Pinaxman: November 2006

Carol Iannone at NRO's Phi Beta Cons launched this interesting thread. It picked up over at NRO's The Corner. The Vanity Fair article, in which one of posters below, Michael Rubin, is quoted, that Carol refers to is here.

#1

Freedom Isn't Free, Right?
[Carol Iannone 11/10 01:58 PM]

I was very upset with what I've read of the Vanity Fair interviews with seven neoconservatives who have distanced themselves from the war in Iraq. All I want to know is, where did the idea come from that freedom is the universal desire of all mankind, and that, consequently, functioning self-government would follow the fall of Saddam, so much so that we didn't even need to secure the country or stop the looting (which was in fact seen as an expression of that very freedom), and that we could rely on elections plus constitution to equal democracy. This is one bad idea I know did not come from today's academy, which is given to cultural relativism. It has been generally associated with neoconservatism but exactly how did it arise and how did it influence President Bush and his cabinet? Did these seven gentlemen believe that? I can agree that freedom is a universal longing (although it may be in competition with other universal longings in certain cultures, such as "submission" in the Islamic world), but that is not enough to build an entire government on, without the cultural foundations that would make it tangible. How could so many really intelligent people believe that "freedom" by itself would be enough, almost as if they were inspired by the allegorical paintings which personify "Liberty" as a powerful female goddess leading the people? I really don't understand. My sense of neoconservatism has always been that it combines idealism with pragmatism, as it did throughout the Cold War, and as in the famous Cromwell instruction to his men: Have faith in God AND keep your powder dry! What happened?

I think the American people wanted to support this effort but when they heard Bush and Rice repeating platitudes about freedom, elections, constitutions, and the awesome spread of democracy in the Mideast, never revising their script to meet the circumstances, even as people were being blown to smithereens day after day, or as Islamic radicals were being elected to office, it almost seemed like some kind of satire by Joseph Heller or Monty Python. The dreamy idealism in Iraq also made a strange contrast to the forceful, specific, pragmatic steps the Administration was taking for national security on the domestic front. It is all very puzzling but one thing is certain. Richard Weaver was certainly right that ideas have consequences, whether from within the academy or without.

re: Freedom Isn't Free [Michael Rubin]

In response to Carol Iannone’s posting over at Phi Beta Cons. First of all, I do not distance myself from the war in Iraq. (I can’t speak for the others, some of whom I do not know and most of whom I seldom if ever see; the idea that the neoconservative form a cohesive cabal is the stuff of the conspiratorial flowcharts of some progressive and libertarian publications, and the DIA sources of Seymour Hersh).

I support the liberation of Iraq and I am dedicated to achieving the best possible outcome. On this day especially, it is imperative to acknowledge the sacrifices which so many have made, both soldiers, and those like Fern Holland and Steven Vincent, who were civilians. If I ever changed my mind on the war, you would hear it directly from me, and not from an ethically-challenged Vanity Fair journalist.

The topic of conversation with Vanity Fair is the very issue about which you are frustrated: Implementation. Your statement that people believe that faith in the universal desire for liberty alone would be enough is a straw man argument.

It is correct to say that the neo-cons are ideological supporters of the war; it is inaccurate to say they are the architects; they were shut out early and often. The NSC and the CPA leadership were neo-con free zones. Who were the implementers and who made the decisions? The Frank’s and Abizaid’s, Rumsfeld’s, Hadley’s, Armitage’s, Khalilzad’s, Bremer’s, Garner’s, McManaway’s, O’Sullivan’s, Kennedy’s, Crocker’s, and a host of others. Feith and Wolfowitz played roles as well, although they were not as bureaucratically effective as Armitage, O’Sullivan, or Kennedy.

How did other myths develop? If you look at David Rieff’s New York Times Magazine piece on pre-war planning, you’ll see that it is based almost entirely on secondary or anonymous sources. George Packer filled in gaps from left wing blogs; this showed poor journalistic judgment. Sy Hersh has an agenda. You just had a lot of very lazy or ideological reporting, and you had some greed. The idea that journalists care about the public good is rubbish: Many rush to literally cash in on the public mood.

