Author: Lee M.

Apparently when you change templates on Blogger it wipes out all your sidebar links. Grumble, grumble…

A few days ago Bill Vallicella posted an entry on his blog criticizing what he dubbed “the diversion argument” – i.e. the claim made by John Kerry and others that the war in Iraq constitutes a diversion or distraction from the war on terrorism proper.

Dr. Vallicella counters that the war in Iraq can legitimately be considered part of the war on terrorism, and that the argument as it stands is unsound:

The war on terror is a war against Islamic terrorists, first and foremost. Of course, there are non-Muslim terrorists, e.g., Basque terrorists, but the threat they pose is negligible as compared to the threat posed by the Muslim variety. It would be an egregious error to identify the war on terror with the task of bringing to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. Even worse is the mistake that Kerry made during his speech, namely identifying the war on terror with the task of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden.The war on terror is not solely about Osama, or solely about the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, or solely about al-Qaeda; the war is about Islamo-terrorism as such.



… Given this, it makes no sense to identify the war on terror with anything so specific as the task of capturing Osama. But that is what libs and lefties do ad nauseam.



…We know that Saddam directly supported Islamo-terrorists, since we know that he supported, with large sums of money, the families of Palestinian Arab suicide-bombers.

Since I have endorsed what might fairly be called a version of the diversion argument in the past, I wrote Dr. Vallicella to take issue with some of his points, to which he graciously responded on his blog.

I wrote:

…I think one can concede that Hussein’s regime had ties to Islamo-terrorism (e.g. the payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers) but still maintain that the Iraq war constitutes a diversion from the war on (Islamo) terrorism. As far as I have been able to tell, Saddam’s regime never directly sponsored terrorist attacks on the U.S. (the first WTC attacks were carried out by Iraqis, but I don’t believe that it has been credibly claimed that they were acting under orders from the Iraqi government).

To which he responded:

If you grant, as I think you do, that (i) the war on terrorism is a war against Islamo-terrorism whatever its source, and that (ii) Hussein’s regime had ties to Islamo-terrorism, then I don’t think you can say that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the war on terrorism. To prosecute a proper sub-task of a given task is not to divert oneself from the task. I think what you want to say is that there has been an undue emphasis on Iraq, that resources used there could have been put to better use elsewhere. But then we would be discussing a Misallocation rather than a Diversion Argument. Kerry, however, repeatedly used the word ‘diversion’ in his speech.

I’m willing to concede the point here that one should speak properly of a misallocation rather than a diversion. If we define the war on terrorism as a war on any and all groups that have ties to (radical Islamic) terrorism, then I think Dr. Vallicella is right that an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime counts as part of that war, since it seems clear that he had some ties to terrorism.

Dr. Vallicella continues:

Just how much a threat Saddam posed is hard to ascertain because the relevant facts are hard to ascertain. But it is worth mentioning that Saddam tried to assasinate Bush the Elder. There is also the ‘Abu’ connection: if I am not mistaken, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abu al-Zarqawi all received support from Saddam. Abu Abbas was the mastermind behind the Achille Lauro incident during which the elderly, wheel-chair bound American Leon Klinghoffer was shot and then thrown overboard.

I agree that the threat posed by Saddam qua sponsor of terrorism is hard to ascertain. However, I think what should be pointed out is that the stated reasons for going to war – i.e. Saddam’s ties to terrorism combined with the threat of WMD – have turned out to be based on false information. So, if nothing else, I think it’s safe to say that Saddam turned out to be less of a threat than we were led to believe (I don’t say deliberately misled; I don’t have the information to know if President Bush, et al. deliberately made false statements about Iraq’s WMDs).

I continued:

…Since there are other groups and regimes that have supported, directly or indirectly, attacks on the U.S., it would seem prudent to have dealt with those before dealing with Iraq. I realize that reasonable people can disagree about the gravity of the threat Iraq posed, but I think at the very least one has to take into account the considerable opportunity costs of going to war in Iraq when we did. Was it really the best allocation of the resources that it has absorbed (and will continue to absorb for the forseeable future)?

