from around the globe.  Thirteen of them are from the United States.  One, Kenneth R. Insley, Jr., bills himself as a consultant to the US State Department.  Mr. Insley’s Zoom Info profile describes him as the Director of Public Diplomacy for the Capital Communications Group, and a board member of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, Inc.  The Foundation’s Links page includes a number of virulently anti-Israel groups such as the Holy Land Trust and the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem/Society. (Note: the Foundation’s website does not show Insley as a board member, but the last update is marked with a date of March 2008.)

CIF Watch was able to obtain Insley’s prepared remarks for the Jerusalem conference (which was originally scheduled for 2011 but was postponed by the Arab Spring).  Among other things, Insley warned (emphasis at CIF Watch):

It is now well understood by almost everyone that either Israel will cease to be a democratic state, or a Jewish one, because it can’t have both without the creation of a Palestinian state…or it will lead to Armageddon.

Read the whole thing.

Another associate of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation is attending the conference: Albert Mokhiber.  Mr. Mokhiber is listed only as an “attorney” on the conference roster, but he’s being modest: he is a former president and vice-chairman of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC.  (His daughter Leila currently serves as the ADC’s Outreach and Communications Coordinator.)  Mr. Mokhiber is also listed as a member of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation’s advisory board, at least as recently as 2008.

A notable recent victory of the ADC was, of course, partnering with the FBI to eliminate “discriminatory” and “inflammatory” items about Arabs and Muslims from the Bureau’s training material, a project that trashed 1,000 documents and presentations.  Among the other groups involved in the effort is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which, like ADC, has close links to anti-Israel organizations, including the terror group Hamas.  And sure enough, CAIR is represented at the anti-Israel Jerusalem conference this month by Mr. Nehad Awwad Hammad, CAIR’s national executive director.

The other Americans include many “usual suspects,” such as Alison Weir of the Council for the National Interest (please note: not Alison Weir the biographer and novelist) and Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now.

Religious participants

Sadly, one of the Americans is Bishop Georgi Panossian, Primate of the Armenian Orthodox Church.  At the conference from the various nations are four Catholic bishops, two patriarchs, an Anglican minister from the UK, and a representative of the Roman Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem, as well as attendees from Religions for Peace (including the American William F. Vendley).  The holocaust-denying, anti-Zionist rabbinical group Neturei Karta has six persons attending.   (*UPDATE*: Challah Hu Akbar has remarkable conference video of Mahmoud Abbas and the emir of Qatar shaking hands with Rabbi Meir Hirsch of Neturei Karta.)  Of course, there is representation from Islam as well.

UN participants

Eight attendees are listed as representing the United Nations:

Amb. Mutlaq Majid Alqahtani, Chairman, UN General Assembly

Ms. Elpida Rouka, Chief, Regional Affairs Unit, UNESCO

Dr. Raymond Dolphin, UN Officer for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Mr. Robert Serry, UN Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process

Mrs. Shifa Awni al Jayousi Abdeen, Program Officer, Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process

Mr. Filippo Grandi, Commissioner General, UNRWA

Mrs. Maria Mohammedi, External Relations and Projects Officer, UNRWA

Mr. Peter Ford, Representative of the Commissioner General, UNRWA

European and other participants: Government officials

European nations are being represented by their officials as well as academics, activists, and media professionals.  Mr. Ranier Fsadni’s roster entry describes him as representing the European Commission, for which he served in the past as the operations director for the Euro-Arab Liaison Office.   Fsadni, a Maltese professor, is also advisor to the prime minister of Malta on Mediterranean and Maritime Affairs.  Finland has a member of parliament and an advisor to the Ministry of Education and Culture at the conference; France has her ambassador to the Holy See, Stanislas de Laboulaye there; Spain has a Mr. Jose Antonio Martin Pallin representing the Tribunal Supremo (Supreme Court); and Sweden has a member of parliament and two officials of the Center Party at the conference.