If reporters were serious about accountability, they’d demand the declassification and release of all pre-war documents so they could see the real debate.

Back to Vanity Fair: On November 7, they told CNN they released portions of the article early because “at a time when the vice president says the administration is going full speed ahead with its Iraq policy and when the president is saying Donald Rumsfeld's job is secure, the magazine felt it was in the public's interest to hear what these men are saying about the war before the election.” And yet, they cherry-picked what was released to give a false impression of what was said. Vanity Fair: If you really cared about Iraq and were not just interested in a cynical pre-election ploy, release the full-transcripts of every interview now. Either stand by your stated principles, or expose yourself for what you are.

Is The Vanity Fair interview or this posting a ploy to escape responsibility? Absolutely not. I can give specific mea culpas about specific decisions in which I was wrong. And it’s fair for the public to hold decision-makers accountable. But if lessons are to be learned, it is imperative to be precise when identifying both the decision-makers and the decisions, instead of whipping up lynch mob frenzy.

Posted at 12:45 PM

Re: Re: Freedom Isn't Free [Andy McCarthy]

Michael, Carol Iannone can obviously speak for herself, but I don't think your (understandable) outrage at the quality of journalism answers the central point she raises. You say the topic at Vanity Fair "is the very issue about which [Ms. Iannone is] frustrated: Implementation." With due respect, her post is not principally about implementation; it is about the policy that was sought to be implemented. You call her argument in this regard a "strawman." I don't think it's a strawman at all — indeed, it's a faithful rendering of the second inaugural. In any event, Ms. Iannone asks:
[W]here did the idea come from that freedom is the universal desire of all mankind, and that, consequently, functioning self-government would follow the fall of Saddam, so much so that we didn't even need to secure the country or stop the looting (which was in fact seen as an expression of that very freedom), and that we could rely on elections plus constitution to equal democracy[?]... I can agree that freedom is a universal longing (although it may be in competition with other universal longings in certain cultures, such as "submission" in the Islamic world), but that is not enough to build an entire government on, without the cultural foundations that would make it tangible.
I certainly agree with you that the implementation has been poor, and that it is grossly unfair to blame the neocons for that, for the reasons you state (among others). I think you are also quite correct if, by "implementation," you are referring to Ms. Iannone's points about looting and failing to secure the country. But there is much more to what she is saying than that.
It is a fact that the Bush policy is based on assumptions that (a) freedom is the universal desire of all mankind; (b) given the opportunity, Islamic countries are sure to choose democracy despite aspects of their own culture(s) which regard democracy (or enlightened liberty as commonly understood) to be depraved, or at least un-Islamic; and (c) a country is a "democracy" if it holds a few elections and has a constitution, notwithstanding the dearth of democracy's cultural underpinnings (not least which is a people's perception of itself as a single body politic of equal citizens sharing a common destiny).
These assumptions are all highly questionable. And if they are wrong, perfect implementation would not salvage the policy.
Posted at 1:59 PM

re: Freedom isn't Free [Michael Rubin]

Andy, let me address what you identify as the three assumptions of Bush policy:

(a) freedom is the universal desire of all mankind.

We may disagree on this one. At the risk of debating a negative, what is your evidence to the contrary?

(b) given the opportunity, Islamic countries are sure to choose democracy despite aspects of their own culture(s) which regard democracy (or enlightened liberty as commonly understood) to be depraved, or at least un-Islamic.

There needs to be a balance of both “choice” and construction of the template for “choice.” In this case, the Korean experience is perhaps most apt.

(c) a country is a "democracy" if it holds a few elections and has a constitution, notwithstanding the dearth of democracy's cultural underpinnings (not least which is a people's perception of itself as a single body politic of equal citizens sharing a common destiny).

We don’t disagree here; this goes into issues of implementation and the nature of accountability.

