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he publication of the 9/11 commission’s regimes—all aspects of the former East-West HOOVER report provides an opportunity to reflect rivalry—but it is not analogous. DIGEST T not just on the lack of preparedness for The doctrine of preemption, of striking before RESEARCH AND the history-altering terrorist attacks but also on the being attacked, is a fundamentally different concept OPINION ON realities of the post–Cold War world. than the Cold War restraint and is here to stay no PUBLIC POLICY The nearly 600-page report from the National matter who wins the presidential election in Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United November. With American civilians and soldiers States paints a disturbing picture of a government dying by jihadi bullets and beheadings, clearly largely unprepared for the suicide assaults on the we are in a hot war, not the old, icy standoff with World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But what it Moscow. points to in the future is even more chilling. The Although the degree of preemptive attack report reminds us that Osama bin Laden and his should be weighed soberly, terrorism cannot be fellow extremists are cold-blooded fanatics and that prevented by defensive measures. No White no negotiations, compromise, or appeasement will House occupant can simply react to events. SUBSCRIBE placate them. Nuclear and biological weapons in terrorist hands Receive four quarterly issues at the introductory rate of $20. The 9/11 commission report will be debated can kill far too many people for a reactive posture; FREE ISSUE and dissected for some time to come, helping us to jihad upends the former challenge and response Receive a complimentary better understand the vast challenges we face. formula. A glacially paced strategic response born of issue of the latest Digest without obligation. Perhaps it, along with the daily news from Baghdad, Cold War thinking will not cool the fires of jihad. will at last pour cold water on the assumption that We may not engage in another ambitious Iraq Call 800.935.2882 or visit we are in another fledgling Cold War–like struggle. www.hooverdigest.org war or even an Afghanistan intervention. America has The current antiterrorism campaign is not about already scaled down to smaller preemptive actions deterrence, containment, or chesslike moves on a from these two major counterterrorism ventures. global board. The United States is opening bare-bones bases from Historical analogies are instructive. Munich and which to launch preemptive attacks. Special Forces Vietnam still hold lessons about appeasement and teams have been deployed in a globe-spanning belt protracted conflicts in peripheral areas. The battle stretching from Latin America and the Philippines against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is not through Central Asia, East Africa, and the Maghreb another Cold War, however. Yes, it will drag on for to train local forces to battle terrorists. decades, like the Cold War, and resemble aspects Future strategies to nip terrorist plots in the bud similar to the Soviet standoff. Public diplomacy—how might include surgical airstrikes, cloak-and-dagger America spreads its message of hope, democracy, operations, and even smash-and-dash commando and tolerance to the world—will certainly be raids to take out nuclear facilities or eliminate Paid for by the Hoover Institution,Paid Stanford University. rekindled. Our antiterrorism struggle will necessitate terrorist camps. The old Cold War business as usual alliances and occasional cooperation with unsavory is over and so should be the analogous thinking. —Thomas Henriksen

Thomas Henriksen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

HOOVER INSTITUTION . . . ideas defining a free society

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this special achievement. THIS IS A COMBINED ISSUE. THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD WILL APPEAR IN TWO WEEKS. Contents August 16 / August 23, 2004 • Volume 9, Number 46

2 Scrapbook . . . . French diplomacy, Al Franken, and more. 6 Correspondence . . . . . Playboy bunnies, Bostonians, etc. 4 Casual ...... Victorino Matus, futurephobe. 7 Editorial ...... The Antiwar Candidate Articles

8 No Silver Lining in the Kerry Cloud There will be no consolation prizes for conservatives...... BY FRED BARNES

9 The Issue That Dare Not Speak Its Name The candidates can’t avoid the gay marriage debate. . . . . BY JEFFREY BELL

11 Bad Headlines for Bush . . . Though the economy is actually doing pretty well...... BY IRWIN M. STELZER

12 Barbarism Then and Now Appeasement still doesn’t work...... BY JOSEPH LOCONTE

14 Inside the Zarqawi Network An interrogation memo sheds light on the top terrorist in Iraq.. . . BY JONATHAN SCHANZER

16 Give Them Shelter Congress moves to help North Korea’s defectors—and its people...... BY DUNCAN CURRIE Features 19 Is Reading Really at Risk? It depends on what the meaning of reading is...... BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN 24 Not Worth a Blue Ribbon The conventional (and unhelpful) wisdom of the 9/11 Commission...... BY REUEL MARC GERECHT 27 Purple America The country is really an even mix of blue and red...... BY MICHAEL ROBINSON & SUSAN ELLIS Cover: Lev Nisnevitch Books & Arts

31 Land of Hope and Fear Nathaniel Hawthorne and the American past...... BY WILFRED M. MCCLAY

36 Morning in America Rewatching Red Dawn, twenty years later...... BY MATTHEW REES & ROBERT SCHLESINGER 39 THE STANDARD READER...... New books by Karl Zinsmeister and Christiane Bird.

40 Parody ...... Volvo: Swedish fire on wheels.

William Kristol, Editor Fred Barnes, Executive Editor David Tell, Opinion Editor Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Senior Editors Richard Starr, Claudia Winkler, Managing Editors Joseph Bottum, Books & Arts Editor Matt Labash, Senior Writer Stephen F. Hayes, Staff Writer Victorino Matus, David Skinner, Assistant Managing Editors Jonathan V. Last, Online Editor Matthew Continetti, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reporters Duncan Currie, Rachel DiCarlo, Erin Montgomery, Editorial Assistants Lev Nisnevitch, Art Director Philip Chalk, Production Director Gerard Baker, Max Boot, Tucker Carlson, John J. DiIulio Jr., Noemie Emery, Joseph Epstein, David Frum, David Gelernter, Reuel Marc Gerecht Brit Hume, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Tod Lindberg, P. J. O’Rourke, John Podhoretz, Irwin M. Stelzer, Contributing Editors Terry Eastland, Publisher Peter Dunn, Associate Publisher Nicholas H.B. Swezey, Advertising & Marketing Manager Don Eugenio, Midwest Advertising Manager Mark Krawiec, New York Advertising Manager Lauren Trotta Husted, Circulation Director Tina Winston, Finance Director Catherine Titus Lowe, Publicity Director Taybor Cook, Carolyn Wimmer, Executive Assistants Michael Goldfarb, Staff Assistant

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hortly after Bulgarian truck as ridiculous, arguing that all coun- of breach of etiquette,” and then Sdriver Georgi Lazov’s headless tries must learn to deal with hostage- actually managed to make things body was fished out of the Tigris takers as a matter of course, paying worse by returning to his seat, where River on July 14, his country’s them off as necessary. Here, presum- he “unfurled a French newspaper, NATO ambassador in Brussels, ably, d’Aboville was communicating interrupting his reading only to Emil Valev, proposed that the organ- only his personal views and not the quote Voltaire to disparage the ization issue a statement condemn- formal policy of France. At least we speaker.” ing this and other hostage-takings hope so. Incidentally, d’Aboville “traces in Iraq. NATO Secretary General This same Benoit d’Aboville has his lineage from an artillery colonel Jaap de Hoop Scheffer did end up since been the subject of a most who helped the American colonies releasing such a statement, on July revealing and excellent profile by win a key battle of independence” 20, calling these incidents “abhor- reporter Philip Shishkin in the (at Yorktown). It’s something he rent” and “revolting,” and express- August 2 Wall Street Journal. Accord- rather “likes to joke” about, in fact. ing “deepest sympathy” for the vari- ing to Shishkin, “fellow diplomats To wit: “I always say that maybe my ous victims’ families. call [d’Aboville] the most outspoken ancestor made the wrong choice in But he did so, THE SCRAPBOOK has and unpredictable ambassador backing the insurgents.” learned, only over the initial objec- NATO has seen in years,” a man Figures that a man like Benoit tions of Benoit d’Aboville, France’s “notorious for losing his composure d’Aboville would “always” like to NATO envoy. Monsieur d’Aboville, at meetings.” mention his ancestors, doesn’t it? one well-placed diplomat reports, dis- At one such session, for example, After all, he “who serves his country missed his Bulgarian colleague’s d’Aboville first “stormed out” of the well has no need of ancestors.” request for an expression of support room, by itself “an almost unheard- Voltaire said that. ♦

Mountain Brahmin Maybe all these people are just tic resources at their disposal, “can’t plain stupid, the paper’s editors imagine” how their own state’s vot- ot citing Voltaire specifically, speculate, drawing inspiration from ers think. For the record: West Vir- Nbut grimly noting that “some a “brilliant, hilarious new book” ginia awarded its electoral votes to European writers are beginning to they’ve read that describes Republi- George W. Bush four years ago— call America a ‘pre-fascist’ society,” can voters as “low-income, blue-col- and, if recent polls are any indica- the Charleston Gazette, West Virginia’s lar, evangelical, white Americans” tion, they may well do it again come largest daily newspaper, has gone on who get “duped by the party of this November. ♦ record with its concern over a “puz- wealth and militarism.” zling phenomenon that needs serious In any case, the Gazette editorial study.” Never mind who’s going to says, “Educated, progressive people win America’s upcoming presidential we know are unanimously disgusted The Bee election, the Gazette advises in a July by Bush. They can’t imagine how in His Bonnet 17 editorial. Consider instead the anyone could vote for such a mili- “deeper, more troubling question” taristic servant of the privileged emember how, two months back raised by the fact that the race class.” Ror so, THE SCRAPBOOK ran a sin- between George W. Bush and John In which case, maybe the (self- gle-paragraph-long summary of a Kerry remains a neck-and-neck affair. described) educated and progressive June 3 Sacramento Bee story concern- That deeper, more troubling question people who run the Charleston ing Air America talk-show host Al being, of course: “Why do half of Gazette ought to turn in their press Franken’s possible 2008 Senate cam- Americans want a shallow, smirking, badges and find some other line of paign in Minnesota? Remember how self-righteous leader who started a work. Because by their own admis- an affable but insistent Al Franken needless war?” sion they still, with all the journalis- then personally rang us up to ques-

2 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 Scrapbook

and (3) that the matter might by now be getting a little old and stale. “I totally understand” that, Franken replied, acknowledging that we might justifiably decline to pursue the issue any further. THE SCRAPBOOK never- theless promised to look into the rele- vant facts, complimenting Mr. Franken on his meticulous attention to detail. And Mr. Franken accepted the compliment as appropriate: “We’re very scrupulous.” The conver- sation then ended. THE SCRAPBOOK has subsequently conducted a comprehensive internal investigation of the Sacramento Bee- related paragraph published in our June 14 edition. The results are these: A story headlined “Capitol Hill com- ic? Franken may run for Senate in 2008” ran on page E8 of the Bee on June 3. That story, recounting an interview with Franken conducted “outside a New York skyscraper that hosts his new liberal radio talk show,” was bylined “Rob Hotakainen, Bee Washington Bureau.” Mr. Hotakainen, a fine reporter who surely has better things to do, tells THE SCRAPBOOK that he is a Washington correspondent for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, working out of the D.C. bureau offices maintained tion the accuracy of several somewhat decided to pass along a full report. by the McClatchy Newspapers chain, less than crucial nuances in the afore- “I wasn’t interviewed by the Bee” at which owns the Star Tribune. mentioned summary paragraph? (It all, Franken informed us over a shaky McClatchy also owns the Sacramento hadn’t been fair of us to suggest that cell phone connection early last week. Bee, however, which not infrequently the Bee had “quoted Franken gush- “I was actually interviewed by an picks up Hotakainen’s dispatches, ing” about Hillary Clinton, for exam- Associated Press stringer for Min- crediting him, not inaccurately, as ple, because “I don’t think I gushed.”) nesota. So you’ll have to correct that.” “the Bee’s” Washington reporter. Remember, next, how an unusually He was very nice about it, mind you. Moreover, so far as THE SCRAP- deadpan and generous SCRAPBOOK THE SCRAPBOOK was noncommittal BOOK has been able to determine, Mr. dutifully and soon thereafter offered about what it might “have” to do, Hotakainen is in no respect affiliated its readers a full account of Mr. advising Franken that (1) the Bee with the Associated Press. Nor is he Franken’s complaint? story in question hadn’t credited any- anybody’s “stringer.” Well, it turns out Mr. Franken now body from the Associated Press; (2) An unusually deadpan and gener- wishes to revise and extend that com- the injured party here, if any, would ous SCRAPBOOK sincerely regrets the plaint. And an unusually deadpan and thus appear to be the AP’s purported peculiar error Al Franken has made generous SCRAPBOOK has once again “stringer” and not Franken himself; about all this. ♦

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 3 say the word ‘agent.’” (Funny, since the villains throughout the Matrix Casual movies are also known as agents.) My line was eventually fixed, but TAKE METOYOUR AGENT not before I’d caught a glimpse of the dark times to come, when we will talk fruitlessly to machines, as they lure us through labyrinths of very time I pass my lefty “My phone isn’t working,” which questions and answers and we waste neighbors’ car, there seems to brought the response: “Let me just hours, unproductive and increas- be a new bumper sticker plas- confirm. You want to report on or ingly agitated. Where will it end? Etered on the back of it. There check on a repair problem. Is this cor- And, equally important, who is are anti-Bush slogans like “Hail to the rect?” When I affirmed this, I was responsible? Thief,” “The Emperor Has No transferred—to a busy signal followed Speech recognition technology Brains,” “John Ashcroft: The Best by disconnection. has powerful backers. It uses some- Attorney General the NRA Can Buy,” On my second go-around, I man- thing called VoiceXML (Voice and “Dump Dubya,” as well as “Boy- aged to get past the “report a prob- eXtensible Markup Language) and cott Kraft” and “Kucinich for Presi- lem” phase and talk to the “Repair is promoted by the VoiceXML dent.” Well, there’s one that I find Resolution Center.” But just then the Forum, whose board includes exec- myself agreeing with more and more— computer admitted that my records utives from AT&T, IBM, Motorola, the paranoid “Fear Technology.” Oracle, and, yes, Verizon. Given Lately, you see, I have succumbed their clout, it is only a matter of to the outlandish fear that comput- time before speech recognition ers will gain self-awareness and technology is part of all tele- take over the world. phonic communication. The Not that I believe mankind’s phone companies were just extinction will happen in the the beginning. How about apocalyptic manner of the Terminator the fire department? Or the movies, in which the U.S. military’s 911 dispatcher? As the defense system becomes self-aware Borgs say, resistance is and, when humans try turning futile. it off, retaliates by triggering a In 2001: A Space Odyssey, nuclear holocaust. Nor do I imag- Darren Gygi the astronauts must learn ine our demise will be as deceptive to deal deftly with the as in the Matrix trilogy, where computer known as the humans don’t even realize they are HAL-9000. But in the living in a fantasy world created by a end, HAL outsmarts them— sinister cyber-intelligence (while it hadn’t gone through and asked me to indeed, it kills them all. Similarly, secretly harvests energy from their please speak my number again. And VoiceXML will probably get the bet- bodies). Instead, machines will tri- was this a business or a home line? ter of us and bring an end to our umph over man by means of a harm- Aggrieved, I asked sharply to speak to existence—by annoying us all to less sounding innovation called an operator, then went tactile, press- death. “speech recognition technology.” ing the “0” button. But the computer I imagine my lefty neighbors Chances are, you have already was unfazed. It said that it would be have seen this coming for some encountered this insidious techno- unable to connect me to a (human) time now. These days, especially, logy when you’ve tried calling your representative until I explained my their fear of technology must be at cable or phone company in the absurd problem. fever pitch (what with voting hope of speaking to a human being. When at last I was transferred to a machines being rigged for the On a recent call to Verizon, I was living, breathing person, I was so upcoming election). But all of us asked by a machine (with a friendly exasperated I spoke to the man as if should look with dread toward the female voice) to speak my answers to he too were a machine. Happily, he, future of technology—a bleak a series of questions, starting with my being in fact a human, was fitted out future in which every single phone phone number. Second, I was asked, with a full range of emotions, and so call will begin with those fateful Was this a business or a home line? understood my frustration and told words, “Please tell me briefly the Easy enough. But then came the ques- me the secret of getting out of the reason for your call today.” tion, “Okay, please tell me briefly the voice matrix: “The next time you are reason for your call today.” I replied, in the system and it starts talking, just VICTORINO MATUS

4 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 NATIONAL BESTSELLERS NOW IN PAPERBACK What’s Left of America?