Turkey is also represented by a member of parliament, as well as a deputy prime minister (see below).  Former Australian prime minister Robert “Bob” Hawke, a Labor politician long described as an “emotional” friend of Israel, is at the conference.  The roster reflects one anti-Zionist Arab member of the Knesset in attendance, purportedly representing Israel; other reporting indicates there are at least four.

The largest delegations are, of course, from the Arab Muslim nations.  But the US, UK, Netherlands, and Sweden are heavily represented.  Other participants come from Canada, South Africa, Denmark, China, Russia, Australia, India, Germany, Iran, Pakistan, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy.

Oh, and Yousef al-Qaradawi is attending too.

Conference topics

The conferees have so far enjoyed a series of anti-Israel perorations, such as the one delivered by the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, in his conference-opener.   According to the website OnIslam, the emir asserted the following:

There is no Palestinian State without Al-Quds and there is no Al-Quds without Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, in Doha for the conference (but not on the roster), had this to say:

“Without the liberation of Jerusalem, no real peace and stability can be achieved in the Middle East or farther afield…”

Atalay described Jerusalem as “a captive city in the hands of Israel,” saying that Israel’s policy is aimed at denying Jerusalem’s thousands-year-old history with Muslims, Christians and Palestinians. …

“Israel’s oppressive attempt is aimed at changing Jerusalem’s historic fabric by intimidating Palestinians. Turkey will not allow that.”

Mahmoud Abbas, long-superannuated head of the Palestinian Authority, delivered a speech Sunday morning in which he simply ignored facts and made up “history” to justify calling on Arabs to “fight the Judaization of Jerusalem.”  Abbas called Jerusalem “the cause of every Arab, Muslim, and Christian,” a grotesque but far from unusual attempt to establish a common interest between Muslims and Christians in seizing Jerusalem from the control of Israel.

Abbas’s themes have become well-worn in the campaign to erase the Jewish heritage of Israel and delegitimize the modern state.  Elder of Ziyon has a worthwhile takedown of Abbas’s conference remarks.  Challah Hu Akbar also calls out the theme of “Temple denial” in Abbas’s speech; that is, the denial that a Jewish temple has ever actually existed in Jerusalem.  (For numerous articles on the documentation of Jewish history in Israel, see Emet m’Tsiyon.  The Jewish Virtual Library’s Israel portal has comprehensive links.)

Sudden al-Aqsa Syndrome

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Report points out that this conference takes place in the wake of inflammatory statements made less than a week ago about the al-Aqsa mosque, by Hamas and al-Qaradawi.  Hamas accused Israel of seeking to “storm” the al-Aqsa mosque, and asserted the mosque’s need for “rescue” from the “occupation.”  Qaradawi followed up the Hamas statement with the announcement that al-Aqsa is a “red line” for Muslims, and urged Palestinians and other Arabs to rise up and liberate the mosque from the “Jewish occupation.”

The trend of sudden claims about peril to the mosque has been gathering steam for about two weeks.  The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, who is not to be outdone in Temple denial, reportedly proclaimed earlier in February:

Arabs and Muslims must protect Al-Aqsa before it is ruined by the Jews. According to Hussein, Israel is trying to destroy Al-Aqsa in a variety of ways and that all the violations “cannot be summed up in words.”

And on 12 February, Xinhua relayed a Syrian news report that Israel’s Likud Party had called for Jews to storm the al-Aqsa mosque, citing what turned out to be false reports that Israeli right-wing websites were circulating posters inciting the attack.  The poster presented as evidence of the incitement campaign was an obvious fraud – and hilariously inaccurate, rendering “Manhigut Yehudit,” or the “Jewish Leadership” movement, incorrectly as “Manhigut HaLikud” – meaning “Likud Leadership,” which is not the movement’s name.  A number of websites are referring to this incident as a “prank” against Likud and Manhigut Yehudit leader Moshe Feiglin.

More on Sudden al-Aqsa Syndrome is here and here (Elder of Ziyon and Challah Hu Akbar are doing a superb job following this).  Meanwhile, two US congressmen were caught in a rock-throwing attack by Palestinian Arabs at the Temple Mount on the 24th – a repeat of an earlier attack on tourists on 19 February.  In each case, Arab anger at the “Jewish” threat to al-Aqsa is invoked.