Posted at 2:26 PM

Re: Freedom Isn't Free [Andy McCarthy]

Michael, as always, it's a pleasure to discuss these points with someone who's given them as much thought as you have. Staying with the three points, I'd say this:

(a) Freedom is the universal desire of all mankind. Since this is one of those philosophical matters that defies ontological certitude, it's probably worth preliminarily observing that I am not claiming to have apodictic knowledge on this point, while the president does not merely claim to have it but is staking the national security of the United States on his view.

In any event, there are at least three other points worth making. First is history. The idea of freedom and self-determination as the animating imperatives of society is fairly recent in human history. There have been many fewer free societies than non-free ones. If freedom is such a universal desire, one would certainly expect to have seen more instances of it.

Second, and more parochially, the evidence is all around you. People are constantly choosing security over freedom when given the choice. And this involves not only their physical security, but their economic choices, their healthcare choices, and a whole range of other options. Mark Steyn's brilliant book is, IMHO, particularly good on this point. If the "proof" of a universal desire for freedom is based on some kind of historical imperative, the fact is that our country is less free than it used to be (try building an extension on your house if you live within 60 feet of a Connecticut wetland, for example), and Europe is becoming much less free as it becomes more centralized and more Islamic. At the time of her death, Oriana Fallaci was under indictment, in Italy of all places, for speaking her mind.

Third — and I think this is important to both the point about freedom as a universal desire and about the prospect that Muslim societies are apt to choose democracy (point (b) in our discussion) — the principal fault I find with the president's premise is its lack of regard for the pull of jihadist strains of Islam (whether Sunni or Shiite) on the Muslim world. I respectfully think his view is both wrong and counterproductive because it's implicitly insulting.

In our culture, we can't wrap our brains around what Ms. Iannone referred to as the Islamic culture of "submission." So we blithely assume that if Muslims could only see freedom in action (i.e., Western style) they'd adopt it. In point of fact, however: (1) what we politely call "radical" Islam is really not so radical at all; its aims (though not the terrorists' methods of obtaining them) are sought by a substantial percentage (if not a numerical majority) of the Muslim world; and (2) for tens of millions of Muslims, submission to Islam is a free choice. (It should be obvious by now that the younger generation of Muslims in Europe is more radical than their parents who first came to Europe. They are choosing fundamentalist Islam and all the lack of freedom and equality that, for us, radical Islam implies.

(b) Islamic countries are apt to choose democracy. Just to finish this point, you say, "There needs to be a balance of both 'choice' and construction of the template for 'choice.'" I may be misunderstanding what you mean by this. If by "construction of the template for 'choice,'" you are implying something like what Secretary Rice does when she says we can't expect all "democracies" to "look like ours," I think that's a cop-out. We are all well aware that all democracies need not be exactly alike to be democracies. Ours looks different from the Brits', and both look different from, say, France ... or, as you mention, South Korea. We needn't contort the definition of democracy beyond recognition in order to fit them all under the tent.

When Secretary Rice says that what she generously refers to as the emerging "democracies" of the Muslim world will not look like ours, she is talking about something quite different. She is saying that these countries should still be considered democracies despite the absence of some elements we would regard as basic to democracy (no established religion, separation of the religious and the political, equality of all persons, freedom of choice in basic matters like whether to convert to another faith, freedom to enact laws that conflict with a religious code, etc.). That is not democracy that any of us would recognize as such.

(c) Elections plus constitutions equals democracy. We seem to be in essential agreement on this one, but allow me to pursue one point: The administration's propensity to regard Middle East countries (or territories, like the Palestinian Authority) as "democracies" once they've had a national election or two is not just wrong; it's dangerous.

Elections are about popular choice, not necessarily democracy. (The third grade has elections for class president.) More importantly, they may just be means to very un-democratic ends. In Iraq, the Shiites want to run the country and the availability of popular elections allowed that to happen (in theory at least) because they are a sizable majority. But that doesn't mean they all want the country to be democratic. Many of them want a theocracy. (I understand Iraqi Shiites are not a monolithic group, but the three most important parties — Dawa, SCIRI and Sadr's group — are Islamist.) In Lebanon, Hezbollah participates in the electoral process, but they don't want the country to be democratic. Ditto Hamas in the PA (and, for that matter, Fatah — Arafat certainly did not seek to preside over a democracy when he was popularly elected).