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QUESTIONING KERRY Wendy’s restaurant in Newburgh, New brought soft-core pornography to main- York. stream America really worthy of such ILLIAM KRISTOL presents four It was reported that the Kerrys tried lengthy treatment in your magazine? I Wexcellent questions for John Kerry chili and chocolate Frosties, while the doubt it. More disturbing than your deci- (“Four Questions for Kerry,” August 2). Edwardses had burgers. Most reports end- sion to review Hefner’s book were the But I would also like to see the ed there—but not Mark Steyn’s piece in pictures that you included with it. And Massachusetts senator address this ques- the London Daily Telegraph. Steyn added the quote attributed to Penthouse publi- tion: If he were president, would he allow that, after stopping at Wendy’s, Kerry and sher Bob Guccione was over the edge. “Old Europe,” Russia, and a variety of Edwards boarded their bus. There, it I have always felt very comfortable let- Third World countries on the U.N. turned out, “the campaign advance team ting my children read THE WEEKLY Security Council to dictate how the had ordered 19 five-star lunches from the STANDARD before I did, knowing that the United States fights the war on terror? Newburgh Yacht Club for Kerry, content was generally safe. After “Bare President Bush has emphatically Edwards, Affleck and co. to be served Nekkid Ladies,” I need to rethink that. asserted his right as commander in chief back on the bus: shrimp vindaloo, grilled ROSANNA SHENK to defend the American people from ter- diver sea scallops, [prosciutto-wrapped Plain City, OH rorists through unilateral action. Indeed, stuffed chicken], etc. I’m not sure whether Bush maintains that he has an obligation Ben had the shrimp and Teresa the scal- to do so. Does Kerry also consider this a lops, but, either way, it turns out John LOYAL BAY STATERS presidential obligation? Or do his hyper- Edwards is right: there are two Amer- multilateralist instincts make him cate- S A TRANSPLANTED MASSACHUSETTS gorically opposed to the potential unilat- Anative and a die-hard sports fan, I eralism implied by the Bush Doctrine? enjoyed Christopher Caldwell’s “The BILL STRONG Boston Diaspora” (August 2). I once tried Elk Grove, CA in vain to be both a Boston Red Sox fan and New York Yankees fan. When I was a THOUGHT THE QUESTIONS laid out in kid growing up in the Bay State, I didn’t IWilliam Kristol’s “Four Questions for know what a Yankee was apart from the Kerry” were reasonable—until I came to maker of bean soup. But then I went to the fourth. It asked: “If Kerry were pres- school in New York and saw pinstripes ident, would marriage be redefined?” everywhere. The Yankees were popular It amazes me that a magazine that sup- and I was in enemy territory. It wasn’t posedly champions “conservative” causes easy to be loyal amidst that sea of strident has latched onto the issue of denying gays opposition. I felt that “coming out” as a the right to marry. The more important Red Sox fan might be unwise. question that needs to be asked of These days, coming out on foreign soil President Bush, Vice President Cheney, can be similarly daunting in the realm of and the entire Republican establishment politics. Indeed, I can’t decide which is is whether they believe gay couples more intimidating—to come out as a Red should have the same legal rights as het- Sox fan in Manhattan, or to come out as a erosexual couples. Put aside the seman- Republican. In our ultra-partisan climate, tics of “civil unions” versus “marriage” icas—one America where folks eat at the culture wars feature all the red-hot for a moment. Does the GOP believe in Wendy’s, another America where the elite intensity of a Yankees-Red Sox series. equal rights under the law, or not? That is pass an amusing half-hour slumming ABE NOVICK the true issue at stake here. among the folks at Wendy’s and then Baltimore, MD JASON SCORSE chow down on the Newburgh Yacht Santa Cruz, CA Club’s specials of the day.” Yes, John Kerry is different from the ••• rest of us—very different. THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT DAVID CRUTHERS THE WEEKLY STANDARD Groton Long Point, CT welcomes letters to the editor. All letters should be addressed: OEMIE EMERY’S FINE ARTICLE “John Correspondence Editor NKerry Is Different from You and THE WEEKLY STANDARD Me” (August 2) is made even more rele- NO PLACE FOR PLAYBOY 1150 17th St., NW, Suite 505 vant by Kerry’s recent trip to Wendy’s. A Washington, DC 20036. few days after the Democratic convention, WAS APPALLED as I read Brian where John Edwards spoke of “two Amer- IMurray’s review of Hef’s Little Black icas,” Kerry and Edwards ate lunch with Book (“Bare Nekkid Ladies,” August 2). You may also fax letters: (202) 293-4901 their wives—and Ben Affleck—at a Is a book by and about the man who or email: [email protected].

6 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 EDITORIAL The Antiwar Candidate

veryone knows that John Kerry is ambivalent about certain response.” But what does it say about a presidential the war in Iraq. In fact, he’s so ambivalent that he candidate when he thinks it a show of strength to insist that Ewon’t say anything more definite about whether or he would actually respond to an attack on the United not we should have gone to war than that, as president, he States? “might” have done so. Nor will he say what his plan is for Furthermore, Kerry suggested on CNN last week (in the the future, though he claims to have one. But Kerry doesn’t spirit of the antiwar movement) that attacking terrorists can mind being thought ambivalent about Iraq. The American result in “actually encouraging the recruitment of terror- people, after all, are ambivalent about Iraq, too. But what ists.” One wonders whether a President Kerry wouldn’t find John Kerry does not want the American people to know is reasons to hesitate in prosecuting the war on terror. that he is also ambivalent about the war on terror in general. Or consider Kerry’s remark that “we need to rebuild Consider his acceptance speech at the Democratic con- our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get vention. He concedes that “we are a nation at war,” us.” Do we really have to wait to “get the terrorists” until engaged in a “global war on terror against an enemy unlike our alliances are rebuilt (whatever that means)? Indeed, any we have ever known before.” Yet, despite the radical what terrorists aren’t we “getting” because of alleged prob- dissimilarity of this enemy to previous ones, here’s how lems with allies right now? And what of Kerry’s statement Kerry says he will fight this war: “As president, I will wage last December that he would treat the United Nations as a this war with the lessons I learned in war.” That is, with “full partner” in the war on terror? Again, Kerry shows lit- the lessons he learned in Vietnam. tle evidence of having thought at all seriously about the But Kerry’s lessons are not, strictly speaking, lessons nature of today’s war on terror, and its implications for the learned in war. They are instead the conclusions drawn by use of force, for the limitations of international institutions, the antiwar movement about American foreign policy in and the like. reaction to Vietnam. They presumably are somewhat less And consider this: “Today, our national security begins extreme than the critique Kerry presented in his Senate with homeland security.” Doesn’t it rather end with home- Foreign Relations Committee testimony in April 1971, land security? Surely our national security begins with when he spoke of the 200,000 Vietnamese a year “mur- dealing with terrorists far away, in their recruitment centers dered” by the United States, and when he said he had seen and training camps, and in dealing with the regimes that “America lose its sense of morality.” But it is clear Kerry harbor, sponsor, and fund them. But that would suggest sees today’s war on terror through the lens of the antiwar reflecting on the lessons of our inaction during the 1990s movement he helped to lead three decades ago upon his vis-à-vis Afghanistan, and on what Bush did after 9/11. But return from combat. the words Afghanistan, Taliban, al Qaeda, and Osama bin “Lesson one” in Kerry’s speech, therefore, is that a “real Laden are nowhere to be found in Kerry’s convention and imminent” threat is “the only justification for going to speech. For President Bush, 9/11 is fundamental. For Kerry, war.” Presumably there was no such threat in Vietnam— Vietnam is decisive. and thus we should not have fought there. But can we afford The truth is this: John Kerry began his political career to act in the war on terror only when the threat is “immi- as an antiwar activist. He remained one through his Senate nent”? Is it not necessary to take action against al Qaeda career, opposing President Reagan’s efforts in Central before it strikes? Kerry’s antiwar activism has so shaped his America and the first Gulf War under the first President thinking that he doesn’t want to confront the fact that pre- Bush. And at heart he remains one still. Kerry claims he emptive action may sometimes be necessary in this war. wants to fight the war on terror. But in key respects he still Now, it is true that Kerry tries to assure us in his con- sounds more like a protester against, than a prosecutor of, vention speech that he “will never hesitate to use force the war on terror. when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and —William Kristol

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 7 “end welfare as we know it” in the 1992 campaign made it difficult for No Silver Lining him to oppose a reform bill as presi- dent. The same was true for NAFTA. Because of strong opposition by a majority of House Democrats and in the Kerry Cloud organized labor, he considered aban- doning NAFTA. But that would If he wins, there will be no consolation prizes for have meant reneging on a campaign promise and would have resulted in a conservatives. BY FRED BARNES rift with Canada and Mexico. So he stuck with the trade agreement and HE PRESIDENCY of Bill Clinton add to their slim majority of state lobbied hard for its ratification. The had a silver lining for Repub- legislators. But gaining a sizable key vote was in the House, where Tlicans and conservatives. number of House seats would be all Clinton again prevailed with Repub- Thanks to Clinton, they made signif- but impossible. The maximum num- lican votes. icant political gains in the 1990s. ber of seats they could win in an Clinton thinks his policies alone More important, they achieved three America evenly divided between the produced a balanced budget. Hardly. policy breakthroughs that in all like- two parties is around 240, and Congressional Republicans were lihood would have eluded a Republi- Republicans already have 227. The indispensable, forcing deep spending can president: serious welfare Senate offers slightly better cuts in 1995 and spending restraint reform, the North American Free prospects. Republicans need any- later. They also pressured Clinton Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and a where from 5 to 10 new Senate seats into signing a balanced budget agree- balanced budget. Don’t expect simi- to cut off Democratic filibusters, ment—an act, not a constitutional lar successes if John Kerry is elected depending on the issue. They’d need amendment—in 1997. (That mea- to the White House. The chances are to pick up more than 10 to stand a sure included a tax cut on capital exceedingly slim Republicans will be chance of overriding vetoes by Presi- gains and a child credit for families.) able to pull off victories on conserva- dent Kerry. To produce such gains, The question is whether Republicans tive issues in a Kerry era. Why? Clin- there would have to be a powerful would have insisted on sharp spend- ton was a “new” Democrat who backlash against President Kerry. At ing reductions with a Republican in endorsed some of the conservative the moment, there are 51 Republican the White House. Probably not. agenda. Kerry is a conventional lib- senators, but only 45 or so are reli- They certainly haven’t with George eral who buys almost none of it ably conservative votes. Bush as president. So we’re left with except the goal of a balanced budget. The out party—the one that this conclusion: The best arrange- The delirious reception Clinton doesn’t control the presidency— ment for holding down spending is a got at last month’s Democratic con- often gains House and Senate seats Republican Congress and a Demo- vention makes clear that Democrats and does better in state contests. cratic president. believe he was good for their party. What made the Clinton era so If Kerry is elected president, this In truth, he was even better for unusual, however, were the Republi- arrangement is likely to prevail, Republicans. In reaction to Clinton’s can victories on substantive issues. though there’s an outside chance the first two years as president, Republi- On reforming the welfare system, Senate will go Democratic. Kerry’s cans made extraordinary political long a target of conservative criti- stated goal is to cut the budget deficit gains in 1994, not only capturing cism, a “Nixon goes to China” phe- in half in four years and achieve a both houses of Congress but also nomenon was required, a president balanced budget later. Is this possi- winning a majority of governorships going against the partisan and ideo- ble? Maybe, but don’t hold your and a plurality of state legislatures. logical grain. Since it was a Demo- breath. Kerry has elaborate spending And since 1994, Republicans have cratic president proposing the plans, particularly on health care. No largely held onto these gains. reform, many Democrats in Con- doubt Republicans would balk at Clinton prompted a Republican gress were inclined to go along. Had some of the spending. But on health landslide. Kerry won’t. Even a failed it been a Republican president, they care, an issue on which Republicans Kerry presidency would be unlikely wouldn’t have. In short, only a Dem- are desperate not to be viewed nega- to produce sweeping electoral wins ocratic president could have deliv- tively, they might go along with Ker- for Republicans. Sure, they could ered conservative welfare reform— ry. One more factor. A roaring stock take a few more governorships and and Clinton did, with some Demo- market increased tax revenues dra- cratic and overwhelming Republican matically in the late 1990s and wiped Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE support. out the deficit. But that was a once- WEEKLY STANDARD. The fact that Clinton promised to in-a-lifetime event.

8 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 Unlike Clinton, Kerry doesn’t have any pet projects Republicans and conservatives favor. On trade, The Issue That Dare he’s joined the Democratic—and increasingly Republican—chorus of protectionists. He’s refused to back Not Speak Its Name the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), saying it should include worker and environ- The candidates won’t be able to avoid the gay mental standards theat Latin Ameri- marriage debate. BY JEFFREY BELL & FRANK CANNON can countries would never accept. On Iraq, what Kerry would do is anybody’s guess. He claims to have a HE JUXTAPOSITION last week and congressmen, the vote was 69.2 plan for Iraq but hasn’t said what it was startling. On the same day, to 28.6 percent in favor of an amend- is. He says he’ll recruit more allies to T(a) voters in the Missouri pri- ment overruling that state’s supreme take some of the burden in Iraq off mary overwhelmingly approved a state court. Between now and November the United States. There’s good rea- constitutional amendment establish- 2, as many as 12 more states will son to be skeptical he’ll find any. ing marriage as being exclusively hold constitutional referendums on Kerry has occasionally veered between a man and a woman, and (b) a marriage. from liberal orthodoxy. He once state judge in Washington ruled that John Kerry, as it happens, was in called for ending teacher tenure and the 19th-century writers of that state’s Missouri the day after the same-sex questioned the effects of affirmative constitution had made exclusively het- marriage vote. It is a state in which, action. But, as David Brooks wrote erosexual marriage unconstitutional. according to the daily political news- in the New York Times, “he will The vote in Missouri was not close: letter The Hotline, two of the three momentarily embrace daring ideas, 71 percent in favor of the constitu- most recent polls show Kerry leading but if they threaten core constituen- tional amendment, 29 percent George W. Bush; the third has the two cies, he often abandons them, return- against. Moreover, because of a hard- candidates tied. Missouri’s 11 elec- ing meekly to the Democratic choir.” fought primary that wound up oust- toral votes, won narrowly by Bush in But the “Nixon goes to China” ing Democratic governor Bob 2000, would make Kerry president if analogy has not been lost on Kerry. Holden, turnout was weighted to the the 49 other states stayed with the In campaign appearances recently in Democratic side—roughly 58 percent same party as in 2000. Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cape Democratic voters, 42 percent Repub- Asked in St. Louis about the pre- Canaveral, Florida, he invoked it and lican. And the opponents of the vious day’s vote, Kerry said he had insinuated he will part company amendment—the pro-gay-marriage no problem with it. He, after all, with trial lawyers, a key Democratic side—outspent backers of traditional unlike George W. Bush, is the candi- constituency. He said he’d back tort marriage roughly 40 to 1—$400,000 date who favors letting each state reform to aid doctors facing exorbi- to $10,000. make its own decision. He didn’t add tant malpractice insurance premi- Missouri, the first state to hold a that he was one of 14 senators, all lib- ums. Indeed, he and his trial lawyer referendum since the Massachusetts eral Democrats, who voted against running mate, John Edwards, insist supreme court imposed same-sex the Defense of Marriage Act, signed in their campaign booklet, Our Plan marriage over the objections of the into law by President Clinton in for America, that they would “take governor and state legislature, con- 1996. The purpose of DOMA was to steps to curb the rising cost of med- firmed that nothing has changed in let each state prohibit same-sex mar- ical malpractice insurance.” voters’ attitude to the idea. In 1998, riage even if a gay couple, married That sounds nice, but there’s a it was Hawaii and Alaska; in 2000, under some other state’s law, glaring omission from the Kerry- Nebraska; in 2002, Nevada. In 2004, demanded recognition of their union Edwards plan: a cap on non-eco- Missouri. The vote in every one of by invoking the Full Faith and Cred- nomic damages. And it’s the only these states was more than 2-to-1 in it clause of the U.S. Constitution. In thing that matters in limiting dam- favor of a constitutional prohibition his 1996 statement opposing DOMA, ages, holding down the price of mal- of gay marriage. In Hawaii, the only Kerry said he believed the law to be practice insurance, and keeping doc- state more Democratic than Massa- unconstitutional. tors in business. Without a cap, the chusetts when it comes to electing John Edwards was not yet in the Kerry-Edwards plan is one trial Democrats as governors, senators, Senate when DOMA passed. But lawyers can live with quite comfort- during the primaries he stated that ably. Kerry is no Nixon. He’s no Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon are principals he, too, would have voted against it. Clinton either. And there’s no silver of Capital City Partners, a Washington So on this, as on so many other lining. ♦ consulting firm. issues, Edwards is in complete agree-

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 9 ment with his running mate: He is honor this nation’s diversity; let’s Boston, will get their wish. Kerry has in favor of the right of states to respect one another; and let’s never made it clear that he and Edwards are define marriage, but opposed to the misuse for political purposes the most personally opposed to same-sex mar- federal legislation that sought to precious document in American his- riage, so the debate will not be about guarantee each state the right to keep tory, the Constitution of the United the merits of this impending social its own definition. States.” change. Kerry, remember, has “no In this straddle, Kerry and It was the biggest applause line of problem” with the Missouri vote. Yet Edwards are perfectly in sync with the speech. And it was, in its way, everyone knows that, if left to them- their party’s elite. The existence of adroit. Everyone in the hall knew selves, judges like the ones in Massa- the Defense of Marriage Act was the that, in the guise of calling for a civil chusetts and Washington state will reason most frequently cited by debate, Kerry had accused the presi- override the preferences of the 70 per- Democratic senators earlier this sum- dent of prostituting the Constitution cent or so of Americans who likewise mer for tabling a proposed constitu- by endorsing an amendment defining oppose same-sex marriage. tional amendment to preserve tradi- marriage as between a man and a When it comes up in the fall cam- tional marriage. Never mind that the woman. paign, as it certainly will, the issue Supreme Court is almost universally Kerry was also demanding that the will be what to do about this collision expected to rule DOMA unconstitu- drive by federal and state judges to between democratic decision-making tional some day, and that the amend- enshrine same-sex marriage not be and judicial ambition. President Bush ment—which 46 of 49 Democratic opposed, or even debated. In a town will have a clear answer: He will fight senators voted to scuttle—is intended hall meeting in Wisconsin the week to preserve marriage, and his oppo- to let states keep traditional marriage after the convention, he repeated the nent will not. How does Bush know even if the Supreme Court so rules. warning: “We’ve got leadership that this? Kerry opposes changing the Near the end of his acceptance tends to try to drive a wedge between Constitution to preserve traditional speech at the Democratic convention, people. It picks one of the hot button, marriage. He was one of 14 senators to Kerry suddenly assumed a tone of cultural issues and drives that at you, vote against legislation to let states high drama: “I want to address these whether or not that’s the most impor- preserve it. And he is committed to next words directly to President tant thing on America’s mind.” appointing the kind of federal judges George W. Bush: In the weeks ahead, Events such as those last week in who created the problem in the first let’s be optimists, not just opponents. Missouri and Washington are making place. Let’s build unity in the American it less and less likely that Kerry, and That is the debate John Kerry can family, not angry division. Let’s the Democrats who cheered him in no longer avoid. ♦ SENDSEND THEMTHEM A A MESSAGE MESSAGE