Global March to Jerusalem

If you thought the only thing lacking was an activist plan to complicate the security situation, you were wrong.  A “Global March to Jerusalem” is being planned for 30 March, and is to involve foot marches (being organized by Hamas), a fly-in to Ben Gurion Airport, and – of course – a flotilla.  CIF Watch has this one cold; start here and work backward through comprehensive summaries of the usual-suspect activists behind the “march.”

Conclusion

We can hope the following: that the US State department will publicly repudiate the conference in Doha, as it has previously repudiated the anti-Semitic “Durban” conference series; that Ban Ki-Moon will rebuke the UN officials who claim to represent his organization at the conference, and state the UN’s fundamental interest in impartiality and the rule of law; that Christians around the world will make a point of rejecting the participation of Christian leaders in the Doha conference; and that Western governments will discipline their officials who are in attendance this week, and discourage their citizens from challenging Israel’s authority to secure her territory and enforce law and order on it.

I am hopeful that the State Department may at least distance itself from the conference, and that Christian leaders in many countries will reject the conference’s premise and the idea of Christian participation.  Perhaps the rest is not as unlikely as – regrettably – it seems to be.

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 we frame the issue as a question of how close Iran is to getting the bomb, as if all other things are equal – as if Iran could get the bomb in a vacuum, with nothing else mattering or changing along the way – then it makes a sort of sense to focus exclusively on the potential ambiguity of our various data points; e.g., computer files from 2003; Iran’s connections with Pakistan, North Korea, and the A.Q. Khan network; persistent attempts to import suspect materials in defiance of sanctions.

In this extremely narrow, simplistic construct – one or zero, Iran is about to get the bomb or isn’t – analysts can justify incessantly splitting the distance from here to a bomb.

“Well, they’re closer than they were, but that’s a technicality – we still don’t know if they want one. “

“Well, they’re closer than they were, and they’re being less cooperative with the IAEA, but we still don’t have direct indications that they are designing and testing a warhead.”

“Well, they’ve offered their Middle Eastern neighbors a ‘missile umbrella’ as a defense against outside powers, which is something that would only work if the missile umbrella were nuclear, but we just don’t have the evidence that they are working on a warhead right now.”

I’ve compared this approach in the past to Zeno of Elea’s famous paradox.  Zeno proposed, as a basis for a reasoning exercise, that because the distance between an arrow and its target can theoretically be divided in half an infinite number of times, the arrow can never actually reach the target.  US intelligence seems determined to operate on this basis, biasing its estimates with an emphasis on the remaining distance to the target.

But this is a posture, not an intelligence conclusion, and it’s based on an assumption that we can afford to focus on whatever Iran doesn’t seem to have done yet.  A different, less complacent posture – e.g., from the Oval Office – would require a different emphasis from intelligence.

The disconnect with reality is rather startling.  Perhaps the strongest clue that America’s intelligence community misreads the historical moment is its officials’ use of the expression “strategic ambiguity.”  According to the New York Times:

[Intelligence officials] say that Iran could be seeking to enhance its influence in the region by creating what some analysts call “strategic ambiguity.” Rather than building a bomb now, Iran may want to increase its power by sowing doubt among other nations about its nuclear ambitions.

Well, sure.  And the point here?  “Strategic ambiguity” is what Iran has now, which is why we’re in a scramble – arms build-ups, sanctions, economic insecurity, regional realignments, the spread of Iranian-backed terror incidents, threats of “World War III” from Russia and China – and the situation is getting steadily worse.  This is what strategic ambiguity looks like, Iranian-nuclear-intentions-wise: destabilization of the Eastern hemisphere.  It’s no way for any of us to live.