It is simply ridiculous to regard a country as a democracy just because it has popular elections. And, to agree with your observation about implementation, it is even more absurd to allow "parties" to participate in the "democratic" process if they are anti-democratic in nature. There has to be a price of admission to participation if there is ever to be any hope of democratizing this part of the world. You can't let Hezbollah participate if their charter is telling you they are anti-democratic (and they insist on maintaining their weapons).

Posted at 5:13 PM

FREEDOM ISN'T FREE: DEMOCRACY AND THE RULE OF LAW [Mario Loyola]

Michael, Andy: I just wanted to jump in with an angle I raised at a recent AEI event on reform in the Arab world (which btw was organized by Michael).

I asked one of Michael's guests at the AEI event whether anyone in Lebanon talks about the crimes Hezbollah committed against the laws of Lebanon. His response (this was a Lebanese moderate) really brought home for me the vast gulf in political consciousness between the Islamic World and the West. He said, in essence, that if we resolve the issue of the Sebbah Farms, then Hezbollah will not have an excuse to continue armed resistance, because of course everyone has a fundamental right to resist the occupation of their land.

This response seemed to me so strange. Imagine that the Canadians went berserk and occupied Minnesota. Then imagine that a militia formed to "resist the occupation" but the Federal Government ordered it to disband. Would any American say that the right of resistance trumped obedience for the rule of law? No, of course not. Nothing trumps obedience for the rule of law in this country, not even religion.

But in the Arab world, as another one of Michael's Lebanese guests pointed out, there is something that trumps the rule of law — and that is the concept of justice, especially Koranic justice. The fundamental problem in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq, is that those societies have not internalized universal respect for the rule of law as the supreme social ethic.

And now I understand that there is an important sense in which the war on terror is a clash of civilizations, or rather, a clash for supremacy between the texts of two religions: Islam, with its supreme law in the Koran, on the one hand, and the Enlightenment, a secular religion whose supreme law is captured in the constitutions of its disciple democracies. And except in Iraq, where it is trying to make a stand, the Enlightenment is in retreat all along the front. That is why the recent cancellation of a Mozart opera in Germany, in deference to Islamist sensibilities, was so symbolic, disheartening, and historic.

Posted at 1:19 PM

Re: Re: Freedom Isn't Free [Michael Rubin]

Andy, let me push back a little on one issue. Your statement that "There have been many fewer free societies than non-free ones," may be true, but does not account for the trend of the last two decade, if not century.

The question of security vs. freedom goes to the core of our argument, which is why I'd suggest any solution to the Iraq problem requires addressing rule-of-law. Unfortunately, the proposals floated by the Baker-Hamilton Commission and Democrats in Congress seem to favor proposals which would either create a vacuum or entrust our national security to the good faith of Tehran and Damascus. There is also the question of North Korea: If security is predominant issue—North Korea is stable and secure—why are so many North Koreans risking life-and-limb to flee the country?

To another point: With all due respect for the Secretary of State, her willingness to entertain that some "democracies" need not be democratic are disingenuous. So what do I mean by a template for change? There has to be a common acceptance of the principles of demcoracy by all participants. Maintaining armed wings and being democratic are mutually exclusive for political parties. If we allow armed political parties to compete in elections, we do not get democracy, but rather Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq. With regard to Islamism, I've addressed this elsewhere.

I'm afraid too many people will throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to tthe democracy debate. You're absolutely right that we cannot approach democracy simplistically. We cannot pretend that elections are enough. And we cannot legitimize those groups which seek the legitimacy of democracy but the benefits of terrorism. But, I'd argue it is counterproductive in the long-term to abandon democratization and transformative diplomacy as key principles of US foreign policy.