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For further information, please call Peter Dunn at 202-496-3334, Nick Swezey at 202-496-3355, Don Eugenio at 312-953-7236, or Mark Krawiec at 917-699-2619. in the previous month. New orders and order backlogs also rose in the Bad Headlines service sector. Consumer confidence is high, probably because personal incomes have grown for three consecutive for Bush . . . quarters. Consumers returned to the auto showrooms in July, and drove Though the economy is actually doing pretty well. vehicle sales up by more than 12 per- cent from June levels. Despite high BY RWIN TELZER I M. S gas prices, sales of light trucks and SUVs led the way. HERE WAS A FLOOD of eco- doing—until now. He can, of course, Wal-Mart, which accounts for nomic data last week—and of point out that the unemployment about 8 percent of all non-auto retail Tpolitical commentary on the rate dropped last month to 5.5 per- sales in the United States, reports data—and John Kerry had it all his cent from 5.6 percent, that we have that net sales for the four-week peri- way. The economy created surpris- had 11 consecutive months of job od ending July 30 increased by 10.9 ingly few jobs—a mere 32,000, 10 growth, and that the indices of week- percent over the same four weeks in percent of the number Bush had ly hours and weekly payrolls in- 2003. Even Target, which has been been hoping for—in July. To add to creased. But these points will be struggling, reported an 8.8 percent the president’s discomfort, the drowned out by the roar of disap- increase in July sales over last year’s already low job-creation figures for pointment over the jobs figures. As levels. These figures bode well for May and June were revised down- will the good news contained in the important back-to-school sales of wards by about 50,000. This wounds much of the data released last week. clothes, computers, and bedding, Bush in key swing states such as Wis- although retailers remain nervous consin and Ohio. And not only there. that high gasoline prices might sop All over America, even those work- The most widely up so much consumer purchasing ing will now worry a bit more about power that parents will rein their their jobs, especially when new data watched and reported darlings in when it comes to apparel show that experienced workers with and other optional goodies. long records of service are among figures—jobs, oil prices, Meanwhile, retail sales at the high those most frequently laid off, and and stock prices— end of the market continue strong. for long periods. The shops of leather goods seller Kerry’s slogan, “We can do better,” are grist for the Coach and other posh retailers such will resonate more loudly. Never Kerry mill. as Saks Fifth Avenue (up 15 percent) mind that if voters put him in the and Neiman Marcus (up 14 percent) White House, he promises to push remain crowded, and not merely through tax increases on the wealthy The Institute for Supply Manage- with curious lookers. and on dividends and capital gains, a ment reported that its index of man- Most important, the housing mar- variety of protectionist measures, and ufacturing activity rose in July for ket continues to advance. Interest an expensive health care plan. Just the fourteenth consecutive month. rates hover around a relatively low how such measures will stimulate Eighteen of the 20 industries sur- 6 percent, making new houses afford- economic growth remains a mystery. veyed reported stepped-up activity. able to the bulk of Americans. And The president will find it difficult Norbert J. Ore, the chairman of the the banks are making credit freely— to continue arguing that, thanks to institute’s survey committee, sum- well, not freely, but cheaply—avail- his economic program, “we have marized the good news, “The manu- able to businesses as their profits and turned the corner” from recession to facturing sector continues to grow at credit ratings rise. growth. He has justified the massive a rapid rate.” New orders are up, and But the most widely watched and deficits resulting from his tax cuts inventories are too low relative to reported figures—jobs, oil prices, (and his spending spree) as needed to orders, meaning that manufacturers and stock prices—are grist for the create jobs, which they have been will have to step up output to restock Kerry mill. The jobs market is not as their customers’ shelves. Even export strong as Bush would like it to be, oil Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to orders rose. and gas prices are higher than he THE WEEKLY STANDARD, director of eco- The service sector is also growing would wish, and stock prices are nomic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, rapidly. In July, activity in that sector stuck somewhere between level and and a columnist for the Sunday Times increased for the sixteenth consecu- falling. (London). tive month, and at a faster rate than Those are the numbers that voters

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 11 see repeatedly reported on television screens, and, in the case of gas prices, feel in their pockets every time they Barbarism Then fill their tanks. BusinessWeek esti- mates that consumers are spending an average of an extra $10 billion per month for gas and other energy prod- and Now ucts. Also, the effects of the Bush tax refunds have worn off, and a good Appeasement still doesn’t work. day for stock prices is one on which BY OSEPH OCONTE they don’t fall. All of this is apt to J L tame the animal spirits of both con- sumers and businessmen. That is not HE RECENT WAVE of church gions made him a target of the Third a recipe for reelecting an incumbent bombings, kidnappings, and Reich, offers perhaps the best- who took responsibility for the now- Texecutions of civilians in Iraq known critique of the moral and slowing recovery when it was steam- seems to support a contested claim spiritual rationalizations of fascist ing ahead. by the Bush administration: that ideology. A short work published in The White House is hoping that radical Islam is the philosophical 1939 by philosopher Lewis Mum- Federal Reserve Board chairman cousin to European fascism; that it ford, however, is also worth revisit- Alan Greenspan will reassess his has less to do with politics than with ing. Titled Men Must Act, the book plans to continue raising interest nihilistic rage. As Bush put it in his grew out of Mumford’s visit to Ger- rates. If he does, share prices might address to Congress barely a week many in the early 1930s. There he be given a bit of an uplift. The Bush after the 9/11 attacks, “By sacrificing saw copies of Mein Kampf (“my team is also hoping that last week’s human life to serve their radical struggle,” Hitler’s autobiography announcement by the OPEC cartel visions—by abandoning every value and political manifesto published in that it will pump more oil to bring except the will to power—they fol- 1926) being snatched up in book- down prices proves to be more truth- low in the path of fascism, and stores. He watched how Nazi brown- ful than past OPEC statements. After Nazism, and totalitarianism.” The shirts had taken over the streets in all, the president is supposed to have president has asserted an Islamist- Lübeck, and listened at dinner par- close ties with the Saudi royal family. fascist link in at least a dozen ties as upper-class Germans praised If that is true, now is the time for all speeches over the last three years. Hitler’s program against the Jews. good Saudis to come to the aid of Critics assail this argument as Writing when America was still in their president, and tap the two mil- dangerously “ideological”—there’s a pacifist mood, Mumford aimed to lion barrel per day reserve capacity too much moralizing about the evil prod U.S. support for the Allied that they have been claiming is avail- of terrorism, they say, and not cause. His summary of fascist princi- able to them. enough curiosity about the “root ples reads today like a recruiting Finally, Bush’s campaign advisers causes” of Islamic violence. Reli- manual for the al Qaeda network: (1) are counting on rising business gious liberals such as Bob Edgar of the glorification of war, (2) a hatred investment to give the economy a the National Council of Churches for democracy, (3) a hatred for civi- quick and noticeable shot in the arm deride Bush’s moral vocabulary as a lization, (4) a contempt for science in the 86 days remaining before way of “dehumanizing” America’s and objectivity, and (5) a delight in Americans go to the polls. enemies. Writing recently in the physical cruelty. Voters, of course, do not live by New York Times Book Review, politi- The sadism and irrationality of bread alone. They worry not only cal scientist Ronald Steel scolds fascism have long been favorite about the economy, but about Iraq administration hawks for ignoring themes among scholars, but many in and whether they are secure in their “the essentially political causes of America came under the spell of its homes, offices, and in the nation’s terrorism.” pseudo-scientific arguments. Big- shopping malls. Bush is hoping that The eyewitnesses to Nazi terror- otry was part of the reason: From things will break his way in Iraq, and ism, however, might well take excep- 1933 to 1941, over a hundred anti- that continued successes in uncover- tion to that view. Eric Voegelin, Semitic groups appeared in the ing al Qaeda plots will prevent a new whose 1938 book The Political Reli- United States, many of them with a terrorist attack in America. But that Christian hue. Some of Mumford’s means the president is now at the Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon fel- close friends turned against him mercy of events, rather than in low in religion at the Heritage Foundation when he argued that Nazi claims charge of his campaign. Not exactly and editor of the forthcoming The End of rested on racist, conspiratorial delu- where he hoped to be at this late date Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront sions. “What the leader desires is in the election cycle. ♦ Hitler’s Gathering Storm. real: what he believes is true: what

12 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 he anathematizes is heresy,” he Muslims. Here, then, is an ideology the outset was hurt,” Wise observed wrote. “These fiat truths bring about that reviles anyone who upholds the in 1938. “Men heeded not that the a debasement of the entire intellec- moral norms of civilized states. As Jews were assailed as symbol of that tual currency.” Christopher Hitchens has aptly civilization, the values of which How does that compare to Islamic phrased it, here is “fascism with an Nazism was resolved to destroy.” radicalism? Islamic face.” Mumford similarly faulted Amer- The writings and statements of ica’s political and religious leaders Osama bin Laden, and those of his for excusing “the true stigmata of philosophical mentor, Sayyid Qutb, ne of the first religious figures fascism,” its love of sadistic violence. point to the true nature of their Oin America to grasp the threat The roots of this pathology had little grievances. The object of their of German fascism was Stephen to do with political or economic hatred is not merely “international Wise, president of the World Jewish grievances, as many assumed at the Jewry”—the Nazi slogan—but all Congress. As early as 1933, when time. Rather, the Nazi obsession “infidels,” in particular the “Zionist- Hitler came to power, Wise was with violence and war was self-gen- crusader alliance.” The terrorist warning that Nazism challenged erated—and insatiable. It produced attacks in Iraq show that the ene- “the conscience of humanity” with a regime in which blackmail, repres- mies of al Qaeda include citizens not its treatment of Jews and other non- sion, and terror were not accidental only of the United States, but of Jor- Aryans. He insisted that Hitler be injustices, but part of the very struc- dan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait, judged not only by his military ture of the state. Kenya, India, Bulgaria, South aggression, but by the viciousness of “We had glibly assumed,” Mum- Korea, and the Philippines. They his anti-Semitism—a campaign to ford wrote, “that barbarism was a may be politicians, police, factory shatter the foundations of every condition that civilized man had left employees, doctors, relief workers— democratic society. “Peoples and permanently behind him.” The anyone supporting a decent civil churches permitted themselves to be Nazis refuted all those assumptions, society. They include not only lulled into unawareness, because it and no appeals to reason or diploma- Christians and Jews, but dissenting was only or chiefly the Jew who at cy would deter them. Indeed,

“Finally the smoking gun that conclusively proves what many have long known: that Chomsky simply cannot be trusted. This book documents the reality that Chomsky chronically ‘fabricates facts;’ ‘fakes figures;’ ‘misquotes authorities;’ ‘distorts data;’ plays ‘fast and loose with source material,’ and engages in ‘blatant professional mendacity.’ After reading this book, no one will be able to rely on anything Chomsky says without independently checking every claim.” –Alan Dershowitz

Collier and Horowitz have put together a book that analyzes Chomsky's intellectual career and the evolution of his anti-Americanism. (“About time!” was the reaction of one early reader.) The essays in this provocative book focus on subjects such as Chomsky's bizarre involvement with Holocaust revisionism, his obsessive apologies for Khmer Rouge tyrant Pol Pot, and his claim that U.S. policies since WW II, are comparable to Nazism. Chomsky’s linguistics is also subject to second thoughts by some of his leading colleagues. The Anti- Chomsky Reader is a fascinating composite portrait of a man whose anti-Americanism has made him a hero abroad and a cult figure at home.

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AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 13 although a secular thinker, Mum- ford came to believe in “radical evil”—that savagery is the easy way Inside the for mankind, the natural drift of things apart from some restraining force or grace. That insight is worth bearing in mind in light of the 9/11 Zarqawi Network Commission report. Its authors complain of a “failure of imagina- An interrogation memo sheds new light on the top tion” in the face of terrorist threats, terrorist in Iraq. BY JONATHAN SCHANZER but it’s still not clear that Washing- ton’s policy elites appreciate the reli- gious nihilism that sustains radical T LEAST 13 IRAQIS were killed The memo explains that Zarqawi, Islam. in fighting with U.S. soldiers who had allied himself with the Kur- In his recent book The Third A in the Iraqi city of Falluja on dish al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al Islam Reich, historian Michael Burleigh July 30, part of the ongoing U.S. in northern Iraq, lost his lifeline to al argues that Hitler’s Germany clung offensive against fighters loyal to Abu Qaeda in January 2004 when U.S. to a Teutonic myth of heroic doom, a Musab al Zarqawi, the man Bush intelligence arrested Hassan Ghul. high-stakes war for national and administration officials claim is the Ghul, according to U.S. officials, was racial restoration—or perdition. The most dangerous terrorist in Iraq carrying a message from Zarqawi to ideology of Nazism, he writes, today. Critics, however, contend that Osama bin Laden. Ghul, who was “offered redemption from a national the Jordanian-born Zarqawi is a reportedly a lieutenant of 9/11 plan- ontological crisis, to which it was Washington-made bogeyman who is ner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was attracted like a predatory shark to not worth the $25 million bounty on considered to be the top al Qaeda blood.” his head. They doubt the strength of operative captured in Iraq. Baziyani Today, it seems, the predators Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad (Unity explains that after Ghul’s arrest, have returned. The crisis this time and Holy War) group, citing intelli- Tawhid and Jihad was cut off from al is not national and race-based, but gence officials who generally agree Qaeda. Recent reports, citing U.S. supranational and faith-based. The that no more than 1,000 foreign fight- intelligence agencies, indicate that stakes are equally high, the methods ers are active in Iraq. Zarqawi may have been trying to as thoroughly wicked: videotaped A memo acquired by the Washing- reconnect with bin Laden “in the last beheadings, the mutilation and pub- ton Institute for Near East Policy from few weeks.” lic parade of corpses, the murder of Iraqi intelligence sources, however, Baziyani explains, however, that women and children, the recruit- provides a first glimpse into the con- Zarqawi’s group did not wither when ment of boys for suicide missions. figuration of Zarqawi’s Iraqi network, it fell from the al Qaeda vine. He “We must keep in mind the nature which may be more dangerous than claims that there are nine regional of the enemy,” President Bush told previously imagined. The memo, leaders of the Falluja-based Tawhid graduates at the U.S. Air Force “Structure of Tawhid and Jihad Islam- and Jihad under Zarqawi. His deputy, Academy in June. “No act of Ameri- ic Group,” details several days of also based in Falluja, is known as ca explains terrorist violence, and no recent interrogations of one of Zar- Mahi Shami. If U.S. intelligence concession of America could qawi’s captured lieutenants. Umar manages to catch up with these two appease it.” Baziyani, Zarqawi’s number four, a top leaders, there are still regional Some reject that argument—such member of the Tawhid legislative “emirs” fanned out around Iraq, as the governments of Spain and the council, and the “emir” of Baghdad, which could make the network Philippines, which have bowed to was captured by U.S. forces in late May incredibly difficult to break. For terrorist demands to pull their troops 2004. The account of his confessions instance, Baziyani explained during out of Iraq. Yet the early warnings details the hierarchal structure of Zar- his interrogation that he had been about Nazism seem eerily relevant qawi’s group, its ties to Syria and Iran, replaced as emir of Baghdad after his today. “What will finally emerge, if the number of fighters it commands in arrest. There are also regional emirs fascism continues to prevail in Iraq, the names of the regional emirs, in the Kurdish north (Hussein Sal- Europe, will be a system of bar- its media strategy, and more. im), the western Anbar province barism: its stunted, emasculated (Abdullah Abu Azzam), and the city minds: its grandiose emptiness: its Jonathan Schanzer is a Soref Fellow at the of Mosul (Abu Tallah). In this way, formalized savagery,” Mumford Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Tawhid and Jihad can execute spec- wrote. “The relapse into barbarism is author of the forthcoming Al-Qaeda’s tacular terrorist attacks throughout a recurrent temptation. Only men can Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups the country. These include the Bagh- resist it.” ♦ and the Next Generation of Terror. dad-based bombing of the Jordanian