And it certainly isn’t going to get better with age.  The Iranian mullahs are one of several entities jockeying for leadership of the Islamist vision for the Middle East.  Conflict and uncertainty are on their side, and that’s what strategic ambiguity over Iran is ideal for promoting.   The longer it goes on, the more likely it is that at least some of the power relationships affecting the region (and Iran’s prospects in it) will be realigned.  Indeed, the entire region is already changing, even as the US strategic focus seems to narrow to an absurd concept of waiting to prevent Iran from getting the bomb at the precise, Unassailable Moment when no one could claim she wasn’t trying to.

An extended period of strategic ambiguity for Iran means strategic discontinuity for the rest of us.  There is no steady state in which the only thing that changes is how many seconds closer to a bomb Iran is.  “Strategic ambiguity” over Iran’s nuclear intentions isn’t some intermediate future condition that might be less of a problem than Iran having the bomb; it’s the condition of today, and it is the problem.

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.

Conservative voters who are alarmed about the direction of government recognize that procedural mechanisms and ephemeral election-year sentiment can’t fix it.  They perceive that our problems with government can only be addressed with moral decisions: difficult decisions made when much is at stake and there are deeply compelling interests in competition with each other.  Moral courage exists for such scary things, and doing the right thing when all of the choices at hand will break someone’s china requires a kind of moral courage that rarely sounds soothing to the ears of a harassed public.  It is more likely to resonate as trenchant, annoying, or painfully necessary.

Many of the voters are down for that this year.  A growing number of them are less put off by the sting of astringent than they are afraid of what will happen if America tries to avoid it.  They aren’t irritated by “moral talk”; they are interested and primed for it.

As regards Santorum’s suitability to this mood, however, a question in my mind is whether moral courage for the hour has to sound particularly theological, oddly detailed, or hectoring.  Along these lines, William McGurn offered Santorum good advice in a column on Tuesday:

[W]hen Mr. Santorum discusses [social] issues, he needs to fold them into his larger narrative about the free society. …

There is, however, one area where Mr. Santorum needs to demonstrate a discipline it’s not yet clear he has. That is the ability to resist the efforts to drag him out of the public questions into the weeds of theological debate.

I would go a bit further and suggest Santorum take a page directly from Ronald Reagan’s book.  This would entail a pivot in emphasis.  John Podhoretz has nicely identifiedwhat we might call Santorum’s “presentation” problem: his tendency, at least in his non-campaign speeches from the past, to dwell on rebuking a fallen America.

The point is central, because rebuke of the past is not a guide to policy for the future – and the “rebuke” theme gets old quickly, as demonstrated by a similar tendency in the current president.  Something like Santorum’s now-infamous “mainline Protestants” comment may get vigorous agreement from a lot of evangelical Protestants, but it isn’t the basis for an action plan or a useful source of vision for national government.  Granted, Santorum made that remark in what was essentially a religious speech at a Catholic college.  But when you’re running for president, your memorable comments need to have a more positive and visionary emphasis.

Fortunately, there’s a lot to be positive about in the American tradition Santorum invokes.  It is also an excellent source of vision.  And one of Reagan’s greatest strengths was in defining and celebrating the important elements of that political tradition: the trademark American idea of government that is limited, constitutional, and federal.

Reagan saved his rebukes for left-wing ideology and policy.  He didn’t approach the American people as a sick society in need of exhortation, even though America was putting up plenty of soft targets in that regard in the 1970s.  Rather, he predicated his political approach on expecting the best of the people.  He spoke often about liberty and small government in terms of their unique power to unleash the people’s virtues.  He couched his message in positive terms, speaking far less about the evils of welfarism, for example, than about the benefits of liberty and opportunity.

With his positive approach, Reagan was unusually convincing on an essential principle: that the people do better with less government.  Santorum may embrace that principle, but it’s not readily associated with him, because he spends so much time talking about things like the societal problems that arise when contraception is considered a cheap “out” from moral decisions about sex and procreation.  He may have good points on that and other topics, but as a practical matter of communication and point-making, those essays in forensic pessimism don’t really advance the argument for political liberty.

Republicans this year should emphasize encouraging the people with reminders of what America was constituted to do right, and what Americans have done right with their freedom.  In 2012, it may be necessary to speak in some explicit detail about the moral principles behind American liberty.  Today’s voters are less likely to have been reared on them than the voters of 1980 were.  But if there’s one thing this primary season has shown, it’s that the voters want that discussion.