Posted at 7:22 PM

Universal Desire for Freedom [Michael Ledeen]

I'm going to put in one copper penny on the "is the desire for freedom universal?" discussion. I understood Andy to be saying that security trumps freedom every time, with which I agree. But I also believe that if people are free and secure enough to be able to choose between freedom and tyranny, they will usually choose freedom. I'm an historian of fascism, and I know—in enormous detail—that people have freely chosen monstrous tyrants to lead them. To which we can add the great popularity of "benevolent dictators" in places like Singapore. But my Russian grandmother taught me the basic rules of good government:

1. Best government = good Tsar

2. Worst government = bad Tsar

3. Good Tsars are very rare. So it's best not to have Tsars at all.

Most people get that, I think. They may (freely) make mistakes, to be sure (that's truly a universal human attribute), but I think it's quite wrong to dismiss as nonsense the notion that people generally want to be free. It's relatively rare for them to have the choice, after all, and all those people risking their lives to vote, from Salvador to Iraq, are pretty impressive.

On the Adenauer thing, the notion that "it worked" strikes me as pure tunnel history. Adenauer was a great leader, and Truman was a great president, and the Germans were duly defeated and had lost their zeal for a greater Reich. But I think it was terrible to be generous to the Nazis, most of which was driven by something neither Buruma nor Andrew chose to mention, namely the desire to enlist Nazi military, scientific and intelligence people in the Cold War. That gave decades of life to monsters like Eichmann and his ilk. That is part of the moral corruption about which people find it possible to happily conclude "it worked." Germany could have been democratic even if the Eichmanns had been hung when they should have been.

Posted at 7:25 PM

ECHOS FROM IRAQ (FREEDOM ISN'T FREE) [Mario Loyola]

Two great interviews, one with an Iraqi member of parliament, and the other with PM Al-Maliki.

First, MP Iyad Jamal Al-Din, a Shiite cleric member of Ayad Allawi's party, explains why Iraq must be secular. He talks about religionists and hypocrites, and explains that even when Mohamed was alive, when religious authorities take political power, the government becomes full of hypocrites. Only by staying out of government can religious movements remain pure. He ends with this:

You cannot plant democracy in a country that rejects it. Freedom does not come through learning how to read and write. Freedom, like love, is an inner feeling. If you are not free, no force in the world can liberate you. Freedom is a will within the individual, and, unfortunately, this wonderful and beautiful [will] in our countries has been distorted by the fraudulent Islamic culture.

Then there is this long (20+ minutes) interview, in which PM Maliki talks to the BBC's John Simpson. The encouraging thing here is how convincingly Maliki talks about imposing "the authority of the state," and he shows a pretty nuanced view of the danger the militias pose outside state control, and the role they can play if properly regulated. He also makes a point I had never thought of, which is that the United States and the Coalition have an obligation under Security Council resolutions to maintain security in Iraq until Iraqi security forces can take over. And by the way, he has every intention of seeing Saddam hang before the end of the year. (Click on the video, it's worth watching in its entirety).

The Maliki interview (from November 7) gets even more interesting with recent reports of a looming cabinet reshuffling in Baghdad — Maliki wants to be sure that his entire cabinet puts the central government above their respective parties.

Posted at 8:52 PM

#10

Freedom ... again [Andy McCarthy]

Both Michaels (Ledeen & Rubin), Mario Loyola and Carol Iannone. My lucky day to be in this discussion!

It’s important to untangle a few significantly distinct things. Indeed, the confusion here mirrors that seen in what little national discussion there has been about the democracy project, especially in the administration’s rhetoric.

First, there is a difference between security and tyranny. The administration’s democracy project champions – except when it is inconvenient to their purposes – claim that we must push for democracy because the alternative is tyrannical Islamic regimes that foster terror and thus threaten us … except when, for example, someone has the temerity to suggest that, if that’s the case, maybe we shouldn’t hand management of U.S. ports over to the non-democratic UAE; no, no, we are then told, it is unimportant that the UAE is not a democracy. Its regime, the administration argues, is non-oppressive and “moderate” (as that term is very loosely used) – good to its people and a friend to us.