14 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 embassy; suicide bombings against which is close to the Syrian border, responsible for transferring former Shiites and an attack on Basra’s oil just west of the Euphrates River. One Ansar al Islam fighters and other infrastructure in the south; suicide Pentagon official believes that the jihadis back and forth from Iran to bombings against Kurds in the number of fighters Baziyani put in al- Baghdad once the U.S. occupation north; attacks against police recruit- Qaim is likely inflated, but says that was underway. In other words, Iran ing centers throughout the country; the importance of the town cannot be has been involved in supplying fight- and the beheading of American Nick overstated. Al-Qaim, to the bewilder- ers to tangle with U.S. soldiers. This Berg in an unknown location. ment of U.S. officials, was where the should come as no surprise, given the In addition to its regional bases, Iraqi army put up some of its fiercest 9/11 Commission’s recent report that Zarqawi’s group has a specially desig- resistance during the 2003 Iraq war. Iran was a transit state for 9/11 nated media department. Baziyani A senior administration official calls plotters. claims that a man named Hassan Qaim “critical” and “the key to Looking back, Sunni-Shia enmity Ibrahim heads this department, along understanding how Syria is has never been a concern for Iran with lieutenants Khadi Hassan and involved” in the insurgency. when it comes to providing logistics “Adil,” who were responsible for tap- With the help of Zarqawi, the to al Qaeda, or even supporting Sun- ing and releasing the May 11 ni groups such as Hamas in the beheading of Berg. West Bank and Gaza. Iran, it is Baziyani also details the mili- also worth noting, provided assis- tary strength of Tawhid and Jihad. tance to the Sunni and Kurdish He lists seven military comman- Ansar al Islam on the eve of the ders under Zarqawi’s control 2003 U.S. invasion. Tehran throughout Iraq with about 1,400 allowed Ansar fighters to cross the fighters at their disposal. Not sur- border to escape the U.S. assault. prisingly, Baziyani stated that the According to several Ansar pris- Falluja group, headed by Abu oners, Iran allowed fighters to Nawas Falujayee, has the most remain there, and then later fighters with 500. Second to Fallu- helped them back into Iraq to join ja is Mosul, with 400 fighters. the insurgency. (Analysts believe Mosul is a haven Interestingly, the Baziyani for former Ansar al Islam fight- memo is not all bad news. The ers.) There are also strongholds in captured militant says that U.S. Anbar (60 fighters), Baghdad (40 forces have hammered the Falluja fighters), and Diyala, the province bases of his organization in recent just northeast of Baghdad (80 months. This, he said, has caused fighters). According to Baziyani, the network’s leadership to dis- AFP most of the fighters in Tawhid and Abu Musab al Zarqawi perse. Thus, Baziyani states, some Jihad are Iraqi Arabs and Kurds— of Zarqawi’s deputies have consid- not foreign jihadis—which corrobo- town is said to be a depot for ered Samarra as a new base. Accord- rates reports by U.S. intelligence that weapons, cash, and fighters supplied ing to one Iraqi source close to the the foreign fighter presence is much by Zarqawi’s financiers—the bulk of new Iraqi security cabinet, there has smaller than previously imagined. whom are now believed by U.S. intel- been some indication of “command One senior administration official, ligence to be operating out of Syria. and control in the Samarra area.” however, doubts Baziyani’s claim that Abu Muhamed, whom the memo fin- Several U.S. officials, however, Zarqawi has 1,400 fighters under his gers as the military emir of the Bagh- believe this assertion to be untrue— command. A more realistic figure, he dad cell, is a former Lebanese mili- perhaps wishful thinking or even dis- said, speaking on condition of tary officer who once lived in Den- information on the part of Baziyani. anonymity, might be 500. But the mark. According to Baziyani, he was The information in the Baziyani official admitted, “I’m not sure how smuggled into Iraq via Syria. Many interrogation memo needs to be fur- anyone would really know. If we other fighters, including Zarqawi’s ther vetted by U.S. and Iraqi intelli- knew more, we would have probably driver and bodyguard, are of Syrian gence. Still, the memo provides an rolled up this group by now. It could descent. unprecedented look into the mind of be wrong for us to think we know There are other foreign links. one of Zarqawi’s lieutenants. It also better than the man we debriefed.” Baziyani explained to his interroga- provides a view of the small but pow- Interestingly, Baziyani’s interroga- tors that the Zarqawi network erful network that may or may not be tion reveals that Tawhid and Jihad received a great deal of assistance at the center of the Iraqi insurgency, maintains a strong military presence from Iran. One Tawhid and Jihad but has established itself as its brutal, (150 fighters) in the town of al-Qaim, militant, Othman, was reportedly public face. ♦

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 15 humanitarian aid; condition non- humanitarian aid to Pyongyang on Give Them substantial human rights progress; urge China and the UNHCR to fulfill their obligations; and call for the establishment of international refugee Shelter camps. (The House bill allocates $24 million per year between 2005 and Congress moves to help North Korea’s defectors— 2008, including $20 million for refugee assistance.) Suzanne Scholte, and its people. BY DUNCAN CURRIE vice chairman of the North Korea Freedom Coalition steering commit- AST SUMMER, as Americans pre- According to Rep. Joseph Pitts of tee, sees these measures as a break- pared to celebrate their inde- Pennsylvania, a cosponsor of the bill, through. She told a joint House sub- Lpendence, four refugees half a it makes North Koreans “a priority committee meeting in April, “Despite world away were dreaming of their refugee group.” He says its provisions the frustration of being involved in own American freedom. On July 4, were modeled on those implemented this issue for so many years, I have 2003, the North Korean defectors, for Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. never been more encouraged than by aged between 16 and 19, entered the The legislation also pressures Beijing the introduction of the North Korean British consulate in Shanghai, China. to provide the United Nations Freedom and Human Rights Acts.” Each carried a personal letter to High Commissioner for Refugees “The primary thrust” of the legisla- George W. Bush requesting asylum in (UNHCR) with unrestricted access to tion, Brownback explains, “is to get the United States. Edward Kim, edi- North Korean defectors living in the human rights agenda in the middle tor of the online Chosun Journal, had China. The Chinese government, of the North Korean six-party talks,” made arrangements for them to be which maintains close ties to the fourth round of which is scheduled adopted and live in Orange County, Pyongyang, regards such defectors as for September in Beijing. The talks California. “economic migrants” and forcibly have focused almost exclusively on But a Catch-22 in U.S. immigration repatriates them to the North. nuclear weapons; but Tim Peters policy dashed their hopes. Since “China hasn’t given the [UNHCR] stresses the intimate linkage between South Korea’s constitution grants de any access to these people,” says the North’s domestic brutality and its facto citizenship to all North Korean Debra Liang-Fenton, executive direc- aggressive international posture. defectors, those defectors are consid- tor of the U.S. Committee for Human How bad are things in the Hermit ered South Korean citizens under U.S. Rights in North Korea. U.N. officials Kingdom? An October 2003 report of law—and thus cannot qualify for asy- are simply “not allowed to go to the the U.S. Committee for Human Rights lum in America. If they’re “South border region.” Consequently, we in North Korea found as many as Koreans,” the logic goes, they aren’t don’t know how many North Korean 200,000 North Korean political prison- being persecuted in their “home coun- refugees are in China. According to ers being held in slave-labor colonies try.” Kim says his calls to the State Liang-Fenton, estimates range from known as kwan-li-so. It’s estimated that Department went unanswered. The 30,000 to 300,000. Tim Peters, director some 400,000 North Koreans have four teenagers were taken to Seoul, of the Seoul-based Helping Hands died in the gulag over the past three where they now reside. Korea, believes the world community decades. This winter, a defector claim- Thanks to bipartisan legislation should focus on “rescuing these peo- ing to have been a prison guard at passed by the House on July 21, future ple, one person at a time.” Camp 22 in Haengyong told the BBC defectors may have more options. The The recently approved House he’d witnessed chemical weapons North Korean Human Rights Act of legislation is very similar to the North being tested on detainees. 2004, introduced by Rep. James Leach Korea Freedom Act, a Senate bill first In addition, at least 2 million North of Iowa, clarifies that North Koreans introduced last November by Sam Koreans have died of starvation since will not be barred from “eligibility for Brownback of Kansas and Evan Bayh the mid 1990s. As Stephen J. Morris refugee status or asylum in the United of Indiana. Both bills recognize North has written in the National Interest, States” because of any claim they have Korean defectors as refugees and let “The great historical achievement of to South Korean citizenship. It estab- them apply for asylum in the United Korean communism is to have caused lishes that, for purposes of refugee States. They also boost financial sup- a famine that has killed off a greater resettlement, North Koreans will be port for North Korean human rights percentage of the population than has distinguished from South Koreans. and pro-democracy NGOs; expand occurred anywhere else in the world radio broadcasts (including Radio (Pol Pot’s Cambodia possibly except- Duncan Currie is an editorial assistant at Free Asia and Voice of America) into ed).” A 2002 survey sponsored by the THE WEEKLY STANDARD. North Korea; enhance monitoring of United Nations and the European

16 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 EPA / Landov Adrian Bradshaw EPA Malnourished kindergartners in North Korea: Lacking strength, they sleep three to four hours each afternoon.

Union showed that 4 out of every 10 rapprochement strategy calls for dia- lation could impede progress on the North Korean children are chronical- logue and engagement, while depreci- nuclear standoff, and that it is an ly malnourished. Most foreign food ating human rights. Peters and underhanded attempt to collapse the aid never gets to the people in need, Brownback both label it “appease- North Korean regime. and is instead diverted to the military ment.” “The Chinese have been very As Peters points out, the legislation and Communist party elites or sold in disappointing, and I hope they have a does implicitly encourage emigration; other markets. price to pay for that,” says Brownback. it assumes that North Koreans are The humanitarian crisis has made “The key country, though, that needs yearning to vote with their feet. And Seoul more generous to North Korean to make up its mind in this whole sce- many of its more hawkish backers no defectors than it once was, and the nario is South Korea.” doubt do hope it will spark a mass exo- flow of refugees has increased accord- A number of lawmakers from dus that hastens the peaceful collapse ingly. As the Economist recently noted, South Korea’s ruling Uri party have of Kim Jong Il’s regime. The model “About 4,000 of the 5,000 or so criticized the U.S. House legislation as here is Eastern Europe, where a flood refugees who have gone South in the an unwarranted “intervention” in of East Germans escaping to Austria past 50 years have arrived since 1999.” North Korean domestic affairs. The via Hungary in September 1989 cat- The exodus of roughly 460 defectors opposition Grand National party, alyzed the events that brought down to the South—via Vietnam, apparent- however, supports the bill. Not sur- the Berlin Wall on November 9 and ly—in late July constituted the biggest prisingly, North Korea’s foreign min- toppled Erich Honecker’s Communist single arrival ever. istry has angrily denounced it, and dictatorship. “It’s kind of a landmark,” says threatened to boycott the upcoming Is it quixotic to think Kim’s regime Peters, who hopes the historic defec- six-party talks in response. But Rep. might similarly implode? “I think it is tion will prompt “a more realistic Pitts dismisses this as bluster, saying, a possibility,” says Brownback, though appraisal” of the refugee situation by “I don’t think that China is going to he acknowledges the differences South Korean officials. “They’re on let them withdraw.” between East Germany and North the right track,” he explains, but are Brownback’s office expects Senate Korea. “The goal of the bill is to get still hindered by fears of economic debate on the North Korea Freedom the human rights portfolio included in strain and by fears of upsetting Act to proceed next month. Support- any negotiations with North Korea, Pyongyang. The South Korean gov- ers hope a compromise bill can be [and] that’s a good part of what caused ernment of President Roh Moo Hyun enacted before the end of term. One the Soviet Union to collapse, when remains wedded to the North-South Brownback staffer predicts the chief they engaged the human rights portfo- détente begun by former president opposition will come from Joseph lio. I’m sensing myself that we’re going Kim Dae Jung in the late 1990s. Biden of Delaware. Critics will likely to have a chance to put pretty aggres- Known as the “sunshine” policy, this demur along two lines: that the legis- sive pressure on North Korea.” ♦

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 17 The Gift of Self-Reliance

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Images by Darcy Kiefel. All contents © Heifer International Is Reading Really at Risk? It depends on what the meaning of reading is

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN 1982 and 2002, with actual numbers of readers having gained only slightly despite a large growth (of 40 million eading at Risk” is one of those people) in the overall population. More women than men hardy perennials, a government continue to participate in what the survey also calls liter- survey telling us that in some vital ary reading—in his trip to the United States in 1905, area—obesity, pollution, fuel deple- based on attendance at his lectures, Henry James noted tion, quality of education, domestic that culture belonged chiefly to women—though even relations—things“R are even worse than we thought. In the among women the rate is slipping. Nor are things better category of literacy, the old surveys seemed always to be among the so-called educated; while they do read more some variant of “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” “Reading at than the less educated, the decline in literary reading is Risk”— the most recent survey, carried out under the also found among them. But the rate of decline is greatest auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts as part among young adults 18 to 24 years old, and the survey of its larger Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the quotes yet another study, this one made by the National whole conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau—doesn’t for Institute for Literacy, showing that things are not looking a moment suggest that Johnny Can’t Read. The problem any better for kids between 13 and 17, but are even a little is that, now grown, Johnny (though a little less Jane) worse. doesn’t much care to read a lot in the way of imaginative Although the general decline in literary reading is not writing—fiction, poems, plays—also known to the survey attributed to any single cause in “Reading at Risk,” the as literature. For the first time in our history, apparently, problem, it is hinted, may be the distractions of electron- less than half the population bothers to read any litera- ic culture. To quote an item from the survey’s executive ture (so defined) at all. summary: “A 1999 study showed that the average Ameri- Such surveys are as meat and drink—perhaps pot and can child lives in a household with 2.9 televisions, 1.8 coke might be more precise—to editorialists, who can VCRs, 3.1 radios, 2.1 CD players, 1.4 video game players, usually be counted upon to discover their findings any- and 1 computer.” By 2002, to quote from the same sum- where from worrying to alarming to frightening. They mary, “electronic spending had soared to 24 percent [of haul out their best solemn tone; words such as “distress- total recreational spending by Americans], while spend- ing” and “grave concern” and “dire” are brought into ing on books declined . . . to 5.6 percent.” Up against all play; look for “threat to democratic society” to pop up this easily accessible and endlessly varied fare—from with some frequency; nor will “crisis” be in short supply; Palm Pilots to iPods—the reading of stories, poems, and “serious action,” one need scarcely add, is called for. plays is having a tough time competing. Nothing remains, really, but to ring up the livery service and order the handbasket in which we, along with the culture, shall all presently ride off to hell. any of the facts set out in “Reading at Risk” are “Reading at Risk” reports that there has been a less than shocking. Whites do more literary decline in the reading of novels, poems, and plays of Mreading than do blacks, who do more than His- roughly 10 percentage points for all age cohorts between panic Americans, though the rate of reading in all three groups goes up with family income. Concomitantly, the Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD rich and the college-educated do more literary reading and the author most recently of Fabulous Small Jews and Envy. than people less well-off or less trained to read through

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 19 advanced schooling. People who do such reading also rates declined, home Internet use soared.” But it does not tend to go to a lot more—roughly three times more—art take things further than that. museums, plays, concerts, operas, and other performing- One mildly depressing finding of the survey is that the arts events; they also participate more in civic affairs gen- only increase in putatively literary activity is in the realm erally. Among the divisions of literary reading, fiction is of creative writing. “In 1982, about 11 million people did read by roughly 96 million people (or 45 percent of the some form of creative writing. By 2002, this number had population), some form of poetry by 25 million people (or risen to almost 15 million people (18 or older), an increase 12 percent of the population), while plays are read by 7 of about 30 percent.” This is owing in part to the increase million people (or 4 percent of the population). The of creative-writing courses in universities and community results of the “2002 Survey of Public Participation in the colleges (“creative writing is most common among those Arts” show that literary reading, then, is still a popular under 25”); and perhaps, regrettably, to the increase of but declining leisure activity. falsely inflated personal self-esteem, in which altogether “Reading at Risk” does provide a few not exactly sur- too many people feel, quite wrongly, that they are artistic. prises but slight jars to one’s expectations. For me, one is (An earlier survey, run by a vanity-press company, claimed that “people in managerial, professional, and technical that 80 percent of Americans felt they had a book in them, occupations are more likely to read literature than those which is also, in my view, bad news.) In any case, the rise in other occupation groups.” I would myself have expect- in creative writing set alongside the decrease in the read- ed that these were all jobs in which one worked more ing of literature suggests that there is some truth to the old than an eight-hour day and then took work home, which, quip that holds one can either read or write books, one consequently, would allow a good deal less time for read- can’t really do both. ing things not in some way related to one’s work. The survey also claims that readers are “highly social people,” more active in their communities and participating more wo points of great importance about “Reading at in sports. I should have thought that lots of reading Risk,” and which cripple its significance, need to might make one introspective, slightly detached, a touch Tbe underscored: first, that in its findings the quality reclusive, even, but, according to the survey, not so. “Peo- of the reading being done is not taken into consideration; ple who live in the suburbs,” the survey states, “are more and, second, neither has serious nonfiction been tabulat- likely to be readers than either those who live in the city ed. As for the quality of reading, the survey presumably or the country.” Perhaps this is owing in good part to sub- counted mysteries, science fiction, bodice-ripping urbs’ being generally more affluent than cities; and, too, romances, and sentimental poetry as literature. The litera- to book clubs, in which neighbors meet to discuss recent ture being read, in the reckoning of the survey, is, then, bestsellers and sometimes classics, and which tend to be fairly likely not to be of a serious nature: More Tom Clan- suburban institutions. cy than Ivan Turgenev is doubtless being registered, more The one area in which “Reading at Risk” is (honor- Maya Angelou than Marianne Moore. The thought that ably) shaky is in its conclusions on the subject of televi- 96 million people in our happily philistine country are sion, which is the standard fall-guy in almost all surveys regularly reading literature, even though it might repre- having to do with education. Only among people who sent a decline over 20 years earlier, would still be impres- watch more than four hours of television daily does the sive, except for the fact that we don’t know how many of extent of reading drop off, according to the survey, while them are reading, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. watching no television whatsoever makes it more likely The surveyors probably had no choice here, for setting one will be a more frequent reader. On the other hand, a standard of what constitutes reading of genuine literary the presence of writers on television—on C-SPAN and merit would entail vast complication: One can see a com- talk shows—may, the survey concedes, encourage people mittee of literary panjandrums arguing into the night to buy books. No mention is made of those people, myself about whether to include, say, the novels of Alice Walker among them, who are able to read with a television set, or John Galsworthy or Gore Vidal. But excluding serious usually playing a sports event, humming away in the nonfiction is perhaps a more radical problem. One could background. be reading a steady diet of St. Augustine, Samuel Johnson, In the end, “Reading at Risk” concludes that “it is not and John Ruskin and fall outside the boundaries of what clear from [its] data how much influence TV watching the report calls “literary” readers. Given this exclusion, has on literary reading.” The survey does suggest that who can be certain that, for example, George Kennan, surfing the Internet may have made a dent in reading: Jacques Barzun, or the late J. Robert Oppenheimer would “During the time period when the literature participation qualify as among the survey’s readers of literature?