To which Dr. V responded:

I think one must also consider the other reasons for the war in Iraq, namely, the humanitarian reason; the enforcement of unanimous U.N. resolutions that that august body did not have the will to enforce; the need to put an end to an on-going war; the need to try the noble (if perhaps in the end misguided) experiment of bringing (more) democracy to the Middle East for the sake of the long-term stability of the region; the need to remove a dictator and his sons who was going to have to be removed at some time anyway, with removing him now while he is weak being better than later when he is strong; the sheer danger of allowing Saddam to develop nukes which he would be more than happy to give to terrorist groups for use in the U.S. and Israel.I submit that these reasons, taken cumulatively, add up to a very strong case for the war. I stress the cumulative nature of the case. Thus the first reason, taken by itself, is insufficient. It may that they are all insufficient, taken by themselves. But taken together, they are reasonably held to be sufficient.

While I think the cumulative case is strong, I think it would only be dispositive if allocating the necessary resources to a war in Iraq wouldn’t take away resources from more pressing matters. However good it may be to liberate an oppressed populace or enforce UN resolutions, the primary duty of the United States government is to see to the safety of American citizens. If going into Iraq has made it less able to do this, then it is derelict in this duty. It may be good for a man to give money to starving orphans in Africa, but not if by doing so he neglects his own children. That is, I regard this primary duty as exercising a kind of veto power over other ventures, however worthwhile they may be in themselves. One might add that given the seriousness of going to war, the gravity and cetainty of the threat should be the paramount consideration.

So, if the war in Iraq has resulted in resources being allocated to it that could have been used to deal with more pressing threats, then I think it was a mistake. I think given recent revelations, it’s reasonable to think that is indeed the case.

Thanks again to Dr. V for taking the time to engage in civil and (I hope) instructive debate!

Michael J. Totten makes “The Liberal Case for Bush” today at TCS.

I would take issue with this:

Woodrow Wilson, good Democrat that he was, fought to make the world “safe for democracy.” There is no more noble or inspiring reason to fight. John Kerry is no Woodrow Wilson. In his most important speech, the set-piece of his campaign, he didn’t mention freedom or democracy for Iraqis. Not even once. (emphasis mine)

No more noble or inspiring reason to fight? How about fighting for hearth and home? The defense of kith and kin? The protection of the innocent and defenseless? I don’t deny that the spread of democracy is a noble cause, but the noblest? Democracy is certainly a good, but chiefly as a means to an end. And untempered democracy, as political theorists from Plato onward have argued, can be a positive bad. It may well be “the least bad” form of government, but let’s keep things in perspective here.

Also, it may be doubted that the U.S. government is charged with the spread of democracy as its primary mission. Surely its chief duty is the protection of its citizens. When this duty overlaps with the broader good of encouraging democracy elsewhere, wonderful. But prudent statecraft would seem to require a realistic assessment of how much we can contribute to this broader good.

From a story in the Philly Inquirer:



As is the case with American bourbon, Scotch whisky is an outgrowth of unlicensed distillers fighting with the government over taxation of their homemade products.

The first recorded mention of whisky in Scotland was in 1494. For the most part, it remained a homemade product for centuries, used on an everyday basis.

By the 18th century, unregulated whisky-making had boomed in numerous glens where pure spring waters needed for top-level distilling were abundant. A continual tussle went on between the British crown, which wanted to license all distillers so they could be taxed, and the distillers, who didn’t care for the crown and hated its taxing policies.

One by one, most of the illicit distillers’ operations were shut down. Those that remained reached an accommodation with the government and then began to do battle with each other for what today we call market share. The folks in Glenlivet, where more than 100 distillers plied their trade by the early 1800s, were the most market-savvy.

In the wine business, appellation – the name of the area where the wine is produced, such as Burgundy, Napa and Finger Lakes – helps identify and sell a product.

In the early days of legal Scotch whisky-making, the same held true. Distillers made a point of telling merchants not just what they made, but where they made it. Thus, Glenlivet was the first producing district most whisky consumers knew by name.