This distinction between tyranny and basic security goes to two of Michael Ledeen’s points.

First, with due respect, I was not arguing “that security trumps freedom every time.” I don’t believe it does. Some context here. What Michael Rubin and I were debating was the democracy project premise that the desire for freedom is universal. I believe that assertion is dubious at best, and, practically speaking, irrelevant.

This is illustrated nicely by the eternal struggle between security and liberty. While people don’t always choose safety over freedom, they do it often enough to cast doubt on any claim that freedom is a universal longing. By saying they frequently value security over freedom, I am not saying that they would choose a malevolent tyrant. But it is just as warped to equate security with malevolent tyranny as it is to suggest that freedom is in all circumstances our highest desire.

On the other hand, if the point is that everyone wants freedom but they also have other universal desires (the point that Carol Iannone aptly made at the start of this discussion), then it would have been just as correct for President Bush to wax extravagantly about the “universal desire for security.” That is, wholly apart from the questionable democracy project contention that country X being free somehow makes country Y safer, why emphasize the human desire for freedom as if it did not compete with other core desires?

Second, re: good Tsar/bad Tsar (i.e., because the potential of a bad tyrant is so real and so awful, we can’t run the risk of having any tyrants), that theory works as an argument for democracy only if democracy is not vulnerable to the same pernicious possibilities. Who among us, though, would not rather live in a monarchy run by Michael than, say, the “democracy” in the Palestinian authority? Or the one in Lebanon in which Hezbollah calls many of the shots?

This, I believe, gets to the heart of the matter. There is, of course, a very powerful argument that democracy is the form of government least likely to lead to the subjugation of the individual. But that presupposes two things that the democracy project ignores to the peril of all of us:

(a) The argument works only if we are talking about democracy as we understand that term. Here, I disagree slightly with Michael Rubin (although I may be misunderstanding him, and if so, I apologize). Michael says, “There has to be a common acceptance of the principles of [democracy] by all participants.” (Emphasis added.) If the qualifier by all participants means "accepted within whatever body politic we are talking about," I think that’s wrong. Democracy is an objective reality. A country certainly has a right to determine the form of government it will adopt; it does not, however, have the right to have the rest of us regard it as a “democracy” if it is not one – which means, if it does not hew to the commonly accepted principles of democracy we have been discussing.

(b) The culture of democracy is far more important than the procedural trappings of democracy. In its haste to show “progress” through democratic reformation, the administration has gotten this exactly backwards. It has highlighted elections and constitution writing. The elections have installed theocrats and terror mongers, while the constitutions are in basic ways antithetical to liberal democracy. A real democracy project would focus on growing the institutions prerequisite to democracy; if those take hold, elections and the form of government will eventually take care of themselves. This can’t be done quickly – it may take decades (and for that reason we must grapple with such questions as how much of a task this is for the military as opposed to other government assets, and whether we are willing to be an occupying power reminiscent of the British empire). But it is the only hope … and it is by no means a sure thing.

On that last point, I will end this too long post by observing that freedom, too, needs to be defined more precisely. The assumption of democracy project enthusiasts is that the freedom Muslim countries universally long for is reflected by democracy as we understand that term. Thus, so the argument goes, once Muslims understand democracy and grasp its possibilities for enriching their lives, they will reliably choose it. I respectfully submit that many Muslims – even some who should be our allies – find this assumption both arrogant and ignorant. They see themselves as having freely chosen strains of Islam that reject Western notions of freedom and liberty. Democracy project fans regard these folks as a fringe. They are not. There are tens of millions of them, and their conception of freedom – as Andrew Bostom relates in this FPM piece – is fundamentally different from ours. We have to factor that in in deciding whether democracy promotion should be the driving force (as opposed to a subordinate aim) of our foreign policy.

Posted at 11:54 AM

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