That is a tremendous opportunity.  Santorum can seize it best by concentrating on what we’ve got going for us and why we can turn this thing around.  If our focus is on social negatives, and if we are discouraged as to whether we will do good things with liberty and small government, it’s hard to make the case that those conditions frame a better future for the country.

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.

We’ll get to the Iranian warships.  The drones – according to Pentagon officials, a “good number” of them – are reportedly being used to collect information on Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on his people.  They will provide supporting evidence to justify an international intervention in Syria.  The US officials say the intelligence collection is not a precursor to military operations in Syria.

The US has actually done this before.  During the gruesome internal conflict in Rwanda (back in the Clinton administration), when Hutus were massacring Tutsis, the US dispatched military reconnaissance aircraft to collect intelligence on the fighting.  We have also, of course, operated drones over Somalia and Yemen at various times in the last decade, both to collect intelligence and to target terrorists.  But in Syria, the interested parties include Russia, Iran, China, and a collection of Islamist groups.

The US administration’s interlocutors are not wrong to wonder if sending in the drones is a preparatory measure for sending in troops to intervene: the intelligence collected by tactical drones is more immediate, dynamic, and ephemeral than that gathered by standoff collection assets.  If you want to know what Assad’s overall posture is, you use the standoff assets; if you want to know what his forces are doing on a moment-to-moment basis, you use operational-level (e.g., Predator) or tactical drones.  (If there are a “good number” of drones being used, most of them have to be operational or tactical drones – and are probably Predator operational-level drones, with good range and altitude.)

Meanwhile, as if on cue, the Iranian warships that stopped in Jeddah earlier this month have transited the Suez Canal – without any prior brouhaha in the press – and arrived in Syria.  They are in Syria exactly a year after their last visit, and presumably will offload weapons and/or ammunition from the supply ship Kharg, which is accompanying the Iranian destroyer.  Reporting from a Syrian defector (see last link) indicated that last year’s Iranian naval task force delivered weapons and ammunition to the Assad regime.

The ships’ arrival makes Iran the third foreign government that has been able, without hindrance, to enter a Syrian port and offload whatever it wants, in spite of the sanctions being imposed on the Assad regime.  Hugo Chavez has delivered diesel fuel to Syria since the sanctions were imposed, and Russia, besides sending her carrier task force to Syria during its recent deployment, used a commercial cargo ship to deliver arms to Syria in January.  The sanctions thus look pretty perfunctory (not to mention perforable).

Could a US drone be shot down over Syria?  Yes, the capability is there.  I don’t assess that Assad wants to do anything so provocative, and Russia – the supplier (and very possibly the current operator) of anti-air missiles in Syria – will want to keep things calm as long as possible.  But drones watching Syria will inevitably end up watching Russian forces there, and at a certain point Russia may well find that intolerable.  If a combination of Assad’s and Moscow’s preferences should cause them to want to exclude the drones, the question will really be whether anyone thinks President Obama would retaliate for a drone shoot-down or two.

There are too many variables in this situation to predict narrowly which direction things will go.  The reason for that is largely that the Obama administration’s policy is to avoid securing an outcome with the use of US power.  If the US will not seek a particular outcome, we will be consigned to waiting on others to do so.  There are many players, and numerous potential reactions.  The permutations of hostility and resistance along the way are endless.

What should the US do?  Our first principle should be that Assad must go, but that principle can’t stand on its own. It would not be better to have a new government of Islamist radicals than to have Assad in power.  It matters who takes over, and how.

A key problem, however, is that we have put our chips on Muslim Brotherhood groups and the brokerage of the Erdogan government in Turkey.  That is a very bad policy move, one guaranteed to generate enemies (Russia, China, Iran) for our non-policy policy while giving nations like Saudi Arabia less reason to endorse our activities.  We can’t make the Muslim Brotherhood good for the Middle East by throwing our weight behind it.