Demanding “The Glenlivet Scotch” became the discriminating thing to do. Even King George IV, a noted drunk, womanizer and gambler, got into the act by making it his favorite court drink, with a particular fondness for the product made by one George Gow Smith.

In 1880, according to historians at the University of Edinburgh, the exclusive designation “The Glenlivet” was granted to Smith in a test case to distinguish it from the 18 or so other distilleries that at one time or another appended the name to their own.

Lee Smith writing at Slate:

…while we interpret the current Iraqi occupation as a situation where U.S. troops are putting down Iraqi insurgents, another way to see the conflict—one more in keeping with the region’s history—is that we are a proxy force in a civil war: The coalition is fighting for the Shiites against the Sunnis, while our presence protects the Sunnis from the Shiites.

More

Or, Newt Gingrich call your office.

Anne Applebaum:

Seen from the perspective of the 108th Congress, which is stumbling to the end of its ignominious session this week, Newt Gingrich is a towering historical figure.

By that I don’t mean Gingrich was a paragon of virtue, or that Gingrich was a great unifier of men. I mean that Newt Gingrich, as speaker of the House, tried to do what no one has done before or since. Ten years ago this autumn he set out, quixotically, to control Congress’s apparently insatiable urge to spend the nation’s money. He tried to limit the terms of the all-powerful committee chairmen, who had so skewed the appropriations process to the advantage of their constituents. He assailed what he called the “East German socialist” farm subsidy programs that had gone unchallenged for a half-century. He even managed to pass a line-item veto, which would have allowed then-President Bill Clinton to cut pork from the then-Republican Congress’s legislation, had it not been declared unconstitutional. …



…while there is campaign talk about tax cuts and the resultant deficit, mostly from Democrats, I hardly hear anyone from either party crusading against the government spending that is equally responsible for the deficit and that will, if unchecked, force taxes up again anyway. With a few oddball exceptions, no one talks about what happens to the national economy when more activity is controlled by the government.

It’s as if campaigning against big government has become passé: It’s so old, so dull, so 1990s. It’s impossible to believe that Gingrich ever tried it, impossible to believe anyone ever will again. You’d have to be an anti-establishment nut even to want to reform a system that keeps everyone comfortable.

From Pontifications:

It is popular today, as perhaps it always has been, to assert that God reveals himself in many ways. This is of course true. But the creedal claim is more than just an assertion of divine revelation. It is a claim that Jesus of Nazareth reveals God because Jesus is God. In each generation the Church must make a stand against the Arian attenuation of the Christian confession. It’s easy to say that Jesus gives us a glimpse of the divine. Doesn’t everything? As one German philosopher responded to the charge that he had denied the divinity of Jesus: “I have never denied anyone’s divinity!” Believing that Jesus reveals “something” about God does not require my conversion, my repentance, my death and rebirth. I can believe that Jesus reveals “God,” while at the same time maintaining my preferred religiosity, without fear of being confronted by the divine Other who objectively challenges my idolatries and self-interpretations. It’s quite a different matter if Jesus is in fact the one God.

Because God has embodied himself as the son of Mary, his revelation to mankind is definitive, unique, and unsurpassable. God has no other Word to speak to us but the man named Jesus Christ. This is why the Church has always insisted that the period of revelation is closed–not because God has become silent but because all further divine communication must conform to the revelation given once and for all in the Nazarene.



More here.

Reading the pieces from the Commonweal symposium on the election that I linked to yesterday, I was struck more than anything by the fact that partisans on each side can disagree so sharply not just about values or policies, but about the facts themselves.

Here’s how Thomas Higgins, who’s voting for Kerry, describes the Iraq situation:

The majority of military and diplomatic professionals in government had grave concerns about the wisdom of going into Iraq with such flawed assumptions and poor planning. Now we are left to cope with the bitter fruit of the ideologues’ arrogance: the worst foreign-policy disaster for the United States in thirty years. It seems wholly irrational to return to office an administration that has failed so thoroughly the test of national security.