20 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 A great many people, of course, do a vast amount of kind that reading is supposed to provide. What the reading, chiefly in newspapers, magazines, and on the decline in the reading of literature really means, according Internet, but little of it in books and none of it in the to Andrew Solomon, is that “the crisis in reading is a realm of imaginative literature. For people who want crisis in national health.” Not reading, I believe he is say- merely information—just, or mainly, the facts, ma’am— ing, is bad for your health. there is no reason to presume that it is best available in the If that sounds a bit loony, don’t be surprised, for read- form of books. People bring so many motives to their ing is one of those subjects that, like religion, quickly get reading—the need for consolation, the search for pleasure, people worked up, their virtue glands pumping. Perhaps it a quest for the reinforcement of one’s prejudices, the hunt is not going too far to say that for some people, reading is for truth and wisdom—and no one can say with any cer- their religion. In the July 19, 2004, Chicago Tribune, tainty what they take away from it. W. Ralph Eubanks used the occasion of the publication of Still, skewed though “Reading at Risk” may be by “Reading at Risk” to blame the Patriot Act, through its these two items, the demographic fact remains that the implication that reading is dangerous, for its potential for audience for the reading of novels, poems, and plays, even further discouraging reading. “These two events are com- junky ones, fell over the past 20 years from 56 percent to pletely unrelated,” writes Eubanks, director of publishing 47 percent of the nation’s population. The decline, more- for the Library of Congress, who then proceeds to attempt over, was across the board: “In fact,” the survey has it, “lit- to relate them. Eubanks reports that “at the heart of the erary reading rates decreased for men, women, all ethnic NEA survey is the belief that our democratic system and racial groups, all education groups, and all age depends on leaders who can think critically, analyze texts, groups.” and write clearly.” If this were true, My own speculation is that our the United States would have been speeded-up culture—with its FedEx, No mention is made done for around the time of Andrew fax, email, channel surfing, cell-phon- Jackson. ing, fast-action movies, and other ele- of those people who are W. Ralph Eubanks’s statement ments in its relentless race against reminds me of the time I sat on a boredom—has ended in a shortened able to read with a panel on government and the arts national attention span. The quick- with the playwright Edward Albee, ened rhythms of new technology are television set humming who opened the proceeding by not rhythms congenial to the slow blithely announcing that, until such and time-consuming and solitary act away in the background. time as every member of Congress of reading. Sustained reading, sitting had a solid education in the arts, the quietly and enjoying the aesthetic pleasure that words ele- country was in danger of lapsing into fascism. Eubanks gantly deployed on the page can give, contemplating care- himself lapses into mere self-congratulation, writing: “I ful formulations of complex thoughts—these do not seem learned to think clearly by reading great literature, even likely to be acts strongly characteristic of an already books that contained ideas I disagreed with or that dis- jumpy new century. turbed me.” People who openly declare themselves passionate read- ers are, like Eubanks, usually chiefly stating their own or all its shortcomings, “Reading at Risk” has virtue, and hence superiority, and hence, though they are nonetheless permitted some wild jeremiads. The unaware of it, snobbery. “So many books and so little Fmost extreme reaction to the survey I have seen was time,” reads a T-shirt that shows up occasionally at the in an op-ed piece by Andrew Solomon in the New York farmer’s market to which I go. “I adore reading,” I have Times. Under the ominous title of “The Closing of the had people tell me, and then go from there to reveal that American Book,” playing off Allan Bloom’s The Closing of much of what they read is schlock, and of a fairly low the American Mind, Solomon sets out what he feels are the order even for schlock. Young parents who read to their frightening implications for a nation in which the reading infant children are always delighted to report that the kids of literature is radically in decline. The author of an auto- are mad for books; they take it as a sign, a premonition of biographical book on depression, Solomon believes that brilliance and success ahead. the passive activity of watching television, and not read- The assumption—and it is also the assumption behind ing, is a serious factor in the spread of depression in our “Reading at Risk”—is that reading is, per se, good. But is day. Escalating levels of Alzheimer’s, too, he feels can be it, immitigably and always? Surely everything depends ascribed to the lack of engagement of adult minds of the upon what is being read and the degree of perspicacity

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 21 brought to the task. Even so powerful a reader as Samuel returning from it; one’s family, especially in our day when Johnson claimed that his indulgent reading of romances the rearing of children has become a full-time, full-court- deepened his plunge into depression. press affair; friendships and community life; the various The unspoken assumption of Oprah’s Book Club, pleasing distractions that modern life affords the even which has gone back into business, is that reading, like mildly affluent in the form of sports, travel, entertain- broccoli or sound dental hygiene, is intrinsically good for ment, and much else. To me the shock isn’t the discovery you. Something, albeit of minimal significance, to it, I that Americans are reading less; it is the knowledge that suppose, but very minimal. When you are reading, after we read as much as we do, though no one can say, with any all, you are, ipso facto, not raping or pillaging. But might precision, how much of this reading is really serious. you as easily be wasting your time? One of the statistical reportings of “Reading at Risk” When Oprah Winfrey’s book club, which did so much that surprised me is the very low rate of reading which for the fortunes of those authors and publishers lucky occurs among people over 65. Among the middle-classes, enough to have had their books selected by the club, went at any rate, adult education, which features much reading, out of business, a long moan was heard over the land. The would appear to be a highly attended activity. No doubt novelist Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, com- many older people attend such classes out of boredom or plained after being selected for the club (and enjoying the loneliness, but many more, I suspect, are trying to fill in attendant boost in sales), and was roundly vilified as a liter- some of the larger blank spots in their knowledge—to do, ary snob. But what if the books that Oprah’s club endorsed as a former student of my own once put it to me, “a second were mostly works of victimology—whinging, hopeless draft” of their own education. books about dysfunctional families that chiefly reinforced If some people are too secure in their own virtuousness readers in their own self-pity and self-righteous anger? because of their reading, many more feel vastly insecure, The answer, I suspect, would probably be, So what? sure they haven’t read enough books, or the right books. It’s still reading, Roscoe. And reading is good, even read- They are even more certain that they will never catch up, ing books that aren’t themselves all that good. The read- and one day arrive at that august condition known as ing of less than good books, after all, can lead to the read- being “well-read.” The bad news is that, while some peo- ing of superior books, right? The argument that reading ple are better read than others, nobody is well-read even junk is intrinsically a fine thing is a reverse on the enough, ever. Well-read is a condition that, like perpetual old slippery-slope argument. Instead of slipping down- happiness, cannot be achieved in this life. Anyone who ward, the reverse-slippery-slope argument here holds that has been bedeviled by feeling inadequate about his read- the reading of junky books is likely to lead in time to the ing will take comfort, I hope, in Gertrude Stein’s remark reading of good ones. But literary culture has no supply that the happiest day of her life was the day on which she side; it trickles neither down nor up. realized she could not read even all the world’s good Add the general dumbing down in the culture at large, books. and access to the good or great book becomes rather more More and more books are published every year, which improbable. As part of this dumbing down, popular cul- further complicates things, with bad books Greshamly ture cuts a wider and wider swath through higher educa- helping to drive out good. According to R.R. Bowker, the tion. Outside universities, the New York Times Book firm that compiles the database for Books in Print, the Review has long run what it calls “chronicles” of mystery number of books published last year was a shelf-groaning and science fiction books, and has now added comics (or 175,000, an increase of 19 percent over the previous year, visual novels) to its chronicles. If one ever wishes to retain despite the decline in reading generally and the reported one’s fantasies about the good sense of the people in the flatness of book sales. realm of literary taste, one does best never to consult the “Reading at Risk” breaks down its readers into Light bestseller lists. (reading 1-5 books a year), Moderate (6-11 books a year), Frequent (12-49 books a year), and Avid (50 or more books). Alexander Gershenkron, the economic historian, s someone permitted the luxury of reading books who in his day passed for the most erudite man at Har- during what for other people are working hours, I vard, claimed to have read only two books a week, outside A have long been surprised at the amount of reading of reading required by his profession. This meant that, that does get done in America, even though I believe, over a 50-year career of adult reading, he would have been contra “Reading at Risk,” that nowhere near 96 million able to read only 5,000 or so books, a pathetic figure when Americans read serious books. So many other things one considers how many books there are in the world. nowadays demand time. The job, including getting to and Like all surveys, “Reading at Risk” is an example of

22 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 the style of statistical thinking dominant in our time. It’s perfectly sound classical statement of the case for reading, far from sure that statistics are very helpful in capturing so “What Use is Literature?” by Myron Magnet, that origi- idiosyncratic an act as reading, except in a bulky and nally appeared in City Journal and a key paragraph from coarse way. That the Swedes read more novels, poems, and which reads: plays than Americans and the Portuguese read fewer than Literature is a conversation across the ages about our expe- we do is a statistical fact, but I’m not sure what you do rience and our nature, a conversation in which, while there with it, especially when you don’t know the quality of the isn’t unanimity, there is a surprising breadth of agreement. material being read in the three countries. The statistical Literature amounts, in these matters, to the accumulated style of thinking has currently taken over medicine, where wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins with observation, with reporting, ren- it may have some role to play: I am, for example, taking a dering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity pill because a study has shown that 68 percent of the peo- sharpened by imagination. At its greatest, it goes on to ple who take this pill and have a certain condition live 33 show how these facts have coherence and, finally, meaning. percent longer than those who don’t. Dopey though this As it dramatizes what actually happens to concrete individ- uals trying to shape their lives at the confluence of so many is, I play the odds—the pill costs $1 a day—and go along. imperatives, it presents us with concrete and particular But I’m not sure that statistics have much to tell us about manifestations of universal truths. For as the greatest a cultural activity so private as reading books. authors know, the universal has to be embodied in the par- ticular—where, as it is enmeshed in the complexity and contradictoriness of real experience, it loses the clarity and lucidity that only abstractions can possess. erious reading has always been a minority matter. By serious reading I mean the reading of those nov- That is a grand statement of the case, perhaps a little Sels, plays, poems—also philoso- too thumpingly elevated for the taste phies, histories, and other belletristic and temper of our day, but I was writing—that make the most exact- Merely being good struck in reading it by the penetrat- ing efforts to honor their subjects by ing ending of its lengthy final sen- treating them with the exacting com- at school doesn’t mean tence, where the unusual and highly plexity they deserve. Serious readers people have the least interesting claim is made that read- at some point make a usually acciden- ing great imaginative literature helps tal connection with literature, some- interest in things artistic us to lose “the clarity and lucidity times through a teacher but quite as that only abstractions can possess.” often on their own; when young they or intellectual. Ours is supremely the age of come upon a book that blows them abstractions. “Create a concept,” away by the aesthetic pleasure they Ortega y Gasset said, “and reality derive from it, the wisdom they find in it, the point of leaves the room.” Careful reading of great imaginative view it provides them. writing brings reality back into the room, by reminding us Nor do the serious often come from places one might how much more varied, complicated, and rich it is than think. No one social class has a monopoly of them. Nor any social or political concept devised by human beings were they necessarily good students. When I was editor of can hope to capture. Read Balzac and the belief in, say, the American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly sponsored reining in corporate greed through political reform by Phi Beta Kappa, many people assumed the magazine becomes a joke; read Dickens and you’ll know that no was read by the 400,000-odd Phi Beta Kappas roaming social class has any monopoly on noble behavior; read around the world. Not so. When the magazine attempted Henry James and you’ll find the midlife crisis and other an intensive direct-mail campaign to get Phi Beta Kappas pop psychological constructs don’t even qualify as stupid; to subscribe, the results were dismal. What became plain read Dreiser and you’ll be aware that the pleasures of pow- is that merely being good at school didn’t mean that these er are rarely trumped by the advertised desire to do good. people had the least interest in things artistic or intellectu- Read any amount of serious imaginative literature with al. More often than not they did as well as they did at care and you will be highly skeptical of the statistical style school because they were by nature obedient or because of thinking. You will quickly grasp that, in a standard sta- they hoped to get into other (medical, law) schools, thence tistical report such as “Reading at Risk,” serious reading, to earn a good living. always a minority interest, isn’t at stake here. Nothing The final question that “Reading at Risk” avoids is the more is going on, really, than the crise du jour, soon to be point of reading fiction, poems, and plays. It does send its replaced by the report on eating disorders, the harmful- readers, in its “Summary and Conclusions” section, to a ness of aspirin, or the drop in high-school math scores. ♦

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 23 Not Worth a Blue Ribbon The conventional (and unhelpful) wisdom of the 9/11 Commission

bottom up. If we can just get the bureaucracy, ever bigger Y EUEL ARC ERECHT B R M G and more centralized, married to the right management, he 9/11 Commission says it wants to have a better things will follow. Operationally, the commission’s national debate about its report. Actually, report simply does not address the principal problem of that’s not quite true. It would prefer that the America’s intelligence effort against Islamic extremism— Bush administration and Congress, feeling the failure of the CIA to develop a clandestine service with a the heat of its bipartisan mandate, submit methodology and officers capable of penetrating the Islamic quicklyT and completely to its collective and deliberate holy-warrior organizations in Europe, the Middle East, and judgments. The Bush administration apparently would elsewhere. And analytically, the report’s bureaucratic rec- rather not fold so quickly. Yet Senator John Kerry’s imme- ommendations are unlikely to improve the quality of the diate embrace of the lengthy document and its recommen- U.S. government’s thinking about counterterrorism— dations, and the commissioners’ intention to turn them- indeed, they could make intelligence analysis more mono- selves into a continuing, nationwide road show, have chromatic and defined by groupthink than it already is. made this report, like the commission’s televised hearings, Worst of all, the report fails to tackle seriously the into a political drama with possible repercussions on the overarching policy lesson from 9/11—the need to strike elections in November. Senator Kerry would love to first. The failure to preempt—and after al Qaeda’s attacks berate the president, as well as the Republican-controlled on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the failure to provide Congress, for dallying with America’s security and the war self-defense—is the underlying theme of the historical against terrorism, which will probably be the decisive narrative of the 9/11 report. The stark gravity of this issue in the presidential campaign. The administration is theme, and the general merit of the narrative—which is running for cover. It has embraced the core recommenda- well written, incisive, and politically damning (vastly tions of the commission—the creation of a new national more so of the Clintonites’ eight years than of the Bushies’ intelligence director and a new National Counterterrorist eight months)—make the conventional and sometimes Center—without accepting all the bureaucratic rewiring sophomoric quality of the recommendations that follow and fiscal and hiring-and-firing authority that the com- all the more off-putting. mission wants to give to this intelligence czar. The 9/11 Commission dutifully recites all of the It might not be politically astute to play hardball with domestic and international circumstances conducive to the 9/11 Commission, but the Bush administration would the American government’s failure to use military intimi- be on solid intelligence ground in doing so. Though one dation and force as the indispensable counterterrorist can find sound criticisms and recommendations among tools before 9/11. And it’s hard to say which characters in those made by the commission, the report overall is quin- the commission’s story are the most enthusiastic in under- tessential blue-ribbon Washington: conventional, conserva- scoring why the United States couldn’t have confronted tive, and exuberantly bureaucratic in its analysis and solu- Osama bin Laden more aggressively before 9/11. Former tions. Like so many earlier post-Cold War commissions and defense secretary William Cohen, former Central Com- think-tank reports about the state of American intelligence, mand chief General Anthony Zinni, former chairman of it tackles the intelligence community—particularly the the Joint Chiefs Hugh Shelton, the former chief analyst at Central Intelligence Agency—from the top down, not the the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Paul Pillar, President Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger and Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise attorney general Janet Reno deserve honorable mention. Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Two exceptions are the counterterrorist chief in the