Doing so is, in fact, wasting and diluting the power we still have.  If the US policy were to fence in and discourage the Muslim Brotherhood, while bolstering liberalizing elements instead — elements that exist in every nation of the Middle East – we would make it more desirable for a nation like Russia to collaborate with us on the Syria problem.  Russia is the one nation that could directly help us to get rid of Assad; if one of our top objectives were to ensure that the follow-on government was not taken over by Islamists, we and Moscow would have that key objective in common.

The only way to secure a positive outcome in Syria is to use US power, under US strategic direction, to do it.  This has never necessarily meant military intervention, but it does necessarily mean acting with purpose and determination, rather than throwing random reconnaissance assets into the fray while handing the political problem over lock, stock, and barrel to the Arab League and the UN.  Even after the non-intervention intervention in Libya, there is still a level of respect for US power; it would still be possible for America to foster a good outcome in Syria by bringing together the positions of the various parties.

We cannot exclude Turkey, the Arab League, or Russia from Syria, but the US could establish limits on what they can hope to do there.  For the sake of the Syrian people and regional stability, one of the two most important things in ousting Assad is preventing an Islamist takeover.  (The other is fostering a positive character for the follow-on government of Syria.)  Liberalization of the Muslim Middle East faces obstacles under any kind of regime, but radicalization is most likely under Islamism.  There are elements in the Arab League (and in the larger OIC as well) that want an Islamist takeover as little as Russia does; there is common ground to be found if the US is willing to take leadership.

We have not been, however.  The Obama administration has chosen an ideological course of passivity as regards concrete political outcomes, combined with courtship of third-party Islamist groups.  This is an exceptionally bad approach.  Nothing this administration does is a conventional use of US power – and that is why Assad is still mowing down his hapless people while his allies deliver fuel and arms to him without let or hindrance from NATO or the United 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.

Time has called out Rick Santorum for “wanting to ‘fight the dangers of contraception’.”  Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller sees electoral danger for Santorum in his insistence on discussing social issues and registering committed opinions on them, rather than parrying such questions with a kind of unifying boilerplate.

Lewis isn’t necessarily wrong on the point about electability.  But I see much more danger for America’s future in the fact that so many Americans are now apparently unable to make important distinctions about the operation and functions of government.

Consider the method by which Michael Scherer presents the video of Santorum’s interview with the evangelical blog Caffeinated Thoughts in October 2011.  Scherer includes in his article a transcript of the comments he wants to discuss, and helpfully tells readers to start watching the video at the 17:55 mark.

I decided to watch from the beginning (in spite of the awful audio quality).  Out of context, Santorum’s remarks sound like he might have a plan to “fight contraception” the way Democrats always want to fight something: that is, outlaw it, impose fees and penalties on it, sue the bejeebers out of it in court, sic the IRS and all the other federal agencies and commissions on it, demonize it in the media, teach children in the public schools that it is associated with hate, racism, violence, and fascism, and make movies in which the left’s point of view about it is validated by George Clooney.

But in context, it turns out that Santorum has no plan to do anything with federal law other than ensure that ObamaCare is repealed and that federal money is not used for contraception or abortion.  (Federal money is currently used to fund both.)  Santorum was speaking in October in the Caffeinated Thoughts video, before the contretemps over the ObamaCare insurance mandate for contraceptive services; otherwise, he would presumably have referred to that as well.

To appreciate the context in which his remarks were made, it is necessary to start no later than the 10:00 hack.  The overall discussion is about various social issues (e.g., fatherlessness), and the theme Santorum emphasizes is that a president can shape a national debate on these topics, which profoundly affect the social health of our communities.  He repeats the word “debate” quite a few times.  His examples of positive intervention in such issues come from the local level and involve community groups and local governments.

He says explicitly in the 16:00-17:30 timeframe that laws in Congress are just a small part of what he’s talking about, and his examples of working through federal law – there are only two – are ensuring that no federal funds are going to abortion, and repealing ObamaCare.   He is also explicit, if fleeting, about the federal government not being the right level at which to actually deal with social issues by adopting government policies.