By contrast, Robert Royal, who supports Bush, says this:

My son-in-law is a Marine lieutenant in Fallujah and his e-mails to me … express disgust with domestic media coverage of the Iraq conflict, which he thinks is going far better than most Americans realize. I hope this is right. But I cannot say that I think the administration has done a first-rate job in managing the postwar situation. I supported and still support the decision to go into Iraq. … But it does not take much insight to see that the administration has occasionally let the tiller slip and has had to fumble to get a grip again. A Kerry administration would be far worse, disastrous in fact, but I expected more steadiness from this White House.

“Occasionally let[ting] the tiller slip” is a far cry from “the worst foreign-policy disaster for the United States in thirty years”! Who’s right here? Like most Americans, I only know what I read in the papers, which leaves the impression of a worsening insurgency with occasional signs of hope. But the fact that people with access to the same information can form such wildly diverging impressions about the state of affairs makes one think we’re not just divided, but inhabiting alternate realities.

This may be the residual libertarian in me, but if there’s one idea that repulses me, it’s “the politics of national greatness.” This was brought to mind by a recent article by former McCain adviser Marshall Wittmann explaining his support for the Kerry-Edwards ticket:

I am an independent McCainiac who hopes to revive the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and I support the Kerry-Edwards agenda. Don’t get me wrong — this Bull Moose is not completely in agreement with the Democratic donkey. But the Bush administration has betrayed the effort to create a new politics of national greatness in the aftermath of 9/11.

What exactly is a politics of national greatness in Wittmann’s view?

Although this new political perspective was never spelled out in specifics, its adherents (including me) envisioned an energetic federal government that would implement a foreign policy advancing American interests and human rights, along with a domestic policy that would promote national service, and an economics focused on benefiting the middle class.



If this sounds a bit like fascism to you, you’re not alone. (Okay, cheap shot.)



More Wittmann:



The modern champion of conservatives for national greatness is Sen. John McCain. In the 2000 campaign, he advocated rogue state rollback, reform of government, an economic plan that focused on middle-class tax relief, and national service. He inspired Americans “to enlist in causes greater than their self-interest.”

We see here the example of nominal conservatives falling for what John Ray correctly identified as a common leftist argument “that the individual could accomplish nothing and would earn nothing without the community of which he forms part — and that therefore he ‘owes’ the community something. That is of course true. What is hilarious is that Leftists by some amazing feat of illogicality then immediately equate ‘the community’ with ‘the government’ — which is in fact merely one part of the community, and a very parasitic part at that.”

The “national greatness conservatism” touted by Wittmann and writers like David Brooks and William Kristol envisions a government whose ambitions are far greater than simply protecting person and property as the classical liberal “night-watchman” state was supposed to do. It aims to provides spiritual uplift and a sense of identity, purpose and cohesion for the people. Thus the need for monument-building, conscription-based “national service” programs, and far-ranging projects to export “American values” to the world.

Contrast this with C. S. Lewis’ idea of the proper role of government:



The State exists to promote and protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for.

In this view, the State exists to defend and nourish the goods of private and communal life – the lives of families, neighborhoods, churches, businesses and the other “intermediate institutions” that constitute the texture of our daily lives. An important, if modest, role.



“National greatness” reverses this order of priorities; it says that the citizen exists for the sake of the State and to promote its greatness. But to make the greatness of the nation the focus of our political efforts is to court idolatry. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the Bush administration. But in my view this is more because of its departure from traditional, limited-government conservatism than of a failure to embrace a spurious notion of national greatness.

Johny Ray makes an often neglected point:

One of the commonest Leftist arguments in defence of big government (a sophisticated example here) is to say that the individual could accomplish nothing and would earn nothing without the community of which he forms part — and that therefore he “owes” the community something. That is of course true. What is hilarious is that Leftists by some amazing feat of illogicality then immediately equate “the community” with “the government” — which is in fact merely one part of the community, and a very parasitic part at that.

More here.