24 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 Clinton administration, Richard Clarke, and the CIA case When President Bush remarked to the 9/11 Commis- officer Gary Schroen (with whom I once worked), who sion that even before 9/11 he had been “prepared to take was always free of operational deceit and professional on” the possibility of an American invasion of Afghan- bravado. They are notable for their willingness to use istan—“an ultimate act of unilateralism,” the president force when most around them thought it unwise. thought some would have called it—his words cannot be The layers of resistance to the use of military power in easily dismissed as retrospective bravado. Such an action is the American government are a constant in the years lead- conceivable from the president who led us into Iraq. It cer- ing up to to 9/11. Overcoming that resistance—clearly iden- tainly couldn’t have come from President Clinton. And it is tifying this timidity and rallying America’s political class to utterly unimaginable from John Kerry, had he been presi- a greater willingness to use force in foreign affairs—should dent before 9/11. Honest Democrats might as well admit have been a primary, clearly articulated aim of the 9/11 this difference in vision and will, since, after all, it is the rea- report. It isn’t, of course, because the report is “bipartisan,” son many Democrats want Bush retired as a menace to a and to have made that case might possibly have been to jus- peaceful, multilateral international order. tify President Bush’s preemptive war against Saddam Hus- But let us leave the spirit and politics of 9/11 aside, and sein, or some preemptive attack in the future against a state look at the nuts-and-bolts of the commission’s report. with a terrorist track record and a proven hunger for There are two principal issues with American intelligence weapons of mass destruction. Thus, the antiproliferation vis-à-vis al Qaeda before 9/11. One is that the CIA’s Direc- recommendations in the 9/11 report read as if they could torate of Operations, also known as the clandestine service, have been written at the close of the Cold War, before the had no human sources inside the organization’s command Islamic Republic of Iran, Pakistan, Pakistan’s favorite structure. A foreign agent in the inner circles of al Qaeda “rogue” scientist A.Q. Khan, North Korea, and others would have given us a heads-up on the embassy attacks in made mincemeat of international-treaty regimes. Africa, the botched torpedoing of the USS The Sullivans in the port of Aden in January 2000, the near-sinking of the ruth be told, the historical narrative of the 9/11 USS Cole nine months later, and the 9/11 suicide dive- report, like that of the Senate Select Committee on bombings. The Operations Directorate, wedded to the TIntelligence report on prewar intelligence on Iraq, heavy use of officers with diplomatic and military cover and is pretty powerful ammunition for the Bush administra- culturally and operationally averse to developing training tion to use against Clintonite critics of its wars against and methods to seed either foreign agents or case officers Islamic terrorism and Saddam Hussein. Whether the into foreign organizations, never even tried to develop John Bush administration and pro-war Republicans are agile Walker Lindhs to use against al Qaeda or the Taliban. Yet enough to make that argument against the more rhetori- even one such source could have obviated any need for cally skilled Senator Kerry and the bipartisan 9/11 Com- Washington to “connect the dots.” mission is a different question. According to active-duty CIA case officers, the Near Right after 9/11, the Bush administration chose not to East Division of the clandestine service still has not devel- undertake a sustained historical critique of its predeces- oped new programs for secreting officers or agents into sor’s counterterrorist policies and actions—or a sustained radical Islamic groups. This is considered too unorthodox, defense of its own first eight months in office. Conscious of difficult, and dangerous by clandestine-service manage- having failed to act decisively against bin Laden (and it is ment. So what is the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation? distressing to learn that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul “The CIA Director should emphasize . . . (b) transform- Wolfowitz considered the al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole ing the clandestine service by building its human intelli- in October 2000 “stale” just months later, and not a casus gence capabilities; (c) developing a stronger language pro- belli demanding a full-frontal assault against al Qaeda in gram, with high standards and sufficient financial incen- Afghanistan), members of the Bush administration didn’t tives; (d) renewing emphasis on recruiting diversity loudly point out that they were actually developing a plan among operations officers so they can blend more easily in against bin Laden when the hijackers struck. It certainly foreign cities; (e) ensuring a seamless relationship was not enough. The lengthy transition at the Pentagon between human source collection and signals collection at and Secretary Rumsfeld’s overriding concern with the the operational level; and (f) stressing a better balance threats likely to face us 20 years from now unquestionably between unilateral and liaison operations.” retarded the administration’s early response to al Qaeda. That’s it. In a 447-page report on the intelligence fail- Yet its performance was better than the administration ings of 9/11, the clandestine service gets nine lines. The gave itself credit for, and better than that of the Clinton important bit—“transforming the clandestine service . . .” administration in any eight-month period. —is a 10-word platitude. You can find the same recommen-

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 25 dations in numerous internal CIA reviews from the Casey Since 9/11, personnel of different agencies have been era forward. Numerous external reviews, which didn’t have working together at the Terrorist Threat Integration Cen- the 9/11 Commission’s extensive access to classified infor- ter and elsewhere in the intelligence and law-enforcement mation or its incomparable mandate, have said the same communities. Dissemination codes on cable slug lines things for 15 years. A meaningful exercise for the 9/11 Com- more or less guarantee that the electronic and paper traffic mission would have been to compare and contrast Lang- is automatically shared among the agencies and among ley’s clandestine human-intelligence collection efforts personnel from different agencies in the same organiza- against other terrorist targets. What has the Operations tion. One can surely refine this process further. Still, the Directorate been doing, say, against the Islamic Republic of sharing problem has largely been solved. Iran? How does it deploy its officers? How have Iranian Undeterred, the commission would have us create a big agents been recruited? How good has been the intelligence? intelligence bureaucracy associated with its new director. Have there been problems? Count on it: The ethos that would develop under him One can think of other terrorist organizations to add to would be no more competitive than it was collegial. Differ- the review. None is exactly like al Qaeda, the first ecumeni- ing opinions within America’s intelligence community cally inclined, globally motivated, anti-American Sunni would tend to become fewer, not more, as a new bureaucrat- holy-warrior organization. Nonetheless, the comparisons ic spirit radiated downward from the man who controlled would have allowed Americans, especially senior officials all the purse strings and wrote the performance reports of who usually know little about Langley’s world, to see the the most important players in the intelligence community. CIA’s track-record against all the terrorist targets in the American intelligence could well become more focused on Middle East. The Iranian parallel would have been partic- the bureaucratic gaming that would be intense as the new ularly disturbing, since the clerical regime, with its nuclear structure solidified. It is hard to see how the quality of ambitions and affection for terrorism, is a growing prob- American intelligence analysis would improve through this lem for the United States. Such comparisons would have reorganization. Competitive analysis is likely to be better in shown the shortcomings to be systemic. organizations that are truly independent of one another. The commission appears to be in love with synergies and he commission was somewhat more detailed in economies of scale. But this isn’t the way it works in the recounting the failures of American counterterror- intelligence business, operationally or analytically. Five Tist analysis—the “connect-the-dots” episodes, hundred analysts do not necessarily do a better job than which if they’d gone in our favor might have uncovered fifty. Fifty case officers deployed correctly will certainly do a the 9/11 plot. Dozens of pages tell the story of the snafus. better job than 500 deployed as they are now. This discussion is undoubtedly worthwhile, but the rec- As the commission has detailed well, American intelli- ommendations that follow don’t make much sense. The gence is in poor shape. It would be a good idea to shock it. primary issue at stake analytically was the failure of the But trying to do to intelligence gathering and analysis U.S. intelligence and security agencies to share their infor- what General Motors did to car production isn’t the way mation in a timely and illuminating manner. This failure to make American counterterrorism more effective is the reason for the commission’s two largest bureaucratic against an enemy who is crafty and adaptable and going to recommendations—the creation of a National Counterter- come at us in small platoons. The great medieval historian rorism Center, built on the foundation of the current Ter- Ibn Khaldun wrote in his masterpiece of cyclical history, rorist Threat Integration Center at Langley, and a new the Prolegomena, that barbarian invasions were the key to intelligence czar, the national intelligence director, who revitalizing societies and their stale bureaucracies. In a would supercede the director of central intelligence as the sense, we had our barbarian invasion on 9/11. The com- most important intelligence official in the government. mission’s response to that invasion is to hurl wiring dia- With considerably more power than the DCI over the grams. These are not likely to kill al Qaeda. America’s national intelligence budget, and the ability to hire and military might, combined with a determination to push fire, in consultation with the president, the key office political reform in the Middle East—that is, to break the heads below him, he would be able to corral and focus the deadly nexus between Middle Eastern tyranny and Islam- intelligence community. The new center would gather in ic extremism—is the formula essential to our eventual all the bright, essential counterterrorist minds to ensure success. Intelligence will matter along the way. September that nothing slipped through the cracks and that analyti- 11, however, seems not to have been the event that will cal and operational contingencies were better foreseen. shock the Washington establishment into serious reform Sounds okay in theory. However, on the key issue of of the intelligence community. For that, we will have to sharing information, all of this is probably unnecessary. wait for other barbarians to come through the gate. ♦

26 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 Purple America Forget polarization—the country is really an even mix of blue and red.

BY MICHAEL ROBINSON which for 40 years has been considered not just sunny but solidly Republican. And yet once-red New Mexico now has & SUSAN ELLIS a very blue governor, Bill Richardson. End up in Arizona, n June 1, Stephanie Herseth, a true-blue what was once Goldwater country and is still color-coded Democrat, won a special election for the bright red on The Map. Arizona also has a new governor lone House seat in the blood-red state of who is blue. California is blue, so we won’t, as the Californi- South Dakota. But in a state that gave ans say, go there. But even Valley Girls know that Califor- George Bush 60 percent of its vote back in nia just installed as chief executive Arnold Schwarzeneg- 2000,O Herseth’s win turns out to be the rule, not the excep- ger—a man of many colors. tion. The two senators from South Dakota are also Demo- And what about the other blue states? Are they as faith- crats. Political “blue flu” infects both Dakotas. North less to their party as the red states we just visited? In a Dakota also elects one House member along with its two word, yes. Al Gore wound up winning only three states by senators. Again, all three are Democrats, even though Bush 20 points or more: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New did even better in North Dakota than in South. York. All three have Republican governors. In fact, New Two blood-red states. Six true-blue congressional York has not elected a Democratic governor since Mario Democrats. Not a Republican in sight. How can this be Cuomo in 1990; Massachusetts hasn’t elected a Democrat happening in a political environment that is assumed to be to its top office since Michael Dukakis in 1986; Rhode polarized state by state, region by region? The answer is Island hasn’t elected a Democratic governor for 14 years. that the assumption is wrong. The theory of red states ver- Indeed, seven of the ten states Al Gore won by the largest sus blue states is about as wide of the mark as it is widely majorities all currently have Republican governors. accepted. For those who prefer something a bit more systematic From the Capitol dome, one can look east into blue than a travelogue, we have checked all 50 states for loyalty Maryland. But Maryland has a red governor. One can look to their color. Every state has at least three offices elected west and see a reddish Virginia; but Virginia has a bluish statewide: the governor and the two senators. A polarized chief executive. Climb down from the Capitol and travel state in a polarized nation, you might think, would com- west by southwest, through the American version of the monly show all three officials either red or blue. Yet only 16 Red Belt. Let’s see how far one can go into the Red Belt states have a political triumvirate that is monochromatic and still find blue governors. Travel down toward Ten- and matches the state’s Campaign 2000 color. Thirty-three nessee: blue governor. Cross the Mississippi into Mis- states fail the test; their statewide elected leadership is a souri: blue governor. Then take your pick: Kansas or mix of red and blue. The 50th state is unique. George W. Oklahoma—two longtime red states, both with recently Bush didn’t break a sweat to win in hot and humid elected blue governors. Louisiana in 2000, but in 2004 all three statewide leaders Drive the Oklahoma panhandle into the Sun Belt, are Democrats.

Michael Robinson retired from the government department at o much for The States. What about The People? The Georgetown University in 1993 and serves as a consultant to the best way to answer that question is to ask them. No Pew Research Center. Susan Ellis is a senior analyst at Market Spollster with any sense would ask people whether Strategies, Inc., in Livonia, Michigan. they see themselves as polarized. Terminology like that is

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 27 Greek to them. But pollsters do ask voters to describe themselves politically. The Pew Research Center has been doing just that for more than a dozen years. Pew asks, “In general, would you describe yourself as very conservative, con- servative, moderate, liberal, or very liber- al?” In May of this year, a meager 5 percent labeled themselves “very conservative.” The exact same percentage said “very lib- eral.” Forty-one percent said “moderate.” So there are four times as many moderates as “wingers”—right or left. What about in years past? Consider the politically charged year of 1994, when Newt Gingrich rose from obscurity to become the first Republican speaker of the House in four decades. The numbers from 1994 are virtually identical with those from 2004. The wings accounted for 10 percent of the public at large; the moderate catego- ry contained 39 percent of the total. After KRT / Chuck Kennedy Congressional hearings on the media coverage of the 2000 election, February 14, 2001 ten eventful years, there’s been no change in how and where the public positions itself. The watch- Americans were not especially polarized at the time. So, word then and now is centrism. taken together, 1860 and 1960 prove that being evenly Pew’s most recent and wide-ranging study of polariza- divided is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for tion, completed in 2003, finds that Democrats and Repub- polarization. licans now differ more widely on issues and values than at There’s a serious definition problem here as well. Polar- any time in the last 15 years. Fair enough. But we checked ization is not a modest increase in differences between the 50-plus items that Pew included in that survey and Democrats and Republicans. That definition is both found the nation as a whole was not closely divided on myopic and alarmist. Polarization worthy of the name most issues and values. In fact, about a quarter of all those involves an intensity and hostility that engenders some lev- questions indicated a public closely divided, while there el of political violence, or something akin to it. At mini- was something approaching national consensus on a third mum, real polarization must produce an extremist move- of them. ment with significant public support. Politicians know all this, even if the conventional wis- Think 1968. Remember the ugliness of George Wal- dom doesn’t. Why else would George W. Bush have lace’s Independent party, a backlash movement that strained to pass the largest entitlement package in 40 attracted nearly 10 million very hostile voters, and even years? Why else would John Kerry now oppose gay mar- garnered 46 votes in the Electoral College. Compared with riage and favor an additional 40,000 soldiers for the Wallace voters, Ralph Nader’s 3 million voters in 2000 are Army? They do all this because each realizes that for the few in number and very bourgeois. Political grievances in vast majority of Americans extremism is still a vice, and the past have spawned the Klan, the SDS, and the Nation moderation is still a virtue. of Islam. Political grievances since 2000 have given us the Why, then, the obsession with polarization? The most “Deaniacs.” The 1860s and the late 1960s epitomized gen- important reason is an error in logic. Pundits and political uine political polarization. The “50-50” politics of this scientists have equated “evenly divided” with “polarized.” decade do not. Big mistake. In 1860, one-third of the states were on their way to hen there is the tyranny of “Map 2000”—the becoming the Confederacy. Two-thirds would remain in unfortunate byproduct of Electoral College realities the Union. America was not equally divided then, but she Tand television’s ongoing standard operating proce- was most certainly polarized. In 1960, Americans were dures. In the Electoral College, the states matter far more evenly divided, at least as to presidential preference. Yet than the voters. In television journalism, the visuals matter

28 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 way too much. It was great for television that the blue states This academic establishment balked when it became and the red states seemed to be oh-so-regionalized. But we clear that coherence was increasing just as the Republicans have been color-blinded by The Map. were gaining ground. We suspect that if the Democrats The best example is the West Coast. TV’s uniformly were still the majority party and still controlled Congress bright-blue coloring of Oregon, Washington, and Califor- and the presidency, the professoriate and the press would nia implied that the coast was all Al Gore’s. Gore did carry probably consider these changes to represent good, respon- all three states, but not nearly as dramatically as the color- sible government, not dreaded polarization. ing implied. Had less than half of one percent of the total Polarization is mostly an urban legend, imagined by the West Coast vote shifted to Bush, two of the three Pacific chattering classes of the metropolitan centers of politics coast states would have turned the networks’ bright red. and media. Still, as in any legend, there is truth here. But it The Gore Coast was a graphics-driven exaggeration. The isn’t new and it isn’t news. For decades white southerners Pacific states were not nearly as solid for Gore as the colors have gravitated toward the Republicans. So the lion’s share looked. The same thing happened in the Great Lakes of conservatives are now in the conservative party. The region. The Map painted all but two of the Great Lakes abandoned Democrats have been left with almost all of the states as solidly for Gore, making the North Coast appear to liberals. That’s mainly how we became the “50-50” nation. be Gore country. But move 2 percent of the 20 million votes If this transformation meant that neither blue voters cast in the Great Lakes states and the entire region would nor red would cross the color line, then this might be cause have been red instead of two-thirds blue. for alarm. That hasn’t happened. If this transformation led The Map has become the single most indelible contemporary politics to the next level down—back into metaphor in contemporary electoral politics. But this the streets or toward extremist movements—then one graphic metaphor exaggerates almost everything about might be right to raise alarms about Polarization. But that those politics. hasn’t happened either. In fact, the public response to the Another factor here is political expediency. Leaders in death of Ronald Reagan implies that we are not now at war both parties have their own reasons for pushing the polar- with ourselves. ization theme. Democrats know that since 2001 there has been a tilt toward the GOP. But calling that shift a minor ore than 30 years ago, there was a popular slo- realignment would be bad PR for Democrats. Better to call gan about the political crisis that was raging at the phenomenon Polarization! That term characterizes Mthe time: “We have met the enemy and he is Republican gains as somehow sinister, even dysfunctional. us.” Since 2001, we all know who the enemy is. And he Republicans have their own motives for embracing the isn’t us. Americans recognize full well that their real ene- myth of polarized politics. It’s a good, all-purpose excuse my comes not from an American state that is either red or for a party that holds the White House and controls the blue; he comes from a nation-state that has failed (like Congress but can’t pass much of its legislative agenda. Why Afghanistan) or is failing (like Pakistan). How ironic that can’t George Bush get his energy package adopted? Why polarization theory should become received wisdom at a can’t the Republicans get 100 percent—instead of the actu- time when nationalistic fervor is greater than it has been al 80 percent—of Bush’s judicial appointments confirmed? for at least a decade. It can’t be the fault of the Republicans. So it must be the Still, this isn’t a political picnic we’re experiencing in newly polarized political environment that’s to blame. 2004. We can expect a nasty campaign and overheated For Democrats and Republicans, the new polarization rhetoric from both sides. But what was a 19th-century max- is akin to the old partisanship. It’s something both sides im remains a 21st-century reality: Politics ain’t beanbag. use to explain away almost anything and everything. Even Yet almost nothing the public has done since Campaign the press has a self-serving motive for hyping polarization. 2000 could be accurately described as antipodal or extrem- Like partisanship, the specter of polarization gives the ist, let alone radical. watchdog press a system-wide malfunction about which to How, then, best to describe the politics of the last few bark. years? Each party has done about as well as the other in Journalists aren’t the only ones barking. For decades attracting voters, but the voters themselves have remained liberal academics actually argued in favor of polarization. middle of the road. So we ought not to be too melodramatic Back then, political science labeled that prospect “responsi- in the labeling. ble, coherent party politics.” But now that we do have more Kids might call this the politics of “Even Steven.” coherent and consistent parties—even without violence or Adults should prefer something more adult, but no more extremism—political scientists have joined the media in sensational. How about the era of Much Too Close To decrying the changes they once advocated. Call. ♦

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 29 The Untold Story of the Remarkable Rise of the Bush Dynasty

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Land of Arts Hope and Fear Nathaniel Hawthorne and the American past By WILFRED M. MCCLAY

f all the complaints lev- eled at the canon of nine- teenth-century American Obooks, the hardest to credit is the charge that they are con- ventional and comfortable—like pic- turesque little pleasure boats plying the sunny surface of American life.