Santorum isn’t coming after your contraception.  He does consider it an issue that affects the health of society, and his hope is to foster a debate on that and other social topics, a rhetorical power he ascribes – along with millions of other observant Americans – to the president.

Many readers will think it’s misguided of Santorum to want to use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to spark a national discussion on contraception.  But let’s make the minimal effort required to at least understand what Santorum’s position actually is, and oppose it for what it is, instead of taking cherry-picked soundbites from him and reading into them the themes of governmentalism popularized by the left over the last century. The left doesn’t own the idea of “government” and what it’s supposed to do to and for us.

Regarding contraception itself, as it happens, I hold the fairly typical Protestant view that our virtue does not depend on things like contraception being proscribed to us, and that while the unborn child is a human being, his or her human status before conception falls in the category of what Paul calls “disputable matters” (see Romans 14).  Protestants frame the argument about contraception a bit differently from Catholics, although I have sympathy for the Catholic Church’s viewpoint on the larger issue of sex, procreation, and human life.

Ultimately, I don’t know how much social good a national debate on contraception would do, if it were promoted by the president.  I view the federal government, including the presidency, as too compromised and suspect an entity to honestly broker such a debate under current conditions.  (I am very happy for the churches to foster the debate, and indeed, to see the Catholics sticking to their guns.)

But what I do believe is that the government – and the federal government in particular – should have no policy on ensuring the distribution of contraception.  Santorum is right that the federal government should neither fund contraception nor subsidize its advocates’ prowling the land in various guises, encouraging young women to resort to it.  It should not be the policy of the state to subsidize or promote the avoidance of pregnancy, any more than it should be the policy of the state to prohibit contraception.  A government that interests itself in this matter is too big.  It needs to be slapped down hard.

The more things government subsidizes – and therefore promotes – the more likely it is that the actions of government will become topics of religious and moral dispute.  Americans can handle this one of two ways.  We can take the bait every time, getting into knock-down-drag-out fights over the issues as if the only solution is for one side to end up with the weight of government and the taxpayers’ money behind it.

Or we can take the issues out of government’s purview, and let reality, nature, and people’s consciences decide.  We can also reduce the weight of government, so that the cost when government decides to endorse a position – an act that should be rare, and exceedingly so in the case of the federal government – is not unacceptable to those who may lose the argument.  “Tolerance” does not mean “obligation to subsidize,” for example, nor does “unwillingness to endorse” mean “intolerance”; these creeping inversions only make sense to the narrow mind in the context of an all-encompassing government – a context that is unnecessary and avoidable.

I would like to hear from Rick Santorum what his philosophy of government is.  I don’t disagree that the executive has a hortatory function, although I would define the scope of it pretty narrowly.  The problem with wanting to engage the people from the Oval Office on the topic of contraception is that there is so much water under the bridge now:  the mode in which government approaches social issues has been established as overweening “big-governmentism,” on the model exemplified by FDR, Lyndon Johnson’s social legislation, decades of judicial activism, and the geometrically expanding activism of the executive agencies created by both parties since 1952.

What we chiefly need is to disestablish that very convention.  It distorts, often decisively, all our public dialogue on contentious topics.  Can Rick Santorum articulate a philosophy of government that defies this model, to which so many Republicans and conservatives are justly opposed?  Does he want to?

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.

Most American pundits address the problem in terms of the Greeks (and undoubtedly some other Europeans) demanding “goodies” from the “government.”  And they are not wrong about that, but the refrain is an incomplete depiction of what’s at work with the public-debt implosion of the West.  The more fundamental problem is the vilification and punishment of work and individual initiative.

This is not just a matter of the Europeans imposing rules that look like rank sloth to Americans, such as the EU’s 35-hour work week, and the Greek designation of hairdressing as a hazardous occupation, meriting early retirement (at the age of 50).

It is a matter, more basically, of suspicion and hostility about “labor,” as if labor is an imposition on the human being, rather than our greatest opportunity, and requires constant amelioration and adjustment by the state.

This is a thoroughly Marxist view of labor.  Marx’s original definition of the well-known term “excess value” related not to the profit the capitalist made on the workman’s labor, but to the excess productive work the capitalist extracted from him, over and above the amount necessary for the worker’s self-sustainment.  Marx accepted that sustaining human life was more than mere brute survival, but his theory was that capitalism had distorted the connection of work with sustaining the individual in an appropriate level of consumption and comfort.  Capitalism forced the worker to work harder than he would have to, if his work objective were sustaining his own life rather than meeting the goals of the capitalist boss.

Marx’s view was essentially negative: work could be appropriately scoped and properly rewarded only within certain limits.   A work regime developed outside those limits was distorted, oppressive, and in need of correction.

Marx had no perspective on the tireless engine of the most powerful Western economies in the Enlightenment and modern eras:  the entrepreneur.  In Marx’s formulation, the entrepreneur did not exist in any form significant to broad social dynamics.  Marx’s theory involved capital and labor, but ignored the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship.

This was a fatal error, because the entrepreneur is the entity that combines labor and capital.  He overcomes – naturally, and without artificial intervention – the systemic clash of interests posited by Marx.  The entrepreneur defines labor for himself, and he finds it good to do so.  He sees his work as a tremendous opportunity, and most definitely not as an imposition of something defined against his interests from without.  The existence of the entrepreneur is what makes it invalid to define labor narrowly, and in terms of conflict between socioeconomic roles.

In dismissing the entrepreneur, Marx left out the most important birthing mechanism of a dynamic economy.  And so does Europe, with its laws designed to relieve its citizens of the “unjust” burdens of labor.  The a priori assumption of the European political class is that labor is, in fact, an imposition – unless it is being regulated and adjusted by a compassionate state.

The problem here is not really that people tend to take advantage of that state posture and imagine themselves entitled to a utopian existence.  The problem is that the initiative to work for a self-defined reward is the most powerful factor in human economic life – and the EU has been laboring diligently to shut it down.

The European political perspective doesn’t just encourage a languishing entitlement mentality; it actively discourages the only thing that could enlarge the pie and work off the absurd and dysfunctional debt regime of the European Union.  It is not, for instance, because millions of young Europeans are lazy and stupid that their unemployment levels are so high.  It is because their governments regulate the people’s lives so heavily, and impose such costs, that very few people of any age are free to define work for themselves, and get on with it.

Some of them do, of course, running what are effectively small businesses in an underground economy (especially in the south).  But in much of Europe, the regulatory and tax environment is hostile to starting small businesses legally.  If you make it effectively illegal to start with little – not enough for full regulatory compliance – and act as an entrepreneur, you shut down entrepreneurship in the official, above-board economy.  Less entrepreneurship – less opportunity, less growth, less empowerment of the young and poor, less creative destruction and renewal.

It is quite true that not all of Europe is so steeped in self-imposed sclerosis.  But that’s really the point:  it only takes as much as there is today to produce the seemingly unsalvageable debt and unemployment situation in the “PIGS” – Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain – and to unsettle the rest of Europe and world markets.

America is headed down the same path. We haven’t reached the point of mandating a 35-hour work week yet, or retiring hairdressers on their public pensions at 50, but we are all but there in the spirit of our labor laws.  If you heap suspicion on work that isn’t directly controlled or defined by government or a union; if you punish the rewards of independent, profitable, uniquely hard work; if you discourage the unguided, creative development of work – you get less work.

We can only tax what we produce.  The epic economic error of the modern West lies in its determination to discourage production, whether by ruling out industry entirely with environmental ukases, by denigrating productive work in the culture, or by actively discouraging productive work with regulatory obstacles and punishments.

This model is unsustainable, and if we want to fix the problem, we have to let people work.  We have to let them define work and rewards for themselves.  If we insist on an intrusive supervision of other people’s work and production arrangements – if we insist, on an ever-growing list of points, that they be regulated or prevented, “for their own good,” by the state – then we have indeed consigned ourselves to a future like Athens’.

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.

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.