How then does one account for the A surviving daguerreotype of Hawthorne. Courtesy: Library Congress. unsettling preoccupations of those authors: the desperate God-grappling of American literature. For much of fellow who also turns out to be a hyp- of Herman Melville, the macabre fixa- the twentieth century, an acquaintance ocrite and a bit of a coward. The tions of Edgar Allan Poe, the fevered with The Scarlet Letter was considered woman, an impressively resilient spirit omnisexuality of Walt Whitman, the an essential part of American educa- who bore a love-child out of that nature-intoxicated anarchism of Henry tion. But it’s hard to imagine a more furtive encounter, is publicly humili- David Thoreau? This doesn’t sound bizarre candidate for a literary rite of ated. The minister chooses to conceal like the stuff of which genteel outings his part in the matter, although pro- at the lake are made. In fact, such a list Hawthorne in Concord found feelings of guilt gnaw away at makes one wonder whether there has by Philip McFarland him. The cuckolded husband schemes ever been a great national literature Grove, 341 pp., $26 to get even, while degenerating into an more full of craziness and inflationary ever-more loathsome monster in the Hawthorne excess, more indifferent to measure A Life process. In the end, everyone lives (or and proportion, more riddled with by Brenda Wineapple dies) unhappily ever after. Pretty anxiety and self-doubt. Random House, 512 pp., $16.95 depressing stuff, when you consider Americans seem generally unaware how much better off everyone would of their literature’s disquieting fea- passage—or one better calculated to have been, if they could just have . . . tures. Take, for example, the exalted establish a permanent aversion to well, gotten over it and moved on. status accorded The Scarlet Letter, classic literature. It’s hard to improve on what one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 master- This seems especially true for stu- my students said during a class discus- piece, the first indisputably great work dents who’ve grown up in the age of sion of Whittaker Chambers’s passion- Bill and Monica. What they find in ate and gloomy autobiography, Witness. Author, most recently, of Religion Returns to The Scarlet Letter is the story of a minis- “The dude just needed to chill,” he the Public Square, Wilfred M. McClay ter and a married woman who had a murmured, gazing down at his finger- teaches history and humanities at the University love affair and feel bad about it after- tips, a tiny smile playing upon his of Tennessee at Chattanooga. ward—especially the man, a sensitive lips—affectless contempt expressed in

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 31 alism and consensus.” Other critics, such as Jane Tompkins, concluded that Hawthorne’s high literary reputation has been undeserved, having been propped up artificially by patriarchal networks of critical opinion. It increas- ingly seems that the only point of keeping Hawthorne around is to have him handy as a whipping boy. Thankfully, though, an important counterbalance to these influences has come from the biographical literature on Hawthorne. Generally produced by writers operating on the fringe of the academy, that literature presents Hawthorne in a richer and more multi-

Library of Congress dimensional way. It’s too much to hope Hawthorne’s birthplace in Salem. that the recent appearance of Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne: A Life and perfect twenty-first-century pitch. The imaginative world—his insistence that Philip McFarland’s Hawthorne in Con- other students nodded agreement. the weight of the sinful human past, in cord signal a turning of the scholarly They say the same, and then some, one’s own life, in the life of one’s fam- tide. But both books are well written about Nathaniel Hawthorne and his ily, and in the life of one’s city and and sensibly argued, with only a mod- characters. Leaving aside the spidery country, can never be denied or wished icum of interpretive excess or psycho- intricacies of the prose in The Scarlet away—is completely lost on a genera- analytic license. They may help keep Letter, and the lack of action in its plot, tion raised on smug therapeutic alive the possibility of a more respect- what really dooms the novel for platitudes. ful audience for Hawthorne, during a present-day readers is the alien intensi- Given such difficulties, one might dry season that dismisses him too ty of its moral universe. Part of have hoped that the academy at least easily, and may need him more than it Hawthorne’s message makes sense to would keep Hawthorne’s reputation suspects. them, the part they’ve been trained to alive. But Hawthorne has had a rough hear—that the Puritan religious and time of it in recent years. The problem, orn in Salem on the Fourth of July social code (as he understood it) was of course, is politics. Much of the Bin 1804, Hawthorne was a paradox excessive, cruel, sexist, and inhuman, Hawthorne scholarship emanating from start to finish: The isolated and that it wrung all beauty and joy from from academic English departments brooding child of an old and rooted life, and that the actions of the aveng- during the past two decades has been family, he became the first great liter- ing husband, Roger Chillingworth, dominated by “New Historicism,” ary voice of a boisterous, restless new though he was technically the wronged which has tended to reduce nation. He found endless ways of party, were ultimately far more sinister Hawthorne to little more than the sum embodying this tension, in a life that than those of the unconfessed adul- of his unacceptably skeptical or reac- was both cautiously provincial and terer, the Reverend Arthur Dimmes- tionary positions on the burning issues perpetually unsettled. He was both dale, and his near-blameless lover, of his day: slavery, abolitionism, deeply proud of his Puritan family Hester Prynne. women’s rights, the conditions of the pedigree and deeply troubled by it, not laboring classes, movements of radical least by the fact that his great-grandfa- ut what they can’t comprehend is social reform. To make matters worse, ther John Hathorne had been one of Bwhat all the fuss is about—why he was an ardent American nationalist the judges in the infamous Salem Dimmesdale felt so guilty, why he and expansionist. Surely an author so witchcraft trials. It was part of the fam- couldn’t confess, why what he and politically benighted must have pro- ily tradition, one that formed the basis Hester did was in fact a grievous sin, duced works that “inscribed” all the for his novel The House of the Seven why our sins and the sins of our fore- worst features of American life. Gables, that the family house retained a bears are inseparable from who we are, Accordingly, in an influential 1991 curse brought down upon it by that why those sins must be paid for, why it book, Sacvan Bercovitch disparaged forebear’s deeds. Hawthorne may have is almost impossible to pay for them The Scarlet Letter as an ideologically changed the spelling of his own sur- fully, and yet why sins that remain conservative work of “thick propa- name partly to avail himself of the unacknowledged and unconfessed and ganda,” a “vehicle of continuity” that American promise of a fresh begin- unpaid will surely destroy our souls. opposed radical change and celebrated ning. But at the same time he never The central premise in Hawthorne’s the tawdry American icons of “gradu- ceased to acknowledge and even wal-

32 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 low in that heritage—in ways that pro- distinctive American liter- foundly affected his view not only of ature was, as Brenda Wine- his own past but also of America. apple says, “the secret His father was a sea captain who ambition lodged like a died in Dutch Surinam of yellow fever thorn in his own heart.” when Nathaniel was four. So he grew That ambition would be up with his eccentric, reclusive mother a long time in the realiza- and sisters in an entirely female house. tion. After college, he His own tendencies toward introver- returned to Salem, and sion and bookishness were only accen- spent a mysterious twelve tuated by a youthful foot injury, which years living in his moth- kept him indoors a great deal of the er’s home, incubating his time. By the time he went off to college talent, publishing stories at Bowdoin in 1821, he was already here and there (usually in fairly certain that he would not aspire near-complete anonymi- to any of the conventional masculine ty), and struggling with careers of business, the clergy, the law, the fears and loathings that or medicine. Instead, he was already such a self-imposed isola- setting his sights upon becoming “an tion must have imposed Author, and relying for support upon upon him. Others found my pen.” But those ambitions also had it incomprehensible that a nationalistic tinge to them, for he Hawthorne, who was an hoped, as he told his mother, to pro- extraordinarily handsome duce works that would be regarded as man, with captivating eyes equals to the “proudest productions of that were, in the admiring the scribbling sons of John Bull.” words of Elizabeth Pea-

The years at Bowdoin were impor- body, “like mountain lakes CORBIS tant for a variety of reasons. He came seeking to reflect the heav- The Old Manse, Hawthorne’s house in Concord. out of his shell a bit and initiated some ens,” chose to withdraw of the most lasting relationships of his into the blue chamber of his soul. One could plausibly argue that life, notably his friendship with Hawthorne was at his most inspired in Franklin Pierce, a future president of ut his exalted sense of authorial his early short fiction. Certainly the the United States. In the company of Bcalling was accompanied by an reader can see the characteristic lines Pierce and other Bowdoin friends, he equally powerful apprehension that the of his thought, in ways that would not discovered a passion for partisan poli- work of a writer could not qualify as be much altered or improved upon in tics, settling easily into the political “man’s work.” Writing became, as the later work. The penchant for sym- sympathies of a Jacksonian Democrat, Wineapple neatly puts it, “a source of bolism and allegory is there—together an outlook that would stay with him shame as much as pleasure, and a with the spooky echoes of past sins and for the rest of his life and help immu- necessity he could neither forgo nor the creepy defamiliarization of ordi- nize him against the Whiggery and entirely approve.” Yet out of this tor- nary life, which is seen to hide strange- evangelical reformism that dominated tured state would finally come, slowly ness and horror beneath its thin his literary circles. but surely, a body of short fiction that veneer. These early stories all show the Such a rough-and-tumble practical- would eventually make up his Twice- typically static Hawthornian charac- mindedness in politics might seem out Told Tales (1837), the work with which ters frozen compulsively in moral of character with his authorial ambi- he finally emerged in the public eye. dilemmas, often self-chosen, and they tions, but the two were united by a This collection of tales, all of them pre- all run on a prose style that conveys strong sense of American cultural des- viously published, included some of his gauzy, dreamlike distance rather than tiny. The commencement address at best-known short stories, “The Foun- novelistic clarity and specificity. Hawthorne’s 1825 graduation—deliv- tain of Youth” (later retitled “Dr. Hei- Take for example the baffling story ered by fellow graduate Henry degger’s Experiment”), “The Minis- “Wakefield,” which had first appeared Wadsworth Longfellow and entitled ter’s Black Veil,” and “The May-Pole of two years earlier in New-England Mag- “Our Native Writers”—offered a pas- Merry Mount.” He had already written azine. The story is presented as an sionate plea for a new American litera- such classic stories as “Roger Malvin’s imaginative reconstruction derived ture, “springing up in the shadow of Burial,” “My Kinsman, Major from scraps in an old periodical, just our free institutions.” Such words Molineux,” and “Young Goodman the kind of framing device Hawthorne spoke directly to Hawthorne: The Brown,” but chose, for his usual myste- loved to use. An ordinary Londoner desire to have a hand in creating such a rious reasons, not to include them. named Wakefield—“a man of habits”

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 33 field decides to return The great virtue of Philip McFarland’s and put an end to “the charming and immensely readable little joke” that he has Hawthorne in Concord is to show us the played “at his wife’s writer not as the radically isolated man expense.” We are left in he imagined himself, but as a member the dark about how he of a lively community of writers and was received. But Haw- thinkers: Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, thorne means the story the Alcotts, the Manns, and the to show how easily each Peabodys. of us, if diverted from But Concord, although a place of the comfortable and unusual happiness for Hawthorne in familiar, can find him- the early years of his marriage, was far self “the Outcast of the less important to him than Salem, and Universe.” the fact that he lived in Concord on It is vintage Haw- three separate occasions (and is buried thorne, a weird and there) does not appear to have trans- troubling little story, lated into the town’s having any partic- filled with misogyny ular significance for him. The more and bottomless despair. enduring reality about Hawthorne Yet writing such a tale, seems to have been his restlessness, his far from being an act of inability to be content in any setting— symbolic transgression, whether Salem, Maine, Boston, Con- Matthew Brady’s was surely an act of self- cord, West Roxbury, Lenox, West portrait of Hawthorne disclosure, and self- Newton, or Liverpool, where his mortification—for friend President Pierce had appointed Wakefield was, in part, him U.S. consul. Even Rome, a place

Bettmann / CORBIS Hawthorne himself, or where the past was never dead, Hawthorne as he feared reminded him in the end of a rotting —leaves his wife, allegedly on a short he was becoming. “He always puts corpse. The sense of place was, for business trip to the country, of no more himself in his books,” opined his Hawthorne, a haunted and confining than a few days. But, for reasons that sister-in-law Mary, wife of the great thing at best. are never explained, involving some educator Horace Mann, “he cannot If, however, one thinks less about deep and inscrutable psychological help it.” And as Hawthorne confessed place than about milieu, then McFar- compulsion, he decides not to return. poignantly to Mary’s sister, Sophia land’s angle of vision becomes very He does not go to another woman, or Peabody, who would soon be his wife: useful, for it reminds us of how to some faraway place to begin a new “Thou only has taught me that I have a enmeshed Hawthorne was in many of life. Instead, he rents rooms on a street heart. . . . [W]ithout thy aid, my best the most characteristic enthusiasms of near his home, and stays in them, liv- knowledge of myself would have been his day. It is customary to see him as ing there incognito for twenty years. merely to know my own shadow—to the soberly pessimistic countervoice to He was “spell-bound,” an illustration watch it flickering on the wall, and Emerson’s wild optimism, the caution- of the principle that “an influence, mistake its fantasies for my own real ary voice of the repressed past, the beyond our control, lays its strong actions.” unredeemed present, and the unre- hand on every deed which we do, and He knew that the literary artist formable future. That is true, but not weaves its consequences into an iron could easily become a heartless man true enough. Hawthorne was a Jack- tissue of necessity.” like Wakefield, “dissevered from the sonian Democrat, not a Burkean neo- During those twenty years, Wake- world,” reduced to being an observer, a Calvinist, let alone a neomedievalist field feels compelled occasionally to wraith cut off from the world he claims crypto-Catholic. spy on his wife, although always with to understand. Brenda Wineapple’s He shared with his longtime friend an electrifying feeling of terror at the biography adroitly traces the twists John O’Sullivan a belief in “the essen- thought of being found out. He sees and turns in this relentless struggle of tial equality of all humanity,” in which her grow old and portly, adjusting authorship, showing it as a continu- “all ranks of men would begin life on a resignedly to her widowhood, a ously formative theme in Hawthorne’s fair field”—and believed that it was woman whose “regrets have either entire career. America’s destiny to spread this doc- died away, or have become so essential trine across the continent. And it was to her heart, that they would be poorly f course, there is more to he, and not Emerson or Thoreau, who exchanged for joy.” Then, just as sud- OHawthorne’s life than his years was willing to go live in George Rip- denly as his decision to depart, Wake- of painful and anonymous alienation. ley’s utopian experimental community

34 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 Brook Farm for seven months (and men.” McFarland says then, like any red-blooded American that “Earth’s Holocaust” opportunist, turn his experience into is less a story than a publishable prose with The Blithedale sketch “reflecting on Romance). contemporary issues.” These readings may or should like to sail on and on for- may not be accurate. But “I ever,” Hawthorne mused when they are essentially triv- returning from Rome, “and never ial in comparison to the touch the shore again.” But the alien- profounder meanings ated artist, with his joys and fears, is by that leap off of these now an exhausted, even tiresome, pages today. theme. We hardly need the assistance These irony-filled of Hawthorne to understand it, and if allegorical tales, with his reputation were to hang on that their constant reversals alone he would not really deserve the and inversions, are also high status he is granted. warnings about the In fact, however, there are deeper moral perils of human themes in Hawthorne that may never efforts to gain mastery before have been as salient as they are over the terms of human in our own times. Consider a story existence. What a bitter such as “The Birth-mark,” in which a sadness it would be, scientist insists on removing from his Hawthorne reflected at beautiful wife’s left cheek a crimson the end of “Earth’s Holo- birthmark, her sole imperfection, and caust,” if “Man’s age-

inadvertently kills her in the process. long endeavor for perfec- CORBIS Or “Earth’s Holocaust,” in which a fire tion” served only to The House of Seven Gables in Salem. begun to rid the world of its “accumu- “render him the mock- lation of worn-out trumpery” ends up ery of the Evil Principle, from the fatal to reembrace the Christian theology of consuming everything and leaving the circumstance of an error at the very his forebears in all its details, his invo- world no better. Or “The Celestial root of the matter.” And what was that cation of an “original wrong” was a Rail-road,” in which the hard path of error? It was lodged in the heart, “the long and respectful bow to the explana- Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is replaced little, yet boundless sphere”; all the tory power of their most fundamental by an easy and convenient railway, misery of the world derives from that assertion. which carries its comfortable passen- “original wrong.” The human heart is gers straight to Hell. Or “Rappaccini’s where the problem is, and where the t its best, Hawthorne’s prose Daughter,” a complex allegory in only solution can be found. “If we go A achieves an uncanny quality in which a beautiful young woman, as an no deeper than the Intellect,” he which the fiber of familiar reality gives experiment in the control of nature by warned, striving, “with merely that way. McFarland casually compares this her scientist father, has been raised on feeble instrument, to discern and rec- effect to the “magical realism” of a diet of poisonous plants to make her tify what is wrong,” then the result will Gabriel García Márquez, but that self-sufficient—and ends up being be no more substantial than a dream. utterly fails to capture the terrifying killed by her lover when he adminis- Hawthorne’s appeal to the heart moral energy swirling through ters an antidote to the poison. over the intellect aligns him, once Hawthorne’s writing. Especially in a Unfortunately, the interpretations again, with the romanticism that was handful of his most powerful short of such stories offered by both Wineap- sweeping through the salons of Boston stories, Hawthorne’s work forces us to ple and McFarland fall short. Wineap- and Concord in his day. So too do the observe the essential moral value of ple sees “The Birth-mark” strictly as a dreamy and gothic elements in his fic- fear. This hasn’t been a popular thing tale of sexual anxiety, in which “a man tion. But if Hawthorne was partly a to notice since the Enlightenment’s confronts marriage, and hence sexu- romantic, he was even more of a disenchantment of the world, and it is ality, with horror.” And she reads Hebrew prophet, a throwback to the completely at odds with the therapeu- “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as a “bio- Isaiah who reviled the hardened and tic ethos that now reigns. If the fear of graphical palimpsest” in which the evil self-satisfied hearts of his contempo- God is the beginning of wisdom, how- doctor is his father-in-law, or perhaps raries—and prophesied that the hid- ever, it is so partly because such fear Emerson, and the young woman “rep- den things would come to the light and protects us against the fatal presump- resents a woman’s struggle to free her- the pitiful wisdom of the wise would tion of mastery—a fearlessness much self ” from confinement and “irresolute be destroyed. If he was not quite able more to be feared than fear itself. ♦

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 35 the Cuban and Nicaraguan armies B A sweep through Central America in a & Latin domino effect that finally engulfs Mexico; Western Europe (what we now call Old Europe) goes Green Morning in and nonnuclear, and NATO dissolves. The United States, we are told, “stands alone.” America In the film’s opening scene, a high- school teacher lecturing on military Rewatching the movie Red Dawn, twenty years later. strategy (that of Genghis Khan, no BY MATTHEW REES AND ROBERT SCHLESINGER less) is interrupted when he sees dozens of parachutists landing just outside the classroom. “I would say his week marks the twenti- was largely unknown at the time but they are way off course,” he under- eth anniversary of the first went on to achieve varying degrees of states. (Ironically, during filming, movie released with what stardom: If you grew up in the 1980s, extras in full costume actually were Twas, at the time, the new rat- there’s something weirdly entertaining blown off course, and at least one had ing of “PG-13.” Called Red Dawn, it about watching the Brat Pack muja- to convince unwitting locals that he was a near-future tale of teenage guer- hedeen of Patrick Swayze, Charlie wasn’t a Russian invader and thus rillas defending their hometown after Sheen, Jennifer Grey, Lea Thompson, shouldn’t be shot.) When the teacher the Soviets had invaded. and C. Thomas Howell wielding RPGs goes outside to investigate, a para- While the film was widely (though and heavy machine guns as they set trooper berates him in Russian and not universally) panned, it remains out to kill the Commies for their mom- then mows him down. The rest of the more than the answer to a good trivia mies. “You’re momma’d be real invaders start firing on the classroom, question about movie ratings. It has proud,” a downed Air Force pilot which is still full of students. Those endured the passing of the Cold War to (Powers Boothe) tells Wolverine leader who aren’t hit—one is left with his occupy a niche of its own in American Swayze. body hanging out the schoolroom win- culture. Something of a cult classic in For that matter, there is undeniable dow—try to flee as they are sprayed right-wing circles, the film has been appeal about a film layered with a rock- with gunfire. accorded the ultimate compliment by ribbed ideology that sends it happily the denizens of mainstream subversive careening between patriotism and pure n short order, the invaders occupy comedy: It has been spoofed in an camp. Opening shortly before the 1984 Ithe fictional Calumet, Colorado (Red episode of South Park. Republican National Convention in Dawn was actually filmed in Las The film also endures in the mili- Dallas, where Ronald Reagan would Vegas, New Mexico), and the rest of tary: When American troops were declare that it was “morning in Amer- the movie is the story of how eight planning the mission that would ulti- ica,” Red Dawn painted a picture of a teenagers eke out an existence in the mately lead them to Saddam Hussein, dark, stormy midnight in the nation. If nearby mountain range and wage an they called it “Operation Red Dawn”— Reagan was the smiling, optimistic implausible (though seemingly suc- and the two locations targeted in the face of the GOP, Red Dawn presented cessful) five-month guerrilla war raid were named “Wolverine One” and the party’s apocalyptic, fear-mongering against the occupying forces. They “Wolverine Two,” in honor of the side, with grim glee and all the subtle- adopt as their name the mascot of their movie’s band of teens-turned-freedom- ty of an Al Sharpton speech. This was, high school: Wolverines. fighters. The Army captain who came after all, before the heady days of Gor- The movie’s explanation of how the up with the label, Geoffrey McMurray, bachev, glasnost, and perestroika—and Communists penetrated America’s said afterward, “It was a patriotic, pro- the formula worked. Red Dawn was defenses could have been scripted by American movie. ...I think all of us in number one at the box office its open- Pat Buchanan, though it is told by the military have seen Red Dawn.” (On ing weekend, displacing a somewhat Powers Boothe, the Air Force lieu- a less uplifting note, Timothy McVeigh less ideological film, Ghostbusters. tenant colonel who has been shot was also said to have been an avid fan Before the opening credits roll for down and brings news from FA— of the film.) Red Dawn, the film uses stark yellow “Free America.” So, why does Red Dawn endure? lettering against the backdrop of an all- “First wave of the attack came in Some of the appeal is the cast, which black screen and ominous music to set disguise as commercial charter flights, up its world thrown into turmoil, a same way they did in Afghanistan in Matthew Rees is a former staff writer at THE scenario straight out of an early 1980s ’80, only they were crack airborne out- WEEKLY STANDARD. Robert Schlesinger is a conservative nightmare: The Soviets fits,” he tells the Wolverines, who are freelance writer in Washington, D.C. are set on edge by poor crop harvests; sitting around a campfire in the snow-

36 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 Movie stills: MGM / Everett Collection. Conquering Russian soldiers pose for a photograph in Red Dawn. covered mountains. “Infiltrators came Distrust of foreigners is just one The film also targets politicians as up illegal from Mexico, Cubans mostly. ingredient in the film’s apocalyptic sniveling bootlickers. Calumet’s mayor They managed to infiltrate SAC bases stew. Guns are another. The review in (played by Lane Smith, who would in the Midwest, several down in Guns & Ammo described it as “one of later in the same year play nearly the Texas—it wreaked a helluva lot of the most potent pro-gun movies ever same character in the short-lived tele- havoc, I’m here to tell ya. They opened made.” Indeed, guns (and a healthy vision series V) does a first-rate up the door down here, and the whole dose of gumption) enable the Wolver- impression of a quisling, collaborating Cuban and Nicaraguan armies come ines’ heroic resistance, and the movie with the invading forces, and standing walking right through, roll right up doesn’t shy from going overboard to idly by while about two dozen Ameri- here through the Great Plains.” make the point: Shortly after the Com- cans—whom he presumably fingered In short, America was undone by a mies have stormed Calumet, the camera as the troublemakers’ families—are combination of free-traders and illegal spies a pickup truck bearing a bumper lined up and executed, as the Soviet immigrants. What about Europe? asks sticker with the NRA’s unofficial slo- national anthem plays in the back- one of the Wolverines. “I guess they gan: “They can have my gun when they ground. (“This community is indeed figured twice in one century was pry it from my cold dead fingers.” The fortunate to have a shepherd like him,” enough. [Pause for a slug of whiskey.] camera immediately pans down to a the leader of the occupying forces They’re sitting this one out. All except Calumet citizen’s corpse clutching a chuckles to his assistant.) Predictably, England, and they won’t last very handgun before a Commie boot steps the mayor’s son—who is student body long.” The scene’s highlight comes on it and the invader pries the gun president at Calumet High—is the when Boothe explains who is on our away. Later, a leader of the occupying Wolverines’ early voice favoring sur- side: “600 million screamin’ China- forces orders a minion to go to the local render and later turns traitor. “He’s a men.” When a Wolverine objects that sporting-goods store and retrieve “form leader, but not in a violent, physical the last he heard there were a billion 4473,” which, he explains, has “descrip- way,” the mayor explains. “He’s more screamin’ Chinamen, Boothe throws tions of weapons and lists of private of a politician, like his father.” his whisky onto the fire, igniting it, owners.” The NRA couldn’t have asked Precisely why director John Milius before observing, “There were.” for a better piece of agitprop. (who has also worked on Apocalypse

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 37 Now, Dirty Harry, and Conan the Barbarian), chose to include two teenage girls in the band of brothers who make up the Wolverines remains a mystery. But they’re not weak sisters. Indeed, Jennifer Grey’s character plants a bomb that detonates in the Soviet American Friendship Center that’s been established in Calumet, and she’s the first Wolverine to kill one of the occupiers. Later, when she’s shot and can’t keep pace with her fellow Wolverines in the heat of battle, she asks Swayze to kill her so she won’t be caught and tortured for in- formation. Instead, they give her a grenade, which ex- plodes when an occupy- ing soldier finds her Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, and Charlie Sheen fight the Communist invaders in Red Dawn. body and tries to move it. (Grey and Swayze apparently A member of the Dutch resistance been brutally penetrated. And after clashed during the making of Red during World War II boasted on NPR watching the Wolverines boast of their Dawn, but that didn’t prevent them that the film skillfully captured the ignorance of the Geneva Conventions from teaming up a few years later for spirit of an insurgent movement. But as they prepare to execute an enemy the box office smash Dirty Dancing.) the movie’s rhetoric is often over- prisoner, one can only wonder if per- When Charlie Sheen tells Lea Thomp- wrought: “All that hate’s going to burn haps a few of the soldiers serving in son to “make yourself useful” by wash- you up, kid,” Powers Boothe tells C. Abu Ghraib might have learned the ing dishes, she angrily knocks them Thomas Howell as the teen carves wrong lesson from late-night viewings away and barks back, “Me and her are another notch in the stock of his AK- of the film. as good as any of you!” It’s 47. “It keeps me warm,” snarls Howell grrrrrrrrrrrrl power, Rambo-style. in response. And much of the acting ut in the end, the story of Red Indeed, while the film spilled has the grace of Keanu Reeves at his BDawn is a story of the quest for enough blood to be tagged by the most wooden. Shortly after a few of the freedom over totalitarian aggression— National Coalition on Television Vio- Wolverines have fled Calumet and schlocky, but still powerful. And in the lence as the most violent ever made taken refuge in the nearby mountain telling of this story, what emerges is (134 acts of violence per hour), the range, they kill a buck for food, and history’s most fiercely anti-Commu- machismo is offset by tears of fear. The then make Howell drink a cup of its nist movie (an admittedly small cate- number of scenes where various char- blood. Once you drink the blood, they gory). There was clearly something to acters declare that no one should ever tell him, “there’s gonna be something like about a movie that Pravda panned cry again is matched by the number of different about you.” Indeed, Howell at the time as “a monstrous anti-Soviet scenes where they blubber about lost ends up the most radicalized of the concoction” that “poisons the audi- family and friends. “If you didn’t love group, and dies in a blaze of gunfire ence’s minds with the drug of anti- anybody you’d never even be here,” while defiantly screaming at his ene- Communism.” And there would, of one Wolverine comforts Thompson mies, “WOLVERINES!” course, have been only one appropriate after the death of a comrade. Hearts Twenty years after the release of Red response to such Kremlin-inspired bleed figuratively as well as literally in Dawn, the film takes on a slightly dif- belligerence: “Wolverines of the world, Red Dawn. ferent hue: America’s defenses have UNITE!” ♦

38 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 The Standard ReaderBooks

caring. Most are capable of making good decisions on the fly in dangerous situations. Contrary to the professor, & “independent thinking . . . is not only tolerated in our armed forces, it is Arts required.” —Dan Dickinson

A Thousand Sighs, A Thou- sand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan by Christiane Bird (Ballantine, 432 pp., $25.95). The Kurds are one of the most important political factors in the Middle East. Spread across six countries, they number perhaps forty million—larger than the population of Canada and more pro-American. At the same time the Kurds are mis- trusted and discounted. Human-rights groups that once publicized Iraq’s genocide of the Kurds now ignore “You don’t seem to understand, sir. I said this book is must reading.” them. When the United States trans- Books in Brief ible, stable, and moderate than is com- ferred power to the Iraqis in June, the monlyThis portrayed.” is dummy Still, he typesees Iraq for as State Department closed down its rep- Dawn Over Baghdad: a broken land of corruptions that are resentation in Iraqi Kurdistan—a How the U.S. Military is the legacya readout;of decades of stateto besocialism: slight to a region that opinion polls Using Bullets and Ballots “We could pour billions into this place show is over 90 percent pro-American. to Remake Iraq by Karl and makereplaced. no long-run This difference is if we Christiane Bird’s well-written trav- Zinsmeister (Encounter, don’t change attitudes.” elogue starts to fill an important gap in 237 pp., $25.95). During the drive on Zinsmeisterdummy regards type the for media a as popular knowledge of the Kurds. Bird Baghdad, many reporters were embed- almostreadout; as great toa threat be replaced.to our soldiers describes the suffering of the Kurds, as ded with military units. This program as the insurgents. Our troops confront well as their diversity and frequent dis- gave us the best reporting of the war, a “two-front war” against terrorists and unity. The Kurds have an interest in and produced a number of solid books, against adversaries on the world’s news changing the status quo in the Middle among them Karl Zinsmeister’s first desks. Zinsmeister presents a depress- East and a desire to see democracy book on Iraq, Boots on the Ground. ing litany of exaggerations, selective forced upon the region. And some But then the press retreated to readings, and lies, all designed to pre- changes have happened. Since the fall Baghdad’s hotels, and the reporting sent the Iraq war as a failure. The war of Saddam, the Kurds of Iran and Syria turned negative and distanced. Feeling is too important to let it be “done in by have openly challenged their regimes. newspaper readers weren’t getting the snipers plinking from keyboards.” In Turkey, the government has been real story, Zinsmeister re-embedded Ultimately, Dawn Over Baghdad is forced to ease restrictions on the Kurds with soldiers in the Sunni Triangle about those who serve. Quoting a pro- so that it can start negotiations for early in 2004. Dawn Over Baghdad is fessor who told protesters that they membership in the European Union. his account of our fight to establish “a could be proud that they were “A stu- Iraqi Kurdistan is now the most free, prosperous, and democratic Iraq.” dents, who think for themselves,” in peaceful region of Iraq, a place where Despite press accounts that trumpet contrast to the “C students with their there has not been a single terrorist each outbreak as the start of a civil war, stupid fingers on the trigger,” Zins- attack on American forces. The Kurds the United States is carrying both the meister finds the troops are a widely often say that they have no friends but military and political battles. Most diverse group, some possessing the mountains. Read this book and you Iraqis are opposed to insurgent attacks advanced degrees, and many boasting will understand why in Iraq the Ameri- and are against both an Islamic state real accomplishments in military and cans need to give the Kurds another and a Baathist revival. “The Iraqi pub- civilian life. While no angels, they are friend. lic,” Zinsmeister says, “is more sens- professional, committed, and often —Andrew Apostolou

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 39

MONTH ??, 1999 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / ?? “Volvo's recent ads . . . highlight what safety advocates say is a shift toward speed and high performance in the auto industry and Parody the glorification of those qualities in advertising.” —Washington Post, August 5, 2004

AUGUST 16 / AUGUST 23, 2004